Dispensing Witan Wisdom Since The Days of King Eggbound The Unready...

Not to mention "Left-Wing Pish"

Sunday 30 October 2016

Epiblog for the Feast of St Herbert

It has been a busy fortnight in the Holme Valley. The weather has been getting worse, by which I mean, generally, colder.  There’s still quite a lot of light about, though it goes suddenly these past few days, decaying at about half past four.  From today, it will be dark at that time.  I should have been writing this epiblog last Sunday, as per usual, but of course, and also as per usual, real life had other ideas.

On Friday night, a week ago, Debbie’s laptop computer exhibited (briefly) the blue screen of death, then fulfilled that prophecy by dying on its arse. I tried what I could, by way of computer CPR, on Friday night, but I had to give it up, and call it.  I went to bed. No problem, I thought – I’ll get a windows 64 bit recovery disk sorted, and fix it in the morning.  I started trying to fix it at 9.45AM on Saturday and finally gave up at 9.45PM. Realising that this was something that wasn’t just going to magically come right by waggling the leads or turning it off and then turning it on again, I phoned Colin, our computer guru, and he agreed to come round on the Monday and have a proper look.

Throughout Sunday (because I am a stubborn old git, who doesn’t like to be beaten) I carried on trying to fix it. And carried on failing to fix it. Basically, had I known it at the time, I was (in the words of the old Norfolk saying) farting against thunder.  So that was why there was no Sunday blog last week.  Fortunately, on Monday, Colin came around, took it away into computer intensive care, and, miraculously, fixed it. So no real harm done, apart from to my work schedule.

Matilda has been busy sleeping, eating, and occasionally, when nobody was looking, fighting, judging from the scar on her head.  Last week I was complaining that she didn’t go outside enough, this week I’m complaining that she goes outside and gets into fights.  She also had a fairly unpleasant experience this week on Friday, when I let her out and then about half an hour later some donkey started letting off fireworks in the neighbourhood. She did come in, eventually, scuttling through the cat flap, ears flat to her head and tail down, and obviously unhappy.

Misty, however, has not been getting into fights, but she has been getting into scrapes. On that vile day that was last Saturday, while I was struggling with the computer, Debbie took Misty off for a walk in the woods up beyond Beaumont Park, on the way towards Blackmoorfoot Reservoir. They’d reached the apex of their walk and had turned to come back, when a massive salvo of fireworks split the sky, in true First World War barrage fashion. Misty immediately took flight, unsurprisingly, and Debbie grabbed for her collar, and missed. Because the ground was treacherous underfoot, Debbie compounded it by slipping and falling on her arse in the mud. The doggone dog was gone.

I didn’t know any of this at the time.  I was sitting here at home, struggling to fix Deb’s laptop, when she came trudging in, covered in mud. “I assume the dog’s not here, then?” she said. No, I replied… well, she’s not with me either, she replied. She proceeded to relate the saga.  The only thing to do was for her to get warmer and get dry, and then go out again looking. Having done so, and arming herself with two more powerful torches, Debbie once more set off into the dark.  Half an hour passed. I kept going to the conservatory door, opening it, and shouting, just in case the dog had found her way back.  Nothing – except yet more fireworks going off in the distance.

45 minutes later, Debbie rang on her mobile. “They’ve got her at the Co-Op in Meltham. She went through the automatic doors and she was running up and down the aisles”.  I boggled at this, unable to comprehend how Misty had managed to end up there.  Meanwhile, Deb was jogging back through the woods in the dark, because of course she had gone on foot, and now needed the camper van to drive up to Meltham to get the dog back. I didn’t know what time the shop stayed open until, so I rang them to check – Oh yes, Misty’s fine, she’s in the office with me here, she’s had some water and some dog biscuits… right.  That £6.00 I spent at Collars and Tags on the dog tag with the mobile phone numbers on it was one of the best investments I ever made.  She was very subdued, though, when she got back – probably because we both told her, in no uncertain terms, that one day, her luck is going to run out.  

A bit like UKIP’s. They announced their new leadership candidates this week, Paul Nuttall and Suzanne somebody. I’m not sure, at the time of writing, whether the rules governing the election will be set by the Electoral Commission or the Marquis of Queensbury.  It could turn out to be irrelevant, anyway. UKIP is already moving out of its expensive Westminster offices, and when and if Brexit happens, the £5.4M its MEPs can currently claim in expenses from the EU parliament and the £84,000 salary enjoyed by its 22 MEPs, will be no more.  Winter is coming… Bye-bye, UKIP. I’d like to say it’s been nice knowing you. I’d like to, but…

They were even denied second place in the Witney by-election by the Liberal Democrats, a surprising comeback, obviously owing more to collective public amnesia than any forward-looking policies. People seem to have quickly forgotten that the populace was pimped by the Liberal Democrats for five years from 2010 to 2015, and without their support, the Tories wouldn’t have been allowed to carry out their gross abuses. This week, Iain Duncan Smith, after being held over a slow flame while wearing thumbscrews (I wish) has finally been forced to admit, under a Freedom of Information request, that almost 2,400 people died shortly after being declared fit for work by the DWP. We should never forget that he could not have done this without the “help” of the Liberal Democrats.

The Electoral Commission did manage this week to rise from its torpor and fine the Labour Party £20,000 over irregularities in the electoral expenses in 2015, especially regarding the so-called “Ed Stone”. I see it as an encouraging sign – if the relatively minor misdemeanours engendered by Labour’s administrative clumsiness garnered that size of fine, how much more are the Tories going to get hammered for their illegal spending on the battlebus? I mean, obviously, the blatant Tory election fraud won’t just be ignored, will it? Oh, hang on…

The current Tories (as opposed to the previous Tories) are preoccupied this week yet again with Brexit, anyway. Once more, it’s been a wild and contradictory week on the Brexit front, characterised by confusion and contradiction. Quelle surprise. Apparently, because we don’t have a ready-trained corps of skilled trade negotiators to start work on this huge raft of desperately needed export trade deals with anyone but the Walloons, a new deal with Australia, for instance, we’ve been forced to try and borrow skilled negotiators from other countries. Australia, for instance. So we can look forward to the spectacle of “our” Australian negotiators trying to strike a deal with other Australian negotiators, to save Britain’s bacon over Brexit. Except that, in the last couple of days, Australia has scuppered the idea of any deal before we formally leave the EU anyway.  This means that basically the DTI will be sitting on their hands for the next 2.5 years. At great public expense.

Theresa May has had to walk a difficult tightrope between on the one hand trying to blunt the worst effects of Brexit (plunging pound, more costly imports, prices rising in the shops, inflation, interest rates rising) and coming out with enough meaningless Euroskeptic drivel to stop the UKIP loop fruit lunatic fringe and her own in-house lunatic fringe from howling at the moon and starting to grow hair on the back of their hands. Especially as she has just had to announce that there will be no new money for the NHS, after all.

Occasionally, you see things in the papers which you aren’t sure are satire or not, especially regarding Brexit.  This week it was the story that apparently our salvation will come from selling British tea and cakes (and possibly teacakes) to the wider world. Yep, that should sort it. Apart from the fact that tea is imported, as is the sugar which goes into it, and into many of the cakes. Imports are getting more and more expensive, as you can see by comparing anything that is originally priced in $ - so you either have to absorb the costs, or charge the foreigners more for their traditional English “Battenberg”.

Plucky British exporters will, at least, be able to get their cakes and their tea to these hungry Europeans more quickly, eventually, because we are now going to demolish half of Harmondsworth to build a third runway at Heathrow. This will (in some unspecified way) help exports, apparently. Assuming that eventually we are able to strike a deal with the EU which allows us to carry on trading with them, rather than setting out, like Alcock and Brown in the 21st century version of the Vickers Vimy or the Royal Yacht, to conquer the American colonies instead.  This is of course, also dependent on the hungry Europeans not deciding to say sod it and have a Black Forest Gateau or a Tarte Tatin instead.

Boris Johnson, whom you may recall promising that the NHS would actually benefit to the tune of £350million extra every week when we left the EU, once said that if the third runway at Heathrow ever went ahead, he would lie down in front of the bulldozers to stop it.  Seeing Boris Johnson lying in front of a bulldozer would be a refreshing change after all the pictures of him lying next to a bus.

It could all be academic anyway. By the time the first concrete mixers are on site, we may find we can’t afford it:  Desmond Cohen, writing in “Social Europe” recently, spelled it out quite simply:

The collapse of Sterling’s foreign exchange rate since the Brexit referendum is on a scale we have not seen in many years and yet the government seems totally unconcerned. Indeed, in large part the fall is directly the result of government statements and actions. Some decline was predicted following the referendum but the rate seems now to be in free fall after recent declarations by a Government that it is intent on a ‘hard Brexit’. At least 44% of all UK trade is with the EU and access to this market can only be retained unless the UK accepts free movement of labour. So it is unsurprising that, in these conditions of uncertainty, the exchange rate has collapsed. 

Still, nothing, not even logic and reason, seems to deter the aimless fools in power who seem determined to send us hurtling over an economic cliff. The pound plummets, Theresa May says there will be no extra money for the NHS, bombs rain down on Aleppo, and nobody emits a peep. Yet 14 unaccompanied children arrive from the Calais jungle camp, after weeks of shameful foot-dragging by our so-called government, and the entire country goes batshit crazy, and starts demanding dental tests to make sure they really are refugees.

