Epiblog for the Fifteenth Sunday after Trinity

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley.  The weather continues much the same, with dull days and occasional bits and bats of rain, although it’s stayed reasonably warm. The leaves are starting to turn, however, and of course this week we had the equinox as well, so we’re now on the ever-darkening road to Christmas.

Matilda’s been making the most of what sunshine there is, although she never strays far from the decking, presumably because the wood is warm and retains the heat. She’s also taken to sleeping on the settee in Colin’s front room, yet another shift of location (she seems to swop around where she sleeps every couple of months or so). Anyway, this has at least enabled Misty to reclaim the disputed dog-bed, which she did on the first opportunity.

I sometimes wonder what’s going on in Misty’s little furry brain. She was dithering about on the decking the other day, and I wanted to make sure that she went down into the garden to do her stuff, so I picked up one of the “fat balls” that we put out for the birds, and lobbed it over the fence. It landed down by the pond, and I was hoping that Misty would go down and investigate it, being a collie and therefore more interested in balls than the average dog.  She did, in fact, go down and investigate it: not only that, but she picked it up in her mouth and carried it around the garden for a while. Then she dug a hole for it next to the pond, and buried it. Strange, strange dog.

Zak and Ellie have been around for a couple of days while Granny’s been otherwise occupied, so Zak got the “benefit” if that’s the right word, of two separate 11-mile walks with Misty and Deb. He was certainly hungry when he got back.  Ellie didn’t go because she’s not too well. Also, she does have a habit of setting off on her own at a tangent. She’s been back to the vet this week because of a potential allergy problem with the stitches from her biopsy, so we’ll have to see how she gets on.

I sometimes wonder what’s going on in Debbie’s little furry brain as well. This week, while the garage had the camper van, they lent her a car. Having the unaccustomed luxury of a bonnet (the car, not Debbie) she parked up at one of her peripatetic venues and, while she was locking up, she dumped all of the paperwork, personal assessments, lesson plans etc in a pile on the said bonnet. One small but effective gust of wind later, and she was picking them out of the hedge for the next 45 minutes.

Actually, I shouldn’t crow. Something similar once happened to me, with a box containing an entire financial year’s receipts, which I was taking to the accountants. In my case, the gust of wind was not small but effective, it was a full blown blast of a gale, which scattered them like the autumnal leaves that strew the brooks in Vallambrosa, half way down the street. It was just about dawn on a cold November morning, and it had been raining overnight, so most of them landed in puddles. I spent the next three hours picking up each last one. I phoned the accountants to tell them there was a problem, and I would have to re-appoint the meeting. Fortunately, on that occasion, my friend Maisie, out of the great goodness of her heart, not only straightened them all out, but actually ironed them, to get rid of the rainwater. By this means, most of them were saved. She returned them with a note that said “Here are the receipts. I never want to see them again.” So I guess Debbie got off quite lightly, although some of the lesson plans might have been a bit grubby. Other than that, she has been busy foraging, in what is laughingly described by Kirklees College as her spare time, and brought back another two poisonous specimens this week.  No, I didn’t put them in the stir-fry. Although there have been occasions when I felt like it. This week has been even worse than last, in many ways. Thank God I’ve been too busy to notice, most of the time.

The bitterness and resentment on all sides over the result of the Scottish referendum continues. The internet is full of disgruntled yes voters, whose complaints focus on the vote being rigged, the media being biased, the banks being against them, and the “scaremongering” which apparently “cowed” the no voters.  I found myself trying to examine these assertions as dispassionately as I could, given the fact that I thought the version of “independence” on offer to Scotland was a disaster waiting to happen, for the reasons I have often enumerated in previous blogs.

The vote was fixed: could this really have been done? Like the 9/11 conspiracy theories, for it to be correct, it would have required a level of country-wide organisation which would also have involved dozens of people being “in the know” – and as for the video of the teller supposedly putting yes votes on the no file, presumably since this woman and the count at which she was working can be identified, why not make an official complaint to the Electoral Commission or whoever is supposed to oversee these things? So far, the only “official” complaint seems to have come from Russia, a country where thieves once broke into the Kremlin and stole next year’s election results.

The media was biased: this complaint seems mainly to rest on the fact that the yes voters objected to Nick Robinson’s line of questioning in the new-famous press conference where he tried (in vain) to pin Alex Salmond down on the issue of corporation tax. If you ask me, and I have absolutely no brief for Robinson, Salmond was lucky to have such an easy ride from the media during a campaign where he answered very few questions.

Which leads me on to “scaremongering”: there would have been one easy way for the yes campaign to have neutralised "scaremongering" - they could just have come up with some credible answers to the quite legitimate fears and concerns on which it was based. The fact that they could not, or chose not to, was their undoing, if you ask me.

I can only assume that they could not because the necessary detail was lacking on several crucial issues and/or the yes voters were simply told to say, well, we'll worry about the detail after we've won, and that didn't wash with the more canny, risk-averse no voters.

The banks were against the yes voters: the banks are not “for” or “against” anyone, other than themselves. Same for the big companies. They looked at the SNP’s economic plans, they came to the conclusion that they didn’t add up, and they voted with their wallets. As they always do, and as they always will.

Part of the injustice that the yes voters feel seems to also rest on the idea that Scotland always gets a government it didn’t vote for. Whilever Scotland is part of the UK, it gets the government the UK, of which it is a part, votes for.  The fact that Scotland (or some parts of its political establishment) regards itself as a country is irrelevant in UK electoral terms. Across the UK, up to 49% of people could get the government they didn’t want. If you want an SNP government, then send SNP MPs to Westminster which some people are finally waking up to as a solution.

Having said that, I have said some pretty hard things about Alex Salmond over the years, but at least he had the courage and integrity to resign in the wake of the defeat. Some of the scumbag politicians we've had in the UK parliament, who have clung on until their grubby fingernails were prised off the cliff one by one could well do to take a lesson from that.

But, in the meantime, the rancour goes on. It will only get worse, as well, if Cameron is allowed to get away with ratting on his pre-referendum promises to the Scottish electorate. But right now, the atmosphere is pretty poisonous, with people posting things on social media sites like:

The No-voters are a poorer calibre of human being than the Yes-voters. The very fact they allowed fear to rule them instead of hope in the possibility of change. Anti-Scottish spite was all over some of the comment-sections of the newspapers. It made me ask myself just where all this bile came from.

As a heady mixture of assumption, stereotyping, and irony, you’d have to look a long way for a better example.  It is possible, of course, that people voted “no” out of a very genuine concern for Scotland’s future, so I wouldn’t be too quick to label them as a sub-species  – sometimes it requires a certain amount of courage to stand up and be the only lemming who says hang on, shouldn’t we re-think this whole cliff thing. But it hasn’t stopped people posting “I am proud of my yes voting friends in a way I could never be proud of those who voted no.” It’s all very sad.  I have actually wondered myself whether we really should be going on holiday next year to a country where 45% of the people will be harbouring some sort of brooding resentment against us, and I’m probably not alone in this.

I don’t blame the Scots for feeling betrayed by Cameron, though, as it is becoming more and more obvious that he is going to try and weasel out of the additional commitments he promised.  I’m sorry to go on about him so much. I realise this started out as a blog on spiritual matters, so feel free to either skip the next bit or treat it as a homily on the problem of evil and the impossibility of forgiveness. At least he had to suffer the chagrin this week of being castigated for giving away the details of his private conversation with the Queen when he phoned her to tell her the referendum results.  My own theory is that, rather than purring down the phone at him, she was snoring. Either that, or she’d already hung up and he was listening to the dialling tone.

It would be funny if it wasn’t such a manifestation of malevolent intent, but this week also saw the carefully-orchestrated decision to pledge UK support for air-strikes against ISIL.  Not only was the recall of parliament and the debate deliberately timed to spike the guns of the UKIP conference, but the previous evening also saw the arrest and detention of several of the “usual suspects” under the pretext of “preventing” “terrorism”. The fact is that the Junta could have arrested Anjem Choudary at any time, and with a similar result: that they would have to release him again, because, although he is a fundamentalist wingnut of the first order who is never happier than when he’s winding up some innocent young kid to strap on a suicide vest, he’s also very careful always to do it within the law, which is why he hasn’t been nailed many times before. It was done (along with the other arrests) on Thursday night purely to add to the climate of fear.  In the same way as, once the vote had been announced in Parliament, Boris Johnson urged Londoners to be “vigilant” on the tube. If Boris Johnson advised me to be vigilant the first thing I'd check would be to see if his hand was in my pocket stealing my wallet.

I watched/listened to the ISIL parliamentary debate online on Hansard TV, while I was working. When you look at this appalling set of grotesque old waxworks in person, you find yourself wondering "Jesus Christ, is this really the best and most able 635 people in the country?" I think it was George Bernard Shaw who said that if the scenes from inside an abattoir were broadcast, people would become vegetarian overnight; I think if watching broadcasts of parliament was made compulsory, there's be a revolution tomorrow.

