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 16^th 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 16^th 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 10^th 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 16^th 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, 30^th 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?