Epiblog for the Ninth Sunday after Trinity

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley, and a very frustrating one. The loading and the preparation of the camper van continued, though seriously hampered by the crappy weather, which threatened to drench Debbie every time she ventured into the driveway with yet more items to load up. Monday, we spent the whole day watching it rain; it was coming down like stair rods.

Tuesday was probably the most frustrating day in a series of frustrating days. Another day of dismal weather, although the kayak was at last now on board. I lost the sides to my other wheelchair, then I found the sides to my other wheelchair. An hour later. I solved a major problem with my mobile phone. I made (and ate - for now, at least) the world's worst risotto. Debbie wisely had 2 vegan bacon wraps and a crisp sandwich instead. We lost the winch and spanner for the kayak rack, then we found the winch and spanner to the kayak rack, one and a half hours later.  Cats fed, one, several times. Dogs fed, two, at least twice. Tomorrow, God willing, would find us at Mossburn Community Farm. Thursday at Ardrossan and, provided the ferries aren't on strike or anything, Thursday teatime at Dougarie, on the Isle of Arran.  

On Wednesday, finally, we set off for Scotland . I put the front on the radio and tried to tune it in. No sound from the speakers. That's odd, thought I, and asked Deb if she'd had the radio on since it last came back from the garage, having its alternator done. No, says she...

OK, I said, keep driving and I'll try to fix it as we go along. I kept trying various buttons, took the front off and put it back on again, but the most it would raise was a feeble pop and crackle. Engrossed in my task, I was not paying much attention until Debbie shouted "####!" at the top of her voice. I looked up, thinking she'd run over a kid, or something, to see smoke coming out from the dashboard. "It's on fire", she said, rather unnecessarily, coasting in to the side of the road, and ripping the keys out of the ignition,. The engine kept running. Argh! What knavish devilry is this?

The fire had died down, though, so she said "I'm going to try and get it home", which she did, albeit with no indicators, which had also crozzled. It still wouldn't stop when we got home, so she had to deliberately stall it. The RAC man at 8pm, when he came, said there's a "short" inside the “bezel” behind the dashboard where all the wires go into.

Thursday was largely spent arguing with the RAC about whether “free” in the context of “You can have a free tow to the garage of your choice” actually meant “We will charge you £87.50 for this”.  Eventually, they gave in, but the problem was finding someone who could fix it. Our normal garage was closed for annual holidays, and it was a case of scouring the internet equivalent of Yellow Pages.  Eventually I hit upon Prolek, in Huddersfield, and on Friday morning the tow truck turned up, hooked up the camper, and it disappeared (still with the kayak on top, because where it had conked out on Wednesday night, there wasn’t room in the driveway to unship it.)  Friday came and went with the camper in bits at the garage, and on Saturday morning I called to check progress.

Bad news. Very bad news, in fact. The part needed to fix it - VW Part Number 251919059J, a small blue flexible PCB attached to the back of the dashboard clock cluster, is obsolete, and has been since 2008.  The garage were trying to find one for us, but it occurred to me that out of the millions of people on Facebook someone might have a favourite scrappers or enthusiasts' group for VW campers who could point us to someone who might have this part for sale - even a whole clock cluster off a VW T25 transporter would do, as that comes with the PCB in place... so I put a speculative post to that effect on my Facebook page, asking for help and for people to share it.

People started sharing it and by the end of Saturday it had been shared 395 times. By Sunday morning it was up to 505.  As a result of the sharing I had several potential offers of the bit in question, plus literally dozens of helpful suggestions and also discovered that there is a hard-wiring kit which circumvents the PCB in question, if all else fails.  I even had a call at closing time from a gentleman in Aberdeen who wanted to tell me about a scrapyard he knew of, on the road up to Lossiemouth. It was a salutary lesson in the power of Social Media.

