Epiblog for the Feast of St Ethelburga of Barking

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley.  It’s been seven days of odd weather this week. One minute you look out and it’s a fine, quiet, autumnal day with pale sunshine and you could believe that summer is still more or less with us, and the next minute you look out and it’s dull and dark and cold. The mornings are fresh-to-crisp, and the nights are colder as well, with the darkness falling much sooner each successive day, or so it seems.

For the second week running, there has been no sign of the squirrels, and for the second week running, Matilda shows no sign of going back to her old ways and has continued to be an indoor cat. I am hoping that it’s simply a combination of her having become, almost without us noticing, an elderly cat, and elderly cats tend to stay indoors anyway.  I am hoping there’s no underlying cause, but I’m keeping a watchful eye.

We have still not got to the bottom of the dog exclusion notices on West nab and Wessenden, and whether they are legitimate and legal. Emails to local councillors in Meltham go unanswered. Misty, and Zak, who is staying with us at the moment, have therefore been forced to seek alternative walkies during the last few days, one of which, an excursion up to Castle Hill, almost ended in catastrophe, when Debbie was chased by a cow.

Traversing a field which is normally empty, but which on this occasion was a temporary billet to assorted large quadrupeds, Deb made the tactical error of attempting to take a line which would have meant crossing between a cow and its calf. Mother Moocow, seeing this coming, moved to close off this route, and also possibly to see off the intruders. Cows can move surprisingly quickly when they want to, and in this case, this particular cow wanted to.  The dogs saw the lumbering bovine approaching at a rate of knots and very sensibly scarpered, leaving Debbie to it. Debbie took the only open escape route, over the dry stone wall and into the next field.  At the first fence the order was: first equal, Misty and Zak, second Debbie, and third, the cow. Several lengths separated one and two, and a short head, two and three. The only casualty in the end was the pouch that Deb uses to carry her waterproof, which snagged on the barbed wire on top of the fence, as she went over. So, four faults there and a bit more sewing and mending for me to do next time I get my sewing kit out.

As far as the avalanche of books goes, I am still digging myself out and now have two left to get off to press before Christmas. All of the others are either at proof stage or at press. However, the amount of work represented by the two that are left is disproportionately huge.  Still, we plod on, into the gathering gloom. Eyes on the prize, Steve, eyes on the prize.  When Deb’s mum was dropped off at the station by Debbie on Friday, apparently she gave Debbie a Sainsburys carrier bag with some things from her fridge in it, that needed eating up, saying we might as well have them. Debbie duly dumped this on the kitchen floor when she returned. Shortly afterwards, Sainsburys delivered our order, and the kitchen floor was littered with carrier bags, all of which I unpacked and put away.  I was just finishing off, when Debbie came back in from next door.  “You won’t believe this,” I said to her, “Sainsburys have delivered some stuff we didn’t order – look! Half a cucumber, not even wrapped, some tomatoes, and half a carton of milk! What about that!” She was incapable of replying through laughter for several seconds, and then I realised this must have been the stuff her mother had donated, which I had assumed was just another carrier left by the Sainsburys man. I guess you had to be there, but it was further proof, if proof were needed, that I am going gaga.

Talking of gaga, it’s not all been doom and gloom in the wider world this week, as UKIP entertained us all by going into self-destruct mode. Clearly they have been watching, and learning from, the Labour Party. Firstly, their new leader, Diane somebody, resigned after just 18 days in the job, which, as the satirical web site, Popbitch, pointed out,  is the typical gestation period of a budgie.  It later turned out that, although she did really resign, she never actually filed the appropriate papers following her election, to confirm her leadership with the Electoral Commission, so she wasn’t actually the legal official leader at the point she resigned.  When this came to light, much head-scratching ensued – always a potentially dangerous business for UKIP supporters, owing to the risk of splinters.

Because Diane some nonentity had resigned from a post she didn’t really hold, ergo, Nigel Farage, who had resigned from a post he did hold, was held to have unresigned and resumed his duties as leader, or something.  I don’t know and frankly don’t care. UKIP never had any credibility anyway, and the only thing they were ever good at was telling lies about immigrants, but nowadays at least they do have some comic entertainment value. They also seem to have some sort of a problem with filing the appropriate paperwork by the correct deadline, because one of the other candidates in the election which put Diane whatsername in the hot seat, Stephen Woolfe, failed to file his nomination papers in time and had thus been excluded from the ballot.

