Epiblog for St Crispin's Day

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. The balminess of early October has now gone, and the weather has acquired a steely edge.  The wind is getting up as well, as if the few remaining leaves hanging on the willows needed any further encouragement to join the drifts of gold-yellow leaves that have already dropped off the trees. 

That time of year thou may in me behold 

When yellow leaves, or none, or few do hang... 

The drop in the temperature has seen Matilda relocate her household activities (which consist mainly of sleeping) from the settee in the conservatory, which can get a bit chilly now, in the watches of the night, to the settee under the window in Colin’s front room, where she nests in an old woolly jumper of mine which I donated for the purpose. She jumps up on it and gives it a good kneading while going round and round for a minute or two, then settles down on it with her tail over her nose and before you know where you are, she’s gently snoozing.

The dogs (we’ve had Zak on and off again, as Ellie is still not 100%, though she’s better than she was) have been getting used to coming home in the dark with their twinkly lights on their collars, as the nights are definitely drawing in, all the more so since the clocks went back this weekend.  Sadly, this also brings with it the increased risk of morons letting off fireworks as soon as darkness falls, but so far, touch wood, the combination of keeping Misty on a lead when this is likely, plus the twinkly light to spot her if she does run off (it can be seen up to half a mile away, apparently) has got her home safely. We’re stuck with fireworks now until just after New Year’s Day, I reckon, so once again, we’ll have to cope with selfish idiots upsetting the dog and the risk of her running off.

Deb has successfully made it to half-term, and next week we’re hoping to get away for a couple of nights to the Lake District in the camper, as she has set her sights on Scafell. She’s done Scafell twice before, once with Tiggy, but Misty and Zak have never been up England’s highest mountain, so it’s time they added to their tally of Wainwrights.  Meanwhile, yours truly has been scrabbling around frantically trying to finish off the last three books to go to press this year (not counting mine, which always get pushed down the batting order when there’s a crisis!)

I have mixed feelings about going away next week, but then I always do. On the one hand, I could do with a break, even though the days will probably be cold and dark, but on the other hand, there’s much to do here. Having said that, since the advent of the hated smart phone, which is completely useless in many respects, at least I do have a reliable modem and internet connection, unless we’re completely shut in by mountains all around.

If we are completely cut off from the outside world, the positive aspect of that is that we won’t be able to hear the news, which should do my blood pressure some good. This was the week the Chinese came to town.  In order to demonstrate their determination to take a hard line on China’s appalling human rights record and their illegal occupation of Tibet since 1950, the Junta stuck president Ping or whatever he’s called in a golden state carriage and trundled him along the Mall in the company of HM Queen.  That’ll larn ‘em! Meanwhile, up and down the country, workers in our steel industry, or what was left of it, were learning that, like turkeys, they were mostly for the chop at Christmas, even if they managed to survive Thanksgiving. Undeterred, David Cameron fearlessly challenged the damage being done to our own manufacturing industry by cheap Chinese imports as her, er, signed a deal to allow China to build several nuclear reactors on British soil, presumably complete with remote detonator buttons, to save them all the tedious nonsense of firing a missile.

It’s all perfectly safe, really. The prime minister, a man who has often set out his opposition to the very concept of nationalisation, has assured us that the nuclear power stations will be built by state-owned firms from China and France. As eny fule kno, there is a long tradition of France having nothing but the best of feelings and good intentions towards Britain. One has only to look at Agincourt, a mere 600 years ago today. What could possibly go wrong? Presumably all those tedious people who keep bleating on, apropos the refugee crisis, that we should “look after our own first” and who undoubtedly voted Tory to a man, or woman, are, despite their “Britain First” views, quite happy with our steel industry being trashed in favour of cheap imported steel, then? After all, like the benefit cuts, which they are belatedly realising also apply to them, they did vote for this crap, unlike me.

The “cuts to tax credits” saga is still rumbling on, and I, for one, sincerely hope it turns into Cameron’s “poll tax” moment.  Thatcher, too, displayed a pig-headed attitude towards pushing through legislation for purely ideological reasons, despite the fact that it also hurt some of her own core demographic and voters, and this is exactly what Cameron is now doing. Of course, he’s already said he’s going before 2020, so his colleagues may not have to queue up in the corridor to administer the lead sock treatment, as they did to Thatcher, but it would be satisfying to see the whole imbroglio blow up and derail before he goes, while he’s still around and able to feel the full effects of the blast.

Some people say (usually the same people who say that we should look after our own first) that they have no sympathy with the victims of tax credit cuts and that they certainly never had any help in the form of tax credits when they were bringing up a family, blah blah, etc etc. This may well be true, but I like to think we’ve got a bit more civilized since then. In the times they were talking about, children had bad teeth and rickets, and probably left school at 12 to go up chimneys or something. Things are supposedly better now – you wouldn’t want to go back to the bad old days, would you? Unless you voted Tory of course, in which case, yes, I can see where you are coming from.  Your natural standpoint will be to complain if someone else is getting a perceived benefit which is currently denied to you and yours, irrespective of the truth or otherwise in that assertion, which has probably been made up by the Daily Mail anyway, and irrespective of the fact (often overlooked) that if you were in their position, under a universal system, then the benefit, whatever it is, would be available to you, too.  It’s amazing how often you have to point this out to the hard-of-thinking.

Clearly Jeremy Corbyn still has a lot of work to do to challenge the misapprehension that there isn’t enough money to raise the standard of living of the poor and take children out of poverty.  You would expect, wouldn’t you, that, having seen a clear mandate for the Labour Party to oppose “austerity” being handed to Corbyn by his 59% victory, that the rest of the party would be uniting behind him to help achieve this aim. Er, well, not quite. This week two Labour peers left the party, claiming that Jeremy Corbyn was “unelectable”. These were, of course, two unelected people complaining about the result of a democratically held election. In purely monetary terms, as well, I doubt Corbyn will be too worried – 160,000 in, two out.

The two peers in question obviously thought their exit would be splashed all over the media (which it was, briefly) and that it would damage Jeremy Corbyn (which it didn’t, really, because most people’s initial reaction was “Lord Who?”)  The second of the two, Lord Grabiner, hadn’t attended the chamber since 2013 and hadn’t spoken since 2011. He does, however, on the plus side, have a name which is tailor-made for sexual harassment, if he ever decides to take it up as an occupation.  The first bloke was so obscure that, in my notes for this piece, he appears as “Lord Wall, or whatever he’s called” and I still can’t remember his real name. Not that it matters.

There are those who would say that the term “Labour Peer” is actually an oxymoron, and I would agree, they are partly right, in that most of them are morons.  But the really sinister Labour peers are not the sleazy old buffers who snort cocaine off the embonpoint of a hooker (and we’re not talking the Rugby world cup here) while wearing her bra, but the ones who remain there, particularly when they are consorting with the Tories to abandon a fundamental concept of the NHS.  It emerged briefly this week, but was not covered by any of the so-called mainstream media, that talks and discussions have taken place in the House of Lords, including contributions to the debate by Labour peers, some of whom seemed to quite favour the idea, on abandoning the free aspect of the NHS and moving towards an insurance-based payment for treatment system.

Leaving aside for a moment that we already have an insurance-based system to underpin the NHS, called National Insurance, though it has been a long time since this was hypothecated on health spending and these days it is just grabbed by the government and used for whatever current war we’re embroiled in East of Suez, how can any of the Labour peers who seem to be in favour of this move reconcile these views with belonging to the very party which founded the NHS and which established the principle that care was free at the point of treatment? Well, Lord Desai? [The debate may be found in House of Lords Hansard for 9^th July 2015, if you want to look it up, but be prepared with a sick bag near at hand if you are nauseated by reading page after page of back-slapping convivial bonhomie between people who are supposed to be opposing each other.]  The House of Lords can still just redeem itself in my eyes by passing its “Fatal Prayer” or whatever it’s called, to kill off the tax credit cuts, but from now on, you ermine-lined fools, I’ll be watching you.

Yes, money is in short supply, which is allegedly why the cuts to working tax credits are necessary in the first place.  How odd, then that the Department of Work and Pensions has seemingly found £8.5million in the back of a drawer somewhere, or down the back of a sofa, with which to visualise, create, and advertise on TV a campaign featuring “Workie” an 8-foot-high tie-dye furry gonk who is supposed to be the “living embodiment of a workplace pension”. If you think the living embodiment of a workplace pension is an 8-foot-high multi-coloured gonk, I would lay off the Tramadol for a while, if I were you.

Apart from the fact that there’s absolutely no artistic connection between the idea and its execution, apart from the fact that the gonk has a more than passing resemblance to Iain Duncan-Smith, its exploits, as shown at least in the TV ads I have seen, are completely unsuccessful – maybe it’s meant to be ironic, in some sort of way only the hipsters from Hoxton who staff the sort of agencies the COI habitually uses for this kind of drivel understand, but it’s lost on me.  If you were going to piss away £8.5million of public money on an imaginary character to embody workplace pensions instead of spending the money on, say, directly alleviating child poverty, you could at least have the common sense to make your character a successful character!

As it is, I predict that in real life, “Workie” will be as successful as he is in the adverts, and the money wasted on him will vanish down the same sinkhole as the money wasted on the badger cull, and the money wasted on inept and cack-handed defence contract procurement, and so on, and so on. I don’t know if “Workie” actually exists physically in any way shape or form, or whether the adverts are all done by CGI. I suspect the latter, but if there is indeed a physical “Workie” anywhere, come the revolution, I would like to see its vile multi-coloured body doused with petrol and publicly burnt on College Green, and its severed head set on a spike next to Westminster Bridge, as a warning against politicians with no compassion and an overdeveloped sense of their own importance.

