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

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Sunday 31 March 2013

Epiblog for Easter Sunday



It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. The snow continues to linger stubbornly. It started out by being annoying; it’s now got to the stage where it’s boring as well.  I have been putting off the evil day when I have to clear it off my ramp in the hope that it would have melted, but the stuff is packed so hard it will probably take a road drill to shift it.  I managed to break some of it by sitting in the doorway and whacking it with the yard-brush, which also helped me work off some aggression.  The weather’s also been playing havoc with my “just-in-time” shopping solutions, in that we’ve been (unaccountably) running out of stuff that we normally have in the cupboard. Debbie is a firm believer in stockpiling, of course, which is how we found, on one occasion, that we had 22 tins of beans in the house.

Matilda has been (very sensibly) keeping warm and not doing anything so unwise as venturing outside for longer than she absolutely has to. A typical Matilda journey into the outside world lasts about twenty seconds; half a minute, if you’re lucky.  It may change, of course, if it ever stops snowing. As I type this, she’s curled up on the Maisie-blankets at the foot of my bed, her nose in her tail, snuggled up to Mr Hedgehog. 

At least now that the snow has packed down into hard ice, the nuts and bread I put out for the birds don’t immediately vanish from sight, as they did earlier in the week when the snow was new, soft and powdery. I’m always amazed by the speed with which the birds and squirrels appear, once I’ve thrown the stuff down for them. I can only assume that, in some way I haven’t fathomed yet, the squirrels have the house under surveillance.

Brenda, however, just turns up whenever she feels like it, and takes pot luck on what’s available. It has been suggested that I should write “Brenda” on the stainless steel bowl we leave out for her on the decking, but I think that probably would be going too far.  She definitely visited on Tuesday and Thursday, but I still haven’t got any photographs to speak of, because on both occasions, by the time I’d untangled the web cam and set it all up, she’d wolfed the food down and gone.

This being the last week before the Easter break, Deb was looking forward to just getting through the remaining four days of teaching. She had a rude awakening, however, when she got lost in the snow drifts on Monday. As she left, my last words to her were to the effect that I’d been looking at the weather photos on Facebook and if I were her, I would go via the main roads. 

Debbie, of course, totally ignored this advice and went via her usual back roads short-cut way, through Kirkburton. She got so far along the route and found a snowplough blocking her way.  Eventually, she had to backtrack and just got there in time for the class to start.  She said she’d never seen drifts like it, and they were as high as the camper van on both sides of the road.  She doesn’t have a good track record with Dewsbury; when she went there for her interview, one of the windscreen wipers fell off - obviously an omen.

The teaching week finally ground to a halt and Deb emptied out all of the boxes and bags of teaching stuff out of the camper on Thursday, including several dozen library books. In fact, there were so many library books that I suggested that rather than Debbie take the books back, the college could just post a notice somewhere saying the library is now located at 111 Meltham Road, Lockwood. In terms of logistics, it’s the obvious solution.  The reason Deb was emptying out the camper was that she is talking of our setting off somewhere, for a few days, over Easter. We shall see. Personally, I’d rather be cold and miserable in the comfort of my own home.

Deb does deserve her break, though. Unbelievably, the College have asked her if, after Easter, she will cover the hours of another lecturer who is off with stress.  This is obviously part of the official “share the stress” College policy.  In addition to your own stress, you have to take on an additional portion of the stress from someone else who has been made ill with stress.

These days, I don’t get stress, myself, I give it. It is more blessed to give than to receive, especially when it’s to some nudnik who deserves it. This week, I had a follow up call from AXA/PPP healthcare insurance, following on from my conversation with one of their bods last week, checking that I still had a terminal illness... I foresee hours of fun stretching ahead with these people. Next time they ring to check if I'm still suffering from a terminal illness, I am going to say "Yes, in fact it's much worse today, I am feeling... .... .... argh!" then let the phone fall to the floor.  Or get Debbie to tell them I have died and their prayers went unanswered.  Somehow I doubt that even that would get me off their call list!

The Archers message board saga rumbles on.  This week I had my reply to my various Freedom of Information Act requests to the BBC about the numbers and the traffic on the messageboard which the BBC say were their justification for the closure. Basically the BBC’s position is that such things come under the heading of operational stuff which they are not obliged to disclose to mere plebs like us; we just pay the licence fee! The letter was signed on behalf of the BBC FOI unit by one Lisa Quarrell, and I foresee this is a quarrel which I will be pursuing again next week, as soon as I get round to it (and, fourteenthly…)

Meanwhile, the idiot who actually took the decision to close the message boards has been promoted to a new “digital” job at Five Live, although he was only in fact implementing the flawed policy of someone else who has already left the BBC, and even the much-maligned (and justifiably so) producer of the show, Vanessa Whitburn, is going. She is retiring, no doubt to spend more time with her “ishoos” and her zeitgeist.  So it would seem that the poor old Archers message board has been the victim of what might be called the “Samson Agonistes Defence”, pulling down the temple on good and bad alike.  What a way to run the British Broadcorpsing Castration.

Still, it all gives me something, and someone, to think about, while I am playing Whack-A-Mole and clouting the lumps of ice on my wheelchair ramp with the head of the yard brush. Take that BBC! Take that, AXA/PPP!

Friday didn’t seem like Good Friday; in fact, because of the weather, this whole Easter hasn’t seemed like Easter, really.  I did my usual devotional task of trying to find some quiet space to read Good Friday 1613, Riding Westward, by John Donne, something I’ve done every Good Friday for as long as I can remember.  Usually, it sets me in the frame of mind for thing about these sorts of things, but it seemed different with snow on the ground. It is really strange that an aberration in the weather can have such a profound effect on how you feel about everything else, but I know I am not alone in being depressed by the cold, lingering winter, other people, too, have told me how it makes them feel “seasonally affected”. It is still a great poem, though, and I recommend you to read it in its entirety (too long really to quote here) and marvel at the dexterity and wizardry of Donne’s use of paradox, to name but one – “A sunne, by rising set”, and the way he plays with the idea that his body is travelling westward on a day when he should be turning to face Jerusalem.

Zak and Freddie spent the day with us on Saturday, Granny being out and about.  We all sat and watched the snow melting, which it was doing, albeit slowly. Eventually, towards dusk, Debbie decided that they had to be exercised whether they wanted it or not, and rousted them up to go “walkies”.  The magic word had its customary effect, and they were soon at the door, tails wagging in anticipation.  They all set off into the wintry waste down the track into the woods out the back.

A quarter of an hour later, I was tip-tapping away at my keyboard and I looked up to see Zak standing on the decking outside the conservatory door. A couple of seconds later, he was joined by Freddie. I trundled over and let them in. No sign of Debbie. Hmmm. Odd, that.  Just on the offchance that she might be lying face-down in a snowdrift somewhere, I dialled her mobile. Fortunately, she answered.

“Yes, I know. They’ve abandoned me.”

Apparently they had got so far along the track towards the cricket-field, decided they had had enough of this cold, unpleasant white stuff, and, on some unspoken but mutually understood doggy signal, had turned round and set off for home, leaving Debbie to make her own way back.

