Epiblog for the Feast of St Leger

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley.  It’s definitely turning crisper and of course it’s October already. White rabbits (black rabbits matter) and a pinch, a punch, the first of the month. What has happened to this year? Gone in a flap, that’s what.  It’s definitely colder, as well.  Soon the clocks will go back, and then it’ll be feet off the pedals, and downhill all the way to Christmas.

The squirrels are still missing in action, Matilda shows no sign of going back to her old ways and has continued to be an indoor cat. I think there were a couple of days during the week when she didn’t go outside at all. Misty, however, is still very much an outside dog, though the fact of the evenings closing in means that once more, we are back to her and Deb coming home in the dark, wet through and shivery. Plus, one of their favourite walks, up on West Nab and Wessenden, has sprouted a number of official-looking notices excluding dogs under section something, subsection something, of something or other. It needs looking into, but on the face of it, it’s the work of the gun club that owns vast tracts of the Wessenden moorland, and undertakes to “conserve” it for Natural England. They also “conserve” the grouse, in order to be able to blast them out of the sky and turn them into grouse pate. Or possibly grouse conserve.

In case you wondered whether (because of my comments last week) I had gone under in an avalanche of books, I can happily report that the week probably turned out better on the work front than I expected.  When I came back from holiday, I had two new books to launch, one to reprint, and six to send to press. Last week I organised the reprint and sent three (almost four – the other will go tomorrow) off to press.  So I am still in there and pitching, but next week is looking equally, if not more, ostrobogulous.

Still, it keeps my mind off the news, and the forthcoming end of the world and apocalypse if Trump gets elected.  On the additional evidence of the candidates’ debate (always makes me think of Mrs Robinson, that phrase) – as if we needed any additional evidence, it seems the man is delusional, irrational, hotheaded, and likely to get gakked off his face and press the button to nuke North Korea, miss, and hit China by mistake.  Actually, being charitable, the man may just have had a bad cold and attempted some sort of self-medication which malfunctioned.  And his microphone definitely wasn’t working properly. Every time Hillary Clinton started speaking, it cut in and interrupted her.  I have no brief whatsoever for Hillary Clinton, by the way. She’s just as likely to order the National Guard to shoot protestors as Trump is, except that he’d probably do it for no reason,  just to see what happens.  Psychopaths are like that.  I pity the USA its choice this November, but seriously… Trump?

The prospect of a Trump victory is especially worrying in view of the current imbroglio in Syria. I don’t have the words to express my hatred for the Russians and the Syrians bombing hospitals with barrel-bombs. Well, I do have the words, most of them begin with F, B or C and I am sure you’ve heard them all before. Unfortunately, our idiot government (I use the word advisedly) is only making things worse.  As the redoubtable Mike Sivier wrote this week in his Vox Populi blog:

This makes it possible that US and Russian forces will end up shooting each other – even if they say they don’t mean to. Americans have an extremely poor record in this regard – as their British allies in the Second Gulf War learned to their cost. In the midst of all this, the UK’s damned-fool Defence Secretary, Philip Hammond, has asserted that this country will continue bombing IS, in Syria, for “as long as it takes” – even though the Conservative Government has no Parliamentary mandate to do anything of the kind. MPs rejected military action in Syria, almost exactly two years ago. They have since approved strikes against IS in Iraq, but the ban on raids in Syria is technically still in force. Our personnel should not be there.

In the light of the new development, there is even more reason for the UK to pull out of Syria – but of course our Defence Secretary is a damned fool. This is a situation that could escalate into a shooting war between America and Russia, if damned fools like him are allowed to continue running around like bulls in front of red rags. That should be the last thing anybody wants – but do you see anybody trying to stop it?

