FOUR MEN IN A BOAT. OR OUT OF IT.
Could this be Flight MH 370-something?
Or is it the missing British yacht?
Or is it the missing British yacht?
Good evening, look you and this is Huw Welshman with the six o' clock news from the PBC. And in a dramatic day, no honestly, dramatic, in a dramatic day of twists and turns and wotsanames the search for some people is back on, thanks, in large part to you, the viewer, to the unelected prime minister, Mr Cameron, to Mr Murdoch's arselicker-in-chief, Mr Jeremy Hunt and to interest flagging in the doings of Mr Nigel Fruitcake and his NutKipper Party.
And it's over now to our Northern correspondent, ishmael smith, ishmael what's your take on this?
Take on what?
On the search for the four missing yachtsmen.
Oh, them. 'Slike polo, isn't it?
Isn't what?
Yachting, it's like polo. It's for layabouts, it's for people with too much money, or access to other people with too much money. It's for people with nothing better to do. Fuck 'em. I don't care about them, let 'em fucking drown, they don't give a fuck about me. why've I gotta be wound-up, all over again, about some buncha pricks who can't even sail a boat properly. What, I'm supposed to piss myself because some cunt's mummy loves him, or his sister? And anyway, the North Atlantic's no place for a fucking yacht, not unless you gotta a ten-thousand ton ship tied on the back, that you can jump into. I went across it in a six thousand ton tramp steamer and it was like a fucking rowing boat. Ya ever see those waves, Huw, close-up? They're like fucking cathedrals crashing down on top of you, you never seen anything so big, so fuck-off powerful. Davy Jones's locker, me 'earties, that's the place for them; full fathom five, my father lies, and his bones they are of coral made...
You what...??
It's Shakespeare, Huw, the Tempest, I think.
Shakespeare??? What's Shakespeare gotta do with it, look you. This a real life human drama, here, with these four blokes. And their families.
Ah, their families.
And what's that supposed to mean, eh, Ah, their families. Something wrong with families, is there, boyo?
Not something.
What, then?
Everything.
Everything's wrong with families, the cradle of racism, the family; the crucible of insanity, mothers'n'fathers; they fuck you up, your mum and dad. Never mind, Huw, you wouldn't understand , you're only a filthcaster. And your chosen filth subject is Are these blokes dead or not? Well I don't know but Oscar Testosterone is in the loonybin for a month, before they let him off the charge of trollopkilling, so there's no trial, and nobody gives a fuck, now, about the Malayan airline, so I suppose this is a good bit of filth to have happened along. That bloke won't be able to believe his luck.
Everything's wrong with families, the cradle of racism, the family; the crucible of insanity, mothers'n'fathers; they fuck you up, your mum and dad. Never mind, Huw, you wouldn't understand , you're only a filthcaster. And your chosen filth subject is Are these blokes dead or not? Well I don't know but Oscar Testosterone is in the loonybin for a month, before they let him off the charge of trollopkilling, so there's no trial, and nobody gives a fuck, now, about the Malayan airline, so I suppose this is a good bit of filth to have happened along. That bloke won't be able to believe his luck.
What bloke?
That bloke, professor of upturned yachtology studies, the geezer from Southampton University,
needle-in-a-haystacking, that bloke. I betya he thought he'd had his fifteen minutes of fame and now, less than a month later, here he is again, talking shite, currents and wind speed, like he knew something when the only reason he's there is because they need a titled talking head. Richard Branson, he was on, too, hissing and stuttering about his various founderings and crashes.
unusually staying afloat for a few minutes.
Well be that as it may, ishmael, is there any sign of a liferaft up there, on your shore?
On my shore? No, just the seals.
But I suppose there could be, I suppose it might eventually drift up there, they're great blokes, these sailors, everybody says so.
You mean their families say so. Not only my son but my best friend, too, was it?
Well, their families and two hundred thousand twitterers.
Yeah, exactly, two hundred thousand Twitterers. Is that how things now happen, through Twitter, is that how the US Coastguard is to manage itself? Fuck me, Jesus, Huw, fuck me Jesus; good thing we didn't have Twitter at the time of D-Day.
Well that was ishmael smith for us there on the Atlantic shore giving us the latest on this breaking story of the four wotsanames, missing presumed alive by their families and dead by the US Coatsguard and I'm joined now here in the studio by that well-known ventriloquism act, Drs Gerry McCann and Cilla. Gerry, what do you and your dummy make of all this.
