Epiblog for the Feast of St Herman the Cripple

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. September seems to be zipping by at an alarming rate, although it’s still been warm, or it’s seemed to be warm, at any rate. It could just be me being febrile. It would be easy to be febrile at the moment, being me.

Matilda has still largely ignored the weather, in fact she seems to be spending much less time outdoors.  Given that she was allegedly 9 when we got her, and we’ve had her 4 years, she’s 13 now, which is 65 in human years, so maybe we can expect that she’ll slow down a bit.  Not that she seems troubled in any way, in fact, as Debbie remarked, if anything, she’s been clingier and much more friendly since we got back from Arran.

Misty, too, has settled back down into the routine of home life, with the beach, Kilbrannan Sound, and games of stones being but a distant memory.  She is, however, seemingly content to potter around the garden, snooze in the sun, and go on long walks up on t’moors with Deb and Zak, when the latter is available, although at human age 63, he’s also slowing up a bit as well. Still, he managed a 14-miler during the week. Good dog.

The production of new books continues to be fraught and shitnastic, although it’ll all come out in the wash, no doubt. College, for Deb, is the same as ever, swift to chide and slow to bless.

So, all in all, it’s pretty much par for the course and business as usual here, and nothing much to report. To be honest, I’m not entirely sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. Sadly, it’s pretty much business as usual in the world at large as well.  The fragile ceasefire in Syria exploded in a welter of flame as the Russians bombed an aid convoy. Or maybe it was the Syrians. Or both. Or, since they each denied any responsibility, maybe it was the fairies.

David Cameron announced that his career after politics will be giving after dinner speeches about austerity at £50K a pop; Jeremy Hunt’s lawyers argued that he is “not to be held accountable for what he says in the rough and tumble of parliament”.  Jeremy Corbyn once more trounced an opponent in a leadership contest, increasing his lead from 59% last time to 60% this time, despite his opponents gerrymandering the electorate and disallowing anyone who they thought wouldn’t vote for Owen Smith, on all sorts of fabricated precedents.  A kid died in Calais, trying to stow away on board a lorry to get to his brother in England. 115 migrants died when their boat overturned off the coast of Egypt.  And Mary Berry announced that she wouldn’t take part in the next series of The Great British Bake Off, a story which the BBC thought was much more important than all the rest, judging from its prominence in the news agenda.  Well, that and Brad and Angelina, whoever they might be.

It wasn’t all bad news in the press though: a woman found a message in gold marker pen scrawled up the inside leg of the underpants she had bought her husband from Primark, and automatically assumed that this was evidence that he was having an affair.  Why, God alone knows.  If you were having an affair with someone, communicating with them by writing letters in gold felt pen in their underpants is a tad insecure.  It turned out to be a message from a Primark worker in India. Probably saying “Help, I am prisoner in an underpant factory.”

It was also the week that a woman travelling from London to Skipton on a Virgin train took photos of the two able bodied businessmen types who refused to get out of the seats she had reserved because she was disabled, leaving her to stand all the way.  The photos found their way on to Facebook, and incredibly, as well as sharing her justified anger at these two drones, there were those who sought to take issue with her about it.  She should have sat in the special disabled seats near the door, apparently.  Which were also full. And to be fair, she had paid for the seats that she’d reserved, and she should have been able to sit in them.  One of the men later contacted the press to say he hadn’t moved because she “didn’t look disabled”.  I think the NHS should sign up these psychics who can diagnose people on sight without going through the tedious seven years of doctor training. Think of the money we would save. It might even come to £350million a week, which we could spend on the NHS instead. Oh, hang on…

I actually blame the Paralympics.  Don’t get me wrong, I have the greatest respect for the people who throw the discus with their teeth and do one-legged triathlons, and Tanni Grey Thompson and all that, but basically, all that the media do is to use it as an example of how they think all disabled people should behave. It perpetuates the myth of the deserving and the undeserving poor. If it were expressed in terms of race instead of disability, it takes us back to the deep south of the USA in the 1950s and the difference between good negroes and “uppity” ones.

Never mind that you might be aching in every limb, feeling like crap, and that you’ve nearly fallen off your banana board that morning. The taxi driver’s happy to point out that he saw a bloke in a wheelchair do the 1100 metres last night – so why aren’t you?  It must be, implicitly, because the disabled bloke who can do the 1100 metres is a good disabled, whereas you are an uppity disabled, and possibly a benefits scrounger, to boot.  Or, as I was once told when I asked, en route to a meeting in the University of Manchester, “Oh, yes, there’s a lift. It’s round the corner and up the stairs!” The government feted the paralympians. The government that has stopped the benefits of hundreds of thousands of disabled people, declared them fit for work when they were dying, and driven them, in some cases to suicide over abominations like the Bedroom Tax. Yes, that government.