By the time I had cooked and served the evening meal, they were both snoozing soundly; Zak in his armchair, Freddie on the rug in front of the fire.  Fearless guard dogs and protectors of our property that they are, they slept through the visit of Brenda the badger, who scoffed the remains of the cheesy topping from Thursday’s pasta bake; and Freda-who-may-be-Fred the fox cub, who demolished the remains of the peanuts put out for the birds.

And so we came to Sunday. Easter Sunday, and the start of British Summer Time, no less, and the snow still lying.  Again, it feels all wrong. Easter should be a time of hope, of rebirth.  Even if you don’t literally believe all the stuff about Jesus rising from the tomb, it should be a time when you can look forward to the advent of, well, if all else fails, better weather.  So this is one of the stranger Easter Sundays I’ve spent, probably – at least on a par with the one I spent in Oakmoor aka Broadmoor, having intensive physio, two years ago.

It is perfectly possible to believe in the Bible literally, and believe that every word of it is true, and is the revealed word of God.  Lots of people, many of them living in the southern states of the USA, do just that. I, personally, struggle with it on many levels.  There is evidence to suggest that a historical person called Jesus did exist – references are scattered throughout Tacitus, Suetonius, Josephus, and Thallus.  There may even have been, at one time, and official record of the Crucifixion, written by Pilate himself, which is now long since lost.

Tacitus, writing about a great fire in Rome in 115AD, mentions Jesus in passing:

"Consequently, to get rid of the report, Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace. Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus, and a most mischievous superstition, thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judea, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome, where all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world find their centre and become popular. Accordingly, an arrest was first made of all who pleaded guilty; then upon their information, an immense multitude was convicted, not so much of the crime of firing the city, as of hatred against mankind. Mockery of every sort was added to their deaths, Covered with the skins of beasts, they were torn by dogs and perished, or were nailed to crosses, or were doomed to the flames and burnt, to serve as a nightly illumination, when daylight had expired. Nero offered his gardens for the spectacle, and was exhibiting a show in the circus, while he mingled with the people in the dress of charioteer or stood aloft on a car. Hence, even for criminals who deserved extreme and exemplary punishment, there arose a feeling of compassion; for it was not, as it seemed, for the public good, but to glut one man's cruelty, that they were being destroyed."

This is a far cry from the magical son of God stuff, though, it’s a straightforward account of the persecutions of the early Christians. In fact, with a few details updated, it could be the Coalition Junta’s policy towards the disabled.

The main evidence for Jesus is what we today call the New Testament, which also does have brief, tangential connections with actual historical events recorded in other sources, but those recollections that we now regard as the New Testament weren’t written down until maybe 100 or 150 years after Christ’s death, and not collected together until about 150AD. The early fathers of the church omitted many of the stories of Jesus which they found inconvenient or incompatible with the narrow version of Christianity promulgated by St Paul, and these became what we now know today as the Apocrypha. However, even allowing for the fact that oral tradition would undoubtedly lead to some variations in the recollections as set down, what strikes me most, whenever I look at the New Testament, is the cohesiveness, the degree of agreement between the accounts. Whoever Jesus was, whatever he did, he must have left a strong impression.

As to whether he performed miracles, who knows?  I have my own views of the nature of what we call reality, and the more I read, particularly of modern physics, the more I personally become convinced that it is perfectly possible, in theory at least, to bring about an alteration of perceived reality by the exercise of the will. It’s what people try to do whenever they pray. Maybe Jesus was just very, very good at it, or maybe there was something in him, something divine, that allowed him to step out of time. In effect, to have a “rewind” button, to enable him to raise the daughter of  Jairus, or Lazarus.

It still doesn’t answer the question that bothers me most of all, theologically speaking, which is why God, if indeed Big G is behind it all, chose to redeem mankind in this particularly long-winded manner in the first place. All this son-of-God stuff. I suspect I never will know, at least not this side of the tapestry.  Interestingly enough, in diagrammatic representation of the Kabbalah, the Jewish mystical tradition, the Sephiroth traditionally associated with Christ, Tiphareth or Tiferet, is placed at such a point on the intersecting pathways that it looks as if it is mounted on a cross.  And between the more “material” aspects of the world, and Tiphareth, is Paroketh, which can translate as “the veil of the Temple.”

As Glyn Williams writes:

Paroketh resides on the Tree of Life, between the level of Hod and Netzakh and that of Tifaret. It is known as the veil of illusion, concealing from the illusion of our everyday senses a greater illusion beyond. But the veil of Paroketh is itself illusory, because there is no real division between the physical and the spiritual worlds.

So in that sense, the Jewish mystical tradition and the Christian story of the Crucifixion coincide. A rending of the veil of the Temple, the Crucifixion showing the continuity of the physical and spiritual worlds.

This “revelatory”, revolutionary aspect of the Crucifixion is also, maybe what the anonymous author of The Dream of The Rood was getting at.  Since I managed to replace my lost copy of Sweet’s Anglo-Saxon Reader, I’ve been reading it again in the original. Painfully slow going, because it’s been 36 years since I last studied it in depth, and I haven’t retained the vocabulary, so I have to look up nearly every word.  Like Homer Simpson, every time I learn something new, it pushes some of the old stuff out of my brain.  The poem, preserved in the 10th century Vercelli Book, and carved, in part, on the Ruthwell Cross in Dumfries-shire, recounts the story of the Crucifixion told from the point of view of the cross on which Christ was crucified. I’ve been obsessed with it for years, and we make a point of stopping off at Ruthwell on our way back from Arran, most years.  There are several online translations of the original Old English text.

The idea of a speaking, “animated” cross is not as odd as you might think at first. Anglo-Saxon verse is stuffed with “riddle” poems, where inanimate objects describe themselves, and then invite you to guess what they are. If the description can be smutty and sexually ambiguous, so much the better. I guess this sort of thing eventually evolved into doubles entendre and jokes.

The startling things about the “talking” cross in The Dream of the Rood is not the fact that it talks, but what it says. Using imagery that almost harks back to the pagan, Germanic roots of the way Old English society was organised, Christ is not the meek sacrificial victim as he is often depicted, the sort of portrayal that troubled me as a child when I used to think “why doesn’t he just get down off his cross and zap them?” – in this poem, Christ is the battle-leader, the Lord in the sense of one to whom fealty is owed, and the cross becomes his faithful retainer, fighting at his side. At the height of the battle they are both pierced with nails, both splattered with blood, and Christ dies a heroic warrior’s death, taking one for the team, willingly embracing his fate.

The cross in the poem says that Christ wanted to climb up on it, with great “zeal”

Geseah ic þā frean mancynnes
efstan elne micle, þæt hē mē wolde on gestīgan.

I, personally, find this interpretation of the Crucifixion much more revealing, much more satisfying, though it still doesn’t answer the question, why? So, to sum up, even though I still can’t say the Creed without crossing my fingers, maybe what we’re meant to get from the story of Jesus rising from the dead is this:

Was there a historical person called Jesus?  Yes, probably.
Did he do the miracles attributed to him in the Bible? Who knows – it depends what you classify as a miracle.
Was he crucified under Pontius Pilate?  Again, there seems to be some sort of historical reference.
Did he rise from the dead after three days in the tomb?  Who knows.
If he did, what does it mean?  Ah. Now that is a toughie. The best I can get to is that maybe it means that we don’t have to fear dying, or we don’t have to fear it quite as much. 

