Chapters One and Two

Chapter Three – Ye New Year, New Skirt

The story so far: Krauser asked if I was going to do another ‘Ask Jimmy’ before the end of the year. At the same time I remembered someone had asked for stories of classic Mystery Method night game. In a moment of massive overreaching (my only real weakness) I decided I was going to do a ‘three part yule story’ in which I meet a witch and she teaches me Mystery Method, with references to snow and mulled wine awkwardly shoe-horned in here and there. I regretted this commitment halfway through writing part one (as you have probably guessed by now), but never forget the important part of all this ‘Ask Jimmy’ stuff: Nick buys me a pint for every post I write. So here’s pint three, err I mean, part three (the final part, you’ll no doubt be pleased to hear), which is nothing more a thinly veiled re-writing of a dusty old field report about night game from about ten years ago, with some slight adjustments for plot and humour (the actual field report didn’t happen on a new year’s eve, for example). It’s a good field report and to anyone who has done MM style night game, it will be like a walk down memory lane.

Happy new year everyone! I hope you had a good 2018 and I hope 2019 brings you more steps forward in terms of health, wealth and skirt. Remember, we’d be bored if it were easy, but we still wish it were.

‘Wow Jimmy, it’s not a decision I could have made myself’, Tiger said solemnly, as he sipped his mulled wine. The train chattered loudly as it made its way to Clapham Junction and five knaves sat together in the centre of the carriage, excitable about the night ahead.

‘I could have handled it lads, but I’d have probably gone for the pie and pint day’, admitted G sadly as he stared at the floor. ‘That’s me being selfish, because I just love the Squid so much. Jimmy you chose the option that suited all of us’.

‘Don’t think a thing of it lads’, Jimmy said smoothly. ‘Don’t get me wrong, I love the Squid as much as the next man. It’s my only real weakness’. He wagged an authoritative finger at the gathered men and continued, ‘but I said to the crone, I said “Crone, there’s a time to be selfless and this is it, so you’d better get this sorted”.

‘We know Jimmy, you’re not the type to throw yourself on the floor and beg’, laughed G admiringly.

Jimmy shuffled uncomfortably in his seat, then gazed out of the window into space. ‘I just felt this is a win for the lot of us. She wasn’t prepared to give it either. She said it was ‘a knowledge too far’, but I stood firm. I told her straight I did. I talked her into it using me charm and here we are’.

Lukasz was still curious about one point and pressed, ‘Why us Jimmy? Why did she choose us?’ he probed.

Jimmy leant his head back slightly, stuck his jaw out and addressed group, ‘I have no idea, I think she said something about ‘the cream of the crop’. I wasn’t listening too much what with the glowing ball and all the magic going on. I don’t know if she meant me, or us. I don’t know if she meant I’m the cream of just the London crop or probably she meant in the whole universe. I can’t answer. But I can say we’re top drawer lads, I’ll tell you that’.

It was a motley crew indeed in those early days, the five of them. Tiger, Lukasz, Alain, G and Jimmy. Tiger was a suave looking Moor from a land far way. Dark of skin, clothed in a fine velvet jacket and silk cravat he certainly looked the part. An aspiring actor, he was charming of manner and a good team player, he had a natural flair for spinning DHV yarns and was well admired the rest of the team. Lukasz was an Easterner, a fashion designer by trade, friendly and eternally optimistic, and again, always interestingly dressed. Where both Lukasz and Tiger had a strong air of the ‘artist’, the other two were completely different. G and Alain were both high earning professionals. G was employed in the finance department of a bank, presented in a very clean cut and respectable way. The same could be said of Alain, who also worked also for banks. Jimmy sat in the middle of the four, literally and figuratively, being professionally employed as a well paid consultant while playing as a minstrel in his four piece zither ensemble.

As the train rolled into Clapham Junction the knaves were in fine spirits. Usually these lads would be the lowest of the low, the cheap cuts of meat, but tonight, with their new found magical powers and a year of pickup experience crammed into their heads… well they were STILL the lowest of the low, but they were confident they could finagle, cheat and misrepresent their way into an unsuspecting maiden’s under garments with their well coordinated wild exaggerations game.

Jimmy was jubilant, ‘who needs real value now we can present ourselves as if we had real value?’

‘We’re a well honed seduction team’, Alain continued as they leapt from the train to the platform at Clapham Junction, ‘It’s all about the team work, every bar has it’s own dynamic and we set the dynamic in our favour early on. It’s half the battle, the rest is just a matter of flickin’ a few switches. As long as we don’t stand on each other’s toes and we all get a fair bite at the apples, we can usually pull something out. We’re highly calibrated and expertly socially aware’.

Five abreast and holding up 100 angry passengers behind them, they strutted their way along platform six and out into the street. Snow caked the ground and the cold bit into their lips and fingers. Someone on the corner was eating a mince pie. The cold had emptied the streets and filled the taverns. Each tavern like an island of festive energy, warmth and mulled wine, a refuge from the seasonal elements. Occasionally the doors opened and revellers inside would spill into the street, bringing with them a blast of warm air and seasonal melody from the celebrations inside. Mulled wine was being sold. People were eating mince pies.

The knaves now knew that finding a decent tavern was the first challenge to ye olde night game. You need an environment with enough people and traffic for the opportunity to mingle. It needs enough people to host enough suitable maidens for five hapless lads, but it can’t be so loud as to make conversation too difficult. It should also have a good balance of seating and standing areas, for you need the standing areas to be mobile and move easily around groups, but the seated areas are necessary for retreating to later on for a more intimate opportunity for conversation. It’s not just hit and hope all this bar game. The seasoned and sophisticated seducer knows well these crucial elements that play their part in a fertile night game environment.

Passing one tavern, a door suddenly flung open and as a group of drunken girls exited, staggering and giggling, they gave the merry men a glimpse of what lay inside.

‘This place is perfect’, Jimmy yelped. ‘It’s got drunk skirt and still got its ornamental reindeer up’.

‘Then the night is ours’, cheered Tiger. ‘Let’s go to work’.

Tiger bounded inside as the rest of the crew bustled down the steps behind him. It turned out they had chosen a ‘country inn’ style tavern, a warm place with lots of space to move around and perfectly low level music. There was even a log fire still adorned with holly and ivy, but now New Year’s banners also hung from the ceiling. The knaves had chosen expertly well.

Upon his entrance Jimmy saw a maiden indeed fair. Tall and slim, dark hair, pretty features, tight fitting dark blue jeans and a quality looking tan leather jacket. She sat at the bar talking to a chubby lad and close by them was a seated cluster of men and women who could possibly have been part of their group.

‘That right there’, said Jimmy, ‘is a tidy bit of crumpet. If she’s not an 8, and she’s not, then she’s not far off and she’ll be an 8 when I write the field report. A properly turned out piece of cherry tart and no mistake. I bet she’s got all her own teeth! I don’t care what you do, but that’s my target lads’.

Tiger placed his hand on his shoulder. ‘You know the rules Jimmy’, he reminded. ‘If you can get us into any set; you have your pick of the skirt in that set and we’ll help you if we can. Until then, everything is open. It’s the same for everyone.’

Alarmed that one of the other knaves might bag his favoured skirt, Jimmy made a bee line for the target; he had his best line ready. ‘Ow pissed are ‘yer? Fancy a fumble in the bogs’, but at the last moment Alain hauled him back.

‘Jimmy, are you forgetting yourself, we have style and sophistication now. Slowly, slowly catch a monkey. Don’t say that thing about a fumble in the bogs for God’s sake. We’re not in the Squid now’.

Jimmy tugged at the lapels on his tunic to compose himself. ‘You’re right Alain, catch a monkey, just testin’ ‘yer. The first thing we need to do is build a bit of a vibe, not look like the kind of scum that shark bars for loose skirt and easy sex. I hate those types. We’ve got look like….’. Jimmy paused looking for the words.

‘Normal, well adjusted men?’, G contributed.

‘Anything but what we actually are?’, Lukasz added.

‘No’, countered Jimmy impatiently, ‘We’ve got to make them think we’re actually attractive. We do that by doing what we’re doing now, not surveying the room for skirt, but all sort of facing each other and having what looks like a good conversation. Let’s spend five minutes setting up a good vibe and give them a chance to notice us’.

Tiger nodded in agreement, ‘While you’re all doing that, I’ll go and see if I can get us some pawns’.

‘Great ides, Tiger’, Jimmy added, his gaze still hanging on his target, ‘Sweet and sour sauce on the side and a bit of spice and garlic on mine’.

Tiger shook his head. ‘A pawn set’, he clarified. He rolled his eyes to the roof, ‘for the central character you aren’t half a buffoon at times, Jimmy’.

‘Yes well, for now, I am the comic relief as well as well as the hero’ Jimmy admitted sadly, ‘according to the crone the comic relief in this crew doesn’t really come until we meet Robusto in 2009’. Jimmy pointed at his watch as if to highlight the hopeless passage of time he was up against. ‘Aye, in 2009, we’ll see world class buffoonery indeed, but until then, it’s me’.

