Mourning Sickness: Good Grief It’s Baby P
BABY P Watch: Anorak’s at-a-glance look at Baby P in the news and the Sun’s case of Mourning Sickness and how we can all feel good and get off on a big dose of grief…
THE SUN (editorial): “Nation’s grief”
In driving snow and icy rain, decent folk from all over Britain yesterday came to pay their respects to baby P… Many brought their own children to lay flowers and toys, turning the toddler’s grave into a shrine”.
Baby P was cremated and his ashes scattered. There is no grave.
But there is a headstone, made of granite and placed in the ground by the caring Sun newspaper. It gives the dates of Baby P, his codename, not his real name, thus offering him no escape even in death from the crimes that ruined his life.
Page 13: “1,000 IN PILGRIMAGE TO CEMETERY”
Putting the GRIM in pilgrimage.
“An extra-tight hug for tot at baby P shrine” – it’s a picture of a woman and child. “Safe in my hands”, runs the caption. There’s a picture of a child with a careworn face.
“When biting winds came they clutched each other for warmth and support. But still they came”.
People like:
“Son Oliver, eight, had also painted Baby P a picture of a ship with the words ‘Sail away into the sun. No more pain.”
But there is more pain. The Sun is giving the readers more of what they want: “Agony as wrong bay is cremated”; “Cig mum burns ‘wimp’ on child”; “Dad raped his girl 1,000 times” – and that all in one column…
Getting off on grief…
Baby P: Like Diana’s Death, I Was There
Baby P: Spot The Ashes, Protect The Mum And Kilo The Cat
Baby P: Socialist Liberal Conservatives To Blame And Sterilising The Guilty
The Columnists Do Baby P: Death, Middle Class Evil And Porn
Margaret Beckett, Baby P And Social Workers
Baby P: Like Diana’s Death, I Was There
Posted: 24th, November 2008 | In: Media Comments (40) | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed: RSS 2.0 | TrackBack | Permalink
Comments
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November 27th, 2008 at 10:50 pm
I object to your description of me as a hand wringing liberal tosser, as it is patently obvious I am a hand tossing liberal wringer.
November 27th, 2008 at 9:47 pm
fuck baby p. i am so fed up with reading about it yawwwwwwn, get a life all you hand wringing liberal tossers. Shit happens, deal with it.
November 26th, 2008 at 6:14 pm
W-H-A-T? Oh dear, there’s an impression of my keyboard in the side of my face and my spine has taken on the shape of a question mark from sleeping at my desk. Also the expiry date on that cough mixture was 2005 and the bottle looks to be half-empty. Whoops. Gateway drug. I’ll be seeking out old-fashioned Benylin and Calpol from before they took the good stuff out now.
Well, I think I’ve reached the logical conclusion of what what a dadmum like me can say on this subject of Baby P. Grief. Club. Cult. Now that it seems to be merging with the McCann stuff, it’s starting to look like another gateway drug to harder and more soul-destroying stuff too. Going to see if I can fritter away some of my life on the lighter posts from the recent past instead.
Thanks for putting up with MY shit on this subject everyone. Please send any spare Oxytocin you may have on a postcard to the usual address…
November 26th, 2008 at 12:13 pm
M-A-G-N-E-T-I-T-E…………………………….. oh dear he’s tumbled..
November 26th, 2008 at 8:27 am
’twas only Wilkinson (Wilko) own brand chesty, coolandcalm, but I think thr lack of sleep from staying up all the night before with the little ‘un and having a good heart-to-heart with her about life, the universe and why Hollyoaks makes me want to drive forks into my own eyeballs may have artificially boosted the potency - like that first cigarette they dissuade you from having just after you’ve given blood… Or it’s truly wondrous, and I’ll start a run on it that neither Wilko nor the PRC can cope with.
Either way I expect to topple like a felled tree before long.
November 26th, 2008 at 7:51 am
magnetite…. can you recommend the cough mixture? I’m on pholcodine at the moment and its nowhere near as good as yours sounds!
November 26th, 2008 at 3:32 am
Okay, that wasn’t as immediate as I had hoped. Damn, this cough medicine is good! Probably made in China. I’ll glow in the dark tomorrow no doubt, but I’m glowing inside now. Thanks, PRC!
Good night all. God bless and sweet dreams.
November 26th, 2008 at 3:22 am
I can even do that immediately. No need to wait at the House Of Magnetite. Say - hypothetically - one of my shildren WAS killed by someone. I’ll leave you to picture the details, but do it in your head for Christ’s sake. Say I DID swing my pickaxe handle at the griefmob that bore down on me to pass on their selfish, insincere and ephemeral sympathies. I’m certain that that same mob would fall on me like wolves for daring to reject their attentions. That’s what mobs do. They aren’t rational. This wholesale outpouring of misdirected grief isn’t rational. it’s a club, and a disgusting one at that.
