Tuesday 26 January 2016

DEATH IN ANTARCTICA. A HUMANITARIAN SPEAKS.



Peepul ov Brittun, And indeed.  Peepul ov the world. For I think I am. Now. A citizen of the world. I simply say.  That when I left, I said I would always be with you. And I am.  Me'n'Imelda. 'N the kids.  Yeah.  The drunk boy, Yeah. And the suicidal girl.  Wendy Deng Murdoch? No. Never heard of her. 

But what I wanted to say. Is extend my sympathies. To the family of Brigadier "Snowy" Golightly Jockstrap. The chap who died.  Yes, ski-ing across the Antarctic. For the wounded soldiers. And just to tell you. 


That I asked one of my staff to pop a fiver into the kitty for him.  And that, as a matter of fact, will actually be a tenner.  When the govament tops it up.  No, it's the least I can do.  Don't mention it.

But actually, y'know, it is a bit rich.  Asking busy, hard-working families, like mine.  To support soldiers when they come back from wars.  Shouldn't the govament support the wounded soldiers?  I mean, it's the govament who send them there.  And let's face it.  Wot, with war being what it is, people are gonna lose bits, legs and arms and eyes.  It's a bit rich, as I said, to expect ordinary people like me to  cough-up for glass eyes and tin legs and things.

No, 'sno use that ishmael bloke looking for a picture of me with a wounded soldier. Alastair Campbell'd never have allowed it. Cheering, healthy, gung-ho fuckwits, all nicely arranged, me in the centre, them like, well, like soldiers in a row, plenty of those pictures, 

 but you wooden catch me near a wounded fucking soldier. Much less a dead bastard.  That's what Wootton Basset's for.

Mind you, I blame the soldiers. I mean, they should've sorted better terms and conditions for themselves.  I mean, look at myself'n'Imelda. 


We have rich friends, round the clock armed servants, drivers, aircraft, which the grateful taxpayer provides and  I have a fabulous pension and a job in retirement that allows me to travel the world, causing wars and taking bribes from  torturing despots.  And Imelda gets to defend them, at a grand an hour, 

 
from any questions about the way they treat their citizens.  She'll probly get to be a judge in the Hague War Crimes Court. So I'll have nothing to worry about. If I fetch-up there. Not that I will.  Get an earldom, I should think, after Chilcott. It's not bad, is it? Imelda'll be delighted. Always wanted to be an aristocrat. It's her socialist background, you know, great believer in equality, Imelda.

No, I get a bit impatient with the wounded squaddies, to be frank with you.  I mean, nobody forced them to join-up, did they?  It's not as though it's my fault they got their balls shot off, in a pointless and illegal war, is it ?  And actually, it wasn't pointless for the people I work for.  

The British prime minister with his employer, Mr Cheney of GlobaDeath.

Just for the tens of millions of ordinary people. And let's face it. Nobody comes into politics to give a fuck about them.


So there, fuck off, 
And that'll be forty thousand pounds.





This guy, Henry Worsley, the ex-SAS officer, one of Andy McNab's True Grit characters,  he could have had himself hoisted out of that shithole at any time, his training, he must have known he was ill, fucked. And yet he left it until, well, he left it too late, for himself, his wife, his family and friends - one of whom mouthed that At least the mission was not a total failure.  I don't know how much more of a failure it could have been, its sole member having died before completing it,  that seems like failure to me. But I don't speak SAS.  Or Ruritanian. The Princes Gormless and Hooligan love all this stuff.  As long as it's not them, losing limbs or freezing to death.  And all for nothing.  Seems that before he died he'd raised just a hundred grand;  make more sense to sign-over his army pension, bound to be worth more than that. And he'd still be alive.

I'm with Tony Blair, above, that such charities as these existing is a national scandal;  if we can't afford to care for the soldiers, we can't afford to send them, no ifs, no buts, no charity show-offs.   

I don't know how we cope with it all. First David Bowie, then Alan Rickman, then Dirty Cecil Parkinson and now this chap.  Sometimes it gets so hard, to care.

21 comments:

Mike said...

I'm not religiously inclined, but I have to believe in Hell. And that there is a specially hot corner reserved for Tony and Imelda

Call me hard-hearted, though I'm a calm, pacifist, humanitarian sort of person, but I would feed Blair into the woodchipper, feet first, without a moments self-recrimitation.

mongoose said...

The whole country has become mindfucked by trivia. A hundred thousand quid. Question: how much does it cost to get a half-dead bloke from the wilderness of Antarctica to Punta Arenas? I bet there's not much change.

tdg said...

I suppose we should chalk that up to vanity suicide.

call me ishmael said...

I am not overtly romantic but considering the impact of my natural and timely death on my wife, mrs ishmael, fills me with dread. To court, invite and facilitate such prematurely and unnecessarily seems to me an abomination to which the term Vanity Suicide scarcely does justice, but it's a good start.

The pot will grow, mr mongoose, with his death, but is that really a welcome arithmetic? Is self-slaughter fund raising's new Gold Standard?

I was always a bit queasy about smiley, dying children, raising huge sums for whatever was their particular, accursed condition, thought it macabre and mawkish and the logic of it enables us to enquire of tin-rattlers, If I give you a fiver, will you self-harm for me, here, in the street, just a fiver's worth of razor blade cut on your forearm, otherwise, how do I know you really care?

Doug Shoulders said...

I was thinking that myself Mr Mongoose, plus the transport of the explorer and equipment and of course the cost of the risk assessment….there was a risk assessment done wasn’t there?...

Anonymous said...

