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

Not to mention "Left-Wing Pish"

Sunday 30 November 2014

Epiblog for the First Sunday in Advent



It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley.  The weather has been officially described by the local TV weather man as “quiet”, which I take to be another way of saying wet, dull, miserable, and cold, with occasional outbreaks of more persistent rain.  The only decent day this week has been today, which dawned with a brilliant Maxfield-Parrish-blue sky outside my window, and in one corner, the remaining golden leaves on the Cotoneaster next to John’s fence dancing about like flickering autumn flames.

Matilda’s still going outside, though, apart from on days when it’s absolutely persisting it down, when she just stands at the door and meows at me to make it stop. On Wednesday she came in, wet through, and with yet another dead leaf stuck to her tail, and she stood there patiently purring, while I dried her off with kitchen roll, as if this is now some sort of right which she can exercise any time she comes in drenched. Which it probably is, to be honest.

Muttkins is still suffering with the fireworks, and twice last week ran off when she heard some whizz-bangs in the woods, both times, thankfully, making her own way home and suddenly appearing like a pantomime fairy outside the conservatory door. Debbie is more or less resigned to keeping her on the long line until Spring, now, when the selfish idiots with fireworks have got tired of terrorising animals and gone on to some other equally anti-social activity. This week, she ordered a new, even beefier Karabiner, and she is now using actual parachute line instead of Dyneema.  The lengths you have to go to, simply to take your dog for a walk in the period between Hallowe’en and New Year.

Deb’s also, rather belatedly, discovered the delights of online vegan shopping.  Because the local Holland and Barrett didn’t have her pretend cheese slices in stock, she ended up not going into town to buy them, but she had an £8.00 off voucher that had to be used up by today, so she ordered some vitamins off their web site, then discovered another one that sold vegan ice cream and  another one that sold vegan bacon and so on, and so on. At one point she was even on Tesco’s web site:

“Stomach, bowels, and haemorrhoids,” she said.

“Mmm, sounds delicious. Does it come with a red wine jus?”

It turned out, however, to be one of the “dietary and lifestyle filters” you could apply to refine your selections on the site. Even so, this seemed rather bizarre; what foods are particularly bad/good for piles? Actually, if you do know, don’t tell me, I really am not that interested.  The reason I was only listening to her with 48K of my RAM is that I was actually trying to watch Inspector Montalbano on the TV. Eventually I gave up and admitted that I now had no idea what was going on.

“That’s because you can’t speak Swedish.”

It’s not been such a horrendous week on the book front, this week; well, it’s still been busy, but this time with catching up on all the loose ends that I neglected in order to get the four books I was working on all off to press at once.  This has meant that we have been able to indulge in the odd outbreak of what passes for domesticity, such as on Thursday afternoon, when Debbie had stopped teaching for the week, and Granny called by with my little niece Isobel.  Propped up on the sofa, near the stove, she seemed perfectly happy with her toys and her little blanket, and we had a great time, with my imitation of an owl being particularly popular (with Isobel, at least, the others were not so impressed). Eventually, after singing her all three verses of “All The Little Chicken in the Garden” she fell gratefully, deeply asleep on Debbie, so Debbie propped the Nexus Tablet up on her, and continued browsing for Karabiners.

My other attempt at domesticity was the continued importance of baking. I made another tofu, leek and potato pie, but we couldn’t eat it the same day I made it, so I proposed leaving it on top of the cooker to cool overnight, then I would cut it into slices that could be microwaved. Debbie said that she thought I was probably encouraging rodents by leaving stuff out, and I airily overruled her, reminding her that the cat slept on the settee in the kitchen anyway, so the pie was probably safe, unless Matilda decided to cut out the middlemouse and eat it herself.  The next morning I came trundling through to the kitchen just as Deb was going through the door to set off for her voluntary work at Kirklees College, to find, carved by a knife-point in the pie-crust, a paw-print, the word “Rat” and three “XXX” kisses. Ho bloody ho.

I haven’t really been paying much attention to the news of the wider world this week, it’s that time of the year, to be honest, that makes me want to stoke up the fire, pull up the drawbridge and bolt all the doors. The winter evening settles down, with smells of steaks in passageways, as T S Eliot puts it, although in our house the steaks are “pretend” vegan ones from Holland and Barrett.  I did, however, note one very obvious attempt at news management by the Junta in the timing of the results of the enquiry into the death of Lee Rigby, released the day before parliament was due to debate yet another new “security” bill designed to increase still further the powers of the Blight Brigade to snoop into every aspect of our lives, smuggling through yet more anti-libertarian legislation under the pretext of combating a supposed terrorist threat which they themselves have been largely responsible for creating and sustaining,  We now have a situation where the conflict in Syria is becoming the Spanish Civil War of the 21st century, with young, misguided, impressionable people leaving the UK to fight on both sides of the conflict, now there are reports of UK nationals fighting as mercenaries against ISIS in that country.

The premise of the Rigby enquiry was that MI5 (who, if you read between the lines, had quite clearly dropped the ball, losing sight of one of the suspects, and apparently, also, on a separate occasion, attempting unsuccessfully to recruit him) were more or less exonerated, and the blame fell largely on Facebook, for not disclosing the various non-specific ravings in several “chat” sessions between the suspects and their “friends” about killing soldiers.  Bear in mind, dear reader, that one of the proposals in the bill under discussion in parliament the following day was that internet companies should be forced to disclose precisely this sort of detail, and ask yourself are these facts connected?

I’m afraid I just don’t buy it.  Several aspects of MI5’s involvement in the case were not discussed in the enquiry “for security  reasons”, so we will probably never know the true story, or at least not for fifty or a hundred years until the files are released, but, given the previous week’s revelations that Cable and Wireless (back in the days when I used to work with them on implementing government contracts, known as “Cable and Witless”) have been allowing the security services to siphon off traffic from their undersea cables, and given the revelations of Edward Snowden that basically, everybody was snooping on everybody, I can’t believe that the security services didn’t know what these jokers were up to.  They nodded off, with tragic consequences, but it’s much easier and more convenient to blame Facebook, especially with that debate coming up.

I always tend to assume that anything I write, especially online, is read by all sorts of questionable Herberts. In fact, some times, I write stuff just for them. They are like the people in Richard Thompson’s Small Town Romance

They peep through faded curtains,
They read your valentine

Not all political organisations are as adroit at news manipulation. It’s been the usual week of gaffes, blunders and bizarre embarrassments for UKIP, though. The BBC, which for some reason loves UKIP and treats it like a precious orchid, instead of exposing it for the festering mass of vile decaying bug-ridden compost it really is, decided to set up a stunt in the street and film it, under the general heading of “Would Nigel Farage be any good as Prime Minister” or some such malarkey. They got two large David-Blaine-type Perspex boxes with a hole in the top, and invited passers-by to pop a different-coloured plastic ball in the appropriate one, depending if their answer was “Yes”, or “No”.  Despite being given free publicity by a publicly-owned broadcaster, UKIP still complained, saying that the result was bound to be skewed, because the BBC had set up their experiment to be filmed outside a mosque.  The “mosque” in question turned out to be Westminster Cathedral, the Roman Catholic equivalent in this country to Canterbury Cathedral, prompting several wags on Twitter to “tweet” pictures to UKIP of other things that were also obviously not mosques, such as The Albert Hall, Kate Moss, or a moose.

Nigel Farage must have been still smarting from this when one of his party’s donors popped up in my Facebook news feed. On checking, I found that the story related to May 2013, when  one Demetri Marchessini donated £10,000 to UKIP that year, so I am not altogether clear on what he’s recently done that has brought him back out of the slime to the surface of the pond, but he has some entertaining views on women:

“Trousers are made for men's bodies, which are mostly straight up and down. Women's bodies on the other hand consists of curves. Women have big bottoms - they are meant to have big bottoms.  Countless women who would look lovely in dresses or skirts are embarrassingly unattractive in trousers."

His blog contains more colourful views, including: "There is a basic fact of life that women do not grasp — skirts give erections, but trousers do not."  He was, in fact, widely reported at the time as saying that single mothers deserved a slap and that date rape was a fallacy, which occurred when a man made love to a woman and did not satisfy her, and that such women had been encouraged by feminists to shout “rape” in such circumstances.  I am paraphrasing here, but it is all pretty much standard UKIP stuff, for a party that, whatever its public pronouncements, seems to prefer it when women put on a French maid outfit and bend over to clean behind the fridge.

Mr Marchessini also thinks that women who wear trousers are “hostile” in some way, and I suppose if this is true we must accept the corresponding position that men in skirts are placid and submissive, which will come as a great shock to the Scottish nation in general, and the Black Watch in particular.

I checked up on Mr Marchessini’s more recent writings, to see if he is still with us, and indeed he is, commenting on the Junta’s proposals on the issue of domestic violence:

It is reported in the press that the Home Secretary will be announcing powers to allow the police to prosecute men who are guilty of “psychological and emotional abuse”.  I must say that I do not think that this has been carefully thought out.  Under the terms of the bill, a man could face up to fourteen years in prison.  It is important to remember that all the women have chosen their husbands or lovers.  If they find they do not like them, they can divorce the husband or leave the lover.  But to send them to jail is monstrous.  For those who are married, the wife made marriage vows to look after her husband for the rest of her life.  If she sends him to jail, those vows become lies.

So, there you are, girls. Get your skirt on, and remember your marriage vows. And if your husband clouts you, you can always be the one who has to flee the marital home with whatever you manage to stuff in a carrier bag before he hits you again. Now get in the kitchen and make my tea, you chattel.

You look at this stuff, and you think “who the hell votes for this set of clowns anyway?” but people do, in their droves, and without necessarily knowing what the party they are voting in stands for, anyway.  Part of it is down to political ignorance, part apathy, and these days, the overwhelming reason is intolerance, xenophobia, and racism.  For which, as well as UKIP, David Cameron and Ed Miliband are to blame.  Cameron because of his ill-judged decision to spend four years pumping out bile about how immigrants are the cause of all our woes, failing to realise that in a race to seem tough on immigration, tough on the causes of immigration, UKIP could out-Kipper him at every end and turn, and Miliband because he a) accepted the Cameron agenda without question and b) abandoned vast swathes of his traditional, typical white working-class support and failed to engage on the issue, having first failed to challenge the premise.