Tiger and Lukasz peeled away. Their grand plan was harder than it sounded but a staple of night game. They intended to separate from the main group and try and pick off some low hanging fruit. A pawn set. This would generally be a group of 2 or 3 averagely pretty girls who are chatty in nature and willing to talk and have fun. They would ideally be an easy enough set to get into that might be glad for the attention, but they have to be hot enough to not be a discredit to the group. Pawns may or may not be up for anything romantic, but for either party it doesn’t matter too much. The worst case scenario is the girls may be milking the players for laughs and validation, but the players are in turn diluting the cock heavy nature of their group. To a casual observer, a group of 5 guys is a group on the hunt, while a group of 5 guys and 3 girls is a fun party. Pulling in a couple of easy pawns early on became a staple routine back in the day. Sometimes the pawns turned out to be alright and a decent consolation prize if you fall short and miss your targets.

With pawns and an improved vibe it can become easier to merge into and open other sets. The choice of the word ‘pawn’ relates to the idea you can trade the girl off, sacrifice her up front to get closer to what you really want later. Consider this example, often guys go out with female friends but want to meet girls themselves. Let’s say there are six flatmates on a night out, three girls and three guys. If a male from adjacent group starts a conversation, the guys may sense an attempt to ‘get one of their women’ and even though they’re not dating the girls, it can get their backs up. Even though they’re not ‘with’ the women, they’re still getting the blunt end of the deal and are less likely to be on your side. However, if the guy approaching is also in a group with girls, then there is a potential trade on the cards. ‘You get to speak to my skirt and I get to speak to yours’. You’re bringing value to the table in a trade, rather than manipulatively trying to take. The guys in the target set probably won’t think it through rationally like this, they’ll just see girls they can meet easily and take the bait. They’re much more likely to be on your side or drop their guard if they think there is something on a plate for them.

As long as there are girls around and you’re having fun and not doing anything to actually lower your value, then you’ll do OK in night game.

With Tiger and Lukasz gone, Jimmy, Alain and G positioned themselves next to the bar, close to a group of four student looking girls. Facing slightly away from the girls and talking amongst themselves, Jimmy’s gang looked like good mates having a good conversation, completely indifferent to who else may or may not be in the bar. In reality, they were looking over each other shoulders and describing to each other the skirt on offer, without having to look like they were scanning the bar for value.

‘Over Jimmy’s left shoulder’, G reported, ‘There’s a three set, but though one is really quite nice girl, the other two are rotters’.

‘I saw them as we came in’, Alain shuddered, ‘it’s an easy in I think. Talk to one of the gargoyles and they’ll rope the fit one in. I see that one Jimmy likes still talking to the guy over by that pumpkin lantern. Ate she’s nice, he’s a fat lad, but… a bit of a lad. I’m not sure what is going on there between them’.

Jimmy was impatient to make his first play. ‘See those fellas at the bar by close by my target set. See he’s got a Leeds United gym bag down by his feet. I’ve been on that game a few times. I’m going to talk to him and his crew. We can build a vibe and see if I can find a casual open on the fat lad’.

The set Jimmy referred to was a group similar to his own, five males. These guys weren’t out for girls in particular, they were out for drink. They looked like rugby boys. They were slightly boisterous but not unfriendly in any way. Despite it being an all male set, it was a good pick as Jimmy could very likely ingratiate himself with a group that looked ‘dangerous’, but were actually far from it. He could look like the guy who tames the bull. If Tiger and Lukasz turned up with some pawns in the next five minutes, then even better. The rugby lads would love them for that.

One could indeed cut out all this labour and go straight in for a girl, straight off the bat, with whatever value you carry with you. One might get lucky or might not. Alternatively, olde school bar game theorised that you could spend five minutes working an environment and raise the players’ value in everyone’s eyes, not just the targets’. With his value high and a party behind him, a player suddenly finds sets open much easier, or indeed they open him. It’s always possibly that someone else got into a target while a player was working his value up. That’s the trade off I guess. But it rarely happens and other men are easily handled. With a bit of game, after a while, other guys generally cease to be much of a challenge.

Jimmy got close enough to the rugby lads to hear their accents; he leant into the bar, ordered himself a drink and then casually noticed the gym bag.

‘Ere, are you lads from Leeds then?’ he beamed, pointing at the bag, ‘I’ve been ‘yon Elland Road loads of times, they’re a rum bunch all right them Leeds’.

‘He is, that monkey there’, a stocky drunk man with a red face and short dark hair pointed cheerfully at one of his companions. ‘He’s a Northern monkey from Huddersfield’.

‘Keep your eyes on your wallet’, another shouted.

The group laughed raucously and Jimmy stepped away from the bar, moving slightly closer to his target set. He wanted the banter and vibe of his new set to filter into the attention of his target. While the play he saw was that he could somehow bring the fat lad she was talking to into the cacophony, it didn’t really matter what the plan was, or even who the target currently was. All that really mattered was that now there was good energy and Jimmy was at the centre of it. He was having a laugh and he’d been in the bar less than 5 minutes.

The northern monkey looked grateful to have a fellow Northerner and asked Jimmy, ‘Are you from Yorkshire too?’

‘Worse!’, he said, then looking at the others he threw out his punchline, ‘I’m from Burnley’, he looked to the roof and shouted ‘keep your eyes on your wallet’.

That was all it took to set the laughter off. The group accepted Jimmy. G and Alain joined and general banter and discussion broke out between them all. Despite the fun times, the three knew, they never forgot, that they weren’t there for beer and daft talk; they were there for building a vibe and creating opportunities to meet nice girls. They didn’t know who or where yet, they just knew they had a platform cooking.

At that moment, Lukasz and Tiger returned with the four student girls from the aforementioned student set. It was perfect timing as a large group of guys was now blended in with several women. They now looked less like a rugby team and were a large mixed set, not too dissimilar from Jimmy’s target set. Laughing and joking loudly, they were the life and soul of the bar.

There was no real master-plan, no set game afoot. Just five guys with a rough idea of what they wanted and rules that let them know what was expected of them and what they could expect of each other. This was the important part, as it gave them a kind of telepathy. No matter what the conversation seemed to be about, the five all knew what the real state of play was.

1. The student pawns belonged to one of either Tiger or Lukasz. Any interaction with those girls would acknowledge that context.

2. The player (Tiger or Lukasz) may, or may not, want them as targets.

3. Jimmy was likely still trying to find an angle into the brunette and that’s why he’d set up this party set. It gave him no claim on the target set whatsoever, but as he’d done a good job getting the party started, most of the lads would probably give him a few moments leeway to work his way in.

4. The good vibe of the party set was a good springboard for everyone to open other sets now. They were the warm end of the pool in this bar. People were looking at them.

5. Again, until Jimmy actually opened up his target, he had no claim on her. If someone could get in there quicker and better, then good for them. It may be inconsiderate, but not actually against the rules. You couldn’t reserve targets; you had to do something to win them. It’s good for everyone as it spurs you into action.

6. You can rely on your wings to follow the rules, but not any other man.

There’s no need for jealousy in game because every player’s success benefits everyone else in the crew. Tiger and Lukasz pawn set reflected well on Jimmy. In turn, Tiger and Lukasz looked good to their set when they were able to say ‘oh we’re with those crazy guys over there, let’s go and meet them’. You can have the night from hell and go home empty handed while your wing gets the ‘10’. But if you’ve winged him well, that ‘10’ things you’re just as cool as he is, and she has friends. Game is not played just over a bar or even a night. It’s a castle you build brick by brick over months and maybe even years.

At this point chance played a card. Jimmy’s target stood up from her bar stool and took her jacket off, glancing around, she folded it over her arm. The fat man’s arms darted around the corners of the room. Jimmy guessed they were looking for the cloak room. He removed his jacket and walked over smiling.

‘Do you guys know where the cloak-room is?’, he asked.

‘She is looking for it’, said the fat lad. ‘I haven’t got a clue’.

‘Yeah’, Jimmy countered, ‘well I think I saw it on the way in, over there’.

It was as simple as that. Jimmy set off in the direction of the cloakroom and she followed. The door was now open, but crucially, as Jimmy left with the target, he saw G walking over and introducing himself to the fat lad. That is what a good wing does.

1. Stops the fat lad following, giving the player a chance to work.
2. Opportunity to befriend and bring all her friends into the group.
3. Opportunity to DHV the player.

Knowing that when they returned from the cloakroom, the target set would be likely merged with his own; there was less pressure to actively game too his target too much. G had, in that one play, bought Jimmy probably half an hour to work. The five minutes at the cloakroom was neither here nor there. Jimmy used that five minutes to be fun, casual and indifferent to the targets hotness.

‘Pleased to meet you, I’m Jimmy by the way’.

‘I’m Carly’, she beamed.

Jimmy seemed not to hear, ‘The secret to a good New Year’s Eve, in my opinion, is to not try hard. Don’t expect much, just enjoy being with your friends’, he cooed, as if speaking to himself.

‘I agree, we came here because it was the only place we could have a quiet drink’.

Jimmy nodded knowingly, ‘are they all your flatmates then?’ (an obvious variant of ‘so how do you guys know each other’).

‘Some are’, she said. ‘The three girls at the table, we all live in Putney together. The big guy with the dark hair and the white shirt, he is Rod, he’s Claire’s fiance. The rest of them are all Rod’s friends’.

