Epiblog for the Feast of St Robert of Newminster

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. A week which I might be tempted to describe in a single word, “shitnastic”.  I don’t know what it is about 2014 but so far its first 26 days have been marked by an unremitting mix of crapness and stupidity which, when set against the foulness of the weather, makes for a very unappealing cocktail indeed.

Matilda has managed to pick some fine bits of some days to go and sit outside, but largely she’s been confined to barracks. This morning she stuck her nose an inch outside the conservatory door, just enough to determine that it was pissing down with cold horizontal rain, and, with a mournful meow at me (because of course, the weather, like everything else, is my fault) she settled herself down on the settee beside the stove, to snooze away the dark days and dream of hunting little mousies through the fragrant grasses of Spring.

The dogs by and large don’t mind the weather, but it does add an extra dimension of hassle to exercising them when they come back wet, bedraggled and caked in mud, especially as this means that Debbie also comes back wet, bedraggled and caked in mud. We’re going through more towels than Huddersfield General at the moment, and the kettles always seem to be on the boil.

Yesterday (Saturday) Debbie set off with Zak and Misty in tow intending to do a long 10 mile walk, as part of her own fitness regime, yomping across the hills surrounding the Holme Valley. Unfortunately, when they’d been gone about 45 minutes, a storm of Biblical proportions crashed through the trees and hail and rain drummed on the conservatory for a good half hour. The wind was howling and the trees were thrashing and it was as black as Hell’s knocker outside. I predicted there would be an early return, and I was not wrong; the longer walk idea had been aborted, but even so, by the time she got back, Debbie was soaked through, the driving rain having even penetrated her waterproof jacket and trousers. The dogs looked like they’d been in a car wash then had a swim in a slurry tank. Not good.

Eventually, however, they were towelled dry and sort of clean, and Debbie’s wet waterproofs consigned to a heap just inside the door while she repaired the damage by getting changed and then sitting clutching a hot water bottle and an “Ainsley Harriot Hot and Sour Sechaun Cup-A-Soup”, which may sound and taste dreadful, but at least restored to her the power of speech.

Zak and Freddie have spent quite a lot of time with us this week while Granny and Grandad fulfilled various commitments and appointments, and generally Misty seems to enjoy their company, especially curling up on top of Zak in the armchair. Not sure that he enjoys it quite as much, but as I tell him, there will come a day when you might well wish for a hot bitch to be snuggling up next to you, so take it while you can, boy, take it while it’s there.  The presence of so many dogs milling around after a walk and at feeding time does bring with it further opportunities for canine mischief. Twice this week at some unspoken but obviously mutually understood signal Misty and Zak seamlessly switched feeding bowls in mid-scoff, which meant of course that twice this week, Zak had Misty’s Canicalm. Not that it’ll do him any harm.

I was telling Debbie about this on Friday when she asked me out of the blue if there was such a thing as “Humancalm”, to which I replied that indeed there was and it was called Prozac.  She’s still counting down the days to half-term, and has decided probably not to go for the full time post if it becomes available, though there was one bright spot on the blighted landscape of education this week, when the College finally paid up her arrears stretching back to September 2013.  Other than that, it’s been more or less a case of “the mixture as before” but with the additional hassle of machines and technology dying all around us as we struggle.

The HP Deskjet printer on which we rely for much of our day to day usage has developed a habit of yanking the paper in skewiff, and then (if it doesn’t jam in the process) kicking out something that’s been printed at an angle. A quick solution was needed, so I ended up buying an El Cheapo £34.99 ink jet printer from PC World, just as a stop-gap, while we find out a) if the HP really is broken or if there’s just something stuck so far inside it that it’s invisible to the naked eye and b) how much a new drum for the Brother laser printer is, that being the other option, and one whose persistent bleating for a new drum and toner kit I had hitherto been ignoring, on the grounds that the Deskjet was working fine.

Then Debbie’s mobile developed some sort of intermittent fault which means that sometimes it will work and the display comes up as normal, and sometimes it displays pixellated nonsense, and in the middle of that epic walk though the storm on Saturday, the GPS gave a feeble squeak and packed up, although in the latter case we think it’s just the batteries. Or maybe it was struck by lightning. Then, to top it off, Father Jack from the garage rang to remind us that the camper’s MOT is due on February 8^th. Let joy be unconfined.

So, not a good week on the technology front.  In the midst of all the chaos, I tried to carry on working, but the problem was that I, too, was distracted. What I really want to do at the moment is paint. I don’t know why, but the painting bug has really gripped me. I think I’d even rather be painting than writing this. Well, I sort of do know why, but I probably don’t really want to admit it to myself; it’s that I want to get these paintings done while I still can. You never know the minute or the hour, and all that stuff. There may come a day when I can’t hold a paintbrush.   

It was Grandad’s birthday this week, and I have spent some time working on a portrait of him and Granny sitting on a sofa with Freddie, Zak, and Lucy, their previous dog, whom I “resurrected” to include in the picture. I had forgotten what a slog working in acrylics on a large canvas is, and I ended up having to burn the proverbial candle at both ends to get it done in time. I wasn’t particularly pleased with the result, either, but he seemed happy enough when I presented it to him on Burns Night, when they came over for a meal to celebrate his birthday.

Burns Night was a rare convivial evening in a week that up until then had been pretty adverse, one way or another.  The Sainsburys man delivering the order, which included vegetarian haggis, had never heard of Burns Night, apparently, so I filled him in on a few salient details while he was unloading the carrier bags. I only celebrate Burns Night really as a passing tribute to the Fenwicks, my mother’s ancestors.  I’ve already done the whole Scottish independence thing here, and I don’t really have anything to add to that, except it is always a pity to see misplaced nationalism overcome common sense, whoever we’re talking about.

Anyway, haggis (vegan) was consumed, and the Selkirk Grace was said, by me at any rate with feeling:

Some hae meat, and cannot eat

And some can eat, but want it;

We hae meat and we can eat

So may the Lord be thankit.

The news from the outside world continues to convince me that we’re living in some kind of strange Orwellian parallel universe where up is down, black is white, good is bad, and so on, and the law of unintended consequences has started to run out of control. One unintended consequence of the weather is that, apparently, a “ghost ship” full of cannibal rats may have been blown into our territorial waters by the succession of prevailing westerly or south-westerly gales. The Lyubov Orlova, which broke its tow-rope while being towed to the breaker’s yard off Newfoundland last year, has been adrift on the high seas ever since, and is supposedly now heading our way.

The only living creatures on board are apparently a swarm of cannibal rats, reduced to eating each other ever since the food ran out.  Presumably shotgun-toting UKIP supporters will be out in force along the cliffs of Cornwall and Pembrokeshire, just in case it makes landfall. In a way, I rather hope it does. I have this vision of the ramp coming down and the last surviving rat, the size of a Rottweiler, lumbering ashore and asking for directions to the bins behind the nearest McDonalds. 

Other than that, the news has been more about things that haven’t happened, or are unlikely to happen.  Stan Collymore, an ex-footballer, received a storm of abuse and even death threats on Twitter after he accused Luis Suarez, a footballer, of pretending to fall over in the opposition’s penalty area to obtain the advantage for his side of a penalty kick.  Twitter and the police seem to have done nothing about this, in the same way as Twitter seems to have done nothing about the death threats, trolling and abuse hurled at the people featured in Channel 4’s “Benefits Street”. But this week, two Twitter “trolls” were jailed for abusing the woman who wanted Florence Nightingale on the bank notes, and the Labour MP Stella Creasey. So once again it seems that a double standard is operating here, and Twitter, and the police, are being selective about whom the prosecute.  I’ve no particular brief for Stan Collymore, and I neither know nor care whether Luis Suarez cheats or not, but someone, somewhere, needs to decide and take appropriate action. A death threat on Twitter is either an offence or it isn’t. Consistency needs to be applied.

