Epiblog for Trinity Sunday

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. The weather remains capricious (more on that story, later) but there are, at least a couple of flowers on the clematis, and many more in the form of tightly-folded buds, waiting to burst out when the clematis, in some unknown signal, sends the message to itself that the time is right.

Matilda is definitely a fair-weather cat.  Although she’s now going outside on a fairly regular basis, she still refuses to go out if it’s wet [unlike Kitty, who used to scuttle reluctantly out in the rain, do her necessaries, then get back to the fire as soon as possible]. And she still hasn’t worked out how to use the cat flap.  Sometimes, when I look at her, she has a particular absent, semi-vacant countenance and a glassy stare that tells you that she is undoubtedly the product of generations of in-bred farm cats with extra toes, cats whose father was also their cousin and whose mother was also their aunt.

Animal welfare was a fairly significant concern for me this week.  I received an email alert from one of the many “Stop the Badger Cull” groups to which I subscribe, reminding me to have one more go at “badgering” my MP about the fact that the cull won’t work, and that DEFRA needs to think again. [That would, of course, imply that DEFRA thought in the first place, which is by no means certain].  Conscious of the fact that, because I feed her and have semi-tamed her, by the reasoning of Antoine de Saint Exupéry at least, I am now responsible for Brenda, I decided to email my MP.  Of course, by that reasoning, I am also responsible for several squirrels, three jays, a carrion crow, a thrush, a blackbird, a bedraggled robin and a miscellaneous collection of tits [Google spider, please note] but DEFRA aren’t currently planning to kill them… yet.

I pointed out all of the obvious flaws in the cull strategy, which I have stated many times on both my blogs and which can be widely found everywhere from Brian May to the badger trust. I also added a few extra bits, pointing out that the Tories weren’t exactly flavour of the month at the moment, and they needed another PR disaster like they needed a spare arsehole (I am paraphrasing here, but not much) and finally tossed in a googly to the effect that, since the existing TB test was only being done because it was foisted on us by Europe, I may have to hold my nose and vote UKIP at the next election if they promised to get rid of it. [Not that I would ever vote for that particular bunch of closet crypto-fascists until the day the Devil went past the window on a skateboard because Hell had frozen over, but you have to use whatever subterfuge you can. In a dirty fight, sometimes you have to fight dirty.]

Much to my surprise, he rang me up. It may have been the magic word “UKIP” which did it, in which case I offer the advice for what it’s worth. Anyway we had quite an amiable chat about why the badger cull wouldn’t work – he did actually vote against the cull, last time – and, despite the fact that I am implacably opposed to almost everything he believes in, we did at least agree on one thing, that UKIP is a single issue party that hasn’t even really thought through its single issue.

Maisie, meanwhile, discovered that her new house came with two unexpected lodgers, feral cats who come over the wall from the Cemetery. I tried to offer what help I could, passing on the numbers and details of contacts who might be able to help her, and as we go to press she was attempting to borrow a cat trap in order to get them to the vet. I have to say that, notwithstanding that they are maxed out at a local level, the national numbers I rang for the Cats Protection League were anything but helpful or informative, and I am definitely cutting the donation to the CPL out of my will when I revise it, which I must do soon. Alfred Wainwright, mapper of Lake District walks, put it quite succinctly, in a book he wrote back in the 1990s.

“The general apathy of the public towards domestic animals is also appalling. Dogs are thrown out of cars on motorways, kittens dumped in plastic bags on rubbish tips, and few care. The church, professing concern and care for all God’s creatures, does nothing.  The human race has nothing to be proud of in its treatment of fellow creatures, unable to protect or defend themselves, nothing at all. We are guilty, and stand condemned. We should hang our heads in shame.”