As far as the rights and wrongs of us bombing ISIS are concerned, I could produce a masterly summary of what is wrong with it, going back and quoting things I have written previously, starting with condemning the first Iraq war in 2002. But I don’t think, in all honesty, I could do better than Aubrey Bailey, of Fleet, Hampshire, who summed up the whole stinking mess in one pithy letter to, of all people The Daily Mail.

Are you confused by what is going on in the Middle East? Let me explain. We support the Iraqui government in the fight against Islamic State. We don’t like IS, but IS is supported by Saudi Arabia, whom we do like.  We don’t like President Assad in Syria. We support he fight against him, but not IS, which is also fighting against him.  We don’t like Iran, but Iran supports the Iraqui government against IS. So, some of our friends support our enemies and some of our enemies are our friends, and some of our enemies are fighting against our other enemies, whom we want to lose, but we don’t want our enemies who are fighting our enemies to win. If the people we want to defeat are defeated, they might be replaced by people we like even less. And all this was started by our invading a country to drive out terrorists who weren’t actually there until we went in to drive them out. Do you understand now?

Well said, Aubrey Bailey.  I’d go on further to say that I never realised that our smart bombs were so smart that they could detect, from 30,000 feet, an ISIL/ISIS terrorist raping a tribeswoman victim, and blow him to smithereens while leaving her unharmed. Of course, this only applies if he’s on the wrong side of the Syrian border. If he drags her a few yards into Syria and then has his evil way with her, we won’t do a thing about it. (As it currently stands, anyway, although the vote gave Cameron the option to take further action as he thinks fit, without necessarily having to come back to parliament for another mandate, so what’s the betting that in six months time, Cameron, or Boris Johnson, or Nigel Farage, or whoever’s prime minister, will be on our screens saying that regrettably we had no option but to commit ground troops and our thoughts are with the families of the casualties, who have been informed. Better dust off those flags in Wootton Bassett.)

This is the rub, though. What to do about the abuses of the ISIL/ISIS/whatever they are calling themselves this week who are massacring and oppressing Christians in the area. (See, I said I would get back to religion eventually, and I have already mentioned Jesus, albeit slightly out of context.)  To provide the necessary cordon sanitaire, I can’t see any way other than deploying ground troops. But the question is whose ground troops? Again, I could have a stab at answering this myself, but it would take a lot of ink and paper, and it would also contain a detailed and parallel argument for the draining of the swamp of anti-Muslim sentiment at home and abroad. When you’re in a Wadi, stop digging. But perhaps the argument is better illustrated by a section of the actual ISIL debate from Hansard (I have removed the line and column index inserts, because they break up the flow. If you want the original it’s online on their web site.) George Galloway may be a controversial figure, but I can’t really argue with most of what he says here.

George Galloway (Bradford West) (Respect): Mr Speaker, time does not permit me to tell you how many millions of times “I told you so” is currently being said in the country—or will be once people read of this debate. Millions of ordinary people knew what the expensive talent governing our country did not know, namely that there was no al-Qaeda in Iraq and that there was no Islamist fundamentalism in Iraq before Mr Blair—and his mouthpieces who are still here—and Mr Bush invaded and occupied the country. What a tangled web we have woven is abundantly clear to everyone watching this debate. The mission creep has not even waited for the end of the debate. The words on the motion are about bombing Iraq, but there is a consensus in here that we will soon be bombing Syria. The words do not mention boots on the ground, but there is a consensus here that there will be boots on the ground, the only question being whose boots they will be.

The debate has been characterised by Members of Parliament moving around imaginary armies. The Free Syrian Army is a fiction that has been in the receipt of hundreds of millions of dollars and hundreds of tonnes of weapons, virtually all of which were taken from them by al-Qaeda, which has now mutated into ISIL. The Iraqi army is the most expensively trained and most modernly equipped army in history. Hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent on the Iraqi army, which ran away leaving its equipment behind. ISIL itself is an imaginary army. A former Defence Secretary no less said that we must bomb its bases. It does not have any bases. The territory that its personnel control is the size of Britain and yet there are only between 10,000 and 20,000 of them. Do the maths. They do not concentrate as an army. They do not live in bases. The only way that a force of that size could successfully hold the territory that it holds is if the population acts as the water in which it swims. The population is quiescent because of western policies and western invasion and occupation. That is the truth of the matter. ISIL could not survive for five minutes if the tribes in the west of Iraq rose up against it.

Ian Austin (Dudley North) (Lab): Does the hon. Gentleman understand how appalled people will be to hear him say that women who have been buried alive or enslaved have been quiescent in their persecution by these people? What a total disgrace.

George Galloway: They don’t like it up them, Mr Speaker. They would rather have an imaginary debate, moving around imaginary armies. ISIL is a death cult. It is a gang of terrorist murderers. It is not an army and is certainly not an army that will be destroyed by aerial bombardment. ISIL is able to rule the parts of Iraq that it does because nobody in those parts has any confidence in the Government in Baghdad, a sectarian Government helped into power by Bremer and the deliberate sectarianisation of Iraqi politics by the occupation authorities. The Government know that. That was why they pushed al-Maliki out—even though he won the election, by the way, if we are talking about democracy. They pushed him out because they knew that far too many people in ISIL-occupied Iraq had no confidence in the Baghdad Government. Nobody has any confidence in the army emanating out of Baghdad.

This will not be solved by bombing. We have been bombing Iraqis for 100 years. We dropped the world’s first chemical bombs on them in the 1920s. We attacked them and helped to kill their King in the 1930s. We helped in the murder of their President in 1963, helping the Ba’ath party into power. We bombed them again through the 1990s.

Emma Reynolds (Wolverhampton North East) (Lab): I am sure we are all ever so grateful for the lecture, but what is the hon. Gentleman’s solution to this problem?

George Galloway: Now that I have an extra minute, thanks to the hon. Lady, I will be able to tell her. This will not be solved by bombing; every matter will be made worse. Extremism will spread further and deeper around the world, just as happened as a result of the last Iraq war. The people outside can see it, but the fools in here, who draw a big salary and big expenses, cannot or will not see it, like the hon. Lady with her asinine intervention.

Rory Stewart (Penrith and The Border) (Con): I thank the hon. Gentleman very much for giving way, but will he please bring us towards his solution to this problem?

George Galloway: In five minutes it is difficult, but we have to strengthen those who are already fighting ISIL. We have to give them all the weapons they need—the Baghdad Government have paid for weapons that have still not been delivered. We have to strengthen the Kurdish fighters, who are doing a good job of fighting ISIL.

The Saudi, Emirati and Qatari armies are all imaginary armies. They have not even told their own people that they are on the masthead. Has anyone here seen a picture of them fighting in Syria? Anyone seen a picture of a Saudi jet bombing in Syria? Saudi Arabia is the nest from which ISIL and these other vipers have come, and by the way, it does a fine line in head chopping itself. Saudi Arabia has 700 warplanes—get them to bomb. Turkey is a NATO member—get Turkey to bomb. The last people who should be returning to the scene of their former crimes are Britain, France and the United States of America.

We shouldn’t kid ourselves, though, that this is about humanitarian efforts and an attempt to impose religious tolerance. As with our ill-timed, ill judged intervention in Libya, someone is going to get shredded whatever the result, and the only choice is really which set of unfortunates get turned into human confetti. It’s not about saving the non-Muslims from being oppressed by ISIS, it’s about saving Iraq and its oil from falling into the hands of a gang of nutters who might well turn off the tap. People said the first Iraq invasion was about oil, and I tended to disagree. It was about the fact that Bush had decided, and Blair went along with him, on the idea of regime change and to get rid of Saddam Hussein on any pretext whatsoever. This time, though, having presided over the post –Saddam chaos and also, in the interim, created many more Jihadis world-wide, we’re having to go back and clean up the doo-doos we left. This time, it really is about oil. It really is.

So, at the end of a depressing week, we find ourselves at war. And, despite the presence in the country of people like Anjem Choudary who would quite cheerfully hoist the red crescent over Buckingham Palace and declare his own warped version of an “Islamic” state, we find ourselves instead watching the Home Office once more trying to deport Harley Miller, an Australian expat NHS worker, who was told previously that she had indefinite leave to remain, and who has lost her job and her livelihood while being kept in limbo now for nine months waiting for a ruling on her appeal against deportation.

