Epiblog for the Feast of St Vincent de Paul

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley.  Work continues, autumn draws in, the squirrels and birds are busy (though I haven’t seen the old squirrel for a day or two, and I hope he’s OK) and Matilda continues to be wedded – indeed, almost welded – to the settee in the conservatory. So much so that these days, when Granny comes round with Zak and Ellie, instead of skedaddling next door, as she used to do at first, she remains in situ, only raising her head to give the milling canine horde a bleary, baleful glare before yawning and settling down again.

Debbie has been offered yet another class, so from having “no hours” during the summer, she is now on her way to being full time. All good stuff, if all she had to do was teach, but sadly, I predict that – taking preparation into account - there will be a few all-nighters to come, especially as Tuesdays and Wednesdays have three classes each, spread over a twelve hour day in both cases.  Meanwhile, the van window on the driver’s side decided to stick two-thirds of the way up the other day, and she had to dismantle the handle with a screwdriver in order to shove it back up into position.  The state of the windows has been generally giving some cause for concern, and replacing the rubber seals is not a cheap job. Fortunately, owing to an incredibly kind act of generosity, we do have the wherewithal to attempt it, and it may have to be accelerated up the batting order of “things to do”. This particular window has, however, already been fixed by Father Jack once, so with a heavy sigh, I made a mental note to ring the garage next week.

The College also called Deb in (not on her own, she was one of many) this week for a conference which included the compulsory training on “how to spot a terrorist” which was hinted at over the summer.  The present government’s failures in foreign policy (and, indeed those of the Blair administration) have now painted us into such a corner that we’re having to train people who should be teaching English and helping people acquire skills for life, and get on, and get a job, to be government snitches and watch out for signs of radicalization. If it weren’t such a tragic commentary on the way things are going generally, it would be funny. I recall similar directives from the Home Office back in the days when I used to have a “real” job – throwing the onus onto employers to check that people who applied for a job were legally entitled to be in this country. Fine. I have a couple of hours free next Tuesday afternoon if you’d like me to man a border post for you. Just remind me again, why did we elect you?

It’s all futile anyway, because these misguided fools who listen to the non-Islamic, jihadi witterings of all these soi-disant Muslim imams whose sole job is to wind up imprerssionable young people to commit acts of terrorism, using the indignation they feel, and which we fuel by bombing their countries, are not going to stand up in class like it was an AA meeting and say “My name is Mohammed and I am a terrorist!” The whole point is to become a “sleeper”, what the security services call a “clean skin” – keep your head down, don’t attract attention,  wait until it’s time to strike, or time to be missing from class when the register is called because you are en route to Syria.  Quite frankly, if MI5 have to rely on the likes of Debbie to spot the terrorists they missed, then we’ve lost already, and it really is time to give up and open a whelk stall on Southend Pier.

But, it says in ye manual, one of many no doubt that are kept by the College for the purposes of box-ticking, causing many hours of unpaid extra work for the people who have to compile the stats, and are then shoved on a shelf to gather dust and never looked at again unless OFSTED come calling, that this training shall be done, so, yea, it was done. Selah.  So, watch out, ISIS, Debbie is on your case, and if you so much as misplace an apostrophe, you’ll be singing soprano in the Unemployable Reprobates’ Choir for the rest of your days.

Sadly, this sort of thing has been entirely symptomatic of the lunacy which seems to have infested the world these days. The older I get, the more I have this feeling that sometime, probably in the late 1970s, I must have dropped through the Earth’s crust a la Monty Python, and into a strange, alternative universe where everything is strangely off beam and a bit too far to the right.  The most obvious manifestation of this during the last seven days was what has come to be known as pig-gate. Michael Ashcroft, a multi-millionaire tax avoider and Tory donor, who is probably not as nice as he looks, apparently thought that £8M in donations was enough to secure him a place in the Tory cabinet, after the election. Sadly for him, Mr Cameron thought otherwise, and Mr Ashcroft wanted revenge.

It would be nice to think that Mr Cameron’s refusal to reward such an obvious attempt to buy power was done out of principle, but I’m assuming that it was probably just because there were other, bigger fish to fry.  What I do find surprising though is the way in which it seems to be commonly accepted that this is what Mr Ashcroft was up to. Personally, I blame Lloyd George. 

Anyway, Ashcroft’s revenge has taken the form of a book in which he dishes the dirt on Dave, telling of days of debauchery at Oxford, including the now-famous – or should that be notorious – incident of the alleged future prime minister putting his alleged dangly bits into the alleged head of an allegedly deceased pig, as part of a bizarre initiation ritual to the Piers Gaveston Society, one of the many such organisations which exist at Oxford University to provide opportunities for rich grots to trash restaurants and then have Daddy pick up the tab.  The initiation rite to the Bullingdon Club, for instance, of which both Cameron and Boris Johnson were members, is said to have included burning a £50 note in front of a homeless person. I am not sure that there were £50 notes at the time Cameron was at Oxford, but nevertheless, once the principle is established, the actual amount is largely irrelevant (unlike buying a cabinet post in the government).

Of course, predictably enough, the entire universe, or at least Twitter and Facebook, which amounts to the same thing for some people, went totally bananas, with jokes and parodies galore. It certainly put Jeremy Corbyn not singing the National Anthem into perspective. The problem is, though, that, entertaining as it is to see the Tories fighting like rats in a sack, firstly it will be a nine-day wonder (although Cameron and his aides will have to watch out for pig-based metaphors in speeches and keep well clear of any farmyard environments where photographers may be lurking) and secondly, it has also served as a massive distraction and smokescreen, deflecting attention from what Cameron and his cohorts are doing to the country, let alone to a dead pig.

Jeremy Corbyn, in the meantime, has been given a breather, for now, and I hope he uses it to start to pull together some form of effective response mechanism to the smear campaign which will now continue against him, and against the shadow cabinet, until the next election. Corbyn says that it was a tragedy [in terms of international justice] that Bin Laden was killed [and not forced to stand trial for his crimes] and it is reported as “Corbyn says Bin Laden’s death was a tragedy”.  What Corbyn needs to realise, and realise quickly, is that presentation matters as much as substance, and that elections are won on soundbites not on arguments. The soundbites can be based on arguments and policies, but he needs someone to condense his political philosophy, and his attacks on the Tories, into ten words at a time, aimed at the hard-of-thinking floating voter, who believes that the economy is in safe hands, despite record borrowing and every austerity target since 2010 being missed by George Osborne.  Presentation, and rebuttal.

He is not helped, of course, by idiots such as Peter Mandelson, who this week called on his Labour Party colleagues to “wait until Corbyn has proved himself unelectable” before moving against him. Thank you very much, Mr Mandelson. Perhaps we should wait until we’ve proven that you don’t know the difference between guacamole and mushy peas before we defenestrate you.  You can always join the Liberal Democrats, they can probably squeeze one more person into the phone box where they meet, these days.

The BBC has taken to reporting the conferences of the lunatic fringe parties as if they were in some way significant. Tim Farron, the new leader of the Liberal Democrats, thinks they can get  into power again, and that they are on their way back. Well, that makes one of us.  And, over at UKIP, Nigel Farage, from beyond the political grave, has been sounding off about the refugee crisis, saying “We want our country back!”