Well, clearly, Huw, and lessbeclear about this, clearly, we are doctors and we are the victims here but putting that aside, Cilla and I are clearly prepared to fly down there, in the First Class(Grieving) cabin, to the Caribbean with some of our highly professional drinking companions, liars of the greatest integrity, and trample all over the crime scene, refuse to answer any questions and blame the local police for kidnapping the yacht and sinking it. What do you think, Cilla?
Gottle-a-geer, gottle-a-geer.
There's a good little scouse git, I mean girl. And I'd just like to mention, while I'm here, Huw, that Cilla and I are, as all right-thinking people believe, entirely innocent of neglecting liddle wotsername in any way at all and viewers can still send us just three pounds a week to keep us out of jail, I mean to help us in our search for wotsername, whatever it is. Like those missing yachtsmen, she is out there somewhere. Isn't that right, Cilla?
Gottle-a-geer, gottle-a-geer.
SUN ARISE.
BUT NOT FOR MUCH LONGER
These daily images, of eighty-year olds going into court distress me a bit. In a way it's OK, you know, for richer for poorer, for better for worse but in another way it's a bit creepy, punitive, the walk of shame they call it on Cruelty TeeVee, it's a bit like putting people in the stocks. There ought to be a discreet, private entrance to the courts, at least until people are convicted, especially old, old married people.
mr vincent was saying here that Rolf Harris being a beast was particularly shocking. I know what he meant even though it doesn't shock me. Some aspects of childhood, ephemera, really, for no readily discernible reason, remain more vivid than others, as though they happened yesterday and I remember - I cannot remember where or with whom - seeing, on a new-fangled teevee set, in 1957, a children's programme called Mick and Montmorency, a big guy and a little guy, Charlie Drake was the little guy, I don't know the other player but there was a regular guest star, an eccentrically comic turn, he did things like draw an octopus on his hand, dangle the hand in a bowl of water, wriggle the fingers and talk like an octopus.
The octopus impersonator was Rolf Harris and at the age of six or seven I found him distinctly creepy, if that was entertainment it was a talent I didn't want to have.
I subsequently found the rest of his skillset equally creepy - the double-tracked voicings of Sun Arise, his first pop hit; the wobble board and the didgeridoo, the painting, the version of Led Zeppelin's Stairway to Heaven, bad enough by that gang of noncing plagiarists, infinitely worse by this stage Aussie, beardy, kids entertainer. And then there was the showbiz-veterinary shit, Animal Hospital, wasn't it? Always gimme the heeby-jeebies, did Rolf, always.
I am not shocked, therefore, to hear that he abused his counterfeit, showbiz stature in the ways that those people do. To digress, momentarily, from Rolfing, I have, in passing, read, over the years that the Beatles' performing tours were, in their own words, like Fellini's Satyricon; that the Rolling Stones' tours were worse, darker, more humiliating for female fans than were the Beatles' high-jinx and that the afore-mentioned Led Zeppelin behaved in ways that the Romans would've found depraved beyond belief.
There weas also a blatantly beastly so-called Supergroup, Blind Filth, containing at least two heroin adicts, and they displayed a frightful paedo sensitivity, but then they were brilliant musicians, like Rolf Harris.
BLIND FAITH:
WINWOOD, GRECH, BAKER AND CLAPTON
AND THEIR EPONYMOUS ALBUM COVER
She was eleven, old enough, eh?
I wonder if Time will ever stand still long enough to see if these demi-Gods, too, might have visited their starry greatness on the under-aged, might face charges; if McCartney or Jagger or Plant and members of their entoureages might, instead of being feted and soireed and honoured by pimp presidents and criminal prime ministers, find themselves in the dock.
FAB MOPSTERS WITH LEADING DJ.
GOLDEN GOD WITH
WHOLE LOTTA YOUNG LOVE
Harris, anyway, as far as I know, has all but admitted at least one set of serious sexual offences and faces many other, lesser ones.
I say lesser because they are lesser in the eyes of the law, they attract lesser penalties but if you ask anyone who has been molested by a clergyperson they will tell you that the word lesser has no place in the conversation and some of those who allege assault and molestation by Harris claim that their lives were irreparably damaged, devastatingly derailed as much by the fact of the offence as by its gravity, the beast's gross and - to the victim - truly, fundamentally,
That Queen Brenda, what's she like?