Cameron’s empty and vacuous pronouncements on immigration were dealt a further blow this week when ONS figures showed that net immigration had increased over the same period last year.  The headline figure, of course, as usual, masked a slightly different story if you drilled down into the figures, because a significant proportion of this is EU immigration, which we can do absolutely nothing about. Even Cameron’s proposals to limit access to UK benefits for EU migrant workers are only as workable as the EU will let them be, which hasn’t stopped Miliband from joining in a chorus of “me too”, in the Dutch auction that will eventually lead to the 2015 election being won by the party that promises to string up asylum seekers from the nearest lamp-post.

Unless something is done to challenge the basic premise of what passes for the current “debate” on immigration, we are heading for a country where all of the reforms and advances in society that have taken place since the 1960s  will eventually be reversed under a tsunami of bigotry engendered by politicians willing to sacrifice principle for power at any costs, and we will start seeing signs in our streets saying “No Blacks, No Irish, No Muslims, No immigrants, No Gays, No disabled people, No benefits claimants”.

A brief preview of what such a society based purely on selfishness and greed might look like was available this week in the form of “Black Friday”, an orgy of consumerism that saw people fighting each other in the aisles of the nation’s supermarkets for a cut-price TV.  Black Friday is another unwelcome import from the USA (see also under prom nights and trick or treating) and was originally a phrase used in the retail trade to denote the day, somewhere around the Thanksgiving holiday, which traditionally marked the start of the Christmas trading season, where a store’s finances, after languishing in the red for much of the trading year, would finally tip into the black as consumerism kicked in and people realised there were only three or four weeks to Christmas. Once this trend had been noticed, the larger retailers in the US, who are not stupid, although they are totally amoral and venal to a man, began to encourage this trend by scheduling specific sales to coincide with this period, and feed the greed.  Now, of course, it’s become an annual media event as well, and the one feeds off the other, with the media almost cheering on the participants in specific retail scrums.  All it needs is a voice over on an endless tape loop of Thatcher intoning over and over again, like a demented Dalek,  “there is no such thing as society”, and you have a much truer, and much more chilling, vision of the future than Orwell’s one of a jackboot stamping on a face.

So we have arrived at Sunday, the first Sunday in Advent. It’s also St Andrew’s day, of course, and I did toy briefly with the idea of once more going North of the Border for this blog, but I have spent a lot of time there, metaphorically, since September, and I don’t really have anything to add to what I wrote on St Margaret’s day, recently, that I hope that the SNP annihilate the Westminster parties in Scotland in May 2015, the Junta because I hate them, pure and simple, and Labour because they need to be taught a lesson.  This doesn’t mean I am wavering from, or rowing back from, my belief that the SNP’s version of “independence” as offered in September’s referendum was an uncosted, unsubstantiated fairy-cake of disaster, but it’s possible that the SNP might actually create more mayhem for the Blight Brigade at Westminster post 2015 than a renewed Labour “opposition”, especially as there is no obvious successor to Ed Miliband.

I did note one item of Scottish interest though, in passing, which is that a Chinese student has started a research project on the Isle of Arran to measure the intelligence of the island’s native red squirrels. This was front page news on the local rag, The Arran Banner, which did give her full name, Ka Yee Chow, and noted that she was more often known by her friends and colleagues as “Pizza”. Considering that The Arran Banner managed to spell it “Piza” in once place on their Facebook page and “Pizza” on their web site, we have to conclude that the red squirrels are probably slightly more intelligent than a sub-editor on the Oban Times group.

I am finding it difficult to come to terms with how quickly this year has gone. It only seems like a few days ago since we ourselves were on Arran, and now it’s the season of Advent.  The bells of waiting advent ring, the tortoise stove is lit again, as Sir John Betjeman wrote in his Advent poem. For a long while I thought that the “tortoise” in “tortoise stove” referred to the colour of the glass in the door of the pot stove, which, after it’s been exposed to smoke for a while, does go sort of tortoisy brown and crazed like a tortoise shell. I was quite disappointed to find out it was a brand name, and I still sort of prefer my explanation, even though it is complete garbage.

Anyway, today I have found myself looking for the various readings and Collects for this first Sunday in Advent, in an attempt to convince myself that there’s more to life than getting 25% off a television in the Black Friday sale, especially as the said life in question seems to be slipping through my grasp faster and faster. I am saying this not to try and convince anyone else, I am not into religious proselytising; I’d really like, above all, to be able to convince myself!

It’s at times like this, when I watch the Black Friday mayhem on the news, that I do find a certain resonance in the reading from  Isaiah 64:1-9, for instance.

Oh that thou wouldest rend the heavens,
that thou wouldest come down,
that the mountains might flow down at thy presence,
as when the melting fire burneth,
the fire causeth the waters to boil,
to make thy name known to thine adversaries,
that the nations may tremble at thy presence!

That should get Tescos’ attention. Not to mention all these dreary politicians who think that the only measure of a person’s worth is their economic imprint.  Or, failing that, I suppose I could fall back on the reading for today from  Mark 13:

But of that day and that hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels which are in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father. Take ye heed, watch and pray: for ye know not when the time is. For the Son of man is as a man taking a far journey, who left his house, and gave authority to his servants, and to every man his work, and commanded the porter to watch. Watch ye therefore: for ye know not when the master of the house cometh, at even, or at midnight, or at the cockcrowing, or in the morning: lest coming suddenly he find you sleeping. And what I say unto you I say unto all, Watch.

You never know the minute or the hour. That much at least is true. I seem to be saying it every week now, but life is an unpredictable business. Cherish what you have while you have it, and always eat dessert first.  And if there’s someone in your life you love,  go and find them, and tell them that you love them, right now. However many legs they have. I’ll wait. Twenty-two years ago today, to the day, in that dreadful year of 1992, our tail-less, but nevertheless characterful and extremely entertaining cat Sylvester went out, just after The Archers, and was killed, not ten yards from our back door.  Poor old Silvo. He was a great cat, he had a heart the size of a bucket, he was a real character, the second cat we lost in the same month of November that year, the other being little Halibut who went out one night and just never came back. Silvo’s going left a huge hole in our lives, and changed lots of things forever.

This probably has little to do with Advent, but I have always remembered Halibut and Silvo, the same way I remember every anniversary of every one of our pets.  Advent is supposed to be about looking forward, though, looking forward to a better world, where the metaphorical child can poke its hand in the metaphorical hole of the metaphorical asp, and the lion lies down with the lamb.  And we’re being enjoined to watch and wait and be alert for that time coming.  I don’t, in all honesty, see any signs of it coming soon, but maybe that’s just me.  We may not all believe (and I am not sure I do, to be honest) as Sir John Betjeman puts it, “that God was man in Palestine, and lives today in blood and wine”, but surely we can at least all get behind the idea of a better world tomorrow?

Ah, but, you’ll be saying, what do you mean by “better”? to which I can only quote, as I have done every time I’ve come to this juncture Antoine de Saint-ExupĂ©ry’s little prince.

“And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”

Feed the hungry, heal the sick, teach the children, house the homeless, respect the animals. That would be a start.

So, later on tonight, when I’m too tired and achy to sleep, I am going to practice waking and watching. I’ll be Big G’s sentry. I’ll take first watch. I was planning to be awake anyway. But as for me, right now, I have pies to make, and dishes to wash, and dogs and a cat to feed, and coal to fetch. Better look busy, Jesus is coming (allegedly)!

Sunday 23 November 2014

Epiblog for Stir-Up Sunday



It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley.  The weather though, has got into my bones, and the cold and damp has been making me ache this week.  We’re definitely on the road to Christmas now, plodding down that long dark tunnel that began when the clocks went back and will only end with the winter Solstice and the turn of the year. Hilare Belloc once wrote somewhere to the effect that setting off on a long journey, the first step is easy, it’s when you get to four or five hundred that it begins to hit you what you’ve taken on, and that’s how it feels right now. Like a marathon runner hitting “the wall”.

There have been some flashes of brilliant gold sunshine in all the grim greyness, few and far between. Some days have started grey and rainy then faired up a bit, some have gone in precisely the opposite direction.  Matilda has been taking advantage of it when she can, although most of the time all she actually does when she goes out these days is patrol to the end of the decking and then sit there, scanning the garden for marauding neighbourhood moggies, or small rodents rustling in the grass.  She’s learnt the hard way not to stray too far into the wilderness, in case it suddenly starts banging down with cold, hard rain, so she keeps within scuttling distance of the door. The seamless transition between being the fearless guardian of all she surveys and being curled up on her jiffy bag on the settee, steaming gently in the heat of the stove, has been narrowed down to just a few seconds, and, as the weather worsens, no doubt she’ll even shave a bit off that. One advantage of Matilda sleeping on her jiffy bag is that if Debbie comes in and wants to get next to the fire, she just slides Matilda along the settee to make room at the corner!

Weather is not something that figures on Misty’s radar much, however. She’s more than happy to go out, up into the hills, whatever the rain-gods are chucking at us, and she seems to like nothing more than to come back splattered with mud, after having rolled in something disgusting en route.  Part of it is the collie dog breeding, of course: she’s genetically hard-wired, programmed to be out on the fells all day, working with sheep and covering mile after mile of rough terrain.  The remainder of it is, however, pure stupidity and daft-dogness.  Still, at least the fireworks have abated slightly, though she’s still having to spend most of her walks either on the lead or on a length of Dyneema hitched to a karabiner which is then clipped through the loop of her harness (the other end being a karabiner clipped to Debbie’s belt) The latter arrangement does at least allow her a bit more freedom to snuffle on a longer line (the dog, that is, not Debbie) though the downside is that if some inconsiderate idiot does let off a firework and she hears it and takes off, unless Debbie grabs the slack in the line quickly, she’s likely to be yanked off her feet.  Not one to be employed on clifftop paths.

