Readers will have to respect the fact that this is not a report but a diary written contemperaneously with the events on the trip.  So there will be some repetition and in fact as I type there might be the odd sentence thrown in when events did not give me the time to include in the written diary.  So here goe

Bien venue au Maroc.  Well here we are only 45 minutes late in Agadir in Central Morocco on the Atlantic coast with Madeira nearly 400 miles out to the west and the Canary Islands about 250 miles to the south west, emptied into Africa for the very first time courtesy of Aer Lingus.  Agadir, the scene almost of the start of the Great War in 1912, only stymied by diplomacy after the French and Germans squared up to each other as to who should be the liege lord of this strategically positioned country.  A triumph for Churchill as First Sea Lord, who then persuaded the French to defend the Mediterranean whilst he looked after the defence of the western seaboard of Europe.  This bottled up the mighty German fleet in their ports for the duration of the oncoming war except for one breakout in 1916 which resulted in the Battle of Jutland.  Here the German navy had the upper hand but the inexperience of the German admirals made them run for port where they remained until ordered to Scapa Flow at the end of the war.

We came off the plane to be met by a surly chap in immigration control who was smoking some big fat weed that looked like a cigarette, a man certainly not happy in his job, but in this country a job without doubt is a job worth hanging onto.  Wages are poor with most of the population earning less than 80 dirhams a day (1 euro = 10 dirhams).

Our taxi man was waiting, a youth of not more than 20 and an old man to carry our bags to the taxi.  I gave the old man 1.5 euros, I had no dirhams, he was not happy, so I gave him another euro, he moaned and I told him to piss off, at which he gratefully accepted.

Our taxi ride of 220kms to Essaouira was an experience I will never forget.  The car was a Mercedes of about 1970 vintage, with a good engine but only two gears, 3^rd and 4^th and seeing we had the back end of the Atlas Mountains to traverse, it was only the skill of the driver and his excellent timing of brake and accelerator got us to our destination in three and half hours of steep slopes, hairpin bends and the occasional wild dog and wandering camel to negotiate.  The driver, who must have been driving since he came out of nappies, was an ace, not only did he deal with the above but also with a telephone call or a text every two minutes.  This was not so bad as we chugged up the hills in 3rd gear doing about 15kms per hour but coming down the other side in 4^th gear doing 100kms per hour around hairpin bends whilst answering his texts and fiddling with his radio which played non-stop Moroccan diddley diddlies was a work of art.  The fee for this masterful performance was 700 dirhams, 70 euros to transport four people 130 miles was unbelievably good value.

The taxi man dropped us off outside the Medina where we were met by daughter and son in law and another old man with a cart who transported our bags to our riad.  The Medina is the original town encircled by high walls dating back to the 17^th century and the riads are the modernised houses of merchants and officials who ran the place back then.  Our riad, the Riad de la Mer was in the Kasbah, the oldest part of the town.  No vehicles except official vehicles are allowed in the Medina, the roads anyway are to narrow so these men with carts transport everything, winding their way down the alley ways and tunnels all for 20 or 30 dirhams per trip.  The riad was approached down a long tunnel until we reached a cobalt blue door in the tunnel wall.  The tunnel walls were lined with workshops and doors all now closed at this late hour.  We all spilled into a huge hallway and straight into a chicken tagine prepared by our maid and a lovely bottle of gris, a rose type wine, almost opaque in colour made by removing the skins of the red grapes very early on in the wine making process.  My daughter had raided a supermarket in Marrakesh earlier in the day and had stocked up well on the alcohol front.  We eventually got to bed about 2.00am and by then we were ready for sleep.

Awoke early on Day 2 and explored the riad.  It is a seven bedroomed house on five floors built around a central hallway or roofless atrium.  The hallway itself could accommodate 100 people for a dance and still have room for the band and off it was a small lounge, a store and a kitchen and toilet, on the first floor were two large bedrooms and a bathroom and toilet, the bath was huge, you could put all the five kids who were with us in it and still have room for more.  The second floor was similar and in one corner was this winding staircase which served all floors, the 3^rd floor opened onto a patio with another two bedrooms, a kitchen and a laundry, up a few more steps to a rooftop patio/dining area where you could view the Medina and the fishing port just outside the walls.  Another flight of stairs took you to the last bedroom.  The maid provides breakfast every-day and although it is a carb explosion the coffee is well worth climbing the stairs for.  All floors and walls are tiled with exquisitely designed hand-made tiles and the furniture and colour smacks of the Sahara.  It sleeps 14 people in total but I understand you can rent off a floor at a time as each floor is self- contained.  The rental is 100 euros per person per week.

From the street you would not know the place existed except for the cobalt blue door, neighbouring buildings tie it in on all sides, there are no windows and the only light is that which floods in through the open atrium.  Our neighbours in adjoining riads are only yards away from us as we breakfast, perched on their own terraces, polite and non-inquisitive.

After an hour’s relaxation we set off for a tour of the Medina, ie., the old town within the 17^th century walls.  It is a warren of passageways selling everything from themselves to elephants and attended by the most courteous of shopkeepers, who might sell nothing all week but they are there and if not selling they are chatting to each other or making trinkets or objets d’art.  This was my second unmissable experience in 24 hours, an absolute delight, charmed by snake charmers and wandering troubadors chanting arab type songs whilst playing one string fiddles and expecting a few dirhams for their deeds.  As I said before a job is a job.  They portray their skills, they are not a nuisance, if you do not pay them attention they just walk on by.

Lunch was down by the harbour, where a collection of covered stalls sold the catch of the day and cook it for you while you sit and eat it in the sun.  We had prawns, sardines, shrimp, red snapper, bream, crab and calamari and a plateful of chips and bread and all washed down with bottled water for 5 euros each, then it was back to the riad for some much needed R & R whilst the women pampered themselves in a local hammam.  These are Moroccan bath houses cum beauty parlours varying from the expensive to the very cheap, mainly for women but some take men.  They get scrubbed, covered in  mud, washed off and scrubbed down again and then massaged with argon oil.  I understand it leaves you cleansed and relaxed.  The hammam women do both sexes and while the women are naked for the process, the men have to wear their jocks.  All who went thought highly of the experience.  By the way there are eleven of us in the party, six adults and five children.

It has been decided that tonight we eat out in shifts after feeding the kids.  We will eat first then the younger ones can eat later.  I certainly need a good sleep, so should be in bed for 9 o’clock to make up for yesterday’s marathon.  Myself, spouse and youngest son went out at 6.15 on the early shift, the streets re crowded with locals.  Eventually we found a restaurant we fancied, it was one of not many that served wine.  I had salade du pays, which was onion, tomatoes, cucumber, mint, and hot peppers, all finely diced and drenched in argon oil to bind it and placed in a mould so that the presentation on the plate was a circle about 12mm thick and about 100mm in diameter.  It was delicious with the nutty flavour of the argon oil standing out.  My main course was a Vietnamese dish of beef and shrimp served with brown rice.  The restaurant was mainly Moroccan but the chef had worked in France and Vietnam.  We washed the food down with a wine that was to become my main attraction Domaine de Sahari gris.  Ma femme et fils had a sea food dish held together with a Moroccan pastry , little like filo pastry only finer which was cooked over steam and the pastry applied with a brush in thin layers.  I had a small piece and that was equally delicious.  With wine and cocktails the bill was 600 dirhams, 20 euro each.

Day 3 dawned and I was up first at 7.30am to a cold dawn.  As Essaouira is on the same line of longitude as the west coast of Ireland the days are the same with dawn coming at about 8.00am and dusk at about 5.00pm.  Between the hours of 7.00am to 9.00am when the sun is out in all its glory, the temperature rises quickly from about 7C – 18C in a short time and by 11.00am it is over the 20C.  Breakfast on the terrace was crepes and strawberry jam and the lovely coffee then some of the chosen few went out shopping for food.  We are eating in tonight, it should be good, we set off to forage at 10.00am and another fantastic experience.

And what an experience it was.  In the centre of the Medina are the souks or food markets.  One for fish, one for vegetables, one for volaille (fowl) and surrounding them were lots of little butchers and spice stalls.  English is only spoken as a fourth or fifth language, if you don’t have a modicum of French you would feel slightly lost.  Most Essaouiran English is as good as my French and that ain’t good, but if you are confident enough, you can just about get by.  I’m lucky, my daughter is fluent which helps considerably with the task of buying.  I did not send her to Bede’s for nothing.

In the vegetable souk you can hardly move for people buying, arguing,  joking and just passing through and everything so cheap, you would have a job spending 10 dirhams.  Everybody goes shopping every day.  They only buy for that day’s meals which ensures freshness even though the displays do not contain the shiny, all one size look of the European supermarket.  When you get your vegetables home and clean them for the pot, they taste so good.  With a fruit like an orange, you peel the discoloured skin but you will never taste an orange so good.  The taste sensation here seems magnified.  In the Souk des Volailles, the birds are running round at the back of each stall, you just pick out which bird pleases you the most, the man picks it up by a wing, breaks its neck, slits its throat and bangs the poor bird into a cone shaped dish while the blood runs off and with its feet kicking merrily in the air for several minutes.  It reminded me of being on my granddad’s farm as a kid, only there they did not save the blood; here they must sell the blood on.  The carcase is then thrown to a man attending a small machine, who cuts the head off and plucks the bird in a matter of seconds.  It’s like being at an old time battlefield with blood, guts and feathers flying everywhere and the pens of chickens, like soldiers of old just standing there glumly awaiting their fate.

At the small butchers shops beef and lamb is the choice.  There is no art to the butchery just the brutal waving of a large axe, you have to take bone and meat together all for 80 dirhams per kilo, which makes it expensive and you can understand why the Moroccan diet is mainly vegetarian with the addition of bits of chicken.  There are other souks that sell grains of hundreds of different varieties, others that sell spices and herbs with mint, coriander and tarragon being the most popular herbs.  You would be baffled by the range of spices sold but ground cumin is the most used, it seems to go in everything.  Today’s purchases are lamb onions, tomatoes and garlic for a tagine with couscous tonight along with a beetroot salad and merguez sausages for breakfast tomorrow.

This afternoon they have all gone off for a camel ride along the beach, a massive sweep of sand about five miles long.  I did not bother for fear of breaking the camel’s back and went for a salade nicoise at the restaurant a few yards from the riad and am now busy writing up what you are now reading.  A quiet afternoon for me, time for a read, my book of choice is Patrick Leigh Fermor’s  A Time For Gifts which tells of his walk from Amsterdam to Istanbul in 1934 at the age of 18.  A remarkable book written in such a fantastic style, like no other writer I have read.  His descriptions of art, architecture and life generally in a newly Nazified corner of Europe, as he carried out this amazing stroll along the Rhine and the Danube, are not to be missed.  I recommend the book to everybody.  It is 23C outside but lovely and cool in the riad.  The development of architecture in these hot countries is amazing: no need at all for air conditioning.

I prepared the lamb tagine, the art of this type of cooking is to cook the onions, tomatoes and garlic to a pulp, then throw on the lamb and spices and leave and all done on top of the stove on the lowest heat possible.  This process takes hours and leaves time for one or two aperos either round the table or more relaxingly at a nearby rooftop bar.  My apero of choice was Ricard, the amount very generous.  I do not think it was Ricard but certainly pastis.  I put about half a pint of water in mine but it was still as strong as hell.  There was a manic atmosphere in the place even at 6.30pm.  We found out later when the young ones went out that Absolut, the vodka people, were doing a promotion.  They came home at midnight and I believe they were washing the glasses in the stuff.  However in between the sessions the tagine was delicious and thankfully I retired early after a few slugs of wine

With Day 3 seeing me to bed at 9.00pm, I had a lengthy 10 hour stint before arising at 7.00am for the start of Day 4.  Today promises excitement, we are being given the works by a local vineyard, Val d’Argon, the only biologique vineyard in Morocco.  It is about 20 minutes away in a taxi and the vineyard is providing us with lunch, a tour of the vineyard and winery and a hopefully pleasant afternoon.

It is now 9.45am and the day is warming up.  Someone has just mentioned that it is Christmas Eve.  When I think back over the many Christmas Eves I have experienced, this surely as the makings of the best of them.  I remember lots of them that alcohol took over and more when the weather did the same but it is a pleasant 20C here at the moment and only a hint of wine in the air.  Our housekeepers Abdul and Saida have their jobs made slightly easier by the presence of seagulls.  They line up on the ramparts of the terasse whilst we eat our petite dejeuner and when finished they swoop down and take away anything that is not wood, ceramic, glass or steel, leaving the tables spotless and devoid of crumbs and bits of bread.

Well anybody who comes to Essaouira needs to visit Val d’Argon.  Lunch was fantastic in a lovely dining room overlooking the vines.  We started with an assortment of vegetables, carrots, lemon and coriander, peppers green and red, cauliflower, lentils with a sprinkling of sea salt, tomatoes, beans and radish all cooked but served cold some with olive oil, some with argon oil and aubergines served warm.  Prior to this we had bread and the two oils and little pieces of goats cheese and radish served with salt, pepper and cumin.  The vegetable assortment, which was all grown in the vineyards own vegetable garden was absolutely delicious with everybody’s favourite being the aubergines and lentils.  Then for the main course there was a choice of lamb chops, fish or beef, all cooked over charcoal.  I had the lamb and has I said there is not much art to the butchery here, just a 2 kilo axe and the beast is cut into manageable pieces.  I had four big pieces of lamb with potatoes and beans.  I was gnawing at bones for 10 minutes after the meal.

With each course we had wines from the vineyard, a beautiful dry white mainly of muscat but with degrees ofclairette, bourboulenc, ugni blanc, roussanne, viognier and grenach,  Then we had a gris made of muscat, very dry but delicious and with the meat we had a dark red, slightly chilled made of syrah, grenach, mourvedre, marsanne and muscat de bambourg.  Finally we had a fantastic desert wine which smelt of port wine but was very dry and flavoursome.  The whole experience cost us 200 dirhams each and was fantastic and then a tour of the winery and vineyard.  All the vines are picked by hand and the vintage is early July and sometimes the last week in June.  Orange trees and argon trees abound around the edges of the vineyard and ponies  chew up the weed and grass growth round the base of the vines without disturbing the vines themselves.  The owner also has a vineyard on the Rhone at Chateauneuf de Pape.  We loaded the two taxis up with wine and headed back to Essaouira, the 18km trip takes about 20 minute and cost 200 dirhams for the four of us.  Another 30 year old merc.  The driver was from the Sahara in south, south Morocco about 1400 kms away and he goes in his taxi two or three times a year.  God knows how many miles these mercs can do, for all I know they could be like Trigger’s brush.

If I can I will just explain the argon oil business.  The oil is big here and highly prized in Europe as both a cooking oil and a cosmetic oil.  Here it is plentiful and reasonably cheap whereas in Europe it is expensive.  The argon tree is planted all along the westen side of the Sahara and is the main reason why the desert has not reached the Atlantic.  It thrives in temperatures up to 50C.  It is a totally female based industry with female communes, collecting and processing the nuts.  Most of these females for one reason or another have fallen foul of the community mainly by having children out of wedlock, so has well has being an industry it is also a charity.  The nuts have a casing which is hard to remove so they are fed to goats whose digestive system removes this casing but cannot break down the nut.  The goats excrete the nuts and the women extract the nuts from the manure, they then grind them to produce the oil.  The cosmetic oil is produced by grinding the nut and the casing together and is not edible.  The edible oil has an intense nutty, smoky flavour and is delicious with salads, the cosmetic oil is good for both skin and hair and the females in our party after a few days swear by its positive affect.