She gives these to any old slag.
shattering violation of trust is, in my view, deserving of as severe a penalty as are those offences of penetration, perversion and aberration which we deem more serious. The breaking of trust between the powerful and the weak can only breed delinquence in the victim.
But I am uneasy at seeing an old lady, perhaps herself image-manipulated by showbiz handlers, tottering daily into court, before the filthsters' assembled cameras. She has few blossom times remaining to her, few, if any and her final days should not be such as these. If Harris, himself, will not spare her this grim ritual, then he has grown creepier now than my seven-year old self could ever imagine.
SUN ARISE.
BUT NOT FOR MUCH LONGER
These daily images, of eighty-year olds going into court distress me a bit. In a way it's OK, you know, for richer for poorer, for better for worse but in another way it's a bit creepy, punitive, the walk of shame they call it on Cruelty TeeVee, it's a bit like putting people in the stocks. There ought to be a discreet, private entrance to the courts, at least until people are convicted, especially old, old married people.
mr vincent was saying here that Rolf Harris being a beast was particularly shocking. I know what he meant even though it doesn't shock me. Some aspects of childhood, ephemera, really, for no readily discernible reason, remain more vivid than others, as though they happened yesterday and I remember - I cannot remember where or with whom - seeing, on a new-fangled teevee set, in 1957, a children's programme called Mick and Montmorency, a big guy and a little guy, Charlie Drake was the little guy, I don't know the other player but there was a regular guest star, an eccentrically comic turn, he did things like draw an octopus on his hand, dangle the hand in a bowl of water, wriggle the fingers and talk like an octopus.
The octopus impersonator was Rolf Harris and at the age of six or seven I found him distinctly creepy, if that was entertainment it was a talent I didn't want to have.
I subsequently found the rest of his skillset equally creepy - the double-tracked voicings of Sun Arise, his first pop hit; the wobble board and the didgeridoo, the painting, the version of Led Zeppelin's Stairway to Heaven, bad enough by that gang of noncing plagiarists, infinitely worse by this stage Aussie, beardy, kids entertainer. And then there was the showbiz-veterinary shit, Animal Hospital, wasn't it? Always gimme the heeby-jeebies, did Rolf, always.
I am not shocked, therefore, to hear that he abused his counterfeit, showbiz stature in the ways that those people do. To digress, momentarily, from Rolfing, I have, in passing, read, over the years that the Beatles' performing tours were, in their own words, like Fellini's Satyricon; that the Rolling Stones' tours were worse, darker, more humiliating for female fans than were the Beatles' high-jinx and that the afore-mentioned Led Zeppelin behaved in ways that the Romans would've found depraved beyond belief.
There weas also a blatantly beastly so-called Supergroup, Blind Filth, containing at least two heroin adicts, and they displayed a frightful paedo sensitivity, but then they were brilliant musicians, like Rolf Harris.
BLIND FAITH:
WINWOOD, GRECH, BAKER AND CLAPTON
AND THEIR EPONYMOUS ALBUM COVER
I wonder if Time will ever stand still long enough to see if these demi-Gods, too, might have visited their starry greatness on the under-aged, might face charges; if McCartney or Jagger or Plant and members of their entoureages might, instead of being feted and soireed and honoured by pimp presidents and criminal prime ministers, find themselves in the dock.
WHOLE LOTTA YOUNG LOVE
Harris, anyway, as far as I know, has all but admitted at least one set of serious sexual offences and faces many other, lesser ones.
I say lesser because they are lesser in the eyes of the law, they attract lesser penalties but if you ask anyone who has been molested by a clergyperson they will tell you that the word lesser has no place in the conversation and some of those who allege assault and molestation by Harris claim that their lives were irreparably damaged, devastatingly derailed as much by the fact of the offence as by its gravity, the beast's gross and - to the victim - truly, fundamentally,
That Queen Brenda, what's she like?
She gives these to any old slag.
shattering violation of trust is, in my view, deserving of as severe a penalty as are those offences of penetration, perversion and aberration which we deem more serious. The breaking of trust between the powerful and the weak can only breed delinquence in the victim.
But I am uneasy at seeing an old lady, perhaps herself image-manipulated by showbiz handlers, tottering daily into court, before the filthsters' assembled cameras. She has few blossom times remaining to her, few, if any and her final days should not be such as these. If Harris, himself, will not spare her this grim ritual, then he has grown creepier now than my seven-year old self could ever imagine.
