Epiblog for the First Sunday in Lent

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. The weather has turned grim, grey and grotty, apart from a few sunny, frosty mornings, and with the return of the damp in the air, the pain in my shoulder has returned once more, although it’s not the immediate, nagging pain I suffered over the summer, more of a dull ache, but it’s still tedious, nevertheless.

The birds and the squirrels have well and truly woken up, however, and are busy preparing for the spring.  When I put some food out for the birds this morning, the first two customers were two chubby squirrels who immediately started rummaging through the grain, looking for sunflower seeds, like two grannies at a jumble sale looking for bargains.  Having stacked away a considerable quantity each, they retired from the field, presumably to sleep it off, and left the remains to the birds. Later on, while I was busy with some filing (I had got up early in anticipation of a courier delivery which didn’t actually materialise until twenty past two, and it seemed a shame not to put the time to good use) there were two squirrels, whether the same two or a different two, I know not, chuffing around on the roof of the conservatory. God alone knows what they were doing, but from the way they were clomping around up there, I would guess at clog dancing.

All this activity has been extremely entertaining for Matilda, amounting as it does to the equivalent of a box set of “cat TV”.  Most days this week she’s spent a considerable time with her snouty face pressed against the inside of the conservatory door, chattering, growling and swishing her tail at the antics of various squirrels, pigeons and other specimens of ornithological interest.  It’s harmless enough, because despite her show of aggression, there is absolutely zero chance of her catching one of them in the wild, as both the squirrels and the birds are faster than her, and the birds have the additional advantage of being able to fly.  She’s made the most of the finer weather when it’s been on offer, but she did the world’s shortest ever cat expedition this afternoon when Debbie let her out in the wind and the rain and she was back at the door yowling to come in almost before Deb had closed it behind her.

Ellie and Zak have been staying for a couple of days this week, so Misty has had some canine companionship, and Ellie has been able to take over the important task of keeping an eye on the squirrels while Matilda is otherwise engaged, curled up in a tight ball asleep on the settee in Colin’s front room, with her tail over her nose. As it’s been half term, Debbie’s been able to get in some good walking with the dogs, off in the wild blue yonder, where there is miles and miles of bugger all, covered up with peat and heather.  They did the Crowdon Horsehoe, and Misty managed to lose the metal tag with her microchip ID number on it. This isn’t a major disaster, as her name and address tag, which is separate on her collar, also says “I am chipped, please scan me”, but it’s another addition to a list of things to do which is already a yard and a half long, to organise a replacement. Zak takes such excursions in his stride, but I think little Ellie may have found the two successive days when they did eight miles and thirteen miles respectively to have been a shock to the system. She certainly wasted no time hoovering up her tea and putting herself to bed, when they got back each time.

As you have probably gathered, we didn’t get away in the camper, mainly owing to reasons such as lack of time, lack of energy, and bad weather. The weather here at home hasn’t been anything to write home about, and indeed we were already at home, so why bother wasting a stamp; the weather in the Lake District was even worse, though, and I am glad to say that Debbie saw the logic in not climbing a 3000 foot mountain in the driving rain only to find that when you get there, wet through and frozen stiff, the summit is in fog and you can’t see further than the end of your nose.

As for me, I put the time to good use, and although I haven’t yet done anything about publicising any of it, I laid out and sent off to press the reprints of all the missing Gez Walsh Potty Poets books, The Spot on My Bum, The Return of the Spot, Someone’s Nicked My Knickers, and Parents, Zits and Hairy Bits. Plus, in a completely different, and much more serious, vein, I’ve been working on a new collection from a young writer with an astonishing amount of talent and potential, Philippa Crundwell, called Seventy Beats. Watch this space, as they say.

The wheelchair man came and fixed my wheelchair (in the driveway, I’d forgotten he has a phobia of dogs) so I am no longer typing at a 45 degree angle. And with my other leg, this week, by dint of ignoring various issues that seemed to think they were crises, but I disagreed, and the sky hasn’t fallen in, yet, as a result, I managed to pull together some work on one of my own books, We’ll Take The String Road, now expanded to include 2014’s Arran trip.  I also fixed the vacuum cleaner. Well, I say “fixed”, all that it needed was a shard of a broken plate removing from half way up the flexible hose, where it had gathered various other elements of chip fat and gunge to cause a blockage.  The potsherd was a result of my having dropped the plate in the first place, and Debbie having hoovered it up. I had hoped, when I saw the plate heading for the tiled floor, that it would bounce, as bone china is reputed to do , but sadly, this proved not to be the case, and it shattered into several hundred pieces of pottery shrapnel, in the full-on Greek taverna approved manner. One of which later became wedged in the vac hose and stopped it working. Yes, it’s just one white-knuckle ride of excitement round here.  I have measured out my life in coffee spoons.

I’ve been ignoring the outside world, too, while I’ve been busy getting on with stuff, but there are some stories that inevitably filter through from the daily round, the bundle of “telegrams and anger” that passes for the country we’re forced to live in.

UKIP have continued their stick-on comedy election campaign with their prospective candidate for Great Grimsby asking in the context of a pre-election debate “what happens when the renewable energy runs out.” You can’t buy stupidity like that, you have to be born with it. As Bernard wryly observed during his most recent visit to me, “When you’re dead, you don’t know you’re dead, it’s the people around you that are affected, troubled, and saddened by it. It’s the same when you’re stupid”.  I was discussing it with Debbie and she said, with her ‘teacher’ hat on, that surely the idea of renewable energy running out was an oxymoron. To which I replied that the woman was not only an oxy moron, but a silly cow to boot.

Actually, I do her a disservice, maybe. There is a possibility  - a certainty, some would say - that the sun will one day turn into a supernova and burn us all to a crisp. It could already have happened, as light from the sun takes 8 minutes and 20 seconds or so to reach the Earth, so the sun could have blown up eight minutes ago and we wouldn’t know until…..arrrrrgh!

OK, admit it, I had you going there.

I do think, though, there is a correlation between fascism and stupidity, the more I study the antics of UKIP.  Well, it’s not only UKIP, to be honest, there’s also the EDL, the BNP, Britain First, Chelsea football fans, you name it.  ISIS are a crowd of medieval mumbo-jumbo merchants, suet from the neck up, as are the Taliban.  The essence of fascism is coercion by force to adhere to a set of values that are simply not up for discussion, no matter how much you point out their failings of interior logic. Please note, I am not having a go at Islam here, in general, merely at the people of all religions who refuse to discuss their beliefs and seek to impose their will on others, unwillingly. It’s not the exclusive province of radical Islam, either – this week the Pope said that transsexual people were as dangerous as a nuclear weapon, or something similar.  Well, pardon me, I know that UKIP think that gays cause flooding, but I have yet to see a transsexual wipe an entire city from the face of the earth and leave fallout that lasts for thousands of years.

The same thing, the fascism = stupidity equation, was also true of the Nazis. All of their best generals, people like Rommel and Guderian, were Nazis in name only, along for the ride. People such as Goering, and indeed Hitler himself, liked to think of themselves as master tacticians and intellectuals, but in truth, they hardly troubled the scorers.  We should be grateful, I suppose, that Hitler was such a meddlesome, megalomaniac duffer at battle tactics – if he had continued bombing the RAF on the ground while they were refuelling, in 1940, instead of switching to a carpet bombing Blitz on London, and if he’d ignored the Russian front instead of capriciously switching in 1941 and initiating Operation Barbarossa, the outcome of the last war might have been very different. One can only hope his present-day acolytes self-destruct in a similar manner, but without taking several million innocent lives with them.

