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Narrow Minded Italian Catholic Conservative Peasant From Footscray

The prompts from the blog platform suggest that I introduce myself.

In short, I am several things.

Firstly, I am a Narrow Minded Italian Catholic Conservative Peasant From Footscray. I have been describing myself as that for at least the past 15 years or so.

This description might not be totally accurate.

I am probably not as narrow minded as I boast I am.

Whilst I am of Italian ancestry and reasonably fluent in Italian, I probably think more the iconoclastic way that Australians do, having been born and lived in Australia my whole life.

Nor am I particularly observant religiously, although like most people, 1600 years of Christianity being the dominant religion (‘thank you’ Emperor Theodosius) in Western Civilisation does tend to hard wire us in a particular way. (I do like to amuse myself by claiming that the dinosaurs missed the ark and that the world is just over 6000 years old.).

Peasant? Well, my parents are from peasant stock, as probably most Italian migrants in the 1950s were, and I like growing my own tomatoes in the backyard. But I am a lower middle class office worker really, with the luxury of participating in a post industrial economy. I also have a university education, and not in agriculture.

Whilst I am very personally Conservative, both culturally and socially, I am more Liberal than Conservative, and believe in individual rights and liberties and freedom of choice and conscience etc to the point where I can get quite worked up when I hear of proposals to intervene in the lives of people or to curtail our freedoms.

I also don’t live in Footscray, although I was born there (and proud of it), and lived and went to school there during my childhood and adolescence, and the Western Bulldogs (formerly known as the Footscray Football Club) is my AFL team. I do not live too far from Footscray though. I am in Avondale Heights, which is like a north western outpost of Footscray, and previously lived in Maribyrnong. But just like people from Fremantle claim that they are from Fremantle rather than from Perth, real Footscray people claim that they are from Footscray rather than from Melbourne. I suppose, historically, that it has something to do with the fact that there is quite a distance between the eastern boundary of Footscray at the Maribyrnong River, and the centre of Melbourne, and most of that two mile distance was occupied firstly by a swamp and then by a wasteland involving docks, chemical depots (where were you during the Coode Island fire in 1991?) and quarantine grounds….

Secondly, I am a postgrad dropout. That does contradict a lot of what my first description suggests I am, but we all are complex and many layered people. The MA thesis I was planning to write was about Nietzsche, Hegel and the End of History or some such, which is the sort of topic which would have been pretty passe in 1994 when I was interested in doing it. However, life gets in the way – working full time and getting a promotion at work which resulted in me focusing my energies and attention on my job meant that I did not have much left in the tank for a 30,000 word thesis. And whilst I still enjoy reading Nietzsche for his manic and frenetic style, Hegel is really boring.

As for more? I much prefer the writings of Anthony Trollope over Charles Dickens. I still enjoy re-reading my favourite Nevil Shute novels, and I occasionally re-read my copy of JRR Tolkien. I did ditch Game of Thrones about 100 pages into the first book, and don’t regret it at all. I remain very curious as to whether some of the unpublished novels of JD Salinger from his period of seclusion (I have the general impression he wrote some) will see the light of day during my lifetime, although I loathed Catcher in the Rye whilst finding his short stories fascinating.

Dunlop Volleys: The Model T Ford Of Tennis Shoes

When I started high school, part of the uniform and book list related to Phys Ed class – we were required to buy flat white soled shoes, specifically Dunlop Volleys.

I guess it was because the gymnasium was pretty new and they did not want to damage the polished wooden floor.

Dunlop Volleys are a rather primitive type of sports shoe. They are a canvas upper on a rubber sole. I believe that they were first made in 1939, and was even commonly used by top tennis players into the 1970s.

They still make them, despite there being many more sophisticated high tech sports shoes available, and they are pretty iconic in Australia.

I’ve been meaning to buy a pair for a while, wanting a cheap casual shoe to wear around the house and on errands to the supermarket etc, and finally did so this week.

I must say, not only are they cheap and simple in construction, they are also vey comfy, like a pair of slippers with laces.

I do wonder how long this pair lasts before it wears out. Probably not long, but I think I will get my $39 use out of it.

