THE DRENCHING ARMS: PROFESSOR SPORTS DIRECT

DON'T DESPAIR. THESE PEOPLE CAN BE BEATEN

Mar 23, 2025

Exciting Sports Direct and USC concept store opens at Flemingate - Wykeland

Raven sat in the caravan's bedroom, watching a documentary on the Great Plains. His three new companions were out, scavenging on the tip.

Sunset over vast fields, then sandhill cranes landing on a Mississippi tributary which could dwarf the Thames. Whenever he saw America's pristine landscapes he imagined the contrast with its cities, places he didn't know except that in one - somewhere and somehow - he'd a lost son.

A 1980s Oxford coupling then a bombshell letter from St Louis, with a baby's picture. Two meetings at a hotel off the M25 then a legal document, informing him the boy had been adopted - 'for his best future' - and Raven could never have contact. His legal rights were non-existent. He didn't even know if the boy's mother had married and the husband was the new father or if the child had gone to a random couple, somewhere in the vastness of the USA.

Raven had spent many thousands and years searching. His only leads were to the Mid-West, where the trail irretrievably stopped. No way of finding the name the boy went under. Not a week he didn't wonder then banish the thought, only for it to resurface by night. The ache, then an emptiness, bottomless, beyond representation. It seemed impossible he'd contained such pain, but he had.

He obsessively watched documentaries on US urban decay, praying the boy hadn't finished up there. A lifetime's obsession with tramps, from childhood glimpses at King's Cross of meths drinkers or the subterranean encampment under the roundabout by Waterloo station.

Coexisting squalor and affluence, the constant elements in English life. He'd never forget his daughter seeing a collapsed man, dog on string, outside The Randolph:

'Dad, he looked so sad.'

Professor Sports Direct became his confessor - though all three knew Raven’s life and history. Mostly Raven and him, trudging the canal banks north of Oxford, avoiding the narrow-boat dwellers epitomising the gentrified nonsense throttling things.

‘How did it come to this - angrily exiled from your class, education and acceptable opinion?’

‘I knew it would. It started with a bar-job during my DPhil, in the Lamb and Flag.’

‘I always hated that place.’

‘Or maybe it’s epigenetic. My Greek grandparents were ethnically cleansed by the Turks.'

‘Don’t be a twat.’

'Perfection bores me. Where did all the bastards go? Writers used to screw their half-sisters, machine-gun toilets or attack the Nazis for being philosemitic.'

'Byron, Hemingway and Celine, I assume?'

Despite declaring himself 'blissfully uneducated', Professor Sport Direct’s reading shamed Raven’s English teacher ex-colleagues, whose idea of great literature ended with To Kill a Mockingbird or The Kite Runner.

There was an evening in a Wetherspoons pub, Witney. Forget the Cotswolds of Cameron and David Beckham. Here was the real England, where nascent resistance to the left-liberal elite was stirring, attacks planned on their homes, hipster-bars, boats, gastropubs, LTNs and - of course - artisan coffee shops.

Raven’s encounters with Laptop had been noted, so he entered to thunderous applause. He gave a short talk, outlining the target and his many crimes against humanity. Flyers were circulated with his dogging activities and suggestions on where to film then upload them.

Later that evening, a group led by Raven and the Shiremen crept into scrappy woodland opposite The Greyhound, Besselsleigh. The pub itself was one he'd not wanted targeting; the venue for many family meals and it wasn’t gastrofied.

They waited in silence. According to Laptop's notes: 'things kick off about 11.30pm. Park alongside the copse then flash your lights three times to show you're trading!'

Raven’s Omega Speedmaster showed a time of 11:32 as three cars pulled off the A420.

An ex-colleague of Raven’s - a test tube left-liberal - had his smugness punctured one Christmas. Under the twinkling lights, his wife left her laptop open on an unseasonal dogging site: Mrs Lecturer in Public Health Policy was popular with 'consenting adults in the Aylesbury area'.

His pieties on sexual freedom went into reverse and colleagues received frank emails explaining this situation. Like most middle-class lefties, he felt obliged to share his personal life, sending Raven hilarious poems and love letters he'd penned for the errant spouse. This Deputy Head wore berets to department meals, and – most horribly of all – in pubs.

If Raven sounds callous, he was. Nothing now surprised him about these clowns, facetiously wielding power but unfit to run a bath. The buffoon flaunted anti-Brexit t-shirts at GCSE results' days. When Raven was diagnosed with a life-threatening illness, he’d consoled him with unsolicited lectures on NHS funding.

Waiting in the flickering darkness, Raven hoped that the Deputy Head’s disgraced wife occupied one of the cars, down from Bucks to meet Laptop. The aim was to pinch their motors whilst the doggers were busy in their wooded love-nest. Who knows, maybe they'd stay and breed some colony of perverts, a Pitcairn island off the A420? Even Ballard wouldn't have used that scenario!

Although he'd never in fact stolen a car before, his companions were old hands. One bloke - 'Gypo Geoff' - had a bunch of keys programmed for common cars and an App for everything else. Raven and the two Shiremen jumped into an Audi A4. Shireman Two drove them almost into the woods, headlights undipped.

What our heroes witnessed is too horrific to retell in detail, but was recorded by Shireman One for posterity and posted online:

Laptop being 'spit-roasted' by two Village People types with handle-bar moustaches. His startled face was sadly blanked out from the Oxford Mail's image but the damage to his reputation was fatal.

In a final irony, he now works behind the till in Aldi, muttering obscurely at Raven when he occasionally shops there.

Don’t despair. These people can be defeated.

This is the entire story, to date:

THE DRENCHING ARMS

CHAPTER ONE: EXILED TO NORFOLK

The rain fell as if the world was made from water.

Raven stood manacled to a seawall. The mounting waves would anyway soon drench him, though he'd probably escape drowning.

