Andy Burnham has won the Makerfield by-election with 24,927 votes, a 9,231 majority over Reform UK's Robert Kenyon, while Restore Britain got 3,111 (6.8%).

What does this mean for Labour, Reform UK, Restore Britain, and the Tories (who lost badly here but did well in Aberdeen)? I break it all down here (including why I was sadly right about it all!).

Watch below, or if you’re a paid subscriber, listen in the audio player.

Thanks!
Nick

P.S. Also check out all my new ‘Nick Reads’ videos here:

Read more

Hello, we are back for another catch-up with the Rev Dr Jamie Franklin. We have decided to call this occasional podcast God Knows.

The title is not mentioned in the pod because we only decided it after.

I think this is the best episode we’ve ever done. Though it could be just that I was feeling better.

We discuss:
-Why Jamie loves horror and Nick hates it
-Which is the best Cohen brothers film?
-Quentin Tarantino’s top films of the 21st Century
-The world cup, and whether football is too woke
-Who we would have voted for in Makerfield
-Why the left tends to win
-Whether law can have a secular basis
-Assisted dying
-Jamie’s new beliefs about intellectual Christian ideas vs the power of prayer
-The Abolition of Man
-The strange flaw in Roger Scruton’s views on beauty
-Advice for people who struggle to believe
And much more

Sign up now to watch this episode, which is only available for paid subscribers of either me or Jamie.

By becoming a paid subscriber, you also gain access to the full versions of my many guest interviews, my topical podcasts with Paul Cox, videos on literature, and my new Q & As. Plus you can comment on all posts and join my private chat group.

Sign up for £5 a month, or just over £4 with the yearly option. I can only keep doing this with your help, so please consider subscribing today.

Many thanks,
Nick

Read more

Dixon Cox is back.

This week:
-Media figures apologise for getting the ‘axe girl’ story horribly wrong
-The Reform vs Restore battle gets even more nasty as Makerfield vote looms
-Wes Streeting says Starmer should resign
-Reports that Ed Miliband is ‘ghosting’ Starmer
-A female pundit hails a ‘victory for immigration’ at the World Cup
And lots more!

Sign up now to watch the full episode, exclusively on nickdixon.net.

By becoming a paid subscriber, you also gain access to the full versions of my many guest interviews, my videos on literature, all my articles, my new Q & As, and my exclusive regular podcast with Jamie Franklin on the big questions. Plus you can comment on all posts and join my private chat group.

Sign up for £5 a month, or just over £4 with the yearly option. As ever, I can only keep doing this with your help, so please consider subscribing today.

Many thanks,
Nick

Read more

Hello,

I have just posted a new video on my books channel ‘Nick Reads’.

It’s about why you should read fiction, and I really like this one. I draw on all my years of studying and reading fiction and condense it down to five points.

Someone on here recently asked me ‘What is literature for?’ and hopefully this answers it.

I have accidentally moved into the educational space, but I hope you will enjoy the video.

If you do me a favour and watch this one all the way through for the algorithm, I may even release a new Dixon Cox episode tonight.

Watch the video below.

Thanks!
Nick

Hello,

I’ve released a new video on my book channel ‘Nick Reads’, which you should definitely watch if you haven’t seen it.

It’s about Michel Houellebecq’s Submission, which imagines a world where Islam has taken over France.

I read the book four times and condensed my findings into a five minute essay. As my grandad used to say ‘I can’t do much more than that, can I?’

A lot of people get this novel wrong (including Aaron Bastani), and this video clears up all the confusion and is just jolly interesting.

If you’ve already seen it, perhaps click on it anyway and let it play for five minutes for the algorithm. I will owe you one if you do this (obviously this is just a figure of speech, don’t show up at my house late at night with a shovel).

But it would really help me get this new channel going. Though obviously the ultimate aim is to break free from politics, fake my own death and change my name. But that’s later.

The video is below if you have five minutes.

Many thanks,
Nick

Readers of this Substack are all smart and well-informed enough to know that sinister government units have clearly been coaching families on what to say after tragedies that undermine the Regime narrative.

Well, now the Daily Mail has named the unit responsible for all this, and revealed some details that seem extraordinary even to me.

I go over it all in this video, and question why the Mail is choosing to release this now.

Have a watch below, and as ever paying subscribers can listen in the player if they prefer.

Cheers,
Nick

Read more

Hello,

I’ve just launched a dedicated literature channel on YouTube—separate from politics, purely for people who love books.

It’s called ‘Nick Reads’ (incredibly that name went through extensive testing). Non-political, no current affairs. Just books, authors, and literary criticism for people who still think that sort of thing matters.

The first video is below. It’s about Narnia, and what C.S. Lewis got right that we’ve lost.

Some on here may have seen that one, but soon there will be new stuff. So if you enjoy it, please subscribe to the channel. It’s brand new, and early subscribers genuinely help the algorithm suggest this frankly awesome content to new people.

As for this Substack, nothing will change. I’m not starting a separate literature Substack, and you’re not losing anything by staying here. Over time some of the literary content may end up exclusively on the new channel, but that’s a longer-term thing.

Please subscribe here.

More soon,
Nick

It is well known that those teaching English literature degrees have long been at war with English literature.

