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, 9th March, would have been Tiggy’s 18th 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 13th 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.
"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.
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