It’s hard to find words to describe my feelings upon reading the story of the British teacher Gillian Gibbons, who is today facing 40 lashes and/or imprisonment in the Sudan for allowing her class of six and seven year old pupils to name a teddy bear, Mohammed.
I’ve always been a keen student of history, it’s been my hobby for many years now and I have spent more money on obscure history books than I care to reckon. A large part of the fascination that history holds is that through the ages, you see exactly the same events repeated over and over…ok, the time, the place, the characters and the detail changes, but the same themes are repeated continually.
I was appalled to hear that injured war veterans, some of whom had suffered lost limbs and severe burns, were heckled and jeered as they partook of their once weekly hydrotherapy sessions at Leatherhead public baths in Surrey. Apparently, one lane of the baths was specially roped off for the veterans use and as they went through their rehabilitative routines, several members of the public shamed themselves and their town, by raising an outcry against said veterans.
Today I spent a freezing cold, but fascinating day out at Old Sarum in Wiltshire. Old Sarum is a giant earthworks and hill fort complex first created by Iron Age people in around 500BC. Subsequent occupiers included the Saxons, the Romans, the Normans and at its apogee, King Henry the II. Whilst standing there in the midst of the wide plains of Wiltshire, surveying the scene before me, I couldn’t help but be aware though, that for all the power and grandeur of its former occupants, time had reduced the site and its previous owners to naught.
Now I like to think of myself as a fairly level headed kind of chap, very logical and not given to flights of fancy, but the relentless drip of Government and Council incompetence and insanity has lead me to a fairly startling conclusion; the powers that be, have no less a plan than the total destruction of our great nation!
How do I come to this colossal presumption?
Before bringing you an example of latest manifestation of the lunacy that is running rampant within our country, I must first ask you whether you have noticed the increasing habit within all Councils of systematically and savagely pruning mature trees; reducing them in a trice to mere parodies of their former selves?
Well, in answer to that question; in spite of massive competition from many other Councils, I believe that they may indeed be the stupidest and most incompetent Council in the land.
Why?
Because after reading about the case of Fran Lyon 22 of Hexam, Northumberland, all the evidence proves this beyond all reasonable doubt!
This weekend, whilst enjoying a rare moment of repose on the sofa, circumstance had it that an episode of the ITV series Heartbeat appeared on the television; and having previously challenged a bottle of post dinner Pinot Grigio to a contest…and having lost, I sat back sleepily to enjoy the show.
Watching this nostalgic vignette of times past, I couldn’t help but reflect that even right up to my own pre-teen years, this was a fairly accurate portrayal of how policemen and policing used to be; I also started wondering as to how things had got so bad now, that the opposite picture of the Police is now true.
Ah…democracy…that magical panacea for the worlds ills. Seldom does a day go by without someone using democracy to justify some sort of incursion into another persons or another nations business. “Don’t you believe in democracy?” they ask, whilst bringing some hapless democracy bereft primitive, a goodly dose of democracy at the barrel of an M16.
The truth is, that were we to stop mindlessly chanting this ridiculous mantra of blanket justification (for what cannot be, or is not currently justified by democracy?) and actually use our minds for a millisecond, then we would quickly realise that NO, we don’t really believe in democracy. Why? Well, the fact is that in a TRUE democracy, 51% of the people can do away with the rights and wishes of the other 49%.
When I was a kid, it was a standing joke that old folk never wanted to go into hospital for anything because they thought that once there, they were never going to come out alive. The truth at that time was that the NHS was at its zenith and you could probably not receive better treatment anywhere else in the world. The old timers fears were just out of date recollections of life in the 1920’s and 30’s when this was probably true.
What a strange world we live in…fast forward to the 21st century and the converse is true; the NHS is at its nadir and if, in some misguided recollection of times past, you imagine that you will be treated successfully, you will probably end up discharged… in a hearse!