Protesting against the lack of affordable social housing in an East London borough, a group of 29 homeless single mothers and their children, calling itself Focus E15 have occupied a block of flats on an estate in Stratford, in the borough of Newham, that was almost empty, to demand action on their housing crisis.  During the week, they were visited by Russell Brand, and, as if they hadn’t suffered enough, at the weekend, Newham Council cut the water off.  I may be wrong, but isn’t there something in the UN Charter of Human Rights about a right to clean water? Perhaps it’s time for “humanitarian” air strikes against Newham Council. It would certainly be cheaper than going all the way to Iraq, and would probably have a better outcome.

A woman in Exmouth narrowly avoided prosecution for growing a five-foot high cannabis plant in her garden, as it was adjudged to have self-germinated from some discarded budgie seed she’d thrown out. Who knew that there were hemp seeds in budgie food? No wonder all those budgies all over the UK are happy to sit on a perch all day, staring glassily into a little mirror. Anyway, after this week, I’m going to start adding a packet of Trill to my weekly Sainsburys order, and sprinkle it on my corn flakes.

And now, somehow, again, it’s already Sunday. The fifteenth Sunday after Trinity, apparently. I looked at the calendar of saints for today, and to be honest, I have never felt more uninspired, notwithstanding that today is the feast of St Wenceslaus of Bohemia, yes, that one, who went out when the snow was deep and crisp and even. I did toy with him, but the thought of his association with Christmas made me so depressed, I turned instead to the Book of Common Prayer. Even that seemed at first devoid of any particular spiritual sustenance. Congratulations, by the way, if you have persevered with me thus far, because this week there were times when even I felt like giving up, and I’m the guy who’s writing it.  You will now be considered automatically for the Mrs Joyful Prize for Raffia Work.

Anyway, as I said, my eye scanned the Book of Common Prayer, which, to be honest, I have not looked at in many a week, nay month. Perhaps one of the reasons Big G seems to have given up on me is that I have stopped looking for him, although in the past, it’s been my experience that the point where you stop looking is the point where you find what you’ve been seeking. You finally see the moon, and not the finger pointing at the moon, to borrow an aphorism from Zen.  I sort of thought, though, that the thing about God was he was supposed to continue taking an interest in you even if you went off the rails – “If I forget thee, forget thou not me” as the Edge Hill prayer has it. Or that story about looking back over the sand and only seeing one set of footprints.  I have to say, I don’t feel as if God has been carrying me through my difficulties, but I suppose we ought to give the old codger the benefit of the doubt.

So I read the service for today, and to my surprise the first thing that leapt out was the bit from Psalm 127, as I sat here typing at nightfall, about “unless the Lord keepeth the city, the watchman waketh in vain.” I smiled at that because it does have personal resonances for me; particularly watching the Wakeman ceremony in Ripon’s Market Place where a horn has been blown every night at 9pm to mark the curfew by the “Wakeman” or “Hornblower” since about 886AD. Originally devised as a way of keeping nocturnal watch against marauding Vikings, the ceremony is today entirely ceremonial (unlike Chester, where I believe it’s still legitimate to loose off an arrow at any Welshman seen within the City Walls after dark!)  Originally, the Wakeman must have been a volunteer, but when it became formalised in later years, it was paid for out of a local tax levied on people whose house doors faced onto the market place. Being canny Yorkshire folk, many of the householders immediately had their front doors bricked up in favour of using a side entrance! I believe that this verse is actually inscribed on the gable of the Town Hall in Ripon, from memory. It’s either there, or the Wakeman’s House, if you want to go and look.

That verse cheered me up, for some unknown reason. The New Testament reading was Luke 11: 37-54, where Jesus rounds on the Pharisee who questions why he didn’t wash before sitting down to eat, and delivers a verbal flaying that, in modern internet parlance, “owns” him.  A lawyer who overhears rather foolishly attempts to join in, saying, in effect, that by attacking the Pharisees, Jesus is also attacking lawyers: Jesus, not surprisingly, agrees, and gives him a verbal kicking as well. I won’t quote it all, after clubbing you earlier with a page and a half of Hansard, but this is just a flavour of it. It’s worth reading the whole thing. In the original King James high-tar full-fat version, listening to it rumble round above your head is like being outside in a thunderstorm:

And the Lord said unto him, Now do ye Pharisees make clean the outside of the cup and the platter; but your inward part is full of ravening and wickedness. Ye fools, did not he that made that which is without make that which is within also?  But rather give alms of such things as ye have; and, behold, all things are clean unto you. But woe unto you, Pharisees! for ye tithe mint and rue and all manner of herbs, and pass over judgment and the love of God: these ought ye to have done, and not to leave the other undone. Woe unto you, Pharisees! for ye love the uppermost seats in the synagogues, and greetings in the markets. Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are as graves which appear not, and the men that walk over them are not aware of them.

Selah, as the Bible is fond of saying. Or, put more vernacularly, “stitch that!” It reminded me strangely of something. Hypocritical, supposedly clean on the outside but inside full of ravening and wickedness, loving the uppermost seats… oh yes. The houses of parliament. I think that phrase, technically, should really have capital letters, but until and unless it again becomes worthy of them, I’m going to use lower case from now on.

You find me in ill humour, then, as you can see. When I have finished this I’ll feed the dog, and the cat, and make some tea, and make Deb’s sandwiches for tomorrow, and then the whole treadmill will start again for another week, if I’m spared. Possibly foolishly, I have had an idea for a national dog show PURELY FOR RESCUE DOGS, in the same way that Crufts is the national dog show for pedigree breeds.

The idea behind this is threefold.

1. To raise money for dog rescue generally – precise methodology yet to be decided.

2. To raise awareness of dog rescue and to try and do something to stop the appalling waste of 7000 unwanted dogs per year being put down simply because no one wants them.

3. To make the point, subtly, that all dogs whatever their pedigree or origin or appearance, are unique beings capable of love and trust and deserving of the same in return, and thus to promote the ideals of responsible pet ownership.

We are hoping that, by pitching the idea as a national show, it will attract more attention from the media, from potential sponsors, and from people who may be able to provide “celebrity endorsement”.  Anyway, a group of people who are supporters of Rain Rescue, whose mascot is Ralf, whose picture is at the top of the page, a dog whose life they saved (but – sadly - at the expense of one of his legs, which had been damaged so badly by his abuser that it had to be removed) seem to have got behind the idea and want to progress it, so I have agreed to write some stuff for them.  I’m going to use it as what passes for light relief. If it all comes off, they certainly need the donations, with huge vet bills to pay.

In the meantime, I’m going to try and close this week with the song that my father and I once argued about. It, too, seems strangely appropriate for our times. I only wish the old buffer was here today, to have another go.

Epiblog for Battle of Britain Sunday

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. The first week of term, no less, and also the run up to the Autumn Equinox.  Never my favourite time of year, Autumn. I like the light, some days, when it’s sunny and the garden is bathed in mellow warmth. The sunshine in autumn is different, there’s no doubt about that.  And I like the crispness of some mornings as well. When there’s just a tinge, a tingle of frost.  But as for the rest of it, the dull days, the rain, the mist and fog, the nights drawing in, and the damp cold that gets in my bones and makes them ache, no, you can keep that.  And, of course, this time of year is the precursor to that long dark tunnel of winter, the weeks between the day the clocks go back and the winter solstice.

Debbie has started teaching again, and with a worse timetable than last year, in terms of workload. It remains to be seen whether the College’s new system for payment by registers, which kicks in after half-term, will result in her being paid either more correctly, and/or earlier, than last year.

Meanwhile, the mushroom-collecting continues. Yesterday’s two specimens were almost certainly innocent-looking morels, according to Debbie, so did I want to put them in my stir-fry? Further scrutiny of the mushroom identification book revealed that they were in fact something called Sulphur Tuft, and the picture of them had a skull and crossbones next to it.  Debbie has also been complaining that the layout of the mushroom identification book is “confusing” in that it sorts them by habitat, size, colour, etc., and it would be much better if it was laid out alphabetically, until I pointed out to her that if that was the case, you’d have to know what the mushroom was called before you could look it up.

Matilda agrees with me about the cold, murky days, and now spends more time curled up either on what used to be Misty’s bed, under the folding table in the conservatory, or on the settee next to the stove, or sometimes even on the conservatory windowsill, where she can maximise the effects of what little sun there is.  Occasionally, she comes in from the garden soaking wet, having been caught out by a sudden shower, and I dry her off with kitchen roll while she stands there purring, exactly in the same way as my mother used to dry off Ginger, at home, forty years ago, and no doubt she, in turn, learnt it from watching Granny Fenwick dry off Widgy, up Elloughton Dale, although in those days it would probably have been a real towel, rather than kitchen roll. Probably Granny Fenwick learned it from Grandma Walker, and so on. A historical succession of spoilt cats, stretching back into antiquity.

