Uncategorized – Page 14 – Writer-insighter

Where are we now?

I was fourteen. I had a stupid haircut that lumped-up over my ears and parted naturally down the middle, the way it always has, the way it always will if I grow it too long, although back then Too Long was an impossible dream away.

It was Wiltshire. We had cows and grass and snow and frost and car crashes that left blood all over the road walking home from the school disco on a Friday night. Only once. How often does that need to happen?

We had a pork pie factory and a brewery in the centre of town. On Tuesdays, you could hear the pigs screaming until noon when they were all dead. After about one o’clock you could smell the lard as the carcasses were flensed with a steam hose. On Thursdays, huge clouds of steam wafted the smell of hops all over the Georgian mansions that had become a bank and a cafe and a row of offices in Fore Street, just up the hill from the eighteenth-century single cell jail house and the Gateway supermarket.

And then there was David Bowie. And we didn’t know what to make of all that New York and space and saxophone zoot-suited androgynous stuff at all. WE didn’t have androgyny in Wiltshire. Ok, the manager of Gateway had a bit of a turn and invited first the delivery van driver into a new lifestyle and then invited his new friends in day-glo singlets into the store while there were customers still there. But it wasn’t much like the kind of thing David Bowie might sing about. We had a shot-away ex-hippy definitely not ex-junkie calling himself Ziggy who used to unwantedly follow Theresa Powell around. But again, probably even David Bowie would have had a hard time making a song about that, that anyone would want to listen to.

He was singing about another planet, one none of us had ever seen. So were the New York Dolls. So was Iggy. So were the Velvets. So were The Eagles and Little Feat and all kinds of massive bands. But Bowie did something none of them did. I don’t to this day know what it was. This is the day he’s died.

I loved Hunky Dory. When it came out I used to play Ashes to Ashes, the whole album, while I took breakfast in my digs in my first term at Bath, the sound of a tortured ghostly clown singing while I ate bacon and eggs in a newish house in distinctly not-newish scruffily Georgian Larkhall, still my never-happen fantasy place to live, snuggled under Solsbury Hill in the frost, my Triumph 650 waiting to take me to uni, up the hill that trashed my clutch the first term I was there.

Radio On (1979) by BFIfilms

Heroes had been the anthem for a time in Bristol and Bath, a time of leather jackets and silk scarves and patchouli and cowboy boots on Park Road, hanging around the record stores and bookshops, living our preposterously tamely genteel version of street-life that was unimaginably alien to parents brought up on rationing. Our rebellion was making sure all our girlfriends were on the pill. That’s how wild we were. You think I’m joking.

This was still a time when I went to the doctor one day to discuss the pros and cons of this policy with my family doctor, a man so cool he hand-rolled liquorice papers in the surgery while telling you not to smoke. He didn’t approve of our practice. It wasn’t the idea of shovelling hormones into people whose hormones were all over the place that he objected to. Just that when, as he put it, the word got around that a pretty young girl (he had that kind of voice, the kind of voice you could say that with, then) was on the pill it was people like me that were the problem. Me? You’re like dogs with a plate of meat, he told me. I was shocked.

You’re like dogs with a plate of meat, he told me. I was shocked.

And all the while we could be heroes. And nothing could keep us together. And then nothing much that I listened to from David Bowie until Heathen, twenty? thirty years later? I liked that. Then nothing for another decade until the desolate survivor-story of Where Are We Now. I haven’t heard Blackstar. Not except the Radiohead version, the one that like so much of Bowie’s stuff, takes me back to Radio On and Bristol and Bath and silk scarves and girls with curled hair and Afghan coats. Cold cheeks and warm lips. The flash of white teeth bared in a smile in street light. Blame it on the black star. Blame it on the satellite that takes him home.

Faking it

A woman in Wiltshire has just had her car stopped by a fake police car. as Morcheeba used to sing back when I was cool, who can you trust?