I can’t prove that, of course, I can’t prove any of this. It is a matter of belief, of faith.  And I have absolutely no idea why it has to be this way. What I do know is that there’s a something in the human spirit which turns and embraces sacrifice. The early Christian martyrs certainly suffered – just to recap, thank you, Tacitus, from the top:

“Mockery of every sort was added to their deaths, Covered with the skins of beasts, they were torn by dogs and perished, or were nailed to crosses, or were doomed to the flames and burnt, to serve as a nightly illumination, when daylight had expired.”

Yet it’s Nero who is reviled today, as the idiot who fiddled while Rome burned.  And all those people in the past who were willing to be torn by dogs and perish, nailed to crosses, covered with the skins of beasts, and all that stuff, are the bedrock on which 2000 years of Christianity has been built.

Organised religion gets a bad press, not least from me. For a start, I can’t be doing with a one-size-fits-all morality. Some people (mainly followers of Richard Dawkins) would like to subject all Christians to the equivalent of Nero’s tortures today. I don’t blame them. In fact, there are some Christians I’d quite like to see covered with the skins of beasts and fed to the lions, for giving the rest of them a bad name (are you listening, Westboro Baptist Church?)

But for all the evil, intentional and unintentional, that it’s done, Christianity has also done good.  I don’t want to get into some sort of crude “scales of justice” type of argument here, with a hundred child-molesting priests on the one hand versus one Dietrich Bonhoeffer on the other, but there is something, something in the human nature which, when nurtured by devotion, tends towards the lost state of the divine.  In this case, by devotion to Christ.  That last paragraph, it may surprise you, took over twenty minutes to write and re-write, and I still feel I haven’t nailed it.  As Eliot says, I had the experience, but missed the meaning.

So if you come to me and you way, what is the meaning of Easter Sunday, what is the meaning of the Easter story, all I can say is, it means that, at the point where things look worst, when – for instance -  your garden has been battered with winter storms and them dumped on by snow and ice, when your daffodils are flattened, or your sheep are lost in snowdrifts, at the point where your heroes have all died in battle and are lying cold in their tombs, and you feel like the last survivor on the battlefield, picking through the corpses of your comrades; at the point where you wake up in the dark before dawn, and you feel cold, hungry and bereft; at the point where you think life’s done its absolute worst and then some bastard goes and pulls the rug even from under that, there will come a day of renewal, of resurrection, when the sun rises, the snow melts, the stone rolls away, the garden blooms again, and light and justice and goodness will be restored, and darkness will vanish into fleeing shadows.

The night is long, but day is longer still; no matter what you’ve lost, be it a home, a love, a friend. Pharaoh’s armies got drownded. And all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.  Happy Easter, everyone.





Sunday 24 March 2013

Epiblog for Palm Sunday



It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. I don’t know about April being “the cruellest month”, but March must be running it a close second! This year, March has come in like a lion and gone out like …er …a lion.  Sadly, it turned out that both the Look North weatherman and Harry Gration’s dentist were right after all, and the Hawaiian shirt and the sunglasses remain firmly at the back of the wardrobe.

The latest snow is apparently the worst we’ve had round these parts since 1992, or 1979, depending who you ask. Since I was elsewhere in both those years, I can’t comment, and have to take the word of the locals. The latest dump of snow has added yet more evidence to the theory that Matilda was an indoor cat in her previous life, though; it’s taken her three days to venture out into it. Two days of outright refusal to even contemplate going out into all this strange white stuff, and finally, this morning, a brief venture, but only after she had pawed at it from the safety of the conservatory first, to check if it really was dangerous before she stepped on it.  Gingerly, she took a few tentative steps, then turned tail and scuttled back indoors. Thank God for cat litter.

I know how she feels. I haven’t been out of the house myself for four days, and have been trundling round manically singing “Shut Up In The Mines at Coal Creek” by Hedy West, a sure symptom of cabin fever if ever there was one.  The dogs are divided in their judgement on the weather.  Zak loves it, Freddie hates it. On a very basic level, this is probably something to do with the length of their legs. If my “bits” dangled in the snow every time I went outside, I’d get pretty depressed about it as well. Freddie’s also over 80 in human years, and he’s earned the right to curl up on the settee wrapped in a Sheffield Wednesday towel, with a hot water bottle for comfort, while Zak pelts across the cricket field at Armitage Bridge, rolling over, barking and doing skidding u-turns.  He’d make a great Prime Minister.

Hot-water bottles have been a feature of this house for many a year, but this week the HWB situation reached crisis point because two of them gave out in the space of as many days. The one I habitually use has been getting old and flabby and a bit perished (not unlike its owner) and finally sprung a leak on Tuesday.  Debbie found a spare one upstairs and I filled that up and took it to beddies. In the morning, I discovered why it was spare; it leaks from round the stopper. Oh, for the old days, when lying in the wet patch at least meant that you’d just had sex.  So, I am now on my third hot water bottle in as many days, and a replacement has been ordered off the internet to give us a backup. If this one goes, I am going to fill them with plaster of Paris, spray them with silver paint, and mount them up the wall like a set of “flying ducks”.

I haven’t seen the fox-cub again, so maybe I really did hallucinate it, but I have been making an effort to catch Brenda on film. Without any success whatsoever, I hasten to add. I sat up during the week because I wanted to watch I Claudius, as it was being repeated by the Beeb in homage to the Television Centre, which they are abandoning to move to Salford in an attempt to squander even more of the money which could have been used to keep open the Archers message board.  Despite having to listen to it through a barrage of criticism from Debbie for watching something so “tinny”, culminating in her eventually intoning “Caecilius Est In Horto” over and over again, it was good seeing it again, and I made a mental note to find my copy of the book again.  Brenda still hadn’t put in an appearance, so I gave up and went to bed. Debbie came through later and told me that Brenda had just been for her supper, and that she’d got some video of her on the mobile.

Since then, we haven’t had any confirmed sightings, but we live in hopes. They stay down their setts during bad weather, which is eminently wise of them.  The weather hasn’t just clobbered us, by the way; as I type this, the poor folk of Arran are entering their third day without power and we’re listening with trepidation to news reports of the powers that be landing generators and snow-blowers on the island, and people being airlifted back to the mainland with hypothermia. It would be bad enough in any circumstances, but when it concerns people you actually know and care about, it’s very worrying.  The worst that the snow’s done to us, so far, is that the Sainsbury’s delivery was cancelled because they couldn’t get the vans out.

