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.
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