Misty’s given up coveting the lost dog bed, at least for the moment, and acknowledged the supremacy of Matilda, who appropriated it while we were away in Scotland. Misty did, however, pick up her food bowl by grabbing the edge of it in her mouth, and took it behind the settee with her the other night, when Zak and Ellie came round. A case of “You may take my beddies, but you will never take my Bonios!” Ellie has (so far at any rate) managed to avoid emulating her escapade of two weeks ago when she went AWOL, and Zak is, well, just Zak. Every time I trundle past his chair in my chair, he gives paw, and never tires of repeating the exercise. I was reminded of the time we took him off with us in the camper and he slept on the bed. At some point in the night, he must have “given paw” and I must have, three-quarters asleep, taken it, because I woke up in the morning holding hands with him.

The animals have been blissfully unaware of the turmoil going on in the world outside the Holme Valley, and many times this week, I wished I could join them, especially during the wall to wall coverage as the Scottish Referendum campaign reached a climax.  Nailing my colours to the mast one last time here, it will come as no surprise whatsoever to readers of previous blogs that I think devolution is a bad idea and has been a disaster for this country since it was foisted on us by Tony Blair in 1997.  The problem with saying this is, of course, that people automatically label you as some sort of Godawful old dug-out Colonel Blimp Little Englander who thinks that Whitehall should run everything and the peasants should know their place. 

Nothing could be further from the case, and you have only to read what I have written in the past to see this. I want to see a more just and equal society, and, especially since we have been suffering the deliberate imposition of scapegoating and division since 2010, a more compassionate society.  I also think there is a difference between things being organised on a national level, but delivered locally, by and for the people they are intended to benefit.  This is a distinction often lost on people who seem to think that a government organised by, for and on behalf of the whole UK cannot be delivered and differentiated according to local needs and priorities, because it can.  Four or five more years of “austerity” and what people have taken to calling “the status quo” is not an option, as far as I am concerned.

Nevertheless, by Thursday night, we were in a situation where Scotland may well have voted to break away from the UK. The result was expected sometime in the early hours of Friday morning, and I determined to sit up and watch it. At least there would be no more argument on either side (well, there might be, actually, but if the vote was Yes, that argument would be Scotland’s problem.)  Good luck, Scotland,  I thought, and bon voyage, if you decide to go.

Now if, if you insist that this is for the best
Well then I'll sail this ship alone
And if, if you swear that you no longer care
Well then I'll sail this ship alone

The Beautiful South more or less summed it up for me. I expected a narrow victory for the “yes” camp.  I thought independence, at least as envisaged by the SNP, would be the wrong choice, and I’ve said why in a dozen different ways, and I still do think so, but on Thursday night, that was all blood under the bridge now.  You’ve got to play it as it lays. In the end, it became clearer and clearer, as the early hours of the morning passed by on leaden feet, that Scotland was not going to vote for this version of independence at least. My own take on it was that the people with nothing to lose probably thought “what the hell, how much worse can it be” and voted “yes”,  and there were also those who had considered it all intellectually, dissected it, and come to the conclusion that yes, it might be risky, but Scotland could muddle through somehow and make a fist of it.  As I’ve said before, I think that position was incorrect, but I can respect the thought process that leads to it. The canny, risk-averse Scots, who’d examined the White Paper and found it wanting, and the people who had most to lose from a parting of the ways, voted no. And there were more of them.

The narrow victory, though, has left a bitterly divided country. I think it was Churchill who once said, famously, of an election result, “The people, the bastards, have spoken!” Or, as Shakespeare put it, probably more poetically: “The words of Mercury are harsh after the songs of Apollo. You that; we this way.”  It was certainly a case of “Love’s Labours Lost” for the “yes” camp.  The decision was actually the worst kind of outcome for Scotland - it has left a nation divided. The bitterness will linger. It would have been much, much better if there had been an emphatic victory one way or another rather than there just being 10% in it.  A lot of Scottish people will be hurting now, including some that I count as friends. As it happens, personally, I feel Scotland has dodged a bullet, in that the vision of "independence" they were voting for was completely barmy, and would not have delivered any of the things they want, and would have left Scotland as an economic basket case. But that's an argument for another day. Any day when you know that your friends must be upset and grieving for a lost dream is a sombre day.  By 5AM on Friday, I was ready to write my own version of Orwell:  Homage to Catatonia. So I went to bed.

Friday was, indeed, a dour and sombre day. The online forums were full of braying English hooray-Henry types but this wasn’t a day for vulgar triumphalism. Not in my name. Nobody had “won”. The best you could say was a period of acute division, nastiness and unrest had transmuted into something else, the next stage, thankfully, it seemed, without violence, although on Friday night there were ugly scenes in George Square, Glasgow, with the sectarian bigots out in force, throwing flares, singing the Famine Song, burning flags, and giving straight-arm salutes. Scotland showed what it was made of, though. On the site of the clash, by the end of Saturday, there were donations for Glasgow’s food banks, being left under a single Saltire in the square.

I could understand the despair of people who had voted “yes”. I recall having a similar discussion once, with one of my then work-colleagues, about football, of all things. When England crashed out of Euro 2004, or possibly another international competition, there have been so many; I drove to the office that day with two of those little plastic flagpoles with St George’s flag on them, sticking out of the car window. You probably remember them. My colleague said that surely, that day of all days wasn’t the day to fly the flag. I replied that the day after you’d just suffered a major defeat was exactly the day to fly the flag.  So I hoped on Friday that my Scottish friends were still proudly flying the Saltire.

There were, inevitably, accusations of vote rigging and irregularity. Even now, there is a video going the rounds on social media which purports to show a teller counting yes votes and then putting them on the no pile. It should be fairly easily to identify the woman, find her, and ask her what the hell she was doing. I tried to watch it myself, online, and my Adobe Flash Plugin crashed, which was clearly a conspiracy.  It’s just one step away from the grassy McKnoll.

I think it’s important here to take a breath and just re-group and re-assess, especially as there will be people – many people, I suspect – in England also, who will feel anger and rejection, even in the wake of a Scottish “no” vote, given that the margin of the victory was so narrow.  They may feel less welcome in Scotland, rightly or wrongly, and less likely to visit there in future. Apparently some have already cancelled pre-booked holidays. 

Throughout the latter stages of the campaign there were constant accusations of BBC bias in reporting and “scaremongering” against people who were trying to point out some of the more obvious flaws in the SNP’s strategy.  It became, by the end, the standard practice amongst the “yes” camp to deflect awkward media questions either by dismissing them as “scaremongering” or by saying, in effect, “that’s something we’ll sort out  the detail of after the referendum”.

As far as the BBC bias is concerned, Nick Robinson may well be an evil little Mekon and a former young Conservative, but at least, unlike Kay Burley, he didn’t call anyone on the “yes” side a “knob” (though I don’t doubt there must have been occasions when he was sorely tempted.) I watched the now-famous exchange between Robinson and Alex Salmond and to be honest, I thought he was just trying to get a straight answer to a fairly important question that was germane to the issue. In fact, Salmond was lucky, throughout the campaign, that the media gave him a fairly easy ride; I would love to have seen him endure a Paxman-style “did you threaten to overrule him?” session. Although, having said that, and having said some fairly harsh things about Alex Salmond in the past, I have to say I did feel some grudging admiration and respect for his act of resignation.

So there now needs to be a process of reconciliation and healing. All week I have had The Stare’s Nest by My Window by W. B. Yeats going round my head. The poem was written by Yeats in the aftermath of the Irish civil war in 1922, as part of his Meditations in Time of Civil War, and uses the image of the bees colonising the empty nest abandoned by a starling, outside the window of his tower. It is also a metaphor for the people of Ireland to unite and rebuild Ireland after the conflict, and it seems strangely apposite for today.

We had fed the heart on fantasies,
The heart's grown brutal from the fare;
More Substance in our enmities
Than in our love; O honey-bees,
Come build in the empty house of the stare.

And we must keep up the pressure. Firstly, Scotland needs the wherewithal promised by the leaders of both major parties (and the Liberal Democrats, though they are neither here nor there) in the run-up to the final day. There is already a petition up to pressure David Cameron to keep to his promise.  Scotland needs the fairer, more equitable, more compassionate society that the people who ticked the “yes” box thought they were voting for. As, indeed, does England. And it’s really about England that I’m writing now.  The Scottish “independence” decision throws a harsh, sharp focus back on England.  The other parts of the remaining UK will now be looking to make their own case for departing.  Inevitably, under a federalist agenda, Northern Ireland could potentially merge with Eire (though, given the history there, that particular referendum campaign will make the Scottish one look like Noddy’s tea-party) and Wales might be asking us to flood Offa’s Dyke.  Before you know where you are, we’ll be back to the middle ages where even people from adjacent villages were viewed with suspicion, if not downright hostility. “You’m be an overcomer. Them folks in Little Piddlebury be queer and different to loike what we be”.  

