Category: People

Last Great Female HellRaiser

betty may
Tiger? Me? I’m just a little puddy dat.

When nature calls and we really need the bathroom, we might cross our legs, like a four year old at nursery school, and somewhere along the way, eventually, we have to pee, or run the risk of soiling ourselves. Betty May would simply cock her leg to mark her territory and she wouldn’t even need to go.

Physically, Betty May is long gone, but she is still here somewhere. Her will, personality, character and integrity is strong enough to penetrate the present time and is still very pertinent to this age and to the women of today. In spirit, Betty May is still alive. And that’s why I’m going to talk about her as if she is still alive and kicking. Kicking hard.

Betty May is the type of woman who doesn’t care what people think of her. At all. This is a  woman who has no sense of self consciousness whatsoever. But that isn’t all. She isn’t just a rebel without a cause. She doesn’t do things just because she can. She has no sense of that awful destructive sin of pride. One of the worst. Or are they all named equal? Sometimes it depends on your perspective.

Her autobiography first published in 1929, is entitled ‘Tiger Woman. My Story. The Incredible Life That Inspired the musical, Betty May. Tiger Woman Versus The Beast’.

Who is the beast? Why, the most famous/infamous magician of all, Aleister Crowley. She takes him on and wins. Or rather, she doesn’t bow down to him or give him the time of day. She sees right through him. She knows he is probably just a creep, who couldn’t get girls when he was an adolescent. He may have internalised this, it may have built and built, as things do, into a rage against the female of the species and the obsessive thirst for that Golden and easily obtained Knowledge of ‘how to control women’ (A least half a dozen of his girlfriends had nervous breakdowns, the other half committed suicide) leading inevitably into deeper misogynistic thinking, paranoia and eventually impotency. Therefore, it’s only natural that he may learn other ‘methods’ of potency. i.e. killing defenceless animals.

Oh no, don’t go up against your local muscle bound peers or even your intellectual ones or your morally superior ones, ‘cos you can’t hack it can you Mr. Crowley? Don’t try to better yourself emotionally, mentally, educationally or spiritually to get ‘power.’ Instead, just act like any poorly brought up, ill educated teenage boy from an impoverished council estate…and kill the local moggy. Oh yes, Mr. Crowley, that is so manly.  But you can’t even kill it yourself can you? You have to order other people to kill the cat, because you don’t have the stomach. (Please skip the rest of this paragraph, if you’re of a nervous deposition and/or love animals, especially cats) You would then order others to drink the blood of these animals. What a challenge it must have been for you to catch and kill something so much weaker than yourself, eh, Al? How Satan must have loved you for being able to catch and kill a cat. Where is the challenge in kicking a kitten and taking candy from a baby? Taking the wide road has always been incredibly easy, rather sad, and without challenge, and a real attraction to snivelling cowards.

I’m getting ahead of myself, as usual, and, I am in, a rather bad rant.

Ahem, Cough. Let me out. I apologise and compose myself. No, forget that, apologising is a sign of weakness and I take it back but I should state here that Crowley emphatically denied the cat killing/blood drinking incident. He also attempted to censor the book but was unsuccessful. Some people may think, ‘Well if Betty May fabricated some of the story, who’s to say what is truth and what is lie.’ Fair point but this book is a puzzle that needs to be unravelled and perhaps never solved and therein lies the beauty and the intrigue. So who is this Betty May? Why is she The Tiger and why is she connected with Aleister Crowley, the Great Beast, as he liked to call himself?

Aleister_Crowleybaldbastard
Would you let this man pet-sit Fluffy?

Betty May was born in 1893 in Canning Place, into abject poverty. She lived with her mother and brother initially, but, her mother, tired of working tirelessly, to ineffectively support two young children, sent Betty and her brother to her estranged husband. He lived in a brothel, an idle drunken slob and that is where Betty and her sibling stayed for some time. That was  until her grandfather, her dad’s dad, arrested him and sent him off to jail. He was an inspector and long tired of his son’s lifestyle choices.

