(Image courtesy of Wikipedia)

It’s Good Friday. To anyone who grew up in rural Ireland in the 1950s this was the most boring day of the year. Nothing moved. All the shops were closed — as were the pubs. There was boiled fish for lunch. And then three interminable hours of religious ceremony from 3pm to 6pm, with purple shrouds over all crucifixes in the church and incomprehensible mumbo-jumbo (in Latin). And, I seem to remember, a preposterous rite known as the ‘stations of the cross’ in which the faithful symbolically retraced various stages in Christ’s journey towards crucifixion.

One Good Friday, however, stands out in my memory. It was the day our first new car arrived. For a family in our circumstances, this was a Really Big Deal. Up to then we had coped by borrowing cars for holidays and weekends from indulgent garage proprietors (who were pals of my dad and invariably had a wreck or two available for charitable use). Later, we got by with a series of fifth-hand wrecks which were constantly breaking down. But eventually my parents felt financially emboldened enough to contemplate the purchase of a new car.

There then followed weeks of intensive discussion. Should it be a Fiat (there was a new Fiat dealership in Donegal). Or should we buy British? In the end, my Dad decided that we would get a Morris Minor 1000. On Maundy Thursday he set off for Dublin, having deposited us with our grandparents in the one-horse town in Mayo where they lived. He had decided that he would drive down in the new car (complete with a ‘Running In’ sign) the following day. The roads, he explained, would be quiet.

Good Friday dawned sunny and warm. I was up early and I spent the day on the street waiting with mounting excitement for the arrival of this marvellous new acquisition. The town slept in the sunshine, like a Mexican backwater in siesta time. Not a creature stirred, except for the odd dog. The clock crept round to 3pm, when we would be dragged off to church by my (ultra devout) mother. No sign of Dad. Never had the doleful rituals in the church seemed so interminable. But eventually they came to an end. We came out into the late afternoon sunshine. And there, outside the church, stood Da, next to his gleaming black car. It was the kind of moment one never, ever forgets. And to this day I can remember that strange ‘new car’ smell.

We had that Morris Minor for years and years. What amazes me now is that we often made long family trips in it — three or fours hours at a time with two adults, four kids, a dog and all our luggage. Many decades later Sue and I used to have difficulty fitting three small kids and ourselves into large Swedish saloons. How did we fit in to that Morris Minor all those years ago? Why didn’t we complain? These are puzzles whose solutions are now lost in the mists of time.

Lovely post in the Nicci French Blog

I just got back from doing the coast-to-coast bike ride, Whitehaven to Tyneside, with my stepson. I do a lot of exercise, regularly, relentlessly, grimly. He doesn’t do much at all, except as a by-product of something else. Over three days of cycling, I was in more pain day by day, and he was in less pain day by day. And now I feel pain in many muscles, joints and tendons, while his body has already forgotten all about it.

The words of the Leonard Cohen song keep coming in to my mind:

“Well my friends are gone and my hair is grey,

I ache in the places where I used to play.”

Beautiful ride, though.

The evolving story of the attack on Ian Tomlinson illustrates lots of things, many of them disturbing. For example, when did police officers on public duty start wearing balaclavas — as the guy who attacked Mr Tomlinson was? On the face of it, just about the only upside is the fact that citizens now have tools (cameraphones, small digital cameras and camcorders) which enable us to monitor and record the behaviour of police officers and other officials. If we’d had the same tools thirty years ago, the police officer who murdered Blair Peach, and the colleagues who covered up for him, might have been identified and maybe prosecuted.

So three cheers for the tools of citizen journalism? Celebrations might be premature. I suspect that the ‘system’ will not take this lying down. Since 9/11 we’ve seen extraordinary official repressiveness towards amateur photographers (see e.g. this post) trying to take photographs in what are clearly public places.

So here’s a prediction. We will see an adaptation of the time-honoured practice of stopping coaches bound for London-based demonstrations and searching everyone on board for ‘offensive’ weapons like bottles, marbles, ball-bearings, pepper, etc., all of which are then arbitrarily confiscated. The definition of ‘offensive’ will be extended to any electronic device capable of recording events. No doubt there is already a clause in the Public Order Acts which can be used to justify this. And if there isn’t, then I’m sure the Minister of the Interior, Jacqui Smith, can provide a Ministerial Order that will do the trick. After all, for a UK government with a big majority to get intrusive measures through Parliament is almost as straightforward as ordering ‘adult’ videos from Virgin.

Following my post about the assault on Ian Tomlinson at the G20 demonstrations, I had an email from a reader pointing me to a remarkable photograph on Flickr. Since it has an “All Rights Reserved” licence I can’t reproduce it, but you can find it here. Note the wording on the back of the cop’s jacket.

Brooding on the shocking attack on the two kids in Edlington, I came on this characteristically wise article by Nicci Gerrard, who has done more than her fair share of thinking about evil and savagery (she sat through — and wrote about — the West trial, and, later, the Soham murder case). Here’s part of what she writes today in the Telegraph about the Edlington case:

This distressing story follows an intense scrutiny of childhood; it seems like an apt and ghastly demonstration of the anxiety that has been expressed by think-tanks, children’s charities, teacher associations and cultural commentators. The teenage gangs in inner cities; the increasing knife culture; the angry 19-year-old who lashed out and killed the boy in a bakery; the shocking case of an 18-year-old youth who, when in foster care, raped the two-year-old in the family and abused the nine-year-old; the extensive survey earlier this year that expressed a widespread anxiety about the state of the nation's children and the fact that childhood ends too quickly; the finding that a teacher suffers a violent attack almost every school day; the growth in childhood obesity, in teenage and pre-teenage binge drinking, in under-age sex and under-age pregnancies – there is a sense of a growing crisis in childhood, certainly a crisis in the way that we think of children.

On the one hand, we sentimentalise them, on the other we are scared of them. We idolise them and scapegoat them. We want them to be young and innocent, unblemished by hard and mucky life for as long as possible, and we want them to grow up, flooding them with adult expectations and media images, encouraging them to be sexualised way before their own desires, pushing them through the hoops of exams, forcing them out into the harsh realities of adult life. The way that the attack in South Yorkshire has already been characterised in the media is a neat example of this cultural dichotomy: the so-called “devil brothers” versus the “regular” boys and “pals” who were out on a harmless fishing trip; the unnatural versus the natural, and indeed, in a wider context, evil versus good.

But evil is too easy, too comforting. Children are products of their environments and monsters are not born but made. It is no surprise at all that the two boys in Edlington were in care. Such cases almost always happen on the fringes, the extreme edges of a society. Robert Thompson and Jon Venables, the two 10-year-olds who led the two-year-old James Bulger down to the railway embankment by the hand, kicked him, then battered him to death with bricks and an iron bar, came from deprived families. So, too, did Mary Bell who strangled Martin Brown the day before her eleventh birthday, in May 1968, and then two months later, strangled the three-year-old Martin Howe to death (her mother was a prostitute and often absent; Mary was forced to engage in anal and oral sex with men from the age of five)…