As the boy King emerged from the voting booth, it was clear from his facial expression that he wasn’t expecting the Assembly carnage that was to follow. In the next door booth (see high heels to his left) the fragrant Brigitte was still engaged in her decision. Was she, we ask ourselves, voting for LePen?

If she was, then she was clearly far from alone: today, Marine’s Party finds itself the owner of 89 seats – whereas previously, she had just the 8.

A very clear message was sent to Macron by the French People last night: you are the President, but you aren’t Macronapoleon. The new share-out of seats in the Assembly means that Macron’s Ensemble has lost its parliamentary majority – a very rare occurrence for a Head of State in the the Fifth Republic brought about by Charles de Gaulle 64 years ago. Worse still for Manny, several of his allies and appointments suffered a particular drubbing: his Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne, came within a whisker of losing her own seat in Normandy. Macron will have to form a coalition with les Républicains, which will go down very badly with its anti-EU nationalist wing. And LePen will, of course, be in the scrum offering it more power if it allies with her. For Mme LePen is now in charge of the third biggest Party in the legislature.

What fun we shall have. But such amusement will be short-lived.

As my colleague Amy Boone is fond of remarking, “He’s nothing more than a shark’s tooth” viz, quickly replaced by the paymasters who put Macron into the Elysée in the first place.

Look at the broader situation here, and the obvious desire of the NWOs to create a perfect storm of “emergencies” as the excuse for Rule by Decree.

Food shortages, climatic peril, unsustainable welfare, galloping inflation, an angrily armed US electorate, alleged Putinesque fantasy ambitions alongside rocketing car fuel and house heat energy prices “have created a State of Emergency unsuited to democracy and liberty” will be the next insistent whore-media line….a line the citizens cross at their peril hint-hint.

There will come a point when even the most stubborn lalalah-fingers-in-ears-mask-over-eyes denialism will be overwhelmed by threats of bailiffs, repossession, cancelled school fees, unpaid rent evictions and so forth. But even then, there’ll be a need to encourage action….and hairy geography teachers marching under out-out-out banners ain’t it.

There is no longer any case at all for relying upon bureaucratic, political, media, police or judicial goodwill to defend liberty and the Rule of Law. Only refusal to comply will defeat the madmen.

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My life is temporarily a process of culling, recycling – and then packing to protect the inanimate survivors. It consumes my daily existence from light until dark with only one or two breaks for reading and writing.

For it is time, as the French say to “réduire” – to downsize. I am moving to climes way beyond EUNATO, and so the dross of previous lives must be cast into the darkness of the local tip or the garden fire. I am burning millions of pulp words: 1934 Nazis, eat your hearts out.

In doing so, I am also burning the boats that brought me to where I am…but emphatically don’t want to be any more. There’s no going back: only the experience of what lies ahead in the final chapter.

Moving house is an event that brings with it tedious repetition, roller-coaster frustration, the worst side of French bureaucracy, weird discovery of the long-forgotten and yet – in the end – new awareness that leads inevitably to unexpected humour.

For example, you very probably don’t know this, but you have more combs than you ever thought possible. Combs disappear down every sofa cushion and inside pocket: they plunge to the bottom of every toilet bag and hide beneath any available pile of filing in the New Order paperless office; they creep down the tiny crevasses in car seats, and fall out of pockets into the boot.
The statistic that follows is not an exaggeration, it is an audit: I am the owner of seventeen combs. I just didn’t know it until now. If you’d told me two weeks ago I need a new comb, I’d have probably agreed.

In the same vein, while making yet another dumping visit to the déchetterie (Council tip) ten days ago, my spectacles must have fallen out of a shirt pocket. In the afternoon, I began to pack up the bedside cupboard contents, and by 9pm that evening I had a collection of twelve pairs of glasses sitting on the breakfast bar. So the visit to buy new specs was cancelled. And now the world knows at last: I’m a little OCD about having enough glasses to see exactly what kind of state my unruly hair’s in.

Ants. That’s the other plague that accompanies a removal op in summer. Lift up any ageing packet of dishwasher salt, mega casserole pan, septic doormat or tangle of hitech spaghetti and ants will spill forth. The word goes round Antland: “They’re moving house, yo! They’ll snack, leave leftovers lying around, empty fridges….happy days are here again!” One thinks one is living alone in a house: but of course, we aren’t. Curtains are full of rodent nests and their ever-associated excrement.

One wild animal curious as to what I’m up to is our old friend Henry the Hare. Yes, he lives: I thought he’d expired over the winter, but two nights ago I spotted him staring from a safe distance at one of my Viking funeral pyres piled up with broken chairs, tax files from 1983, wobbly IKEA cupboards and long-hated birthday presents from my second mother-in-law. I’m afraid Henry is looking a little down at heel, mangy and flea bitten. But the next morning in the early chill he was resting against the fire’s stone circle as it happily smouldered away.

One manuscript finally committed to the flames was a novel I wrote in 1988 called Blue Murder. It was about an adman appointed by the Tory Party to run a campaign showing its great success at cutting a rising crime rate by 60%. In the course of preparing the campaign, he discovers that the stats about rising crime are entirely false, and merely a ruse to get reelected on the platform of being tougher on crime than the Opposition.

After several friends had read and enjoyed the manuscript, one lady who knew an editor at Pan showed it to her, and the book was then shortlisted for presentation to the British Board. They turned it down because (and I quote) “we feel the idea of any democratic government being involved in such a gigantic fraud would not be credible to the readership”. I suspect that awful innocence continues 34 years later.

Burning boats and books as I am, my friends can rest assured I’m not burning bridges. But I would ask The Slog’s readership to be patient in the coming weeks until this necessary chore is done and dusted.

I leave you with the insight that time is finally going backwards in the MSM. Britain is about to suffer a full-on national rail strike, German holidaymakers are still insisting that it is Deutschland Über Alles* when it comes to naughty reserving of sunbeds in Tenerife, and rising interest rates are already leaving some homeowners in fear of repossession.

It’s just like 1974 again. Only problem is, the Establishment media tip-toe around the approaching dystopia of 2023 like so many 1937 Times apologists for the Third Reich. In that Murdoch tabloid today, William Hague writes, “Inflation is here to stay unless we get serious”. For once I am speechless.

* I was amazed to discover last year that Deutschland Über Alles was written by Papa Haydn. When I finally woke up to classical music in my late Twenties, for some long-forgotten reason Haydn was my first port of call, and the thought of his connection to Hitler pained me. In fact, Haydn only wrote the melody as an anthem for the birthday of Francis II of Austria, and the Nazis nicked it as an anthem in 1923, when little Dolfie was only Member N° 555.

A somewhat startled Slog takes a Saturday night break from the Packathon to celebrate something not entirely clear in the local Salle de Fetes. The evening included paella, and a rendition of Edit Piaf anthems by a singer who belted out No regrets in the manner of a Wagnerian Brunhilde. Only the usual sparkling conversation of new friend Elizabeth Guerrier saved the evening