Epiblog for St Osburga's Day

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. The snowdrops are still holding on, more daffodils are appearing even as I type, there are now catkins coming out on the branches outside my bedroom window, there is a brief haze of cherry blossom on a neighbour’s tree, and I think there may even be tiny buds on our magnolia.  Other than that of course, the rest of the garden is a complete wasteland, redolent of Vimy Ridge or The Somme after the conflict had swept over it and then moved on elsewhere.

Still, even some signs of spring are welcome, and I found myself yet again thinking of Perdita’s speech from A Winter’s Tale, about

Faire daffadils, that come before the swallow dares,

And take the winds of March with beauty.

I suppose, given that it’s somehow got to the 30^th day of March without me really noticing, that we are truly half way through Lent and into those days described by the anonymous author of the 13^th century Harley Lyric:

Bythuene Mersh and Averil

Whan spray beginneth to springe…

There is quite a lot about daffodils in literature, even without recourse to old Wordsworth nodding and dancing in the breeze. In fact there is quite a lot about daffodils in A Winter’s Tale, because Autolycus also sings about

When daffodils begin to peer

With hey, the doxy, o’er the dale…

But then, since the whole play can be read as an extended metaphor, where spring stands for the concepts of redemption and possible forgiveness, I suppose I shouldn’t be too surprised by this. I have been spending my time drawing up plans for the garden, anyway, in the hope that – as far as winter is concerned – that really is it for this year. It is still a little early to hope, though – I’ve known snow at Easter before now and there was once a Yorkshire v Derbyshire cricket match at Buxton where snow stopped play in June.

Matilda has continued to welcome the advent of milder weather, and has now settled down to a fairly set daily routine, inasmuch as a cat can be said to have such a thing. First thing in the morning, when I come into the kitchen, she will be curled up on the settee next to the stove, and she often greets me with a short and unintelligible phrase in her own language. I make a fuss of her and furfle her ears while I am mending up the stove, and she retaliates by purring and head-butting me.

Eventually, she gets fed up of this, jumps off the cushion and goes and sits by her dish in the conservatory, which is her way of asking for her breakfast. Once she has stacked away a sachet of Felix, she then proceeds to the first of her daily patrols around the decking. This can vary in length from a few minutes to a whole day, depending on the weather. Or, if it’s showery, she can be in and out like a fiddler’s elbow, necessitating frequent trips to the door to allow her to come in or exit again.

By teatime, she’s normally got fed up of this and will come in and curl up on the Maisie-blanket on “her” chair next to the television, often remaining there until bedtime, when she gets fed again and then (usually) takes up her place on the corner of the settee nearest the stove, as we’re all going to bed.  Once I’ve closed everything up and turned the lights off, I commend her to the safe keeping of St Gertrude of Nivelles, and wish her goodnight, and head off to my own repose.

Such are the days of Matilda, and I was struck in setting that down by two things; one, how much of her daily routine is part of our daily routine, even though we’ve only had her for 18 months, and secondly, there are distinct similarities between greeting Matilda first thing in the morning and greeting Debbie first thing in the morning: mainly the short phrases in an unintelligible language, and the likelihood of being head-butted.

Misty Muttkins doesn’t really have a daily routine as such her time is fairly randomly divided between eating, snoozing, walkies, and trying to round things up, be it cats, other dogs (especially Freddie, but since he wanders round aimlessly, in a completely gaga state for large parts of the day, this is no bad thing) postmen, visiting authors and the coal man. It is actually quite fascinating to watch her total self-absorption as she goes into Border Collie sheepdog grandmother’s footsteps mode. The only way to restore communication is to distract her, by waving a dog-treat. Apparently, the Border Collie’s instinct to circle the flock and get round behind it was a genetic trait originally belonging to wolves, who circle their prey, and was selectively bred into the Border Collie breed over many hundreds of years, taking a detrimental trait and gradually moulding and bending it to serve man’s purpose in rounding up sheep.

Having said that, Misty’s complete ignorance of the standard Border Collie commands (away, come by, etc) and her inability to fetch back even a small stick might explain why she was initially turfed out of doors and left to her own devices. I can’t see Northumbrian farmers being particularly patient with, or tolerant of, a dog which, when you throw it a pebble on the beach, comes back with a jellyfish (deceased).  On the dog-sheep scale though, we are at least progressing slightly. We’ve gone from Tiggy, who was scared stiff of sheep and would actively go out of her way to avoid them, to Misty, who has no idea what they are.

Of the unofficial members of our menagerie, there have still been no definite sightings. Having sad that, the embryonic compost heap has once more been eaten, as have the remaining potatoes that I was trying to get to “strike” with their tubers. If it is Brenda the badger though, she sees to be a darn sight more furtive this year than has hitherto been the case. It could also be the foxes from Lockwood cemetery: we know they are there because we used be able to lie in bed and hear them barking and snuffling and making the most extraordinary sounds while mating, and once or twice we were able to return the compliment. At the moment, all we can say is we have a mysterious unidentified night-time visitor with a penchant for undercooked tuberous vegetables.

My own week didn’t exactly pan out as I had hoped. I closed last week’s Epiblog with the news that I felt that, as old daffodil-bonce Wordsworth might have put it, the world was too much with me, late and soon… and I was hoping to be able to set aside some time for quiet contemplation.  The problem with deciding to do this is that, unless you do a “Sister Wendy” and go off and live in a caravan in the woods, it is quite difficult to disengage from the world, especially if the world doesn’t want to disengage with you.  So I actually spent another week grappling with spreadsheets, figures, editing, costings, corrections, Debbie’s pay arrears, et cetera, et cetera. I was up and down like a dog at a fair, all week, with scarcely time to draw breath, let alone pray. Plus, I have lost my rosary – well, not exactly lost it, I have a pretty good idea where it got tidied away to, but it would take a major feat of urban archaeology to uncover it.

So I think we can safely cross off the life of hermetic, contemplative prayer, at least for last week. Maybe next week will be quieter, who knows I don’t see it, myself, as I am at least three weeks behindhand with everything this year, thanks to having to deal with the stock problems that still keep rumbling round, like surprise thunder in spring, some of which we also had this week.

There were, though, some moments where, though not exactly quiet and contemplative, the battle paused for a while, and I was able to savour something of special significance to me. The first of these was that, on the herbs front, all is not lost.  The herbs in the troughs outside have had a hell of a pasting from the rain and wind for weeks on end, over the winter. At least one of the troughs was completely waterlogged for days. However – and this was the bit that cheered my heart – the Comfrey, which I thought was dead as mutton, has forced a single, trembling bright green spear of a leaf through the mould and mulch of last winter, and is coming up again.  The Ladies’ Bedstraw, which had withered away to a few sticks, now also has new green bits on it, and the Soapwort, which had died back to twigs, is now putting forth green leaves again. Most startling was the Wood Avens, which appeared, still green and growing, when I tipped the standing water off the waterlogged trough: it appears, miraculously, to have continued growing underwater all through the weeks of rain and gales.

Then there was the arrival of my portrait, by the late Leslie Stettler. It had journeyed here all the way from Arizona, very kindly sent to me by her widower, John. Leslie and I had started corresponding after I wrote a poem about the Haserot Angel, the famous “weeping” monument in the Cleveland cemetery in Ohio. Leslie and her sister Christie were both Haserots before marriage. It began an unlikely correspondence which ended up with her reading Here Endeth The Epilogue and painting the portrait. I never met Leslie in real life, and the picture was done from a photograph. On seeing the original portrait, I can't get over how she has just "got" it. The photo it was done from was the one where Debbie always said I looked "as if someone had just nicked my Cornish pasty", but in fact, when it was taken in 2009, I was very ill at the time, and didn't know it, and somehow - God knows how - Leslie has even sensed and captured that.  Anyway, I felt very privileged to have it, and it is stored away safely next door until such time as we can get it properly put up on a wall. Orwell once famously wrote that by the time he was fifty, a man had the face he deserved, and certainly, looking in the mirror in the last few days before my 59^th birthday, I can sympathise with that sentiment, but now at least thanks to Leslie’s skill, I can have a sort of reverse Dorian Gray effect, where the portrait stays ever youthful, and I get ever older and more wrinkly.

Those were two oases of calm in an otherwise hectic week, and the outside world has been hectic too, or so it would seem.  Talking of undercooked tuberous vegetables, the Junta and the opposition have both been busy this week. In fact, on Wednesday, it was becoming increasingly difficult to tell them apart, when the parliamentary Labour party, with the exception of thirty or so brave souls on the back benches who rebelled, shamefully voted in favour of the Blight Brigade’s proposed benefits cap. This provoked a storm of criticism from those who think (correctly, in my opinion) that it is Labour’s job to shield the weakest in society and defend them from deplorable welfare cuts. Forty or so key figures in the Labour movement and on the left signed a letter critical of Miliband, and demanding that Labour must adopt new principles, or face disaster in the 2015 election.  Quite so. It must be FOR something, and not just against the Tories. Actually, having said that, it should maybe start by looking up the meaning of the word “opposition” in any reputable dictionary.

