Goodbye 2023, Hello 2024

My Substack has been quiet for a full month now. This is because I have been working full-time on Millenniyule since the 20th of September. I hoped to have enough essays completed beforehand that they could go out in the meantime, but unfortunately this wasn’t feasible.

I want to write something to acknowledge this situation but also to review my first year on this platform.

In short, I think it has gone very, very well.

Yes, that’s my amusing “Rising Damp” T-shirt

As well as doing the Monday “Gram” broadcast every week, I published one essay every week between February and October - occasionally more than one. 2023 has been possibly the busiest and most productive year of my life. At several points, there were so many thoughts swimming around in my head that I felt anxious and overwhelmed; there is always the danger that you will forget some thought or idea, or fail to capitalise on some potential or explore some avenue. Throughout the year I developed several techniques for guarding against this, though next year these could be improved.

One interesting point to make is how, when starting the Substack, I had no idea I would end up writing something like Aryan Blues. I imagined that it would simply be a continuation of my traditional MW work, basically a written equivalent of my improvised talks. In actuality, it has become something quite different, not just in tone and method but in mentality and subject matter.

With any new project, you begin with a notion of how it will be. Then you spend some time finding your feet, trying to make the thing as you envisioned, but the more you work the more it takes on a shape of its own, something you hadn’t foreseen, and you realise that this - this - is how it should be. Compare my very first essay, What Do the Old Think? with later ones. It’s a nice enough piece, but basically an aimless lament. The later essays are more interesting and valuable, in my opinion.

I think the turning point occurred while writing Scottish Hospital Food. Initially it was just a wistful nostalgia trip. But then I decided to add the final four paragraphs, which have a very different thrust. This made the whole piece less straightforward but more well-rounded, less cosy but more truthful. Then I revised the earlier text to bring it more in line with this, which meant being more fair to “the managers”. I think the result is a much better essay, and it’s one that I have particular fondness for. (My only real disappointment with Substack so far is that so few people seem to like this essay. I suspect the title repels many readers. I should probably have gone with the first idea, “Logistics and Soul”.)

A second turning point occurred in July with the essay about Sinéad O’Connor, In the Absence of Order. This was written over an incredibly intense and frenzied three days following the news of her death. I’m honestly baffled that I managed it. But I had a flight to Italy booked in four days, so there was really no choice: it just had to be done in that time. The result is, I think, one of the best pieces of work I’ve ever produced. A large section of my traditional “fan base” don’t like it, which is unfortunate because it was fascinating to write.

I would like those two essays to be the template for my 2024 work - more open-minded and less ranty than some of my 2023 essays.

Another important thing about those two essays is that they would have been unwritable without heavy amounts of research.

I discovered research sort of by accident and at exactly the same time as I began on Substack. A friend and I did a personal history project in January in the course of which I learned that there are newspaper archives online, and you can search through them. I didn’t know that before. This would come in useful just a few weeks later when I began writing an essay about the Life of Brian (not yet published). I didn’t intend it to be a big project, but soon found myself scouring the Internet and ordering old second-hand books from Wob. After all, if you’re going to do something, you might as well do it properly.

As the year passed, research became an ever larger part of my Substack work. Some of the essays were really learning experiences as much as anything else. I found this process very rewarding.

Research means that your arguments, if they survive, are better-bolstered with knowledge, but it also means that many of them don’t survive, and rightly. In both cases this is to the benefit of your work and you as a thinker.

Another benefit of research is that it enables you to write about subjects which would otherwise be “non starters” for you. This changed how I thought about my Substack. Instead of being tied to “standard MW concerns”, it can be about whatever takes my interest - rather like the first year of my YouTube channel.

For example, one forthcoming essay tells the history of a particular Edinburgh tradition (which I will keep undisclosed for now). I am certain that I wouldn’t have considered writing it were I still wedded to writing about “standard MW concerns”. I am also certain that nobody else will ever write an essay on this particular subject. Hopefully it will be published next year.

It’s worth discussing the word “essay”. A few people have objected to my using it. I think they associate it with school, so it has negative connotations for them - turgid, dull, something mandated, etc. Or maybe it strikes them as stuffy and pretentious. An alternative word would be “article”, but I don’t like that at all. An article could be almost anything. An essay, by contrast, is a work. It is substantial, is fashioned carefully, has a purpose, and hopefully is executed with some style. It is not a trivial thing.

I don’t want my work to be trivial or to be seen as such. Yes, I take it seriously. I am not “messing around” here. I want to create things that last - ideally beyond my death. I think, for writers like me, a platform like Substack needed to arrive before we felt comfortable entering the fray. After all, if the platform doesn’t take your work seriously, how can you risk doing the same?

One of the many hardships of being a dissident content creator is that platforms either thwart and ban you, or are cowboys who don’t care, and whose lack of care is present in the design and functioning of their website. Mainstream writers have the traditional publishing industry to turn to for proper, accomplished platforming; we dissidents do not. So I am very grateful to Substack. They seem to value not just freedom of speech but also quality of work. As a result, their website is very well-designed and promotes commitment and encourages effort. I think this is pretty much unique in our age.

The result has been a new lease of life for me as an online content creator. It has been rewarding. I am genuinely very proud of some of my essays from this year.

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Next year I want to get better at writing shorter essays. This might mean breaking a subject down into several parts - eg. not tackling so much in any one essay. (This is why I broke In Praise of Hierarchy into three parts.) The average word count this year was 3-4,000. This was not deliberate; it just seems to be where my natural treatment of topics tends to “land”. However, I would like to get it down to 2-3,000. This would result in more digestible essays, each one hopefully more “punchy”.

Certainly, there is no shortage of material for next year. My drafts folder on here has about 80 essays waiting to be finished. In addition to those, four major projects are in the pipeline. Each of these will be a set of essays.