The odd thing, the thing about being older, is that I remember this happening before. Wiltshire isn’t exactly a crime hotspot. So two fake police car incidents made me think a bit. The one I remember was in Trowbridge. A real policeman walked over to a police van to ask the driver something and realised he wasn’t talking to anyone he knew from Trowbrodge police station. Someone had faked up a police van and got their fun just driving around pretending to be in the police. They’d never stopped anyone, or gained anything by it. They just liked playing at being a policeman.

In a world where grown adults pay hundreds of pounds to squeeze 18stone into football kit to go to watch a game, maybe that’s not so odd at all, really. Me, I’d have chosen a cowboy outfit. But Trowbridge was always odd. A couple of years after the fake police car another van got someone arrested. It was camouflage. It belonged to whoever had taken over the old army-surplus shop that sold sand-coloured canvas haversacks and Canadian army greatcoats for sixth formers, back when that was what sixth formers wore. As a tip, maybe it’s best if you do break in to the army gun room and steal a Sterling machine pistol, or know who did, it might be better to keep a lower profile than cruising around town looking like you’re auditioning for The A Team. As I said, a strange place, Wiltshire.

Risking it

I used to research things. That was my job. I stopped doing it when the internet told everyone they knew everything anyway, because we live in an entitled world of stupid. And I couldn’t be bothered with telling people what they were already paid to know. I didn’t have the patience any more to sit there while people just wanted their prejudices confirmed and blamed the research and therefore me if their prejudices were shown to be just that and nothing more. Especially then.

Stupid people wear me out. Especially when they pay people not to call them stupid.

The decision to bomb Syria must count as one of the most stupid things I’ve seen in a long time, just on statistics alone.

The ISIS attack on the cafe in France killed over 150 people. It was utterly horrible. Nobody there deserved to die. So how much more horrible must it be when over ten times that many people are killed?

Imagine 1,700 people killed and 180,000 injured, not just once, but over and over again? Every year. In the UK.

Please don’t say that’s really horrible, because you don’t think it is. In fact, you think that’s an acceptable fact of life in exchange for the convenience of driving to the supermarket.

Meanwhile, the average number of people killed in the UK per year is……5. That’s the average from 2001 to 2011, including 7/7, which bumped up the average massively.

Five people dead is too many. Nobody could argue with that.

And at the same time 1,700 is just one of those things.

I don’t understand how that works.

Oh little town

The Christmas lights are on in Aldeburgh, shining blue and white in the dark. It’s meant to look festive. It just reminds me how empty this place is when the summer’s tourists and weekenders aren’t here. The Christmas tree placed out there on the shingle beach is standing on its own, no lights, no tinsel, surreally placed where no tree ever grew for reasons, as Hunter Thompson used to say, that were never made clear.

It’s lonely. It reminds me of this time last year. I’d met someone again who I used to know but by then she was living in the dark. Smiling, but looking worried and scared almost all of the time. She was crucified with toothache, so much so that she couldn’t arrange a dentist because of the pain. I got her an appointment, drove her there, sat and waited with her so she didn’t have to go in alone. We went across the road to a pub afterwards. She bought a Christmas card there, wrote it on the bar and gave it to me, more a letter than a card.

In all of our time last winter I remember only night or darkening evening or a morning so bone-numbing cold that it might as well have been night, walking her dogs early in the morning, letting myself in quietly so she could sleep an extra hour. Her little dog barked though.

“I knew it was you,” she said. “She only barks for you.”

I miss those dogs and the lights going on in houses we passed as we walked out along the river path, over the narrow plank, so narrow I had to help the little dog become brave enough to cross into fields where there were no footprints, no sgn that anyone had been there since the floods. And later, another day in the teeth of a gale, in bright cold that made you think your fingers might snap off, walking a new path up along the hill, back down by another route, thinking that soon, in just a few weeks there would be bluebells here, the way there were when we met.

