Herself has a cough. We were all up all night. She is very sorry for herself and keeps saying “poor me, poor mite, cough, cough”. She has also observed “Mummy sick, Daddy sick”. Yes, we’re all coughing. This morning while I had my shower, Mr. Waffle minded her. I came out to find him curled up in a ball on the floor beside the playpen wherein the Princess sat poking him and saying imperiously “plasticene”. We’re all tired too.Nothing daunted, the Princess and I went off to mass (“church ‘n Jesus ‘n Mary ‘n Joseph”). On our way there, we passed the synagogue. There is always a policeman with a machine gun across the road from the synagogue but today, the place was crawling with police and plain clothes types with things stuck in their ears. I asked a policewoman who was fiddling with the strap on her submachine gun what was going on. Apparently there was a special service for the 60th anniversary of the holocaust. Is it not a bit depressing that 60 years after the holocaust the Jewish community in Belgium needs half the Brussels police force out to protect them when going to the synagogue?
And while we’re on the subject, I note that the Irish President said something spectacularly stupid when speaking of the holocaust (which is not all like her). I quote from that organ of record, the Irish Examiner “Speaking on RTÉs Morning Ireland programme on Thursday, ahead of attending the Auschwitz remembrance ceremony in Poland, Mrs McAleese said They [the Nazis] gave to their children an irrational hatred of Jews in the same way that people in Northern Ireland transmitted to their children an irrational and outrageous hatred, for example, of Catholics. ”
Oh good grief. She has at least had the good sense to abjectly apologise.
I must add that, in my view extremely rarely for a politician, she did sound genuinely contrite. 