Epiblog for the Feast of St Ethelwald

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. As if to signify and herald the official beginning of spring, we have passed the equinox, and from now on, for a while, we can look forward to shorter nights and the darkness receding. One of Maisie’s indestructible daffodils in the stone trough at the end of my wheelchair ramp is out, raising its golden trumpet in a note of triumph; the ones that were left behind in the back garden have been out for about a week now. I really must do something about the garden, and soon. It looks even more devastated by winter than last year, despite the relatively mild winter so far.

I have actually made a start, albeit in a small way. I’ve started composting again. I made some organic compost last year in two upturned water carriers with the bottoms cut off. These had originally been used for taking water when we went off in the camper, but had outlived their usefulness, so I cut the bottoms off them and last year I used to put things like potato peelings and veg trimmings in them to rot down.  This time around, it was avocado skins from Debbie’s current favourite breakfast of rustic, home-made guacamole. The next day, when I went down my ramp, I noticed that some creature of the night had nudged the makeshift “lid” off the upturned bottle, and scoffed the lot.

Undeterred, when clearing out the veg rack, I found half a bag of mouldy old taties that had started growing shoots, so I carefully laid these out along one of the empty trough “planters” hoping that the shoots would “strike” into the bare soil, or, if not, I’d just dig them in as more “compost”. Again, more  than half of them went missing overnight. I am beginning to suspect the hand, or should that be the paw, of Brenda the badger, especially as the remains of the mock duck cobbler that I put out for the birds has also completely gone.  Normally the birds leave some small residue of what was there before, but in this case the dog-dish I used has been licked completely clean. It wasn’t any of the dogs, because it was put out last thing at night, on a day when only Misty was here anyway. So, either way, some beast has set back compost production by scoffing the ingredients. Selah.

Matilda started the week by deciding to go on a wild camping expedition on Sunday night. Unusually for her, she went out of the conservatory door late-ish on, about nine o’clock, a time of the day when, normally, she is curled up in her armchair, on her Maisie-blanket.  I have no idea where she went, but she remained outdoors for hours , which again was uncharacteristic behaviour. It wasn’t a particularly benign night, either, in terms of weather. My remarks in the opening paragraph about the advent of spring should be balanced by the fact that we’ve had some very windy days, and more than one bout of hailstones. Anyway, return she did, eventually, and settled down.  Leaving aside the theory that, like many other cats, she has a second home somewhere, I can only put it down to a mental aberration in the crinkles of her furry little walnut of a brain. She was hungry when she came back, and I fed her without intervention from Misty, who, like everyone else sensible in the house, had gone to bed.

Once she had chomped her way through a sachet of Felix, she jumped up on the settee and settled down, so I wrapped the Maisie-blanket round her and left her to it. I had a poor night’s sleep for some reason, probably to do with the cold making my knees ache, so I was actually awake to hear the dawn chorus on Monday, and got up shortly afterwards. Matilda was exactly where I had left her, and greeted my reappearance by purring contentedly , then going to sit next to her food dish, which is her way of asking for breakfast. It’s hard to believe, sometimes, that we have been her humans for getting on for 18 months now.  When the days get warmer (we hope!) and the nights shorter, we’ll open up the cat flap in the side door of Colin’s house, then once more she can come and go as she pleases, although the Cats’ Protection League do advise that you should keep your cat in at night, all year round.

Misty is quite happy to stay in all night, especially when there are Muttnuts and Dog Treats on offer. Her favourite thing is still “walkies”, however, even if she doesn’t know the word. We have now managed to teach her “high five” “give paw” and “other paw”, which is a relatively recent development.  Her longest walk this week has been 16 miles, on Saturday with Debbie and Zak, and on her return it was quite clear she would have been happy to go out and do the same again. There must be a limit to her energy, somewhere, but we haven’t come near it yet.  Still, collie dogs were bred for long days of hard work out on the fells, so it’s par for the course, I guess.