Despite the fact that the badgers are all still down their setts, the Junta is apparently hell-bent on continuing its policy of badger-culling in a futile attempt to curb bovine TB this summer.  The official DEFRA policy of badger culling is like tying to curtail an outbreak of winter flu in the human population by shooting all the old age pensioners in Herefordshire.  While I agree that, in certain circumstances, it should be legal to shoot old-age pensioners, especially the ones at the front of the queue in the post office or the railway station, asking how much it is to send this to their daughter in Canada or the times of all the trains to Windermere and can you take a dog, if you did go ahead and do it, all that would happen is that other old age pensioners will move in, from Walsall, Droitwich and Manchester, to take over the territory.  Why this is lost on DEFRA is a mystery to me.  At first I thought they were just stupid, but now I am coming to believe it’s a wilful and hubristic desire to kill animals.  [The pensioners at the railway station do, however, give a whole new meaning to the phrase, “the stations of the cross”]

It doesn’t surprise me, the badger thing: the entire government is stupid and hubristic. Further proof, if proof were needed, came on Wednesday, with the Budget.  For some reason, despite my better judgement, I decided to watch it live on television.  It was like watching a bloody punch and judy show, only not so funny or so entertaining. At times, I had to blink to make sure I wasn’t watching an old edition of Spitting Image by mistake.  It was the way it was all reduced to soundbites: Osborne braying on about the “aspiration nation”, and that capering twerp Miliband with his feeble, useless response, about as effective as a gnat trying to sting a battleship. We all know that the front bench are filling their boots – they just ignored his playground taunts to them to put up their hands if they were getting a tax cut; where was the moral attack on the whole basis of the enterprise? Why didn’t he ask the obvious question – since Osborne’s previous forecasts and projections were all so badly out, why should anyone, from now on, believe a single bloody word he says about anything? And what are we going to do about him? He’s torpedoed the economy by destroying anything that looked like confidence, and now he seems determined to go down with the ship, and take us all with him. The water is lapping round our ankles, and it’s time he acknowledged that plan A (ramming the iceberg) didn’t work, resigned, and walked the plank.

I got involved in an online debate about the Budget afterwards (as you do) and specifically, about whether or not the Junta knows the effect of the policies it’s inflicting on the rest of us, or whether it is merely out of touch.  I don’t believe the latter. No-one can be that out of touch. It’s deliberate, and it’s all about putting us plebs in our place.

Cameron and Clegg, meanwhile, are trying to outdo each other on being mean to migrants, having been stung into moving even further to the right by the likes of UKIP.  UKIP may well be closet-fascist BNP-lite fellow travellers, but at least they are honest about the fact that, until we exit Europe, we can’t actually do anything meaningful about immigration policy.  Cameron and Clegg both perpetrate the lie that they can do something about it despite what Brussels says, and Miliband is too busy apologising for things Blair did in 1997, rightly or wrongly.  But it doesn’t stop all and any of them from blathering on about the prevalence of brown people.

Clegg, in a breathtakingly hypocritical announcement on how he was going to get tough by charging people a deposit to come to the UK, said "Mainstream" parties had to "wrestle the issue from populists and extremists," while announcing the populist and extremist measure. Cameron, tomorrow, is going to be announcing that he will be cracking down on migrants by denying them access to social housing for the first five years they live here, or some such unworkable malarkey.  The Bishop of Dudley, David Walker, to his credit, has attacked the idea, saying:
 
"Public fears around immigration are like fears around crime. They bear little relationship to the actual reality. The tone of the current debate suggests that it is better for 10 people with a legitimate reason for coming to this country to be refused entry than for one person to get in who has no good cause. It is wholly disproportionate as a response. It is especially galling in Holy Week, when Christians are remembering how Jesus himself became the scapegoat in a political battle, to see politicians vying with each other in just such a process.” 
 
As the Joseph Rowntree Foundation has outlined in their 2007 Report about routes to housing for migrants to the UK,

“For all the heated debate about the impacts and consequences of new immigration in the UK, surprisingly little is known about the realities of life for new immigrants. This has not stopped media speculation about the motives of new immigrants, the priorities of statutory agencies and service providers and the consequences for long-standing residents. Much of this increasingly divisive debate has focused on the issue of housing and questions about who gets what and why, and the knock-on effects for local neighbourhoods, in terms of population change, community relations and sustainability.

But, of course, rational debate, and pointing out that the vast majority of migrants to the UK go into private accommodation anyway, and that while there are “Hotspots” of immigration in the UK, the presence of a couple of Polish shops on a West Yorkshire high street, for instance, doesn’t equal an invasion, counts for nothing compared to the Gadarene rush to be more right-wing than UKIP. The genie is out of the bottle, and the fart is out of the genie; the stench gets worse and worse, and the next election will probably be won by the party that promises to hold public hangings of asylum seekers.

I haven’t read Cameron’s speech, so I have no idea what he intends to do about emergency situations, for instance; presumably homeless migrants will be turfed out into the street to beg, along with the rest of us, in order to free up social housing for Tory swing voters, the way things are going.  But once again, I ask why is there a shortage? Why aren’t there sufficient resources? What did I pay all those taxes for, 1976-2010? Was it merely to subsidise cuts for the likes of Rich Ricci, the improbably-named, racehorse-owning Barclays Banker who copped a £40million bonus last week?

The remainder of the week panned out in more or less predictable fashion, with me struggling with the same intractable Gordian knot of problems that I was struggling with last week.  Odd nuggets of humour were in evidence; I had an email from Care2 Causes which was headlined “5 Uses For Left-Over Beer”. I replied, to the effect that “left-over beer” was not a concept I recognised. Then I had a man on phone trying to sell me Axa PPP healthcare. Boy, did he pick the wrong person to call. I heard out his spiel about how it is possible to be doddling along perfectly fine and dandy and then life pulls the rug out from underneath you… then I patiently explained to him that I was in a wheelchair, suffering from a progressive and incurable condition, and therefore possibly health insurance was pretty low on my list of things to give a shit about, (it’s actually number 437, just below “learn Portuguese”). He heard me out, and then said:

“Are you a praying man?”

I replied that I was indeed occasionally a praying man,  though sometimes I felt more like a praying mantis, but I wasn’t sure that they were ever listened to, let alone answered.

“How do you know that?” he said.

“Because if my prayers were listened to, and answered, my life, indeed the world in general, would be a very different place. George Osborne would have been struck by lightning, for a start.”

“Well, I can tell you that God exists…I will pray for you!”

By this time, I was starting to think that a) this call had strayed quite a way from healthcare insurance into hitherto unknown and quite surreal territory and b) I hoped his employers weren’t recording the call, given that call centres can come down heavily on people who don’t follow the script.  So I promised him that, when we’d both put the phone down, I’d pray for him, if he’d pray for me, and we left it at that.

The same day, I heard that the proposed re-enactment of the Battle of Towton had been cancelled because of the snow, which is quite ironic, given that the original battle was fought in a blizzard. Still, I suppose Health and Safety at Work was probably less of a consideration in the Wars of the Roses.

And so, we eventually reached Sunday. When I woke up this morning, I thought the snow was melting a bit, because clumps of it were falling out of the trees outside my window; then I realised it was just the squirrels, skittering about high up in the branches, scouring for any morsel of food they could find.  Given that the past week had seen the Equinox, I had assumed that the clocks should have gone forward today, so, as I lay in bed, I thought I’d better get up; cats to feed, birds to feed, squirrels to feed, writing to do, and I’d already lost an hour!

