It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. And a cold one. Very cold, in fact, despite the fact that we are still burning the coal faster than the Peruvians can dig it up, and every conceivable log from the garden and its immediate surrounds, including the ones our neighbour’s son (the landscape gardener) kindly donated to us, has been chain-sawed up and are now seasoning in various locations throughout the garage and elsewhere.
Matilda has had a traumatic week. Because of the cold, she’s been spending most of her time on the bed in the hearth, sometimes to her peril. The wrought-iron chestnut roaster hangs on a nail just above her resting-place, like the sword of Damocles. The other day she was so blissed out with the heat from the stove that she stretched out all her legs and flexed her toes, catching the edge of the chestnut roaster, which then fell off the hook, and onto her. It was the fastest, and the furthest, I have seen her move for some considerable time.
She’s also come face to face with Spidey, next door’s cat, at last. Fortunately for both parties, there was a closed, double-glazed conservatory door between them at the time. He was outside on the decking, she was inside where she likes to sit, watching the birds on the bird-feeder high up in the tree. Not that this prevented Matilda from arching her back, fluffing up her tail like a bog-brush, and finally emitting the full repertoire of terrifying growls and hisses which the vets had assured us she possessed.
They were right after all, as it turned out, about both the volume and venom of her utterances, but it took Spidey to provide the inspiration and focus for them. He, however, remained in place, taunting her, completely unimpressed by Matilda “doing her pieces” at him through the glass door, and, after a sort of cat-shrug which was the body language equivalent of “are you quite finished?” he wandered off on his merry way.
Debbie now has her sights firmly fixed on the end of term, and we just need the van to hold out long enough to make it to next Thursday night, when she officially finishes. It’s been a bitter-sweet week for her, and indeed for me, because it’s marked the first anniversary of Tiggy’s death, and also I have been working on the preparations for the advent of Elvis. At one point, it looked as though he would actually arrive on the actual anniversary of Tig’s death, St Lucy’s Day, 13th December, but in the end it seemed better to allow him a few more days to recover, which will also give Deb’s mum time to get Zak and Freddie’s injections topped up and to give everybody the best possible start, without infecting each other.
The lady from the kennels is over in Huddersfield on Mondays and Thursdays anyway, so rather than make a special journey, it looks like the sensiblest option is to bring him next Thursday, which will also coincide with the end of term, so he’ll have time to get used to both of us before the routine of Debbie being out for most of the day four days a week kicks back in again in the new year. That’s the plan, anyway.
We wanted to mark the anniversary of Tiggy’s death in some way, but in the event, it was an evening pretty much like any other. I did, during the day, when I was working on my own, stop to put on The Joy of Living by Ewan McColl, and blub my way through that, especially the lines about
You filled all my days
Kept the night at bay
Dearest companion
Which always makes me think of her. But in the end, we didn’t really need to make a special effort to remember Tig, she is still a “household word” and often still spoken about as if she’s still alive and just gone out into the garden or down for a snuffle in the woods out the back, a sort of canine equivalent of Canon Henry Scott Holland’s “death is nothing at all.” We remember her all day and every day. Good dog, Tig.
By Thursday night when I was finished doing the washing up, I was so cold I not only jammed my microfleece buff down over my head, but I also wrapped the spare yashmak from my pile of clothes next door round my ears and my head. By the time I had finished, I looked like a cross between Mother Theresa, Lawrence of Arabia, and Touche Turtle. Debbie cast me a disdainful look:
“You look just like an old woman!” she pronounced.
“So do you, dear, but tomorrow, I can take off my yashmak!” I replied. Rather foolishly as it turned out. So, that will be no sex for a month, and sleeping in the dog kennel for me, then.
Unfortunately, it hasn’t been a week of unrelieved humour and gay badinage. Paypal saw to that. On 6th December , I had received an email from Paypal saying that my account had been limited (ie frozen) by Paypal. This meant that – two weeks from Christmas – I could not take orders for our books on my web site www.kingsengland.com. The reason advanced for this by Paypal was that, apparently, our site at the time made it possible for people from Iran, Syria, and The Sudan to order books from us, and this contravened some guideline or sanction or other set by the US Department of Defense.
