Ellie Bloggs appeared in an Allison Pearson piece in the Daily Telegraph on Saturday, explaining why it is that cops and firefighters don’t always run straight down tube station escalators when bombs have just gone off in the Underground.
She expands on her views here.
Funnily enough, I was talking to an ex soldier friend of mine about this the other day. He said that whenever a soldier was shot in Northern Ireland the standing order was that his colleagues should not approach him immediately, even if he were lying in the street screaming in agony.
‘I used to say b*llocks to that,’ he said. ‘I wasn’t going to let rules stand in the way of getting to a guy who needed help. Then one day I walked right past an 50lb IED. The only reason it failed to detonate was because the command wire had been disturbed.’
Theodore Dalrymple’s wife says he doesn’t talk enough (maybe because he’s always writing). We’ve just brought out his classic Life at the Bottom as an e-Book, by the way. UK readers can get it here at amazon.co.uk; outside the UK, you should go to amazon.com.
It was a classic IRA strategy, known as a ‘come-on’ device, which was used with devastating effect at Warrenpoint.
Yes, that’s exactly the thing he was talking about Charlie.