People are now calling for a federal England, with a written constitution. As one person put it on Facebook, “free from the yolk [sic] of Westminster.” Perhaps someone egged him on to post that, I don’t know.  The thing is, though, the logical end to that conclusion is independence for the garden shed, and each of us guarding our own little patch of potatoes with an AK-47.  There’s a reason why countries exist: it’s generally more efficient and more beneficial to organise things on a larger level. What’s the point in half a dozen hospitals each ordering bandages separately, when if they banded together (see what I did, there?) they could place a larger order and get them cheaper?  What’s the point in waiting until the invaders are coming up the village street, when if we all band together and pay taxes, we can have a navy and an air force that stops them on the other side of the Channel?

The last thing we want is yet more regional devolution, another useless layer of "local" "government" to sit alongside elected mayors and police commissioners et al. It's really quite simple. What it needs is for the Tories, especially Eric Pickles, to stop the unfair practice of making the North of England and the former Labour working class areas bear a much higher and disproportionate burden of the cuts in the rate support grant, while letting southern counties off with token reductions. Give the councils the money, and give them the power to build more social housing to replace the huge vacuum left by Mrs Thatcher’s fire-sale of our national assets.

The first step is to elect a Labour government in 2015. I know this means Miliband as prime minister, which would be a major downside, but we have to find a way to work round it. Maybe he could job-share with his brother. Labour also needs a truly visionary manifesto and they need to win the argument that Keynsian investment in public works is the route out of financial difficulty, not "austerity". They've wasted four years faffing around trying to be more Tory than the Tories, they've allowed the Scotland thing to become a massive red herring and a distraction, and they've alienated a lot of their potential once-core supporters. I'm going to have to really hold my nose to vote Labour, but it's the only way to get shot of the unelected Junta of the ConDems.

As if the idiocy of the perpetrators of the rioting in Glasgow wasn’t enough, this week the alleged perpetrators of the Manchester Dogs’ Home fire were named on social media. Someone with the intelligence of a particularly dim gnat published the name of the alleged perpetrator of the fire and now it is all over Twitter and Facebook, along with those of his alleged co-conspirators. .  

His defence barrister will even now be writing the speech that starts, "MLud, members of the jury, my client cannot possibly have a fair trial now his name has been released zzzz zzzzz zzzz." There is now much less chance of him being convicted. even if he is guilty, and he might now get off, or get a lesser sentence, because he has been named.

Secondly, I think I'm going to have to have my jaw re-wired yet again because, despite the above, apparently the police have let him out on bail. If ever there was a case for protective custody, this is one, I would have thought. In any case, even if he was still incognito, what are the police thinking of? If someone kills 43 people they don't get let out on bail. This is precisely the sort of lax, laissez-faire attitude to animal cruelty that sends the message to animal abusers that it's no big deal. Finally,  it seems apparently he may have been but one of a number of alleged yobboes who allegedly set fire to the place. If so they should all be charged as a common purpose or joint enterprise or whatever it's called, with conspiracy to commit arson. And whoever named them should be charged with contempt of court.

By the end of the week, despite having been a mere ineffectual bystander and a spectator in the pageant of history in the making, I felt like I’d spent a day in the tumble drier. By Saturday I’d at least caught up on the lost sleep, and so eventually Sunday arrived.

Today is Battle of Britain Sunday. This is another one of those rather odd meldings together of a military anniversary with a quasi-religious overtone, a bit like Remembrance Sunday, and I have similar reservations about it.  This year, because of the centenary of World War One, it has been rather overshadowed. However, I do think it behoves us to remember those who died in the fight against fascism, the more so in view of the rise of the far right again, all over Europe, not just in this country.  And also, it does us good every so often to remember what it is they were fighting for, as much as what they were fighting against. The Labour landslide election of 1945 was an emphatic endorsement that people who had spent five long years fighting a war now wanted to see a better world.

Those who died in the Battle of Britain didn’t do so for a society where we have food banks and kids going to bed hungry.  They didn’t die for a society where the NHS was dismantled and sold off to the highest bidder. They didn’t die for a society where animals are thrown away and discarded. They didn’t die for a society where the poor sleep out in the cold under railway arches and flyovers, while the rich sip Armagnac from crystal goblets.

In particular today, I was thinking of Squadron Leader B. J. E. “Sandy” Lane. Born in Pannal, near Harrogate, he joined the RAF in 1936, and was awarded the DFC for his bravery over Dunkirk during the evacuation.  The Battle of Britain saw him rapidly promoted to Squadron Leader, and his war came to an end when, on his first operational flight with his new Squadron, on 13 December 1942,  he was last seen giving chase to two Focke-Wulf 190 fighters. He never returned from this mission and was listed as missing. Lane has no known grave, having most likely been shot down over the North Sea. He was just 25. At the time of his death, the more powerful, heavily-armed FW-190 had achieved a temporary ascendency over the current version of the Spitfire, one that was not really redressed until the Spitfire Mark IX came into service, so as well as being outnumbered, his pursuit of them was also in a technically inferior machine.

Some would call it bravery, some would call it stupidity. What we call bravery is often stupidity leavened with courage anyway. The pedestrian who dashes into the motorway traffic to rescue a stray dog. The lifeboat crew that sets to sea in the teeth of a howling gale, the bloke who climbs out onto the wing of a plane to put out a burning engine with a fire extinguisher.  We owe it to the collective bravery of humanity never to stop trying to make things better for everybody, and we should also remember, at these times, when we commemorate our own dead, that there were brave men and women on both sides in the war, and we should never forget the terrible waste of young life and all the potential that it represented.

I take two lessons from this week, neither of which is overtly religious, though I like to think that Jesus, when he gets back from his holidays, does his email and clears his in-tray, wouldn’t have any trouble with either of them, were I to run them by him in what passes for my prayers these days. The first is from the final blog posting of Charlotte Kitley, who was a blogger on The Huffington Post, and who died on 16^th September from stage 4 bowel cancer.

So, in my absence, please, please, enjoy life. Take it by both hands, grab it, shake it and believe in every second of it. Adore your children. You have literally no idea how blessed you are to shout at them in the morning to hurry up and clean their teeth. Embrace your loved one and if they cannot embrace you back, find someone who will. Everyone deserves to love and be loved in return. Don't settle for less. Find a job you enjoy, but don't become a slave to it. You will not have 'I wish I'd worked more' on your headstone. Dance, laugh and eat with your friends. True, honest, strong friendships are an utter blessing and a choice we get to make, rather than have to share a loyalty with because there happens to be link through blood. Choose wisely then treasure them with all the love you can muster. Surround yourself with beautiful things. Life has a lot of grey and sadness - look for that rainbow and frame it. There is beauty in everything, sometimes you just have to look a little harder to see it.

The second is more of my own devising. The Scots are fond of quoting precedents from history (sometimes selectively, when it suits them) so you will often hear the Declaration of Arbroath mentioned (well, a lot more frequently than the Darien Disaster, anyway). But two can play at that game. Let me borrow some phraseology from the Declaration of Arbroath, and adapt it to my own needs:

For, as long as but a hundred of us remain alive, never will we on any conditions tolerate a society which does not look after the weakest, the most deserving, and the most deserving of our compassion, be they human, or animals.

I think I might have to get that typeset and printed onto a postcard, along with the last four lines of Jerusalem. There is a lot of work to be done.

Epiblog for Holy Rood Day

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley.  As predicted last week, the phoney war is over, the sunlight is getting weaker, the days are dulling down, the mornings crisping up, and Autumn is on the way.  The peaceful, ruminative mood in which I ended last week’s Epiblog vanished a lot sooner than I expected, last Sunday, when I’d just posted my thoughts online, and the phone rang with the news that Ellie was missing.  Ellie, I realise, may need some introduction. She is, in fact, Granny’s new dog, and therefore Zak’s new little sister.  Since Freddie’s demise in February, Granny had been discussing the pros and cons of getting another dog.  Not just any dog, obviously – it would have to be the right dog, and any dog who came into the wolf pack would be very much Freddie’s successor, and never his replacement.

Anyway, the arguments raged back and forth, with some saying that perhaps Zak was enough to be going on with now, but others contending that he’d be lonely. For my part, I couldn’t help but point out that 7,000 unwanted dogs a year die in local authority shelters, at a rate of something like 21 a day, according to the Dogs’ Trust.  So any new dog that came from a shelter would at least be one saved from a possible doom.  Along came Ellie, or rather, up she popped on one of the dog rescue web sites, and visits were arranged, donations made, and Ellie joined the team.  At first, though, we agreed to soft-pedal her presence, because of her health. Unfortunately, she had not one, but two cysts, either or both of which could have turned out to be nasty. So over the last couple of months, there’s been a considerable amount of vet-work involved, and operations, and stitches, and biopsies, and things like that.  Finally, she seems to have been given something approaching a tentative all-clear.