Zak and Freddie, the other animals on my watch, haven’t been in evidence much this week, but Freddie did do something strange/amusing on Tuesday. I let him out onto the decking, and he came back after his foray into the wilds of the garden but, instead of coming back in straight away, he sat down and started looking out over the valley – it was like he had suddenly noticed the arm of the big digger swinging away down in the factory demolition site in the valley bottom, and for some reason, he found its repetitive arc of action fascinating.  Eventually, he got bored and came back in, but it was weird while it lasted.  The demolition work, meanwhile continues, as noisy and annoying as ever.

Uncle Phil, having re-acclimatised himself to the UK and re-acquired his taste for traditional ale [not that I think he ever really lost it] has recovered from his jet lag, and departed on Tuesday morning on his way to the Lake District, where the idea is that we would hook up with him again at some point next week, during half-term.

Wednesday was a frenetic day for a number of  reasons – I had my annual physio assessment, and the herbs I had ordered arrived.  In the meantime, the punctured tyre on my wheelchair was judged to be terminal, so Clarks the wheelchair bods had to take it away for fixing, which meant that I spent Wednesday in my clunky old spare wheelchair, wishing I wasn’t, and generally hurting and aching.

Meanwhile, the saga of the door handle coming off (which came to an end when Owen fitted new door furniture and two large grab-handles) has now been replaced and supplanted in our affections by the saga of the spare keys. Timpsons in Huddersfield have now had two goes at cutting a spare key for the outside door, a task which is seemingly beyond them, even with the original key to copy off.  I’d like to report some witty, humorous twist in the tale whereby the impasse was solved by the means of a coup-de-theatre, but, sadly, all that happened in reality was that Granny has now had two wasted trips into town to try and sort it, and the key has gone back in the post to the shop with a request for a refund. It’s only £7.00, but it’s not the principle of the thing, it’s the cost!

One of the herbs which arrived was catmint. We had two catmint plants last year, neither of which survived the winter. One was dug up by Spidey, next door’s cat, and carried off into the driveway. Although I found it, and re-potted it, it was never the same again.  The other one, out on the decking, was chomped first by Kitty and then latterly by Matilda, so by the time it was deluged by the autumn rain, it was nothing but sticks and twigs. I tried to put the new catmint plant out of Matilda’s reach but on Thursday I felt sorry for her and offered her a couple of leaves I’d snipped off it. She went totally bananas over them, sniffing them, rolling over onto them, then finally eating them, before proceeding to an amazingly energetic washing session followed by one of her “mad half hours” where she charges around aimlessly.  So, not only is our cat the product of cat incest, she’s now also on drugs.

Thursday saw the arrival of my niece Chloe’s knitted teddy bear,  which I hope will be able to be passed on to her very soon, if indeed the outlaws haven’t already done so. It arrived with an unexpected surprise. When my old  knitted teddy bear was restored to its original 1950s condition, the brilliant lady who restored him sent him back with another bear, made of brown wool, which got christened Lulu. This time, Chloe’s bear arrived with two small bears, part brown like Lulu, part cream like Lumpy (I mean, they had different coloured heads, bodies and legs) - mixed race teddies, in fact. Maybe the knitter was onto something, and these small teddies with their cream head, brown body, cream arms, and brown legs, or vice versa, are a symbol to hold onto in these troubled times. Except that if you tried to suggest as much, no doubt some idiot would be bound to compare them to “golliwogs” and misrepresent their motives.

Anyone who still seriously thinks we haven’t screwed the pooch when it comes to the British climate only needs to look at Friday as an example of how bizarre things are these days, weather-wise.  Horizontal rain and howling winds – we’d already had showers of hailstones in the week – and all this at the end of May, supposedly the warmest, sweetest month. The tub of petunias blew over and started rolling around the decking, and the other plastic greenhouse, not the one which Owen lashed in place last time he visited, but the one which had the strawberries in it last year, was picked up bodily by the wind and ended up lying on its front, wedged against the chiminea. God alone knows where it would have finally come to rest but for the fact that the chiminea was heavier than it was, and held it in place. Debbie donned her waterproof and ventured out onto the decking to stand the petunias up and move them to a place where they couldn’t be blown over again, and pick up the greenhouse. For a moment, as she struggled with it, I had visions of it taking off with her still clinging to the legs, an accidental balloonist, but she managed to wrestle it and get it under control.

