Ah, the Kurds. How can mere words render a proper appreciation? They’re trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous … um … no; no, they’re not. Oh, sure, as individuals they can be fairly boon companions, but in the main and in the mass? Not so much.
My first experience of the Kurds – rather, of how the rest of the area thinks of and feels about them – was before I’d ever met my first one. This was at a majlis, in the town of Judah (or Goodah), Saudi Arabia, sometime in December or so, 1990. Citizenship is kind of an iffy and flexible concept in that part of the world, so there were folk from Saudi, from Oman, from the Emirates. There was even one Arab who insisted he was a citizen of the Gulf Cooperation Council, since he was a fully documented citizen of so many places in the GCC. I had my doubts right up until he pulled out a bilingual ID card which, indeed, did seem to list him as a citizen of the GCC. One of the attendees had brought with him a book detailing the results of the chemical attack on the Kurdish town of Halabja by the army and air force of Saddam Hussein.
It was really heartbreaking, all those picture of gassed, dead, discolored, and decomposing Kurdish kids, who are, in fact, every bit as cute as the papers and television made them out to be. At least when they’re not dead they are. My team sergeant, Sig, and I were duly appalled and sickened.
The Arabs, though, didn’t seem to understand. To paraphrase, “What’s the problem? Don’t you understand that these were Kurds who got gassed?”
At the time, I found that attitude completely inexplicable.
Fast forward a few months; we’ve incited the Kurds and Shia to rise up and overthrow Saddam. They didn’t, of course, while such an uprising would have looked difficult and might have done us some good. Oh, no; instead the Shia – whose rebellion was spontaneous, anyway – waited until it looked like the Iraqi Army was crushed and such an uprising would be easy. The Kurds – who were organized – waited even longer.
Sorry, boys, but when we offer you a quid pro quo, that doesn’t translate into “free lunch”. Moreover, when we’ve already offered someone a ceasefire it’s a bit late to try to get us to start hostilities again. In short, we owed them nothing.
Fast forward, again, to late May, 1991. I’d come home from the Middle East, hung around a while, and been sent back, this time to Operation Provide Comfort, the Kurdish Rescue, there to quasi-govern a few towns, run refugee camps, coordinate humanitarian relief, and such like. While we’re waiting in the camp on the Turkish side of the border, not too far from Silopi, overwatched by a Turkish police fort on a hill, some Kurds got in position to fire at the fort such that, should the fort return fire, the Turks will be shooting at us. So much for gratitude from people you’re trying to save, eh?
Fortunately, Turkish discipline held firm and enlightened Kurdish dreams of advancing the cause of having a homeland of their own by getting their rescuers killed came to naught. After a couple of days at the camp, the crew I’m with and I are ordered forward to link up with the British Marines and their Dutch counterparts, already inside Kurdestan. We’re riding in on the back of a British Bedford Lorry, one which, based on the comfort of the ride, probably crossed the Rhine with Monty in 1945 … after enduring the entire war in North Africa. If it had a suspension it was tolerably hard to see, and impossible to feel.
Sitting next to me is a Staff Sergeant Farnsworth. Farnsworth and I are both grunts, so we’re doing what grunts do when there’s nothing better to do and neither sleep nor playing cards nor reading are possible; we’re analyzing the terrain. It is fiercely rugged, with winding roads going through narrow passes between hills and mountains difficult enough to climb on foot and impossible for vehicles. Reverse slopes were of such an angle as would make defenders largely invulnerable to artillery and would make even high angle mortar fire of much reduced effect. In any case, at a certain point, looking over a particularly defensible pass, Farnsworth and I looked at each other. I no longer remember who spoke first but the conversation went like this: “If the Kurds” “couldn’t defend themselves” “in this kind of terrain” “they don’t deserve” “their own country”. And that was before we even knew how much they used mines.
A little digression is in order here. As mentioned previously, Kurdish kids are adorable. (The women are also quite fetching, right up until they’re worn out, usually by age twenty-four or so, from being used like mules, which is to say, beasts of burden, but who, unlike mules, can still bear young … and must.) Most people shy away from or are at least ignorant of the reason so many of those adorable kids died. It’s simple; the Kurds starved them to death themselves. It’s a cultural imperative among them, when times get hard, to let the little girls die of starvation (first, of course), and then the little boys. Good guess, dear reader; why, no, I didn’t like that for beans. As a matter of fact, now that you ask, I’m not much for multiculturalism, in general, either.
Interestingly, before we even arrived in our area, there had been an incident – a firefight resulting in several Iraqi dead – between the British Marines and some Iraqi troops guarding one of Hussein’s palaces in that part of Iraq. I asked a British officer about it and his answer was to the effect that, “As near as we can figure, as one of our patrols was passing, two Kurds, from different positions but surely with coordination, took a shot each, close to simultaneously. One shot was at our patrol, the other at the Iraqi on the gate to the palace. Both shots missed, but the Iraqis and our men, thinking they were under attack, reacted as one would expect. We were just a lot better shots, better led, than they were. Poor bastards. One of the reasons we’re quite sure that the Iraqis didn’t shoot first was that, as our men passed, they waved at each other, as soldiers will who have no particular reasons for enmity.”
The main town I ran was Assyrian and Christian, Catholic, actually, having their own rite but being in full communion with Rome. It was an experience to attend mass held in Aramaic, the language of Jesus, a memory I rather cherish despite not understanding a word of it. They are nice people, the Assyrians, seriously nice people. I’ve dealt with a lot of different kinds of foreigners, over the years, even married one, for that matter, and liked almost all of them. But the Assyrians have a special place. They’re also amazingly hardworking. They can’t defend themselves or, at least, they don’t think they can, which amounts to the same thing.
Everyone knows about the Armenian genocide. The genocide of the Assyrians, around the same time period, was about as bad and may have been worse, as a percentage of the premassacre population. And among the chief agents of that genocide? Of both of them, really? You guessed it, the Kurds.
I asked my Assyrian translator there, once, what he and the other Assyrians really wanted. He answered, “We’d like the British to come back and run the place, permanently. Failing that, we’d be very happy to be subjects of the American Empire, if you would just declare one. If that’s not possible, then letting the Iraqis back would be minimally acceptable. Under no circumstance, however, do we want to be under the Kurds.”
