Epiblog for St Valerie's Day

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. Spring’s still struggling to catch up with the calendar, up here in the Pennines. It’s still stubbornly cold, although the days have been brighter, and the long evenings help with lifting the spirits a bit. 

I forgot to record in last week’s Epiblog how, on Saturday evening, we’d ventured out onto the decking and lit the chiminea for the first time this year. To be honest, it wasn’t a roaring success. The charcoal burnt well enough, and we managed to cook some vegan hot dogs on a wire rack balanced over the chimney, but the after-twilight cold was such that, eventually, we were driven back indoors. Still it was a start.  The surprise guest at the feast was Matilda, who decided to venture outside and join us, and also went down into the garden for a while, even though the dogs were here as well.  It was almost like she has just realised what the outside world was for.  Or that she’s settled in now, to the point where she no longer finds it daunting.

Anyway, as I say, the week’s been fine enough, with the occasional shower; I shouldn’t complain, but I do wish it would get warmer. A ten degree rise in the temperature would be most welcome, if anyone up there is listening and can do anything about it!

The birds and the squirrels continue to be busy amongst the branches outside my bedroom window on a morning; it’s almost like they are willing me to hurry up, which they probably are, because they know I’m going to chuck some stale bread and some peanuts out for them! 

We get the usual varieties of small tits (yes, I know, I am on the trail of the "Google whacker" again!) blackbirds and thrushes; there’s a little robin who visits, and of course there are the inevitable wood-pigeons, lumbering around like portly comedians, and a jaunty jay, with its head on one side, a cocky character, a Max Miller of the avian world, and Ronnie the raven who is actually a carrion crow.  Plus various grey squirrels, some of whom may or may not be family members of, or descendants of, Wilbert White-ear.

Finally, as well, in a belated acknowledgement of the fact that it is almost May, the first catkins have started appearing, giving a fuzzy green haze to the more distant trees, and the nearer ones nodding and dancing in the crisp spring breeze.

Debbie has been teaching til she drops, as usual; the College’s latest plan is to encourage people who don’t want to tick the box for voluntary redundancy to re-apply instead for a post to which they have been “mapped” by the College admin’s restructuring plan.  Or, the College could, of course, sack some of the £500 a day consultants they use, and not cut the hours of the part time lecturers, but that would, of course, be far too simple.  When she’s not been huddled inside a nest of papers, hammering on a laptop, Deb’s been making sure the hanging bird-feeders outside are bombed up with peanuts.  The other day, she was looking at the results of her handiwork, while insisting to me that she didn’t have a short attention span, breaking off in mid-sentence to exclaim “Ooh! A woodpecker!”

Brenda has been coming round for her tea on a fairly regular basis, although we don’t always see her.  She did, however, honour Owen’s presence with a visit on Friday night where she stayed outside the window for long enough for him to see her as well. He said we were very lucky, many people go through their whole lives without seeing a live badger.

The wider world continues to be a bewildering jumble of idiocy, stupidity and downright evil on behalf of those who are supposedly our betters, and in charge of things. Nominally, at any rate.  The ceaseless attack on those least able to bear the burden of paying for the mistakes of the rich continued this week. Given that 46% of the welfare budget goes on old age pensions, it was only a matter of time until some heartless grasping bastard came up with the idea that the old age pensioners should surrender some of the rewards of the state pension they’ve slaved all their lives for in order to keep the corporate robber barons in the luxury to which they have become accustomed. 

Cometh the hour, cometh the prat, in the form of Lord Bichard, a man whose entire career has been spent as a top civil servant or Quango-monger, and who retired at the age of 53 on an index linked annual pension of £120,000.  Lord Bichard thinks that pensioners should have to work for their money, and to be honest, I should imagine the feeling is mutual. Anyway, with people such as Lord Bichard on the case, it will only be a matter of time until it’s government policy that, after cremation, every dead person should make themselves useful by doing a stint in an egg timer. Purely voluntarily, of course.  

Politicians such as Clegg, Cameron and Osborne continue to obfuscate the debt and the deficit, and cherry-pick whichever definition suits them. Various party political broadcasts continue to assert (incorrectly) that the government has “cut the deficit by a third” – it hasn’t.  The figures, for a start, are based on a comparison between 2009-2010 and 2010-2011 fiscal years, and the figure is nearer 23% than 33.33%, but – as with all accountancy figures – it depends what you include and what you leave out; the Junta makes a point of including the most flattering interpretation. Since then, we haven’t had any more up to date figures, but, given the dismal lack of growth, I’d be surprised if plan A isn’t dead in the water.  They must be praying for someone else majorly famous to die, to provide another blanket distraction, al la Mrs Thatcher, before the local elections. If I was the Queen, I'd let Charles taste the porridge first.

The subtle manipulation of official statistics for political purposes wasn’t confined to the economy. Iain Duncan Irritable Bowel Smith popped up this week with a speech claiming that there are a million people on benefits who are capable of work, and have been so for three years.  This was eagerly lapped up by the media lickspittles in The Daily Mail and the Daily Express, who splashed headlines to the effect that there were a million scroungers on the dole across their front pages.

As usual, once you start to drill down into the figures, the situation is rather different. It is true that there are just over one million people who have claimed either Jobseeker's Allowance (JSA) or Income Support Lone Parents for three out of the past four years, or have been in the Work Related Activity Group or Assessment Phase of Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) for the same amount of time. But – for a start – 187,000 of those people are in the Work-Related Activity Group of ESA. This doesn’t mean that you are fit to work.  They were placed in the WRAG in the hope that they may be able to undertake work-related activities that might help them back into a job at some point in the future. Despite that fact that some of them are on chemotherapy, or have diseases which include spontaneous evacuation of the bowels. However it is wrong to describe this group as currently fit-to-work, and their eligibility for ESA is not in dispute. But the accidental-on-purpose, hopelessly optimistic use of the magic word “work” in their description doesn’t stop hard-of-thinking journalists labelling them as scroungers.

A further 117,000 people of the one million claimed to be "fit-to-work" are placed in the ESA Assessment Phase. This means that they have yet to have a Work Capability Assessment to test their eligibility for the benefit. To declare them all to be "fit-to-work" is therefore certainly premature. But, in the marvellous world of Oz, where ATOS declares double amputees as being fit for work as tap-dancers, it shouldn’t come as any surprise.

As the independent fact-checking web site Fullfact.org put it:

While the DWP has identified one million working age claimants that have been on benefits for three out of the past four years, the Daily Express and Daily Mail are wrong to claim that they are all necessarily "fit-to-work".  Almost a third of these people have either been assessed for ESA and found not to be fit for work, or are currently waiting to be assessed (of whom we would expect the majority to be found eligible for support). The newspapers would therefore have been on firmer ground claiming that 700,000 were fit-to-work yet living on benefits. However even this remaining two thirds - those claiming either Jobseeker's Allowance or Income Support for Lone Parents - need to be properly understood. While these benefits are targeted at people who are out of work, rather than those prevented from working by a debilitating condition, it is worth noting that people currently claiming these benefits may have been legitimately considered unable to work at other points in the four year period. In light of this, we'll be asking each paper to correct the record.

Good luck with that. It’s yet another lie that will be bandied in every pub in the country, while the truth is still struggling to get out of bed and get its trousers on.  In any case, it’s all academic, with 2.6 million unemployed.  The only person I know who suffers from spontaneous evacuation of the bowels and is currently in a job, is Iain Duncan Smith, and his evacuations get wiped up by the Daily Mail, which is all it’s fit for.

If you were deliberately seeking out instances of manipulative, daring leaps and incorrect conclusions, then you would also have noted the fabric of lies which UKIP wove into their party election broadcast this week. Of all of the questionable, actively evil, sub-Goebbels corrosive inflammatory crap being hosed around by the media in the days covered by this blog, this was the most offensive. UKIP, as a party, should have as its motto, “I’m not racist, but…” Its membership is composed of fruitcakes like John Sullivan, a UKIP councillor candidate in Gloucestershire, who congratulated Russia on banning Gay Pride marches and claimed that regular exercise can prevent homosexuality. Obviously, he has never been to a gym. In a series of Facebook posts, he likened gay activists to termites, and stated that feminism is evil and being gay is even worse.

It’s easy to laugh at this buffoons on one level, but the danger here is that the Junta’s own torrent of vilification of immigrants and/or those on benefits, thank you Iain Duncan-Smith, has actually been feeding UKIP, giving it what Thatcher once called “the oxygen of publicity”.  UKIP has got two things going for it. It’s latched on to the neglectful intransigence and unwillingness of the main parties to confront the problem of Europe and all it entails (an area where I do actually agree with Nigel Farage, though I hasten to add that my conclusions and solutions to the problem would be vastly different to his) and in this vacuum, it has woven a seductive mythos, confected around the simple message that “there are too many of them, they’re all over here on benefits, taking up all our jobs and resources.”

This strikes a chord with the white working class, especially those who have been neglected by the major parties in recent years, as they know that general elections are decided on a few hundred thousand swing votes in key marginals, and it doesn’t matter to them if a pensioner in Bolton is being forced to live off cat food on toast.

For a long time, people, including me, have been trying to tell the Labour Party especially, that they neglect the needs and concerns of white, working class voters at their peril. Nature abhors a vacuum and, into the vacuum which the New Labour project has created by ignoring huge areas of what used to be its most solid, bedrock supporters, has slipped the likes of UKIP, the EDL, and the BNP. They start by empathising with the disenfranchised, disaffected people in deprived communities, many of whom are elderly and who have probably, in their eyes, had enough of a world of madness, deprivation and uncertainty, a world where the things they used to be able to take for granted, a job, a neighbourhood, the friendliness of neighbours, a reasonable standard of living and healthcare, the local pub and post office, bus services and housing, are all either gone or under threat from people like Lord Bichard. It is no wonder they hark back to a bygone era.

UKIP offers tea and sympathy, and agrees with them that their lives are shitty. The voters respond. At last, someone is listening to them. Then the  far right Faragists play their trump card – “And do you know who is to blame for all these problems? Immigrants!”

