Bill Sparkman of Clay County, Kentucky.

  

Me and my pal Nick, in the street, recently,  

with Shaftesbury Avenue in the background.

I wrote this in 2009 when I lived in Los Angeles and today I found it, read it and that's why it's here. The photo - a couple of months ago after a roam around Soho.

I heard an article on NPR this morning (in 2009) about the death of a fella called Bill Sparkman in Clay County, Kentucky.
Bill Sparkman was a Census Bureau worker for Clay County and he was found on September 12th hanging from a tree with the word 'FED' scrawled on his chest; now when they say scrawled I don't really know what they mean unless it was on his actual bare chest which makes the whole thing even more macabre.
The people in Clay County overwhelmingly voted for John McCain in the election last year (2008) and have been protesting against President Obama ever since; they see him as a big spending socialist. 

To me, and to anybody from Europe that sounds comedic; we have lived under so called socialists, they have always been in our governments, and Mister Obama is nowhere near being a socialist; if he lived in Britain he would be on the right wing of the Labour Party.

But to get back to Bill Sparkman; he was, apparently, a man who had gone back to school to qualify as a school teacher and, indeed, worked as a substitute teacher; the census only happens every so often – five years is it or ten? - and he had started his census work recently; he had also been diagnosed with a form of cancer – non Hodgkin's lymphoma.

The FBI have said that his death is either a homicide, a suicide or an accident. Have you ever heard anything so ridiculous in all your life; how could a man accidentally scrawl something onto his chest and then hang himself – some accident!

Here is direct quite from Yahoo News: 'Al Cross, a former reporter for the Louisville Courier-Journal who covered the area for 30 years, believes that the conditions underlying the murder go back much farther and much deeper - and are more local - than the spate of recent ire.'

Today I'm going to write about illegal alcohol in Donegal, Ireland; not that I know too much about it but I know what I want my characters to do in the next part of my novel. One of my heroins gets involved in the distribution of poteen and I want a little adventure to happen now so I'll get on with that.

Toodle oo!!