Autobiographers From England

"Attacks like this, a crisis like this — hurtful though it is to be accused of what I consider to be the most appalling crimes, to be accused of this is very, very painful and very hurtful. But I am being shown that there are consequences for the rather foolish way that I lived in the past. Though of course, to reiterate due to the nature of the world we live in, of course I deny any allegations of the kind that have been advanced."

"We're here on this planet for a temporary time, we should be spending our time -- some of our time pursuing leisure and joy, all of our time in a spirit of love; we've ended up somehow in this mad planet where we work all the time, most of us doing jobs that we absolutely deplore, getting up to trudge through some meaningless ritual that doesn't relate to the survival of the planet, that doesn't benefit our community."

"The world is changing and we are awakening. These statistics give us a numerical glimpse at the visceral dissatisfaction that most of us feel. Now is the time to express it. These corrupt structures cannot be maintained without our compliance. You could vote against them, if there was anything to vote for, but there isn’t, or you could stop paying your mortgage, stop paying your taxes, stop buying stuff you don’t need. When we, the majority, unite and demonstrate our new intention, we will be invincible. If we, who are complicit by our silence, become active and disobedient. This is a pivotal time in the history of our species. We are transitioning from an ideology that places power and responsibility in the hands of the few to one where we all collectively have power. It is important that we clarify, in a manner accessible to all, which institutions and systems are beneficial and which ones have to go. It is important that we propose ideas and systems that will be advantageous, like the handful in this book, and ensure that they are presented properly. When they are inevitably disparaged by the fearful enemies of change, we must remain unified and insistent. At this climactic time, we have no choice but change. This book, written by a twerp, with minimal interaction with brilliant thinkers and uncorrupted minds, demonstrates that. Now, what are you going to do about it?"

"A pound shop Enoch Powell"

"Oh also I raped someone once, [laughter] I killed her after."

"It terrifies me to contemplate, Tucker, that people like Alex Jones, and in our country, David Icke — who aside from some views that are impossible to corroborate around quite a cultist and shall we call them marginal ideas, difficult to corroborate ideas — when it comes to the subject of globalisation and the increasing authoritarianisation of our planet, appear to have been ahead of the curve."

"Me, I don’t see immigration as a real issue; for me an immigrant is just someone who used to be somewhere else, and the sooner we unite and organize to dismantle the structures that prevent all of us being free, the better I’ll feel."

"Generally speaking, when empowered as a community, or common mind, our common spirit, our common sense reaches conclusions that are beneficial for our community. Our common unity."

"I should also point out that empathy, sympathy, and love are limitless resources, energies that never deplete, and at this time of dwindling fuels we should cherish and explore these inexhaustible inner resources more than ever"

"[On Brand's video comments preceding the media coverage of the September 2023 allegations] It’s insulting [...] And it's laughable that he would even imply that this is some kind of mainstream media conspiracy. He's not outside the mainstream – he did a Universal Pictures movie last year, he did Minions, a children's movie. He is very much part of the mainstream media, he just happens to have a YouTube channel where he talks about conspiracy theories to an audience that laps it up. And, it may sound cynical, but I do think that he was building himself an audience for years of people that would then have great distrust of any publication that came forward with allegations. He knew it was coming for a long time. And then, as for him denying that anything non-consensual happened. That's not a surprise to me. These men always deny any of the allegations brought to them – I knew he would. What he didn't deny was that he had a relationship with a 16-year-old.”"

"[On Revolution] Having read his new book — which is uniquely worthless both as an exercise in writing and as a manifesto for social change — I feel able to dismiss Brand's new self-ascriptions, both as self-taught man and revolutionary. He is neither. An autodidact is not someone who, as Brand does, summons up a convenient line from Goethe cut and pasted from the endless shallows of Wikiquote (or, more probably, gets someone else to do it). An autodidact is, rather, someone who learns German and reads the original — as my father did. As to revolutionaries — successful ones tend, unlike Brand, to have plans and strategies, which is what makes them formidable, if no fun at orgies."

""God, please make me a channel of your peace." The first line of the St. Francis prayer, popularized by Mother Teresa, bastardized by Margaret Thatcher, and cherished by those of us who have fallen through the cracks and floated ourselves back up with crack."

