Epiblog for Trinity Sunday

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley.  Sadly, it also turned out to be the week when several unhealthy chickens also came home to roost. The animals have been fine, even the metaphorical chickens, but the humans were tried, and found wanting.  Deb was already feeling grim at the end of her teaching week, and it developed from a sore throat into a cold into  raging flu that put her in bed for the best part of three days straight, then no sooner was she up and about again (though not fully recovered by a long chalk) than I started with the same dreary, depressing cycle.

As I type this, I am sitting in my wheelchair, surrounded by Lem-Sip, Strepsils, Paracetemol, and Buttercup Syrup. I’ve also ingested, over the last few days, considerable quantities of cider vinegar, orange juice, and slices of lemon, usually brewed up in a big mug with scalding hot water and lots of brown sugar.

So, yes, I have had man-flu, and I am still viewing the world through the hazy soft-focus of its after-effects.  One of the worst things about being ill is that it is very boring. You want to get on with all the multifarious tasks that are breeding unchecked everywhere you look, but in the end all you are capable of doing is reading the back of the packets the various remedies are sold in, and noting how many of them are made by Reckitts in Hull. Meanwhile, May, my favourite month in the whole year is running through my fingers like sand.  Needless to say, our planned trip to The Lakes got cancelled. The dogs were bored, and Matilda looked concerned that her source of food on demand may have been in peril, albeit temporarily.

So, I’ve not been firing on all cylinders this week, not by a long chalk. Like Glenn Miller, I am still missing.  Consequently, I haven’t been paying attention to the world at large, not that it deserves much attention, anyway. David Cameron has been trekking round Europe, feebly grasping at any vague hope that someone somewhere might let the UK somehow amend the terms of EU membership in time to save his skin and stave off the thumping NO vote in the 2017 referendum on whether or not Great Britain should remain a member.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the House, the various candidates for the Labour leadership have been jockeying to show how they, and they alone, will be able to save both the party and the downtrodden working class – in Andy Burnham’s case, reckless Marxist firebrand that he is, he’s against the Mansion Tax and for the Benefits Cap and I cannot help but think either he is a very stupid man indeed or he has got the string bag inside out, or both.

In any event, there is every chance that my membership of the Labour Party will be very very short at this rate. I am not going to vote for, and prop up, a bunch of closet Tories.  The sad news for all of us is that we are stuck with government (if you can call it that) by the Blight Brigade either forever, or until Labour finds a leader with some principles and the balls to enunciate them. So, probably forever, then.  The Labour Party needs to present a bold alternative, a visionary choice: if it is just the Tories in slightly cheaper suits, it is dead.

One thing I did end up watching was the Cup Final, although to be honest I cared little whether Arsenal or Aston Villa won in the end. There is so much wrong with football that I could fill an entire Epiblog just in enumerating the many faults and failings which beset “the beautiful game”. Here we had two teams, for instance, who had absolutely no geographical connection to the areas they purport to represent. The days when the town’s football team was made up of men who, when they were all young urchins, used to kick a tin can around in the same back streets, with goalposts for jumpers, are long gone.

Then there is the issue of “support”. Both HRH Prince William and David Cameron, apparently, “support” Aston Villa. I would like to tell them that you can only claim to “support” a team when you have stood on a draughty concrete terrace for ninety minutes feeling the sting of sleet showers against your face while you watch the said team draw nil-nil with Preston North End, punctuated only by queuing up for a meat pie from the van on the touchline at half-time, and trying to eat it straight from the foil without the gravy going down your wrist.  If someone with a smart phone, a clipboard and an earpiece has “advised” you what team you “support” and you only ever turn up there for the prawn sandwiches, that is not “support” in any sense I recognise.

One aspect of the Cup Final that did impress me, though, was Abide With Me.  In recent years the FA has tended to sideline this, and there have been some bizarrely awful renditions. However, for this year, some bright spark, and for once I am not being sarcastic here, had the idea of bringing together a choir of supporters from every club that qualified and made it as far as the third round to sing the hymn, under the leadership of one Alfie Boe, whom I must admit I had not previously been aware of, but somehow, whether it was the “ad hoc” nature of the performance, with the real enthusiasm of the fans showing through, or whether it was my generally feeble and maudlin frame of mind, with my head full of Buttercups and Paracetemol, I don’t know, but it really affected me.

It reminded me of what football was really about. You started playing football at school, maybe, in the playground, with the goal painted on a brick wall, or on the school field with – yes, it’s a cliché, but it’s true – jumpers for goalposts. You maybe had kickabouts in the park with your mates, and you resolved the problem of odd numbers of people wanting to play by one team playing “goalie stick” and one team playing “goalie ness”.

When you were old enough, your dad, or your mate’s dad, or uncle Ken took you to watch your local team, and you stood on the terraces and shouted yourself hoarse, part of the tribal music as the crowd swayed and chanted around you. And your hands were numb with cold at half time, when you queued up to buy a hot dog and a plastic cup of Bovril from the touchline stand and your breath streamed away in a cloud of steam as you tried to eat the food and drink the drink without taking out the back of your throat. 

There was always one old gadger there, with a flat cap and a scarf, who didn’t say much, but when he did talk, he talked about the old days, the glory days, when men wore long baggy shorts and the ball was as solid as once of Nelson’s cannonballs. Sometimes, he’d even tell you how football once stopped a war, and his dad played in a match against the Jerries in No-Man’s Land, at Christmas. Then, on the bus back home, you’d re-live the match, and act it out for real at school on the Monday.

Eventually, when you got married and had kids of your own, you taught them to kick a ball about in the garden when they were old enough to toddle, and played “three and you’re in” with one of those little pop-up tubular goals you can get from B & Q.  And then one day you took your own kid to his first match.

And you weren’t the only ones. Families all over England were going through this cycle, were part of this tradition, growing up to love the game. Every generation, in succession, had the old gadgers who said it was never as good as before the war, the Uncle Kens who reeked of Brycreem, and the eager, snotty kids who could be found kicking a raggy old ball round the cobbled backstreets by lamplight. They pretended to be their own favourite players, the ones whose blurry pictures they collected from their weekly comics and stuck into albums.

Anyway, the moment passed, and Arsenal won, 4-0, in case you were interested.

The cup final was a welcome distraction from two other stories this week which, had I not been so ill, would have made me extremely angry.  They still raised anger in me in my present state, but it was more the sort of “Oh for God’s sake” despairing anger than the “I am going to do something about this” anger.  The first was the Daily Mail story about how Kos is being “ruined” as a holiday resort for British holidaymakers because of the presence of refugees and boat people trying to make their way to any EU country where they can claim asylum.  The irony that these resorts were previously “ruined” by gangs of drunken British tourists, who did far worse than dry their dirty washing on the promenade (something the Mail found particularly objectionable) was lost on most of the online commentators.  One of these, taken to task, replied that the drunken Brits could always go home again afterwards, which is very true. Sadly, that option isn’t open to people whose miserable breeze block huts have been bombed by the USAF, or the RAF, or have been taken over and infested by ISIS, or all three.  The dirty washing that is being hung out in Kos is the dirty washing of all of us, and this is only the pre-wash. There’ll be a lot more dirty washing in the Ali Baba basket before this gets sorted out.

But of course, if and when the UK does vote to leave the EU, or even if we don’t and Cameron gets his way on bombing the refugee boats at anchor, and if we do succeed in repealing the Human Rights Act, then Katie Hopkins and Britain First and UKIP and all the rest of them can all line up on the White Cliffs of Dover and have a party, while they listen to the drowning cries of refugee children.  We will have become even more of a quasi-Fascist, xenophobic hellhole. But at least the freedoms our forefathers fought for in 1940 will have been saved. Or something.