Debbie came though at that point, so I asked her;

“Have you put the clock on?”

“On what?”

She can be disturbingly literal sometimes. I filled her in on the concept of British Summer Time and she was most indignant that, despite getting up early, she was still an hour behind. Then, when I got up and logged on, I realised my computer hadn’t updated itself after all; it turns out that it’s next weekend that marks the official start of British Summer, which is just as well, really, with six inches of snow on the decking outside!

Palm Sunday has special resonances for me. In my Book of Common Prayer I still have the frond of the Palm Cross which Jan, my Occupational Therapist gave me when I left hospital.  Normally, Palm Sunday would be associated in my mind with balmier weather, better days, though, and not unremitting bitter struggle.But unremitting, bitter struggle is all we seem to have these days. To quote Yeats for the second (or is it the third) week running:

“The best lack all conviction, while the worst

are full of passionate intensity”

Reading back through these last few blog postings, what surprises me is how political they have become. Actually, “surprises” isn’t really the right word there. It’s more that reading them back, now, confirms my suspicion that I am finding it increasingly difficult to separate matters of politics, ethics, morality and spiritual development, and that is manifesting itself more and more in my blogging, to the extent that I have now more or less given up posting  on my separate, political, blog.

I guess I have reached that stage again, where I am at the same place I was ten years ago, trying to work out how to forgive those responsible for the Iraq war.  Only this time, the war is on us, and it’s being fought in the soup kitchens and the job centres and the shop doorways. It doesn’t help that ordinary life (or what passes for it) doesn’t always go to plan, either. I guess I might find myself more amenable to ideas of forgiveness if I had finished all three of the books I was supposed to have done for Easter this year, instead of only one of them.  The combination of feeling under pressure, and not being able to do a lot about it, is not conducive to spiritual calm.

I’ve always struggled with the Easter story; the way the crowd turned on Jesus and the way he was allowed to be killed. When I first heard it, as a kid, my reaction was, “hang about, this bloke has super-powers, why doesn’t he just get down and zap them all?"  And there’s still a bit of me today that would like to see a few of the buggers who obviously deserve smiting, get smitten with one of Big G’s thunderbolts.  Starting with Rich Ricci. Pharoah’s army got drownded, as the song says.

Later I came to realise that it was, apparently, all part of a much bigger plan, fulfilling ancient prophecy (usually, anything in the Bible which is illogical or weird can be explained away as “fulfilling ancient prophecy”) with Judas the necessary betrayer, and Jesus the necessary victim.  That explanation is still the official one, though no one has ever yet been able to explain to me why Big G arranged it that way, when presumably he started out with a blank sheet of papyrus, any more than they’ve been able to explain why poor people should pay for the mistakes and greed of rich people. I have, personally, started to believe more and more in life before death.

The reason I haven’t finished the latest book on Arran to schedule is also that, in order to write it, I will have to travel once again my own personal Via Dolorosa, as this last book is tied up so much with going back to Arran for the first time without Tiggy, and then coming back to find Kitty on the point of expiring.  I’m not looking forward to it, but if I don’t write it truthfully the best way I can, the book will stay forever unfinished. Suffering is necessary, apparently. It is necessary to suffer, in order to be beautiful, according to the French, and they should know.  But is it really necessary to suffer, in order to become closer to the idea of communion with Big G? Many people think so, which is why they go on pilgrimages, and fast, and lock themselves in cells with only a candle and some oatmeal biscuits.

The theological explanation is that you don’t need to, because Jesus redeemed us all by dying on our behalf. As the Activated Ministries web site puts it, rather glibly:

We're all sinners by nature, and our sins separate us from God (Isaiah 59:2). The only way we could be reconciled with God was if our sins were atoned for, and only Jesus--who was Himself perfect--could do that. Jesus gave His life "a ransom for many" (Matthew 20:28).

OK, so that’s that then. That’s the theory. But that opens up the much larger question (for me, anyway) of what counts as a “sin”. Because that is the path to moral absolutism, hierarchical churches, and organised religion being used as a tool of oppression.  How can I renounce sin, if it’s a sin to wish this hateful Government and all it represents could be struck by lightning and extirpated from the surface of the Earth?  Sometimes, it is only the anger and the hate and the indignation that gets me out of bed in the mornings. Hate the sin, but love the sinner, just doesn’t do it for me.

So, I trundle into Holy Week as confused and benighted as ever. Feeling maybe in whatever period is left to me, I should be devoting less time to the spiritual wranglings of a lapsed agnostic violent Quaker and more time to trying to build a new Jerusalem here on earth. One with love to the loveless shown. One without a way of sorrows.

Sunday 17 March 2013

Epiblog for St Patrick's Day



It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. We are now officially “bythuene Mersh and Averil, whan spray beginneth to spring”- lapsing into Middle English there, for a moment, in case you thought my keyboard had gone funny.  Not that there is much sign of the spray beginning to spring, at least not at the moment. The weather has gone completely bonkers, and we’ve had four seasons in one week, if not in one day.

The week began with the snow making a comeback, and bitterly cold draughts everywhere within the house. Noting that we were down to three bags of coal, reluctantly I administered a local anaesthetic to myself and signed a cheque for yet another coal order.

Matilda and the doggies haven’t been liking it much. It’s OK for the brief moments when the sun shines, but hail followed by rain followed by cold winds is not their cup of tea, or Felix, or Winalot, if you see what I mean. Matilda’s been curled up on the Maisie-blankets at the foot of my bed, and the dogs, when they have been here, have been curled up with their noses in their tails. Zak on his armchair with Tiggy's old quilted winter dog-coat spread out over him, and Freddie on the settee wrapped in a Sheffield Wednesday towel with a hot water bottle, -odd, that, I always thought he supported Huddersfield Town, what with him being a terrier - and me sitting in my wheelchair two feet from the stove with another hot water bottle stuffed down the front of my Berghaus fleece.

Our own quest for a new dog has more or less stalled, but may also be about to take an unexpected twist, because Grandad is finding it more and more difficult, on medical grounds, to take Zak out, and one option that has been discussed is Zak coming to live here, so that I would be able to let him out in the garden to exercise himself to a certain extent during the day, and then whenever Grandad feels up to it, he can come and pick Zak up from here.  God knows how this will pan out; Zak is a pretty confused dog as it is, but who knows, time spent in regular human company might help him to become more generally adjusted, who can tell?

Notwithstanding the lack of spray beginning to spring, there is still evidence of a vast stirring in the undergrowth, of something happening, at least with the birds and the squirrels. Every morning now, as I am getting up, I can see them in the branches outside my window, and every time I put out some stale bread or some peanuts, they come flocking like never before, or so it seems. I don’t know whether there are really more of them, or just that the existing ones have got a bit tamer. Either way, it’s a full-time job feeding them.

Brenda has also been visiting, if it is indeed Brenda, and I’ve also seen what I thought was a young fox-cub in the garden once or twice.  If it is Brenda, she’s become a lot less regular in her habits since last year. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to get any pictures, largely because of the time it takes to rig it all up, and the fact that I can’t really justify sitting up half the night on the offchance that a badger might put in an appearance.  Still, the food seems to be disappearing. The fox-cub may in fact be a figment of my imagination, I have only seen it a couple of times, and then only out of the corner of my eye.

