Epiblog for the Last Sunday of Trinity

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley.  The weather has continued its inexorable slide into autumn, and so have we.  The dogs have been coming back from walkies wet and windblown, and then snoozing, steaming, and farting by the fire, and the other day, Matilda came in from the garden with a huge decaying wet leaf stuck to her leg, a sartorial addition of which she was totally unaware.  I picked it off her, and she hissed at me for daring to touch her leg. No change there, then.

There are leaves everywhere, of all colours and hues – yellow, and pale, and hectic red, as Shelley might have said, were he in our garden at the moment.  Matilda doesn’t seem particularly fazed by the weather, actually, to say she was such a fair-weather cat when we first got her. She seems to be actually enjoying staying out in the gathering dusk, listening out for hapless little rodents rustling in the foliage, sometimes for hours at a time.  Either that, or like many other cats I have known, she has a second, and possibly a third, home.

The darkening nights have also brought with them the inevitable fireworks, of course, and this year we’re trying to help Misty out not only with Canicalm, but also by buying her a “Thundershirt” which is like a close-fitting blanket/ dog-coat thing that you Velcro round the dog’s torso, and apparently it works by making the dog feel safe, cherished and cuddled.  Well, that’s the theory, but it’s early days yet.  Anything that makes her less terrified of sudden bangs and flashes is a good idea in my book, so we’re going to give it a go.

If it works, I think Debbie and I could do with one apiece, since we could both do with the calming influence of feeling that we are being cherished and cuddled. Debbie has at least reached half-term, still without being paid for any of he work which she has done since 11^th September. When people ask these days, I say “Oh, my wife does voluntary work for Kirklees College.” In one of my emails to the College recently, I compared the admin staff to Schrödinger’s Cat, in that nobody really knows if they are alive or dead. They didn’t like that, but at least from the fact that they replied, we can cross off the “dead” option and replace it with “merely inept”.

I had four books to get off to press last week; Kyle Franklin and the Knights of Heaven; Mac and the Lost Tribe; Great Aunt Fanny’s Moustache, and The Meeting Room. I managed the first two of them, and was 79 pages into The Meeting Room, out of 209, at close of play on Friday, so I was pretty much bushwhacked by the time the weekend came around. Great Aunt Fanny is waiting for the illustrations, anyway. So, a solid week’s work, including also doing all the invoicing and packing right up to date and, somehow, unaccountably, fixing the vacuum cleaner.  I worked out that the loss of suction was due to a hole in the bag, if you’re interested (no, me neither.) Anyway, changing the bag solved it. My dad would have been proud of me.

George Osborne is someone else whose bag appears to be leaking, at least from the point of view of the nation’s finances.  “Austerity” isn’t working. The Junta’s proud boast, its very reason for existence was to reduce the national deficit to nothing by the next general election in 2015. We found out very quickly that this was not going to happen, and George Osborne has, in his tenure as Chancellor, moved more goalposts than the badgers, but last week, we learned that the deficit is actually rising again, partly because the Blight Brigade’s squeeze on workers’ wages has meant none of the people who have been put to work on a pittance, or on zero hours contracts, or been forced into declaring themselves “self-employed” in order to get the benefits numbers down, have been able to pay any taxes.

Meanwhile, twenty MPs have declared earnings of more than £100,000 pa from second jobs, in the same week that Lord Tebbit suggested that the poor should “earn” their benefits by pulling up Ragwort.  I suppose we should be grateful to the ageing psychopath for once more igniting the smouldering controversy surrounding Lord Fraud and the “disabled”, just at the point where it was in danger of fizzling out.  The point all these people are missing is that there is no correlation between the salary of a person and their “worth”. I mean, look at all those worthless MPs, on huge salaries.

Sometimes, when I look around me, I think that we’ve all fallen through a collective time warp and we’re in a slightly different, but nevertheless still recognisable, version of the 1970s. We’ve got a weak, ineffectual Labour Party, an international economic crisis, doubts over the continued availability of oil, a great British public that often sounds like Alf Garnett crossed with Enoch Powell, without any of the redeeming features of either, and the casual racism of “The UKIP Calypso”.

I couldn’t believe this vile piece of crap when I first heard it. In fact, at first, I thought it must be a spoof, but then I realised that the concept of satire is way beyond Mike Read’s pay grade.  As is the concept of irony, particularly the irony of singing a “protest” song about immigration, in a cod Jamaican accent.  Oh, but it’s just a bit of fun, say Mike Read’s supporters, usually adding “don’t you remember the calypsos of Lance Percival?” Er, yes, I do, and they were crap as well.  Someone should tell these people that the Pope has abolished limbo.

If you haven’t heard it, don’t sully your ears. I am not going to add to the oxygen of publicity by giving it the full I. A. Richards critical analysis treatment (I am not even that happy, pace Linda Smith, about Mike Read having access to the oxygen of oxygen.) However, two particular bits of what might loosely be described as the lyrics do bear some critical scrutiny.

The leaders committed a cardinal sin

Open the borders let them all come in

Illegal immigrants in every town

Stand up and be counted, Blair and Brown.

Opening the borders refers to the claim, often made, that Labour needlessly extended the range of people from within the EU who could come here, something for which, as the blog “Not the Treasury View” has frequently pointed out, there were very good reasons at the time.  And of course, spineless wimp that he is, something for which Miliband has subsequently apologised, instead of telling the Daily Mail to go to hell.  As Jonathan Portas, author of the blog, said at the time:

So; the new migrants get jobs, contribute to the economy, pay taxes, don’t use many public services, and don’t take jobs from natives. What, exactly, is the problem? The decision was correct at the time, and the UK should be proud that, unlike most of the existing Member States, it was prepared to take that decision on the basis of rational argument and good analysis, rather than fear and prejudice.

It is, of course, true that the UK has a persistent problem with youth unemployment and inactivity – and that this was true even before the recession. But research suggests that this has little or nothing to do with immigration; it is about educational underperformance among disadvantaged young people while at school, the poor quality of much post-16 education for those who are not going to university, and our neglect of the school-to-work transition. And it is just as bad (often worse) in areas where there are few immigrants as in areas where there are many.

“Illegal immigrants in every town” – well, of course, if they are illegal immigrants, then they are presumably not EU citizens, since they have the right of free movement and to come here anyway, which is one of the (many) things actually wrong with the EU, and which, until we have politicians sensible enough to fix it in a calm and rational manner, will continue to feed the foaming bigotry and xenophobia of UKIP.  But is that assertion even true?  Portas again:

How many illegal immigrants are there in the UK? Unlike other such questions - how many 12 year olds are there in the UK? how many gay Jews? - where, although we don't know the exact answer, either survey and administrative data allows us to make an informed and reasonably accurate guess, we don't know, even approximately. But a new initiative by the Metropolitan Police suggests that the number may in fact be surprisingly low. 

He goes on, in a lengthy and detailed blog posting far too long to reproduce here, to extrapolate that the country-wide figure might be as low as 50,000 to 70,000, extrapolated from the detail of how many people arrested by police actually turn out to be illegal immigrants, out of all the arrests in a given year.  I know, of course, that you can prove anything with statistics, but the article is definitely worth scrutiny, especially given the authoritative nature of the author and his former “inside track” on how the treasury, and government works. And, of course, as Portas also points out, studies suggest that legal immigrants, far from being a drain on resources and services, are actually net contributors overall to the economy. They pay more in taxes than they consume in services.  The fact that the Junta chooses to take that surplus and squander it in firing £800,000 missiles at ISIS, instead of investing it back in more hospitals, GPs (of whom there is a crucial shortage) and health centres, is not the fault of the immigrants.