Apart from rare exceptions like Harold Bloom, a passionate advocate of the Western canon, English departments have been dedicated to deconstructing literature into oblivion via postmodernism, post-structuralism, postcolonialism, and any number of other ‘posts’, usually imposed upon innocent students by weird French nihilists via Marxist professors.

This was the case even when I was at university, and is of course much worse now. For a while, though, it seemed the world of mainstream publishing hadn’t quite caught up with the madness of the academy.

Publishing was still concerned with things like the Great American Novel, which was high in ambition and word count, and usually written by a gifted and somewhat curmudgeonly middle-aged bloke. Yet there was still plenty of diversity: the bloke could be either white or Jewish.

But then woke reached the publishing world and that was the end of all that. Now publishers were suddenly only interested in non-male, non-straight people with names no Westerner could confidently pronounce. Those largely responsible for creating this great tradition were kicked out on explicitly racist and sexist grounds, and simply didn’t get to be writers anymore.

But as sickening as that was and is, it got much, much worse. With wokeness came ‘sensitivity readers’, obscure eunuchs who were intent on wiping out not just white men, but the occurrence of anything remotely human in any work of fiction.

Well-established novelist and screenwriter Bruce Wagner was asked by an editor to remove a female character’s description of herself as ‘fat’. He refused, the book was rejected, and he ended up publishing it for free on his website. Bret Easton Ellis informs us a female writer was asked to take out some jokes about the use of MSG in Chinese restaurants. Presumably in a bid not to victimise the country that might soon end up the world superpower.

Ellis himself was asked to reduce the sex scenes in his recent novel, The Shards. As if they didn’t know what they were getting with Bret Easton Ellis by now. Though perhaps they didn’t. I’m not convinced these people are aware of a world before George Floyd. Perhaps that’s why they have accidentally ended up back at the Puritanism they presumably would think lame in another context (a context where at least it is backed by a coherent moral system).

In yet another bizarre example, (AKA Pens and Poison on YouTube) was asked to include more exploration of ‘privilege’ in her novel, and was told that it ‘wouldn’t resonate with contemporary audiences because it contains depictions of supportive men’.

So far, so woke. But it turns out there is also a culture of plain incompetence in publishing, where grindingly slow decisions are made by committee, publishers no longer have in-house editors, and general Zoomer flakiness reigns.

This is covered in all its infuriating detail by writer in a recent Substack piece. Barkan eventually managed to get published despite being a white man, which, as he admitted on the Bret Easton Ellis podcast, was for a long time a brick wall for new writers. But even then, agents and publishers ghosted him for no reason, forced him to change endings and titles, and generally messed him about for years. And this is someone who is friends with leftist darling Zohran Mamdani, so imagine how much worse it is for those of us with normal political views.

Although Barkan argues we are now post-woke, there seems to prevail an ultra-censorious, risk-averse legacy that must be in part a result of woke cancel culture. Anything offensive in a book could potentially be pinned on the publisher, and is thus best avoided. And this is coupled with the philistinism and literalism of our age, which believes everything in an artistic work must be the author’s view, and that said view must be ultimately political.

Everyone is afraid of the mob, and that is the worst possible place from which to approach literature. Publishing used to be one guy or girl with a hunch and a big helping of ‘f*** you’ spirit. That’s how so many writers people revere today were published. Ellis’s Less Than Zero was a controversial gamble. Douglas Coupland, who coined Gen X, was discovered from a postcard he’d written to a friend which she had stuck to her fridge. I am not making this up: that was how it worked.

Now we have a bunch of ultra-conformist, scared children vandalising a priceless literary tradition. They have no clue what literature is or what it’s for, and to the extent that they do, they want to destroy it.

I have occasionally found myself wishing that one could still publish decent work somewhere. I recently caught myself lamenting, as I have many times before, the pogrom against white men, along with the entire woke orthodoxy. But, catching up with the current state of publishing, I am reminded of a line from the first Mission Impossible movie: ‘Relax Luther, it’s much worse than you think’. Publishing is now so bad that I can almost forget about it, because in wishing for it to be different, so much would have to change that I may as well wish the moon were made of cheese.

The industry would have to stop being aggressively racist and sexist against white male writers, and also cease to be woke in all other regards. Hired readers would have to stop trying to sanitise language. Publishers would have to be actually competent and understand literature. And ideally we’d have to go back to the Gen X days where you could make money from writing, and books actually meant something in the culture.

Given all that, the reality is it’s often better to just publish on Substack. I still miss the ‘monoculture’; I miss people who cared about literature and understood it; I miss when riskiness and edginess were valued over the insipid desire to never offend even a Chinese chef. I hate what these woke publishers have done to literature, and genuinely think most of them should be in prison. But in compensation we now have platforms like Substack precisely because these gatekeepers have let everyone down so badly.

Still, with great power comes great responsibility, so for anyone who may be offended by anything in this article, I would just like to say that white privilege isn’t real, men can be supportive (okay none of my friends, but that’s mere coincidence), if you’re fat you should consider eating less, and if you go to a Chinese restaurant be warned that the food will be absolutely smothered in MSG and communism.

And if your instinct is to remove any of that paragraph, then literature is probably not for you. Which means—congratulations—you probably work in publishing.

I was always sceptical of Long Covid, and remain so. But lately I have been suffering from an equally mysterious condition known as ‘Long 90s’. This is the ailment whereby one feels a sudden and almost unbearable desire to return to the 1990s. It can strike at any time, in some cases lasts several days, and particularly affects men over 40.