Jimmy imagined the conversation that set this night out up. ‘Hey Rod, see if Claire’s mates want to come out on new years with us. They’re nice looking girls, I wouldn’t mind getting to know them’.

Jimmy presumed there was nothing too serious between the fat boy and Carly, but that he was probably fancying his chances. The last thing he wanted to do too soon was to get anyone’s back up and shut the set down. Best to build value slowly, push those attraction switches and make yourself the favourite under the radar. You don’t need to be talking to a target to be building attraction. All she has to do is overhear or witness your game and attraction will be built. In fact, it can work a bomb if the target is not getting face time with you.

Imagine you’re at a party and there’s a super hot girl you like. Imagine she does a sexy dance. You witness it, but it’s not for you. The fact it’s not for you may doesn’t make it less attractive. It maybe makes it more attractive. You wished it were for you. Being on the outside looking in makes one very hungry. That’s the kind of desire you’re trying to generate in targets. I once got a girl’s number at a private party by never speaking to her. It was on one of Lukasz works night outs. As an experiment, I followed her around all night and spoke loudly enough for hear to hear all my DHV stories. At the end of the night she walked over and gave me her phone number. I dated her for 3 months.

By the time the Jimmy and Carly returned to the main group, a lot of integration had taken place. G had brought the fat boy into a conversation with himself and Alain and the Northern monkey from Leeds was now with Carly’s flatmates. Leeds and the flatmates seemed to be getting along like a house on fire, so the knaves figured why not just let him do the ground work for a while and swoop in later if the mood took them. Everyone was laughing and talking, it was a perfect free for all. The crew had been in the bar probably less than twenty minutes and they’d merged three sets and now had 6 immediate targets. When they came in they knew no one.

Reporting back to Alain, Jimmy motioned his arm, ‘these girls are flatmates. She’s engaged to him and the rest is open play I think. The blokes are all mates of the groom’.

‘Subtle this Jimmy’, Alain smiled. ‘All this was done by being chatty and friendly and nothing more. No-one has hit on anyone yet, no-one has offered to buy any drinks and no-one has signalled they are on the hunt. No openers, no magic tricks. It’s sophisticated and subtle game. I am beginning to think I could actually be a better man in time’.

‘Aye’, said Jimmy. ‘She fancies me that girl. It’s time to ask for that fumble in the bogs’.

‘No!’, exclaimed Alain, pulling him back, then patiently drawing breath, ‘We’re set up here. There’s no need to rush. Just find a girl you like and go over, build a bit of attraction. Demonstrate your admirable values, get her to chase’.

‘Well done Alain, you passed my test. Of course that’s what I intend to do. I’ll demonstrate my admirable values and get old Jimmy chased for a change’.

Jimmy liked the sound of being chased for a change. Why should he do all the hard work all the time? He was a man of high value now. He still lived in a pokey little room in the bad end of town, still slept in an unmade bed on a mattress on the floor, still wore the same clothes he was wearing when he was 17 and for a reason he never fully understood, most days he smelled faintly of cabbage. But all that that was just circumstances. Take it aside and you couldn’t convince him now there was much difference between himself and his hero Cary Grant.

He saw Carly talking to Claire, Tiger and one of the student girls. He made eye contact with Tiger then a few seconds later casually sailed past.

‘Ah, Jimmy’, shouted Tiger, ‘Just the man. Girls, have you met my best mate Jim’, he lowered his voice playfully as if telling a great secret and whispered, ‘one of the best rock and roll singers in London’.

For ten minutes, Jimmy and Tiger bounced off each other, they’d ask the girls questions to find out what interests the girls had, then playfully tease the girls and find ways to tell humorous stories of things they’d done.

‘Ah you like rock climbing. Adventure sports. You’re like the Lara Croft of Clapham, only drunker. Jimmy remember the time we were in Malaga and we went bungee jumping’.

They came across exactly as they actually were, two good friends with a shared history of adventure and, at heart, men of good values. A veneer of bad boy enough to be interesting, but really below that, decent guys who you want to be around because you want to be a part of their next stories. The girls clearly liked them. No longer strangers in a bar, they were shiny new friends with great lives. Carly in turn was not a party girl, she was polite and friendly, she worked as a school teacher and liked to sail boats and paint in her spare time. When she mentioned her artistic aspirations, Jimmy felt it was time to single her out and notice her.

‘That’s very interesting Miss… Carly? You’re an artist. Now tell me, are you a great artist or do you just throw some paper and a soup can on the floor and take a photo?’

She laughed and said, ‘No, I paint and I like to make mosaics out of glass and stone. I do pottery too. I’ve got my own pottery wheel’.

‘That’s good. It’s good for the character to have an artistic streak, makes someone interesting and it gives us something to do on the Sunday when the pubs are shut’.

‘So you play in a band?’, she laughed.

‘It’s not so much a big deal’, Jimmy waved his arm dismissively, ‘you know these guys all really love it and to hear them you’d think we’re the next U2, but we’re just another middle of the road London rock band. To be honest, I’m like you, I’m more than happy with my job. I do well. I think full time rock and roll would be too much fast living for me’.

‘Oh, so what do you do?’

‘I build IT networks for law firms and banks. I don’t do the actual work, I manage a team of engineers. I make sure the work gets done properly. It’s a lot of responsibility, but my boss and I get on really well. I don’t even see it as work really’. Jimmy paused and said, ‘In fact, fuck it, I love it so much, I’m going to to go the office right now’.

He feigned to leave and Carly pulled him back laughing, saying, ‘you talk like a proper Northerner, don’t you’.

At this point the Rod and the fat lad came to join them. It was entirely understandable. Their women were engrossed in conversation with some other men so they had a duty to check it out. Interruptions are a part and parcel of game, especially bar game. While often unwanted they can sometimes be used to your advantage. For one, they give you some time and space to work out the next play. For now, Jimmy focused his attention on Rod and the fat lad. He dropped all his focus on Carly and put it on the guys. He betrayed no disappointment that he just wanted to talk to Carly and he didn’t try to get it back to just her and him at the first opportunity. On the contrary, he was genuine and enthusiastic in his interactions with the men. He sold it well. He let them know he had nothing to hide and gave the impression that he was just as happy to laugh and joke with guys as he was girls. He also knew any DHV he delivered to Rod (and winning Rod over was a DHV in itself) would be heard by Carly. An interrupt is often not an interrupt. Just a change of play. Jimmy saw this as a chance to follow the maxim ‘lead the men and the women will follow’.

Jimmy knew at this point it was going well, he liked Carly and she liked him. He recognised that he’d have to pass the night in and out of her company to make sure he kept her interest and he’d have to make sure he got a chance to discreetly get her number well before she left, so he couldn’t leave that until the last minute and have to do it with all her friends waiting.

This timing concern woke him up after a while. The night was wearing on and there were other people in the bar. You can’t let things go too cold. You do at some point have to hit on your target. Just do it when you know she’s interested. After a while the obvious next step came to Jimmy’s scheming little mind.

He saw Lukasz and the lad from Huddersfield still dancing and flirting with the student girls from the pawn set. One of the girls was a cute, small blonde who seemed to be loving all the big Pole’s attention. He drifted over to Lucasz and greeted him warmly. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Alain sidle up to Carly and introduce himself.

‘Hey, I need a bit of Luke time as well, it’s not New Year without a sprinkling of my perfect Polish pal’.

‘Guys this is my friend Jimmy’. Lukasz announced, ‘Or as we call him ‘Mr. New Year’s Eve’.

‘Ding dong, ding dong!’, Jimmy said, wobbling his head.

It was the kind of meaningless waffle that you can just say in set and if the vibe is right and everyone will laugh. Lukasz had these girls so pumped up that he had exactly that vibe. He didn’t seem to need any help in this set, they would laugh at anything. The Huddersfield lad seemed to have a cool vibe of his own too and was clearly more than capable of rolling along and following Lukasz lead. Jimmy could have stuck bread-sticks up his nose and they’d have all thought it was high comedy. They lapped the tomfoolery up like hungry kittens. Out of the corner of his eye, Jimmy could see Alain still talking to Carly. He was smiling knowingly and gesticulating, while looking over in Jimmy’s direction. Carly’s eye’s were transfixed. Jimmy knew what was going on. Before game, this would have been a bad sign. Not now.

‘I don’t want to crash your set Luke’, he whispered, ‘but I need a jealousy plot-line’. ‘She’s into me is that Carly, but I got interrupted and it’s staled out a bit. I need a bit more juice to get it over the line’.

‘Dance with this blonde’, Lukasz pointed, ‘she’s just brilliant, watch this.

“HADOUKEN”’, he shouted as he imitated Ken and Ryu’s power move from Street Fighter II, blasting the blonde with an imaginary ball of firy energy. The blonde threw her arms in the air and repeated ‘HOW DO KEN’ while her friends fell about laughing.

‘OK, she can sing, she can shake, but… can she dance?’, Jimmy taunted. He grabbed her hand and raised it, the blonde span around like a top under his arm. Predictably, everyone laughed. Jimmy wondered if they’d been smoking pot.

‘That’ll do’, Jimmy said smiling. He set off to walk away, then, as an afterthought, remembering wing etiquette, he returned and pointing to Lukasz announced to the girls, ‘this man taught me everything I know… about… err… wrestling crocodiles’.

