The Weasel has often waxed lyrical about Switzerland. The news that the good people of CH have voted to ban the building of Minarets is music to his weasly ears. Good news, because, despite the best efforts of the liberal elite there and in the rest of Europe, the peoples' voice has been heard. Good news because, frankly, it is time to send a message to The world of Islam that it cannot obliterate Western Culture.
You know, if you want to build a Minaret, fuck off to Abu Dhabi and build it, or let us build a replica of Boston Stump in the centre of Tehran.
(Yes, I know, the Von Trapps were from Austria. The photo at the top is Mrs Weasel humouring me during a holiday in Vaud)
Don't get ill in Essex. Those unfortunate enough to get a case of Billericay Dickie or just get a bit old and in need of a routine service, may be wise to go elsewhere, after two major Essex hospitals have been declared filthy and fatal.
Unannounced visits by inspectors from the Care Quality Commission found blood spattered on curtains and chairs in the A&E ward, a catheter bag on the floor, poorly-trained nurses and patients treated on trolleys.
A commode was soiled under the seat, nurses were failing to feed frail elderly people and patients had pressure sores.
There was no paediatric nurse for most of the time so children were not getting the best care.
The mortality rate in the A&E ward was 6.1 per cent in 2008, more than a third higher than the national average of 4.4 per cent.
It's one of those stories that makes me shudder with the realisation that the UK will be a third world country within decades.
For the purposes of enlightenment I watched a You Tube Video of the phenomenon known as Jedward. I wondered what it was all about; how two talentless karaoke singers who looked like spring onions with little faces biro'd on them could get so much public exposure, that is, until I saw confirmed batchelor, Louis Walsh slavering over them. It's all about young boy bum then.
I myself warned the Foreign Office in October that I might have to consider my own position
You know, I have hear this so many times now; the voices of the people who "nearly" resigned. It makes me wonder how many deals were done by Blair's henchmen, how many blackmailings, how many carrots or sticks were used on persons unknown to push through this atrocity. Believe Tom Harris, pressure is applied all the time on Ministers, Diplomats and the Press to drive forward the correct "narrative".
My MGF is still in the garage being tarted up. Anybody got a spare hard top they want to flog?
I just handed someone £100 for two bulk bags of logs. They don't grow on trees you
know.
David Truscott, 40, broke into a farm, covered himself in the waste and was seen masturbating, a court heard.
He was caught just weeks after he was released from a previous prison sentence for a similar offence.
Does the local council cover this kind of thing? If it did, it would be shouting hysterically that this man's sexual preferences had been denied and his human right, to wank off in pig shit was as natural as gay cruising on the Bristol Downs.
And to blow away the blues, let's go over to the California coastline, and the bleached blond haired girls and the beautiful sunshine...
Writing in February 2007, Jeremy Paxman wrote, of the BBC's attitude to the climate change debate:
the BBC's coverage of the issue abandoned the pretence of impartiality long ago.
Well, coming from Paxman, that's fairly compelling and unquestionably damning.
It's been revealed this week that the BBC had sight of the "climategate" emails weeks ago and sat on them. Apparently a weatherman called Paul Hudson was sent them over a month ago.
It begs the question, does it not, "Why did the BBC sit on one of the biggest stories this year?"
As I have always said, the BBC rarely strays into the arena of explicit bias, apart from the Middle East and Jeremy Bowen, or against Christians, etc. The BBC is riddled, is infected and stinking, with bias by omission; it's what they don't report - the people who you never hear on "Today" or "Newsnight", why the audience in "Question Time" is carefully picked, and so are the questions and why they exclusively recruit their staff from the media pages of The Guardian. Remember the Dan Hannan speech that went viral and the failure of two chief correspondents, Nick Robinson and Mark Mardell, to even give it a mention.? It didn't get a mention on the BBC until the BBC became the story for pointedly ignoring it.
I post it again here to make the point that, if you only had the BBC to rely on for news, you would never have seen it.
It's not often an album from the 60's and 70's takes me totally by surprise, but Swaddling Songs, by Mellow Candle did.
This long sought after record still sells for hundreds of pounds among vinyl collectors. In many ways it is typical of the 60s/70s folk rock period; eclectic, with a nod to Trees, Pentangle, Jethro Tull, Fairport Convention, Spyrogira and even CSN, but as a whole it is complete, beautifully executed and sublime. All the tracks are different and crafted as free standing songs, but the twin voices of Alison Williams and Clodagh Simonds pull it all together as a wonderful album.
