Epiblog for the Fifteenth Sunday after Trinity

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley.  The weather continues much the same, with dull days and occasional bits and bats of rain, although it’s stayed reasonably warm. The leaves are starting to turn, however, and of course this week we had the equinox as well, so we’re now on the ever-darkening road to Christmas.

Matilda’s been making the most of what sunshine there is, although she never strays far from the decking, presumably because the wood is warm and retains the heat. She’s also taken to sleeping on the settee in Colin’s front room, yet another shift of location (she seems to swop around where she sleeps every couple of months or so). Anyway, this has at least enabled Misty to reclaim the disputed dog-bed, which she did on the first opportunity.

I sometimes wonder what’s going on in Misty’s little furry brain. She was dithering about on the decking the other day, and I wanted to make sure that she went down into the garden to do her stuff, so I picked up one of the “fat balls” that we put out for the birds, and lobbed it over the fence. It landed down by the pond, and I was hoping that Misty would go down and investigate it, being a collie and therefore more interested in balls than the average dog.  She did, in fact, go down and investigate it: not only that, but she picked it up in her mouth and carried it around the garden for a while. Then she dug a hole for it next to the pond, and buried it. Strange, strange dog.

Zak and Ellie have been around for a couple of days while Granny’s been otherwise occupied, so Zak got the “benefit” if that’s the right word, of two separate 11-mile walks with Misty and Deb. He was certainly hungry when he got back.  Ellie didn’t go because she’s not too well. Also, she does have a habit of setting off on her own at a tangent. She’s been back to the vet this week because of a potential allergy problem with the stitches from her biopsy, so we’ll have to see how she gets on.

I sometimes wonder what’s going on in Debbie’s little furry brain as well. This week, while the garage had the camper van, they lent her a car. Having the unaccustomed luxury of a bonnet (the car, not Debbie) she parked up at one of her peripatetic venues and, while she was locking up, she dumped all of the paperwork, personal assessments, lesson plans etc in a pile on the said bonnet. One small but effective gust of wind later, and she was picking them out of the hedge for the next 45 minutes.

Actually, I shouldn’t crow. Something similar once happened to me, with a box containing an entire financial year’s receipts, which I was taking to the accountants. In my case, the gust of wind was not small but effective, it was a full blown blast of a gale, which scattered them like the autumnal leaves that strew the brooks in Vallambrosa, half way down the street. It was just about dawn on a cold November morning, and it had been raining overnight, so most of them landed in puddles. I spent the next three hours picking up each last one. I phoned the accountants to tell them there was a problem, and I would have to re-appoint the meeting. Fortunately, on that occasion, my friend Maisie, out of the great goodness of her heart, not only straightened them all out, but actually ironed them, to get rid of the rainwater. By this means, most of them were saved. She returned them with a note that said “Here are the receipts. I never want to see them again.” So I guess Debbie got off quite lightly, although some of the lesson plans might have been a bit grubby. Other than that, she has been busy foraging, in what is laughingly described by Kirklees College as her spare time, and brought back another two poisonous specimens this week.  No, I didn’t put them in the stir-fry. Although there have been occasions when I felt like it. This week has been even worse than last, in many ways. Thank God I’ve been too busy to notice, most of the time.

The bitterness and resentment on all sides over the result of the Scottish referendum continues. The internet is full of disgruntled yes voters, whose complaints focus on the vote being rigged, the media being biased, the banks being against them, and the “scaremongering” which apparently “cowed” the no voters.  I found myself trying to examine these assertions as dispassionately as I could, given the fact that I thought the version of “independence” on offer to Scotland was a disaster waiting to happen, for the reasons I have often enumerated in previous blogs.

The vote was fixed: could this really have been done? Like the 9/11 conspiracy theories, for it to be correct, it would have required a level of country-wide organisation which would also have involved dozens of people being “in the know” – and as for the video of the teller supposedly putting yes votes on the no file, presumably since this woman and the count at which she was working can be identified, why not make an official complaint to the Electoral Commission or whoever is supposed to oversee these things? So far, the only “official” complaint seems to have come from Russia, a country where thieves once broke into the Kremlin and stole next year’s election results.

