Epiblog for the Feast of St Odran

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley.  Still warm, but the leaves are coming off apace, now, and making a thick carpet on my wheelchair ramps. The rain, when it comes, is sudden, and fierce, then gone again, almost as quickly. We have, indeed, lost the Feverfew, and there’s no point in replacing it before next Spring. I have great plans for the garden next year, but they will have to wait. Now, it’s a case of battening down the hatches and counting the damage after Christmas.

Matilda’s been skittering about with the wind up her tail, thundering around in the middle of the night, chasing her own shadow and/or imaginary spooks.  Like all the cats we’ve ever had, she seems to think I am able to control the weather.  When I open up the door to the cat flap in a morning, she goes to it and sticks her head out to check what’s going on, and if it’s raining, she follows me, yowling, as I go through to the kitchen, then goes to the conservatory door and asks to be let out there. I have told her that the weather outside the conservatory door is exactly the same as the weather outside her cat flap, but she won’t rest until she has tested it personally.

The remainder of the animal contingent have had a relatively blameless week, although whenever three dogs get together and form a pack, however rudimentary and ad hoc, there’s bound to be some shenanigans.  Misty went for her first ever walkies with Grandad and Zak this week, and celebrated the event by throwing up in Grandad’s new car.  Not content with that, she added to the mayhem on Saturday by barrelling in after her outing to Deer Hill Nab with Debbie, and putting her foot on the edge of the muttnut dish, reprising her earlier chaos.  Once again, I found myself picking up each one individually with my grabstick.  I don’t know how many there were this time, I lost count at 93. In fact, I was losing the will to live.

Most of the time, Freddie takes one look at the weather outside, turns round again on the settee, and settles back down to a further bout of snoozing.  He did, however, show some signs of wanting to go walkies on Wednesday, so Debbie adapted her plans to something more suitable for a 90-year old (in human years) and set off down to the cricket field with Misty, Zak and Freddie in tow.  I settled down to carry on working. I have done little else this week. [No Max Miller jokes about Little Else, thank you!] Half an hour later, the phone went off. It was Debbie.

“I don’t suppose he’s come back, has he?”

Several possibilities crossed my mind – Elvis? Jesus? – then I realised she meant Freddie. I looked outside, through the conservatory door. Blackness, wind, possibly the odd spot of rain. But no dog.

“No, there’s no sign of him.”

“Oh God, the little sod’s scuttled off somewhere, and I have no idea where he is!”

I suggested to Deb that all she could do was to retrace her steps as quickly as possible with the other two, and hope to overtake him somewhere along the path.  She said she would. In the meantime, all I could do was open the conservatory door and bellow “FREDDIE!” several times into the darkness.  All that did was to set Butch next door off barking, so I packed it in and went back to get warm by the stove.  Ten minutes later, I had just about thawed, when I looked across and saw Freddie’s whiskery little face pressed up against the glass of the conservatory door. I trundled over and let him in, and he made a beeline for the settee, while I speed-dialled Debbie and told her that he’d somehow found his way back.

When she returned shortly afterwards, Debbie gave Freddie an almighty dressing down, calling him a “dementia-ridden old fogey” and telling him he was grounded for a month.  I ventured that he must still have some of his marbles left, as he did find his own way back, and received the full benefit of a gamma-ray glare for my trouble, so I shut up.

Anyway, with the weekend, and Granny’s return from her royal progress through the southern half of her dominion, Freddie and Zak have returned home, and Misty is once more queen of the contested armchair. I think she might be missing the other members of her impromptu pack, though, as she keeps coming up to me while I am working and nuzzling at my arm to stop and make a fuss of her.  If I am ever going to get any real work done while she’s in this mood, I need to somehow fix up a false arm bolted to the side of my wheelchair, so she can nuzzle away while I carry on typing.

Debbie has been looking forward to half-term, and maybe even getting off to the Lakes for a couple of days in the camper van. She’s been looking up the Wainwrights, and talking about getting even fitter for walking, and wanting to bivvy out on top of a mountain.  I have no objection to going off in the camper as a concept, it’s merely the destination I quibble over, at this time of the year, though I doubt that the camper would make it as far as Majorca.  Plus, Debbie is becoming more and more a disciple of Father Vincent McNabb, at least as far as walking is concerned:

Buy boots you can walk in. Walk in them. Even if you lessen the income of the General Omnibus Company, or your family doctor, you will discover the human foot. On discovering it, your joy will be as great as if you had invented it. But this joy is the greatest, because no human invention even of Mr. Ford or Mr. Marconi is within a mile of a foot.

In the meantime, we continue our medieval monastic existence here, pending any departure on a vehicular peregrination.  I have discovered that I can make a home-made rustic hummus by mashing a tin of chick-peas and then adding in various other ingredients. I could always put it through the blender, but I begrudge the effort/reward ratio involved in putting the bloody thing together in the first place, then dismantling and washing it up afterwards, for the sake of a couple of slices of toast and hummus for Debbie, so I mash it by hand.  I did say, when I was making her breakfast the other day, that I felt as if I should be singing traditional tribal chick-pea pounding mouth music.  She said I shouldn’t feel obliged.

It’s a great way of taking out your aggression, though, or should I say frustration.  Or maybe a mixture of both.  Still, it’s not all been gloomy news. The Home Office has finally decided that the “go home” vans are a bad idea.  They were “too much of a blunt instrument”, apparently.  Well, I could have told them that, if they’d asked me at the outset, but then we would have all missed out on the entertaining spectacle of a shitstorm of protest blasting Theresa May.  No sooner had this happened than Cameron himself popped up saying that Facebook were irresponsible in hosting graphic videos of beheadings.  Against a background of energy companies raising their prices faster than an Amish barn, John Major, of all people, rose from the grave to say that the higher prices should be subject to a windfall tax.  By now, I was starting to pinch myself.  I am sure it’s just a temporary aberration, though, and the aliens will be giving us the real Tories back, any day now.

Meanwhile, the cost of the initial badger culling trial was announced. 1558 badgers had been culled, at an averaged-out cost of £2,246 per badger. Given that a double room at The Savoy costs £346.48 per night, for that money it has taken to kill these badgers, the government could have put each of them up at The Savoy for six nights. Leaving aside the arguments against culling badgers, and the many reasons why the proposed cull will not help in stopping the spread of bovine TB, purely on cost grounds alone you have to wonder if it is money well spent.

Despite the rather odd Damascene conversions from the likes of Cameron, May, etc, here have also been some depressingly-familiar stories rumbling around.  The potential disaster at Grangemouth Oil Refinery was averted, but only by means of a climbdown by Unite, who were backed into a corner by the owners so that they had no choice but to either give way or be seen to be held responsible for the loss of 1800 jobs and 14% of our national energy capacity.

One of the blogs I read on the subject at the time summed it up rather neatly:

What is there left to be positive about in the British economy? People genuinely talk as if this might be the future, that we may need to accept total dominance of employers with no recourse at all by workers. This is a vision of Britain where we're all like Mexican immigrants waiting at the side of the road for a truck to drive up and its driver to say 'one day of work – you, you and you'. But, as is par for the course in Britain with its far-right media and utter lack of understanding of how the world works beyond our shores, people seem to think we're normal. Yet one more time, the Grangemouth disaster shows one thing above all – Britain is not normal. Not at all.

You could argue that such sentiment has no place n a weekly spiritual reflection, of course, but then you would be arguing against Father Vincent McNabb, who said;

"There is general agreement that some opportune remedy must be found quickly for the misery and wretchedness pressing so unjustly on the majority of the working class: for the ancient working-mens guilds were abolished in the last century, and no other protective organisation took their place. Public institutions and the laws set aside the ancient religion. Hence by degrees it has come to pass that working men have been surrendered, isolated and helpless, to the hard-heartedness of employers and the greed of unchecked competition. The mischief has been increased by rapacious usury, which, although more than once condemned by the Church, is nevertheless under different guise, but with the like injustice, still practised by covetous and grasping men. To this must be added that the hiring of labour and the conduct of trade are concentrated in the hands of comparatively few; so that a small number of very rich men have been able to lay upon the teeming masses of the labouring poor a yoke little better than that of slavery itself."

He was writing this in the 1930s, fired up by the zeal sparked in him by his reading of the papal encyclical Rerum Novarum,  as he ministered to the poor and the disadvantaged in the slums of St Pancras in London, but – rather depressingly – his words still ring true today.  The fact that nothing ever seems to change was also the subject of a much-debated piece of television, namely Russell Brand versus Jeremy Paxman on whether not voting can ever be, in the words of 1066 and All That, “a good thing.”

I didn’t watch it live, but it caused a flurry of interest on the internet (not to be confused with a flurry of interest in real life) so I logged on and played it back on the BBC’s I-Player thingum.

In fact, the whole exchange seemed rather sterile and pointless. There was no progression, because Paxo and Brand were just lobbing grenades at each other from entrenched positions. Brand saying, in effect, what I have said in the past: - don't vote, it only encourages them, but then failing to develop his argument and provide alternatives, and Paxo saying over and over again that Brand had no right to make that statement if he himself didn't vote, which is a connection I didn't quite get.

The crux of the issue is how to send a massive and unequivocal message to politicians that things have to change and there has to be a re-connect with ordinary people's aims and aspirations and an end to the ever-widening gulf between the rich, cocooned political elite and the rest of us, the lumpenproletariat queuing for buses in the rain.

My own solutions are

a) a boycott of the existing political process, a "none of the above" campaign, but this would have to be a truly mass boycott, and carried out in such a way that the politicians could not just ignore it and carry on as before or write it off merely as apathy. This would of necessity involve people with wildly differing views burying the hatchet temporarily and working together for one cause only, re-establishing fairness and representation in politics. It would be a bit like playing football in no-man's land while the campaign was in process. Or:

b) setting up an alternative structure alongside parliament to monitor and comment on what parliament does which is the route the Occupy St Pauls movement an d the People's Assembly are going down. Or:

c) cross-party pressure for parliamentary reform, in effect a new Great Reform Bill, including curbs on expenses, curbs on unelected special advisors and lobbying firms, curbs on donations, individuals and corporate, a residency qualification before you can stand for a constituency, limit the number of MPs' homes to one home, in the constituency, and maybe powers of recall. If I wasn’t so damn tired, I would start a campaign now, calling for a new Great Reform Bill, along those lines. I offer the idea for free to anyone who wants to pick up the baton and run with it. Or:

d) Various forms of direct action a la UK Uncut. The problem with these though is they are prone to being hijacked by either violent loony anarchists and/or MI5 agents provocateur, who want to cause violence so the message of the original demo will be lost in the media noise about the violence. Or:

e) Rioting, looting, civil disorder, water cannon and troops on the streets. (My least favourite of all these options, but that is where we are headed if we don't do something).

or f) all of the above

And, I hasten to add, that a) above would have to be carried out in such a way as to remain mindful and respectful of the great privilege we have of owning a vote, and not be allowed to become metaphorical peeing on the graves of all those, including Emily Davidson, who gave their lives in order that we could choose our representatives in democratic elections.

