'Nother Solent

Laban Tall covered the same Scottish terror kid story I did and then went and found some seriously weird links. The one I linked to doesn't have sapphists in it. Or bagpipes.

UPDATE: Russians have a sense of humour, sense of humour, sense of humour. I don't know if there's some Russian-language pun I'm missing, but Pravda's treatment of the story seems tickled to death (sorry) by the aromatherapy angle.

In any case, if it was the Scottish national liberation army, it was a success in the awful action. Now it is going to be popular all over the world. Scotland Yard has faced a complex task of neutralizing the terrorists, otherwise the British prime minister will be cured to death with aroma therapy.

What made them boo, the adultery or the colour of the co-respondent?

(Do we still have "co-respondents"? There used to be such things as co-respondent shoes, which presumably were particularly flash.) I'm not citing Kwame Kwei-Armah's column in the Guardian yesterday to disagree with it, exactly, although he does seem to miss the point somewhat. He, like me, thinks this is a sad story:

A smiling and proud Bernie [Grant] walked on to the stage. But instead of being greeted with the love and affection one would have expected, particularly from this crowd of "conscious black folk", (conscious being the term used to describe one who has awaken from the slumber of political apathy) he was met by a barrage of boos and hisses. It didn't stop until he got to the end of his two-minute speech. Even from the back where I was seated one could see the pain in his eyes. Here was a man who had dedicated his life to this community, thus consigning his political career to the margins of the then Labour party. The reason for the booing? Bernie had just left his wife of 20 years or so and was now living with his secretary. He was booed for that? Of course what I omitted to mention was that Bernie's wife was black and the woman he had moved in with was white, a highly treasonable offence to the assembled crowd.

That seems to make it clear that Grant's offence in the crowd's eyes was not his abandonment of his wife - I would have some sympathy for their boos if it were - but that he shacked up with a white woman. Racism, in other words. Imagine if Robin Cook's sometime mistress and now second wife had been black, and those who upbraided him had done so on grounds of miscegenation rather than adultery! Kwei-Armah says that the reaction of the crowd made his heart retreat to a place of great sadness. I sypmathise. Then he loses the plot. In the next paragraph he goes on to say:

This was not really an issue of black and white but one of perceived notions of right and wrong. To them, he had betrayed a fundamental principle, and on the surface, yes I can see that. But to me some things are too important, too fundamental to the essence of our being to be denied. Love is one, your children's education is the other. It would have been all too easy for Bernie to have cancelled his appearance that night, but he didn't. He didn't because in my opinion he saw the bigger picture. The fact that Bernie remained married to "his secretary" until he died is testament to that.

The talk of "perceived notions of right and wrong" and "he had betrayed a fundamental principle" now seems seems to be saying that it's the adultery that was the problem. Kwame Kwei-Armah can't be saying that yes, he can see that not shagging white women is a fundamental principle, can he? The rest of the article then expounds his view that love, like your children's education, should override all other principles. For myself I think that, unlike Grant or Cook, Diane Abbott could make all well by announcing that in the light of personal experience she has changed her principles and is sorry for unfair remarks she made in her previous state of error.

And let's not forget

it's also happy blogiversary to them.

So it's happy blogiversary to me...

As Iain Murray has pointed out, I am two today, blogivistically speaking. And as Kris Murray has pointed out in the post above, Iain is twenty-one-and-a-bit today as well. I think it may be time for a re-enactment of the sign-off line from The Two Ronnies... and Happy Birthday to him.