But the problem is that you can’t put the above words to a calypso beat and sing them to the sort of gullible people whose lips move even when they are not reading the Daily Mail.  A very telling section of the UKIP Calypso’s lyrics reads:

“Labour and Tories shaking in their boots

when Ukip kick them up the grass roots

Meanwhile down in Clacton-on-Sea,

Ukip are making history,

Douglas Carswell, we're quite adamant,

will be the first MP in parliament."

Yes, I know. It makes William McGonagall look like W. B. Yeats, but we shouldn’t forget that at least one person interviewed in Clacton said that they were voting UKIP this time because “the previous MP was rubbish, and never did anything for the town.” I kid you not.

UKIP’s strategy, as the full horror of this crime against music began to spread on social media and by word of mouth, was first to offer the Red Cross the proceeds of its sales, to help the fight against Ebola. The Red Cross, to its eternal credit, told UKIP to stuff its money up its Ebola. Or its arse, UKIP doesn’t really know the difference anyway.  Then Nigel Farage came out bleating, saying that “the left” were more concerned about the UKIP bloody calypso than they were about child abuse.

What? I’m sorry? Nigel Farage knows as little of my views on child abuse as I know of his on musical taste. How dare he suggest, just because I think his tacky little piece of racist scum masquerading as “fun” is an evil act of propaganda worthy of “Der Sturmer”, that I am in some way blasé about child abuse? If there is a link, which I doubt, it’s that the various buttoned-up weirdos and sexual fruitcakes who make up UKIP, especially the ones with an overarching and unhealthy interest in what gays get up to behind closed doors, and the ones who think of women as sluts, are far more likely, in my view, to be interested in that sort of thing.  Glass houses, Farage, and stones.  Be very careful, especially as your party has voted in the EU parliament against sex education in schools, which means that the onus would now be on parents to teach, or to neglect to teach, their children about what is, and is not, appropriate sexual behaviour.

It’s a mad world, with people like this around and at large, and it seems it’s going to get madder yet.  As my old granny used to say, “there’s more of them out, than in.” Now that Ebola has spread to Liberia, I eagerly await “Britain First” calling for all librarians in the UK to be deported. You may think that far-fetched, but remember the paediatricians.  Sadly, the idea that all our problems could be solved by getting rid of all the foreigners is now the default position of many, including several politicians who should know better – well, let’s be honest, who do know better, but they can’t ignore such a tempting bandwagon.

Independent Yorkshire blogger “Another Angry Voice” decided to try and unpick this idea further, in one of the graphics on his blog.

What exactly would your methodology for getting rid of all the foreigners be?  Who would you get rid of? People born abroad? (that would include a lot of Brits) People with foreign ancestry? (that would include a lot of Brits, too.) Dark-skinned people? (what about Poles, Germans, French, etc). Then you’ve got to consider the practicalities: forced deportation and “internment” camps? Just kill them all? I suppose what you’re asking for is for some system of ethnic purity tests (let’s say at least 4 generations of “pure British” blood) a system for marking out non-Brits (maybe some kind of armband or tattoo) and some special “residential” camps to keep the foreigners away from the “true Brits”.  Does that sound like a good (if slightly familiar) idea?

Given the lack of democracy shown in the heavy-handed policing of the “Occupy Parliament Square” demonstration this week, we’re already a long way down that road – the police role as the arm of the fascist state, in this case, suppressing protest and disquiet in a brutal and illogical manner. How Britain has the nerve to lecture the likes of the Chinese on human rights amazes me.  What also amazes me is where all these extra police come from.  It seems there’s an unlimited supply of bobbies whenever there’s a Royal Wedding and the streets need to be cleared of detritus and undesirables (as they would see them), or when some Chinese dictator wants his goon squad to run through the streets of London with the Olympic Torch,  or when there’s a miners’ strike, but – oddly enough – they’re nowhere to be seen when someone’s nicking your car radio, or some little scrote is setting fire to the local dogs’ home.  I think there must be a refrigerated storage area under Scotland Yard, where they are kept in suspended animation until they are needed to do something anti-democratic, then they’re thawed out by the promise of overtime, which we pay for through our taxes.

The forces of law and order have not been idle round here, though! I have had a reply, finally, to my letter of a few weeks ago now, castigating the Police Commissioner for Greater Manchester over the behaviour of the police in letting the suspect for the Manchester Dogs’ Home arson out on bail, and asking them to press for the most severe penalties the law would allow against anyone guilty of the crime.  Basically, over the course of a sheet of A4, it admits that the Police and Crime Commissioner cannot influence the police, that the police are still “looking into” the crime, and totally fails to respond to my point that the media responsible for naming the suspect and thus prejudicing the trial should themselves be charged with contempt of court.  BBC research reveals that the salaries of the majority of the PCCs are between £70,000 and £85,000, although the commissioners overseeing the three major forces of Greater Manchester, West Yorkshire and West Midlands each receive £100,000. In addition, the Greater Manchester Police Commissioner has a chief executive on £90,000 pa, and a staff of 40. If, despite all this, they are truly unable to influence the police in any way, in terms of their general practice and enforcing the letter of the law on animal welfare in particular, or, indeed, generally, then they would be better off being abolished and the money being given to dog rescues instead. 

So, anyway, somehow we stumbled through the week and came to Sunday. The clocks have gone back, today, and, while I welcomed the extra hour of sleep, I viewed with no great enthusiasm the way the night “drew in”, and it was already dark at 5.30pm. As I’ve said before, the day the clocks go back marks the start of winter “proper” for me, that long, dark tunnel that leads to the Solstice.  There are but 66 days left until the end of the year, apparently, and I have a frightening amount to accomplish in that short time. Just thinking about it makes me feel tired.

I looked around for a saint to write about this week and, apart from St Cedd and St Alfred the Great, whom I have to admit I didn’t realise had even been elevated to the sainthood (presumably culinary skills aren’t part of the interview process) they all seemed rather an unprepossessing bunch. I disregarded Cedd and Alfred because we’ve done quite a few Anglo-Saxons lately, and while I find them perpetually interesting, I’m aware that the reader doesn’t share my excitement.  So I did something that perhaps I don’t do often enough, these days, looked in the Book of Common Prayer instead,

I was particularly taken by the Compline (evening prayer) service for today, a piece of worship of which I have often admired the language and the imagery:

[Brethren,] be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour: whom resist, steadfast in the faith.

And then this bit, from Psalm 91:

Whoso dwelleth under the defence of the Most High: shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty. I will say unto the Lord, Thou art my hope, and my stronghold: my God, in him will I trust. For he shall deliver thee from the snare of the hunter: and from the noisome pestilence. He shall defend thee under his wings, and thou shalt be safe under his feathers: his faithfulness and truth shall be thy shield and buckler. Thou shalt not be afraid for any terror by night: nor for the arrow that flieth by day; For the pestilence that walketh in darkness: nor for the sickness that destroyeth in the noonday. A thousand shall fall beside thee, and ten thousand at thy right hand: but it shall not come nigh thee…There shall no evil happen unto thee: neither shall any plague come nigh thy dwelling. For he shall give his angels charge over thee: to keep thee in all thy ways. They shall bear thee in their hands: that thou hurt not thy foot against a stone. Thou shalt go upon the lion and adder: the young lion and the dragon shalt thou tread under thy feet.

