Dispensing Witan Wisdom Since The Days of King Eggbound The Unready...

Not to mention "Left-Wing Pish"

Sunday 20 July 2014

Epiblog for the Feast of St Margaret of Antioch



It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. I must admit, when I sat here last week typing the Epiblog, I had not expected it to have been a busy week in the Holme Valley. I had expected it to have been a busy week on Walney Island, Dumfries and Galloway, or the Isle of Arran, or all three, but no, we’re still here. A combination of unexpected last minute hitches, things going wrong and needing fixing, the usual preparation that always takes far longer than we think, and general lethargy and exhaustion.

So, here we are. Matilda is enjoying her unexpected reprieve from the regime of only being visited and fed twice a day by Katie the doggy nanny, and Misty, well, Misty’s life is pretty much the same wherever she is, sleeping, dog treats, walkies, dog treats, sleeping... Matilda did – rather strangely – have a full scale cat wash,  including all the bits behind the ears and sitting with one leg straight up in the air, in the rain, on the decking, As one of my friends said, she’s just invented the shower.

The preparations are also slow because I keep falling asleep, from cause or causes unknown, but those iron tablets don’t seem to be working, and Deb has painful tendonitis in her right foot, so she has been trying not to aggravate it by doing anything too sturm und drang, as, when we are on holiday, she wants to be able to climb mountains.

The week also included St Swithun’s Day, which, like Kim Kardashian, was hot and dull. St Swithun’s has acquired a great significance for me, not so much for the weather-predicting aspects, but for the fact that four years ago on that very day, I did my “mercy dash” in an ambulance through the streets of Huddersfield, leaving Debbie, Tig and Kitty bewildered at home and me at the gates of death with a perforated bowel.  Although I saw Deb nearly every day through the long, slow six months of recovery that was to follow, I only saw Tig once, and Kitty not at all, and I missed them both terribly. The reason my recovery turned out to be so long and slow, as it happened, was because the mobility problems that had plagued me for years before my gut went “ping” turned out to be facioscapularhumeral muscular dystrophy. Which is how I ended up trundling round in this mobile birdcage, waiting to cop it.  As a memorial of the day my life fell apart, then, St Swithun’s day, 15th July, was both sobering, and tinged with black edges, for me.

The end of the week was also, sadly, tinged with a bit of mortality. Debbie had to attend a funeral on Thursday afternoon, and Friday would have been the 86th birthday of my mother, had she lived. Strangely, as well as remembering Mum, I also found myself missing Kitty and Freddie and all the other four-leggeds who have gone ahead into the great beyond, and wondering once more if heaven allows animals, and whether any of our deceased cats would have been adopted by my mum.  Either way, it was a reminder that life is lent, not given, and you never know the minute or the hour, a lesson reinforced by the events in Gaza and the deaths of those poor people on the Malaysian Airlines plane.

Other than that, Friday was enlivened only by a plague of bizarre and annoying technical issues: specifically, that we wanted to burn some CDs of (mainly classical) music to take with us and we had one laptop that for some reason couldn’t or wouldn’t create an MP3 file, but which could burn CDs, and one which could easily create an MP3, yet couldn’t burn CDs. We ended up getting around it by transferring the MP3 files via a detachable hard drive. A bit of a “don’t build a bridge, drain the river” solution, but it worked.

Saturday was the gloomiest day of all. After struggling the day before over burning music onto CDs for the trip, possibly the most trivial cause for marital discord ever, neither of us was in the mood to compromise or offer mutual help on Saturday, so we each struggled on alone, getting done what had to be done. The weather was lousy, dull, dark, raining, depressing. About 4pm there seemed to be a bit of a break in the clouds, so Debbie announced her intention of meeting up with Granny, who was also dog-walking, on the cricket-field at Armitage Bridge.  Ten minutes after she had gone, a massive clap of thunder rent the air, followed by a downpour of Biblical proportions. Uh-oh, that’s torn it, I thought to myself, and started to look out for Misty’s face at the back door, figuring that she would almost certainly have run off on hearing the bang.  I was right about this – she had – but fortunately, Granny had the presence of mind, and the reactions, still, at an advanced age, to reach down and grab Misty’s collar as she streaked past. They all came back in Granny’s car, wet through, with Misty hiding under the seat. They had lost the yellow, vulcanised rubber ball that Deb usually chucks for Misty to fetch – it’s still somewhere on the cricket-field, but as I said, better to have lost the ball and brought the dog home, rather than vice-versa.

Even with all of the fraught preparations, setbacks and delays preoccupying me most of the week, it’s been impossible to ignore the outside world, especially the desperately sad situation in Gaza.  I have been troubled by this problem for years. As an Englishman, my sympathies are with the underdog, of course. But – unlike many left-wing commentators – I don’t think the underdog in this question is merely “The Palestinians”.  The Palestinian leadership is, in its own way, just as nasty and cynical as the Zionist reactionaries who seem to have a grip on the Israeli cabinet. The “underdog”, as I see it, is the mass of ordinary people on both sides of the conflict, Israelis and Palestinians, who find themselves in the fallout area of a war zone while various lunatic fringes fight it out over their heads.