After spending the next couple of years in an  idyllic existence, in the countryside with an strait laced and aunt and uncle, Betty escaped to London and became involved in the bohemian world of the Cafe Royal. She would only be matched, decades later, in her drinking, dancing and hell raising by her future male counterpart, Oliver Reed.

Whilst also being worldly in other matters, she was strangely innocent in others. She took a steam boat to Paris one evening with a lecher who tried to rape her at the end of the evening. She stabbed him with a pair of nail scissors and fled, ending up on the street, without fare back to England. Homeless and wandering, she inadvertently and rather haphazardly stumbled into a Parisian underworld rather like a French Mafia, called Les Apaches. A tough knife wielding female gang member was set upon her, as a kind of test. She gave as good as she got and then some. Thereafter she was nick named The Tiger.

I have a feeling that much in that last paragraph may be a fictional account in Betty May’s autobiography. She admitted that the book was ghost written but a large part of the resource was taken from articles she had written herself. She said the first part of her life is wholly true, as is the latter, but there are bits in between which aren’t. The continental Oliver Twist section feels contrived and rather romanticized but there is no way of knowing for sure.

So let’s just say, when eventually she escaped the gang and was able to return to London, she meets a  man named Miles L. Atkinson, (1888–1917), nicknamed Bunny. He was a cocaine addict who quickly got her into the habit. He went to war in 1914 and was killed in action in 1917, but May was by now a heavy addict. She married again. Her new husband cured her of her addiction, by using the short sharp shock treatment of making her go cold turkey.

By the end of 1918, May had divorced her husband when she discovered he had been unfaithful. Husband number three was Raoul Loveday, an Oxford graduate. They lived in one room and Betty supported them by sitting as an artists model for sculptors Jacob Epstein and Jacob Kramer. Raoul meanwhile wrote poetry and was a bit of a tortured soul, as poets often are. He became bewitched by all things occult and found solace in the teachings of his friend and mentor, Crowley.

May gave her husband an ultimatum and he her. Stay or else, from her. Go or else, from him. They upped sticks and went to Sicily, taking up residence in the sparsely furnished and threadbare Abbey of Thelema. It was here she became cook and bottle washer for Crowley and his cronies, in exchange for sour cheese and bread every day and the most excellent wine she had ever tasted.

Crowley seems to have spent most of his time pouring over books, studying in the library and meditating like a proper old style monk. Apparently there were no orgies or anything remotely satanic going on at the Abbey, apart from the feline murder and the drinking of its blood.

crowley2
I’m very cuddly really. I don’t have sex with goats or anything.

Betty herself is no stranger to the orgy and had partaken of many in her time. She says nothing like that ever happened at the abbey. The worst thing there was the lack of toilet facilities. No basin or lavatory to be seen. Betty even went rock climbing with Crowley on Sunday afternoons, as a special treat and they had a lovely time. Apparently, he couldn’t half climb rocks. He’s beginning to sound more like a benevolent Uncle, with each new piece of information, gleaned.

A few days after the blood drinking incident, Raoul, Betty’s current husband, and one of Crowley’s most obedient male sycophants, died. At first glance, it appears the ritual had something to do with it, but he drank some dodgy spring water that Crowley had warned him not to. Crowley to the rescue, once more. It’s like an Enid Blyton novel. Take these hard boiled egg sandwiches and lashings of ginger ale and have a wonderful time, but remember children, don’t drink the water.

At least his misogynistic view would be in line with Blyton literature. Remember, Betty May, let the boys put up the tent, ‘cos you’re a girl. (I had that said to me as a kid, but without the Betty May bit and the tent). Saying that, Cuddly Crowley did take Betty May rock climbing. That’s not so misogynistic. Oh, he’s such a mass of contradictions.

With Raoul gone, Betty got out of there fast and returned to London. Unlike Raoul, she resisted drinking the water on that thirsty outing out. I say, Betty May, that’s pretty smart…for a girl.

The book fizzles out somewhat and you just get the impression that she’s about to ride off into the sunset for some more wonderful and exciting adventures and perhaps a fifth husband, of which there is rumour. She apparently moved a bit further north in her twilight years, did some charity work for orphans, stopped having orgies (or perhaps not) and died when she was 86 in about 1986, which wraps it up nicely.