Oh, if only that were true – or rather, if only I could believe that it were true, and applied to me. But, as I already suffer from “the sickness that destroyeth in the noonday”, where does that leave me? Is the Psalmist trying to tell me, in some demented extension of Mary Baker Eddy, that the reason I have muscular dystrophy is that I didn’t believe strongly enough in God as my hope and my stronghold? Reading it more closely, then, I realised that it isn’t actually promising me immunity from these things, merely saying that I should not be “afraid for” (ie because of) them.

I’m usually willing to give Big G the benefit of the doubt, but these next few weeks really are a time when I could indeed do to be delivered from the snare of the hunter and the noisome pestilence. It is certainly a long while since, apart from occasional glimpses which are few and far between, I felt safe within God’s feathers. I didn’t even know God had feathers.  Apologies, a feeble joke, and I do really understand the image of being sheltered and protected, in the same way as a bird protects its chicks.

I would love to believe that I was somehow immune in the battle of life, that a thousand would fall beside me and ten thousand at my right hand, but it would not come nigh me, but my experience of life tells me otherwise.  I’m sort of caught in a double bind – I no longer seem to have the faith to say that it doesn’t matter what happens to me, everything will be alright in the long run, and yet at the same time, when the logical extension of that position would be to give up trying to make sense of God, or whatever passes for it, and turn my face to the wall, I keep coming back to it, like a niggly tooth or a pebble in my shoe.  And in any case, it’s not just me; what about some justice and righteousness for all the people in the world who are victims of the plague, the noisome pestilence? What part does Ebola, for instance, play in the grand scheme of things?  Yes, I know it’s been caused in part at least by the greed, neglect and stupidity of mankind in general, it’s not some supernatural entity brewed up by Big G and visited on humanity from on high, like the plagues of Egypt. OK, so people say God brings about his change, his work on Earth via the actions of man, but why should this be the case? He’s God, and if he wanted to, he could say “Shazam!” and cure the lot of them. Once more, I’m not getting this complex nature of the mind of God, and it irks me, and troubles me. I find myself like George Herbert in The Collar:

I Struck the board, and cry’d, No more.

I will abroad.

What? shall I ever sigh and pine?

My lines and life are free; free as the rode,

Loose as the winde, as large as store.

Shall I be still in suit?

Have I no harvest but a thorn

To let me bloud, and not restore

What I have lost with cordiall fruit?

Sure there was wine

Before my sighs did drie it: there was corn

Before my tears did drown it.

Is the yeare onely lost to me?

Have I no bayes to crown it?

No flowers, no garlands gay? all blasted?

All wasted?

Especially the last bit, when I look out on the garden on an October day, towards evening. Is the year only lost to me?  But then at the same time, again like George Herbert, I keep coming back to this:

But as I rav’d and grew more fierce and wilde

At every word,

Me thought I heard one calling, Childe:

And I reply’d, My Lord.

So, here’s the deal, Big G, me old pal, me old beauty. We seem to be sort of stuck in this together, you and me. As Bob Dylan once said, I’ll let you be in my dreams, if I can be in yours.  And if you can see your way, next week, in the midst of the various battles in which I will no doubt find myself, to make sure that a thousand fall at my right hand, but it comes not nigh me, I’d be grateful. Selfish, but grateful.  And still no nearer to understanding why it has to be that way.  That’s probably one for C. S. Lewis, but right now, I can’t find the book and I have dogs to feed and soup to make, and miles to go before I sleep and all that jazz.  So I’ll close with the end of the Compline service, in the version I would like at my funeral, actually, to end on a cheery note, and lettest thou thy servant depart in peace.

Epiblog for the Feast of St Frideswide of Oxford

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley.  Sadly, the weather has turned dull, rainy and autumnal, though it picked up a bit on Friday, it was a reasonable day on Saturday, and, as I started typing this, earlier today, it was warm enough to have the conservatory door open (although the stove is lit), such leaves as are still on the trees were dancing green and yellow in the autumnal breeze, and it was sunshining and raining, both at once.

Matilda’s been out this morning for the first time in about 36 hours, after her epic controlled disappearance on Friday night. I refer to it as a controlled disappearance, because, although the manner of her going wasn’t exactly of her own choosing, her return certainly was.  She was pottering about in the garden on Friday afternoon at about 4pm, when Zak and Ellie arrived, because we were dog-sitting them. To put the event truly into context, however, you also need to know that Owen was here, once more helping us with the house, and specifically with dog-proofing the garden, as Ellie and Zak will be staying with us next week while Granny is off on her peregrinations, and should Ellie decide to leg it, I couldn’t very well catch her, owing to the inherent incompatibility between wheelchairs and steps.

So, Owen had just finished his efforts when Ellie arrived, and it seemed a perfect opportunity to test the dog-proofing under operational conditions.  Therefore Ellie was released into the wild, went round every inch of the garden’s perimeter, sniffing it and looking for a way out, and then saw Matilda over by the corner gate.  Matilda decided, in the words of the late, great, Michelle Shocked, that the secret to a long life is knowing when it’s time to go, and duly flitted off into the trees behind the house, via one of the gaps in the wrought iron gate.  What neither Matilda, nor indeed Owen, had anticipated, was that Ellie, being a small dog, of the type which simply must be carried on escalators, could also fit through the gaps in the gate, and duly did so, in pursuit of Matilda. Owen followed, although he stepped over the gate rather than going through the gap, and returned shortly afterwards with Ellie tucked under his arm like a parcel. Matilda had, very sensibly, gone to ground.

Anyway, the day wore on, and it was only in the evening that I began to become a tad concerned about Matilda, and kept checking next door to see if she’d come back though the cat flap and was once more in the position she’s currently appropriated for sleeping, in the corner of the settee under Colin’s front window. But there was no sign.  Owen, meanwhile, was labouring heroically, as always. In fact, during the course of a visit lasting just over 24 hours, including sleeping, he dog-proofed the garden, helped to get rid of the old camper van, which disappeared on the back of a low-loader to a scrapyard in Dewsbury, lopped off a number of dead and semi-dead branches from the trees out the front, and chainsawed them into logs for us, did a run to the tip to dump a load of miscellaneous old tut, fixed a dead table lamp, and took the stove apart to chip all the clinker off the riddling-plate. Plus, of course, as he always does, he gave us a much-needed boost and dose of positivity.  Meanwhile, Debbie set off with three dogs secured to her by means of various ropes and karabiners, in the direction of Blackmoorfoot reservoir.

Because he’d had an early start, by the time Debbie had returned, Owen had knocked off for the day and I was making the sort of pasta meal that can be added to or extended as needed. After we’d eaten, and the dogs had been fed, we all gathered round the stove as in olden days, talking and quaffing wine and beer. And gin and tonic, in the case of Granny, when she turned up to reclaim Ellie and Zak.  Owen decided he was going to turn in, and took himself off to beddies. 

I had decided to stay up and wait for Matilda to come back, mostly because I wanted to know she was OK, but also partially because, with her safely indoors, I could close the door between my bedroom and the lobby where the cat flap is – otherwise I would have had to leave the door open all night, which would have lowered the temperature in my bedroom by several degrees. Never a good thing.  Debbie seemed unusually perky, to say that she had yomped for 12 miles o’er hill and dale in the course of exercising the mutts. So we sat up, and continued drinking, red wine in my case, and Henry Weston’s cider in Debbie’s.

