My Auntie Clarina in Sierra Leone is worried that, living in Cambridge and visiting London as I do from time to time, I might be in danger.
23Jul05 — 12
- 04.05.23 Ten-year quest through Development Hell pays off
- 04.04.23 Testing "podcasting"
- 04.03.23 Mistakes Have Been Made
- 04.02.23 Coming soon
- 11.02.19 Live comedy review: Geoff Norcott at the Southport Comedy Festival
- 08.20.19 Republic Interiors
- 12.27.18 The Wykehamist Fallacy
- 12.08.18 The Moral Degradation of The Labour Party
- 10.14.18 FILM REVIEW: Downsizing
- 09.09.18 Film Review: Fright Night
Recent events appear to suggest that the terrorists do not present as great a threat as our trigger-happy police.
Oh, I think they do, paterfamilias. Come to London and try it.
If a policeman tells you to do something and you do it then you’ll live; if a terrorist tells you to do something and you do it then you’ll die anyway. I know who I’d rather bump into on the Tube.
It’s not easy to identify a policeman in plain clothes.
There are twenty of them, so one reads, shouting for you to stop two days after a major bombing attempt. You leap over a barrier into a tube station. You might be scared, true, but seeing as they have guns it might be better to stop in full view of the public. Your pursuers may be shouting things like ‘Police!’. They have seen coils of wire on your person. You might possibly consider why they have stopped you and wondered about the coils of wire.
Too many ‘may’s and ‘possibly’s I agree. It is a tragedy, of course. But O father of fathers, do you really think 56 against 1 are such terrible odds? Would you really be more afraid of a policeman than anyone else? If yes, you had really better never go out. If no, what’s the point of a cheap joke?
[WARNING FROM THE PROPRIETOR: Do not follow Eric’s link below if you, like me, have yet to watch 24 and would prefer not to have the plot spoiled for you. Thanks, Eric.]
I’m with George on this and it seems harsh to blame the copper.
Wires? But now we learn that the poor chap was an electrician.
Oh well, all those people who don’t need to wait for an investigation, who never make mistakes and who have never held a job where they are resposible for protecting the lives of others, will shout the odds. Plonker geeks.
Still waiting to work this one out, dearie me, as is everyone else. Various sources of information, including one that he came out of the house being observed, and other possibly suspicious stuff etc. I don’t know. We shall see, I hope.
My point is not that it was right to shoot him (what do I know about the alternatives presented by the situation? – never been in anything like) but that PG Snr’s joke was inapposite. Surely it is?
Oh, sorry. You haven’t even watched the first series?
How many times do I have to drawl condescendingly about it from my oak-lined drawing room? I don’t have a television set. During my “sabbatical”, however, I will construct a full-size papier-mâché replica of one from the tens of threatening letters I have received from the TV licensing authorities.
I understand that the Brazilian chap was working in the UK illegally. Did he think the police were going to arrange for his deportation?
[…] Sierra Leone has only recently stopped being the poorest country on the planet, partly thanks to the fierce competition between various thieving thugocrats in control elsewhere around the World to take their own countries to the top of the table, and partly for other reasons that I’m not going to go into here. I’ll just say that fairly recently Sierra Leone stopped hosting a UN peacekeeping mission for the bizarre reason that it had worked. […]