It may seem fatuous, and indeed disrespectful, to compare the present day Junta’s treatment of the poor, the ill, the unemployed, migrants and asylum seekers to the Holocaust. Nobody is suggesting rounding up all the unemployed or people on benefits, and putting them in special camps, not yet, anyway, though Katie Hopkins did suggest last year that they should be forced to wear some outward mark denoting their status, in a bid to win the oxy moron award for 2014.  We should not forget, however, that people have died as a result, as a direct result, of the policy of “austerity” and the deliberate targeting of people on benefits by the DWP and their agencies, ATOS, and, latterly, CAPITA.

In case you thought I was being melodramatic about the way in which the war on welfare is going, the Tory faction of the Junta this week re-announced their policy of workfare for all 18-21 year olds in long term unemployment, and the withholding of benefits from people with drug, alcohol, or obesity problems.  There is an argument to the contrary, that these people need additional help, to be able to kick their unfortunate addictions and start on the long road back, but that doesn’t pander to the Daily Mail myth that all people on benefits are living high on the hog at the expense of “hard working families”, when in fact quite a lot of hard working families are working hard at crappy jobs where the pay is so low they have to have it topped up by, er, benefits.

As to the mass “workfare” programme for 18-21 year olds, I have said this before and I’ll say it again. Once you abandon the principle of one universal system which treats all claimants the same, once you start creating sub-divisions into the deserving and the undeserving poor, then I am afraid that is a step down the road to deciding that this or that section of society is not “worth” supporting with benefits, it is a step down the road to identifying these people with a special badge and keeping them corralled in camps.  And as we all know, the journey of a thousand miles starts with but a single step.  You mark my words.  First they came for the obese and the drug addicts, and I did not speak up because I was not obese, or an addict; then they came for the 18-21 year olds…

Thankfully, there are still some people in our society who have the courage and the guts to speak out against the nasty injustices of the evil Junta, and propose an alternative. I don’t mean the Labour Party, which fell ill under James Callaghan and died under Tony Blair. Ed Miliband and his miliband of merry men are about as successful at opposing the Junta as a gnat trying to sting a battleship. No, I mean the good old Church of England, the nearest thing to an opposition we have got at the moment.  This week the Bishops took some time off from moving diagonally, and instead released a round-robin letter, a “Pastoral Letter” for the 2015 election, condemning the politics of “austerity” and pointing out almost in words of one syllable that those who could least afford it are being asked to bear the burden.

“There is a deep contradiction in the attitudes of a society which celebrates equality in principle yet treats some people, especially the poor and vulnerable, as unwanted, unvalued and unnoticed,”

This is something which has been so self-evident for the last three or four years that it hardly bears saying. Nevertheless, they seem to have annoyed the Tories in general and Iain Duncan Smith in particular, which is never a bad thing.  If the Church of England was a political party, right now, I think I might even vote for it.

This week marked the release of the news that Lucy Glennon had died on 29^th January. I say “the release of the news”, what I mean is that I was too busy looking the other way to notice it until I saw an online obituary. Lucy Glennon suffered from Recessive Dystrophic Epidermolysis Bullosa, which you have to admit, knocks Facioscapularhumeral Muscular Dystrophy into a cocked hat when it comes to diseases with outlandish wacky names. It’s actually a very nasty condition which renders the skin incredibly susceptible to damage even from the ordinary wear and tear of everyday life.  Lucy Glennon lived a life of pain, exacerbated by the idiocy of having the Damoclean sword of benefits cuts hanging over her for the final years of her life. She was 28 when she died, and she wrote with great humour and courage in blog postings and articles about being forced to move out of her two-bedroom flat because of the changes in her housing benefit and a muddle, not of her own making, over her DLA. Her early death was due to her condition, and not directly caused by the Junta’s policies, but one thing’s for sure, the constant battles and uncertainty she had to endure didn’t make it any easier, and her story should be required reading for anyone who thinks that being incurably ill, in pain, and on benefits, is a doddle.

But, of course, as the Blight Brigade would have us believe, people on benefits are apparently leaching the country dry, which is why there is no money for any of the things we used to have, like libraries and Sure Start centres. The bishops’ letter describes it as “game-playing, to claim that anyone who cares about the impact of austerity on the most vulnerable members of society is … careless about the extent of national indebtedness”.

Well, if it’s a game, it’s not a very entertaining one, and the result is always rigged. Councils across the north of England are finding out around now how much they have to cut this year to take account of further reductions in central government funding, not that this stops them from indulging in grandiose gestures when there is a bike race to be underwritten out of the public purse, and now we find this week that the absurdly-named “Tour de Yorkshire” is going to receive £800,000 of public funding, so we can obviously find magic money down the back of the sofa somewhere, when it’s a case of civic junketing and New Years’ Honours.

If anyone doubted the way in which the disadvantaged are treated as a problem to be airbrushed out of the picture in these times of “austerity”, one need look no further than Selfridges in Manchester, which has become the latest building in a town centre to install spikes to deter rough sleepers from using its doorways to shelter at night. So, in the bewildering cacophony of 21^st-century retailing, they have at least made one decision easy for me – boycott Selfridges.  You sort of half expect compassionless brutality from a set of rapacious moneygrubbers like Selfridges. But the people who should really be hanging their heads in shame this week are Hull City Council, who put up a series of posters in the town centre targeting rough sleepers with the strapline “Beggars Can Be Choosers”, implying once more that living rough and being forced to beg on the streets is some kind of lifestyle choice.  It shows yet again how insidious the propaganda which has been pumped at us since 2010 has been. It’s quite simple, as I have said before, these days we are all just three bad decisions away from being on the streets, and with the current set of clowns in charge, they don’t even have to be your bad decisions! So, think on, Hull City Council. There but for fortune, goes you and I.

So, after a mixed week, we staggered on to Sunday, and, as I said earlier, I was up and about startlingly early, and looking forward to knocking some of the tedious tasks off my “to do” list, and maybe even get around to something a little more recreational, but sadly, my computer had other ideas and started displaying all of the symptoms of a hard disk that is not very well at all. I cursed myself that, with everything else I’d achieved during the week, I hadn’t found the time to back up my files.  Eventually, with the aid of a Windows recovery boot disk and several hours of frustration and chewing my own beard, I’d got it to boot up and run various diagnostics and scans. I also backed up about 53,000 files onto an external hard drive, so that if it does go “brustenauf” next week, at least my work will be safe, although setting up a new machine would definitely not be on my “to do” list, all other things being equal. Next week is going to be horrid enough as it is.

Today is the first Sunday of Lent, and it certainly felt suitably purgatorial.  This means, of course, that the week also contained Ash Wednesday, a suitably sombre day, as it turned out, and one where I made a point of re-reading T S Eliot’s poem of that name, in the same way that every Good Friday, I try and read Good Friday 1613, Riding Westward, by John Donne.

And pray to God to have mercy upon us

And I pray that I may forget

These matters that with myself I too much discuss

Too much explain

Because I do not hope to turn again

Let these words answer

For what is done, not to be done again

May the judgment not be too heavy upon us

Because these wings are no longer wings to fly

But merely vans to beat the air

The air which is now thoroughly small and dry

Smaller and dryer than the will

Teach us to care and to not care

Teach us to sit still.

Eliot’s remorse for “what is done, not to be done again” was probably related to the breakdown of his marriage to Vivienne Haigh-Wood, a process which eventually led to Eliot, aided by Vivienne’s brother Maurice, having her committed to a mental institution in 1938.  He had already left her (“deserted” her, as she would have it) in 1933, three years after Ash Wednesday was published.  My own remorses are much more prosaic. If anyone’s going to be committed, it’ll probably be me, the way things are going.  That’s not to say I haven’t let people down in the past, even the quite recent past, by not being there when needed, by hurting people as a result of bad decisions or letting hubris get in my way… been there, done that.

