Jan 12th – I don’t know what you heard about me, I’m a motherfuckin’ P.I.M.P.

You hear about these things when in the noble company of journalists. There is a national scandal unfolding in the UK at the moment – whereby the Post Office wrongly prosecuted its own staff for fraud, theft, and false accounting. It has been known about, and reported on, by two journalists since about 2011. People like me have known about it, through them, since about 2013. It began in 2003, and twenty years later, it has still not been resolved. Meanwhile, the (many) victims of the scandal have had their lives ruined.

There are many things to say about this, all of which has been better said elsewhere. This link [https://www.postofficescandal.uk/] is to Nick Wallis’s work, who doggedly pursued this story, and got to the bottom of it, when no-one else was interested. Over the holidays, ITV aired a shitty drama show about it, and suddenly, everything has changed; the government has sprung into action, and the country is enraged by the injustice. The pioneering journalists couldn’t get arrested [alt: couldn’t score in a brothel]; the writer of the drama is being lauded as a national hero.

This news is current as I read the novel, We (Мы). Written by Yevgeny Zamyatin in Soviet era Russia in 1924, it is the least read of the Russian classics. It’s a dystopian novel describing an oppressive totalitarian state, in which its subjects are made the joyless tools of industry and the state machine. Sound familiar? George Orwell was commissioned to write a review of a smuggled copy in the 1940s, and within six months of doing that, guess what? Yes, that’s right, he was inspired to begin work on “his” novel, 1984. What a coincidence, eh? And even more spooky, the few good bits of his awful book, were identical to those in already set out in We.

Yet, that it was ripped-off, doesn’t convince as the greatest injustice this novel has suffered. For some reason, out of two essentially identical works, one stands as a lasting indictment of communist-era Russia, and was perhaps the single most important element in establishing in the minds of people of the West, that the world it described, was what The Soviet Union was actually like to live in. Whereas, the place in which the whole thing was originated, was forever condemned by its own idea! It might, had there been equally slick imperialist, propogandists on their side, have come to be recognised as the prescient work of genius which foretold the ultimate fate of capitalism. Tell me that a second Trump presidency wood knot* not look like Gilead. It is certainly closer than the homogonised drudgery of We ever came to reality.

[*Did you notice my AI-defeating, homonym-based, grammar error signature in that last line? Kudos]. All plagiarisers in all forms must be destroyed.

Perhaps Zamyatin was lucky. He was never a happy creature of self-determined liberty, living in the prosperous West, free to buy his own Post Office. Nor did he benefit from the sort of education that turned its subjects into idiot automatons who did not understand that a catastrophe was unravelling in their own country until it was put on the tele; who could not tell the difference between Donald J Trump and Jesus H Christ; and who get as much intellectual stimulation from reading about Harry Fucking Potter as they do Raskolnikov.

Places where they who cheat best always win, and where a narrative, once established, is seldom allowed to be usurped by facts.

Your lucky sign: a black plimsoll.

Your advice for January: avoid meeting commercial airline pilots socially.