The bluebells came but we had gone by then. I never found her again. It was too dark. I hear her still, especially on evenings like this, when the Christmas lights shine in an empty street. I can still hear her footsteps, never in synch with mine.

Is Steve there?

I was discussing the use of English today, touching lightly on the devastating potential of the word “actually,” a topic never even mentioned in TEFL course books, which is a surprising omission, actually. You see what I did there?

Some words and phrases go out of date. Describing something as ‘spruced up’ when you mean making something smarter instantly labels you irredeemably 1950s, but in an odd, other side of the Iron Curtain sort of way, as if you popped round to Kim Philby’s Moscow flat for a chat rather too often. Personally, I think Leslie Phillip’s English is as near the apogee of sophistication as it gets, but I’m old and irritating anyway.
https://youtu.be/Wdysfh8r6ZA

Actually, accent, for some (well, ok, me then) is as important as what’s actually said, actually. Thinking about it reminded me of a time I was trying to get hold of someone I didn’t know and had never met. I’d just bought something on eBay and was trying to go and collect it from the person at work, but I only had his home number. I rang it. A woman answered, with a kind of voice and accent that wasn’t mine.

I explained I just needed to phone her husband, it turned out, about the thing he’d just sold me. Yes, he’d mentioned it. She didn’t say actually. I sometimes get a bit hazy with names. Especially when I don’t really need to know them or think I don’t, which has the same effect.

He’s at work. Ok, I said, should I call him there? She needed to find his work number.

It’s Steve Nidge.

The woman went off to get the rest of the number.

The English among you, or at least those who have a passing familiarity with Hertfordshire and/or me will know what was going to happen.

So, I said. Do I ask for Steve?

Sorry?

Steve, I said. He’s your husband’s boss, is he? I ask for him and he what, gets him to come to the phone? Ok.

She had no idea what I was talking about. I had no idea why she had no idea. Our common language had dumped us into a conversational cul-de-sac that neither of us could see any possible way out of.

It’s just one of the things that foreigners find so hard to understand: if you’re English, foreigners are always foreigners. It doesn’t matter if they’re living in their own country as they have for 3,000 years and you just got off the plane there. They are foreign. No English person ever is. But that doesn’t mean we all speak the same language.

Even when we say ‘Of course, there I suppose we’re foreign to them!!’ but it can’t really be said without at least a widening of the eyes and a little jutting of the chin if not a little shriek of laughter to show it couldn’t really be true. Not really. It’s English, you see. It’s how she is spoke. I wrote about it once, myself. It’s as much what isn’t said.

Being English

It was all quite straightforward

We both knew where we were.

We sort of got along, like that.

That way too.

And then suddenly, well – you know.

All sorts of things happened.

And before we knew where we were at all

That was it really.

Now I just look to see if her car’s there.

If you see what I mean.

I’m not sure I did at the time.

Thinking back.

Pity, actually.

What Now?

I discovered Hans Falada via a friend, who recommended Alone In Berlin. I say recommended – she insisted I read it, not least because a relative of hers had died in circumstances not entirely dissimilar to those of the hero and heroine who fell foul of the Gestapo. As another relative had captained the ship that captured the Enigma machine, maybe history balanced that one up a little. But irrelevant. Little Man, What Now? is nothing like Alone In Berlin. Nothing.

OK, the central characters are firmly at the bottom end of the social scale again and the latter half of the book is firmly set in Berlin, but a Berlin of straggling suburbs and allotments rather than the tram-infested zentrum.

This is about poverty and hopelessness and despair and struggling to survive and being a tiny, disregarded, probably un-necessary cog in a huge machine that you can’t see the purpose of. And at exactly the same time it isn’t. It’s a love story, not just of the Little Man for his Lambchen, but a story about love and trust and faith in each other. It’s intensely moving, not just because you know with each passing page that as the characters know too, their world won’t last but unlike them, you know why and how and what’s going to happen.