I have also been engaged in an exercise pretty much akin to getting all the sheep in the pen this week, in that I finally decide I had better tackle the mountain of receipts which needed writing up, before it toppled over and killed someone. So I spent a fascinating day entering them up and analysing out the VAT. The government requires this of me, I don’t do it for fun. If you are an MP who is quizzed about expenses, you get away with blithely saying “accountancy is not my strong suit” or some such malarkey. I, however, have to be able to put a figure on what I spent on paperclips last year,  and, furthermore, if  happened to take one of those paperclips and bend it so I could use it to remove earwax, what  should do is to deduct the value of that item from my balance sheet as it would now be counted for purely personal use and not for business purposes.  It is all very tedious, and if I don’t do it they fine me or send me to jail.

Jail might yet, however, turn out to be the safest place. The week in the world at large has once more been dominated by bad news, or if not bad, then at least officially scary. Russia carries on seamlessly annexing the Crimea and no-one says boo to a goose about it. God alone knows where that will end, but it’s a good job that Debbie got out the Trangia camping cooker recently and checked it over.  At least we’ll still be able to boil a kettle when Putin turns the gas off, and we’ll have warmth while coal supplies last.  Of course, but for Mrs Thatcher we wouldn’t be in this predicament to start with, but that’s all blood under the bridge now. We can’t very well dig her up and throw stones at her. Thatcher is dead, even though, sadly, Thatcherism lives on, in both the major political parties and the lunatic fringe, the Liberal Democrats and UKIP.

And of course, talking of mad right-wing ideologies that damage the best interests of our country, here at home, this week, we had the Budget, with George Osborne’s grinning face everywhere as he claimed the credit for a recovery which only began when he stopped implementing the policies he claims are essential to fixing the economy, and which is at best patchy, selective, and unsustainable.  Just in case you thought that was merely me saying that, with my own level of numeracy firmly established by my failure to get O level maths, take a look at what the institute for Fiscal Studies said, as reported by The Guardian:

The message from the IFS is that life will get a lot grimmer after polling day. North Sea oil revenues are in long-term decline; the short-term fillip to investment will be removed; and – most significantly – there will be a second wave of cuts so big that no amount of smoke and mirrors will be able to disguise them.

The IFS web site has pages of number crunching graphs and analysis but if you work your way through the bewildering maze of statistics you occasionally find places where the think tank tells it like it is. The government is getting into “bad habits” of funding permanent giveaways with temporary tax raising revenues, and the mythical balancing of the books and return to stability which the Junta originally promised for this parliament has now been shunted into 2018-19.

This will, however probably go down in history as the bingo budget.  In another pre-election bribe, Osborne cut both the beer duty and the bingo tax, because let’s face it, that’s what working class oiks spend their time doing, isn’t it? He should know, he once met one.  The essentially patrician, patronising nature of this gesture was driven home by Grant Shapps, who produced and “tweeted” a graphic which many people, at first sight thought was a spoof, so crass and insensitive was it. Cutting the bingo and beer tax, helping hardworking people do more of what they enjoy. It’s that patrician “they” that sticks in the craw.  We toffs know what you peasants enjoy, I once met a common person you know, he carried my bags into Eton.  Now run along and get on with your beer and skittles, and leave ruining the country to us.

Still, at least it rebounded on them this time, with Shapps’ tweet mercilessly parodied and re-tweeted time after time in the days tat followed. However, amusing as it is to watch the wheels come off and the Tory bingo bandwagon roll headlong into a pile of cack, we should not overlook the sinister undertones in the thinking that lay behind Shapps and Osborne’s clumsy attempt at courting popularity with the beer and bingo poster – as Orwell wrote in 1984:

“Heavy physical work, the care of home and children, petty quarrels with neighbours, films, football, beer, and above all, gambling filled up the horizon of their minds. To keep them in control was not difficult. All that was required of them was a primitive patriotism which could be appealed to whenever it was necessary to make them accept longer working hours or shorter rations. And when they become discontented, as they sometimes did, their discontentment led nowhere, because being without general ideas, they could only focus it on petty specific grievances.”

Political blogger and commentator Thomas G. Clark published a table of Osborne’s original 2010 promises and the 2014 realities side by side on the day after the budget. His analysis of the figures on his blog Another Angry Voice, would – and should – make disturbing reading for anyone who thinks that George Osborne is leading us out of the wilderness and back into the promised land:

These headline figures illustrate the sheer scale of George Osborne's incompetence, yet the man is so delusional that he actually seems to believe his own feeble propaganda narratives, and even sees himself as a candidate to become the next leader of the Tory party!

