Momento Mori: July 4

Taking stock on my birthday - and America's

Top row: lunch for one, in my garden; woodland path, North Wales; the Comandante on Cader Idris, 2025. Middle row: Roman bust (Julius Caesar?) Mérida, Spain; the Comandante in Santiago Cathedral, 2023; gravestone near Stamford, Lincs. Bottom row: the Comandante in Ponte de Lima; the tomb of a nobleman and his wife, Chichester Cathedral; the Comandante and cousin Kevin Powell, Porto.

Yesterday was my birthday, like America’s, and although I am not 250, I have reached an advanced age: 71. Rather terrifying, not because I’m afraid of the oak overcoat, but because of how much of my life I have wasted. I spent the day cloistered in my cave-like house, with all shutters closed against the ferocious heat, which reached 39 celsius, over 100 fahrenheit, as it will again today. (Remind me: why do I live in Portugal?) So perhaps inevitably I found myself remembering past birthdays. For instance, my 18th: I had a party at home, which my parents allowed on condition that they remained in the house—my own condition being that they stayed strictly in their bedroom. Unfortunately my mother didn’t comply, and marched into the living-room, against my protests, but recoiled at once, on seeing a girl with her skirt around her hips and her knickers around her ankles. (Alas, I was not the lucky boy responsible.) Or my 21st, spent on Sardinia with my bank-clerk girlfriend, who was not terribly bright but looked like a Burne-Jones nymph. As I recall it (or is this nostalgia re-imagining the past in the best possible light?) we spent almost the entire holiday naked. We had a vast beach which was almost our private one: just one other couple shared it, usually, and they kept off about a mile away. (And also invariably naked.) Not altogether unpleasant, you might say, even if those two weeks were devoted purely to sensuous pleasures, and involved negligible cultural, intellectual, or spiritual enrichment. No, I don’t regret that one. And of course at that age you assume that this kind of mindless bliss will last forever—which alas, it doesn’t, or didn’t in my case. I don’t want to get maudlin. I’ve known some pleasures and joys, and doubtless the defeats and disappointments are not worth crying over. They are the norm, of course. At twenty-one, you are convinced that your own life will be exceptional, that you won’t make the same mistakes as all the other fools. How wrong you are, generally.

We’ll come back to me later. Because I share a birthday with the United States of America, a country I lived in for sixteen years, and became a citizen of in 2015, I always spare some thought for the progress—or otherwise—of the nation that adopted me too. I noticed yesterday that Time magazine’s cover had a sentimental and very ‘progressive’ collage of heroes. MLK, naturally, and I’ll concede he deserves to be on it, but plenty of other leftist icons too—unfortunately I don’t recall them all—and a bizarre re-imagining of the Statue of Liberty, not as the noble Greek goddess envisioned by the French who made it, but a modern girl, surprisingly Caucasian, with somewhat untidy hair: the kind of surly girl you’d expect to see at Free Palestine march, or a BLM march, or a MeToo march, in fact. I did wonder if the model was Taylor Swift. Time probably thinks she’s a great woman, after all. As far as the country’s liberal elite is concerned, freedom simply means open borders, whatever the consequences. We know this because this very week the Supreme Court ruled that birthright citizenship shall continue, despite President Trump’s attempt to overturn the Fourteenth Amendment by executive order. So the children of illegal immigrants, and of women who came to the States on vacation for the express purpose of having a baby there, will continue to be citizens. The liberal elite claims that it’s color-blind, and just doesn’t care whether the white population becomes a minority or not. In fact, that’s disingenuous: they welcome the end of the white majority. But if whites become a minority, can America remain American? I think not, at least if by that we mean remaining the bastion of western civilization. As in Britain, the Left actively wants the Great Replacement: that’s why white women are instructed to study, to become girlbosses, and not to have children, while open borders are seen as a panacea for all our problems. Unless there’s a muscular response, which probably can’t take place this year in Congress, in the form of another constitutional amendment, given that the midterms are not likely to be a resounding success for the Republicans, the USA is on a downward trajectory. Perhaps JD Vance will be able to reverse it in 2028. I hope so.

In the meantime, I’d like to offer a somewhat random list of my own American heroes. It’s not exhaustive, obviously, just a personal one. Washington, Franklin, and Jefferson, of course. Lincoln. Teddy Roosevelt, the president I’d most like to have known. Poe, Melville, Emerson, William James, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Flannery O’Connor, Carson McCullers, Mark Helprin. Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Miles Davis and John Coltrane, Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan, John Fogerty, Joe Pass. TS Eliot—or does he count as English? Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, T-Bone Walker. Humphrey Bogart, Clint Eastwood. I know, mostly blokes. Quite a few are black, though. Maybe I’m not as bigoted and far-right as my detractors claim.

All right, back to me, since I’m taking stock. If the US is at a critical juncture, as Britain obviously is—I think both have to take the right direction, i.e. a traditionalist one, in the next ten years, or else face extinction—what about the old Comandante? I certainly face extinction, if not in the next ten years, almost certainly the next twenty. So time is running out. And looking back, notwithstanding a few notable successes—getting into Cambridge, a handful of notable amorous conquests, becoming a professor and publishing a couple of works of fiction—you’d have to say that on the whole it hasn’t been a triumph. Three failed marriages! My academic career ended by cancellation! My two books (already a paltry number) ignored by the media, unread by the public. Donald Trump wouldn’t hesitate to call me a loser. However, I haven’t given up yet. Whether I’ve inherited the Dunkirk spirit, or I’m just bloody-minded, I don’t know, but perhaps I can make something of this last decade or so that I might have left. I’m learning to ride a motorcycle again, something I haven’t done for over half a century. Still hoping to publish a couple of books, my historical novel about Gabriele d’Annunzio, and a weird Welsh novel which interweaves Owen Glyndowr’s rebellion with medieval and apocalyptic tales. I’d like to find a very old farmhouse to live in. As for love… it would be delightful, though I can’t see any pre-Raphaelite nymph wanting to spend a couple of weeks with me naked, these days, sad to say.

This one has been more personal than is my wont; forgive the lapse. But I do hope that Britain and America, who are beset by internal enemies, can overcome them and find themselves again, just as I hope that I can defeat my own greatest enemy, the one who also lurks within, and you can, too. It’s not death we should fear, but death-in-life.