During acute attacks the only thing I’ve found that brings some relief is listening to medicinal amounts of Britpop on Spotify. And not just Oasis and Blur. I’m talking about Shed Seven, Dodgy, and, yes, even Gene. I hear in extreme cases people have been known to play up to two songs by Echobelly.

Suffering a moderate bout the other night, I found myself watching A Few Good Men for the eight trillionth time. It then hit me, as if roused from my sleep by an especially violent ‘Code Red’, that the movie is now 34 years old. In other words, it would be like someone from 1992 (when the film came out) watching a film from 1958. That is simply unacceptable.

I still see the movie as essentially contemporary. I feel it came out ‘a while ago’. But no. It’s equivalent to childhood me, firmly ensconced in the loving bosom of the 90s, sitting down to watch something in black and white about dames and plucky shoeshine boys who say ‘Aw shucks mister’.

And that actually is the right comparison, because the 90s were wholesome. Look at the warm, soft colours, the subtle grading, the knitted sweaters. The worst swear word was ‘sonofabitch’ (see the thrilling 1997 movie Breakdown, where Kurt Russell is unable to countenance a more scathing epithet for the relentlessly evil psychopaths who have kidnapped his wife). There was a successful film about fly fishing, for pity’s sake. It was beautiful and almost nothing happened. Just like the entire decade.

The 90s is now the distant past. It is another era. But it was—all complaints about the Gulf War, Tony Blair, and Nu metal aside—the last good time there was. It may have been the last time period. I don’t mean the last time period but the last time—period. The end of history. True, that didn’t work out in the sense that Mr Fukuyama meant (essentially that liberal democracy had absolutely nailed it once and for all), but I do feel like history kind of did actually end.

Because after that what has there been? The noughties (Americans call them the ‘oughts’ apparently—odd folks) were essentially a continuation of the 90s, just with everything mildly worse but still highly comforting. Then after 2010 it all falls apart very quickly. Probably after 2008 really, and the rest was just catching up to the crash whose domino effects were already inevitable.

The signs of decline were there even in the 90s, of course. I describe the Gen X era as the blue cheese days. Yes there was already mould, but what delicious mould! Nihilism was ubiquitous, from Fight Club to Grunge. But it wasn’t that serious. In hindsight the grievances seem like the bleatings of emo kids not realising they’re still basking in the glow of a coherent society and functioning economy. Things worked. Ultra-competent men with massive budgets directed movies that the whole world saw. And they were bloody good.

A Few Good Men was one such movie. I can’t help but see the fact that Rob Reiner directed it, and more recently developed Trump Derangement Syndrome then got murdered by his own son (allegedly) as some kind of sign of decline. And not a particularly subtle one.

And even though the liberal messaging is all there, it is relatively subtle. Yes, the mentality that sees the lawyers in A Few Good Men persecuting the military eventually gets you to Keir Starmer. But there was still a long way to go before that in 1992. And the always excellent if occasionally annoying Aaron Sorkin even gives the ‘baddies’ (AKA military personnel who bravely sacrifice their lives to protect cocky lawyers) some great lines. Speaking of which:

What did Jack Nicholson say to the lady who asked for an Italian, aromatised, fortified wine?
Vermouth? You can’t handle Vermouth!

You’re welcome.

Even with the clear liberal bias, this was still the pomp of the American Empire, where even the left were revelling in Manifest Destiny. Tom Cruise at this point was virtually a Weapon of Mass Destruction. Even the nerdy autistic woman was played by *checks notes* Demi Moore. And no one thought that was ridiculous. Well, a bit. Kevin Pollak was still working regularly. And darn good he was too. In both this and The Usual Suspects three years later. He had a particular look that you only saw in the 90s. A certain receding hairline and sweater tied around shoulders combo you simply don’t come across anymore. We have lost so much.

And how did we lose it? The West didn’t stand up for its values. Just as the lawyers in the film (except Demi) don’t value the men who stand on that wall protecting us, the culture that produced films like this didn’t value what made us great, and what made such movies possible in the first place. Of course, that’s just one of a million things that went wrong. As the quote goes from one of the last great movies, No Country For Old Men (which is somehow twenty years old): ‘It’s the dismal tide. It’s not the one thing’.

Now everything is falling apart. Random acts of primitive, gory violence occur daily in your local town. Civl unrest in the United Kingdom will reach new levels this summer. With the possible exception of Amazon deliveries, absolutely nothing works anymore, from the publishing of literary fiction to your local bin collection. People don’t even pick up after their dogs, litter is everywhere—oh and we have land wars in Europe and teenage boys killed for being white. One day even Fraser Nelson will admit it’s not working out. It’s time we started handling the truth.

Dixon Cox is back.

This week:
-The latest horrific migrant attack, this time in Belfast
-Belfast erupts in fiery but mostly peaceful protests
-All the usual suspects attempt to blame Nigel Farage
-Why was the attacker in the country, and who is to blame?
-What are families told to say following these tragic incidents?
And lots more

Sign up now to watch the full episode, exclusively on nickdixon.net.