You can’t entirely blame the voters. It’s a very plausible argument, one that comes with its own ready-made solution.  No one in the target audience, or very few people at any rate, will respond by saying, “Well, actually, immigration isn’t really as simple as all that, you have to take into account the numbers of people who actually leave the country as well as those who enter it,  and there are at least two ways of measuring that, and the government chooses between them depending what message it’s trying to get across;  plus, nobody, not even the government, knows how many illegal immigrants there really are, and the whole debate is skewed anyway by the issue of the EU, which says we have to accept any Tom, Dick or Harry, as long as he’s an EU citizen”. Nobody points out that social housing is under particular pressure, never having really recovered from the onslaught of Thatcher’s selloff, which has never been rectified.

It’s much easier to come up with the simple two-trick pony answer that UKIP peddles.  Your life is shit right now. (That, for many white working-class or elderly voters, particularly in Labour’s traditional heartlands, is often true, but because of government cuts and economic mismanagement, not immigration). And it is all the fault of Muslims, immigrants and asylum seekers. (False, of course, and even if it were true, these are three very different kettles of fish, but it suits the UKIP’s rhetoric much better to pretend they are all the same, or at least blur the issue).  Asylum seekers, for instance, are not allowed to work until their request to remain is accepted, and can only claim, if they are lucky, £36.62 per week in cash support from the UK Borders Agency (which is being abolished anyway).

In view of all these attempts to mislead us this week, it seems strangely apposite that the Collect for today, the Third Sunday after Easter, starts, according to my copy of The Book of Common Prayer:

ALMIGHTY God, who shewest to them that be in error, the light of thy truth, to the intent that they may return into the way of righteousness…

The past week contained St George’s Day, of course, a day when there was much debate over what it meant to be English in England. Every year, the media is full of stories of people who have obviously swallowed the UKIP manifesto, hook, line and "stinker", complaining that in some way they are being made to feel “second best” in “their own country”.

Coincidentally, it’s also coincided with a week when I’ve made some major discoveries in my own family history research, as a result of getting back in touch with a couple of family members who I didn’t even know were interested in genealogy, and who turn out to have progressed it further back than I have!  And, of course, it turns out that my own ancestors were probably descended from immigrants stock – if Vikings count as immigrants (well, they did in those days) and in more recent times, they immigrated from rural Norfolk to the seething, bubbling, industrial melting-pot that was Victorian Hull.  So yes, in that sense, Benjamin Rudd, who set off from Hilgay Fen and ended up running a steam engine in an oil seed crushing mill on Holderness Road, did indeed get on his bike and look for work. The major difference between now and then being that, in his case, when he got there, there were plenty of jobs to choose from.  Not that this stopped Victorian employers from treating the working poor like absolute serfs and chattels, to be disposed of at will. (Something else that, given the opportunity, will no doubt be in the next Tory manifesto).

When I want to think of England though, and what it means to be English, I think of things like John Betjeman’s description of Highworth, or – paradoxically, increasingly these days, the writings of a Frenchman, Hilaire Belloc, who only became a British citizen in 1902.  Yet, in his writings about the Sussex Downs and about the English landscape generally, he catches a rare sensitivity, even though he never abandoned his essentially European viewpoint on things such as faith and politics.

Sally is gone that was so kindly,
Sally is gone from Ha'nacker Hill
And the Briar grows ever since then so blindly;
And ever since then the clapper is still...
And the sweeps have fallen from Ha'nacker Mill.

Ha'nacker Hill is in Desolation:
Ruin a-top and a field unploughed.
And Spirits that call on a fallen nation,
Spirits that loved her calling aloud,
Spirits abroad in a windy cloud.

Spirits that call and no one answers --
Ha'nacker's down and England's done.
Wind and Thistle for pipe and dancers,
And never a ploughman under the Sun:
Never a ploughman. Never a one.

Are lines that I first learnt when I moved to Chichester in 1980, and discovered Halnaker Hill, and the South Downs, and The Trundle.  Belloc, in his polemical works and journalism, believed (like the people who bleat about St George’s Day) that England was “done”, because of a descent into public corruption and moral decay, and he wasn’t shy about pointing the finger of blame. Controversially, in some cases, in his books attacking the Jews and the Muslims.  We must be wary, of course, of judging a writer of the 1920s and 30s, when casual racism was in many ways de rigueur, from the viewpoint of today. We do not know how Belloc’s views would have been modified by a full and exhaustive understanding of the holocaust. He himself was in decline from 1942, when his son, Peter was killed, and died in 1950, living a quiet, reclusive, feeble declining life at King’s Land, near Shipley.

Plus, he made the fundamental error of post hoc, ergo propter hoc, in his attacks: one might almost call it the UKIP error – because some of the people he castigated for corruption in public life – in the Marconi affair, for instance - happened to be Jewish, he tarred the entire race with the same brush – pretty much in the same way that the Daily Mail believes that because a few people (statistically speaking) make fraudulent benefit claims, everyone must be at it.

The writings of Belloc are a classic illustration of how it’s possible to be a contradictory, often selfish, sometimes unlikeable person, and yet still a great writer. See also under T S Eliot.  If you wanted a single poem that encapsulates a feeling for the English landscape, albeit with excursions into the poet’s own essential weirdness, you could go a lot further than Belloc’s poem (which is really a song, because he always sang it, never recited it) The Winged Horse:

Its ten years ago today you turned me out o’ doors
To cut my feet on flinty lands and stumble down the shores,
And I thought about the all-in-all, oh more than I can tell!
But I caught a horse to ride upon and I rode him very well,
He had a flame behind the eyes of him and wings upon his side.
And I ride, and I ride!

I rode him out of Wantage and I rode him up the hill,
And there I saw the Beacon in the morning standing still,
Inkpen and Hackpen and southward and away
High through the middle airs in the strengthening of the day,
And there I saw the channel-glint, and England in her pride.
And I ride, and I ride!

Inkpen and Hackpen are ancient hill-forts on the Berkshire Downs, and I have no idea whether or not you can actually see the Channel glint from the top of them, perhaps one of my kind readers who lives in the area could climb up and have a look for me, because I doubt I will ever see the Lambourn Hills or the Vale of the White Horse again.

The other part of Belloc’s poem/song which resonates with me is the envoi, which is also a great shout of defiance from the poet, about those who took away his “all-in-all”, the fates that conspired against him, and cast him “out o’ doors” – that despite all that, he’s still capable of looking, seeing, and singing.

For you that took the all-in-all the things you left were three.
A loud voice for singing and keen eyes to see,
And a spouting well of joy within that never yet was dried!
And I ride.

If I had to define Englishness, it would have to involve an idea of movement.  Maybe movement involving water. Certainly in the middle ages, the rivers played a crucial part in travel and navigation, more than we think.  We are a tidal nation. We even talk about receiving “tidings” from distant places.  Time and tide wait for no man, and I know I’ll never again have a picnic with a fine young lass in a summer dress on a summers’ afternoon on the patch of grass that is the eye of the White Horse at Uffington.  But that doesn’t stop me having a vision of the English landscape and its relation with the people who’ve lived in it, a sort of Eric Ravilious panorama of green South Downs speckled with sheep, white chalk hill figures, ley lines and beacons, churches in the valleys with village greens dotted with white cricketers.

I come back again and again to one of my favourite books on being English: England, Their England, by A. G. MacDonnell. Here, the book’s protagonist, Donald Cameron (no relation to David) is discussing the English with another colleague, Davies, in the First World War in the trenches: 

"I've lived for five years in London," said Davies, a big, pleasant man whose five-and-thirty years were an exception to the general youthfulness of liaison officers, with steel-rimmed glasses and a heavy black moustache, "and I must admit I find the English are extraordinarily difficult to understand."

"I was never in England before the War," replied Cameron, "so I've really only seen them as soldiers. I've been in London for a day or two when I was on leave, of course."

Donald Cameron was a boy of about twenty, slender and fair-haired with a small fair moustache and small hands. He was about five feet nine or ten, and even the changes and chances of war had not battered his natural shyness out of him. He spoke the pure, accurate English of Inverness-shire.

"What do you think of them as soldiers?" asked Davies.
 
"They're such an extraordinary mixture," replied Cameron. "The last time I was liaison to an English battalion was about a month ago. It was a battalion from Worcestershire or Gloucestershire or somewhere. The Colonel wore an eyeglass and sat in a deep dug-out all day reading the Tatler. He talked as if he was the Tatler, all about Lady Diana Manners and Dukes and Gladys Cooper. We were six days in the Line and he had the wind up all the time except once, and that time he walked up to a Bosche machine-gun emplacement with a walking-stick and fifty-eight Bosche came out and surrendered to him. What do you make of that? Do you suppose he was mad?"
 
"I don't know," replied Davies, puffing away at a huge black pipe. "We had an English subaltern once in our battery who used to run and extinguish fires in ammunition-dumps." 

Cameron dropped his cigarette. "He used to do what?"

 "Used to put out fires in shell-dumps." 

"But what ever for?" 

"He said that shells cost five pounds each and it was everyone's duty to save Government money." 

"Where is he buried?" asked Cameron 

"In that little cemetery at the back of Vlamertinghe."

So yes, laugh at it if you will, mock it if you must, but I’d like to see a fairer, more tolerant, more respectful England; less bigoted, less xenophobic. As I wrote at the time of the 2010 Election, on my other blog:

Think of how social enterprises could change the landscape for the people of Britain. Feed the hungry. House the homeless. Treat the sick. Teach the Children. Cherish the animals. End the Wars. Punish the Guilty. Fulfil the spirit. We need a gentler more tolerant and respectful society like we had in the 1950s, one where people realise there is more to life than a new sofa from DFS. It is not rocket science. All that is lacking is the political will. And every valley shall be exalted and every mountain and hill made low. The crooked straight, and the rough places plain: the crooked straight, and the rough places plain.