I probably will end up holding my nose and voting Labour, as they are the only ones with a realistic chance of beating the Tories in Colne Valley, but I wish there was some way of adding “this is in no way an endorsement of their shameful, lamentable, lacklustre, weak, weasly, uncaring, stupid, careless, pathetic, vacuous, nebulous, and quite often frankly idiotic, performance in opposition since 2010″ without spoiling my vote. Plus, anyone can promise anything a year out from an election. Look at last time Labour got in, when we ended up being saddled with Tory spending plans that figured nowhere in the Labour manifesto.

In any case, until and unless Labour gets its act together, out there in front of voters who matter, this is all academic anyway. The Tories and UKIP will romp home on a tide of xenophobia and bigotry. Sadly, the party most likely to be the party that wins in 2015 would be the one that announces a complete moratorium on immigration and an immediate re-negotiation of our membership of the EU, which ain’t going to happen, but that’s what the white van men and racist pensioners think they want, and that’s what Labour has to counteract. Putting it bluntly, people who have spent the last four years listening to the mantra that there are too many brown people over here taking our jobs and houses, are not going to be impressed by a pledge to create new apprenticeships, for instance, laudable though that is.

Labour needs to stop aiming over people’s heads and target the issues that matter to people, and not concede the ground to the Tories (eg on an EU referendum) without a shot being fired. The wonks in charge of Labour policy may well think it’s lamentable that so many people have bigoted and erroneous opinions about immigration, as indeed it is, but nevertheless they DO hold these opinions, and unless Labour does something to correct and counteract this propaganda, starting NOW, in fact, starting YESTERDAY, other than just trying to be more Tory than the Tories, this lack of engagement with an issue which is seen (probably wrongly) as crucial to the electorate, and which is exploited mercilessly by UKIP, will be fatal to Labour in May 2015. Wake up!

The extent to which the insidious all-pervasive message (which actually originated as Junta propaganda, until they realised it was also unwittingly feeding support for UKIP and toned it down) that there are too many brown people over here taking all our jobs and houses has taken hold in the national psyche was demonstrated by the television debate this week between Nigel Farage of UKIP and Nick Clegg of the Liberal Turncoats.  Clegg was predictably useless and Farage trampled all over him, pausing only to reinforce the audience’s prejudices with a few carefully-selected “facts”.

The thing is, though, that all this “tough talking on immigration” and all this vying to crack down harder than the next man, does have human consequences. Mariam Harley Miller, for instance had her life turned upside down because the Home Office wants to revoke her indefinite permission to stay in the UK. She’s lost her job, and now will remain in limbo until her appeal is heard in August.  Then we have the grotesque idiocy of Theresa May hiring a private plane at the expense of the taxpayer in the middle of the night in a botched attempt to deport Isa Muazu, despite his being too ill to even stand up; we have Jimmy Mubenga, who unaccountably died while being restrained by Border Agency contracted staff, on the flight which was trying to deport him, though in his case we may yet see Justice meted out to those responsible; and we have the case of four-year-old Assia Souhalia, dragged from her bed at dawn to be deported along with her parents to an uncertain fate in Algeria.

The list goes on. 39-year-old mother of two Ama Sumani, deported to Ghana at the end of 2009, despite being under treatment for terminal cancer, treatment which could not be continued there, where she died shortly afterwards.  That was in May 2010. You could be forgiven for thinking things had moved on since then, but it’s not so:  even as I type this, final preparations are under way to deport Yashika Bageerathi from the Yarls Wood detention centre, where she has been held since March 19th. She came to the UK as a student, with her mother, younger brother and sister in 2011 to escape a relative who was physically abusive. The family all claimed asylum last summer but all four now face deportation, and because of Yashika’s age, her application was considered separately from the rest of her family and she is facing returning to Mauritius alone, without any support network and family. A legal battle rages as I type.

And that’s not all: on Mother’s day, today, here in the UK, perhaps we should be thinking about a mum who has been left to bring up her daughter alone after her American husband was denied a return the country - because he had cancer.

The Home Office ruled he had become a burden on the taxpayer and originally the NHS actually billed him £98,000 for the cancer treatment he had received so far. Lorraine Marx, 56, is now bringing her 10-year-old daughter Alexandra up alone, after her husband Ralph was forced to return to America despite having lived here for 13 years. Previously, Ralph’s lack of resident status meant that he had to re-apply at six monthly intervals, but as he was frequently abroad because of his work, it was never really an issue.  When he was diagnosed with leukaemia in 2012, his hospital treatment meant he was at risk of over-staying his visitor status, so he surrendered his passport and applied for residency, at which point the Home Office rejected it and the NHS billed him!

His wife, a former Royal Navy chief petty officer, claims that when her husband was taken into hospital, he actually had private health cover, but was told that because his life was at risk his treatment would be on the NHS, even though she also pointed out that Ralph technically wasn't British.

A judge upheld the family's appeal in January, but the Home Office, unbelievably, is still wasting our money contesting this decision, and Ralph continues to live in America. As a result, the couple's daughter has seen her dad, who is now in remission, only once in the past year. The NHS has since dropped its demand for payment, but the Home Office spokesman said:

"We are appealing the decision because we believe it did not apply the immigration rules correctly. "Our family rules have been designed to make sure that those coming to the UK to join their spouse or partner will not become a burden on the taxpayer and will be well enough supported to integrate effectively."

To which Ralph Marx replied:

"We are not scroungers. We can support ourselves and have done so all of our lives. But we are being treated as criminals."

So the next time you hear a politician lying that they will “get tough” and control immigration (you can tell they are lying, because their lips are moving) just bear in mind that in reality, while we are part of the EU, they can actually do very little about it, other than the sort of tinkering around the edges that produces cases such as these. I am not arguing here for a completely open door to immigration, either. I’d like to see a sensible immigration policy, controlled by us, which is humanely applied and which allows into this country people who can benefit the country and/or are willing to work to do so. I’d also like to see some rigour and some intelligence put into developing an alternative dialogue on the future of Europe, other than UKIP’s simplistic “pull out and then send all the brown people home.”

And the next time you hear some politician wittering on about the finite resources, hard times, and austerity, ask them why there aren’t enough houses, schools and hospitals to go round. What have we all been paying our taxes for, all these years. When England was a bombed and smoking wreck at the end of the last war, Atlee’s government managed to build, restore, and house, school and treat everybody.  Replacing the social housing stock sold by Thatcher would also be a very good way of kick starting the economy for real, without having recourse to the sort of smoke and mirrors employed by Osborne.

You are unlikely to receive a sympathetic hearing, though.  Note the words of Ralph Marx, who felt compelled, from his cancer sickbed, to deny that his family were “scroungers”. Another of my correspondents, speaking to me this week, opined that she was heartily sick of “hard working families”. As a single person who has worked hard all her life and paid into the system, she wants to know where the recognition is for her efforts, and points out how puritanical we have become, with this idea of putting hard work above all other virtues. I’m not afraid of hard work, personally, though it is often boring and frequently unnecessary.  If I was still employing people, personally I’d want a range of talents. Yes, the ones who can grind it out have their place, but so also do the people who sit and dream and maybe have one good idea a day that either makes, or saves, the company a stack of money. But to hear the likes of Mr Osborne, we are on a fast track back to the days when you used to have to get up at four o’clock and pay’t mill owner for permission to work!

The Mental Welfare Commission this week reported on the tragic case of a woman in Scotland, identified only as “Miss DE” for reasons of confidentiality, who took her own life after failing an ATOS-administered Work Capability Assessment in 2011.  When she was informed that her £94.25 per week Incapacity Benefit would be reduced to a Jobseekers’ Allowance of £67.50 per week, she became very distressed and said she did not know how she was going to pay her mortgage. She took an overdose on New Year’s Eve.

The chairman of the MWC, Dr Donald Lyons, said:

"This lady had a lot to look forward to, she was getting married. She was being treated. She was undertaking voluntary work. She had a good social network. There wasn't anything else which we could identify that would lead us to believe that there was any other factor in her life that resulted in her decision to end her life."

No, quite. But then we live in barbaric times.  The difference between the two rates of benefit is £26.75 per week or £1391 a year. Such is the financial tightrope many people are walking these days, and such is the value of a human life to the pennypinching, cheeseparing DWP and its minions. It seems especially cheap when you contrast it with the millions wasted by the same department on not implementing the universal credit.

A correspondent of mine, a reader of this blog, once asked me, “how do you find so much to complain about?” to which my answer was that sadly, there is a never-ending stream, a litany of cruelty, stupidity and injustice, most of it emanating from the Junta, the Blight Brigade, our soi-disant rulers, elders and betters.

Anyway, one way or another this week, we arrive wearily at today, the Feast of  St Osburga.  Osburga was the 11^th-century Abbess of a convent in Coventry, which had been originally been founded by King Canute, that well-known scourge of typographers. Her shrine was a popular place of pilgrimage during medieval times, because of the many miracles reported there. As usual with Saints at such a distance in time from us now, there are several variations on this. For a start, she was also known as Osburgh or Osburh, and at least one source claims that the sketchy references which have come down to us, in various documents and chronicles, are actually to a male Saint called “Osburn”. Other accounts have Cnut attacking the convent, rather than founding it! Some accounts give her feast day as January 21^st. John Rous, writing in the 15^th century, refers to “the holy virgin Osburh” resting at Coventry cathedral, in a tomb possibly in the south transept. She had a “noble shrine” apparently, and other references are made to her head being “encased in silver and gold”.  And, of course, to make things even more obfuscatory, all of this refers to the old Coventry cathedral, burnt to a crisp in the blitz 1941 and reduced to the ruins which now stand next to Sir Basil Spence’s replacement.