Of course, you don’t have to be a destitute Afghan or Syrian to feel the wrath of officialdom in Britain today – even somewhere as prosaic as Hackney is doing its bit in turning Britain into one gigantic Victorian workhouse, by instituting something called a “Public Space Protection Order” which allows them to fine homeless people sleeping in doorways £100.00, which can become £1000 in court, for effectively the “crime” of being a nuisance and not having a home to go to.  Needless to say, this development has been blasted by homelessness charities:

Matt Downie, director of policy and external affairs at Crisis, said: "Rough sleepers deserve better than to be treated as a nuisance – they may have suffered a relationship breakdown, a bereavement or domestic abuse.  "Instead, people need long-term, dedicated support to move away from the streets for good.”

While Mark McPherson of Homeless Link added: “Those who sleep on the streets are extremely vulnerable and often do not know where to turn for help. These individuals need additional support to leave homelessness behind, and any move to criminalise sleeping rough could simply create additional problems to be overcome."

This measure is being particularly targeted at “tourist friendly” parts of Hackney, such as the Broadway Market and the Regent’s Canal.  No doubt the Council would prefer it if the homeless just cut out the middleman and jumped in the tourist-friendly Regent’s Canal, thus saving them a lot of paperwork.  This sort of behaviour, of course, is typical of London Tory councils, like Westminster, where the wealthy don’t like to look out of their windows and see poor people being given soup, because it pricks at the fragmentary remains of their consciences, but hey, guess what, Hackney is a Labour Council. I must find out if there is a way of instigating a motion of censure on Hackney Council at the Labour Party conference.

One of the other activities prohibited by Hackney’s PSPOs is “taking drugs in a public toilet” – it’s a pity that the Houses of parliament aren’t in Hackney.  Anyway, as part of a Labour Party that seems to believe every bit as much in grinding the faces of the poor as the Tories do, Hackney Council will probably get headhunted by Cameron to sort out the mess in Kos.

So, today we have come to Trinity Sunday, and I have to say that on this red-letter day in the calendar of the Church, I feel even less spiritual, even less enlightened, than I did last Sunday. I have, in the past, spent a considerable amount of time and effort trying to understand and explain the ideas of the Pentecost and the Trinity, but this year the whole thing has passed me by. Partly because I’ve been so busy working, partly because I’ve been ill, and partly because I think I have once more begun the process of losing my faith, such as it was.  My only spiritual connection with the Trinity is that it’s lent its dedication to Holy Trinity, the unacknowledged cathedral of Hull.

It becomes harder and harder to cling to the idea that there is some purpose and meaning to things, even though it may not be vouchsafed to us, in a world where the answer to refugees is apparently to bomb them, a world where the answer to the homeless is to put them in jail.  Not to mention the election result and the relegation of Hull City.

Joking apart, though, the more I look at life these days the more it does seem to be random, pointless and cruel, although there are still moments – when I look at the flowers on the clematis in the garden for instance, trying to fix them in my mind so that I can remember them, come November, when everything is black and dead again – there are still moments when I feel a connection to – something. But as to the complex theology of the Trinity and Jesus telling his disciples to go and baptise everybody, and Pentecostal fire and speaking in tongues, it is all starting to look a bit… dare I say, irrelevant?  I know that Jesus, if he here were today, would be in the boats with the migrants, but that doesn’t stop one single child from being drowned.

The best lack all conviction while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity

As Yeats put it in The Second Coming.

As well as Matthew 28: 16-20, which is the bit where Jesus tells the disciples to go and teach all nations, the other reading for today is Romans 8: 14-17

 For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God.  For ye have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear; but ye have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father.

An appropriate cry in a week which also contained the Eurovision Song Contest.

So I find myself almost in the position of becoming one of those people who say “if there is a God then why does he allow…” and going on to list a whole litany of ills and injustices.  The answer is I don’t know, as I have previously said. No idea. Absolutely not a Scooby.

I have been here before, like T S Eliot in Little Gidding:

If you came this way,
Taking the route you would be likely to take
From the place you would be likely to come from,
If you came this way in may time, you would find the hedges
White again, in May, with voluptuary sweetness.
It would be the same at the end of the journey,
If you came at night like a broken king,
If you came by day not knowing what you came for,
It would be the same, when you leave the rough road
And turn behind the pig-sty to the dull facade
And the tombstone. And what you thought you came for
Is only a shell, a husk of meaning
From which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled
If at all. Either you had no purpose
Or the purpose is beyond the end you figured
And is altered in fulfilment

I hope I feel better, physically and spiritually, next week. What I think I need at the moment is some sort of spiritual Lem-Sip. Something to dull the pain and make me see things more clearly.  Sadly, I don’t think you can get it from Sainsburys.

Anyway, it’s Sunday teatime and all I have done all day is doze off and write this blog. I must get well and get on. People are depending on me. But I think that’s it for today, at least for what passes for intellectual effort. I don’t really know why I am writing a spiritual blog at all these days when the only spiritual experiences I have are largely incommunicable. At the moment it feels like that low point after a major defeat when the confused survivors have fled the field where you have to just trust that somehow, tomorrow is another day and everything will sort itself out somehow.  The Platonist in me tells me that there is something good in everything I see, which is, I suppose, all that Julian of Norwich was saying as well. Perhaps it’s time to call in Abba after all.

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Epiblog for the Feast of St Joanna the Myrrhbearer

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. Summer still stubbornly refuses to break out, though, and there are only six days left of my favourite month of the whole year. The weather seems to be set at the moment in a pattern of dull starts to the day followed by it fairing up around teatime, when it’s too late to do anything or go anywhere.

Matilda’s now set into her summer routine of going out first thing, coming back after an hour or so for a late breakfast, and then resuming her station on the decking, in any patches of sunshine she can find. In the late afternoons, she comes in, has a second meal, and then puts herself to bed on the settee in Colin’s front room.  Sometimes she comes into the kitchen in the early evening and has a further short outing, via the conservatory door, but more often she stays there until first light, when she gets up and wanders round the house yowling, in order to tell us that it’s light outside.

Misty and Zak ended up last week having done over 50 miles in three days, but this week has seen some backsliding, mainly because Deb was so exhausted at the end of the teaching week that she developed a foul cold, which has curtailed the usual overland expeditions. I had something similar during the week, so I probably gave it to her, which I would have done anything to avoid – but sitting here in this mobile birdcage I’m prey for anything that comes along.  I probably got my dose of it, whatever it was, when I went to the hospital, which is an inherently unhealthy place, full of ill people.

So we’re all feeling a bit sorry for ourselves today. I’ve been dosing Debbie up with Buttercup Syrup, cider vinegar, orange juice, hot lemon and sugar, and garlic soup, but not all at the same time.  The garlic soup worked particularly well for me, I had two steaming mugfuls of it and felt much better the day after. I recommend it for anyone else with a touch of the grimblies.

The pressure was on to get better because Owen was going to drop in for one of his flying visits, and I needed to be on reasonable form if we were going to achieve anything. As usual, he hardly stopped, and in the four or five hours he was here, he banged in a fence post, mounted a hurdle on the wall, so now my rampside garden is finished, and unloaded a carful of books that he’d brought up from Wales. What made this especially welcome and a really brilliant gesture is that he had given up five hours of his birthday to do it. Truly worthy of a mention in despatches.

Armed with the said books, I was able to process some orders that have been stuck in the system, for some days, and I spent a merry three and a half hours packing books, ending up with dust and spiders in my beard.  I had just enough time to tape up the last box and still make the courier deadline on the Parcelbroker web site, in order for the various parcels, boxes and orders to be picked up on Friday.  So I felt pretty pleased with my efforts.  Only to have them completely undermined the next day when only one out of the two couriers actually came to pick them up. UPS did their bit, and DHL didn’t, just so you know who to avoid in the future.  I don’t know what’s wrong with couriers. It’s not exactly rocket science, you pick up a parcel, put it in your van, take it to the depot, where it gets sorted and put on a lorry to another depot, where it gets put on a van and delivered to its destination. What part of that are they struggling with? Whatever the cause, there is a great market opportunity for any courier who can do it right, do it at the first time of asking, and do it without being constantly chivvied to make sure they haven’t dropped your parcel down a bottomless well filled with piranha fish by mistake.

