Johnny Vedmore

Let’s get this straight! There are Palestinian children being jailed in Israel, Europe is more unstable than any time in the past 70 years, Russian spies are being poisoned with nerve agent in Salisbury, and children in Yemen are being murdered, without hesitation or regret, by an evil Saudi regime.

Sergei Skripal was undoubtedly a traitor to his country. Russian court documents suggest he gave British Intelligence the names of more than 300 Russian agents. In return, Sergei Skripal received at least £100,000 and access to a holiday home in Malaga, where he could meet his handler, or make dead drops of his stolen information. His MI6 contact was a man named Pablo Miller, who went by the name Antonio Alvarez de Hidalgo during this time whilst working for British intelligence via MI6. Miller apparently recruited Skripal in around 1994 whilst Skripal was working in the position at the Russian military attaché′s office in Madrid, Spain.

When I was a child, a dog was always out of the question. My father wanted to buy an illegal exotic pet whilst my mother would say she was allergic to dogs and cats. We settled on a jar full of worms that I collected from the garden and eventually a goldfish with suicidal tendencies. After the death of my worms at the hands of my sisters, I was left alone with Bob the goldfish. I would chat to him for hours and in return he would commit suicide by jumping down the back of the freezer. Bob II would replace him and he lasted a relatively long time before his accidental death. It was my birthday and a shiny 50 pence coin would fall from my hand and into the tank, striking Bob II and dealing the goldfish a fatal blow.

I walked back from the Radisson Blu Cardiff still in shock from being fired. They had just destroyed my potential career with no care for the repercussions. Why should they care? Who am I to them? I was running everything through my mind. The past month was repeating on my synapses like mental indigestion. How was I going to pay the rent? What was my girlfriend going to say? I finally knew what it felt like to have been fired. I needed to know what had happened. Why was I the one to get the boot? What did I do? I thought about everybody I had interacted with but me knew who had wanted me out. The opening general manager for the SAS Radisson BLU Hotel Cardiff had been a German lady who had been brought in from the Radisson BLU’s Liverpool hotel. She wasn’t alone, she came with other German employees who had also been with her in Liverpool. Marlen was one of those allies, along with two other younger German receptionist who were obviously hungry for career opportunity. The GM had always acted strange around me.

The global economic crisis was in full swing. It was early 2009 in the beautiful Welsh capital city of Cardiff and I was happy to be working in Head Entertainment, previously the iconic Virgin Megastore. Virgin Megastores had gone into administration a year previously but some entrepreneurs had saved it by creating Zavvi. On Christmas 2008, Zavvi had also fallen into administration, again to be saved and turned into Head Entertainment. My job was still fairly secure in the short term but everyone was looking for new employment. It was clear that my fairly short spell in the retail sector was slowly grinding to a halt, and that it was time to return to the industry I knew so well.

Cocked and fired.