EVENSONG. SOMETIMES SATAN COMES AS A MAN OF PEACE, EXTRACT.

TORIES OVER BIRMINGHAM, WILLIAM'S LAST HURRAH.

 DATELINE SUNDAY

R uth Boy Davidson 

Leader of the Scottish Tories,

and William Boys Hague, 

...ah, no, no, no, you have it, if I may say so, entirely wrong,  Andrew, we simply share ay room to save money.

they  stole the show at today's ArseFest in Birmingham.

The  front bench anal fistula, Osborne,

AN ECONOMIC ILLITERATE SPEAKS TO OTHER ECONOMIC ILLITERATES.

Well, conference, there may well be growing govament  debt, wages may well be  worthless; the only growth is in house prices and tax fraud  but look on the bright side, apprenticehips are providing very useful - £2.55 pence per hour - slave labour to businesses, as well as teaching our young people valuable skills such as grass-cuting and floor-sweeping, sometimes for as long as ten hours per week, but do not worry conference, we will try to drive these wages down further and spread the culture of zero-hours contracts to all, apart from ourselves   (cheers and applause from elderly, bilIous Tories;)   we have cleared the way for asset-stripping companies, such as the recent owners  of Phones4You, to borrow money at almost zero per cent, load it onto the balance sheet of a perfectly healthy company, extract and pay themselves bonuses and expenses in excess of thirty million pounds - paid, of course into tax-free accounts overseas - and then crash the company, throwing 5,000 proper taxpayers out of work, depriving the Exchequer of proper tax revenues (cheers, whistles foot-stomping.) Best of all, building on the work of the last lot, we have extended the practice of borrowing-money-into-existence and passing it to our friends in the banks in order that they may loan it to the public in the hope that mortgage holders and businesses may in due course be robbed by the banks of their lives' work.

Unemployment, homelesssness,  illness, slavery and usury;  these,  conference, are what we proudly offer you; mock growth, mock jobs, a mock health service and every other shop in the High Street a loan shop. No-one can say I'm making a fuck of the economy, I am proudly and determinedly making a mock of it.

(Conference erupts in tears of jubilation, no-one present  having a fucking clue how money works, much less economics. Well, they wouldn't be there, wouldn't be Tories, if they did, would they?)

looking as sickly-pasty as if he had fellated half the hall and was about to throw-up, 

had a good go, sneering  his pleased-with-himself, prefect's sneer,  singing praise to Billy the Bum's achievements - or humiliating failures as most of  us would term them - whilst Ffffffion bearded away like a good un,

 sitting beside Winston in the front rows,

 grinning, she was,

 like a wanking chimpanzee.

Christ, it was fucking awful. 

An almost day-long tribute to the party's gay and lesbian tendency, all it needed was Liam Fox to make a hat-trick of  bugger-marriagers, the gift to UKIP which keeps on giving.  

Talking of which, the Poundland Conference 

is always presented by the PBC as though it was filmed on a Nokia 'phone  in a Budapest Bier Kellar. I wonder why that is.

Nige, the Bruce Springsteen of Geriatrica.

Conference, friends, yes, whatever, Poundland uber alles,  Rule Britannia, Wogs Out, No More Welfare State, you're all as mad as March hares; they're all joining me, I mean us, the Tories, all of 'em. I could stand here and say anything and you'd cheer. (Cheers, applause, footstomping etc.)

No, it's not fair, the way they cover Mr Fruitckase and his elderly, enraged believers.  Makes them out to be a bunch of barmpots,  it does, shuffling about in the dark, spending their days writing FuckMails to the Filth-O-Graph, about treason and LibLabConners, raging that political parties are a busted flush, while forming more of the same. Only worse, much, much worse. 

 Osborne, though, 

even with proper lighting and more than one camera and looking like a zombie,  lacked the passion and verve of RuthBoy

I love Tory Scotland  and I won the referendum single-handed.

No use sending a woman to do a man's job, eh? 

 and has some way to go before he achieves the incessant, monotonal, Regency-style Alan Bennet Yorkshire, old wives',  gossipy  raconteurism of the hideous Hague, 'e's a right caution, is our William,  a persona which has bizarrely and very recently assumed the conference sheen  of full-blown Heseltineia.