On the one hand you have an Israeli authority intent on taking over ever more Palestinian land with illegal settlements, and stifling any attempt at Palestinian movement, commerce and trade. On the other hand you have the leadership of Hamas, who seem to think that the answer to this is to fire crappy old rustbucket rockets into Israel and hope for the best.  Actually, the cynic in me says that perhaps they hope for the worst. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if someone in the Hamas leadership hadn’t come to the appalling conclusion that, given that Israel can be relied on to kill Palestinian children as a part of its inevitable random and massively disproportionate response, a few hundred dead Palestinian children are worth it to Hamas, to incite the passions and sympathy of the liberal West.

Neither Hamas nor the Israeli government seems capable of recognising that two wrongs don’t make a right. Thus you get a cycle of vendetta, revenge, and “whataboutery”, spiralling ever backwards into the past.  Hamas – as I said last week -  cynically site their rockets where they know that a huge and disproportionate Israeli response will cause the maximum harm and damage to their own people, and Israel never fails to oblige by providing the said huge and disproportionate response, because that’s what they do.  Collective punishment, random air strikes, shelling kids playing on the beach, is all grist to the mill to the lunatic fringe on the Israeli side. Never apologise, never explain, just send Mark Regev out to deny anything happened, or, failing that, to promise an enquiry that never materialises.

Something radical and different needs to happen, to break the cycle of violence.  Either Israel or Hamas has to deliberately not retaliate, to break the cycle, Hamas has to stop firing rockets and Israel has to call a halt to bulldozing people’s houses and building illegal settlements and relax the trade and movement restrictions, which is all about as likely as John Prescott at a Chumbawamba concert, or an outside power – effectively the US, since no one else has the wherewithal to do it – has to step in and impose such a solution, militarily if necessary. 

And that’s not going to happen either, any time soon at any rate.  Hamas will never win a military conflict against Israel, so the only other possible solution I can see is that Israel is eventually allowed, by virtue of the US and the UN turning a blind eye, to wipe Palestine off the map completely, which would, in effect, create a whole displaced nation of people with a burning hatred of the west, ripe for radicalisation and swelling the ranks of ISIS. Not a prospect we should relish.

Otherwise, Hamas will carry on firing rockets made from barbecues and dustbins, many of which drop short and land in their own territory* anyway, and Israel’s government will carry on taking 500 Palestinian lives for every 5 Israelis killed, and by their careless and rather random approach to the rules of engagement, coupled with Hamas hiding rocket sites in civilian areas, create tragedies and the deaths of innocent children, that will continue to fuel Palestinian revenge vendettas for years, generations, to come. 

[*I suspect this is the origin of the map showing the plots of Hamas rocket strikes within Palestine which was produced by the Israeli Defence Force. Not so much strikes on their own people, as the IDF claimed in their caption, but failures of equipment and/or possibly interceptions by Israel’s “Iron Dome”.]

Still, it may all be rendered completely irrelevant by the outbreak of a world war in the Ukraine, so perhaps we shouldn’t worry too much.  President Putin (not gay) was busily trying to backtrack this week and spread the blame for the destruction of Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 as widely as possible. It would never have happened if there had not been a war zone in the area. Very true, in general terms, I agree. Specifically, though, Vladimir me old chum, it would never have happened if you hadn’t given a BUK ground-to-air missile system to a group of Yahoo rabble rebels who were so pissed out of their heads on vodka that they couldn’t tell an airliner from a military transport.  Therefore seek not to send for whom the bell tolls, Putin, it tolls for thee.  

And, sadly, it tolls for all those caught up in conflicts, directly or indirectly, human and animal, and it asks of use once again the endless question of why suffering is allowed in the world? The most positive thing we can ever say is that there is a reason, but it’s not apparent to us. As the song says, what can you do when God acts like a punk/except comfort each other, go home and get drunk.

As a sidebar, I do wonder what Malaysian Airways was doing flying over a war zone anyway, though I gather they aren’t alone in doing so. It is all tending to reinforce a rather unfortunate impression of a now-you-see-them, now-you-don’t airline. To lose one airliner is a misfortune; to lose two, looks like carelessness.

So, it’s been a grim old week in the world at large, leavened only by the demotion of Michael Gove, who then managed to lock himself in a toilet.  He was there from Monday to Saturday, everyone knew he was there, as one wit quipped on Facebook. This latest shuffling of the deckchairs on the Titanic has seen Nick Clegg give perhaps his most unconvincing performance to date, that of a man who shakes his head, rubs his eyes, and says “I don’t know what came over me”. Here’s a clue – look up the word “gimp” in the dictionary, and ask those Eton boys you’ve been fagging for since 2010 about “The Biscuit Game”. Then you’ll know exactly what came over you.