It has been a “big” week for news, as you will undoubtedly know, unless you live under a stone on the Isle of Rockall. I have inevitably been affected by what happened, as everyone has, one way or another. But there were other stories in the news as well, one staggering one in particular.

The staggering story was that police in Redbridge, which used to be in Essex but is now a London Borough policed by the Met, have mounted a sustained planned operation against homeless people sleeping in a disused public baths and have confiscated, amongst other things, their sleeping bags and food parcels given to them by the Salvation Army. Now, I am normally one of the first to say that the police do an excellent job in difficult circumstances, unarmed, and in a world increasingly clogged by paperwork and bullshit, at a time when resources are being cut. My great-grandad was a police superintendent, two of my great-uncles served in the force, as did two uncles and a cousin who is still a civilian police support worker.

But I am absolutely mind-boggled as to what the police were trying to achieve here. Apart from the misuse of scarce resources, did someone really think that by taking away a homeless person's sleeping bag this would encourage them to put down a deposit on a semi or something? It defies logic. The police have issued a statement since, claiming that the facts were not as reported in the local press. Well, that’s as maybe, but part of that statement says that the issue of homeless people has often been raised as a matter of concern by local residents and businesses. I can’t help but feel that maybe somebody should have done something before now. Treat the disease, not the symptoms.

One thing that did go largely unreported in the outside world was that Iain Duncan Smith’s dishonest and misleading use of statistics has finally caught up with him in that he has been hauled in front of a committee of MPs to explain his department’s, er, “cavalier” use of statistics to give the impression that all benefits claimants are “scroungers”, something which it has been doing largely with the connivance of a press who are willing to swallow everything they are told without questioning it. I hope he gets the good mauling he deserves, but I am not holding my breath.

Oh, and the BBC finally abandoned its digital management initiative after wasting £100million of licence-payers’ money. I wonder how many Archers message boards that would have kept open?

But obviously the overriding story, the inescapable outside world story of the week, was the murder of drummer Lee Rigby on a normal English street in Woolwich.

Big sigh. Where to start unravelling such a mess? The most obvious place to begin is, I suppose to express regret and condolences for such a young life cut brutally short.  A wife deprived of a husband, a child suddenly fatherless, and a wider family in mourning. [In passing, and apropos of this, I wonder if the family actually wanted that obviously distressing – for them, I mean, as well as for us – press-conference, or whether they were herded into it, while still in a shellshocked state, by a media hungry to serve up victims as its audience sits down to their early evening meal.]

Trying to look at it in the round, and see the bigger picture, the two questions that seemed to prompt themselves most obviously to me were, why did this happen, and what can we do to make sure it never happens again?

Why did it happen? In bald terms, because two young men [assuming here from the point of view that they were happy to be filmed doing it and made no attempt to flee the scene, hanging around for the police to turn up, that they won’t be pleading ‘not guilty’ when it comes to court] seem to have taken it upon themselves to kill an off-duty soldier as some sort of misguided protest against British military involvement in Afghanistan, primarily, even though they were not Afghans, nor even originally Muslims.  Quite what they hoped to achieve by this is open to question. “We want to start a war in London”, one of them is reputed to have said.  They believed, like all such deluded individuals, that the religion they profess allows killing in its name, and that an attack on one Muslim is an attack on all Muslims, everywhere. There is little point in me calling this attitude deluded, however, or pointing out its obvious flaws, doctrinally speaking. The sad fact is, there are people who have reached such a level of fanaticism that they believe the end justifies the means, and that two wrongs do make a right. And not all of them are Muslims.

