Nigel Mountford

A Buddhist man at the Vagina Museum

I paid my first visit to the Vagina Museum two days ago. It is a wonderful museum with brilliant staff, and it’s changing the world. I have a quasi-medical background with particular interest in psychiatry, medicines, pain, ophthamology and…

Buddhism, Zionism, Judaism, Michaelism

J’accuse Metropolitan Thames Valley (MTV)

Alea iacta est, or a history of World War Three

When the history of World War Three is written, it will record the opening shot as ringing out on Christmas Day in 1979 when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. The 1970s were a grim time for the Great Powers. The Soviet Union was stagnant, its…

Capita ergo evolvit

One of the previous Labour Government’s worst decisions was to give a French IT company called Atos a contract to perform Work Capability Assessments on people claiming state benefits due to illness or disability. Atos isn’t good at its core business…

The cancer of hatred: a man who wants autistic people dead

The internet is replete with hatred. Every form of hatred. Homophobia, misogyny, antisemitism, Islamophobia, racism of every form. But even I am taken aback by this one. There is a YouTube account called Kill the autistic. He has produce a video…

A Mitra’s Praises to the Venerable Sangharakshita

Adapted from Pingiya’s Praises of the Way to the Beyond We call him Bhante. Sangharakshita, Awake, dissolving error, with total clarity. Knowing the path to its ends, he has gone beyond most of the states of being and of becoming. He has no inner…

Eis sinite parvulos, or the Secret Life of a Hunter

Oh how I remember that fateful day. It was Summer 1997 and London was baking in the sunshine. I was roasting indoors, halfway through a severe 3-year bout of depression and agoraphobia. And I was drunk on a very cheap gassy cider, that was so foul it…

Pro patria mori: the bitterest betrayal

Twenty-five years ago, I was a clerk at the Ministry of Defence (MOD).I worked for Defence Medical Services, amid a colourful coterie of characters. My favourite was a retired major who was about to retire from being a Retired Officer (don’t ask),…

Per ardua ad astra: in defence of ‘Bomber’ Harris

Hot on the heels of dispatching the left-wing myths around the Falklands, despite being a man of the Left myself, I now turn to the issue of Marshal of the Royal Air Force Sir Arthur Harris. I was involved in a discussion online in which a man who…

Let us rejoice at that – my Falklands War heresy

As I discussed in my political testament, I am a man of the centre-Left who spent some years on the revolutionary Left, and a brief period in the Conservative Party as an adolescent. I was very active in the anti-war movement in 1990-91 and would…

Jordan Nichols – sit over there next to Captain Owen

I am back after having gone mad again, with depression. And still I live in fear of mania even though my bipolar diagnosis has been overturned – more on that story later. What brings me here today is a landmark in poetry, and a lamentation that I am,…

Pronouncing Amitabha, Bodhisattva, Avalokitesvara, Mahasthamaprapta, Mahayana

Nigel Mountford

Strange Meeting by Wilfred Owen read by Nigel Mountford

Nigel Mountford

Et tu pygmeo, or the one-sided battle between Gove and Baldrick

Actor Sir Tony Robinson has criticised unfit-for-purpose education secretary Michael Gove for his infantile nonsense about World War I. In summary, Gove claimed that left wing academics use fictional accounts of World War I such as Blackadder Goes…

White Tara For Tam

This is the mantra to White Tara, praying for long life, good health and wisdom for my friend Kerry's husband Tam, who is very ill.

The Clutha tragedy: In Memoriam John McGarrigle

In a media age, every disaster has an image that becomes iconic of the grief of the bereaved. For last Friday night’s tragedy in Glasgow, when a police helicopter crashed into a packed pub, that image was of young John McGarrigle, holding up his…

Arma virumque cano: a gun compromise for the USA

I was born and raised in the UK. When I was a child, my country had not had a gun massacre. Then in 1987, Michael Ryan murdered 16 people in Hungerford, and semi-automatic rifles were banned. In 1996, Thomas Hamilton murdered 16 children and their…

The Lord Mayor of Peckham is dead. Requiescat in Pace.

Tony Gallagher is dead. He was the most important human who ever lived. He was the centre of the universe. Those last two were true in his head, as the same facts are true of me in my head and of you in your head. Tony emerged from a woman’s womb.…

For reason in revolt now thunders, or Blair is not a monster

My political path has been long and has twisted and turned like a twisty-turny thing. My earliest memory of saying something political was in the 1983 election when I was 10, amusing my older sisters’ friends with precocious anti-Tory remarks. This,…