Epiblog for the Feast of St Herbert

It has been a busy fortnight in the Holme Valley. The weather has been getting worse, by which I mean, generally, colder.  There’s still quite a lot of light about, though it goes suddenly these past few days, decaying at about half past four.  From today, it will be dark at that time.  I should have been writing this epiblog last Sunday, as per usual, but of course, and also as per usual, real life had other ideas.

On Friday night, a week ago, Debbie’s laptop computer exhibited (briefly) the blue screen of death, then fulfilled that prophecy by dying on its arse. I tried what I could, by way of computer CPR, on Friday night, but I had to give it up, and call it.  I went to bed. No problem, I thought – I’ll get a windows 64 bit recovery disk sorted, and fix it in the morning.  I started trying to fix it at 9.45AM on Saturday and finally gave up at 9.45PM. Realising that this was something that wasn’t just going to magically come right by waggling the leads or turning it off and then turning it on again, I phoned Colin, our computer guru, and he agreed to come round on the Monday and have a proper look.

Throughout Sunday (because I am a stubborn old git, who doesn’t like to be beaten) I carried on trying to fix it. And carried on failing to fix it. Basically, had I known it at the time, I was (in the words of the old Norfolk saying) farting against thunder.  So that was why there was no Sunday blog last week.  Fortunately, on Monday, Colin came around, took it away into computer intensive care, and, miraculously, fixed it. So no real harm done, apart from to my work schedule.

Matilda has been busy sleeping, eating, and occasionally, when nobody was looking, fighting, judging from the scar on her head.  Last week I was complaining that she didn’t go outside enough, this week I’m complaining that she goes outside and gets into fights.  She also had a fairly unpleasant experience this week on Friday, when I let her out and then about half an hour later some donkey started letting off fireworks in the neighbourhood. She did come in, eventually, scuttling through the cat flap, ears flat to her head and tail down, and obviously unhappy.

Misty, however, has not been getting into fights, but she has been getting into scrapes. On that vile day that was last Saturday, while I was struggling with the computer, Debbie took Misty off for a walk in the woods up beyond Beaumont Park, on the way towards Blackmoorfoot Reservoir. They’d reached the apex of their walk and had turned to come back, when a massive salvo of fireworks split the sky, in true First World War barrage fashion. Misty immediately took flight, unsurprisingly, and Debbie grabbed for her collar, and missed. Because the ground was treacherous underfoot, Debbie compounded it by slipping and falling on her arse in the mud. The doggone dog was gone.

I didn’t know any of this at the time.  I was sitting here at home, struggling to fix Deb’s laptop, when she came trudging in, covered in mud. “I assume the dog’s not here, then?” she said. No, I replied… well, she’s not with me either, she replied. She proceeded to relate the saga.  The only thing to do was for her to get warmer and get dry, and then go out again looking. Having done so, and arming herself with two more powerful torches, Debbie once more set off into the dark.  Half an hour passed. I kept going to the conservatory door, opening it, and shouting, just in case the dog had found her way back.  Nothing – except yet more fireworks going off in the distance.

45 minutes later, Debbie rang on her mobile. “They’ve got her at the Co-Op in Meltham. She went through the automatic doors and she was running up and down the aisles”.  I boggled at this, unable to comprehend how Misty had managed to end up there.  Meanwhile, Deb was jogging back through the woods in the dark, because of course she had gone on foot, and now needed the camper van to drive up to Meltham to get the dog back. I didn’t know what time the shop stayed open until, so I rang them to check – Oh yes, Misty’s fine, she’s in the office with me here, she’s had some water and some dog biscuits… right.  That £6.00 I spent at Collars and Tags on the dog tag with the mobile phone numbers on it was one of the best investments I ever made.  She was very subdued, though, when she got back – probably because we both told her, in no uncertain terms, that one day, her luck is going to run out.  