Mr Woolfe, a UKIP MEP (now there’s an oxymoron) had other things on his mind this week, after an altercation involving fisticuffs with Mike Hookem, another oxymoron, although in his case the emphasis is more on the “moron”, if you see what I mean, allegedly took a swing at him after being invited to settle his differences “mano a mano” in the stationery cupboard at the European Parliament. They grappled briefly, apparently, in the sort of approved homo-erotic manner which UKIP members believe causes localised flooding, and then Mr Woolfe fell backwards through an open door onto another UKIP member, and ended up in hospital under observation for a clot on the brain.  I am tempted to muse philosophically at this point in the fashion of Yeats, who asked “how can we know the dancer from the dance”, how can we know the clot from the brain, where UKIP are concerned.

Mr Hookem, meanwhile, took to local radio to defend his actions, claiming it was all something and nothing, and was merely “handbags at dawn, as we say in Hull.”  So, well done there, Mr Right-Hookem, in one fell swoop you managed to be sexist, homophobic, and confirm people’s unfounded impressions of Hull on the eve of its stint at the City of Culture 2017.  Way to go. I look forward to UKIP choosing its next leader by means of trial by combat. Since they appear to want to wind time back to the middle ages, it seems highly appropriate.

Farage must have been quite surprised to have been awoken in the middle of the night, in the USA, where he is advising Donald Trump how to lie about immigration, and told that he was once again UKIP’s Fuhrer. For a few seconds, he must have wondered if it was a recurring nightmare. Actually, it is, for us as well as him, but that’s by the bye. It must have resembled the scene when Good Queen Bess was told she was now officially in charge, on the grounds that anyone better qualified for the job was either dead, insane, or Catholic.

Talking of insanity, Trump never ceases to amaze me with his ability to plumb new depths of loathsomeness. I am beginning to think the flip remark I made a few blogs ago now, about him being the Antichrist, might actually be true, and under that stupid “Make America Great Again” baseball cap, he has “666” neatly shaved into the neck hair normally hidden by that orange guinea pig he wears on his head.

Admittedly, the audio tapes which surfaced this week are ten years old, and we’ve all said stupid things we now regret. Ten years ago I told Barclays I would repay the overdraft, instead of telling them to pogo off over the horizon, and not come back. I have had a decade to pause, repent, and regret that decision, but it seems to me that in Mr Trump’s case, the really damaging thing is that his views today on the subject of female emancipation are pretty much what they were then, and what’s worse, he sees no problem in it.  So he can object to the line of questioning coming from a combative female reporter on the grounds that she might be having her period, and he can blithely say that if his daughter wasn’t his daughter, hell, he’d be dating his daughter (yeck!) and all of this stacks up perfectly with someone who, ten years ago, boasted that he could get any woman because he is rich and famous, and all you have to do is “grab them by the pussy”.  Nigel Farage must have been face-palming himself and muttering “It’s the immigrants, stupid!” under his breath. It was never actually confirmed as official UKIP policy, in their constitution, after all, that women who fail to clean behind the fridge are sluts, it was merely a sort of folk-belief, in the same way as The Apocrypha are sort of almost like the official bits of the Bible.

Here at home, we have been preoccupied by the febrile atmosphere of Brexit, and of course we don’t have neo-Nazi demagogues like Trump who want to make foreigners wear some physical indication of their non-indigenous status.  Oh, hang on, yes we do. Amber Rudd, a woman who makes me want to change my surname to Whalebelly every time she opens her gob, and who I am glad to say is no relation, wants to make UK firms compile lists of foreign workers so they can be named and shamed. The rationale behind this is unclear, but then the rationale behind many government pronouncements is unclear.

On a purely practical level, it serves no purpose. For a start, the data already exists somewhere, since foreigners need permission to come and work here, so the government could, if it wished, just do a quiet data mining exercise and come up with the relevant info. Secondly, foreign workers working for UK companies are presumably paying tax and national insurance, and contributing via those methods, so where exactly is the problem? If she means illegal foreign workers, good luck with trying to get a list of those, since anyone working illegally in this country would doubtless just do a duckdive when the subject cropped up, then re-surface somewhere else when the hoohah has died down.  Finally, the whole idea is posited on two economic fallacies, one being that for every job taken by a migrant worker, there is a British worker who is equally qualified and willing to do that job, who is displaced and disadvantaged by the migrant’s intervention, and the other being that there is a finite number of jobs possible in the capitalist version of the Labour market. There isn’t.

