Temper, temper!

The Seven Deadly Sins: Wrath. Jacques de Backer, c. 1595

Are you overcome with fury?

The answer, writes Dalrymple, is to

• lay down your smartphone
• send no message
• wait for at least 24 hours, if not for ever

The chances are, says Dalrymple,

that when you are angry you are enjoying yourself, and that there is something bogus in your rage.

The nobility of Count Dankula

Count Dankula, aka Markus Meechan, recently made the following statement:

If Frankie Boyle got arrested people would be fucking furious and the police would not have any public support.

Dalrymple comments:

Here the question is not whether or not this is true, but what the difference is between being furious and being fucking furious. Is there any way to distinguish between the two, and if so, what is the test? Does fucking furious mean very furious?

But

if you can be very furious, you can presumably be slightly furious, which makes nonsense of the word furious.

Dalrymple explains that the word fucking as used by the Count

is not used to convey meaning, for it has none, but to convey an attitude to society and perhaps to life, an attitude that he probably believes to be virtuous and on which he no doubt prides himself.

The word fucking is to the Count’s language

what the ironmongery and other impedimenta are to his face: they are inserted to prove that he is a savage. And the savage is a noble being, much superior in every way to the effœte, affected, and civilised one.

The Count is one of the United Kingdom Independence Party’s candidates (representing Scotland) in the elections for the EU’s rubber-stamp parliament

The Count with his Führer-worshipping pug and fellow free-speech advocate Tommy Robinson

Journalistic aërology or mood climatology

In British newspapers, writes Dalrymple,

such things as fury and outrage seem often to subsist independently of anyone who feels them.

They are, he says,

a kind of meteorological phænomenon.

Postcards from Laos

Dalrymple wishes to be sent, in luxurious conditions, to Luang Prabang to write, possibly under a palm tree, about the Welsh poet Henry Vaughan, whose Silex Scintillans came out in 1650

The Dalrympian Shangri-La

In the 13th century, writes Dalrymple,

when the world climate was much warmer than it is now, there were vineyards in the far north of England, a precedent that must give some hope of gainful employment to the chronically unemployed there.

He points out that

working oneself up into a fury of indignation is one of the great consolations of human existence, which is otherwise apt to be so tedious and unsatisfactory.

Hence the appeal of rioting to European spoilt-brat radicals who love the planet and its biosphere. But Dalrymple cannot work himself up into a state of righteous indignation over wastage and extravagance

because I have in my time done a fair bit of travelling at other people’s expense to no very obvious benefit to anyone except myself. These days I don’t go anywhere only because I’m not asked, or not often. If someone tomorrow were to offer me a free trip in luxurious conditions to Laos (a country I have long wanted to visit, my Shangri-La) to discuss, say, the works of Henry Vaughan, the 17th-century religious poet of mid-Wales, I should of course at once accept, even if by doing so I added my mite to the downfall of the planet and the destruction of the coral reefs in the Pacific.