France and my old friend

Dear Diary,

My old friend and I had a long conversation. He was forced off the street by the police because busking is not allowed where he is (apparently). It's his home town where he was born and raised. He was drinking and staying with some friends.

He said to me, "You are the most erudite person I know. How is it that you hold a master's degree and only work at McDonald's?" I had to reply with the truth, "Britain is an island of slaves. Education is meaningless here." It doesn't matter how you dress it up, this is the actual reality. "But you have studied for twenty years!" he said (I corrected him, it's only twelve, at Univeristy). That is just the way things are here. This is not Renaissance Italy, evidently.

He is, I fear, heading in the wrong direction. He has been for years now. It is only because of the kindness of a friend that he is not sleeping out in the snowy mountains. He desperately wants me to go back there. (Apparently the restrictions from the pandemic have all been lifted now in France). If I go back there (or rather when I return), as I told him, I shall never come back, because there is nothing to come back to. There is no work here, only slavery and poverty. Yet before I make footfall on French soil, I shall have to have my books up online, and selling.

I've done a bit more translation today, and seemingly, the secondary literature I have read concerning this book is bang on target. It is, in fact, a book of black magic. These beings are the personification of evil things. I wish I could translate something nice, and helpful, and good, not evil, but all those books have already been translated, and I would therefore be poor again. (Mammon is far richer than Christ - where Christians give, with kindness, the Devil takes, being materialistic and more like Daniel Plainview than Mother Theresa). So, I risk and hazard my very soul, just to have my palm crossed with silver. That's okay. This is Dark Age Britain: the only way out of poverty here, is to prostitute what little you have, or turn to crime. Education, law, talent, good will, these things are meaningless here, least of all honesty or having such outmoded things as morals.

Max.