Epiblog for the Feast of St Thomas A Becket

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley.  The first half of the week was dominated by last-minute preparations for Christmas, while the second half was largely devoted to keeping warm.  Both halves involved food, to a great extent.  I never feel “Christmassy” these days unless and until I hear the lone chorister (Hi Ho, Silver, Awayyyy!) singing Once In Royal David’s City, to kick off the festival of nine lessons and carols on the radio.  By then, it’s too late to alter the course of events, Christmas will be Christmas, and that’s that. For good or ill.

This year, I heard it while prepping the veg for Christmas dinner the next day.  Normally, I like prepping veg, as a mindless, meditative exercise. This year, however, was slightly more mission-critical as Deb’s dad was going to join us at the festive board.  Plus, Debbie was going to take Zak and Misty for a long tramp on the moors on Christmas Day itself, although given the weather, tramps of any stature would have been best advised to head for the nearest hostel.

Anyway, this meant timing would be more crucial than usual, which is why Christmas Eve found me topping and tailing sprouts and singing along to “Most Highly-Flavoured Gravy”, and reflecting on the magic that used to attach to Christmas Eve, when I remember my mum dragging me round Crowle Street in the snow, stuffing last-minute Christmas cards in the letterboxes of neighbours as it got dark.  That particular year, I seem to recall it had snowed as well.  It’s odd that it’s things like that which I particularly remember, rather than the presents I got.  Not that I didn’t appreciate the presents. I probably appreciated them even more when I realised they weren’t delivered via the chimney by a fat, bearded, supernatural entity, and that my Dad had worked a number of hours at building real aeroplanes in order to earn the money to buy me the model one I found wrapped up under the tree.

I wouldn’t even have known the word at the time, but it was the sacramental nature of Christmas Eve that seemed to touch a nerve somewhere inside me. The thought that it was a magical time when you might just find yourself tramping through the deep snow across a field or two, and enter a barn, dark at first, until the wick of your lantern burned up, then full of the steam and the smell of the oxen, and see them kneel in their stalls on the stroke of midnight, as in Hardy’s poem.  Much of that wonderment has rubbed off since, but there are still glimmers, here and there, as in listening to the Christmas Eve carols and joining in with those old familiar words that we used to belt out when carol singing with the Methodist church choir and the Boys’ Brigade in Brough.

Christmas Day itself was something of an exercise in logistics, by comparison.  It would have all worked, if Debbie and the dogs hadn’t been 45 minutes late back, meaning that there was a necessary degree of re-organisation involved in turning stuff up or down. The resulting meal was less satisfactory than I’d have hoped, but it was eaten with appreciation.

Boxing Day dawned bright and clear, though things quickly went downhill in several directions.  Firstly I found myself fulminating at the Junta’s proposals to repeal the ban on fox hunting.  Given their complete callousness, lack of compassion, and hatred of the people they’ve been persecuting since 2010, I suppose it was naïve of me to expect that they would display any pity for animals, especially given the badger cull.  Anyway, at least they have nailed their colours to the mast, for those who were in any doubt. They are in favour of charging around the countryside like a gang of medieval Yahoos with a pack of dogs, killing and maiming animals. OK.  I  didn’t really expect much more of them, to be honest.

The justification that the ban is somehow unworkable, however, doesn’t really stand up. If the police put as many resources into cases of animal cruelty as they do into dispersing peaceful demonstrations by “Occupy”, then we’d soon see if the act was “workable” or not.  As it is, the police don’t seem to give a stuff, and the police and crime commissioners care even less.  When there are arrests and trials for animal abuse, senile magistrates let those responsible off with a caution. The two suspects who were arrested on suspicion of arson by Greater Manchester Police in respect of the Harpurhey Dogs’ Home fire have been quietly released without charge. Very poor, GMP.  Four out of ten, must try harder.

Katie Hopkins, someone who is famous for self-promotion and not winning The Apprentice, said this week that opposition to fox hunting is just jealousy dressed up as animal rights. Well, Katie, my dear, I can assure you I have never felt the slightest pang of regret that my circumstances prevent me from mounting up on horseback in a silly red coat and driving a pack of dogs to rip a fox to shreds, and to be honest, I can’t imagine the mind set where anyone would be envious that they can’t have a go at it. Mind you, Katie Hopkins also said this week that she thinks fat kids are being abused by their parents because of their diet. She’s very big on fat, Katie. Presumably her house doesn’t have any mirrors. 

My beard-chewing fulminations were interrupted by a domestic drama which was much more sudden.  It was 4pm and getting dark. Matilda had already put herself to bed for the day on Colin's settee. Debbie set off to take Muttkins into the woods and throw some sticks for her.

Sometime towards the end of this proceeding, Misty heard something - probably a firework, since there was some moron setting them off at 2AM on Christmas Eve, and they are pretty prevalent round here at the moment. Misty legged it, with Debbie in hot pursuit.

On her way back down to the main road, Debbie heard an awful bang. Next, she met a woman she sees occasionally out dog walking, who said "If you're chasing a border collie, I'd get a move on, she's just been hit by a car and it doesn't look good."

Debbie called on her former Yorkshire Cross Country champion running reserves and stepped it up by several gears. When she reached the road, Misty was lying partly on the pavement, party in the road, with four people round her.  Debbie sprinted to the house, got two dog towels out of the lobby, and shouted round the kitchen door to me "She's been knocked down! I'm taking her in!" [to Donaldsons, the vets] I phoned Donaldsons on my mobile and let them know. By the time I got off the phone and wheeled my wheelchair out into the lobby, Debbie had already scooped up Misty off the road, wrapped her in the towels, put her in the camper van, and taken off in the general direction of Donaldsons, at a speed calculated to escape Earth's gravitational pull. By the time I reached the end of the ramp, all I heard was the distant whine of the turbo-charger cutting in, as she went under Lockwood Viaduct.

Anyway, the vets checked her out (the dog, not Debbie) and, at a cost of £107.99, we now know that she had three cuts, two to one hind leg, one to the other, but no broken bones or other serious damage. She was a bit subdued that night, as you might expect, but once she’d had her painkillers, wrapped in some pressed ham, she curled up and went to sleep on the other settee in Colin's front room.

Stupid dog.  As I said at the time, on Facebook, cherish what you have, brothers and sisters, because you never know when it is going to be snatched away from you in an instant.

Our other, fat, “child”, Matilda the cat, was rather nonplussed by the arrival of the Boxing Day snow. She dithered on the doorstep of the conservatory and eventually turned round and went back into the kitchen, jumping up on the settee nearest the stove.  I think that’s known as voting with your feet, or in her case, paws. She did, later, stomp angrily into next door and go out briefly through her cat flap, in a futile bid to discover whether the grass really was greener on the other side. It wasn’t, so she came back in, curled up and went to sleep, which actually seems to be to be possibly the most sane reaction to waking up and finding that he house is surrounded by snow.

