Epiblog for the Winter Solstice

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. The week running up to the Winter Solstice, in my experience, certainly in recent years, has a habit of tossing us wobblers, googlies, grimblies and other various wrong ‘uns, and this year has been no exception, in fact, this year, it’s been an absolute doozie.  It’s as if the nearer we get to the narrow pass over the mountains that is the shortest day, the more adverse the conditions seem to become. The weather has remained cold, grim and grey, though I have now discovered what that unexplained crash was in the gale last week, because I noticed yesterday that it looks like a section of the shed roof has been flapping around in the wind. Not good.

Matilda’s been coming back inside the house more often now that the cold and rain is really starting to bite, though she does still like to go out first thing in the morning and have a patrol around, just to see if anything’s changed in her little patch of the garden and the decking.  The cold spikes of the hard rain and hailstones soon bring her back to the conservatory door, though, meowing to be let back in, right now, and dried off with kitchen roll.

Misty, Zak and Ellie did seven miles on Friday in the company of Debbie, and all four of them came back plastered with mud and wet through. I can’t help but feel that Debbie is missing a trick. Since she has, these days, got to tether Ellie and Misty more or less permanently to her belt with paracord, dyneema and Karabiners, she might as well just get a skateboard, and stand on it for seven miles while the dogs provide the motive power.

Anyway, yes, it’s been a hell of a week and no mistake.  The story starts one night last week, actually, when John from the garage was driving home late at night and happened to spot Debbie’s dad’s car parked up in Berry Brow. Nothing strange about that, in itself, and, of course, as he sold the car to the in-laws, you’d expect him to take a proprietorial interest in it, perhaps.  What was odd, however, was that there were three youths gathered round it, two by the side and one on the ground underneath. He stopped and wound down his window and shouted at them, asking what they were doing, and they legged it, up a ginnel and over a low stone wall.

Nobody thought anything much about it, although he did tell the in-laws what he’d seen, and then on Monday, Granny went to collect the car and bring it round to park outside their house, and some lowly example of pond-life had sprayed cavity-foam insulation up the exhaust pipe. Unfortunately, she didn’t notice until she’d started the engine, which means the car now needs a complete new exhaust system.  Bastards.

This began three days of joyful fun, dealing with insurance companies, the garage, the police, the garage, the insurance company, etc etc. If you have ever been involved in anything like this, I don’t need to tell you how tediously dull it all is, and how time-consuming.  It wasn’t helped by the fact that the in-laws’ land line was out of order for three days until “Everything Everywhere” (possibly the most misleading title for a telecommunications company ever) bestirred themselves to fix it.

Then, in the midst of all this, on Wednesday, there was some sort of fumble over the prescription for my father-in-law’s medication, which left him without it for a day, because either the surgery had forgotten to write it or the pharmacy had forgotten to pick it up, I still haven’t got to the bottom of the sorry saga. This was exacerbated by the fact that the surgery itself was shut for “training” all afternoon, with a message on their phone line that said, in effect, if your leg is actually hanging off, please ring NHS Direct or 999, but, other than that, please don’t bother us, and please try to avoid dying on the third Wednesday of the month.  

Normally, every year, I send the surgery a Christmas card with a little thank you note in it, and I had in fact written this years, but I’m afraid to say I was so enraged by not being able to get through to them that I fished it out of the pile of cards waiting to be stamped and posted, and chucked it on the fire. It made a merry blaze, for a few seconds.

It was, of course, all sorted out the next morning, after a wait in the phone queue of only 13 minutes or so, during which time I was reassured that my call was important (something which I already knew, in all honesty) and of course it turned out that the original prescription had been there all along, so now FIL had two lots of medication, which is probably a good thing, since Christmas is coming and the surgery and the pharmacy are a comic collection of cockwombles who can’t be trusted to run a bath. I did actually point out in my email to the surgery that if training results in the death of patients it’s probably not the best of outcomes.

