Lionel Shriver is the bestselling author of 15 novels, including the Orange Prize-winner We Need to Talk About Kevin, and a prolific journalist currently with a fortnightly column in Britain’s the Spectator. Her work has been translated into 35 languages.
Her new novel MANIA is published April 11th 2024 (Harper Collins).
First of all, I must say I thought MANIA was phenomenal. It’s darkly funny and uncomfortably accurate about the appetite our society seems to have for ideas we would have firmly rejected just a couple of decades ago, such as the idea that women can be men and men can be women. In the ‘ALT’ (alternative) world of MANIA this destructive derangement takes the form of the ‘Mental Parity Movement’ where discrimination based on intelligence is illegal.
The books contains allusions and similarities to manias that people will recognise such as transgender theory, lockdowns, vaccine mandates, critical race theory, the climate catastrophe cult, affirmative action etc. Which of those specifically inspired you to write MANIA? When did you start tracking them and why?
A social mania is so all-encompassing that I hardly needed to ‘keep track’ as one followed the other. All that’s required is to take a step back and recognise: everyone has gone nuts. Everyone is reciting exactly the same thing over and over again. Everyone thinks exactly the same thing and is consumed by exactly the same thing. Any dissent turns people into crazed animals. The media, academia and Government are all disturbingly in accord. Oh, I see. It must be another social mania. One can take some comfort in ‘this too shall pass’, but it will only pass, apparently, to make way for another mania.
I set the novel starting in an alternative 2011, because it was in 2012 when I identified the first of the recent hysterias took off — the rage for transgenderism — and I wanted to get behind them and fashion my own mania. If anything, the mania I invented most resembles our sudden obsession with pretending to change sex, because virtually overnight it becomes holy writ that you mustn’t ever impugn anyone else’s intelligence, much as virtually overnight transgenderism also became ‘the last great civil rights fight’, and to emit a single discouraging word about ‘trans’ would be guaranteed to destroy your career and reputation. But I am passing larger comment on the lot of them: #MeToo, Black Lives Matter, DEI and Covid, which was itself a mania — the infection fatality rate of the disease especially for anyone but the very old did not merit our draconian response — and which gave birth to sub-manias (the love of lockdowns, the cult of the vaccine, the hysterical faith in masks). The climate ’emergency’ or ‘collapse’ or ‘global boiling’ or whatever we’re calling it now shows every sign of being another one.
We like to think we are ‘modern’, as every population in the present has always fancied themselves, and we like to think we’re too rational and scientific to subscribe to lunacies like phrenology or bloodletting with leeches. But we’re the same as we’ve always been, just as vulnerable to getting seized en masse by goofball ideas as we ever were. ‘Some people are born in the wrong body’ is right in there. One of the passages in MANIA I’m most attached to is the one in which the narrator explains that she used to be confounded by mass atrocities of the past, but now they all made sense: Nazi concentration camps, Pol Pot’s killing fields, Stalin’s show trials, Mao’s cultural revolution. That’s what I concluded after Covid, when in the land of the Magna Carta literally overnight people abdicated every civil right that they had the very day before imagined to be their birthright: free speech, freedom of assembly, a free press, free movement, even the right to leave your own home. Obviously people will believe anything, and for something like National Socialism to triumph in the U.K. it would take Adolf Hitler at the most about three weeks.
You quoted Jung at the beginning of the book. As someone who went on the record saying that the U.K. was suffering from a psychic epidemic during lockdown ‘mania’, I revelled in the book’s biting references to the lockdowns, vaccine mandates and money-printing instigated by “the morons in control of the country”. Do you think society is in the grip of a psychic epidemic?
We’re continually in the grip of one psychic epidemic or another — remember the ‘recovered memory’ scandal of the 1990s (which wasn’t perceived as a scandal until much later), or that same decade’s consuming obsession with pedophilia? What’s changed is the rapidity with which people suddenly embrace one prescribed view, and also the ease with which these mind viruses now spread internationally. So you had South Koreans marching down their streets chanting ‘Black Lives Matter!’ when the country basically doesn’t have any black people. Pre-internet, it would have been less likely that Britain would adopt woke ideologies from America wholesale. Now the infection spreads instantaneously. I am trying to call attention to the dangers of our credulity — or, to get fancy, our susceptibility to mass formation psychosis — as well as to examine what it is about some people that makes them immune. The most heartening aspect of the last 15 years for me has been the emergence of a cadre of independent thinkers who have been willing to risk their careers to say the suddenly unsayable. They give me hope for the future. You’re one of them, Laura.