I’ve left the outside world to its own devices this week. I did have an email from the Labour Party assuring me that I would have a vote in the election of the new Labour leader, although there is still no sign of the promised membership pack in the post. I can only hope that they are never invited to organise a social event in an environment where the fermentation of alcoholic beverages has taken place.

Partly, my lack of interest in the news has been down to shell-shock and apathy, partially down to viewing everything through a haze of man-flu. The government failed to meet its immigration targets (or rather its anti-immigration targets) in the same week as Cameron was talking tough and posturing at the EU. No surprise there, then.  Labour has (belatedly) decided, or at least Harriet Harman has, that they will support an EU Referendum after all.  That resounding clang you just heard was the stable door being shut.  Meanwhile the Blight Brigade is pressing on with plans to repeal the Human Rights Act.

As this is supposedly a spiritual blog, at this juncture it is probably also apposite to mention that Hull City AFC will need a miracle if they are to avoid relegation this afternoon. They have painted themselves into a corner whereby they have to beat Manchester United (fourth in the league) and Newcastle also have to lose to West Ham, for them to have a hope of survival. They have only themselves to blame. To win the Premiership title, you need to have a mad foreign owner with bottomless pockets who will buy you the players you need to basically buy the trophy.  Hull City only have half this solution in place, they have a mad foreign owner, but their new signings this year have been lacklustre under-performers.

Merely to survive in the Premiership, you have to do two things – score goals at one end and keep them out at the other, and time after time this season, against mediocre opposition, they have failed to do even that. Quod erat demonstrandum, I’m afraid. God alone knows where all the heart and passion and energy that took them to the FA cup final last season, and helped them give Arsenal the scare of their lives has gone, but it’s been missing in action for weeks now.

My attention was caught this week, however, since we’re on spiritual ground, by the proposal that the Catholic church should make Mother Teresa into a saint.  There are some quite vociferous arguments against this – that she opposed the empowerment of women, and by doing so she prolonged the misery of poverty in the areas for which she was responsible. As Christoper Hitchens said: 

Mother Teresa was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction.

I’m not quite sure what Mr Hitchens meant about empowerment of women being the only known cure for poverty, as there are plenty of others: diverting the money spent on arms in the world into the alleviation of disease and the provision of clean water in Africa and India; making sure that aid donations get to the people who need them, instead of being spent on gold bath-taps in the presidential palace; asking India why, when it has a space programme, there are still beggars on the streets of Calcutta, and halting the relentless plundering of the “undeveloped” world and its resources by rapacious multi-national companies. To name but a few.

Yes, obviously, more effective birth control in some areas would reduce the number of mouths to feed, but in those areas there also tends to be high infant mortality, so you can’t really blame people for having a large family partly to ensure that they themselves will be looked after in their old age. Some of the “indigenous” and “tribal” and “primitive” cultures which we in the west like to feel superior about could teach us a thing or two about the importance of the extended family.

But the crux of the matter for me is that it’s probably impossible to come up with any saint who is wholly good.  To be a saint, a religious one at any rate, it seems to me that you have to have been some kind of single minded monomaniac weirdo, probably with a sprinkling of added foibles.  The problem with people like Mother Teresa and indeed Julian of Norwich, whom I wrote about last week, is that they have such a strong belief in the salvation that is to come, that they tend to place less importance on suffering and poverty in this world. Julian of Norwich thinks that sins are mistakes which we have to learn from and overcome in order to get closer to God. Mother Teresa thinks that suffering is a gift from God. Personally, if anyone had told me on Wednesday that my man-flu was a gift from God and I should offer it up in prayer, they would probably have gone home with their windpipe in their pocket. Not all of us are made of such unworldly stuff, and some of us believe in life before death as well as life thereafter.

I’m guessing, therefore, that all saints had off days, and that maybe some of them weren’t the sort of person you’d want to share a breakfast table with.  Plus, the goalposts have been moved (perhaps Hull City, at least, can learn from that). In olden times, all that was necessary seemed to have been to have been hacked to pieces by a Roman, or to have been a hermit, or maybe to have been one of those members of the Royal Anglo-Saxon households of the Wuffingas, or Wessex, or similar.  Gradually, over the years, the idea of good works has set in, as the more supernatural elements of earlier sainthood have receded (miracles, picking up your severed head and walking off with it under your arm, and the like).

Much as I can see the logic in the Catholic post-demise progression from beatification to eventual sainthood and it all being ordered and ordained and all that, I still think, as I have said in previous blogs, that what we need is maybe an order of secular saints, this side of the grave, starting with the people who rescue and rehome unwanted dogs, cats and other animals.

As far as religious sainthood goes, whether someone is a deserving saint or not seems to depend on where you stand on the question of whether the possibility of a better life in the next world outweighs suffering and poverty in this one. Atheists and their like will automatically say that this attitude simply helps perpetuate the injustices and inequalities in the world, keeping the poor poor, and buying off their aspirations with a dazzling vision of heaven and the better world a-coming, by and by, where the circle will be unbroken.

I still find myself disagreeing with the view that any man-made poverty and suffering is necessary, let alone desirable. Sister Wendy Beckett said that praying during times of suffering is asking God to come and stand with you and help you get through it, and that seems to me a more sensible, more defensible attitude than saying “Yippee, thanks be to God, I have no money and my children have cholera”. 

So, once again, I’m at odds with established religion (at least the bit of it that’s responsible for turning Mother Teresa into a saint) which comes as no surprise to me, as it’s pretty much my default position these days. I have still been reading Julian of Norwich, and I was bothered enough to find out that, as well as being Whit Sunday, today is also the feast of St Joanna, who was the wife of Chuza, the steward of King Herod Antipas, tetrarch of Galilee.  She was apparently one of the women who discovered the empty tomb of Jesus on Easter Sunday, AD33.  In the Orthodox tradition, she is known as Joanna the Myrrhbearer, because she had come intending to anoint Jesus’s dead body with myrrh, though we should perhaps remember that, in the Orthodox tradition, it is also customary to have a beard like ZZ Top and wear a jiffy bag on your head, so it’s not all plain sailing.

The four Gospels don’t agree on the details of the women who were present at the tomb that morning when they apparently found it empty apart from an angel or two:  you can take your pick - Luke names them as Mary Magdalene, St Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and "the others with them".  Other gospels also include Salome (the one who was a follower of Jesus, possibly the wife of Zebedee – time for bed – and not the one who had John the Baptist’s head served up as a centrepiece). 

Whole books have been written by theologians about who was there that morning, comparing and contrasting the texts which have come down to us and positing that there may have been lost originals of which these are but copies, which would resolve the many dilemmas and variant readings of the Gospels as we currently have them.

St Mary Magdalene is a fascinating enigma. There has been so much written about her over the centuries, that even to attempt to summarise it here would mean I would still be sitting here on Wednesday typing this, and nowhere near finished.  Go and look, unless you are already familiar with it, of course.  Coincidentally, this week, I happened to catch a programme on TV about Mary Magdalene, through the haze of cotton wool and indifference which my cold had bred within me. This was in many ways the distillation of all of the various legends surrounding her: that she was the earthly consort of Jesus, that she bore him a child, begetting a bloodline; that she sailed from the Holy Land with various companions including Martha, Lazarus, and her unnamed child by Jesus, in the years following Christ’s crucifixion, making landfall in the south of France; that she is portrayed in The Last Supper by Leonardo Da Vinci, as the mysterious feminine figure who is leaning in towards Jesus and making a symbolic “M” shape.  This is all familiar territory, bred out of a mixture of The Holy Blood and The Holy Grail and Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, but I was struck by the strength of the devotion even now to the cult of the Magdalene in that area.

