Epiblog for the Feast of St Boswell

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley.  The bad weather has shown some signs of letting up, though, and the endless succession of storms that have marched like a series of conquering armies across the south and west seems to have come to a temporary halt. For us, here in the Holme Valley, this has meant days when, yes, it was still windy and raining, but has often been sunny at exactly the same time. Dodging the showers has led to many instances of soggy doggies, and rainbow-spotting.

Matilda’s been skittering about on the decking, trying to cope with the changing weather. One minute she’ll be sitting in the sun at the top of the garden steps, surveying her domain for any signs of Spidey from next door, or dicky-birds that might not have seen her. Then it starts hailstoning and she streaks past the window, belly flat to the ground and ears back, seeking the shelter of Deb’s tarpaulin over the camp cooker. As soon as the first blast of the shower has passed, she’s up at the door, meowing furiously to be let back in. This has been an oft-repeated cycle, over the last seven days.

The week started with us both barking and snuffling. Debbie’s cold was two days behind mine, but, by now, we’d both reached the disgusting stage where the cold, and all that it entails, was physically leaving us, in a raging storm of snot, phlegm, mucus, and discarded tissues.  Thankfully, Debbie had already decided over the weekend that there was no way on God’s green earth she could get into College this week to do any teaching.  Apart from anything else, in order to teach somebody something, you need to be able to speak to them, and see them; two things of which Debbie was incapable on Monday morning.

She was also deaf to the world, which proved to be rather inconvenient on Monday morning when I was getting out of bed and transferring to my wheelchair, and fell off the banana board onto the floor.  It was my own fault, I was hurrying and trying to wing it on my own, because I knew Debbie was ill in bed upstairs and I had to get up and do stuff. I felt the chair starting to slide away from me, and instead of doing the sensible thing and going back, re-seating the board and trying again, I decided to press on regardless, figuring that one last push would take me into the chair.  Sir Isaac Newton, however, had other ideas, gravity took its toll, and I ended up crashing to the floor in a blubbery mass.

I took stock. I could still wiggle everything, so I hadn’t broken anything, I guessed. I would, however, no doubt have some spectacular bruises on my arse and my elbow, assuming I could tell the difference, which is always a moot point.  More than anything else, I was furious with myself for ending my long unbroken run of successful transfers: previously, I had only fallen off my banana board twice in the preceding three years.  Anyway, there was nothing for it, unable to get myself up, dust myself down, and start all over again, I had no option but to call in the cavalry to come and put Humpty together again.

I dialled 999, and explained the situation, and they asked me various questions such as was I bleeding or anything, and then told me help was on the way. The only problem now was that the ambulance men would not be able to get in, because the house was still locked up, bolted, barred and chained. So, reluctantly, I would have to rouse Debbie. I shouted, but – not surprisingly, given that she was effectively upstairs in the other side of the house and had taken enough flu remedies and painkillers to stun a fairly large elephant – she failed to hear me.  I tried dialling her on my mobile, and it went to voicemail, six or seven times in succession.

Soon, my attention was distracted by an ambulance man looking at me through the window, and while I was miming to him that I was locked in and he needed to go and shut under Debbie’s bedroom window, his controller called me back on my mobile, and I told her the situation and what he needed to do.  Somehow, the message must have got fairly quickly to his colleague, because I could hear her standing in the front garden, yelling “DEBBIE!” as loud as her lungs would manage.

Then medic number one returned to the window and I mimed to him that I was going to try and crawl to Colin’s side door and let him in that way. I got as far as the doorway leading to the lobby when Debbie appeared, having finally been roused from her sleep of a thousand years.

I filled her in on the situation and she flitted off to let them in, and then my bedroom was suddenly filled with ambulance men and women all talking on their radio and doing that “10-24 officer down bravo echo tango bacon sandwich” type speech that you have to use by law if you are in the emergency services.  I did, however, catch them telling the police to “stand down”, so it would seem we narrowly avoided having our door battered in, in order to effect an entrance, as they put it.  As with all NHS operations, it took them five minutes to fix me (two of them picked me up in a sort of cross-armed firemans’ lift, as used by cross-armed firemen the world over, and dumped me in my chair) and half an hour to do the paperwork afterwards.  Anyway, they went away happy, and I had signed to say that basically I still had all my legs, I wasn’t diabetic, or allergic to anything, apart from gravity, and if I died now, it was my own fault for not breathing.

Having got that crisis out of the way, I looked forward to the remainder of Monday passing in relative peace and tranquillity, in order for me to recover and “centre” myself, in the current phrase beloved of New Age psychobabble.  The washing up needed doing. Having made myself a coffee, I started in on it, because it was exactly the sort of mindless task that would allow me to smooth out my ruffled mental feathers. What could possibly go wrong?

Dropping a wine glass for a start.  The thing squirmed out of my grasp like a live fish, and landed on the tiled portion of the kitchen floor. I have occasionally got away with this, in the past, but this time it didn’t bounce, it shattered into a few thousand shards of shrapnel. Heaving a big sigh, I began picking up the pieces, and of course stuck one of them into my thumb. Having safely gathered the big bits, I swept up the rest, and then Debbie, cursing me for a clumsy oaf, roused herself from the couch for long enough to hoover up the dust, and order was restored.

By now, the postman had arrived, and I was looking forward to the arrival of the little desk lamp I’d ordered off Amazon to help me paint in the evenings when the light in here is dim and eye-strain is the order of the day. I’d noted that it came without a bulb, but the Amazon software did its usual thing of “people who bought this lamp also bought these bulbs”, so I’d ordered three of them, as well. It turned out, however, that the people who had ordered “these” bulbs were quixotic idiots  who had ordered the wrong size, ones that didn’t fit, and so was I, for mindlessly following their example. Still, I reflected, as I put them wearily aside to sort out later, at least we now know the answer to that age-old question about “how many publishers does it take to change a light bulb?” The answer is, nearly one.

On her way back from the lobby with the post, Debbie caught her foot on the edge of the dog’s dish and catapulted the muttnuts in it all over the kitchen floor.  I briefly considered a Munch-type scream but the moment passed and I began picking the scattered pellets up one by one with my grab-stick. I had counted 174 before Debbie got fed up of me bemoaning the fact that, since I had an honours degree from the University of London, upper second division, I shouldn’t have to do this, and joined me in restoring the remainder of them to Misty’s bowl.

By now, I was wishing I had just stayed in bed.  The only bright spot of the day was that the postman had also brought our replacement hot water bottles. Because two of the old ones had perished, literally as well as metaphorically, in the ceaseless fight against the winter cold in our house, I’d ordered two new ones, which duly arrived from China, again via Amazon, complete with the following instructions sheet:

Rubber Heat Water Bag - Direction

1. Heat water bag is used in medical treatment health and common live to get warm

2 The water temperature that the heat water bag used should be around 90 degrees C. The water should be not over 2/3 than the capacity of the heat water bag.

3. After filling water, must let the air in the heat water bag out and let the screw tight. Check if there is leak water phenomenon.

4. When baby use the heat water bag, should let the heat water bag a little far from baby.

5. When the heat water bag is used or storage must avert it to be weight on or stabed, not touch sour, alkali, oil and sunlight shoot.

6. Storage heat water bag should fill a little air inside. Put it in shady environment.

7. The dirt on the heat water bag can be washed by soap water than use water wash it clean.

8. The heat water bag should not be put n the display window so long time, especially the display window in the sunlight shoot.

