Epiblog for Ash Wednesday

It has been a busy few weeks in the Holme Valley. We seem to be stuck with winter, at least for the time being, as Candlemas Day (2nd February) dawned bright and clear, and, as eny fule kno, according to the old weather rhyme:

If Candlemas dawns bright and clear,
We’ll have two winters in the one year.

One winter is more than enough for me, thanks. If anyone wants my second winter, inbox me, as they say in the realm of Facebook. In the unlikely event of my ever becoming stupendously rich, or even stupendously well off, I intend to do what Robert Graves did and go and live in Majorca, at least from the start of October to the beginning of March.

I could even go the whole hog and marry an unstable female poet who jumps off the balcony, if I wasn’t married to one unstable female already. Debbie’s anger-management failures tend to manifest themselves externally, though. I still cherish the memory of the day she hurled a loaf of bread at my head. I ducked, and it took out a shelf of wine glasses. Thank God it wasn’t frozen, or there would have been a hole in the wall. Or the time she took off her wedding ring and flung it at me. It missed. There was a long moment while the realisation dawned that it was actually Granny Fenwick’s wedding ring from 1911, and then we were both grovelling around on our hands and knees looking for it under the kitchen unit. We found it, dear reader, we found it.

I wouldn’t want to miss the spring in England, though. There is something special, something magical about it. Oh, to be in England, now that April’s there, and all that. In the fixed medieval world (and indeed in our world, since I seem to be living a medieval life at the moment) winter punishes, and spring redeems. And oh boy, I need a shot of redemption, as Paul Simon would no doubt say if he were here right now.

The garden needs it even more than I do. It really has had a pasting and a half this winter. What it needs is a capable person to take it on. I’m a capable person, but can’t take it on. And the last few people who have taken it on, have proved to be anything but capable! Ho hum. Anyway, this year, as in previous years, I have a cunning plan!

Those of you (all three of you) who noticed that the blog stopped being written in 2017, might have vaguely wondered what happened to us all in the interim. The true, but boring, answer, is “not much”. Although there is a great deal of comfort to be had from boredom, especially if, like me, you hate change. We are still all in more or less the same place doing more or less the same things.

Debbie is still lecturing, and growing more and more disenchanted with the world of education, day by day. That’s not unusual. I don’t know anyone involved in education who isn’t plotting their escape, one way or another. Some of them even have a vaulting horse, a secret tunnel, and bags of soil inside their trouser legs. It’s not hard to see why. For every hour she spends on her hind legs getting paid to teach English to people who fell through the school system without touching the sides, she spends four to five unpaid hours either prepping, marking, or filling in incomprehensible bumff so that the College can claim it has ticked all the boxes. Then put it on a shelf, and after seven years, shred it, unread.

Misty is still being a borderline collie. Teamed up with Zak, M-I-L’s increasingly elderly collie cross, she has been yomping across the moors over Wessenden Head through the worst of the winter. There was one day just before Christmas when Debbie came back and the poor dogs were soaked to the skin, shivering, and nithered to the bane, and they made a beeline for the stove where they resignedly steamed themselves back to dog-body-warmth before even considering the contents of their dog-bowls, while Debbie was getting changed. When she came back down, she said it had been blowing horizontal snow in her face for the first two miles up there, then it had started laying and freezing to a crust across the track all the way back. By then it was pitch black. She said, “And, do you know, I didn’t see another single soul, all the time I was up there.” Quelle surprise!

Matilda has now firmly established what I refer to as her “winter” routine. This consists of a brief foray from the recliner chair in the kitchen, into the garden, first thing, the brevity of which is determined by the air temperature and weather outside, and whether or not it is actually raining/snowing/hailing, followed by a slightly-less-brief visit to her food bowl, followed by her jumping on to the foot of my bed and settling down for the day. It’s got to the stage now where I try and mould the duvet into a doughnut-shaped cat bed, and cover it with the Mexican blanket. She’ll sleep there till gone midnight, then, when everyone else has gone to bed, she’ll come through and jump up onto the recliner chair next to the stove, and Matilda and I will surf our way into the early hours before I finally give up, cross another day off the calendar, and head to bed, leaving her in sole command of the kitchen.