Sadly, no, I don’t.  I only see the people of Aleppo being sacrificed in a proxy war of willy-waving between Assad, Putin, and Obama, with well-meaning but ineffectual and ultimately unhelpful interventions by the UK, at the taxpayer’s expense. A Paveway bomb costs $21,896 or, in real money, at today’s exchange rate, £16,852.  The starting salary for an NHS healthcare assistant is between £15,000 and £18,000pa.  Since the yardstick for deciding anything these days is seemingly to compare it against the NHS (and yes we’re still waiting for the non-existent £350 million a week) just bear in mind that every time we piss away £16,852 by dropping a Paveway bomb on Syria (sometimes on forces which are nominally our allies, which happened recently) we are denying the NHS a healthcare assistant. I’m sorry to be so blunt. I tried being subtle, and nothing happened.

One of the aspects of the horror in Syria – indeed in war zones generally - which is often overlooked in the impact it has on animals. Now, I know there will be people, on reading the next paragraph, who will say, Oh, that Steve Rudd, here he goes again, he prefers animals to people.. To them, I would give my usual answer. That depends which animals, and which people. There is a man in Aleppo called Mohammad Alaa Jaleel, who has chosen to stay behind in Aleppo and care for over a hundred abandoned cats in that war-torn hell zone. Many of these are family pets who have had to be left behind in a heartbreaking decision by families who have fled the conflict. I can’t imagine what it would be like having to leave Matilda behind and hit the road to get away from incessant bombing. And that’s before you start adding in the terror of seeing other family members killed, having to leave your home and go and sleep out in the open in the cold and rain, and all the other stuff that goes with being a refugee.  Whoever this man is, he deserves international help. Perhaps the Cats’ Protection League could evict some of the many moths from its wallet and get some fund to him, somehow.

Here at home, the refugee crisis might as well not exist, for all the sympathy the government and the press showers on it. The media are happy to indulge in hand-wringing and shroud-waving when it suits them, but never go on to make the obvious connection between the dead children floating in the Mediterranean and the policies of our government, amongst others, that put them there.  They report on the proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia which is tearing Yemen apart, and out of which comes film of horrendously overstretched hospitals and children dying of malnutrition because of the famine, but they never go on to say that we sold the Saudis the very missiles they used to take out the dockyard cranes so no more grain ships can dock and unload. (They claimed they had “accidentally” hit the cabs of each individual crane, apparently, while aiming for something else. Yeah, right. ) On the eve of the Jungle Camp at Calais being demolished by the French government (Why? What will this achieve? How will this help in any way?) the Archbishop of York, Dr John Sentamu, himself an asylum seeker who came here as a child fleeing Idi Amin’s Uganda, has become an unlikely cheerleader for the Daily Mail hate brigade.

Speaking at a literary event sponsored, in fact, by the Daily Mail (the clue is in the sponsor) he said that basically, refugees were being passed on to the UK as a direct consequence of the principle of free movement in the Schengen area. Since I had previously believed him to be a man who had sympathy with, and who had previously spoken out on behalf of, oppressed people, I can only hope that he has been misquoted or misreported.

Surely he must know that this country is not bearing anything like its fair share of the refugee crisis. It is far from being “swamped” and the only people who peddle this fiction are racist, fascist organisations such as UKIP who have an axe to grind, or people who are simply incapable of differentiating between asylum seekers, economic migrants, and refugees. He must also be further aware that other countries in Europe, especially Germany, have taken far more than their share of refugees and that it is not, as you wrongly asserted, simply a case of every refugee in Europe automatically making a beeline for Calais and thence trying to get into the UK.

More importantly, he must also be aware that, since the Brexit vote, every racist xenophobic bigot in the country thinks they have now been given carte blanche to abuse, harass, and, in some cases, physically assault, those people who have already managed to gain asylum here, not to mention EU nationals who are here legitimately, and even British citizens whose ethnic origin is other than white.  I cannot comprehend why he felt it necessary to offer further succour to these people by your inaccurate and frankly inflammatory statements.  It would have been more helpful, all things considered if he had spent his time on rebutting some of the common myths around refugees and asylum, instead of propping up the Daily Mail’s agenda. Anyway, I have written to him, ticking him off, and I’ll let you know if and when he replies, what he says.  If anything.

