The Journey not the arrival matters-the 101st birthday of rebel and socialist, Harry Leslie Smith.

Hey Dad:

It's your birthday- today. 101 years have passed since you were born to poor working-class folk in a Barnsley slum. Five years ago last November, at the age of 95, you died raging against the dying of the light. For me- and everyone else who still lives many bad things to society or ourselves have transpired, since you died. I got cancer, the bad sort, but not bad enough to kill me, yet. The world fell into a plague like the one that right after WW1 befell the world- five years before your birth. Tens of millions have died, so far from this modern pandemic which still smoulders. Society is much changed because the entitled saw this time of plague as their moment to make things more authoritarian and economically harsh for the many.

There is a housing crisis, cost of living crisis and climate emergency crisis, which has unleashed misery on anyone not part of the top income earning class. Politics and politicians can't save us or offer hope as the rot is too deep in government. Besides, official left-wing opposition doesn't have the stomach to put up a 1930s resistance to fascism.

War in Ukraine broke out that will not find peace. Gaza was put to the sword with a medieval barbarity that still has not reached satiety. The refugee crisis is worse now than it has ever been in modern history. It is a shit show that I am glad you missed.

For most, you are a vague memory now, forgotten by publishers, journalists, trade unions and naturally-perhaps even thankfully- politicians.

You still are remembered by the ones caught between capitalism's millstones who are ground down into raw profit for the 1%.

Even if I wanted to, I can't forget you. You sit impatiently in the chair of my consciousness and urge me to survive the calamities of my health and finances. You were of good cheer through most of your life because, despite the harshness of your beginnings, you were able to love and be loved in return.

In your brilliant blaze across British political society in your last years; it frustrated many influential people that you couldn’t be marketed as a sentimental treacle for a bygone age, where people still had patriotism for their country. You dispelled that nonsense in the essay you wrote in 2014 for Remembrance Sunday. In that piece, you proudly and defiantly stated you refused to wear a poppy to whitewash Britain’s wars of aggression in Afghanistan and Iraq. It was a superb essay, but it also meant you were unmarketable to a nation addicted to nostalgia for a non-existent past redolent in tunes of glory.

There is only a whispered breath between life and death. You knew it, Mum knew it, and so did my brother Peter. Now, I know it because cancer and the disease growing in my lungs stole from me the certainty of a long and healthy life. We are brief residents to existence and then gone.

There are far greater things to mourn than my diminished life expectancy. Society, at this moment, is a busted flush. We are walking through fires similar to what your generation experienced in the 1930s and 1940s. But this time ordinary people won't be triumphant; against the greed of the few. There will be no Welfare State, no public healthcare and no democracy. Those aspirations have faded to black.

The longer you lived, the more your early past seemed to repeat itself. “Intolerance, narcissism, and greed will be written at the entrance to the tomb of the early decades of the 21st century.” You were becoming increasingly impatient with politicians and the news media's indifference to poverty, racism, economics and inequality. “The suffering of the ordinary is just a collection of buzz words to get well-off people elected to parliament.” You were pissed off and started to feel that nothing we had done since Peter died had altered anything for either good or bad.

But everything done at the end of your life, with me, had a purpose. It redeemed us from our grief. It returned us to a state of joy and laughter despite the deadly seriousness of your Last Stand. It was worth the bloody try.

I will drink tonight to your memory. I will give thanks, you were my dad because having you and Mum as parents was the only lottery worth winning.

In my memory, I will place you today where you were happiest-Hamburg 1947. You are 24, the world is at peace, and it is summer. You are in a canoe with your lover, who will become your wife and, much later on- my mother. Your lover's hand trails in the water of the Alster. You are shirtless, ploughing an oar gently into the cool water while quoting from the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.

On the shore is your picnic lunch liberated from the RAF's officer's mess, which includes a bottle of wine chilling in an ice bucket. The future awaits you, and you are not afraid. You will plunge into it and swim its beautiful rough currents until the tide drags you under in 2018, and join the dead from your life on the shores of history. As Peter said at the end of his short life, "It was a fucking blast." I will love you until the darkness comes for me too, John.

Thanks for reading and supporting my substack. It’s an SOS because the end of the month approaches and I am short on rent. Your support keeps me housed and also allows me to preserve the legacy of Harry Leslie Smith. A yearly subscriptions will cover much of next month’s rent. Your subscriptions are so important to my personal survival because like so many others who struggle to keep afloat, my survival is a precarious daily undertaking. The fight to keep going was made worse- thanks to getting cancer along with lung disease and other co- morbidities which makes life more difficult to combat in these cost of living crisis times. So if you can join with a paid subscription which is just 3.50 a month or a yearly subscription or a gift subscription. I promise the content is good, relevant and thoughtful. Take Care, John