Epiblog for the Feast of St Aelric

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley, and a frustrating one. Not just the weather, which remains stubbornly dull and showery, but also the fact that almost everything I have attempted this week has either gone wrong, blown up, caught fire, or groaned and slipped to the floor in a dying heap. 

It’s been one of those weeks when you begin to think that either you aren’t speaking English any more or that everyone else has suddenly developed hearing problems, and/or the government is putting something in the reservoirs to make everyone stupid.

The only thing which I managed to achieve without a hitch was to organise the delivery of some more herbs from Norfolk Herbs; they arrived on Tuesday, so now I  am the proud owner of a variety of funny-looking plants with names like Alecost, Horehound, Good King Henry, Dittander, and Lady’s Bedstraw.  But even this was tinged with disappointment, because they arrived on Tuesday, a very fraught day when I was unable really to give them my full attention, apart from unpacking them and lining them up outside alongside my wheelchair ramp, and giving them a good blasting with the water sprayer, then leaving them to it.  Dittander is a very versatile herb, in that it can be used apparently as a substitute for horseradish and also to treat leprosy.  Not, I hope, at the same time.

Anyway, I’m not the only one who has had a fraught week. Debbie ended up doing three or four hours of unpaid extra work on Monday, as exam fever gripped the college, and she was deluged with people wanting last-minute help, advice, and to finally hand in work which they should have completed back in January, and which she has been asking them about for so long she gave herself laryngitis.  Twice.  Like me, she has had a mixture of “buffet and rewards”. A candidate who she expected to be a slam-dunk for a pass actually failed because he didn’t turn over the exam paper and therefore, poor bloke, didn’t see the questions on the other side, with disastrous consequences for his percentage. On the plus side, one of her tough, uncompromising, take-no-shit learners at an outreach centre wrote her a poem, which she presented Deb with on Thursday, by way of saying how much Debbie had helped her.  Sometimes, it’s things like that that make all of the random crap, the endless observations, the reorganisations, the smart targets nobody ever looks at, and the “please re-apply for your own job or tick here for voluntary redundancy” letters from HR almost worthwhile.

Of course, it being the exam season, the ink jet printer decided to die on its arse on Wednesday morning, just at the point when Debbie had a huge stack of stuff to print out and take in to college at lunchtime. I was jerked out of a very pleasant dream where the Archbishop of Canterbury and I were judging the swimsuit round of a beauty contest, by Debbie barking round the edge of  the door about the #### printer not working, so I got up as quickly as I could, and hastened to help.  It turned out to be an interesting little conundrum, because the printer was working one minute, then not the next. By a process of elimination, I narrowed it down to loose wires inside the USB cable. In fact, at one point, I plugged it in to a USB slot on my laptop and you could see it flickering on and off on screen as the connection fizzed. 

Naturally, we didn’t have a spare cable – that would have been too much like forward planning – but I did manage to bodge the existing cable by winding gaffer-tape around it so it no longer wobbled at the point where the lead came out of the USB connector, and thankfully that was enough to hold it together until Friday, when the two replacement leads I had ordered off the internet arrived.  

As if that wasn’t bad enough, also on Wednesday, I suddenly realised, with a chill of horror, that, when Colin repaired the great email disaster and re-installed Outlook, he’d only set up one of my five email accounts! So the mail for all the other four was  still sitting up there in cyberland on the various servers; aaagh! An hour later, and I had managed (after a prolonged struggle in the case of Virgin Media) in getting Outlook talking to them all again, and had downloaded all of the waiting email. It wasn’t as bad as I had feared – there were only 175 unread emails, and most of them were spam which I was able to block-delete but even so, it was a couple of hours out of my day that I wasn’t expecting. 

In the midst of all this chaos, the animals have been keeping their heads down and keeping out of the way. Matilda has had an uneventful week, dodging the showers and sniffing the new herbs, particularly the Catnip and the Red Valerian.  Other than that, she’s had a simple, uncomplicated few days, alternating between chomping her way through a box of Felix during the week, and sleeping on the foot of my bed, but only when I’m not in it. 