The Nazis are going to get in. Berlin is going to be demolished. The Little Man is going to be drafted. Lambchen is almost certainly going to be raped and the rest of the world is going to look the other way then pretend it didn’t really happen for the rest of time, because of what some politicians she had no control over did. And then the Russians are going to cut their country in two and if Pinneburg and Emma and their son, the Shrimp, somehow survive then they’re going to be living in the GDR until the Wall comes down, when they will be in their 80s.

But somehow, you get the feeling that maybe, just maybe they might get through even all of this, all of these horrors they don’t even know about, that Hans Falada didn’t know about, back in 1932 when this was written. And if they don’t, or didn’t, you feel that they did their best. And that’s pretty much all anyone can do.

Don’t be put off by the fact that this was the book that lead directly to Hans Falada’s death. It sold massively. So much so that it was turned into a film. In Hollywood. By Jews. You see the problem? You would have done if you lived in Germany in the mid-1930s.

Don’t be put off by the age of this book. The view from the bottom of the 99% upwards could have been written last week. Ignore the fact you’ve never heard of this book. Ignore the fact it was written in German. It will leave you quiet and sad and happy at the same time, wondering if maybe, just possibly, love will find a way after all.

Hanging on the new barbed wire

It’s Rememberance Sunday. The Prime Minister has gone to the Cenotaph and done his very best SadFace, even if being David Cameron he looks like an eight year old who can’t tell Nanny he needs a new dog because he wasn’t supposed to set light to the old one in the first place.

Without the slightest sense of irony the BBC are happily broadcasting stories explaining why we have to invade Syria despite the fact that hardly anyone can even point to it on a map without names on it because as usual, “they” are threatening to destroy ‘our way of life.’ Unlike say, a Home Secretary demanding to be able to see exactly which websites you visited, when, all of you. Perhaps like Patrick Rock, one of David Cameron’s special advisors, who collected child sex images on his computer, but somehow that wasn’t specifically mentioned. When it comes to destroying our way of life we don’t need any help from outside, thanks.We’ve got it. If you want a job doing properly you do it yourself.

Meanwhile a Russian airplane has exploded in Egypt because the airport security is a joke, as everyone has known for always, so it’s going to be another bonanza at Luton for airport security who were wondering what they were going to do about Christmas again.

Everyone I know who has left the army tells the same story. One word out of place and you aren’t just out on your ear but the roof will fall on you. ‘ The Army won’t just turn its back. It’ll stab you in yours.

I remember being told about a soldier in Northern Ireland whose officer was shot and down on the ground. The soldier jumped into the armoured car they had which happened to have a .50 Browning on top and opened fire at the flats where the shots had come from. Brownings are serious kit. There is nothing on a High Street you could hide behind that would save you. The shooting stopped, chiefly because the flat disintegrated, along with whoever was doing the shooting.

The army thought, in the circumstances, that things could have been done a little more discretely. So they asked the soldier to resign. He didn’t think he’d done anything wrong so he wasn’t inclined to do this having done pretty archetypal soldier stuff. OK, said the army. We’ll give your name to the Press when they ask what happened. Your choice.

Someone told me how he personally got turned over when Operation Stakeknife was being investigated. He was arrested by Special Branch in his flat, mob-handed and armed with sub-machineguns. He said he was quite flattered that they obviously thought he was Jason Bourne instead of just a fairly junior staff officer. He was only reaching for his jumper as it turned out, which was why he was able to tell me the story. They hung him out to dry. He hadn’t done anything, he wasn’t charged with anything, he’d served in Afghanistan and Iraq, killed people and almost been killed. The Army made it impossible for him to carry on there. The Prime Minister personally apologised to the journalist involved. The person I talked to is still waiting.

