Month: August 2017

We’re living in dangerous times and sharing our planet with many disturbed people. There seems to be no shortage of misguided characters who, for reasons best known to themselves, are quite happy to kill and to be killed.

Some of them justify their actions through a far-fetched interpretation of a religious doctrine while others are just homicidal maniacs who latch on to a cause to justify their lust for blood.

Recently, we have experienced some despicable acts of terror resulting in the deaths of many innocent civilians. There was a time when wars were fought on a battlefield but the modern tactic seems to be to take the fight to the streets and to target families and innocent children.

The latest incident was a terrorist attack in Barcelona in Spain. It happened when a van was deliberately driven into a crowded pedestrian area that was full of tourists at the time. Fourteen people died so far and something like one hundred were injured.

A short time after that, five suspected terrorists were shot dead by police in the Spanish town of Cambrils, near Barcelona. They had also driven into pedestrians as part of what appeared to be the country’s second terrorist attack in the space of 24 hours. Six bystanders and one police officer were injured in the attack in Cambrils.

Isis has claimed responsibility for the attacks.

In another incident, a man was found dead after a shootout at a police roadblock in a town close to Barcelona. The owner of the car was in the passenger seat and he had been stabbed to death. It seems that this car had been hijacked and the driver fled the scene.

Some time ago there was a similar incident on London Bridge where seven people were killed and forty-eight were injured. A van rammed into pedestrians on the bridge before it crashed into a wall. Then three men jumped out of the van and stabbed people at random before they were shot dead by the police. Witnesses heard the men shouting, ‘This is for Allah.’

That attack took place just a couple of weeks after a suicide bomber killed twenty- two and injured one hundred and sixteen at the Manchester Arena. This was an assault at a concert that was being attended mainly by young people. One of those who lost their lives was an eight-year old girl.

There have been other such events in the last couple of years too. In Tunisia, an attacker posed as a swimmer but he was carrying a rifle. He shot people on the beach and then went into a nearby hotel where he continued to shoot as he walked around, shooting people at random, killing thirty-nine and injuring a whole lot more before he was shot dead by the police.

It’s not that long ago since we had the terror attacks in Paris. The first explosions occurred outside the Stade de France stadium where a man wearing a suicide belt was prevented from entering the stadium after a routine security check so he blew himself up on the spot. The bomber and a passer-by were killed.

A third suicide bomber blew himself up at a fast-food outlet near the stadium. More attacks took place near the centre of town and one gunman turned his gun on a restaurant. Fifteen people died in that attack, with 15 severely injured. More than 100 bullets were fired.

The worst attack of the night happened at another concert venue. The 1,500-seat Bataclan hall was sold out when three attackers wearing suicide belts stormed the concert hall. Eighty-nine people died as the men fired assault rifles into the crowd. At least 99 others were taken to hospital in a critical condition.

Last year, we witnessed the brutal beheading of a twelve- year old child by a rebel group in Aleppo City, Syria. The horrific murder, captured in footage circulated on social media, was allegedly carried out by Islamist rebels who accused the boy of fighting alongside government forces. It seems that the boy was decapitated by members of a group on the back of a pick-up truck on a public road.

Another horror involved the killing of an eighty-six-year-old priest in France while he was saying mass in a small little church. Two attackers slit his throat and then filmed themselves making a speech in Arabic in front of the altar.
Apparently, there is nothing in Islam that allows for the slaughter of prisoners. In fact, Islam requires captives to be well-treated, fed and cared for. All the experts seem to agree that Islam is a religion that promotes love and peace but extremists are distorting it to create disciples of death.

Shooting and stabbing innocent civilians while they are out socialising at a restaurant or a concert is simply madness. Driving a truck into a crowd of unsuspecting men, women and children is an act of insanity. Beheading a twelve-year old boy for being on the wrong side in a conflict is indescribable and I fail to see how cutting the throat of an eighty-six-year-old priest is going to advance any cause.

I saw the footage of the boy in the back of a pick-up truck being taunted by his captors. They appeared to be toying with him and describing the treatment that was about to be meted out to him. It’s impossible to imagine what the last few hours were like for that unfortunate child but he must have been terrified. It doesn’t bear thinking about.

