It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley.
The weather has turned grim, grey and grotty, apart from a few sunny, frosty
mornings, and with the return of the damp in the air, the pain in my shoulder
has returned once more, although it’s not the immediate, nagging pain I
suffered over the summer, more of a dull ache, but it’s still tedious,
nevertheless.
The birds and the squirrels have well and truly woken up,
however, and are busy preparing for the spring.
When I put some food out for the birds this morning, the first two
customers were two chubby squirrels who immediately started rummaging through
the grain, looking for sunflower seeds, like two grannies at a jumble sale
looking for bargains. Having stacked
away a considerable quantity each, they retired from the field, presumably to
sleep it off, and left the remains to the birds. Later on, while I was busy
with some filing (I had got up early in anticipation of a courier delivery
which didn’t actually materialise until twenty past two, and it seemed a shame
not to put the time to good use) there were two squirrels, whether the same two
or a different two, I know not, chuffing around on the roof of the
conservatory. God alone knows what they were doing, but from the way they were
clomping around up there, I would guess at clog dancing.
All this activity has been extremely entertaining for
Matilda, amounting as it does to the equivalent of a box set of “cat TV”. Most days this week she’s spent a
considerable time with her snouty face pressed against the inside of the
conservatory door, chattering, growling and swishing her tail at the antics of
various squirrels, pigeons and other specimens of ornithological interest. It’s harmless enough, because despite her show
of aggression, there is absolutely zero chance of her catching one of them in
the wild, as both the squirrels and the birds are faster than her, and the
birds have the additional advantage of being able to fly. She’s made the most of the finer weather when
it’s been on offer, but she did the world’s shortest ever cat expedition this
afternoon when Debbie let her out in the wind and the rain and she was back at
the door yowling to come in almost before Deb had closed it behind her.
Ellie and Zak have been staying for a couple of days this week,
so Misty has had some canine companionship, and Ellie has been able to take
over the important task of keeping an eye on the squirrels while Matilda is
otherwise engaged, curled up in a tight ball asleep on the settee in Colin’s
front room, with her tail over her nose. As it’s been half term, Debbie’s been
able to get in some good walking with the dogs, off in the wild blue yonder,
where there is miles and miles of bugger all, covered up with peat and
heather. They did the Crowdon Horsehoe,
and Misty managed to lose the metal tag with her microchip ID number on it.
This isn’t a major disaster, as her name and address tag, which is separate on
her collar, also says “I am chipped, please scan me”, but it’s another addition
to a list of things to do which is already a yard and a half long, to organise
a replacement. Zak takes such excursions in his stride, but I think little
Ellie may have found the two successive days when they did eight miles and
thirteen miles respectively to have been a shock to the system. She certainly
wasted no time hoovering up her tea and putting herself to bed, when they got
back each time.
As you have probably gathered, we didn’t get away in the
camper, mainly owing to reasons such as lack of time, lack of energy, and bad
weather. The weather here at home hasn’t been anything to write home about, and
indeed we were already at home, so why bother wasting a stamp; the weather in
the Lake District was even worse, though, and I am glad to say that Debbie saw
the logic in not climbing a 3000 foot mountain in the driving rain only to find
that when you get there, wet through and frozen stiff, the summit is in fog and
you can’t see further than the end of your nose.
As for me, I put the time to good use, and although I
haven’t yet done anything about publicising any of it, I laid out and sent off
to press the reprints of all the missing Gez Walsh Potty Poets books, The Spot
on My Bum, The Return of the Spot, Someone’s Nicked My Knickers, and Parents, Zits and Hairy Bits. Plus, in a
completely different, and much more serious, vein, I’ve been working on a new
collection from a young writer with an astonishing amount of talent and
potential, Philippa Crundwell, called Seventy
Beats. Watch this space, as they say.
The wheelchair man came and fixed my wheelchair (in the
driveway, I’d forgotten he has a phobia of dogs) so I am no longer typing at a
45 degree angle. And with my other leg, this week, by dint of ignoring various
issues that seemed to think they were crises, but I disagreed, and the sky
hasn’t fallen in, yet, as a result, I managed to pull together some work on one
of my own books, We’ll Take The String
Road, now expanded to include 2014’s Arran trip. I also fixed the vacuum cleaner. Well, I say
“fixed”, all that it needed was a shard of a broken plate removing from half
way up the flexible hose, where it had gathered various other elements of chip
fat and gunge to cause a blockage. The
potsherd was a result of my having dropped the plate in the first place, and
Debbie having hoovered it up. I had hoped, when I saw the plate heading for the
tiled floor, that it would bounce, as bone china is reputed to do , but sadly,
this proved not to be the case, and it shattered into several hundred pieces of
pottery shrapnel, in the full-on Greek taverna approved manner. One of which
later became wedged in the vac hose and stopped it working. Yes, it’s just one
white-knuckle ride of excitement round here.
