No cars outside today, just the occasional crawling and bedecked pantechnicon or double-decker, but plenty of peds and more noise than usual shaking the windows and doors in their frames.
In the last hour I have seen a man in a 12ft wide crinoline with, strapped to his chest, the front end of a wickerwork galleon complete with foremast, fore-topmast and fore-topgallant mast, with furled sails on their yards, and what looks like a New York fireman in silver glitter strapped to the masthead, and a crowd of 100 or so nippers bopping past with a forest of tall feathers shaking above them.
Yes, it's that time of year again. But my mind is much on the death in Baghdad two days ago of a friend, the brother of a close friend, a very brave and dedicated human being who had chosen to go and help his country out of its dark night of the intellect by bringing a bit of reason to the upper reaches of the civil service, not for ground-floor opportunist big American money but a bit later, out of principle, for peanuts. Big, big bummer. I don't know yet whether that child of the Enlightenment, educated in an advanced, progressive and almost democratic pre-Saddam Iraq, and in voluntary political exile in Europe for much of the time since then, was targeted or just the random victim of one of the big bangs beloved of the obscurantist forces. Whatever the circumstances he is a loss to humanity. Saw him a couple of months ago and he said things were looking up a bit in Baghdad, he was optimistic.
Edited by Lud on 24/08/2008 at 15:43
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Sorry pal. Nothing much positive can be said, can it. I remember how I felt years ago now when the IRA got a Military Police pal of mine with a bullet in the back when he was driving a staff car (motoring link) in Germany. He lived but I'll never forget the shock of seeing his cap lying in the road and the guy on TV saying 'the victim has been identified as Cpl ---- ----- from the Taunton area'.
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Whatever the circumstances
I know what they were now. His car was stopped on a bridge by three carloads of people who shot him dead with automatic weapons gangland style. His ministry driver, who would have been armed - he had no other bodyguard that day -, is in hospital with three or four bullet wounds, and has been receiving threatening letters and messages. I am told 'the Americans' had recently issued a warning that death squads trained in Iran were prowling around with lists of intellectuals to kill on behalf of major Shia Islamist organisations, the biggest coherent political forces in Iraq.
His brother told me he had known for four years that this would happen one day. Of course the real possibility was lost on no one, and many ingenious reasons for hanging about in Europe had been advanced over the years, to no avail.
To go from the sinister and horrible to something else you may not see in the papers, but that is altogether more ridiculous, bottles and other dangerous missiles were hurled at police in riot gear in my block last night in the closing stages of Carnival, and the road was taped off for half a mile for a good couple of hours. Plod had been making an officious nuisance of himself en masse all day, and in the end got his comeuppance, although not on a very impressive scale. They need to purge the twit in charge of carnival plod for the last couple of years. Haven't seen brickbats being hurled since the early eighties, but the sensible commanders who ran carnival for the subsequent decade and a half have obviously retired and there are pompous hostile ignorant twits in their place. Of course I don't blame the front-line plodlet, overtime or no, because he has the grace sometimes to quite like carnival and sometimes to look ashamed when he has been used stupidly.
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