Chris James's Blog, page 3

What? Spring already?

There are two reasons this blog has been quiet since 7 January, both of which are pretty dull: one, I’m heavily into writing the next novel, over halfway, in fact, which means everything and everyone tends to get a bit neglected at this point in the process (just ask Mrs James – er, on second thoughts, maybe don’t); and two, this year’s winter has also been dull. If we get a nice cold snap and a blue sky, I can post pictures of how great the scenery looks. But since January, it’s almost been like a British winter here in Warsaw: cold, wet and humid with the occasional frost and nothing to look at but a back garden that clearly needs a lot of work.

And if you’re wondering about those gorgeous five chicks Mrs James and Eldest Daughter raised last autumn, the news is also dull: out of the five, three transpired to be cocks. We’ve eaten two of them and the third is plucked and chopped and currently residing in my freezer waiting to become another Sunday lunch. One of the two remaining hens fell ill and also had to be dispatched. I assumed that you would not have appreciated a post showing my axe doing the deeds and Mrs James all a-plucking and a-gutting

On the upside, the crocuses came out last week, and they looked rather nice.

World War Three: Game of Cowards

Welcome to your free trial of the newest, most exciting multiplayer video game of the century! Brought to you by Age of Stupid productions, this is the video game everyone has been waiting for:

World War Three: Game of Cowards!

How to play? Easy, first just choose which character you want to be from these avatars:

Vladimir Putin: Cower in your impenetrable bunker under the Kremlin and direct your blood-thirsty subordinates to bomb Ukrainian schools, hospitals and apartment blocks. Score points for all of the innocent civilians you can murder at no risk to yourself. Score bonus points for every one of your own dead troops that you can have incinerated on the battlefield so you don’t have to pay compensation to their families.

Joe Biden: Cower in your impenetrable bunker under the White House and fret about “escalation” if you give Ukraine the weapons to defeat its enemy. Score points for all the excuses you can think up to avoid helping Ukraine win, because the last thing you want is a civil war in RuZZia, where any hate-filled freak might get their hands on a nuke. Score bonus points if you can remember 20 years ago, when the US invaded Iraq because Saddam supposedly had WMD and therefore had to be killed. Now you’re faced with a genuine fascist madman who you know has 6,000 nukes, you cannot possibly be interested in regime change. Oh no. No, no, no…

Benjamin Netanyahu: Cower in your impenetrable bunker in Tel Aviv while the IDF murders as many Palestinian women and children as it can. Score points for every day that no one mentions how shit you and Mossad must have been to have missed the surprise attack by your sworn enemy last October, and how those 1,400-odd murders were partly due to your arrogance and incompetence. Score bonus points for every time you insist that your endless murder spree in Palestine will definitely bring an end to the violence, because killing young people’s families and friends absolutely never radicalises them and has always, throughout history, led to people who hate each other eventually agreeing to set aside their differences and live in peace.

The Hamas Leadership: Cower in your impenetrable bunker somewhere in Saudi Arabia while congratulating yourself on your military genius in launching the surprise attack that saw your radicalised freaks murder 1,400-odd innocent Israelis. Score points for every day no one says to you, “What the actual fuck did you think Israel would do to Palestine in response?” Score bonus points every time you chuckle to yourself when you remember that your own families are perfectly safe, while your decisions have led to the deaths of tens of thousands of people you claim to represent.

The British Conservative Party: Cower in your impenetrable bunker under Downing Street as you fret about how to explain away your military support for Ukraine after taking so many bribes (er, “donations”) from Vladimir Putin. Console yourself that Putin still thinks he got a bargain, paying you a trifling GPB 5 million for you to slit the UK’s economic wrists with Brexshit. Score points for every oligarch who still invites you to enjoy the best RuZZian prostitutes at his exclusive parties in his Italian castle. Score bonus points for every day the UK media, which is owned by all your billionaire chums anyway, fails to publicise your despicable rape and betrayal of your country.

Olaf Scholz: Cower in your impenetrable bunker in Berlin as you struggle to give Ukraine the fewest possible weapons in order to hasten its defeat. Score points for every media interview you can give where you claim that “Ukraine must win” without smirking. Score bonus points every evening when you cry into your peach Schnapps bemoaning why things couldn’t just be like the good old days, when Berlin and Moscow had a convivial get-together to carve up central Europe between them.

The coward who can score the greatest number points will then proceed to the Ultimate Challenge! The coward will have to face the ruthless Emperor Xi Jinping of China! What can the coward offer to appease the mighty Chinese Emperor Xi? Gold? Rare silks? Taiwan? You decide!

We hope you enjoy your free trial of World War Three: Game of Cowards, before millions more innocent civilians are killed by men who live in unalloyed luxury and security, and who will never be held accountable for their bloodletting.

Don’t delay! Play World War Three: Game of Cowards today and remember: Only the poor die young!