So, I don’t think there’s a lot here to detain us, as far as St Osburga is concerned, noble, saintly, holy and pious as she undoubtedly must have been. I could do with a few miracles myself next week, if she’s listening, but other than that, I don’t really have a lot to say to her.  I did contemplate making this blog about Mothering Sunday, which was the Sunday half-way through Lent, when servants were allowed time off to visit their mothers, and which became the more commercial Mothers’ Day.  It is painful for me to write about this on two levels though – one being the obvious one that my own mother is no longer with us, and – as next week’s birthday will prove, if I am spared – I have now, myself, passed the age that she was when she died, which feels a bit like sailing into uncharted waters. Also, a dear friend of mine has a mum who is very ill at the moment, and if you are of a praying bent or frame of mind, some positive vibes beamed in her direction would be greatly appreciated. You may not know who she is, but if Big G is doing his job, then he knows, and that’s all you need.

Other than that, I am looking forward to another week next week very much like last week, if “looking forward to” is the correct expression. I could, I suppose, carve out some of the peace and quiet I was looking for by including a long list of my intended prayers in this blog, except that subjecting you to a list of the names of the people on whom I wish to call down God’s benison would quickly become boring.  So, instead, I am just going to have to soldier on, and hope for some quiet times in the battle ahead, to catch up on my dialogue (or is it monologue?) with Big G.  I don’t know if he listens, but there is an old saying anyway about men in battle that there are no atheists in foxholes.  This is very true. In my experience, there are just foxes in foxholes, listening in wonder to the strange sounds emanating from semi-rural bedrooms.

Meanwhile, here in England, the nights are lighter, it is still an hour to sunset, Debbie and the dogs are back from the cricket field, the fire once again needs mending up, but the kettle is already singing on the stove.  We live in barbaric times, but the Comfrey is thrusting out a green spear of hope.  We are six jolly miners, we’re not worth a pin, but when we get a bit o’coal, we’ll make the kettle sing!

Epiblog for the Feast of St Ethelwald

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. As if to signify and herald the official beginning of spring, we have passed the equinox, and from now on, for a while, we can look forward to shorter nights and the darkness receding. One of Maisie’s indestructible daffodils in the stone trough at the end of my wheelchair ramp is out, raising its golden trumpet in a note of triumph; the ones that were left behind in the back garden have been out for about a week now. I really must do something about the garden, and soon. It looks even more devastated by winter than last year, despite the relatively mild winter so far.

I have actually made a start, albeit in a small way. I’ve started composting again. I made some organic compost last year in two upturned water carriers with the bottoms cut off. These had originally been used for taking water when we went off in the camper, but had outlived their usefulness, so I cut the bottoms off them and last year I used to put things like potato peelings and veg trimmings in them to rot down.  This time around, it was avocado skins from Debbie’s current favourite breakfast of rustic, home-made guacamole. The next day, when I went down my ramp, I noticed that some creature of the night had nudged the makeshift “lid” off the upturned bottle, and scoffed the lot.

Undeterred, when clearing out the veg rack, I found half a bag of mouldy old taties that had started growing shoots, so I carefully laid these out along one of the empty trough “planters” hoping that the shoots would “strike” into the bare soil, or, if not, I’d just dig them in as more “compost”. Again, more  than half of them went missing overnight. I am beginning to suspect the hand, or should that be the paw, of Brenda the badger, especially as the remains of the mock duck cobbler that I put out for the birds has also completely gone.  Normally the birds leave some small residue of what was there before, but in this case the dog-dish I used has been licked completely clean. It wasn’t any of the dogs, because it was put out last thing at night, on a day when only Misty was here anyway. So, either way, some beast has set back compost production by scoffing the ingredients. Selah.

Matilda started the week by deciding to go on a wild camping expedition on Sunday night. Unusually for her, she went out of the conservatory door late-ish on, about nine o’clock, a time of the day when, normally, she is curled up in her armchair, on her Maisie-blanket.  I have no idea where she went, but she remained outdoors for hours , which again was uncharacteristic behaviour. It wasn’t a particularly benign night, either, in terms of weather. My remarks in the opening paragraph about the advent of spring should be balanced by the fact that we’ve had some very windy days, and more than one bout of hailstones. Anyway, return she did, eventually, and settled down.  Leaving aside the theory that, like many other cats, she has a second home somewhere, I can only put it down to a mental aberration in the crinkles of her furry little walnut of a brain. She was hungry when she came back, and I fed her without intervention from Misty, who, like everyone else sensible in the house, had gone to bed.

Once she had chomped her way through a sachet of Felix, she jumped up on the settee and settled down, so I wrapped the Maisie-blanket round her and left her to it. I had a poor night’s sleep for some reason, probably to do with the cold making my knees ache, so I was actually awake to hear the dawn chorus on Monday, and got up shortly afterwards. Matilda was exactly where I had left her, and greeted my reappearance by purring contentedly , then going to sit next to her food dish, which is her way of asking for breakfast. It’s hard to believe, sometimes, that we have been her humans for getting on for 18 months now.  When the days get warmer (we hope!) and the nights shorter, we’ll open up the cat flap in the side door of Colin’s house, then once more she can come and go as she pleases, although the Cats’ Protection League do advise that you should keep your cat in at night, all year round.

Misty is quite happy to stay in all night, especially when there are Muttnuts and Dog Treats on offer. Her favourite thing is still “walkies”, however, even if she doesn’t know the word. We have now managed to teach her “high five” “give paw” and “other paw”, which is a relatively recent development.  Her longest walk this week has been 16 miles, on Saturday with Debbie and Zak, and on her return it was quite clear she would have been happy to go out and do the same again. There must be a limit to her energy, somewhere, but we haven’t come near it yet.  Still, collie dogs were bred for long days of hard work out on the fells, so it’s par for the course, I guess.

I have also been engaged in an exercise pretty much akin to getting all the sheep in the pen this week, in that I finally decide I had better tackle the mountain of receipts which needed writing up, before it toppled over and killed someone. So I spent a fascinating day entering them up and analysing out the VAT. The government requires this of me, I don’t do it for fun. If you are an MP who is quizzed about expenses, you get away with blithely saying “accountancy is not my strong suit” or some such malarkey. I, however, have to be able to put a figure on what I spent on paperclips last year,  and, furthermore, if  happened to take one of those paperclips and bend it so I could use it to remove earwax, what  should do is to deduct the value of that item from my balance sheet as it would now be counted for purely personal use and not for business purposes.  It is all very tedious, and if I don’t do it they fine me or send me to jail.

Jail might yet, however, turn out to be the safest place. The week in the world at large has once more been dominated by bad news, or if not bad, then at least officially scary. Russia carries on seamlessly annexing the Crimea and no-one says boo to a goose about it. God alone knows where that will end, but it’s a good job that Debbie got out the Trangia camping cooker recently and checked it over.  At least we’ll still be able to boil a kettle when Putin turns the gas off, and we’ll have warmth while coal supplies last.  Of course, but for Mrs Thatcher we wouldn’t be in this predicament to start with, but that’s all blood under the bridge now. We can’t very well dig her up and throw stones at her. Thatcher is dead, even though, sadly, Thatcherism lives on, in both the major political parties and the lunatic fringe, the Liberal Democrats and UKIP.

And of course, talking of mad right-wing ideologies that damage the best interests of our country, here at home, this week, we had the Budget, with George Osborne’s grinning face everywhere as he claimed the credit for a recovery which only began when he stopped implementing the policies he claims are essential to fixing the economy, and which is at best patchy, selective, and unsustainable.  Just in case you thought that was merely me saying that, with my own level of numeracy firmly established by my failure to get O level maths, take a look at what the institute for Fiscal Studies said, as reported by The Guardian:

The message from the IFS is that life will get a lot grimmer after polling day. North Sea oil revenues are in long-term decline; the short-term fillip to investment will be removed; and – most significantly – there will be a second wave of cuts so big that no amount of smoke and mirrors will be able to disguise them.

The IFS web site has pages of number crunching graphs and analysis but if you work your way through the bewildering maze of statistics you occasionally find places where the think tank tells it like it is. The government is getting into “bad habits” of funding permanent giveaways with temporary tax raising revenues, and the mythical balancing of the books and return to stability which the Junta originally promised for this parliament has now been shunted into 2018-19.

This will, however probably go down in history as the bingo budget.  In another pre-election bribe, Osborne cut both the beer duty and the bingo tax, because let’s face it, that’s what working class oiks spend their time doing, isn’t it? He should know, he once met one.  The essentially patrician, patronising nature of this gesture was driven home by Grant Shapps, who produced and “tweeted” a graphic which many people, at first sight thought was a spoof, so crass and insensitive was it. Cutting the bingo and beer tax, helping hardworking people do more of what they enjoy. It’s that patrician “they” that sticks in the craw.  We toffs know what you peasants enjoy, I once met a common person you know, he carried my bags into Eton.  Now run along and get on with your beer and skittles, and leave ruining the country to us.