And now that, unlike the birds that flock in our garden, I am unable to “beat my wings”, now that I am indeed, as Eliot would say, “an aged eagle”, I find myself  thinking back on those times with the intention, perhaps, of doing some sort of penance but also, perhaps, to try and understand why I did what I did, at the time.  Maybe I should try and write it out of my system, as a Lenten exercise, since in some cases it won’t be possible to apologise in person to those involved, even if I knew where they are right now.  The Collect for today has, amongst the readings, the chapter in the Gospel of Mark where Jesus spends forty days in the wilderness being tempted by Satan. Even for someone like me who has difficulty with the literal interpretation of the Bible, I have often been puzzled by this episode, and why it was necessary at that particular juncture.  Perhaps it’s meant to be symbolic of the need to overcome the inner “Satan” in order to concentrate on the divine “spark” within.  In my case, my own temptations would not be the world, the flesh, the devil, but the torment of not being able to go back and put right what I previously did wrong. To care, and not to care.

Eliot returns to precisely that theme in Little Gidding, when he writes:

And last, the rending pain of re-enactment

Of all that you have done, and been; the shame

Of motives late revealed, and the awareness
Of things ill done and done to others' harm

Which once you took for exercise of virtue.

Then fools' approval stings, and honour stains.
From wrong to wrong the exasperated spirit

Proceeds, unless restored by that refining fire

Where you must move in measure, like a dancer.'

Well, Thomas Stearns, me old pal, me old beauty, my dancing days are over, except mentally, perhaps.  Tomorrow, I shall be remembering a sad occasion which was not of my doing, in that it is 18 years by the date since Phil’s cat, Reggie, didn’t come home one night and was found by Phil next day at the side of the Wombwell by-pass. So, tomorrow is Reggie day, black-bright little imp that he was, and he lives on in our memory and, over the years, in many passwords.

Which brings me back to computers, and this one. While I’ve been picking my way though this blog, it’s behaved itself, more or less, so it’s been a long day and I’m going to quit while I’m ahead, lock up, and fetch in some coal. Good night all, and possibly sundry.  Tomorrow shall be my dancing day.

Epiblog for the Feast of St Onesimus

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley.  The weather has at least calmed down, and entered what the weather forecasters rather quaintly refer to as a “quiet phase”, as if having worn itself out snowing and blowing a gale, the weather has overtired itself and is having to have a little lie down. In practical terms, that means the equivalent of living in a Tupperware box, with grey skies and cold days.  When the sun does occasionally make its presence known, it’s with the feeblest of glimmers, what Bob Copper once referred to as “the counterfeit gold of February sunlight.”

Still, it’s better than snow and ice, and there are encouraging signs that things are starting to happen on the Spring front in general.  The snowdrops have increased their numbers since last week, and Maisie’s indestructible daffodils have been joined by their more elusive brethren, the ones that got left behind beside the pond when we thought we’d dug them all up, so we shall soon have, in a few weeks, daffodils front and back.

Matilda has been spending an increasing amount of time out of doors, and when she’s not actually outside, she’s again been indulging in her second favourite pastime, that of sitting just inside the closed conservatory door, bird- and squirrel-watching.  The birds have been very busy, and seem to be increasing in numbers every day. This week of course included Valentine’s Day, the day on which wild birds traditionally choose their mates for the coming year:

For this was on Seynt Valentynes day,

Whan every foul cometh ther to chese his make,

Of every kinde, that men thynke may;

And that so huge a noyse gan they make,

As Geoffrey Chaucer tells us in The Parliament of Foules. But we don’t have to take his word for it: the traditional English folk song, Dame Durden, as sung by the Copper family, takes place:

…on the morn of Valentine,

When birds begin to prate,

Dame Durden and her maids and men

Were all together met…

I didn’t see any particular evidence of the birds choosing their mates on Saturday, but Matilda did choose that day to go missing from 11AM until 7PM, thus lending further credence to the “other house” theory. Wherever her other house is, they are not feeding her, because when she got back she demolished two sachets of Felix, back to back, straight off the bat.

Misty has been joined in the latter half of the week by Zak and Ellie, who have come to stay while Granny is on another one of her Elizabethan progresses through the southern portion of her realm.  So on Friday and Saturday, Debbie set off with Misty and Ellie attached to her via Dyneema ropes and karabiners, with Zak trotting obediently behind.  They did at least seven miles each time, which is meat and drink to a border collie like Misty and a large dog like Zak, but poor little Ellie, trotting along on her little terrier legs, slept very soundly, both days, after eating a huge meal on her return.  She’ll have to do a lot more training before she conquers her first Wainwright.

I’ve had mountains of my own to climb this week, mainly comprising paperwork, which seems to multiply exponentially the moment you turn your back on it.  It doesn’t matter whether you’re a geologist or a genealogist, you look away for a moment and when you look back, a whole new range of administrative alps has thrust itself upwards, obscuring the horizon.

This has not been made any easier by the fact that the socket that holds the right arm of my wheelchair in place has malfunctioned (I think the bolt holding it on to the frame has sheared) so my wheelchair tray is listing at about 25 degrees, left to right. I have rung up to get the chap who repairs NHS wheelchairs to come and fix it, which is normally a five minute call at worst, but this time the number was unobtainable. Following a tedious round of phone tag table tennis, I eventually found out that “wheelchair services” has been taken back “in house”, as part of the continuing dismantling of the NHS, no doubt. Finally in possession of the right number, I dialled it, only to find it was an ansaphone.  Eventually they rang me back, and it seems the earliest it can be fixed is Monday.  Truly marvellous.  So I am typing this at a slant, which is probably why it will seem even more biased than usual. My old chum, Bernard, bless him, descended on us like a deus ex machina this week and cheered me up considerably, and even he tried to have a go at fixing it, but without drilling out the sheared bolt, we were stuffed.

I consoled myself with watching the final episode of the re-run of Smiley’s People, the 1982 televisation of the John Le Carré book, which has been re-shown on BBC Four over the last four or five weeks. I feel a connection with the book because I bought it in hardback the day it came out, and I actually met John Le Carré (briefly, and eminently forgettably, for him) when he gave a lecture at Hull University, following its publication.  Anyway, it was good to renew my acquaintance with Alec Guinness’s masterly portrayal of George Smiley. Debbie, however, was not a fan. When it finished, I mentioned to Deb that I quite fancied visiting Switzerland (where the final episode was largely set). “Good idea,” she said, “that’s where Dignitas is, isn’t it?”

Grim humour has sometimes been very necessary this week. UKIP have at least done their best to keep us entertained. They do add to the gaiety of nations, although perhaps that’s not the most appropriate phrase for Rev. George Hargreaves, who has been parachuted into the Coventry South constituency as UKIP’s candidate in May. Rev. Hargreaves apparently wrote the song “So Macho” for Sinitta in the 1980s, but despite this major contribution to the canon of gay disco anthems, and despite having a former flatmate who died of AIDS, Rev Hargreaves had a previous attempt to be elected when he campaigned (for the Scottish Christian Party, which he founded) on a platform which included proposals for the reinstatement of Section 28, banning of gay adoption and the prohibition of ‘acceptance or approval’ of homosexuality in diversity training, outlawing embryo research and introducing mandatory Christian religious education into schools.  He has also campaigned to have the dragon removed from the Welsh flag, because it is a symbol of Satan, apparently.  I’m not sure, as I type this, how much of this bilge is actually official UKIP policy, but since Nigel Farage tends to make it up as he goes along, neither is he.  One thing’s for sure, Rev Hargreaves must have graduated magna cum laudae from the UKIP fruitcake academy that year.