Zak doesn’t care what the weather is like as long as Grandad takes him walkies, and a couple of times he’s come back wet through, when they’ve got the timing wrong, but tired and happy. Freddie’s been pottering about, and even accompanied them on a couple of days, just to stop his old joints seizing up altogether. I felt a bit mean one time, when I said “squirrels!” as loudly as I could (we are convinced he’s getting deafer and deafer) and he leapt off the settee and rushed to the door, little suspecting it was only a ruse to get him to go walkies!  Poor mutt. He’s also had a couple more episodes like the one he had that weekend at Walney, where he seems to go into a complete trance and nothing will attract his attention or make him move. It’s a bit like he’s having some sort of fugue or something; the other night, he just stood at the top of the steps leading down into the garden for about twenty minutes before he seemed to shake himself awake and remember what he’d gone out to do.  I suppose it’s inevitable, given his age, but it’s still sad. 

A quick Tour d’Horizon will give you the rest of the animal news: Maisie’s ferals, Bill and Sunshine, are still not placed in a shelter anywhere. After several dozen fruitless phone calls and emails this week, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s easier to get your kid put down for Eton than it is to get two feral cats into a cat shelter in South Yorkshire.  Everywhere that might be able to take them and socialise them with a view to their eventual re-homing is rammed to the gills, with a waiting list.  At the same time, though, at least some doggies are being re-homed. We found this out when yet another prospective replacement for Tiggy was snapped up by someone else before we could get there this week. Back to the drawing board.

The birds and squirrels must all be on their holidays, with the exception of Mr Popinjay, who I suspect is actually about four or five different jays, who can be relied upon to come around for peanuts.  Meanwhile, Brenda (or somebody) continues to eat the stuff I put out for her each night. 

The other major thing that went wrong this week was Nelson Mandela.  No disrespect to the great ex-leader, who did so much to fight apartheid, but he really screwed up my press release about Gez Walsh’s flash mob.  The flash mob in question was with the kids of Swallow Hill Community College in Leeds, who descended on Briggate in Leeds on Wednesday to perform “Thriller” in tribute to Michael Jackson, who died four years ago that day.  Personally, I think that all of the effort which they put into it was deserving of high praise and recognition. As Gez said, it would make the kids’ day, especially as the school itself isn’t exactly over-endowed with high status academy-style recognition, though the kids and the teachers are both the proverbial salt of the earth.  They aren’t a performing arts college, they aren’t the Kids from Fame, and if they do have a career on TV, it’s probably going to be CCTV, but for a few brief moments, all the work they’d put in came to fruition, all the efforts of their teacher, driving round in her own time to get the parents to sign permission waivers, all the bullshit about risk assessments and the like, was forgotten, and they did their thing. 

I’d already sent out one lot of press releases, and on Monday I sent them again, to try and raise some sort of media enthusiasm, then followed up by phone. Look North, the regional TV News programme from the BBC, said they hadn’t made any decisions what they were going to cover on the Tuesday, because they were “keeping their options open, because of Nelson Mandela.” I wasn’t aware of any specific Leeds connection with Nelson Mandela, and in fact suspected they may have been confusing him with Charlie Williams, but anyway, I bit my tongue, rather than arguing. 

Calendar, the ITV regional news programme, has a “news hotline” which is basically a voicemail to stop people like me bothering the presenters when they are putting on their make up.  I doubt anyone ever listens to it. I might leave a message on it that Brantingham Pond has dried up, one day, just to see what happens.

BBC Radio Leeds were also playing the “Mandela gambit”, but at least promised to phone me back after their morning meeting on the Tuesday. I do have “form” actually, for killing off well-known public figures in the pursuit of publicity for Gez Walsh: back in 1997 I had a mass press sendout planned to promote “The Spot on My Bum”, release date set for 1st September that year. On  the evening of 31st August 1997,  however, Henri Paul decided to drive Princess Di home via the Pont D’Alma. The rest is history, as, indeed, was my press release, unfortunately. 