By becoming a paid subscriber, you also gain access to the full versions of my many guest interviews, my videos on literature, all my articles, my new Q & As, and my exclusive regular podcast with Jamie Franklin on the big questions. Plus you can comment on all posts and join my private chat group.

Sign up for £5 a month, or just over £4 with the yearly option. As ever, I can only keep doing this with your help, so please consider subscribing today.

Many thanks,
Nick

Read more

Subscribers to this page may have heard me talking about the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard.

Here I give an overview of his life and work, why it matters to me, and why you should read him.

I rank my favourite of his works, which writers he can be compared to, and why most critics get his influences wrong.

I also break down how he developed his unique style, and discuss why he didn’t believe in translations.

I might start a separate literature page of some sort in case people don’t want this stuff here, but for now I thought I may as well post it for those interested.

Best,
Nick

Read more

One problem with being in your 40s is you can’t tell how far you’re mourning the death of the monoculture and the lack of meaning inherent in the digital siloed world of the culture war, and how far you’re just having a midlife crisis.

Lately I feel trapped by politics, trapped by lack of opportunity, trapped by my past choices. The latter especially is exactly how one feels during a midlife crisis, but it’s also all bound up with the culture war, which only ever seems to escalate and is now so vast you don’t even see it because it is simply the world we live in—as ubiquitous as the sky.

Partly it’s the now barely worth mentioning but never forgotten purge of straight white men, especially from my generation onwards, from virtually every industry. All men in this position resent it more than they will ever let on, no matter how woke they claim to be. Everything gets worse once you remove the SWM, especially in arts and entertainment, because they formed such a large part of these fields, which are now declining in all regards. Publishers put out almost exclusively garbage and don’t even have proper editors anymore, movies have absurd diversity quotas and are generally completely devoid of ideas or energy. And all the things we’ve all talked about a thousand times before.

But it’s also the internet. Perhaps you’ve heard of it. It has good aspects, obvs. It means I can have this Substack, for example, with discerning and highly intelligent subscribers. However for all the benefits of a niche, self-selecting audience, something about this model, and all similar distribution models, drains some of the larger meaning from an endeavour.

Following the death of the ‘monoculture’ (not the one Google says is something to do with agriculture) somewhere around 2010ish, or maybe a few years later, instead of a book everyone is reading, a film everyone has seen, or a TV show everyone at work or school is talking about, we all get exactly what we want at all times (as long as we don’t want anything good, or we cap our consumption at the point before the culture died). And that’s probably not good for us. It’s like a relationship versus porn. The former is something real that is stubbornly itself. It’s not perfect, but it lives and breathes and surprises us in awful and delightful ways. The latter is an ever-evolving attempt to cater to our own protean and sordid whims.

AI, of course, takes this fiendishly easy access to the next level, and also augurs the potential death of all art. If I can say ‘Write me a Bret Easton Ellis novel but set in my hometown and I’m the hero’, what you have is not art or human connection but decadent wish fulfilment. It might be amusing to play with a few times, but very soon it starts to haemorrhage meaning.

Think about those cool dystopian movies that we’re not good enough to make anymore. They often begin in a future world where the protagonist can have everything he desires instantaneously, perhaps via some kind of clunky VR headset. We immediately know it’s all going to come crashing down before long. The hero is going to find it was all fake and weird, and he just needed a nice girlfriend who’s not quite as hot as the fantasy one who turns out to be evil or a robot. We inherently know there’s something sinister about things being too easy, and that administering to all our desires is not necessarily healthy.

Ideally we are supposed to go out and meet art and culture halfway. In a cinema, or gallery for example. I say this as a radically anti-social person who hates museums and galleries and loves the fact that the internet means I’m never bored. I’m never bored, but I am incredibly miserable. There’s a reason it’s not called ‘funscrolling’.

‘Doomscrolling’ is in fact the perfect term: we have chosen our own doom, lured by the siren song of the on-demand world. The promise of infinite freedom has somehow left us the least free we’ve ever been.

Our silo is technological but it is also political. And this of course goes far beyond the mass racist banishment of the SWMs. Every artist or ‘creator’ must now have broadly the same opinion. This is particularly deleterious in mediums that are by their nature suited to eccentrics and out-and-out maniacs. J. R. R. Tolkien backed Franco in the Spanish Civil War. Do you think any fantasy writer could do something like that now and have a career? Back then it wasn’t even an issue. Some great writers were hardcore leftists, like Roberto Bolaño. Others were far right, like Ezra Pound. TS Eliot is still revered, but his reactionary views would make him a pariah today. A healthy artistic culture would have popular writers who dig Mussolini, as well as the inevitable slew of communists who happen to be talented screenwriters, directors, musicians, or whatever.

Instead we have conformity of opinion, combined with alienation via technology. A narcissistic Bugman culture; everyone staring at their own bullshit as it reflects back at them from a few inches away. And I’m one of the worst. The most isolated, the most finicky in my endless curated playlists. It’s hell and I want to kill myself.

Most of this has been foisted on us by the totalising ideology of the Regime, plus the death march towards new technology that seems as hardwired into us as a male bee about to get his two second kamikaze chance to mate before being annihilated.

There are very rare exceptions to all this and they seem to be French. Michel Houellebecq goes on doing his thing as if we were still at the peak of Gen X culture. Controversial, uncompromising, and widely read despite being a literary author who will happily go on about Joris-Karl Huysmans in the middle of a dystopian novel about Islam.

