Epiblog for St Lucy's Day

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley, downhill all the way now to Christmas, with your feet off the pedals. And just to prove it, the weather’s turned dark, cold and wintery, first with Hurricane Bawbag lashing Scotland, and Arran cut off – in fact, all the Western Isles were, as Calmac pulled all its services for the day, and the performance of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves at Lamlash Village Hall was cancelled. Then with snow, hoar frost and ice. Winter is gnashing its teeth with a vengeance.

It’s also been a sad week in the Holme Valley, and here I am, by my fire, on a Sunday teatime, typing the Epiblog I hoped I would never have to write. Tiggy, our beautiful, wonderful old dog, died at 5.15pm on Tuesday 13th December.

This fact, this single, overriding fact, has dominated all our waking, to the extent that the normal sort of knockabout stuff that happens and usually finds its way into these pages, has either not happened, or happened and gone unnoticed.

True, there was the occasion when Debbie was watching some science programme on BBC4 about microbes, and the commentator said they were invisible to the naked eye, prompting Debbie to shout at the TV, “Well, I can see them!” only for me to point out the “X15” in the corner of the screen which indicated a certain amount of technical expertise had been employed by the cameraman in enlarging them; there was the programme we were both watching on church restoration, which featured a guest appearance by Sister Wendy Beckett, and Debbie asked when she was going to get her guitar out and sing; and there was the time when, admiring the chestnut roaster in the hearth, I told Debbie that William Morris recommended having nothing in your house that was neither useful nor beautiful, and she retorted that in that case, I had better start packing my bags.

But humour has been sadly lacking. Even when I had my annual assessment of my needs from the NHS and/or Social Care (all these people tend to merge into one after a while) and they asked me how I was getting on with my dialysis and recovering from the stroke I had two years ago, it barely raised a smile. The best I could manage was a feeble comment that it was actually indeed about two years since I had last had a stroke, but not the sort she was thinking of! Needless to say, they were reading from someone else’s notes. You can see how people go in for an eye operation and end up losing a leg, sometimes.

We’d been watching Tiggy for what the vets call “clinical signs” ever since they told us, back in September when she had the cancerous growth removed from the side of her mouth, that there were probably secondary tumours, too deep inside her to do anything about.

I wrote in the previous Epiblog that we’d had to camp out downstairs a couple of times when she’d been bad, but lately she had been having better days and worse days, and on her better days, you’d hardly have known there was anything wrong with her, other than general feebleness and old age.

She'd had a really bad day on Saturday, but a much better one on Sunday and an OK-ish one on Monday, though she was obviously getting weaker and there was only ever one way it could go. She'd been snoozing on the dog bed and she woke up, and I trundled over and held up her water-bowl so she could lap some water out of it, then she just suddenly keeled over to one side and that was more or less it. I shouted to Debbie, and she came and knelt by her, stroking her and comforting her, but it was all over very quickly – probably in under a minute, though it seemed like hours at the time.

Anyway, we're all in bits here. Granny came round and was in floods of tears. So I had to organise a doggy funeral. Tiggy was - as far as we knew - about fifteen years old, maybe a bit more, which is something like 108 in human years, so she had had a good innings, bless the old sock.

We spent the evening after she’d died playing music, sitting by the fire and talking about her, totting up how many miles she'd done with us, she'd been down to the South Coast, over to East Anglia, up to Alnwick and beyond, she'd been up Blencathra, Cat Bells, Helvellyn (via Striding Edge) Scafell Pike, Scafell, Fleetwith Pike, Coniston Old Man, a few more Wainwrights we've forgotten, Mam Tor in Derbyshire, Goatfell on Arran, she'd been to Tipperary (and that's a long way to go) and she'd been up Snowdon, and to Anglesey, and .... well, you get the idea. She had swum in every major lake in the Lake District, and done the entire towpath of the Lancaster Canal the other year, when Debbie kayaked it. She was once patted on the head by the Duchess of Hamilton, which is more than you can say for me.

And now she is no more, at least the physical shell of her is no more. I like to think that the Tiggyness of Tiggy goes on. We decided to have her cremated by the Pet Crematorium at Rossendale that did Granny’s old dog, Lucy, when she died. And, oddly enough, Tiggy died, of course, on St. Lucy’s day.

I have to say they did a very good, caring and professional job, albeit in a rather strange profession that hadn’t hitherto impinged on my consciousness. We were allowed to put some things in with her, so she went wrapped in her blanket, with an envelope into which we’d put some pictures of her we’d printed out, some of her favourite dog treats, some sprigs of dried heather from Arran, and the Arran Tide Tables to remind her of all the times that she and I had sat in the camper, snoozing, waiting for Debbie to come back to shore.

We brought her ashes back home on Friday, in their little casket, and we’re going to make a special place for her in the bookcase in the kitchen, so she will always be with us and always at the warm heart of the house, hearth and home.

Yes, it will be an enormous void. It is, already, an enormous void. No question about it. And yes, we have talked about getting another dog, to get me out of the house and to keep me company, even if it's only trundling up the road to the post box. But no, another dog will be a different dog, no-one could ever be Tiggy, and she'll be a hard act to follow.

It's far too soon to say whether we will or not. There are also practical factors to consider. But at the same time, I guess there might be some poor abandoned mutt out there, scared, frightened, maybe turned out of doors over Christmas, that will eventually find its way to an animal shelter and thence to us. That was the route Tiggy arrived by, and she did OK, in the end, as it turns out. When the pupil is ready, the teacher appears, so the Zen saying goes, and maybe when the owners are ready, the dog appears.

But for the moment I am just going to get stuck into all of the things I should have done last week, and didn't, and try to remember the good times. We've still got little Kits to take care of, who has been wandering round and yowling as if she’s looking for Tiggy, and we'll still be dogsitting Freddie and Zak on a fairly regular basis, in fact we'd already arranged to look after them over Christmas, as Deb's Mum is going away, so the house won't be completely empty.

I could go on, to write a religious aspect to this Epiblog, and try and draw out some lessons about why Tiggy had to die, when there are evil bastards and murderers still walking the earth drawing breath, but to be honest, I am too tired, too raw, and too drained. And in any case, something like this does give your faith a severe knock. The best you can say is that it’s God’s will, and that sometimes, God’s will is completely bloody incomprehensible. I tried every prayer I knew, to anyone who’d listen, in the days leading up to her death, praying for spontaneous remission. Somehow, I thought that if she could make it to the Solstice on Wednesday, then we might have her for another six months. But her time had come, and that’s that.

Anyway, Tig, you were always a good dog, a loving accomplice to Debbie in her role of pack leader, Tomboy, and chum to the meek, and always willing; and if Debbie had jumped off a cliff and cried "Come on, Tig", you would have followed unquestioningly. You'll leave a massive hole in our miserable existence.

As it says in the song:

“You filled all my days, held the night at bay, dearest companion”

Bestest Doggie All World. Go Sleepies.

Epiblog for St Roch

It has been a busy couple of weeks in the Holme Valley. Life goes on. We’re all still here. Just – but more of that later. Last Thursday, I had a visitor, and last Saturday, another! My social life, speaking as a parcel, is looking up no end.

Yes, a parcel I remain, sadly, as the saga of the Ramp (now dignified by an initial capital letter) has ground to an unhappy close, with Kirklees Council deciding, after weeks of filling in forms and supplying proofs of destitution, that we apparently don’t qualify for the grant after all, so even our “initial contribution” of £1956.54 was wrong. Or something. I have given up with these people. The good news is, that because I have a “degenerative condition” I can apply again at some point in the future, when I have got worse!

Given that the application form this time around was 28 pages long and contained questions such as “Are you now or were you ever a prisoner of the Japanese?”, I would rather hack my own toes off with a rusty knife and serve them up on toast to next door’s cat than give those inept, miserable bastards the satisfaction of screwing up my life by taking up vast acres of time, raising my hopes, then dashing them again, as they have done twice now. If they really want to make a difference to the “Streetscene” as it says on their letterhead, perhaps they could go outside and fill in a few potholes.

Talking of next door’s cat, I am happy to report that Spidey, like the poor, is also with us, yea, even to the end of time, it would seem, as he blithely uses the cat flap and comes and goes as he pleases now, quite regardless of the presence of a large hairy Yorkshireman sitting up in bed and watching him. I suppose the next stage will be the said large hairy Yorkshireman discovering that Spidey is actually sharing the said bed with him, if it gets any colder.

But I digress. Visitors. My first honoured guest was the Vicar, for tea, on Thursday. Martin, as we shall call him, for that is his name, has been promoted to look after two parishes round here, and his church is just up the road, but by a strange quirk of ecclesiastical cartography, we actually belong in the parish of Golcar, which is miles away. Anyway, that didn’t stop Martin making a welcome visit on Thursday, for tea, and bringing his little 10-week old puppy, Seth, who promptly went round and polished off all the dog food he could find in all the pet bowls around the kitchen. He’s a growing boy, little Seth, and unbearably cute, as well.

We roasted the chestnuts, which Debbie had got at the market last weekend, on the fire, and put the world to rights, aided by Granny, who dropped in on her way across the valley. I was delighted to be able to achieve one of my ambitions and use one of my all-time “must say” phrases, for real. “More tea, Vicar?” That only leaves “Follow that car”, “Not so fast, Dhakarumbha!” and “Take that, you bastard!” and my life will be complete.

Martin told us of his translation from the life of a hospital chaplain, bright-lit, ordered, self contained, to his work now, looking after two large parishes, semi-rural in nature, with just him and Seth rattling round in a huge, gloomy 1930s vicarage. It all sounded a bit Jane Austen to me, and I told him so. He replied, rather startlingly, that he had considered the issue and had agreed to give short term shelter to a family of Zimbabwean asylum-seekers, who were otherwise homeless.

The fact that he is putting up an otherwise homeless family of Zimbabwean Asylum Seekers in his otherwise huge and echoing Father-Ted style vicarage, makes him a top banana, in my book. It’s also an incredibly Christian act of charity. In contrast, I must say, to the attitude of some members of the Church of England to the “Occupy” protestors, which I have had cause to complain about, latterly the Dean of Sheffield, who seems determined in his opposition to their attempts to create a fairer, more just society, a situation from which we must draw our own conclusions.

