Epiblog for the Sixteenth Sunday after Trinity

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley.  The trees are really turning now, and the nights are definitely drawing in. October, with its light like no other, when the sun shines, golden, mellow and sweet like a Spatlese wine, left out slightly too long, so the frost makes it crisp and the sun gives it extra sugar.  Towards the end of the week, it was unseasonably warm, so much so that for a couple of nights I eschewed my hot water bottle. (As opposed to those nights when you dream of eating a large Cornish pasty and find you have chewed your hot water bottle). Still, the weather forecasters on Look North are promising us gales, rain, and unsettled, much colder weather next week, so I must look out my Hawaiian shirts and sunglasses.

Probably because of the warm weather, at least in part, Matilda has taken to sleeping on the sofa in Colin’s front room again, so Misty has moved back to the dog bed/cushion under the table in the conservatory. Except for one night during the week when Matilda decided to be contrary and claim it for her own, leading Misty to lie down alongside it with a big sigh. Their two back ends were almost touching each other. It can only be a matter of time before they end up being like Tiggy and Russell, a pile of animals. It’s a bit like the monarchy – the institution endures, even though the incumbents change from time to time.

Thankfully, there have been no more instances of Debbie bringing me back mushrooms to try, probably because, now the evenings are drawing in, she is increasingly coming back with Misty and Zak in the dark, so the mushrooms go unseen, and my life expectancy has (presumably) slightly increased.

Apart from work, which, like the poor, is always with us, I’ve been trying to catch up on some of my householderly tasks this week, including one horrible job which I had been putting off and putting off, changing the riddling plate in the stove. The riddling plate is the bit that rotates when you “riddle” it, allowing all the ash to fall through into the pan beneath. Anyway, it had become absolutely clogged up with clinker, so I had no option but to let the fire go out and dismantle the old one, stick the replacement on the end of the “pronger” thing that rotates it, and then make the fire again. It sounds a simple enough procedure, and in fact it is, if you aren’t stuck in a bloody wheelchair. As it was, it took me two hours! It was very character building, and my character is now fully built. Still, I did it in the end, and now I have the prospect of additional fun in the form of chipping the clinker off the old one, which looks, actually, as if it could do another turn once that was accomplished.  One day when I feel particularly bloody, I will take it outside and whack it with an axe. It will make a nice change from shouting incoherently at passing traffic.

Speaking of button mushrooms, I was taken to task last week by a reader of this blog who asked me my I hadn’t featured the story of Brooks Newmark, the Tory MP who allegedly “Tweeted” photos of his button mushroom to someone whom he imagined to be a young, blonde, female, personable, fragrant Tory activist, but who in fact turned out to be a grizzled tabloid reporter. Open bag, exit cat, and minister resigns.The short answer is that, at the time I wrote the blog, I hadn’t heard the story.

Having now scanned it, several things occur to me. One is that Brooks Newmark would be a great name for a firm of accountants. Secondly, I gather the truly horrific aspect of the case was not in fact the disputed displaying or not of the todger in question, but the truly dreadful paisley-pattern pyjamas. Thirdly, and I would have expected Mr Newmark to have known this, but it just goes to show yet again how out of touch MPs are, no-one on the internet is who they say they are. Not even me. We all invent a slight fiction of ourselves, especially on social media, and some people go way beyond that, into a whole world of whoppers, fantasy and make believe.  So if you are approached online by someone who says she is a 19 year old college girl who is having trouble doing up her bra and is there any way you could help her with that, if she sends you a picture of her, wearing/not wearing the offending garment, the chances are that it’s a 55-year-old, balding douchebag from Colorado, wearing grey sweat pants and a T-shirt stained with the sauce from yesterday’s Tacos. Just sayin’

Mr Newmark, obviously inexperienced in the art of escaping from holes via the "cessation of excavation" method, has now been claiming “entrapment”, apparently, as if it was the most natural thing in the world and no one could possibly have resisted the temptation to send pictures of themselves in their jimjams to some random blonde on Twitter, thus rendering him blameless.  There is, of course, one sure-fire way to avoid being “entrapped”, and that’s not to do it in the first place! And to those who ask what is the public interest, well, he’s been shown to have at best faulty judgement, and at worst to be yet another member of the dismal crew infesting parliament who are fond of trying to regulate us and tell us what to do, while doing something entirely different and opposite themselves.

