Saturday 10th October

I don’t mean to be morbid I can assure you, but we are surrounded by killing.  Almost every night on telly there is some detective series, usually involving serial killers of competing brutality, while upstairs young kids play computer games blasting people to digital pieces.  I have just finished reading another Rebus novel by Ian Rankin, again involving killers.  By the way I read his books because I love the way he deals with the character of Rebus himself, the essentially miserable and deteriorating old man that he has become; the murder and eventual solving of the crime is almost irrelevant – merely a coathanger on which to hang the crumpled suit of clothes that is Rebus.

But what is this fascination with killing people, and often young women too.  I can honestly say that the most awful thing I can imagine would be for me to take somebody else’s life from them.  And yet, by our passive acceptance, by our tacit complicity, that is what we are involved with.  Every night on the news bombs are dropped on Syria and Iraq, and by not protesting, by not voting against candidates supporting this killing we are a, maybe unwilling, party to it.  And it all sound so innocuous, doesn’t it.  Bombing sorties, successful missions; and even the cockpit videos only show clouds of dark smoke as ‘enemy command centre’s’ are blown up.  We do not see the mutilated and bleeding bodies that “we” are killing, the children torn apart before they even have a chance of deciding the future of their countries, which we have taken upon ourselves to intervene in.

So, maybe it is no wonder that we sit glued to the box and watch ‘innocent’ detective stories about murders that will never happen where we live, or be at our own hands, of course.  “Make another cup of tea, love – Lewis has just discovered another body, and he was just closing in on the killer too….”