Another dark day this week was marked by the passing of the Data Retention Investigatory Powers (DRIP) legislation. Drip is a very appropriate acronym both for Ed Miliband and Nick Clegg, who failed to raise any concerns about this gross abuse of civil liberties and the cynical disregard for due parliamentary procedure. The day after was marked by the arrest of about 600 suspected paedophiles in one of the biggest ever police swoops of this kind in the UK. On the news, the wave of paedophile arrests is now being subtly linked to, and advanced as a further justification for, the DRIP Act.

I have no sympathy whatsoever for people who abuse children, but I would be interested to see how many of this unprecedented wave of 600 arrests actually lead to convictions. I  suspect that what the Junta is doing is what they used to do whenever there was a need to create a panic about Islamic terrorism - round up the usual suspects, stick a couple of armoured cars on the lawn at Heathrow, claim that society has been vaguely saved in some unspecified way from some unspecified threat which is never vouchsafed to us... and then quietly let them all go without being charged some weeks later.

Speaking of the arrests, Justice Secretary Chris Grayling, said: "Somebody who starts looking at pictures on the internet may go on to do something much worse, so this is the kind of operation that is absolutely vital for our society."

They may indeed go on to do something much worse - such as chucking away a dossier that proved that the rich and influential were not only molesting kids themselves, but shielding others in power who were doing the same. But not to worry, that particular festering sore at the heart of the establishment has been booted down the news agenda by this new furore and hoohah. Anyone who doubts my assessment of it should pause to consider that some of the people arrested were on the sex offenders’ register anyway, and therefore, being known to the police, could presumably have been picked up at any time.  But they weren’t.

And so we came to Sunday, the Feast of St Margaret of Antioch in Pisidia. Or possibly Antioch in Syria, even that much is disputed. As I wasn’t expecting to be here at all this week, and, wherever I was, wasn’t going to be sure of internet access, I have done very little research on this week’s saint.  In fact, I could probably just have made it all up, because her historical existence has been questioned anyway. She was declared apocryphal by Pope Gelasius in 494AD, which is a bit of a cheek considering he had by far the sillier name.  In the way that saints do, she is reputed to have offered powerful indulgences to those who wrote about her or who read her life, or even invoked her intercession, so I wait with bated breath.  She is also one of the Fourteen Holy Helpers, and apparently was one of the saints who spoke to Joan of Arc, which of course went very well.  In the Greek Orthodox Church, she is known as St Marina and her feast day is 17th July, but then as I have said before, there is nothing “Orthodox” that I can see about a group of people with beards like ZZ Top wearing jiffy bags on their heads.

Anyway, according to legend, Margaret of Antioch was the daughter of a pagan priest called Aedesius, and, after the death of her mother, was nursed by a pious woman “five or six leagues” from Antioch.  Her father reacted badly to the news of her conversion to Christianity and the dedication of her virginity to God, and turned her out of doors. Fortunately, she was adopted by her erstwhile nurse, and set to work as a shepherdess. She was painted as a shepherdess, complete with dragon (an unlikely combination, but read on) by Zurburan, one of my favourite painters, in 1631.

Sadly for her, she came to the attention of the Governor of the Roman Diocese of the East, Oybrius, who was browsing the sheep one day and noticed her. The deal was that she could marry him if she renounced Christianity, which she refused to do. She was tortured because of this, fairly inevitably, but then various miraculous and disputed events occurred, including her being eaten by Satan in the form of a dragon, from which she escaped alive because the cross she was wearing irritated the dragon’s digestive system.  She was martyred in 304AD.

The Greek Orthodox version, St Marina, doesn’t have this particular legend attached to her, but instead has her beating a demon on the head with a hammer. If she hadn’t come from Antioch, a girl like that could surely only have hailed from Barnsley.  Her cult became very popular in England for some reason, with more than 250 churches dedicated to her. She is considered by some to be the patron saint of pregnancy, not a bad achievement for someone who dedicated her virginity to God, and is often depicted struggling with, or vanquishing, the unfortunate dragon. She is also the patron saint of: childbirth, dying people, kidney disease, peasants, exiles, falsely accused people, Lowestoft, nurses, Queens College Cambridge, and two towns in Malta, Sannat and Bormla. Quite a diverse list. All that’s missing is wheely-bins. Unfortunately for St Margaret, Pope Paul VI took one look at her cultus in 1969, thought “no way”, in Latin, and took her off the syllabus. So, no indulgences for him, then.