It’s always amused me the way the scandals divide along party lines. With the Tories it’s always sex, usually involving whips and black stockings, with the Liberals it’s homosexuality, whereas Labour always go for money. Sometimes you do get an adventurous soul who tries to encompass two, or even all three of these, but they are few and far between.  And of course the figures are skewed because Labour MPs who fiddle their expenses get prosecuted to the hilt, whereas Tory malefactors are let off with a slap on the wrist.

We may never know the true extent of expenses fraud in future if IPSA have their way. (I almost typed “ISIL” there – it’s an easy mistake to make). IPSA is the new, expensive, standalone quango set up to monitor MPs’ expenses, at our, er, expense, since they can’t be trusted to do it themselves.  So far, this body has recommended a pay increase for MPs and come up with the idea, put forward this week by its chief executive, the improbably-named Marcius Boo, that, in future, investigations into expenses fraud should be conducted in private, and no-one should know about them. Because of course, with public trust in politicians at an all-time low, and the system already suspected of cronyism, Machiavellian shenanigans, and widespread abuse, what’s needed at this time is clearly more secrecy and opacity, and a general assertion that MPs know best.  No.  I’m afraid not.

My suggestion, in order to bring MPs back into the real world where the rest of us live, is as follows. Firstly, abolish IPSA, it’s a waste of space and money. Secondly, MPs should be issued with an “expenses card”, similar to the one proposed this week by Iain Dunkin-Donuts for benefits claimants. This would allow them to pay for agreed items essential for their office and work as an MP, such as stationery and travel, at a range of approved outlets, so that their spending can be closely monitored and they can’t fritter away our hard-earned taxpayer cash on duck houses and moat-cleaning. Time and time again these feckless scroungers have been shown that they can’t be trusted, and if it’s good enough for benefits claimants, it’s good enough for MPs. I have applied to start a government petition on this subject, let’s see what happens. 

The IDS/IBS suggestion came of course out of the Tory party conference, otherwise remarkable for rats jumping ship to the SS UKIP, course and destination unknown, but somewhere well beyond Barking and a long way off the bus route. The difference between UKIP and the Tories reminds me of that old joke about the people who became actuaries because they found accountancy too stimulating. I have been told off this week on a social media forum by some earnest beardies of the left for “being nasty” about the Tories and UKIP.  We should rise above that sort of thing, apparently. That nice Mr Miliband has the right idea. They are not evil, just misguided. So, the next time he is monstered in the Daily Mail, instead of retorting in kind with sarcasm and hatred, Labour will just sit them down and read them an instructive passage out of News From Nowhere. Yeah, that should work. 

As for me, fine, I’ll start being nicer when they stop trying to wreck the economy and kill the poor, the ill, and the disadvantaged, or at least drive them into a state of terminal despair. UKIP should just come out and say on mic what they are always saying when they think no-one’s listening outside of the closed echo-chamber, that they want all the brown people sent home.  It would be less hypocritical, but sadly, I suspect that in the current climate, it would also increase their membership, though, so maybe their brown shirts and “Heil Farage” £-symbol armbands are best kept in the closet for now, for the sake of the rest of us. We’ll see more than enough of them, come May 2015.

By the way. Anyone who wonders why I am consistently “nasty” about the Junta should maybe pause to consider one salient fact. The number of people made homeless because they were evicted by their private landlord has more than doubled in the last five years, new government figures show, according to Shelter. Now, how long has the Junta been in power…yes, almost five years! Give that man a coconut.  The Tory conference was responsible for several things that almost brought on a bilious attack. Cameron’s shroud-waving “promises” about the NHS. This from the party that “promised” no top-down reorganisation, er,  of, er, the NHS.  Cameron’s magic rabbit out of a hat tax cuts, which actually mean that, in addition to the £30bn of cuts already pledged, they will now have to cut another £7bn from somewhere; Cameron lying about having “paid down the debt” – once again confusing his debts and his deficits, either because he doesn’t know the difference, or he thinks we don’t, or both.  And finally, the main event of the evening, as Kent Walton used to say, repealing the Human Rights Act and replacing it with an official (and probably much shorter) Tory-approved list of things you can do, and all else ist verboten, dressed up as a “Bill of Rights”.

