Numb at the Lodge

Three years ago, I took my girlfriend to Hebron to walk around the eerie ruins of the old city. It’s not a nice place. Wasteland of barbed wire and broken glass, into which the settlers have copy-pasted a few gaudy apartment buildings. She’d wanted to go to the Dead Sea and bob around in its famously tonic saline waters. I’d insisted on taking her to the heart of the occupied West Bank instead. I think it was, in the end, a piece of very classic Jewish male neuroticism.

It’s none of your business why, but I’ve been planning a party. The idea was to get some caterers in to cook something over live coals, so I went online to see what was available. The first company I found described itself like this: ‘We don’t just provide food—we create meaningful experiences. Our passion for traditional fire cooking allows us to offer something unique, authentic, and expertly crafted.

I have a piece in the spring issue of Jacobin, on the decline of literacy and what might happen to politics once our minds are no longer intimately structured by the written word. Like all these essays, it quotes Walter Ong.

Human beings have manic episodes; when it happens to an entire nation we call it empire. The affliction is the same. You prance around town with your tits practically pouring out your top, demanding drinks from strangers, snatching cigarettes out their hands. Isn’t it funny how I can do absolutely anything I want? And everybody loves me? You know you have a special destiny in the world. It’s obvious; flowers turn their faces towards you whenever you walk past.

How many apricots do you think you can fit in your mouth? Five? That’s how many apricots the average person can fit in their mouth. One stuffed in each cheek, plus three in the middle. If the average person tries to shove a sixth apricot in there, they start to gag. Eyes water, nose runs, eventually a thin dribble of orange pap escapes from between the teeth. Too many apricots feels like burning. Before long they’re gasping and retching and puking up great slimy globs of apricot flesh.

They arrested Praskovya Petrovna on a beautiful rosy spring morning in 1933, while she was waiting at Moskovsky Station in Leningrad. They asked to see her internal passport, and she said that her husband had it. She’d been standing with the luggage while he went to chase down one of the station comrades about something or other; he could never get through a journey without trying to lodge some kind of a complaint. In Leningrad without an internal passport, they said.

Last weekend, the British government proscribed a protest group called Palestine Action under the Terrorism Act, which means that they are now, legally speaking, terrorists. It’s against the law to be a member of Palestine Action, or to raise funds for Palestine Action, or to hold a meeting at which any members of Palestine Action will speak. But because British antiterror legislation is, as historians will one day put it, interesting, there are a few other provisions.

Chat, am I washed? Chat, be fr, am I washed? I think I might be washed. I think they might have washed me. But chat, who washed me? Chat, who dried me? Chat, who tucked me up in bed? Every day I spawn in. Emerge wriggling out my skibidi bolus of slime. Whence and where? Lol. Idk. Vibes here be mad shady fr. Shit is not aesthetic. Shit is not bussin. Shit is burned-out cars piled in barricades across the street. Shit is THE END IS NIGH scrawled across bridges.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published Reviewed:On Democracies and Death Cults (book, Douglas Murray, London, 2025) Democracy (political form, Solon the Lawgiver, Athens, 594 BC) Death cult (attitude before the unknowable, unknown early humans, Qafzeh cave, Israel, 100,000 BC) Douglas Murray (contemptible little freak, Mr and Mrs Murray, London, 1979) Georges Ruggiu is a former special needs teacher from a small town in the south of Belgium.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published Reviewed:On Democracies and Death Cults (book, Douglas Murray, London, 2025) Democracy (political form, Solon the Lawgiver, Athens, 594 BC) Death cult (attitude before the unknowable, unknown early humans, Qafzeh cave, Israel, 100,000 BC) Douglas Murray (contemptible little freak, Mr and Mrs Murray, London, 1979) Georges Ruggiu is a former special needs teacher from a small town in the south of Belgium.