The race parallel still holds true. I don’t doubt there are probably people around in this country who would like to make the bad disableds, the uppity disableds, sit in the back of the bus. America, of course, has its own problems with race pure and simple, and they’ve also been impinging on my consciousness.  Carolina is in flames.  Black Lives Matter are out on the streets.  I have been taken to task, ticked off, no less, for saying “All Lives Matter”. People claim that saying “All Lives Matter” is in fact incipiently accepting the oppression of black people, and they quote Martin Luther King’s Letter From Birmingham Jail.

“We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor, it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct action campaign that was “well timed” in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word “Wait!” It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This “Wait” has almost always meant “Never”. We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that “justice too long delayed is justice denied.”

I appreciate that, and I have never been an oppressed black man, though as I have tried to indicate above, being a disabled is giving me a bit of a grounding in it. The police don’t routinely shoot disableds in the UK, though, like they do back people in the USA, but give it time.

I read an article that claimed that basically, before the police in America started shooting black people, nobody said “All Lives Matter”. I must say I take slight exception to the article's statement that "nobody said that all lives matter before black people were being shot". How the hell does the author know what I said and when? I lobbied against the Iraq war in 2002. Because I could see it was the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time for the wrong reasons and a lot of innocent people were going to get killed. As it happens, in that particular case, brown people. So I guess even then I was saying brown lives matter. I also thought that our politicians here in the UK were culpable in putting our service personnel in harm's way for no reason. So you could say that was me saying khaki lives matter. I've consistently lobbied for animal welfare and an end to cruelty against animals since at least 2000, so I was saying animal lives matter. I've campaigned against the senseless deaths of refugees fleeing the Syrian conflict and the inhuman treatment of those that do manage to make it to Europe without drowning. So there I'm saying Syrian lives matter.

I appreciate that the particular racial tensions in America (fuelled by the inflammatory statements of people like Donald Trump and the apparently trigger-happy responses of some police personnel) have taken "Black Lives Matter" to a whole new meaning in the context of current events. There is also the issue of the USA's attitude to the ownership and possession of personal firearms, a problem which it seems wilfully blind to, despite Obama pointing it out again and again. The prevalence of guns leads inevitably to increased use of guns.

But to say that people like me who regard ALL life as sacred and something to be cherished, nourished and encouraged in a peaceful environment are somehow doing so out of a misguided and incipiently racist  reaction to the justified anger of the Black Lives Matter campaign, is a bit simplistic. Please don't presume to pigeonhole me on the evidence of your mistaken assumptions about my beliefs.

Anyway, my rant is over and it’s time to put away the soapbox for another week, because today is Sunday, and the feast of St Herman the Cripple. Actually, we narrowly missed St Padre Pio, by two days, so if I’m still alive in 2018, we’ve got that to look forward to. A scary Italian monk with stigmata and the gift of bilocation.  What’s not to like?

Meanwhile, we’re back with Herman the Cripple, who was born in an age not known for political correctness. See also under William the Bastard.  He was born disabled in Altshausen, Swabia. He was so terribly deformed he was apparently almost helpless. He was confined in  Reichenau Abbey beside Lake Constanz in Switzerland, in 1020 when he was seven, and he spent all his life there. He became known to scholars all over Europe, wrote the hymns Salve Regina and Alma Redemptoriis Mater as well as poetry, a universal chronicle, and a mathematical treatise. He died on September 21 1054 and is sometimes called Herman Contractus.

He would probably have been labelled a good disabled and, who knows, ATOS may even have left him alone.

I can’t say I’m looking forward to the coming week, but then, these days, I very rarely am.  At least the Labour Party might now stop behaving like dicks, and unite against the common enemy, but I’m not putting any money on it. I’ve made some progress with the eikons, having got to the point where I only have to do two eikons, a triptych and a panel, and then I’m up to date with all the requests and promises I made over the summer!

Somehow, these days, it seems that painting eikons is the only sane response to the lunacy of this world. Last Sunday, Rachel Emec and Chris Paris, two blameless and harmless individuals who were returning to the UK after delivering aid to the refugees in The Jungle, in Calais, were arrested at Dover and held by the anti-terror police at the port. They were held incommunicado for several hours before being released without charge.  Naïve as I am in the ways of state harassment, I was surprised to read this, but subsequent research during the week has established that this sort of hassle is routine for people returning from the camps.  It cannot be right. It is an absolute scandal.

Anyway, it’s late and I’m tired. It may even technically be Monday. So I’m going to knock it on the head and go to bed. Everyone else is asleep anyway, and I think it’s high time I joined them.  I find myself getting increasingly frustrated these days that whatever I do seems to make no difference, but I guess I just have to fall back yet again on good old Si Kahn. It’s not just what you’re born with, it’s what you choose to bear. It’s not how big your share is, it’s how much you can share. And it’s not the fights you dreamed on, but those you really fought. It’s not just what you’re given, it’s what you do with what you’ve got.