I immediately told them to bugger off and also to learn how to spell “defence”, saying that as a UK citizen, and a subject of Her Britannic Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, I was not under the jurisdiction of US Law. Paypal’s reply to this was that this requirement is enshrined in Paypal’s terms and conditions, to which I must have signed up. I then asked them to point to the precise part of their terms and conditions that says this, and told them that they may in fact be acting ultra vires, and they ignored me.
Against my better judgement, I actually went into the back end of our Actinic web shop and geographically limited the countries we ship to, excluding those to which Paypal objected, and also geographically limited the payments we can accept to exclude those countries. Paypal, however, then objected to the fact that it was still possible for people in those countries to go on the web site and create an account, even though, once created, they couldn’t do anything with it!
I even checked with Actinic, who make the web shop software, and they confirmed in writing that this drop-down menu is not editable. I am not prepared to ditch Actinic and start again with another shopping cart – I have spent over a year building up the site, there are many thousands of Actinic sites, and many thousands of them use Paypal and/or Paypal virtual terminal. My preferred solution, I told them, would be that Paypal used some common sense for once and un-limited my account.
The whole thing was a complete farrago of nonsense anyway – we do not sell to those countries, and never have done so, and probably never will. We sell books on English history, and children’s books, and things like that. So, as you can see, we are hardly a hotbed of international terrorism. I even thought of sticking a few pictures of rockets and bazookas on the site, just to see if Paypal noticed.
So a week of lost sales went by, and Paypal did nothing to sort things out. In the meantime, I reported them to the Luxembourg banking authorities and made an official complaint about you to the UK Financial Services Ombudsman. Eventually, in desperation, I resorted to using Facebook to kick up a stink about it, finding the names of Paypal senior executives on the net, looking up to see if they had a Facebook account, then if they did, personal messaging them with details of my problem with their damfool company, copying in their friends for good measure.
I told them: “You are taking food from my mouth. That doesn't matter, I will survive, I have survived worse than Paypal. But you are also metaphorically taking the food from the mouths of my wife and my cat, and I will NEVER forgive you for that, as long as I live, and I will make it my business from this day forth to see that Paypal suffers.” I don't do forgiveness.
Eventually, the mindless morons at Paypal who “review” this sort of thing saw my point, caved in and restored access to our account, but that was a week of my life I won’t get back. But it is a salutary warning to any small business that relies solely on Paypal for its web sales. Beware. These people are idiots, no, worse - they are idiots with a manual strapped to their chest. Unthinking robots, who would march straight off the edge of a cliff, if it was company policy. They don’t care about their customers, they don’t communicate with their customers, they are totally unresponsive to the needs of their customers, and they get uppity when you point all this out to them.
The whole organisation should be disbanded for incompetence and put to work doing something more socially useful, like picking up litter or drilling the little holes in the end of toothbrushes. I wouldn’t even trust them to get that right, though, since on last week’s performance they would be intellectually and organizationally incapable of daubing shit on the walls of a khazi.
Eventually, I got them to specify the clause in Paypal's T & C's which justified them limiting my account:
9.1 Restricted Activities. In connection with your use of our website, your Account, or the Services, or in the course of your interactions with PayPal, a User or a third party, you will not:Breach any law, statute, contract, or regulation (for example, those governing financial services including anti-money laundering, consumer protections, unfair competition, anti-discrimination or false advertising)
Now the first thing that strikes ME about this is the vagueness. ANY law? Do they mean ANY law, ANYWHERE in the world? There are probably laws in some backward countries that require me to take heretics out into the desert and stone them to death. Am I risking my Paypal account by not doing so?
Or, as I suspect, do they mean any US law? In which case, they do not have any jurisdiction in the EU or the UK. And as far as I know, I wasn't breaking any UK or EU law with my site. All very strange, very woolly and very, very unsatisfactory.
I know one thing though, that if I was ever going to take anyone out into the desert and stone them, it would be bloody Paypal.