Another thing that didn’t happen this week was that another week went by without the Blight Brigade announcing the date of the inquiry into the effect of benefit cuts which parliament voted for on 13^th January.  So next week, I will be writing to my MP pointing out the constitutional necessity of following the will of Parliament and asking when the inquiry will be set up. If I get an answer, I’ll post it here.

The Blight Brigade managed to not tell the truth on at least three occasions that I spotted, though there may well have been more. Cameron himself announced (because the Tories are rattled for once, by the continued Labour attacks on the cost of living) that apparently we are all better off.  Our take-home pay is finally on the rise for all but the top 10 per cent of earners, with the rest of us seeing our wages rise by at least 2.5 per cent.

Oh really? The Junta’s claims  only  take into account cuts to income tax and national insurance, using data leading up to April last year. The New Statesman promptly published a chart showing that in fact, when the full effect of all the pending and announced benefit cuts and changes takes place, almost every sector of society will be worse off in real terms.

 “The data used … takes no account of the large benefit cuts introduced by the coalition, such as the real-terms cut in child benefit, the uprating of benefits in line with CPI inflation rather than RPI, and the cuts to tax credits,”

wrote the New Statesman‘s George Eaton. He also pointed out that other major cuts such as the bedroom tax, the benefit cap, and the 10 per cent cut in council tax support were introduced after April 2013 and were therefore not included in the Coalition figures.

The BBC, meanwhile, have been shamelessly re-broadcasting DWP press releases as if they were in some way factual and not confected by cherry-picking official statistics and quoting them out of context.  The story was along the lines of "nearly a million people who applied for sickness benefit have been found fit for work" adding that "The DWP claims 980,400 people - 32% of new applicants for Employment and Support Allowance - were judged capable of work between 2008 and March 2013.”

This story first did the rounds about a year ago, and was debunked then by various fact checking web sites as being clearly bollocks. What the DWP are doing, in effect, is conflating two different sets of statistics – the numbers of people being migrated off the previous Incapacity Benefit onto ESA, and the numbers of “fresh claims” for ESA which are dropped for one reason or another, before the final award stage.  The DWP are doing this to give the erroneous impression to Joe Public that the people on IB, now they are faced with the prospect of a strict and rigorous now test under Atos, those notorious dead-horse-floggers known for insisting that people with terminal cancer are fit to work, are bottling it and admitting they were swinging the lead and were never really ill in the first place.  Whereas in fact, the situation is more accurately summarised by the ILegal web site:

"In excess of 2.3 million claimants incapacity benefit claimants are being tested under the much stricter 'Employment & Support Allowance' regime and those who are 'examined' on a second, third or even fourth occasion are being completely left out of the figures.

"Had the BBC fully reported the facts, they would have had to report that in the six months between October 2012 and May 2013 an average of 83% of 1,078,200 incapacity claimants were passing their assessments and 88% of the 1,332,300 repeatedly assessed were re-qualifying for the allowance."

Furthermore, Andrew Dilnot, head of the UK Statistics Authority, writing in reply to an MP who had queried the DWP’s cavalier use of statistics, said:

"Of the 600,000 people who have been migrated from Incapacity Benefit over the past two years, only 19,700 have dropped their claim. This is the figure that should have featured in the headline, but the 900,000 figure was used instead."

You expect this sort of thing of the Daily Mail, it’s meat and drink to them, but the BBC? If it’s not just sloppy journalism by someone called Tarquin on work experience then it’s very bad news indeed. The BBC has gone over to the dark side.

The third, and final example, concerns the unemployment figures. The Blight Brigade wants this figure to seem low because it can then build further on the house of cards that is George Osborne’s unsustainable “recovery”, and claim that “austerity” worked (apart from for the people whom it killed, of course).

But can we trust the figures any more (I might add, could we ever, but that’s a separate argument)? Since the “tough” new sanctions regime started in October 2012, the staff at job centres have been encouraged to “sanction” people by knocking them off benefits for 13 weeks for a number of potentially minor infarctions. A number of commentators estimate that there may be as many as 1,015,000 people who are unemployed but not claiming JSA, or 43.7% of the unemployed workforce.

Then there is the mystery of the 230,000 people who seem to have vanished without a trace from the official IB/ESA statistics.  This is outlined by the Vox Political web site:

We know from the DWP itself that benefit reassessments have been taking place at a rate of 11,000 per week, and the assessors have been finding 68 per cent of claimants 'fit for work'.

This means that in the last year, the work capability assessment will have found 389,000 people 'fit for work' and kicked them off-benefit. Around 40 per cent of them - 155,600 - are likely to have appealed, in which case they will still be on the system.

So the number of claimants would have dropped to 1,806,600. We now have 2 million claimants. Some of them will be brand new; some of them may be re-claims. We don't know how many.

The fraud rate is 0.7 per cent. Assuming all those people have given up pretending to be sick/disabled, that means 1,634 people correctly had their benefits cut off, while 231,766 were treated unfairly by the assessors. This suggests that a number between 191,766 and 231,766 people have been wrongly knocked off the books

Leaving aside the issue that many of these “jobs” being created will be low paid and will need to be topped up by in-work benefits, I repeat my original question – how can we trust any of these figures?

Meanwhile, in the background, the imbroglio over the loss of revenue from the loophole I mentioned over the bedroom tax last week rumbles on, with estimates that this policy, which was unprofitable anyway, is now going to suffer the loss of the 40,000 to 60,000 pre-1996 cases at £728 per year, and this is a £29m reduction in government income.

Statistics are heavy going, I admit.  I am the first to say “my head hurts” and reach instead for my paintbox instead. Yet these glib soundbites and Daily Mail (and now BBC) headlines will lose Labour the next election, unless the Labour Party manages to find some equally glib, facile and memorable way of rebutting them. 

Meanwhile, I can at least help you by simplifying the Junta’s own statistical pronouncements.  They are lying through their teeth and hoping that the “recovery” won’t go bang before the next election, while trying to distract anyone from asking awkward questions by tales of giant cannibal rats, Romanians and Bulgarians all coming over here to claim our benefits and take our jobs (hang on, I thought we had record employment, make your mind up).

So, at the end of an extremely depressing week, we come to the Feast Day of St Robert of Newminster, who lived from 1100AD to 1159AD. I shall be 59 years old myself in three months time, so his “dates” have resonances for me. It is thought that he was born in the village of Gargrave, near Skipton, but he studied at the University of Paris. Unlike those people in the song who didn’t want to stay down on the farm, now that they’ve seen Paree, Robert returned to Gargrave as a parish priest. He became a rector, then joined the Benedictine community at Whitby Abbey.

Together with a band of monks from St Mary’s Abbey in York, he established a monastery in the winter of 1132 in a temporary structure on land given to them by Archbishop Thurston of York, on the banks of the River Skell near Skeldale.  Here, they practised the strict Benedictine way of holiness, austerity and dedication, eventually attracting the attention of a rich new novice, Hugh, Dean of York.

Using Hugh’s money, they were able to put up more substantial buildings – the core of what eventually became known as Fountains Abbey, because of the large number of natural wells and springs in the area.  They also switched allegiances and came under the influence of the Cistercian movement, introduced by Bernard of Clairvaulx.