Your country, Nigel? Have you still got the receipt? Because the last time I looked, it belonged to all of us, and not just the purple patches. If you want to live somewhere where there are no brown people, no taxes, untroubled by the EU, and you can stand and smoke in public to your heart’s content, may I recommend Rockall?

Of course, it’s not just Jeremy Corbyn who is being monstered and misrepresented in the media, it extends now to his shadow cabinet as well. Kerry McCarthy, who is in charge of DEFRA, happens to be a vegan. This in itself was enough of a shock horror sensation to send tremors through the likes of the NFU, especially as she has, in the past, spoken out against the badger cull.  This week it emerged that, in an interview with a vegan magazine, Viva, she apparently put forward the entirely sensible view that meat products should perhaps be labelled in such a way as to flag up the health dangers of a high-meat diet, in the same way as cigarettes carried health warnings for smokers.  That was what she actually said, but from the howls of protest and derision which arose on all sides (or at least all sides with a vested interest in keeping the countryside just the way it is, that is the big landowners and the factory farming industry) you would have thought meat was going to be outlawed at midnight.

Firstly, the fact that she’s a shadow minister means she is not in power, not that this stopped the words “loony” and “crank” being bandied around, and secondly, I repeat, she was proposing warning people about the health risks of eating some kind of meat, so they could make an informed choice. It’s the same story as with Corbyn and the economy.  Austerity will never pay back the debt or close the deficit, and Corbyn has pointed out this essential lie, to which there is no counter, so his opponents have to resort to personal attacks. Kerry McCarthy went on to point out the essential unsustainability of chopping down forests and growing crops that exhaust the soil just to feed beef cattle which are then slaughtered and processed with God knows what additives and hormones and GMOs before eventually being presented on your plate as a Big Mac.  The truth always hurts, and the response of the Big Mac eaters is not to counter the argument – they can’t – but to call her a loony instead.  For God’s sake! No one is stealing your burger and fries, darling, just calm down and eat your BSE mad cow quarter pounder lips and genitals special, and let natural selection take its course.

She’s also right about the badgers. Something needs to be done about bovine TB, true enough, but culling badgers in selected areas is cruel, expensive and useless. All that culling does is drive potentially infected badgers out of the cull area into adjoining areas where they will infect others, and at the same time draw in badgers from adjoining areas who will benefit from the lack of competition for food. So it’s a very costly way of basically stimulating population movement in badgers. It can only be a matter of time before the Daily Mail realises this and starts running articles about swarms of migrant badgers, coming over here and infecting our cattle.

You might be able to make a difference to bovine TB if you were prepared to have a mass foot and mouth style cull of badgers everywhere, and then cover the countryside in concrete to prevent them coming back. But that still doesn’t address the presence of m. bovis in other wild animals, which also harbour substantial reservoirs of potential infection. Unless of course DEFRA wants to kill them, as well, and then pour over concrete, see above – sometime I think they really do.  If we were serious about tackling bovine TB there needs to be much more work on vaccination and bio-security, much less emphasis on intensive farming with thousands of cattle cooped up in giant sheds where any infection can spread like wildfire through the herd, and we also need to stop applying the EU directive that a cow that tests positive for bovine TB – a “reactor” - must be slaughtered there and then.  A better test would also be a good thing, but while the government is only interested in keeping the NFU happy and not actually solving the problem, there is no political will for any of this.

In a twist to the tale (or should that be a twist in the tail?) it also emerged this week that Jeremy Corbyn apparently became a vegetarian himself after observing cruelty to pigs.  But this was at a pig farm, not at Oxford University.  Lack of political will continues to mar the refugee crisis as well, and it’s starting to drop down the news headlines as compassion fatigue sets in. It looks as though this winter, but for the efforts of local grass-roots organisations across the UK and the affected countries on the European mainland, it is going to be very bad for the refugees, very bad indeed. 

The commentator Alan Dawson has said:

 If anything is proven by this crisis it is that it has nothing to do with migrants but all with rich elites and corrupt politicians, with incompetent governments and total lack of vision.

And this is very true. If, generally, you have a political system that promotes people not on merit or ability, but on the basis of favours done and donations made, it not only demeans and cheapens the political process in the eyes of the voters, leading to apathy and disaffection, but also it doesn’t actually produce very good politicians. True, you might get the odd exception, but generally you get plodders, time-servers, risk-averse paper shufflers with one eye on their pension, who, in any given crisis, wait for the other guy to make a move first.  Their kids are safe at university, you see, probably having fun with a pig’s head and preparing to inherit the earth. It’s not their children whose bloated corpses are bobbing up and down on the choppy waves of the Mediterranean or the Adriatic.  And meanwhile, the boats keep coming, and people keep being drowned

As if to prove that the world has gone mad, France has apparently confirmed this week that they, too, are now bombing Syria, because obviously that’s going to make the situation a whole heap better, isn’t it? I would have thought after Charlie Hebdo, they might have thought twice about hitting every wasps’ nest with a stick, but no, it seems that France wants to demonstrate that it needs to be taken seriously in any post-Assad negotiations, and this is the result.  And man, proud man, dressed in a little brief authority, performs such fantastic tricks before high heaven, as makes the angels weep.

Mention of heaven and angels reminds me that technically, I should be writing about religion, although of course religion (or the misinterpretation of it) underscores much of what I have just commented on in the preceding paragraphs.  Anyway, yes, the week we have just had, which contained not only the Equinox but also the feast day of St Padre Pio, and which has had surprisingly settled and sunny weather, almost an “Indian Summer” in fact, has brought us to today, and the Feast of St Vincent De Paul.

He was born in Gascony, on 24^th April 1581, and died in Paris, aged 79, on 27^th September 1660.  He is the patron saint of, amongst other things, charities, horses, leprosy, lost articles, prisoners, and, for some reason, Madagascar.  Since his canonization in 1737, he’s become known as the Great Apostle of Charity, in reference to his many charitable endeavours in his lifetime.  When Vincent was aged 15, his father sold the family’s oxen, and with the money, paid for Vincent to go into the seminary. He was ordained in 1600 at the age of only nineteen, and ran into trouble because the Council of Trent has stipulated a minimum age of 24 for ordinands.  Rather than court trouble, he continued his studies at the universities of Toulouse and Paris.

In 1605, he sailed from Marseilles on his way back from an errand to sell some property on behalf of one of his patrons, and the ship he was on was captured by Barbary pirates and towed to Tunis, where Vincent De Paul was sold as a slave. His first owner was a fisherman, but Vincent proved useless as his slave, owing to seasickness, so back on the market he went, and this time he was bought by an alchemist and practitioner of traditional medicine. Vincent’s new master was so good at this, that he was invited to go to Istanbul, but on the way, he died,  and Vincent changed hands yet again, his new owner being a former Franciscan Priest named Guillame Gautier, who had himself converted to Islam to escape slavery, and in the process had acquired three wives.

