Had a lovely long lie in this morning, after staying up till 1.30 watching 'Enchanted April' on youTube. Lovely movie, a bit twee, but pleasant (poor Miranda Richardson has to kiss Jim Broadbent, acting one of his most oafish roles). I must be getting old... once upon a time I would have thrown up at the sound of the word 'heart-warming", but now I'm getting like the old ladies who come into the library in search of 'a nice story, dear'. They've had a lifetime of sorrow and personal difficulty, and now just want to read a nice story, no sex, no violence, no dysfunction. (I think at one time we even had a booklist called "Nice novels" or somesuch.)
You certainly don't get nice stories in the newspapers. Reading the Guardian yesterday about the Hillsborough football disaster in 1989. It now appears that police stood over witnesses to make them change their statements so that the police would look better. Eighty ambulances arrived but were not allowed into the ground, because police wanted to make the situation look like a riot gone wrong. An ambulance driver who removed part of the hoarding round the field to carry a victim to his ambulance was told by a policeman that he 'couldn't just vandalise stadium property'. It all makes horrific reading. Survivors suffered years of post-traumatic stress; some killed themselves rather than live with the memories.
And there's the ongoing saga about the paederasty of Jimmy Saville and the Beeb's atempt at a cover-up. And there's revelations that systematic child abuse took place in Welsh orphanages during the '70s, involving a highly-placed Tory politician, as yet unnamed. Two boys, 8 and 10, have been convicted for abducting and torturing two other boys, in eerie echoes of the James Bulger case - it just goes on and on.
Is it any wonder that a person might want to read a nice story for a change?
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