As I said last week, I do find it difficult these days to distinguish between the “real” news and the spoofs generated by people like Private Eye, and the Daily Mash. I really did think, for at least five seconds, that “Workie” was a Daily Mash article.  Some stories, though, are all too obviously real. The Second Chance Animal Home in Crockenhill, Kent, has been targeted by vandals in an arson attack, the second in two or three years.  They are in desperate need of donations, and also practical help to get up and running again, if you are within a sensible distance to offer help.  I can’t begin to describe the anger I feel at the people who would do this – as I have said before, I’m with Wainwright on this one, I would do to the yobboes exactly what they did to the animals. In this case, lock them in a burning building.  Except it would probably be a waste of good paraffin. Anyway, yes, I know, vengeance is mine, saith the Lord, and all that, and I hope he does come through with his promise to repay, and the people who did this eventually have a long and intimate relationship with arson at first hand, in the ovens of Hades, on the prongs of a demon’s pitchfork, for the rest of eternity.

George Bernard Shaw once said that man’s inhumanity to man begins originally with man’s inhumanity to animals, and criminologists back this up as they discover time and time again that people who turn out to be psychopaths or serial killers started out in a small way by being cruel to animals, so perhaps our judicial system instead of handing out ridiculously light sentences to animal abusers, should start taking note of this tendency, and take steps to nip it in the bud.

I doubt, though, that there would be much mileage in that idea, in a world that doesn’t even seem to care that much for people, let alone animals.  There have been two very grave developments in the refugee crisis this week, while the politicians continue to haver and hem and haw about what to do. One of them has been reported, but its impact has been dimmed by what I can only describe as “compassion fatigue” setting in, and the second of which I have hardly seen reported at all.

The first is that, as predicted, even in the Med, the weather is turning more autumnal, and the conditions in the various camps are starting to reflect this.  Lesbos is on its knees.  There are various organisations over here raising money and aid to send out to the people stuck there, and they are fairly easy to find, so I won’t give a long litany of them here.  But it’s not only Lesbos, more or less everywhere where there are temporary encampments, for instance along the Macedonian border, you will find bad conditions underfoot, people suffering from a lack of tents, tarpaulins, food and warmth.  While the efforts of the various aid agencies (and indeed individual fundraising groups which have sprung up more or less overnight, born out of frustration at the lack of an EU-wide, co-ordinated response, have been magnificent, the media definitely give the impression that for them, it is yesterday’s story. This cannot be allowed to happen. 

What would really make a difference, though, is some action by someone with some clout.  Greece’s economy was on its deathbed before this summer’s refugees arrived: Germany, which has actually taken probably more than its fair share of refugees, is too far away to help directly. But we can. There is an RAF base on Cyprus – in fact, this week, one desperate boat load of refugees actually landed there – it is the base from which we are currently bombing Syria. Here’s an idea. Stand down the Tornados, get some Hercules transport planes over there, load them up with humanitarian supplies, and air-drop them to designated areas near the local hot-spots where the relevant authorities can access them and make sure they are distributed fairly.  Or we can carry on with the missiles, creating more refugees, and eating up the defence budget £800K at a time.  Which is the better choice?

The second development is entirely more sinister, and I have only seen it reported in a couple of non-mainstream news outlets, following reports to the NGO Human Rights Watch. There have been stories of refugees at sea being sighted and approached by fast RIB-style vessels, the sort commonly used by police forces and the military. These vessels carry no markings, and their crews are armed, and wearing balaclavas.  One of the witnesses related how, at first, the occupants of his boat were jubilant, as they thought this was the rescue services coming for them. Victims in six separate cases told of having their fuel lines deliberately cut, of having their outboard motor disabled or taken away by these armed men, and in one instance, a rubber life raft was punctured and left to sink with its occupants still aboard.

So, who is doing this? It could just be pirates, of course, but there aren’t any reports of robbery or anything like that – plus, the equipment seems to be the sort that is commonly used by police and the military, see above. But whose police or military? ISIS aren’t known for their naval prowess, nor do they have particularly convenient access to a port near enough to deploy what are essentially inshore craft.  When attempting to tease out this kind of puzzle, my usual method is to employ the phrase cui bono? Who will benefit most from migrants being stopped before they can reach their destination?  Greece, certainly, but do they have the money to do it? Turkey – yes, another candidate, especially as they hate the Kurds, who may be found amongst the refugees; Russia, maybe, in an attempt to curry favour with Assad, although to be honest, it’s Assad who needs to curry favour with them, to save his neck, so maybe not.  Or possibly the UK? Cameron has previously suggested that one method of stemming the flow of refugees would be to bomb the boats that the people-smugglers use.  The most plausible theory that I have seen so far, though, is that it is actually renegade elements of the Greek coastguard who are doing this, because they disagree with their country’s policy.

I’d like to think it still is too far fetched to believe that UK special forces are now operating covertly in the Med, to achieve this aim by other means. I’d like to think that, if ordered to cast civilians, including helpless women and children, adrift on the high seas, at peril to their lives, even the most hardened SAS man would have qualms.  But stranger things have happened. And meanwhile, while the politicians faff and muddle, the boats keep coming, and people are still drowning.

Reading the comments on various social media postings relating to this story, with people actually praising this action, whoever is responsible for it, and saying it was long overdue, could make you very depressed, if you let it.  Either way, it’s been a grim old week, not improved for me by the clocks going back. Anyway, bad news notwithstanding, somehow we’ve staggered through to today, which is of course St Crispin’s Day!  The real St Crispin is rather nondescript, sadly, but has been given a prominence possibly beyond his original level of potential interest by being featured by old Shakespoke in Henry V.

Even people who will happily recycle any old twaddle about the semi-legendary exploits of saints admit that the St Crispian story is possibkly “unreliable”.  Together with his brother Crispinian, these two Roman nobles left ancient Rome to travel to Gaul and settled at Soissons, where they both preached the Gospel by day and mended shoes by night.  Unfortunately for them, the Emperor Maximian, who was visiting Gaul, heard about this and arranged for them to be tortured by one Rictiovarus (whose existence is apparently doubted by some scholars). It turned out, though, that Rictovarus was unable to break them, and in the end, he committed suicide instead. When the Emperor heard about this, he decided that enough is enough, and had Crispin and Crispinian beheaded.  They became, jointly, the patron saints of shoemakers, leatherworkers and cobblers.

And there they would probably have remained, in relative saintly obscurity, had not The Bard given Henry V the St Crispin Day speech before the depiction of the Battle of Agincourt in the play.  There must be a few people living in remote settlements who haven’t ever heard Sir Laurence Olivier give the definitive reading, including the incredible rising intonation on the last word “day” where Olivier manages to achieve a sound which resembles a jumbo jet taking off.

It has, of course, been appropriated by many people for their own ends (as have many other bits of Shakespeare, including “this sceptered isle” which has been given a meaning completely contrary to that given to it by John of Gaunt, simply by cutting the last few lines) and for a while, fell out of favour. I remember my old English teacher in the 1960s dismissing it as “patriotic rubbish”.

As I’ve got older, however, I’ve got past the French-bashing aspects of it and have been able maybe to think my way into the mind-set of Henry, as shown by that speech.  He’s outnumbered, hundreds of miles from home, and facing if not outright mutiny, then at least dissent in the ranks. He overhears Westmoreland wishing (in a plea that has lots of modern resonances in the week of the steel industry redundancies…)

O that we now had here
But one ten thousand of those men in England
That do no work to-day!

And seizes his chance to deliver a startling peroration where he actually takes their rather dire situation and re-packages it to point out that it actually has advantages. I must admit I find myself wishing I had some of that spirit right now.  I feel possibly more beleaguered than Henry V, only in my case I am surrounded and outnumbered by problems, rather than the French.  And for at least some of next week I will be spending cold dark days away from home, if the camper trip comes off, and little Matilda will be in the combined care of Granny and Katie the Doggy Nanny for a couple of days or so.  Sadly, the problems won’t go away, only I will.

Still, we few, we happy few, and all that.  And in a sense Henry V is right – if you are going to go down fighting, give it your best shot, I guess.  Many years ago, when I first started writing these Epiblogs, I wrote one on the eve of a (then) crucial meeting with the bank manager, which I likened to the eve of St Crispin’s Day.  The bank manager is long gone, but strangely, it feels like it did that time, again today.  I don’t really know why, except that by the time the end of October comes around, it’s nearly the close of the year – it’s dark at five, and soon it’ll be dark at four. 

I’m late finishing this tonight, and I haven’t really progressed very far this week. When I think of the amount of spiritual stuffing that has been knocked out of me, it’s a wonder I’m still standing – well, metaphorically standing.  So, I’m going to close this down, do the washing up, make sure the dogs and cat (and Debbie) are all warm enough, and have had enough to eat, and then bomb up the stove, lock up and maybe even (gasp) have an early night, as I suspect I won’t get much sleep in the camper, unless the weather dramatically warms up.  Whatever, there’s a long week ahead, so I’d best get my bowmen (or dare I say The Archers) in a row!

