It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley.
The weather once again turned mild, unsettled and rainy, so there was a bit of
everything, apart from snow and ice and fog, which suits me just fine. I doubt
it will stay that way till March, though I wish it would. Matilda’s been staying in more this week,
however, despite the mildness and the mellow dappled yellow and green sunshine
filtering through the turning leaves. Perhaps the people who own her second
house are away on holiday or something.
Anyway, the most momentous event in Matilda’s life this week is that
she’s acquired a jiffy bag.
The said jiffy bag arrived here from Bulgaria,
containing a pair of trousers which Debbie had bought off some Bulgarian woman
on Ebay. I said to her at the time that we are already living like Wombles,
there’s no real need to order in additional rubbish from Bulgaria, but there’s
no talking to her in that mood. The jiffy bag had already been a source of
amusement to me, because it arrived with a rubber stamped legend on the front
that said “Manky Nacker” or something very similar, which a puerile person such
as I could hardly ignore. Presumably “Manky Nacker” means something to the
Bulgarian postal service. Personally, I’d like to see the Royal Mail adopt a
similar programme of motivational slogans over here.
The discarded jiffy bag was left on the settee and, within a
few minutes, Matilda had settled down on it and put herself to bed. Since then, she’s slept on it every night,
going round and round on it until it crinkles. Last night, however, we
discovered the ultimate combination of cat-bedding – the jiffy bag, with
Maisie’s crocheted cat-blanket over the top of it. Cat bliss. She settled down on it in front of the stove last night, and was still there this morning.
Misty has had a quiet week, now her erstwhile canine
companions have gone back home. Unfortunately, this week has been the absolute
worst for fireworks, not only with obvious scheduled displays, but also with
anti-social idiots setting off “air bombs” up in Newsome and Berry Brow between
11pm and midnight. Apparently you can be fined up to £5000 for doing that, what
a pity the police can’t be arsed to arrest the little buggers. Perhaps I should
phone up the rozzers and say that there is an Occupy Democracy sit-in demo
going on right now in Newsome and Berry Brow, they’d definitely be there for
that.
Meanwhile, Misty has spent a lot of time cowering behind the
sofa next door. Actually, the fireworks
have been so bad, they even attracted the attention of Matilda, who growled,
hissed, and scuttled off (also next door) on a couple of occasions. I know enough about Matilda’s moods to
realise when she is on the verge of causing bodily harm, and I could quite easily imagine her, if she had
the means and the opportunity (the motive already being present) doing severe
harm to those responsible for the bangs, given the way that she can turn from a
hairy purry furbag to a howling mass of teeth and claws in a second. I imagined her jumping out of the darkness
like a Ninja cat, landing on their heads, and ripping chunks out of the faces
of the firework-toting-yobboes, and was strangely comforted.
Debbie has been back at her voluntary work this week,
although there is a rumour that she might actually be paid something on
November 23rd, or thereabouts.
The new system for payment at Kirklees is also supposed to have gone
live this week, so that brings with it yet more potential for spag bol and
general chaos all round. Still, maybe
they’ll pay her twice. That would make
up slightly for not having paid her anything at all so far, since the start of
term.
We’ve also been discussing further changes to the kitchen,
spurred on by our mass clearout of rubbish and general Wombledom over
half-term. Sometimes, in these
discussions, I must admit, I do tend to tune her out slightly, so I can get on
with other stuff. If anyone asks, it’s called multi-tasking – but I almost
choked on my Horlicks the other night when she said “I’d still like a
baby.” It turned out that what she’d actually said was “I’d still like a Baby
Belling”, continuing the kitchen discussion theme. I didn’t know whether to be
relieved or disappointed.
Remembrance has loomed large in our communications this
week, or rather lack of communication. I was wittering on earlier in the week
about not being able to get hold of a poppy to wear for Remembrance Sunday,
because I never – or rarely – go further than the end of the ramp, these
days. Later in the week, I had the
bright idea of enlisting the help of one of my Facebook Friends, whom I knew
would have a couple of spare poppies. If I did an online donation to the
British Legion, would she in turn post me a couple of poppies? Yes, of course
she would, and these duly arrived in the post. I gave Debbie hers on Saturday,
and she said “Where did you get these from?” I told her, expecting to be
applauded for my initiative, but it turns out that she had been at the garage
getting diesel on Wednesday, had seen the poppy tray and collecting tin, and
had also bought two, forgetting to tell
me. So this year we have two poppies
each, and the Royal British Legion have done rather well out of us.
