Hung, drawn and quartered

I have a friend who is an ex-student of mine from Rockingham Senior High School around 1978.  We, and now I, have kept in touch with Sean over the years and we have stayed with his family, his lovely wife Denise and their kids Cody and Bae in Sydney and they with us when they return to W.A..   Sean recently asked me if I could look at his mother Penney’s stereo amplifier as it was making some strange noises.   Today, Penney dropped by and I managed to wave the magic wand over it and it now works well.     In actual fact I figured it was a build-up of carbon on the volume control and opened it up and blasted it out with compressed air.  All good!     I love those easy jobs!

As the population of this vast state increases we read of more violence from its citizens. Letters to the newspapers demand that the government ‘Bring back the birch’.  Others say that a return to harsher school discipline such as using the cane is needed.  Sorry, that just won’t work in these times.  Maybe the miscreants should be Hung, Drawn and Quartered.

Here is something I read today in The Writers Almanac.  Free subscription and a great daily read.

On this date in 1305, William Wallace was executed for treason in London. Wallace was a Scottish national hero. He'd fought unsuccessfully against the English for Scottish independence. In the 14th century, a convicted traitor was typically "hanged, drawn, and quartered": first he was dragged behind a horse to the execution site, which was often some miles away. Then he was hanged until he was nearly dead, at which point he was cut down and disemboweled; his entrails were often burned in front of him. At this point, he might be beheaded, and the final step — quartering — involved tying each of his limbs to four separate horses, which were then spurred to run in opposite directions.

A history book called The History of English Law Before the Time of Edward I (1898) reports that Wallace was drawn — that is, dragged behind a horse — for treason, hanged for robbery and homicide, disemboweled for sacrilege, beheaded for outlawry, and quartered for "various depredations."