Kate Milner, writing in The Huffington Post, put the counter-argument very succinctly:

For those who ask harsh questions about where all the tiny children and girls are, I give you harsh answers. They didn’t make it. The girls have been sex-trafficked. The tiny children have died. The ones who are now arriving in the UK are strong looking because only the strongest have survived these harsh conditions. Seven-year-olds aren’t equipped to cross a continent and then fend for themselves in a makeshift tent. They die, they disappear and all the time smug fascists are sitting in their provincial homes posting on Facebook about an immigrant’s hoodie looking too clean.

The newspapers even resorted to using software – an experimental Microsoft app – which can look at a photograph (of a refugee wearing a hoodie, for instance) and guess the age of the subject. I tried it on a photo of myself to test it, and it added 12 years to my age.  But then I have had a hard and stressful life. Mind you, so have some of the 13 and 14 year old refugees.

The French have begun (and in fact, claim to have completed, though this is far from certain) their threatened demolition of the Jungle camp, regardless of whether we take any of the children or not. As I type this, a few days after the anniversary of Agincourt, our relations with France don’t seem to have improved a lot since 1415. Meanwhile, the Calais camp is in flames, children are missing, some inhabitants of the Jungle have been told to go back there, even though it’s alight, and basically, it’s a complete shambles, and nobody seems to know what’s happening. It reminds me a lot of Brexit. 

To be fair to the French, which is a sentence you won’t see me type very often, so make the most of it, they are trying, in their own cack-handed, too-little-too-late way, to instigate the sort of reception and rehabilitation centres I advocated months ago now, but in tandem with a pan-European plan and a managed scaling-out of refugees on a Europe-wide basis according to a matrix of population density, infrastructure, and other factors. Unfortunately, faced with a problem which demands a pan-European response, this is precisely the problem which has caused the EU to fracture along narrow, nationalist lines, turn their backs on the issue, and close borders left right and centre, with the glowing exception of Germany under Angela Merkel.  You will often search in vain for other favourable mentions of Mrs Merkel/Merton in my blogs, so you had better make the most of that one, too.

One of the most heartbreaking images, glimpsed fleetingly on the news footage of the French clearing the camp, was of a gendarme of some description chucking clothes and possessions left behind into a skip. There was a brief moment when you could see that amongst the clothes was a stuffed pink elephant, presumably a child’s toy. I wondered how many miles that toy had travelled to get there, and now it lay discarded in a skip. Together with what looked to be perfectly good, serviceable clothes  – presumably because its owner had been carted off elsewhere and people were not allowed to take everything. The buses which ferried them away even had plastic sheeting on the seats to stop them being “contaminated” by the refugees.  Maybe that toy elephant had been donated by someone in one of the many groups in the UK which have been collecting for The Jungle, and had – I hope – brought some fleeting comfort to its owner.  I was reminded of When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit by Judith Kerr. Read it, and weep that it’s all happening all over again.

Demolishing the Jungle will not solve the problem, of course, as there will be other Jungles, elsewhere, until people stop mitigating the symptoms, and start treating the actual disease. There will be another “Jungle” somewhere else, within a few weeks. Mark my words. Of course, being nasty to foreigners and refugees who try and make a better life is not the exclusive provenance of the French authorities. Our own good old Home Office is trying to evict a Canadian family who have been performing a useful social function (unlike most Canadians, who can’t see a seal without wanting to club it) in the Scottish Highlands.  Craig Murray tells the story in his blog.

Jason and Christy Zielsdorf are Canadian. They have been in Scotland for eight years, legally, and several of their children were born here. After studying theology at St Andrews, Jason decided to stay on. Armed with an entrepreneur visa, two years ago he bought the general store and bothy in the small Highland village of Laggan. The premises had been empty for 18 months, because there is not a rich living in providing this community service. The Zielsdorfs reckoned that by investing in the accommodation and opening a coffee shop highlighting their excellent home cooking (and it really is excellent), they could make a go of it and cater not just for locals but the passing hillwalkers. And they have done.

It took some time and a lot of work for the business to find its feet, and to date they have only been able to give full time employment to one person, not the two their visa stipulates. Although they argue given time their business will reach a stage to employ two people, the Home Office says their time is up and is insisting on their deportation; a month ago they were told they will be deported imminently.

Deporting children who have only ever known Scotland is ludicrous. Fairly well the entire community of Laggan has written in support of the Zielsdorfs. Both Jason and Christy have Scottish ancestry. It is not easy to run a business in the Highlands and Laggan is better for what the Zielsdorfs have done. Local MP Drew Hendry has worked hard for them, but met only unhelpfulness from the Home Office, who have not even given a ministerial meeting promised in response to a parliamentary question.

We do not know when they will get the 5am knock on the door and be taken into custody.

This is what happens when you let the Daily Mail dictate immigration policy. The thing is, though, that by pointing out this sort of agenda-driven xenophobia, which has increased enormously since the referendum, it seems that now we run the risk of being accused of treason! Tory Councillor, Christian Holliday (I kid you not, that really is his name) has been suspended, but sadly, only on paper and not by the neck, after starting an official government petition to charge anyone who argued the case for a sane, sensible relation with the EU following the disastrous Brexit vote, with treason.  Yes, you heard it right.  Treason.

If you can’t win the argument, shut down the discussion. You could say that it’s treasonable – by any commonly understood definition of the word – to have voted for and actively supported the Brexit campaign’s lies which will eventually wreck our economy. But it would be an equally stupid assertion. I’m not sure what Mr Holliday’s motives were for tagging all “Remain” voters as traitors, other than he fancied 15 minutes of fame, but since he was unwise enough to leave his contact details on his web site after he’d done so, I was able to send him an email ticking him off for doubting my patriotism. He wouldn’t have liked it.  Unless he has changed it by now, his mobile phone number and his address are also there. I can’t be bothered to send him a text or order him a pizza though, that would just be childish.

I don’t know what it is about Tory councillors. In Bradford, one David Heseltine (no relation) has suggested grabbing the homeless by the scruff of the neck and “eliminating” them. The irony that many of the homeless are where they are precisely because of the policies of his party is presumably lost on him. I sometimes think the government is putting something in the water to make everybody stupid, and clearly some people will need a much smaller dose than others. Homeopathy in action.

Accusations of treason are very raw in the constituency of Batley and Spen, where the by-election took place last week for the vacant seat created when Jo Cox, the Labour MP, who had a high-profile support for the refugees from Syria, was allegedly gunned down and allegedly stabbed by an alleged assailant in her own constituency who allegedly shouted “My name is Britain First, death to traitors!” Although the Tories, and minor fringe parties such as the Liberal Democrats didn’t field candidates, as a mark of respect, the right wing lunatic fringe had no such qualms, because they have no respect, and stood against the successful Labour candidate, all losing their deposits in the process. Good.

In the wider scheme of things, though, despite this expected win, Labour are still letting the Tories get off scot-free. Not that parliament seems to have much relevance these days anyway. There was a debate last week on whether we approved of supporting the Saudis continuing to bomb Yemen. 101 Labour MPs abstained. There is a list of them on Hansard if you want to see if your Labour MP is one of the 101 people who consider that sticking it to Jeremy Corbyn in the face of not one but two overwhelming democratic mandates is more important than ending the Saudi genocide which is killing babies and children in Yemen.  Shamefully, Tracy Brabin, the newly-elected member for Batley and Spen, was one of those who failed to vote.

So, the world is a depressing place, the clocks have gone back, we all got an hour extra in bed, much good that it did us, and now I am watching the light fade on the feast of St Herbert, who was apparently Bishop of Marmoutier in France and Archbishop of Tours. No details of his life survive, says the online dictionary of saints, which is probably what people will say about mine one day (not that I am claiming sainthood, far from it).

I have been thinking, however, a lot, about what makes a saint and why some people are deemed worthy of the title and seemingly others are not. It’s quite an odd concept really. While you are alive, you aren’t a saint, and you don’t know you’re a saint. You only become one after you’re dead, and even then you have to jump through various hoops; miracles and intercessions and the like.  Also, you don’t decide to become a saint.  There is a problematic quotation from Sister Wendy Beckett which attempts to explain this –

We don't make ourselves saints, we're made saints, by God. We simply have to say "yes".

I think, on mature reflection, as it says in all the best wills, that it’s even simpler than that. Big G won’t take no for an answer, if he’s set his heart on making you into a saint, that’s what will happen. You don’t necessarily have a say in it, because you only see “through a glass, darkly” and not face to face. You probably don't even notice. 

I’ve argued before on this blog that there ought to be a category of “living saints” or “secular saints” – although quite what help this would be to them, except for the purposes of fundraising for the secular saints who run the dog and cat rescue centres, for instance, or the people who collect food and the essentials of life for people in refugee camps. I don’t really know.  And in any case, maybe the trick lies precisely and exactly in not knowing you are being a saint. If we want puffed up people with a sense of their own spiritual importance trying to raise funds, we could always turn on the TV evangelists’ channel.

And in any case, it’s not about the money – it’s about laying up store in heaven, but not knowing it. I suppose that’s maybe the essence of sainthood, if you had to distil it.  I don’t know, of course. I am not an authority on these things, nor am I ever likely to be. In fact, the more time I spend looking for the answers to these spiritual questions, the less likely I seem to be to find them, and the more I realise the vast and staggering scope of my own ignorance. Like Sir Isaac Newton, poncing about on the shore, diverted by pebbles, while all before me lay the vast oceans of unexplored truth or something like that.

I do think, though, that the capacity for “sainthood” is perhaps encoded in all of us.  What precisely makes that one person in the passing crowd go over to the drunk, homeless woman who seems to have collapsed on a park bench to offer help? Is it something that is in all of us, but in some it’s nearer the surface while in others – in the words of Gerard Manley Hopkins - it lives  “deep down things”. But to advance this theory – as I have done before, that we all carry a “God chip” a spark of pre-Fall innocence somewhere inside us, that we should be trying to re-connect with, the argument of the 17th Century Neo-Platonists, in effect, is to argue that it must have been present in Hitler, Thatcher, Mussolini, Franco, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot.  Obviously in their case, they never made the connection. Does Donald Trump have somewhere buried within him, a spark of the divine? That is a big question, a bit like that Zen koan about “Does a dog have Buddha nature?” and probably with about as many answers.