Talking of making rough places plain, Friday saw the advent of Owen, who once more made a selfless journey all the way from Wales to help us in the endless struggle with the house and garden.  Thanks to his efforts this weekend, we’ve managed several major achievements, none of which would have been possible without his help. 

The tray on my wheelchair has once more been levelled. More robustly this time. The recalcitrant door handle has been disassembled and replaced with a much more substantial one, the door has been planed, and varnished, and two grab handles have been added, one on each side, so that if it does swell in the wet and stick again, you don’t have to yank the actual handle to free it. The willow screening fence has been re-erected (quiet at the back) and new fence posts added to give it additional stability.

All of the fallen wood has been gathered into a woodpile under the decking, and sheeted down with a tarpaulin so it can season ready for next winter. The drunken greenhouse has been stood back upright, and lashed in place now, so that it will no longer wobble in the gales. Plus, in an unexpected bonus, inside the scrambled wreckage of seed trays were three pots of oregano that seem to be thriving.  Or it could be shepherd’s purse. We shall see. 

All of the miscellaneous rubbish, including the old dustbin that was full of water, has been cleared and skipped at the tip. All of the tools and miscellaneous boxes of stuff in the lobby have been sorted, rationalised, and any rubbish disposed of. Colin’s boiler has been given a healthcheck and, with one minor adjustment, is now working properly.  The highlight of his visit, though, apart from the convivial Friday evening spent discussing whether Handel was ahead of his time or not, and listening to Hilaire Belloc singing The Winged Horse on Youtube.

But the piece de resistance of the whole weekend was when I was sitting on the edge of my bed on Saturday morning, just about to transfer into my wheelchair, when I heard Owen getting up. I  shouted to him that I’d be through in a minute, and he replied to the effect of “not to worry, I’ll just mend the fire!”

Most people, when they “mend the fire” interpret that phrase as simply putting more coal on.  Owen, however, takes a more literal view, and, when I joined him in the kitchen, had the entrails of the stove spread out across the hearth, and was just removing the riddling plate, which was absolutely caked with burnt-on clinker.

“I’ve found out why it wasn’t drawing,” he said, laconically, proceeding to broddle at it with an implement which looked strangely familiar.

“What is that?” I asked him, and he replied that it was the head off a multi-purpose hoe. I replied that I had known several of those, when I lived in Barnsley, but by this time he was already re-assembling the innards and screwing up little bits of torn up newspaper to re-lay the fire. One firelighter, and a couple of shovels of coal later, it was back to full-on, thermo-nuclear, Frodingham-ironworks-on-a-good-day setting, and the house basked in warmth.

[It did, however, much later in the day, provide an illustration of the law of unintended consequences. Debbie has taken to storing joss sticks in a little brass samovar on top of the stove, and, towards teatime, the principle of the conductivity of heat finally asserted itself by transferring the thermal output of the stove, via the brass legs of the kettle, to the combustible contents therein.  This became obvious by stages, as a thick cloud of incense began to fill the room, because the entire contents of two packets of joss sticks were, by now, on fire. By the time the red-hot samovar and its flaming contents had been removed – gingerly, with the coal-tongs, on account of it being, er, red hot – it resembled one of the Holy Roman Church’s more efficient thuribles, as I accompanied its being carried ceremonially from the room, to be extinguished safely, out of doors, with a brief snatch of plain-song. It was either that, or “Samovar, over the rainbow…” The house still smells like the basilica of St Peter’s, this morning.]

Owen has also added another to our litany of visiting birds, because as he sat in the armchair in the conservatory, enjoying a well-earned cup of tea after lunch on Saturday, he noticed that we had a treecreeper in the branches near the bird-feeders.  Sadly, I missed it,  so I have still never seen a treecreeper, which I gather is quite a rare visitor.

There was also another dimension, another benefit to me from Owen’s visit. Apart from the fact that the stove is working properly again, the progress we made on getting the house squared round and sorted out also made me feel much more positive in myself.  Even to the extent of planning to get some raised beds installed alongside my ramp, so I can have a much more concerted effort at growing herbs this year. If you had suggested this last Sunday, I’d probably have said “what’s the point?”

After Owen’s departure on Saturday afternoon, things settled down to a slower tempo (apart from the incense conflagration) as we caught up with the online world and, in my case, answered a few emails. That was, in fact, the sum total of my achievements for the remainder of Saturday, apart from cooking tea and feeding Matilda.

Sunday dawned bright, clear, and catkin-nodding, with a song thrush decanting silver notes outside the window. As I trundled into the kitchen, Matilda was circling round me, yowling for food, and I did a double-take when I saw Flat Eric, her catnip mouse, lying in the middle of the floor, looking dreadfully realistic for once.

Today is St Valerie’s day.  St Valerie of Milan, that is. There’s another St Valerie, of Limoges, apparently. Anyway, today’s St Valerie was martyred in the first or second century, in Rome, for burying Christian martyrs, and then refusing to sacrifice to the Roman gods. The reigning Pope had issued a decree commanding the faithful to locate the corpses of Christians who’d been sacrificed in the Coliseum, and bury them; unfortunately for Valerie, the Roman authorities took a dim view of this, and beheaded her. Ouch.

Also, unfortunately for St Valerie, I’ve already talked far too much about Saints this week, so I’ll curtail this discussion of her, and make it a musical tribute, instead.  Next week beckons, with all the usual problems and issues, and no doubt some I haven’t thought of or anticipated. Another week of work awaits the hands, but, thank God, I've still got a loud voice for singing and keen eyes to see. So, for now, I’m going to go and count my plant-pots.  Cheerio, me old pals, me old beauties.

Epiblog for the Feast of St Anselm

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. The cold, late Spring continues, with both lots of Maisie’s indestructible daffodils now in full flower, nodding their yellow trumpets in the breeze. They remain, however, the only splash of colour in the garden. The Forsythia, which is normally out now in that heart-stoppingly brief blaze of yellow so bright you couldn’t really paint it, stubbornly refuses to show.  And it’s not just our garden that’s a largely brown, dead wilderness. A local news report on Look North this week showed a West Yorkshire nursery dumping £1000s worth of plants, simply because nobody is gardening, nobody is planting, and, sadly, nobody is buying.

The garden is now getting to the top of my urgent things to do list, but this week I’ve had other, even more urgent things to attend to.  As well as all the business of laying out books, trying to plan a summer school, and negotiating the contract for the Portuguese edition of The Spot on My Bum, on behalf of Gez Walsh, I’ve also had a torrid week with the door handle.

It started on Monday, when Debbie pulled the inside handle off, as she exited, late and in a hurry, for her afternoon class at Dewsbury.  That was soon rectified – it’s got to the stage now where I can take it apart and re-assemble it in a couple of minutes, a bit like those blokes at the Royal Tournament who used to dismantle field guns and pass them through a hole in a wall.

However, when Debbie returned at teatime, she came in and immediately said “What’s wrong with the door handle?” to which I replied,

“Nothing. I fixed it.”

“No, the handle on the outside. It’s missing altogether. I had to shoulder-barge the door to get in.”

Sure enough, when I went to check, this was indeed the case. I looked around outside on my wheelchair ramp, in case it had merely fallen off, perhaps as an unintended consequence of my earlier repair on the inside handle, but there was no sign of it lying on the ground or on the ramp.

The only people who had been to the house since Debbie had left at lunchtime were the postman, and Grandad, who had called by to take Zak and Freddie walkies. Discounting the postman as a likely handle-thief, I saw immediately what must have happened. Deb’s dad must have pulled the handle off when he went out with the dogs, and – unable to get back in – he must have pocketed it and taken it with him, so he’d have it when he came back.  True, it seemed unlikely, but as Sherlock Homes says, once you have discounted the impossible, what is left, however improbable, must be the truth. Or something.

I explained this theory to Debbie, and she seemed to accept it, and we settled down to other things (her, marking, me making tea) to await his return.  The dogs came barrelling in, with him following more slowly, as is his wont these days. His first words were:

“I see you’ve made the house burglar-proof, then!”

“Eh?” says I, “Oh, you mean the handle. Yes, have you got it? Did you take it with you?”

“No, it was like that when I came for the dogs, I had to shove the door to get in.”

Resisting the urge to say “Well why didn’t you bloody well say something at the time, then?” I realised this left only one suspect. Eurnlee wurn person had boeth ze means, and ze motive. Ze postman. [Sorry, I just had to do that last bit as Hercule Poirot]. Unlikely as it might seem, the postman had made off with the door handle. But why? Or had he? It seemed so improbable that I went out for just one more look, prior to phoning an emergency locksmith, which was our only other option, if we wanted to be able to lock the door that night and/or get out again in the morning.

I looked absolutely everywhere, and finally I saw it, wedged in an obscure crevice on one of the outside windowsills. It had obviously come off in his hand, but why he chose that particular out of the way hole to stash the now-detached handle, God only knows.  Anyway, it was back in situ in a couple of minutes and, having wasted acres of time on the whole imbroglio, I felt the only sane reaction was to put the kettle on.

Matilda, of course, slept through all of this trauma, in fact that seems to be her default setting these days, having settled down into a routine where she sleeps on the foot of my bed in a large patch of sunshine (when the Almighty provides it) all day, and then marauds around the house at night, scratting in her litter tray, noisily chomping her way through the food in her bowl, or thundering across the bare floorboards in a sudden burst of cat-madness.

On Monday night, after an already traumatic day, everyone had gone to bed bar me, and I was just getting ready to go, when I heard her start up with a full-blown cat-territorial-argument style caterwaul from the vicinity of Colin’s front room.  What the hell was she doing? Was she stuck somewhere? Thinking that somehow, maybe another cat had got in through the cat flap, and/or she’d caught a mouse, and/or she was having a barney with Freddie who’d come back downstairs for some reason, I went trundling through to see what the beef was.