Several people asked me, last year, why I’d stopped writing this blog, and to those who actually got in touch with me direct, I told them all the same thing. I stopped because I wasn’t making a difference. I was spending two or three – sometimes more – hours on a Sunday afternoon, hammering the guilty, calling them out, vilifying them in the most coruscating prose I could summon up, and it made absolutely no difference. People were still being forced to visit food banks, Trump was still president, homelessness was growing, and the country I love was growing more savage, insular and bigoted by the day.

So I gave up. Why should I spend three of my remaining hours a week writing songs no one would hear, with words that stretch and strain to rhyme, as Paul Simon would undoubtedly yet again say if he were here right now. So I decided I would put the time to better use. Painting, and stuff like that. Sleeping, and stuff like that. Actually, I have been doing rather a lot of sleeping, and if the Robert Graves option (see above) doesn’t come off, then hibernation might be a viable alternative.

Of course, by not writing about these things, (homelessness, for instance) I haven’t affected the situation either. It’s just as bad as it was, if not worse. Recently, the Daily Mirror ran an article about a former driver to Prince Charles and Princess Diana (as she then was) who is now homeless and living on the streets. I “shared” this story on Facebook and, amongst the various comments I received from my “friends” was one complaining that the article in question used “Too much emotional language.”

Too much emotional language. Because, of course, we can’t get emotional about people sleeping under the railway arches. We can’t get emotional about people bedding down on the canal towpath. We can’t get emotional about people being pissed on by drunks as they try and shelter from the cold in a shop doorway in the precinct. We can’t get emotional. We’re British, don’t you know?

Well, let me just say this. I will get emotional about homelessness. I will continue to get emotional about homelessness. I will get emotional for England, if I have to. I will shout. I will scream. I will stamp my foot. Until someone who has the necessary authority, bloody does something about it!

Requisition the second homes of MPs and turn them into homeless shelters. Make the MPs sleep in a sleeping bag on College Green until homelessness is consigned to the dustbin of history, along with witch-burning, wife-selling, hare-coursing, bear-baiting, and fox-hunting. Then, and only then, will I resume my normal, affable, urbane, well-balanced persona.

So, why am I writing this, then, here and now, when I have apparently decided, along with W H Auden, that “poetry makes nothing happen”? Well. To answer that question, you would need to talk to a gentleman called Matthew Cashmore, or Father Matthew, as he is apparently known. If the name seems vaguely familiar, then you might have been watching A Vicar’s Life on the BBC recently. It’s a fascinating series, focusing on the struggles of the Church of England in Herefordshire, which is apparently its most rural diocese. Previously, all I knew about Herefordshire was cider, Hereford cattle, the Mappa Mundi, and the SAS, which is, you will agree, a fairly potent mixture! Anyway, Father Matthew is one of four vicars featured in the series and he is a big, uncompromising character. Speaking as one of nature’s heavyweights myself, I hope that, if he ever reads this, he will not mind me commenting on his physical presence.

The thing is, if you are a priest, this can often be an advantage. In my days in Brighton, I once had the good fortune to know Father Joseph Flanagan, of St. Mary Magdalen’s church, Upper North Street. He was a big man in every sense of the words. Father Elvins, who was his curate at the time, once told me of the group of American tourists who knocked at the door of the Presbytery:

“Say, do you still have that big Irish priest here?”

“Father Flanagan? Er, yes!”

“Great! What time’s he on?”

Father Matthew always wears a cassock. I recall at college we used to have always to wear undergraduate gowns for formal occasions, and at first we thought these would be an encumbrance, until we realised they would be useful as emergency parachutes, shields in food fights, and camouflage after dark. I imagine Father Matthew is more sober and sensible about his cassock, but I commend these hints and wrinkles to him for what they are worth. About £4. 2s. 6d. I would guess.

Anyway, even if he wasn’t wearing a cassock, you would know he was a priest. Especially when you saw him praying with the hungry refugees at the gates of the food depot set up to try and maintain the lost and scattered former inmates of “The Jungle” at Calais, and then giving them his rosary afterwards. That really got me. I would never give away my rosary (green agate, from Ampleforth) but then I thought well, why not? And it was but a short mental step to thinking, well, this bloke thinks he can make a difference. So why not me? They also serve, who only stand and wait. So, here I am again, binding on about refugees and Syria and homelessness, courtesy of being inspired by Father Matthew. I’m sure you can find him out, if you wish to complain to him about him rattling my cage.