Across the pot-holed car-park lurked the pub where he drank twice weekly. A possibly cheery looking place but with violent undercurrents of dislike, boredom and gnawing frustration. Of course class was the real issue. Never more so than now, with EDI emblazoned on every public building - even in this bleak coastal outpost.

Yes, most likely one of the better regulars would persuade Worzel to relinquish the key so that, at closing time, he'd be unshackled and led back into The Drenching Arms, where a rough towel would be thrown over him and a pint of mulled cooking lager poured down his throat.

Such kindness still existed!

The obvious question was why he tolerated this? But his options were limited socially and he'd never needed more than a pub and a book. Unfortunately, conversation to him was pointless without any content, so he often overstepped the mark in intellectualism when talking with the grizzled regulars.

Worzel was a pontificating ex-hairdresser who brooked no interruption nor dissent, during his diatribes on the slights and insights gained from various Cambridge academics whose hair he'd cut. As was typical of the English class system, this left the man resentful and endlessly provocative, on topics he knew nothing about.

Mostly Raven kept schtum, but tonight he'd felt the need to pipe up when the man's lecture on global warming had become intolerable. Needless to say, he'd then himself been accused of interruption and lecturing - tendencies he harboured - hence his freezing confinement on the seafront after being dragged from the pub. And since Raven himself hated ‘experts’ and middle-class ownership of ideas, he was hopelessly conflicted.

Last September, he'd been expelled from the Party for hate crime, after disagreeing with a Muslim colleague who’d claimed Father Christmas was trans and probably pro-Hamas. But Raven’s crimes were existential and had been tabulated over many years in teaching. At least he'd gone down with a bang, posting an image in the staffroom of Santa in a red and white kaftan, pouring burning petrol down a snow-covered English cottage’s chimney.

Retribution had been swift. He'd been stripped of his middle-class membership and exiled to this Norfolk seaside town, ostensibly to oversee diversification of fast food outlets and net-zero compliancy in failing pubs and hotels. As always with such managerial tasks, this meant no actual work.

Obviously he was now failing at that too.

Despite the gathering storm and vast stretch of North Sea facing him, an inflatable dinghy seemed to be nearing shore. What looked like Kurds and Arabic tribesmen were peering at him anxiously.

Raven laughed grimly but genuinely for the first time in many months.

‘Thanks for this,’ he muttered.

CHAPTER TWO: NEW YEAR'S EVE

A museum of yesterday’s rainbows,

guarding the memories of car lights by night.

How the tide of the whole world is changing,

even in this corner, where a tired wind

rattles a battered pub door and only

I glance up to see if some ghosts arrive,

blown in past the broken-down wind turbines

now sheltering seagulls and my people.

So writes Raven, spending his New Year’s Eve

adrift in the emptying Drenching Arms.

The pub karaoke bursts into life

and a recent boat refugee belts out

I will survive by Gloria Gaynor,

cheered by a pensioner dressed as Hitler.

CHAPTER THREE: RAVEN AND THE PAST

It’s true that in England, our past isn’t even an earlier time. It’s oxygen, mother’s milk - and gold.

Progressives hate it and see only a crime scene. But the True Crime was their murder of this country - slow, deliberate and shameless - and the evidence is piling up daily. Our towns are filled with abused girls, their rapists empowered by an establishment of diversity cretins enforcing an ideology of callous absurdity.

Raven sat staring into his battered laptop. Tonight he was too depressed even for the Drenching Arms, which lurked nearly empty beyond net-curtains and a lonely milk bottle rolling down Fore Street in the January gales.

Onscreen was a heart-breaking YouTube video, of 1935 London. He remembered that solidity, the purpose and unassertive self-assurance, even from his 1970s childhood. Left-liberals - many with no memories of the place nor roots there - painted a stygian pit of prejudice, basted in Dickensian poverty and monochrome ennui. But the feelings of freedom and belief negated this cartoon portrayal. Our elite’s obsessions with such ‘evils’ had reduced London to an uneasy shell, showy yet silly - and painfully aware of it.

A Glimpse of London 1930s in color [60fps,Remastered] w/sound design Added

He reread the opening chapter of Our Mutual Friend, in a first edition inherited from his father. Maybe the city would survive, the Thames slowly carrying away the bodies of its wreckers.

As for his own writing, he’d just completed a belated Christmas ghost story. Not exactly an M. R. James setting, but Raven’s exile to East Angla had jolted him into writing it.

A year later, The Spectator – who sometimes used spooky Xmas tales – returned it as ‘enjoyable but problematic in its violence to women’. Raven laughed outright at the over-reaction. He’d once gently closed a classroom door on an arguing ‘pupil-pastoral manager’, to the hilarity of his pupils. The woman claimed he’d hit her on the nose. For once, CCTV came to his aid and revealed her lie:

A CHEERY GHOST STORY FOR CHRISTMASTIDE

By Lucas Raven

Somewhere that I'd driven past a thousand times but never entered. Reassuringly there, without the need for any thought or analysis: The George, a roadhouse outside Andover on the way to Salisbury.

Who's ever written about it? But whenever I saw the place, I'd imagine an evening's drinking. Entering without expectation and slouching into some 1930s tiled corner - unseen, seen or even scrutinised - it wouldn't make any difference.

This Christmas, I pulled over. My Jag seemed perfect for the pub and I'd not driven past since acquiring it.

And how my country has now vanished! What one always thought was bedrock - igneous, metamorphic, Jurassic, whatever - isn't even sandstone, just playground stuff which runs through your fingers.

The area is military. Dunkirk then D-Day troops once drank in The George. No nostalgia from me though; I've even given up watching Remembrance Sunday. Whatever their sacrifices, we've been invaded via invitation.

The place was full of ghosts; at Christmas everywhere now is. Except not figures from my past nor ones many young people would recognise. Maybe they'd know the column but who can see him on top? He was drinking Spanish lager in the corner, unmistakable with his hat, eye patch and wild hair. Ignored by the Polish bar staff let alone the public-sector office crowd in paper crowns, unleashing party poppers. Horatio was muttering to himself, one eye focused on a crumpled document:

I am a friend of Peace without fearing War; for my politics are to let France know that we will give no insult to her government, nor will we receive the smallest. If France takes unfair means to prevent our trading with other Powers, under her influence, this I consider the greatest act of hostility she can show us.

