I went to the dentist the other day and, as always, chose a magazine from the collection on the side table in the waiting area – Vogue, Elle Decoration, Good Housekeeping and others for example – to while away the minutes before the enforced time in ‘the chair’. I am pleased to see the magazines have returned …..

…… as during the uncertainty caused by Covid they were all assumed to be carriers of the virus, so disappeared. (Note 1) As I was sucking up the contents of Elle, as if I can’t buy the magazine myself somewhere, I got engrossed in a series of articles about individuals termed ‘creatives’. After some minutes I found an article about some pottery by the Israeli chef Ottolenghi, inspired by the Sicilian style. These days it’s easy to simply take a photo.

Returning home with a numb cheek, I found a supplier on line, ordered a vase and it was delivered two days later (Note 2). I sent a photograph to Celina’s best friend Mimi, looking for confirmation of my taste.

Fortunately she thought it was gorgeous and so I explained via WhatsApp how, looking at a magazine in a doctors’ surgery close to home in Battersea in 2009, I had seen a photograph of a chap sweating doing yoga. At the time I was doing Hatha yoga twice a week but it wasn’t hot enough to produce sweat. I had asked a neighbour if they knew what sort of yoga it was, she said I’ll take you and on 11^th March 2009 I joined 71 other individuals in a hot Balham studio for my first class of the Bikram series.

The ‘WhatsApp’ exchange continued:

“It seems so random ….. that you read an article in a random magazine and through that discovered a passion ……. and Celina (Note 3) ….. and moved to Hove and a change of life style.”

“C’est la vie!” (I was about to eat supper so didn’t want to engage right then in some philosophical debate, so this was a ‘hand-off’!)

“Really? Nothing more profound?” (Slightly incensed by my short repost?)

“More profound in a PC perhaps. But life can be extremely random!”

“Definitely a PC. I can understand ‘random’ about encounters and coincidences yes ….. but why one person reads or hears something then decides to follow up and someone doesn’t? Not sure why that happens ….  you could explore this  further?”

Well, that’s a nice challenge; where to start? Definitions maybe:

‘Random: made, done or happening without method or conscious decision.’

‘Fate: the development of events outside a person’s control, regarded as predetermined by a supernatural power.’

‘Coincidence: a remarkable concurrence of events or circumstances without apparent causal connection.’

So …… I made a conscious decision to buy an Ottolenghi vase, ergo it can’t be random. And if fate is determined by some supernatural power, count me out. I love coincidences and find them in so much of my life but this was no coincidence; I didn’t go looking for a vase! We generally learn our behaviour, understand how our actions have a reaction, how our behaviour is dictated by how we think and feel and how experiences can act as a brake or an accelerator to those actions.

The trouble is there is so much conflicting advice out there. For example, if you were hurt or had something go wrong because of your actions, you might be more cautious next time: “Once bitten twice shy” goes the ‘brake’ saying, whilst the ‘accelerator’ prompts one to act: ‘He who hesitates is lost’, one of the Christian Proverbs – proverbs 3verse 2. Conversely, ‘Fools rush in ….’ (note 3) doesn’t mean every time you make a quick decision you’re an idiot!! Of course a person who spends too much time deliberating about what to do often loses the chance to act altogether; booking tickets for some international star’s concert – any hesitation and they’re sold out!

One’s personal preferences play a part here. Although dismissed by some, the Myers Briggs Type Indicator, based on Jungian principles, can offer a clue. It has four comparative preferences: Extraversion (E)/Introversion (I), Sensing (S)/Intuition (N), Thinking (T)/Feeling (F) and Judgement (J)/Perception (P). I register as ENTJ; an ‘N’ prefers the world of the future, of ideas, of possibilities. In addition someone who registers as a ‘J’ is quite decisive, whereas a ‘P’ wants more information, wants to do some research. So, I bought a vase, without buying a magazine entitled ‘What/Which Vase?’! An explanation of my decision perhaps?

One’s life is littered with ‘What If?’ choices; for instance, in 1985 I debated leaving the British Army after twenty years. What if I had stayed, where might my life have gone? No one will ever know and I am a firm believer we make such decisions …… and stick with them: regretting any decision is for the fairies. The fork in the path? Choose the road less travelled … or not?

