9th April 2013 - Gaza

Roy and I have just returned from a trip to Gaza at the invitation of the Khan Yunis community for dehydrated bedouins where we were due to take part in the annual Gaza Marathon that had been hosted by the UN Relief & Works Agency in partnership with the Ethekwini Municipality in Durban at a substantial budget of twenty million Rands of Durban rate payers' money. When we arrived in our ageing ex BOAC Brittannia on loan from the Angola army munitions & relief supply division, we were told that the race had been abandoned because the Gaza Strip leaders, Hamas, decided in their infinite wisdom, & at the eleventh hour, that women could not take part. 

We had entered the race in December just after we had competed in the Vasbyt ultra marathon from the tip of the Drakensberg close to the Underberg Abseiling Club, at the back of the kevlar wingsuit factory, all the way to the zebra glue & hoof ashtray factory on the outskirts of Swakopmund close to the Ark for Near Extinct Hottentot Dialects. We can clearly remember submitting our forms for rehydration & Bar One sustenance outside the intensive care unit of the Swakopmund Muslim & Christian Center on the edge of the used Anglo American copper mine, now an open air swimming pool for the under priveleged. The race had been aimed at raising funds, and heart rates of course, for the Summer Games Programme for Orphaned Hottentot Offspring and the 2018 Winter Olympics for Obscure Sub-Saharan African Tribes due to be held in the Comores, courtesy of the incumbent President Ikililou Dhoinine's offshore bank account for embezzled funds on the Isle of Man.

The controversy was started last year when an Arab woman, wearing a dark Burka, outran all the men of bearded demeanours despite running on a prostheses having lost her left foot, amputated due to her alleged adultery at the hands of Uday Hussein during the Kuwaiti invasion of the early nineties, and was duly disqualified.

The chairman of the Christian Fellowship for the Alcohol Compromised, just outside Riyadh in Saudi, was the first to lodge an objection. The race also drew unwanted criticism because of the lack of water throughout the Khan Younis community. The competitors were hoping to donate a water truck to the area, hijacked a few years back only a few kilometers outside Djibouti during the 2006 Dakar Rally. A committee is being set up by the leader of the Retired Somali Pirates Association, who have graciously donated 5 million US for the next games, courtesy of the MV Lehman Timber hijacked on its maiden voyage in 2008 & courtesy of the German government who eventually paid the ransom.