Stirring words, as I told him without reservation.

'I sent it to Theresa May's government when she was surrendering all that I fought and died for.'

'Did she reply?'

'I got a postcard of wheat fields, some Waitrose vouchers and an application form for Disability Living Allowance.'

'What are you even doing here?'

He switched his eye-patch so I was met with the blank socket, looking wrinkled and soft to touch. Before I could stop myself, I'd reached out and confirmed this.

'I'm in the area to go riding with Emma Hamilton, on Porton Down.'

At last, a link to myself! I'd been told how the couple would meet on that bare scrubland - almost savannah like - around the road to Porton. My father had been a director of the microbiological lab there, and his father had headed wartime research on gas attacks, at field stations in the wild grassland.

The door slammed open with that deafening crash, heard in pubs throughout the land when Christmas drunks enter.

Of course it was Sir Winston Churchill, completely bladdered, propped up by a squinting Rudyard Kipling. He chucked a box of his namesake mince pies at the office party group, landing on their table apparently out of thin air, glasses flying. The looping trajectory suggested only I could have thrown it.

'What's his fucking problem?' a huge Shireman hollered, advancing with fists ready to deliver a steam hammering on my puny frame.

Churchill had one Doc Marten back-lifted, about to crush this oaf's testicles. But my invisible protector wasn't needed. An enormous middle-aged woman, lanyard dangling, directed 'Geoff from Maintenance' back to their table then turned on me.

'I think it's time you left. We'd all prefer it if you went home then reflected on your actions.'

I'd rather have a steam-hammering than hear this management speak. To my delight, Kipling was also apoplectic from the horror of his beloved language being mangled and tortured. Although a reasonably short man, he was built like a bull. Ominously he slipped off his spectacles and handed them to Sir Winston.

An unseen whirlwind enveloped the table of these Yuletide revellers. I was remined of some jinni in one of his Plain Tales from the Hills.

'Even Joseph Conrad would struggle to describe that,' quipped Gigger, as all four of us stared in wonder at the devastation visited on the HR department from some Local Authority office.

As a child, if humiliated I'd relive in my head that scene from A Fistful of Dollars, when his mule demands retribution on bandits and Clint Eastwood slaughters them all. I left The George elated, although aware that my victory was likely to be temporary. Sure enough, I heard Old Bill's sirens approaching. Urged on by my three jubilant companions, I stepped in front of a thatch-headed Hampshire plod.

'I've had my Islamic faith insulted with pork scratchings chucked all over my meal-deal Hunter's chicken.'

He informed me how I'd suffered a hate crime and urged that I pressed charges. As I completed the paper-work, I saw several of the less critically injured being frog-marched into a riot van. Ambulances then arrived to remove the more serious cases.

I fired up the Jaguar and thanked a lone evening star for the Ghosts of Christmas Past, somewhere looking over us still - if we dare to ask.

CHAPTER FOUR: RAVEN IN WELWYN GARDEN CITY AND OXFORD

The childhood house he was haunted by still existed, nightly in his dreams and half-wrecked in this now-affluent area. Raven had driven to see it. As with any distance from childhood, the actual mileage was much smaller than he'd endlessly imagined.

And on the drive, he'd suddenly known exactly what was wrong with him and everyone else. Their online world had replaced reality, flattening the joy in beauty, knowledge - and discovery. Every experience, insight and idea got mediated through a human vastness – and uniformity – which meant that nothing felt real. So obvious was this, he almost dared not think it.

It was why literature didn't exist anymore, replaced by competitive virtue. And how writers from the past - Dickens, Dostoevsky and Celine - did; they weren't in the past now. That was his only way through, and a redemption. The new world had inadvertently abolished time, so he'd no need to live for today or compete on its terms.

What if he moved into this Welwyn Garden City house? One look in the garden reified things. Trees actually growing - huge ones - through the back-lawn. Like the scene from Where the Wild Things Are, the sleepy boy in pyjamas finding woods around his bed.

Except now he was outside and could barely see the room where he'd slept. And men were working there, clearing the mess around the house.

Raven was at Oxford station, hours early for his reprogramming session. As ever, he was constructing fictional scenarios for the shabbiest looking people - including himself - wandering around this dismal place.

Pity was what he wanted to feel but anger was his unavoidable reaction, at what his country had become rather than the individuals he saw. Still, neither seemed possible starting points for literature. That was his limitation, not the world's. Hadn't some philosopher said we always confuse the two - presumably only the true artist could reconcile them.

What would they make of the man sat opposite, checking his watch constantly then staring at it with open admiration, even love? Possibly nothing, although the inconceivable filth of his clothes and the stench from them were incredible. No doubt this was why Raven had found an empty seat at his table.

'Nice watch!' he ventured.

'Couldn't you at least have attempted to disguise your surprise?'

The stinking man's voice was educated, almost aristocratic. Raven peered closely at the timepiece shown to him. To his delight, it was a Dirty Dozen British Army watch, clearly original, with patina and fading radium lume.

'Worn at D Day?'

'Possibly - everything they fought for has been lost.'

Raven's 'kindness counselling' took place on the first Monday of every month in his old Oxford college - despite his exile in Norfolk, or because of it. His car had been seized after his Welwyn Garden City epiphany and handed over to a 'boat person' (some Somalian drug dealer), so this re-education now necessitated an excruciating cross-country rail trip. If he refused, his beloved 15-year-old daughter would be moved from her current school into one notorious for bullying and drugs. His meagre pension would also be cancelled.

Monday was chosen so that he had to travel up on the Sunday, staying overnight in some shithole chosen by the authorities. Usually this was in London but last night he'd been forced into an Iffley Road guesthouse, notoriously the preferred venue for Oxford’s Pakistani rape gangs. Of course, he had to pay for this travel and accommodation.