In St Maximin la Sainte Baume in southern France, the church has a life size golden reliquary of Mary Magdalene with a detachable gold face. When the face is removed, there is a glass bowl underneath, inside which is what is said to be the skull of the Magdalene herself. Every year, on the Sunday nearest to her feast day of July 22^nd, the relic is paraded through the town.  This tradition dates from 1279, when her sarcophagus was discovered on the site of what is now the basilica, as a result of a prophetic dream.

The presenter of the programme was also allowed to watch some, but not all, of a Cathar religious ritual, and apparently there are still people in that area who follow the (technically heretical) beliefs and tenets of the Cathars, despite their ruthless suppression in the Middle Ages. Whether this is really a continuing, unbroken tradition, a line going back to the time when Beziers was besieged by the Albigensian Crusade, or whether, a bit like Morris Dancing in many English villages, it was re-invented in the 1920s by pseudo-bucolic antiquaries and had a merrie olde gloss painted over it, is immaterial: these people were holding a service based on a text from the Book of Philip, in France, in the 21^st century. I’d love to have known what happened in the bit where the presenter was turfed out back into the street and not allowed to watch.

Mary Magdalen is important to the Cathars because the alleged relationship with the human Jesus is important in re-enforcing their dualistic view of the world.  The Coptic Gospels, the Gnostic texts, the Apochrypha, call it what you will, forms a large body of fascinating commentary on Jesus, his life and times, which has never found its way into the “official” Bible for various reasons, ever since AD46.  Mainly because they ask or pose awkward questions that can only be answered by recourse to potential heresy, and of course, the people who decided what was and wasn’t a heresy, were also the people who decided what went in “The Bible” or not.  So in many ways, it was “Catch 22”.

I seem to have got diverted a bit from St Joanna here: what I was going to say is that she is, I suppose, one of a third sort of saint. You have the early martyrs and the Anglo Saxons and the miracle workers, you have the later saints who actually went off into the jungle and founded clinics to fight disease and then died of it, and then you have the really early saints, who were saints simply by virtue of being “tinged” by association with Jesus during his time on earth.  Sort of automatic sainthood.

Yet clearly, St Mary Magdalene was not all good – at least in terms of conventional morality.  She is a very complex character, even if you discount all the unofficial legends and general hokum that has become attached to her by the likes of Dan Brown.  Were does sainthood lie, where does holiness actually lie? This is one of those questions like trying to pin down exactly where in the human body the soul may be found.  There are probably as many answers as there are saints, which I suppose gives some hope to those of us who are a lot less than perfect and have no idea what we should be doing with the remainder of our lives.  And also maybe we need a standard of sainthood other than the official route of beatification to canonisation.

Today is also Whit Sunday, of course, and as a Larkin fan, (Philip, not Pa) I am unlikely to have forgotten this, but for the last two years I have written specifically about Whitsun, and I just felt like a bit of a change.  That doesn’t mean I have forsaken that reedy river bank “where sky and Lincolnshire meet” – far from it, in fact. In what is laughably described as my spare time, this week, I have been doing some more family history research, and attempting actually to write up my notes of many years past.  This is a bit like a security blanket for me. In adverse times, when I feel under pressure, I always tend to burrow back into the past – it’s like a giant archival duvet where I am safe from all this modern-word stuff that needs sorting out – book deadlines, idiot couriers that don’t turn up, illnesses, packing orders, doing the bank rec. etc etc., If I can take a wander back to Cockley Cley in the 1730s, or even Hull in the 1860s, I quite often return from my historical rambles feeling refreshed and renewed.

And it’s not all been bad news this week. Thanks to Owen’s sterling efforts, the hurdle is now in place, it looks quite good, even though I say it myself, and one of the Litadora is in flower.  So I count that a small victory.  And re-reading Larkin’s poem about The Whitsun Weddings also makes me think yet again about the random nature of life and how there could be saints amongst us even now, that we do not recognise.  Don’t ask me why, or how, it’s just the random glimpses into other people’s lives – someone running up to bowl, and all that.  We meet these people for an instant, and then never again. Read the poem – the descriptions are a succession of what-might-have-beens, each frozen in that moment of time when he actually intersected with them, but carrying on outside of the poem, afterwards, to an unknown conclusion.  Which is a bit like life in general.

Anyway, it’s Sunday teatime and once more I’ve argued myself to a standstill. Debbie is about to take her first tenuous steps outside for a couple of days, on a short walk with Zak and Misty, and see how she gets on.  I have a rhubarb pie to make. I may do some more writing up on the Rudds later. Next week, though, I am really going to have to get my act in gear, and slough off the duvet of genealogy, and strap on the armour of commerce (quite what either of those metaphors would look like in real life escapes me, but you get the idea). In short, I need to stop fannying about and tinkering around the edges while I watch each deadline flying past, and instead get a grip on things. I may, however, find time to plant some marigolds.

Epiblog for Ascension Sunday

  

It has been a busy week in the Holme valley. Not without incident, but mostly unremarkable. Just how I like it, in fact.There have been no ghastly and untoward shocks, apart from some idiot couriers not delivering some books on Thursday morning as they were supposed to, and paid to. But even that resolved itself in the end, in an unprecedented outbreak of serendipity.  Today, of course, has been a different matter, but Matilda has been going to and fro with no obvious alarums or excursions, the squirrels and the birds have had their sunflower seeds, and maybe the badger has graced us with another visit, as one morning I found that the dish had not only been emptied but also turned over, as if grasped in a pair of strong jaws and upended to get at the last leavings.  The weather could have been better on a couple of days, but basically God’s in his heaven, and all’s right with the world (well, not quite, but more of that later).

Misty and Zak have been off, too, over hills and mountains high with Debbie. In the course of Thursday, Friday and Saturday this week, they did a total of 42 miles, mostly over the moors around Wessenden.  Ellie’s little legs can’t cope with that sort of thing, as we have discovered, so generally she’s been staying here with me, either snoring away in the chair (on a strangely basso profundo note for such a small, white dog) or pottering around the park with Granny.

It was Debbie’s birthday this week, so we did at least sort of take Friday off, although we didn’t do anything special, other than welcome her sister, on a flying weekend visit from Southampton, and the whole family went out for a celebratory meal on Friday night while I did the dog-sitting.

I’ve been trying to progress my “rampside” garden of plants in tubs, and this week I made significant progress, getting the tubs in place on their stacks of bricks, with the hurdle currently balanced above them, but sadly, today, I ran out of topsoil, so I am still unable to finish it.  Having said that, the plug plants in their trays are still progressing well, so with a bit of luck, maybe, this week I’ll get them planted out.

Gardening is therapeutic, at any rate, certainly when compared to watching the news. Mr Cameron was quick to warn us that if Labour got into power at the next election, almost the first thing they would do would be to get in cahoots with the dangerous extremists of the SNP. So this week, he set off for Scotland, to, er, hold talks with the dangerous extremists of the SNP.

The SNP are a very principled party, led by a very principled leader, who makes it clear what she stands for. Mind you, the last time we had one of those, it was Mrs Thatcher, and we all know where that led.  Still, it’s good to know the SNP has principles, such as, for instance, the principle of agreeing to abstain in a vote on the restoration of fox hunting in return for an extra thirty pieces of silver for Scotland. It must be nice to have principles.

Mr Cameron has also been brandishing his principles in public.  Especially his Christian principles.  He isn’t the first Tory leader to seek to appropriate Christianity to his own ends, of course, Mrs Thatcher (I need to be careful here, I’ve mentioned her twice – one more time and she might appear!) was fond of saying words to the effect that it was only because the Good Samaritan had invested wisely and bought British Gas shares and his own council house that he had enough money to help the man who fell among thieves: if the parable were to be translated to the modern-day xenophobic rat-hole which the UK has been turned into by the Blight Brigade and their ilk, the Good Samaritan would probably be deported, assuming he managed to get into the country in the first place.