Debbie noticed (for the first time) the copy of Gwynne’s Latin by N. M. Gwynne, which I’d ordered from Amazon and which had arrived earlier in the day. I had ordered it because I have decided to brush up my Latin, which I haven’t studied formally since I was at school in 1971, apart from brief forays into the dog-Latin of medieval documents such as Inquisitiones ad quod dampnum. Debbie asked me why Owen had brought a Latin textbook with him, and we had a good laugh about that, me first and then Debbie joining in when I explained.  She started flipping through it and we got into a sort of, well, not exactly an argument, but the sort of discussion you have after several glasses of wine and three bottles of cider, tending to be long winded and circular, about the parts of speech.  Somehow, this developed, as it often does with Debbie when drink has been taken, into an exposition of whether Sister Wendy was the one with the teeth and the Singing Nun was the one with the guitar, or vice versa, and which one of them lived in a caravan.

I found myself wondering whether the fact that two of us were sitting up at 2.15AM waiting for an errant cat, discussing the parts of speech in Latin grammar and the Singing Nun/Sister Wendy, delete as applicable, made us unique as a household in the UK, or possibly the word, that night. I suspected it did. Eventually, Debbie tired of nun-classifying and decided she, too, would head bedwards and leave me to it. I had hunkered down for a long night of it, when she reappeared in the doorway.

“Matilda is outside in the front garden. I’ve just seen her from the bedroom window.”

So I unlocked the inside door, took off the chain, unlocked the porch door, and trundled off down my wheelchair ramp. Matilda was indeed chuffing around in the driveway, and showed no signs of being affected by her brief 100 metres relay with Ellie earlier on in the day. In fact, she was revelling in her new-found freedom, and showing absolutely no signs of coming in any time soon. Her eyes, in the torchlight, were large and glittering, and she was obviously in full-on nocturnal hunting mode, seeking out any hapless rodent that so much as rustled in the leaves.  All very well, but if I left her to it, that meant sleeping in an arctic bedroom, see above. Or shutting her out all night, which was a non-starter.

Reasoning that she hadn’t eaten (apart perhaps from rodent-based snacks) for twelve hours, I went back inside and fetched a sachet of Felix. I opened it at the end of the ramp and sat there in my wheelchair, wafting it about to spread the scent. Fortunately, at that hour of the morning, there were no neighbours or passers-by to see me. The smell of chicken Felix senior had the required effect, and I was able to lead Matilda up the ramp and in to the house, like the pied piper of Hamelin.  Leaving her purring contentedly, with her face stuck in a dish of cat food, I finally went to bed.  Four and a half hours later, I was back at the stove making the first pot of tea of the day.

So when I say it’s been a busy week, it really has. Not that the outside world has been entirely absent, although it has taken a back seat now and then.  Ebola continues to be the bogeyman (or bogeybug) of the moment. It’s got to the stage now where people are making the usual very bad jokes about it (including me) in the same way as they do with other disasters. It’s a very human defence mechanism after all, to joke about that which we find most terrifying, which is why you’ll always find there is a very thin line between undertakers and comedians.  I was particularly struck by a report which I overheard almost by accident, not about the disease as such, but about the preparations for the vaccines.  They didn’t develop anti-Ebola drugs more quickly because “there was no market for it” there in one sentence, in one phrase, is everything that’s wrong with the whole Ebola crisis. Don’t even get me started, or I’ll be outside shouting random incoherence at passing traffic.

Godfrey Bloom, meanwhile, has quit UKIP because it has become “too politically correct”, which is a bit like Sveyn Forkbeard leaving the Vikings because there are insufficient opportunities for rape and pillage.  Presumably old Bloomers misses the old days, when you could call a spade a spade.  Last week I wrote about UKIP supporters letting their naturally exuberant racism bubble to the surface on every occasion, whereas the Tories were careful only to express what they really thought when the microphones were off, but this week, we were treated to the relatively rare spectacle of one of the Nasty Party, Lord Fraud, sorry, Freud, being recorded (without his knowledge) agreeing with some appalling old dug-out at a conference, that the disabled weren’t worth the minimum wage and should work for £2.00 per hour.

Leaving aside for the moment the collective labelling of disabled people as “the disabled” (disabled people are “disabled” for a wide variety of reasons and conditions, in the same way as MPs are corrupt venal sleazebags for a wide variety of reasons, and have taken many different paths into greed and corruption) what irked me so much about this was that it is yet another attack on the concept of the minimum wage, this time by the back door. If “the disabled” aren’t worthy of it, one is left wondering what other groups will be identified and picked off, one by one.

I am not saying there isn’t a debate to be had about getting mobility- and ability-impaired people back into work, and that people who make an equal contribution being expected to be paid equally. However, the idea of “an equal contribution”, especially in jobs where it’s not physically possible to measure, say, a day’s output, in our essentially service economy, is one that is worthy of far more exploration than is available to us today, in the scope of a 4000-word blog posting, and should be determined by older and wiser heads than mine, including some older and wiser heads that are attached to mobility- and ability-impaired bodies.

My starting point would be, however, that everyone gets the minimum wage, and that those who can, by virtue of their excellent physique, in manual work, say, produce more, get paid correspondingly more on top. Levelling up for once, instead of the usual Blight Brigade “race to the bottom”. It has been said, time and time again, by much better economists than me, ever since “austerity” began, that if the minimum wage were to be increased, or people now on minimum wage jobs were paid more, there would be more disposable income in the economy, and perhaps the so-called “recovery”, which at the moment is a mythical and unsustainable Chimera, based on a mini property boom that can’t last, and can’t be allowed to last, much longer than May 2015, would become more solid and more beneficial to us all.

The other thing which irritated me about Lord Freud was the hypocrisy of someone who is supposedly in charge of the well-being of “the disabled” saying in private something which he would never have had the balls to say in public.  Yes, he is entitled to his private life, but when you become a minister, a politician, a member of the government, you are expected to be, and should damn well be, like Caesar’s wife, above suspicion. Not saying one thing in public and another to your mates at the bar. Having said all that, I don’t know why I was surprised, after all, Lord Fraud is the person who said not so long ago, that people only use food banks because they’re there, a bit like Mount Everest. By extension, I have no doubt he thinks that people only become homeless because of the free soup and the bracing air underneath the railway arches.

People (I am using the term loosely here, to include bloggers sympathetic to the Junta) were quick to point out that in 2003, Patricia Hewitt had consulted with the leading mental health charities and the DTi at the time for a proposal to pay “the disabled” £20.00 a week for some sort of “supported” work as a bridge back to full-time employment. I actually chased known the PDF of this document via a helpful link provided by one of these blogs, to a copy in the National Archives, and yes, it is true. There are, however, some possibly crucial differences. Hewitt’s proposal would have allowed the people who benefited from it to earn this money over and above their disability benefit, and there would have been no sanctions if they had chosen not to participate.  We don’t know anything about the detail of Lord Fraud’s ideas, because the clandestine recording ends with him promising to go away and think about it (presumably when he was sober) but I ask you, dear reader, against this Junta’s background record to date, of sanctions, unpaid work experience, and bipping people off benefit wherever possible, whether it is likely that, had they emerged as concrete proposals in the 2015 Tory manifesto, they would have been anything like as generous in spirit as those in Hewitt’s consultation document. Myself, I doubt it. 

To take our minds off asking awkward questions about the ongoing and continuing costs of our Middle East misadventures, including the fact that we’re now deploying drones as well as fast jets, so I wouldn’t hold any wedding parties in Baghdad if I were you, we have been reminded once again this week that apparently there is still some sort of terror threat at home.  Or at least, at Tony Blair’s home. As the threat level is still at “Godzilla Apocalypse” and the legal proceedings are the subject of one of these secret trials, we have absolutely no idea of the more precise details of the current prosecution, which suits the Blight Brigade just fine. However, it turns out that one of the accused had a folder on his computer entitled “bomb making”, which must make him the world’s most obvious terrorist. Perhaps he skipped class to go boogie boarding the day they did “secrecy”.

