It has been a busy week in
the Holme Valley. Another week where you get to
Friday, and you count the survivors, close ranks, and carry on. Thankfully,
we’re all still here, God willing. Sometimes it felt like a close call. I have
no idea what the weather did, not that it matters anyway; it is what it is, at
the end of the day.
It’s also been a week of
mundane maintenance. As a householder, at this time of year, I am extremely
conscious of the leaves from the trees clogging the gutters. If it gets out of
hand, and the water starts to go sideways into the eaves and soffits, instead
of gurgling away down the downpipe, you can end up with all sorts of expensive
problems. So this week I started by organising a haircut from the local mobile
hairdresser. It’s always easier to organise having your gutters cleared with a
crewcut.
Actually, I am joshing
here. I organised both the hairdresser and the gutter men to come on the same
day. I was hoping that the haircut would be done and gone by the time the
gutter men started. As it turned out, I needn’t have worried. My flowing locks
had already been shorn and swept up and thrown on the fire, long before the
gutter men finally turned up. Anyway, despite my misgivings about them
teetering on their ladders in the gathering gloom, and the potential of them
crashing through the conservatory roof, and all the tedious paperwork their
deaths would create, they managed to finish and clear up and go home without
serious injury to themselves or the fabric of my house. I was shorn of hair,
and shorn of cash.
Matilda took no notice of
the various visitors. There is no creature on earth that can ignore you so
effectively, so implacably, as a cat. She briefly registered the presence of
the hairdresser, and the gutter man, when he came in to collect his payment, by
glaring at each of them in turn, then giving an enormous, fishy yawn and
curling back round into her favourite sleeping position (currently the
conservatory windowsill, for some reason only she knows in her little furry brain
the size of a walnut). She’s had a quiet week, punctuated by yet another
unauthorised visit to the garage. God alone knows what she finds so interesting
in there, I just wish that while she was in there, she’d do some tidyng up.
Misty, meanwhile, has developed
a new early morning routine, which I have dubbed “the mad half hour”. She
starts off at the top of Colin’s stairs, thunders down them and barrels across
Colin’s front room, through the connecting door to our side of the house,
through the bifold doors into the kitchen, out into the conservatory, does a
skidding turn and re-traces her steps into Colin’s, barges into my bedroom and
jumps up on my bed via my head, down to the foot of my bed where she jumps off
and heads back towards the stairs again, via Matilda’s food dishes which she
hoovers up en passant, then scuttles
back up to Colin’s landing. Then repeats the whole process. The first couple of
times she did it, it was quite entertaining.
Usually, I am up before
Debbie and I’m able to short-circuit the procedure by opening the conservatory
door and letting Misty out to tear round and round the garden instead,
scattering the fallen leaves in all directions, but this week there have been a
couple of days where Debbie deliberately got up before dawn, while I was still
a-bed, in order to do her College prep, as a result of which I got the full
treatment.
This brought us to
Wednesday and the eve of Debbie’s “observation”. It is no exaggeration to say
that this single event overshadowed the whole week. Once a year, the College
“observes” its tutors to make sure that the unemployable reprobates it signs up
for its courses are being taught in the prescribed manner, and this week, on
Thursday, to be precise, came Debbie’s turn.
So, on Wednesday night, we
ended up facing an all-nighter. I made sure that there was enough coal in the
scuttle so Deb could keep the home fires burning, made her a pot of coffee and
a hot water bottle, and, reluctantly, left her to it. By the time I was rousing
myself on Thursday morning early, she was already leaving the house. She’d had
45 minutes sleep.
Needless to say, the
experience of being “observed” in itself almost completely de-motivated Debbie
to the extent that she was thinking of giving up GCSE and jacking it in, an
idea with which I heartily agreed, much to her surprise. I truly think she
would be a much happier person once again if she realised that success or
failure in real life is a completely different thing to success or failure in
the insane Kakafaesque kaleidoscope- fractured world view of Kirklees bloody
College. Conversely, perversely, however, the College observed her as being a
“high grade two”, which is a gnat’s gonad away from “excellent”, so all the
midnight cramming paid off. At a price, of course.
Debbie also went into
College on Friday afternoon, even though she didn’t really have to. Next week
is tutorials for the GCSE groups, but one of them was going off on holiday
(alright for some!) and had asked if she could have her tutorial early. Debbie had
a meeting about standardisation of marking for GCSE anyway, so she generously
(I thought) said that she would go in an hour early (unpaid) and give this
woman her tutorial (unpaid) early, so she could go on holiday and not miss out.