The media was biased: this complaint seems mainly to rest on the fact that the yes voters objected to Nick Robinson’s line of questioning in the new-famous press conference where he tried (in vain) to pin Alex Salmond down on the issue of corporation tax. If you ask me, and I have absolutely no brief for Robinson, Salmond was lucky to have such an easy ride from the media during a campaign where he answered very few questions.

Which leads me on to “scaremongering”: there would have been one easy way for the yes campaign to have neutralised "scaremongering" - they could just have come up with some credible answers to the quite legitimate fears and concerns on which it was based. The fact that they could not, or chose not to, was their undoing, if you ask me.

I can only assume that they could not because the necessary detail was lacking on several crucial issues and/or the yes voters were simply told to say, well, we'll worry about the detail after we've won, and that didn't wash with the more canny, risk-averse no voters.

The banks were against the yes voters: the banks are not “for” or “against” anyone, other than themselves. Same for the big companies. They looked at the SNP’s economic plans, they came to the conclusion that they didn’t add up, and they voted with their wallets. As they always do, and as they always will.

Part of the injustice that the yes voters feel seems to also rest on the idea that Scotland always gets a government it didn’t vote for. Whilever Scotland is part of the UK, it gets the government the UK, of which it is a part, votes for.  The fact that Scotland (or some parts of its political establishment) regards itself as a country is irrelevant in UK electoral terms. Across the UK, up to 49% of people could get the government they didn’t want. If you want an SNP government, then send SNP MPs to Westminster which some people are finally waking up to as a solution.

Having said that, I have said some pretty hard things about Alex Salmond over the years, but at least he had the courage and integrity to resign in the wake of the defeat. Some of the scumbag politicians we've had in the UK parliament, who have clung on until their grubby fingernails were prised off the cliff one by one could well do to take a lesson from that.

But, in the meantime, the rancour goes on. It will only get worse, as well, if Cameron is allowed to get away with ratting on his pre-referendum promises to the Scottish electorate. But right now, the atmosphere is pretty poisonous, with people posting things on social media sites like:

The No-voters are a poorer calibre of human being than the Yes-voters. The very fact they allowed fear to rule them instead of hope in the possibility of change. Anti-Scottish spite was all over some of the comment-sections of the newspapers. It made me ask myself just where all this bile came from.

As a heady mixture of assumption, stereotyping, and irony, you’d have to look a long way for a better example.  It is possible, of course, that people voted “no” out of a very genuine concern for Scotland’s future, so I wouldn’t be too quick to label them as a sub-species  – sometimes it requires a certain amount of courage to stand up and be the only lemming who says hang on, shouldn’t we re-think this whole cliff thing. But it hasn’t stopped people posting “I am proud of my yes voting friends in a way I could never be proud of those who voted no.” It’s all very sad.  I have actually wondered myself whether we really should be going on holiday next year to a country where 45% of the people will be harbouring some sort of brooding resentment against us, and I’m probably not alone in this.

I don’t blame the Scots for feeling betrayed by Cameron, though, as it is becoming more and more obvious that he is going to try and weasel out of the additional commitments he promised.  I’m sorry to go on about him so much. I realise this started out as a blog on spiritual matters, so feel free to either skip the next bit or treat it as a homily on the problem of evil and the impossibility of forgiveness. At least he had to suffer the chagrin this week of being castigated for giving away the details of his private conversation with the Queen when he phoned her to tell her the referendum results.  My own theory is that, rather than purring down the phone at him, she was snoring. Either that, or she’d already hung up and he was listening to the dialling tone.

