Too Much To Dream

I think you're right to recommend psychiatric treatment for Ms. Drabble. I believe she has some sort of fixation on bodily functions and disease. The imagery in the column suggests it, but the name of the lead character of her new novel confirms it. . . CANDIDA Wilton. She chooses the name of a yeast infection?? What's up with that?

The left wing appears to be losing its mind. Her rants definately sound psychotic.

Isn't it appropriate that nearly every so-called fact Ms. Drabble quotes is from a work of fiction? Fits right in with her fictional, opinionated writing.

Given the empirical nature of the victory in Iraq, the continuing international success with the War on Terror™, and the overwhelming popularity of President Bush with the American electorate, the heretofore ensconced and unchallenged leftist-elite fantasy of "The REAL America" has been obliterated. Recent events have come crashing down like a 10-ton wrecking ball through a papier-mache hothouse filled with bug-infested, inbred tropical flowers (not that such rarefied and diseased flora wouldn't have died anyway, given the inevitable exposure to the elements and passage of time). Now all that the sad-little-folk of Miz Grabble’s ken are left to do is cry over the wreckage, and curse the day they invested the whole of their intellectual currency in flour-paste and strips of newspaper.

Thanks for that link. Margaret Drabble sounds like she needs an exorcist as much as a shrink.

The article was pure spleen/rant, though. Maybe Drabble should get a blog.

However, unlike in Spleenville, where the host actually argues with evidence and reason, Drabble sounded like a two-year-old having a temper tantrum. "I hate America!!!" "Waaaa!"

What was our reaction supposed to be?

What's really funny is that, like so many people of her political persuasion, she thinks that history began 10 years ago. Bad news, Mrs. D -- painting faces on airplanes in wartime is a practice that dates back at least three wars, and your very own countrymen engaged in it, too. It's a way to help relieve the grimness of the task in which the pilots are engaged.

Let's hope she never encounters an airborne Ranger with a "D.F.A." tattoo.

I tried reading a Margaret Drabble novel once (I was in a self-improvement phase, which always seemed to involve mortification of the flesh in one form or another). My God. Turgid, flat, mind-numbingly boring prose. It was as close to unreadable as I think it is possible to be.

I only have one question: what the hell was the Telegraph thinking? I can envisage this sort of excrescence in the Grauniad or Indescribablypisspoor (although to be fair not even Fisk is this bilious), but the Torygraph? Charles Moore, see me after class.