I know that many of the people who have contacted me via this website live in the Gulf states, and if you are reading this, I hope that means that you are at least safe. Every news bulletin seems more appalling than the last, and I simply cannot imagine what you are going through. The scale of the disaster itself is unthinkable, but the fact that five days on from the hurricane aid is only now reaching the survivors is incomprehensible. And if you’ll forgive my intrusion on what is essentially a domestic matter, I think that dismissing people’s dismay at the lack of urgent action with the accusation that they are ‘playing politics’ is inexcusable. That’s what politics is about – why else do we elect national governments if it isn’t to take swift and secure control of situations that are beyond the scope of individuals and local authorities? My thoughts are with everyone who has been affected by this catastrophe.

These letters are becoming depressing, so perhaps it’s just as well I didn’t manage to produce one for August, because it would probably have been about the hideous mistake made by the police here when they shot dead a young Brazilian electrician in the mistaken belief that he was a suicide bomber. Once again, the incident itself was dreadful enough without its being compounded by wild and untrue statements that appeared to vindicate the actions of the police being given wide currency before they were all finally retracted. And it seems that the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police feels that the investigation into the bombings is too important to give time to any immediate official enquiry into the shooting and the subsequent actions of his officers, though he denies actually asking for the enquiry to be delayed.

So just who is ‘playing politics’? Surely we can hold people to account for their fatal mistakes without allowing them to hide behind the gravity of the problem that produced them? When I started this website, I said that I would rarely refer to the real world, and for the most part I’ve stuck to that, but the real world has intruded once too often of late. I had to get some things off my chest – I hope you don’t mind.

Those of you who have been visiting this website for a couple of years will know that there is a point in the life of a Lloyd and Hill novel when everything else has to take a back seat, and the website is always a casualty, as it was last month. The good news is that it means that work is progressing on No. 14, but I would advise you not to hold your breath, because it still isn’t plain sailing.

To make up for the lack of both a June (computer failure) and August (author failure) update, I have picked three lots of winning entries from the July competition, which had a bumper mailbag even before it was left live for an extra month. So that’s six first prizes and nine runner-up prizes – I hope you were lucky. The winners have been notified, and hopefully the prizes won’t be too long in reaching their new owners.

George fans – sorry, I know I said I’d let you know in September what he’d been up to during the summer, but that will have to wait, I’m afraid. In the meantime, I thought you might like this photograph of him smiling, which he does a lot. And I do have a correction to information previously given. I told you that George had presented Una with a small dead bird, and I took this to mean that he had completed a rite of passage, having made his first kill, but I now think I was wrong about that. Una and I have since, at separate times, seen George sitting in the middle of the garden surrounded by birds unconcernedly pecking away at worms and whatever else it is birds peck at. It seems very unlikely that the birds have got him pegged as a killer, so I think he must have found it in its dead condition, and brought it home like he brings home anything interesting that he finds. We were right in the first place – St George of Assisi really doesn’t have an aggressive bone in his body.

That’s got to be it for this month – see you in October.

Love,
Jill

Top of Page