I can’t really derive any life-lessons from St Margaret of Antioch, especially only on this brief acquaintance and given that large parts of her life may have been completely imaginary anyway. I briefly considered some long convoluted analogy between her struggle with the dragon/bashing the demon on the head (delete as applicable) and the decision this week of the Synod of the Church of England (finally) to allow for women bishops to be ordained, at last. But maybe that analogy is for others to paint, not me. Time is short, and there is packing to be done. After a few days of inactivity, it looks like the log jam is moving. Katie the doggy nanny is prepped and primed, and tomorrow we may finally be setting off for points north, in the camper van. Half of me feels glad at this, half of me feels sad and trepidacious. I have no idea what the future holds for me, but obviously, given my condition, there will inevitably come a time when I can no longer manage to go on holiday in the camper van, and therefore I should seize every opportunity.  And, the sooner we go, the sooner we’ll be back.

On the other hand, we don’t exactly have a great track record of coming back off holiday to find our remaining pets at home hale, well and hearty, having lost Russell in 2005 and Kitty in 2012 during our absences on Arran. They were, both, admittedly, old and ill before we went away, but the thought of anything happening to Matilda while we were away would be too bitter a blow to bear. Plus, I am sure she actually misses us when we’re away, and I, in turn, do get terribly homesick on holiday, on top of the added stress of wondering whether the dog or Debbie or both will fall off a mountain or go missing in some way.  And there is much, to be honest, that I could, and should, be doing here, especially to the garden, which has been grievously neglected this year.

Provided I can overcome the stress and the homesickness it will inevitably cause, and provided I can avoid falling off my banana board when transferring, I am sure it will be a good experience for me, spiritually, going on holiday. Plus, I am planning on taking some of the work-mountain with me, and it is always easier getting on with it with a beautiful and calming vista of the sea, one thing I miss about living here so far inland.

So, dear reader, at the risk of putting the spec on it by provoking big G to call down yet more thunderbolts on our heads and delay us, this time next week I could be typing this looking out across Brodick Bay towards Goatfell, or at the side of Kilbrannan Sound, or beside the castle at Lochranza, and cursing the lack of an internet connection to enable me to post it.

Life is a pilgrimage, and I’m about to set off on the next stage of it, whatever it holds for us. Baby, baby, it’s a wild world, and we’re heading off for the wilds. By now, you are thinking, for God’s sake, Steve, it’s only a holiday, and you’re supposed to enjoy it. Which is true. But, as good old TSE puts it, and as has been amply demonstrated by the delays of this last sombre week, all too often, between the intention, and the action, falls the shadow. Oh well, better start packing in earnest, I suppose.

Sunday 13 July 2014

Epiblog for the Feast of St Dogfan



It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. As I sit typing this, I am surrounded by piles of gear and kit, maps, guidebooks, and propped in the corner is a large piece of pallet-top, to which is pinned a piece of A3 paper, a list of everything that we still have to do before we can go away.

We’d both have hoped to have got away before now, but we always do this when we’re setting off on a trip. We massively underestimate the amount of preparation necessary to actually get the camper shipshape and on the road and massively over estimate our ability to do it in the time available. Given that we can’t afford the luxury of keeping the camper in full operational mode with all the food and gear on board while it’s just parked in the driveway (and it would be unwise anyway, unless we really wanted to encourage someone to put the side window through and help themselves) we have no option but to start from scratch each time.

Checklists help, of course, up to a point. But, unfortunately, just writing “don’t be tired” on a checklist doesn’t make it so, and we are both knackered. Debbie, understandably, after three terms of teaching, and me because the iron tablets at the moment seem to be going down without touching the sides or having any discernible effect.  So, another week has gone by, we are where we are, and where we are, is still here. We will get going, probably in the next three or four days, and funnily enough, I noticed in my notes from last year that we didn’t get off until 21st July 2013 and we still managed to get to Arran twice last summer, so there’s hope for us yet.

Matilda remains blissfully unaware of all this activity, largely because she has been spending a lot of time on her summer holidays, out on the decking, ignoring us.  She has actually been one of the chief causes of the delay, or at least concern over who is going to feed her has been.  For reasons I won’t even begin to bore you with,  the normal arrangements are potentially in question, and after the debacle over Kitty, I definitely don’t want to confine her to a cattery. Obviously there’s the (expensive) option of the Doggy Nanny, who will come in twice a day and feed her, at a price. What we really need is someone with no commitments and lots of time on their hands who could come and live in our house for three weeks. The position is paid, and still open to last minute applicants.

Misty, meanwhile, is getting into practice for the mountainous, hairy-arsed regions of the North, with five long walks on the trot, two of them over 11 miles each. As I speak, she is curled up on her cushion, asleep, which is not surprising, really.

I’ve been ignoring the outside world, but it’s been impossible not to be aware of the conflict in Gaza. My sympathies, such as they are, lie with the ordinary people on both sides who are the victims of extremism.  Hamas are a bunch of hotheaded idiots. Whatever their grievances, they are not going to be resolved by firing rockets made out of old zinc dustbins and Citroen 2CVs into Israel. The last time I checked, more people died per year in Israel from road accidents than from Hamas rockets, but it’s not about numbers. Every dead person is 100% dead, and Hamas know that Israel will retaliate with massive, disproportionate, and deadly force.  They always do. It’s like prodding a scorpion with a stick and expecting it only to tickle you in return. Israel will carry out the usual indiscriminate collective punishments because they can. Nobody’s going to stop them, least of all the USA.

