Postcard from Montenegro

Seeing that my country, the UK, has become one where a school teacher is forced to apologise for saying “Good afternoon, girls” to a class of girls, a boy accidentally scuffing a Koran necessitates the need for a press conference involving the police and local ‘faith leaders’, and citizens have their bank accounts closed if their views happen not to align with left-wing dogma, I figure it’s time to go abroad again, this time to Montenegro, one of the seven countries formerly known as Yugoslavia (six, if you don’t count Kosovo).

In late July 2023, I go for one week, accompanied by a friend and David Szalay’s magnificent book All That Man Is. The weather is hot and sunny (in summer, in Southern Europe, who knew?) and we stay in the slice-of-heaven Old Town in a nice Airbnb. I fly with easyJet into Tivat airport from Gatwick, my friend from elsewhere.

To speedily get the covid crap out of the way first: in terms of finger-wagging signage I see only the very occasional faded sticker on shop doors to act as a reminder of the pandemic of tyranny. At the airport, which is chaotic and hopelessly inadequate for its current passenger numbers, there is still, risibly, a sign saying ‘Social distancing in effect – 2 metres’, as scores of travellers go cheek by jowl in the minuscule check-in space. 

With masks, the tiny number I see are all on the very few Muslim women around. Some are in the full niqab, some have a burqa on along with a stupid blue face mask. I suppose when your life has always been run by senseless authoritarian brutes, a little bit more senseless authoritarianism doesn’t matter; when you’ve been dehumanised for decades, a little bit more dehumanisation doesn’t mean much. Just spare a thought for the poor women forced to walk around in scorching heat in those ghastly garbs. Funnily enough, most feminists tend to be rather quiet about this living torture being inflicted on these females.

The vast majority of women in Budva are not dressed like this. Some are barely dressed at all. And I’d say they are the most stunningly gorgeous women I’ve ever seen. The standard look appears to be: long hair, pretty face, olive skin, slim build, big boobs. No breast-binders here. If their school teacher told them they could be men if they wanted to, they’d probably look at them as if they were from Mars (or the US, or Canada, or New Zealand, or Australia – same difference nowadays). You can see why the region’s birth rate never collapsed, despite their ancestors’ hopes and dreams being crushed by the stamping boot of state socialism…

On the beaches, the bikini-clad beauties pose for one another. For five minutes, one will take pictures of her pouting friend by the sea. Then they’ll look through the pics. Then for another five minutes, the model will turn photographer and take snaps of her friend. Then they’ll look at the pics again. Then there’ll be another swap and another five-minute session, then a pause, then more shooting, then more, then more. Sessions can easily go on for 30 minutes. I’ve been told by Western liberals that photographic imagery of attractive women is a sign of the repressive patriarchy (or something). Someone forgot to tell the girls.

Talking of imagery of attractive women, in Montenegrin newsagents you’ll still see puzzle magazines adorned by sexy ladies in their underwear; elsewhere there’s a Red Bull fairground punchbag game with girls showing their knickers; a shop front with a huge photo of a swimwear model in a bikini with pokey nipples; pretty girls standing outside restaurants trying to lure you in. In the UK, this sort of thing has disappeared. Ideology has flushed out business sense and natural impulses. That particular avenue of pleasure has been closed off, as Basil Fawlty might have put it.

Meanwhile, the boys on the beaches climb up ever higher rocks and throw themselves off ever more spectacularly, perhaps a double backward somersault to impress the watching girls. One time, a girl climbs up the rock to try and emulate them. She stands there for literally half an hour, too nervous to jump, unable to come down and unwilling to take the plunge. Finally, amid much cheering and clapping, she jumps into the sea. It’s almost like males and females are different.

Yep, here the boys are boys and the girls are girls. Nowhere is that more brought home by a trip to the beach, if you watch both the bodies and the behaviour. (Meanwhile in reality-denying Britain, sexual terrorists Stonewall are paid a shedload of money by our major banks and Regent Street looks like a woke version of Triumph Of The Will. Meanwhile in the Netherlands, a bloke wins the country’s premier beauty contest.)

Getting to some of these Budva beaches can be challenging. There is no literal translation of the words ‘health’ and ‘safety’ in the Montenegrin language. Or at least that’s the impression you get. To go from one part of Mogren beach to the other, you go into a cave and are faced with a small inlet to cross. On my first encounter with it, there is a rickety wooden plank that wobbles as you rush across the three-metre gap. Two days later, this has been replaced by what appears to be a permanent iron structure – which is even worse! There are huge gaps between the rungs that spell a probable fall and great pain, possibly testicular, to go with it. I end up wading through the water. 