The problem is that anger in itself has nowhere to go.  I am angry about a great many things. Angry about the uncaring, stupid government with their wrecking, slash-and-burn policies. Angry about homelessness, angry about dogs and cats being abandoned and left to die in council pounds.  Angry at the way my country, once a beacon of respect and tolerance, famous for giving the underdog a chance, has been turned into a nasty, narrow-minded nest of bigots. Angry at being potentially labelled a useless scrounger because some genetic fault way back in my family’s history long before I was born now means I am confined to this mobile birdcage with a life-limiting disease. It’s not bad enough that I’m dying , apparently, the DWP is intent on labelling me as a leech on society as well, for daring to claim back some of the money I paid into the system all those years I worked, back in the days when here were still real jobs, from 1976-2010.

But what good does it do? Over a million people were angry about Tony Blair taking us into an illegal war in Iraq, but he still went ahead and did it anyway.  We need to find some way of channelling my, and other people’s anger, into real, believable change for the better in society, otherwise it will find another way out, with much less pleasant results.  If the politicians really do want to end up swinging from a lamp-post like Mussolini, they are going the right way about it.

I shouldn’t read Father Vincent McNabb, it does my blood pressure no good at all, but I have (rather perversely, considering all the other more urgent stuff I should be doing) been continuing to research the book I started to write some years ago on utopias, and Fr McNabb is an important link between people such as Chesterton and Belloc, who espoused “distributism” and Eric Gill’s arts and crafts community, to which he was, briefly, the Dominican chaplain. Fr McNabb is a very interesting figure in many ways, and well worthy of a book in his own right.  I wouldn’t be at all surprised if they canonised him one day. He deserves canonisation alone for describing having to listen to the confessions of nuns as “like being slowly pecked to death by a duck.”

Anyway, at one point he says:

"Only once did anyone come to Jesus after speech with Him and go away sad. This was the young man who had great desire to have everlasting life. But he also had great possessions. He did not know that for him the way to the joy of life was to accept the challenge of Jesus, Go, sell whatsoever thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in Heaven. And come follow me. He did not realise that his invitation to follow the poor Babe of Bethlehem, the poor man of Galilee, the poor outcast of Golgotha, was a call to enter the narrow path of perfect joy. He could not leave the things which sooner or later would leave him. He clung to his great possessions on earth rather than seek treasure in Heaven, and left the joy of wilful poverty and the following of Jesus for the sadness of wilful wealth and the service of Mammon."

Which is all well and good, but I object to the poor being told to give up what little they have in the first place, in order to make the lot of the rich happier and more comfortable, which seems to be our current situation.  Especially as, in some cases, when they complain about it, the poor are told not to worry, not to make a fuss, because it will all be better in the next world.  Poverty and wealth are relative terms, of course, and there is also poverty and wealth of the spirit, as opposed to money and possessions.  Fr McNabb probably owned less in the way of material possessions than many of his parishioners. He only ever owned one cassock at a time, and wore it until it was past repair, at which point he was usually, providentially, donated another. He would tramp round his parish, visiting the poor and the sick (even washing kitchen floors, on occasion) with his rucksack (he called it a “Nabb-sack”) on his back, and wearing his hob-nailed army boots, which took him everywhere.  Yet he seems to have been possessed of the same wealth of spiritual treasure that the Zen monks who possessed only a robe and a bowl used to enjoy, as they tramped from monastery to monastery.

Eight or nine years ago now, in one of my very first Epiblogs, written about having a meeting with Barclays Bank who were trying to take away our overdraft at the time, using the metaphor of St Crispin’s Day, I said that I needed to be careful not to get too hung up about the things that don’t matter, and concentrate on those that do.  I still hold by that, eight years later, in another week that also contains St Crispin’s Day.  What I object to is people having what little they do possess taken away from them, whether they like it or not. It’s one thing to decide voluntarily to give up all you have an follow Christ into the wilderness, it’s a completely different matter to have your house taken away from over your head because some idiot politician needed the money to have his swimming pool cleaned out on expenses, or the boss of some energy company needed a third home in the Bahamas. What I object to is living in a country where the Helping Hands Dog Rescue has to find £1500 by the end of the month or it will be forced to close. [They are on Facebook, if you can help them in any way, please do.]

Anyway, we seem somehow to have reached Sunday again, by a roundabout route, and the Feast of St. Odran of Iona.  As usual, of course, there is more than one St Odran, and to make it even more confusing, the other one was also a sidekick to a famous saint, in his case, St. Patrick.

“Today’s” Odran, whose name is sometimes spelt “Otteran”, served as abbot of the Irish monastery of Tyfarnham in Meath, and founded another abbey at Latteragh in County Tipperary. According to Irish tradition Odran served as abbot of Meath and while carrying out that duty, also founded Lattreagh. Although little is known about his life, he is described as “noble and without sin.” He left Ireland with eleven others to accompany the Irish missionary priest Saint Columba on his sea journey to the Scottish island of Iona, where Columba subsequently founded the Iona monastic colony. Shortly after their arrival, Otteran sensed his own death drawing near, and predicted that he would be the first monk to die on the island.

After taking leave of Otteran and giving him his blessing, Columba stepped outside, where he experienced a vision of angels battling with demons as the soul of his friend Otteran was borne to heaven. Columba learned that Otteran had in fact died just then. Iona’s original cemetery grew around Otteran’s burial plot. In fact, the oldest remaining church on Iona is dedicated to Saint Odran and the surrounding cemetery is called Reilig Odhráin in his memory.

Another legend surrounding Odran’s death tells that the chapel which St Columba wanted to build on Iona kept on being destroyed every night. Finally he was told by a voice(!) that it could never be finished until a living man was buried below. So Odran volunteered to be buried alive, in order that the chapel could be finished. But one day he suddenly reappeared, and pushed his head through the wall and said that there was no hell as was supposed, nor heaven that people talk about!  Alarmed by this, Columba had the pit covered with earth again, quickly, “to save Odran's soul from the world and its sin.” Yeah, right.

It has been pointed out by George Henderson, in Survivals in Belief Among The Celts (1911) that the legend points to an ancient folk-belief, and he sees a similarity with the Arthurian legend of the building of Dinas Emris, where Vortigern was counselled to find and sacrifice "a child without a father" to ensure that the fortress walls did not collapse.  This folkloric tradition is known as “foundation sacrifice” and Peter Ackroyd uses it to great effect in the thriller Hawksmoor.

I see it, though, as less sinister and more gentle -  more as a relict of the various Irish tales about the little people, the faery folk, objecting to humans building at their sacred sites and undoing overnight what the earthly folk built up during the day, a common motif, unless the humans agree to give them a hostage to take away into the land of faery, but either way it’s a fascinating survival of some sort of vestigial, shamanistic notion from a time long before anything was ever written down, handed on in tales told round a flickering fire, while all outside the winter darkness raged and monsters prowled.

It’s all too easy to believe in such things at this time of year. Next week brings Halloween, a time when the dark curtain between this world and the next can sometimes grow less opaque, more transparent.  Coincidentally, talking of a different kind of haunting, tomorrow would have been my father’s 91^st birthday.  He doesn’t haunt me in a literal sense, of course, wandering around he house in a sheet or clanking chains,  though, as I have often said before, I do have long and lucid dreams where I have conversations with him and I know he’s dead and he knows he’s dead, and it’s no big deal, really.  But he haunts me in the sense of some days I feel myself becoming him, and I find myself defining my daily experiences and reactions through the filter of what he would have said, or done, at the time.

As far as Iona is concerned, the modern-day community on the island say that it is

“a dispersed Christian ecumenical community working for peace and social justice, rebuilding of community and the renewal of worship.”

All of which is very fine and good, but fine words butter no parsnips.  So maybe, as we go into yet another week of potentially bad weather and unforeseen challenges, while still trying to maintain some sense of equilibrium and count my blessings, such as they are, I should take the unprecedented step (for me) of releasing my prayers at this time (such as they are) publicly in the form of an open letter to Big G.

“Hello.  It’s me, but then you knew that from the caller display.  Please don’t faint on not having heard from me for a while, and I pray obviously for all the normal family stuff, plus please bless Misty, Matilda, Zak and Freddie. If at all possible, could you house the homeless, feed the hungry, stop the redundancies and the house repossessions, bring about a change of heart in the rapacious robber-barons of the Junta and their allies so they give most or all of what they have to the poor, and find homes for all the animals in the sanctuaries, in the process reuniting any lost ones with their owners.  Also please ensure Hull City stay in the premiership this season (you may need to call on St Jude for help on this bit).”

“Finally, please give me the strength to carry on for as long as I need to, because of the people (furry and not that furry) who, unaccountably and completely to my surprise, apparently depend upon me.  And when the time does finally come, please bear in mind good old Cardinal Newman when you come to weigh me in the balance and ‘the shades lengthen and the evening comes and the busy world is hushed, and the fever of life is over, and our work is done. Then in your mercy may you give us a safe lodging and a holy rest, and peace at last’.”

Until then, I am going to put the kettle on. It’s what my dad would have done, in the circumstances.

Epiblog for the Feast of St Acca

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley.  The weather continues its downhill slide, although yesterday and this morning started out sunny, and for the moment the air temperature seems to have lost some of its bite from earlier, but, sadly, I fear this is only a temporary remission, before Autumn starts its ravings again next week. "A soft day, at last".  I might do some more re-potting, after I’ve posted this blog, although it does look as though we’ve had some more casualties among the outdoor herbs, the Feverfew has shrivelled and turned brown – whether this is terminal, or just winter dieback, I will have to investigate further. And something seems to be munching the Soapwort on a regular nocturnal basis, so that will need addressing as well.