A bit like UKIP’s. They announced their new leadership candidates this week, Paul Nuttall and Suzanne somebody. I’m not sure, at the time of writing, whether the rules governing the election will be set by the Electoral Commission or the Marquis of Queensbury.  It could turn out to be irrelevant, anyway. UKIP is already moving out of its expensive Westminster offices, and when and if Brexit happens, the £5.4M its MEPs can currently claim in expenses from the EU parliament and the £84,000 salary enjoyed by its 22 MEPs, will be no more.  Winter is coming… Bye-bye, UKIP. I’d like to say it’s been nice knowing you. I’d like to, but…

They were even denied second place in the Witney by-election by the Liberal Democrats, a surprising comeback, obviously owing more to collective public amnesia than any forward-looking policies. People seem to have quickly forgotten that the populace was pimped by the Liberal Democrats for five years from 2010 to 2015, and without their support, the Tories wouldn’t have been allowed to carry out their gross abuses. This week, Iain Duncan Smith, after being held over a slow flame while wearing thumbscrews (I wish) has finally been forced to admit, under a Freedom of Information request, that almost 2,400 people died shortly after being declared fit for work by the DWP. We should never forget that he could not have done this without the “help” of the Liberal Democrats.

The Electoral Commission did manage this week to rise from its torpor and fine the Labour Party £20,000 over irregularities in the electoral expenses in 2015, especially regarding the so-called “Ed Stone”. I see it as an encouraging sign – if the relatively minor misdemeanours engendered by Labour’s administrative clumsiness garnered that size of fine, how much more are the Tories going to get hammered for their illegal spending on the battlebus? I mean, obviously, the blatant Tory election fraud won’t just be ignored, will it? Oh, hang on…

The current Tories (as opposed to the previous Tories) are preoccupied this week yet again with Brexit, anyway. Once more, it’s been a wild and contradictory week on the Brexit front, characterised by confusion and contradiction. Quelle surprise. Apparently, because we don’t have a ready-trained corps of skilled trade negotiators to start work on this huge raft of desperately needed export trade deals with anyone but the Walloons, a new deal with Australia, for instance, we’ve been forced to try and borrow skilled negotiators from other countries. Australia, for instance. So we can look forward to the spectacle of “our” Australian negotiators trying to strike a deal with other Australian negotiators, to save Britain’s bacon over Brexit. Except that, in the last couple of days, Australia has scuppered the idea of any deal before we formally leave the EU anyway.  This means that basically the DTI will be sitting on their hands for the next 2.5 years. At great public expense.

Theresa May has had to walk a difficult tightrope between on the one hand trying to blunt the worst effects of Brexit (plunging pound, more costly imports, prices rising in the shops, inflation, interest rates rising) and coming out with enough meaningless Euroskeptic drivel to stop the UKIP loop fruit lunatic fringe and her own in-house lunatic fringe from howling at the moon and starting to grow hair on the back of their hands. Especially as she has just had to announce that there will be no new money for the NHS, after all.

Occasionally, you see things in the papers which you aren’t sure are satire or not, especially regarding Brexit.  This week it was the story that apparently our salvation will come from selling British tea and cakes (and possibly teacakes) to the wider world. Yep, that should sort it. Apart from the fact that tea is imported, as is the sugar which goes into it, and into many of the cakes. Imports are getting more and more expensive, as you can see by comparing anything that is originally priced in $ - so you either have to absorb the costs, or charge the foreigners more for their traditional English “Battenberg”.

Plucky British exporters will, at least, be able to get their cakes and their tea to these hungry Europeans more quickly, eventually, because we are now going to demolish half of Harmondsworth to build a third runway at Heathrow. This will (in some unspecified way) help exports, apparently. Assuming that eventually we are able to strike a deal with the EU which allows us to carry on trading with them, rather than setting out, like Alcock and Brown in the 21^st century version of the Vickers Vimy or the Royal Yacht, to conquer the American colonies instead.  This is of course, also dependent on the hungry Europeans not deciding to say sod it and have a Black Forest Gateau or a Tarte Tatin instead.

Boris Johnson, whom you may recall promising that the NHS would actually benefit to the tune of £350million extra every week when we left the EU, once said that if the third runway at Heathrow ever went ahead, he would lie down in front of the bulldozers to stop it.  Seeing Boris Johnson lying in front of a bulldozer would be a refreshing change after all the pictures of him lying next to a bus.

It could all be academic anyway. By the time the first concrete mixers are on site, we may find we can’t afford it:  Desmond Cohen, writing in “Social Europe” recently, spelled it out quite simply:

The collapse of Sterling’s foreign exchange rate since the Brexit referendum is on a scale we have not seen in many years and yet the government seems totally unconcerned. Indeed, in large part the fall is directly the result of government statements and actions. Some decline was predicted following the referendum but the rate seems now to be in free fall after recent declarations by a Government that it is intent on a ‘hard Brexit’. At least 44% of all UK trade is with the EU and access to this market can only be retained unless the UK accepts free movement of labour. So it is unsurprising that, in these conditions of uncertainty, the exchange rate has collapsed. 