At the last session, he'd been set the task of using three ‘key-concepts’ in a PowerPoint presentation, explaining the dangers from the ‘far-Right’. The specified words were equity; diversity; inclusion. He’d added two of his own: ‘desultory’ and ‘deracination’.

The first was one of his favourites; for some reason, it evoked his school days. As a child, he'd had few friends and none he actually liked. Sundays had stretched out endlessly, ending with the comfort of a Vosene hair wash.

He made his way into Oxford through the commuters, beggars and homicidal cyclists.

CHAPTER FIVE: BREAKFAST IN WETHERSPOONS

At some time, everyone needs to walk away, break loose, light out for the territory. Maybe just metaphorically, deliberately failing to arrive for something important. Walking out on an obnoxious class, or people who hate you and find ingenious ways of showing it.

So, Raven's decision to drop into Wetherspoons can be rationalised. He was due in his college at ten and left the station at nine. Typically for him, this made it just possible to consume a small breakfast and be on time but introduced anxiety into an already toxic morning. Because he was always thinking of watches and time. His sight of the Vertex Dirty Dozen on the stinking man had both cheered and disturbed him. What its proud owner said - defiant but defeated.

Aeons ago he'd studied science at college and time's dimensionality had delighted him. He'd long felt some force weaving his life in more dimensions than could be comprehended, other than through feelings and beliefs. It was the nearest he got to anything spiritual, somehow linking the people and things he loved to something larger which could – and hopefully would – preserve them.

But there seemed no way of reconciling all this with society now. The bedrock feeling of permanence had gone. Previously, whatever the inevitable cascade of events, that sense of solidity had existed, however illusorily. It was even true in the 1980s, when he'd been at Oxford. Then Blair arrived and the systematic destruction began. Degrees, doctorates and entire ideologies ‘justified’ this, in terms of historical wrongs - some of them partly true. But you can't destroy a country's past without destroying its people.

‘But what does that even mean?’ the progressives would scoff. Easy. A country’s people have been destroyed when they no longer instinctively feel they are its people. Like now.

What a joy Wetherspoons pubs are! Such a horror to the middle classes, with their loathing for unabashed Englishness and boozy camaraderie. The last remnants of our 'chop houses' and market pubs, open for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and frequented by everyone except prim progressives. How relaxing to see pints of lager being unashamedly necked and even the occasional punch-up erupt.

Raven checked his Murph 38mm Hamilton. Of course no messages from the future - on interstellar planetary escape and rebirth - were moving its second hand. Yet the still-ticking beauty emboldened him.

He was off - after breakfast and a couple of pints. But not to some punishment meeting in his old college.

CHAPTER SIX: A GIRL AND HER DAD

With anywhere one knows well, the sense grows that it's watching you. When so much of your life has been spent there, something living forms. It doesn't matter if this is internal - 'just a feeling' - or personification. Time's accumulations and destructions stare back at you. There's no need for some Nietzschean abyss. It might be a street corner or a shop that's changed its name, again and again.

Raven could still lose himself in Oxford’s old stone and layers. That weird alley linking George Street with the top of New Road was a favourite, also Beef Lane off Pembroke Street. Hours of wandering until some refreshment and downloading became urgent.

He'd by now traipsed west, uneasily wondering how this indulgence would affect his daughter's schooling. Staring into the Manley Hopkins darksome burn of the Thames at Osney, a heron perched by the bridge. So many times he’d done this, staggering back from drinking in the Lamb and Flag.

Thinking over his time in teaching, he sometimes experienced pupils surfacing from his memory so clearly that he was back in the classroom or at a parents' evening. Running water encouraged such reverie. Perhaps it was the river's churn and disappearance, the drama subsiding into its relentless flow downstream.

One of his final appointments, though she'd not booked a slot. Something in her stance and downcast eyes - weariness and wariness - was heart stabbing. Nervous then embarrassed at Raven's offered hand and her father tremulously grasping it.

Raven slipped into machine-talk on projected grades and 'stretch' targets as the inebriated man blinked and nodded his head. He said nothing as his daughter spoke for them both, saying more than she ever had in a lesson. She mapped out her plans and Raven forced himself to be cheerfully optimistic, overdoing reactions whilst pretending not to notice the father's whisky stench.

To his discredit, he recalled nothing on what she’d hoped to become. Had the drunken dad insisted on coming - had she even begged him to? He couldn't bear to think of her feeling ashamed. But he remembered standing up and saying the bloke should be proud of his daughter. Then they were gone.

The horror and terror this encounter must have been to her. The tracking data and colour coding had said nothing, but what did EDI monitoring care about this child? Suffering like hers was never discussed in all his years of teacher training or 'continuous career development'. He hated his profession for this progressive idiocy, wrapped in self-congratulation but callously blind towards so many English children.

By the Thames now, he thought of Jenny Wren in Our Mutual Friend.

What help was literature when it came to it?

Raven despised those who sat in cafes, tapping away - ‘laptop jockeys’ he dubbed them. But he sat writing a six-part sequence on True Crime, in a Botley coffee shop, mixing memory and desire. He knew his obsessional interest was spurred by an inner rage and need to avenge childhood cruelty. Raven never censored his poems, especially now this was happening to every vital part of English life.

Without doubt, his poetry seemed crude and terrible to many - and the cutting away to it a juddering structural shock. There was no choice; he’d change style only if his world allowed it.

How many people carry knives routinely now? They were a commonplace at the dump of a school he was terrified his daughter would get exiled to, as revenge for him bunking off the 'meeting' at his college.

He carried - for artistic purposes - a beautiful brass Japanese Higonokami pocket-knife. Digging it into his palm was a vital and hidden spur.

Perhaps the garden city house now gleamed white above its lawn.