Well we all tied one on last night and had a good night’s sleep, up at 7.30am and I cooked the merguez sausages bought on Monday as a pre-breakfast treat.  The kids loved them as did I.  It is the start of Day 5 and would you believe Christmas Day, the sun is low in the sky over the Sahara but it is only 9.00am and the heat already is making itself known up on the terasse.  Today for Christmas Day lunch we are walking the few hundred yards to the port and eating in the Restaurant de la Porte which sits about 3 metres above the Atlantic with South Carolina just beyond the horizon.  No turkey today but plenty of soupe de poissons and prawns and octopus.  After a relaxing pastis, I had the fish soup which was brill and then fish tagine, the tagine pot was wiped clean with plenty of bread and the lot was washed down by Sahari gris and then back to the riad for a feet up afternoon.  This is the way to spend Christmas, no cooking, no washing up and no flaming turkey but lots of delicious wine.  It is a balmy 22C feeling cooler because of the breeze.  I cannot truly relate how good all the experiences are.  You can walk 100 metres down the same street every day and see or feel something different each time, something you missed from the day before, there are so many things to take in and everybody so friendly and everybody so desperate for the odd dirham or two off you.  Everybody thinks we are millionaires and in this environment I suppose we are; millionaires for the two weeks.

So after a glass or two of wine in a local rooftop bar watching the massive Atlantic waves being smashed to pieces on the rocks outside the walls of the Medina and watching the Christmas Day evening sunset magnificently dip below the western horizon, it was home to the Riad de la Mer for another early night and the end of Day 5, our muslim Christmas Day over.

St Stephen’s Day, Day 6, started early for me.  Showered and washed and tarted up for 6.00am, I spent the next few hours writing letters and catching up on this diary.  It is hard to get used to how such poverty stands side by side with great wealth on a daily basis.  This riad we are in is down a dingy, smelly tunnel lined with smart boutiques, luxury hammams and portable stalls selling everything and anything.  One man outside our door sells single cigarettes, he does 15 hour shifts at his stall and every now and then somebody brings him mint tea and in the six days watching him I have only seen him sell three cigarettes.  He specialises in Marlboro.  Opposite our riad door is a tailor/dressmaker called Barak, a smashing chap who has fitted my daughter out with some great clothes.  He is making me a Moroccan shirt from linen cloth and he is bringing it round this morning.  He worked in New York for 20 years but was glad to come home and he can speak at least five languages.  He is also going to show me how to fashion a turban.  The shirt is delightful and my turban turns me into a proper Berber.  I am now a fully fledged Essaouiran.

Essaouira is a town of 90,000 people, on latitude 31N and longitude 10W about 400kms south of Casablanca.  We are on Greenwich Mean Time, one euro is 11 dirhams, bread is one dirham, a glass of tea or coffee is 7 dirhams, vegetables are 2 dirham per kilo, meat is 80 dirhams per kilo.  Beggars, troubadors, acrobats, singers, snake charmers abound all doing their best for an odd dirham or two that you hand out.  One of these street turns was an artist, wheeled to his pitch every day, he doesn’t beg, he cannot speak and he has no arms or legs.  He paints remarkable pictures of local scenes in bright colours with a brush held in his mouth and along with all his frailties he has the tremors, how he manages his beyond belief.  He has a water bottle and every now and then a waiter from one of the cafes walks over and gives him a slug of water.  There is no state benefit system here but an unemployment/redundancy benefit will be started shortly, so you have to earn your corn as best you can.  The beggars are the most cynical at least the others have some skills or at least the odd limb missing.

The evening of Day 6 consisted of me preparing a beef tagine and having a few aperos, I find cooking a lot less tiring when alcohol accompanies the task.  My apero of choice in riad this week is vodka, juice of half a lime and the glass topped up with sparkling water.  It is ideal for this climate.  The women went off for another hammam, so myself and son in law swallowed a couple of aperos more prior to tagine in our favourite rooftop bar.  We returned shining and the tagine was, as I expected, lovely.  Beef, onions, garlic, tomatoes, beans and carrots with harissa, cumin, pepper and ginger, all washed down with a bottle of gris and I wandered off to bed uncertainly at 9.oopm

Unfortunately I have been off the boil these last few days having been struck down with post African lurgi which is a vicious form of an amalgamation of pig, donkey, camel, butterfly and cat and dog flu.  Before Christmas when the doctor called me in and tried to talk me into having the flu jab because I am at an age when it could have severe effect and I told him to feck off and that I did not want any hand or leg or arm in his poxy, proxy poisons and don’t come near me with that old shite, I realised I would have to go cold turkey to overcome what ailed me.  Well I am into Day 4 of this distressing condition and only small signs of relief, but I am heartened enough to pull out my typing finger and write of the events of the last few days which has enlivened my viewing figures on this blog tremendously.  Every man and his dog round the world wants to know.

It was great to see some recognition of our labours over the last four years bearing fruit with the major news story in Murdoch’s Sunday Times recording dark deeds at Bede’s and a few other high falootin’ schools attended by politicos where in fact they must have learnt their trade.  Dacre’s Mail also did a piece but just copied it from the Times like they do with all their stories.  The important thing to come out was that the Times thought the Bede’s story was the worst experience of the lot and they might not be far wrong.

Since I started this up nearly four years ago, I have learnt of things that happened at that school, my alma mater, that would make you cringe.  I initially wrote in February 2010 about my mate who had been abused by Thomas Duggan, the school’s head honcho back in the 1950s, thinking naively that he must have been the only one abused.  Within weeks I was getting e-mails from old Bedians all around the world relating their experiences with that man and others on the staff of the school and in fact how it had been going on there unchecked for over 50 years.  The headmasters, Burke, Ganley and Byrne have a lot to answer for and the Rectors, Riley and the invidious Dodgeon who was up to it himself according to lads who came after me, are the cause of real alarm.  The school truly was a horrid, dirty, filthy environment in which to be educated even though there was possibly a couple of decent teachers to make it bearable.

I was staggered and continued in my quest for action.  Firstly with the totally useless Safeguarding Commission of the Salford Diocese and the cowardly bishop of same diocese who will no doubt now resign.  They thought I was too pugnacious, too confrontational for them to deal with and all I ever wanted was an apology.  What I got was a dribble of words from Bish Brainless which did not approach an apology.  The thing could have been put to bed at this stage with everybody happy but the servants of the Holy Roman Catholic Church are not the sharpest tools in the box and their indolence in the matter sparked me on to a full enquiry.

A feisty lawyer from Noo York met me in Carrick on Shannon for a cup of tea, all she had was dollars, so I bought the tea.  She said we could do business, I liked the look of her and no euros aside, we went to work and after a hell of a lot of hard work we made the Sunday papers together.  There is still a long way to go but it looks as though we are now a damn sight closer.  My spies, and after four years of sometimes clandestine hard work you gather a few of these honest brokers, tell me that the Brainless and the Diocese are shitting themselves and the school is preparing itself for doom in the fall out after recent years of diminishing returns.  And all we wanted originally was a right fucking apology, the stupid dozy bastards.  They should not have been put in charge of a dog kennel.

However what I have not liked about recent events is the inference that the Savile outrages spurred us on into coming forward.  Savile was not a speck on the horizon when we started this journey although everybody you speak to knows he was guilty for the last 50 years.  The way the papers portrayed it, it was Savile’s nasty emergence that made us all jump on the bandwagon.  Nothing could be farther from the truth and I know the stories at the other schools like Caldicot have been going on for many years.  I just think it wrong that Jimmy’s good name as been linked with all these posh schools when thick as pig shit Jimmy would not have been employed to paint the gates of the various establishments.

But in a way I am glad it has all come out, the court case when it comes will be an anti-climax and not a cause for celebration because without a doubt the school did many a fine job for a few but for the rest of us, the massive majority, we were left by the wayside to graze on the verges of life.  Poor little Catholic boys, who gives a fuck.

Well it is all happening in Manchester in light of the Sunday Times disclosures last weekend about abuse at St Bede’s College with Grenada putting out a film in their regional news programme on Monday http://www.itv.com/news/granada/  You have to scroll a long way down but its there on Monday’s date.

Besides featuring Georgina Calvert-Lee of AO Advocates, it also talks to Richard Scorer, a head kiddie at Panone.  It is funny how he jumped on the bandwagon last year.  He was already looking after the Green victims from the 2008 case at Bede’s and just prior to the Bishop’s apology, he heard about my investigations and he e-mailed me and asked me to contact him.  I met him in November 2010 and gave him my information collected so far and he said he was not interested, it would go nowhere.  He soon became very interested when two misguided Old Bedians approached him last year and he desperately wanted to talk to me then and got his right hand man, Molly, to ask me to play ball with him and again only recently they were asking me to help them.  A very polite feck off sufficed.  He messed up in a big way by not responding to me originally.  The Yanks came in and quickly realised the potential.  So fuck you Mr Scorer

Anyway today the BBC news team are at the Yank’s London offices to shoot a piece for their news programme tonight presumably.  One or two of the victims are coming along, so let us see what happens.

The school is now admitting that the half century of abuse happened, it has taken the whores 50 years to admit it.  Why, oh Why are they so far behind the pace.  All their present day problems did not need to exist if they had held their hands up, admitted the abuse and publicly removed the culprits because they knew it existed and they knew who these men were but the Catholic Church are not able to stand up like men and be counted, they can only hide behind corners and at the end of dark corridors.  Sweeping shit under the carpet time is over for these buckos and I do not pity the demise of the school in its present format.  They have brought it on themselves.  There is a book to write on this particular case, I had 220,000 words written up to two years ago, some serious editing will be needed to stop in turning into an encyclopedia.

However on a lighter and more encouraging note, the latest news has brought forth other complainants, we will see what can be made of this new testimony.  A wrong is slowly being righted it does a lot for mankind when the truth almost always comes out.  Now let us cast our mind back to the holocaust, the man in the moon and 9/11 and let that truth explode.

Now we here at the Paul Malpas Blog have been very patient, almost kind to our old alma mater, St Bede’s College in Manchester.  We have said nothing detrimental about the poor school in nearly three months, letting time take its toll.  We have allowed Danny Kearney and his senior management team to continue digging the hole they have been digging for the past four years, but there comes a point with any hole, that if you do not provide side support, the bloody thing just falls in on top of you and having been in the construction industry all our lives, we know what we are talking about.

Well it has happened to Danny and his team and happened in a big way.  Danny has been telling the chief arab or bishop or whoever pays his wages these days to leave it up to him and they did and it happened.  I understand rescue teams have been alerted and some already are at work but whether they can save anything or anybody, we do not know and only time and some brave actions will tell, as the rescuers burrow down into the pile of shite that has landed on Danny and his mate’s heads.

It seems last term, St Bede’s was hit by a surprise inspection by ISI (Independent Schools Inspectorate), the government inspectorate that regulates all independent schools to ensure that parents get what it says on the can and that the school is abiding by present legislation.

Well the results of that inspection have now been announced to the privileged few, they will be published for all shortly.  It appears that the standard of teaching in the prep school and at the College is good but the governors and the management of the school scored an “unsatisfactory” mark.  That is ISI-speak for bloody dreadful.  It is only one grade above “failing”.

The Bishop was informed immediately and summoned a meeting of the governors (of which he is one) and senior management of the school (Kearney and his cronies) which took place last week.  Whatever happened at that meeting we do not know, it was held behind locked doors but it seems that old Danny was not able to explain satisfactorily, the criticisms of the Inspectorate.  The upshot was that he took his ball and went home and has not been out to play since.  The official line is that he is on “sick leave” again and we all thought his mental problems were behind him.  Obviously he has had a relapse.

Of course Old Brainless, the Bishop, who was still smarting from the frontal assault on his person by a determined band of parents last summer, has decided that this recent report and subsequent actions was the last straw, at last.  He has certainly taken his time over the matter but brainless by name, brainless by nature.

Because it cannot be left at that, with one side sulking at home and the other fuming in the playground.  We can only reasonably deduce that the truth that many parents and staff saw and what we in this blog wrote about over the last few years has finally come home to roost and we have all been vindicated in our opinions.

Quinlan and Kearney’s deceit, detestation of parents and their total ineptitude have been found out and it looks as though Kearney is no more.  Vaporised by independent but official criticism and obviously the florid Quinlan cannot live through this mess either, his days must be numbered.  In fact Brainless might already be counting.  Perhaps and has we all know his days are also numbered.  New brooms please, certainly Trigger, who sadly died yesterday has left one spare.  But Brainless who is now well passed the age of reason has a good few tonnes of shite from other sources about to drop on his head and it might be a case of a fleet of road-sweepers and not an army of brushes that will be needed.

Whilst this problem will be massively difficult for the school and the good teachers or those that are left, they will be free from the binding shackles of the oppressive Kearney regime.  Given time, and they have not been given much time; do not forget that recruitment for next year will now be underway and when this report comes into the public domain, which it will in the next few days, it will go viral, with the result that the poor recruitment suffered last year will be severely magnified this year.  But given time under a new head, if they can find one, and under a new chair of governors, which will be easy, next priest forward please, it might be able to rebuild.  But they will have to be quick because Pike has been left Acting Head; God help everybody.  I suppose Brainless had no choice other than putting himself in charge.  The loitering Byrne would have been a better bet but even he is probably past it by now and if he has any sense left he would not touch the temporary job with mine never mind his.

The apologists and there were many, this blog is full of comments from idiots taking us to task for criticising Kearney’s woeful antics, should hang their heads in shame.  It is they who have allowed Kearney to languish in his megalomania and make shite of a proud institution.  We , who were despised by so many, we, the doom- mongers have been proved right all along.

Poor Mrs Carr-Deed and Mr Barber, the real casualties of this foul regime, must be allowing themselves a sad but wry smile today.  I do hope that both of them have recovered their dignity and come out OK.

For everybody interested and who wants to read the report in full and wallow in Kearney’s death throes, the ISI website will be publishing the report any day now.  http://www.isi.net/

Our personal opinion is as we have opined on several occasions in the last year, Brainless and Florid have let the school decline too far, for whatever clandestine reason.  It has now listed a degree or two beyond the point of recovery.  Rescue from this point would need a miracle, but have we not got the old Catholic Church on hand.  Are they not good on miracles?

My Moroccan Diary – Day 7 to Day 9

When I awoke on Day 7, I knew immediately that it would be a warm one.  Breakfast under a cloudless sky followed by mint teas all round at an adjacent café.  It was turban weather, 23C at 11.00am by noon hunger was setting in, so it was up to the rooftop restaurant of Taros, our favourite bar.  What a feed we had I started with palourdes and pasta in a creamy source, little like sphagetti  vongole only the sauce was creamy not tomato based, followed by a cuttlefish tagine which was remarkable and the whole washed down with Domaine de Sahari gris, a particularly lovely wine to have with fish especially when the temperatures are in the mid 20C.  We fell out of the restaurant at 3.30pm and straight into kip and would you believe it was then into apero time again.  Do not think me degenerate with all this alcohol but somebody has to make up for the natives who do not touch it at all.  A light meal is in the offing, merguez sausages, a particularly tasty North African sausage liberally dosed with harissa.  Tomorrow we go off to another riad, Riad des Palmiers, just off the Rue d’Agadir in the tailoring and textile district of the Medina, but first where is that apero.