I spend a lot of time castigating people and maybe I should also be looking at the beam in my own eye – if I were to spend more time searching for the speck of goodness in others – not the obvious Samaritans who cross over to help, but the obvious Pharisees who pass by on the other side, maybe I would gain a better understanding. That would imply getting to know them, reasoning with them, using logic, and things like that. It’s a very scary concept.  Especially as there are some people (ISIS, to name but one) whose response to “Hello! I would like to try and discover if you have a spark of divinity within your soul” would be to lop off your head with a Parang (or similar).  Which I suppose serves as a handy illustration of the quick path to martyrdom, another branch of sainthood.

My problem with trying to see the best in other people is that sometimes it involves forgiving them, something with which I will be honest, I have struggled all my life, and also there is a great temptation to let “looking for the spark of divinity in others” shade over into “trying to convert them to your way of thinking” which in turn leads to the sort of religion that insists that there is only one right answer to any moral conundrum, sometimes based on a very shaky interpretation of some obscure text or other.

Better, maybe, to blunder on as before, and perhaps each of us should work instead on connecting with our own inner spark of the divine, and let our true colours shine. “Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven.” I’ve been lucky enough to connect with something extraordinary (in spiritual terms, and in the strict sense of the word) a few times in my life. At Glastonbury Abbey; Holy Cross Abbey; The woods beside Coniston Water; beside the harbour at Lochranza; under the Lebanese cedars at Buckland House; beside Loch Nevis watching the sun set over Skye, and of course, inevitably, at Little Gidding – “the moment in the draughty church at smokefall”. I wish it could have been more, to sustain me through those long droughts in between, when the blaring world shuts out the still small voice of calm. 

Next week, I fear, that blaring world will be much in evidence. So, to sustain me during the ordeal which is inevitably going to come, right now, I am going to have a toasted teacake and a pot of English Breakfast Tea.  There is no problem that cannot be diminished in importance by approaching it with a mug of tea in your hand.


Monday 17 October 2016

Epiblog for the Feast of St John The Dwarf



It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley.  Gradually, now, autumn’s taking hold, and it’s getting colder. I doubt we’ll get much more done in the garden this year now, and I’ve more or less resigned myself to hunkering down for the winter in terms of outside jobs. There have still been bright days though, or to be more accurate, bright periods during some of the days - usually, frustratingly, coinciding with the days Debbie is teaching and I’m up to my ears in the proverbial muck and bullets.

There has still been no sign of the squirrels. I am beginning to think that something nasty must have happened to them while we were away on Arran, which I hope isn’t the case. Matilda, meanwhile, has been going out now and again, but she’s found herself a new perch, in a corner of the front room, on the duvet that we take when we go off in the camper van,  snoozing there for most of the day. As I said last week, she’s now officially, at 13, an elderly cat, and elderly cats tend to stay indoors anyway.  I am still keeping a watchful eye.

Misty and Zak, meanwhile, have had some reasonably long walks, despite the demands of teaching on Debbie, and the weather which has frequently been inclement at just the wrong time. They don’t care about inclement weather, of course, in fact I’m convinced that Misty doesn’t count it a proper walk unless she finds some disgustingly aromatic dung to roll in, and comes back plastered with mud up to her armpits. Mind you, neither does Debbie.

I still have the last three stubborn books to go to press, and they are inching along at a glacial rate. Next week will be crucial in that respect, because after half term sets in, it will be marketing marketing marketing, all the way to Christmas.

Always assuming the world makes it as far as Christmas, what with Putin rattling the sabre and the UK parliament (such as it is) responding in kind.  Not that it makes one jot of difference, because Putin knows that unless someone was actually prepared to stick a missile in one of his aircraft to enforce it, there is absolutely no chance of a no-fly zone this year, next year, sometime, or never. As if to prove the point, Putin has routed two of his warships, en route to the Mediterranean, via the English Channel this coming week. Strangely, I found myself agreeing with Boris Johnson of all people, twice in the course of that debate. Or rather, I should say, since I was calling for these things long before he was, he found himself agreeing with me. I am glad the mop-headed clodpoll is finally seeing the light. There should indeed be a no-fly zone over Syria, and there should indeed be demonstrations outside the Russian Embassy – and outside the American Embassy, since they seem intent on ramping up the unnoticed war which has been festering in the Yemen, by firing cruise missiles at rebel radar sites. And there should be demonstrations outside the Saudi Embassy, about the destruction and famine they are causing in that very war, and there should be demonstrations outside the Department of Trade and Industry, because we are selling the Saudis the arms which they are using to bomb their own people into a state of perpetual famine.  Boris Johnson stopped short of mentioning all but the first, obviously because there is only room in his brain for one idea at a time. Which is presumably why he never mentions the extra £350million a week to the NHS, these days.

Actually, the way the pound is going at the moment, £350million a week will probably buy two second hand bedpans.  The currency markets were in turmoil again over “Brexit”, and will no doubt continue to be so until someone in “government” takes control and steadies the ship. Theresa May, bless her, has announced in advance the date for invoking Article 50, in effect giving the gnomes of Zurich almost six months to be panicked. Meanwhile, Johnson, Davies and Fox, the three blind mice of Brexit policy, run round aimlessly, trying to avoid having their tails cut off with a carving knife by Theresa May whenever they say something that contradicts government non-policy over Brexit, a non-policy which consists largely of doing nothing, but doing it with a gallant, plucky heart, and trusting that it will all come out alright in the end and there’ll be blue birds over, the white cliffs of Dover, tomorrow, just you wait and see. Because after all, we are British.

Meanwhile, confusion reigns, and into this vacuum of inactivity, fools rush in, where angels fear to tread. Stephen Lopresti, who is MP for Bristol, apparently, has suggested that British business should form a consortium to raise the necessary cash to re-commission the currently-mothballed Royal Yacht, Britannia, and use it to spearhead a new export drive, in a sort of 21st century version of “send a gunboat”.  I can just hear the response… “Dear British Trade Delegation, I was intending to buy my widgets from my usual supplier just down the road as they are good quality, yet low in cost, and his close proximity means that they can deliver quickly. But now you have turned up in this wonderful yacht, I have changed my mind and will order your much more expensive British widgets that have to be flown half way across the world to get them here…” Yeah, right.

It turns out, this week, apparently, that Brexit may not even be legal, or at least the way the government was going to implement it may not be. There is actually a crowd-funded legal case going through the courts at the moment, challenging various aspects of what the government intends to do.  The problem lies in the fact that Article 50 (a document which, as I have said before, was written on the back of an envelope in about ten minutes because nobody ever dreamed it would ever be used in earnest) blithely says that the country wishing to leave should decide to do so “under its own constitutional conventions” – but our constitution is largely unwritten (one of its greatest strengths) -  and therefore nobody knows whether the referendum result can be actioned simply by the executive power of the government, or after due scrutiny by parliament, or after scrutiny and a vote, or what. So now the judges must rule on it. What’s the betting they refer it up to the European Court!

The harsh economic realities of Brexit – or at least the potential harsh realities, if it is bungled by the government, started to become clearer this week, with the great Marmite Famine of 2016. As famines go, it had nothing on the 1845 potato blight, but nevertheless it made the papers, and possibly may indicate some of the more serious issues that lie ahead. Presumably Unilever (which apparently makes Marmite) must take their profits and convert them into dollars, and having done so, because of the parlous state of the pound, they discovered that there weren’t as many as they usually are. Panic ensued. Presumably they went back to Tesco and asked them to do something about it, and presumably Tesco told them to bugger off. With the result that Marmite vanished from the shelves, momentarily, until a deal was stitched up at the 11th hour, presumably to pass the price increase on to Tesco’s customers in a couple of weeks or so when everyone has forgotten about it.

Most of the news, though, this week, has been verging on the bizarre. Donald Trump continues to be a raving caricature, a purple and orange Rumpelstiltskin on a mission to make America “grate” again. He may well have been outed as a pervert and a paedophile, if you believe the most extreme allegations, and to some people these revelations are a sign of hope. Surely, they say, Trump cannot survive this? I wish I was so sure. I think a lot of the people who will trundle out and vote for Trump will do so precisely because he comes across as a “good ole boy”, and some of the things he is alleged to have done, are precisely the things that certain of his supporters would have liked to have done. So, it could end up being a lot closer than anyone thinks. Why some women and some black people are thinking of voting for Trump, however, remains a mystery to me – it’s like turkeys voting for Thanksgiving.

Once again, it has been a week when it would be very easy to become depressed, even though there have been some weird and maybe even slightly funny stories. Depending on your viewpoint, of course. The weirdest story is these bloody idiots dressing up as clowns and scaring people. Nobody quite knows why, but as crazes go, amidst all the people who are only doing it for a laugh, it does of course provide plenty of potential for people with more nefarious intentions to join in.  So far, the incidents reported have been relatively minor, but the police seem to be keeping a close eye on it, and there is always the potential for some idiot who thought it was funny to dress up as a clown to be on the receiving end of being lamped for their trouble, or worse. Given that the craze actually started in America, it’s surprising that no scary clowns over there have been mistakenly shot by the police. Presumably because clowns have predominantly white faces.