The thing is, the book may have been ghost written, it may be fictional in some parts. (I hope it’s the cat bit, ‘cos I love animals, but I only think it’s true, ‘cos I’m not a big fan of Cuddly Crowley and it seems like just the kind of thing he would do. Well, he was the most ‘Wicked Man In Britain’, no wait, it’s worse than that, the world.Betty_May_tiger_woman

Betty May seems like such a natural soul, so innocent and sweet in some ways, apart from the orgies of course, but we all have our little foibles. She is spontaneous and impulsive and responsive with the people she comes into contact with, a prerequisite for orgies, I think, but also for being warm hearted and lovable. Not sure if we can be lovable if we over think things and it’s so easy to over think things. I’m not sure she did a lot of thinking but she got Cuddly Crowley’s number, and that was rare, for after his schooling in the art of pick up, he was reputedly, hard to resist.

Maybe, this scene will sum up what I’m trying to say about Betty May. I think it says something nice about this woman, hell raiser or not.

She works in a hairdressers and has heard a newspaper report that a woman had caught leprosy from a Chinese hair net. Maybe it’s the drugs, paranoia or both but guess what product she has just started unpacking while she was in the hairdressers? Yes, you guessed it, Chinese hair nets. So she runs out into the street and onto a packed bus, tells everyone to keep away from her. Gives the fare to the bus driver and tells him not to touch it because she has leprosy (she doesn’t) and makes a complete spectacle of herself in front of very many people. She may also have been off her face on drugs, but she cares and that’s the main thing, she genuinely cares.

 

The Last Woman

ruth ellis
Ruth Ellis 1926-1955

Imagine you’re doing a quiz somewhere, let’s say down the local pub. The Quiz Master asks, ‘Who was the last woman to be executed in Britain?’

Your pen/pencil is poised. That’s easy. It went into human consciousness years ago. It’s like being asked ‘Who won the 1966 World Cup?’, or ‘Who was British Prime Minister between 1979 and 1990?’ It’s a no-brainer really, certainly for people of a certain age. You know that you can afford yourself a self satisfied smile, which passes between you and your team mates, as you smugly supply the answer on your quiz sheet.

I wonder though, if, in that smoke free but boozy bar room, the quiz master asked another question instead. ‘Who was the last person to be executed in Britain?’ There is a silence. You can hear people thinking, a few glasses clink at the bar. People shift buttocks. The teams confer with puzzled expressions. They start to cast surreptitious looks to the other teams and their closely guarded papers. It’s a bit like being at school suddenly. Hmm, you tap the pencil on your knee/chin/beermat/glass. Then the quiz master says something you did not expect, a generous clue. ‘It’s a trick question this one.’

He has further added to the confusion, he said person, not woman, still, same thing isn’t it? Maybe that’s where the trick question is. After all, this is the cliché standard answer to a standard question and there is the scratchy sound of pencil on paper as most people write ‘Ruth Ellis’

Now before we get too bogged down in this mythical pub, we’ll come back to that later,  it’s been 50 years, this year, that the Sidney Silverman’s Murder Act was passed, abolishing the death penalty in Britain. The famous Ruth Ellis murder trail and her subsequent execution, played no small part in a social awareness evolution. An evolution that was to eventually end capital punishment in Britain.

Ruth Ellis was brought up in a poverty stricken working class home. Her father abused the female members of the family, resulting in him fathering two children to Ruth’s sister, Muriel.

As soon as she  was able, Ruth reinvented herself. She escaped to London and into the sleazy, yet often exciting world, of west end night life. The nerdy, bespectacled and rather mousy young woman hid her inhibitors to glamour (her glasses) in a place where they would not offend her, usually her handbag. Then, she bleached her hair an eye catching platinum blonde. She began taking modelling courses, became a hostess and eventually ran a nightclub herself, turning quite a profit.

In this environment, she met the public school boy educated David Blakely and they had an tempestuous off and on affair.

The rest as they say…is history.

Ruth and David make the future Sid and Nancy look like Andy Pandy and Looby Loo, yet, just like the yet-to-be Sid and Nancy, Ruth and David were lost souls, helplessly gravitating towards each other, drowning in their misery, gasping, as they are grasping, and destroying each other accordingly.

