Epiblog for Septuagesima Sunday

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. The snows came, and they stayed. And stayed. Like an unwelcome guest, the snows stayed and overstayed. It was always on the cards, I suppose. The garden was reduced to a series of frozen hummocks, smoothed and simplified by the drifting flakes; the driveway was covered, and, most annoyingly, the ramp was also covered, with about four inches of fresh snow. This immediately curtailed my movements, especially after it had been crunched up into ruts with the passage of feet backwards and forwards.

While it is possible to propel a manual wheelchair over snow, if you know what you are doing and/or you are Tanni Grey-Thompson, it is also possible to get stuck at the bottom of your wheelchair ramp and die of hypothermia while waiting for your wife to come back from teaching. So I decided on discretion, as the better part of valour, and stayed indoors. As did Debbie, because college was closed for two days – to all apart from those people lucky enough to be taking exams, for whom the health and safety risk of a fractured ankle is presumably judged to be more acceptable than the risk of having to reset in the summer and create additional admin work for the college. Sadly, Debbie doesn’t get paid for those missed classes, but at least she got a rest, some extra kip, a lie-in and some extra time to prep for the rest of the week. The college also issued an appeal (rather hopefully) for staff members to come in and help clear snow and ice from the paths (bring your own shovel) - an appeal which I have to say fell on deaf ears as far as Debbie was concerned, very deaf ears.

The Sainsbury delivery man, when he struggled down the drive bearing the crates of groceries I’d ordered online, had a shovel with him (presumably so he could dig his van out if he got stuck) and he very kindly offered to clear the snow off the ramp. This worked brilliantly for about three days, until the remaining lumps of snow which he’d left all coalesced into a hard icy fringe along one edge, which once more made the passage of my small wheels impossible. Then the postman came the day after that, bearing a very welcome parcel, of which more later, and he very kindly kicked away all of the said lumps of ice and also took away my post to post it for me!

In fact, give me those two, and the bloke from the Pharmacy who battled through the snow-drifts, delivered my meds, saw me struggling across the ice-field with the bin-bag balanced on the tray of my wheelchair, took it off me and dumped it in the wheelybin for me, and I could probably have a half decent stab at re-taking Harfleur for the English Crown. In fact, throw in the coalman, who carried 16 x 25kg bags of Real flame over the hard-packed snowy ice to deliver them to us on Friday, and I’ll push on and besiege Burgundy as well.

Despite the traditional Scottish weather, on Friday, for Burns Night, we celebrated the event this year with the traditional Scottish fare of Tofu with Lime and Coconut (or should that be “Cokernut”) curry sauce. Eventually, the weather outside got around to doing what the weather forecasters had said it would do this weekend, albeit on a slightly different time-scale, and the promised rain arrived and started to eat away at the lying snow. This morning, I woke to hailstones battering against my window, in what I hope is a last vexed flexing death-rattle from the tail of winter’s rattlesnake.

Mind you, our snowy week has been a picnic, compared to the friends in Wales I wrote about last week, who had embarked on having their roof replaced just before the snow arrived. Fortunately, proceedings weren’t materially affected by the weather, and in addition, they earned themselves a hot, freshly-made lemon drizzle cake in return for rescuing one of their neighbours who was stuck on some ice, so all in all they probably had a better week than we did.

As I type this, the snow has all gone, swept away by a combination of last night’s rain and the accompanying rise in temperature, but I am still wearing my leg-warmers - one of two pairs - which arrived in the said parcel brought by the ice-clearing postman, in response to the piece I wrote last week about how to keep the backs of my legs warm and combat the many draughts. The ice-postman cometh, and he bringeth the leg warmers. So, from the knees down at any rate, I now resemble one of the Kids from Fame. If only I could dance as well. Thank you to the kind person who sent them, they are very useful and they fit a treat. Now, about that Ferrari…

The dogs largely took the snow in their stride. Zak managed to lose his (well, really Tiglet’s) “lunker” (a tennis ball thing on a rope that allows you to hurl it even further afield) in the snow one day, down on the cricket field, and then found it again the next. Freddie continued his habit of coming home from walkies early, on his own, whenever he got fed up. Sadly, there’s still no further news of Elvis, either better or worse, so we’re still in limbo, and we assume his health is pretty much the same as when we last heard.

Matilda has been dealing with the weather in her own way, by nesting on my bed next door, on top of a couple of crocheted Maisie-blankets and snuggled next to Mr Hedgehog. The amount of time she decided to spend there has been directly proportional to the amount of time the central heating was on next door. So much so that she now seems to prefer it to the more direct heat of the stove.

So, it was one of those weeks beloved of the media, with headlines about “Br-r—r-r, Britain Freezes in the big chill”, and that perennial favourite, “Met Men Say There’s More To Come”. The enterprising lemurs in a Somerset zoo learned how to lean out of their cage and tweak the thermostat to turn up the heating to compensate for the sub-zero temperatures, and of course there is always some intrepid nutter on the news who snowboards in from Thames Ditton, having harnessed up the family dog as a husky, when everybody else has simply taken one look at the snow, groaned, turned over and pulled the duvet higher. It snows, and the country comes to a virtual standstill. That’s the law.

When temperatures drop consistently below freezing for more than a couple of nights, the council has a duty to implement its emergency plan for the homeless, apparently. For someone with a general interest in the subject, I must admit this was bit of a hazy area for me. And for some councils as well, I gather; while the best councils kick into action at the first opportunity, commandeering community centres, setting up camp beds etc, others are more prone to dragging their feet, apparently.

I was alerted to this situation by an email from one of these “campaigning organisations” onto whose email list I seem to have managed to wangle myself, probably by signing a petition in the past. As a result of my own subsequent email enquiry to Kirklees, I discovered that they had implemented their plan, and that a total of seven people who were officially living rough in Kirklees had been identified and helped by it.

While every little widow’s mite helps, this figure sounds incredibly low to me, and I said as much. I have often thought that the official figures, on which – ultimately – the DCLG bases its policies, are understated. I also suggested, to the Kirklees councillor who emailed me, that the council should consider opening up vacant shops (where the council was the landlord) as daytime drop-in centres for rough sleepers, somewhere where they could get out of the cold for a few hours, have maybe a warm drink or some soup or something, and gain access to people who might have the official capacity to help them further.

My subsequent foray onto the Kirklees web site for details of the local organisations that help the homeless then led me on to the council’s own list of public venues, which was of interest because of my planning for Lockstock. Sadly, many of those listed would probably be unsuitable on religious grounds, since I fully intend that if Lockstock happens, it should feature wine, music, and possibly pigs. But, like two feminists doing the washing up, it is at least a start.

(If you’re worried about someone you’ve noticed sleeping rough in this icy cold weather, by the way, you can make sure they get help by telling Streetlink, the new national helpline and website: http://www.streetlink.org.uk/tell-us-about-a-rough-sleeper)

The prevalence of headlines about the snow made it a good week for politicians to bury bad news. Actually, I may be doing Cameron a disservice there, which is not a sentence you will see me type very often, in that he did originally intend to make his big pronouncement about the EU on another day – one which his advisors then advised him would have caused offence both to France and Germany, and then he had to postpone it again because of the Algerian hostage crisis. And after all that, was it even worth waiting for?

I start from the premise that I am highly suspicious of the “ever closer union” aspect of the EU, and I often get the feeling that it is invasion by any other means, invasion by the back door, in fact. The trouble is that, in order to register my views in any political forum, I have to appear, by saying so, to ally myself with the likes of UKIP and the Euroskeptic Tory MPs, all of whom are very high on my list of people never to get stuck in a lift with. Mainly because their dislike of the EU comes bundled with several other attitudes which are not officially party policy, and are only ever tacitly admitted, but which can be summed up as “once we’ve sorted out Europe, we’ll start on the brown people next”. In that respect, at least the BNP and the EDL are more honest about their aspirations, however nauseating.

Cameron has obviously been looking at the recent election results and has come to the conclusion that, when it comes to Europe, you catch more flies with the vinegar of UKIP than the honey of the Liberal Democrats. While it is always gratifying to see the Liberal Democrats hoist, nay, even shafted, with their own petard, it nevertheless raises to disagreeable possibility that they might seek to ally themselves with Labour at the next election. It doesn’t happen very often in life, but if it did, this would be yet another rare instance of rats rushing to join a sinking ship. Whether or not Cap’n Miliband and his crew have the sense to repel boarders remains to be seen.