Meanwhile, of course, Kitty continues her own “Occupy” protest, occupying the bin bag full of shredded financial papers (donated by Granny for the purposes of lighting the fire) in the corner of the hearth. Actually, I think she would protest more if you tried to take the bin-bag away, which is why it remains in situ.

I discovered - as well - there's actually a local Asylum Seekers' support group, which I didn't know about, but that they've also been contact with one guy, an Eritrean who was also homeless. He's likely to go off the radar because his living arrangements fell through.

Now I don't know about you, and I don't know about him, his rights and wrongs, I suspect he's a mixture, like the rest of us - other than that he's a human being, like us, two arms, two legs, shaves in the morning, some mother's son, that sort of stuff. A long way from home, and not a friend in the world, right now. Yeah, according to the hard of heart, those who had a compassion bypass at birth, he should go back whence he came, yadda yadda.

But it looks pretty dark out there right now, outside, and it's cold tonight, even here, inside my kitchen, writing this, sitting next to the stove, and the drumming on the conservatory roof tells me it's raining as well, and I just want to know, all you people who go on about this sort of stuff, are you happy with him being out there, alone, in that? Irrespective of his rights and wrongs, just tonight, don't you think there might just be a better way to treat a fellow human being? You may think he shouldn't have come here, and he deserves all he gets, but could you really harden your heart to that extent?

And if, like me, you aren't happy with it, maybe we should put pen to paper, maybe we should put finger to keyboard, hand to plough, foot to accelerator, pen to chequebook, whatever, tomorrow, and start the long tedious process of doing something about it, and finding him, and bringing him in somewhere warm?

The truth is, despite government-inspired, divide and rule propaganda to the contrary, that asylum seekers are not entitled to cash help from the government and they are not able to claim benefits. However, while we take forever to sort out their applications (which is not the fault of the seeker) they have the right to be able to survive and live directly on a hand to mouth existence for the very basics they need to survive.

Despite what is reported in papers such as the Sun and the Daily Mail, taxpayers do not fund this directly, it comes from an EU fund that supports asylum seekers/refugees who go to any EU state. People living in limbo like this do not have a quality of life, as they are not allowed to work or do anything to improve their situations, and of course they have the Damoclean Sword of deportation always hanging over their heads, often to somewhere dangerous to which they have actually no connection.

Speaking of quality of life, my second visitor of the week was Owen, from South Wales. He of the free stairlift. He was appalled to hear of the council decision and he is going to come and build me a ramp, and fix the door which is hanging off its hinges, and chip back the 5mm lip of concrete with a chisel, so, after this weekend, I will be able once more to exit and enter my own house of my own free will, without being carted in and out like a sack of spuds. It won’t exactly conform to building regulations, but do you know what, Kirklees Council, if you object to that, then you can stick it up your arse, second shelf! It will be a year come 7th December, that I have been a virtual prisoner in my own home.

This will still leave me without a disabled-friendly downstairs bathroom and loo, but Owen seems to think he can sort out something at the foot of the stairs, a sort of bench-seat to allow me to transfer on to the stairlift, then I will once more be able to go upstairs, if it works, and sleep in the same bed as my wife, (yes, and my dog!) for the first time in 18 months.

Except that it may be too late to sleep with my dog on the bed, because for a couple of nights at the weekend, we all had to camp out down here, in the kitchen/conservatory, with Tiggy on a blanket and panting for her life, because she took a sudden turn for the worse. She is fifteen, going on sixteen (with apologies to the King of Siam) and when she had that cancerous growth removed from her lip at the start of September, the vet advised us then that there may be secondary tumours, and to watch out for “clinical signs”.

One such clinical sign was on Saturday, when she keeled over on her way back from her water bowl and lay on her side in obvious distress. We already had some Rimadyl from the vet for her, and we managed to get some of that down her, plus some Furosemide, and she calmed down, while Debbie knelt by her side, stroking her gently and soothing her by saying anything that came into her head. Eventually, we got her to lie on her dog bed, and on Saturday night and Sunday night, with an emergency trip to the vet surgery to pick up some steroids and anti-biotics in between, we all bedded down in here like Anglo-Saxons in the mead hall, me sitting up in my chair all night and Debbie with the duvet, pillows and sleeping bag.

Given that we already had every form of conventional veterinary medicine on our side, I started looking on the internet for “prayers for sick dogs” and discovered, via the magic of Google, that dogs have their own patron Saint, St. Roch. Apparently he was cast out for curing people of the plague by making the sign of the cross over them, and went and built himself a hut of leaves and branches in the forest, where he would have perished had not a spring of fresh water suddenly welled up at the site, and one of the hunting dogs of a local nobleman found him and started feeding him by bringing him bread rolls.

So, in addition to praying to Big G himself for Tiggy to recover, I prayed to Padre Pio, St Jude, and St Roch. I am not choosy, any Saint will do in a crisis, and at a push I’ll even make do with one of those Egyptians that looks a bit poochy from the neck up, and walks sideways.

By Sunday night, we’d more or less said our goodbyes to Tiggy, and I was remembering all the many miles we’d travelled together, how she’d been to Ireland, and up Scafell, and Snowdon, how she’d been up Goatfell on Arran and swum in nearly every lake in the Lake District, how she’d plodded the entire towpath of the Lancaster Canal when Debbie kayaked it the other year. She’s been part of our lives for fifteen years, and her going will leave an immense and unbridgeable gap in our lives. There will never be another dog like her, and we’ll always remember her.

Desperate, on Sunday night, wondering whether to call in the vet, we rang Juanita at her animal sanctuary for help, and she sympathised too, because Oliver, her 20-year-old dog, with whom Tiggy shared a snooze under the table during our memorable St Swithun’s Day visit, had finally died, back in September. Debbie made me promise not to blub when I phoned Juanita, then made the mistake of playing “Auld Lang Syne” by the Tannahill Weavers just before I made the call, with the result that I “roared like a bairn”, the whole time. Juanita’s advice was, as always, sound, and helpful. We had two choices, either let nature take its course or call the vet in, and in effect those may become one choice, when it comes to the time to finally let her go.

Tiggy, of course, had other ideas, and promptly confounded us by not dying. As I speak, pausing to touch wood and offer up yet another hasty orison in the general direction of St Roch, she has responded well to the new medication and is back to how she was before she had her “episode”. We, however, have aged about 50 years apiece, and are totally drained, but at least each remaining day we have her is a blessing, and there’s no telling, when you think about it, that any of us will be here this time tomorrow.

Conventional depictions of St Roch, I remarked, also show him with a wound on the thigh in more or less the same place where, I noticed (on finally going to bed for the first time in 48 hours) I currently have a wound on my thigh, from pouring boiling water on it when I was trying to fill up the hot water bottle, which is a touch too near stigmata for comfort, and at least spooked me!

It’s not been a good news fortnight then, and I was hoping that the weather would at least get better (it didn’t) or that something would happen in the world at large to lift my gloom – any light at the end of the tunnel?

So, finally, today, to end a week of gloom, we had the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s formal statement on how we are doing. Well, it was all supposed to be worth it, wasn't it, this wrongheaded, doctrinaire, primrose path to disaster, it was all going to come right because the magic economy fairy was going to sprinkle trickledown dust on the private sector and it would magically burgeon, creating health, wealth and happiness, and we would all be so “ankle-deep in gold dust” that throwing some of it to the grateful urchins and charities who would be doing the work which the government had washed its hands of would be funded to the max, and stuffed to the gills with smiling big society volunteers, who would make Hare Krishna “chuggers” look like manic depressives.

Yeah right. It was all supposed to be worth it. If it's not hurting, it's not working, and we're all in this together. So. let's have a look, then. Has all that grief and pain of the last 18 months been worth it? Have all the redundancies been worth it? What about the people made homeless? That worth it? What about all the people taking their pets to the animal sanctuary - or worse, turning them out of doors, because they can't afford to keep them any more? What that worth it? What about Mark and Helen Mullins? Worth it? Was it worth all the pain and suffering George Osborne, David Cameron and their lickspittles have inflicted on us?

Do we have a rosy, glowing economy, with a bright future of sunlit private sector vistas and happy green uplands where finches and fairies skim between the trees? Has it worked? Or - if not yet, might it work very soon, if we could just cling on with the last vestiges of our fingernails?

No. It hasn't.

and

No, it won't.

And the worst thing is, not only do I know this, and knew all along it would never work, but Osborne and his acolytes know it too: because you can't artificially divide the economy into public and private, four legs good, two legs bad, however much you put your propaganda machine into overdrive and set everybody at each other's throats with divisive, demonising divide and rule tactics. It's the economy, stupid, as William Jefferson Clintstone once memorably observed, and it all depends on each other.

And despite that, they've chosen to wreck the economy. And wreck people's lives, futures and prospects along with it. Seventy years ago, they would have been shot for treason. How times change.

If I start to think about the dismal state the country is in for long, a red mist starts to descend, sometimes, and if I then go on to link it to my own situation, it is often, sadly, followed by a black mist. I haven’t really written before about the black mist, because I think writing about it gives it strength, and gives it a claim on you. Ideally, I would choose not to name my demons, in case I become attached to them, or vice versa. The black mist doesn’t have a name, though occasionally, through the black mist, you can hear forlorn voices sobbing, and crying “Nevermore!”

Nevermore the trip to the Lake District with Tig snoozing in the back of the car and the kayak sitting on its hydraglide on the roof, Deb snoozing in the passenger seat and Ewan MacColl warbling “The Manchester Rambler” on the CD player. Nevermore being able to walk from one room to the next. Nevermore the sunshine and happiness. Nevermore the sitting by Derwentwater and painting, nevermore the financial security, nevermore the self-worth of being able to provide for yourself and others, nevermore your friends, nevermore your independence, nevermore your usefulness. Once Tiggy really has gone, and it can only be a matter of time, nevermore, nevermore, nevermore. A few more years of this struggle and then - ?