I am no stranger to the world of media priorities. I remember once when I was appearing on a show on Radio Sheffield where we discussed the week’s news topics, and the host handed me a list of the authorised BBC news agenda topics which we were permitted to discuss. He didn’t actually say that going off piste would result in me being faded out by the producer, but the inference was there. 

However, I digress. The day dawned, and Tuesday found me madly tweeting a link to the press release on our web site to all the presenters on Look North, Radio Leeds, Calendar and the journalists on the Yorkshire Post and the Yorkshire Evening Post. I then did a blanket search on Twitter for anything related to Leeds and sent them it as well. I may even have sent one to Leeds Castle, which is in Kent. Oh well.  Radio  Leeds did turn up, did an interview, and took some footage, which ended up on their Facebook page. 

Look North did actually send a static camera, but when Elaine, Gez’s colleague, approached the guy and asked if he was up for an interview, he just said “No”, turned his back on her, and stomped off, apparently. They didn’t use the footage, preferring to concentrate that night on devoting a large proportion of the programme to their performance at the Royal Television Society awards. Right, fine, good.  The Yorkshire Post apparently wrote a two-sentence piece on it, which I have been unable to find anywhere on line.

It sort of makes you think that the kids would have got more coverage if they had lived up to the stereotype everybody has of them, stabbed a passer by, then nicked the BBC Leeds Radio Car and burnt it out somewhere. 

Meanwhile, oblivious of the chaos he was causing, Nelson Mandela stubbornly started recovering.  After the flash mob was over, I sent Gez a text that said “OK, Nelson, you can let go now!” He didn’t reply at my feeble attempt at cheering him up, because I guess, like me, he was pissed off at the way it all panned out.  I don’t know why I should be so surprised. It was just a reminder of the media’s priorities, and that bad news is always more newsworthy than good news, which is why nearly every Look North bulletin starts with a car crash and then goes on to feature a tragic toddler dying of something incurable and hard to spell.

There was plenty of bad news around this week, and you didn’t have to look far for it. It was plastered all over the media on Wednesday, in the form of George Osborne’s spending review statement, including the announcement that benefit claimants would be forced to learn English (or "lean" English, as Andrew Selous MP unfortunately tweeted).

The thing is, though, as is so often the case when you start to do a forensic analysis of the premise on which these decisions are made, you find that the story is actually quite different to that suggested by the blaring headlines in The Daily Mail.  “100,000 jobseekers forced to learn English or lose their benefits” it trumpeted on Wednesday, or thereabouts.  Suspicious of this dodgy-looking round figure, I decided to look into it. Four days later, I am still no nearer finding out where that figure comes from.  I suspect, it’s another case of the DWP having done a sampling exercise of a small data set, which has then been extrapolated by either them, or the Daily Mail, and presented of a fact which is typical of all claimants. That’s what they usually do.

On the way, I’ve discovered that there’s absolutely no strong evidence that there are hundreds of thousands of idle immigrants who can’t speak English at all, living off benefits in Britain. The most recent census data, published in March, shows that there are about 138,000 people in England and Wales who can’t speak a word of English. While you could argue that, from a social cohesion point of view, that’s still too many, nevertheless as it stands it’s 0.3% of the population. 

There are no published figures that I can discover for how many of these 138,000 are claiming benefits – it appears to be yet another of those statistics which it would be really useful to know, but which the Government, perversely, does not collect.  A DWP study published last year, however, gives a figure of 371,000 of the 5.5 million people claiming working age benefits in the UK (approx 6%) were born outside of the country – however, of a random sample of 9,000 of these, about half of the sample were found to be UK citizens. 

