… all of the excitement today, anyway.

You may remember that I told you yesterday that Barry Town had beaten the FAW hands down in the court case concerning the football club’s expulsion from the league.

Anyway, to day in one of the Welsh newspapers was a letter from a member of the FAW commenting on the case, and I have to say that in all my life I have never ever seen such an inflammatory, insulting, offensive letter.

Its contents, full of vindictiveness and hatred, certainly would have brought it into the realm of a “Contempt of Court” charge.

It provoked a whole hornets nest of comment from all kinds of people and I myself spent some considerable time drafting a letter of complaint.

And then what? Yes, the newspaper concerned withdrew the letter with a comment that the author denied ever having written it and does not subscribe to the views that are represented within it.

Frankly though, I cannot believe that a respectable on-line newspaper would have published a letter of such a type without making further enquiry.

If the editor didn’t, then he only has himself to blame for whatever might follow for, as night surely follows day, this matter is not going to rest here, given the amount of dust that has been spread around.

It wasn’t without its moments of humour either. I sent my mail to the editor of the newspaper concerned. It came back with “sorry I’m on holiday, please send your mail to (my deputy)”
So I resent the mail to his deputy. It came back with “sorry I’m on holiday, please send your mail to (the editor)”.

You couldn’t make up a thing like that.

At lunchtime I went off to do the shopping. I went to the Carrefour at Evere today and made a little diversion on the way.

If you remember from last Sunday, I took you all to the cemetery at Ixelles to see some of the war graves. I mentioned the Tir National, the old army firing range at Schaarbeek quite close to where I used to live when I had the little apartment in the Boulevard Reyers.

I told you all that the Tir National was used as the execution point for those found guilty of War Crimes by the Germans.

Many of the victims have been buried there, and although I did tell you that Edith Cavell was there, that’s no longer true.

She was disinterred shortly after the end of World War 1 and taken to be reinterred at Westminster Abbey and ended up being buried at Norwich Cathedral on 19th May 1919 as Annie so kindly informed me.

However, her name is there on this World War I monument along with that of the people who died with her, and plenty of others from World War 1. A mere thirty-odd, you might think.

One is more than enough but 30-odd does pale into significance when compared to the several hundred others from World War 2

Amongst these hundreds and hundreds of graves from World War II is this one of a certain Robert Roberts-Jones.

With a name like that you might be forgiven for thinking that he is a Welshman, but he is in fact a 3rd-generation Belgian and was a lawyer before he was shot in 1943.

Brussels was honeycombed with spy networks (for example, the Soviet “Red Orchestra” had its headquarters a brisk walk from where I’m currently sitting) and escape routes, called “rat lines”, which were used to dispatch escaping and evading Allied forces personnel and others into neutral territory for trans-shipment back to their units.

The most famous was arguably Andrée (Dédée) de Jongh’s “Comet Line”. This was however infiltrated and collapsed in 1943 and Roberts-Jones, one of the members of Comet, was arrested, tortured and executed.

He has a street named after him, at the back of the Russian embassy here and I often wondered, while I was driving down the street to pick up visas and the like, what the street referred to.

More poignant though are the “unknowns” here. Probably a hundred or so graves are marked as “unknowns”.

No-one will ever know who they are and what they did – they will be amongst the victims of what the Germans called Nacht und Nebel, “Night and Fog”, the name given to the method by which people were quietly abstracted from their environment and “disappeared” for ever, presumably after suffering all kinds of horrors ant the hands of their torturers.