In the strange way intractable problems seem to have of sometimes solving themselves when you aren't really looking, I also found one on Ebay, bid on it, and won. So one way or another, it looks like we are sorted now and the focus switches to getting this bit to the garage and getting it stuck on ASAP.

My sister – bless her, and her husband – live in Northampton, the very place where the Ebay clock cluster was located. So earlier today she picked it up for me from the vendor and then tomorrow, God willing UPS will pick it up from her husband at work, and it will be with the garage by 10AM on Tuesday.  If they can get us up and running that day, or the day after, then we’ll still be able to have 20 days on Arran before we need to come back, to prepare for the advent of Uncle Phil from Australia and the start of the new term.

Matilda, meanwhile, has remained blissfully aloof from all the chaos milling around her. Her little world continues to be bounded by going out through the cat flap, patrolling the decking, chasing the squirrels in a sort of half-hearted and ineffectual manner, then coming back in through the cat flap, having another breakfast, and going to sleep for a while on one or more of her little knitted cat-blankets, provided courtesy of Maisie. It’s a blameless little existence, apart from when she growls and hisses at other cats who have the temerity to wander into her territory, and/or comes in with one of their toenails embedded in her fur, as happened the other week.

But then, that’s what cats do.  If further proof were needed that cats have been generally doing their own things and, by extension, buggering up stuff for the rest of us, since the era of antiquity, staff at a museum in Gloucestershire this week found a Roman roof-tile with the imprints of a cat’s paws in it – presumably from the cat having walked across the object in question before the clay had been fired.  There is also the well-documented 15^th century manuscript at the University of Sarajevo which has a double page spread where a cat has obviously walked over the calligraphy before the ink had dried. 

It’s something in the cat curiosity genome that drives them to get up and come over and sit on any large-ish sheet of paper that you have to hand. Somewhere, in my last job, if they still have it buried in the archives (which I doubt) there will be a large, folded A2 sheet of paper which was a handwritten process flow chart I did of the entire system in use at the time, with a muddy paw-print from Russell in one corner, dating from when he came in after having been in the garden and ran straight across it, while I was working on it at home one day in 2004.

Misty and Zak have been good, patient doggies all week, enduring days of boredom while Debbie trooped backwards and forwards, then ending up with a perfunctory walk in the rain at teatime, when we’d given up for the day.  The most confusing day for them was Wednesday, of course, when they must have finally thought they were off on their jollies, only to be unloaded again in the driveway twenty minutes later, along with me. Poor mutts.

I don’t know whether it’s because this week contained the famous “blue moon” – two full moons in the one month, or whether there is some other strange conjunction of the heavens bringing out all the unhinged people and giving them a platform on the broadcast media, but this has seemed to me to be a week in the outside world where, in the words of my late father, “there’s more of them out than in.” Quite why there should have been such a mass silly buggers’ outing remains a mystery, but for me the week’s news, insofar as I have seen it, seems to have been dominated by two stories which both revolve around the relative values of human life and animal life.

The killing of Cecil the lion, lured out of his natural protected habitat and shot by a motley collection of local guides and a megalomaniac American dentist who had paid thousands of dollars to be able to kill things with a crossbow, sparked a veritable shitstorm of outrage on social media generally, and at the time of writing, the dentist in question is in hiding. Dentists are never people’s favourites anyway – you would have thought he would have had the sense to try and do something as a hobby that would have made him more popular, rather than massacring animals. Hey ho, call me capricious, Mr Dentist, but generally, when you’re in a cavity, stop drilling.

Such stories are, as I always say, proof that there should be a right to arm bears. However, there was also a story (not so widely reported, sadly) where the animal came off best. A householder in Texas saw an armadillo grubbing up plants and digging in his garden, rushed inside and got his handgun, a .38 special, and loosed off three rounds at the offending animal, one of which ricocheted off its thick, scaly shell and struck its would-be assassin on the jaw, leading to him having to be airlifted to hospital to have it wired.