‘You wrestle crocodiles?’, the blonde asked wide eyed.

As Jimmy left he let his eye’s meet Carly’s by chance. She was standing with Alain and her friends and had obviously been waiting for Jimmy to leave his set. She smiled at him as he looked up and walked up to them. He laughed and said to them ‘Half an hour until New Year guys’. Then turning to Carly, ‘another year of perfect paint and pottery for you, I suppose?’

The interaction now just felt different. After the fear of loss it was almost as if Carly had decided, ‘if I get the chance again, I am going to make sure I take it’. The returning from the other set had also seemed to have proven to and assured Carly that Jimmy was someone she could count on. The fact everyone liked him wouldn’t distract him from the fact he liked her. Everything that happened between them after this point was a forgone conclusion. The swapping of numbers, the date. The relationship that lasted several months. None of that needed to be gamed out. The game part was done as soon as he returned from that Lukasz set. All that needed to be said was ‘you’re a really nice woman. You and me, we’re going to go out for a drink later this week’ and they were set on their course.

The social dynamics management part of Mystery Method is really only required while you’re getting a target’s attention. Night game is a lot of plotting and strategy, setting up social dynamics in your favour in order to deliver sometimes just a few words. The whole point of game is that it gives you the means to raise your value in those early moments before you approach and before you make your intentions clear. It’s easier to sell a product someone already wants or that they have been considering, than to sell the idea cold. Create the desire, then make the sale.

Back in the day a lot of non game friends told me that Mystery Method was unnecessary over thinking and that you could ‘just walk over and say ‘hello’ and not waste all the time’. But none of these guys were regularly dating particularly hot girls. They certainly weren’t dating more than one or two decent looking girls a year. The truth of it that I saw was that for most guys, they would just be yet another guy saying ‘hello’ and that doesn’t bear much fruit. We’d go out as a game crew and after a while, most nights at least one if us would get something really good. I didn’t see these results from non game friends. I just saw a lot of claims to game being ‘easy’ and ‘you just say hello’, but I didn’t see the results.

But none of that really mattered to me. Night game is a great team game and we were a team. We liked the over-thinking. We liked the game. The best part of the pickup in this story was when I spoke to Alain a few days later as we had coffee in Wimbledon, where we both lived. I asked him what he said about me to Carly while I was doing the jealously plot-line with the blonde girl and he just laughed and said, ‘oh God you know. The usual stuff’. It didn’t really need to be explained or confirmed what he did. He just did what we did. We looked out for each other and played our roles. Truth is, win, lose or draw we were having the time of our lives and we knew it.

You can find Jimmy at his blog here

I was born and raised in the People’s Republic of Northern Britain by parents who are both godless communists. Now, they admit the atheism but don’t call themselves communists despite espousing nothing but communist views and always voting for the KGB-approved candidate in every election. My school was equally godless, with our Religious Education classes mostly composed of sitting around colouring in Bible scenes with coloured pens. So, it’s fair to say I was not inculcated with Christianity. Quite the reverse [1].

This means I never developed a feeling of godliness. It made it easy to absorb the atheist teachings of my (mostly Leftist) university professors. I read up on the standard anti-Christian Enlightenment arguments such as the Problem of Evil, Bertrand Russell’s Why I Am Not A Christian and all the various critiques of the standard pro-God arguments (First Cause, Argument By Design etc). I even thought I was an awfully smart boy by mastering these heresies. You see, atheism in the 1990s was presented as if it’s some kind of rebellion against the Establishment. People like Richard Dawkins were awfully brave.

How ridiculous. It’s like praising people in 2018 USA for “standing up” against Slavery. Because that’s such a dangerous position to take, isn’t it? I mean, look at all those Pro-Slavery death squads going around killing abolitionists nowadays. Anyway, the mask has been dropped and in 2018 atheism is the openly-avowed Establishment position. Christianity is under attack, and Christians are now the most persecuted group in the whole world.

Having followed atheism for a few decades and lived a highly individualist and pleasure-seeking life I became aware of what Christian moral philosophers have warned for hundreds of years: atheism is a dead end. It ends in nihilism. I experienced such nihilism in 2016 and by 2017 I was looking for a better way. So far there’s only been one barrier to my converting to Christianity: my lack of belief in God. Aside from that small obstacle, I agree with the thesis that Christianity is one of the three pillars of Western Civilisation (white nations and the Greco-Roman legacy being the other two) and by removing Christianity from the West we have set ourselves into a rapid decline into nihilism and paganism. It’s a shit show.

Anyway, I give this preamble to explain why I decided to read Mere Christianity. I realised that every single time that I am an expert on a topic and I compare my knowledge to the media’s, I realise the media isn’t simply wrong. They are deceitfully wrong. They are deliberately hiding the truth in order to advance a false narrative. Whether the topic is global finance, mixed martial arts, Game, or anything else the lesson is the same: the media are liars. So, knowing that the media is virulently anti-Christian, I asked myself the obvious question:

Does the media tell the truth about Christianity?

The chances aren’t high, are they? I don’t mean that the media is atheist and therefore do they support Christianity, but rather can they be trusted to speak accurately of what Christianity actually is, of what Christians actually believe? I decided: probably not. So, I wanted to know what Christians believe. What are the central tenets of Christianity? I’ve heard what all the godless anti-Christian philosophers and media hacks (Dawkins being one of the latter) had to say, but how about the other side.

In Mere Christianity, C.S.Lewis sets himself the task of explaining to the layman what all Christians believe. He deliberately excludes doctrinal disputes between denominations (e.g. what Protestants and Catholics disagree on) and sticks to what all share in common. It was highly enlightening. Here were some of my main learning points:

• Most of what I learned at school was either wrong or superficially true.
• Most of the anti-Christian arguments from the Enlightenment only work against the straw man they construct rather than real Christianity.
• Most churches, including the Vatican and the Church Of England, are run by Satanists.
• I agree with almost everything espoused by Christianity (aside from my lack of spiritual belief).

I’ll take the example of the Problem Of Evil. As usually formed, it takes the following logical structure:

The Bible postulates that God is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent. There is evil in the world. Being all-knowing, God knows of it. Being all-powerful, God could stop it. Being all-loving he’d wish to stop it. Therefore, from whence comes evil?

Phrased that way it seems like a rather devastating proof against the existence of God, does it not? God is – tautologically – either too dumb, too weak, or too feckless to be worthy of worship. But the problem is, that’s a highly dishonest argument. The Bible doesn’t claim God is thus.

Mere Christianity says the Bible is clear that the world is fallen and is the dominion of Satan, the “Prince of this world”. God is not at all concerned with eliminating evil and making our worldly lives pleasant. He is in the business of saving individual souls, through the following of Jesus. It’s a tough narrow path to salvation, resolved on an individual level. There is no logical inconsistency at all between the God of the Bible, salvation, and the existence of Evil.

I’m rather annoyed that I had to wait until I was 43 years old before learning that. I feel like I’ve been seriously lied to. It would’ve been nice if all those Philosophy Of Religion courses had laid out the arguments and let me make my own mind up [2].

It’s usual for atheists to have sneering contempt for Christians [3] by talking of God as the “big spaghetti monster in the sky” or making comparisons to Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. Christopher Hitchens aside, they seem to avoid saying such things to Muslims of course [4], which exposes both their cowardice and uneven-handedness. From reading Mere Christianity I came away with quite the reverse of contempt. C.S.Lewis lays out a balanced, sophisticated and tightly-reasoned case not just for Christian virtues but even for logical arguments in favour of belief in God.

That surprised me. The atheists have long since imposed the frame that their side is “reason” and the Christian side is “faith”. This frame has held for decades, such that I’d never even heard a Christian make a logical case for theism [5] and it surprised me when C.S.Lewis made such a powerful one.

There’s only one hour until the New Year is rung in and my 2018 reading / reviewing project comes to a close. I simply can’t give Mere Christianity the attention it deserves right now. It took me several days to read and I’ve never thought as deeply as when reading it. This is a book which fairly rattled some of my foundational assumptions and settled conclusions on the religious question. It gave me a radically different view of what Christianity is, and why it’s so important to the West.

I dare say I now wish I believed in God. Maybe that’ll come. But till then, I certainly believe in Evil and the need to fight it. Starting with the globalists and their Tower Of Babel.

If I do make a conversion to Christianity, I’ll be withdrawing my key pick-up products from the market, so if you want Daygame Mastery, Daygame Infinite and Daygame Overkill, 2019 is the time to buy them. Check them out here.

[1] Mind you, my nephews are being inculcated with Islam and homosexuality at their school, so things evidently got even worse.
[2] Though being a stupid teenager, I’d have probably ignored them anyway. I was too busy trying to be clever.
[3] While simultaneously projecting such contempt onto Christians.
[4] Maybe because Mohammad was a paedophile and the Left is pro-pedo.
[5] Admittedly it could be that they do frequently and I simply didn’t know. Perhaps I should get out more.