One of these women, after speaking with Vincent, became convinced of the truth and sincerity of Vincent’s Christian beliefs, and went to her husband to persuade him to let Vincent go. Guillame decided to go with him, and after a wait of over nine months, they finally succeeded in making their getaway, crossing the Mediterranean in a small boat and landing at Aigues-Mortes in 1607.

After finding himself once more in the bosom of the church, Vincent went to Rome where he continued studying until 1609, when he was sent back to France. A series of duties eventually led him to become the spiritual advisor of the Gondi family, who were famed for their wealth. He became the spiritual advisor to the Contesse de Gondi, who in turn persuaded her husband to endow a group of missionaries to work amongst the poor tenant farmers and the peasantry in the area.

This led on, in 1617, to his founding the “Ladies of Charity” who raised funds for victims of war and paid the ransom of 1200 galley slaves from North Africa, to enable their return home.  The “Ladies of Charity” eventually became “The Daughters of Charity of Vincent De Paul” and in 1622, Vincent himself was appointed chaplain to the galley slaves.  At that time, he also became the leader of what amounted almost to his own order – The Congregation of the Mission, otherwise colloquially known as the Vincentians, promoting poverty, chastity, obedience and stability.  He also served for twenty-eight years as the spiritual director of the Convent of St Mary of Angels.

His relics lie in the church dedicated to him in Paris, and  for some reason, in 1712, 53 years after his death, his body was exhumed and found to be incorrupt, which was generally taken to be a sign of sanctity. However, following his canonisation in 1737 he was dug up again, and this time an underground river had apparently made him rather the worse for wear, so a wax figure of him was made to cover the remaining bones, and put on display in a glass reliquary in the chapel. Apart from his heart, which is apparently still incorrupt, and may be viewed at the chapel belonging to the Daughters of Charity in Paris, where it is also contained in a reliquary.  His name lives on in the Society of St Vincent De Paul, a charitable organisation dedicated to fighting poverty established in France in 1833 by the Blessed Frederic Oznam, and working worldwide today in 132 countries.

So, what are we to make of the life and example of St Vincent De Paul. Well, if I was feeling uncharitable, and wanted to make a cheap point, I could say that France would do well to take on board the ideals of this man who landed on their shores in a small boat after crossing the Med, who dedicated his life to poor people and victims of war, who organised relief, and who embodied ideals of service and compassion, instead of making a bad job worse by bombing Syria.  In fact, I am feeling uncharitable and I do want to make that cheap point, so I will. There. I said it.

Manifestly, he was one of the good guys, insofar as we can trust the accounts written four centuries ago, though obviously all the stuff about incorruptibility and keeping his heart on display may well be suspect. Although the practice of the heart being buried/displayed separately is surprisingly common. T S Eliot’s heart is buried at East Coker, and Thomas Hardy’s heart is buried in Dorset. There is a story, poo-poohed by Claire Tomalin in A Time-Torn Man, that while Hardy’s heart was being kept overnight at Max Gate prior to its interment, it was in a biscuit tin on the kitchen table and the cat got at it. I’d like to think that was actually what happened, because I can imagine it was the sort of thing that would have amused Thomas Hardy.

Well, while I have been finishing this off, darkness has fallen and any minute now Deb and Misty will be back. I’ve bombed up the fire, and I’m going to shut the cat flap and try and keep the heat in a bit. Then I’ll feed Matilda, and Misty when she comes back, and I guess Debbie.  Then it’ll be another Sunday night, followed by another Monday, bloody Monday.  It’s all a bit of a battle at the moment, life – a bit like cowering in a fox-hole watching the shells scream down all round me.  Anyway, there’s only one way out of this, and that’s to bash on.  I’ve got three books to finish before Christmas, not counting the ones I’ve finished over the weekend (or will have finished by the end of tomorrow).  Then there’s just the hoohah of launching each one of them, plus the attendant admin. And then it will be Christmas

There’s little time for spiritual development or contemplation, nor has there been, since we got back from Arran. I seem to be heading into a perfect concatenation of all the things that I fear the most – dark night of the soul, a dark night of the body (as winter grips my aches and pains) and the dark night of the year as well, this long dark tunnel between now and the Solstice.  I’m not sure where God is in all of this – in fact, I’m not sure what I believe, in any coherent sense.  My biggest problem at the moment is that .the world seems to make so little sense that it’s hard to see where goodness, where that neo-platonic spark of the divine, can be found.

Maybe next week will bring better fortune. If there is any good left in the world, it’s in the efforts of the volunteers who are trying to mitigate the sufferings of the refugees in weeks to come.  If I prayed any more, it might be worth a swift one to St Vinny. Or St Padre Pio, or maybe even cut out the middleman and go to Big G himself, and see if something can be done about the fact that people are going to be sleeping out in the open tonight all over Europe.

In the meantime, since Debbie is vegan and I’m a vegetarian, at least I can say that no piggies will be harmed in the preparation of our supper, and maybe give thanks that we’ve got some supper at all.

Epiblog for the Feast of St John Houghton

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley.  The nights are certainly drawing in now, as Debbie discovered when she found herself getting back to the camper with the dogs in the dark, a couple of times this week. It’s been another crushing week, work-wise, with one book launch out of the way, and another two looming on the horizon. Then there’s National Poetry Day, around which we hope to hang two more, and that just leaves two for Halloween or thereabouts and one which doesn’t really have anything to tie it to. Either way, it’s going to be work, work work.  Deb has also picked up an extra class, so, once more, after going round the loop of “I’m afraid there are no hours for you this year”, back in the summer, it now turns out she’s doing more or less the same as last year, but with the added pleasure of an observation in October. Marvellous.  As I said to her at the time, in any negotiation, always ignore the first offer.

The aliens seem to have given us the real Matilda back, as she seems to have finally reconciled herself to the fact that we are back from Arran (or forgotten that we ever went away) and abandoned her new-found clinginess, in favour of her previous practice of ignoring us unless she wants feeding or feels the need to hiss at somebody.  She’s also been staying in a lot more, in fact yesterday I was moved to suggest that someone should check her pulse, as she was curled up on the settee in the conservatory from about noon until after midnight, when we went to bed.  I did hear her moving about in the early hours though, and constructing what sounded like a major civil engineering project in her litter tray, so obviously she was still with us.  She’s also adopted the practice of observing the squirrels and birds through the closed door of the conservatory, as it is warmer inside, especially on those bright, crisp mornings we’ve been having of late.

The squirrels and birds are busy, as you would expect at this time of year. They seem grateful for the bird seed I put out, especially the squirrels, who rummage through it looking specifically for the sunflower seeds. There’s one particular old squirrel I noticed who comes down from time to time. He’s only got one eye and his ears are torn, and his tail is thin, not bushy. He also walks with a peculiar sideways, crabbed motion, as if the wires joining his brain to his back legs are twisted. Obviously someone like me who has had a brush with the grim reaper. I haven’t seen him for a day or two, and I hope he’s alright.

Zak and Ellie were with us for a few days, midweek, and Deb decided to give Ellie another go at a longer walk. They’ve been regularly doing 13, 14 miles without her, but Deb thought she would give her a try on a 10-miler, and she apparently acquitted herself very well, though when she got back, she ignored her tea and jumped straight up on the chair, still wearing her harness, and fell fast asleep, snoring. Poor little dog.