So the leadership on both sides is incapable of realising that two wrongs don’t make a right, and every time it flares up, innocent people die and the cycle of vendetta and revenge gets ratcheted up another few notches.

Meanwhile, here at home, the massive public sector workers’ strike on Thursday went largely under-reported by the BBC, and what reporting there was, was simplistic and biased.  The Junta’s line that the strike would hurt “hard working families” was parroted without question. Has it not occurred to the BBC that public sector workers are also “hard working families”. They trotted out the usual collection of yummy mummies complaining that for an extra day out the year they’d had to take responsibility for their offspring instead of bundling them out of the door of the 4x4 at the school gates. The climax was an engineered “confrontation” between a public sector worker on strike and the owner of a local shop, who was representing the private sector. Oh how I longed for her to say “If I don’t get a living wage, you will have no customers, no shop and no job.” But if she did, the Beeb edited it out.

We also had the first reports of the “legacy” of Le Tour de France. Leeds City Council is spending a further £29m on a cycle track.  This is the same Leeds City Council that underwrote the £11M fee for actually staging the race.  I must be missing something here, but I don’t see how this can be described as a legacy.  To my mind, if a self-funding bike race in Yorkshire built a facility that was afterwards made available to local people to use for free or at a reduced rate, that would be a legacy. To spend a further £29m on something that is already going to make a thumping loss, is throwing good money after bad.  And if you doubt my maths, pause to consider this: the race was watched by an estimated 2.5m people on its transit through Yorkshire. In order to gross the estimated, claimed extra £100m into the local economy, each of those people would have had to spend an extra £40.00 that they would not have spent anyway in Yorkshire that weekend, and even then, it wouldn’t have gone straight back into the coffers of the local authorities who shelled out for it, and who are going to have to recover it through the council tax in years to come.

As if the world wasn’t mad enough, tomorrow, which is Bastille Day, ironically enough, parliament will be asked to rubber-stamp a piece of the most fundamentally anti-libertarian legislation in recent years, which is saying something.

I was absolutely infuriated by the way the journalists were summoned to Number 10 to be TOLD this was happening - what happened to Parliament hearing about it first and debating it? Since when did Parliament become a rubber stamp for the behind the scenes stitch-ups of Cameron Clegg and Miliband?

(Actually, I can probably answer my own question there, the answer is ever since Labour gave up any pretence at being the opposition to the Blight Brigade)

We only have the word of untrustworthy politicians that there is an increased terrorist threat. Ever since Blair's ill-judged support for Bush's overseas adventurism in the wake of 9/11, we have had this cycle of making ourselves targets for every hothead East of the Euphrates with an AK47, then passing ever more anti-libertarian legislation off the back of that, to restrict the liberties of the rest of us in response to a threat which, if it does exist, we bloody created in the first place! Remember, as well, that this legislation can be used not only to keep tabs on the Slough branch of ISIS (membership 12, if you're lucky) but also at the end of the day on ANYONE the Blight Brigade Junta doesn't like.

I am aware of the argument about well, what happens if a terrorist atrocity happens that could have been prevented, and my answer is that the security services don't need mass fishing expeditions, they already know who they should be looking at and there's plenty of existing legislation to be used if necessary. One of the recent terrorist threats was foiled by the French – using existing powers – who stopped a plan to blow up the Eiffel Tower. I can’t imagine how Theresa May reading my emails is going to prevent ISIS from finding out where the Eiffel Tower is. If we have to turn all of England into an armed camp with 100% surveillance, 24/7,  just to nominally safeguard the freedoms our fathers fought for in 1940, there's a certain irony there. If this was France, the cobbles would be winging their way through the Junta’s windows, and there would be piles of burning tyres on the motorway.

And so, after a fraught, frustrating week, we came to today, the feast of St Dogfan, whose name appealed to me because obviously, I am a bit of a dog fan myself. This Dogfan, however, was a Welsh martyr, descended from the chieftain Brychan Brycheiniog, a Prince of Powys, of Brecknock. He was slain by pagan invaders in the fifth century.

St Dogfan’s name is associated with a plant called Mwyar Doewan, or “Dogfan’s Berries” which grows freely on the Berwyn mountains. According to an old tradition of the Berwyn Shepherds, the annual tribute to St Dogfan was a quart of Berwyn berries.  It became the custom to present this gift to the vicar of the parish on the morning of St Dogfan’s feast, and the first farmer to achieve this on the day was let off a year’s tithes!