Another word for nothing left to lose

We pretend to remember. We don’t want to, or only to spin it into a version that suits the government better. The BBC’s Cenotaph broadcast this morning talked about ‘the dead of two World Wars,’ as they always do, then slipped in the compulsory bit about protecting our freedom, then reminded us that he who seeks peace must prepare for war/it isn’t over yet/~~brave little Belgium/~~Our Brave Boys are still dying by telling us about the two RAF men killed in Afghanistan last month.

Which only begged two questions, the first being since when did the Afghan crusade had the moral equivalence of World War Two, although the reasoning of Saudi Arabians working from Germany and living in the US with flame-proof passports justified invading Afghanistan and Iraq in much the same way that shooting an arch-duke in Sarajevo inevitably meant UK conscripts defending a canal in Flanders. Obvious, really.

The other question unaddressed by the BBC was exactly what the two RAF men were doing there, given that the Afghan campaign was supposed to have ended in 2014. Since they weren’t by definition ‘defending freedom’ (because freedom won, remember?) it would be quite hard to see how their deaths were the same thing at all. The British Army lost more people to traffic accidents in Afghanistan than it did to any enemy.

But it doesn’t matter. We’re wallowing in young men’s blood for another year, dipping our hands like Jacqui Kennedy screaming out of the car in Dallas, but without the few shreds of dignity she had left, nor the justification. So far as I can see, we always will.

Making It Up

Tweedledum or Tweedledee, or possibly both, once said to Alice that words meant anything he (or they) wanted them to mean, neither more nor less. As a descriptor for modern media it’s horribly accurate. Words that mean one thing one year mean the opposite the next. War is peace, as Orwell pointed out a long time ago.

Ever get the feeling you've been conned? — Ever get the feeling you’ve been conned?

All three might have been mildly amused by a man having a heart attack this week. Strictly, that wasn’t the nub of the story, although it seemed to be at first glance. After the driver had the heart attack the vehicle drove on and literally into Terminal 5 at Heathrow. Yesterday.

My father had a fatal heart attack and carried on after death much as he’d lived, being an expensive nuisance to other people causing a mess everyone else was expected to sort out and crashing into three cars. I don’t know whether this driver survived. But two things stood out immediately.

First, there was huge debate over whether the man should be called a taxi driver. It used to mean a black cab driver who had done the Knowledge and had a proper licence from the Hackney Carriage Office dahn the end of Chapel Market where Sammy Fox’s granny shopped, left then right then there guv, you won’t mind if I drop you here because I can’t get back otherwise what with the traffic and that, I was going down Kings Cross anyway but not this time of the afternoon living out in Essex south of the river nah, I’m not going that way this time of night. I had that Jeremy Clarkson in the back of my cab last week, very clever man. And all that STUFF.

No For Hire sign. No proper cab. So he was a mini-cab, like the dreaded Uber, which seems to be shorthand for the kind of no-insurance but gee-it’s got-a cute-app-plus-its-cheap which is shredding the black cab business, so long as you don’t mind nobody knowing where they’re going and legging it if there’s a traffic accident.

Rather more significant I thought was the fact that the picture showed so many lies we’ve all been told. Back in 2007 two men attempted to massacre people in the main concourse at Glasgow airport by driving a car into it and detonating gas bottles there. No, the big ones. The attack failed, not least because an airport baggage handler headbutted one of the attackers who was already on fire. After that we were told over and over again that airport security blah paramount importance- lessons-will -be -learned – best practice – watchful – security – terrorism – CCTV – vigilance and all the customary words that clearly mean nothing at all.

Because terrorism

Why do I say this? Why do I doubt that when I have to hold my trousers up at airports with my hands like someone on Death Row because my belt has to be interrogated because Terrorism, that this isn’t just a stupid charade that does less than nothing to stop terrorism? Becuase of the picture at the top.

