(Failed) Theft of Spirituality

Unhloly heist. Sacrilegious  swindle. Capillary crook. The New York Daily News reported the theft of a vial containing traces of the blood of Pope John Paul II (‘pontiff’s plasma’), as a kind of cartoon caper. Presumably to permit the paper’s readers – Guys and Dolls, Native New Yorkers – to live out their lives among the cast of characters in Damon Runyon’s low-life off-Broadway stories.

Containing a shred of cloth stained with the pope's blood during the failed attempt to assassinate him in 1981, the vial was itself contained in an elaborate package or ‘reliquary’ – half- box, half-holy writ. 

(Pope John Paul II died in 2005 to cries of Santo Subito – make him a saint now! He is due to be beatified at the end of April 2014.)

Not a vial but a river of blood between the two sides of the civil war in Syria, now facing each other for 'peace talks' in Switzerland. So much blood – leaving aside the not-so-well documented stories of people eating each other. So much certified blood it can't be easy for them to stay in the same room together: the foreign minister who interrupts the UN secretary general interrupting him because he must, simply must finish his speech; and the opposition spokesman at pains to explain to waiting journalists that the government delegation is guilty of using confrontational language.

Overlooking the unruffled waters of Lake Geneva, at any moment the negotiating chamber may be flooded with blood – a tidal surge of it. The levels keep rising – then falling a little; rising and falling.

Rising into the air above St Peter’s Square two doves, released from the papal balcony by children accompanied by the new pope, were attacked by seagulls and a crow.

Pope Francis, the people’s pontiff, Time’s person of the year, man of his times, though still wearing those spectacles favoured by 1990s German chief execs. He is Papa to us all, allegedly. Raised above the square, he stands for all the Syrian fathers who have not been allowed to be Papa, whose children were ripped and torn out of their arms.

Except that his standing isn’t high enough. Dove of peace? You might as well ask him to remake their civil war as a cartoon caper complete with unholy hostages, scintillating sieges and people’s plasma.

Here's a heist which the religious vernacular has not managed to pull off - not even with all that papal paraphernalia.

Hell On Ice

Old age doesn’t creep up. It rages over you like the flames which engulfed an old people’s home (Residence du Havre) in small town Canada (L’Isle-Verte, Quebec) on Wednesday night, leaving up to 31 dead. 

Even Frankie Boyle couldn’t make it up: residents reliant on walking frames, washed-out shuffling things, overtaken by quickfire. See how they cannot run! Now they have run out of time.

Chief firefighter Yvon Charron described it as ‘a night from hell’. Away from the flames, the temperature dropped to 20 degrees below freezing. Pumped onto the fire to put it out, gallons of water turned to icy, witchy fingers.

Hell froze over. The world stood still. In our flaming youth we often saw it that way. We could afford to, with all that time hanging over us.

Mixed Messages

On Saturday night they queued outside St Andrew's Church, Muirhouse, to attend a memorial service for Mikaeel Kular. Early that morning police found the three year old's body in the woods next to his former home in Kirkcaldy.

The Kirkcaldy address makes you wonder why deaths like his don't happen more often. Think of a caravan built of bricks with a Sky dish tacked on. In Newmarket the stables - houses for horses to live in - look more prepossessing. 

Welcome to the pinched world of Kirkcaldy, part of the Ancient Kingdom of Fife....or Poundland, where masked robbers raid Glen [the] Bakers, making off in the delivery man's van with cash from the till, his phone, and perhaps a pile of Scotch pies (salt content to rival the Dead Sea); and the local sign writers haven't yet mastered the English language.

Back in Muirhouse on the north side of Edinburgh, again there's little to stop us killing each other. Many of the postwar flats have already gone - the last bonkers tenant ('no surrender', 'remember the Alamo', 'citizens' republic of Pennywell Gardens') was evicted in 2007. But the new housing stock seems to have the same pinched look built in. Is it something they add to the cement?