Needless to say, the silly
cow didn’t turn up. What a waste of dog-farts. Sorry, but I have had it with
these people, and, unlike Debbie, I don’t care if they all fail. It might teach them not to take the piss so much. This is
why I could never be a teacher; you need the hide of a rhino and the patience
of a saint, and sadly I have the hide of a saint and the patience of a rhino.
There would be blood on the carpet before the first bell went.
So we got to Friday, limping
along, and I just fancied the sort of night when we bank up the stove, cook a
nice meal, put some medieval plainsong on, pull up the drawbridge, and loosen
our stays a bit, and maybe even light the odd T-light or two. Along the lines
of W. B. Yeats:
Bolt and bar the shutters,
For the foul winds blow
And everything outside us is
Mad as the mist and snow.
I phoned Debbie on her
mobile and caught her in Holland
and Barratt on her way back from College, buying vegan sausages.
“You know those joss
sticks that are in the camper van, when you pull up in the drive, can you bring
them into the house?”
“Why? Has somebody
crapped?”
Goodbye, romantic evening!
Actually, we did have a reasonable evening, and I was as happy as a pig in
archives, though Debbie crashed out towards the end, and after the week she’s had,
I didn’t blame her.
The week has also been,
inevitably, peppered with the sound of fireworks, although Misty seems to have
calmed down a bit, after the setback of her going missing on November 10th.
It could be that the pet remedy that I have been judiciously spraying
everywhere has finally started to have an effect.
I wrote last week that I
was going to start a petition on the Government e-petitions web site in an
attempt to restrict the sale of fireworks and the time when they could be
deployed. Thus it was that I duly wombled off to the site in question, only to
find that 16 other petitioners had got there before me, all with very similar
aims and objectives. Since the only effect of starting a 17th
petition would be to dilute the effect of the existing ones still further, I
signed the one that already had 11,000 signatures instead. I may get around to
signing the other 15 in due course, time permitting.
I have also written to the
West Yorkshire police, the council’s noise pollution anti-social behaviour
unit, my local councillor, and the police commissioner for West Yorkshire complaining about the nuisance posed by
fireworks, and telling them to do something about it. So far I have only
received perfunctory and unsatisfactory replies from the police commissioner
and the council itself. I only really sent the copy to my local councillor for
her information. She is a wonder-worker, though and if I was going to bet my
mortgage on anyone pulling a rabbit from a hat, it would be her.
I haven’t really had time
to do more than keep an ear cocked for news of the wider world this week,
though I did note that a Scottish minister on the Isle of Lewis has been
suspended from his Church for “transporting rams on a Sunday”. As someone wryly
observed on Facebook, if he can’t move his flock, then what’s he doing
preaching. It would, of course, have been even funnier to someone such as
myself, with a puerile sense of humour and an over-reliance on racial
stereotypes, had it happened in Wales.
It’s just as well that it
didn’t happen anywhere under the jurisdiction of DEFRA, otherwise they would
probably have ended up being culled. Owen Paterson, surely the most inept and
obtuse in a long line of agriculture ministers, announced this week that the
culls of badgers in both Gloucestershire and Somerset had failed in their objectives and
would be called off, despite previously being extended in a bid to reach the
required quota. I take no delight in being proved right, but everything I said
would go wrong, has gone wrong. The badgers didn’t just surrender and line up
obligingly to be shot, they skedaddled, probably spreading TB over a wider area
than they would have if left undisturbed.
The whole fiasco has been
a costly blunder which has left everything back at square one, with the
exception of course, that almost another year has been wasted in the real fight
against bovine TB. I briefly saw a report this week somewhere that Owen
Paterson had called for a cull of the wild white cattle of Chillingham as a
precaution against BTB, and if that is truly the case, if he really believes
that killing out one of the most historic herds in the country is the answer,
then he truly has developed scrapie, and should be culled himself.
It’s not been a good week
for animals, real or imaginary. The idiots in charge of the US adult cartoon
series Family Guy decided to kill off
Brian, the family dog, the only character that makes the whole thing worth
watching, in a cynical attempt to boost ratings which has backfired
spectacularly with over 120,000 people signing an online petition in three days
to express their anger at the plot development, and here in the UK we had our
own, minor key version of a similar tragedy, when the sheepdog puppy Baz got
(literally) caught in the crossfire between the warring Grundy brothers on The Archers, and met his demise.
