Death Comes Knocking (but has the wrong address)

For Life, Liberty and Property 

By Sean Gabb 21 April, 2024 @ Free Life

At 10:45am on Monday the 20^th August 2023, I was sat at the desk in my teaching room, thinking about what electro-junk to pack for a family holiday in Greece. All of a sudden, I came over queasy.

“I don’t feel very well,” I said to Mrs Gabb.

“How don’t you feel very well?” she asked.

The answer was that I was feeling queasy, and then queasier than ever I could remember.

I am told that I lurched forward and stopped breathing. My own recollection, between looking down at a USB stick and sitting in a different position with an aspirin in my mouth, is of absolutely nothing. There had been no blackness with a continued perception of time. It had been like no kind of sleep. There had been a minute or so of nothing. As I began wondering what had happened, my wife was shouting into the telephone, arguing with the emergency services. I blinked and suggested that I was perfectly fine. I promptly blacked out again. This time, I remained semi-conscious. I was aware I had stopped breathing, and I told myself to start again. My wife tells me I was taking in terrible gasps and looked as if I were dying.

Almost at once, an ambulance arrived, and two women gave me an ECG examination. They said my heart was going at about thirty beats a minute, and that my blood pressure was dangerously low. I asked if there was any evidence of a stroke or heart attack. They said there was none, but that I might die unless they took me straight to hospital. I thought about this. I had suffered no pain in my chest or left arm, nor any confusion or loss of vision. But the assurance of possibly immediate death was alarming. So I went off in their ambulance to the nearest main hospital, where I spent eight hours with my women and a shifting cast of kind and attentive but broadly incompetent persons of diversity. At last, someone who spoke English came into the room to confirm I had suffered neither a stroke nor a heart attack, and that I showed no signs of diabetes or anything else in the blood tests. After this, I announced that we were going home.

No holiday to Greece the next day. Instead, my women lectured me on how everything was somehow my fault, and that I should drink less coffee and sleep more. Over the next week, I visited half a dozen medical specialists. They all confirmed that I was in apparently perfect health. After the last set of tests, they agreed with my own explanation, and told me to be more careful in future.

We did eventually get to Greece, for a very nice fortnight at the end of October. The weather was more like a good English summer than my usual experience of the Mediterranean. There were almost no other tourists. We drove about the Peloponnese on empty roads, and walked for hours through empty museums. We climbed to the top of Mistra with no company but a busload of Chinese students, to whom I gave a lecture on Byzantine history.

But this is a digression. I have mentioned my own explanation of what happened. I suppose I should give this now.

At the end of July, I had asked my dentist to put a crown on one of my crumbling teeth. He did this, and it hurt almost at once. I took the pain as something that would pass in a few days. But we went off almost at once to Slovakia, where the pain continued and grew steadily worse. It was the worst pain I had ever suffered, and words fail to describe how bad it was. It grew so bad that I began to wake up in the middle of the night when the painkillers had worn off. I would then stay awake for an hour, reading Homer until the next dose of aspirin began to take effect. After a week of this, I went to a Slovak dentist, who ignored my clear instructions and pulled out the wrong tooth. After this, I decided the painkillers were a better option than having all my teeth extracted one after the other.

On the journey back to England, the pain grew even worse. I had made an emergency dental appointment for the one day between returning from Slovakia and setting out for Greece. Back home on Sunday evening, though, I decided to give myself some relief from the pain by going to bed with a cocktail of codeine, paracetamol, aspirin and ibuprofen. The pain went away, but I woke up covered in sweat and feeling sick. I repeated the dose, ignoring all prior evidence that ibuprofen did not agree with me. Sure enough, the dose took effect and I fainted.

I think it was the ibuprofen – though the codeine may have helped. The other day, I woke up with a stiff neck. I took the opportunity presented. I rubbed in a small amount of muscle cream that contained five per cent ibuprofen. Within half an hour, I had turned red all over, and was fighting for breath. Before then, I felt as sick as on the day of the fainting attack. Mrs Gabb was displeased, though it was useful confirmation of my own earlier diagnosis.

So, I can sit here, reassured of better health than many men of advanced years and sedentary habits can boast. But does this explain why I have given up on libertarian activism? Not really. The reason for that is that the possible window for libertarianism that opened in England during the 1970s has closed. If the national collapse we now face is to be avoided, it will need less gentle solutions than I have spent my life recommending. I do not plan to remain silent forever, but think silence a sensible choice until after the next election.

The Conservative Government that came in after the 2010 election was led by men whose only plan was to get into office by lying to their electors, and then strike a deal with the Blairite Establishment. They would let this Establishment continue ruining the country in ways I do not need describe. In return, they would be left alone to grow rich from bribes and insider trading. They and their parasites wanted as easy a life as they could arrange. These arrangements involved a purge of real conservatives and of libertarians, who might otherwise embarrass the new project.

I was not the only victim of this purge. But it was souring to have my novel contracts cancelled and my existing novels remaindered, and almost to lose my teaching position when someone who later became a person of importance in the affairs of this realm – perhaps the same person who had approached my publisher – told the senior management at my place of work that I was a “right wing extremist.” Because I am one of the few people alive who can read and explain classical texts on sight, I have not been put out of work. Even so, the easy circumstances I had reasonably expected from my writings have not returned, and, while my health continues, I must earn my daily bread as a teacher of Greek and Latin.

As often as I look at the news, I burn with outrage. I choose for the moment, though, to say very little. I recent years, I suspect, I have been forgotten. I have no wish to be remembered now by men who never had much scruple when I knew them, and are now part of a network that shows decreasing respect even for the lives of those who get in their way.

The next election, it seems, will be a wipeout for the Conservatives. I cannot see any recovery from the scale of the betrayal they have delivered since 2019. There will then be reckoning with the projectors and agents of this betrayal, and I will join in the denunciations with spotless hands. Until then, I will remain as silent as I can manage.