Great meal in the New Four Seasons Chinese/Thai restaurant. Attentive staff, huge vegetarian choice, happy and 'normal' diners, reasonable prices, wonderful ambiance. Loved it.
40 minutes wait for the bus back. So, we went over the road to the Crown Inn. Car park full. Felt huge energy change as we walked in. Lots of people eating, real wooden beams, great interior design, good staff.
Over by a corner was a quiz machine of some kind. Surrounded by four hypnotised adults and five kids. The kids, four girls and one boy, ages ranging from say 3 to 10, were running about the pub, but mostly spent their time back and to to the bar, ordering drinks, which they could barely see over. Four of them were running around drinking from glass J2O bottles. One, the eldest, was dressed like she was in her 20’s. She was the semi-permanent fixture at the bar.
Then in walked 2 ‘body builders’ one about my height [over 6’], the other about 6” shorter. The shorter one had a heavily developed torso and under-developed legs. The taller one had shorts, a see-through tee shirt and walked as if [thanks Len] he was carrying two carpets under his arms. They were both so heavily tanned, I can’t think of a location on earth which would have turned them that colour.
Shortly after a succession of women of various ages trotted in, most under 30. Two of a small group went up the bar for drinks. Let us say both were-how can I put this?-amply proportioned. One had a very short skirt on. The tray of drinks being carried to their mates was five pints. Coke, lager, Guinness.
We drank up and left. Got the bus. Back at Barnard’s Green [Malvern] my energies were just about coming back to normal.
Later, we both watched ‘The King of Devil’s Island.’ A [brilliant] Norwegian film, subtitled, based on fact, about an island borstal in the early 20th century. Young men were sent there for petty offences or more series ones. It was the 'gateway' to prison.
They were housed like battery hens in one big room with metal beds. There were forbidden to use their own names, each had a number, each block a letter. The drama centred around C5 [a weak lad] and C19 [the strong one]. The Governor had his hand in the till, and epitomised hypocrisy, couldn't smile and spouted religious cant. His C block house master was a tyrant who was sexually abusing C5. You can probably guess the rest. The abuser was told to go, went, but had something on the governor...
The young lads were treated brutally. Orwell or Obomba would have been proud the way lies were hourly presented as truth. The religious ‘prison visitors’ were all conned by the governor and his staff about what went on. Any dissent was crushed. Another lad, there for six years for stealing some money, was continually promised release [and then let down] in return for ‘supervising’, those in his block.
C19 escaped and was caught. The whole block was punished for not stopping him, even though no-one knew he had made an escape attempt. Later the abuser came back. There was a rebellion and…
In the space of five hours, I saw what life should [and will] be like, what life has become, and how ‘they’ still and always have operated. Needless to say, although my school days were never brutal, all the
psychological stuff was used.
The inmates will close the asylum…
Jack Stewart.