Reflections On The Farrer By-Election

When I was a young and foolish teenager (as opposed to being a late middle aged fool as I am right now), I felt an enthusiasm for the rather quixotic Joh For PM campaign (an early political intervention by Clive Palmer), and indeed a deep fondness for Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen, the union bashing, lefty head-kicking, premier of Queensland.

Even now, despite all the evidence to the contrary, I still find it very hard to believe that Sir Joh was as crooked as most people believe.

After all, when all the universities in Queensland installed condom vending machines in their toilets in mid 1987, this matter somehow came up for discussion at Queensland state cabinet, and Sir Joh asked what a condom was. When the purpose of this item was explained to him (does anyone ever still use the slang term ‘franger’ anymore???), he expressed a shocked disgust and ordered their immediate removal. Hence I find it hard to accept that someone with that sort of naivety would be leading a government profiting from illegal brothels in Fortitude Valley.

After his reluctant resignation from the Premiership in late 1987 due to the latter issues, rather than the former decision, he decided to retire from parliament and a by-election was held for his seat in early 1988.

The result was that someone from the Citizens’ Electoral Council, a rather odd ball right wing movement, was able to win the seat in front of the National Party candidate.

That did spook people at the time, but was just a precursor to the electoral annihilation of the National Party in the 1989 state government, something which was, if I am being honest, richly deserved.

The victory of One Nation at the weekend, in the Farrer By-Election, forced by the resignation of the risibly ineffectual former Federal Opposition Leader Sussan Ley, has caused shockwaves across the Australian polity.

In winning over 40% of the primary vote to convincingly see off all other contenders, and cause something like a 30% swing against the Liberal Party who have held the seat for some 80 years, One Nation has made history by winning its first ever House of Representatives seat in an actual contest (Barnaby Joyce recently changing parties and Pauline Hanson winning a seat as a disendorsed Liberal in 1996 don’t count).

What does this actually mean? Some are seeing this as a tipping point (along with the recent South Australian State Election), where One Nation is going to replace the Liberals (and Nationals) as the popularly supported party of the conservative side of politics in Australia.

I am skeptical about calling that as such just yet: aside from the fact that I have never seen and still do not see One Nation now as a responsible protest vote, let alone as a credible and viable potential party of government [If you want to know why, please refer to my recent post about their ‘print more money and give it to the farmers’ finance policies.], there is an abundance of recent political electoral history to examine first.

Aside from that 1988 By-Election to replace Sir Joh, there are other anomalies. Let’s take the 1998 Queensland State Election, where One Nation outpolled the Nationals and Liberals and were able to take 11 out of the 89 seats in the Queensland Parliament. That was a much more significant outcome than the recent South Australian State Election, yet one which One Nation was incapable of building upon, and from which One Nation then quickly imploded.

Then there have been various more recent Queensland State Elections, where first the incumbent ALP and then in the next election the incumbent LNP were virtually obliterated by their opponents. Not really One Nation related matters, but instances where significant electoral volatility and voter disillusionment caused significant change from previous outcomes.

And we have had various independents of different colours winning seats mostly off the Coalition in recent years, although we have had several doing so since at least the demise of the political career of current Teal Allegra Spender’s Liberal MP father John Spender in 1990.

With sufficient resources and voter disengagement, it is doubtful that any seat is absolutely safe, particularly if the candidate for the incumbent party is not appealing (eg Kristina Keneally, arguing the most electorally repulsive person in Australian political history).

And protest voting, in Queensland, in the countryside, and in by-elections, is a very normal state of affairs.

I hope, given that I prefer the relative responsibility of the Liberals over the boganesque chaos of One Nation, that this is only a flash in the pan.

But I could be wrong. I am after all, a fool in late middle age.

So… what could make this different and mean a permanent turn away from the Liberals and Nationals and to One Nation?

One new aspect to One Nation is that they are much disciplined than they have been in the past, with Pauline Hanson being better advised and using social media much more effectively than the other parties. She has mastered the weapon of ridicule in a way not seen since Keating, and before him, Whitlam. Recent defectors like Barnaby Joyce, despite his indiscretions with drinking and family values, add credibility – he was, after all, Deputy Prime Minister.

