Epiblog for the Feast of St Oswald of Worcester

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. Finally the weather looks like it might be turning from winter into spring, or at least a close approximation thereof.  My composting seems to be coming along well, notwithstanding that something - a badger possibly - seems to have been rooting around in it for tidbits, and soon it will be time to dig out the result and distribute it amongst the various tubs and planters, ready for this year’s round of herbs. We’ve succeeded in making contact with another (different) gutter man who seems quite keen to actually turn up and do the job, this time, so we may well let him.  The plumber is still missing in action, but the one recommended by the chimney sweep may yet prove to be a fitting substitute; I have an eye test booked for next Thursday, and I have once more had some vitamin B12 jabbed into what remains of my shoulder muscle by the NHS. So, as Churchill said, it is not the end, it is not even the beginning of the end, but it may be the end of the beginning.

Notwithstanding the finer weather, it’s still been cold, especially on those mornings when Deb has an early start for her 12-hour days of teaching, and Matilda is correspondingly reluctant to do her promenades along the decking until, as Granny Fenwick used to say, “the streets have been aired a bit”.  The squirrels and birds, however, have no such compunction, and while Matilda curls herself round into the shape of a Davy Crockett hat and purrs contentedly to herself in the chair, these days, almost as soon as I put the bird food out, there is a brawl of birds and squirrels all trying to barge their way to the front of the queue like Black Friday bargain-hunters. It always amazes me how they know when I have put out fresh stuff for them. The only explanation I can think of is that the squirrels somehow have our house under surveillance, which could be a worrying thought, if I allowed it to be.

Misty has had her usual week of barking at couriers and postmen, barking at people who have the temerity to slam a car door in the road outside, barking at me, sometimes, when I go out into the lobby for more coal. In fact, as Border Collies go, I have to admit, she is, indeed, completely barking.  She also barked at the District Nurse on Tuesday, who had originally come to administer my 12-week injection. The said District Nurse, who, sadly, didn’t come from the same redoubtable stock as Miranda Hart in Call The Midwife, retired back to the safe side of the door, pleading that she didn’t like dogs. I managed to shout to her, amidst the constant obbligato of Misty going woof woof woof, to come back on Thursday afternoon, when my wife would be here to take the dog out.

On Thursday afternoon, the District Nurse was back. In the plural. Two different ones, in fact, neither of whom I had seen before, and both of whom looked like experienced and formidable dog-wranglers. Their skills in that direction remained un-deployed, however, as Debbie was around, as predicted, and took Muttkins upstairs out of the way.  Having duly stuck the needle in me, the D. N.s then proceeded to test me for dementia, giving me an address to remember, then getting me to tell them the time, the date, to count backwards from 20, to recite the months of the year in reverse order, then finally to recount the address they had told me earlier. (John Smith, 42 High Street, Huddersfield, if you’re interested). When they had finally gone, and Debbie came back downstairs, she was highly amused to find I had been thus tested. Did they test you for dementia last time they came, she asked, and I was forced to admit I couldn’t remember.

In the wider world, it would have been a good week to have acquired the skill of dementia, or at least of selective memory-loss, as the last seven days have been full of thinks I would rather un-remember, or forget entirely, although sadly we’re forced to confront them on a daily basis.  The good news, possibly the only good news, this week, is that of a tentative cease-fire in Syria. If it holds. If it does hold, though, it will be a long while before there is any discernible impact on the flows of refugees from that stricken country.  As if to counterbalance that, we also heard of the French government’s plans to bulldoze half of the “Jungle” camp at Calais, seemingly without any backup plan for at least the continued welfare of the several hundred unaccompanied children it contains.

Clearly, refugees, especially when they are referred to as “migrants” are going to be high on the news agenda until at least June, as both sides in the EU referendum debate are interested in perpetrating what I have come to call “The Great Confusion” between legitimate economic migrants, refugees, British citizens with non-white ethnicity, and asylum seekers, and “migrants” are good raw material out of which to spin the confections of lies we are currently being offered. Cameron says if we leave the EU, we will end up with the UK equivalent of “The Jungle” on the South Downs behind Saltdean, and Boris Johnson saying that if we stay in, then more of them will worm their way into the country and secrete themselves under the beds of maiden aunts in Droitwich, waiting on the precise moment to rise up and murder Middle England in its bed.

The level of debate is dire, even more stupid and illiterate on both sides than the tripe we normally encounter about the economy at election time, and neither side wants to admit that the most likely migrant in practice is a white Catholic Polish electrician who gets a job, rents a house in the private sector, and pays taxes.  Long live “The Great Confusion”, because the more people they can infect with it, the easier we will be to control, to influence, and to render supine.  The problem is, as I wrote last week, that unpicking this ball of confusion takes time, effort and study.  It is not the sort of thing that can be debunked overnight. It relies, to a certain extent, on the public having the desire to understand the problem, and politicians don’t want us understanding the problem, because it might lead to awkward questions like, well, why aren’t there enough affordable houses to go round, and could you explain exactly how carpet-bombing the economy with the death of a thousand cuts and reducing the amount of spare cash people have to spend will stimulate growth?

They have no answers to these questions, and now that they have a leader of the Labour Party who is actually starting to ask them, and ask them publicly, they are rattled. That is why Cameron chose such a disgraceful cowardly response to Corbyn’s questioning at Prime Minister’s Question Time this week – because he has no answer to the arguments, and he is reduced to a knee-jerk ad hominem response – do up your tie, wear a proper suit, and sing the National Anthem.  Because, of course, that will solve everything!  The economy is tanking, and Osborne is warning of still further insane cuts to areas which will impact hardest on the poorest and least able to bear them. Never mind - do up your tie, wear a proper suit, and sing the National Anthem.  Jeremy Hunt is lying about junior doctors’  terms of employment, and the NHS is in chaos. Never mind - do up your tie, wear a proper suit, and sing the National Anthem. Food bank usage is at an all time high. Kids are going to bed hungry. Never mind - do up your tie, wear a proper suit, and sing the National Anthem.  The DWP is cutting ESA by 30% and the new PIP benefit has taken away Motability cars and scooters from people who previously relied on them. Never mind - do up your tie, wear a proper suit, and sing the National bloody Anthem. I must admit, I find it difficult to take lessons on correct behaviour from someone who once stuck his genitals in the mouth of a dead pig, but then I suppose, in fairness, during the act, he was probably immaculately dressed in white tie and tails, and for all I know he was intoning “God Save The Queen” throughout.

The phenomenon of politicians giving glib, specious, ready-made answers to problems which they made up in the first place, to deflect attention from the questions that really need to be asked, is by no means confined to these shores alone. I have watched the rise of Donald Trump in the US presidential campaign with first amusement and then something akin to concern. I am the last one to invoke “Godwin’s Law” but I have to say that there are very few differences between watching footage of a Donald Trump rally and footage of a Hitler speech from the 1930s. Substitute “Make America Great Again” for “Make Germany Great Again” and substitute “Muslims” for “Jews” and that’s about it.  The fact that Hillary Clinton may be the best hope of stopping this dangerous megalomaniac getting anywhere near the levers of power is probably one of the more depressing aspects of the whole situation.

Nearer to home, the areas of what you might call “local” or “personal to me” politics have all moved on this week. 5,000 people marched through Huddersfield to protest against the closure of the local A & E. Sadly, that will do little or nothing to redress the massive tactical blunder the campaign’s organisers made of issuing paper petitions for people to sign thus misleading people into thinking they were signing the official “online” petition.  And people on the Facebook page devoted to this campaign, and on the Calderdale Floods Support Facebook page, have been saying that they don’t want to see any “political” posts on those pages. Who do they think caused the situation? The A & E cuts Fairy? The Floods Fairy? In the latter case, the floods are a direct result of Tory cuts to the flood defence budget and DEFRA’s response, this week, to the online petition calling for more trees to be planted on uplands to prevent them shedding rainfall too quickly, is to promise a 25 year plan. Better stock up on sandbags and blow up your water wings. I have come to the conclusion that these people who say they don’t want to see “political” posts must be people who voted Tory and don’t want to have to stand up and defend the consequences of their various chickens coming home to roost.