What did he teach me, unwittingly? That you have a choice. You can either roll over and give in, or keep fighting. That everybody has their contribution to make, be it never so humble. That the race is not always to the swift. Things I have to admit, I’d forgotten.

That doesn’t mean it’s easy, or simple. Last week saw Ash Wednesday, and also St Valentine’s Day. St Valentine is highly questionable, but does at least give us an opportunity for bashful lovers to declare an interest and, if Geoffrey Chaucer is to be believed, for the birds to choose their mates for the coming year. Ash Wednesday is altogether more serious. So far as I know, people do not send each other cards on Ash Wednesday that say “Roses are red, violets are blue, I’m mortifying my flesh, how about you?” Maybe they should.

Anyway, I’ve decided what I’m giving up for Lent. I’m giving up copping out. Thank you, Father Matthew. I feel like someone who has been suffering from prolonged laryngitis, who has just croaked their first curse in weeks. It’s been a bad winter, though, and not just for me. One of my friends in California lost everything she had in the wildfires, including her poor old cat, Morris. So you would expect me, since I have once more strapped on my armour, taken down the dusty old shield of the Rudds from its hook in the panelled hall (azure, a lion rampant or, a canton of the second, in case you were interested. No, I thought not.) and prepared to justify the ways of God to men, to come up with some reason why this was all going to be OK and work out well. Wouldn't you?

I can’t. As far as suffering in the world is concerned, I’m in exactly the same position as I was last year when I stopped writing this blog. Raymond Chandler, a writer whose motto was “when in doubt, have someone come through the door with a gun in his hand”, put it much better than I can:

"Is God happy with the poisoned cat dying alone in convulsions behind the billboard? Is God happy that life is cruel and that only the fittest survive? The fittest for what? Oh no, far from it. If God were omnipotent and omniscient in any literal sense, he wouldn’t have bothered to make the universe at all. There is no success where there is no possibility of failure, no art without the resistance of the medium. Is it blasphemy to suggest that God has his bad days when nothing goes right, and that God’s days are very, very long?"

Given the school shooting in Florida last week, you could well be forgiven for asking if God was having yet another bad day. I’ve actually seen a “meme” being circulated where a “concerned student” asks God why he didn’t prevent the suffering, and “God” replies “because I am not allowed in schools these days”.

Bollocks. I’m sorry if you choked on your macaroon when I said that, but bollocks. Bollocks, bollocks, bollocks. If God is God, nothing is going to keep it out of school or anywhere else, for that matter. God was there in Florida. God was there in the football coach who lost his life shielding others. Why don’t these numbnuts get it?

Sorry, Emotional language, which will never do. Because “emotional language” means we might actually have to confront the problem. To square up to the proverbial elephant in the room.

Still. We should be celebrating. I’m back, and this time it’s personal. There are some things I can’t change. Poor little Morris, lost in the ashes of the wildfires. But on the other hand, there is that point of return. That moment when everything seems lost, done and dusted, when suddenly... and that’s how I feel right now. Morris will never come back in this world, God bless him. But his little catty soul is in cat heaven, and at this point (emotional language alert) I’d just like to say that if heaven doesn’t allow cats, book me a slot in Hades. And the love and the goodness that surrounded Morris will, like the Phoenix from the ashes, like the Mary Ellen Carter, and indeed, like Jesus, allegedly, rise again.

Epiblog for Baggis Day

It has been a busy couple of weeks in the Holme Valley. Sadly the weather has turned dull and rainy for the last few days which is a tad depressing, considering Midsummer has already been and gone. I hope that this isn’t an indication that we’re heading for one of those summers where the weather transits seamlessly from Spring to Autumn without anyone particularly noticing.

Misty is enjoying the summer, anyway, now that Deb’s term has ended and thus longer and usually more frequent walkies are on offer, often accompanied by Zak (though not Ellie, whose little leggies can’t cope with mountaineering).

Matilda, meanwhile, has been ligging around and occasionally yawning in a Bagpuss fashion at the squirrels when they are being particularly rowdy and knocking over the dish with the peanuts.  Brenda the Badger seems once more to have forsaken us, though we do now have an additional house guest in the form of Deb’s Uncle Phil from Australia. Unlike the badger, though, he doesn’t wander around on the decking in the early hours looking for peanuts. Or if he does, it must be at times when I am asleep.