25 comments:
I think that if we could "fast forward" into the later part of this century we would find that "the Establishment" had changed the law to make all this sort of thing just as "Acceptable" as is Homosexuality currently.
For exactly the same reasons!!!
There must be legions of them trembling at the knee.
Zeplin and the stones seem to prove the rule of right place right time.. privileged underachievers. Loads of albums between them and a handful of reasonably decent songs..half-inched from penniless blues blokes.
Backstage after the show…gruesome prospect for the young ladies.
Wonder if bigger heads will roll after Harris and Hall get theirs…I’m not holding my breath
Testing of the water…age of consent lowered.. per that club that Harman n Tatchell were in.
I flick through the music tv sometimes..and oft countenance the flesh of virgins whoring themselves. Too much bouncing about. It’s a learning for kids on how to behave.
I’ve stopped pointing that out to people. If enough people do likewise (Stop pointing it out) then enough people will not be appalled.
Then we will live as our betters intend
The only thing belaying our journey to decay is the stupidity of the pilot. It is a committee after all.
I would prefer, mr alphons, to anticipate the Establishment swinging from lamp posts. It is probably out of the question, a revolution, even if it is the only solution.
The rise of the Right, the far Right, however, may also have some trembling at the knee. The National Front seems set to win the French Euros and the NutKippers will do well here and apparently it is the same everywhere, the only parties for which large numbers of people feel enthusiasm are those which at their core are bad shit.
Farage, of course, is more of a Neanderthal-nostalgic than Gove but he presses Cynicism's buttons, sometimes even with your correspondent, I much prefer his version of Back In The USSR to Hague's.
I guess there are some, though, regardless of political party allegiance, who simply see sex with children as part of an upward curve of liberation and as you say the enforcement of the self-contradictory argument for homosexual marriage will be seen as a step further along that curve, can only be seen as that.
I have done this to death, over the years, the erosion of self restraint is not Freedom, the homogenisation of Depravity is not Progress.
However much one formerly argued for, let's call it homosexual rights, it is hard not to see, now, that the freedom to be loudly, variously and extremely sexually aberrant can have only one destination - Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.
It may be disingenuous to report but I read awhile ago that some prominent medic claimed he would rather be HIV positive than diabetic; diabetes, he said, will inevitably deform, weaken and kill such as your correspondent; retro-virals have made Acquired Immuno-Deficiency Syndrome quite manageable. Maybe Lady Sir Elton John will switch from AIDS charity to diabetes fund raisers but I doubt it.
Odd, though, that a disease which afflicts anal sexers, IV drug users and those in their sexual circles is more or less cured, whilst diabetes is both comprehensively promoted and encouraged by GlobaFood and treated still, largely, by 1960s methods. Oh, the needles are better but they're still needles, I know this because I have injected or pricked myself about 65,000 times, so far. Elton wouldn't stand for it.
In the Global Village, connected by electronic media, wrote Marshall McLuhan, minority groups can no longer be suppressed. (He was talking about the phone and the photocopier) I believe McLuhan refered instinctively to political liberation groups and that he had not foreseen that, amongs others, our publicly-funded, national broadcaster would become the smug, unrepentant, unreformed HeadQuarters of child buggering.
You might be right, mr alphons, we might well find, in future, that '"the Establishment" had changed the law to make all this sort of thing just as "Acceptable"'
There is a site, mr shoulders, which catalogues Zeppelin's larceny; most of their songs were stolen, unaccredited to still living black composers; their inspiration towards the eclectic whimsy, they averred, was due to them being creatively bust and sitting around in a welsh cottage, listening to what I call the riffs, reels and ragas of the Incredible String Band. Their penchant for Satanistic orgy with young girls is well-known. I would love to see them in the dock.
Often remarked upon here, even the handful of good Stones tracks was piched from maestro Ry Cooder and skilfully embellished by newboy, Mick Taylor. Ry Cooder has never been credited and JaggeRichardsCorp found a way, years ago, to deny Mick Taylor his share of royalties from their most creative, most lucrative, most toured period. But all this is business stuff, these people are psychic and sexual vampires, even stealing one another's partners. There will be legions of lawyers suppressing paternity and abuse claims, bullying where they can, bribing elsewhere.