We also got caught up in watching the week-long drama on the
BBC, Passing Bells, mainly because it was usually on more or less when she was
getting back from teaching and I was cooking tea. The most confusing part for Debbie was
telling the Germans and the English apart, because both sides spoke RP. After I
explained that this bloke on screen now was one of the Germans, she said “why
doesn’t he speak with a German accent?” You can tell she was brought up
watching Allo Allo.
Actually, the cleverest thing about the whole series was the
way in which in the first episode you saw the young man and his girlfriend
larking about in the fields in what looked like the archetypal 1914 Edwardian
sunshine and harvest scenario, with the storm clouds of war gathering, etc etc,
which has been done so many times before – all that was missing was George
Butterworth’s The Banks of Green Willow
as background music – then you finally see him in uniform after he’s joined up
and it turns out he’s a German.
After that, it was downhill all the way, I’m afraid. The battle sequences were generally filmed in
a combination of soft focus and slow motion, and ended up looking like a cross
between a herbal essences commercial and an advert for Abercrombie and Fitch.
When people were hit and died, there was none of the blood-spatter, people’s
heads being blown off, severed limbs, or shell fragments taking huge chunks out
of bodies – they did a slow-motion balletic twirl and fell in carefully
choreographed positions. Even in the bit where the wind changed and they
mistakenly gassed themselves, there was nothing you wouldn’t hear in the
average GP’s waiting room during a winter bronchitis epidemic. The series also suffered from the same
problem that bedevilled the otherwise-excellent German world war two series, Unsere Mutter, Unsere Väter, namely that
coincidence was deployed far too often as a plot device to ensure that people
kept meeting up who, in the reality of an actual global conflict, would not
have seen each other from one war to the next.
And, at the risk of a “spoiler”, the climax, where the
British and German protagonists finally met, fighting hand-to-hand in No-Man’s Land
just as the Armistice was in the process of being signed, and killing each
other at 11AM on 11th November, was so telegraphed that I had
already bet Debbie that this would happen. Still, the BBC is a past-master at
stating the bleeding obvious, none of us likes this crazy war, Wilmot, Don’t
tell him, Pike, etc., but I was really hoping for a twist where they both said
Oh, sod the barbed wire, shook hands, and each went back to his own lines. In
some ways, that ending might have been more of an illustration of the
pointlessness of the whole thing.
As I wedged my (duplicated) poppy in the zip toggle of my
fleece, I was once again reminded of Russell Baggis, and his strange penchant
for investigating paper poppies wherever they may be found. I first discovered
this when I came in one day in 1992 or 1993, I can’t exactly remember, and I
was wearing my Dad’s old army greatcoat, which I once used to possess, with a
poppy stuck through the lapel. Russell
had a habit of jumping up on the worktop anyway, while I was putting his Felix
into his bowl, and this time, he jumped up, the poppy caught his eye for some
reason, and he carried on, straight up the front of the greatcoat, in the sort
of manoeuvre that characterised the aliens in Alien, and ended up stealing the
poppy and running off with it in his mouth.
I thought this was such a neat trick that I retrieved it and encouraged
him to do it again, which was probably a mistake, because from then on he did
it every time I wore that coat, for the next few days. The year after, thinking he would have
forgotten all about it in the intervening period, I tried it on him again, and he ran straight
up the front of the coat, grabbed the poppy in his teeth, and was off and away
with it.
Why he did it, is a reason lost in the crinkly recesses of
his furry cat-brain, and he’s long gone now, nine years dead, in fact, so I
can’t really ask him, not that he could have told me. It’s a good job that nobody important (the
vicar, for instance) came to visit us while wearing a poppy during Russell’s
long and happy life. It would have been
embarrassing. It was also Russell, of
course, who ran up my back and sat on my shoulder while I was standing attention
during the minute’s silence on TV one year.