In the furore over Baz's
demise, which lit up the Archers Facebook page like the proverbial Christmas
tree, we should remember that this is in fact an episode in a fairly tinny
radio drama, and that Baz was not a real dog, he was in fact a sound effect.
I did once get into bother
by responding to a student who posted on the old BBC Archers Message Board, asking for information for their
dissertation on radio drama, and telling her that it was a little-known fact
that all the animal noises in The Archers
are made by real animals in the studio, and sound effects were never used. But
I know the truth. Baz was a sound-effect. In fact, I can almost hear Tony Blair
now delivering Baz's eulogy - "He was the people’s sound effect..."
The problems start
because, although no sound effects were harmed in the making of the programme,
the act depicted actually polarises the listenership. There are those who
dislike dogs (or indeed all animals) and gleefully post celebratory posts about
how it was good riddance, served him right, the only good dog is a dead dog,
there are too many dogs in the world, and they would do the same
themselves. This is occasionally coupled
with sniping at people who *do* care for animals, in the most extreme cases, by
people who enjoy winding others up and causing problems on internet message
boards. Then you get the followers
of the other side of the argument responding in kind, and so it goes on, with
each side lobbing grenades at each other from entrenched positions.
In many ways I see this as a manifestation of the dichotomy that exists in a wider form in the farming/food industry as a whole. On the one side, the people who see animals basically as chunks of meat in a freezer, on the other side, the people who stand on the quayside at Harwich or Dover on a freezing day, trying to stop live exports. Or the people who sit up all night trying to trap and re-home feral cats, or the people who turn out mob handed to look for someone’s lost dog. And never the twain shall meet. This is also evident in Ambridge, as it is in the discussion over the badger cull, veal exports and factory farming in real life. In that respect at least, the otherwise rather surreal imaginary community clustered on the banks of the Am is, indeed, in touch with the zeitgeist.
Although I have been
vegetarian since 1988 (initially for health reasons, the knowledge of animal
welfare issues only came later) I realise that there is no point in trying to
"convert" people like these to vegetarianism. Likewise religion. It's
something you have to find for yourself and come to in your own way. Or not at
all. I look forward to a day when
animals of all kinds are treated with the respect I think they deserve, and
when people no longer die of crackling-related illnesses, but I doubt it will
happen in my lifetime, although there are sound economic, health and, I
believe, moral arguments in favour. Anyone interested in the latter aspect
could do a lot worse than read Andrew Linzey's book Animal Theology. Unfortunately, I can’t cut and paste the entire
book into this blog, although I would very much like to. You can try and put
forward a reasoned argument for discussion, and some clown will inevitably
post, in response, “anyone fancy a burger?”
Against stupidity, the
gods themselves contend in vain, as the old saying has it – or, in the words of
Granny Fenwick – “You can’t educate pork”. I mustard mitt my heart sank when
the Baz episode aired, not least because listeners can now look forward to
weeks of this tedious wrangling feud between the Grundys drivelling on and on.
I think the time has come for me to stop listening again, as I did for over a
year, the last time the Archers scriptwriters allowed a timid, harmless
creature to suffer a needless death in the pursuit of sensationalism (Nigel
Pargetter).
And I do think it is right
to draw that parallel. Leaving aside for the moment the wider question of
whether or not the scriptwriters are in order to use a sensationalised version
of animal suffering as the stuff of entertainment, they should also realise
that, with a long-running show such as The Archers, the audience have
collectively, invested years of “emotional capital” in the storylines, the
plots and characters, and it ill behoves any jumped up little Jack-in-Office to
tinker with a national treasure. It’s like painting over a Constable with Dulux
emulsion because you fancied a change.
Anyway, as with Family Guy,
dear Archers, I am afraid your ratings just went down by at least one.
Responsible dog
ownership’s also been on my mind this week not just because of The Archers, but also because it was 21
years ago this year, on November 30th 1992, that Sylvester was
killed, and I found his body lying just a few yards from the back door of my
house at Carlton,
Near Barnsley. He’d been set upon by one of the many vicious and semi-stray
dogs that used to roam around Crookes
Lane and Bramah
Street in those days in more or less feral packs,
and had had his neck broken. However, if I’d been in Ed Grundy’s position that
night, and had a shotgun to hand, I wouldn’t have shot the dog, I would have found, and shot, the owner.