Actually, that would be a good place to start. Perhaps Mr Cameron can explain what, precisely, is “Christian” about his proposed alternative to offering sanctuary to a quota of the Mediterranean refugees: bombing the boats of the people traffickers at their North African moorings.

Or what, specifically, is “Christian” about presiding over policies which deliberately set out to damage the poor, bearing in mind that the meek shall apparently inherit the earth? What is “Christian” about making the rich richer and the poor poorer, when it says in the Bible that it is harder for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven than it is for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle?

As a “Christian”, David Cameron should know that “we’re all in this together” means you’re supposed to love your neighbour as yourself – unless, of course, your neighbour happens to be ill, disabled, or, worst of all, on benefits, because then, according to the Blight Brigade, you cease to be worthy of love and become instead an object of derision, a scapegoat for all of society’s ills.

I recommend Mr Cameron reinforces his new-found faith by some judicious Bible study.  The texts to which I would direct his attention are as follows:

Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye pay tithe of mint and anise and cummin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith: these ought ye to have done, and not to leave the other undone.   Ye blind guides, which strain at a gnat, and swallow a camel. Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye make clean the outside of the cup and of the platter, but within they are full of extortion and excess.  Thou blind Pharisee, cleanse first that which is within the cup and platter, that the outside of them may be clean also.  Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men's bones, and of all uncleanness.  Even so ye also outwardly appear righteous unto men, but within ye are full of hypocrisy and iniquity.  Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! because ye build the tombs of the prophets, and garnish the sepulchres of the righteous,

It’s Matthew 23: 23-29, if you want to look it up, Prime Minister.  I am sure Mr Cameron won’t mind me pointing these out to him, because, after all, he did say that he wants Christians in this country to be more “evangelical”. Because, after all, “evangelical” always works well, just ask the Westboro Baptist Church. Or Isis, for that matter. But, says Mr Cameron, apparently unconscious of the old joke that “if there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s intolerance”, and totally impervious to irony, he thinks that we’ve all been too tolerant for too long.  I disagree. The one thing that still, just about, differentiates us from the bad guys is the last shreds of our once tolerant, respectful and caring society. Take that away, and you can’t fit a fag paper between us and the idiots who stone people, or cut off their hands, or whip them in public, because it is the will of Allah. Or God. Or whoever.

In fact, Cameron said something that would not have been out of place had it emanated from the mouth of a mad Mullah in Saudi Arabia.  Basically, obeying the law is no longer enough to keep you from the attention of the authorities.  From now on, presumably, you will be watched for a variety of reasons, including failing to join the Tory party, or failing to cheer enthusiastically enough at torchlight parades.  They’re going to have a problem with me, because this week I joined not the Blue Rinse Set, but the Labour Party. This may well be a mistake, but at least I have done it by direct debit, which is cancellable without doing too much financial damage. I joined online with a heavy heart, and in the “reason for joining” field I put that “someone has to sort out the shambles that has saddled us with another five years of Tory nuclear winter”. I have previously resisted being a member of any organised political party, on the grounds that it makes it easy for your opponents then to turn around and say “well, you would say that, wouldn’t you, because you’re a Labour supporter”. I haven’t joined the Labour Party to support the Labour Party, right or wrong.  I have joined it so that I will at least have a voice that might be listened to in the post-disaster inquest, and a say in how it goes forwards from this point.  They certainly didn’t listen to me before the election, even when I emailed them it, with links. And if they don’t listen afterwards, the direct debit will be cancelled faster than you can say Tolpuddle Martyr.

Prince Charles also knows what it’s like to be ignored by the political classes, at least from the evidence of his so-called “black spider” letters which were finally published this week in response to a lengthy freedom of information request dispute. Personally, I don’t see what the fuss was about: it would have been much more of a surprise if Prince Charles, as a member of a family that actively enjoys “field sports” (which is what rich people call ripping animals to pieces with a pack of dogs) wasn’t in favour of the badger cull.  Still, it’s good that we live in a Christian country, one where Tesco, for instance, can instigate a prosecution against people who were forced to scavenge for discarded food in the bins outside the back of one of those stores. Fortunately, the judge threw the case out, but as Joanna Blythman wrote about it in The Guardian:

Paul and Kerry Barker fit the label of “hardworking families” that politicians bandy about. Or they did, that is, until Paul Barker had to quit his job after breaking his back while working as a scaffolder, and post-natal depression forced Kerry to give up her job at Durham county council. They finally became desperate enough to steal food from bins when her benefits were stopped after she missed a meeting earlier in the year. The couple’s two children now live with their grandparents because their parents can’t afford to feed them. That’s how grim things are for the Barkers.

No doubt Mr Cameron has matters in hand, probably with a plan which involves five loaves and two fishes.

For such a pleasant week, at least at home, if not in the country at large, today has proved to be a complete and utter disaster.  I didn’t have enough topsoil to finish planting out my tubs, and the axle of the front bogie wheel on the wheelchair came loose yet again and almost tipped me out on the ramp. I just made it back inside and boarded out of the chair in time to fix it with the Allen key. Why, when we allegedly have a national health service that is supposed to fix wheelchairs, are they unable to do so? Yes, that’s a rhetorical question. I know. It’s because the entire country, including the NHS – especially the NHS, under the Blight Brigade – is going to hell in a handcart. In those circumstances, the wheel coming off is actually quite an appropriate metaphor.  And yes, I know, these, along with idiot couriers who can’t tell the time or read a map, and stupid Epson printers that don’t scan properly and can’t print labels or postcards, are very much first world problems. At least I haven’t had to watch my kid die from cholera or seen all my animals starve because the crops failed.

Anyway, I’ve had it with today.  Today, a day when I felt both ill and out of sorts with the world, a day when I have struggled and fought the good fight to no avail, is the Sunday after Ascension Day. Ascension Day, when Christ was taken up bodily into heaven, was Thursday, but I largely missed it owing to spending the day grappling with idiot couriers, see above.  In any case, following my brief flirtation with her last week, I have been exposing myself more fully to Julian of Norwich (quiet at the back, there.)

No one knows her real name, and she was only designated Julian of Norwich because she set up as an anchoress in St Julian’s Church, in that flat East Anglian town.  But whatever her real name was, it is as Julian of Norwich that she has come down to us.

After briefly revising her writings for last week’s blog, I actually invested in a copy of The Revelations of Divine Love, and read it from cover to cover. It’s not that long.  I read most of it at one sitting, in the driveway, on the end of my wheelchair ramp, on Thursday morning, while waiting to ambush the dustmen to make sure they took the bin. I contend strongly that I must have been the only person in England who was simultaneously engaged in those two particular activities.

Anyway, re-reading Julian of Norwich, several things jumped out at me straight away, which I’d forgotten, or may not even have noticed, when I first read it, many years ago, as an adjunct to studying the works of T S Eliot.  The most obvious one was re-reading the famous passage about the hazel nut.

Also in this he showed a little thing the quantity of a hazel nut lying in the palm of my hand, as it had seemed to me, This little thing that is made that is beneath our Lady Saint Mary, God showed me as little as it had been a hazel nut, and to my understanding, and it was as round as a ball. I looked thereupon with the eye of my understanding  and thought, 'What may this be?' And it was generally answered thus,  'It is all that is made'. I marveled how it might last, for I thought it might suddenly have fallen to nought for littleness. And I was answered in my understanding, 'It lasts and ever shall, for God loves it'.

