Archive for November, 2012

Having previously won the club competition and area competition, I travelled down to Donington to take part in the Division E humorously speaking competition. Division E covers an area from Royal Leamington Spa and above – the North of England and Scotland.

I got flattened at the competition, I didn’t even place. This was disappointing as while I thought I was well beaten for first place, I thought I might have done enough to get in the top three. But live and learn, the next competition starts in March, and that one ends in the World Championship of Public Speaking.

Recently, Brendan O’Neill wrote an article for the Huffington Post, entitled “If You Were Abused by Sir Jimmy Savile, Maybe You Should Keep It to Yourself“.

He argues that there is no reason for people who claim to have been abused by Jimmy Savile 30 years ago, to now come out and talk about it. It doesn’t make the victim feel any better, as they’re essentially just having horrible memories splashed across the media for everyone to see, not to mention that they are then fitted into a neat little box of victim, rather than the fully-rounded human being they probably are.

It doesn’t do justice any good, because Savile is now dead, and therefore cannot be brought to justice. The unfortunate reality is that it genuinely is too late – if he did do what he is alleged to have done, and it’s looking like he probably did, then he has now got away with it, forever.

Thirdly, it doesn’t do any good for society either, as it simply increases the paranoia that there is a sexual predator lurking in every corner and continues the slide to where, as Chris Morris suggests, we will reach a time when even a simple conversation between mother and daughter, will be carried out at gun point.

As a consequence of the whole incident, they’re probably going to dismantle Jimmy’s charity, because if there is anyone that should be punished for Jimmy’s actions, it is almost certainly the beneficiaries of a charitable foundation, many of which weren’t born when the alleged incidents took place. In fact, the idea of it being Jimmy’s charity is nonsense, because he’s dead, it’s actually our charity, it belongs to society, so I’m not quite sure why we are smashing up our own things in some form of mob justice against ourselves.

I tried out my new lens at the pre-party. Unfortunately, I had to be in Donington the next day, so I was getting my coat out of the cloak room as people were still queuing to put theirs in. Never the less, good times were had.