Epiblog for the Feast of St Columba

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. One step forward, several steps back.  If anything else goes wrong in the remaining hours of Sunday, I will officially put my underpants on my head, stick a pencil up my nose, and say “wibble”.

It started last Saturday, when I shut the lid on my laptop to put it on standby, went off to make a cup of tea, then came back and opened up the machine, only to find that it wouldn’t power back up.  So I had to turn it off completely, and try again. Unfortunately, Microsoft Outlook must have been open at the time, and the .pst file got corrupted, meaning that the program wouldn’t open.  This was the first major waste of time this week: I then spent a day and a half trying to create new profiles, rename old profiles and get the one to recognise the other. Nothing worked, so in the end, I created a workaround using Mozilla Thunderbird, so at least I could receive new mail, but four years worth of back emails were denied me, together with all of the information therein.

So it was time to call Colin, the computer whiz. An expensive solution, but the thought of starting again with the emails from year zero was just too much to bear.  The only problem being that I didn’t have his number, because it was … in an email.  Eventually, I managed to find an old invoice.  He ended up, though, having to take away the file to see if he could hack into it.  Meanwhile, on Monday night, the TV channels started to go, one by one.  I did the normal Freesat retune, and that failed to find anything, so I ended up doing a manual tune, which brought us some new channels I had never seen before, mostly zealous evangelists with thousand-yard stares. Most of the old ones were missing. Time to go on the internet and look for a remedy.

In the meantime, I thought I would at least get on with some work, which I had been grievously neglecting as domestic chaos raged around me. So you can more or less put your money, in those circumstances, on the printer not working properly, which it didn’t.  After several bouts of “turn it all off and turn it on again, waggling the leads, and re-connect at logon, I finally got it to go again, but it was another hour or so of my life I won’t get back.

By Wednesday, Colin had managed to reinstate the email, the printer was working, and I had managed to get a quotation on next year’s home insurance that would save us £144.00 per annum. On the downside, I had to pay Colin for his work, though to his credit he only charged us for two hours when he could easily have charged for four, and the TV channels were still missing in action.  I hoped that I was at least through the worst.  As I trundled out on Wednesday morning I was pleased to find some strawberry plants at the side of my ramp, a gift from Jan, my erstwhile physio. I remembered that she had offered to drop some off, last time we spoke on the phone.  Well, it was either her, or the strawberry fairy. Or maybe she is the strawberry fairy, who knows. I was chuckling to myself, and quoting Andrew Marvell 

“Then, careless, I upon the bed

Of gelid strawberries do tread…”

I was looking forward, also, to the prospect of my new mattress being delivered. At my annual assessment, we’d discussed the contribution my old saggy mattress was making to my general inability to sleep for more than half an hour at a time.  The head honcho physio said she would arrange for it to be swopped for a new, harder one.  So far, so good.  The mattress duly turned up, borne by a man with the incongruous name of David Mellor, as it turned out. I know this because he had to borrow my phone to ring the hospital stores when it turned out that the new mattress he had brought was, in fact, exactly the same as the old one.  The NHS had once more gone into funny wonky uncle mode, it seemed.  This one will run and run.

Also on Wednesday, just to keep the pot of disasters bubbling under, there was a power cut, and the boiler (the new boiler, in fact) failed to revive and reset itself when the juice came back on again. Unfortunately, this wasn’t discovered until Thursday morning, when Debbie and Phil had cold water in the bathroom.  On Thursday night, after another twelve hour day of teaching, Debbie attempted to do a manual re-set, and it failed.  The TV channels, meanwhile, were still missing.

On Thursday, I loaded Sage for the first time this week, because I had some invoicing to do. Sage went into its setup mode, informing me that it was “preparing Sage to be used for the first time”. Not a good omen.  I decided to let it choogle through its setup wizard, because there was no other way I was going to be able to get into the program.  When it got there, my worst fears were confirmed. No data. I had a backup, that was the good news; the bad news was that it was dated 21/04/2013. Nevertheless, it did restore, and – hey presto! – the missing invoices returned.  All I had to do now was to re-create every invoice I had raised since 21^st April. That took two days.