 I never knew that Hague, after his  freakily eccentric old-womanning at the age of 16,

Jesus fucking wept, this makes me shudder, even now; poor little fuck-up, someone should have taken him into a place of safety, censured his parents. We now know, of course, how detrimental a role model was Whisky Maggie, a pitifulful parent and a sorry wretch so besotted with power that she ignored the Beasting activities of her friends and colleagues,  her criminal neglect cast  by the degeneracy as patience, tolerance and understanding.  I hope that Satan finds something hot and unpleasant to shove up her arse, see how she likes it. And yes, where is Dame Butler-WhiteSchloss's  replacement, can he or she be found before the election?

 

  was much more than a conference oddity;  maybe they cheered so  in relief at his parting;  always, always a bit of an embarrassment, wasn't he, a bit creepy, a bit unwholesome, bit of a freak.

Sadly we will look on his like again.

And even though all that  is demonstrably true - Hague IS weird, by any standards, is a party political and diplomatic failure and the  subject of widespread, national and international derision and contempt, not to mention deep suspicion, following his role in Welsh Paedogate -  those   felching for a living in MediaMinster prefer the story of the great man, graciously bowing-out, having served his country so well; no business like showbusiness.

 I have never seen any of these TeeVee talent shows, I try to avoid spectator cruelty but I think that every speaker at Birmingham saw themselves as participating  in competitive Cabinet worship, but especially that of the New Hero of Baghdad, Mr Dave, himself, the Great Arsehole of Eton,

 although their not very GreatLeader, himself,  instead of enjoying the  desperate, adulatory conference horsehsit, is dreamily contemplating, as he must, a life beyond unelected political office.
And the sooner the fucking better.

TRAPPED IN THE GHOST TRAIN OF PROGRESS.

AIN'T 'ALF BEEN SOME CLEVER BASTARDS.  

The i-thing's touchy screen keyboard  is a construct of Satan and of no utility to decent persons, although for those who use only their thumbs to communicate in abbreviations and cartoon symbols the Apple virtual keyboard  is probably gr8, :).

I have been trying to use the unaugmented i-thing  to write blog responses from the comfort of the sofa but the staggering number of seemingly unavoidable  and difficult to correct typos arising from use of the kiddy keyboard has been demoralising.

I bought an Apple keyboard but there was no way of physically connecting it to the pad, itself,  and it had all the character irregularities of the screen keyboard, it was a bollocks, really and times out of number I have been tempted to junk the i-pad, despite its huge expense.

The other day, though, someone visited the house with one of these under their arm and I immediatley ordered one from the tax-free Friends Of George at Amazborne.

The i-thing experience is transformed.  Maybe I am just so behind the times that I couldn't be bothered to seek this out, myself, but on the other hand new consumer stuff appears by the minute, the second, how can one keep up with it all?

This is it closed, in carrycase mode, the pad just pops in to the top cover

Opened for use, the pad  simply  slots into an angled groove

like this

the keyboard, which has a conventional configuration as well as some common Apple commands can be backlit, which is a huge boon and  bluetooth connection takes a few seconds, operation is dead easy  and the long-lasting  battery charge - athough this is not an Apple product, is achieved in an hour via a USB connection to the iPad charger plug. Brilliant, they range from fifty to ninety pounds, this is the ninety pounds one but the other models are well reviewed, too.

SCOTLAND, BEST PART OF ENGLAND.

THE RUMOUR McMILL.

Scottish legal circles thrum to a couple of current post-referendum rumours: which prominent politician, when an undergraduate, was so incensed by a boyfriend's infidelity that, with her teeth, she almost removed the poor man's errant penis? Which prominent politician is planning to retire to Canada but is in a quandary over whether to take his wife, his mistress or both? All very Louis Quatorze, the latter,  but then, in honour of the cowardly Prince Charlie and his scarpering abroad,  we do have road signs in French;  perhaps, again,  we will see a King Across The Water, in Quebec.

Ugly rumours, maybe they are a lawyer thing;  who, after all, in our legislature could behave so badly?

THESE FEW PRECEPTS.

...

POLONIUS

Yet here, Laertes? Aboard, aboard, for shame!

The wind sits in the shoulder of your sail

And you are stayed for. There, my blessing with thee.

And these few precepts in thy memory

Look thou character. Give thy thoughts no tongue,

Nor any unproportioned thought his act.

Be thou familiar but by no means vulgar.

Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried,

Grapple them unto thy soul with hoops of steel,

But do not dull thy palm with entertainment

Of each new-hatched, unfledged comrade. Beware

Of entrance to a quarrel, but being in,

Bear ’t that th' opposèd may beware of thee.