Generally speaking, as much as a cat can have fun on Remembrance Day, he
did.
I’ve been engaged in my own titanic struggles again this
week, with another two books more or less off to press. Next week is going to
be for typing up the loose ends on all four projects, and by the time next
weekend comes, if I’m spared, I should have produced four new books in three
weeks. Sadly, none of them mine, but I am working on that, in odd hours and
minutes, with my other leg.
I have been keeping an eye on the news, however, to see what
gems the Junta has been trying to sneak past us, in this week dominated by
World War One and all that it entails. George Osborne claimed to have halved
the unexpected £1.7BN European Union bill by the simple expedient of booting
the transaction into the long grass of the next financial year, and then
offsetting against it a rebate we were going to get anyway. I’m not quite sure
how stupid he thinks we are, but I’m guessing it’s somewhere on the scale
between “very” and “extremely”. It
doesn’t meet any accounting definition of “halving” something that I have ever
come across, but then I am not part of an organisation whose reaction to
potential expenses fraud is to shred all of the documents prior to the present
parliament.
Or, indeed, an organisation that is going to spend millions,
or possibly billions, of pounds of taxpayers’ money, writing to taxpayers
telling them how it is spending taxpayers’ money, in the form of a highly
fictionalised “statement” that lumps together as “welfare” several items which
are plainly not, in the sense that you or I would understand the word, to give
the false and lying impression that more is being spent on benefits and
“scroungers” than actually is. I know
that “politician is found to be lying” is really not that sensational: as a news story, it’s right up there alongside
“Mafeking is relieved”, but sometimes it’s
so blatant and so obviously
intended as electioneering propaganda using public money, that you start to
wonder if M’Learned Friends should be taking an interest. Perhaps if I rung up
the Met Police and said that George Osborne is illegally occupying the
Treasury?
In other, more commendable news, we (the UK, that is)
apparently built a brand new hospital in Sierra Leone in seven weeks, on a
brownfield site, from scratch, as part of the fight against Ebola. Admittedly, it’s nothing much to look at,
it’s hardly Guys or Barts; it makes heavy use of prefabricated buildings and
concrete roads, but nevertheless, I found myself wondering, if we can do it in
Sierra Leone, a brand new treatment centre up and running from scratch in seven
weeks, why can’t we do it here? Then I remembered, it’s because the Chancellor
has spent all the money sending out misleading self-justifying election
propaganda, at the public expense, to 60 million households. Yes, that would be
it.
Someone who could probably afford to fund a pop-up hospital
out of his own current account is multi-millionaire entertainer Griff
Rhys-Jones, who was bleating this week that if Labour got in at the next
election, he’d have to consider moving abroad as a consequence of the proposed
“mansion tax”. Well, Griff, you could always do that, and, if you do, don’t let
the door bang your arse on the way out. Or you could do what people who live
in council houses have had to do, when clobbered by the Bedroom Tax, and move
to a smaller home. Here’s a goose and here’s a gander, pass the sauce.
Not that Labour have a hope or prayer of getting in to power
in 2015, or any other year any time soon,
with the hapless Ed Miliband in charge.
Four years too late, the Labour Dinosaurs are waking up to find that the
swamp is dry, the savannah is dying, and there’s a strange meteorite in the
sky. And they are wishing (as I have
been since 2010) that they’d chosen David Miliband instead. This week’s Miliband controversy wasn’t
actually of his own making. He was photographed wearing a T-shirt that bore the
slogan “This is what a feminist looks like”.
Clegg also put one on for a photo-shoot, prompting Ian Hislop of Private Eye fame to comment “this is
what a desperate politician looks like”.
Cameron refused to wear one, saying he was far “too busy” for all that
feminist nonsense and generally left that sort of thing to his wife. The Daily
Mail, foaming at the mouth with its hatred of Miliband and not content with
blackguarding his dead father, despatched a news team to Mauritius, where it
discovered that workers making the T-shirts were being paid 62p per hour or
some such figure, which was later comprehensively debunked and disproved by the
Fawcett Society, the womens’ rights charity that was promoting the
garments. As Paul Dacre, the editor of
the Daily Mail, also heads the Press
Complaints Commission, I am confidently expecting the Daily Mail to run a full front page apology to Ed Miliband in the
same size font and the same position as the original story. I’m also expecting
unlimited funds for donkey sanctuaries, and for King Arthur to wake from his
sleep of a thousand years.
