Elizabeth Gardens in Salisbury
Elizabeth Gardens in Salisbury
Elizabeth Gardens in Salisbury is a rather lovely park. Situated next to the river, and overlooking the Water Meadows, it is a wonderful place to take an early morning stroll, and then to walk along the town path, where you get a wonderful view of the towering 13th Century gothic cathedral from the very spot where Constable painted his famous Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows.

Yet, like the centre of the City, it is now apparently a place synonymous with poisoning. According to latest reports, it is apparently the place at which Dawn Sturgess and Charlie Rowley became poisoned on Friday 29th June. This from The Mail:
"Police are hunting for the deadly syringe or vial laced with Novichok that poisoned a couple in Salisbury as they finally evacuated homes five days after they fell catastrophically ill. Dawn Sturgess, 44, and her boyfriend Charles Rowley, 45, became critically ill within hours of visiting Salisbury on Saturday - the site of the murder attempt on Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia. The authorities are still searching for the container carrying the nerve agent, which could kill anyone who found it, and the homeless shelter where Dawn lived in Salisbury and Charlie's home in Amesbury have now been screened-off and residents evacuated.

A security source told the Evening Standard: 'It could have been picked up by anyone, including a child. There's no doubt it will be contaminated still', adding the poison could be deadly 'for decades' if kept dry.

Salisbury Hospital chief executive Cara Charles-Barks has revealed the victims remain in a critical condition in intensive care and are 'acutely unwell' but added that nobody else has been poisoned.

One friend of the couple, who were known to be drug users, believes they may have found a syringe believing it contained heroin rather than the deadly poison used by assassins Britain claims were sent by Russia.

'It was definitely an accident. I think they found a package and it looked like drugs', she said.

Dawn and Charlie collapsed after a visit to the Queen Elizabeth Gardens on Friday, an area not searched or decontaminated after the Skripals were poisoned in March, raising serious questions about the quality of the clear-up operation four months ago."
Okay, so this one is pretty easy to debunk, and I think I can save the media the trouble of going on about this for days on end, only to have to shift their explanation away from the vial/syringe in Queen Elizabeth Gardens to another door handle perhaps, or a car, cemetery, restaurant, bench, or even porridge.

The article points your attention to the apparent expert, who is able to assure us that the substance A-234, which prior to March 2018 was reckoned to be highly volatile, is able to survive in a syringe/vial for donkeys years. Here's my advice: Don't pay any attention to what he's saying! Why? Because it's a complete and utter red-herring, which - either wittingly or unwittingly - turns your attention away from a rather obvious reason why this is complete nonsense. And what is that?

It is this: Queen Elizabeth Gardens is nowhere near Christie Miller Road. Even if you had accepted the Government narrative that the Skripals were poisoned by a military grade nerve agent (of a type 5-8 times more toxic than VX), which was poured (or now presumably squirted from the syringe) onto the door handle of Mr Skripal's front door, by professional assassins not wearing HazMats - all of which requires much cognitive dissonance - what are you now being asked to believe? That the professional unHazMatted Russian assassins, after leaving Chez Skripal, decided not to leg it to Heathrow or Gatwick pronto, but to drive to Elizabeth Gardens.

As I say, it's a beautiful park, and one which I would encourage people to visit, although you may find that quite tricky just at the moment. But here's the thing: How likely do you suppose it to be that the alleged professional Russian hitmen, after undertaking their dangerous and potentially deadly assignment, decided to drive from Christie Miller Road to Elizabeth Gardens, which is out of the way, and certainly not the way you'd drive if you wanted to get to an airport quickly, where they parked their car, got out and then went for a walk to drop their deadly (but non-lethal) Novichok-laced syringe in the gardens, where it lay undetected for four months. I'd put the chances of that at zero, and not a smidgen more.

But that's apparently what we're being asked to believe. Until of course they change the narrative tomorrow.

UPDATE

One or two commenters have questioned my claim about Queen Elizabeth Gardens being "nowhere near" Christie Miller Road, when in fact it is less than a mile (as the crow flies). What I meant by this term was not so much the actual distance, but rather the whereabouts of the Gardens in relation to Christie Miller Road, in terms of professional hitmen wanting to escape the country. In my view, there is simply no way that this could have happened, unless the alleged hitmen were either:

a) Particularly stupid or

b) Fancied doing a bit of sightseeing (these two things would largely amount to the same thing, given the nature of what the official narrative alleges happened).

I think a map would help to explain what I mean:
Christie Miller Road and the green marker is Queen Elizabeth Gardens
The red marker is Christie Miller Road and the green marker is Queen Elizabeth Gardens. If I was driving from Christie Miller Road and I wanted to get out of the country pretty quickly, there are three potential routes I would take, which I have marked on the map in light blue. There is absolutely no way I would go anywhere near Queen Elizabeth Gardens (especially given that this would take me into Salisbury's one-way system), and there is no way a Sat Nav would take me there.

If someone were to argue that the alleged hitmen might want to get rid of the alleged syringe, it would be an even more crazy route to take. It would far simpler to turn left onto the A360 towards Devizes (the blue road at the top left), and within about 2 minutes the car would be travelling in open countryside, which would make it remarkably simple to fling it out of the window into a hedge or ditch. The idea that professional hitmen would have driven to Queen Elizabeth Gardens, get out of the car, dispose of the syringe, before then fleeing the country is utterly ludicrous.

I hope that explains what I meant, and my apologies for not being clearer before.