Saturday - October 17, 2009

on the drink-sodden streets of modern Britain, their paths crossed in the most sickening way

That very old and overused expression, The Road To Hell, etc. comes to mind right now.

I had every honest intension of beginning Blog Saturday with humor, I have my weekend ladies all lined up ready to go, but this double story came up and has reignited a bit of anger and yes. RCOB is back in all it’s glory yet again.

The article here that deals with the dumb jerk who pissed on a war memorial was aggravating when I first saw it this week.  Well, I passed on it because it was just another story of drunk students, yoots, pin heads acting bad and who cares? Then too, I thought the dope did what he so publicly did without any thought to where he was doing it.  I didn’t think that was his way of making a public statement.  Like way too many “"yoots" of his generation of both sexes, this binge drinking thing is par for the course.  Some of these kids have actually died from over drinking.
BUT THEN ...

We get two papers every morning and you can imagine what weekend ones are like. So the DAILY MAIL who somehow knew I was up a bit early and hadn’t had coffee or breakfast (still haven’t) just had to have the drunk and piss story tied to a story of a soldier of WW1, his death in battle and the lower standards since that time. And so reading about that long dead hero and the future he never got to see along with so many others on every side, and the comparisons made and the photos published, naturally I just HAD to make this my first posting of the day.
I don’t know if I’ve done the right thing or not.  I tend to think I have.  I think the “yoot” needs to be arrested and spend some time in a cell. Or be made to do community service.

Since I started writing this, I suddenly realized that maybe it isn’t all this jerks fault.  What standards has his generation been given to meet?  An “ORGANIZED Drinking Binge?” That’s a standard to aim for?  Heaven help us all.

On Facebook, however, some of Laing’s friends congratulated him on his antics. One wrote: ‘Most amazing thing I have ever seen …I’m very proud. LEGEND!’

A tale of two very different Britons: The student who defiled a war memorial and the soldier who died at Passchendaele

By Paul Harris and Jaya Narain
Last updated at 12:09 AM on 17th October 2009

They are separated by the best part of a century and a lifetime of change.

One volunteered to fight for his country and made the ultimate sacrifice for freedom. The other became part of a culture where respect has no meaning and courage comes from a bottle of cheap booze.

Edwin Ievers and Phil Laing never met of course. But on the drink-sodden streets of modern Britain, their paths crossed in the most sickening way.

Laing, a 19-year-old ex-public schoolboy studying sports technology at university, was among thousands of students on an organised drinking binge in Sheffield.

Edwin Ievers was the name on a wreath that the soldier’s family had placed on a memorial to those who fell in World War I.  Edwin Ievers volunteered to fight in the First World War

They were linked when Laing, barely able to stand, defiled the memory of the dead by urinating on the memorial. He drenched the Ievers family’s Armistice Day poppies before tottering away to collapse in a shop doorway.

The disgraceful episode was captured by a photographer and highlighted in the Daily Mail. Tousle-haired Laing was identified from the pictures and duly found himself facing a charge that perfectly summarised reaction to his loutish behaviour: outraging public decency.

But it also underlined just how far standards have sunk in a country for which Edwin Ievers fought and died.

Sunderland-born Mr Ievers (pronounced to rhyme with drivers) was a railway manager when war broke out, but was keen to sign up.

The father of three was 29 then, far older than many of the young men who volunteered to fight.

He became an infantry private in the 1st/7th Battalion Northumberland Fusiliers. Their motto is Quo fata vocant, variously translated from Latin as ‘Whither the fates call’, or ‘Where destiny calls’.

At training camp in Alnwick, the Geordie lads wryly interpreted it as ‘We gan wor us telt’ (We go where we’re told).

It was here that Edwin stood proudly alongside 21 fellow fusiliers for a photograph before they went to war. No one knows precisely how he died but it is not hard to speculate.

His unit had moved to the front line of one of the bloodiest battles of the war, fighting in the cloying, stinking mud of Passchendaele. The day he died – October 26, 1917 – coincides with a military push that became part of a huge Allied offensive in the notorious Ypres Salient.
Private Ievers was one of three brothers who served in the so-called war to end all wars. Robert Ievers joined the Royal Engineers and survived the conflict but the third brother, Private R W Ievers, was killed at the age of 27 in April 1917 while serving with
the Durham Light Infantry.

Edwin Ievers is buried at Tyne Cot military cemetery in Flanders, the largest British military graveyard, alongside some 12,000 fellow casualties. His name also appears
on a flagstone outside York train station, marking his pre-war railway service.

Yesterday Edwin’s grandson John Ievers, a 49-year-old software consultant and company director, described the urinating student as ‘a drunken idiot’.

Mr Ievers, a former Royal Engineer cartographer and father of two teenage boys, added: ‘It was a stupid thing to do but I doubt he remembers it. He must have been out of his tiny mind. I don’t think he should be flogged in the streets, but there should be some reparation. There’s a certain irony in contrast between my grandfather and his generation and this idiot, especially when there are people his age going off to Afghanistan at the moment.’

Mr Ievers, whose takes his middle name of Edwin from his grandfather and great grandfather, had placed a wooden cross surrounded by a poppies at the foot of the memorial Baker’s Pool in Sheffield during an Armistice Day service last November 11. It had lain undisturbed with other wreaths ever since – until Philip Laing came along.

Laing is a product of the £8,700-a year King’s School in Macclesfield, Cheshire, which he left in the summer. A talented sportsman, he played for the rugby 1st XV and also enjoys cricket. He enrolled at Sheffield Hallam University in September to study sports technology.

Laing is the second of four children. His mother, Kathleen, 53, an ophthalmic optician, and his Guyanese-born father Robert, 57, a computer programmer and IT expert, married in 1985 but split up this year and sold their £450,000 detached home in Macclesfield.

The night he was photographed at the memorial, Laing had been on a commercially organised drinking binge entitled Carnage UK. He was one of 2,000 students on a seven-hour pub crawl through the city while a similar event was taking place in Cardiff.

Half-naked girls were seen passed out on the streets as drunken boys weaved through the traffic.

On his Bebo website, he says he is happiest when he is ‘Eatin ’n’ drinking ’n’ shoppin ’n’ listenin to music’. Although he is in the middle of his course, the student has returned to the rented home he shares with his mother in Cheshire.

Yesterday he answered the door bare-chested and said: ‘My lawyers have advised me not to talk about it until my hearing is over. I intend to plead guilty and issue a full public apology when the time is right.’

University officials were said to be ‘deeply embarrassed’ by the incident while the Students’ Union was believed to be holding a crisis meeting to review activities for freshers.

On Facebook, however, some of Laing’s friends congratulated him on his antics. One wrote: ‘Most amazing thing I have ever seen …I’m very proud. LEGEND!’

MORE PHOTOS HERE

Here, lets take another look at what a “LEGEND” looks like these days.
Yup.  I would definitely say and believe in my bones that standards have gone to hell.

Disgrace: Before urinating on the war memorial, Laing was in such a state that he curled up on the street in front of a shop window

Posted by peiper     on 10/17/2009 at 02:03 AM   
Filed Under: • CULTURE IN DECLINE • Stoopid-People • UK •  
• Comments (4) • Trackbacks(0)  Permalink •  

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