Which of course, she celebrated by running off. She’d been down on the local playing fields with Grandad, she saw something in the woods, and off she went.  Now, in his day, Grandad was quite a speedster. If he’d relied on his Irish ancestry, he could have run for Ireland, but he chose to ally himself with England, just at the time when England had a plethora of very fast runners such as Ibbotson, so he didn’t get in the team.  But he could shift.  However, since then, time has marched on, and he was, reluctantly, forced to give up and come home and raise the alarm. Granny rang me, and I got straight on to Dogslost.co.uk, Facebook, Twitter, and West Yorkshire Dog Rescue. It furthers one to set armies marching, as it says in the I Ching.

I have to say that, possibly next to International Rescue, Dogslost.co.uk are pretty quick at getting the word out.  No giant hangar doors opening in the side of mountains or anything like that, but within ten minutes I’d received an email alert about Ellie, complete with a link to the site and therefore the picture of Ellie I’d posted. So, even as Granny and Grandad were on their way back to the playing fields to resume the search, I knew that everyone on the Dogslost site in the HD postcode would have received the same alert.  At that point, I’d done all I could for them.  An hour later, my mobile rang – it was Granny saying Ellie had been found. She must have wandered through the woods adjoining the playing fields and gone on into the housing estate beyond. Ellie, that is, not Granny, who was still crashing about and blundering around in the said woods looking for Ellie, when her mobile rang. A concerned householder had noticed Ellie wandering and had collared her, and the dog tag with all the phone numbers on did the rest. So, all’s well that ends well, I suppose, and all that remained for me to do was to stand down the various armies I’d set marching.

Compared to Ellie’s adventures, the remaining animals have been pretty staid this week. The main issue remains the contest for the dog-bed, which Matilda continues to usurp. Misty’s latest tactic is to engage in staring contests with the cat (unreciprocated, she just turns her back and settles down again, facing the other way) and, on occasions, to whine pathetically, which is equally ineffective. Misty does of course have two other beds, a settee and a chair to choose from, as well as sharing the beddies at night, but she wants that bed back.

Just when I could have done with a week where the outside world refused to impinge on my consciousness, so I could get on with the mountain of things that needed doing, the outside world had other ideas. The world of telegrams and anger, as E M Forster called it.  The week contained the anniversary, for instance, of the 9/11 attacks in the US, which started all this crazy madness in Iraq and Afghanistan and the Arab Spring and the establishment of the “Caliphate” and the massive undeclared war that is now raging between radical “Islam” and the west.

Here at home, the Junta has once again caved into the farming lobby and resumed badger culling, despite the fact that there is absolutely no guarantee that it will affect the issue of bovine TB, and once more it will rack up massive costs and once more demonstrate the prevalence of casual cruelty towards animals, in this case, officially sanctioned.  This, and events later in the week, have made me more convinced than ever that the law regarding animal cruelty needs to be re-aligned and made more like the law on human cruelty, with appropriate penalties.

When we had the elections for the police commissioners, although I had my reservations anyway about whether or not they would have any real effect other than draining the public purse of £85,000 per year,  I wrote to all the candidates in West Yorkshire to ask them about their policy on offences against animals and for their assurance that they would use their influence to press for the maximum possible penalties. Not one of the buggers replied.

The truth is that animals are often treated as disposable commodities.  Someone noticed this week an odd entry in Peterborough Council’s annual report and accounts – they had 101 cats in the council’s freezer.  It turns out, though, that this is not uncommon. The cats were a year’s worth of roadkill, and the council’s cleansing department keeps them for a year, and, when they are still unclaimed at the end of that period, allows them to be passed on to a “specialist waste disposal” contractor. This process is replicated by other councils – Adur District Council in Sussex, for instance.  While on the one hand, it’s better, I suppose, that the council does this than simply leaving them lying in the gutter, it is still a long way short of the respect and care that should be meted out to the cats and dogs kept as pets.  I’m coming to the conclusion that both dog and cat registration is not only necessary, but desirable, together with microchipping, and, in the same way as we have a sex offenders’ register, there should be an animal offenders’ register, on which those who are convicted of relevant offences are placed.

There are those, of course, who would say that I care more about animals than I do humans, and my usual answer to that is  to quote Gandhi when he said that “I hold that the more helpless a creature is, the more it is entitled to the protection of man from the cruelties of man.” Or, to put it another way, in the words of Orwell’s protagonist in Coming Up For Air, George Bowling, who says:

“Sentimental, you say? Anti-social? Oughtn’t to prefer trees to men? I say it depends on which trees, and which men.”

So yes, it depends on which animals, and which humans. It’s not an either/or though, and sadly there’s just as much cruelty and stupidity from human to human as there is from human to animal in the UK today. If you needed any evidence of this, the coroner’s inquest this week on David Clapson, whose case I featured in this blog some time ago, brought it back sharply into focus. His benefits had been stopped as a result of missing one meeting at the jobcentre. He was only on benefits in the first place because he’d been forced to stop work to care for his elderly mother. He was diabetic, and without the £71.70 a week from his jobseeker’s allowance he couldn’t afford to eat, or put credit on his electricity card to keep the fridge where he kept his insulin working. Three weeks later, he died from diabetic ketoacidosis, caused by a severe lack of insulin. He had £3.44 and a tin of sardines to his name. A pile of CV’s was found next to his body, which will no doubt have pleased Iain Duncan-Smith.  Another “scrounger” written off the books. All hail austerity. I don’t actually know what the coroner decided on, as a verdict, but if there was ever a clear-cut case of Goliath slaying David, this was it.

Meanwhile, Cameron, Clegg and Miliband to set off for Scotland on a joint campaign to rally the No campaign.  I bet every Co-op in Glasgow sold out of eggs within minutes of that announcement. Alex Salmond is now in a position where he can’t lose. If there is a no vote, he will still go down in imagination of his followers, in the pantheon of Scottish leaders who tried but failed to break free of the yoke of English tyranny, see under William Wallace, plus he will now get Devo Max, which is what he wanted all along, all the advantages and benefits of independence, but without any of that tedious business of balancing the books, and the UK still there to bail him out if things go badly.

I tried to demonstrate last week that the SNP’s position on defence, for instance, to name but one, is unsustainable to the point of bonkers barminess, and to be honest, I am getting to the stage now where I’ve more or less resigned myself to the fact that Scotland is going to inflict an act of massive harm on itself for reasons I don’t really understand. It all starts to unravel with the currency issue, but the vast majority of people to whom I have tried to point this out seem to be in “La La La La, I’m not listening” mode. In the more extreme cases, it’s a bit like trying to talk to the North Koreans.  Without a central bank and a formal currency union, Scotland would have three options for balancing the books, or a mixture of these three. Either increased borrowing, increased taxation, or public spending cuts.  The SNP are arguing that you can cut taxation, and yet still have high public spending. You can’t. Not unless there’s a magic money tree somewhere in Holyrood that they’re keeping under wraps. Actually, they think there is. They think it’s oil, which no two experts seem to be able to agree on.  Oil is not sustainable anyway, long term, and there are massive risks on basing your entire economy on one industry, but by the time the doodoo connects with the air conditioning, Salmond will have moved on to “Dunrulin, Isle of Arran” and it won’t be his pension that goes down the tubes.

The SNP’s reaction to the fact that both major parties in the UK (and the Liberal Democrats, but no-one gives a stuff about them, they are toast at the next election anyway) and the Bank of England have said that there will be no currency union, is to continue to insist, blithely, that there will be a currency union, and that the threat of no currency union is just a negotiating tactic.  Unfortunately, this ignores the fact that there would be an immense backlash at the polls against a “Rest of the UK” Government which caved in and allowed an “independent” Scotland to link to the pound sterling, and there are also compelling economic reasons for the RUK not to stand guarantor for Scottish public spending when it has no political say in how those decisions are made. As I’ve said before, it would be like Nigella Lawson handing over her credit cards to her PA, and saying “there you go, have fun!”

If Scotland carries on using the pound without a formal currency agreement, then it will be at the mercy of interest rates set by the Bank of England, and at the mercy of international markets. It will, in fact, be less “independent” than it is now. But try telling people that. It’s like lemmings voting for a higher cliff, where some people are concerned. And if there is a currency union, against all indications, the chances are that the terms of it will be so onerous to Scotland that, once again, there will be even less wriggle room for an “independent” Scotland than there was before. If it does come down to negotiations, for instance, Cameron would be even more of a fool if he didn’t make keeping the nuclear submarines at Holy Loch and Faslane as a precondition of even sitting down at the same table as Alex Salmond. Imagine the howls of derision that would raise at the next SNP conference thereafter, if the SNP had to give way in order to get a currency union.