And at times like this, when the black mist is at its worst, I feel like getting all of my tablets, and all of Tiggy’s tablets, and every tablet in the damn house and washing them down my neck with a bottle of whisky. There is no doubt in my mind at all that Debbie would be better off if I was dead, provided the insurance policy pays out on suicides. Her financial woes would be over, and she is still young enough to find someone else to love and take care of her.

You could say it is faith that has stopped me. So far, at any rate. Faith, and a lack of whisky. Faith that things will get better, and that there is a lesson from little Seth, that old dogs go, and eventually young dogs come along to take their place and the world turns, and whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should. You could say it is sheer stubborn-ness: why should I be the one who gives in, when the guilty, the people responsible for this mess, from God downwards, to the “colleagues” who so kindly organised my redundancy, to the idiots in government who are trashing the economy, go unpunished? You could say it is my desire to prove everyone else wrong, that I was right all along. You could say that while Tig still needs me, while Kitty still needs feeding, and while there’s still a few wrongs to be righted, I had better keep going.

Personally, I honestly do not know. But for the moment, the black mist seems to have receded.

Epiblog for Remembrance Sunday

There are certain stories which come around at certain times of the year and obsess the media for a few days, sometimes even causing an outbreak of “spats” on message boards across the face of the internet. The appearance of the first charity Christmas card catalogue, the annual (and shameful) culling of seals by Canada, the Boxing Day hunt meetings, even the first cuckoo. So it is with poppy day.
I don’t actually recall poppy day being such a big deal when I was at school – the tray of poppies came around, you put your donation in the tin, you bought a poppy and you wore it. These days, under the forensic glare of the media, it certainly is a big deal. You can’t even turn on your TV without finding programmes that are normally miles away from anything military suddenly morphing into “Remembrance Day Specials”, and wearing a poppy – or worse, not wearing one – has become a political act, by which you can be judged, irrespective of any other evidence either for or against! Even TV newsreaders such as Jon Snow have been dragged into the controversy.

This year, there have been particularly sparky exchanges on both sides, because of stories about FIFA not letting the England football team wear poppies on their shirts during the friendly match against Spain on Remembrance Day weekend, and because of our old friend Anjem Choudhary and his merry band of useful idiots wanting to burn poppies in the streets near the Albert Hall on the day itself.

FIFA’s excuse is that if they allow one nation to bear “national symbols” on their shirt, then all nations will wish to do so. In effect, they sort of have a point – we would soon be up in arms if the German football side wanted to put swastikas on their shirts – even if it was done in memory of people who died in Germany resisting the Nazis! FIFA, however, is a totally discredited body led by a totally discredited windbag. Everybody knows that FIFA is, in many respects, very like the EU – the English are the only people who actually obey the rules, and as a result, they are usually the only ones who get the shitty end of the stick. I would have a lot more respect for FIFA’s rules if their sudden discovery of a rule book extended to them opening it and reading the page about not trying to bribe people in distant parts with jiffy bags of the local currency handed over clandestinely in car parks. However, it seems that their rules only work selectively, on days when Sepp Blatter is actually in the office.

The football imbroglio has been solved by a typical British compromise, which allows the team to wear the poppies on their armbands instead of their shirts. This may solve the immediate problem, but long term, international football needs a cleaning of the stables at a much more fundamental level. Perhaps Prince William and David Cameron could keep up their pressure on Sepp Blatter over other, dare I say, more important issues around FIFA, although I suspect that, in Cameron’s case, as usual, he saw a bandwagon rolling by, and couldn’t resist the temptation to hop on!

The actions of “Muslims Against Crusades” (membership, approx. 12), are of course more problematic. Theresa May has now banned them, as I speak, which has achieved the following results – instead of being justly, and justifiably, ignored, they are now all over the news; they will pop up again next month under a different name; they have dissolved as an organisation, which doesn’t stop them burning poppies as individuals on 11 November; and of course she has not only fanned the considerable inferno of Mr Choudhary’s own self-importance, but also given the approving nod, once again, in a dog-whistle, subliminal message sort of way, to all the white van men, the BNP and EDL supporters and Daily Mail/Sun readers who think that anyone who is a bit brown is automatically an enemy of the state and should be deported, irrespective of whether they are British or not. The people who now look questioningly at you if you don’t wear a poppy

Of course, what these people neglect is that actually, in both World Wars, many people of many faiths fought for Britain, and – for instance - Khudadad Khan, the first soldier in the British Indian Army to win the V. C., in 1914, was … a Muslim. But, sadly, this is unknown territory to the many, many people who now seem to view wearing a poppy as being equal to “being patriotic” and “supporting our troops”. And with that, of course, comes the baggage of tacitly supporting the likes of the EDL, thinking there are too many immigrants, they are all after our jobs, all Muslims are fundamentalist terrorists and all the rest of the shit that goes with it. Shit which I utterly reject.

Which brings me back to my own reasons for wearing a poppy. Because I like to pick and choose my wars, you see; I’m funny like that. The First World War was a tragic and blunderful episode that wasted lives and left a generation blighted. I can empathise with wanting to remember that needless, heartless sacrifice, and wanting to ensure it would never happen again. And I would wear my poppy in memory of my great-uncle, Harry Fenwick, of the RFA, gassed at Ypres in 1917, and Debbie’s great-grandad, William Evans of the Suffolk Regiment, died of wounds in 1915. I can certainly see the point of commemorating the struggle against Fascism, 1939-45, and the sacrifice, again, of the fallen in that massive conflict, such as my Mother-in-Law’s distant relative James Ross, RAF, whose Hawker Hurricane plunged into the Irish Sea, sadly with him still inside it, one January day in 1942.

But, and here I am going to surprise you, like Anjem Choudhary, I am against the war in Afghanistan. For completely different reasons, of course. He sees it as part of a global war on Islam, which is to be countered by introducing Sharia Law and re-establishing the Caliphate (!) I am against the conflict in Afghanistan because I think it is now a waste of time, we have already telegraphed to the Taleban, for God’s sake, that we’re giving up in a couple of years, the place is beyond redemption, sadly, the puppet government established by the US is hopelessly inept and corrupt, and all that our troops are doing now is being professional targets, and coming home in body bags.

This doesn’t mean I don’t feel sorry when one of them is killed, or sympathetic to their families for their sacrifice and loss. But I think it is perfectly possible to respect and honour, even, the professionalism of our armed forces out there, making the best of things with poor equipment and shortages, with little or no help from our European “allies”, without tacitly approving the bungling adventurism of the politicians that put them in harm’s way. And if they are injured, then the Government should make damn well sure they are looked after – and well looked after – for the rest of their lives, not leave it up to some charity set up by a tabloid newspaper with questionable morals and motives which gets them off the hook. We didn’t need “help for heroes”, we’ve already got a Government to do that sort of thing, and failing them, the British Legion. But of course the Sun, and the tendency it both fosters and represents, has commandeered the “Help for Heroes” agenda in the same way as the EDL has commandeered the cross of St George, and would do to the poppy, if allowed.

So, in answer to those who would castigate me for picking and choosing what wars I support, and for having my own reasons for wearing the poppy, I can only remind you that in the years 1939-45, people fought and died for the right to choose which government and which policies you support, and for the free speech to debate it, and for the right to wear or not wear a poppy without being coerced either way, for your own reasons. And if we lose that, if we forget it, and forget – for instance - that Muslims have won VCs as well, if we continue in some Gadarene rush towards an even more xenophobic and bigoted nation, using the poppy as a symbol, for all the wrong reasons, allowing it to be hijacked in the same way the St George’s flag has been hijacked, if we forget our history, if we forget the enormous and painful sacrifices of the struggle against Fascism, we may just be condemned to repeat it.

Lest we forget.

A DISTANT PERSPECTIVE OF TOTTENHAM FROM ST. PAUL'S

I started writing this while on holiday in August, on the Isle of Arran. The Isle of Arran is a very long way from Tottenham. In fact, it is a very long way from anywhere, but especially, culturally, geographically, and socially, from those parts of London and other cities across the UK where similar disturbances occurred, Birmingham, Wolverhampton, Salford, Liverpool, and Nottingham.

When I first heard about it, my reaction was flippant – no sooner do we leave the country, than rioting breaks out! And indeed, throughout the whole episode, we only heard what the BBC saw fit to tell us. Nevertheless, it is often the case that “distance lends enchantment to the view” and I believe it is possible, even at that distance (geographical) then, and at this distance (in time) now, to come to some conclusions about why these riots happened.

The first, and most obvious, answer to that question is that there was an incident which seemed to have involved the police and a black man with possibly an illegal firearm, in a taxi. This ended with the man being shot dead, in circumstances which were far from clear and which are now the subject of an official inquiry. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the episode, which this enquiry will eventually uncover, we must never forget that police firearms officers often only have a fraction of a second to make a life or death decision, in real-time, with no slow-motion replays, no “hawkeye”, and on those decisions may depend not only their own lives, but those of their colleagues and the general public.

Sadly, the key word that people seem to have taken and remembered from that episode, is “black”. It shouldn’t be the case, and of course there are always people who will argue that black is white and white is black, and vice versa. But the fact remains that the spark of the original demonstration was a perceived injustice to the black community by the police, set in the context of a history (real and perceived) of such injustices.

Following on from that, though, the spread of the riots is symptomatic of a wider and more political agenda than just the death of one man. I say “wider”, but I guess the word I really mean is “deeper”. The people in these depressed areas (we should note at the outset the coincidence of the areas of rioting with areas of deep economic deprivation, lack of prospects, and low expectations) would have seen the killing of a black man as in some sense a symbol of the oppression of all black men, whether that oppression was legal, political, economic, or all of these. Whether or not you think they were correct in this is sort of beside the point. The point is, they believed it, and it was enough to spark off their anger into a riot.