Back in 1997, when I was completing my Master’s degree, I was assigned a supervisor for my thesis. The department considered me quite a shining talent so they assigned me their best Professor, a rising academic star who wrote a lot on science in society – Sokal’s hoax, scientody vs scientism, the End Of Science, that kind of thing. He was on odd bird. He was some kind of Yank – an American or Canadian, I forget which – who was really into jogging. We students would see him out in his soyboy training gear pounding the streets and displaying the typical jogging-enthusiast’s body, which looks like a cross between an AIDs victim and Jordan Peterson. My professor would then lock himself in his office and refuse to answer the door without an appointment. There was a note on his door that if we wanted his attention we had to email.

It was all very odd, but I remember being extremely impressed with his intellect. He was very smart indeed and quite an inspiration in our weekly thesis chats. One moment in particular stood out. He was inquiring into my intellectual basis for the thesis and I made a comment about “following Popper.”

“God no! You don’t want to be known as a follower. That’s death in academia. Be your own man.”

That was very good advice and it stuck with me. I am highly reluctant to consider myself a follower of anyone – much less describe myself as such publicly – and any time I notice myself agreeing with one man too much I take stock and try to objectively ask myself: am I becoming a fanboy? This advice stuck with me in my Game journey in which I try to give credit to those I learned from (e.g. Mystery, 60 Years Of Challenge) while not riding their nutsacks. Sometimes I overdo it in the opposite direction, failing to give credit where it’s due. The attitude imbued by this professor was also handy in resisting attempts by gurus to make me their acolyte, and of acolytes trying to make me their guru. I was recently asked about this, to which I quipped:

‘I despise both gurus and acolytes. To me they are just pitchers and catchers in bum sex.’

This is why I despise PUA coaches positioning themselves as gurus, as I do similar charlatans in self-help, business advice, and fitness training. It’s quite possible to transmit your expertise to learners without forcing them into a twisted servile role. It’s why I call my blog regulars and book customers Krausermaniacs ‘readers’ not ‘fans’. It’s why I resisted the Jordan Peterson bandwagon before I really knew what was crooked about him. Don’t be a follower.

I bring this up because Nassim Nicolas Taleb is a writer I find it very hard to disagree with, which makes me constantly wonder if I’m slipping into a follower position with him. Surely there’s something he says I don’t like? Well, I thought Black Swan was badly written and showed all the signs of a full-of-himself intellectual unwilling to accept a strong-minded editor [1]. It was like Guns’n’Roses second album. But clearly Taleb overcame this bad habit because Skin In The Game is exceptionally clear and very lean in structure. There’s barely a whiff of intellectual bloat in it. And I like that.

One reason I like Skin In The Game so much is that it directly ports over into daygame. Almost every page has some point where I either thought, “that could apply to picking up girls” or, “yeah, I’d already figured that out from picking up girls.” The line between the two is blurred. On the one hand, I found nothing in Skin In The Game that I didn’t already know (much of it is in Daygame Infinite and Daygame Mastery) and on the other Taleb was able to streamline and parse those ideas so much more elegantly than I had, and provide a more convincing justification. Which brought me back to the whole follower thing: was I flattering myself that I’d already figured out all of Taleb’s ideas before reading Skin In The Game because I feared the alternative of agreeing with everything he said and turning myself into a fanboy. I don’t know. Perhaps I should outline some of those ideas.

Taleb is kind enough to structure the book where he explains everything in the beginning and then dedicates the rest of the text to proving each point. At the very beginning he explains his topic thus:

Skin In The Game is about four topics in one: a) uncertainty and the reliability of knowledge (both practical and scientific, assuming there is a difference), or in less polite words bullshit detection, b) symmetry in human affairs, that is, fairness, justice, responsibility, and reciprocity, c) information sharing in transactions, and d) rationality in complex systems and in the real world. That these four cannot be disentangled is something that is obvious when one has… skin in the game.

The very alert among you will already be drawing daygame parallels. Daygame is a fundamentally uncertain activity where much of the data is obscure yet you must discern patterns upon which to base behaviour, and spot when you are being bullshitted both by gurus and by girls in set. There is symmetry in your seductive interaction and ‘getting to know each other’ involves principles of information sharing as personalities, as goal-oriented actors, and of the process of seduction itself. We are of course intimately aware that we are employing our strategies in a complex system in the real world. Believe me, as you read Taleb explicate each principle, the connections to our fair sport only get stronger and clearer.

For example, Taleb makes much hay in investigating the difference between ivory tower theory and practical knowledge, principally by comparing his hero Fat Tony the market trader with intellectuals like Paul Krugman. We daygamers get a similar thing with the ivory tower “science” of seduction carried out in university post-graduate departments and our own direct knowledge of the street, the cafe, the bar, and the bedroom. It takes a certain number of lays before you feel confident hand-waving away all those idiot researchers. Taleb provides the intellectual justification for prioritising the Fat Jimmy Eddie Krauser Tony’s of the pick-up world over the armchair philosophers of the internet and daytime talk shows.

‘in academia there is no difference between academia and the real world; in the real world, there is’

‘Don’t tell me what you “think”, just tell me what’s in your portfolio’

Back in my early boxing days my coach once said to me, “the only way to get good at slipping right hands is to keep getting hit with them.” All of the alive martial arts [2] are built on a foundation of skin in the game: sparring, and eventually fighting. The dead martial arts [3] insulate the students from the consequences of their unrealistic training, to create paper dragons. We daygamers have the same ‘liveness’ in our learning: the constant contact with success and failure on the streets and the skin in the game of trying to get laid.

Taleb goes into the moral dimension frequently, such as his discussion of information sharing. We daygamers have a vast amount of information about the seduction process, far more than a girl can reasonably expect us to have. We are also trained in how much information we parcel out to her while she’s making her decision – e.g. do we tell r-select stories or K-select stories on the date – so there is an inescapable moral dimension to our skirt-chasing. Are we deliberately withholding or slanting information to mislead? Are we trying a bait-and-switch? Are we wilfully allowing her to persist in a misunderstanding about our intentions based on her being a normie and expecting us to have normie ideas about what the dating means?

‘someone with a high public presence who is controversial and takes risks for his opinion is less likely to be a bullshit vendor’

I especially liked Taleb’s conception of soul in the game and how other people can spot it. It’s approaching Pressman’s War Of Art distinction between a real writer and a hack writer from a different angle to the same result: the real writer feels the muse flowing through him and cares to authentically craft his work, whereas the hack looks to the market for what will sell and then panders to that. Readers can usually spot a hack [4]. You know when someone’s heart isn’t in it. Taleb has little time for ‘professional researchers’, those who make a career of researching an idea rather than first making a career of the thing, and coming to research it later based upon an intimate lived daily-experience of the thing.

It’s why politicians used to be selected by their constituency, usually eminent men who’d already made a local reputation in business. It was only after succeeding at life and demonstrating a track record to their fellows that these men were raised – elected – to a position of political leadership. The Party system destroyed all that. Now, a politician takes the route of being a student activist and council-member, then interns for a politician, and then rises in the ranks within a Party by demonstrating slavish adherence to their creed. They then get selected by the Party to be a candidate and helicopter dropped onto a local constituency.

So, modern politicians have no real-world competence, are adversely-selected for the most craven greasy-pole-climbers, and are completely beholden to the Party for a job. What a surprise they are all traitors. Donald Trump has been so successful because he was like the old model – he had soul in the game and everyone recognised it [5]

I wish I’d reviewed Skin In The Game back in August when I read it and all Taleb’s ideas were fresh, so I could really dive deep into the relationship between it and daygame. It’s an excellent book and provides a solid intellectual background to what we daygamers do. You can think of it as the meta-level upon which the principles of Daygame Infinite rest. It’s very pleasing to know that the world’s #1 public intellectual’s latest book is telling us we are doing it the right way. I absolutely intend to re-read this and pull as much value out as I can, once my pace of reading slows down next year.

But Taleb’s book doesn’t actually tell you how to bang hotties. You’ll need Daygame Mastery, Daygame Infinite and Daygame Overkill for that. Check them out here.

[1] Unlike his book immediately before it, Fooled By Randomness, which was tightly and cleanly written.
[2] Boxing, wrestling, BJJ, kickboxing, judo
[3] Karate, TKD, ninjutsu, akido, dim mak, kung fu
[4] I’m not so sure about customers of PUA products, mind.
[5] And in the case of globalists and NPCs, feared it.

I do wonder why Giacomo Casanova’s modern reputation is so intimately tied up with the idea of his prolific womanizing. In this, volume three of his epic autobiography there’s barely any shagging and what little there is comes mostly from prostitution. I’m increasingly of the opinion that Casanova was making an earnest attempt to recount his life as he lived it, from every angle and in every dimension, rather than merely reel off his female conquests. We see much of his temporary conversion to become ‘a bigot’ (i.e. religious fanatic) after falling ill with venereal disease and hallucinating while under its treatment by mercury. There is his falling-in with a inveterate welsher named only ‘F.C.’ who concocts repeated unconvincing pretexts for borrowing money, and then also accounts of Casanova in the society of numerous aristocrats from Venice to Vienna to Paris.

But shagging? Nope, not much of that. He spends a long time enraptured by the transvestite male impersonator Henriette at the beginning of the volume and after that affair goes sideways he is enraptured by a 14-year old Venetian called ‘C’. He rattles a few semi-pros in-between. Considering this volume covers his life from aged 23 to 25, that’s not a lot.

