A lesson learned

  Sethren, it has been suggested to me that that to adjure those who are good enough to stand here on the ringroad and listen to me to depart in a certain manner, is disrespectful.  As in, it might, be “Off you fuck”.

  Sethren, I am a person of the cloister and the bare and monkish cell.  My only luxury is the library.  I stand on the pavement here because I believe in the dissemination of truth, but it is not my calling.  So I try to couch my lucubrations in the language of the street.  I had understood that “Off you fuck” was a perfectly amicable, if not wholly courteous way to say that, while of course I would appreciate the intimate company of my followers for ever and anon, that company has for the moment ceased to be imperative.  I had gleaned this phrase from a television comedy programme about a British bomb disposal unit in Afghanistan, where I gather we are engaged in exporting the British style of democracy; such democracy involving, as I have heard on Twitter, neotonous gentlemen who have not yet outgrown their public school backgrounds making suitable arrangements on behalf of Saudi Arabian Princes, Russian kleptocrats, American healthcare and education corporations and the like.  What these arrangements are I have no idea.  We who inhabit the streets do not concern ourselves with such matters.

  However, the public school soldier on the comedy show, which may be called Bluestone42, (my memory for such things is imperfect) is constantly saying to his state educated inferiors, “Off you fuck”.  And indeed, the holy person in their midst, a young blond woman wrapped decorously but somehow demonstratively only in a towel (her hair wet, her shoulders aglimmer with translucent beads of water) herself adjures the public school soldier, who has come into shower room to address her on some matter, “Off you fuck.”  So, out of the mouth of innocence!  And it put me in mind of another holy tableau, in the movie Life of Brian, where Brian is followed into the wilderness by his disciples, and turns to them, and says, “Oh, fuck off.”  And his disciples make as if to depart, but then turn to him again and ask, “How shall we fuck off, oh Lord?”

  So, following these precedents, I tried to make my voice acceptable to the people.  But I take heed of your admonitions.  I have “learnedlessonsandputinplaceappropriatesafeguards”, as the police and many other organisations blithely assert when caught in the midst of some yet new (however much it appears to be just like the last one) criminal procedure.

  Sethren, depart in peace.