The only redeeming feature of Cameron’s blustering, which has absolutely nothing to do with “the national interest” and everything to do with saving his miserable hide from being savaged by his own party, is that there are a lot of ifs and buts in the way. If he succeeds in renegotiation, if this, if that – if indeed, he is still Tory leader at the next election. It’s all going so terrifically well on the economy that the quicksand of George Osborne’s “Plan A” may yet suck him under as well.

With or without him, though, rather depressingly, it seems that the next general election will be fought on a platform of popular xenophobia based on the government-inspired popular (but untrue) white-van-man-taxi-driver ideas that “there are millions of ‘em over here, taking our houses and our jobs.” The race card at one remove, in fact, because when the Junta and UKIP say it, they mean “EU Immigrants” but the silent dog-whistle note that always underscores it says “brown people”.

As I type this, Cameron's poll ratings have already risen on the strength of this empty rhetorical claptrap, as he is obviously tapping into the vague, unfocused anti-EU sentiment in the UK at large, in the same way that Alex Salmond does in Scotland with vague unfocused anti-English sentiment. You don’t have to do anything, or have any policies really, other than vague hints and promises, you just find the patriotic xenophobic vein, the familiar my country-right-or-wrong supernumerary nipple, and leech onto it like a bloated vampire.

The Lib Dems must be feeling pretty pissed off right now, at having been used as a figleaf for all those nasty little Tory policies for two years, only to be told that, when it comes to Europe, their services are no longer required from 2015 onwards. It serves them right, of course, but I really do hope they do something Quixotic, petulant and self-destructive that really damages the Junta before then, just out of spite.

Meanwhile, the Blight continue to pick and choose who they let in and who they deport when it suits them, on a politically-motivated basis. I have nothing against Malala Yousafzai and wish her well in her self-appointed crusade (probably the wrong word) for women’s education in Afghanistan against the medieval nutcases who run the Taleban. I fear it will end badly, but at least we saved her life this time by flying her to Birmingham and throwing a lot of NHS resource at her.

Others are no so lucky, as I have said before, and as pointed out in various press articles this week about Luqman Onikosi, who the Home Office are sending back to die in Nigeria. The journalist Alana Lentin, who knew him personally, wrote a piece about Theresa May's decision to deport this seriously ill Nigerian man after university. The Junta probably don’t like Mr Onikosi’s views very much: he used his experience as an African to highlight everyday racism in the UK, and drew attention, not only to black history, but to the politics of migration and Islamophobia as well.

He had started an organisation, which he still heads, Hear Afrika, to help African youth projects. In 2009, Onikosi was diagnosed with hepatitis B. Two of his brothers, Hanuna and Kolade, had died of the same illness at home in Nigeria. Despite the fact that the chronic liver condition suffered by Onikosi and his brothers, if untreated, leads very quickly to the loss of life, Theresa May has decided to deport him to Nigeria. After graduating from Sussex, Onikosi continued to work, pay taxes and volunteer in the UK.

As Lentin says:

The Home Office disregards this and, following legal appeals and the intervention of Onikosi's MP in July 2012, deems it correct to send Onikosi back to Nigeria where virology specialist, Dr CI Anyanwu, explains there is "no definitive treatment available for the level of his condition he is experiencing".

In austerity Britain, the government has no qualms about universities accepting international students to pay huge fees to keep a virtually unfunded higher education system going. Foreign students are regularly referred to as cash cows by cynical university managers. Yet those same cows are accused of "milking the system" as soon as they overstay, no matter the reason, even when it means life over death.”

And she ends her article by saying:

“Integration, a word beloved of post-9/11 western governments, suddenly becomes an irrelevance when it comes to wrenching from their homes people who have put down roots, created professional links, and benefited the society. Onikosi has lived in the UK for five years. It is the country in which he entered adulthood, as well as political consciousness. He has contributed to this society in ways in which his peers, born into the privilege of citizenship, may do also but do not have to in order to prove their worth.

There is no doubt, barring a miracle, that removing Onikosi to Nigeria will result in this young man losing his life. The UK is quick to preach when it comes to human rights abuses in other countries, but equally quick to moralise when the same victims of global inequality put its own ethics to the test. Are we really willing to cause a third, useless, death in one family?”

And, sadly, yes, it seems we are. I don’t begrudge the compassion shown to Malala Yousafzai, but it’s time we acknowledged the appalling double standard and extended that compassion to some other case where medicine and borders collide. If borders and nationality were no problem in Malala’s case, what is different here?

Today is Septuagesima Sunday, which is easy for you to say, meaning that it is the 9th week before Easter. Next week is Sexuaguesima Sunday, which sounds a lot more fun, but don’t let’s go there. Septuaguesima Sunday marks the start of the preparation for Lent, which in turn is a preparation for Easter, so this is sort of the start of the start of the run-up to Spring, although it doesn’t feel like it today, with the hailstones bouncing off the decking.

The text for today is the parable of the workers in the vineyard, Matthew 20, 1:16.

For the kingdom of heaven is like unto a man that is an householder, which went out early in the morning to hire labourers into his vineyard. And when he had agreed with the labourers for a penny a day, he sent them into his vineyard. And he went out about the third hour, and saw others standing idle in the marketplace, and said unto them; Go ye also into the vineyard, and whatsoever is right I will give you. And they went their way. Again he went out about the sixth and ninth hour, and did likewise.

And about the eleventh hour he went out, and found others standing idle, and saith unto them, Why stand ye here all the day idle? They say unto him, Because no man hath hired us. He saith unto them, Go ye also into the vineyard; and whatsoever is right, that shall ye receive. So when even was come, the lord of the vineyard saith unto his steward, Call the labourers, and give them their hire, beginning from the last unto the first. And when they came that were hired about the eleventh hour, they received every man a penny.

But when the first came, they supposed that they should have received more; and they likewise received every man a penny. And when they had received it, they murmured against the goodman of the house, saying, these last have wrought but one hour, and thou hast made them equal unto us, which have borne the burden and heat of the day.

But he answered one of them, and said, Friend, I do thee no wrong: didst not thou agree with me for a penny? Take that thine is, and go thy way: I will give unto this last, even as unto thee. Is it not lawful for me to do what I will with mine own? Is thine eye evil, because I am good?

So the last shall be first, and the first last: for many be called, but few chosen.

The key to the parable being that everyone receives the same generous payment, whether or not they have been labouring for the whole day or not. The idea being that the Kingdom of Heaven is equally available to all, those who have been lifetime adherents of a religion and those who have had a blinding epiphany and suddenly feel the presence of something other than what we commonly call reality. Equally available to all; those who have access to the privileges of a cushioned life and to those who have no such access. In fact, in other pronouncements, Jesus indicates in the Gospel of Mark that:

It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the Kingdom of God.

Sadly, though, the same maxim doesn’t apply to this world, where, as we have seen far too often, it is easier for a rich man to do anything and everything, than for a poor man. So it seems the poor and the disadvantaged have got the next world sewn up, alright (though organised religions of various flavours have interpreted that, shamefully, as “so shut up in this world, and be happy with your lot”) but what I would like to know more about is this stuff about the meek inheriting the Earth.

Perhaps what we need at the next election is a coalition. A coalition of the meek. When the meek get stroppy, it’s time for the rich and powerful to watch out. When the going gets tough, the meek get organised. Like Langland’s Piers Ploughman, I have a vision of “a field full of folk”

Then began I to dream a marvellous dream,
That I was in a wilderness wist I not where.
As I looked to the east right into the sun,
I saw a tower on a toft worthily built;
A deep dale beneath a dungeon therein,
With deep ditches and dark and dreadful of sight
A fair field full of folk found I in between,
Of all manner of men the rich and the poor,
Working and wandering as the world asketh.
Some put them to plough and played little enough,
At setting and sowing they sweated right hard
And won that which wasters by gluttony destroy.

