THE BIG RETORT

  (Photo: Chris Floyd) TheBigRetort pursues phantoms in the haunted mind of  Journalist Hannah Betts, and  comes up with a discovery about her ghosts.      THE HAUNTED HOUSE Make what you will of Hannah Betts, the journalist. She claims that her former family home was haunted throughout much of the family's time there. Hannah has appeared in both print and tv or blog extolling the belief that her former home was regularly visited by these poltergeists, a ghost or other supernatural being supposedly responsible for physical disturbances.  She  writes a haunting tale:    “ Teenage fears or a more sinister presence? Make up your own mind as our writer reveals her haunting Hallowe'en story.” The Telegraph headlined in 2013, adding some weight to a very spooky tale indeed. THREE SPECTRES Betts claimed that the house, boasted three spectres: a woman, who paced the ground floor, an aged doctor, forever racing up the stairs searching for a...

Virginia Giuffre, nee Roberts, claimed that she had been sex-trafficked across the Atlantic in 2001, to dance and later sexually pleasure a prince. The teen partied long into the night in a London nightclub with this handsome prince - “sweating profusely all over me”.  Decades later, the handsome prince turned into an ugly frog and denied sweating.  TheBigRetort... uncovers the truth. In a now infamous interview with Emily Maitlis, Prince Andrew was probed. Did he or didn’t he sweat?  Andrew retorted: "There’s a slight problem with the sweating, because I have a peculiar medical condition which is that I don’t sweat or I didn’t sweat at the time and that was…was it…yes, I didn’t sweat at the time because I had suffered what I would describe as an overdose of adrenaline in the Falklands War when I was shot at and I simply…it was almost impossible for me to sweat… So, I’m afraid to say that there’s a medical condition that says that I didn’t do it, so therefore…” ...

Photo: Mark Harrison The United Kingdom is in tight lockdown. However, whilst the nation inches towards struggle street, are the Queen's ministers secretly being 'groomed' in the sacred salons of Westminster' ?    TheBigRetort... F ollowing  the Covid-19 pandemic,  Prime Minister  Boris Johnson advised against all “non-essential” travel.  The pub, the clubs, and even - God forbid - the hairdresser came under BoJo's it's a no-no 'thingy me bob'.  A week later the whole country was ordered into a lockdown described as  so ‘hair' tight it  even covered hairdressers.    It seemed to many that hairdressers should not have been placed out of bounds. If the country were to die from a thousand cuts  economically...  this was a cut too deep.  Yes there was anger. Confusion even... W hy were some among the flock allowed to work and others not? Nevertheless barbers were on "the list".  And wea...

The search for the identity of the first person to come into contact with Covid-19 is fruitless... at least for journalists with a "patient zero" in mind.   TheBigRetort A Canadian who died in 1984 was believed to be the first person to introduce AIDS into America and the wider world. But it later transpired that he was not patient zero. Earlier cases dated back to the '70s - by  which time the victim's reputation was tarnished beyond the grave. Similarly the search to find the Covid-19 patient zero lies in that same world. It's in this tiny devastating  domain - where the occupants speak a language few can interpret - where another patient zero will be found. And w hilst it seems possible that the outbreak of Covid-19 may have silently taken place before it made its appearance in a seafood market in Wuhan, it will not be any journalist who tracks down patient zero. That's because any person deemed to be misidentified 'the first' s...