Anyway, until the police start properly enforcing the law on fireworks and/or their sale and use is prohibited apart from in organised displays, we’re stuck with it, and have to do the best we can.  I was going to go on and say that the chances of that happening are about as high as those of Kirklees College paying Debbie for the work she has done between September and now, but finally this week, that does, in fact, actually seem to have happened. There is corn in Egypt yet. So I may have to choose my comparisons more wisely in future, if I want to use an analogy for something which is as likely/unlikely to take place as the Devil going past the window on a skateboard.  

As for me, I’ve been plodding along, metaphorically putting one foot in front of the other, while feeling tired, cold, ill and depressed. For light relief, I have begun following Masterchef on the BBC. I say “following”, but in truth it’s more often a case of having it wittering on in the background while I am working.  That’s probably a safe dosage, you wouldn’t want to get any more deeply involved, because the BBC broadcasts it continuously on a loop, and eventually I would start having disturbing dreams where Greg Wallace is licking my head and saying “laaarvley!” over and over again.

Still, even so, under their influence, so far this week, I have produced a leek and potato pie, four Mediterranean vegetable parcels in puff pastry, and an apple tart that ended up probably slightly more dense than your average Black Hole. Oh, and a strange, mis-shapen sausage roll thing, the runt of the litter, concocted from all of the left over scraps of the puff pastry sheet. See what I mean about it being addictive?

When the BBC isn’t broadcasting Masterchef these days, its output is almost entirely given over to unquestioning and adulatory reporting of UKIP, who scored another victory for racism, bigotry and xenophobia this week, in electing the latest Tory defector, Mark Reckless, in the Rochester and Strood by-election. I struggled with an analogy for what Mr Reckless (crazy name, crazy guy) has done, something along the lines of rats leaving sinking ships, but given the destination of these Tory defectors, that analogy only works if the rats in the analogy then swim to an even more rat-infested hulk, and swarm gleefully aboard. I am not doing very well with my analogies.

Thousands of words have already been expended on why UKIP, a party with no discernible policies, other than send the immigrants home, withdraw from the EU, and possibly privatise the NHS,  is so successful, even though it can’t actually deliver on even those limited policies unless it at least holds the balance of power after the next election. Policies don’t seem to be the issue, though.  As demonstrated by that painful phone-in after the Clacton UKIP victory, people vote UKIP who have no idea what their actual policies are.

So why do people vote for them, then?  Well, since 2010, the ruling Junta, the Blight Brigade, has made sure to keep immigration high on the political agenda, with a combination of talking tough, and scapegoating immigrants (amongst others) for the chaos which their misguided “austerity” was causing in the economy. No money? That’s because Labour gave it all to immigrants as benefits. Local hospital overcrowded/underfunded? – again, all those pesky immigrants. No council housing available? - Yep, the immigrants have got them all. Schools full to bursting, can’t get your child the place you want at the school you want? – It’s those pesky kids of those pesky immigrants. And so on, and so on.

None of this is true, of course, not in any meaningful sense as you or I would understand the term. Each of these statements can, in fact, be carefully picked apart and rebutted. But a careful, measured rebuttal that explains that immigrants are more likely to enter the private rented sector than council housing, and the reason that there is pressure on resources is as much due to under-supply of council houses, schools and hospitals (many of which rely on immigrants for their staff) as to over-demand, falls on deaf ears.

The government has created this genie, hoping it would serve them well in the next election. In fact, it has gone further: it’s deliberately encouraged, in the minds of the public, the erroneous conflation of economic migrants, illegal immigrants, asylum seekers, and Muslims, into one homogenous mass, of which there are “too many of them over here”.  There are always useful idiots in the media who can be relied upon to regurgitate this stuff at every opportunity, leavened with the occasional anti EU piece about straight bananas.

The genie worked well for The Blight Brigade while it seemed that they were the only potential master of it. Then along came UKIP, promising to out-Kipper the other parties on all these issues surrounding immigration, and because they are given totally uncritical media coverage, and because their leader (despite being a millionaire former stockbroker) appears to come across as a man of the people, with a fag and a pint of beer in his hand, who never answers any question put to him, the genie is out of the bottle, and will never be put back. The sad fact is that, apparently, there are 16,867 people (42.10% of the electorate) in Rochester and Strood who are bigoted and stupid enough to vote for a party with virtually no policies,  because they have swallowed lies pumped out by the party in alleged government, about immigrants.

So, what are the mainstream parties doing about this drift to the fascist right? Well, discounting the Liberal Democrats (as ever) who polled a massive 349 votes, almost twice as many as the Official Monster Raving Loony Party, the main reaction of the Tories and the Labour Party seems to be to er, join the drift, and try and out-Kipper the Kippers. In Cameron’s case, this consists of banging on about his in/out referendum while Theresa May gets busy deporting key NHS workers, people on stretchers, and family breadwinners, leavened with a sprinkling of people suffering from learning difficulties and/or terminal diseases. 

Labour’s reaction has been to “toughen up” its own stance on immigration, after having previously apologised for immigration failures that weren’t actually its fault, and sack an MP who “tweeted” a picture of a house in Rochester with a white van parked outside and the windows festooned with the flag of St George, for reasons that still aren’t exactly clear to me. Personally, I have no problem with saying that UKIP are a strange collection of borderline fascist closet racist xenophobic fruitcakes who think being gay causes localised flooding, disabled children should be killed at birth, and women who don’t clean behind the fridge are sluts. I don’t know why everyone seems to have a problem saying it, and keeps pussyfooting around this, especially not Labour, who should be taking the fight to UKIP, not kow-towing to their misguided premises.

It’s not been a good week for Ed Miliband, but when is it ever? The Labour “leader” was also taken to task by Myleene Klass, no less, on some mid-morning TV programme somewhere or other, over his proposed implementation of the Mansion Tax.  Instead of telling her that one of the key principles of taxation in a democracy is that fairness demands that those who can bear more of the burden, do so, and drawing the analogy with the Bedroom Tax, which has done much more damage, and to much poorer people, than Myleene bloody Klass, he hemmed, and havered, and possibly quavered.  I would love to see Myleene Klass try the same shit on Denis Skinner.

I must admit, I had to Google Myleene Klass, to remind myself that she is famous for once being in a girl band, for having a shower while wearing a white bikini in I’m A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here, and for advertising Littlewoods. As a struggling single mum with a fortune of £11,000,000, clearly she is a most deserving case, and I wonder what will happen to the country in the unlikely event of Miliband ever being able to put his tax into operation.  On that day, we will lose (by emigration) Myleene Klass, Sol Campbell, and Griff Rhys-Jones, and I have to say that will be a triple whammy so grievous I find myself pondering if the UK will be able to survive at all without these prodigiously talented and useful members of society.

The rest of the news was equally depressing/bizarre.  The Royal Mail is considering having to ditch the universal delivery obligation, whereby they have to deliver to every house in the UK every day, all for one single price. This is the inevitable consequence of Royal Mail privatisation, and I pointed out at the time that this would happen. It’s the fault of various people, including Menzies Campbell,  Vince Cable, and George Osborne, so when it costs you £4.95 to send a birthday card by DHL to your auntie in Aberdeen, as opposed to 62p for a first class stamp, please do remember who it is you should be giving a kicking at the next election.

That was the depressing. The bizarre was that apparently the Royal Bank of Scotland (which is 80% owned by us and has done very little to pay anything back) is going to be fined a massive amount – the figure escapes me, but its several millions of pounds – by us, for a series of computer problems that prevented us accessing our money. I’m still boggling at this. Every so often, I think I’ve got it, then, ooops, it’s gone again.  They owe us 80% of the value of the bank, which they can’t pay back. So we charge them more money for preventing us getting at our money, which will delay them paying back our money even longer. Or something. I don’t know.  It’s like repossessing the rags of a beggar. It’s like having an argument with your own leg. Well, I suppose the Bible does say “if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out”, but I don’t see how that will help them see their way to keeping up the repayments.

And there appears to have been a conference held somewhere or other in the UK this week to answer the crucial question of “How do Muslims get radicalised”.  I gather next week’s conference is on ursine defecatory habits in mixed woodland environments, or possibly the likelihood of smelling incense in the Vatican.  Just in case anyone wonders, this is how it happens.  If anyone wants to invite me to the next conference, feel free, as long as it’s got disabled access.

There are some people who, though nominally Muslim, have, in fact, a rather extreme view of what their religion demands of them.  They are to Islam what the Westboro Baptist Church is to Christianity. Before 2001, there were about twelve of these people, scratching their backsides in a cave in Tora Bora and concentrating on growing a beard like ZZ Top. All that changed after 9/11. The west’s response in Afghanistan could, I suppose, at a pinch, be sort of justified by the need to capture Osama Bin Laden, assuming he was actually guilty, and even though there was no intention of ever putting him on trial.

But the misguided invasion of Iraq, which as I said at the time was the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time, has been followed by a string of equally ill-starred interventions, Libya, Egypt, Syria, which have had the effect of recruiting hundreds of thousands of would-be Jihadis, all of whom believe in some sort of Universal Caliphate under Sharia Law and all of whom believe that an attack on one Muslim is an attack on all Muslims, and they have a duty to fight back.  In this country, the media has given these people (or rather, the Imams and other would-be commentators behind them, who wind them up and send them out to kill) a disproportionate voice.  Thus, someone like Anjem Choudary is always popping up commentating on terrorism and similar matters, as though he actually had some mandate to speak for all Muslims.  The voices of moderate Muslims get stifled in the crush.  The government is busily scapegoating Muslims and keeping the “terror alert” level high, and the thing just feeds on itself.  The fact that the Jihadis believe this warped version of things is what matters. You can argue ad nauseam that it’s completely barmy, bonkers and well off the bus route, and it is. Sadly, however, that is what they believe, and that is what needs countering, dispelling, taking apart, brick by painful brick, retracing our steps, rather than blundering on further into the Valley of Death.