Today, she did pretty much the same routine, except that she interspersed it with a period of bird-watching through the conservatory door. The birds, especially the pigeons and jays, took great delight, knowing that Matilda was safely shut behind 2cm of double glazing, in strutting around on the decking, hoovering up the bird food I’d broadcast on the snow, and generally taunting the cat. Matilda, for her part, chattered and growled and swished her tail, and very occasionally waved a half-hearted, well-fed paw in their general direction. Then she gave up and went to sleep, which is pretty much the default factory setting for any make of cat.  Debbie, too, was quite excited by watching the birds, and called out to me, while I was otherwise engaged cooking her breakfast porridge, that there were two crows on the railing of the decking. I said I thought this was unlikely and she said, well, they could be blackbirds – or are they the same thing? The last time I castigated her on her lack of ornithological knowledge, she replied that what did I expect, she wasn’t Percy bloody Thrower, so this time, I wisely let it lie.

There has been no news as such this week, not that has reached me, anyway. Britain is paralysed by snow and ice, which, as a story is right up there with “Mafeking has been relieved” or “Catholic Bears Take Dump in Forest”.  Oh, and Nigel Farage has been named “Briton of the Year”, by The Times, a newspaper owned by Rupert Murdoch, a man who has done so much in his long life to contribute to those core British values of eavesdropping, nudity (specifically naked breasts, which is doubly ironic, given UKIP’s stance on breast-feeding) and offshore tax evasion.  These days, nothing much surprises me, but this is on a par with Jimmy Savile being given an award for childminding, or Dracula being honoured for services to the blood transfusion service.

It’s a classic illustration, though, of how someone can barge their way to the front in politics by appearing to be a man of the people, not answering any questions,  and yet seeming to have all the answers.  Without wishing to invoke Godwin’s law, the parallels with the rise of Hitler are striking enough to at least note, if not (yet) a perfect fit.  You have a period of unrest and hardship. In our case, the financial mess after the world banking crash of 2009, followed by four years of misguided “austerity” which has made things worse.  In Germany’s case, it was the Weimar Republic struggling to cope with the effects of the harsh reparations imposed by the Allies on Germany at Versailles.  And in each case, you have a distrust of mainstream politicians, and a man who comes along, presenting himself as an outsider, a man of the people, who has simple solutions to make Germany/England great again, by scapegoating the Jews/immigrants, delete as applicable.  Of course,  Hitler’s vision of “greatness” was a bit more global, whereas Farage’s is mainly confined to sending all the brown people home, being allowed to smoke in pubs, getting women to clean behind the fridge, and not letting gays stay in B&Bs.  But give him time.

Anyway, in this strange week where every day is like a Sunday, we have finally reached a real one. Another bright, sunny morning, where I was reminded, as I trundled down the ramp to put the rubbish in the bin, of T S Eliot’s “Midwinter spring is its own season”.  There can’t be many people who recite T S Eliot to themselves while putting out the rubbish, and my own extempore performance of Little Gidding was curtailed by my discovering the lid on the dustbin was frozen down, so I had to whack it with a stick to free it before I could dispose of the bin-bag. Nevertheless, there were all the elements of Eliot’s vision present in the garden and the trees across the road:

Midwinter spring is its own season
Sempiternal though sodden towards sundown,
Suspended in time, between pole and tropic.

And, indeed, as Eliot asks, where is summer now, the unimaginable zero, summer.  I looked through the calendar of Saints for today, and to be honest, they are a rather lacklustre, unprepossessing bunch.  Apologies to anyone with a special devotion to any of them, but my eye was caught rather by the fact that tomorrow is the Feast of St Thomas a Becket, which seemed altogether more interesting, and which also has a T S Eliot connection, of course, via Murder in the Cathedral.  I found that Eliot’s lines in the speech of the chorus, where they describe themselves as living and partly living, had particular resonance for me after the fiasco on Boxing Day. How easily we could have been mourning, rather than rejoicing, and who knows, maybe in an alternative universe, our other selves are.  One thing’s for sure, as far as I’m concerned, I’ve had it with partly living. From now on, as if I shouldn’t have already learned this lesson well enough from my own life in the last four years, I intend to try and cherish every moment, even the moment when you find that the wheelybin lid is frozen shut.  Because you never know the minute or the hour. You never know when you are going to find three drunkards with longswords (or the modern equivalent) barring your way and saying “Time’s up.”

So I’m now going to put this idea to the test by cherishing every moment of tidying up and rationalising the contents of the food cupboard.  There are going to be things which are even more of a challenge. By this time next week, it’ll be al over and we will, once more, have had to endure the most loathsome night of the year, New Year’s Eve, where we count the empty chairs and nurse our wounding regrets. Try cherishing that, me old matey.  Then there’ll be January, the month of tax returns and abandoned cats and dogs. That, too, will be a tough cherish.  So I had better get some practice in now, on these jars of piccalilli.

Epiblog for the Winter Solstice

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. The week running up to the Winter Solstice, in my experience, certainly in recent years, has a habit of tossing us wobblers, googlies, grimblies and other various wrong ‘uns, and this year has been no exception, in fact, this year, it’s been an absolute doozie.  It’s as if the nearer we get to the narrow pass over the mountains that is the shortest day, the more adverse the conditions seem to become. The weather has remained cold, grim and grey, though I have now discovered what that unexplained crash was in the gale last week, because I noticed yesterday that it looks like a section of the shed roof has been flapping around in the wind. Not good.

Matilda’s been coming back inside the house more often now that the cold and rain is really starting to bite, though she does still like to go out first thing in the morning and have a patrol around, just to see if anything’s changed in her little patch of the garden and the decking.  The cold spikes of the hard rain and hailstones soon bring her back to the conservatory door, though, meowing to be let back in, right now, and dried off with kitchen roll.

Misty, Zak and Ellie did seven miles on Friday in the company of Debbie, and all four of them came back plastered with mud and wet through. I can’t help but feel that Debbie is missing a trick. Since she has, these days, got to tether Ellie and Misty more or less permanently to her belt with paracord, dyneema and Karabiners, she might as well just get a skateboard, and stand on it for seven miles while the dogs provide the motive power.

Anyway, yes, it’s been a hell of a week and no mistake.  The story starts one night last week, actually, when John from the garage was driving home late at night and happened to spot Debbie’s dad’s car parked up in Berry Brow. Nothing strange about that, in itself, and, of course, as he sold the car to the in-laws, you’d expect him to take a proprietorial interest in it, perhaps.  What was odd, however, was that there were three youths gathered round it, two by the side and one on the ground underneath. He stopped and wound down his window and shouted at them, asking what they were doing, and they legged it, up a ginnel and over a low stone wall.

Nobody thought anything much about it, although he did tell the in-laws what he’d seen, and then on Monday, Granny went to collect the car and bring it round to park outside their house, and some lowly example of pond-life had sprayed cavity-foam insulation up the exhaust pipe. Unfortunately, she didn’t notice until she’d started the engine, which means the car now needs a complete new exhaust system.  Bastards.

This began three days of joyful fun, dealing with insurance companies, the garage, the police, the garage, the insurance company, etc etc. If you have ever been involved in anything like this, I don’t need to tell you how tediously dull it all is, and how time-consuming.  It wasn’t helped by the fact that the in-laws’ land line was out of order for three days until “Everything Everywhere” (possibly the most misleading title for a telecommunications company ever) bestirred themselves to fix it.