If borrowing £207 billion more than you claimed you would, in order to make the economy £128 billion smaller than you said it would be is some kind of success that qualifies you for a promotion in George Osborne's mind, one must wonder what on earth a failure must look like?

The days around the budget are traditionally used by governments of every hue to slip bad news stories unnoticed into the public domain, while all the mainstream media is busy looking the other way, nitpicking and number-crunching.  This time around it seems to be the news of the closure of the Disability Living Fund.  This central government fund is worth £320m and provides payments for 18,000 of the most severely disabled in the UK, to allow them to continue living something like a normal life in society, as opposed to residential care, which would be the only option if this payment was not forthcoming. The Junta has already had one go at shutting the fund down, in November 2013, and was told by M’Learned Friends in the courts to go away and think again.  They have gone away, and they have thunk, and they are still going to damn well go ahead and do it.  The money will now be devolved to local authorities for them to administer it, but – and this is the crucial “but” – it won’t be ring-fenced, so it will take its place amongst other local authority expenditure such as civic junketing and mending potholes in time for the Tour de France.

This comes at a time when a report by the Centre for Welfare Reform estimates that severely disabled people are impacting unfairly on the 4.5m people who suffer a significant disability. Disabled people living in poverty were hit by cuts of £4660 compared to the average of £1126, the report claims.  Despite this, disabilities minister Mike Penning blithely asserts that the government’s long-term economic plan would “ensure that disabled people are given the support that allows them to fulfil their potential”. If you believe that, how do you feel about the tooth fairy?

Unfortunately, the “disabled” – and I am not sure that personally, I am happy with such a broad-brush approach to labelling anyway, when disability takes so many forms, many of which are not obvious – are up against the tide of insidious propaganda emanating from the DWP, which seeks to separate people into the deserving and the undeserving poor, the deserving and the undeserving disabled, as a first step to getting rid of the universal entitlement to benefits. So you get idiots posting things on Facebook which show that they have unquestioningly accepted this vile, spoonfed mess.

He's got MS, is bed bound most of the time and his brain is fried due to too much cannabis. There's very little chance he'll last another 10 years. That's properly disabled. Not the sort of people that go around the street with a crutch because of an ingrown toenail then claim DLA because they can't be arsed to get out of bed.

Properly disabled! There speaks a man who really needs to be reminded, by fate and by his own body, that we’re all only as good as our last heartbeat.  But it just shows how deeply ingrained the myth of the scrounger, the “disabled shirker” has become in mind of Joe Public in the last four years.  Lord Tebbit rose from the undead this week to repeat the lie that the only reason people use food banks was because they are there. I’m rather glad that I have taught Misty to run into the garden, barking madly at the mention of the word “Tebbits”. Barking madly seems an entirely appropriate response to anything connected with Mr Tebbit. This old chestnut was addressed once again this week in the blog of the London Food Bank:

Was it Chancellor George Osborne who got this myth up and running earlier in 2013, when he suggested food bank use had gone up, ‘because people have been made aware of the food bank service through jobcentres’? The insulting implication being that a bunch of layabout chancers are flooding through the doors of food banks in search of freebies that ‘hard-working people’ would never dream of taking.

It’s been emphasised already, and it was good to see this addressed in the first episode of Famous, Rich and Hungry, but the message hasn’t quite got through yet: Getting a food bank voucher is anything but easy. If you want to use a Trussell Trust food bank, you need to be referred by the jobcentre, by a frontline professional such as a doctor, a health visitor, a social worker or the police. They are deemed to be best placed to identify if you’re going through a real crisis and that your need is genuine. It’s only then that a voucher will be issued.  Are thousands of people in the UK – escalating numbers every month – really jumping through those hoops to collect a three-day supply of long-life food, without being in real need of help?

Still, we’ve always got the shiny new £1.00 coin to look forward to, unless of course you are standing in a supermarket car park in the rain searching your pockets for one of the old ones, just so you can get access to a trolley.