Meanwhile, in Thurrock, UKIP councillor Robert Ray has been banned from driving for 19 months and fined £1,160 at Basildon Magistrates’ Court, and, yes, you guessed it – suspended, after admitting drink driving following a party last June. It must have been a good party, because he was double the legal alcohol limit when he was arrested by police after asking them, “Do you know who I am? I am a prominent councillor, I know the police commissioner.” I find myself wondering what happens when it gets to the stage where UKIP has more suspended members than members.

UKIP are undoubtedly stick-on comedy gold, although of course deep down they are just as sinister as all the rest of them, possibly more so.  We should be thankful they are such an inept bunch of clowns. To re-enact the Holocaust, they would need to make the trains run on time, which is clearly beyond their capabilities.  Sadly, the Junta have proven more efficient at killing people off.  Andrew Sherratt, of Stoke-on-Trent, died last week after having his disability benefits stopped by Hanley Jobcentre, despite his being terminally ill.  And earlier this month, a coroner ruled on the case of Malcolm Burge, 66, who faced a bill of £800 because of a payments mix-up by Newham Council. With a bank balance of only £50, he took the only way out he could see when his repeated letters to the Council were ignored because they were engulfed with a massive caseload of Housing Benefit-related queries caused by “austerity” policies.

On 23^rd June 2014 he drove to Cheddar Gorge in Somerset, parked up, and ignited a 20-litre can of petrol in the passenger footwell.  He suffered 100 per cent second-degree burns to his body, and was rushed to hospital by air ambulance, but he could not survive his injuries. He died at 5AM the following day.

Following the coroner’s ruling of suicide, the DWP acknowledged this week that it has reviewed 49 cases where employment benefit recipients were “sanctioned” – having their payments stopped for a period of weeks or months after failing to comply with the rules – and subsequently died. Esther McVey, the employment minister, this week told MPs no link had been found between the deaths and the sanctioning policy. She told the work and pensions select committee: “We ensured that we followed all of our processes correctly.” Yes, well, quite. In fact, there’s your trouble, as the Dixie Chicks would no doubt say if they were here right now. Perhaps it’s time to re-think having a “process” which cuts people off from benefits to which they are entitled for no good reason, then drives them to the brink of suicide and beyond? Just a thought.

When street trader Tarek al-Tayeb Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire in Tunisia in December 2010, as a protest against the repressive, harsh policies of his government, the Junta generally hailed it as a heroic gesture, and indeed it was one of the key moments in the Arab Spring, that led to us meddling in yet more Middle Eastern countries with all of the attendant expense and no discernible benefit. What I can’t understand is why someone who sets himself on fire in Tunisia is a hero, whereas someone who does the same thing, and for many of the same reasons, in Cheddar Gorge, doesn’t even merit a public enquiry. Perhaps Cameron is playing his cards close to his chest, and planning a surprise missile strike on the Department for Work and Pensions. We can but hope.

Double standards from politicians are nothing new, of course. In the same way as it came as no surprise to me when Lord Fink (a wonderful name, redolent of Bertie Wooster’s chum, Gussie Fink-Nottle) was shown to be avoiding tax. My default position with the political establishment is that, to a greater or lesser degree, they are all at it, and they are all lying, in the same way that I always assumed the NSA was bugging everybody anyway. Having said that, a spectacular example of double standards has occurred this week. Compare and contrast, as it used to say on exam papers, the reaction to the murders by (at least nominal) Muslims of the cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo with the reaction to the murders this week of three Muslims, in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, by a self-confessed white atheist.

The victims, all shot in the head, execution-style, were identified as Deah Shaddy Barakat, 23, and his wife, Yusor Mohammad, 21, of Chapel Hill, and her sister, Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha, 19, of Raleigh, North Carolina.  Craig Hicks, 46, whose Facebook profile read “atheists for equality” and who had posted pictures of himself toting a loaded .38 calibre revolver, turned himself in to authorities, and has now been charged with three counts of first-degree murder. I may have missed the parades along the Mall in Washington DC to protest about the killings and to call upon white atheist militants to integrate with society. I may have missed Richard Dawkins being quizzed on prime-time TV about whether it’s acceptable to have atheists being radicalised and then turned loose in society. I probably missed the politicians, strolling arm in arm for yet another photo opportunity linked to violent murder, as they did in Paris. I must have missed the BBC sending a planeload of correspondents to report direct from the scene.  I certainly missed the bit where the NRA says there are too many guns in the hands of irrational people in the USA, and they plan to lobby for stricter control. Yes, I certainly missed that bit.  Anyway, I’ll say it here and now: Je Suis Deah Barakat.

In the same was as irrational wingnuts in the Muslim community are (thankfully) in the minority (although we have gone out of our way since 2001 to increase their numbers) by no means all Americans are gun-toting executioners motivated by a warped view of “religion”. To balance up Craig Hicks, we have the example of Kayla Mueller, whose death during an allied air strike, while being held hostage by ISIS, was also announced this week.  In her last letter to her parents in Prescott, Arizona, she wrote:

"I have been shown in darkness, light, and have learned that even in prison, one can be free."

which is a modern-day echo of Lovelace’s

Stone walls do not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage;

Minds innocent and quiet take them for an hermitage…

But even so, she is gone, for all her bright idealism, gone into the world of light, and we alone sit lingering here, as Vaughan put it.  And this world is a sadder place for her loss.

One way or another, it’s been a grim week, despite the first showings of maybe something approaching Spring stirring in the undergrowth.  There are some times, some days, some events, that get a hold of your faith and shake it with all the ferocity of a terrier shaking a rat.  And if that faith is only clinging by a thread, if it’s currently as transient and substantial as a spider’s web on a dew-drenched hedgerow, then it’s not going to be able to withstand much shaking.  All week I have been trying to make some sense of the death of four-year-old Mitzi Steady, killed in Bath when a tipper-truck went out of control and hit her and her grandmother on a zebra crossing.  It’s been with me all week, nagging at me, always there, like a pebble in my shoe.

Today is the feast of St Onesimus, who I originally chose out of the various saints whose feast day it is today because I knew his silly name would allow scope for making jokes about him inventing the onesie, and also give me an opportunity to poke fun at the inveterate letter-writing of St Paul. But it all seems so… feeble, so useless, in response to the tragedies represented by Mitzi Steady, Kayla Mueller, Deah Shaddy Barakat, Yusor Mohammad, Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha, Malcolm Burge, and Andrew Sharratt. It doesn’t seem right that I should come on here and make folksy, whimsical observations when these people are senselessly dead for no reason.

If anything, I should be ditching St Onesimus and, instead, putting up a spirited defence of Big G and explaining why all this was deemed necessary.  Why I should have to take one for the team is also a mystery to me, but I suppose if I try and explain why I feel there is a something, underlying everything, it comes with the territory. I was going to go on and say words to the effect of “not that God’s ever gone out on a limb for me,” and make some sort of joke about him appearing as a witness at a benefits tribunal. But of course, Christian convention would assert that God, or at least Jesus, did go out on a limb for me, quite literally, in the case of the Crucifixion.

But still, how can it justify Mitzi Steady? Better people than me have tried to explain or justify the death of a young girl. Dylan Thomas, in his Refusal To Mourn The Death By Fire of a Girl in London, takes a very uncompromising view:

I shall not murder
The mankind of her going with a grave truth
Nor blaspheme down the stations of the breath
With any further
Elegy of innocence and youth.