Meanwhile, by Friday morning, I had located, and booked a visit from, Jeremy the Aerial Rigger.  Despite his rather incongruous name, he was a solid, straightforward, uncompromising man. He took one look at the existing installation and did that sucking the teeth/sharp intake of breath thing: “The people who put this in should be shot.”

I agreed with him (it seemed simplest) and assured him that, were I ever to find myself in possession of a firearm with the safety catch off, I would have no compunction whatsoever in hunting them down and giving them each a spare arsehole, but in the meantime could we possibly look at getting the satellite dish fixed? We could, it turned out - at a cost.  What he ended up doing was sticking a heavy duty band kit round the chimney stack of Colin’s side of the house, then attaching the dish to that, and re-aligning it.  This was what he called a “future-proof” solution, on the grounds that it would take the trees literally years to grow to the point where they impeded the signal again. I agreed, and said that by that time, I probably wouldn’t be that bothered, as it would probably be a case of me pushing up the trees from the bottom.

So, by Friday lunchtime, the missing TV channels had been restored, the missing emails had been restored, the printer was working again, but the boiler was putting up an error message saying “Call Installer”. I did, and John the Plumber duly arrived, some twenty minutes later, like the demon king in a pantomime, appearing behind me in the doorway (oh, no, he isn’t!) and pressed the boiler’s reset button, and – for him - it worked.  Obviously the magic touch. That just left the invoicing.  By now, I had re-created all of the missing invoices since 21^st April, and, unbelievably, also found some time to start replacing the single quotes with double quotes in Turned Out Nice Again. All I needed to do at this point was post all the re-created invoices, and print the new invoices.  Back into Sage, go into the invoice print routine, to find that  - aaaaargh! – all of my invoice templates are missing! Cue another day of epic struggle with Sage Report Designer, a piece of software so labyrinthine in its conception that it would even have outwitted Machiavelli.

So, by the end of Friday, the email was working; the TV was working; the boiler was working; the printer was sort of working, and the accounts were sort of not working.  So I was more or less back to where I was before the previous five days of struggle, but with a few more dents in the bank account, and a few more grey hairs and knits in my brow.

While all this has been going on, summer has suddenly decided to happen outside my window, and for most of the days of chaos this week, I left the conservatory door open and Matilda ambled happily in and out, back and forth, oblivious of the shambles going on around her.  She has turned into even more of an outdoor cat with the coming of the warm weather and has spent much of the time she used to spend curled up on the end of my bed, flaked out on the warm wooden decking instead, like a giant furry set of bagpipes with her legs going in all different directions.  She did manage to bestir herself enough to come back in and eat Freddie’s neglected dog food one evening during the week (I forget which, probably Wednesday) which was a neat role reversal and reprisal for what normally happens when Freddie and Zak come to stay.

Another frequent visitor to the decking has been Brenda the badger, who pops round for her tea most nights, and seems to enjoy the fare on offer, judging by the way she clatters about and occasionally shows her appreciation at the end of the feast by upending the bowl on her head.  I don’t know whether it’s to do with the shorter nights, but she seems to arrive quite early in the evening these days, including one night, Friday, where she came and started scoffing the contents of her bowl on the decking before it had even got dark.  Her near-constant attendance has been in marked contrast with that of the birds and squirrels, who seem to have been mostly absent without official leave this week.  Presumably there is other, tastier, more plentiful fare for them, nearer at hand.

The only other animal news of note this week has concerned Maisie’s ferals, who are still happily inhabiting a combination of her garden and Wombwell Cemetery and coming round now for meals on a regular basis, meals which consist of the cat food Maisie now buys, specially for them (of course).  The cats, in return, have already invaded the house and got as far as the bedroom (Sunshine) and the stair carpet (Bill Sikes) before being apprehended and/or deciding to leave of their own accord.  Confucius he say: “Cat that starts off living in garden ends up sleeping in bed”. In quite a short timescale, it would seem. As you can see, she has given them names, which is always the first step on the journey to being a crazy cat lady.