It is these monstrous, old, thieving, verminous reprobates selling-out fantastically overpriced stadia all over the world as much as your ".....flesh of virgins whoring themselves" which depresses me.
Maybe bigger heads will roll, we must live in hope.
'...or pricked myself about 65,000 times, so far. Elton wouldn't stand for it. '
You're wrong there, Mr Ishmael. I'll wager he's been pricked a whole lot more than that.
Vincent
I think Elton is just one big prick.
Whoa, no relation I assure you!
I see that the writing credits to stairway to heaven is a subject of contention right now…interesting…their most famous song..a masterpiece to the ears of some. Ralf done it too…
Wonder how much clout zeplin have left to deal with this.
Old geezers in court is trending amusement for J Public Sports Fan.
A worrisome prospect to contemplate.. past recklessness with people’s lives appearing in the rear view mirror. Don’t they look frail and vulnerable?
Fucking ridiculous indeed Mr I, a twitter petition of 200,000 to 'force' the yanks to spend more time scouring the ocean.
I have some sympathy for the family but I don't believe that the US Coastguard just gave up for no reason. These boats all have a little gizmo that floats free when the thing sinks and then sends a distress call and acts as a homing beacon. If it didn't float free then the chances are it's snagged up in the wreckage at the bottom of the ocean. But more importantly - if I was abandoning ship in any kind of a controlled manner - the very first fucking thing I would do is chuck the fucking beacon in the water. Or take it in the life raft with me.
Sailors are a generally self-reliant mob but will go to enormous effort to help another in distress. As you say it's a fucking big ocean out there and nobody would leave another at its mercy if there was any realistic chance they were alive. I spend six weeks zig-zagging up and down the North Sea a few years ago in a big seismic boat and we were pounded by force 8 and 9 gales. I would be fucking terrified if you suggested I go out there in a bloody 40ft yacht made of fibreglass.
It's one thing looning around the Caribbean where you are never more than three hours from land and you can run and hide from such storms. It's a whole nother ball game heading out into the open ocean.
I hope I'm wrong but it looks like these guys took one chance too many.
As to Rolf Harris I have to confess I didn't see it coming. Seemed a harmless enough eccentric. You seem to have the same sixth sense as my mother who had only to see an accused miscreant's picture in the paper to declare him guilty.
'Oh you'd know he was guilty just to look at the cut of him.'
They were completely fucked if it was a black and white picture. Nothing screamed 'guilty' more than a black and white picture.
The justice system could save a fucking fortune if they could have cloned a dozen of my mum. Just drive her around the street and have her point out all the guilty people.
As I said, mr shoulders, the contention has been around for decades, good to see something happening at last, even though I am vexed hy the whole concept of what we call songwriting, curious about the ownership of what we call intellectual property, saddened that it is my g-g-g-generation which has so ruthlessly copyrighted its own farts.
As I was saying about taxation, production and creativity do not happen without a commonly owned infrastructure for them to happen in, without a market or an audience to consume them.
High time that Fab Macca and Sir Mick and Sir Elton and the rest gave most of it away, or was rock'n'roll really all about dying a rich old man, lawyered-up and accountanted-up, like some Mafia plutocrat, fixin' to die like Bob Dylan, paying gangs of legals to police Youtube for unlicensed fragments of songs which he, himself, stole in the first place. Fuck 'em all. I hope Zeppelin get hammered financially and that maybe some hapless groupies appear in THEIR rear viiew mirror.
It was my Dad, mr jgm2, always going on about the nancyboys in showbusiness, and he was right. And we do have an intuition, all of us, about the freak and the creep, it's not about a witch hunt, it's just that if your hackles rise it is Nature's radar doing the job which brought us here.
Do you remember Mr Brown, Punk, we called him, then, Christ, he gave me the creeps?
I read in the Filth-O-Graph, this morning, that one of these 22 year-old sailors is/was, a very experienced skipper; at twenty two I wasn't a very experienced anything. And that two of skipperboy's crew are/were in their fifties, sounds like onboard lunacy to me. As does the fact that they radioed that they were taking on water but that they'd just sail another thousand miles to the Azores, instead of screaming Mayday! like a sensible fellow would.
I hope, in any event, that if they are rescued they will donate every celebrity penny which they and their famlies make from it to the widows' and orphans' fund of the US Coastguard. Only they won't.