Some put them to pride and apparelled themselves so
In a display of clothing they came disguised.
To prayer and penance put themselves many,
All for love of our Lord living hard lives,
In hope for to have heavenly bliss.
Such as anchorites and hermits that kept them in their cells,
And desired not the country around to roam;
Nor with luxurious living their body to please.

Which could easily be a vision of the inequality of our own society, apart from the fact that the Sumptuary Laws have been repealed, that prevented people in Langland’s day from wearing clothes that would identify them as being “above their station”. Though I wouldn’t be surprised if they made a comeback.

The poor, the unemployed, the sick, the asylum seekers, the deportees, the homeless. These shall be my coalition, then, along with the lost, neglected and homeless animals. At one time, you could rely on the Labour Party to stand up for at least some of these categories, but since they became a slightly less Tory corporate arm of the Tory Party, until recently, you couldn’t get a fag paper between them all, and the only reason you can do so now, is that the Tories have differentiated by moving even further into the territory of the nasty. So if we are to have a general election in two years from now (or sooner) where hateful, ill-informed xenophobia is manipulated by David Cameron in a desperate attempt to cling on to power so he can carry on ruining the country while pretending to run it, then this is going to have to be the coalition that stands against him. We can’t rely on anyone else, least of all the Opposition. The labourer is worthy of his hire. Many are called, but few are chosen. I stand with all of them. Me, Jesus, and Bill Langland. It is time for us all to stand up, and be counted. Which is quite ironic, really, in my case.

Epiblog for the Feast of St Sebastian

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. After a few days of leaden skies where it was so cold the very air around you almost rang like a bell, the long-threatened snow finally came, this week. Two things were slightly different about it, though; firstly, unlike in previous “snow events”, we seem to have got off comparatively lightly, this time. Our friends in Wales were right in the middle of the “Red Warning” belt on the TV snow map, and I found myself wondering how they were faring. Fortunately, they are pretty self-reliant and if all else fails will probably have built an igloo or scooped themselves a snow hole or something – and secondly, unlike previous “snow events”, the coming of the actual white stuff has not been accompanied by the corresponding slight rise in temperature that you get when it has fallen. It’s still perishing cold. (Since when did snow become a “snow event”, anyway?)

Consequently, Matilda has not been impressed. I don’t know if she’s ever been out in snow before, but she took a few tentative steps in it this time, did a Charlie Chaplin skidding U-turn and quickly skedaddled back inside. Since then, she’s not moved far from her chair, onto which she has (I noticed) dragged Eric the catnip mouse for company. She’s also taken to nesting on my bed next door, but only when I am not in residence. This week she was the lucky, indeed some would almost say spoilt, recipient of a Red Cross parcel from her Auntie Maisie, containing two new crocheted blankets and a small stuffed hedgehog toy.

This takes her total of toys to three, the catnip mouse Eric, the Big Mouse, and the hedgehog, plus three ping-pong balls, current whereabouts unknown. So it was rather a surprise when, one morning during the week, Debbie saw Matilda hoick a small new potato out of the veg rack and start batting that around the conservatory floor with her paws and pouncing on it. I didn’t witness the incident at first hand, but apparently, Debbie said, the cat was most indignant at being deprived of her new plaything. Debbie put the potato back in the veg rack without identifying it in any way, so undoubtedly one of us will have subsequently eaten it. Still, at least it will have been sterilised by boiling. I say “surprise” above, but of course it won’t really be a surprise to anyone who has ever seen a child get an expensive Christmas or Birthday present, cast it aside, and start playing with the box it came in.

Freddie and Zak, who are currently staying with us while Granny does one of her “Good Queen Bess” royal progresses to the Solent, absolutely love the snow, and every time I let them out into the garden, they run about madly, criss-crossing each other’s path like a demented version of the Royal Signals motorbike display team, and barking insanely for no reason.

Debbie took them both off for a walkies down to Armitage Bridge cricket field in the snow, and Freddie obviously decided he’d had enough because he ran off and came home early, ending up howling like the Hound of the Baskervilles (albeit a smaller point size – he’s only a 9pt Baskerville, though he is bold) outside the back door, to be let in. I wondered about the fact that he’d come back alone, and thought I had better phone Debbie on her mobile, in case she’d slipped and broken her leg or something, or fallen down an old mine shaft, and Freddie had done a “Skippy” to raise the alarm. She was about five minutes from home when she answered:

“I wondered where the little bugger had scuttled off to!” she said. He’d had enough of the snow and the cold, and had voted with his feet, re-tracing his steps. I told her about the howling. “That’s because he knows he’s going to get his arse kicked for abandoning us!” In fact, his punishment – such as it was – when Debbie returned, was to be given his tea early, then wrapped in a fluffy dog-towel and laid in front of the stove to dry off, where he steamed gently for the next hour.

Freddie stopped briefly to cock his leg on the hard-packed snow on the decking the other morning, and then tried to do that thing that dogs do, of scratching the earth with his back legs – but because of the slippery, hard-packed snow, his legs were going nineteen to the dozen underneath him and getting no purchase – he looked for all the world like a cartoon dog. Usually, I am pretty pro- Freddie and pro-Zak, but if this carries on much longer, I may actually need Pro-zac.

Talking of medication, feeding time continues to be problematic, as demonstrated on Tuesday when Freddie ate Matilda’s food, complete with her last worming tablet. It doesn’t seem to have done him any harm – actually I have no idea whether wormers are generic or whether there are specific cat and dog wormers – something I must look up…one day. The point is, however, that Matilda still goes unwormed, because Freddie, the greedy little git, got in there and hoovered up the remains before I could stop him, so now I have to send off for another load of worming tablets.

The coal is going down at an alarming rate, as you might expect in such bitter weather; the draught excluders are holding their own, apart from Slippy, who is still on compassionate leave, having counselling after allegedly suffering sexual abuse at the paws of Nigel. Meanwhile, like Nic Jones’s whalermen, we huddle round the little pot stove, and struggle off to work each day, through the icy wind and sleet.

And still it snows. Another week has gone, or almost gone, and already it’s the middle of January. One of the few compensations for being in this wheelchair is (I suppose) that at least I will have to try very hard if I want to fall over and cut my head open now, whereas before, when I was tottering about, it was so easy that I managed it quite spectacularly, two winters in a row. There is another, linked, compensation, too; I no longer have to set off on mornings like those we had this week, and drive 26 miles through Jackson Bridge or Hade Edge or Crow Edge to get to the office and spend hours on end in a little room with a high window with bars across it, dealing with people who I thought at the time were friends and colleagues, which was the price I paid for 21 years of relative financial freedom.

There are disadvantages, too: but we’ve already been through those, oh so many times before. Lately, reading back over the last few weeks, they seem to have been weighing rather heavily on me. The inevitability of the situation, or rather the solidity of the situation, seems overwhelming at times when set against the fleeting, chimera-like shreds of what I used to, on a good day, call faith. January is a miserable month anyway, it’s usually when we get our bad weather, and everybody’s totally brassic, you have to do your tax return and spring, let alone summer, seems a long way away, although Maisie’s daffs in the garden are coming up, perhaps unwisely in view of the weather.

“Where is summer? The unimaginable zero, summer?”

Asks T. S. Eliot in “Little Gidding”. Where indeed, T. S. To misquote Shelley – “if winter comes, spring can be far behind.” At the moment we’re in the middle of a truly Shakespearean cold snap –

“When icicles hang by the wall, and Dick the shepherd blows his nail
And Tom bears logs into the hall, and milk comes frozen home in pail
When blood is nipp’d, and ways be foul, then nightly sings the staring owl;
To-whit! To-woo! A merry note! While greasy Joan doth keel the pot”

All very true, except that it’s me that does the nail-blowing, the coal (not log) bearing, and the keeling of any greasy pots. Tom, Joan, and Dick the Shepherd were not available. The part of the owls was, however, played by the owls, who have been giving it big licks in the trees out the back for a few nights recently, while during the day:

“All aloud the wind does blow, and coughing drowns the parson’s saw
And birds sit brooding in the snow, and Marian’s nose is red and raw…”

We must be feeding the entire bird population of the Holme Valley at the moment, given the rate at which they demolish anything we put out on the bird table. Large tits, small tits (see what I did there, Google?) jays, black birds (come on Google, I’m really trying to get up the rankings here) and pigeons. Maybe soon there will be chicks (last chance, Google!) Still, it’s cheap amusement for Matilda. Cheaper than a video of a fish tank, anyway.