Matilda is another nocturnal muncher. With Zak and Freddie staying here, I’ve taken to feeding her next door. It was bad enough for her when she had to compete with one just canine gannet hoovering up her Felix before she had chance to even taste a morsel, but three of them would be the equivalent of a crash weight-loss diet for her, and while she is a bit of a porker, as cats go, and it probably wouldn’t hurt her to skip the odd meal, I don’t like to think of her going hungry. Consequently, I am now frequently disturbed by the sound of her chomping her way through the contents of her food dish at 3AM, which seems to be her favourite time of the day to take on board fresh nourishment.  If you don’t believe a cat can eat loudly and enthusiastically enough to wake a sleeping human, you are welcome to come and try it.

She’s also taken to trying to open the inner door that leads to the cat flap, also in the early hours, by burrowing underneath it. (Following the advice of the Cats’ Protection League, we shut her in at night. Matilda disagrees and tries to open the door in the same way that she does the bifold doors. Unfortunately her technique doesn’t work for any door that actually has a handle and a catch, but it doesn’t stop her trying.)

Misty revels in the company of Zak, and frequently sits on him when he is in her favourite chair, as if he wasn’t there at all, until he gets fed up and, with a heavy sigh, extricates himself from underneath her and goes and lies on the dog bed on the floor.  Together with Freddie, the three of them have formed a sort of mini-wolf pack, and this morning I heard a distant rumbling, which was three dogs barrelling down the stairs on Colin’s side, followed by them erupting through the bifold doors and into the kitchen, then streaming through the conservatory and out into the garden, via the door I’d left open for Matilda, earlier on. I felt like a spectator of the Wild Hunt, streaming across Richmond Park in pursuit of a spectral Herne the Hunter.

In fact, if anything, the animals have probably had the best of it this week, followed by Debbie, who is looking forward to half-term, and then me, trailing along in the rear, grappling with the same knot of 14  intractable problems day after day.  The Portuguese edition of Gez’s book The Spot on My Bum looks as though it’s going ahead, although the contract which has come back from the company in the Azores is completely different to the one we sent them, and is also incomprehensible, being in Portuguese. What I need is a free bilingual solicitor, and while I’m at it, how about someone to pay for me to go out to the Azores for a couple of months to sort it all out. Oh, and a Ferrari, and unlimited funds for donkey sanctuaries. No, it’s not going to happen. You’re right.

Even when I’ve tried to a) be clever and b) help others this week, it’s backfired and gone spats over monocle, straight into the slurry. On Thursday, I had three courier parcels ready to go, but one of them couldn’t be sent until the Friday, because the recipient wouldn’t be there to receive it until Monday.  To save the courier having to come back again on Friday just for one parcel, I explained this to him and said if he could take it now and just keep it at the depot overnight, then put it into the system a day after the first two, all would be well, and he could save himself coming back for another pickup. He readily agreed and took all three parcels away. You can guess the rest, as Bryan Ferry might say, if he was here right now.  A courier turned up on Friday anyway, to collect a non-existent parcel, and of course, meanwhile, the couriers tried to deliver the parcel they should have held back for a day, on Friday instead, when the recipient wasn’t at home.

Mind you, at one point during the week, I thought we’d be lucky to reach Friday at all.  I was working away on Tuesday when I suddenly heard he distant wail of an air-raid siren.  For a while, I didn’t really allow it to impinge on my consciousness, because there is often the noise of sirens from emergency vehicles echoing across from the other side of the valley, but the insistence of this particular noise, and its eerie reverberation, made me finally take notice.  What the hell was it? I briefly considered that I might have somehow suffered a time-slip and gone back seventy years (an easy mistake to make in our house) and we were about to have an air raid. But I quickly discounted this idea as ridiculous. Who would want to bomb Huddersfield? Semtex is very expensive. 

Eventually, the answer came via the web site of The Huddersfield Daily Examiner, next to a story about a woman from Denby Dale who had just sold her collection of 400 teapots (there are many stories in the naked city…)  On the other side of town, there is, believe it or not, a factory that manufactures fertilisers for agriculture. Because of Health and Safety legislation, they have to test their siren once a year, and because the siren has been beefed up, more people than ever before can hear it. Apparently they wrote letters to 4,800 people in the area warning them this would happen and not to be alarmed, but we didn’t get one.  What it didn’t say on the Examiner web site, is what you do if the siren goes off one day and it’s not a test. Don your gas-mask and run for the hills, I guess!

As far as news from the outside world is concerned, I’ve been somewhat shielded by the vast amount of work I’ve taken on, this week. Apparently Michael Gove, that wily cove, wants to get rid of teaching assistants now, on the grounds of cost.  But why stop there? The Junta could save yet more money to fill the swimming pools of their supporters by abolishing teachers altogether.  True, this would lead to gangs of semi-feral urchins roaming the streets (in some areas, these already exist) but eventually, they could collapse from hunger in the gutter, allowing rich people to rescue them and pop them up the nearest chimney. Mr Gradgrind would be very proud.  Mr Gove is also a professed enthusiast for unqualified teachers, which has led to speculation on Twitter that he would therefore, presumably, be happy to be operated on by an unqualified surgeon. We can but hope.

Collapsing in the gutter from hunger may well be a reductio ad absurdum at the moment, but  am pretty sure it’s going to feature largely in the next Tory manifesto, the way things are going.  According to the Trussell Trust, which runs 400 food banks across the UK, the numbers of people relying on them to survive has tripled over the last year, and now stands at 350,000. A third of these were children, and a third of them were in need of food because of a delay in the payment of benefits. Quasi-Labour MP Frank Field has gone over to the dark side to head up some sort of Government enquiry, instigated by the Junta to kick the problem into the long grass of post-2015. Apparently he has said he will investigate the impact of benefit of cuts, low wages and high food prices.  Yeah, well, that would be a good place to start.

The Trussell Trust has said that  the problem of hunger in the UK is getting worse, saying that “Rising living costs and stagnant wages are forcing more people to live on a financial knife-edge”. It has also forecast that rising energy prices this winter are likely to see more people "choosing between heating and eating," as the Trust put it.

Critics of food banks in the Junta (usually fat Tory peers and Liberal Democrats who, quite frankly, should know better) claim that the supply stimulates the demand, in a classic cart-before-the-horse reversal of accepted laws of economics. "The Trussell Trust itself says it is opening three new food banks every week, so it's not surprising more people are using them," said a spokesperson for The Blight. Perhaps the Trussell Trust should just ease off a bit and wait till people start dying of starvation in the streets, or social order breaks down as people decide to go “shopping” with a breeze block instead of a credit card, then. Then we’ll see whether, like the mountains, people go to the food banks merely “because they’re there!”

On the matter of benefit payments, the Department for Work and Pensions  said that there was "no robust evidence that welfare reforms are linked to increased use of food banks". If that’s true, it’s probably because they don’t collect it.  You can’t ignore 350,000 hungry people – if that’s not robust evidence, I don’t know what is. The DWP also said that “ benefit processing times have steadily improved over the past five years, with 90% now being paid within 16 days.” So, in other words, 10% of benefits claims take more than 16 days to process. (and you can bet that’s working days, although sadly you can’t take the day off from starving just because it’s Sunday.) Note that this is before the new proposals (shamefully, supported by the Labour party) to make claimants wait even longer for their cash.

Of course, people will say “there should be no need for food banks, if people managed their affairs correctly.” While it’s true, undoubtedly, that people should (and could, still) be taught to cook proper, nutritious meals, make the most out of ingredients, and feed themselves and others, this is just one small strand of the problem.  Not everybody has the time to make “proper” meals, with the increasing demands of the workplace. Or the space. Or the money to pay for the energy to cook it. One of the most chilling aspects of the Trussell Trust report was the instances of people returning food to the food bank that had doled it out to them, because they couldn’t afford to pay the energy bill to cook it!

Inevitably someone will come along and say, well, I bet they have still got their telly and their fags and their lager etc etc etc in the same anecdotal voice that usually brings tales of immigrants jumping to the top of the housing queue and being given free wide screen plasma TVs.  The people who come out with these kinds of remark usually follow it with “if I was in that position, I would get on my bike and find work, I would go without as long as my children had enough to eat, and other similar platitudes.”

No doubt they would. So would I. I would go without food to make sure that my dog and cat had enough to eat, if necessary, but that is missing the point. Whose fault is it, really, that the jobs have gone? Whose fault is it that the economy is bumping along the runway instead of taking off again? Why should I? Why should anyone be forced to scrimp and save and give up what few “luxuries” remain in a pretty grim existence.   Have we really become so petty and mean-minded that we begrudge people a packet of fags and a few cans of lager, and if we were in their position, wouldn’t we want those things as well, or the equvalent?  I strongly suspect, in any case, that these apocryphal tales are just that, but even if not, surely it’s better that the genuine cases of hardship are alleviated, even if it means getting it wrong occasionally and giving a box of canned food to someone who doesn’t really “need” it.

If, instead of the present regime of self-strangulation and inequality, the economy was properly managed, it would grow, and the tax take would grow. If the taxes were fairly levied, fairly collected, and fairly distributed, there would be no need for food banks. No need for food banks, no need for homelessness, no need for poverty, and no need for anyone, child or adult, to starve to death in a land of plenty.

Given that, whatever the rights and wrongs of an admittedly complex situation, people are nevertheless struggling, one could at least expect that energy companies, already making vast profits and paying very little tax  in some cases, would at least do their bit to help out their hard-pressed customers. I mean you would expect that, wouldn’t you? In the same way, perhaps, as you would expect a squadron of pigs to zoom, in perfect Red Arrows formation, across the skies outside your window. This week, British Gas, God bless them (preferably with a thunderbolt) raised their prices by 9.2%! At least Dick Turpin had the decency to wear a mask. 

In a masterpiece of social media planning, the British Gas publicity machine had set up their director of customer services to do a question and answer session on Twitter, that very day, and he was of course assailed with sardonic “tweets” asking him things like which items of furniture he recommended chopping up first, and why.  Funny as this was, and pleasing as it was to watch them squirm, sadly, the pain of that experience was only transitory. For those affected by their rapacious, money-grabbing greed, the effect may well be permanent, given the numbers of pensioners who die of fuel poverty each winter.  In one sense, the reliance on the fluctuating wholesale price of gas, which BG claim justifies their price hike, is an unintended consequence of the act of political vandalism that trashed Britain’s mining industry in the 1980s and finished it off in the 1990s, leaving us reliant on fickle Russian oligarchs for our energy. I say “unintended”, but given that Mrs Thatcher was behind it, it could just as easily have read “intended”. Since the old bat is now dead, we can’t dig her up or ask her, or put her on trial. I said this would happen, and I take absolutely no pleasure whatsoever, for once, in being proved right.

