Monday 2 May 2011

Bin there, done that

Nurses are obviously being paid too much. Have you seen that advert for Sky? It shows a couple coming home late after a shift at the hospital - she's obviously a nurse, I think he is too. And they're ordering a Sky subscription or an upgrade or something.
It's not the Sky bit that suggests they have cash - you can't go past a council estate without seeing a zillion satellite dishes - but if you look, the downtrodden nurses have a gleaming new Aga in the kitchen. An Aga? On NHS pay? Blimey.
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The thing about Osama Bin Laden's death, apart from the fact everyone now seems to refer to him as OBL, is that you can't help wondering how different things would have been been without him.
In particular, what would Blair have been like without OBL? Whether or not you like or loathe him, much of that is probably based on the conflicts in Iraq (mainly) and, to a lesser degree, Afghanistan, the lies over weapons of mass destruction, the part he and Alistair Campbell may or may not have played in the death of Dr David Kelly, the whole 'not in my name' campaign.
I know there's other aspects of his premiership that will help form an opinion but a lot of his natural supporters hate him for the war, for example, and many of his natural opponents may not have turned against him so much if there had never been a 9/11 for him to react to.
All the WMD, BBC and other TLAs (three letter acronyms) may not have happened. We would have had a completely different kind of Prime Minister. Indeed America may have had a completely different president.
And whatever else, this is a good day for Obama. Even if he was lucky, it doesn't matter. It happened on his watch and his ratings will soar. I watched his very funny 'roasting' of Donald Trump in the speech he gave to the Washington correspondents a couple of days ago - when he probably knew OBL's death was on the horizon. Grab a look on YouTube, he's got a very good delivery for humour.
He also took the mickey out of Fox News who got their own back. Their on-screen headline about OBL called him Obama instead of Osama.
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I was actually in America the day of 9/11. To say it was strange is an understatement. I was staying in a remote hotel in the middle of the Everglades.
As I checked out the receptionist said the oddest thing had happened. A plane of some sort had crashed into one of the Twin Towers. I pictured a kind of two seater plane going off course and hitting the skyscraper.
I got in the car to drive down to the Keys where my brother was getting married the next day. Instead of my usual easy listening music station (which was called something like KRXW-Y Miami) there was news on, talking about a second plane crashing into the Towers.
They stayed with CNN and as I drove I got the whole story. So much so that by the time I pulled into a diner in Key Biscayne, I seemed to know everything while locals coming in to gawp at the TV couldn't get their heads around it.
So I started explaining what was going on. How they were terrorists, how the lead suspect was someone called Bin Laden who had been responsible for other atrocities.
But the Americans couldn't cope with the fact this had happened in their own country, not as a US Embassy abroad or a warship or the kidnap of citizens in a foreign hotspot.
Gradually a crowd gathered round me. Every time someone said 'what's going on?' others would point at me and say 'the British guy, ask him, he'll tell you' and so I became like some sort of sage simply by being able to translate what the experts were saying on the TV behind me. It was a bizarre episode and continued to be for the next few days out there in Florida.
As I went to leave the diner, a little old Jewish couple with a fierce Noo Yoik accent came up. The guy, about 80 and 5 ft nothing with a cigar in his mouth and a trilby, pointed to the screen and said 'you know what dat iz?' He took a puff, looked up and down and said 'terrorism, dat's what it is,' turned round and left with his wife. As I said, everything was a bit bizarre out there in that period immediately afterwards.
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We all hope that if our lives achieve anything, it is to leave this place better than we found it.
I once saved someone's life. No really. Well, possibly. My friend Kim and I were on our way home from a club in town very late one night. This is almost 30 years ago when I used to have late nights. And friends. And went to clubs 'up west'.
Anyway. We were walking down the Embankment, north side, past Westminster Bridge, streets were empty, and we saw a man sitting on the wall overlooking the river, feet dangling over the edge, clearly getting his bottle up to jump in. He kept making to jump but stopping.
We approached him and started chatting. He sat on the wall and chatted though it felt a bit uneasy. Turned out he lived in one of those council blocks you see almost adjoining the river, possibly the most expensive land in Britain for 'social housing' as they call it.
He was a youngish man, not much older than us at the time, in his 20s. He'd lost his job (it was Thatcher's Britain back then don't forget) and his brother had been killed by a motorcyclist. The biker got  off and continued to zoom up and down the road where this guy lived. It ate him up so much, his mum was on anti-depressants as I recall, and he'd had enough.
Kim and I kept eyeing each other thinking what the hell would we do if he jumped so we persuaded him to come down and took him to have a cup of tea in an all-night cafe in Westminster and then we walked him home and left.
No idea what happened to him and I must admit that for the next few nights I kept an eye out in the papers for London suicides and saw nothing so I like to think, and hope, that he did okay.
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My wife and daughter went swimming yesterday in a woman's pond. Which, for me, conjures up an image of a lascivious fisherman who looks like Terry-Thomas tweaking his moustache and saying 'I say girls, just take the bait, ding dong' as he waits for a bite.
Actually it's a female-only, outdoor pond in leafy North London, the posh bit where the people are ever so slightly different. The missus and youngest daughter met up with an American friend and her teenage girls while another woman took photos for a book she was doing on 'mothers and daughters' while some more friends turned up on a tandem. And despite my preconceptions, the place is not heaving with lesbians. Which conjures up an entirely different image all together.
On that thought....good night, Solly.

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