Then look again at the Saturday night queue. These people are more than the sum of their 'built environment'. They are not tacky or tawdry. They don't appear to be climbing on to the emotional bandwagon, either. Suffused with light, which happens to be coming from inside the church, they look like people who wanted to help find that boy and give him back his life. Now he's been found dead, they'd like to give something back to each other.

Just don't read the messages tacked to the teddy bears.

Oh, America

Dennis McGuire (53), who was put to death earlier today by the State of Ohio, ordered a last meal of roast beef, fried chicken, fried potatoes with onions, potato salad, toasted onion bagel with cream cheese, butter pecan ice cream and a Coke.

America, where death sits down at the diner alongside representatives of the Coca-Cola corporation. There’s no need for spicy food, everyone agrees, when you’re gonna have it fried.

That’s not what happened to McGuire: the electric chair is little used nowadays. Instead he was injected with a novel combination of midazolam, a sedative, and hydromorphone, a morphine derivative. The State of Ohio has previously administered lethal injections of a barbiturate, pentobarbital. But Danish manufacturers Lundbeck have refused to supply the drug to the United States for use in executions.

America, is your Big Pharma so belittled – so much in decline – that you can’t come up with a new killer drug? Is this what you call R&D nowadays - trying out a new cocktail?

The drugs used on McGuire did not work well. Following the injection (do they rub their arms with alcohol to prevent infection?), his wife and grown-up children watched as he heaved, choked, snorted and gasped, suffering the effects of ‘air hunger’.  After 10 minutes of this, McGuire remained still for a few minutes more before he was pronounced dead.

Still as the placid man with a light beard in the mugshot issued by the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility. Thrashing around as he and his heavily pregnant victim must have done, when he raped her and slashed her neck so that she bled to death in the woods where her body was found the following day.
America, the Big Country where executions are small and mean……and not very well executed.

On Trial

On his way in to Southwark Crown Court today to face charges of ‘historic’ indecent assault and sexual assault, former Radio 1 disc jockey Dave Lee Travis seems bemused by the sight of so many cameras. Having lived so long on the airwaves, perhaps he cannot stop himself associating media attention with professional success. Because being seen and heard – that’s-what-it’s-all-about, folks. Even though he knows they’re here this time to capture him at his lowest ebb.

Dave Lee Travis might have bumped into his old BBC stablemate Rolf Harris, also facing ‘historic’ charges at Southwark; except that Harris was allowed to use a side-entrance so that he could push his wheelchair-bound wife into the building.

Both men deny all charges.

‘DLT’, Travis’ radio moniker from the old days, sounded a lot like BLT: three fillings in just the one sandwich; proof that we don’t have to pinch pennies any more.

In those days, we took it that everyone should have the price of a BLT because DLT says so. Of course he never really did, but you could hear as much in his radio voice.

Nowadays our intrinsic self-worth is not so readily understood. You can hear as much in the spread of Operation Yewtree and the sexual assault trials sandwiched into Southwark Crown Court.

News In Brief

The barge slips across the River Styx to the Underworld. No, the barge which looks like a cargo container with the top-half sawn-off, is ferrying Syrian refugees across the Tigris to the Kurdish Autonomous Region of Iraq. Of those climbing out of the barge on the Iraqi side (one soldier tries checking them for entry, another hovers ineffectively), among the cheap shirts (men) and the women wrapped up in paisley peasant bundles, the refugee with the most unkempt hair and grizzled beard is not a wild man of the country. ‘Designer’ leather jacket, pulling airport-style luggage behind him, he could be the business man who had come back to his birthplace to retire; or perhaps the teacher from a war-torn village (one of many). Either way his old life isn’t there anymore. Assuming he reaches Baghdad 150 miles away, will he have another go….? Or burrow into his suitcase, living off leftovers for as long as he can make them last.

