Epiblog for the Feast of Some Random Welsh Saint

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley.  As I feared it would turn out, we were unable, in the end, to carve out the time or the opportunity to get away in the camper van for New Year, largely because the changing climate has currently washed away or submerged anywhere where we might have had a vested interest in going. Certainly the Lake District doesn’t need us tootling around in a decrepit VW camper, getting in the way of the emergency services, while they are still trying to rebuild the A591, half of which is now lying in pieces in the burn at the foot of Steel Fell, if the photographs on the web are to be believed.  It’s almost enough to make you feel like you are living in apocalyptic times.

So, instead, we sat at home and watched the rain, with varying degrees of interest.  Matilda, having once established that a) it was raining and b) probably set in for the day, proceeded to set in for the day herself, usually “setting in” to an armchair and covering her nose with her tail.  A brief period of contented purring would then follow, giving way eventually to deep sleep. I envy her that ability. There have been several times this winter when I have felt like hibernating but my old bones have prevented me.  The dogs are impervious to the rain. Misty is a collie and Zak is part-collie, so they are used to spending their days on the hills and fells getting wet through and frozen stiff.  As for me and Deb, we watched the rain come down primarily with the question in our minds of “when the hell will it bloody stop?”

The floods that we’d all hoped would have started to recede by now have spread, and got worse. This week marked the transit of Storm Frank across the region, with attendant misery and disruption. One of my friends on Facebook posted that it is only since we started giving storms names that they have created this kind of mayhem, so maybe we should start ignoring them again. Perhaps she has a point.  Either way, the Lake District got another drenching, parts of York, Leeds and Manchester remained sodden, and in addition, the towns of the Calder Valley, Todmorden, Hebden Bridge, Mytholmroyd, Elland and Sowerby Bridge suffered severe damage.

As I type this, today, it is raining again, and by all accounts, Todmorden, Hebden Bridge, Mytholmroyd, Sowerby Bridge and Elland look like a war zone, with abandoned vehicles, dismal piles of ruined possessions stacked in the street, and severe damage to the roads, with at least one bridge down altogether. The bridge at Elland is apparently going to take a year to fix properly.  Sadly, the medieval bridge at Tadcaster near York has gone, too, after standing all those years: the water pressure was too much and it just crumbled, and slid into the river.

It will be months, possibly years, until the north recovers from this. Not least because, once the initial rescue effort has been made by the army and the emergency services, it seems that now the inhabitants of these stricken towns are largely being left to fend for themselves.  Schools will be shut for days, if not weeks. The councils are doing what they can to co-ordinate efforts on the ground, but mostly the burden seems to have been taken up by volunteers, not only from the immediate area, but from as far away as Croydon, Reading, and other far-flung regions.  None of this has been reported on the BBC, the media in general having moved on, which is a shame, because the volunteer effort has been a truly multi-faceted, multi-cultural, multi-faith approach, including major contributions from those of the Muslim and Sikh religions, wounded war veterans, and, unbelievably, even some Syrian refugees.

The determination, activism, and sheer effort being put in by the people on the ground has been an inspiration to see unfolding as I have followed it via the Calder Valley Flood Action Facebook page. We call down social media and deride it as being trivial (or at least I often do) but in this case, it has more than proved itself and provided some of the essential glue which has helped to make sure that the assistance needed has arrived when and where it was required.

It is not all plain sailing, however: clearly, there is still a massive and ongoing need for some sort of overall direction, though God knows, the flood action group are doing the best they can. There is also the issue of security, and looting. While the vast majority of people involved in the massive clear-up effort have had nothing but the best interests of their neighbours and community at heart, there are always going to be one or two bad apples, people with an eye to the main chance.  What is disturbing though, is that the large area of devastation has highlighted just how thinly the police are spread these days, to the extent that the locals have been forced to rely on biker clubs, 4 x 4 owners, and their own arrangements to “patrol” areas where houses and businesses have been forced to remain unoccupied. While it is heartening that there were people willing to take on this task, it does set a worrying precedent, as the thin end of a potential vigilante wedge.

What surprises me, to be honest, is the overall lack of support and co-ordination by what might loosely be called “the powers that be”. It reminds me of the reaction of the US administration to the after-effects of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans.  Obviously the councils will have their plans to rebuild roads and bridges, and there will be a massive bill for this, the details on the payment of which are unclear at the moment – probably met by a long term increase in Council Tax. But there doesn’t seem to be any urgency to impose any sort of overall structure for delivering help. The area should be declared a disaster area, now, and money, aid, food, clothes and logistics help with transport etc should all be pouring in. Instead, there is a group of people in the flood action group posting on Facebook that there will be hot soup at Hebden Bridge Town Hall, and starting to organise fundraisers.

