Quality of mercy is sadly lacking...
It’s being ever so cheerful!
A CERTAIN Professor Daniel Levitin has decreed that the happiest age in a long lifetime is the period starting at 82. I do not know the location of the flagstone under which the professor lives but I can tell him, as one whose 82nd birthday will arrive next August, that he is talking poppycock.
No one that age is as strong, fast or agile as he once was at 30. Unless some cosmetician has worked a miracle he will not be as good-looking as he was at 25. And after 80 things start to drop off, drop out and simply drop – don’t ask!
Contentment at this age involves a visit from the grandchildren or, if that is not possible, a comfy and above all uninterrupted snooze after Sunday lunch.
Meanwhile, two professors in America have decreed that the way to stay cheerful in old age is to consort with the happy and satisfied, rather than with miserable old grumpies.
That amazing breakthrough apparently took 20 years of study.
I wonder how much the Americans have to pay their academics to be told the bleeding obvious.
IT CONTINUES to baffle me that our authorities will have no mercy whatsoever for Shamima Begum and the handful of other young women and their children trapped in a freezing slum camp in northern Syria. Five years ago, at the age of 15, as a badly educated and not-very-bright child from the East End of London, Ms Begum fell for the propaganda and subscribed to a cult.You would think no one has ever done that before. It happens all the time.
But this was a religious death cult – IS. Thinking to become a better Muslim, she and two others ran away to join it. There is no evidence she ever carried a gun or killed anyone.
Instead she was used as a sex slave by the brutal fanatics called jihadists. She was impregnated with three children who were born and are now all dead. A young womanhood destroyed. Now she wishes to come home – to the only real home she ever knew, the UK.
Permission refused, and for ever. Nationality removed. A stateless reject with nowhere else to go. But the Kurds cannot maintain and run these camps for ever.
There is a camp for real fanatics who hate us all. That is the Al Hol camp. But Shamima Begum is in the Al Roj camp of those deemed recoverable. France and Belgium are repatriating their nationals in Al Roj.
Almost all the children were conceived and born out there – so what sins have they ever committed? There are between 20 and 30 British women and some 60 children.
Every year our authorities set free murderers, rapists, robbers, thugs and drug smugglers – not to mention locally captured terrorists who have actually planned to plant bombs among us. Foreign-born gangsters live here and prosper as the authorities look the other way and judges whinge that they are helpless due to the Human Rights Act.
Yet they continue to say we simply cannot create a holding centre for this handful of women and children who live in misery because of a stupid mistake made years ago.
They might recall the words of Shakespeare: the quality of mercy is not strained. It falls from heaven like gentle rain upon the place beneath. We have had enough not-so-gentle rain. How about a bit of mercy?
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ONCE again, it seems, Greece is clamouring for the return of the Elgin Marbles, long displayed in the British Museum. This repeated whinge is an oddity. For one thing, other extremely important statues of ancient Greek origin like the Winged Victory of Samothrace and the Venus de Milo are stored in the Louvre in Paris but Greece seems to have no problem with that or with the numerous other items of Greek statuary displayed elsewhere in the world. For another thing, museums worldwide display artefacts which originally came from other countries. To return them all would be to strip thousands and thousands of museums. Why just the British one? And finally, these statues were spotted by Lord Elgin being used by the occupying Turkish forces for target practice. If he had not bought them at an agreed price they would have been rubble 200 years ago. He didn’t steal them, he saved them.
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WE ARE told at every hand that dire misfortune will fall upon us if we do not capitulate to the Eurocrats and continue to make every trading concession needed by EU membership. Perhaps these ladies and gentlemen, oxygen-starved in their Brussels penthouses, could be apprised of some basic facts of life.
In our habitual trade with the EU we have always racked up an £80billion per year deficit. Meaning, we import that amount more of their product that they do of ours. That need not be perpetual. Every widget we buy from them could be replicated by other suppliers worldwide – who would be more
A CLASSIC
1932 Bugatti sports car has just sold at auction in Paris for £3.8million. It was a Type 55 roadster. The vendor had bought it in 1963 for just £750. As a much later fan of two-seater sports cars, I might have been in the market for it bar one small detail. Back then, aged 24 and a reporter for Reuters in Paris, I might just have afforded a hubcap. So another missed opportunity. than happy to do just that. Not that super-Eurocrat Michel Barnier gives a stuff.
His lifestyle and chauffeured limo are safe – he thinks. So he tells us we have just 10 months to December 31, to capitulate.
Actually we have 10 months to set up new trading relationships – ample time. But the effects on working people across the continent if our purchases plunged would be dire. Perhaps instead of talking to Barnier we should send teams across Europe to talk to the trade union leaders. They have the members who will get their P45s, they have the votes.
As Dr Johnson said, being hanged in a fortnight “concentrates the mind wonderfully”.