My own online petition https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/120545  to introduce a new deterrent and toughen up the laws on animal cruelty, has now reached, as of today, 1063 signatures, and while this is a long way off the 100,000 needed for it to be considered for a debate in parliament, .it is at least an encouraging sign, given that I have done little, if nothing, to push it online this week, having been occupied elsewhere. Maybe it is starting to gather a momentum of its own, with friends of people who have shared it now also sharing it amongst themselves.  Maybe. Anyway, it’s a long road stretching ahead, and I must step it out.

It’s another bright, cold, sunny morning today, and somehow we’ve made it through another week, and also, in fact, another month. It is also a year to the day since Deb’s dad died, which seems incredible. A whole year having zipped by without me noticing. Plus, it is also the feast of St Oswald of Worcester.

Oswald was born into the religious life. It was sort of a family business. His uncle, Oda, was Archbishop of Canterbury, and he was also related to Oskytel, who sounds more like a mobile phone company than a Saxon cleric, but who nevertheless became Archbishop of York. It was a slam-dunk, therefore, that Oswald would become a churchman, and he was instructed by a Frankish scholar named Frithegod, became Dean of Winchester, and then was sent to France to study at the Abbey of Fleury in 950AD.  His uncle summoned him back to England in 958AD, but died before Oswald reached him.  Left at something of a loose end, he began helping Oskytel with the administration of York, until St Dunstan secured for him the See of Worcester in 961.

Once installed, he invited Germanus of Winchester, whom he had met at Fleury, to come to England and found a religious institution. This was originally a small affair at Westbury-on-Trym, but eventually, with the gift of lands at Ramsey, in Huntingdonshire, and therefore the promise of a more permanent home for succeeding generations, it translated there and became, eventually Ramsey Abbey in 974. Oswald bestowed it generously with textiles, hangings and a magnificent Bible.

Apart from founding Ramsey, Oswald’s career at Worcester was chiefly taken up with re-organising the structure of eccelesiastical lands to ensure a more even flow of money into the coffers of the church, and re-introducing a system of worship based more closely on the Benedictine rule. Two years before Ramsey came to fruition, Oswald became Archbishop of York, alongside his existing role as Bishop of Worcester. This was generally seen as highly unusual and irregular, but it benefited York to be able to draw on the resources of a much richer and more stable diocese.

When King Edgar died in 975AD, some of the monastic institutions in which Oswald had taken an interest were broken up or otherwise curtailed, but Ramsey remained untouched, probably because of the original patronage of other members of the Saxon royal household, whose descendants also protected it. Oswald invited Abbo of Fleury to come over and take charge at Ramsey in 985AD, and while he was there, Abbo taught the Computus, the method used for calculating Easter, and also, occasionally, on a whim, for calculating when the Day of Judgement would be. The long winter evenings must just have flown by.

It was Oswald’s custom, during Lent, to wash the feet of the poor, and it was while engaged in this activity, on 29^th February 992AD (although his feast day is always celebrated a day earlier) that he keeled over and died. Almost immediately, miracles were being reported around his tomb, which was moved to a different location in the same building in 1002, ten years later. No trace of it remains, but, incredibly, the British Museum and Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, possess a psalter and a pontifical that were said to have belonged to St Oswald and were used daily by him.

It’s easy for us to scoff at the simple piety and quasi-superstition which was a significant component of what passed for faith in those days. Personally, I think we should be careful of judging people of Saxon times by modern, cynical, 21^st century standards.  In some ways, they were more in tune with the universe than we are – they saw the cycles of the seasons, the growing time and the harvest time, a time to reap, a time to sow, and all that, in a way which we would find completely alien. True, life was nasty, brutish and short, but what there was of it may have been more spiritually fulfilling.  And yes, I accept that it must have been easier to become a saint when your family tree was stuffed with Abbots, Bishops, Archbishops and monks, but even so, Oswald seems – from what scant accounts remain – to have been a pious man and a capable administrator. I could wish for a worse epitaph.

 Anyway, it’s already almost four o’clock and I am starting to droop and drowse, with what is turning out to be my usual mid-afternoon energy-drop, these days. I don’t know why it should be, but it’s another condition imposed on my by my body, that I have no choice other than to accept.  Debbie, Zak and Misty are off somewhere over hills and mountains high, and Matilda and Ellie are both asleep, albeit in different parts of the house, since neither of them is intelligent enough to realise that they would both be warmer if they set aside their differences, forgot their respective species, and cuddled up next to each other. I’m lucky they’re all in such good fettle, though. Poor little Jazz, my cousin’s Border Terrier, is very ill as I type this today, and I must rouse myself to try and pray, after my own poor fashion, for his continued well-being and recovery.

And I must also face whatever next week brings, not that I am looking forward to it particularly, as it will involve long days, early starts, being cold, being tired, and an eye test on top as a special bonus.  But mainly today, I am contemplating the passing of time.  Particularly that year which has elapsed since Mike left us. I can enumerate the months backwards if necessary, if only to convince the District Nurse I am not gaga, but to actually make them go backwards, ah, there would be the trick.  Says Donne:

Oh, how feeble is man’s powre

That if good fortune fall

He cannot add one single houre

Or a lost houre recall…

Nope, that’s pretty much it. Go with the flow, as no doubt the Buddha would say, if he were here right now and I understood Sanskrit. I can never think about time, and the nature of time, even in logical, Stephen Hawking mode, let alone in full-on, Buddhist satori mode, without my head starting to hurt. Somehow, in a way I don’t understand, there was a branch in the river of time, and we left Mike back there, while we sailed on down a different tributary, and have been for another year now. And what is a year, anyway, other than a collections of sunrises and sunsets, days made up of hours which are themselves just arbitrary marked scratched at intervals down a burning candle. Where’s Abbo with his Computus, when  we really need him?

I’m not the first to think this way, not by a long chalk. Unacknowledged poet laureate and part-time Eric Morecambe tribute act, Philip Larkin, summed it up in his poem, Days, much better than I can.

What are days for?
Days are where we live.
They come, they wake us
Time and time over.
They are to be happy in:
Where can we live but days?

Ah, solving that question
Brings the priest and the doctor
In their long coats
Running over the fields.

And since I am never going to be able to better that as an exposition of the essential dilemma, not even if I wrote until the Computus finally came out right and God lost patience and shook a seven, I think I might just leave it there this week. Days are to be happy in. While we can. I thank you for the days.

Epiblog for the Second Sunday in Lent

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. But before I tell you about it, I’d just like to say a few words about why I started my petition https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/120545

This is pure selfishness on my part, but the reason I am putting it here is that, because people have been sharing it on Facebook and Twitter, inevitably people have asked questions and raised points about it, and, rather than try and get round them all individually, especially given the limitations of Twitter for long conversations, I thought if I posted some of my reasoning here, it might help with the frequently asked questions and to provide some background. Plus, in future, I can just link to this blog when someone asks a question I know is answered here.

For those who have already signed the petition and are anxious to crack on and find out what new disasters have befallen us this week, if any, please feel free to skip the next two or three paragraphs.

Firstly, the existing animal welfare legislation is rooted in Victorian times, where attitudes to animals were completely different. True, a horse might expect to be worked to death, or a pit pony would spend its life underground and never see daylight, but the idea of deliberately killing an animal “just for fun” was relegated to a hard core of psychopaths.  So we have a situation where successive laws have come down and been amended through the years, based, for instance, on the principle that a dog is essentially a working animal, and a cat is nothing more, in law, than a household chattel.

Currently the Animal Welfare Act allows for 26 weeks as the maximum custodial sentence in cases of the severest, intentional cruelty, with malice aforethought. However, all too frequently we see cases of people who have inflicted wilful violent cruelty on animals either walking free from court, or with the most minimal punishments. Magistrates have told me that one of the reasons they don’t go for the severe end of the punishment scale, is that it will just be overturned on appeal, which is to my mind another symptom that the whole attitude towards animal welfare and deliberate animal abuse needs revising and strengthening.