That main town was the only one in which no Kurdish babies died, of the smallish number that the Kurds didn’t let starve anyway, and the only one in which there were no political or ethnic murders in that time period. Part of that was probably my own rather forthright approach to domestic harmony – “One incident, just one, and I’ll cut off your food, medical care, and other goodies, causing all your followers to desert you for other groups and leaders I haven’t proscribed!” – but part of it, too, at least for the long term maintenance of the thing, was probably the perception among themselves that the various Kurdish groups needed one safe area in which to engage in local diplomacy, and, since this one area was peaceful, well, why not? That meant a lot of luncheons, meaning, yes, I had the chance to meet most of the bright lights of Kurdish domestic politics and self-determination of the day. I’ve long since forgotten their names, but am pretty sure I could identify most of them in a police lineup and wouldn’t, of course, mind doing so. One in particular stands out in my mind, a rather distinguished looking middle aged barbarian who had once, over what amounts to a domestic dispute, murdered some thirty-seven Christian men, women, and children. And then there was the day the Kurds demanded to be paid. Paid? Why, yes, we were providing free food, free medical care, free shelter, and free security, but they saw no reason not to be paid for unloading the free food and other goodies. I sent the trucks back with the food until they knuckled under.
Thus, it might be better for the United States, before pinning too much hope and faith on the Kurds, to understand that they’re military imbeciles with an unearned and undeserved reputation, that their culture is barbaric, they their one talent seems to be propagandizing and manipulating liberal Western opinion, which is eager to be manipulated, anyway, that any kids who die usually do so because of their own neglect of those kids, that they have no sense of gratitude for any help you give them, that they treat women like donkeys, and that they place zero value on the lives of those who try to help them.
Why we, or anyone, would place our faith and trust in them … well, it eludes me. To help that lesson stick in your mind I offer a Kurdish National Anthem, written by my team sergeant, Sig, in a moment of complete disgust with them. Every line tells a story: (Tune: O Tannenbaum)
A voice without a hint of shame
Cries, “It’s all your fault; you’re all to blame.
We must be clothed, we must be fed
And when that’s done build our homesteads”Chorus:
A Kurd can have no greater love
Than his brand new Kalashnikov;
O Kurdestan, my Kurdestan,
Do what you want; grab what you can.You gave us shelter overhead
Doctors and blankets for our beds.
You’ve saved us from Iraqi raids,
Now tell us when do we get paid?Chorus
We fought the Turks, we fought Iran
We fought Iraq for Kurdestan.
And now you’ve made us free and strong,
We’ll kill the Christians when you’re gone.Chorus
This column is dedicated to the memory of Father Hanna Marko, of Mangesh, Iraq
Tom Kratman, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2026-07-25.
October 28, 2026
QotD: “Our Gallant Allies, the Kurds (and other fairy tales)”
October 23, 2026
Faint signs of civilizational hope: “The Great Un-Karening”
It’s become old hat for Generation Jones and Generation X grizzled grognards to moan on about the almost-unsupervised “come back when the streetlights come on” childhood they remember in comparison to the over-scheduled, over-organized, over-computerized, hyper-supervised situation too many children now find themselves in. But there’s an occasional glimmer that things are changing:
The Great Un-Karening has begun, and decades of cultural engineering have finally run into something their architects cannot fucking control: human nature.
A seven-year-old conquers El Capitan, breaking his older brother’s record, and some sanctimonious busybody responds by reporting his father to Child Protective Services. Apparently, raising children capable of extraordinary achievements now qualifies as suspicious parenting.
And that tells you everything about the suffocating bullshit we’ve allowed to masquerade as progress.
For years, the helicopter-parenting crowd, DEI bureaucrats, ideological school administrators, and professional grievance merchants have worked to remake childhood in their own miserable image. Courage became recklessness. Masculinity became toxic. Independence became neglect. Every hurt feeling became an emergency, and every whining control freak acquired a fresh excuse to interfere.
They built entire systems around rewarding fragility, policing behavior, and teaching children to view the world through the narrow lens of identity, victimhood, and institutional permission.
And now the machinery is encountering resistance.
Kids are reportedly refusing school Pride Day activities. Parents are defending their children’s right to adventure. Twenty to forty neighborhood kids organized their own nighttime pursuit game, complete with strategies, head starts, and a mile-long course. Some neighborhood hall monitor called security.
The kids kept playing.
Fucking beautiful.
There’s the nightmare for the self-appointed guardians of acceptable behavior: children discovering they can organize their own lives without a diversity consultant, a school psychologist, or some miserable asshole clutching a rulebook.
And every independent decision chips away at the authority these people spent years accumulating.
The Karens can scream. The bureaucrats can threaten. The ideological busybodies can keep issuing commandments from their increasingly ridiculous little thrones.
The generation they expected to mold into obedient, perpetually offended dependents is discovering the exhilarating pleasure of telling them to piss off.
They tried to rewrite normalcy.
Now they’re watching the next generation reclaim it without asking their fucking permission.
October 20, 2026
Elon Musk’s evil plan to turn American youth into filthy capitalists
Did you hear the latest outrage? Arch-capitalist exploiter Elon Musk — reportedly the richest man in the world — intends to bribe American children by giving them each a share in one of his most important businesses. On X, Brivael Le Pogam has thoughts:
In 2021, the head of the UN World Food Programme said $6 billion from Elon Musk could solve world hunger.
Elon replied: publish the plan, right here, publicly, and I’ll sell Tesla stock on the spot.
The plan came out. And when you read it, it wasn’t a plan to solve hunger. It was one year of food for 42 million people. A twelve-month subscription. And the year after? Start over.
A few months later, Elon summed up his view: if you care about the reality of goodness rather than the perception of it, philanthropy is extremely difficult.
“Reality of goodness over perception of goodness.”
That line stuck with me for weeks. Does philanthropy actually work?
Gates-style philanthropy is first and foremost institutional capture. Foundations funding NGOs, funding governments, funding programs, producing reports, producing photos. Everyone’s happy, and the aid machine keeps itself alive. Sixty years and hundreds of billions later, much of Africa is still dependent on aid. Zambian economist Dambisa Moyo laid it out in Dead Aid: aid breeds dependency, feeds corruption, and short-circuits the only mechanism that has ever lifted a country out of poverty.
So what actually works?
It’s been tested. In Kenya, Berkeley researchers working with GiveDirectly randomly selected villages and gave every poor household about $1,000 in cash. No program. No training. No conditions. Just cash.
The result: people bought metal roofs, livestock, started small businesses. Barely any inflation. And every dollar injected generated around $2.50 of economic activity locally, including for neighbors who received nothing.