In some of the accounts in the biography, ‘A Fine Day For A Hanging‘ The Real Ruth Ellis Story’ by Carol Ann Lee, it appears Ruth was a victim of domestic violence. Many witnesses in her circle, at the time, spoke of the very many and numerous bruises covering her body on a daily basis. The book talks about one incident where she disrobes in front of a man and he was so shocked and disturbed by what he saw (she was so badly bruised) that their night of sexual congress was aborted.

She was punched in public by her lover, two days before she shot him and was often seen with black eyes. She acquiesced to his need to drink and became a drinker herself. It is alleged that she was drinking a bottle and a half of Pernod a day (after meeting David)

The problem was, like most victims of systemic physical or psychological violence, the victims are ashamed and often believe they are deserving of the treatment and/or do not feel they have the strength to leave, or to end the relationship. They are unsure how to resolve the situation and are unable to see any avenues for a way out.

When Ruth gave her statement to the police, there was no solicitor present and during the trail there was very little reference to any physical violence she may have endured at her lover’s hands. Her defence team were woefully inadequate in that department and so, a plea for manslaughter was never in it.  Although, it has to be said, Ruth would not help herself in this matter. She would not ‘accuse’ anybody of anything. Apparently, during the trial, she never had a bad word to say about anyone. Wouldn’t. She thought it was ‘traitorous.’ It was very frustrating for her defence team.

Perhaps it was a kind of honour. Certainly, where I come from, there’s a culture where people  don’t ‘grass’, don’t tell on other people, even if those other people are to blame and even if it might save our skins. S.O.S. Maybe it’s a foolish kind of honour, but there it is. It’s better to save our souls than save our skins.

However, a plea of provocation was introduced.

Her legal team, credit where credit’s due, did make a concerted effort to make a plea of  ‘slow burn’ provocation, but it was not a term recognised either in America or Britain at the time, and this was obviously the case here.

‘Provocation- defined as an act that might reasonably cause a person of sound mind to suffer a sudden and temporary loss of self control, rendering the accused  so subject to passion as to make him or her not master of his mind.’

‘With diminished responsibility not yet a legal term, it may be this is why David’s violence over the past eighteen months, together with his persistent infidelity and emotional abuse, were deemed irrelevant in court.’

From ‘Eve Was Framed‘- Helena Kennedy

And then there’s the other angle. The angle of the gun. Desmond Cussen was the other man in the love triangle. He adored Ruth and disliked his love rival, David Blakely. Cussen did seem like a decent guy, but the theory was, he had not only provided Ruth with the murder weapon, he reputed to have regularly oiled it, loaded it, taught Ruth how to shoot and goaded her into shooting David, when she was drunk and deeply emotionally disturbed. There were even accusations that he had been the one to drive her to the scene of the crime. None of this stuck however, as Cussens was never fully cross examined in the witness box and certainly not on this issue. He did perspire in that box however, unnaturally and profusely, like a stuck pig.

Less than twenty four hours before she was due to hang, part of Ruth’s defence team, Mishcon and Simmons, questioned her once more about how she obtained the gun. There was still a slim chance that she could escape the noose. She was keeping it zipped until one of them mentioned how her children would feel if the truth didn’t come out. Then she started to talk about how she had indeed been taught how to shoot by Cussens and more. She had been drinking on the night of the murder. Indeed, so had Cussens. She mentioned how jealous he was of Blakely and how they despised each other. She said he gave her the loaded gun and drove her to the scene of the crime. Mischons and Simmons took her new statement to Whitehall. The person they really needed to speak to wasn’t there, so the information was passed on to somebody else. The Home Office did not delay the execution in the light of new information.

And now back briefly to our mythical pub, when the quiz master gives out the answers. ‘Question 18, ‘Who was the last person to be executed in Britain?’ The answer is ‘Gwynne Evans and Peter Allan. Two men from Preston who had killed a man in  a botched robbery.

