The Girl Who Saved the King of Sweden

The Girl Who Saved the King of Sweden

A girl on the run from South Africa. With (due to a post-room failure) an atomic bomb. Twin brothers only one of whom exists, officially. The mad girlfriend of the officially existing twin.

There's not many dull pages.


(The Lack of) a Welcome Mat

It never ceases to amaze, although it shouldn't, in light of experience. The dreariness and lack of imagination, of outside the box thinking, the political classes are capable of.

Were you living in a cave, munching on a squirrel or rat half raw, half burnt over the fire that is smoking out your sleeping quarters and stinging your eyes, admiring the wife's cave paintings while shivering in your lioncloth; and you looked over at your neighbours:

Your neighbours with their hi-fi, wi-fi, like something out of sci-fi. Their glass-walled house, clothes, beds, appliances, cookers, fridges. The smell of your neighbours' curries, their pizzas, their Singapore noodles sizzling away in those...those...what is that stuff? Metal?

Were you the cave-dweller, might you not, at some stage, say: “guys, look at those dudes over there. They not just ahead of us, they're, like, light-years ahead. We've got some serious catch-up to play here.”

Or would you bury your head in the sand and just shout louder and louder than anyone who dared to dispute it that:

“This is the way. This is the only way. Ours is the one and only way to (delete the non-applicable) economic stability / health and happiness / salvation...for this is the way of (delete where non-applicable) the tory party / the labour party / the other party / the lord.”

While technology, science, art and literature continue to evolve, to amaze and astound with wonders anew, elsewhere, nothing changes.

By way of example:

Gove buggered about with 'his' education department, desperately trying to make a name for himself by turning the clock back fifty years or so, cheesing off anyone who really cared enough to be cheesed off in the process.

Meanwhile, coders somewhere produced the 'slap Gove' app, that ended up on any number of phones and andriod devices, bringing pleasure to thousands (thanks for letting me have a go, Mr Naughty, and very satisfying as well as amusing it was, too).

So Baroness Warsi leaves the tory party and says their stance on ethnic minorities will cost them a chance of retaining power. What posessed her to hook up with them in the first place?

My family arrived here, by chance as much as by any other way, after their men fought on the same side, expecting a welcome, and receiving more cold shoulders than warmth and love.

Over 60 years later, and because some UKIP numpties succeed in winning the hearts and minds (what there is of them (minds, that is)) of the hate-filled Daily Mail readership, the three other parties jump on the same easy vote winning bandwagon.

Not one says “hold on, calm down, lets look at this differently”.

All of them talk about control, about foreigners as if being foreign is, in and of itself, a bad thing, about stronger barriers at the borders to repel the nasty invading barbarians heading this way.

All of them.

That's not democracy, reasoned debate and listening to opinions that differ to yours.

That's a bunch of bullying sheep, incapable of original thought. In their caves. Doing the same stuff the senates did thousands of years ago, and the wars still rage, the displaced still suffer, and huge numbers of people still starve while others throw food away.

Minds stuck in the stoneage.