The thing that I know now, of course, that I didn’t know then, is about the concept of the singularity. The science behind black holes and the big bang was largely unformed back in the 1970s, though since then it has been developed and published and even re-gurgitated by people like John Gribben for the “popular reader”, ie me.  Sadly, I dropped physics in the third year, like a red hot brick, never to pick it up again, so I have a lot of catching up to do.  But I do know that apparently at the core of every black hole there is a point where time stops, according to Einstein at any rate – the very small, very dense core. Seemingly every galaxy has a black hole at its centre.  It was also, apparently, supposedly, a singularity such as this, an incredibly small, incredibly dense particle of matter that was the origin of everything, at the big bang.

I don’t know what lies on the other side of the singularity, or indeed if any of the boffins have any idea.  To the puzzled layman (that’s me, folks) physics seems to be stuck at the moment for want of something to unify the theories of all the big stuff with all the theories of the small stuff, and take into account string theory and multiverses as well.  I realise that’s a horrendous over generalisation, which will have physicists and people of a more scientific bent than myself throwing up their hands in horror, but just hold that thought, because in a moment I am going to come out with a real lulu that will have you reaching for your pearl-handled Luger.

I ask this from a standpoint of pure ignorance, so feel free to shoot the idea down in flames, but why can’t the singularities at the centre of each galaxy be the portals to the multiverse. You get the other side of the singularity, and everything starts up again, except you’re in a slightly different universe, and that universe also contains galaxies with a black hole at their centre, and so on.

Very good, I hear you cry, but what has this to do with religion? Well, if God really is this “thing” outside of time and space which encompasses everything that ever was, is, and shall be, world without end, amen, including all of the possible permutations of all of the possible universes, where God has all eternity to listen to the momentary prayer of the dying airman, as C S Lewis said, the model of the universe I’ve just described would not be incompatible with this, necessarily. In fact, one could even go further and posit that it might be infused with an intelligence which would gradually direct you through several portals until you arrived at an alternative universe where everything was joy and light eternal and there was no pain and suffering, where, as Julian of Norwich puts it, “all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well” – or “heaven”, as it’s sometimes known.

I realise I am getting into some pretty strange theology here, and I feel a bit like Galilleo (Figaro Magnifico-oh-oh-oh-oh) must have felt when he had the temerity to suggest that the earth went round the sun rather than vice versa.  But the more modern science explores the physics behind reality, the less “real” reality becomes, and you have to ask yourself, if everything that we think of as being solid, reliable, and durable, is actually just some sort of flickering flim-flam of electrical energy, then what is actually real? What’s behind it all?  It could be that the entire universe is being run by a bloke with a home-made Van-Der-Graaf Generator in a shed in Droitwich. It could be an old bloke on a throne, with a flowing beard, and a penchant for hurling thunderbolts – or it could be something so far beyond our comprehension that we find ourselves in the position of a Neanderthal hunter-gatherer trying to think of, and describe, a computer.

The problem with this view of religion, of the universe, of God being in and around everything, is that it doesn’t really allow for any moral guidance or, indeed, any organisation.  When I have had my occasional thoughts that “all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well”, it’s rarely if ever been in the context of a formal church service.  Once, I felt it in the church at Little Gidding, but I was alone there at the time, and not exactly taking part in a service – and, given the location, I have to allow for the fact that I may just have “grafted” the experience onto the moment, because I was there, in Eliot’s words, “to kneel, where prayer has been valid,” and that was what was expected of me, “in the draughty church, at smokefall.”

But organised religion has much to say about morality, and how we should live our lives, and this advice, although based on a 2000-year old desert survival manual for the Children of Israel, plus the teachings of Jesus written down for the first time up to a century after his death, is sometimes apposite. It would undoubtedly be a better world if we loved our neighbour as ourselves. But it’s also open to abuse, coercion and manipulation, and justifying bad things because someone somewhere has decided with absolutely no authority or compassion, that this act, whatever it is, is the will of God, or Allah, or whoever.

I wrote last week about Julian of Norwich’s attitude to sin, which can be (very crudely) summed up as being that sin is a learning process from which we grow nearer to God.  I said last week that I had difficulty with this. There are some people who seem so deliberately evil that it is almost impossible for me to believe that their conduct is simply mistaken.  But on the other hand, if you do allow for the fact that we all have a spark of the divine, the good, call it God or whatever, inside us, and that we are trying to get back to that happy state of childhood innocence and purity of heart, which is what the 17^th-century Neo-Platonists believed, then there is a case to be advanced for “sin”, whatever its causes, to be the thing that obfuscates that process, that sets us back on the journey. This still leaves unresolved, though, the larger questions of what sin is, where it originates, and who decides what is a sin and what isn’t, and whether some sins are worse than others.

Either way, given the “Christian” values apparently espoused by our political leaders, and the curious absence of any correction from the Church of England, given how vocal they were before the election, I feel more than ever now that my church should be a grove of trees, and my choir the birds, and my holy water the rain that raineth every day. George Fox had the right idea, and if I could, I’d go up on the moors and shout alongside him, “Woe unto the Bloody Country of England!”

Who knows what next week will bring. Tomorrow can only be better, but to be honest, right now, I’m too tired to care.

Epiblog for the Feast of St Juliana of Norwich

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. Sadly, this week, Spring failed to live up to its earlier promise, and instead of getting warmer, the weather seems stuck in a default “cold and grey” mode, with occasional fleeting glimpses of sunshine, and a horrendous downpour on Wednesday, leaving me fearing for the well-being of my herbs, although as it turned out, the drainage holes I’d drilled into the tubs did their stuff, and they dried the soil out as the rainwater passed through.

There’s been no need to water the garden, then, which seems to be coming up quite nicely, even where we don’t want it to! But the clematis is in bud, and there are flowers on the magnolia, so it’s not all bad news.  Matilda has been dodging the showers, and the birds and squirrels have been dodging Matilda, rather more successfully.  Actually, she almost came unstuck during the week when she was out on the decking and I heard a tremendous racket coming out of the tree that overhangs nearest to the conservatory door. I trundled over to see what was going on, and found myself being eyeballed by a raven, of all things, who was telling Matilda, and anyone else who would listen, how unimpressed he was with the cat preventing him coming down for some bird seed.  I must admit, I thought ravens were exclusively carrion birds, but nevertheless, that is what I saw.

Matilda, for her part, was eyeing up the raven with a sort of “come and have a go if you think you’re hard enough” look, and I could only foresee this ending one way – badly, with Matilda being borne off in its talons towards Castle Hill.  I opened the door, the raven flew off with enormous, slow, wing-beats, Matilda scuttled in and stuck her face in her Felix bowl, and we all went back to whatever it was we had been doing before we were so rudely interrupted.  As I type this, she is once again sprawled out in her little favourite sunny spot on the decking, snoozing, with her legs stretched out on the warm wood.

Misty, Zak and Ellie have all had a fairly uneventful week, for them. Because it was a teaching week, Deb hasn’t been on any long expeditions, just a couple of ten milers or so.  Ellie’s been sticking her snout down mole and rabbit holes in the time honoured terrier fashion, and has come back a couple of times with a black face instead of the usual brown and white one.  She also suffered a slight contretemps when she ran, barking, into a large puddle in one of the fields on her walk, and suddenly found that it was a lot deeper than she thought when it came up to the tops of her legs.

Freddie used to have that trouble as well, in snowdrift and in puddles, and Friday, as well as being the 70^th anniversary of VE Day, we also the first anniversary of his death. I’ve written many words in many books about little Fred, about how he used to sleep, in his last few trips with us, on the front seat of the camper van, wrapped up in my desert scarf. I’m glad he made it to Arran, that one last time in 2013. For a little dog, he climbed some big mountains, and was never daunted by any of them.  I suggested to Debbie that we should think of some appropriate way of marking the anniversary, and her suggestion was that, for that day, whenever we saw a squirrel on the decking, we should hurl ourselves against the glass of the conservatory door, barking, but in the end we went with my idea of lighting some T-lights.  Matilda has had a very close encounter with a squirrel, actually, this week because she had been watching “cat TV” (ie sitting just inside the conservatory door and lashing her tail and chattering at the squirrels and birds outside) and she must have dropped off, while in the meantime, a daring squirrel came right to the other side of the glass and started hoovering up some spare sunflower seeds.  Because the decking is lower than the threshold on the outside, it wasn’t immediately obvious it was there, so when Matilda woke up from her snooze and looked out of the window again, it came as a considerable shock to her when a squirrel popped up an inch from the end of her nose, albeit separated by a double-glazed door. She did that thing that cats sometimes do when startled, of jumping upwards and backwards at the same time, with all four paws off the ground at once. The squirrel skedaddled.