Another is that for some reason, there is now a mass protest movement behind One Nation. All the working class battlers who feel their standard of living and opportunity are being threatened by current policies are protesting against the major parties and deserting them. Similarly, people I speak to who are lifelong Liberal voters are openly expressing their patience with their party of choice has run out.

Liberal Party insiders are getting scared – the intelligent ones are starting to look at the patterns of political history which predate the creation of the Liberal Party in 1944 and starting to see instability. The rest are looking at whether there are better opportunities elsewhere.

For the first time in many years, I pulled out the reading list from a course I did during my part time Honours year in 1992: PLT 420 Electoral Behaviour. In this course, which I have kept at the back of my mind for more than thirty years, we read about the theories trying to explain why people vote the way that do, and why they tend to stay loyal to their party of choice, election after election.

Much of the reading list featured academics who argue that voter loyalty is not immutable – that there are times and reasons why a large number of voters can and will en masse abandon their party of choice for either an existing party or for a new party entirely. The 1932 US Presidential Election was one such election (particularly in that the blacks for the first time abandoned the Republican Party for the Democrats, marking the end of abolition as an electorally relevant issue), and I think that as we were studying the course, the postwar Italian political consensus unravelled to the point that I wrote my essay for that course on that issue.

There are still two years until the next Federal Election. The Victorian State Election may be a test in the meantime, as may be other elections that will occur between now and then. Circumstances may change. But I am unwilling to make the call that One Nation is going to attract a major voter realignment in its own favour just yet.

The Music Of Lana Del Rey

About 15 years ago, when the Metro was still a nightclub which had been converted from a cinema, I was sitting late one afternoon after work in a bar located in Little Bourke Street directly behind it, sinking a few cold ones with some friends from the office. [When you spend as long working for the same employer as I did, most of your friends tend to be people you met through work.]

I am not sure whether the alley next to that bar was named yet, but it was later named Amphlett Lane after the late Chrissy Amphlett, front woman of the Divinyls. The bar at the time was named Mrs Parma’s, and I had been going there fairly regularly since the mid 1990s, when it was known as Cheers.

We were sitting at a table overlooking the alley, when I saw a very attractive, very short woman (accompanied by a couple of security) standing facing a group of fans, who were offering her bouquets of flowers. She seemed very young, although I was later to learn that she was 25 at the time.

It only much later that I learned that this woman was the artist popularly known as Lana Del Rey, who happened to be performing at the Metro at the time.

Very nice of her to meet those fans.

It was about a year or more later that I was introduced to her music by one of my colleagues, who was quickly to become one of my closest friends, when we were working together on Christmas Island. One night, over a few beers (or wines, or duty free whiskeys – who knows exactly), he played her music on his blue tooth speaker.

I have been a fan since then. Her music seems to be the lush audio equivalent of dark chocolate and fine port, doing for the ears what those do for the taste buds and the mood.

I reminded myself of this the past week, where I played catch up by playing her more recent albums on Apple Music a couple of evenings. She has definitely lost none of her artistry in the intervening decade or so since I became a fan.

Breaker Morant 2.0?!?

It is interesting to see what kind of comments appear on social media in relation to the Ben Roberts-Smith arrest.

For those who came in late (as they say in the Phantom comics):

My position has always been that we need to follow due process of the law and that no one is immune from prosecution or otherwise above the law. My position also has been abundantly clear that we have mythologised Breaker Morant to the point of martyrdom and that this has not helped form an accountable culture in our Defence Forces, particularly in recent years, nor in forming the lens through which we as a nation see the conduct of our Defence Forces.

The phrase at the top of this blog – Breaker Morant 2.0 – was posted by one of the online supporters of Mr Roberts-Smith on Facebook, and then showed up in my feed. That sort of comment is probably typical of the world view of the people who publicly support him on social media.

They are entitled to their opinions (we are after all a democracy and we should engage in civil discussions), but I consider that parallels to Breaker Morant are part of the cultural problem which has led us to the sad state of affairs where a national hero has been accused of war crimes, and where many people in our community are stating openly that killing in warfare (including of non-combatants, prisoners, and wounded) should happen with impunity, rather than within accepted rules of war.