What was obvious to me, even at a distance, was that the Government has quite clearly either misjudged, misunderstood, or deliberately, completely and wilfully ignored the seething anger in these areas (and in other areas, too, but we will come to that) People were already very angry with the political process, and with politicians generally, from the time when it became clear, from revelations in The Daily Telegraph, that the majority of the political class were on the take, with their snouts deep in the trough. Subsequent media revelations about how the current ruling class were hugger-mugger with Rupert Murdoch, and the culture of rule at one remove by the editors of tabloid newspapers and their barons that successive Governments have been too timid to tame, have done nothing to restore faith in politics and democracy as a way of getting things done – quite the reverse, in fact.

Into this volatile brew you need to add the inconclusive election result. I have said this before, and I’ll say it again, but both major parties and the Liberal Democrats fought vacuous negative campaigns in 2010, aimed more at media presentation (especially Nick Clegg) and damage limitation and knocking the opposition than at imparting a vision of our future that we could vote for. Thus, in the circumstances, it was unsurprising that those who could be bothered to turn out and vote were unable to demonstrate conclusively which set of oafs they loathed the more. This, of course, paved the way for the “Coalition”, with no mandate, which has, despite its lack of public approval, proceeded to implement savage, radical and far-reaching policies which were in no-one’s manifesto, have hit the people in these economically depressed areas hardest, and of course have made people yet more disillusioned with the democratic process.

Add to this the almost totally supine uselessness of Her Majesty’s official opposition and you get to the stage where it is, in many ways, unremarkable that people are taking to the streets. Now I know I have said, on this blog, before, that what it would take is a few bricks through the windows of 10 Downing Street to wake up the Government, but I was not being entirely serious. I certainly never imagined, when I wrote in my short story The Last of England, in October 2010, about a vision of a post-crash, dysfunctional, failed-state England, that it would all start to come true so soon.

The danger with “direct action” of course, is that what starts out as a sensible, peaceful demonstration inevitably attracts all sorts of unsavoury hangers-on, the likes of “Black Block”, who think that the way to smash capitalism is to start with the bus shelters, not to mention the undercover police and MI5 agents provocateur whose purpose probably is similar, though with official approval. Either way, the event degenerates into a violent shambles and this makes it easy for the Government to smear the organisers and rubbish the whole premise of it, off the back of the attendant violence. Conveniently forgetting that the Government probably caused it in the first place, if by “caused” you mean “creating a situation where people feel that direct actions and demos are the only way to make their voice heard.”

This Government, and its lapdogs in the Liberal Democrats, must know the effect their policies are having. People see the poorest and the most disadvantaged in our society being forced to pay for the mistakes of a rich elite of bankers, bond salesmen, and arbitrageurs, who, together with politicians, media moguls and celebrities, are carrying on exactly as before and either avoiding paying taxes and/or awarding themselves 49% pay increases. They may well continue to pump out garbage about “The Big Society” and “we’re all in this together” but, in reality, their policies have the effect of divide and rule, creating a nasty, bigoted, xenophobic racist society that despises the weak, the poor, the homeless, the unemployed and the disabled.

So when Mr Cameron stood up on his hind legs and said “there is something sick in our society”, I am afraid it is he who is the disease, not the cure, his Government which is the mortician and not the doctor. If he is a doctor, he is Doctor Death, Doctor Shipman.

And I repeat, the Government knows this. They are not stupid. They have been deliberately targeting the effects of the cuts on poorer areas, because their ideology says “small government good”, and they believe (wrongly in economic terms alone, never mind any moral consideration) that cuts should be inflicted on poor people, and that poor people should pay for the errors of the rich.

Cameron is also right in another, unintended sense, one he would never admit to of course; there is something sick in society, and that “something” is the materialism, the consumerism, call it what you like. But if you take people who have sod all in terms of possessions and sod all in life to look forward to, and you blast them relentlessly with the message that your worth to society is how much stuff you own and how much money you have and how famous you are, and you dangle in front of their eyes the vision of the latest trainers, the latest mobile, the latest high-spec computer equipment, and expensive booze, and then you say “not for the likes of you, though.”

In olden times, people would have saved up for such things, developed a work ethic, got a job, and saved up for them. In areas where they are lacking in work, ethics and savings, it is hardly surprising that people take advantage of a bit of civil unrest to go shopping in their local Tescos with a house-brick. Understanding why it might happen doesn’t amount to condoning it, of course. Ironically, in these areas, as well, often the only people who do manage to develop a work ethic are the Muslim shopkeepers, members of another cadre of society which has also been the target of government-sponsored bigot training.

And the government want consumerism of course – they want people to go out and spend money that they haven’t got on tat they can’t afford and don’t really need, to get them out of the economic shitstorm that has blighted the world since capitalism first started to come unstuck in 2008. Their economic “recovery” depends on it, because that will start the next cycle of “boom” and save their miserable hides at the ballot box. Or so they think. So, creating a desire without the corresponding means of people being able to fulfil it is always a dangerous game. If you put a system under undue pressure, it will always go bang at the weakest point, which is what happened when the various looters and hangers on decided to employ the precepts of capitalism without the tedious necessity of any money changing hands!

So, on the subject of the riots, what I think happened is what Malcolm Gladwell would have called a “Tipping Point”. The tipping point is when a number of factors come together at a critical point and together act upon each other to bring about momentous change. So we have the inept or stretched policing; the people who feel totally excluded with the political process, alienated from politics and politicians; the rich and the famous taking the piss and hoping the rest of us won’t notice them avoiding their taxes, banking their bonuses, and fiddling their expenses; the government bringing in cuts and radical “reforms” no-one ever voted for; and you add a single flashpoint such as a black man being shot by police in questionable circumstances, and it all goes bang.

Of course, it suits the Government to present the riots as criminality, pure and simple. There is no doubt that there was an element of opportunist criminality and maybe even more organised looting, perhaps linked to drugs. Young kids looting the local off licence “just because we can”. The looters have realised that policing is only ever policing by consent, and if they take away that consent, there is nothing that the police can do about it, despite Cameron talking tough and mentioning water cannon, short of turning the whole country into a vast armed camp (which may well be government policy anyway!) if the rule of law breaks down.

The other thing the Government hopes to do as well, alongside draconian and inappropriate sentences, which will doubtless be appealed and overturned, is to try and crack down on the use of social media and the internet to organise anti-government activity. So the likes of UK Uncut will see the impact of this on their peaceful protests against tax avoidance and government cuts, because as far as the likes of Cameron are concerned, anti-government activity is anti-social activity. So the Government will seek to wring what advantage they can from this damp sponge of a response, because there is no opportunity that this Government will pass up to curtail our individual liberties.

One of the more disturbing aspects of the Government response has been the depressing numbers of petitions on that potential bigots’ charter, the e-petitions web site, demanding that rioters be evicted, have their benefits cut, etc etc ad nauseam.

I had grave reservations about this site from the start (although I did actually use it for an attempted petition myself, about Rooftree and social housing, because for all its flaws, anything is better than nothing in the fight against homelessness) and I believe the Government has made a grave mistake in promising to consider having a debate in the House of Commons for any petition that gains 100,000 signatures, notwithstanding what I said earlier about the lack of involvement in the political process. The way to political involvement is to have policies that people can vote for and to enact them for the good of all, not to have some sort of x-factor contest where each week we get to vote off our least favourite policy. The flawed nature of the site was already coming home to haunt the Government in the form of many duplicate petitions on the site calling for the return of the death penalty.

When I got back from Arran, and originally set out to type up these notes, there was a petition on the site which was, already then up to 78,000 signatures, urging the Government to cut the benefits of those who rioted. (Or who were convicted of rioting). Clearly the bigots have not thought this through. If you cut their benefits, and/or evict them, as some have suggested, if they live in social housing, you condemn them to live by stealing or begging on the streets, and turn an occasional aberration into a perpetual occupation, and inflict a double punishment to boot. Nobody has (or should have) any problem with people convicted, by due process, of unlawful activity, receiving a just and commensurate sentence in accordance with the law. Anything on top of that is spite and retribution.
Also, people on benefits often have dependents; are they, too, to be punished because they didn’t stop their “breadwinner” from getting involved with the rioting? Are we going to evict a whole family because one of their children got caught up in the mob? And finally, and most sinister of all, if you stop someone’s benefits because they took part in anti-social activity, what’s next? Stopping someone’s benefits or evicting them if they protest legitimately against Government policy, a policy that might have been responsible for them ending up on benefits in the first place.

So, Mr Cameron, if you really want to know what it is that’s sick in our society, you need to be looking at more inclusion, less division, fewer cuts and more help in the depressed areas, stop and reverse the policies that nobody voted for – or go back to the country with a manifesto this time that actually says what it is you are going to do; don’t peddle the message that materialism is the be-all and end-all of life, and resist the temptation to use justice as Judge Dredd style revenge and retribution. No disproportionate sentencing, no gimmicks such as bringing in Bill Brattan, and pause to consider for a moment why people should take moral lectures from a party that was in cahoots with phone hackers, drug pushers, and dominatrixes.
But of course he won’t. Even though things won’t get better on their own. Certainly not with this lot in power. It’s not Britain that is broken it’s capitalism. Or at least the sort of capitalism that the Tories believe in. You can argue all you like about whether the Tories are cutting too fast, too soon (and all of the evidence, including that from the excellent blogger Sue Marsh, in her Diary of a Benefit Scrounger, seems to indicate they are) but nevertheless, Labour’s avowed policy is now little different.

Sue Marsh says:

2008 - Credit Crunch. Not just here, but all around the developed world. Starting with the sub-prime mortgage collapse in the US, we all know just how horribly our banks crashed and that America, the EU states and others were all just as badly affected as we were. Our dependence on the financial markets left us more exposed than some, but by the end of 2009, though a mixture of stimulus and all-time-low interest rates, the UK posted the following growth figures :

In the 3 months to February 2010 the U.K. economy grew by 0.4%.
In Q2 of 2010 the economy grew by 1.2% the fastest rate of growth in 9 years.
In Q3 of 2010 figures released showed the UK economy grew by 0.8%; this was the fastest Q3 growth in 10 years.

-The UK economy was growing at an annualised rate of 4.4% - the fastest rate of any EU country - when Osborne took over.
-The deficit fell by over 20 billion in the same period, largely because of this strong growth.

