My Finnish step brother, who I’ve known since 1976 when we first met at Helsinki, lives in Fort Austin, Texas and wrote to me yesterday:
“Dear Mark, I hope your 2025 has begun well!
We have a new president since Monday noon, and the first thing Trump had to do was to try reverse the executive orders that Biden rushed to give, in the last 15 minutes of his presidency.
We are "enjoying" new vocabulary, like "Trump-proofing", which is going on especially in California, where it might instead be more important to make sure fire hydrants actually work... Altadena and Pasadena look like Hamburg after Bomber Harris was done with it.
Meanwhile, Kamala Harris is possibly going to run for governor in California, now that she's been kicked out of Washington DC. Well, as long as she stays out of Texas.
We discovered Keir Starmer's contribution to modern vocabulary: knife control. I'm sure you have heard about it. What next? Background checks before you can buy a cheese grater? Those can do a lot of harm in the wrong hands!
Enough of that. I hope you are still cycling. I had a good cycling routine until Christmas, when the chilly and rainy weather started. When that ends, I'm going to start again and hope to do it more regularly than before!”
His final paragraph is highly significant because he suffered a stroke a few years ago and has been using a tricycle to help recover his strength, fitness and coordination with steely and intelligent determination.
Now is a good time to make a cup of tea as Andrea would say. My reply this morning is as follows:
“2025 is off to a fair start even if it is chillier than usual. It's got as low as 180C in the mornings over the past few weeks. I also took a pause over the Christmas and New Year holidays and it is amazing how quickly one can lose strength in just a matter of a few weeks. After 3 weeks of recovery training with proper nutrition though and I'm almost back to full strength and am off today to Khun Khon waterfall despite being a few kilos overweight. I should be fully back in shape by the end of February.
The self-declared Trotskyist, anti-monarchist and utterly corrupt Starlin, with his cabal of open communists, hard socialists and anti-white anti-British racists, is the worst thing to have happened to England for centuries. The catalyst for all of this appalling and deranged madness though was the manifestly evil Blair who in 1997 opened the doors for Marxists to gain unfettered entry to unelected and uncontrolled quangos and to the education institutions and opened the floodgates for uncontrolled and unchecked mass immigration of hardened criminals and Muslim terrorists and men of fighting age. His cheating, highly corrupt and devious sidekick, Mandelson is now our ambassador to Washington. There is a common theme among all of them.
The reason I have not responded to your message until now is because I am truly sickened by everything that the Granny Harmer, Farmer Harmer Starlin and his treacherous and traitorous politburo do and have done, without our permission. I've never been so despondent as I am now. Mercifully, Trump and Musk are visibly on the case, humiliating Starlin on the world's stages, and I'm 9000 Km away where Two Tier Starlin and his plagiarist and fraudster of a chancellor, the incompetent customer complaints assistant and tea girl, Thieves (Reeves), don't yet impact me. When the pound crashes though, as it will, the exchange rate of my armed forces pension is going to take a huge hit which is a worry for the annual renewal of my non-immigration visa here in Thailand. Still, as a bachelor in my 20s, when I could not afford heating, I survived by running 10 miles a day and eating spaghetti with olive oil, garlic and black pepper, or rice and lemon juice. The other big positive is that I have no loans, no debts and no credit.
The great news is of course that the horrors of Biden and Harris are behind us and Trump has the experience and inside knowledge of the swamp and of course the fantastic drive of Musk and his VP to get the USA back to normal very soon which is what we all need in the West and throughout the world.
Hopefully, I will feel much less depressed by the time of my next message in a few weeks, especially after watching yesterday illegals being shackled and herded onto your military aircraft and sent back - hurray - at long last.
Wishing you and Natalie the very best for a much brighter and happier year ahead.”
* Letter from America by Alistair Cooke was broadcast on Radio 4 until 2004.