Apparently, armadillo-related ricochets are quite a hazard in Texas. The same report also wrapped up with a previous story where a man had also shot at an armadillo raiding his garden, but that time the bullet had ricocheted, gone through a door, and the back of a chair, and struck his mother-in-law. [Allegedly, your honour.] Either way, I bet that the insurance diagram for that one was an entertaining document.]

Seeing a bandwagon coming, David Cameron (on a tour of the far east, but that didn’t stop him) clambered aboard, condemning the murder of Cecil the lion and declaring his passion for protecting wildlife. Apart from foxes, obviously. Oh, and badgers. To be fair to Cameron, he has been rather preoccupied this week with the insect, rather than the animal, kingdom, referring to the growing numbers of migrants at Calais who are attempting to enter the UK via the “Chunnel” or by stowing away on ferries, as a “swarm”.

He’s not the first person to have resorted to such de-humanising language, not will he be the last.  His previous administration sent vans round the streets bearing exhortations that brown people should go back home. Further back in history, David Blunkett spoke of areas being “swamped”, and of course, there’s always Katie Hopkins, whose comments on migrants were set out in a column in The Sun, headed “Rescue Boats? I’d use gunships to stop migrants”.  Hopkins sparked outrage in the article, back in April, when she described migrants as “cockroaches” and “feral humans”, prompting the UN high commissioner for human rights, Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, to denounce her for using racist language and leading him to compare her comments to pro-genocide propaganda.

Pro-genocide propaganda seems to come naturally to Ms Hopkins, however. In an interview with the Radio Times, totally unconnected of course with the fact that she has a new panel show coming on air soon, for those of you who want to set a timer to avoid it, her latest pronouncement is that she is “super-keen on euthanasia vans” and says there are “far too many old people”. Apparently it is “ridiculous” to live in a country “where we can put dogs to sleep but not people”.

Her proposed solution, she said, was “easy”.”Euthanasia vans – just like ice-cream vans – that would come to your home. It would all be perfectly charming. They might even have a nice little tune they’d play. I mean this genuinely. I’m super-keen on euthanasia vans. We need to accept that just because medical advances mean we can live longer, it’s not necessarily the right thing to do.”

Pausing to let that sink in, I can only reflect that Ms Hopkins herself is already 40 years old, so she needs perhaps to be more circumspect in her comments. Heaven forfend that she should get some sort of debilitating, life-limiting condition in middle age, but if she does, I hope they put her in the freezer, cover her with sprinkles, stick a large flake (it would have to be large) and a couple of wafers in her gob, and pack her off to Dignitas, in a little van that plays Greensleeves as it goes down the street.

Mr Cameron will no doubt have taken note of her utterance, and will have people who can doubtless advise him that euthanasia vans have been actually used, by the SS Einsatzgruppen in the early years of the Second World War, until they graduated to more efficient ways of exterminating the old, the ill, the gays, the Jews, and other people who were considered as vermin, cockroaches, and the enemies of society. I bet Iain Duncan Smith is writing it all down in a little black book as well, although he could probably teach the SS a thing or two about demonising, scapegoating and marginalising the most vulnerable in society.

The first step, the necessary precursor to eventual genocide, is to use language which  reduces the subject of your prejudice to something less than human.  This is why the EDL the BNP, Britain First and the like frequently refer to Muslims as “Musrats”. The next (or maybe even a concurrent) step is to stir up confusion and ignorance. I was struck by the number of postings on Facebook threads commenting generally on the migrant crisis by the sheer ignorance displayed by people who either do not know, or if they do know, don’t care, about the difference between economic migrants, illegal immigrants, asylum seekers, and people who are British by nationality or birth, but not ethnically.

