Epiblog for the Feast of St Marina

It has been a busy fortnight in the Holme Valley. My work crisis is getting worse and worse, so it’s just as well that the weather at the start of June has been shitey, otherwise I would have been feeling really hard done by if I was sweating away over the bank rec or Crowle Street Kids, while everyone else was out in the sunshine enjoying themselves.  As it is, I just felt mildly aggrieved.

I truly don’t know how I am going to get everything done before the looming mid-July deadline.  My main problem at the moment is lack of sleep. It’s not that I’m burning the midnight oil at both ends or whatever the current metaphor is – it’s that when I do actually go to bed, I can no longer get that deep refreshing sleep that I used to have for hours on end, because my legs go into cramp or pins and needles. So these days at most I sleep for about an hour before my body wakes me up and I have to change position. It’s a bit like being a porn star, only they change position every couple of minutes (allegedly, m’lud).  Plus, parts of my body have become angry, red and swollen. (My thumb. Keep quiet at the back!)

So, if I could just find a way of working during the day when I’m asleep in my wheelchair when my body shuts down on me, I’d be fine. In the meantime, the following beings automatically get more sleep than me: Matilda, Misty, and even Debbie, now we’re into the exam season and there’s no class prep to do.

Matilda has recently taken to sleeping on the decking during the day, now that the weather is turning warm again. At first, the squirrels were wary of this new development, but now they have resumed their feasting on the peanuts we put out in what used to be Freddie’s dish, having worked out that the most she is likely to do is to stretch in their general direction, arch her back, and emit a huge fishy yawn, before settling back down again in the sun.

It’s ironic that Freddie’s old food bowl is now providing sustenance for the squirrels when all his life was spent barking in a paroxysm of hate at them whenever he saw one through the conservatory door. As the Gawain poet puts it – “very seldom does the beginning accord to the end”.

Misty has been enjoying the prospect of more face-to-snout time with Debbie now that the exam season is upon us and there is no more tedious preparation to be done.  She’s still obliged to go in for her allotted hours (Debbie not Misty, though to be honest, the college never checks lanyards and probably wouldn’t notice) but those hours are now spent making sure that people turn up, get to the right room where the right exam is taking place, and put whatever it is Deb has been dinning into them for the last year into practice.  Come to think of it, being a Border Collie, Misty would be ideally suited to rounding the up and herding them in, with a nip to the calf for any tardy latecomers.

In other news, Brenda is back! This is quite strange, actually, as in previous years she’s only visited us from about the end of March to the end of May. It could always be a different badger, of course, but she’s been on the last three nights in a row now and hoovered up a combination of leftovers we put out for her and peanuts the squirrels have left behind.  So we’ll have to see how this goes on. We are into a whole new badger game.

Also, since I last wrote a blog, we have of course had the general election. Oh what a night... My first thought on the morning after, though, was where we MIGHT have been had not the Parliamentary Labour Party spent the last four years attempting to undermine Jeremy Corbyn, which meant in effect that he was always fighting the election with one hand tied behind his back.

Now is not the time for recrimination but history will judge these people and it won't be a case of community service. Just the opposite in some cases. Still, here in the Colne Valley we have a new MP and I hope that she starts as she means to go on by aiming for the goolies and stopping this insane closure of Huddersfield Royal's A&E Department.

As for Corbyn, the man is a limpet. Speaking as a stubborn old bugger myself, I recognise a master of stubborn old buggery when I see it, and he could do stubborn old buggery at the Olympics if stubborn old buggery were an Olympic sport. If he does eventually become PM, and takes the lead on negotiating Brexit, I look forward to the Europeans scratching their head in puzzlement and saying "Mon Dieu" and "Mein Gott" and stuff like that during the Brexit talks. Unlike May, who just wanted her anti-immigration stance rubber-stamped at the expense (literally and metaphorically) of the Single Market.

The poll brought some interesting entrances and exits: Vince Cable is back! At least he is until the staff in the Twickenham Home for the Terminally Confused notice he's missing at roll call, recapture him and tuck him back up under a tartan rug in the TV room with a cup of tea and a hobnob. "Do you know who I am?" "Ask Matron, Dearie, she'll tell you!" Alex Salmond is gone. The loathsome Ether McVey is back to continue her self imposed mission of driving poor people to their deaths along with her partner in crime, Duncan-Smith the Impaler.  Nick Clegg is gone, and looked like someone whose rabbit had died and he couldn’t even sell the hutch. No amount of hubris, chagrin, or schadenfreude, however satisfying it was, will ever make up for the damage he did by propping up the Tories for five years, enabling (inter alia) the Bedroom Tax suicides.