I think the proof of how scarily spot on MANIA is, is not just how recognisable it is in general, but that some of the things you wrote about have actually manifested. Here are two particular examples. First, it becomes dangerous to get surgery in MANIA’s ALT world, because of the degradation of medical training standards; similarly there have been stories in the past few years about doctors and hospitals refusing care to patients who complain about mixed sex wards or using preferred pronouns. Second, the idea of ‘discrimination’ based on ability being verboten should be ludicrous, but the Russell Group universities recently issued guidance that saying the most qualified person should get the job is a ‘microaggression’. Do you think your dark allegory could actually come to pass? Could we be that stupid as a society?
Yes, the notion that all people are equally intelligent is just a hair away from where we are now, and that’s as I intended. Medical schools in the States are already lowering standards and eliminating test requirements because all they care about is ‘diversity’. Merit is already under attack. It has been under attack in the U.S. for 50 years. Affirmative action was installed in the early 1970s, and I still remember when I first learned about it. I was 16. I was appalled. I couldn’t see how institutionalised unfairness would end well. It hasn’t. For some years now, I’ve been warning the U.K. that if you bring in racial quotas — for that is what ‘affirmative action’ demands — you will never get rid of them. The rot sets in quickly. Nothing gives me the willies like the fact that air traffic control is now consumed with diversity, equity and inclusion. I travel a lot…
You have talked in the past about your religious upbringing. In the novel, Pearson comes from a Jehovah’s Witness family, she has a man’s name, like you, and is prepared to go against the grain. Although her IQ is just 107, how much of you is there in Pearson?
Oh, sure, Pearson (and is that a man’s name? it’s more traditionally been a surname: “The name Pearson is primarily a gender-neutral name of English origin that means Son Of Piers/Peter. Medieval English surname.”) and I have plenty in common. I rejected my Presbyterian upbringing, though Jehovah’s Witnesses are far more oppressive and much scarier to rebel against. Pearson as a kid was dumbfounded (of course, that’s a word that in MANIA will get you cancelled) why her peers raised in the same religious tradition simply went along with a creed that made their lives miserable. Whyever didn’t they declare like Alice, “You’re nothing but a pack of cards!”? The most central thing Pearson and I have in common is a resistance to conformity. I’ve never been one to get with the programme. But being constitutionally odd man out (or woman out) is dangerous right now, and I’m amazed that so far I’ve got away with being so ornery and uncooperative.
Would you prefer to hang out with Pearson or Emory?
Pearson’s best friend Emory is stylish, socially adept and droll. She’s good company, and she’s actually smarter than Pearson, not to mention savvier, since she realises early on that resisting the Mental Parity Movement would thwart her aspiration to become a television commentator. Pearson is more awkward and less social. She’s stubborn, and she won’t bend to orthodoxy; she’s self-destructive. She may not be academically gifted, but à la Orwell she refuses to say that two plus two equals five. I’m afraid if I hung out with Emory she and I would eventually have a catastrophic falling out. Which funnily enough is what happens in the novel…
What do you think about IQ tests? And do you know what your IQ is?
Ha! Interesting question. IQ tests measure something, though I’d be the first to concede there are different forms of intelligence. I only took an IQ test once when I was very young (maybe nine?) I didn’t know I was taking an IQ test at the time. I think the result was something like 125, which I frankly found insulting. (I still do.) See, my older brother tested as a ‘genius,’ meaning his score was at least 145; again, I think it was over 150. So f**k 125. I wanna take that test over again!
Please assume the role of an Oracle and describe how Great Britain ( ALT-Great Britain perhaps) will look in 20 years’ time.
Immigrants and their children will form the majority. You will be something like 30% Muslim. The country will be broke. Public services in future will make today’s seem positively Japanese. Net Zero will have been completely abandoned, but not before doing untold economic damage and leaving the U.K. with insufficient energy sources. There will be blackouts, and typically for Britons everyone will get used to them, just as they once got used to lockdowns. Immigration will start to slow, because there is no reason to pay money to enter another Third World — oh, sorry! developing world — cesspit. It is entirely possible that the pound will have collapsed, on the heels of the American dollar having collapsed, since both countries will have accumulated so much debt that no one will loan them money anymore, so they will both have resorted to money printing, with the usual consequences. Want me to go on? No? Didn’t think so.
