Congratulations and celebrations. Our feisty lady footballers winning the hearts of all who watch them and putting up a terrific challenge to the professionals. These women go the extra mile, they finish the day job and then take to the pitch and if, and when, they do become professionals the world had better watch out. We often talk of examples to younger people and here is a great example of determination, fair play and great spirit.
And what about Rory McIlroy. Fingers crossed. It would be sensational if he winds at St. Andrews, it’s been a while and how the crowd in Scotland and at home would jump for joy.
And then we come onto the men of the Irish rugby team who walloped New Zealand down under. The good cheer must have spilled out over the streets of Wellington as the 21-24 win was a very fine first. And boy, do those hunks know how to celebrate!
TRENDING ON FACEBOOK: John Grey deserves support in his campaign to save the historic Assembly Rooms in Belfast once site of the Harpers’ Festival and favoured by Wolfe Tone and the United Irishmen in 1798. Still a fine building. It’s a no brainer…….. A handsome building in a city centre with few other builds of quality. ……….. Absolute disgrace the way this historic building has been left to fall apart by neglect , The infamous abortive attempt in 1786 by rich merchants to set up a Belfast Slaveship Company ,The 1792 Harpists celebration of Bastille Day ,the trial in 1798 of Henry Joy McCormick after the failure of the United Irish Uprising .
Belfast City Council are now debating this. John Grey has told them, and us, “The Assembly Rooms are ripe for immediate and respectful rejuvenation, whilst seizing a glaring opportunity for the city….. The building should become one of Belfast’s cultural and tourist centrepieces – not just as a monument to traditional Irish music, loved the world round, but as a broader cultural venue of international appeal. It has been slow coming, but it’s not too late for the city council to act.”
A letter to the Council at the City Hall would be a good idea. Let’s make an effort to save this building. Just look at the state of the Court House on Crumlin Road. Someone is just waiting for it to be declared dangerous and pulled down to redevelop the site. We must rise up in anger.
IS THE END NIGH?
If the Government don’t scare us to death, global warming might well burn us to hell and back.
Imagine a total wipe out of the world as we know it. Towns and cities levelled, no satellite communications so no Internet, no media, empty streets – sounds familiar when you think of Ukraine. This is a pandemic that reduces society to one major power source handing down orders to their commanders and so on to the few remaining human beings. People don’t have names anymore they are numbers, ‘operatives’ carrying out terrible deeds and leading a life of routine and misery, not allowed to make their own decisions nor make friends or have interests. Too extreme to imagine? Well, just read the science fiction novel WIPE OUT written by operative OP344, aka award winning writer Teresa Godfrey.
Teresa has imagined that future in such a way that you can’t leave down her book, it’s intriguing but it’s frightening and all too possible. There are so many parallels to what we are experiencing at the moment and have done in past atrocities. In this new world order, unless you do what you’re told you will go into a a downward spiral and before you know it you want to give up and wallow in your nothingness. Every morning begins by reciting, in unison, the twelve tenets of the Moral Code – it’s chilling. ‘The Future is Survival. We are the Future.’
The story is told by Op344, Hazel as we come to know her, who was conceived in a womb, born naturally and immediately taken to a nursery and had no further contact with her birth mother; she has an extra strong immune system as she was bred from specially selected ultra immune genes. She is repeatedly tested, her eggs harvested and frozen for use in the Ex-Vivo programme. Any known germ can’t touch her, she’s valuable to the experimental cause for making test tube babies. Any babies or adults with defects are eliminated, others are used for experiments including being filled with drugs and deadly viruses with the reaction then monitored. It began with small animals, moved to apes now onto men, women and children.
STARTLING DISCOVERY
Hazel is a military driver, one of a group who come on a remote house untouched by the carnage. They have never seen anything like it before, walls covered in a soft textured floral design coating, a floor made of wooden boards with a faded red and blue rug, dust piled high in thick layers, armchairs, plates and cups, devices for accessing music and mirrors everywhere: “as if people who lived here had always needed to see themselves.”
Hazel comes on a photo of a woman and a child clutched in the hands of a dead boy. She’s assigned to Military Intel and tasked to finding out who the two are and their backgrounds. To be found sentimental would mean being court-martialled but she was intrigued with the image and has stirring of forbidden curiosity.
GAME CHANGER
Meeting a man who had been deprogrammed was to be a significant event in her life hitherto dedicated to rebuilding the population where the weak both morally and physically are destroyed. He was mentally strong, couldn’t be brainwashed, he’d escaped to the hinterland to live outside The Citizenship, turned his back on structure and purpose. Above all, he wanted to take down the regime of brutality in the experimental labs.
Although Teresa Godfrey had begun this book before our own pandemic it had rested on her desk. Lockdown stimulated a new energy and a remarkably relevant end product. She lived with the characters as the story developed. “You have to stay in that world and identify with the people, become one of them, I have two best times of thinking, very early in the morning when I lie in bed and when I’m walking with a phone recording my thoughts. I walk in County Fermanagh and record mostly in Big Dog, Blackslee Forest, Ely Forest, Carrickreagh Woods and around Lough Navar. In fact, the magnificent rural landscapes helped me envisage the backdrop for Wipe Out. ”
There are shades of George Orwell’s 1984 in this story, images come to mind of the Holocaust and Dr. Mengele and disturbing thoughts of our own lives through the Covid pandemic and fears of what’s yet to come. What is happening in the laboratories of today? Testing vaccines and boosters that have no long term proven effect. My thoughts go back to thalidomide. There was a time last year when there were accusations that the elderly with Covid were allowed to die, denied of course. Are the anti-vaccers actually trying to get answers and probe the dictate of the hierarchy?
In Wipe Out, Op344 Heather makes headway with her colleagues and recruits important people from the authorities to bring down the regime. The author throws everything at us, Bio-Medic Research Center Labs, Psychoscience Training Unit, Aversion Therapy, Grand Controllers, Factory Births and the dreaded After Labs. Could it ever be that we’ll accept government authorised euthanasia, state controlled birth programmes, egg harvesting from teenage girls? No relationship to each other, no emotional or cultural connections, no traceable blood ties, no loyalties, nothing to bind us to each other. Just look around the world in 2022. As one Grand Controller said: ‘We’ve been designed not to care, not to have feeling.’
There are layers within layers in this book and I would suggest a pen and paper as you read to keep track of the numbered operatives, it’s complex and compelling. A fascinating science fiction novel with a question mark over fiction. I look forward to the sequel.
More from www.sunburypress.com Available throughout Northern Ireland, Sligo and Cavan or can be ordered in any bookshop including Waterstones. Official prince is £16.95
