Death watch beetle in the soul

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Licensed to shill

Once again, an American‑led war exposes British delusions of premier‑league power. Downing Street’s hesitation over striking Iran exposes a deeper truth: we talk up ‘Global Britain’ even as questions over our role – Partner?, Stooge, Footrest? - show how conditional that power is. The real shock is that Washington bothered to ask at all.

In this light, James Bond works as a Rorschach test for Britain’s international standing, embodying, depending on your politics, either a soothing fiction of Anglo-agency or proof of subservience to the USA. In his 1965 James Bond Dossier, Kingsley Amis casts Bond as a morale‑boosting fantasy keeping postwar Britain buoyant as America’s ascendancy takes hold.

Amis’s love letter valorises 007’s kills, romances, and villains, brushing aside any negative claims. Patriotic PR disguised as criticism.

Four decades later, Alan Moore flips this argument in Black Dossier - formatted like Amis’s collage of letters and reports - to dismantle the myth the earlier book had built. Moore’s Bond, ‘Jimmy Bond’, is a ‘snivelling’ racist misogynist with zero integrity and a traitor to boot: a double‑agent undoing the empire he pretends to protect. For Moore, Bond isn’t Britain’s heroic projection but proof of its humiliations.

Both readings, however, miss the point. Everything hinges on Felix Leiter, presented as Bond’s CIA equivalent. To Amis, he’s a ‘nonentity’ whose presence makes Bond shine brighter. Moore flips that reading, suggesting Leiter’s deference is strategic, allowing the CIA to guide Bond unnoticed.

But Felix’s sporadic, almost accidental appearances - sometimes turning up with intel, mostly not turning up at all – suggest Bond is neither America’s pawn, nor Britain’s global champion. He’s smaller: a bit player whose missions rarely register with US priorities. Felix’s third‑tier, project‑manager vibe signals indifference not control. Bond isn’t overshadowed by the CIA. He’s overlooked. 007 simply doesn’t matter.

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5 More Minutes - Hannah Berry (2025) 

If you are any sort of parent or carer you will have been in this playground.  Inadequately dressed. The drizzle stinging your cheeks. Good days. The sense you’re having an adventure, the slight smugness that you are the only ones out.

It’s impossible to talk about 5 More Minutes without diluting its power. But we’re adults. We can talk around elephants, wars and genocides, they can exist in the gaps of the gutter.

The damp and cold are reinforced by Berry’s watery muted colour palette, there’s a confidence in the simple truth of her line that carries through the story. She has a Shirley Jackson-like ability to unnerve and unsettle through small details. Nothing happens really. A distracted parent, a fizzy child, the thrill of the big slide. But our unease mounts with every panel. Something somewhere is profoundly wrong.

A mobile phone abandoned transforms the unease into a spike of fear. What would it take for me to set my phone down?

Nothing continues to happen.

A chocolate bar wrapper given to the wind rather than a bin, ‘That’s really naughty mummy’ our children love to admonish us for not following the rules we’ve set.

And then everything happens at once in a rush of light and dark.

My child’s bedtime routine is that one of us reads and one of us counts backward from 100. An improvised dodge to help a whirling mind became a routine. I read 5 More Minutes more while my partner is reading his bedtime story. I’m lucky. I get to go and hold his hand and count him to sleep knowing this ‘existential terror’ for Berry, for me, is more and more people’s daily reality. 

https://hannahberry.co.uk

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Broadcast - Tender Buttons

Trish Keenan died unexpectedly in 2011.

This death attached itself irrevocably to Broadcast’s legacy. But then, there was always something in their music that felt like something passing. They were a band unmoored in time, an uncanny fusion of retro-futurism and nostalgic soothsaying. Hard to locate. Haunted sounds. Ghost radio. The moment of expiration in a perpetual loop.

‘Tender Buttons’, their third and best record, is an elegy in the moment. Meditations on the transience of existence. A masterpiece.

“Under the X-Ray, I’m just a vertebrate”

Keenan’s vocals, austere but warm, fragile but strident, surf the fractured buzzing melodies of the music. Spectral drones and spiralling synths. Broken, beautiful fragments of space pop, but hard edged and urgent. Looking death in the eye and carrying on anyway.

Once again, I am walking from King’s Cross to work, ‘Tender Buttons’ in my ears. I follow my footsteps exactly, each journey laid on top of the other. Time travel.

A cold mist enshrouds London, buildings fading into the void. At Tavistock Place I note the ghost of a shop sign tattooed to a building wall, promising cures for wounds and sores.

On the side of Capital City College is a handwritten plaque from a mother to her dead son, next to her mural of coloured squares, one for each of his life.

In St Andrew’s Gardens a big Rottweiler pisses on the newly emergent crocuses.

Trish’s vocals in my ear 

“You and me in time, we’re saying goodbye”

These journeys feel charged and potent, the city resonating to the moment. No pigeons in the park, only crows today.

The mist doesn’t lift all day. The city is constantly dissolving into it.

I’ve reached the conclusion with this route. Next week, I’ll divine a new walk to work.

I Found the End. 

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Andrew and Steven, Those Amusing Brothers

The Pen Is Mightier Than The Sword part one.