I have been up and down of late, health-wise. This damn infection in my hand still makes it difficult to hold either a pen or a paintbrush, or to type. Plus, on some days when I feel particularly infected, the world seems to bulge and blare around me, sometimes stuffed with a deadening layer of cotton wool that reduces reality to the background noise which is being drowned out by the drumming of my blood. I do feel it’s slowly getting better, but I wish it would get its skates on.

In the wider world, the weird phony war in parliament goes on. Theresa May finally managed to cobble together an agreement of sorts with the fruitcake fundamentalist terrorist sympathisers of the DUP. And the best bit was that it only cost us, the taxpayers a billion pounds. Just say that a few times. A billion pounds. A thousand million pounds. At a time when nurses are having to use food banks and firefighters need extra part time work to keep going. A billion pounds, just so that Theresa May can cling on a few months longer before the electorate places a well-deserved boot squarely in the arse of her thousand pound trousers.

Just think what they could have done with that billion pounds. They could have mounted 200 bombing raids on Syria. Oh, wait, they’re doing that already. They could – of course – have lifted the public sector pay freeze that has capped the pay of nurses, firefighters and police at 1% per annum, while inflation has been eroding the value of fixed incomes. They didn’t. They just managed, with their new friends in the DUP who have been so successful at administering public money in the management of heating schemes in Northern Ireland, to defeat the Labour motion. And they cheered.

They cheered. Remember that, in days to come. They cheered. Remember it when they come round your house campaigning in the next election. Remember it the next time they’re on the news when there’s been some dreadful terrorist outrage or a massive disaster and as usual the fire brigade the ambulance service and the police have had to pick up the pieces. Remember it when they’re on camera crying crocodile tears and expressing their admiration for the emergency services. They voted to continue to cap the pay of those same emergency services. And then they cheered themselves. They actually bloody cheered.

One of the major reasons why people voted to leave the EU last year was that they believed Boris Johnson’s lie that there would be an extra £350m a week for the NHS. Clearly this is never going to happen. However, it will not be such a problem now that Mrs May has apparently discovered that there IS a magic money tree after all.

Whether or not Arlene Foster of the DUP was a deserving recipient of the first harvest of £1bn from the tree is a moot point. I would rather give it to the NHS. My reasons for this are as follows:

Arlene Foster has never held the hand of a dying patient. Arlene Foster has never had to explain to grieving relatives that there is no brain stem activity and the only option is to turn off the life support. Arlene Foster has never had to catch an hour’s fitful sleep on a makeshift bed in a storeroom during an 18 hour shift. Arlene Foster has never had to argue with a drunk in A & E whose cut ear is dripping blood all over her and the floor. Arlene Foster has never had to wipe the shit off the arse of an incontinent geriatric. Arlene Foster has never had to answer the same question 7 times in an hour from a patient suffering from dementia. Arlene Foster has never had to try and focus on the medication records while dropping off to sleep. Arlene Foster has never had to complete 13 different bits of paperwork before she’s even allowed to go on the ward and treat somebody. Arlene Foster has never been asked, year on year, to “do more with less” for a 1% pay rise. Arlene Foster doesn’t have a boss who is trying to sell off a vital public service to the highest bidder.

Even assuming for a moment that you thought that people whose job it is to confront armed terrorists when your only weapon is a baton, or to plunge head first into a burning building to try and save a victim trapped by fire, or to piece together the shattered bones of a road traffic accident victim while simultaneously making sure that someone’s looking after the relatives weren’t worth a pay rise, there is another quite simple explanation why austerity is useless. It doesn’t work.

At the risk of sounding like Max Bygraves (never a good thing) I want to tell you a little story. Let’s take it out of the realm of politics and the UK and imagine for a moment I am an apple farmer and I owe somebody 1000 apples. I incurred the debt because they originally helped me plant out the orchard, lent me their rotavator, and even threw in some bags of compost. But now, they want their 1000 apples. And, as it happens, through no fault of my own, it’s just rather a bad time at the moment, and my apple farm has been hit by a few unexpected expenses.