In the UK Tristram Hunt MP, newly appointed shadow spokesman for Education, has revealed Labour’s plans for a Teachers’ MOT. Teachers would have to apply for their licence to be renewed every few years, subject to satisfactory professional development. Hunt, himself a former lecturer, is bright-eyed and coiffed like a posh sixth-former. Strip back the mature jaw and tone down the full-square chin, and you’d take him for Head Boy, mugging something up for Speech Day on the Future of Our School. His rationale for the Teachers’ MOT is half-way between sixth-form vernacular and infantilised self-esteem-speak: ‘This is about believing that teachers have this enormous importance.’

PC Keith Wallis tried to make himself important, claiming he had witnessed Tory chief whip Andrew Mitchell slagging off police officers as plebs. Now he admits making it up. Watching Wallis on his way into court to plead guilty, you can well imagine what he hoped to gain. Thinning hair, moustache from another era, lower jaw bulging to the left – neat enough, but he looks like a man who’s still a PC at the age of 53. Then there’s the question of the way policemen wear a collar and tie and a suit with an executive overcoat on top. Somehow it always looks mutton. Perhaps the indelible stain of being plebeian.

The New China?

Is it a climbing wall at your local sports centre, taken over by Trendy Circus Types dressed in white (too much Fellini at their mother’s breast)? Or a relic of the Inquisition, when the Spanish speaking world was ripped and torn between Medieval and Modern; and The-Love-of-God turned into a hated, hooded figure.

Neither. Here are the bodies of five victims of Mexico’s drug wars (30 000 killed in the past decade? No one really knows), wrapped head-to-toe in white and left dangling down the side of an underpass in the northern city of Saltillo. Some of the ‘mummies’ have swung round to face the wall, as if trying to climb up the ropes they’re suspended by. Terrible irony – yes, yes, yes. But you have to hand it to the killers: they’ve made it dead easy for the police to drive by and cut down the bodies.

Meanwhile car production in Mexico is projected to rise 60 per cent by 2020, following $10 billion investment from North American, European and Japanese manufacturers. Mexico is ‘quickly turning into the China of the West,’ according to automobile industry analyst Joseph Langley. To the delight of foreign investors, the Mexican government has established an assembly line of polytechnics and technical universities, producing graduates equipped to work with their world-class kit.

All kitted out in their company polo shirts. All signed up to make regular payments on their house in a newly built, middle class enclave. Happy Days; suburban ways.

It’s Regular Mexico versus the Irregular Economy. Game On between new modern and failed modern. With international backing, the strength of the regular guys should see them through; but really it’s anyone’s guess.

Waving Not Drowning

More than a hundred volunteers joined South Devon coastguards and police in the search for 18-year-old Harry Martin, the film and photography student who has not been seen since Thursday when he went out on a coastal path to take photographs of stormy seas at the height of the tidal surge.

Christ knows what his Mum and Dad are thinking right now. Are they cursing the mountainous waves for bearing down on their boy like a volcanic eruption? Or cursing their son for taking unnecessary risks – gambling with their lives as well as his own?

Please allow me to address you, Mr and Mrs Martin. For the sake of everyone else, for all the people you don’t know and who never knew your son, I’m asking you not to be too hard on him.

Harry Martin may have lost; but he had to play. Taking those shots, trying to get the story – that was his chance to leave behind spotty youth and grow into the firm jaw line already prominent in the photo the papers have of him. The chance to go beyond everything you’ve offered him, Mum and Dad, which might only have stifled him if he’d stayed.

Of course it’s easy for me to say. Not difficult for a lifelong journalist to make a public pronouncement in favour of a young man’s ambition to enter the public domain with a fistful of newsworthy photographs. But even if I had known him personally, I should like to think I would still know his actions for what they are – a young photographer's drive to get it right.

I hope Harry Martin hasn’t gone down beneath the ocean waves. But if not for the level of ambition which he has demonstrated – a firm reminder to the rest of us, we would all be plunged into the abyss.