((c) Copyright, all rights reserved, Age of Stupid productions, 2024)

News from nowhere: looking back at 2024

Dateline: 1 January 2025

As revellers around the world celebrated New Year’s Eve last night and the arrival of 2025, today we look back on what was a tumultuous 2024. The number one story of last year is the re-election of Donald Trump as president of the United States. He defied all attempts to have him struck off the ballot under Article 14 of the US constitution, which failed when the Supreme Court ruled in his favour. In addition, Trump’s first-term appointments to the Supreme Court worked hard to delay his numerous trials and indictments throughout 2024 by dragging out appeals process after appeals process. Then, his election victory was all-but-assured when Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, died from an alleged drugs overdose three weeks before polling day, which poleaxed the incumbent president with grief, leaving Trump to dominate the airwaves and gain more than enough electoral college votes to secure the White House.

Since Trump’s re-election in November, the Bidens are not the only ones to suffer unfortunate turns of events. Trump has wasted wasted little time making good on his promises to “hunt down the vermin” and punish those “traitors” who tried to stop him running for a second term last year. Before he’s even taken office, Trump has had over a thousand judges, election officials and others arrested by his fervent supporters. These are now in various local prisons awaiting trial. Local media in many states in the US report more violence, intimidation and other irregularities. But Trump has dismissed this as “libtard hysteria”.

In addition, Trump’s re-election has also sent shockwaves around the world. With his declaration that on day one of his second term, he would pull the US out of NATO and remove all military personnel and equipment from Europe, he has effectively ended the security organisation’s ability to defend its remaining members. The Kremlin was quick to point out, on 6 November, that NATO’s Article 5 was now meaningless because, without American military might, it could not be enforced. Although other NATO members, including the UK, France, and Germany, refuted this and reaffirmed their commitment to mutual defence, this was thrown into doubt the next day, 7 November, when Russia hit Kyiv with a low-yield nuclear weapon. The blast killed thousands of Ukrainians and left that country’s leadership with little option but to offer their surrender, especially when, in a fraught phone call, Trump warned Ukrainian President Zelenskyy that Putin wanted to bomb all of Ukraine with nuclear weapons, but Trump had “talked sense to Putin”. President Trump immediately took the credit for ending the nearly-four-year-long war in Ukraine within a day, as he’d said he would.

On the next day, 8 November, China attacked Taiwan. President Trump stood down all US forces in the region and again took the credit for saving thousands of US lives. Since the Chinese invasion, only sporadic reports have been received from the island with a population of 23.5 million. Most of these claim that the Chinese invaders are committing the most brutal acts of oppression against the local population, although Beijing strenuously denies these reports, calling them “typical propaganda from the discredited and defeated West”. The situation has not been helped by confirmation of the earthquake that hit the island just three days ago on 28 December 2024. Seismologists insist the destruction must be substantial but the Chinese military refuse to allow aid into Taiwan.

Meanwhile, countries in central and eastern Europe are reeling under the influx of millions of Ukrainian refugees fleeing the advancing Russian army. Numerous unconfirmed reports of summary executions and mass rape by Russian soldiers appear to be driving the exodus. The Polish president recently attacked Germany and other west European countries for closing their borders to refugees from the east, but west European leaders have insisted this step is just a “temporary measure”. Further north, concern is growing in the Baltic States in fear of a potential Russian invasion. After a year of the complete militarisation of Russian society and the supply of thousands of tanks, artillery pieces and other weapons from China, a vastly expanded Russian army has massed in Belarus and the enclave of Kaliningrad, and now threatens to engulf the small Baltic states from two directions. However, the Kremlin insists that it has no plans to invade any more neighbouring countries, calling such suggestions, “typical fear-mongering propaganda against peace-loving Russia, peddled by the discredited and defeated West”.

So, after the upheavals of 2024, what does 2025 hold? To try to find out, we spoke to a leading authority in geopolitics, the Romanian Prof. Eduard Pulamica. He explained, “As the Age of Stupid continues, we must expect such dislocations. The twentieth century was the American century, and the twenty-first will be the Chinese century. But this transfer of supremacy cannot happen peacefully. Many in the West thought that they had ‘won’ the Cold War in 1989 when the Soviet Union collapsed. But nothing could be further from the truth. That bitter, little KGB agent in the Kremlin knew he could never regain his beloved Soviet empire by conventional military means, oh no. But he could by subterfuge.

“You see, the purpose of Tump in the US and Brexit in the UK, although these are only the most obvious examples, was to make the people in those countries hate each other more than their true enemy: Russia. The Kremlin has sought to undermine and ultimately destroy every democracy in the world, in every way possible except via direct military confrontation. Until, that is, when the military confrontation would be on his terms. Today, Russia has begun the war that so many of us grew up in fear of in the 1970s and 1980s. But then, countries in the West were run by people who’d fought in the Second World War and who had seen and understood the barbarity of totalitarianism. However, they are all dead now. Today, the West is run by cowards and traitors. And these fools have ensured the West’s ultimate defeat. Russia is now all-but-certain to reconquer and brutalise the countries of central Europe once again.

“With the new ‘Axis’ powers of Russia, China, Iran and North Korea working together so effectively, we see clearly now how China, with Russia at its side, will become the most powerful country on Earth. This year, China will overtake the US militarily and economically, mainly due to the latter’s self-imposed isolationism and abandonment of all the values that millions of Americans, Europeans and others fought and died to defend 80 years ago. On the other hand, I may be wrong, so do get back to me at the end of 2025, thanks. Oh, and Happy New Year.”