Since the election, we’ve had the edifying prospect of Theresa May clinging on by her fingertips, sacking her election advisors, and trying to get into bed with the DUP and thus endangering the Good Friday agreement in Northern Ireland. This, from a woman who had the nerve to tick off Corbyn for having been allegedly soft on terrorism! Woe unto ye Phairsees and hypocrites. One unexpected upside of the self-inflicted gunshot wound in Mrs May’s foot has been seeing the likes of Polly Toynbee, Matthew D’Ancona, John Rentoul, Dominic Lawson, Uncle Tom Cobley and all, lining up to say they were wrong about Jeremy Corbyn.  Once again, one wonders where Corbyn would be right now had he not had to fight an election campaign with these commentators repeating the same dismal predictions over and over again like a parrot with Alzheimer’s.

Further evidence of the immense cockup which May has foisted on herself emerged when it came to light that the Queen’s Speech will have to be re-scheduled, partially because the DUP are still arguing whether to burn Papists at the stake or have them hung, drawn and quartered, and partially because it clashed with the start of the Brexit negotiations. I hear that they had also booked the local Brewery for a piss-up on the same day.  Her latest wheeze is to plan for a two year legislative programme so there won’t need to be a Queen’s Speech next year, the excuse being that Brexit is so much more important than everything else and therefore we need to concentrate on it. It’s so important, in fact that nine weeks of what could have been preparation time were wasted on an unnecessary election.

Nevertheless the Brexit negotiations start tomorrow, and we are up La Creek Du Merde, Sans Padeil. As Ian Dunt put it, writing on Politics.co.uk

So they have confirmed it. Britain will start talks with the EU on Monday. We are now about to go into the most challenging negotiations since the Second World War with no government, no overall aim, no plan to achieve it, no functioning department to deliver it, no confidence at home or abroad with which to pass it, no trade expert capacity to negotiate it, and no time to manage it. This is beyond even the bleakest warnings of Remainers in the days after the vote. We must now face the very real possibility of an unmitigated disaster with very severe damage to our quality of life and a painful spectacle of humiliation on the international stage.

I don’t think I could have put it better, or more succinctly. I do find myself wondering what would drive anyone who is what we used to call “working class” to vote for the Conservatives.  Since “austerity” came in in 2010, we have reduced the ranks of the police by 19,000 and the armed forces by 40,969.  We’ve also got rid of 3,230 mental health practitioners, 343 libraries, 64 museums and 214 playgrounds. 

The whole rationale for “austerity” was to get rid of debt and stabilise people’s economic prospects. There are now roughly 900,000 people employed on zero hours contracts, the national debt has risen to £0.7 trillion, the number of food parcels given out by the Trussell Trust has gone up to 1.2 million, and the official total of rough sleepers stands at 4134, although that is almost certainly way too low as it doesn’t take into account people who are homeless but “sofa surfing” or relying on other informal arrangements that could break down at any moment.

Austerity was also the lever which drove the DWP in its arm’s length campaign using ATOS to drive people off benefits and into suicide aided by a supine and complicit press who were happy to find the odd extreme example of someone gaming the system and present it to gullible readers or viewers as the norm.  The precise figure of these may never be known, as the DWP had to be dragged kicking and screaming and beaten over its collective head with several FOI requests even to release the figures of those who died after being declared “fit for work”.

And now, apparently, because Theresa May botched the election, and is flailing around looking for any sort of political lifejacket before she goes down for the third time, “austerity” is at an end.  Oh, so that’s alright then. Could I just ask, though, was it worth it? Well, was it?

We could certainly have done with the extra police in the aftermath of the recent atrocities in Manchester and London, and indeed in preventing further such outrages.  We could have done with the extra firefighters that Boris Johnson got rid of when he was mayor of London this week, when Grenfell Tower caught fire in Kensington.  I’m not going to add another huge dollop of words to the many millions that have already been written about this dreadful event. I’ll confine myself to two or three general observations.

I’m no expert, but it seems to me that coating a building with something that, when it catches fire, goes up like a Roman Candle, was never going to end well.