For me, a depressing take away from the book is simply that people can be so ‘stupid’, as a catch-all term. As a society, we are subject to destructive hysterical cycles which undermine what we should be capable of. Groupthink (a.k.a. social conformity) has sound evolutionary purposes but in large societies connected in real-time by the internet and social media, appears to be warping into something dangerous. I’ve been rolling this around my mind since the first horrific lockdown. The power of the totalitarian mindset can tear apart even the most important connection between parent and child. Lucy turns on Pearson, just as children have turned against their parents in communist regimes over and over. Big question: what do you think of people?
Some of my best friends are people.
That said, during the last 12 years I’ve been very disappointed in our species. Covid profoundly changed what I think of people, as it also changed my estimation of so-called liberal democracy. As for the latter, there is apparently little difference between our system of government and autocracies, because we collapsed to autocracy all over the West in a heartbeat. And here’s the thing: we don’t know what’s around the corner. It’s not always possible to recognise an irrational social mania when it’s first taking off. We have no idea what barmy idea will take hold next.
Which book have you most enjoyed writing?
Hmm, hard to say just one. But the process of writing the following was especially fun: Kevin: The Mandibles (see: the collapse of the dollar), Should We Stay Or Should We Go, and this one. With each of those, I kept laughing out loud over my keyboard.
What is your proudest and most important achievement? And if that achievement is not your writing, which of your writings are you most proud of?
Oh, the writing is all I’ve achieved, aside from a solid marriage, a great relationship with my younger brother and a passably mediocre tennis game. The novels are of more enduring importance (assuming anything I’ve written is of enduring importance) than the journalism, though I am proud of having stuck my neck out in non-fiction early on in relation to issues that were dangerous to tackle. I was one of the first to oppose lockdowns. I was one of the first to express dubiety about transgenderism. I was virtually the only person in my London social set who backed Brexit, though that was operating on the absurd assumption that the British establishment would take advantage of it; no such luck. As for which books I’m proudest of, I’d probably list all those novels that were the most fun to write. But I would also add so much for that — because while there’s always something to be said for novels that make you laugh, there’s also something to be said for the ones that make you cry.
What is the aspect of your work that people most disagree with and why?
I do not pander. I will not shovel a lot of horseshit about how ‘diversity is our strength’ and I will not use fashionable but idiotic formulations such as ‘people of colour’ (when saying ‘coloured people’ will get you sacked) or ‘LGBTQIA+’. Especially since I fiercely oppose racial quotas and uncontrolled mass immigration, my detractors believe I am a racist. That used to smart, and now does not affect me in the slightest.
Describe your biggest epiphany and how it shaped you?
It wasn’t a single moment, but coming to the conclusion that the IRA were the bad guys all by myself in my early 30s was my first genuine exercise of independent thought. (You would think this conclusion would be self-evident.) I lived for a dozen years in Belfast, and when I arrived I had no opinions about the Troubles whatsoever. So I was a blank slate. In time, I came to loathe Republicans and Nationalists in general. Nationalists were really the originators of identity politics, and having spent all that time in Northern Ireland may be one reason that today’s progressives get my goat. But Democrats in the U.S. were largely all in with the IRA back then, so this independent positioning of mine also broke my allegiance to liberal Democrats in my own country (that would include my parents). Ever since, I have spurned factionalism, and I try to make up my mind about matters one by one and not because ‘my side’ thinks a certain way.
If you could rewind a few of decades, would you choose a new career, or would you do something differently?
Nah. This career has worked out swell for me. Only one point of wistfulness: I used to be heavily involved in visual art, and I wasn’t a half bad ceramic figure sculptor. That side of my life has withered, because there isn’t enough time in the day to pursue visual art and still write journalism and book-length fiction.
If you were an absolute monarch for a day, what law would you introduce?
I would outlaw the use of the word ‘space’ unless you are talking about the night sky.
What is the most interesting thing you have learned in the last year?
That both major American parties have a death wish. If either party ran any other candidate for president other than the one it is in fact running, it would win. That is documented in the polls. This is the freakiest American election in my lifetime, and I am trying really, really hard to simply find it riveting, since otherwise I subside into misanthropic depression. That death wish, alas, appears to extend to the country itself. I am hard-pressed to say whether four more years of Trump or Biden will be more disastrous.