She was pressed up sideways against the glass panel in Colin’s front door, eyes like saucers and her tail the size of a bog-brush, giving it the verbals at something, or someone, on the other side of the glass, to whom she had clearly taken great exception. Probably another cat, either Spidey, or John’s cat from next door. Or possibly Brenda or Freda. Either way, she was telling the intruder in no uncertain terms to bugger off, and in the process, waking the whole household.  Eventually, whatever it was must have taken the hint, because she packed it in and went back to her bed, where I shortly joined her, as it was actually my bed, a point which she disputes.

It comes to something when the cat is a more effective guard-dog than either of the two dogs, both of whom snore on resolutely during the nocturnal visits of Brenda, who has been calling by for her tea so regularly now that she hardly merits a mention. Of course, it could be that the doggies are employing reverse kidology, and only pretending to be asleep in case I suddenly demand that they do their duty, and thrust them out into the cold and dark to confront this strange, fierce, hairy beast that is impinging on their territory.

Brenda, for her part, is a very efficient consumer/recycler of leftovers, nuts and raisins, and stale bread.  As indeed are the birds and the squirrels who swarm over the decking in – so it seems – ever increasing numbers every time I put some peanuts out.  Poor little Freddie expends a lot of his energy, elderly dog that he is, yapping fiercely at them from behind the conservatory door,  and they, in turn, completely ignore him. I know that grey squirrels are in effect, just rats with good PR, but nevertheless, they are undeniably cute. On the feathered fowl front, Ronnie the Raven (or near offer) has put in a re-appearance, and I have confirmed, from managing to get a good look at him, that he is indeed, as the joiner who did our panelling suggested, a carrion crow, but Ronnie the crow isn’t so alliterative.

The week was, inevitably, dominated by a singular event which interrupted the normal processes of life. Not the Boston bombings, nor the funeral of Margaret Thatcher, outrages though they both were, in their own way, but the severe stormy winds on Wednesday night through into Thursday.  My perspective on this sort of thing has changed a lot since I became a householder. I was living in Sussex during the great hurricane of 1987, and it was – in a sort of Dunkirk spirit, keep-calm-and-carry-on, sort of way – almost fun.  But that was because when I was lying in bed listening to the tiles being stripped off the roof and going plink, plink, plink, one after the other down into the courtyard below, I was comforted by the knowledge that they were my landlord’s tiles, not mine.

This time, I listened with great trepidation for any signs of Colin’s roof, the single worst weak-point of the whole house, and the biggest structural task needing repair, apart from some of the windows, parting company with its rafters. Fortunately, this time, we got away with it. Some of the willow screen fencing originally put in to contain Elvis has been flattened, so I need to order some more fence posts, and one of my plastic greenhouses is leaning at a drunken angle, everything inside, seed trays and propagators, in a jumbled shambles, so that’s another job for next weekend.  Other than that, and fallen twigs and branches scattered everywhere, we seem to have got off rather lightly, but it was an anxious night with not much sleep.  Earlier on, Grandad had actually been blown over – knocked off his feet by the wind – when out with the doggies, and arrived back looking very shaky and doddery, to the extent that I was quite concerned about him, but he said that he’d be OK once he’d got back home and rested up.

My thankful mood on Thursday morning was only dented slightly when Debbie pulled the door handle off (the inside this time) when leaving for her morning class at Birstall. I’d been trying to avoid the BBC’s re-writing of history to retrospectively canonise Margaret Thatcher as some sort of secular saint, and had managed to do so by and large, but I did catch the local news reports of her mock-funeral in Goldthorpe, where an effigy of the Iron Lady was drawn through the streets on a cart pulled by a black plumed horse, and led by a man playing the bagpipes for some reason, then hanged, before being burned, in a coffin inscribed “Burn in hell with Jimmy Savile”, on a pile of pallets on some waste ground.

Waste ground is easy to find in Goldthorpe, of course, and places like it. I spent twenty one years of my life in Goldthorpe, in a small room with four bars across the window. I wasn’t in jail; I was lucky enough to have a job (or thought I was, at the time – heaven knows, I’m miserable now) and the bars were to keep people out, not to keep me in – although it often felt that way.  Goldthorpe actually came through the Miners’ strike of 1984 with the pit intact. The Goldthorpe pit, and the cluster around it, were casualties of the Heseltine-inspired closures programme, designed to kill off the rump of the industry so that it could be privatised, in 1992-94.  Grimethorpe, Great Houghton and Darfield went in 1993, and the Goldthorpe pit and the nearby Hickleton Main Colliery at Thurnscoe were closed in 1994.

True, there was an effort made to secure inward investment to replace lost jobs, and the area was an “Objective 1” area for EU aid money. However, and I can personally attest to this, much of the cash went in training programmes, training people to get them jobs which didn’t exist, rather than in creating jobs; and where large companies did settle in the Dearne valley, in some cases it was done purely cynically, with the businesses staying only as long as the rates holidays, the subsidies and the tax breaks lasted, and then closing down and relocating to another depressed area elsewhere, to begin the cycle of subsidised trading yet again.  I said at the time, and I still stand by it, that I can’t see any difference between the government subsidising a nationalised industry directly and the government (directly, or via local government) subsidising the industries it was trying to entice into the former South Yorkshire coalfield to replace the jobs it had shut down. It would have been less hassle all round just to have kept the jobs in place to start with. But that was political anathema to Margaret Thatcher and her followers, who even today believe, pace Mervyn King and people like Charles Moore, that unemployment in the North of England is a price worth paying for the privilege of living in the soft south-east.

So, although I don’t condone what was done in Goldthorpe on Wednesday, I can see why it happened. In fact, I am surprised it was only carried out in effigy, and not in person.  The justification for closing the pits, something I argued against at the time, even going on a demo and marching against it through the streets of Barnsley behind the banner of the NUM (in the days when I could still march) was that the market for gas was better value. At the time, there was widespread suspicion that this was not the case, and that the government was massaging the situation for political ends.

It is perfectly possible to back up any dodgy political proposition, however phoney, and make it look quasi-plausible by the carefully selected use of statistics. I started to look at some of the claims that were currently being made about welfare, for instance, following the Philpott case. [In passing, I should point out that all governments do this: Blair was a past-master at it, as anyone who can remember the claim about WMD being ready in 45 minutes will attest]. The current mantra being recited by people like Iain Duncan-Smith is that it is unfair to have a situation where someone in work has to earn £41,000pa just to be on the same level with a family on benefits.

Once you start to pick it apart, however, you find out that the figure of £41,000pa, which does indeed come down to about £26,000pa after deductions, is not equivalent to the average income of a family on benefits, as the £26,000 level at which benefits are now “capped” is only a very tiny percentage of benefit recipients.  It would have been more honest to have said “Is it fair that someone has to earn £41,000 a year in order to be on the same level of income as the tiny minority of benefits recipients who obtain the maximum amount, capped at £26,000?" But it makes for much better headlines in the Daily Mail if you can get away unchallenged with asserting that in some way £26,000pa is a typical, average income of a household on benefits, instead of admitting the truth, that it’s only a few thousand people who are in this position.

Similarly, the assertion that “already”, some 8000 people have been driven off benefits because of the cap. That figure, used by Iain Duncan-Smith and others, is actually the normal amount of people coming off benefits over that period. No one knows how many of those 8000 were specifically induced to do so by the threat of a benefits cap. But that doesn’t stop IDS making it up as he goes along.

Other useful idiots are all too happy to join in the chorus. A. N. Wilson, writing on the Philpotts, is horrified that spending on benefits has apparently reached 13% of GDP – omitting to note that it has hit similar levels before, including under Thatcher’s reign.  And the 878,000 people who he assert have been “forced off benefits by tough new government tests” is, in fact, four years worth of  the natural wastage of 219,000 people a year who come off ESA for a variety of reasons; some die, some get work, some get better.

Time and time again, when you start to drill down into the detail of these pronouncements from the Junta, you find that they are mainly concocted of flim-flam, tissue of lies, smoke, mirrors, chip fat and gunge.  Even George Osborne’s favourite economists this week have been caught out by a PhD student in America who happened to notice that the Excel spreadsheet on which their influential paper on the effect of high national debt on growth was a few cells short of a formula, as indeed is George Osborne. No wonder he was in tears on Wednesday.

What gets measured gets managed, and whoever forms the next government, I hope they make it a priority to reform the system of gathering government statistics to the effect that some of the things about which we actually need to know the answers start getting recorded. But I may as well save my breath to cool my porridge.

Where are the jobs, in any case? There is a commonly held belief that there is work there if people want it, but with 16-24 youth unemployment in areas such as Barnsley, Doncaster, Rotherham and Sheffield running at around 9.8% and the economy, even with its forecasts downgraded, bumping along the bottom, I really do strain to see where the recovery is going to take place. The Federation of Small Businesses is worried that the ritual burning in effigy of Mrs Thatcher is going to hurt inward investment into Goldthorpe. What inward investment would that be?

The Junta would point to the fact that “a million new private sector jobs” have been created, without going on to add that the definition of what constitutes being “in work” is so wide as to be almost meaningless. Meanwhile, the unemployment head count has gone up, but the number of fresh claims for JSA (Jobseeker’s Allowance) has fallen. The fact that there are two different methods of enumerating unemployment is confusing in itself, and it’s not helped when politicians use the terms interchangeably, and omit to mention that, although the number of people coming on to JSA is falling, so is the number signing off it, indicating maybe things aren’t as rosy as they would have us believe. As the independent web site Fact Check put it: 

…in short, not all unemployed people are eligible for JSA, some are eligible but don't claim it, and some people who are eligible for JSA may not fit the definition of unemployed (those working fewer than 16 hours per week can claim, for example).