I don't normally comment on ongoing legal proceedings for fear of prejudicing a fair trial but it did strike me that you would have to be one spectacularly stupid terrorist to have a folder called "bomb making" on your computer. It's a bit like a burglar making sure he wears a mask and a stripy jersey and carries a sack with "swag" written on it. Anyway, as my own small protest against the attack on British justice and values by this (and previous) governments, I have created a folder called “Bomb Making” on my desktop, and downloaded into it a PDF of the recipe for Bombe Surprise, if MI5 (or, indeed, MFI) would like to come and look.

It’s definitely been a week for doing the garden, then, if only to get away from all this lunacy in the world at large. There’s still a lot to do in the way of clearance, and one job which I will do when the insanity of life in general all gets too much is to take the soil out of the pots that had dead herbs in them, and sort out all the pots into sizes, ready for next year.  But I’ve run out of time to do it today, as today is the Feast of St Frideswide, and I am sitting here writing about her, instead.

St Frideswide was an Anglo-Saxon saint, whose name means “bond of peace”, and is also known by other slight variants of the name, but for the sake of clarity I’ll just stick with “Frideswide” if that’s all the same to you.  She was supposedly the daughter of a king, who is known as Didan, in some accounts.  Historically, if he existed, he is likely to have been a vassal of the king of Mercia. In some accounts, he is said to have originally founded the monastery of which Frideswide was in charge, and where she administered charity to the poor, the sick and the needy.

At this point in the story, the focus switches to Frideswide’s would-be suitor, described as Algar, the King of Leicester, who allegedly sent envoys to bring back Frideswide for his bride. When she refused to renounce her vows, and they tried to carry her off, they were all struck blind.

They repented, and their sight was restored, but they returned to King Algar, who then set out himself, to seize Friedeswide by force. An angel warned her to flee, so she gathered up some food, her missal, and a few belongings, and wrapped in a warm cloak, she slipped out with her companions in the darkness of night through a small gate in the castle wall, which she did, following the Thames upstream. Hiding the boat among the reeds of the riverbank, they concealed themselves in a byre among the beasts stabled there, and waited until dawn. This is why she is often depicted in representations with an Ox.

When king Algar arrived at the gates of Oxford, he was also blinded, by a lightning bolt, but, unlike his followers, he refused to repent and therefore remained blind. Frideswide, meanwhile, continued to perform miracles, healing the sick, enabling the blind to see, and returned to Oxford three years later.

St Frideswide continued to live  in the monastery until her death on October 19th, 727AD.  As well as Oxford itself, there are other places in the wider Oxfordshire countryside which are said to have an association with the Saint. One of the two main accounts of her life says that she went into hiding at Bampton, and the other that she concealed herself at Binsey.  She may have actually hid in both places, moving around, but there is still a healing well in the churchyard of St Margaret’s Binsey, where people leave flowers. It is also a site where pilgrims with eye ailments came to bathe their eyes, hoping for a cure, and women prayed to conceive

The original monastery in question is thought to have been where Christ Church now stands, and in the 1980's archaeologists found a 7^th century graveyard there. By 1180, the prior of the then Augustinian monastery dug up Frideswide’s bones and had them ceremonially interred in an ornate reliquary, displayed in a shrine to which pilgrims flocked, hoping for miracles, some of which allegedly happened.

This was replaced in 1289 by a later shrine, which was broken up during the Reformation in the 1530's, but many pieces from it have been recovered, and it has been reconstructed in Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford. It stands in the Latin Chapel, in front of Burne-Jones stained glass window telling the story of her life, dating from the 1850's.  The saint’s bones were, however, dug up in the reign of Mary Tudor, and kept in two silk bags.  In the religious turmoil of the times, a few years later, St. Frideswide's relics were deliberately mixed up with the bones of another woman who had recently been buried  in the Cathedral, and they were re-buried together in "the upper part of the church towards the east". This is the present site of the shrine, but also, in the Lady Chapel, there is also a dark paving stone in the floor carved simply with the name Frideswide, which is where that the anniversary of her death is commemorated on October 19th each year. She is now the patron saint of Oxford.

Entertaining as it is, as a tale or fable, the life of St Frideswide is a bit short on spiritual meaning.  I’m more affected by it at the point where it touches history, and things such as the healing well, which is perhaps evidence of some sort of what you might call “holy attachment” to the site, even if nothing can be historically proven.  I lived in the Oxfordshire countryside for three years, and I have followed the Thames up and down stream, rambled over its water-meadows, in the days when I could still walk, in a landscape where I often felt that a former era was somewhere close at hand, just around a corner, down a path not taken. “You are here to kneel where prayer has been valid”. It’s part of that separate tradition, that alternative thread in the tapestry of English history: folk traditions, unwritten tales, oral history, and tales passed on at the fireside, on nights such as this, when the night outside is dark and rainy, and there is warm food and ale to be had.

Spirituality hasn’t been high on my agenda this week anyway. The nearest I have got is to attempt to reconcile the philosophical problem of The Ship of Theseus with the uncertainty principle that says you can’t know exactly where a particle is until you observe it, at which point you become part of the process, and affect it.  The Ship of Theseus was the ancient version of Trigger’s yardbrush from Only Fools and Horses (17 new heads and 14 new handles) and asks if a ship which has had every plank replaced is still the same ship. It’s also another version of Heraclitus’s maxim that you can never jump in the same river twice.  Be it Frideswide's river Thames or otherwise. What interested me was that some philosophers have sought to solve the conundrum by referring to the fourth dimension, time. So that well-known and authoritative source, Wikipedia (!) says:

Ted Sider and others have proposed that considering objects to extend across time as four-dimensional causal series of three-dimensional 'time slices' could solve the Ship of Theseus problem because, in taking such an approach, each time-slice and all four dimensional objects remain numerically identical to themselves while allowing individual time-slices to differ from each other. The aforementioned river, therefore, comprises different three-dimensional time-slices of itself while remaining numerically identical to itself across time; one can never step into the same river time-slice twice, but one can step into the same (four-dimensional) river twice.

I’m struggling here, because I have never had any formal philosophical training (as you can tell) but it seemed to me that this was pretty similar in some way that intuitively struck me but which I can’t readily explain, between the flow of the river, the idea, in the uncertainty principle, of movement, and the point where you step into it, the idea, in the uncertainty principle, of measurement.  So you can either have the river flowing on, or you can have the river at the point you step into it. But you can’t have both. 

Does this have a religious interpretation? Well, in a broad sense, I suppose any paradox which forces you to question the nature of what we blithely refer to each day as “reality” and which is nothing of the sort, is, in that broad sense, religious.  This is why the Zen masters use “Koans” or riddles such as “does a dog have Buddha nature?”, “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” and “What was the face you had, before the world was made?” to challenge their pupils and get them to the point where they actually give up trying to answer the question. This, paradoxically, is the point where the pupil is actually starting to learn, because it is only by stilling the mind that the true nature of existence can be experienced. 

And, as I keep coming back to this point, I am forced to admit that if reality (the everyday reality of tables and chairs and gravity and stuff) is in fact all purely electrical energy, then what is the “real” reality behind it.  We’re back again to John Gribbin’s idea, in Schrödinger’s Kittens, of the only answer being a “something” that encompasses everything that is, was, and shall be, for ever and ever, amen. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be. God being outside of time.