If you go to Edinburgh airport you can get a car near the concourse. There are metal barriers stopping you repeating the attack at Glasgow. There are concrete bollards protecting the main doors, so you definitely can’t drive a car in there, whether you get head-butted or not. At Heathrow T5, obviously none of that matters. This taxi, mini-cab, VW microbus, call it what you like, stopped only because the driver’s foot came off the accelerator. As you can see clearly, it went straight through the puny designed-to-stop-people-only metal railings that were the front-line defence against a car being used to smash straight through the windows onto the concourse. As this vehicle nearly did.

Public response to this? Nothing? Security implications debated all over the media? No. Social media backlash? Well actually yes. I was told this was ‘nothing to do with terrorism’ and I was ‘stupid’ to mention it by someone on Facebook. So that seems to be official. Fifteen years of ‘security’ which has been nothing more than legalised theft of alcohol and perfume bottles over 150 ml at every airport where the G4S personnel don’t fancy doing their own Christmas shopping and the net result is that anybody with access to a car can still stage their own carbon copy of a terrorist attack mounted seven years ago. It isn’t just that it doesn’t matter. That matters in itself. What matters more to me is that nobody is even supposed to notice, or to mention it if they have.

The Furmity Tent

I don’t know when people started hating food. I had a fantastic dinner yesterday, a fairly ordinary spag bol sauce albeit using venison mince and – gasp!! – a veggie stock-cube along with Worcestershire sauce, with furmity. I liked it so much that I said so on Facebook.

One person said they didn’t ever want to see such a thing again. Another told me to fuck off. The first one I blocked, not least because I don’t want anyone posting Our Brave Boys knee-jerk seasonal adulation on their time-line anywhere near mine. The second I know as a farmer and I know what she meant. Which is ok. Mostly.

What isn’t is people thinking that anything doesn’t come out of a packet is suspect. There is a distinct meme running through what passes for contemporary life that the only good food comes from a factory. At the same time that the number of TV programmes about food increases, so does the number of ready-meals and cook-at-home pizzas sold. Tabloids scream that if people used all the spices Jamie Oliver does it would cost a whole week’s JSA. Which if you used all of all of the herbs in his kitchen it undoubtedly would, but nobody would ever need to go and buy them all in one go anyway. The fact that every packet of processed food, the kind that directly leads to coronary heart disease, Type II diabetes and ADHD has a list of ingredients far more disturbing than a pinch of oregano and half a nutmeg, grated, is irrelevant. Since when did nutmeg buy any advertising space?

What was really surprising was the horror about furmity. As you remember from school, when you had to read Thomas Hardy and snore through The Mayor of Casterbridge, or watch it on TV one Sunday afternoon to be polite to your girlfriend’s parents before they went out for the evening and you could maybe listen to that new Santana album again but shut up until they’ve gone or they’ll hear you, furmity was what got Michael Henchard into trouble. It also made a success of him for the next twenty years, which isn’t bad going for some raisins. Admittedly, I’m biased. A friend once lived in Thomas Hardy’s sister’s schoolhouse and his was our country in our twenties. We read every single book. Not so much because they were great books, I think, but because they were about our land. A half-mythical place. The place we were from. But anyway.

Separate the egg yolks, you say, Ezekiel? I suppose I could do meringues with the whites. 'Tis pity to waste they. — “Separate the egg yolks, you say, Ezekiel? I suppose I could do meringues with the whites. ‘Tis a mortal pity to waste they,” said Henchard.