The sole laugh of the week (for me, anyway) came when the BBC Breakfast News announced that they would be running a piece on Nicola Sturgeon’s renewed bid for a second bill on Scottish independence, but in the background, showed a clip of the escaped gorilla from London Zoo, munching its way through a bunch of bananas. Nicola Sturgeon, whatever you think about her, does seem to have something of a sense of humour (she will need it, in the coming months, trying to work out what the hell Theresa May is trying to do, especially as she doesn’t know herself) so perhaps she saw the funny side. The BBC later said they had apologised. Presumably to Ms Sturgeon and not the gorilla.Whether Nicola Sturgeon likes bananas is an unknown quantity at this moment.

That was it, I’m afraid. The rest was bleak, and it can only get bleaker. On 24th October, a week tomorrow (I’m writing this late Sunday night) the French authorities have said they are going to begin the task of demolishing the Jungle, the unofficial refugee camp outside Calais.  The fate of the unaccompanied children, at the time I am writing this, is still undecided.  Meanwhile, on 14th October, the 950th anniversary of the Battle of Hastings, funnily enough, Holly Kal-Weiss, a volunteer with a car-load of aid destined for the camp was stopped at Folkestone and denied entry to France on the grounds of her being a threat to French national security!

This is part of a pattern of harassment of aid shipments by both the French and the British authorities – two or three weeks ago I reported how Rachel Emec had been detained at Dover, then released later without charge, on her return from delivering aid, this time by the British anti-terror police.  Kal-Weiss then drove to Dover and tried to board a ferry for France instead, and was again turned away, as were several other volunteers trying to deliver aid that day.

Of course, these frightened, friendless children, many of whom have seen more war and terror in their short, young lives than the rest of us will see in a lifetime, several lifetimes, are apparently wanting to come here to claim benefits and take away our jobs, our council houses and our hospitals. All 379 of them. And the people who think like that are seemingly content to sleep soundly in their beds while these kids are out in the cold, in harm’s way, facing an uncertain future at best, and God alone knows what else. But it doesn’t matter, because we’re British, aren’t we, and it’s all going to be alright. So we’ll pull up the drawbridge, and pull up the duvet, and snuggle down to dream of the days when Britannia ruled the waves and the Russians would have had to stay holed up in the Crimea.

It reminds me of Orwell’s description in Homage to Catalonia, of returning from the Spanish Civil War.

And then England--southern England, probably the sleekest landscape in the world. It is difficult when you pass that way, especially when you are peacefully recovering from sea-sickness with the plush cushions of a boat-train carriage under your bum, to believe that anything is really happening anywhere. Earthquakes in Japan, famines in China, revolutions in Mexico? Don't worry, the milk will be on the doorstep tomorrow morning, the New Statesman will come out on Friday. The industrial towns were far away, a smudge of smoke and misery hidden by the curve of the earth's surface. Down here it was still the England I had known in my childhood: the railway-cuttings smothered in wild flowers, the deep meadows where the great shining horses browse and meditate, the slow-moving streams bordered by willows, the green bosoms of the elms, the larkspurs in the cottage gardens; and then the huge peaceful wilderness of outer London, the barges on the miry river, the familiar streets, the posters telling of cricket matches and Royal weddings, the men in bowler hats, the pigeons in Trafalgar Square, the red buses, the blue policemen--all sleeping the deep, deep sleep of England, from which I sometimes fear that we shall never wake till we are jerked out of it by the roar of bombs.

Complacency has often been our undoing in the past. We blundered into two world wars in the 20th century on the assumption that it would all be over by Christmas. Now, it is highly likely that some refugee children might be put in greater danger, and maybe even die of our complacency.  There were many people here in the 1930s who were complacent when Hitler was on the rampage, but at least back then we were still compassionate enough to take in the Kindertransport.  Father Dominic Howarth, writing in Independent Catholic News, has said:

For the children at Calais this is a hideous situation. Unaccompanied, more than 800 are in the camp, and 387 of those have been documented as having relatives in the UK. For months, their fate has been the subject of political wrangling, even after Lord Dubs fought and won Parliamentary approval for action to be taken. That was in May. The hopelessness of the waiting meant they tried to make their own way across the channel, and at least three have been killed. They were run over by lorries or - in one particularly appalling case - froze to death within a lorry carrying frozen goods. This week - finally - it does seem as if the children with relatives here can come to the UK. There are many more who do not have relatives in the UK, and who - when the camp is bulldozed - will be ever more vulnerable. As a Christian, when I see the teenagers running around the Calais Jungle, I am always minded of Christ's words: "It is to such as these that the Kingdom of Heaven belongs." What are we doing, and what are our Christian leaders in France and the UK doing, that hundreds of children are abandoned and alone, right in front of our eyes?

Suffer little children.  Father Howarth is referring obliquely to the passage in Matthew 19: 13-14 where:

Then were there brought unto him little children, that he should put his hands on them, and pray: and the disciples rebuked them. But Jesus said, Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven.

You would think, wouldn’t you, in a country which is ostensibly Christian (people who hate Muslims and begrudge them even being here and leading ordinary lives and trying to raise a family and just get on in life are always banging on about this being a “Christian” country) – you would think that there would be some leeway, some compassion given, some concern for the underdog. You would think, perhaps, that the Home Office (prop. Amber Rudd, no relation thank God) would be thinking “how can we best deploy the Christian virtues of compassion and mercy in this Christian country?” But no.  When Jesus said "suffer little children" he meant it in the sense of "allow". It seems that when the Home Office says suffer, little children, they mean it literally. 

Not only is the fate of the Calais children still undecided, but today I heard a story which, in its own way, because it is a one-off personal story, maybe tops even that.  May Brown, 23, who lives in Dorset, was diagnosed with leukaemia last year. She needs a stem cell donation, and she and her husband were delighted to hear that her sister, Martha, who is Nigerian, was a perfect match – especially as several other avenues had already been tried and proven to be unsuitable.

But the Home Office has apparently said it is “not satisfied” that her sister Martha would be a “genuine visitor” or that she had the necessary funds to cover the costs of the trip. May Brown has pledged to fund the visit, and said her schoolteacher sister, who has two children in their native Nigeria, has no wish to stay in the UK. May Brown is said to be distraught at this development, and I am not surprised.  A Home Office spokesperson said: “We are sensitive to cases with compassionate circumstances, but all visa applications must be assessed against the immigration rules. The onus is on the individual to provide the necessary supporting evidence to prove they meet the requirements.” Oh, just sod off, Home Office, before your doublespeak actually kills someone.

So, there you have it. We live in a country where the Home Office will deny medical help to a person suffering from leukaemia because they are scared of some infinitesimally-small risk of the donor going "rogue" and turning into an illegal immigrant after they have donated their stem cells. Because, let’s face it, if the Daily Mail got wind that we were letting in stem cell donors from Nigeria, or unaccompanied child refugees at risk of abuse or worse, well, there’d be hell to pay, wouldn’t there?  I mean, it might even derail Brexit. What?  Not to worry, May Brown, it’ll all turn out alright in the end, because we’re British.  Although unless someone at the Home Office has an outbreak of reason and common sense, you might just die of a mixture of our complacency and our xenophobia. But, we are British! Never forget that. 

This is the sort of crap that makes me want to apply for Dutch citizenship. Van Der Damm, Naar Der Mundt. It makes me ashamed to be born part of this shitty, botched, sham apology for a theme park, obsessed with baking cakes and dancing on TV, with its food banks and its substandard housing, its people starving from benefit cuts, and its dying NHS and its lying politicians, and its shopping precincts, swimming in piss, vomit and lager, that we used to be able to call a country.  It reminds me of J B Priestley talking about the disadvantaged kids of Rusty Lane, West Bromwich:

There ought to be no more of those lunches and dinners, at which political and financial and industrial gentlemen congratulate one another, until something is done about Rusty Lane, and about West Bromwich. While they still exist in their foul shape, it is idle to congratulate ourselves about anything. They make the whole pomp of government here a miserable farce. The Crown, Lords and Commons are the Crown, Lords and Commons of Rusty Lane, West Bromwich... and if there is another economic conference, let it meet there, in one of the warehouses, and be fed with bread and margarine and slabs of brawn. The delegates have seen one England, Mayfair in the season. Let them see another England next time, West Bromwich out of the season. Out of all seasons, except the winter of our discontent.

And there should be no more crowing about Brexit, and “taking back control”, and “sovereignty”, and £350 million pounds a week extra being given to the NHS, until someone sees sense and lets in May Brown’s sister so she can donate her cells.  We are not a great country any more, and have no claim to be, until someone who can do something about it, realises that true greatness relies on compassion alone.  And the person responsible for the original decision denying her access should be set to work breaking rocks in a quarry until they see the error of their ways and repent.

Actually, that is much better put in 1 Corinthians 13: 1-4,

Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing. And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing.

So, yes, Home Office, you “whited sepulchre”, this means you. I hope you can sleep at night.  No. Actually, I don’t. I hope your sleep is even worse than mine.  I’m often woken up nowadays in the middle of the night by pain in my knees and by cramp and pins and needles. I hope your dreams, however, are nightmares, disturbed by the screams of the people you have denied help and sanctuary. Over and over again.

Sunday was the feast of St Baldric, a rather unremarkable abbot, and now it’s past midnight, and I am still typing, it’s technically Monday, and the feast of St John the Dwarf, an early Egyptian desert father.  Neither of them is particularly remarkable as an example of saintly piety, but you have to admit that their names offer immense comedic possibilities. I  am sorry to be so irreverent, but to be honest, in the world as it is at the moment, sometimes irreverence is the only answer. I would like to think God has a sense of humour, and if you doubt that, just look at the duck-billed platypus.  He certainly needs a sense of humour right now, these days, something God has in common with Nicola Sturgeon.

