8 February 2012
It was the coldest night of the year, and one of the coldest on record, something in the order of -12°C around Bedford. Ironically, it was colder here than in Sweden, which was certainly a first for Michael.
On the personal front, I’m glad to say it was almost painless night for me. after the dreadful one yesterday. Dr Michael increased my paracetamol to 2000 m.g and chucked in a cortisone tablet for good measure, that on top of the cocktail of drugs which I already take. The problem is that I rarely have a really bad and painful night so we do not know whether it was the extra drugs which were effective or was just a night when I would have been pain-free anyway.
The main media and news involves the imminent release from prison of Abu Qatada, the self confessed terrorist who was thought to be Al Qaeda’s representative in Europe. Abdul came to this country as a radical preacher openly spreading hatred of the Christians.
He was imprisoned, prior to an attempt to have him deported back to his homeland in Jordan. However, on the intervention of the European Court of Human Rights, we were told we would not be allowed to send him back to Jordan as he was a convicted criminal there and information which had been extracted from him by torture might be used against him in any further trials. This being the case, we have the crazy situation where he openly exposes the murder of Christians and we cannot get rid of him.
Our own courts then intervened and decided that we could not hold him in prison any longer because he had committed no crime in this country (I’m not sure quite how far you could have proved incitement against the Christian society) and the judge ordered him to go under house arrest for three months, whilst trying to sort out the deportation business. He would only be allowed out for two hours a day and was not allowed to use mobile phones or the Internet. He has, however, I understand, being given consent to walk his children to school everyday! I can’t help feeling that if I was a parent at the same school and saw him turning up every morning with the possibility of some madman trying to eliminate him, I might well have second thoughts about keeping my children at that school. If it turns out that we cannot deport him. then, we are faced the ludicrous situation of spending millions of pounds over the years protecting him around the clock and paying sufficient benefit for him to live comfortably with his family as he is clearly unemployable!.
Are we mad or what? No other country in the world would take such a soft line on one of the most dangerous confessed terrorist in the world. This may well be the trigger for us to defy the European Court of Human Rights and start the process of withdrawing control of our legal system from Europe altogether, which is something I have been advocating in this blog for a very long time. Our jurisprudence has been the envy of the world for two or 300 years and why we should suddenly be able to be overruled by disparate mixture of judges, some from the Third World, maybe with an axe to grind,? This is, to my mind sheer lunacy. The electorate no doubt will take note of how well our Prime Minister, Mr Cameron (through our Foreign Minister) deals with this lose/ lose situation.
The funeral that Alice, Miles and Kimberly attended yesterday afternoon, fortunately, went off without a hitch, unaffected by the snow and ice, that we have suffered from over the past two or three days. Apparently there was a very big turnout for this sad business and Smiler, who was a particularly good friend of the deceased, read, the 23rd Psalm. They will all be off again tomorrow, heading for North Wales, for the Memorial Service being held for my dear mother-in-law, where, I trust the atmosphere will be different from yesterday’s funeral in that this can genuinely be a celebration of her life, the actual funeral having taken place earlier.
The good Dr Michael arrived around 7 p.m. last evening from Sweden, having two days earlier been in New York. He will stand in as locus parenti for Alice whilst she is away in Wales. In any event, the normal visits will be made from Ross Nursing, so the babysitting element should not be too onerous. As far as food is concerned, which will be fairly basic. I know Michael to be a reasonable cook so we will not starve.
We have booked to go next door to the Cricketers on Friday but if this sub zero weather continues, we shall probably eat in the breakfast room. Mick has some idea about going to the pub and bringing some food back here to eat – not a bad idea if Trevor Oliver agrees.
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