Me column...

[Tony Bell]

Because I'm bored with nothing better to do in work, I thought I'd post my column from tonight's Evening Leader. Sorry there are no photos, particularly for the last piece.


Paradise Lost?
THE people of Pitcairn Island have never welcomed intrusions by outsiders into their lives, but this week the inhabitants of the tiny pacific outcrop have no choice. The islanders, descendants of the men who mutinied on HMS Bounty in 1790, find themselves the centre of media attention thanks to a *CENSORED* abuse trial which began yesterday. Seven men - that is half the male population - are accused of rape and other forms of *CENSORED* abuse dating back thirty years. Three judges have arrived from New Zealand, along with a twenty-strong prosecution team to decide the fate of the accused, who will not have the benefit of a jury.
Should they be found guilty, a prison has been built, the construction work carried out by the same men who are standing trial. This underlines more than anything else the bizzare nature of this case, as the seven men are responsible for the running of the island and this means a hands on approach to everything. There is no natural harbour on Pitcairn, so when a ship arrives the same men row out to meet it *CENSORED*, where they load their longboats with provisions. Incidentally, the prison they have built is just yards away from their homes, and the question of who will guard them should they be found guilty still has to be addressed.
Pitcairn is a place none of us in the developed world can really understand. Alcohol is not available, they don’t have television, they speak their own language, Pitkern, a mixture of 18th century navy slang and Tahitian, and they grow up in a population which never exceeds fifty. Their island is six kilometres long by three kilometres wide, and New Zealand - their closest large neighbour - is 2000 miles away.
But the most unusual aspect of Pitcairn life can be seen in the way in which the women of the island have reacted to the trial. They have defended the men, pointing out that it is the custom for girls as young as 12 to have *CENSORED* and that as long as it is consensual, there is no problem.
The women have said that underage *CENSORED* has become acceptable over the last 200 years because of the lack of female partners for men, and that this is nobody’s business but their own. But is it really just their business? It used to be customary to send children up chimneys to clean them or to work down mines, but thankfully these practices were eliminated long ago.
Perhaps the most chilling aspect of the trial is the allegation that girls as young as five years old have been raped. If such allegations are made in a British colony - no matter how distant - they must be investigated fully, and no amount of talk about custom and tradition can stand in the way of that.


Mad World sending me over the edge
PERHAPS it’s my age - I’m rapidly approching the Grumpy Old Men category - but occasionally I see something which makes me wonder what’s going on in the world. There have been two examples this week, the first coming when I discovered that when advertising a job vacancy, it is no longer acceptable to state the applicant must be ‘hard working’.
My first thought on hearing this was ‘if only this had come into force in 1974 when I started my engineering apprenticeship’. The foreman who was always calling me a ‘Bone idle, skiving little git’ wouldn’t have had a leg to stand one once I brought the lawyers in to point out that hard work was not a qualification for the job.
But to be serious for a moment, this is apparently intended to end discrimination against disabled applicants, but you would think that these people are well protected by the various pieces of employment legislation introduced over the last thirty years.
And anyway, isn’t it patronising to assume that because somebody is disabled they are not capable of hard work? This is another sign of political correctness taken to extremes, as is the next story which had me reaching for my blood pressure *CENSORED*. A ten year old Flint boy takes a toy gun to school, where it remains in his bag. A teacher discovers it but instead of doing what any rational, normal *CENSORED* would do - perhaps confiscating it until the end of lessons - the police are called.
You would hope that the officers concerned would have given the teacher a lecture about wasting police time, but no, it gets worse. The parents of the child are asked to sign a form allowing the ‘gun’ to be destroyed.
Why didn’t they go the whole hog and call out an armed response unit to the school, hurl in a couple of stun grenades, break down the doors and spreadeagle the suspect on the ground, before interrogating him about any possible links to Al Queda, the IRA, Meibion Glyndwr or the Toys R Us catalogue? It might sound like a hardline approach, but its one way to make sure kids don’t act so irresponsibly in future.


The kid hasn't got what it takes
MATT Johnson gave us all a surprise when he turned up on The X Factor last weekend. The former singer with One True Voice has been in the pop wilderness since the band split up - although he reappeared briefly a few months ago to tell us about a song he’d written about speed cameras - but when he walked onto the stage it seemed like he was back on track.
Well, it did until Simon Cowell spoke and told the Mancot teenager ‘Making an album with you would bore me to death’. This may have sounded a little harsh, but Cowell is renowned for saying what he thinks, and in this case it’s hard to disagree with him. Matt has a pleasant voice, and he seems like a nice enough lad, and that’s about it.
I was watching the X Factor with a friend and just a few minutes after Matt’s audition, neither of us could remember what he sang. Despite that pleasant voice - or perhaps because of it - he is just too bland to stand out from the thousands of others who are trying to make it. I don’t know about the X Factor. This boy has got the Zzzzz Factor.
If he is going to get anywhere in the music business, he needs to get himself an image. It doesn’t have to be as elaborate as the lengths which Adam Ant or Zigue Zigue Sputnik went to in order to make themselves known. Anything will do, because at the moment Matt Johnson is instantly forgettable.

Jeez, I need a map
*CENSORED*, the human biologist who gained fame when he wrote The Naked Ape in the sixties, seems determined to make life difficult for us men. In his latest book, The Naked Woman, Morris informs us that women have not one, but four G-spots. The balding *CENSORED*-Boffin has named them the U spot, the A spot and the C spot. What is he trying to do to us poor blokes? Now that women are armed with this knowledge, we’ve had it, we’ll never be able to keep them happy. It’s hard enough to locate one of them, never mind four, so the least Des could do is print a map so we stand a chance...