So, that was the week that was. I sat in the midst of the chaos, like an old arthritic spider trying frantically to knit together a web that was unravelling faster than I could spin it.  Debbie, meanwhile, was soldiering on with her last four days of term. This time last year, this involved both buns and bhajis, as the classes all brought in food to share, but this year all she brought back was three empty Quality Street tins. When I queried the reason for this, to be frank, over-the-top recycling, she said that she thought they would do to put my baking in.  Right. Fine. Good.

But even then, fate had a twist in store for Deb’s teaching. On the last morning of term, Thursday, she set off to do her class at the outreach centre at Birstall, very low on diesel, and got there basically on the fumes in the tank. Coming back, when all she wanted to do was get home and rejoice that she had 17 days free of teaching, she was not so lucky, and ran out in Birstall.  No problem. She knew where the garage was, or at least she thought she did. In fact it wasn’t.  The garage hadn’t moved, but Debbie displayed the sense of direction of the average breeze block, and set off in the wrong direction, eventually arriving at the garage after a prolonged traipse in the rain, a bit like Columbus thinking he was going to India and discovering America by mistake. 

The quick purchase of a plastic container costing £6.99 and the diesel to fill it, and a (much shorter) walk back to the camper van, this time avoiding the pretty way, soon saw her on the road again, and that was that. The end of term. Hooray! All that remains now is to make sure that she gets paid on 23 January for the outstanding teaching hours she did in September.  Still, she’s quite excited about going back to one of her regular venues in January because it’s now got a whiteboard! It’s not actually plugged in to anything yet, but as I said to her, at least she can sellotape her resources to it.

By contrast to the first four days of the week, Friday brought a period of relative calm, the relative in this case being my little niece Isobel, whom Granny was minding for the day. Actually, “calm” is not really the right word for Isobel, who clearly has enough energy to power a small, landlocked, European country, if only there was some way of harnessing it.   As one of my Facebook friends put it, “a two-year-old is like a blender with the lid off!” Isobel is only just over one year old, but the analogy holds.  We sang Your Baby Has Gorn Dahn The Plughole, It’s a Long Way To Tipperary, and all of the verses to Ilkley Moor Baht t’at, the latter twice. I juggled with apples. Unsuccessfully, as it turns out, but she was still amused.  Eventually, she went home tired but happy, and I dozed in my wheelchair, feeling as if I had spent the afternoon in a tumble-drier.

Even if last week hadn’t been such a disaster zone at home, the news of the wider world would have been enough to drive me to the brink of depression. True, there were some occasional flashes of humour. I particularly liked the story of the man in Brighton who called the police to protest that his neighbours, with whom he had been involved in a planning dispute, had stuck a “creepy” cardboard cutout of Cliff Richard in one of the windows of their house, a window which overlooked his own dwelling. The police were apparently sympathetic, but couldn’t really offer any practical help. They were probably too busy investigating the real thing, although it must be difficult, at times, to tell one from the other.

In terms of general “what the – “ potential, however, the Cliff Richard story was dwarfed by the news that American band Skinny Puppy (no, me neither) are demanding $666,000 in unpaid royalties from the American government after it emerged that their music was used to torture prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. Susan Boyle must be rubbing her hands and ordering a Ferrari.  And as for Celine Dion…

Talking of Celine Dion  (she’s Canadian, stick with me, we’ll get there eventually) reminds me that, although this week has been largely free of UKIP gaffes for once (unless I missed any) the slack has been taken up to a certain extent by Britain First, the Nazi Facebook page, one of whose members tweeted that if “moose limbs” had a problem with the UK, they should “move to a moose limb country”. I don’t know whether predictive text was to blame or whether the author really was as dim as a bucket of pig manure, but either way, the only moose limb country I can think of is Canada, which is where Celine Dion comes in.

Otherwise, it’s been a very, very bad week.  The Sydney café siege, the massacre of over 300 schoolkids by the Taliban, where do you start? The media was quick to label the perpetrators of both acts as Muslims (though not moose limbs) although they had about as much to do with Islam as the Spanish Inquisition had to do with Christianity, and a similar mind-set. (Bet you didn’t expect that). The Taliban, especially, are a medieval-minded death cult who hate the idea of education, especially for women.  I don’t have the words to condemn what they did. Unspeakable doesn’t even touch the sides.  But then Pakistan itself is an unstable, ungovernable, fractured entity, where the rule of law is riven by factional interests and rivalries.  Look at how Osama Bin Laden managed to live there for years, under the noses of the Pakistani security service. 

