It's not as though we couldn't see that coming

Not once, but twice as it happens.

First the easy one, dog-faced junky warblesmith Amy Winehouse finally checks out in a haze of booze and recreational pharmaceuticals. I mean come on was anyone surprised? If I still played "dead pool" she'd have been right at the top of my list along with that other celebrity smackhead "musician" Pete Doherty. The only thing that surprised me was that it took so long.

Secondly the more difficult one, Anders Behring Breivik, and the horrible events in Norway last Friday. It would be easy to dismiss this as the actions of a lone nutter with a grudge and a thing for the Knights Templar but I think that would be too simplistic as this is clearly no fruit-loop with a swastika and a skinhead haircut; by all accounts he is lucid, intelligent and calculating. I hate to say it and I hope you don't take this the wrong way but what he did was, from a terror perspective, very clever indeed. Sets of a bomb in the capital and when everyone's attention is sorting that out he goes for his main target with a ruthless, military efficiency. This is clearly no foaming-at-the-mouth loony here.

And why did he do it, well again from what I've read it seems he had a grump that isn't that uncommon on both sides of the political spectrum, that multiculturalism and the spread of Islam has gone too far. Sure he went way, way past what I would consider a reasonable "Look, your culture isn't very nice, Sharia sucks goat cock and I really do rather resent paying for your extended family living on benefits who won't learn English so if you don't mind I think we should be more careful on how many people we let in, you're all going to have to learn our language, make a bit more of an effort to adopt our historic way of life and as to having separate courts where a woman's testimony is worth a quarter that of a man, well you can stick it where the sun doesn't shine." and wanted to drive every immigrant out of Europe in time for the anniversary of the Siege of Vienna and execute several thousand "cultural traitors" (including Prince Charles for some reason) and decided the best way to accomplish this was shoot up a camp full of kids learning centre-left politics and how to sit by a fire singing songs to a badly played acoustic guitar. Not very wise it seems to me but then wisdom != intelligence as any AD&D player will tell you.

Now what he did was wrong on every possible level and can't ever be justified but I can't help thinking that there's going to be more than a few people, especially if he gets his day in court today and says what the media are expecting him to say, thinking "You know, he might have a point."

I can't help feel that there is more than one Anders out there. I really hope that there isn't and that this is just a dreadful one-off, a Timothy McVeigh moment for Europe, but just from browsing the web, watching the news and listening to the odd conversation I sense there is a lot of simmering anger out there that isn't going away.

Note to self: start planting more veg, rear more chickens, just in case.