Epiblog for the Feast of St Luke

It has been a busy fortnight in the Holme Valley, one which contained publication of not one, but three books, and the official launch of a fourth - a sort of “here’s one I did earlier”.  But more of that, later. On the home front meanwhile, life goes on, pretty much as before. Matilda has been sleeping on the old settee in the conservatory, basking in the unexpected October sunlight, although for the last few days, that’s not been so much in evidence. 

Zak has been staying over again, and has been curled up on his dog bed, wuffiting in his sleep and twitching his way though various adventures in his dreams, and Misty has been trapping back and forth in that way Border Collies do, keeping everyone in order, barking her head off whenever someone comes to the door, and occasionally patrolling the garden as well.  The reason why Zak has been staying is that, unfortunately, Ellie has been ill, necessitating an overnight stop at the vets, and a combined course of painkillers and antibiotics thereafter. While she is, thankfully, apparently, now on the mend, it meant that she needed special care on her own at home, so Zak was boarded out with us.

The squirrels and the birds have also been present, as always, although I haven’t seen the old guy lately, and I hope he is alright. Something is certainly demolishing the bird food on the decking, and if it’s not the squirrels, my money is on the badger, though I haven’t seen much of her, either. Judging from the amounts of food being consumed she must weigh about 19 stone by now.  I bet the decking wobbles every time she walks across it.

Debbie was totally preoccupied with the run-up to her “observation” at College, which went, in the end, like a breeze, thankfully, and a huge black cloud has been lifted from her life.  The sheer amount of effort involved in the preparation of meaningless paperwork that nobody will ever so much glance at again, however, amazed me, and continues to do so. No wonder people are leaving teaching in droves. It’s one of the two professions – the other being the NHS - where everybody off the street (not to mention meddlesome politicians) thinks they can do the job better than the professionals, and in order to satisfy the likes of the Daily Mail, a forest, a veritable thicket, of paperwork, observations and targets has sprung up all around, just so the politicians can cover their arses. I am not saying that there should be no regulation whatsoever – clearly there has to be something to stop the hospital window cleaner putting on a white coat and pretending to be a consultant - but in its present state, it’s so grossly overburdening that it’s actively preventing the “good practice” it’s supposed to promote.

As for me, I’ve been fighting battles on several fronts. Last Sunday, notably, four days before Debbie was due to be “observed”, the hard disk on her laptop died. For six hours, I tried everything I knew (which isn’t much, and a more competent software engineer could probably have done what I did in half the time) to get it going again, to no avail. That six hours was also the time set aside for doing the Epiblog, so it never got done.  I was touched and surprised that a number of people got in touch with me by other means to check if I was OK, because they had noticed that the blog hadn’t appeared.  I tried to catch up and write it in odd moments during the week, but it didn’t work out. There were plenty of odd moments, but they were all crammed with incident, and no time for quiet, reflective musings.

As well as the new books appearing on or around National Poetry Day, there was also a mad rush of publicity to organize, with my other leg, and meanwhile, we had yet more woes with the camper van. On the Tuesday of last week, the week that should have had the missing Epiblog, Debbie had trouble with it overheating and all the warning lights came on. By the time she got to Dewsbury, it smelt like it was about to burst into flames. She phoned me up and I told her to let it cool off while she was teaching, then top it up with water immediately before she set off home, and try and nurse it back.  Fortunately, she did make it home in one piece, but the next day, the garage confirmed that (yet again) the camper had been the target of vandalism, and the coolant hoses had been cut. 

I was furious, because one of the coolant hoses had only been replaced just after we got back from Arran, on 4^th September, because it had finally blown owing to wear and tear of having probably been on there since 1986, and now that new hose had been cut. Although the hose on the other side wasn’t in bad nick, the garage did ask me at the time if I wanted both hoses doing while they had it in bits, and I said no, on the grounds of keeping the cost down. So at least that was one good decision I’d made – otherwise it would have been two new hoses that had been maliciously severed.

However, it was still a case of criminal damage and vandalism, to add to the one back in March. So it was back to the police with yet another crime number, then to the insurance company with yet another insurance claim. Fortunately, owing to the kindness of the people who so generously donated the money which was going to be used for replacing the window seals, we had the cash in hand to fund the repair while we waited for the insurance company to pay up (they still haven’t) but it was yet another enormous tranche of time which I could have spent doing other, more profitable, and dare I say it, even perhaps more enjoyable things.

As to why our vehicle in particular is the target of this sort of thing, I am at a loss.  Unless it’s the local branch of UKIP, the EDL, or the BNP, I can’t think it’s anyone I’ve upset with this blog – and even then it would be quite a testimony to the sting of my attack if I’d inspired them to get up at three o’clock in the morning, just for the purposes of inflicting revenge. I can’t imagine Debbie or her family upsetting anyone – she’s too busy teaching anyway – and, unless it’s someone who’s seen me trundling around in my wheelchair, and thinks that (because of the Junta’s propaganda) I’m some sort of dole-wallah benefits cheat who needs to be taught a lesson, the conclusion I’m reluctantly forced to accept is that it’s some idiot walking home from the pub who does it just because he can.

The police, sadly, were less than interested this time, and an altercation ensued on the phone with their call centre when I threatened to procure an illegal firearm and shoot anyone I found tampering with the van. For this I was told that the conversation would be recorded and reported to police officers. Fine, I said, at least it might get their attention. They did, however, redeem themselves slightly when I had a long phone call from a PCSO a couple of days afterwards, who assured me that he would personally look into it, and that there would be drive-by surveillance on our property. I have no idea what effect that will have, and in the end we will still probably have to spend money we shouldn’t have to, beefing up our external security yet again. I could, actually, quite cheerfully murder the little scrote who has inflicted this on us, assuming it’s the same person every time, and I guess that makes me a bad Christian.

Meanwhile, the hard disk saga rumbled on. On Monday, Colin the computer wizard manifested himself among us, and pronounced that the disk was indeed deader than tank tops and sideways-ironed flares. He left clutching the deceased laptop under his arm, as it would need a new hard drive and major surgery. True to his word, two days later, he was back again, and he had certainly done a good job on it. Stripped of all the various crap that had stuck on it during the years, and pared back to basics, it was like getting off a bike and into a Ferrari. Unfortunately though, there was still the job of spending hours copying files back onto the (new) hard drive from various backup disks, and that work once more fell to yours truly to carry out.

So. Not much fun, and not much time, either. Anyway, we ended the fortnight with the van once again running and the computer once again running, though I would have preferred it, obviously, if both of the had been running all along. With all this going on, the outside world mostly passed me by. There was a story which particularly caught my eye about a wild pig in the Australian outback that stole some beer from a camping–ground, got drunk, and then picked a fight with a passing cow. Oddly enough, this was balanced in the week just gone by a story from England this time, about a bow-tie wearing pet duck which is kept in a pub.  It walked into the bar (cue for a joke, there) had a drink, and picked a fight with a passing dog.

Pissed and belligerent animals/fowl notwithstanding, the rest of the news was inordinately depressing. The Tory party had their conference in Manchester, and delegates seemed surprised to find that quite a lot of people hated their guts. The fact that they had to hold the event behind a security barrier dubbed “the ring of steel” and that the conference organizers advised delegates not to venture out into the world at large while they were still wearing their conference badges, should have been a big clue, but then again, these people were bone-headed enough to vote Tory in the first place.

The demonstrators, in some cases, sadly, played into the hands of the Tory media, spitting at the delegates and, in one cases, egging one of them on camera. I don’t agree with throwing eggs at politicians. I would never waste a good egg on a Tory, but in any case, once you start throwing eggs, or spitting for that matter, you’ve lost the argument. You make it easy for the likes of Boris Johnson to dismiss an entirely legitimate protest as “a bunch of crusties with nose rings”.  However, although I don’t agree with it, or sympathise with the people who did it, you can see how, hated as the Tories are, things like eggings happen. 

The other problem with egging your opponents is that the egging becomes the focus of the story – this allows people like Theresa May to get away with jaw-droppingly chilling speeches, attempting to re-define the terms of asylum and immigration. In the midst of the biggest refugee crisis since the second world war she outlined plans to harden her heart (if that were possible) and reduce the numbers of people given safe haven on our shores. I realize that ad hominem attacks can be counter productive, but I have to say, if I had a dog with a face as miserable as Theresa May’s, I’d shave its arse and teach it to walk backwards.

The fact is, still, that, however much the Tory yahoos at conference bay their approval from the floor, Theresa May can do absolutely nothing about immigration from Europe while we are still members of the EU. It was, however, the week when the UK withdrew the last ship dedicated specifically to saving the refugees. It was also the week when fifteen children drowned off the coast of North Africa.  Meanwhile, Alex Wild of the Taxpayers’ Alliance, who apparently lives in France and doesn’t, er, pay any UK tax, suggested that it was time to cut the benefits paid to pensioners.  Some pensioners, he said,

"won't be around to vote against you in the next election and the other point is they might have forgotten by then. If you did it now, chances are that in 2020 someone who has had their winter fuel cut might be thinking, 'Oh I can't remember, was it this government or was it the last one? I'm not quite sure.' "

Well the thing is this, Mr Wild, this is the thing. I hope you live to be a hundred and you end up with some sort of debilitating disease, existing on cat food on toast in a garret in Hastings, scared to put the heating on, because the Tories followed your advice and cut the winter fuel payment. Hypothermia is too good for you. It would be too quick:  a merciful release. I want you to be cold, and I want you to suffer. For a long time. And I want you to remember precisely who it was who suggested the cut that caused you so much pain, misery and discomfort.  And once again, I guess that makes me a bad Christian.  What would Zeus do, though? Warm him up with a thunderbolt, I would hope.

