They buried Menezes today. As darkeel pointed out in a comment on Tuesday’s entry, yesterday his family gave a press conference in which they revealed that the Met has told them that Menezes was wearing a denim jacket, not a ‘bulky puffer jacket’, and that he used his Oyster card to swipe through the barriers, not vaulting them, as was initially reported.

(But it looks like the police may be redeeming themselves slightly. Following arrests in the last few days, we have been unable to leave our building here at work, because downstairs in Liverpool Street station the police cordons are out following the arrest of two people (reports vary – some say it is two women, some say a man and a woman) who are said to have links to last weeks’ attempted bombings. )

My concern at the lack of public protest at Menezes’ shooting is that if we don’t decry these actions, we condone them by proxy. Which is the current state in America – because of the self-interest of the many, the few (generally non-white, non-Christian, non-Rightwing) have their human rights systematically stripped from them. I really hope this does not become the case here, and am delighted to see that Amnesty International have called for a full investigation into Menezes’ killing.

It’s eviction night in the Elstree house, and at the risk of disappointing some of my regular readers with more comments from the cultural morass that is Big Brother, I really have to have my say.

Kemal went through a bit of a bad time with the whole Makosi-Mole-Paranoia, but with that platypus-faced Orlaith going from group to group with her insidious bitching, and trying to break up the Kemal-Makosi-Vanessa trio, can you blame him for his insecurity? This week he has more than redeemed himself with his Red Squirrel antics, and I am loving his work and his Missoni-style shrug. So please for god’s sake don’t vote for him, but evict that sour faced, insipid, nipple-fiddling twat. The public already got rid of one of the most genuinely interesting people ever to grace (and I use that word with lashings of irony – grace is not the first word to spring to mind when I think of the force that is Science) the Big Brother screen last week when Orlaith escaped eviction. Leave someone interesting in there so that we don’t get left with a bunch of moaning Craigs.

Speaking of which. If he had been a heterosexual male, and Anthony a woman, then surely Big Brother would have intervened last night to stop him sexually harassing Anthony. This is the man who is worried that people will call him Myra Hindley when he comes out. She has nothing on you, love. You are a selfish, manipulative, preening winge-bag with man-boobs.

I feel much better now.

On Monday night at 7.30pm I was sitting on the sofa, halfway through blogging Mr Menezes, when on trying to stand up I realised that something in the lower region of my back had stopped co-operating with its close neighbours. I spent the next half hour bent over holding the coffee table, pissed off because I couldn’t get to the remote control to put Eastenders on at 8pm. In the event it didn’t matter, because by then I had managed to lever myself to the floor where I spent the next half hour until I remembered that I had some Ibuprofen gel and another epic journey to find that began.

I have since then spoken to NHS Direct and my GP though their phone surgery (what a great idea that is), and walked to and from the local pharmacy, with a journey time of approximately one and a half hours, and a speed of approximately a quarter of a mile per hour. It would seem I am suffering either from a slipped disk, or have ‘put my back out’ (great medical terminology there, courtesy of the NHS). I am a lot better now, but still fairly immobile. I have managed to set up my computer so I can sit in front of it without too much pain. My friend, The Queen of Cakes, and I, have been deciding via email what would be useful in such circumstances:

1. a Stannah stairlift
2. some handles in the loo
3. a bath you can walk in and out of, with perhaps a non-slip bathmat
4. some arm extensions
5. a gadget that allows you to pull up your pants without bending over

Friday’s fatal mistake by a police officer in Stockwell station has been remarkably downplayed by the media. The first headline on all channels on Friday was the release of CCTV images of the failed bombers. At that point I began to be concerned about the authenticity of the intelligence that the police were acting on when they shot Menezes dead. Had he been either one of the bombers (the first media assumption) or implicated (the police justification for the shooting, put out shortly after the death), then I have no doubt that there would have been bombastic speeches in crowing press conferences from the Metropolitan Police and politicians.

Of course, we now know that he is innocent, and I see that the incident is not listed on the front page of any of the major news services’ web pages today. I have a great concern that there has been no outcry at the killing of this man. There has been a small vigil held by Brazilians, but the public seems unmoved by the death.

We were initially told that he was shot five times in the head, but reports out in the last few hours confirm that a senior police officer has told the complaints commission investigating the killing that it was 7 times in the head, and once in the shoulder. And while Sir Ian Blair defends the ’shoot to kill’ policy when dealing with known suicide bombers, and while there is justification in a policy dedicated to ensuring that a known suicide bomber is rendered incapable of detonating his explosive device, the guidelines when using such policy says that it is allowable if the suspect present an immediate and known threat to the public.

Far from this being the case, the truth is that Menezes left a block of flats which was under surveillance because the address of one of the flats in the block was written on a piece of paper found in one of the rucksacks holding the failed bombs. He was a pale-skinned Brazilian, and the footage of the would-be bombers had already been released at this stage, so the police would have known he was not one of them – they were all recognisably Asian or East African. He was wearing a heavy jacket, but carried no rucksack. The police did not approach him as he left the flats, while he travelled a ten minute bus ride or while they followed him on foot to the tube station, but rather let him enter the tube station, which was surely inadvisable if they believed he was a suicide bomber.

And while the one justification of the killing is that Menezes ran and jumped over the tube barriers when police shouted out to him, there are also question marks over that in that some witnesses don’t recall the policemen shouting out to him, and they were wearing plain clothes and carrying guns, so he would have been justified in feeling threatened by them, especially as it has been revealed that he was recently mugged on the underground.

A straw poll of people at work revealed that they feel comfortable with the killing, because we are ‘at war’. And would not be bothered if more innocent people died, although they weren’t entirely happy with his death. When I asked whether they would feel the same if it was their partners or families killed in this way, they laughed as though my question was ridiculous. I bit my tongue, and was grateful one more time, that I had handed in my notice.