Give every man thy ear but few thy voice.

Take each man’s censure but reserve thy judgment.

Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy,

But not expressed in fancy—rich, not gaudy,

For the apparel oft proclaims the man,

And they in France of the best rank and station

Are of a most select and generous chief in that.

Neither a borrower nor a lender be,

For loan oft loses both itself and friend,

And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.

This above all: to thine own self be true,

And it must follow, as the night the day,

Thou canst not then be false to any man.

Farewell. My blessing season this in thee.

  Polonius to Laertes, Hamlet, Act 1, scene 3

 It is,  this achingly paternalistic stricture,  one of those seam-welded bundles of tut-tutting axiom and expansive duality, back and forthing yin and yang, resolving in smug I-Know-Bestism upon which, to an extent, rests the reputation  of William Shakespeare.

 That reputation, however,  bestows upon a rather ordinary man of rudimentary education a knowledge which could never have been his, now or then  - of travel, geography, politics, history, statespersons and diplomacy, of courts; of  languages and cultures, of scripture, classical literature and philosophy far - impossibly far - beyond the knowledge of a Warwickshire lad, come up to London, like Joe Orton in doublet and hose,  a-hustling. 

 No matter, there is no busisness like show business and to some, doubting the Bard is  Devilish heresy, as though the authorship was more important than that authored.  

Those, anyway, as bewildered as I for all my life by the array of competences displayed in these writings, the depths of knowledge, the surely classical adroitness and  specifity might usefully glance at the life and times of the seventeenth-century  Earl of Oxford, who, some contend, is - must be -  the author of much Shakespeariana.  Shakespearian scholars, of course,  abide steadfastly beyond any such uncertainty,  how could they do other?

But is it any good, that's the thing; does all this convoluted and showy moralising assist?  Oh,  it is true that we can fashion Hamlet to ourselves, we boy-men, can declaim in our own minds, in our own imagined cadences his perpetual, mutinous angst;  we can make tempestuous and extraordinary the mundane, we can see betrayal where none is;  we can all clutch at a tawdry nobility, its coat of arms rusted by  catastrophe and mayhem; it is the disreputable and unwholesome in us which Shakespeare ennobles with his fine, fine words but they are just show business and we should never see them as Virtue's repository. 

Above all, to thine own self be true is facetious dribbling,  the BigBrother, X-Factor argot of its day. Who, for God's sake, is thine own self? I'm fucked if I know, do you? Do any others, corporeal others,  know you as mongoose  or woman on a raft or noblest prospect or dyers garden?  I betcha they don't.

So, given the elasticity of identity, who's to blame, for sin and error and ruination?

By any index of human  error my early marriage was a disaster, calamitous to all involved  and for the longest time I blamed myself, even though it was I made ill, injured, impoverished and distressed; it was I crawled from the wreckage, supported only by native bloody-mindedness.  It was the launch of a  doomed vessel at which the wise would not have cheered and as these things do the sounds of its foundering reverberate down the years, its plates groaning,  its wreckage floating past, now and again, most recently in the shape of a Best Man, terminally ill, approaching me, clutching, after decades, hauling me back, dragging me down to the early wreckage  of my life.

It was the Prague Summer, did it; a Summer of Love did it; a uniform absence of Wisdom and Courage did it.  Love was all around. If only someone had found the loving but Love-less words with which to state the obvious, if only someone had held-out Jackson Browne's strong but gentle father's hand.... but it was all, then, about the recently-invented Individual and telling someone that their marriage was  doomed was, well, impolite; someone only needed to say, Look, you two are simply not compatible,  you may look very fine, but you won't be,  there is nothing wrong with either of you but by difference your union will cursed be.  Instead, everybody mouthed, Ah, bless them, being true to their own selves. going, as they used to say, with the flow. 

 A lot of them died young, that Wedding Group, some in their early sixties, some, a married couple, suddenlym,  in their forties; one by suicide,  there're only three left, now, and one of them is dying.  The guests were met, the table set and all turned to shit.

I, normally hyper-attuned to risk and peril,  should have known better; the vicar, Charles Nettleship, was as pissed as a rat, unsurprisingly,  as Mrs Nettleship was the village bicycle, some of those villagers present, in his church,  having ridden her up and down the lanes, bless her. I didn't know any of the hymns, not one, which says something because I have always known lots of hymns; indeed, I sometimes fear that Hymns, Ancient and Modern will die with me but I had never previously heard any of these caterwaulings. I didn't know any of the guests. I had never seen most of them, I still haven't. Too busy being to mine own self true to notice the bizarre incongruities of the ceremony.  Put me off weddings for life, that one.

