pumpkinstrokemarrow

I see from yesterday's DT that the badgers are winning. That is to say that despite the fact that they are digging up a church graveyard - with the result that bones are being scattered about the place - the parishioners are not allowed to do anything drastic about it. Like shooting them. So live badgers are deemed to be more important than dead people. I wonder what the story would be if it was a Muslim graveyard. Or a national heritage Inuit burial ground. I bet they would be able to claim religious immunity for direct action.

But a dead person who is fairly important just presently is the drunken barrister waving a shotgun about who was shot by a large posse of armed police somewhere in Kensington in 2008. Now while the Metropolitan Police record in such matters is not very good at all, I do have some sympathy in this case. A chap is waving a shotgun at you in the dark and ranting. Shooting him is unfortunate but not unreasonable. OK, so there might have been a better outcome, but I am not sure that putting the police through the wringer in public is the best way forward.

My last dead person is Aldous H., a chap whom I mention quite often. A urbane, civilised sort of chap for whom I have a high regard. So reading a short story - 'Chawdron' - last night, rather surprised and disappointed to come across some Jew remarks. Not written as words of the author himself, rather put into the mouth of one of his charecters, but not in a way which dissociated the author from them. Not particularly offensive, the sort of thing which was common enough at the time he was writing and Aldous H. does takes pops at all kinds of people, but nevertheless I was surprised. Published at a time when Hitler was up and running and he ought to have known better. Not the sort of remarks one would make about black people now.