I’ve got a choice at this point. In these days when there is denial of the existence of a magic money tree, I can choose, for instance, to be cautious, because I think it will help me to cling on to my farm longer. So I take caution to a fairly extreme level. I cut down half of my apple trees, so I don’t have to buy so much fertiliser. I make a quick buck selling off the apple logs to people with wood burning stoves, but then of course the logs are all gone. I’m producing fewer apples, and I can handle the workload myself, so I give old Jim, who used to help me out, his P45, and carry on alone. I can’t repay the 1000 apples, of course, since I’m growing even fewer than I was when I made that deal. But I give my debtor some apples, to keep him going, and he says that’s fine, he’ll let it ride longer, but in the end he now wants 1500 apples not 1000.  And so it goes, getting worse and worse and more and more unsustainable until one day I have no option but to chop down the remaining trees, pay my debtor what I can, go bust, and start sleeping under the railway arches. Where there was once an orchard is now a wilderness of austerity, brambles and tree stumps.

Or, I could do this, instead. I look around my orchard. Well, I owe 1000 apples. How could I repay that and still carry on growing enough to sell as well. Clearly, I need to produce more apples! I have the room to do it, but what about the cost? I sit down and produce a carefully-costed plan, and take it to the bank, asking to borrow enough to buy some more sapling trees, some more fertiliser, additional crates, and to hire a rotavator to dig up the new area. Everyone says I am barmy! Borrowing yet more money! But somehow I persuade the man to lend me the money. After all, he knows that if I fail, he can always take away my farm.

The new crops of apples start to come through into the system and make a difference. Soon, I am making inroads into the debt I owe and starting to pay back the 1000 apples. Old Jim is delighted with the extra hours and decides to spend some of his increased pay on taking his wife away for the weekend. The hotel they go to for their break therefore gains extra money that they, in turn, can invest in growth.

I’m starting to pay back the bank as well. Jim’s nephew has just left college and is looking for a summer job, so I take him on. He’s a hard worker and soon the apples are flying out of the door. He comes up with new ideas as well – apple juice, apple sauce, apple chutney, artisan cider – all of these are ways of using up apples that aren’t high-grade enough to sell as fruit. We’ve now paid back the 1000 apples, established loads of new retail outlets, and we’re working on launching the cider. We will have paid the bank back by the end of the year. Jim’s nephew is hoping to buy his first car. The local second hand car lot will gain from that additional profit, which they can re-invest for growth, and so on.

The point was, just when it looked most doomy and gloomy, that was just the point NOT to put up the hatches or batten down the shutters and start making people redundant. For apples, read “government tax take”. But don’t take my word for it, read Paul Krugman, Jonathan Portes, or any of the other many, many economists who said from the start that “austerity” was insane, voodoo economics.

Of course, in that second scenario, what you don’t want to do, just when you are on your way back to economic prosperity, is to decide one day on a whim to build a big wall round your farm, tell all the foreign fruit pickers to go home, and find that the countries they all came from take such umbrage at this, that they start turning back your apples at the border! Before you know where you are, you are surrounded by rotting apples and the ones on the trees aren’t worth harvesting. You might as well let them be windfalls. As in the Woody Guthrie song, the oranges rot in the creosote dumps. And as for your ex-workers, all they will call them will be deportees… just like the people who are drowned in the Mediterranean still, on a daily basis, whose names we will never know.

I know I keep coming back to Brexit like the dog that returneth to its vomit, but this week has provided yet another example of the stupidity of the Labour leadership, just at the point where the Tories are reeling on the ropes. There was a Labour amendment which was tabled to insist that the only acceptable form of Brexit was one that continued to allow us to access the single market after. Surprisingly, in view of the fact that it was eminently sensible and made sound economic sense, it was tabled by Chukka Umunna. Even more surprisingly, St Jeremy of the Corbyns sacked three Labour shadow cabinet ministers for voting in favour of it. Even more surprisingly still, both Katie Hopkins and Nigel Farage this week praised Corbyn for his “Hard Brexit” stance.

I can see I am going to have to add another one to my list of questions to which I still have not had any answer. I started the list with “why should poor people have to pay for the mistakes of rich people” in 2008, and it has been revised periodically ever since. But the latest addition is going to have to be “Why isn’t the Labour Party pushing for the softest of soft brexits?”  Someone should tell Jeremy Corbyn that when you are the leader of the Labour party and you are praised in the same week by two of the nastiest hard right commentators in the realm, you are clearly doing something wrong. And that something is that you are the leader of the opposition, but you are not actually doing any opposing.