To take the second one first, here is an example. In what is laughingly described as my spare time, I have been painting my own versions of eikons of the saints, on chunks of reclaimed timber. Suppose I were to turn that into a business, and it eventually took off to the stage that I needed to pay someone to do all the accounting and admin so that I could get on with painting the damn things.  That has created one job. But in order to create that one job, the nascent business has also been consuming things like paint, and jiffy bags, and postage or courier costs – so if that carries on, the art supplies shop, the post office, the couriers and the stationery store will also be hiring. And if they start hiring, then there will be people who have more money in their pocket who will start spending their spare cash on all sorts of things, and creating all sorts of other jobs, and that is how the economy grows, in a very simplified nutshell.

Aha, you are now saying, that’s all very well, but how many of those people are British? To which I reply that, whilever we remain part of the single market with its attendant free movement of labour, pending Brexit, that is irrelevant, as long as the employer abides by the law in respect of pay and conditions and everyone involved, unlike Donald Trump, pays their taxes.  Yes, obviously some unscrupulous employers will get away with doing the bare minimum, but we shouldn’t kid ourselves that, post-Brexit, they will all suddenly have a Damascene conversion and start treating British workers better than they treated, say, Polish migrants – all that will happen is that the British workers will then be subjected to the same crappy low pay, job insecurity and bad conditions that their migrant predecessors had to put up with.

Some in the Tory party no doubt think that would be a good thing. These are the people that believe that there is a vast pool of workshy British labour which is unwilling to do the jobs done by migrant workers and prefers to spend their lives on Benefits. I have argued against this biased and inaccurate view of the labour market for literally years now.  But even if this were true, it takes no account of the skills gap, which is another crucial factor in the mix.  If every migrant worker in the UK were told to pack their bags and go tomorrow, true, somebody would probably still be around to pick the fruit before it goes rotten in the fields, but there would be vast swathes of the economy and the public services where literally we do not have the appropriately trained and qualified indigenous workforce to fill the gap – the NHS being a prime example, which is why Amber Rudd’s blethering about restricting immigration at the same time as creating hundreds of new doctors is so laughable, unless somebody’s found a false door to Narnia at the back of a wardrobe in the Department of Health, leading to an aircraft-hangar-sized secret room stuffed full of trained doctors and nurses from the Cotswolds.

So, given that it’s a non-starter in practical terms, that it would serve no actual purpose, and that the data already exists elsewhere, what can possibly have motivated Amber Rudd to have uttered this invocation of racial discord? In fairness to Amber Rudd, which is a sentence I won’t be typing very often, so make the most of it, she has known suffering in her own life, having once been married to A. A. Gill.  And now it seems she’s decided that the rest of us must suffer too.  The only reason for floating this – frankly – loopy proposal was to make a pitch for the UKIP voters to come back to the fold, to appear to be doing something tough and nasty to foreigners, because she, her advisers, and the Tory party generally, think that the prevailing zeitgeist in this country is now one of “sod the foreigners, send ‘em all home and pull up the drawbridge.” And sadly, in that, she is probably right. A tolerant and sane politician, from a tolerant and sane party, would be trying to correct the various misapprehensions surrounding immigration, but obviously in the current climate of hatred created by Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage and others of their ilk, there are no votes in being sane and tolerant.  We are in a post-reason environment, gripped by a collective madness that now says it’s OK to accost a woman in the street and pull off her hijab, beat up Polish plumbers, and have lists of  places where all non-British workers may be found.

The parallels between the Nazis and Amber Rudd have all been pointed out by now, and I am late in the day, but coincidentally, and chillingly, last week I was doing some research for the eikon of St Maximilian Kolbe I was painting, and found the original chart of all the different identification badges used in the Nazi concentration camp system. (St Maximilian Kolbe was murdered in Auschwitz when he took the place of a married man with children who had been selected to die in a punishment block).  It looks like the physical embodiment of Amber Rudd’s philosophy. Different  coloured triangles for different nationalities, symbols for political prisoners, criminals and “the workshy” – or, as the Tories and the Daily Mail refer to them, “benefits scroungers”.  It really would be quite a simple step to extend Amber Rudd’s idea into colourful badges, and once you have established, and had accepted, the principle of a list for one type of person, why not animal rights activists, or people who write stroppy blogs, or anyone who looks a bit funny…

By the weekend, however, the proposal had raised such a howl of protest that, faced with the impending shitstorm, Justine Greening was wheeled out on TV to say that actually, Amber Rudd had had her fingers crossed behind her back all the time, and the lists wouldn’t be used for “naming and shaming” after all, in fact they might just quietly row back from the idea. But it’s not the end of it. They’ve had one go, and mark my words, they’ll come back again, especially if Trump gets in and starts making the Muslims wear yellow stars, or the Brexit negotiations go badly, and they need to grasp at a particular straw to make them seem tough and nasty to foreigners so their poll ratings go back up.

