Halloween

Halloween goes back to the time when the Celts parts of the UK and parts of Northern France. Back then November 1 was their New Year's Day. They believed that the night before the New Year, 31st October, was a time when the living and the dead came together.

The Celtic new year was eventually taken over by the Christian church and they named it All Saints Day or All Hallows. This was a special holy day to honour the saints and other people who died for their religion. The night before All Hallows was called Hallows Eve. Later the name was changed to Halloween.

Many people of that time also believed that the spirits of the dead would visit the earth on Halloween and that the evil spirits would cause problems or hurt them. So it became a tradition that on the night Halloween people would dress up with costumes that looked like ghosts or other evil creatures. They thought if they dressed like that, the spirits would think they were also dead and not harm them.

Originally the people in Europe would carry lanterns made from turnips, however the influence of America reaches far and now in the United Kingdom we use pumpkins. These we carve and by putting candles inside them we create lanterns. The other idea that has come over from America is trick and treating, turning something that was once serious into something that is fun. 

Popular Posts

Given all that has been going on the last month with the Aldi Store planning application I thought it might be good to look at the most popular posts this month as provided by Blogger itself, all be it one day short of the end of the month. Now I take such things as the stats provided by Blogger with a large pinch of salt, as the detail in the stats is very lacking.

Blogger basically only gives you the number of page views for individual pages and a web browser and operating system percentages over the lifetime of the blog, however it does allow you to look at the top ten posts for a month and these, this month, were:

1. Aldi Plans for Oakham get Approval
2. Police investigate Rutland County Council
3. Politics is a dirty word in Rutland 
4. Social Media Campaign to get Aldi to Oakham 
5. Aldi Plans to be Torpedoed Tomorrow 
6. Rutland County Council Election Results 
7. Not to late to have your say - Aldi Oakhm 
8. NHS Management tell staff have "No to Mugs" 
9. Harrington School gets the go ahead
10. Lucy turns Four

Given the local interest and the lack of reporting in the local press and the immediacy of the internet, the interest in the local politics comes without little surprise that the Aldi planning application comes up high on the list. The only one that did come as a surprise is the last one, Lucy turns Four, which dates back to an event that is nearly three years. Since the start of the year appeared in the top ten posts of all time and it would be interesting to find out why.

Other posts that seem to get a lot of readers are those to do with politics in general and the posts looking at the posts made this month, especially the post about the UKIP MEP and the massage parlour. Seems everyone likes aa bit of scandal.

A606 closed next week

According to the Rutland Council website the the A606 will be shut from its junction with Whissendine Road, just outside Langham, to the Leicestershire county boundary, between Sunday, 2nd November, and Friday, 7th November, next week.

It will reopen for the weekend on Saturday 8th November, but two-way traffic lights will be in place on Monday, November 10 to allow the central reflectors to be put in place.

While the road is close for repairs a diversion will be put into place that takes traffic via the A6003, A47 and B6047 from just outside Oakham to Melton (see map). 

I'm sure, although details have yet to be released, that there will be local diversions in place, but HGV drivers should be aware that all the non classified roads in Rutland have weight limits on them and so they should only use the indicated diversion. 

People taking the main diversion shown in the map should allow at least 20 minutes if not longer for their journey.

Strange Diversions

There have been some strange bus diversion of late due the new policy of closing complete sections of roads to do resurfacing rather to introduce traffic lights and keeping a single carriageway open. This has been causing a number of problems for the local bus drivers especially down some of the country roads that are no more than a single track without passing places.

The problem for the bus drivers is that the average bus on number 19 route, between Oakham and Nottingham is over 40 foot long and weighs in at over 5 tons. It can't get round corners like a family car and has a non-existent turning circle, so getting it to turn in some of the junctions on some of the single track roads is impossible. 

With the coming road closure for maintenance work in Whissendine the number 19 bus is being sent on 5 mile plus diversion down single track roads. This is just at the point where it is highly probably it will meet another number 19 bus coming in the opposite direction. The last time Rutland Country Council did something similar that is exactly what happened and both buses struggled to get past each other on a single track road. 

I'm not sure who plans the diversion routes but they should try driving these routes in a bus before they put them in place. Then may be they would realise what they are asking the bus drivers to do on some of the country roads we have in Rutland. 

Finally a failing of Rutland County Council is to produce and publicise details of the routes in advance. There is little on there website and there is no maps of the diversions. This needs sorting and the diversions need to be published well in advance.

It is going to be a interesting trip for the next few days, with the drivers having to drive at speed to make up  for the time lost in the 5 mile diversion, I just hope they don't meet another number 19 along the way coming in the opposite direction.