I have had that much to deal with at home, that I’ve not been keeping up with the wider world outside of the Holme Valley, with the exception of one or two bits that filtered through. The Duke of Edinburgh is once more paying the price of Royal fame by having hourly reports on the state of his innards splashed across the world’s media. I wonder if the doctor who opened him up for exploratory surgery took one look and said “My God! That looks like it was put in by an Indian!”

A 62-year-old homeless woman on the Isle of Wight was told that she didn’t qualify for emergency help from the IOW District Council, because she didn’t meet some damfool poodlefaking criteria or other, and advised to sleep in a tent! As Mark, an avid reader of my blog, has pointed out, there are always two sides to such stories, but my issue was that a) we have now become such a heartless and uncaring country, thanks at least in part to this “Government” that it wouldn’t have surprised me if every word of it was true, and b) what I found possibly more disheartening even than the story was the compassionless comments of the readers of the online version of the story. In one sense, hardly surprising, since if you want to know what the entrenched small-c conservative attitudes of England were in 1958, you only have to go to the Isle of Wight today, but nevertheless, some of these fat, comfortable, suburban burghers should take a good long look in the mirror and reflect that we are all just three bad decisions from being on the streets.

Iain Duncan-Smith, meanwhile, has more troubles on the horizon. His (let’s be generous and call it cavalier) misuse of official statistics has now also come to the attention of the Church, or at least the Quakers and a few other nonconformists, plus the Bishop of Bradford. All of the above, and a few more similar besides, have signed a public letter this week condemning the way in which IDS has been manipulating and cherry-picking statistics to suit his own agenda. So, it’s comforting to know that now he has pissed off the Church, however supine, feeble and useless Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition are (see below) at least there’s a chance of Iain Duncan Smith eventually being prodded in the arse by a demon with a pitchfork, which can never be a bad thing.  Beelzebub has a devil set aside for him.

Then there was the proposal floated by someone or other (probably one of the robotic zombie useful idiot backbenchers that the government winds up and sends out when an unpalatable idea needs airing and there isn’t a Liberal Democrat patsy immediately to hand) that children should all swear allegiance to the flag every morning in school, as a way of promoting social cohesion.  I was trying to sum up my own thoughts about this in a succinct manner that didn’t use any words starting with “f” or “b”, when I came across this rather neat post by one James Lee Jobe on Facebook, of all places:

What exactly are we teaching? If it is blind nationalism, well, I am against that. If the goal is raising people that love their country, it might be better met by showing them a country that loves its people.

Well said, that man.

Teaching continues to be a political football, with another questionable idea being mooted during the last seven days – that returning military personnel from Afghanistan, not necessarily with degrees or indeed any teaching qualification, should be fast-tracked into teaching in the UK. Because of course, teaching is such a breeze, anyone can do it, and then there are all those long holidays! Idiots.  Actually, I do have some mixed feelings about this. I would really love to see the collection of recalcitrant bolshy halfwits that constitutes Debbie’s worst class of the week, the class from hell, forced to do press-ups and a round of the assault course, the muddier the better. When there was that proposal on the news about arming teachers in America after the most recent tragedy there, I saw Deb’s ears prick up, and I knew then that at least part of her was imagining pistol-whipping some of the people who have caused her major grief, or maybe just firing a few rounds at random into the suspended ceiling, to get their bloody attention for once.But really...

I am wondering how long it will be before Michael Gove despatches a crack squad of geography teachers, complete with leather elbow patches, to Afghanistan, as a reciprocal gesture, to keep peace on the North-West Frontier: “Come on, Mujahid.  When you’re ready. It’s your own time you’re wasting you know. You’ve let the class down, you’ve let me down, and most importantly, you’ve let yourself down. Now write out 100 times, `I must not prime IEDs in class’”

Actually, what they need is one of the teachers from my dim and distant childhood. They wouldn’t be allowed to do it these days, but this bloke’s favourite trick was, whenever there was a disagreeable menial task such as litter picking or leaf-sweeping to be accomplished, to stride into the classroom and declaim in a loud, booming voice, “Now, hands up anyone who keeps tropical fish!” Inevitably, there would be one or two hapless kids who would venture a tentative hand in the air, wondering what this was all about.  He would then point at the kids with their hands up and say “Right. You two. Go and help the caretaker pick up the litter in the courtyard.”