I don’t know where I’m going any more. Other than to my grave, sooner or later. On the one hand, I have found some peace, and – I like to think, anyway – done some good by painting eikons. But I’m not so stupid as to not realise that, in the terms of the good old Norfolk vernacular, I am merely “farting against thunder”. No eikon has ever yet stopped a war. So why do I carry on? This is not a rhetorical question, by the way, I really would like an answer! Why do I carry on, like some latter-day Milton, trying to justify the ways of God to men, when half the time, I am no longer sure I believe in any of this stuff anyway, and “the best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity”, to quote Yeats. Beats me. Answers on a postcard, please.

Goodnight.





Tuesday 11 October 2016

Epiblog for the Feast of St Ethelburga of Barking



It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley.  It’s been seven days of odd weather this week. One minute you look out and it’s a fine, quiet, autumnal day with pale sunshine and you could believe that summer is still more or less with us, and the next minute you look out and it’s dull and dark and cold. The mornings are fresh-to-crisp, and the nights are colder as well, with the darkness falling much sooner each successive day, or so it seems.

For the second week running, there has been no sign of the squirrels, and for the second week running, Matilda shows no sign of going back to her old ways and has continued to be an indoor cat. I am hoping that it’s simply a combination of her having become, almost without us noticing, an elderly cat, and elderly cats tend to stay indoors anyway.  I am hoping there’s no underlying cause, but I’m keeping a watchful eye.

We have still not got to the bottom of the dog exclusion notices on West nab and Wessenden, and whether they are legitimate and legal. Emails to local councillors in Meltham go unanswered. Misty, and Zak, who is staying with us at the moment, have therefore been forced to seek alternative walkies during the last few days, one of which, an excursion up to Castle Hill, almost ended in catastrophe, when Debbie was chased by a cow.

Traversing a field which is normally empty, but which on this occasion was a temporary billet to assorted large quadrupeds, Deb made the tactical error of attempting to take a line which would have meant crossing between a cow and its calf. Mother Moocow, seeing this coming, moved to close off this route, and also possibly to see off the intruders. Cows can move surprisingly quickly when they want to, and in this case, this particular cow wanted to.  The dogs saw the lumbering bovine approaching at a rate of knots and very sensibly scarpered, leaving Debbie to it. Debbie took the only open escape route, over the dry stone wall and into the next field.  At the first fence the order was: first equal, Misty and Zak, second Debbie, and third, the cow. Several lengths separated one and two, and a short head, two and three. The only casualty in the end was the pouch that Deb uses to carry her waterproof, which snagged on the barbed wire on top of the fence, as she went over. So, four faults there and a bit more sewing and mending for me to do next time I get my sewing kit out.

As far as the avalanche of books goes, I am still digging myself out and now have two left to get off to press before Christmas. All of the others are either at proof stage or at press. However, the amount of work represented by the two that are left is disproportionately huge.  Still, we plod on, into the gathering gloom. Eyes on the prize, Steve, eyes on the prize.  When Deb’s mum was dropped off at the station by Debbie on Friday, apparently she gave Debbie a Sainsburys carrier bag with some things from her fridge in it, that needed eating up, saying we might as well have them. Debbie duly dumped this on the kitchen floor when she returned. Shortly afterwards, Sainsburys delivered our order, and the kitchen floor was littered with carrier bags, all of which I unpacked and put away.  I was just finishing off, when Debbie came back in from next door.  “You won’t believe this,” I said to her, “Sainsburys have delivered some stuff we didn’t order – look! Half a cucumber, not even wrapped, some tomatoes, and half a carton of milk! What about that!” She was incapable of replying through laughter for several seconds, and then I realised this must have been the stuff her mother had donated, which I had assumed was just another carrier left by the Sainsburys man. I guess you had to be there, but it was further proof, if proof were needed, that I am going gaga.

Talking of gaga, it’s not all been doom and gloom in the wider world this week, as UKIP entertained us all by going into self-destruct mode. Clearly they have been watching, and learning from, the Labour Party. Firstly, their new leader, Diane somebody, resigned after just 18 days in the job, which, as the satirical web site, Popbitch, pointed out,  is the typical gestation period of a budgie.  It later turned out that, although she did really resign, she never actually filed the appropriate papers following her election, to confirm her leadership with the Electoral Commission, so she wasn’t actually the legal official leader at the point she resigned.  When this came to light, much head-scratching ensued – always a potentially dangerous business for UKIP supporters, owing to the risk of splinters.

Because Diane some nonentity had resigned from a post she didn’t really hold, ergo, Nigel Farage, who had resigned from a post he did hold, was held to have unresigned and resumed his duties as leader, or something.  I don’t know and frankly don’t care. UKIP never had any credibility anyway, and the only thing they were ever good at was telling lies about immigrants, but nowadays at least they do have some comic entertainment value. They also seem to have some sort of a problem with filing the appropriate paperwork by the correct deadline, because one of the other candidates in the election which put Diane whatsername in the hot seat, Stephen Woolfe, failed to file his nomination papers in time and had thus been excluded from the ballot.

Mr Woolfe, a UKIP MEP (now there’s an oxymoron) had other things on his mind this week, after an altercation involving fisticuffs with Mike Hookem, another oxymoron, although in his case the emphasis is more on the “moron”, if you see what I mean, allegedly took a swing at him after being invited to settle his differences “mano a mano” in the stationery cupboard at the European Parliament. They grappled briefly, apparently, in the sort of approved homo-erotic manner which UKIP members believe causes localised flooding, and then Mr Woolfe fell backwards through an open door onto another UKIP member, and ended up in hospital under observation for a clot on the brain.  I am tempted to muse philosophically at this point in the fashion of Yeats, who asked “how can we know the dancer from the dance”, how can we know the clot from the brain, where UKIP are concerned.

Mr Hookem, meanwhile, took to local radio to defend his actions, claiming it was all something and nothing, and was merely “handbags at dawn, as we say in Hull.”  So, well done there, Mr Right-Hookem, in one fell swoop you managed to be sexist, homophobic, and confirm people’s unfounded impressions of Hull on the eve of its stint at the City of Culture 2017.  Way to go. I look forward to UKIP choosing its next leader by means of trial by combat. Since they appear to want to wind time back to the middle ages, it seems highly appropriate.

Farage must have been quite surprised to have been awoken in the middle of the night, in the USA, where he is advising Donald Trump how to lie about immigration, and told that he was once again UKIP’s Fuhrer. For a few seconds, he must have wondered if it was a recurring nightmare. Actually, it is, for us as well as him, but that’s by the bye. It must have resembled the scene when Good Queen Bess was told she was now officially in charge, on the grounds that anyone better qualified for the job was either dead, insane, or Catholic.

Talking of insanity, Trump never ceases to amaze me with his ability to plumb new depths of loathsomeness. I am beginning to think the flip remark I made a few blogs ago now, about him being the Antichrist, might actually be true, and under that stupid “Make America Great Again” baseball cap, he has “666” neatly shaved into the neck hair normally hidden by that orange guinea pig he wears on his head.

Admittedly, the audio tapes which surfaced this week are ten years old, and we’ve all said stupid things we now regret. Ten years ago I told Barclays I would repay the overdraft, instead of telling them to pogo off over the horizon, and not come back. I have had a decade to pause, repent, and regret that decision, but it seems to me that in Mr Trump’s case, the really damaging thing is that his views today on the subject of female emancipation are pretty much what they were then, and what’s worse, he sees no problem in it.  So he can object to the line of questioning coming from a combative female reporter on the grounds that she might be having her period, and he can blithely say that if his daughter wasn’t his daughter, hell, he’d be dating his daughter (yeck!) and all of this stacks up perfectly with someone who, ten years ago, boasted that he could get any woman because he is rich and famous, and all you have to do is “grab them by the pussy”.  Nigel Farage must have been face-palming himself and muttering “It’s the immigrants, stupid!” under his breath. It was never actually confirmed as official UKIP policy, in their constitution, after all, that women who fail to clean behind the fridge are sluts, it was merely a sort of folk-belief, in the same way as The Apocrypha are sort of almost like the official bits of the Bible.

Here at home, we have been preoccupied by the febrile atmosphere of Brexit, and of course we don’t have neo-Nazi demagogues like Trump who want to make foreigners wear some physical indication of their non-indigenous status.  Oh, hang on, yes we do. Amber Rudd, a woman who makes me want to change my surname to Whalebelly every time she opens her gob, and who I am glad to say is no relation, wants to make UK firms compile lists of foreign workers so they can be named and shamed. The rationale behind this is unclear, but then the rationale behind many government pronouncements is unclear.

On a purely practical level, it serves no purpose. For a start, the data already exists somewhere, since foreigners need permission to come and work here, so the government could, if it wished, just do a quiet data mining exercise and come up with the relevant info. Secondly, foreign workers working for UK companies are presumably paying tax and national insurance, and contributing via those methods, so where exactly is the problem? If she means illegal foreign workers, good luck with trying to get a list of those, since anyone working illegally in this country would doubtless just do a duckdive when the subject cropped up, then re-surface somewhere else when the hoohah has died down.  Finally, the whole idea is posited on two economic fallacies, one being that for every job taken by a migrant worker, there is a British worker who is equally qualified and willing to do that job, who is displaced and disadvantaged by the migrant’s intervention, and the other being that there is a finite number of jobs possible in the capitalist version of the Labour market. There isn’t.

