Murderous thoughts

There was an interesting piece by Stuart Jeffries in The Guardian a short while ago. He had been on a retreat and was musing on the quality of silence. A passing motorcycle annoyed him, and he commented:

He (I am sure it's a he) goes through the same noisy routine repeatedly as I meditate. It is insufferable. Why, I ask myself inwardly, doesn't someone from the Self Realization Meditation Healing Centre string one of the lanes round here with cheesewire? That would settle motorcycle boy's hash.

(H/t to Highwaylass.)

Well, it seems that his wish came true. Someone has gone and put a metal bar across the Taff Trail in South Wales and a young motorcyclist has lost his life. Visordown was the first to cover it, and the BBC haven't much detail. I don't know the circumstances yet, but it would appear that someone has left this bar across the trail deliberately. If that's true, then it's murder, plain and simple.

I like the countryside as much as anyone (I live there, after all) and like my peace and quiet. Sometimes, I find other people's noise irritating. But would I wish to murder them? I don't think so. What irritates me more than anything is the way thay the writer is so completely up himself about his meditation (peace, man) but then when this very Islington pastime is disturbed by some working-class oik - the champagne socialists see bikers as somehow common, don't you think? - then the mask slips and the hatred comes to the surface.

Or perhaps he thought that having violent thoughts, and writing about them in a national newspaper, was just some jeu d'esprit, and that no-one would surely think of him in the same way as some red-faced old Colonel banging on about 'young people today'. Still less that someone might take his casual comments seriously and carry them out.

The Left never did connect theory and real life very well.