Although Miliband wasn’t actually at fault in this case (who
checks the provenance of their T-shirts, and in any case, it wasn’t even his)
he does seem to have, nevertheless, this penchant for landing in the mire. I
wonder how much of it is down to his special advisors (SpAds). For a long
while, I have thought his SpAds are more like spuds, actually, only with fewer
eyes and nowhere near as tasty or nutritious.
Someone who did wake from his sleep of a thousand years this week was
Lib Dim minister Norman Baker, who suddenly came out of his persistent
vegetative state as a Minister at the Home Office and realised that he’s
actually been propping up a fascist regime for the last four years. It’s
absolutely amazing the way the effects of
comatose amnesia can suddenly be completely reversed by the prospect of
an electoral Armageddon. It’s too
little, too late, obviously, and I will be watching out for him, on election
night, to raise a glass to his departure. Hardly a “Portillo Moment” but they
all count.
The Home Office of which he was a vital, if slightly wonky,
cog, continues to be a stranger to the concepts of compassion and
humility. There has been a decision in
the Harley Miller case (they were trying to deport an Australian NHS worker who
had previously had unlimited right to remain, see previous blogs) but she is
legally prevented from publishing it or commenting on it. The only circumstances I can conceive where
this would happen would be a defeat for the Home Office where they managed
somehow to obtain a gagging order to prevent it being made public and turned
into some sort of precedent. I hope they did get defeated, naturally, but then
I’m no lawyer. Meanwhile, however, Wadih
Chourey, of whom I have also previously written, a Down’s Syndrome sufferer who
has no one to care for him in his native country, is still under threat of
deportation because of the death of his parents here, as I write these words.
It turns out, though, that the Home Office has a rival in
its quest for mutton headed supremacy and stubbornness in the compassion bypass
stakes, Fort Lauderdale, Florida,
USA’s mayor, Jack Seiler, who had
90-year old Arnold Abbott, known locally as “Chef Abbot” arrested, no less, for
feeding the homeless. Abbott, who is a
world war two veteran, started a charity called “Love Thy Neighbour” in
remembrance of his dead wife, and fell foul of the local arrangements in Fort
Lauderdale which, I was surprised to find, in common with several other US
cities, only permit certain designated organisations to feed the homeless in
certain designated areas. It’s a bit like Westminster Council banning the soup
run at Christmas because rich people don’t want to look out of their windows on
Christmas Day and see poor people shivering in the cold. I know nothing else about Jack Seiler other
than that, on the face of it, based on this action alone, he seems to be a
cruel, cold-hearted ruthless bastard who doesn’t deserve to be in charge of Fort Lauderdale’s public
latrines, let alone the whole city.
Maybe, like the Everglades, he has
hidden depths. Or hidden shallows. Who
knows.
So, my friends, this is the better world which it seems that
those whom we remember today, on Remembrance Sunday, fought and died for. Because of the anniversary of the start of
the First World War this year, this was always going to be a specially poignant
period of remembrance for many, but sadly, also, once again, it seems to have
become something of a political football, and not in a good way, like the
political football used in the 1914 Christmas truce.
Inevitably, this year as well, with the 70th
anniversary of D-Day and the UK’s
formal withdrawal from Afghanistan,
there were always going to be contrasts between old and new conflicts. The
Blight Brigade would much rather, of course, that no-one asked whether Afghanistan
had been “worth it”, because with each
day that passes, the answer becomes more clearly and patently a resounding
“no”. [I discovered this week, by the
way, that the UK
apparently spent £200,000 or thereabouts during the conflict broadcasting an
Afghan version of The Archers at the
Taliban, and still they didn’t
surrender and their morale remains unbroken, despite this. They should have
played them the appallingly bad Joss Stone travesty of Eric Bogle’s No Man’s Land, if they really wanted to
destabilise them. I know it certainly destabilises me.]
