Valiant victims deserved victory
FOLLOWING the Russian invasion of Ukraine, a friend of mine who escaped from Hungary after the Soviet invasion in 1956 has been sharing his experiences with me by email. On a packed train heading towards the Austrian border he met a man who advised him to jump off to avoid arrest and continue on foot.
He had no idea if he could trust him but did so anyway when the train slowed.
In pitch darkness he walked across fields for five and a half hours, not knowing if he was going in circles, fearful of landmines.
A searchlight swept across his path and he threw himself on the ground.
There were the sounds of machine gun fire, screams and barking dogs.
Eventually he came to a village, deserted with no street lights. He crept up to a building: “The oval sign displayed a two-headed eagle and one word: ZOLL. Customs.” He was in Austria. He’d made it.
A PUB in Devon stands accused of gender wokery after it renamed its Ploughman’s Lunch a Ploughperson’s lunch. The landlord said it was meant to be “tongue in cheek” and to acknowledge the “amazing ladies who work the land”. So before we reach for our “political-correctness-gonemad” pitchforks, let’s remember that while generations of farmworkers may well have munched on bread, cheese and pickle, the title “Ploughman’s Lunch” was actually a marketing device dreamt up by the Milk Marketing Board in the 1960s to flog cheese – intended to appeal to a nostalgia for our agrarian past – at a time when pub grub was often limited to a bag of crisps and a pack of fags.
Ploughman’s Lunch is no more authentic than Ploughperson’s Lunch. And I’ll have Stilton with mine please.
THE MORNING after the Oscars my radio woke me up.while surfacing, I heard bits and pieces about what had happened at the awards – usually enough to send anyone back to sleep.
But hang on.what was this?will Smith “hit” presenter Chris Rock after the comedian made a joke about his wife Jada Pinkett-smith’s lack of hair?
At first Smith seemed to chuckle along, then changed his mind and strode out to give Rock what some have described as a “girly slap” rather than the sort of manly right hook we’d expect from, say, John Wayne. Did Mrs Smith breathe “my hero” or did she do what most wives do when their husbands draw attention to themselves – that is, roll her eyes and do that long drawn-out sigh?
The chivalrous husband has since apologised to Rock and explained that he is “a work in progress”.will Smith is 53.
I SEE NO reason for Downing Street revellers who received Fixed Penalty Notices to be named and shamed. If they pay their fines that’s an end to it.you don’t sack someone for getting a parking fine.
But it’s also apparent that the Tories are desperate to cling on to the “don’t you know there’s a war on?” excuse as a way of burying Partygate. Cynically some must be hoping the Russia-ukraine conflict continues beyond the May local elections.
THE DAMNING Ockenden report into failures at Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital Trust shocked me. The idea that obsessive targets for fashionable “normal” births led to women being denied Caesareans makes your blood run cold. Hundreds of babies were stillborn or suffered broken bones or permanent disability. At least 12 women died.the consequences of this dreadful tragedy will reverberate for generations.
One problem is that medicine is still as susceptible to fashions as it was in the days when Greek physicians believed the womb regularly went walkabout in the bodily cavity, rather like a supermarket trolley with a mind of its own.
Whereas the current trend is to de-medicalise childbirth – in favour of the “natural” – the opposite has happened to the menopause. It has now been medicalised out of existence, as though it’s an illness rather than a perfectly natural occurrence.
But back to the Ockenden report.
There is no doubt this maternity scandal would not have come to light were it not for the bravery and determination of bereaved
‘It would have been easier to give up...’
parents such as Richard Stanton and Rhiannon Davies, whose daughter Kate should now be looking forward to her 13th birthday.
They chose to swim against the tide of medical orthodoxy and be the awkward squad. In their attempts to find out what had gone wrong they were met with “closed doors, dismissal and obfuscation”.
But they persevered and in 2012 an inquest found Kate’s death, shortly after her birth, was preventable. Joining forces with another family they wrote to then health secretary Jeremy Hunt who launched the inquiry.
It would have been so much easier for them to give up and accept that these tragedies happen and that the medics know best.
Just as it would have been so much easier for Richard Radcliffe to accept that the Foreign Office knew best when it told him it was handling the matter of his wife Nazanin’s detention in Iran.
We were all surprised to find that there were other people in Nazanin’s situation.
Anoosheh Ashoori was released at the same time but Mehran Raoof and Morad Tahbaz are still detained. People we have never heard of before. The difference is that their families followed Foreign Office guidance, and no criticism of them for doing that.
But Richard Radcliffe went against government advice by stubbornly keeping his wife’s name in the public eye.and it paid off.
It takes tremendous energy and self-belief to swim against the tide of the consensus as Richard Radcliffe and these grieving parents have done.they are all remarkable people.