The irony of it is that there are areas of the UK where the migrant worker population is very high, and these areas are often cited (wrongly) as being examples of what is happening to the country as a whole. Regional variations and regional areas of  economic depression is of course something that the EU provided money to combat and try and alleviate some of the stresses of a one-size-fits-all market over a single labour market spanning 28 countries. Post-Brexit, of course, what will happen is anyone’s guess, and nobody knows, least of all the government. It is unlikely that the money currently invested by the EU will be replaced by our own funds. OK, all of the migrant workers may well end up going home, but the poorest and most depressed regions will also be hardest hit, so there may be no jobs left for British workers to step into. 

All of the people who bang on about the economy being “unaffected” by Brexit are missing the point. Right now, the markets are just watching and waiting to see what happens. Theresa May had her bluff called by the EU, who refused to even start negotiations until Article 50 had been formally triggered, and when she announced that this would be in March 2017, the pound immediately went into a Kamikaze nosedive.  The people who run the markets are not stupid. They are not philanthropists, either. They have no sense of honour, no sense of “cutting a bit of slack”. Their inexorable logic is profit. Pure and simple. And once the process of Brexit starts in earnest, they will punish us, make no mistake.  52% of the country voted to leave the EU, although I still contend that not many of that 52% had thought it through, or voted on the actual issue on the ballot paper, as opposed to immigration... But nowhere on that ballot paper was there a space to specify that the government had any right to say “Oh, sod it” and accept the worst terms possible on leaving,  and cause unnecessary hardship to the 48% who didn’t want to leave, in the pursuit of percentages in the polls running up to the 2012 election and to try and bring back the fruitcakes of UKIP into the Tory fold. The government, such as it is, should be striving to broker the best possible deal and minimise the damage Brexit will cause, but of course that would be seen as being soft on “Johnny Foreigner” and with clowns like Boris Johnson involved in the proceedings, it is unlikely to happen, because he is a cheerleader for popular xenophobia, see above. By the way, Boris, whatever happened to the £350million a week extra for the NHS?

In fact, it’s been a thoroughly depressing week if you believe in concepts such as freedom and compassion. The frequency of bad news from Aleppo is now such that compassion fatigue is setting in and people are becoming almost inured to the daily scenes of the Russians bombing hospitals and aid workers. In the Yemen, bombs and missiles sold to Saudi Arabia by the UK are being used by Saudi forces trained in the UK to inflict carnage in a civil war which has now led to a famine.  And here at home, in the absence of anything resembling a pulse or a heartbeat in the Labour Party, once more it’s been left to the Church to be the official opposition, with the Bishop of Manchester, the Rt Rev. David Walker among others, signing an open letter to the government asking for the 379 unaccompanied child refugees in The Jungle to be allowed to enter the UK, and calling our refusal to do so “A stain on our nation’s conscience”. The Home Office (proprietor: Amber Rudd) has replied that this is a matter for the French authorities. The French authorities are intending to bulldoze the whole camp “before winter”.  Perhaps Katie Hopkins’s solution of machine-gunning refugees might turn out after all to be quicker and kinder than leaving them to die slowly of hypothermia in the hedgerows of Normandy this winter, but only after Amber Rudd has pinned the appropriate colour triangle over their heart, to give the firing squads something to aim for.

Today is Tuesday, already, the second day of a new working week, and I can ill afford the time to be typing this. The weekend was actually something of an oasis of calm and sanity, marked by another visit from Owen, who – in the course of a flying visit, has fixed the clock, the lower door on the stove, and various other small but niggly things. Meanwhile I got on with trying to clear the backlog of eikons because I knew that when this week began, it would be books, books, books, all the way.