"It was ridiculous—he was soaking. I had to get a towel and offer him clothes that he wouldn’t take. I knew immediately that I’d like him; he just had one of those faces. I could see what he’d been like as a boy, probably always fenced off in the electronic penitentiary of a too-fast mind."

"There is a relationship between government, media and industry that is evident even at this most spurious and superficial level. These three institutions support one another. We know that however cool a media outlet may purport to be, their primary loyalty is to their corporate backers. We know also that you cannot criticise the corporate backers openly without censorship and subsequent manipulation of this information."

"It’s early in the process for me, but my infatuation with fame is waning, my need for external approval and the control of other people’s opinions is expiring. Practically I’ve decided that profits from this book will go towards creating a place where recovering addicts like me can run a business based on the ideas in this book. A café and production company run to create community, not money, democratically managed by the workforce. No bosses. No profit. No bullshit. Selling food sourced ethically, grown locally, and served by people who have had a Revolution in their own lives and are now able to learn and give back. Supporting modest creative projects, building a community of people who want to be part of something other than the toxic hegemony. We will start small but we will grow quickly because we have a limitless resource and we are providing an alternative to a dying system. There are no limits to what we can achieve if we behave collectively, responsibly, and humanely."

"I really hate it when I think I’m on the precipice of saying something deep and empowering when it’s actually more or less a quote from Rocky IV ("If I can change and you can change, everybody can change") or a lyric from an M People song ("search for the hero inside yourself") but I’ve really got very little to add to these scattered and perennial pop cultural artifacts."

"Any corporation selling us products on the basis of anything other than utility should be revoked and shut down. Any corporation that at this time of fast-diminishing resources designs products that have in-built doomsday devices, planned obsolescence, should be shut down. All this glamour and clamor and blagging and skanking has to end."

"All the good things about America either came from the counterculture or were there already when the white people arrived."

"Or as Flight of the Conchords put it: "They’re turning kids into slaves just to make cheaper sneakers. But what’s the real cost? ’Cause the sneakers don’t seem that much cheaper. Why are we still paying so much for sneakers when you got them made by little slave kids? What are your overheads?""

"Since industrialization, we have moved rapidly out of synchronicity with nature and our own nature."

"How did it feel in there to you when you were a child, in the aquarium of your head? I was lonely in mine as the world swam by in immaculately choreographed schools, like an inaccessible gang of Nemos. I was only really at ease with my mum and animals, and I treated them pretty badly. If you feel how I felt, I have been taught a few techniques that might help you. Here’s one for a kick-off: You have to forgive everyone for everything. You can’t cling on to any blame that you may be using to make sense of the story of your life. Even me with my story of one nan that I love and another that I don’t—that story is being used to maintain a certain perspective of mine, a perspective that justifies the way I am, and by justifying the way I am I ensure that I stay the same. I’m no longer interested in staying the same; I’m interested in Revolution, that means I have to go back and change the story of my childhood."

"This phone will connect you to people everywhere, except for where you are, and sever you from God forever. Apple."

"My dad, Ron Brand, was an entrepreneurial Essex man, Del Boy’d up to the hilt on Thatcher’s creed. He was a self-made and self-destructive man and intermittently tumbled either side of the line. The prevailing mentality of the time, the eighties, was "every man for himself." Unions were crushed, state interests were carved up and flogged, and council houses were sold back to the people whose efforts had built them. One of the great venture-capitalist heroes of this time, who epitomized this buccaneering spirit, was Sir James Goldsmith, Tory hero, Thatcher crush, scourge of Private Eye, and demon of the left. My dad and a lot of people from modest backgrounds admired him; there was something appealingly antiestablishment and daring in the aggressive and ingenious ways that James Goldsmith exploited the system."

"Usually, when I’ve met the people who are meant to be in a position of power, I’ve always made sure to give them a damn good soul stare—y’know, look right in their eyes, through the blackness of the pupils and into whatever conscious field exists within. Then lock the eyes on, but let them gently defocus so that the defined parameters of the visual physical go blurry and you can feel the energy behind it, the unseeable energy that isn’t made of photons. Then, if your mind is quiet, you will be informed of the quality of their essence, or at least of the manifest persona that they believe themselves to be."