All of which we found predictably hilarious, although I did say at the time that there was absolutely no way in which I could instruct a Chinaman in the correct usage of a hot-water bottle (or heat water bag) either in Cantonese or Mandarin. Still, it gave us a chance to reprise all the old “Waiter, this hot water bottle is rubbery! Ah, thank you, Sir!” jokes. No doubt the Chinese find us screamingly funny, and no doubt my name means “donkey testicle” or something in Cantonese.

Still, at least the worst is over, I thought, as I trundled out to the lobby to get some coal for the stove. When the coalman delivered, he had stacked it in a stack of 6 and a stack of 8 sacks, instead of two stacks of 7. No problem, I reckoned. I could just gently slit the top sack of the 8-hgh stack and remove the coal bit by bit. Unfortunately this course of action, which sounded fine n principle, resulted in the coal moving inside the sack, destabilising the teetering mass even further and sending the 25K plastic bag crashing to the ground, narrowly missing my foot, but catching the corner of my wheelchair tray (the very one I had repaired the previous week) and bending it down out of shape. Further examination revealed that the only way it will go back again is to be put in a vice and whacked with a large lump-hammer, and if Clarks can’t do it, it’ll have to wait till Owen comes up again.

So that was Monday, and in truth, I have had better days.  The rest of the week, thank God, was easier. The stock imbroglio remained an enigma, with no sign of a return of serve, so I left that cage unrattled (if I may be allowed to mix the odd metaphor).  It’s just as well nothing else challenging happened, since we were both seeing the world through a haze of man-flu and spent hours dozing when we should have been working. Or in my case, painting.  The elusive portfolio still remains at large in the wild somewhere, so I have decided, like Carlyle, to start again.

The pleasant highlight of the week, for me at any rate, was a trip to Radio Leeds to be interviewed by Martin Kelner for the “One-on-One” programme on Thursday afternoon.  This necessitated a trip in a taxi, both ways. On the outward leg, I got into a conversation with the driver about which team I supported, and I said Hull City. He asked me what I thought about the current owner’s plans to re-brand them as “Hull Tigers”, incorporating the club’s unofficial nickname (on account of their black and amber strip) into the official name of the club. I said not a lot, and that the owners had obviously badly misjudged it, since the supporters’ club had obtained thousands of petition signatures telling him not to do it.

“I think it’s because he’s trying to get them to be big in the Asian market,” said the taxi driver, “but it’s not as if they’re Manchester United!”  I was tempted to add a “Thank God”, at that point, but by now we were there, or at least his sat nav said we were. Of BBC Radio Leeds, however, there was no sign. We were parked (temporarily) outside the Northern Ballet. “Are you sure this isn’t it?” asked the taxi driver, and I assured him that my dancing days were over.  Then we saw the metal BBC sign sticking out round a corner, and in a few moments he’d deposited me outside and pushed me into the foyer.

The whole thing was a very slick, very well-managed operation and I was well looked after by the BBC. I really enjoyed the interview. Martin Kelner is a knowledgeable and professional broadcaster and interviewer, and it seemed we shared some tastes in music and (more improbably) T S  Eliot. Like all enjoyable experiences, it was over far too quickly, and I found myself in a different taxi, heading back to Huddersfield.  “So,” said the driver, “which team do you support, then?” It must be something they learn at taxi driver college. Anyway, I found myself agreeing with this one on at least two points; one, Mourinho should have been Manchester United’s new manager and two, that Fulham were toast on toast, with a side of toast, this season.  And then I was home.

Friday was the start of half-term for Debbie, since she didn’t have any classes that day – not that she’d have been in a fit state to teach anybody anything – and she was starting to make noises about maybe going off for a few days in the camper, so I made a desperate effort to try and catch up on everything else, but since I was so banjaxed by the after-effects of the cold, I ended up only achieving about a quarter of the things that I’d intended. At that point, I called it a day for the week, at least mentally, and spent Saturday painting.  Debbie watched the rugby, the stove ticked away, the kitchen was warm and snug, Misty was asleep on her cushion, Matilda snoozing on the chair, and all was right with the world.  Then the phone rang.

It was a paramedic from the Queen’s Medical Centre in Nottingham.  He was ringing because he was looking after Deb’s dad. Grandad had got a lift with one of his mates to go and watch the National Cross-Country Championships in Wollaton Park, and somehow, the arrangement to get a lift back had fallen through, leaving him wandering alone and hypothermic in the dark, long after everyone else had gone home. Hence the encounter with the paramedics.  He was fine, they reassured us, and they had organised him a taxi to come home, but they just needed someone to pay for it. His home number was ringing out unanswered and he couldn’t remember his wife’s mobile. 

I filled them in briefly on some of his extensive medical history and cautioned them that he was not a well man.  Then I gave them Granny’s mobile, and rang her myself to tell her not to panic when she got a call from the paramedics in a minute or two.  So, to paraphrase Bob Dylan, it might really have been the end, to be stuck inside of Nottingham with a mobile phone again, except that Grandad doesn’t carry a mobile phone, a state of affairs which may need to be rectified in future. On this occasion at least, thankfully, he came to no harm. And, one way or another, the family has done its bit this week for the NHS and the long-distance taxi industry.

With so much going on here this week, and the remaining gaps being filled with coughs, sneezes, and spreading diseases, I’ve scarcely had time to comprehend any news from outside the Holme Valley, but I did note that, during the week, following on from the attack made by Archbishop Vincent Nichols, who pointed out the essential immorality of benefits cuts forcing people to use food banks, a further 40 faith leaders, no less, including 27 Anglican bishops, signed an open letter dated March 5^th and published in The Daily Mirror to mark the beginning of Lent, condemning the Blight Brigade for their war on the poor.  The bishops, who included those of Oxford, Gloucester, Newcastle and Manchester, pointed to figures showing that 5,500 people were admitted to hospital for malnutrition in the UK last year, while records show half a million were forced to visit food banks.

In the letter, the bishops said the figures were unacceptable for “the world’s seventh largest economy”, continuing:

“We often hear talk of hard choices. Surely few can be harder than that faced by the tens of thousands of older people who must 'heat or eat' each winter, harder than those faced by families whose wages have stayed flat while food prices have gone up 30 per cent in just five years. We must, as a society, face up to the fact that over half of people using food banks have been put in that situation by cutbacks to and failures in the benefit system, whether it be payment delays or punitive sanctions.”

“We call on government to do its part: acting to investigate food markets that are failing, to make sure that work pays, and to ensure that the welfare system provides a robust last line of defence against hunger.”

Responding to the bishops' calls, Labour's shadow work and pensions secretary Rachel Reeves said: “This letter should be a wake-up call to David Cameron.” This is the same Rachel Reeves who has publicly declared that, if they come to power, Labour will be even tougher on benefits than the Tories. Remind me again, is there a Nobel prize for hypocrisy?

The thing is, though, the debate about food banks and their causes, their virtues and vices, is at last gaining ground. Despite the attempts of die-hard Tories to focus the discussion elsewhere, or dismiss such talk as “divisive” (this, from a Junta that specialises in ‘divide and rule’) it is getting to the point where the clamour is becoming impossible to ignore.  And it is a debate we urgently need to have, because according to the London Food bank Blog, the DWP are now “rationing” food bank vouchers.

Is an unofficial quota system for food bank vouchers operating at job centres? One man who called into a food bank in this London borough recently said he was told by his job centre that they’d given out 15 vouchers already that week. Persuading the staff there that he was in need was hard work. He said he did get a voucher eventually, but his experience begs a question. How many people in genuine need of an emergency supply of food are now being refused a food voucher by job centres?