To take the second one first, here is an example. In what is laughingly described as my spare time, I have been painting my own versions of eikons of the saints, on chunks of reclaimed timber. Suppose I were to turn that into a business, and it eventually took off to the stage that I needed to pay someone to do all the accounting and admin so that I could get on with painting the damn things.  That has created one job. But in order to create that one job, the nascent business has also been consuming things like paint, and jiffy bags, and postage or courier costs – so if that carries on, the art supplies shop, the post office, the couriers and the stationery store will also be hiring. And if they start hiring, then there will be people who have more money in their pocket who will start spending their spare cash on all sorts of things, and creating all sorts of other jobs, and that is how the economy grows, in a very simplified nutshell.

Aha, you are now saying, that’s all very well, but how many of those people are British? To which I reply that, whilever we remain part of the single market with its attendant free movement of labour, pending Brexit, that is irrelevant, as long as the employer abides by the law in respect of pay and conditions and everyone involved, unlike Donald Trump, pays their taxes.  Yes, obviously some unscrupulous employers will get away with doing the bare minimum, but we shouldn’t kid ourselves that, post-Brexit, they will all suddenly have a Damascene conversion and start treating British workers better than they treated, say, Polish migrants – all that will happen is that the British workers will then be subjected to the same crappy low pay, job insecurity and bad conditions that their migrant predecessors had to put up with.

Some in the Tory party no doubt think that would be a good thing. These are the people that believe that there is a vast pool of workshy British labour which is unwilling to do the jobs done by migrant workers and prefers to spend their lives on Benefits. I have argued against this biased and inaccurate view of the labour market for literally years now.  But even if this were true, it takes no account of the skills gap, which is another crucial factor in the mix.  If every migrant worker in the UK were told to pack their bags and go tomorrow, true, somebody would probably still be around to pick the fruit before it goes rotten in the fields, but there would be vast swathes of the economy and the public services where literally we do not have the appropriately trained and qualified indigenous workforce to fill the gap – the NHS being a prime example, which is why Amber Rudd’s blethering about restricting immigration at the same time as creating hundreds of new doctors is so laughable, unless somebody’s found a false door to Narnia at the back of a wardrobe in the Department of Health, leading to an aircraft-hangar-sized secret room stuffed full of trained doctors and nurses from the Cotswolds.

So, given that it’s a non-starter in practical terms, that it would serve no actual purpose, and that the data already exists elsewhere, what can possibly have motivated Amber Rudd to have uttered this invocation of racial discord? In fairness to Amber Rudd, which is a sentence I won’t be typing very often, so make the most of it, she has known suffering in her own life, having once been married to A. A. Gill.  And now it seems she’s decided that the rest of us must suffer too.  The only reason for floating this – frankly – loopy proposal was to make a pitch for the UKIP voters to come back to the fold, to appear to be doing something tough and nasty to foreigners, because she, her advisers, and the Tory party generally, think that the prevailing zeitgeist in this country is now one of “sod the foreigners, send ‘em all home and pull up the drawbridge.” And sadly, in that, she is probably right. A tolerant and sane politician, from a tolerant and sane party, would be trying to correct the various misapprehensions surrounding immigration, but obviously in the current climate of hatred created by Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage and others of their ilk, there are no votes in being sane and tolerant.  We are in a post-reason environment, gripped by a collective madness that now says it’s OK to accost a woman in the street and pull off her hijab, beat up Polish plumbers, and have lists of  places where all non-British workers may be found.

The parallels between the Nazis and Amber Rudd have all been pointed out by now, and I am late in the day, but coincidentally, and chillingly, last week I was doing some research for the eikon of St Maximilian Kolbe I was painting, and found the original chart of all the different identification badges used in the Nazi concentration camp system. (St Maximilian Kolbe was murdered in Auschwitz when he took the place of a married man with children who had been selected to die in a punishment block).  It looks like the physical embodiment of Amber Rudd’s philosophy. Different  coloured triangles for different nationalities, symbols for political prisoners, criminals and “the workshy” – or, as the Tories and the Daily Mail refer to them, “benefits scroungers”.  It really would be quite a simple step to extend Amber Rudd’s idea into colourful badges, and once you have established, and had accepted, the principle of a list for one type of person, why not animal rights activists, or people who write stroppy blogs, or anyone who looks a bit funny…

By the weekend, however, the proposal had raised such a howl of protest that, faced with the impending shitstorm, Justine Greening was wheeled out on TV to say that actually, Amber Rudd had had her fingers crossed behind her back all the time, and the lists wouldn’t be used for “naming and shaming” after all, in fact they might just quietly row back from the idea. But it’s not the end of it. They’ve had one go, and mark my words, they’ll come back again, especially if Trump gets in and starts making the Muslims wear yellow stars, or the Brexit negotiations go badly, and they need to grasp at a particular straw to make them seem tough and nasty to foreigners so their poll ratings go back up.

The irony of it is that there are areas of the UK where the migrant worker population is very high, and these areas are often cited (wrongly) as being examples of what is happening to the country as a whole. Regional variations and regional areas of  economic depression is of course something that the EU provided money to combat and try and alleviate some of the stresses of a one-size-fits-all market over a single labour market spanning 28 countries. Post-Brexit, of course, what will happen is anyone’s guess, and nobody knows, least of all the government. It is unlikely that the money currently invested by the EU will be replaced by our own funds. OK, all of the migrant workers may well end up going home, but the poorest and most depressed regions will also be hardest hit, so there may be no jobs left for British workers to step into. 

All of the people who bang on about the economy being “unaffected” by Brexit are missing the point. Right now, the markets are just watching and waiting to see what happens. Theresa May had her bluff called by the EU, who refused to even start negotiations until Article 50 had been formally triggered, and when she announced that this would be in March 2017, the pound immediately went into a Kamikaze nosedive.  The people who run the markets are not stupid. They are not philanthropists, either. They have no sense of honour, no sense of “cutting a bit of slack”. Their inexorable logic is profit. Pure and simple. And once the process of Brexit starts in earnest, they will punish us, make no mistake.  52% of the country voted to leave the EU, although I still contend that not many of that 52% had thought it through, or voted on the actual issue on the ballot paper, as opposed to immigration... But nowhere on that ballot paper was there a space to specify that the government had any right to say “Oh, sod it” and accept the worst terms possible on leaving,  and cause unnecessary hardship to the 48% who didn’t want to leave, in the pursuit of percentages in the polls running up to the 2012 election and to try and bring back the fruitcakes of UKIP into the Tory fold. The government, such as it is, should be striving to broker the best possible deal and minimise the damage Brexit will cause, but of course that would be seen as being soft on “Johnny Foreigner” and with clowns like Boris Johnson involved in the proceedings, it is unlikely to happen, because he is a cheerleader for popular xenophobia, see above. By the way, Boris, whatever happened to the £350million a week extra for the NHS?

In fact, it’s been a thoroughly depressing week if you believe in concepts such as freedom and compassion. The frequency of bad news from Aleppo is now such that compassion fatigue is setting in and people are becoming almost inured to the daily scenes of the Russians bombing hospitals and aid workers. In the Yemen, bombs and missiles sold to Saudi Arabia by the UK are being used by Saudi forces trained in the UK to inflict carnage in a civil war which has now led to a famine.  And here at home, in the absence of anything resembling a pulse or a heartbeat in the Labour Party, once more it’s been left to the Church to be the official opposition, with the Bishop of Manchester, the Rt Rev. David Walker among others, signing an open letter to the government asking for the 379 unaccompanied child refugees in The Jungle to be allowed to enter the UK, and calling our refusal to do so “A stain on our nation’s conscience”. The Home Office (proprietor: Amber Rudd) has replied that this is a matter for the French authorities. The French authorities are intending to bulldoze the whole camp “before winter”.  Perhaps Katie Hopkins’s solution of machine-gunning refugees might turn out after all to be quicker and kinder than leaving them to die slowly of hypothermia in the hedgerows of Normandy this winter, but only after Amber Rudd has pinned the appropriate colour triangle over their heart, to give the firing squads something to aim for.

Today is Tuesday, already, the second day of a new working week, and I can ill afford the time to be typing this. The weekend was actually something of an oasis of calm and sanity, marked by another visit from Owen, who – in the course of a flying visit, has fixed the clock, the lower door on the stove, and various other small but niggly things. Meanwhile I got on with trying to clear the backlog of eikons because I knew that when this week began, it would be books, books, books, all the way.

Today is also the feast of St Ethelburga of Barking, who was the founder, and first Abbess, of Barking Abbey in Essex. I have already done all my UKIP jokes, so I will leave you to insert the “barking” references.  Ethelburga died in 686AD,  and her brother, Earconwald, was Bishop of London. Earconwald, or Erkenwald as he is sometimes spelt, was instrumental in the founding of Barking Abbey and also founded a Monastery at Chertsey in Surrey. In fact, according to Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, Ethelburga’s whole family went in for the religion thing in a big way – her sisters were also all Saints - Etheldreda, Sexburga, and Withburga. They could have formed a pop group, except that the band name “All Saints” has already been taken…

Bede speaks of miracles associated with her at Barking but to be honest, these seem a bit thin on the ground, although allowances have to be made for the material lost in the intervening centuries. Apparently Ethelburga enquired with the female members of her monastery about the spot in which they would have liked to be buried, at which point a resplendent light appeared from heaven and moved to the south side of the monastery, pointing out the spot where the bodies were to rest. OK.  Oh, and the Old English Martyrology records a vision, recounted by a nun of Barking, who saw Ethelburga being drawn up into heaven by golden chains. Ethelburga was buried at Barking, but nothing of her tomb remains, and her feast day was set as 11th October – presumably based on the day of her death.