These atrocities cannot be justified under any circumstances. These mad men can’t put forward any argument that will excuse or even explain their actions. They are nothing short of barbarians with no hope of being rewarded in this life or any other.

 

There is no doubt that there are people in the world who are lonely, for a variety of reasons. They may have lost a loved one or might not have any friends or relatives living nearby. They may be living in rural and remote areas where callers are rare. For those people, life presents certain challenges.

Living in isolation can be difficult and the days must be very long if you are a person that craves company. Some studies have suggested that apart from being just inconvenient, loneliness can also be unhealthy and has been linked to heart disease, insomnia and depression. It can also lead to an early death.

Solving the loneliness problem is not a simple matter. Telling lonely people that they ought to get out more often and meet people is a little bit like telling someone who is afraid of bats that they should try living in a cave.

It’s not that straight forward. It seems to imply that it’s their fault that they’re lonely but for those who never recover from a bereavement, that kind of loneliness never leaves.

Having said that, solitude is a welcome way of life for certain people and they are perfectly happy with their own company. There are times when I am like that and sometimes all I need is a good book or my laptop and I’m happy. I love the peace and quiet.

I was having a pint in my local pub one day when I started chatting with the guy sitting next to me. I had never seen him before. He told me that he was living in Cork City and that his wife had died and he was now living alone. He took the train from Cork as far as Carrigaloe and then walked the rest of the way into Cobh which took him about an hour.

He spent the next few hours walking around the town before going for his lunch. Later he went for a pint and his plan was to get the train back to the city when he finished his drink and then he would get the bus back home.

This was his daily routine. He had free travel, so he would head off on the bus in the morning and make his way into town. Then he would look at the bus timetable or he would go to the railway station and check the time table there. At that stage, he would decide where he was going to go for the day and he could end up anywhere, depending on his humour.

I think this character has a fantastic attitude to life and he loves to get out every day and meet new people. On the other hand, solitude suits others and when they go for a pint, they prefer to sit in the corner and mind their own business and that’s fine too. To each his own.

One guy who can deal with solitude is Enda O’Coineen. He’s an Irish sailor who found himself stranded on the other side of the world after being forced out of a solo round-the-world race. He had spent 62 days on his own at sea, in the middle of nowhere, when he suffered an accident and had to bow out of the race. He was rescued by a fishing trawler and was towed into port.

This 60-year-old entrepreneur from Galway had been drifting for several days after a squall in the Southern Ocean broke the mast on his 60ft racing yacht. He was on track to be the first Irish sailor to go single-handed around the world.
Despite his ordeal, Enda wants to go back to where he was picked up so he can finish his travels. It takes some willpower and determination to endure something like that and you need to be sure you can survive without company.

There is another type of loneliness too. The kind that hits you when a loved one emigrates and loses contact with home. I was told a story recently and I’m not sure how true it is but I’ll tell it again anyway.

There was a guy in a small village, I won’t say where, who was having a going away party before he headed off to Australia. A little old lady from the village approached him and asked him to tell her son Paddy that she loved him. He didn’t want to disappoint her by telling her that the chances of him finding Paddy in a country of that size were probably zero, so he just agreed to pass on the message.

He was in Oz for a few years and one day he was working on a pipeline when he got chatting to the foreman. The foreman told him that there was another Irish guy working at the next station and he would arrange a meeting on the next visit. When he came back the next time he met the other Irish guy who turned out to be the missing Paddy from his home village. He passed on the message from his mother and asked Paddy why he hadn’t kept in contact.

Paddy said that he could never return because of the terrible thing that he had done to his parents. He told the story of how he was out one night in the village and he borrowed his father’s car. He was acting the goat and he wrote off the car in an accident. After that, he was so ashamed of himself that he couldn’t face his parents so he decided, there and then, to leave home.

He subsequently ended up in Australia and sent a message home that he was alright and then he cut himself off from his family. All because of a broken car.