How many indeed? This is a question perhaps for the enquiry on the effect of government policies on poverty, which Parliament has voted for, but which the Junta is ignoring on the grounds that it would be very embarrassing. Meanwhile, on Thursday, an all-party group of MPs launched an inquiry into the causes of UK food poverty and food bank use. The inquiry will be headed by the Bishop of Truro, Tim Thornton, and inquiry members include Labour MP Frank Field and Tory backbencher Laura Sandys. Good luck with that. Still, every little helps, as Tesco are fond of saying, as they skip tonnes of perfectly edible food.

They could save themselves a lot of time and effort by reading the report which was commissioned by DEFRA on poverty and food bank use back in June, and which has been gathering cobwebs in someone’s in tray ever since.  Finally, on Friday, it slipped out under the wire, and it’s devastating stuff, albeit entirely predictable. The Guardian reported that:

The researchers found that a combination of rising food prices, shrinking incomes, low pay and increasing personal debt meant an increasing number of families could not afford to buy sufficient food.

No shit, Sherlock. The Guardian went on to say:

Examining the effect of welfare changes on food bank use was not a specific part of its remit, says the report, which is understood to have undergone a number of revisions since early summer at the behest of the Department for Food and Agriculture and the Department for Work and Pensions.

Ha ha ha ha. You bet it has. “Revisions” consisting of Iain Duncan Smith scribbling “No” and inserting the word “Not” in red pen, at various strategic points in the text.

Still, once more we have a situation where the Church seems to be the only effective opposition, since Labour have already sad they will be worse, and conceded the debate.  Beastrabban, a blogger who specialises in the benefits debate, posted a very interesting analysis of the attitude to the poor in the early days of the Church, a small part of which I reproduce below:

The Fathers of the Church believed that superfluous wealth belonged to the poor. The great medieval theologian and philosopher, Thomas Aquinas, stated that

According to natural law goods that are held in superabundance by some people should be used for the maintenance of the poor. This is the principle enunciated by Ambrose … It is the bread of the poor you are holding back; it is the clothes of the naked which you are hoarding; it is the relief and liberation of the wretched which you are thwarting by burying your money away.

St. Basil, in his sermon ‘On Mercy and Justice’, stated that if the rich did not making offering to God to feed the poor, they would be accused of robbery. This was reflected in another of Pauper’s statements

Withholding of alms from the poor needy folk is theft in the sight of God, for the covetous rich withdraw from the poor folk what belongs to them and misappropriate the poor men’s goods, with which they should be succoured.

Ambrose went further and stated that those, who did not provide food for the starving killed them. Pauper also made the same statement when he referred to the Fifth Commandment: Thou shalt not kill.

If any man or woman dies for lack of help, then all who should have helped, or might have helped, or knew the person’s plight, but who would not help are guilty of manslaughter.

Are you listening, IDS? And do the names Mark and Helen Mullins ring any bells?

ATOS, the private company which is making millions out of misery by operating the Junta’s “assessments” aimed at knocking people off benefits, has said this week it wants to pull out of the contract, citing the fact that its staff have been receiving abuse and death threats. Basically, ATOS’s stance is “we were only obeying orders” (where have we heard that one before) and the catalyst for this announcement was the UK-wide day of protest against ATOS at various centres throughout Wednesday.

The Junta replied that ATOS were rubbish anyway, and the DWP was already looking for alternatives.  If you were looking for an illustration of rats fighting in a sack, look no further. And I also have to observe that, while the allegation about death threats is regrettable, if true, perhaps the attitude of ATOS staff in referring to all benefit claimants as “LTBs” (it stands for “lying, thieving bastards” in case you wondered”) may have contributed to the situation. Two wrongs don’t make a right, but perhaps ATOS should have paused to consider the numbers of people who have actually died after being declared fit for work by ATOS, and possibly even as a result of it.

And finally, no, not a skateboarding duck, but the sound of the recovery falling into a pothole, after George Osborne was forced to concede that the tax revenues and other government income expected to top £7.5bn this month by experts, actually netted £4.7bn. Still a surplus, yes, but down from last year’s £6.5bn, and attributed to the falling tax take from a faltering, stuttering economy, caused by, er, George Osborne. As I have said many times, if you owe somebody 100 apples, you do not pay them back by cutting down the orchard.

At the end of a fairly bludgeoning week, then, we woke today to St Boswell’s day, to a fine sunny morning and a howling, horizontal gale bending the trees down the valley. St Boswell, also called “Boisil”, died in 661AD and was the Abbot of Melrose Abbey. He studied under St Aidan and served as a biblical scholar. He is reputed to have trained both St Cuthbert and St Egbert. His chief claim to saintly fame seems to have been the gift of prophecy, which unfortunately didn’t extend to seeing the plague coming, since he caught it and died.  ATOS then declared him fit for work. 

Once again, I’ve not had a very spiritual week, and to be honest, unlike St Boswell, I failed to predict several things, to my detriment, and mostly involving the effects of gravity. What I need to do is to shake off this feeling of having a head full of cotton wool, and come through this “dark night of the body” that seems to be oppressing me these days. The feeling that I am using every atom of my energy just to get through the day. I can ill afford the time, and I am not sure Debbie is up to it anyway, but if we could get away to the Lakes for a couple of days in the camper, seeing the hills again would do me the world of good. “I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills”. I have to say, though, that the omens are not propitious. We will have to overcome illness, inertia, lack of motivation, weather, and several practical tasks that I can’t leave undone before I go. I could certainly do to see the world in a grain of sand again, and experience infinity in an hour, something which is always easier to do, I find, when you are under the protection of the Old Man of Coniston or in the lee of Helm Crag. In the mountains, there you feel free, as T S Eliot said.

Who knows, though? If the sun shines and the wind drops, we might yet manage it. And spring is coming; Maisie’s indestructible daffodils grow stronger and higher every day, and the snowdrops are now out in the garden. En route to Leeds, I saw my first crocuses of this year. More to the point, we’re almost through February, because today, as well as being St Boswell’s day, is also Reggie day, the day we remember little Reggie, Phillip’s cat, a re-homed feral, who died on this day in 1998 and who now, I hope, sits purring with the rest of them, on the lap of St Gertrude of Nivelles.  Sardines and cream are the plat du our in cat heaven, and if anyone deserved them, Reggie did. Reggie, you were remembered by those who still mss you. Sit terra tibi levis.

As for me, who knows. Last Monday was the worst day so far of 2014, a year which has been full of unpleasant surprises.  I have got some steel wool under the sink. If I start knitting now, I might just manage a suit of armour by morning.

Epiblog for the Feast of St Onesimus

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley, and one where I have often found myself singing along with Feste, in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night:

When I was but a little tiny boy

With a hey, ho, the wind and the rain

A foolish thing was but a toy

For the rain it raineth every day

“The rain it raineth every day” seems to just about sum it up.  And, of course, it never rains but what it pours, to trot out the sort of thing Granny Fenwick would have said.  Actually, she always used to refer to this month as “February Filldyke”, and she’s not wrong this year. The weather has gone way beyond silly, it’s now two stops beyond Barking and well off the bus route, and it seems to be de rigueur for TV news anchors to have to present to camera while standing ankle-deep in a saturated solution of poo and sewage, lest they be thought faint-hearted, feeble, and out of touch.