Deep with the first dead lies London's daughter,
Robed in the long friends,
The grains beyond age, the dark veins of her mother,
Secret by the unmourning water
Of the riding Thames.
After the first death, there is no other.

I wrote a couple of weeks ago about my theory that maybe God is everything that has ever happened in all possible universes, and a tragedy in this universe was balanced up automatically by a joyous occurrence somewhere else. You might call this the “Rosemary’s Sister” explanation, as in the song by Huw Williams where, despite being killed by a Doodlebug in the Blitz at the age of nine:

High upon the heavens, in a host of angels’ wings,

Rosemary’s sister will be dancing…

Which is the hopeful counterpoint to the first part of the chorus:

You fly high, your dreams are all in vain

One moment you are laughing and the next you cry in pain

Which sums up the inexplicable brutality of life.  So, we have some comfort, I suppose, in the “many worlds” theory.  It is a similar attempt to the explanation proffered by Canon Henry Scott Holland in 1910, when he wrote his sermon on the death of King Edward VII, Death, The King of Terrors, a famous extract from which has circulated ever since:

Death is nothing at all. It does not count. I have only slipped away into the next room. Nothing has happened. Everything remains exactly as it was. I am I, and you are you, and the old life that we lived so fondly together is untouched, unchanged. Whatever we were to each other, that we are still. Call me by the old familiar name. Speak of me in the easy way which you always used. Put no difference into your tone. Wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow. Laugh as we always laughed at the little jokes that we enjoyed together. Play, smile, think of me, pray for me. Let my name be ever the household word that it always was. Let it be spoken without an effort, without the ghost of a shadow upon it. Life means all that it ever meant. It is the same as it ever was. There is absolute and unbroken continuity. What is this death but a negligible accident? Why should I be out of mind because I am out of sight? I am but waiting for you, for an interval, somewhere very near, just round the corner. All is well. Nothing is hurt; nothing is lost. One brief moment and all will be as it was before. How we shall laugh at the trouble of parting when we meet again!

I first came upon this text when someone sent it to me on the death of my mother in 1986. It has been quoted dozens of times in many contexts, but this week I was prompted to read the entire text of the sermon, which I had not done before. Later on, he refers to Edward VII, lying in state.

So that black coffin harbours its black secret. But over it and round it and about it the light of Whitsuntide sweeps in to scatter all our fears. Why are we afraid? Have we not the gift of the Spirit? Has it not swept in upon us with a mighty wind? Is it not in our heart as a fire?

Well, that’s as maybe. Sometimes I feel like I do have “the gift of the spirit”, but most times these days, I don’t. I do still think there’s a something underlying everything, but I can’t describe it, or explain why it allows such things to happen, other than the fragments I have already offered – that its ideas of justice and mercy are almost diametrically different to ours and inexplicable to us.  Other than that, and the fact that at every disaster you will always see the helpers, and the indomitable nature of the human spirit gathers together and responds in a positive way, I have nothing to put forward.

The only other thing I can offer is Spring. Spring itself, the annual redemption, that rises again out of the death of, the depths of, Winter. It’s a poor consolation to say to someone who has just lost their four-year-old daughter, wiped out for no reason, that it will soon be Spring, but it may be that the message we are supposed to get from the turning of the seasons is that nothing is permanent, not even suffering and death. That people have been shown in darkness, light, and have learned that even in prison, one can be free.

Well, this has been a cheery little missive, and I find myself wondering if St Onesie might not have been a better bet after all.  Next week brings shrove Tuesday, which can only mean one thing, apart from pancakes for tea – Ash Wednesday and the start of Lent. As the Gawain poet says:

“After the Christmasse, comes the crabbed Lentoun…”

Next week also brings the promise (or should that be the threat) of going off for two or three days in the camper van, it being half term and all. A consummation devoutly to be avoided, unless the weather perks up by several tens of degrees.  But for now, it’s Sunday teatime and I have three hungry dogs, one hungry cat, and one hungry wife to feed, although the latter has just started independently on the poppadoms. Tomorrow brings the wheelchair man, the Sainsbury’s man, and possibly even the garage man, if the switch for the camper’s reversing light arrives. But today, today we have the naming of parts.

Epiblog for St Cuthman's Day

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. Thankfully, the threatened second instalment of snow never arrived. Maybe it was sent by Parcel Force, who knows, but either way, I was very glad of its absence, and this morning as I type this, it’s a bright, hard, sunny, almost spring-y day, or it would be if it were 10 degrees warmer. We’re eight days into February and so far it’s showing no sign of living up to its reputation of being “February fill-dyke”. Dare we hope that, despite the fact that the groundhog apparently saw its shadow and vanished back down its hole again, and the fact that Candlemas Day did indeed dawn bright and clear last Monday, we might have seen the worst of the cold, dark weather, and be at least on the road to spring? It would be a cheery thought, if true, although – as usual at his time of the year – I look at the garden and think of the depressingly large amount of work that is going to be needed to repair the ravages of winter.

The birds and squirrels certainly seem to think it’s spring. In fact, as I type this, there are at least three, if not four, grey squirrels on the decking helping themselves to such peanuts and bird seed as the birds have left from their feeding frenzy earlier this morning when I put the stuff out for them. It’s been a busy week for the squirrels too, as they appear to have stolen the “suet stick” bird feeder in its entirety, complete with all the contents. Last week they’d managed to knock it out of the tree and on to the decking, meaning Debbie had to re-hang it. This week saw a repeat performance, except that it’s vanished altogether now. So either it’s been carried off in triumph by a squad of squirrels, or even one lone hefty squirrel, so that the suet can be devoured in private somewhere, or Brenda the Badger has returned, or possibly the dog has picked it up, taken it down into the garden, and buried it.  Stranger things have happened.  Either way, that’s £4.20 we won’t see again.

Matilda has been largely a spectator as far as the squirrels are concerned, sitting inside the conservatory door, watching them, and the birds, through the glass, swishing her tail and making those strange chattering noises that cats do when they have seen some prey they fancy.  The chances of her ever catching either a squirrel or a bird are, however, minimal, or at least they are this side of a crash diet.  Misty is rather indifferent to the squirrels. Obviously she can see them and knows they are there, and sometimes goes over to the door for a closer look (usually their cue to scatter and re-group) but generally, having given them the collie dog stare, she leaves them to it and goes about her business. It’s about as different as it could be from poor little Freddie, who used to bark even at imaginary squirrels

“Scatter and regroup” could also be the motto of the NHS at the moment.  I’ve always been a supporter of the NHS, and I still am, especially of the ideals behind it and the principles on which it was founded, but we’re once more experiencing the sharp end of dealing with the poor health of an elderly family member at the moment, and the change since my own illness in 2010 is quite marked, particularly in the lack of communication and the unwillingness of the local hospital to put in the effort required to actually cure him.  The overall impression is one of a system under incredible strain, with people at some key points struggling to hold it together.

So it came as no surprise to me to read this week that a report from the leading health “think tank” The King’s Fund, blasted the Junta for its mishandling of the health service and specifically for the disastrous “reforms” instituted in 2010, which were in nobody’s manifesto and which nobody voted for at the election.  I’m not normally a Guardian reader, but you can’t really fault the assessment made by Dennis Campbell, their health correspondent:

The coalition’s shake-up of the NHS was misguided, deepened the growing problems facing A&E units and left it weaker, structurally “incomprehensible” and less able to improve care for patients, according to a leading health thinktank.

