Mind you, however bad we have had it, we’re nowhere near the
state of those poor people in the Somerset Levels who have been cut off by
rising flood water for weeks now, with nobody paying much attention, to be
honest. It wasn’t until the badger-murderer in chief, Owen Paterson, was
heckled on camera by some angry residents of Muchelney during a visit to see
the chaos for himself (presumably he thought the BBC were making it all up and
the shots on the news of field after field under water were CGI) that things
started to happen. Finally, the army got
involved, and not just any old regiment, but the Commandos, according to the
commentary on the BBC news. The officer they then went on to interview on
camera, according to both his shoulder flashes and the caption on the screen,
was from the Royal Engineers, not the Royal Marines. I can only assume that the
BBC knew something we didn’t – that he was not wearing any underpants, and was
“going Commando”.
Matilda has taken a sensible approach to the weather, aided
by the receipt of two new cat blankets crocheted/knitted (one of each) by her
Auntie Maisie. These arrived just in time for her to burrow down into them on
either “her” chair or the settee next to the stove, with her tail over her nose
to keep out the draughts, which are legion.
Misty’s been curling up on her own cushion/doggy bed, behind the same
settee, which she obviously sees as some sort of safety bolt-hole, so much so
that when the weather is blustery and the falling twigs and leaves clatter on
the conservatory roof and scare her, she scoots behind there and all you can
see is the end of her snout sticking out.
The other morning, Debbie had left one of her “oranges”, or,
as the rest of us call them, tangerines, on the corner of the table, so I
picked it up and put it on my wheelchair tray, intending to return it to the
fruit bowl in the conservatory. For some
reason best known unto itself, it fell off and rolled away across the floor. I
made a mental note to retrieve it and busied myself about my domestic
tasks. When I went to look for it later,
it had gone, and it was only some time afterwards that I spied it on Misty’s
pillow/dog bed behind the settee. She had obviously decided it was time for a
new “ball”. At various times during the
week, it surfaced in various places, as she moved it around her beds and
cubby-holes. Obviously by now, it was no use as a tangerine, unless you like
your tangerines coated with dog-slobber and full of teeth-holes. A couple of
days ago, it vanished altogether. No doubt it will turn up eventually, wizened
and inedible, unless Misty has actually eaten it, of course.
My own week has been dominated by the sudden need to find a
home for up to 44 pallets of books, because the people I had been mistaking for friends colleagues and
allies for 25 years or so have turned out to be bastards after all. Oh well,
it’s all blood under the bridge, and the ball is now firmly back in their
court, but it’s still a hassle I could have done without. Meanwhile I was getting ready for my hospital
appointment – this was the one which I had cancelled on 20th
December in order to re-create the timesheets for the massive amount of money
the inefficient idiots in the payroll department at Kirklees College
owed to Debbie, only to be then told by them that they couldn’t pay it until 20th
January.
Anyway, by Thursday I was as ready as I could be, including
having packed my new “everyday carry” rucksack with a book to read, a notebook
and two or three pens, wallet, mobile phone, cuddly toy, etc. The ambulance
duly arrived, but the ambulanceman had bad news. On his manifest, I was listed
as a tail lift, and I should have been a wheelchair one. He would have to contact
his controller, as he had no authority himself to alter my status on the
system. Having done so, the further bad
news was that he couldn’t take me. I
suggested that he should tell the bloody controller that if I could bloody walk
I wouldn’t need a bloody ambulance, and we left it at that. But honestly, what
a waste of dog-farts. Free the wheelchair one!
It wasn’t the only WODF of the week, either. As you may have gathered, I‘ve been giving
away my artworks in return for donations to either Mossburn Animal Centre, Rain
Rescue, or Freedom of Spirit Trust for Border Collies. This necessitates packing up the pictures
which people have selected off Facebook, and posting them to their recipients.
Unfortunately, this week, I had some artwork which was too big for the postbox,
so on Monday I lay in wait behind the lobby door for the postman, and asked him
if he wouldn’t mind awfully taking this back and posting it for me. It turned
out that, in fact, it would be too much trouble, as he wasn’t going back to the
Post Office when he finished. Granny
posted it for me, eventually, on Friday.
I was feeling well pissed-off and bolshy by this
time, so I indulged myself by writing to
my MP to ask for the date when the inquiry into the effect on poverty of
government benefit cuts was going to take place, plus three-page letters of
complaint to the BBC and the UK Statistics Authority about the shameful
unquestioning recycling by the BBC of DWP dodgy statistics (what Debbie calls
my “and fourteenthly” letters) and finally, sending details of the Rooftree
Project to Owen Jones at the Independent. I have no idea what he will make of it, a hat
or a brooch, probably.