On the subject of the debt and the deficit, by the way, and the difference between the two, and how Britain’s national debt has risen in the last four years and not fallen, I recommend the independent blogger “Another Angry Voice” who has an explanation of the whole debt/deficit thing, and why David Cameron deliberately confuses them when he’s lying. This week, he said:

The evidence is absolutely clear. Since the Tories were enabled into power by the Liberal Democrats in 2010, the national debt has grown dramatically.  Statistics from the UK Public Spending website show that the national debt stood at 44% of GDP at the end of 2009 (Labour's final full year in office) and have risen to over 76% of GDP now. To put this into monetary figures, the debt the Tory party inherited from Labour was less than£1 trillion, it is now more than £1.4 trillion and still rising rapidly. That means that rather than "paying down" the debt, this Tory led government has increased it dramatically!

In just four years George Osborne has created more debt than every single Labour government in history combined. One of those Labour governments was in power during the worst global economic crisis of the 20th Century (the Wall Street Crash and Great Depression) and another was in charge during the worst global economic crisis so far in the 21st Century (the global financial sector insolvency crisis), yet in just four years George Osborne has borrowed more than both of them together, and all of the other Labour governments in history added in for good measure too!

Only the most egregious of liars could try to claim that increasing the debt by significantly more than £400 billion in just four years represents a "paying down" of debt, especially if he's already been officially rebuked for telling exactly the same lie before.

There are already signs that “election fever” is hitting a rolling boil early. Matt Hancock, a Tory MP who I have never heard of, tweeted a limerick asserting that the Labour party was “full of queers” – not only politically incorrect, but also inaccurate – it’s the Liberal party, see above. Not that it matters. The Liberal Party also started their conference this week. Not that it matters.

In Clacton, meanwhile, it’s not so much election fever as by-election fever. Banksy, bless him, the graffiti artist’s graffiti artist, painted one of his clever little murals on the outside of a bog on Clacton sea front.  Tendring Council’s Cleansing Department (who, on the strength of this performance, won’t be entering a team in the local authority version of “University Challenge” any time soon) received a complaint from that old mainstay, a “concerned member of the public” and, in accordance with some damfool “target” probably set by someone in a power point presentation somewhere deep in the bowels of the Council, put down their bacon sandwiches and their mugs of tea, got in their van, and scrubbed it off within 48 hours, not realising how valuable it was.

Banksy, meanwhile, had put it on his web site, so at least it survives, albeit only digitally. What it boils down to, though, is that some ignoramus at Tendring Council used about 39p worth of Cillit Bang to get rid of something they could have sold for hundreds of thousands of pounds, because some other ignoramus thought that a picture of four pigeons surrounding a visiting summer bird and holding placards saying "migrants go home"  and “keep off our worms” was in some way racist.  It may not have been racist, but it was, however, definitely pigeonist, but the pigeons have their own way of commenting on public art, and indeed, on candidates in by-elections, if they are foolish enough to walk about without an umbrella. One can but hope. Come, pigeon-crap, and fall on Clacton; it’s even worse than bloody Acton. And yes, graffiti is often a nuisance, and unsightly. It’s a shame that not all graffiti artists are up to Banksy’s standard. Perhaps they should have to pass some sort of test before allowed to buy a spray-can of paint, in the same way that Tory MPs should undergo basic psychometric screening before being allowed to annoy us on Twitter.

All this frothing immigrant bashing and trying to out-kipper UKIP does have serious consequences, though, as the Home Office is being forced to carry out ever more bizarre deportations in a failed attempt to keep the Daily Mail happy.  I’ve written about quite a few of these, most recently Harley Miller, last week, an Australian who worked for the NHS for nine years and was highly regarded by her colleagues, and who has now lost her job and lives from day to day in limbo waiting for the decision on her appeal, and her future.

This week brought the case of Portas Ongondo, who was a 55-year-old caretaker at Collingham Lady Elizabeth Hastings CE Primary School in Leeds. I say “was”, because after working there for six years, he’s been deported back to Kenya. This despite a petition asking for him to be allowed to stay which garnered over 1000 signatures, and his description by the school authorities as a dedicated worker, whose commitment to the school “far exceeded the role of caretaker”.  The Home Office moved in on him following the breakdown of his marriage. Talk about kicking a bloke when he’s down. The decision also separates him from his three grown-up children, who will remain in the UK. Well, I hope the Daily Mail are content. At least this time it wasn’t someone so ill they had to be deported while unconscious and strapped to a stretcher, but nevertheless, where’s the compassion?