Bret Easton Ellis is still around, though lamenting all of the above and sometimes deciding to not even bother writing as a result. After ditching the novel for many years, he did eventually come out with his recent masterpiece The Shards, though he had to set it during his school years, as our current time was too appalling even for the author of American Psycho.

This is the same reason you don’t really see films or shows about the Covid era. I note that even ongoing TV series that had to deal with Covid largely skirted around it. The characters weren’t depicted suddenly all wearing masks, and it was clear to me at the time that we’d either have to drop masks (despite the claims from deranged technocrats that we should keep them forever) or that the world of film and television would have to have a total break from reality, and continue in a kind of parallel universe where Covid never happened. There was some talk of ‘Blitz spirit’ around 2020, but unlike the war, no one wants to tell stories about the Covid era, because it wasn’t a heroic moment of national unity, more like a glitch in the Matrix that the programmers are still trying to permanently erase.

We tried to throw out every rule of being human and we have never recovered, and this is all somehow tied to the death of art and culture. During Covid, the Regime tried to install dystopian practices that could never be sustained, yet we were already primed for it by an internet culture that mainly involves lying to ourselves and others about what people are really like. Whether its’s the perfect ski lodge life presented by women with aggressively filled lips on Instagram, or the virtue signalling midwits of X and (shudder) Bluesky, we like to deny the humanity of others whilst presenting an inhumanly perfect self (or perhaps that should be perfectly inhuman self).

I thought I had accepted all this a while ago, and that it was now just about getting one’s head down and winning this darn culture war. But I don’t see any winning or any real change. There are minor victories, but the other side doesn’t accept them anyway. The two realities, or ‘two movies’ in the late Scott Adams’s formulation, remain firmly intact.

But really it’s six billion movies (the approximate number of people in the world with internet, according to Google). Six billion hyper-individualised monsters who, in a cruel Faustian twist, have actually lost all individuality. The medium has become the message to an ever more radical degree. Although theorists would have told you that was already the case in the heyday of film, for example, there is a big difference between giving our unique take on a shared experience, compared to now, where we are all speaking completely different languages.

I recently did a podcast where we all offered up our favourite music. Yet we were all various ages and nationalities, which meant that our totally different reference points rendered the whole thing meaningless, and something like this seems to be where we are as a culture.

Of course, putting this on Substack is perhaps an example of what one English teacher of mine called ‘self-betraying irony’. As great as Substack is, the death of the monoculture seems to bring with it the near-death of meaning. At least for me. Maybe if you don’t really care about films, books, music etc it doesn’t matter very much. But for some of us, it was all we really had.

Or maybe I’m just having some kind of midlife crisis.

About twenty years ago, I left my life in London and returned to the house where I grew up, in the Lake District.

My big, ludicrously romantic plan was that I was going back ‘to write’. I had a job at Foyles bookshop in central London, which left very little time and energy to get much done—or that was my excuse at least—whilst also surrounding one with books, tempting the young, sensitive, and somewhat deluded to imagine they could write one of their own.

The final straw of many final straws was me leaning on the front desk by the till one day, daydreaming as I often did, and the cheerfully cynical security guard breaking my reverie by saying ‘It’s too late to think about what to do with your life now!’ In hindsight this was a far-fetched attempt at demoralisation: I was only in my mid-20s. But something about his words made me snap, and I decided to quit the job right then and there.

That wasn’t the only cause. I had recently learnt Transcendental Meditation and had suddenly adopted a radical ‘go with the flow’ attitude, very much at odds with my actual personality. Instead of trying to bend the world to my will, I would allow it to guide me. I took this to absurd levels. For example, if I sent a text message that didn’t arrive, I would not attempt to resend it. On a slightly larger scale, my flatshare was coming to an end, so I decided that since I was quitting my job anyway, I may as well not look for another place to live in London. The universe was telling me to leave. None of this, of course, had anything to do with the actual teachings of Transcendental Meditation.

But I went with my new life approach, and ended up sleeping on the floor in the lounge of the flat, having given up my bedroom, but needing a little more time to see out my notice period at work. The girls I shared the flat with would walk into the lounge and talk about how they were going to arrange the room when I was gone, whilst I was lying right there on the floor, on a squalid mattress. I believe this would now be called a ‘microaggression’. Obviously the girls all hated me. And who could blame them? I was self-involved, with an unseemly habit of telling the truth.

I then moved into the house my brother had just left, which was between tenants. This meant I got to live much nearer to work, in Islington, in what was a very nice house, if you didn’t mind the flying ants that guarded the entrance to the bathroom.

Here I was all alone in a four-bedroom, getting an early taste of the solitary living that I always knew was my destiny. Flatshares for me were a harrowing daily nightmare, born purely of necessity. Friends and family would tell me ‘You don’t want to live alone’. But of course I did. More than anything. But they didn’t get it. I was young and misunderstood by a cruel and boorish world.

In this new house I roamed around, dodged ants, and read John Fante’s Bandini Quartet. I slept in a sleeping bag on top of a bed that had no sheets, and continued my twice-daily meditation practice. As I was using this technique for the first time, the effect was very powerful. Especially combined with the stress relief of finally living on my own, and knowing I would soon be done with the low-wage retail grind. During one meditation I felt like I was moving up and down on a giant stair machine. It felt much better than it sounds.