It would be funny if it wasn’t such a manifestation of malevolent intent, but this week also saw the carefully-orchestrated decision to pledge UK support for air-strikes against ISIL.  Not only was the recall of parliament and the debate deliberately timed to spike the guns of the UKIP conference, but the previous evening also saw the arrest and detention of several of the “usual suspects” under the pretext of “preventing” “terrorism”. The fact is that the Junta could have arrested Anjem Choudary at any time, and with a similar result: that they would have to release him again, because, although he is a fundamentalist wingnut of the first order who is never happier than when he’s winding up some innocent young kid to strap on a suicide vest, he’s also very careful always to do it within the law, which is why he hasn’t been nailed many times before. It was done (along with the other arrests) on Thursday night purely to add to the climate of fear.  In the same way as, once the vote had been announced in Parliament, Boris Johnson urged Londoners to be “vigilant” on the tube. If Boris Johnson advised me to be vigilant the first thing I'd check would be to see if his hand was in my pocket stealing my wallet.

I watched/listened to the ISIL parliamentary debate online on Hansard TV, while I was working. When you look at this appalling set of grotesque old waxworks in person, you find yourself wondering "Jesus Christ, is this really the best and most able 635 people in the country?" I think it was George Bernard Shaw who said that if the scenes from inside an abattoir were broadcast, people would become vegetarian overnight; I think if watching broadcasts of parliament was made compulsory, there's be a revolution tomorrow.

As far as the rights and wrongs of us bombing ISIS are concerned, I could produce a masterly summary of what is wrong with it, going back and quoting things I have written previously, starting with condemning the first Iraq war in 2002. But I don’t think, in all honesty, I could do better than Aubrey Bailey, of Fleet, Hampshire, who summed up the whole stinking mess in one pithy letter to, of all people The Daily Mail.

Are you confused by what is going on in the Middle East? Let me explain. We support the Iraqui government in the fight against Islamic State. We don’t like IS, but IS is supported by Saudi Arabia, whom we do like.  We don’t like President Assad in Syria. We support he fight against him, but not IS, which is also fighting against him.  We don’t like Iran, but Iran supports the Iraqui government against IS. So, some of our friends support our enemies and some of our enemies are our friends, and some of our enemies are fighting against our other enemies, whom we want to lose, but we don’t want our enemies who are fighting our enemies to win. If the people we want to defeat are defeated, they might be replaced by people we like even less. And all this was started by our invading a country to drive out terrorists who weren’t actually there until we went in to drive them out. Do you understand now?

Well said, Aubrey Bailey.  I’d go on further to say that I never realised that our smart bombs were so smart that they could detect, from 30,000 feet, an ISIL/ISIS terrorist raping a tribeswoman victim, and blow him to smithereens while leaving her unharmed. Of course, this only applies if he’s on the wrong side of the Syrian border. If he drags her a few yards into Syria and then has his evil way with her, we won’t do a thing about it. (As it currently stands, anyway, although the vote gave Cameron the option to take further action as he thinks fit, without necessarily having to come back to parliament for another mandate, so what’s the betting that in six months time, Cameron, or Boris Johnson, or Nigel Farage, or whoever’s prime minister, will be on our screens saying that regrettably we had no option but to commit ground troops and our thoughts are with the families of the casualties, who have been informed. Better dust off those flags in Wootton Bassett.)

This is the rub, though. What to do about the abuses of the ISIL/ISIS/whatever they are calling themselves this week who are massacring and oppressing Christians in the area. (See, I said I would get back to religion eventually, and I have already mentioned Jesus, albeit slightly out of context.)  To provide the necessary cordon sanitaire, I can’t see any way other than deploying ground troops. But the question is whose ground troops? Again, I could have a stab at answering this myself, but it would take a lot of ink and paper, and it would also contain a detailed and parallel argument for the draining of the swamp of anti-Muslim sentiment at home and abroad. When you’re in a Wadi, stop digging. But perhaps the argument is better illustrated by a section of the actual ISIL debate from Hansard (I have removed the line and column index inserts, because they break up the flow. If you want the original it’s online on their web site.) George Galloway may be a controversial figure, but I can’t really argue with most of what he says here.