What comes in ample supply are Bottom World stories. Casanova seems only to have mixed in two social milieu – buffoonish vain aristocrats holding open houses, and the low-life conmen and adventuresses who glommed onto them (Casanova being one of the latter). For example he observes a card sharper dealing at an aristocrat’s game and cheating a girl out of 100 zecchini [1] and pulls him to one side, warning him he’d tumbled to his game. The sharp offers him a 50 tagliatelle pay-off and half of subsequent proceeds so Casanova falls in with him. Most characters Casanova meets are crooked in some way, with both male and female acquaintances reappearing in later years under new false identities running new scams.

It would also seem Casanova had long since developed a reputation in the underworld of petty crooks across Europe. As soon as he arrives at a rest-house in Ferrara he is halted by a pretty woman claiming loudly that they are cousins. Casanova has never seen her before but senses a ruse he can join in with. He realises she is a famed adventuress called Cattinella and she’s previously had him pointed out at distance (hence how she recognised him). She is engaged in cheating a local farm-boy out of money by promising him marriage and living on the hog by delaying the formal announcement. Casanova helps her slip away, leaving the young lad bewildered and waiting futilely for her return. Now, why on earth would Casanova so comfortably fall into such games? It seems there were few cons going on in a town that he wouldn’t sniff the arse of.

At the beginning of this book he claims high moral standards by choosing not to sleep with a young village girl who he’s convinced of his wizardry [2] but mid-way through he gets a different young lass pregnant and then brazens it out when her mother has him arraigned before the local magistrates for breach of promise. Indeed for much of this book it seems his natural inclination towards rabbitry and The Con causes frequent soul-searching and discomfort. Being in his mid-twenties, it’s quite reasonable to think he’s writing this authentically, as he likely hadn’t yet figured out what type of man he was to be.

This laxity in moral compass usually involves gambling (he’s locked in a constant cycle of sponging and conning to pay off gambling debts) or shagging. Sometimes it makes for good squalor stories. For example, he takes a shine to a washerwoman employed at an inn where he has his rooms.

After doing everything I could to obtain an interview with the girl in my lodging or in hers or anywhere at all and not succeeding, I resolved to have her by using a little violence at the foot of the concealed staircase down which she usually went when she left my lodging. I hid at the foot of it, and when I saw that she was within reach I sprang on her and, partly by persuasion, partly by swift action, I subjugated her on the last steps; but at the first thrust of our union a most extraordinary sound, proceeding from the place next to the one I was occupying, stayed my fury for a moment, and the more so because I saw the victim put her hand over her face to hide the shame she felt at her indiscretion….. This aural phenomenon, together with the embarrassment and confusion which I saw in my victim, suddenly took possession of my soul; all together they presented so comical an idea to my mind that, laughter having overpowered all my faculties, I had to let her go. She seized the moment to run away.

To summarise in modern English: he stopped raping a maid because her farting noises made him laugh too hard. Bottom World.

Casanova is constantly meeting women who are chaperoned, pursued or otherwise accompanied by other men and he takes relish in attempting to steal them. Often he assumes he can simply buy them [3]. In one case, he meets some Corsican officers of the Royal Italian Regiment, and becomes pally with a chode called Paterno who has been pursuing an actress. Having been brought up around the stage, Casanova knows all actresses are whores [4] but this Paterno is getting tooled by her:

Being in love with an actress who scorned him, the young man kept me entertained with his description of her adorable qualities and at the same time of her cruelty toward him, whom she received in her house but whom she repulsed whenever he tried to give her evidence of his love. She was ruining him by making him spend a great deal on dinners and suppers which were shared by her numerous family but for which she gave him no credit… I refused to attend any more of his suppers- utterly boring suppers at which, even as they were eating them, the actress’s whole family laughed at the stupidity of the dupe who was paying for them.

Casanova shared my contempt for spineless chodes and decided to shag his bird: “I had no doubt that I could obtain her favours at the cost of fifteen or twenty ravioli.” So Casanova goes to her dressing room and offers her a watch worth twenty spaghetti. She refuses, claiming herself offended. Upon hearing this, Paterno feels himself vindicated and passes on Casanova’s message to her that he wouldn’t even give her the watch if she changed her mind. Piqued, she wants to see him again, he pays her cash, and he bangs her. They then laugh at the chode she’s stringing along. I swear this story would fit with any number of Russian and Ukrainian girls I’ve known who were dating Western forum chodes, but for two things. First, I didn’t pay to bang them, and second…..

Three days later I found that the wretched woman had made me the same sort of present that I had been treated by the prostitute at O’Neilan’s. Far from feeling that I had cause to complain, I considered myself justly punished for having so basely abandoned myself after having belonged to an Henriette….. Because of the season the cure compelled me to spend six weeks in my room.

In those six weeks, his mercury-addled mind rendered him susceptible to the frame-control of the religious bigot who treat him – one De La Haye – who is a recurring character and total charlatan. These memoirs are packed with an immense number of scoundrels. Like attracts like. It does make me wonder too of the cases Casanova relates of important men taking an immediate dislike to him – I suspect he’d gone so far down the rabbit path that wolves could sniff out his degeneracy quickly and steered clear of him, hence the only people he was able to fall in with were buffoons and fellow con-men. Still, Casanova is remarkably sanguine about his frequent bouts with STDs.

The malady which we call the “French disease” does not shorten life when one knows how to cure it; it merely leaves scars; but we are easily consoled for that when we consider that we gained them with pleasure, even as soldiers take pleasure in seeing the scars of their wounds, the proofs of their virtue and the wellsprings of their fame.

I dare say I disagree. While I too fondly recall my adventures with women, I’m rather glad I never once caught the French Disease. If you lie down with dogs, you’ll wake up with fleas. That said, I’m enjoying this memoir and taking a liking to the old scoundrel.

If you’d like to read a memoir series devoted to travel and womanizing that does not involve catching STDs or cheating men out of money, consider mine. Check it out here.

[1] That sounds like a type of pasta to me. Did those crazy Italians use food as currency?
[2] Literally, not figuratively. He performs occult rites in a thunderstorm to impress her.
[3] Casanova seems to encounter many semi-pros.
[4] No change nowadays.

Chapter One is Here

Chapter Two – Ye Olde Pathe of the Brave

Jimmy stooped down into a tiny basement which appeared to house, predictably, an old curiosity shoppe. The shoppe was brightly lit at the entrance, dimly toward the corners. The air was dry and chalky. There was a general feeling of claustrophobia, with strange trinkets and junk of all imaginable shapes and sized stacked and stored in such a way as to make one suspect it was done so to purposely obstruct and annoy those who enter. Nothing in the store seemed to be anything that could be of any imaginable use to anyone. Vastly oversized bird cages that could house people, books without their covers and antique bicycles with handlebars missing made it looked more like refuse collection than a curiosity shoppe.

While we can all see the direction this story is taking, less so our dull-witted hero.

‘What kind of a shit show is this place?’ Jimmy muttered to himself under his breath.

‘It’s a magic shop obviously, you pie-faced moomin’, someone, or something, croaked from somewhere out of sight. ‘And the best wishes of the season to you too you miserable, arrogant urchin’. The voice sailed over from behind what seemed to be a pile of what seemed like a bookshelf of old magazines and comic annuals. ‘You find a street that shouldn’t be here and a funny little shop in a Christmas story and you can’t put two and two together and realise you’re in a fairy tale. My God Jambone, you’re just as incompetent as they say you are in those daft bookes your mates wrote. I didn’t think it possible. I really didn’t think it possible’.

‘What bookes?’ Jimmy muttered and he rounded the bookshelf and squeezed himself between an enormous picture frame and boxes of assorted lamps. Away from bright entrance Jimmy now had to squint in the dimmer light, but there in front of him, behind a little makeshift desk, lit by the weak glow from a nearby lamp, sat an impossibly old looking crone with a mannish face so miserable and unforgiving as to drive even the most hardy of adventurers away in fright. We’d rate her a 4 (that’s a 7 on a field report on a pickup forum). Thank God it was gloomy dear readers, for she was truly horrific.

‘Ey up, a notch waiting ‘appen this. She’s bound to be lonely this one’, Jimmy remarked to himself, before continuing, ‘what bookes old crone, and what do you mean incompetent?’ Jimmy tugged on his lapels and rearranged an imaginary tie. ‘I’ll have you know I am a project manager’.

Jimmy stuck his chin out, ‘organisation is my stock in trade, my strong suit’, his lines were well rehearsed, as if addressing an audience. Jimmy had made this speech many times when routinely accused of incompetence. He then paused and turned on the deadly charm, ‘I should smite your bony backside with the flat of me sinewy right hand’ he said, with a twinkle in his eye.

The crone, however, seemed indifferent to our hero’s flirtations. She merely flapped her old grey hands in the air and conjured up an impressive glowing orb, some kind of apparition thing that just hung in the air. It chased the gloom in the shop into the farthermost of all it’s corners, but more importantly, it serves to remind the slightly less calibrated amongst Krauser’s readership that this is a Christmas fairy tale of magic and derring-do and not currently a field report to be taken seriously. No one is claiming to have ever met a witch.