What is next for you?
I’m halfway through the first draft of a novel that takes on mass immigration, which is certain to destroy my career. Oh, well. Might as well go out with a bang!
MANIA is published in the U.K. April 11th 2024.
MANIA: What if calling someone stupid was illegal? In a reality not too distant from our own, where the so-called Mental Parity Movement has taken hold, the worst thing you can call someone is ‘stupid’.
Everyone is equally clever, and discrimination based on intelligence is “the last great civil rights fight”.
Exams and grades are all discarded, and smart phones are rebranded. Children are expelled for saying the S-word and encouraged to report parents for using it. You don’t need a qualification to be a doctor.
Best friends since adolescence, Pearson and Emory find themselves on opposing sides of this new culture war. Radio personality Emory – who has built her career riding the tide of popular thought – makes increasingly hard-line statements while, for her part, Pearson believes the whole thing is ludicrous.
As their friendship fractures, Pearson’s determination to cling onto the “old, bigoted way of thinking” begins to endanger her job, her safety and even her family.
Lionel Shriver turns her piercing gaze on the policing of opinion and intellect, and imagines a world in which intellectual meritocracy is heresy.
This article was first published on Laura’s Substack page the Free Mind. Subscribe here.
Stop Press: Toby Young will be interviewing Lionel Shriver on stage at the Hippodrome at the Free Speech Union’s launch party for her new book on April 15th. You can purchase tickets here – and it’s cheap as chips! £10 for FSU Members and £15 for non-members.
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Greens are just communist pigs in disguise. They want to own you and take total control of your life. They are Cambodian Year Zero people. They are an existential danger to normal people. Fight the bstards wherever you find them
So everyone’s the problem, apart from the greens?
In a word ‘yes.’
The solution would be for them to stop breathing.
Now you’re talking!!
Trigger warning: Eat your Greens!
Soylent?
But may cause vomiting and diarrhea …
James Delingpole’s classic watermelons.
Green on the outside, red on the inside.
CO2 is a gas produced by all human activity from breathing to flying in a Private Jet. So what better way to control every human activity than by controlling the CO2? To get away with this, the Liberal Progressive (Communist) technocrats need a very plausible excuse, and that excuse is Climate Change. —-It appears to most ordinary people plausible that there is dangerous changes to climate going on and ofcourse the Consolidated Media are all over every Flood and Hurricane, so these “ordinary people” remain oblivious to the fact that there is actually no increase in Floods or Hurricanes or any other type of weather event for that matter.
The academics who produced this research paper emitted CO2 in the process. Ban academic research!
No doubt they used personal computers linked to the cloud based computers in giant data centres somewhere. So, yeah, probably quite a heavy carbon footprint, I would think.
Computers manufactured using rare metals in enormous factories. Computers that are designed to become obsolete within a few years.
The reasoning for this anti-gardening argument is so thin and riddled with nonsense that it is crystal clear that it is actually about something else other than the climate. As with EV’s and the electrify everything campaign, it seems to me it is about control, subservience, dependence and surveillance. The last thing any of these eco-green exponents want is people being independent, resilient, self sufficient and free thinking.
With my garden of fruit and veg, my oil tank capable of holding a year’s worth of oil for the boiler, my wood burner and a full log store, I seem to be the nightmare vision for these eco-control freaks.
But hey don’t get caught out Steve. ————Remember to register any chickens mate. Can’t have you eating some non government approved fried eggs on your roll.
One day they will come for your chickens!
Then they came for the chickens. But I was not a chicken so I said nothing
I didn’t realise you made my exact point lol
How can they control the food supply if you keep on growing your own. Just stop doing it and behave.
And if you have more than on Chicken, don’t forget to register it. Though it was funny hearing about people registering their local garden birds etc.
But I have 2 budgerigars … will I be put in prison for years (like Christian people silently praying in the street) for not registering them?
Hear, hear … more power to you!!
Someone posted this example of the earth’s atmosphere quite recently here on the sceptic and well done them!
I’ve kept it on my phone ready for any carbon bleaters who start on about the deadly World ending gas
This image is failing to load on my laptop
Sorry about that varmint, I can’t find another link to it but there are many pye charts on the net showing the painfully small amounts of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere
Brilliant! Thank you.
See also:
https://co2coalition.org/media/why-climate-change-is-not-an-emergency/
There wasn’t much danger of overusing potable water in the garden with the amount of rain we had this growing season.