The fact that much of what the SNP promise for an “independent” Scotland will be plainly impossible in economic terms is now coming home to roost, as banks and some businesses are making announcements about their intention to scoot South of the Border in the event of a “Yes” vote, and/or put up prices for a separate “Scottish” market, if one happens. Much has been made of the timing of these announcements, and yes, I would not be at all surprised if there hasn’t been some skulduggery in getting them to make their statements ahead of the poll.

Skulduggery is no stranger to this campaign, look at the instances of the No posters being defaced and graffiti’d all over the place. And of course, if the businesses concerned had been stating their public support for the SNP’s proposals, they would have had no compunction in using the facts to further their cause. Feelings are running high, and understandably so, in a campaign that’s been marked by a paucity of accurate information on all sides.  But the point is, surely, that if these people were planning to up sticks and leave anyway, better that they come out and say so now while the people of Scotland have a chance, in advance of the poll, to weigh up the options.  Some will weigh the options, and continue as before. Some may change their minds from Yes and vote No. Some, enraged by what they see as bullying, might well switch the other way! According to the SNP, anyway, these are all just scare stories, which is an easy way of getting out of actually having to counter them.

The fact is, though, that at the end of the day, these people, the likes of Tesco, and M&S, and the Banks, and people like BP, are all just rapacious capitalists. They aren’t siding with any one campaign for any other reason than that they, and their analysts and advisors, have taken a look at the SNP proposals, seen them for what they are, and voted with their wallets. These people are not fools. They will do whatever brings in the greatest profit at the least risk, and there is absolutely nothing either side can do to persuade them otherwise.  Yes, there is an upside in the RBS not having to be potentially bailed out by a Scottish government in the future, but then the Scottish government won’t really be in a position to bail out anybody, anyway, and wouldn’t have been even if RBS had stayed, which is presumably why they moved. As I said, these people aren’t stupid. Feckless and reckless, venal and grabbing, perhaps, but not dumb.

Oddly enough, in the weird way that coincidence sometimes prompts the thought process, I had to send some books to The Isle of Arran this week, and obtained a quotation for doing so from an online courier broker. The actual cost wasn’t too bad, but when I got to the checkout, they tried to stiff me for an additional £16.00 “remote area surcharge!” So I thought stuff that, I’ll send them by Royal Mail instead. This then set me thinking, what happens to Royal Mail in an independent Scotland? At the moment, I can send a first class letter to someone in Stornoway for 62p, the same price that it costs me to post one to someone in the next village. This is possible because of a thing called the universal delivery obligation. This means, from Royal Mail’s point of view, although it costs them vastly more to deliver my hypothetical letter to Stornoway than my hypothetical local letter, the cost is offset and shared out across all the letters posted in the UK, so that the easy peasy city centre deliveries are cost-effective enough to balance out the costs of the postman and his van driving half way up the glen to a lonely croft miles from anywhere.

Plus, the Royal Mail used to be heavily “subsidised” by revenue streams from the large volumes of business direct mail, much of which has already been creamed off by the people who are now allowed to compete with Royal Mail for that type of traffic, and have been since the Royal Mail’s part-privatisation a few years ago.  The other mainstay of Royal Mail is small packets traffic from people placing online orders, and again, at present, the costs of delivering these to different parts of the UK are all, presently, averaged out into one national price structure.

Before Scottish devolution reared its ugly head, Royal Mail were already looking at what they called “regional pricing models” – that is, charging more to deliver the same item to different parts of the UK.  They would dearly love to ditch the universal delivery obligation, especially since they are even more privatised these days. Once Scotland becomes, in effect, a “foreign” country as far as Royal Mail is concerned, I wonder how long it will be before there is a separate (and more expensive) pricing structure for those who have to post things to destinations North of the Border.  And maybe even within Scotland as well, which can only have a knock-on effect on business costs and increase inflationary pressures, which can only be eased (with no central bank of last resort, see above) by cuts or borrowing or taxes.

This doesn’t mean I am in favour of the status quo. Or even Status Quo. Especially not Status Quo, in fact. I have been described, rather patronisingly I thought, by Scots on a Facebook forum as “a guid wee footsoldier” as if I was some sort of stooge for David Cameron! Yes, that’s why I write such laudatory stuff about him, week after week. I, too, would like to see a more just, equitable, fair, compassionate society in Scotland that benefits those at the bottom of the heap: I’d like to see it for the whole of the UK. Sadly, the fact that the Labour Party in Scotland has allied itself with the Tories of “Better Together” in a campaign which has diverted attention from what Labour should have been doing, has not only damaged their credibility north of the border, but also made it less likely to happen elsewhere. Plus, if the vote is as close as everyone seems to think, whatever the decision is, it will leave a bitterly divided country that will take a long time to heal. 

As if the completely bonkers machinations of the Scottish referendum weren’t bad enough this week, there came the terrible news of the fire at Manchester Dogs’ Home that has killed up to 60 dogs at the time of writing. Previously, I had been vaguely rejoicing in the fact that Parliament had voted to further curtail puppy farming, but, in the way the universe seems to have sometimes of balancing the books, this more than cancelled out any brief elation on my part that the mindless oversupply of dogs by commercial breeders might have been counteracted, if only slightly.

In the white-hot rage that possessed me when I heard about this, I said several things that were unwise, but I was only a small part of the huge shitstorm that blew up on social media, suggesting that the culprit should be made to bury the dogs he had killed with his bare hands, etc.  It was scarily easy to join in, fuelled by the passion of the lynch mob, and it was only the next morning that I started to think more coldly and logically about how the maximum damage should be inflicted on the person or persons responsible, which is not by prejudicing any likely case.

Although the police are not naming him, under the rules governing the legal proceedings involving minors, I made it my business, in my state of bloody anger, to try and find out who he was, using just the internet. It was surprisingly easy. It involved trawling through the comments sections on Facebook pages and news stories about the tragedy. Invariably there is someone local who feels the need to comment and may give away more information than they intended. In this case, my first lucky break came after an hour or so of searching when I found that someone had posted that there were news stories to the effect that the accused had himself apparently been the victim of a dog attack, thus implying that this gave him some sort of motive.  I got into a discussion on this point, about whether evil actually exists, per se.  I don't think anyone is born evil or born holy for that matter. I think we all have it in us to be saints or serial killers, and it all depends on which buttons get pushed. The same motors that drove Michael Ryan, Fred West, et al are inside me and you as well. It's just that we're a lot better at keeping them under control. And those who don't keep them under control, or can't, must be segregated to protect the majority who can. In my blind fury at the bastard who did this despicable act, I wished him dead, which just goes to show how near to the surface the coal-seam, the instinct for violence actually lies.

Anyway, a quick Google search for various permutations of relevant phrases revealed links to three news reports all naming the same victim. The actual news pages had been taken down, presumably as a precautionary measure, by their media owners, but the old cached versions of the pages were still available and all three carried the same name and other details which made it likely.  I’m not going to name him nor am I going to elaborate, but it shows just how easy it is to cross reference stuff online and come up with an answer, one in this case which I am pretty sure is correct. Of course, naming him online – assuming my suspicions are correct – could also have a counterproductive outcome, because it would make it easier for a defence barrister to argue that his client had already been named, tried and convicted by social media, thus making a fair hearing impossible. 

So I will confine myself to wishing once again for the harshest possible sentence under the law in the event of a guilty verdict, in order to send out an exemplary message to any other yobboes  who might be contemplating similar high jinks. And if there were others involved, they should all be charged with conspiracy to commit arson. The going rate for sentences for what the law calls “simple” arson seems to be 4-5 years, whereas conspiracy to commit seems to attract 5-10 years.

After such a heavy week of truly dreadful events, it was somewhat of a relief to watch the Last night of the Proms on the BBC, though even there, the spectre of the Scottish Referendum hung about like Banquo’s ghost, with the careful cutting away from the Proms in The Park celebrations on Glasgow Green at the point where the Albert Hall crowd were belting out Rule, Britannia, and Land of Hope and Glory.  They may as well have cut away from the whole thing, for me, after a week where there has been not much hope, and precious little glory. Things can only get better.

Somehow, then, I’ve staggered through to Sunday again, and, fortified by a breakfast of bubble and squeak made from last night’s colcannon, with the addition of two fried eggs done “over easy” and lashings of brown sauce, plus a steaming mug of tea, I sat down to write this blog.  At which point, I heard the news that ISIS had beheaded their British hostage, David Haines. So there we are, then, another act of barbarian cruelty, just to book-end the week and conclude it in the spirit it’s displayed all along. As I said last week, we’re not in Kansas any more. We’re back on Dover Beach again, where the ignorant and confused armies clash by night. I feel desperately sorry for his family, and I can’t begin to imagine what it must be like to have someone you love, or even just someone you know, caught up in such a terrible situation. I was afraid that his fate had already been sealed by the fact that the Junta have painted themselves into a corner with their anti-ISIS sabre-rattling rhetoric in public, and the more insidious anti-Muslim propaganda at home. The fact that ISIS has about as much to do with “Islam” as the Westboro Baptist Church has to do with Christianity is neither here nor there in the argument. Cameron was not going to be seen to be kow-towing to “terrorists” (of our own creation, but it’s too late to do anything about that now, the genie is now well and truly un-bottled) and from that moment, there was only ever likely to be one outcome.