 

 

 

In 1972, for my fourteenth birthday, my father brought me to Wales to see Leeds United play Cardiff City in Ninian Park. That mightn’t sound like a big deal today but back then I imagine it was a bit of an ordeal for him to pull it all together.

It probably cost him an arm and a leg as well. He would have had to organise the match tickets, the Cork to Swansea ferry, a train ride from Swansea to Cardiff and then a bus trip to the stadium. He did it in pre-internet days when arranging something like this was a lot more complicated. I can’t remember too much about the journey itself but I imagine it took forever to get there and back.

He wasn’t much of a football fan but he knew that I had been a Leeds United supporter since I was about nine years of age. That time, there was very little football on the television, in fact there was very little television.

As a young lad, I used to go to my bedroom on a Saturday afternoon and listen to the match commentary on BBC Radio 2. I would lay on the bed, close my eyes and I would imagine myself standing on the terraces with the rest of the fans.

I had a huge interest in the football league and sometimes before going to sleep I would test myself by naming all the players on each of the twenty-two teams in the first division. If that didn’t send me off to sleep, I would name the managers and the names of their home ground.

The walls of my bedroom were a shrine to all my favourite players. Not a single square inch of wallpaper was visible. Photographs and posters from Shoot magazine completely obscured whatever lay behind them.

So, to find myself leaning on a three- foot wall that ran around Ninian Park, watching my heroes going through their warm up routine, was simply mind numbing. I knew about the speed of Terry Cooper and Mike Jones and the power of Peter Lorimer from the commentaries, but to see them in real time was almost unbelievable.

When the match started the most striking thing for me was the lack of commentary. I was so used to having the game described to me in detail that I found it strange not being able to hear it. What I did hear though was the players shouting to each other, the thud of the ball, the thump of tackles and of course the chanting of the crowd. It was magical.

At one point during the game Billy Bremner gathered the ball for a throw in right in front of me. I could have touched his head as he bent down.

The match ended and when we went back to the ferry we were able to watch Match of the Day on the TV during the crossing. This was another rare treat and it was nearly as exciting as being at the game. The whole event left a huge mark on me and one that I would never forget, not even after all these years.

The one blight on the trip was the violence between opposing supporters. I had a Leeds United scarf around my neck and as we walked towards the stadium an older man approached my father and suggested that I should put the scarf inside my coat out of sight.

Soon after, we saw a large group of supporters facing up to each other just before it turned into a running battle. Shop windows were boarded up and there were police on horseback trying to maintain order but the numbers were just too great. It was a frightening spectacle.

When my son Colin was twelve, I took him to Anfield to see his heroes, Liverpool. There is a lot more football on television now and travel is a lot easier to organise and kids take a lot more for granted. So, with that in mind, I wasn’t really expecting the same reaction from him that I had experienced all those years earlier.

We got to the ground early and we waited near the dressing rooms for the Liverpool coach to arrive. My son was standing by the door of the bus as the players got out and his mouth was wide open in amazement. He was totally absorbed in the occasion and his mouth was rarely closed for the rest of the day.

We entered the stadium and took our seats and he was speechless as he just soaked up the atmosphere. He lived every kick of the ball during the game and he was able to identify every mark on the pitch afterwards and he could even describe how it happened and who put it there.

The crowd singing “You’ll never walk alone” would make the hairs stand on the back of your neck whether you are a football fan or not. When the match was over he stood in his place and just looked all around him. Stewards eventually approached and asked us to move. He was in a different world.

The crowd control these days is excellent and the stadium empties within miniutes of a game ending and the streets are cleared soon afterwards. Thankfully, those crowd scenes I witnessed in Cardiff appear to be a thing of the past. The all seater stadia now make for a more comfortable experience as well.

We’ve been to a few games since then and the stewarding has been top class. There seems to be a huge emphasis on making the day a family event and a pleasant experience for everyone.

They’ve come a long way since 1972 and hopefully, crowd trouble will remain a thing of the past.