We’ve also had visitors this week, both expected and unexpected. The expected one was Owen, who called in on Wednesday on his way back to South Wales from Dundee, to collect and take back some surplus stock of books that had got here by mistake.  When he arrived, he had a conspicuous bright red Hazel O’Connor style streak in his hair, which he explained was due to it coming in contact with some wet paint while he had been decorating the communal parts of his son’s flat. It was actually quite well executed and if Adam Ant was still looking for people to form a backing group, Owen would have been a shoo-in.

While he was here, he also took the opportunity to put up the string of prayer flags we brought back from Arran, which are now fluttering bravely out of the reach, I hope, of the squirrels who stole the previous lot.  We were having a mug of tea and generally putting the world to rights, when a knock came on the door – Owen went and there was my neighbour on the doorstep. If she noticed his hair, she was too polite to comment – or perhaps she thought it was a fashion statement.

“Excuse me, have you lost a small white dog, only she’s in my house?”

I looked over to the chair where Ellie had been snoozing. No Ellie. I apologised, and Owen offered to go and retrieve her, and a few minutes later, returned with her under his arm, like a parcel. She must have got out through the cat flap and decided to take herself off for a one-way walkies, which is one of her specialities, unfortunately. So, for the remainder of her sojourn that day, the cat flap door remained firmly closed, not that Matilda was bothered, as she was curled up asleep with her nose in her tail, see above.

The unexpected visitors took the form of Scott from Arran, and the police, of whom more later. Scott arrived on Friday morning and kept us entertained with his tales of Arran since we came home, and of the year he spent in Australia. Sadly, since his return, he is feeling that there aren’t really any job opportunities on Arran for him, and thus he will, like so many other young people from the Western Isles, have to leave and try and make his fortune on the mainland.  He brought two welcome gifts from his dad, a CD of Phil Rambow and a book which has just been published by Feis Arran, concerning the remnants of the Gaelic culture on the Island.  I was especially taken with the Gaelic proverbs, including one that translates as “It is only at evening that the hooded crow pisses”, which I took to be their sort of equivalent of the opera not being over until the fat lady sings.  I may have to start randomly introducing it into conversations in a knowing, gnomic fashion.  Either way, it was a top present and I must write and thank them.

The visit of the police was rather harder to explain. To backtrack slightly, the Arran Silkie, although parked in our own driveway, at the end of March, was the target of vandalism that left it with four slashed tyres, two cut brake pipes, a damaged door lock, damaged brake calliphers and superglue in the petrol cap lock. Needless to say this produced a huge bill and a wrangle with the insurers, who, thankfully, paid up most of the cost in the end. Because of the cut brake pipes, the police were involved, and in the course of discussions with the local PCSOs they did, at least, kindly promise to check up on the house if we were away for a long time in the summer.

At the end of July, I texted the number the PCSO had left with me and told them we were setting off on holiday. Of course, that was the day the dashboard caught fire 600 yards up the road and we were forced to turn back, then were delayed setting off by a further week or so. In all the hoo hah, I had forgotten to untext the police, so I was quite surprised one day during the week of enforced waiting for the van’s electrics to be fixed, when I was sitting in the kitchen working, to receive a text from the PCSO saying “Dear Mr Rudd, I have checked your house and everything seems to be OK”. I resisted the temptation to text back and ask if they’d seen the grey haired burglar in the kitchen, sitting in my wheelchair and using my laptop, and left it at that.

Anyway, fast forward to Saturday afternoon, and once more I am sitting there in the kitchen working when there is a sharp rat-a-tat-tat at the door.  Debbie was off up on the moors with Misty, so when I opened the door and saw a policeman standing on the end of my wheelchair ramp my first thought was “Oh, God, what’s she done now?” but he set off on a different tack:

“I’m sorry to bother you. We’re attending a lady who is having breathing difficulties further up the road and I wondered, is the house next door to you occupied, and do you know who the owner is?”

“Do you mean number 113?”

He did a quick mental count up in his head before he replied “Yes”.

“It’s ours,” I said “It’s all one house inside.”

“Ah, right. It’s just that there seems to be a dead rabbit in the front window.”

Several possibilities crossed my mind, the first being that it was Matilda, until I remembered she was still firmly welded to the settee in the conservatory, see above. There was the outside possibility that one of the other neighbourhood cats had caught a rabbit, brought it through the cat flap, and released it, only for it to expire on the windowsill. Then I remembered.

“Ah, I know what you mean. It’s a carved wooden elephant, lying on its side.”

“Oh,” he said “Now I think about it, it did have a bit of a tusk. Oh well, sorry to have bothered you, sir.” With that, he made to go.

“What about the woman with the breathing difficulties, can we do anything to help?”

“Oh, no sir, it’s all under control, I have four paramedics on the scene”.

And so he left. And I came back in, slightly puzzled, and resumed work. Discussing it with Deb later, I could only surmise that he’d been killing time outside while the paramedics did their stuff, and had gone for a stroll and noticed Deb’s wooden carved elephant and jumped to the conclusion that this was one of these animal horror houses where the RSPCA go in and find a dead rabbit, 14 mummified cats and a deceased pensioner whose legs have been nibbled away from the knee down, still sitting in the chair watching a burnt out TV. If so, a carved wooden elephant must, by comparison, have seemed rather a disappointment, though it will undoubtedly have saved him a great deal of paperwork.

As I said to Debbie, we don’t have much money, but we do see life.  Sadly, sometimes, however, life is random, pointless and bloody heartless instead of being mildly amusing and quirky.  The refugee crisis is worsening in Europe, as once again, no one is managing the process and countries have now started shutting their borders unilaterally. I argued a while ago now that the only way in which this crisis would be averted would have to be by some kind of pan-European response that sees a temporary, but managed, derogation from the Schengen agreement which allows free movement of people inside the Euro zone, in tandem with a process for scaling out agreed quantities of refugees on a formula based on land mass, population density and resources, and the establishment of humane transit centres where these people could be assessed, properly documented, checked medically, and prepared for the next stage of their transition.  None of this is happening, except that the closure of borders is derogation from Schengen by definition, but is being done in such a way that it will inevitably provoke violence.

And, of course, when pictures of dead children are replaced in the fickle media a few days later by pictures of live refugees rioting, this produces the inevitable backlash at home – not that it needed much provoking in the UK, where attitudes to immigration and asylum have been hardened by five years of xenophobic Tory propaganda which helped fuel the rise of UKIP. Thank God there are people around like Gabriela Andreevska, who has apparently begun a single-handed effort to hand out food and water to refugees in Croatia, or that British couple who have been trying to help the dozen or so boatloads of refugees that make it to Lesbos every day.

John Betjeman’s caricature of the woman praying in Westminster Abbey, in his 1940 poem of that title, seems, unfortunately, to be on the verge of making a comeback here in England, or at least her attitudes do:

Keep our Empire undismembered

Guide our Forces by thy hand

Gallant Blacks from far Jamaica

Honduras and Togoland.