Day 8 dawned early, repacking of suitcases and everything in the hall by 9.00am.  The ladies came in to clean the place after our week of festivity, the kids on and off have been sick and plenty of rear end discharge whilst they got used to the food.  I have ate everything and anything and not been affected by at all.  A quick promenade round the square and an omelette aux fine herbes and a cup of mint tea and I was fit for the day.

Our baggage cart came at 12.00 noon, everything piled in and off to Riad des Palmiers and what a lovely house it was at the end of a short alley off the Rue d’Agadir.  This street is one of the main thoroughfares of the town and at its best it is no more than two metres wide.  The house itself boasts a garden and swimming pool which I understand is the only one in the Medina.  Two lovely Moroccan ladies who would be looking after us for the next week were there to greet us but had not finished the cleaning.  We dumped our bags and went off for lunch in the souk and later found the only wine shop, outside the walls of the Medina.

There are strange politics at work with the consumption of alcohol in Essaouira, the locals do not touch the stuff, it’s against their religion, but lots of restaurants sell it and lots of cafes offer it provide you sit inside.  The bars are all rooftop bars that cannot be seen from the street.  The wine shop does a roaring trade but in the four times I was there I never saw a white face, they were all local fellows.  Probably a lot of dirt swept under the Muslim carpet just as there is in the Catholic Church in western Europe.

Friends of my daughter came over from Marrakesh, she an English woman, he a Berber from the Algerian border.  They are setting up a holiday trekking business, he with his knowledge of the Sahara and camels and she with the business acumen to hopefully succeed.  The way she described what she wanted to do, made it a very interesting proposition and at the end of the day the start up costs are high and it is all a gamble but there seems to be demand.  A chicken tagine, a pastis and a bottle of wine and I am in bed for 9.00pm and up at 6.00am to clean up the mess from the night before.  I have been well trained by my wife as regards morning cleaning and although we have a lady to do it for us I could not let her clean up the most.  I would be useless with servants.

I got the place nicely ship-shape by 9.00am and only wife, daughter and son up plus two kids.  Son in law and desert chums, who tied one on last night, still in bed along with another daughter and a few more kids.  We will be setting off late this morning but a welcoming cup of coffee and I’m fit for anything life throws at me.

The house is four storeys high, two bedrooms on the ground floor plus a kitchen and a large central lightwell linking all floors which leads to a lounge and garden boasting two tortoises which kept the kids enthralled all week and a large eating area and small pool, on the first floor there were two more bedrooms, a large kitchen and a lounge which can also be reached from the garden via a circular staircase.  On the third floor two more bedrooms, a kitchen and a lovely open verandah with chairs and loungers and on the top floor the same but with a roof top terrace overlooking the walls of the Medina with views out to the bay and beyond.  Each bedroom was en-suite with hot water 24/7 and of the two this riad was much the nicest but in a far less salubrious part of town.  We were looked after by a cheery young Moroccan girl whose French was as bad as mine but was like a mountain goat up and down the stairs.

It is amazing how quickly one gets used to the warren of streets, no more than 2 metres wide, all buildings are attached to another and the ground floor rooms are either a workshop or a retail outlet with men and women beavering away but never together.  The gap between the sexes is remarkable with the men thinking they are in charge but in fact it is the women, although always deferring to men, who most definitely are, far more than I have ever noticed in our European countries.  There are no sexist type jobs where women get the most mundane, boring and repetitive work, men seem quite happy sitting at a stall all day almost selling nothing, their purpose just to be there.  Where we are now, the area is full of textile type work and men and women equally spend their days bent over sewing machines or spinning fine gossamer threads of silk into thicker threads for embroidering the edges of garments.  It is an absolute pleasure to watch the industry all round you as you walk up for bread and milk in the morning.

I am sitting in the garden of the riad with three massive palm trees at my back and side, the pool in front and the kids enthralled by the tortoises glued to the grass.  There are lots of songbirds in the trees and bushes and the ramparts of the Medina towering over me to the left.  An oasis of peace within the hustle and bustle of the souks which are only yards away.  Our party are slowly arising from their overlong slumber, so I will pack in this chronicle for a minute and join the post mortem of last night.

After a morning lounging around we went for an unusually boozy lunch at Taros, our favourite bar and restaurant.  I had a goat tagine with plenty of Sahari gris.  Helen had her favourite calamari.  We were with Mohend, the Berber and he ensured the boys in the restaurant were on their toes.  I might have this wrong but the Berbers of the desert seem to be feared by the local Moroccan arabs and despised at the same time, a type of discrimination and worry bound up together but I think the Berber as the higher moral ground.  Basically the Essaouiran population is made up of Arabs, Touaregs and Berbers, with another darker tribe, the Gnawa from much further south and add to these Jews and Europeans and you have a right old social mix.

In the afternoon Mohend went shopping, he was set on making us a Berber meal.  He was proud of his people and their ability to live in the harshest of climates.  The meal he made was a lamb and prune tagine and like no other tagine we had that holiday.  Great conversation flowed accompanied by dwindling stocks of wine about where everybody was in this turgid world of ours and about the

purity and simplicity of desert life.  Mohend is illiterate and has not got a pot to piss in but he can speak or be understood in five languages and loose and find 99% of people when it came to practicality.  An early night was followed by a hot sweaty sleep and I was up and showered at 1.00am before heading back to the cot.  The night before, I had been bitten by a nomadic tribe of mosquitos, on my left arm, back, shoulder and neck.  They are not normally a problem in Essaouira but those bastards found me and set up camp.  Our room is in the centre of the house and must be its warmest and the only way to counter them is to make the room as cool as possible, so last night I left the door open after my early shower and the Atlantic breeze spiralled down the light well and I had a perfect seven hour uninterrupted sleep

My Moroccan Diary – Day 10 to Day 12

It is now Day 10 of my Moroccan visit and a lovely cool morning, not cloud in the bright blue sky.  It is 9.10am and most adults are still in bed.  I breakfast on tomato and onion omelette and then it is off to the beach for the kids and their carers where there are camels, horses and quad bikes to ride in the surf or sit and laze at a beach shack.  Ocean Vagabond was our meeting place after getting ripped off by a petit taxi, but the food made up for it.  I had the biggest and best salade nicoise ever, fresh eggs, tuna and anchovy, olives of small but different types and a lovely gris to wash it down.  It was my first experience of camels, they are so gentle it is remarkable.  Mohend says that some camels can be fierce, but only in the mating season whilst looking for their oats.  He says these camels on the beach have been well looked after and are in good condition.  The horses in the main are small ponies and the kids enjoyed galloping through the surf. 

Myself and Helen went back to the Medina allowing the kids to blow off steam.  We met the usual assortment going in the Medina by a different gate.  Arab beggars, big Moors selling anything and everything and wanting to know about England, Man Utd and Wayne Rooney and a waiter admiring my turban inveigled myself, Helen and young Paul into the restaurant we had been to on the first night, another but now reserve gris went down our necks and we eventually got back to the riad at 4.00pm, with just enough energy to fall asleep.

I invigorated myself with green tea and a Moroccan delicacy, pastille de pigeon which I bought for Paddy Jo but it was that big she could only eat half of it, I had a quarter and Rebecca when she returned had the other quarter.  Pastillas are about 225mm diameter pies about 25mm thick made with this very thin Moroccan pastry and stuffed in this case with ground almonds, chopped dried fruit and breast of pigeon.  They are delicious.

Both our guests, Rebecca and Mohend have been fantastic, especially Mohend, who has been doing a lot of cooking and as a guide through the intricacies of the souk as been worth is weight in gold.  A smiling, nice , kind chap who could fit into decent company anywhere and I think he has learnt an awful lot from us, just as much as we have learnt from him.  He has told us that when we come to Morocco again, he will meet us and make sure we do not get ripped off.  He bought a turban for Joe, about 3 metres of decent material which eventually turns into a splendid and necessary headdress.  I am now an expert at twirling mine into acceptable Berber style.

Tonight we eat Kofte and pasta, washed down with the wonderful and obligatory local wine but first a pastis or two.  I will return.

In the kofte tagine there are the usual onions, tomatoes and cumin sweated over a low heat for a long time, meatballs eventually are added, liberally mixed with spices varies and all left to sweat on the lowest heat possible, no liquids or oil added.  It is so simple yet so delicious.  Then an early night for me whilst the youngsters went out on the town.  We baby sat the kids and if they woke I never heard them.  I was up at 6.00am showered but as it was still pitch black I went back to kip again.  The younger set drank too much and seem a little hung over this morning, a kind of nowtiness pervades the atmosphere which only subsided after lunch.  Our guests went back to Marrakesh and we lazed in the riad with a view of going to the grog shop later and having a few snifters before our evening meal at al Farachah for a celebration of la nuit de St Sylvestre, which is what New Year’s Eve is called here by some.  Al Farachah, Arabic for butterfly, has a great reputation.  It is in a lovely riad and beautifully decorated.  There is a special menu tonight for the night that is in it.  The lady patron is from Cannes and therefore the cuisine is kind of Provencal.  My choice was a spiders web of fruit,cooked vegetable and crab meat mixed with a balsamic vinegar, I then had the tendresse d’agneau and the finest patates dauphinoise and then the assiette gourmande of trois deserts, all washed down with Val d’Argon wines and all wonderfully served.  Well with the aperitifs and the degustatifs we had to have some digestifs and a 390 dirhams meal turned eventually into a 650 dirhams meal but it was worth it.  The house aperitif was a white rum base with lime, orange and a berry juice.  Lovely bread was accompanied by olive paste and courgette paste,  there was an amuse bouch of mint, courgette and pea soup served cold.   The trio of deserts, chocolate and cream truffle, nougat ice cream and a pear reduced to pulp by frying in pastis.  The desert wine was a muscat from Val d’Argon.  Coffee followed,  with two Armagnacs each and full to busting we just made the 50metre walk back to the riad to have a few more bottles of wine and see in 2014.  However by then there was only two of us standing.  We shook hands, emptied our glasses and went to bed.  Unfortunately for me the mosquitoes carried on partying.  My left hand and head were covered in bites, the only one of 11 sleepers to suffer.   I must be tasty stuff.

Day 12 was a slow starter, an 11.00am breakfast, followed by a laze around the pool, lunch in the riad and a pizza for the evening meal.  It was a day of relaxation and reflection on what I had learnt in almost two weeks in this strange and magical town.  The weather is good all year round with the temperature at night and early morning plunging to about 8C in the winter but remaining a steady19C to 25C during the day.  Of course it gets hotter in the summer and it’s a long one.  In Val d’Argon the host said their vintage was normally in the first week of July, sometimes in the last week of June, which is two months before Bordeaux.

The people are very poor, average wage is about 350 dirhams per month but I would suggest most are on less than that.  They work where and when they can.  Work starts at daybreak which is about 7.30am at the moment and the town closes down at about midnight.  It also looks as though most people have two or three jobs, everything is in cash; there must be massive tax avoidance.  Every metre of every street in the Medina is either a shop or a workshop, most about 4 metres deep by 2 metres wide and the owners ask what they think they can get for their small items of produce.  You can in most places bargain them down but sod it, you have the money, they don’t.  If you are happy with your purchase, give them the money but offer a token gesture that you are paying but you could get it cheaper elsewhere.  Everybody seems so nice and so they should be, we tourists are helping them fill their pockets.  If you lived here permanently you could live very cheaply.  You would be a rich man on a £300 state pension.  Our riad costs £100 per man per week and that is living in luxury with maid service.

I am unsure of education, most I think are illiterate and they have a natural flair for simple mathematics and never giving the right change.  Everyday there are lots of kids on the streets, playing football for which the country is crazy, or watching television down back alleyways or often just stood about.  The streets are crowded with people 16 hours per day, walking, on bicycles and scooters.  You have to have your eyes about you at all times, but the cyclist and scooter riders are skilled at avoiding injury to themselves or others.  There is a fairly large police presence on the streets but crime is not a big issue, certainly out in the countryside it does not exist.  Certainly in Berber country where Mohend comes from, it does not exist.  He did not have a word for crime.  He did not know what it was.  He did not understand the meaning of prison but when it was explained he did say that in M’hamid, where he comes from, the police station had a place for bad men,who he said were drunks or drug users.  It held 10 people, that in a city of 10,000 people.

There is a general awareness however that education is the key to a good job and this charge forward seems to be led by the women.  There is a saying here “educate a boy and you educate a man, educate a girl and you educate a family, a community, a nation”.

My Moroccan Diary – Day13 to Day 15

The morning of Day 13 dawned and I was up with the lark and out to the boulangerie in the semi-darkness at 7.30am with the Medina coming to life, I bought three petit pain au chocolat, one baguette and three round breads for 6.5 dirhams about 60 cents and one litre of milk for 7 dirhams about 70 cents.  All basic foodstuffs are cheap.  All bought at small dirty but friendly shops, not a supermarket within 100 miles or more likely 200Kms.  The only one we know of is in Marrakesh.  It is really like going back to my childhood in not too salubrious Longsight in Manchester, where corner shops littered the rows of terraced houses and you were always being asked to run errands by your mam.  Our diet then was not the best, very staple but everything bought at a little shop.  So living in Essaouira is like going back at least 50 years if not more and the kings of the castle who make everything work are the carossiers.  The men with carts of very different scales of quality, from little carts with buckled bike wheels and cardboard floor and sides, through car tyres and wooden sides and bottom, to motor bikes pulling high steel sided carts.  Nothing in this town moves without a carossier moving it and all for 20-30 dirhams a trip.  Motor vehicles except for the two main boulevards are banned and then only official council and police vehicles are allowed.  The odd large delivery van bringing in stuff too large for the carts is allowed in but only with permission.  Plenty try but the main roads are well policed.

Every morning the rubbish build up from the previous day including all household waste which is just tipped into the warren of narrow streets is collected by an army of council men and loaded into a chassis cab van with a 6yd skip clamped on the back.  The men have no tools only a brush and when the waste is gathered in heaps, they shovel the detrita up with pieces of cardboard they scavenge from the rubbish.  Wherever you look small power tools are almost non-existent, holes are dug by hand, demolition is all done by hand, scaffolding for what it’s worth has no handrails or toe-boards and the scaffold boards, creak under a man’s weight and must have been first used 50 years ago.  The council at the moment are re-rendering the outside wall of the Medina which was built in the late 18^th century, it must be at least four miles long and everything is done by hand, there are no scabbling tools, just small hammers hacking away, all day, every day, followed by bricklayers laying a smooth outer skin of thin bricks to give the wall a straight outer face as the original wall after the old render is knocked off is totally uneven, a determined person could climb up it.  The renderers then come along and finish the wall to a smooth profile.  Everything including the lifting, mixing and rubbish removal is done by hand.  All carried out under the auspices of Unesco, who in 2001 put the Medina onto its World Heritage Site list.