It wasn't coincidence. Schemes to support the property market and car industry kept the economy ticking over, while mortgage protection schemes kept home owners afloat and business schemes stopped businesses folding.

Then, by the end of 2010, we started to see the impact of Osborne at the treasury and his austerity disaster. As stimulus was stripped away, VAT hit ordinary people right in the pocket and cuts started to bite, growth drifted away.

There has been no growth at all for 9 months. Since the end of 2010 (Q4). This would be painful enough, but with inflation recently reaching 5.2%, and average yearly cuts to services of 6%, it feels disastrous to ordinary people trying to make ends meet.

But even if Labour were back in power, it wouldn’t make much difference: we are where we are, and we still have to face up to the fact that capitalism as we know it may not be sustainable. Given that no mainstream politicians anywhere are willing to admit this, and given that there is no way of engaging in the political process – or at least people believe that there is no way – it is not surprising that the latest manifestation of direct action has taken the form of the various “Occupy” movements, the most recent of which is the occupation of the area in front of St Paul’s Cathedral.

My own personal view, my own suggested solution for a way out of the mess we have gotten ourselves into, this crisis of capitalism, would be for a massive growth in the Social Enterprise sector of the economy. We can all see things which need doing, all around us.

The social enterprise sector needs to grow to become as significant as the public or private sector. Social enterprise is where companies are set up to do worthwhile things and their profits (instead of being spirited abroad to fund the lifestyles of the super-rich) are re-invested for the good of all of us. Looking around, we can all see things that need to be done, which would benefit everybody. For instance, one model of the Rooftree idea has the individual communities as self-supporting social enterprise companies.

Whatever the answer, it is clear we need something, and soon. I don't think Cameron and his cronies realise just how much they are playing with fire here. We aready have a situation where there is widespread distrust, cynicism and sheer disgust at the political classes and their shenanigans over expenses and phone hacking. We have seen demonstrations in Greece, we have also - significantly - seen the riots here (admittedly there were multiple causes there, and many hanging on the coat-tails, but there was also an element of frustration and anger at politics) We have seen the rise of single issue pressure groups, aided and abetted by the government's glib announcement of a parliamentary debate for anyone who can get 100,000 signatures on a petition. We've seen the rise of extremist parties, recruiting people who already feel the democratic process holds nothing for them. Some, if not all, of these elements are part of an extremely volatile concoction that could go bang at any moment.

Whoever these people are on the steps of St Pauls, and I agree that some of them are probably “the usual suspects” or whatever it was somebody called them - though even in that case, they may still have some valid points to make - they are at least trying to draw attention to the problem and propose some fixes. Their initial demands, in case anyone has missed them, are:

1 The current system is unsustainable. It is undemocratic and unjust. We need alternatives; this is where we work towards them.

Well, you and I both seem to agree with the first bit of this one, whether or not we agree that the steps of St Paul's is the best venue to thrash out a way forward

2 We are of all ethnicities, backgrounds, genders, generations, sexualities dis/abilities and faiths. We stand together with occupations all over the world.

I assume they are meaning the other occupations (ie Wall Street) If they meant, for instance, the Israeli occupation of Palestine, then that's a different matter, but I can't think they mean that...

3 We refuse to pay for the banks’ crisis.

I have been asking for three years now why poor people should be expected to pay for the mistakes of rich people, and no-one has yet given me a good answer.

4 We do not accept the cuts as either necessary or inevitable. We demand an end to global tax injustice and our democracy representing corporations instead of the people.

I have no problem in agreeing with that, especially since UK Uncut highlighted the massive amounts of tax avoidance by multi-national companies based here

5 We want regulators to be genuinely independent of the industries they regulate.

Yes, especially the energy regulators!

6 We support the strike on the 30th November and the student action on the 9th November, and actions to defend our health services, welfare, education and employment, and to stop wars and arms dealing.

I would say that these are currently the only way effectively to oppose the government's policies, especially since the official opposition and its leader give a very convincing impression of a rabbit caught in the headlights of an oncoming juggernaut. But this is not a healthy situation for democracy to be in.

7 We want structural change towards authentic global equality. The world’s resources must go towards caring for people and the planet, not the military, corporate profits or the rich.

This is going to be difficult to achieve, but I do think they have a point.

8 We stand in solidarity with the global oppressed and we call for an end to the actions of our government and others in causing this oppression.

Oppression is a relative term of course, but at least their hearts are in the right place.

9 This is what democracy looks like. Come and join us!

If I could, I would! But for those who cannot make it in person, the protestors are now developing their “maqnifesto” online. And if Cameron had any sense he would be trying to include these people in the democratic process instead of pursuing policies that exclude them to keep his chums in the City happy, the same City chums who have been leaning on St Pauls and the BBC. Before something really nasty happens as people get more and more teed off. Ordinary people, not just eco-warriors. We could be seeing Britain in the grip of a pre-revolutionary fervour. Rising inflation, unemployment, disenchantment with the political process and the scapegoating of outsiders as being responsible for all society’s ills; it’s not quite yet Weimar Germany, but it’s getting there.

Plus, with the glowing exception of the two Canons who have now resigned over the issue of the Church of England potentially using violence and bailiffs to evict the protesters by force, the clerics of St Paul’s have been disappointingly un-Christian over the protest, first of all in insisting that they had to close the Cathedral for health and safety reasons, and now apparently colluding with the likes of Boris Johnson and the Corporation of London, to launch legal action.
Of course, it’s perfectly fine to camp outside St Paul’s if there’s a Royal Wedding, apparently, but camping is frowned upon if you are someone protesting against the Government. The same double standard was applied to Brian Haw.

As Richard Murphy has pointed out:

The Dean of St Pauls has said that: he had "met members of the chapter that governs St Paul’s on Thursday evening. As a result of that meeting, and reports received today from our independent health, safety and fire officers, I have written an open letter to the protestors this afternoon advising them that we have no lawful alternative but to close St Paul’s cathedral until further notice."

Hmmm, let’s see the sort of people who govern St Paul’s. Of course there are the clergy. They’re listed in here.

But the St Paul’s Foundation gives more clue about who really influence things. It’s trustees are:

Chairman
Sir John Stuttard

Trustees
The Right Reverend Graeme Knowles, Dean of St Paul’s
Dame Helen Alexander DBE
Lord Blair of Boughton
Roger Gifford
John Harvey
Joyce Hytner OBE
Gavin Ralston
Carol Sergeant CBE
John Spence OBE

According to the Dean these are the people who will be replying to #occupylondon.

So let’s see what they do:

Chairman
Sir John Stuttard PWC partner, Former Lord Mayor of London.

Trustees
The Right Reverend Graeme Knowles, Dean of St Paul’s
Dame Helen Alexander DBE Deputy chair of the CBI, director of Centrica plc
Lord Blair of Boughton Former Metropolitan Police Commissioner
Roger Gifford Investment banker, big in City of London
John Harvey – Not clearly identified
Joyce Hytner OBE – Theatre director
Gavin Ralston Global Head of Product and leading international asset manager at Schroder Investment Management
Carol Sergeant CBE - Chief Risk Director at Lloyds TSB, formerly Managing Director for Regulatory Process and Risk at the FSA
John Spence OBE – Former Managing Director, Business Banking, LloydsTSB

They don't sound like the sort of people to me who would be overly interested in exploring alternatives to capitalism, more like they would still be clinging to the wreckage of the status quo by their fingertips long after the rest of us have drowned. Like the media, which has been so spooked by the Occupy London protestss that they have had to resort to running non-stories based on their use of thermal imaging cameras to “prove” that not all of the tents were occupied overnight!

Take heed, David Cameron. As a well-known past Dean of St Paul's once said - "seek not to send for whom the bell tolls: it tolls for thee". And it tolls for capitalism. If we want to protect our liberal democratic values, we should be moving to bring the Occupy London protestors inside the tent, not shutting the doors on them.

Epiblog for St Swithun's Day (or "High Tea at High Tae")

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. Probably. I haven’t actually been here for much of it, not since Tuesday morning. I know I said last week that I was leaving this blog aside for a while, and I am really going to do that, after this week, because I have a list of things a yard long to do (I might actually give you a list, later on) but, in the meantime, like Colombo (or St Columba, or something) there’s just one more thing.

I re-read the stuff I wrote last week, and I was struck that it seemed rather a downbeat ending to a series of postings chronicling a period of struggle that has, to be honest, has had its ups as well as its downs, so I’ve decided to try and square it up with one more posting, to even it out, to leave a straight edge. I employ the same principle with pies, flans and quiches, actually, because those last little portions always look so lonely, sticking out like that.

Anyway, I digress. For some time now, we’ve been wondering what, if anything, is going to happen about holidays now I am in a wheelchair, and also what to do about our venerable old VW camper van, The Arran Silkie. It was all very well when it was just a relatively expensive anachronism, sitting in the driveway, but now it’s become our sole vehicle with the demise of the Berlingo, it’s equally essential for getting Debbie to her teaching classes and ferrying me about, and we’ve been forced to put money into putting right various things that were wrong with it. With the result that, although it still doesn’t look much, it is probably in better mechanical nick now than it has been for a long while.

All of which has led us to talk about going back to Arran. As I wrote last week, a year ago, on St Swithun’s Day, I keeled over with acute peritonitis (which, until then, I always assumed was just a dodgy Greek football team) and got carted off to HRI, just four days before we were due to set off for Arran. So, through no fault of her own, Debbie lost her holiday, and her kayaking trip. She hasn’t been kayaking now for over a year, and in my present state I am absolutely no help to her, unable to do the task I used to perform, of standing in between the cradles with the rack hanging down the side of the van, and guiding the nose of the boat onto them, as she fed it in from one side. Since the Berlingo died, we have still got its “Hydraglide” kayak carrier, which was a lot easier to use, but it’s in pieces in our front room, so that’s not a lot of help.

There had been talk of her giving up altogether, which, naturally, I was against, but the fact remained, that if she was ever going kayaking again, we would have to find some way in which she could, single handed, get 22kg of extruded tupperware kayak on to the top of a 2.5 metre high camper van, by herself.