Of all of us, Matilda’s life and routine has been the least disrupted by the weather, as she has developed the coping strategy, when it’s absolutely sheeting it down outside, of sticking her nose out of the conservatory door just enough to determine that today is going to be the cat equivalent of a “duvet day”, then jumping up onto Auntie Maisie’s cat blanket spread out on the chair, curling round, and going to sleep.

Even Misty, made of hardy mountain-dog stock, has become rather cheesed off at being turfed out into a garden that resembles the set of “Singing in the Rain” in order to do her necessaries. A couple of times when I have suggested that “wee-wees” might be in order, she has stopped at the open door and looked round at me with a pitying look intended to convey “If you think I am going out in that, you are out of your tiny little Chinese mind.”

So, cabin fever is the order of the day, and Matilda sits at the conservatory door watching “Cat TV”, in the form of the birds desperately trying to get the bread I put out on the decking for them, before it turns to mush and is washed away, while Misty is curled up on her dog-cushion behind the settee, with only the tip of her snout protruding to the outside world.  Occasionally, they meet in passing, and one day last week they almost “kissed” noses, while sniffing each other, before Matilda ruined the romantic moment by hissing at Misty and then uttering one of the special stock of low unearthly growls that she normally reserves for when she meets Spidey, next door’s cat, crossing our garden.

"It never rains but what it pours" more or less sums up my week as well. I don’t remember a year in recent times that has started so badly, with so many adverse challenges for me and mine.  Debbie has been battling the weather to get in and out of College, including the dusting of snow which we had on Wednesday, on top of the relentless wind and rain, and on a purely physical level, I’ve been seeing the week through a haze of man-flu and suffering as I started coming down with a cold on Tuesday which is only just leaving me as I type today, having reached the foul disgusting stage where it is coming out of my nose, my eyes, and probably my ears. Apologies if that’s too much information.

One bright spot in an other wise grim week was the unexpected visit of Mark’s son, Scott, on Tuesday, en route back from Tralee to the Isle of Arran, and having decided to do the journey via Huddersfield. As you do. We got to talking about pets, and he was telling me of his friend who owns a parrot that originally belonged to a Saudi prince in Saudi Arabia. Because it was forced to hear it several times a day, it began to mimic the Muezzin’s Islamic call to prayer, which led to a fatwa being placed on the unfortunate bird, but because its owner was a price, he managed to pull some strings and the death sentence was commuted to exile. It was shipped to Europe, where it passed through several owners before ending up on the Isle of Arran, where it no doubt continues to startle the good folk of that Isle, as they hurry to Kirk on a Sunday, with its cries of “Aaaa-allah-u-akbhar!”

My cold set in more or less a few hours after Scott had left, and much of Wednesday and Thursday was spent huddled dozing in my wheelchair, clutching a hot water bottle. The only thing I actually felt up to doing was painting, and even that was lacklustre. I still had to sort out the problem of moving the stock, however, which continued to be the thorn of my life and a bane in the flesh all week.  We have got it down from 44 pallets to 25, and of those, I have managed to find a home for 14, I think and hope.  My mood, already darkened by depression, cold, and the fact that every day it is grim, grey and pissing down, wasn’t improved by my receiving a snarty email reminding me that this agreement had resulted in “a substantial loss” for the company concerned.

I was very tempted to reply that, had I known I was going to keel over and nearly die, thus choking off any sales for between six and 18 months while I clawed my way painfully back to some sort of state of recovery, I would never have signed the bloody agreement either.  At the time, Barclays Bank, God strafe them, had just sandbagged me behind the ear with a lead-filled sock and taken away my overdraft, so, a bit like the multiple compartment design of the hull of the Titanic, it seemed like a good idea. At the time. Hindsight is a wonderful thing.

I might also have taken issue with the notion of “a substantial loss”. To me, “a substantial loss” is when you go overnight from being a director of two companies to being a hospital patient, narrowly escaping dying, losing the ability to walk, and being diagnosed with a progressive and incurable wasting disease. That’s what I would call “a substantial loss”. A “substantial loss” is when you are lying in a hospital bed and your erstwhile colleagues conspire in your absence to let you go, on the grounds that they can save a stack of money, and no-one speaks up for you or the good things you did while you were there. That’s what I would call a “substantial loss”. The rest is just money, and could have been rectified, given time and effort, and God knows I have tried over the last three years to dig myself out of the pit into which I slid in 2010.  OK, so now I will have to do the rest of that digging without a spade. Fine. I’ll survive, I’m a Fenwick.  When you’ve had some of those sorts of substantial losses, come back, and we’ll talk.

Not that they have a monopoly over questionable redundancy practices – one of my friends, who teaches in the same field as Debbie, albeit at another College, had a “substantial loss” of her very own this week, when she discovered her class had been cancelled when one of her students texted her to tell her. When she contacted the College administration to confirm, she was given a semi-literate explanation to the effect that a letter had been put in the post to her (no doubt from an office two doors along from hers). Welcome to the wonderful world and white heat of the thrusting Cameron/Osborne recovery, driven by ideology and managed by halfwits. What a waste of dog-farts.

The worst substantial loss, for me this week, though, was the loss of one of my online friends, who died of non-Hodgkins lymphoma.  On the face of it, it was an unlikely friendship, which began when her sister wrote me an email to tear me a new one about a poem I’d written about their family monument in Cleveland, Ohio.  I had made some references to the family (intending to use them as a paradigm for all of the people in that state in the US at the time) and in any case the poem was really “about” the nature of reality and whether death is the end (cheerful stuff) and not in any way a comment on the family escutcheon.

I had no idea that there were so many descendants still alive, but there were, a whole raft of them, and they were ornery as hell at this upstart from England writing about their family. Anyway, after many emails, we all became friends, and I used to get regular bulletins from Leslie about the life she enjoyed with her husband in Florida, going off on boating trips and about their getting “gussied up” as she put it, to go out to restaurants for their happy hour.  It was obviously a different world. We did have painting in common, though, and she actually painted one of me, from one of my online pics, and I hope I entertained her in her retirement with my tales of wild and woolly weather, and the doings of the various animals here at home and characters from The Archers. I’d known she was ill because she said, in the last message I got, that she’d had to give up painting for a while, but I didn’t know how ill, and now she’s gone.  Now, that is a substantial loss, to all her family, friends, and to the world at large. She was a kind, funny, talented lady, and we’re all the worse for her not being here.

The week progressed in a wild and windy way, see above, and on Wednesday night the plastic greenhouse that wasn’t previously damaged blew off the decking and down into the garden, where it currently remains. This is more of a minor irritant than anything else, but it’s just typical of the way this year has panned out so far that it was the good greenhouse which went, and not the broken one which has already been shredded by the wind and rain this winter, yet which still stands defiantly, its structure a scarecrow of sticks, rags and tatters.

Meanwhile, in the wilder world, now that the flood waters are lapping literally and metaphorically at the doorsteps of Tory-voting, middle-England heartlands, Cameron and all the other politicians have been wading through the floods in an effort to woo “floating” voters and to be seen to be caring. This is nothing new, of course, ever since hurricane Katrina in the US, all politicians have been aware of the damage that weather can do – to their prospects of re-election. Their attention can be selective, however. When the village of Toll Bar near Doncaster flooded in June 2007, there was coverage of the event in the national media, but it was nothing special. It was only a fortnight later, when the flooding hit the Cotswolds and all those picturesque little stone villages where the BBC executives and the politicians and the reporters all have their weekend cottages, that it became a news agenda priority.

