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.