Today is also the feast of St Ethelburga of Barking, who was the founder, and first Abbess, of Barking Abbey in Essex. I have already done all my UKIP jokes, so I will leave you to insert the “barking” references.  Ethelburga died in 686AD,  and her brother, Earconwald, was Bishop of London. Earconwald, or Erkenwald as he is sometimes spelt, was instrumental in the founding of Barking Abbey and also founded a Monastery at Chertsey in Surrey. In fact, according to Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, Ethelburga’s whole family went in for the religion thing in a big way – her sisters were also all Saints - Etheldreda, Sexburga, and Withburga. They could have formed a pop group, except that the band name “All Saints” has already been taken…

Bede speaks of miracles associated with her at Barking but to be honest, these seem a bit thin on the ground, although allowances have to be made for the material lost in the intervening centuries. Apparently Ethelburga enquired with the female members of her monastery about the spot in which they would have liked to be buried, at which point a resplendent light appeared from heaven and moved to the south side of the monastery, pointing out the spot where the bodies were to rest. OK.  Oh, and the Old English Martyrology records a vision, recounted by a nun of Barking, who saw Ethelburga being drawn up into heaven by golden chains. Ethelburga was buried at Barking, but nothing of her tomb remains, and her feast day was set as 11^th October – presumably based on the day of her death.

Ethelburga’s name survives in various dedications – there is one near Pocklington in the East Riding, and St Ethelburga’s church in the City of London, having survived the Blitz, was obliterated by the massive IRA car bomb in 1993, and is now used as a centre for international peace and reconciliation.  Given the current state of the world, they should have a lot of work on, right now. I don’t know where we are heading, but I would hazard a guess that the destination includes the words “hell” and “handcart”. 

I haven’t been able to shake off my militant mood from last week, either, although the weekend was actually full of cheer, and conviviality, and that old friend, fun, all things which have been missing of late. But nevertheless, I am still gripped by anger and frustration that the world is unjust and that on every side, it seems the forces of evil are on the march. Maybe you think I’m over-egging it.  Maybe you think that people like Amber Rudd, and Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump and Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage aren’t active manifestations of evil. Don’t worry, I am not going to get into a David Icke vibe here and start denouncing them all as shape-shifting lizards, but I do believe that – just as some people seem to be able to channel peace and goodness – there are some people who, whenever they go to the dentist, it’s the dentist who needs the anaesthetic.  Some people spread joy wherever they go, and others cause joy whenever they go.

Thinking that I might eventually get time to collect them all together into a “best of” (har har) I have been looking back through some old blog posts, and found this, which I quoted on what was then my other blog, about four years ago: it’s part of a speech by a fictional character, Quellcrist Falconer, created by Richard K Morgan in his Harlan’s World novels:

So if some idiot politician, some power player, tries to execute policies that harm you or those you care about, take it personally. Get angry. The Machinery of Justice will not serve you here – it is slow and cold, and it is theirs, hardware and soft-. Only the little people suffer at the hands of Justice; the creatures of power slide from under it with a wink and a grin. If you want justice, you will have to claw it from them. Make it personal. Do as much damage as you can. Get your message across. That way, you stand a better chance of being taken seriously next time. Of being considered dangerous. And make no mistake about this: being taken seriously, being considered dangerous marks the difference - the only difference in their eyes - between players and little people

It’s really quite sad and depressing to think that this is true, and it’s also very tiring actually having to do it. But it’s true – people in power only react when they think their position is threatened.  I am struggling, though, to give the concept  some moral grounding. Ultimately, terrorists are, I suppose, trying to get the attention of people who they feel are oppressing them, but clearly it’s not a moral solution to cause death and mayhem by blowing people up and killing innocent bystanders. I suppose for me, the “red line” is that it ceases to be a moral solution when trying to get someone's attention causes physical harm to a person or an animal.

A Christian, or at least a better Christian than I purport to be, would no doubt tell me off here for being judgemental, pointing me at “judge not, that ye be not judged”.  They would also say that the way to bring about change is to pray for it, and that God effects change through the actions of humans, and that it’s pointless hoping and praying for Amber Rudd to be struck by lightning – indeed, it’s an unchristian, uncharitable thought to even consider it.  And, of course, they'd say that prayer is much more than simply taking a shopping list of things to Big G and saying there you go, sort that lot out, chum. They would also say that God knows better than I do what is ultimately right or wrong, and that the mind of God is unfathomable so any attempt to try and interpret the actions (or the inactions, which is usually my concern) of a deity in terms of human values is doomed to failure.  In truth, these are all arguments I have advanced myself, over time, over the many times when I have found myself in this now familiar place.  And, of course, I still don’t know the answer, and nor will I, but it doesn’t stop me coming back to it over and over again, like the dog that returneth to its vomit. About the only thing that has really changed is that these days I find it harder and harder to believe in any of the above paragraph.

So, on a Tuesday teatime, instead of a Sunday for once, it’s time, I guess, once again, to shake my head ruefully, and go and put the kettle on.