That was Tony Blair and Labour, but something similar happened this week when Cameron came out with his “money is no object” speech.  This may yet come back to bite him on the bum, and actually I hope it does, since I always enjoy seeing hypocritical politicians hoist with their own petard.  There is actually money available, from the EU, which could be tapped right now, except that Cameron also knows that to be seen to be going “cap in hand” to the EU for a grant to fix flood damage would open a very large can of Eurosceptic worms, at a time when UKIP is already snapping at his knackers, electorally speaking.

So, where is the money to come from? If the likes of the Daily Mail are to be believed, it should come out of the overseas aid budget. I have my own issues with giving aid to countries which only spend it on missile systems or gold-plated taps in the presidential palace, but I don’t see why it has to be either/or. Plus there are other potential sources, such as the money we spend internationally promoting arms sales, to name but one.  And we are a rich country, says Mr Cameron. There are times when anger makes you incoherent, and I started to write a long diatribe about this, only to discover that the blogger Jane Young had already summed it up so much better:

So, here we are. Disabled people clearly don’t matter. Poor people clearly don’t matter. Older people matter a bit, but not enough to ensure social care is properly funded. But suddenly, after lots of people and communities have been suffering from dreadful flooding for many weeks, the Thames breaks its banks. As if by magic, the Prime Minister tells us “Money is no object. We are a wealthy country”. I feel sick.

When disabled people can’t get suitable housing, we have no money. When we need accessible public transport, we have no money. When poor families can’t afford both food and heating, we have no money. When people who appeal an incorrect “fit for work” decision need money to live on while their decision is “reconsidered”, we have no money. When those who care 24/7 for family members are penalised financially, simply to remain in their homes, we have no money. When A & E departments are under severe strain and sick people are waiting hours even to get into the hospital, we have no money.

BUT, when homes in middle England are flooded, money’s no object and we’re suddenly a wealthy country.

 

I can’t believe, by the way, that there are still some people who say all of this weird, freak and extreme weather has nothing to do with climate change. What will it take to remove the blinkers? The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse wearing flashing deely-boppers, surfing a 500-foot Tsunami wave up the Severn Estuary?

Into the argument about whether money is no object stepped the unlikely figure of Cardinal-Designate Vincent Nichols, the Roman Catholic archbishop of England, proving once more that the only effective opposition to the Junta at the moment is the Church.

“People do understand that we do need to tighten our belts and be much more responsible and careful in public expenditure,” said the Archbishop to the Daily Telegraph “But I think what is happening is two things: one is that the basic safety net that was there to guarantee that people would not be left in hunger or in destitution has actually been torn apart. It no longer exists and that is a real, real dramatic crisis. And the second is that, in this context, the administration of social assistance, I am told, has become more and more punitive. So if applicants don’t get it right, then they have to wait for 10 days, for two weeks with nothing – with nothing. For a country of our affluence, that quite frankly is a disgrace.”

My own continuing battle against the misuse of statistics took a minor setback this week when the UK Statistics Authority wrote back to me and said they didn’t accept the point of my complaint against the BBC.  They pointed out that the figures used by the BBC in their report did come from official statistics and were right, neither of which I ever disputed. It was the way in which the BBC presented it as if these were people who had been caught swinging the lead and then withdrew their claims as a result, when in fact it took no account of claims later allowed on first or second appeal.  I am not sure I have either the strength or the time right now to write to them and correct this. The BBC has not even replied to my letter of complaint or indeed acknowledged it in any way.  Time to stop paying the licence fee for a while, in order to get their attention, perhaps.

The only other newsworthy event of note this week was that I found myself agreeing with something George Osborne said. Probably for the first, and I certainly hope the only, time. It was concerning the inadvisability of Scotland continuing to use the pound sterling after “independence”, should they vote “yes”.

Looking at recent developments I have been modifying my theory about Alex Salmond and "independence". It's always been my contention that Salmond never wanted "independence" in the true sense of the word. In that respect, the vote to have a referendum originally set him back on his heels, because it meant he could no longer carry on surfing the wave of casual anti-English sentiment (for reasons ranging from Culloden and the clearances through religion to oil to football) which voted SNP on the premise that "one day" Scotland would be "free" and he would now have to actually do something about it.

If Scotland voted to be truly independent, then the SNP would find itself in the position of the Imperial Cancer Fund on the morning someone discovers a cure for cancer. Oh shit, no raison d’etre and nowhere to go... So the wily Mr Salmond comes up with plan B, in the form of “Devo Max”, whereby Scotland retains all of the advantages of being within the UK, but has yet further powers devolved to it. That having been negated by Cameron, we're now on to plan C, where an independent Scotland looks pretty much the same as it does now, but Salmond gets to cherry-pick the things that will be electorally popular.

I don't know why it should have come as such a shock to Scotland that the UK government ruled out the use of the pound after a “yes” vote for independence. The Treasury has long had a phobic dread of cross-border currency sharing ever since our inglorious exit from the EMS. Brown hated the Euro and kept us out of it (thank God) and there is no way that a free-spending post "independence" Scotland could be allowed to run wild with the £ sterling and undermine its value. It'd be like giving your credit card to Nigella Lawson's stylist.

But my latest theory is that Salmond actually secretly welcomes this development, because if he now loses the vote, he can retire safely to "Dunleading, Isle of Arran" safe in the knowledge that he did his best and he will be forever remembered alongside Bonny Price Charlie and William Wallace.

I should say at this point I would have no problem with a truly independent Scotland, with its own currency, judicial system, armed forces, diplomatic system, passport etc and a border post at Gretna. However, I suspect that would be anathema to Alex Salmond, who wants Scotland to exist in a sort of "Schrodinger" state of neither independent or not independent, or both at once, or something. You can’t have it both ways.

Personally, as I have said before, I think the whole premise of the independence vote is barmy - self determination for an indigenous people who don't even live in the place its current inhabitants are voting for. I think the whole of the UK should have voted on this, as well, especially as there are probably more "Scots" living in England than Scotland.

As well as the currency issues, there are also constitutional matters to settle - if Scotland votes “yes” in 2014, do we expel the Scottish MPs from an English parliament at that point, or at the next general election in 2015?

Much has been made of the paucity of the "better together" campaign and I agree that most of the reasons for not voting “yes” can be summed up in the obverse of that phrase, "worse apart", but I also think many of the people lining up to vote “yes” are dong so on a platform of the Young Pretender, over the sea to Skye, tartan, Braveheart, and the Proclaimers, just to "stick it to the English" without thinking it through and, actually, without thinking that there might be English people who agree with some of their historical grievances and who do want to see a happy, prosperous and contented Scotland, but not at the expense of breaking up the UK and making the future for all of us more uncertain.

Meanwhile the drear wee dragged on, and Friday brought us to valentine’s day. Let it not be said that I didn’t give my wife anything for valentine’s day, because by Friday, Debbie, too, was streaming with my cold.  I tried to do my usual valentine’s day ritual of singing Dame Durden, and collapsed into a paroxysm of coughing.

'Twas on the morn of Valentine when birds began to prate
Dame Durden and her maids and men they altogether meet.

'Twas Moll and Bet and Doll and Kit and Dolly to drag her tail
It was Tom and Dick and Joe and Jack and Humphrey with his flail.
Then Tom kissed Molly and Dick kissed Betty
And Joe kissed Dolly and Jack kissed Kitty
And Humphrey with his flail
And Kitty she was the charming girl to carry the milking pail.

Valentine’s Day also makes me think inevitably of Geoffrey Chaucer and The Parliament of Fowlis, which sets out the premise that it’s the day when all of the birds choose their mates for the coming year. I did see two magpies out the back on Friday morning, a rare outbreak of joy, so who knows, it could be true.

