In 1957 Ian Fleming’s brother, Peter, published a novel called The Sixth Column, which I read in the ’seventies because I was researching the field of espionage history at the time. It turned out to be very disappointing (by comparison with the ‘Bond’ books, which I devoured eagerly – didn’t everyone?), and incredibly reactionary in its politics. I can’t remember the main plot, set in the near future; but that didn’t seem to matter to Peter Fleming so much as the underlying but persistent theme of the Decline of Britain since World War II; which the author attributed to the nation’s ‘softening up’ by – yes, you’ve guessed it – Labour governments, the welfare state, and what today would be called ‘woke’ ideas. Foreign intervention also came into it, with the Commies (of course) infiltrating a popular TV presenter into the BBC in order to demoralise British youth with his trivial and jokey spiel, and pop music. As I read the book, Terry Wogan (remember him?) came irresistibly to my mind, although The Sixth Column predated him by a couple of decades.

What brought this back to my mind was the England cricket team’s defeat (albeit in the shorter form of the game) by Afghanistan a few days ago. At the end of Peter Fleming’s book, news comes in that the English cricket team has lost to ‘West Africa’; which is taken to be a disgrace – England beaten by black ex-colonials! – and a sure sign, therefore, of her final descent into the abyss.

Personally, I’ve always regarded the global spread of cricket through the world as one of the greatest and most beneficial contributions of British imperialism (perhaps its only one) to civilisation; and often feel a little glow of pride when England is beaten by the West Indies, or Pakistan, or (currently) India. So imperialism wasn’t all bad, then.

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OK, that’s a trivial comment. I should be writing about more important things: the real decline of Britain at the hands of these almost unbelievably stupid and incompetent Tories (perhaps Terry Wogan got to them); neo-fascism; Ukraine; Palestine; knife-crime in Stockholm; global warming; the eventual destruction of our galaxy… I hope to post about some of these later. In the meantime, however, I still have some more medical procedures to go through; in England unfortunately – I really should have stayed in Sweden – starting tomorrow. Nothing life-threatening, I hope. But mildly embarrassing, which is why I haven’t been more specific.