There were some kids, believe it or not, who didn’t get the connection between unwise volunteering under false pretences and enforced arbitrary labour, the first time around, and actually succumbed to the same stratagem more than once! I can just see him now, out in Helmand: “Right. Who here keeps tropical fish? OK, you, you and you, go with the caretaker and walk slowly through that minefield to clear it!”

And, of course, the week ended with the news that the CIA have apparently been into Facebook, Google, Yahoo and Apple through the unlocked back door, and read all our emails and our deepest and innermost thoughts and desires.  So, President Obama, if you are reading this: I had very few expectations of you as a president, and even then I have been disappointed. Obviously, anybody was going to look good, in comparison to George W Bush.  President Coolidge would have been an improvement on George W Bush, and he’s dead. Although Dorothy Parker allegedly found it hard to tell. 

But with Dubya, what you saw was what you got. He wouldn’t have promised to close Guantanamo and then kept it open, and he wouldn’t have pretended to want peace and then sanctioned more and more drone strikes. He’d just have kept Guantanamo open, and continued killing innocent people with drones, without any pretence at all that he was doing anything other than just carrying on being his normal innately evil good ole’ boy self. He wouldn’t have made himself out to be some kind of reforming good guy and then just carried on doing the same old same old while insisting all he time that he was different.  George Bush would have just tapped everyone’s emails on principle, or rather on lack of principle, rather than do it and pretend he was somehow doing nothing of the sort.  I don’t know who you are any more, Barack Obama, and I am not sure that you do.  Now I have seen both innate evil, and innate evil leavened with a pretence of hypocrisy, I am not sure which is worse, to be honest. Can I name the most disappointing, two-faced US president in living memory? Yes I can.

Still, if you really wanted an example of politicians who ratted on their principles and on the expectations of the poor, the underprivileged and the vulnerable this week, you would have to go a long way to find a better one than the Labour Party under Mr Ed “The Talking Horse” Miliband.

An important line was crossed this week, a virtual Rubicon in fact.  It may not have seemed that important, but what it meant was that Labour had given in, and stopped trying to fight the Tory idea that there is such a thing as the deserving and the undeserving poor. By reneging on the universal nature of benefit payments, the Labour leadership, in a single black and bloody day, ceded the field to the merchants of austerity, folded their tents, retreated like cowards, accepted the Daily Mail agenda, and crept away like spineless curs, whelps with their tails between their legs.

Since both Eds, Miliband and Balls, have been invited to the annual meeting of the Bilderberg Group* this week, we can be sure, if there was ever any doubt, where their real sympathies lie.  The choice at the next election will be between the Fascists, the Tories, the other Tories, and the other other Tories. Marvellous.

For pointing this out to various Labour MPs on Twitter, I was referred to by one of their (I suppose) minders or apparatchiks on Thursday as “a dick”. Note there was no attempt to engage with the core accusation, that Labour had betrayed those who support it, and were now in fact just Tories in slightly worse suits.  It started going downhill when Labour began issuing apologies for things that weren’t actually their fault, like the credit crunch. Any day now I expect them to issue an apology for creating the NHS and the Welfare State, and beg the forgiveness of bigot Britain’s Daily Mail swing voters for creating “welfare scroungers”.

There comes a point where ordinary invective isn’t enough for these people, and you have to resign yourself to mining the rich vein of Elizabethan and Jacobean insults. The Labour Party is a motley band of whoreson varlets, rogues, cozeners, vagabonds and gongfermours who are not fit to daub the wall of a jakes.  And, when it comes to their stance on tax-effective political donations, apart from the Biblical verse about whitened sepulchres, which starts “woe unto you Pharisees”, what springs most readily to mind is one of Dr Johnson’s favourite insults:

“Sir, your wife, under pretence of keeping a bawdy-house, is a receiver of stolen goods.”

