I’m imagining these two eventually meeting face-to-face some years from now, in a bunker in the Golan Heights. Two old Dissensus comrades who always had each other’s backs when one of them was under attack from k-punk, hmlt, sufi or zhao.
Craner finally meets the generously-hootered Hebrew princess of his dreams over a kosher sharing platter and bottle of prosecco in the Golders Green branch of Zizzi. Having adopted the faith upon marrying her, getting the old snippy-snippy and moving to Tel Aviv, his encyclopaedic knowledge of Middle Eastern politics leads inexorably to a career in intelligence and security, until he finds himself, in his middle years, heading up a Mossad counter-terrorism unit.
Meanwhile Vimothy’s disgust with the dying, decadent, liberal West starts a trajectory that can only end in inevitable radicalization, and he eventually finds his calling in Syria: a postmodern Lawrence of Arabia, Mancunian vowels still audible beneath his fluent Arabic, leading a breakaway Islamo-Spenglerist jihadi brigade regarded as insanely fanatical and violent even by Daesh and Tahrir al-Sham.
The only question is who will have captured whom.