Poor little Matilda has been caught out a few times by the capricious
nature of the weather, especially the hailstorms, which literally start without
warning. I have never seen her move so fast. She’s back at the conservatory
door before you can say Jack Frost, who is another person she’s not too fond
of. One particular night last week, the coldest one (was it Wednesday?) she
went to the door and asked to be let out, so I just keeked it open a little bit
and she squeezed through. Twenty seconds later, she was back, asking to come
in. Poor little cat. Well, large cat,
actually, but I made it up to her by giving her a tin of sardines for her tea
one night, and apart from that she’s spent most of the week in her “stable 1”
position, on the settee in Colin’s front room, curled round with her nose in
her tail.
Oh, apart from Thursday night. Because we are getting low on
coal for the stove, the old cat flap which Stuart the builder put through the
outside wall of the lobby in 1996 has been exposed again. The coal bags are
normally stacked in front of it. Matilda was in the kitchen, gazing into space
at nothing in particular, no doubt thinking catty thoughts, when suddenly her
head whipped round and she hurtled over to the glass kitchen door, jumping up
at it and batting at it with her paws. What the hell? Then I saw that on the
other side of the door was next door’s cat, doing the same. I have never seen
two cats having a full-on, handbags at dawn, standing on your hind legs, fight with a
plate glass safety door between them, but it was quite amusing. And how enterprising of next door’s cat to
find a new way of annoying Matilda by exploiting the (literal) loophole of the
uncovered cat flap to invade her territory, if the lobby can be described as
such. Matilda seems to think it is, anyway.
Misty, by comparison, has had a quiet week, for her at any
rate, with only the prospect of 14-mile route marches across featureless
moorland encased in a perma-frost tundra of ice and snow to break up the
unrelieved tedium of eating, sleeping, and barking at anyone who has the
temerity to come to the door, whether they live here or not. Deb has also been using the landscape as
therapy, mired as she is in the boggage of the exam season at the moment, and
counting down the hours until the end of term.
The squirrels and birds have been constant visitors as
usual. The birds included more sparrows, a rare enough sight these days to be
worth remarking, and a pair of loved-up wood pigeons that seem, perhaps, to be
nesting ion one of the trees in the back garden, judging from the coo-cooing
that goes on more or less constantly in the background. The surprise visitor,
though, has been Brenda the badger, assuming it is Brenda and not just a random
passing badger that happens to have battened on to us this year. Anyway, for
the last six or seven nights, she’s been visiting the decking and hoovering up
what’s left in the bird/squirrel dishes. Plus some stale bread that we put out
for her, and some pumpkin seeds that Debbie bought a few years ago in the
mistaken belief that they were tasty and nutritious, only to find out that she
had been half right. It remains to be seen how long this phenomenon will last,
but I was glad that my little nephew Adam saw it, last night, just before he went
home.
As for me, I’ve had a quiet week as well. Sometimes I have
been quiet because I’ve had my head down working on the three books at once
that are going through the press, and sometimes I have been quiet because I’ve
been feeling sick as a dog and dozing off in my wheelchair once the pain
killers kick in. Whatever it was seems to have passed over me anyway, hastened
by several piping hot draughts of hot orange, honey, cider vinegar and lemon,
which has killed it off for now. On the
plus side, my second order of herbs arrived and I have been busy putting them
in here and there during the week when the opportunity presented itself. I have
also been plagued with a fault on my wheelchair, which, for those of you
readers who can still walk, is the same as having a fault with your legs. One
of the wheels is on its way out, and is no longer round. Roundness is sort of a
sine qua none, as far as wheels go, so at the moment I am progressing through
life in lurches, jinking and jiving like Ian Butler on the wing, and wondering
if the wheel is going to finally go “crunch” one day and deposit me on the
floor like a sack of spuds, waving my arms and legs around like an overturned
stag beetle.
To be fair to the NHS, wheelchair services, or whatever they
are called now they have been privatised, did send the guy out on Monday,
promptly enough, to look at it, but sadly, look at it is all he did,
pronouncing it to be beyond repair, and saying they will order me a new
wheel. When will it come, I asked. Maybe
it will come this week, he said. (It didn’t).