Then, in the midst of all this, on Wednesday, there was some sort of fumble over the prescription for my father-in-law’s medication, which left him without it for a day, because either the surgery had forgotten to write it or the pharmacy had forgotten to pick it up, I still haven’t got to the bottom of the sorry saga. This was exacerbated by the fact that the surgery itself was shut for “training” all afternoon, with a message on their phone line that said, in effect, if your leg is actually hanging off, please ring NHS Direct or 999, but, other than that, please don’t bother us, and please try to avoid dying on the third Wednesday of the month.  

Normally, every year, I send the surgery a Christmas card with a little thank you note in it, and I had in fact written this years, but I’m afraid to say I was so enraged by not being able to get through to them that I fished it out of the pile of cards waiting to be stamped and posted, and chucked it on the fire. It made a merry blaze, for a few seconds.

It was, of course, all sorted out the next morning, after a wait in the phone queue of only 13 minutes or so, during which time I was reassured that my call was important (something which I already knew, in all honesty) and of course it turned out that the original prescription had been there all along, so now FIL had two lots of medication, which is probably a good thing, since Christmas is coming and the surgery and the pharmacy are a comic collection of cockwombles who can’t be trusted to run a bath. I did actually point out in my email to the surgery that if training results in the death of patients it’s probably not the best of outcomes.

So, that was the week that was. I sat in the midst of the chaos, like an old arthritic spider trying frantically to knit together a web that was unravelling faster than I could spin it.  Debbie, meanwhile, was soldiering on with her last four days of term. This time last year, this involved both buns and bhajis, as the classes all brought in food to share, but this year all she brought back was three empty Quality Street tins. When I queried the reason for this, to be frank, over-the-top recycling, she said that she thought they would do to put my baking in.  Right. Fine. Good.

But even then, fate had a twist in store for Deb’s teaching. On the last morning of term, Thursday, she set off to do her class at the outreach centre at Birstall, very low on diesel, and got there basically on the fumes in the tank. Coming back, when all she wanted to do was get home and rejoice that she had 17 days free of teaching, she was not so lucky, and ran out in Birstall.  No problem. She knew where the garage was, or at least she thought she did. In fact it wasn’t.  The garage hadn’t moved, but Debbie displayed the sense of direction of the average breeze block, and set off in the wrong direction, eventually arriving at the garage after a prolonged traipse in the rain, a bit like Columbus thinking he was going to India and discovering America by mistake. 

The quick purchase of a plastic container costing £6.99 and the diesel to fill it, and a (much shorter) walk back to the camper van, this time avoiding the pretty way, soon saw her on the road again, and that was that. The end of term. Hooray! All that remains now is to make sure that she gets paid on 23 January for the outstanding teaching hours she did in September.  Still, she’s quite excited about going back to one of her regular venues in January because it’s now got a whiteboard! It’s not actually plugged in to anything yet, but as I said to her, at least she can sellotape her resources to it.

By contrast to the first four days of the week, Friday brought a period of relative calm, the relative in this case being my little niece Isobel, whom Granny was minding for the day. Actually, “calm” is not really the right word for Isobel, who clearly has enough energy to power a small, landlocked, European country, if only there was some way of harnessing it.   As one of my Facebook friends put it, “a two-year-old is like a blender with the lid off!” Isobel is only just over one year old, but the analogy holds.  We sang Your Baby Has Gorn Dahn The Plughole, It’s a Long Way To Tipperary, and all of the verses to Ilkley Moor Baht t’at, the latter twice. I juggled with apples. Unsuccessfully, as it turns out, but she was still amused.  Eventually, she went home tired but happy, and I dozed in my wheelchair, feeling as if I had spent the afternoon in a tumble-drier.

Even if last week hadn’t been such a disaster zone at home, the news of the wider world would have been enough to drive me to the brink of depression. True, there were some occasional flashes of humour. I particularly liked the story of the man in Brighton who called the police to protest that his neighbours, with whom he had been involved in a planning dispute, had stuck a “creepy” cardboard cutout of Cliff Richard in one of the windows of their house, a window which overlooked his own dwelling. The police were apparently sympathetic, but couldn’t really offer any practical help. They were probably too busy investigating the real thing, although it must be difficult, at times, to tell one from the other.

In terms of general “what the – “ potential, however, the Cliff Richard story was dwarfed by the news that American band Skinny Puppy (no, me neither) are demanding $666,000 in unpaid royalties from the American government after it emerged that their music was used to torture prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. Susan Boyle must be rubbing her hands and ordering a Ferrari.  And as for Celine Dion…

Talking of Celine Dion  (she’s Canadian, stick with me, we’ll get there eventually) reminds me that, although this week has been largely free of UKIP gaffes for once (unless I missed any) the slack has been taken up to a certain extent by Britain First, the Nazi Facebook page, one of whose members tweeted that if “moose limbs” had a problem with the UK, they should “move to a moose limb country”. I don’t know whether predictive text was to blame or whether the author really was as dim as a bucket of pig manure, but either way, the only moose limb country I can think of is Canada, which is where Celine Dion comes in.

Otherwise, it’s been a very, very bad week.  The Sydney café siege, the massacre of over 300 schoolkids by the Taliban, where do you start? The media was quick to label the perpetrators of both acts as Muslims (though not moose limbs) although they had about as much to do with Islam as the Spanish Inquisition had to do with Christianity, and a similar mind-set. (Bet you didn’t expect that). The Taliban, especially, are a medieval-minded death cult who hate the idea of education, especially for women.  I don’t have the words to condemn what they did. Unspeakable doesn’t even touch the sides.  But then Pakistan itself is an unstable, ungovernable, fractured entity, where the rule of law is riven by factional interests and rivalries.  Look at how Osama Bin Laden managed to live there for years, under the noses of the Pakistani security service. 

This is not to say that they’re all as bad as one another, and we should just leave them to it, although that does now seem to be the policy, after having meddled ineffectually for a decade: I don’t doubt for a minute that there are good people in the country who want to see it stable, peaceful, and untouched by proxy wars between the US and radical “islam” – the problem is, as with Afghanistan, that these people have no voice and no power to bring about that situation, and we in the West haven’t exactly gone out of our way to make their task easier.  In any event, it’s now looking like the Taliban will eventually re-establish control in Afghanistan and seep over the border, such as it is, into the areas of Pakistan where the government has little or no power to evict them, bringing with them a new dark age of blinkered “religious” (in name only) bigotry. Also in Australia this week, a deranged woman managed to slaughter eight other members of her family. The media did not report on her religion, if any.  Because she didn’t purport to be a Muslim.

It was a sad week, a bad week, for justice, as well.  The trial of the three Border Agency contract staff who were accused of either causing, or not preventing, depending how charitable you feel, to death of Jimmy Mubenga on his deportation flight ended this week with their acquittal.  OK, so the court has decided, and we all have to live with that decision, but I am still finding it difficult to get my head round why, even if, as claimed, Jimmy Mubenga got himself into the position where he couldn’t breathe, the security officers responsible did nothing about the situation.  One possible explanation would be that they regarded him as some sort of lesser being, a human parcel to be returned to sender, and thought that a bit of brutality and neglect wouldn’t matter. I don’t know. There may be other explanations. Either way, surely there was an issue of negligence, at the very least.  If I said what I really thought, I would be had up, no doubt, for contempt of court.