Depressed by the stupidity of the news, I have been taking consolation in small things today. At long last, I trimmed my beard, and not before time. It had grown to the extent that I could actually see it out of the corner of my eye.  I thought briefly about cultivating it to the exact width of my body, so I could use it to judge whether or not I would be able to get through doors, like cats do with their whiskers, but, at the end of the day, I have a wheelchair for that, so the beard had to go. It was either that, or become a minor Old Testament prophet. For the technically-minded amongst you, it took an electric trimmer, two disposable plastic razors, a generous amount of shaving foam/mousse, and a small pair of nail scissors, but it was worth the effort, as I now look, ooh, all of eighteen months younger.

This Sunday is the Feast of Christ the King, the last Sunday before Advent, but it is known more colloquially, especially to fans of The Archers, as “Stir-Up Sunday”. Yes, folks, depressing as it may seem, traditionally, today is the day when you prepare and stir your Christmas pudding.  The tradition of the whole family gathering together to prepare the festive duff, with each one taking a turn and making a wish as they stir, is said, like many of our best-known Christmas traditions, to have been introduced by the Victorians, specifically Prince Albert. If this is true, at least this is one of Price Albert’s inventions that we can talk about in mixed company, unlike some of the others.

The link with the church arises because the Collect for today in the Book of Common Prayer begins:

Stir up, we beseech thee, O Lord, the wills of thy faithful people; that they, plenteously bringing forth the fruit of good works, may of thee be plenteously rewarded; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The idea being, apparently, that because, by dint of rubric, this collect is always used on the last Sunday before Advent, your servants, cooks and domestics would all be in church that morning, hear the opening lines of the Collect, and then think…Oooh, yes! Time to stir the Christmas pudding. All very Downtown Abbey. Those of us who don’t have domestic help, have to do it for ourselves, of course.  If you are interested in preparing a Christmas pudding from scratch, you will need:

8 oz. raisins
8 oz. sultanas
8 oz. currants
2 to 3 oz. mixed candied peel
2 to 3 oz. of chopped glace cherries
8 oz. plain flour
4. oz. breadcrumbs
4 to 5 oz. brown sugar
6 to 8 oz. suet (vegetable suet will do just as well)
A glass of brandy (for the pudding mix. You may wish to add other, further glasses for your own consumption while making the pudding)
Nutmeg, Cinnamon, Allspice, Salt (to taste)
The rind (grated) and the juice (juiced) of an orange and a lemon.

You can mix with milk, soya milk, or water.  You also need three eggs, or for the vegan version you will have to make up and mix in an equivalent quantity of egg replacer. You can also adjust the proportions of the fruits to each other according to your personal taste.

Mix all the dry stuff in a huge bowl, add the eggs or egg replacer, folding and beating it in to the mixture, then the orange juice, lemon juice and brandy, then mix and stir in the milk/whatever until it’s all thick and aertex-y. 

Spoon the mixture into a large pudding basin (metal) which you have previously greased with butter or marge. Cover the top with a layer of greaseproof paper, which you have also greased on the underneath, then wrap the whole thing in cooking foil and steam it in a huge pan like a bain-marie for six or seven hours. You have to do this on a day when you are going to be able to watch over it, because you need to keep topping it up or it will boil dry.  Then let it cool when it’s cooked and put it away somewhere cool and dry until Christmas dinner, when you’ll have to re-steam it using the same rigmarole for another hour or two to heat it through, before serving up! Laaarvely!

Or you could just buy one from Sainsbury’s* (*other supermarkets are available, your soufflĂ©s can go down as well as up) as apparently over two-thirds of people recently surveyed said they did. I must admit, when I read that statistic, what really surprised me was that the proportion of people still cooking their own Christmas pud from scratch was still as high as a third.

There is something strangely satisfying about making your own food, though. I thought that the other night, when we were all sitting here in the kitchen, Deb by the stove, Misty in the armchair, and Matilda on her jiffy bag, and I had just taken the pies out of the oven and they were on top of the stove cooling. I found myself giving thanks to Big G, though I doubt he was listening. I think he’s tuning me out, these days.  Basically, despite everything, how lucky we are to have food and warmth and a roof over our heads. If I’m really cold, I can fill a hot water bottle. Our animals are warm and well, and not cast out of doors or in the shelters. True, any or all of these could be snatched away from us suddenly, by unforeseen events – life is a dangerous business, eat the apple pie first. God willing, though, we’ll have our usual quiet, unobtrusive, low-key Christmas, if we’re all spared, and we’re a lot better off,  several nautical miles better off than many, who are out there in the cold tonight, trying to survive, while I sit here in the warm typing this. There but for fortune, go you and I.

There needs to be something done about it. I do not know how, or when, but I do know why, as indeed anyone does who thinks about it.  If we’re going to do any stirring, as well as our Christmas puddings, we maybe need to be stirring up the feeble and apathetic excuses for politicians, in government and in opposition, to do something to reverse the growing numbers of homeless, and provide more social housing. Obviously that’s not going to happen by Christmas, but the fact that it’s going to take a long while to accomplish shouldn’t deter us. In fact, it means we haven’t got a moment to lose.  The journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step.

Whether or not you observe Christmas, or indeed Christ (which can often be two different things, these days!) the basic needs of food, warmth and shelter are common to all humanity. Is it too much to ask of our politicians that by, say, next Christmas, someone, somewhere, should have a serious attempt at sorting the problem out? 

In the meantime, I am going to start work on a Christmas pudding of my own.  While I can, I still want to be able to cook, and feed my family, though the animals won’t be allowed any, as sultanas and similar are bad for both dogs and cats. I might have a go at making them something different though, something extra, a bit nearer the day.

Next week is looking pretty similar to last week, but then that, too, is pretty much par for the course, these days.  At some point, soon, I need to have a discussion with Deb and take a decision one way or another whether to stand as an independent for the constituency of Colne Valley at the next election.  Apart from anything else, it would probably add yet more strain to our lives, financial and otherwise, and of course I would have to find twelve electors to nominate me in the first place.  But that’s next week’s problem, because right now, I am off to look for the lucky sixpence, to put in the pudding mix.  Failing that, I think I still have a three penny bit somewhere.  Laaarvely.







Sunday 16 November 2014

Epiblog for the Feast of St Margaret of Scotland



It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley.  November has finally realised what it is that it’s supposed to be doing, and is now doing it.  Cold, damp days, with a definite edge to them, and cold nights as well, despite the fact that the local TV forecast described it as “mild”.  Oh, and it’s rained this week. Quite a lot, actually, so Debbie has been coming back with the dog or dogs, depending on what day it was, splattered and plastered up with mud, often to the top of their legs. In fact, one memorable day when she put her foot on what she thought was a tussock, up on the moors, and it turned out to be the crust of a bog, she also came back plastered with mud, up to the top of her legs.

Matilda’s speciality is leaves, rather than mud.  She seems to have developed a unique facility to be a leaf magnet. It started when she came in twice in a row with wet, dead leaves stuck to her hind legs. I removed them patiently (the leaves, not the legs) and dried her with kitchen roll. The next significant development was when she had one on her back, and was wandering round with it stuck in place for ages, because I couldn’t catch her in order to remove it. Eventually, she must have caught sight of it out of the corner of her eye, and it spooked her, because she did that thing that cats do where they jump upwards and sideways all at once, with all four legs off the ground, like a Jump Jet taking off. It did at least dislodge the leaf.

This morning’s piece de resistance, however, was the dead leaf stuck to her bum, underneath her tail. Neither of us was particularly anxious to investigate it further, in case the adhesive holding it in place turned out to be something other than rain and mud.  I thought it best to let nature take its course, as she was bound to want to go out again at some point, and it might just drop off outside. By the time she went back to the door, however, it had gone, so somewhere in the house she has left a wet, muddy, dead leaf, smeared with questionable substances, no doubt. It’s probably on my pillow.Cats are such charming creatures.

So, all in all, it’s “that time of year, thou  may’st in me behold, when yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang,” as old Shakespoke would doubtless have said, if he were in the garden. Probably adding:

When blood is nipp’t, and ways be foul
Then nightly sings the staring owl
To whit, To woo, a merry note!
While Greasy Joan doth keel the pot.

Winter, in other words. Nothing more to be said, really. Just keep on going as best we can and clog on, to get through it.

As far as I’m concerned, it’s been another solid week of work, punctuated by falling asleep over the keyboard, and bracketed in the real world by Remembrance Day on Tuesday and Children in Need on Friday.  I said pretty much all I had to say about Remembrance Day last week, except that it seems that my suggestion of auctioning off the ceramic poppies at the Tower of London in aid of the Royal British Legion has already been pre-empted – I didn’t realise it at the time, but obviously it was far too good an idea to have occurred only to me, and the Tower of London have already sold them all, at £25 a pop, and the revenue will be divided between six service charities.  I don’t want to get into the game of whether any one charity is “better” than another, or more useful, or more valid in absolute terms, but I was disappointed not to see BLESMA in the list, and I was disappointed to note that the British Legion will only get one-sixth of 888,246 x £25.00 less administrative and distribution expenses. (Anyone got a calculator?)

Children in Need also produced the usual astronomical sums, quite an achievement in these stringent times of “austerity”. There are those who denounce it as a self-serving publicity exercise, and of course, ultimately, we elect governments to take care of children in need. We shouldn’t really have to be baking cakes and knitting gonks and sitting naked in a bath of baked beans to ensure that children are safe from want, poverty and abuse.  Pretty much in the same way as we shouldn’t be holding jumble sales to make sure there’s enough money for the lifeboats. But then that’s what governments do.