If the grief junkies want to do something, let them do something positive. Volunteer work, perhaps. Adopt a chav. Take them out for the day. Show them life isn’t all Jeremy Kyle, Pot Rice and crackpipes. Maybe it’ll do no good - but it’ll be a damn sight better than dragging their own kids to stand by the fake grave of a cremated child they never met and were never likely to meet; at the behest of newspapers that would see his peers were thrown into twenty-first century workhouses in a heartbeat if they could.
November 26th, 2008 at 2:36 am
Oh, curses. I had to deal with my unwell spawn as well as suffering with the flu myself, so I was away when Rich had his bit rant. I hope he isn’t this new fire-and-forget breed that Basil Rathbone seems to epitomise. Just in case you do return, Dickie, I’ll respond. Open those eyes and ears.
My real name is actually Stuart. Now you can see why I use a nick. Magnetite is a nod to a preternaturally good sense of direction that is one of my few plus points. You can spin me round with my eyes shut and 8 times out of 10 I’ll still accurately find North. Not much to brag about I know, but since it exists below the conscous level, I’m still pretty amazed by it myself.
Daddy died when I was fourteen, and though I cared for him practically alone in the years of his slow deterioration from the many ilnesses his work had given him instead of a carriage clock for a retirement gift I never felt smothered by him.
Do I want a bad boy? Well, I tried the whole manlove thing briefly in college; but it wasn’t my cup of tea - so no, I don’t think so. A bad girl on the other hand - now you’re talking!
I am poor. Churchmouse poor - and was educated at a Comprehensive school near a shithole mining village. Sadly, the whole doing something for someone who wasn’t me (though I look much like my passed-on pater) stymied my formal education, so I had to do it myself. That’s why it’s hit-and-miss. Don’t let my clumsy eloquence fool you. I just bloody love my language for the subtle, yet powerful tool that it is.
And, lastly - the world fills me with futile rage, Rich. Why do you think I became I misanthrope? People like you who tell me to stop pissing when they should be encouraging me to start.
To sum up: How wrong can you be?
Still, best regards to you and to those who put up with your shit. My kids only pity me, but since I fostered that attitude in them to make sure they didn’t repeat my mistakes I don’t hold it against them. I’ll be able to mooch from them when they’re gainfully employed after the university educations, and better lives, I urged them toward anyway.
Wow, I sound like a fucking saint now. I’d better blot my copybook, and quick!
November 26th, 2008 at 1:20 am
Hopefully the new Martial Laws that the Coco Commentariat Party is putting together will see an end to all these children dying.
I have drawn up new laws wherein social workers will be replaced - wholesale - and immediate neighbours and community workers will be offered the chance to be thoroughly nosey and intrusive - and they will be paid to teach some parenting skills to this filthy sub-strata of society who do not give a flying fuck about their offspring!
Social workers will simply have to be given the same powers of the police forthwith - or we will get absolutely nowhere.
It is going to take a completely different personality-type to be a social worker from now on! They are going to have to stop pandering to a lot of social welfare reforms that have crept in during the past twenty years - and get fucking real!
It’s a jungle out there and there is a breed of kids that is growing up wild. Some children like Baby P - won’t even get the chance to grow up!
It would have been nice to see a Left-Wing paper get off its arse and do some decent reporting on the case - instead of the Sun jumping up and down and using it as an excuse - not just to bring down Haringey - but to start its daily pumping out of tripe to get the working classes to vote errrrrrrr ……… Tory.
Surely not …….. But yes …….. the Gunning for Gordie Campaign starts right here.
There’s nothing like a little bit of civil unrest and a dash of outrage from the unwashed to unseat a PM. Ask Thatcher.
Gordie - I think your days are numbered
November 25th, 2008 at 7:56 pm
Blimey….. someone else who hasn’t got to grips with Anorak!
November 25th, 2008 at 6:43 pm
What a bunch of whingers!!! If you hate tabloids why fucking read em, or would you have nothing to say for yourself? Don’t ever have kids. They will hate you for being the self-obsessed bunch of pricks you all are. Magnetite (your real name, right?), Whaddup? Does Daddy just give you too much love that you feel smothered and trapped. Do you want a bad boy? Do you secretly wish you were poor and didn’t speak posh? Does the world just fill you with numb bland feelings of whatever. When was the last time you did anything for somebody other than your big, fat useless self? Probably never. You are the ugliest sounding person I think I’ve ever heard of. Stop pissing or get off the pot.