Why? Because you didn’t give them charity. You gave them capital. You primed the pump.
And that’s where everything hinges: ownership. Hernando de Soto showed that the world’s poor hold trillions of dollars in assets, but without recognized property titles, it’s dead capital. You can’t borrow against it, pass it on, or grow it. Where property rights are respected, the system starts running. Where they aren’t, no amount of aid will ever be enough.
Now reread Elon’s post.
“Next year, I will give one of my SpaceX shares to every kid in America. This will be the first of many.”
That’s not a meal. That’s not a handout. That’s a property title. A piece of the company building the infrastructure of a multiplanetary civilization, owned directly by millions of kids.
A kid who gets a handout depends on the state. A kid who owns a share of SpaceX owns a piece of the future. He learns what an asset is, he has a stake in the economy working, and one day he’ll vote as an owner, not as a client of the state.
Gates buys perception. Musk distributes ownership.
The reality of goodness versus its perception. And it’s absolutely brilliant.
October 13, 2026
No wonder the wokies hate J.K. Rowling
The Harry Potter books used to be sacred lore to the woke generation until the author committed the unforgivable crime of defending the rights of women against the encroachment of trans-women. Yet, it doesn’t take a very close reading of the texts to discover so many things that appear to have slipped under the notice of the progressives and form the core beliefs of the fictional world she created:
Amelia crossing paths with Harry Potter and the gang seems much more appropriate than it might have in the past
Potential is largely hereditary, family is most important, the media are lying parasites, the state can’t be trusted with education, and children should be taught armed self-defense.
These are not subversive readings. These are the plot.
The Harry Potter series was the most successful publishing phenomenon of the late twentieth century. It sold half a billion copies. Progressive parents handed it to their children as a parable about tolerance and the courage to stand against prejudice. The movies grossed eight billion dollars. The author became an icon of liberal cultural production and then, by a process that remains opaque to the people who made her famous, a figure of political villainy for holding positions indistinguishable from mainstream liberal feminism circa 2005.
Set aside the author. The books exist independently of whatever J.K. Rowling believes or is believed to believe. Read them for what they actually say. The worldview encoded in the narrative structure, the plot logic, and the moral arc is not the worldview the books were marketed as containing. It is considerably more interesting.
Blood Will Tell
Magic is inherited. This is the foundational premise of the entire fictional world and the premise from which everything else follows.
You are either born a witch or wizard, or you are not. No amount of study, effort, practice, or desire will make a Muggle magical. The reverse is also true: Squibs, born to magical families but lacking the gift, cannot acquire it. They are defective members of magical lineages, pitied and often hidden. Argus Filch, the Hogwarts caretaker, is a Squib. His bitterness and cruelty toward the students is the bitterness of a man who can see the gift in others but will never have it himself.
[…]
Family Carries Everything
Harry survives Voldemort’s killing curse because his mother died to protect him. Not a metaphor. A literal magical mechanism. Lily Potter’s sacrificial love created a protection charm encoded in Harry’s blood that made him impossible for Voldemort to kill directly.
[…]
The Press Are the Enemy
The Daily Prophet is introduced early and is corrupt throughout.
[…]
The State Cannot Be Trusted to Educate Your Children
Dolores Umbridge is a government administrator appointed by the Ministry of Magic to reform Hogwarts.
Her arrival at Hogwarts in Order of the Phoenix is the politicization of education made literal. The Ministry does not trust Dumbledore. The Ministry does not want students to learn Defense Against the Dark Arts. A student body trained in combat magic is a student body that might resist. Umbridge’s curriculum is therefore purely theoretical: no spellcasting, no practical application, only reading approved texts about defensive magic that the students are forbidden to practice.
[…]
The books contain other lessons that the progressive readership tended not to discuss.
House-elves are slaves. They are hereditary servants bound to magical families, forbidden to disobey direct orders, and conditioned to punish themselves for disloyalty. Dobby is freed and becomes a hero. But Dobby is the exception. Most house-elves, including the Hogwarts house-elves, do not want freedom. Hermione’s Society for the Promotion of Elfish Welfare is played for laughs. The elves reject her knitted hats. They are offended by the offer of liberation. Dobby is a weirdo.
The narrative does not resolve this. The house-elves are not freed after Voldemort falls. The epilogue does not mention them. The implication is that hereditary servitude is acceptable if the servants are happy, and these servants are happy. Whatever else this is, it is not an abolitionist text.
[…]
What The Books Actually Taught
The Harry Potter series is a fundamentally reactionary conservative text dressed in the aesthetic of liberal tolerance.
It teaches that ability is inherited and the argument is only about whether pedigree or demonstrated ability should determine status. It teaches that family is the highest loyalty and the source of the most powerful magic. It teaches that the press serves power and the only response is to route around it. It teaches that the state will capture education to produce compliant subjects and that the answer is to arm the children. It teaches that some people are born for greatness and others are born for service, and the main thing is to get the sorting right.
None of this requires reading against the grain. It requires only reading.
October 11, 2026
“Reconciliation should never mean suspending critical thinking”
L. Wayne Mathison on the social media site formerly known as Twitter:
I watched this video about Indigenous education and reconciliation in BC schools. It raises some questions we should be asking across Canada.
Schools should teach history, including residential schools, treaties, colonization and the treatment of Indigenous people. But history should be taught honestly, with evidence, context and room for disagreement.
When students hear slogans like “Indigenous brilliance” and “land back”, are they being encouraged to examine what those terms mean, or simply expected to agree?
Orwell warned us about political language that substitutes slogans for clear thinking. Sowell taught us to judge policies by their results rather than their intentions. Hayek warned against assuming anyone possesses all the necessary knowledge. Bastiat reminded us to consider the costs nobody bothers to mention.
Those principles belong in every classroom.
Reconciliation should never mean suspending critical thinking. Historical injustices deserve examination, but so do competing historical accounts, modern treaty obligations, property rights, individual responsibility and the consequences of government policy.
Students should be free to question every claim, including those made by teachers, politicians and Indigenous leaders.
If a historical claim is true, it should withstand scrutiny. If a political proposal is sound, it should withstand debate.
Education should produce independent thinkers, not obedient political activists.
We owe young Canadians an honest education, not a preferred political narrative dressed up as unquestionable truth.
October 6, 2026
The insanity of the Kamloops Residential School allegations
For whatever reason, the Canadian government decided to not challenge the claims that 215 First Nations children had been buried in unmarked graves (media often changed that detail to a “mass grave”) at the former Kamloops Residential School in BC. On X, Tristin Hopper outlines the story as it was relayed to the public:
Kamloops Indian Residential School, 1930.