Finally, on Monday, wonderful day that it was, Debbie was
backing the camper out of the driveway onto the road in order to go to College,
when she discovered that it no longer had any brakes. She managed to drive it to College on the
gears, then called me. We both had the same idea, more or less simultaneously,
which was that the mad bastard who had put the threatening note on the van when
she had parked in Lockwood the other week, had also done something to tamper
with the brakes. The garage took it away
and put it up on the ramps, but it turned out to be a caliper that had bust,
and not someone taking a hacksaw to the brake pipes. As I type, we are hoping
for it back on Monday, brakes fixed, cross-member welded, and MOT-ed for
another year. I will need to be shot
with a tranquilising dart before I can sign the cheque for this. It’s just as well that the College paid up.
I’ve been preoccupied with finding a new home for a huge wall
of books all week, so I haven’t had time to keep up with all of the tidings from
the world outside of the Holme
Valley. I did note, however, that the Home Office have
turned down the appeal from Mariam Harley Miller, of whom I have written
previously, to allow her to stay in the UK . If you have not already signed
the petition against the stupid, wrongheaded, and possibly even illegal
decision to deport her, it’s to be found here, together with background details
on the case, to save you skimming back through my blogs.
It’s been a bad week for democracy, though, because the
gagging law was finally passed through Parliament. So, from now on, if you agree with anything I say, or if I agree
with anything Joe Bloggs says, or if me and Joe Bloggs agree with anything 38
degrees or change.org says, and together we lobby for the law to be altered, we’re
illegal. Especially if it’s critical of
the government. Within hours of the gagging law being signed onto the statute
book, the DWP moved to ask Twitter to shut down two satirical parody accounts
that had poked fun at the “official” DWP tweets, in a way that pointed out
their shortcomings and which obviously got too near the truth.
Twitter is of course being highly selective about who or
what it censures, and was quick to comply with the DWP’s request, but curiously
slow to take action against the trolls who were flaming Maajid Nawaz after he
“tweeted” a cartoon of Jesus and the prophet Mohammed. Twitter really needs to
get its act together and start showing some consistency. At the moment it seems
that it’s very reluctant to take action in cases where it either sort of
tacitly agrees with the people making the death threats, and/or is scared of
offending them. Well, I am sorry, but
making death threats, whatever medium is employed, is against the law of the
land, the law which we have n this country and which applies equally to me and
to you irrespective of whatever wacky ideas we may or may not have about
whether or not it’s right to depict religious figures in cartoons.
Resurrection, but of an economic rather than a religious
kind, was on the mind of George Osborne this week, whose ubiquitous presence
trumpeting about the “recovery” on every available news outlet managed to
penetrate even the ball of confusion and spreadsheets that I have spent the
last seven days unwinding. As I posted
last week, I have grave doubts about the basis for the “recovery”, whether it
is sustainable in the long term, and whether or not it simply represents people
having got so fed up of “austerity” that they are just going back to their old
ways of racking up unserviceable personal debt.
And it seems I am not alone. Michael Meacher subjected Mr Osborne’s
claims to some rather more detailed analysis than I am capable of bringing to
bear:
Osborne’s latest boast
is that Britain’s GDP grew by nearly 2% in the year to last September, showing
a strong recovery from the two previous years when the economy barely reached
1%. This is highly misleading for several reasons. Will it be sustained
when it is based on the fragile foundations of consumer borrowing and house
price inflation, and when business investment, wages, productivity and exports
– all the really essential factors needed – are all flat? Even more
important, this 2% growth is counted from a much lower level of output than
would have been the case if Osborne austerity hadn’t stopped in its tracks the
recovery already taking place in the middle and second half of 2010 as a result
of Alistair Darling’s stimulus measures in 2009. If output had continued
to rise after 2007 in line with previous trends, GDP would now be 20% higher
than it is. Instead of preening himself with the 2% upturn, he
should be humbly apologising for the 20% of output (worth nearly £300bn!) lost
for good as a result of his ideologically-driven dogma of endless cutbacks.
But humility and contrition are beyond Osborne… Then he has the nerve to
pretend that this ‘recovery’ is the result of austerity. The opposite is
the truth. The main source of what little growth there’s been in 2013
results not from cuts, but from public spending turning out higher than
expected. The triple dip was only avoided by Osborne surreptitiously
adopting the stimulus policy which publicly he so vehemently denounces.
