Is anyone as baffled as I am about the disappearance and subsequent death of Jay Slater on the sunshine island of Tenerife? I’ve thought about it a lot but I’ve barely blogged about it because there are no facts out there.
We hear, but don’t know for sure, that he nicked a Rolex watch off someone, hung around with a convicted heroin and crack dealer and that he likely went on holiday without any insurance. At some stage he decided to wander off back to his apartment, a mere 11 hours walk away, fell and died in an area so dense it took an age to find him. But that’s it.
The conspiracy stuff is running wild. I can’t be bothered to repeat it, but confess that I too have been caught up in it, describing Slater as a wrong ‘un. That’s conjecture on my part. I just wish I knew some facts.
As for the fundraising, his mum has asked for even more money “to give (Slater) the send off he deserves”. A wag on twitter said it would “probably one of those dreadful horse drawn black coaches and endless cars and a wake that goes on for days – then the burial and an enormous headstone.” Who knows? Debbie Duncan, his mum, trousered £59,000 via Go Fund Me, a figure that has risen to £65,000 since her latest appeal. These are enormous sums. Is it rude to ask where that money has gone and is going? As with everything else in this weird, sad story, no one seems to know anything. Yet someone must know something.
Or is it a simple story of a young man who went abroad, got in the wrong company, went for a late night walk and fell down and died?
Once we do know what happened, lessons can be learned, like bringing up your children to not hang around with convicted drug dealers, to go for late night walks in the middle of nowhere and, yes, take out holiday and funeral insurance?
At my request, my technical department has removed the sub-header from this blog, Tales from the Food Bank. I am still volunteering every week, hero that I am, but for a variety of reasons I have decided to discontinue this stand alone ‘feature’ of the site. But that doesn’t mean I’m not going to write about food poverty. Au contraire, as Del Boy might have put it.
I volunteer at the imaginary Melchester food bank, just down the road from Melchester Rovers’ football ground. And, surprisingly to some, we see people from a wide demographic, including people who work, some full time. This week, we had an actual nurse in the building.
Yes, a nurse whose actual job in life is to help make sick people better. Well, after being close to the edge for a long time, this week she fell off it, running out of money and food.
First she went to the food bank operated for staff at the hospital in which she works but they had completely run out of stock. So it was us or nothing.
I will not go into details but this was a tough watch. Anxiety, depression and suicidal thoughts. And there were tears galore.
We provided stopgap assistance in order to deal with the immediate crisis, but stopgap is all that it can be. I do hope that the actions of the new government will, over time, make me redundant.
Seeing a nurse with no food to eat felt like a new low to me.
If you were to ask me to to define the word insanity, I’d be inclined to use three words: Marjorie Taylor Greene. According to Wikipedia, she is described as an ‘American far-right politician, businesswoman, and conspiracy theorist who has been the U.S. representative for Georgia’s 14th congressional district since 2021.” In other words, an absolute nut job. Anyway, this week, she truly excelled herself.
Just before the assassination attempt on Donald Trump she said – and I am not making this up, even though she is – she witnessed an angel coming down from heaven that looked like an American flag that saved Donald Trump’s life. Good old God, then, coming to the aid of a rapist, paedophile and convicted criminal. In a moment of rare modesty, Trump himself added, “I stand before you in this arena only by the grace of almighty God.”
For those of us who don’t do God, never mind believe in angels descending from heaven, Ms Greene’s vision is utter nonsense. But for those who do God, it’s entirely feasible, and certainly no more unlikely to have happened than anything in the bible.
As I was taking the piss out of this angel nonsense yesterday, with a group of kindly believers, one pointed out that “God moves in mysterious ways.” That’s one way of putting it, I suppose. Another way to put it is that he isn’t there at all. I don’t need convincing of the latter, but even if I did Marjorie Taylor Greene’s vision of an angel would provide me with all the proof I needed of His non-existence.
My initial reaction to the sentences handed down to ‘Just Stop Oil’ supporters after their M25 shenanigans was rather meh. ‘Serves them right,” and all that. However, the five years imprisonment handed down to founder Roger Hallam and four years to four others (including the gloriously named Lucia Whittaker de-Abreu and Cressida Gethin) seem a little harsh, given that their protest was peaceful and the fact that prisons are full to the brim already.
I’d have preferred financial penalties against the so-called activists. Their actions cost the police over a million quid. Maybe there could be ways of penalising them by attachment of earnings (if any of them work) or to sequester Just Stop Oil’s funds?
They do have a point because unless action is taken with climate breakdown, untold disasters will befall the world in the next decades. I am just not convinced that messing with the lives of ordinary folk helps their cause. The exact opposite, really.