Protect them Lord, in all their fights

But even more, protect the Whites.

Think of what our country stands for

Books from Boots and country lanes

Free speech, free passes, class distinction

Democracy, and proper drains.

Lord, keep beneath thy special care

One-eighty-nine, Cadogan Square.

We can only expect to see more of this sort of thing in the run up to Remembrance Day, of course.  The 75^th anniversary of the Battle of Britain  has already given it a brief airing, especially when Jeremy Corbyn, the new leader of the opposition, didn’t sing the National Anthem at the memorial service.  I have long been uneasy anyway about the mixture of religious pomp and military celebration. What happened to “Blessed are the Peacemakers”?  And I say this as a monarchist (or at least a believer in the idea and institution of a monarchy, as a bulwark against having arriviste politicians as president).

I have to say, also, that the National Anthem is unutterably dreary. France, Italy and Poland have all got better anthems, and there is undoubtedly a case for letting the Welsh have Land of My Fathers, the Scots Flo’or O’ Scotland (though Caledonia by Dougie MacLean would be much better) and the Irish, well, probably alternate weeks of The Wearing of the Green and The Ould Orange Flute or something, or at a pinch, Danny Boy, while we have either Barwick Green, Jerusalem, or I Vow to Thee my Country, though even the latter is a queasy mix of religion and nationalism.

Jeremy Corbyn refused to sing the National Anthem because of his beliefs and principles, and I have to say that I would rather have someone who believes in something and stands up for it, however difficult this may make life for them, rather than just bellowing along with the rest of the herd, even though you don’t believe a word you’re singing.  As has been pointed out several times, it’s not as if everyone who fought in the second world war was a Christian who believed in the monarchy, anyway.  My own father had only a very rudimentary faith (probably where I get it from) and a marked aversion to singing in public, especially at funerals and the like.  He never went to church from one year’s end to the next, and, like most of our family, his only contact with organised religion would have been attending the crematorium services of other family members. That didn’t prevent him and his mates and a few million others from stopping Hitler in his racks.

No doubt it will all surface again when Corbyn wears a white poppy on Remembrance Day.  Personally, I would wear all three – a red poppy to remember those of my family who didn’t survive, especially the first world war, a white poppy to express the hope for peace and no more wars, and a purple poppy to recall the animals who suffered and died in war zones, through conflicts sparked by us, a supposedly superior species. No doubt this year we will see, once again, the government trying to appropriate Poppy Day for political ends, with the subtle peer pressure of “if you don’t wear a poppy you can’t possibly be patriotic or support our troops” and the much less subtle attempts of fascist organisations such as Britain First to misrepresent what the struggle against Nazism was all about.

Believing that God is on our side and we have a divine right to blow people to smithereens does, unfortunately, tend to reduce us to the level of the likes of ISIS, as that is precisely the affliction they suffer from.  And the more it goes on, the more likely we are to see it visiting us back here at home. Once again, we seem to be re-visiting the 1930s as in C Day Lewis’s 1938 poem, Newsreel.

Fire-bud, smoke-blossom, iron seed projected –

Are these exotics? They will grow nearer home:

Grow nearer home – and out of the dream-house stumbling

One night into a strangling air and the flung

 Rags of children and thunder of stone niagaras tumbling,

You’ll know you slept too long.

I’ve thought long and hard and I can’t see anyway in which  God could endorse one side at the expense of another in any conflict. I think Bob Dylan nails it:

If God’s on our side, he’ll stop the next war

Coincidentally (or maybe not) in the same week as the Corbyn national anthem hoo-hah erupted, an announcement was made about the effectiveness of the bombing campaign against ISIS. According to the defence secretary, the RAF strikes in the 11 months since September 2014 have killed 330 ISIS fighters.

Leaving aside for a moment that for every one killed, we've probably radicalised another half dozen nutters hell-bent on revenge, the missiles we have been firing at them cost about £800,000. Assuming we got lucky and took out all 330 with one missile, that is £2424 per ISIS fighter killed, not counting the ongoing costs of maintenance, aviation fuel, pilots' wages etc. [Obviously, some of these are costs we would have anyway, though I suspect we're using a lot more fuel than we would be doing in peacetime]  If it took two missiles, then that goes up to £4848 per ISIS fighter killed, and so on. Surely there must come a point where it would be more cost effective to get their bank details and offer them ten grand each to become Buddhists. OK, maybe not, but apparently there's no money for schools, hospitals, libraries etc. I wonder why?

Corbyn has been the focus of intense media scrutiny again, as a rattled establishment and their newspaper poodles try anything and everything to distort the message and smear him, since they can’t defeat him on the economy.  The latest revelation is that Jeremy Corbyn and Diane Abbott had a “fling” in the 1970s, after Corbyn had been divorced.  Man has sex with woman, shock horror sensation.  Actually, it shows how out of step with the political establishment Corbyn was, even back then, because while he and a woman were engaging in consensual heterosexual sex, the Tory cabinet of the time stand accused of either engaging in and/or covering up the abuse and possibly murder of young boys from children’s homes. Typical Corbyn contrarianism.

And so we came to Sunday, a grey day that couldn’t ever really decide if it wanted to sunshine or not, and the feast day of St John Houghton, the first person to be martyred in England under the persecution of the monasteries by Henry VIII. 

Born in Essex in 1487, he left Cambridge with degrees in canon law and civil law and was ordained in 1501, becoming a parish priest.  From this, he went on to become a Carthusian monk, a novice at the London Charterhouse, until 1516.  He was then prior of the Beauvale Carthusian Monastery in Northampton and of the London Charterhouse.  In 1534, he became the first person to oppose Henry VIII’s act of supremacy, and was imprisoned, along with the Blessed Humphrey Middlemore.  When the king relented and modified the oath to include the words “insofar as the law of God permits”, John and several other of his monks felt this would be sufficient to permit them to sign it, thus securing his release.  Following this, however, the remaining members of the Charterhouse were forced to sign the modified oath by troops who arrived there with that express purpose.

On February 1^st, 1535, parliament – or probably Henry – moved the goalposts asnd now required that everyone must now sign the original oath, unaltered. St John, together with St Robert Lawrence and St Augustine Webster, asked Thomas Cromwell, Henry’s chancellor, for an exemption, and were immediately arrested and put on trial for treason. 

Because of his vows, St John Houghton refused to speak in his own defence in court and refused to co-operate with the proceedings or sign anything.  Despite the gravity of the charge, the jury reported that they could find no actual evidence of malice to the king, so Henry threatened them in turn with arrest on the same charge, leaving them no option but to bring in a verdict of guilty of treason. 

St John Houghton was  hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn on 4^th May 1535, alongside the Blessed John Haile and three others. His corpse was then chopped into pieces which were put on display at various locations around London as a warning to others. 

The National Anthem didn’t exist in Tudor times, of course, but nevertheless there was the expectation of absolute loyalty to the idea of church and state when under Henry they became one and the same. Henry was but one of a succession of monarchs who were not at all fazed, with God on their side, by the idea of employing extreme violence against people who disagreed with their views on religion – although in Henry’s case it may have been more out of expediency and the desire to produce a male heir, than out of any genuine religious conviction, in much the same way that the people who squeal loudest today when someone refuses to sing the National Anthem probably never attend church from one year’s end to the next, and couldn’t recite the Lord’s Prayer, let alone the Nicene Creed.