As you say, I simply cannot understand how anyone with a grain of sense would attempt to sail across the Atlantic in an oversized KFC box.
And no, I've seen the families and I don't feel for them, I don't like them, seem like vain emptyheads to me, gibbering like chimps, like New People. I think, too, that there is part of them that's loving this, this what would you call it, this public orgasm of celebrity, these thrusts of competence and achievement, doomed, probably, to wilt and shrivel in a feeble spurt of Grief's watery ejaculate.
I'd love to have the confidence or the courage to sail across the Atlantic. Although perhaps I'm confusing confidence and courage with sheer fucking stupidity and failure to appreciate the risks.
I was on a flight to (I think) Grenada a few years ago and got chatting to the girl next to me. And it turns out she was a girl. Doing her 'A' Levels in the summer. Anyway she was travelling with her older brother and parents and they were going to be sailing around the Carib. So far, so normal.
But then in the New year after her 'A' Levels, during her 'gap year' she and her brother were going to fly back to the Carib and sail back to the UK. Sailing across the fucking Atlantic at 18? Your entire gene pool in a 32ft or 40ft plastic yacht?
The yachtie scene down there is packed with such people. I met them in bars at various marinas as we pootled around the islands and drank ourselves senseless. Intensely staring eyes, gaunt, muscles and arms and legs that looked like they're made out of knotted string. Telling you that they're going to sail to Ireland in their boat and then point to some monohull thing that they'd built themselves from plywood or aluminium (seriously) that couldn't be more than 20ft long.
'You're fucking mental' I would volunteer but they'd see it as a stamp of approval. Proof that they were living the dream. Doing stuff that most people wouldn't dream of and, even if they did, certainly wouldn't fucking well dare to so it. 'No, seriously, you're off your fucking head.' But you simply couldn't dent their aura of invincibility. Fucking mental.
Messing about in the water with the sun on your back, a stiff drink in one hand and a fishing rod in the other is my idea of sailing. Jumping over the side in a nice sheltered bay into shallow warm tropical waters teeming with fish and swimming with the turtles followed by a BBQ of the fish you'd caught earlier is my idea of an overnight stop.
Slipping down the side of a 20ft wave in the icy cold waters of the mid Atlantic - in the dark - is my idea of bowel-loosening terror.
Met a chap in (Name drop - sorry) Bora Bora - me and the kids were going diving and the dive boat picked him up off his yacht. Another 28ft or 30ft thing. He'd sailed single-handed down from New York, through the Panama Canal and was now half way across the Pacific. Kid was only 26 or so.
I asked him how long he'd been sailing and where did he learn to sail.
He told me he worked for Citibank or Merryl Lynch or one of those big US banks (can't remember now) for about three years and then quit and bought this boat. He'd learned to sail on the way down.
I don't think he was kidding.
Fucking mental. It's a whole 'nother world Mr I.
Yes, I know a couple, too, into hardcore sailing, he a five or six millionsaire, she his tanned totty, equally novitiate, equally determined to sail the fucking Atlantic, equally fucking stupid. I wouldn't piss on them if they were on fire.
I daresay there are some admirable qualities in these maritime funsters but this degree of coercion which we are suffering is intolerable, to me, anyway. They're like the fucking McCanns, this gang, in and out of the Foreign Office, soundbiting to the filthsters, encouraging everyone to get involved, get involved? Gerry and Cilla'll be saying Hey, hang on a minute, how about a sattelite search of the world for our wee wotsaname, people can go online for two pounds an hour and examine every scrap of dirt in the Sahara, every street in Caracas, every drop of water in the Pacific. She's out there somewhere.
Meantime, of course, lonely people are dying in hospital every minute of the day whilst the fate of a quartet of imbeciles dominates the national consciousness. No business like showbusiness.
It is very McCann-like.
Didn't they (the McCanns) hire some BBC PR guy as soon as the story broke. If you and me were lost in mid-Atlantic I don't think that my missus would be able to escalate the situation to the media circus it has become. I wonder who these people 'know'.
We've got some yachtie friends who keep attempting to persuade us to try it. An afternoon on board was enough for me. It was OK on deck, but below stairs it resembled a very small, smelly caravan. They told us of one journey back across the Atlantic in heavy seas; it took them weeks, and every minute they thought could be their last. Raving mad, obviously. Still, I'm glad in a way that people are prepared to give it a go. As for looking for them, though, that ought to be what our own navy should be capable of doing, with helicopters.