He sent the completed sequence to a London poetry magazine and (of course) never saw it again. Who knew if it was any good, or even if he’d any talent? But then, that wasn’t enough; one needed permission to have talent. And with his sort of writing, it wasn’t likely to be given:

TRUE CRIME

His recurrent childhood nightmare was of getting caught burgling a house. He recalled the alien smells, the feeling of suffocating in the noisome dark, a certainty he’d lost any security forever.

Then he’d be awake, safely stretched in bed.

Now he was planning to make this reality. He was clearly mad. The place he’d chosen was a detached house, way up Cumnor Hill. It was to be a ritual desecration, a revenge attack on the class and character of its owners.

Talk with such types had become circular; nothing could breach their liberal certainties. Words no longer held any meaning for these people. It was pointless to contradict this through more argument. An empirical representation – an objective correlative – of his opposing thought was needed, for himself and for them. Hadn’t the husband unknowingly demanded it?

‘You’re a right-wing wanker. Worse than a Nazi.’

He was mad but not responsible for making himself so. His class was the target. To wear a Balaclava was essential, not to avoid recognition but from 70s memories of drying them on school radiators and images of terrorists.

You’ll need to know the details, what I took.

A penknife: small; portable; collectable.
I’ve kept some from my childhood,
lost the flick-knives from trips to France.
I waited at least an hour on the sloping lawn,
hidden from the house, the incline so steep.
The expected security lights didn’t activate.
Of course there was an alarm – I welcomed it.

Have you been inside a house when one goes off?

Sickening disorientation and five-minutes’ panic.
Time for me to smash up some pictures,
piss in a wicker basket and their boots,
tear off a coat-rack then grab the knife.
I was filmed jumping over a hedge.

*

He sat and dug under his finger nails with the shining blade:

The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.

Presumably the soil he removed was ‘forensic evidence’? In a true-crime documentary, trace-element analysis would pinpoint the Cumnor ridge and its famous clay.

His urine would obviously yield DNA.

But he doubted this bourgeois burglary would divert the police from queuing in Greggs or surfing internet porn.

He was safe.

SONNET ON STEALING A CAR

At fifty-nine I’ve stolen my first car.
In films it’s done with the utmost of ease –
glancing round, ruler down the driver’s door,
a rapid twisting of wires and away.
Reality? Smashing my way in then
electrocuted getting connection.
Alarm blaring, me waving and mouthing:
‘Don’t worry, it’s my car – temperamental!‘

Meanwhile, that burgled berk from Cumnor Hill

is bustling back, swinging his Waitrose bag.
Eventually it starts and I soak him,
aquaplaning through water, a puddle
for him and his wife. I flick salt-shaker
gestures and he feebly attempts to chase.

RACHE

Like A Study in Scarlet, red ‘Rache’ carved

inside their lives. He saw them smiling and
decided how to; who to trust. But the
rash sharing of an obsession was why
many got caught. If he acted alone,
only his thoughts had importance. He could
live inside those and switch to some dagger –
if he dared to – then slash without warning.

You think this mad but the pain seen in her

should not be forgiven. To know they had
enjoyed it ’caused his monstrous behaviour.’
True-crime documentaries said that and
‘Nobody thought he would ever do this.’
Each step was easily traced, if you tried.

IV. UNMASKING OF A SERIAL KILLER

In the old Truman brewery, Brick Lane,
the world’s leading Ripper experts sipping
champagne while ruminating on some wretch;
Isaac Dipski – the mad kosher butcher –
lifted crusts from gutters, believed he was
conversing with Abraham using farts.
Five witness reports of him running past
Chapman’s death scene on the way to Nando’s.

The killer is named, to thundering applause:

‘Charles Allen Lechmere, found there in Buck’s Row,
we’ve tracked his mobile phone. Early for work –
claimed he thought it was on old tarpaulin –
standing by Polly Nichols, freshly slain.
And there’s six minutes lost he can’t explain…’

V: AMONGST THE HALF MAD

I’m not complaining –

it’s where I’m meant to be.
An Internet discussion board:
Casebook: Jack the Ripper; I’m barred!

Was it him – Francis Thompson – my quest.

London, up from autumnal tree-tunnels
to border areas of Holborn, the City, those
streets I walked once, bored, lonely. no one.

Up past Newgate, St Mary-le-Bow down to

Watling Street with its views of St Paul’s.
St Stephen Walbrook, my days have
wandered then become a joke, his

‘have crackled and gone up in smoke’.

Praise God no tourists, just sentinel
towers from Wren dwarfed by capital.
It’s beautiful to live on visuals,

memories – bits of a building, a

childhood scout-hut, some adventure
playground. Schools are here, one
on Mitre Square where I’m going.

A lone muttering, others the same.

London can be taken by trackless
steps. Odd to arrive in Bevis Marks,
into Dukes Place & down the passage –

St Botolph Church, burial place of rebels.

So was I banned for posting my research:
‘I may have hitherto hidden my dismay,
at the seeming shambles that is “Ripperology” –

Simple experiments and observations.

It’s sorted! Took me twenty minutes on site.
Discovery of a new (highly unsavoury) ‘clew’ –
bagged and sent to forensics. All done after

a leisurely stroll from Drury Lane, through

old Holborn/City (some Wren churches) to
Mitre Square, where I solved the case!
I don’t want to be critical;

but what the hell have you all
been doing for these 135 years?’

VI: THIS BITER GETS BITTEN

Let's be honest about economic reality.

There are Slavs who'll work till midnight

in awful restaurants, places where you'd ask:

who can eat here? Then they take the

last bus and so do you. The English get

anywhere, to any place even when roads are shut –

our history says so. We might seem to be absent -

we're there. Those ribcage towns in hopeless dawns,

I can’t describe them nor Oxford (its pale lights

on cobbles) glowering high-rise block monoliths

marching through snow. They're here for the children,

not yours, they'd take yours and show them what’s worse.

I shouldn't be saying that and I am. Maybe rebirth happens in

sonnets? Or the whole thing starts again in something else.