I have measured out my life in coffee spoons.
I’ve been ignoring the outside world, too, while I’ve been
busy getting on with stuff, but there are some stories that inevitably filter
through from the daily round, the bundle of “telegrams and anger” that passes
for the country we’re forced to live in.
UKIP have continued their stick-on comedy election campaign
with their prospective candidate for Great Grimsby
asking in the context of a pre-election debate “what happens when the renewable
energy runs out.” You can’t buy stupidity like that, you have to be born with
it. As Bernard wryly observed during his most recent visit to me, “When you’re
dead, you don’t know you’re dead, it’s the people around you that are affected,
troubled, and saddened by it. It’s the same when you’re stupid”. I was discussing it with Debbie and she said,
with her ‘teacher’ hat on, that surely the idea of renewable energy running out
was an oxymoron. To which I replied that the woman was not only an oxy moron,
but a silly cow to boot.
Actually, I do her a disservice, maybe. There is a
possibility - a certainty, some would
say - that the sun will one day turn into a supernova and burn us all to a
crisp. It could already have happened, as light from the sun takes 8 minutes
and 20 seconds or so to reach the Earth, so the sun could have blown up eight
minutes ago and we wouldn’t know until…..arrrrrgh!
OK, admit it, I had you going there.
I do think, though, there is a correlation between fascism
and stupidity, the more I study the antics of UKIP. Well, it’s not only UKIP, to be honest,
there’s also the EDL, the BNP, Britain First, Chelsea football fans, you name it. ISIS are a
crowd of medieval mumbo-jumbo merchants, suet from the neck up, as are the
Taliban. The essence of fascism is
coercion by force to adhere to a set of values that are simply not up for
discussion, no matter how much you point out their failings of interior logic. Please
note, I am not having a go at Islam here, in general, merely at the people of
all religions who refuse to discuss their beliefs and seek to impose their will
on others, unwillingly. It’s not the exclusive province of radical Islam,
either – this week the Pope said that transsexual people were as dangerous as a
nuclear weapon, or something similar.
Well, pardon me, I know that UKIP think that gays cause flooding, but I
have yet to see a transsexual wipe an entire city from the face of the earth
and leave fallout that lasts for thousands of years.
The same thing, the fascism = stupidity equation, was also
true of the Nazis. All of their best generals, people like Rommel and Guderian,
were Nazis in name only, along for the ride. People such as Goering, and indeed
Hitler himself, liked to think of themselves as master tacticians and
intellectuals, but in truth, they hardly troubled the scorers. We should be grateful, I suppose, that Hitler
was such a meddlesome, megalomaniac
duffer at battle tactics – if he had continued bombing the RAF on the ground
while they were refuelling, in 1940, instead of switching to a carpet bombing
Blitz on London, and if he’d ignored the Russian front instead of capriciously
switching in 1941 and initiating Operation Barbarossa, the outcome of the last
war might have been very different. One can only hope his present-day acolytes
self-destruct in a similar manner, but without taking several million innocent
lives with them.
It may seem fatuous, and indeed disrespectful, to compare
the present day Junta’s treatment of the poor, the ill, the unemployed,
migrants and asylum seekers to the Holocaust. Nobody is suggesting rounding up
all the unemployed or people on benefits, and putting them in special camps,
not yet, anyway, though Katie Hopkins did suggest last year that they should be
forced to wear some outward mark denoting their status, in a bid to win the oxy
moron award for 2014. We should not
forget, however, that people have
died as a result, as a direct result, of the policy of “austerity” and the
deliberate targeting of people on benefits by the DWP and their agencies, ATOS,
and, latterly, CAPITA.
In case you thought I was being melodramatic about the way
in which the war on welfare is going, the Tory faction of the Junta this week
re-announced their policy of workfare for all 18-21 year olds in long term
unemployment, and the withholding of benefits from people with drug, alcohol,
or obesity problems. There is an
argument to the contrary, that these people need additional help, to be able to kick their unfortunate addictions
and start on the long road back, but that doesn’t pander to the Daily Mail myth that all people on
benefits are living high on the hog at the expense of “hard working families”,
when in fact quite a lot of hard working families are working hard at crappy
jobs where the pay is so low they have to have it topped up by, er, benefits.
