Free the ghost of poor Marley

WHAT WITH it being Christmas and all that, it’s appropriate that we should have a story about Marley’s Ghost … although in this case, the apparition isn’t the famous Dickens character but Rose West’s deceased hamster.

(You know, that’s a sentence I never expected to write.)

Poor Rose, currently incarcerated in Bronzefield Jail in Middlesex, is demanding a post mortem on her dead pet because she suspects that two other women prisoners poisoned it. Perhaps she shouldn’t feed her morning muesli to the hamster instead of eating it herself - not that I know anything about this grievous crime, officer.

Funnily enough, I never knew that people locked up in prison because of their crimes against society got to keep pets. Well, they never did in my day anyway. I suppose it’s to be expected. Hardly a week passes without the tabloids running a “prisoners live in luxury” story, detailing how the lags get free cable telly and fluffy slippers in their capacious quarters. Due anytime now is the annual “prisoners stuff their faces at Christmas” story about how the seasonal menu at Sutton Prison consists of a pigeon stuffed inside a pheasant stuffed inside a chicken stuffed inside a goose … with Ferrero Rocher chocolates left on every pillow. It won’t be: it’ll be wafer-thin institutional turkey, specially selected from birds with a sniffle, and the chef’s special four-day sprouts, four days being the time for which they’ve been boiled. But hey, that’s newspapers for you.

Anyway, back to the banged-up budgies. If prisoners are being allowed to have pets, why isn’t the RSPCA running a campaign to get them freed? Presumably Rose West’s hamster hadn’t committed any crime, so why was he doing life alongside a serial killer? It doesn’t seem fair.

Similarly, Ian Huntley’s hedgehog deserves a demonstration of do-gooders at the gates of Wakefield Prison. Mind you, in the current political climate, the jury is probably still out on Peter Sutcliffe’s pack of foxhounds.

ON WHAT must have been a very slow day, Sky News helpfully informs us that a five-year-old boy has killed a 445lb black bear in a forest in Arkansas. Now if he’d strangled it I’d have been impressed, but apparently the kid just hid up a tree and shot it.

Tre Merritt told a local TV station: “I seen the bear come out of a thicket and it was beside the road and I shot it.” (Remember that name, especially if you happen to emigrate to Arkansas and have to send your kids to the local high school in 10 years time.)

Tre was with his grandfather, who said he had whistled at the animal when it was 40 to 50 yards away, at which point it stood still long enough for the killer nipper to pull the trigger.
Seems a bit unfair to me. Couldn’t they have just locked the bear up with Rose West?
Incidentally, we don’t know the name of the bear, but we’ll have no speculation about that here if you don’t mind.

AMONGST A raft of new measures announced this week aimed at improving the lot of our children – free alcopops, table football games in classrooms, a complete ban of five-year-olds wearing thongs (or shooting bears) – was a pledge by Children’s Secretary Ed Balls to “flush out 17,000 bad teachers”.

Let’s just think about that for a minute. Why 17,000? Why not 16, 943? Why not 17,168? Who counted them, and how were they identified? Does everyone wearing a tweed jacket with leather elbow patches and carrying a copy of the Guardian count? Or are we at the other end of the spectrum, amongst the denim-wearing trendies who ask pupils to call them by their first name and then try to interfere with your daughter behind the bins at the school disco?
You see, however impressed Wee Gordie Broon wants us to be with these fantastic new measures, it just blows the whole thing apart when they come out with plainly stupid statements like that. We’re not all thickos – just those of us who passed through the education system in the past 15 years.

MORE CHRISTMAS cheer: Lollipop lady Margaret Russell has been banned from wearing seasonal fancy dress by the Health and Safety Nazis. Every Christmas for the last 20 years, Margaret has dressed up to collect money for charity while doing her job. Previous costumes have included a Christmas post box, a giant turkey, a holly bush and Santa disappearing down a chimney.

But this year’s effort – a giant gold bell – has been banned by Southampton council bosses, who insist that Margaret can only wear the traditional high visibility jacket in fluorescent yellow on health and safety grounds.

Quite right too. This attention-seeking nutter’s job is to escort children safely across the road. No parent wants her pratting about dressed as a snowman just as a mad woman in a Porsche Cayenne comes steaming down the road after a sherry too many at the Trophy Wives’ Club Christmas bash. For once the Puritans have got it right.

And I’m now going for a long lie down.

IF THE police go on strike, as threatened, over their bungled pay deal, is there any chance that former miners might be called up to keep order on the picket lines? Just a thought.