It seems that we’ve now got to a stage where the general perception as espoused by the Great British Public is that migrants only have to rock up at Dover docks to be handed the keys to a council house complete with flatscreen TV and a BMW on the drive, all paid for out of benefits taken from the taxes of “hard working families”.  It’s a nasty, pervasive, insidious fiction, aimed at the hard of thinking, but it’s gained such a hold in the last five years that, even though the Tories have now toned it down a bit, when they realised that all it was doing was fuelling support for UKIP, it is extremely difficult to counter, not least because people like the Labour Party, who should have been countering it, were feeble and ineffective where they should have been bold and assertive.

The first thing is to separate out the strands – as far as economic migrants go, any EU citizen can come to the UK to live and work, in the same way that people from the UK can go there. There are reciprocal arrangements in place for things such as health care and benefits. The general conception is that ours are the most generous in the EU, but in fact there are others which are more “beneficial” – the “league table” is on the Refugee Council’s web site, if you’re interested.

The people at Calais are basically refugees from war zones, many of which are in areas where we either initiated the conflict, or at least exacerbated it.  Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, et al.  Or they are from areas in Africa blighted by post-colonial conflicts, civil wars, new havens of terrorism created off the back of the Bush-Blair “war on terror”, and natural disasters such as famine – Somalia, the Sudan, etc.  By hook or by crook, taking their lives in their hands and often with the “help” of people-traffickers, they somehow make it across the Mediterranean to Southern Europe. The ones that don’t drown. Once they are in Europe, the free movement of people within the EU allows them to travel to France, where they then gravitate towards Calais, the nearest point to England.

This is where the Daily Mail would have you believe that these people are queuing up to come here because we are a “soft touch”, and that we already bear a disproportionate share of the burden. In fact, the UK is home to less than 1% of the world’s estimated 50 million refugees and displaced people, and the likelihood of an asylum application being granted depends to some extent on the country in which the application is made. The UK only grants about 25% of applications,  whereas some countries such as Switzerland or Finland, grant over 70% of applications received, but you won’t see that on the front page of a tabloid newspaper, above the fold. Nor is it true that we are an automatic destination for all such migrants. It’s estimated that nearly half a million people have fled the ongoing wars in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, but of the 15,000 who did so in 2011, for instance, only 188 of them sought asylum in the UK.

Nor do they get an especially good deal when they do succeed in coming here.  Despite the popular myth that they all arrive here seeking benefits, research by the Refugee Council has shown that most of them know nothing about welfare benefits before they arrived and had no expectation that they would receive any financial support. They are not allowed to work when they are here and many struggle to pay for basics such as clothing, powdered milk or nappies for their children.  The money they do receive can be as little as £5.00 per day. They don’t “jump the queue” for council housing either, and can’t choose where they want to live. They frequently end up in “hard to let” properties where nobody else wants to go.

Again, you won’t find any of this reported in the media. In the main, the reason they are trying to get here seems to be that they actually admire our way of life (God alone knows why) and believe that if you work hard and apply yourself, it is possible to be successful in Britain and have a good standard of living. They actually want the chance to work. And, I suppose, that even eking out an existence on £5.00 a day in some Godforsaken tower block somewhere in Luton while your case is decided is preferable to sitting in a breeze-block hut in a war zone listening to Isis and the USAF slugging it out in the skies above your head, counting the bangs, and wondering if you or your family are next.

But these are the swarms, the cockroaches, the feral humans, in the words of people like David Cameron and Katie Holmes, who apparently must be kept out of our green and pleasant land at all costs. Eammon Holmes, too, has joined in the fray, calling for the fences at Calais to be electrified. Just out of interest, I checked on his biographical details. On Wikipedia, it says he was born in Ireland, but "...he departed from Ulster Television in 1986 to join the BBC. At the corporation's Manchester studios, Holmes worked as a presenter on the daytime Open Air programme which was broadcast nationally on BBC1." So he left Dublin to go to Ulster TV, then left Ireland altogether to come to England in search of work, a career, and a better standard of living.Which makes him an economic migrant. Personally, I think he's lucky there weren't any electric fences around Liverpool Docks.

