NOT THE BEST OF STARTS.
The
noughties.
From Ventnor we moved on in 2001 to Newport, I.W. (above), where
we bought the three-storey terraced town house that became our
beloved home until last year.
The decade was to be dominated by
events emanating from the portentous 9/11 attacks on US targets by
suicidal terrorists flying hijacked passenger planes.
In 2003 our
government, persuaded by Tony Blair's contention that there were
available (apparently at the forty five minute drop of a hat) weapons
of mass destruction in Iraq, joined forces with the US to forcibly
enter that country. The action was not sanctioned by the UN and
proved to be a massive cock-up that cost thousands of lives.
No WMD
was found and shortly afterwards British scientist and leading
weapons inspector Dr. David Kelly (above) - taken to task (and subjected to
aggressive questioning by parliament's foreign affairs select
committee) for rightly exposing the forty five minutes malarkey as a
load of bullshit - was found dead in woods near his home. The Hutton
Inquiry, hurriedly set up by a whitewash-seeking government,
concluded that he committed suicide. I still think that highly
unlikely.
Nonetheless, in May of 2005 Blair's New Labour was elected
for a third term with a much reduced majority.
A couple of months
later London transport was hit by suicide bomb lunatics who
presumably thought they could paralyse the city with fear. The IRA
didn't manage it in the1930s with bombs in letter boxes and the
Luftwaffe didn't manage it in the 1940s with over eight weeks of
nightly blitzkrieg, so the noughties nutters might have known;
Londoners don't cave in to intimidation: nor, for that matter, does
the rest of Britain.
It's
a shame we've given so many in the Middle East that much cause to
hate us, though.
By 2007 there was at least hope of an end to
conflict in Iraq and Ireland. In the middle of that year Gordon Brown
replaced Tony Blair as prime minister. New Labour was in rapid
decline.
In 2008 the tatty-haired Tory, Boris Johnson, became Mayor of
London.
Banks fell apart through greed and over-confidence and in
2009 there was uproar when it was found that far too many MPs had
been robbing the country blind with their (apparently legal) expenses
claims.
By the end of the decade the Conservatives were back - in
coalition power with the Liberal Democrats - and David Cameron was
PM.
My mother died nine days before 31 December, 2010, when she would
have been 103. It seems such a long time ago now.
And that, for this
family, was the end of the noughties. Not the best of starts, but
being around to experience it was better than the alternative.
Mind
how you go.