Meanwhile, the world goes steadily more and more bonkers. It really does seem at times as if I – or indeed, as if we all – have fallen through a worm-hole in space into a weird alternative universe where everything is just slightly out of whack It reminds me of those old black and white episodes of The Twilight Zone from the 1960s.   

I had a long and interesting talk about the Grenfell Tower disaster with an old friend of mine, who has worked in the housing sector for around 40 years. His take on the issue is very illuminating and confirmed my own opinion that whoever is really responsible will almost certainly never be punished because some of them are actually dead. If the terms of the Grenfell enquiry were to be truly and accurately framed, they would involve a savage and damning indictment of social housing policy in the UK since 1979.

He said the root of the issue is management of the properties, coupled with social engineering (sometimes deliberate, sometimes accidental) going back over almost the same four decades that he has spent in the housing industry. When Mrs Thatcher introduced the right to buy it was coupled with a ban on the councils who had sold council houses from re-investing the profits in building more council houses. Also, a disproportionate amount of the good, modern, well-maintained housing stock was sold, leaving local authorities in many cases with just the problem properties and tower blocks.

Plus, whereas previously, council housing may have contained a wider mix of people with differing incomes and abilities in the past, when the aspirational owners were encouraged to buy their home, it had the inevitable result that those left behind in council housing, in the worst properties, were the least aspirational and most disadvantaged tenants. In effect the poorest of the poor where ghettoised, and Thatcher kick-started the process of dividing society and creating the very “underclass” that so many of her supporters deride even today.

Labour could have reversed or at least halted that process. They had from 1997 to 2010 to do something about the situation, and they didn’t. So, naturally, things got worse. If you add into the recipe the mixture of decreased budgets year on year for “proper” maintenance, ie effective and safe maintenance, because of “austerity” since 2010, plus the buck-passing arms-length management techniques of quangos, plus the fact that the people left in the worst social housing are now those with the least influence, so they are ignored (gone are the people capable of exerting pressure because they know someone on the council, or they have a child who might be a solicitor or something) then inevitably, somewhere, an accident is waiting to happen. Mix them together and what do you get, bippity boppity boo…

At times like this I sometimes turn to poetry to try and make sense of something that defies rational explanation and in the case of the Grenfell disaster I seem to have settled on A Refusal To Mourn The Death By Fire of A Child In London by Dylan Thomas. The first time I read this poem I was rather taken aback by what I thought was its brutal ending. But then I was young and stupid. Thomas’s answer to the senseless death of a young girl in the London Blitz seems at first shocking but does it make as much sense to maintain that death is part of a natural process and therefore whatever made the person still continues, even if only as constituent parts. Of course in many ways, explaining a poem is like explaining a joke, it kills it stone dead: so perhaps it’s better to let the words speak for themselves and hope they might bring someone some comfort.

The majesty and burning of the child's death.
I shall not murder
The mankind of her going with a grave truth
Nor blaspheme down the stations of the breath
With any further
Elegy of innocence and youth.

Deep with the first dead lies London's daughter,
Robed in the long friends,
The grains beyond age, the dark veins of her mother,
Secret by the unmourning water
Of the riding Thames.
After the first death, there is no other. 

Grenfell Tower casualties, meanwhile, are being accused of "complaining too much" and apparently are still having rent taken out of their bank accounts in some cases despite being deceased, plus survivors of the disaster are being sanctioned for not turning up at the job centre. To the DWP it’s clearly a pathetic lame excuse that your house burnt down and your family died. It’s only a matter of time before ATOS declare the victims fit for work and stick their ashes in an egg timer.

Still if we grow stale and weary over the state of domestic politics, there is always the glorious spectacle of Trump! At first I thought his wacky, random utterances and his weird “Tweets” were just part of a clever strategy to enrage the left and speak over the heads of everyone to the cast of Deliverance which makes up his core demographic, at least when they are not playing the banjo. But no. In fact, he’s just bonkers. Mad as a box of badgers. There’s no point in satirising him when he undercuts it at every turn by being even further off the bus route than anything the satirists can make up. Please, America, do something about him. All we can do is to take a deep breath and keep repeating the words of Cromwell to the Rump Parliament. Or should that be the Trump parliament?

You have sat too long for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go! And stand not upon the order of your going.