Meanwhile, Brexit rumbles on. There were reports, this week, that Theresa May was going to announce at the Tory conference in Birmingham that she was going to have to first enshrine every aspect of EU law into British Law, so they could then subsequently repeal the bits she didn’t like.  I guess this comes under the  heading of “taking back control”. One can only hope that the first aiders at the conference have the defibrilators handy.  She went on to say that she would formally trigger article 50 by the end of March 2017. She couldn’t really leave it much longer, bless her, although she must have been tempted to think about saying  “How about ‘never’ Is never good for you?” There’s nothing quite like telegraphing in advance to the gnomes of Zurich, though, when they need to start taking their money out. So now we know when it starts, though God alone knows when and where it will finish.  Meanwhile the three stooges, Johnson Davis and Fox, who sound more and more like a firm of dodgy accountants, continue to make self-contradictory statements and give every impression of three people who couldn’t tell their arse from their elbow without a large, labelled diagram. And, down at Canary Wharf, all those ships are being loaded up with money, which will be sailing away into the sunset, out of the economy, forever. Bye bye. Bye bye.  Bye bye jobs, bye bye prosperity.

It hasn’t all been bad news. This week, in a rare outbreak of common sense, although it remains to be seen where they will try and claw the money back with the other hand, the DWP finally decided to stop re-testing long-term ESA claimants. While this will undoubtedly save the government money, it won’t bring back all the people they’ve driven to suicide since 2010, so there will still, I hope, be lots of evidence to prosecute Iain Duncan-Smith and Esther McVeigh, if and when it ever comes to court.  It was sneaked out on a Friday night, with minimal publicity, as befits all government climb-downs.

Anyway, somehow we’ve once again made it to Sunday without having noticed and today is the feast of St Leger, or Leodegarius, who managed to get himself killed in 675AD or thereabouts by having his eyes put out and his tongue cut out before being murdered near Fecamp in Normandy.  In 1458 Cardinal Rolin caused his feast day to be observed as a holy day of obligation, which I am sure came as a great consolation to him They later named a horse race at Doncaster after him, which I am sure also chuffed him enormously.

I’m sorry, but this sort of stuff leaves me cold. In a week when the horrors of Aleppo have been all over the news, what comfort, what guidance, can I derive from Saint bloody Leger? Answer, nothing at all. I struggle from week to week to try and maintain some sort of semblance of belief that no matter how haphazard and nasty life seems, no matter how much bad shit happens to good people at random for no reason, that there is some sort of logic or reason behind it all, and to be honest, were it not for those odd moments when I somehow, suddenly, am seized with an awareness that “all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well”, I’d have thrown in the towel long ago.

So, my question is this.  Are we happy with what’s happening in Aleppo, and if not, what are we going to do about it?  There is anecdotal evidence that, in 1954-55, when Eisenhower, not known for his conciliatory approach to anything, really, was contemplating bombing China, he was dissuaded by a grassroots campaign which exhorted people to send in little bags of rice to the White House, to dissuade the president from this course of action. According to Albert Hassler, of the International Fellowship of Reconcilation, the bags were sent:

with the message, 'If thine enemy hunger, feed him. Send surplus food to China.' The surplus food, in fact, was never sent. On the surface, the project was an utter failure.

But then - quite by accident - we learned from someone on Eisenhower's press staff that our campaign was discussed at three separate cabinet meetings. Also discussed at each of these meetings was a recommendation from the Joint Chiefs of Staff that the United States bomb mainland China in response to the Quemoy-Matsu crisis.

At the third meeting the president turned to a cabinet member responsible for the Food for Peace program and asked, 'How many of those grain bags have come in?' The answer was 45,000, plus tens of thousands of letters.

On hearing this, Eisenhower apparently rescinded his decision to bomb.  Whether or not this actually happened is a moot point, and we shouldn’t be too optimistic about the effect of mass action: after all, if they sent the rice to Trump, he’d probably put it in a stir-fry, and over a million people voted against he Iraq war with their feet, but it didn’t stop Blair following Bush down the primrose path of dalliance. But what’s the option? Just roll over and let the buggers steal the shop from underneath us? OK, maybe bags of rice are a bit passé. There are some politicians I’d far rather send a bag of Ricin to, to be honest. But maybe in this era of mass social media communications and the internet and everything, we should at least do something.