I always thought, growing up in the optimistic sixties, that life could only ever get better. New cures for diseases were being invented, we landed on the moon, the long period of drab 50’s austerity and rationing was over, the music was fabby and brill, and Harold Wilson told us we were basking in the white heat of technology.  Then came the hangover after the party. After the Lord Mayor’s parade, the muck cart. After enlightenment, the laundry, as the Zen masters put it.  Now, there’s an automatic presumption that life will only get worse for the vast majority. Even that, if eschatologists (and I don’t mean Houdini) are to be believed, that we might be in the last throes.  The precious gift of life is so casually broken and cast aside almost everywhere you look.  I hope not, but I wouldn’t be surprised, if there was even violence in Scotland, whichever way the vote goes. The song needs re-phrasing for the times we live through - things can only get bitter.

But today, at any rate, is the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross, or to give it its more common moniker, Holy Rood Day. Rood is the Old English (Anglo Saxon) word for cross, which comes down to us in the title of the epic Anglo Saxon poem The Dream of the Rood, incised into the cross at Ruthwell in Dumfries and Galloway, and also in the term “rood screen” (the screen that prevented the congregation from looking directly at the altar in a church)

This feast day commemorates the day in 326AD when ‘the true cross’, the one on which Christ was said to have been crucified, was put on display in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Constantinople. The church was built specially to house and exalt it by the Emperor Constantine at the behest of his mother Helena, later St Helena. She had discovered the cross and proved it to be the original, by way of a miracle, as people were wont to do in those days, during a pilgrimage to Jerusalem.

At one time, though, it was said that the churches of Europe and the Middle East had enough whole “true” crosses and pieces of  “the true cross” to have made a fair-sized boat. An alternative explanation of Holy Rood day, is that it commemorates the recovery of St Helena’s true cross from the Persians (who had looted it in 614AD), and its return to Constantinople by the Emperor Heraclius in 629AD.

The term “Holy Rood” has been used as the dedication for many churches and other ecclesiastical establishments, including (weirdly enough in this week of preoccupation with all things Scottish) Holy Rood Abbey in Edinburgh, founded by David I, King of Scots, in 1128, and which now lends its name both to the Royal Palace of Holyrood and the Scottish Parliament building.

More prosaically, Holy Rood Day was a significant mediaeval holiday, when tradition dictated that you went out nut-gathering. In most cases, this meant gathering hazel-nuts which were an important source of protein in the winter, but in fact people have been gathering hazel nuts in Britain since ”time immoral”. In 1995 an archaeological dig on the Hebridean island of Colonsay discovered a shallow pit that was actually a midden, filled with the remains of hundreds of thousands of burnt hazelnut shells, which were carbon-dated to about 7000 BC.

Notwithstanding the immense amount of hokum surrounding the mediaeval pilgrimages based on sites of famous relics, and the commercialism of the ensuing trade, markets and fairs that surrounded them, I can personally attest to the powerful nature of such an experience.  My own theory about this, for what it’s worth (probably about £4.2s.6d) is that the relic acts as some sort of focus, conduit, or even portal to the instinctive intuitive and spiritual side that we suppress in “everyday” life, thus creating one of the “timeless moments” which Eliot commemorates so often in Four Quartets. It’s perfectly possible, of course, to still your mind and put yourself in the “zone” by other means – prayer, meditation, and so on, but how much easier when you have a lightning rod to concentrate the power of the metaphysical. (Coincidentally, “rod” is another word which goes back to the same Anglo –Saxon root as “rood”. As indeed, is “root” itself.)

My own lightning-rod moment, about which I’ve written previously in this blog, came during a visit to Holy Cross Abbey, in Ireland, in 1998. Holy Cross Abbey did in fact have a supposed splinter from the “true cross”, but the original one went missing during the turmoil surrounding Cromwell’s brutal rampages through Ireland. The present relic is an “authenticated” one, given by the Vatican when the Abbey was re-commissioned after the Abbey’s restoration and re-dedication in 1969. I still struggle to describe the experience I underwent; the only time I have ever felt something so similar and so intense was in Chartres Cathedral in France.  There was a sense of the burning sun and the heat of the Middle east, somehow blended with the cool green of the Irish landscape and the intense turquoise blue of the sea.  There were scents, and distant sounds, there was something intense transmitting from the heart of the tiny splinter of wood held in the centre of the golden cruciform reliquary.

It didn’t matter then, and it doesn’t matter now, whether it actually was a splinter of the true cross or not.  In all honesty, it probably wasn’t, but what I felt was the power with which generations of pilgrims had imbued it.  Like Eliot’s moment in the “draughty church, at smokefall” in Little Gidding, I was here to kneel, where prayer had been valid.  Such occasions are always going to be intuitive, and never logical, but as Alan W. Watts points out in The Way of Zen:

Indeed, an exponent of the I Ching might give us quite a tough argument about the relative merits of our ways for making important decisions. We feel that we decide rationally because we base our decisions on collecting relevant data about the matter in hand. We do not depend upon such irrelevant trifles as the chance of tossing a coin, or the patterns of tea leaves or cracks in a shell. Yet he might ask whether we really know what information is relevant, since our plans are constantly upset by utterly unforeseen incidents. He might ask how we know when we have collected enough information on which to decide…On the contrary, we go through the motions of gathering the necessary information in a rational way, and then, just because of a hunch, or because we are tired of thinking, or because the time has come to decide, we act.

The decision, in my case, being the decision to believe, I suppose, that this “fragment of the true cross” had come to stand in some way as a conduit to its archetype (in Neo-Platonist terms) the real true cross. Strangely enough, in what passes for my spare time this week, as well as re-reading the Alan W. Watts book, I’ve also been re-reading The Paradise Within, by Louis L. Martz, ostensibly a book of literary criticism of the work of Vaughan, Traherne and Milton, but also in many ways a very informative text on the Neo-Platonism that informed their work, and the work of others such as Marvell and indeed Eliot.  Thus it is that, separated by three hundred years, Eliot and Marvell are both able to describe an experience which I guess is similar to the one I had, in Burnt Norton and The Garden, respectively, where Marvell’s contemplation results in

Annihilating all that’s made,

To a green thought in a green shade.

I’m beginning to sense a vast synchronicity behind these timeless moments. Martz points out how Traherne, in his Centuries of Meditation, constantly uses the theme of seeing the world about you as if you were the only person in it, as it was back in the perfect, archetypal Eden, much in the same way as Kabbalists talk about getting back to the blissful Ain Soph Aour or limitless light, and Zen Masters meditate on the outcome of unsolvable Koans, in order to still the mind and glimpse the Tao that underlies everything. It’s like seeing the ghost out of the corner of your eye, but when you actually turn and look at it, there’s nothing there. Or like Donne’s description of mysteries, which are plain for all to see, but dazzling like the sun.

In fact, the web of synchronicity is so vast that even Joni Mitchell seems to have tuned in to Neo-Platonism – we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden.

Maybe these timeless moments are just moments because to sustain them for more than a brief fleeting instant would be more than humankind could stand.  “Humankind cannot bear much reality”, Eliot once famously said, and this is especially true, I suppose, if the reality is the real reality that underlies everything, and not the façade we normally rely on to get us through the day.  Maybe we have to fret and worry about whether there is a God, simply because if the majesty and certainty of whatever it is that exists outside of time and underpins the entire universe was revealed to us irrevocably and constantly, we would indeed be dazzled, or fried to a crisp, like a moth that got too near the candle.

Well, once again, it’s got to be Sunday teatime and I am, once again, in pretty much the same position (physically as well as spiritually) that I was in at this time last week.  God alone knows what next week will bring, but at least on Friday the referendum will be over, one way or another. I could do with a week unlike last week, however, I’ve had enough of “the heartaches and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to” for a while, thanks.  I toyed with signing off with either the wistful Caledonia, by Dougie McLean, with its line of

If I should become a stranger, it would make me more than sad

Then I considered Will Ye No Come Back Again, or even Auld Lang Syne, but I think both of those are more appropriate for when the referendum campaign has been lost, and Scotland has voted to break away. So my final choice came down to the sentiments expressed in Both Sides The Tweed.

And now, I must post this, then go and change the grit in Matilda’s litter tray. After enlightenment, the laundry.