Photo from Archives Deschâtelets-NDC, Richelieu via Wikimedia Commons.
I still don’t think Canadians appreciate just how crazy the unmarked grave allegations at Kamloops were. So I tried to sum it up as best as I could …
The unmarked graves at Indian residential schools mentioned by the Truth and Reconciliation predominantly refer to students who died of disease, usually tuberculosis and usually before 1930. They were then buried in onsite cemeteries with wooden markers, with the result that the grave location was lost when the marker rotted away. When you hear about graves being excavated at IRS sites, it’s usually something like this.
The Kamloops 215, from the start, was an entirely different thing. It purported to provide evidence of an insane blood libel that the Catholic Church was secretly murdering Indigenous children en masse as late as the 1960s. The specific “knowing” was that staff were disappearing Kamloops Indian Residential School students and burying them in the school’s apple orchard in the middle of the night. This was despite the fact that nobody could actually name a specific student that had been disappeared in this fashion.
What Kamloops did was equivalent to claiming that we finally had physical evidence of the Satanic ritual abuse panic. So, think of it like a Canadian hospital publicly claiming that they’d found an onsite mass grave filled with babies murdered by Satanists in the 1980s.
Actual residential school deaths were employed as cover for an utterly bananas urban legend. And that’s why, in 2021, Canada was thrown into a profoundly destructive cultural revolution from which we may never recover.
September 30, 2026
Undermining any attempt to discover truth and achieve any reconciliation
The urge to uncover past wrongs in the Canadian government’s dealings with First Nations groups isn’t a bad thing … but the government’s unwillingness to require factual evidence in support of claims of past wrongs will do exactly the opposite of working toward cultural reconciliation:
Photo from Woke Watch Canada
Why is the federal government trying to prevent Canadians from learning the truth about Indian residential schools?
On 24 September 2026, six days before Canada’s National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, Minister of Crown-Indigenous Relations Rebecca Alty issued a statement about so-called ‘Residential Schools denialism’.
Alty claims so-called ‘Residential Schools denialism’ “spreads false information by denying or casting doubt on the history of Residential Schools and the lasting harm they caused”. She offers no examples, which strongly suggests she could not provide examples if pressed to do so. The federal government is thus using Canadian taxpayer funds to attack a straw man of its own creation.
In fact, the federal government has gone far beyond using Canadian taxpayer funds to attack the straw man it calls ‘Residential Schools denialism’. It has even entertained bills which would criminalize it.
The federal government refuses to release residential school attendance records to the public which would disprove claims of missing children
In addition to using Canadian taxpayer money to attack so-called ‘Residential Schools denialism’ — a straw man of its own creation — and entertaining bills which would criminalize it, the federal government has actively prevented the truth about Canada’s Indian residential schools from coming out.
For years there have been tales of thousands of missing Indian residential school students. The federal government has allowed these baseless rumours to proliferate, despite the fact that not a single name of a missing Indian residential school student has ever been produced by anyone, including the federal government.
Moreover the federal government has allowed these baseless tales of missing Indian residential school students to proliferate while actively concealing from the Canadian public the attendance records in its possession which disprove them.
An example is the attendance records for the Kamloops Indian Residential School. A close examination of the quarterly returns for the Kamloops Indian Residential School from 1943-1952, which are available online, establishes that every student is accounted for during that decade.
The government also has quarterly returns and other attendance records for the remaining years of the existence of the Kamloops Indian Residential School, 1952-1977, which it has not released to the public. Their existence is attested to by the federal government itself in the school narrative it prepared for use in the Independent Assessment Process.
Quarterly returns were the basis on which the Department of Indian Affairs calculated the per capita grant which covered the operating costs of the school. School officials ensured they were meticulously accurate in order to obtain as large a grant as possible based on current student enrolment, and the Department of Indian Affairs likewise demanded that they be meticulously accurate to avoid the federal government overpaying the school.
It is thus of the greatest significance that on pp. 7-8 of the attached school narrative, the federal government provides a table of total attendance figures for the years of the Kamloops Indian Residential School’s existence. The figures given by the federal government for the years from 1952-1977 are not estimates. They are very precise numbers — 402, 424, 381, 390, for example — indicating that they are derived from attendance records in the federal government’s possession, and in fact the federal government’s heading on the table reads “most are September figures for each year and based on Quarterly Returns where possible“.
It is thus clear that if released by the federal government, the quarterly returns underlying the figures in this table would establish conclusively that not a single student from the Kamloops Indian Residential School went missing between the years 1952-1977, yet the federal government refuses to release these attendance records so that the Canadian public can learn the truth. Instead, the federal government allows the damaging and completely unfounded myth of thousands of missing Indian residential school students to proliferate, and even to be promulgated beyond Canada’s borders (as, for example, in the recent hearings of the Rome-based Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal).
The federal government needs to release these attendance records, not just for the Kamloops Indian Residential School, but for all Indian residential schools in Canada, so that the Canadian public can learn the truth, i.e., that federal government records establish that not a single student is missing from an Indian residential school.
On X, Mr Bench points out that First Nations’ political representatives see literally no end to the need for reconciliation for generations yet to come:
Will reconciliation ever end?
According to Candice … NO.
Plan for this to continue for generations.
She says some people haven’t even started healing yet.
Her son will need healing.
Her future grandchildren will need healing.
And she admits:
“Don’t know how many generations it’s gonna take for us to heal, and healing is forever.”
So when does reconciliation end?
It doesn’t. So keep the funds flowing
If “healing is forever”, apparently there is no finish line.
L. Wayne Mathison speaks for an increasing number of Canadians here:
I’m sick and tired of being told that people generations from now will still need to “heal” from events they never personally experienced. My ancestors went through terrible things too. History is full of conquest, poverty, discrimination, war and displacement.
Remember the past. Teach it accurately. Deal with specific injustices that still exist. But at some point adults also have to build a life in the present.
I do not believe anyone should inherit permanent victimhood, and I do not believe anyone alive today should inherit permanent guilt.
Reconciliation without measurable goals, accountability or any conceivable end point stops looking like reconciliation to me, period.
Keep this up, and I am totally done with this.
September 26, 2026
QotD: The game of Marbles
Nevertheless, we scoured the tracks for endless hours, turning over every likely pebble that caught the sun. No steelies. I did amass a small collection of spikes that had worked their way loose from the ties. Never did figure a use for them. But they were cool.
