User:Howard Alexander

This page exists only so that my link turns blue.

I believe in writing of things as they are, so let us reflect things as they are and not tie ourselves up with "official" and "regulation" as if conformity with some stranger's view were law to us. To believe know only if it is labelled "official" is to be a slave to the state but we are Britons not robots, and officials are a necessary nuisance, not masters of us.

I am with Brooke. When he was in Berlin he contrasted life in Germany, enslaved in officialdom, with his lost ideal at home in Grantchester, and from the Café des Westens in Berlin he wrote:

Are soft beneath a morn of gold. Here tulips bloom as they are told; Unkempt about those hedges blows An English unofficial rose; And there the unregulated sun Slopes down to rest when day is done, And wakes a vague unpunctual star, A slippered Hesper; and there are Meads towards Haslingfield and Coton Where das Betreten's not verboten.