But things change and  I stopped blaming myself or anyone else some time ago, now. 

I, for so long damned as matrimonial ruin's author, am happily married these twenty-five years;  whereas, well, never mind, save to say that irreconcileability to  married life - though not for lack of trying -  is another's portion.

This matters only inasmuch as it lays axiom waste, that of Polonious or anyone else.  It is personal reinvention in the very face of Ruin which distinguishes and redeems us, not a Fool's devotion to an imaginary self.

And that's what I came to talk about, this idea that we are inalienably who we are at any given moment when, so obviously, we are a  reactive continuum; which of us,  knowing the truth of this, has never thought: let me forget about today, until tomorrow.  Tomorrow is another day, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. In Macbeth's speech of ruin, Shakespeare contradicts the haughty Polonius and his  life-by-recipe:

She should have died hereafter;
There would have been a time for such a word.
— To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury
Signifying nothing.
— Macbeth (Act 5, Scene 5, lines 17-28)

Which is it, then, should guide us, is it judiciously chosen  apparel,  the carefully filtered word and the selectively screened comrade;  the avoidance of the random, all the infinite paranoias of Polonius, all dangerous yet avoidable by constant, watchful self-safeguarding or is it  the acceptance of Macbeth's wearily observed  futility - is there a self to which we should be true, and if there is, what is the point?

Well, there is no point to be determined, no reason;  such are mere constructs which we have devised to make intelligible for a moment what is utterly incomprehensible;  the need of a point to things is mother, father and midwife to Religions Incorporated and whether devout congregant or smirking  humanist it is pointlessness which hollows us out;  without a point, without a recognisable self, though both are a coward's confection, we would all be sprinting to Dignitas.

Yet a confected self, an identity imagined by others and enacted by the individual, is a dark master.  Yesterday, mr mirage made in heaven related the news that one Roy Harper

 was facing child abuse charges. Mr Harper is one  of that small army of distinctly British guitar players, called-up, originally, by post-war and 'fifties players like Davey Graham and Bert Jansch and which includes Richard Thompson, the late Nick Drake, John Martyn, Martin Simpson, Nic Jones, there's dozens of them and among them Harper was a determinedly original, forceful stylist, not a folk player, nor jazz, just a unique acoustic player;  his songs are often angry, sometimes poignant and one of his tunes, When An Old Cricketer Leaves The Crease, augmented my reporting of the loss of the late blogdog, Buster.

Even so, I never liked him, personally; he was too angry, too conceited but worst of all he was friendly with Messrs Led Zeppelin,  

a hugely over-rated rock four-piece from the 'seventies,  an ensemble whose off-stage, brutal, degrading  debauchery was and is widely known but indulged, bless, as is that of so many and none, yet, of Rock's household names has attracted the attention of the BeastPolice. Still, like Zepp, many will have low friends in high places, might even be knighted.

As well as competing among themselves  to photograph the largest head of celery inserted in a teenager, Led Zeppelin are the most comprehensively larcenous people in show business, having stolen  nearly all of their  material and impudenty claimed it as their own, even the massively lucrative Whole Lotta Love was lifted lyrically, musically and stylistically from Steve Mariott of the Small Faces.  There are channels on YouTube dedicated to exposing Zeppelin's thievery but as yet their star still shines, surviving members recently filling the Albert Hall with ageing fuckwits. Most of their peers despise them but Harper - a natural, original creative soul - was happy to associate and be associated with them.  Doesn't make him a nonce, although we should all be judged by the company we keep, over decades, grappled to our souls with hoops of steel.

When Rolf Harris was first accused  many, myself included,  were unprepared to give him the benefit of the doubt which Justice demands, well, she demands more than that but she demanded in vain.  Many of those so keen to crucify Harris now call for something else in Harper's case;  the charges are fewer in number but no less grave and they date, too,  from four decades back.  Since Harper is a  relative unknown and probably skint one can see little reason other than the pursuit of Justice  motivating the complainant and just because a man wrote and performed some genuinely original and accomplished songs, doesn't mean he isn't or wasn't a beast.  And so I differ from mr mirage and many of my contemporaries.  Hanging around with beasts, like Zeppelin's Jimmy Page, 

Harper is,  must be, to his own self being true.  