Imagine the horror of finding out after all those years, if she really didn't know. Perhaps she just can't bring herself to believe it, and insists on being there. It is painful to see.
A couple of them do seem very media savvy, almost as though they were in the business, and the rest appear to have been rehearsing for this moment all their lives. Gerry McCann's first call on finding, as he claims, the kid missing was not to the cops, it was to his mum in law, announcing, without a shred of evidence, that Madeleine had been abducted. He then phoned Kirsty Wark in Edinburgh, and then engaged a costly PR team before finally calling the cops, whose fault, we are still led to believe, it all is. Man's a cunt. His PR team was eventually funded by you and I, his gabshite-in-chief, Clarence Mitchell, on permanent secondment from the foreign office, Gerry's own mortgage swiftly settled by the charitable trust set up and run by his family, funded by the same numpties prepared to scan sattelite images in this case.
Funny, how we have no money to allow disabled people to remain in their homes, insisting that they must move somewhere smaller yet we have funds to search for these genuinely feckless, irresponsible idiots. I wonder what this is costing, tens of millions of dollars, I should think.
I used to say a little mantra to myself, mrs n, Spare a thought for Sonia, spare a thought for Sonia. Sonia was Sonia Sutcliffe who presumably at some point loved and married Peter, known now as the Ripper, even though he was the Hammerer. And everytime there is a child killing I remind myself that there will be two mothers shattered, here, the victim's and the perp's. Indeed, I sometimes wonder if the easier task is to bury the child than confront the monster, visit him or her, perpetually, in prison.
If Mrs Harris was ignorant of these things then she, too, deserves a measure of sympathy. Not an acceprable remark in tabloid Britain but who cares about that.
And never mind all these marinieres parfait, mrs woman on a raft has disappeared from her moorings, somewhere off the coast of reality, not been seen since April, Perhaps mr dtp or mr right wing git know of her whereabouts.
Mr I and Mr jgm2: I qualified as a day-skipper in the UK over 20 years ago. Took many months of study (though I don't know if they have dumbed it down now). To qualify for off-shore, blue water stuff would take a very long time (I can't remember if there is even a time-at-sea minimum experience, but I think there was). So I too found it quite absurd to read of a "very experienced 21 year old skipper". I wouldn't dream of goind out of sight of land with someone under 40 at least, with years of experience.
BTW, a few years ago I was marooned with a dead engine in Sydney harbour - that was bad enough.
I remember seeing an interview with Peter Sutcliffe's father, quite soon after he was convicted. His eyes were empty, he was devastated, that he could have fathered a child like him, that he had done what he had done, that he was now going to spend the rest of his days in prison.
The interviewer asked him what he himself thought should be done with him. Without hesitation, he looked straight at the interviewer, and said 'Hang him'.
I can swim like a brick and have had several near-misses with drowning, one fairly recently. Paddling at Skeggy is my limit, not buggering about in an overgrown biscuit tin in the middle of nowhere.
The cost of search and rescue are gigantic. Sea King helicopters use thousands of dollars of fuel an hour. I dread to think the MPG of a Pacific freighter, redirected, gotta be more than a Nissan Micra. These people should be made to have insurance, just like those morons who get altitude sickness in the Himalayas and these blonde haired, scruffy, usually American lads (or even worse, girls that think they are lads) that make funny hand gestures and talk in code, whooping, just before they fling themselves off the world's highest mountain/TV mast/bridge/skyscraper, who seem to think that I should be touched by the death count of their mates who didn't make it. At least he died doing what he loved, they say. Morons, what a stupid thing to say. Heroin addicts die doing what they love, so do drunks, and I have more pity for them than people who value their lives, and the emotions of their loved ones so very little that they deliberately endanger themselves doing lunatic stunts, like sailing vast oceans in piddling row-boats.
Vincent
I'm fine Mr Ishmael - just pottering around trying to sort out the physical surroundings. It is unbelievable how much time it takes to do simple things. For instance, the wind got hold of a rose-arch and playfully shook it down. It took the best part of two days just to disentangle the thing and cart it off.
Glad to see you, mrs woar, always a pleasure, here or at your place. All this stuff, the furniture of being, house and garden, Christ, I wish I could just abandon it all, for some scruffy little farmhouse in SW France, no wallpaper, no carpets, no polished boards, no swanky fireplaces, but maybe a thirty acre wood and a river running through, you can buy them for a song.