And more amusing than watching the news, much more amusing, in fact, as it seems we’re just about to open up yet another front in the unwinnable, self-sustaining, self-fulfilling “War on Terror”, this time in North Africa. This one is particularly close to my heart, because I had a part (a very small part – ooer, Missus) in raising the funds to build a well, in Ende, in Mali, in 1993, via a festival organised in Sheffield in that year, to benefit Tree Aid, a festival of which I was one-quarter of the organising committee. Or possibly one-fifth, it’s all a bit hazy, twenty years on!

I’ve always wanted to go and see “my” well. I found a picture of it on the internet. But since the rebels of Al Quaida in the Sahel are currently having the shit bombed out of them in Diabaly, which is even nearer to the capital than Ende, Mali, I have to assume, is off the map for the moment. In fact, a quick check on Tripadvisor reveals the following:

From the U.S. State Department: The U.S. Department of State warns U.S. citizens against all travel to Mali at this time because of fluid political conditions, the loss of government control of Mali’s northern provinces, and continuing threats of attacks and kidnappings of Westerners in the north of the country. Mali’s path toward stabilized legitimate governance has clarified considerably since the March 21 military coup, and in particular with the installation of an expanded interim government on August 20. Effective August 29, the Department of State is lifting the Authorized Departure of non-emergency personnel and all eligible family members of U.S. Embassy personnel. While the security situation in Bamkao is improving, the country faces continued challenges including food shortages, internally displaced persons, and the presence in northern Mali of factions linked to Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM)

And that was probably before all of this Algerian malarkey. It’s all very depressing. There used to be about twenty of these fundamentalist wingnuts, living in a cave in Tora Bora and dreaming of re-establishing the Caliphate and Sharia Law. Since 2001, it’s like we have embarked on a deliberate policy of creating as many radicalised hotheads as we possibly could. Afghanistan was, I suppose, just about justified, as originally envisaged, but now it’s turned into a morass that claims the lives of our forces, and all the Taleban have to do is sit and wait for us to go home. To say it wasn’t thought through is an understatement. Then there is Iraq. I wrote at least two full length essays on that war, trying to explain why I thought it was the wrong war, at the wrong time, against the wrong target, so I won’t rehash them all here.

Then there’s the Arab Spring. Well, what a marvellous success that has turned out to be. Replacing one set of murderous bastards in Libya with another, different set, ditto in Egypt, and now the attempt to do the same in Syria is all going shitshaped, with Al Qaeda rushing in to fill the resulting power vacuum, as they will now do at every opportunity. When will we ever learn?

I am not arguing for complete disengagement – if it were possible, I would be, but we’ve let the Genie out of the bottle, and Christ alone knows how we’re going to get out of this one, now. If we had deliberately set out to create a worldwide crisis where religion and politics is all tangled up in one huge Gordian knot, we couldn’t have done it better. Exponents of “realpolitik”, including my MP, to whom I wrote complaining that we were wasting money on firing missiles at Libya when we were closing libraries here at home, would say that we should do what we can, and if the result is replacing one set of repressive, murderous bastards with another – different – set, that doesn’t matter, as long as the second set is bought, paid for and in our pockets. Of course, a certain Osama Bin Laden used to fall into that category, at one time. And we certainly shouldn’t kid ourselves that “regime change” has anything to do with “democracy”.

God knows where all this is leading; it can only be a matter of time till “mission creep” sucks us in, and of course every British National Party, UKIP, EDL and similar supporter has been refreshed and renewed by this week’s events into asserting that we have to crush Muslims wherever they are found, and similar. I get fed up – to be honest – of trying to explain that there are thousands, millions, of Muslims who just want a quiet life and to get on with it, not all Muslims are fiery-eyed zealots with headscarves and Kalashnikovs, it’s only ever the wingnuts who get on TV, etc, but it’s turning into a dialogue of the deaf.

The Junta has been so successful with its denigration of immigrants (without ever being truthful about – or even referring to – the role of the EU) that there is now a popular belief that thousands of Muslim asylum seekers/immigrants/economic migrants (the people who promote this theory are usually incapable of making the distinction) who just have to rock up at Dover Docks and they get given a free house, a free car, and a plasma TV. It’s all bullshit, of course, but it’s very effective bullshit. As I have been told more than once … “but hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people think like this…” to which my response is usually that just because hundreds of thousands of people have hateful and ill-informed opinions and sleepwalk through life believing everything the Blight spoon-feeds them via the media, it doesn’t mean I have to.

There are answers, but the options are closing off fast. The answers would require a blog posting several times longer than normal, gathering together everything I have ever written about the subject of “integration” but the danger is now that a combination of events, and the Blight, the Junta with its deliberate policies of division will mean any solution I suggest is overtaken by events.

It’s always tempting to go for the easy option, the gut reaction. I was asked more than once to sign online petitions requesting the death penalty for those found guilty of the Delhi bus rape, recently, and I refused to do so, on the grounds that I am morally opposed to the death penalty in any circumstances. So I haven’t been doing very well, really, because as a moral relativist, I should really have been thinking that there are maybe situations where the death penalty is not only appropriate, but necessary, and maybe this was one of them, but I searched what passes for my conscience these days and I still couldn’t. It’s easy to shout for the death penalty if you are not the executioner, but I would imagine that actually having to pull the lever, then to try to get to sleep that night, and look at your face in the mirror the next morning is a different matter.

But yes, I have been doing it all wrong, lately. It’s alright for me to prattle on about Jesus and forgiveness, but I am spectacularly crap at it. I’m in danger of becoming the man who shouts “If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s intolerance!” Wasn’t I posting just a few weeks ago that I’d like to see the coal thieves get their hands chopped off, or something? How does that make me more of a moral arbiter than an Islamist Wingnut of the Thames Ditton branch of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade? It doesn’t, really. In fact, the Koran does say that the hand of a thief must be cut off if certain conditions are fulfilled. But again, here I struggle – one of the conditions for hand amputation is if the item(s) stolen have to have actual worth:

“The stolen property should be something of worth, because that which is of no worth has no sanctity, such as musical instruments, wine and pigs.”

My problem with that is the definition of “worth”. As a vegetarian, music-loving wine-bibbler, those things all have great worth to me. I like pigs. They are as intelligent as three-year old children, less trouble, and much more appealing. Which is why, I suppose, I am not a Muslim. Or an anything, really. I’m a Violent Irrational Quaker, a Lapsed Agnostic, strictly Chapel of Rest. But it’s not for the want of trying. As I said last week, I have been grappling with these issues seriously now for eight long years, and getting nowhere. Well, actually, getting somewhere, but nowhere anywhere near a conclusion. The conclusion is that there never will be a conclusion. Because in the end it is an act of faith. Which makes the rather smug pronouncements by the adherents of Richard Dawkins on his Official Richard Dawkins Facebook Page look rather stupid, really.

It’s all too easy to deride organised religion – I should know, I do it all the time, especially when it needs deriding, whether it’s the Pope trying to cover up child abuse or the Church of England saying that gay bishops can only move diagonally. But what these smug gits, sorry, “ardent followers of Richard Dawkins” fail to appreciate, is that there is a world of difference between mocking the foibles of organised religion (and incidentally overlooking any good it might have done) and the direct experience of something other than physical “reality”. Claiming that science-based atheism is “better” than religion is like claiming that engineering is better than dancing.

Fine, go ahead, be an atheist, but there’s no need to be so damn nasty about it: just don’t ram it down my throat, as Linda Lovelace said to Chuck Traynor. These people, with their seeming desire to attack every aspect of religion, not just the bad bits, are as depressing an example of zealotry as the extremist Christians on the other side who refuse to believe in dinosaurs or insist on wearing bloody crosses. Once again I find myself (as with the Muslims) of being the voice of reason in the middle saying hey, let’s cut each other a little slack – and when you get to the stage where the voice of reason is me, then you know things are really bad. The Islamist extremists and the far right are squaring up to each other, the fundamental Christians and the sneering atheists are squaring up to each other – it’s like the countdown to Armageddon, and Armageddon outa here!