Still, at least it rebounded on them this time, with Shapps’ tweet mercilessly parodied and re-tweeted time after time in the days tat followed. However, amusing as it is to watch the wheels come off and the Tory bingo bandwagon roll headlong into a pile of cack, we should not overlook the sinister undertones in the thinking that lay behind Shapps and Osborne’s clumsy attempt at courting popularity with the beer and bingo poster – as Orwell wrote in 1984:

“Heavy physical work, the care of home and children, petty quarrels with neighbours, films, football, beer, and above all, gambling filled up the horizon of their minds. To keep them in control was not difficult. All that was required of them was a primitive patriotism which could be appealed to whenever it was necessary to make them accept longer working hours or shorter rations. And when they become discontented, as they sometimes did, their discontentment led nowhere, because being without general ideas, they could only focus it on petty specific grievances.”

Political blogger and commentator Thomas G. Clark published a table of Osborne’s original 2010 promises and the 2014 realities side by side on the day after the budget. His analysis of the figures on his blog Another Angry Voice, would – and should – make disturbing reading for anyone who thinks that George Osborne is leading us out of the wilderness and back into the promised land:

These headline figures illustrate the sheer scale of George Osborne's incompetence, yet the man is so delusional that he actually seems to believe his own feeble propaganda narratives, and even sees himself as a candidate to become the next leader of the Tory party!

If borrowing £207 billion more than you claimed you would, in order to make the economy £128 billion smaller than you said it would be is some kind of success that qualifies you for a promotion in George Osborne's mind, one must wonder what on earth a failure must look like?

The days around the budget are traditionally used by governments of every hue to slip bad news stories unnoticed into the public domain, while all the mainstream media is busy looking the other way, nitpicking and number-crunching.  This time around it seems to be the news of the closure of the Disability Living Fund.  This central government fund is worth £320m and provides payments for 18,000 of the most severely disabled in the UK, to allow them to continue living something like a normal life in society, as opposed to residential care, which would be the only option if this payment was not forthcoming. The Junta has already had one go at shutting the fund down, in November 2013, and was told by M’Learned Friends in the courts to go away and think again.  They have gone away, and they have thunk, and they are still going to damn well go ahead and do it.  The money will now be devolved to local authorities for them to administer it, but – and this is the crucial “but” – it won’t be ring-fenced, so it will take its place amongst other local authority expenditure such as civic junketing and mending potholes in time for the Tour de France.

This comes at a time when a report by the Centre for Welfare Reform estimates that severely disabled people are impacting unfairly on the 4.5m people who suffer a significant disability. Disabled people living in poverty were hit by cuts of £4660 compared to the average of £1126, the report claims.  Despite this, disabilities minister Mike Penning blithely asserts that the government’s long-term economic plan would “ensure that disabled people are given the support that allows them to fulfil their potential”. If you believe that, how do you feel about the tooth fairy?

Unfortunately, the “disabled” – and I am not sure that personally, I am happy with such a broad-brush approach to labelling anyway, when disability takes so many forms, many of which are not obvious – are up against the tide of insidious propaganda emanating from the DWP, which seeks to separate people into the deserving and the undeserving poor, the deserving and the undeserving disabled, as a first step to getting rid of the universal entitlement to benefits. So you get idiots posting things on Facebook which show that they have unquestioningly accepted this vile, spoonfed mess.

He's got MS, is bed bound most of the time and his brain is fried due to too much cannabis. There's very little chance he'll last another 10 years. That's properly disabled. Not the sort of people that go around the street with a crutch because of an ingrown toenail then claim DLA because they can't be arsed to get out of bed.

Properly disabled! There speaks a man who really needs to be reminded, by fate and by his own body, that we’re all only as good as our last heartbeat.  But it just shows how deeply ingrained the myth of the scrounger, the “disabled shirker” has become in mind of Joe Public in the last four years.  Lord Tebbit rose from the undead this week to repeat the lie that the only reason people use food banks was because they are there. I’m rather glad that I have taught Misty to run into the garden, barking madly at the mention of the word “Tebbits”. Barking madly seems an entirely appropriate response to anything connected with Mr Tebbit. This old chestnut was addressed once again this week in the blog of the London Food Bank:

Was it Chancellor George Osborne who got this myth up and running earlier in 2013, when he suggested food bank use had gone up, ‘because people have been made aware of the food bank service through jobcentres’? The insulting implication being that a bunch of layabout chancers are flooding through the doors of food banks in search of freebies that ‘hard-working people’ would never dream of taking.

It’s been emphasised already, and it was good to see this addressed in the first episode of Famous, Rich and Hungry, but the message hasn’t quite got through yet: Getting a food bank voucher is anything but easy. If you want to use a Trussell Trust food bank, you need to be referred by the jobcentre, by a frontline professional such as a doctor, a health visitor, a social worker or the police. They are deemed to be best placed to identify if you’re going through a real crisis and that your need is genuine. It’s only then that a voucher will be issued.  Are thousands of people in the UK – escalating numbers every month – really jumping through those hoops to collect a three-day supply of long-life food, without being in real need of help?

Still, we’ve always got the shiny new £1.00 coin to look forward to, unless of course you are standing in a supermarket car park in the rain searching your pockets for one of the old ones, just so you can get access to a trolley.

And what are Labour, Her Majesty’s loyal opposition, doing about all of this? Having conceded the battlefield on the EU and on benefits without a shot being fired, are they at last going to turn and fight? Planning to vote with the government next week, in support of the idea of a Benefits Cap, that’s what!  Meet the new boss, same as the old boss, as a certain Mr Roger Daltrey once wryly observed.  To think that the aims and aspirations of millions of poor, ill, and disadvantaged people, who will otherwise be thrown to the wolves if the Tories get back in in 2015, are reliant on the likes of Ed Miliband and Rachel Reeves is a truly chilling thought.

So yes, it’s been a black week.  As if things weren’t bad enough, I was reminded by emails from  several campaigning organisations that the Canadians will soon once again be starting their annual seal cull. I’m quite happy to debate this, although the reasons why it is a bad, uncivilised, barbaric, inhuman, nasty squalid little activity that doesn’t even make economic sense, would fill a blog s long as this one again. I just find myself hoping that there is some way those humans responsible could be clubbed to death within sight of their parents, and then skinned alive, and if that makes me a bad Christian, well, I never claimed to be anything more than a lapsed agnostic, these days. When it comes to seal cullers, caritas non conturbat me, as Belloc said in another context.

And so we came to Sunday, the feast of St Ethelwald, a day when I mistakenly tried to put the clocks forward a week early, much to mine and Debbie’s confusion, until I realised ‘d got it wrong.  Still, it made Debbie get up an hour earlier than she normally would have done, so it wasn’t entirely a bad thing.  Ethelwald, sometimes known as Ethelwold or Edelwald, lived as a hermit on the Farne Islands, two miles off the coast of Northumberland. St Cuthbert, with whom St Ethelwald is closely associated, lived there between his time n a monastery and his elevation to being in charge of Lindisfarne.  No less an authority than Cardinal Newman wrote of the place:

We are accustomed to consider a hermitage as a rural retreat in a wood, or beside a stream; a wild, pretty spot, where the flowers fill the air with sweetness, and the birds with melody. So it often was; and hard indeed it should not be so. Hermits have privations enough without being cut off from the sight of God's own world, the type of glories unseen. However, otherwise thought St. Cuthbert: accordingly he so contrived the wall which circled round his enclosure, as to see nothing out of doors but the blue sky or the heavy clouds over his head.

Ethelwald had been for many years a monk of Ripon, where St. Wilfred had founded a religious house, and afterwards was buried. Bede adds that in this respect Ethelwald presented a remarkable contrast to St. Cuthbert.  Newman again:

When therefore God's servant Cuthbert had been translated to the heavenly kingdom, and Ethelwald had commenced his occupation of the same island and monastery, after many years spent in conversation with the monks, he gradually aspired to the rank of anchoritic perfection. The walls of the aforesaid oratory being composed of planks somewhat carelessly put together, had become loose and tottering by age, and, as the planks separated from one another, an opening was afforded to the weather. The venerable man, whose aim was rather the splendour of the heavenly than of an earthly mansion, having taken hay, or clay, or whatever he could get, had filled up the crevices, that he might not be disturbed from the earnestness of his prayers by the daily violence of the winds and storms. When Ethelwald entered and saw these contrivances, he begged the brethren who came thither to give him a calf's skin, and fastened it with nails in the corner, where himself and his predecessor used to kneel or stand when they prayed, as a protection against the storm.

The oratory on Farne was eventually restored by Eadfrith, bishop of the Church of Lindisfarne, after Ethelwald’s death.  At that point, Feldgeld, Ethelwald’s successor, determined to cut up the calf-skin into pieces and give a portion to each of the devout people who asked for it.  The miraculous properties of the calf-skin worked on him first of all, when he used it as a flannel, restoring him to health from a condition where he had developed a huge red swelling that covered all of his face. 

Another miracle attributed to Ethelwald was that he saved some of his visitors from death by shipwreck:

Having been refreshed with his discourse and taken his blessing, as we were returning home, on a sudden, when we were in the midst of the sea, the fair weather which was wafting us over was checked, and there ensued so great and dismal a tempest that neither the sails nor oars were of any use to us, nor had we anything to expect but death. After long struggling with the wind and waves to no effect, we looked behind us to see whether it were practicable at least to recover the island from whence we came, but we found ourselves on all sides so enveloped in the storm that there was no hope of escaping. But looking out as far as we could see, we observed, on the island of Farne, father Ethelwald, beloved of God, come out of his cavern to watch our course; for, hearing the noise of the storm and raging sea, he was come out to see what would become of us. When he beheld us in distress and despair, he bowed his knees to the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ in prayer for our life and safety; upon which the swelling sea was calmed, so that the storm ceased on all sides, and a fair wind attended us to the very shore. When we had landed, and had dragged upon the shore the small vessel that brought us, the storm, which had ceased a short time for our sake, immediately returned, and raged continually during the whole day; so that it plainly appeared that the brief cessation of the storm had been granted from Heaven, at the request of the man of God, in order that we might escape.'