Perhaps a more fruitful approach then, is to ask why they believed this. For all the vilification of “Radical Islam” by the media, the Government, the likes of UKIP and the EDL, and from the taxi driver and the man down the pub, it’s not a question I hear put very often.  We’re told by the Prime Minister that it’s simply the case that “these people hate our way of life” over and over again. But why do they?

I’d like to advocate two or three linked reasons why, for a start. Although each of these in turn, also prompts further whys. As Graham Swift says in Waterland, often, when you start out on this process, of trying to unravel skeins of history, you end up with just a succession of whys until they all merge into one long whywhywhy – but we have to try, if we’re ever going to get anywhere with this problem.

I should say one thing, quite clearly, at the outset. Seeking to understand why something happens, in order to perhaps suggest ways of stopping it from happening again, is NOT the same as agreeing with it, or making excuses for it. Just so we are clear on that point, in case there are any supporters of EDL knee-jerk type responses reading this.

I’m leaving aside the most obvious reason – that one that’s always there, like a piece of grit in your shoe, that sometimes, random bad shit happens for absolutely no discernible reason at all, and we have a hard time squaring that with some ideas of God – or at least I do.

So let’s start with the phenomenon of religious fanaticism. I’m being careful to distinguish this from religion per se, though if you have read other stuff I have written, you’ll know that I do struggle with the concept of any church peddling a one-size-fits-all morality, because I don’t think morality works like that.

There are those who would contend that Islam in itself is a violent, backward and barbarous religion, prone to fanaticism, and therefore all Muslims are likely to be violent and cruel.  This is basically the view of people like The English Defence League, and their favourite newspaper, The Daily Mail.

I would contend that this is not the case.  While it is possible to pick through the Koran and find verses that seem to support this view, we have to remember, for a start, that we are dealing with a text that wasn’t originally written in English, and which is very widely open to interpretations, both formal, in terms of things such as Hadith, and Fatwas, and informally, by gullible young men with highlighter pens and Imams with potentially inflammatory web-sites.

I should also say, at this point, that it’s perfectly possible to find similar “hellfire, brimstone and damnation” passages in the Old Testament, and probably in the Torah as well, for all I know.  And of course there have been instances of Christians killing people because they held the “wrong” beliefs, from the Crusades to the Cathars to the Spanish Inquisition to the people who shoot abortionists still, even now, in the USA.

So what is it that makes religiously fanatical people “radicalised”?  Not religion as such, but a mixture of the erroneous belief that “your” God is the “only true God” and that any disagreement with this, particularly if it manifests in an attack on “your” religion, should be resisted with, and replied to with, violence.  This was the sort of thinking that manifested in the hard-line Wahabi Muslims such as Osama Bin Laden, who objected to the presence of US bases in Saudi Arabia, and which led ultimately to the massive tragedy of 9/11.

Since that fateful day, we [by which I mean the West generally and specifically the UK following Amercia’s lead] seem to have done everything we can to increase the numbers of radicalised hotheads with a grudge against us.  Nobody expected Bush to turn a blind eye to the events of 9/11, but the way in which he set about exacting revenge on the part of the USA has had massive repercussions for all of us. For a start, the global nature of “the war on terror” which we signed up to feeds directly into the supposed grievance that an attack on one Muslim is an attack on all Muslims.  In that respect alone, we have acted as a recruiting-sergeant for Al-Qaida, especially when you add Guantanamo Bay into the mix.  A legal [in international law] declaration of war on the states of Afghanistan and Iraq would have been a better option, but then the Geneva Convention might have had something to say about the use of depleted Uranium, cluster bombs, and Drones. Not to mention locking people up without trial for 12 years, torture, and extraordinary rendition.