Although the Church of England is in many ways more like a hobby than a religion, and we’ve given up the idea of snicking off people’s heads because they do/don’t believe in transubstantiation (in this country at least – some of the more evangelical members of the worldwide Anglican communion have rather robust views on gay marriage, for instance, and of course, outside the confines of the Anglican church, ISIS’s raison d’etre is behading infidels) this is nevertheless why I find it difficult to support the idea of the conjunction of church and state.  Perhaps if we were allowed to render unto Caesar that which was Caesar’s, then people would be freer to follow their own hearts when it came to spiritual matters, and not be castigated for refusing to be forced into a one-size-fits-all religious straitjacket that is increasingly used to impute and impart a set of beliefs in the efficacy, necessity and even desirability of war which is completely at odds with the Platonic idea of God as the holy spark of divine redemption and goodness that can be found somewhere in all of us.

All of which is very heavy for a Sunday teatime, but then these days, even in the little oasis I have created for myself in the time between finishing this blog and the starting of the dark Satanic mills again on Monday morning, there’s still a sense of the heaviness going down elsewhere. Et in arcadia ego. What right do I have to sit here dozing by my stove when the nights are drawing in and the lights are going out all over Europe and there are people sleeping out in the open on bits of cardboard next to railway lines, or trying to carry their sleeping child through forests of barbed wire when they themselves are almost dropping from hunger and fatigue? Today,

at least 13 refugees were killed when their inflatable dinghy collided with a cargo ship at sea between Greece and Turkey. Six of those who died were children and another 13 people are still missing.

But what can we do? Specifically, in my case, in my situation, very little, apart from sorting out some stuff to send off, and continuing to write about the problem and arguing against the entrenched and selfish attitudes engendered by the press, the Home Office, and the DWP.  As individuals, though, we can band together and circumvent the official channels – which seem to be clogged with mud anyway – and carry on sending food and clothes and carry on raising funds and donating where possible. It’s not how big your share is, it’s how much you can share, as the song says.  And we just have to accept that the media are much more obsessed with whether or not a 66-year old politician is willing to mouth and mumble along with an 18^th century dirge stuffed with questionable theology and promoting, ultimately, a linkage of religion with state-sponsored terrorism, than with a daily human tragedy which is just going to get worse and worse. And still the boats keep coming.

Once again, we find ourselves in the situation at the end of Auden’s September 3^rd, 1939:

All I have is a voice

To undo the folded lie

The romantic lie in the brain

Of the sensual man in the street

And the lie of authority

Whose buildings grope the sky

There is no such thing as the state

And no-one exists alone

Hunger allows no choice

To the citizen or the police

We must love one another or die.

Defenceless under the night

Our world in stupor lies;

Yet, dotted everywhere

Ironic points of light

Flash out wherever the just

Exchange their messages:

May I, composed like them

Of Eros and of dust

Beleaguered by the same

Negation and despair

Show an affirming flame

All we can do, I guess, is do what we can do, and keep on keeping on.

Anyway, next week stretches ahead, containing, I believe, the equinox, which marks the start of that long dark descent into the underworld which only turns back at the Solstice. Deb has just bombed up the fire, and Misty is watching the rugby – or at least she was until she was scared off by New Zealand’s haka. The nights are drawing in, and it is time for frowsting by the stove. Next week will be fairly mission-critical for getting books out in time for Christmas, not to mention finishing off the VAT return which has been hanging around like a bad smell. And I have a dead rabbit to polish.  Also, the surgery recently sent me a repeat prescription of the two drugs I now have to take all the time, Omeprazole and Furosemide, but this time it only contained two week’s supply, instead of the usual two months.  Either it’s a mistake, or they know something about my life expectancy that I don’t, but either way, it’s tomorrow’s problem.  

For now, though it’s time to make a hot water bottle and frowst awhile, and, since Matilda shows no sign whatsoever of moving off her little Maisie-blanket on the settee, to shut the cat flap door and stop off at least one of the many draughts that have once more returned to beset the house all winter.  There may even be a hooded crow, peeing in the garden. Yes, it’s just one white-knuckle ride of excitement, here.

Epiblog for the Feast of St John Chrysostom

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. Arran seems but a distant memory, although we have only been back about four weeks, but they have been four weeks crammed with activity – some good, some not so good.  Uncle Phil’s holiday is drawing to a close and he will be leaving us next week and heading back to the sub-tropical climate of Darwin, which will be a culture-shock for him after all these crisp, bright, golden autumn mornings we seem to have had (when it’s not actually raining).

In the meantime he’s been making the most of it, including accompanying Deb and the dogs on a moorland hike up to Stoodley Pike during the week. (The dogs in this instance excluded Ellie, who would probably have had to climb it by being carried in someone else’s rucksack, if she’d gone.)  College assessments have also begun in earnest, which meant that Deb was missing for most of Tuesday and Wednesday, so Granny stepped into the breach and took Misty and Zak down the field and up into the park and the woods.

I think the badger (or something similar) has been trying to munch my wallflower plugs, as on more than one occasion in the morning, the cover on the trough has been pushed to one side, and some of them appear to have been nibbled. Either that, or there’s a twelve-stone slug out there somewhere. The wallflowers themselves have developed a yellowish tinge, which is apparently because the soil is too acid and needs the addition of lime.

Matilda has had a quiet week of squirrel-watching and snoozing. I don’t know whether it’s because her increasing maturity has mellowed her somewhat, or whether she is still feeling neglected after we were gone so long on Arran, but her “clinginess” since we got back still persists, to the extent that she now spends a lot of time curled up in the armchair next to where I am working and snores and dreams her way through several hours of the day. I could, of course, just be flattering myself – it might be that the autumnal drop in temperature also has something to do with it.

Her watching of the squirrels and birds, too, has now become more of an indoor occupation, as she squats on the doormat and looks at them through the closed conservatory door rather than actually joining them outside on the decking as she used to do in summer. The squirrels themselves, meanwhile, have been as busy as I am, preparing and storing away food for winter. We haven’t put out the new prayer flags which we got from Arran yet (the previous set were stolen by squirrels last winter) but I saw one of the little buggers trying to nick the 3 foot by 4 foot flag of Free Tibet the other day.

We shouldn’t forget, though, that the grey squirrel is, at the end of the day, merely a rat with a very good PR agency, and that they invaded and drove out our native red squirrel (a couple of which I was lucky enough to see on Arran on holiday, as they still have them there). One of successive waves of invaders, in fact, and another potential threat was flagged up this week.

Britain is being invaded, apparently, by foreigners. Foreign moths, to be precise. The convolvulus hawk-moth, which has a wingspan of 10cm and is addicted to wine and tobacco, or to be more specific, the nectar of the tobacco plant, is becoming more and more prevalent in the UK and has been seen as far north as Shetland. ‘It has already been an amazing year for moth immigration and such activity usually peaks in early autumn,’ said Richard Fox of the Butterfly Conversation Trust.

