Zimbabwe's Curse of the Mugabe Mummy

Few things are as tragic as watching a dreadful disaster unfold yet being powerless to to anything to prevent it.
This is now the situation in Zimbabwe, where the sinister figure of Robert Mugabe, the only world leader to be embalmed whilst still in power, casts a dark shadow across his starving and desperate people.
Down on our little allotment in South Gloucestershire the ongoing tragedy that is the steady cultural and social collapse of the Dis-United Kingdom is proceeding more slowly, affording us the luxury of sitting in judgement upon the misery of others.
On a day in which the dim interior of Nosher's dusty and cobwebbed shed seemed eminently more comfortable than enduring the cold squally showers outside, we sat in our old deckchairs with our thermos flasks of hot soup.
'You were wrong about Mugabe, laddie!' Nosher called out to me as we each poured ourselves a mug of hot glutinous liquid that smelled considerably better than Nosher's old wellington boots. 'A couple of weeks ago you said he was on the way out, now he's more determined to stay than ever!'
As you can see, Nosher takes great delight in pointing out my errors.
At his age pleasures are few and far between, and celebrating my mistakes obviously ranks high on his list of worthwhile entertainments.
Can't begrudge him that, though, mostly on the basis that he is almost always completely right in what he says.
'My only defence' I replied 'is that a couple of weeks ago it did look as if he was losing the support of his own party - but now they seem to have rallied and are intent on fixing the election results in his favour.'
'It is really astonishing' continued Nosher 'that a man pumped so full of embalming fluid can still function at all, let alone deliver long rambling speeches placing all the blame for his own failures at the hands of the British Government, which is what he did at Zimbabwe's Independence Day celebrations a couple of days ago.'
My hot vegetable soup tasted excellent, and it occurred to me that millions of ordinary Zimbabweans could only fantasise about such pleasures given that they live on the brink of starvation.
'The situation in Zimbabwe has certain parallels with our own' I ventured 'in that in this country too it is becoming almost impossible to publicise the truth such is the stranglehold of the government and the mass media upon the widespread dissemination of information. What is achieved at the end of a police truncheon in Zimbabwe is being attained here through much more subtle means, but the result is the same: we're being lied to, yet exposing the lie becomes ever more difficult because accurate and reliable information is becoming harder and harder to obtain. And the distinction between truth and falsity is often so cleverly obscured these days by clever media people that even when the truth is out it's not always possible to see it for what it is, because it's deliberately muddled up with other information designed to distract or mislead.'
Nosher sipped his soup and gazed out of the dusty, cobwebbed window for a while.
'Do you think anyone is injecting embalming fluid into Gordon the Moron?' he said 'for that might actually improve his performance as a politician!'
More from http://www.overthegardenfence.blogspot.com/ soon.
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