"It could be that our longing for Revolution is like our longing for perfect love, the impulse we all have for union that was for so long met by religion. However we assign these yearnings, it is difficult to ignore the obvious need for change. Some of us will ascribe it to romantic love, some to consumerism, some to utopianism. It doesn’t really matter. What is important is that for the first time in history we have the means to implement a truly representative system, the means to globally communicate it, and the conditions that require it."

"That is why I do not vote; that is why I will never vote. Let’s instead participate in a system that is truly representative. In the next chapter we are going to look at some stuff that, if we don’t really concentrate and determinedly remain upbeat, could get all boring, and we hate that. The fact is, though, if we’re to shut up Paxman and the naysayers (good name for a band), we have to show our working out. Like in a boring maths GCSE, which I knew was pointless even as I was failing it."

"I recently researched my family tree, and quite quickly labels of class are smudged into nonsense. For a couple of generations back, it’s all very proletariat in every direction—Bethnal Green bottle-makers and jobs that belong in Dickens. But with the generational doubling that occurs, before too long it’s a muddle of all manner of colliding types: scullery maids and sculptors, officers and gentlemen."

"All anyone’s got is theories, usually distorted by what they’ve been through or what they want. This book, for example, was written by someone from a suburban, broken home, raised in Thatcher’s Britain, where inclusive ideas and family values were dismantled. A culture in which fame and celebrity became deified and drug use among the young extremely prevalent. Where modern manifestations of tribal identity like trade unions or guilds became redundant, manufacturing industries disappeared, neoliberalism emerged, and the welfare state was all but abolished. You could probably predict the contents of this book by looking at my weekly shopping receipt from Tesco’s. Alright, Waitrose. I’m dying to paint myself as a lowborn, Wat Tyler, Essex messiah; fortunately, I’m not quite that mad. I know that that heroic myth is part of my programming. That I’m quite a funny, normal bloke, that there’s a bit of bad in the best of us and a bit of good in the worst of us, that any centralized power structure with an egocentric figure at its helm will become corrupt."

"Only Boris [Johnson] concerns me. When I used to watch Have I Got News For You, which as a kid I was proud to watch, full stop, I loved it when Boris Johnson came on. I didn't know who he was or what he did, I didn't think about it, I just liked him. I liked his voice, his manner, his name, his vocabulary, his self-effacing charm, humour and, of course, his hair. He has catwalk hair. Vogue cover hair, Rumplestiltskin spun it out of straw, straight-out-of-bed, drop-dead, gold-thread hair."

"Who does a baby think he is before he can recognize his face in a mirror, before he’s taught his name, before he’s drummed into stagnant separation, cordoned off from the infinite oneness? Love is innate. We must be taught to hate, and now we must unlearn it, as the Buddhists say; let it burn, that which needs to burn, let it burn. The class system isn’t fair on them either, poor little sods—packed off to school, weaned on privatized maternity shopped in from a northern spinster. Trying to find love in the tangle of dismantled family. No one can be happy imbibing a poisoned brew. It’s poisonous for us all. They’ll gratefully sigh when we unlock them from their opulent penitentiaries, they’ll be grateful when their fallow lords and empty chambers feed the hungry and house the poor. They know contentment cannot be enjoyed when stolen. They need the Revolution as much as we do. The whole of human history is nothing new, the whole of your personal story is nothing true, you can do with it whatever you want to do—flick a switch, scratch the record off, look behind the veil. Anything you don’t want, discard; anything that hurts, let go. None of it’s real, you know—all that pain, all that regret, all that doubt, not thin enough, not a good enough mum, not a good enough son, not a good enough bum. You are enough; you’re enough; there’s nothing you can buy or try on that’s going to make you any better, because you couldn’t be any better than you are. Drag your past around if you like, an old dead decaying ox of what you think they might’ve thought or what might’ve been if you’d done what you ought. That which needs to burn, let it burn. If the idea doesn’t serve you, let it go. If it separates you from the moment, from others, from yourself, let it go."