Cameron rounded off the conference with a direct, personal attack on Jeremy Corbyn.  Probably because Corbyn rattled him by addressing a meeting of the CWU just down the road during the actual conference itself, thus breaking the long-standing convention that party leaders don’t pee on each other’s doorstep during the conference season.  Cameron ended his speech by saying

We cannot let that man inflict his security-threatening, terrorist-sympathising, Britain-hating ideology on the country we love.

Security threatening is a laugh, coming from the party whose criminal stupidity has left us without an aircraft carrier on the high seas until 2017 or 2020, and squandered £100m in reversing the decision to use a CATOBAR system, going back to the original STOVL configuration for both new ships.  Not to mention the cuts (to the bone and beyond) of the UKs land forces.  Terrorist-sympathising rests entirely on Corbyn’s statement, taken out of context, that the death of Osama Bin Laden [without being put on trial] was a tragedy. Of course, the Tories always leave out the bit in brackets. Britain-hating? Well, I leave that one up to you. If wanting everyone to have a job, a home, a health service, and a good school is Britain hating, then I guess I must hate Britain too.

Compassion and common sense are in short supply these days, thanks to Cameron and his ilk, so I guess it falls to me to respond in kind to David Cameron: Mr Cameron, we cannot allow your divisive, economy-threatening, banker-sympathising, disabled-hating, pig-sticking ideology to continue to destroy the country I love.  See, two can play at this game.

If we needed any confirmation that this country is on the slippery slope to becoming the sort of dog-eat-dog, shop-thy-neighbour, I’m-alright-jack society where people pass by on the other side when they see those less fortunate than themselves lying in the gutter, then a particular instance in the last fortnight should convince any waverers. One of my Facebook friends was in London when she saw a young lass fall off her motorbike. Several people, to their credit, gathered to help. My friend has first aid training, and quickly ascertained that the rider has probably broken her leg. She did what she could to help make her comfortable and reassure her until the ambulance came: all the while, because they were still partially in the road, they were being hooted at and abused by motorists because their precious car journeys were being delayed by a few seconds.

And, of course, inevitably, there was further proof in the hoohah which arose following the victory of Nadiya Hussain in The Great British Bake-Off on BBC TV. Her crime? She wore a hijab. Cue the inevitable “she only won because she’s a Muslim” postings on social media. Er, no. She won, because in the opinion of Paul Hollywood and Mary Berry, because she cooked better cakes.  Not that success in the eyes of Paul Hollywood and Mary Berry is in any way to be confused with success in real life.  What happened to generosity of spirit, cutting the underdog a bit of slack?

Actually, I am sad to say that I have also contributed to this polarisation, this hardening of attitudes this week, following the appearance of Michelle Dorrell on BBC TV’s Question Time, complaining to Tory minister Amber Rudd (no relation, I am very pleased to say) that the Tories were going cut her child benefit by £243 per week, despite the fact that she had voted Tory in the election.  One has to wonder what these people thought they were voting for.  They remind me of turkeys saying “hang on, no-one mentioned Cranberries!”

There was a very mordant article in Private Eye this week, satirising people who thought that voting for benefit cuts wouldn’t affect them, but rather northerners, Muslims, and guests on the Jeremy Kyle show.  As I said at the time of the 2015 election, anyone who voted Tory voted for five more years of ”austerity”; five more years of welfare cuts affecting the most needy and vulnerable; five more years of the bedroom tax and the benefits cap; five more years of the NHS being dismantled, brick by brick; five more years of crappy low paid zero hours pretend jobs on zero hours contracts that have to be topped up with in-work benefits; five more years of people dumping their pets or having to take them to the shelter because they can no longer afford to keep a cat or a dog; five more years of hatred and xenophobia, of vans driving round telling brown people to go “home”; five more years of people being declared fit to work by ATOS and then dying of cancer; five more years of rising homelessness; and five more years of people starving to death with £2.60 in their bank account because their benefits have been sanctioned.  Anyone who voted Tory voted for that, and I hope it comes back to bite them and theirs, in spades redoubled.

So, I found it difficult to sympathise with Michelle Dorrell, especially as she is exactly the sort of person who would undoubtedly bang on about “immigrants get all the best houses” and “we should look after our own first”, despite never having been anywhere near a homeless shelter in their life.  I do, however, feel sorry for her kids.  For calling her criminally stupid I have been called out myself, for lacking in compassion. My initial response was that I am fed up with unilateral compassion. I will be as compassionate to these people as they would be to me. I’ve spent five years since 2010 being told I was some sort of unworthy scrounger, leeching off the hard working taxpayer, by people like Michelle Dorrell who looked down on me because I’m now ill with something they can’t cure, despite the fact that from 1976 until 2010 I was that hardworking taxpayer and paid in shedloads of PAYE, NI and Corporation Tax which various governments wasted on firing missiles at Godforsaken breeze-block villages in the desert instead of building schools, hospitals and affordable houses here at home.  Now these people suddenly find themselves in George Osborne’s gunsights, and I can’t really raise that much in the way of sympathy.

But, on mature reflection, I suppose I really should try.  Otherwise what am I but another part of the hardening and polarising which is taking place on every level across our society since the Tories decided on a divide and rule policy while simultaneously telling us we were all in it together. I suppose that, by refusing to feel sorry for Michelle Dorrell, I am being a bit like those motorists who hooted at the girl lying in the road. It is her fault, in that she brought it upon herself by voting for a set of economic vandals motivated by a psychopathic desire for class war, but she wasn’t the only one gullible enough to fall for Tory lies, and some of the blame must also lie with the Labour Party for meekly accepting that lie, and letting it run. At least the new shadow chancellor seems to have belatedly looked up “opposition” in the dictionary and started to “oppose” Osborne’s insane charter of fiscal responsibility or whatever damfool poodlefaking cockamamie name it goes under this week.  It’s a pity that 21 of his colleagues felt unable to join in, but they can always join the Lib Dems – they will then need two phone boxes in Truro to meet in, instead of one.

In other news, President Putin is certifiably mad, but then we all knew that, didn’t we? At least he’s not gay. Firing cruise missiles from the Caspian Sea into the midst of the Syrian conflict is obviously going to wrap the whole thing up much more quickly and with minimal loss of life, isn’t it? It almost goes into the “you couldn’t make it up” category, along with the woman who sued her nephew because he hugged her so hard that he broke her arm, or the Walmart store in Alabama which displayed bottles of “gun oil”(a gay sex lubricant, M’Lud) on the gun counter instead of the gay sex counter or wherever it should have been on display.  

In fact, the older I get, the more difficult it becomes to separate out the news into “real” and “skateboarding duck” categories. Whenever we send out a press release, we live in fear of two things, a member of the Royal Family dying and/or a skateboarding duck. The death of a member of the Royal Family is obviously going to knock everything else off the news for days, and the best one we ever achieved in that regard was sending out the PR for Gez Walsh’s second book on 31^st August 1997, the day when Di died, Dodi died and the Dodo was already extinct.  We have also, in our time, accounted for the Queen Mother and Nelson Mandela with our press releases. Gez has suggested that instead of just sending them out, we should get it all ready, then contact the Royal Household and say “how much to not send it out?”

The skateboarding duck is my shorthand for one of those cutesy “and finally” stories which now also tend to go viral on the internet and once again, everyone is talking about the cute duck, instead of your story. If the duck wore a bow tie, got drunk and picked a fight with a passing dog, so much the better (for the story) or the worse (for us).  It used to be quite easy to spot these stories a mile off, but these days I could turn on the TV and it would seem perfectly natural if the newsreader said that a duck wearing a bow tie had got drunk, broken into the Kremlin and launched a nuclear missile at Damascus, while Putin was busy arm-wrestling with Sergei Laverov (or “so gay lover of…” as the BBC subtitles once called him.)

So, after two weeks of what has often felt like being stuck in a tumble drier along with half a stone of pebbles, we have arrived at today, the feast of St Luke. This is the St Luke to whom authorship of one of the four Gospels is attributed, along with the Acts of the Apostles, though obviously, at this great distance in time, very little of what is known about him is hard fact, and is mostly inference and informed conjecture. The description of him as a doctor, for instance, would seem to imply a certain degree of social standing: however, it was also not uncommon for families to educate their slaves in medicine, so that they could have an in-house on-call physician. I gather this is where Jeremy Hunt got the idea for his new contract. Luke is also the patron saint of painters, which is easy for you to say, and he is often depicted painting pictures of Mary, although there is absolutely no foundation in fact for this – or at least none has been discovered so far.

It’s generally assumed that Luke was a gentile, and was born in Greece, although the early church historian Eusebius says Luke was born at Antioch.  His Gospel shows a definite interest in explaining the message of Christ to gentiles: it is only in his Gospel that we find the parable of the Good Samaritan, for instance. He is the patron saint of doctors and physicians, and is often portrayed in art in the company of an ox or a calf, as they were symbolic of Christ’s sacrifice.