The Rainbow Regime

This is mostly a history of the Alt-Right vs. the quasi-totalitarian system which materialised over the course of the 2010s.

It is largely written now, but I want to add more of my own personal experiences, and possibly beef up some of the sections. (When you decide to split a huge essay into parts, there is always trouble in that some of its sections are too short to work as standalone essays. You can either merge them, expand them, or put out a piece that is sensibly formed but is so short that your fans feel insulted.)

This series is slightly autobiographical in that it describes how it felt to be a dissident up against this emerging behemoth, and having the gradual dawning realisation that it really was everywhere and there were no “alternatives” to it, in any way.

The Culture Machinery

This is a particular analysis of how “the system”, and by extension Western society in any era, operates. This series is largely written, but the finessing with this one is going to take time. The ideas need to “percolate”. It could be a fairly important work, or it could be an embarrassing misfire, depending on how much time I give it to develop.

Monty Python and the Life of Brian

This tells the story of the 1979 film, its immediate aftermath and its long-term historiography, its integration into Britain’s cultural history. The project started as a simple study of the contemporaneous TV debate about the film, but I soon found many other interesting facets to write about, and the essay quickly grew to 17,000 words.

This series is roughly 50% written but before continuing I need to do quite a lot of research. (Several second-hand books are on my shelf waiting to be read.)

There seems to be fruit in discussing comedy from a historical perspective. Comedy is one of the ways in which a society looks at itself but of course there is more to it than that. Just like the deep-sea creatures that are altered by the lights that examine them, the British are altered by the comedy that ostensibly is just showing them “who they are”. Immediately, there is food for thought here. Who creates the comedy, and what is their worldview, and how is the comedy received by its audience and “used” by its society, and what is “established” by it, sociologically?

These are very interesting questions, so I would like to do some work documenting the history of subversive British comedy since 1945. The Have I Got News For You (1990s) series was a start. By the end of next year The Life of Brian (1970s) should be added. But what else? Well, here is how this “history of subversive British comedy” might turn out:

• 1940s: ?

• 1950s: The Strange World of Gurney Slade

• 1960s: Beyond the Fringe, Alf Garnett and Curry and Chips

• 1970s: Love Thy Neighbour, Monty Python generally and The Life of Brian

• 1980s: ?

• 1990s: Have I Got News For You and Brass Eye

• 2000s: Brass Eye paedophile special and Green Wing

• 2010s: ?

The 1980s is a glaring gap here, but I don’t know how to fill it. The obvious options are Blackadder, The Young Ones, The Comic Strip… but I have a lot of affection for those shows, especially Blackadder, so I don’t think I could be trusted to be objective about them. And, but for Blackadder Goes Forth with its account of the Great War, I don’t know that these shows were actually subversive. Were they? If people can give examples, I will listen. But also, other suggestions for the 1980s would be welcome. (Incidentally, The New Statesman just seems to depict the Conservative Party as it really is: a nest of spineless philistines and vicious yuppies.)

For the 2010s, some British equivalent of the appalling US comedy Shrill would be good, but I am so “checked out” of modern culture that I don’t know of any candidates. Again, suggestions would be welcome.

The Loony Left

By far the biggest project for next year, which I hope to get done in the first quarter, is an investigation into the 1980s phenomenon of “the Loony Left”.

I embarked upon this in late August thinking it would just be a standard essay but had soon churned out 8,000 words. Then I realised I should step back and re-consider, because clearly there was potential for something much bigger than one essay. I already had far more material than one essay could contain. The more new material that was added, the more focus would be lost, and recapturing it would require deleting material. Clearly, this had to be a set of essays, each with its own focus and “room to breathe”.

Once that decision was made, I became even more excited about the project and began making “cover images” for the essays as and when each one was decided upon.

I continued gathering research for several weeks but then had to drop the project to begin work on Millenniyule. I am very much looking forward to returning to it in January. I don’t know how many essays it will end up comprising - somewhere between 15 and 20. Once they are published on here, I might look into publishing them as a physical book.

The work in August/September was so interesting that I’ve even written 2,700 words about the work itself. This includes:

• reflections on doing a project like this

• how it took shape

• description of my motivations

• description of working methods

• instances of serendipity

• what was necessary in order to track down certain information

• the many thoughts and feelings that the project elicits in me

That essay will be expanded as I continue the work next year, to be published alongside the series or maybe reserved as the preface to a physical book version.

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Bear in mind, the above are only the projects that I currently intend to do. But, at the start of 2023, none of these were in my head at all, so who knows what will occur during 2024. No doubt there will be many more ideas, many more essays.

All of this is to say that, even though my Substack is quiet just now, be assured there is an abundance of work yet to be done - and I am itching to get started on it! I even wish I could forego Millenniyule this year and do this instead, but the breaking of that tradition would disappoint many.

I will leave you with a list of what I think are my best essays from 2023:

• In the Absence of Order

• Aryan Blues

• Logistics and Soul (AKA Scottish Hospital Food)

• The Corporation and Consent

• The Gender Criticals

• How Equality Corrupts (especially the section between the two pictures)

Special mentions:

• Richard Dawkins and Reality

• The Future of the Quiet Carriage

• RIP Network Distributing Ltd.

• The “Right-On” Left and the “Woke” Left

• the glossary

That’s it for now.

I hope you will watch Millenniyule. Either way, I am greatly looking forward to being back on here after that, for what I expect will be another very busy and very productive year for me. I will need a few weeks off to recharge after Millenniyule, so the first new essays probably won’t go up until February. My apologies for that, but I am only human.

Until then… thank you for reading my Substack, thank you especially to those of you who support me financially on here, and merry Christmas and happy new year to all of you.