I think Harper is as guilty as Sin of, if nothing else, consorting with the extremities of  Wickedness and letting them go unreported. As we see at the PBC, it is the silent approval of others which makes all  these things possible, a conspiracy of men, generally men, being true to their selves,  their careers,  their almost certainly baseless idea of who they are.

In his defence,  the grossly obnoxious, talentless bully, Dave Lee Wotsaname, growls of a time when men were true to their own selves and groped and fondled and fucked women at will, just a birrafun,  tactile; this is all political correctness gone mad, he rages. He is now a convicted sex offender, let us see how true he can be to that self, now that his life is all used-to-bes.

Had I a young man to influence and direct I guess that I would find words inappropriate,  the tools of slippery lawyers, infinitely adaptable and corruptible.  I remember my Dad, in his cups, reciting from memory Grey's Elegy and I think that's the only thing he ever said to me which remains constant,  unassailable and precious;
 better drunken melancholy than pompous instruction. 

As the night follows day, he will be  a wrong 'un, so to thine own self be false and daily, start anew.

EVENSONG. PLEASE TO SEE THE KING.

 If you had seen my Charlie at the head of an army 

He was a gallant sight to behold 

With his fine tartan hose on his bonnie round leg

 And his buckles all pure shining gold

 The tartan my love wore was the finest Stuart Kilt

 With his soft skin all under it as white as any milk

 It's no wonder that seven hundred highlanders were killed In restoring my Charlie to me.

 My love was six foot two without stocking or shoe

 In proportion my true love was built

Like I told you before upon Culloden Moor

 Where the brave highland army was killed

 Prince Charlie Stuart was my true love's name

 He was the flower of England and a pride to his name

 Ah but now they have banished him over to Spain

 And so dear was my Charlie to me 

(repeat last verse)

NO SAYS NO TO YES. SCOTLAND, STILL BEST PART OF ENGLAND

SNP STUFFED.

Alec Salmond dismisses result as scaremongering.

Nicola Moustache talks so much her head falls off.

Tearful Tommy Sheridan "heartbroken" and in serious need of socialist coke and hookers.

 Queen arrested, drunk and disorderly.

 A lone member of the Yestapo Pipe Band plays the traditional lament: See you, Jimmy?

MR SNOT GOES TO TOWN. BROWN OVER SCOTLAND.

This, today,  was the best speech, by miles, that I have ever heard from Snotty - passionate, sincere, factual and all the more eloquent for the occasional slip; by comparison Salmond really is just an oily bastard, playing to a crowd of retarded mutants.  One has to ask,why didn't Brown make this speech months ago?

We can set aside his bollocks about more powers, he has no power to deliver anything from MediaMinster;  we can set aside his history of stuttering, bullyboy incompetence as unelected prime minister, his cowardice, his blackmailing, his great clunking nailbitten fist of Doom thumping on the despatch box;  his serial hypocrisies, his graft, his backdoor money from David Abrahams and others;  his dodgily funded think tanks, his intolerable nepotism;  all of these are chronicled in glorious Technicolour by my young friend,  stanislav, who,incidentally, was saying these things whilst all in MediaMinster, absolutely all, were praising Prudence and her Iron Chancellor;  we can ignore all that because the Jock Terror is commencing already - togetherist farms, here, in Orkney of all places, last night the scene of criminal damage by NatNutters - and these nasty wee men will never be happy, happiness has been bred out of them and will grow violent perhaps murderous, regardless of the outcome, tomorrow.

Brown is naturally more popular here than down there and his plea was to perhaps more sympathetic undecided voters as well as being an encouragement to the sensible togetherists.  Stealing, comprehensively, Salmond and Sturgeon's bogus patriotism, we caught a glimpse of what he might have been had he not joined the Mandestein-Blair-Campbell Betrayal of the Labour movement. A pox  on him for that but may his current passion prevail, for all our sakes.

THE NERVE OF SOME PEOPLE, WHO DO THEY THINK THEY ARE?

Quite sickening, this head-chopping jamboree, the act, its broadcasting, its dreadful, protracted arrival but also the victims, themselves; just who the fuck do they think they are, Bruce Willis?

This bloke, Haines, he had young children, what was he thinking about? His gruesome murder will define their lives. Yeah, that's my Dad, having his head hacked-off by some nutterbastard, want my autograph?  