"It felt like the end of the world. I get prophetic flashes. There, I’ve said it. There are times when I see reality unfurl—not like the future is revealed, more like the past, or the present, like I can see the projector from which the spectacle is emitted. In the moment I feel dread. I watched them—maybe it’s my own cultural indoctrination, I’ve watched a lot of films and gone on a lot of conspiratorial websites, so my mind too has been narrativized; I’m not free from tales and agendas. I saw the earth crack open and yawn belligerent fire and the sea take back her bounty. The animals in nightmarish calm know the end is nigh and move to high lands. The unduly unfurled flags are lashed by rain and untethered from their masts by lightning. All nature converges; the purple sky bears down on the cleaved soil as Earth roars. The furious ocean envelops her lover, as long-somnolent beasts rise up from the deep. Things don’t fall apart; they move suddenly inward, in vengeful implosion."

"I truly felt, ultimate objective aside, that the Marines had something beautiful about them. Fraternity, initiation, mentoring, honor, valor, duty—beautiful male attributes in a society in which masculinity is maligned. I can get a bit like that, a bit D. H. Lawrence, a bit jazzed on unexamined humanity. When I chatted on camera to a pair of perfectly assembled teen Marines who sat handsomely in their fatigues, rifles pristine and bolt upright at their sides, I was overwhelmed by the salvation that the military offers to boys that may otherwise have fallen through the cracks."

"With each tentative tiptoe and stumble, I had to inwardly assure myself that I was a good comedian and that my life was not pointless. "I am addicted to comfort," I thought as I tumbled into the wood chips. I have become divorced from nature; I don’t know what the names of the trees and birds are. I don’t know what berries to eat or which stars will guide me home. I don’t know how to sleep outside in a wood or skin a rabbit. We have become like living cutlets, sanitized into cellular ineptitude. They say that supermarkets have three days’ worth of food. That if there was a power cut, in three days the food would spoil. That if cash machines stopped working, if cars couldn’t be filled with fuel, if homes were denied warmth, within three days we’d be roaming the streets like pampered savages, like urban zebras with nowhere to graze. The comfort has become a prison; we’ve allowed them to turn us into waddling pipkins. What is civilization but dependency? Now, I’m not suggesting we need to become supermen; that solution has been averred before and did not end well. Prisoners of comfort, we dread the Apocalypse. What will we do without our pre-packed meals and cozy jails and soporific glowing screens rocking us comatose? The Apocalypse may not arrive in a bright white instant; it may creep into the present like a fog. All about us we may see the shipwrecked harbingers foraging in the midsts of our excess. What have we become that we can tolerate adjacent destitution? That we can amble by ragged despair at every corner? We have allowed them to sever us from God, and until we take our brothers by the hand we will find no peace."

"Now I’m up at the front and Tall Bloke, Long Suit, is still Sieg-Heiling; women are still jiggling and beseeching. There is an unspoken acknowledgment that I am an interloper, that I am unlike everybody else there, neither Eritreanh or Ethiopian, and that there is a risk, therefore, that I am there to mock or judge or disrupt, and I’m capable of all those things. Bellamy has clearly overcome any doubt he has in his self, if not in me, as he is now insistently inquiring, "Do you accept Jesus Christ?" He says it in English, so he definitely knows I'm not Eritrean; the jig is up. "Do you accept Jesus Christ?" he says again, like Jesus is a credit card and I’m an unhelpful waiter. The conditions of the inquiry do not suggest that there is time for me to go into my honest answer: "Yes, but there are caveats." Jesus Christ, the Son of God, sent to earth to redeem us all. Jesus Christ, the Jewish nationalist radical. Jesus Christ, the metaphor for the divine within the corporeal. Jesus Christ, the human being superimposed, literally, placed on the cross: the pagan geometric emblem that represents on the vertical plane the relationship between the earthly and the divine and on the other, horizontal plane the lateral relationships between individual humans. Christ as the end of paganism, the beginning of individualism, of idolatry. Of the acceptance that some humans are more equal than others. Christ as a reminder that we must all constantly die and be born again, moment to moment, to live forever in the now, if as Wittgenstein says, "eternity is taken not to be an infinite temporal duration but the quality of timelessness, then are we not all eternal if we live in the present." Christ as the symbol that the flesh is human, that the carnal human ape has expired, and that we can achieve no more until we transcend, until we ascend, into new conscious realms and manifest the divine. "On earth as it is in heaven""? "Do you accept Jesus Christ?" he says again, and this time gives me a bit of a prod, which he tries to pass off as shamanic but I think is actually frustration. The answer, as I have outlined above, is conditionally "yes," but the most expedient answer is a totally unconditional "yes," so that is the answer I give. "Yes.""