So what can you do? What can anyone do, at the mercy of behemoths like British Gas who don’t care if you live or die, and politicians who are unwilling or unable to bring them to heel, and er, don’t care if you live or die, either?  My suggested solution would be to take action on your own behalf to reverse the price rise.  First of all, if you pay for your gas by direct debit, stop it and ask to be sent a bill. Yes, this may initially be more expensive, but bear with me.

When the bill arrives, ignore it, until they get around to sending you the final demand red reminder, then deduct 9.2% (or, if maths isn’t your forte, just round it up to 10%) off the requested sum, and pay the balance.  Then, when the next bill comes, pay the unpaid balance off the old bill, and all but 9.2% of the new one.  I can’t believe they would go to the trouble of taking thousands, or (I hope) hundreds of thousands of people to court and getting them cut off, for the sake of 9.2% of the average bill. Plus, the delay in their cash flow and the extra work means that for once, the bastards will have to work for their money instead of just milking it from the semi-conscious corpses of their frozen victims.

We can no longer rely on politicians to act in the best interests of “ordinary people”. They are all liars, charlatans, frauds and confidence tricksters. It is time for a campaign of mass civil disobedience over gas prices, to get their attention.

In July 2012, Centrica, the owner of British Gas, reported a 15% rise in first-half adjusted operating profits to £1.45bn. The results included a 23% rise in operating profits at its residential energy division, British Gas, to £345m. In May2012, British Gas suggested that bills could increase for customers that coming winter, blaming rising wholesale gas costs. Wholesale prices subsequently dropped.

Just sayin’. I wonder how much tax they paid?

And so we came to Sunday, the feast of St Acca of Hexham, who lived from 660AD until either 740 or 742AD, and was Bishop of Hexham from 709 until 732.  Acca was born in Northumbria, and, after service in the household of Bosa, eventually to become Bishop of York, Acca joined with St Wilfred, and took part in his various travels.  One of these involved a stay at Utrecht with St Wilibrord, who was taking his revenge for having a silly name out on the heathens, by converting them. 

Acca’s travels with Wilfred included two trips to Rome, and after the second of these, in 692AD, Wilfred was reinstated at Hexham and, in turn, Wilfred made Acca the abbot of St Andrew’s Monastery in the town. Acca carried on the work of church building and decorating started by Wilfrid. He was also both a learned theologian and an accomplished musician. Given his name, it was a great pity that the clarinet wasn’t invented until several hundred years later.

Acca was also famous for his theological learning, and no less a personage than the Venerable Bede praised his theological library. Acca lent Bede various texts and sources which the latter incorporated into his Ecclesiastical History, and was apparently the person who persuaded Stephen of Ripon to write the life of St Wilfred.

For reasons now lost down the back of the sofa of the mists of time, Acca left his diocese in 732. Local tradition in Hexham says he became bishop of Whithorn in Galloway, Scotland, while other scholars claim he founded a See on the site of St. Andrews, taking with him relics collected on his Roman tour, including those of St. Andrew himself. Yet a third account states that having fallen out with the Northumbrian king, Acca went to live in exile in Ireland, on a remote coast before eventually returning to Hexham. Given the frequent confusion in the interchangeable nomenclature between Ireland and Scotland in those days, this could be another version of the Whithorn story, of course.

I’d like to think of him having visited The Isle of Whithorn, because I’ve been there myself. No other reason, really. I just like to feel a personal connection with these places.

The Isle of Whithorn has changed quite a bit since the days of St Acca, chiefly because it is now no longer an island. What used to be the causeway that connected it to the mainland, in pretty much the same way as present-day Lindisfarne is connected, has now been infilled and turned into basically the High Street.  It’s possible to chart this process on successive old maps, some of which also show that there was once a specially-formed dyke at the tidal harbour entrance, whose specific purpose was to catch fish. Insert your own equality and diversity joke at this point.

The Isle of Whithorn is still, in many ways, though, a wild and lonely, melancholy place, or it was when I was last there in 2008. I certainly felt like a stranger on the shore. Not for nothing was it used as the location for several scenes in the film The Wicker Man.  The saint most associated with Whithorn, however, is not Acca, but Saint Ninian, the ruins of whose chapel still stand there, having been maintained over the centuries by the Marquesses of Bute.  When we were there, I added my own stone to the pilgrim cairn at the entrance to St Ninian’s Chapel, with the message “New Life/New Leaf” – little did I know just how radically fate would take me at my word.

In modern times, Whithorn has, sadly, been probably most famous for the tragedy of the sinking, 17 miles away off the Isle of Man, of the Solway Harvester, which was based at the port, in January 2000, in which seven lives were lost, and there is a granite memorial commemorating the tragedy in the town.

I seem to have wandered off course almost as far as St Acca did, here, so I suppose I ought now to make an effort and rejoin him in Hexham, at least metaphorically. It’s just that the mention of the Isle of Whithorn led me to muse for a while on all the things I can’t do any more, and how different life was, back then.

Acca  was buried at Hexham, near the east wall of the Abbey. Two finely carved crosses were erected at the head and foot of his grave, and fragments of one of these still remain. Acca was revered as a saint immediately after his death, but his cause gained a boost in or around 1153, when canons sent by the Archbishop of York to re-establish Hexham as an Augustinian Priory also “conveniently” as Tom Corfe puts it, rediscovered Acca’s remains. His remains were eventually translated at least three times.  In the early 11th century, by Alfred of Westow, in 1154, at the restoration of the Abbey, when the relics of all the Hexham saints were all combined in a single shrine; and again in 1240. Acca’s  only surviving writing, though, out of all his theology and learning, is a letter addressed to The Venerable Bede, and printed in his works

I suppose if the life of St Acca serves to point up one thing, it’s probably the futility of human endeavour. Who knows, one day all that remains of me might be a letter I wrote to the Archbishop of Canterbury. Not that I am attempting here to put myself on the same plane as a distinguished theologian such as St Acca, merely that I am pointing out that very seldom does the beginning accord to the end, as the Gawain poet puts it, and life is rarely pure and hardly ever simple.

Sometimes you have to wonder what’s the point of carrying on. The contents of the medicine cabinet start to look more and more appealing The country’s in a mess, the world’s in a mess, and I am out of sorts with all of it, and I doubt I have the energy any more to do a Kipling and stoop, and build it up with worn-out tools. What’s the point of doing another book, of chivvying the powerful and unjust, of collecting together jumble for the dog rescue, if at the end of the day, your whole existence, your whole being, every fibre of what you tried to achieve, is reduced to a dusty scrap of paper in an archive somewhere, a line in faded ink in a dusty ledger. He lived, he died, it will say. But between those two parentheses will be a tantalising blank. “Ah, but,” a Christian would say, “that does not matter, because by then you will be enjoying your reward in heaven!” Which is all fine and dandy, but fine words butter no parsnips. Why does it have to be either/or? Why do we have to suffer cruelty and injustice and inequality in this life?  Even if we believe in life after death, what about life before death?

Anyway, I have been here before, a stranger on the shore, and peeped over the cliff-edge, and then turned and gone back to the relative warmth and safety of my daily round, my monastic tasks of writing manuscripts, cooking food, and tending to animals. No doubt I daresay next week will be the same. Me and my Gordian knot of 14 problems. I’ve scourged myself with them so often, they’ve almost become a cat o’nine tails. Work and pray, they say, and everything will come right, Work and pray. Ora et Labore. It would be nice, just sometimes, though, to think that someone in the great beyond, someone who can do something about it, is listening. Big G, if you aren’t having a Sunday afternoon nap right now, Centrica UK’s head office is at Millstream, Near Windsor. That’s where to send the thunderbolt. But you knew that already, I guess.

Epiblog for the Feast of St Edward the Confessor

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. We’re definitely on the treadmill now, only this treadmill has a downhill tendency that ends with Christmas. In a couple of weeks, the clocks will go back and the fairy lights will go up in town centres all over England and that will be it.  We’re also promised a massive belt of snow between now and then (although it was in the Daily Express so at best it will be inaccurate and at worst a lie) so it’s all shaping up once more for my least favourite time of the year, 

That time of year thou mays’t in me behold

When yellow leaves, or none, or few do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold
Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang

The bit about yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang, could also be applied to my herbs, some of which have been taking a bit of a pasting from the weather this week as well. They also appear to have been providing a veritable smorgasbord of a buffet for any passing slugs, as well.

Matilda’s no great fan of it, either. She does go to the door each morning and I open it to let her out into the lobby, and thence her cat flap, but it’s a quick foray into the outside world, doing her necessaries in the garden, and back on the settee in Colin’s front room, curled in a tight furry ball with her nose in her tail, before you can say “Go-Cat”.  Misty, of course, doesn’t care what the weather is doing, as long as she can go w-a-l-k-i-e-s, the word which cannot be spoken aloud, a bit like the Hebrew YHVH, because uttering it brings about a cataclysm of milling dogs, as Freddie and Zak are staying here as well, for the time being.

It was such a cataclysm that was responsible for the first major domestic disaster of the week, when one of the milling dogs circling Grandad, in the frenzied anticipation of being led through muddy puddles on Saddleworth Moor, trod on the edge of the dog dish and catapulted the entire contents spraying over the tiled floor of the kitchen.  Having shooed the culprits out of the door, I set to work tidying up the mess. Misty’s food is called Skinners 18%, and is intended primarily for working dogs. It consists of hard little pellets of kibble, which we refer to as “Muttnuts”. There were 187 Muttnuts in the dish when it was upset.  I know this, because I had to pick them up individually with my grabstick.  As I said at the time, I was born to sing of love and eternity, and to paint with light, and somehow I ended up in a wheelchair, picking up Muttnuts with a grabstick.

I topped off that particular piece of idiocy the following day when, adding coal to the stove, I managed to knock the riddling plate through the hole in the grate and all of the red hot coals, and the riddling plate itself, fell through into the ash pan beneath. So I then had to wait for everything to cool, then un-make the fire, rescue the riddling plate, re-attach it to the end of the rod that enables you to waggle it, then put it all back together again and re-light the fire. Another ninety minutes of my life I won’t get back.

It’s been a week of tedious admin, in fact, when I haven’t been working on new books. I finally got around to filling in the necessary multi-page forms to apply for a licence from the Ministry of Justice to allow the cremated remains of my Mum, my Dad, Granny Fenwick and Auntie Maud to be exhumed and scattered somewhere more meaningful to them in life than a damp, dark corner of Hull’s Northern Cemetery.  It will now take six weeks for the MOJ to make a decision either way, which means we will probably not hear anything until the New Year.  Of all the things I thought I’d ever do in my life, filling in an application to exhume human remains was not one of them!