Still, nothing, not even logic and reason, seems to deter the aimless fools in power who seem determined to send us hurtling over an economic cliff. The pound plummets, Theresa May says there will be no extra money for the NHS, bombs rain down on Aleppo, and nobody emits a peep. Yet 14 unaccompanied children arrive from the Calais jungle camp, after weeks of shameful foot-dragging by our so-called government, and the entire country goes batshit crazy, and starts demanding dental tests to make sure they really are refugees.

Kate Milner, writing in The Huffington Post, put the counter-argument very succinctly:

For those who ask harsh questions about where all the tiny children and girls are, I give you harsh answers. They didn’t make it. The girls have been sex-trafficked. The tiny children have died. The ones who are now arriving in the UK are strong looking because only the strongest have survived these harsh conditions. Seven-year-olds aren’t equipped to cross a continent and then fend for themselves in a makeshift tent. They die, they disappear and all the time smug fascists are sitting in their provincial homes posting on Facebook about an immigrant’s hoodie looking too clean.

The newspapers even resorted to using software – an experimental Microsoft app – which can look at a photograph (of a refugee wearing a hoodie, for instance) and guess the age of the subject. I tried it on a photo of myself to test it, and it added 12 years to my age.  But then I have had a hard and stressful life. Mind you, so have some of the 13 and 14 year old refugees.

The French have begun (and in fact, claim to have completed, though this is far from certain) their threatened demolition of the Jungle camp, regardless of whether we take any of the children or not. As I type this, a few days after the anniversary of Agincourt, our relations with France don’t seem to have improved a lot since 1415. Meanwhile, the Calais camp is in flames, children are missing, some inhabitants of the Jungle have been told to go back there, even though it’s alight, and basically, it’s a complete shambles, and nobody seems to know what’s happening. It reminds me a lot of Brexit. 

To be fair to the French, which is a sentence you won’t see me type very often, so make the most of it, they are trying, in their own cack-handed, too-little-too-late way, to instigate the sort of reception and rehabilitation centres I advocated months ago now, but in tandem with a pan-European plan and a managed scaling-out of refugees on a Europe-wide basis according to a matrix of population density, infrastructure, and other factors. Unfortunately, faced with a problem which demands a pan-European response, this is precisely the problem which has caused the EU to fracture along narrow, nationalist lines, turn their backs on the issue, and close borders left right and centre, with the glowing exception of Germany under Angela Merkel.  You will often search in vain for other favourable mentions of Mrs Merkel/Merton in my blogs, so you had better make the most of that one, too.

One of the most heartbreaking images, glimpsed fleetingly on the news footage of the French clearing the camp, was of a gendarme of some description chucking clothes and possessions left behind into a skip. There was a brief moment when you could see that amongst the clothes was a stuffed pink elephant, presumably a child’s toy. I wondered how many miles that toy had travelled to get there, and now it lay discarded in a skip. Together with what looked to be perfectly good, serviceable clothes  – presumably because its owner had been carted off elsewhere and people were not allowed to take everything. The buses which ferried them away even had plastic sheeting on the seats to stop them being “contaminated” by the refugees.  Maybe that toy elephant had been donated by someone in one of the many groups in the UK which have been collecting for The Jungle, and had – I hope – brought some fleeting comfort to its owner.  I was reminded of When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit by Judith Kerr. Read it, and weep that it’s all happening all over again.

Demolishing the Jungle will not solve the problem, of course, as there will be other Jungles, elsewhere, until people stop mitigating the symptoms, and start treating the actual disease. There will be another “Jungle” somewhere else, within a few weeks. Mark my words. Of course, being nasty to foreigners and refugees who try and make a better life is not the exclusive provenance of the French authorities. Our own good old Home Office is trying to evict a Canadian family who have been performing a useful social function (unlike most Canadians, who can’t see a seal without wanting to club it) in the Scottish Highlands.  Craig Murray tells the story in his blog.