So once again we have a ladle full of statistics soup, which is about as meaningful in real terms as the EU sprout regulations.  It gets better – or worse, depending how you look at it.   The very same DWP study also found that those born abroad were significantly less likely to claim benefits than those born in Britain.  The then employment minister, Chris Grayling, a man who probably spends his spare time sticking pins into wax models of asylum seekers, was forced to admit, grudgingly and possibly through clenched teeth, "We've yet to establish the full picture. It may be that there isn't a problem right now." But you won’t see that in 72pt bold on the front page of the Daily Mail.

So this suggests that only a very small proportion of the 138,000 non-English speakers are likely to claim benefits. And of those, an even smaller proportion are likely to fail to turn up to classes when required to do so. Plainly, the figures, and the announcement, are bollocks. But it’s bollocks that has done its job, because who, apart from nitpicky warty old cynics like me, is going to bother to unpick all this tissue of crap and expose the vapid bogus appeal to dog-whistle politics which is what it’s really all about? Certainly not the people who post on Facebook things like “stop all there [sic] benefits and send them all home”.  When it comes to addressing the constituency of people who think a homophone is something Graham Norton uses to ring up Gok Wan, the government’s work is done. 

It’s possible, of course,  that the measure is not aimed at a mythical group of claimants who can't speak any English at all, but at a different group whose poor English is a barrier to them getting work. They may well be “strivers” rather than “scroungers” (by the Junta’s definition, anyway) and they may well welcome the extra provision of English classes for them. But again, you won’t see that on the front age of the Daily Mail. 

And you won’t hear the Labour Party point it out, either, since they have entirely conceded the argument, and the battleground, to the Tories.  George Osborne stood up in Parliament this week and announced that in 2015 we are giving Belgium £1M to help do up the site of the Battle of Waterloo in time for the 200th anniversary.  This, for me, was a genuine WTF? moment.  We’re closing libraries and museums, we can’t afford to keep the lights on, local council services are being decimated, and we’re giving away a million pounds for this? I know that, in government expenditure terms, a million pounds is chickenfeed, and I am the first to argue for the importance of the study of history, but even so. A million pounds. 

And, to make matters worse, he used it as an excuse to make a cheap political point about Labour, which wasn’t even very funny. I don’t think I have ever hated the odious little squit as much as I did at that moment, and had there been a house-brick within reach,  right there, right then, the TV screen would now be a smoking heap of broken glass. 

The Labour Party, meanwhile, just sat there like puddings and took it.  It’s beginning to look to me like they’ve already conceded the 2015 election, either deliberately or accidentally, by saying that, after the next election, they will be more Tory than the Tories. If we really had been discussing the Battle of Waterloo, the current Labour attitude to opposition is like Wellington and Blucher turning up to fight Napoleon, each wearing a silly hat, each with their hands stuffed in their waistcoats, and the other arm round a girlfriend called “Josephine”. 

The next day, the salt of the cuts was rubbed further into our wounds, by the announcement of the Queen’s pay rise.  Now, I'm a monarchist. I believe in the idea of a monarchy - amongst other reasons because it's a constitutional bulwark against the idea of having (for instance) President Thatcher, President Blair or President Cameron. I also think that as a person, the present Queen has dedicated her entire life to her duty as she sees it, and she should be acknowledged and given respect for that.

BUT

I'm afraid, in an era when the government is waging all-out war on the poor, the ill and the disadvantaged, and we're all being told that we've got to eat bread and scrape for a decade to come, or lump it, the sort of funding increases announced this week, coming a day after that braying jackass Osborne announced further plans to wreck the economy and make people's lives a misery, is, putting it frankly, taking the piss. Once could almost say, the Royal Wee. 

As far as Labour is concerned, I despair.  This week, I happened to catch Ken Loach’s film, Spirit of ’45, on Film 4, a semi-documentary about the formation of the Welfare State by political giants such as Clement Attlee and Nye Bevan.  It should be required viewing for the current Labour front bench, particularly Ed Miliband and Ed Balls. On a loop. Til they get the message.  Or until their eyes start to bleed, whichever is the sooner.