As if to reinforce the fact that we now seem to have invented a society where we've abandoned compassion and a concern for injustice, on Thursday, when the wind was blowing huge gusts of rain across the garden, and I was already thinking, as I tend to do whenever the weather is bad, of those poor unfortunates obliged to be out in it whether they like it or not, I read a story online that I had to actually go through twice to make sure I wasn’t imagining it.  Police in Brighton issued an ASBO and a warning to a man in a wheelchair who was distributing food to the homeless in a public place.  Apparently the area was covered by one of these standing legal arrangements that have turned so many of our public spaces into private fiefdoms, from which we can be barred or excluded as the authorities see fit, backed up by the raft of legislation on the issue which has been smuggled through parliament in the last few years.

It’s a product of the attitude that treats the homeless as a pestilence, from which the rest of us are to be shielded, instead of grasping the nettle and dealing with the causes of the problem in the first place. It’s much easier to look at the homeless as if they were rats or pigeons, and treat them accordingly.  Especially if you’ve had a compassion bypass, as Sussex Police seem to have had, and your common sense removed at birth.

Unfortunately, it’s an attitude that’s all too prevalent.  Again, the media are partly to blame, although most of the responsibility lies on the Junta. The media are quite good at describing members of the armed forces as “heroes”, but somehow, they lose that heroic status when they leave the Army, lose their job and their home, and end up on the streets as homeless, alcoholic mental cases.  I’m afraid, too, that there are many members of the great British public at large who tend to think this way, as demonstrated by Mike Sivier in his Vox Political blog this week, when he highlighted the case of a man in the Wirral who was killed by a refuse lorry while scavenging in bins for food, after his benefits had been sanctioned. The story came up in the evidence given to the parliamentary committee on hunger. He had been forced to try and survive without any money for 17 weeks, and was reduced to scavenging in bins for leftovers or out-of-date food, and it was while he was doing this that a rubbish-compacting lorry arrived, picked him up and crushed him to death.

Yet some people, commenting on the story online, seemed to be implying that if the claimant was sanctioned because of some shortcoming on his part, then he brought his death upon himself.  Given the remarkably capricious range of reasons advanced by the DWP for stopping people’s money, and the fact that they have targets of how many people they should sanction in any given period, it’s highly unlikely that it was the man’s own fault, but even if it was, surely it’s hardly a crime deserving of death, especially such an ignoble and pointless death?

Yet you get people writing:

As poor as this policy is, and as grim as the side-effects are, at least this Coalition Government took steps to try to make sure that all of my tax money goes to that majority of people that are in honest need so that there was a chance that the welfare budget might have been enough for them to have a shot at something approaching decency and dignity in their quality of life rather than forcing them to make the choice to eat or to heat due to the fact that some of my money is wasted on those fortunately few but sadly still-present people who have decided that working the system is preferable to working a job.

Except that the Junta hasn’t taken any such steps. It’s given away tax money in breaks and handouts to people who are in the richest income bands instead, and the level of benefit fraud, which I assume is what the commentator meant by “working the system” has remained at a lowly 0.7% throughout the tenure of the Blight Brigade, so all their “steps” have done is cause poverty, deprivation, and death, in this case. But this commentator has obviously swallowed the DWP/Daily Mail line about the deserving and undeserving poor, hook, line and sinker. It just shows how insidious their propaganda has been.

At the end of a very sad and trying week, feeling depleted and tired, if not exhausted, we’ve managed to crawl to Sunday, the day of the Winter Solstice.  While this isn’t a specifically Christian occasion, there are enough resonances with the concepts of light and darkness to make me consider the day in a religious context. It ought to be considered also in a celebratory context, as, from today, the nights get shorter, and, believe it or not, spring and summer are coming. Warmer and better days. We just have to get through the rest of winter, which might be more difficult than we think, of course.

But for now, we’re at the top of the mountain pass. It’s time to pause and take stock, and look back on 2014 and forward to 2015, even though it’s not officially new year yet. In the country at large, I don’t think 2015 is going to be much to look forward to. There will be even deeper and more savage cuts in the misguided name of “austerity”, regardless of whoever wins the 2015 election.  And no doubt the mindless idiots with their heavily, selectively annotated copies of the Koran and their AK-47s will be plotting something horrendous in the course of which they will take the name of Islam in vain.

On a personal level, next year promises again to be much the same, if I’m spared.  Looking back on 2014, I can count some accomplishments, seven books produced. One of them mine, and some pictures painted. We lost poor little Freddie from the tribal wolf-pack in February, but little Ellie came along in May.  So we can still have a three-dog-night when the weather’s cold enough.  Tonight, we’ll be lighting a candle and keeping a vigil of sorts, as I have done one way or another for the last twenty-five years or so: keeping my lamp trimmed, because you never know the minute or the hour.

I must admit to not feeling particularly “Christmassy” – that’s not unusual, though – I don’t normally start to feel the Christmas tingle until I hear the choir singing Once In Royal David’s City on Christmas Eve.  I tend to cover my ears when the Christmas adverts come on, especially those truly dreadful Morrisons ones with Ant and bloody Dec.  I’d like to issue some sort of ringing declaration invoking the spirit of Christmas to get everybody up on their feet and shouting for a better world, a New Jerusalem where it could be Christmas every day, the hungry would be fed, the homeless sheltered, the crooked straight and the rough places plain, but I am just so weary today, and I still have to prep all the veg, because the In-Laws are coming for a meal this evening.  One of my resolutions for 2015, though, is that no one shall go hungry under my roof while I have anything to do with it.

This time next week, it’ll all be over for another year – as in Alan Hull’s Winter Song:

The turkey’s in the oven and the presents are all bought

And Santa’s in his capsule, he’s and American astronaut

Will you spare a thought for Jesus, who had nothing but his thoughts

Who got busted for just talking, and befriending the wrong sorts…

But for now, as I said, we’re at the top of the pass. The still point of the turning world, as T S Eliot might have called it, if he’d been here right now.  I’m sorry if you came here looking for an inspiring Christmas message, and all I had was scraps. I hope that Christmas brings you whatever you want from it, anyway, and let’s hope for better times for all of us in 2015.

Epiblog for Gaudete Sunday

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. The weather has deteriorated remarkably, to exhibit all of the very worst features of winter in Britain. Cold temperatures, below freezing at night and not much better during the day; horrible driving rain for days on end, grey days when you never get to see the sun; darkness at four; yet more rain, drumming through the night. Oh, and did I mention the cold?  Yes, it’s true, there were a couple of days when it dawned bright, crisp and golden, but generally everything is sodden in the garden, and covered by a soggy mulch of dead leaves, some of which Matilda seems to bring in with her, stuck to her fur, every time she’s been out.

This was the week that the British Isles was supposed to have been hit by a “weather bomb”, a sudden and catastrophic lowering of air pressure creating a howling storm out in the Atlantic that was then going to sweep across the country like a Zombie Apocalypse, destroying civilisation as we know it.  In fact, what happened, here at any rate, was that it got a bit windy and it pissed down for three or four days solid. So from our point of view, the “weather bomb” was a bit of a damp squid.  A few of my friends (online, real-life, and both) who live in the Western Isles of Scotland were more seriously incommoded, with power outages and food shortages, not to mention ferry cancellations, but generally they took it in their stride. As far as they are concerned, it’s called ”winter”, and nothing much to get hung up about.