It’s no wonder that I find myself looking back more and more on the days of my childhood, when everything seemed possible and everything seemed inexorably bound to lead to progress and improvement. I found, last week, on Youtube, the opening sequence to “Fireball XL5”, which I used to watch when I was eight years old. We truly thought, back in those days, that by now we’d all be wearing space suits and taking our holidays on Mars. Harold Wilson was wittering on about the white heat of technology, and space seemed even nearer to me than it did to many of my schoolmates, since my dad worked at a factory that made jet aeroplanes.

Looking at it now, fifty years later, three things sprung out at me (apart from the fact that we were easily pleased in those days because we knew no better - I doubt my 8-year-old nephew Adam would sit through it!)

a) in the opening credits – “Supermarionation” - I am tipping that is where the creators of Super Mario got the name from. I haven’t checked, but no doubt someone will prove me either right or wrong

b) How incredibly phallic Fireball XL5 is - something totally lost on me in 1963, or at least something I didn't connect with at the time. And

c) The takeoff mechanism of Fireball XL5 is exactly the same as that of a Doodlebug. At first, I sort of thought that maybe this was something to do with Wernher Von Braun going to work in California after the war (don’t ask me how) but it turns out that Fireball XL5 was actually made in Slough, of all places.

Whatever its faults though - and it is easy now to scoff at the idealism of the 1960s when technology was supposed to be the answer to everything, giving us lives of leisure and electricity too cheap to meter – it was an era when anything and everything seemed possible, and progress seemed assured. How different to the home life of our green and pleasant land. These days, rockets usually mean high explosive. We’re back to Wernher Von Braun again – “I reach for the stars, but sometimes I miss, and hit London.”

“Don't say that he's hypocritical
Say rather that he's apolitical
"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down
That's not my department," says Wernher von Braun”

And so we come to Sunday, the Feast of St Sebastian. If there is a lesson to be learned from the life of St Sebastian, it is surely to stay well clear of The Archers, something which I have been carrying through in my daily life ever since they mistakenly, stupidly and unnecessarily killed off Nigel Pargetter by chucking him off the roof on New Year’s Eve 2011. Because he is commonly depicted being tied to a tree and shot with arrows, this has given rise to one or two common misconceptions, the first being that his last words were “one Hundred and eighty”, and the second that this was the cause of his demise. In fact he survive the arrows, was nursed back to health, and then rather unwisely indulged in some personal criticism of the Emperor Diocletian, which lead to him being clubbed to death.

Eliot wrote a suppressed poem (in one of his early notebooks, The Inventions of the March Hare) which was only published after his death, called The Love Song of St Sebastian. Scholars argue over the dating of the poem, and Eliot himself nicked half his own title for The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock, which started modern poetry in 1917 in exactly the same way as the Beatles started sexual intercourse in 1963, while I was busy watching Fireball XL5.

Eliot’s poem is certainly strange, and has led to much speculation about the poet’s own sexuality, but as I read it, it is definitely heterosexual, at least in content if not in intent, because the poet adopts the voice, the persona of St Sebastian, addressing St Irene of Rome, who nursed him back to health after the arrows incident, alternately declaring his feelings for her and at the same time saying he should have strangled her, for preventing his martyrdom. Whether or not it was really addressed to Jean Verdenal (Mort Aux Dardenelles, 1915) and whether or not Eliot had feelings for the man, and ever acted on them, is really taking us in to the territory of “how many children had Lady Macbeth”, - does it add anything to the interpretation of the poem? Lyndall Gordon and Carole Seymour-Jones have both shown that Eliot flirted with homosexuality, maybe even with homosexuals, but in the 1920s, those days of “masculine women and feminine men”, this may have been a lifestyle choice in the circles which he inhabited.

“And when the morning came
Between your breasts should lie my head.
I would come with a towel in my hand
And bend your head beneath my knees;
Your ears curl back in a certain way
Like no one’s else in all the world.
When all the world shall melt in the sun,
Melt or freeze,
I shall remember how your ears were curled.
I should for a moment linger
And follow the curve with my finger
And your head beneath my knees---
I think that at last you would understand.
There would be nothing more to say.
You would love me because I should have strangled you”

Saint Sebastian is a popular male saint, as in “popular among men”, with distinct homoerotic overtones, at least in some of the historical depictions of him, so any day now I expect the Synod to chuck him out, and he is the patron saint of athletes, soldiers, and, rather sportingly in the circumstances, archers. No hard feelings, eh, lads? He is also invoked as a protector against the Plague. As a saint and martyr, he falls into that period where the early Christian church was being persecuted in Rome, probably by the same sort of people who, these days, would post facetious Facebook messages in support of Richard Dawkins.

As I’ve tried to outline above, though, being prepared to die for your beliefs and principles can be a sign of big trouble for the rest of us. Maybe we need to redefine martyrdom so it’s a lot less chic, a lot less fashionable, a lot less smart. So maybe the smarter thing to do is to try and engage, cut people some slack, try to understand, and maybe, heaven forfend, to live and let live, and agree to differ. Be a smarter Martyr. Someone please tell Al Qaeda, Opus Dei, the house of Laity of the Church of England, the Westboro Batist Church, and the Official Richard Dawkins Facebook Page. Blessed are the cheesemakers, for they shall make cheese. These are my principles, if you don’t like them, I have others. We laugh at Groucho Marx for saying this, but maybe he had a point.

As for me, next week, maybe it’s time I stopped fannying around and feeling sorry for myself, and got stuck back into some things that need getting stuck back into. (Is that even grammatical?). I’ve been like a fart trapped in a colander these last few weeks, so many holes I don’t know which one to choose for best.

Anyway. Despite the fact that the last time I organised a festival, the single thing that it achieved is now (twenty years later) potentially being bombed to shit in a war zone, I am thinking of organising another one! Maybe to raise money for Rain Rescue and/or a homeless project. Or both.

In honour of this particular part of the Holme Valley, I am thinking of calling it “Lockstock”. If I build it, they will come. That’s all I have at the moment, a name. A name, an idea, two sleepy dogs, and a fire to mend. Or maybe several fires to mend. It’s a long road, but the pilgrimage of a thousand miles starts with a single step, and in many ways, life itself is a secular pilgrimage. My armour is dented, and needs a polish, my scallop shell is next door somewhere, and my staff is in the lobby. Rocinante, my wheelchair, is old and creaky – or maybe it’s just me. None of us likes this crazy war, Wilmot. It’s time for a futile gesture, and possibly a needless sacrifice. It won’t be easy. Who’s with me, then?

Epiblog for the Feast of St Enogatus

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. And another cold one. The weather man on Look North has been preparing us for this snow since Friday, so we have been hunkering down and expecting it, and no doubt the purveyors of rock salt and snow chains have been counting up their profits as they trouser tenner after tenner off the back of it. So, of course, it hasn’t snowed. It’s a bright, brilliant, crisp Sunday morning, and it’s absolutely freezing, probably literally, if the draught whistling round my ankles while I type this is anything to go by. The sky is the colour of a biscuit-thin china duck egg, and the rain filling all of the waterlogged pots and troughs on the decking has a glazed meniscus of ice.

I did think it was starting to snow last night, when I went out last thing at about 11.30 to take the rubbish out and lock up. It was that sort of very fine, very cold snow that touches your face like the brush of feathers from an angel’s wings, but it wasn’t laying, and it must’ve actually warmed up during the night (at least in relative terms it’s still decidedly parky!) Maybe my face was, in fact, just being brushed by the feathers of angels' wings.

Speaking of draughts, this week we have doubled the number of draught-excluders, and we now have one at each door to this room, and still the cold finds new ways to seep in, so that once you move out of the cosy ambit of the stove, it’s like Captain Oates opening a door and stepping out into the blizzard. What I really need is some 1980s leg warmers, or puttees. I may experiment later by wrapping my legs in bubble wrap and gaffer-tape. I asked Debbie if she would bring Slippy, the third draught-excluder, down from upstairs (yes, our draught-excluders each have names, how twee is that, on the twee scale?) and she replied that there was a problem: he needs vacuuming first, because he is still covered in ginger fur from when Nigel used to “shag him”, as she put it.