The reason why I have been so exercised particularly by this story this week is partly my frustration at being unable to find the details of the would-be migrant who was killed when he was accidentally crushed by the wheels of a lorry, trying to enter the Channel Tunnel the other night. All that I have been able to discover is the details in the following quotation from a spokesman for Eurotunnel, which appears more or less identically in several news stories: 

"Our team found a corpse this morning and the firefighters have confirmed the death of this person," added a spokesman for Eurotunnel. The migrant, a man of Sudanese origin believed to be aged between 25 and 30, was hit by a truck that was leaving a cross-Channel ferry, the police source said."

In the course of trying to find out more, I hit upon a very moving article by Anders Fjellberg, which took as its starting point the discovery of skeletal remains in a wetsuit on a remote part of the Norwegian coast. A similar body, in a similar state and in exactly the same type of wetsuit, had been found on a sandbank near Texel in the Netherlands.  The article is too long to quote even in extracts, but it follows the story of how police pieced together evidence, and DNA, and eventually identified one of the bodies as Mouaz al-Balkhi, and the other as Shadi Omar Qataf, both refugees from the Syrian conflict who had got as far as Calais and then, it is thought, decided to try and swim the Channel.  Fjellberg makes the point much better than I can, by documenting the meticulous care taken over the investigation and identification, that these are not just nameless ferals, a swarm of human cockroaches, vermin: they are human beings – someone’s son, brother, husband, friend, maybe someone’s father. And given that we have had a substantial hand in creating the mess that drove them there, they deserve better than to die a nameless death, like the deportees in Woody Guthrie’s song.

Anyway, after a depressing week in more ways than one, we came to today, the ninth Sunday after Trinity. I haven’t had time to do more than glance at the texts which are supposed to be part of today’s service. But, on the plus side, in the last 24 hours, I have learned much more than I ever thought I would about auto-electrics.

I haven’t actually been neglecting my thinking about Big G, though. One of the books I intended to take with me on holiday was The Revelations of Divine Love by Julian of Norwich, and in odd moments while I have been sitting here, either becalmed, or waiting for people to get back to me, or otherwise obfuscated, I have been dipping into it again, and trying to make sense of it all.

Once more, I have been trying to tie it in with ideas of timelessness – moments when everything seems to make sense, however briefly. God knows, these have been few and far between in my own life these days. I find myself wishing more and more that I had the tools, either linguistic, mathematical, or both, to put all of these theories about the relationship between time and eternity into one unified…thing, and write it down.

Was there time in Eden, for instance? (Allowing for the moment that it existed, not necessarily literally, but maybe as a symbol of some more perfected state which, for reasons unknown, humankind can now no longer access apart from in mystical glimpses.)  Time, the force that propels us seemingly inexorably forwards (at least in this existence) may be a consequence of The Fall.  So does that make The Fall the Big Bang? And now we are all God’s fishes, caught in the net of time, willing or unwilling participants in our own physical demise.  Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.  Except that the physical world as we have been brought up to believe in it does not, actually, exist. Could it be that God is, in fact, what we call time, and/or that time itself is the physical manifestation, in this world, this plane of existence at least, of God?  If you think about this sort of thing for long enough, though, you find (or at least I do) that looking for unobtainable car parts can become a very alluring alternative.

So, we enter another week probably pretty much where we were last week. Sitting here, waiting for the camper van to come back, fixed this time, we hope.  There is still time, just about, to get off to Arran and have 20 days there before we have to return, but the longer it drags on, the more probable it becomes that we will reach a point where it is no longer viable to set off, and we’ll have to have a plan B.

In the meantime, while we grapple with our “first world problems”, the travellers who don’t end their lives washed up dead on the beaches of Lampedusa will keep on arriving at Calais, and some will fall among thieves, although as it currently stands, they are more likely to discover attack dogs and razor wire than a friendly Samaritan, if they do.  It’s a funny old world, but I wouldn’t like to paint it. Not now, at least.  Not in its present state.