Ethelwald lived as a hermit for twelve years on the Farne Islands, and died there in 699AD. His relics were translated first to Lindisfarne and thence to Durham Cathedral but have long since been lost.

So, there we have St Ethelwald and his miraculous calf-skin and the life of a hermit. Once again the stories about him are probably hokum. Regular washing with a flannel probably did more for Feldgeld’s skin infection than the miraculous nature of the flannel, but nevertheless the Farne Islands, and Lindisfarne, come to that, are a wild and lonely and holy place, where it is easy to imagine living an austere and holy life of contemplation and prayer.

I finally got round to watching again a programme I had recorded last year, this week, about Sister Wendy Beckett, the nun and art expert who Debbie thinks should play the guitar. Sister Wendy lives as a hermit in the grounds of a Carmelite Nunnery in Norfolk, and I was very taken with one thing she said about prayer, which I hadn’t actually registered first time around when I watched it live. She said that silence is when God comes and talks to you, and that when you ask God for something in prayer, he doesn’t give you it on a plate, but he stands by you and helps you to try and achieve it.  I’ve been attempting to employ these concepts in a renewed effort at prayer this week, and I can imagine how being somewhere like Lindisfarne or the Farne Islands, with the wind howling and the sound of the sea and the keening of the gulls as an eternal background soundscape would help you to get into the zone. We are talking about stilling the mind here, which is also a key concept in Zen Buddhism, and perhaps it is no accident that the other Holy Isle (in Lamlash Bay off the Isle of Arran) is a Buddhist colony.

There are good silences and bad silences though. I’m not too keen on the silence at 4AM when you wake up because your knees are cramped and aching and you can’t get back to sleep, and your mind races over everything you’ve ever done wrong in your life and how you ended up in this state and that yes, life is indeed a terminal disease.  Caritas may not conturbat me, but Timor Mortis conturbat me, it conturbat me very much in the small hours of the morning.  I have, eventually, found some comfort in praying at those times, but I am not sure if prayer when you are semi-conscious actually counts.

The seeming pointlessness of life on some occasions, in a depressing week, can occasionally be offset by some slivers of good news, I suppose: two abandoned badger cubs were rescued by a wildlife sanctuary in Leatherhead, Surrey. One of them, unfortunately, was wounded and has subsequently died, but his sister is still hanging in there, a little beacon of hope, as I type. There has been a verdict on Jimmy Mubenga that means there is now a chance of some form of justice being applied to those who held him down while he died during his forcible deportation.  But really, you’d be scratching around for anything more cheerful, or at least I was, which makes me wonder whether once again my sense of purposelessness and my inability to pray any more may well have a clinical root, in depression or similar. Of course, there are those no doubt who would say that depression is not a “proper” disability, but believe me, it is.

I can see I am going to have to watch myself. At the end of the day, like Hardy says, maybe we shouldn’t expect too much from life, “just neutral-tinted haps and such”.  I’ve also been re-reading good old Belloc, or should I say mad old Belloc.  Especially The Winged Horse with its final stanza:

For you that took the all in all, the things you left were three:
A loud Voice for singing, and keen Eyes to see,
And a spouting Well of Joy within that never yet was dried!
And I ride!

My problem seems to be that I’ve still got the loud voice and the keen eyes, but the spouting well of joy has dried up. As Granny Fenwick used to say, you never miss the water till the day the well runs dry. Maybe it is time for a retreat. A retreat is not a rout, it is a regrouping – a controlled withdrawal to a prepared position. Maybe that is what’s needed. So next week I am going to try and deliberately set aside some quiet time, and see if anyone – or anything – speaks to me.

Teach us to care and not to care

Teach us to sit still.

Epiblog for the Second Sunday of Lent

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. It could almost be spring, but I don’t want to actually say the words, for fear of banishing the spell. The Archers have finally got around to appointing a flood warden (it’s David Archer, if you cared. No, me neither.)  Just when the rest of the country is finally drying out and that bloke in Muchelney has finally been able to recover what was left of his submerged car.  In our garden, the remaining standing plastic greenhouse has been reduced by yet more gales to a "tattered Arras", but on the plus side, the snowdrops are holding their own and, this morning, I looked out of the conservatory window and found that the remainder of Maisie’s indestructible daffodils by Russell’s mosaic had come into flower. “Faire daffadils, we weep to see ye haste away so soon”, as Robert Herrick might have said if he were here right now.  The ones in the stone trough at the front are in bud, as well.

Matilda and Misty have been vying for patches of sunlight on the conservatory rug. On at least a couple of days, it was so warm that we had the conservatory door open,  allowing Misty to wander in and out at will, something that she hasn’t been able to do since last summer.  Freddie and Zak have been to stay this week as well,  Zak benefiting from a couple of 13-mile walks with Deb and Misty, and Freddie getting to sleep in his brand new fleecy dog bed, in front of the stove. Matilda has been looking enviously upon it and coveting it, and it can only be a matter of time until we find Freddie sharing it with her, possibly against his will.

Debbie has been preoccupied with John Steinbeck’s use of language to convey emotion in the characters of George, Lennie and Curley’s wife. Yes, it’s GCSE exam season again, building up to the point where they all go mission-critical around exam time.  Tin helmets and NCB suits are the order of the day. It’s about time they started doing some decent books for GCSE English though. The chief virtue of Of Mice and Men seems to be its brevity.

I’ve been ploughing steadily on. Everywhere I turn there are mountains of things needing to be done, but all I can do is to make every moment count and try and knock off the ones with the biggest payoff each day. Unfortunately, the stock problem reared its head again, I have got book layout work coming out of my ears, the VAT return was due, I still have to pursue Kirklees College over Debbie’s pay arrears, and somewhere I’m supposed to find time to do some marketing.  It’s a symptom of the fact that we’re slowly recovering, I suppose – it’s better being busy than sitting here watching the wind blow the cobwebs, but it’s the relentless nature of it that sometimes gets wearing. It’s like being charged by the North Koreans, you mow down the front row and behind that there’s another one, and another one behind that, all singing Gangnam Style.  Before you know it, another day of your life has gone by and you lie there listening to the sound of your tired bones singing you to sleep.

I finally completed the first stage of my art giveaway this week, which is, I suppose, some kind of achievement. In the end we’ve offered about half the found portfolio in return for donations to Rain Rescue, Mossburn Animal Centre or The Freedom of Spirit Trust for Border Collies, and about half of what we offered has been taken up. Debbie, who thinks that all art is pretentious crap, especially mine and Lucian Freud’s is delighted that some space has been freed up, and the prospect of any of my stuff being framed and stuck on the wall here has considerably lessened. I guess I should take some comfort in being in good company.  I would love to find some way of painting full-time, but I can’t see it as a route to paying off my debts before I die, somehow.

The only mildly amusing bit of news that has percolated through to me from the outside world this week was that the fire station in Downham Market, Norfolk, burned down because it a) caught fire and b) didn’t have a sprinkler system. Downham Market is where my Rudd ancestors came from, and is a place for which the phrase “Normal for Norfolk” might have been invented, so I wasn’t entirely surprised by the story.  I hear they have requested emergency cover from Trumpton.

Other than that, it’s been pretty bleak and bloody. In a variation on the famous opening of George Orwell’s 1940 essay The Lion and The Unicorn, as I type these words, civilized men in a far away country are conspiring to kill me.  There seems to be a perception that the crisis in the Crimea has gone off the boil, but today’s referendum on whether or not to become Russian might well see it all kick off again next week. Mr Putin is already in a grumpy mood because thieves broke into the Kremlin and stole next year’s election results, and he doesn’t want to waste any more money on printing.  Joking aside, though, it’s no laughing matter if they go ahead and turn the gas taps off, especially since Margaret Thatcher saw fit to dispose of our own indigenous energy reserves underneath our very feet, as an act of political vandalism.

I was reminded of this because the week saw the 30^th anniversary of the outbreak of the miners’ strike in 1984.  I wasn’t involved at the time – I only moved to Barnsley in 1989, and our fight, at the time, was against the Poll Tax and the final round of pit closures in 1992. I never met Arthur Scargill, though I did march behind him, and a number of pithead union banners, and the Bishop of Wakefield (Nigel McCulloch, at the time) in a demonstration against closing the pits, in 1992. I was struck once more, watching a documentary on the dispute, by how bloody it all was at the time. Not only the violent confrontations on both sides, but also things such as people going hungry and kids being sent to bed without any supper. Thank God things have improved in the last thirty years…er…oh.