In an assessment of the government’s NHS record, the King’s Fund said that the reorganisation forced through by then health secretary Andrew Lansley in the early period of the coalition was “damaging and distracting” for a health service that should have been preparing for the serious challenges it is now confronting.

Prof Chris Ham, the King’s Fund’s chief executive, said: “Historians will not be kind in their assessment of the coalition government’s record on NHS reform. The first three years were wasted on major organisational changes when the NHS should have been concentrating on growing financial and services pressures. This was a strategic error.”

As well as its unsparing critique of Lansley, the 80-page assessment of how the NHS has fared under the coalition also accuses David Cameron of making errors that allowed Lansley to press ahead with a “sweeping and complicated” reorganisation of the NHS in England, even though the coalition agreement of May 2010 had specifically ruled one out.

The whole report is stuffed with criticism of the way the NHS has been handled, but those four paragraphs just about sum it up. It seems increasingly likely that the NHS will be used as a political football in the run up to the election by both sides, along with immigration and, sadly, child abuse.  UKIP’s stance on the NHS is (unofficially, like all their real polices) that they would scrap it and make everyone take out American style private health insurance.  A UKIP councillor in Keighley, Samuel Fletcher, “tweeted” as much in more or less those words last year, and either resigned, or “was resigned” from the party as a result. Except that he seems to have “tweeted” again on 21^st January that he hadn’t formally resigned, but was “going back after the elections in May”.  The question “where do UKIP find these turnips” is becoming rather hackneyed by repetition, now, but perhaps the wider question is, “why does UKIP seem to have a completely private and undisclosed set of neo-fascist policies which only come to light when someone in the party is caught out, resulting in a hasty denial?” or even “How many times does this have to happen before it becomes clear that actually, behind the veneer, everybody in UKIP is a closet Nazi?”

UKIP’s stance on child abuse is that it makes a very good bandwagon to jump onto, and from which they can indulge in their usual practice of immigrant-bashing.  UKIP have been making a great fuss and hoo-hah in Rotherham about the child abuse scandal, with Nigel Farage indulging in a shroud-waving, inflammatory visit to the town this week, which resulted in a near-riot when anti UKIP protestors besieged him.  Nobody should be glorying in that situation. When you have anarchy breaking out on the streets, it’s democracy that suffers.

The Rotherham situation is a mess, undoubtedly. I worked near to Rotherham for 21 years, and there is an ingrained stupidity in those South Yorkshire councils which had to be seen to be believed. Barnsley Council, which once sent my cat a poll tax bill, is another organisation that is largely suet from the neck up.  Add to this the lack of funding and the economic collapse of the area post-Thatcher, and the general economic depression in the area, and add to that the fact that nobody dared point out the pattern of abuse by largely young Asian males, or those that did point it out were ignored, out of a false application of “political correctness” and you end up with a pretty toxic brew.  The police in South Yorkshire have also been conspicuous by the absence of any real interest in these cases until the scandal was blown apart, but they have their own fish to fry in the form of allegations of cover ups over Hillsborough and the like.  None of the foregoing is intended to be an excuse for, or an attempt to dismiss, what seems to have happened to these people lightly, merely to point out and to try and understand that the causes are manifold and complex, and not, as UKIP seem to believe, simply down to Muslims/immigrants/asylum seekers/British Asians (UKIP tend not to bother differentiating) molesting young white women.

In fact, turning the abuse into a simple issue of immigration/racism and Muslim-bashing actually obscures some of the other causes and makes it less likely that they will be dealt with properly. Not that this prevented a UKIP Plymouth branch official from tweeting this week: "South Yorkshire police says PC Hassan Ali who was under investigation in relation to child abuse in Rotherham has died in a car crash KARMA!" Needless to say, UKIP claimed later that they weren’t expressing UKIP policy, it was all down to some “freewheeling” amateur, etc. etc. Yeah, right. 

Another one who never gave a stuff about Rotherham before this blew up is Eric Pickles, the Junta’s Communities Secretary, but again this week he suddenly realised that there is an election in 80 days so he had better be seen to be doing something about child abuse in Rotherham.  Normally, his only interest in northern councils is in squeezing their rate support grant as much as he can, disproportionately, in order to soften the blow of “austerity” on southern, Tory-led, councils in Tory constituencies. This contributes to their being starved of funds, and having to put up the council tax, a situation which isn’t helped when gong-seeking councillors embark on grandiose projects such as channelling public funds into bicycle races. This week, in the wake of the damning report by Louise Casey, Pickles appointed five high-powered civil servants to take over the day-to-day running of Rotherham from the Rotherham Council “Cabinet”, which resigned en masse after being slated in Louise Casey’s report.

Again, this is going to sound like I am defending Rotherham Council, which I am not: clearly they were duffers at child protection, for the cocktail of reasons given above and probably more besides which are yet to emerge from the woodwork in the plethora of post-resignation further enquires, reports, and possibly criminal proceedings. But there is also a principle here: bad as they undoubtedly were, Rotherham Council were at least elected, and there is another election due in 80 days time. They could have stayed on for that time in a caretaker role (we do have a caretaker, zombie parliament at the moment as an example to follow) and then stood down in May.  That would have been a more democratic outcome, if anybody actually cares about democracy any more, but then it wouldn’t have gathered those all-important pre-election headlines for Eric Pickles.

It must be pretty depressing to be an ordinary British Muslim right now, one of the silent majority who just want to get on with their lives and are never asked for their opinions on Jihad or Caliphates.  In the aftermath of Rotherham, apparently people have taken to ringing up Asian taxi firms and asking for a “groomer”, instead of a taxi.  And another story which caught my eye this week was the sharing on Facebook of a CCTV picture of a left-hand drive car with Dutch number plates which was said to have been used in an incident when the two occupants (who “looked like Muslims”) are supposed to have shouted insults as two teenage girl Army cadets outside a training facility in Gateshead, and threatened to “behead” them.  What puzzles me is not whether this happened or not, I am sure it did, there are always more idiots outside than in, especially these days – but what puzzles me is that, given the CCTV clearly shows the car’s number plate, and given that the UK is infested with CCTV, number plate recognition, and the like, and given that we’re presumably able to pick up the phone and talk to the Dutch police, why was it felt necessary to release the CCTV at all, especially as, according to one report, in the Daily Telegraph, so it must be true, detectives “have already traced the car”?

What it has done, of course, is unleash a wave of furious comments on social media from people indulging in Muslim-bashing, and a rash of articles in the press comparing it to the murder of Lee Rigby.  If these people were really adjudged to be such a comparable threat, though, what good is served by tipping them off and  plastering them and their vehicle and number plate all over Facebook?  The only circumstances in which releasing this CCTV seems to make sense is as part of a deliberate attempt by somebody (the papers say “officers”, but whether police, army or some other kind of “officers” is unknown) to release the picture, to stoke up general anti-Muslim feeling.  As far as I know, there are no comparable official appeals via social media to trace, for instance, EDL members who abuse Muslim women in the street for wearing the hijab, but maybe that just counts as “banter” these days, I don’t know.

And so we came to today, the feast of St Cuthman of Steyning. Some people spell his name Cuthmann, with two n’s at the end, but it’s the same bloke. He was born about 681AD and was known as an Anglo-Saxon hermit, who also built a church.

The main sources for Cuthman’s life are documents held at the Abbey of Fecamp, in Normandy, and his origin is, as you might expect after such a period of time, open to dispute. His birthplace has been given as Devon or Cornwall, but a more likely place is the alternative suggestion of Chidham, which is near Bosham, on Chichester Harbour. If he was born at Chidham, it would put him in the right area and at he right time, to have been preached at by St Wilfred, and maybe even to have been converted by him.