I was listening to Old Crow Medicine Show, who I had just seen live down the road in Islington. The song I related to most was ‘Take ‘em Away’.

Take ‘em away, take ‘em away, Lord
Take away these chains from me
My heart is broken ‘cause my spirit’s not free
Lord, take away these chains from me

It’s about the backbreaking work of sharecropping in 19th century America, but I felt that a retail job in noughties London was essentially the same. I mean, we did late shifts for heaven’s sake.

I could just about walk to work from the house, and there was a magical freedom to this time unlike anything else I’ve experienced. It ended very soon, though, when I was suddenly turfed out and had to move to my aunt’s house, further out in the suburbs of North London. I enjoyed packing up my things to leave, even though I knew I was going somewhere worse. It was then I realised I just liked the idea of leaving places and moving onto something new, whatever that may be. As one of the verses in ‘Take ‘em Away’ went: ‘Some birds’ feathers are too bright to be caged’.

I then lived with my annoying aunt. I had the attic room, which in itself was fine. I had my own bathroom, with no sentry ants, flighted or otherwise, and I spent most of my time reading James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces, in a free hardback copy that I got from work. At the time there was massive controversy because Frey had passed the book off as memoir, yet it turned out much of it was fiction. I saw absolutely no issue with this. For one, it was immediately obvious to me that this was a highly stylised and clearly embellished account. And, as the fearsome writing tutor in Todd Solondz’s film, Storytelling, says: ‘Once you start writing, it all becomes fiction’.

James Frey was the only good thing about staying with my aunt, who irritated me at every opportunity. She would eat my toast in the morning, insist I stay up late playing cards when I was the only one who had to get up for work, and many other things that were perhaps meant to be jocular, but were very tiresome. Later everyone in my family stopped talking to her, and all for separate reasons. You could say I was a pioneer in this regard.

Finally I reached the end of my work notice period, and it was time to go home. My lofty plan was, as I say, to go back and write. I had essentially convinced myself I was Austrian novelist Thomas Bernhard. Virtually all of Bernhard’s books are about solitary, obsessive, pessimistic figures (so far I checked all boxes) attempting some artistic feat or other monumental task, and procrastinating until they go virtually insane. For example, Concrete is about a man trying to begin a definitive scholarly work on the composer Mendelssohn, but he can’t start writing it in case his obnoxious sister comes back to the house and interrupts him. Trust me, that is all that happens. Bernhard has stacks of novels like this, and they are all excellent. My favourite is The Loser (feel free to supply your own joke, but keep it to yourself).

Like one of Bernhard’s protagonists (but hopefully a more productive one), my idea was to use the cottage that my parents usually rented out to do my writing. My dad had agreed to this, and on those terms I returned home. When I got back, it turned out my dad had changed his mind and insisted I stay with him and my mum in the house. It was hard to appreciate at the time, but this was, if anything, even more Bernhard-like. How could I possibly get anything done now, with my philistine parents around, when I was supposed to be in the cottage on my own! For Bernhard, that alone would be 200 pages of literary gold.

So I ended up staying in my childhood bedroom, with the chronic damp that stuck the pages of my books together, and a host of equally musty childhood memories. My parents pressured me to get a job, and I found myself working at Waterstone’s in the town where I was born, taking my old school bus to work. Yes: I had left London only to find myself doing a much worse version of the job I had just quit. I can laugh about it now, a mere twenty years later.

Despite my failure to do any writing whatsoever, I still felt I had some kind of latent talent, and this pressed on me from the inside like my arteries were about to burst. I would watch BBC4 documentaries on Bob Dylan and have spasms of almost physical pain that I wasn’t expressing my abilities. Not that I thought I was Dylan, but I knew I could do something.

I formed a plan to return to London. I had lingered at home long enough. Even my old grandad said I was wasting my life. Before I left (or a bit later, I don’t remember) I applied and was accepted onto the Birkbeck Creative Writing MA. One can endlessly scoff at such courses, but it was better than killing yourself. But before the course ever started, I discovered standup comedy.

I was quite good at it immediately, and decided comedy was my true calling. Thus I deferred the writing course, and ended up never taking my place. One year and one day after I first got onstage, I won the notoriously brutal Comedy Store King Gong show. Shortly after that I signed with Comedy Store Management, after receiving several offers of representation based on my performance that night. I had found my talent. Heck, I even had a girlfriend.

More than a decade later I quit comedy, and found a new calling commenting on politics. And I have actually done better at this, at least in terms of worldly success, as measured by money and social media followers. I have also been able to use more of myself, free from the limitations of having to repeat the same tried and tested jokes for drunk people in seedy nightclubs.

Of course, political commentary has its own limits. Sometimes I feel like moving on again, though it would be more complicated this time. Anyone who has engaged in politics in anything but the most conformist way becomes a social pariah. This feeling of being buffeted by the forces of history is unpleasant. No one wants to feel like they have no control over their life. The soul screams out against such impositions. But that is how it is, from the decline of the grammar schools, robbing me of the educational opportunities afforded to my dad’s generation, to the woke hierarchies that were a large part of the reason I left comedy and moved into politics in the first place. We are never really free.