This track, Reverend Sisters, reminds me of Laura Nyro. See what you think...
I don't often, on this blog, allude to the fact that I started out as an art student.
I struggled, but I had moments when I knew I had some talent. To cut a long story short, I did a painting like this one. This painting was done by Damien Hirst. I did mine in about 1973 whilst still in my first year at Art College. My effort consisted of a skull, very much in the manner of this one, atop one of those torsos that tailors use to make suits. All was going well - it was a standard piece of painting - until I had the bright idea of embossing little white circles on it. Don't ask why, I just did it. The effect was pretty much as you see it now, and as you can see the Damien Hirst version at The White Cube.
My personal tutor at the time was one John Bellany who has since achieved international acclaim and curiously, I now live about five miles from where he was born and raised. Bellany was, in those days, a violent, nasty, Scottish drunk, who regularly turned up for work drunk, and nasty and violent, and who had very little to say because, he was totally.. drunk. Bellany looked at my skull painting and observed the white blobs. He took me by my coat lapels, lifted me off the ground and said, "If you ever do anything like that again I shall beat the shit out of you!"
Staffordshire pottery, sitting resplendent in leaded diamond windows. Deep maroon livery with gold-leaf coach lines. Chromed water jugs, freshly blacked stoves.
Every thing spotlessly clean and houseproud. Fairground people traveled in style. At least the owners did. The mobile homes for the hired hands amounted to little more than a lorry with bunks. But in between the fearsome generators, bolted onto ancient Fodens, the runs of high-voltage cables, the mud, the smell of Westler's hot dogs, the onions and the reek of candy floss - that is where the stuff of dreams lay; the Golden Gallopers, the Caterpillar, the Dodgems, the Cakewalk, the Speedway the gaudy promise of a kind of excitement that could only be realised upon the production of a silver sixpence. Not much had changed since D H Lawrence, writing in 1919, described the fairground thus:
The roundabouts were veering round and grinding out their music, the side-shows were making as much commotion as possible. In the coconut shies there were no coconuts, but artificial substitutes, which the lads declared were fastened into the irons. There was a sad decline in brilliance and luxury. None the less, the ground was muddy as ever, there was the same crush, the press of faces lighted up by the flares and electric lights, the same smell of naptha and fried potatoes and electricity.
During the May fair, as a young lad, I was given a shilling a day for fairground amusement, until the final day when the family would go together and ride and eat until we were nearly sick. My favourite ride was the "Speedway" known in the business as an "ark".
And then there were the Hurricane Jets, which cost a bit more, but were perfect! It was, all in all, a magical experience for a child, and not at all the tawdry, tired, reality it is today.
The side shows always promised far more than they delivered, but you had to check them. You absolutely had to see the smallest man in the world, Rhona the Rat Girl, the Siamese Twins and The Woman with Three!
When I was older, my regular haunt would be the Boxing Booth. Before the days of television boxing, and the internet, it was entirely possible for someone who "claims to be" the former light-weight boxing champion of Scotland could be right there before us, in Boston, Lincolnshire, ready to take on the local lads. Yes! A local boy stepped up to take on the champ. Oh, but he was from Grantham. Well, I suppose that was local enough, and we would cheer him on. The fight started well enough - this local boy could punch. By the end of round one, the professional was struggling and on the bell, the local hero throws an almighty punch. Round Two, and the local boy is tiring. Next he is falling all over the place. The professional from Scotland is going to murder him. It's horrible!
Round three starts just as badly for the pretender to the throne and he's telling the ref he has had enough. Are the crowd with him? Of course they are - he's local! He is stumbling, the professional boxer is throwing one punch after another and it's a murder, not a boxing bout. Oh no! The local boy is on the floor..One! Two..the crowd are going crazy. A woman shouts "get up, go on, have 'im". And then the tide turns. As if energised by the woman's command, he staggers up before the referee can count "Three". He moves towards the professional who delivers a mighty blow, sending his opponent into the ropes. But the local boy bounces back and "whack". Unbelievable! the Scot who claims to be the former champion is on the floor, shaking his head. He gets up and "Whack"! The local boy delivers a thundering right hook and its all over. The professional has been vanquished and the local boy raises his hands to rapturous applause and the shouty woman passes 'round the hat for the local boy made good.