So, as in the song, with one wheel on my wagon, I’m still
rolling along. Pretty much like the government, in fact, which lurches on from
crisis to crisis. Jeremy Hunt, in his bid to become “most despised politician of
the decade” is still putting his hands over his ears and chanting la la la la I
can’t hear you, whenever anyone tries to talk him into resuming talks. Frankie
Boyle, not normally a person I have a lot of time for, writing in The Guardian,
not normally a paper I have a lot of time for, summed up the agenda succinctly.
It’s all about privatisation.
Naturally, things won’t actually be improved; they’ll be sold to something like Virgin Health. Virgin can’t get the toilets to work on a train from Glasgow to London, so it’s time we encouraged it to branch out into something less challenging like transplant surgery. With the rate the NHS is being privatised, it won’t be long before consultations will be done via Skype with a doctor in Bangalore. Thank God we’re raising a generation who are so comfortable getting naked online. “I’m afraid it looks like you’ve had a stroke. No, my mistake – you’re just buffering.
Naturally, things won’t actually be improved; they’ll be sold to something like Virgin Health. Virgin can’t get the toilets to work on a train from Glasgow to London, so it’s time we encouraged it to branch out into something less challenging like transplant surgery. With the rate the NHS is being privatised, it won’t be long before consultations will be done via Skype with a doctor in Bangalore. Thank God we’re raising a generation who are so comfortable getting naked online. “I’m afraid it looks like you’ve had a stroke. No, my mistake – you’re just buffering.
It would be even funnier if it weren’t true, but the fact
that it will probably happen tends to make the humour rather bitter-sweet. Hunt keeps banging on about “fulfilling
manifesto pledges” – point me to any page in the 2010 or 2015 Tory manifestoes
where it says they are going to do a top down re-organisation of the NHS and
then sell it off to the highest bidder amongst their corporate cronies!
The Tories must have been incredibly grateful for the
bungling boobies of Labour giving them a ready-made distraction just when they
needed it most. I can just imagine Cameron heaving a huge sigh of relief when the
“anti-semitism” row broke out. It was just like Peter Griffin cutting away to a
Conway Twitty gag. Labour are entirely to blame, for falling back into the twin
traps of a) accepting the Tory agenda and b) apologising for things which
weren’t really their fault. All that Naz Shah, the MP who started it all had to
say was that she might well have forwarded a couple of tweets accusing Zionists
of Nazi policies or whatever they were, but it was over two years ago and
before she even became an MP. To be honest, I can’t even remember what I
tweeted last week, let alone two years ago.
But then, of course, any criticism of the Israeli
government’s massively disproportionate attempts to deal with the ham-fisted,
pig-headed Hamas leadership’s encouragement of their own people to commit acts
of ineffectual “terrorism” is always met with cries of “Anti-Semitic!”. Some blind
fool enthused by Hamas fires a dustbin rocket that lands six yards inside Israel and
mildly injures a passing donkey. Israel retaliates with a six-hour
airstrike that takes out a couple of suburbs, a school and a hospital. People
rush to condemn Israel, Israel accuses
them of anti-semitism. It’s a depressing cycle, oft repeated.
What makes this different is of course, the Tories, the
media, and half his own party (the ones who have trouble with the concept of a
democratically elected leader with massive popular support) are all queuing up
to use this as a stick with which to beat Jeremy Corbyn. Enter Ken Livingstone,
a man who never knows when to keep his trap shut, and proceeds to make it
worse. Well done, Labour, well done.
With an open goal before you, you hit the corner flag. It’s like back to the
bad old days of Mr Ed the talking horse. Idiots.
The reason the Tories are so happy to grasp the opportunity
of talking about non-existent anti-semitism scandals is that anything’s better
than Brexit. The great confusion continues to rage and once more it’s
immigration that’s being used to stir the pot.
Like a particle of anti-matter in a Dan Brown novel, the idea that there
are “too many brahn people over ‘ere” getting all our jobs, all our schools,
all our hospitals, being given free flat screen TVs and council houses, and
demanding that we alter our culture to theirs and sing Allah Things Bright And Beautiful and Halal Black Sheep, Have You Any Wool, has expanded to fill the
known universe, and proves impossible to kill off. Even the Tories are desperately trying to
kill it, at least those who want to stay in the EU are, even though they started
saying it in 2010, because they know it will (completely and mistakenly) be
their undoing in the EU exit referendum.