They rely on the great British public to take up the slack and dig into their own pockets, on the premise that they, themselves, aren’t going to do anything extra or significant about reducing child poverty, economic disadvantage, or abuse, any time soon. They have to pay for all those expensive missiles somehow. And of course, if we did suddenly say no, and faced the buggers down, and made them put in place suitable provision for the weakest and neediest in society, there’d inevitably be a lot of people suffering during the long gap between the donations stopping and the government deciding to do something about it.  As I write this, the total donations from last Friday’s Children in Need stand at £32.6million.  The amount of tax lost through non-payment and avoidance increased in fiscal year 2012-2013 to £35billon, according to official figures released in October 2013 by HMRCE.  Perhaps the collecting tins need rattling under some different noses next year. Top Shop, Vodafone, Amazon, Starbucks, Google, are you listening?

Like November, Ed Miliband has finally realised what it is that it’s supposed to be doing, and is now doing it.  Too little, too late, though. While it is heartening to hear him attacking the Junta at long last, what he is saying now is what he should have been saying in 2010, and ever since.  So yes, zero hours contracts are a bad thing, we all knew that, but what’s he going to do about the benefits cap which Labour voted for, and what about Rachel Reeves, who is now using PriceWaterhouseCoopers, the very same consultants who also advise the Blight Brigade. Is there any wonder, when people like Rachel Reeves run with the hare and hunt with the hounds, that people say they can’t see any difference, these days?

It remains to be seen, however, whether a Labour government would be quite as evil and ruthless as the Junta at killing off people who are on benefits. The DWP was forced to admit this week, after several Freedom of Information Act requests, that they had carried out investigations of 60 cases where deaths of benefit claimants had been linked to their actions. It refused to reveal, in answer to another, separate, request, how many letters the Department had received from coroners expressing concern over the circumstances of benefits-related deaths, on the grounds that providing the figure would be “too expensive”. Compared to the cost of a missile, presumably.

If we didn’t have the DWP to remind us what a heartless, compassionless excuse for a society we are degenerating into, then we could still rely on the latest craze amongst the rich, privileged, and – quite frankly – stupid, high school kids in America where the thing now is to take a “selfie” including you and a homeless person, and post them online with suitably mocking captions.  As the Addicting Info web site puts it, it involves:

“finding a homeless person and snapping an oh so outrageous selfie to post on Tumblr or Instagram. Then other youngsters come along to laugh and heap scorn on the mostly sleeping, ragged, destitute stranger”. Oh how clever. How witty. How socially conscious…t he kids are reflecting the value our society places on homeless people. All it takes is a person to become dirty, smelly, and unkempt – and they become detritus, vermin – of no more note or merit than a rat or a pigeon”.

While not necessarily wishing ill on anyone, it behoves these jackasses to remember that we’re all just three or four bad decisions away from being on the street, and with the current set of clowns in charge on both sides of the Atlantic, they don’t even have to be your bad decisions.

If you doubted, by the way, my description of the Junta as “clowns”, then may I direct you to the story this week of Miss Annabel Honeybun, the splendidly-named gardener employed by the palace of Westminster to remove the leaves individually from the trees in New Palace Yard as this was (in some warped view of economics known only unto those who compile and regulate expenses claims) more “cost-effective” than sweeping them up afterwards – “austerity” cuts every bit as philosophically unsound as their macro-economic equivalent. Miss Honeybun, whose name initially led me to conclude that the story was indeed a spoof, until I found to my utter amazement it wasn’t, apparently defended the action by saying:

“I am not picking leaves off the trees, I am cutting them individually down to the second bud so they keep their shape. I am doing some mini-pollarding but they do look nice after they have done.”

You can almost hear the Junta saying “We are not cutting welfare, we are just individually chopping people out of the system, but they do look nice at their funerals.” The problem we have, dear reader, is that in 2015, any Labour “government” including Rachel Reeves would apparently be just as keen on “pollarding” DWP claimants as Iain Duncan-Smith has been.  It is not possible, apparently, to separate out the cost of picking the leaves off the trees in New Palace Yard from the gross cost of the entire gardening contract for the parliamentary estates, apparently. Despite the fact that presumably someone must know a) Miss Honeybun’s hourly rate, b) how many trees there are and c) how long it takes her to do one tree. (Anyone got another calculator?) I can’t find the rate for gardeners, but the staff at the Palace of Westminster who man the doors and check the bags are paid £9.00 per hour, according to a job advert currently online. There are 52 trees in the picture, posted on the internet, of Miss Honeybun wielding her secateurs (there may be others, of course) and say it takes her a couple of hours to do each one, factoring in time for bagging up the leaves and moving the ladder, that would make the calculation something like 52 x 18 = £936.00, paid for by thee and me. I wonder if she also does moat cleaning?

Personally, I found it quite easy to resist the temptation to go and prune the yellow leaves or few that hang, and instead allow them to descend naturally and stick to the cat.  This morning, however, she voiced her disapproval of the weather in general by mewing at me and standing just inside the door, as if to say “Come on, what are you waiting for, make it warmer, so I can go outside!” I have told her, as I told every cat we have ever had, that if it was but up to me, the weather would be a) warm and b) sunny, all year round. But it isn’t up to me. This is England, on a rainy afternoon, there is no sun, there’s just a pale and tired moon, as Alan Price sang.

A rainy November afternoon. November 16th, and the feast of St Margaret of Scotland (1045AD to 16th November 1093) sometimes known as “The Pearl of Scotland”. She was actually born Margaret of Wessex, of the Royal house of Saxon kings that was ended by the Norman Conquest. She was actually the sister of Edgar Atheling, the short-ruling, uncrowned king of England, and was born in Hungary, where her father, Edward the Exile, had been exiled (the clue is in the title) by Canute, following his conquest of England in 1016.  She was brought up at the Hungarian court of Andrew I of Hungary, who was also known as “Andrew the Catholic”. At a time when everybody was Catholic by default, and you were likely to have your head snicked off for backsliding, Andrew must have been spectacularly pious to earn such a “monicker”.

Margaret returned to England following the recall of her father when Edward the Confessor died childless in 1057AD.  Unfortunately, the Normans had other ideas and eventually the dispute over the English throne culminated in William the Conqueror invading in 1066 and killing Harold Godwinson at Hastings. Margaret’s brother, Edgar Atheling, then briefly became king, for about three hours. The Witangemot presented him as King to the Normans, who presumably said the Norman French equivalent of “Ha Ha, that’s a good one!” before William had him packed off to France.  Margaret, meanwhile, fled to Scotland, or according to some accounts, was attempting to flee elsewhere when her ship was driven off course by a storm. Various authorities say that the chronology is a bit muddled, and that she may have got to Scotland as late as 1068AD, or even after the rising of the Northumbrian Earls and the Conqueror’s infamous “harrowing of the North” in 1070, an episode of genocide so effective that sixteen years later, many Yorkshire villages were described in Domesday Book as vasta (i.e. “waste).

The spot where they are supposed to have landed, near North Queensferry, is known as “St Margaret’s Hope”.  The Scottish king at the time, Malcolm III, was a widower, and must have felt attracted to Margaret, who would have been about 25 years old, for political as well as personal reasons, and they were married some time before the end of 1070. This also led Malcolm to invade Northumberland several times, in support of the claim to the English throne of Edgar Atheling, but sadly, all these incursions seem to have achieved is more bloodshed and misery for the locals.

Margaret’s religious influence on Malcolm, and through him, on the rest of Scotland, appears to have been considerable. She began reforming the customs of the local church, altering the Sabbath from Saturday to Sunday, and reforming the festivals to accord with the Roman rite, standardising, for instance, the observance of Lent.

According to her later hagiographers, especially Turgot of Durham, the main source for her life, Margaret also performed charitable duties, feeding the poor and the orphans every day before she herself ate, washing their feet, and rose at midnight every night to attend church. In an outbreak of nominative determinism that survives to this day, she also established the ferry across the Firth of Forth from South Queensferry to North Queensferry, for pilgrims travelling en route to St Andrews.

Malcolm of Scotland must, at times, have wondered just what he had taken on. Not only did she intercede with him for the lives of English exiles driven north by the Conquest, but also read him stories from the Bible, and spent much time in private prayer and embroidery. Despite all of that, however, he seems to have been content for her to continue to express herself in these ways.

Unfortunately, as was often the case in an era where people ruled by force of arms, and violent death was the norm rather than the exception, Margaret’s personal family life was not to last: she suffered an immense blow when both King Malcolm and her eldest son, Edward, were killed at the Battle of Alnwick in 1093, fighting the Normans.  She herself was already ill. Though not yet fifty years of age, young by modern standards, her life of good works, fasting and caring for others had already worn her out, and she died on 16th November, 1093, just three days after receiving the news of her husband and her son’s deaths, almost as if that was what finished her off. As no doubt it was.

Originally, she was buried in Dunfermline Abbey, and in 1250, following her canonisation by Pope Innocent IV, who, despite his name, did not invent the “smoothie”, her body was dug up and placed in a new shrine in the Abbey, alongside that of her husband. 310 years later, Mary Queen of Scots decided that the head of St Margaret would be a useful relic to aid her in childbirth (quite how, is never explained) and removed the head from the tomb, taking it to Edinburgh. By 1597 it was in the hands of the Jesuits at the Scots College in Douai, in Northern France, but was lost during the French Revolution and has never been seen since. The remains of her remains (if I may) were also dispersed at the Scottish Reformation, with Philip II of Spain having them transferred to the Escorial in Madrid, and the location of these, too, is now lost.  There is also confusion over her feast date: in 1693, Pope Innocent XII changed it to 10th June, as a gesture intended in some way to flatter King James II of England, whose birthday it was. In 1969, it was changed back to 16th November, the date by which it was always kept in Scotland anyway.