The other news that
reached my ears all concerned immigration, some good, some not so good. On the
good front, Mariam Harley Miller, whose name I have managed to get wrong in my
blog two weeks running, was informed of what may have been the first step in a
process that might eventually lead to the review of her case and a reversal of
the Home Office’s frankly insane decision to deport her after nine years of
legal residency in the UK, as a valuable NHS worker who always paid her taxes
and dues.
The not so good news is
that Nigerian asylum seeker Isa Muazu was deported this week, in a move which
can only be viewed as Theresa May sticking two fingers up at all the concepts
of human dignity, compassion and decency. Never, ever let anyone kid you that
the Tories care about anything other than waging class war and protecting their
own. As I wrote last week, Muazu had been refusing food and drink and had not
eaten for over 90 days, in an attempt to get what he considered as the errors
in the way his case had been dealt with, reviewed and re-assessed.
Muazu was on a drip at the
Harmondsworth detention centre, and, when a last-minute injunction failed at
1AM on Thursday morning, Theresa May struck. According to the statement issued
by Isa Muazu’s solicitor:
"The home secretary went to great lengths to remove this seriously ill man from the UK. "She didn't allow him an in-country right of appeal against his asylum refusal; at massive expense to tax payers she hired a private charter plane to remove Mr Muazu to Nigeria today- no other returnee was on the plane; for the out of hours injunction she instructed Queen's counsel to make submissions. "The court was not willing to intervene at such a late stage. We do not know how Mr Muazu is as we lost contact with him late last night."
"The home secretary went to great lengths to remove this seriously ill man from the UK. "She didn't allow him an in-country right of appeal against his asylum refusal; at massive expense to tax payers she hired a private charter plane to remove Mr Muazu to Nigeria today- no other returnee was on the plane; for the out of hours injunction she instructed Queen's counsel to make submissions. "The court was not willing to intervene at such a late stage. We do not know how Mr Muazu is as we lost contact with him late last night."
God alone knows how much that little lot must have cost, hiring a private jet in the middle of the night and rousing a QC from his bed to go before a bleary-eyed Judge in the early hours. I thought we were supposed to be short of cash these days, but it seems that money is no object when it’s a case of Theresa May spending it like water to keep the readers of the Daily Mail happy. One protester was arrested for super-gluing his hand to the gate of the detention centre in a vain attempt to stop the deportation, and campaigners in Glasgow protested outside Air Charter Scotland’s HQ, demanding the firm refuse to operate Muazu's deportation flight. Apparently the normal carrier of choice, when it’s not a question of crating someone up in the wee small hours and bundling them out of the country before they die, is Virgin Atlantic, in case you wanted someone else to boycott. Once again, the Church of England proved to be a more effective voice of opposition than the Labour Party (no surprise there) as John Packer, Bishop of Ripon and Leeds, attacked the decision:
"It cannot be right to deport someone to Nigeria when they are in danger of attack from Boko Haram,".
"It also cannot be right to deport someone who is close to death.
"This seems an astonishing decision by the Home Office and I urge the home secretary to reconsider it in the name of both justice and mercy."
Good luck with that. Justice and mercy are two words entirely absent from the lexicon of the Home Office and UKBA. Ask Jimmy Mubenga, killed by being restrained during a deportation flight in October 2010; ask Ama Sumani, deported to Ghana in 2008 despite the fact that the form of cancer she was battling had no viable treatment there – ah, I forgot, you can’t ask her, she died four days before a plan to get her back to the UK for private treatment could be implemented. OK, then, ask Assia and Athmane Souhalia and their (then) two year old daughter Nouha, hauled from their beds and deported back in 2009, to face an uncertain future in Algeria where other members of their families had already previously been shot. God knows what’s happened to them since the “Arab spring”. Ask the Tamil asylum seekers deported back to face possible torture and death in Sri Lanka.
The list goes on, and on. I can’t begin to describe just how angry it makes me to see my country turned into one of the bad guys, when we used to be a beacon of liberty and tolerance for the whole world. It makes me ashamed to be British, and I am thinking of changing my name to Jan Van Der Vaart until Theresa May either comes to her senses or self-destructs, whichever is the sooner.
The reason why we are hearing so much about immigration these days is because Cameron is desperately clutching at straws to avoid losing a huge swathe of votes to UKIP at the next election. His own filthy propaganda and scapegoating of immigrants has worked too well (from his point of view) in that he has been UKIP’s best recruiting sergeant, and now, belatedly, he is floundering, trying to be seen to be tough on immigration and tough on the causes of immigration, in order to stem the flood of supporters deserting him at the next ballot for what they see as a tougher alternative.
