Joomla! site syndication http://www.outsidethegates.com Tue, 07 Oct 2008 11:30:57 +0100 FeedCreator 1.7.2 http://www.outsidethegates.com/images/M_images/joomla_rss.png http://www.outsidethegates.com Joomla! site syndication http://www.outsidethegates.com/content/view/364/20/ Now that my mourning is over it is time to write the last piece for 'Outside the Gates'.Around about March 2007 my mother, Jessie Skeates was rushed into hospital with a severe chest infection. She was in her eightieth year and nobody thought she was going to survive very long. Her health had been getting progressively worse for the last twenty years and she was in constant pain; oesteporosis, diabetes, chronic asthma. All diseases on the increase as the population in Britain ages. Well she did survive and was discharged nine months later. The main reason for the stay in hospital lasting nine months was being infected in hospital by the MRSA bug. She was out of hospital for a few months before being rushed in again with a severe chest infection - the flu - and again she came through and was strong enough to be discharged. But she had been severely weakened and within weeks she was back in again.By this time the hospital was getting a bit fed up with my Mum and only kept her in for a few weeks before discharging her to a nursing home where she was for a week before suffering a massive heart attack and from which she finally died. I posted a notice of her death to this site on 01.07.08 and which came down the next day. It certainly attracted some attention in that short time. A comment was sent to a piece I had written over 18 months before about a friend of mine whose 20 year commemoration of his death I had attended. The piece was very critical of Mark's mother who I met at his hospital bedside. The comment was from someone claiming to be Mark's brother, though he never mentioned to me that he had a brother. I have no argument with the description of Mark's mother in the comment. She may very well be like that in other circumstances, but the description I gave is accurate for the one time I met her. The timing of the comment though confirms the vindictiveness which Mark was trying to leave behind when he moved to London.As I intimated in the opening line of this short article, this is the last posting to this site. It will now wither on the vine, as they say. Articles - Essays Wed, 10 Sep 2008 08:40:08 +0100 http://www.outsidethegates.com/content/view/362/20/ On Tuesday 24th June my mother suffered a severe heart attack following a long illness. She had been in hospital for 11 of the previous 12 months and died in the Weston Super Mare General Hospital on Thursday 26th June. Her funeral will beheld at the Ebden Road Crematorium on Monday 07.07.2008 at 11am. Articles - Essays Tue, 01 Jul 2008 15:11:57 +0100 http://www.outsidethegates.com/content/view/359/20/ Last June I posted a piece about my disabled car parking woes (content/view/349/). In it I pointed out the action of the local Tory MP Anthony Steen in leaving his car for 2 days in a disabled parking bay at Newton Abbot railway station and complaining about the level of provision of disabled parking spaces. There being to many as opposed to there being not enough. Well, he has made the news again, this time by spreading falsity about Romanians living in Britain and trafficking children.The story starts on the 24th January this year when the Metropolitan Police and Thames Valley Police carried out a joint operation in Slough called Operation Caddy. They raided 17 homes at dawn and took 10 children into care. The press and TV were invited along to witness the smashing down of doors as the police heroically save children who had been sold into slavery with criminal gangs by their Romanian parents and were, according to the Daily Mail front page the next day, Fagin's Heirs . ITN filmed the raid and the report with its sensationalised language is something to behold. (http://itn.co.uk/news/d3e910f2bb81354e20e03d3cdac919f0.html) The story also made headlines in other tabloid papers like the Daily Star. Articles - Essays Wed, 13 Feb 2008 07:55:29 +0100 http://www.outsidethegates.com/content/view/357/20/ I haven't written or posted anything to the site for at least a couple of months, having been asked to put up some photographs on a wall at the Red Wizard (http://www.theredwizard.com/index.php) cafe in Totnes. They are on the wall until the end of January. The fact I have been working on it is my excuse for the lack of writing and which will be rectified in the not to distant future. It seems appropriate that the photographs also be put up on the site. They all follow 'after the fold' as they say, and are fully captioned for a change. Articles - Essays Wed, 09 Jan 2008 08:09:40 +0100 http://www.outsidethegates.com/content/view/356/20/ In the late 1990s early 2000s, there was a period in which the medias - film, TV, press etc - produced fictions and documentaries about extraterrestial mass extinction being visited on the Earth by asteriods, comets or gigantic meteors. Serious, comedic, sometimes scientific and sometimes frightening, they, in the most part, played on the bipolar expectations of hope and dread in a superstition for the number 2000. In Christian countries at least. And there the Jesus Army marched in lockstep to the drumbeat of an elitist End Times theology, Armageddon for most and Rapture for the few. A cataclysmic millennialism. Whose computer burnt, the hard disc fried as the clock struck 00.00hrs 01.01.2000? Did any die with a phtt like a strangled, tired fart? I had a right giggle about apocalypse with the person I was house sharing with at the time. I would prefer to be around if it happened than not , was his sanguine take on the possibility of an asteroid strike.It's a state of mind, a perspective, an attitude I have tried to adopt in the eventuality of a nuclear war being unleashed, at the same time struggling, trying in my own limited way, to see that it doesn't. Preferring to be around to find out if the likes of metronomic liar Dick Cheney get to action the next level of their insanity, and that I act as witness, while I can, to the sheer malevolence of a misanthropic ideology trying to outlive its sell by date. Articles - Essays Fri, 16 Nov 2007 08:24:21 +0100