Where Sea Meets Dirt
An Official NHS-affiliated* Guide to Harwich
'Letter of the week'
Dear WSMD, I've noticed that the proprietors of Skippers Fish & Chip Shop don't like me. The frequency with which they get my family orders wrong is stunning, and portion size is somewhat diabolical given the price. The portions keep getting smaller and smaller. Very small indeed at times. I'm wondering if my recent unsolicited comments to them on Christianity - which seems quite popular locally, more so that I've seen elsewhere in Essex - and Jacobin politics might have rubbed them up the wrong way. Also, the manageress has webbed feet, like a Yapock.
It's positively Cromwellian around here in places. The Mayflower-era yokel puritanism hasn't quite gone away. It's a fundamentalism a little bit like that bizarre movie, Sleepy Hollow, even down to those Massachusetts trees by the river on the other side of roundabout. Inevitably you could make Lovecraftian 'Innsmouth' comparisons, or a slight hint of the Exclusion Zone created in aftermath of that well-renowned nuclear disaster in the Urals. A budget remake of The Wicker Man from the perspective of Edward Woodward's force and their island, yet respectfully mimicking the same narrative plot events and eerie sacrificial methodology, you know, just to be fair.
Ever since I attempted to shame a local Conservative politician with fierce, incensed letters of detailed (if overcomplicated) covid-19 anti-NHS criticism whilst re-highlighting his 'family-friendly' nudism fascinations and his notorious expenses scandal to the internet, and since I noted that the district council delights in withholding Green/Smart/Global/Third World area plans from the public, discussed to us post-consensus at their dreary question and answer sessions, and invite-only social club soirees, and with the full propagandistic support of local agit-prop newspapers, all of a very Fabian and Marxian tone, gushing nepotistic lower middle-class Statist praise for the establishment and for the system, with the amateurish writing standard of a Girl Scouts newsletter, and always those sensationalist frontpage grumbles to keep the local population in fear, suspicion and hostility towards each other, usually of the "White British Man Caught Doing Something Terrible" theme, I have sensed that I am no longer welcome around here.
I was hardly welcome in the first place. It's like walking into a Potemkin amusement-park and experimental citizen research enclave for an economy class gulag set up by the Tavistock Institute to abstractly glorify the philanthropic policies of Nicholae Ceausescu. A real sense of cold, windswept decay. Sussex University's former "technetronic" future-shock research facilities are not all that far away after all. The island itself serves as an extension of Hut 6, a 94,354 square mile firing range before a reinforced one-way viewing window.
I told my Dad off gently in the street during his visit after he gave £3.50 to a fat, ugly Syrian (Albanian? Roma?) immigrant woman in a headscarf selling The Big Issue. She should recognise me and my familiar walk by now as I pass that way a few times a week. Her shameless, money-grabbing insincerity in putting on a sing-song cheeriness is not enough to sell her act to me. Interestingly, as I stormed past her shaking my head, she fixated on him, but, as the coins were handed over, it was me she looked at, and me she gave the cheeky smile and the "thank you!" to, with vindicated smugness.
I hate that thinly veiled propaganda 'magazine', for the traitorous anti-European content. The writing is also uninspired, bland, and increasingly dumbed down. Familiar. As usual with every other newsman in the UK, we see that it is possible for John Bird to claim to be, in his own words as reported by a United Nations agency worker in 2010, "both profitable and ethically correct" as his ugly little newspaper business continues to serve the present financial interests and future wellbeing of cynical non-European freebooters who are by now so numerous in our population, and so pampered and endorsed in the face of our comprehensive disenfranchisement that it seems we are, as has been clearly demonstrated, on the way out, homeless natives and all.
What a strange ethical high ground to claim. Wikipedia reminds us that he is "non-partisan", helping to "pull their hands up" so they can stab us through the throat, an extra grand or so for them to contribute to the furnishing of the government-approved priority social housing dwellings they are simultaneously fast-tracked into as private rental landlords continue to evict their European tenants under financial encouragement offered by the multinational defence company Serco, private contractors to the British government.