This is why he’s making
tough speeches on the subject all of a sudden. Once again, Labour has failed in
its function as an effective opposition – they should have been pointing out,
for instance, that most of the things announced in his recent speech on benefit
tourism already exist. It’s not a crackdown, he’s just re-announcing the status
quo! And, of course, Nick Clegg, a politician who, it is believed, may have
once been in possession of some principles, although they have not been seen
for several months now, backed Cameron in this, as he and his party have backed
the Junta in scapegoating immigrants since day one. So why aren’t Labour
rebutting all these myths?
The Junta would have you
believe, as well, that there are “good” immigrants and bad immigrants. This is
yet another facet of the divide and rule philosophy which has been a mainstay
of everything the Blight Brigade says and does. Now we are being wound up to
hate the Roma, the next immigration target of opportunity. We should beware of,
and reject, this strategy. The concepts of humanity and compassion should apply
just as much to Isa Muazu as to Mariam Harley Miller, otherwise how can we call
ourselves a civilized nation.
The thing is, the simple
fact is, if an immigrant from eastern Europe (or anywhere for that matter)
comes here and takes a “British” job you shouldn’t really blame the immigrant,
however much David Cameron would like you to do so. For a start, there isn’t
really such a thing as a British job
any more. There are only EU jobs, but
David Cameron doesn’t have the balls to admit this, or grasp the nettle.
Neither does Ed Miliband or Nick Clegg. As for the immigrant, all he is doing
is what the Tories have been telling people to do for years – get on your bike
and look for work. The fact that his
bike happens to be in Romania
and the job he takes is in Droitwich is the result of three factors, none of
which the actual immigrant has any control over. Firstly, there are no jobs
where he lives which pay remotely as well as even the crappiest, most menial
no-rights minimum pay job in the UK; secondly, the EU says its OK for him to
get a job in Droitwich (see above) and thirdly, there are unscrupulous
employers willing to pay crappy low-wage no rights rates for boring manual
work. Put them together and what do you
get, bippity boppity boo. For what it’s worth, it cuts both ways. If anyone in
Droitwich wants to go and be a goat herd in the Carpathian
mountains, they are also free to do so. 15p an hour, and all the
yak-butter you can eat. No, I thought not.
David Cameron’s policy
with regard to this conundrum has been selective amnesia about the EU aspect of
it, until the sound of UKIP’s teeth getting close to his arse forced him
reluctantly into his present stance of lying about being tough about something
which in fact he can do nothing about, in order to appease the readers of the Daily Mail. He would much prefer it, of course, if the
British unemployed got on their bikes and took the low paid minimum wage no
rights jobs, but the British unemployed have been used to jobs with better pay
and conditions, and who can blame them?
If, instead of trying to foment an economy where workers stand at the
side of the road hoping for a van to pull up and offer them a casual day’s cash
in hand fruit picking at below the minimum wage, the Tories spent their time
putting pressure on employers to pay more like a living wage, this would – at a
stroke – make existing jobs (such as they are, and I have my doubts about that,
too) more appealing to British workers, put some surplus money into the economy
to strengthen any recovery, and address the issue of the gap between wages and
benefits not being wide enough, in a positive
way. But they won’t, will they?
This is where UKIP and I
part company though – they want to pull us out of the EU then pull up the
drawbridge on the UK as a whole, and not allow anybody vaguely brown to cross
the moat, so that eventually England turns back to a sort of ersatz 1950s home
counties suburb. I, on the other hand, want to see us being able to decide on a
fair immigration system of our own choosing and devising, based on the immigrant’s
ability to support themselves to bring much needed skills to the country and to
be willing to pitch in and help and contribute. Regardless of their race,
religion or skin colour.
The final, and possibly
the most depressing piece of immigration news in what has been a bad week, was
the verdict in the case of Bijan Ebrahimi, beaten to death and set on fire
outside his flat on an estate in Filton, Bristol, by a racist mob who wrongly
suspected him of being a paedophile. Well, not actually the verdict – the main
perpetrator got life, and deservedly so, in my opinion – but the re-iteration
of what the case actually meant, how much it demonstrated the depths to which
once-great Britain
had sunk. There were others involved in
this sorry episode as well, of course, who have gone as yet unpunished. People
who were responsible for creating the
very climate of toxic xenophobia where a legal
immigrant could be dragged from his flat, stamped to death, and cremated with
(ironically) white spirit. These people are David Cameron and Theresa May. I
seem to hear the ghost of Shelley, somewhere near at hand:
I met murder on the way
She looked just like Theresa May.