Last Wednesday was the feast of St Erfyl. The date of her death is unknown, and her claim to fame is that she founded the chapel at Llanerfyl in Powys. St Erfyl was supposedly a daughter of the better-known St Padarn. This church is the only dedication to her in Wales. The current church of St Erfyl was rebuilt in 1870 but contains the remains of a shrine dating back to the 15th century The churchyard is circular and contains, amongst others a gravestone which has been dated to the 5th or 6th century and which is inscribed in Latin:

HIC [IN] / TUM(V)LO IAC/IT R[O]STE/ECE FILIA PA/TERNINI / AN(N)IS XIII IN / PA(CE)

  

('In the grave here lies Rhostege daughter of Padarn, 13 years, in peace'). Quite how she goes from Rhostege to Erfyl is a mystery to me. But then Welsh generally is a mystery to me. The Clwyd Powis Archaeological Trust also identified a site of a possible holy well, known as Fynnon Erfyl, just down the hill from the churchyard, although its remains are now apparently difficult to locate on the ground.

Clearly there is no “religious” message that we can glean from the unknown life and unknown death of St Erfyl, not at this great distance from the days of her life. Except, I suppose, that there is the blind devotion which has kept people coming back to the spot for maybe 1500 years to pray, or whatever their equivalent is, and maybe – if there really was a holy well – for even longer than that. “You are here to kneel where prayer has been valid” – as T S Eliot said of Little Gidding.

Given my own medical situation, and the limited outlook it inevitably entails, I often wonder what the archaeologists of the future will make of us, today. Will, for instance, the Grenfell Tower disaster still be remembered in 1500 years’ time. It damn well ought to be – if it was, then maybe for once the crap that gets trotted out at every such juncture, that “lessons will be learned” might actually prove to have been true. Somehow, I doubt it.

What will our shrines be in 1500 years from now – or even 500 years? In a world where the ancient 850 year old Al-Nuri mosque in Mosul can be reduced to rubble and the Taliban can get away with dynamiting ancient Buddhist statues, sometimes I wonder. Yet there does seem to be something in the human psyche which draws us to specific places, even if all that is left there now is a jumble of weathered stones on a grassy, wind-swept moor. The ancient stones on Machrie Moor on the Isle of Arran have stood for thousands of years and no-one knows who put them there and why. People visit them today for different reasons to those of the people who built the circle, yet you would need a soul of iron not to feel… something, when you stand there in their shadow.

The thing is, for me, I suppose, that I cling on to the idea that although my faith (such as it was) has been seriously damaged by all sorts of factors yet it hasn’t been completely extinguished, and there are special places for me where it feels stronger – like being plugged into a re-charger. Is it too fanciful to suppose there are locations where it is possible to feel closer to the spark of the divine inside you? What is it that makes us gravitate to a particular place to commune with the world beyond the word? 

Anyway, as you have probably gathered, I started this blog on 5th July, was overtaken by events, and it’s now 9th July and St Erfyl’s day, bless her, has been and gone.

Today, Sunday, is also Baggis Day, 12 years ago to the day that Russell, a.k.a. Baggis the cat, died. His deeds and doings are legendary and Here Endeth The Epilogue is full of them. Stealing an entire piece of brie off the Christmas dinner table, depositing a live frog from the pond in Debbie’s lap, breaking his leg and then climbing on top of the wardrobe while he was supposed to be recuperating, and last but not least, swallowing a GPO parcel band that had to be dug out of him by the vet at a cost of £127 plus VAT. He has his own shrine, in the form of the mosaic I did of him that marks his resting place in the garden, where eventually he was joined by Nigel, his partner in crime, Dusty and Kitty the ladycats, and even Adam’s hamster, Henry. It’s a peaceful little corner, but, like everything else it will pass, and maybe archaeologists in years to come will find a fragment of his mosaic and mis-date it as Roman. (Although I have to say the Romans were better craftsmen and that was, and will be, my first, last, and only mosaic).

The year is passing. Soon it will be time to pack everything into the camper van and set off for Scotland more in hope than expectation of getting there. Time’s passing, life’s passing, and I find myself increasingly at odds with the world, or to explain how I feel about being, as one of my college tutors once put it (he was talking about Beowulf) a fly-speck on the mirror of eternity.

Dylan Thomas again –

And I am dumb to tell a weather's wind
How time has ticked a heaven round the stars.

Still. It’s looking like a good day, and everyone is at the seaside, apart from me and Matilda. I think it’s time to mix up some paint and put the kettle on.

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.