Later that day we had a marvellous lamb tagine washed down with wine from the local blob shop and then to bed early at 9.15pm, followed by a lazy 12 hour sleep and made ready for our last full day with the hammers of the masons on the far side of our garden wall thudding in pour ears.The Medina wall forms the back wall of our garden.  It is time to think of breakfast, bread and a cup of coffee will suit.

Good news coming in from Portugal is that the bin men are on strike due to unfair austerity measures by the government, so the public, God bless their little cotton socks, are dumping their household rubbish at the doors of the nearest bank.  We should do it in every country while these bastards in suits and ties get away with their excesses.  It is a basic question that every decent human being should be asking, why should we all suffer for the blatant madness of the few dickheads who are not suffering.

Sadly we are preparing to leave this place tomorrow, gathering up the last of our dirhams, putting sweaty used clothes into the bowels of our suitcases, thinking of where to have our farewell meal tonight.  We have just bartered down our local friendly taxi driver who will take four of us to Agadir tomorrow in his brand new 4×4 for 700 dirhams.  We will leave early to see the country on the long trip back.  Incidentally if ever you find yourself in Essaouira and in need of a taxi ask for Fassi and you will not go wrong, he is a man from the Sahara and will only do right by you.  His phone number is 06 64 96 38 39 and his e-mail address is fassitaxi@gmail.com.  A good honest man.

In the meantime after lunch of lamb attacked by the usual 5lb axe, it was back to the riad whilst the ladies and kids went shopping, me to read, think and write, over a well-earned digestif, about my recent experiences.

Essaouira is not for the fainthearted, it is a dirty, filthy city, most houses having no water or wcs, public wcs abound, looked after and kept very clean by attendants.  There are little hatches in walls where you can fill up your water canisters for free.  Smells surround your senses, urine, shite, sweat, spices, herbs and perfumes, it is an olfactory explosion, but saying all that, it has colour, excitement, hard labour and intenseness.  This morning I went to the fowl souk, a five minute walk through thousands of people and I bought a dozen eggs, saw three chickens killed in front of me and three hefty cockerels with beaks like eagles bartered between two men, the cockerels licking their lips at the idea of this different harem that their new owner was taking them to.  Even at that time, 8.00am, the streets were alive with people.  They only buy for the meal in front of them, at this time it was mainly bread and eggs, some were more forward thinking and buying for lunch.

To do any good and not be ripped off by 50% of the shopkeepers, you need a modicum of French.  A form of Arabic is widely spoken, with French the second language, Spanish is the next most common but mainly in the north, English is spoken by about 10%, but Arabic in all its nuances is top dog.  If you are brave enough and have only English, you can just about get by but you could get pillaged for a few dirhams on every purchase.  However the experience of the deal makes up for all that and the majority of people are as honest as you would expect.  We have met some really lovely people and they are the intelligent ones who realise that you will go back to them time after time.

It is not really a place for small babies and toddlers whose digestive tracts are still unformed, we had problems with the kids this week, but they recover quickly and do not seem scarred by the experience.  For my part a small touch of the squitters one morning and I ate and drank everything in sight.  It would be nice for all people to experience the place before it, like the rest of the world disappears into the 21^st century.  From beggars to millionaires, all lend themselves to the experience, all give something to the air of chaos that is abundant.

And so here I am in the garden of the riad, at 3.00pm in the afternoon, in brilliant sunshine, looking over the small pool, everybody out and only the riad birds for company.  It is an oasis of greenery and solitude, interwoven by outside Medina noises and seagulls.  I am totally wrapped up in my delight for the place, this Riad des Palmiers, with its tortoises, birds, greenery and water and most importantly sunshine on this 3^rd day of January 2014.  My only fear is that I have put on weight after all my hard work.  The high carb diet makes the women go in and out in all the right places and they are highly praised for their roundness of contour, the men who eat little and work hard are like laths.  January for me will be Spartan, my diet awaits but this time with no alcohol or yoghurt I hope, the lbs will shed, the greyhound within me awaits.

On our last night out we went to a Moroccan restaurant on the corner of the Bab Marrakesh.  It was just a covered alleyway with a 3 metre square kitchen.  We heard the food was good and they played Arab blues with their resident musician whose instrument was a cross between a guitar and a set of drums, he was excellent. 

The front of house lady, a French woman from Lyons, gave us the bad news first, that because it was Friday, Prayer Day, in muslim land, there would be no wine served.  This news upset certain members of our party but then the front of house lady said after our second bottle of water that perhaps in this instance because we were not of the faith and because it was our last night and because we were looking downcast, perhaps wine might be permitted but she could only get red wine and it would have to be served in clay mugs.  We jumped at the opportunity, we would have drunk the bloody stuff out of a sweaty clog by this time, but then she started serving all manner of wine to other diners.  One last little conundrum to match the million we had experienced over our two week stay.  The food when it came was fantastic.  I had a tagine of stuffed calamari which was absolutely delicious.

Then home, a glass of wine and bed.  Up at 7.00am on Day 15 to put the last few thoughts in my diary, before packing and taking our 4×4 to Agadir, driven by our friendly Saharan taxi man, Fassi, who had told Katy, my daughter, that he would look after her mother and father as though we were his mother and father, a kind remark from one of a kind people.  He is picking us up at Place Moulay Hassan at 12.00noon in four hours time, just enough time for breakfast, last minute shopping for some and to organise a carossier to take our bags across the Medina.

Well Fassi loaded the four of us and our luggage into an eight seat vehicle, very plush.  He was not going to drive us but introduced us to his driver, a smiling young man and then asked us for his money before we set off.  He must have thought his driver or we would do a runner.  The driver shrugged his shoulders and said “Il est le patron”.  Three hours of a drive to Agadir airport whilst we passed millions of Argon trees and millions of goats with women following the goats picking up the dissolved nuts.  The land is best described as arid and except for the argon trees there was no other cultivation except in small pockets as you neared Agadir.  Dried up river beds, rocks and sand were the only features, every now and then square boxes of houses in poor condition but every house had a satellite dish.  About 25 miles from Agadir we hit the Atlantic, it really did look like surfers paradfise.  Agadir traffic was manic with an everyman for himself philosophy and free use of the indicator.  There were no rules just go where you want and when you want with the indicator telling everybody which lane you were going to go into one second before you made that manoeuvre.

The airport was packed with French, Germans and Dutch returning after their Christmas holiday but it soon quietened down.  We were three hours early and in that time there were six flights to France, two to Germany, one Swiss, four to Casablanca, three Dutch, One Danish, One to London, One to Belgium and then our own to Dublin.  It really is a European destination.  After the first flush left, the airport settled down and what a remarkable airport it was, the ambience superb.  I was never more relaxed, security was totally relaxed and we just flowed through the few hours of a wait.

Nicely settled in our Aer Lingus seats, one of the ground crew came rushing on board and into the cockpit, the two pilots rushed out and ten minutes later one of them came back and on the intercom said that the ground crew had found bits hanging off the engine, the pilot assured us that the bits were not important and he had instructed the ground crew to cut them off and he would then be happy to take the flight to Dublin.  I liked his WW1 bravado and settled down.  The plane left an hour later and on top of that it encountered 180mph headwinds so that the three and half hour flight turned into five hours.  We eventually got into Dublin at 2.30am, found our car in the massive acreage of the long-stay red car-park  and eventually got home at 5.00am.  Hungry and parched, I settled down to a large G&T the first time I had ever had one at that time of day and then to bed dreaming of a full Irish breakfast when I awoke.

Adieu Essaouira it was lovely meeting you, it was great learning your ways and eating your food but as they always say, there is nothing nicer than your own bed.

http://isiservice.devprocess.com/DownloadReport.aspx?t=c&r=GRT6928_20131112.pdf&s=6928

Well it has been made public and the above link will take you there.  It is a damning indictment of the leadership of the School and in the areas that you would have thought most attention would have been paid.

What surprised me was how much the school had shrunk, only 597 pupils in the senior school, years 7 to 13, that is less than when I was there 50 odd years ago.  I do not know whether the figure of 597 includes the footballers from City.  But my, how its shrunk in 10 years when there was well over a thousand pupils there.

Lines like “governance since the previous inspection has been unsatisfactory” and “leadership of the school has weaknesses.  There is no school development planning and no sharp vision for the whole school” and worst of all “the governors, leadership and management of the school have not however maintained sufficiently rigorous procedures regarding recruitment of staff” and “the review and monitoring of the main school policies regarding child protection has not been completed”

After all the School has been through over the last 50 years with regard to child sexual abuse and not withstanding the boasts and bravado on their website, the Schools Safeguarding procedures are just what I have said all along, BUNKUM.  No attention to detail on this most important topic.

Although it does say that the teaching staff are good and the relationship with the pupils is good, they lack the motivation from sound leadership.  No wonder Kearney went home after his meeting with the Brainless one and buried his head in the sand.  The report is seriously critical of him but not just him, the Governors are as much to blame, in their lack of governance.  Not only should Kearney go but Quinlan should follow and the flaming bishop as well, he is a governor to.  The clerics to a man should be heaved overboard, they have nothing to give professionally or even intellectually to the school.  This institution is a business, it is not a religious Sunday School.

So read the thing carefully and let me know your thoughts.  Have we not been right all along about Kearney, Pike et al and the abuse I have received from you god fearing parents is something I never want to hear again.  I really fear for the development of the kids in years 7, 8 and 9.  The years when abuse normally takes place and the years when serious care from well inspected staff should take place.

The debate will continue over these next few days but please let us hear of some dismissals.

Well it has all been happening rather fast on the Bedian front since I wrote my last posting on 17th January 2014 entitled Even More On St Bede’s College In Manchester.  That same day the Senior Deputy Headteacher as she now calls herself, the honourable and elegant, Sandra Pike, wrote the above letter to parents enclosing the ISI report and saying how pleased she was with the report without mentioning the fact that the teaching was only rated good (ISI speak for not bad) and the leadership was piss poor.  She bluffs her way through the real problem of safeguarding; it is as though she was speaking to a class of kids and not real people with real money.

She asks for a meeting of parents to discuss any problems from the report, for an hour on the 27th January, (I hope it went well) and for an hour on 6th February.  I do wonder whether these problems that the school faces can be discussed openly and adequately in an hour but it is certainly an altogether different approach to that yawning, eyes rolling, arse scratching, paternalistic approach of Quinlan and Kearney last summer to a group of concerned and agitated parents.  I would ask any parent who attended the meeting on the 27th January or is going to attend the one on 6th February to contact me so that I can fully understand the feelings aroused.

In neither letter as she mentioned the whereabouts of one, Daniel Kearney, who seems to be hanging on to his job of Senior but Absent Headteacher by the tip of his foreskin.  Behind the scenes of this and the following letter, chaos reigns, with no captain on the bridge, the ship is heading for the rocks.  Then in the last few days the BBC must have alerted the school to the report that is appended below and which I explained in a previous blog was being filmed on the 14th January.  So the fragrant Pike went to paper again and sent this load of shite out to all parents

Old Pikey says that Modern Bede’s exists in a very different society today than 50 or 60 years ago but the honest truth is that The College to a large extent remains anchored in the past and has the same arrogant approach as regards Safeguarding of Children as it did in Duggan’s day.  The school does not give a toss for parents and kids are just a currency while the leadership of the school just sail blindly on.  Nero, fiddles and Rome come to mind.  Read both letters again and tell me whether she cares, she has not addressed one problem that the ISI Report high-lighted.  I do not really blame her, she is just biding time, her end is nigh or definitely should be.  The canker in the school should be eradicated, all senior management including Quinlan has to be removed for a new and fresh start to be made by a new bishop, Brain wants out, he thinks all these problems are not his and why should he suffer.  Again his lethargy is not apparent to himself but if he had acted correctly some years ago, today’s problems could have been alleviated considerably.

Then a kind of bombshell dropped, the BBC, those of Savile fame released the following item on Friday 31st January.  I say a kind of a bombshell in that it reported things already reported in the Sunday Times of 12th January and which the BBC recorded on 14th January.  I thought I’d missed it but here it is full of daft questions and inuendo, another piece of shit on a real live problem, but at least it put it out for the numb-skulls who cannot think beyond the first full stop.

This from the BBC on 31/1/14:

Here’s the news report:

And if that gets taken down for any reason, here’s the link on the BBC website: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-25987513

The lad featured in that film I have known on and off for 56 years,  he was treated abominably by Duggan and two other priests, Hamilton and Mulholland, raped repeatedly and for him to come out publicly was an unbelievable piece of bravery.  He told me this morning that he cannot bring himself to look at the film.  If you could read his sworn testimony you would cry, he has lived with that memory, as have all the victims, for all that time.  Their lives have been one long car crash.  I can only say that for three years now I have been alternating between tears and massive determination to get these lads stories heard and up come the BBC with trumps of a nature.  I cannot thank that dogshite corporation for anything.

The article below was brought to my attention by St Bede’s veteran, Michael Lawlor, now a resident of the state of Ottawa in Canada, but part of the 1947 intake at Bede’s making him one of my oldest correspondents.  The article appeared in this week’s Tablet newspaper and shows Kearney to be the bumbling obfuscating academic that we all know and love.

Read it, understand it if you can and I will comment on it, in my own very wanting fashion afterwards.  Myself and academe do not fit too well together because I was educated at St Bede’s College in Manchester, where only the worthy were allowed into academic obscurity.

Abuse is neither ‘historic’ nor just the Church’s problem

03 February 2014 by Daniel Kearney, St Bede’s College

The phrase “historic abuse” troubles me on many levels. I hear it repeatedly and annoyingly used to refer to the unspeakable wrongness of depraved acts perpetrated in the past by “trusted” adults against the innocent and vulnerable children in their care.

As a headmaster at a school where abuse has taken place in the past – and has been, thankfully, in some cases, rightly and legally addressed – I offer my apologies. For those who continue to suffer and to campaign to seek redress I pray and continually hope that you will find peace of mind and some sense of closure in your endeavours.

In my view the term “historic” is wholly inappropriate because it fails, catastrophically, to acknowledge the present reality of the daily debilitating consequences of such abuse in the chaotic unfulfilled lives of those who have suffered and, more importantly, continue to suffer the corrosive effects of such ordeals. The adjective, in my mind, might be used, legally, to locate such abuse to a particular time and place but, unfortunately, it is sometimes used to distance the pain and suffering to another time, another world.

But the past is now; it is a present memory. It is not ameliorated or lessened by the passage of time.

I know, all too well, it is irrelevant and of no consequence whatsoever to see perpetrators imprisoned or for victims to receive arbitrary amounts of compensations from the courts. Such pain and suffering are not so easily assuaged.

There is, however, a deeper and a more disturbing reality here; a stinging nettle to grasp. Paedophiles, abusers, rapists and recidivists are all products and symptoms of society; they are not born and bred in a vacuum or some Frankenstein laboratory.

Too many lives have been blighted by unrestrained and self-serving appetites. Legislation and stringent popular policies might tick boxes but will reams of paper really prevent the recondite practices of the few who seek to manipulate and to abuse? It is easier to vilify and to lock up the individual but much more difficult and revealing to dig deeper, expose the root cause and eradicate it. Such action requires honesty and wholesale change in the very structures of our society. It demands truth, authenticity and maturity. Perhaps it is easier, after all, to focus on the disordered and depraved few.

