We have been lucky enough to be here at our house in warm, peaceful, leafy Dordogne for four months at a stretch. Spring has merged into summer and we are already a week into August. The grapes will soon be ready for picking and autumn is round the corner.
The days have been marked by a few projects around the house and garden with the occasional interlude for lunches and soirées fuelled by copious amounts of fine wines and food with well and newly met ex-pats who appear to be of a rather better financial disposition than us. With what little money we have at our disposal we have done some painting and decorating and outside we have planted hydrangeas, roses, hibiscus, lavender a palm tree and six cypress trees. We have also created a feature in the centre of the courtyard to the rear of the house. We found an ornamental, carved urn in an antique shop in Riberac mounted it on a, stone plinth planted lavender around it and bordered this with a ring of terracotta floor tiles cemented into the ground and grouted with a mix of white choux...
These small projects notwithstanding we have had time to reflect on how lucky we are to be untouched by the horrors of world events which we see televised on the British news channels courtesy of our Sky satellite dish. There have been pictures of the appalling oil spillage from BPs damaged rig in the gulf of Mexico, of the continuing suffering of earthquake victims in Haiti months after aid should have reached them, the recent floods in Pakistan that have left at least 15,000 dead, the search for Raoul Moat, the serial killer of innocent bystanders in Cumbria, of Ian Huntley the Soham murderer who is demanding £100,000 compensation for an attack on him by a fellow prison inmate and, last but not least, we see pictures every day of our brave soldiers, killed in Afghanistan, being flown back home..
It is the latter I find most upsetting. Our young soldiers’ deaths make me feel even worse by languishing here in southern, sunny rural France and being so removed from this horrible pointless conflict that Britain should never have been involved in. With time to think, I have a suggestion to make to the politicians and decision makers about how to deal with helping our boys in Afghanistan.
Some, like me, think bringing back National Service might be an idea. It would be a means of helping to solve the unemployment problem and give many young, undisciplined youths the chance to earn money and self worth instead of turning to drugs and crime. But this apparently is not feasible as we don’t have the money, army personnel or wherewithal to monitor and train such a large number of raw recruits.
Could I suggest another route?
Why not oblige all persistent offenders, including paedophiles and including Ian Huntley, to enrol in the army, give them the minimum training - perhaps a couple of weeks square bashing at Pirbright - fly them out to Afghanistan, put them in the front line and let them dodge the IEDs. This will give our real soldiers more chance to get on with taking the fight to the Taliban without the constant worry of improvised roadside bombs. To add to our dwindling reserves of troops we could also empty our prisons of first time offenders and bogus asylum seekers, who cost the tax payer circa £80 a day for being in jail, and pay them half that money to sign up.
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hmm might set some of the budgets issues to rights, but wed probably outsource so much of the training, kitting and transport as to be able to ill afford it, and then the soldiers might moan that they weren't real soldiers, just like pc's moan about CSO's community support officers not being real PC's and perceive it as a threat to their jobs, But to be honest regardless of these issues id be prepared to do a trial run of it, after all we can but try to find solutions to the problems in blighty.
ReplyDeleteThis is a good idea
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