I must admit to becoming more interested than I thought I would be in St Margaret of Scotland, having looked her up and researched her. Obviously they were different days, back then, and the past is another country, and all that jazz, but I took away from it something of the Scots and English uniting against a common enemy, the evil, marauding Normans, laying waste to the land.  I am fully aware, of course, that it probably wasn’t like that at all, that loyalties were driven by expediency, and ran across each other sometimes, but, in the wake of all the hoohah and the division over the recent Scottish Referendum, I found it strangely comforting.  I think that St Andrew’s day, 30th November, is the deadline for whatever it was that Gordon Brown pulled out of the hat like a rabbit on the eve of the vote, so I will be interested to see what Cameron does, given that his preferred tactic is now to bundle up the whole issue with the West Lothian Question, and kick it as far into the long grass as possible, in order to give him some breathing space to remove the jaws of UKIP from his nether regions.  “Politician betrays voters who voted for him” is not a news story: it’s not even a new story, but if it does happen to the people who voted “No”,  then I sincerely hope they join up with those who voted “Yes” and, at the next election, annihilate the Westminster parties in the 2015 election.  Even though that will probably leave us in England worse off and having to hunker down for another five years of “austerity” and class war, but then it’s not as if Ed Miliband is going to win anyway.

Not that this means we should ever all stop striving to make things better.  Even passive resistance can help, as can gradual change and what the I Ching calls “Work on That Which Has Been Spoiled”. I should, nominally at least, include prayer in that list, along with the admission that, given the coming of the long dark nights, I have begun praying once again, not that either myself or any of those I prayed for shows any discernible improvement for my trouble. Mind you, there is, of course (or at least not in this alternative universe) no way of knowing what would have happened to them if I hadn’t prayed for them.

Was it a prayer, or was it a dream, this better world we pray for? William Morris, at the end of News from Nowhere, which I have just finished reading, or rather re-reading, after many years, has this passage where the protagonist, having seen the Utopian future, wakes up back in his own bed, at home, in the present:

“If others can see it as I have seen it, then it may be called a vision, rather than a dream.”

So, next week, as for many weeks in my past, I’ll be once again existing on chip fat and gunge, keeling the pot, and attempting to live my visions, trying to see the diamonds glinting through the rubbish, and follow the lost thread back to the door that will lead me into the garden of paradise, while praying for those dreams to come true. Yes, it’s a tough call. Yes, I am probably deluding myself,  when all that’s left of the trees is “bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang,”  but then, after all, what choice have we got?


Sunday 9 November 2014

Epiblog for Remembrance Sunday



It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. The weather once again turned mild, unsettled and rainy, so there was a bit of everything, apart from snow and ice and fog, which suits me just fine. I doubt it will stay that way till March, though I wish it would.  Matilda’s been staying in more this week, however, despite the mildness and the mellow dappled yellow and green sunshine filtering through the turning leaves. Perhaps the people who own her second house are away on holiday or something.  Anyway, the most momentous event in Matilda’s life this week is that she’s acquired a jiffy bag.

The said jiffy bag arrived here from Bulgaria, containing a pair of trousers which Debbie had bought off some Bulgarian woman on Ebay. I said to her at the time that we are already living like Wombles, there’s no real need to order in additional rubbish from Bulgaria, but there’s no talking to her in that mood. The jiffy bag had already been a source of amusement to me, because it arrived with a rubber stamped legend on the front that said “Manky Nacker” or something very similar, which a puerile person such as I could hardly ignore. Presumably “Manky Nacker” means something to the Bulgarian postal service. Personally, I’d like to see the Royal Mail adopt a similar programme of motivational slogans over here.

The discarded jiffy bag was left on the settee and, within a few minutes, Matilda had settled down on it and put herself to bed.  Since then, she’s slept on it every night, going round and round on it until it crinkles. Last night, however, we discovered the ultimate combination of cat-bedding – the jiffy bag, with Maisie’s crocheted cat-blanket over the top of it. Cat bliss. She settled down on it in front of the stove last night, and was still there this morning.

Misty has had a quiet week, now her erstwhile canine companions have gone back home. Unfortunately, this week has been the absolute worst for fireworks, not only with obvious scheduled displays, but also with anti-social idiots setting off “air bombs” up in Newsome and Berry Brow between 11pm and midnight. Apparently you can be fined up to £5000 for doing that, what a pity the police can’t be arsed to arrest the little buggers. Perhaps I should phone up the rozzers and say that there is an Occupy Democracy sit-in demo going on right now in Newsome and Berry Brow, they’d definitely be there for that.   

Meanwhile, Misty has spent a lot of time cowering behind the sofa next door.  Actually, the fireworks have been so bad, they even attracted the attention of Matilda, who growled, hissed, and scuttled off (also next door) on a couple of occasions.  I know enough about Matilda’s moods to realise when she is on the verge of causing bodily harm, and I  could quite easily imagine her, if she had the means and the opportunity (the motive already being present) doing severe harm to those responsible for the bangs, given the way that she can turn from a hairy purry furbag to a howling mass of teeth and claws in a second.  I imagined her jumping out of the darkness like a Ninja cat, landing on their heads, and ripping chunks out of the faces of the firework-toting-yobboes, and was strangely comforted.

Debbie has been back at her voluntary work this week, although there is a rumour that she might actually be paid something on November 23rd, or thereabouts.  The new system for payment at Kirklees is also supposed to have gone live this week, so that brings with it yet more potential for spag bol and general chaos all round.  Still, maybe they’ll pay her twice.  That would make up slightly for not having paid her anything at all so far, since the start of term.

We’ve also been discussing further changes to the kitchen, spurred on by our mass clearout of rubbish and general Wombledom over half-term.  Sometimes, in these discussions, I must admit, I do tend to tune her out slightly, so I can get on with other stuff. If anyone asks, it’s called multi-tasking – but I almost choked on my Horlicks the other night when she said “I’d still like a baby.”  It turned out that what she’d actually said was “I’d still like a Baby Belling”, continuing the kitchen discussion theme. I didn’t know whether to be relieved or disappointed.

Remembrance has loomed large in our communications this week, or rather lack of communication. I was wittering on earlier in the week about not being able to get hold of a poppy to wear for Remembrance Sunday, because I never – or rarely – go further than the end of the ramp, these days.  Later in the week, I had the bright idea of enlisting the help of one of my Facebook Friends, whom I knew would have a couple of spare poppies. If I did an online donation to the British Legion, would she in turn post me a couple of poppies? Yes, of course she would, and these duly arrived in the post. I gave Debbie hers on Saturday, and she said “Where did you get these from?” I told her, expecting to be applauded for my initiative, but it turns out that she had been at the garage getting diesel on Wednesday, had seen the poppy tray and collecting tin, and had also bought two, forgetting to tell me.  So this year we have two poppies each, and the Royal British Legion have done rather well out of us.

We also got caught up in watching the week-long drama on the BBC, Passing Bells, mainly because it was usually on more or less when she was getting back from teaching and I was cooking tea.  The most confusing part for Debbie was telling the Germans and the English apart, because both sides spoke RP. After I explained that this bloke on screen now was one of the Germans, she said “why doesn’t he speak with a German accent?” You can tell she was brought up watching Allo Allo.

Actually, the cleverest thing about the whole series was the way in which in the first episode you saw the young man and his girlfriend larking about in the fields in what looked like the archetypal 1914 Edwardian sunshine and harvest scenario, with the storm clouds of war gathering, etc etc, which has been done so many times before – all that was missing was George Butterworth’s The Banks of Green Willow as background music – then you finally see him in uniform after he’s joined up and it turns out he’s a German.

After that, it was downhill all the way, I’m afraid.  The battle sequences were generally filmed in a combination of soft focus and slow motion, and ended up looking like a cross between a herbal essences commercial and an advert for Abercrombie and Fitch. When people were hit and died, there was none of the blood-spatter, people’s heads being blown off, severed limbs, or shell fragments taking huge chunks out of bodies – they did a slow-motion balletic twirl and fell in carefully choreographed positions. Even in the bit where the wind changed and they mistakenly gassed themselves, there was nothing you wouldn’t hear in the average GP’s waiting room during a winter bronchitis epidemic.  The series also suffered from the same problem that bedevilled the otherwise-excellent German world war two series, Unsere Mutter, Unsere Väter, namely that coincidence was deployed far too often as a plot device to ensure that people kept meeting up who, in the reality of an actual global conflict, would not have seen each other from one war to the next.

And, at the risk of a “spoiler”, the climax, where the British and German protagonists finally met, fighting hand-to-hand in No-Man’s Land just as the Armistice was in the process of being signed, and killing each other at 11AM on 11th November, was so telegraphed that I had already bet Debbie that this would happen. Still, the BBC is a past-master at stating the bleeding obvious, none of us likes this crazy war, Wilmot, Don’t tell him, Pike, etc., but I was really hoping for a twist where they both said Oh, sod the barbed wire, shook hands, and each went back to his own lines. In some ways, that ending might have been more of an illustration of the pointlessness of the whole thing.

As I wedged my (duplicated) poppy in the zip toggle of my fleece, I was once again reminded of Russell Baggis, and his strange penchant for investigating paper poppies wherever they may be found. I first discovered this when I came in one day in 1992 or 1993, I can’t exactly remember, and I was wearing my Dad’s old army greatcoat, which I once used to possess, with a poppy stuck through the lapel.  Russell had a habit of jumping up on the worktop anyway, while I was putting his Felix into his bowl, and this time, he jumped up, the poppy caught his eye for some reason, and he carried on, straight up the front of the greatcoat, in the sort of manoeuvre that characterised the aliens in Alien, and ended up stealing the poppy and running off with it in his mouth.  I thought this was such a neat trick that I retrieved it and encouraged him to do it again, which was probably a mistake, because from then on he did it every time I wore that coat, for the next few days.  The year after, thinking he would have forgotten all about it in the intervening period,  I tried it on him again, and he ran straight up the front of the coat, grabbed the poppy in his teeth, and was off and away with it.