But then, the sins of the past continue to weigh heavily on the present – perhaps it was, and will be, ever thus! As the poet Philip Larkin wrote: “Man hands on misery to man, it deepens like a coastal shelf.”

Daniel Kearney is the headmaster of St Bede’s College, a Catholic private school in Manchester

Now Danny would not have written this article unless St Bede’s was under the cosh.  Danny is not interested in the world wide application of sexual abuse of children, no, he is only interested in the sexual abuse of children when it affects him and it affects him at St Bede’s.  So let us approach his words from that standpoint and not try to widen the argument like he seems to want to and blame abuse on the society as a whole.  The abuse we are talking about at Bede’s stems from the immature emotional development of priests in schools and seminaries of the Catholic Church from the age of 11 through to 24.

He says abuse at St Bede’s “in some cases has been rightly and legally addressed” but that is not the case.  In only one case, the Green case, has the perpertrator been brought to justice, with a lot more to come out in that case yet.  And that only came to court because a victim complained to Scottish police.  The school obviously knew about Green’s transgressions when Byrne and Kelly the then Bishop of Salford swept him under the carpet in I think, 1991 never dreaming he would come back to haunt them a decade later.  With one sweep of the broom Green was gone but with the backward sweep Dodgeon, Byrne and Moynihan were flicked aside and to compensate Byrne got a papal ear tag.  All this skullduggery might have been new to Byrne but Kelly was a man well known for waving brown envelopes under victims noses and nailing it down with a gagging notice.

In all the other cases at Bede’s from 1950 onwards, 63 years of abuse, no other case has been rightfully and legally addressed and I doubt if a lot of them will be.  Sp please Daniel get off your high horse about how decent Bede’s is.  They have behaved appallingly ever since Bishop Marshall in 1951 took Duggan’s side and shooed away the complaining parent and they have been doing it up to the present when they have accepted that abuse took place but damn well prove it in court was the back answer.

The rest of the article is just clap-trap where he throws the problem at the world at large but I suggest to him that he keeps his eyes on the little things close to him, get your bit of the puzzle sorted and not allow your input into safeguarding of children get classed as appalling by the ISI in its recent report.

Before I go there has been a massive piece of breaking news, old Florid has jumped ship and about time to or to jump out of the vernacular, Monsignor Michael Quinlan, chairman of the board of governors of St Bede’s College in Manchester has resigned with effect from the 3rd February.  So that leaves the school with no head, no chair of governors and, I understand, no bursar.  Rats and sinking ships is what immediately come to mind.  If these people had anything more than their overwhelming sense of their own importance they would have stuck with it but no and probably is a good thing to.  They fucked it up, therefore they go.  I do think that Quinlan’s departure is bigger than Kearney’s vamoose, the bloody school is shagged.

Look it up on the school website, Flash Moynihan has taken on the job of acting chair and sent a letter to all parents.  The letter itself is full of crucifying shite to let us know how hard Florid worked for the College.  The parents should ask the council for a discount, their volume of rubbish is increasing by the week through no fault of their own.

People recently have been remarking on the language used in my blog postings and how it offends some and puts them off attaching to my ideas.  Well I feel very sorry for having offended their honourable dignities but feel that I do not really want to attach myself to those whose dissonance makes them so sensitive.  For come on now, we are talking here of grown religious men sticking their fully engorged pricks up small still forming arseholes with all the blood, shite, pain, clerical cum and mental stress that ensues from this act.

Myself and the Venerable Helen sat up last night discussing such and although Helen is very squeamish, she thought it right that I use words closer to the point than the words we read in newspapers and books that tend to soften the blow to the readers eyes and generally soften up everything around this most grievous and horrific of acts.  This softening of processes makes it easier for the reader to pass over the subject without emotion being stirred.

However for me and over the last four years since picking up this cudgel the emotion that swells up in my body is so great, I feel I need to use the words with the most punch and if I feel that fuck, cock, arse, shagged, cunt, prick, words that I have used recently, best describe the message, so I will use them.  We have to get across to the general reader the horror being raped, is to the victim and in this instance pretty words do not come into the equation.  So I will continue, if you like, to shock the poor reader, if only to stir them out of the languor most people exist in, to shake them into reality.

So to introduce these languorous masses to reality. I have decided to tell the story of one victim, one survivor, of the abuse suffered by so many children at the hands of Monsignor Thomas Duggan at St Bede’s College in Manchester.  I am able to tell this story which is as bad as any experience I have heard because of the idiocy of the Court system whereby this boy’s experience was thrown out by the lawyers because of the Statute of Limitations which states that any abuse committed before April 1954 is not allowed and nobody so far as the ability or the wherewithal to challenge this idiocy.

The subject of this story is about 74 years of age now and for the purposes of this story we will call him John.  He entered the last year of Prep in September 1950 from St Cuthbert’s School in Withington.  He now lives in the Antipodes.  In that last year of Prep he had some very chilling moments with Fr Bernard Rylands, the head of Prep which did not go any farther than furtive touching and watching as he changed for swimming and PE.  John did not know why he should feel uncomfortable, he was only 10 but he knew it was wrong and he eventually chose to avoid these situations, ducking classes but telling nobody.

Later in that Autumn term of 1950, John started to get sent up to Monsignor Duggan, the Rector of the College, on a regular basis. He recognises now that Rylands must have been pimping for Duggan.  He remembers the long walk from the Prep, across Wellington Road and the playground of the Main School, down Our Lady’s Corridor and up the stairs to the 1st floor study.  Even now after 63 years he can remember the study, the furniture, the smells of the room.  Nothing happened that first meeting, Duggan just warned him about his behaviour and sent him on his way. But not long afterwards, John was once again sent up to Duggan, this time the atmosphere was more intense.  Duggan told him to remove his trousers and underpants, he was sat in his armchair and he pulled the naked John over his knees and began to rub his hands over the young boy’s arse, long, gentle strokes followed by a squeeze of the buttocks.  This went on for several minutes and then Duggan told John to put his clothes on and go.  John was totally confused.  This man who had been massaging him was the next thing to God and John had not then reached puberty and so did not understand.

In the following Spring of 1951, John was back up with Duggan again and the same scenario, stroking and kneading of John’s backside.  Duggan said “if I warm up your bottom like this the spanking won’t hurt as much” and then his hand slipped down John’s arse and started to caress his bollocks, this went on for a long time until Duggan took hold of John’s prick and began, caressing it, stroking and squeezing it.  By this time John was totally alarmed, he could not understand the situation but he knew it was wrong, but Duggans grip was strong.  Eventually with John still struggling, Duggan gave his arse a beating with the palm of his hand and told him to get dressed and go.

That night John decided to tell his father what had happened. He was too embarrassed to tell his mother, but he knew both parents, who were both strong Catholics, loved him and would protect him.  John’s father was furious, not with Duggan but with his son for telling such lies.  So strong was his faith he could not accept a priest would do such a thing and gave John another hiding for telling lies.  He doubly hit him for first of all being so naughty to be sent up to the Rector and then again for telling lies and told him never to repeat that filth in front of his mother.

Following that third occasion and for the rest of the term and into the Summer term of 1951, John was sent up to Duggan by Rylands between four and six times and on these occasions he was raped by Duggan.  On each occasion the preliminaries were as before, trousers and underpants off and Duggan would proceed to fondle John’s buttocks, thighs, bollocks and prick, trying to relax the taut muscles in the boy’s backside.  Sometimes he was over his knee, sometimes stood up but bent over while Duggan held him close and toyed with John’s prick.  As John was bent over he could feel Duggan rubbing something against the cheeks of his arse, he only later realised it was Duggan’s fully engorged cock.  Duggan was groaning and spewing out his semen, he would then wrap his cock in a small towel after he had finished and turning his back tell John to go.

Sometimes John struggled but soon learnt that the harder he struggled the bigger the beating he got.  John was now starting to feel complicit in this abuse, his prick was starting to become erect as Duggan tried to masturbate him and has he realised the less struggle the less beating, he stopped resisting.

He joined the Main School in September 1951 and his new form teacher was doing the same as Rylands, as though he was under orders.  Every few weeks he was sent up to Duggan with the same resulting performance.  John started to withdraw into himself. He had no friends, his school work was suffering and in September 1952 and John still only 12 years old, he was sent up again to Duggan for some homework misdemeanour.  Duggan told John to remove his clothes and bend over the arm of a Chesterfield couch.  Duggan stood behind him as usual and began his warming up exercises but there was more of an urgency this time.  He had hold of the tail of Johns shirt and had it pulled up to his shoulders, John braced himself for a beating but he felt a new sensation something hard was pushing up into the cleft of his buttocks and against the tautness of his arse and it took him a while to realise it was Duggan’s cock.  It was an aggressive approach not like the tenderness of before and John was off guard.  John reacted by tightening his buttock muscles and Duggan kept kicking John’s legs further apart. John was pleading with him to stop but Duggan managed to break John’s resistance, his cock tearing into the boy’s small clenched anus in a moment of unbearable pain.  John screamed with Duggan ordering him to silence, the pain continued as Duggan thrust himself time and again into the young boys body, eventually climaxing and quickly pulling his cock from the boy with the same pain.

Duggan produced a towel and used it to wipe the blood, shit and cum issuing from the young boy’s arse and told him to get dressed and get back to class.  He was now in a permanent state of pain with every movement and Duggan told him he was lucky to get away without a good hiding.  John went home and as he crossed Fog Lane Park he went into bushes and removed his underpants, which were full of shit and blood and some greasy liquid, buried them and then went home telling nobody of his ordeal.

A few days later on 17th September 1952, a date etched in his mind, a teacher told John to go and see Duggan the following morning.  He was in a daze he could take no more, so on the way home at the tender age of 12, he decided to take his own life, he had been told that by stepping in front of a bus he would be killed.  So on Wilmslow Road in Fallowfield on 17th September 1952, this 12 year old kid did just that.  Even the bus driver thought he had killed him, but John was lucky, he had multiple injuries, his legs had been torn to shreds.  He was taken to Withington Hospital in a coma where he remained for some days, his legs in plaster and in traction.

After coming out of the coma the nurses brought John news that the Rector was outside waiting to speak to him.  John became so distressed he flailed about in the bed and half fell out wrecking the traction equipment and the careful plaster encasing his legs.  Duggan was asked to leave and the nurses soon realised that John had broken most of the stitching in his legs, back for emergency surgery but his right foot never came right and to this day he still has the scars and troubles with the big toe of his right foot.  His mother found half the big toe in his sock days after the operation when they gave her his soiled clothes to wash.

John was in hospital for three months before being allowed back to school on crutches, he had to give up sport, and again Duggan called for him.  He was terrified his scars were just healing but with the sight of the erect cock jamming up his arse, he looked around grabbed a book and hit Duggan where it was sure to hurt and they both fell on the floor, Duggan lost his grip and John grabbed his clothes and ran from the room, pulling his trousers on as he ran and went straight home.  When John’s dad came home that night he could see his son was in obvious distress and eventually the story came out and this time he believed him and he told his son to return to school, stay out of Duggan’s way and he would sort it.  And he did and he secured a meeting with Bishop Marshall and Duggan a few days later.

John was called out of class to meet his father who had been crying, the Bishop and told him that he believed Duggan’s story and not John’s and that also John would have to leave St Bede’s.  According to lads who contacted John afterwards, the following morning Geoff Burke, the headmaster, called an assembly of all pupils and told them that John had been dismissed from the school for bringing it into disrepute.  John went to St Mary’s School in Levenshulme, a senior school of a local parish church.  This was in the days before comprehensives and he sat out his time there, taking no examinations and leaving school at 15 in the hope of picking up some job or other.

His father was a broken man that day and slowly deteriorated and died five years later at the age of 50.  Duggan himself went from strength to strength abusing and shagging kids for another 10 or 12 years.  John from a child became an argumentative young man, always in fights at work and could not keep a job for any length of time.  He eventually ended up in Australia, married a gem of a woman, a school teacher, but again his temper stopped him time and again in the job market.  His wife could not understand the underlying weaknesses in her husband, he never told her of his ordeal until in late 2011 when I eventually persuaded him to sit her down and tell everything after 40 years of marriage.  She now knew why he would never have kids, he did not want them destroyed like he was.  She wrote me a remarkable letter thanking me for my persistence, I hold it dearly to this day and it is my motivator when times get hard with this fucking bunch of shite that calls itself the Holy Roman Catholic Church.

John and his wife now live happily in the full knowledge of each other, their bliss only marred by the stupid Statute of Limitations and the inanity of British Law.

We set off early on Friday morning, 24th January 2014, destination Llandudno, in North Wales, up to Dublin and embarked on the 2.00pm boat, the Epsilon, on its maiden voyage.  Owned by Irish Ferries and aimed at the freight traffic at a guess.  Extremely sparse and with room for only a few passengers, I chanced the restaurant.  It is always a gamble on these Irish Sea ferries and I was not disappointed, the eastern european crew served up fish and chips I would not give to a dog.  How can you mess up that fairly staple dish?  What I got within the batter, it smelt like fish but definitely was not fish of the swimming variety.  It looked more like porridge with a fishy smell, absolutely disgusting.  Your best bet is to hire a cabin and have a kip for the three and half hour crossing.  39 euros for a little comfort.  Being a maiden voyage there was bound to be a problem.  Wherever the fault lay I do not know but ships rear doors and jetty did not line up causing an articulated lorry to bottom itself as it’s cab wheels left the safety of the folding door.  There was a big drop between door and jetty and I in my 4×4 only just made it, leaving a host of cars behind me.

It was 7.00pm when we arrived in Llandudno on a cold and blustery night and could not appreciate the town until the following morning.  The purpose of my visit to this Victorian idyll was to meet some old friends that I had not met for 47 years.  We all played cricket for East Levenshulme Cricket Club, a club long since knocked over the boundary by the march of time but through this blog we contacted each other and I was invited on their annual reunion.  My years playing with them were 1965-1967 before I was moved by my job up to Durham and then onto Tewkesbury and lost touch.  Of all the clubs I played for, those three years were the best, the lads were great and the after the game entertainment followed by a must have curry at the old Takdir Restaurant on Stockport Road really topped off the weekend.

However it was with some trepidation that myself and Helen walked into the Queen’s Hotel, our venue for the weekend, wondering what to expect.  47 years takes a lot of catching up, time and people change but we were massively surprised.  Of course one or two of them had fallen off the log in all that time and we would not have made a full team but in the party of 30 odd people there were seven or eight lads I used to play the game with.  Names from antiquity kept floating across my mind as vaguely familiar faces, some with too much hair, others bereft of same, came walking up and shaking hands.

Howard Skelton, the hero of my blog A Case Of Mistaken Identity, which I wrote about three years ago, was the first to greet me, followed by Stuart Coleshill, our demon fast bowler, Gilbert Holmes, Stan McLeod, Harold Evans, Dave Verity and Graham Fletcher, all looking as fit as very mature butcher’s dogs, most of them toting bemused wives and girl friends.  They had been having this do for years and had become accustomed, for me it was like an explosion of old favourites, for them I suppose, old hat.