As I said, I spent a lot of my week justifying what I was doing to various people who didn’t give a stuff if I lived or died. “Justifying” is also the word for what typesetters do when they make the right hand margin of a block of text a straight one, like the left margin. So I have actually, one way or another, spent more of the week justifying than I thought. And here I am at the weekend, justifying the ways of God to man, or vice versa. Better people than me have tried of course, including Old Blind Milton, who went on to invent sterilising fluid.
Before going on to the topic of the third Sunday of Advent, though, I would also like to report that this week I have been the victim of random acts of kindness. First of all, during the epic struggle with Paypal across the many pages of Facebook, several of my friends piled in and stuck up for me, posting supportive messages, and if you were one of them, and I omitted to thank you properly at the time for your support, then please consider yourself warmly thanked now.
Then, at the weekend, a parcel of unsolicited knitting arrived from Auntie Maisie, including a completely beezer Doctor Who scarf, in electric blue and white, which I have immediately appropriated, a woolly hat, and a knitted bolero waistcoat which was intended for Debbie but which Granny has adopted. Brilliant stuff.
Talking of Granny, she, in turn, handed on a bag of windfall apples which she’s been given, and which were surplus to her own requirements, and during the week, I got two meals out of that bag of windfalls, so again I was very grateful for that gesture.
The most startling gesture of kindness, though, came in the form of a windfall of a different sort, from one of my online friends who is also a reader of my books, and who has been a massive source of help and support in promoting my work throughout the year. I won’t embarrass them by naming them publicly, but their incredibly generous gift meant the difference between being able to pay the garage bill for the alternator and still being able to have a reasonable Christmas, or having to choose one or the other, which was where we were before they stepped in. Plus, I was able to pay a little bit of it forward in the form of small donations to Mossburn and to Rain Rescue.
It was completely unexpected, and came completely out of the blue, but I would like to acknowledge the kindness behind it, and also to a certain extent, I hope, the belief in my writing. It can be a lonely furrow, sometimes, and knowing that even just one person can see the point in your continuing does make a difference. I don’t write for adulation, I write because I seem to have to, but it’s still good to see the welcoming flash of the lighthouse when you are out alone at sea in the dark and a storm is coming. Thank you.
In the wider world, it’s been a grim week for news. The focus in the establishment media here in the UK has once again switched to immigration as a topic, with the release of the headline figures from the 2011 census. In an incredibly stupid piece of clumsy journalism, the main BBC news that night led with three headline pronouncements from the newsreader; that immigration had gone up; that the number of self-described “white British” had fallen, and that a growing percentage of the population regarded themselves as having no religion, Norwich, for some reason, being the “Godless capital of the UK”, at 43% heathen.
This just invites the likes of the BNP, the EDL, and UKIP, and all of the other mad colonels in Much-Barking-on-The Lune to make a connection between the three that doesn’t necessarily exist. Much of the growth in immigration in the period has been from Eastern European countries, especially Poland, which is at least nominally Catholic. The decline in the importance of the Church is caused in part by complex issues such as the breakup of the family, and the message that is pumped out at people by the advertising industry every day that you are only a success as a person if you have the latest phone, the latest Ipad, and a new sofa from Dfs or similar. The Church of England hasn’t done itself any favours in the relevancy stakes recently either, with its constant wrangling over gay marriage and women bishops. Rarely have I seen such a mighty blunderbuss discharged with such devastating effect directly into the marksman’s foot.
And the growth in people who are not “white British” but other hybrids of British is presumably down to precisely the type of integration which certain sections of our society are accused of not doing enough of. It sometimes seems to me that Muslims, in particular, are damned if they do and damned if they don’t.
When some fundamentalist wingnut in Southampton or Reading decides to declare a one-man jihad, he gets prime time in the media to demand Sharia Law and the restoration of the Caliphate and witter on about the supremacy of the Muslim culture. If I called for the restoration of the Druids, I doubt it would make it on to the six o’clock news. Yet the relevance, and the amount of people who would agree with me is probably equivalent in both cases. But when people of different ethnic backgrounds do attempt to integrate and adopt the British way of life, people in right-wing, racist political parties go on and on about coffee-coloured Britons and the “mongrelisation” of our culture!