"My indulgent mum, a single mum of an only son, would let me skip games, pandering to my teary complaints as a former fat child herself. This, I suppose, is where a father figure would come in handy, a loving, authoritative strong male to affectionately shove you into adversity. As it was, notes were written and physical activity strenuously avoided, until I discovered that some exercise had an orgasm at the end of it. This syndrome of "fatherless" boys is a much-cited problem that military organizations effectively resolve: Personal identity put aside, a male ideal upon which to focus is provided and pursued."

"I don’t see myself as a yoga person or a man who meditates and prays and eats well and says "Namaste" or "God bless you." I became that because I exhausted all other options. There was a point, I’ll admit, when I flung myself full force into an L.A. New Age lifestyle. I’d just got divorced, and a movie I wanted to do well didn’t meet my expectations. My response to this was to stop shaving and start wearing pajamas outdoors. That is relatively typical behavior for any lunatic; we see them everywhere—twitching, twisting, hollering at their imagined foes. The difference is I was doing it in Hollywood and my pajamas looked suitably ethnic, so I think I got away with it. Although my mates have subsequently told me they were worried and, thinking about it, they did drop hints like "Trim your beard, you look like a shoe bomber" and "Stop wearing them gap-year trousers, you fuckin’ nut," but I was immune. A friend of mine, himself no stranger to mental illness, and that’s putting it lightly—he’s a right fucking fruitcake, living at his mum’s on disability benefits—said to me, "In India if you have a mental breakdown, they don’t build you back up again; they leave you in communion with God." He then looked up, mimicking, I supposed, an Indian yogi, and raised his hands and eyes skywards as if he were playing a tiny accordion just in front of his hairline. "They say, ‘Ah, he’s in conversation with Brahman now,’ and they revere you. In this country they just give you a bus pass."

"Jesus as protagonist in the Gospels is good because, like Superman, he’s been sent from another dimension; like Superman, he’s decided to dedicate himself to saving humanity; and, like Superman, he’s got special powers: heal the sick, walk on water, food multiplication. His vulnerability is that he is part man and as such can be speared, mocked, nailed up, and, at least carnally, sacrificed."

""I believe in God," says my nan, in a way that makes the idea of an omnipotent, unifying frequency of energy manifesting matter from pure consciousness sound like a chore. An unnecessary chore at that, like cleaning under the fridge. I tell her, plucky little seven-year-old that I was, that I don’t. This pisses her off. Her faith in God is not robust enough to withstand the casual blasphemy of an agnostic tot. "Who do you think made the world, then?" I remember her demanding as fiercely as Jeremy Paxman would later insist I provide an instant global infrastructure for a post-revolutionary utopia. "Builders," I said, thinking on my feet. This flummoxed her and put her in a bad mood for the rest of the walk. If she’d hit back with "What about construction at a planetary or galactic level?" she’d’ve had me on the ropes. At that age I wouldn’t’ve been able to riposte with "an advanced species of extraterrestrials who we have been mistakenly ascribing divine attributes to due to our own technological limitations" or "a spontaneous cosmic combustion that contained at its genesis the code for all subsequent astronomical, chemical, and biological evolution." I probably would’ve just cried. Anyway, I’m supposed to be explaining the power of forgiveness, not gloating about a conflict in the early eighties in which I fared well against an old lady. Since getting clean from drugs and alcohol I have been taught that I played a part in the manufacture of all the negative beliefs and experiences from my past and I certainly play a part in their maintenance. I now look at my nan in another way. As a human being just like me, trying to cope with her own flaws and challenges. Fearful of what would become of her sick daughter, confused by the grandchild born of a match that she was averse to. Alone and approaching the end of her life, with regret and lacking a functioning system of guidance and comfort. Trying her best. Taking on the responsibility of an unusual little boy with glib, atheistic tendencies, she still behaved dutifully. Perhaps this very conversation sparked in me the spirit of metaphysical inquiry that has led to the faith in God I now have."