As to the mass “workfare” programme for 18-21 year olds, I
have said this before and I’ll say it again. Once you abandon the principle of one
universal system which treats all claimants the same, once you start creating
sub-divisions into the deserving and the undeserving poor, then I am afraid that
is a step down the road to deciding
that this or that section of society is not “worth” supporting with benefits,
it is a step down the road to
identifying these people with a special badge and keeping them corralled in
camps. And as we all know, the journey
of a thousand miles starts with but a single step. You mark my words. First they came for the obese and the drug
addicts, and I did not speak up because I was not obese, or an addict; then
they came for the 18-21 year olds…
Thankfully, there are still some people in our society who
have the courage and the guts to speak out against the nasty injustices of the
evil Junta, and propose an alternative. I don’t mean the Labour Party, which
fell ill under James Callaghan and died under Tony Blair. Ed Miliband and his
miliband of merry men are about as successful at opposing the Junta as a gnat
trying to sting a battleship. No, I mean the good old Church of England, the
nearest thing to an opposition we have got at the moment. This week the Bishops took some time off from
moving diagonally, and instead released a round-robin letter, a “Pastoral
Letter” for the 2015 election, condemning the politics of “austerity” and
pointing out almost in words of one syllable that those who could least afford
it are being asked to bear the burden.
“There is a deep
contradiction in the attitudes of a society which celebrates equality in
principle yet treats some people, especially the poor and vulnerable, as
unwanted, unvalued and unnoticed,”
This is something which has been so self-evident for the
last three or four years that it hardly bears saying. Nevertheless, they seem
to have annoyed the Tories in general and Iain Duncan Smith in particular,
which is never a bad thing. If the
Church of England was a political party, right now, I think I might even vote
for it.
This week marked the release of the news that Lucy Glennon
had died on 29th January. I say “the release of the news”, what I
mean is that I was too busy looking the other way to notice it until I saw an online
obituary. Lucy Glennon suffered from Recessive Dystrophic Epidermolysis Bullosa,
which you have to admit, knocks Facioscapularhumeral Muscular Dystrophy into a
cocked hat when it comes to diseases with outlandish wacky names. It’s actually
a very nasty condition which renders the skin incredibly susceptible to damage
even from the ordinary wear and tear of everyday life. Lucy Glennon lived a life of pain,
exacerbated by the idiocy of having the Damoclean sword of benefits cuts
hanging over her for the final years of her life. She was 28 when she died, and
she wrote with great humour and courage in blog postings and articles about
being forced to move out of her two-bedroom flat because of the changes in her
housing benefit and a muddle, not of her own making, over her DLA. Her early
death was due to her condition, and not directly caused by the Junta’s
policies, but one thing’s for sure, the constant battles and uncertainty she
had to endure didn’t make it any easier, and her story should be required reading
for anyone who thinks that being incurably ill, in pain, and on benefits, is a
doddle.
But, of course, as the Blight Brigade would have us believe,
people on benefits are apparently leaching the country dry, which is why there
is no money for any of the things we used to have, like libraries and Sure
Start centres. The bishops’ letter describes it as “game-playing, to claim that
anyone who cares about the impact of austerity on the most vulnerable members
of society is … careless about the extent of national indebtedness”.
Well, if it’s a game, it’s not a very entertaining one, and
the result is always rigged. Councils across the north of England are finding
out around now how much they have to cut this year to take account of further
reductions in central government funding, not that this stops them from
indulging in grandiose gestures when there is a bike race to be underwritten
out of the public purse, and now we find this week that the absurdly-named
“Tour de Yorkshire” is going to receive £800,000 of public funding, so we can
obviously find magic money down the back of the sofa somewhere, when it’s a
case of civic junketing and New Years’ Honours.
If anyone doubted the way in which the disadvantaged are
treated as a problem to be airbrushed out of the picture in these times of
“austerity”, one need look no further than Selfridges in Manchester, which has
become the latest building in a town centre to install spikes to deter rough
sleepers from using its doorways to shelter at night. So, in the bewildering
cacophony of 21st-century retailing, they have at least made one
decision easy for me – boycott Selfridges.
You sort of half expect compassionless brutality from a set of rapacious
moneygrubbers like Selfridges. But the people who should really be hanging
their heads in shame this week are Hull City Council, who put up a series of
posters in the town centre targeting rough sleepers with the strapline “Beggars
Can Be Choosers”, implying once more
that living rough and being forced to beg on the streets is some kind of
lifestyle choice. It shows yet again how
insidious the propaganda which has been pumped at us since 2010 has been. It’s
quite simple, as I have said before, these days we are all just three bad decisions away from being on the streets, and
with the current set of clowns in charge, they don’t even have to be your bad decisions! So, think on, Hull
City Council. There but for fortune, goes you and I.