The game was marbles. Way we played it in upper Michigan was to draw a chalk circle on the cement or scratch one on the sand with a stick, sometimes we even used a length of string. The battleground was set. The players approached cautiously if their stock was low or boldly if their marble bag brimmed.
One boy against one boy. Man against man. A test of skill and mental grit. Incidentally, only boys played against boys, girls against girls: this was back in the day when adults didn’t burst a spleen for kids noticing the obvious differences in the sexes. Besides, boys were daring and cavalier. They were out for conquest. Girls would sometimes — this still baffles me — agree to play to a draw! Even if one girl would outright win she wouldn’t claim her prize. Bizarre creatures.
First boy, if he was a pro, placed his middle finger against his thumb and then snapped it at his marble, aiming to smack it into his opponent’s. If he hit it, he got to keep it. No time outs, no I-wasn’t-readies, no whimpering. Newcomers and cowards could be identified by the anemic way they smacked their marble, say by giving it no more than a half-hearted push with their forefinger.
Strategy was obvious. If you were the better shooter, you attacked attacked attacked. Go right after the other guy. Intimidate him. Like Nelson, ignore all subtleties and blaze away. Cagier boys took advantage of the braggarts and only pretended to be cautious. They let their opponents open with a bold shot or two, answering with a shot away as if in retreat, then when the other boy’s shot would miss and stop close by, the jig was up.
And that was the problem. Too bold and your shots would come close, too close. Countless times the marbles would stop an inch away. It was a goner. This is why it made sense to shoot hard; over-shooting was hardly a risk. Unless you in a sudden-death match where shooting outside the lines meant an automatic loss.
Most of us neither lost too many nor gained too many. But a few kids were easy pickings. Every day they’d come with a new small bag (these were sold in grocery and “dime” stores) and lose them. Rich kids.
Unless by prior agreement, only even matches were allowed. Cat’s eye against cats eye were the lowest, entry-level bouts. Cats’ eyes, for those monumentally ignorant of Americana, are the clear marble with the squiggly, colorful aberration running through the center. These were the general stock, like ten-year-old used cars; useful, but unloved. Why, you could find spare cat’s eye rolling around behind the home room teacher’s desk. What counted was quantity.
Perries, probably a corruption of puries, solid colored beauties. These were always just a shade smaller than the cat’s eyes. Perries, though coveted, had a tendency to chip, sometimes even crack open when hit hard. Clears were solid glass, no color. Steelies were polished ball bearings. I only ever saw two of them. Not the railroad kind, but small ones from who-knows-where. They were said to be unbeatable, which is why we latched onto any rumor of a source.
Then came the boulders, the double-sized version of the normal marble. One of these was worth five to ten of the regular kind, depending on availability. Boulder-on-boulder matches were always closely attended. They were rare, too, especially when they featured perries. (I have since learned boulders are called “shooters” in other areas. But all our marbles were shooters.)
We used to empty our marble bags and compare, holding our treasures up to the light for the kind of close scrutiny used by gemologists sizing up wedding rings. Oddities such as pea-sized perries occasionally showed up. These were said to be from China, then still a mysterious land.
I don’t guess kids play marbles anymore. Unless there’s a marble “app” for their cell phones. But it now makes sense that my favorite adult game is petanque.
William M. Briggs, “Marbles!”, Science Is Not The Answer, 2026-06-23.
September 22, 2026
QotD: Organized activities for children versus informal play
I didn’t ask why. I wish I had, because I’m sincerely curious — these were busy, active kids, actually in the process of racing around the playground with their buddies while the adults chatted, so it’s not as though they needed organized sports to keep them from merging with the couch cushions — but at the time it seemed rude and pushy so I changed the subject. Now, obviously not everyone is like this mom: some people, including Tim Carney, really do love sports and delight in sharing that love. But the truth is, people are obsessed with signing their kids up for stuff. Carney calls it the Travel Team Trap, and it’s probably most evident in youth sports culture, but it shows up everywhere. Your kid likes to write? Find a creative writing class! Having fun with chess? Quick, hire a tutor! My local rec center even offers courses in Dungeons & Dragons, taught by a real live professional nerd, because apparently eating Doritos in your mom’s basement while your friends mock you for touching the Sphere of Annihilation isn’t good enough any more.
And it’s a vicious cycle, because all these official activities crowd out informal play. If the artsy kids in your neighborhood are taking a musical theater class half an hour away, there’s no one to join your kids in pulling out the dress-ups and staging a drama of their own. If everyone is off at soccer practice, you can’t meet up at the park to kick the ball around. Sorry, Zerubbabel can’t come over and play Legos this week, he’s got his STEM Makers class on Wednesday and then Thursday afternoon is junior robotics team … Soon even the families who want a more relaxed, unprogrammed life are signing their kids up for things because it’s the only way they’ll ever see their friends.
There’s nothing wrong with formal instruction in its place, especially for things where technique really matters: the world needs basketball coaches and piano teachers, too. And sometimes it’s just fun! A big stage with lights and music and real costumes scratches an itch that Mom’s old prom dress and a dinosaur mask (“Velociraptorella”, currently in previews off-off-off-Broadway) just can’t touch. But when we regard these things as potentially interesting and entertaining, rather than absolutely vital to our children’s well-being, we can make sane tradeoffs about them. A day-trip to the awesome museum in a neighboring city is also potentially interesting and entertaining, but nobody thinks you’re a bad mom if you spend the weekend doing something else.
And what’s more, the push for legible achievement over experience, without regard for what’s good for your family — or even, apparently, whether your kids like it — robs them of the opportunity to motivate and direct their own lives. Basketball practice three times a week surely does more for your jump shot than a pickup game at the local park, but in the long term the ability to take ownership of your time, make and keep plans with your friends, sort out interpersonal disagreements, etc. are going to be a lot more useful. (And, sorry, I’m still stuck on this D&D thing: the threat of your friends losing interest and wandering off to play foosball instead is a much greater incentive to become a good DM than anything you could learn in a class.)