Richard 31^st March 2023

Hove

www.postcardscribbles.co.uk

Note 1 Some ‘waiting areas’ have a wider assortment, obviously depending on the quality of the establishment, or not! For instance the gentlemen’s hairdresser in the exclusive Gavea Golf & Country Club in Rio de Janeiro’s Sāo Conrado suburb has a selection of magazines that cover interest in mansions costing millions of dollars, motor yachts that have ten cabins …… and the latest Playboy magazine!

Note 2 I had a Christmas gift of some money so it was good to choose something.

Note 3 Celina started practising hot yoga in September 2008. After over two and a half years of practising in the same classes, we agreed in September 2011 to have a meal somewhere. The rest is history.

Note 4 Alexander Pope (1688 – 1744) added ‘ ……where angels fear to tread’ to this proverb. He is well known for many other quotations, such as “To err is human: to forgive divine.”

I had promised Mo I would meet her in The Hope this week and so on Wednesday afternoon I popped in. Susie saw me and automatically started making a double espresso; being a regular anywhere has its advantages! I pulled up a chair at Mo’s table.

“Hi! Mo. Good to see you. You OK?”

A sort-of strangled “Yes” came out, as she had just put a large piece of a Brigadeiro into her mouth!

“I remember you saying that you had two twenty-something children. Did you see the column in the Sunday Times by Charlotte Ivers headlined ‘Over-forties! Your digital etiquette is appalling?’

She shook her head, wiping the chocolaty crumbs from her lips, and her look said, ‘tell me more’.

“I can only assume she has written the whole piece with her tongue firmly stuck into her cheek, but then I am over 40.”

“Me too!”

“She writes that there are only 3 circumstances when it is acceptable to call someone without prior warning: if you are married to them, if you are engaged to them or if someone has died. Never heard such nonsense! Alexander Bell would be turning in his grave. Surely if you want to talk to someone, dial their number. If it’s convenient, the recipient can answer the call; if not they won’t, although most seem obsessed about answering any call. If you don’t answer and it is important, they will try again!”

Mo showed me a flier that had been left on the tables:

“Come and chat! Every Thursday in April the Hope Café will be focusing on the art of conversation. Come in, have a tea or coffee and talk to someone.”

“What a great idea! It seems more and more people are living alone and rarely talk to anyone.”

“Don’t think you met Edith, Mo? Lovely elderly lady, a Kinder Transport child. Used to come in here regularly and was always up for a chat. Sadly she died towards the end of last year; but she was, I think, 89 or so.”

“Susie says Thursdays are going to be specifically for those who live on their own, who never normally talk to people. Loneliness, or social isolation for a modern description, can significantly increase a person’s risk of death, a risk on a par with those of smoking, obesity and physical inactivity. In extremis, it can take you down, and down, to a point when you fail to see any point in living.”

“Absolutely! Jenni Russell in her Times column suggested, inter alia, cafés’ reserving a table for those who are want to chat: a ‘talking table’! Now that’s a great idea and it sounds as though The Hope Café is right on the ball.

I think Susie said they are going to ask an aunt of hers to facilitate these ‘conversation days’, as some people are extremely shy and probably out of practice in talking to others.”

“What? Ensuring there’s no politics, no sex and no religion? Ha! Ha! You still watching the Couples Therapy series?”

“Yes, although when Cyn, as in Cyn & Yaya, talked about the abuse she had suffered as a child from her uncle and how this affected her relationships today, I wondered why she hadn’t tried to deal with it in one-on-one therapy and not bring it to the table of her relationship with Yaya. Incidentally had quite a lot of comments about my last PC on this programme, reinforcing how relationships define our lives. Orna talks about the need for both boundaries and space in relationships. My very first Hot Yoga teacher, Paul Dobson, writes that ‘….. committing to our relationships is a way to make space in our lives. Relationships are what open our hearts and spirits. So make space for a relationship and have space within it.’”

I roughed out a little diagram:

Sometimes a topic stays in the front of my mind for a while, challenging more thought, more research or just more focus. After a recent visit to my dentist, I thought about this particular relationship, with one’s dentist. (See also PCs 64 & 66 ‘Molars & Wisdom’) (Note 1) No matter how much you like them, once you’re in that chair you are captive to their whims. Unable to communicate as the suction device that removes your saliva is pulling your bottom lip down and your top lip feels the size of an Orca due to an injection, the best you can do is a quiet ‘er!’, ‘ah! or ‘oh!’ as appropriate. And where do you look? Stare at them, or obliquely at the nurse, or at the television that some modern Dental Clinics have installed above the chair but in the latter case if you don’t want to watch football …..?

