First up, a little about me would be in order I suppose, before we get to the nitty gritty day to day tedium of my life, passed through the sieve of hindsight, leaving you only golden nuggets of interestingness.
I’m a 29 year old male, living in the city of Norwich, UK. Very little of note happens here, which seeing as most noteworthy events are bad for somebody in the locality, suits me just dandy. Frankly, given that no-one who doesn’t know me is ever going to read this thing anyway, I’d be wasting my time to tell you any more.
For our international viewers. “Dr Germ”, who despite her alleged crimes has managed to get a pretty cool nickname, handed herself in today to the allied forces. She, along with a great number of her co-workers, studied mass-murder at the University of East Anglia right slap bang in Norwich. She is the only one, to my knowledge, with a playing card though. It’s flashback time!
It was 1993. A bright-eyed young scientist was making his first steps towards academic brilliance. Across the lab, I was breaking test-tubes, being sick, and headed for a failing grade. Then Saddam came to my rescue.
A Cypriot student was assigned to be my lab partner. Right away my marks began to rise, as he would have nimbly disected anything placed before him before I had even finished vomiting in the toilets. One could place anything before that man, alive or dead, and he would have it neatly pinned and labelled within minutes. All was well with the world for a time, but then things became awkward.
We had struck up a friendship of sorts. And he asked me if I’d like to discect one of the university’s wild rabbits. In his room. I declined as gracefully as I could, and he laughed. The British weakness for small fluffy animals. In Cyprus it was considered perfectly normal to go out, find a cat or dog, take it home and, umm, analyse it. I made discouraging noises.
Not discouraging enough, for he later that month told me that his time at UEA was being sponsored by the Iraqi government, and he would be going to work in the field of biological weapons. He had a “friend” from the said organisation who would love to meet me. And quite probably offer me an exciting new career.
Every life has a number of moments which you look back on and think, blimey, things would be damn different if I’d chosen “b” rather then “a”. As anyone who knows me now would tell you, commiting crimes against humanity isn’t really my thing. Remember though, this was before the world (or me at any rate) heard of of the crimes the Iraqi regime perpetrated upon it’s own people. I considered it quite seriously. It did sound a most marvellous way to see the world, and make some good cash. I was young and foolish, but not quite foolish enough, thank the gods.
He persisted for quite some time, trying to arrange meetings with his contact, but the sense of wickedness was as pervasive in those latter conversations as the reek of formaldehyde and dead things in the labs, and I never had the stomach for either.
And that, gentle reader, is why I shall never be portrayed on a playing card.
What happened to my lab partner I have no idea. The next year I shared no classes with him, and I managed to dodge him the few times we almost came within speaking distance. He graduated in ’94, and went on his way, presumably to Iraq.
I have never met anyone who treated life with such soulless interest. Most biologists chose the subject because of a love of animals, or a sense of wonder at the infinite diversity of life, or in the case of doctors the desire to heal. He would take apart an living animal as a curious child might dismantle a radio. He would have been quite happy to take apart a human, I am sure, if he could avoid the repercussions. In my estimation he was a psychopath, in the true sense of the word, and now I look back with the benefit of somewhat more wisdom, I get shivers down my spine at my brush with such a person. And I pray I never learn what he accomplished in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.