I am not anticipating that, if this ever did reach the statute book, it would become the de facto legislation for prosecuting all cases of animal abuse. I see it as rather like a nuclear deterrent, something you hope will be rarely, if ever used. Maybe once or twice a year, for high-profile cases. I want it to be sitting there on the statute book in the hope that the next time a gang of yobboes thinks its funny to kick a dog or cat to death, or to set fire to an animal sanctuary for a laugh, they might just think twice, and think again.

As to the length of the sentence, I could have said, a life for a life, or 10 years minimum or an even longer sentence, but that would have limited the chance of large numbers of people signing it. I may well agree with you that more draconian measures would be preferable. I have written before that one possible just punishment would be to do to the abuser whatever they did to the animal they killed, and that once you had set fire to a few yobboes and thrown them off the car park roof, cases of deliberate animal cruelty would decline appreciably. However, such remedies aren’t available to us, so I tried to go for a term which would still be seen as a deterrent, commensurate with the suffering caused, but reasonable enough that people would sign in large numbers. I imagine anyway that if it ever did become law, there would be several attempts to dilute the penalty, by vested interests.

Finally, I would like to touch on a couple of those vested interests, fox hunting, and useless animal experiments. It’s been pointed out to me that, the way my petition is framed, it would be possible to bring a prosecution against either a fox hunt or an animal experiments laboratory, as both can on occasion be said to have deliberately  caused cruelty and death to animals with no heed to the animal’s suffering, and with malice aforethought. Good. I have not made exceptions for these two despicable activities because I would like to see the law challenged in both cases, as part of a wider re-assessment of society’s whole attitude towards animals.

Anyway, that’s enough of the soapbox, so back to the week that was. As I said, it’s been a busy old week in the Holme Valley. The weather has been kinder in that at least we’ve seen a bit of sunshine, here and there, but it’s also been frosty, and on some days windy and rainy. A real mixed bag, in fact. The snowdrops are now out, but the daffs are still stubbornly refusing to flourish their brazen trumpets.  The squirrels and the birds have been busily nibbling their way through the contents of several dishes of bird food,

Matilda is no fan of changeable weather, especially as she’s been caught out by one or two showers this week and has had to be hand-dried with kitchen roll on her return.  The most amusing thing is when she goes to the door when it’s actually raining, and dithers on the threshold, letting “I dare not” wait upon “I would” like the cat i’the adage, as Shakespoke might have put it.  I have told her several times that I do not control the weather, and that if I did, it would be warm and sunny every day, but it goes in one ear and out the other.

Misty has also developed an unwillingness to leave her cosy and warm bed and go out into the garden to do her necessaries, when the weather is bad.  This is odd, because she thinks nothing of yomping miles across the moors in all kinds of foul sleet and snow in the company of Deb. Obviously somehow, in the crinkly recesses of her furry little tennis ball of a brain, she differentiates between “walkies” mode and “garden” mode.

The garden is actually in a terrible state, and one of the things I must do, and sooner rather than later, is sort it out. I made a start this week by compiling a list of “house” jobs that need attention, but most of the outside ones will have to wait until it stops raining, and not just for a couple of hours, but for a couple of weeks.

In the meantime, I have been bashing on with the books. It has been half-term, which also gave both of us a much-needed rest from the punishing routine of early starts. And we’ve had the chimney swept, which means the stove is suddenly several degrees more efficient, and we’ve all been a bit warmer. He was a personable enough bloke, very efficient and very good at keeping the mess to an absolute minimum. It was the first time I’d met him in person (I was in hospital the last time the chimney got swept, in fact, I organised the sweeping of it from my hospital bed) and I asked him if he ever got asked to go to weddings.  He does, surprisingly enough in these materialistic, un-superstitious times, but he doesn’t go. Only to family weddings, and even then, in a suit, and not dressed as a sweep. Oh well.

Despite my deliberate attempts to keep busy and ignore it, the outside world has been intruding into my life, even if only via the ever-present and increasingly-depressing medium of the television news. A couple of neatly-bracketed stories which particularly caught my attention related to how, back in 1990, Peter Walker, the senior Tory cabinet minister, tried to persuade Thatcher to charge Poll Tax to the homeless, and this week the DWP asked a boy who was born with no arms and no legs to prove that he was disabled. There is thirty years of caring, compassionate Conservatism, summed up for you and tied with a little blue bow.

But all the talk this week has been about the EU, and “Brexit” – and it’s much worse than I anticipated.  A week is a long time in politics, as Harold Wilson once famously observed, and this week has been a particularly long-one for the pig-bothering Prime Minister. A week of the long knives, in fact.  Cameron seems to have bungled this business of allowing cabinet ministers to campaign in favour of “Brexit”, and while at this time last week, I was entertaining vague notions that he might have the balls to do a spring re-shuffle, get rid of the anti-EU faction, and “accidentally” defenestrate Jeremy Hunt in the process, clearly that’s not now going to happen.

Because of the paucity of the “deal” he has managed to secure, Cameron is now in a much weaker position and his whole career is now staked on the outcome of the referendum – so much so that there are those who say he was doomed either way.  I have no sympathy for him. He brought it upon himself. He didn’t have to include the EU referendum in his manifesto for the last election, he only did it to spike the guns of UKIP. He didn’t have to announce so far in advance that he was planning to step down. Both major tactical blunders. Still, whatever the outcome for him, he will come out of it very nicely, thank you, and much more comfortably than any of his victims.

In fact, the seeds of the imbroglio currently facing our beloved leader go back six years. It must have seemed a slam-dunk, back in 2010, to blame the immigrants.  It doesn’t matter particularly what for. The Tories set out from day 1 to pump out anti-immigrant propaganda, in the same was as they pumped out anti-disabled propaganda.  What they didn’t foresee is that the specific anti-immigrant propaganda also fed UKIP support, and in fact, it probably acted as a recruiting sergeant for the kippers, as the government, for all its rhetoric, was believed to be weak, compared to UKIP’s non-specific, but nevertheless dire, sabre-rattling about immigration.  Having realised they had made a boo-boo and let the UKIP genie out of the bottle, the only thing they Tories could do at the last election to try and rein in the monster their propaganda had created and nurtured, was to out-Kipper the kippers, and thus the idea of an in/out referendum was born.  It must have seemed a good idea at the time, but then he blundered into the Syrian conflict, which was already creating millions of refugees, and made it worse. Suddenly, the kippers are able to point at the poor desperate refugees in the Jungle at Calais, and use them to scare maiden aunts in Leamington Spa into voting no. So Cameron has to be seen to be even tougher than UKIP, and so it goes on.

I said at the time of the last election, when totally false allegations about immigration were being used as political missiles by all sides, that the winner of the election would probably be the party who voted to string up asylum seekers from the nearest lamp post, and I am beginning to think I was right.

And this is only the start of it. We still have three months of this crap to come. Part of Cameron’s trouble is that his propaganda ministry, aided and abetted by a supine and unquestioning media, has firmly planted in the psyche of white van man bigot Britain the idea that “there’s too many of ‘em, coming over ‘ere, takin’ our jobs and using our resources and being given the keys to a council house and a flat screen TV, claiming benefits paid for by hard working British taxpayer families”.  That myth – and it is largely a myth – has taken such a pervasive hold, particularly amongst people who don’t (or can’t, because they lack the intellectual capacity) differentiate between legal immigrants, asylum seekers, people who are British but have a different ethnicity, Muslims, illegal immigrants, refugees and terrorists. To the people who this message appeals to, all those categories are just “em”. There’s too many of ‘em.