In all that time, all those 47 years “Adge” Evans had not stopped talking and hitting sixes, Stuart still the strong silent type, Howard with his captains eye on all proceedings, Stan settling arguments with a few quick words of wisdom, Gilbert as knowing as ever, especially when betting and bookies came into play, Dave surprisingly eager for information about what is happening in this god forsaken modern totalitarian state in which we find ourselves in, Graham telling me he had walked up the Great Orme before breakfast, a lie as big as any he has told.  They were all mighty, they had not lost an ounce of that Levenshulme swagger, and all in their 70s and 80s.  A proud bunch of men.

Well the inevitable happened, but I held it together and it was not until I reached the bedroom, late that Friday night or perhaps it might have been early Saturday morning that I decided to have a fight with the bathroom door, a chest of drawers and the carpet.  They were strong hardy men and when I awoke next morning, the scars of battle were there for the world to see.  Over my left eye where the chest of drawers got me with a straight right and the back of my head where the door had kicked me as I reeled and grappled with the carpet from that straight ramrod of a right.

My wife comforted me as only a woman can who remembers my tricks over 40 years of marriage, castigating me sensibly and seriously whilst we all ate breakfast to a cacophony of knowing sniggers from the assembled.  Then out onto the wind-swept promenade, hoping the elements would blow sense into my addled brain, followed by a trip round the shops more for constitutional purposes than retail.  Here we met Stuart’s wife for the first time, her birth-name was Morrisroe, whose family hailed from Ballaghaderreen, not only a neighbour but a cousin three times removed.  If the blood kinship was not there, we made it up over a few glasses of wine that afternoon, both before and after lunch.

Llandudno town surprised me, it has kept its aura of respectability.  Many of these old seaside towns have become tatty but Llandudno was clean, painted and ordered with some very nice shops and an absence of pubs which have been and are the bane of those old resorts.  The people of the town should feel proud of their efforts., long may it last.  Our hotel was kind of shabby chic, more by age than design.  The staff were attentive and very pleasant and the management had obviously put a load of thought into their product.  The place was crowded with people all weekend and that cannot be said of most hotels on a cold, windy, wet weekend in January and they served a rather charming Argentinian Red which unfortunately I found to my cost.

The whole of Saturday afternoon was just one long conversation about the modern social drug that is football, City’s chances of defeat in the cup against Watford looked good until the Blues redeemed themselves by scoring four goals in the last five minutes.  There was a good chunk of truth told about how we are not getting the truth, with the wool being continually pulled over our eyes.  I was amazed by the reaction I got from this section of the conversation.  Normally the seniors tend to be stick in the mud but this group was alive and kicking.  One 90 year old Liverpool lad, now living in Southport, came up to me the following morning and thanked me for the conversation of the previous night.  I had been holding fort on the things I felt wrong with modern life and he at his age with an open mind was totally appreciative of all I said.  Not many are that way but I would like to thank him for his appreciation.

Bag packing followed, tentative goodbyes and a careful drive to Manchester in atrocious conditions and into the arms of kith and kin and especially the welcoming arms of our youngest grandchild Ernie, who took us for dim sum at the Tai Pan, a fine recuperative end to a busy week end.  Feet up now, no booze and plenty of rest, only for the alarm on my car going off at 5.30pm on Monday morning.

Well would you believe it, I was halfway through reading my e-mails this morning when the following dropped onto the screen. A complaint from a gallant but obviously very young person who is a newly appointed governor of St Bede’s College, one of a galaxy of stars thrown onto the stage in recent months to help sweep away the chaos and despondency the school has sunk into.

Helen West is the scribe’s name and she seems to have got the bit between her teeth and is trying to make a name for herself like all young nag’s do and she seems to be telling me off. She has written to our hosting company asking peevishly for them to remove my blog from the internet.

Hi Steve,

We’ve received the following email via our abuse helpdesk from a contact at St Bede’s college in Manchester making claims regarding potentially libellous content on a site hosted by yourselves. Could you please investigate and respond to the sender?

Thanks in advance,

Mike

College Junior Division

tel: 0161 226 3323 0161 226 7156
fax: 0161 226 3813 0161 227 0487

www.stbedescollege.co.uk

Disclaimer:
This message contains confidential information and is intended only for abuse@melbourne.co.uk. If you are not abuse@melbourne.co.uk you should not disseminate, distribute or copy this e-mail. Please notify the Network Administrator immediately by e-mail (admin@stbedescollege.co.uk) if you have received this e-mail by mistake and delete this e-mail from your system. E-mail transmission cannot be guaranteed to be secure or error-free as information could be intercepted, corrupted, lost, destroyed, arrive late or incomplete, or contain viruses. St Bede’s College therefore does not accept liability for any errors or omissions in the contents of this message, which arise as a result of e-mail transmission.

Well I would just like to comment if I may Helen and I address these comments to the interested readers and not you dear girl.

Para 1. Note immediately she is introducing herself as a nymphet, having been born sometime after the 1960s.

Para 2. I have been blogging on this subject of pupil abuse at St Bede’s since 2010 but never that I know of, have demanded litigation/compensation for victims although I do know there are a couple of law suits on the subject pending.

Para 3. If I have ever posted libellous content I would like to know and if she knew her subject, she should have written to me and I would certainly consider removing it, but one woman’s libelous content is often just a bag of shite. I agree that to some my blog could be offensive, it is meant to be so to those implicated but it was never racist but in one case might have been politically incorrect but I am not one for politics.

As I described in my posting of 9th February 2014, my blog went into graphic detail to shake the reader from their complacency into reality and not let the described depravity be softened by pretty language. If an 18+ filter is needed for such reality it is up to the parents and college to do this on their computers. Our hosting company have no power in that matter at all.

Certainly my daughter, who does not run a web optimisation company has never interfered or took any part in my blog except to comment occasionally. It is ranking highly because many people are interested in the obvious deterioration in the school and the blog is widely read. My daughter in fact went to St Bede’s and had a great time there and received a very good education before going on to Oxford University. She often praises her teachers but at the same time recognises the obvious faults in the management system under John Byrne when she was there in the 1980s and 90s which have multiplied under the present management.

The potential safeguarding situation Helen talks of is something within her control, the bigger safeguarding issue has been pointed out to the school by the Independent Schools Inspectorate and they have said in their report how badly the management have performed on this score. It is that that should be concentrated on, not my blog.

Para 4. It is a lot more difficult to take a blog down than young Helen thinks and there are far worse things on the internet than my postings. She could start by trying to take down the easily accessible porn sites or perhaps she does not mind her little kids viewing those.

The threat of Garda and GMP is just what it is, a bag of shite. We know these boys in blue have become a bunch of illiterate thugs these days, eg Barton Moss but they have more to do than come round for a cup of tea at my house. Does she think she is a school ma’am castigating her pupils, the silly woman.

So Helen West, go south with your comments. If you see libel somewhere show me and I will be happy to consider removing it. Otherwise, shut up. Better still, concentrate on putting right the obvious short-comings at Bede’s before you go round trying to break my windows.

Now the board of it looks like 17 governors, two or three for every day of the week, have been sworn in and lawyers abound, so why do they not write to me in the first instance instead of this stupid woman. This e-mail from Miss West has been badly written, poorly composed and shockingly thought out which is all you can expect from modern day St Bede’s.

Well I am back online after suffering an attack last Thursday and me only discovering it on Friday night and these computer anoraks who only work five days a week not getting into gear until Monday meant I was bereft for five days.  It is like having your legs cut off and the longer I am off air, the more frustrated I become, lashing out at everyone within hearing distance,  Ignorance and bad information allied to complacency sets me up to be a horrible person.  But it is over now, I am back on form and eager to please, albeit with a different set up which is taking time to learn.

Things have certainly been happening on the Bedian front judging by the comments on the blog after Ms West’s essay into blowing me aside but let us just let things take their course.  I have no further news on that scene so let us wait.

In the meantime I will tell you of my trip to Cork last week.  We had been invited down to Rebel Country but Storm Darwin struck Ireland on Wednesday 12th February, arguably the worst recorded storm in Irish history.  Certainly off Kinsale a record wave of 25metres high hit an offshore weather station.  The storm created untold damage to the country south of a line between Dublin and Galway.  This was followed by freezing temperatures creating black ice in all southern counties.  We had a 200 mile drive through Ballaghaderreen, Charlestown, Tuam, Galway, Limerick into Cork via Charleville and Buttevant.  So early Thursday we were having second thoughts but in the end decided to chance it.  We were pleasantly surprised, the early sun soon burnt off the ice and a fine day ensued on our trek south but in the big sky of Ireland on both sides of the road some places were still having it rough,

Evidence of the previous day’s turbulence was easy to see, south of Galway thousands of acres were flooded and around Limerick, tree after tree had been blown over like matchsticks, but the council men had been active and the roads were clear.  Before Charleville, a whole garage and petrol station had been flattened, the canopy blown over onto workshops and showrooms.  Signs, fences and walls all in disarray were an unhappy sight all along the way, with electricity board men round every bend trying to reconnect power to cut off areas.  Even on Sunday night thousands of homes and farms were still cut off causing havoc to milking systems, workshops and general living arrangements.

But then after a four hour drive, God smiled on us, we had booked into Garnish House, a guest house owned by a lovely lady, Joanna Lucey, more by luck than good judgement.  It had been recommended by our son, who is doing a culinary course at Cork Institute of Technology.  What a find was Garnish House, from the moment Joanna opened the door and welcomed us in.  After a 200 mile drive, a cup of tea is very welcome but what Joanna gave us was a full blown afternoon tea.  Scones, fruit bread and pastries and lashings of  Barry’s tea.  We were fully replenished in no time and ready for the high spots of Cork.

A rendez-vous with our son and a visit to the English Market set us up.  The Queen was there last year and was impressed and as Joanna said if it was good enough for the queen it should be good enough for us.  It was six or seven years since last I was there and certainly the place had been tarted up but the quality of the food was as good as ever, especially the meat stalls.  There can be few places as good as it in this world I’m sure.  We bought pates, rilettes and sausage and spent a happy couple of hours just wandering.  We then had a cider in Cork’s oldest pub, lit by candles at 5.30pm, it felt like a lock-in and then sauntered off to a lovely restaurant across the river Lee which was in full flow, after days of rain and storm.  The part of Cork we walked through had been under water for days and even now the river was lapping at the top of the arches of the bridges, all ready to invade again.

The restaurant had been selected again by son, on Bridge Street up from St Patrick’s Bridge.  It was called Star Anise, a clean decent looking bistro with no frippery and obviously popular when at 6.00pm there were already 26 diners.  I had the seafood chowder, big lumps of red and white fish, prawns and mussels in a creamy fish broth which was helped down with  delicious house breads, I then had the fish of the day which happened to be turbot.

You could tell how good the chef was, I read somewhere that when you are cooking white fish, you have a five second window between under done and over done, this chef had it timed to the second, resulting in a firm and tender fish on a bed of al dente vegetables in a saffron sause.  A carafe of house chenin blanc washed the lot down perfectly.

Back to Garnish House and our lovely clean and comfortable room for a glass or two of Malbec before the bed beckoned.  Son cleared off for an early start next day when we would be seeing him again.  We slept for 10 hours before showering and breakfast and here we come to the bit where God really smiled.  I have stayed in some places in my time and ate getting on for 25,000 breakfasts but never once have I seen a breakfast the like of what Joanna and her team put on.  Porridge with honey and cream, 15 different fruits with home-made yoghurt, compotes of caramelised fruits laced with cognac, whiskey or Baileys Irish Cream.  Fish of all sorts including kippers and smoked salmon, assorted meats and cheeses.  Traditional me went for bacon, sausage, scrambled eggs and delight, delight, potato herb cakes.  Joanna could see I was enjoying myself and bought another two of these delicious herb cakes to the table.  It was all washed down with pots of freshly ground coffee and then she said “I’m sorry I cannot offer you more”.  A delightful woman with a lovely, lilting local accent.

All I can say to any reader is that if you ever fetch up in Cork, seek out the Garnish House, opposite the gates of University College Cork on Western Road.  You will be overwhelmed with the welcome and the bill.  For the two of us, with all that was thrown in, 79 euro was for nothing.  An incredible experience and thank you Joanna Lucey and your staff for making our short stay so memorable.  We will go back to Garnish House whenever we are in Cork and if you my dear reader ventures that way, try a meal in the Star Anise.

Well at lunch-time that day we were up at CIT for a meal, Paul was commis chef to his friend, Eileen.  It was not as good as the last time when son was chef de jour.  I had a passable butternut squash and red pepper soup, followed by a pork vindaloo which was horrible, but the ice cream that son had made was very good.  Helen had decent fish cakes stuffed with red and white fish, the seasoning could have been better with a good looking lamb shank to follow with shovel fulls of vegetable and mash.

We could not stay long the weather was threatening, floods were expected with the afternoon tide and we had to cross the river.  We had an uneventful four and half hour drive home in appalling weather.  Once home we snacked on English Market goodies, a sup of wine and an early, but surly night after I discovered my computer had been attacked by some unknown low life.

Timothy Rustige Trial Part 1

We were up early, 4am, for our journey down to Dublin.  It was perfect weather, 2C in the West, 4C in Dublin.  Terminal 2 was very quiet, only a few last minute stragglers for the rugby match at Twickenham that afternoon.  Our plane to Aberdeen had real propellers, a brand new AVT something or other.  We landed in Scotland in bright sunshine and 9C. It was a big day of rugby, all the pubs were packed out.  Scotland v Italy were first up and I thought I would watch the second game, Ireland v England.  I tried three pubs, there were bouncers on doors letting nobody else in.  I gave up and went and watched it in solitary confinement in my hotel room.

Up at 6.00am Sunday 23^rd February 2014, a momentous day in our lives, the start of a week we thought at the time was full of promise but deteriorated very quickly.  The reason for our visit, Helen my wife, accompanied me, was that for some years I have been supporting the Hollie Greig campaign seeking justice for a young Downes Syndrome girl from Aberdeen, who was systematically raped by a ring of Aberdeen professional and legal people led by her father Dennis Mackie.  Robert Green, a Warrington man, more than anybody has brought this campaign to the attention of the public and has been imprisoned for his actions.  His main grief being the inaction of the ex-Procurator Fiscal of Grampian region, Elish Angiolini, a scrawny Govan chancer of a lawyer, who refused over a ten year period to investigate the case with the police.  She went on to be Procurator Fiscal for Scotland and then Lord Advocate until she retired nearly two years ago, at the early age of 50, to become Principal of St Hugh’s College in Oxford.  Some might consider this to be a bolt hole, well constructed by the establishment.

Robert Green continued the campaign when he was released from prison in 2012 after being given a 12 month sentence for his alleged Breach of Peace and others fuming at the injustice joined the fray including a fellow from Altrincham, Timothy Rustige, who managed a blog called Rusty’s Skewed News Views and the organisation he was connected with, Prisoners of Conscience, ran an e-mail campaign on the announcement of Angiolini’s insertion as Principal of St Hugh’s.  They tried to tell as many people concerned with this appointment of the dangers of employing Angiolini with all its baggage.  This infuriated Angiolini that much she had the Grampian Police invade Manchester and arrest Timothy at his home in Altrincham and they confiscated all his computer equipment.  He was arrested for causing her “fear and alarm” a criminal matter and not under defamation, which she pleaded later in court was what it was, the criminal route being more able to control.  Since then he has been arrested three or four times, held for a short time and then told to find his own way home.  The last time was 19^th February this year, five days before his postponed trial date.  The now Scottish Police considered he was a flight risk even though he showed them his plane ticket to Aberdeen and his hotel reservation and while they were at it they confiscated more computer equipment. Timothy appeared in court the next day, Thursday 20^th February 2014.  The local Sheriff immediately threw the case out but Timothy still had to fly back to Manchester at his own cost.  To my mind Scottish legal intimidation knows no bounds.

