Before I continue with my exploits in Mongolia, now that I have returned to the UK, I should précis what happened outside the borders of the Land of Blue Sky. In these three weeks that I was away deserts of news – a veritable Gobi of originality. The old adage about being unconcerned about the bulletins when disconnected from them could not be more true, moreover. Returning from the north to Ulaanbaatar, I cadged some BBC World News on the television and my greatest joy was seeing George Alagiah front a current affairs slot – the mighty coming down from his primetime throne to help out the Foreign Office-funded channel. What was reported, these ‘olds’, might as well be sand shifted from dune to barren dune.
The football World Cup continued its interminable build-up. Enough already; let’s get it going and stop talking about it till then. That Pepsi advert with Thierry Henry coming up to some African kids with other celebrity soccer lunks in tow to say “Do you know who we are,” instead of being greeted with his name on the back of a shirt followed by the baffling formation of a square (is it a Zulu military thing or something?), should have suffered the indignity as these kids engaged in a frenetic bout of handballing. Henry might not have even been in this advert had France not cheated against Ireland.
The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico grew as exponentially as BP’s share price fell. The political opponents of Barack Obama try to pin the disaster on him despite a fairly competent federal response in unprecedented circumstances – next they will be blaming him for stubbing their toe in the shower.
Israel was being hauled over the coals of international opinion, again, for shooting first and holding limited inquiries later (though surely custom officials operating in daylight from coastal patrol boats would have been more adept at seizing illicit material than heavily-armed naval commandos bundling down from a helicopter in the middle of the night).
One shocking departure from all this plus ca change was the shocking gun rampage in Cumbria. Only earlier that day (Mongolia being seven hours ahead of Britain), probably musing on the latest random outbreak of violence in China of a fatal gun attack on three Chinese judges that had occurred the day prior, I was thinking how such few such massacres occur in the UK, only Hungerford in 1987 and Dunblane in 1996. It still is rare compared to countries like Germany or Finland, let alone the USA, though that is never comfort to the victims or their families. It was such a striking coincidence that I should be pondering Britain in this regard just hours before the terrible sequence. A total tragedy for everyone concerned with that part of the country.