One major focus of political wrangling has been the fate of
the incredible visual display of ceramic poppies filling the moat of the Tower of London, 800,000 of them or thereabouts,
one for every WWI allied casualty. As a piece of art, it is startlingly
original and has certainly captured the imagination of the public. It was also, apparently, only ever intended
to be transitory. It has also been
denounced by some art critics as a vulgar stunt, and if I were the artist, who
lost a finger to an accident in the studio while rolling out the clay for one
batch of the flowers, I might feel more than a bit aggrieved about that. Boris Johnson, allegedly Mayor of London,
though he never actually seems to be behind a desk doing any work, is not a man
to allow a bandwagon to go by, un-jumped, and he weighed in, saying that he
thought the installation should remain in perpetuity. Others have said it
should be left in place for the next four years, to mirror the progress of the
original war.
My own feeling is that it should be left for four years, and
at the end of that period, it should be carefully dismantled, and the
individual ceramic poppies should be donated by the artist to the Royal British
Legion, to be auctioned online, with a minimum bid of £10.00. True, this would
entail setting up an order processing and despatch facility, or massively
expanding the existing one, with attendant costs, but overall it could harvest
for the RBL the thick end of £8m+ in additional donations.
Some of that money (although I would much rather it wasn’t
necessary to spend it on such peripheral activities) could then be used by the
RBL to prosecute Britain First and other right wing fascist organisations which
are looking to appropriate the poppy symbol for their own ends by marketing
their own poppy-themed merchandise and conning people into donating money to
them for it, instead of the RBL, essentially under false pretences. I don’t see
why it should be necessary for the RBL to have to do this, taking expensive legal
action when the money could be put to far better use elsewhere, though it seems
it is. There is an old-fashioned legal phrase which is something like
“Obtaining a pecuniary advantage by deception”, which it seems to me that
Britain First is guilty of. The police
should be taking an interest. But I guess the police are too busy rounding up
people letting off illegal fireworks to take any notice of a crime being
committed, though. Oh, hang on…
Britain First are the would-be successors to Hitler’s SA, except
that they don’t know the words to the Horst
Wessell Lied, though often deploying similar tactics on the street, and their sole
theme, even more so than UKIP’s is that immigrants, and/or Muslims, are
responsible for all our woes (in 1930s Germany, it was the Jews). So much so,
that this week also saw the launch of a poppy-print hijab, for Muslim women who
want to show their support for the concept of remembrance while at the same
time maintaining the decorum of traditional dress! It seems my previous remark
that Muslims in the UK will only be seen to be truly integrated to the
satisfaction of the Bigot Brigade when they start wearing Union Jack underpants
is coming true, bit by bit. One Muslim
who is fully integrated by most people’s standards is Khudadad Khan, who was
awarded a VC near Ypres 100 years ago: finding himself one of the few survivors of a
British force sent to stop a German advance, he manned a single machine gun to
prevent the enemy making the breakthrough it needed, continuing to fire until
he was the last man remaining. Still
probably not good enough for Britain First, obviously, but then there are some
people for whom you could crap out a golden egg and they would complain that it
wasn’t silver.
It’s not just Britain First who see Muslims under the bed,
though. In the last week, four suspected Islamist terrorists were rounded up
and arrested in conjunction with an alleged plot to kill the Queen at the
Remembrance Day service at the Cenotaph this morning. Forgive my cynicism, but there is a track
record on behalf of the Junta of high-profile arrests of un-named alleged
terrorists who are then later quietly released without comment. But let’s reserve comment for if and when it
comes to trial, then we’ll see. Meanwhile, to give her credit, the old dear
turned up regardless, and did her stuff, even if she was wearing a bullet-proof
vest underneath her liberty bodice.
The overriding debate, though, this year as in other years,
is whether you should wear a red poppy at all.
White poppies are available via the Peace Pledge Union, and Purple
Poppies to remember the animal victims of war, though the latter two require
more forward planning to obtain, compared to the ubiquitous RBL red poppy. Especially for us.