To unpick the myth takes lots of words, hardly an ideal remedy in an age of soundbites and limited attention-spans.  The whole issue of benefits for migrants for instance, applies to EU migrants, who are more likely to be white than brown. Research has shown that migrants most often go into the private rented housing market, and not into social housing. Asylum seekers can’t claim benefits.  Newspaper columnists who have written about immigrants being given free cars, TVs and council houses have actually been caught out and forced to print an apology – but it’s never the same size or the same prominence as the original lie. When you start to unpick the minutiae of the problem, it is much more complex. There are reciprocal arrangements, for instance, governing British migrants who live in other EU countries. These types of “benefits“ are hardly ever mentioned.  Instead, we are going to be treated to three months of the unedifying spectacle of Cameron and Farage arguing about who can be the most beastly towards the child of a theoretical Polish economic migrant. Generously larded with “dog-whistle” statements (I will be charitable and call them statements, but they will be mostly lies) on refugees and Muslims, all aimed at keeping the pot boiling.

This is what our once-great country has descended to. And when Cameron loses the referendum, he will resign, and Boris Johnson (Britain’s answer to Donald Trump, although we’ve forgotten precisely what the question was) will become Tory leader and ipso facto Prime Minister. He will no doubt commence building a giant fence round the entire British coastline, with machine gun towers every 100 yards. Only then will the freedoms our fathers and grandfathers fought for in 1940 be safe. Oh, hang on…

Start digging that fallout shelter now.  You heard it here first. Whether the boss is Cameron or Johnson, the message is going to be that we’re standing firmly with the priests and the Levites, happy to pass by on the other side while the refugees suffer. Johnson may pose as a bumbling maverick but in reality he is a ruthless right-wing ideologue who idolises Margaret Thatcher.

Given what I have just written, you might think I am in favour of unrestricted immigration and the EU as it currently stands. I am not. The EU as it currently stands is a corrupt, self-serving organisation that needs reforming over a period of years to wean it off its bloated political ambitions towards “ever closer union” and back to the idea of it being a “Common Market” which is what I thought I voted for back in 1975, last time we had a referendum. But you can’t reform an institution from the outside.  I also think we should have control over who we let in to the country, which might seem at first sight like I am taking the same stance as UKIP. Where I differ, however, is that the people I would let into the country are probably precisely the types of people Nigel Farage would seek to exclude. Given that Jeremy Hunt is making a complete Horlicks of the NHS, we can’t afford to be picky about not letting in doctors for instance, just because they happen to have brown faces. The same applies to any other skill that is in short supply in the UK.  And, indeed, we should stand up for the beliefs that made this country great, and let in more refugees.

This very day, as Gabriela Andreevska writes:

the Greek-Macedonian border will be closed for Afghani people as of today. ONLY Syrians and Iraqis with valid passports/IDs will be allowed to seek asylum. For the hundredth time, this constitutes a BLATANT VIOLATION of the Geneva convention and many other international laws and agreements. It is a state of lawlessness where Fortress EU dictates atrocities and Macedonia and the other Balkan states readily execute its orders. In doing so, the Balkan states are just as blameworthy, becoming accomplices in this mass suffering of thousands of people stranded at the borders and obligated to have recourse to smugglers or walk on foot across countries to seek refuge.

Somehow, we have managed to lose three weeks of February already, and it is the Second Sunday in Lent.  I omitted to mention Ash Wednesday, a week ago last Wednesday, though I did read the Eliot poem on the day, as I always do, and in the same way as I try to always read Donne’s Good Friday 1613, Riding Westward on Good Friday.  To be honest, I never find Lent very inspiring. I am fond of quoting the Gawain-poet’s lines about “After the Christmasse, comes the crabbed Lentoun…”  It’s not the act of giving things up, God alone knows I have given up so many things in the last six years that a few more either way won’t make a lot of difference. It’s more that I find Lent boring. Not even Lent, really, more this time of year. When will it ever get warm? When will it ever stop raining? So much of what needs doing on the house relies on it being warm and sunny enough outside to get it done.  At the moment, I feel I am marking time.

I’m not short of tasks, of course. If I can’t get on with one thing, I just go down to the next one on a (very long) list. But it’s not necessarily the important stuff that gets done. The readings for today, particularly the one from Genesis and the one from Philippians, are all about being patient and waiting for God’s purpose to work itself out. So there is no help or consolation there, particularly, and as for today’s saints, well, apologies to anyone who feels a special affinity with any of them, but they are a motley bunch.

Sometimes, all you can do is close ranks and carry on. The petition is up to 747 signatures, anyway, so at least that is plodding along. What it needs is a re-tweet from someone with hundreds of thousands of followers, but I am not living in hopes. The other main problem with me, spiritually speaking, at the moment, is I am so tired. Physically and mentally tired.  And there is so much bad news in the world, even on the home front, my cousin’s little dog is very ill as I am writing this, and his little life is in the balance, so any prayers to St Roche for the well being and recovery of Jazz the Border Terrier will be gratefully received.

I suppose for me if there is a lesson in Lent it’s not so much to do with self-discipline and denial and abstinence and giving things up, its value lies in reminding me that not all days can be filled with fun, excitement, and achievement. As the song says, some days are diamonds, and some days are stone, and if it were not for days and weeks like these, then the good times would seem dull themselves, by comparison.

I think, also, it’s a time for planning and re-focusing, and remembering that time is probably shorter than you think. Certainly shorter than I think. Lancelot Andrewes, the 17^th century bishop who was one of the prime movers behind the King James version of the Bible, wrote this specific Lenten prayer.

O remember what my substance is; that I am:
dust and ashes, grass and a flower,
flesh and a wind that passeth away,
corruption and a worm,
like a stranger and a sojourner,
dwelling in a house of clay,
days few and evil, today and not tomorrow,
in the morning and not so long as till evening,
now and not presently,
in a body of death,
in a world of corruption,
lying in wickedness.
Remember this.

While that’s a bit sturm and drang, especially on a day like this, it does behove us (well, it behoves me, at any rate) to get on with the things that need doing. So, next week, I will be doing just that. Donne preached a Lenten sermon which seemed to be saying the same sort of things about the fleetingly short time we have to accomplish anything:

BUT WE ARE NOW in the work of an houre, and no more. If there be a minute of sand left, (There is not) If there be a minute of patience left, heare me say, This minute that is left, is that eternitie which we speake of; upon this minute dependeth that eternity: And this minute, God is in this Congregation, and puts his eare to every one of your hearts, and hearkens what you will bid him say to yourselves: whether he shall blesse you for your acceptation, or curse you for your refusall of him this minute: for this minute makes up your Century, your hundred yearess your eternity, because it may be your last minute.

Andrewes preached a sermon on Ash Wednesday, 1619, which is generally acknowledged to have been a major source for Eliot’s poem of the same name.  His use of a circular structure for the sermon, and his language, such as the instruction to turn to God, was picked up by Eliot who began his poem, “Because I do not hope to turn again”.  Here is Andrewes:

And reason; for, once a year, all things turn. And, that once is now at this time; for, now at this time, is the turning of the year. In Heaven, the sun in his equinoctial line, the zodiac, and all the constellations in it, do now turn about to the first point. The earth and all her plants, after a dead winter, return to the first and best season of the year. The creatures, the fowls of the air, the swallow and the turtle, and the crane, and the stork, “know their seasons,” and make their just return at this time, every year. Every thing now turning, that we also would make it our time to turn to God in.

So, there you go. Big G is telling me it’s time to be a little patient. Everything in its turn. To every time, there is a season, and all that.  The trouble is, I never was a little patient, not even when I was in hospital and had to have the bed extended.  Whether or not it is clear to me, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should. I just wish it would get a move on.

Epiblog for St Valentine's Day

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. The weather has turned a bit brighter, but also a bit colder. Better than all those grey dreary drippy days of rain, but a bit of a shock to the system when it’s bright sunshine one minute and hailstoning like buggery the next. Maisie’s indestructible daffodils are continuing to flourish in both their locations, although neither clump has yet “begun to peer, with hey the Doxy o’er the dale”. The snowdrops in the front garden are just starting to show white flowers, and the whole feeling is of having reached a tipping point, that from now on it’s only a matter of time. But there’s still plenty of opportunity for winter to have one last snarl – it was snowing up at Diggle when Deb was up there with Misty, yesterday.

