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.