Programming note: Tomorrow, Wednesday, I'll be presenting another Clubland Q&A taking questions from Steyn Club members live around the planet at our regular hour: 3pm North American Eastern - that's 8pm British Summer Time/9pm Central European.
Meanwhile, welcome to Part Five of a unique and prescient adventure set in an England where the elites have made common cause with Islam: The Flying Inn by G K Chesterton. David, a First Week Founding Member from Minnesota, says:
With The Flying Inn I am getting the full radio serialization effect as I am following along as we go and eagerly anticipating the next installment. This adds a lot as for most of those I have listened to they are deeper in the catalog so binge listening is more common.
It is fun waiting for one to drop and you will have to excuse me now as I have Episode Four to listen to.
And off he goes. But David is quite right. There are two ways to enjoy our Tales for Our Time - either as a slug of nightly audio Ovaltine twenty minutes before you lower your lamp. Which means cliffhangers-a-go-go. Or you can save them up for a binge-listen on a long weekend car journey - in which case you're hanging on a cliff only for the few seconds it takes to click the next episode. Better a binger than a whinger, as the old Australian proverb has it.
Yesterday concluded with Lord Ivywood's confident declaration that, in an England of "modern communications", Pump and Dalroy would be swiftly captured. In tonight's episode, the old countryman sets out to prove that Ivywood's confidence is misplaced:
Lord Ivywood was in error, therefore, when he said that the fugitives could not possibly escape in modern England. You can do a great many things in modern England if you have noticed; some things, in fact, which others know by pictures or current speech; if you know, for instance, that most roadside hedges are taller and denser than they look, and that even the largest man lying just behind them, takes up far less room than you would suppose; if you know that many natural sounds are much more like each other than the enlightened ear can believe, as in the case of wind in leaves and of the sea; if you know that it is easier to walk in socks than in boots, if you know how to take hold of the ground; if you know that the proportion of dogs who will bite a man under any circumstances is rather less than the proportion of men who will murder you in a railway carriage; if you know that you need not be drowned even in a river, unless the tide is very strong, and unless you practise putting yourself into the special attitudes of a suicide; if you know that country stations have objectless, extra waiting rooms that nobody ever goes into; and if you know that county folk will forget you if you speak to them, but talk about you all day if you don't.
By the exercise of these and other arts and sciences Humphrey Pump was able to guide his friend across country, mostly in the character of trespasser and occasionally in that of something like housebreaker, and eventually, with sign, keg, cheese and all to step out of a black pinewood onto a white road in a part of the county where they would not be sought for the present...
Does any of that still apply 110 years later? In most western nations, the law-abiding are under constant surveillance by the 24/7 security state, while the vast tides of humanity that pour across their borders can gambol and frolic as if they're in the wilds of Waziristan, free and "undocumented". Random example: a Peruvian migrant known as "Gianfranco 23". Why's he called that? Because he's alleged to have personally killed 23 people, as head of a friendly community group called "Los Killers".
Best to steer well clear, before it becomes 23 and me, eh? Alas, in May, Gianfranco strolled into the United States near Roma, Texas, and was intercepted by "the authorities", who gave him a form to appear in court on a date far into the future ...and then released the mass killer into what is laughably called "American society".
That's the bifurcated world we live in: the blissfully undocumented ...and the seriously over-documented, who, as English tweeters have just discovered, can be arrested within hours. It's way more basic than "two-tier policing": a total two-tier existence.
Members of The Mark Steyn Club can hear me read Part Five of our adventure simply by clicking here and logging-in. Earlier episodes of The Flying Inn can be found here, and previous Tales for Our Time here.
If you'd like to join us in The Mark Steyn Club, we'd love to have you: please see here. And, if you've a chum who enjoys classic fiction, we've introduced a special Steyn Gift Membership: you'll find more details here.
Please join me tomorrow evening for Part Six of The Flying Inn.