`Now welcom somer, with thy sonne softe,

That hast this wintres weders over-shake,

And driven awey the longe nightes blake!

`Saynt Valentyn, that art ful hy on-lofte; --

Thus singen smale foules for thy sake --

Now welcom somer, with thy sonne softe,

That hast this wintres weders over-shake.

Yes, welcome summer – I can’t bloody wait.  Meanwhile Sunday brought us to the feast of St Onsiemus.  I must admit I chose to make this Epiblog about him because he had such a silly name and sounded as if he might have just invented one-piece fleecy pyjama suits with a bum-flap. But he didn’t.  He was a martyr and former slave, who died in AD 68.  St Paul, the man who more or less kept the Mediterranean postal system going single-handed after Jesus was crucified, mentions Onsiemus in a letter to Philemon, as a slave in Colossae, Phrygia, who ran away.  Paul met Onsiemus in a Roman prison, and baptised him. On his release, Paul sent Onesimus back to Philemon with his epistle, asking Philemon to accept him as:

“no longer as a slave, but more than a slave, a brother, beloved especially to me, but even more so to you, as a man in the Lord. So if you regard me as a partner, welcome him as you would me. And if he has done you any injustice or owes you anything, charge it to me”.

In St Paul’s Letter to the Colossians, Onesimus is again mentioned, as accompanying Tychicus, the bearer of the letter. The pre-1970 Roman Martyrology incorrectly identifies Onesimus with the bishop of Ephesus who followed St. Timothy as bishop of Ephesus and who was stoned to death in Rome. Other traditions maintain he was not stoned to death but was actually beheaded, and just to confuse matters further, in some traditions, his feast day is celebrated on 15^th February and not February 16^th.

So, there you have St Onesimus, whose chief claim to sainthood appears to be that he was some kind of personal postman to St Paul.  Sainthood by association, if you like.  Of course, it’s easy for me to scoff, as we are talking about things that happened one thousand nine hundred and thirty two years ago, things are bound to be a little sketchy.  I suppose Onesimus, if he indeed existed, must have been a holy man – more holy than me, that’s for sure!

My holiness, these days, is more holey than righteous. I don’t think I have ever felt more out of touch with spiritual matters. By the time I’ve dragged my reluctant body out of bed, across the banana board, and into the wheelchair, I’m already tired, and everything this year has been bloody, full-on, and relentless.  Painting, which I seem to have rediscovered big-style, helps to get me into the zone, but even when I am there, it seems strangely empty. I’ve more or less given up praying, except in extremis, although this week I did try and formulate a prayer for what Catholics would probably call the repose of the soul of my friend Leslie in Florida.

I miss those times when I had the feeling that there really was someone looking out for me, someone who’d got my six.  Especially when that entity was what Barbara Ehrenreich, in Nickled and Dimed, called “Jesus, the wine-guzzling vagrant and precocious socialist.” Maybe I need to go on a retreat or something. Time spent in the mountains is never wasted. The great art giveaway, in favour of Mossburn Animal Centre, Rain Rescue, and The Freedom of Spirit Trust for Border Collies, is also stuck, now, until Deb can find the missing portfolio, something she is unlikely to accomplish in her present state, huddled in a poncho next to the stove, clutching a hot water bottle and sneezing, coughing and groaning by turns.

The room was dusty and the pipes were old

All that winter, we shared a cold

Drank all the orange juice we could hold…

Amen to that, brother Paul Simon, you must be reading my mail.  Except that in Debbie’s case it’s carrot juice. “I do it for your love”. Vaguely appropriate, in a week which included St Valentine’s day. I may cook some vegetable soup later, if Deb feels she can manage to eat it. But in the meantime, from our cosy fireside in the Holme Valley, that currently looks a lot like the Fever Hospital at Missilonghi, at the end of another week where I once more failed to connect with the infinite, failed to achieve anything here on earth, failed to save the world or even part of it, and suffered a substantial loss, of a friend I had never met in person, I am going to sign out, and maybe do some painting. All too soon it will be Monday.

Epiblog for the Feast of St Eingan

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley, and one with yet more wind and rain. I don’t know if we are actually going to get any real snow this year, although usually if we do, it comes at the end of February or the beginning of March. I’m hoping we can get by with a mild winter, although “mild” is a relative term when the country is being lashed and trashed by a rolling Atlantic gale every two days, with no hope of respite or letup. 

We’ve been so lucky, so far, touch wood, compared to Devon Somerset and Cornwall, not to mention Dorset, Oxfordshire and the Welsh Marches.  David Cameron has now officially taken personal charge of the flooding crisis, like a latter day Cnut (subs, check spelling) which means we are all doomed.  They should do what Labour did in the great drought of 1977 and appoint a minister specifically for it. The day Denis Howells was appointed Minister for the Drought, that summer, it promptly pissed down, and continued to do so for the next six weeks; I know this, because I was hitch-hiking from Hull to Bridlington on that very day.

Here, the week started bright and sunny, for Monday and Tuesday at least, and Matilda was almost basking in the pale sun as it filtered in through the conservatory windows. She’s discovered that spot on the rug where Tiggy used to lie around this time of year, where what sun there is, is concentrated onto one spot. I reminded her of that proverb I quoted in last week’s blog, about the cat that lies in the sunshine in February will creep behind the stove in March, and she blinked at me, and yawned.

Wednesday saw the weather back-sliding into wind and rain again. The poor garden never looks its best at this time of year, but now the days are getting slightly longer, I can see the extent of the damage the gales have done, and it’s definitely worse than last year.  The entire vista looks like it’s been sprayed with mulched leaf-mould from a high-pressure hose, and the pond is full of the muck.  So much so that on Wednesday, when she went out into the garden to do her necessaries, Misty failed to notice that the pond even was a pond, fell in it, and came back plastered up to her shoulders with vile, brown, pongy mud and bits of leaves. A Border collie may be cheaper if they ever re-introduce the dog licence, on the grounds that she’s only black and white, but keeping the “white” bits actually looking white at this time of year is a full-time job, akin to painting the Forth Bridge.

As time passes, Misty is becoming more settled and less nervy, overall, fireworks notwithstanding. It’s hard to believe we’ve had her for seven months or so now.  She is still completely random in some of the things she does (the mad collie-dog agility chase through the house every morning, incorporating jumping onto and off my bed, for instance) but her recall and behaviour off lead is getting back to something like where it as before she was scared out of her doggy wits back in November.  Considering that she is such a good natured little dog overall, she seems to have a knack of inspiring a level of terror completely out of proportion to what damage she could actually achieve.

So it was on Monday, when Father Jack brought the camper van back from the garage, newly welded and MOT-ed, and I found myself negotiating with him around the edge of the lobby door, he being unwilling to come any further into the kitchen.

“I’m afeared of your dog; I think he might bite me,” he said, sounding for all the world like an extra from James Herriott or Heartbeat. If he’d also used the word “vitnery”, that would have clinched it.  As it was, he left a happy man, clutching his cheque, albeit still afeared. Then, on Wednesday, the man from Clarks came to fix my wheelchair and asked me to keep Misty under control. I assured him that the worst she would do was probably hi-five him into a state of catatonia in the hope of being given a dog-treat, as hi-fiving for dog treats is currently Misty’s favourite thing in all the world.  Anyway, my wheelchair is restored to health, even if I’m not, with two functioning brakes, and I am no longer leaning drunkenly to one side (except for those occasions when I am, actually, drunk) or in danger of losing one of my wheel-rims.