I doubt Nigel’s interest was actually sexual, since he, too, was a member of the Counter-Tenors, his pompoms having long resided in a glass jar somewhere at Greenside Veterinary Surgery in Mapplewell, it was probably more to do with the warmth and comfort of fur-fabric, but anyway, until Slippy is rehabilitated from his ordeal at the paws of Nigel, he remains, as a draught-excluder, hors de combat.

So, we’ve largely spent the week huddled in front of the stove, and the store of seasoned logs has gone down, as has the stack of coal bags in the porch, as we’ve tried to keep the weather at bay. The poor birds have been out looking for nuts, bread, anything really. I put out a couple of mouldy muffins the other day and it was like a scene out of Hitchcock. The squirrels, too, seem to be active, hanging off the bird feeders in the trees and making forays onto the decking in search of anything vaguely edible.

The news on the Elvis front is not brilliant. He’s still on antibiotics, he hasn’t been signed off by the vet, he's also got an ear infection, and he’s not coping well with stuff. So he’s still at Danewalk for the time being, where they know him and can care for him more effectively. In the meantime, Zak and Freddie have been staying with us until today, Sunday, when they went home at lunchtime, via a crisp walkies in the woods with Grandad.

This has made feeding time rather complicated. Zak will basically eat anything. Freddie is a fussy feeder – his favourite food in the whole world being freshly cooked mince (yes, spoiled at home, I agree) or, if he can’t get that, cat food. So you can begin to grasp the nature of the problem. Matilda’s state of armed neutrality and mutually-assured destruction with Zak and Freddie doesn’t really extend to sharing communal meals, and also she needs a worming tablet (more of a precaution than anything, although she has been drinking out of the disgusting muddy water in the aforementioned flooded pots on the decking, which is a common source of poolworm infection in cats, I gather).

So, feeding them all, at more or less the same time, making sure everyone has something, and making sure everyone, ideally has their own food, is a bit like solving one of those maths problems I could never do in school, where a man sets out in a van, drives 35 miles at 20 miles an hour then stops for lunch and you have to work out when he will overtake the cyclist who left Penney Hassett at 10AM on the road to Borchester. Zak will only eat his food if the bowl is put down in exactly the right place where he is always fed when he comes here. Put the bowl anywhere else, and he will jump off his chair, go to it, sniff it, and then jump straight back on the chair again, leaving the food untouched.

Freddie likes to have a couple of mouthfuls out of his own bowl, having first checked that there is nothing better on offer, then to stroll over to Zak’s bowl and have a couple of mouthfuls out of there. Zak, meanwhile, seeing Freddie’s bowl unguarded – even though it is Freddie’s bowl, and in the “wrong” place – slinks off his chair and goes and finishes up Freddie’s leavings. Freddie, meanwhile, is busy removing the gravy bones and other biscuits from the general mixture in Zak's bowl, one by one, and bringing them back to the carpet in front of the fire, one by one, and sitting there and crunching them up, one by one. He probably expends more in energy than he gains in nutrition, but at least it keeps him occupied.

This morning, in order to make sure Matilda had her tablet without the dogs filching it, Debbie let them out into the garden and then shut them out while she put Matilda’s food down, with the tablet crunched up in it. Needless to say, the cat had just got to the bit with the worming tablet in it when the dogs arrived back at the door and started a cacophony of barking to be let back in, so she muttered under her breath and scuttled off, growling. The tablet remains uneaten as I type.

I haven’t been keeping up with the news from the outside world this week as I have had my head too deep in the long term planning to notice. Deb’s back teaching with a vengeance, and it looks like there might be a new course in Calderdale in the offing. Just as well, because it looks as though her Tuesday morning one is on its way out. Last Tuesday, she got up before dawn, did two hours preparation and then set off in the grim greyness to some Godforsaken outreach centre north of Huddersfield, only to find she was the only one there. She hung around for a while, but no students turned up, so she gave up and came home. She was pretty philosophical about it; if they’d done it to me, I’d have hunted them down and sent them an invoice for lost sleep.

My week’s been planning, accounts, PR for Gez’s new book, Changes (mostly directed at people who didn’t care if I lived or died) and more accounts. Oh, and did I say accounts? Also, the deadline for my tax return is looming, so I did what any sensible person would do in the circumstances, and started work on writing a new story. I have, however, seen sense and got back on to some “real” work as the week progressed. I’ve also taken the plunge to convert the first two of my back catalogue titles to Kindle format – now all I need is 130 customers to download them when available, and I will have recouped the conversion cost!

The rest and recuperation we enjoyed over Christmas are but a distant memory, and we must be fast approaching “Blue Monday” or whatever it’s called, officially the most depressing day of the year. It would be very easy, if I allowed myself, to become depressed every day, the way things are going. Not just materially; in fact, things are possibly slightly better there than they were this time last year, in material terms, though it’s still one step forward, two steps back, up with the rocket and down with the stick, and we’re not out of the woods yet. It’s my spiritual side that I’m really thinking about. Yes, I do have a spiritual side, or rather I used to.

I started writing these Epilogues (now Epliblogs) in 2004, believe it or not. Eight years ago. A lot has changed in the last eight years, and not much of it for the better. And here I find myself, once again, eight years later, on the Feast of St Enogatus, wondering why I am doing this. I’m still no further on in finding answers to the questions that were troubling me then, and I’m still as lost and bewildered as I ever was. True, as an exercise in crisis management, the last eight years has been a tour de force, and several major crises have been averted. I’ve also learned a lot about desk top publishing, and have published several desk tops. But I still find myself with Thomas Hardy, in “He Never Expected Much”:

Well, World, you have kept faith with me,
Kept faith with me;
Upon the whole you have proved to be
Much as you said you were.
Since as a child I used to lie
Upon the leaze and watch the sky,
Never, I own, expected I
That life would all be fair.

'Twas then you said, and since have said,
Times since have said,
In that mysterious voice you shed
From clouds and hills around:
`Many have loved me desperately,
Many with smooth serenity,
While some have shown contempt of me
Till they dropped underground.

`I do not promise overmuch,
Child; overmuch;
Just neutral-tinted haps and such,'
You said to minds like mine.
Wise warning for your credit's sake!
Which I for one failed not to take,
And hence could stem such strain and ache
As each year might assign.

Which just about sums it up, really. I know I should be saying at this point that I’m going to achieve some of my long-term goals this year, and I should witter on about the power of gradual change, as I have done in recent years, but right now, today, I just want to work on my story and finish it, then curl up in a warm ball and go to sleep. Preferably without any more bits falling off the house, the camper, me, Debbie the animals, or my life. Preferably til about Easter. So, if you came here looking for enlightenment, I am fresh out of it today. I didn’t have an epiphany on the feast of the epiphany, and I don’t have any messages. Try Western Union. There might be a new delivery next week, if Big G gets his van mended.

I started out on Burgundy, but soon hit the harder stuff
And everybody said they’d stand by me, when the game got rough;
But the joke was on me, there was nobody even there to bluff,
I’m going back to New York City, I do believe I’ve had enough.

As the late, great, Robert Zimmerframe puts it so well. Next week, I shall be mainly managing my expectations, I guess, and looking out for those neutral-tinted haps. Who knows, maybe I’ll be pleasantly surprised. It’s my own fault that I’ve got myself into this brown study, thinking back over the last eight years, and no doubt I’ll snap out of it. I need to, because I need to be strong next week and this year, for the sake of all the people who depend on me, even if they don’t know it, including the ones who have four legs and a furry brain the size of a walnut.

St Enogatus was a bishop in 7th century Brittany, by the way; he was a successor to St Malo, and, in common with his predecessor, managed to have a town named after him. In St Enogatus’s case, one with lots of holiday cottages. Such is the wonder of the internet – you log on to look up an obscure French saint, and end up considering booking a holiday!

In the meantime,it's a Thomas Hardy sort of a day, here, just me and the Darkling Thrush, and he's the only one who knows why he's singing. If anybody finds my mojo down the back of the sofa, box its ears and send it home.

Epiblog for the Feast of the Epiphany

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. At least the weather has turned a bit milder, though, just when we were all in danger of freezing our pompoms off. Well, those of us that have pompoms, which I guess narrows it down to, well, just me, really, since Zak and Freddie are definitely both counter-tenors these days, Matilda never had any to start with, and Debbie’s are only figurative (though possibly more in evidence than most).