The whole thing nearly came to grief at the last minute because, on looking up the precise dates of Gran’s and Auntie Maud’s deaths on the family tree, I noticed that there was a distant Auntie who, if still alive, would have been a closer relative than either me or my sister, and who would certainly have to be consulted, and may even have held some sort of veto on proceedings. Oh bugger. How could I have overlooked her? I was facing the prospect of filling in the forms all over again.  Fortunately, a hone call to one of my cousins elicited the news that the Auntie in question was indeed distant. Distant as in deceased. I put the phone down and turned to Debbie.

“Hooray! She’s dead!”

That didn’t come out quite as I intended it. Poor old Auntie Doris, if you are reading this from the great beyond, it was more of a cry of relief that my entire day’s paperwork hadn’t been wasted. No doubt Gran and the rest are chuckling at my tribulations, up there in heaven, or wherever heaven is. After that, filling in the claims forms for Debbie’s salary seemed like light relief. [In addition to filling her life with organised chaos, the College also expects Debbie to tell them when she needs to be paid, instead of just paying her every month, like any normal employer].

The only news I saw this week, I saw by accident; Tommy Robinson has left the EDL, for some reason, and may or may not have forsaken some of his previous beliefs, depending who you talk to. I’m not entirely convinced, but maybe one of the things that does still make Britain great is that we’re prepared to give people the benefit of the doubt. There is more joy in heaven over one sinner that repenteth, and all that.  

David Cameron announced that he was planning to cap rail fares to help the ubiquitous hard-working families that pop up everywhere in his speeches these days.  Yet when Ed Miliband announced a proposal to cap energy prices in order to, er, help hard working families, Cameron denounced it as “Marxist” [which seems, by the way, to have somehow become a swearword] and “a gimmick”.

But the prize prannet of the week award has to go to Owen Paterson, whose apology for the lamentable failure and chaos of the pilot cull of badgers included the memorable statement that “the badgers moved the goalposts”. As a feeble fig-leaf of an excuse to cover up incompetence it’s right up there with “the dog ate my homework” and “a big boy did it, and then ran way”, both of which I expect the Junta will use next week to cover up some other clanger. The plot cull has not killed enough badgers, and the Minister was pointing out that this was because badgers don’t stay put in one place, something which I, and every other opponent of the cull, has been saying for weeks, if not months. 

Either that, or they didn’t accurately measure how many badgers were in the pilot cull area to start with, which questions the whole basis for the cull, if correct.  It just shows it up as what I have said it was all along – a feeble attempt to be seen to be doing something, to appease the Brian Aldridges and the David Archers of this world, when what we should really be doing is examining the whole basis and the premises upon which the dairy industry operates, and asking awkward questions about why it is that the only reason “reactors” have to be slaughtered anyway is because the EU demands it.

To round off a week of depressing idiocy, Rachel Reeves, a Labour MP who many tip as a future leader of the party, was reported in the press as saying that, if elected in 2015, Labour would be as tough, if not tougher, than the present Junta on benefits:

She added: "It is not an either/or question. We would be tougher [than the Conservatives]. If they don't take it [the offer of a job] they will forfeit their benefit.

Leaving aside the fact that the “job” in question, if not actually mythical, will probably be some kind of unpaid internship or zero hours contract, once again it is very dispiriting to see Labour failing to engage with and challenge the popular myth, fostered by the DWP propaganda, that people on benefits are some sort of worthless scroungers who have opted for a cushy number.

Nothing could be further from the truth, in fact. I repeat my contention of last week: while there will always be a tiny minority that try to “blag” the system, the vast majority of people on benefits would like nothing better than to get themselves, and their lives, back on track.  Take Tom Weaver, for instance, who launched an appeal on Facebook this week to try and find himself a job.  Ex-Royal Signals man Tom, who was left paralysed and in a wheelchair following a stroke in 2010, posted a humorous message on a Facebook group for former members of The Royal Corps of Signals, saying  he was “looking for a job” despite being unable to walk and only having the use of one arm.

So window cleaning is out of the question.  I could answer the phone and I can use a PC.  I’m not looking to be paid a wage. Yes I’ll work for free. I just can’t spend my life watching Judge Judy re-runs. Inbox me if you can help.

In four days he has apparently been inundated with offers of help and support from around the world.  Good for him. I hope he gets something commensurate with his obvious talent, skill, humour, and motivational attitude.  Not only because he seems a thoroughly good, able chap, who’s had an undeserved kick in the nads from life, but also as one in the eye to all those people who write off the wheelchair-bound as useless leeches on society.  I hope also, that with the help of health professionals, he may eventually be able to recover still further. And although he’s said he would be willing to work for nothing, personally I don’t think he should, nor should he have to. The labourer is worthy of his hire.  

The Labour Party, however, is not worthy of my vote, at least while it has Rachel Reeves in it.  Last week, I said I might have to hold my nose and vote Labour at the next election despite their being a feeble and useless opposition to the slash and burn policies of the Junta, basically just to annoy The Daily Mail, who, being closet fascists, don’t like Ed Miliband’s Jewish heritage.  But I am not voting for a party that’s more Tory than the Tories. If I wanted to see a further five years of spineless collusion with the enemies of my class, I might as well vote Liberal Democrat!  So, sorry Ed, but Rachel Reeves just lost you my vote in 2015.

Anyway, it’s all a long way away from the life of St Edward the Confessor, whose feast day it is today.  He’s known as St Edward the Confessor not because he had a habit of owning up to stuff he hadn’t done, but in recognition of his having lived a contemplative lifestyle but not having been a martyr. He was one of the last Anglo-Saxon kings of England and is usually regarded as the last king of the House of Wessex, ruling from 1042 to 1066. He was the seventh son of Æthelred the Unready, in this case by his second wife, Emma of Normandy, and was born between 1002 and 1005 in Islip, Oxfordshire. He is the patron saint of difficult marriages (of all things) and it may well be that he gained his supposed expertise from his experience of family life in his early years, which were a confusing mish-mash of betrayal and exile, as rival factions vied for the throne.

The Danes, under Sweyn Forkbeard and his son, Cnut [a man who, like Hilaire Belloc, has bedevilled typographers ever since] were harrying the country, and following Sweyn's seizure of the throne in 1013, Edward’s mother fled to Normandy, followed eventually by Æthelred. Sweyn died in February 1014, and leading Englishmen invited Æthelred back on condition that he promised to rule 'more justly' than before. Æthelred agreed but died in April 1016, and he was succeeded by Edward's older half brother Edmund Ironside, who carried on the fight against Sweyn's son, Cnut. Edmund died in November 1016, and Cnut became the acknowledged king. Edward again went into exile, but his mother had had enough and changed sides, and in 1017 she actually married Cnut. In the same year Cnut had Edward's last surviving elder half-brother, Eadwig, executed, leaving Edward the Confessor as the leading Anglo-Saxon claimant to the monarchy.

So, having lived in an era of uncertainty, in a family that put the “fun” into dysfunctional, Edward remained in Normandy, was brought up a Norman, and in 1042, on the death of his half-brother, Hardicanute, son of Canute and Emma, and largely through the support of the powerful Earl Godwin, he was acclaimed king of England. In 1044, he married Earl Godwin's daughter Edith. That summary actually considerably simplifies another period of intense to-ing and fro-ing, including Harold Harefoot ruling as Hardicanute’s regent because Hardicanute was too preoccupied with fighting his own battles at home, Earl Godwin arranging to have the eyes of Edward’s half-brother Alfred put out to prevent him from ever becoming king, and Edward’s mother finally being forced out of the country to exile in Bruges. It was anything but plain sailing.

He was also in quite a weak position when he came to power. He was dependent on the support and goodwill of the three leading earls in the kingdom, Leofric of Mercia, Godwin and Siward of Northumbria. He only really succeeded in staving off a planned invasion of England by Magnus, King of Norway because Magnus rather carelessly died before he could put the plan into action.

The worst crisis of his reign came in 1050-1051, and it centred on that old chestnut, who was to be Archbishop of Canterbury. Edward had promoted one of his close advisors, Robert, Abbot of Jumièges, over a local candidate. Once in position, Robert accused Earl Godwin of illegal possession of some lands that belonged to the Archbishop. In September Edward was visited by Eustace, count of Boulogne. His men caused an affray in Dover, which obviously hasn’t changed much since 1050, and Edward ordered Godwin, as earl of Kent, to punish the town's burgesses, but he took their side and refused. Archbishop Robert then accused Godwin of plotting to kill the king, while Leofric and Siward supported the king and called up their vassals. 

It all looked very nasty for a while, but Godwin’s position weakened when his men refused to fight the king. Godwin and his sons fled. Their differences were only settled when Edward agreed to replace Robert with Stigand as Archbishop, who was more to Earl Godwin’s liking.  Godwin himself died in 1053, but this was not the end of the problem for Edward the Confessor, as he then faced an undercurrent of trouble from Godwin’s two sons, Harold, and Tostig, who was Earl of Northumbria. Gradually, his old allies died off and were replaced by thegns of the Godwin family, or loyal to the Godwins. Edward failed to prevent  a rebellion led by Morcar to oust Tostig in 1065, which drove him, too, into exile, and, since he was childless, acknowledged Harold Godwinson as his successor, although William the Conqueror also claimed that the throne had been offered to him by Edward on his death. 

He devoted the remainder of his reign to building St Peter’s Abbey, the first Norman Romanesque church in England, where he was buried (and which later became “our” Westminster Abbey, when Henry III tore it down and built over the site in 1245) and died in London on January 5th 1066.  When Edward died in 1066, he was indeed succeeded by Harold Godwinson, who was defeated and killed in the same year by the Normans under William the Conqueror at the Battle of Hastings. On October 14th, in fact. 947 years ago tomorrow. And the rest, as they say, is history.

He was canonized in 1161 by Pope Alexander III, and is commemorated on 13 October by both the Church of England and the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales. Saint Edward was one of the national saints of England until King Edward III adopted Saint George as patron saint in about 1350. It was Henry who was responsible for the translation of the remains of Edward The Confessor to their present tomb in 1269, an event which happened on October 13^th and thus gave rise to the saint’s feast day. For some time the Abbey had claimed that it possessed a set of coronation regalia that Edward had left for use in all future coronations. Following Edward's canonisation, these were regarded as holy relics, and thereafter they were used at all English coronations from the 13th century onwards, until their destruction by Cromwell in 1649.