Now I, like so many others, have been sucked up into the great vortex of the Culture War. Or, to use another metaphor from the physical world, I am forced to tackle politics as one is forced to tackle a giant boulder that has just fallen into one’s path. It must be dealt with, but furiously smashing up a rock should not be mistaken for Jungian self-actualisation. Of course, saving the country is important and has a kind of collective grandeur. But there is not that much one individual can do, and it is very different from the personal transcendence made possible through art.

Soon I will leave London and return home again, to that same house where I grew up, and where my parents live still. The noisy concerns of the world will fall away. The lakes don’t care about politics or what’s happening on X. They whisper something far more mysterious and ancient. The wind moves over Rydal Water in a melancholy song that seems like it’s just for me. Me whom these lakes virtually raised as a child, though they speak in a language I’ve forgotten. Me, always restless, never quite at home even in my home. Yet always longing to go back, though in my heart I have never left.

Just like I did twenty years ago, I will seek some kind of answer on where to go next, but I do not expect to find it. The gentle waves will just smile at me, with the quietly amused love of a grandparent watching a child at play. They will let me work it all out for myself.

This week:
-The appalling footage of Henry Nowak’s murder shocks the world
-The establishment attempts to blame Farage and silence dissent over the incident
-Insane College of Policing guidance shows that two-tier policing is official policy
-Kemi Badenoch is praised for her response, but did she really get it right?
-Protests in Southampton see police officers refusing to take the knee
-Ben Habib stands down Advance UK as a political party
And lots more

Sign up now to watch the full episode, exclusively on nickdixon.net

By becoming a paid subscriber, you also gain access to the full versions of my many guest interviews, my videos on literature, all articles, my new Q & As, and my exclusive regular podcast with Jamie Franklin on the big questions. Plus you can comment on all posts and join my private chat group.

Sign up for £5 a month, or just over £4 with the yearly option. I can only keep doing this with your help, so please consider subscribing today.

Many thanks,
Nick

Read more

Sorry for the lack of content. I have been ill for over three weeks now, stuck at home with my (incredibly gloomy) thoughts. The best I can say is, I’ve had a lot of time for reading.

Today I started reading a short story by Roberto Bolaño, which I have read probably twice before. In the story, the first person narrator submits short stories to competitions under various pseudonyms. I began to think how nice it would be to change one’s name and start a new career as a writer, free from all the controversy and dubious ‘baggage’ one may have acquired from being a minor public figure. You could refuse to ever do public appearances, and deal with all correspondence in writing. In fact this is what happens in a Paul Auster novel I also started rereading, but got bored with. You’d create a sense of mystique, like a less rubbish Banksy, but in reality it would be for the practical purpose of not being associated with your former public transgressions against the ideology of the day.

Well anyway. As I was thinking this, I suddenly realised I had already done something similar in my real life many years ago. It was when I decided to try standup comedy. I was unemployed, lost, and totally miserable. One day I decided to join a local tennis club. The idea was to do one nice thing for myself, to puncture the endless blank days of lonely introspection. It cost £150, which at the time was an enormous sum for me. Not just that, but tennis clubs were an indulgence for ultra middle-class people with money, not weird loners with nothing.

But the tennis club was fun. In hindsight, it seems almost idyllic. I was young and everything still worked, and I got much better at tennis than I had ever been. That, indeed, is one of the central features of playing a lot of tennis. Chatting in the clubhouse one day, one of the regulars mentioned that he was a standup comedian. I had never met anyone who did standup comedy. I had watched it on the TV as a child, but that was the closest I’d ever got. Yet I’d always been obsessed with ‘being funny’. At school my sole aim was making the class laugh. Sometimes even the teachers. This started as early as age ten, and never wavered till I escaped that brutal detention camp known as secondary school (my only relief being the many sitcoms I watched in the evenings, instead of doing homework).

Hence, I found myself replying to my tennis friend that I thought I could do standup. I was somewhat surprised at my own words. I had always told myself that going onstage was something I could never do. Yet here I was, claiming I fancied myself a comedian. This led to me writing some jokes and showing them to him. He actually rated one of two of them, and suddenly the previously impossible seemed possible. Maybe this was something I could actually do.

My friend explained that the best way to start was to do a comedy course. I have barely ever spoken about this course, because it felt like a slightly embarrassing origin story. I’m not sure why. It’s not like there are any shortcuts in standup. Even with some talent, one has to suffer for years, as ‘bombing’ (or, perhaps more fittingly, ‘dying’) is a perpetual hazard for any comic, with the possible exception of a famous comedian performing for their own audience. Though even then it is not unheard of.

So I went to do the comedy course. It was in Camden, in a dingy pub, during a hot May that seemed far less oppressive than the heatwaves we get now (due either to climate change or the delusions of nostalgia). What now strikes me as extremely odd is that I used a made-up name, not just for my onstage persona, but from the first moment of the class, never telling my real name to anyone. Essentially I don’t think ‘Nick Dixon’ could have managed to do this course at the time. He was someone who could never bring himself to get onstage. He only wanted to be a writer of some kind, and knew he was not a performer. His life also felt like it had run into a dead end and was basically over. Thus he had to become someone else in order to carry on, and not just carry on but take this huge leap.

I stuck with the name for quite a long time. I suppose it was actually only a few months, but I did a lot of gigs in that time, and it felt like longer. Eventually I realised I didn’t want to keep the name going, and was able to just be me again. Though a completely different me who had broken through this barrier and was able to do things I never would have believed.

