Raoul Moat

Finally I sit down to write after far too long of a sabbatical. It’s been over a month and plenty has happened in the interim. I have worked many hours, wedding plans have changed, I’ve buried an uncle and there has been an entire World Cup. So it is with a little trepidation that I sit back down at this keyboard to write, after all I am slightly out of practice.
Upstairs the Girlf sleeps off her virus which the morning will reveal to be either imaginary or substantial and that revelation will dictate my day. Therefore it is at this late hour, sweaty and tired from work, that I shall let my mind and fingers flow and get back into the swing of things.
Raoul Moat is dead. The soap opera of the last week has reached its inevitable conclusion. Compulsive viewing, compulsive reading, pulling me away from the back pages, away from a dour tournament into a gory tabloid heaven of voyeuristic smut. Joy.
Each new day has brought forth yet another sweetmeat to titillate me. Jealous revenge, written confessions, arrests, kidnappings, accomplices, ex’s. Dirty revelations that have had my fertile imagination working overtime, fleshing out what journalists can’t and won’t say.
Drugs, violence, searches, dead-ends and the most talented footballer of his generation all coming together to intrigue and amuse.
People are stupid.
A strange man with a misspelt name infatuated with a girl young enough to be his daughter, straight from prison, embarks on a rampage. Murderous, he cast himself as a hero. A wronged lover victimised by society and by the police. A down trodden renegade he moralises about his action, justifies them, blames everyone else, glories in the limelight and develops a cult following.
Tragedy becomes farce as he evades capture in an area scarcely bigger than a football pitch. He pops up to steal a tomato or sleep in somebody’s spare room. He brazenly saunters down the main street in a small village and gets away with it and all the time the families of his victims and friends leak stories of domestic abuse and violence. In every picture he looks increasingly deranged and yet he still thwarts the police like some kind of criminal mastermind.
He knows the area like the back of his hand we are told because he’s fished there. The area is tiny so no doubt anyone could know it ‘like the back of there hand’ after a couple of visits.
He discards mobile phones as if he himself is getting bored of the police’s inability to shot him and has to resort to leaving clues. Slowly, slowly a legend is forming. There is a hitless of his perceived enemies. People are in hiding. Facebook groups are being created. We are told that he is a lovely bloke.
Then at the story’s denouement Gazza turns up with a chicken dinner for his best mate Moaty. Gazza’s people are speechless and the police aren’t swayed by that goal against Scotland so Moaty doesn’t get his chicken dinner or a one to one with the great man.
A long winded search turns into long winded negotiations. On his knees with a shotgun to his chin Raoul Moat cry’s that he never knew his dad. Clearly he was fucked from the start. His ‘One’ has abandoned him, all is forfeit and still the police don’t put him out of his misery. ‘Just shoot the cunt’ we scream at the news.
Eventually the poor prick has to suck it up and do it himself. It takes him seven hours to pull the trigger.

Fin.

No. Not Fin, because this whole sorry saga brings to the fore the worst in our society, an abandonment of our natural family ties. All those connections of love, all those bonds that should have held a nutter like Moat in check weren’t there. I’m not just referring to the hackneyed poor me story of his non-present father.
What of Samantha Stobbart’s parents, her mother, who allowed her to take a doorman’s number on a night out when she was only fifteen, a doorman twice her age. What of her stepfather, who was initially against the relationship but was ‘won over’, charmed by this thirty one year old, steroid using bouncer who was fucking his 15 year old daughter. Like we’d been already told, he was a lovely bloke. He didn’t throw 15 year old girls out the clubs he worked in, he fucked them. Both primary carers complicit in all this and what do they do as it becomes apparent that he’s not as charming as they once thought? When he starts to become increasingly controlling and begins to isolate her from her friends and family? What do they do when the bruises start to appear? They emigrate to Tenerife taking her ‘loving’ sister with them. They leave her to her fate; they leave her to deal with choices she made as a child.
Nice family.
What of Raoul Moats own brother? Who had to watch the ‘execution’ live on television? He is reported to be devastated by this. Obviously not devastated enough to get his arse off the sofa and away from the television. Not devestated enough to get to the scene of the stand off and perhaps talk his brother down. Not that devastated after all they hadn’t spoken for nearly twenty years. He of course blames the police, not his psycho brother who blew his own head off.
All these natural connections, all these stock responses haven’t been forth coming during any of this soap opera. Moat never knew his father, so he became an awful father. He was violent and controlling so his women bore him children and everyone involved was left to their fate by the extended families.
Samantha Stobbart apparently still loves him. He took her child hood, he beat her and eventually shot her with her child in the house and yet she still loves him. He murdered her new man, perhaps a relationship she fostered merely to keep Moat away from her, yet she still loves him. Perplexing. Perplexing and depressing.
People are stupid.