Friday, June 18, 2010
Codfail
Today was supposed to be the day when I tried simmering our Friday cod in milk and butter, rather than baking it. Another hot tip from Tooting. However, the Hastings fish man has had the cheek to take off for Lanzerote without bothering to call at Cheam to deal with his faithful customers first. So cod fails. However, all is not lost. It is a dull and miserable day so we shall have a warming hot pot made of neck of Southdown Lamb, on the bone. Cost, slightly more than the cod would otherwise have been, that is to say, not a cheap dish.
Meanwhile, my eye was caught over the breakfast bread and cheese (the Lancashire Poacher from Brighton; a decent cheddary sort of cheese. Good texture, fairly strong) by a letter in the Guardian about the Bloody Sunday enquiry, to the effect that it was a bit like having bought a ridiculously expensive car. You have paid for the thing so there is no point in whining and leaving the thing in the garage. You might as well go for rides in it.
Next stop was Surrey Library where several attempts to find the thing in the catalogue fail. One might of thought that a public interest item like this would be there, but maybe being many volumes it is reference only, in the bigger branches only, and so not visible in the online lending catalogue. I shall make enquiries. Then off to the enquiry website, all very spiffy with the full report available online. But I don't want to read a thing this fat online, rather, where do I get a copy of the report from? Website no help at all on that front. So I shall have to continue to comment on the matter without the benefit of any more fact than has been gleaned from the DT and the Guardian - the Independent having gone missing from our corner shop.
It suddenly dawned on me that Mr Blair, at that time at the beginning of his term, maybe knew what he was doing. Throw lots of money at the thing. Tell the committee to take their time and leave no stone unturned.
The money is mainly a good thing. There are frictional losses involved in pumping it through the trousers of luxury lawyers but a good proportion of it will wind up in Northern Ireland, meeting bills at hotels, restaurants, bars and the like. Helping things along.
It was a reasonable bet that the conclusions would be what they, in the event, turned out to be. Yes, the army lost control on the day, but there was no conspiracy to do evil and there was an armed IRA presence. Armed with arms that were used.
So now, most people think why on earth have we spent so much time and money on all this ancient history? Can't we just put all this away now and get on with our lives? And the few die-hard IRA will maybe be content, if not happy, to bury the hatchet. So maybe it is mission accomplished.
I hope there will be no prosecutions. I think it would be quite wrong to prosecute men who were (possibly badly led) young soldiers facing a hostile crowd a long time ago - particularly given that those who did far worse things were amnestied some time ago.
# posted by Jim @ 3:18 AM 