Not that Misty minds, it’s all the same to Misty. I wish I could somehow tap into her Border Collie resilience and energy; I could certainly use it right now. I’ve developed a niggling little pain in my ankle which has been preventing me from sleeping even more than usual. Or even less than usual, if you see what I mean, so I have not been at my best this week, not that my best is that good to start with, these days.

For me, it’s been yet another week of battles. The sort of week when you end up with lots of things half done and nothing actually completed. I can truly say “I haven’t half got a lot done this week!” It’s also been yet another of those weeks when things have blown up, stopped working and generally slid  to the floor and died. One of the things that rather crucially stopped working (or at least working properly) was the stove. We were sitting there with it roaring away and suddenly there was the sound of a soft “flump” which could only have been a major fall of soot. It didn’t all come straight out into the room because the Morso stove has a “baffle plate”, sometimes known as a “throat plate” which covers almost the whole of the inside of the firebox, at the top.

The idea of this is to channel the smoke and fumes into a narrow gap and promote the stove drawing up the chimney. However, with what as clearly a large bucketful of soot now sitting on top of it and blocking off any airway to the stove-pipe and thence the chimney, it was clearly a non-starter, and instead, the smoke and its accompanying deadly fumes started to come back into the kitchen. Fortunately, this was one occasion where having a decrepit old house which is full of draughts and holes worked to our advantage, because although things did get fuggy for a while, they never achieved that crucial concentration needed to be lethal.  However, it was a problem, and we had no choice but to let the fire go out overnight.

I had already phoned the chimney sweep, who last came five years ago, and, resisting the temptation to ask him if he was finding it easier to get apprentices now the Tories are back in office, fixed up for him to come and sweep the flue on 15^th February, the earliest available appointment. Meanwhile, he advised, I should “let down the baffle plate” and try and clear the obstruction behind it, as it could be dangerous. I don’t like letting anybody down, and I certainly wasn’t looking forward to letting down the baffle plate. A fitful night’s sleep ensued, where I dreamed that I had promised to take the baffle plate to the zoo, and then not turned up. Eventually, the cold dawn came, Debbie accelerated away to college, leaving me listening to the whine of the turbo fading under Lockwood Viaduct, and I was forced to confront the now-cold grate.

As it happened, as so often happens, in fact, I discovered the solution by accident. I had already cleared all of the ashes and cinders out of the grate and put them in a zinc bucket. I found that, by leaning forward in my wheelchair as far as I could and reaching up inside the firebox, I could just about grasp the front edge of the plate. I waggled it, tentatively, and was rewarded with a small, trickling avalanche of soot and what looked like loose mortar falling into the grate. Because the plate is curved, and rests on top of the firebricks, when I pulled it down at the front, it raised up at the back, opening a small gap through which the blockage was able to pass. True, it was at about the rate of sand passing through an hourglass, but it was infinitely preferable to taking out the plate, finding myself ankle deep in soot, and then not being able to get it back in place again afterwards.

Half an hour of waggling had yielded about half a bucket of what looked like a mixture of loose mortar, soot, ash and maybe crumbled brick. It didn’t bode well for the health of the chimney generally, but that’s a question for the sweep. In the meantime, I was tempted to give it a go and re-light the fire, because I was as bored doing the waggling as you are reading about it, and I was also getting tired.  However, I felt as if there was still more soot up there, so I decided to carry on. It was then that I had my second brainwave. Instead of leaning forward and waggling the plate by hand, I stuck the little hearth shovel up inside the firebox. It has a notch in it caused by some nameless mishap in the past, and by engaging the notch with the edge of the plate, I was able to waggle it quite comfortably from a normal seated position.

Another twenty minutes of waggling, and I was done in. The bucket was full, as well, so it would have to do. Tentatively, I screwed up a bit of paper, put it in the empty grate, and lit it. Eureka! The smoke went up the chimney. It was then the work of about twenty minutes to re-lay and re-light a fire, and a further half an hour to bag up the grunge and trundle out to the dustbin with it.  I looked at my watch once I had cleaned up. Ten past ten. Time to start work for the day!

Matilda was as pleased as I was to see the fire back on again. She’s been feeling the cold, I think.  I’m starting to come to the conclusion that maybe the vets were wrong and she was actually older than nine when we rescued her, because she’s certainly slowed down a lot, of late.  It could be that she’s just got used to having a succession of warm chairs and beds covered with purpose-made crocheted cat blankets of course. That might have something to do with it.   In any event, most days the squirrels and the pigeons come and go unmolested. Actually, a couple of nights last week the dish that had the bird food in it had been completely cleaned out and moved a considerable distance on the decking overnight, so I am wondering if the badger has been coming back.

One cat which has been in the news this week is Huddersfield’s own railway cat, Felix, who has been given her own hi-vis jacket and a badge to confirm her official status as head of rodent control at Huddersfield station. It made great copy for The Huddersfield Examiner, of course, and even went briefly viral on social media, but I just hope it doesn’t make her a target for the sort of mindless violence that Missy the bus-stop cat may have met with. A station is a dangerous enough place for a cat, as it is.

My official government petition to try and beef up the UK law against cat (and dog) cruelty, by introducing a five year sentence as a deterrent for a new offence of “animal murder” is currently languishing in the doldrums with 412 signatures out of a possible 100,000. Still, you could look at it another way. It’s had almost 500 signatures in just over a week, and it runs until August 11^th.  So if it keeps up that rate… well, who knows.  I had hoped for some re-tweets from animal-loving celebrities on Twitter, but so far my hopes are in vain. Someone who has 800,000 followers on Twitter could make such a difference just by clicking a couple of buttons on their phone, but obviously that’s too taxing for them. I understand. It must be very tiring counting all that money. I’m surprised they don’t have someone to do it for them.

One petition that I noted did actually do rather well (in that it went from zero to 100,000 in about four days!) was the one demanding Jeremy Hunt resumes negotiations with the BMA about the strikes by junior doctors over their new contract. I will forebear from making the obvious joke about Mr Hunt out of respect for the Sabbath, but he really does seem to be going out of his way to be an unpleasant, hubristic, well, what can I say? Blockage? Especially when it emerged that apparently a deal had been close, and he then vetoed it, thus virtually guaranteeing the strike went ahead on Tuesday.  Clearly he is either very stupid, or he has an agenda – actually, belay that comment, because the two aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive.  I have to declare an interest here. My sister works in the NHS; the NHS saved my life in 2010; I have also had occasion to thank them since then.  True, the NHS isn’t perfect, and people have ridiculous expectations of it sometimes, fuelled by a media which prints whatever the Tories tell it to print, setting up the NHS to fail.  I can see, also, a background shift in the NHS – what used to be “wheelchair services” is now “Opcare”. What used to be the Community Rehab Team is now “Locala”, and I can’t believe either of those two organisations are charities.

I repeat. The NHS is being set up to fail, in order for it to be dismantled in direct contradiction not only of the will of the people but also of the Tory manifesto in 2010, not that that particular document was worth the effort of flushing down the bog.  Crises are being engineered deliberately in the NHS by the government, in order for the public to be “softened up” to things such as the closure of A & E departments on the spurious grounds of cost. How much extra is it costing to use external companies instead of the internal resources that were already there. How much did the “tendering” exercise cost? How much was spent on TUPE payments?

Mr Hunt, meanwhile, has mad staring eyes and is seemingly untroubled by self-doubt.  At the end of the week it is difficult to know what he could have done to make himself more unpopular – gassing kittens perhaps, or wringing the necks of cute budgerigars. But you can see, he obviously doesn’t give a stuff. Like the Rum Tum Tugger, “he will do what he will do, and there isn’t any doubt about it”.  As Mark Steel said this week, writing in the Independent, if Jeremy Hunt was the Minister for Circuses, within a fortnight, the clowns would be on strike.