The coming of the milder, kinder weather has revealed the true extent of the damage to the garden, though. All the leaves that have been shredded off the trees by the autumn and winter gales are plastered all over everything in a disintegrating brown mulch. I realise that this is probably ecologically very good for the soil, and if I were Monty Don, I would probably dig them in and give the earthworms a treat. But I am not Monty Don, nor was I meant to be. When it comes to gardening, I am probably more like Don Corleone, with occasional forays into Don Quixote.

I have, however, been looking at it and trying to plan what we are going to do with it this (I almost typed “next”) year. Especially now that this year seems to have arrived. In fact, I have been trying to get down to planning all sorts of things this year. I have a business plan to write, maybe two; I have to plan what work we’ll be able to do on the house, if any; I have to plan what we’re going to do in the garden this summer – and, judging from last year, it will involve irrigation channels, paddy fields, and a hosepipe ban – and I now have to plan Uncle Phil’s itinerary, as he is coming over from Australia in May!

Matilda, of course, has no idea what year it is anyway, but seemed relatively unfazed by the fireworks on New Year’s Eve, and has passed the week in her usual manner, batting flat Eric and Big Mouse around the floor, playing with her ping-pong ball (originally a set of three, two of which she’s lost already) watching Cat TV out of the conservatory door, and sleeping. That just about sums it up, apart from the occasional excursions into civil engineering in the cat litter tray.

As far as Elvis goes, he’s still pretty much the same, apparently, so we’re still a dog down on the deal. Maybe there’ll be better news next week.

We actually saw New Year in quietly, at home, as we were both too tired, really, to do anything else. I did the usual Granny Fenwick thing of sweeping out the old year, and ushering in the new, and I came back in with a piece of coal – not so much first footing, as first trundling.

The next day dawning bright and fine, Debbie declared it a holiday and we took Zak and Freddie off to the Macclesfield Canal, where Debbie did two hours of highly symbolic kayaking in a bitter, biting wind, and I stayed in the camper under a blanket with the dogs and wrote some more of The Bow of Barnsdale Bar. Though the wind was absolutely perishing, it was a fine day, and there were even a couple of narrowboats chugging up and down, and loads of people walking along the towpath, some with dogs, all blowing away the cobwebs of Christmas and New Year’s Eve, no doubt. When Debbie got back and loaded up the boat, she offered the dogs the chance of walkies. Freddie voted with his paws by turning round, curling up into an even tighter ball and snoring. Zak got out briefly, for about as long as it took him to realise how cold it was, and then turned tail and came back, jumped up on the bed, and joined Freddie. So we drove home, to where the nice warm fire is.

When I haven’t been planning stuff this week, I have been skiving off from real work by doing the family history. It’s all the fault of the Mayans, as I said last week. Anyway, convulsed into action in a futile quest to find out who I really am before I am extinguished by some cosmic (or even domestic) catastrophe, I’ve actually made a huge amount of progress in sorting out the morass of chaos that my notes had descended into. I did a phone interview this week about Granny Fenwick’s Recipes and Remedies with a journalist from the Hull Daily Mail and she asked me if there were any plans for a follow-up, and I realised that there probably is enough material for a full family history, though who would read it, apart from the Fenwicks of course, is anyone’s guess. Another potential snag is that, for the sake of completeness, in writing such a book I would also need to do Debbie’s family tree, and at the moment some of her family still live in it.

I have long suspected that all of the news is pre-recorded at this time of year to allow journalists the same Christmas holiday as the rest of us, but obviously The Hull Daily Mail was still working at any rate. You could be forgiven for thinking that the rest of the news this week had been randomly generated by a rogue news application, though.

I had already written in previous blogs about the way in which the Church of England was going out of its way to appear stupendously irrelevant and make itself a laughing stock over the issue of women bishops. This week, to my horrified amazement, they topped it off with an even more bizarre pronouncement about gay bishops – we can have gay bishops, apparently, but only if they keep one foot on the floor or cross their fingers while having sex. Failure to observe this simple rule of Canon Law will bring the Chastity Inquisition (I bet you didn’t expect that) abseiling through the window on a zip-wire, hurling a smoking thurible into the room, and shouting “Step away from the KY Jelly!”

The last time I checked, there were at least two women on Facebook who are actually called Gay Bishop, and the news that they are no longer allowed to have sex is going to come as a bit of a shock to them. Although, judging from their profile pictures, it may just end up being the de jure confirmation of a situation which already existed de facto.

I have heard all the arguments on both sides of this case about the Bible says this and the Bible says that and my answer is, I am afraid, rather simple. The Bible says God is love. And I say that you can make the Old Testament mean anything you want it to mean. If you took it literally, you wouldn’t be able to have a ferret kebab while wearing a spandex body-suit. And we’d still be stoning people. Church of England, listen! You are arguing about a massive irrelevance. Those who want to believe that women and gay people are second-class beings in some way should perhaps find an island somewhere, and go and live there. Meanwhile, Church of England, the rest of you, there is work to be done, and souls to be saved, in this world. Stop wittering about people's sexuality and get on with it.

The Junta certainly isn’t going to save the souls of the supposedly second-class. No sooner had my jaw been re-wired after the gay bishops farrago, than Westminster Council announced that it was thinking of making people who it judges are too fat perform some exercises before they will be paid any benefits!

My first reaction on hearing this was that it would make a great theme park. Perhaps a suitable location in Westminster could be flooded and turned into “Doleworld” where, instead of porpoises, seals, orcas and other aquatic creatures, benefit claimants in Speedos, Budgie-Smugglers and Matalan Tankinis could jump through hoops, balance beach balls on their noses, and perform tricks for the diversion of the rich people who live there.

My second reaction, which, I have to say, followed on quite swiftly from the first, was that anyone who can’t afford to pay the exorbitant and grandiose demands of the energy companies for heating this winter because their benefits have been stopped by Westminster Council, should keep warm and get some exercise by setting fire to… Westminster Council. I am sure that quite a few of the homeless people they’ve persecuted over the years will hold the matches for you. To the burghers of Westminster I would say, appropriately enough for Twelfth Night:

“Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?”

The stage is now set for some latter-day Swift to come along and write “A Modest Proposal for Feeding the Landed Gentry off the Bodies of the Corpulent Sturdy Beggars” or some such pamphlet, but it seems The Daily Mash has already scooped the pool with their suggestion that benefits claimants should each wear a headset and be remotely controlled by a member of the Middle Class, who knows what is best for everybody.

As I have said before, I am fine with the idea of a Benefits Card provided MPs also participate by having an Expenses Card, so that the rest of us can see that they are spending our money wisely on staplers and folders from Rymans, and not frittering it away on moat-cleaning. After all, we are all in this together, or so we’re always being told.

However, even as I typed those words, I realised that the MP Expenses Card would probably be a non-starter, because if the Tories win the next election, I can see people on benefits will be having to clean out the moats of the toffs for free, in return for their dole money, while their friends watch and bray with laughter, all the time scoffing canapés and swilling champagne.

The sad thing is, though, that all this lunacy does have a darker side. The constant drip drip drip of denigration of people whose circumstances have taken an unfortunate turn by Iain Duncan Smith, a man who refused to be moved from his post at the last reshuffle so he could go on grinding the faces of the poor into the dust, is having an effect. A TUC-commissioned poll showed as much this week. Most of the pronouncements of the TUC are (rather fittingly) completely crackers, but this one had rather a ring of truth about it. Of the people surveyed, the figure they came up with for the proportion of the total welfare budget spent on unemployment benefit was 48%. The actual figure is 3%. And the total they came up with for the amount of the budget lost in fraud was 27%, when the actual figure is 0.7%.

It just goes to show that if you repeat a lie often enough, and loudly enough, people will believe it rather than believing the truth. A lie can be half-way round the world before the truth has even got its trousers on, as the saying goes. I can’t remember if that was said by Churchill, Hitler or Stalin, but no doubt somebody will write in and tell me. The first correct answer wins a doorknob.