But does anyone remember them? And do we know who was the last of these men to be hanged? Was it Evans or was it Allan? Indeed, it was a trick question. It wasn’t Ruth Ellis at all. She was the last woman and not the last person, and it wasn’t one person at all. It was two. Two men.

Why then, was Ruth Ellis the one who provoked such incredible feelings from the public? Did it resonate somehow, this crime of passion? Was it because her defence was so abysmally weak? Did we feel it wasn’t a fair trail? We are sticklers for fairness in Britain, are we not?

Or was it because she wouldn’t save her skin? Or was it down to the polite and utterly dignified composure she exhibited during her trial from start to finish? Did her calm resignedness strike a nerve with the stiff upper lips of the nation?

Or was it simply that we, as a nation, had reached an evolution, a certain perception and outlook regarding capital punishment? Britain was getting queasy, squeamish, soft, or maybe just more humane?

‘This was a crime of passion under considerable provocation.’

– Raymond Chandler

‘I pray to Almighty God to cause this disgraceful sin (execution) to pass from among us and to cleanse our land of blood.’

–Victor Gollanz.

‘I reject the death penalty because of its absolute nature, it’s questionable nature and its revolting nature.’

Bishop Of Stepney, who visited Ruth Ellis shortly before her death.

‘Executions are unnatural crimes.’

– Fredric Raphael

Ruth Ellis wanted to die. She wanted to be with the man she had killed. She believed she deserved to die. And for that, I think she deserved to live.

‘An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,’ said Ruth. ‘A life for a life. I took David’s life and I don’t ask you to save mine. I don’t want to live.’ And for once, in her short and turbulent life, Ruth finally got what she wanted.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Love and Mashed Potatoes

I never knew mash could get me laid.

Did I fall in love with the iconic image of Paul McCartney when he was young and vibrant and known as the ‘cute one’ with the world’s best boy band, The Beatles, writing and creating wonderful melodies that would go down in history as some of the best songs in the world? No.

Did I fall in love with Paul McCartney, the family man, when he was older and wiser and off on his own, with the great seventies band ‘Wings‘ being successful and productive in another group? No.

Did I fall in love with Paul McCartney, as a solo artist, when he was having No.1 hits in the eighties and always on Top Of The Pops, when he still seemed possibly at his peak, when he’s absolutely still got it, when he’s still brilliant? No.

Or did I fall in love with Paul McCartney when I saw him making mashed potato in a You Tube video, ignoring all health and safety issues with reckless abandon. Yes.

Yes. I fell in love with him, there and then.

What did it for me, regarding the video was a) his childish enthusiasm b) his pure joy c) his naturalness and d) his complete disregard for culinary competence.

I suppose you could surmise that he has no need to seek perfection or indeed approval from anybody, therefore making mashed potato was no big deal.

He was so happy showing us how to make it. To this day, how he taught the viewers to cut an onion (as taught to him by Linda) is indelibly printed in my mind. I thought that was the sweetest thing, bringing his late and beloved wife into the proceedings.

Also, the way he sloshed scalding water about, almost giving himself a first or even second degree burn. How he held a very sharp knife, in a cutting position that could only result in several severed fingers.By a miracle – it didn’t. It was looking-through-your-fingers while-watching-a-horror-movie stuff.

In this video, he is like a little boy who never grew up and who has no intention, who loves his life the way it turned out, with no regrets. (I’m not mentioning any names).

So people might say, well, it’s obvious, with his money, lifestyle, success, talent whatever, he would appear joyful, whatever his endeavours. But his joy is the most natural unaffected thing.

He has this wonderful down to earth manner, that one would expect from a Northerner perhaps, especially a Scouser, but you may not expect someone of his accomplishments and fame to be like that, regardless of where they come from and that is hugely endearing.

I think the tip of the iceberg was when he started telling jokes.

I was shocked. Paul McCartney telling dirty jokes on YouTube. I mean no. It’s wrong. It’s just all wrong. He changed my perception of him. The contradiction is attractive. Men who look/seem a certain way should contradict it, by doing something completely the opposite to how you would expect them to behave. It messes with your mind so much. It causes distraction, a chink in the armour. Women take note. It might backfire if you contradict people’s perceptions of you but it might just give that hot guy in accounts something to think about. What? A hot guy in accounts? What planet am I on?  The planet where there are hot guys in accounts. That’s my kind of planet.