We need to move the national conversation away from the mythologising about convicted war criminals like Breaker Morant and towards nurturing a military culture where our troops do not behave with impunity.

Exorcising The Ghost Of Breaker Morant

The news today that Ben Roberts-Smith VC has been arrested on charges of murder relating to war crimes allegedly committed in Afghanistan whilst serving with the Australian Army has triggered a wave of outrage from some supposed patriots.

My own views on this, particularly given that the matter is now sub judice, are more nuanced.

For several months, if not years, there has been a Facebook page dedicated to demanding a ‘pre-emptive pardon’ for Mr Roberts-Smith. Given that he had, despite serious accusations and the findings of a civil court to a lower standard of proof, not yet been charged with any crimes, let alone convicted, I deplore calls for pre-emptive pardons as I feel that they undermine the place of due process in our legal system.

Indeed, I do not think that you can pre-emptively pardon someone who has not yet been found by a criminal court to have actually committed a crime. [Indeed, it implies that these petitioners believe that he did commit the crimes in question, but that he should not answer for them.]

But I doubt that those who talk of pre-emptive pardons are actually holders of law degrees, although I have met enough law graduates over the course of my adult life that I do not put my faith unreservedly in the understanding of jurisprudence held by all members of that category.

Australia’s relationship with the concept of war crimes has unfortunately been an ambiguous one, despite the fact that we are, on the whole, an extreme decent and fair nation, particularly when compared with most others.

On one hand, we played a significant role in the creation and then adoption of what is commonly known as the Rome Statute, the current main international legal instrument defining war crimes and crimes against humanity. [In my former day job, I had the pleasure and privilege of meeting and discussing these serious matters several times with a law professor from Melbourne University who had contributed greatly to the creation of the Rome Statute.]

On the other hand, we have this collective belief in the martyrdom of Breaker Morant, an Australian officer in the Boer War who, along with several of his colleagues, was convicted and executed for the killing of various prisoners of war and civilians.

Various books and a movie have emphasised this martyrdom myth in the intervening 125 years, particularly in the past half century.

This collective belief appears to have mutated into a sense of immunity for the conduct of Australian soldiers in conflict, that our troops can do no wrong, are above reproach in their behaviour on the battlefield and hence are immune from prosecution.

Ben Roberts-Smith, as arguably the most decorated living Australian soldier, has benefited from the shadow that the execution of Breaker Morant has cast on the conduct of Australian troops in the intervening 125 years.

But, Victoria Cross or not, he is not above the law. He was found by a court in a defamation trial to have, to the civil standard of proof (balance of probabilities), committed war crimes. He was unsuccessful in appealing that verdict to a higher court.

Now that the civil trials are over, the way is clear to establish in a criminal court, with its higher standard of proof (beyond reasonable doubt), whether he is guilty of murder or related war crimes.

I do feel sadness about this. I am patriotic, and I value our defence forces and the supreme sacrifice that a hundred thousand Australians have made since Federation in so many wars. I mostly believe that our troops are better behaved than those in other armies, and that we are fighting for just causes, rather than for conquest or to defend tyranny.

But that does not mean that we turn a blind eye to serious allegations of conduct that does not meet the standards of behaviour that we expect of our troops. To do so would not only undermine the legitimacy of our just cause when we do fight, but also will provide those who might behave otherwise the impunity to behave as if they are above the law.

Hence it is necessary, given the existence of such serious accusations, to see them tested in a court of law, in a criminal trial.

The Australian nation requires this, to preserve the moral integrity of our legal system, and of our defence forces, to show the world that we will behave better than others do in armed conflict, and that if we do not, we will investigate and punish transgressors.

As a footnote, in relation to the historical fact that Mr Roberts-Smith is a holder of the Victoria Cross, it is unlikely that it will be stripped from him, even if he were to be convicted. Whilst this happened several times prior to 1920, George V was asked his views that year as to whether the holder of a Victoria Cross should ever have it revoked for subsequent crimes. His views, as expressed through one of his courtiers, was:

The King feels so strongly that, no matter the crime committed by anyone on whom the VC has been conferred, the decoration should not be forfeited. Even were a VC to be sentenced to be hanged for murder, he should be allowed to wear his VC on the scaffold.