Personally, I am hoping that Mr Hunt has made a major tactical blunder with his tactic of riding roughshod over reason and common-sense. The fact that there are now two separate government petitions, one calling for Hunt to resume negotiations and another calling for a vote of no confidence in him, and that both these petitions have well over 100,000 signatories as I write, cannot have escaped David Cameron.  Cameron has his hands full at the moment thinking of new lies to tell to the media about refugee camps on the Sussex Coast if we leave the EU, in order to quieten down the Euro-skeptics and the UKIPpers and stop them baying at the moon. The last thing he wants right now is a rumpus in his own back yard about the NHS. I hope that he’s thinking about an early re-shuffle, which he could use to shunt several critics of the EU back to the back benches, and also, as an added bonus, shunt Mr Hunt into a post more commensurate with his talents. I would suggest O/C Latrines, The Falkland Islands. A new health secretary would then be a perfect pretext for the government to resume negotiations without seeming to lose face or back down.

Whether Cameron actually has the foresight to see this, however, is a moot point, as he is currently obsessed with trying to woo white van man bigot Britain with dog-whistle pronouncements about migrants being denied benefits and dire warnings about  migrants setting up camps on the bowling greens of Hove.  The people he is aiming at are incapable of differentiating between “migrant” and “Muslim” and don’t realise that he is talking about EU migrants. They are also incapable of differentiating between “migrant” and “asylum seeker” – with the sort of logic that would make an amoeba look like a towering intellectual giant, these are the people, let us not forget, who blamed Muslims for the unexploded bomb at Victoria Station, as chronicled last week.  Cameron knows that to stop them putting their cross in the “no” box, he has to say anything, do anything, to make it look as if he is being tough on migrants, however preposterous or untrue. If you don’t believe me, just start listening to some of the stuff he will come out with between now and the referendum, whenever it is.

It’s been a bad week to be a refugee. France, one of the richest countries in Europe and one that has done very little, compared with Germany, say, to shoulder the burden of the refugees from the Syrian war, is now contemplating bulldozing about half of the “Jungle”, the massive sprawling refugee camp outside Calais, and forcing the inhabitants to go and live in government hostels… made from old shipping containers! You’d think the country which gave the world so much civilization in the form of literature, art, and fine cuisine, could at least run to some prefabricated huts, but hey, that might be too much like establishing an example of the kind of permanent refugee resettlement/screening/integration camps which I have been asking for ever since this torrent of humanity started its desperate attempts to escape.  Greece, meanwhile, has been told by the EU to shut its borders, and a NATO fleet, no less, has been despatched to the Eastern Mediterranean. Its mission is somehow to target the people traffickers who are responsible for getting the refugees over the sea to Greece – although how they will do this without destroying the boats, which are full of people, see above, remains to be seen.  If they were truly serious about decreasing the flow of refugees, they could be enforcing a no-fly zone over Syria, and stopping any more bombing. It is the bombing (specifically the Russians bombing moderate anti-Assad groups which in turn strengthens Assad’s position so he can do more indiscriminate barrel-bombing in turn) which is prolonging the war and making the Syrian refugee crisis worse.

When you look at all the lunacy and idiocy in the world which is masquerading as politics, and I haven’t even mentioned Donald Trump yet, it seems by comparison an act of pure logic, reason and sanity that apparently somebody is working on a full size floating replica of the Titanic, and that they hope to launch it in 2018.  Haven’t they seen the film? I don’t know if they are also working on a full-scale replica of the iceberg, or indeed a full scale replica of Kate Winslet, but one of the classic definitions of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result this time.  Maybe they should offer it to the French, to have it moored off Calais as a floating hostel for migrants.

As you have probably gathered, I am out of sorts this week and I don’t have a good word for anybody, as least not one that I can use on a Sunday. Apart from the fact that my ankle feels like I am wearing a leg iron, my petition is languishing in the doldrums, I have a mountain of things to do (or more accurately half-do) most of which are to placate people who frankly don’t care if I live or die, and this is punctuated by the occasional crisis which requires me to be wheelchair Superman and solve it by doing something boring tiring and dirty (see under baffle plate). And I am cold, I am fed up of being cold, and I want it to be spring.

Actually, we have reached a small landmark along the road to spring today, in that it is St Valentine’s Day, traditionally the day when the birds meet to choose their mates for the coming year, as in The Parliament of Foulys, although nobody seemed to have told the wood pigeon, that seemed more interested in the bird food than any avian hanky-panky.

‘Twas on the morn of Valentine

When birds begin to prate

Dame Durden and her maids and men

Were all together met…

as the old Sussex folk song has it.  So yes, it is a day of love, romance and harmony, allegedly.  In actual fact, there is very little hard evidence for a St Valentine, or at least one who is fitting to be the patron saint of lovers.  It isn’t even certain whether to commonly-accepted story of Valentine’s life refers to just one person, or is in fact a concatenation of two (or more) separate legends about different people.

The generally accepted version is that Valentine was the former bishop of Termi, a town in the Italian region of Umbria.  Valentine was placed under house arrest by a judge, for being Christian, and, in an early case of what has later to become known as Stockholm syndrome, fell to discussing his faith with his captors. The judge decided to test out the claims of this so-called “Christianity” and commanded that his adopted daughter, who was blind, should be brought before Valentine.  Valentine immediately laid his hands on the girl and restored her sight, and rather shaken by this, the Judge asked Valentine what he should do now.  Valentine told him to throw away all his idols and fast for three days, following which he would be baptised.

The Judge, in somewhat of an excess of zeal, not only did what Valentine asked, but freed all the other people who were being kept prisoner under his authority because they were Christians.  This sort of thing could not be allowed to continue and Valentine was arrested again and this time sent to Rome.  The emperor at the time was Claudius II, who initially got on well with Valentine.  You have to give Valentine points for trying, although clearly he did not know when to stop, because his next wheeze was to try and convert the emperor himself to Christianity.  Claudius II failed to see the humour in the situation, and made a fairly compelling counter-proposal, straight out of the Jeremy Hunt manual of negotiating tactics – either Valentine would renounce his faith, or he would be beaten to death with clubs, then beheaded. Valentine in turn took a huff and refused, which led to the sentence being carried out, outside Rome’s Flaminian Gate, on 14^th February 269AD.

In the same way as there may have been more than one Valentine in real life, a similar situation has arisen with his relics: his skull, crowned with flowers, is exhibited in the basilica of Santa Maria, in Rome. Some bits of him which were found when the catacombs of St Hippolytus were excavated in 1836 are also currently in Rome, and in that same year, a reliquary said to contain St Valentine’s blood was taken to Dublin by an Irish priest, Fr John Spratt, where it remains in Whitefriar Street Church in that city.  There are also relics of St Valentine in St Anton’s Church, Madrid, which have been on display since 1984, and a further relic of St Valentine was found in 2003 in Prague. There’s more – a silver reliquary said to contain a fragment of St Valentine’s skull is in a Catholic church in Chelno, Poland, and other bits or alleged bits of the deceased saint can be found in Roquemaure, in France; in Vienna; in Malta, and, perhaps most improbably, in a church in the Gorbals district of Glasgow.  Putting them all back together would probably be like assembling flat-pack furniture: at  the end, you would have a couple of fingers, a metatarsul and a vertebra or two left over that you didn’t know what to do with.