Trade Union disputes also featured in the news this week because of the deaths of Bob Crow and Tony Benn. Bob Crow’s untimely demise at the age of only 52 serves to remind us of the transitory nature of life. If I may be allowed to quote Mr Gordon Sumner, “how fragile we are”. Or, as the Anglo Saxons preferred it, “lyf is leone” – life is lent, not given.  Tony Benn’s death was, to a certain extent, more expected, in that he was 88 and he had recently been very ill, but nevertheless it was another hammer blow to the aims and aspirations of all those who struggle for justice and fairness in a society which is increasingly making war on the poor, the old, the ill, and the disadvantaged. I was reminded, bizarrely enough, of one of the times England’s football team crashed out of the World Cup. The morning after, when all around was defeat and demoralisation, I stuck two of those plastic St George flags on the car windows and drove to the office. One of my colleagues happened to mention that it was a bit late, putting up the flags the day after we’d been ignominiously trounced, and I replied that I thought that it was precisely the time when we should have been flying the flag.  To show we may be down, but we are not out. I get knocked down, but I get up again.  That’s what we have to do now. Parts of this country in the last four years taken more of a shitkicking than they did in the miners’ strike. It’s time to turn round, and fight back. And if that means we have to stoop and build up Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land, with worn-out tools, then so be it.

To do this, however, we need a more effective opposition. Well, just any opposition, really. I wonder where we can find one, given that it’s only a year till the 2015 election. By his pronouncement, this week, that Labour would not consider a referendum on Europe if elected, Miliband has once again shown the former white working class core Labour voters that he doesn’t give a stuff about their concerns.  Every time Labour does this, it drives the people they ignore more and more into the arms of UKIP, who claim to have all the answers. It’s no good wishing the EU wasn’t an issue – the hateful spew of vile bigoted propaganda issued by the Junta since 2010, which has done much to inadvertently boost UKIP’s prospects, has made it an issue, like it or not. As with the debate over benefits, what is needed on Europe is to take on the Junta’s agenda and defeat it, not to concede the field of battle without a shot being fired.  All Ed Miliband has done is to add a few thousand disgruntled ex-Labour voters to UKIP’s tally in 2015, to add to the many thousands of disgruntled ex-Tories who had already decided to vote for them.

There is nobody at the next election for people on the left who distrust the whole EU political project to vote for. I won’t vote UKIP, because I know that their stance on the EU is in fact a thinly disguised veneer behind which lurks a much nastier idea: round up anybody vaguely brown and deport them all to Bongo-Bongo Land.  But there are many others who are not so discerning. Meanwhile, just in case we were in any doubt as to their true intentions this week the Blight Brigade passed a law which allows them to close a local hospital by executive order, against the wishes of the local community. This is because they were beaten twice in the courts trying to do it under existing legislation, so they just changed the law, to make what they want to do legal.  They aren’t alone in this of course, Labour passed legislation in 2002 to make the previous year’s illegal contiguous culls for Foot and Mouth retrospectively legal.  The Junta were supported in their efforts to further trash the NHS by the Liberal Democrats, so remember that, at election time, when the Lib Dem candidate tells you he went into politics to “make a difference” – what he meant was “make a difference to the availability of healthcare in the UK”. And not in a good way.

People were queuing up in the media to pay “tribute” to Bob Crow and Tony Benn, in a manner reminiscent of the aftermath of Nelson Mandela’s death, when those who would cheerfully have seen him hanged in real life surged onto every media channel, brandishing their onions and lauding him as a statesmen whose like we would never see again.  The BBC commissioned the following poem on Bob Crow, from the performance poet “Atilla the Stockbroker”, and then refused to broadcast it on the grounds of “balance”:

There was a man who held his ground.
Fought every inch, and won the day.
His legacy, his members’ lot:
Good work conditions, decent pay.
By Tories and their tabloid dupes
And those who seek more than their share
Just like Millwall, his favourite team,
He wasn’t liked, and didn’t care.
But those who worked in transport knew
Their leader stood right by their side.
No management could lay them low:
They wore their union badge with pride.
He spoke for passengers as well:
Safety, not profit, always first.
Opposing fatal funding cuts -
Paddington, Potters Bar the worst.
Bob Crow. A boxer’s grandson, he:
Led with the left and packed a punch.
The bosses knew he’d take them on:
No smarmy smile, no cosy lunch.
We need more like him, that’s for sure:
Upfront and honest to the last.
He bargained hard and kept his word.
A union leader unsurpassed.
As zero hours contracts grow
And bosses offer Hobson’s choice
Let us not mourn, but organize:
Get off our knees and find our voice!
This man worked hard for workers’ rights:
A fair wage, a safe, steady job.
So join a union and stand firm.
That’s the best way to honour Bob.

Whatever you think of its merits (or otherwise) as verse, it goes to show where the BBC’s true loyalty lies. Of course, all these people who go on about what a good thing Mrs Thatcher was, and talk about Union “dinosaurs” and “back to the 1970s” totally fail to acknowledge that, had our own native industries been allowed to grow and flourish instead of being angrily stifled, there would have been forty years of growth and development and innovation; they talk as if it would simply be a case of going back in a time-warp to the days of beer and sandwiches at 10 Downing Street, three black and white channels on the TV, and everyone driving around in Ford Anglias.

The Union barons of the 1970s are often denounced as being greedy and rapacious. Last week, IPSA, the body which oversees Parliamentary ethics at Westminster, released data showing that between October and November 2013, MPs made over 3,300 claims for expenses totalling £4.5 million.

This data covered 61 days and showed:

•On average, 541 claims made DAILY
•Each Claim was, on average, £135
•£73,300 claimed in expenses DAILY

Hmmm. Anyway, we have all made it to today thank God, and apparently, according to the Lectionary, it is the Second Sunday of Lent, and violet vestments are in order.  Sadly, the only violet garment I possess is an Australian “Lizard under the Moon” T-shirt, and I had already got dressed this morning, before I read the Lectionary, so I shall have to remain inappropriately attired. I hope Big G will cut me some slack.  In the absence of an appropriate saint for today, I appear to have given up saints for Lent, so I turned instead to the recommended Bible texts which we should, apparently, be studying today. Some of them (eg St Paul’s letter to the Romans) are – I must admit – rather dense and impenetrable. I’m sure this is my fault, rather than St Paul’s, but I glazed over when he started talking about circumcision and uncircumcision, and the best I could manage was a feeble joke about reading it in the hope of picking up some tips, a witticism which I may yet discard on the grounds of taste.

Psalm 24, however, was much more to my liking, prefiguring Christ’s entry into Jerusalem:

Lift up your heads, O ye gates;
even lift them up, ye everlasting doors;
and the King of glory shall come in.
Who is this King of glory?
The Lord of hosts, he is the King of glory. Selah.

It’s the “Selah” in the King James Version that does it for me. Every time. So much so that I am thinking of appending it to every email and letter I send. “Dear NPower, I am stopping my direct debit in your favour. Selah.”

But the passage that most held my attention was the description of the Transfiguration in Matthew 17: 1-9.

And after six days Jesus taketh Peter, James, and John his brother, and bringeth them up into an high mountain apart,  and was transfigured before them: and his face did shine as the sun, and his raiment was white as the light. And, behold, there appeared unto them Moses and Elias talking with him. Then answered Peter, and said unto Jesus, Lord, it is good for us to be here: if thou wilt, let us make here three tabernacles; one for thee, and one for Moses, and one for Elias. While he yet spake, behold, a bright cloud overshadowed them: and behold a voice out of the cloud, which said, This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased; hear ye him.  And when the disciples heard it, they fell on their face, and were sore afraid.  And Jesus came and touched them, and said, Arise, and be not afraid.  And when they had lifted up their eyes, they saw no man, save Jesus only.

Assuming Matthew wasn’t making this up entirely, after a few hookahs too many, or whatever they had in those days, assuming Jesus hadn’t changed the water into wine while they weren’t looking, for a lark, this is a description of something between a mass hallucination and a supernatural experience. Like everything else to do with religion whether you believe in Jesus in the first place, and then go on to believe that he was transfigured in some way in front of his followers, is purely an act of faith. But it has set me thinking about the concept of transfiguration as a whole – about how a thing or a place or a person can suddenly become completely different.

For me, the concept is linked to art, because one of my favourite paintings was also in itself a transfiguration, for me. It was both literally and metaphorically a Transfiguration, because it was the painting of that name, by Giuseppe Cesari, in the Ferens Art Gallery, in Hull. I have appended it to the top of this blog. [I realise, by the way,, this is the second time in as many weeks that I have mentioned the Ferens. It’s a bit like buses, I’m afraid, you wait ages, then two come along at once]. 

When I first found my way into the Ferens, and stood in front of this painting, many years ago now, as a callow youth from the slums of East Hull, I was not only transfigured, but transfixed. I didn’t understand the painting then, in terms of subject matter, and I even didn’t understand the complexities of its construction and composition until much later, when I stood in front of it and sketched it for myself,  under the watchful eye of a museum guard – but, nevertheless, I knew, somehow deep down, that it was important, these figures and their strange aerial ballet. It meant something. Apart from anything else, it meant that art was not something that “wasn’t for the likes of us” – I could appreciate it, as much as the next man.

I guess what I’m groping at is that behind the idea of transfiguration lies the further ideas of hope, renewal, and that anything is possible. Shortly we’ll once more be in the period “bythene Mersh and Averill, whan spray beginneth to springe” and the woods around here will be transformed and transfigured by a new raiment of green. Maybe that’s the key. Maybe that’s what has been missing in my own life. A bit of transfiguration.