Jason and Christy Zielsdorf are Canadian. They have been in Scotland for eight years, legally, and several of their children were born here. After studying theology at St Andrews, Jason decided to stay on. Armed with an entrepreneur visa, two years ago he bought the general store and bothy in the small Highland village of Laggan. The premises had been empty for 18 months, because there is not a rich living in providing this community service. The Zielsdorfs reckoned that by investing in the accommodation and opening a coffee shop highlighting their excellent home cooking (and it really is excellent), they could make a go of it and cater not just for locals but the passing hillwalkers. And they have done.

It took some time and a lot of work for the business to find its feet, and to date they have only been able to give full time employment to one person, not the two their visa stipulates. Although they argue given time their business will reach a stage to employ two people, the Home Office says their time is up and is insisting on their deportation; a month ago they were told they will be deported imminently.

Deporting children who have only ever known Scotland is ludicrous. Fairly well the entire community of Laggan has written in support of the Zielsdorfs. Both Jason and Christy have Scottish ancestry. It is not easy to run a business in the Highlands and Laggan is better for what the Zielsdorfs have done. Local MP Drew Hendry has worked hard for them, but met only unhelpfulness from the Home Office, who have not even given a ministerial meeting promised in response to a parliamentary question.

We do not know when they will get the 5am knock on the door and be taken into custody.

This is what happens when you let the Daily Mail dictate immigration policy. The thing is, though, that by pointing out this sort of agenda-driven xenophobia, which has increased enormously since the referendum, it seems that now we run the risk of being accused of treason! Tory Councillor, Christian Holliday (I kid you not, that really is his name) has been suspended, but sadly, only on paper and not by the neck, after starting an official government petition to charge anyone who argued the case for a sane, sensible relation with the EU following the disastrous Brexit vote, with treason.  Yes, you heard it right.  Treason.

If you can’t win the argument, shut down the discussion. You could say that it’s treasonable – by any commonly understood definition of the word – to have voted for and actively supported the Brexit campaign’s lies which will eventually wreck our economy. But it would be an equally stupid assertion. I’m not sure what Mr Holliday’s motives were for tagging all “Remain” voters as traitors, other than he fancied 15 minutes of fame, but since he was unwise enough to leave his contact details on his web site after he’d done so, I was able to send him an email ticking him off for doubting my patriotism. He wouldn’t have liked it.  Unless he has changed it by now, his mobile phone number and his address are also there. I can’t be bothered to send him a text or order him a pizza though, that would just be childish.

I don’t know what it is about Tory councillors. In Bradford, one David Heseltine (no relation) has suggested grabbing the homeless by the scruff of the neck and “eliminating” them. The irony that many of the homeless are where they are precisely because of the policies of his party is presumably lost on him. I sometimes think the government is putting something in the water to make everybody stupid, and clearly some people will need a much smaller dose than others. Homeopathy in action.

Accusations of treason are very raw in the constituency of Batley and Spen, where the by-election took place last week for the vacant seat created when Jo Cox, the Labour MP, who had a high-profile support for the refugees from Syria, was allegedly gunned down and allegedly stabbed by an alleged assailant in her own constituency who allegedly shouted “My name is Britain First, death to traitors!” Although the Tories, and minor fringe parties such as the Liberal Democrats didn’t field candidates, as a mark of respect, the right wing lunatic fringe had no such qualms, because they have no respect, and stood against the successful Labour candidate, all losing their deposits in the process. Good.

In the wider scheme of things, though, despite this expected win, Labour are still letting the Tories get off scot-free. Not that parliament seems to have much relevance these days anyway. There was a debate last week on whether we approved of supporting the Saudis continuing to bomb Yemen. 101 Labour MPs abstained. There is a list of them on Hansard if you want to see if your Labour MP is one of the 101 people who consider that sticking it to Jeremy Corbyn in the face of not one but two overwhelming democratic mandates is more important than ending the Saudi genocide which is killing babies and children in Yemen.  Shamefully, Tracy Brabin, the newly-elected member for Batley and Spen, was one of those who failed to vote.

So, the world is a depressing place, the clocks have gone back, we all got an hour extra in bed, much good that it did us, and now I am watching the light fade on the feast of St Herbert, who was apparently Bishop of Marmoutier in France and Archbishop of Tours. No details of his life survive, says the online dictionary of saints, which is probably what people will say about mine one day (not that I am claiming sainthood, far from it).

