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 5th 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.
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