I never did see Sutcliffe senior, mr vincent but I cannot imagine his mother speaking similarly. And even if his Dad's macho pragmatism was genuine what levels of personal shame and anguish drove him there, to Abrahamism. And the thing I didn't mention is that There, but for fortune, go you or I. You know me, maybe it is my own need for forgiveness which makes me so often her engineer.
I agree entirely with your view of the celebrity of Risk, fuck 'em. mrs narcolept mentioned that she admired those who do it because it's there and I agree with that, too; stupidity, though, and cynical media manipulation, such as we have seen with the yachties, is another story. I accept that some are God's brinksmen, I am one, or I used to be, one of those who always stands right at the edge of the railway platform, jumoped on and off moving vehicles, I don't do it now but I used to and I understand it. When I was a kid I used to slipstream, on a drop-handlebar racing bike behind a double decker 'bus on my way to school, thirty miles an hour, downhill, my front wheel inches behind the 'bus, confident that my two-inch brake pads would protect me; I wouldn't want to health'n'safety such behaviours out of existence but the Atlantic rowboat thing is a conceit too far. Fuck 'em.
It is amazing, isn't it, mr mike, how MediaMinster so blithely insults our intelligence, my mouth dropped open, like in a cartoon, when I heard that very experienced baby skipper shit.
As I write the understanding is that Uncle Sam is callinhg it off at midnight if he doesn't find a bobbing, thrilled to be alive quartet. Dunno what the families will do. Shame that Max Clifford is in jail, sure he could organise some PR.
It does sound terribly harsh, this, but it is just a reaction to utter bullshit and stupidity - even in the face of overwhelming evidence of their crass knuckle-headed stupidity and incompetence their relations insist that this ship of fools are superheroes.
Here, in Scotland, best part of England, there was a happy ending, yesterday, to the temporary disappearance of a sixteen-foot crab fishing boat, when two physically and mentally ill-equipped fisherfolk wee found safe, about forty miles off course, no studied, media-savvy commentaries from their friemds and families, just relief and ribaldry.
The fact that you recognise a need for your own forgiveness is more than half the battle Mr Ishmael, the thing which separates you from the likes of Sutcliffe, who, as far as I know, is not one little bit remorseful. No good forgiving people who aren't sorry, is it? This hinders their reformation, horribly.
You're right about the '...but for the grace of God go I' thing. Terrifying.
Vincent.
I think Mr Ishmael is right; Alwen Harris is being used as a prop in some sense. Her hair has been changed to make it nearer to the average and although it is not disputed that she has serious mobility problems, until now she has used sticks. Then again, it is the sort of shock which would tend to make arthritis much worse.
There is a very good argument for the accused coming to court by a doorway not in the eye of the media. The show is in the court, not outside it. Neither the prosecution nor the defence should be allowed to spin it or be mauled by it. An old lady who is not even a witness has got enough trouble with coming to terms with adultery now admitted in public.
Or perhaps I'm out of step and nobody is in the least bothered by that, these days.
Yes, I noticed the changes in the hair and from sticks to wheelchair, I suppose they may just have been incidental, mobility strengths do vary but my guess would be that all these appearances will be as scrupulously sculpted as is Rolfie's goatee beard. I may well offend some here but I cannot help but cringe from men of a certain age with these painstakingly razored goatees, they are the Devil's vanity. I have had a moustache since I was twenty but it's just there; if I had to do all this laser razoring stuff I'd just shave everything off. Apart from anything else I wouldn't want to look in the mirror for however long all this stuff takes, searching for who I used to be.
The banning of extra-courtroom posturing for the cameras would not only spare the innocent but would deny the guilty, such as Huhne and Clifford, a last opportunity of media management.
I don't know, mrs woar, I think most here are out of step with the March of Ruin, most would regret the humiliation of the plucky Mrs Harris.
I did see Harris in one of those dreadful teevee interviews, before Piers Moron's time but that sort of thing, in which he tearfully admitted that he wished he'd been a better parent to his girl/s, it was Life-In-The-Vomitarium showbiz confessional, I wanted to kill him, rotten egomaniaical bastard, but then I want to kill most of them.
A proper government, nevertheless, a just justice minister, would put an end to the Courthouse Walk of Shame.
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