Success or Otherwise?

With the pulling out of British Forces in Afghanistan many questions will be ask about if the 13 years of conflict has been, as David Cameron claims, a "Success" or something else. What will be needed, if the campaign is to be looked at properly, is some kind of independent review body which comes up with a number of measure that can be used to evaluate the success of the conflict. This will give us an understand of the approach we took and if it was the right one. Of course the real measure of success will be one that the historians come up with in say a hundred years time, when most of the official documents will be available to them and not locked behind closed doors.

The back ground to the conflict stems from the 9/11 attack on the twin towers. US President George W Bush demanded the Taliban hand over any leaders of al-Qaeda and the Taliban did not immediately comply but called for talks, but President Bush said there would be "no negotiations" and he ordered US Forces to attacked the Taliban controlled country on October 7th 2001. The reason we went into Afghanistan was to support US forces as part of a US-led coalition which toppled the ruling Taliban, which we did. Then we remained there for the past 13 years with the final camp in Helmand province lowering the Union jack for the last time today.

Estimates of the cost of the war to the UK economy vary according to what site you read with estimates of £19bn from the BBC while other national papers suggest the cost is twice that amount, with even the MOD admitting £25bn had been spent in the first 12 years. No real figure will ever probably exist but even using the conservative figure of around £19bn that represents nearly £1.5bn per year since the war started and we joined forces with the US back in 2001 on some American pipe dream. That is enough save to have save the Air Fleet arm and RAF Harrier fleet, a couple of Aircraft Carriers and countless front line jobs, if we had cut our losses and withdrawn sooner or had never gone to war in the first place.

In the 13 years the British Forces lost some 453 troops, with the some 2,600 troops being wounded and requiring long term care. Further to this it is estimated that there will be in excess of 5,000 troops that suffer some kind of psychological injury and will require care. Given some 140,000 troops served over the 13 year period of the war the number of deaths and causalities seems relatively low compared to other conflicts, however given the nature of the war you could ask if going into the region to back the US was the right move back in 2001.

Some experts claim that Helmand is no more stable now than when thousands of British troops were deployed there in 2006. Opium production that fell under the Taliban, is increasing, fuelling corruption and the coffers of warlords. In fact if you look through the history of the region any military action in the region has never been successful and the country has gone back to being the way it was before the action took place. Of course it hoped that the installation of a democratic government will change the region, however this will soon become corrupt and some popular uprising will occur that topples it and replaces it with some kind totalitarian rule. It is also believed by many ordinary British soldiers that idea of that the Afghan armed forces can secure the province is little short of ridiculous.

In the short term others argue there has been an improvement in the country with girls going to school and increasing access to college education. Western values and ideals have been instilled in some of the population and there has been investment infrastructure projects, although some claim a lot has been spent on  development consultant fees rather than those Afghans who need it most. What the country will need is a strong government and leader, if it can find one has yet to be seen. At the moment it is likely that a new war will break out between the drug barons and the government and with arms supplied by the international arms companies in abundance it will be a bloody war. And of course the Taliban will still be there undefeated fighting in the hills and carrying out hit and run raids on the cities.

We were told this was a war to stop al-Qaeda after the attack of the twin towers in 2001 who US believed had planned that attack from Afghanistan, who it claims was operating freely under the Taliban regime. This was achieved and al-Qaeda was driven out of the country, but only to set up training camps elsewhere and we now have a new set or radical Islamic organisations threatening the world. The action over the last 13 years hasn't made the world a safer place, in fact it is more dangerous now and there is no reasons why al-Qaeda won't return to train in Afghanistan, again paid for by the drug barons who want to protect there crops.

The US lead action hasn't changed a thing, in fact military action is probably the wrong approach altogether and it would have been better use the intelligence services to identify and take out al-Qaeda rather than invading a country were nobody has ever won a war. In fact not a single al-Qaida operative or 'international terrorist' who could conceivably have threatened the United Kingdom is recorded as having been killed Helmand province.

So why were we there so long and will it all be worth it in 15 years time, are the questions I keep asking myself? I hope so, for I have a lot respect of the armed forces in the UK, but do question the leadership of those forces by our political leaders and if we made the right move in the first place. I feel that maybe we stayed to long and risked the lives of British forces. We also spent too much on a war that could never be won.

We aren't the military nation we were back in 2001 and the armed forces have decimated my Conservative spending cuts. In fact the Conservative government have done more damage to our military capability than the Taliban could ever have done.