One Incontrovertible, Unequivocal, Undeniable Fact Which Refutes the Diary

[David Orsam]

And of course if you knew the 'crucial' details were not obtained until after our book was published, but had been in the public domain for years, how did it even make sense to argue that nobody could have considered their significance before? Of course they could! They've had at least nine years to do so.

I have never argued that "nobody could have considered their significance before". You have imagined this.

[caz]

My sense of humour's fine Graham. But tell you what, why not log on at about 4pm tomorrow, after what will probably be the next massive tranche of Caz's misguided posts, and make some joke about her not being able to stop...

The above was posted on February 5th, two days after my dear mother-in-law was admitted to Exeter hospital (she passed away there on February 10th). So I humbly apologise to David for not yet being willing or able to produce my 'next massive tranche' of misguided posts for him to respond to in his own inimitably superior way.

I'll be back...

Love to all,

Caz
XX

[Iconoclast]

The above was posted on February 5th, two days after my dear mother-in-law was admitted to Exeter hospital (she passed away there on February 10th).

I'll be back...

Love to all,

Caz
XX

Looking forward to it, Caz - sad to hear your news.

Ike

[GUT]

The above was posted on February 5th, two days after my dear mother-in-law was admitted to Exeter hospital (she passed away there on February 10th). So I humbly apologise to David for not yet being willing or able to produce my 'next massive tranche' of misguided posts for him to respond to in his own inimitably superior way.

I'll be back...

Love to all,

Caz
XX

Sorry to hear of your loss.

[caz]

Many thanks Ike and GUT. And thank you for bearing with me. I have been way below par for many weeks now, without fully appreciating it at the time or I might have done everyone a favour by staying away from the cut and thrust here. I should not have used it as therapy, that's for sure!

Anyway, I hope to be back soon and more focused. Life for me will become easier, but also emptier.

Love,

Caz
X

[Abby Normal]

Many thanks Ike and GUT. And thank you for bearing with me. I have been way below par for many weeks now, without fully appreciating it at the time or I might have done everyone a favour by staying away from the cut and thrust here. I should not have used it as therapy, that's for sure!

Anyway, I hope to be back soon and more focused. Life for me will become easier, but also emptier.

Love,

Caz
X

Hi Caz
I just noticed this. Sorry for your loss : (
Hope your feeling better soon.

[GUT]

Many thanks Ike and GUT. And thank you for bearing with me. I have been way below par for many weeks now, without fully appreciating it at the time or I might have done everyone a favour by staying away from the cut and thrust here. I should not have used it as therapy, that's for sure!

Anyway, I hope to be back soon and more focused. Life for me will become easier, but also emptier.

Love,

Caz
X

Take time for yourself, what you've been through puts this in perspective.

There have been times I'd have been better to stay away too, but the distraction can help.

Thoughts and prayers are with you.

[ChrisGeorge]

Hi Caz

I am also very sorry to hear about your recent loss of your mother-in-law. I hope to see you at the Liverpool conference in September and trust that by that time you are in your usual good spirits.

Best regards

Chris

[caz]

Thank you all for your good wishes. I will try to catch up with the latest diary posts here and see if there is anything I wish to address. I have about ten pages to wade through first.

Love,

Caz
X

[caz]

Not for the first time, Caz has lost track of the argument.

Her original claim was that no-one found the diary suspicious "when details of it first emerged." That was, of course, in January 1995, in Barrett's affidavit, supplemented by the information in the 2003 'Inside Story' (and the misinformation in Shirley Harrison's book later that same year). I was dealing with THAT point and saying that at this time no-one knew of the advertisement.

Now Caz unilaterally changes the premise of the argument to the period when people first knew about the advertisement, a completely different point in time to when the details of the diary first emerged.

Hi David,

I don't really understand this. I didn't change the premise of my argument, although I might have worded it more clearly to begin with. If you initially assumed I was referring to when the brief details given by Mike in 1995 'first emerged', I apologise, but that would have made little sense in the context of my repeated observations that there has been ample opportunity for people to discuss the wording of the advert and therefore to give 'serious consideration' to the possibility of Mike's 11-day wonder.

It was always about the emergence on the message boards of these details, which was several years before you described them as 'crucial' in light of Mike's 'blank pages' request. That was the context of my remark that the little red diary had failed to clobber 'the' diary to death years ago, ie when Mike's request for it to have 'blank pages' first emerged. If nobody up until your arrival has connected the dots and given them serious consideration, the explanation has nothing to do with which details emerged or when, because all the details we now have emerged years ago, to be considered by anyone to their heart's content.

Further we saw Caz's attitude earlier in this thread that it would have been insane for Mike to present Doreen with a forged diary only days after writing it. And she didn't think it was possible for it to have been written in an 11 day period. It's this kind of thinking I believe that has prevented serious consideration being given to the notion that the diary was written between 26 March and 13 April 1992.

Much as I would hate to disabuse you of the notion that my kind of thinking has had that kind of influence over every other person's thinking apart from your own, I do wonder whose intelligence you imagined you were insulting here.

Love as always,

Caz
X

[caz]

Much as I would hate to disabuse you of the notion that my kind of thinking has had that kind of influence over every other person's thinking apart from your own, I do wonder whose intelligence you imagined you were insulting here.

I hope everyone appreciated I had my tongue firmly in my cheek there.