Following the Banksy debacle, art seems to be causing Cameron some trouble as well. He’s trodden on Her Majesty’s toes again, following the “Purrgate” debacle, by apparently crowing to a gathering of MPs at Chequers that he had the original of a portrait by Van Dyck hanging there, and the one the Queen has at Windsor is only a copy, although HM thinks otherwise. When  news of this reached the Palace, HM apparently pulled a frosty one and, like her predecessor whom she is increasingly coming to resemble, was not amused. Still, if they ever re-make Mary Poppins, Cameron could audition for the part of “Van Dyck dick”.  He’d almost certainly get it.

Plus, if he were to find an alternative career capering about and speaking “mockney”, it would stop him causing any more havoc in the world. This week saw the first air strikes by the RAF, and already as I type pressure is growing for the UK to extend the remit already given to it by parliament last week and carry the bombing over the border into Syria. Mission creep in action.

I’ve been trying to keep a running tally of the cost of this to us, the people who, one way or another, are paying for it.  It isn’t as easy as you might think.  The main armament of the Tornados taking part is the Paveway IV guided bomb and the Brimstone missile.  The Paveway IV is actually a kit which converts a “dumb” 500lb HE bomb into a smart one which can then be laser-guided on to its target. I found an acquisition cost for the Paveway II, an earlier version, but even so that is only the cost of buying the thing, and contains no element of storage, training, delivery, etc.

Raytheon, who manufacture the Paveway IV, were completely unhelpful and unresponsive to the simple requests I made (including via their Facebook page) about the cost. Their web site, however, does have a section on corporate social responsibility and environmental stewardship.  Perhaps their bombs don’t kill people, so much as recycle responsibly them over a wider area.

Anyway, so far we’ve flown four sorties, destroying two pickup trucks and a larger truck, presumably with occupants, a heavy machine-gun position, and the ruins of an old hospital where ISIL fighters were holed up. (The building, hit by 2 x Paveway IVs, was a disused hospital with concrete structure and metal frame. The ISIL fighters just took refuge in its cellars till the air strike had gone on, then came out to carry on engaging the Peshmerga, and had to be mortared out eventually).  After several attempts, I came up with the following: Apparently there is a per sortie cost of £35,000. Not sure if that's per sortie, or per sortie per plane, but let's err on the side of caution and call it per sortie.

Based on four sorties so far, so, conservatively estimated, that's £35,000 x 4 = £140,000. Previously, I had calculated the munitions cost at £738,507.64 but a) that's based on purely the acquisition cost and contains no element for storage, training, delivery, maintenance. Plus we now know that Paveway is a guidance system and we don't know, because we can't establish, whether that actually includes the warhead or whether that's an additional cost. Plus the cost for a Paveway is based on a Paveway II whereas these are Paveway IVs. Also, one other gnat in the germolene, in some reports the munitions used yesterday were Paveway IV's and not Brimstone missiles. So, in fairness, I should take off £210,000 and add on 2 x £13,507.64 (£27,015.28) making a revised total of £555,522.92  To which we add the sortie cost (bearing in mind that if it's per sortie per plane this will at least double) of £140,000 which gives us a grand total of £695,552.92

Or just over half the money that is needed to be raised by charity for the Mid-Cheshire MHS trust MRI scanner appeal. These figures are almost certainly a massive understatement, though.  Because a Sky News correspondent has already got there before me, and on his figures, we've had 3 sorties @ £210,000 = £630,000, 5 x Brimstone missiles @ £105,000 = £525,000, 3 x Paveway Mk IV guided bombs @ £22,000 = £66,000. His “per sortie” figure is based on £35,000 per plane per hour.

This gives a total of £1,221,000, so, we've passed the Mid Cheshire MRI appeal total with ££ to spare in only 3 days! Hooray! Er.... oh. So far, at least, no-one has fired a Shadowstorm at them, which would be a bang that costs £800,000 a pop. Once more, I am forced to question why we are doing this in the first place, why there is such a gross cost/benefit mismatch – even in purely monetary terms, spending £1.2M a week to destroy three trucks that were probably worth £5,000 each, plus maybe a heavy machine gun or two, is just not sustainable. And you don’t have to take my word for it, the professional military pilots who post on the PPRUNE military aviation forum have been asking precisely the same questions. Remind me again about austerity, and the cash crisis in the NHS?