It's at this point the decent reader wants

to see this writer receive what he's doling

out so here's a rambling account of how

I escaped through alleys and slippery

courts not in Oxford or London but

somewhere too Gothic to be safe as when

I went there it wasn't for tourists but exile.

That was just before the Berlin Wall fell

in Prague 1989, the country in freefall.

You know the old Eastern block cities

had terrible crime under Communism?

Actually it was more dangerous since

the causes couldn't be admitted as

social in a perfect society I went

for a walk along the river away

from anything picturesque towards

distant tower-blocks such numbers,

all of them in a line like that scene from

the Bourne film where he visits the Russian

girl – Moscow I think – whose parents

he's killed. Anyway on I wandered into the

Czechoslovak night lights were bright and

high up I think then I was hit from behind

and expertly robbed in a smell of vodka or

schnapps the bloke took very little since I

grabbed his legs and pushed him over easily.

The fear, I ran without wondering why it

was raining with no drops on the river – blood

of course from my broken head - sunrise back

in the Hotel Bristol reception called this doctor

who nodded uninterested and said ‘only a

fool walks to any of those places since now

the whole state is failing.’ My money was

gone only worthless Czech stuff I'd bought

at five times the official rate. It's not much but

I can say I've suffered from True Crime just

like we all have though I'd forgotten it and

how a friend from university got murdered

by a whack across the head in Battersea Park.

CHAPTER SEVEN: REBELLION

‘Presumably I can sit here?'

Headphones in he was tapping on his device before Raven agreed. One of those laptop jockeys in Botley's artisan coffee shop. A writer-in-residence of the digital future, swapping human failings for the icy perfections of code and spreadsheet.

The setting was perfect – for him. A mixture of faux-chumminess and industrial austerity; a Covid redoubt, haunted by the lockdowns its regulars enjoyed.

Raven stole his tablet and it couldn't have been simpler. It was easily hidden under his own.

'Is your milk allergy-tested?'

The annoyance peered into the cake display, reciting its tempting contents. The device sat open and unlocked. Raven took it without glancing, remembering Clemenza's words to Michael Corleone on how to leave Louis’ restaurant in the Bronx. Walk straight out but don’t hurry.

The bar at Botley's Premier Inn was perfect - for Raven. Its jarring interior sure to repel hipsters and digital workers; the purple and cream tones ensuring his nemesis would never set foot there. The files revealed:

* A list of dogging locations off the A420 and A34. I'll initially spare you elaboration (his activities were lovingly chronicled).

* A database of Tesco superstores in the Oxford area, linked to programs for stock-levels. It was in edit-mode so Raven made random changes then hit 'Go Live'. Expect vast quantities of Tunnock’s Tea Cakes in your local store.

* A detailed inventory of his late-father's possessions, with likely values and ideas on how to ensure he - and not his sister - got them. Most were worth under £20.

* A local health authority database of Covid vaccination status for Botley's locals. Raven recognised many names, including his own. Scrolling through, each cell linked to information on voting habits, views on Brexit, ethnicity, race, qualifications, occupation…even where one shopped for food.

There was a link to 'preferred pronoun if realignment prescribed or promoted.' Raven edited his own information, until the program locked when he identified as a pan-sexual Muslim with a geography degree from Durham, seeking urgent and drastic realignment.

Later he returned to the artisanal oasis, wearing a mask, balaclava and great-coat - like a revolutionary from Dr Zhivago. Raven pushed the sorry item under one of the benches and almost collided with its febrile owner, ranting at a cowering barista.

'Surely you have CCTV? It was stolen and this is now a national security matter. I can have you closed and searched if it's not returned!'

It needed starting - a rebellion, of sorts.

'We know it was you.'

Laptop was queueing behind him in Home Bargains. Raven had been staying for a week at the Botley Premier Inn, revelling in his anonymity. Remarkably, his daughter had been left untouched at her current school.

Was there anywhere Raven would be less likely to meet Laptop? Maybe he was checking toilet-roll stock against the Leave/Remain voter ratio in Botley. Or the staff were getting compulsory kindness training. Raven pretended not to hear, pondering his use of pronoun.

Laptop then swung his basket into the back of Raven’s knees. An act that couldn't be ignored.

Raven turned and rammed his thumbs into Laptop’s eyes, kicking him brutally in the bollocks and smashing a basket over his head.

In violence - of which he had vague experiences - the vital thing is speed. More risky for Laptop than Raven. He was a disgraced teacher, exiled for crimes against gender realignment plus saying 'Islamophobia' is a synonym for common sense.

The checkout staff roared their approval.

'Get stuck into the shithead. He had me put on disciplinary for my checkout rate falling below 80% of regional average.'

The speaker was a defeated looking Sikh on an adjacent till.

Laptop staggered up, shakily extracting his mobile.

'Send in the supervisory team. I'm being attacked by a nativist!'

Management rushed to the checkout area but Raven made good his escape, into the Pets at Home superstore.

'I was at college with that twat.'

The young assistant pointed. Toy police and store detectives were gathering, unable to see Raven crouching behind a row of hamster cages.

Leading them was Laptop, barking for 'the immediate arrest of a far-right extremist.'

She led him further in, opening a door into the Vets' rooms.

'Mr "Social justice through control then rape". Universally hated, especially by women. But boy he did the woke talk.'

Raven sat flummoxed. The woman was oddly familiar.

'Misty, your cat - I do her jabs.'

His trust was won. Glancing at the CCTV, Laptop and his Stasi crew were wandering next door, into Oak Furniture Land.

'I'm Julia. I won't ask your name, since you're cancelled.'

'Wise. And who's my pursuer?'

'He's not called O'Brien. Rupert Howard, the vacuum created when ideology replaces God, man or morality. He studied Geography, of course. A monster to be ranked alongside Beria or Mao.'

Pretentiousness or profundity?

'Surely he’s just a turd with open windows on dogging, supermarket management and lockdown - not Stavrogin?'