One of my online friends circulated an illustration on Facebook this week of the many and various reasons why people were admitted to a particular lunatic asylum in 19^th Century America. Apart from the fact that some of them are almost scarily whimsical (“woman trouble”) I noted that the first two on the list:

Bad habits and political excitement

Kicked in the head by a horse

Were almost a perfect summary of how I currently feel.  But maybe transfiguration is possible, and somehow, painting seems to be the key.  I could, of course, be reading this all wrong, and in any case, financially, I have no option but to keep on with the books and try and turn things around. But the concept of transfiguration is maybe what could stop it all seeming so damn pointless, as it has been of late. Now, I see through a glass, darkly – but then, face to face. Or, as T S Eliot put it in Little Gidding:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

So, for the first time in many weeks, I take some personal hope into the days to come.  The possibility of transfiguration. Well, it works for me. But for now, I have to go and get the coal in, and transform the fire, as the coals have sunk low while I was trying to write this, and the clouds have swallowed the sun.  And then I think I will transform some spuds into chip butties for tea. As the Zen masters were fond of saying: “after enlightenment – the laundry”.

Epiblog for the Feast of St Bosa of York

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley.  I almost daren’t say it aloud, but there is a possibility – I put it no higher than that – of spring just around the corner. The owlies are hooting at night, the birds and squirrels are active during the day, the pale silver sun of February is finally percolating through to March, the snowdrops are nodding in the wind, and I am certain that every time I turn my back, Maisie’s indestructible daffodils add another half-an-inch to their stature. The only harbinger of spring that I haven’t actually seen so far is Brenda the badger. I hope she’s OK – given the disturbance and noise nuisance caused by those morons demolishing the derelict bits of Park Valley Mills last autumn, I wouldn’t blame her if she’d upped sticks and moved to Brockholes. I almost did the same thing myself.

Matilda is relishing the opportunity afforded by all this springtime activity to sit inside the conservatory door, tail swishing and teeth chattering as she drools over the tasty-looking birds and squirrels helping themselves to stale bread and peanuts, only a few feet away. Occasionally, as a variant, she will actually go out on to the decking and sit just a few inches away from the dish, wondering where the birds and squirrels have all gone.  When she tires of these pursuits, which are inevitably fruitless, she can be found curled up and snoozing on her Maisie-blanket, in the armchair net to the TV in the conservatory.

Misty’s another who likes sunny spots, and she’s taken to sleeping in that sunny patch on the rug in the conservatory, exactly where Tig used to lie curled up. I like the pleasing continuity of that.  I have tried to get Misty interested in going out onto the decking to get some sun, on warmer days, but for some reason she doesn’t seem to associate outdoors and sleeping, she thinks that outdoors is reserved solely for walkies. Maybe it’s a border collie trait. I even tried to encourage her by saying “Squirrels! In the garden!” and then, when that failed, “Rabbits!” and, eventually, “Tebbits!” At the latter, she let out a feeble whimper, turned tail and fled. I don’t blame her, he has that effect on me as well.

She did, however, perform one useful and semi-heroic deed during the week, and one which proved she can do the border collie thing, if she chooses to. I was looking after Freddie and Zak on Tuesday evening. Freddie went to the door, which is what he normally does when he needs to do his necessaries, and I let him out onto the decking. As I watched him toddle down the steps and vanish into the gloom of the garden, I was simultaneously thinking he’s still not in bad nick for 108 or whatever he is in human years, and wishing I had a torch, so I could track his progress further. 

Also wishing that either Debbie (teaching until 9.30pm) or Granny (at Jonathan’s) were here to go down into the garden and check he was OK.  Minutes passed, each one seeming like several hours, and still he didn’t come back up to the door. Twenty-five minutes later, just as I was reaching for the mobile to tell Granny, reluctantly, that I had lost her dog, he came creaking up the steps, each one an obvious effort. Thank God. My relief was short-lived, however, because Freddie seemed to be oblivious to his whereabouts, and instead of coming to the door, he started wandering across the decking towards the other set of steps at the far side. Where the hell was he going? Shouting was no use, since he’s so deaf these days, so I flung the door open and said to Misty, “Go and find Freddie!” Much to my surprise, she went and did the sheepdog thing – she went round Freddie, on his far side, then dropped onto her front paws in front of him. Suddenly he seemed to snap out of his reverie, turned round, and headed for the door, with Misty behind him.  I don’t know why she can’t do it all the time, but whatever, she earned her Muttnuts that day. 

In other news, we narrowly dodged a bullet this week. Well, not so much a bullet, as a bung, and we're not talking expenses here. On Monday when Debbie set off for college, the camper engine made a strange rattling noise then gave an enormous backfire, before settling down to its normal rhythm. As she was already late, she drove off without investigating further.  On her return, however, she found a blackened and sooty lump of cavity wall insulation lying in the driveway. Someone must have tried to sabotage the van by squirting insulation foam up the exhaust, probably over the weekend while it was parked up in the driveway. Debbie had actually been very lucky that the evil little scrote who had done it had failed to vandalise it properly and the pressure had blown it out of the end of the exhaust pipe, instead of travelling back to the engine and knackering the piston rings, as happened with Debbie’s mum’s car when someone did it to her.

Our finances are so precarious that we probably would not have been able to carry out the expense of an engine rebuild and thus we would have lost not only our vehicle, but also any means of transporting me about or going on holiday. So I reported it to the police, and duly gave a statement to a PC who came around to discuss it with me on Friday morning. He asked me if I had any idea who had done it, and I was forced to admit that no, I didn’t, and that furthermore, if I did know, I would send Debbie’s brother and some of his mates round there with baseball bats to break his arms. Which probably wasn’t the wisest thing to say in the circumstances, but which at least was the truth. I don’t do forgiveness. In fact, I hope that the bastard responsible can feel my anger and fury boring into his back, right between the shoulder blades.

The police interview was rather surreal because the constable they sent had an earpiece in, and they no longer have those radios that everyone can hear, the ones that crackle and mutter all the time, but he must’ve been getting messages from base direct into his ear, because he kept drifting off into unrelated conversations and staring into the distance. Either that, or he was PC Tourettes of the Attention Deficit Disorder Squad.  He left with a promise that they would ask the beat officers to pay special attention to our house, which is something, I suppose.

Inspired by my recent resurging interest in art, and as an antidote to the essential unproductivity of the police interview, I then decided to knock one of the other tasks off my to-do list. For ages now I have been meaning to ring the Ferens Art Gallery in Hull and to ask them if they still sell those postcard reproductions of some of the highlights in their collection. When Hull was a lot nearer, and I was a lot more mobile, I used to pop in and buy them, but for the last two decades that hasn’t been possible.

The first obstacle was to get past Hull City Council’s call centre and actually speak to someone at the gallery, which took 8 minutes, 52 seconds of a conversation with a bloke called Stuart and/or a combination of various types of hold music.  Eventually, he admitted that he didn’t know the answer to my question and he couldn’t put me through, so he gave me a direct number.

Which turned out to be wrong. Well, it was sort of the right department, but not the gallery itself. Fortunately, this time around, the person who answered the phone had more idea what was needed, and after I explained my quest for the second time, put me through to the Ferens Art Gallery switchboard, who, in turn, transferred me to the shop. Yes, they did sell the postcards. And no, they didn’t sell them online, they didn’t have an online shop, although they had recently discussed it at a meeting. Well, I suppose this is Hull, where the internet is in black and white and only on for three afternoons a week.

So I said, do you have a list that I could send you an SAE to send out to me, and she said no, you have to send us in a list of what you want. I might just do that, starting with world peace and unlimited funds for donkey sanctuaries.  What a waste of dog farts.

The week contained a couple of milestones that marked the passage of winter and the potential coming of spring – shrove Tuesday and Ash Wednesday, neither of which we particularly marked. I think we ended up having vegan burgers and chips on pancake day, which is even less appropriate than one of my erstwhile colleagues in a previous job, who used to celebrate “hash” Wednesday by cooking corned beef hash for her family.  Ash Wednesday, for me, always makes me think of the T S Eliot poem, especially as I am, now, myself, an aged eagle, still trying to stretch its wings. And of course, the fact that spring is coming also means that time is passing me by, but I can’t have it both ways, I suppose; the only ones of us who are privileged to dwell in a land of perpetual unchanging summer are those of us who have gone before, all gone into the world of light, as Henry Vaughan put it. Talking of whom, today, 9^th March, would have been Tiggy’s 18^th birthday, if only dogs lived that long. There is an argument, also, that living in a land of perpetual summer would in itself become boring, that you need change to give you light and shade. Which would you rather have, a full life or a happy one?  Well, given the way my own cup has been running over in recent years, I think, right now, a happy one!

There is every danger, however, that we may all experience a full life, possibly fuller than we wanted, the way things are kicking off in the Ukraine. It’s been a case of waking up every morning and checking the radio to find out if we are at war yet. The parallels to the build up to the Great War are scary. The same combination of aggressive powers jockeying for position, a far away country of which we know nothing, and international treaty obligations that could snare us into a conflict that nobody wants. All that is missing is some modern day Gavrilo Princip, a wild-eyed fanatic to provide the spark that lights the blue touch-paper, and retire. One of my correspondents, Mark Harwood, drew attention to the complete lack of irony in Britain and the UK warning Mr Putin (who is not gay, by the way) about the concept of national sovereignty and how it was wrong to invade another country just because you didn’t agree with the election results and you wanted to change the regime. One wonders how Putin got the idea that it was OK in the first place?  I wonder if Mr Blair or Mr Bush might have any views on it?