Incidentally on Monday (20^th) had to go to Hove Implant Clinic. I didn’t need a reminder as that morning’s Codeword in the Times had ‘Implant’ as one of the answers!

I had been chatting to Mo for 20 minutes or so when Sami & Lisa walked in, shaking the rain off their umbrella, and sat down. Never enough time in the day and I needed to be on my way, I said goodbye to Mo and went across to Sami.

Without sitting down, I asked them if they would like to come to supper, as I sensed we could have an interesting evening. They looked delighted, so I offered to email some dates and walked out into the rain.

Richard 24^th March 2023

Hove

http://www.postcardscribbles.co.uk

PS You may have read in PC 326 the simple observation that Dove’s were advertising their Men’s skin care products alongside a rugby match, all brawn and toughness. (See note 2 below) Rather made a dent in the traditional image of male hunks and cauliflower ears, singing raunchy songs in a post-match bath and drinking huge quantities of beer. I made another observation during the Ireland V Scotland game the other weekend; Guinness, the sponsor of the whole Six Nations tournament and renowned for its creamy dark stout, was advertising its ‘0.0’ ((ie no alcohol) beer. At last the separation of being a top athlete and alcohol is being understood; at least by the athletes but probably not by the spectators!

Note 1 I remember that when stationed in Germany a very appropriate slang word we  used for ‘dentist’ is ‘fang-farrier’; so descriptive! The proper word is zahnarzt (m) or zahnārztin (f).

Note 2 Women’s Rugby and Football are two of the fastest growing sports in the UK.

I love going into the Hope Café, never quite sure who will be there, apart from Josh and Susie behind the counter. Teresa from the Brazilian delicatessen next door occasionally pops in as does Duncan, the Hope’s manager. As you will appreciate, finding copy for my postcards is an on-going, delightful chore and places like The Hope, or on the bus, or in the supermarket, or on television, or traveling here and there, prompt ideas that sometimes take root, germinate.

Last year there was a programme on television I found fascinating. It was simply called ‘Couples Therapy’ and was a fly-on-the-wall documentary about the interaction between an Israeli-American psychoanalyst, Doctor Orna Gurainik and those seeking help with their relationships.

Interviewed about it, Orna said: “I think good TV, like good literature, gives people a space where they can imagine themselves in the shoes of someone else. It’s like a rehearsal. It’s the way play prepares us for a real experience. The participants in the show are incredibly courageous and generous. They’re giving the audience the option to jump into their shoes and go through the experience with them. (Ed: I find myself equally in either Orna’s shoes or those of the clients!)

My take on what makes things easier for couples and families is to be really mindful of boundaries and space. Create boundaries, respect boundaries, even artificial ones, Create space because there’s so much mashed togetherness in a ‘state of anxiety’ that I think is adding distress rather than helping. That would be my prime advice.”

I am much taken by the third series, airing now of British television, and was ruminating about one particular aspect as I entered the café, when I spied Mo, sitting at a corner table, head down into her mobile. She looked up and beckoned me over. I am always intrigued by people’s ‘back stories’ and knew nothing about Mo, apart from the fact she had been reading ‘Act of Oblivion’, Robert Harris’ latest book when I had first met her, (See PC 322 February 2023) so I was keen to elicit more!! Sometimes I have to preface the conversation with: ‘I am sorry if I appear nosey, it’s just that during my 16 years of 1:1 executive coaching, I found it fascinating to hear my client’s answers to “So how did you get to be here? Tell me about yourself?”

Mo admitted she had been a senior teacher in a private girls’ school but had decided to move to Hove to be near her aging mother, a fiercely independent woman who lived on her own in a retirement complex in Shoreham. We talked about this and that …… and what she was watching in television …… and she mentioned the Couples Therapy programme.

“Fascinating isn’t it?” I said; “This new series started when we were in Brazil so I recorded it. We’ve watched the first episode.”

“Well, I think I am up to date but I was stopped in my tracks during the first session of India and Dale, when they were explaining how they got to be where there were, on the couch so to speak”.

India and Dale

“Tell me more?”

“Firstly I needed to understand exactly what was said ….”