Obviously the story of Luke’s travels with St Paul is pretty well-known and it would probably be a waste of pixels simply to re-tell it here. It is interesting, though, to note the differences in his Gospel, as compared with the other three.  For a start, it contains six miracles and eighteen parables not found elsewhere in the Gospel story.  Various commentators have suggested that Luke’s gospel is shot through with concern for the poor and for social justice.  The story of Lazarus being ignored by the rich man, and the quotation of Jesus saying “Blessed are the poor”, rather than the “poor of spirit” as it appears elsewhere. It is only in Luke’s gospel where we find Mary, in the Magnificat, saying of God that:

He hath put down the mighty from their seats,
and exalted them of low degree.
He hath filled the hungry with good things;
and the rich he hath sent empty away.

He is also the author (if indeed they were his words) responsible for framing the scriptural parts of the Hail Mary prayer – “Hail, Mary, full of grace” and “Blessed art thou amongst women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus”. 

The themes of forgiveness and mercy are also found throughout Luke’s work. It is only in Luke’s Gospel that the stories appear of the Prodigal Son being welcomed back by his overjoyed father and of the forgiven woman washing the feet of Jesus with her tears. His default position is always that of someone who loved the poor and always saw the possibility of hope, forgiveness and redemption.  No-one really knows what happened to Luke: some reports state that he was martyred, others that he lived a long and fulfilling life, finally dying, in Greece, of old age. 

I must admit that, much as I admire St Luke for his concern for the poor, the oppressed and the needy, I still struggle to square this with forgiving those responsible for causing that very need and oppression. I think this is one reason why I often feel so conflicted these days. I also get the impression that even if I could find it within myself to forgive people like Michelle Dorrell for saddling us with five more years of “austerity” and all that entails, they would just take my forgiveness, laugh in my face, and carry on as before.  Well, again, maybe not her, specifically, but the politicians behind it all. I should imagine that, even if they knew of my existence, Cameron, Osborne, Duncan-Smith and people like Alex Wild of the Taxpayers’ Alliance wouldn’t give a stuff if I forgave them or went to my grave hating their very guts.  Energy is in short supply with me, as well, at the moment, and it is much easier to maintain a default position of hatred than to reach out and forgive someone who doesn’t want to be forgiven, doesn’t care, and frankly, probably doesn’t deserve it. 

People will say, of course, that the act of forgiveness would really benefit me, most of all, and that I wouldn’t then be such an angry, hate-filled, bitter old man, consuming myself up inside with blind fury. But what they are missing is that some days, it’s only the blind fury that gives me the strength to push my wheels round and keep blundering forwards.  Some days, it’s only the knowledge that these people want to beset my door with wolves, to the detriment of me and mine, that gives me the strength to swing my legs over the side of the bed, instead of lying there looking at the grey rectangle of cloud through the trees.  

So, yes, forgiveness. Not as easy as it looks, and unless you are someone like St Luke, it’s very difficult to square that with concern for the victims of society. It must be very easy, if you are Boris Johnson, for instance, to forgive, and laugh off people throwing eggs at you; after all, you can afford a dozen new suits a day. It’s much harder to forgive the person who stopped your brother’s benefit, say, and started a chain of events where he died of starvation with £2.63 in his bank account.  Except that this is probably a false comparison, because you can reasonably bet that Johnson was, behind his affability and jokes, not planning forgiveness of the demonstrators at all, but something quite different, involving water cannons and baton charges. 

Should I forgive the person who cut the camper’s coolant pipes? The Bible says yes, and I say only if they paid for all the damage, picked up all the fallen leaves in the driveway, and licked every inch of the van’s paintwork clean with their tongue, and even then, the Devil would have to go past the window on a skateboard before I would even think of it. I guess that makes me a bad Christian, if indeed I still am one at all.  They say that what goes around, comes around, and that if I was to make the first move, and extend goodness and mercy even unto mine enemies, that they would do the same to me, and I say yeah, right.  Like I said, I am fed up with unilateral compassion.  It gets me nowhere. I know, as well, that the point of forgiveness is not to “get you somewhere” but that you do it for you. I wasn’t born without the compassion gene, unlike some members of the Tory Junta, but I have certainly had it knocked out of me. 

This has been a depressing read for you, no doubt, and you waited two weeks for it, as well.  If there is a ray of hope in all of this darkness that seems to be rising all around us at this time of year, it lies in the people who asked if I was OK when they didn’t get the blog. Thank you.  Meanwhile, we’re teetering on the brink of yet another week of battles, alarums and excursions, keeping on ploughing my furrow. Iron-clad feather-feet pounding the dirt, an October day towards evening. It’s already getting dark at 3pm, the clocks are going to go back next weekend, and dark times are ahead, in more ways than one.  Still, the stove is ticking away, the cat is on her settee and the dog is on her bed. Deb is getting ready to go walkies, and the rugby is set to record later.  It does give the superficial impression of a world where it would only take one little click of the kaleidoscope to make it much more pleasant and even more perfect, but it’s a click that eludes me, has always eluded me, and it’s maybe a click that was lost way back when, way up the family tree, when Adam was a lad.   Anyway, that’s the news that’s fit to print, and I’m sorry there’s no better. At least there’s scrambled egg for tea. 

Epiblog for the Feast of St Francis of Assisi

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. Autumn is setting in now, the mornings are crisper, and the leaves outside my window are definitely turning. There’s also a carpet of freshly-fallen ones at the end of my ramp; in fact, the entire driveway needs them all sweeping up and adding to my burgeoning compost-heap. I haven’t however, seen the old squirrel for a few days now, though the others have been busy enough, and we’ve also had the usual pigeons, tits (Google crawler, please note) a robin, and even, on one occasion, a Nuthatch.

Despite the unseasonable sunshine, which has been very welcome, if not very warm, Matilda has now more or less taken up permanent residence on the settee in the conservatory, on her little woollen Maisie-blanket. She does still go outside, but only to do her necessaries, and maybe for a half-hour or so at dusk, to patrol round and check there are no foreign cat interlopers in her immediate kingdom.  Despite this self-limitation of her abilities, I have to say she seems happier at the moment than at any time since we saved her from the chop in 2012.  She does still have occasional bouts of hissy-fits and stand-offishness, but then so do I.  The other night, she was on the armchair next to me when I was working late. Deb and the dogs were already in bed, and I thought it was getting a bit nippy, so I took off my desert scarf and wrapped her in it, as I used to wrap Freddie in it on cold nights when we were off in the camper van. She was still there, snuggled in it when I came trundling through the next morning.

We’ve got Zak staying with us as well this weekend, as Granny is in Cambridge, and he’s once more slotted perfectly into the routine of going for a long walk over the moors with Deb and Misty of an afternoon, and coming home to a hearty meal and a warm fire in the evening.  The other day, they were up on Wessenden and Debbie saw a bloke in the distance dressed in what she could only describe as “a wizard’s robes” complete with pointy hat. He was too far in the distance to catch up with him and investigate further, and the dogs seemed unconcerned, but we speculated later about what he could have been doing up there and who he was.  As Sherlock Holmes once memorably said, once you have discounted the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth, so, discounting the possibility that he was the Wessenden Branch of the Ku Klux Klan, or a hallucination brought on by Deb’s low-carb diet, I can only surmise he must have been some sort of Wiccan, Pagan or Black Magician.  Anyway, since then he has been absent, despite my determinedly singing “You’re off to see the Wizard, the Wizard of Wessenden”, every time they set off to go walkies.  Perhaps the Wiz of Wess was having a waz, who knows. 

The big news on the college from this week is that Debbie, in addition to her new role in sniffing out radicalisation wherever it may be found, is now also obliged to embody “British Values” in her teaching.  British Values, capital B, capital V. This is yet more subtle anti-immigrant doublespeak by the Junta, the implication being that anyone who doesn’t automatically and willingly embrace these British Values (capital B, capital V) must therefore be either a dangerous extremist radicalised Jihadi, a potential terrorist, a left wing Trot Corbinista fellow traveller, or possibly all of the above.

We were discussing what these “British Values” might be the other day, and I came up with a simplified version. If you want to teach someone “British Values”, this is what they have to do.

1. Talk about the weather all the time

2.  If in doubt, make a pot of tea

3. Learn to queue, and

4. Entertain completely unrealistic hopes about the prospects for the England football, cricket, and rugby teams.  And Andy Murray, depending what nationality we think he is that week.

It will also help if you learn the following phrases by heart, and use them whenever possible:

“Mustn’t grumble!”
“I’m afraid it’s going to spoil itself later”
“Oh, well, the gardens need it”

“Mathematically, we could still qualify”

“It’s that fine rain that really wets you”

“Come on, Tim!”
“More tea, vicar?”

“We can still go through on penalties” and
“Fondant fancy, anyone?”

Also, you should learn two important things. If you are ever invited to play cricket, the only safe stroke to make on any wicket in England is the forward defensive stroke. It was good enough for Trevor Bailey and Geoffrey Boycott, and it’s good enough for you. And secondly, if you are walking down the street, late for a job interview perhaps, and carrying a take-away coffee, and some clumsy oaf barges into you, the correct response is always to apologise, even if the scalding coffee has run down your wrist and spoilt your best shirt.

On a more serious note, though, there are some British Values I rather would like to see made compulsory, but unfortunately, they seem to have been rather eroded of late.  I’m talking about outmoded ideas like compassion, respect, and looking out for the underdog. Oh, and justice, and a fair trial, kindness to animals, and giving people a fair chance. All that sort of stuff.