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MINDLESS EXPLORATION - the mall, The Chair Company (Tim Robinson, Zach Kanin, 2025–)

It’s no accident that the path that leads to Ron Trosper (Robinson) falling on his arse on a big company call goes through the mall. When we first meet Rob he’s out for dinner to celebrate him nailing the lead job on a mall design project. A server at the restaurant calls the relevance of this task into question:

“I don’t think I’ve been to a mall though, since I was like fourteen.”

“Yeah. You probably have. You probably just didn’t realise it.”

The landscape Ron navigates on his rampage-cum-investigation might seem a little disconnected at first. It’s a world of website colour charts, angry email chains, team meetings, sparsely populated municipal buildings, undeveloped land, stores that want you to sign you up to a chat group, and companies that can never seem to be reached by phone. A dull alien landscape rendered partly comprehensible by Ron’s determination. Somehow, it all feels aggravatingly familiar. 

“I’m saying, you wouldn’t know if you’ve been in a mall.”

In 2024’s Friendship (see MO #30!) Tim Robinson played Craig, who toiled away in marketing to make your screen time more addictive. Does the physical environment Ron navigates in The Chair Company feel thin and empty because the commercial world has moved towards the digital, or because the aesthetics and functionality of the digital are everywhere? Would Ron’s job – the one he’s paid to do, rather than one of his passions – be that different from Craig’s if he carried it out properly?

“I mean, this is kind of a mall!” 

The mall is everywhere now, the mall is nowhere. At work, at play, at home, on the conspiracy trail. All one. The mall isn’t finished yet. The mall will never stop. Is the attempt to see beyond the frontage just new frontage? Hard to determine!

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Disappearing ink

Tell just one person that you liked this newsletter. Word of mouth, more than any other form of promotion, is how creative works get noticed and sustain themselves. Thank you very much for reading.

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QUAIL/QUAID – THE DIVIDED SELF

Saw some teens the other week on a woodland escarpment, listening to EsDee Kid loudly through a Bluetooth; they had built a series of ramps and huts. I shed a mf‘ing paternal tear of respect to see the youtdem still know how to be cool.

Because I live in a hologram universe, of course after dealing with a dual persona fixating on me on their various YouTube channels in the rankest way last week the short story group I go to – not run, I didn’t set this – did We Can Remember It For You Wholesale, they don’t often do SF, but we ended up talking of Dick’s experience of his psychoses involving delinearisation of time, kinda imagining these three point acausal turns – as with his living an experience of the fall of Roman Empire simultaneously to Nixon’s downfall, or the Horselover Fat identity in VALIS or indeed the largely aptly named Quail in the short/Quaid in Total Recall as played by Arnie.

It’s a plot contrivance here perhaps but the only constant is his primordial drive to go to the red planet. It’s almost as quintessentially Dickian as Ursula LeGuin The Lathe of Heaven, with a very similar climax conundrum I won’t spoil.

So but, I do invite the bicameral mind myself a bit – I like to imagine for a wider scope view, probably more for my own curiosity and stimulation and I am drawn to compare my person with the anti-self that has cropped up in my life (don’t worry I come off really well, winning the abjuration of awful people is a compliment basically but it can be draining; I am always doing it & they seem to know to dislike me first) 

I have my fixations, but I learned to divest myself from trying to engineer outcomes – which I have literally no idea how to do anyway – and if I especially admire someone I would try and learn from and incorporate whatever virtue I intuit, and oh yeah, I run a safe space and contribute to the community. 

If I ever see you again.

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War Machine (Patrick Hughes, Netflix, 2026)
A Thousand Machines by Gerald Raunig (Semiotext(e), 2010)

A squad of numbered nameless US Army Ranger trainees encounters an alien hunter-killer assembly in the Colorado Rockies. It exudes a veil of superheated vapour. Empires hurtling towards extinction cling to old certainties: that the solar intensities they gather and direct will find pliant territories to infest. For this purpose, the AN/FPS-132 Block 5 ziggurat array manifested an alien circle of perception five thousand miles wide. Its removal places a terminal limit on that space for the imperial apparatus. The desert narrows, growing hotter as space diminishes and pressures build.

The outsider is delivered into earthspace through an asteroid whose tubular morphology – the common shape of any living body, snakes, plasma-angels, nanobes, humans – resembles the recent beyonder beings entering our heliozone. We bound them into our codings as 1I/’Oumouamoua and 3I/Atlas, but they have not ceded their mysteries. Currently in Gemini approaching the orbit of Jupiter boundary-defender, 3I/Atlas embodies a heroic resistance to Sol tyrant-lifegiver, spitting occult materials in his face, gas and dust in defiance of the heliosphere’s directives. Its rebellion has no known explanation. Perhaps it is following orders. 

The US Army Rangers is an invasion-extermination process which uses human beings as constituent parts but bears no relation to human subjectivity. Its founder Benjamin Church, in his mission against the indigenous people of North America, bribed and recruited them into his design, building their strategies into the engine.

Raunig references the anonymous author of De Bellis Antiquitatis, who wrote of the Roman empire when it reached this stage, and conceived of a horse which could propel itself into enemy lines without a rider, a whip-spur mechanic embedded into its saddlery and powered by its own bodily momentum. Alan Richardson plays the horse as ersatz-Kurtz, the wounded veteran who becomes the cadet to undo traumas from the last war and charge without cease, liberated into the machine.