Actually, there was some poetic justice this week, courtesy of the predictive text on Channel 4 news’s subtitles – Matt Frei on screen referred to the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, whereas the subtitles read “so gay lover of…” tempting one to add “Mr Putin”to the unfinished sentence.  Another public figure who had difficulty this week was the Pope, who unwittingly dropped the F-bomb while getting lost in translation and attempting to deliver a speech n Italian, not his first language, from the Vatican balcony. Unfortunately, instead of saying “caso”, which was in the script, he said “cazzo”, which apparently means something very rude in Italian. Still, he got our attention.  As did the Elvis Bus Pass party, a one-man political organisation, David Laurence Bishop, also known as Lord Biro, whose policies include legalising brothels with a 30% discount for OAPs, and who found himself unaccountably beating the Liberal Democrats in the local council elections in Nottingham. This speaks volumes for the popularity of the yellow Quislings, who have spent the last three years helping the Tories grind the faces of the poor, and no doubt Nick Clegg, as a committed European, muttered “cazzo” to himself as he kicked the table leg and left the building.

Other than that, the news has been nasty and depressingly predictable. It emerged that Patrick Rock, the 62-year old former deputy head of David Cameron’s number 10 policy unit, had been arrested on February 13^th accused of possessing images of child pornography. While it is of course the case that Mr Rock has not been found guilty of any crime and must therefore be considered innocent until proven otherwise, what does interest me about the case is the three week gap between the event and the news of it emerging, three weeks during which the Daily Mail suddenly started running a series of articles stirring up tenuous old allegations against  Harriet Harman, Jack Dromey, and Patricia Hewitt arising from the connection between the National Council for Civil Liberties and the so-called “Paedophile Information Exchange.” If I was of a suspicious and cynical disposition, I may have formed the conclusion from this, now that the arrest of Mr Rock has become public knowledge, that Captain Cameron, up on the bridge and seeing some heavy weather and potential enemy action ahead, got on the voicepipe to Stoker Dacre in the engine room at the Daily Mail, and ordered up a smokescreen, tonto pronto.  Cameron’s official explanation for his own silence was that he didn’t want to prejudice the case. Unlike those occasions, for instance, when a Labour MP is arrested because of allegations of suspected expenses fraud.  Perhaps a more charitable explanation is that Mr Cameron was just too busy mugging up on the concept of sovereignty, so he could lecture Putin.

Meanwhile, the food bank argument rumbled on. I used to think that the Junta would only see sense if and when someone died as a result of their policies, but I suppose that the Mark and Helen Mullins case should have disabused me of that erroneous assumption. Certainly, sympathy has been in short supply from the Blight Brigade over the case of Mark Wood. The inquest into his death was told that he died of starvation, four months after his benefits were cut. 44-year-old Mr Wood weighed 5st 8lbs when he was found dead in August 2013. He had been told the previous April that he was fit for work, despite having been previously diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, OCD, and a wide range of phobias. His housing benefit and employment support allowance were taken away, leaving him just £40 a week disability living allowance to cover all of his costs.

The coroner ruled that his death was probably "caused or contributed to by Wood being markedly underweight and malnourished" and his doctor testified that given Wood's body mass index, it was not possible for him to survive. Mr Wood’s  sister Cathie Wood described her brother as a "sweet and gentle" person:

"When the police found him, there was very little food in the house, just half a banana and a tin of tuna, I would like Iain Duncan Smith to stop talking about this as a moral crusade, and admit that this whole process of reassessing people for their benefits is a cost-cutting measure. I want David Cameron to acknowledge the personal costs of this flawed system. This is not just someone being inconvenienced – this is a death," she said.

A spokesman for Atos Healthcare, who carried out the assessment, said: "We carry out assessments as professionally and compassionately as possible." Which means not very professionally and compassionately at all, it would seem.  Meanwhile, a DWP spokesman added: "A decision on whether someone is well enough to work is taken only after thorough assessment."

Yeah, right. Well, you can blather on about mitigating circumstances, you can say well, he was just some nutter, you can say he should have sought help, you can blame his family, you can say that he was a scrounger and his illness was imaginary. You can say all of the many and myriad heartless things that those who have had a compassion bypass will no doubt trot out to try and divert attention away from those who were responsible, but the overriding fact remains – his benefits were stopped, and then he was allowed to starve to death in a land of plenty, and that is just plain wrong, and someone should pay for it, not just politically at the next election, but criminally. In religious terms, of course, this week sees the start of Lent, and sadly, it would seem that this year,  there may be some people out there – quite a lot of people, actually, whose abstinence during the coming weeks may not be voluntary, and we need to be looking out for them.

Someone who is trying to do something about that is Ransford Amoah, who will be fasting throughout Lent in an attempt to raise awareness of food poverty in Britain. He said:

Lent this year begins on 5 March. From that day until Palm Sunday I'm not going to eat any food. I'll have a glass of fruit juice in the morning, some vegetable stock in the evening and make sure to keep hydrated but otherwise I won't be eating anything at all. This will be a time of study, prayer, my regular work and attempting to highlight the growing crisis of hunger in the UK.

A person going without food in Britain is not new but, for some reason, it's only just becoming news. According to Oxfam half a million people accessed a food bank in the past year, and those I've met who have used them – and those who refer them in the first place – confirm that by the time people get to a food bank they've often already missed several meals.

He adds, tellingly,

Fasting is practised by many religions, in many different ways. In the Christian tradition, rooted in its Jewish cousin's practices, fasting has a strong and regular role in bringing the individual to a place where they understand their complicity in an unjust system and where they draw closer to God and to their neighbour. Well, our neighbour is hungry (in my case that is literally true, I've just discovered someone's been sleeping in our garden this week).

When Jesus began his ministry of liberation for the poor and dispossessed he spent 40 days in the wilderness and fasted. In these stories, fasting was not a stunt but rather a sign. Fasting can point the way to a greater compassion and help us demand that something be done to stop this crisis in its tracks. This is why we're inviting you to join us by signing up to a National Day of Fasting on 4 April by registering at endhungerfast.co.uk. We can all help: whether you are spiritual, religious, or just that wonderful thing called "human".

And so we came to Sunday, and the Feast of St Bosa, and a bright, fine, hard, spring day.  St Bosa died in 705AD, and, strangely enough, he was involved n the events surrounding last week’s saint, St Chad, which gives a strange sense of continuity I don’t think we’ve ever had to concurrently running saints before. St Bosa was a bishop of York who was praised by the Venerable Bede. Starting out as a monk at Whitby Abbey under St Hilda (not literally, although you never know…) he was consecrated a Bishop by St Theodore in 678AD, going on to become the Bishop (effectively Archbishop) of York when St Wilfred was exiled by King Aldfrid in 691AD.  Apparently he was a man of unusual merit and sanctity, according to Bede, but the actual grounds for his sainthood see rather thin and sketchy.

In fact, if we were looking for saints this week, possibly the best candidate might indeed be Ransford Amoah.  As for my prospects for Lent, the “crabbed lentoun” as the Gawain poet calls it, look pretty much as before. Thank God, so far, we haven’t been driven to the desperate state of not having enough to eat, but it’s all so precarious, when something like an act of mindless vandalism and a huge garage bill could alter everything overnight. The bad news is I am gong to have to call a halt to the painting – I’ve got accounts tasks to do, as well as a VAT return, a mountain of book layout work to do, and the issue of the disposal/dispersal of the stock has reared its ugly chops again. So I doubt I’ll have time for much in the way of prayer and reflection. However, on the plus side, the missing art portfolio has now been found, so I can at last start giving away my early artworks in return for donations to Mossburn Animal Centre,  Rain Rescue, and the Freedom of Spirit Trust for Border Collies. Other than that, it’s looking very much like the mixture as before, with only the distant glimmer of Easter as the light at the end of the proverbial tunnel, that may yet turn out to be the proverbial oncoming train.

I think I have to largely accept, because the wreckage of it is lying around me everywhere in plain sight, that my spiritual life is currently in a state of disrepair. In fact, in many ways, this blog is turning out a lot like the first world war, starting out full of idealism and fire and it’ll be all over by Christmas, and ending up as day after day of grim, meaningless attrition. This is, of course, at least partially down to me – as Richard Bach is fond of pointing out, you are never given a problem without also being given the key to its solution, and this is true in my case. I could sell up everything, impose a radical change on my life and the lives of those for whom I am responsible, and go and live in a Yurt in the woods. But that would be like admitting I was wrong with everything I have tried to do in my life, or at least in recent years. And it would be so tiring, I quail at the thought of it.

So, in the meantime, I concentrate on keeping hearth and home together, welcome the lengthening days, and wearily, I begin to make plans to rectify the damage that yet another winter has done to the garden, and to me.  To stoop, and build ‘em up with worn out tools, as Mr Kipling has it.  Talking of which, it might be time to put the kettle on, this Sunday teatime, and see if we have any exceedingly good cakes. And meanwhile, accounts, stock and editing notwithstanding, I’ll try and do what I seem to be best at, and keep the home fires burning.