St Robert was said to be favoured with gifts of prophecy and miracles. In 1138 he led the first colony sent out from Fountains and established the Abbey of Newminster near the castle of Ralph de Merlay and his wife, Juliana, at Morpeth in Northumberland.

During his abbacy he achieved the foundation of three more new monasteries. The monasteries were established at Pipewell (1143), Roche Abbey near Rotherham, (1147), and Sawley (1148).  Because of his church-building activities, he is often depicted in religious art as an abbot holding a church. St Robert ruled and directed the monks at Newminster for 21 years until his death.

He couldn’t be a saint without miracles, of course. In one instance, a monk is said to have fallen unhurt from a ladder while working on one of the buildings. St Robert was a close spiritual friend of the hermit, Saint Godric. On the night Robert died, St Godric is said to have seen a vision of Robert's soul, like a ball of fire, being lifted by angels on a pathway of light toward the gates of heaven.

As a small monastery of only some seventeen monks, Newminster Abbey was one of the first religious institutions to be dissolved, in 1535, by Henry VIII, and the site has been privately owned ever since, but St Robert’s tomb in the church of Newminster had become a place of pilgrimage. A variant feast day is also celebrated, June 7th, the date of his actual death.

59 years old was a reasonable knock in those days, and I have to say that founding four or five different monasteries in one lifetime is, indeed, going it some. I’m not so sure about the sketchy nature of the “miracles” but, as I’ve often observed, the entry requirements seem to have been much more lax in those days. Of his achievements, Newminster Abbey is now in ruins, and even the ruins lie on private land and are thus inaccessible to pilgrims, if any.  I’ve been to Roche Abbey, which is now English Heritage, though a long while ago. And of course, like every Yorkshireman, I have been to Fountains.

Roche Abbey was quite impressive, I recall.  Mind you, the only thing I remember with any clarity is that we took Lucy, Deb’s old family dog (she of the Burns Night portrait, see above) and there was a rope swing over a stream at the edge of the Abbey Grounds, which Debbie felt compelled to try out, as you would.  Lucy got quite excited by this and rushed into the stream, standing directly underneath where Debbie was suspended, and barking her head off, leaving Debbie no option but to let go of the swing and drop into the stream. Happy days!

Saint or no saint, though, Robert of Newminster certainly achieved more with his life than I have done with mine. And of course, both of us will leave ruins behind us. In my case, it could well be the ruins of a publishing business, depending on the outcomes of the next few months. I really do have to get my act in gear this year, time is short, and the challenges that we’re facing are probably as grave as they have ever been.  Suffice it to say, no names, no pack drill, but people who mean us no good, some of whom I once mistook for friends and colleagues, are up to their usual knavish tricks again, and the business is going through a period of flux and rebuilding anyway.  The new books are not the issue, and the digital books are safe, and provided I have got the will and the strength in what’s left of my body to carry on, I will carry on, and so will the business, in one form or another.  But the major problem is now the issue of the stock of the existing titles in the warehouse, and what happens to it, going forward. So, there may be some hard decisions to take next week, and I’m not looking forward to it. Oh, and that secret project which I was so excited about last week crashed and burned, so it’s now back on the drawing board.

Like I said, 2014 has been a challenging year so far, and next week looks no better. God had been markedly absent from things lately, I know he’s busy, but boy, I could do with some help right now. Perhaps I could tap into St Robert’s gift of prophecy and working miracles. In the meantime, we fall back on “at least”.  At least the stove is lit and at least there’s food, so let the Lord be thankit. At least the dog’s asleep on her bed, and at least the cat’s curled up in a tight ball with her arm over her face on the settee by the fire. Sensible cat. 

So, at least while I still have the ability (however questionable) to churn out a picture or two, I’m going to do some more painting tonight, to relax me on the eve of battle.  That, at least, I can do, without anyone questioning my means and my motives.  I’m sorry if this seems obscure, but I don’t want to make a potentially bad situation worse than it is by being more explicit at this stage, so let’s leave it that the cat is happy, the dog is happy, Debbie is (as much as one can ever tell) happy, the house is warm, dry and secure, and at least there’s no one actually actively trying to kill us.

In my beginning is my end. In succession

Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,

Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place

Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass.

Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires,

Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth

Which is already flesh, fur and faeces,

Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf.

Houses live and die: there is a time for building

And a time for living and for generation

And a time for the wind to break the loosened pane

And to shake the wainscot where the field-mouse trots

And to shake the tattered arras woven with a silent motto.

Epiblog for the Feast of St Wulfstan

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley, but then, when isn’t it? At least the rain seems to have stopped hammering down, for the time being at any rate, and the weather forecasters are saying that the remainder of January will continue to be “mild” whatever that means. If you don’t believe me, and you want to read their forecasts for yourself, you will find them in Waterstones under “fiction”.  Personally, I can’t believe that we’ve already had 19 days of war and attrition, it only seems like the other night since we were all together round the fire for New Year’s Eve.  Meanwhile, we’ve lost some more herbs through waterlogging, in a trough which I stupidly forgot to bore some holes in during the summer, and which is now full to the brim – or was, until I managed to tip some of the rainwater out by the simple expedient of leaning over in my wheelchair and picking up one end of the said trough in question.

Matilda’s become much more discerning about when and if she goes out, of late, mild weather notwithstanding.  She has been seen, not by me, but I have no reason to believe it is not true, to go outside and then come back in specifically to use her litter tray.  Nigel also used to do this, so I can believe it happened. At least she doesn’t share Nigel’s erroneous conviction that as long as the feet are all in the litter tray, the bottom must also be in the litter tray. Something about which Nigel was often wrong, and with disastrous consequences. Matilda’s now got to the stage where she actively refuses to give up her perch on the settee next to the stove voluntarily, even if Debbie wants to sit there. It’s a long way from her first night with us, which she spent hiding under the sink and growling continuously.  It can only be a matter of time, if she keeps on like this, before she ends up curling round and going to sleep on Debbie’s knee, which will at least give Deb something on which to rest her laptop.

Misty’s also been seeking the warmth more, although her preferred method is to curl up behind the settee, rather than on it. God alone knows why, any normal dog (ie one that wasn’t a borderline collie) would just curl up on the rug in front of the stove. Anyway, you’d have to ask Misty why, but, given that she has a furry brain the size of a tennis ball, I doubt you would get much of an answer. She does, however, recognize the rustle of the packet of dog treats and the presence of food generally as a reason to emerge and sit hopefully in your line of vision, giving paw on the offchance, while we are having breakfast.

Debbie’s now two weeks into her prolonged countdown to half-term, and the College payroll department are still struggling with the logistics of paying her the claims they have screwed up owing to maladministration and inefficiency, going back to September 2013. There will be a final decision tomorrow on whether they will pay the outstanding arrears, having now claimed not to have had some forms which we know they had in their possession on December 20^th, and one of which they emailed me a PDF of, last week, with a query about the hours! So, we shall see. I was sorely tempted to send them an email which included the phrases “judgement plus costs in the small claims court” and “winding-up order”, but let’s hope they come to their senses in the morning, pay up, and it doesn’t end with fisticuffs.  Then they can go back to what they normally do all day, something more in tune with their intellectual and administrative capabilities, such as playing Sudoku and pinging laggy bands at each other across the desk.  News also came this week of the possible availability of a full-time, contracted post in Debbie’s department which, if she were to apply and be successful, would mean that she would not get paid for 37 hours a week instead of not getting paid for 17 and a half. Watch this space.