The chief reason for not wearing a red poppy for me has
always been that in a sense, supporting the RBL is a bit like giving the
government a fig leaf. Governments of all hues and persuasions are very bad at
making sure that ex-service personnel get a fair deal and a smooth transition
to chivvy street. True, these days, driven by the necessities of casualties in
Afghanistan, the facilities are better than they have been at any time in the
past, but in many ways, the government gets away with holding back precisely
because they know that the public, via the Royal British Legion, via Help For
Heroes and via charities such as BLESMA will pick up the slack, and donate
generously (even if sometimes by accident!) to the cause. And we do, by and large, because the
alternative is too bad to contemplate.
At least this week, to give them credit (which is not a
sentence you will see me type often if ever) this week the Junta announced that
they will continue to pay the War Widows’ Pension to widows who subsequently
re-marry, thus meaning that for some women, it is no longer a choice between
financial security and loneliness or re-marrying and taking the hit.
Increasingly, though, as well as the feeling of being held
collectively to ransom by a government keen to impose collective compulsory
patriotism by means of peer pressure, there’s now a trend for the red poppy to
be subverted and appropriated not just by right-wing goon squads, but by more
subtle forces of evil. These attempts to
exploit the poppy and what it represents are all the more cause for concern
because they appear to be taking place with the connivance of the Royal British
Legion itself.
Thales, an arms company responsible for the construction and
supply of the unmanned drones that have been causing so much havoc to civilian
populations as well as to the Taliban over the poppy-fields of Afghanistan, has been allowed to erect a
poppy-covered billboard at the entrance to Westminster tube station. BAE systems, the
UK’s biggest armaments company, has sponsored the annual “Poppy Ball” white tie
event and dinner, and Lockheed Martin, the worlds single biggest arms company,
this year sponsored the British Legion Young Professionals’ Branch annual
event, “Poppy Rocks”. Maybe it is time that the Royal British Legion got shot
of some of this uncomfortable baggage and had a cleansing of the stables. Apart from anything else, any half decent
defence lawyer for Britain First, if it does come to fisticuffs, would surely
point to the fact that Thales have been allowed to use the poppy as a plea in
mitigation.
Maybe it’s time that the RBL got back to basics, back to the
ideals of Major Henry Howson of Richmond, who invented and manufactured the
ubiquitous poppy which is such a feature of Armistice fundraising, and whose
last words to his staff, as he lay dying, were “remember lads, if I peg out, I
go in the factory van.” The RBL would doubtless reply that we’ve come a long
way since Lady Haig’s Poppy Factory in the old disused brewery in Richmond, and
that charity fundraising today is a multi-million pound business and needs to
be dealt with as such. Even so, if the Red Cross can refuse the tainted
proceeds of Kip’s racist calypso, I do think there’s scope for the RBL to look
again at taking money from arms companies.
But then again, the RBL would probably say that the arms companies would
make the money anyway, and that it’s surely better that some of it finds its
way back somehow to the victims of the arms companies. And yes, if they wait
for the government to shoulder the burden of caring for ex-service personnel
properly, they’ll be waiting a long, long time, and they have to get funds from
somewhere.
So, even with these reservations, and recognising that it’s
an imperfect situation, and even with the reservations I also have about the
uncomfortable merger of armed forces and state religion that is manifest in
many a remembrance day service (I tend to agree with Bob Dylan when he sings, ”If
God’s on our side, he’ll stop the next war”) I still end up coming down on the side of buying a poppy. The ideal symbol for me would probably be a
purple, red, and white poppy, not
that such a thing exists, because for me it doesn’t have to be either/or. I’m
remembering the ones who didn’t come back, be they pack mules or people, and in
the family, I’m specifically remembering Gunner Harry Fenwick RFA, gassed at
Ypres, 1917; Private William Evans of The Suffolk Regiment, died of wounds,
1915, and Pilot Officer Jack Ross, killed when his Hurricane crashed into the
Irish Sea in 1942. And I’m wearing it to
embody the ideas behind the white poppy, as well; that one day, instead of
armies, we will have national humanitarian disaster relief forces (as we’re
doing in Sierra Leone) and that the final lesson of all those wars will be the
one which they came back with an put into place in 1945 – to build a better,
fairer, more compassionate, caring and respectful society for everyone,
including better housing, better education, and the NHS – all the things, in
fact, under attack from the “austerity” mongers today.