Although I find the idea of eternity utterly terrifying, and almost impossible to grasp, and although I am terrible at actually explaining these concepts, I do, nevertheless, take some comfort from them, in a world which seems increasingly mad, random and cruel, and I offer it to you in the same spirit. I think it’s possibly as near as we shall ever come, at least in this state of existence, of understanding the nature of God.

All of which is a long way away from St Frideswide. And a long way from the Holme Valley where, as I was writing this, Debbie, Zak and Misty arrived back, soaking wet and wind-blown, from a 12-miler round Blackmoorfoot, where it was apparently blowing a hooley.  Stout October winds. So, two of them need drying off and three of them need feeding.  After enlightenment, the laundry. After an insight I can’t really explain (nothing new there) it’s time to go and chop some onions.  Come, you stout October winds, come with all your power.

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Epiblog for the Feast of St Wilfrid

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley.  The weather this week has been better, and worse.  By that, I mean that, rather than dull dark dingy days, we’ve had either bright, crisp sunshine or pouring rain. Or sometimes, both at once.  This has confused Matilda more than anyone else, and several times she has suddenly had to scuttle back to the conservatory door and stand there mewing to be let back in and dried off with kitchen roll. Not that she’s spoilt or anything.

The weather is all the same, as far as the dogs are concerned.  Now that Ellie has recovered a bit from her most recent operation, she’s once more been included in the daily walkies schedule, and the other day she did a personal best of 12.7 miles, round Blackmoorfoot reservoir, in the company of Zak, Misty and Deb.  It must have been a bit of a shock to the system, because when she came back, she jumped up on the settee, curled round, and fell fast asleep before we could even get her harness off.  She only woke up when it was time to go home. 

Thankfully, Deb’s mushroom gathering mania seems to have abated in recent days, probably because it’s too dark to see them, so the danger of me being inadvertently poisoned has receded, slightly at any rate. I think her backup plan is to drive me mad by channel-hopping.  On Friday night we were watching “Mastermind”, one of the few programmes we can actually agree to sit and endure at the same time, when she referred to John Humphrys as “Barry”.  That set me thinking; “Mastermind” would, indeed, be much improved if Barry Humphries, aka Dame Edna Everidge, was in charge. I am sure it would have a much wider audience, and the winner could have their Caithness glass bowl filled with gladioli.  In flicking through the channels, later that same night, she lit upon the Horror Channel, which was showing old Dr Who episodes and informed me, in the course of a discussion about Dr Who’s various enemies, that one of them was Stavros. Well, I know Easyjet is indeed inherently evil, but then I realised that was Stelios, not Stavros. Still, I like the idea of a Greek Dr Who arch-villain. Obviously no evil would be done between about 11am and 3.30pm. Perhaps the Daleks could be adapted to glide round at parties, with little trays of olives and meze attached to that thing that looks like a sink plunger.

Anyway, there have been few such nuggets of humour, in a week which has once more been full of bad news from the outside world.  As I write, a terrifying plague is spreading contagion across the entire country, a horrendous infection in danger of taking hold and spreading fear and devastation throughout the land. But that’s enough about UKIP, for the moment, what about Ebola?  There’s no doubt that it is a nasty, horrible disease, and not to be taken lightly.  It was a nasty, horrible disease when it was killing people in Africa, as it has been for years, along with West Nile Fever, Dengue, Malaria, and all the other things we’ve been generally happy in the West to turn a blind eye to, on the grounds that it was only killing black people, and some sections of the press here probably thought, on the quiet, that this was no bad thing, mentioning no names, Dailymailcoughcough.

It constantly amazes me how the west ignores things like kids dying in Africa for want of fresh water, Ebola, Yellow Fever, Malaria, Dengue, you name it. Until someone white catches it, whatever it is, then it's "chicken licken! the sky is falling!" And of course, for those who don’t like black people generally, it gives some sort of presumed grounding to their irrational prejudices to say that black people should be stopped from coming to the UK on the grounds that they might have, and therefore spread, the disease.  So it’s a win/win situation for the hysterical tabloids, a heady cocktail of fear and prejudice, which sells lots of papers, so they will no doubt be ramping it up for all it’s worth in days to come.

So, we have got Ebola. Well, not so much got it, as it’s another thing in the panoply of fear and paranoia that’s going to be used to oppress us and, no doubt at some point, to be used to pass yet more anti-libertarian legislation through parliament, on the pretext of making us all safer by strengthening the prison bars around us all, bit by bit, day by day. We shouldn’t really be surprised, in our pursuit of ever more money and the shiny electronic toys that enable us to tweet a complaint that the latte at Starbucks on the way to the office this morning was cold in the same 4 seconds of time that it takes a baby in  Sub-Saharan Africa to die of bad water and poor sanitation, that people in what we rather patronisingly call the Third World decide that they would rather like some of what we’ve got, if that’s all the same to you, and they up sticks and leave their failed states and their breeze-block hovels in the middle of the desert, the ones that we have bombed the crap out of (using missiles that cost us from £105,000 to £800,000 a pop) and they make their way overland and get to the coast of Africa and then risk their lives on flimsy rafts to try and land somewhere in the EU via Lampedusa, en route eventually to Calais and the (comparative) Shangri-La that is Droitwich.

As with Mrs Thatcher’s class war against the workers and the poor, or the endless tit-for-tat cycles of violence between Israel and Palestine, you can see how it happens, but this doesn’t mean that you agree with it or endorse it. As with Jihadism, it’s a problem of our own making. Our unwillingness to share the benefits of previous exploitation, our inability to manage a post-colonial legacy, our partial, and politically-motivated allocation of government aid that goes towards paying for a new missile system or gold-plated taps in the corrupt emperor’s palace, rather than for grain and fresh water for those starving or dying on the ground. All these are our doing, if by “our” I mean the Western world as a whole.

In its natural habitats, the Ebola virus is apparently harboured by colonies of wild old bats, which I must admit is rather worrying, as I do know several wild old bats in this country, who are indeed quite capable of unpredictable and dangerous behaviour. Still, according to the BBC News this week, one of the symptoms of Ebola is death, which should make it fairly easy to spot.

Death, or at least an inherent wish for it, in political terms, is also a symptom of both the Tories and the Labour Party, or so it would seem from this week’s by-election results.

Since 2010, the Tory/Lib Dem Junta has been pumping out propaganda about immigration. Immigrants are the cause of all our woes, apparently, and are coming here in droves to steal our jobs. Or our benefits. Or sometimes, when they think we’re really stupid, we’re told by the government they are coming here to steal both. Basically, what the Tories would like to say is “we’ll send all the brown people home”, because they know this would resonate profoundly as a vote-winner amongst the racist grannies, white van men, and Sun readers who make up the majority of the Bigot Brigade.  However, the Tories can’t say that, because, apart from anything else, it’s against the law to discriminate between people over the colour of their skin. If the Tories do say it, they say it to each other in private, when they are damn sure the mic is turned off, or they “say” it in coded messages to the electorate, such as making sure Theresa May deports a brown person a week. If it’s a terminally ill brown person, being returned “home” to certain death, so much the better.

UKIP have absolutely no compunction about their desire to send all the brown people home, being, as they are, a haven for those lost souls who have been looking for a political home ever since the BNP and the EDL imploded. Like the Tories, they are legally prevented from saying so in so many words, but unlike the Tories, they are often too stupid to check if they are being recorded, or their natural racism bubbles to the surface and they make that comment about Bongo-Bongo Land anyway. Or about gay people causing localised flooding, or sluts who don’t clean behind the fridge, or that it would be better for disabled people to have been aborted, or all of the above. Then there is a brief hoo-hah for as long as it takes for Nigel Farage to dissociate himself with the comments, the perpetrator is defenestrated, and another closet racist and fruitcake seamlessly takes their place in the UKIP hierarchy, to repeat the process.