To give you an idea of how pervasive the feeling is, this
week a pub, the Royal Oak at Attleborough (the one near Nuneaton, not the one in
Norfolk) published an on-line petition because they claimed to have been told
to paint out the red cross of St George that adorns the front wall of the pub,
because it might cause offence, by the local council. The pub is painted
outside in white, and the red cross is actually quite striking, and has been
professionally done, and to be honest, if attention hadn’t been drawn to it,
would have passed unnoticed, especially as it’s apparently been painted like
that for the last 15 months. But the landlady was adamant she’d been told to
paint it out. I did vaguely wonder
whether wires had been crossed and actually it was something to do with
planning and conservation, because Attleborough is a conservation area. I do
know that councils can get very sniffy about that sort of thing. We had some
official correspondence a while ago demanding we trim back the trees along the
frontage of the house because they were overhanging the road, so I wrote back
to the council by return of post applying for a tree preservation order on the
trees in question.
However, I digress. It turned out the solution was even
simpler. The phone call from the council had been a hoax. When the local paper
asked the council, they basically said they had never been in contact with the
woman and didn’t give a stuff what colour she painted her pub. Warwickshire
police, who were also asked, just in case, said they would only get involved if
it was a traffic matter. Which it
wasn’t. But, as a measure of how firmly
the great confusion has taken hold, a) nobody bothered to check on the phone
call and b) the online petition shot to 10,000+ signatures in the first hour or
so. All with comments from the usual
suspects saying we want our culture back and St George was our saint (the fact
that he was Turkish is lost on these people, as Oscar Wilde said, ignorance is
a precious flower; touch it, and the bloom is gone.) This is the speed with
which people will be queuing up to give the EU the boot, fuelled by a heady
cocktail of xenophobia, fear, and ignorance, on June 23rd. Time to
start stocking up on canned food, bottled water, and candles.
I was mildly surprised to hear that the pub in question
hadn’t bothered to check back with the council, until I realised of course that
in effect they have just benefited from the sort of publicity which you would
have to pay lots of money to acquire by commercial means. Even I have now heard of the place, and I
live 200 miles away! I do think though, that people who post comments on social
media about “our culture”, should probably be required to learn and recite a
Shakespeare sonnet from memory before being allowed anywhere near a keyboard.
Being able to know the difference between “there”, “their”, and “they’re” would
also help.
I can only assume that similar rabid xenophobia was behind
the decision of the MPs who voted against accepting 3,000 unaccompanied child
refugees from the camps in France.
I hope their dreams are haunted by the screams of drowning children until the
end of their worthless, miserable lives, which I hope will be soon. It has been a good week for the government to
bury bad news, of course, with the media dominated by the verdict in the
Hillsborough enquiry. I was an unwitting
bystander to the disaster – well, not so much a bystander as a bydriver… I was
living in Chichester at the time and we had just bought the house at Carlton, near Barnsley.
Simon, my Chichester friend, had very kindly
agreed to come up for a weekend and help do some joinery work, and we were all
driving up there in his car. There used to be two massive cooling towers on the
right hand side of the M1 (they were blown up a while ago) just about opposite
where the road from Hillsborough came in to join the motorway on the left, and
as we approached, we saw police in high viz jackets actually walking about on
the motorway, frantically waving the traffic over into the outside lane. How they avoided being run over themselves,
or even winged, I’ll never know. They
were putting out bollards to close off the inside and middle lane. Needless to say, everybody was slamming on
the anchors “toot de sweet” and a bit of a melee ensued. Meanwhile, a convoy of
ambulances, blue lights and all, swept up the slip road, on to the near-empty
motorway, and disappeared at speed in the direction of Leeds.
We looked at one another. Bloody hell!
We later found out that is was part of the sadly
all-too-belated medical evacuation. It
all seems so long ago now, which puts into perspective the purgatorial wait for
something approaching due process and justice for those who lost family members
that day. It has also prompted, as did
the death of Thatcher, a further outbreak of hostilities, with both sides
choosing to re-fight the salient points of what actually happened, fuelled by
mutual hatred – the Tories’ hatred of the working class, especially as
manifested by football fans, and the Liverpudlian hatred, with good reason, of
a party which has brought such devastation and economic depression to the North
and to Liverpool in particular, and of the Tory media which is its mouthpiece. Those
on both sides have reprised the role of the fans who turned up late outside the
Leppings Lane
entrance. Those with an axe to grind
against Boris Johnson reprinted his infamous Spectator article, which spoke of
the dependency culture and victim mentality and other slurs. In fact, that
article was ghost-written by a staffer and appeared under Johnson’s name,
because Johnson at the time was too busy horizontal jogging to know or care.