On Friday, having finished teaching for the week, Debbie decided she would take Misty and Zak up to Blackmoorfoot for a jolly jaunt in the rain and the dark.  I, meanwhile, was at home. I had been working, and I had also spent a considerable amount of time picking up Misty’s dried food, the aforementioned “Muttnuts”, off the kitchen tiles, because in the excitable milling about and running backwards and forwards that always accompanies preparation for walkies, Misty had put her foot on the edge of the dish and scattered them far and wide.

Granny arrived, wanting to leave Ellie with me while she went round to Adam’s for tea. There was no problem with that, except that Ellie wasn’t with her.  One minute, she was half way up the wheelchair ramp, following at Granny’s heels, the next minute, Granny arrived in the porch alone.  She went back outside, shouting “Ellie!” at the top of her voice, then came back in and went to the back door, repeating the process.  No response. Gradually, each time she went out the front, she retraced her steps further and further, then returned to the back door and once more issued her unanswered summons.  By now, her orbit was beginning to resemble one of the more eccentric comets, and I was beginning to fear that I would only see her once every few years, training a cloud of ice and rocks.  The next time she came in, she managed to put her foot on the edge of the dog dish and once more scattered the Muttnuts far and wide. I sat in the midst of the wreckage, blowing the dog whistle for all I was worth and shouting “Ellie!” but I might as well have saved my breath to cool my porridge.

Eventually, Granny’s forays brought her within the gravitational pull of a woman at the bus stop further down the road, who shouted to her that if by any chance she was looking for a little brown and white Parson Jack Russell terrier, she had seen one scuttling off thataway (points finger). Thanking her, Granny broke into a trot and was eventually able to catch up with Ellie, scoop her up in one fluid movement, and march back with the dog wedged under her arm.

Ellie was deposited on the dog bed while Granny administered a bollocking of Biblical proportions, leavened with several expressions that I had not realised she was familiar with. Admonished, Ellie curled round and went to sleep.

The week also contained, on Saturday, the anniversary of Tiggy’s passing, three years ago, but at the time, we were rather preoccupied with living dogs than ones which have gone to doggy heaven, and the day was generally a bit fraught, so we didn’t really get to commemorate it as it should have been commemorated.  Perhaps this evening might afford us a better opportunity.

The living dog who caused the problems was Misty. Deb had taken Misty and Zak up to Wessenden Head to walk them over the moors, even though the weather was deteriorating by the hour. The thing is, Debbie takes the view that if you can get wet through just taking them down to the cricket field (which you can, in this sort of weather) then you might as well go the whole hog and give them a decent walk.

No sooner had Debbie opened the door of the van and let them out into the car park, even before she had got Misty clipped onto the Karabiner, some inbred half-wit idiot let off his shotgun at a “grice”, up on the moors, and Misty took off like Usain Bolt on hearing a starting-pistol.  There was no way Debbie could have caught her, even though she was a former Yorkshire women’s cross country champion. Misty is made for the 100m dash, not the long run, and with Debbie it’s vice versa. So all she could realistically do was sit there with Zak and hope Misty returned.  If she’d driven off, and then Misty came back to the spot where the van was, she might have set off in yet another direction.

At home, where I was steadily ploughing through the annual task of writing a stack of Christmas cards, the phone rang. It was a very nice lady who asked did we have a dog called Misty. Yes we did, I said.  Well, they had her with them in their car, she had been barrelling down the white line in the middle of the 60mph limit road over the tops towards Rochdale and Oldham, and they’d managed to stop their own car, stop the traffic, grab her collar, and get her to safety. Then they’d taken her home and phoned the numbers on the dog tag. That dog tag was the best £6.00 I ever spent.  I thanked them profusely, and told them to hang fire and I would contact Deb on her mobile and she would come over and collect Misty from them.

This was where the problems started. Wessenden Head, despite being bare, windy, high up, covered with a combination of snow, heather, sheep, stone walls, and bugger all else, has no mobile phone signal. There are many places in the Holme Valley where you can only make a mobile phone call if you are standing touching the phone mast with one hand.  “The mobile phone you are calling is not available”.

At that moment, I could quite cheerfully have punched whoever at Virgin was responsible for this debacle.  I was stuck in the house in a wheelchair, Debbie was sitting in the van up in the snow at Wessenden, not knowing that Misty had been found, and the clock was ticking.  As there were no communications staff within arms reach, I contented myself with hurling the phone into the conservatory. It hit the floor once, then the door, and bounced off, back onto the dog bed. 

Fortunately, at that moment, Granny arrived like the demon king in a pantomime, with Ellie (firmly secured on a lead) in tow.  Did I know Misty was missing. Yes, and I also know she had been found.  My aborted phone calls to Deb had actually registered enough to make her phone squawk feebly, but not actually connect. She’s tried to call me back, reasoning I was maybe ringing about the dog, and, when she couldn’t get through to me, had called Granny. Using Granny’s mobile, which seemed to work better for some reason, the details of where Misty was were conveyed to Deb. Half an hour later, they were reunited.  I have no way of comparing the almighty bollocking that Debbie undoubtedly administered to Misty with that unleashed by Granny on Ellie, but I would imagine it was comparable, from Misty’s subdued nature on her return.

So, we don’t have much money, but we do see life, as Granny Fenwick was fond of saying. Other than that, hone life this week has been dominated by pre-Christmas chaos and we’re all clinging on by our fingertips, waiting for the Solstice, when things begin to turn around again.  Next week is Debbie’s last week of term, and then we will have a few days to catch our breath before the entire world shuts down for Christmas.  Amongst all the cheery missives and Christmas cards in the post this week was Debbie's annual statement of her former occupational pension from way back in the dim & distant when she was a social worker.  It contained the heartwarming message "If you had died on 30th November 2014, we would have paid you £7642.43". I can't help feeling that she has missed a trick there somehow! And, given their penchant for pointing out the bleeding obvious I was also surprised that there wasn’t some small print that said: on the down side, you would of course be dead.

I have been diverting myself by watching Masterchef again, albeit out of the corner of my eye, and only using 48K of my RAM, in what is laughingly described as my “spare time”. I have however learned two things from it this week – “When you are cooking pigeon on the bone, there’s no place to hide!”  Oh, really? What about behind the fridge?  And, apparently, when you are dressing a dish, the flowers always go on the plate last. So, that’s where I’ve been going wrong, putting the brown sauce on last.

It would be funny, if food were not so much at the forefront of the political debate at the moment, with the continued hardship inflicted on the poor and miserable by the Tory Junta’s “austerity” and benefits cutting policies.  The Bishbosh of Canterbury obviously reads my blog, anyway, because no sooner had I typed the words last week about why isn’t the Church of England denouncing this situation from every pulpit, when up popped Justin Welby and did just that.  I had very low expectations of him, when he came to the Office of Archbishop. To be honest, I thought that Rowan Williams was much better at being a “turbulent priest” but I can understand why he must have got fed up banging his crozier on the same doors over and over again.  I was hoping his successor would have been John Sentamu, which would have been like Mourinho becoming manager of Manchester United, never a dull moment.  Anyway, I have written to the Archbishop, telling him if he keeps this sort of thing up I might have to start going to church again. No doubt I will get the standard “nutter” reply from some ecclesiastical flunkey or equerry.