 

 

 

There were many heroic deeds during World War II carried out by real life heroes. Many of these stories have been well documented and immortalised in film. The heroes, usually from the Allied side, gained their status by blowing up something or eliminating a whole bunch of enemy forces to save their colleagues and win the day.

In the movies, these guys were usually played by actors like John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, Sylvester Stallone and Steve McQueen, the cool clean hero types.

I was lying in bed the other morning and I was listening to Today on BBC Radio 4 when I heard a story of a guy called Desmond Doss who went on to become a WWII hero in unusual circumstances. He was a Seventh Day Adventist and he was the only conscientious objector to ever win the Medal of Honour.

Because of his religious beliefs, he wasn’t allowed to carry a gun but he still wanted to do something to help his country. He felt guilty that his friends were all taking part in the war while he stayed at home, so he decided to do something about it.

Doss was working in a shipyard in the States when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbour and his work there would have excused him from being drafted because he was contributing to the war effort. But he didn’t want to be known as a draft dodger for the rest of his days. So, even though he didn’t need to, he registered for the draft as a conscientious objector. He told the draft board that, while he was not willing to kill anyone, he was more than willing to serve his country.

Doss was a member of the Seventh-day Adventist Church so he was forbidden from taking any active part in the war because its followers were not allowed to take up arms. But he persisted and went on to become an army medic and he saved many lives.

As a conscientious objector, he was often ridiculed and cursed during his training, by fellow soldiers. He refused to carry any type of weapon and instead he carried a Bible. He suffered for his religious beliefs and boot camp was difficult period for him. Fellow soldiers threw shoes and other items at him when he knelt beside his bunk praying.

One particular officer threatened to have him court martialled and at one stage he even tried to have Doss discharged for being “mentally unfit.” The fact that he wouldn’t carry a gun angered some of his colleagues and one soldier vowed, “When we go into combat, Doss, I’m gonna shoot you myself.”

When he wasn’t looking after the wounded, he would read Scripture. But although his religious beliefs prevented him from taking a life, Doss did what he could to save them. The LA Times reported that Doss was a very humble man, and while he was not proud of himself for going to war, he was proud that God used him to save so many lives.

He received the nation’s highest military award, The Medal of Honour, without ever firing a shot. O n Okinawa, he faced heavy enemy fire and single-handedly rescued 75 wounded infantrymen and lowered them one by one, down a cliff to safety.

He was part of the assault on the heavily fortified Maeda Escarpment with a 30 to 50-foot-high rock cliff at the end of it. At the summit, the soldiers were met with heavy artillery, mortar and machine-gun fire. Those not killed or wounded were quickly driven back. Doss, however, refused to leave the dozens of wounded behind.

His Medal of Honour citation says that Doss “remained in the fire-swept area with the many stricken, carrying them one by one to the edge of the escarpment and there lowering them on a rope-supported litter down the face of a cliff to friendly hands.”

As he made his way to each wounded man, Doss prayed, “Dear God, let me get just one more.” In the 1998 interview, he remembered that “I just caught them by the collar and dragged them. You made yourself as small a target as you could and just hoped and prayed [the Japanese] didn’t hit you.”

The Army credited Doss with saving 75 lives. While soldiers were initially hostile to Doss, as a medic, however, he quickly earned the respect of his comrades. He earned a Bronze Star for valour for putting himself at risk to care for wounded men.

But that wasn’t the only action on Okinawa between April 29 and May 21 that led to Doss’ Medal of Honour. He repeatedly braved enemy fire to aid the wounded and move them to safety and over that three- week period he was responsible for saving the lives of many.

During a night attack, Doss was tending to the wounded when a grenade exploded, shattering his legs. Rather than calling for help, Doss treated his own injuries and waited five hours before two litter bearers reached him. On their way to a first aid station, the trio was caught in enemy fire.

Doss, seeing a more critically wounded man nearby, crawled off the litter and told the bearers to pick up the other man. While waiting for the litter bearers to return, Doss was hit in an arm. Using a rifle stock as a splint for his shattered arm, he crawled 300 yards over rough terrain to the aid station.