Debbie, meanwhile, continues to dream of making a fire with Ray Mears (don’t we all) and was practising with her flint and some tinder on the hearth the other night.  I asked her whether she thought it was entirely wise to be trying to start a new fire on the hearth next to a bucket full of coal, a wicker basket full of firelighters and candles, and a stack of kindling twigs, when there was already a perfectly serviceable fire in the grate; I mean, what could possibly go wrong? I received the usual mouthful of sarcastic and abusive invective for my trouble, so I gave up and just put the kettle on: at least I would be able to offer the fire brigade a cup of tea.

Sometimes, however, it’s what she doesn’t say that causes the most damage. I made her some rustic guacamole on toast for her breakfast the other day, and she wolfed it down. While she was eating hers, I was busy making my own - croissants with marmalade. To save on washing-up, I asked her if I could use her plate, now she had finished, and she allowed me to do so before telling me that the dog had also licked it.  She has this thing at the moment about eating fresh fruit, so she has been chomping her way through a net of tangerines from Sainsburys, referring to them as “oranges”. When  challenged her on this, she said that, as far as she was concerned, anything that was round and orange was an orange. I tried to reason with her, alluding to the existence of satsumas and clementines, and Eamonn Holmes, all indicators that you can have something round and orange that is not, actually, an orange, but to no avail. I think I will have to by her a copy of Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit for her birthday.

As for my week, it’s been the usual mix of pointlessness and frustration. For some reason, probably because I registered with Dogslost.co.uk when Misty went missing back in November, I keep getting lost dog notices popping up in my news feed on Facebook, and this week I noted on from Rotherham Rescue Rangers to the effect that an old, ill, border collie dog had been handed in to the vets in Bramley, and they were desperately trying to trace his owner, in case he had to be put to sleep in the morning.  Knowing, as I do, of the existence of the Freedom of Spirit Trust for Border Collies, I cross-posted it on their Facebook page, reasoning that they would surely step in and help a border collie in distress. But it was too late, sadly. The next morning, I found out that the dog had died at the vets in the night, and they were thinking it was probably antifreeze poisoning. Ah well, we tried, and although he didn’t know it, that poor nameless dog didn’t die alone, because he was surrounded by, and mourned by, a wide circle of cyber-friends and mourners.

Perhaps they could make his remains the basis of “the Tomb of the Unknown Animal” and make it a condition of the punishment of animal abusers that they have to go there and make a pilgrimage on their knees, wearing sackcloth and ashes. I am thinking here particularly of those people who, this week, at Niton on the Isle of Wight, poured several buckets of poison down badger setts, in an effort to kill their inhabitants, and possibly any passing dogs and children to boot. Because of DEFRA’s mistaken, short-sighted and useless policy of badger-culling in a vain effort to stop Bovine TB, it now seems that people in the farming community have got the idea that it’s open season on badgers, which is yet another demonstration of the law of unintended consequences.

This came in a week when Owen Paterson, the alleged environment secretary, was forced to admit that his Department had got the figures wrong for more than two years. It suspended the statistics of herds under movement restrictions due to the disease and of the incidence rate since September 2011. And it admitted that the data is likely to be "revised significantly downwards for 2012 and 2013".  At the same time, the figures for the cost of the police operation to monitor the badger culls and keep apart the farmers and the saboteurs were put into the public domain. These were apparently £1800 per badger. (Which contrasts rather markedly with the £4 2s 6d the police customarily spend each year enforcing the fox-hunting ban, but hey ho)

1558 badgers have 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 already have put 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.

*This is based on the figures given out by DEFRA in October. I do not know whether it includes the £1800 per head in this week’s news but I suspect, from the delay between the two announcements, that the £1800 is indeed on top of payments to contractors. If so, this would give a figure of £4046, or 11 nights at the Savoy each with some “spends” left over for sightseeing. I rest my case, it was getting heavy anyway.

Meanwhile, I was burning the proverbial midnight oil and waiting for the coalman, which is not as much fun as waiting for Godot.  The coal yard had phoned and explained that the only time they could deliver our coal was 7.30AM on Friday, as they were so busy with other (presumably larger and more profitable) customers.  Because of my fitful sleep patterns these days, I decided that the only way I could guarantee being up and around to let him in at that time on a morning was to spend Thursday night not in bed, but dozing in my wheelchair by the stove, which I duly did, wrapped in an alpaca wool poncho and clutching two hot-water bottles. I managed to sleep until about 5.45AM, then something disturbed me and I couldn’t get back off again, so I logged on and caught up on some backlogged emails, much to the surprise of anyone who was around to receive them.

There was something strangely satisfying about keeping watch for the coalman, just me and Matilda, keeping vigil by the fire – a touch of “Unless the Lord keep the city, the wakeman waketh in vain” about the whole thing, and I thought of the army of nocturnal workers out there and found myself singing along mentally to Tom Waits in Tom Traubert’s Blues:

Goodnight to the street sweepers

the night watchmen flame keepers

and good night to Matilda, too

Needless to say, the coalman didn’t deliver until 8.50AM. 

While I was preparing myself for my sitting-up vigil, I listened (for the first time in months) to "Today in Parliament". MPs and members of the House of Lords were pissing around and making stupid jokes. Topics of debate: the Profumo Scandal of 1963 and the rodent infestation in the House of Commons. How much are we paying these clowns?

Meanwhile, there are people sleeping out in the cold, in doorways and under railway arches. Tell you what, MPs, *I* can tell stupid jokes and make dry puns, for £5000 a year LESS than what we are paying you, so you had better watch out, you'd better take care.

Gez Walsh wrote in his blog this week, coincidentally:

"Wars are a result of politics. I wish these problems could be sorted out by sending politicians out to fight each other, and I also wish that where there is famine, the leaders also starved, until the problem had been solved: if they too suffered the same as the people they inflict their stupidities on, I'm sure some of the world's problems would be resolved a lot sooner."

I'd go further. Make the MPs sleep in a sleeping bag in Parliament Square tonight. And every night, until there are no more homeless people. Problem would be solved in a fortnight.  Bastards.

Finally, to round off a week whose trademark seems to have been frustrating idiocy, Waterstones Loughborough refused to consider a signing session for one of our authors on the grounds that sales of her books were too low, which is a bit like refusing a blood transfusion because you are short of red cells.  Or in their case, brain cells.

So, yes, a week in which the fruitcakes have taken over the bakery, I am afraid, as was shown by the UKIP councillor David Silvester from Henley-on-Thames, who defected (I almost typed “defecated”, which would probably have been more accurate) from the Conservatives to the UK Independence Party over David Cameron’s stance on gay marriage (something looks odd about that last bit, but then it’s not me who has love-ins in the rose garden with Nick Clegg).  According to Mr Silvester, the storms and flooding which have wrecked large swathes of our green and pleasant land are the result of God’s wrath at the UK having embraced gay marriage (oh, give over!)

I am not a theologian, but as I have said elsewhere whenever this particular red herring breaks the surface, do you really think that a supreme intelligence which is capable of existing and having existed forever out of time, and encompasses all the sins and joys of the universe and everything that ever was, is and shall be, world without end, amen, is really going to get upset about two gays in a register office in Droitwich? I mean, if you are God, that would be a bit of a waste of dog-farts, wouldn’t it? I really wish all these “religious” people would stop getting the bag on about gay marriage and start concentrating on the massive revival of spiritual values this world needs – not who does what to whom with what, but things like loving thy neighbour as thyself, as a general principle, and let the details work themselves out, behind closed doors if necessary!