I like reading about Shackleton and the early explorers but the Feinnes and Stroud effort just seemed narcissistic masochism (or masochistic narcissism?) as did this latest misadventure. It's an exercise in not dying in a place which forbids mammalian life. Any fool can trudge and freeze, and being fit enough to do it for weeks instead of hours doesn't mean anything except that there's something awry in the survival instinct.
Antarctic chill is a reasonable metaphor for the look in TB's eyes in the above pic. In fairness it's a better man who trudges into oblivion in the deep South, knowing his enemy, than anyone who doesn't have the wit to revile this....demon.
-richard

call me ishmael said...

I do my best, mr richard, to be ishmael the reviler. Whipped and scourged by MediaMinster we too often let the sin retire prosperously with the sinner, into a cleansing, airbrushed history; Parkinson, as we see, outrageously sanctified for his low cunning, self-interest and bullying. Oily fucking bastard, may Satan spitroast him on a serrated skewer, forever and ever.

And from the look of him maybe Blair already has an intimation of Satan's Blair agenda. Perhaps he'll endow a Third Way Chantry, where masses may be feverishly sung for his rotten soul.

A good job I have a septic, vengeful imagination or my loathing of capital punishment might, in Tony'n'Imelda's case, disappear.

yardarm said...

Yes, Blair is ageing rapidly, his head taking on a skullish appearance, like the Duke of Edinburgh`s, only Phil the Greek is thirty years older. Blair is haunted by the impending encounter with Mr Satan.

But perhaps Blair`s descent into Hell won`t be too much of an ordeal. He`ll have plenty of old friends there, his heroine the Blessed Corpse of St Margaret with her chums Leon Brittan and now Cecil, giving poor old Lucifer gip about privatising the gas supplies for the Fires of Fucking Hell and in time Campbell and Straw will join him and Murdoch too, although he still might be pissed off about catching the Warcriminal grunting in copulation between the spread thighs of his paid for concubine. It`s Satan I feel sorry for, time for some sympathy for the devil.

yardarm said...

I`d always envisaged them, faced with sudden death, I`ve mentioned it before, say their Gulfstream broke up in mid air. Blair would be jiggling the beads, babbling Hail Mary`s to ward off Mr Death`s ballifs while Imelda, as she plummetted through 30 000 feet would be emitting piercing shrieks of terror and at the same time scrabbling desperately at all the money billowing about them.

SG said...

Sympathy for the Devil? Yes! Why not? What was it Mr Churchill said? Ah Yes... "If Hitler invaded hell I would make at least a favourable reference to the devil in the House of Commons". A much worn but apt quotation I think...

Bungalow Bill said...

Hope that the Great Winds have not caused you problems there, Mr I.

call me ishmael said...

Thanks, mr bungalow bill, not too bad, this time, we have had worse, the sea, though, was blowing up over a stretch of road where it never has previously and there are ever more lochans - large ponds - standing in the fields; winters have worsened considerably since we have been here as far as wind and rain go, althought lots of bulbs have popped up early, even before Christmas; strange days.

Mike said...

Yesterday hailstones like golf balls were falling on my garden; this morning its clear blue sky and a sunny 27 deg.

On my walk (http://short-walks.com.au/new-south-wales/sydney/spit-bridge-to-manly-walk/) I ran to the aid of another female walker who was screaming - she had a leach on her leg - she thought it was a snake.

Funny old times, indeed.

Anonymous said...

Jesus, Mr Mike - must have been a fucking big leech. Mind how you go...

v.//

inmate said...

Trust you are well Mr I.
In other news, another 'celebrity' has carked it, Mr Sir Terry moneybags Wogan has caused the PBC News to berate us with the never-ending loop of grief. Such a talent lost forever, never more to 'earn/demand' £2M from hosting Children in Need.

Mike said...

She was a woman, Mr Verge; any of us chaps could have panicked under similar circumstances.

I did notice, en passant, and call me an old sexist voieur if you wish, that she had rather nice legs.

Anonymous said...

Therapeutic benefits of a leech, perhaps, the shapely legs.

As I understand it some of the critters that'll kill you will fuck off if you make sure they hear you coming? ("Hear" in a figurative sense with snakes, of course. Some say the outback's Death Adder got its name from a biologist's mishearing the name it was given by early white folks - "deaf adder"; as an ambush predator, it holds its ground even if you get quite close. So you'd be the one that'd need to fuck off, in this case, I imagine.)

v.//

Mike said...

Mr Verge: you are generally correct. Here in Sydney the types of snakes we have are deadly (red-bellied black snakes) but they keep out of the way unless you provoke them. Eleswhere down here there are snakes that don't back off - I believe the 'fierce snake' (aptly named) is a bugger.

Locally, we also have the Sydney funnel web spider which is small but aggressive, can kill in 15 mins. They lurk around swimming pools. I was once bit on the hand by something clearing leaves from my pool. Not sure what but the pain was the most intense I have ever felt. Slowly my arm went numb. I thought of calling an ambulance, but the thought of having to explain it all to my wife afterwards, and being told I am an idiot was too much to bare. Better a quick and silent death. Anyhow, the numbness stopped at my shoulder although my hand was painful for a while.

Lots of animals and fish able to kill down here, but nobody seems too worried.

Anonymous said...

Sounds like you had yourself a full-on Bloke Apotheosis there, Mr Mike. Well done. (I'd have been screaming for medevac, and no mistake.)

The fierce snake would be the taipan, I suspect. Remember seeing that berk Steve Irwin fucking around with one once on TV.

I think there's an entry in William Donaldson's book of "Rogues and Eccentrics" that describes an Irish aristocrat exiled to Sydney when it was still a few shacks, so petrified by the abundant snakelife that he had tonnes of peat imported to surround the house he was having built with genuine St Patrick fangproofing. Fuck-all good it did him, natch. (And Donaldson may have been making it up in any case.)

v.//

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