Never mind all his showy good works, somebody who claimed to care about him - and there's a plague of them -  should have given him a sobering slap round the ear, told him, get a job down LIDL or whatever they have in fucking Croatia, where he lived, just don't make me have to watch you getting your head cut off, eh? Prick.

Terry Waite started it, another posturing egomaniac, whose great ambition was to be Man of the Year on the front cover of Time magazine; Archbishop of Canterbury's Special Envoy to the Middle East, he was styled, like some mediaeval Papal legate, a bigmouthed beardy gabshite, world's full of them. 


Anyway, he was kidnapped and Ahmed, not giving a fuck  about the Archbishop of Canterbury, kept Big Tel for years.

Simpering, right-on, boyish journalist John McCarthy  was another one whose fate was supposed to concern me for years, as though I had personally begged him to go into that shithole and send me despatches. 


John had a pretty bint back at home whom the media loved, as she devised new ways, fresh anniversaries of capture and so on to keep his name in our faces, keep their love alive. Only trouble was that when JohnBoy was released it turned out he didn't love Jill Morrel any more, bless. The nation was denied a happy ending;  still, him and Big Tel got out with their balls still attached and their heads on.

And there was another gobby captive, Brian Keenan, 
an absolutely unendurable little Irishman.

Hailed, in the way of these things, as conquering heroes, this trio of nitwits was  awarded some gong or other,


Order of Stupidity, I hope. 
 
Today, there's always some daft civilian fucker in captivity, journalist  or aid worker;  it's a brainless taxi driver, just now, went-out-there-to-help-people, he did, great bloke and everything, just got shit for brains; probably thought,  Wow,  he's so fucking good, himself, that nothing bad could happen to him,  that Ahmed would see the very real and meaningful difference between him and some RAF bod bombing his kids' playground, between him and some vicious Lancashire BovverBoys, togged-up in Her Majesty's best and beating civilians to death.  And now, all who knew him are honour-bound to participate, to join the walk down  Decapitation's broadcast aisle. Who, for fucks sake, would want to be helped by somebody as unpardonably, selfishly  stupid as David Haines or Alan Wotsisname?   Not me, anyway, keep the fuck away from me, do-gooders.

The obvious do-gooding for do-gooders to do is to scream and fucking yell at government and military on all sides, shout and bawl at intolerable fucking Imam beardy bastards and Sheiks and fucking Rabbis, chaplains; military chaplains. was there ever such fucked-up and contradictory a profession, sprinkling holy water on the cruise missiles?  But no, they all, followers of Death's caravan, they all probably describe themselves as partners, tooled-up warriors and gormless tent-erectors like Haines, water-carriers like Wotsisname,  all working together, knee-deep in blood and fucking sanctimony.

It would be in everyone's interests if Haines et al just restrained their egos for a while and realised that thay are actually making matters worse, holding, as they do,  Villainy's coat for him, tempering. minutely, his excesses, fooling themselves and seeking to fool us that Good, actually, you know what, is Triumphant. Fucking idiots,  the more they meddle, the more they save a handful of thirsting lives here and there, the more empowered grow Mr Death and his Sergeants; they should just, in the  parlance of the Newpeople, not go there. Let Justice hear her own voice and raise it.

This, if it is anybody's work, this poxy sanitising of Carnage, this is soldiers' work, not taxi drivers'. This is the work of the United Nations, the work of heavily-armed men in body armour and APCs.  To recognise that, of course, would be to - at the very least - increase the costs of the Death Industry and - at worst - to  illuminate the Stone Age imbecility of statespersons, clergypersons and  Brigadier Generals Rupert Golightly Jockstrap, the world over.

This repulsive creature, Jihad John and his cameraman, they only wield the blade, the true conspirators reside in the White House
 and  in the palaces of Saudi Arabia




- both of whom permit and encourage similar atrocities to be perpetrated on their own citizens 

- is in their unsung, unprotected, unpaid and unpensioned  service that these foolish men died;  it is for the useless strutting of David Cameron and the buffoonery of COBRA that Haines lost his life.

And although we might legitimately enquire why it is that in light of recent revelations of national, industrial-scale beasting in every strata of society the NSPCC didn't just quietly and decently disband itself, if we seek a darker, more farcical interpretation of the new nature of Charity we need look no further than the world's current leading philanthro-bandits, Tony'n'Imelda Blair.

Oh, the Sisters of Mercy, 
they are not departed or gone.