Politics is full of people who know what’s best for us, of course, or think they do, and who, like Mr Silvester, think we are dumb enough to swallow any old crap they put before us, without question. One such being George Osborne, who has undergone a sudden Damascene conversion this week and decided that yes, we can afford a rise in the minimum wage to £7.00 per hour, because the country can now afford it, with the recovery underway!

Pausing only to re-wire my jaw at such a staggering display of hypocrisy, could I just point out, dear Chancellor, that you have got the string bag inside out.  Firstly, the “recovery”, such as it is, is limited by geography and sector, is only happening because you stopped meddling with cuts, and is, I am afraid, unsustainable anyway, based as it is simply on a return to debt and people going back to their bad old ways of racking up liabilities based on the theoretical value of their house.  Any sustainable recovery is more likely to happen because you increase the minimum wage, rather than the wage increase being a result of the recovery. Plus, I wonder how many of those minimum wage people realise that the effect of any increase you give with one hand will be snatched back with the other, in the promised post-2015 benefit cuts, which are bound to impact on the low-paid.  While there is more joy in heaven over one sinner that repenteth, and all that, I am afraid Osborne’s gesture is a completely cynical intervention, prompted purely by the fact that the Labour Party seem to have found their balls for once (perhaps they got an anatomically-correct Kier Hardie doll for Christmas) and are turning up the heat on Osborne’s shirt tails over the cost of living.

The Blight Brigade haven’t had a good week when it comes to figures and statistics, come to think of it. Up to 40,000 people will receive a refund of their Bedroom Tax thanks to an east London “hero”, after he discovered that the government have wrongly assessed who is liable for it. Peter Barker, a freelance financial advisor, had worked out that council and housing association tenants getting housing benefit for the same home since 1996 are exempt from the bedroom tax. Last week ministers from the DWP grudgingly acknowledged that analysis is correct. Councils are now indentifying tenants eligible for refunds. A conservative estimate puts the cost to the government at £26million.

It has also been reported that the suicide of Stephanie Bottrill from Solihull who jumped in front of a lorry on the M6 on May 4 last year and, in a note, blamed her death on the financial strains aggravated by the bedroom tax, meaning she would potentially lose her home of 18 years, would have been exempt had this loophole been acknowledged by the DWP, and, if she was still alive, eligible for a refund.  I have been criticised before for writing “un-Christian” things about Iain Duncan Smith, the minister responsible for her death, but I really hope that, for the remainder of his life, however long or short, each night as he tries to sleep, I hope he hears her fingers scratching at his window. And if that makes me a bad Christian, Big G will judge me accordingly, when my time comes.

Not that the Blight will take any notice. Last week, on Monday, calls for a ‘commission of inquiry’ into the impact of the government’s changes to social security entitlements on poverty won overwhelming support from Parliament. The motion, by Labour’s Michael Meacher, was passed with a massive majority of 123 votes; only two people – David Nuttall and Jacob Rees-Mogg – voted against it. But there won’t be an enquiry. Nothing is going to happen. David Cameron is going to ignore it.  This turn of events raises serious questions about the role of Parliament in holding the government of the day to account, influencing legislation and taking effective initiative of its own, and it should provoke a massive outcry across the land. I am not holding my breath.

Still, at least the Labour Party are trying, bless their little hearts, hampered they are by a leader who believes that we are all capitalists now, or so his business spokesman Chuka Umunna said today. I seem to have got onto one of their dreary fundraising/volunteering email lists since I took part in that spectacular “dialogue of the deaf” conference call hosted by Caroline Flint, and I take great delight in replying to every email they send me with a standard answer that I will only support their fundraising and campaign for them if they insert the following words into their constitution:

To secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry and the most equitable distribution thereof that may be possible upon the basis of the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange, and the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each industry or service.

I don’t know who, if anyone, reads my replies, but unless and until Rachel Reeves apologises for her remarks about people on benefits, I would rather vote for the fascinating witches who put the scintillating stitches in the britches of the boys who put the powder on the noses of the ladies of the court of King Caractacus.  Just so we are clear on this.

And so we came to Sunday, the feast of St Wulfstan, which, since he is the patron Saint of vegetarians and dieters, probably involves lots of Quorn, nut cutlets, and lentils.  Wulfstan is not to be confused with Wulfstan, Archbishop of York. To prevent possible confusion, he is often known as Wulfstan II, to indicate that he is the second Bishop Wulfstan of Worcester. This would work just fine, except that the first Bishop Wulfstan is also called Wulfstan II to denote that he was the second Archbishop of York called Wulfstan. Shades of I’m ‘Enery the Eighth I Am”. As a further complication, Wulfstan II, Archbishop of York, was the maternal uncle of Wulfstan II, Bishop of Worcester. Got that? Good. I’m just glad they didn’t make a film about him – Wulfstan II 2: The Sequel.  I suppose that forenames where in shorter supply back in Saxon times, when everyone was called things like “Hobbinol”, “Colin” “Orm”, and “Tharg”.

Wulfstan, who lived from 1008AD to 1095AD, was born at Long Itchington in Warwickshire, a village whose very name is testimony to the scarcity of flea-powder in Anglo-Saxon England.  He studied at the abbeys of Evesham and Peterborough, received ordination, and joined the Benedictines at Worcester. Wulfstan served as treasurer of the church at Worcester, was prior of the monastery, and finally was named bishop of Worcester in 1062.

Despite some misgivings locally about his ability to hold the office of bishop, he demonstrated such skill after the Norman Conquest that he was the only pre-Conquest bishop to be kept in post by William the Conqueror.

For the next three decades, Wulfstan rebuilt his cathedral, cared for the poor, and struggled to alleviate the harsh decrees of the Normans upon the vanquished Saxons. However this did not stop him from supporting the Normans when it mattered. In 1075, Wulfstan and the Worcestershire levy put down the rebellion known as 'The Bridal of Norwich' of Ralph de Guader, Earl of Norfolk, Roger de Breteuil, 2nd Earl of Hereford and the Saxon Waltheof, Earl of Northumbria, against William the Conqueror.

Wulfstan founded the Great Malvern Priory, and undertook much large-scale rebuilding work, including Worcester Cathedral, Hereford Cathedral, Tewkesbury Abbey, and many other churches in the Worcester, Hereford and Gloucester areas.  Sixty-three years after his death, at Easter of 1158, Henry II and his wife Eleanor of Aquitaine visited Worcester Cathedral and placed their crowns on the shrine of Wulfstan, vowing not to wear them again. He was canonized in 1203, by Pope Innocent, inventor of the “Smoothie”. Among the miracles attributed to him was the healing of Harold Godwinson’s daughter.

So, that was St Wulfstan, that was. An interesting chap, no doubt, but I am not sure what, if anything, I am supposed to have learned from reading him up. Given the churches that he founded, you could argue that he was the earliest progenitor of the Three Choirs Festival, and therefore responsible for Elgar. Post hoc, ergo propter hoc.  With some of these medieval saints, though, you get the idea that Sainthood was for them just a natural progression in the afterlife of a busy political and administrative career in this world.  I’m afraid I tend to think, when I think of Saints at all, of people such as Father Vincent McNabb, and if there isn’t already a “cause” for his canonisation, then I think I might just start one.

