[during third message] (singing ...) I'd like to apologise for the terrible attacks, Andrew Sachs, I would like to show contrition to the max, Andrew Sachs. I would like to create world peace, between the yellow, white and blacks, Andrew Sachs, Andrew Sachs. I said something I didn't have oughta, like I had sex with your granddaughter. But it was consensual and she wasn't menstrual, it was consensual lovely sex. It was full of respect I sent her a text, I've asked her to marry me, Andrew Sachs ...

I truly felt, ultimate objective aside, that the Marines had something beautiful about them. Fraternity, initiation, mentoring, honor, valor, duty—beautiful male attributes in a society in which masculinity is maligned. I can get a bit like that, a bit D. H. Lawrence, a bit jazzed on unexamined humanity. When I chatted on camera to a pair of perfectly assembled teen Marines who sat handsomely in their fatigues, rifles pristine and bolt upright at their sides, I was overwhelmed by the salvation that the military offers to boys that may otherwise have fallen through the cracks.

Attacks like this, a crisis like this — hurtful though it is to be accused of what I consider to be the most appalling crimes, to be accused of this is very, very painful and very hurtful. But I am being shown that there are consequences for the rather foolish way that I lived in the past. Though of course, to reiterate due to the nature of the world we live in, of course I deny any allegations of the kind that have been advanced.

I recently researched my family tree, and quite quickly labels of class are smudged into nonsense. For a couple of generations back, it’s all very proletariat in every direction—Bethnal Green bottle-makers and jobs that belong in Dickens. But with the generational doubling that occurs, before too long it’s a muddle of all manner of colliding types: scullery maids and sculptors, officers and gentlemen.

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In secondary immigration, as I await processing, I sit with people for whom I imagine the experience is less of a novelty. To be blunt, non-white people. Mexican and Arabian people, mostly—I assume, I don’t look at their passports; they don’t have them, they’re behind the desks with the border police, equally trapped and obese, behind the counter, often the same color as the people they’re casually harassing. "Who does this notion of nation most suit," I wonder as I sit there, unable to use my phone. Proper rich people don’t encounter these rooms, these borders, these problems. For them the world is as it is when seen from space, without boundary, without limitation, full of fluid possibility and whispering wonder.

Folk codes of pride and togetherness, pride in both senses, honor, and togetherness. Ring-fenced emotion permitted only at three o’clock for ninety minutes in the sanctuary of the stadium. Can we march that pride out of the gates and into the streets? Can we harness it? Direct it? Use it for something less stymied by white lines and whistles, that could pour from the terraces and into the oak-and-leather chambers, the steel-and-glass towers?

I could see the room dividing as I spoke. I could hear the laughter of some and louder still silence of others. I realised that for some people this was regarded as an event with import. The magazine, the sponsors and some of those in attendance saw it as a kind of ceremony that warranted respect. In effect, it is a corporate ritual, an alliance between a media organisation, GQ, and a commercial entity, Hugo Boss. What dawned on me as the night went on is that even in apparently frivolous conditions the establishment asserts control, and won't tolerate having that assertion challenged, even flippantly, by that most beautifully adept tool: comedy.

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