He is recorded in the source documents for his life as having been a shepherd during his time at Chidham. One day, needing to go and find some food, but having no-one to watch his flock in his absence, he ended up drawing a line on the ground around the sheep with his staff, and on his return he found that, miraculously, every last one of them was still there within the area he had marked. Apparently there is, or there was, a field in Chidham known locally as “St Cuthman’s Dell” or “St Cuthman’s Field”, in the middle of which is, or was, a large stone on which Cuthman habitually sat, and the stone itself was reputed to have unspecified miraculous powers. It would be interesting to know if either the field, or indeed the stone, can be found today. 

Apparently, according to legend, Cuthman was forced to beg door to door and care for his paralysed mother, after his father died. Seeking a better way of life, he devised a one-wheeled cart, something akin to a wheelbarrow, and, dumping his mother in it, set off walking eastwards from Chidham, into the rising sun. The wheelbarrow was partly stabilised by a rope harness which took some of the weight and went around Cuthman’s shoulders.  When the rope broke, he fashioned a new one out of willow twigs, and continued on his way, declaring that when this new rope broke, he would stop at that point, wherever he was.

A few miles further along the coast, at what is now Steyning, the second rope went, and Cuthman, true to his word, declared that he would stop there and at that very point, he would build a church. There is no record of his mother’s reaction, but she must have been wondering by now what the hell she had got herself into.  Anyway, after suitable prayers, and pausing only to build a rudimentary hut to shelter himself and his mother, he commenced work on what eventually became St Andrew’s Church. 

As with all building projects, throughout the ages, it didn’t run exactly to plan. One particular roof-beam was proving to be a problem, and things ground to a halt until one day, a stranger showed Cuthman how to resolve the issue. Cuthman expressed gratitude and asked the stranger’s name, only to be told, enigmatically, “I am he in whose name you are building this church.” Presumably, especially given the reference to carpentry, we are meant to infer that this was Jesus himself, offering a bit of holy DIY advice.

Various other legends, some more dubious than others, have become attached to St Cuthman, notably the one which attempts to explain the origin of Chanctonbury Ring and The Devil’s Dyke on the Sussex Downs.  The devil was angered by the spread of Christianity in England so he had decided under the cover of darkness to dig a channel to let in the sea, and drown the Christians in Sussex. Somehow (this bit is left unexplained) Cuthman got wind of the scheme, and set out to thwart Old Nick. He shoved a local cockerel off its perch in the middle of the night, causing it to crow loudly and angrily at being thus disturbed, then he held up a sieve with a candle behind it.  The devil, hearing the cock crow and seeing what he thought was the sun rising, was tricked into thinking daylight was coming, and fled, leaving his excavations unfinished, which are today known as Chanctonbury Ring and The Devil’s Dyke.

A likely story, obviously, and Chanctonbury Ring is certainly some kind of pre-Christian hill fort or similar. I don’t know about the Dyke, I am not much of an expert on the dykes of Sussex, never having risen above the status of enthusiastic amateur, though I am sure it would make a great PhD thesis. By 857AD, though long after Cuthman’s time, there certainly was already a church at Steyning, because records show that King Ethelwulf of Wessex was buried there in that year.  When the Normans came striding into Sussex, after the conquest, dividing up the county and parcelling it out to William’s favourites, they must have found the local cult of veneration of St Cuthman already up and running, because Norman charters refer to Steyning as “Cuthman’s Port”. The Normans gathered up Cuthman’s relics and took them back to the Abbey at Fecamp, which, perversely, probably actually led to more people hearing about him, because they were in a place there was now a means by which his deeds could be recorded on paper (well, vellum, probably) and not just passed on orally from generation to generation. In the taxation records of Henry VIII in 1522, a reference can be found to taxes being levied on the “Guild of St Cuthman”, at Chidham, and in 2007, the dedication of St Andrew’s Church in Steyning was amended to become “St Andrew and St Cuthman”.  A chapel in the church remains dedicated to him, and he is depicted in stained glass and in a statue, and of course the “logo” of the town of Steyning, as appearing on its town “sign”, is a rendition of St Cuthman pushing his mother in the wheelbarrow.

So, what are we to make of the life of St Cuthman? I will ignore the obvious answer, a hat, or maybe a brooch. Obviously there’s no way of unweaving the historical facts (if any) from the legends at this great distance from the past, and one should always know one’s devils from one’s dykes, but I suppose he did display the virtues of perseverance and resourcefulness, and compassion to his dear old mum. Having said that, and speaking as someone myself these days who only goes anywhere when someone delivers them like a parcel and it has to be planned like a military operation, one can only hope that she actually wanted to be dumped in a wheelbarrow and carted off to start a new life somewhere.

It is a scary thought that, had I developed facioscapularhumeral muscular dystrophy in the dark ages, it would have been the equivalent of a swift death sentence. Scary because, if the continued dismantling of the NHS is allowed, the dark ages is where we’re heading back to.  “Wheelchair Services”, the local NHS Trust department that dealt with after-care and maintenance and fitting and supply of wheelchairs has already been “privatised” to a non-NHS company, so maybe I had better start work on constructing a rudimentary wheelbarrow and finding a strapping young shepherd lad to push me around in it.

Still, spring may be just around the corner – the snowdrops are out in the front garden, and Maisie’s indestructible daffodils are flourishing, although not yet in flower.  It’s a mad, bad old world, with war raging in the Ukraine and in the Middle East, and God alone knows what next week will bring in terms of our own daily struggle to keep going. But spring always makes me feel hopeful that something might still be achieved, something won back, something recovered from the chaos.  I’ve been listening a lot to Elizabethan madrigals all week, it’s the sort of music that makes me think of pastorals and this time of year, and the green English countryside thriving and growing, and let’s face it, there’s nothing like a mad wriggle in spring. If it keeps the spirits up, what’s the harm? Especially when it seems sometimes that God has withdrawn his approval from many of my activities, or at least has stopped listening. Maybe he/she/it is putting all his/her/its energies into the long run-up needed for spring to be sprung.

Of course, the composers of such gems as “Though Amaryllis Dance in Green” and “Hark, All Ye Lovely Saints Above” were writing in a very closely defined, artificial genre, where nymphs and shepherds strayed and dallied in an idealised courtly countryside, and shepherds discussed the issues of the day. Given that my own ancestors include as least one bona fide shepherd, Thomas Thornhill of Gainsborough, I suppose I feel what you might call almost a “genetic affinity” with the pastoral tradition, which brings us full circle to good old St Cuthman again. 

I don’t have any sheep, but at least we’ve got a sheepdog.  It’s freezing cold, but we’ve got some coal. I’m hungry, so I’m going to cook cauliflower cheese. Count your blessings, Steve, and cherish what you have.

Epiblog for St Brigid's Day

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. As far as the weather is concerned, it can be summed up in just three words – more bloody snow. As I type this, the stuff that fell on Thursday is now going, at last, after lingering for two days owing to very cold air temperatures, although it’s still evident where it’s packed down hard and frozen in dips and hollows.

Debbie was praying hard for College to declare a “snow day” on Thursday morning, when it was coming down in sackfuls and laying thick even on the road outside, although we supposed that would have been gritted. However, the web site said Kirklees College was open for business as usual, which meant Deb had to set off in the teeth of the blizzard, in the grey half-dawn, headlights full on and windscreen wipers at double click, to do her class at Birstall outreach. Needless to say, she was spectacularly late – it took her twenty minutes just to get to Dalton – but, as this is a venue where most of the learners live on the doorstep, at least when she did arrive, there was someone to teach, unlike last week when she struggled to Dewsbury to find only two of them had made it in. 

