Four children between the ages of 4 and 8 were playing by a lake on an indutrial estate in the Val-d'Oise region. A man who lived in a caravan nearby says he had often stopped the children from throwing stones and branches in the river and playing there. The four children are from 3 different mothers, and the mothers are now having psychiatric help. Two children died and two others are in a critical state. One must assume that the banks were too high to scramble up.
As I scrawl the papers looking for French news these sort of incidents throughout France with rivers, lakes, swimming pools seeing death after death of small children, it reminds me of a document I once had.
When I had my first antiquarian bookshop in Bolton I bought some documents from a local Doctor of which one of his great grandparents had been the first coroner of Bolton. These were important documents which I sold to Bolton Libraries (my former employer) Local History Department. The interesting thing reading them was how it was so obvious that young children were dying in ordinary homes by falling in domestic fires. It was before the time when parents realised having a fire guard was essential. The situation here with pools and rivers flags up to me that same problem of infant deaths.
Sally says I enjoy the conflation of "scan" and "trawl" into "scrawl" .....a real journalist's word?
Comments to taglines82@gmail.com