The Vita Ædwardi Regis states Edward:

was a very proper figure of a man—of outstanding height, and distinguished by his milky white hair and beard, full face and rosy cheeks, thin white hands, and long translucent fingers; in all the rest of his body he was an unblemished royal person. Pleasant, but always dignified, he walked with eyes downcast, most graciously affable to one and all. If some cause aroused his temper, he seemed as terrible as a lion, but he never revealed his anger by railing.

In many ways, with the above description and his acknowledged love of hunting, Edward is an unlikely saint, and there is a theory that his canonisation is more to do with politics, Papal struggles and rivalries at the time, and the need of the English Royalty to legitimise their succession retrospectively. Certainly, things such as attributing his childlessness to deliberate chastity in marriage are probably a case of later chroniclers over-egging the pudding. So, fascinating as he undoubtedly was, and interesting as I find his life and times, I have to say that he doesn’t really do much for me, as a saint.  And as a king, if he did really promise the succession to two different people, he set up England for a catastrophic series of events when the power vacuum caused by his death ultimately saddled us with the Normans.

Spiritual insights from the life of St Edward the Confessor, then, are few and far between, at least for me they are. In fact, they have been few and far between altogether this week, but that’s just about par for the course these days.

To balance out the “hooray she’s dead” moment over dear old Auntie Doris, I did have a considerable shock when I logged on to the Chichester Folk Song Club Facebook page and found that one of my old friends from the club had died on Monday. I had known for a year or so she was not very well, and in a nursing home, so the news wasn’t especially unexpected, but the manner of it was rather startling, a bit like when I found out by text message that Cousin Ted had died.  And now Pat has walked the lonesome valley. She was 82, which I suppose isn’t a bad innings. I published three of her books,  Follow “Mee” to Gloucestershire, Hampshire Hauntings and Hearsay, and Hampshire at War, an Oral History 1939-45, so I have lost an author and a colleague, as well as a friend. I hope, anyway, that her books will live on, as a memorial to her.

As I said, it’s been a week of little spiritual comfort, to be honest, although I did note, drily, that professor Peter Higgs, the theoretical physicist who predicted the existence of the Higgs Boson, the so called “God Particle” has apparently criticised the “fundamentalist” approach taken by people like Richard Dawkins in their stance of militant atheism.

"What Dawkins does too often is to concentrate his attack on fundamentalists. But there are many believers who are just not fundamentalists. Fundamentalism is another problem. I mean, Dawkins in a way is almost a fundamentalist himself, of another kind."

Which is what I said, only slightly less concisely, a few weeks ago. I trust my Nobel Prize is in the post. 

I don’t suppose I shall feel much better in myself until after Christmas now. It’s just a question of buckling down and getting on with it. It’s not as if I am short of things to do, it’s the motivation that’s lacking.  I could do with some of Tom Weaver’s get up and go.  The problem is that at this time of the year, the nights grow long and dark and cold, the days aren’t much better, and I feel myself once again torn between wanting to opt out of a commercial Christmas on spiritual grounds, and yet  desperately needing to be part of it, for our economic future.  And, of course, I feel time slipping through my hands like grains of sand.  Tesco, meanwhile, never backwards at coming forwards when it involves the commercial aspects of Christmas, has apparently run an ad based on the theme of “All I Want for Christmas is a Puppy”, totally ignoring the fact that 7,000 unwanted and homeless dogs are put down every year because of the sort of irresponsible pet ownership they are advocating. So that’s another one for the boycott list. Nothing that a donation of a couple of million to Wood Green Animal Shelter or Rain Rescue couldn’t sort out; are you listening, Tesco?

So, yes, I keep coming back to that Shakespeare sonnet which I quoted from at the start, because there are some other lines in it which seem to apply to me, right now:

In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire,
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the deathbed whereon it must expire,
Consumed with that which it was nourished by.
This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

Yep, it seems like that time of year when it’s all too easy to remember that you got to walk, that lonesome valley, you got to walk it by yourself. Or trundle it, in my case. Ain’t nobody gonna trundle it for me, or untrundle it, if that’s even a word. Which reminds me, I must do something about getting the side of my wheelchair fixed, because the same arm that the bit dropped off now has a loose Allen key screw that means it wags about like Misty’s tail, especially when I am carrying stuff on the tray. So that’s another one for the to-do list.

Next week? I don’t really want to think about next week. Even counting my blessings isn’t really doing it for me now, to be honest. The stove’s ticking away, and Freddie, Zak, Misty and Matilda have all been fed and are snoozing on various chairs, sofas, cushions and blankets, and I’m just gong to lock up for the night. In Australia, it’s already tomorrow.

Oh well, close ranks and carry on, I guess. Forward, the armoured brigade.

Epiblog for St Bruno's Day

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. A week I could, to be honest, have done without, except that technically it counts as part of my life, and my Mum always used to say you shouldn’t wish your life away. Since I am now a year older than she was when she died, that’s a lesson I can feel being reinforced, every morning when I wake up feeling slightly worse than I did when I went to bed the night before.

The weather, for what little I have actually seen of it, has been dull, but warm. So warm in fact, for this time of year, that I let the stove go out (deliberately) on Friday, then only re-lit it in the evening. At least we’ll save a bit of money on coal if it carries on like this.

Matilda approves of Indian Summers, if her morning routine is anything to go by. She yowls for food, then, when I have got up and fed her, and she has chomped her way through the offering in her bowl, she follows me to the conservatory door, winding round my wheelchair wheels the way she would wind round anyone else’s legs, and waits for me to open it and let her out on to the decking.

Then she goes round the side of the house, and in through the cat flap set in Colin’s side door, across Colin’s side of the house, through the bifold doors, into the kitchen, thence to the conservatory door, to be let out onto the decking. Following which she goes round the side of the house, see above. After about the fourth time, it can get very tedious. As an annoying flurry of misdirected energy, it’s rivalled only by Debbie getting ready for work.

Misty, meanwhile, continues to settle down, I’m pleased to say. It must be about ten days since she last did a completely random, gaga, unexpected thing, which I guess must show that she’s become used to the rhythms of the house; the various comings and goings of Granny, Grandad, Freddie, Zak, the postman and the Sainsburys delivery man. However, on Thursday night, she was being distinctly odd. A sudden reversion to the old, skittery Misty. She kept sticking her head under the kitchen table. Then suddenly reversing and letting out little wuffit, then repeating the process all over again. Almost like she was trying to pounce on something. What the hell was she doing? The only thing I could see that might be spooking her was a box of blank CDs, but I couldn’t imagine that was it – she’d never shown the slightest interest in computers or audiovisual equipment before, and her reaction to music is usually limited to her tolerating me singing “Old John Braddleum” at her while furfling her tummy.

Debbie finally declared that she couldn’t stand it any longer, and crouched down to see what the problem was.

“Oh my God, it’s a frog.”

Within a few seconds, she had caught the offending amphibian and evicted it onto the rainy wet, cold, slimy decking, where no doubt it would be very happy. Misty got praised for alerting us to its presence, even though she was probably actually trying to incorporate it into her diet, as a tasty and nutritious snack. She actually ended up with a dog treat for her trouble, which I am sure she viewed as a poor substitute. The wider question, of how a frog came to be on the tiled floor under the kitchen table in the first place, remained unanswered. I am hoping it hopped in when the conservatory door was left open to allow the dogs to go into the garden, because the only other option is that there’s a secret underground frog-tunnel from the outside world into the kitchen, and I don’t like to think about that! As Sherlock Holmes said, once you have discounted the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. Or something.

In terms of my week, if I listed everything that’s gone wrong or fallen over this week, it would be tedious and depressing, so I’m not going to! Suffice it to say it’s a week when events – and indeed people - have conspired to threaten and undermine everything I‘ve tried to do, and for every step forward, I’ve probably taken one back. I have put solutions in place, only to see them bring their own, new problems. Still, nobody said paying off my debts before I die would be easy, but sometimes I despair at the UK book trade and also at the actions of people who I mistakenly thought for a quarter of a century or so were friends and colleagues who had my best interests at heart. Nuff said. Don’t get me started, or we’ll be here all night.

It’s been a week when idiocy was abroad. The sort of week my dad would have called a silly buggers’ outing, all round. Hardly politically correct, but then since when are we responsible for things which our dads used to say, in their more embarrassing moments? Well, the answer is, according to The Daily Mail, perpetually – for ever and ever, amen.

According to The Daily Mail, Ed Miliband would be an unsuitable candidate for Prime Minister because of some things his dad once said. Excuse me? I can think of many reasons why Ed Miliband would be a useless Prime Minister – not least because he’s been such a feeble and useless leader of the Labour Party and of Her Majesty’s loyal opposition – but none of these have anything to do with his dad! One of the Mail’s wackier allegations about Mr Miliband is that he is buried quite near to Karl Marx, so presumably they feel he may have been affected by post-mortem Marxist underground seepage or something.

But let’s cut the Mail a bit of slack, here. Assuming just for the moment that we are all responsible for the actions of our fathers, and that the sins of the fathers shall be visited upon the sons, even unto the third generation. What did Ralph Miliband actually say, that was so anti-British and heinous? The Mail’s beef seems to be that Ralph Miliband wrote, as a 17-year-old refugee from the Nazis, fleeing to this country, that

‘the Englishman is a rabid nationalist’

and

‘you sometimes want them almost to lose (the war) to show them how things are’.

Note the “almost”. Still, I can see instantly why this would get up the nose of The Daily Mail – they are indeed rabid nationalists, so they wouldn’t like seeing the sort of thing they believe in blindly dissed by a 17-year-old Communist! He’s also alleged to have said, aged 45, writing of his disdain for the British Establishment, that it included:

‘Eton and Harrow, Oxford and Cambridge, the great Clubs, the Times, the Church, the Army, the respectable Sunday papers ... the House of Lords ... social hierarchies, God save the Queen.’