The vacuity and stupidity of some of the people – especially celebrities – who have been brought in to comment on the tragedy is jaw-dropping. Lily Allen, being interviewed on Channel 4 news, claimed that the true death toll was being “hidden” and asked why the full death toll figure could not be released straight away.  Er, well, Lily, it’s because teams of firemen have to sift through every bit of ash and rubble and decide whether what they are looking at was once a coffee table, a Cornish pasty, or a person. It’s nasty and gruesome work. And that takes time, because it has to be done professionally, and with dignity. And sadly, horribly in fact for the grieving survivors, some people may never be found, it would seem.  Why on earth John Snow didn’t put her right, God alone knows!

And finally, the bleatings of those who say that it’s too early to draw conclusions and we must be careful not to “politicise” the event.  This is the default stance of those who think their policies may have contributed to the scale of the disaster, of course.  In truth, there is probably some blame to be apportioned on all sides, and I hope that any inquiry gets to the bottom of who decided – for instance – to use cheaper, more flammable materials, and why. The Boris Johnson 2014 cuts to the fire service must also be given their due weight, especially any damage this caused to the fire brigades’ largely unseen work of fire prevention and advice.

It seems to me though that the Grenfell Tower disaster is also symptomatic of the whole culture of government and management in the UK today – symptomatic of an outsourced, hands-off, freewheeling attitude to legislation that’s always looking to dismantle “red tape” and “free us” from the perils of excessive legislation. We don’t need experts! We can see that this block of flats looks nice and new and shiny! We don’t need sprinklers! Too expensive (this, in a country currently spending £508,000 per mission on bombing Syria to no avail) And in any case, only poor people live there! And if it all goes to hell in a handcart, we’ve set up a Quango to manage it, so they can take the blame, not us!

This is a mindset you see over and over again right across the public services.  We shouldn’t be surprised, if we allow the government to play Russian roulette with public safety in the name of “austerity” and penny-pinching if the occasional shit/fan collision happens. If you light enough fuses, you shouldn’t be surprised by the odd explosion.  Didn’t David Cameron promise a bonfire of regulations? Well now we’ve got one. Very seldom does the beginning accord to the end. We should be careful of bonfires. The Nazis made a bonfire out of books that eventually led to Churchill making a bonfire out of Dresden.

I have to say, as well, I don’t understand this business of not “politicising” things. It’s not like there are two separate things – politics and real life. I came up against the same thing over Huddersfield’s A & E. I have been vociferous in the campaign to stop it being closed and merged with that of Calderdale, and have been castigated for my “political” postings about it. Well, the problem has arisen because the government wedded to “austerity” has been unable to find the money to pay off the PFI debt, and has handed the entire shit sandwich to the local clinical commissioning group leaving them no option but to recommend a cost-saving merger. If that’s not political, what is? The cuts weren’t implemented by the fairies, were they?

This week has also seen the anniversary of the murder of Jo Cox, and a well deserved award of a George Medal for the 78-year-old ex miner who jumped on the back of Thomas Mair in an attempt to intervene in the attack and who was stabbed by Mair for his trouble. That medal will, obviously, never bring Jo Cox back, but it was a brave act deserving of some form of official recognition. Mair has never opened up about the precise trigger for his actions, but given that the Leave campaign’s “Nazi” poster with the hordes of brown people who were, according to Farage “heading for Calais” was published that very morning, and had been all over the breakfast news, you have to wonder. Again, beware of lighting bonfires you can’t control. Although in this case, maybe Farage’s actions went beyond recklessness and shaded into malice.

Today, if you were at all interested, is the feast of St Marina. St Marina the Virgin, in fact.  She flourished in Bithynia in the eighth century, and apparently served God under the habit of a monk, apparently with extraordinary fervour.  She died about the middle of the eighth century. Her relics were somehow translated from Constantinople to Venice in 1230, and are venerated there in a church which bears her name. A portion of her relics has also found its way to Paris, where there is also a St Marina’s church.  There is a variation of some sort in her feast day, which is celebrated on 18 June in Paris and 17 July in Venice. So you pays your homage and takes your choice.