So now, at the tail-end of this adventure, when the Taliban know that eventually we are going to fold our tents and leave, the government is still sending hard-pressed and probably under-resourced young men and women into Afghanistan simply to be professional targets. I have nothing but respect for the skill, dedication and training of the British army. We have, in my opinion, probably the best army in the world. But I have nothing but contempt for the spineless politicians who want to squander this precious resource on an unwinnable endgame, and who refuse to acknowledge that if you go into other countries and kill people, some of them are going to get mad enough to have a go back at you in return, especially when you are now allowing Drones over Afghanistan to be controlled from a bunker on an air base in Lincolnshire.

For reasons which will become clear later in this blog, I’ve been reading Alfred Wainwright’s Memoirs of an Ex-Fellwanderer this week, and one passage in particular leapt out at me – especially as Wainwright wrote it long before September 11^th, 2001:

The world is sick, and getting worse…few seem to give two hoots about the old virtues of pride and dependability, and respect for others. Violence and terrorism and vandalism are rampant. Clever men are engaged in the devising of instruments of mass destruction… religion proclaims a cure for all the ills of mankind, but has turned sour. Stupid people of different faiths and dogmas are slaughtering each other all over the world. The Sermon on the Mount is a dead duck.

If he thought that then, God alone knows what he’d make of the mess we’re in today. Sadly, I also have to say that the media has much to answer for here; for a start, whenever something like the Woolwich atrocity happens, they home in on people like Anjem Choudary and give them a prime-time platform to spout his views, as if he somehow speaks for all Muslims everywhere, instead of a very small sect nowhere in particular.  Then White Van Men all over the country see what they think is “some Muslim bloke on the telly” wittering on about Sharia Law, and the re-establishment of the Caliphate, and so it goes, and so it goes…

They are also very quick to report acts of “terror” in a way which I can only describe as biased, I’m afraid.  As Dr Gavin Lewis of Manchester noted, in a letter to the Independent:

National statistics show that about 300 people die from knife attacks every year. Few of these cases fit the media’s priorities, which to many appear racist, jingoistic and hypocritical.

Last month, 75-year-old Mohammed Saleem Chaudhry was fatally stabbed returning from prayer, in what police believed was a racist attack.

Theresa May did not recall Cobra. BBC News24 did not fill hours of air time asking local people if they felt safe (from whites). Newspapers did not print letters telling the “white” community to get its house in order.

Two wrongs don’t make a right, and I would rather Lee Rigby and Mohammed Chaudhry were both still with us and going about their business, but the difference in coverage between the two stories is, as Dr Lewis points out, quite telling as to where the media’s priorities lie.

In between times of heightened tension, the press, particularly the Daily Mail, are happy to make sure the embers of hatred remain smouldering, fanning them with stories about “asylum seekers who can’t be deported” and who are “benefit scroungers”. These stories are always written in a manner which has only a nodding acquaintance with the truth, and the paper often seeks deliberately to conflate Asylum Seekers, Immigrants and Muslims in what passes for the minds of its readers.

When the media aren’t splashing tragedy all over the front page, or “exposing” some other wrong supposedly perpetrated by Muslims, they are fond of saying that Muslims must “integrate”.  I’ve tried to show above how we are driving Muslims precisely away from any idea of integration and instead making them easy prey for the shadowy manipulators who want to “radicalise” them, but, on the other foot, I find that actual ideas of what could be done to “integrate” Muslims are rather thin on the ground. Instead, we’ve gone down a route of multi-cultural co-existence and even, in my opinion, some rather mistaken positive discrimination.  I’ve said before that this, in its more extreme forms, at least, does more harm than good, in that it hands a supposed grievance to the likes of the bigots in the EDL, a stick with which to beat us – that somehow, “Muslims” are getting some sort of special deal.

We need to face up to areas where there is a need for rational and informed discussion about some aspects of the Muslim faith.  And both sides must be unafraid to discuss these, without fear, favour or Fatwah.  The Muslim attitude to women* is one of these areas, especially in the light of recent “grooming” scandals, and also the issue which I particularly have with them, of ritual Halal slaughter of animals. I am not in favour of Halal Slaughter, but then I am not in favour of any animal slaughter, be it Halal, Kosher, “humane” or whatever.