Nor has it prevented ISIL from carrying on pretty much before, and nor will it do, including the cowardly and grim murder of Alan Henning. The fate of the hostages was already more of less sealed when parliament voted as it did. In fact, some have argued that the fate of Alan Henning was sealed when he decided to quit his taxi-driving and take part in a humanitarian mission to Syria. You can argue it round and round and talk about post hoc ergo propter hoc and cause and effect, but wherever it started, we’re now definitely looped in to the cycle of action followed by revenge, against people who have no concept of the idea that two wrongs don’t make a right.

I could well have done to remember that adage myself, when I happened on another horrible news story, of the theft and killing of a pet rabbit called Percy from a hutch in Seaham, Co. Durham, by four drunken yobboes who were unaccountably allowed to walk free by Peterlee Magistrates this week. I wrote to the chairman of the bench saying that, in my opinion, the failure to impose a hefty fine and a custodial sentence was a disgrace. That probably counts as contempt of court, so if I’m not around next Sunday, they will have locked me up.  I will spare you the exact details of what they did, but it was sickening.

In contrast, my digital version of the Arran Banner, should I have chosen to download it, led with the story of a lamb which has been born out of season on a farm at Shiskine, and I said to Deb at the time that it must be nice to live in a place where that’s the lead story in the weekly newspaper instead of things like “Drug Dealer’s Dismembered Body Found in Bin Bag”.  Although maybe not Norfolk, where David and Jill Stolworthy drive around with a life-size dummy of Sir Cliff Richard in the back of the car. David found the head at a car boot sale, and attached it to a body he had made of MDF. His wife says that when she is in the car on her own, it makes her feel “safer”, although I have to say that the only thing that would make me feel less secure would be an anatomically-correct Jimmy Savile. 

This week’s also seen the festivals of Yom Kippur and Eid, prompting Debbie to ask why they couldn’t just amalgamate the two, showing a basic failure to grasp the history involved, there. Having said that, maybe she’s got a point. I was also heartened to see a posting from one of my Facebook friends who had been the recipient of Eid related hospitality, in the form of big plates of party food,  after putting an Eid blessings poster in her window and her husband having gone across the road to wish them a happy Eid.

So we came to today, Sunday, the sixteenth after Trinity, at the end of another week where I felt like I had been through the mangle, a week which has severely tested the remaining shreds of my faith.  It has highlighted, once again, the two areas where I have the most trouble in believing that existence has a point any more: the problem of evil in the world, and the problem of forgiveness. Better theologians than me have grappled with these issues and failed, so in that respect, I suppose I shouldn’t be too downcast that I haven’t been able to crack it.

When things like the senseless, meaningless murder of Alan Henning (or even the killing of Percy the rabbit) take place, I really struggle to see what function they have in a universe that purports to have a meaning. It is even worse when, as with Alan Henning, someone who was apparently good and kind-hearted and acting out of the best of motives is killed in the name of “religion” – though ISIL have about as much to do with Islam as the Spanish Inquisition did with Catholicism, and are probably at a similar stage of evolution.

An atheist would say, of course, there is no meaning, and people who kill in the name of an imaginary friend in the sky are just deluded wingnuts. Some days, I am beginning to think they have a point. I normally fall back on the  belief that there is a plan behind all of this, but it is not vouchsafed to us on this limited, fallen, plane of existence, where all that is available is the occasional glimpse that there might be some kind of pattern behind it all. But even then, what plan could possibly encompass such senseless and cruel deaths? I came up against this when the arguments were raging about the huge Pacific tsumani, and why did God not intervene? Some people said, how do you know he didn’t? and I thought then, would I want to be party to a deity where the effect of its intervention was so obscure and perverse?

I gave up a long while ago believing that “God” was some sort of friendly humanoid form, an old buffer in a robe, sitting on a throne up in the clouds keeping a list of who’s been naughty and who’s been nice, like Santa. Clearly, as I’ve said before, any entity that is capable of taking on the sins of all the world, and which contains all that is, was and ever shall be, world without end, living outside of the concept of time, is going to have a radically different concept of fairness, pain and justice to the rest of us. But the question has now moved on, for me, to “well, assuming this was true, is it something I want to be a part of when it necessarily contains evil and repugnant acts that were presumably part of some pattern I can’t see?” – and, perhaps even more pertinently, if I don’t, what are the choices for opting out?