Friday was cheered up by the arrival of some knitted leg warmers from Auntie Maisie, who has been prodigious in her efforts to knit us all into a state of warmth this winter, bless her. Leg warmers may well be deader than tank tops and sideways-ironed flares in fashion terms, but nevertheless they are an essential item of clothing for surviving a wheelchair winter.  However much I thrash about, rave incoherently, and stamp my feet during the day (and this varies, depending how stupid other people are being) I can never get the blood sloshing around my body and keeping the extremities warm like I used to when I was up and lauping around.  Consequently, I spend a lot of my time sitting in draughts, of which our house has many, and getting nithered to the very bane, as Father Jack might have said if he were here right now.  The other year, I actually got frostbite on my feet.  Maisie made me some leg warmers last year which I wore more or less to destruction, so these new ones arrived just in time. Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow. 

Talking of Auntie Maisie, her indestructible daffodils now look as though they might be about to actually come into flower, although I haven’t seen the snowdrops in the garden yet this year.  There has also been lots of activity from the birds, and the squirrels seem to have woken up. So, it seems everybody is under the impression that Spring has sprung. All we need for a full set is Brenda the Badger. Let’s hope that we’re not all going to get a short, sharp shock in March.

I know that the daffodils are coming along nicely because I got the chance to examine them in close detail while preparing the glass recycling for collection.  Kirklees Metropolitan Borough Council, may God strafe them for this, decided to stop collecting glass for recycling in our area in April 2013, at the same time as they put the council tax up by £2.00 a month.  Consequently it tends to accumulate, and we’ve only had two real trips to the bottle bank since, one when Owen was here, and one when I gave the blokes who cleaned out the gutters last year an extra £20.00 to take it all away and dump it. I had the bright idea of getting rid of at least some of it by separating out the wine bottles and putting them on Freecycle, figuring that they might be of use to amateur winemakers. Debbie won’t let me make home-made wine any more, partly from the fear of explosions and partly because the last batch I made tasted like rats’ piss, with an aroma of peasants’ feet.

This makes it sound like there were hundreds of wine bottles, but in fact there was enough to fill a couple of cardboard boxes. What there was, though, was another couple of boxes worth of clear glass bottles, very similar, which had previously held the organic carrot juice which Debbie quaffs on a regular basis, in an attempt to be able to see in the dark and be as orange as Clint Eastwood.  Anyway, I put the whole lot on Freecycle, and an arrangement was made for some woman who expressed an interest in them to come and collect them on Thursday. So, on Thursday morning, which was, thankfully, bright and clear, albeit freezing, I spent two hours of my life separating them out from the rest of the glass recycling (it never ceases to amaze me how much stuff is still packaged in glass, when plastic must be both cheaper and lighter) and boxing them up ready for her to arrive.

I had asked her whether she was a winemaker, and she had replied that no, she wasn’t; she wanted them for an artwork.  I was quite interested in this remark, and looked forward to quizzing her about it more when she arrived. Which she never did, of course. I should have known. My only previous experience with Freecycle was exactly the same.  Freecycle is a nice idea, but until they make the bids legally enforceable, like they are on Ebay, it’ll always be a complete waste of dog farts, run by superannuated hippies with the organisational skills of a bloody Womble.  Of course, it banged it down with rain overnight on Thursday which meant that on Friday morning I spent another two hours of my life picking the bottles up and putting them back in the crates with the rest of the glass, and sweeping up the mushy remains of the boxes.  This is my life, these days, I am beset by idiots who hang on my every move like dingleberries.

Talking of which, the saga of the book stocks rumbles on. I now have a list of the stock which needs moving, but when I asked for the further detail which would enable me to get it actually moved, namely the number of pallets and the number of loose boxes, and what each title was packed in (ie 12s, 24s, 80s etc) I was told this wasn’t available. I am still puzzling as to how they managed to come up with the fact that there were 903 copies of Arthur Mee’s Hertfordshire just by looking at the pallet.  Either their warehousing skills have improved enormously to the stage where they have evolved psychic powers, or they used X-Ray specs or something, who knows. It is, however, another bloody thing that will need sorting out next week, just when I feel like spending the time painting, something that I feel like doing increasingly these days, partly for the calm it brings me when everything else around me is a raging ball of chaos, and partly because of an obsessive need to chronicle my life while I still can.

My plans to give away all my old artwork, however, have not been progressing as quickly as I may have hoped. One reader of this blog compared what I was trying to do (give away all my old paintings and drawings in return for donations to Rain Rescue, Mossburn, or The Freedom of Spirit Trust for Border Collies) to Princess Diana auctioning her old dresses for charity. I think that’s over-egging the pudding, to be honest, but I would like to see them do some good, and I’d rather they were up on someone’s wall, even if it’s only covering a damp patch in the downstairs loo, than mouldering away in a portfolio somewhere.

The problem has been finding the portfolio. We found a portfolio this morning. It looks very similar to mine. In it were... four A2 colour posters of tooth decay, clearly a left over from the day when Granny used to visit schools as a travelling tooth fairy and mental dental hygienist.  [Big sigh]. So it's not my portfolio, which is now officially lost, including all its contents, and which has not been seen for four years. Also lost is a framed painting of Skiddaw and a massive attempt at a medieval "Doom" painted in oils on a plywood board that was originally a pallet top. Debbie denies putting any of it on the fire while I was in hospital, so, in the words of the late, great, Toyah Wilcox, it's a mystery, it's a mystery, I'm still searching for a clue... as they say in all the best ad campaigns, watch this space. If I do decide to stand as an independent at the next election, I might get offered the post of Minister Without Portfolio.

Once again, it’s been a week when there has been so much going on here, that news from the outside world has had a job to filter through into my consciousness. I did hear that Mark Harper, the immigration minister, architect of the “immigrants go home” placard vans, has been forced to resign for er, employing an, er, illegal immigrant.  Why am I not surprised? You have only to read Mortimer Feinberg’s book Why Smart People Do Dumb Things to realise that hubris can blind the political classes (featherbedded and sheltered as they are from the vicissitudes of life) to ordinary, everyday common sense. The Junta has been very vocal about pressing for the maximum penalties in the case of people caught out dong what Mr Harper has been doing, so it will be interesting to see if a prosecution is forthcoming.  Maybe they’ll deport him. O/C Latrines, Falkland Islands, is vacant at the moment, I hear.

Meanwhile, the Home Office continues to dog and harass Mariam Harley Miller, whose appeal is now pending (see last week’s blog for a link to the petition against her deportation) and Isa Muazu continues to languish in the Harmondsworth detention centre, while Theresa May has seemingly escaped parliamentary censure for wasting taxpayers’ money on a futile attempt to deport him on his own private jet in the middle of the night, despite that fact that his hunger strike had left him blind and unable to stand.  Maybe Mariam Harley Miller should ask Theresa May if she wants any cleaning doing.

I have, however, finally had a reply to my letter to my MP, Jason McCartney, about the likelihood of a start date for the enquiry which Parliament voted for into the effects of benefit cuts on poverty. As you may recall, Parliament voted very emphatically that such an enquiry should take place.  He says:

The backbench debate on welfare was initiated by Labour MP Michael Meacher, Conservative MP Peter Bottomley, and Liberal Democrat MP John Hemming. As far as I know none of the details of any inquiry have been released, and as it was not business in Government time, Ministers are not compelled to take any action.