This report from the future has been brought to you by TTZ, your time travel experts ready to meet all of your time travel needs!

Happy Christmas and thanks for reading

Regular visitors will recognise the title of this post. Christmas has rolled around once again, and, once again, if you’ve read any of my stuff this year, you have my sincerest thanks. There are millions of books out there, the majority of which, I am fairly convinced, are objectively better than mine, although it’s fiendishly tricky to be objective about one’s own efforts. So if you decided to spend time on a book of mine, I really do think the world of you. Thanks.

Here are a few pictures from our Polish Wigilia this evening. Eldest Daughter attended remotely this year, as she struggles to cope with life in the warmth and sunshine on Miami beach, before the next catamaran she’s helping to crew sails down to Key West before crossing the sea to Mexico… You always hope your kids will have a better life than you

Oh, and for those of you who might be wondering, including the reviewer who made her frustration plain at the outrageous cliff-hanger on which this year’s book, Operation Repulse, ended, yes, Book Seven is in production and I plan to publish it in the first half of next year.

Have a lovely, safe and warm Christmas, peeps.

The best way to cope with a Polish winter…

…is to leave Poland. That’s what Eldest Daughter did four weeks ago. She graduated this summer and decided to take a gap year. This has transpired to be a prudent choice. After years of mild winters, with no more than a few frosty days in January, this winter is a little more like the old days. Temperatures have been below freezing for most of the last two weeks and are set to stay there.

Meanwhile, Eldest Daughter fell in with the crew of a Polish sea captain whose job is to sail the playthings of the ultra-wealthy to whichever agreeably exotic port they would like them delivered to. (I’m talking catamarans for which, brand new, you don’t get much change out of a million euros.) They started from Portugal and are currently crossing the equatorial Atlantic Ocean, having stopped in the Canaries and at Cape Verdi. Their destination is the British Virgin Islands.

So, here is what the outside of my house looked like this morning:

And here are the pictures of Eldest Daughter’s first stop in the Canaries:

And here are the pictures of their second stop at Cape Verdi. I’m sure you will join me in sympathising with Eldest Daughter as she struggles to cope with 30-degree sunshine and a diet of salads and freshly caught seafood. Take care, peeps, it can be tough out there

Bribing the blue jays

Winter has rolled around again here in Warsaw. The snow has settled and morning frosts have returned to remind me once more that, despite the years of “one-day-eventually” promises to myself, I still do not live in a part of the world where water exists only as a liquid.

One of the garden jobs when the seasons change is to put the bird stand in the front garden and load it up with seeds, far enough away from the windows not to scare the birds, but close enough that I can photograph them. I put the feeder out yesterday and this morning took these shots. We usually get a range of birds, but today the blue jay mafia came from the forest and monopolised the supply. I don’t mind; soon the tits and siskins and robins and bullfinches and woodpeckers will turn up because these birds also can’t resist the bribe of free food

Take care and stay safe, peeps!

1 November in Poland (2023)

All Saints Day has come around once again. This year, Eldest Daughter and I decided to visit the Cemetery of the Parish of St. Vincent de Paul in Otwock (cmentarz parafii św. Wincentego á Paulo w Otwocku), to the south of Warsaw, to take these images. This is how all cemeteries in Poland look this evening.

Autumn

Today, the sun finally came out after a week of cloud and rain here in Warsaw. I took the following shots while walking the dogs this morning and you can see how gorgeous this season is in my local forest. And after those are three shots that Eldest Daughter took of the chicks today. Another week gone by and their necks have thickened since last Sunday.

Have a great week and stay safe, peeps!

Baby dinosaurs

Normally at this time of the year, I would be trying to show you how beautiful my local forest becomes in autumn. While it would be churlish to complain at the weather after the glorious summer just gone, we have already had a series of frosts that killed off the climbers and other seasonals before their leaves had a chance to change colour. The trees do still have their leaves, and the oaks in particular are looking gorgeous. The problem is that to show off autumnal colours, you need to have a blue sky in the background, and today it is absolutely chucking it down out there.

So, instead here are some photos Eldest Daughter took yesterday of the chicks, now five-and-a-half weeks old and looking for all the world like baby dinosaurs. She let them out for the first time to eat some grass, and it made them happy little bunnies (insofar as one can tell their moods, natch).

Take care till next time, you lovely people!

Chicks’ update

It’s been a hectic few weeks for me since my last post, including a week in London and another week in Romania, both on business (I had a really good time on both trips, in the event/in case/if you ask ;)).

Nevertheless, here are a few pics I took on my phone today of the chicks, which are nearly a month old (the red hue is from the heat lamp). With plenty of care from Mrs James and Eldest Daughter, they are growing very quickly and are already about one-fifth to one-quarter the size of a fully grown hen. Elsewhere, the temperature has at last begun to drop and autumn to come on, and as I don’t have any travels scheduled, I should be able to post some proper autumnal photos next week.

Take care for now, you dear people!