Then there’s the issue of forgiveness.  I have to admit that my first reaction was, on hearing about Alan Henning and seeing the video still, online, of “Jihadi John” threatening him with the knife, that it would be worth the £800,000 cost of a Shadowstorm missile to see “John”, in particular, pureed to strawberry jam and spread across several miles of sand dunes. But then what? He’d be revered as a martyr by his equally sick followers, and two other Jihadis would pop up to take his place. In the case of Percy the rabbit, would it actually stop some other twisted psycho from stealing another rabbit in the future and killing it, if the magistrates had ordered that those found guilty should themselves have been dropped from a high window and then had their necks wrung? Again, probably not.

But to forgive these people? How is that even possible? I have no conception. Even by trying all the sophisticated tricks like “hate the sin but love the sinner” doesn’t work for me, especially as in these cases the sinners seem to be deeply unpleasant people that even their own mothers would struggle to say a good word for.  I think part of my struggle to forgive these people rests in the sense of injustice and the helplessness to be able to do anything about it.  There is no prospect of “Jihadi John” ever having to stand trial in a court of law and account for his actions, and in any case we have painted ourselves into such a corner that we’re now in a no-win situation, even if we blew him into chops, see above. 

In terms of the sentencing in the animal cruelty case, unless and until the judiciary and the courts wake up and start handing out exemplary sentences under the law, there will continue to be casual animal cruelty and meaningless suffering. None of this makes me feel “forgiving” even in the faintest regard.  In fact, it makes me feel savage. It makes me feel like employing nastiness and sarcasm and invective (sadly, these days, the only weapons I have available) – in short, it turns me into one of them.  If you continue to see injustice day after day after day, there comes a point where you decide to do something about it. As Yeats put it “too long a sacrifice makes a stone of the heart.”

And there’s the paradox. We’re back to evil again, because evil lurks inside all of us and it only needs the right combination of buttons to be pressed to bring it boiling to the surface. In which case, where’s the plan? Where is the humanity, the compassion?  It all vanishes in one thunderclap, in one lightning bolt, and we’re back in the swamp, clubbing each other with stone axes again. How does that fit in with any plan I would want to be a part of, let alone one I would like to recommend or even worship?

Having already looked at, and rejected, most of the saints whose feast is supposed to be actually celebrated today, though I could have cheated and had Michelmas, which fell in the week just gone, I turned once more to the Book of Common Prayer and found – again, as like last week – at least something in the readings that seemed apposite to my current concerns. The second reading for evening prayer today is 1 John 2, 1:17, which contains to passage about:

He that saith he is in the light, and hateth his brother, is in darkness even until now.

He that loveth his brother abideth in the light, and there is none occasion of stumbling in him. But he that hateth his brother is in darkness, and walketh in darkness, and knoweth not whither he goeth, because that darkness hath blinded his eyes.

So,  that’s me told, I guess: every time I respond to nastiness with nastiness, every time I demand an eye for an eye, I am blundering further into the darkness, giving the old evil in me more strength and moving further and further away from the light? Well, maybe. But again, if there was more justice in the world, if the bad guys didn’t always seem to come out on top, perhaps I wouldn’t be so prone to savagery in my responses.

If there is any redeeming factor, in a world which often seems meaningless, random and cruel, it is, as I have often said before, in the indomitable nature of the human spirit.  It is the little splinter, the little spark of the divine that encourages us to go over and greet our neighbours when they are having a religious festival. It is that which encourages a 47-year-old taxi driver from Eccles to go on a humanitarian mission that he must have known was dangerous, driving aid into a war zone.  It’s there in the thousands of people who are not cruel to animals, who go out of their way to rescue lost pets and either re-unite them with their previous owners, or find them new ones, via re-homing.

Ultimately, it’s the acts of heroism and sacrifice that characterise so many of the lives of the saints. And if that is also part of the plan, whatever the plan is, then it starts to make a tiny bit more sense, but again, do we like the plan? Do we even understand the plan? We’re back once again in territory I’ve often visited, with Raymond Chandler’s paragraph about the poisoned cat dying behind the billboard, and God having off days, and some of God’s days being very long.

I’m sorry, I have no answers, and another week goes by when I have nothing for you. You come for loaves, and I give you stones.  I have no comfort for you today, because, to be honest,  like the night club proprietor in John Betjeman’s poem, I am “old, and ill, and terrified, and tight”.

I think it’s time I made use of what little sunlight there is left today, and went and watered my plants.

God alone knows what next week will send to vex us, if, indeed, he actually does.