But it’s not actually surprising that people parent like this, because it’s how they grew up: today’s moms and dads are yesterday’s Organization Kids.1 Their image of the good life is tallying up achievement points on some great celestial board. And no wonder they’re desperate to tally up points for their kids, too: they think their futures depend on it! In fact, every time I bring this up, someone tells me that Harvard is full of kids whose parents drove themselves crazy coordinating travel sports schedules and private school dropoffs and chess tutors — all of which is true, and some of which is probably even causal. (Nobody appreciates achievement points tallied up on a great celestial board like a college admissions office.) But a lot of it is also because that’s how smart, conscientious, upper-middle-class parents are expected to raise their kids, and the best way to get into Harvard is to be the offspring of smart, conscientious, upper-middle-class people. (It also helps if they’re neither white nor Asian.)
Jane and John Psmith, “JOINT REVIEW: Family Unfriendly, by Timothy P. Carney”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2024-10-14.
- I hadn’t reread the article since I was in college, but revisiting it now it’s an amazing artifact. “No one is political, no one protests.” Things change!
September 18, 2026
One disruptive kid can ruin class for all the others
I remember talking to the teacher who taught the special needs kids at my middle school … Mr. Gibson was the only black teacher in the school and he was far more qualified than any of the others. It also helped that he had the patience of a saint: I doubt any other teacher there could last more than a day with the kids he looked after. At some point in the decades since I was in school, the powers-that-be decided that integrating all the children together was the right decision. By any sensible reckoning, it has been the worst thing they could have done, both for the special needs children and all the other children, as GenX Anecdotes relates on Substack Notes:
GenX Anecdotes didn’t include this in her post, but I thought it to be appropriate, in a way.
Having worked in schools and hearing my daughter’s experiences, it just can’t be the case that a tiny minority of extremely disruptive kids ruin the learning for all the others. Yet I have seen time and time again how one or two disruptive kids with severe behavioural issues can derail a whole lesson.
The dogged insistence that all the kids must be thrown together regardless of capabilities and behaviour is insane to me.
I have seen the amount of time, effort and extra staff required to deal with just ONE kid who clearly needs “round-the-clock” close supervision.
I have often thought those kids should not be in a “normal” class or school. They need to be somewhere else where they can get specialist support. And I don’t care how many times you shout “inclusivity” at me. Those kids would be better off somewhere else too.
I have watched kids who, during lunchtime, will smash up a whole table of kids’ lunches and try and run out of the school gates; kids continually shouting in lessons; bully and “hit” other kids repeatedly; demand all the other kids play games exactly as THEY want them to be played; derail a whole lesson and be continually brought out of the classroom, but only to be brought back in again!
Then I see the adults pander to the disruptive ones time and time again and expect all the other kids to suck it up and put up with their bullshit. All under the guise of some “neurodivergent” excuse. If their “neurodivergence” continually negatively impacts everyone around them, then they need to be removed from everyone else. Sorry. It’s not everybody else’s responsibility to put up with it.
Time and time again, the needs of a minority of kids prioritise the needs of many.
I remember when I worked in one junior school, attending a training day for teachers and support staff, which was conducted by the school head teacher.
When I raised this issue, he just went over to his laptop and brought up that “equity” meme of the three people standing on boxes looking over a wall onto the big screen and said THIS is why.
He didn’t like the fact that I had brought this up, especially since some of the teachers agreed with me. He very quickly shut me down, and his whole tone was this kind of patronising and smug “you don’t understand at all do you?” Like he was having to explain basics to me. There were a thousand things I wanted to say about it, but I didn’t.
What really got me was how all those teachers who had agreed with me looked at the meme and were nodding! They were impressed by it and acted like they hadn’t seen it before. It was beyond infuriating. I SO wanted to get up and go over to the laptop and find the other “equity in reality” meme, which is far closer to the truth.
But I didn’t, because I didn’t want to derail the whole thing and be the only “disrupter” in the room.
It was close to lunchtime, and it was already running over, and everyone was clearly eager to get out of there, so I didn’t want to turn it into an ideological battle of wits. In hindsight, I wish I did.
But I wasn’t brought up to be that person. And yet, ironically, here we are. Raising a generation of people who WOULD totally hold everyone up and much worse.
I left that job soon after that. It wasn’t just that. It was a lot of things related to this. I watched daily as things that I thought could actually be quite easily made better with some practical adjustments were continually and self-evidently made worse for EVERYBODY because of an adherence to this arrogant and utterly insane ideological bullshit.
It drove me nuts.
September 10, 2026
Women’s dissatisfaction with modern life
On Substack Notes, Copernican linked to this article saying:
While revoking the 19th wouldn’t fix EVERYTHING, it’d probably be a step in the direction of reestablishing a structural social frame for a lot of women. The problem is that feminists want a system that works for the top 0.5% of women, while the historic systems have worked for 95% of women. We need systems that work for most people most of the time, not a small fraction of the population all the time.
For my (relatively few) non-American readers, “the 19th” refers to the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which granted the right to vote for women. Some cynics claim it was the fatal step leading to today’s political situation.
In the linked article, The Appalachian Gorilla wonders why women are so miserable:
There is a famous clip of Joe Budden and his crew watching a Bill Hicks joke with a woman. Bill hicks says he figures out how the fall of man from Eden happened. Adam said, “Look at this, Eve. We are one with nature, one with god and every time we fantasize about something, it becomes reality”. Eve looks at Adam and says, “Yeah, it’s just not enough, is it?” The guys laugh, and one of Joe Budden’s crew asks the woman why she wasn’t laughing, and she says, “I was just waiting for more”. Joe Budden immediately chimes in and says, “Yeah, that’s the point”. And everyone laughs.
Mitch Hedberg once made a joke that if you are ever lost in the woods, just build a house. You went from lost to being home.
Men will adapt to situations and eventually survive, making any situation the norm.
Women, though, can find themselves in the best situation possible and call it prison. I recently pointed out that I would kill to not have to go to work every day. I would kill to just spend time with my children. This isn’t a fantasy; I spent 6 months laid off with a 3-year-old and a 7-year-old, cooking, cleaning, fishing, reading bedtime stories, doing laundry, and loving life every day. There was a point where a hurricane hit the mountains here in PA, and we didn’t have power for 3 weeks back in the holler, and my sons and I spent the days fishing and the nights cooking and sitting by the fire staring at the stars.
Women are miserable, though, constantly. Not women in my life, just in general. Every protest, every demonstration, every meeting is full of women looking to enact vengeance on a man or some evil fabricated structure they built in their heads.
[…]
This is the thing. Why do women see these kids as work? Why do they see chores as work? I have seen women turn hygiene into work. I have seen them turn sex into work. This is an almost universal attitude. I say I get to be a dad. They say they have to be a mom. I say I get to cut my grass. They say I have to do the dishes. I enjoy doing the laundry and cooking meals. I get excited about food I make repeatedly. I get excited about hitting the grocery store and getting fresh eggs or stopping at a local spot to get them from a farm.
