Afternoon music
Battles past
From the newspapers
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/wealthy-son-hired-dad-78-30602462
“A mother was left injured in a horrific revenge attack when her lover hired his retired father to help ‘sort her out’ after she refused to have sex with him.
Alex Craig, 36, and his 78-year-old father Francis Craig carried out the attack when Alex dumped Luana Dougherty. Luana’s daughter Carlee, 16, and her boyfriend Finn McBride were also injured.
The court heard [that] Craig snr, a retired builder, arrived at Miss Dougherty’s house on March 19 and went on to threaten Carlee by saying he would kill her as he pulled her hair and threw her to the ground.
Craig jnr then kicked Miss Dougherty, a mother-of-two, twice in her ribs and repeatedly kicked Finn McBride, 16. During the attack, he also threw a bicycle, pool balls, and an electric fan at the teenager.
Miss Dougherty, a community support worker from Cheshire, was left with bruising to her ribs, a cut to her right arm, and a cut to her lip. Carlee suffered a bump to the side of her head and a bloody nose while Finn suffered cuts to his knees, a bite mark under his left arm, and a split lip.
…at Chester Crown Court they admitted affray and were each sentenced to 18 months in jail suspended for 18 months.“
[Daily Mirror].
In what world are the above offences suitable for suspended sentences, looking at the deliberate and premeditated assaults, and the injuries? Crazy Britain, 2023.
Of course, routine over-sentencing in other cases is one factor that has led to a shortage of space in the prisons.
There is a sense that this country is not far from “anarchy” or, better put, societal breakdown. The urban jungles are the worst areas, of course.
We are living pretty much on the edge now, to a greater extent than is generally understood.
Incidentally, I have just been reading the memoirs of Gorbachev, which came out in the mid-1990s. He says that, in Stavropol region, southern Russia, of which he was effectively in charge before going to Moscow as a candidate-member of the Politburo in or about 1980 , they had exactly the same problems— petty and not so petty crime, and arguments around sentences, community penalties, and as to whether prison was the right punishment in less serious cases.
This is the kind of treachery taking place in schools.
Tweets seen
If this war both continues and continues to escalate, Kiev will eventually cease to exist except as a blackened ruin. Stop the war now. Stop funnelling arms and ammunition (and money) to the Kiev regime.
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More tweets seen
Well, you live and learn. I should never have thought that Karachi was as green and lush as that; looks like England. Maybe outside the main city, and/or in hills. I do not know. I know that Karachi is the 12th-largest city in the world (20M inhabitants) and that much of it is rather bare and dusty. Obviously not all, though.
PMC Wagner, aka “The Musicians”.
As someone once wrote about the (I think) Conservative, or maybe also Liberal Party MPs, after the First World War, “hard-faced men who had done well out of the War“.
Ah…just pinned down that quotation: Stanley Baldwin, and the correct quotation is, apparently, “A lot of hard-faced men who look as if they had done very well out of the war“, referring to MPs elected in 1918. Baldwin was quoted in the influential 1919 book by J.M. Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economic_Consequences_of_the_Peace].
Bournemouth
https://www.bournemouthecho.co.uk/news/23694543.letter-the-town-centre-looks-like-wasteland-filthy/
“After visiting Bournemouth town centre today, I came away feeling shocked and sad to see what has happened to the town since I last visited and felt the need to vent my frustration.
I consider myself a local despite no longer living in the area.
I am 34 and lived in Christchurch for most of my life.
I loved regular day trips or nights out in Bournemouth.
The town was always so vibrant with lots going on, great shops and restaurants and always felt very safe.
I moved up to Scotland five years ago and have just returned to Bournemouth for a visit.
What the hell has happened to this place? There are barely any shops left, with many boarded up.
The town centre looks like a wasteland and is filthy.
A high proportion of people walking around the town centre seem to have a drink or drugs problem.
Quite frankly there is no centre to visit anymore and the issues with drink and drugs make the place have an unpleasant and uncomfortable atmosphere.
I just don’t understand what this council are doing but it genuinely disgusts and saddens me.
Simply having a nice beach and gardens is not enough of an attraction with such a rundown town at its centre.
Growing up I was always so proud to live in such a beautiful place.
Now I couldn’t be happier that I no longer live here and after my experience this week I doubt I will ever return to the area again.
What a shame.
SAM GRIFFITHS
Elgin, Scotland“
[extracts from a letter to the Bournemouth Echo newspaper]
Bournemouth is about 17 miles from my present home. I remember, just about, being there (from Berkshire) with my family on occasional days in the early/mid 1960s. My memories were of somewhere safe, white, English, sunny (we visited on odd days in the summer), with clean streets and buildings (mainly hotels and apartment buildings), a beach not too crowded, bright yellow double-decker buses.
I also spent a few days there in the 1980s, as a kind of unofficial add-on to a Soviet dance ensemble (my then girlfriend was interpreting for them); I cannot now recall which dance or ballet group it was, but one of the well-known ones. The hotel was a quite decent 3/4-star place, with an unheated outdoor swimming pool. All the Russians opened their windows and looked out when I jumped in and swam in the cold water at about 8 in the evening, after dark.
I also visited the place another time, also early 1980s, when I and my then girlfriend swam with the ex-wife and children of the poet, Yevtushenko. I blogged about that years ago. The grandmother of those children had a wooden bathing hut on a semi-private beach in a pleasant area of Bournemouth; also a nearby home.
Bournemouth is appalling now. I almost never go there. 20+ years ago, it was still not too bad, though nothing like what it was like in the 1960s anyway. I drove there a few times in 2000.
By 2009, when I had to go there and nearby a few times, the downturn was pretty obvious. Large numbers of foreign persons, mostly non-white. Part of that would be the number of language schools there (genuine or otherwise), and also other higher education institutes attracting foreign students. That is far from being the whole picture, though.
As for drugs, I have never had any connection with them (unless you count the cannabis-smoking bourgeois dropouts etc I knew in the mid-1970s, or the DEA agent to whom I was introduced at the Federal Courthouse in Trenton, New Jersey, in 1990, and who showed me the real evidence in a trial that was going on: a sportsbag filled with vacuum-packed cocaine, the packs looking like supermarket coffee packs, but transparent, containing white powder, packed hard). Worth USD $250,000 wholesale, apparently.
However, Bournemouth is apparently now a drugs hotspot.
Sad. Bournemouth is not alone in becoming a dump. Torquay and many other towns, previously rather nice, are no better.
Late tweets seen
A “conspiracy theory” that may not be completely impossible, when you look at times, dates, and the behaviour of Trudeau’s mother.
Interestingly, Justin Trudeau was, it is said, a passenger on at least one flight of the aircraft owned by Jeffrey Epstein, the now-deceased Jewish rapist, supposed millionaire/billionaire, and Israeli intelligence asset: see also https://ianrobertmillard.org/2019/08/11/the-jew-epstein-and-prince-andrew-the-british-royal-family-has-another-scandal-maybe-its-time-to-just-get-rid-of-them/.
Late music
Ian Robert Millard 