Why he did it, is a reason lost in the crinkly recesses of his furry cat-brain, and he’s long gone now, nine years dead, in fact, so I can’t really ask him, not that he could have told me.  It’s a good job that nobody important (the vicar, for instance) came to visit us while wearing a poppy during Russell’s long and happy life.  It would have been embarrassing.  It was also Russell, of course, who ran up my back and sat on my shoulder while I was standing attention during the minute’s silence on TV one year.  Generally speaking, as much as a cat can have fun on Remembrance Day, he did. 

I’ve been engaged in my own titanic struggles again this week, with another two books more or less off to press. Next week is going to be for typing up the loose ends on all four projects, and by the time next weekend comes, if I’m spared, I should have produced four new books in three weeks. Sadly, none of them mine, but I am working on that, in odd hours and minutes, with my other leg.

I have been keeping an eye on the news, however, to see what gems the Junta has been trying to sneak past us, in this week dominated by World War One and all that it entails. George Osborne claimed to have halved the unexpected £1.7BN European Union bill by the simple expedient of booting the transaction into the long grass of the next financial year, and then offsetting against it a rebate we were going to get anyway. I’m not quite sure how stupid he thinks we are, but I’m guessing it’s somewhere on the scale between “very” and “extremely”.  It doesn’t meet any accounting definition of “halving” something that I have ever come across, but then I am not part of an organisation whose reaction to potential expenses fraud is to shred all of the documents prior to the present parliament.

Or, indeed, an organisation that is going to spend millions, or possibly billions, of pounds of taxpayers’ money, writing to taxpayers telling them how it is spending taxpayers’ money, in the form of a highly fictionalised “statement” that lumps together as “welfare” several items which are plainly not, in the sense that you or I would understand the word, to give the false and lying impression that more is being spent on benefits and “scroungers” than actually is.  I know that “politician is found to be lying” is really not that sensational: as a news story, it’s right up there alongside “Mafeking is relieved”, but sometimes it’s so blatant and so obviously intended as electioneering propaganda using public money, that you start to wonder if M’Learned Friends should be taking an interest. Perhaps if I rung up the Met Police and said that George Osborne is illegally occupying the Treasury?

In other, more commendable news, we (the UK, that is) apparently built a brand new hospital in Sierra Leone in seven weeks, on a brownfield site, from scratch, as part of the fight against Ebola.  Admittedly, it’s nothing much to look at, it’s hardly Guys or Barts; it makes heavy use of prefabricated buildings and concrete roads, but nevertheless, I found myself wondering, if we can do it in Sierra Leone, a brand new treatment centre up and running from scratch in seven weeks, why can’t we do it here? Then I remembered, it’s because the Chancellor has spent all the money sending out misleading self-justifying election propaganda, at the public expense, to 60 million households. Yes, that would be it. 

Someone who could probably afford to fund a pop-up hospital out of his own current account is multi-millionaire entertainer Griff Rhys-Jones, who was bleating this week that if Labour got in at the next election, he’d have to consider moving abroad as a consequence of the proposed “mansion tax”. Well, Griff, you could always do that, and, if you do, don’t let the door bang your arse on the way out. Or you could do what people who live in council houses have had to do, when clobbered by the Bedroom Tax, and move to a smaller home. Here’s a goose and here’s a gander, pass the sauce.

Not that Labour have a hope or prayer of getting in to power in 2015, or any other year any time soon,  with the hapless Ed Miliband in charge.  Four years too late, the Labour Dinosaurs are waking up to find that the swamp is dry, the savannah is dying, and there’s a strange meteorite in the sky.  And they are wishing (as I have been since 2010) that they’d chosen David Miliband instead.  This week’s Miliband controversy wasn’t actually of his own making. He was photographed wearing a T-shirt that bore the slogan “This is what a feminist looks like”.  Clegg also put one on for a photo-shoot, prompting Ian Hislop of Private Eye fame to comment “this is what a desperate politician looks like”.  Cameron refused to wear one, saying he was far “too busy” for all that feminist nonsense and generally left that sort of thing to his wife.  The Daily Mail, foaming at the mouth with its hatred of Miliband and not content with blackguarding his dead father, despatched a news team to Mauritius, where it discovered that workers making the T-shirts were being paid 62p per hour or some such figure, which was later comprehensively debunked and disproved by the Fawcett Society, the womens’ rights charity that was promoting the garments.  As Paul Dacre, the editor of the Daily Mail, also heads the Press Complaints Commission, I am confidently expecting the Daily Mail to run a full front page apology to Ed Miliband in the same size font and the same position as the original story. I’m also expecting unlimited funds for donkey sanctuaries, and for King Arthur to wake from his sleep of a thousand years.

Although Miliband wasn’t actually at fault in this case (who checks the provenance of their T-shirts, and in any case, it wasn’t even his) he does seem to have, nevertheless, this penchant for landing in the mire. I wonder how much of it is down to his special advisors (SpAds). For a long while, I have thought his SpAds are more like spuds, actually, only with fewer eyes and nowhere near as tasty or nutritious.  Someone who did wake from his sleep of a thousand years this week was Lib Dim minister Norman Baker, who suddenly came out of his persistent vegetative state as a Minister at the Home Office and realised that he’s actually been propping up a fascist regime for the last four years. It’s absolutely amazing the way the effects of  comatose amnesia can suddenly be completely reversed by the prospect of an electoral Armageddon.  It’s too little, too late, obviously, and I will be watching out for him, on election night, to raise a glass to his departure. Hardly a “Portillo Moment” but they all count.

The Home Office of which he was a vital, if slightly wonky, cog, continues to be a stranger to the concepts of compassion and humility.  There has been a decision in the Harley Miller case (they were trying to deport an Australian NHS worker who had previously had unlimited right to remain, see previous blogs) but she is legally prevented from publishing it or commenting on it.  The only circumstances I can conceive where this would happen would be a defeat for the Home Office where they managed somehow to obtain a gagging order to prevent it being made public and turned into some sort of precedent. I hope they did get defeated, naturally, but then I’m no lawyer.  Meanwhile, however, Wadih Chourey, of whom I have also previously written, a Down’s Syndrome sufferer who has no one to care for him in his native country, is still under threat of deportation because of the death of his parents here, as I write these words.

It turns out, though, that the Home Office has a rival in its quest for mutton headed supremacy and stubbornness in the compassion bypass stakes,  Fort Lauderdale, Florida, USA’s  mayor, Jack Seiler, who had 90-year old Arnold Abbott, known locally as “Chef Abbot” arrested, no less, for feeding the homeless.  Abbott, who is a world war two veteran, started a charity called “Love Thy Neighbour” in remembrance of his dead wife, and fell foul of the local arrangements in Fort Lauderdale which, I was surprised to find, in common with several other US cities, only permit certain designated organisations to feed the homeless in certain designated areas. It’s a bit like Westminster Council banning the soup run at Christmas because rich people don’t want to look out of their windows on Christmas Day and see poor people shivering in the cold.  I know nothing else about Jack Seiler other than that, on the face of it, based on this action alone, he seems to be a cruel, cold-hearted ruthless bastard who doesn’t deserve to be in charge of Fort Lauderdale’s public latrines, let alone the whole city.  Maybe, like the Everglades, he has hidden depths.  Or hidden shallows. Who knows.

So, my friends, this is the better world which it seems that those whom we remember today, on Remembrance Sunday, fought and died for.  Because of the anniversary of the start of the First World War this year, this was always going to be a specially poignant period of remembrance for many, but sadly, also, once again, it seems to have become something of a political football, and not in a good way, like the political football used in the 1914 Christmas truce.

Inevitably, this year as well, with the 70th anniversary of D-Day and the UK’s formal withdrawal from Afghanistan, there were always going to be contrasts between old and new conflicts. The Blight Brigade would much rather, of course, that no-one asked whether Afghanistan had been “worth it”,  because with each day that passes, the answer becomes more clearly and patently a resounding “no”.  [I discovered this week, by the way, that the UK apparently spent £200,000 or thereabouts during the conflict broadcasting an Afghan version of The Archers at the Taliban, and still they didn’t surrender and their morale remains unbroken, despite this. They should have played them the appallingly bad Joss Stone travesty of Eric Bogle’s No Man’s Land, if they really wanted to destabilise them. I know it certainly destabilises me.]

One major focus of political wrangling has been the fate of the incredible visual display of ceramic poppies filling the moat of the Tower of London, 800,000 of them or thereabouts, one for every WWI allied casualty. As a piece of art, it is startlingly original and has certainly captured the imagination of the public.  It was also, apparently, only ever intended to be transitory.  It has also been denounced by some art critics as a vulgar stunt, and if I were the artist, who lost a finger to an accident in the studio while rolling out the clay for one batch of the flowers, I might feel more than a bit aggrieved about that.  Boris Johnson, allegedly Mayor of London, though he never actually seems to be behind a desk doing any work, is not a man to allow a bandwagon to go by, un-jumped, and he weighed in, saying that he thought the installation should remain in perpetuity. Others have said it should be left in place for the next four years, to mirror the progress of the original war.

My own feeling is that it should be left for four years, and at the end of that period, it should be carefully dismantled, and the individual ceramic poppies should be donated by the artist to the Royal British Legion, to be auctioned online, with a minimum bid of £10.00. True, this would entail setting up an order processing and despatch facility, or massively expanding the existing one, with attendant costs, but overall it could harvest for the RBL the thick end of £8m+ in additional donations.

