PROPAGATION OF THE FAITH

Please indulge me this one last broadside, I do solemnly promise this to be the absolutely final blog entry regarding The Wire magazine.

Our school head, a patronising maternalistic old dragon, often tried to force us to eat the weekly shepherd's pie, which all of us hated despite her it's-good-for-you exhortations and yet I did really use to love the rice pudding. Especially with a blob of jam. So anyway, as I was tucking into a third bowl of the goo, Martin, a nice kid with good intentions, who regularly used to sit at the table opposite me, would contort his face, and say, 'William, I don't get it, I just don't understand how anyone can eat that muck, it's disgusting, you're crazy!'. He couldn't get his head round it and that was an early moment I realised how people can be such prisoners of their belief systems, anything that doesn't fit into their narrow worldview is incomprehensible to them.

Keith Moliné, please tell me how much your article helped to pay a bill. Tell me how much sex it'll help you get. Tell me how it's improved your journalistic CV. Tell me how it's helped you do a bit of networking. Tell me what success really means to you as you stop and reflect that this is not about us, it's about you. And in the meantime, while you rewrite your 1,000 words on 'Noise and the Failure Imperative', I'll just sit here and enjoy my rice pudding.