Of course, by the time they have moved on to the next town, the two have mysteriously changed identities. It was all fixed! But great theatre for a 12 year old young man like me.
Below is a picture of Boston May fair that has been running each year since 1125. The picture was taken at the beginning of the 20th Century, but the town and the fair looked pretty much the same to me, in the early 1960s.
Boston Market Place, c 1909. The taller building on the left was a theatre where I went to see Billy Cotton and his Band. The monument in the foreground is to Herbert Ingram, founder of the Illustrated London News. The photo was almost certainly taken from the tower of the Boston Parish Church, aka "The Stump"
U2, the most pretentious band in the universe, is going to headline at Glastonbury, the most pretentious festival in the galaxy. Michael Eavis' version goes:
At last the biggest band in the world is going to do the best festival in the world.
Well Michael, this is my take on the event. Your festival is good, efficient, eclectic and organised. In fact, it is everything a festival should not be. In fact, Glastonbury is the Marks and Spencer of festivals - good quality, easy on the eye, universally respected and consistent. These days, they even have ATMs. I have chatted to people who have headlined at the Isle of Wight, and turned down Woodstock and the story is that these events were utter chaos. And yet, the iconic festivals, the ones you remember forever, always were chaos. Young Weasel (who by the way is now safely back from Nepal, after being held hostage by local insurgents) goes to a lot of festivals - Womad, Dour in Belgium and a lot of very green, alternative and possibly quite smelly little festivals that neither you nor I will have heard of, but that are at the hypocentre of soulful, real, believable music. He has done them all, including Glasto, and it is obvious that he prefers the little crazy festivals, packed with artisans and musical journeymen who are there because they are committed to the music, not the money.
So what is wrong with Bono and band headlining at Glasto? Let me say, U2 are great. They are justifiably at the top of their game. I just cannot help feeling that the whole schtick somehow eclipses the heart of rock and roll.
The Large Hadron Collider at Cern in Switzerland has been turned on again after the 14 month break for repairs, so this may be my last post before we are all sucked into the Space/Time vortex. Imagine when they had to call out the repair man? (sucks intake of air through teeth) "You are looking at at least £3 million for parts and labour squire and I can't even look at it for 6 months. You could put some duck tape on the helium tanks and flush the Ohm Valves , but really, mate it's a replacement node and half a dozen bi-furcked knoll nuts."
Does anybody normal, apart from that guy who used to be in D-ream, know what Cern is about? I don't.
It turns out that Anthropogenic Global Warning is a load of toss. There is surprise, but what is worse is the number of "academics" who appear to have been very economical with the truth in order to promote the fallacy:
If you cannot trust Scientists who can you trust? Probably the only scientists you can trust are the ones who don't work for the government. Even better if they are sacked .
I am a big Spectator fan but my comment on this Martin Bright thread did not get through, which is odd, because everyone else at the Speccie does let them through, even when I am nasty about them, which I certainly was not on the Martin Bright piece. The crux of his piece is that Islamic fundamentalism and the BNP "are cut from the same cloth", which is bollocks. He calls it "the twin threat of the Islamist extreme right and the BNP. " I merely pointed out that, while I was able to believe that some members of the BNP had committed the Protocols of the Elders of Zion to memory, the BNP is a democratic political party and does not blow people up, treat women as second class citizens, advocating the stoning to death of homosexuals or the establishment of a world Caliphate, etc, etc, and that it did his argument no good to try and pretend the two were synonymous. That is all. My only other point was that the BNP are an ad hoc political party who will fade into obscurity as soon as the main parties take the protection of our way of life seriously. Clearly it did not fit in with his rant. Extremists of any colour never do their causes any good.
Me, I have been totally naughty and irresponsible. I have traded the Peugeot Partner Quicksilver in for an MGF vvc in British Racing Green. The Peugeot, which I bought as a practical workhorse, has proved fragile. It is the first time in decades that I have ever had a car let me down so badly, including one episode of the gear linkage breaking in the centre of Edinburgh at 11pm on a Sunday. I had no money, no phone and I had waved a cheery goodbye to my friends15 minutes before. We had to get a taxi home (£40), get the other car, go back to the city, tow the Peugeot to the local garage and pay for it to be fixed. That was only one of a catalog of problems. The clincher was on Friday when I got to the Supermarket car park with a trolley full of shopping to find a dribbling diesel leak. I managed to start the car with difficulty and it limped back to the garage again. I know, I should have had breakdown cover and between me and Mrs Weasel, we should have had a phone, but you know, you get a mile down the road, remember you left the phone and think "nevermind". I have had four Peugeots and three of them have broken down and left me stranded. I just don't think they are built well enough, and compared to my old Volvo and the Volkswagen we also have, it is a pile of poop.