I repeat, this is not to decry the efforts of the volunteers, but the Junta must act, and act quickly. These people need help and support on an unprecedented scale, as do the other flood-ravaged areas. And they need it soon.  Part of the problem is that Britain no longer has a Civil Defence force.  It is clear to me that such an organisation has been needed for at least the last decade.  Yes, it would cost money, but then perhaps we could use some of the money we are currently wasting on bombing Syria.  There has been much discussion this week about “looking after our own” again, with the argument being made that the money we spend on overseas aid would be better deployed on disasters at home. Amongst those making the case was Labour MP Simon Danczug, who really ought to know how the economy works. If he doesn’t, maybe he could ask his seventeen-year-old researcher to look it up for him, instead of texting her about how he’d like to spank her bottom. (Allegedly, M’Lud).

We control our own money supply. This means that, if he wanted to, Cameron could order that little weasel Osborne to order the governor of the Bank of England to fire up the photocopier and run off some more tenners. Far from there being a finite amount of money, Cameron could, if he chose, give every flood victim a cabin trunk full of money, with which to rebuild their lives. It is not the money that is lacking, it is the political will to grasp the nettle of climate change in the first place, and to deal effectively with the aftermath of climate-change disasters.  As to the manpower for a Civil Defence Force, it could come from a variety of sources.  It could be a volunteer, territorial organisation. It could, heaven forfend, be part of some sort of voluntary National Service scheme to take up some of the void left by the lack of proper apprenticeships, these days. It could be a route back into work and society for prisoners out on parole. Or all of these things. I am beginning to sound like my Dad here, but at the end of the  day, wherever it comes from, and however it is funded, we need a Civil Defence Force.

Then there is the issue of what causes flooding, and what to do about stopping it happening in the future, or at least mitigating its impact.  George Monbiot is a controversial figure, and I am the first to point out that he is not always right. In fact, I once wrote him a letter telling him he was an idiot, to which he never replied, so I guess that means I was telling him something he already knew.  But, he has put forward some persuasive arguments about the way in which upland landscapes are managed, under the pressure of the EU grants system, by the removal of tree cover and the creation of, amongst other things, grouse moors.  His contention is that the soil underneath woodland absorbs rainfall much more readily, and – crucially – retains it for longer, like a sponge, releasing it slowly, at a pace the river system can deal with.  What is happening now, he says, is that the rainfall just “flashes” straight off the upland landscape, creating in effect something like a “bore” in the rivers, which then spills over and floods the first real obstacle it reaches, usually an ill-advised housing development on a flood-plain somewhere, or even a town centre.

This theory does seem to be plausible in some cases, and there are indeed lots of “managed” grouse moors on the hills above Hebden Bridge.  I am not an ecologist, geographer, or farmer, but it seems to me common sense that if you alter a system that used to release rainwater slowly, and replace it with something that lets it go all at once, and you have more rainfall anyway because the warmer air of climate change means more moisture, and you have building in inadvisable places, and inadequate flood defences, you have the ingredients there for a “perfect storm”.

Naturally, since the flooding is close to home, it’s been my main preoccupation this week. But the rest of the world has carried on getting madder and madder, new year notwithstanding. James Delingpole, a journalist who writes for the Daily Telegraph, has been out fox-hunting, and declared it “the greatest sport on God’s green earth,” freely admitting that he was offered so many free drinks and swigs from various people’s hip flasks, that he rode back “half-cut”.  The 1872 Licensing Act states that a person can be fined or face a prison sentence of up to a month if caught drunk in charge of a carriage, horse, cattle, or a steam engine.  True, this would have had to have happened on a public road and there would have had to have been a policeman around to have breathalysed him, which is unlikely, given the reluctance of the police to get involved with enforcing the Hunting Act. But it’s a pleasant thought to go to bed on, and even if he didn’t get locked up, maybe he at least caught gingivitis.

Theresa May, meanwhile, the Roy-Hodgson-lookalike Home Secretary, refused a request to release her own internet search history to campaigners who object to her plans to force the rest of us to release ours to any official busybody who cares to look.  Her grounds for refusing were that this was just a fishing exercise. Oh, the irony.

And finally, according to the Education Secretary, whose name escapes me, such has been her monumental impact on the office in question, from next year, schools are going to be forced to teach "Christian" values (on top of "British" values) because David Cameron has apparently decided (despite all the evidence to the contrary, eg a marked reluctance to help the poor, and massive amounts of *not* loving thy neighbour, especially thy flooded-out neighbour, or turning the other cheek) that Britain is a "Christian" country*.  It's a good job we're not like Da'esh or the Taleban, who we're currently fighting because they are so religiously insecure and intolerant that they've been rigorously converting people to the "official" religion, whether they want to or not, isn't it... oh, hang on...