I am sad that a national hero must face justice in relation to the crimes he may have committed. But I am relieved that even heroes are not above the law.

Treasury Wine Estates Continues To Spiral

The more I look at the news around Treasury Wine Estates, the more I am grateful that I sold 90% of my shares last year, leaving only sufficient to get me an invitation to the Annual General Meeting.

The announcement in mid-February that TWE was not going to pay a dividend this half year was not exactly surprising, given that the share price had been continuing to travel south and there has been no good news amongst any of the company announcements over the past year.

This morning, one of my friends sent me a link to the latest cheery news reports – that the Plato fund management group has not only been betting on the share price falling even further, but that they believe that there is a strong risk that the company could go bankrupt.

Well… in just under 18 months the falling share price has caused about $8 billion to be wiped from the company’s value.

A lot of the blame for the fall in the share price and the poor financial situation is due to the decision some 30 months ago to buy Daou vineyards in the USA. I remember that TWE did a rights issue at the time – a rights issue in which I did not bother participating.

Thinking about it, I have some 26 years of history as an investor in TWE and its various predecessor companies, such as Fosters Group and Southcorp to give me context.

Southcorp made a fatal mistake in consenting to what became a reverse takeover when it merged with Rosemount circa 2000. Not only did the fall out from that merger seriously damage the bottom line, but it caused the rise of Casella Wines’ Yellowtail brand at Southcorp’s expense. Nor was the Rosemount brand maintained (it had been the second biggest selling domestic wine brand in 1999) – it is now just a footnote in the TWE annual report each year rather than a surviving brand.

Then… despite the reservations held by the CEO of Fosters, the Fosters Board decided to take over Southcorp shortly afterwards, when the Oatley family (former owners of Rosemount) offered to sell their shares in Southcorp to Fosters. That decision did not exactly benefit the Fosters bottom line.

The moral of those stories is that bolting on additional large wine businesses to an existing wine conglomerate is not necessarily going to be a successful transaction. Indeed, looking at the many mergers and demergers which occur across many businesses in all sectors (the 1999 merger of BHP and Billiton, and the various capital restructures of Westfield come to mind) cause me to think that merger and acquisition lawyers are the main beneficiaries of such boardroom decisions. Call me cynical.

The TWE AGM is due to occur in October. Last year, I was very disappointed with the quality of the catering and the quantity of wine available, particularly in comparison to the 2024 AGM. I will go along again, but I will anticipate the explanations from the Board almost as much as the post meeting refreshments. And I will be bringing my party posse.

The Latest Twist In The Moira Saga….

I was premature in my predictions about Moira Deeming and Western Metropolitan. There was another twist I did not see coming.

It has been known for several years that Dinesh Gourisetty, the endorsed candidate for 18 hours for that seat, had been fined heavily over health code violations at a restaurant he owned. This issue was raised by a Liberal Party official four years ago when he sought the Western Metropolitan preselection for the 2022 state election. At that time, that was enough to kibosh his chances of a political career.

This time around, it seemed that everything was forgiven. Despite his conviction for health code violations, he was able to win the endorsement with 37 votes against 29 for Moira and 3 for the second upper house MP, Truong Luu (who is a really good bloke).

Then, on Monday morning, all the triumph came to a premature end. It turned out that two years ago, Dinesh had written a character reference for a friend who ended up getting gaoled for child sex offences. This reference was public record, in that it was held in the AUSLII legal database, easily accessible to anyone who might think to look.

[I do wonder do had actually thought to look and then release this information at the most unfortunate moment, rather than sometime before the preselection convention.]

Suddenly Dinesh no longer looked like a barely viable candidate. The state opposition leader, Jess Wilson, announced that she would not allow him to join the party room after the election. Phillip Davis, the state president, sent out an email late Monday afternoon announcing that the preselection would be redone, without Dinesh as a candidate, and that Dinesh had agreed to step down.

Subsequent news reports suggest that he did not agree to step down, or at least not so readily.

In any event, nominations were reopened almost immediately for the number one spot on the Liberal ticket for Western Metropolitan. The Herald Sun has misinterpreted this as the party making another move against Moira Deeming, rather than the party trying to follow due process, albeit in its usual ham fisted way.