I don't for one second think David meant that my own thinking had influenced, never mind prevented, anyone else's. But if he is right about everyone thinking along the same lines as me when it comes to Mike's 'insane' 11-day wonder, it must come down to a case of great minds thinking alike - or fools never differing, which reminds me of a line from the tv sitcom 'Ever Decreasing Circles' about being the only one in step.

Are you the only one in step, David?

Love,

Caz
X

[caz]

We seem to be going in circles, back onto points that have already been discussed. Caz, no doubt, has a perfect memory and remembers events in her life and the order they occurred with perfect clarity. But ask her to put herself inside the mind of a shambolic drunk who has a bad memory to start with and she simply can't do it.

David shows here how easy it is to forget one's own arguments. He forgets that this same 'shambolic drunk who has a bad memory to start with' is meant to have suddenly regained perfect recall in the middle of his affidavit regarding precisely how many days he and Anne had spent [nearly three years previously] copying out the diary into the guard book. Aside from this moment of perfect clarity regarding the 11-day wonder, he is allowed to wallow in the alcohol-induced haze which leaves him unable to tell the difference between two days, two weeks, two months or even two years.

Remember, Mike only had to recall having received the red diary a couple of weeks before his appointment in London (if not the year this happened), and he'd have known how long he could afford to give himself and Anne for the task, when claiming this as evidence of their intentions.

Summing up, I can't see how it can be argued that, on account of his poor memory in 1995, he was unlikely to have come up with 11 days unless it was the truth and he actually remembered it taking that long, even though three years had in fact now passed. Isn't there a fatal contradiction here?

Love,

Caz
X

[caz]

Originally Posted by caz
If he had more than enough time at this crucial final stage of the process, why did he not remove all traces from the inside cover of the guard book, where he claimed more photographs had been mounted? If he dealt with all those inside the book by hacking out all the pages containing them, why was he worried about a little more defacing to remove any remaining signs of its potentially post-Victorian usage?

Originally Posted by caz
Fortunately for the Barretts, nobody knows for sure if there were any photographs to remove, nor if the book was originally home to photos, business cards or Victorian cartes de visite. The traces left behind, contrary to what we have been assured in the past, are perfectly consistent in nature and size with items known to be from the right period. I have a small album of maternal family photos dating back to the 1860s, some of which were cut to fit the individual mounts while others fit snugly without the need for any cutting.

Of course those traces will be from the right period. The question is why were they removed along with the pages, and who did this.

You may have misunderstood, David. I was referring here to the traces that have not been removed, which at one time were said to have been left behind after post-Victorian photographs had been removed from the inside front cover by the forger. If they had been photos from WWI, as Mike claimed in his affidavit, the traces would not have been from the right period either, yet he presumably had time to remove all remaining traces if he wasn't sure of their origins, but did not do so.

Love,

Caz
X

[caz]

You claim that I asked "does Keith still hold to his 2007 opinion on the strength of the Battlecrease evidence?" and that you responded "Yes he does". This is completely and demonstrably untrue. I love the way you describe it as you saying this "in no uncertain terms". You never said it! You are imagining it!

Your trouble, David, if you don't mind my saying, is that you take everything so literally that if I wrote one day that you had a bee in your bonnet, and the next day claimed I had said you had something to get off your chest, you'd accuse me of 'never saying that' and 'imagining it'. This is how I actually phrased my precis of our somewhat lengthier dispute over Keith's 2007 opinion and whether it had remained the same ten years on:

Quote:
Originally Posted by caz
...you seem perfectly happy to rake over the whole "does Keith still hold to his 2007 opinion on the strength of the Battlecrease evidence?" question, which both Keith and I answered you in no uncertain terms with "Yes he does".

You will note I did not in fact claim that you had 'literally' asked this specific question, but described it as 'the whole.... question', resulting from me pointing out that Keith's opinion had remained the same ten years on, and you expressing doubts and loftily announcing this was clearly no more than an assumption on my part. That is why I asked how exactly I was meant to convince you. The upshot, as you know full well, was that Keith felt obliged (or was 'literally forced', if you prefer your own more colourful vernacular) to reassure you - privately - and make it clear that his opinion had not changed and that it was no assumption on my part that it hadn't. If you were still unsure about my own "Yes he does" position, from what I had already posted and from Keith's confirmation, I am genuinely perplexed if not literally gobsmacked.

Love,

Caz
X

[caz]

Obviously I don't think that a transcript was prepared in March 1992 because my view is that the Diary was not completed until April.

What I have been trying to establish from you is this: If Mike was (hypothetically) in the process of preparing a transcript, would it still, in your view, have made sense for him to hunt for a Victorian diary into which to write extracts?

If the answer to this question is "yes" then frankly it doesn't matter whether a transcript was or was not, in fact, in the process of being prepared. But I don't know if your answer is "yes" or "no" because you haven't told me.

I don't recall if I have already responded to this one, but the problem with your question is that Mike's hunt began very shortly after his first conversation with Doreen, but we seem to agree that it wasn't a chicken and egg situation, in that the process of typing the transcript would have begun later. So the question as it is worded does not apply, because he needn't have had a transcript in mind when he made the telephone enquiry.

Incidentally, it's interesting if you think the transcript was prepared after the diary was completed. Obviously I do too. But I seem to recall many a modern hoax theorist before you assuming the transcript came first and was the famous draft allegedly produced on Mike's equally famous word processor back in the late 1980s.

Love,

Caz
X