Almost all disasters have multiple causes, and there is no
doubt that the excess fans milling about were a factor. But so was the failure
of the police to contain and deal with the situation, the decision once they
were admitted to the ground to direct them to compounds already full, the
failure to recognise what was unfolding, and act promptly to summon appropriate
medical resources, the general lack of communication between the emergency
services themselves and between the emergency services and the public,
especially those searching frantically for lost family members, and last but
not least, the decision by the police to cover it all up and to resist,
stubbornly, every subsequent attempt to uncover the truth since.
Apart from the last one in that list above, it’s possible
that if only one of that list had been missed out, the outcome may have been so
much better. The police have a difficult job, and often lives, their own and
other peoples’ depend on their decisions, which sometimes have to be made on
the spot. But at the same time, they have power vested in them to police us by
public consent, and in order to maintain our trust they need to ensure that if
mistakes are made, they are owned up to immediately, and remedial action is
taken.
One disaster which was, fortunately averted before it ever
happened, this week, was the shutdown of CERN, the multi-billion pound atomic
particle accelerator buried under miles and miles of the Swiss countryside, by
a weasel. The unfortunate mustelid trod on something electrical that had about
a bazillion watts going through it at the time, and blew the lot. It’s a good
job they weren’t in the middle of one of their atom-smashing, particle
splitting experiments at the time or even now we would be watching rolling news
reports of a giant mutant glow-in-the-dark nuclear weasel, or even worse, an
anti-weasel, trampling through the smoking ruins of Zurich, like Godzilla.
This has been a grim week, though, in the world, errant
weasels notwithstanding. Proof, if proof
were needed, that it’s a mean, nasty, compassionless society came in the form
of a follow-up to the case of a homeless man who was hailed as a
"legend" after saving a young girl from spending a night on the
streets of London
when she missed her last train home. Nicole Sedgebeer, 21, had missed her last train from Euston to Milton Keynes and was on the verge of bursting into
"drunken tears" she was offered help from a homeless man called Mark
Collins.
Mark walked her to a 24 hour cafe where she would be safe to
wait overnight and, leaving her with a cup of coffee, he went off to collect
his sleeping bag before returning in the morning to walk her back to the
station for the first train. Nicole posted her story on Facebook in the hope that
"this story makes people look twice when they see a homeless person",
prompting comments from her friends that Mark was a "legend". This
all happened a couple of months ago, and since then, moved by such a
heart-warming story, people have been showing their appreciation by the means
of donating online. £13,143 has been raised, and it would be a nice finish to
the story to find that with some of that money, Mark had been able to find a
flat somewhere that he could then use as a base while seeking employment.
It would have been nice, but sadly he has yet to see a penny
of it, because a charity working in the area, Safer Streets, has recommended
that it might be more appropriate to give the money to, er, them, instead, than
as a handout to a single individual.
Here we go again, back to the
patrician “well, I would give you a sovereign, my man, but you’ll only
go and spend it on drink!” attitude. Safer Streets is a project run by a larger
charity called Change, Grow, Live, whose chief executive pays himself £180,000
per annum. Go figure.
So, anyway, without really noticing, we have reached May
Day, my favourite month of the year is here, and it’s crept up on my while my
back was turned. The merry month of may, in the spring time of the year. No doubt Jack in the Green will have been up
at dawn at Hastings, the Cornish in Helston and
Padstow will have been singing Hal-an-Tow, and the Green Man will have been
seen in the meadows around Oxford.
I was in Oxford
for one of those mornings, either May 1st 1974, 1975 or 1976, and it
is indeed a spectacle. Worth getting an early bus, to see all those people in
fancy dress, some of whom have clearly been up all night, wandering around at
5AM. Morris Dancing for breakfast tests the strongest constitution, even if you
are only a spectator. These are but a
few of the things that make England great, of course, but they are interesting
remnants of a past now largely obscured, largely forgotten, when the horned god
Cernunnos was being ousted by the Romans, and Herne the Hunter and his wild
hunt were heard, and occasionally seen, hurtling through the skies pursued by a
pack of spectral hounds at midnight. Before the Roman came to Rye, or out to Severn strode, and all that. Last night was Beltane, one of the four great “sabbats” of the Wiccan
year. I did know what the three others were, but I can only think of two of
them right now. Mind you I forgot Uri Geller’s name this morning when I was
trying to describe him to Deb and had to resort to “that bloke who bends
spoons”.