After we’ve taken a boat to Ploce beach we disembark on a plastic floating ramp that threatens to send the less sure-footed into the sea. It reminds me of It’s A Knockout (“And the big German’s plunged into the drink!”). But the boat voyage has been an exciting one. That’s because I think I’ve recognised a famous person I adore. I think it’s podcaster/life coach/musician/intellectual Zuby sitting a few rows back from us. I steal a few more looks. I’m now sure of it. Facial hair. Handsome. Toned. Cool clobber, cool demeanour. I say to my friend: “Google ‘Zuby Montenegro’ on your phone.” He does so. Not only do images come up that look exactly like our boat man (and if you’re thinking at this point I’m r*cist for this, get stuffed) but there is a recent tweet of Zuby sitting on stairs presumably in Budva Old Town with the caption ‘Montenegro vibes’. Surely it’s him! I have to talk to him.

Shortly after we disembark and get a little further away from the ear-splitting techno music that is entertaining the patrons of the foam party in the pool next to the dock (it’s a classy place), I take my chance.

“'Scuse me mate, can I ask – are you Zuby?”

“Who’s that?” he asks.

Suddenly wrong-footed, I manage to utter: “He’s, er, an athlete… he’s on the internet.” I’m awful with famous people.

“Not me,” he says.

“Are you sure? You’re not… English, or anything?” I’m getting worse.

He shakes his head, doesn’t look annoyed, possibly only confused, and ambles away. But I think he’s lying. Why would he admit to being Zuby if he was Zuby? He’s going to deny it. He wants a peaceful break. I go back to my mate: “Well, he denied it, but I’m sure it’s him, it’s got to be him. Damn, I wish I’d said stuff to him like ‘I think you’re great, I agree with everything you say’, then maybe he would have owned up.” My friend nods sagely. 

A couple of hours later a more in-depth Google search reveals that Zuby is in London for a gig he’s playing that night.

Later in the week I’m sitting enjoying the sun and sights on what they call Hawaii (Sveti Nikola Island) when a text pops up on my phone. It’s from ‘NHS No-Reply’ and says:

From Tues 1 Aug 2023 due to the RPZ (Residents’ Parking Zone) currently being introduced in Oldfield Park we are closing the car park at Oldfield Park Surgery to patients

A rude interruption from home. The green bureaucrats continuing their mission. Making people’s lives a bit worse in order to ‘save the planet’. Just 157 out of the 382 people (41%) who responded to the RPZ survey supported or partially supported it but the council pushed ahead with it anyway, in order to reduce pollution and ‘follow the Journey to Net Zero plan’ ('15-minute cities’). The wokery and borderline malevolence is not a surprise. Over the last month or so, Bath council’s tweets have extolled the virtues of Pride, Windrush and the covid jab for children.

This is why it was so vital for me to escape the suffocating psychodrama that is modern Britain. In our apartment I check my podcasts app and it feels fitting that the weak Wi-Fi means that the podcasts struggle to download. They have no place in Montenegro. Spiked’s ‘The rise of heatwave hysteria’, The Spectator’s ‘Road rage: the great motorist rebellion has begun’, the New Culture Forum’s ‘Sharia in Soho?’, The Rubin Report’s ‘Exposing why even red states’ schools are no longer safe’, Planet Normal’s ‘A heat storm in a teacup’ , The Weekly Sceptic’s ‘Decline of the West (End)’ – they all feel like dispatches from madcap lands where things have gone haywire. Escaping to anywhere is vital, it just happened to be this country this time.

Montenegro surely is different, though. But I have not, and do not intend to, do in-depth research on the country’s current political and social situation. A brief Google search does reveal to me that they have a 37-year-old prime minister, Dritan Abazovic, who heads a party called United Reform Action which is ‘green, socially liberal and pro-European’, which sounds hideous, so perhaps the politicians and institutions here are as cracked and dysfunctional as ours are. It’s the little random things I see around Budva, though, that may give a cannier view:

A little girl falls in the street and cries. I expect her mother to offer her comfort. Instead, she angrily reprimands her daughter for falling. No affirmation there. 

The DJ Gilles Peterson is in the Old Town speaking on a panel. It consists of four white men. (I curse myself for even noticing this – ID politics damages the minds of even those who do not embrace it.) 

‘No-vax’ Djokovic advertises watches on billboards. Haven’t seen that in Britain!

At a restaurant we eat in, the back of my friend’s chair is inches away from a big step down. As I say, health and safety isn't much of a thing here. And taxis routinely rip you off.

Advertising has only white people. Contrast this to the UK where it’s, what, about half-white, despite whites still making up 86% of the population, which feels like the propaganda-isation of society, deliberate subversion that twists reality for ideological ends, just as the Pride stuff does, like the lockdown madness did. You don’t get a sense of that here in the Balkans, although I’m sure the nudgers will be working their ways. There’s more independence. People still largely use cash, for example. No banks cancelling you for your opinions here.

Sure, I expect Montenegro will one day be ruined by the continued leakage of toxic US identity politics worldwide (maybe they’ll change its name, what with its problematic last five letters!), and be flattened by morose EU technocracy, but for now it appears to retain a certain raw spirit, a certain resistance to the West’s woebegone ways. And I’ll raise a Niksicko beer to that.

If you enjoyed this article, please check out my postcards from Latvia, Slovenia, Austria/Slovakia and Luxembourg, all written during the evil madness of 2020 and 2021, and all also up at the Daily Sceptic.