I have seen so many women turn sex into a chore or a reward or a way to punish their significant other. Let’s be honest about this too. Most women do 0 work in bed. They may claw your back or throw it back when on their knees, but most won’t ride to fruition. They want choked and hit and slapped. I have been asked to spit on them, or finishing on their face is a reward for them. They want swings built or contraptions to restrain them. Insane stuff to give the illusion of danger.
I cook my relationships because, well, I enjoy food, refuse to eat Kraft Mac and Cheese, have never had ramen noodles, and will not start eating them at 43. Food is supposed to be the most basic of love given from one person to another. It is the labor of love and skill translated to reality. Sustaining another human from your hands to their plate is a beautiful way to connect with others. Doing so for your children, or having them cook with you and watch them appreciate their own labor and ability, is beautiful. Seeing their skill level rise with each meal is amazing. Women act like teaching their children is a chore.
I must say that this is not all women, but it is most at this point in our society. I know there are fathers out here who are pieces of shit, but most I know are good men who have been railroaded by the system and have to work 5 jobs to pay child support to keep themselves afloat while dealing with the loss of identity, their children, and fighting the depression that goes with that.
I once asked a wiser man than myself, “Why do women continue a system that will destroy their sons?” He replied, “Because women don’t actually like children. They like babies.” Today, though, with what we are seeing with women making videos where they are admitting they want to harm their children or even joking about dropping their children off the steps or a balcony or into a dryer to support Lindsey Clancy, it makes all of us wonder if they actually even like babies.
September 7, 2026
“Don’t forget to like and subscribe!”
Along with the earlier post on the recent steep decline in basic literacy, here’s Christopher Gage discussing the same phenomenon of younger Brits’ increased dependency on videos while also demonstrating reduced verbal skills. A mere co-incidence, we can be sure:
La Cigarette by Henri Lebasque (1921)
A friend of a friend of a friend — a primary school teacher — reckons her pupils spend so much time glued to screens that they speak in YouTube English.
Rather than greet one and other with “Hello” they say, “Hi, guys! Welcome to my channel!” When saying goodbye, it’s “Don’t forget to like and subscribe!” Apparently, these little dopamine fiends cannot endure one moment without suckling on the eternal teat of Mother iPad. With their scrolling fingers they tear the pages in strange, ad-free artefacts once known as “books”. Reader, I don’t know if this little fable is entirely true or some semblance of the truth. But it rings truer than false.
Am I being facetious? Not really. The British government, in a rare bout of usefulness, conducted a study into screen-time amongst primary school children. That recent study by the education department found that the more a child spends scrolling on a screen, the less good their vocabulary be.
Please excuse that example of mongrelised English. Then again, perhaps we should call it Future English given that, in just a few years, the YouTube kids will speak in that very bastardised tongue.
According to a bleak wave of childhood study, spending hours tethered to screens quite literally dissolves learning. Researchers found that the “heavy users” — a term usually reserved for heroin addicts — recalled significantly fewer words from a list than their less addicted peers. These screen-addled sprogs spend more than five hours chasing that dopamine dragon. In Plain English, them don’t talk good and shit. At least when compared to their mates who spend less than one hour on a screen. Them kids know more words and shit.
They asked kids to recall words from a list of 34. The ones double-stitched to iPads upwards of five hours daily recognised barely half the words whilst their peers recalled two thirds. Eighty-six minutes. That figure represents the tipping point between literacy and a life talking in the mangled English of a failed rapper.
The study arrived at a rather chilling conclusion: If a child spends over an hour and a half each day thumbing through brain-bleaching bilge on YouTube, their grasp of language withers faster than a doormat outside a crack den.
Of course, these are hyper-sensitive times. The researchers keenly doled out the old “correlation doesn’t imply causation” disclaimer mandatory in a neurotic culture which treats truth like hazardous waste. And who am I to judge? The ability to express one’s thoughts isn’t utterly essential. The development of language — I’m sure a Foucault-addled academic might agree — is elitist and racist and sexist and ableist and all that.
And so, I am intensely relaxed about this brave new world in which the brains of the next generation dissolve in a swamp of TikTok reels and YouTube videos. There is nothing to worry about. This is progress. And progress must always progress. Words are just words and you can still talk good and shit without knowing them words in them things that don’t even have videos on them pages.
The New Dark Ages by James Marriot
Ed West reviews James Marriot’s The New Dark Ages, which covers issues that are certainly of deep concern to parents as GenZ and Gen Alpha appear to have almost completely abandoned literacy in any written form:
I’m not the only parent who feels increasingly anxious about their children’s media diet. For teenage boys in particular, entertainment often comes in the form of YouTube, which for any adult briefly glancing at the screen seems to feature an array of thumbnailed gawping imbeciles, besides an invitation to watch the latest work of creativity: “I took a bath full of Diet Coke and Mentos” or “I cemented a microwave to my head”. In comparison to this, the mindless television I watched in the 1990s seems as narratively complex as Dostoevsky.
Most of all, it’s notable that many children aren’t reading anymore, and it’s steadily become a topic of interest among fellow parents, then worry, and now panic. It’s impossible to ignore the fact that something quite bad is happening.
Every catastrophe needs its Jeremiah, and for this we have Times columnist James Marriott, whose increasing anxiety about the decline of literacy was articulated in a hugely popular substack post last year. Having written extensively about how no one reads books anymore, he decided to turn the subject into a book, The New Dark Ages, published this week.
I wouldn’t call the book “urgent” because I usually take that to mean “worthy scolding by an ideological ally”; it’s entertaining, informative, often amusing and makes a coherent case in 50,000 or so words, which many of us can still manage. But the implications he lays out are disturbing, and influence everything around us.
James and I have become friends over the past couple of years, drawn together by a mutual sense of despair, and he’s probably the only person in journalism even more pessimistic than I am. If you believe the media to be a circle-jerk of people helping their mates (which it is, obviously), bear that in mind, but reading his prose one gets a sense of how likeable as well as articulate he is, even if born in the wrong decade. His upbringing will seem as alien to those raised in the coming years as the world of Boethius would have been to Alfred the Great.