So, yes, it’s been a heavy
old week, and I was glad to see the weekend, especially as Saturday dawned
bright and sunny, albeit colder than of late. Debbie took Misty out for a
ramble over the hills, leaving me at home working away and keeping Matilda
company, as well as dog-sitting Zak and Freddie. I had put the remains of
Debbie’s last night’s meal into the dog dish, and Zak found this to be of
immediate interest on his arrival, all except one solitary sprout, which he
picked out of the dish and carried off in his mouth, before thinking better of
the enterprise and abandoning it in the middle of the conservatory carpet. Fortunately
I noticed it before I ran over it in my wheelchair and turned it into sprout
paté in the middle of the rug.
And it’s also been a weird
old week, when I found myself singing “I Pity The Poor Immigrant” more than
once. I do, pity the poor immigrant, I mean, especially as they will be used as
a political football all the way up to the next election. I pity the poor
immigrant, especially in a country where 120,000 people sign a petition for the
restitution of a cartoon dog, however funny, and well-loved, as opposed to only
9,000 who signed Mariam Harley Miller’s petition to be allowed to remain in the
UK.
Not that the real animals get a substantially better deal, but even so, it
shows how much work there is to do to counteract the commonly held
misapprehension that immigrants are a drain on the system.. (I, of course,
signed both petitions, but that’s just me. Shove something under my nose, I’ll
sign it).
Sunday brought us to the First
Sunday of Advent, as well as, in a nod to readers of other faiths, being more
or less the start of Hannukah, I believe. I like the use of light in the
Hannukah story, the idea of lights being lit and kept alight at the darkest,
most difficult times. The lights are going out all over Europe,
said Sir Edward Grey, and they may not be lit again in our lifetimes, but I
prefer W H Auden’s slightly more optimistic take, from September 1, 1939:
All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the
brain
Of the sensual
man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the
sky:
There is no such thing as
the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the
police;
We must love one another
or die.
Defenceless under the
night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the
Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.
The
actual readings for this Sunday, according to the Lectionary, are Isaiah
2.1-5; Romans 13.11-14; and Matthew 24.36-44. The Matthew reading is the well-known
one to the effect that you never know the minute or the hour, and that you
always need to be ready, because when Jesus comes again, he will come like a
thief in the night. The Isaiah reading includes:
And he shall judge among the nations, and shall rebuke many people: and they shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. O house of Jacob, come ye, and let us walk in the light of the Lord.
And he shall judge among the nations, and shall rebuke many people: and they shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. O house of Jacob, come ye, and let us walk in the light of the Lord.
And the Romans one:
The night is far spent, the day is at hand: let us therefore cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armour of light. Let us walk honestly, as in the day…
Light is very important to me at this time of the year. It always seems, between Halloween and the Solstice, as though we are going through a long dark tunnel, a sort of Alice-in-Wonderland rabbit hole, until finally, once more, at the Solstice, we see the spark of light and hope that brings with it the return of the good. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this time of year also sees other religious festivals dedicated to light, Hannukah and Diwali.
It’s a natural human reaction to the harsh, unfriendly darkness outside, to gather around the hearth, light a T-light or two, and even the odd joss-stick. So yes, walking in the light, or in my case, trundling in the light, is maybe something I should aspire to, next week. It would be all too easy, and oh so tempting, given the things that have happened, both real and imaginary, this week, to give in, to fold my tents and steal away. Turn your face to the wall, and blow out the candle. Put out the cat, and then put out the light, as Othello might have said, but didn’t.
But I’m not going to. I’m still here. Beleagured by the same old same old negation and despair, but still trying to show an affirming flame. So, we’re into advent, and old Sir John Betjeman’s tortoise stove is lit again:
And marbled clouds go scudding by
The many-steepled London sky
I should be looking forward to Christmas – advent is about looking forward. The clue is in the title. I’m not actually looking forward to the run-up to the event, though, because it’s going to be cold, bleak and dark, and fraught with heffalump traps on a personal level, and no doubt there will be yet more upsetting and depressing things in the news, courtesy of our lords and supposed masters.
If we can get to Christmas, and find we’re all still, standing, count the survivors, close ranks and carry on into 2014, I guess that’s about the best we can hope for. Or, as Jesus and W H Auden (strange bedfellows!) might have put it:
We must love one another or die.
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