Same here. I hardly used any on my allotment this year! I almost never use any around my house, as there are a couple of water butts that capture rainfall from a garage roof.
I wonder how much funding they receive to produce such crap and from whom
UK100 seems to pop up a lot these days.
WEF one of the main culprits … e.g. ‘Farmer’ Bill Gates
More eco-stupidity. Much is talked about and much money made using forest products for fuelling power stations such as our Drax by wood pellets – renewables – as the CO2 emitted is magically different from that emitted by combustion of oil and gas, because those trees not yet cut down ‘sink’ CO2 in photosynthesis of cellulose.
Less is talked about the role of trees in sinking and emitting methane (CH4). This certainly happens when they fall and anaerobically decompose. It also happens when they are harvested. 20% of the total mass – the commercially unviable branches and foliage or brash – is raked into rows to decay and release nutrients for the next crop rotation. And this process happens in all soils, not just urban compost heaps.
There are papers on this subject such as https://nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/nph.15624 They pontificate about processes or rather limited application ‘models’ run in the comfort of their offices. These academic professtitutes have no concept of proportionality. Their conclusion is predictable “Until additional integrative empirical studies are conducted, and process-based models are developed and tested, the contribution of forests to global CH4 dynamics will remain poorly resolved.” a call for more money for papers, please.
It was also used as a track for when the Harvester comes and collects the wood piles collected by a machine, or one man bands with a Saw. I remember helping someone do that in the valleys. Speaking of keeping you fit! You have your Saw, Petrol etc and you can’t always park near the trees that you are to fell, so you’d hike with all that kit before you even started. It would help if you had a stacker while you were working. Either way, very physical but paid well.
You are absolutely right about it being very physical. Keeps one fit without needing a gym subs! There is a move towards chipping the brash mats that have been travelled over by the forwarder ( collects bars, rods and poles ), on site. The profit is small and the use for fuel wood biomass ensures the CO2 is released quicker than waiting for it to decompose.
Is it not the case that coal is just dead trees that have been there a long time?
Hey, why don’t we dig a bit of coal out of the ground and burn it? Novel idea, I know but we have to be innovative and at the cutting edge to tackle this ‘crisis’
First they came for the chickens..
We should stop eating ‘Greens’ and save the planet.
Or start eating the greens?!
Indigestible. I remember a menu that said Vegetarian Soup and when there were screams coming from the kitchen, just assumed they were throwing another vegetarian into the pot. Long slow cooking might render them into a good stock but I expect the meat is a bit stringy
The key sentence is:
“cities can offset this risk by centralising compost operations for professional management”.
The entire green agenda is one giant rent-seeking scam, designed to continue the massive transfer of wealth to the already rich.
The muesli knitters are the expendable dupes who form the public face of the project.
Scratch the surface and you will always find land speculation underneath.
Think of all those allotments that can be built on once the composting operation gets centralised and the allotmenteers have to pay someone to take away their organic wastes.
… and then have to buy it back in plastic sacks …
“Sending food aid to famine-stricken countries avoids the more fundamental problem of population growth, Sir David Attenborough has said, as he called for more debate about population control.
The renowned broadcaster told the Daily Telegraph the world was “heading for disaster”, and without action the “natural world will do something”.
“What are all these famines in Ethiopia? What are they about?” he said. “They’re about too many people for too little land. That’s what it’s about. And we are blinding ourselves. We say, get the United Nations to send them bags of flour. That’s barmy.”
He admitted the issues had huge sensitivities, but insisted it was important to “just keep on about it”.
From the link provided by Chris to The Guardian article above.
Nice bloke this Attenbore.
It is rather perplexing that all these people who say there are too many people on the planet, never seem to volunteer to leave. Perhaps Sir David as he is well beyond average life expectancy should be a little more public spirited, shuffle off and take his CO2 with him.
As it happens, the perma-famines in East Africa, have more to do with political instability than anything else. Look into what happened to the aid that came from ‘Live Aid’. We have the technology and the resources to irrigate Ethiopia and turn it into a wonderous land of green and bounty, but we’d rather have the World Bank play games with them to stop them developing.
