Beyond the Strandline

Christabel had made it up with Nigel. He was waiting outside her flat that night when she finally got home in such awful distress. He did all the right things. Organised her a bath, found a bottle of white wine in the fridge and brought it to her as she lay there soaking herself. While she was relaxing, he made a further raid on the fridge, found a half-eaten pizza and warmed it up, grated some extra cheese over it and melted it in under the grill, brought it to her while she was still thus ensconced.

  Afterwards they went to bed, she found herself to be highly aroused, perhaps as a reaction to the earlier trauma she had been through and she and Nigel burned up together in each other’s arms until exhaustion overcame and they slept in late into the next morning.

  ‘Today, Islamic State militants attacked crumbling Libyan official government forces, taking control of Tripoli airport and harbour. Explosions rocked the Grand Hotel as foreign correspondents hid in the basement sending out their reports. Al Jazeera and Reuters were able to give reasonably coherent coverage despite the rapidly moving escalation of violence.

  American and British bombs exploded in Tripoli for the first time since the attack on April 15 1986 when US lightning airstrikes on strategically important targets within Gaddafi’s soviet-leaning dictatorship had been designed to disable his military capability and send him an unmistakeable, clear warning. In a period of twelve minutes a total of 60 tons of bombs were dropped, mostly on airfields. An American aircraft was lost, the crew of two being killed in the action, there were reportedly 40 casualties on the Libyan side.

  This time the target was various ill-defined warring factions associated with an Islamic State in Levant (ISIL) Insurgency. Poorly conceived and badly executed, the effect was stir up what was already a hornet’s nest and massacring innocent displaced civilians.

  “Supporters of ISIL and other armed groups have exploited the turmoil in Libya, where two governments and parliaments are fighting for control four years since the ousting of Muammar Gaddafi.”

  In the eastern city of Benghazi, nine soldiers were killed when fighting the Majlis al-Shura, an umbrella of armed groups including Ansar al-Sharia blamed by Washington for the storming of a US diplomatic compound in 2012. The US ambassador, along with three other Americans, was killed in the attack.

  ISIL's growing influence

  In the central city of Sirte, ISIL fighters fought with forces sent from the western city of Misrata allied to a self-declared government that runs from the capital, Tripoli, officials and residents said.

  ISIL fighters have in recent months claimed responsibility for several attacks including the storming of a Tripoli hotel and the murder of dozens of Egyptian and Ethiopian Christians.”

  Source BBC World Service 4 October

  The Paris Climate Change conference was overtaken by the very phenomenon it was convened to address. Europe moved from a summer of extremes, most notably drought and high temperatures causing wildfires on an almost unprecedented scale, to a plunge into violent and protracted storms producing flooding on a scale last seen as recently as December 2014. In the UK, with its political system already in disarray, its Tory Government’s slim overall majority left it impotent and bogged down in internecine factional arguments. Back-bench MPs found individual bargaining power they had rarely enjoyed before and while a shire-counties ‘Make Britain Great Again’ rallying group wanted to restore fox hunting, providing amusing tabloid newspaper coverage, the serious matter of a steep and deepening financial crisis was starting to dominate everything.

  In the run-up to a dark and gloomy Christmas with retail sales plummeting, manufacturing output largely stalled and the looming spectre of mass unemployment as companies trimmed their workforces, nobody now had any illusions that economic growth was over, at least for the foreseeable future. The bubble had well and truly burst as even ‘the Daily Telegraph’ was forced to acknowledge.

  Britain seemed to be hit worse than most eu member states. By the New Year it was being widely mooted that the GBP would reach parity with the euro with the possibility of further decline as the slide into recession continued to deepen.

  Property prices which tended to be viewed as the British ultimate barometer of prosperity first stalled and then begun to fall back as the recession slumped the market. The ‘First-time buyers’ end of the property ladder effectively froze as bank lending choked off.

  BBC ‘Horizon’ documentaries began to display an almost smug ‘revenge is sweet’ attitude as they charted the ever-steepening fall from a financial powerhouse trading at 1.411 euro to the pound down to almost Greek levels of debt-driven despair.

  It was now the Eurozone’s turn to consider whether it wanted Britain to remain as a member state.