Meanwhile Osborne capers around like a latter-day Nero,
fiddling the figures while the economy burns.
The recovery is going so well, in fact, that people are
being forced to “steal” out of date food from skips behind Iceland and are being prosecuted
for it!
Paul May, 35, a freelance web designer, along with Jason
Chan and William James who all live together in a squat in North London were
arrested on 25th October 2013, after a member of the public reported
three men had been seen climbing over the wall at the back of Iceland in Kentish Town. They were apprehended with some tomatoes,
mushrooms, cheese, and Mr Kipling cakes, amounting to about £33.00 in value,
which they had removed from a skip behind the shop and which would otherwise
had been destined for landfill.
May’s defence was that he was taking the food because he
needed it to eat, and he does not consider he has done anything illegal or
dishonest in removing food destined for landfill from a skip. Initially, the
men were arrested for burglary, but the police then changed their minds and the
Iceland Three were charged under an obscure section of the 1824 Vagrancy Act,
after being discovered in "an enclosed area, namely Iceland, for an
unlawful purpose, namely stealing food". They were held in a police cell
for 19 hours. At one point, the Crown
Prosecution Service were considering a full-scale prosecution, because "we
feel there is significant public interest in prosecuting these three
individuals".
This would be the same Crown Prosecution Service that in
September 2013 was forced to admit that it had awarded “golden handshakes” to
its former CEO, Mike Kennedy - a package worth at least £515,000, and another
to an unidentified "senior employee" worth £620,000. Anyway, in due
course, common sense prevailed and the charges were dropped. The chief executive of Iceland, recognising a PR disaster of gigantic
proportions looming on the port bow, phoned the CPS and told them Iceland would
not be pressing charges. I would
imagine, as well, although I don’t know and can’t prove it, that there might
just have been some phone calls from the MOJ to the CPS asking what the hell
they thought they were dong bringing a case that would focus the full glare of
media attention on food poverty and would require magistrates to scrutinise the
phenomenon of "skipping" – taking discarded supermarket waste to cook
and eat, and would highlight the issue of how much supermarket food is
discarded, despite long campaigns to reduce the waste. It would also focus
attention on a group of people taking radical steps to feed themselves as they
struggle with the rising cost of living in London, playing straight into Labour’s only
effective weapon against the Blight Brigade at the moment, the cost of living.
So I’m not surprised the case was dropped. It would have
touched too many nerves of too many powerful people who don’t want to answer
the question about why so many people are going hungry in a land of plenty. In fact they don’t even want the question
asking in the first place.
The recovery is going so well, in fact, that the DWP has
been reduced to sanctioning an Oldham man who
had a heart attack during his JSA assessment! Robbie Gill covered the story in
the Oldham Evening Chronicle:
A MAN forced to give
up work with heart problems had his benefits axed for failing to complete a
capability assessment... after suffering a heart attack during the
examination. The man, who received
employment support allowance, was required to attend a work-capability
assessment to assess his suitability for work. During the appointment he was
told he was having a heart attack, forcing the nurse to stop the assessment.
Two weeks later he got a letter from Jobcentre Plus saying he had withdrawn
from the assessment and was being sanctioned. The man took his case to Oldham East and Saddleworth MP Debbie Abrahams.
Of course, he will also have vanished from the
statistics! So what do we do abut all
this? How are we to fight back against the overwhelming tide of crap emanating
from the Junta? One possible solution came from Jayne Linney, who campaigns on
political issues via her eponymous blog.
She suggests that there should be a new political party to replace
labour, comprising a broad alliance of all the campaigning groups that are
fighting against the cuts, the Bedroom Tax, “austerity” globalisation, and
similar issues. Factionalism has always bedevilled the left, of course, as
famously satirised by Monty Python in The Life of Brian, with the People’s
Front For The Liberation of Judea. But maybe there is some scope for a truly
co-operative movement designed to reverse the worst of the Blight Brigade’s
excesses, since it seems we can no longer reply on the Labour arty to campaign
for the poor, the ill and the unemployed, as Miliband is too busy apologising
for things that Labour never actually did, and thereby ceding the argument, and
Rachel Reeves is going round saying that she’s going to be tougher on benefits
than Esther McVey.