I’m pleased to report an apparently happy outcome to the saga of Poppy, the stray black cat in the garden, who has now been taken on by the neighbours as a fully-accredited auxiliary pet, and has been down to the vets and neutered, courtesy of the Cats’ Protection League.  I have to report, in the interests of even handedness, that this is the first occasion since 1992 when I have actually called on the Cats’ Protection League and they have actually helped, but in this case at least, they, and my neighbour, are to be commended for their actions.

As for me, I haven’t yet been re-homed, though I am sure Debbie has it on her to-do list, but in the meantime, I’ve been keeping busy editing books, doing various marketing tasks, accounts, sorting out boxes of old stuff, and also doing yet more gardening. I am now working on setting up the left hand side of my ramp, with three more planted-out tubs, and to that end I managed to procure a 6 ft  by 3 ft willow hurdle, which I intend to paint white and then mount onto the wall behind the tubs, to reflect light.  Debbie came out and watched me giving it the first coat, with an amused look of tolerance.

“I was going for the old, distressed, weatherbeaten look,” I said, by way of explanation.

“Are we talking about you, or the hurdle?” was her reply.

The other big domestic event of the week was my trip to Huddersfield Royal Infirmary, for my six-monthly check up, to see how much further I have deteriorated.  I almost didn’t make it, because when the ambulance man came, apparently I was down on his paperwork as being ambulatory, when in fact I should have been designated as a “Wheelchair One”. Free the wheelchair one! The vehicle had a perfectly adequate tail-lift, but the problem was that this single tick in the wrong box on the ambulance control system meant that I wasn’t insured for the journey. No insurance = no travel. One twenty-minute mobile phone call by the ambulance man to control later, and all was sorted. I was loaded on board in the usual sack of spuds fashion, and apologised to my fellow-travellers for the delay in their journey.

I got to discussing the world in general (it was election day, after all, though I had already voted, by post) and setting things to rights. I mentioned Hull, and his ears pricked up He, too, had been born in the city. Whereabouts? I enquired – only to be told “Bean Street”.  Bean Street was where Granny Rudd and my Dad and Auntie Mavis were living in the 1920s and 30s. It was there that the unfortunate George Hill Cooper, Granny Rudd’s father, finally gave up the struggle against the strange voices and sounds in his mind, and stuck his head in the gas oven, with fatal consequences.  My compatriot in the ambulance was born in 1928, he said, which meant he must have been living there when my Dad, aged 7, was living in the same street.

He told me he’d been back to Hull, recently, to look up the old place, and I said I imagined he’d found it greatly altered, to which he agreed.  Bean Street’s alterations began on the night of 14^th/15^th March 1941, when a German parachute mine, jettisoned by a Luftwaffe plane from KG54, probably a Junkers JU-88 based at St Andre-en-Evreux in France, blew half of Bean Street to brick-dust and crap, causing what the official war diary called “extensive domestic damage”, killing nineteen people and injuring twenty-two.  One of those made homeless that night was Granny Rudd, but it’s an ill mine that blows no good, because eventually her lack of a house led to her being given a prefab, on Sweet Dews Grove off Newbridge Road, where yours truly entered this world ten years after the war ended.

When we commemorate VE day, we think of course of the sacrifices of the military and emergency services personnel during those five dark days, but we shouldn’t overlook the very real fear, privation and hardship undergone by the civilians, such as both my grandmas. By now, anyway, we’d reached the hospital, and I have to say, my first sight of the brand-new outpatient facility at Acre Mills, a former wire-works which has been taken over by HRI and fitted out as a drop-in centre, was very impressive.  During my consultation, which consisted mainly of my detailing the various ways in which I could no longer do things which I could do previously, I happened to mention that my wheelchair was also a bit the worse for wear, but that this was only to be expected, as I had taken it up to Arran a few times.

Anna, Dr Naylor’s registrar, exclaimed that she went to Arran every year on holiday as well. Her husband’s family have a holiday flat there at Corriegills.  As I had previously observed to Harold from Bean Street in the bus on the way in, it’s a small world, though I shouldn’t like to have to paint it.  Unfortunately the journey home didn’t prove so entertaining or trouble-free, as there was some sort of ambulance crisis on and I was stuck there waiting for about two and a quarter hours in the “transport lounge”.  Oddly enough, yesterday, when I had all but forgotten the trip, I got a text asking me to rate them on how likely I am to "recommend them to a friend"!  Dear Friend, if you too are lucky enough to contract a life-limiting genetic disease, why not try Huddersfield Royal Infirmary outpatients for that (possibly) once in a lifetime experience. They've got a Costa Coffee and everything. Or you could always let the Fire Brigade have a crack at curing you! This is why the NHS is short of money. Too much of this poodlefaking nonsense sucking up the budget.

The NHS has been much on my mind in a more general sense this week, of course, because of the election. The election was a disaster, as predicted, but at times like this, you do find yourself casting around for the odd scraps of good news in amongst the gloom. True, we are still saddled with Katie bloody Hopkins, but on the plus side, Esther McVey lost her job, and I truly hope she gets sanctioned unless she can prove that she was actively looking for work at 9AM tomorrow.  And of course, the Liberal Democrats (an oxymoron if ever there was one) met their Waterloo, or rather, their Stalingrad, and deservedly so. I cheered as each domino fell.  The Junta is no more. Plus there is every chance of the rebellious Scottish Nationalists kicking large holes in any attempts to impose “austerity” by the Blight Brigade.  Nigel Farage failed in his bid to be elected.  Paddy Ashdown may well have to eat his hat, live on TV.  (That would make a good “Masterchef” challenge… Paddy has cooked his hat three ways…)

And of course, although it may not seem like an advantage, it is – the enemy is now in plain sight. No more chindit-ing around in the jungle, deciding to strangle the first-born of every voter in an attempt to keep the benefits bill down, then sending out a Liberal Democrat to make the actual announcement. We know who the bad guys are, they are there for all to see, we know what they think and what they’re going to try and do. No more Lib Dim figleaves and obfuscation. The enemy is in the field, on the plain before us, drawn up in serried ranks like the Orcs and Nazguls at Helm’s Deep. Fire up the War-wolf.

I have written many words on the inadequacies of Ed Miliband, and I don’t want to re-visit all of them here. He made several serious tactical blunders, both in his period of “opposition” and in the campaign itself. These included; not offering a referendum on Europe, and thereby cutting off any hope of the working-class voters who had defected (I almost typed ‘defecated’) to UKIP ever coming back; failing to counter the repeated Tory lie that a) Labour had left the economy in a mess and b) the Tories had fixed it, neither of which is true; meekly accepting the Tory frame of reference on things such as the Benefits Cap; apologising for things which weren’t his fault; and actively campaigning with the Tories against the SNP during the referendum, an act which was, for the Scottish Labour Party, on Thursday, the equivalent of being sent “over the top” on July 1^st 1916, and with a similar outcome.

Ed Miliband proved to be the Tim Henman of Labour, a man with the killer instinct of Bambi. We needed someone with the intellect and vision of Clement Attlee and the street fighting pugnacity of John Prescott, and what we got was the exact opposite. I’m sorry if this sounds harsh. It’s actually nothing I haven’t said before, many times, and if the Labour Party has listened when he was up, I might not now be kicking him when he’s down.

