My Son's in Afghanistan: While I Store up the Food Parcels

Soldier's Mum Mandy gets another worrying call from her son

Good ol’ British weather! Half-term and under orders of flood-alert! Again!  My escape to the countryside is hastily replaced with Plan B. Well, it would be, but the house phone keeps ringing. Because call centres ‘do what it says on the tin'. “No! I do not want your broadband, nor your tax band, not even your brass band! Go away.” Well something like that.

“What? You ok Mum!”  I am. But the dog legs it.

“Hello!.......I’m back at Kandahar now thank god! Training on quad bikes….yeah it’s all good….thought I was lazing around did you?”

He sounds great, but visions of him roaring off across the Sandy Land on a quad bike leading 3 Para into battle run through my head. “This is scary Ross, what about all the roadside bombs? The open top….?”

“You’re off your head mum! I follow behind them, with supplies….”

So now I have him so skinny and weak that they won’t let him walk anymore….He laughs at this and reminds me, rather expletively, to keep taking my medication.

Apologies to Gordon (DEAF) Brown if you have been trying to get through. 

While your government has been agonising over what category of drugs cannabis should be, Afghan farmers are switching to growing it in the province of Balkh after an intense anti-poppy campaign. It turns out that cannabis (hemp) can not only fuel cars, but can be used to make them…. In fact, hemp can fix just about anything. Oil producers quaking yet? Don’t be silly! Freeing the weed might cause the shackles of global conglomerate domination to snap. So, let’s just re-classify it instead…right Jacqui (spliff) Smith? Or at least hope for a good down wind when they start burning these crops.

Meanwhile, floating somewhere in the heavens, TB’s finally landed his celestial mansion and will be “spending the rest of his life uniting the world’s religions”.  Such arrogant reverence will hopefully protect him from any stray RPG’s and has nothing to do with the £500,000 a year he is paid by JP Morgan the Investment bank. Just wish he’d been with me on Friday night coming home from the cinema with Tom. The under 18’s disco turned out at the same time and hoards of hyped up teenagers  rampaged down our multi-cultural streets, screaming racist accusations at each other, lobbing alcopop bottles and fighting.  The police must have been busy fining all their parents… Talking of police...

Sir Hugh Orde-red That (Head of the Police Service of Northern Ireland) has been slated by our government for his ‘outrageous’ suggestion they should open negotiations with al-Qaeda.  Oh really? Brown nosing terrorists must be so last year. Chuck in the impending Presidential visit, the food price con and the credit crunch and not even Simon Cowell will be able to save Gordon. Someone is bound to make a film.

Ross and Beenie celebrate four years together this month. He has managed to send her a present….but will be off on ops for the next few weeks and has asked us not to send any more parcels. So now I start panicking that this op is so long it might take him over his R+R!