I’m afraid in this country, these days, there isn’t much scope for that sort of thing. Take Bournemouth, for instance. You would think, wouldn’t you, that if anywhere embodied the sort of solid, British values we should be teaching these pesky foreigners, it would be Bournemouth? Solid Victorian villas, monkey puzzle trees, B&B, paddling in the sea with a knotted handkerchief on your head, sandcastles, deckchairs, fish and chips.

Yet it seems that in Bournemouth, Donald, a two month old baby that had been living in a car with its homeless parents, has died. And while we pause to let that sink in, perhaps we should also note, that, also in Bournemouth, presently, a homeless, 37-week pregnant, mother is living in a tent in a graveyard.

Claire Matthews, who runs the Hope for Food soup kitchen in the town, said baby Donald’s parents were “grief-stricken”, and they had nothing left to live for. The soup kitchen (another British Value we really shouldn’t have in the 21^st century) have offered to pay for his funeral expenses.  In the other case, the couple in the churchyard, Claire Mathews highlighted, there is some hope of a place in a mother and baby unit, but this is complicated because the mother has mental health issues and taking up the place would mean splitting up the family. So they carry on rough sleeping, and no doubt soon we will be hearing of another little tragedy, another life snuffed out before it had hardly begun. Welcome to Britain under canvas – for those who are lucky enough to even have a tent.

But will we even hear about it? Why, even now, isn’t the death of baby Donald front page news on every media outlet in the land? If he’d been abused by a “feckless” mother, or burnt alive by a father attempting a benefits scam by setting his own house on fire, the likes of the Daily Mail would be boiling over with froth and indignation, gnashing their teeth and chewing their own beards in anger, queuing up to write about the “vile product of benefits Britain”. Somehow, it seems “vile product of Tory local government austerity cuts” isn’t such a good story.

And where are all those people who keep complaining and posting on Facebook that we should “look after our own” before we do anything for the refugees (as if it had to be either/or in the first place, which is a false dichotomy) Come on, then! Here’s your chance! Here’s some of “our own” living in a tent in a graveyard in Bournemouth. Who’s going to be first to offer them a room, eh? No, I thought not.  Woe unto ye, Pharisees.

Homelessness will not be resolved until Local Authorities are allowed, nay, positively encouraged, to build more social housing stock. Yet only last week, Britain’s housing association chiefs and the Junta negotiated an agreement enabling the Tories’ plans to extend the right-to-buy and its associated discount to housing association tenants to go ahead without any parliamentary scrutiny whatsoever. Dave Hill, writing about this in The Guardian, said that it was opposed by both Labour and Tory councils in London and that the business community thought it was “bonkers”.  Bonkersness, something politicians of all stripes are often known for, is usually described in “British Values” terms as “eccentricity”.  Not all eccentricity is harmless, however.

Homelessness is not a British Value, capital B, capital V, nor should we mutely accept it as the norm. An Englishman’s home is his castle, and all that.  That’s all very well, as long as an Englishman actually has a home to start with.  Or, if you are an MP who wants his moat cleaning on expenses, a castle. Yet this government, if I may dignify it with a name it doesn’t really deserve, is currently considering cutting the Homelessness Prevention Grant in next month’s spending review. This is the money which Local Authorities can access from central government to provide mediation, outreach and debt advice to try and prevent homelessness at the point where it’s just about to happen.  Perhaps someone should remind George Osborne that compassion for those worse off than yourself also once used to be a British Value. Capital B, capital V.  

If you are wondering, by the way, why the government is apparently so short of money, the quick answer is, they aren’t. Whether or not you get government money depends on who is asking, and what they want it for. It’s very important for the government to be able to carry out extra-judicial executions of people who don’t embrace British Values (capital B capital V) by drone strike, without the tedious bother of going through due process of law, so if you are, say, the arms consortium led by French manufacturer Thales, say, developing the Watchman Drone, say, and you find that the order for 54 of these drones placed by the then Labour Defence Secretary John Reid in 2005 at an expected cost of £800m, still hasn’t been delivered, is running late, and although it was supposed to be operational from 2013, won’t now be available until 2017, at a cost of £1.2billion, no problem! But - Homeless Prevention Grant? You must be joking, sunny Jim.  I wonder how many homeless hostels in Bournemouth they could have built for £1.2billion? Note, as well, that this is not the current drone. The one we are currently using to re-inforce British Values is the Reaper drone. I have tried (and failed) to find out how much the current Reaper drone programme is costing, at a time when we can scarcely afford to keep the lights on in schools.

Mention of the due process of the law reminds me that I also discovered this week that apparently you have to now pay for “using” the courts, even if your “use” of the court is not because you got up one day and thought, I know, I’ll hack on down to the Old Bailey and have a go at being Perry Mason, it even applies if your “use” of the court is because you’ve been “had up” for something.  This impinged on my consciousness this week when I heard of magistrate Nigel Allcoat resigning after he was censured for paying £40.00 out of his own pocket towards the spiralling costs of a destitute asylum-seeker who had just appeared before him in court.  The defendant was up before the beak for defaulting on a previous fine, and had then, automatically, clocked up £180 in court fees, by virtue of his being done for non-payment of the first fine. Since asylum seekers are not allowed to earn money or work while their appeal is being considered, it was unclear how he was ever expected to clear this debt, and the situation was bound to get worse.

Allcoat, who had been a magistrate for 15 years, realised the absurdity of the situation and decided to make a contribution.  He was suspended by the Ministry of Justice and resigned so he could speak out on the matter.

“I wanted to show what British justice meant, to show him the character of this country is actually compassionate… What can someone do in that situation, when you tell them they need to find £180 or they will go to prison, but they cannot work? They could steal the money? Commit another crime? That would cost the state even more money to have him put in prison. It costs more to keep someone in prison than to send a boy to Eton.”

Ah, but the thing is, Mr Allcoat, had this chap actually gone to Eton, and then no doubt on to Oxford, then he would have been imbued with proper “British Values” and would no doubt have been able to sing the National Anthem.  Who knows, he might even have found himself a cosy little Civil Service billet in the Ministry of Justice, thinking up damfool legislation that treats defendants and plaintiffs like supermarket customers, and eventually disappears up its own fundament, in the logical conclusion of a fast-track system for “10 offences or less”[sic].  Instead he had the misfortune to draw a bum ticket in the lottery of life, and be born in one of those places we’ve been using for target practice since 2003. The bounder.  If only he’d known about Magna Carta. Er, oh.

Sadly, there will now be many more like him, since Russia decided this week that it would pile in and start bombing Syria as well. President Putin (not gay) is clearly a dangerous, deranged psychopath, so he will fit in well with the other combatants in the Syrian mess.  It takes me a few minutes to work it out these days, but I think I’ve got it.  The US were bombing Syria originally in support of the forces that were trying to topple Assad. Then the forces that were trying to topple Assad split into the bad guys (ISIS) and the not-quite-so-bad guys.  So now they are trying to only bomb the bad guys and miss the not-so-bad-guys.  The UK is doing the same thing as the US, and for the same reasons, the only difference being our planes are older, and we can’t really afford it, but hey, it’s only money. Plus, it apparently slipped Mr Cameron’s mind to tell parliament that we were doing it in Syria when they thought we were only doing it in Iraq. The French joined in purely so they would have a say in the post-apocalypse outcome, although the way that is going, their “say” may be merely limited to a gasp of “Mon Dieu!”as Paris vanishes under a mushroom cloud; and the Russians are bombing everyone, because they don’t give a stuff. The only people the Russians aren’t bombing are the pro-Assad forces, which in turn takes the pressure off them and allows them to drop more barrel-bombs on their own people.  My, what a long paragraph.

The Russians and the US are supposedly co-operating so they don’t mistakenly bomb each other, but it is my painful duty to observe that they don’t have a great track record in this regard.  On 3^rd October the US bombed a Medicins Sans Frontieres run hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, killing at least nine people, despite medics at the site ringing the US Department of Defense for over an hour and telling them to stop. It doesn’t bode well.  It’s all getting a bit too Dr Strangelove for my liking, and I find myself actually praying (yes, I know!) that nobody will go and stick a missile in a MIG by accident.  I have no idea what Putin is trying to achieve, and his actions will only have the effect of pouring petrol on a bonfire. However, I doubt he is overly concerned about British Values, living as he does in a “democracy” where thieves can break into the Kremlin and steal next year’s election results. One thing’s for certain, though, the flow of refugees will undoubtedly increase.  And meanwhile, the boats keep coming, and people carry on being drowned.

If there is a nuclear holocaust, there may well be some delays in publishing the next blog, but at least Jeremy Corbyn won’t be to blame, as he came out this week and – possibly unwisely – gave a straight answer to a straight question, that if he was Prime Minister, he would never use our “independent” nuclear deterrent, which is of course independent in a rather specialised use of the word, in that if the time comes, the US president will ring us up and tell us to press the button.

I discovered this week (as part of the “fallout” from Corbyn stating his position) that in the event of a nuclear strike on the UK and it ceasing to be “a viable state” (some would argue we’ve already reached that point) the captain of whatever nuclear sub was at sea when that happened would try and pick up BBC Radio 4, and if they failed to do so for three days in succession, would then go to a locked safe, open it, and take out a letter from the Prime Minister of the day, telling them what to do.  Presumably in Corbyn’s case his letter would say “try Classic FM instead” but either way, we had better hope that The Archers is as indestructible as it seems, and even if the real English countryside was toasted to a nuclear crisp, they’d still be playing Barwick Green in Borsetshire, and talking about possible swine flu in Neil’s weaners at Hollowtree on a tape loop, even if no-one but the submarines could hear them.