The coal was delivered bright and early Tuesday morning. So bright and early, in fact, that I was still in the midst of my ablutions, but that was no problem, because Debbie was up and about and let him in, and he stacked it neatly in the usual place.When I came through I said to her:

"Did I just hear the postman?"
"No, it was the coal being delivered"
"Oh. That's early. Did you give him the cheque?"
"What cheque?"
"That cheque on the table in the envelope with 'Ace Energy Ltd for coal delivery, give to driver' written on the front! That cheque!"
"How was I to know you'd written a cheque?"
"Who do you think pays for the coal? The coal fairies?"

In retrospect, this was probably an unwise retort, but anyway, my bruises are healing nicely and in a couple of weeks, I’ll be right as rain. Meanwhile, I posted them the cheque. So the coal arrived, the stove stayed in, and the fire stayed lit and kept us warm, and, unlike the Vatican, we achieved all of this with smokeless fuel.

I can’t let the week pass without commenting briefly on the white smoke from the Vatican chimney. Mainly because I want to bang on about how zeitgeisty I was last week. No sooner do I start whittling on about St Francis of Assisi last week, than the new Pope decides to call himself Francis I. How weird is that? But anyway, yes, the white smoke. If they lived in Kirklees, the Cardinals would be getting a snotty letter and a visit from the council, threatening them with an ASBO under the clean air act.  It’s early days yet on the new Pope front, he’s a bit of an unknown quantity; in fact, he hasn’t even been installed yet. That happens next Tuesday, and no doubt, half-way through the ceremony, a paper-clip wearing a mitre will pop up and say, “You appear to be attempting to install a new Pope – do you want help with that feature?”

Anyway, the election of a new Pope had very little impact on the remainder of our week, which unfolded as usual, with a catalogue of disasters.  The camper van’s gearbox had failed to “settle down” as the garage had predicted, and it was still popping in and out of second gear at random. So, it was back up to the garage for further investigation.  Colin the computer man had to be contacted because of Debbie’s laptop running slowly, like a cludgebucket full of clarts, in fact. He promised to come on Friday, and, as I had to go back to Calderdale Royal Infirmary on Thursday, I had arranged with the plumber to come on Friday as well.

My trip back to Calderdale was a bitter-sweet experience, to be honest; the actual reason for my attendance was to be assessed for botox injections to straighten out my legs. The fact of sitting in a wheelchair for so many hours in the day means that the muscles in your legs go what the physio calls “chair-shaped”. This means that you can’t straighten your legs in bed, so you go into cramp, or at least I do, and you can’t sleep for more than twenty minutes or so without having to turn over.

Unfortunately, the neuro-surgeon who assessed me for the procedure took the view that my consultant and the physio were both wrong, and that injecting me with botox would actually make me worse – because what you are doing is equalising up the forces pulling on my knees by making the strong muscles weaker, rather than the weak muscles stronger.  So that was that, back to square one.

It was strange, though, going back to somewhere where I’d spent almost six months of my life.  I almost didn’t make it back there at all – on her way out on Thursday morning, first thing, Debbie pulled the door handle off, and I had only just re-attached it in time for the ambulance man to come in and get me.  I didn’t see any of the staff who had nursed me in 2010 – in fact, the old rotunda, where I was, isn’t even a ward any more, it’s been closed down and the staff dispersed to the more modern areas of the hospital. But, as I say, it was bitter-sweet.  On the way back, I fell to talking to the ambulance driver, and found that he restored VW camper vans in his spare time, a fact which I filed neatly away in the lumber-room attic of my mind, in case of very bad news from the garage. On the sweet side, I saw my first crocuses, huge blocks of them, on the verges near Greenhead Park; on the bitter side, the funny little DIY shop that used to sell “invisible nails” has gone. Empty and boarded, another casualty of the insane economics of the madhouse, of which we will no doubt hear more when Osborne gets up on his hind legs and starts braying about there being no alternative, on Budget day.

So that was Thursday, totally wasted, by the time I got back. I looked forward to catching up with things on Friday, which turned out to be a mistaken apprehension, because Friday was a disaster, all things considered.  The camper needed a new set of gear rods and a membrane, which generated another huge bill.  On the plus side, the parts are genuine VW parts, and guaranteed for a year, which is just as well, because the way it’s going, we may have to sell up the house and live in the camper.

Debbie’s laptop, by the time Colin looked at it, was diagnosed as having had some sort of “event” on 28th February, which had left its hard disk littered with errors and detritus, and in his opinion, the easiest thing to do was to just back up everything, then wipe it and re-install Windows from scratch.  Ouch. On his way out, he pulled the door handle off.

About the only bright spot was that the plumber was quickly able to diagnose and rectify the fault with the boiler. The timer clock was exactly 12 hours out, so it had been coming on at 7pm instead of 7am, and at 11am rather than 11pm.  Once he’d sorted that (free of charge, top man) it now seems to be behaving itself – so it was just the switch after all, rather than anything more sinister.

By the end of Friday, Deb was feeling ill again and went back to bed for three or four hours, so I was left sitting in the wreckage of the day, with only Zak and Freddie for company, til Granny arrived back at 9pm to pick them up.  She felt a bit better on Saturday though, and was able to get up in time to watch the rugby, culminating in the debacle of England being trampled by Wales and managing to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in Cardiff. Still, according to the commentary, when I could hear it over Debbie screaming obscenities at the TV,  Wales appeared to have not only Katherine Jenkins, but also Aled Jones playing for them, so we were obviously doomed from the outset.

Which brought us, of course, inevitably, to Sunday, and the feast of St Patrick. Which gives me a reason to write about Ireland, for a change. It’s a long while since I’ve been there, and I wouldn’t mind going again.  But it’s a long way to Tipperary, it’s a long way to go. Writing about Holy Cross Abbey last week reminded me of that trip in 1997, a trip when we also visited Thoor Ballylee, the tower near Gort, in Co. Galway, where W. B. Yeats and his family lived from 1921 to 1929, having bought it for £35.0s.0d. in 1916 from the estate of Lady Gregory.

It’s now a museum, dedicated to Yeats, with the usual memorabilia, first editions, and a visitor shop. Amongst the memorabilia is a painted board which says:

I, the poet William Yeats,

With old mill boards and sea-green slates,

And smithy work from the Gort forge,

Restored this tower for my wife George.

And may these characters remain

When all is ruin once again.

“George” being Georgie Hyde-Lees, whom he married in 1916, on the rebound after having been rejected by both Maud Gonne and her daughter, Iseult. Yeats described the ground-floor chamber as “the pleasantest room I have yet seen, a great wide window opening over the river and a round arched door leading to the thatched hall”. It became not only a home for him, but also a symbol in his poetry, and, in some ways, a symbol of Ireland itself.