*If we are able to discuss the issue of Muslim attitudes to women, by the way, it shouldn’t get bogged down with the distraction of whether or not they should be veiled. Left to itself, if everyone stopped banging on about Burkhas, this matter would be a self-solving problem in three generations. What girl wants to dress exactly the same way as her Grandma? The veil is a symptom of lack of opportunity and lack of equality for Muslim women, it should not be mistaken for the disease itself.

So, having looked at some of the causes, what can we do to stop it all happening again?  Knee-jerk reactions, such as burning down Mosques or attacking ordinary Muslims in the street as they go about their business, will only make matters worse.  Politicians who misuse statistics and rhetoric to make grandiose and misleading statements about immigration will only make matters worse, especially as the only party who claim to be able to do something about it are closet-Fascists in waiting. Fading politicians who use the opportunity to lay flowers at the impromptu shrine to Lee Rigby as a photo-opportunity will not help (Nick Griffin and Boris Johnson please note).

Media outlets that drip-feed Government anti-immigration hate propaganda and who give zealous “religious” hotheads a platform while ignoring or sidelining the views of the vast majority of ordinary Muslims, will only make matters worse.  And, I’m afraid to say, mindless, unquestioning, “my country right or wrong” patriotism will not help. We should get out of Afghanistan now, before any more of the young lives of our dedicated and professional servicemen are wasted on the vanity of politicians. (Or even worse, former politicians).  Arming the very types of people in Syria who we are fighting in Afghanistan will not help.  And resurrecting defunct anti-libertarian legislation to snoop on everyone’s emails and phone calls under the guise of national security is sheer political opportunism, and that will not help either.

So, we could start out along the road of making sure it never happens again, by doing none of the above.  But that alone will not be enough.  We have to rise to the challenge and not let this unimaginable tragedy for the family and friends of Lee Rigby spawn yet other, further, wider unimaginable tragedies elsewhere. And we (our politicians specifically) must be truthful and face up to the causes of these atrocities.  In the wake of Woolwich, a former soldier who had served in Afghanistan posted the following on one of the many internet forums discussing the crime:

It should by now be self-evident that by attacking Muslims overseas, you will occasionally spawn twisted and, as we saw yesterday, even murderous hatred at home. We need to recognise that, given the continued role our government has chosen to play in the US imperial project in the Middle East, we are lucky that these attacks are so few and far between.

It is equally important to point out, however, that rejection of and opposition to the toxic wars that informed yesterday's attacks is by no means a "Muslim" trait. Vast swathes of the British population also stand in opposition to these wars, including many veterans of the wars like myself and Ross, as well as serving soldiers I speak to who cannot be named here for fear of persecution.

Yet this anti-war view, so widely held and strongly felt, finds no expression in a parliament for whom the merest whiff of boot polish or military jargon causes a fit of "Tommy this, Tommy that …" jingoism. The fact is, there are two majority views in this country: one in the political body that says war, war and more war; and one in the population which says it's had enough of giving up its sons and daughter abroad and now, again, at home.

For 12 years British Muslims have been set upon, pilloried and alienated by successive governments and by the media for things that they did not do. We must say clearly that the alleged actions of these two men are theirs alone, regardless of being informed by the wars, and we should not descend into yet another round of collective responsibility peddling.

Indeed, if there is collective responsibility for the killings, it belongs to the hawks whose policies have caused bloodbaths – directly, as in Afghanistan and Iraq, and indirectly in places as far apart as Woolwich and Boston, which in turn have created political space for the far right to peddle their hatred, as we saw in the immediate aftermath of the Woolwich attack.

What we must do now is straightforward enough. Our own responsibilities are first of all to make sure innocents are not subject to blanket punishment for things that they did not do, and to force our government – safe in their houses – to put an end to Britain's involvement in the vicious foreign occupations that have again created bloodshed in London."