It really is amateur hour. Davis’s opponents on the state executive are demanding he immediately resign – despite the fact that his term is up in May. Some people are calling for a federal takeover of the state division, even though I somehow do not see that the federal apparatus of the Liberal Party looks particularly credible right now.

But the Western Metropolitan debacle is merely symptomatic of a wider malaise in the Victorian Liberals. The state election is scheduled for 28 November, less than 8 months ago. The coalition need to win a minimum of 45 seats – 26 more than they won at the last election. The only endorsed lower house candidates are the 19 in the coalition held seats. Nominations closed on 27 February for 4 marginal seats, and on 27 March for 8 marginal seats. No candidates have been chosen yet in those seats, let alone in the additional 14 minimum seats needed to win government.

Time is growing short to select candidates and get them on the ground, running for office. The lack of candidates is going to hurt.

And every day reduces the likelihood that the candidates will be chosen by a preselection convention involving local grassroots members, rather than appointed by the State Executive.

At this rate, I do not see that Federal intervention in the state Liberals is actually going to make a difference – it will just put a new captain on the bridge of the Titanic at the time after the iceberg has already collided.

What Will Moira Do Next?

Last Friday I hosted one of my former colleagues for luncheon at the Savage Club.

Whilst waiting for my guest to arrive, I grabbed a cup of coffee and settled down in the Social Room (the large downstairs bar) with a copy of the Australian Financial Review to update myself on business news.

As soon as I opened the paper, I saw an ad covering both of the next two pages for the United Australia Party (ie Clive Palmer’s occasional political vehicle), featuring Clive and his current sidekick, Senator Babet.

Hmmm… I thought. It looks like Clive is making another comeback. Then I turned to the companies index overleaf to check which publicly listed companies of which I am a shareholder were being covered in that issue.

The United Australia Party (aka Palmer United Party, aka Trumpet Of Patriots) has had a rather interesting and eccentric history over the past 13 years, as well as exerting a more directly plutocratic influence over Australian politics than most billionaires would attempt.

But then, Clive is not exactly subtle.

Choosing to resurrect the UAP at this particular moment, 12 months after the most recent federal election was called, and when Pauline Hanson’s One Nation is surging unprecedentedly in the polls as an alternative conservative protest party, does seem like an uncommonly eccentric decision by our most entertaining homegrown billionaire.

It was not however the most interesting political news of the past few days.

I would consider that the decision of the Victorian Division of the Liberal Party yesterday to choose an alternative candidate rather than Moira Deeming MLC for the lead spot on the Western Metropolitan Province ticket for the upcoming state election to be a much more interesting outcome.

In other words, Moira has been dumped by her party, and is not going to re-contest her seat at the state election, at least not as a Liberal.

The news for much of the past 24 hours has speculated on what will happen next.

Given that the reappearance of Senator Babet and his sponsor Clive Palmer in political advertisements three days ago, it is moot perhaps to observe that the good Senator today has denounced the dis endorsement of Moira as a a disastrous decision for the Liberals, and expressed the hope that she defects and that everyone stops voting for them.

Of course he would say that. He narrowly beat out a Liberal for the sixth senate spot four years ago and is up for re-election next year.

I was not particularly surprised about Moira losing her endorsement. At various times in the past three years, I have expressed my grave reservations in this blog about Moira’s judgement, priorities and impact as a Liberal MP. I fear that her impact has been quite destructive to the chances of the Coalition at the next state election.

It also has, through her initial activities to pursue the expulsions of local Liberals who campaigned for Fred Ackerman after he decided to run against her, damaged the local Liberal grassroots base.

The question is what Moira will do now?

All the major news sources – the ABC, the Murdoch Press, and Fairfax – have speculated that Moira will defect to One Nation. The president of One Nation has described her as ‘courageous’ and said that she would be welcome in One Nation.

When I saw Moira Deeming speak to the Collins Club three years ago, just after she had been expelled from the parliamentary Liberal Party, she described the Liberals as ‘The Party that I love’. Given that in that same speech she spoke about her non-Liberal background, and her first disillusioning encounters with Young Liberals, I suspect that her love has limits, and that those limits have been reached.