And what are Labour, Her Majesty’s loyal opposition, doing about all of this? Having conceded the battlefield on the EU and on benefits without a shot being fired, are they at last going to turn and fight? Planning to vote with the government next week, in support of the idea of a Benefits Cap, that’s what!  Meet the new boss, same as the old boss, as a certain Mr Roger Daltrey once wryly observed.  To think that the aims and aspirations of millions of poor, ill, and disadvantaged people, who will otherwise be thrown to the wolves if the Tories get back in in 2015, are reliant on the likes of Ed Miliband and Rachel Reeves is a truly chilling thought.

So yes, it’s been a black week.  As if things weren’t bad enough, I was reminded by emails from  several campaigning organisations that the Canadians will soon once again be starting their annual seal cull. I’m quite happy to debate this, although the reasons why it is a bad, uncivilised, barbaric, inhuman, nasty squalid little activity that doesn’t even make economic sense, would fill a blog s long as this one again. I just find myself hoping that there is some way those humans responsible could be clubbed to death within sight of their parents, and then skinned alive, and if that makes me a bad Christian, well, I never claimed to be anything more than a lapsed agnostic, these days. When it comes to seal cullers, caritas non conturbat me, as Belloc said in another context.

And so we came to Sunday, the feast of St Ethelwald, a day when I mistakenly tried to put the clocks forward a week early, much to mine and Debbie’s confusion, until I realised ‘d got it wrong.  Still, it made Debbie get up an hour earlier than she normally would have done, so it wasn’t entirely a bad thing.  Ethelwald, sometimes known as Ethelwold or Edelwald, lived as a hermit on the Farne Islands, two miles off the coast of Northumberland. St Cuthbert, with whom St Ethelwald is closely associated, lived there between his time n a monastery and his elevation to being in charge of Lindisfarne.  No less an authority than Cardinal Newman wrote of the place:

We are accustomed to consider a hermitage as a rural retreat in a wood, or beside a stream; a wild, pretty spot, where the flowers fill the air with sweetness, and the birds with melody. So it often was; and hard indeed it should not be so. Hermits have privations enough without being cut off from the sight of God's own world, the type of glories unseen. However, otherwise thought St. Cuthbert: accordingly he so contrived the wall which circled round his enclosure, as to see nothing out of doors but the blue sky or the heavy clouds over his head.

Ethelwald had been for many years a monk of Ripon, where St. Wilfred had founded a religious house, and afterwards was buried. Bede adds that in this respect Ethelwald presented a remarkable contrast to St. Cuthbert.  Newman again:

When therefore God's servant Cuthbert had been translated to the heavenly kingdom, and Ethelwald had commenced his occupation of the same island and monastery, after many years spent in conversation with the monks, he gradually aspired to the rank of anchoritic perfection. The walls of the aforesaid oratory being composed of planks somewhat carelessly put together, had become loose and tottering by age, and, as the planks separated from one another, an opening was afforded to the weather. The venerable man, whose aim was rather the splendour of the heavenly than of an earthly mansion, having taken hay, or clay, or whatever he could get, had filled up the crevices, that he might not be disturbed from the earnestness of his prayers by the daily violence of the winds and storms. When Ethelwald entered and saw these contrivances, he begged the brethren who came thither to give him a calf's skin, and fastened it with nails in the corner, where himself and his predecessor used to kneel or stand when they prayed, as a protection against the storm.

The oratory on Farne was eventually restored by Eadfrith, bishop of the Church of Lindisfarne, after Ethelwald’s death.  At that point, Feldgeld, Ethelwald’s successor, determined to cut up the calf-skin into pieces and give a portion to each of the devout people who asked for it.  The miraculous properties of the calf-skin worked on him first of all, when he used it as a flannel, restoring him to health from a condition where he had developed a huge red swelling that covered all of his face. 

Another miracle attributed to Ethelwald was that he saved some of his visitors from death by shipwreck:

Having been refreshed with his discourse and taken his blessing, as we were returning home, on a sudden, when we were in the midst of the sea, the fair weather which was wafting us over was checked, and there ensued so great and dismal a tempest that neither the sails nor oars were of any use to us, nor had we anything to expect but death. After long struggling with the wind and waves to no effect, we looked behind us to see whether it were practicable at least to recover the island from whence we came, but we found ourselves on all sides so enveloped in the storm that there was no hope of escaping. But looking out as far as we could see, we observed, on the island of Farne, father Ethelwald, beloved of God, come out of his cavern to watch our course; for, hearing the noise of the storm and raging sea, he was come out to see what would become of us. When he beheld us in distress and despair, he bowed his knees to the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ in prayer for our life and safety; upon which the swelling sea was calmed, so that the storm ceased on all sides, and a fair wind attended us to the very shore. When we had landed, and had dragged upon the shore the small vessel that brought us, the storm, which had ceased a short time for our sake, immediately returned, and raged continually during the whole day; so that it plainly appeared that the brief cessation of the storm had been granted from Heaven, at the request of the man of God, in order that we might escape.'