This is not to say that they’re all as bad as one another, and we should just leave them to it, although that does now seem to be the policy, after having meddled ineffectually for a decade: I don’t doubt for a minute that there are good people in the country who want to see it stable, peaceful, and untouched by proxy wars between the US and radical “islam” – the problem is, as with Afghanistan, that these people have no voice and no power to bring about that situation, and we in the West haven’t exactly gone out of our way to make their task easier.  In any event, it’s now looking like the Taliban will eventually re-establish control in Afghanistan and seep over the border, such as it is, into the areas of Pakistan where the government has little or no power to evict them, bringing with them a new dark age of blinkered “religious” (in name only) bigotry. Also in Australia this week, a deranged woman managed to slaughter eight other members of her family. The media did not report on her religion, if any.  Because she didn’t purport to be a Muslim.

It was a sad week, a bad week, for justice, as well.  The trial of the three Border Agency contract staff who were accused of either causing, or not preventing, depending how charitable you feel, to death of Jimmy Mubenga on his deportation flight ended this week with their acquittal.  OK, so the court has decided, and we all have to live with that decision, but I am still finding it difficult to get my head round why, even if, as claimed, Jimmy Mubenga got himself into the position where he couldn’t breathe, the security officers responsible did nothing about the situation.  One possible explanation would be that they regarded him as some sort of lesser being, a human parcel to be returned to sender, and thought that a bit of brutality and neglect wouldn’t matter. I don’t know. There may be other explanations. Either way, surely there was an issue of negligence, at the very least.  If I said what I really thought, I would be had up, no doubt, for contempt of court.

As if to reinforce the fact that we now seem to have invented a society where we've abandoned compassion and a concern for injustice, on Thursday, when the wind was blowing huge gusts of rain across the garden, and I was already thinking, as I tend to do whenever the weather is bad, of those poor unfortunates obliged to be out in it whether they like it or not, I read a story online that I had to actually go through twice to make sure I wasn’t imagining it.  Police in Brighton issued an ASBO and a warning to a man in a wheelchair who was distributing food to the homeless in a public place.  Apparently the area was covered by one of these standing legal arrangements that have turned so many of our public spaces into private fiefdoms, from which we can be barred or excluded as the authorities see fit, backed up by the raft of legislation on the issue which has been smuggled through parliament in the last few years.

It’s a product of the attitude that treats the homeless as a pestilence, from which the rest of us are to be shielded, instead of grasping the nettle and dealing with the causes of the problem in the first place. It’s much easier to look at the homeless as if they were rats or pigeons, and treat them accordingly.  Especially if you’ve had a compassion bypass, as Sussex Police seem to have had, and your common sense removed at birth.

Unfortunately, it’s an attitude that’s all too prevalent.  Again, the media are partly to blame, although most of the responsibility lies on the Junta. The media are quite good at describing members of the armed forces as “heroes”, but somehow, they lose that heroic status when they leave the Army, lose their job and their home, and end up on the streets as homeless, alcoholic mental cases.  I’m afraid, too, that there are many members of the great British public at large who tend to think this way, as demonstrated by Mike Sivier in his Vox Political blog this week, when he highlighted the case of a man in the Wirral who was killed by a refuse lorry while scavenging in bins for food, after his benefits had been sanctioned. The story came up in the evidence given to the parliamentary committee on hunger. He had been forced to try and survive without any money for 17 weeks, and was reduced to scavenging in bins for leftovers or out-of-date food, and it was while he was doing this that a rubbish-compacting lorry arrived, picked him up and crushed him to death.