I was rather hoping that the green community would become a death cult and they would commit suicide en masse. This would have tremendous benefits for us normies: the population of the planet would be substantially reduced and we wouldn’t have to listen to lectures from idiots about climate change. We could just get on with enjoying our lives in peace
“Population Control” ———-By who and how? ——Population growth is highest in the poorest countries. Once poor people come out of poverty, they get better educated, they live organised lives, and population growth falls to levels seen in the wealthy west. –But absurd climate policies that coerce poor people into not using the fuels (fossil fuels) that would bring them out of this eternal poverty are preventing poor countries developing their economies so their people can prosper.——-Climate policies like Sustainable Development and Net Zero are wholly supported by people like David Attenborough. Instead of letting people develop and prosper he prefers some method of “population control”. —-The best method is Prosperity and that can only come by using the same fuels as we in the wealthy wet did. —-Coal Oil and Gas.
Heard some of Starmer’s speech on the radio, he mentioned Carbon Capture twice!
Yep they know that if they are going to try and use more and more wind that they will need gas as the 100% backup so they have had to add carbon capture into the mix. Energy Policy just gets more and more absurd as each day goes by. It is layers and layers of clutter with more layers added to the clutter to ty and fix the clutter below
Oh, he just reads a script written for him by the BBC, according to the man himself. Didn’t you know? Doesn’t even take responsibility for his what he says. Begs the question, why the gong?
As a longterm lover of making my own compost and feeling personal responsibility for my precious worms, I feel shocked at my wanton disregard for the greater good of humanity. It makes much more sense getting rid of all that garden waste to my friendly central composting operations. Do I drive, or will my waste greenery be collected in special bins by big lorries? Once the compost is centrally made, will it be nicely packed in (compostable) plastic bags and delivered back, or will I have to take public transport to buy back my own garden waste? I’m sure they will be careful to monitor what other people add to my compost – I am very particular.
As we used to say in school,I may be Irish but I’m not green.
I make my own compost too, Ardanearg, every day, sometimes twice a day, usually in the bathroom
and it is magically transported through the sewage system to our local ‘processing plant’ ie Mogden Lane Sewage Farm
I thought organic, local (saves carbon miles), non-industrial food production was what would save the planet. Now it’s the opposite.
Activists are never happy. If their main issue is addressed and resolved, they must immediately extend the parameters, find a new anxiety to fill their otherwise empty, dull lives.
I don’t know much about allotments, but I didn’t realise so many were plumbed in or had wells. In my limited experience rainwater was collected in barrels.
Groundwater wells replenish from rainfall and also of course the water from them the allotment keepers use to irrigate will soak back into the water table.
We need to build lunatic asylums.
So much for dig for victory!
It’s tempting to see this as the opening salvo in a war against self-sufficiency, but I suspect it’s just the usual ‘underwater dressage emits more/less carbon than whistling the Marseillaise backwards with a paper bag over your head’ story. Easy for an academic team to churn out meaningless figures – just get a research assistant to make some stuff up, no-one is ever going to check your assumptions – and watch the grant money roll in. Even better, press coverage is guaranteed upon publication.
It just gets more and more desperate.
It’s time to end this fiasco – either at the ballot box or without.
It is a very necessary part of creating food shortages and starvation. Closing farms and destroying crops livestock will not do it by itself. Bill Gates will also be able to sell his lab grown meat and GMO products which will justify his investments.
Mmmm, every autumn trees and shrubs shed their leaves to produce a naturally occurring compost to fertilise the ground beneath their canopy. Perhaps all trees should be cut down to prevent them shedding their leaves and producing ‘greenhouse’ gasses.
Don’t give them any ideas!
Gates et al don’t want us eating fresh, healthy food just his manufactured pap…
There’s de-humanising, and there’s dehumanising. Not trying to be a smart arse but that’s what’s going on. That’s what we’re up against. These people are doing everything they can to wipe us out.
I sometimes like to tease organic gardeners who adopt a position of moral superiority that decomposition of organic matter in soil is one of the largest natural sources of CO2 in the atmosphere
Interestingly the worst composted material available is in the bags labelled “peat free compost”. All of my recent purchased bags, except one which was composted horse manure (straw and whatever), contained much not composted at all twigs, sticks, and general debris from “green” alleged recycling. To compost properly the material needs large quantities of water, turning very regularly and sufficient nitrogen. I have experience of this as I used to have an organic farm and made many, many tons of properly composted material every year (which is the point of organic agriculture). This took a lot of work, a great deal of collected rainwater, and heavy machinery. The results were excellent, unlike this “stuff” sold as compost!