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.