Meanwhile, flamboyant and super-wealthy banker Rich Ricci is to join the ranks of the unemployed, though I doubt he will be signing on when he leaves Barclays. The racehorse-owning 49-year-old head of Barclays investment bank will retire from his post within weeks, with a notice period payment of up to £700,000. And of course, as they do every year, the Canadians are indulging in the ritual slaughter of baby seal pups while pretending to be a modern, civilized nation and nobody apart from a few animal welfare charities lifts a finger to try and stop them.  So, yes, it’s been a great week in the big wide world out there. The Director of the charity Network for Animals, reported from Newfoundland that:

“The scenes of cruelty we have witnessed are heartbreaking. Live seal pups are being impaled on steel hooks and dragged onboard sealing vessels while still conscious; wounded baby seals are escaping into the water where they will die a slow death; baby seals are crying out in agony after being shot in the face. More than 10,000 baby seals were slaughtered in just a few days. Global warming is causing the baby seals' sea ice habitat to literally melt from under them. Many of these defenceless pups are being forced into open water before they are old enough to survive there. Unbelievably, the Canadian government is allowing sealers to club and shoot the pups that live through this ice disaster.”

At times like these, I really would like to harpoon Stephen Harper. But it’s not been all bad news this week [although it nearly has].  On Friday I got an email from Shelter about supporter Matt Ruskin

Matt was once homeless himself. In fact, he's been homeless three times -- starting when he was just eight years old. By his teens, his family had fallen apart and he was sleeping in a broom cupboard in his nan's one-bedroom flat, which sounds like a line from the Monty Python “Four Yorkshiremen” sketch, until you realise it’s true.

Matt was homeless throughout his 20s -- an experience he calls "dehumanising" -- but more than a decade on, he's a successful businessman, married with two young children. Now, he wants to help people who are still struggling with homelessness. So on  4 May, Matt will tackle a gruelling 12-mile obstacle course designed by the Special Forces, all to raise funds for Shelter. You can sponsor him here:

http://action.shelter.org.uk/matt-sponsor

As Matt says, homelessness is not always the anonymous person in the doorway of a shop or church. Knowing how easy it is to make the wrong choices and end up homeless again, he says he is constantly watchful -- especially now he has a family of his own:

"The spectre of homelessness is so much more frightening when the eyes of your children look deep within you with such unconditional trust. On occasion I have been in utter despair and consumed with panic, but I have mustered the strength from somewhere and am in control again. Always watchful, but in control."

I don’t normally put myself out to proselytise on behalf of charities, with the possible exceptions of Mossburn and RAIN Rescue, and people like Wood Green Animal Shelter, about whom I wrote last week.  I do think, and I have seen nothing to convince me otherwise, that the larger the charity, the less likely it is that your money will actually a) get to the cause in question and b) do any good, and if you doubt this, have a read of Paul Theroux’s Dark Star Safari, which is very illuminating on the actual harm that aid handouts in eastern Africa can cause. I have no way of quickly finding out what proportion of donations to Shelter actually go straight to the cause as opposed to being swallowed up by admin, so I offer the link with no warranty, express, implied, or otherwise.  Shelter are a bit like the Labour Party, the Church of England, or the WI; what passes for their heart is in what passes or the right place, I suppose.

Speaking of the Church of England, in what is (nominally, at any rate) supposed to be a blog devoted to the struggle for faith and prayer, today, Sunday, is the Feast Day of St Anselm. St Anselm, who lived from 1033 to 1109, was born at Aoust, in the Piedmont; a long way from Canterbury, where he ended up.  Aged 15, he attempted to join a monastery, but was rebuffed. One of the standard hagiographies says:

Neglecting, during the course of his studies, to cultivate the divine seed in his heart, he lost this inclination, and, his mother being dead, he fell into tepidity; and, without being sensible of the fatal tendency of vanity and pleasure, began to walk in the broad way of the world: so dangerous a thing is it to neglect the inspirations of grace!

He seems to have pulled it round, though, because, after his mother’s death, he made his way first to Burgundy, where he studied for three years, then to the Abbey of Bec in Normandy, where he became a pupil of Lanfranc, who eventually became William’s Archbishop. Eventually, in 1060, following his father’s death, Anselm took Holy Orders, and by 1063 became the Prior of Bec himself, when Lanfranc moved on to Caen.

In his time as Prior of Bec, Anselm had already started writing theological tracts; he wrote his Monologium, so called because in this work he speaks alone, explaining the metaphysical proofs of the existence and nature of God, followed by the Prosologium, a meditation on the attributes of God. So, all in all, his material was God-related, as you might expect. If he did knock out thrillers on the side, none of them has survived. He would have been hard put to write anything other than theology anyway, as, while Prior, he followed up the first two works with On Truth, On Freewill, and On the Fall of the Devil. or, On the Origin of Evil, and also his Grammarian, a treatise on Dialectics, or the art of reasoning. Clearly, Anselm was on a fast track to glory, and when the Abbot of Bec died in 1078, the natural successor was Anselm.

This is where the connection with England arises. The Abbey of Bec held extensive lands in England, necessitating travel by the Abbot on a fairly regular basis to oversee them. Also, by this time, Lanfranc, his former mentor, was Archbishop of Canterbury, appointed by William after the Norman Conquest.  It seems that Anselm got on very well with William, who was, by all accounts, a complete bastard in nature as well as name, but was a different man altogether in the company of Anselm, the affable Abbot of Bec.

By 1089, Lanfranc was dead, and the post of Archbishop of Canterbury was vacant. William the Conqueror’s successor, William Rufus, had said there would be no replacement, largely because he had succeeded in diverting most of the income and benefits of the See of Canterbury into his own Royal coffers! In 1092, Anselm received a message from one of his former acquaintances, Hugh, Earl of Chester, to the effect that he (Hugh) was ill, and also he needed help with setting up a Priory dedicated to Chester’s own saint, St Werburgh.  This wasn’t that unusual, in terms of medieval thinking. People often made such arrangements to safeguard their immortal soul, and no doubt if Hugh, Earl of Chester had died, the Priory would have been stuffed to the gills with Chantry Priests saying masses for him. He didn’t, however, or at least not right then, and Anselm would have gone home, except the King forbade it.

The next twist in the knotted skein of Anselm’s life happened in 1093, when William Rufus himself fell ill, and, fearing that he was going to die, decided to wipe the slate clean, pardoning everyone he’d ever fallen out with, discharging debtors and generally tidying up the loose ends of his reign, which were many. One such loose end was the question of who should be Archbishop, and William, terrified that his soul would burn forever if he died with the post unfilled, immediately backtracked and offered it to Anselm. Who refused, on the grounds that he was quite happy where he was, he was unworthy of such high public office and so on, and so on. There is some debate amongst scholars about whether Anselm’s reluctance was genuine or not, or whether he was doing the ecclesiastical equivalent of saying “Oh, I couldn’t possibly” when someone offers you the last macaroon, and then taking it anyway.

Matters came to a head when the bishops, who took the King’s side in this dispute, seized Anselm, forced a pastoral staff into his hands, more or less carried him into the church, and sung a Te Deum over him, whether he liked it or not. Get out of that one, then!  Anselm still refused to take it seriously, however, and did not accept the honour until the King had agreed to recognise Pope Urban (presumably by the fact that he was wearing shades and had his hat on back to front) and, possibly more important, had agreed to restore all of the lands and revenues that had been seized from the See of Canterbury since the time of Lanfranc.

It would be good to report that Anselm led a blameless and happy life thereafter, but, sadly, this wasn’t the case. William continued to back-track and to attempt to move the ecclesiastical goalposts, and Anselm responded by condemning the King’s attempts to appropriate land and money belonging to the church. In fact, within a couple of years, William, who had been so anxious for Anselm to be appointed, was now trying to deprive him of his living! The bishops were anxious to please the King, and went along with the idea of getting rid of Anselm, but the barons couldn’t see what the problem was, so the King eventually wrote to Pope Urban, guaranteeing to recognise him and to pay him an annual pension out of England if he, in return, would depose Anselm.  The Pope, via a legate, said no, and Anselm then wrote to him, complaining about William and his conduct. And so it went on.  Anselm applied to the King to be allowed to travel to Rome and seek the counsel of the Pope in person, and the King refused, three times, adding on the third occasion that if Anselm did leave England, William would one more immediately seize the lands and assets off the See of Canterbury.

Needless to say, Anselm immediately disguised himself as a pilgrim, and set sail from Dover, accompanied by a few trusted companions. He got as far as Lyons in France, where he was stuck because of the presence of the Anti-Pope at Avignon, barring the road to Rome, and also, while there, Anselm fell ill.  This was that rather surreal time in the history of the church when they had two Popes on the go, the Pope, and the Anti-Pope. Good job they never met, or there would have been the sort of explosion Dan Brown could only dream of.  This is also why you should never put pasta and antipasta on the same plate.

Finally, in 1098, Anselm reached Rome, and the Pope agreed to write to William Rufus demanding restitution of that which he had seized. Anselm, meanwhile, found the time during his stay to churn out two more works; Why God was made Man and On the Faith of the Trinity and Incarnation, to add to the growing pile. Anselm asked the Pope to relieve him of his duty, saying that it was pointless to return to England; the Pope refused, and was later minded to excommunicate William Rufus, until Anselm begged him not to do so.  The Pope relented and said that instead he would merely threaten William with excommunication. Shades of Michael Howard. Paxman would have had a field day.

Anselm made his way back to Lyons, stopping off there to write On the Conception of the Virgin, and On Original Sin.  In  August 1100, William Rufus had his fateful rendezvous with Walter Tyrell in the New Forest, or, more specifically, with a crossbow-bolt fired by Walter, whose attitude to the risks involved in hunting seems to have prefigured that of Dick Cheney.  Anselm, hearing the news, hastened to return to England, having been invited by the new King, Henry I, and landed at Dover on 23^rd September, 1100.