'My mother was Russian,' she replied, smiling or grimacing.

CCTV now showed several uniformed police entering the shop. She led Raven through the back doors to a welcoming skip, crammed with flattened cardboard boxes and polystyrene packing debris. He felt strangely at peace and fell asleep, safely concealed by the retail-park detritus.

CHAPTER EIGHT: REBIRTH THROUGH LANDFILL

Why rubbish dumps and landfills are magical, Raven did not know. Since childhood he’d relished any trip to the tip. The curves, seagulls, tatty characters lurking to scavenge.

One could be literary - God forbid - and link it to individual then societal collapse. But there's a purity in seeing so much discarded, covered over, awaiting festering bioprocesses and gas.

Anyone who's cleared a parental home starts with visits to charity shops then - as the scale of their possessions overwhelms - resorts to dumping stuff undifferentiated, desperate to be done.

How often he’d sat in queues on the Wilton Road, Salisbury, laden down, crawling forward to disgorge his parents' books, pictures, letters, ornaments, photo albums - even clothes.

And now he was in a skip looking up into outer purity, entropy doing its job. He just had to wait...

Destined for landfill in the indigo dawn of suburban morning. He'd not even felt any jolting as his nocturnal abode was loaded onto a lorry. Fast asleep, until the A34 congestion awakened him to traffic chaos.

Have you encountered the atavistic types who work on municipal dumps? Eyes alert for items of discarded value, speedy links to supply lines for stolen copper, lead roofing and knackered radiators.

Raven hopped out unseen - or so he thought. But those on the adjacent site were ever vigilant, chained dogs announcing his arrival in the underbelly of by-passed Oxfordshire.

Before he could scarper, he'd been bagged and dragged into some static caravan. Seated in the steamy atmosphere were a couple of obvious Shiremen, beaming contentedly at an enormous tea-pot.

He'd read Ballard and imagined some nightmarish confinement, in a rewrite of Concrete Island. Or life as a white-slave from the English diaspora, traded between building crews and Bulgarian gangs traversing the south-east.

'Does he fancy a brew?'

'A boy like this wants his skinny latte!'

He was handed an enamel mug swirling with two tablespoons of sugar. Drinking sweetened tea was no more possible for Raven than if salt and vinegar got added.

The closest thatch-head jumped up and opened his gob. The other Shireman eagerly poured the sickly stuff in.

'Now we're all friends,' cackled Shireman One. 'You'll need that sugar for energy, with what we've got planned.'

All his life, Raven had been expecting the bedrock of middle-class comfort and security to collapse beneath him. Now he felt relieved.

Perhaps the only hope lay in sudden violence. Or maybe the tea was drugged...

He was back in his Garden City childhood, vague poverty on the estates with underpasses to Shoplands and Harlands shopping precincts.

Socialism then didn't involve pandemic-fear and inculcation of mental-health collapse. Crime wasn't normalised and used for social control.

Such blinding insight! As always too late and no one to share this with.

He could remember it all. There was his primary school, dazzling plate glass and lawns to run down at lunchtime. A viaduct alongside, carrying the London line from Kings Cross. Council flats seen through the 70s heatwaves, all nylon, sideburns and heavy smokers.

Most of his teachers were decent old-style lefties, committed to fairness rather than indoctrinating children. But he remembered one who obsessed about overpopulation, the new ice age and nuclear testing in the Pacific. And shopping was different somehow; not as dominant and more expensive. Let's face it, the old elites were less ruthless than today's rootless 'experts' with worthless degrees who live online...

'Do you like your rubies?'

Don't let some left-liberal fool you into pitying travellers and their 'lives of poverty'. There's wealth a plenty, gold and gemstone opulence on open display when you get inside.

'Take a look at Dave's!'

An enormous star ruby - flanked by what seemed D-colour Marquise cut diamonds - winked at Raven. The grin on Shireman Two was pure gold.

'Surely that's not a find from the tip?'

Roars of appreciative laughter. The cultural shifts were exhausting, his separation of internal and external worlds had collapsed.

He was led into a comfortable bedroom then lowered onto a huge double-bed. Drugged mental overwriting followed. Reverie and review, Raven rationalising his rejection of delusions of 'being on the right side of history'. Reification through retelling events from his lonely twenties, Liza-style abandonments on streets of falling sleet, maybe composing his own Notes from Underground?

Diversity was England’s state religion, ruthlessly enforced, tolerating no dissent or human failing. No pity, individuals crushed in brutal demonstrations of worthiness. Pity, the emotion one cannot fake. Still there - if it somehow survived - in England’s Christian faith.

People walking their dogs at night, waiting at bus stops. Any of them mattered more than ideology. Raven hallucinated, reciting, semi-conscious next to a recycling site.

The only Christian left in the west
lives at small expense in a hidden flat
above squealing lorry wheels and brake lights.
He gave up sending himself Christmas cards
years ago - they were always being pinched -
not malicious but curiosity
in neighbours who prayed five times every day.
The country was bursting with believers
agreeing online in those empty realms
from which he served a lifetime's banishment.

The head of his church and its worshippers
he’d dismissed as secular heretics,
so he said to the doctor, complaining
that people always seemed to barge into
him in the city’s streets which now all stank
constantly of marijuana without
any believable explanation.
He'd stood still today alongside All Souls
and been floored by an aromatic reek.
Surely it wasn't being smoked in there?

Infinite complete trivialities
required competitive claims of belief.
He preferred exile beyond the gas-fired
kebab burners lining the Cowley Road.
Alone one Sunday night he sat sad and
crying for what had vanished from his world
behind twinkling lights of traffic flashing
red then blue and constant sirens circling.
They'd not be coming for him to be sure:
vaccine coronaries were so common now.

Simplicity was everything he had.
Any demands for diversity caused
him anxiety or sudden madness.
People assumed he hid a shameful past.
All he'd done through life was open his mouth
but out came the truth on all that he felt;
inside lurked monsters demanding exit.
Language could disguise them as ideas
then he'd stare in surprise at the tearing
those creatures delivered without caring.