Ethelburga’s name survives in various dedications – there is one near Pocklington in the East Riding, and St Ethelburga’s church in the City of London, having survived the Blitz, was obliterated by the massive IRA car bomb in 1993, and is now used as a centre for international peace and reconciliation.  Given the current state of the world, they should have a lot of work on, right now. I don’t know where we are heading, but I would hazard a guess that the destination includes the words “hell” and “handcart”. 

I haven’t been able to shake off my militant mood from last week, either, although the weekend was actually full of cheer, and conviviality, and that old friend, fun, all things which have been missing of late. But nevertheless, I am still gripped by anger and frustration that the world is unjust and that on every side, it seems the forces of evil are on the march. Maybe you think I’m over-egging it.  Maybe you think that people like Amber Rudd, and Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump and Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage aren’t active manifestations of evil. Don’t worry, I am not going to get into a David Icke vibe here and start denouncing them all as shape-shifting lizards, but I do believe that – just as some people seem to be able to channel peace and goodness – there are some people who, whenever they go to the dentist, it’s the dentist who needs the anaesthetic.  Some people spread joy wherever they go, and others cause joy whenever they go.

Thinking that I might eventually get time to collect them all together into a “best of” (har har) I have been looking back through some old blog posts, and found this, which I quoted on what was then my other blog, about four years ago: it’s part of a speech by a fictional character, Quellcrist Falconer, created by Richard K Morgan in his Harlan’s World novels:

So if some idiot politician, some power player, tries to execute policies that harm you or those you care about, take it personally. Get angry. The Machinery of Justice will not serve you here – it is slow and cold, and it is theirs, hardware and soft-. Only the little people suffer at the hands of Justice; the creatures of power slide from under it with a wink and a grin. If you want justice, you will have to claw it from them. Make it personal. Do as much damage as you can. Get your message across. That way, you stand a better chance of being taken seriously next time. Of being considered dangerous. And make no mistake about this: being taken seriously, being considered dangerous marks the difference - the only difference in their eyes - between players and little people

It’s really quite sad and depressing to think that this is true, and it’s also very tiring actually having to do it. But it’s true – people in power only react when they think their position is threatened.  I am struggling, though, to give the concept  some moral grounding. Ultimately, terrorists are, I suppose, trying to get the attention of people who they feel are oppressing them, but clearly it’s not a moral solution to cause death and mayhem by blowing people up and killing innocent bystanders. I suppose for me, the “red line” is that it ceases to be a moral solution when trying to get someone's attention causes physical harm to a person or an animal.

A Christian, or at least a better Christian than I purport to be, would no doubt tell me off here for being judgemental, pointing me at “judge not, that ye be not judged”.  They would also say that the way to bring about change is to pray for it, and that God effects change through the actions of humans, and that it’s pointless hoping and praying for Amber Rudd to be struck by lightning – indeed, it’s an unchristian, uncharitable thought to even consider it.  And, of course, they'd say that prayer is much more than simply taking a shopping list of things to Big G and saying there you go, sort that lot out, chum. They would also say that God knows better than I do what is ultimately right or wrong, and that the mind of God is unfathomable so any attempt to try and interpret the actions (or the inactions, which is usually my concern) of a deity in terms of human values is doomed to failure.  In truth, these are all arguments I have advanced myself, over time, over the many times when I have found myself in this now familiar place.  And, of course, I still don’t know the answer, and nor will I, but it doesn’t stop me coming back to it over and over again, like the dog that returneth to its vomit. About the only thing that has really changed is that these days I find it harder and harder to believe in any of the above paragraph.

So, on a Tuesday teatime, instead of a Sunday for once, it’s time, I guess, once again, to shake my head ruefully, and go and put the kettle on.





Monday 3 October 2016

Epiblog for the Feast of St Leger



It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley.  It’s definitely turning crisper and of course it’s October already. White rabbits (black rabbits matter) and a pinch, a punch, the first of the month. What has happened to this year? Gone in a flap, that’s what.  It’s definitely colder, as well.  Soon the clocks will go back, and then it’ll be feet off the pedals, and downhill all the way to Christmas.

The squirrels are still missing in action, Matilda shows no sign of going back to her old ways and has continued to be an indoor cat. I think there were a couple of days during the week when she didn’t go outside at all. Misty, however, is still very much an outside dog, though the fact of the evenings closing in means that once more, we are back to her and Deb coming home in the dark, wet through and shivery. Plus, one of their favourite walks, up on West Nab and Wessenden, has sprouted a number of official-looking notices excluding dogs under section something, subsection something, of something or other. It needs looking into, but on the face of it, it’s the work of the gun club that owns vast tracts of the Wessenden moorland, and undertakes to “conserve” it for Natural England. They also “conserve” the grouse, in order to be able to blast them out of the sky and turn them into grouse pate. Or possibly grouse conserve.

In case you wondered whether (because of my comments last week) I had gone under in an avalanche of books, I can happily report that the week probably turned out better on the work front than I expected.  When I came back from holiday, I had two new books to launch, one to reprint, and six to send to press. Last week I organised the reprint and sent three (almost four – the other will go tomorrow) off to press.  So I am still in there and pitching, but next week is looking equally, if not more, ostrobogulous.

Still, it keeps my mind off the news, and the forthcoming end of the world and apocalypse if Trump gets elected.  On the additional evidence of the candidates’ debate (always makes me think of Mrs Robinson, that phrase) – as if we needed any additional evidence, it seems the man is delusional, irrational, hotheaded, and likely to get gakked off his face and press the button to nuke North Korea, miss, and hit China by mistake.  Actually, being charitable, the man may just have had a bad cold and attempted some sort of self-medication which malfunctioned.  And his microphone definitely wasn’t working properly. Every time Hillary Clinton started speaking, it cut in and interrupted her.  I have no brief whatsoever for Hillary Clinton, by the way. She’s just as likely to order the National Guard to shoot protestors as Trump is, except that he’d probably do it for no reason,  just to see what happens.  Psychopaths are like that.  I pity the USA its choice this November, but seriously… Trump?

The prospect of a Trump victory is especially worrying in view of the current imbroglio in Syria. I don’t have the words to express my hatred for the Russians and the Syrians bombing hospitals with barrel-bombs. Well, I do have the words, most of them begin with F, B or C and I am sure you’ve heard them all before. Unfortunately, our idiot government (I use the word advisedly) is only making things worse.  As the redoubtable Mike Sivier wrote this week in his Vox Populi blog:

This makes it possible that US and Russian forces will end up shooting each other – even if they say they don’t mean to. Americans have an extremely poor record in this regard – as their British allies in the Second Gulf War learned to their cost. In the midst of all this, the UK’s damned-fool Defence Secretary, Philip Hammond, has asserted that this country will continue bombing IS, in Syria, for “as long as it takes” – even though the Conservative Government has no Parliamentary mandate to do anything of the kind. MPs rejected military action in Syria, almost exactly two years ago. They have since approved strikes against IS in Iraq, but the ban on raids in Syria is technically still in force. Our personnel should not be there.

In the light of the new development, there is even more reason for the UK to pull out of Syria – but of course our Defence Secretary is a damned fool. This is a situation that could escalate into a shooting war between America and Russia, if damned fools like him are allowed to continue running around like bulls in front of red rags. That should be the last thing anybody wants – but do you see anybody trying to stop it?

Sadly, no, I don’t.  I only see the people of Aleppo being sacrificed in a proxy war of willy-waving between Assad, Putin, and Obama, with well-meaning but ineffectual and ultimately unhelpful interventions by the UK, at the taxpayer’s expense. A Paveway bomb costs $21,896 or, in real money, at today’s exchange rate, £16,852.  The starting salary for an NHS healthcare assistant is between £15,000 and £18,000pa.  Since the yardstick for deciding anything these days is seemingly to compare it against the NHS (and yes we’re still waiting for the non-existent £350 million a week) just bear in mind that every time we piss away £16,852 by dropping a Paveway bomb on Syria (sometimes on forces which are nominally our allies, which happened recently) we are denying the NHS a healthcare assistant. I’m sorry to be so blunt. I tried being subtle, and nothing happened.

One of the aspects of the horror in Syria – indeed in war zones generally - which is often overlooked in the impact it has on animals. Now, I know there will be people, on reading the next paragraph, who will say, Oh, that Steve Rudd, here he goes again, he prefers animals to people.. To them, I would give my usual answer. That depends which animals, and which people. There is a man in Aleppo called Mohammad Alaa Jaleel, who has chosen to stay behind in Aleppo and care for over a hundred abandoned cats in that war-torn hell zone. Many of these are family pets who have had to be left behind in a heartbreaking decision by families who have fled the conflict. I can’t imagine what it would be like having to leave Matilda behind and hit the road to get away from incessant bombing. And that’s before you start adding in the terror of seeing other family members killed, having to leave your home and go and sleep out in the open in the cold and rain, and all the other stuff that goes with being a refugee.  Whoever this man is, he deserves international help. Perhaps the Cats’ Protection League could evict some of the many moths from its wallet and get some fund to him, somehow.

Here at home, the refugee crisis might as well not exist, for all the sympathy the government and the press showers on it. The media are happy to indulge in hand-wringing and shroud-waving when it suits them, but never go on to make the obvious connection between the dead children floating in the Mediterranean and the policies of our government, amongst others, that put them there.  They report on the proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia which is tearing Yemen apart, and out of which comes film of horrendously overstretched hospitals and children dying of malnutrition because of the famine, but they never go on to say that we sold the Saudis the very missiles they used to take out the dockyard cranes so no more grain ships can dock and unload. (They claimed they had “accidentally” hit the cabs of each individual crane, apparently, while aiming for something else. Yeah, right. ) On the eve of the Jungle Camp at Calais being demolished by the French government (Why? What will this achieve? How will this help in any way?) the Archbishop of York, Dr John Sentamu, himself an asylum seeker who came here as a child fleeing Idi Amin’s Uganda, has become an unlikely cheerleader for the Daily Mail hate brigade.

