As readers may recall, in recent years, after announcing a rare bit of activity from yours truly, I have generally observed that I am engaging in such against the advice of my doctors.
So it was that I spent over a month in Ukraine, venturing hither and yon and trying to stay one step ahead of the bombs and drones. I was there to research a personal project, but did not manage to complete my work, and was planning to return in late summer. I understand that, in a world where Victoria Nuland and Lindsey Graham lob darts at the map blindfold in order to select the next hapless country to implode, it can be hard for Americans to retain interest in this or that passing quagmire, but I find it helpful to see these places for myself and felt bad at not having returned to Ukraine even as the conflict has outlasted the Great War.
So I was pleasantly surprised to find that I'd survived not only Putin's nightly bombardments but also prolonged exposure to eastern Ukrainian cuisine. I was thinking, since that went so well, I'd rest up for a few weeks and maybe head to the Persian Gulf.
Alas, that will not now be happening.
Instead, I have spent much of the time since last we spoke in a coma.
On the Friday after my return to the western side of the Iron Curtain, three of my SteynOnline colleagues on different continents noticed that at a certain point I'd apparently checked out of the website and had not checked back in. Which was odd, because that's normally the time I'm in there getting Mark Steyn on the Town ready for broadcast. Sometimes I weary of who's two points up in Iowa and go dark on the political bollocks, but it had never happened before with a music show. So multiple efforts were made to get in touch with me, all of which failed. At that point, a neighbour in the French village where I was staying (and where I had not been seen for a couple of days) was rustled up and prevailed upon to go round and check on me. He found me on the floor in a coma.
Fortunately, the neighbour had taken the precaution of bringing the district nurse with him, and the nurse had taken the precaution of readying two ambulances - a small one that could make it up the winding narrow mountain approach to the village perché, and a larger one to wait on the big road at the bottom of the hill, and to which I was transferred so that they could begin working on me on the fairly long-ish drive to the hospital. Without either of these anticipatory measures, I would be dead.
Meanwhile, my darling daughter had managed to rustle up the last two seats on Air Transat out of Montreal - for her and Melissa Howes, no stranger to Steyn Clubbers and cruisers. For the benefit of non-Canadians, Air Transat was founded by François Legault, the current premier of Quebec, so, by sheer coincidence no doubt, it tends to be less afflicted by things like gate delays and lost departure slots. However, the promised Internet service did not work en route, so the ladies landed at Marseille with a vague feeling that I had likely died while they were in the air. Instead, they found me in the ICU unable to speak. The only sign of life was that, in recognition of familiar faces, one hand apiece twitched in the pair's direction on either side of the bed. The doctors took this as an encouraging sign of at least minimal cognitive function. Because of all the swelling in the brain, they appear to have assumed most of my marbles had headed for the exit. There then followed a somewhat premature discussion on where my remains were to be disposed. My daughter has not gone in for public displays of emotion since her best friend dumped her in Fourth Grade, so she held it together in the room, and then burst into tears in the corridor waiting for the lift.
She cheered up a few days later, when I asked her to play this song on her telephone. It's the only coma-bound hit I know - lyrics by Morrissey, to whom I am quite partial these days. Aside from anything else, he was a nightly watcher of The Mark Steyn Show during its GB News days:
Bored out of my skull, as one eventually gets in hospital, I passed a couple of days mapping out a big swingin' version of "Girlfriend in a Coma". I may do it on the Mark Steyn Cruise.
My emergence from a comatose state did not go smoothly. I had carelessly assumed that a coma is at least fairly relaxing for the person in it. But in fact mine was extremely vivid and exhausting. For some reason, as the days passed, I assumed that I was on the Mark Steyn Cruise and was not happy to find myself in a windowless cabin in the hold instead of my usual fabulous stateroom up top. So I mistook my unilingual francophone medical team for Cunard stewards and began yelling at them in incomprehensible English so ferociously that they put me in restraints. My poor daughter did not regard the handcuffs as a sign of progress.
Eventually, a lone English-proficient doctor was found. He had not hitherto heard the phrase "sod-bollocking" - a familiar epithet around these parts - so, it not being in his Larousse, he regarded it as further evidence of my mental enfeeblement. Once I was out of the coma, he administered (without announcing it as such) a Canadian version of the dementia test:
"Name the Prime Minister of Canada."
"Mark Carney."
"Wrong," he said. "It's Justin Trudeau."
With hindsight, the doctor's misapprehension would not prove as funny as I initially found it.
Twenty-four years ago, I stood across the street from a maternity shop in Vienna, and got a glimpse of the west's future. I could not unsee what I saw, and, despite my best efforts, that future has now shown up. Taking my doctors' advice more seriously than I once did, I have been staying away from electronic devices, but I take it it's been just the usual parade of slow-boiled-frog stories - another stabbing, another rape, another street murder in broad daylight, another incremental advance for the barbarians, the million-and-forty-seventh tree in a forest most of your neighbours refuse to see. I won't deny that the last ten years have taken their toll. A decade ago, I left the stage of the Munk Debate on mass migration, mildly encouraged that in fact people were capable of being persuaded toward sanity. Alas, not in sufficient numbers.
Of the three other people on stage with me that night, I note:
Simon Schama has been knighted;
Louise Arbour is now Governor General;
Nigel Farage is the supposed PM-in-waiting;
...and I'm in a coma banged up in the nuthouse.
Oh, well.
More to come. Maybe.
~A brand new edition of Mark's weekend music show, Mark Steyn on the Town, will air on Serenade Radio tomorrow, Saturday, at 5pm London time - which is 12 noon North American Eastern, and 6pm in Western Europe: you can listen from almost anywhere on the planet by clicking the button at top right here.