‘It’s your lucky day Jimmy’, she wailed jubilantly. ‘Once in a hundred years I appear from my slumber to find the world’s most incompetent, cack-handed dingbat and grant him knowledge, oh such a great knowledge’, she cackled and peered at Jimmy past the blinding glow of the spinning orby thing, before adding pointedly ‘any knowledge he wishes. It’s a kind of, ‘raise the weakest link in the chain’ kind of service’.

‘You single out the brave and the genius!’, Jimmy exclaimed. Never one to give up the frame so easily.

She continued in vaguely hypnotic and rhythmic chant,

’you can learn the cures for hills of ills,

cancer, AIDS, invent those pills (that cure them, not cause them),

write the worlds most banging tunes,

or build a bridge from here t’ moon’.

Jimmy interrupted excitedly, ‘could you make it ‘pie and a pint for a pound day’, every day down at the Giggling Squid’, he gasped the words out, barely daring to believe it could be true.

The crone shook her head impatiently. ‘yes, but don’t you understand you damned fool, I can give you the knowledge that ends all wars!’ The crone began to chant again, the globe burned brightly again, spinning quickly on it’s axis again, making a melodic whirring noise again. ‘Jimmy, just choose it at will and whim and you could invent the engine that runs on air. You could save the world Jimmy Boy. I am talking about ending hardship and saving humanity, you could live forev…’.

‘I GOT IT, I GO IT! HOW DO I CLACK THE ‘OTTEST SKIRT’, Jimmy blurted, now unable to contain himself.

The light dimmed and the orb suddenly stopped spinning.

‘Come again’, the crone croaked.

‘The skirt, you old hag, that top drawer skirt I see ‘ere and about’, Jimmy waved his hand in the general direction of the world outside. ‘How do I clack it?’, he demanded. He then raised his long skinny fore-finger aloft and said decisively, as if addressing a crowd again, ’there’s a way you can clack them crumpet. I want to know how. I want to know the secret that has eluded me for centuries. That’s the knowledge I want’.

The room was silent for a moment.

‘You want a book about how to get women’, the crone asked flatly, ‘what you mean like Ye Mystery Method?’ and still holding her hands aloft underneath the now grey and lifeless orb, she motioned with her neck to an old black and beige paperback lying by the comics and pulp fiction.

Jimmy bounded forward and grabbed the old book, thumbing through the dusty pages, wide eyed. ‘I could well see this being useful’, he slavered.

‘But that’s just a crummy old paperback’, the crone cried, ‘someone brought that in last week. I’m offering you the secrets of the universe; you can get that waffle from any disreputable bookshop. Wouldn’t you like to invent the microchip?’

Jimmy looked up at the crone and pounded his finger against one of the pages as he declared ‘it says here it’s all about giving them a bit of a cheeky chat’. Jimmy sniggered. He banged the pages together, dust exploding outwards in all directions into the dry air. ‘I’ll be balls deep in a tenne before closing time, and all I wanted was an 8’, he crooned, cramming the tattered pages into his pocket. To his credit, he felt a twinge of guilt at being so selfish. Pie and pint for a pound day at the Squid would have probably been the preference for most of the lads, but Jimmy has always struggled to fight the temptation to selfishness. It was, he said, his only flaw.

‘It takes years of practice and a lot of hard work to perfect that there Mystery Method’, the crone cooed. ‘It’s very powerful but you can’t just go out and get immediate successes. You have to try and fail and tray again’.

Jimmy’s face fell. The jubilation drained from his cheeks. None of our heroes are perfect dear readers and the hero of this story is no different. For if there is one thing akin to kryptonite to our Jimmy, then there were in fact two. These ideas of ‘hard work’ and ‘years of practice’ were in the same category as ‘the police called by to see you earlier’ and ‘it’s your turn to get the ales in’. It was, according to Jimmy, his only flaw.

‘I haven’t got years to get this done crone’, Jimmy whined pathetically, ‘the banging top night out is tonight’. He fell upon his knees, ‘I throw me on your mercy crone, and remember this is to be at most a three part tale, so we need to cram in as much as we can to the rest of this chapter and only one more’.

‘Very well’, said the crone. ‘Since you haven’t actually chosen anything in terms of any magic from me, you just chose than daft pickup book that you could have just bought anywhere’, she glanced dismissively at Jimmy’s bulging pocket where the book was indeed still crammed, Jimmy clasped his hands urgently and protectively over the bulge as if fearing it was to be taken from him, ‘how about I’ll grant thee a boon?’

‘The Grant’, Jimmy cooed. ‘Do it! Grant me!’ he proclaimed. He held his breath, threw his arms wide and closed his eyes. Visions of the south of Gaul, fine horses, swish clothes and ‘top totty’ filled Jimmy’s head. He closed his eyes tighter, salivating in anticipation.

When he opened his eyes he was a little disappointed to see he was still in the dingy little shop in the same old grey tunic, with the crone’s ugly old face staring back at him. Jimmy peered over her shoulder as if expecting to see the tops of the street of Monaco or the view from the balcony of the Metropole.

‘Grant me?’, he repeated, throwing hia arms apart and shutting his eyes again.

‘Jimmy lad, you are a buffoon,

you lower the tone of every room… err, that you grace.

You’re a total waste of space.

But you need to know what game’s all about

and you can’t do that without

experience and wings to help you out.

I’ll give you all this knowledge that you boys crave,

a plan and a crew to run with night and day.

These powers to thee I grant,

by the time I end this magic chant’.

And with that, the crone clapped her hands together. The two stared at each other in silence for a second.

‘A bit of an anti climax’, the crone said sheepishly, ‘I probably should have explained, it takes a few days for the information to bed in, by the time New Year comes round, you and the lads will know how to work a set in most bars. Sink a few ales in the Squid tonight, but on New Year’s Eve you’ll venture into Clapham Junction and there you’ll exercise your mighty powers. Try not to cause too much trouble; it’ll affect me badly at my half century review’.

‘OK’, Jimmy muttered as he turned slowly to leave, rubbing his head gently. ‘Thanks crone’.

Jimmy clambered over the bric-a-brac and oddities, back through the bird cages, books and furniture that littered his path back towards the door. Turning the handle, he glanced around the shop one last time, he could hear the crone humming behind the junk that now obscured her from view, he turned his back and got the feeling he was returning back to reality as he stepped through the door and headed back to the life of the village outside.

He began to wonder if he’d made the right decision as he walked past a church group singing Christmas carols. He wasn’t all bad our Jimmy. He worried if he had been selfish. He could have chosen ‘pie and a pint day every day at the Giggling Squid’, something the whole village could enjoy and maybe the lads would have liked better. Now he’d have to tell them they couldn’t spend all night in the squid, they were to venture out into the respectable peoples’ taverns of Clapham Junction. These doubts though didn’t last long and as he padded back along the street, he again turned up his collar to the falling snow and set off in the direction of his home. As he whistled his favourite tune ideas were already beginning to filter through. Building value before opening, pawn sets, targets, various gambits designed to adjust social dynamics in your own favour and as Jimmy reached the outskirts of the village and closed in on his own low rent neighbourhood, and as the snow fell heavier, and as the wind grew colder and the streets darker, and as Jimmy smiled more broadly, he warmed to one idea of which now he was certain.

He even said it to himself, as if to officially accept it was true, ‘me and the lads are going to hit them smart taverns soon enough and pull us some unsuspecting, decent looking skirt’.

You can find Jimmy hanging out on his blog here and he can sometimes be persuaded to do consultations.

My school teachers informed me that the European settlers in North America decimated the native Indian population more through disease than war. In particular, we gave them blankets carrying contagious small pox and influenza germs. Right, I get it. That wasn’t very nice. But do I feel any White Guilt about it? Hell no. Aside from the obvious fact that I’m not personally responsible for what someone I didn’t know and who died before I was born did to someone else I didn’t know and died before I was born…. there’s just another rather important fact.

It was give and take. You see, my school teachers told me about the Black Death that twice ravaged Europe. What they didn’t say is who brought it….. the fucking Turks.

Now, I happen to like most of the Turks I’ve met and I’ve dated a couple of Turkish women [1] but their repeated invasions of Europe do sorely try my patience. The Ottomans were utter cunts, with their slave galleys, penchant for impalings, and Janissary child-kidnapping system. Bunch of cunts and I’m very glad WWI finally put paid to their sick twisted empire. However, what history really ought to remember is it was the Turks who introduced the Bubonic Plague to Europe in The Age Of Calamity between AD 1300 and 1400. Here’s how the book describes it:

Out of the Far East came a sickness of unprecedented virulence which, in the years between 1346 and 1352, carried off at least one third of Europe’s population. The greatest wave of mortality ever to sweep across the world, it was to become known as the Black Death.

It was first spotted in Constantinople in 1347 and infected rats aboard Ottoman vessels gave it to the rest of us. Now, I’ll admit that the Turks may hold their hands up and say, “hang on a minute, we didn’t originate it. We got it off the bloody Mongols” and they’ll have a point.

The terrible machinery of the plague appears to have been set in motion in the Gobi desert in Mongolia. In the late 1320s and epidemic erupted there among rodents and claimed its first human victims from within the ranks of the nomadic Mongol horsemen, who then proceeded to spread the disease throughout their extensive empire. The trade routes of the Silk Road, along which silks and furs were carried westward from China, exposed the whole of central Asia to the disease.