*I await with interest the day when David Cameron sells all he has and gives the money to the poor, as part of helping the meek inherit the Earth. But I am not holding my breath. Meanwhile, here's a Biblical text from the Gospel of Matthew (Matthew 23, 23-23) which Mr Cameron may wish to ponder...

Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye pay tithe of mint and anise and cumin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith: these ought ye to have done, and not to leave the other undone.  Ye blind guides, which strain at a gnat, and swallow a camel. Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye make clean the outside of the cup and of the platter, but within they are full of extortion and excess.

Thou blind Pharisee, cleanse first that which is within the cup and platter, that the outside of them may be clean also. Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men's bones, and of all uncleanness. Even so ye also outwardly appear righteous unto men, but within ye are full of hypocrisy and iniquity.

Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! because ye build the tombs of the prophets, and garnish the sepulchres of the righteous, and say, If we had been in the days of our fathers, we would not have been partakers with them in the blood of the prophets. Wherefore ye be witnesses unto yourselves, that ye are the children of them which killed the prophets. Fill ye up then the measure of your fathers. Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of hell?

Which brings me neatly to religion, which is, after all, supposed to be the purpose of this blog.  Today is the feast of several obscure saints, none of whom, to be honest, really inspired me to research them any further.  It is also the thirtieth anniversary of the death of my mother, which makes it rather a sombre day of remembrance for me.  I was thirty when she died, and I am sixty now, so I have lived for precisely the same amount of time without her, now, as I lived with her.  There’s no real significance, I guess, in that fact, it’s just a weird quirk of the calendar.  In many ways, both my mother and my father still seem very close to me. They are inside my head, after all, and you can’t get much closer than that. I also believe that, if what I have come to assimilate about multiple universes is correct, they are also still “alive” somewhere else.  The vagueness of the somewhere else phrase is entirely down to the fact that I don’t have the language or the maths to express the concept any more accurately than that, having been a duffer at physics and having (much to my regret, these days) dropped it like a red hot brick in the third year.  Nowadays, I would be very interested in that red hot brick, and in understanding whether, if I drop a red hot brick in three dimensions, it also drops in all the other 37, or however many there are supposed to be – or in fact, whether the red hot brick always existed, was always dropping, and will drop forever and ever amen. But my brain is too old and wizened to take it in.  I do know, however, that where the rain is concerned, Louis MacNeice seems to have got it right:

The glass is falling hour by hour, the glass will fall forever

But if you break the bloody glass, you won’t hold up the weather.

Or time. You can’t hold up time, either, and here we all are, in yet another year, that looks a bit like the one we just vacated but no doubt has several surprises, nice and nasty, hidden in the murky future.  New Year’s eve, a day which I hate, loathe, and detest with every fibre of my being, came and went, and, since the weather had found us unexpectedly confined to barracks, we spent it by the hearth, until the hour came, at which point I trundled out into the lobby, opened the door to let the old year out and welcome in the new, and brought back a piece of coal.  There were some midnight fireworks, in the distance, but these seemed strangely muted, compared with the “air bomb” type explosions that some morons were letting off in Berry Brow earlier in the day.

In all, it has been rather a muted end to the festivities. As it is also the end of the financial year for the Press, I have had a stack of reports to run and accounts to do, which I have been wading through over the last couple of days. The choice was either that,  or turn out some more of the cupboards, and to be honest, only one of those choices brings in the money, and it’s not the cupboards. They will have to get done though, so that we can get on with the next phase of our plans for the kitchen.

Tomorrow, of course, it all starts up again, and it’s the Monday morning of the year, the day Britain gets back to work. Except in the Calder Valley, where the many secular saints who have sprung up since the disaster hit will be continuing their largely unsung, unfunded and under-appreciated efforts.  As for me, I will be printing off the statement run and totting up royalties; one of my resolutions is not to leave the year end figures until the last minute this year, if at all possible. We shall see.

2016 seems rather bleak and scary at the moment, but then we’ve only had two days of it, and I hope that there will be some sort of a Spring, and soon.  Other than that vague hope, I don’t really have any spiritual thoughts or messages today, except to say that if Britain is a Christian country then it’s most evident in the actions of those people who’ve been turning out in Calderdale this week to do things like clear the drains with their bare hands to allow the surplus water and mud to drain away. Except that some of them were Muslims, Sikhs, and God knows what else.  Who knows – here’s a wacky thought for 2016 – perhaps “God” is the goodness in all of them – in all of us, if we did but let it show – and all people are doing is expressing it, or worshipping it, showing their true colours, in slightly varying ways?  Happy New Year, and may it be better than 2015 for all of us, in all the ways that count.