The church of St Dogfan at Llanrhaeadr-ym-Mochnant in Powys is also famous because the incumbent, William Morgan, was the first person to translate the Bible into the vernacular Welsh in 1588. Morgan’s parishioners were apparently unimpressed by the amount of time he was spending on this translation, as opposed to his parochial duties, and Morgan found himself summoned before the Archbishop of Canterbury to explain himself.  He so impressed the Archbishop that he made Morgan his personal chaplain and made the requisite funds available to him to complete the translation!

St Dogfan is undoubtedly interesting, and his church, a grade II listed building, is full of unremarked gems. But his life holds few or no lessons for me, apart from don’t bandy words with pagans carrying sharp objects, which I already knew, to be honest.

I wish I could say I’m looking forward to next week. I am, actually, until I think of all the things that could go wrong. Debbie goes missing, Misty goes missing, Debbie and Misty go missing, I fall off my banana board, Matilda goes missing. I suppose there are no more certainties in life these days as there were when St Dogfan launched his ill-judged attempt at converting the pagans.

Right now, I find myself in the position of the Anglo-Saxon poet of the seafarer:

Grove bears blossom,
Burghs grow fair,
Fields show fruitful,
World seems new.
All spurs on                                       
The eager-minded
Spirit to sail,
In one who seeks
On flood-ways
His faring.
So cuckoo admonishes
With sorrowful voice,
Sings, summer’s guardian,
Boding sorrow
Bitter in breast-hoard.

Oh well. I’ll probably enjoy it when I get there.                                    


Sunday 6 July 2014

Epiblog for the Feast of St Maria Goretti



It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. A week spent doing the preparation which is necessary before we can start to prepare to go on holiday. It might seem strange, having escalating levels of preparation, a bit like the US military with its DEFCON statues, but nevertheless, it’s the only way to ensure that everything, and everyone, necessary for the holiday eventually gets packed into the camper van and on the road.  As an example, in order to find some of the gear we'll need, like storm lanterns and guy-ropes and tent pegs, Debbie has first had to remove and excavate three terms’ worth of accreted teaching materials, worksheets, lesson plans, ILPs (no, I have no idea, either) which she has done by the simple expedient of “filing” them in the stove.

It’s been the final week of term of course, a cause for at least muted celebration, although sighs of relief are probably more apposite.  Thursday was marked by the traditional end of term “conference”, bracketed by two trips to the pub. When teachers say they are just nipping down the pub, especially on the last day of term, it’s a bit like the captain of the Titanic saying they might have a slight problem with frosted icing.  So it was that Debbie’s term finally ended at about 10pm, in a mixture of cider and gin & tonic, though not in the same glass at the same time. 

This meant that any celebration planned for the actual day of Misty’s anniversary were, by definition, muted, although it could be argued that Debbie’s sojourn in the pub included an element of carousing in Misty’s honour.  Debbie made it up to her the following day, though, with a long walk up Castle Hill to blow the cobwebs away.

The weather’s remained hot and dull; in fact, hot and dull just about sums up the week in general. Matilda has been enjoying the warm weather, and staying out in the dusk much longer than she normally does, although all she does is sit on the decking and watch and listen for little things rustling down in the garden below. Such is her little life, interspersed with eating, of course, and sleeping on her Maisie-blanket on the settee next to the stove.  She’s taken to having conversations with me, first thing.  These aren’t yet on the level of the in-depth discussions I used to have with Kitty about whether she wanted her Felix later or “naow”, or when I asked her who it was who de-stabilised Chiang-Kai-Shek and began the Long March, and she replied “Mao”. Matilda’s vocal effusions are limited to a truncated sound that comes out like “map” or “mat”, so I have to frame my questions accordingly: what is that thing that Mummy can’t read, Matilda? What did the cat sit on, Matilda?

In amongst all the tedious shit which has beset me from all sides (the spare part for the vacuum cleaner doesn’t fit, for instance - there are two types of Dyson DC08, apparently, and ours is the TW model. Who knew?) I have actually achieved something this week. I finished a book, Hauntings, the latest collection of poems and stories. I managed this by the simple expedient of deciding arbitrarily to leave out and unfinished story and two old poems that I’ve lost the only copies of. Hey presto, suddenly a book. Less is more.  I’ve also made some progress with We’ll Take The String Road, which has been forced to languish while I worked on other things I’d promised to do for other people.  So, there’s corn in Egypt yet.

I’ve also caught up on masses of accounts, which hasn’t done much to improve my mood, or to dispel the thought that I am sitting here while the sun shines and the summer slips away, wasting what remains of my life adding up the lack of success of an enterprise based on the fact that no-one gives a stuff about books any more, good, bad, or indifferent. Nevertheless, as an act of faith, having finally crowbarred some stock out of the warehouse, yesterday I sat and packed four huge cartons of books with orders that had been pending in some cases since April. 