[*The Bilderberg Group, by the way, for some reason best known to itself, seems to be meeting at a Travelodge just outside Watford this year. Either there has been a monumental cock-up of historic proportions with the bookings, for which the person responsible is even now languishing in chains in a dank dungeon beneath the Wivelsbergerschloss, or else times are hard in the world of international conspiracy groups, and the Illuminati are down to their last shape-shifting lizard and skull and bones Yog-Soggoth demon in the Pentagon, and the 2-for-1 off-peak “Corby trouser press in every room plus complimentary breakfast muffin” offer proved irresistible. ]

Where does this leave us, though; the poor, the ill and the disadvantaged? Who will now speak for us?  The Labour Party may well sink with all hands, and deservedly so, though it’s a sad end to the story that began with George Lansbury and the ILP, Keir Hardie, and continued with Ellen Wilkinson, Clement Atlee and, yes, Harold Wilson, who at least kept us out of the morass of Vietnam. But who will look out for those who can’t look out for themselves, now that Miliband and his miserable crew have decided to ape the Tories?

It’s becoming clearer and clearer to me that Parliament, and the traditional methods of deciding things that it represents, is no longer working.  Or rather, it is working, but only in the interests of the political class, the moneyed, privileged few, who stand on the backs of the rest of us. MPs are mostly interested in feathering their nests and claiming expenses. Half of them have several other jobs apart from being an MP.  They’ve all got two or three houses, which we are paying for. You only have to watch the BBC Parliament Channel to see how few people actually attend for debates. What other job would pay you £65,000+ a year for not turning up? Possibly one or two middle-management posts in the BBC, but not many. [Well, on reflection, probably most of the BBC, actually, but in the bigger picture, in the wider world, it’s still uncommon.]

Owen Jones, with his People’s Assemblies, is making a valuable effort at affording people who wouldn’t otherwise get heard, a platform, a voice. The Occupy movement, while it lasted, gave the powers that be a shock to the system, which is one reason why they moved so assiduously to crush it.  One thing we do have is social media, albeit social media which is instantly read by the NSA and by GCHQ.  We can set up informal support networks like “I Got Your Six” and we can use it to push revolutionary ideas like Rooftree. We can use it to fight the mistaken idiotic evil of things such as the badger cull. MPs don’t like it when you hit them with a message on Twitter that starts @them and tells them exactly what you think. That’s why they called me a dick. I got under their skin.

But I think what we need is something bigger. Something like a mass campaign of peaceful civil disobedience. Suppose everyone just opted out one day? What if they gave a society, and no-one came? We have to force the issue and get their attention somehow. If 2 people stop paying their taxes, then they’ll get taken to court.  If 25 million people suddenly stopped paying their taxes, then suddenly, it’s a case of “Oh shit, recall Cobra!” Income tax is taken at source, of course, but there’s nothing I can see stopping people from submitting a voluntary tax return to HMRCE reclaiming an “overpayment” of tax for the same amount. As I understand it, it would be automatically repaid to you. Sure, they would eventually get around to querying it, and you’d have to give it back yet again, but can you imagine the chaos if 25 million people all did that?

The other thing we can do is stop paying our Council Tax. Keep the money you would have paid safe, don’t go and spend it, as you’ll have to settle one day, but in the meantime, let’s cause some chaos. I don’t advocate this lightly, but what else can we do? No taxation without representation. Local councils, starved of their income, would have to go back to central government and ask them for a bailout. So we’d have the same effect as refusing to pay income tax, but at one remove. It's Mrs Barbour's rent strike, but on a massive scale.