If this is to be introduced as evidence of “hating Britain”, then it presupposes that these things constitute “Britain” - which they don’t, in my book. At least not on their own, not materially. Not in any way that matters. Britain for me stands for brass bands, dry stone walls, steam trains, cathedrals, cricket, green hills, the Magna Carta, country pubs, archery, Wesleyan chapels, tolerance, respect, and sticking up for the underdog, to name but a few. So, actually, what The Daily Mail is saying is that Ralph Miliband hated their idea of “Britain”. Well tough shit, Daily Mail. I couldn’t give a stuff if they turn Henman Hill into a multi-cultural BMX circuit. I hate your idea of Britain as well. And so did George Orwell, by that yardstick, when he wrote, at the end of Homage to Catalonia:

And then England--southern England, probably the sleekest landscape in the world. It is difficult when you pass that way, especially when you are peacefully recovering from sea-sickness with the plush cushions of a boat-train carriage under your bum, to believe that anything is really happening anywhere. Earthquakes in Japan, famines in China, revolutions in Mexico? Don't worry, the milk will be on the doorstep tomorrow morning, the New Statesman will come out on Friday. The industrial towns were far away, a smudge of smoke and misery hidden by the curve of the earth's surface.

Down here it was still the England I had known in my childhood: the railway-cuttings smothered in wild flowers, the deep meadows where the great shining horses browse and meditate, the slow-moving streams bordered by willows, the green bosoms of the elms, the larkspurs in the cottage gardens; and then the huge peaceful wilderness of outer London, the barges on the miry river, the familiar streets, the posters telling of cricket matches and Royal weddings, the men in bowler hats, the pigeons in Trafalgar Square, the red buses, the blue policemen - all sleeping the deep, deep sleep of England, from which I sometimes fear that we shall never wake till we are jerked out of it by the roar of bombs.

Still, I don’t doubt that The Daily Mail probably does think that George Orwell, who in Animal Farm and 1984 wrote searing attacks on communism, probably is a dangerous lefty. The fact that he is dead probably doesn’t matter, see also under Ralph Miliband and Karl Marx. There are several layers of irony about the Spanish Civil War anyway, not least of which being that the anti-fascist slogan, “If you tolerate this, your children will be next”, which was originally on recruitment posters for the anti-government forces in Spain, and which was (much later) turned into a song by the Manic Street Preachers, has now been appropriated by the far-right fascist EDL as their song of choice for their protest marches.

My dad was no saint, but in his own way, he loved Britain. He loved nothing better, on his retirement, than to sit on Brough Haven photographing the ships and yachts in the Humber. Some of his views would, today, be politically unacceptable, but he was a product of his times. Like many others, including Ralph Miliband, he did his bit to resist fascism from 1939-1945, in his case manning an anti-aircraft gun on Fairlight Cliffs (although he did once tell me that, on principle, they used to fire first at any aircraft they saw, and check afterwards whether it was one of ours or not). In 1982, when the Falklands was invaded, the entire production at Brough was switched to Harriers more or less overnight, in anticipation by the MOD of replacing aircraft losses which, thankfully, never materialised, and he slogged his guts out with the rest of them. In fact, apart from five years when his objective was to blast the crap out of them, the remainder of his working life was spent building aircraft for the RAF or the Fleet Air Arm. Anyway, if anybody wants to have a pop at me because of anything my father did/said/believed, then feel free! I’d be all agog to see what you can come up with.

I mean, what can you say about The Daily Mail, that hasn’t been said already? In March 2013, transsexual teacher Lucy Meadows killed herself after news of her sex change was published in a Mail article which monstered her and questioned whether she was fit to be teaching children, insinuating that there was some sort of incipient, inherent, link between having a sex-change and being a paedophile. This is what the Daily Mail does, see. It takes one little nugget of fact and confects an unholy mess of fabrication, bile and innuendo around it. Very cleverly. You have to admire their artistry. They know just how far to go without overstepping the line. Of course, the fact that their Editor, Paul Dacre, is also head of the Press Complaints Commission might be a helpful factor here. Just sayin’.

More than 182,000 people signed a petition calling for The Daily Mail to sack Richard Littlejohn over the nasty, sneering, character-assassinating article he wrote on Lucy Meadows. The PCC’s ruling was:

“The commission has received a number of complaints about this article following the death of Ms Meadows last week. We are able to inform you that the commission has previously investigated a complaint about this coverage following publication of the article, and the matter was resolved. However, we are unable to provide further information at this stage.”

So, that’s alright then. Then there was the issue of Wood Green Animal Shelter, of which I have written previously on this blog. To recap briefly. The Daily Mail published an article which implied that a wealthy dog owner had left her pet, and a substantial legacy, to Wood Green, who had promptly had the pet in question put down and yet still kept the legacy. I heard about this, and fired off an angry letter to Wood Green, which elicited probably a better and fuller reply than it deserved, from Alison Campling-Williams at the shelter. It turned out that Wood Green had complained to the PCC about the article, and, for once, had won:

I am pleased to tell you today that the complaint has now been resolved and the Mail on Sunday has sent us a letter of apology. The newspaper has acknowledged that we were unaware of the legacy when Henry arrived in our care and that the decision to euthanize him was based purely on welfare grounds. The newspaper also apologised for the distress caused to the Charity, its staff and volunteers.

I asked if, in view of this, The Daily Mail would be printing an apology and making a donation to Wood Green:

They won’t be printing an apology or making a donation I’m afraid – as ever, it seems that unless you have high-powered lawyers to fight your case, they generally tend not to! They have written to our Trustees to apologise and admit they were wrong but this is what is classed as a private apology so we can’t print it.

So, once more, with one bound, they were free. Then there was the article about Mick Philpott, about which I was one of the many complainants to the PCC. This was the one headed “Vile Product of Welfare Britain” that implied that all recipients of benefits were workshy scroungers who were likely to set their house on fire and kill their children. In this case the PCC ruled that – as I said in a previous blog – because the article was a matter of opinion and not presented as fact, the author can say what the hell he likes. So that basically gives The Daily Mail carte blanche to spew whatever venomous shite it pleases, as long as it makes it clear that it’s an opinion.

Which is, ultimately, probably what they are going to say about the article regarding Ed Miliband’s dad. Clearly, the PCC is a busted flush and whilever it remains in the gift of Paul Dacre, it’s unlikely that justice will ever prevail. Still, I intend to complain about it, and I hope I am one of many.

What I am interested in, though, is the genesis of the article – of this particular article. I mean, we know that the “newspaper” in general has an agenda, but why this particular article, in this manner, at this time? Well, one answer is that Ed Miliband has finally discovered what his balls are for, after three years of supine agreement with the Junta, and has actually started proposing policies that threaten the powerful vested interests which fund, inter alia, The Daily Mail and the Tory Party. But we can get nearer than this. Why this article, why now? What made Geoffrey Levy write this, right here and now? The motivation was obviously smearing by association, but what was its precise origin? Did Geoffrey Levy get up one morning and think “I’ll trawl through Ralph Miliband’s 70-year-old teenage diaries and see what I can turn up”, or did an editor tell him to do it? And if the latter, did the editor think the idea up for himself, or did someone tell the editor to think it? I’m not an investigative journalist, but if I was, I would be asking those questions. And the person I would start by asking about the timing would be not Geoffrey Levy, but Lynton Crosby, David Cameron’s new attack-dog spin doctor. Just sayin’.

As I type this, The Daily Mail is still trying to stave off the shitstorm of criticism it has unleashed, and I have to say that it’s really lovely, and cheering to my heart, to see them on the receiving end for once. The potential exists, of course, for people to put still more pressure on the Mail’s advertisers to pull their support for the paper, which would really hurt them in a spot most tender to them: their wallet. The Mail’s reaction has ranged from blustering that it’s Ed Miliband who should be apologising to them (for having such a boring dad that they had to dredge up obscure 70-year old diary entries? for defending the memory of his parent? search me!) to a grudging admission from Alex Brummer, the Mail’s City Editor, yesterday, that:

“I think it [the article] just had the wrong label on it. Sometimes articles which are comment should be labelled and made clear that they’re comment... So perhaps it should have said comment on it to make absolutely clear it was comment instead of a special report.”

Which is very interesting. The Mail dodged the complaint I made to the PCC over the Philpott case article because it was adjudged to have been merely comment. Now they have admitted the Miliband piece was comment passed off as something else, that will be the starting point for my new complaint. We’ll see.

Of course, we don’t need the lies of The Daily Mail to attack the ill, the poor, and the unemployed. [I originally typed “likes” of The Daily Mail, but my laptop keyboard has had so much hammer that a couple of the keys have duff connections. Still, as typos go, it’s probably one of my more accurate ones.] We also have the Conservative Party, who have been disporting themselves at their conference, announcing yet more policies designed to appeal to white van man bigot Britain if we are unfortunate enough to be cursed with them again after the 2015 election.

Increasingly, these days, I find this blog replacing my previous political blog, The Bolshy Party, because there is no difference between the spiritual life and the political life or me. I’m not quite sure where this will lead. Still, rather than re-type it, it is easier at this juncture to quote from what I wrote then.

While it’s tempting to think that some of the people who post stupid, ill-informed and badly worded claptrap about people on benefits on social media sites are actually Tory Central Office by any other name (and undoubtedly some of them are) unfortunately, most of them aren’t. And what this means is, that the Junta’s propaganda is working. It’s an insidiously simple (if inaccurate) nasty little cocktail of twisted fiction, and it goes like this:

There is no money [subtext, Labour spent it all]. In order to “pay down” the deficit, we have to make cuts. There are lots of “scroungers” on benefits whose benefits could be cut to help “pay down” the deficit and ease the burden on “hard working families”. To make matters worse, there are lots of immigrants coming over here and taking all our resources [subtext, Labour relaxed the controls and let them all in]. This, again, is nothing new – historically speaking, that is. It was par for the course in 1930s Germany, for instance. Pick a group in society, scapegoat and demonise them, and appeal to the supposed patriotism of the remainder. Divide and rule. The disabled, the ill, the poor, and immigrants (specifically Muslims) are the new Jews.

Most people who are on benefits want to get off benefits. You don’t live on benefits, you exist. Sure, it’s better than nothing, but if you are on a ship that sinks and you manage to save yourself from drowning by clutching a bit of flotsam or jetsam [I never know which is which] you don’t plan to spend the rest of our life bobbing up and down in the briny – you hope to be rescued one day, so you can resume your place at the Captain’s table. [Of course, these days, the analogy doesn’t hold so well, because you are likely to find that any flotsam (or jetsam) has been privatised and some rich people have used it to start a barbecue on the beach.]

