Bits of crazy stuff!

Today I met some friends for lunch in Manchester, catching up on the news. One of them told us about her holiday in Crete that went haywire when her daughter's foot slipped off a raised kerbstone, resulting in a broken leg. The struggle she went through to get her daughter back to the UK - involving a travel insurance company that would pay for the daughter to travel home on a scheduled flight instead of a budget airline flight but would not pay for someone to accompany her - was the stuff of nightmares. My friend forked out for her own flight, while her husband and her daughter's husband took home on the budget airline flight. Her tales of the shambolic attempts by airline staff to locate a suitable wheelchair in Heathrow airport would be funny if they were in a film instead of in real life. The whole thing makes our frustration at having our Monarch airline flights to Portugal at the end of this month pale into insignificance.

As if that were not bad enough on its own, six weeks or so before the holiday fiasco, my friend's daughter and grandchildren had narrowly escaped being blown up by the Manchester Arena bomb. They were physically fine but somewhat traumatised. The oldest grandchild, ten and a half, had some difficulty going back to Victoria Station. She still hasn't talked about it. Her sister, three years younger, wrote in her diary, "There was a bomb. Ariana was not hurt." No mention of her mother or siblings! What a difference a few years make!
M
Terrorism has become a part of our lives. When a car mounted the pavement outside the Natural History Museum in London the other day, almost everyone's first thought was terrorism. Noted tweeters vented their spleen on social media. One right wing group even turned up with a camera crew ready to film what has turned out to be a road traffic incident.

In the midst of all the reporting of the mass shooting at the music event in Las Vegas one voice of sanity spoke put about how we should be circumspect on how we report events like that. Too much emphasis on what happens glamourises it in a way, he said, and leads to copycat crimes. But how do you find a happy medium? We all want to know what is going on in the world. We also want to know why things happen. And the gruesome side of us, the bit that makes us slow down and take a look as we drive past a road accident, wants to know the gory details. But the speaker was right: we need to find a way of reporting these events without giving hem too much glory. I have no idea what the answer is.

One thing that has been talked about a lot is the mechanism used to convert an ordinary repeating rifle (if that is the correct term for the gun) into something like a machine gun: a device called a bump stock. As moves are afoot to ban the sale of the device gun enthusiasts have been buying them like crazy. Gun owners are hoarding them. One gun-owner is reported to have said, “I don’t even have the gun for it, but I want the stock just to have it down the line. I just like the idea of them and want to see how it feels and if it’s worth it – for $100, it’s almost not a bad investment to buy it, try it out and sell it if I don’t like it.”

These people are seriously deranged. This is not the latest toy fad that you absolutely must have for your child for Christmas. Neither is it the latest fashion in clothing which is selling out in a limited edition. It is effectively a weapon of war.

Meanwhile, life goes on, as it must. On the tram I overheard a couple, not teenagers by any means, discussing what they were going to do for Hallowe'en. I suppose it's a hard decision when you are too old to go trick or treating but don't yet have children you can take out on that pointless, sugar-filled activity. And besides, Hallowe'en, as one of them complained, falls on a Tuesday this year. So difficult to organise!

Why not just skip over it? And skip over bonfire night as well? After all, the Manchester shops are already busily preparing for Christmas!