George Galloway (Bradford West) (Respect): Mr Speaker, time does not permit me to tell you how many millions of times “I told you so” is currently being said in the country—or will be once people read of this debate. Millions of ordinary people knew what the expensive talent governing our country did not know, namely that there was no al-Qaeda in Iraq and that there was no Islamist fundamentalism in Iraq before Mr Blair—and his mouthpieces who are still here—and Mr Bush invaded and occupied the country. What a tangled web we have woven is abundantly clear to everyone watching this debate. The mission creep has not even waited for the end of the debate. The words on the motion are about bombing Iraq, but there is a consensus in here that we will soon be bombing Syria. The words do not mention boots on the ground, but there is a consensus here that there will be boots on the ground, the only question being whose boots they will be.

The debate has been characterised by Members of Parliament moving around imaginary armies. The Free Syrian Army is a fiction that has been in the receipt of hundreds of millions of dollars and hundreds of tonnes of weapons, virtually all of which were taken from them by al-Qaeda, which has now mutated into ISIL. The Iraqi army is the most expensively trained and most modernly equipped army in history. Hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent on the Iraqi army, which ran away leaving its equipment behind. ISIL itself is an imaginary army. A former Defence Secretary no less said that we must bomb its bases. It does not have any bases. The territory that its personnel control is the size of Britain and yet there are only between 10,000 and 20,000 of them. Do the maths. They do not concentrate as an army. They do not live in bases. The only way that a force of that size could successfully hold the territory that it holds is if the population acts as the water in which it swims. The population is quiescent because of western policies and western invasion and occupation. That is the truth of the matter. ISIL could not survive for five minutes if the tribes in the west of Iraq rose up against it.

Ian Austin (Dudley North) (Lab): Does the hon. Gentleman understand how appalled people will be to hear him say that women who have been buried alive or enslaved have been quiescent in their persecution by these people? What a total disgrace.

George Galloway: They don’t like it up them, Mr Speaker. They would rather have an imaginary debate, moving around imaginary armies. ISIL is a death cult. It is a gang of terrorist murderers. It is not an army and is certainly not an army that will be destroyed by aerial bombardment. ISIL is able to rule the parts of Iraq that it does because nobody in those parts has any confidence in the Government in Baghdad, a sectarian Government helped into power by Bremer and the deliberate sectarianisation of Iraqi politics by the occupation authorities. The Government know that. That was why they pushed al-Maliki out—even though he won the election, by the way, if we are talking about democracy. They pushed him out because they knew that far too many people in ISIL-occupied Iraq had no confidence in the Baghdad Government. Nobody has any confidence in the army emanating out of Baghdad.

This will not be solved by bombing. We have been bombing Iraqis for 100 years. We dropped the world’s first chemical bombs on them in the 1920s. We attacked them and helped to kill their King in the 1930s. We helped in the murder of their President in 1963, helping the Ba’ath party into power. We bombed them again through the 1990s.

Emma Reynolds (Wolverhampton North East) (Lab): I am sure we are all ever so grateful for the lecture, but what is the hon. Gentleman’s solution to this problem?

George Galloway: Now that I have an extra minute, thanks to the hon. Lady, I will be able to tell her. This will not be solved by bombing; every matter will be made worse. Extremism will spread further and deeper around the world, just as happened as a result of the last Iraq war. The people outside can see it, but the fools in here, who draw a big salary and big expenses, cannot or will not see it, like the hon. Lady with her asinine intervention.

Rory Stewart (Penrith and The Border) (Con): I thank the hon. Gentleman very much for giving way, but will he please bring us towards his solution to this problem?

George Galloway: In five minutes it is difficult, but we have to strengthen those who are already fighting ISIL. We have to give them all the weapons they need—the Baghdad Government have paid for weapons that have still not been delivered. We have to strengthen the Kurdish fighters, who are doing a good job of fighting ISIL.

The Saudi, Emirati and Qatari armies are all imaginary armies. They have not even told their own people that they are on the masthead. Has anyone here seen a picture of them fighting in Syria? Anyone seen a picture of a Saudi jet bombing in Syria? Saudi Arabia is the nest from which ISIL and these other vipers have come, and by the way, it does a fine line in head chopping itself. Saudi Arabia has 700 warplanes—get them to bomb. Turkey is a NATO member—get Turkey to bomb. The last people who should be returning to the scene of their former crimes are Britain, France and the United States of America.