Sure enough, there’d be some short term disruption, if this strategy were ever to be implemented. It would be like the winter of discontent all over again.  Maybe worse. But fine words butter no parsnips, I’m afraid. The only language these people in the political class understand is the language of hurt. I can write things about them that are intended to sting, and I like to think that if they ever did read it, by the agency of the CIA or even just for themselves on the internet, they’d at least recoil a bit. I fear, however, I may be overestimating my powers, considerably. However: the one thing the rich government class need, in order to continue grinding the faces of the poor is money.  Starve the bastards of the tax income. They need us to be compliant, complacent, workhorses and to say “oh well, mustn’t grumble”, so they can carry on screwing us over and making us pay for their mistakes.

Well, I am sorry, but I must grumble.  It’s been a pretty shitnastic week in the real world, my world, but despite that, I’ve been seriously considering going on hunger strike over the badger culls.  I mentioned it to Debbie, and her only comment was “At least you’d lose some weight”. But I am starting to think more and more that desperate times need desperate measures.  Anything less than that is dealing with the political classes on their own terms, and we’ve tried that, and it isn’t working. Dig up Parliament Green, put up a bender, and plant some sprouts and turnips, and sod Boris Johnson. OK, once we’ve got through to them just how pissed off we are, democracy can resume from then on, but in the meantime… here are some apposite words from John Ball, official preacher to the Peasants’ Revolt:

"When Adam dalf, and Eve span, who was thanne a gentilman? From the beginning all men were created equal by nature, and that servitude had been introduced by the unjust and evil oppression of men, against the will of God, who, if it had pleased Him to create serfs, surely in the beginning of the world would have appointed who should be a serf and who a lord".

And so we came to Sunday, and the Feast of St Columba. St Columba is the patron saint of Derry, floods, bookbinders, poets, Ireland, and Scotland, and lived from 521 – 597AD. He was probably born in Donegal, a town I last visited in 1982. It was part of that experience that everyone goes through when they visit the Republic of Ireland, that wall you hit, when you realise that nothing is going to get done that day, or possibly tomorrow, or even next week, and do you know what? It doesn’t matter.  I was wandering round the town, feeling like I had fallen through the back of the wardrobe into a parallel, timeless universe, and I came eventually to Donegal Castle, where a workman was tastefully restoring the original stone fireplace, adorned with a fine carving of the coat of arms of Red Hugh O’Donnell, with dollops of pre-mixed concrete. I said to him that he had a nice castle, but it would be better if the roof was on.  He cackled a wild-eyed grin in my direction:

“Ah, now, do you know, sorr, the people who built this castle, they don’t suffer from toothache!”

“Oh really,” says I, “And why is that?”

“They’re all dead!” he replied, gleefully, giggling manically to himself.

Anyway, St Columba. He was probably of royal descent, and studied at  Moville under St. Finnian then in Leinster at the monastery of Clonard under another [different] St. Finnian. He was ordained before he was twenty-five and spent the next fifteen years preaching and setting up foundations at Derry, Durrow, and Kells.  He is most famous, of course, for the work he did at Iona, the cradle of Christianity in Scotland.

Possibly because of a family feud, which resulted in the death of three thousand people (they knew how to do feuds properly in those days) and for which he considered himself partly responsible, he left Ireland at the age of 42, and landed on the island of Iona off the west coast of Mull in the Hebrides. There he built the monastery which was to become world-famous. He also developed a monastic rule which many followed, until the introduction of the Benedictine rule. He died on Iona, and is also known as Colm, Colum and Columcille. He is remembered today as a Christian saint and one of the Twelve Apostles of Ireland.

The “family feud” happened as follows:

Tradition asserts that, sometime around 560AD, he became involved in a quarrel with Saint Finnian of Movilla Abbey over a psalter. Columba copied the manuscript at the scriptorium under Saint Finnian, intending to keep the copy. Saint Finnian disputed his right to keep the copy. The dispute eventually led to the pitched Battle of Cúl Dreimhne in 561AD, during which many men (this is presumably where the 3000 comes in) were killed. A synod of clerics and scholars threatened to excommunicate him for these deaths, but St. Brendan of Birr spoke on his behalf, with the result that he was allowed to go into exile instead. Columba suggested that he would work as a missionary in Scotland to help convert as many people as had been killed in the battle. As I said, if you want feuds with a capital “F”, you really do have to go to Ireland for them.

