TRICKSTER FINDS GOD

If Sebastian from Brideshead Revisited had woken up in the 21st Century with a one hundred year hangover he might have found himself as out of place with modern Western society as James Angelos, a troll provocateur of the highest order and one who had amassed more sin than he had time to confess. Being born in an age you don't feel you belong is a genuine dilemma for those with the ability to articulate this subtle disorder, for it isn't typically something diagnosed by conventional health care professionals or psychiatrists.

James knew he was born in the wrong century from an early age as he instinctively hated ugly contemporary things and could often be found brazenly pointing at random strangers' ill fitting clothes or crying at the sound of manufactured pop music that his eldest brother, Giles, often played which he was convinced he did simply to spite him. His parents found his fragile aesthetic sensibility impossible to understand as the only thing that appeared to soothe their youngest son's troubled soul was beauty. And not just any humdrum definition of beauty as determined by the left wing "communist" academics James later came to despise at his university but his very own idiosyncratically tailored tour of the most escastic beauty he could find in existence.

"I am simply the Marco Polo of divine beauty and you're just going to have to deal with it, darling," he once told his 'bolshevik' tutor Mr Parkinson after he complained that James's essay on Louis XIV was borderline fetishitic rather than truly historical. "You just hate anyone celebrating anything with any sense of genuine admiration for the subject unless its your beloved psychopathic idol, Karl Marx."

Eventually, after being kicked out of university for causing a mass triggering event amongst his peers in the debating society, James suddenly found himself an outcast and one with outrageously expensive taste. How would he possibly maintain his addiction to beauty with no money outside of the slow dripping tap of funds allowed from his relatively meagre trust fund?

The real trouble for James however was that his love of beauty flew in the face of the "progressive" modern world and was even considered by some to be positively fascistic.

"In this age of complete moral and cultural degradation of our society and culture I believe much like Doestoyevsky's Prince Mishkin that 'beauty will save the world'."

Having embraced this pursuit of beauty to such an absolute degree, James found himself increasingly shunned. Perceived as anti-progressive and a potentially dangerous influence on others easily persuaded by his aesthetic philosophy, James found there were few places that would entertain his rarefied taste outside of private underground niche events and the occasional unwokefied music performances - Bach's B Minor Mass, Beethoven's Missa Solemnis, Faure's Requiem or Mahler's 8th Symphony, were just a few of the concerts he'd recently attended over the past year that brought salve to his tender soul.

A tender soul protected by a protective, spiky personality.

In an age where people were so easily offended, it didn't take much for James to move up through the ranks of social media celebrity status as a professional troll. His mere existence as an unapologetic celebrant of beauty was seemingly enough to incite fury amongst his legions of haters. James had the uncanny ability to press the right buttons to annoy anyone who firmly believed that the West was utterly toxic and solely responsible for all the injustices in the world. But the sad reality was that for James it was just too easy to provoke his enemies, much like shooting fish in a barrel and not particularly exotic or interesting fish at that.

"I'd have more luck wrestling an anorexic sumo."

These 'flakes' whom he refused to associate with snow were so conceptually limp and devoid of beauty that he couldn't sustain any great interest in continually warring with them, although that didn't stop them routinely coming for him like an army of woke zombies.

Employed to write a shock column for a polemical magazine that wasn't afraid to take on law suits brought against them, James briefly found his calling writing a social diary about being a non millennnial millenial.

"We live in a victim economy. Or you might call them the victim olympics. Anyone who can weaponise their own victimhood for money will do it. Though they won't say its for money. they'll say it for virtue. But I can see through all their duplicitous fuckery. It's my super power."

When you're a human firework like James Angelos, you inevitably reach a point of no return after you've exploded in the night sky in a blaze of glory and fallen back down to earth landing in the wet, soggy grass. James couldn't help but feel like an exploded firework after his whole firebrand controversy reached it apex and he had every social media account of his cancelled and found even banks would no longer do any business with him.

"At such times, when the world has turned its back on you, it forces you to search for something with greater meaning that can protect you."

James, like Sebastian Flyte, found his protection in God though not in a private family chapel at Brideshead but in Westminster Cathedral where he said a prayer to the holy father hoping that his divine providence would bring salvation not just upon his soul, but on the entire western world.

How could someone who'd been so openly and wantonly provocative be simultaneously so sympathetic to the divine? This was the paradox that frightened his critics and threatened his avowed enemies.

"The truth is, a love of beauty without God can invite decadence. But a love of God will protect all beautiful things from such human fallibility," he'd written recently in his journal.

Doubling down on God was the easiest way to protect James for all future battles against those who he believed endorsed ugliness as an ideology both political and cultural.

As he made the sign of the cross, he felt truly sanctified and leaving Westminster Cathedral he popped his air pods into his ears and wandered into the London Babylon protected by Bach's "Mach Dich Mein Herze" from St Matthew Passion.