Amen to that. And as a nation, we need to show our true colours – stand up and speak out against extremism, and seek to understand why it happens -  remembering the compassion, respect and tolerance for which we have been known, as a country and a nation, throughout the centuries.  Otherwise, we will end up being just as bad as the murderous cowards who killed Lee Rigby, and I like to think my country is greater than that. Not greater in military might, not greater in xenophobia, but greater in the things that matter.  So don’t be afraid, let them show, Great Britain, your true colours are – as the song says – beautiful like the rainbow. And that’s why I love you.

After such a heavy week, I was looking forward to the weekend. Phil had already let us know he was settling in to his hotel in Keswick, and we were readying the camper van to enable us to join him in the Lakes over the long bank holiday weekend.  However, as usual with us and the camper van, things didn’t exactly run to plan.

Friday was always going to be a shitnastic day, weather-wise and otherwise. Debbie had declared her intention of getting off to the Lakes in the camper van as soon as possible, but as soon as we saw the weather, we decided that it was much more sensible for her to use up the day on some of the preparation and paperwork she has to do for College over half-term anyway, and to review the situation when we wake up to better weather and kinder skies on Saturday.

If I had to sum up the weekend that I have just endured, it was a weekend dogged by bad decisions, and not all of them were ours.  In order to meet the insane and grandiose demands of the College, Debbie had decided that first of all, so she could go off with a clear conscience, she must go up to College and have a meeting with this woman who has been wittering on at her about standardisation and “special marking” that she wants Debbie to do.  So Debbie spent two hours on the Friday, going up to the College, finding somewhere to park, parking up and then locating this particular woman’s room.  Only to have a meeting with her where she discovered that the “special marking” was, in fact, just, er, marking, of the sort Debbie had been doing already, anyway.

The loss of Friday as a travelling/preparation day to these timewasting idiots meant that we were obliged to travel up on the Saturday, instead, and thus spent the hottest and sunniest day of the Bank Holiday weekend, mostly on the M6.  Granny and Grandad had decided that they didn’t want to lend us Zak and Freddie for the weekend, so we were dogless, for the first trip in ages.  Meanwhile, the inshore waters forecast for Great Ormes Head to the Mull of Galloway, consulted prior to our leaving, had promised gale force winds later on the Sunday, so Debbie had decided to leave the kayak behind.

Also before we left, I had my eye on a potential rescue dog to be our new pooch, a small German Shepherd called Lottie. [Actually, the dog rescue web site described her as “small” although there was nothing else of note in the pictures online to give an impression of her true scale, so you couldn’t really tell if she was little, or, pace Father Ted, just far away]. Anyway, I had decided to ring up and see if we could take her on a four day introductory seaside holiday, to see if she “gelled” with us and our way of life – but unfortunately, the rescue centre had already decided to re-home her with somebody else.

When we got there, on Saturday, I decided to try and plug in the portable CD player we’d brought with us, which Debbie had unearthed from somewhere, and I rigged up the transformer and the universal lead into the cigar lighter on the camper’s dashboard. Not knowing the correct voltage, I decided to give it a blast at 19v, and it decided to make a crackling popping noise and emit a feeble wisp of smoke. So, not a successful repair, I think is the conclusion we were meant to draw from this short episode.

Of course, despite the forecast, Sunday at Walney Island was a fine, warm sunny day and Debbie, kayakless, was reduced to watching a seal frolic offshore, via her binoculars, instead of frolicking out there alongside it, while the silver wavelets of the Irish Sea danced and sparkled.  To cheer her up, I decided to suggest going to look around the shops in Ambleside, reasoning that there would be shiny things a-plenty to delight her bright, beady, magpie eye and matching attention-span.  Unfortunately, the cheeky thieving bastards who are in charge of Ambleside’s car parks had decided not to let you park free with the blue badge. Instead, you pay for the first hour and get the second hour free! Neither of us had any change or any real money at all, so, after that brief sojourn in the car park, we drove back out of Ambleside again and all the way back to Walney, with me in particular seething and vowing to look up, when I got home, whether this was actually discriminatory or not.

