Programming note: Join me tomorrow, Saturday, for the latest edition of my weekend music show, Mark Steyn on the Town, at Serenade Radio. The delights are diverse, from nineteenth-century humoresques to disco. It airs at 5pm UK time - which is 6pm Western Europe/12 noon North American Eastern. You can listen from anywhere in the world by clicking the button at top right here.
~It's always a pleasure to hear from recent additions to our ranks who are just discovering the delights of one of the best archives on the Internet. Pauline Fielder, a brand new member of The Mark Steyn Club from the English Home Counties, writes:
Thank you Mark, I've just joined the club and have a lot to get through. First stop everything James Bond, thoroughly enjoying where it all started for John Barry. Spine tingling music. Wishing you well.
Great to have you with us, Pauline - and our John Barry special is a pretty good place to start.
Music of a different kind sets the scene for tonight's episode of The Flying Inn, G K Chesterton's eerily prescient 1914 novel set in an England in which the elites make common cause with Islam - and in which Parliament's totalitarian progressives wage war, just as Sir Keir Stürmer is doing, on the English institution of the village pub. In tonight's episode, another colossus of the House of Commons decides to extend his initiatives to donkey confiscation:
He leaned forward and tapped the glass frontage of the car, and the chauffeur suddenly squaring his shoulders, jarringly stopped the wheels. Dorian Wimpole had just seen something in the clear moonlight by the roadside...
Two shabby looking men ...were halted under the hedge, apparently loading a donkey cart. At least two rounded, rudely cylindrical objects, looking more or less like tubs, stood out in the road beside the wheels, along with a sort of loose wooden post that lay along the road beside them. As a matter of fact, the man in the old gaiters had just been feeding and watering the donkey, and was now adjusting its harness more easily. But Dorian Wimpole naturally did not expect that sort of thing from that sort of man. There swelled up in him the sense that his omnipotence went beyond the poetical; that he was a gentleman, a magistrate, an M.P. and J.P., and so on. This callousness or ignorance about animals should not go on while he was a J.P.; especially since Ivywood's last Act. He simply strode across to the stationary cart and said:
"You are overloading that animal, and it is forfeited. And you must come with me to the police station."
Members of The Mark Steyn Club can hear me read Part Fifteen of The Flying Inn simply by clicking here and logging-in. Earlier episodes can be found here.
In this eighth year of The Mark Steyn Club, if you've a friend who's a fan of classic literature and want to give him or her a present with a difference, we hope you'll consider a one-year gift membership in The Mark Steyn Club. The lucky recipient will enjoy full access to our back catalogue of audio adventures and video poems - Conrad and Conan Doyle, Orwell and Orczy, Kipling and Kafka, and all the rest - which should keep you going until the next variant blows in from Wuhan, or at least until the cancel crowd has had all the books banned. For more details, see here.
Through the hellish plot twists of 2024, our nightly audio adventure goes on, so do join me right back here tomorrow for The Flying Inn Part Sixteen, a few hours after the latest Serenade Radio edition of Mark Steyn on the Town.