I am feeling a bit wistful and melancholic today. Don't worry, it will pass as it always does. But I had a flashback, a pleasant one, to the days, many years ago, before being married, before the children, when all I had was me and a modest job waiting at tables three days a week.
My days then consisted of being a waiter, getting a lot of tips, enjoying my rather nice, cosy flat, and planning hearty hikes in the Lincolnshire countryside. During that year I suppose I really learned about the fabric of my county of birth, trekking along some of the 4000 km of footpaths, mostly alone, but sometimes with friends. I remember the depths of winter; setting off in near blizzard conditions, finding to my delight that the blizzard abated and the brilliant sunshine warmed me, and the hedgerows and trees dripped with melting snow like diamonds falling.
The Bluestone Heath Road is a breathtaking ancient way where the views are sublime and the spirit soars. It runs across the Wolds, the stunning, gently rolling landscape, peppered with little villages which are quaint but genuine, and as rough and ready as the people who live there. You could stay at Woody's Top, perhaps one of the most isolated Youth Hostels in England, where you had to haul a water bowser up a hill to it, in order to wash and make your tea.
The highways and byeways of Lincolnshire were always so quiet. Perhaps, you would occasionally hear the scream of an RAF jet, and catch a glimpse of the pilot waving to you, but apart from that, all was so still. Nothing hurried. Everything seemed as if all you might encounter was a horse and cart and perhaps, another wayfarer to share tales with.
Pennan, the "picturesque" village that clings ot the coast of Aberdeenshire, is in danger again after severe flooding, causing the "Local Hero" location to be closed to all but emergency vehicles. This comes after a major mudslide two years ago which devasted houses. According to a report in The Times, only 12 householders reside there now.
I vistited Pennan a few years ago, as a sort of pilgrimage to see the location for "Local Hero"
"Local Hero" was a fantastic film; quirky, fresh, visually pleasing and heartwarming. The actual place was none of these. The Pennan Inn, at which we were planning to eat, had been neglected badly, and was a stinking, nicotine stained pit. The menu was of the sausage and chips variety, and so filthy was the bar that it took about 5 seconds to decide to move on and ended up at Portsoy. The local pub in Portsoy was run by a Londoner and the food was good. Outside, some loud East End types with lots of thick gold jewellery were tucking into some fish. I got talking to them and quipped that there were so many East Londoners here they must be on the run, and it was like the Costa Del Crime. One of the group fixed me with a strange stare and replied, "You are not far from the truth, there".
Pennan has attracted incomers. I suppose it may have had something to do with the film, but, apart from the pub, the only accents we heard were Surrey accents. Their houses cling to the edge of the pebbly grey coastline for dear life. I would feel doomed if I had to live there. Maybe they are.
There have been a lot of data-related and freedom of speech stories this week. We had a laptop full of voter records go missing, the T-Mobile scam, the virtual defeat of the Government's attempt to make so called "homophobic" comments a thought/hate crime, and the PCC's attempt to debate whether bloggers should be subject to their rules.
They all have one thing in common: the way our personal opinion, our lives and our personal details are monitored and used and the way others are trying to regulate our basic rights to freedom and privacy.
The depressing thing is that we now have a war on two fronts. Firstly there is the war that the Government is waging on our privacy and our freedom of speech. And then there is the commercial war, exemplified this week by T-Mobile, whose employee apparently sold the details of its subscribers to cold callers. Of course, Tescos, Amazon, and a raft of other retailers know quite a lot about you already. Your phone, though, is an interesting one. It can nail you if you are breaking the law, but it can also be your alibi. Christine and Neil Hamilton produced phone records to exonerate them from an entirely made up accusation against them as long ago as 2001. I remember it well because I sent them a letter of support right at the outset of their ordeal and received, in due course, an A4, handwritten letter from Christine Hamilton, just to thank me.
Handwritten? Yes. When was the last time you hand wrote a letter? Handwriting is definitely dying as an art. I have written nothing longer than a shopping list for years, in my own hand. I digress here, because, ironically, the Royal Mail is still protected from interference and tampering, unless it is by the order of a Judge. Sending a letter by snail mail maybe time consuming and a pain, but if you want to live under the radar, I guess it is your best bet.