By the time we visited in 1997, I was already getting pretty decrepit, and couldn’t make it up the winding stair to Yeats’s writing room, but the whole place was, nevertheless, imbued with his brooding presence. The winding stair itself became central to his symbolism, as did the antique Japanese sword he kept, and wrote about in  his collection Meditations in Time of Civil War, noting that:

Two heavy trestles, and a board
Where Sato's gift, a changeless sword,
By pen and paper lies,
That it may moralise
My days out of their aimlessness.
A bit of an embroidered dress
Covers its wooden sheath.
Chaucer had not drawn breath
When it was forged. In Sato's house,
Curved like new moon, moon-luminous
It lay five hundred years.

Various interpreters of Yeats have seized on his fascination with this artefact and built interpretations on it that suggest he was familiar with the ideas of Zen. I was one of these, once, when I first read the poem he wrote that starts:

If I make the lashes dark
And the eyes more bright
And the lips more scarlet,
Or ask if all be right
From mirror after mirror,
No vanity's displayed:
I'm looking for the face I had
Before the world was made.

Because, of course, “what is the face you had before the world was made?” is one of the Koans, the gnomic riddles, questions without real answers, asked by the Zen Masters of their pupils in an attempt to prod their mind into a state of enlightenment. These days, though, I’d class the poem alongside the one that asks “What then, cried Plato’s ghost, what then?” as its chorus, and I think Yeats is talking about the experience, common to all religions, of the “timeless moment”, the realisation of eternity, the mystical, felt-rather-than-understood point where you stand, for instance, in Holy Cross Abbey, and realise for a second or two, although you aren’t conscious of the time, at the time, that everything all exists, always has and always will and then it’s gone again, and you snap back into time once more.

Van Morrison, no less, has also “written” a song which contains the same image – well, to be honest, it starts off with the Yeats poem and then veers off piste into repetitive rambling, as do many of his other songs, now I come to think about it. Carla Bruni, Mrs Sarkozy as was, has also covered it. I’m not sure how far that knowledge takes us towards a state of enlightenment.

Yeats lived at Thoor Ballylee through some politically turbulent times, the aftermath of the Easter Rising and the turmoil of civil war following the establishment of the Irish Free State. I’ve written before about the sequence Meditations in Time of Civil War, especially the pivotal poem The Stare’s Nest By My Window, where he compares the state of Ireland during and after the conflict to the bees building a hive in the abandoned starling’s nest outside the window.

The bees build in the crevices
Of loosening masonry, and there
The mother birds bring grubs and flies.
My wall is loosening; honey-bees,
Come build in the empty house of the stare.

There was no way at the time that Yeats could have known just how long and how bitter the struggle to rebuild his country would be.  Even today, seventy four years after his death, Ireland still has to have two national anthems when the rugby team plays, one for Northern Ireland, and one for the Republic. True, our visit in 1997 was a lot more peaceful and a lot less fraught than my previous one in 1984, when there were checkpoints and armoured cars and soldiers with Armalite rifles everywhere, and the bloody Queen Mother, bless her, decided to visit the province on the day we wanted to cross the border into Donegal, which had a similar effect on the security forces to that produced in wasps (or bees, come to that) by prodding their hive with a sharp stick. But there are still people who want to use bullets rather than ballots to change the face of the country, although, thank God, their numbers have declined.

I’ve written before about devolution, and what a disaster it has been both for the United Kingdom as a whole, and for each of its constituent parts. We have a Welsh assembly whose chief function seems to be the licensed murder of wildlife and livestock in futile gestures to appease the farming lobby, and a Scottish assembly that has given us the current dogs’ breakfast that is the imbroglio over the Scottish referendum, but I do feel that maybe there should be a little asterisk somewhere so that what I’m actually saying is “devolution has been a disaster* except, maybe for Northern Ireland”.

I realise that in setting down these thoughts I will possibly offend or discomfit at least three of my friends north of the border, but I hope if they re-read this they will realise that actually every word has been carefully considered to have what I think are their best interests at heart. The trick, it seems to me, is “how do we ensure the continued independence and wellbeing and growth of the Scottish people and Scotland while also continuing to ensure the continued wellbeing and growth of the UK as a whole?”

Although the issue has been obfuscated by all sorts of party politics and vested interests, I do believe that it is possible to achieve that aim, although what I am suggesting will be viewed initially as anathema by some people whom I count as my friends. I hope my own loyalty to Scotland is not in any doubt. I have been going to Scotland on holiday since 1971, over 40 years ago. All my adult life, in fact. My ancestors, the Fenwicks, were on the side of the Jacobites. “Sir John Fenwick’s the flo’or amang them” is piped by smallpipers both sides of the border, Ettrick shepherds in shepherds’ check, in memory of Sorrell, the sequestered horse that resulted in William of Orange’s death when it stumbled on a molehill, leading to much quaffing of Drambuie and toasting of “The Wee Gentleman in Black Velvet”. When it comes to Scottish culture, I can quote Rabbie with the best of them, I can recite the Selkirk Grace on Burns Night (and I cook a mean vegan haggis) and I even know my Hugh MacDiarmid. So, as an “eemis stane in a yowdendrift”, I hope you will respect my bona fides.

If I could, I would wind back the clock and apologise for Culloden and the Highland Clearances. Not least because it would take the wind out of the sails of Alex Salmond. And that could never be a bad thing. But I can’t. Even though my ancestors were probably on the losing side, I can’t. We have to start from where we are.

At the last election, Alex Salmond won a mandate from Scotland for a referendum on independence.  Which probably was rather a “brown trouser” moment for him, since previously, up to that moment his political stance had been posited on the sort of vague idea of “Scotland shall be free … er … one day” That was perfect for Alex Salmond, while it lasted, because it was the optimum mix that allowed him to surf a wave of vague, unfocused anti-English casual racism that is extremely prevalent in some parts of Scotland.  The Braveheart tendency, which is normally expressed these days by supporting whoever England happens to be playing at either football or rugby. “Anyone but England”.  That should be the SNP’s motto. Unfortunately for him, the people of Scotland seemed to have called his bluff.

So, a devolution vote there must be.  I have to say at this juncture, that if it was up to me, I wouldn’t have started from here, but if we have to, personally I think England should also vote on whether Scotland breaks away. I just don’t buy this self-determination for indigenous races argument which is the basis for Scotland deciding on its own. We’re all such a genetic hotchpotch in these islands, who is to determine what being “Scottish” truly means? I think the road to devolution down which we were set by Tony Blair in the run up to the 1997 election has led to all sorts of anomalies and precedents, it’s created divisiveness and ill-feeling, it’s fed extremism and xenophobia in both Scotland and England, and it’s landed us with, amongst other things, the West Lothian question.  Anyway, good luck, Scotland, if you decide to go your own way, though quite what you are going to do for a currency, armed forces, a diplomatic service, etc., etc., is a mystery to me.

It’s impossible to look at the history of Ireland, or Scotland, for that matter, and ignore the effect of hundreds of years of conflict in the name of religion.  In many ways, the history is the conflict. It’s also well nigh impossible to pick it apart in a sensible fashion, since it’s mired in what Slugger O’Toole calls “Whataboutery”, whereby each side on the sectarian divide can top the other side’s stories of past atrocities, going back to when Adam was a lad. It strongly resembles Israel versus Palestine, in that respect.  The late Alastair Hulett, writer of Among Proddy Dogs and Papes, said of his song:

Sectarianism is a blight on the working class that keeps us divided against each other and thus much easier to keep in our place. Divide and rule is as simple as it is effective.