My Furmity Recipe

Put some cracked wheat (bulgar) in a pan of water overnight. I have two measurements, “some” and “many.” This is “some.” Maybe two handfuls. 200g if you want to be picky about it. Don’t be.
Next day, drain the water off. Find some cinnamon in the back of the cupboard. And some raisins. Oh and there might be some allspice there as well.
Those walnuts you tried to pickle in port might be an idea too.
Or pine nuts.
Some of that ginger cordial because frankly I can’t see what else you’re going to do with it. Or why you bought it, to be honest.
Why DID you, anyway?
It’s like that knock-off Microplane grater you got in Paris, isn’t it? Except that at least you’re going to use that in (8).
Microplane half a nutmeg into the mixture.
Oh the mixture of all of it. What did you think you were going to do with it?
Add some almond milk. You could make it but it would be far more sensible to use some soya almond milk stuff.
Enough to cover it, obviously. Have you never cooked anything before?
Some of that ginger puree. About two-thirds of the nearest spoon in the drawer, which happens to be a soup spoon. Well, wash it then.
Add some brown sugar. Not the granulated stuff. You can’t do anything except apple sandwiches with that. About 50 grammes.
Two egg yolks. Separating them out using the two half shells looks really cheffy. I’m not convinced they actually add much to the experience though.
Heat it. Don’t let it boil. Just get it hot enough to burn your tongue on.
Eat it.

Henchard added rum to his and sold his wife, prompting two decades of abstinence in a nicely moral plot. The taste is amazing, layer on layer of complexity and warmth. The ginger isn’t part of any traditional recipe, or rather the Waitrose one I cribbed from, but I was trying to go for tastes that might be found in a country kitchen of Henchard’s time. Or if they might possibly not have had ginger root, at least they would have known about it.

It’s really easy to cook and like a lot of recipes that people say “I haven’t got time to do all that,” it actually takes about five minutes. Most of the ‘time’ is overnight while it’s soaking up water and you’re not doing anything to do with cooking then. I didn’t think I’d like that sweet-and-meat thing that seems to have been so popular in medieval cookery. It still is if you go to Moro or eat duck pancakes with plum sauce. But still quite hard to see why it should irritate people so much. Apart from the fact it’s not Pot Noodle.

Because I said so

This morning two things were reported which ought to scare you senseless.

The Defence Minister whose idea of defence includes blowing people up in foreign countries any time he feels like it said he’s fine with that. The RAF launched a drone, a big explodey model airplane and controlled it from Lincolnshire.

It killed two British people in Syria. According to the Prime Minister they’d been going to threaten our way of life. Again. Before he collected himself the Prime Minister said they’d been going to kill the Queen. So far as I remember in the tabloids they were going to do that the other weekend as well. Then he used the magic word:

“Such actions are required to prevent a terrorist attack.”

He didn’t once use the phrase extra-judicial murder, which was odd. The plaintiff “We have to work extremely hard” just sounded a bit pathetic tagged on the end.

It’s terrorism though, you see? The Attorney General said it was ok and if he wants to keep his very nicely paid job and pension then as every previous one, he’d better. So it’s ok to fly an airplane somewhere and blow people up. You don’t need a trial or any of that old nonsense. You can just go and kill them. It’s fine. Because terrorism.

The final solution

As Michael Fallon said, there was ‘no other way’ to deal with people accused of terrorism. After all, we’ve tried all that arresting people and putting them on trial and witnesses and burden of proof and all that he said but she said and ah-yes-but-m’lud and frankly, where does it get you? Maybe Rebeka Brooks can tell David Cameron some time.

Seconds later on BBC Radio 4’s one o’clock news today we were told a 28 year-old policeman had been arrested along with several others for conspiracy to pervert the cause of justice. That’s serious. You can go to jail for life.

THAW — Just because his lapels are like that doesn’t make it not scary.

For reasons which were never made clear, as Hunter Thompson used to say, the Birmingham policeman had made-up a story. Which sadly isn’t totally unknown among police officers as any cursory viewing of the Sweeney will tell the impartial observer. But this story was different.

This story was that terrorists had been going to kidnap a police officer. Except there weren’t any terrorists. It was all made-up.

Do you see a problem yet? Maybe you should. Because now you don’t need proof to go and kill people any more. Just someone’s say so. For example, a lying policeman’s word on it.

If you’re ok with this kind of drone strike it’s probably best if you don’t even look at people the wrong way in future. The party of conservatism is taking us a long, long way from Dixon of Dock Green. Mind how you go.