Henry I had a similar attitude to the church’s property and incomes as William had, but before relations could deteriorate to a similar level, Henry faced a much bigger threat, when Robert, Duke of Normandy decided he would rather like the crown of England too, thank you very much, and started to prepare to invade. He got as far as landing at Portsmouth with an army, and things looked decidedly dodgy at that point for Henry, as several of his barons were preparing to switch allegiances to Robert.  In a classic demonstration of the axiom that “there are no atheists in foxholes”, Henry turned to God, in the form of Anselm, for help. In addition to sending a quota of armed men (this was in the days when bishops were allowed to have their own, private armed retainers; these days they just employ secretaries to write back to nutters like me, that is when they can be bothered to reply at all) Anselm issued generic threats of excommunication to any baron who broke his oath to the King, and one against Robert for good measure.  Robert retreated to Normandy. Being excommunicated was a big thing in those days.

Unfortunately for Anselm, the controversy over whether the King had the power of investiture or not continued to smoulder. Before being distracted by Robert, both Henry and Anselm had appealed to the new Pope (Pope Paschal) on the issue, and the Pope had ruled in Anselm’s favour. It seems crazy to us, in these secular times, that this can be such a big deal, but it was, and thus Anselm found himself again in exile, from 1105 onwards, until 1107; meanwhile, Pope Paschal retaliated by excommunicating all those bishops Henry had invested.  In 1106, Henry travelled to the Abbey of Bec and met with Anselm, at which meeting a compromise was established and various excommunications and threats of excommunications were reversed, and this eventually became the Concordat of London, which allowed Anselm to return to England, and live out his last two years carrying out his normal duties as Archbishop, dying on 21^st April 1109. 

So, what are we to make of St Anselm? The first thing that strikes me is how much we know about him, compared to, say, some of the early Roman martyrs, who scarcely troubled the scorers.  Also that it must have been rather fun, if rather terrifying, to live in an age when invading armies could be stopped by simply anathematizing or excommunicating their leaders.  Modern scholars disagree about whether Anselm acted purely on his own behalf, to strengthen the political position of the See of Canterbury, or as the Pope’s representative, or as something in between the two. But there was also a human face to the man, as recorded by a contemporary chronicler:

One day as he was riding to his manor of Herse, a hare, pursued by the dogs, ran under his horse for refuge: at which the saint stopped, and the hounds stood at bay. The hunters laughed, but the saint said, weeping, "This hare puts me in mind of a poor sinner just upon the point of departing this life, surrounded with devils, waiting to carry away their prey." The hare going off, he forbade her to be pursued, and was obeyed, not a hound stirring after her. In like manner, every object served to raise his mind to God, with whom he always conversed in his heart, and, in the midst of noise and tumult, he enjoyed the tranquility of holy contemplation; so strongly was his soul sequestered from, and raised above the world.

What amazes me, however, is the amount of writing he managed to do, in the midst of all this political chaos raging around him. I first read Anselm’s Ontological Proof of the existence of God at the age of eighteen, and, forty years, later, I have to say, it still puzzles me. These days, though, I regard any attempts at proving or disproving the existence of God to be inherently futile, but nevertheless, Anselm’s Proof is like one of those “brothers and sisters have I none…” puzzles, or the Cretan Paradox; it grips your mind and it won’t let go, but just when you think you’ve got it, it’s slip-sliding away from underneath you.

I’ve been told off, by philosophers, no less, for writing about philosophy on here. Because I have no formal training in philosophy, I have been told I should leave philosophy to the experts. I wonder how those experts became experts in the first place, except by making the same blunders they accuse me of making?

Anyway, if you are truly interested in the Ontological Proof of the Existence of God, there is reams of stuff on it which you can look up, but basically it says that his belief in the existence of God rests on the phrase "that than which nothing greater can be conceived". He reasoned that, if "that than which nothing greater can be conceived" existed only in the intellect, it would not be "that than which nothing greater can be conceived", since it can be thought to exist in reality, which is greater.

It follows, according to Anselm, that "that than which nothing greater can be conceived" must exist in reality. The bulk of the Proslogion is taken up with Anselm's attempt to establish the identity of "that than which nothing greater can be conceived" as God, and thus to establish that God exists in reality. This is all very fine and dandy, but it assumes a difference between that which exists “only in the intellect”, and that which exists “in reality” which the principles of modern physics seems to undermine.

It still staggers me, though, that he found time to even think this stuff, let alone write it down, at a period when messengers must have been bursting into his chamber every few minutes with news of William’s latest outrage, and the Templars were busy carrying cats to Dover Castle.

Anselm also had a stab at answering the biggest question of all, why did the Crucifixion have to be like it was, and once more, at the risk of outraging the philosophers in the audience, here’s my potted version:

The satisfaction theory of the atonement, as it has become known, was formulated by Anselm in his book, Cur Deus Homo, which  translates as ‘Why the God-Man?’) He has introduced the idea of satisfaction as the chief demand of the nature of God. In his view, God’s offended honour and dignity could only be satisfied by the sacrifice of the God-man, Jesus Christ.  According to this view, sin (as in this case, the Original Sin of Adam and Eve) incurs a debt to Divine justice, a debt that must be paid somehow. Because no sin, according to Anselm, can be forgiven without satisfaction, but in this case, the incurred debt is something far greater than a human being is capable of paying, the only way in which the satisfaction could be made was by the coming of a Redeemer who is both God and man. He himself would have to be sinless, thus having no debt that he owed. His death is something greater than all the sins of all humanity, and makes a superabundant satisfaction to God.

Which again is all very well, but doesn’t explain how Big G got himself into such a pickle in the first place. If the philosophers object to this, by the way, I suggest they do something more useful with their time, such as arguing about whether the grass outside is still green when it’s dark.

St Anselm’s contemporaries held that the transmission of original sin had to do with the lustful nature of the act of sexual intercourse. Anselm was the first thinker to separate original sin from the lust of intercourse. So that, at least, is something we can all thank him for. Or, as Tom Lehrer puts it, in Vatican Rag:

Get in line in that processional,

Slip into that small confessional

There a guy who’s got religion’ll

Tell you if your sin’s original

Next week, of course, contains St George’s Day, a day when shaven-headed pot-bellied bigots throughout England will bang on about how not being able to fly a flag with a red cross on a white background in honour of a Graeco-Roman alleged dragon slayer is somehow in breach of their “yooman” rights, and it’s a diabolical liberty; as if anybody is actually trying to stop them.  And it’s also the day when traditionally, you’re supposed to gather the dandelions to make your dandelion wine. If you can find any, under the snow. And it’s old Shakey’s birthday, to boot. Happy Bard-day to you, varlet!

Maybe it’ll get warmer, next week. This cold is killing my knees. Like Paul Simon, on a good day, I ain’t got no pain, but on a bad day, that’s when I want to lie in bed and think of things that might have been.  Can’t be done though. Got to get up there and at ‘em. There is much to be done. Lists must be made, fence posts must be ordered.   This last week, the one just gone, I get the feeling that, for all of the energy I expended, I might as well have just concentrated on fixing the door handle, and let the rest of it stew.  The nearer my destination, the more I keep slip sliding away, just like Anselm’s elusive ontological proof.  Still, we shall see. Cast your bread upon the waters and all that.  Meanwhile, I am going to try and think of something which is bigger than that which can be conceived. Such as a duck, with two legs both the same, or a very large elephant.  But then who created the elephant?

Epiblog for the Feast of St Lydwine

It has been a busy second half to the week in the Holme Valley. Since we got back from Walney, late on Tuesday night, we’ve been nose-down, heads to the grindstone, catching up. The weather deteriorated as soon as we got back, so at least we were lucky with that. In fact, if it hadn’t been for the icy easterly wind, sharp as a Cossack’s sabre, that whistled round the camper while we were there, we’d have had the best of the spring so far.  Since we got back, there have just been dull, cold days, and, today, wind and rain.

Matilda, who was very interested in our return, has grown progressively more uninterested now she’s realised we’re really back. By Saturday morning it had got to the stage where she jumped on the end of the bed even before I’d got out of it! Freddie has relished his return to (relative) civilization by spending as much time as possible flaked out on the settee next to the fire, and Zak’s in his armchair as usual.  He had a busy day on Tuesday; a bracing walk on the beach at Walney, followed by climbing a 1000 foot mountain, and then, just after we’d got back, Grandad called and took him off down the running club for training. No wonder he slept soundly on Tuesday night.

There’s no snow at all in the garden now, and the full extent of the destruction wrought by the most recent depredations of winter can now be seen. I really must organise something to be done about it, and soon.  The spring seems to be happening about three weeks late, after being put into suspended animation by the weather – we’re now getting the winds of March. And I am pleased to report that Maisie’s indestructible daffodils, “that come before the swallow dares, and take the winds of March with beauty”, have survived being crushed by several cubic tonnes of snow.

The birds and squirrels were glad of our return, I think. Some of the squirrels are getting so tame, now, that they don’t bother to run away all that far when we let the dogs out.  They more or less ignore Freddie, for all his paroxysms of furious barking at their antics.  Zak nearly trod on one that didn’t get out of the way quickly enough, the other day.  Meanwhile, Brenda has been round for her tea on a regular basis, lumbering up the steps and chomping her way through a variety of leftovers, including pasta bake with cheesy sauce, boiled spuds, and nuts and raisins. But not all at the same time.  Still, if I ever want to start a drive-through badger café, I now have the basis of a menu.

Debbie has gone into full-on college preparation mode, as the new term starts on Monday, so at the moment, I have to make an appointment to talk to her. Still, I am glad she got the break away in the camper, and I have to admit, I almost sort of enjoyed it myself, it reminded me of why we’re doing all this. I’ve been busy with books, and marketing, and accounts, and planning; all the usual stuff, in fact. Four days’ invoicing and bank recs kept me busy enough, but I’ve now got three books in layout at the moment (only one of which is actually written by me!) and am writing the next “Harry Fenwick” with my other leg.  As part of the research for that, I’ve been re-reading the excellent “A Traveller’s Guide to Medieval England” and was telling Debbie about the Sumptuary Laws, the royal statutes in the 14th Century that prohibited people of a lower social status from wearing expensive clothes trimmed with weasel or ermine fur.  Debbie listened with interest and then asked me whether or not the Sumptuary Laws said anything about Gore-tex. Er… that would be a no.