I have been thinking, however, a lot, about what makes a saint and why some people are deemed worthy of the title and seemingly others are not. It’s quite an odd concept really. While you are alive, you aren’t a saint, and you don’t know you’re a saint. You only become one after you’re dead, and even then you have to jump through various hoops; miracles and intercessions and the like.  Also, you don’t decide to become a saint.  There is a problematic quotation from Sister Wendy Beckett which attempts to explain this –

We don't make ourselves saints, we're made saints, by God. We simply have to say "yes".

I think, on mature reflection, as it says in all the best wills, that it’s even simpler than that. Big G won’t take no for an answer, if he’s set his heart on making you into a saint, that’s what will happen. You don’t necessarily have a say in it, because you only see “through a glass, darkly” and not face to face. You probably don't even notice. 

I’ve argued before on this blog that there ought to be a category of “living saints” or “secular saints” – although quite what help this would be to them, except for the purposes of fundraising for the secular saints who run the dog and cat rescue centres, for instance, or the people who collect food and the essentials of life for people in refugee camps. I don’t really know.  And in any case, maybe the trick lies precisely and exactly in not knowing you are being a saint. If we want puffed up people with a sense of their own spiritual importance trying to raise funds, we could always turn on the TV evangelists’ channel.

And in any case, it’s not about the money – it’s about laying up store in heaven, but not knowing it. I suppose that’s maybe the essence of sainthood, if you had to distil it.  I don’t know, of course. I am not an authority on these things, nor am I ever likely to be. In fact, the more time I spend looking for the answers to these spiritual questions, the less likely I seem to be to find them, and the more I realise the vast and staggering scope of my own ignorance. Like Sir Isaac Newton, poncing about on the shore, diverted by pebbles, while all before me lay the vast oceans of unexplored truth or something like that.

I do think, though, that the capacity for “sainthood” is perhaps encoded in all of us.  What precisely makes that one person in the passing crowd go over to the drunk, homeless woman who seems to have collapsed on a park bench to offer help? Is it something that is in all of us, but in some it’s nearer the surface while in others – in the words of Gerard Manley Hopkins - it lives  “deep down things”. But to advance this theory – as I have done before, that we all carry a “God chip” a spark of pre-Fall innocence somewhere inside us, that we should be trying to re-connect with, the argument of the 17^th Century Neo-Platonists, in effect, is to argue that it must have been present in Hitler, Thatcher, Mussolini, Franco, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot.  Obviously in their case, they never made the connection. Does Donald Trump have somewhere buried within him, a spark of the divine? That is a big question, a bit like that Zen koan about “Does a dog have Buddha nature?” and probably with about as many answers.

I spend a lot of time castigating people and maybe I should also be looking at the beam in my own eye – if I were to spend more time searching for the speck of goodness in others – not the obvious Samaritans who cross over to help, but the obvious Pharisees who pass by on the other side, maybe I would gain a better understanding. That would imply getting to know them, reasoning with them, using logic, and things like that. It’s a very scary concept.  Especially as there are some people (ISIS, to name but one) whose response to “Hello! I would like to try and discover if you have a spark of divinity within your soul” would be to lop off your head with a Parang (or similar).  Which I suppose serves as a handy illustration of the quick path to martyrdom, another branch of sainthood.

My problem with trying to see the best in other people is that sometimes it involves forgiving them, something with which I will be honest, I have struggled all my life, and also there is a great temptation to let “looking for the spark of divinity in others” shade over into “trying to convert them to your way of thinking” which in turn leads to the sort of religion that insists that there is only one right answer to any moral conundrum, sometimes based on a very shaky interpretation of some obscure text or other.

Better, maybe, to blunder on as before, and perhaps each of us should work instead on connecting with our own inner spark of the divine, and let our true colours shine. “Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven.” I’ve been lucky enough to connect with something extraordinary (in spiritual terms, and in the strict sense of the word) a few times in my life. At Glastonbury Abbey; Holy Cross Abbey; The woods beside Coniston Water; beside the harbour at Lochranza; under the Lebanese cedars at Buckland House; beside Loch Nevis watching the sun set over Skye, and of course, inevitably, at Little Gidding – “the moment in the draughty church at smokefall”. I wish it could have been more, to sustain me through those long droughts in between, when the blaring world shuts out the still small voice of calm. 

Next week, I fear, that blaring world will be much in evidence. So, to sustain me during the ordeal which is inevitably going to come, right now, I am going to have a toasted teacake and a pot of English Breakfast Tea.  There is no problem that cannot be diminished in importance by approaching it with a mug of tea in your hand.