We will, of course, shortly be bombarded by yet another “British Value”, that of “wearing your poppy with pride.” It is so depressing to note how, year on year, Poppy Day becomes increasingly the subject of a tug-of-war between the government, who want to misappropriate it and hijack it to inculcate a sort of faux patriotism that automatically brings with it the baggage of supporting our troops and tacit approval of our misguided actions in delivering a catastrophic foreign policy at the point of a missile, and the fascist organisations like Britain First who are all over Facebook, sharing if you wear the poppy with pride and pocketing the money they raise from Poppy-related merchandise, while the British Legion is seemingly powerless to stop them, even though it is almost certainly fraud.

I object to anyone telling me why I should wear my poppy, and so this year, alongside the traditional red poppy from the RBL, I will be wearing a white poppy from the Peace Pledge Union, and a purple poppy from Animal Aid, in memory of all the innocent animal victims of war. I’ll probably weave them into a gay little corsage and stick it in my hat. Either way, it covers all bases. Fair play, you see, a traditional British Value. 

I’m still in several minds about Trident. Obviously in an uncertain world, we need something to defend ourselves, and while Trident is no use against the single dedicated terrorist, it is some sort of a threat to the rogue states that harbour and foment international terrorism. It also guarantees us a certain international status (although it shouldn’t). If our idiot politicians hadn’t spent the last fifteen years smacking every wasps’ nest they could find with a stick, we wouldn’t need it so much. We can’t really afford it, although the government wastes huge amounts of money on totally unnecessary things, money which could be better deployed elsewhere.  In my perfect world, starting from here, by the time the procurement process of Trident was ready to sign off, we’d have somehow achieved a world where we didn’t need it, but at the moment we seem to be going in precisely the opposite direction.

Another British Value, capital B capital V, is that we are apparently a nation of animal lovers.  If you wanted a classic illustration of the combination of Olde English flummery and tradition, with our affection for animals, you could note the recent story that the new High Sheriff of Rutland has just exercised his hereditary right to drive a flock of his sheep across London Bridge, free of charge or any toll.  Andrew Brown, who holds the post and lives in Caldecott, has also become a Freeman of the City of London by virtue of his appointment, and thus joins the privileged elite who are able to drive their sheep over the Thames and into the City without having to pay anything for their crossing.  The tradition dates back to the 12^th century, when ordinary people had to pay a fee for the privilege, and the Freemen of the City were awarded an exemption.

So, it would seem that at least the establishment, with all its reliance on pomp and ceremony and hereditary privilege, does at least uphold the British Value (Capital B, capital V) of kindness to animals. After all, the Queen has corgis, doesn’t she? True, her husband seems to believe that you need to keep your 12-bore handy, because you have to be cruel to be kind sometimes, and her eldest son would rather like to be allowed to rip foxes apart during an afternoon spent crashing around the countryside on horseback like some kind of medieval yahoo, another Quainte Olde English British Value that the government wants to bring back (next stop bear-baiting, wife-selling, and stuffing orphans up chimneys) but I suppose we have to cut them a little slack, close our eyes and count to 10, and remember that, whatever the foibles of its present incumbents, the Monarchy is at least a useful constitutional bulwark which has stopped people like Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair from causing even more havoc and mayhem as President after their respective stints as Prime Minister.

Then along comes Princess Michael of Kent and declares that animals don’t have rights “because they don’t vote”.  OK, that’s another one to just leave lying there for a few seconds while it sinks in.  So, it’s open season on anything that doesn’t pay taxes. Right.  Let’s start by hunting down Apple, Vodafone, Starbucks, Google and Boots then. I’m not particularly bothered if we use the traditional red coats, horns and a pack of dogs to rip them to pieces method, or lock and load with a full metal jacket. I’m easy either way, or so the girls all tell me.  Perhaps we could get the heads of the respected CEOs tastefully mounted and stuck on the wall somewhere.  She’s great entertainment value, is Princess Michael.  I remember her comments that they had had to cut back just like the rest of us, because they didn’t have so many dinner parties and didn’t always get the caterers in when they did. You can’t buy “gaga” like that, it takes generations of in-breeding.

And of course, we’re such a nation of animal lovers, and we value this particular “British Value” so highly, that every year, 7000 unwanted and abandoned dogs are put to sleep in local authority pounds and kennels because no-one wants to re-home them.

I seem to have a bee in my bonnet about British Values (capital B, capital V) but if I do, it’s because of the massive, jaw-dropping, buttock-clenching hypocrisy this programme represents. Democracy in other countries is OK, as long as the people elect the leaders we want them to elect. If not, the bombs start falling. Here we are, with a government that has presided over – indeed, caused – discord and division and inequality at home, seeing fit to lecture people on democracy when deals are done to flog off the housing stock without parliament even getting a sniff at them. We see fit to lecture people on British justice yet we suspend people who are trying to demonstrate its basic values and virtues. We bleat on about fair play and championing the underdog while we spend the money that could be used to give the underdog a home on firing missiles at Syria instead, to create more refugees. We are so much in favour of the underdog, with our “British Values” that we’re only accepting 20,000 of them, over five years, and only then because David Cameron fleetingly rediscovered his long-lost sense of shame when that kid drowned (one of many).  We’re so in favour of the underdog, that we deport them even when they’re dying of cancer, or likely to be shot back in their own countries, or even, on some memorable occasions, both. We’re so in favour of the underdog that we label them scroungers and spend money that could be used to feed the people who are starving, in our land of plenty, on vans, driving round the streets, painted with the message “brown underdogs go home”.   We’re so in favour of the underdog, that we turn a blind eye while 7,000 real, canine, underdogs are destroyed each year. Oh yes, British Values. Capital B. Capital V.

Of course, I have to watch my step as well. These are the days when, under British Values, a mentally-confused 14 year old kid can be simultaneously a) on a government anti-radicalisation programme while b) being secretly groomed by ISIS handlers and c) sentenced to life for merely plotting an attack which was foiled.  I realise there will be those who will disagree with me, and say that he deserved it, and certainly, had the attack gone ahead, I would have had no compunction whatsoever in banging him up for conspiracy, and I am not saying he should have escaped scot-free in this case either, but I am still markedly uneasy with the “thought crime” of merely thinking about committing an act of terrorism, and more specifically with the severity of this particular sentence.  Obviously the intention here was to set a precedent, to draw a line in the sand, to fire a warning shot, pick your own clichés: I can’t help but think, though, that such a draconian sentence will only, in the long term, be counter productive. And any society where you can be locked up for life merely for intent, doesn’t seem to have much to do with British Values as far as I can see.

A big part of the problem, as I have often said before, is that politicians are so removed from life’s ordinary pressures and tasks, that they’ve forgotten what it’s like to be us.  Denis Healey died this week. I once met him. Well, I say met, he was coming up the steps at King’s Cross underground and into the main line station, while I was going the other way. Our eyes met, then we did that very British thing of each trying to get out of each other’s way. He was wearing a camel-hair coat and carrying two what looked like very heavy briefcases, one in each hand. He’d probably travelled across London from Westminster on the Victoria line, carrying them. No doubt he was looking for a train to Leeds, to get back to his constituency for the weekend (it was a Friday night).

I thought at the time, and I still do now, how healthy it was for democracy that this bloke, who might have been Chancellor or Foreign Secretary at the time, obviously had no problems about mixing with the great unwashed and travelling by tube. If it were to happen at all today, it would be as part of a carefully-staged photo opportunity.  There are lots of politicians anyway who fail to acknowledge anywhere north of Leeds anyway.  This week, the steelworks at Redcar, which was previously under threat because its owners wanted to mothball it, went belly-up as its owners called in the administrators.  Of course, you also have to factor in the knock-on effect on the local economy of those businesses who supplied the steelworks: from the authorised sub-contractors to the tea-and-sandwich van at the factory gate. 1700 jobs have been lost, and you would have thought, wouldn’t you, that this might be the sort of asset that the government could maybe take over, and keep going, given that we need steel for all sorts of things – or that it could have been the focus for a managed change of use to a nationalised facility manufacturing items necessary to help us win the war against climate change.  It is a situation which is crying out for imaginative, visionary solutions. But the government has thrown £80million at the problem to help people re-train and get other jobs. There are no other jobs. There will be a surfeit of self-employed window-cleaners and gardeners in Redcar this winter. And contrast £80million with the £1.2billion racked up by the Watchman Drone so far.

It’s a mad old world, and it’s getting madder. But at least today, the sun is shining, it’s a peaceful Sunday morning and The Archers is burbling away on the radio, so at least no one will be launching a Polaris missile any time soon. It’s also the feast day of St Francis of Assisi, of all people.

Francis was born in Umbria, Italy, in 1182. A rich cloth merchant called Pietro Bernardone came back from a sales trip to France to find his wife had given birth. Apparently the event wasn’t particularly unexpected, but what did annoy him was that his wife had already baptized the child, calling him Giovanni, after John the Baptist. Pietro wanted a son who would become a merchant like himself, so he had him re-named Francesco, in homage to France, his biggest sales market.