The case now starts tomorrow, Monday 24^th February 2014.  Robert Green was going to be Timothy’s main witness, but no, Robert had been arrested on 12^th February for alleged breach of bail conditions and was incarcerated in Perth prison, awaiting indictment.  Would you believe they, the Scottish legal thugs, can hold a person for 110 days prior to indictment and we are expecting not to see Robert, if at all we do see him, until early June.  We do understand however that he is being treated very well by the Governor and staff at Perth but it is no place to be for a 68 year old man when young murderers and thugs run free on bail and young children being raped and not investigated with all the evidence available.  The main result of all this blatant victimisation is that Robert will not now appear for Timothy.

Timothy is due in Aberdeen today, 23^rd February 2014 and we have arranged to stay in the same hotel, we await his presence with anticipation.  We have never met but corresponded frequently over the last while.  He is due at 1.00 pm and meets his legal aid team at 4.00pm, so we should have time for a preliminary chat and hopefully a glass of beer this evening.  Over the last few days, even with the tribulations of arrest Timothy has appeared fairly sanguine about the whole affair refusing to let the Stasi/Gestapo behaviour of Scottish Police get to him, in fact he has been laughing at their behaviour.  Let me just say that Timothy is a 65 year old man, yes another pensioner hoicked out of his home in the North West of England to face charges under a foreign jurisdiction, a jurisdiction unfathomable to most.  He has spent the last 30 odd years running Prisoners of Conscience from first of all his previous home in Manila, to now from his home in Altrincham, helping prisoners jailed for their principles all over the world.  He is well used to dictatorial police states, so these skirted Jock plods from Aberdeen do not worry him and the irony of the situation amuses him somewhat.

What is very obvious however is that the UK seems to be going down the same perfidious road as all the rest of the totalitarian states in the world.  Today Iraq, Libya, Egypt, Syria and Ukraine, tomorrow the UK, America etc. We the people will have our say and make the politicians realise they have overstepped the mark big time.  Revolution is on the way.  These suited and sometimes bewigged bastards, especially those in skirts and knives down their socks, are finished.  They do not realise how close to the tipping point they really are at.

Timothy bounds through the door of the hotel, his appearance a total surprise.  I was expecting a tall avuncular figure, slightly stooped with age but what came through the door was a fit, medium size bundle of energy, looking more like 45 than 65, with a military swagger about him, culled from his time in the Philippines when he was attached to the American Intelligence Service from his unit in the Rhodesian Army.  He is attuned to a 7.4km jog every morning and eats all the correct food and is dressed in combats.  He is ready for a fight.  We talk for an hour before he jogs off to meet his legal team and if it wasn’t obvious before, we are found to be of like minds and immediately gel.  As he said the worse they can now do is give him 12 months and that will only toughen him up, make him even tougher than he already is.  He returns even more confident and is pleased with the way his legal aid team are performing.

The real situation now is that Scottish Law is entirely and conveniently different from English Law, so how can Scottish Police come down to England and arrest a man and bring him up to Scotland to be tried for an alleged offence committed in England about an English matter, ie. Angiolini’s suitability for her new job of Principal of St Hugh’s College in Oxford.  It is now over 12 months since Timothy’s first arrest, so the matter reverts from one of solemn procedure where the trial is by jury, to one of summary procedure whereby the accused is tried by a sheriff alone.  The sheriff appointed in this case by the accuser will be jumping for joy.

Monday 24^th February 2014, we are up early to meet Belinda McKenzie for breakfast, she came off the overnight sleeper from London, Belinda has been a warrior for all things wrong in the UK and has supported Robert Green in all his travails and is today holding a demonstration outside the court with a few Scottish friends she has managed to gather through this  nightmare.  The Sheriff’s Court starts at 10.00am in Court 2, the main corridor is thronged, things go on in Aberdeen of a weekend that even the police cannot control adequately, with the oil there is a feeling of the Wild West about the place.

It becomes immediately apparent that two stories are being played out in Court 2, Timothy’s case itself and the ins and outs of the Hollie Greig affair.  The personae of Timothy’s case are Sheriff Derek Pyle, the judge who has been brought in from outside the region, the Procurator Fiscal or prosecuting counsel; McIntosh, I did not get his first name, but he has been picked from outside the region also, Edinburgh in fact; Mr David Moggach, Timothy’s legal aid barrister and Graham Morrison, Timothy’s legal aid solicitor.  The personae in the Hollie Greig affair are Sylvia Major, Ann Royal and Winifred Dragon, three middle aged and well- upholstered named abusers of Hollie Greig.  Winifred Dragon stands apart from the other two with a male escort, it seems there has been a schism and they now do not communicate.  Along with these three women sits another mysterious type, equally well up holstered, who so the word on the street informs us is a MI5 disinformation activist who goes under the name of Rachael Keely, her real name I was told is Mags O’Neill, married to some Socialist big-wig in the town.  Why she should associate herself with these women is obvious if disinformation is her ploy.  She seems anxious to talk to us all but gets no encouragement except from Belinda, who seems to know her well enough.  Sylvia Major’s husband, who was also a named abuser of Hollie Greig but carefully died some years back, was chief forensic officer for Grampian Police.  Personae connected to the two stories are Belinda McKenzie, five good men and true from Aberdeen, who have been wronged by Grampian and now Scottish Police, in abuse cases in the past and Helen and myself.  Overseeing all this rabble is the burly court police officer and the humour rationed Court Usher and the Clerk of the Court, a lady, who did nought as far as I could see until the dying minutes.

The prosecution witnesses were first up.  We had a secretary at St Hugh’s who said she received e-mails denouncing Angiolini and then in all her finery, the lady, now Dame, appeared for what was possibly two hours of questioning by Procurator Fiscal, from now on known as PF.  She spoke mainly of the Holly Greig case and tried to explain that she had nowt to do with it, that the police had examined it and said there was no case.  How they could do that without interviewing named abusers is beyond my realm of thought.  She explained how full of fear and alarm she was with this campaign against her at St Hugh’s and in fact how boring it got and how all her friends rallied round and how it had done more good than harm for her.  She had received an avalanche of e-mails from different IP addresses and that she is still receiving them, even though the courts remit is for a period during February and March 2012 and that Timothy Rutlidge sent them all, even funnily enough one from France where the well- travelled Timothy has never been.  Angiolini, for an experienced lawyer, appeared nervous in the dock, her hands trembling, her papers shaking as she explained that a mother of two children should not expect e-mails of this nature despising her sexuality.  She made one big mistake when she said she would have blamed all this bile on its source which was Ann Greig but as she knew Hollie’s mother was mentally ill and action against her would have worsened her condition, she pursued Timothy, the alleged scribe, instead.  Now this ploy was tried on Ann by the legal system 12 or 13 years ago when she first made her complaint against the paedophile ring.  They tried to section her then which the psychiatrists threw out on examination.  They did the same with Robert Green last week, all to no avail.  Old Elish, 53 years old now and who is now rather broad of beam having lost her scrawniness in the comforts of St Hugh’s armchairs, waddled off to hopefully examine her conscience, if in fact she ever had one.  One other point I noticed and thought strange for a lawyer, she rarely answered the questions put to her but went off on tangents of her own, the PF continually reining her back.

More prosecution witnesses including some police witnesses followed who continually tripped themselves up and I felt could have been more closely cross-examined by Mr Moggach.  It was the first sign that these jokers of legal aid were there only for the performance. The fourth witness a secretary from Aberdeen University gave a lovely smile to the well upholstered quartet another small sign that this game was being well managed.  The fifth witness was the star of the day when he took the stand, Detective Terry Laing of the Special Operations and Terrorism Branch of Scottish Police. 26 years a plod and no mistake, preferring to stand in the dock rather than sit as he explained his role in Operation Chronicle.  We all looked at each other, the Scottish Police certainly take things seriously when it comes to 65 year old terrorist pensioners,  seven of them had come down on a jolly two years previously to arrest a youthful 63 year old and confiscate his family’s computers.  It was obvious lies were being told and in cross-examination Moggach’s hand was very light.  I could have done a far better job myself.  It was now 5.00pm, a previous case came to light, the court was postponed for two days to reconvene on Thursday.  A nuisance costing me an extra £500 pounds but I was determined to stick this one out.  Belinda McKenzie had disappeared at lunchtime, back to London as it turned out after listening to Angiolini’s testimony.

Tim, Helen and myself went back to the hotel, chewed the cud, drank some wine, had hotel fish and chips and retired at 9.00pm.  Tuesday dawned and lots of e-mails to answer.  Our two day furlough will soon be over.  We booked our return flight for Saturday at 12.00 noon.  One piece of news I received the night before which I find intriguing is that it is almost 26 years to the day that Angiolini and that corrupt, lantern jawed BBC witch, Esther Rantzen, set up the first branch of Childline in Aberdeen.  Having been listening all week to conversations, it struck me that Aberdeen is  the epicentre of child sexual abuse in Scotland and what better place to be to have the pick of the crop.  These two marked women underline the knowledge we all have that Childline is a child molester not a child protector

Timothy Rustige Trial Part 2

Tuesday and Wednesday, 25^th and 26^th February.  We have to sit here now for two days and enjoy Aberdeen  whilst a previous case conveniently reaches denouement, a dour grey town with lots of activity surrounding the docks.  You tend to become bored with granite when it surrounds you but if you look up you can get inspired with the great masonic cupolas and clock towers.  The chisel and hammer were certainly badges of honour round here.  The two days lazing in armchairs gives, Timothy, Helen and myself a chance to get better acquainted.  Tim turns out to be a great guy, grievously harmed by this case.  Why should this woman, Angiolini, now no longer a public figure have the power to waste millions of pounds of public money on protecting her memory when everybody knows of her dubious and illegal dealings.

Tuesday passed and Wednesday was immediately livened up by Belinda McKenzie’s posting on the “Free Robert Green” website dated 25^th February, a site that she solely manages.  If you remember after lunch on 24^th after listening to the two hours of Angiolini’s testimony, she high tailed it back to London, having spent five hours in Aberdeen.  Her excuse was she thought she was about to be arrested.  The content of the blog, entitled Advantage Angiolini, said that Timothy was obviously guilty, this was followed by a comment from John Asprey saying that Timothy should change his plea to guilty and fall on the decency of the Sheriff.  For a start there is no decency up here and as Timothy said “why plead guilty when you did not commit a crime, surely that is illegal”.  The thing that annoyed me was that Belinda McKenzie holds herself up as champion of the people who are wronged.  She supports Robert Green in his quest for justice for Hollie Greig and she has her finger in many pies but it strikes me that her reversal of favour with Timothy smacks of something darker.  I commented immediately on the said blog telling them to hang on because the case is not half over and I noticed later that Ally from Prisoners of Conscience had done the same.  Injustices should not be perpetrated by so called champions of justice.  Belinda McKenzie be warned your cover could be blown.  We, who are in Aberdeen, feel absolutely let down by her actions.  Why, oh why, did she come up here on Monday, she could have written that piece in the comfort of her own home in London without going through the hardships of a 20 hour train journey.  Late on that night she rang Timothy in a nervous state and said it was all a mistake and that she would redact.  As far as I could see over the following days, she didn’t redact but in a comment she apologised.  Nowhere near good enough Belinda, I’m afraid.

It is now Thursday and Day 2 of the trial, 10.00am in Court 2 and the same personae, in the public gallery four well upholstered ladies, five local lads, victims of non-investigated child sexual abuse in the past and are courage personified, scared of nobody and myself and Helen.  On the stage because the proceedings are becoming more a  game or a play for the theatre are the same personae as Monday.  The Court Usher, who seemed to have had his humour surgically removed some years previously and who told us all not to eat, drink or take notes as he finished his mid-morning coffee and his fellow keeper of peace, the burly copper, who had remnants of his, humour that is, still available, were both present and the same legal types.  First up were more police witnesses.  It has to be understood that this case has been evolving for over 700 days by now and not once has Timothy been asked a question by the police.  This latest evidence was again about the arrest which we knew inside out.  Eventually the Chief Inspector in charge of Operation Chronicle was called.  I was just making a note of his name before he came to court when the burly policeman grabbed me by the shoulder and hustled me out into the corridor, I was barred from the Court, for the next two hours the evidence continued but it appears it was the same old, same old, the policemen not corroborating and Maggoch not pressing in cross-examination.

My disbarment, although a nuisance, was educational.  I was thrust into the main corridor at 11.00am and shortly afterwards out came one of the five local lads barred for asking one of the policemen a question after he had been excused by the Sheriff, his offence was for intimidating a witness.  The corridor was full of local humanity, all mumbling about the gross inhumanity of the legal system.  Within their midst were unconcerned legal aid jokers in wigs and gowns full of their own importance in the way they smugly sought out and addressed their appointed clients.  My mate, the witness intimidator, told me his story.  He had a daughter with a previous partner who had been abused by his partner’s father, the child’s grandfather from the age of four onwards.  He had appeared in front of Angiolini, in camera.  Both she and the local PF laughed at him, and told him the usual, “no case to answer”.  This was in 2004 and since then he has been blogging about corruption in Aberdeen.  He started talking to the assembled about Court No 2 and the big cover up of paedophilia in Scotland.

Paedophilia it seems, because it affects the majority of the population here in Aberdeen, does not go down well, especially when it is mentioned that in Court No 2 are people trying to cover up the subject and pointing at me he said we had been thrown out of the court unjustly.  I was expecting a riot, the police moved in and quelled the discontent but I was a hero for two minutes.  It seemed I had missed nothing new in evidence, Moggach had broken no new ground in cross-examination.  While waiting outside the court, a tall athletic man had gone in and came out ten minutes later having himself made notes, his book and pen in one hand.  As we left the building for lunch he was waiting with two expert photographers, judging by the quality of their cameras, they started taking photos of us, not one but many.  Three of our guerrillas ran at them and started to disrupt their actions, it all became quite surreal.