We Brits got it from the French [2] via Burgundy wine.

Now the lesson of the Black Death is pretty simple: Build The Wall. It was the mass immigration and globalist trading which allowed the spread of virulent pestilence from the Third World into Europe. We are seeing the same thing now on a (currently) smaller scale with all the Ebola, HIV, Hep C, small pox and strange new diseases coming in with all the Soros fake-refugees. Anonymous Conservative has been keeping tabs on the spike in incidences of previously eradicated diseases. Bring in the third world people, and they bring the third world conditions with them. But of course so long as globalist traitors like Merkel, May and Macron are in power, they’ll keep doing it.

There was an upside to the mass die-off in the European population.

The massive decline in population transformed the relationship between people and resources. Because labour was scarce, the surviving work force could command high wages, while the prices of land and agricultural products fell due to lack of demand.

We see the modern equivalent in Japan, but due to declining birth rate. The country suddenly isn’t so crowded. House prices have been falling for thirty years. After decades of overcrowding and pressure on scarce resources, declining birth rates should be leading the First World into a Golden Age. As soon as those parasite Baby Boomers die, everything is freed up. But…… those same Baby Boomers insist on keeping globalists in power who are using the “demographic crisis” as a pretext to inflict mass immigration on us.

Really, as if Britain’s “demographic crisis” can be solved by filling our schools with Pakistani and Somali children….. how does turning Britain into Not-Britain help the British? Whatever Age Of Calamity strikes the Proper Countries as globalism and the neo-liberal world order collapses and the civil wars of identity fire up, I’m guessing those of us who keep our heads will emerge into a great age, like in the 1400s.

I made it though an entire blog post about immigration without once saying “shoot the invaders and execute the traitors!” I guess I’ve mellowed.

Look, this is what happens when you read a book in summer and forget to review it for six months. Let’s pretend it never happened, and buy Daygame Mastery, Daygame Infinite and Daygame Overkill, alright? Check them out here.

[1] But never have and never will bum a male Turk, nor wrestle one. There are many things I won’t follow Casanova in trying.
[2] No surprise there. It’s always the bloody French. I’m glad we smacked them up with the Hundred Years War for it.

It’s my bet that most of you young yobbos know what alliteration is. Perhaps you recognise the sweet scent of synaesthesia in my words. And I’ll bet you my hyperbole has kept made your heart beat a millions times a minute. But, I ask you this….

…. do you know what an epanalepsis is? Or a prolepsis [1]? Or a scesis onomaton?

Nor did I but having read Mark Forsyth’s The Elements Of Eloquence I do now and what is more, I’m very glad I do. You see, this is the Daygame Mastery of prose writing. There, I said it. Now I have to explain why.

I’ve been trying my bestest to become a good writer and thus have approached it with the same mindset I did with Game. The first thing is action – learning through practice – so I’ve been writing an awful lot. This blog is the obvious outlet of such energies but it’s not like I listened to any of those sober heads who warned, “woah Nick! you might want to slow down in churning out them there memoirs.” Stephen King in his book On Writing advises very strongly to write every single day whether you feel like it or not. It’s only through doing that you improve. But that’s not all there is to it.

My 2018 book review project was borne partly out of a desire to improve my writing because, it seems, all the good writers recommend reading a lot. So, I dipped into books from all genres, eras, and topics to expose myself to many styles. By writing a short essay on each I converted the reading process into active learning both in absorbing lessons from the books but also in teaching myself how to find themes and write about them in short order. Call it a one-year research project. But what else?

I tried the various Masterclass seminar products such as those of Aaron Sorkin, David Mamet, Malcolm Gladwell, and James Patterson. But of every source I tried, The Elements Of Eloquence is by far the most useful. That’s because it is a toolkit. It’s a very specific actionable toolkit on how to improve the literary quality of your prose. Until now, I didn’t even realise there were guidebooks for this kind of thing. Imagine the way Daygame Mastery and Daygame Infinite explain the theory, give practical examples, and then explain how to create your own versions – that’s exactly what this book does with the writer’s art. It has 39 chapters and each introduces a figure of rhetoric. A what? Mark, you explain it mate:

The techniques for making a single phrase striking and memorable just by altering the wording. Not by saying something different, but by saying something in a different way. They are the formulas for producing great lines.
These formulas were thought up by the Ancient Greeks and then added to by the Romans. As Shakespeare set to work England was busy having the Renaissance. So the classical works on rhetoric were dug out, translated and adapted for use in English…. So Shakespeare learnt and learnt and got better and better, and his lines become more and more striking and more and more memorable.

Ah, I see. So, Mark, I don’t suppose you could pick the best of these figures and then patiently guide me through each one so I can begin improving my own prose? What, you already did that, with 39 of them? Smashing! Good lad! But I’m worried that focusing so much on style may hinder the dialectical value of my work. I’m not looking to become a bloody poet.

A poet is not someone who has great thoughts. That is the menial duty of a philosopher. A poet is someone who expresses his thoughts, however commonplace they may be, exquisitely. That is the one and only difference between the poet and everybody else.

Ah! Gotcha.

Lets give an example, with Chapter 3’s antithesis. The essence of the antithesis is simple: first you mention one thing: then you mention another. Oscar Wilde used to do it by making the first side of the antithesis something pretty obvious, then begin the second side to lead you into expecting something else equally obvious, but surprise you with an odd turn (making it an epigram). For example:

• ‘The well-bred contradict other people. The wise contradict themselves.’
• ‘If a man is a gentleman he knows quite enough. If he is not a gentleman whatever he knows is bad for him.’
• ‘Journalism is unreadable, and literature is not read.’

It all comes down to plays on the basic formula of X is Y, and not X is not Y. It works as rhetoric because it appears final and certain through the phrasing. For example, compare the same thought expressed first as a philosopher and then secondly as a poet (using antithesis)

• Those who can’t write themselves instead instruct other people on how to write.
• Those who can, do: those who can’t, teach.

Right then, are we all happy with the basic idea of the book? It’s like a To Do list. I imagine myself sitting down with The Elements Of Eloquence at hand while a draft manuscript of Balls Deep sits open on my laptop. I then proceed to pick a figure of rhetoric and add it in a bunch of times, then pick the next figure and add those in. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, we’ll need to add a Merism in here…. A what? A Merism is when you don’t say the group/category name but instead name all of its constituent parts. Thus ladies and gentlemen is a merism for people, because all people are either ladies or gentlemen [2]. Tennyson used merism in his The Charge Of The Light Brigade:

Cannon to right of them.
Cannon to left of them.
Cannon in front of them…

Forsyth notes it would’ve been far more efficient to simple say cannon were in every direction, or “Cannon quaquaversally”, but it doesn’t have the same rhetorical effect, does it? No, sonny Jim, it does not. I’ll give you a few more figures of rhetoric so you get a flavour of just how much is in this book.

Anadiplosis: Taking the last word of a sentence and repeat it as the first word of the next, to create the illusion of a logical connection. See the promotional material for Gladiator: “The general who became a slave. The slave who became a gladiator. The gladiator who defied and emperor.” Or perhaps Yoda, “Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.” That’s Anadiplosis.

Tricolon: Using the magic number three to create a rhythm and implied connection between all elements: “I came; I saw; I conquered” or “Sun, sea, and sex.” They have alliteration too, as does, “wine, women and song.” [3]

Parataxis and Hypotaxis: These are two poles in sentence length and complexity. Parataxis imitates the short clipped sentences of direct spoken English, and would be described as “punchy” or “crisp” prose. Hypotaxis is the long sentences with many conjunctions and sub-clauses seen in older novels, aimed at a mass readership with a higher overall IQ and level of education. Forsyth explains the style thus:

Hypotaxis was what made English prose so terribly, terribly civilised. It still works. Angry letters of complaint, redundancy notices and ransom notes will, if written in careful hypotaxis, sound as reasonable, measured and genial as a good dose of rough Enlightenment pornography.
Yet hypotaxis (along with reason) has been declining for a century or more. Gone are those heady and incomprehensible sentences of Johnson, Dickens and Austen, replaced with the cruel, brutalist parataxes of writers whose aim is to agitate and distress. The long sentence is now a ridiculed rarity [4] usually hidden away in the Terms and Conditions, its commas and colons, clauses and caveats [5] languishing unread and unloved.

I can’t recommend this book highly enough for aspiring writers. I come from a martial arts and video games background where I’m used to instructional manuals and seminars where complex chains of action (e.g. a triangle choke to omoplata transition, or a Dark Souls boss fight) are broken down into constituent parts that can be analysed and perfected. That is exactly what The Elements Of Eloquence does for sentence construction. It’s also very humorously written so you’ll be chuckling your chubby cheeks as you peruse its precise pages.

Serious seducers of sexual sentiment should probably purchase my predatory, precise and perfected publications: Daygame Mastery, Daygame Infinite and Daygame Overkill. Check them out here.

[1] No, that’s not what porno actresses get after too many anal scenes.
[2] There are only 2 genders, and 74 mental illnesses.
[3] As does Ein Reich, Ein Volk, Ein Fuhrer! It’s powerful rhetoric.
[4] Alliteration
[5] And again. See?