One of my regular readers contacted me during the week and asked me why I am so angry all the time.  It’s true, I regret to say, I probably am. The only times when I am not angry are when I am eating, sleeping, or painting, these days. I’ve been doing a lot of painting – far too much for the good of my “to do” list, in fact. I may have to ask Debbie to hide my painting gear back under the seat in the camper, where it languished for 18 months, otherwise I will get nothing done this year that needs to be done. It did set me thinking though: upstairs, where I cannot easily get at it, and will therefore have to rely on outside help, is a massive “portfolio” stuffed with paintings and sketches. I might get them all out, scan them in, put the scans online and then offer the originals on Facebook to anyone who wants them, on the understanding that they donate what they think it’s worth to Mossburn Animal Centre, Rain Rescue, or the Freedom of Spirit Trust for Border Collies.  That would a) de-clutter the house and b) raise £4. 2s 6d for good causes in a naughty world. Better than them just going on gathering dust in the attic, while I get older and older down here, like a latter-day Dorian Gray.

But yes, why am I so angry. I suppose it comes from hating injustice and wanting to rectify it. You may not agree with my assessment of what is just or unjust, but that’s what drives it.  It’s the creed of the Rudds:

And this shall be our creed - as I will say to you
For faint cries in the distance
to a cause that needs assistance
against all wrong that needs resistance
we shall stand forward
and do what we can do.

That, I suppose, coupled with the Fenwicks’ altogether more straightforward battle cry, “A Fenwyke”, capable of being encompassed within the short swing of a claymore. Oh well, it’s Monday tomorrow, in fact it’s “Blue Monday”, officially the most depressing day of the year.   I shall spend it compiling spreadsheets and working on a new project so secret that, if I told you about it, I would have to hunt you down individually and silence you.  No change there, then. But, in the meantime, it’s a Sunday evening, it’s cold and dark outside, but here in the stone-flagged kitchen, the stove is ticking away and Debbie has got back from walking Misty and towelled the mud off both of them, and there are animals and a wife (at least one) to feed.  Let’s hope it all gets in the correct dishes, though at least two of them are allegedly so hungry that they wouldn’t know or care, and Matilda eats whatever you put in front of her, whenever you put it in front of her, which is why she is the size of a house end.  Meanwhile, I hope your Monday’s not too blue. I advise anger – the best, indeed, some would say the only, way I know of raising the temperature at this time of year.

Epiblog for Plough Monday

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley, as we’ve continued to watch the trees thrashing about in the wind and listen to the rain hosing down the conservatory windows.  Amazingly, though, amidst all of the climate-change-chaos, I noticed the other day that there are what seem to be tiny, embryonic buds on the Magnolia by the pond, and that, in the square stone planter at the end of my wheelchair ramp, despite being totally neglected since last year and partially covered by an old analogue TV which lodged there for a few days en route to the tip, Maisie’s indestructible daffodils are once more pushing blindly through the earth. If there was ever (heaven forfend) a nuclear disaster that wiped out humankind, at least we can take comfort in the fact that a new race of mutant daffodils would colonise the earth, started by these incredible specimens of zombe-undeadness.

The birds and the squirrels have also been much more in evidence this week. When it comes to the squirrels, I’m not sure if there were hibernating, and the storms have woken them up early, or they haven’t managed to get to sleep for the winter yet, owing to the continual racket and swaying of the trees, but either way they are up, about, and foraging.  All of which has provided Matilda with a great deal of entertainment in the form of “Cat-TV” as she sits at her favourite vantage point (just inside the conservatory door) watching the birds hopping around and the squirrels scampering across the decking in a bid to beat the birds be first to the peanuts in the bowl.  She’s realised, particularly as the weather outside turned colder and crisper towards the end of the week, that it is warmer on the inside of the door, and also more of the creatures she seems to enjoy watching are in evidence than when she’s actually sitting out there, putting them off from landing.

Misty seems much more settled now that the firework season is (I hope) coming to an end. We’ve just got the Chinese New Year to go, and then we can look forward to some really adverse weather driving the yobboes indoors, where they can let off bangers in the comfort of their own sitting room, for all I care.  With her return to growing confidence, Misty has developed a parallel interest in food, so much so that she now regards any food, in any dish, as being fit for consideration and/or consumption, so I find myself currently having to “police” Matilda’s mealtimes and ride shotgun by blocking off Misty’s approach with my wheelchair until Matilda has consumed an elegant sufficiency and wandered off, leaving the dog to hoover up what’s left.  I don’t blame Misty, actually, given the choice between Muttnuts and Felix, I’d have Felix every day, probably on toast, like paté.

Freddie, meanwhile, totters on, and seems back to his normal old curmudgeonly self, so whatever aberration he had last week, it’s passed for the moment, thank God. One of the consequences of his precautionary visit to the vet was that he is now on Furosemide, the same as Grandad, and me. So now we have three old gits on Furosemide, which sounds like it ought to be the title of a play by Pirandello, but sadly, isn’t.

Debbie, thwarted by the weather in her continuing quest for Ray Mears outdoor experiences, has been  once more encumbered by the trammels of Kirklees College. As I threatened, in the meantime, I had prepared all her salary claims for January and submitted them in advance of the 20^th January deadline. Needless to say the College’s payroll department rejected the claim because they have an “audit rule” not to pay people in advance; I replied that I was only submitting this claim in advance because on 20^th December I had rearranged a hospital appointment to spend a day re-formatting and re-submitting claims that the College had lost, only to be told then that they wouldn’t be paid until 20^th January, even though some of them stretched back to September 2013. And they were lucky I wasn’t charging them interest.  But they refused to budge, so I am to re-submit January’s claims on 20^th January. With any luck, they’ll pay her twice, and then, if they do, I will deliberately take a month to process their request for a refund.

Still, the first week of term was over, and I was determined to cook something special for a meal on Thursday, our wedding anniversary.  I managed mock duck with garlic, capers, mushrooms and shallots, plus rosti, and a confit of winter vegetables. The latter used up all the remaining olive oil, but I had a brainwave and phoned Debbie as she was walking back to the camper on her way home.

“If there’s any oil on the van, bring it in with you!”

“What, cooking oil?”

I replied yes, cooking oil, as vegetables confit-ed in heavy grade diesel transmission oil tend to be rather challenging to the discerning palate, even if you grease the roasting dish first by spraying it with WD-40. Debbie is always at her most dangerous when she is bored, and this came to a head on Friday when she chided me because there were no crumpets in the bread bin. I told her that I had given up buying crumpets because the last two lots I had ordered had become first old and leathery, then furry, and I ended up feeding them to the birds. I added that we also seemed to be inadvertently stockpiling bananas, and that I had only ordered them again this week as an act of faith that she would chomp her way through them, or ask me to make her favourite marmite and banana sandwiches. She retorted to the effect that it wasn’t her fault that the weather had been too bad to set up her camping stove on the decking and do the banana version of “orphans on sticks”.

I said that, since the repeal of the Bananas Act of 1876, it was now legal to eat bananas indoors as well, and she asked me if that was some kind of joke, so I said what was and she said “re-peel … bananas?” No, I guess you really had to be there.

My own week has been fairly full on and unrelenting I am beginning to realise just how big a task it is gong to be, to pull myself up out of this slough of despond pay off my debts, get the business functioning properly again, do all of the things that need doing on the house, or at least organise them, and fight a war with my other leg against all of the other crap going on in the world at large.  It’s a bit like setting off on a long voyage and you get beyond the harbour wall and suddenly the waves lengthen and the wind gets up and the sky to windward gives every indication that she’s going to be a bit blowy before too long, and all you can do is keep her head into the wind, and ease her when she pitches, and you know this is going to be a marathon, not a sprint. 