I said, a long while ago, that immigration would be a key battleground in the forthcoming general election, and, sadly, I take absolutely no pleasure in noting that my prediction is coming true. The key point about immigration, as it stands at the moment, is that it is inherently tied up with Europe, and the idea of free movement within EU states.  This is why it’s absolutely impossible to have a sensible debate about immigration right now. If the entire population of Gdansk decided to up sticks and move to Merseyside, there is absolutely nothing we can do about it.  Why they would consider it, of course, is another matter. One city is a grimy, crumbling, decayed shell of its former industrial and shipbuilding past; and then there’s Gdansk. (Only joking, my Scouser chums, calm down, calm down!)

The Tories, to their credit (now there’s a sentence you won’t see me type very often, so make the most of it) have offered an in/out EU referendum in the next parliament, should we be foolish enough to re-elect them.  It is, in fact, the only thing that might be said in their favour – but then, of course, if they are re-elected, you get all the rest of the austerity and class war claptrap that comes with it.  Voting Tory in 2015 just to get an EU referendum is like agreeing to let your “funny” uncle take you for a treat to the zoo, even though you know there’s a strong chance he’ll molest and murder you in a deserted country lane during the journey home. 

Labour, of course, have chosen to ignore the whole issue, thus sending a strong signal to their core white working class vote, who, rightly or wrongly, are concerned with such issues, that Labour doesn’t give a stuff about you, so you might as well vote UKIP. This is what happened in Heywood and Middleton. The Liberal Democrats are irrelevant on this, as indeed they are on so many other matters. Though Vince Cable did have a remarkable recovery from severe amnesia this week, when the shock of am imminent election annihilation suddenly woke him up to the fact that he disagreed with everything he’s been helping the Tory Junta inflict on us for the past four years. I do hope Nick Clegg’s proposed mental health reforms are adopted at least in Mr Cable’s case, to allow him to live out his twilight years in peace, somewhere far away from the rest of us.

The reason why people are voting UKIP rather than Tory in these by-elections, and will do so in large numbers (though not so large) at the general election, is because they perceive that UKIP will be tougher and crack down more on the scroungers, scapegoats, asylum seekers, immigrants, benefit claimants, you name it, than the Tories will.  All of these categories are interchangeable in the mind of the UKIP voter, such as it is. They live in a world where the Muslim who runs the local takeaway signals to Al Qaida submarines at night by closing and unclosing his curtains, where every burkha hides a suicide vest, and where there are Ebola-ridden asylum seekers under all the beds of Droitwich Spa. 

The Tories created these bogey men, and now their evil propaganda has come back to bite them on the bum: despite their protestations (true) that they are actually the only party offering to do something about sorting out Europe after the next election, people are not listening, and are voting UKIP because they think UKIP will somehow be tougher.  The fact that, in order to enact the withdrawal from the EU which is the main, indeed, some would say the only, UKIP policy, UKIP would have to elect enough MPs to form a parliamentary majority or at least a substantial enough wedge in a hung parliament to go into coalition, is lost on people who vote for them.  In fact, as was painfully shown in a radio phone-in on LBC this week, some people who voted UKIP have got absolutely no idea what the party’s policies on, say, farming, or defence are.  Anyone who says they voted UKIP because of their farming policy reminds me of those sleazy old blokes who used to claim they read Playboy in the 1970s because of its well-informed articles on motoring. Yeah, right.

So why do people think UKIP will be tougher? One reason is of course that they haven’t really got a clue, and in fact they are using their vote for UKIP as a kick-ass “none of the above” comment on the two main parties and the failure of the minor parties such as the Greens and the Liberal Democrats to come up with anything better.  As I said, they live in a fantasy world created by the Tory Junta and the media, where Muslim terrorist asylum seeking immigrants (probably all infected with Ebola) are arriving by the boatload at Dover Docks and immediately being given the keys to a free council house, a Ferrari, and a wide-screen TV.  People are resentful about this, even though it’s a complete fairy tale, and resentful about local services being (as they see it) put under strain. (Although much of that strain is in fact the result of self-inflicted “austerity” cuts (those £800K missiles have to be paid for somehow) by the Treasury in the rate support grant to local councils, who then, in turn, have to cut front line services because, unlike Liverpool under Derek Hatton, they don’t have the balls to stand up to the Tories and refuse to set a budget). The voters look at Westminster MPs in their faraway little bubble with their safety-cushion of expenses and several other jobs and their two or three houses, and they think UKIP will somehow sort it all out.

And all this is directly down to failures by the Tories and by Labour.  Labour by washing their hands of it, with the useless, feeble, Ed Miliband issuing platitudes about how they must learn the lesson of Heywood. The lesson of Heywood has been brewing for years, and it’s a bit bloody late, six months before an election, for it finally to have penetrated Miliband’s skull, if indeed it even has. The Tories are to blame for creating the evil genie in the first place, and then failing to be seen to be able to control it.  Even their referendum promise is viewed with suspicion, because of course, like all pre-election promises, there’s many a slip twixt cup and lip, and in any case, I think the options on any referendum should be in/out, or – my own preferred option - “shake it all about”, whereby we remain a nominal member of the EU but the focus from our point of view is on the advantages for British citizens who want to trade and live abroad, and we disassociate ourselves from the EU political process of union and integration. After all, other EU members cherry-pick the bits of EU membership that suit them best – are you listening, mes amis Francaises? – so why shouldn’t we?)

It has often been said of UKIP (in a derogatory way) that they want to get back to the 1950s. I doubt that’s true, in practice, though if they do, it’s the 1950s where you could put up a notice in the window of a B&B saying “No Blacks, No Irish” and no-one batted an eyelid. These days, I suppose, UKIP would add “No Gays”.  Well, for the record, I’d quite like to get back to the 1950s – not in those ways, which I utterly repudiate, but back to the compassionate society where people used to look out for their neighbours and their community, and where rights were balanced with respect.  We obviously haven’t heard the last of UKIP, since there is yet another by-election with yet another Tory to UKIP defector standing in Rochester next Thursday. And in the wake of UKIP comes all the other, similar groups who are several stops beyond Barking and well off the bus route, such as Britain First.

Britain First has been going on about asylum seekers being on benefits this week.  Just for the record, Asylum seekers don't receive benefits. If they're not in detention they get £36.52 a week to live on, often in the form of vouchers that can only be used at certain outlets. They are actively prevented from seeking work while their cases are being heard, which means that they are unable to support themselves or contribute to the country by paying taxes and NI, because the government prevents them from doing so. If their appeal is disallowed, they are likely to be deported back to somewhere where their lives are in danger. Mind you, I shouldn’t expect too much accuracy from a group whose supporters think that Lord Nelson was one of the greatest leaders this country has ever had (!) or who illustrated their article about an anti-immigration demo they had held in Dover with a picture of the Seven Sisters, a series of prominent white cliffs, true, but located near Eastbourne. Should’ve gone to Specsavers.

So, it’s all very depressing, and there’s only so much that ridicule can do to alleviate the overarching and growing sense of despair. I wrote last week about the apparent meaninglessness of life, the random nature of evil, and I can, truthfully, say that nothing which has happened this week has done anything in the slightest to re-affirm my faith or bring back any sense of meaning.  Today, Sunday, is the feast of St Wilfrid, one of the great saints of the North-East, so I turned to his life hoping to gain some lessons I could carry forward into the gathering darkness.