Actually, weasels had quite a hard time of it in Medieval England, as, according to “Royal Bastards of Medieval England”, one of the recommended methods of contraception was for the girl to wear a small bag containing a dried weasel-testicle, tied to the body, during lovemaking. I don’t know how effective it was on limiting the human population, but it must have been pretty disastrous for the weasels.  

As a by-product of the Sumptuary Laws, Lepers had to identify themselves from their clothing, and also carry bells, to warn the finely dressed noblemen that they were in the presence of the unclean. I would bet my mortgage that this idea will be put forward for the next Tory manifesto by Iain Duncan-Smith, as a requirement of qualifying for DLA.

Predictably, one might almost say depressingly, the outside world this week has continued to be dominated by the increasingly bitter row over the legacy of Margaret Thatcher, who is still sowing discord and strife from beyond the grave. To the extent that one of the people who customarily follows this blog has since asked to “unfollow” it, specifically because of what I wrote about Thatcher last week. Well, I’m sorry, but I call ‘em as I see ‘em, and the truth is sometimes an uncomfortable bedfellow.  If anyone had any doubt that her policies were divisive, you only have to look at the arguments raging now between those who did very well thank you during her time in power, and those whom she persecuted.

Although I won’t be personally celebrating at her death, not like the miners’ welfares in South Yorkshire who are planning all-day parties, I have been mildly amused at the schadenfreude of seeing the BBC wriggling on the hook of whether or not to play the Judy Garland Wizard of Oz song, Ding Dong, the Witch is Dead! Which has been adopted (if you read the Guardian) or hijacked (if you read the Daily Mail) by the anti-Thatcher protest movement on Facebook. The thought of all those terribly earnest young BBC suits sitting around and trying to decide on a face-saving formula before the chart show airs, would be even more amusing if they weren’t burning up acres of our money doing it. Still, if the BBC finds itself in an embarrassing public position that makes it look stupid whatever it does, good. They shouldn’t have closed the Archers message board. Serves them bloody well right.

Various right-wing commentators have foamed on in the media about how “disrespectful” it is to Mrs Thatcher’s memory. Well, respect has to be earned, and her legacy of divisiveness is coming home to roost in these manifestations of distaste felt by many whose lives and communities she blighted. What goes around, comes around, I’m afraid, and I don’t remember much in the way of respect or compassion from the Tories at the time of the pit closures.  If she had spent less of her time in power persecuting people in the industrial areas and destroying their livelihoods, they might be more inclined to forgive and forget, and turn out and wave the bunting.

Plus, we should remember that politicians have always had to put up with this sort of thing. There were some pretty offensive comments about Michael Foot while he was still alive, including the Private Eye cover (“Nod your head if you want to stay on as Labour leader”) No doubt there will be jokes when Blair is cremated, about his pants finally being on fire, or about him being done to a turn in 45 minutes.  And if not, then there ought to be. If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the crematorium.

I’m afraid I also don’t get this retrospective hagiography from those on the left who should, frankly, take a leaf out of Glenda Jackson’s script and tell it like it was.  All this crap about Thatcher's “conviction” as a politician. It’s like me saying about those little scrotes who stole my car radio the other year, “Yes, well, it’s true, they bashed in the side window, strewed glass all over the driveway, ripped out the CD player and made off with it, landing me with acres of paperwork and insurance claims and a car full of rain, but hey, you have to admire their get-up-and-go. They knew what they wanted, and they went for it. True self-starters, cutting through the bureaucratic nonsense and kicking off the very basis of the capitalist, free enterprise economy!”

Anyway. I was bored with Mrs Thatcher while she was alive, and I can feel my interest in the whole imbroglio waning even more as I type. My entire stance on her is becoming more and more non-defecatory as the days wear on. I’m only surprised ATOS hasn’t declared her fit for work. If I have to utter the words “Ding Dong,” I am more likely to do it as Leslie Phillips than as a Munchkin.

I am, however, absolutely livid about the cost of the funeral. To spend between £8million and £10million on this, at a time when we’re supposedly up against it, when we’re so strapped for cash we can’t pay people either a decent living wage or a decent living benefit, to say we’ve somehow managed to find £10million down the back of the sofa is an insult everyone who ever suffered as a result of her policies. Apparently she specified that the prime minister at the time of her death should read a lesson from the Gospels, and it’s going to be John 14.1, which says: "Let not your heart be troubled: ye believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father's house are many mansions.”  A highly appropriate text for any senior Tory. Let’s hope nobody shops them for the bedroom tax!

What concerns me almost as much as the cost of the funeral, however, is the concept of our dissent being monitored, leading ultimately, potentially, to the possibility of pre-emptive arrests, as we saw in the lead up to the Royal Wedding in April 2011. This is getting to be a regular occurrence now, in advance of any major public occasion in the capital – there were pre-emptive arrests in 2011 of three people who planned to behead the Royal couple in effigy, for instance.  I have no objection with anyone being arrested if they make a legitimate protest that the police then consider oversteps the mark. There’s a due process there, which can then be followed.

My concern is the effect on civil liberties generally if we allow pre-emptive arrests to take place. I know that, pace Orwell, we only sleep safe in our beds at night because rough men stand ready to do others harm or whatever the quotation is, but it’s a question of where to draw the line, where does the thin end of the wedge get thick enough, no longer to be ignored?  As I wrote at the time of the Royal Wedding:

Personally, I would let the protestors protest … I would have stuck them in some obscure corner of Horse Guards Parade, suitably policed, and let them get on with it. Because the freedom not to be part of this, the freedom to hold contrarian views, however far they are off the bus route, is still one of the things that makes us the good guys.

It’s not just me, either. No less a personage than the Bishop of Grantham has spoken out against the excessive nature of the funeral. The Rt Rev Tim Ellis said: 

"I am not surprised by the parties which show that events of 30/40 years ago still engender that kind of violent reaction because her reign was very divisive and controversial, and people still remember that today. In a context where there is great ill feeling about her legacy, we have a situation where we seem to be expecting the nation to glorify that with a £10m funeral.”

Once again, the Church of England provides a more effective and sensible point of view than the Leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition.

I’ve spent a lot of hours this week being lectured online by people who weren’t even there at the time, about what a bad state Britain’s nationalised industries were in by 1979, and how things had to change.  That’s as maybe, but it’s the nature of the change I quibble with.  And if there was complacency in the nationalised industries, that was matched by complacency in private sector companies, with bosses more interested in a new Jag and a few snifters at the golf club, than in keeping an eye on what the Japanese were doing. One thing’s for sure, though – all of this hoohah about Thatcher’s funeral and time spent arguing about what Scargill said to Thatcher in 1984 and vice versa, is extremely convenient for Cameron, because it’s a massive distraction that stops us arguing about the complete horlicks they are making of the economy.

The newspapers we brought back with us from the day of Thatcher’s death have subsequently been used to re-light the stove (sic transit gloria mundi). I did briefly consider keeping them as historical mementoes, but to be honest, the need to keep warm overcame the need to preserve Fleet Street’s rather rose-tinted view of the Iron Lady. I’ll be interested to see how any dissent at the funeral of Thatcher, or the attendant protests around it, is reported. If those clodpolls at “Black Bloc” or whatever they’re called this week, kick off, that’s enough to allow the press to tar all anti-Thatcher protests with the same brush. In fact it wouldn’t surprise me if there wasn’t already some sort of contingency plan for agents provocateur to start the trouble anyway, without waiting or Black Bloc to fall into the trap. The condemnatory articles have probably already been written.

In case anyone was in any doubt about the way the press works, two things which have crossed my desk this week serve to illustrate that there is, sadly, still something very rotten in the state of Denmark, Horatio.

The first concerns Wood Green Animal Shelter, in Huntingdon. For the last couple of years, I’ve bought our Christmas cards from there. I tend not to support large charities. Oxfam treats its suppliers much in the same way Tesco does, and has a huge plexiglass and steel HQ in Oxford with an atrium and clocks all around the walls showing the time in different parts of the world.  Nuff said.  Similarly, the large animal charities such as the RSPCA and the Cats’ Protection League are sitting on more money than they know what to do with (at least at national HQ level; often the local branches are more strapped for cash). That’s why I tend to give, if I can ever afford to, to little, local animal welfare charities.  Wood Green is sort of medium-sized, but I have actually been there and I know they have helped RAIN Rescue, for instance, in taking unwanted dogs into their care, that would otherwise have been put down.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I read an article by one Nick Craven in the Daily Mail, on 12 January 2013, that says that a lady called Lynda Hill left £100,000 to the Wood Green shelter, and also bequeathed them the care of her beloved Golden Retriever, Henry, but that the charity had, in effect, accepted the legacy and yet had Henry put to sleep. The original article is still there, although the Mail has edited it subsequently, on 12 March, to include a response from Wood Green.

When I first read this article, I was outraged. More fool me, I guess, to believe everything I read in the papers, especially that particular chip-wrapper. Anyway, I sent Wood Green a fairly prompt email, telling them to take me off their list, they’d get nothing more from me, adding a few more pithy observations of the sort for which I have become well known. I received a reply saying that there was, in effect, more to the case than was reported in the paper, and they were taking the Daily Mail to the Press Complaints Commission.

This week, the Press Complaints Commission ruled basically that the Mail had been wrong in several key elements of its reporting. At the time the dog came into their care, the charity had no knowledge of the donation, and the decision to euthanize the dog was taken purely on veterinary grounds. Sadly, his owner’s death was not discovered for some days, and by the time he was transported to Wood Green, his own condition and quality of life were so seriously compromised that the vets felt they had no alternative.

There is no doubt that Wood Green will have lost donations and supporters as a result of this article. The more so, because the Daily Mail has refused – despite, in effect, being caught bang to rights - to either publish an apology, and/or make a donation. So well done, Nick Craven; potentially, by your actions, more dogs and cats will now suffer, because of the shite you wrote, as donations to Wood Green drop. Many people, who didn’t share my sense of nosiness and/or injustice will still believe in the original, fictional, version of events, and will stop donating as a consequence.  A lie can be half way round the world before the truth has got its trousers on.