As the young Francesco grew, he enjoyed a life of privilege and wealth, and in his teens he became involved in living a life of excess and drunkenness, partying till dawn. He also fulfilled his father’s expectations of him, however, travelling and falling in love with France. However, life as a merchant was not enough. He wanted the glory of battle, and to become a knight.

He got his chance when Assisi declared war on the neighbouring city-state of Perugia, but unfortunately it didn’t go well.  At the end of the battle, the field was littered with the corpses of the troops from Assisi. Francesco survived, but was thrown into a dungeon, where he spent a year imprisoned until he was ransomed and returned home.

Despite this experience, he was not deterred from his wish to pursue a military career, and when the chance came to join the Fourth Crusade, he jumped at the chance, commissioning a wonderful new suit of armour and a decorated cloak. One day out from Assisi, though, he had a troubling dream, in which God told him that he had got it all wrong and commanded him to return home.

Coming back only a day or so after his triumphal exit, he was the subject of much scorn and derision, but he ignored it all and took to a life of poverty. He went on a pilgrimage to Rome and begged for alms in St Peter’s Square.  He spent much of his time in a cave, praying and weeping for what he regarded as his sins.  One day, while riding in the countryside, he was confronted by a leper in the road.  Lepers in the middle ages were objects of horror, and very much to be avoided.  However, Francis dismounted and embraced the leper, much to everyone’s horror.  Riding away afterwards, he turned and looked back, and the leper was not there.  Francis always maintained that the apparition of the leper had actually been a test, set for him by God. [Oddly enough, I had only just researched this story when I heard that Gabriela Andreevska, whose work amongst the Macedonian refugees I wrote about previously, has been offering the kiss of peace to the people in the camps there, in an attempt to counter rumours that refugees are spreading disease to the West] 

Matters with his father were soon to come to a head, however. Despite the oddity of his behaviour, as his family saw it, Francis had continued to be a part of the family business. However, one day his wanderings led him to the church of San Damiano, which was in a crumbling, decayed state.  Francis heard a voice telling him to “repair the church” coming from the body of Christ on the crucifix, and, not pausing to ask whether that was with a capital C or not, began restoring San Damiano. Unfortunately, this involved selling some of his father’s stock without his permission, and diverting the resulting funds to pay for the restoration work. His father went what is generally known these days as “apeshit” over this, and hauled Francis up before the local Bishop. The Bishop ordered the money to be returned, telling Francis that “God would provide”.

That was all Francis needed to hear.  He returned the money, and there and then stripped off all his costly clothes and distributed them amongst the crowd. He declared himself no longer his father’s son, and wandered off into the woods, singing, dressed in only a thin hair-shirt.  The story of the time St Francis spent in the wilderness communing with nature is almost too well known for me to bother re-telling it – how he preached a sermon to the birds, and they all sat and listened politely until he had finished, and only then flew off; how he persuaded a wolf to stop terrorising the local village in return for the villagers making a pact to feed it, and similar stories, have been carried down through the centuries.  He begged for building stones, and apparently rebuilt San Damiano with his bare hands.

Eventually, people heard about him and came to join him and share in his simple existence. This was the genesis of what was to eventually become the Franciscan Order, although it was never its founder’s intention to start anything so “organised”.  He and his followers began trying to live their lives literally according to the Gospel, going about in pairs, dressed in rags, and preaching to anyone who would listen.  They accepted what they were given, and only actively begged when they had to.  When the local Bishop expressed incredulity at their way of life, Francis argued that, because they had no possessions, they had no need of weapons to defend them, nor were they afraid of losing what they had never had. He said that this was his definition of freedom.

People tend to think of St Francis as spending most of his time in the wilderness, communing with the birds and animals, but in fact he also travelled widely. Some of these projected journeys were curtailed by illness, or by shipwreck, but he did make it as far as Egypt in 1219, during a brief truce in the Fifth Crusade, when the Crusaders and the forces led by the Sultan, Saladin’s nephew, had fought themselves to a bloody standstill over the siege of a city on a tributary of the Nile. Francis’s rather ambitious plan was to end the conflict altogether by converting the Sultan. Although he failed in this, the fact that he and his companions were allowed to discuss it with the Sultan, having made passage through the Saracen lines, and the fact that they all returned with their gizzards intact, must be some kind of testimony to his persuasiveness and charisma. Some scholars attribute the fact that, after the fall of Jerusalem, only the Franciscans were permitted to remain in the Holy Land, to the goodwill engendered by this intervention in the name of peace.

On his return to Italy, the Franciscan Order, as it had become, had now achieved 5000 members and it desperately needed proper organisation. There were also offshoot organisations – the “Poor Clares”, a female order, and the rather unimaginatively-named “Third Order”. Francis’s simple rule of following the teachings of Jesus and walking in his footsteps was struggling to cope with the influx of followers. Having no stomach himself for the prospect of spending his remaining time on earth as an administrator, St Francis chose to step back and allow the Papacy to take over the Order.  Increasingly frail and ill from his travels, he was also battling against encroaching blindness.  His body allegedly acquired the pattern of the stigmata, the five wounds which Christ suffered on the cross.  Despite his frailty, he also managed to organise the first ever nativity scene, when he set up a real crib and real animal stalls in a church, to create a living scene so that the worshippers could contemplate the birth of Jesus in a direct way, making use of the senses, especially sight.

He died on October 4^th 1226, aged only 45, while listening to a reading of Psalm 142. He was reburied in 1230 under the Lower Basilica of his own church, but his tomb soon had to be hidden for fear of Saracen invaders, and it remained lost until it was rediscovered by accident in 1818.  It was re-fashioned between 1927 and 1930 and in 1978, his remains were placed in a glass urn inside the traditional stone tomb.

As you might expect with such a well-known saint, his legends have been embroidered and have grown in the telling. Because of his popularity in art and literature, his words have also been appropriated by many – and misappropriated as well. Margaret Thatcher chose to quote St Francis of Assisi on the steps of 10 Downing Street in 1979:

Where there is discord, may we bring harmony. Where there is error, may we bring truth. Where there is doubt, may we bring faith. And where there is despair, may we bring hope…

In fact, where there was harmony, she brought discord. Where there was truth, she brought error; where there was faith, doubt, and where there was hope, despair.  But that’s all blood under the bridge, now. The prayer that she was quoting begins “Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace…” and today her spiritual successor David Cameron has just said that he would demonstrate the British Value of pressing the red button to trigger a nuclear holocaust (which will no doubt earn him a swift rebuke from Obama or his successor for jumping the gun! Mind you, if Obama’s successor is Donald Trump, he would probably turn out to be the sort of klutz who would press it by accident. )

St Francis reminds me a lot of Jesus in some respects. He started out with some good ideas and people flocked to him, but eventually the status quo took over and forced him out of the very thing he had founded. In both cases, they left a legacy of a following that is still struggling today to cope with the organisation needed to perpetuate the ideas, and the ideas themselves, which tend to suggest things like giving up the idea of even having an organisation, and giving it all to the poor instead.  The wealth of the Vatican, the Church of England’s position as a major landholder.  We’re back once again with the British Values of John Betjeman’s wealthy woman praying in Westminster Abbey.

Think of what our nation stands for;

Books from Boots and country Lanes,

Free speech, free passes, class distinction:

Democracy, and proper drains.

I realise this has been a long and rambling screed, but this nonsense about all of us having to agree on a set of British Values (cap B cap V) written by Conservative Central Office has really got my dander up.  One of the most important British Values is free speech, which means just that – within the law we should all be free to say what we think, free to differ, not yoked together in some kind of pretend harmony, the orthodoxy of “we’re all in it together” when the reality is nothing of the sort.

The song says that there’ll always be an England while there’s a country lane, while there’s a country cottage beside a field of grain… I’d like to think there’ll always be an England while there are people ready to organise soup kitchens and refugee parcels and rescue and re-home cats, dogs and other unwanted animals.  There’ll always be an England while there are still people who show kindness, compassion and respect. The tea, and the weather, and the football team going out on penalties, and the red buses and the enigma of Andy Murray’s nationality are all important factors, but what really counts is that kindness.  If I could but aspire to some of the kindness displayed by St Francis of Assisi, for instance, I would be a much happier person in myself.

Unfortunately, I don’t have a kind and forgiving nature, which is why one day, they will probably come for me and lock me up as a malcontent who does not share “British Values”. At least if they do, I will get fed regularly in jail and I will be spared the huge stack of work which awaits me next week. In the meantime I might as well go out with a bang, and quote you the traditional song Hard Times of Old England, which is as true today as when it was first composed by some anonymous peasant and sung to the tune of The Roast Beef of Old England, in the aftermath of the Battle of Waterloo.   

Come all brother tradesmen who travel along

Oh pray come and tell me where the trade is all gone?

Long time I have travelled and cannot find none…

And it’s oh, the hard times of old England,

In old England such very hard times…

Our soldiers and sailors have just come from war

They fought for their king and their country for sure:

Come home to be starved, should have stayed where they were

And it’s oh, the hard times of old England,

In old England such very hard times…

Well, once again it’s Sunday teatime, and the pigeon I call Percy, the one with a distinctive white mark on his neck, is stuffing himself with bird seed, Matilda’s asleep in the chair, ignoring him, and I’d like to go on to say God’s in his heaven and all’s right with the world. I would like to, but it manifestly would not be true. And what are we to make of this weird Italian who talks to the birds and the wolves, not to mention this strange, wild-eyed Palestinian activist who said give all you have to the poor, and follow me? Not very… British… was he?