He sings:

And the old men lilt how the blood was spilt
On the banks of the river Boyne
Three hundred years of hate and fear
Clutched like a miser's coin.

The sectarianism in both cases is also a clash between Church and State. The laws of the State prohibit rioting and murder, but there have been those, who, even recently, have been all too ready to cite “religious” authority as a reason for carrying out acts that have all too little to do with “religion” as I would understand it. To my mind, “my religion, right or wrong”, is just as bad as “my country, right or wrong.” This is not to say there aren’t also those in the Irish religious communities, who, like Cardinal Cahal Daly, have spoken out against violence and extremism.

The Roman Catholic church does have a lot to answer for, historically, in Ireland, not least the Magdalene Laundries, and a failure – both recently and in the past – to investigate and punish those involved in child abuse, and to turn them over to the authorities. It has become a bit of a rubric in the public’s imagination, though, these days, to imagine that paedophilia is rampant, that it’s the “norm” in the Catholic church, and that every priest must, ipso facto, be some form of kiddy-fiddler.  It’s now got to the stage where the idea is firmly wedged in the public mind, alongside the notion that everyone on benefits is a scrounger and that all immigrants have to do is rock up at Dover Docks to be given a free council house, a plasma TV and a wad of M & S Vouchers.  It’s probably going to take some shifting, judging from the reaction to the news story this week about the Catholic Archbishop of Durban, Wilfrid Fox Napier, who has been criticised from several sides for having described paedophilia as a “psychological illness, not a criminal condition".

The South African cardinal told the BBC that people who were themselves abused as children and then abused others, needed to be examined by doctors. Personally, I think there is a debate to be had around this topic, especially in such areas as the premature sexualisation of children and the pressures put on them to conform to their peers. And at the end of the day, if you do get a better result from locking someone up in a secure hospital and trying to treat them, than  you do by locking them up in a prison cell and letting them out in exactly the same state as when they went in, surely society wins as well?

He is, of course, entitled to his view, and he was, as far as I can see, speaking for himself rather than for his Church, but his Church does have views on the subject of sexuality, and they are often inflexible and doctrinaire. This is why I don’t get on with “organised religion, anymore, why I am a lapsed agnostic violent Quaker.  There is a difference, however, between religion and faith. One of my Facebook friends, posted this on her page this week, in a discussion about atheism, and it’s so spot on, summing up exactly what I think, that I have nicked it, shamelessly, word for word:

It's not a question of needing religion. It's a question of having faith in God. This is something many atheists do not seem to get. I hate most manifestations of organised religion with a passion…but my relationship with the God I believe in and you don't is central to my life and my being. Religion and faith in God are two different things which may sometimes coincide. Nobody who is capable of rational thought would say that you need "religion" to have "morals". That just isn't the point. I do not differ from you (atheists) in that I have morals. I differ from you in that I believe in God.

I hope she won’t mind. If I say she’s a sweetie, she’ll probably forgive me. 

In St Patrick’s time, Ireland was known as Scotland, in the Dark Ages, which weren’t really dark, it’s just that we don’t know much about them.  It must have all been very confusing. And dark.  To mix up the murky mess even more, many scholars subscribe to the theory that there were not one, but two St Patricks, but that at least one of them was a Scot who was captured and taken to Ireland.

These days, of course, St Patrick’s day is an occasion to dye the Guinness green, and for people to celebrate their “Oirishness” by dressing up in outlandish costumes and getting completely blitzed to the sound of diddly-diddly music.  In the same way that Manchester United fans get more and more fanatical the further away from Manchester they actually live, so the most “Oirish” of the “Oirishness” is to be found in places like Australia and America, where the likes of NORAID used to like “the ould country” so much they raised funds to help blow it up. 

Admittedly, and obviously, the Irish diaspora has also played a part in distance lending a certain enchantment to the view. Anyway, sadly, he probably didn’t drive the snakes out of Ireland, because the fossil record apparently shows there weren’t any there to start with, although, as with Joseph of Aramathea at Glastonbury, there is a legend that his staff sprouted and took leaf when it touched Irish soil. Although other sources say this took place at Aspatria (literally “the ash tree of St Patrick”). He may or may not have used the symbol of the shamrock, with its three leaves, to deliver a parable on the concept of the Holy Trinity.

In historical times, people would wear “St Patrick Crosses” on their hats or clothing, either embroidered or made from paper. Jonathan Swift, writing to Stella, back home in Ireland, in 1713, mentions the custom in London:

The Irish folks were disappointed that the Parliament did not meet to-day, because it was St. Patrick’s Day; and the Mall was so full of crosses that I thought all the world was Irish.

I wonder what he would have made of green Guinness, shamrock bunting, and inflatable shillelaghs. Probably a hat, or a brooch. So, anyway, that’s St Patrick, and a very happy St Patrick’s day to all Irish folk, everywhere. And I hope it’s not too long before I get back there again, to the mysterious land of mists, mountains, and moving statues, where the dark Mourne sweeps down to the sea.

But for now, I have a much more mundane set of tasks to concentrate on, next week.  I’ll be watching the rooks and the squirrels building their nests, not in the empty house of the stare, but in the bare branches of the garden. I’ll be doing my accounts, editing books, and no doubt shouting at the TV when the idiot of a Chancellor delivers a Budget of gross mismanagement on Wednesday, and I’ll be watching the Pope being installed, and, in view of the news about the knees, I’ll be concentrating on the Zen aphorism that:

"Life is a bridge, therefore build no house upon it."

And I’ll be looking for the face I had, before the world was made.

Meanwhile, to be honest, there is so much great music from and about Ireland, that I was spoilt for choice for this week’s “closer”.  First of all, I thought of Bob Davenport singing “The Blarney Stone”, purely for kitsch value.  Then of course, there is the incomparable  Mary Black, who, although she is coming physically more and more to resemble Mrs Doyle from Father Ted, has still contributed some amazing stuff to the canon, notably “Song For Ireland”.  Both of those, and indeed, the gorgeous Maureen Nic Armfluff, whose songs go round and round my head on repeat most days, could easily have clinched it.  Not to mention Ralph McTell singing about how it’s a long long way from Clare to here. In the end, it was taking me so long to decide, so I bunged them all in, an unprecedented St Patrick’s Day playlist.




But then, it’s not every week that a new Pope is elected. Especially a Pope who apparently likes to live the simple life, and who travels by bus.  He may well be a sprightly, dynamic young 76-year-old, and he may well be a traditionalist, and a Jesuit (so watch out for the enemies of the Vatican being bumped off by an albino monk wearing an Opus Dei spiked garter) but he has washed the feet of twelve AIDS victims, I suppose. And, like two feminists doing the washing up, it is, at least, a start. A Pope on the bus, just like one of us. Habaemus Papam, in Omnibus Princeps. Which prompts the question, what if God was one of us?