My culinary skills were insulted this week by two very august personages in the form of Baroness Jenkin and Michael Portillo.  Old Portaloo can safely be defused simply by recalling election night 1997, when the national grid nearly fused by people putting on the kettle for a cuppa at 3AM, the moment everyone had stayed up for. Baroness Jenkin, who, from her picture, looks like Tim Minchin on a bad day, says that poor people can’t cook.  Well, stuff you and the marrow you rode in on, Baroness. I’m a poor person, and I can cook.

I may be in the minority, I admit.  People have got used to convenience foods, and in an increasingly crowded and narrowed school curriculum, what we used to call “domestic science” has probably gone out of the window.  That could be cured, of course, by restoring some of the “austerity” cuts which Baroness Jenkin’s colleagues have inflicted on education, and eventually, the effects would percolate through.  I think, however, that the interest in home cookery has probably never been higher, and what stops a lot of people cooking who might otherwise do so, at home, is that they get in after working long hours in dead beat jobs where they have to have benefits to top up their meagre wages. Which, again, is something we have to thank the Tories and the mini-tories for. 

It takes a considerable effort of will to start making pasta from scratch and pounding herbs in a pestle while singing gay Neapolitan operetta, when you can just about keep your eyes open. Easier to reach for a tin of beans and the can opener.  Assuming of course, that you have a tin of beans, because if the DWP have sanctioned your benefits for missing the bus to your appointment, you might be like the woman I saw on TV this week who had five potatoes and an onion to last out the week. Anyway, Baroness, bloody Jenkin or whoever you are, I take no lessons in cookery from someone whose idea of entertaining is probably to get the caterers in, and who probably made the remarks after consuming the House of Lords annual per head figure of five bottles of Veuve Clicquot at one sitting.

While you are hiding behind the fridge from the pigeon on the bone, you could perhaps do a little light cleaning, which would help out UKIP, as once again they have been in the news this week for all the wrong reasons.  One of their members has allegedly also been “on the bone”, the splendidly named Roger Bird, who, it turned out, seems to have been doing just that, in the shapely shape of one Natasha Bolter.  I will forebear from making further comment, as I have no wish to intrude on private grief, but I suppose we must at least be grateful to him for making UKIP’s position on women clear.  During the week, I was actually the recipient of an act of kindness, which it seems appropriate to mention at this point. I had ordered some print which was supposed to be couriered to me, but owing to reasons of stupidity, the idiot printers had put the wrong house number on the parcel, and Parcel Force (or as we used to call them back in the day, Parcel Farce) had attempted a delivery to somewhere where I was not, given up, and taken the box to the local post office for me to collect.

Given that I can’t even get up the slope out of the driveway without someone giving my wheelchair a push, they might as well have left it on the moon for all the use that was to me. However, when I phoned up the post office and explained my predicament, the owner of the franchise very kindly, at his own expense and trouble, loaded the box into his car and drove it round here. He was, like most of the small shopkeepers and postmasters round here, Asian, or British Asian.  These are exactly the people who the likes of UKIP, Britain First, and the BNP would have us believe are leaching on the economy while plotting acts of terrorism. Just sayin’.

Speaking of wheelchairs reminds me of course that amongst the other “what the hell?” news stories this week was the court judgement that the disabled spaces on buses aren’t guaranteed to be for wheelchairs, apparently.  A wheelchair user sued First Bus because he tried to get on one of their vehicles and some stroppy woman was taking up the wheelchair space with a baby buggy and refused to move it.  The driver refused to intervene, it went to court, and First Bus won. So there you are, that’s another obstacle to getting to the dole office in time now, if you’re unfortunate enough to have to trundle through life on a set of wheels. It would really do some people a world of good to wake up one morning and find they’d lost the use of their legs, starting with whoever the idiot was that decided to defend the action on behalf of First Bus.

The other “WTH” story was the non-story that we have apparently been possibly complicit in torturing people as part of “The War On Terror”. Well, strap me to the mizzenmast and row me out to sea.  I'm slightly confused that this has come as a surprise to people. Was it only me who assumed the UK was complicit in rendition, black prisons, and torture, probably since about 2002, maybe even earlier, and that when our politicians said that we weren't, they were lying to us?

It’s the same with the NSA listening in to and bugging our conversations. They are all at it, like fiddler's elbows. The justification for it, which people have been asking for this week, was George Bush said "jump" and Tony Blair said "How high?" And I'm not surprised by the poor nature of the intelligence gained, either. If someone attached electrodes to my goolies, I'd tell them anything they wanted to hear, and lots of stuff they didn't, including the Hull City forward line for the 1969-70 season. Over and over again, until they turned off the current.

Accompanied by such idiocies around us, once more we have stumbled through to Sunday. This Sunday is “Gaudete Sunday”, when the church gets out its rose-coloured vestments and candles and we are enjoined to “rejoice” for the Advent season:

Gaudete in Domino imper: iterum dico, gaudete. Modestia vestra nota sit omnibus hominibus: Dominus enim prope est. Nihil solliciti sitis: sed in omni oratione petitiones vestræ innotescant apud Deum. Benedixisti Domine terram tuam: avertisti captivitatem Jacob.

Which may be translated as

Rejoice in the Lord alway: and again I say, Rejoice. Let your moderation be known unto all men. The Lord is at hand. Be careful for nothing; but in every thing by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known unto God. Lord, thou hast been favourable unto thy land: thou hast brought back the captivity of Jacob.

And is apparently based on Philippians 4:4-6 and the first verse of Psalm 85.

So, this Sunday, I suppose I should be looking around for reasons for rejoice. I can think of lots of things not to rejoice about: MPs voting themselves pay rises and refusing to consider cheaper champagne;  refusing to approach the EU for help in funding food banks; playing Candy Crush Saga on their phones when they should have been contributing to a committee; wilfully denying any link between their policies and the effects of “austerity”, zero hours contracts, the Bedroom Tax, et al. Cuts and yet more cuts, and all the time, they are borrowing more.

So, Justin Welby, you have a lot to get your Episcopal teeth into. Rose-coloured vestments don’t come with rose-coloured spectacles.  And yet, and yet, I can find reasons to rejoice, if I really try. I can rejoice in the life of Tiggy, which we were lucky to share for fifteen years.  I can rejoice that we have enough food, for now at least. I can rejoice that there are people who are kind enough to find an escaped dog running in the road and rescue it. In fact, that there are people who devote all their spare time to rescuing lost and abandoned dogs, and trying to re-home them.  I can rejoice (if that’s the right word) in the efforts of people to combat the Ebola outbreak – and at this juncture I can mention Gez Walsh, who is doing a charity gig at the Black Bull in Skipton on Tuesday 16^th December, next Tuesday in fact, in aid of the Ebola appeal. 

I wish I could rejoice in more. There are more things in which to rejoice, but the ones I’d most like to rejoice in are barred to me, some of them permanently.  I’d like to rejoice in the feeling that my prayers were answered, I suppose, probably most of all, right now.  But the only way sometimes to confirm a positive is to infer it from a negative.  The fact that I didn’t die in 2010, and the fact that we are just about managing, hard though it is, and the fact that we’re better off than a lot of people, in real, absolute terms, not just in this country but elsewhere in the world, is, I suppose, evidence of some sort of positive effect. Whether any of this would have happened without me praying for it is a moot point, of course. You can’t measure prayer in a test tube.  And, I suppose, in the same way as physics seems to be saying these days that we make up reality on the hoof as we go along, one person’s prayer may not work in the same way as another’s. I can’t tell you how to pray, because what I know as prayer may not work even for me. Prayer itself may not be a homogenous activity; there may be many forms of prayer, as many as there are people praying.