So, we can look forward to homelessness, for instance, going through the roof if and when Cameron gets his way over taking away benefits from the under-25s. It’ll be the Junta’s equivalent of Thatcher’s Poll Tax. The problem which people who disagree with all this simplistic, twisted shit pumped out by the DWP’s propaganda department and regurgitated by the Daily Mail, have, is finding an equally glib five-word soundbite to rebut it. The fact is that, to unpick the clever little knot of misrepresentations I’ve just set out above, you need to read boring academic studies that show that, for instance, in many cases, the government has been lying over the figures, and that many of the “jobs” which have allegedly been “created” in the “recovery” are in fact zero hours contracts, work experience or workfare, and if you took all those out, the figures would look just as sick as they did in 2010; you need to read the boring academic studies that show that long-term unemployment is linked to lack of opportunity and long-term economic depression. It’s not rocket science, it’s all worthy stuff, and, unlike the Junta’s assertions, it’s all true, but I bet you’ve already switched off, and I don’t blame you.

I have often been accused of caring more about animals than I do about people, to which my answer is usually it depends on which animals and which people – but, in truth, I don’t believe the arc, the rainbow of compassion should be limited to a selection of colours, it shouldn’t be either/or, we ought to be able to find within ourselves the full spectrum of colours; but let’s talk about people this week, then. When Gandhi wrote:

I hold that the more helpless a creature, the more entitled it is to protection by man from the cruelty of man

He was actually talking about cruelty to animals, but he might equally have been writing about Hamzah Khan. Starved to death in a land of plenty, as the title of the old broadsheet ballad has it. Just as true today as it was in Victorian times, unfortunately. [I first heard the phrase in a song reproduced by Roy Palmer, but it’s apparently also been attributed to Will Rogers, in 1930s America.]

There was a depressingly circular aspect to the news this week that this poor kid had apparently starved to death and then been left to decay for two years in a soiled baby-gro in a house filled with rubbish. This was the week that Baby P’s mother was released from prison. In 2007, baby Peter Connelly suffered a similar nasty and distressing death caused by a combination of neglect and parental abuse. As did Kyra Ishaq, starved to death by her mother in 2008, and Keanu Williams, beaten to death by his. Not to mention Daniel Pelka, whose short life of starvation and bin-scavenging ended in his premature demise. Do we sense a pattern developing here?

When Sharon Shoesmith was summarily dismissed and ordered to carry the can for the Baby P disaster, five years ago, I wrote [again, apologies for the self reference] in The Bolshy Party:

- but everyone feels that they can do Social Work and everybody thinks they can teach, egged on by government initiatives to foster "choice" in the public services - choice that people really, actually, don't want. They want public services that work and deliver, not to have to choose between two dysfunctional underfunded public services (often contracted out to the private sector, because we all know how good the private sector is at running things, I mean we have only got to look at the financial services industry .... er...oh.)

While today's shenanigans at Prime Minister's Question Time between Broon and Cameron were vaguely entertaining, sort of a bout of "PMT at PMQ's", they will do nothing to help save future Baby Ps. Why the government feels it can run Haringey social services better than the people who are currently running it beats me (unless they have discovered a secret pot of money) and Cameron of course will not hesitate to jump on any passing bandwagon, especially one that allows him to indulge in a little bit of shroud-waving.

So, once again we hear the sound of stable doors shutting all over Westminster with a resounding clang. There will be an enquiry, involving Ofsted, the Chief Constable, Lord Somebody and probably the Keeper of the Queen's Privy Seal, for all I know.

But nobody wants to talk about the real problem, the lack of that secret little pot of money. Everybody's happy to talk about the symptoms, but not the disease. Until social work is properly funded and resourced, you will always have the situation where potentially, a harassed, lowly and inexperienced public official can make a mistake with tragic consequences.

It's a common assertion, especially around the dinner tables of middle England, that the public sector is overstaffed and feather-bedded. It's true, there is some wasteful and totally unnecessary spending in public life - MP's expenses, for instance, are a complete scandal. There is no way we should be paying David Cameron's mortgage! But, given that MPs aren't about to sacrifice their salary and expenses to make Haringey social services better funded, then there's only one other option: if you want a social services which really makes a difference because the caseload is not overwhelming and the people who work there are properly-rewarded public sector careerists, then the answer is a simple one - higher council taxes, but that is precisely the thing the angry mob fuelled by the likes of the Daily Mail, the Sun, and the News of the World refuse to countenance. You can't rebuild the ravages of sixty years of social decay on the cheap.

Things haven’t exactly improved in the funding department for social work since I wrote those words. We have seen massive cuts inflicted on local government funding by Eric Pickles, cuts that the Junta know will impact on things such as children’s services and welfare, but which they wash their hands of and walk away, leaving the people at the sharp end to pick up the bodies. Government by abdication of responsibility.

So we’re left now exactly where we were back then – or possibly in an even worse place, given that the director of children’s services in Birmingham has announced that, as things stand, they can no longer guarantee the safety of Birmingham’s children, and I bet that they are not the only council in that predicament. In fact, we’re probably back where we were in 1918.

“It is pitiful to think that thousands of these men had better homes in the trenches of Flanders than in the sunless alleys of our Motherland. Do thousands of children come into the world, to gasp for life in a slum; to go to school hungry for a year or two; to pick up a little food, a little slang, and a little arithmetic; to grovel in the earth for forty years or to stand in steaming factories; to wear their bodies out like cattle on the land; to live in little rows of dirty houses, in little blocks of stuffy rooms, and then to die?”

These words, written by Arthur Mee, himself a passionate believer in self education writing in “Who Giveth us the Victory” [George Allen and Unwin, 1918, page 139] are, sadly, for many people, still true, 95 years later, after the War to end all Wars. Although the social world which he described has changed beyond all recognition, in some cases real poverty still exists, and in other cases it has been supplanted by poverty of expectation, caused by the failure of educators to provide the circumstances where inspirational teachers can stimulate people to their full potential, leading them to assume that “education is not for the likes of us”

Meanwhile, in some nondescript council estate somewhere in Britain, with boarded up windows, graffiti’d walls, and broken glass in the streets, where there is no work and no prospect of any work, there is probably another kid right now, at the mercy of a depressed, alcoholic or mentally-ill single mother, struggling along, spiralling down and down, who will end up being despised by the media at the behest of the Tories, and who is getting ready to decide that enough is enough. And when her child dies, emaciated, scared, alone and in pain, there will be an enquiry. Lessons will be learned. What will it take, I wonder, for the Junta, for there to be an enquiry that concludes that some part of the fault lies with them and their cuts? How many more children have to die before they finally, grudgingly, acknowledge the phrase, with regard to Eric Pickles, instead of Sir Christopher Wren, Lector, si monumentum requiris, circumspice?

But the question is, what do we do? I’ve spent ten pages (or so my computer says) up to here, ranting about injustice and poverty, on this fine and sunny Sunday morning, and it will barely have made a dent in the smug, self-satisfied, evil carapace of the likes of David Cameron [and you can probably insert any other politician of your choice, to be honest, from whatever party, they are all as bad.] Maybe we should all go on strike at the next election, and write “none of the above” across the ballot paper. I don’t know. All I know is it’s a beautiful, crisp, fine, bright Sunday at the end of a fairly shitnastic week, and I’ve got some herbs that need re-potting, which might calm me down, and make me less angry about the way that things are going. How much longer, though, are we going to put up with this? If you tolerate this, your children will be next…

Today marks the feast of St. Bruno, who really ought to be the patron saint of pipe-smokers, but isn’t. Bruno was born in Cologne, in Germany, of a prominent family. He studied at Rheims, in France, then returned to Cologne about 1055AD, was ordained a Canon. He returned to Rheims in 1056AD as professor of theology, and remained there until 1074, when he was appointed chancellor of Rheims. However, Bruno was forced to flee Rheims when he and several other priests denounced the archbishop in 1076 as unfit for the office of Papal Legate. Bruno later returned to Rheims in 1080 when the archbishop was deposed, and though the people of Rheims wanted to make Bruno archbishop, he decided to pursue the life of a hermit.

He became a hermit under Abbot St. Robert of Molesmes (who later founded the monastery at Citeaux) but then moved on to Grenoble with six companions in 1084. They were assigned a place for their hermitages in a desolate, mountainous, alpine area called La Grande Chartreuse and built an oratory and individual cells, roughly followed the rule of St. Benedict, and thus began the Carthusian Order. They embraced a life of poverty, manual work, prayer, and transcribing manuscripts. The fame of the group spread, and in 1090AD, Bruno was brought to Rome, against his wishes, by the splendidly-named Pope Urban II (whom he had taught at Rheims) as a Papal Advisor.

Bruno persuaded Urban to allow him to resume his former state, founded St. Mary's at La Torre in Calabria, sidestepped the Pope's offer of the archbishopric of Reggio, became a close friend of Count Robert of Sicily, and remained there until his death on October 6, 1101. He wrote several commentaries on the psalms and on St. Paul's epistles. He was never formally canonized because of the Carthusians' aversion to public honours but Pope Leo X granted the Carthusians permission to celebrate his feast in 1514, and his name was placed on the Roman calendar in 1623.

After Bruno’s death, the Carthusians of Calabria, following a frequent custom of the Middle Ages, despatched a roll-bearer, a servant of the community laden with a long roll of parchment hung round his neck, who travelled through Italy, France, Germany, and England, stopping at each place along the route to announce the death of Bruno, and in return, people inscribed upon his roll, in prose or verse, expression of their regrets, or promises of prayers. Many of these rolls have been preserved. In Catholic art, Saint Bruno can be recognized by a skull that he holds and contemplates, with a book and a cross. He may also be depicted crowned with a halo of seven stars, but we should not be deceived by this. Clearly he was a dangerous lefty who, even though he is dead, obviously despised Britain, and remains a threat today to those of us who like to keep our privet hedges neatly clipped and whose starched white net curtains are always twitching.

I’m sorry. I quite like the idea of withdrawing from the world, and living the contemplative spiritual life of St Bruno, if only the world would stop going to hell in a handcart. I mean, my life more or less already consists of poverty, manual work, prayer, and transcribing manuscripts. It’s very comforting at this time of year, when the nights are drawing in, to keep the home fires burning, bomb up the stove, and go round the house bolting and barring the doors. As they always used to be, from the times when men first started to gather round the safety of a fire, the monsters are all out there in the dark. But for some reason today, I am angry, after a bad week anyway, at home and abroad, and I just can’t seem to let it go. I want things to change. For the better.

I’m sorry if you came here seeking spiritual solace, and all I have for you today is dark, brooding anger. But is it any wonder; look at what’s all around us. Look at the country we’ve allowed to be made. The wreckage, the wastelands, the ghosts of all those dead kids. If you tolerate this, your children will be next.