Thursday 3 January 2008

Trouble in the Wind

Reports (the Herald) that 200 returning soldiers were required to change from their uniforms into civilian clothes while standing on the runway at Birmingham Airport, rather than being offered showers and a changing room inside the terminal, will fill most Brummies with engulfing rage.

Birmingham must be the heartland of patriotic commitment, regardless of differing views on the wars into which the Labour regime has sent our grotesquely under funded and under equipped army.

While it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Tommy, fall be'ind,"
But it's "Please to walk in front, sir," when there's trouble in the wind,
There's trouble in the wind, my boys, there's trouble in the wind,
O it's "Please to walk in front, sir," when there's trouble in the wind.

7 comments:

Newmania said...

hey I used that very same bit of Kipling recently when the injured soldiers were chucked out of the Pool.

Are you trying to steal my mojo HG ?

Oh happy new Year...

hatfield girl said...

How horridly the soldiers are treated N.

Kipling is due for a major revival, as is the C of E (which you have noted also!) Lots of friends going to church these days of whom there is every reason to ponder their view of the existence and nature of God, but who believe firmly in the Church of England;they admit they had been slack in turning up to say so at Evensong.

Live your culture - which is an infinitely attractive culture - or lose it.

hatfield girl said...

Happy New Year, your first at the seaside.

Newmania said...

Kipling is due for a major revival, as is the C of E (which you have noted also!)

I wrote a stout defence of Kipling years ago in a long take away paper , like a semi thesis.I have just read Britian 2008 which is a Goverment funded and questionable research organisation. On religion quite informative though People are suprisingly 'religious' still in various ways ...well I am going to blog it under the title Fuzzy Fidelity.

( Snowed today!!)

Sackerson said...

I note the story was quickly followed up by damage limitation on the media.

lilith said...

Unbelievable.

hatfield girl said...

'Damage limitation in the media' S?
That would be the usual lying presumably. The comments in the Herald attached to the original report were burning off the page; I must look at the Birmingham Post.
These are not the only soldiers dumped hundreds of miles from Brize Norton when there were, according to the troops themselves, no visibility or turbulence problems there.

One of the reasons offered, L, for the requirement to hop about on one foot on a windswept runway in the freezing cold trying to get a leg into a trouser, was that after the soldiers had gone their separate ways to individual destinations they might have been vulnerable to attack in their uniforms. Comparisons were drawn with operational requirements from the days of troops on leave from Northern Ireland.
It's the monstrosity of the dissimulation and false analogy that causes the gorge to rise, I feel.