Mashed Potato and Reckless Abandon.

See what I did there? See the contradiction?

Respected British Superstar. Composed composer. Old enough to be our granddad, whatever age we are…telling dirty jokes. And yet it’s not gross. It’s kinda hot. It’s the way he tells ’em. It’s what he does with it. Maybe you had to be there.

That’s what my P.U.A should have done the other week. He should have made mashed potato very dangerously, almost scalding or cutting himself severely. Difficult in a library I know, but overcoming that obstacle only adds to the attraction.

If you put the ordinary with the extraordinary. i.e if you put Sir Paul McCartney with mashed potato, something amazing happens. It’s the key to the secret of the meaning of life, or how to get on in this awful and wonderful world.

If Paul kicks the bucket before me, a little part of me will die with him. So men take note, if you want a women to fall in love with you, just make mashed potato, totally balls it up and laugh it off when you do.

And tell dirty jokes like butter wouldn’t melt.

The Point Of No Return

I subscribe to the Rob Dyke series on ‘You Tube’. I like his his ‘Seriously Strange‘ and his ‘Twisted Tens’ videos. He presents them well. They are entertaining, succinct, informative. What more do you need during supper time, wind down time, whenever you decide to watch? It’s bite size stuff and it works.

However, watching one of his videos will go down in ‘Things I Wish I Hadn’t Done This Week.’ I stumbled across, like a little child in a meadow, his ‘Most Disturbing Deep, Dark Web Sites’, or something like that. No, I’m not going to link. You do that work yourself. I don’t regret much in my stage in life,  but I wish I hadn’t come across that. I’m not easily shocked or sheltered. I think we’ve all seen things we shouldn’t have seen/heard/imagined. Things no-one should see, because they don’t happen. But well, they do happen. It’s part of life. And this is the disturbing factor.

But life is about thinking. And if we want to remain healthy and happy, or just not traumatised on a daily basis, we should fundamentally, be thinking good ideas and not bad ideas.

Bad ideas is an understatement.

There was a warning about said ‘Top Ten’ at the beginning of the video. I ignored it, because I’ve ignored all other warnings at the beginning of Rob Dyke’s videos and others and everything turned out fine. I was able to go to bed undisturbed and relatively untainted. But not this time.

Naively, I did not think the video would be as bad as it actually was. I was innocent to the depravities it exposed. Well, let’s just say, ‘not in my wildest dreams’ and I like to keep it that way. I thought that I had a good imagination and then I realised that there is good imagination and there is bad imagination. The mind can be quite a delicate thing, a bit of a hothouse flower. It can swing. It doesn’t usually swing violently straight away. But I can imagine one year, you are swinging quite happily in the middle, well not happily, but you haven’t gone past the point of no return at least, and then little by little you swing a little further, just a little further each time, until you realise you’re going to extremes and then you fly off the radar, you’re no longer on the meter, ‘cos the meter no longer gauges what you’ve done. The dial only goes up to a hundred. The machine has limits. The human rarely does. It has so much potential for good and so much potential for evil.

I pray with every fibre of my being that I never swing within a million miles of the shadow world of imagination that fills these dark websites. I wouldn’t say dark as much as black. I wouldn’t say deep as much as evil.

People, humans, do unspeakable unimaginable things, that become imagined. Without the creative image in the head, in other words, without the fantasy, it can’t be done. Once it’s imagined, created in the mind, it’s just a short walk for some people, and not too far away for others.

If they make the fantasy a reality, they can cross it off, or make money from it, or become immune to it, or feel omnipotent through it.

They can do evil masquerading as lust, or greed or anger.  Our base desires allegedly lead us to do evil things. Perhaps it is just a con, a way for Satan and his minions to trick humans into doing his evil bidding. That said and done, base desires whether tricked into them or not can spiral out of control. And spiral to such an extent that a human can lose their identity, their humanity and perhaps along the way, their soul. And what about the suffering they inflict on others?