I have finally grasped the electronic nettle and decided to gather together all of the various databases into one mahoosive Microsoft Access database, segmented by market type. This will make it much easier to select people to whom to send marketing information, and will make updating much easier, plus it will save me time in seeking out the right people, as at present they are scattered all over the computer. Fair enough, but MS-Access, despite her name, is a stern dominatrix, and “access” is one of those things she only dispenses when all of her conditions have been met. Plus, mindful of the maxim “garbage in, garbage out”, I spent a lot of time on Friday chasing down the gone aways from a previous email shot so I could remove them from the new database at the point of building it – now seemed the time to sort it out, rather than just importing rubbish.  I don’t know what it was that made me check, but I did, and every email on the list was still correct and current, according to the web sites of the schools concerned. So quite why Actinic saw fit to bounce them last time, is a mystery which must remain unsolved until their tech support desk opens in the morning. What a waste of dog-farts.

I mentioned fighting a war earlier, and this week there has been no mistaking that the Blight Brigade have no intention of giving up or easing off. I wrote a letter to the Independent (which was published, much to my surprise) comparing Michael Gove’s apparent love of First-World-War military tactics, blundering ahead ever deeper into the mire regardless of the damage inflicted, with George Osborne’s similar approach to the economy. For which I was called an “unpatriotic idiot” by one of the people posting comments on the Indie web site.  It is interesting to note, by the way, that “unpatriotic” has become a derogatory term, these days, in the same way that “left wing” has.

Before anyone gets their union jack underpants in a knot, however, maybe we should just reflect on the nature of patriotism. In *either* of the two world wars, anyone who had inflicted as much deliberate and needless damage on the British economy as George Osborne has done, for purely ideological reasons, would probably have been shot for treason!

If my patriotism or otherwise was at issue, just supposing it was, can anyone tell me why I should feel in the slightest bit "patriotic", whatever that means, about the mean, nasty, bigoted, xenophobic, uncaring, compassionless mess that once-Great Britain has been allowed to become? Is this what two members of my family died for in world war one and a further member in the second world war? Is this what my Uncle spent two weeks on a raft for, after being torpedoed by a U-boat?

There are many reasons to be patriotic about England - dry stone walls, brass bands, warm beer, cricket, cathedrals, yes, even spinsters cycling to matins. But mindless morons intent on fighting to the last drop of someone else's blood (or money) is not one of them.

Unfortunately, the mindless morons have been all over the place this week. Boris Johnson has announced that he has ordered some water cannons for the police in London, no doubt anticipating a long hot summer of riots after the Mark Duggan verdict.  Since it has been pissing down for about six weeks now with no remission, and every watercourse and aquifer is swollen beyond capacity, there will inevitably be a hose pipe ban this summer, which might just upset Boris’s plans, but in any case it’s rather ironic that we can apparently afford to spend £1.5M on water cannon in an age of “austerity”, yet we can’t afford to pay firemen, who risk their lives on a daily basis, a living wage.

The Gagging Law, which prevents political lobbying by anyone other than highly-paid political lobbyists (possibly and precisely the very last people who should actually be allowed to do it) is now making its final progress.  Last week, in the Lords,  the Antisocial Behaviour, Crime and Policing Bill reached its report stage, the penultimate phase before it gains Royal Assent, enacting it as law.

This is the law that introduces the new IPNAs (injunctions to prevent nuisance and annoyance) and which can impose this new ‘community service order‘ on people who have committed no crime; it will allow tenants to be evicted for alleged anti social behaviour, and it will allow the police, under the  dispersal power  to remove people from an area where their behaviour is “likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress, or is likely to contribute to the occurrence of crime or disorder in the area”.

So, the sort of pre-emptive “arrest” and incarceration of potential troublemakers before any crime has even been committed, in advance of major public events such as the Olympics and the Royal Wedding, has now been enshrined in law, or almost. Retrospectively legalising something unjust, and contrary to almost every principle of English Law going back to Magna Carta, does not make it right, however.

Nor does the existence of secret courts. We’ve had these since March 2013, when the Liberal Democrats (oh, the irony) facilitated the passage into law of the Justice and Security (Secret Courts) Bill. The web site “Another Angry Voice” summarised it neatly:

As it now stands, defendants (or claimants in civil cases) can be excluded from the hearings where their fates are decided; they will not be allowed to know what the case against them is; they will not be allowed to enter the courtroom; they will not be allowed to know or challenge the details of the case; and they will not be allowed representation from their own lawyer, but will instead be represented (in their absence) by a security-cleared "special advocate".

So, as it stands, if you start doing something the government doesn’t like, such as writing a blog criticising all of their bad and inhuman decisions, they now have at least three ways to clobber you that they didn’t have before. If you were really unlucky, they could use all three! You don’t have to be in the army, as the saying goes, to fight in the war.

The front line, in this war we find ourselves embroiled in through no fault of our own, this year, is undoubtedly going to be benefits.  I could spend a long time explaining what I think is going wrong, but I stumbled across this explanation by a poster completely unknown to me in the comments on an online article about welfare reform, and this just seems to sum it up. Apologies for the length, as John Major said to Edwina Currie.

“The ignorance that lies at the core of Tory welfare policy reform is not an ignorance of unawareness, or an absence of knowledge, but rather one of calculated disinformation. Probably the most disgusting thing about this coalition is the deliberate spreading of lies to facilitate a systematic assault upon the sick, the poor and the disabled. They have lied to and misled the public in order to promote a squalid agenda, an agenda to dismantle the welfare state.

For those who wish to destroy the welfare state, the first move is to create ‘the undeserving poor’. By constant repetition, they construct a cultural underclass via the media, with the tabloid press, much of it owned by multi-millionaires, at the forefront. Each day they fill their pages with accounts of people “living on hand-outs,” living in ‘mansions’, ‘daring to have children’, ‘laying around doing nothing’, all the while emphasising that it’s your taxes letting these scroungers live in ‘luxury.’ By this drip drip feeding, the words ‘welfare’ and ‘scrounger’ become intertwined.

The next phase is to question the idea of a universal welfare state itself. As the welfare state is dismantled, as more and more, due to ever greater reductions in funding, the quality of these services deteriorates, the middle classes begin to ask why they are paying into a system that gives them so little back. This gradual exclusion of the middle classes from the welfare state leads to the middle classes being persuaded to seek private options to deal with old age, pensions and health care, urged on by a government that tells them that it is the only solution. And of course, as private provision takes over, the cycle of dismantling can continue. Public services now become a service solely for the poor, as the middle class abandon the system.

Why dismantle the welfare state? Who benefits from this progressive degradation of the welfare state? Obviously not the lower classes. But nor do the middle classes, as the new private systems are more expensive, often of poorer quality, and invariably far more complicated than what existed previously. No, the real reason behind the cuts is simple.

The real beneficiaries are the very rich, who no longer have to pay for services they never used anyway. And all the cuts are ideologically driven. None of it is to save money. The welfare reform bill won’t save a penny, because the costs will just be passed onto somewhere else. It’s all about crushing the welfare state. The Tories have for years hated the fact that ‘their’ taxes should be used to help the sick and the poor. Based upon no evidence whatsoever, they truly believe there is a vast horde of scroungers out there who are living a life of luxury on benefits. The most shameful thing about the Tories, though, is that to promote this idea, they peddle downright lies as truth and feed it to the masses, who regurgitate this bullshit ad infinitum”

Apart from the fact that l was always taught, by Mr James, my fiery Welsh socialist of a history teacher at school, that the correct term is “working classes” and not “lower classes”, I could not have summarised the situation better myself.