Some of that money (although I would much rather it wasn’t necessary to spend it on such peripheral activities) could then be used by the RBL to prosecute Britain First and other right wing fascist organisations which are looking to appropriate the poppy symbol for their own ends by marketing their own poppy-themed merchandise and conning people into donating money to them for it, instead of the RBL, essentially under false pretences. I don’t see why it should be necessary for the RBL to have to do this, taking expensive legal action when the money could be put to far better use elsewhere, though it seems it is. There is an old-fashioned legal phrase which is something like “Obtaining a pecuniary advantage by deception”, which it seems to me that Britain First is guilty of.  The police should be taking an interest. But I guess the police are too busy rounding up people letting off illegal fireworks to take any notice of a crime being committed, though. Oh, hang on…

Britain First are the would-be successors to Hitler’s SA, except that they don’t know the words to the Horst Wessell Lied, though often deploying similar tactics on the street, and their sole theme, even more so than UKIP’s is that immigrants, and/or Muslims, are responsible for all our woes (in 1930s Germany, it was the Jews). So much so, that this week also saw the launch of a poppy-print hijab, for Muslim women who want to show their support for the concept of remembrance while at the same time maintaining the decorum of traditional dress! It seems my previous remark that Muslims in the UK will only be seen to be truly integrated to the satisfaction of the Bigot Brigade when they start wearing Union Jack underpants is coming true, bit by bit.  One Muslim who is fully integrated by most people’s standards is Khudadad Khan, who was awarded a VC near Ypres 100 years ago:  finding himself one of the few survivors of a British force sent to stop a German advance, he manned a single machine gun to prevent the enemy making the breakthrough it needed, continuing to fire until he was the last man remaining.  Still probably not good enough for Britain First, obviously, but then there are some people for whom you could crap out a golden egg and they would complain that it wasn’t silver.

It’s not just Britain First who see Muslims under the bed, though. In the last week, four suspected Islamist terrorists were rounded up and arrested in conjunction with an alleged plot to kill the Queen at the Remembrance Day service at the Cenotaph this morning.  Forgive my cynicism, but there is a track record on behalf of the Junta of high-profile arrests of un-named alleged terrorists who are then later quietly released without comment.  But let’s reserve comment for if and when it comes to trial, then we’ll see. Meanwhile, to give her credit, the old dear turned up regardless, and did her stuff, even if she was wearing a bullet-proof vest underneath her liberty bodice.

The overriding debate, though, this year as in other years, is whether you should wear a red poppy at all.  White poppies are available via the Peace Pledge Union, and Purple Poppies to remember the animal victims of war, though the latter two require more forward planning to obtain, compared to the ubiquitous RBL red poppy. Especially for us.

The chief reason for not wearing a red poppy for me has always been that in a sense, supporting the RBL is a bit like giving the government a fig leaf. Governments of all hues and persuasions are very bad at making sure that ex-service personnel get a fair deal and a smooth transition to chivvy street. True, these days, driven by the necessities of casualties in Afghanistan, the facilities are better than they have been at any time in the past, but in many ways, the government gets away with holding back precisely because they know that the public, via the Royal British Legion, via Help For Heroes and via charities such as BLESMA will pick up the slack, and donate generously (even if sometimes by accident!) to the cause.  And we do, by and large, because the alternative is too bad to contemplate.

At least this week, to give them credit (which is not a sentence you will see me type often if ever) this week the Junta announced that they will continue to pay the War Widows’ Pension to widows who subsequently re-marry, thus meaning that for some women, it is no longer a choice between financial security and loneliness or re-marrying and taking the hit.

Increasingly, though, as well as the feeling of being held collectively to ransom by a government keen to impose collective compulsory patriotism by means of peer pressure, there’s now a trend for the red poppy to be subverted and appropriated not just by right-wing goon squads, but by more subtle forces of evil.  These attempts to exploit the poppy and what it represents are all the more cause for concern because they appear to be taking place with the connivance of the Royal British Legion itself.

Thales, an arms company responsible for the construction and supply of the unmanned drones that have been causing so much havoc to civilian populations as well as to the Taliban over the poppy-fields of Afghanistan, has been allowed to erect a poppy-covered billboard at the entrance to Westminster tube station. BAE systems, the UK’s biggest armaments company, has sponsored the annual “Poppy Ball” white tie event and dinner, and Lockheed Martin, the worlds single biggest arms company, this year sponsored the British Legion Young Professionals’ Branch annual event, “Poppy Rocks”. Maybe it is time that the Royal British Legion got shot of some of this uncomfortable baggage and had a cleansing of the stables.  Apart from anything else, any half decent defence lawyer for Britain First, if it does come to fisticuffs, would surely point to the fact that Thales have been allowed to use the poppy as a plea in mitigation.

Maybe it’s time that the RBL got back to basics, back to the ideals of Major Henry Howson of Richmond, who invented and manufactured the ubiquitous poppy which is such a feature of Armistice fundraising, and whose last words to his staff, as he lay dying, were “remember lads, if I peg out, I go in the factory van.” The RBL would doubtless reply that we’ve come a long way since Lady Haig’s Poppy Factory in the old disused brewery in Richmond, and that charity fundraising today is a multi-million pound business and needs to be dealt with as such. Even so, if the Red Cross can refuse the tainted proceeds of Kip’s racist calypso, I do think there’s scope for the RBL to look again at taking money from arms companies.  But then again, the RBL would probably say that the arms companies would make the money anyway, and that it’s surely better that some of it finds its way back somehow to the victims of the arms companies. And yes, if they wait for the government to shoulder the burden of caring for ex-service personnel properly, they’ll be waiting a long, long time, and they have to get funds from somewhere.

So, even with these reservations, and recognising that it’s an imperfect situation, and even with the reservations I also have about the uncomfortable merger of armed forces and state religion that is manifest in many a remembrance day service (I tend to agree with Bob Dylan when he sings, ”If God’s on our side, he’ll stop the next war”) I still end up coming down  on the side of buying a poppy.  The ideal symbol for me would probably be a purple, red, and white poppy, not that such a thing exists, because for me it doesn’t have to be either/or. I’m remembering the ones who didn’t come back, be they pack mules or people, and in the family, I’m specifically remembering Gunner Harry Fenwick RFA, gassed at Ypres, 1917; Private William Evans of The Suffolk Regiment, died of wounds, 1915, and Pilot Officer Jack Ross, killed when his Hurricane crashed into the Irish Sea in 1942.  And I’m wearing it to embody the ideas behind the white poppy, as well; that one day, instead of armies, we will have national humanitarian disaster relief forces (as we’re doing in Sierra Leone) and that the final lesson of all those wars will be the one which they came back with an put into place in 1945 – to build a better, fairer, more compassionate, caring and respectful society for everyone, including better housing, better education, and the NHS – all the things, in fact, under attack from the “austerity” mongers today.

After the First World War, when those who returned from the carnage of Flanders were promised “a land fit for heroes”, which they never actually got, Arthur Me wrote, in Who Giveth Us The Victory (1918):

“It is pitiful to think that thousands of these men had better homes in the trenches of Flanders than in the sunless alleys of our Motherland. Do thousands of children come into the world, to gasp for life in a slum; to go to school hungry for a year or two; to pick up a little food, a little slang, and a little arithmetic; to grovel in the earth for forty years or to stand in steaming factories; to wear their bodies out like cattle on the land; to live in little rows of dirty houses,  in little blocks of stuffy rooms, and then to die?”

No, they don’t – but they did, nevertheless, and it  meant that the people of my father’s generation, born to the soldiers returning from the Great War, had to do it all over again, twenty years later.

I doubt whether the people who put that idealistic, caring society in place in Britain after World War Two did so from an exclusively religious perspective, or indeed from a religious perspective at all, but in thinking this week about the enormous sacrifices people made to stop fascism, and at the same time still ploughing my way through The Paradise Within, I did come upon the following, which was written by Peter Sterry, 17th Century Platonist and chaplain to Oliver Cromwell, no less,

As Paradise, so the pure image of God in the Soul, seems to some not to be lost or destroyed, but hid beneath the ruins of the fall.  Thus, knowledge, springing from the soul, seems to be a remembrance, the life of all good, an awakening by reason of the primitive image of pure nature, raising itself by degrees, and sparkling through the rubbish, the confusions of the present state.  Thus also hath the soul in herself the measure of all truth and good in this pure image which, hidden in the centre of the soul, containeth all forces of truth and good in itself.

For some reason, in the way that  you sometimes happen accidentally upon a poem or a piece of writing that strikes a chord, this chimed in with my thinking this week. About remembrance, the life of all good, sparkling through the rubbish, the confusion of the present state.  Remembrance as meaning looking back on the good times, before the people we remember went off to war, never to return, and also as a basis for their sacrifice being turned into something better, so they didn’t die in vain.  For me, it’s the spirit of 1945 that sparkles through the rubbish and confusion that presently surrounds us.  I’m afraid we’re not doing too well on the land fit for heroes again. We sort of had it, then we let it slip through our grasp. Now we’ve got disabled soldiers living on the streets again, we’ve got food banks, we’ve got hatred, mistrust and xenophobia, we’re turning the clock back to the 1930s with health care and the 1890s with education, or at least we were, until Mr Gove got locked in the lavatory.  Some days, there seems to be more rubbish than sparkles.

But if, as Peter Sterry believed in the 17th century, along with others, and I believe now, there is a pure image of God hidden deep in the soul, which can not be lost or destroyed and which is released through acts of remembrance and “containeth all forces of truth and good in itself”, maybe we should start looking for it, and deploying it, more often. Sometimes it seems that the official government line on “Remembrance”, capital R, is that we’ve done our duty to the Glorious Dead, now we can put them back in their box for another year. But maybe we should start asking just how glorious they are, and why exactly they ended up dead, and what are we going to do about it. To stop it happening again.

As for me, I’ve tired myself out writing this, and it’s going to be a long evening with yet more chores and tasks – a bit of a metaphor for building the new Jerusalem perhaps – it has to be done brick by tedious brick, just like my tedious, tedious life. All we can do is stick at it, try and make things better, and keep right on to the end of the road. For everyone who sails on in this curiously shaped ship of Britain, even if we no longer rule the waves.

Meanwhile, we have to thank those who didn’t come back, as well as those who did, that on a peaceful Sunday teatime, by a warm domestic hearth in a house that might not be perfect but doesn’t often want for much, that we can go about our daily lives, such as they are, that we even have the choice to try and build the new Jerusalem, still, just about, and that my cat can sleep undisturbed, on a jiffy bag, on the settee.