November 25th, 2008 at 6:42 pm
Mods… thanks for the release!
Chenier…. Basil seems to have missed the point that Magnetite put far more clearly that I did!
November 25th, 2008 at 5:19 pm
Basil appears not to have bothered reading the other pieces Anorak has written on this, or the comments made on those pieces. Getting off on grief has it nailed…
November 25th, 2008 at 4:49 pm
That might have been my nick had I been born a girl, coolandcalm. I’d probably have tacked an ’s’ on at the start though, being me anyway - gender notwithstanding. Perhaps that’s what’s lacking in me. A shot or two of Oxytocin. Still, lacking that, I still haven’t bumped off my own loinfruit. Even though they’re an excellent source of healthy replacement organs.
November 25th, 2008 at 4:23 pm
hey… that is very eloquent Megmetite. Well said.
November 25th, 2008 at 3:33 pm
As one of Anorak’s few (very, very few) genuine bitterly misanthropic commentators, I can honestly say that the rest of the gang here are quite the opposite of the picture you paint Basil. I couldn’t give a fuck about Baby P beyond being appalled at the way he lived, and yes, died. If he had lived, the Sun would likely be calling him a feral child a few years from now, given the environs and situation that he grew up in. Now I’m as shallow as the kid’s pool at the Dwarftown Municipal Baths (or if you’d like me to conform to your snap judgement of a group who you seem keen to flee from before they can respond to you - a murdered child’s woodland grave) but I’ll tell you this with true, heartfelt feeling. Were I the father of a murdered child myself, and people like you came along and thought you could ride the coattails of my grief despite not having known my offspring at all, I’d be swinging a pickaxe handle at the lot of you grief junkies with fervent energy. I hope that isn’t your real name, as you’ll forever be associated with the Holmes that was hijacked to propagandise something that had nothing really to do with him at all. Says it all really.
November 25th, 2008 at 3:05 pm
It’s Dr Watson, isn’t it? It’s still not safe Doc
November 25th, 2008 at 2:37 pm
So have a go at newspaper’s not people paying respects to a dead baby. You sound like people who are not listened to or taken seriously in life so you come on here and you feel important. Fair enough. Just blaming The Sun for the ills of the world is such an easy target. What’s far more insidious is the lazy thinking/apathy that you display, not to mention your need to make cheap jokes at a dead baby’s expense. I’ll let you have the last word because it’s far more important to you than it is to me. Enjoy your bit of power in this echo chamber of the few.
November 25th, 2008 at 2:21 pm
I’ve had the p taken out of me again
November 25th, 2008 at 12:37 pm
Missed the ‘p’ yet again. Sorry.
November 25th, 2008 at 12:33 pm
You beat me to it Yamster!
November 25th, 2008 at 12:32 pm
Eeeerrrr… isn’t that what Anorak is all about? criticising the reporting of the news?
November 25th, 2008 at 12:30 pm
Ironically, one of the reasons for Anorak’s existence, is to poke fun at the media so having a go at a crumby newspaper is probably what most of us are here to see.
November 25th, 2008 at 12:16 pm
Coolandcalm ironically you’re doing exactly the same as The Sun, cynically using the torture and death of a baby as a platform to have a go at a crumby newspaper. Your comments aren’t insightful and certainly aren’t funny. Coolandcalm? more like Coldandheartless.
November 25th, 2008 at 11:53 am
has my post been spammed or is it in the ether somewhere?
Moderator
Found in spam and released
November 25th, 2008 at 11:48 am
But it won’t put pressure on the council. Remember Maria Colwell and all others before and after? Maybe a lowly Social Worker will be sacrificed but that’ll be about it. (as with Victoria Climbie)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_Colwell
The only thing that will make any difference in the long run is a complete overhaul of the Children’s Act and ‘life means life’ sentences.
November 25th, 2008 at 11:39 am
And there is a body and a crime, Karen…
November 25th, 2008 at 10:59 am
I’ll sign any petition going… In the McCann case it was all pointless. The praying/looking/posters/wristbands… none of it was going to find her or get her justice.
But in this case - the council were at fault and anything that puts pressure on them is a good thing.
November 25th, 2008 at 10:52 am
They failed miserably and they should be sacked.
The ultimate blame for their rubbishness lies with them - they’re paid to visit bad households so that bad households can be stopped from neglecting or torturing or killing their kids & in this case they had plenty of opportunities to intervene.
November 25th, 2008 at 10:51 am
But t’s not a grave Basil. Its a cynical chunk of marble placed by the Sun. Baby P was cremated and his ashes scattered.
Wonder if the rag was selling hot-dogs and pocorn on-site?
xx