The other lie which the Daily Mail has been peddling, and which is also the subject of interest from the Press Complaints Commission, is the one about all people on benefits being like Mick Philpott. I was one of the many hundreds (I should think thousands) of people who complained to the PCC about this slur. It was nothing short of a libel on everyone in receipt of benefits, tarring them all with the same brush. My complaint to the PCC was mainly on the grounds of accuracy.  First of all, 46% of all welfare spending is actually on old age pensions, and the fraud levels for JSA and ESA are 0.9% and 0.5% respectively. So, far from being hundreds of thousands of benefit fiddlers, as the Mail article originally suggested, the true figure for ESA fraud cases is something around 13,000 per annum, based on that percentage. Still too many, but not a mass indictment of everyone on benefits.  Secondly, Philpott was making his money, such as it was, out of the working tax credits, child benefits, and housing benefit. Benefits which are not exclusively tagged to unemployment. The whole Daily Mail article is a crock of shite, and a pretty nasty one, at that. This week, I had a response from the PCC about this, which said, inter alia:

In regard to complaints about matters of general fact under Clause 1 (Accuracy) of the Code, the Commission can investigate complaints from any concerned reader. As such, we are currently investigating the accuracy of these articles following earlier complaints. You are most welcome to contact us if you would like to follow up on these cases.

So, we will wait and see what comes of it: I’m not holding my breath. The head of the Press Complaints Commission is also the editor of the Daily Mail. Draw your own conclusions.

Anyway, in this crazy week when a week’s worth of work was crammed into three days, we finally got to Sunday, and the feast day of St Lydwine. St Lydwine is the patron saint of the chronically ill, ice skaters, and the town of Schiedam. In fact, when I first started to research her, I thought she was the patron saint of chronically ill ice skaters in the town of Schiedam, which is really, like, niche.

She lived from 1380 to 1433, and was born at Schiedam, Holland. After an injury in her youth, she became bedridden and suffered the rest of her life from various illnesses and diseases. She experienced mystical gifts, including supernatural visions of heaven, hell, purgatory, apparitions of Christ, and the stigmata. Thomas a Kempis and others wrote a biographies of her. She was canonized in 1890.

The injury in question happened when Lydwine suffered a fall while ice skating in 1396; a friend collided with her and caused her to break a rib on the right side, an injury from which she never properly recovered. An abscess formed inside her body, which later burst and caused her extreme suffering. Eventually, she came to believe that her mysterious illnesses, in retrospect, seemed to be from the hands of God.  She  accepted her plight as the will of God, and offered up her sufferings for the sins of humanity. Some of the illnesses which affected Lydwine were headaches, vomiting, fever, thirst, bedsores, toothaches, spasms of the muscles, blindness, neuritis and the stigmata. Definitely one to test NHS Direct.  Her biographers state that she became paralyzed except for her left hand and that great pieces of her body fell off, and that blood poured from her mouth, ears, and nose.

Today, some posit that Saint Lydwine was one of the first known multiple sclerosis patients and attribute her disability to the effects of the disease and her fall. After her fall, Lydwine fasted continuously and acquired fame as a healer and holy woman.  The town officials of Schiedam, her hometown, promulgated a document (which has survived) that attests to her complete lack of food and sleep. At first she ate a little piece of apple, then a bit of date and watered wine, then river water contaminated with salt from the tides.  It seems unsurprising to modern readers that such a diet would probably not do her a world of good. At least until you remember NHS food.

The authenticating document from Schiedam also attests that Lydwine shed skin, bones, and even parts of her intestines, which her parents kept in a vase and which gave off a sweet odour. These excited so much attention that Lydwine had her mother bury them. Her grave became a place of pilgrimage after her death and in 1434, a chapel was built over it. Thomas à Kempis's publication caused an increase in veneration. In 1615 her relics were taken to Brussels, but in 1871 they were returned to Schiedam.  After the closure of the Church of Lydwine in 1969, the statue of the saint and her relics were removed to the chapel dedicated to her in the rest-home West-Frankeland on the Sint Liduinastraat in town. Only after the demolition of the chapel in 1987 were all devotional objects removed to the Singelkerk in Schiedam.

So, at last, a saint with whom I can empathise! Although I’ve never been ice-skating in my life, and so far as I know, the bits of my intestines that fell off in 2010 didn’t give off a very sweet odour (judging from the emissions that the remainder of them sometimes produce) and were not buried, but incinerated in the clinical waste at HRI.  Other than that, I can see where she’s coming from.  I used to fall over, when I was younger, but got up again. It never occurred to me that the structure of my standing body was being undermined by wonky genes in the watches of the night; even when it became a possibility that this was happening, for a long while, I still didn’t want to know, which was one of the reasons why I didn’t look into, or claim, Disability Living Allowance, all those years when I could have been entitled to it.  I didn’t do benefits.

There are differences, though. St Lydwine was revered as a holy person, and people sought her out from far and wide, whereas today, she’d have been reviled by the DWP and branded a “scrounger” who should have a miraculous recovery from an irreversible debilitating disease, get a job (or work for nothing for “experience”) and open her curtains on a morning.

The biggest difference, though, between St Lydwine and myself, is that she had reconciled herself to the fact that her illness was a gift from God, and she accepted it, and offered it up on behalf of a sinful humanity.  As each day goes by, this is something which I seem to be finding more and more difficult. My old driving instructor once said to me, “never accelerate into a narrowing gap”, but the inexorable progress of my FSHMD makes it feel as if I am doing just that.  Some days, it is only my rage at being branded a shirker by rich toffs who have never had to struggle in their pampered lives, that gets me out of bed in a morning, so they can at least claim a partial success there. However, I do spend most of my time praying that the same thing, or something worse, will be visited on them, and theirs.  I don’t do forgiveness any more, that’s one of the reasons why I don’t go to Church.  One of the few things that keeps me from taking every tablet in the house washed down with a bottle of Cotes du Rhone is the knowledge that while I still live, I am an annoyance and a small thorn in the side of several people who deserve it.

Some days, it is actually more a combination of the rage, and the desire to ensure that I clear my debts before I die, so that at least Debbie and whatever animals we have at the time will be secure as long as they can scrape together enough for food and the increasingly insane and grandiose demands of the public utilities.

But no. Big G is notably absent in all of this.  It’s the same conundrum as I have over the Crucifixion – why does it have to be this way? How could it possibly further God’s plan for the development of the universe to give me a muscle-wasting disease that (unless something else gets me first) will eventually lose me the ability to write, speak, eat, breathe… it could get to the stage where I won’t even be able to ring my bell, to announce the approach of a shirker, to warn middle-class Tory swing voters!

I have no answer to this impasse. Because it comes back again to the same dilemma, the same dichotomy. Either it is all bollocks, or it means something I can’t comprehend, and “all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well”.  My one comfort is that I am absolutely convinced that this which we call “reality” is nothing of the sort, that there is something much bigger “behind” it in some way, something huge and vast, possibly something infinite.  But right now, I don’t know why I am even writing a religious blog. I don’t believe in the literal truth of the Old Testament, I am a moral relativist, I don’t forgive people, and I am not happy with either my own life or the crap that gets handed out to the poor and the underprivileged on the pretext that it will all be made right in the next world, and all around me I see random bad shit happening for no reason.  I keep coming back to W. B. Yeats and his Second Coming.

“The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity…”

Feeling out of sorts, and wondering why I am typing this, I turned to my trusty 1662 Book of Common Prayer, to see if it held any signs and answers:

The Gospel for today is John 20:19-22

The same day at evening, being the first day of the week, when the doors were shut, where the disciples were assembled for fear of the Jews, cam Jesus and stood in the midst, and saith unto them, “Peace be unto you”. And when he had so said, he shewed unto them his hands and his side. Then were the disciples glad, when they saw the Lord. Then said Jesus to them again, “Peace be unto you: as my Father hath sent me, even so send I you. And when he had said this, he breathed on them, and saith unto them, “Receive ye the Holy Ghost. Whosesoever sins ye remit, these are remitted unto them, and whosesoever sins ye retain, these are retained”.

Hmm. Interesting that it is about forgiveness, my main bugbear.  There is, of course, disagreement on the interpretation of this text (when isn’t there?) 

Some commentators say that it is not Jesus conferring the ability to forgive sins on his disciples, but (interestingly, given my previous references) linking it with the way the Priests were supposed to deal with lepers, as set out in the Septaguint Bible which would have been prevalent at the time of the historical Christ. In the same way as the Priest could not cure the lepers themselves, they could only pronounce whether or not God had cured them, so the disciples could not confer forgiveness, they could only say whether or not the sinner was ready for it.  Apart from the fact that the equation of leprosy with sin sounds a little too much like Conservative party policy, I can understand the reasoning behind that.

A typical US-based Bible interpretation web site says:

Jesus preached a crucial message about forgiving our brothers, as God forgave us. We stand in grace, and He expects us to keep our hearts pure toward others, not holding grudges or harbouring a spirit of unforgiveness, especially after He gave us such undeserved love and forgiveness at such a high personal cost to Himself!

It would seem then, that my mission, should I choose to accept it, is to let go of my enduring grudges against anyone who has ever crossed me up or done me down (and they are Legion) from Margaret Thatcher onwards, and offer up my suffering to God. Is it a mission impossible? Probably.  In the meantime, here I am, another week on, accelerating into my narrowing gap, with the side roads I shall never now take, closing off left right and centre.  Whatever I am going to do with the remainder of my life, like St Lydwine, I had better get my skates on.

But Freddie’s on his sofa, Zak’s in his chair, Matilda’s on the bed, and the bird is on the wing, or vice versa. Maybe by the end of next week, the raked up embers of the 1980s won’t glow quite so hot.  In the meantime, it’s time for a late breakfast, Marmite on toast, and a mug of steaming coffee all round.