These huge moths, or, as Matilda would no doubt call them, “winged snacks”, have been featured in the media as the latest scare.  Apart from the fact that, given their alleged proclivities, they would probably be too pissed and out-of-breath to munch their way through your undies anyway, unless your knickers smell of tobacco nectar, you are probably safe. Mine don’t – in fact they would stun any moth within half a mile, so I am not overly concerned.

The real refugee crisis, though, is nowhere near as funny.  David Cameron announced that Britain would take 20,000 over the next five years, or, putting it in context, the same quantity that Munich recently took over a weekend. Plus, of course, the refugees we are taking, bona fide fugitives though they undoubtedly are, and not in any way to diminish the horrors they may have been through, are the ones who have already reached the relative safety of the camps in Lebanon’s Bekaa valley. It’s better than nothing, but as a reaction to the sight of the dead bodies of children being washed up on every beach in the Mediterranean, it’s pathetic.  Thank God for the unofficial networks of support and aid for the refugees which are springing up all across England’s green and pleasant land.

At least there are people who, thank God, recognise the need for some concrete action. I have been constantly reminded, during the coverage of the refugee crisis, not only of Shakespeare’s “Full fathom five thy father lies/of his bones are coral made” and the refugees having undergone a “sea-change” either way, whether they made it safe ashore or not, but also of Donne’s famous sermon:

No man is an Iland, intire of itselfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as  well as if a Manor of thy friends or of thine  owne were; any mans death diminishes me,  because I am involved in Mankinde;  And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.

I have heard lots of people talk about “we should look after our own first” and “But this is a Christian country”, usually people who didn’t give two hoots about “our own” last week and who only go to church to “hatch, match, and despatch.” But these people are our own.  Any man’s death diminishes me. If a refugee is washed away, Europe is the less, as much as if a manor of thy friends or of thine owne were. There but for fortune, as it says in the song, goes you or I.

Cameron has not had a good week. Not only was he caught out by a microphone he thought was switched off, saying Yorkshire people hate each other (we don’t, David, we just hate you) he has also had to contemplate the possibility of some real opposition for once, and he was forced onto the back foot in parliament, trying to defend the drone strikes that killed two would-be jihadis in the conflict against ISIS in Syria.  I should preface my remarks by saying that I have absolutely no sympathy for anyone who takes up arms against their own country and goes off to a war zone to put themselves in danger in that manner. The people who were killed thought of themselves as enemies of the UK, and in any legal conflict, governed by the Geneva convention, they deserved what they got.

The problem I have with drone strikes (apart from the cost, at a time when we allegedly can’t afford to keep the libraries open at home – a more cost-effective solution, given the numbers of people who have died after having their benefits removed by the DWP, would be to get ATOS to declare ISIS “fit for work”) is the precedent they set.  I am not an international lawyer – in fact, I am not a lawyer of any sort, but you don’t have to take my word for it anyway, Kate Allen, the director of Amnesty International, commented on her blog:

International law prohibits arbitrary killing and limits the lawful use of intentional lethal force to exceptional situations. In armed conflict, only combatants and people directly participating in hostilities may be directly targeted. Outside armed conflict, intentional lethal force is lawful only when strictly unavoidable to protect against an imminent threat to life. In some circumstances arbitrary killing can amount to a war crime or extrajudicial executions, which are crimes under international law… The principle of the rule of law does not require the subject to be likeable in order to be protected by it. Indeed, it is obviously most necessary when they are not. Security is a justifiable aim of any government and it is clear that we are talking about people who frankly revel in jeopardising that security. But the legal question is this; is the threat they pose to the UK, from Syria, one that can justify the suspension of the rule of law and the dismissal of the very concept of accountable justice?

Amnesty is concerned that if we allow this to become the norm, we could have countries all over the world conducting aerial executions of perceived enemies on the basis of secret, unchallengeable evidence. Would we honestly be so relaxed if this was an announcement from Moscow, or Beijing, or Pyongyang or Oceania?

The USA has, of course, been carrying out summary execution by drone strikes for a while now, ever since the response of President Bush to the dreadful events of 9/11 [another anniversary marked this week, although to my mind the recollections of it – at least the public ones – seemed strangely muted, as though fourteen years were more than a lifetime away] international law has been enforced by the detonator of a missile, and it is whatever the USA says it is. In that respect, the fact that we have joined them publicly in this practice is no great shakes, except, as I said, for the precedent it sets. It can only be a matter of time until the category of “bad guy who we decided was a threat so we took them out without bothering with all that tedious judicial nonsense” gets extended to other groups of people David Cameron doesn’t like. Yorkshire people, perhaps?

One person who I am betting Cameron wishes he could drop a drone on and get away with it is Jeremy Corbyn, who scored a decisive victory with 59% of the vote to become the leader of the Labour party. It’s worth noting, too, in view of the fact that there was much carping in the Marsh from the people who objected to Jeremy Corbyn having principles, ideas and policies, that people were just joining as “supporters” and paying £3.00 just to vote for him, that his majority was across all sections of the party electorate and not just the £3.00-ers.

So, now it seems that we have a leader of the opposition who actually knows the meaning of the word, unlike his predecessor, and unlike the other three candidates.  As expected, the predicted, and entirely predictable, Tory attacks began almost before the dust had settled, branding Corbyn as a threat to the economy and a threat to national security.  The Tories are rattled, underneath all the bluster and hoohah, because they know that their free run, of having a Labour leader who implicitly agrees with austerity and all that implies, has come to an abrupt end.  Corbyn represents the aspirations of an anti-austerity movement which seems to be still growing – 10,000 people have joined the Labour party in the day since he was elected.  They can’t get him on the economy, he has got them bang to rights, and the game is up, hence the reliance on ad hominem attacks and smears. There’ll be five more years of this, so he, and we, had better get used to it. They also know that he has the thick end of five years to make himself electable and to convince the electorate, so they are making as much hay as they can out of him being “unelectable”, as if there was going to be a general election tomorrow.

It shows just how far this country has lurched to the right in recent decades, though, that the term “left-wing” is now used as an insult.  Is it  “left wing” to want everyone to have a home, a job, a good education and to be treated well when they are ill?  Is it “threatening national security” to call for a debate on the cost and legality of the drone strikes, about whether we actually need Trident or not? Is it “left wing” to ask why there are some things like wars, and extra police to suppress demonstrations, and water-cannon, that we can always find money for, but to keep the libraries open we have to have volunteers, bring-and-buy sales, and rattling the begging-bowl? If it is, call me Karl Marx.

Whether or not you agree with Corbyn (and I myself have doubts about his stance on Trident and NATO – although we need a debate on them, I rather suspect we are stuck with both of them, unwillingly in my case, for a few decades yet) his election is at least healthy for politics in the UK. Too many identikit politicians, looking like a window display at Burton’s, ends up with the inevitable conclusion that “they’re all the same” and disaffection with politics, and the political process, and all that this implies. At least now that Corbyn is in charge of the Labour party, no one can say “they’re all the same”, any more. 