As an upper-body workout, I couldn’t have asked for better, but unfortunately the consequences for me turned out to be a set of aches that wouldn’t go away and couldn’t be dislodged by Paracetamol. I do have some codeine-based painkillers in my meds bag, left over from my last “do” with the gallstones, but I’m very reluctant to take any of these, as they tend to make me see pink monkeys dancing on the ceiling, which is OK if you like that sort of thing, but most of us left it behind in the 1960s. Eventually, by dint of making myself some Horlicks (the de facto insomnia drink of boring old farts the world over) and taking yet more Paracetamol, I did, eventually, drift off to sleep.

The outside world has, once again, had to take second place this week, although it’s been impossible to ignore the Bloody Tour De France with its road closures and threats to tow away vehicles that would potentially block the route of the drug-raddled velocopedists. The local tourist body made a bid for “Le Grand Depart” and it was accepted, probably to the surprise of several local authorities who have had to stump up eye-watering amounts of money just to stage the event, at a time of “austerity” when Sure Start centres are closing left, right, and, yes, centre.  The organisers have plucked a figure of £100m for the "benefits" of the event, out of thin air, and this has been accepted unquestioningly by the media, especially the BBC, which has been running nightly rolling cycling news features in place of the local news slot formerly occupied by Look North. 

The cost at the moment has been estimated at £37m, but the organisers have promised to publish a full financial assessment in December 2014, by which time all those responsible will have collected their OBEs and knighthoods and moved on, leaving the council tax payers of Yorkshire to pick up the tab, having realised that the Emperor was not, in fact, wearing new clothes at all.  Meanwhile, Madame Toussaud’s unveiled its new waxworks of Prince William and Kate Middleton, while the real thing was at Harewood House to cut the ribbon and officially launch the bike race.  Or was it vice versa?

Talking of appalling old waxworks, Leon Brittan has had a poor week as well. Amnesia may have worked for Ernest Saunders, but forgetting what was in a dossier about alleged paedophile rings operating at the core of the 1980s political establishment and featuring various alleged entertainers, and who he gave it to, and what happened hasn't cut it for Leon.  Since at least one of the people on the alleged list was allegedly a member of MI5, and Leon Brittan’s permanent secretary at the Home Office, to whom the file was handed, was Sir Brian Cubbon, who was allegedly also a member of MI5, someone less charitable than myself could be led to assume that it was no surprise that the police allegedly shredded it, along with the alleged dossier on Cyril Smith that MI5 allegedly disposed of.  I have often said that the only way in which someone like Jimmy Savile could have got away with abuse on such an industrial scale was that he was being protected by someone or a succession of someones, in a position of power.  Now that David Cameron has been forced, reluctantly no doubt, because he needs more bad news attaching to the Tories like he needs another hole in the head, to order a review of this episode, maybe the truth (or at least a version of it) will emerge and there might be some justice for the alleged victims, at least one of whom has (sadly not allegedly) committed suicide.

I'm not in favour of trial by "the court of public opinion" but if there have been crimes committed, and these have gone unpunished, then those responsible should be arrested, charged, and, if found guilty in a court of law by a jury of their peers, punished justly according to the law. If we don't have that, we might as well go back to the dark ages.

In fact, some times I think we are.  It is the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, and this involves fasting. Muslims in Cardiff have been working with local takeaways and curry-houses to provide meals for the homeless. In fairness to the BBC and the other media, it did get reported, sort of, but compared to the many features and mentions given to the misguided idiots from Cardiff who have joined what they see as a jihad in Syria, it was minuscule.  I don’t know why I am surprised. Good news stories featuring Muslims rarely make it into the mainstream media, which is usually preoccupied with the spittle-flecked ravings of the likes of Anjem Choudary.

As well as the non-feast of Ramadan, today is the feast of St Maria Goretti. We could also have had the splendidly named Anglo-Saxon princess, St Sexburga, but I just didn’t trust myself not to be smutty.

St Maria Goretti was born near Ancona in Italy on 16th October, 1890. After the family moved to a village near Anzio, her father died of malaria and her mother struggled to make ends meet and keep the family together. When Maria Goretti was only 12, in 1902, she was attacked by a neighbour called Alexander who attempted to rape her, and, when she resisted, repeatedly stabbed her.  As she lay in hospital dying of her wounds, Maria Goretti is said to have forgiven her attacker.

The murderer was captured, tried, and imprisoned. At first unrepentant, he apparently had a dream one night where Maria appeared to him in a garden and gave him flowers.  From that moment, he became a reformed man and repented killing Maria. On his release, he went directly to Maria’s mother and begged her to forgive him, and she is supposed to have said “If my daughter can forgive you, who am I to withhold it”. 

Bizarrely, when Maria Goretti was declared a saint in 1950, having been canonised by Pope Pius XII for her purity, as a model to youth, and most importantly for her forgiveness, which extended beyond the grave, Alexander, her murderer, was present in the crowd in the square of St Peter’s in Rome, to celebrate her elevation to the sainthood.  St Maria Goretti is now the patron saint of rape victims, which I suppose makes her quite an appropriate saint to bookend a week which has seen all sorts of manifestations of the sleazy underbelly of 1970s and 1980s public life in Britain exposed finally to some sort of scrutiny.