This is not a political blog, I already have a political blog, not that I have much time to write in it these days, and I doubt I could remember the login details, but I have to say, in passing, that it was very depressing to see the leader of the Labour Party making a speech this week in which he tried to out-bigot the bigots. “Admitting” that Labour made “mistakes” over immigration is not going to ease tension or reduce the racial and religious divides in our society. I have very few expectations of Mr Miliband as Labour leader, and even then, I am frequently let down, but to hear him trying to dance to Cameron’s dog-whistle in a feeble attempt to garner some “me too!” votes at the next election is most unedifying. Where is the rational, sane, impartial discussion on the subject; who is going to rebut the media lies and stereotypes; who is going to stand up and talk about one of the major problems with any immigration policy, that the EU political project denies us control over our own borders anyway? Not Ed Miliband, that’s for sure – he’s too busy doing the work of the bigots for them.
I’d already decided I’d had enough with the week’s bad news when the first reports started to filter in about the school shooting in Connecticut. Several people have pointed out that it’s unfair to tar all Americans with the same brush and to automatically assume that they are all rootin’ tootin’ banjo-plucking rednecks who, at the drop of a hat will “go postal” and spray the area with an AK-47 before turning the weapon on themselves. I know they aren't. But it does seem to happen with an awful sense of inevitability, every two years or so. So much so that it almost makes you wonder if the wall to wall media coverage has already sparked the idea in the next one, but we won’t hear about that until another clutch of kids or students is cut down in a hail of lead, next autumn sometime.
I don’t suppose, looked at in the round, although it's probably a faster-paced and more relentless society in many ways, more pressured, that there are any more irrational scary people in the US than in the UK. Pound for pound, man for man. The difference seems to be the access to guns, for which the US must thank the NRA and the gun lobby, which clings resolutely to the “right to bear arms” as part of the Constitution, for the provision of a well-ordered militia, or whatever the phrase is. Just in case the Brits come back and try to land some tea at Boston Harbour again. If it wasn’t tragic, it would be hilarious. It’s like the gangsters in Moss Side justifying sniping at each other and lobbing hand grenades on the grounds that Napoleon might invade any minute!
Ever since the advent of Sarah Palin, I have said that I, personally, am in favour of the right to arm bears, so they can shoot back, and nothing that I have seen since leads me to think that there is any other answer other than to make the private ownership of guns illegal except under carefully licensed conditions, as in the UK. If a farmer needs a shotgun to keep down vermin on his land in Godforesaken, Wyoming, fair enough, provided he locks it up when not in use. Nobody needs a handgun or an assault rife in the home. Whether or not President Obama has the guts to do anything about it, however, remains to be seen. Even the massive tide of public sympathy for the victims is not enough to stem the outpourings of the Obama-haters on right-wing US media and messageboard forums.
For someone who purports to believe in God, random acts of violence of this nature bring great difficulty. We’re right, slap bang up against the old “if-there’s-a-God-why-does-he-allow-such-things-to-happen” question. I know you are probably reading this thinking, go on, then, argue your way out of this one. I’ll tell you now; I can’t explain it. I don’t know. As I have said many times before, the mind of God is almost certainly beyond human understanding. Whatever God is, if it is at all, it has very different ideas to us about concepts of justice and fairness. But then it has an infinite number of multiverses to run, for all eternity, so maybe that changes your perspective. I don’t know. Maybe there isn’t a God, and random bad shit happens for no reason.
One of the message boards I post on from time to time (though less and less these days, because it has become, essentially, a dialogue of the deaf) did, however, have a very interesting post. The author was concerned with the issue of how do you explain to children about this sort of occurrence, when they see it plastered all over the TV, as they inevitably will? The answer was that quotation from Fred Rogers which she posted:
"When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, "Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping." To this day, especially in times of "disaster," I remember my mother's words and I am always comforted by realizing that there are still so many helpers – so many caring people in this world."
America, and the world in general, may well have moved on since Fred Rogers’ folksy homespun charm in Ted Rogers’ Neighbourhood was a regular feature on US TV, but I think that what he said is still essentially true.