So, there you have it. Parliament clearly expresses its will, and the Government is going to ignore it. This leads me on to another question. If the Government is not compelled to take notice of the will of Parliament as expressed quite clearly in the overwhelming vote for an inquiry, and Parliament is not able to enforce that will on the Government, what use are any of the buggers? Let’s just save some money, disband the lot of them, and turn the House of Commons into a shelter for the homeless.  It would be a much more productive use of the building, especially given Shelter’s current estimate of 80,000 children in the UK either homeless or in temporary accommodation, and the situation neatly summed up in the 21^st December edition of the satirical magazine Private Eye:

In 2011 Grant Shapps, then housing minister and now Conservative Party chairman, announced the solution to this problem: give local authorities the flexibility to offer homeless families a tenancy in the private rented sector.

Alas, the number of families accepted as homeless since the election is up by 34 percent – a rise fuelled by the shortage of social housing, cut in housing benefit and, er, the high cost of private rents. The private rented sector is in fact the fastest growing source of homelessness. The number of families becoming homeless after losing a private assured shorthold tenancy has more than doubled in England in the past three years, and more than quadrupled in London.

With the supposed solution to homelessness itself fuelling homelessness, the effects of the coalition’s latest wheeze are likely to be bleak: an extra £100m announced in the autumn statement to spend on increasing Right to Buy sales – which will get rid of any remaining social housing even faster.’

It’s not been all bad news this week, though. A client of one of the Trussell Trust’s food banks was given a new pair of boots by one of the workers there, who noticed on his regular visits that his footwear was disintegrating.  Each small and random act of kindness is a brick in the wall of the new Jerusalem. The collie dog and the guinea pig belonging to the family whose house was wrecked in a gas explosion in Clacton were found, miraculously, still alive in the rubble and wreckage.  The dog began barking when a rescue dog, Reqs, was deployed on the search, which goes to show that the old adage is true, the best way to find a lost dog is with another dog.

Woosie the cat was returned to his rightful owners, after being missing for three years. He had been living as a semi-feral in the grounds of a Ginster’s Pies factory near Plymouth, where workers fed him tidbits and sandwiches.  For some reason, after three years they decided to catch him and take him to the local vet for a check up. The vet discovered Woosie was microchipped, and the rest is history.  What Woosie himself thought about having to leave the enclaves of the pork pie factory and go back to a mixture of ordinary wet and dry cat food is not recorded, but his owners did say he had gained a lot of weight in his absence and was “considerably heavier” now than when he went missing.

Zak the Chihuahua is another one who’s been piling it on, but in his case he definitely needs it, and it’s all part of his recovery. He was found, abandoned, frozen almost to death, and starving, in a cardboard box on 22^nd January, and taken to East Midlands Dog Rescue, who immediately took him to their vets. For a few days his fate was uncertain, but in the meantime, because his picture had been posted on Facebook, he went “viral” and the vets and the dog rescue have been inundated with people sending him dog treats, toys, blankets, and offers of good homes for him when he is strong enough.

When you read of stories like that, it does tend to restore your faith in humankind, at least until you remember the mean, miserable, callous, unthinking morons who left him out in the cold in the first place.  Well, what does around comes around, and I wish them a complete transmission failure on a deserted freezing motorway at 4AM. Badabing, badaboom. No doubt that makes me a bad Christian, but to be honest I am getting fed up of waiting for Big G to dish out the lightning bolts these days.

And so we came to Sunday, and the feast of St Eingan, a Welsh prince and hermit, who died around 590AD.  Other variations of his name include Anianus, Einon, and Eneon Bhrenin. There is also a tradition that venerates his feast day on 21^st April, rather than February 9^th.  Despite his princely birth, in what is now Cumbria, he left for Wales, where he ended his days as a hermit at Llanengan near Bangor. He is said to have been a son of the chieftain Cunedda, whose family claims no less than 50 saints.  I suppose there wasn’t a lot else to do in those days.

Eingan was also a cousin to the great Maelgwn Gwyneth, king of Britain in North-Wales, whose father was Caswallon lawhir, the brother of Owen Danwyn; and his mother Medif, daughter of Voilda ap Talu Traws, of Nanconwey, near Bangor. All of which serves to remind me, when I have found the missing portfolio, the next thing I need to look for is my copy of Early Welsh Genealogical Tracts, by P. C. Bartrum.

Eingan, retired to Lhyn, or Lheyn, now a deanery in the diocese and archdeaconry of Bangor. In that part he built a church, and spent the remainder of his days in the service of God. He seems to have died about the year 590. St. Eingan is the titular saint of this church, in the place which today is called Llanengan.

So, that was St Eingan, that was.  Another one who was sainted, it would seem, for being a holy and contemplative hermit, rather than for any specific acts, actions or miracles.

I seem to say this with increasing frequency these days, but I am not looking forward to next week.  There’s the nonsense with the stock to sort out and all the other myriad irritations and daily chores that grind me down.  Plus there’s an increasing feeling that I’m coming to some sort of crossroads again, where I’m being asked to decide what to do with what remains of my life.  It even affects this blog. I started writing it originally – or should I say, I resumed writing it, as a spiritual exercise, having rediscovered some of what used to be my faith while lying in a hospital bed, contemplating the big questions.

I came out of hospital in 2010 zealous almost, determined to do good, whenever and wherever I could, having being granted a reprieve from near-death. But the sad fact is that I plunged into a morass of trying to sort out my own life and my own future (and, ipso facto, Debbie’s too, so that she is not left with a right old bag of mashings to sort out when I’m gone) all of which leaves very little time for actively saving the world. I can feel my energy levels gong down and down, especially so at this time of the year, when just fighting winter takes up so much of my available resources. Then there’s the time I’m forced to spend correcting the misapprehensions of idiots. I’ve also let down friends, one in particular whom I feel sure has written me off, justifiably, I might add,  for not being around to offer support at a crucial time.

I wrote, and still continue to write, about my own struggles to believe in something called God, in the hope that others in a similar situation might find them of use in some way, but even that has become sidetracked by my reaction to the injustice and inequality I see going on around me as the Blight Brigade inflicts class war on the vulnerable. What am I supposed to do?  Do I sit here praying and writing about amusing things the cat has done, like some sort of modern day St Eingan, withdrawing from the world like a hermit, while ignoring the fact that people are being sandbagged and carted off to detention centres? Do I say it’s no concern of mine that homeless people are freezing under bridges, or animals being abused?  Yet for all that I bang on about it, I get the sense that I am preaching to the converted, and I sometimes think that the time I invest each week writing this blog could be far better spent painting pictures that could then be given away in return for actual donations of real money that would help alleviate real animal suffering.  In an ideal world, of course, one where I was shorn of overhanging financial obligations and where people did hat they should do, did it right, and did it at the first time of asking there would be no conflict, and time enough for both.  I get the feeling though, that this is not an ideal world, and I am not that sure about the next world, either.

So, here I stand, pace Martin Luther, or rather here I sit, on this rather bleak Sunday teatime, pondering my future, however uncertain, however short.  It feels at the moment as if the real Spring will never come, and we’re sort of living in a phoney spring, a bit like the phoney war.  Who would have thought it would be so hard to give things away, as well, just at a time when I need to be simplifying my life, be it artwork or wine bottles? Oh well, next week’s problems will still be there tomorrow, and there will be time enough for them then. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. In the meantime, I’d best get the coal in, bomb up the stove, put the kettle on, and maybe dream about those distant summers, back in the days when I “by the tide of Humber would complain” – the summers “before the war”.