In translation, John Bird is about on par as a non-partisan with James O' Brien and his false pride tactical fantasies in How They Broke Britain, which manages in the first two post-introduction pages alone to achieve for its Labour Party Guardian benefactors everything it accuses its equally awful opponents of, fulfilling its title by its very publication, in succinct confession and with supreme hypocrisy, and with propaganda's myriad weaponized slander techniques and the usual fluid lies by omission.
I recall my periodic visits to the local shop set up by St Helena Hospice, an independent charity providing bereavement counselling to individuals and their families in North Essex, although I'm not sure how independent they actually are as their official website, full of intrusive customer service pop ups and shifting decals of smart, non-white females posing for the familiar stock photoshoots clustering a soft-edged, pastel-hued 'cloud-bubble' page layout that prioritizes style over substance, and employing one of these cuddly corporate fonts set to pacify pre-schoolers informs me that a third of their funding comes directly from the NHS and that the hospice is the proud member of a vast Essex healthcare alliance. I notice that the Essex Freemasons group sent them a £31,000 gift in 2021 which they have pledged to put into new services designed to assist deprived communities with a specified goal of attracting more black and Asian patients.
A very, shall we say, specific goal on their parts considering that the deprived population of the Tendering District covering an area of 130.34 square miles, is 97.5% white, all 143,669 of those native Europeans left in the lurch for the potential sake of 3684 people. Or indeed a potential 239 foreign-born immigrants out of the 6390 UK-born citizens, majority white or an additional handful who are otherwise, living in Harwich's Dovercourt area where their charity shop is based. A recent Mosque and Islamic Community Centre development in Dovercourt will cater to Harwich's 85 Muslims, assuming they are all practising.
An odd decision to award to them in an area that struggles consistently to gain government funding for maintenance and redevelopment and that continues along with the reputation of being one of the worst, poorest, most-depressing parts of the UK to inhabit, if not its most neglected town altogether. Where I live on my own street at the Parkeston outskirts estate (masquerading as a village), I am continuously reminded of the scenes from Harmone Korine's disgusting movie, Gummo. It's a nightmare world out in my little cracked-tarmac segment along the edge-land boundaries, amidst all the used nappies, fag butts, and rusted car frames, those scatterings of plastic bottle rubbish across the outer woods, and of course the dogshit. Oh yes, and the people. They're all drunkards with Class A addictions.
Our environment is more hostile than the vista of that depraved movie though, and threatening, dirty and decayed, akin to a Third World living standard, the feral European inhabitants despising each other, strong echoes of Edward C. Banfield's 1955 South Italian town studies in The Moral Basis of a Backward Society. Rather than an oasis of calm, my house serves as a last bastion, a cultured dugout. However, were a few of the neighbours to vacate, and a few walls knocked through, you'd be in possession of an unlikely Gormenghast.
I'll cut to the chase with these typical liberal errors - given that 8% of the global population is of European heritage, with 7.92% of that total assured in being slavishly dedicated to your historic mentality, I know we appear rather small and measly to your similarly hued smart-mind(s), but, despite that, I've often thought a total minority might be outnumbered, and more likely to be, on account of this, akin to a dying organ-failure burns case on a tiny specialist wing.
Do we, A. Help her out?
Or B. Continue to make a fortune spreading soma and sunshine on a rat line drip to the dark, crowded wellnesses, only to mysteriously lose the occasional patient now and again, but at least everyone's smiling, and the atrium moves?
Where's the bloody triage now, you stupid idiots?!
-Submitted by John Thomas De Luca, Apprentice Port Operative
*In receipt of DLA from the Department for Work & Pensions facilitated by the confirmations of the National Health Service's Mayflower Medical Centre Limited, Severalls Industrial Park, Colchester. Without the psychological solace gleaned from the 250G jar of Marmite purchased with these unparallelled funds, this letter could never have been written, my humble repayment to them.
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