So, after a mixed week, we staggered on to Sunday, and, as I
said earlier, I was up and about startlingly early, and looking forward to
knocking some of the tedious tasks off my “to do” list, and maybe even get
around to something a little more recreational, but sadly, my computer had
other ideas and started displaying all of the symptoms of a hard disk that is
not very well at all. I cursed myself that, with everything else I’d achieved
during the week, I hadn’t found the time to back up my files. Eventually, with the aid of a Windows
recovery boot disk and several hours of frustration and chewing my own beard,
I’d got it to boot up and run various diagnostics and scans. I also backed up
about 53,000 files onto an external hard drive, so that if it does go
“brustenauf” next week, at least my work will be safe, although setting up a
new machine would definitely not be
on my “to do” list, all other things being equal. Next week is going to be
horrid enough as it is.
Today is the first Sunday of Lent, and it certainly felt
suitably purgatorial. This means, of
course, that the week also contained Ash Wednesday, a suitably sombre day, as
it turned out, and one where I made a point of re-reading T S Eliot’s poem of
that name, in the same way that every Good Friday, I try and read Good Friday 1613, Riding Westward, by
John Donne.
And pray to God to
have mercy upon us
And I pray that I may
forget
These matters that
with myself I too much discuss
Too much explain
Because I do not hope
to turn again
Let these words answer
For what is done, not
to be done again
May the judgment not
be too heavy upon us
Because these wings
are no longer wings to fly
But merely vans to
beat the air
The air which is now
thoroughly small and dry
Smaller and dryer than
the will
Teach us to care and
to not care
Teach us to sit still.
Eliot’s remorse for “what is done, not to be done again” was
probably related to the breakdown of his marriage to Vivienne Haigh-Wood, a
process which eventually led to Eliot, aided by Vivienne’s brother Maurice,
having her committed to a mental institution in 1938. He had already left her (“deserted” her, as
she would have it) in 1933, three years after Ash Wednesday was published. My own remorses are much more prosaic. If
anyone’s going to be committed, it’ll probably be me, the way things are
going. That’s not to say I haven’t let
people down in the past, even the quite recent past, by not being there when
needed, by hurting people as a result of bad decisions or letting hubris get in
my way… been there, done that.
And now that, unlike the birds that flock in our garden, I
am unable to “beat my wings”, now that I am indeed, as Eliot would say, “an
aged eagle”, I find myself thinking back
on those times with the intention, perhaps, of doing some sort of penance but
also, perhaps, to try and understand why I did what I did, at the time. Maybe I should try and write it out of my
system, as a Lenten exercise, since in some cases it won’t be possible to
apologise in person to those involved, even if I knew where they are right now. The Collect for today has, amongst the
readings, the chapter in the Gospel of Mark where Jesus spends forty days in
the wilderness being tempted by Satan. Even for someone like me who has
difficulty with the literal interpretation of the Bible, I have often been
puzzled by this episode, and why it was necessary at that particular
juncture. Perhaps it’s meant to be
symbolic of the need to overcome the inner “Satan” in order to concentrate on
the divine “spark” within. In my case,
my own temptations would not be the world, the flesh, the devil, but the
torment of not being able to go back and put right what I previously did wrong.
To care, and not to care.
Eliot returns to precisely that theme in Little Gidding, when he writes:
And last, the rending
pain of re-enactment
Of all that you have
done, and been; the shame
Of motives late revealed,
and the awareness
Of things ill done and done to others' harm
Of things ill done and done to others' harm
Which once you took
for exercise of virtue.
Then fools' approval
stings, and honour stains.
From wrong to wrong the exasperated spirit
From wrong to wrong the exasperated spirit
Proceeds, unless
restored by that refining fire
Where you must move in
measure, like a dancer.'
Well, Thomas Stearns, me old pal, me old beauty, my dancing days are over, except
mentally, perhaps. Tomorrow, I shall be
remembering a sad occasion which was not of my doing, in that it is 18 years by
the date since Phil’s cat, Reggie, didn’t come home one night and was found by
Phil next day at the side of the Wombwell by-pass. So, tomorrow is Reggie day,
black-bright little imp that he was, and he lives on in our memory and, over
the years, in many passwords.
Which brings me back to computers, and this one. While I’ve
been picking my way though this blog, it’s behaved itself, more or less, so
it’s been a long day and I’m going to quit while I’m ahead, lock up, and fetch
in some coal. Good night all, and possibly sundry. Tomorrow shall be my dancing day.
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