Never Shag A Woman At Work

Sometimes I look back with regret on the way my personal life has turned out – alone at sixty. Then I think of my friend Chris Tame and his two failed marriages, or the guy downstairs and his two crazy girlfriends – one on whom I called the police on Valentine’s Day thinking he was being murdered. Then I don’t feel so bad. For the past thirty years when I have worked I have done so for the most part alone; when I was younger I did not work exclusively in all male environments, but I had little opportunity to fraternise with women by and large, that is women to whom I was attracted. I don’t regret that either.

Working with women gives a man the opportunity to mix business with pleasure. That sounds nice, but it can be disastrous. Look at Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. Now that was really sordid, and frankly the cunt brought it on himself, but others have landed in trouble with a capital T, like Staff Sergeant Eddy Soto of the United States Army. Fortunately, his absurd rape conviction was overturned on appeal, but a woman doesn’t have to accuse you of rape to trash your job, your career, your life...

Last month, the Guardian ran a story headlined: Half of women in UK have been sexually harassed at work, study finds

Sure: “Polling of 1,553 women found 52% experienced unwanted behaviour at work including groping, sexual advances and inappropriate jokes” – what does that even mean, inappropriate jokes?

As we’ve seen in some high profile cases, including that of Ellen Pao, sexual harassment and discrimination can mean almost anything. Even though Pao lost her lawsuit against her former employer Kleiner Perkins and was as good as kicked out of Reddit, she is still being lauded by media braindeads as some kind of heroine instead of a toxic bitch.

Any man who has any sort of romantic entanglement with a woman at work is risking everything for what – a shag? Okay, there are exceptions, Robin Cook met his second wife at work, and married her. He had no regrets about that, although his first wife may well have, but when the shine wears off, what are we left with? Charges of sexual harassment or worse. Okay, so the girl is cultured, sweet natured and stunningly attractive, so was Karla Homolka. Don’t go there guys, don’t even think of going there, find your love interests in the club, on the dance floor, even on a dating site, but never shag a woman at work.

The Last Time I Saw Tony

The screengrab below is from an e-mail that arrived on the 22^nd of last month. It is clearly incomplete, but what is not so clear is that it was long overdue because the author had been dead four years by that time.

Anthony Hancock – Tony to his friends but AH to me – died June 11, 2012. I can only guess at what happened, but presumably the e-mail account from which this message was sent has now been long closed. His phone number no longer works, and although his domain – Historical Review Press – has been taken over by Simon Sheppard - the company he founded with his late father is also long gone.

If you read about AH in the mainstream or anywhere slightly to the left of the Monday Club, you will find nothing flattering about him, and much that is deeply unflattering. For some time after our initial acquaintance, I wasn’t that impressed with him either. The sentiment was mutual, but I realised shortly, as did he, that this mutual contempt had been engineered gratuitously by someone we’d both been kind to in our own different ways, and who had repaid us by trying to set us at each other’s throats.

After this individual overstepped the mark, we both realised we’d been played, and although we were never friends with a capital F, we did reach the point where we enjoyed each other’s company. I owe AH a lot; he did some printing for me including one ill-fated project (that he actually contracted out) which left him seriously out of pocket, and one of my pamphlets he printed totally for free. I can’t remember at this distance if this was Holocaust Revisionism After Irving v Lipstadt or The Man Who Invented Racism, but he certainly printed one for free, and the other for a fairly nominal fee.

It was because of AH that I went to Tehran where I delivered a paper on the forbidden subject; I also assisted him albeit belatedly as McKenzie friend in the ludicrous Tosspot Trial which saw him stitched up by a deranged lawyer, a barrister who looked and talked like a pig, and a judge who was out of the Ark.

The photo below is rather sad looking; the last time I saw him – at a political meeting – he looked even sadder. I feel a bit guilty over that because I tapped him for twenty quid, I remember not what for. I realised later that by that point he was a broken man, his horrible common law wife having kicked him out of the house, and he was I am reliably informed sleeping on the floor of his printworks. Even so, he would not have died prematurely at 65 had be followed his doctor’s orders.

It was a sad end for a man who had been demonised by people who on the one hand painted him as a bigoted and quite mad conspiracy theorist while at the same time conspiring against him and everything he stood for, even dragging him into court over the printing of a boring satirical pamphlet while turning a blind eye to or even attempting to justify the crushing of a nation and the mass murder of its people, including its children.

In the grand scheme of things, AH was an important person, and if our race still exists two hundred years from now, history will be a lot kinder to him than his contemporaries.