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.