“At the beginning?”

“Yes, so I wrote it down:

“India: “I was born in Georgia and am an actress; have been in The Lion King here in New York for 8 years now. I met him, Dale, after my first three months and we dated for 4 years.”

“Dale: I come from an immigrant family. I was born in Guyana and then moved to Antigua when I was about four. We moved up here to New York City when I was a teenager. I feel like there are definitely underlying issues we struggle with and it sometimes it shouldn’t be as stressful as it is, it’s hard.”

 …. and this is the bit that rocked me back on my heels, so to speak ……

“I think as Afro-Americans we come into relationships with a lot of trauma that we are not necessarily willing to acknowledge, ready to accept, and there has to be a lot of soul/self-searching in order to understand how real life affects your relationship.”

 …. he seems to separate real life and relationships ……”

“You can’t have a relationship in a vacuum can you?”

“Don’t think so! A relationship with anyone, with anything, happens within the physical, emotional, spiritual boundaries of ‘real life’ There’s no other artificial place surely? But what about his belief that Afro-Americans carry a lot of trauma?”

“I can only assume he means from their historical past, going back to days of slavery?” And as one does these days, when the information lies through the Google portal, I got my laptop out and found, inter alia, “The Traumatic Impact of Structural Racism on African Americans” (Note 1)

“It’s interesting, something I have never been aware of, but there is a great belief that historical trauma, created in this case by the Slave Trade, is an example of intergenerational trauma whose effects can be felt generations later.”

Got me wondering whether other groups subconsciously are affected by ‘historical trauma’, such as Jews, persecuted over centuries, or the English with the invasion by the Vikings, and whether it really does play out in our relationships today, or is it just a crutch for some to lean on? And at this important point, I looked at my watch:

“Sorry Mo, could we continue this discussion next week, I really have to dash?”

“Sure!” a little surprised, “Next week? Wednesday?”

I nodded to Susie as I was passing the counter: “Has Sami been in recently?”

“Oh! Didn’t he tell you? He and Lisa have gone off to a yoga retreat in Kerala for a week and then another week exploring Goa.”

“Lucky chap!” I muttered as I thought of the heat of southern India and headed out into the March cold.

Richard 17^th March 2023

Hove

www.postcardscribbles.co.uk

Note 1 The Traumatic Impact of Structural Racism on African Americans 

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8352535/

Here in the United Kingdom we are coming to the end of Rugby’s Six Nations tournament, where teams from England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, France and Italy all play each other over 6 weeks or so. Whilst football is the more popular game here, rugby has a dedicated following and is a more physical game. Think ‘rugby forward’ and you think ‘big’; the six prop forwards in the current pool for the English team average 125kg each, while the lock forwards are over 2 metres in height. The rules are constantly changing to ensure than injuries are minimised, unrecognisable to those being applied when I hung up my boots aged 31 some decades ago.

Given the human brawn on display during these matches, it was surprising to see on the electronic advertising panels alongside the pitch during one match, in between ‘Enjoy Guinness today’ and ‘O2 for your mobile network’ (Note 1), ‘Dove’s Men’s Moisturiser’.

We have come a long way!! In 2019 the UK Men’s Grooming Market was worth some £500 million and is increasing year-on-year. Of course it’s somewhat dwarfed by the Women’s Cosmetic Market – £9.8 billion in 2017. (See also ‘What Moisturiser Do You Use?’ PC 162 October 2019)

I had to go to our local doctor’s surgery the other day and managed a face-to-face with a real, live human doctor. The following day I was on the bus on my way back from the morning hot yoga session and saw I had an email from the NHS. I opened it; to access the message I needed to add my email address, then decide whether the diagrammatic car’s final destination was at ‘X’ or ‘Y’ to prove I was a human being, which I managed to do eventually (!), re-input my email address, wait for a six-figure ‘security code’ to arrive on my mobile, find my password and eventually get to the message: “How was your visit to your GP?” Think I should get another appointment to check my mental health?

I’ll never need Ayesha Vardag, a lawyer the super-rich call to help them get divorced. Rather like the model Evangelista who famously said during an interview for Vogue magazine: “We (as in we super-models) don’t wake up for less than $10,000 a day”, Ayesha specialises in cases where the assets are in excess of £100 million. But she was interviewed for the Sunday Times’ ‘A Life in The Day’ column which, at the end, asks the subject what their ‘words of wisdom’ would be:

Best Advice I was given: – “You have to howl until you find your pack”. Although I spent twenty years in the British Army, it was only when I left and found a different group of people to mix with did I experience a greater affinity!