Fortunately, there was a solution. Kari Tek, who fitted the original kayak carrier to the camper van in 2005, has, in the interim, grown and flourished. As a company, they now also sell the kayaks themselves, and a wide range of accessories, so that you can now take your credit or debit card for a day out at the seaside at Ayr, visit their rather smart little showroom, buy a rack, buy a kayak to put on it, and still be back home in time to go online to Interflora and send the Bank Manager’s widow some flowers, and a little note saying it must have been very sudden, and you were sorry to hear, etc, etc.

Specifically, we’d noticed that they do a natty little improved version of the original “push me/pull you” version of the rack, now incorporating an integral winch, which takes all of the hard work out of lifting the kayak up to roof height, and would mean that Debbie could go kayaking again. That left but two imponderables, could they do it on our vehicle, and could we afford it?

For a long while now, we’ve been pondering the imponderables, and trading emails with them, back and forth, establishing fairly quickly that they could do it, and we’d narrowed the cost issue down to, “well, depending how much of the existing rack we can salvage, cannibalise and re-use, it won’t cost any more than a new one!”

The other problem, though, was timing. Debbie’s brother had already caused an alteration to the time of year when we would normally have gone to Arran, by fixing his wedding to Claire for the week after next. The WEA teaching term didn’t officially end til next Monday, which is very late in the year, and Kari Tek themselves have a big engineering job they do for a local sawmill (they don’t just do kayak-carriers, they do other types of engineering metal-bashing as well) for the first two weeks in August, booked up solid, so that really only left this week, or next, and next was perilously close to the big wedding.

So it was that, on Tuesday morning, I found myself making and taking a succession of phone calls with Kari-Tek, and, as a result of that exercise, and various emails of scanned drawings, we were finally in possession of a price. Now, this next bit is going to sound like I am carping about high prices, but I am not, because although the price was more than we were expecting, the product, the value, and the service were all also correspondingly high. But it was still a shock to the system, even though it did include coffee and chocolate biscuits when we got there (“how did you blag those?” said Debbie, when she returned from looking round the showroom). Especially given the age of the vehicle we were proposing to have it bolted onto. I jokingly said to Deb that, if it didn’t work out, we could always put it on Ebay as “kayak rack with camper van attachment”, but she wasn’t amused, and a full-blown, toys-out-of-the-pram domestic seemed imminent.

Channelling Brian Hanrahan, I’m not going to say how many pounds left the bank account this week, but I counted them all out, and I hope, one day, to count them all back. I’m not going to say, because someone will inevitably pop up with “Oooh! How did you afford that, when you are supposed to be poor, and on benefits?” The short term answer is that Debbie raided her own meagre savings, and supplemented it with some money her Mum gave her for her birthday. I am hoping to replace it out of my redundancy settlement, eventually, which I spent 21 years of my life earning, in a little room with four bars over the window, while everyone else was outside having fun. It means Barclays will grab a little bit less than the whole sum, and if that is the price of my wife, who has stood by me through thin and thin, being happy and going kayaking again, so be it. Selah.

Having solved the price problem, all we had to do was pack up and go. Sounds simple, doesn’t it? One immediate issue, however, which had to be surmounted, was the spare tyre. When the garage had had the vehicle last week, to look into the oil pressure, for some unaccountable reason they had left the spare tyre inside the back of the camper, rather than on its bracket, underneath. I had queried this, and Father Jack replied that it was “so that Debbie could get to it easily, if she had a puncture.” I suspected the true reason had more to do with lack of forward planning, but anyway, we had arranged to swing by the garage on the way up to Scotland and have them pop it back where it should be.

So it was, therefore, that, once Deb had managed to push me up the ramps and into the side door, I had to squeeze past it and transfer by banana board on to the front seat, which, fortunately, rotates in the VW T25 “Wedgie” camper. Very fortunately, in our case, because, in rotating it, Deb found my rosary, which had been lost since I came out of “Broadmoor”, back in May. I say “lost”, although “mislaid” is the more correct term, in that we knew it was in the camper somewhere, just not precisely where. I was overjoyed at this slice of luck, and hoped it was a good omen for the trip as a whole.

We weren’t so lucky with the garage, though. They were obviously busy, but they could definitely see Debbie standing there, hopping from one foot to the other, trying to attract someone’s attention. And they knew we were coming, because I had phoned them up and warned them. Eventually, after about twenty minutes, and not in the best of tempers, she stomped back to the van, got in, started it up, and drove back to our house, where she then heaved the spare tyre out of the side door into the driveway, booled it round to the front of the old camper, and covered it over with a plastic tarp to prevent it being nicked by passing weightlifters, before resuming her position behind the steering-wheel, and swinging us out onto the road, northwards-bound, at 5pm!

Clearly, we were never going to reach Ayr in one go, but we had made an arrangement by phone to break the journey and park overnight in the yard at Mossburn, the animal sanctuary in Dumfries and Galloway run by Juanita, who has become a great friend of ours, ever since the days of the Foot and Mouth crisis, when we stayed up all night sending emails to every MP about its fate, as it was threatened with extinction as part of the “contiguous cull” policy. It was gone 8pm by the time we trundled through the gate, but Juanita had prepared a huge meal for us, and there was red wine opened on the table. Max, from the Archers messageboard, was also stopping by, as part of her search for suitable premises from which to launch her forthcoming religious retreat.

If I said “a convivial evening ensued” it would be a massive understatement, as it was one of the best evenings I, personally, have had in a long time. Fun, as a concept, has been absent in my life of late, and God alone knows how bleak it must have been for Debbie.

So, let us say a good time was had by all. Even Tig, who discovered she was attracted to older “men” when Juanita’s faithful Oliver, 20 years old and counting, wandered in and sniffed her bottom. It was love at first sniff, and before long they were snoozing together on the kitchen floor, legs straight out in all directions.

How they slept through us all carousing, laughing, and singing, I don’t know. The talk ranged from Santiago de Compostella, through Douglas Bader, to manifestations of St Padre Pio, and back again, broken occasionally by Hilaire-Belloc-like excursions into songs, some of which we all knew, and some of which we didn’t. Eventually, we had to go back to the camper, or we would also have been asleep on the kitchen floor, legs straight out in all directions, but apart from the absence of the long-haired girl with the dulcimer (who was sorely missed) it was pretty near to the description of heaven I wrote about in last week’s blog.

Wednesday dawned hot and sunny. So much so, that I had to sit up in bed and open the slotted window at the side over the grill, just to get a bit of through draught and stop us all cooking! Max had already set off on her house-hunting trail, and Juanita was busy about the farm, so we made a quick cup of coffee, got ready, and set off ourselves, down the road to Lochmaben, looking for the turning to Dumfries, thence to pick up the road that would lead, eventually, to Ayr.

It was a truly gorgeous July day, and the hedgerows were strewn with rose-bay willow herb, campion, dead-nettle, and lush bracken. The farmers were all busy as well, and I quickly lost count of the numbers of tractors and trailers active in fields along the way, making hay, literally, while the sun shone. We seemed somehow to have left behind a countryside at home where it was still March, and stepped through the back of the wardrobe into a strange weather-Narnia, where it was real summer, at last. As T. H. White wrote, in The Once and Future King:

It was July, and real July weather, such they had in Old England. Everybody went bright brown, like Red Indians, with startling teeth and flashing eyes. The dogs moved about with their tongues hanging out, or lay panting in bits of shade, while the farm horses sweated through their coats and flicked their tails and tried to kick the horse-flies off their bellies with great hind hoofs. In the pasture field, the cows were on the gad, and could be seen galloping around with their tails in the air.

We droned on through the heavy air, the camper lumbering along like a bulbous, somnolent bumblebee. Eventually, the countryside gave way to a town, or at least a more substantial settlement than the single-street villages we had hitherto rumbled through. But this one was strangely quiet, New Cumnock, and every house and shop seemed to be boarded up. It used to be a mining town, but since the end of deep coal excavation, it has contracted in population from 9,000 to 3,000, with massive unemployment and social problems. Looking it up later, I found that the boarded up houses were probably some of the many awaiting demolition. Thank you, Margaret Thatcher, and goodnight.

Anyway, we were soon back into open country, and before I really knew it, rolling through the gates of Kari-Tek’s workshop yard. They came out to greet us in force, and, as well as the aforementioned tea, coffee and biscuits, produced ladders, gantries, drills, bits of long metal which presumably formed part of the eventual rack, and set to work. After four hours of honest toil in the blazing afternoon sun, they had done it. The old rack was removed, the new one in place, it had been demonstrated to Debbie so that she knew how to use it, the J-cradles had been repositioned, and we had “shot the breeze” briefly, talking to Ann and Geoff about kayaking, and how they once encountered a nuclear sub in the channel between Largs and Cumbrae.

So, it was teatime, and we faced the choice of whether to hard-arse it all the way back in one go, and get home around midnight, probably, or to take up Juanita’s kind offer of a second night’s sojourn in the yard. It didn’t take long to decide on the latter, but first we had a detour to make. It seemed perverse to have come this far and then to turn back without at least a glimpse of the Isle of Arran, so we turned right instead of left, and ran down into Ayr, following the coast road out to the ancient harbour of Dunure.

It was a glorious evening, up on the Heads of Ayr, the sort that Wordsworth probably had in mind when he wrote about it being calm and free, and the “holy time” being “quiet as a nun”. I doubt he ever rode in a camper van to Dunure, though, but we got his drift. We parked up in the very same layby where we had stopped on 14th July 2009, one year and 364 days previously, on our last trip to Arran, and looked out over the same scene.

The sun was low enough to be sparkling on the water. The improbable “currant bun” shape of Ailsa Craig was away to our left. Further over, I could see distant blue smudges that were the tip of the Mull of Kintyre and the islands of Campbeltown Loch, and then all along the horizon in front of us, the misty blue mirage of Arran itself, its jagged peaks, and the more softer, rounded flanks of Holy Island, in front of Lamlash, and its gradual sloping to the south, ending with the lighthouse, a tiny speck at that distance, sticking up on the platform of Pladda. If he’d been looking out of his window, and using very powerful binoculars, I could almost have waved to Donald in his little chandlers’ shop on Lamlash pier. Except for the 14 miles of the Firth of Clyde in between, of course.