It is a stark fact that we are observed and recorded everywhere. It is still possible to have a conversation with a close friend I suppose, and expect it to stay private, but, speak out of turn at work, in public, in a shop or office and someone somewhere will report you.
Can we take any shred of comfort? I doubt there is any. Society will learn new codes, new mores. Nobody will say what they think in public, nobody will tell jokes, nobody will express criticism of others, and we will become obsessively protective of what little privacy we have.
I have already dropped off the grid to some extent: I no longer have supermarket loyalty cards, I don't have a TV, and consequently no TV licence, I don't work for anybody, I have a pay as you go phone, I don't use credit cards and I live in Scotland some distance from a bus route, which, believe it or not, tends to put people off pestering me for products and services. Until I pose a threat to an individual or part of the Establishment, I dare say I shall be left alone.
This story popped up over the radar over the weekend:
Essentially, a US Attorney subpoenaed an online news organisation with the demand that it turn over all of its traffic records for one day, including all IP addresses, names, credit cards, etc. It also injuncted the said news organisation, Indymedia from reporting that it had been supoenaed to harvest this information. Sound familiar? The fact is, they are not allowed to do this. Nada. No way Jose. There are very specific rules that apply to the Press when it comes to this type of Subpoena, and apparently they were bypassed.
Now, Indymedia is a daft liberal news aggregate site which, in the words of CBS is :
a Web site whose authors sometimes blur the line between journalism, advocacy, and on-the-streets activism
It's the kind that makes Michael Moore look like a paid up member of the GOP. Hence it is not surprising that, when it comes to bending the rules, the authorities should target a left-wing organisation. (I wonder if they were just "testing"?)
The point being made over there is that this is a story that came to light. How many web sites, Indymedia asks, just rolled over, gave the info the Feds wanted and shut up about it?
Over in the UK, High profile libel lawyers Carter Ruck tried the same trick with The Guardian over a damaging report on Trafigura, regarding a toxic waste dumping incident. Carter Ruck not only injuncted the Guardian not to print the story, but injuncted them against telling their readers they had been injuncted.
Already we know that Labour have advanced plans for a super-snooping agency. It will make what happened to Indymedia look like a flea-bite.
Story of the week must surely be the tale about 55 year-old Ged Galvin, victim of a SMIDSY motorcycle crash, whose mangled body was repaired by the clever application of a remote controlled anal sphincter.
How long do you think it will be before the Gays demand the operation on the NHS?
The Glasgow NE election was heralded all over the place as the saviour of Gordon Brown and a threat to the Tories and the SNP. Not here it wasn't. Glasgow NE is a desolate pit of fag-wizened midgets with vitamin deficiencies and a lemming-like predilection for voting for Labour for the last 75 years. The consituency is an anomaly and has no bearing whatsoever on the national picture. It certainly won't save Gordon Brown from departing before the next election as I predicted a while back.
I wasted 1 and a half hours of my life this week watching the remake of "The Day the Earth Stood Still" This dire wannabe Hollywood blockbuster had Keannu Reeves stomping through a movie bereft of charm, coherent narrative, acting and visual interest. I had to watch again the original 1951 version to rid myself of this travesty. When will they get it into their heads that space movies and monster movies are not about space and monsters? They are simply human interest stories. Get that bit wrong and you are spending a hundred million dollars on something with less dramatic impact than a Nike Advert.
I never discuss football on this blog, because it has no interest for me whatsoever, but I did read that someone called Jose Mourinho wants to come back to England to manage a football team, because, apparently, England is the natural home of football. The only other football related thing is that someone called Benitez looks a bit like Ian Anderson from Jethro Tull.
I am please to report that Young Weasel is scheduled to fly back to the UK this weekend, after five weeks in Nepal. Despite illness, being a hostage for five hours at the hands of the local insurgents, he appears to have had a great time and got the material he needs to make a good film. As soon as he lets me have it, you shall have the opportunity to see his work. Thanks to those, (especially APF194) who took an interest in his well-being.
A visit to Tom Harris' blog is worthwhile, if only to measure how desperate Labour loyalists are to clutch at straws. I have a lot of time for Tom personally, but he is tribal Labour through and through, but articulate and witty, and that is why he so interesting. The current Labour mindset is Denial. What else can they do? They are going to lose the election to the biggest bunch of Clowns since the World Circus Championships.