Advice I’d give: – “When something bad happens, remember it may have saved you from much worse, or may bring you something much better.” I am an eternal optimist so concur. There’s always an upside.

What I wish I’d known: – “Don’t waste time on people who don’t care about you, and move mountains to be with the people who do.” Ah! Yes! The ‘false friends’.

My friend Eddie in Weymouth sent me this lovely story and claimed it is true. I asked where it had come from and he replied an old man down the street had told him (Note 2). OK then!

“On 20^th July 1969 Commander of the Apollo 11 Lunar Module, Neil Armstrong, stepped onto the surface of the moon. We all remember his: “that’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” As he re-entered the Lander, he murmured: “Good luck, Mr Gorsky.” Many people at NASA thought this casual remark concerned some rival Soviet cosmonaut, but research found no such surname in any of the space programmes. Over the years many people had asked Neil Armstrong about this remark and he would simply smile, giving no explanation.

But in 1995, in the follow-up questions after a presentation, a reporter asked the same question, “Who is Mr Gorsky?” As Mr Gorsky had by now died, Neil felt he was able to answer. “In 1938, I was playing baseball with a chum in the back yard at home in the mid-west when the ball went over our neighbour’s fence and landed by a window. My neighbours were Mr & Mrs Gorsky. As I bent down to pick up the ball, I heard Mrs Gorsky yelling at her husband. “Sex? You want sex? You’ll get sex when (pause to think of some unlikely event) the kid next door walks on the moon.”

Somewhere in a February postcard, PC 321 ‘All I want …’, I wrote: “And on the subject of acceptance, we have a number of religions on the planet and there is a degree of ‘If you don’t agree with our beliefs, you must be against us.’ No! I am not; I just want you to accept I am not.” I was pleased that our Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, recently publically agreed: “We do not have blasphemy laws in Great Britain, and must not be complicit in the attempts to impose them on this country. There is no right not to be offended. There is no legal obligation to be reverent towards any religion. The lodestar of our democracy is freedom of speech. Nobody can demand respect for their belief system, even if it is a religion. People are legally entitled to reject — and to leave — any religion. There is no apostasy law in this country. The act of accusing someone of apostasy or blasphemy is effectively inciting violence upon that person.”

Exactly!

And finally, here in England we often say “A pinch and a punch for the first of the month” on its first day, the ‘pinch’ referring to throwing a pinch of salt to keep witches at bay and the punch to banish them forever, but used in a school’s playground in a physical way. Saying ‘White Rabbits no return’ means no one will pinch you back, although somehow I think on the 1^st of March you say March Hares, but I could be very confused! Interestingly, according to Rahmi, in central Turkey they say ‘Open the door and bring the log in’ as by the beginning of March all their chopped firewood has been used up and they have to resort to bigger bits.

More scribbles next week.

Richard 10^th March 2023

Hove

www.postcardscribbles.co.uk

PS Why does the battery of one’s smoke alarm always fail between midnight and 0300 causing its incessant beep to invade your sleep?

Note 1 O2 are one of the sponsors of the English Rugby team

Note 2 Maybe he was Neil Armstrong’s boyhood friend.

“I have seen monsters. I know what they look like.” says Rita, eyes locked on Nell’s. “The Nazis yes. The ones in the uniforms and goose-stepping in the streets. But it was the townspeople of my village, looking for all the world like good citizens and good Christians, who reported my family. And it was the local police who arrested them and handed them to the Germans. The real monsters.”

“I am not sure I understand.”

“The Hatheson police told me my son was a monster, a murderer.”

“But you don’t believe that?”

“You are telling me what I believe?”

“Yes.” Nell gestures to the pictures on the wall, the pantheon of Rita’s family.”

The reason for this extract from the Australian author Chris Hammer’s new book “Dead Man’s Creek” will, I hope, become obvious, as a series of unrelated events, coincidences even, come together to add colour to this postcard about monsters, although the topic doesn’t really need any colour.