We shouldn’t kid ourselves, though, that this is about humanitarian efforts and an attempt to impose religious tolerance. As with our ill-timed, ill judged intervention in Libya, someone is going to get shredded whatever the result, and the only choice is really which set of unfortunates get turned into human confetti. It’s not about saving the non-Muslims from being oppressed by ISIS, it’s about saving Iraq and its oil from falling into the hands of a gang of nutters who might well turn off the tap. People said the first Iraq invasion was about oil, and I tended to disagree. It was about the fact that Bush had decided, and Blair went along with him, on the idea of regime change and to get rid of Saddam Hussein on any pretext whatsoever. This time, though, having presided over the post –Saddam chaos and also, in the interim, created many more Jihadis world-wide, we’re having to go back and clean up the doo-doos we left. This time, it really is about oil. It really is.

So, at the end of a depressing week, we find ourselves at war. And, despite the presence in the country of people like Anjem Choudary who would quite cheerfully hoist the red crescent over Buckingham Palace and declare his own warped version of an “Islamic” state, we find ourselves instead watching the Home Office once more trying to deport Harley Miller, an Australian expat NHS worker, who was told previously that she had indefinite leave to remain, and who has lost her job and her livelihood while being kept in limbo now for nine months waiting for a ruling on her appeal against deportation.

Protesting against the lack of affordable social housing in an East London borough, a group of 29 homeless single mothers and their children, calling itself Focus E15 have occupied a block of flats on an estate in Stratford, in the borough of Newham, that was almost empty, to demand action on their housing crisis.  During the week, they were visited by Russell Brand, and, as if they hadn’t suffered enough, at the weekend, Newham Council cut the water off.  I may be wrong, but isn’t there something in the UN Charter of Human Rights about a right to clean water? Perhaps it’s time for “humanitarian” air strikes against Newham Council. It would certainly be cheaper than going all the way to Iraq, and would probably have a better outcome.

A woman in Exmouth narrowly avoided prosecution for growing a five-foot high cannabis plant in her garden, as it was adjudged to have self-germinated from some discarded budgie seed she’d thrown out. Who knew that there were hemp seeds in budgie food? No wonder all those budgies all over the UK are happy to sit on a perch all day, staring glassily into a little mirror. Anyway, after this week, I’m going to start adding a packet of Trill to my weekly Sainsburys order, and sprinkle it on my corn flakes.

And now, somehow, again, it’s already Sunday. The fifteenth Sunday after Trinity, apparently. I looked at the calendar of saints for today, and to be honest, I have never felt more uninspired, notwithstanding that today is the feast of St Wenceslaus of Bohemia, yes, that one, who went out when the snow was deep and crisp and even. I did toy with him, but the thought of his association with Christmas made me so depressed, I turned instead to the Book of Common Prayer. Even that seemed at first devoid of any particular spiritual sustenance. Congratulations, by the way, if you have persevered with me thus far, because this week there were times when even I felt like giving up, and I’m the guy who’s writing it.  You will now be considered automatically for the Mrs Joyful Prize for Raffia Work.

Anyway, as I said, my eye scanned the Book of Common Prayer, which, to be honest, I have not looked at in many a week, nay month. Perhaps one of the reasons Big G seems to have given up on me is that I have stopped looking for him, although in the past, it’s been my experience that the point where you stop looking is the point where you find what you’ve been seeking. You finally see the moon, and not the finger pointing at the moon, to borrow an aphorism from Zen.  I sort of thought, though, that the thing about God was he was supposed to continue taking an interest in you even if you went off the rails – “If I forget thee, forget thou not me” as the Edge Hill prayer has it. Or that story about looking back over the sand and only seeing one set of footprints.  I have to say, I don’t feel as if God has been carrying me through my difficulties, but I suppose we ought to give the old codger the benefit of the doubt.