Crawling back from evil, is not impossible, but improbable. There comes a point of no return. Going down certain roads changes the brain’s chemistry and only by reprogramming can there be any hope. Any reprogramming would have to be spiritual, from the inside out.

I feel tainted having just glimpsed the shadow web and wish I could unlearn, unhear and unsee. That retribution side of me wants to just vigilante somehow. Load myself up from top to toe in guns and ammunition. Bazooka them all to hell. But then, two wrongs and all that…And then of course, I would become a murderer too.

The only solution is spiritual warfare. So yes, I prayed because I didn’t know what else to do and because I’ve seen the power of prayer first hand. Why do people see prayer as a last resort, when it is often the first. It makes a difference.

All this talk about evil… dark, hypnotic,mysterious, exciting, the cause for celebration. In fact there is a major festival that celebrates it. It’s called Halloween, and it involves kids primarily, oh yes, kids are the main recruits. What is mischief after all but just a nice word for evil, even the phrase ‘wicked deeds’ sounds archaic, fairy tale-ish, almost twee. Evil is always trying to play itself up by playing itself down and Halloween is the perfect example. Oh, it’s just all a bit of fun. There are always gong to be excuses and for the evil that people do, there are many.

Thoughts on evil, it’s momentum leading to the truly horrific and the pain of empathy that one feels for victims always needs clarification. The idea of ‘points of no return’ for criminal minds intrigues me, so I rummage around a little. Can evil on such a scale really be stopped? Well no, personally, I would find it difficult to think there is any redemption for those people, but individuals, some socio-paths, who commit chaotic crimes, almost as a reflex to pain, can be plucked out and changed from the inside out with good spiritual counselling. Psychopaths can’t. You can’t cure a psychopath. They don’t have reflexes. They remain lawful evil and are often ‘personable’ and ‘well respected’ in the community to reduce the risk of incarceration. After all, they really don’t want to stop what they’re doing and they know there’s more than one way to skin a cat. Plus, they enjoy it too much. Me killing the little bastard is not going to change anything either. It will just be one more person for hell and one more soul for Satan.

Change has and can, be orchestrated and it can result in a little less evil, a little less suffering, without us having to fry people in the electric chair or murder the murderers. That taints and rubs off on us as a society. Haven’t we all wanted to kill the P’s (paedophile) that harmed us as a child, harmed children we know or who simply lives down the street? But, come on, we have to get a handle on ourselves. Some people can’t be changed, don’t want to be, will mock the system, will pretend that they have changed. We can ‘wipe the dust from our feet,’ regarding those. Yes, those we can write off. And for me, the P is always past the ‘point of no return’.

Jesus said this about the corruption of the innocent. ‘It were better for him that a millstone were hanged around his neck and he cast into the sea, than that he should offend one of these little ones.’

Luke 17:2 (King James Bible Version)

It sounds to me that even Jesus would find it difficult to forgive a P. His words, not mine. I applaud his zero tolerance on this one. I think this is because sex offenders are more likely to pass the ‘point of no return.’ and can’t be redeemed, or rather, the chance of redemption is…what was that word we were using before…improbable.

So, leaving P’s and sex offenders on a back burner for now (they should be) I don’t know why I started on them. When I talk about rehabilitation, I’m generally not thinking about them as potential for rehabilitation, in particular, as I honestly don’t believe they can be cured. Very opinionated of me I know, but that’s how I feel.

Mankind needs a little hope, now and again.

I came across two good books about the truth of rehabilitation, ‘Gram Seed – One Step Beyond’ and most notably his follow on book about his work in British prisons, ‘Gram Seed – It Must Be Love’ Gram Seed, ‘Tees Gazette Live’ Article and one in an American prison system, Psychogram: Spiritual Crossover For The Serial Killer by Robert Creel. Yes, conning does go on, but what do we expect? It used to be how they made their living! You have to separate the wheat from the chaff and in every walk of life, there is wheat and there is chaff. Everyone should be given a chance of redemption. God can see inside people’s hearts, so no conning will be going on with Him. We’re not the ones who have any real lasting power in our judgements, God’s been around the block a few times and can spot a fake a mile off, so in this situation, it doesn’t really matter if we can or not.