“You drive me round the bend, Thomas” she would say, her voice dripping with distain. “You never do anything for yourself.”
…
She was wrong of course, but I never argued back. I never once raised my voice to drown out hers. I just let her speak. It didn’t matter to me that she was chastising me like a mother scolds her child. Just to hear her was to know that she was there, that I was with her, that she was mine.
…
“I’m having a breakdown, Thomas” she would say, her voice quivering like a car running over a cattle grid. But I knew she was being melodramatic. She was an actress after all. An attention seeker. I would listen to her, and obey her in silence.
…
She had a pointed, slender beauty. Perfect for the stage and screen. The directors loved her poise, her calm. But I loved her voice, the way her lips formed her vowels. No trace of an accent. No hint about where she had come from. She was always ‘here’.
…
She was my must-have accessory. After a show, she would be on my arm, and I would open the car door for her. Just sitting on the leather seats turned her on, and she would whisper in my ear all the way home.
…
“I have a new job, Thomas,” she said one evening. It was voice-over work, she said. She would be recording her voice for other men. “We have gone as far as we can go,” she said calmly, and stepped out at the traffic lights.
…
I feel as if I have been driving ever since. The flat no longer felt like home without her voice wafting through the rooms, without her constant nagging and ordering and complaining about where I had gone wrong. I never spend time there now. Instead I sleep in my car, and take long journeys through the busiest cities and to the farthest beaches. So long as I keep driving, and I keep my sat-nav switched on, she will always be there, telling me where to go.
Author: Robert (Page 260 of 328)
This time, I am behind the blog cycle, rather than the mainstream news cycle! Many others have already linked to Dan Hardie’s campaign to ensure that all Iraqis who have worked for British forces are given asylum if they ask for it.
There is now considerable evidence that their lives, and the lives of their families, are at risk: some former workers for the British have been murdered, and many others have fled to neighbouring countries or gone into hiding in Basra. The British Government, for whom they were ultimately working, has not offered them the right of asylum in the UK. This is morally unacceptable.
The most detailed recent report, by Jonathan Miller of Channel Four news, notes the murder of 17 translators in one single incident in Basra.
Dan suggests we write to our MPs, and even provides some handy text that you can paste into a letter or e-mail.
I recall that the plight of Iraqis was one of the first arguments against Tony Blair’s account of the war. When the WMDs failed to appear, the reasons for war quickly shifted to the brutality of the Saddam regime. While this might have been a convincing argument for many, it was certainly not a convincing reason for the government, who had denied many asylum applications from Iraqi before the war. It was therefore misleading and duplicitous for Blair to cite this as a reason post hoc.
However, the current British policy towards foreign nationals who help the armed services is unsurprising. The Ghurka regiment has for many years been mistreated by the government, with former soldiers denied citizenship, or even a pension on equal terms with other British servicemen.
Interestingly, the recent successful campaign to allow one former ghurka (a holder of the Victoria Cross, no less) to be given UK citizenship was also propagated online. The VC Hero site was set up by Tul Bahadur Pun’s solicitors, and a online campaign added political pressure. So Dan Hardie’s initiative stands a good chance of success.
I’m way behind the news cycle on this, but it is noteworthy that some of those people who incited violence in reaction to those Mohammed cartoons have been imprisoned. The PigDogFucker points out a useful statistic:
Now the judicial process has run its course, let’s see the final statistics: number of people prosecuted for disseminating said cartoons: 0; number of people jailed for several years for protesting about them: 4.
Mysteriously, the dhimmibollocks brigade has been silent about this. It’s almost as if it didn’t fit their paranoid conspiracist agenda…
Indeed. When the cartoons came to light and the argument ensued, many asked why we tolerated these illiberals in our mists. They claimed that this was evidence that our society and values were being undermined by outsiders. But in fact this was not the case: our legal system was robust enough to see off the challenge (perhaps, as PDF implies, a little too harshly). As I have said before, our values can easily see off fundamentalist challenges, without the need to tighten immigration restrictions, or create harsher laws.
Hooray! The final installment of the Harry Potter heptlogy has hit the shelves. Those who bought it at one minute past midnight are, by this time, deep into the plot, and might even have discovered which characters have met an unexpected death.
The commentary on the twenty-four hour news channels and interweb pages will come in waves: analysis, counter-analysis, and meta-analysis. Like the floods of previous weeks, these waves will take many days to subside.
So to all political parties out there, I offer this advice: Today is a good day to bury bad news.
Well well. I’m watching the by-election results on TV. The BNP saw fit to heckle and slow-hand clap the Labour Candidate Phil Wilson as he gave his by-election victory speech in Sedgefield.
One of the usually decent things about the democratic process is the (short) period of politeness and respect that follows an election result. In the immediate aftermath of an election, it is unseemly to criticise and abuse a candidate, especially one who has just been elected as an MP with a large majority. To do so is to insult and abuse that majority of citizens who have made their choice. By making a racket as Wilson spoke, the BNP expose themselves as arrogant thugs.
They even boo’ed when the Tory candidate gave his best wishes to Wilson’s family. Ugly.