Joining One Nation must be very tempting right now for her. In the five state elections since the introduction of proportional representation to the Legislative Council, the Liberals have won a second seat in Western Metropolitan only twice. In the other three elections, that seat has fallen twice to the DLP, and once to Catherine Cummings under the Hinch Justice Party umbrella (a party which she immediately deserted).

It is very likely right now that One Nation could take that second seat, the one which makes up the two out of the five which get won by right wing parties, but usually not by the Liberals.

Will she join One Nation, or won’t she? Only time will tell, but my money is on an announcement within the next week.

Goodbye Len Deighton

There’s a somewhat irreverent website I like to visit for some dark amusement. It’s called Deathlist. It’s a British website run by people of approximately my age, and probably started off as a game played in a university cafe in the late 1980s, where a circle of friends would come up with a list of 50 people likely to die over the course of the coming year. The list eventually became a somewhat viral website.

The rules of Deathlist are simple. Only 25 people from the previous year’s list can reappear, and all the people on the list have to be famous enough to get mentioned on the UK media for something other than a condition causing them to die.

The obituaries are irreverent and perhaps rather insensitive (eg the heading ‘Mary Tyler No Moore’, or ‘Duke of Deadinburgh’, or ‘From Sceptre to Spectre’ – well, you get the gist) but funny in that horrid way that most of us would find, but be too polite to admit.

So I just took a look at Deathlist 2026 to see how their predictions are going so far this year, and noticed that Len Deighton passed away yesterday.

Deighton was an author, principally of spy novels. In my mid twenties I read several of them, namely the three trilogies he wrote about Bernard Sampson, the anti-hero outsider of British intelligence, someone who was loyal, but distrusted, repeatedly betrayed, and feared by his superiors. They were quite enjoyable, in their own way, and mostly went a long way to set Deighton up in the company of Robert Ludlum and John Carre as a leading author of spy fiction.

Ian Fleming, mind you, was in a class of his own, if you want my opinion. [Read The Spy Who Loved Me and see if you don’t agree.]

There were a few lines in various of his novels which still call out to me across the years. There is one passage, narrated by Sampson, where he discusses the French occupation zone of Berlin, describing it as given to the French ‘so they could play at conquerors’. Sharp and cynical and totally accurate.

And then there is Goodbye Mickey Mouse, his novel about a Second World War US pilot stationed in England. I think I might have read it in my late teens, if not my early twenties, but definitely a few years before I read the nine Bernard Sampson novels. There is one part where two of the characters are discussing the nature of war, and how men welcome it as a way to escape from the reality of their lives.

It’s very dark, but not quite bleak, and it has stuck in my mind for well over thirty years. He was much more than a spy novelist, his work approached serious literature.

Goodbye Len Deighton.

A Sociopath’s Guide To A Successful Marriage

I still buy and read books, although I much prefer to idle a few hours away on the iPad with the Kindle app, reading what is on offer via Kindle Unlimited (my preference is for Sharpe and Hornblower imitations about the Napoleonic War).

Browsing physical books in an actual bookshop is still a simple and real pleasure for me, one which I do not envisage ever giving up.

Recently, when browsing in QBD at Highpoint West, I came across a new release called ‘A Sociopath’s Guide To A Successful Marriage’.

With a title like that, I had to buy it, and I greatly enjoyed it, with the tension and black humour building as I got further into the book.

One very small detail which stood out for me, which really sets this book apart, is that the first husband (and victim) of the narrator happens to be an Australian, who is first introduced to us wearing a Western Bulldogs cap.

As this happens to be my team (and as we won today, I happened to have noticed that a few people besides myself were wearing such caps when out and about), I am pretty chuffed about this little detail. I have gone as far as contacting the author via instagram to ask what caused him to add this little detail, as it is very intriguing to me, but alas, no response.

I doubt that this book will be studied by scholars in the decades to come, with no Penguin Classic annotated edition to come out, so I expect that this question will remain unanswered.

But I suspect that this is the first time that, outside of Australia, any mention of the Western Bulldogs will have made it into literature, even the crime noir variety.