Even though there was no real cult which associated the concept with him, over the years, the idea has battened on to St Valentine that he was the patron saint of lover and lovers.  The modern-day commercial, schmaltzy St Valentines day goes back to the fanciful suggestions of 18^th and 19^th century antiquaries, who picked up on alternative strands of the legend which see Valentine marrying Christian couples in secret, and marrying couples so that the husband would not have to go to war, both of which would have been frowned upon in times of the persecution of the Christians.  However, there is a folk-belief, which goes back to the middle ages, of Valentine being associated with the birds choosing their mates on this particular day, and ipso facto, because in medieval literature birds are often used as metaphors for other, human activities, Valentine became associated with humans choosing their mates as well. (See The Owl and The Nightingale, which is in fact an extended debate about the relative virtues of art and philosophy, despite the fact that the nightingale spends a large part of the poem telling the owl off for “shitting down behind the settle”) It hasn’t escaped the notice of scholars, either, that St Valentine’s Day falls smack in the middle of the Roman festival of Lupercalia, and it may be yet another instance of Christianity having taken over a much more ancient ritual and appropriated it for its own ends. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss, as The Who might say, if they were here right now and not 50% deceased.

So, where does that leave me, I hear you cry, and what has all this stuff to do with the price of bread. Well, as I wrote last week, I suppose, without love we are as a sounding brass or tinkling cymbals, and love is certainly fairly critical to the New Testament, at least.  All you need is love, said the Beatles, and all you need to do is to love your neighbour as yourself, said Jesus, who was (according to John Lennon) almost as popular.  We could certainly do with a bit more love in the world – well, a lot more, if it comes to that – and Valentine’s Day could certainly do with a re-balancing away from the pink cards and the roses and the chocolates and the sexy underwear and back maybe towards the idea that there is actually more than one type of love. 

I was looking for a suitable piece of music to append to this Epiblog and I originally considered Springseason by Amazing Blondel, but in view of the theme of Love, I actually settled on Everything Possible by Fred Small, which has a lot to say about love, especially in the chorus where a parent addresses their child:

You can be anybody you want to be,
You can love whomever you will
You can travel any country where your heart leads
And know I will love you still
You can live by yourself, you can gather friends around,
You can choose one special one
And the only measure of your words and your deeds

Will be the love you leave behind when you’re gone

This sums it up, more or less, for me.  I’m an unlikely apologist for this weird Middle Eastern cult that is based on creating more love than you started with, but that seems to be the corner I have painted myself into, this week.  And yes, I know that the same obscure Middle Eastern cult has also, in the dim and distant past, been responsible for people being strung up, then cut down while still alive, then cut into chunks and boiled in barrels of tar, simply for believing that the bread and wine either does/does not actually turn into the body and blood of Jesus, delete as appropriate depending who is on the throne at the time, but I would contend that the people who did that had probably rather lost the plot, and substituted fanaticism for love.

Which, of course, inevitably leads me to loving thine enemy, and forgiveness and all that, which is usually the point where I admit defeat. To be honest, I don’t think that this week is going to be any different, either, so maybe this is the point where I get down out of my pulpit and start to prepare for next week’s farrago of nonsense. Well, maybe not tonight, not yet. It feels like a sort of low-key, muted sort of an evening is coming on, and maybe I’ll do some painting later on.  I might spend some time trying to get my head around the fact that they have apparently discovered waves in gravity this week, something I still don’t fully understand. Tomorrow the phone will be ringing and the emails will be pinging and the chimney-sweep will be banging on the door, and already half of February is gone.

Epiblog for the Feast of St Richard The Pilgrim

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. New week, new storm, seems to be the rule these days, and this week it was Storm Henry’s turn.  With predictable results. The rain it raineth every day, as Feste was always fond of pointing out at the drop of a lute.  I seem to remember, though, that a few weeks ago we had Storm Jason, so either we’re now naming storms without reference to alphabetical order, completely at random, or I imagined it. It’s quite likely that I imagined it.

Matilda treats every storm the same way, these days, she suspends operations, comes indoors, and curls up on one of her many Maisie-blankets in one of her many favourite sleeping places. She’s doing it now, in fact, although it hasn’t been that bad a day, so far. In fact, whisper it not in Gath, publish it not in the streets of Ashkelon, but there was almost a spring-y feel to things when I went out earlier to put the rubbish in the bin. Maisie’s indestructible daffodils are coming up again near Russell and Nigel’s mosaic, in the garden, and in the front garden there are several burgeoning clumps of snowdrops – Fair Maids of February. I’ve a feeling that we haven’t seen the back of winter yet, but I am starting vaguely to think about putting in an order for this year’s herbs.

The birds and squirrels are busy as usual, another sign that spring may be just around the corner. In a week’s time, traditionally, they pick their mates for this year, at least according to Chaucer.  As I type this there is a big fat wood pigeon eating out of one side of the dish of bird food and a squirrel eating out of the other. They are even taking it in turns – first the squirrel has a go, then it backs off and the pigeon gets some – I suspect, though, this is more to do with mutual fear and mistrust than good table manners.

Misty has had some longer than usual walks this week as it’s what the College refer to as “review week” so some of Deb's classes have been cancelled in favour of meetings instead, for which, of course, she gets paid less! Fewer classes means less prep, which means more time for doggy walkies, so at least someone benefited.

Mention of Nigel, above, also reminds me that this week has seen some significant events and anniversaries.  On 2^nd February, it was eight years since Nigel died. He chose a significant day for his transit to cat heaven, because of course that date also marked the festival of Candlemas, the feast of St Brigid, and Imbolc, the pagan festival that marks the mid-way point between the winter solstice and the equinox. So it was all go, except that we didn’t particularly celebrate any of them! It was also Groundhog Day, where Puxatawney Pete, the groundhog, who has been busy carving out a second career as Donald Trump’s hair, emerges from his hole in Pennsylvania, and either forages around, or gets surprised by his own shadow and scuttles back into his lair, presaging another six weeks of winter.

It was also Groundhog Day, where Puxatawney Pete, the groundhog, who has been busy carving out a second career as Donald Trump’s hair, emerges from his hole in Pennsylvania, and either forages around, or gets surprised by his own shadow and scuttles back into his lair, presaging another six weeks of winter. And yes I think I did that joke at this time last year as well, which is sort of ironic in a groundhoggy sort of a way.  The British version of the legend is the old weather-saying of “If Candlemas Day dawns bright and clear, there’ll be two winters in the one year!” I must admit I missed dawn on Candlemas Day itself, so I have no idea what is going to happen (no change there, then). 

Actually, that’s not true. I do know one thing that’s going to happen, which is that the government, or more specifically the Prime Minister, will carry on coming out with ever-increasing torrents of bovine excrement as he tried to bluff his way through the forthcoming EU referendum. It’s all about looking tough, you see, which means, given the corner he’s painted himself into, coming out with the sort of xenophobic claptrap and hate-speech that most appeals to the white van men of bigot Britain.  So it’s open season on any soft target that can’t hit back.  This week, it was disability, which is apparently a lifestyle choice.

Yes, David Cameron, you have seen through my cunning plan to choose two parents who possessed dodgy genes, which led to me choosing this nice comfy wheelchair to bool around in, and led to me choosing not to sleep for longer than an hour at a time before the pain and cramp in my legs wakes me up again. And I would have gotten away with it, but for you pesky Tories.  If you ask me, David Cameron has made a lifestyle choice to be an irritating, pink-faced, millionaire who makes a habit of telling lies every time he opens his mouth, and he needs to be weaned off it.

In the week when we were being told we were scroungers in order to keep the knuckledraggers of the right feel secure in the misapprehensions to which they have become accustomed, news emerged of an MP who had remembered to claim 49p for a carton of milk on expenses, but omitted to mention the additional £400,000 in income he’d received that year. Somehow, it slipped his mind, what with having to remember about the 49p and everything. Or perhaps the money was just resting in his bank account, who knows. 

If anyone was in any doubt at all about the depth and scale of the stupidity of the people who think all Muslims are terrorists and everyone on benefits is a scrounger, one only had to take a look at the Facebook Page of the British National Party on the day an old unexploded world war two bomb was found at Victoria Station in London and brought proceedings to a halt until it could be defused.  Given that the BNP is, in any case, so far to the right that it’s four stops past Barking and well off the bus route, its utterances usually come with a pinch of froth and spittle anyway, but they excelled themselves this time, with post after post blaming the UXB on “Muslims”.