For some reason, Beltane always makes me think of that
passage in East Coker by T S Eliot
In that open field
If you do not come too
close, if you do not come too close,
On a summer midnight,
you can hear the music
Of the weak pipe and
the little drum
And see them dancing
around the bonfire
The association of man
and woman
In daunsinge,
signifying matrimonie—
A dignified and commodiois
sacrament.
Two and two,
necessarye coniunction,
Holding eche other by
the hand or the arm
Whiche betokeneth
concorde. Round and round the fire
Leaping through the
flames, or joined in circles,
Rustically solemn or
in rustic laughter
Lifting heavy feet in
clumsy shoes,
Earth feet, loam feet,
lifted in country mirth
Mirth of those long
since under earth
Nourishing the corn.
When I was at university I knew a bloke who was “into” that
sort of thing. I don’t know if he ever did the naked dancing round the
bonfires, but he was known for performing Hebrew banishing rituals in the early
hours. I remember having a discussion with him one day about religion, during
which I said “Do you think there is a God, then?” to which he blithely replied,
with a smile, “My dear boy, there are Gods, in the plural!” Of course, there
are religions which do have “gods” which are different “manifestations”, or
aspects, of the same entity. Hindu Gods that can be either destroyers or
preservers, for instance. In Hebrew mysticism, the Quabalah, the sacred diagram
or “Tree of Life” contains points called Sephiroth, which are again symbolic of
aspects of divinity, such as Chesed, God of Mercy, or Geburah, Lord of Hosts,
and so on. In a sense, I suppose, though
I am no theologian, that when we pray to a particular saint to intercede for a
particular purpose, assuming we do, all we are really doing is “channelling”
that particular aspect of God that concerns, or is concerned with, our
particular “intention”, be it the welfare of cats, or the most hopeless of lost
causes.
May is dedicated in the calendar of the Catholic religious
year as Mary’s month. Hopkins
famously wrote of it that
May is Mary’s month, and I
May is Mary’s month, and I
Muse at that and
wonder why:
Her feasts follow
reason,
Dated due to season
Some churches have specific Mary altars, or processions
where the statue of the Virgin Mary is taken out of the church and processed,
occasionally being crowned with flowers. Specific “Mary Altars” can be set up,
and rites amended to include the Hail Mary. You might expect the church
authorities to frown on this sort of thing, or at least to regard it as an
ecumenical matter, but in fact Pope Pius XII was all for it, and issued an
encyclical to that effect.
It is the obvious association of fertility and bounty with
the concept of motherhood and birth/rebirth which are all knitted together in
this concept. Once more we are4 back to the aspects of divinity – spring
redeems, winter punishes: something which medieval people perhaps understood
more readily than we do in our modern houses.
Having said all that, for all our modern double-glazing and
central heating, and supermarket deliveries and broadband and surroundsound,
I’ve spent a lot of time this week thinking how fragile the membrane of
happiness is, and how, in a way the reverse of disasters, how happiness only
happens if all of a long list of factors are present. The house is warm, it’s
late at night, all the doors are locked, the dog and cat have been fed, the
stove is ticking away, the badger’s been, we’ve had our meal, Deb is snoozing
in her recliner, Matilda on Colin’s settee, and Misty on her bed, and I’m just
going to watch the end of this, or listen to the end of that, then I am going
to go and get into bed and get warm. How
easily all of this could be snatched away. How easily, if you removed one or two critical
bits, the whole house of cards comes tumbling down. Life is lent, not given. One day, your loved ones might go out to a football match, and never come back. It was twenty four years ago this week that my father died. Cherish
what you have folks, cherish what you have.
For me, I guess next week is going to be pretty much more of
the same, Bank Holiday notwithstanding, and my favourite time of year vanishing
before I can do anything to stop it. Not that I can do anything to stop it. I seem to have increasingly less
control over my own life, so stopping time itself in its tracks, or even
slowing it down, is certainly going to be beyond me! My other option would, of
course, be to try and savour it as much as possible, but right now it’s all
hell-for-leather and devil take the hindmost. So I guess I will be left
lamenting May’s passing, a month from now, pretty much as I did last year. I
may plant out the remaining herbs, and allegedly there are some roses and
bedding plants on the way from Jersey, if they
ever get there. If the weather permits. As Shelley might have said, if winter
comes, spring can be far behind.
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