It seems slightly perverse, though, to be wimbling on about saints and relics in a world which is growing increasingly mad by the hour.  I haven’t even mentioned Donald Trump in this blog so far, a man who is clearly as mad as a runaway pram full of burning poodles, but he’s still there. Well, at Mar-A-Lago, probably, given that it’s the weekend. And the UK – especially on hot summer days - is still gripped with that kind of phoney-war complacency that Orwell pictures so vividly in Homage to Catalonia when he returns home after escaping Barcelona:

It is difficult when you pass that way, especially when you are peacefully recovering from sea-sickness with the plush cushions of a boat-train carriage under your bum, to believe that anything is really happening anywhere. Earthquakes in Japan, famines in China, revolutions in Mexico? Don’t worry, the milk will be on the doorstep tomorrow morning, the New Statesman will come out on Friday.  The industrial towns were far away, a smudge of smoke and misery hidden by the curve of the earth’s surface. Down here it was still the England I had known in my childhood: the railway-cuttings smothered in wild flowers, the deep meadows where the great shining horses browse and meditate, the slow-moving streams bordered by willows, the green bosoms of the elms, the larkspurs in the cottage gardens; and then the huge peaceful wilderness of outer London, the barges on the miry river, the familiar streets, the posters telling of cricket matches and Royal weddings, the men in bowler hats, the pigeons in Trafalgar Square, the red buses, the blue policemen–all sleeping the deep, deep sleep of England, from which I sometimes fear that we shall never wake till we are jerked out of it by the roar of bombs.

I fear that Orwell might have been more accurate than he thought though I am hoping the bombs will be at worst economic ones.  That will be bad enough. There are bad times just around the corner.

And where does that leave us, the people of faith. I almost chuckled at trying to shoehorn myself into that category. I think it’s best in my case to view it as a convenient shorthand for “people who have become convinced there is more to life, the universe and everything than a new sofa from DFS every Christmas and two weeks on the Costa Blanca every July. You come to a cross roads early on in that particular journey, the journey of faith, where you either conclude that life is completely meaningless, everything dies and bad shit happens to good people for no reason, or you conclude that there must be some reason, some structure underlying everything, but you have absolutely no idea what it is, and nor does conventional “organised” religion help you in any way – because, when mis-applied, it can often add to the bad shit that happens to good people for no reason, rather than taking it away.

So you set off down that particular leg of the crossroads and if you are lucky you reach a state where you can be more or less happy with two things. One, that something exists which does underlie everything and two, that in your present state for some unknown reason you are precluded from knowing what that something is.

When an appalling disaster happens though, people inevitably ask where God was in all of this. If there is a God, how could he, she, or it, let this happen? As I have said many times before, if you accept that the concept of God has to encompass everything that is was or shall be, then clearly its ideas of “justice” and “fairness” are going to be very different from ours.  Where is God in a disaster? In the actions of the emergency services, the helpers and those who donate to the disaster fund. Why do we have to have a disaster to bring out the best in people? That’s a question for God, but I would say I have seen gestures of quiet unacknowledged and unsung heroism in all situations of life, and the unbidden smile, the friendly gesture that comes out of the blue, the unexpected act of kindness are all things which I take to be at least “something” in action. So is the making of inspired music or art to glorify the golden spark of “something” that seems hard-wired deep inside us. And if you can philosophically admit a God that contains everything and yet is infinite in space and time, then our distinction between “alive” and “dead” is meaningless to God. The dead are still with us, and we are with them.

None of this would be of any comfort to the bereaved, however, nor would I expect it to. We fall back on conventional utterances of saying the same thing – my Mum and Dad are in heaven, or we deploy good old Henry Scott Holland and say that their absence is just as if they had gone into another room. Oddly enough, that is probably exactly what it does look like to God, if my theory is correct. In my father’s house are many mansions…

There’s no denying though that the world is full of madness and stupidity and tragedy. God’s counter to it is the rescuer who plunges into the burning building, the bystander who tries to stop a murder taking place, and the reason why things have to be done that way is a mystery to me as much as it probably is to you.

And to be honest, on this Sunday afternoon a week before Midsummer (how this year is rolling relentlessly on) I don’t think I can get any further down that leg of my crossroads, and who knows, I may even double back. Debbie is going to take Misty Muttkins out in the sun, Matilda is asleep on the decking in the sun and soon I am going to take my place in the sun, just for a little while, as I trundle myself to the back door and sit there painting and looking out over the tangled and neglected vista.  If I have come to any conclusion, I suppose, it’s that acts can have unexpected good consequences, as well as unexpected bad ones.  Very seldom does the beginning accord to the end. Life is an uncertain business. Eat dessert first, especially if it’s ice cream. Stop to smell the roses. And remember, if at first you don’t succeed, then sky-diving probably isn’t for you.