There followed more than a decade of performing onstage. Sharing a bill at the Comedy Store with people like Michael McIntyre (and doing well), appearing on TV, and doing shows in mad places like Dubai for fairly decent sums of money, especially given where I began, terrified of spending £150.

There were other perks, like a new ability to date very attractive women who assumed I was the person they saw onstage being funny and confident in front of hundreds of people. And I suppose I was that person, technically, but he only came out by force of necessity. You simply have to be relaxed, confident and ‘in the moment’ onstage to succeed, so I was. But in all the time I did standup, it never really translated into the offstage me, who remained in some ways the one who could never have got onstage in the first place. It might have been less misleading to have kept the pseudonym after all.

Looking back, I am astonished that I did any of this. Particularly making up an identity, like the protagonist of a postmodern novel. At the same time, I shouldn’t be surprised at all, since I find myself contemplating, if only in daydreams, doing the same thing again.

It could be the nature of a slightly drawn-out illness, which makes one feel like a prisoner staring through bars at all the free people, able to do whatever they want (like eat food) and take it all for granted. This has exaggerated my already solitary, outsider perspective to where I can’t quite see the point of anything I normally do. Politics suddenly appears to be people shouting at each other about nothing. Though the problems remain serious, they naturally look smaller when one is drifting far away from the world.

Losing, for now, the few external points of reference in my life has also exposed the deadening emptiness that has been there for a while, barely kept at bay by work. I could see myself doing a Reginald Perrin (one of the many sitcoms I watched during my school years), faking my own death by running into the sea. I am disturbed to find the character was just two years older than I am now.

One is stuck with oneself. This seems to be the problem (as Eckhart Tolle noted before he achieved enlightenment, which sounds nice). Exacerbated by solitude and illness, in my case, and stultifying routine in Reggie’s. If I get through this I will have to do things differently, though I’m not sure what or how. Unlike the protagonist of Billy Joel’s ‘My Life’, I can’t jack in the job and start doing standup comedy—I’ve already used up that one.

Maybe I could do it in reverse. Change my name and get a normal job, always denying any resemblance to ‘Nick Dixon’ and any controversial statements he may have made. Looking back at that strange summer when I started standup, I wouldn’t put it past me.

In this video I break down what he said and give my reaction. Please have a look if you haven’t already. Or listen to the ad-free audio, for subscribers only.

Thanks,
Nick

Read more

Hi, sorry for the break. I’ve been ill for a while, but today I made a video on the Makerfield by-election.

I look at whether Restore Britain are ‘splitting the vote’, Reform’s flawed approach to Restore, Andy Burnham’s chances, and much more.

Check it out below, or listen in the audio player.

Cheers,
Nick

Read more

Hello, we are back for another catch-up with the Rev Dr Jamie Franklin.

We discuss:
-The chaos of the Labour government
-Why football has gone left wing, and the evil of VAR
-Renaud Camus’ idea of being anti-antiracist
-Reform UK vs Restore Britain, and election strategy
-The Islamification of Britain
-Ed Dutton’s recent comments about Jamie, and Jamie’s response
-C.S. Lewis’s views on the truth claims of Christianity
And lots more

Sign up now to watch this episode, which is only available for paid subscribers of either me or Jamie.

By becoming a paid subscriber, you also gain access to the full versions of my many guest interviews, my topical podcasts with Paul Cox, videos on literature, and my new Q & As. Plus you can comment on all posts and join my private chat group.

Sign up for £5 a month, or just over £4 with the yearly option. I can only keep doing this with your help, so please consider subscribing today.

Many thanks,
Nick

Read more

A slight break from the political chaos here, though still highly relevant to the themes of this Substack.

I recently reread C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia from start to finish. I hadn’t read the books since childhood, and many things surprised me. Lewis’s frequent amusing asides, his scathing assessments of certain characters, how whimsical it is in some parts, and how moving in others.

I also noted Lewis’s unsparing appraisal of the liberal modern world, for example in his description of the progressive ‘Experiment House’ school, and his clear disapproval of the character Susan forsaking Narnia for trivial teenage preoccupations.

As such, I decided to make a video looking at five key moments in the saga that highlight the stark contrast between Lewis’s understanding of morality, and what is seen as good and normal in our materialist, utilitarian society.

As ever, you can listen to the audio version above, but I recommend watching the video, as I made an effort with the production!

Have a look and let me know what you think. But only if it’s positive, obviously.

Thanks,
Nick

Hello, this is a new type of video from me. It’s a podcast, but focussing on a specific issue. In this case, the strange cultural position occupied by Banksy.

Having made two previous videos on this, I decided to consult artist and writer Alexander Adams, to find out whether there was anything more to Bansky that I’m missing.

We talk about the odd concept of being an establishment artist loved by Alastair Campbell, and explore whether art accepted by the powerful is always a bad thing, as historical precedent suggests otherwise.

We then go beyond that to discuss what an art tackling our contemporary moment might look like, and we look at the contrast between Roger Scruton’s ideas of beauty in art versus the shock-based approach of modern art, and whether there is any medium in between.

Watch the video below, or listen to the ad-free audio edition, exclusively for paid subscribers.

Cheers,
Nick

Read more