Of course, Corbyn’s habit of stating uncomfortable truths, asking awkward questions and generally being straightforward and principled has also brought reaction from his own side. Never was the line from The Red Flag about cowards flinching and traitors sneering so appropriate as in the resignation, in some cases within minutes of the announcement, of the tailor’s dummies who decided they had to chuck their toys out of the pram because the days of being nice to the Tories were over. Well, they say the secret of comedy is timing. Suck it up, buttercup.  

News of Corbyn’s election sent me scurrying back to my Penguin edition of Poetry of the Thirties, edited by Robin Skelton.  I was particularly interested to re-read the extract from The Magnetic Mountain by C. Day Lewis, and I was not disappointed, because it summed up exactly what I felt:

You that love England, who have an ear for her music,
The slow movement of clouds in benediction,
Clear arias of light thrilling over her uplands,
Over the chords of summer sustained peacefully;
Ceaseless the leaves’ counterpoint in a west wind lively,
Blossom and river rippling loveliest allegro,
And the storms of wood strings brass at year’s finale:
Listen. Can you not hear the entrance of a new theme?

You who go out alone, on tandem or on pillion,
Down arterial roads riding in April,
Or sad besides lakes where hill-slopes are reflected
Making fires of leaves, your high hopes fallen:
Cyclists and hikers in company, day excursionists,
Refugees from cursed towns and devastated areas;
Know you seek a new world, a saviour to establish
Long-lost kinship and restore the blood’s fulfilment.

I wouldn’t go so far as to echo Rex Warner’s refrain in his Hymn (1937)

Come then, companions. This is the spring of blood,
Heart's hey-day, movement of masses, beginning of good.

But there does seem to have been some sort of shift in the underlying plates -  I hesitate to be so corny as to call it a sea-change, but there has seldom been such a demonstration of a popular will in my lifetime, except perhaps in the mass demonstrations against the Vietnam War, and the anti-Iraq war march in 2002. Finally the tables are starting to turn. Don’t you know, talking about a revolution sounds like a whisper.

And so we came to today – the feast of St John Chrysostom, the great preacher from Antioch whose oratory was such that it earned him the “Chrysostom” on the end of his name – it means “golden-tongued”.  He saw it as his mission in life to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable (we’re back to Jeremy Corbyn again!) as the content of his sermons (which sometimes lasted up to two hours) often upset the rich and the powerful in his diocese of Constantinople.

Originally a priestly monk in the Syrian desert, St John Chrysostom became a bishop more or less against his will, but this was at a time when disobeying the emperor was likely to earn you an appointment with your executioner. His austere manner and his refusal to join in the pomp and intrigue of the court led him into conflict with many around him, especially as he began a zealous campaign of deposing other bishops who had bribed their way into office.

He preached sermons which called for the wealth of the rich to be shared with the poor.  He preached against double standards in public life, and, inevitably, he, too, was “smeared” by the powers-that-be, who claimed that although modest and humble in public, he gorged himself in secret on rich wines and fine foods, and that he was secretly having sexual relations with a rich widow to whom he acted as a spiritual advisor.  Plus, of course, he had made immediate and automatic enemies in the corrupt bishops whom he had unseated.

At the time, Theophilus, the Archbishop of Alexandria, was looking to do something to counteract the growing importance of the Bishop of Constantinople and intrigued with Eudoxia, the Empress, to have St John accused of heresy and exiled. Eudoxia had already been stung by having to sit through sermons contrasting the simple values of Jesus as portrayed in the New Testament Gospels with the excesses of life at the Byzantine court. So she was only too happy to oblige, and St John Chrysostom was sent into exile, where he died in 407AD.

So, there you have it. St John Chrysostom, the Jeremy Corbyn of his day. Let’s hope for a better result this time around, though.  Last night being the “Last Night of the Proms” – an event which has become so micro-managed and packaged by the BBC to fill that hour before news at ten, as to become almost unwatchable, I did find myself listening to Jerusalem with renewed fervour.  Especially as my own chances to be part of building Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land diminish with every breath, every heartbeat.  I actually found myself chasing down alternative versions of the hymn, much as I admire Parry’s setting, even though it has been taken over by the WI, who perhaps do not appreciate that when Blake wrote about “dark, Satanic mills” it was as much a reference to the established church of the day as it was to the actual mills that were springing up on the moors all around, and that Blake’s definition of “Jerusalem” also encompassed free love in the 1960s sense of the phrase.

I found Bob Davenport’s folksy version which uses a Bampton morris tune, and that inevitably led me on to Keep Your Feet Still, Geordie Hinny, which is perhaps more apposite for the long haul of five years ahead:

Keep your feet still, Geordie hinny, let’s be happy through the night

For we may not be so happy in the day

There’s a lot more muck in the sewer yet, and the government aren’t just going to roll over and die at the election of a new leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition. But, the journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step, and, like two feminists doing the washing up, it is at least a start. That’s a joke by the way, in case you wanted to write in. Please don’t bother, unless you also know anything about fixing printers.  

I’ve written about St John Chrysostom before, a long while ago, about his assertion that no man can hurt the man who does not hurt himself, and discovering that today was his feast day led me to look briefly again at some of the things he said in his homilies:

For do not tell me that this or that man is a runaway slave, or a robber or thief, or laden with countless faults, or that he is a mendicant and abject, or of low value and worthy of no account; but consider that for his sake the Christ died; and this suffices you for a ground for all solicitude.

and

let us not summon friends only but also enemies to this common treasury of good things. If your enemy sees your care for his welfare, he will undoubtedly relinquish his hatred.

I can see the wisdom of these words, although I doubt very much my ability to carry them out. The ultimate result would be having to forgive, say the people who have been ruining the country and killing people by driving them to despair and suicide, and I just don’t think I have it in me, There is not enough forgiveness in the tank these days, not that there was ever much to start with.  But I suppose it behoves me to try. Maybe I should practice on forgiving someone considerably less evil, first, to sort of take a run-up at the big ones.

Next week stretches ahead, and to be honest, I am already feeling oppressed by it, having once more painted myself into a corner whereby I am forced to do the things I have to (year-end accounts, VAT return) instead of the things I want to (writing my books, wielding a paint brush, putting lime on my wallflowers, furfling the cat and generally goofing off in the sun which will soon be putting on its winter coat and leaving us, following Uncle Phil “down under” until next year.)

It’s far too early to start talking about a “sea-change” unless you are still protesting about the drowned refugees, and I certainly will have little time for politics next week, except to briefly acknowledge it as it whizzes past. For me, the next few weeks will be crucial to a successful Christmas, horrible as that thought is. And since one day there might be a Christmas that doesn’t include me, I have to make the best of it while I can.

I have, however, come to value the little ritual of Sunday teatime after I have finished this blog but before Debbie and the dogs return, to make a pot of tea and sit and enjoy a cuppa and a biscuit. I’m still a long way from taking tea with my enemies, though. There are three or four hours until it gets dark, as well, so I might as well make the most of it, and trundle outside to get some fresh air and check on who’s been munching the wallflowers. Tomorrow is tomorrow’s problem.