Otherwise, it’s tantamount to saying we’re happy with it. Happy with the kids being killed by barrel bombs. Happy with the refugees drowning. Happy with the families having to leave their pets in war-torn streets of Aleppo. Happy with the kids being tear-gassed by the CRS in the Jungle.  So do something. Sign a petition. Write to somebody. Get a satisfyingly large brick, and hurl it through the window of the Russian Embassy. Or the Foreign Office. Or the Saudi Embassy, Or Number 10, Downing Street. Or all of the above. It worked for the Suffragettes. There’s a large stack of old bricks in the corner of our back garden. I was going to use some of them to build a sundial, but help yourself. I’ve probably already said enough to get myself reported, if not arrested, for thought crime under the “Prevent” strategy, so I’ll leave it there.

You say this is supposed to be a “religious blog” – well, I also believe in life before death. As Revd Elaine Wykes has said:

Do they think Jesus just went round patting people on the back and being nice and kind and caring 'pastoral'? How pathetic. Jesus flipped tables over, ranted constantly, challenged and called people out…

I agree. And to which I would add the following, from John Ball, the radical preacher who was part of the Peasants’ Revolt in 1348: 

My good friends, things cannot go on well in England, nor ever will until everything shall be in common, when there shall be neither vassal nor lord, and all distinctions levelled; when the lords shall be no more masters than ourselves. How ill they have used us!… They have wines, spices and fine bread, when we have only rye and the refuse of fine straw; and if we drink, it must be water. They have handsome seats and manors, when we must brave the wind and rain in our labours in the field; but it is from our labour they have the wherewith to support their pomp.…

That is why, speaking as a fat old hairbag in a wheelchair, sitting here crumbling away from a terminal disease, I keep on writing and agitating. And if I can do it, so can you, and you, and you  - and you at the back. Yes,  you.  At the end of the day, we will be “Only remembered for what we have done” as the song has it.  

The first time I really remember having got to this stage of teary-eyed frustration in my life, I was a lot younger. I forget which war it was, there have been so many, but I asked a priest (as it happens, I knew him because used to go around and chop up logs for him, as he was too elderly and infirm to do it himself. How the wheelchair wheel turns full circle) about this and he said the important thing was to cultivate the habit of patience. If you have patience, then anything becomes possible in time. He’s long dead now, these thirty years or more, but essentially what he was saying was the same as Gandhi said – first they ignore you, then they mock you, then they fear you, then you win.  

It’s not the fights you dreamed of, but those you really fought – as I said last week. I’m sorry once again if you came here hoping for a cosy fireside chat and instead you found me seething and angry at the death of children, angry at the mistreatment of animals.  If it helps, Matilda and Misty are snoozing in their respective beds, as I will be, once I have finally finished this Epiblog. Obviously, I am not advocating violence as an answer to anything- It is always better to shake someone’s hand than to shake your fist at them, but there are occasions when you have to get their attention first, before you can start that process. And if that means shouting about injustice, then so be it.

It’s 2.05AM now, so I am going to finish this off in the morning, or should I say, later this morning.

No, actually, in fact I am going to finish it now. I have changed what passes for my mind these days. I’m going to finish it so I can get on tomorrow with a straight edge and a clean slate. I’ll leave you, then, this week, not with some whimsy about all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well, though I do still believe that, sometimes, albeit infrequently, but with a song instead.  Dedicated specially to Forrest Trump.

Postscript. As I was in the midst of  posting this (on Monday teatime – busy day!) I note that Amber Rudd (no relation, I’m very glad to say) the woman who is pretending to be the Home Secretary, has said at the Tory conference that the government has “done all it can” to help the unaccompanied child migrants at Calais.  I’m glad it’s Monday and not Sunday, as I don’t feel so bad about saying that  statement is complete, and utter, bollocks.