The word ‘pantheon’ means a group of particularly important or famous people and it came to me one night as a collective for the selection of murderers this postcard refers to. It then appeared the following day, in the above extract; it’s not a common word! The fictional Rita, aged 5 and an Austrian Jew, had been staying with an uncle in the country when the Nazis, alerted by neighbours to the presence of a Jewish family in their midst, had rounded up her parents and siblings and sent them to their deaths in a concentration camp. She and hundreds of other orphans were shipped to Australia for a more peaceful upbringing.  

Marcel Marceau

Still unsure where this is going? Well, a few months ago I watched a 2020 film on television called “Resistance” about a Jewish actor, Marcel Mangel (1923 – 2007) , who in 1942 joins the French resistance in Lyon to save thousands of orphaned children from the Nazis. Mangel survived the war and went on to become famous as Marcel Marceau the mime artist. As I watched the film it began to dawn on me that the Gestapo in charge of Lyon was famously known as The Butcher of Lyon. So I expected to find out that at the end of the war he was tried at Nuremburg, found guilty and executed.

I was really saddened to read otherwise. I bought Tom Bower’s 1985 book ‘Klaus Barbie Butcher of Lyon’ and read it, acknowledging it had been written two years after Barbie had been extradited to France from Bolivia and indicted for war crimes in 1984.

I was still reading this book when we flew off to The Atacama in Chile in January (see PCs 319 & 320) and, as you do when you join excursions organised by tour companies, chatted to our fellow travellers. One lovely couple were from Berlin and another from Lyon; it seemed apposite. That and the fact we were only a short distance from the border with Bolivia.

As the war ended, Barbie changed his name and managed to move back into Germany where he got in touch with the United States Intelligence Services. It’s hard to imagine the chaos in Germany after the May 1945 surrender; civilians, refugees, service personnel, no functioning government and from an American point-of-view, a real threat from Soviet Russia. Barbie was employed by the Americans for his anti-communist network of informers and spies. In 1950 the French, who had established Barbie was working in Germany for the US, appealed for his arrest and extradition. The Americans apparently refused and used a well-established ‘rat line’ to send him via Italy to Bolivia. There he spent 30 years living under the name Klaus Altmann, assisting various dictators in their oppression of the regime’s opponents. Nazi-hunters identified him in 1971by some fingerprints, but the Bolivians refused to extradite him to France. (Note 1)

A change in Bolivian politics meant that in 1983 he was finally extradited to France. His trial started in 1987; charged with 41 separate counts of ‘crimes against humanity’, he was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment, the death penalty having been abolished in 1981.  He died in 1991 in jail in Lyon aged 71, a far nicer end to his life than the 4,342 individuals whose murders he sanctioned or the 7,591 men, women and children his organisation sent to concentration camps in Germany and Poland and to a certain death, and far, far nicer than those 14,300 who were arrested and tortured, his moniker, the Butcher of Lyon, reflecting the true evil in this man.

While I read the book, two other names surfaced through the sediment of my memory – Mengele and Eichman.

Joseph Mengeles

Adolf Eichman

Adolf Eichman, the main architect of Hitler’s Final Solution, slipped out of Europe to Argentina, where there was a vibrant German community and politicians sympathetic to the Nazi ideology. Eichman lived in Buenos Aires until 1960 when Mossad agents captured him and smuggled him, drugged, out of the country as an El Al flight crew member. After a four month trial in Jerusalem he was found guilty and hanged in May 1962.

Josef Mengele was known as the ‘Angel of Death’ because of his experiments on prisoners in Auschwitz; his penchant was to use pregnant women, twins and the disabled as human guinea pigs. After the war he fled to Argentina and lived quite openly in Buenos Aires, but after Eichman’s capture he disappeared, eventually living in Brazil under the name Wolfgang Gerhard. He managed to evade Nazi hunters but drowned in the sea in Sao Paulo State in 1979 aged 67.

And now I remember Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, the millions slain during the rise of Mao in China, the Disappeared of Argentina’s Dirty War, the political opponents of Chile’s General Pinochet who were tortured or executed ….. and I have hardly scratched the surface of the monster fraternity!!

But that pantheon of murderers must surely be headed, certainly in the C20th, by both Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler, between the two of them responsible for the deaths of over 26 million human beings. Maybe Putin’s on the short list for this century?

Richard 3^rd March 2023

Hove

http://www.postcardscribbles.co.uk

Note 1 If he had been extradited and found guilty, he would have been executed.