As if further evidence of the rhetorical “regurgio ad taurem excretum” were needed, you only had to look at the .Channel 4 programme which aired this week, Benefits Street, which followed, in the usual fly-on-the-wall manner, the inhabitants of a single street in Birmingham where most of the residents are recipients of some kind of welfare benefits. I could see ten minutes into the programme that it was gong to be the usual hatchet job, and so it proved.  I don’t know why people are so gullible as to believe that “reality” TV has anything to do with reality - it’s all in the edit – if I followed Iain Duncan Smith round for a couple of centuries with a camera crew I could probably get 15 seconds’ film of him behaving compassionately.

Nevertheless, the bottom-feeding mouth-breathers were out in force on Twitter after the programme:

“I want to walk down #BenefitStreet with a baseball bat and brain a few of these scumbags”

“Set fire to #BenefitStreet”

“Why haven’t they castrated these people. Creatures #BenefitStreet”

“#BenefitStreet they need to be put down like dogs. #scum”

The authorities have demonstrated this week that they are taking a new tough line with Twitter Trolls, following the appalling treatment meted out to that woman who dared to suggest putting Florence Nightingale on a banknote. Presumably Twitter knows who the authors of the above comments are, and the police could invoke one of these fancy new IPNAs, since it would seem definitely intended “to cause harassment, alarm or distress, or is likely to contribute to the occurrence of crime or disorder” – it will be interesting to see if the police or Twitter do anything about it. They won’t, of course, because it’s open season on benefit claimants, and we’re fair game. You don’t have to be in the army, to fight in the war.

By far the most shameful evidence of this in the last few days was the letter from the DWP to the partner of one Chris Nelson, who published it on Facebook. His partner suffers from Ewings sarcoma, which is apparently nasty and hereditary/genetic, and the letter tells her at one point that he claim is not valid because the DWP  considers she has “contributed to her own condition” or some such phrase.

There is some debate, as I write, about whether the letter is genuine or not, as it does go on to contradict itself – but I have had letters like that myself  in the past from the DWP, that read as if the operator/typist selected the paragraphs at random from a standard letter, so that alone doesn’t make it a fake, I guess. As I said last night, I would like to think it is a fake, or at least a mistake, because that would indicate some shreds of compassion, but somehow, given the DWP’s track record of enrolling terminal cases onto job creation schemes, I fear it might just be for real. 

It reminds me of what Neil Kinnock said in his speech at Bridgend, on the eve of the 1983 election, and nothing much has changed for the better in the last 30 years:

If Margaret Thatcher is re-elected as prime minister on Thursday, I warn you.

I warn you that you will have pain–when healing and relief depend upon payment.

I warn you that you will have ignorance–when talents are untended and wits are wasted, when learning is a privilege and not a right.

I warn you that you will have poverty–when pensions slip and benefits are whittled away by a government that won’t pay in an economy that can’t pay.

I warn you that you will be cold–when fuel charges are used as a tax system that the rich don’t notice and the poor can’t afford.

I warn you that you must not expect work–when many cannot spend, more will not be able to earn. When they don’t earn, they don’t spend. When they don’t spend, work dies.

I warn you not to go into the streets alone after dark or into the streets in large crowds of protest in the light.

I warn you that you will be quiet–when the curfew of fear and the gibbet of unemployment make you obedient.

I warn you that you will have defence of a sort–with a risk and at a price that passes all understanding.

I warn you that you will be home-bound–when fares and transport bills kill leisure and lock you up.

I warn you that you will borrow less–when credit, loans, mortgages and easy payments are refused to people on your melting income.

If Margaret Thatcher wins on Thursday–

- I warn you not to be ordinary

- I warn you not to be young

- I warn you not to fall ill

- I warn you not to get old.

Prescient words, as it turned out, and though he might not have got every one of them 100% right on the nose, there’s enough there to be going on with, as my old Dad used to say.

And so we came to Sunday. Today is the feast of, amongst others, St Tatiana and St Zoticus, but I am afraid their blandishments and charms are wasted on me. It is also the first (or possibly second, I may have miscounted) Sunday in Epiphany. But it is the fact that tomorrow is Plough Monday that I find the most significant.

Plough Monday signified the real return to work in the farming year.  But they weren’t going to go back without one last hurrah, so in some cases there were church services where the plough was blessed with the words “God speed the plough” and/or processions with people dressed up as if they were Christmas Mummers in blackface, and if you didn’t contribute to their appeal for funds to go to the alehouse, you might find your front garden was “accidentally” ploughed up.  In some places they still keep up these traditions, notably in Ramsey in Huntingdonshire, where a straw bear is paraded through the streets,  in a continuation of a custom thought to have started in the 1400s.

So, work, and my ever-burgeoning to-do list, have been much on my mind of late. Given the scale of the task, it seems to me I have two options – carry on, but try and work smarter, not harder, and put in the most effort where the payoff is hardest, or give up, and accept that I have failed.  Maybe melt away into the woods like Clim O’the Clough or Robin of Loxley, only emerging where there is chance of inflicting damage via a swift ambush.  Or not even that, on the days when I feel old and cold and ill and achy and all I want to do is doze by my fire.

I’d like to say I prayed for guidance, and I got it, but nether of those would be true. I don’t know why God has forsaken me with even the fleeting comfort of his glimpsed presence, right now, but he seems to have done.  Maybe he’s watching and waiting and folding his arms, while I try and make up my mind.

But what to do? At the moment, my favourite thing is painting, since I re-discovered my paints over Christmas. I like the way it gets me “in the zone”, and on days when I feel too crabby, ill and crochety to concentrate on anything else, at least it’s a way of producing something creative, when all other avenues seem temporarily stony and barren. But it is, I am the first to admit, a bit of a cop-out, in the war in which we currently find ourselves, for me to say, yes. I will join you at the barricades once I have finished washing in this fiddly Vermeer roofscape of Delft.

Producing powerful images and being engaged with the world of telegrams and anger aren’t automatically antithetical. You have only to think of Gillray or Rowlandson in this country, and Picasso’s Guernica probably did much more to undermine Franco than any amount of earnest pamphlets from the Left Book Club.  The problem is that they all possessed something I don’t – talent! And I am probably better at expressing my righteous indignation in words, and using painting for keeping me sane (or what passes for it, these days).

There is also rather a lot of work to do. Books to finish, other people’s and my own, if I am ever going to roll this boulder of debt that fell on me back up the hill again, and painting takes time, lots of time.  Time that could probably be better spent.

It’s also rather difficult to disengage one-handedly from a struggle, since your opponents tend to take it as a sign that they are winning, and redouble their efforts.  And if we are to fight, fight, and fight again for a better country, and to see Jerusalem builded here, then the time to rest and disengage is not now, but after the 2015 election. 

So 2014 is going to be a big year for many reasons.  In the words of the strangely-named Minnie Haskins, whose poem was used by the King in his Christmas broadcast in 1939:

And I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year: “Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown.”

And he replied:

“Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the Hand of God. That shall be to you better than light and safer than a known way.”

So I went forth, and finding the Hand of God, trod gladly into the night. And He led me towards the hills and the breaking of day in the lone East.

Meanwhile, it seems we’ve got some fields to plough. And a war to fight.