Literature was our religion: the way we explained and interpreted our lives. As a child I quickly learned that every possible event — from a major bereavement to a minor playground contretemps — could be cross-referenced against a novel by Thomas Hardy or a poem by Philip Larkin. There was a quote for everything. I was dragged off to Shakespeare plays at what now strikes me as a rather cruelly young age (“if you’re not enjoying it”, I remember my dad telling me, “you can just read your book instead”). We worshipped pretty much all the canonical English poets but in our pantheon of literary saints, Shakespeare was Jesus or, more probably, God.
We celebrated his birthday every year with a homemade cake and in the holidays we were taken on solemn pilgrimages to Stratford-upon-Avon. I recall that I was once presented with a Shakespeare-themed stuffed bear (it was wearing a t-shirt with a quotation from Hamlet).
Such a veneration for the written word naturally made him sensitive to disturbing stories about declining literacy that began circulating around the turn of the decade. “The first rumours that something important was happening reached me via friends working in universities”, he writes: “I came close to going into academia myself (though I don’t think the world is a poorer place for the loss of my proposed PhD on landscape imagery in post-war British poetry)”.
Anecdotes were soon backed up by data, showing significant declines in reading comprehension among students, as well as an even sharper drop in the number of adults and children reading for pleasure. The chief suspect seemed obvious: it’s the phones. (Everything’s “the phones”). Yet the more Marriott looked into it, the more he came to believe that the real transformation came with television, as Neil Postman had warned in his 1985 polemic Amusing Ourselves to Death.
“Postman believed that the rise of TV — with its bias towards triviality and charismatic personalities — was beginning to undermine the kinds of reasoned and productive public discourse on which a civilised democracy depends. He was dismissed by some of his critics as a crank and a Luddite. The passing of time has revealed that he was a prophet.”
September 3, 2026
Canada’s “softer, gentler, more inclusive, more sensitive” cadet movement
I was in the army cadets from 1972-76. We were still wearing British-style battledress uniforms rather than the CF Green delivery driver uniforms, but we weren’t in cadets for the pseudo-scouting experience … we wanted to be army cadets. Not long after I left cadets for the reserves, the leadership vision changed to (I assume) make cadet organizations more “inclusive”, as John Carter describes:
This unfortunately isn’t new. I was in Army Cadets back in the 90s. Even then female fatbodies in the adult officer corps weren’t unknown, and cadets was coed.
I didn’t actually mind the coed aspect at the time, I picked up a lot of my hs gfs through cadets. What I did mind was how ridiculously soft it was. Weapons training, in particular, was essentially impossible to obtain unless you joined the marksmanship team (which I did for that specific reason), and even then they only gave us ancient Lee-Enfields with .22 inserts. We did a lot of camping and rucking, including in winter, which was great, but aside from the exercises being on army bases and conducted in combat fatigues using old surplus kit, there was almost nothing to mark it out as military in character. Nor for that matter was there anything in the way of physical conditioning.
I wasn’t the only one annoyed by that. The kids who joined cadets wanted to be little warriors. They wanted to crawl through mud with a knife clenched between their teeth, they wanted to get emotionally abused as they struggled through obstacle courses, and they wanted to handle firearms. There was a rumor that all of us had signed an agreement that in event of war, if the rest of the military had been wiped out, we could be called up for the last line of defence. I doubt that was true but we thought it was the coolest thing.
Instead, the only cadets who were allowed to handle C7s were the honour guard, who were issued (rubberized) rifles before parades.
Unfortunately it didn’t matter what the cadets themselves wanted. The adults had decided that softer, gentler, more inclusive, more sensitive was the name of the game. I didn’t make the connection with the presence of female cadets at the time, though in retrospect that’s obvious. What was obvious to me at the time however was that this was all downstream of liberal females aghast at the very concept of a militarized youth, and weak men who couldn’t tell the females to shut their fool mouths.
As an epilogue, when I turned 17 I joined the Army Reserve, only to discover that this infernal feminine softening had long since infected the military, as well.
The cadet Lee-Enfields firing .22LR were an important part of our weapons training … although due to a weird bit of timing, the very first rifle I ever fired was a full-size .303 Lee Enfield that seemed to have enough kick to push me right out of the rifle pit when I fired it (I was small for a 12-year-old). We hadn’t yet learned about hearing protectors, so my ears were ringing for about an hour after the range trip.
September 1, 2026
QotD: “Down-line clear …”
On one occasion, noticing us waiting by the gates, the signalman slid open his window and asked us if we’d like to come up and see inside the signal box. I was up those stairs almost before he’d finished his sentence and he treated us both to a conducted tour of a fascinating and beguiling little empire.
When bells started ringing, he explained about the bell code system and announced that there was a cross-country passenger train about to pass through Stanford, without stopping, on its way to Rugby. Suddenly, he asked me: “Would you like to signal this train through the station?”
“Gosh, yes! Of course I would!”
The sequence started by closing the gates on the level crossing. These were the traditional, heavy timber gates, rather than the comparatively minimal lifting-barriers seen today. They were opened and closed by turning a huge ship’s wheel-type contraption in the signal box and it took all my strength, plus more than a little help from the signalman, to turn it sufficiently to get the gates completely closed. This reliance on a direct mechanical linkage is the reason why the signal box had to be immediately adjacent to the gates.
Next, it was the signals, which were operated by a system of wires opposed by counterweights. The signalman showed me which levers to pull. I had to pull with all my might to get that red upper-quadrant signal to rise. Pulling the yellow distant signal “off” took even more effort, because its greater distance from the signal box meant that the wire was very long indeed. All these tasks were completed solely by manual devices without any mechanical assistance. It was a technology which hadn’t changed since Victorian times.
After what seemed like a long wait, the train eventually appeared in the distance and I felt so proud, hearing it whistling a greeting. Actually the whistle is a warning device, but I was only eight and I was convinced that the driver was saying “thank you” as he steamed through the station past the signal box, courtesy of my hard work.
And just as it had been with the farm horses, it would not be long before Dr Beeching would sweep away rural railways, together with the way of life which went with them and make such experiences as this impossible.
Whenever I see a railway these days, with everything surrounded by high steel fences, their vertical pales topped with barbarous triple-spikes and further surmounted with coils of barbed wire, together with notices threatening huge fines for trespass, I’m reminded of just how lucky I was to grow up in a time when a signalman could invite a child and his father to join him and give them a singular experience which they would both remember for the rest of their lives.
Brian Meredith, “A 1950s childhood, Part 2: ‘Down-line clear …'”, The Conservative Woman, 2026-05-31.