Debbie lit a huge fire and cooked the usual vegan barbecue on it; spuds in baco foil in the ashes, carrot and coriander sausages, and kebabs of mushrooms, courgettes and peppers on skewers. We were rewarded by seeing a spectacular moonrise as the embers of the blaze died away, and I thought I saw a light on the very distant horizon that could only have been the lighthouse at Puffin Island, off Pen Mon.  Again, I made a mental note to check the bearing on our Imray Irish Sea Chart when we got home.

Monday dawned fair and bright, with hot sunshine at 6AM. Unfortunately, it then did a complete reversal of the old Granny Fenwick dictum of “rain before seven, fine before eleven”, because by 11AM, the sea was crashing and boiling, surf hissing up the beach, and the rain lashed down the van windows. We decided to up sticks and go to Keswick to hook up with Phil. On the way we needed to get some diesel, so Deb pulled into the 24 hour Asda service station in Barrow-in-Furness. Because there was a queue, she switched off the ignition rather than burn what little fuel we had left, and when the time came to turn it back on again – nothing. It was deader than a dead thing. It was a Dodo amongst camper vans, nailed to its perch and gorn to meet its maker.

Time to call out the recovery bods. A couple of phone calls located the relevant 0844 number, connecting me to a bloke in a distant call centre.  I bet it wasn’t pissing down and blowing a gale there.  He addressed me throughout as Mr Hunn, and I didn’t bother to correct him, just gave him the basic details of what had happened,  As I was about to ring off, a thought suddenly occurred to me, that if it wasn’t repairable at the roadside, my status might present a problem in getting me actually home.

ME: Oh, I nearly forgot. One of us is a wheelchair user.

CALL CENTRE BOD: Have you got a spare tyre?

ME: Well, I’ve put on a few pounds since I came out of hospital, but why do you ask?

CALL CENTRE BOD: You said you needed a wheel change

By the time we had worked out the language differences, it was time to call Asda and let the shop know we were clogging up their petrol station, which I  duly did, and they despatched a stolid, solid, large lad in a full head-to-foot suit of high-vis waterproofs, to our aid, who patiently pushed the camper to a less obstructive place with me still inside it!

Eventually, the recovery truck turned up and the issue was located – the blade on the end of the earth wire to the starter motor had become so old and cronky and full of corrosion, that it had dropped off, that very morning.  He couldn’t bodge it, but he did get us going again, by the simple expedient of him holding the bare wire so it made contact with the casing of the starter motor, while Debbie cranked the ignition.  The only problem then was, if the engine stopped, it wouldn’t start again, unless someone performed the same service, or it was somewhere where it could be bumped. So we had no option really but to go home, go directly to home, do not pass go, do not collect two hundred pounds.  And so we did, and the inert lump of the camper sits on the driveway as  type this, waiting for the garage to tow it away and fix it.

So, that was the weekend that was. Lack of an internet connection prevented me posting this from Walney on Sunday. I sort of get the impression that mobile phones and internet connections have yet to discover Walney Island and vice versa.  Now I am looking forward to a week of catching up, watching it rain when I could (and should) be gardening, hardly daring answer the phone in case it is another huge bill on the camper van front, and hardly daring to turn on the TV in case the powder keg of simmering hatred following the Woolwich murder has exploded again. 

Still, Matilda seemed quite pleased to see us. And today is the feast day of the Blessed Robert Johnson, but sadly, I found when I looked him up that he was not who I thought he was, being a martyr of the reformation, hanged drawn and quartered in 1582.  That figures though – everyone knows that the real Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil in return for the ability to play like an angel.