Perhaps what I should be doing, instead of worrying about whether prayers get through, is going into next week rejoicing in the small things and hoping to build on them.  Like the I Ching says, it is better for the small bird not to try and fly too high. So the rest of today will be muted rejoicing that we’ve got this far, while looking forward to the start of the process of casting off the darkness, at the end of next week.  Right now, though, I have a marrow to stuff.

Epiblog for the Second Sunday of Advent

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley, so busy that the knock-on effect stretched into Saturday, the day when I normally do all of my “domestic tasks” and thus Saturday’s tasks had to be incorporated into today, so I am later than usual in sitting down and opening up the laptop to write this. Maybe we’ll catch up as we go along, who knows.

The weather has been vile. For vile, read cold and damp, the worst sort of weather for making my bones ache and sing, and not in a good way. The sudden cold snap was a real shock to the senses after a mild muggy and damp autumn so far: the two empty plant troughs at the side of my wheelchair ramp, which have filled up with rain-water over the last few weeks, were both frozen over the other morning. I had great and childish pleasure in whacking the ice to break it, reciting Shakespeare:

When icicles hang by the wall

And Dick the shepherd blows his nail

And Tom bears logs into the hall

And milk comes frozen home in pail

Matilda is also unimpressed, and has finally realised, somewhere in the crevices of her little walnut of a brain, that it’s warmer in the house.  The thing is, she does seem to like going outside these days (when we first got her, it was all we could do to crowbar her off the settee) and she complains bitterly at the weather when it’s raining or too cold (both of which it has been this week).  This morning, she came in from the garden with her coat full of hailstones, having had the misfortune to be further away than a cat’s scuttle from the door when it all kicked off.

One night during the week, I forget exactly which,  I expended a considerable amount of energy from about 8pm, trundling my wheelchair (with me in it) to the conservatory door at half hour intervals, opening it, and going "Puss puss puss, Tilda, come on, puss puss puss" to no avail.  I was beginning to resign myself to having to spend the night freezing my nadgers off with the cat flap door open, when Debbie informed me that Matilda was, in fact, curled up fast asleep on the settee in Colin's front room and had obviously been there for some hours.

Her answer to the cold snap is to sit inside the conservatory door, looking  out at the dish of bird food I’ve put out on the decking, and threatening the pigeons who swoop down to feed from it. The pigeons, knowing that Matilda is safely behind two centimetres of double-glazing, take no notice whatsoever. In fact, I’d go so far as to say they deliberately taunt her, and cock a snook at her, if that is indeed something which it’s physically possible for a pigeon to  do.

Apart from the hailstones, the threatened “wintry” weather has held off here for the time being  but Debbie, Misty and Zak had a bit of an adventure when they found themselves engulfed in a sudden blizzard on top of Dove Stones on Friday.  Fortunately the dogs were good, and for once, Misty didn’t attempt to abandon the expedition and make her own way home, but trotted along like a good ‘un, secured to the new heavy duty karabiner on Debbie’s belt by a length of Dyneema that terminates in another, similar karabiner, clipped on to Misty’s harness. The last bit of the walk, in the dark, involved a narrow path with a drop into a stream on one side, but once again the Walkies Gods were in a benevolent mood, and the fearless pioneers all managed to negotiate it back to the safety of the camper van, without falling off/in. Debbie is thinking of getting a length of actual lightweight climbing rope, though, just in case Misty decides to go abseiling one day.

I read somewhere (probably on one of the many collie dog training sites) that a good reward for your dog, if you happen to have one to hand, is a raw carrot, and I tried this out on Misty during the week, She mouthed it briefly, before chucking it on the floor in disgust, then coming back and begging for a dog treat.  Yet, one morning towards the end of the week, Deb chucked half a baguette into the garden, because it was rock-hard and only fit for the birds to peck at, and Misty immediately went and “retrieved” it for her.  She has, previously, when I’ve chucked out “fat balls” for the birds, gone and picked them up in her mouth, carried them off, and buried them in the garden.

There was one point on the Dove Stones walk where Misty got spooked by a bird rising suddenly from the bracken, and Debbie was trying to describe to me what happened, when she got back.

“I don’t think it was a pheasant. What are those other things, that aren’t pheasants?”

“Er… Great White Sharks?”

“No, I mean a bird.”

“Grouse?”

“Yes, that’s it . The whirring noise it made startled her.”

The whirring noise made it a pheasant, in my book, but then Debbie isn’t known for her bird recognition skills, frequently describing the wood pigeons that come down for the bird food as “jays”.

Still, at least we can all recognise a great tit when we see one, but just in case there was any doubt, this week’s UKIP gaffe, fresh off the assembly line conveyor belt, was Nigel Farage saying that breastfeeding women should do so in a corner or a little room of their own, somewhere discreet.  Perhaps they should go behind the fridge to do it, then UKIP would have a win/win situation, because they could do some cleaning while they’re there. Why any woman would even consider voting for this bunch of creepy misanthropic perverts escapes me, but then I’m not a woman.  Mr Farage’s stance was supported by The Sun, a “newspaper” that knows a lot about breasts, having featured them every day on page 3 since about 1970. Irony has truly eaten itself.

It would be so easy at this point to glide effortlessly into another “tit” joke to continue on and consider George Osborne and his “autumn statement.” Oh, go on, then, if you insist. According to Mr Osborne, it’s all going trifficly well, everything is ticketty-boo, and er, they have failed to cut the deficit as they said they would, and borrowing has actually gone up again. Given that George Osborne has missed every target he set himself, losing the UK its triple A credit rating along the way, why anybody should believe a word that comes out of his mouth, or indeed any other of his orifices, remains a mystery. If the man told me today was Sunday, I would want that fact verified independently by a competent compiler of almanacs. 

Even economic reality deniers like George Osborne can’t dodge the logic of the situation forever.  If he’d taken the advice of Keynesians like Paul Krugman and invested off the back of the recession to create jobs, instead of behaving like all four horsemen of the Apocalypse rolled into one, the tax take would have risen, and he might even be on the way towards beginning to get out of the hole by now, instead of being still in there and digging furiously with a spade labelled “austerity”.If you owe someone a hundred apples, you can't pay him back by chopping down your orchard.

The tax take has failed to rise and come to his rescue because the fake jobs which the Junta has “created” in order to get unemployment down and as a pretext to lower the benefits bill, are all crappy low paid zero hours contracts where the employee frequently has to be bailed out by the benefits system, rather than contributing to it via income tax.  Obsorne seems to think he has now found a few billion pounds down the back of the settee, given the grandiose schemes announced for public works in the Autumn statement. Anyone tempted to believe any of this is cautioned to remember that there is an election in six months, and to reach for a very large pinch of salt. Osborne’s conversion to Keynesian economics on his political deathbed is only temporary.  The deficit reduction plan, in so far as he ever had one, is now away in la-la-land, somewhere, and he has his fingers firmly crossed. If he gets in again in 2015, watch out for another five years of slash and burn, unless there’s a revolution first.