And so we came, eventually, at the end of a fraught week, to Sunday.  There are in fact a number of saints and similar holy men and women commemorated on 30 June. For a start, it is the Feast of the Holy Martyrs.  These are also called “The Protomartyrs of Rome” Accused of setting fire to Rome by Nero (a man who knew what he was talking about in the pyromania stakes)  some of them were burned as living torches at Nero’s evening banquets, some were crucified, and some were fed to wild animals.  So you blame someone for something which is actually your fault, then devise novel and bizarre ways of bumping them off. I believe the DWP and ATOS have been taking notes.  

However, other than their rather grisly mode of demise, there isn’t really a lot to say about them.  So I started to look more widely, for a more relevant, more well-documented saint whose feast day is 30 June, and came up with St Airick.  Despite sounding rather like an air freshener,  St Airick is at least an English saint. It turns out that he is also known as St Aelric, or even in some cases, St Eric.

For the sake of avoiding any more confusion, I’m going to refer to him as St Aelric, because apart from anything else, “St Eric” is going to get mixed up with St Goderic or St Godric, whose story is entwined with that of St Aelric, as we shall see.  In fact, St Aelric’s chief claim to fame is that he was St Godric’s companion, or rather St Godric was his.  In fact, St Godric was St Aelric’s deathbed companion, in the 12th Century.

There isn’t actually as much in the way of information about St Aelric as I had first thought – but I did find an online prayer forum, where you could make and upload an online prayer to St Aelric.  Once you have formulated your prayer, you then have to fill in an anti-spam “captcha” before you can click on "submit", because obviously, St Aelric gets lots of spam, and he has to make sure you’re not selling him Viagra, fake Rolexes, or payment protection insurance

The friendship between St Aelric and St Godric was based at Wolsingham, in what is now County Durham.   St Aelric was actually born in Norfolk, however, so there’s always the outside chance that he went from Walsingham to Wolsingham, which would be neat, and possibly even funny, in a strangely muted sort of a way.  In medieval times, Wolsingham was apparently a holy place, as well as being the home to Aelric and Godric, who also founded Finchale Abbey. The town is even recorded as the site of a miracle, where a young girl was killed in an accident involving a horse but her life was miraculously  restored. Apparently, however, if you go to Wolsingham today and look for Holy Wood, all you will find it is the site of an executive housing estate.

In many ways, St Godric is actually a lot more interesting than St Aelric. He’d already done many pilgrimages round the Mediterranean before he went to live with St Aelric.  It was on his return to England that he went to live with St Aelric, for two years.  After Aelric’s death, Godric made one last pilgrimage to Jerusalem, where he arrived at the Temple Mount and took off his shoes, swearing never to wear sandals again, and returned home barefoot.  Back in County Durham once more, Godric persuaded Ranulf Flambard, the Prince-Bishop of Durham, to allow him to live as a hermit at Finchale, next to the River Wear. There he remained, allegedly, for sixty years, and the local prior obligingly “screened” his visitors and only let through the ones Godric wanted to see, though these did apparently include St Thomas A Becket (then just plain Thomas Becket) and Pope Alexander III, if tradition is to be believed. 

Finally, if St Godric is not your particular cup of holy tea, and you are still looking to wring the last drop of anything vaguely spiritual out of my ramblings, then you could always reflect on the fact that according to the Lexicon and the Book of Common Prayer, this is also the Sixth Sunday after Pentecost and green vestments are in order, if you feel like dressing up. 

I must admit, I don’t feel very spiritual, these days. I’ve become embroiled again in what Yeats called “the foul rag and bone shop of the heart” or “the fury and the mire of human veins” – but what is the alternative? Are we supposed to turn a blind eye to the suffering and the anger and the injustice, and just go on chanting a Te Deum? What do we do about the abandoned animals chucked out of cars because their owners can’t afford the food and vet bills? What do we say to the single mother whose benefit has been cut? What do we say to the queues outside the food banks? – Don’t worry, you’ll get your reward in heaven? Well, that’s as maybe, but if the meek are going to inherit the earth, I’d like to see them start to get their fair share pretty damn soon now, thank you very much. It would be nice if they didn’t have to die first. I believe in life before death. Probably more, these days, than I do in an afterlife.