Enjoy your weekend and thanks for dropping by. My current condition is that I am obsessed with getting the multifuel cast iron stove to work at optimum levels, since it drives the central heating system too. I am running out of recipe ideas. The same old things seem to end up being cooked. Help!
I hope you don't suffer from Anosmia. That's the condition that is associated with loss of the sense of smell. That would be a shame, for many reasons, but chiefly for me, that trigger which brings back memories from, say, 50 years ago. They even have a name for that; it's called The Proust Effect.
Overwhelmingly these memories centre around school: warm milk, burning bakelite (every thing electrical hummed and got hot), biscuits, cloth, wood, polish, jeyes fluid, wax crayons, sweet shops, stale clothes that were once washed in Surf or Omo or Oxydol powder. Almost anything can trigger those memories of one little, very confused young boy who sometimes forgot his hanky or peed his pants or stared blankly at the blackboard and stared down at olfactory nightmares - school dinners - the enforced eating of which these days would be classed as child abuse. That smell always lingered well into the afternoon and got steadily worse. It is not so long ago that schools still smelt the way they did back then in the late fifties and early sixties. It quite unsettled me to be met by the same aromas when visiting my kids' school, to be jolted into a different reality that had mysteriously shrunken in size and scale.
One of my favourite smell scenarios, and it still is, is the smell of railway stations - particularly Kings Cross. The aroma of diesel combined with a kind of acrid, metallic top-note, and that black, sticky stuff you see all over the rails and sleepers (God knows what it is), wee wee, sick and coffee, presented with a flourish, a huge rush of air that whistles through the galleries and corridors. The reason for this is very simple; it was a portal to another world, the the world that enabled me to leave behind my tiny, parochial backwater town with its shut-down mentality and discover something breathtakingly challenging and other. It was a portal to my coming of age.
London used to smell of Patchouli in the sixties. Now it smells of coffee. I preferred the former. I visited the London Transport Museum last time I visited the Capital. An old Metro Cammel undergound carriage, built in the thirties but still runnning into the 70's looked familiar, but without the smell of tobacco and patchouli, seemed bereft of authenticity.
Many olfactory sensations we shall never get back. Tobacco smoke is one which permeated almost every aspect of life until it was banned. Remember the French Underground? Gitanes! And Disque Bleu!
"Being concerned about the minutiae of National Health Service initiatives, I believe that the hand-written memo I sent you stated we should have a "scorched ear" policy.
Long before the word "Green" gained political significance, Joni Mitchell wrote "Big Yellow Taxi"
They took all the trees
Put 'em in a tree museum
And they charged the people
A dollar and a half just to see 'em
Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got
Till it's gone
They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot
Another casualty of that mass hysteria we call "Political Correctness" (I call it Witch Hunting) is the idea that somebody can better themselves by being, better than you or me. There, I have said it. I have entertained the possibility that someone somewhere is better at my job, luckier, more intelligent, etc., etc.
Instead, we now suffer from quotas. These lists of suitable people are compiled from those who are perceived to be downtrodden, underachieving, discriminated against and shunned for arbitrary and often contrary reasons. There have been defining moments in the history of this phenomenon; for example, the case of the Avon and Somerset Police who binned a sheaf of applications from white male applicants, because they were deemed to be..white and male.
There is plenty of anecdotal evidence to support the belief that competition among children demoralises and de-skills them, and accordingly, nobody is a loser. Everybody seems to have gone to "Uni" these days. We are either winners or "runners up" nobody loses - a prize every time.
So how shocking, how intensely tragic it is and how mentally fragile do the subjects become when they are rejected from something so flimsy, so amorphous and so emphemeral as a Television talent show. They are no longer prepared for failure. It just isn't fair.
I don't watch TV but I know about these shows because even the papers report on the "shock" departure of some poor lass dressed in a party frock whose mum said she could be a star.
When next you watch "The X Factor" or "Britain's got Wannabees", may I suggest you are viewing a Museum of Meritocracy. Enjoy the briefest glimpse into the truth that the masses secretly yearn for; the truth, the "reality" of life which is that there are winners and losers,for, you don't know what you've got 'till it's gone.
On the first day of July, 1940, The liner Arandora Star left for Canada carrying German and Italian internees, residents of the United Kingdom who had been deemed to be a national threat and who had been imprisoned pending deportation to the Colonies. The ship was torpedoed and sunk with the loss of 714 lives.