Ethelwald lived as a hermit for twelve years on the Farne Islands, and died there in 699AD. His relics were translated first to Lindisfarne and thence to Durham Cathedral but have long since been lost.

So, there we have St Ethelwald and his miraculous calf-skin and the life of a hermit. Once again the stories about him are probably hokum. Regular washing with a flannel probably did more for Feldgeld’s skin infection than the miraculous nature of the flannel, but nevertheless the Farne Islands, and Lindisfarne, come to that, are a wild and lonely and holy place, where it is easy to imagine living an austere and holy life of contemplation and prayer.

I finally got round to watching again a programme I had recorded last year, this week, about Sister Wendy Beckett, the nun and art expert who Debbie thinks should play the guitar. Sister Wendy lives as a hermit in the grounds of a Carmelite Nunnery in Norfolk, and I was very taken with one thing she said about prayer, which I hadn’t actually registered first time around when I watched it live. She said that silence is when God comes and talks to you, and that when you ask God for something in prayer, he doesn’t give you it on a plate, but he stands by you and helps you to try and achieve it.  I’ve been attempting to employ these concepts in a renewed effort at prayer this week, and I can imagine how being somewhere like Lindisfarne or the Farne Islands, with the wind howling and the sound of the sea and the keening of the gulls as an eternal background soundscape would help you to get into the zone. We are talking about stilling the mind here, which is also a key concept in Zen Buddhism, and perhaps it is no accident that the other Holy Isle (in Lamlash Bay off the Isle of Arran) is a Buddhist colony.

There are good silences and bad silences though. I’m not too keen on the silence at 4AM when you wake up because your knees are cramped and aching and you can’t get back to sleep, and your mind races over everything you’ve ever done wrong in your life and how you ended up in this state and that yes, life is indeed a terminal disease.  Caritas may not conturbat me, but Timor Mortis conturbat me, it conturbat me very much in the small hours of the morning.  I have, eventually, found some comfort in praying at those times, but I am not sure if prayer when you are semi-conscious actually counts.

The seeming pointlessness of life on some occasions, in a depressing week, can occasionally be offset by some slivers of good news, I suppose: two abandoned badger cubs were rescued by a wildlife sanctuary in Leatherhead, Surrey. One of them, unfortunately, was wounded and has subsequently died, but his sister is still hanging in there, a little beacon of hope, as I type. There has been a verdict on Jimmy Mubenga that means there is now a chance of some form of justice being applied to those who held him down while he died during his forcible deportation.  But really, you’d be scratching around for anything more cheerful, or at least I was, which makes me wonder whether once again my sense of purposelessness and my inability to pray any more may well have a clinical root, in depression or similar. Of course, there are those no doubt who would say that depression is not a “proper” disability, but believe me, it is.

I can see I am going to have to watch myself. At the end of the day, like Hardy says, maybe we shouldn’t expect too much from life, “just neutral-tinted haps and such”.  I’ve also been re-reading good old Belloc, or should I say mad old Belloc.  Especially The Winged Horse with its final stanza:

For you that took the all in all, the things you left were three:
A loud Voice for singing, and keen Eyes to see,
And a spouting Well of Joy within that never yet was dried!
And I ride!

My problem seems to be that I’ve still got the loud voice and the keen eyes, but the spouting well of joy has dried up. As Granny Fenwick used to say, you never miss the water till the day the well runs dry. Maybe it is time for a retreat. A retreat is not a rout, it is a regrouping – a controlled withdrawal to a prepared position. Maybe that is what’s needed. So next week I am going to try and deliberately set aside some quiet time, and see if anyone – or anything – speaks to me.

Teach us to care and not to care

Teach us to sit still.