It was a curiously solemn moment. Especially so, since I had doubted I would ever see Arran again. Seeing it is not the same as getting there, of course, and after a while, the feeling of “so near, but yet so far” and the intensity and general sadness of the situation began to overwhelm me. I understood, probably for the very first time, truly, what A E Housman meant when he wrote that short poem:

Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.

Soon, it was time to pack all our troubles back into our old kit bag, and smile smile smile through the tears, in my case anyway, and hit the trail back to Mossburn. Such were the vagaries of the road system of Ayr and Galloway, that the journey back took over two hours, and I learnt a valuable lesson as a navigator, that the shortest route back in miles is not always the quickest route back in time. That was why we ended up not reaching Mossburn until gone 10pm. Well, that, and an unscheduled stop at Tesco Extra at Dumfries, where Debbie went in to see if they had any vegan beer and some cheap cooked meat for Tig to have her tablets with, and came out an hour later having done most of our weekly shop!

Thursday morning developed into yet another blazing hot day. I spent a considerable time watching one of Juanita’s ferrets sunning itself at the front of its enclosure, before we “got up” properly, and opened the side door of the camper. Debbie wheeled me down the ramps, and we lounged about in the sunshine, drinking coffee. Tig was mooching around in the long grass, and eventually found herself a comfortable patch in which to lie, in the shade of one of the parked-up horse-boxes. In fact, she was, quite literally, in clover, as the meadow grass was full of it, and of groundsel, burnet, plantain, and other humble plants whose names I once knew but can no longer remember.

The cockerel we had heard crowing earlier made an appearance, pecking its way round our wheels and under the camper. One of its chickens joined in, and then, in a rather surreal development, a pig wandered by, to see what was going on. Tig hadn’t minded the chickens walking round her, but she moved out of the way of, and kept a wary eye on, the pig.

Before we set off, I made a pre-emptive visit to the loo across the other side of the farmyard, and on my way back, the pig came trotting over to greet me, then looked, for one brief, heart-stopping moment, as if it was going to jump up on my knee and try and join me in the wheelchair. Given our likely combined weights, I doubt the wheelchair would have survived the experience. It would have been tricky explaining it to Wheelchair Services, but at least drawing the sketch of what happened, for the purposes of the insurance claim form, would have been amusing. Later, while we were borrowing a corner of Juanita’s kitchen table to prepare and consume an ad hoc brunch of the perishable stuff which wouldn’t have survived the journey back, a goat wandered in and tried to steal the onion bhajis. Admonished by Juanita, it calmly turned away and wandered back out again. Mossburn is that sort of place.

Prior to my odd encounter with the pig, I had come to a conclusion, a definitive node in the strand of thought which I had been teasing at and puzzling out for the whole trip. A farmyard in Dumfries and Galloway may seem like a strange place to have an Epiphany, but I have had them in stranger.

I had proved to myself that life in the wheelchair and life in the camper were not incompatible, nor were they mutually exclusive. It could be done. And although the effort cost Deb dear (in pocket as well as energy) we had had a break, a holiday, of sorts. Maybe we would get to Arran, and maybe I should keep on with the standing aid and the weights and keep on trying to get up out of this wheelchair.

Because, despite placing the tea lights on Russell’s mosaic in the pattern of the constellation of the plough, and despite all that has happened to me since St Swithun’s day 2010, it wasn’t the end of the world, in any sense. Not yet, at least, and that is all any of us can say, not yet. In that sense, I was no better, or no worse, than anyone else.

Because, for a time, I had forgotten that I was in a wheelchair, or, to be more accurate, for the first time, really, the fact of my “wheelchairness” had dwindled from being the all-consuming, all-powerful, be-all and end-all of everything, to a merely tiresome irritation. I had realised that I had been doing the very thing that I was ironically accusing others of doing, in fun, when I describe myself in their words as a “disabled raspberry” and “tragic Steve” – only seeing the wheelchair, and not the person.

Yes, there are lots of things I can no longer do, but I am not the sole inhabitant of the land of lost content, not by any means; many other people can also list things they can never do again. I am not a wheelchair, I am a free man. And though I still don’t understand it, somehow this is all apparently bounden up in Big G’s plan. (Not big G-plan, which is to do with furniture, do keep up at the back!)

And now I really must get some work done. I mean it this time. Those year-end accounts won’t cook themselves, you know!

Epiblog for Baggis Day

Third Sunday After Trinity (Baggis Day)
It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley, as we run up to St Swithun’s day, and, once again, the weather remains cool, rainy and cloudy. Debbie says it’s warm and humid out in the garden, but obviously I only have her word for this. I think we have to accept that, because of climate change, we now have only two seasons in the UK, Winter, and Autumn.

The week began with fine weather, and with us sitting out on the decking last weekend, around the chiminea, listening to John next door serenading us with Supertramp’s greatest hits, and me observing that now I was listening to Supertramp, but soon I might be one.

Later that evening, Debbie spoke to John over the fence, while she was ticketyboo-ing round the garden, after I had gone in. Apparently he enquired after my health, and Debbie filled him in on the details. “Well,” he said, after a pause to let it sink in, “at least Steve’s got a brain.” I’m still trying to work out exactly what he meant, and indeed why having a brain should be such an advantage. Most of the time, mine is about as much use as a door-stop.

Tig and Kitty have had their usual sort of a week. They have now taken to eating each other’s food, and to be honest, it’s probably not worth trying to correct it. Sometimes they even swop bowls in mid-meal, as if by some pre-arranged signal. In Kitty’s case, it is a mixture of greed and opportunism. If she could hold a pen and type, she would be an ideal candidate for a career in the banking industry, or perhaps working for News International. In Tig’s case, it is probably more evidence of her increasing gaga-dom, poor old dog, as in the instance of her yet again getting confused and trying to get into my bed one night during the week. She just can’t get her head around the fact that there are now two beddies, one upstairs and one downstairs. I made my usual remark to Debbie about “gaga old bitches who wander round the house at night because they can’t find their way to bed” before adding the usual codicil of “and then there’s the dog”, and received the customary Agincourt salute for my efforts.

On Monday (this next bit will sound like a song by Flanders and Swann, but bear with me) the Yorkshire Water Meter Man came to call, and in less than 45 minutes we were the proud possessors of a brand, spanking new water-meter, which should at least save us some money.

I asked the guy who did it if they made him fit meters all day long.

“Yes,” he said, “it gets pretty boring.” Then he looked at me in my wheelchair and added, bless him ,“but I guess you’d happily swop with me!” He wasn’t wrong. To complete the full set of “utilities bingo” Npower finally got round to sending us a replacement key for the gas meter box outside, so we can at last read the meter and get on with the tedious task of reclaiming the credit which has seemingly built up on our account.

On Tuesday, rather than participate in the meeting with Peter the Handyman about the home improvements list and what the council are planning to do to the house provided we can raise £1956.54 over a period of time, Debbie decided instead that she would climb the trees in the garden and begin to lop the branches that are causing the difficulty over potentially receiving a digital TV signal from Autumn onwards. So it was that, at the end of the meeting, to say goodbye to Debbie, Peter had to go into the garden and shout up into the branches. She asked him, by way of reply, to hand her up the long lopper thing with the shears on the end, which she had left on the ground for some unaccountable reason. He apparently said

“What are you doing up there?”

To which she was apparently very tempted to reply, “Baking a cake!”

He came back in, shaking his head.

“You wouldn’t get my wife up a tree like that.” I reassured him that actually, in Debbie’s case, too, she was much more often “out of her tree” in oh so many ways, and this was an exception.

Peter didn’t want to be involved in the council works (too big a job, not his core skills, fair enough) but he did leave me one storming idea for a thinner ramp, which doubled back on itself. This would, at a stroke, remove the necessity to empty out the old camper van, and provide access not only to the side door but also to the front door and down into the front garden. It was such a good idea, that I wished I had thought of it, and I sent it to the council in the form of a drawing, which they subsequently rang me up about.

They wouldn’t do Peter’s design, because it didn’t comply with building regulations. OK, then, I said, what about if we took the issue of the ramp out of the equation altogether, got Peter to build this ramp, and you just did the rest of the modifications inside the house? No, they wouldn’t start on that footing, because if they did so, it would be tantamount to encouraging the building of a ramp that didn’t comply with building regulations.

It could all be academic now anyway. If things go badly wrong, I might end up spending far more time in the open air in coming months than I had previously anticipated! Be careful what you wish for, etc.

Speaking of matters academic, Debbie had to attend some GCSE training run by AQA on Friday. The only interesting thing to come out of this is that apparently she doesn’t have to use the AQA-approved anthologies which they provide to choose the poetry, and this could have sort of rendered my brilliant model compare-n-contrast between The Charge of the Light Brigade and Mametz Wood obsolete overnight. Oh well…

There is – as always – a gnat in the Germolene, though. In a masterstroke of planning, Calderdale Adult Ed have scheduled both GCSE English and Fastrack English on the same night, come next term, and Deb is supposed to be teaching them both. So unless she can emulate St Padre Pio and appear in two places at once, they will have a problem. She notified them of this, and they are allegedly having a meeting on Monday to sort it out, except that it will probably clash with another meeting, or something. Watch this space.

On her way back from the training, she went shopping and bought a Gola sports bag. Unaccountably, they gave her a bag to take it away in. I said she should have asked for a bag to take away the bag with the bag in it. Earlier, on doing the VAT return, I had taken her to task for always putting the same amount of diesel in the camper. The problem is that you end up with several receipts, all for £40.00, say, and entering them up gets very confusing. I asked her if it might be possible to do, for instance, £39.95 one day and next time, £38.97 or something.

“Oh no!” she replied. “It always seems fuller somehow when you put a round amount of pounds in it”. Long pause from me. “O….K….”