Old Irritable Bowel IDS has been caught out telling porkies again this week, this time by Channel 4’s Fact Check Blog, which took him to task for inaccurate assertions on the growth of Child Benefit claims under the last (inept, shambolic) government, as opposed to the present (inept, shambolic) government. When confronted with the evidence that the figure asserted of 58% was actually more like 8%, the DWP Press Office apparently said that the 58% figure represented the official figures after an “adjustment” had been made, and promised a “clarification”. If Channel 4 ever gets that clarification, I will bare my arse in Woolworths’ window.

I don’t know why I should be so surprised at this. It’s what governments do, and they’ve been doing it a long time. What I really resent, I suppose, is that they take me for a Duggie, and they think I am stupid enough to believe it. Whatever else happens this year, I won’t be holding my breath for an outbreak of sanity.

So, yes, it’s the start of the year. Lots of planning to do. And it’s also the Feast of the Epiphany, which in the Orthodox Eastern Church is actually Christmas, because, in addition to wearing gold-encrusted jiffy bags, all looking like members of ZZ Top, and having wacky names like The Archimandrite of Alexandria, they also run to a different calendar to the rest of Christianity. As I’ve said many times before, if they’re Orthodox, I’d like to see the Oddfellows.

At this time of year, with all these lists to be made, it really can feel as if (in the words of the REM song) you are pushing an elephant up the stairs. (By the way, if you think the REM song is an annoying earworm, try having “Bump the Elephant”, as suggested to me by Meen Bonkers, one of my Facebook friends, this week. Or rather, don’t, you’ll never rid your synapses of the damn thing.) There is simply an overwhelming weight of things to be done, to be sorted out, to be planned. And at the same time, it’s the last knockings of the Christmas festivities – Twelfth Night. Yes, by Saint Anne, and ginger shall be hot i’the mouth, too!

It’s a bitter-sweet sort of a day. In fact, it’s been a bitter-sweet week, really. I couldn’t help but think of Kitty, who was here last New Year’s Eve and not this one. Then January 3rd was the 27th anniversary of my mother’s death. 27 years! Can you even believe it? And then, in the course of doing the family history research, I stumbled across something online that really shook me up. It was one of those bizarre coincidences that sometimes make you winder if there really is such a thing as coincidence or if Jung was right, and everything really is all connected up to everything else in a vast web of synchronicity.

I’d been looking at the Rudd family notes and I remembered that back in 2005, I’d briefly been in contact with an Albert Rudd who was apparently connected with Great Uncle Ernie, who was something to do with the Trawlermens’ Union in Hull, which had offices on West Dock Avenue. I was having trouble fitting the various bits of the tree together, a task made more difficult by the fact that the Rudds made a habit of not calling people by the names they were Christened with, and that there were at least two Alberts and at least two Ernests, an Albert Ernest and an Ernest Albert. Not so much the importance of being Ernest, but the importance of being the right Ernest.

Anyway, I thought it was time maybe to get in touch with Albert again, and see if he could shed any light. I didn’t have his address to hand, however, but I thought I more or less knew it, and the name of the road where he lived in Hornsea was relatively unusual, so I thought I’d just do a quick Google and check the postcode, then I could bang off a letter to him. The search led me not to his address, but – sadly – to an online version of his obituary notice. He died in 2006. That, however, was not the really sad or bizarre thing.

The really sad and bizarre thing was that, underneath Albert’s obituary notice was another one, with an unusual surname that I recognised. It was for the mother of a girl I used to know when I worked in Beverley in the late 1970s, the era I wrote about in Sunday Girl. As I read it, its true import sank in, in that it listed all the offspring in the usual format – “Mother of…” and amongst those listed was “the late Vanessa”.

So Vanessa was dead. I knew her when I worked in the bookshop. She was never my girlfriend or anything like that; at the time when I knew her, I was already in a relationship, albeit a long-distance and rather sporadic one, and Vanessa actually progressed from being a customer to being an acquaintance to being a friend without passing through that awkward nexus of having to decide whether to have a fling with her or not. She was a student teacher, and, like me at the time, she used to ride a little put-putty motorbike, and we used to talk about bikes and other things. She was bright, she was funny, and she was quite pretty. In other circumstances, I could have been quite tempted. She’d probably have run a mile! She used to hang about with all of us from the bookshop, or at least those of us who were all more or less the same age. She even signed my leaving card when I moved from Beverley to Chichester in 1980. And now she’s dead. In fact, she must’ve died at some point between 1980 and 2006, when her mother’s notice was dated.

I suppose I should now go on from this to draw some sort of conclusion, some sort of observation that makes sense of that fact, but right now I can’t think of anything. I don’t really know why I am so shocked by it, except that you sort of expect all these people who you branched off from years ago to have carried on living parallel lives and to be happy elsewhere, and she isn’t.

It should be a consolation, though it probably isn’t, that today marks the feast of the Epiphany, when the three wise men, or the Magi, depending who you believe, came and found Jesus manifested to humanity, and brought him gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Mention of myrrh, though, reminds me of the story Alan Bennett told in Untold Stories about how he encountered a solitary woman in a country churchyard during one of his solitary church explorations. He complimented her on the church and its general upkeep, and she replied that they had been “having terrible trouble with the myrrh”. Puzzled by this, as it didn’t look particularly high Anglican, Bennett asked her to elucidate: she replied, as if talking to a halfwit,

“The myrrh. It’s broken doyen. Seow we hed to cut the grars in the churchyard bye hand.”

Gold, frankincense and myrrh seems an odd combination of gifts, especially as myrrh is used by the Egyptians in funerary rites. The symbolism is that both frankincense and myrrh are the coagulated gums of sap extruded by wounds in the bark of thorn trees, so there is obvious symbolism there, presaging the crucifixion and the crown of thorns. There is also the attendant symbolism that the three wise men also stand for the “old” religions’ acceptance of, and acquiescence to, the idea of Christ as the saviour. I, meanwhile, can only hope it’s true, and that somewhere in the Great Beyond, what passes for heaven, what remains of whatever was the essence of the spirit of Vanessa is happy.

The scene with the Magi around Jesus in his crib has often been depicted in art and frequently the subject of poetry. I first read The Journey of the Magi by T S Eliot at the age of 17, and loved it for years, then came to think it rather passé. Lately, I have warmed to it again, especially so after reading in Lyndall Gordon’s book on Eliot that he said he wrote it one Sunday morning after church with the aid of half a bottle of Booth’s gin. I still slightly prefer the Sidney Godolphin seventeenth century poem, however:

LORD when the wise men came from farr
Ledd to thy Cradle by A Starr,
Then did the shepheards too rejoyce,
Instructed by thy Angells voyce,
Blest were the wisemen in their skill,
And shepheards in their harmelesse will.

Wisemen in tracing natures lawes
Ascend unto the highest cause,
Shepheards with humble fearefulnesse
Walke safely, though their light be lesse:
Though wisemen better know the way
It seemes noe honest heart can stray.

It is a complex poem, with several interlacing ideas, contrasting the actions of the shepherds with the wise men. I recommend reading it in its entirety. I take issue with Godolphin there, because I think it’s perfectly possible to be both a wise man and a shepherd – as I believe some of my ancestors were – but then, reading it again, perhaps that is the poet’s point after all.

Twelfth Night in this country is a last chance for wassail and revels, under the auspices of The Lord of Misrule. In the past, people would cook Twelfth Cake, a particularly solid type of fruitcake (of the sort currently running the country) with a hidden baked bean and a hidden clove. If you found the baked bean you were lucky, and you were voted King for the day - if you found the clove, however, you were the odd one out, the butt of the joke, the village idiot for a year. Sounds a bit harsh, but I guess they made their own entertainment in those days. Other traditional fare for Twelvetide includes Epiphany Tarts, which can be made to resemble panes of stained glass by using different coloured jams.

Meanwhile the rest of us have to close ranks and carry on, like I said before. And that means planning. Tomorrow is Plough Monday, the day when traditionally the plough was paraded through the village and blessed, before the plough teams resumed work on the land for the next year. Back to work, and God speed the plough! Meanwhile, I have to get my planning done, and then – even worse – actually carry out the plans I’ve made, both for me and others! No wonder it feels like an elephant. Come on, Jumbo! Come on, Nelly! Giddyup! One step at a time!