Speaking at a literary event sponsored, in fact, by the Daily Mail (the clue is in the sponsor) he said that basically, refugees were being passed on to the UK as a direct consequence of the principle of free movement in the Schengen area. Since I had previously believed him to be a man who had sympathy with, and who had previously spoken out on behalf of, oppressed people, I can only hope that he has been misquoted or misreported.

Surely he must know that this country is not bearing anything like its fair share of the refugee crisis. It is far from being “swamped” and the only people who peddle this fiction are racist, fascist organisations such as UKIP who have an axe to grind, or people who are simply incapable of differentiating between asylum seekers, economic migrants, and refugees. He must also be further aware that other countries in Europe, especially Germany, have taken far more than their share of refugees and that it is not, as you wrongly asserted, simply a case of every refugee in Europe automatically making a beeline for Calais and thence trying to get into the UK.

More importantly, he must also be aware that, since the Brexit vote, every racist xenophobic bigot in the country thinks they have now been given carte blanche to abuse, harass, and, in some cases, physically assault, those people who have already managed to gain asylum here, not to mention EU nationals who are here legitimately, and even British citizens whose ethnic origin is other than white.  I cannot comprehend why he felt it necessary to offer further succour to these people by your inaccurate and frankly inflammatory statements.  It would have been more helpful, all things considered if he had spent his time on rebutting some of the common myths around refugees and asylum, instead of propping up the Daily Mail’s agenda. Anyway, I have written to him, ticking him off, and I’ll let you know if and when he replies, what he says.  If anything.

Meanwhile, Brexit rumbles on. There were reports, this week, that Theresa May was going to announce at the Tory conference in Birmingham that she was going to have to first enshrine every aspect of EU law into British Law, so they could then subsequently repeal the bits she didn’t like.  I guess this comes under the  heading of “taking back control”. One can only hope that the first aiders at the conference have the defibrilators handy.  She went on to say that she would formally trigger article 50 by the end of March 2017. She couldn’t really leave it much longer, bless her, although she must have been tempted to think about saying  “How about ‘never’ Is never good for you?” There’s nothing quite like telegraphing in advance to the gnomes of Zurich, though, when they need to start taking their money out. So now we know when it starts, though God alone knows when and where it will finish.  Meanwhile the three stooges, Johnson Davis and Fox, who sound more and more like a firm of dodgy accountants, continue to make self-contradictory statements and give every impression of three people who couldn’t tell their arse from their elbow without a large, labelled diagram. And, down at Canary Wharf, all those ships are being loaded up with money, which will be sailing away into the sunset, out of the economy, forever. Bye bye. Bye bye.  Bye bye jobs, bye bye prosperity.

It hasn’t all been bad news. This week, in a rare outbreak of common sense, although it remains to be seen where they will try and claw the money back with the other hand, the DWP finally decided to stop re-testing long-term ESA claimants. While this will undoubtedly save the government money, it won’t bring back all the people they’ve driven to suicide since 2010, so there will still, I hope, be lots of evidence to prosecute Iain Duncan-Smith and Esther McVeigh, if and when it ever comes to court.  It was sneaked out on a Friday night, with minimal publicity, as befits all government climb-downs.

Anyway, somehow we’ve once again made it to Sunday without having noticed and today is the feast of St Leger, or Leodegarius, who managed to get himself killed in 675AD or thereabouts by having his eyes put out and his tongue cut out before being murdered near Fecamp in Normandy.  In 1458 Cardinal Rolin caused his feast day to be observed as a holy day of obligation, which I am sure came as a great consolation to him They later named a horse race at Doncaster after him, which I am sure also chuffed him enormously.

I’m sorry, but this sort of stuff leaves me cold. In a week when the horrors of Aleppo have been all over the news, what comfort, what guidance, can I derive from Saint bloody Leger? Answer, nothing at all. I struggle from week to week to try and maintain some sort of semblance of belief that no matter how haphazard and nasty life seems, no matter how much bad shit happens to good people at random for no reason, that there is some sort of logic or reason behind it all, and to be honest, were it not for those odd moments when I somehow, suddenly, am seized with an awareness that “all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well”, I’d have thrown in the towel long ago.

So, my question is this.  Are we happy with what’s happening in Aleppo, and if not, what are we going to do about it?  There is anecdotal evidence that, in 1954-55, when Eisenhower, not known for his conciliatory approach to anything, really, was contemplating bombing China, he was dissuaded by a grassroots campaign which exhorted people to send in little bags of rice to the White House, to dissuade the president from this course of action. According to Albert Hassler, of the International Fellowship of Reconcilation, the bags were sent:

with the message, 'If thine enemy hunger, feed him. Send surplus food to China.' The surplus food, in fact, was never sent. On the surface, the project was an utter failure.

But then - quite by accident - we learned from someone on Eisenhower's press staff that our campaign was discussed at three separate cabinet meetings. Also discussed at each of these meetings was a recommendation from the Joint Chiefs of Staff that the United States bomb mainland China in response to the Quemoy-Matsu crisis.

At the third meeting the president turned to a cabinet member responsible for the Food for Peace program and asked, 'How many of those grain bags have come in?' The answer was 45,000, plus tens of thousands of letters.

On hearing this, Eisenhower apparently rescinded his decision to bomb.  Whether or not this actually happened is a moot point, and we shouldn’t be too optimistic about the effect of mass action: after all, if they sent the rice to Trump, he’d probably put it in a stir-fry, and over a million people voted against he Iraq war with their feet, but it didn’t stop Blair following Bush down the primrose path of dalliance. But what’s the option? Just roll over and let the buggers steal the shop from underneath us? OK, maybe bags of rice are a bit passé. There are some politicians I’d far rather send a bag of Ricin to, to be honest. But maybe in this era of mass social media communications and the internet and everything, we should at least do something.

Otherwise, it’s tantamount to saying we’re happy with it. Happy with the kids being killed by barrel bombs. Happy with the refugees drowning. Happy with the families having to leave their pets in war-torn streets of Aleppo. Happy with the kids being tear-gassed by the CRS in the Jungle.  So do something. Sign a petition. Write to somebody. Get a satisfyingly large brick, and hurl it through the window of the Russian Embassy. Or the Foreign Office. Or the Saudi Embassy, Or Number 10, Downing Street. Or all of the above. It worked for the Suffragettes. There’s a large stack of old bricks in the corner of our back garden. I was going to use some of them to build a sundial, but help yourself. I’ve probably already said enough to get myself reported, if not arrested, for thought crime under the “Prevent” strategy, so I’ll leave it there.

You say this is supposed to be a “religious blog” – well, I also believe in life before death. As Revd Elaine Wykes has said:

Do they think Jesus just went round patting people on the back and being nice and kind and caring 'pastoral'? How pathetic. Jesus flipped tables over, ranted constantly, challenged and called people out…

I agree. And to which I would add the following, from John Ball, the radical preacher who was part of the Peasants’ Revolt in 1348: 

My good friends, things cannot go on well in England, nor ever will until everything shall be in common, when there shall be neither vassal nor lord, and all distinctions levelled; when the lords shall be no more masters than ourselves. How ill they have used us!… They have wines, spices and fine bread, when we have only rye and the refuse of fine straw; and if we drink, it must be water. They have handsome seats and manors, when we must brave the wind and rain in our labours in the field; but it is from our labour they have the wherewith to support their pomp.…

That is why, speaking as a fat old hairbag in a wheelchair, sitting here crumbling away from a terminal disease, I keep on writing and agitating. And if I can do it, so can you, and you, and you  - and you at the back. Yes,  you.  At the end of the day, we will be “Only remembered for what we have done” as the song has it.  

The first time I really remember having got to this stage of teary-eyed frustration in my life, I was a lot younger. I forget which war it was, there have been so many, but I asked a priest (as it happens, I knew him because used to go around and chop up logs for him, as he was too elderly and infirm to do it himself. How the wheelchair wheel turns full circle) about this and he said the important thing was to cultivate the habit of patience. If you have patience, then anything becomes possible in time. He’s long dead now, these thirty years or more, but essentially what he was saying was the same as Gandhi said – first they ignore you, then they mock you, then they fear you, then you win.  

It’s not the fights you dreamed of, but those you really fought – as I said last week. I’m sorry once again if you came here hoping for a cosy fireside chat and instead you found me seething and angry at the death of children, angry at the mistreatment of animals.  If it helps, Matilda and Misty are snoozing in their respective beds, as I will be, once I have finally finished this Epiblog. Obviously, I am not advocating violence as an answer to anything- It is always better to shake someone’s hand than to shake your fist at them, but there are occasions when you have to get their attention first, before you can start that process. And if that means shouting about injustice, then so be it.

It’s 2.05AM now, so I am going to finish this off in the morning, or should I say, later this morning.

No, actually, in fact I am going to finish it now. I have changed what passes for my mind these days. I’m going to finish it so I can get on tomorrow with a straight edge and a clean slate. I’ll leave you, then, this week, not with some whimsy about all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well, though I do still believe that, sometimes, albeit infrequently, but with a song instead.  Dedicated specially to Forrest Trump.

Postscript. As I was in the midst of  posting this (on Monday teatime – busy day!) I note that Amber Rudd (no relation, I’m very glad to say) the woman who is pretending to be the Home Secretary, has said at the Tory conference that the government has “done all it can” to help the unaccompanied child migrants at Calais.  I’m glad it’s Monday and not Sunday, as I don’t feel so bad about saying that  statement is complete, and utter, bollocks.