It would be ironic, of course, if the gagging law, which is
aimed squarely at silencing the efforts of individual campaigning groups such
as the ones Jayne Linney has in mind, turned out to be the anvil over which a
new political party was formed that then went on to repeal the gagging
law. Whether or not it actually happens,
though, will depend on whether people can put aside their differences and agree
on enough broad objectives to unite a fairly disparate collection of people. It
might be better just to hold your nose and vote Labour just to get rid of the
Junta, in the same way people did in 1997, even though they knew it meant the
downside was that Blair would become prime minister.
And so we came to Sunday, February 2nd, which can
be either Candlemas Day, Imbolc, or Groundhog Day, depending upon your
persuasion. If it is Candlemas day that floats your boat, then we’ll stick with
the Christian interpretations. For most of us, especially this damn year,
though, the more important aspect of Candlemas is:
If Candlemas day dawns
bright and clear
There’ll be two
winters in the one year
And dawn bright and clear it did. It’s also groundhog day, but at the time of
writing I don’t know whether Puxatawney Pete was sufficiently frightened by his
own shadow to scuttle back down his hole or not, but the UK weather omens are
not good. Because it is groundhog day, I
was so tempted to cut and paste the
opening of this blog again at this point, but I have so far resisted that
temptation. The same tradition as
Groundhog Day in the US also
exists in Europe – in Germany,
it’s the badger that does the weather forecasting, in France the marmot, and in England, the
hedgehog.
Candlemas Day represents the mid-point of winter, half way
between the solstice and the vernal equinox.
It was so named because historically, it was day on which all the
candles to be used in church services in the coming year were brought into the
church to be blessed. Candlemas is a
traditional Christian festival that commemorates the ritual purification of
Mary, forty days after the birth of her son Jesus. On this day, Christians also
remember the presentation of Jesus in the Temple.
Like many festivals which eventually became Christian, of course, Candlemas was
originally a Celtic festival of lights.
It is also associated with many folklore traditions. It’s supposed to be
the day on which snowdrops make their first appearance.
"The Snowdrop, in
purest white array,
First rears her head
on Candlemas day."
But most of the folklore is to do with weather, and
specifically the fact that the pale golden sunshine that often attends February
days such as today may turn out to be counterfeit:
When the cat lies in
the sun in February
She will creep behind the stove in March.
She will creep behind the stove in March.
Robert Herrick wrote at least four poems about Candlemas,
each of which more or less makes the same point, that Candlemas is the final
end of the celebration of Christmas, the very last day on which the decorations
may be taken down, and that Lent will soon be upon us. In his "Ceremony
Upon Candlemas Eve," [Down With The
Rosemary, And So] he wrote
Down with the
rosemary, and so
Down with the bays and misletoe;
Down with the holly, ivy, all,
Wherewith ye dress'd the Christmas Hall:
That so the superstitious find
No one least branch there left behind:
For look, how many leaves there be
Neglected, there (maids, trust to me)
So many goblins you shall see.
Down with the bays and misletoe;
Down with the holly, ivy, all,
Wherewith ye dress'd the Christmas Hall:
That so the superstitious find
No one least branch there left behind:
For look, how many leaves there be
Neglected, there (maids, trust to me)
So many goblins you shall see.
Well, goblins is about the only thing that hasn’t been flung
at us this year so far, but I guess there’s time enough yet. Next week is
shaping up to be a class one, grade A groundhog day week, in that we’re facing all
the same old same old problems, that never seem to get resolved. My wheelchair is dropping to bits and needs
fixing yet again, there’s the stock issue, Sainsburys will be delivering, the
garage will be bringing the van back and expecting to take away a cheque, and
one of our authors will be calling round for some of his books. Meanwhile, with
my other leg…
Although, actually, more and more these days, I’m not experiencing
déjà vu, so much as vuja de: I have never been here before and I have no bloody
idea what to do next. It is six years today since Nigel died, in his favourite
armchair in the conservatory while Match of the Day was on. Not a bad end for anyone, even if you are a
cat. In July it will be nine years since Russell Baggis died. These anniversaries of the loss of well-loved
pets seem to come around faster and faster these days, or maybe I am just
getting older and older. Anyway, Nigey, you were remembered.
So, maybe spring is coming, at long last, or maybe we will
have to wait a while longer, now the sun has shone on Candlemas Day. I hope I can hold on. I hope we can all hold
on. I don't know how long I can keep on holding on, to be honest. Come on, Big G, let’s turn this damn
year around - give me the blind faith of the snowdrop, pushing inexorably
upwards, out of the dark and towards the light.
Fair Maids of February, why don’t you come out, today.
No comments:
Post a Comment