You’re Not Welcome Any More…

This is the moment I’ve been waiting for! I am clearing my schedule for a flood of media invitations, and clearing a space on the mantlepiece ready for the announcement of the next honours list, for I have been CANCELLED. Yes, having solicited my contribution, the editors of a new volume have now decided that free thinking is out of step with their radical Woke agenda, and that even a hint of criticism is not welcome within their opinion bubble. I am devastated, and will be maintaining a dignified silence in order to weep quietly, as soon as I’ve finished alerting my loyal Twitter followers and soliciting a few outraged responses from eminent figures in the field. I’m not orchestrating a pile-on, I’m just trying to defend my reputation.

It is of course entirely possible that the piece in question was a pile of crap, further evidence for my sad intellectual decline in recent years, but that’s not going to get me a sympathetic profile in the Sunday Times…

Slightly more seriously: what is a little upsetting – hence trying to work through this with a sarcastic blog post – is not that the editors decided the piece didn’t fit (and I’m going to take that at face value, rather than as a euphemism for “this is a pile of crap”), which is entirely their right, but that the work (and I did work hard on this, even if it may not look like it) is entirely wasted. It was written expressly the volume; there is not the slightest hope of repurposing it for something else, without huge amounts of additional work and time, neither of which I can afford as I have to move on to the next massively overdue thing. The ideas – and there were a couple, albeit very under-developed – will flare and die, like attack ships off Orion, like tears in rain.

And I won’t even get an MBE out of it.