Wilfrid lived from about 633AD to 709 or 710AD, and, unlike many of the more obscure saints we’ve had in recent weeks, had a long and (for the period) well-documented life.  He was yet another of the Saxon saints who were intertwined with the royal house of Northumbria at the time when that area was one of the separate kingdoms of Saxon England.

Born into Northumbrian nobility, he studied initially for a religious vocation at Lindisfarne, but also travelled to Canterbury, on to Gaul, and even as far as Rome.  On his return to Northumbria in 660AD or thereabouts, he became the abbot of the newly founded monastery at Ripon, North Yorkshire. In 664AD he made his famous speech at the Synod of Whitby, where he argued for the Roman method of calculating the date of Easter, rather than the Celtic church’s method. Oh for the days when that was all we had to worry about.

Wilfrid’s success at the Synod of Whitby led to his being appointed Bishop of Northumbria. Rather sniffily, Wilfrid chose to be consecrated in Gaul, because he didn’t rate the currently available English bishops to be validly consecrated enough to consecrate others in turn.  Wilfrid had been appointed by Alhfrith, the son of the reigning Northumbrian king, Oswiu, and while Wilfrid was off in search of the full-fat, high-tar original recipe consecration experience in Gaul, Alhfrith, unwisely as it turned out, led an insurrection against Oswiu and was defeated. Oswiu then appointed his own bishop of Northumbria,  Ceadda, negating Wilfrid’s appointment. This meant that, when Wilfrid returned to England, he was forced to resume his post at Ripon, while Ceadda was bishop in his stead.

Theodore of Tarsus became archbishop of Canterbury in 668AD and resolved the anomaly by deposing Ceadda, which meant that for the next nine years, Wilfrid improved the liturgy, built churches and founded monasteries.

Theodore, however, had his own ideas about how things should be done, and wanted to break up some of the larger dioceses. When Wilfrid quarrelled once more with the king of Northumbria (by now it was Ecgfrith) Theodore seized his chance, and broke up the diocese anyway.  Wilfrid found himself on the road again, this time travelling to Rome to appeal directly to the Pope.  The Pope ruled in Wilfrid’s favour, but Ecgfrith ignored this. When Wilfrid returned to Northumbria, Ecgfrith imprisoned him and then exiled him.

Exile involved spending time in Selsey, West Sussex.  I once spent nine years in exile in West Sussex, and I have to say that they were some of the most enjoyable years of my life so far.  Wilfrid had a slightly harder time of it than I had, however, but he did manage to convert the pagan kingdom of West Sussex to Christianity, and inspired Kipling, many years later, to write the famous poem about Eddi, priest of Wilfrid, giving his sermon to the animals in his church at Manhood End. (Manhood End, despite its rather risqué name, is just a peninsula sticking out into the English channel, near Selsey Bill).

Life was, however, to become even more complicated for Wilfrid. Theodore made up his quarrel with Wilfrid, and by now there was a new king of Northumbria, Aldfrith. Aldfrith initially allowed Wilfrid to return, but in 691AD, expelled him again.  This time, Wilfrid travelled to Mercia, where he acted as a bishop, but in 700AD he appealed to the Papacy yet again, and the Pope ordered that a Council be held at Austerfield, in 702AD, to decide the issue. This council attempted to confiscate all of Wilfrid’s possessions, and so, yet again, he travelled to Rome to appeal in person to the Pope. Meanwhile, his Northumbrian opponents excommunicated him (no half measures there) but the Pope once again upheld Wilfrid’s side of the dispute, and he was re-installed at Ripon and at Hexham. (It always amuses me when I read of clergy being “installed”. I have visions of a little paperclip popping up and saying “you appear to be attempting to install a Bishop. Do you want some help with this feature?”)

Somehow, unaccountably, after his death in 709 or 710AD, Wilfrid began to be revered as a saint.  He was buried near the altar of Ripon, although he actually died on one of his travels, at Oundle in Northamptonshire. I have to say he sounds like a thoroughly unpleasant character who was probably capable of starting an argument in an empty room, but I suppose that we shouldn’t judge the people of those distant days, when the method of calculating Easter was a big deal, by the standards of today.  Quite what was saintly about a life that seems to have been equally divided between administrating and arguing is largely lost on me, I’m afraid.  It is probably a legacy of the fact that the main source for Wilfrid’s life, apart from Bede, is the medieval Via Sancti Wilfrithi, by Stephen of Ripon, a typically hagiographic, uncritical account.  Then, as today, the media sets the message and the victors write the history.

Wilfrid’s feast day is 12^th October, today, although it has also been celebrated on 24^th April.  The confusion arises because the latter date marks when his relics were translated into a new shrine. Miracles supposedly happened almost as soon as Wilfrid was dead. The water which had been used to wash his body caused miraculous events at the location where it had been discarded. In 948AD, however, King Eadred destroyed the foundation at Ripon, and Wilfrid’s relics started a series of travels which were to mimic his travels while alive. 

After 948AD, Archbishop Oda of Canterbury took Wilfrid’s relics to Canterbury Cathedral, although there is also a tradition that some of them were preserved at Ripon and that Oswald, Archbishop of York, restored the monastic community there.  At this distance in time, it’s anyone’s guess, to be honest, but there’s no reason why the relics could not have been split up, given the fact that there were about 17 femurs of St James on the go at any one time. 

The Canterbury relics were moved into a shrine of their own, following a fire at Canterbury in 1067, and by this time, with England now under the control of the Normans, there were 48 churches dedicated to him, and 11 different sites that claimed to have some, or all, of his relics.  In Ripon itself, the feast of St Wilfrid continued until as recently as 1908 to be held on the first Sunday after Lammas-tide, a different date yet again, and was marked with fairs, a parade, and horse-racing.

The only thing really that I have taken from the life of St Wilfrid is that it seems that the lust for power was just as strong in those days as this, that Europe and its supposed interference was a significant factor, and that to the ordinary peasant struggling in the mud, it probably didn’t make a lot of difference anyway. Plus ça change. 

More pertinently for me, though, I can’t find any spiritual solace in it, interesting as it is in terms of the history of those times, and once again, I now find myself questioning the concepts of sainthood, as well as everything else! Well, not so much the concepts, so much as the entry requirements, I suppose.  I still try and pray, for what it’s worth.  It seems to me a bit like when the life in a plant or a tree shrinks down into the ground, in winter, but you hope, one hopes, I hope, that it will burgeon again in spring. 

So, in my little shrunken life, I look forward to another unrelenting week, keep that wheel a-turning, and do a little more each day, as it says in Cosher Bailey, and it’ll all come right.  Which is all fine and dandy, apart from those times when I’m actually just clinging on by my fingertips, when I’m down to my last bullet and the cavalry haven’t yet come galloping over the hill.  I’m not sure what it is that keeps me going at those times: a combination of bloody-mindedness and not wanting to let down those who rely on me and my efforts, such as they are. Is that caused by God? Is there a spark of the once-divine hidden somewhere deep (must be bloody deep and bloody well-hidden, is all I can say) that drives me to aspire towards it, like the spring sap rising, to get up and try again? 

I’m tired tonight. All I really want to do now is to hibernate. To curl up somewhere and get warm and go back to sleep. I might do some painting later. It might help me feel less fed up, both with myself and with the way the world’s going.  Monday will be here soon enough.