Forgiveness, which lies at the heart of the story of St Maria Goretti, is the hardest of all Christian lessons. My inability to forgive people is the chief reason why I am not a practising Christian. Although even when I was, I have to say that all that practice never did me any good when it came to the real thing.  Next week, on Wednesday July 9th, in fact, is Baggis day. The ninth anniversary of when Russell, the Baggis-Cat, died, back in 2005.  I often see that as a watershed moment. The point where my life started to unravel. We came back from Arran, he’s died, within a month, the bank had taken the overdraft away, and the rot set in, starved of cash, the business withered around me while I grieved for the loss of Russbags and got on with making him a mosaic for his little tomb in the garden. Seven years later, I had finally paid off Barclays, despite nearly dying myself in 2010, but that doesn’t mean I’ve forgiven them. In fact, I still go out of my way to do them down, comment adversely on them, deter people from using them, warn them off, and I shall continue to do so until my dying day.  One of my chief aims in life these days, such as they are, is to inflict the maximum amount of damage on Barclays Bank, although lately they seem to be doing a good job of it on their own.  I will die cursing them with my last breath.

I have also never forgiven the death of Russell, either.  Like Kitty, who died in similar circumstances, he was an old cat, and maybe his time had come; but it doesn’t stop me being angry, and lashing out. This is not always productive of course, as the two people who are the most unforgiven by me for the death of Baggis are myself, and God almighty, the big palookah, the Swiss cheese himself, Big G in da house, on da throne. Beating myself up isn’t such a good idea these days, either – never was, really, especially as there is, and always has been, a crowd of willing volunteers happy to do it for me – and God is unlikely to pay attention to me thumping on the sky and telling him to keep it down.  He’s already sent his son round to sort me out. Allegedly.

So, it comes down to this. I am angry – furious, in fact, at the way my life has gone down hill, I am angry at all the losses I have had to suffer, and for the losses of my friends, both animal and human; I’m angry at the tedious shit that gets flung at me from all sides, and I’m angry at the manifest injustices of the world that go continually unpunished. Don’t expect any forgiveness from me.  I’m a bitter, wizened, angry old man in a wheelchair with lots of hate in his heart and lots of scores to settle before I go. The thing is, God, me old chum, I’ll start being pious and forgiving if you’ll see to it that, for a change, justice triumphs and the evil get punished.  Is that a deal? After all, isn’t there something about vengeance is mine, saith the Lord? I am getting fed up of the mind of God being unfathomable, I mean there’s being opaque and there’s being completely bloody obscure just for the sake of it.

And if you came here for comfort, all I have is anger today, I’m afraid, although some of it may actually be anger on your behalf, depending on who you are, reading this. I’m sorry these stones are still stones, and not transmogrified to loaves. I know what I should be doing is cooking up some mean soul food, then feeding my mean soul with it, once I’ve made sure there’s enough for everyone else, but I am old, and tired, and beaten in. The best I can offer you today is some words from Thomas Hardy, another one who knew a lot about loss, irony and suffering:

"I do not promise overmuch,
Child; overmuch;
Just neutral-tinted haps and such,"
You said to minds like mine.
Wise warning for your credit's sake!
Which I for one failed not to take,
And hence could stem such strain and ache
As each year might assign.

Apart from the bit about stemming the pains and aches, of course.  Still, well done, though, St Maria Goretti, you’re a better man than I am, dinner-gong. That’s why you’re a saint, and I am not. I take my hat off to you, or I would do if I was wearing one today. In the meantime, I am going to take myself off, instead, to the Isle of Arran, and check if the sun is basking on the rocks and the seals are shining.  At the moment, I’m not looking forward to going – or rather, I’m looking forward to going, just not to the barren miles of dreary tasks that need doing before I can actually go. Anyway, if there’s no Epiblog next week, it’s because Virgin have no dongles. As you would probably expect. 

Paradoxically, once I get there, I can start not looking forward to coming back, while praying for the continued safety of Matilda during our absence, so that, at least, should perk God up a bit, and who knows, maybe he’ll start talking to me again, and we might be able to patch up our differences, but I’m not holding my breath.

In common with Thoreau, I’ll be trying to find some solace in nature instead:

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life…

Thoreau lived before the days of the camper van, though, and in any case, I doubt I’ll find much marrow to suck. But perhaps there’s a vegetarian alternative. All relationships must be pursued to their end, says John Le CarrĂ©, for that is where the blue flower grows.  I don’t think I’ve found it yet, but there are at least some pleasant yellow flowers in amongst the marram grass and sand-dunes at the side of Kilbrannan Sound, if and when we ever get there, that might do me for a while.

Happy trails, and if you don’t hear from me in the meantime, smoke me a kipper, I’ll be back for autumn.   

He said, resignedly.