Yet some people, commenting on the story online, seemed to be implying that if the claimant was sanctioned because of some shortcoming on his part, then he brought his death upon himself.  Given the remarkably capricious range of reasons advanced by the DWP for stopping people’s money, and the fact that they have targets of how many people they should sanction in any given period, it’s highly unlikely that it was the man’s own fault, but even if it was, surely it’s hardly a crime deserving of death, especially such an ignoble and pointless death?

Yet you get people writing:

As poor as this policy is, and as grim as the side-effects are, at least this Coalition Government took steps to try to make sure that all of my tax money goes to that majority of people that are in honest need so that there was a chance that the welfare budget might have been enough for them to have a shot at something approaching decency and dignity in their quality of life rather than forcing them to make the choice to eat or to heat due to the fact that some of my money is wasted on those fortunately few but sadly still-present people who have decided that working the system is preferable to working a job.

Except that the Junta hasn’t taken any such steps. It’s given away tax money in breaks and handouts to people who are in the richest income bands instead, and the level of benefit fraud, which I assume is what the commentator meant by “working the system” has remained at a lowly 0.7% throughout the tenure of the Blight Brigade, so all their “steps” have done is cause poverty, deprivation, and death, in this case. But this commentator has obviously swallowed the DWP/Daily Mail line about the deserving and undeserving poor, hook, line and sinker. It just shows how insidious their propaganda has been.

At the end of a very sad and trying week, feeling depleted and tired, if not exhausted, we’ve managed to crawl to Sunday, the day of the Winter Solstice.  While this isn’t a specifically Christian occasion, there are enough resonances with the concepts of light and darkness to make me consider the day in a religious context. It ought to be considered also in a celebratory context, as, from today, the nights get shorter, and, believe it or not, spring and summer are coming. Warmer and better days. We just have to get through the rest of winter, which might be more difficult than we think, of course.

But for now, we’re at the top of the mountain pass. It’s time to pause and take stock, and look back on 2014 and forward to 2015, even though it’s not officially new year yet. In the country at large, I don’t think 2015 is going to be much to look forward to. There will be even deeper and more savage cuts in the misguided name of “austerity”, regardless of whoever wins the 2015 election.  And no doubt the mindless idiots with their heavily, selectively annotated copies of the Koran and their AK-47s will be plotting something horrendous in the course of which they will take the name of Islam in vain.

On a personal level, next year promises again to be much the same, if I’m spared.  Looking back on 2014, I can count some accomplishments, seven books produced. One of them mine, and some pictures painted. We lost poor little Freddie from the tribal wolf-pack in February, but little Ellie came along in May.  So we can still have a three-dog-night when the weather’s cold enough.  Tonight, we’ll be lighting a candle and keeping a vigil of sorts, as I have done one way or another for the last twenty-five years or so: keeping my lamp trimmed, because you never know the minute or the hour.

I must admit to not feeling particularly “Christmassy” – that’s not unusual, though – I don’t normally start to feel the Christmas tingle until I hear the choir singing Once In Royal David’s City on Christmas Eve.  I tend to cover my ears when the Christmas adverts come on, especially those truly dreadful Morrisons ones with Ant and bloody Dec.  I’d like to issue some sort of ringing declaration invoking the spirit of Christmas to get everybody up on their feet and shouting for a better world, a New Jerusalem where it could be Christmas every day, the hungry would be fed, the homeless sheltered, the crooked straight and the rough places plain, but I am just so weary today, and I still have to prep all the veg, because the In-Laws are coming for a meal this evening.  One of my resolutions for 2015, though, is that no one shall go hungry under my roof while I have anything to do with it.

This time next week, it’ll all be over for another year – as in Alan Hull’s Winter Song:

The turkey’s in the oven and the presents are all bought

And Santa’s in his capsule, he’s and American astronaut

Will you spare a thought for Jesus, who had nothing but his thoughts

Who got busted for just talking, and befriending the wrong sorts…

But for now, as I said, we’re at the top of the pass. The still point of the turning world, as T S Eliot might have called it, if he’d been here right now.  I’m sorry if you came here looking for an inspiring Christmas message, and all I had was scraps. I hope that Christmas brings you whatever you want from it, anyway, and let’s hope for better times for all of us in 2015.