But whatever reason, the botched Labour campaign and the failure specifically to counter the Tory lies has landed us with five more years of doom. Five more years of food banks; five more years of austerity; five more years of welfare cuts affecting the most needy and vulnerable; five more years of the bedroom tax and the benefits cap; five more years of the NHS being dismantled, brick by brick; five more years of crappy low paid zero hours pretend jobs on zero hours contracts that have to be topped up with in-work benefits; five more years of people dumping their pets or having to take them to the shelter because they can no longer afford to keep a cat or a dog; five more years of hatred and xenophobia, of vans driving round telling brown people to go “home”; five more years of people being declared fit to work by Atos and then dying of cancer; five more years of rising homelessness; five more years of the disabled being demonised and labelled as scroungers, five more years of the NHS being dismantled, and five more years of people starving to death with £2.60 in their bank account because their benefits have been sanctioned. Anyone who voted Tory yesterday voted for that, and I hope it comes back to bite them and theirs, in spades redoubled.

Oh, and the return of fox-hunting. Meanwhile, if anyone can think of a suitable use for the Ed stone, answers on a postcard please.  For Labour there is much work to be done, but we can at least take some comfort from the fact that, even though they have an overall majority (just) the next parliament is not going to be plain sailing for the Blight Bridgade. They will split on Europe, and I am sure Cameron will soon get fed up of being harangued by Nicola Sturgeon. Prime Minister’s Question Time is going to be entertaining.  The Labour Party, meanwhile, needs to pick a new leader who can catch the Tory lies on the wing and ram them straight back down Cameron’s throat. I am seriously considering joining the Labour Party, but of course if I join anything, I lose my independence to comment.  One thing that the Labour Party should do, immediately, from day 1, is put down a marker by abandoning “pairing”.  Pairing is where two MPs on opposing sides agree to be mutually absent for certain votes, so that they can both be elsewhere doing other things.  In any other industry or job, this would be the sort of thing that the papers used to call “Spanish Practices” and it should be illegal.  Make the Tories work for every vote. Once they have had to fly back from Brussels a few times in order to vote on the Statutory Instrument for the Rother and Jury’s Gut Water Catchment Board, the wheels might start to come off.

Cameron has declared his support for the idea of a Margaret Thatcher Memorial Museum and Library. Presumably with Margaret Thatcher memorial spikes in the doorway to stop the Margaret Thatcher memorial homeless sleeping there.  Anyway, I don’t know why he’s bothering. On the evidence of Thursday’s vote, the whole country is turning into the Margaret Thatcher Memorial Museum.  Perhaps the Ed stone can be repurposed and used in the foundations somewhere, in recognition of his small but crucial part in that process.

So, at the end of a sombre week, which also included the VE Day celebrations, though these were largely lost in the static of the fallout from the election disaster, we came to today, the sixth Sunday of Easter, apparently.  It was also the week, though, which contained (on Friday) the feast day of St Juliana of Norwich, and it is to her that I have dedicated this Epiblog, even though her feast was two days ago. Or in three days' time, according to the Catholic calendar. No offence to Jesus or anything, but this part of the gospels and the readings for these various Sundays between Easter Sunday and the start of what the church calls “Ordinary Time” are all full of him going round infusing people with the holy spirit and stuff like that, but the air of painstakingly putting something together again after a massive defeat, rebuilding structures from the bottom and trying to create something even greater than what has been lost, is a bit too close to home and a bit too raw. Juliana of Norwich, however, is just the ticket, at least for me she is, at a time when I feel my spirits need re-balancing.  Especially in a week where I have felt more than usually belligerent and unforgiving.

I was particularly interested in her writing on sin. Unlike conventional theologians of her time, Juliana of Norwich believed that sin arises from ignorance or naivety, rather than some innate evil, latent within us all. She ties sin together with the idea of failure, and that when we learn, we have to fail, and when we fail, that’s where the sin comes in, and the pain we endure because of our mistakes is an earthly echo of the pain Jesus suffered on the cross.  Thus, those who suffer become closer to Christ.  She also preached that there was no wrath in God, but it was more the case that God sees us as we will be when we are perfected, when our souls are finally free from the hindrance of sin because our learning process is completed.

I am drawn to Juliana of Norwich because of her direct experience of God as expressed in her writings. On those odd occasions when I have felt a similar, although much more feeble connection, it is summed up perfectly by her saying that

All shall be well,

And all manner of thing shall be well.

But I struggle with the idea that the people in this world who commit evil, in which I include the incoming government, do so because it is all part of some sort of learning process to do with their spiritual development.  Especially as there is no or little evidence of them learning from their mistakes or undergoing any anguish, crucifixion-related or otherwise.

However, the other thing I find startling about Juliana of Norwich is her pre-figuring of the same sort of explanation of the universe as being God and vice versa, as is sometimes advanced by modern-day physicists: that there is something which was, is now and ever shall be, over which we move the lens of consciousness to make up our own version of “reality” on the hoof as we go along. This theory, expounded by John Gribben amongst others, is also present in Juliana’s most famous passage of revelation, once you strip away the flowery language.

And in this he showed me a little thing, the quantity of a hazel nut , lying in the  palm of my hand, as it seemed. And it was as round as any ball. I looked upon it with the eye of my understanding, and thought, 'What may this be?' And it was answered generally thus, 'It is all that is made.' I marvelled how it might last, for I thought it might suddenly have fallen to nought for littleness. And I was answered in my understanding: It lasts and ever shall, for God loves it. And so have all things their beginning by the love of God.  In this little thing I saw three properties. The first is that God made it. The second that he loves it. And the third, that God keeps it.

I came to her writings via T S Eliot, who draws extensively on her during the Four Quartets.  In Little Gidding he uses the “all shall be well” quotation and the “grounds of our beseeching” passage.

Whatever we inherit from the fortunate

We have taken from the defeated

What they had to leave us—a symbol:

A symbol perfected in death.

And all shall be well and

All manner of thing shall be well

By the purification of the motive

In the ground of our beseeching.

Eliot, too, was obsessed in the Four Quartets by “what might have been”, a concept also embraced by Juliana’s “nutshell”, and a concept which has been much on my mind this week. I intend to re-read the whole of Juliana of Norwich over the next few days, as clearly there are things in it that I didn’t see the first time around.  Sin as a learning curve, for instance. But, at the end of a bruising week, and having once more opened Four Quartets to chase up the Juliana references, I couldn’t help but notice the lines in East Coker about:

…every attempt

Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure

Because one has only learnt to get the better of words

For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which

One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture

Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate

With shabby equipment always deteriorating

In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,

Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer

By strength and submission, has already been discovered

Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope

To emulate—but there is no competition—

There is only the fight to recover what has been lost

And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions

That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.

For us, there is only the trying.

Normally, by this point, I might or might not have come to some sort of spiritual resolution, and maybe give a hint of looking forward to next week. However, at this juncture, I seem to find myself more and more looking back.

The people who came back from the war in 1945 and voted in Atlee in the Labour landslide knew exactly what they wanted. A land fit for heroes. Their parents had been promised it after the carnage and slaughter of Flanders in the first world war, and then had it snatched away again: this time, they were determined. The NHS, education, nationalisation.  No return to the 1930s with its hunger marches, unemployment, and soup-kitchens. 

Now we find ourselves in a similar position. There are undoubtedly going to be some very dark days ahead for those of us who also believe in life before death. A huge, ignorant, brutal and uncaring army is drawn up before us on the field of battle, and they are set on destroying every advance in decent society in the last seventy years. If you ask me, we owe it to the memory of those who stopped fascism in its tracks and built the Welfare State, to buckle on our armour, and go out there and do it all again.

There is only the fight to recover what has been lost

And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions

That seem unpropitious.