"He came round my house the other day, Thomas Piketty, French as kissing, with eyes that twinkled like petrol in a puddle. He had, though, the demeanor I know well, that of a man besieged by diagonal stabs of insidious judgment."

"In this age where politics is presented as entertainment, it's the most entertaining politicians who ascend"

"All prophecies stripped of acculturation and geographic ornamentation seem only to be saying, "Journey within; look behind your feelings, beyond your pain; fashion your world from what you find there.""

"There is always something for it to think, always something for it to solve, so whenever I first start to meditate, the mantra is a tiny clear droplet lost in a deluge of sludge. I’m not a person who finds meditation a doddle or to whom yoga comes naturally. To tell you the truth, I find the whole business a bit poncey and contrary to the way I used to see myself. It’s only the fact that I decimated my life by aggressively pursuing the models of living that were most immediately available—eating, wanking, drinking, consuming, getting famous—that I was forced to look at alternatives."

"We have a culture where principles mean nothing and personalities mean everything. And I can see why it caught on—I’ve done very well out of it. My personality allows me to get away with all sorts of rubbish: riding the wrong way up a one-way street on a stolen bicycle (I didn’t steal it though; I bought it off a dodgy bloke), winking at the police as I pass, years of trouble-free promiscuity, tables at restaurants. But without principles, I was freewheeling away from God."

"When I was an atheist it was because I rejected authority, and why not reject the supreme authority of God, particularly that boring fucker on Songs of Praise. I could reject him with the unsentimental dispatch of a clipped toenail. When I got clean from drugs and alcohol, I saw that the way I’d always seen the world was limited. It will always be limited. By yielding authority to a benign power, I found a key to transcend previous limitations. Modest limitations, like being unable to survive without the use of drugs and alcohol. Until the time when I got clean, I’d had little experience of loving, powerful authority. Authority had only been corrupt or inefficient in my experience."

"[On Melanie Phillips] In person, inconveniently, she is beautiful. Deep brown, soulful eyes, elegant features and a truthful, caring sincerity in her tone. It is surprising and bizarre, then, to see her contort on air into a taut, jabbing Gollum figure, untutored index finger fucking the audience in the face when they pipe up about Syria or whatever. Oddly, I still like her, regarding her opinions as an arbitrary appurtenance that she pops on in public, like a daft hat that says "Immigrants Out" on the brim. When the audience – who, incidentally, make all the best points – boo her, I think it a shame. The wall of condemnation is an audible confirmation that the world is a fearful and unloving place. Like most of us, Melanie just needs a cuddle."

"My whole life, I have sought comfort in individualism. I escaped the banality of my background with the flamboyance of my haircut, the low expectations of my class with the grandiosity of my parlance, and the fear of being ordinary by becoming a professional weirdo. In a way, my success in show business represents little more than the harvesting of my psychosis. I made my idiosyncrasies and flaws beneficial by exaggerating them."

"If I, so close to the peak, could glean no joy from that rarefied air, the air I was told, as soon as I’d acquired language, would absolve me, if in fact all I gleaned was the view from that peak, the vista true, that the whole climb had been a spellbound clamber up an edifice of foolishness, then what possible salvation can there be for those at the foothills or dying on the slopes or those for whom the climb is not even an option? What is their solution? Well, it’s the same solution that’s available to me, the only solution that will make any of us free. To detach the harness and fall within. Now that’s what I call an extended metaphor. In Fairfield, Iowa, then, there could be the solution. But none of us want a boring solution. The Revolution cannot be boring."

"Serenity is the first thing people with addiction issues are instructed to request: God, grant me the serenity To accept the things I cannot change, Courage to change the things I can, And the wisdom to know the difference."

"Have you ever tried to argue with someone who doesn’t want anything from you? It’s hard. Have you ever noticed in a row with someone that no longer loves you that you have no recourse?' No tools with which to bargain."

"Making enough money to become an effective consumer takes time, dedication, devotion. The wait is miserable. It never occurred that the objective was flawed and the rules were skewed."