Three surviving early medieval Latin hymns may be attributed to St Columba. There are also many stories of the miracles which he performed during his work to convert the Picts, the most famous being his encounter with the Loch Ness Monster in 565AD, where he banished a ferocious "water beast" to the depths of the River Ness after it had killed a Pict and then tried to attack Columba's disciple. Columba died on Iona and was buried in AD597 by his monks in the abbey he created. In AD794, the Vikings descended on Iona. Columba's relics were finally removed in AD849 and divided between Scotland and Ireland. The parts of the relics which went to Ireland are reputed to be buried in Downpatrick, County Down, with St. Patrick and St. Brigid, or at Saul Church, which is near to Downpatrick. 

Well, what am I to make of the life of St Columba? As the old joke suggests, maybe a hat, or a brooch.  Despite its rather dodgy underlying premise, that it was an Abbey originally founded in order to convert the same amount of people who had been killed in a battle caused by St Columba himself, today the Island supports the Iona Community, founded by George MacLeod in 1938 as an ecumenical Christian community, committed to seeking new ways of living the Gospel, and running three residential centres on the Isle of Iona itself, and on Mull.

George MacLeod is an interesting character: as the “history of the community” page on the Iona web site puts it: 

The Iona Community was founded in Glasgow and Iona in 1938 by George MacLeod, minister, visionary and prophetic witness for peace, in the context of the poverty and despair of the Depression.  From a dockland parish in Govan, Glasgow, he took unemployed skilled craftsmen and young trainee clergy to Iona to rebuild both the monastic quarters of the mediaeval abbey and the common life by working and living together, sharing skills and effort as well as joys and achievement. That original task became a sign of hopeful rebuilding of community in Scotland and beyond. The experience shaped – and continues to shape – the practice and principles of the Iona Community.

Amongst its present-day activities are “Action for Justice and Peace in Society”. So I suppose that their heart is in the right place, even though the cynic in me tends to respond with “Yes, well, good luck with that!” Actually, I do find the principle behind what George MacLeod was trying to do quite a compelling one. Find somewhere remote, a holy place, and gather a community of craftsmen and artisans, maybe even a few artists, and live a simple life, baking our own curtains and weaving our own bread.  Maybe we could follow Gez Walsh’s lead and try and create some `Twisted Minds’ art, do something different.  Drop out, tune in, turn on. The more I see of the outside world, and especially now that Labour have declared that their policy is no longer jam and Jerusalem, but shit today and shit tomorrow, and cut loose the very people they are supposed to protect and stand for, the more compelling it becomes, actually. 

So, I’m sorry if you came here seeking solace, peace and enlightenment, today, and found me stomping around (metaphorically) in a foul-mouthed foul temper, seething with anger and throwing the furniture around. It’s been a bad week, both at home and abroad.  The next time you hear from me, I might be a hermit, living in a cave, the way things are going.  Or have founded a religious community. Or be on hunger strike against the badger culling, or all, or none of the above.  Until the red mist clears, I don’t know.  Cue Wordsworth:

The world is too much with us, late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers …

Maybe I would rather be “A pagan, suckled in a creed outworn” so that I might have glimpses that would make me less forlorn.  It’s certainly worth considering! Anyway, for the rest of today, I am going to put some marigolds into tubs, and pot on some of my herbs, which are growing at an alarming rate, into larger pots, and generally do some gardening. Tomorrow, the invoice template problem, the outside world of telegrams and anger, and the naming of parts, but today, I am going to spend some time with my friends Lemon Verbena and Red Bergamot, Marjoram and Purple Sage.  I may be a wage-slave on Mondays,  but I am a free man on Sundays. Since I seem to be increasingly becoming a dinosaur, I guess it’s time once more to prove my credentials as a large, docile herby-bore.