After lunch the burly plod allowed me back whilst Moggach started to cross-examine the police computer expert, very lightly as was his norm, he probably knew less about computers than I did.  It is now Timothy’s turn, he expressed his innocence and said although the IP address which churned out some of the e-mails was his, because he paid the telephone bill, there was two Timothy Rustiges and there were four Rustys, he has three sons, besides all the Prisoners Of Conscience members, who used to meet at his flat.  The authors could have been anybody.  He explained the role of Prisoners of Conscience, supporting prisoners of principle round the world who have been unjustly imprisoned.  Again Moggach said nothing preferring to listen instead of leading his client.  The Procurator Fiscal stood up in his role of prosecutor and launched into Tim.  He had shown no talent until now but he was very fierce with Timothy, trying to rubbish everything he had said, however Timothy stood his ground and remained calm.  I looked at the court clock after noticing proceedings taking on a sudden urgency, it was 3.55pm.  The PF finished his cross-examination quickly, turned to the Sheriff and said what more can I say my lord and that was his closing speech.  Moggach stood up spluttered two sentences about Angiolini who should have not have been too worried and that was his final effort, no mention of the considerable doubt about who actually wrote the e-mails.  Timothy stood up and asked if he could speak, to say that he had paperwork to prove he was in Wales mending a boat engine in Holyhead from 26th February to 3rd March of the period in review and when Angiolini received a lot of these e-mails. Moggach although knowing this, had not brought it out in examination and Timothy wanted it known.  The Sheriff silenced Timothy and turned to him and said guilty as charged.  The whole thing was over in two minutes.  There was just enough time for the Clerk of the Court to tell Timothy to return for sentencing on 27^th March 2014 at 10.00am, once the court had received a Social Services report from Manchester.  One final word from the sheriff was that prison was an option he was considering.  All over in a flash, we looked at each other not believing the speed of the coup de grace.  The four well up holstered ladies gloated, their warped minds thinking they had won the day.  Alas ladies this campaign will haunt you for some years yet.

Timothy still does not know for what offences he was charged or for that matter for what offences he was found guilty of.  He has asked but not been told, legal aid is a ridiculous uncaring, low-empathy department, solely there for the pockets of the lawyers.  Perhaps even the Sheriff does not know the offences for which he has given his verdict.  My advice having seen Scottish Law in action would be to not recognise the jurisdiction of the court or fight the case yourself.  You will certainly save time and energy, even if you do end up with the same result.  Legal aid seems to me to be a travesty of justice.  People put in place to fill a hole in the game, not even young bloods learning the art of advocacy were apparent, these men were in their 50s having learnt all they could know of the law, yet failing to grasp they were representing mankind and all its responsibilities and repercussions and only interested in the large income gained for being a stooge to the PF.

I asked Timothy if he had grounds for appeal and he named five points all of which are mentioned in this blog, I said go for it, the five points are very important.  He said I have been told that if I appeal I lose my legal aid.  A disheartened but not defeated Timothy flew back to Manchester on Friday in the arms of a cleft stick.  We have another day to wait before we can leave this accursed place.

Writing this in reflection on the week, the morning after the verdict, with a PF sent up from Edinburgh and a Sheriff brought in from elsewhere it was obvious the prosecution expected to win, ally this to an inept but skilfully inept performance from a legal aid team in Timothy’s defence and he was bound to be found guilty.  Angiolini could not be seen to lose.  This morning she will be feeling good, but one more cloak of ignorance of Hollie Greig has been torn from her shoulders.  We will get to the final cloak shortly.

Meanwhile Robert Green is still incarcerated in Perth Prison awaiting indictment on matters unknown.  The information we were able to glean from the court officials yesterday was that the court has 110 days to serve the indictment from date of arrest.  Usually this procedure takes on average 70 to 90 days.  Robert has been there now for 16 days, so it could be another 64 days before we find out why he has been arrested.  At some stage somebody will think up a story.  I am sure that the Sheriffs and PFs who are members of that famous Violate Club, whose names are now known to many, are shaking in their fur lined boots as they await the outcome of proceedings.  What kind of God-awful society do we exist in, when the likes of Heggarty, the head of the Legal Aid department, who was caught shagging an under-age boy in a public toilet in Glasgow and McFarlane from the Procurator Fiscal’s office in Edinburgh, who was shagging a whore down a back entry in broad daylight when surprised by two plods and who attacked them, injuring both.  When his computer was searched an untold number of child sexual abuse photographs were found.  Angiolini said neither case was in the public interest and their antics were dismissed, both men remained Scot free.

I indict the Crown Service of Scotland for Angiolini’s behaviour.  Time and again it has been found out that in her time as PF, she failed to employ the law in a just and humane manner.

People have asked me was our trip worth it.  Well this week has cost me over £2000 just to watch Timothy get carved up and I have to say that I would spend every penny I have, to experience the evil I have been exposed to this week.  People need to face evil to understand what mankind is up against and if my blog can be read by a few thousand people who absorb its content that £2000 is cheap for its ability to teach

Well events are coming along nicely in the case of alleged abuse of pupils by Monsignor Duggan, Rector of St Bede’s College from 1950 -1966, 16 years when unbridled sexual abuse of young boys was an everyday occurrence in the life of the College.  Carefully picked and even more carefully groomed young boys were dreadfully handled by Duggan and some of his fellow members of the clerical staff.

On 28th April 2014 Panone, the Manchester solicitors are bringing a case in the Manchester courts against the Salford Diocese, amongst others I understand, for the alleged sexual abuse of two boys in the 1955 intake at the College.  These two boys were alerted to the ongoing cause I was waging against the Diocese and the school since 2010 but only came forward after the painfully poor apology by Brain, the Bishop of Salford, published in the Manchester Evening News on 15th March 2011.

Instead of contacting me, they decided to make their own way and contacted Panone in about 2012.  A mistake on their part I consider because my contact with Panone has left naught but bad taste in my mouth.  However these two boys, old men now at 70 years of age, need all the support we can give them, so I ask all that can to be there for them on 28th April.  I do not yet know times or even which court it is to be tried in but will let you know courtesy of this blog nearer the event.

Of course this case is only really a sideshow to the big event.  The cause I started in early 2010 and which gathered pace after the foolish bishop made the limp apology in 2011 which saw me disentangle myself from the cloying and lying arms of the obfuscating and devisive Child Safeguarding Commission of the Salford Diocese led by that mountebank cleric, Barry O’Sullivan and that silver tongued lizard of a lawyer, Michael Devlin.  Their sole purpose was to cover up and deter complaints of clerical sexual abuse against vulnerable children, the exact opposite of their polished policy.

Anderson Olivarius, like knights in shining armour, came galloping over the hill and their senior partner, Ann Olivarius, took on the burden of my cause.  Ann, who only recently called me the biggest pain in the arse she has ever met, set out with her team, who have worked their socks off for 2 years and ten months, intending to turn our case into a groundbreaking event in the area of British law with which we are dealing.  This case if we are lucky might come off this year but look out for it and certainly I will announce it when the time comes.  It is due in the High Courts of Justice in London

As regards the side show, which nevertheless is still very important, they have 16 witnessses to help prove the abuse took place, we have over 40 supporting the fellows who were victims of this horrible abuse.  It promises to be a shocking indictment of the Diocese and possibly a killer blow to the school, which has been on a downward path since William Green, another cleric, received 8 years in prison in 2008 for his awful abuse of young boys at the school whilst there as a teacher of religion in the 1980s.  I would expect the MEN to make a limp performance at both trials but do not rely on them for truth and honesty.  That will only come from this pen and others who are absolutely disgusted with the way the Catholic Church have acted in this instance.

Before I go let me remind you of a certain event in 2010.  Sometime in September of that year an excited Barry O’Sullivan rang me one Saturday morning. Paul he said, the bishop, monsignor Quinlan, Michael Barber (the head of Bede’s at the time) and I had a meeting yesterday and out of it came evidence of a very damning nature against Duggan, evidence that is so damning that I cannot talk on the phone or even write about it in an e-mail, I suggest you get over here as soon as possible and sit with us round the table.  Amazed by this turn of events I made travel enquiries and set a date for 5th November 2010.  In the interim O’Sullivan engineered a breakdown in our relationship, subsequentially browbeating me over the phone in language that the clergy are not supposed to know.  He called me an unreliable and unworthy advocate for the men I represented (there was no lawyers at this stage).  I was heartbroken but I kept the meeting alive and sent my proxies along who were accepted as long as the diocese had my solemn assurance that I had resigned from the cause.  I suppose we can all tell a fib if needs must.  The three proxies went to the meeting on 5th November whilst I waited outside.  The proxies asked the question of the new and damning evidence, only O’Sullivan had turned up for the diocese and he said with a perfect Catholic poker face, “I have no recollection of saying that to Mr Malpas”.

They obviously have known all about Duggan from at least that day in September 2010 if not before, yet they have chosen to hide it and make us fight every inch of the way.  They are the biggest bunch of religious evil tosspots that I have ever met.  Michael Barber, left Bede’s shortly afterwards, I can only think he had a different policy on how to deal with this problem.

Two days ago, I had my first face to face encounter with the other side of the Catholic Church, what you could call the spiritual, good side of the Church, as opposed to the fudgers and clerical paedophiles, liars, dissemblers, disinformation specialists, obfuscators, deviants and general no good arse holes that the Catholic Church throw up anytime there are questions asked which might undermine their position in the hearts and minds of people.  Of course the people are getting fewer and fewer by the week and those fudgers are working overtime to bring the herd back into the shippon.  Knowing this the Church, realising the said mission is not going to be as well attended as those in the past where people struggled with one another to reach a pew only to be called a bastard by the fire and brimstone spewing priest brought in specially for the purpose, have sent out gangs of woebegotten, in cuckoo land canvassers to try and drum up custom.

And so it was on Friday in the pouring rain these two holy women came knocking on my door.  I was available and therefore answered.  They wanted to know if I was excited by the coming mission and would I like a programme of events.  Now it really was teeming down and one of these ladies, an old nun, sister someone or other was wilting under the weather, the other, a younger lady but not that young, was still sprightly.  If I was any kind of a decent Catholic, which I am not, I would have invited them in for a reviving cup of tea.  So I stood full square on the threshold, inviting a few drops on myself and answered their questions in as polite a manner as I thought possible.

You are a Catholic, the younger one said, querying my negativity.  I was I said until November 2009, when I experienced my Damascene moment, when the Murphy Report was published into the goings on in the Archdiocese of Dublin of those people who call themselves celibate priests one minute and the next as they fill the arseholes of 12 year old kids, they become lovers.  The old one took a step back from the partial shelter of the front elevation of the porch but the younger one persisted.  I know she said, it was horrible but in every organisation you will get a few bad apples.  I exploded, I said it would not matter to me if every priest in the Church was a paedophile and every nun was there helping in his dastardly deeds, at least you would know of them and do something about their tricks, like telling the local vigilantes or locking them all up for life.  No, I said severely to the holy women, my grievance is that for 63 years of my life I was conned by the Catholic Church.  They knew of the evil in their midst and chose to cover it up, chose to transfer the guilty paedophiles to another parish, another diocese, another country even, at the first hint of abuse.  So that the same dirty fudgers could play their game over and again with a fresh set of victims.  That ladies is what made me lose the cosiness of the Church, it was the biggest corporate cover up in history and you are saying it was just a few bad apples.  They are all bad apples and what they all say and do and believe in is just a heap of rotting vegetation.  Everybody who was in the know which includes all the religious should be locked up and the key thrown away.

The ladies were now stuttering and mildly farting as ladies tend to do but I had not finished, I thought they needed to know how regular Joes like me are thinking.  I said once I had got my head round this cover up problem and because I was retired and had time to think, I started to dissect all the teaching the Church had ever given to me but now without the silver lining and parachute, and the more I dissected the more I realised it was the biggest load of old bollocks that any sane person could take in.  They had us all brainwashed from birth, they had us all by our short and curleys with this threat of the fires of hell and how priests are a set above mankind, once removed from God.  I do somehow think there is some prime mover but it ain’t the God we all loved but now despise.

The poor ladies, now soaking wet through came up with one final last thought.  Well at least you still have your spirituality, the younger one said.  I said no, I have nothing but my conscience and my conscience says  have nowt to do with that Holy Roman Stinking Church of yours that you are asking me to attend.

We bade each other goodbye and dripping wet they wandered down the path in a daze.  I think they should understand how the man in the street really thinks, don’t you?   As so many people these days still fight shy of confronting the so called religious.  They need to know.  Also I hope they enjoy the mission they are on, these poor folk who have not had an original single thought in their heads for all their years on earth.

Well here we go again, into battle with eflow, the ever beloved agent of the Road Transport Authority, given wholehearted permission to come the bully on all who use the M50 motorway, which takes traffic north and south of Dublin on its industrial west side.  Some five years ago eflow again very, very quickly drew the battle lines when Helen and myself on a trip to Dublin used the toll, which we rarely do.  The following day Helen paid the toll, we had the bank statement as back-up.  eflow said we had not paid and so developed a long campaign ending up with me facing a bill for 5,000 euro or six months in prison and horror upon horror, a mention in Stubbs Gazette.  After a while longer they transferred the cudgel to a fudger and some son of a monkey, who ran a firm of legal chaps in at the back of John B’s pub in Listowel, Pierce and Fitzgibbon by name.  They carried on for a while until there headed paper ran out and they then agreed that I had paid, no apologies, nothing.  But that is the style of a bully.

Well this time round and it was sometime round 1st February 2014, we were returning from England, both of us very poorly with flu.  So poorly we hired a cabin on that afternoon sailing and went straight to bed.  I was so bad, Helen was driving and instead of going along the quays in Dublin and onto the N4, she made a wrong turn coming out of the docks and we ended up going through the tunnel and onto the M50 and the toll.  We eventually got home and straight to bed where we remained for three or four days, getting up only for emergencies.  In fact it served a purpose in that I lost all the weight I had put on in Manchester, so low was my consumption in those following days.  Recovered by the 6th or 7th February we forgot all about the toll payment until a couple of weeks later when Helen remembered and sent off the toll.  Lo and behold at roughly the same time we received a letter from eflow to say that we had not paid the toll of 3.10 euros and that there was now a penalty charge of 3.00 euro making our bill 6.00 euro.  Helen ignored this penalty charge as she had paid the toll albeit late and illness had prevented us from being punctual

A few weeks later whilst we were in Aberdeen, we received another letter from eflow to say that because we had not paid our original toll and the penalty of 3.oo euro, we now owed an additional penalty of 41.00 euro, bringing the total bill now to 47.10 euro.  This demand dated 20th February and which we did not get until 2nd March 2014 on our return gave us 56 days to pay otherwise they will slap an additional charge of 102.50 euros on us bringing the bill to 149.60 euro.  The sums are mounting but it is all computer driven and we will not write to a computer.  We will wait until we have a person to write to, if there is such an animal in eflow.

On the back of this latest demand eflow sets out our perfidious road to ignominy.  It says that the 2007 Road Act tells every vehicle passing through the toll that they have to pay the appropriate toll.  Section 64(8) of the Act says that a person who is liable to pay and fails is guilty of an offence and is liable to a fine of 5,000 euro or six months in prison.  Well that is OK for the toll dodgers but we have paid.

It says that I, as the registered owner who has entered an agreement in respect of paying tolls, am liable.  I accept their logic but I do not remember entering any agreement with anybody.  Without all of that to actually only give somebody less than 24 hours to pay before penalties apply is rather draconian.  There are any number of reasons why a driver cannot pay immediately.  The penalty payment is an ass and as far as I can judge, not applicable.

All I can now do is wait and accept my fate but I am sure there must be another blog or two in this story before it is finished.  If I could choose, my prison of choice would be Castlereagh, it is the handiest but I leave it entirely to the authorities.  What it does show is how the government, through its agents, are beginning to think that the people should respond to their wishes, whereas in a true democracy it is the government who should respond to the will of the people.  It also reminds me of the birth of the Antipodean nations, many a starving country boy was sent out there for life for stealing a loaf of bread.  Has anything changed in 300 years?