He'd gone unnoticed by the crowds chasing
credit up and down. The office party
jockeys lubricated yet still fearful
that a wrong word spelt instant damnation.
Sex was in fact everywhere yet rationed.
The one advantage in age was pissed girls
beaming at this blurred stricken vision of
Father Christmas penned by Dostoevsky.
Poor Liza - ‘apropos of the wet snow’ -
vanished but perhaps she got saved somehow.

Maybe if we understood the logic of dreams, we’d never want to go to sleep - or wake up again.

Next, Raven was manically narrating a Youtube channel, trawling around council estates overrun with recent immigrants, exploring the wreckage of utopian dystopias, garden cities, new towns:

What stories do they tell themselves on

why they moved to this country and who

they are, when even a street here makes

a difference and identity is everything?

I know the lies from economics, claiming

the English can never do anything.

Perhaps it's true we're overrun and

I wish so many hadn't come.

I didn't want to feel abroad,

sitting alienated by violent

jabbering on buses, harsh

elbows, hints of aggression.

Poets never say this though

it's not a poem, thank Christ.

New towns and garden cities are now despised but

a young child could go to Wimpy on the day before

starting secondary school and be on the verge of

newness in drab browns and oranges that weren't

dated then because you didn't know the decade you

were in and neither affluence nor want were felt as

judgements but lived through to say so now gets me

shot I just see Woolco and new shops the glass safe

yet to read about it today would say my parents and

others thought the country was doomed with money

evaporating and worries worse than old trains but

it doesn't seem so bad it's known what was true

plus the separateness gave us enough space

maybe this now plays somewhere just the same.

If I went back to those fields of childhood

would I know anything there? Of course not,

they don't exist anymore – although I'm

sure the old stretches of barbed wire wildness,

with horses no one seems to own or ride,

will still reach down to that chalk river with

its rubble banks and bridges unnoticed

by anyone but me. Worn stones under

which I caught Miller's thumbs or sticklebacks?

Still there for children from schools in summer

to know on those day that last forever,

before online worlds take them off nowhere.

It’s a fact; middle-class people talk too much.

I’m one, but checked by this old git who lives in my memory.

My first encounter was in Welwyn Garden City’s biscuit-brick cinema, aged about eight. The film was that colossal bore - Disney’s Fantasia - my interest finally awakened in the dinosaur fight.

I proceeded to narrate the exact characteristics of Tyrannosaurus and whoever he was devouring, for the benefit of an entire auditorium.

A nicotine-stained relic looked at me, an ex-spiv relocated from Stepney to the council estates by Nabisco’s.

‘Turn the volume down mate.’

How he lurks in the mind!

That ever-present policeman in peripheral vision, class rejoinder, vigilante of bourgeois incontinence.

Shame-faced I have fled cheerful public houses and desolate suburban trains, legging it through twilit council estates with their lurking bovver boys.

Just last week he resurfaced in my local as I was discoursing on Oxford’s traffic.

One word too many and he pounced.

‘Turn the volume down mate.’

I was forced out to meet a grisly fate.

Lastly, he was watching a documentary on Dickens’ unfinished The Mystery of Edwin Drood. The location was Gloucester yet - annoyingly - no solution was offered in the laconic commentary, although some link was made to a wicked uncle, whose dukedom was with the famous and now ruined city:

It would be crass to say they fell as a hard rain, yet glittering, bouncing - sometimes shattering - the diamonds descended without warning on Tredworth, the most depressing of many such areas in Gloucester.

Perhaps they came from Jupiter, where such storms are common? Most people assumed it was summer hail. If this famous place had ever coruscated with gems, they were now found only in its magnificent Gothic cathedral; a treasure hemmed in by drug use, boarded-up shops and feral kids on bikes.

Most people that is but Jasper, who understood the riches strewn amongst the overgrown gardens, junkie parks and vandalised cars. He'd been named after a drug-addled choirmaster and possible murderer, in a similarly decaying cathedral city on the other side of England.

Years earlier, two notorious serial killers had buried most of the locals under patios, in torture-cellars or bedraggled Cotswold fields. The few survivors staggered through the town - it cannot be called a city - blinking in surprise and clutching cans.

Its most famous local resident was in fact buried in the cathedral, rumoured to have had a sizzling poker shoved up his arse.

Middle-class relocators took one look at the place and screeched off, desperate for Cheltenham or Tewkesbury. A few mistakenly moved to Cinderford, where certain unspeakable midnight rites are still practised in the public houses. The Forest of Dean hides their ashes - a reminder that left-liberalism can be dangerous folly.

Jasper gathered up his crop in a Lidl bag and went online. But prices in the wholesale diamond market had recently collapsed. Perhaps he could flog his booty in the Quays street-food market?

'Things can only get better!' was booming from a festival stage as he entered this site of gentrification..

'Surprised by such luxury?' A cheerful voice jolted Raven awake.

Sat in the corner was a hallucinatory figure in JJB sportswear. He handed Raven travel brochures and property listings for exotic locations.

'When fools like you holiday in Southwold or north Norfolk, our Shiremen friends next door are booking cruises and buying second homes on the Costas or in Thailand. Gary Glitter started out with a market stall in Banbury and finished up there - on death row, as it happens.'

What was Professor Sports Direct suggesting? But he kept his mouth shut, keen for more monologues worthy of Ballard or Houellebecq.

'Covid vaccine spike proteins lobotomising the middle class. All good - their houses have never been easier to burgle. First visit as delivery driver, strike up a friendship, pop back to sledge-hammer their patio doors in the small hours.'

Raven thought uneasily of his own back garden.

'Don't worry, anything worth taking from yours is long gone. Ask the cleaners - they gave us the keys.'

He now understood how his Botley home had transitioned into a stark abode worthy of some Nordic noir thriller.

CHAPTER NINE: PROFESSOR SPORTS DIRECT