After the First World War, when those who returned from the
carnage of Flanders were promised “a land fit for heroes”, which they never
actually got, Arthur Me wrote, in Who Giveth
Us The Victory (1918):
“It is pitiful to
think that thousands of these men had better homes in the trenches of Flanders than in the sunless alleys of our Motherland. Do
thousands of children come into the world, to gasp for life in a slum; to go to
school hungry for a year or two; to pick up a little food, a little slang, and
a little arithmetic; to grovel in the earth for forty years or to stand in
steaming factories; to wear their bodies out like cattle on the land; to live
in little rows of dirty houses, in
little blocks of stuffy rooms, and then to die?”
No, they don’t – but they did, nevertheless, and it meant that the people of my father’s
generation, born to the soldiers returning from the Great War, had to do it all
over again, twenty years later.
I doubt whether the people who put that idealistic, caring society
in place in Britain after World War Two did so from an exclusively religious
perspective, or indeed from a religious perspective at all, but in thinking
this week about the enormous sacrifices people made to stop fascism, and at the
same time still ploughing my way through The
Paradise Within, I did come upon the following, which was written by Peter Sterry,
17th Century Platonist and chaplain to Oliver Cromwell, no less,
As Paradise,
so the pure image of God in the Soul, seems to some not to be lost or
destroyed, but hid beneath the ruins of the fall. Thus, knowledge, springing from the soul,
seems to be a remembrance, the life of all good, an awakening by reason of the
primitive image of pure nature, raising itself by degrees, and sparkling through
the rubbish, the confusions of the present state. Thus also hath the soul in herself the
measure of all truth and good in this pure image which, hidden in the centre of
the soul, containeth all forces of truth and good in itself.
For some reason, in the way that you sometimes happen accidentally upon a poem
or a piece of writing that strikes a chord, this chimed in with my thinking
this week. About remembrance, the life of all good, sparkling through the
rubbish, the confusion of the present state.
Remembrance as meaning looking back on the good times, before the people
we remember went off to war, never to return, and also as a basis for their
sacrifice being turned into something better, so they didn’t die in vain. For me, it’s the spirit of 1945 that sparkles
through the rubbish and confusion that presently surrounds us. I’m afraid we’re not doing too well on the
land fit for heroes again. We sort of had it, then we let it slip through our
grasp. Now we’ve got disabled soldiers living on the streets again, we’ve got
food banks, we’ve got hatred, mistrust and xenophobia, we’re turning the clock
back to the 1930s with health care and the 1890s with education, or at least we
were, until Mr Gove got locked in the lavatory.
Some days, there seems to be more rubbish than sparkles.
But if, as Peter Sterry believed in the 17th
century, along with others, and I believe now, there is a pure image of God
hidden deep in the soul, which can not be lost or destroyed and which is
released through acts of remembrance and “containeth all forces of truth and
good in itself”, maybe we should start looking for it, and deploying it, more
often. Sometimes it seems that the official government line on “Remembrance”,
capital R, is that we’ve done our duty to the Glorious Dead, now we can put
them back in their box for another year. But maybe we should start asking just how
glorious they are, and why exactly
they ended up dead, and what are we going to do about it. To stop it happening again.
As for me, I’ve tired myself out writing this, and it’s
going to be a long evening with yet more chores and tasks – a bit of a metaphor
for building the new Jerusalem perhaps – it has to be done brick by tedious
brick, just like my tedious, tedious life. All we can do is stick at it, try
and make things better, and keep right on to the end of the road. For everyone
who sails on in this curiously shaped ship of Britain, even if we no longer rule
the waves.
Meanwhile, we have to thank those who didn’t come back, as
well as those who did, that on a peaceful Sunday teatime, by a warm domestic
hearth in a house that might not be perfect but doesn’t often want for much,
that we can go about our daily lives, such as they are, that we even have the choice to try and build the new
Jerusalem, still, just about, and that my cat can sleep undisturbed, on a jiffy
bag, on the settee.
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