And so it came to Friday teatime and I started writing this, at least a day earlier than I normally would have. I started today, rather than on Sunday, because it was a year to the day since I cooked and ate that lethally-significant stir-fry, and then collapsed with abdominal pains. Today, Saturday, it is six years to the day since Russell, the Baggis Cat, died, after he keeled over and Granny rushed him to the vet, while we were hundreds of miles away on Arran.

As it turned out, with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, the pains of last year would have happened anyway, stir-fry or no stir-fry, because my bowel had perforated, and I was in the throes of acute peritonitis.

I can’t believe it’s a year – or six years, for that matter. In both cases, in many ways, the events are still vivid, but in other ways it seems a much longer time ago, and maybe even something that happened to a different person. (Hah! He speaks truth there.) I can’t really remember bits of the Lake District that I used to know like our own backyard. Keswick, for instance, which we haven’t visited since May 2010.

It’s not just me that’s affected, either. Debbie hasn’t been kayaking for over a year now, although that is only partly to do with the fact that I can’t help her any more, there’s also the issue of our no longer having a suitable vehicle for quick, easy trips, and in any case she needs the weekends in term time now to do the prepping for her teaching stuff.

Anyway, it was definitely my fault that she didn’t get a holiday last year. So, a year on, what have I learned? Or six years on, come to that. I often think that day in July 2005 was the day when it all started to unravel, to come apart, when we came back to bury Russell and then the week after, Barclays fired their first salvo over taking away the overdraft, the beginning of a long campaign of attrition that crippled our business, and which we won’t see the back of til 2012.

For a while, following my sojourn in the bosom of the NHS, last year, I thought I had rediscovered my faith, but now I am not so sure. As I wrote last week, I came out of hospital inspired with so many high hopes, most of which have been dashed or at least remain dusty and unfulfilled, and, to be brutally honest, there have been many days during this essentially botched Spring and Summer when I have pondered whether it wouldn’t have been better all round if I had karked it a year ago.

If I had, I hope I would have gone to heaven. And I’d be there now, with my Dad, my Mum, Gran and Auntie Maud, and all the Fenwick clan, and the Rudds I never knew, with their seamens’ jerseys and their pipes of baccy. I might have learned some new shanties. Not to mention the sheer bliss and joy of seeing Russell again, and Ginger, Nigel, Dusty, and Lucy the dog.

I’ve also been pondering what heaven must be like. If we each create our own niche of heaven, the way that modern physicists tell us that we each create our own reality as we go along, on the hoof, and if the heavenly universe follows that pattern, I would imagine it as a large, rambling, English country house, full of interesting rooms stuffed with strange knicknacks, comfy armchairs, and old books. It’s always midsummer, of the sort we used to have, and the french windows from the library are open to the garden on a stifling June afternoon with the heady scent of stocks and wallflowers. Everything is underscored by the music of Handel, at ambient levels, drifting, coming and going on the soft breeze.

There’s a box maze and a herb garden, and girls with long hair wander round, barefoot, dressed in Laura Ashley dresses and carrying dulcimers. It’s always 3.45pm, and someone’s just brought in a tray of English Breakfast Tea and a delicious assortment of heavenly sandwiches and home-baked cakes, butter, jam, cream and scones. Paradoxically, there is always an open, full, bottle of red wine at your elbow, and a crazed crystal goblet from which to drink it. There’s the distant sound of church bells across a meadow as the ringers practice, and the click, clock and clack, and distant shouts, of cricket being played on the green. You are looking forward to communal feasting in the great hall tonight, where there will be a fire of woodsmoke and incense, with candlelight on the portraits, music, poetry, and song. In the meantime, your favourite cats are always within reach, plump, sleek and contented, and there are dogs snoozing on the rug.

Since heaven must, by definition, be out of time, I am not sure, in my vision, whether I would have been aware that a year had passed. By then, Debbie and Tig and Kitty would have moved on, and found comparable love elsewhere, or at least I’d like to think they would have. Kitty definitely would have, she is always on the lookout for anyone who can wield a can-opener.

But I didn’t. Kark it, I mean. “They are all gone into the world of light, and I alone sit ling’ring here”. And I am left wondering, about my faith, and about the logic of carrying on with this blog, at least on a weekly basis. There are only so many ways I can say that my tenuous faith, never strong to start with, might have briefly flourished in adversity, and has now crashed back again into a state approaching despair at the prospect of being stuck in this wheelchair. I still haven’t solved the problem of homelessness, either, although (thanks to my having been mugged by Zen Internet in questionable circumstances for £77-odd taken from my bank account without my knowledge while I was lying in a hospital bed) I do still own the www.rooftree.org.uk domain for another year.

I haven’t managed to feed everybody, despite my fine words in the Christmas Epiblog that this time, there would be room at the Inn. When I got to this point while writing Here Endeth The Epilogue, I remember quoting that Gilbert O’Sullivan song about

As I sip my Napoleon Shandy
Eating more than enough apple pie
Could I glance at my screen and see real human beings
Starve to death right in front of my eyes…

That was five years ago, not one, so it’s quite depressing really, to look at the pictures of the famine in the Horn of Africa on TV, and realise that the world is still crocked. Not only that, but I am now crocked, with it. So, it’s not a good place to be now, either the world, or my world, come to that. Half the world is spying on each other and twisting each others’ words in the pursuit of power, and the other half is dying from a lack of food, clean water and sanitation. If they are lucky enough not to be in a war zone.

I suppose I should, once again, count my blessings. Meter or no meter, at least we have clean water. The NHS creaks a bit at the joints, but at least I can get seen by a doctor, eventually. We do have food in the cupboard. By comparison with the women sitting at the edge of the road in Somalia or South Sudan, breaking stones for a living, I am incredibly well off. Perhaps I should be using what time is left to me to try and ensure that those who are responsible for their plight are the ones who end up breaking stones by the side of the road.

But how? As usual, the Disasters Emergency Committee has issued the customary appeals, and no doubt, as usual, the great British public will respond. I was tempted, at one point, to type in this week’s Epiblog something like “if you have ever enjoyed what I have written up to now, and you want to show your appreciation, and you were going to donate to DEC anyway, add on a quid for me, and I’ll see you right one day.”

But, on reflection, it sounded a bit wanky and arrogant, and in any case I am not sure how much of this aid will reach the people who need it anyway, and how much good it will do. My experiences in dealing with Oxfam, for instance, in the past, have led me to the conclusion that in many ways, it is on a par with Tescos, and driven by similar motives. I can give you chapter and verse if you want, but this is probably not the time, or the place. Plus, there is the issue of donating to a fund that, when faced with the massive amount of public donation and goodwill after the Tsunami appeal, decided to return the surplus to the donors, instead of having the foresight to open up a bank account somewhere and stick the money in it, in the sure and certain knowledge that when disasters come, they come not as single spies, but in battalions, and that it would always come in useful one day. Now they have to do it all over again, which doesn’t strike me as the best logistical outcome.

Anyway, as well as my failures on the wider scene, I have failures nearer home to worry about, which is another reason for taking a break from the blog. There is urgent, and serious work to be done on the business, if it is going to ever achieve the levels it needs to. Fortunately, thanks to the incredible generosity of one of my dearest friends, two free sessions of “financial planning advice” have turned up, but to make the most of these, I need to take the problem by the scruff of the neck and give it a good shaking. I don’t know how it will turn out, but it will be hard work, and it will take lots of time, lots more time than I have hitherto apportioned it.

One of the things I have had to do for this financial planning thingum is talk about my “vision” for the business. I wasn’t aware that I had a “vision”. Joan of Arc used to have visions, and we all know what happened to her. But in response, I said what I said to one of my (then, sadly, no longer) friends, back in 1998, that I started the business as “a Golden Ship for me and all my friends to ride in”. Several bad decisions later (not all of them mine, but enough to make a difference) we’re holed around the waterline, pumping like mad, and I have also seriously screwed up the lives of several people who were mad enough to want to sail with me for the voyage. The financial advisor sent me an email about the figures she needed from us that ended with “Sent from by Blackberry” and I was oh so tempted to type, on the bottom of my reply, “Sent by a Raspberry…”

Then there’s also the issue of how, when, and if we are ever going to get to Arran again, and several rivers to cross if we are going to achieve that particular objective. Since it might be our last holiday for a while, if we can keep the camper van on the road long enough for the Silkie’s final long voyage, I need to devote time to that as well. That is the least of the many things I owe Debbie, having bolloxed up her holiday last year. I would like to be able to take Tiggy to Kildonan Beach one more time as well. She loves it there. I say “one more time”, because she went to the vet this week as that warty thing on the side of her mouth has started to grow back again, and we were considering whether she needed yet another operation.

“Well,” said Jeremy the Vet, “It’s six months since she had the last one, and six months is a long time in the life of a dog. At her age, she might not be around in six months’ time”. Oh. Thanks. True, of course, but rather brutal to Debbie. Anyway, when it comes, that will be another one of the many challenges to surmount.

Before I start on all this, though, we might have a celebratory sit out on the decking tonight, around the chiminea, singing songs and telling stories of the glory days of Russell the cat and his many doings. And we’re going to light some tea lights and arrange them on his mosaic, in the pattern of the constellation of the plough. If I do inadvertently accidentally trigger the Apocalypse or something, I apologise. Look at it this way, it’s more fun than being raptured, and you won’t have to get up tomorrow and wash the car.

No doubt Big G will be relieved that events down here have conspired to stop me banging on the ceiling for a while, in a futile attempt to gain his attention. St Padre Pio and St Jude can each book their week by the sea with a clear conscience, and Jesus can practice his surfing skills, though to be honest, if you can already walk on water, that is cheating ever so slightly.

If everything goes well, I might be able to pick up the threads in the autumn, and, as Richard Bach said, you are never given a dream without also being given the means to make it come true: you may have to work for it, though. But I have to accept now that it is time to fold up the tents and steal way, not a rout, but a retreat, in hopes that we live to fight another day. If it all goes wrong, of course, my next post will be from underneath the railway arches somewhere (subject to internet access, and being able to find a dongle in a skip behind Morrisons).

Happy trails, everyone. Au reservoir.