So I read the service for today, and to my surprise the first thing that leapt out was the bit from Psalm 127, as I sat here typing at nightfall, about “unless the Lord keepeth the city, the watchman waketh in vain.” I smiled at that because it does have personal resonances for me; particularly watching the Wakeman ceremony in Ripon’s Market Place where a horn has been blown every night at 9pm to mark the curfew by the “Wakeman” or “Hornblower” since about 886AD. Originally devised as a way of keeping nocturnal watch against marauding Vikings, the ceremony is today entirely ceremonial (unlike Chester, where I believe it’s still legitimate to loose off an arrow at any Welshman seen within the City Walls after dark!)  Originally, the Wakeman must have been a volunteer, but when it became formalised in later years, it was paid for out of a local tax levied on people whose house doors faced onto the market place. Being canny Yorkshire folk, many of the householders immediately had their front doors bricked up in favour of using a side entrance! I believe that this verse is actually inscribed on the gable of the Town Hall in Ripon, from memory. It’s either there, or the Wakeman’s House, if you want to go and look.

That verse cheered me up, for some unknown reason. The New Testament reading was Luke 11: 37-54, where Jesus rounds on the Pharisee who questions why he didn’t wash before sitting down to eat, and delivers a verbal flaying that, in modern internet parlance, “owns” him.  A lawyer who overhears rather foolishly attempts to join in, saying, in effect, that by attacking the Pharisees, Jesus is also attacking lawyers: Jesus, not surprisingly, agrees, and gives him a verbal kicking as well. I won’t quote it all, after clubbing you earlier with a page and a half of Hansard, but this is just a flavour of it. It’s worth reading the whole thing. In the original King James high-tar full-fat version, listening to it rumble round above your head is like being outside in a thunderstorm:

And the Lord said unto him, Now do ye Pharisees make clean the outside of the cup and the platter; but your inward part is full of ravening and wickedness. Ye fools, did not he that made that which is without make that which is within also?  But rather give alms of such things as ye have; and, behold, all things are clean unto you. But woe unto you, Pharisees! for ye tithe mint and rue and all manner of herbs, and pass over judgment and the love of God: these ought ye to have done, and not to leave the other undone. Woe unto you, Pharisees! for ye love the uppermost seats in the synagogues, and greetings in the markets. Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are as graves which appear not, and the men that walk over them are not aware of them.

Selah, as the Bible is fond of saying. Or, put more vernacularly, “stitch that!” It reminded me strangely of something. Hypocritical, supposedly clean on the outside but inside full of ravening and wickedness, loving the uppermost seats… oh yes. The houses of parliament. I think that phrase, technically, should really have capital letters, but until and unless it again becomes worthy of them, I’m going to use lower case from now on.

You find me in ill humour, then, as you can see. When I have finished this I’ll feed the dog, and the cat, and make some tea, and make Deb’s sandwiches for tomorrow, and then the whole treadmill will start again for another week, if I’m spared. Possibly foolishly, I have had an idea for a national dog show PURELY FOR RESCUE DOGS, in the same way that Crufts is the national dog show for pedigree breeds.

The idea behind this is threefold.

1. To raise money for dog rescue generally – precise methodology yet to be decided.

2. To raise awareness of dog rescue and to try and do something to stop the appalling waste of 7000 unwanted dogs per year being put down simply because no one wants them.

3. To make the point, subtly, that all dogs whatever their pedigree or origin or appearance, are unique beings capable of love and trust and deserving of the same in return, and thus to promote the ideals of responsible pet ownership.

We are hoping that, by pitching the idea as a national show, it will attract more attention from the media, from potential sponsors, and from people who may be able to provide “celebrity endorsement”.  Anyway, a group of people who are supporters of Rain Rescue, whose mascot is Ralf, whose picture is at the top of the page, a dog whose life they saved (but – sadly - at the expense of one of his legs, which had been damaged so badly by his abuser that it had to be removed) seem to have got behind the idea and want to progress it, so I have agreed to write some stuff for them.  I’m going to use it as what passes for light relief. If it all comes off, they certainly need the donations, with huge vet bills to pay.

In the meantime, I’m going to try and close this week with the song that my father and I once argued about. It, too, seems strangely appropriate for our times. I only wish the old buffer was here today, to have another go.