Yes, those fiendishly cunning Muslims. First they learn German and manage to knock up some Luftwaffe uniforms, then they find out how to build a replica of a Heinkel III and somehow fly it backwards in time 76 years to bomb London from the air. Gor’ blimey, guv’nor, we’ve got our work cut out with this lot.  And while all this was going on, as if the Lords of Misrule were somehow abroad and having a field day, a high court judge declared Lord Lucan officially dead.  I don’t know if anyone took the opportunity of checking the judge’s pulse, while they were at it.

I only ask because I seem to have been taken to task for being critical of the judiciary, specifically, being critical of their habit of handing down lenient sentences to people who deliberately kill and injure animals for “fun”.  It arose out of the incident of Missy the Bus-Stop cat, which was a cat that used to make a habit on sleeping at a specific bus-shelter in Leigh Park near Havant, where it had become a regular fixture and was greeted, and petted by many travellers and commuters. Sadly, this weekend, it was discovered in a badly-injured state and had to be put to sleep. The presumption was, at the time, that yobboes were responsible, although there is now also a theory that she may have been struck by a passing car.

I was angry when I read about it. Especially if it was the yobboes who did it. I make no apologies for calling them yobboes, in fact, I have called them much worse, but out of respect for the Sabbath, we’ll stick at yobboes.  I’m talking about the sort of people that – a while ago now – burned down the stables of Barnsley Riding for the Disabled; the people who set fire to Manchester Dogs’ Home; the dog-fighting rings; the people who think it’s funny to chuck hedgehogs out of tower block windows.

At the moment, under the Animal Welfare Act, the maximum sentence that can be handed down in cases of extreme cruelty and causing the death of an animal deliberately is a 26 week custodial sentence.  All too often, however, this is lessened to community service and/or a fine.  This is no deterrent.  Part of the problem is that the existing laws are rooted in outdated 19^th century attitudes to animal welfare, in an era when life generally was brutish and nasty and animal life didn’t really matter except insofar as it affected economic factors – the loss of a working dog or a horse, for instance.  In the last 150 years, notwithstanding that the Tories want to scrap the welfare state and the NHS, get people begging in the streets again and stuff children back up chimneys, we have made great strides in legislature concerning human welfare, but animal welfare is still stuck in the era of the steam train and the public hanging.

A cat, for instance, is regarded as merely a chattel, from the point of view of its ownership in law, and a dog is not much better. The only reason that you have to stop and find out who the owner is, if you run over a dog, is that you have potentially done them some economic harm, if it was a working animal.  This sort of outmoded approach to framing the law needs to be fast-forwarded.  So I have started an official government petition (link here) to put a new offence on the statute book, of animal murder, which brings with it, on conviction, a minimum jail term of five years with no remission or parole, automatic entry on a new “animal offenders’ register” along the same lines as the existing sex offenders’ register, and a lifetime ban on keeping animals or partaking in any employment connected with animals.

To date, it has garnered 198 signatures – for a government response (which will inevitably take the form of ‘the existing legislation is sufficient’) it needs 10,000, and for a full debate in parliament, 100,000. So there is a way to go yet. But the journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step.  A magistrate pointed out to me that the reason they don’t hand down tougher sentences is that “they just get overturned on appeal” which leads me to question “why is the original tough sentence seen as unjust?” and the only answer I can come up with is that our existing laws have led us to accept the insidious assumption that animal life is somehow not worthy of protection. Ultimately, that is what has to change, but at least if the CPS have a tough new deterrent to use in the very worst cases of premeditated cruelty, leading to the death of an animal with malice aforethought, then this is a step down that road.

So, that is what I have been doing this week, in what is laughingly called my “spare time”.  And somehow, another week has whizzed by, and it’s Sunday again.  Sadly, in the time I have been typing this, the day which started out so promising, weather-wise, has deteriorated to such an extent that I expect shortly there will be drowned-rat Debbie and two soggy doggies barrelling through the door and competing to get next to the stove and steam themselves dry.  So I had better get a move on and deal with the main event of the evening, as Kent Walton used to say in his intros – the fact that this day is the feast of St Richard of Wessex.

I got quite excited when I saw it was St Richard because initially I was confusing him with Richard of Chichester, who is a different St Richard, and whose feast is celebrated on June 16^th as “Sussex Day”. Oh well. An easy mistake to make, what with them both being saints, and both being called Richard, and all.

Today’s St Richard is also known as St Richard The Pilgrim, and he was supposedly born in Wessex, and thought to have been both the brother in law of St Boniface and the father of St Willibald, St Winnibald, and St Walburga. So it was definitely a family business, especially so in that one of Richard’s early miracles was the cure, through prayer, of his son Willibald, at the age of three, when the child fell seriously ill. 

Although of noble blood, Richard renounced all his titles and set sail with two of his sons from Hamble, near Southampton on the Solent estuary, on a pilgrimage. This was in about the year 721AD.  Landing in France, they made their way to Rouen, where, after a brief stay to regroup, they started out along the pilgrim route to Rome, and thence to the Holy Land, their ultimate destination, stopping to pray at shrines and holy sites en route. Unfortunately, Richard never reached his destination. He fell ill in the town of Lucca, in Tuscany, and died there. He was buried in the Church of San Frediano in that town, and almost immediately, miracles began to be reported at the site of his tomb.

The main source for this information is a single volume, written some time between AD 761 and AD 786, a chronicle of the expedition written by Richard’s niece, Huneburc of Heidenheim, and continued by Willibald, Richard’s son.  Willibald eventually became bishop of Eichstatt and took some of Richard’s relics back there with him on his return journey. His cult is still particularly strong in the area of Heidenheim and at Lucca, his original burial place.

Normally, I struggle to find a particular lesson appropriate to my situation in these tales of the old saints, most of which seem to follow a somewhat formulaic pattern.  But there are two aspects of this story that, this week in particular, struck home. The idea that life is a pilgrimage, and the concept of having the faith to set out on a journey that you know you might not finish.  Given that a step is roughly a yard (or it was, when I could still walk) and a thousand yards is a mile, more or less, then 100,000 steps is 100 miles, or roughly the distance from here to Walsingham! In terms of my animal petition as a pilgrimage that may fail before it reaches its destination, I have done 198 yards! 

I do often think of life in terms of a pilgrimage, whereby we undergo the privations of journeying and put ourselves out, and force ourselves to forsake the familiar hearth in order to learn new things about ourselves and about others, and develop.  I had in mind, before I was ill, to do one or two real pilgrimages, and one of my favourite books, to the extent that I am now on my second copy of it, is Cees Van Nooteboom’s Roads To Santiago.  Although ostensibly about Spain, like all good travel books it’s as much a tour through the internal landscapes of the author’s mind as it is a guide to all the cathedrals, monasteries and Black Madonnas.

And, in the same way as Nooteboom can chronicle an internal pilgrimage while actually being on a real one, I’ve come to understand, these last five years, that I can chronicle and create an external pilgrimage simply by going on an internal one. In a sense, the actual pilgrimage “experience” becomes superfluous. I could do with some sun, obviously, but as far as privations go, I carry my own with me these days (it’s a lifestyle choice, don’t you know?) and I am constantly breaking into new, and potentially scary territory.  Plain food? Lack of sleep? Been there, done that. Every winter is a pilgrimage, into which I set off with just the faith that I am going somehow to make it through the darkness and emerge, blinking, like Puxatawney Pete, into the pale February sunshine.  Give me my scallop shell of quiet, as Sir Walter Raleigh, cloak dangler and inventor of the smoking potato, once wrote:

Give me my scallop-shell of quiet,

My staff of faith to walk upon,

My scrip of joy, immortal diet,

My bottle of salvation,

My gown of glory, hope's true gage;

And thus I'll take my pilgrimage.

The only thing that’s been a bit lacking on my pilgrimages has been the spiritual enlightenment at the end of it, but perhaps I’m not there yet.  So, fare forward, pilgrims, and keep right on to the end of the road, even if your destination is literally and metaphorically “round the bend.”