As indeed there might well be, if people like Judge Rebecca Poulet QC continue to sit.  She allowed two former RBS bankers guilty of a property fraud worth £3million to walk away without going to jail for it, because she said in her summing-up that they had suffered enough.  Despite the fact that they each earned more than £100,000 pa, Raymond Pask and Andrew Ratnage set up a string of fake companies and then used them to apply for mortgages.  With the money, they bought and renovated homes and then sold them on at a profit, amassing over £3m in a period of five years. In the four years it has taken to bring the case to court (why?) they have paid back the money and because they expressed embarrassment and remorse, the judge said this was sufficient to avoid a custodial sentence.

I couldn’t help but contrast the four years with the last four years since I came out of hospital.  I wonder if, were I to default on filling in a tax return, or fail to submit a VAT return, or fail to complete one of the many forms that the DWP bombard me with, asking the same crap over and over again, the court would accept as a valid defence that I have suffered enough. I doubt it, somehow.  Not, at least, judging from the evidence so far of the many people driven to their deaths, yes their deaths, by ATOS assessments or the Bedroom Tax.  But still, we should be thankful, because, apparently, according to George Osborne, it’s all been worth it. Worth the four years of cuts and closures, worth the growth in homelessness, worth the food banks, worth the abandoned animals, worth the repossessions, worth the deportations and the xenophobia and the scapegoating because the economy is recovered and we’re all back in the black once more. Hooray!… er… oh, hang on.

Even if that was true, even if the public finances had improved so much that the government could give each of us a tax free one-off gift of £10,000, that still wouldn’t be “worth” the deaths of Mark and Helen Mullins, Karen Sherlock, Richard Sanderson, Paul Willcoxson, Paul Reekie, Elaine Christian, Stephen Hill, David Groves, Mark Wood and Stephanie Bottrill.  And many others. As it is, George Osborne’s strategy for tackling the economy, which started out as a pile of doo doos, is now a festering, smouldering heap of ashes, and all he has to offer is to hold a mirror up to the smoke.

As if that wasn’t reason enough for a revolution, in a week which saw an MP “tweeting” a complaint because she had to share her train seat with a fat member of the public (welcome to the real world – at least your ticket was on expenses) how about this:  it emerged this week that a proposal to make savings on the public finances by merging the catering contracts for the House of Commons and the House of Lords, and thus achieve economies of scale, was vetoed by the Lords “because they were afraid that the champagne on offer would not be of the same quality” as that to which they had become accustomed. Since 2010, the House of Lords has bought in more than 17,000 bottles of champagne at a cost of £265,770. Apparently this works out at five bottles per Member per year. They always used to say that one way of defusing a really pompous, bullying buffoon was to imagine them sitting naked on the toilet.  Well, the next time you’re tempted to give Members of the House of Lords the benefit of the doubt, especially on a night when it’s forecast to be minus seven, and there are people bunking down under the railway arches, image some corpulent fat bastard pissed as the proverbial newt in the House of Lords, swathed in a nice warm ermine robe and surrounded by five empty jereboams of Tattinger.

Stories like these are just so bad for my blood pressure, and only serve to make me even more determined to stand as an independent in the next election, even if it is the economic equivalent of taking £500 out of the bank and setting fire to it in the driveway.  It’s just as well that a double-duty of domestic chores has prevented me from browsing the pages of the news sites further today, which is (already) the second Sunday of Advent.   I’ve been waiting for the appropriate day when the bit from Isaiah about the child sticking its hand into the hole of the adder is going to come up, but so far, I seem to have missed it.  I was driven generally to browse Isaiah looking for all the famous bits and found:

Every warrior’s boot used in battle and every garment rolled in blood will be destined for burning, will be fuel for the fire.  For to us a child is born, to us a son is given, and the government will be on his shoulders. And he will be called wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.  Of the increase of his government and peace there will be no end. He will reign on David’s throne and over his kingdom, establishing and upholding it with justice and righteousness from that time on and forever. The zeal of the LORD Almighty will accomplish this.

Why anyone would want the government upon their shoulder escapes me – we’ve had this set of deadbeats on our backs since 2010 and it’s nearly killed us (I know it doesn’t really mean that, it’s a joke) but I never fail to find these words uplifting.  Especially as I can never read them without sing-along-a-Handel going on inside my head.  I discovered that the really famous bit is Isaiah 11: 1-10, but they don’t have it every year because it depends whther it’s year A, B or C, apparently. Well, I am declaring a unilateral Advent and having it now.

And there shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse, and a Branch shall grow out of his roots:  and the spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and of the fear of the Lord;  and shall make him of quick understanding in the fear of the Lord: and he shall not judge after the sight of his eyes, neither reprove after the hearing of his ears:  but with righteousness shall he judge the poor, and reprove with equity for the meek of the earth: and he shall smite the earth with the rod of his mouth, and with the breath of his lips shall he slay the wicked.  And righteousness shall be the girdle of his loins, and faithfulness the girdle of his reins.

The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid;
and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them.  And the cow and the bear shall feed; their young ones shall lie down together:
and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.  And the sucking child shall play on the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put his hand on the cockatrice’ den.  They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain: for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea.

You have to admit, it’s pretty good stuff, on a par with Churchill in 1940, or Henry V at Agincourt. Every time I read that it makes me want to put on some armour and clank off down the street in Rocinante, my faithful wheelchair, tilting my lance at any and all evil that gets in my way.  I find myself wondering what it is that stops all of us doing the same, and I have come to the conclusion that some of it is the English disease of embarrassment.  We may well feel outraged at the grandiose excesses of our “elders and betters”, but all too often, we just tut and say “mustn’t grumble!” We don’t like to get involved in the suffering of others.  It’s much easier to pass by on the other side. We find religion (or even the mention of it) faintly disturbing, and we laugh nervously and sidle away.

There are those who would call me a “holy Joe” or a “God-botherer” for writing what I write, though to be honest, God doesn’t seem overly bothered by anything I say or do, he’s probably seen it all before.  And so, in our resignation, our weariness, our embarrassment, the time slips by, the years pass, and we’re just as far as we ever were from every valley being exalted, and every mountain and hill laid low. In the same way that the Labour Party needs to remember why it was formed in the first place and start doing something about it, the Church of England should be stepping up its condemnation of the vile crew who are going to be responsible for misery at Christmas, misery in 2015, and misery until at least 2020, the way things are going. Denounce them from every pulpit in the land. Did Jesus think “Oooh, I mustn’t get involved in politics,” before he strode into the Temple and kicked over the tables of the moneylenders?

Anyway, that’s enough soapbox for one week.  I have a fire to mend, and there are those who will say that I have always been better at starting fires than mending them.  So it’s time to prove them wrong, and put the kettle on for the hot water bottle which Debbie will need when she comes back from walkies with Misty, nithered to the bane.  Matilda has already burrowed her way into her little nest on the settee and we shan’t see her again until bedtime when she emerges to scoff some Felix.  Misty will be wanting her tea, though, and then it’s time to get my pinny on and get stuck in. Another week of “proper” work will be here all too soon with the usual seventeen intractable problems, so tonight I’m going to make some vegan Cornish pasties. Sometimes, it seems like the only sane response.