{"id":10548,"date":"2015-02-22T20:00:07","date_gmt":"2015-02-22T20:00:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/?p=10548"},"modified":"2015-02-22T23:19:16","modified_gmt":"2015-02-22T23:19:16","slug":"blogathon-2215-sic-transit-gloria-mundi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/?p=10548","title":{"rendered":"Blogathon 22\/15 \u2013 Sic transit gloria mundi"},"content":{"rendered":"

A wag more waggish than I once said that the unofficial motto of the London Ambulance Service was\u00a0Sic transit gloria mundi<\/em>.<\/p>\n

This declaration was made not because of the English translation ‘Thus passes the glory of the world’ or, to put it in the vernacular ‘Oh dear, there goes the neighbourhood’.<\/p>\n

No, the waggish wag made play on the English soundalikes in the Latin. Sick. Transit.<\/p>\n

And unless someone is being sick in a Ford Transit on a Monday, the phrase has very little meaning.<\/p>\n

Where the heck is he going with all this stuff, I hear you ask.<\/p>\n

*cocks an expectant ear towards the window*<\/em><\/p>\n

Well, pull up a sandbag, young nipper, and I’ll tell you.<\/p>\n

Biological Warfare (BW to its friends) has been knocking about this planet for a very long time.<\/p>\n

I believe the earliest recorded use of what we now know as BW originates from around the C5th \/ C6th, when those fun-loving folk in the middle-east used toxic fungi to poison the oases and wells of drinking water, of their enemies.<\/p>\n

Fast forward a couple of millennia, and through a whole bucketful of geo-political changes.<\/p>\n

A\u00a0big bunch of countries (not a bunch of big countries, obv) got together to sign the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention (BWC), which made the stockpiling, mass production, and use of BWs illegal anywhere on this planet.<\/p>\n

But still the Armed Forces of many of those countries train their troops, so that they know how to react in the event that BWs are deployed against them.<\/p>\n

We were repeatedly drilled\u00a0in the rapid suiting-up of our Nuclear Biological Chemical (NBC) clothing, when I was a trained killer.<\/p>\n

The weird material on the outside of the charcoal-lined trousers, the equally weird charcoal-lined jacket, linen\u00a0gloves, gas mask (which we had to call ‘a respirator’, not an actual gas mask), fitted hood with draw-strings, over-boots, rubber gloves.<\/p>\n

That was the order of dress.<\/p>\n

And we had to aim for 60 seconds or less, to get all that clobber on.<\/p>\n

We’d look a bit like this:<\/p>\n

\"NBC\"<\/a><\/p>\n

(though the guy on the right would be dead in a real NBC\/BW attack, with gaps between his sleeves and his gloves like that)<\/p>\n

But of course, and despite the 1972 BWC, germ warfare\/NBCs\/BWs are still being deployed.<\/p>\n

There was\u00a0Alexander Litvinenko, poisoned by a rare form of radiation as he lived and worked his routine life.<\/p>\n

And let us not forget the Bulgarian dissident\/writer\u00a0Georgi Ivanov Markov, who was poisoned by a BW-laden pellet that was injected in to his thigh as he walked around London.<\/p>\n

I don’t want to trivialise these two personal catastrophes, but I do have slightly more positive and upbeat news.<\/p>\n

Due to my superior physical condition, I have been able, this weekend, to fight off a germ warfare\/NBC\/BW attack on my life.<\/p>\n

This weekend, the dark and shady forces that inhabit the netherworld of cloak-and-daggerliness and international intrigue, made yet another desperate attempt to stop me from revealing state secrets.<\/p>\n

Incapacitated though I have been, by violent attacks of sickness, diarrhoea and vomiting, I have manfully struggled through the dreadful illness.<\/p>\n

And yes, I shall be back at work tomorrow, defending the country from the nefarious underlords who wish to ruin our lives.<\/p>\n

What?<\/p>\n

No, what?<\/p>\n

Yes, I’ve been ill.<\/p>\n

Sicking up all over the place.<\/p>\n

Much to my girlfriend’s amusement<\/del> enjoyment<\/del> consternation.<\/p>\n

No, really.<\/p>\n

Thanks for all the good wishes.<\/p>\n

Really.<\/p>\n

I’ll just struggle on.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A wag more waggish than I once said that the unofficial motto of the London Ambulance Service was\u00a0Sic transit gloria mundi. This declaration was made<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10548","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-stuff","two-columns"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10548","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10548"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10548\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10548"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10548"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10548"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}