Despite which, dead people have been on my mind this week; one dead person in particular, the FESG who I wrote about two blogs ago. I don’t know why she is haunting me so much right now.  Well, actually, I think I do. It’s not haunting in the COTEP sense of the word, prickles down the back of your neck, look up and see a ghostly face pressed against the windowpane type of haunting. It’s because I think I have projected on to her all of my regrets, my fury and my frustration at no longer being able to do stuff that I used to do, and she’s become a sort of symbol, a rebus that stands for all of that loss and regret. I suppose that’s better on blaming it on a living person (not that blame is the right word, really) and at least if she’s no longer with us (at least in this dimension) then no one who is currently alive can feel threatened by it or unjustly compared to.

Methought I saw my late espoused saint,

As Milton said:

Came vested all in white, pure as her mind:
Her face was veil'd, yet to my fancied sight
Love, sweetness, goodness in her person shin'd
So clear, as in no face with more delight.
But O as to embrace me she enclin'd
I wak'd, she fled, and day brought back my night.

I suppose anyone who insists on sitting up late at night listening to Harvest by Neil Young, and reading the manuscript of a ghost book which has been submitted this week, is bound to get these sort of feelings, now and then.  Nothing to see here, folks, move along.

As well as looking back, something I do lots of these days, I am also looking forward to next week, because it seems, during the time that I was writing this Epiblog (in my head, over the last few days) that one intractable and long standing problem which has beset us for 18 months or so may actually be moving towards a conclusion. Tiggy’s successor. The more astute of my readers will have noticed that the picture at the top of this particular blog is not actually St Aelric, but a small female collie dog called Misty, and we believe that she may be coming to live with us, and to be our next dog, following a visit today when we went to see her at the collie dog sanctuary. Nothing much is known about her; she was found tied up with wire by the side of a road. But the people at the Freedom of Spirit Trust for Border Collies rescued her and took her in, and - to be honest, considering that she has every right to snarl with anger at the raw deal she's had from us humans up to that point - she has a really sweet nature.

She wouldn’t be a candidate for a pet of ours unless there was something odd about her, and in her case, it is that she suffers from the genetically inherited condition of heterochromia – her eyes are two different colours, one brown, one blue.  So, in terms of “her song”, we have a choice between “Play Misty for Me” and “Don’t it Make My Brown Eyes Blue”.  Still, David Bowie suffers from the same thing and it hasn’t done him any harm. Plus, if they ever do reintroduce the dog licence, she’ll be cheaper, because she’s black and white.

I have kept relatively quiet about this, because on the last couple of occasions when I’ve blithely announced that it looks like we’ve got a new dog, it’s all gone pear-shaped at the last moment. Indeed, things with Misty could still suffer a slip in the cup/lip interface department. But, as of tonight, we’re quietly hopeful.

Anyway, another week beckons, and we’ll be needing a reference from our vet, and so on, and so on.  But she’s a sweet little dog, and she jumped up into the camper van and made herself at home today, as if she already lived there.  It might just be the start of another era. She’ll never be another Tiggy, but then we wouldn’t want her to try and be anything other than herself, and she’s different enough for it to make a difference, if you see what I ‘m getting at.

In the meantime, would you believe, it’s somehow got to be the last day of June, and – because of the visit to see Misty today – I haven’t done any gardening, apart from to water everything.  There is a time to weep, and a time to mourn, and a time to rejoice, and the wheel goes round and comes full circle. A time to laugh and a time to cry, like the song says. And sometimes, like today, a time to maybe do a bit of both, on the quiet.  And who knows where the time goes, eh? Who knows where the time goes?