Doss was wounded three times during the war, and shortly before leaving the Army he was diagnosed with tuberculosis, which cost him a lung. Discharged from the Army in 1946, he spent five years undergoing medical treatment for his injuries and illness.

Desmond Doss died in 2006 in Piedmont, Alabama, after being hospitalized for breathing troubles. Some man.

 

There are certain people who could be described as financially astute and money wise and there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s ok to be a bit careful about the way you handle your dosh, it’s a healthy attitude to have. Others though, take that to extremes and could be referred to as tight arses.

They prefer to spend their lives in abject poverty, living on scraps. But that’s their choice. If the highlight of their day is finding new ways to avoid spending money, then so be it. They can do what they like just as long as they don’t interfere with me.

I went to a shop the other day to get a newspaper. There was a guy standing in front of the paper stand and he was flicking through the pages of the various newspapers. He was having a good time and he was in a world of his own. He was also in my way so I asked him if he was going to buy one or if he was going to plant a flag on the spot and stake a claim on it.

He walked away without batting an eyelid. I thought that I might have embarrassed him a little but it didn’t knock a feather out of him.

One of the assistants overheard me and she was grinning from ear to ear. She told me she was delighted that someone had challenged him. Apparently, he’s a regular visitor to the shop and he doesn’t mind clogging up the place. I don’t know this man but I would imagine that what he spends there is unlikely to add significantly to their overall profit margin.

If I was involved in managing that premises I would have no difficulty in telling him to either buy a paper or sling his hook and take his lack of business elsewhere.

My grandmother used to say that if you take care of the pennies, the pounds will look after themselves but there are people who take that to extreme levels and we’ve all met them. I worked with a guy one time who probably takes the award for being one of the tightest characters ever.

It was a very rare occasion when he would buy a newspaper. He would normally only invest if he was in for a long shift. Then he might break out and get one and read the ink off it. When he was finished, he would offer it for sale for half price.

I worked with another character, who was single at the time and he lived in a flat on his own. In fact, it’s wrong to say that he lived there because he only existed. His lifestyle was only one step removed from being a squatter. He had a car but he only used it in emergencies or when the weather was too bad for him to either cycle or walk to work.

He dedicated his life to not spending money and he put a lot of effort into it. He used as little electricity as possible and would rather suffer the cold than pay for heating. What cooking he did, was done at work so it wasn’t costing him anything. Whenever he had to part with money he would become visibly agitated.

We’ve all met the guys who like to skip buying a round of drinks. These people can often be entertaining and they’re generally not taken too seriously. But the extremists are a different kettle of fish and they can be difficult to get along with. Their devotion to counting pennies is an alien concept to most of us and I wonder about the point of it all.

A married scrooge can at least leave a decent will for his family when he eventually departs from his miserable existence and maybe that’s his justification for his self- imposed vow of poverty. Whatever about his reason for choosing to live that way, at least some benefit may come out of it for someone else. But what’s the motivation for the unmarried miser?

Of all the scrooges I have met, none has come close to John Elwes. In 1763, Elwes inherited a fortune of more than £250,000 from his uncle. That would be somewhere in the region of £500m in todays’ money. They say Charles Dickens based his Scrooge character on this guy and when you see how he lived, it’s easy to see how he could be the original meanie.

He wandered around the house in the dark to avoid using a candle and he would sit with his servants in the kitchen to save having to light a fire in another room. He wore ragged clothes and would go for months at a time in a suit that he wore in bed. He would get up in the morning and wear the same clothes during the day. He once spent weeks wearing a dirty wig he found in a hedge.

If he got soaked from the rain he would sit in the wet clothes to save the cost of lighting a fire to dry them. He regularly ate mouldy or rotten food. One rumour was that he even ate a rotten moorhen taken from the river by a rat.

Before his uncle died, they would spend entire evenings together sharing just one glass of wine. He never married but he did father two sons but he refused to educate them because he thought that putting ideas in their heads would only lead to them spending money foolishly.

When he died in 1789, he left £500,000 almost £1bn in todays’ money behind him. He probably would have lasted a bit longer if he looked after himself.
Or, maybe he’s still alive and getting in my way.