It is obviously a stupid and simplistic claim to say that God sends down disasters simply in order to strengthen the human spirit, but nevertheless there is a something that always wants to behave altruistically in the human makeup in these circumstances. There is an instinct to help, to hearken back to the good. People come together and hold vigils and hold concerts and fundraisers and give freely of their time and their efforts to try and make things better. It always seems to be just at the point where things are darkest and bleakest that the white shoots of hope push blindly upwards through the muck and the crap of humankind’s worst excesses, to re-establish love and peace.
We see it in the efforts of those who tried to help after Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans , Hurricane Sandy in New York, and similar disasters elsewhere. So much money was donated after the Tsunami, that the charities even ended up giving some of it back to the donors. We see it in the way people organised concerts for the relief of famine in Africa. You see it in the volunteers who go out and take soup and sandwiches to the homeless, or to the people who will spend their nights in the freezing cold setting humane traps to catch lost or feral cats so they can be re-homed. You see it in the people who rescue dogs from a sentence of death in the Council Pound. It’s even there in the soldier who throws himself on the grenade to save the life of a comrade, or the teacher who confronts a gunman to save the lives of the kids, even though it costs hers.
Others have noticed it, too – in that Masefield poem I am fond of quoting, he speaks of
Kind things done by men with ugly faces
And of course, good old Gerard Manley Hopkins is always telling us
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs
Whether God, like Gordon Brown, is just clearing up a mess he caused in the first place by his clumsiness or ineptitude, or whatever, or whether God is having a bad hair day as described by Raymond Chandler or whether you believe that we are like flies to wanton boys to the Gods, and “they kill us for their sport”, there is little prospect of understanding it fully. If you believe that despite all of the random crap that happens – or if you believe that, for every random act of evil, there is a balancing random act of kindness somewhere that cancels it out, if you believe at all, then the best you can do is repeat, alongside the unknown author of Desiderata:
Whether or not it is clear to you no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.
And if you don’t believe me, this week, I wouldn’t blame you. And even if you did, when faced with the death of a five-year-old, it’s little consolation. I have come to this point this boundary, this liminal edge, this cliff-top, so many times, and I still don’t know the answer. We see "through a glass, darkly." I know that I feel something, sometimes, but, like Gloucester in King Lear, I am essentially blind, and I don’t even know if it’s a real cliff or not:
How fearful
And dizzy 'tis, to cast one's eyes so low!
The crows and choughs that wing the midway air
Show scarce so gross as beetles: half way down
Hangs one that gathers samphire, dreadful trade!
Methinks he seems no bigger than his head:
The fishermen, that walk upon the beach,
Appear like mice.
And so we came to Sunday, the third Sunday in advent, and once we’d listened to Desert Island Discs and I had established for Debbie’s benefit that no, Sister Wendy Beckett isn’t the one that plays the guitar, that was Dominique the Singing Nun and yes she is dead (Dominique, not Sister Wendy) I was once more able to sit down and re-commence writing this blog.
As always, when I have been to the edge of the cliff and re-traced my steps, I find myself counting my blessings. For all of the stress and irritation of my dealings with the idiots at Paypal, nobody died. OK, I may have threatened at one point to cut off their goolies with an axe, but that was just me getting their attention. Nobody actually died, like they did in Connecticut. This Christmas I will have the benefit of two things I didn’t have last Christmas, hot water to the kitchen sink, and a stove with a workable oven. And yes, I am in a wheelchair and I have a life-limiting disease, but then as one of my dearest online friends pointed out in a cheery email, life itself is a life-limiting disease.
It’s Sunday lunchtime, and we’re here again. Deb’s prepping for next week’s classes, Matilda is asleep on the settee, and for the first time in a year, I have done an online supermarket order which included dog food. This is the darkness just before the dawn. Next week sees the Solstice, when we come to the end of this long dark tunnel we’ve been trudging down ever since Hallowe’en, and – if we’re spared – we can look forward to celebrating Christmas in slightly better style than we were expecting, with Elvis and with Matilda.
The Solstice candle, that spark of light that marks the start of next Summer, will be lit, the tortoise stove will be providing us with warmth, and there will be food on the table. Yes, we will miss those who can’t be here, for whatever reason. But we really are, compared to many, especially those who mourn the untimely loss of a child today, incredibly lucky.
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