So Are We At War Yet?

Well for all I know we might be because since Friday (9/8/13) I've largely been away from the news because I've been down in Salisbury for my biological mother's retirement/birthday party. If you want to know how that went I'm not really the person to ask.

Arriving a day early I sort of got pushed into the role of cook. As a result when most people arrived I was still busy in the kitchen. Once I'd finished in the kitchen I moved onto setting up the barbecue. As this was one of those disposable jobs this should have been pretty easy. Unfortunately my mothers did seem to realise that leaving charcoal in a place where it would get damp might cause a little bit of a problem. This of course led to led to a nearly two hour battle of wills between me and the charcoal involving matches, a blow torch and an inordinate amount of firelighters. Just as I'd secured victory my army cousin turned up with his two young children meaning the barbecue had to go out to avoid little fingers and everyone spent the rest of the afternoon focusing on the sort of adorable chaos that only toddlers can bring.

After everybody else had left my mothers, my brother his girlfriend and I sat around drinking wine and talking. Regular readers will know that conversations involving my immediate family can often get quite dark. One classic example involved us going to celebrate a birthday at a restaurant where you sat in booths so you could hear but not see the people sitting at neighbouring tables. After about an hour of us talking about all the people we'd seen die in various gory circumstances I got up to go to the bathroom and saw the parents and their two horrified young children sitting at the next table. The look on their faces almost made me want to sit back down and start talking about the terrible news from Lapland. After all while it's very sad that Father Christmas had been killed in a accident he really shouldn't have been driving his sleigh when he was that drunk.

Anyway on this occasion we started talking about the cost of women getting their hair cut. Somehow this led onto a discussion about how barber shops and hairdressers are the number one way to launder drugs money. This led onto a more general discussion about crime and Jury service which touched on the recent Tia Sharp and April Jones cases which led into a discussion about paedophilia. As it always seems to discussion of paedophilia led into a discussion about the Catholic Church which in turn became a long and heated argument about whether the previous Pope Benedict XVI was a Nazi or not. Eventually after everybody had consulted the Internet we decided that he was wasn't because he was conscripted into the Hitler Youth aged 14 and was then conscripted into a German anti-aircraft regiment at 16 if Wikipedia is to be believed. We then moved onto the ideological roots of Nazism and then via Malthus ended up trying to explain to my brothers non-pet owning girlfriend that even the most loving pet ultimately views you as prey. After all that great urban legend about the man with loads of cats who dies only for the cats to feast on his corpse actually a few streets away from us growing up in the late 1980's. This led onto a more general discussion about human cannibalism at which point we decided it was probably time to go to bed. After all as the the cook I felt at least partly responsible.

While I was doing that Morgan Tsvangirai's MDC-T filed a legal challenge to the result of Zimbabwe's Presidential election. You will notice that they did this just as the Courts were closing for the weekend. The intention being to have at least two days for the foreign owned satellite TV stations to put out propaganda building up a belief that the MDC-T's challenge could succeed. If the MDC-T had waited until Monday morning to file this challenge it would most likely have been dismissed by Monday afternoon. That's because even if the Courts accept every single one of the MDC-T's allegations it would only reduce Mugabe's winning margin rather then change the outcome of the election.

With the run-off vote in Mali's election also taking place today the US and the UK have been working hard to confuse and therefore increase pressure on African government over the weekend. The US' effort was the search for and eventual successful rescue of Hannah Anderson. "Hannah" is the name used to describe a composite of female MI5 officers who have been responsible for the treatment of me over the last six or so years including the Bristol Abuse Case. Therefore the search for the kidnapped Hannah could wrongly be interpreted as a discussion about something dramatic happening involving me. The UK joined in with the search for Erika Kacicova who is missing presumed kidnapped from Sheffield, UK. As they are both female and sub-Asian this could be interpreted as a reference to my brother's girlfriend with a specific intention to give the impression that she's the latest informant that's been sent to spy on me and my relatives and promote discussion about how she is doing.

Oh and after we all had breakfast and before my brother and his girlfriend and I travelled back to London separately we all went out for a lunch time drink at a pub in the New Forest where the police had been asking local residents for their help in the search for Daniel Rosenthal a convicted murderer with schizophrenia who just happened to wander out of his secure mental hospital the previous day.

(Originally Posted) 19:20 on 11/8/13.