…it’s because Sebastian Faulks’ farewell to The Independent put me in a wistful and somewhat elegiac mode, mourning my carefree younger self. So you’ll forgive me if a guy who lives with death threats, and “human rights” complaints for “flagrant Islamophobia” with attendant legal bills, and tedious expenses like having to switch hotels at the last minute for security reasons, and US State Department and British Foreign Office advisories warning their nationals it’s unsafe to go anywhere near my events, and even crappy restaurants deciding it’s too dangerous to honor dinner reservations resents being told he’s not pulling his weight and is “hampering attempts to stop the Islamization of the west”. If you’d asked me back when I was “dazzling” Sebastian, it would never have occurred to me that just moving around could get so complex and expensive, and that (with a few exceptions such as Michel Houellebecq) almost every influential voice in western culture would choose to sit out the biggest story of our time.