During World War Two, thousands of German and Austrian Jews, who had fled the Nazis for a safe haven in the UK, were interned, imprisoned, for simply being German or Austrian or later, many of the Italians who had settled here before the war. Now, it does not take much to figure out that a Jewish German is going to be here as a covert Nazi Spy. The idea is unthinkable, but I suppose barely possible given the vicissitudes of human nature.
We are constantly being told there is a "War on Terror". I think we can use shorthand here and define that as a defense against those who seek to bomb or otherwise destroy civilians and the general peace, for political or religious purposes. OK? This is the enemy. Who is the enemy? Whoever we say the "enemy" is. At least that is a definition if you are an American.
And yet, those who are far more dangerous live among us with the full protection of the law. Those who pose a threat to the security of the USA and the UK today have little in common with the internees of WW2. Despite having refugee status, many are economic migrants and itinerant trouble makers who have been thrown out of one country after another and who have taken full advantage of our liberal laws on free speech and punishment.
We have a large population of Muslims in this country who refuse, totally, resolutely, to become British. They refuse to adopt our religion, our dress, our political system, our social codes, our diet, our language, our education and the rule of law. Lurking in each of these families is the potential for one of its members to become radicalised to the point where they are ready to turn on British Society.
These are not dissolute youths wishing to focus adolescent anger on a handy target, these are doctors and academics and servicemen, educated people who are able to move about in society with the blessing of every liberal who never thinks about the consequences.
Those who tried to blow up Glasgow airport were senior medics, working in the NHS. Last Thursday, at Fort Hood, you might have found it difficult to believe that a Major in the US Army, and a doctor, was capable of turning on 13 of his comrades, allegedly in the name of Islam.
I find myself asking, if there is such a thing as a war on terror, and it is pretty obvious who the enemy is, why are they free to move among us?
Young Weasel together with his colleague, guides and a group of disabled Nepali Children were detained by Maoists at a crossroads outside the Capital for five hours while their release was negotiated. YW writes that they wanted the bus in order to block the road and said they were going to burn it. In Richard's words "we thought this wasn't the place to be".
There were armed police there in riot gear but, they were not doing anything, fearing creating tensions with the Maoists. This actually seemed like the right thing to do.. Got no film/pics, we made a hard decision that was it wasn't worth the risk for the shots. If they had seen film cameras they could have felt it was an opportunity to make a statment on a larger scale
The group was released after agreeing to hand over their bus to the Maoists.
Under the heading TMI:
it's been 25C most days and the worst weather we've had is some fluffy white clouds. It's warm dry and dusty here (and this is the cooler time of the year!) due to the dust I have produced goliath bogies of award winning calibre
Young Weasel is currently in Nepal, working with a children's orphanage in Kathmandu. Apart from helping out, he is making a film to promote the work of the Nepali Children's Trust.
Last week Young Weasel accompanied some of the kids from the orphanage on a trek from Pokhara. Here is part of an email he sent me. ( I have emailed him back to ask for more details!)
The trekkin was hard, but worthwhile for the fantastic views, waking up and going to sleep next to mountains was surreal, the whole trip could have been a dream. I have memories of showering under a 100ft waterfall, riding a rickety Nepali style big wheel made of wood, where you actually feared for your life! And boating on a lake surrounded by mountains! I got a bit of fever/saw throat on the trip, but pushed through it and am ok now. The kids were amazing and powered up and down the step rocky paths like mountain goats, despite the lack of limbs! Our bus was hijacked by Maoists settling a dispute!! long story!
The maoists he writes of are utterly unpredictable. They range from casual acceptance of tourists and foreigners to kidnap, torture and "re-education". According to the BBC,
In the summer of 2004, the rebels abducted hundreds of school children for a week-long "re-education" course on Maoist ideology right under the noses of the security forces on the outskirts of Kathmandu
On a more sombre note, we had lots of discussions about the trip before Richard went. We both know that life is for living. At 23, Richard has experienced more in the last few weeks than some people do in a lifetime. What else is life for but to explore and to live it to the full? He is going to be in Nepal for a few more weeks and I shall post more soon, when he sends it.
Young Weasel is currently in Nepal, working with a children's orphanage in Kathmandu. Apart from helping out, he is making a film to promote the work of the Nepali Children's Trust. 