She got back just after lunch, by which time the snow had stopped, and of course College had declared a “snow day” at lunchtime!  It started coming down again about teatime, so we banked up the fire, locked all the doors, and – unusually – put the heating on, mainly as a precaution against burst pipes. NPower’s charges are pretty high on the Dick Turpin scale, but plumbing bills can be even higher.

The animals regarded the snow with their usual reactions. Matilda’s was disdain, and she stayed indoors for two days straight, either curled up and snoozing in the warm, or with her nose pressed up against the conservatory door, watching the birds and squirrels performing.  Misty did her usual trick of curtailing her visits to the garden to the bare minimum, but despite that, she seemed to be quite happy on Friday to accompany Deb on a five mile walk over Dove Stones. Deb said that the snow up there was as deep as she’d ever seen it, and at one point she had to wade through a thigh-high drift. Elsewhere on the journey, Misty must have lost her sure-footedness, temporarily, and came rolling downhill past Debbie, coming to rest in another drift. She got up, shook herself, and carried on.

Poor Misty has had another problem to contend with this week, as well: Matilda has suddenly decided that she rather likes dog food, and has taken to sticking her snout in Misty’s dish whenever she passes by.  Misty was very unimpressed by this and gave her the “collie dog stare” once or twice.  Matilda chomped on, regardless.  So now we have a cat that is as fit as a butcher’s dog. I have tried to explain to Misty that this is only fair, since she frequently polishes off what’s left in Matilda’s dish, but I foresee some interesting feeding times ahead if they both keep this up.

The birds and squirrels suffered badly in the snow, of course, so we tried to do what we could to feed them.  The squirrels succeeded in knocking down the thing that holds suet blocks (intended for small birds) so it fell out of the tree and onto the decking, which meant Deb had to retrieve it and re-hang it so the birds even got a look-in, which impressed her greatly, as you might imagine.  On Friday morning, when I was getting up, sitting on the edge of the bed to get dressed, I looked outside and, level with the window, there was a branch full of various birds looking in at me, as much as to say “hurry up and put out the peanuts, we’re starving”. Two wood-pigeons, a jay, a blackbird, a magpie, and some other small tits (Google web crawler, please note) all in a row. It was like something out of Alfred Hitchcock.  They’re all waking up and becoming more active now, of course, because in two weeks’ time they’ll all be choosing their mates in a Parliament of Fowles on Valentine’s Day, at least if you believe Geoffrey Chaucer they will.

I have been trying really hard to put into practice my new year’s resolution to cherish every moment, this week, although there are some moments which stubbornly resist cherishing, and are much harder to cherish than others. On Thursday morning I trundled down the ramp to put the rubbish in the bin, to find that the wheelybin lid had frozen shut. Uttering what would probably have sounded like a brief prayer to Bast, had there actually been anyone listening, I scrabbled at it with my frozen fingers to try and crack the ice, while the wind blasted me with horizontal sleet and ice cold water dripped liberally onto me, from the split gutter above.  That took a lot of cherishing.  Other than that, I have had a solid week of knocking things off various lists, but I did make the (very necessary) mistake of making a big list of all the things I have to do between now and September. A big, and scary list. 

The only light relief came on Friday when my normal physio turned up, accompanied by her boss, and a student who just liked to watch, in an attempt to get to the bottom of my persistent shoulder pain. Good job it wasn’t the other way round. Anyway, they removed my upper clothing and then two of them took turns at wrangling my shoulder through various postures while the student took notes. Then they stopped, and we had a bizarre fifteen minute conversation, with me naked from the waist up, about how it was probably more likely acute tendonitis than rotator cuff, before it occurred to them to tell me I was OK to put my top back on and take my manly torso off display. I guess they can only take so much masculine beauty at any one time.

The news from the outside world, or such of it as has percolated through to us in our snowy fastness here, has been the usual mixture of idiocy and nastiness, although it has been leavened here and there with the odd sprinkle of hope. Dr Nadar Abood, of whom I wrote last week, has now been released from the Yarls Wood detention centre, as of Friday, although the legal fight to deport her continues, hanging over her head like the proverbial sword of Damocles.

There are several people whose deportation would inevitably benefit the country, and a prime candidate during the week just gone was Rachel Reeves.  Several bloggers were posing the question “Is it possible that Rachel Reeves could single-handedly lose the next election for Labour?” after her comments about out-cutting the Blight Brigade on the issue of the benefits cap: “Labour supports a cap on benefits. We will ask an independent commission to look at whether the cap should be lower in some areas.” What this overlooks, as several commentators were quick to point out, is that prices aren’t lower in some areas than others, even though wages might be, for a variety of reasons.  Although I don’t think she will lose the election single handedly for Labour, since the whole party seems to have collective amnesia when it comes to the word “opposition”, and their feebleness at conceding the battleground to the Tory/Lib Dim Junta on issue after issue would be risible if it wasn’t so tragic.

The benefits cap has been in the news because Cameron has been spouting about how, if re-elected, the Blight Brigade would also reduce it, universally.  The whole issue, in any case, is a red herring, because the numbers of people actually affected by this is relatively small, in overall benefit terms, but of course it’s presented to Joe Public by the likes of the Daily Mail as if everyone on benefits is living high on the hog, and as if benefits was some kind of lifestyle choice, instead of the grim battle for financial survival that it actually is. Cameron said, in an interview, that the cap was working because “many thousands” of people had been forced by the cap off benefits and into paid employment.  Checking by Channel 4’s fact check team established that in fact the likely number was about 2,000, which is hardly “many”.  They need to watch their step, because the Junta has been reprimanded more than once by the UK statistical authority over its cavalier and selective use of official statistics when it comes to benefits.  However, I suspect there will be yet more partial truths and blatant lies as we get nearer to the date of the vote in May.

In terms of blatant lies, the Daily Mail took the biscuit this week with its story of Kamran Kam, which was headlined: “I’m TOO FIT to work! Gym enthusiast who spends four hours a day working out claims benefits because ‘boring 9 to 5 jobs interfere with his fitness regime’”. It transpired that Mr Kam was in fact an actor, who had “benefited” from lots of acting work, according to his CV. So, not a genuine benefits claimant at all, in fact, or at least someone who, if he did obtain benefits, was some kind of bizarre exception to the normal run of the mill recipient. Yet here in the Daily Mail, this fairytale fiction is presented as if a) it was news and b) all benefits claimants had this attitude.

If I didn’t have so much to do, I would be once again complaining to IPSO (the successor to the Press Complaints Commission) about this article.  However, given their ruling on the previous one I complained about, where the NHS and state pensions (both of which are contributory systems) were described as “handouts”, I might as well save my breath to cool my porridge.

Anyone who was in any doubt about the lifestyle choice aspect of benefits should read the article in the Cambridge Evening News about Tommi Miller:

“A 7-year-old Cambridge boy is battling with a devastating cancer – but his disability benefits have been stopped forcing his mother to go without food. “And devoted mum Ruth Miller, 39, has faced eviction and struggles to pay for heating as she and her husband Kevin, 42, of Thorpe Way, Abbey, have been battling with the Department for Works and Pensions (DWP) since May for disability living allowance for their son Tommi.

She said: “It is seriously a joke. I think [they] just want to get out of paying us what we [were] entitled… In the meantime we have nothing to live on. Kevin hasn’t been able to go back to work due to school runs and my other daughter needing emotional support.

“Also, without a vehicle I have to take Tommi out in all weathers. They just really don’t care. I am fed up with battling them. I’ve got no energy or fight left in me.

There are very few occasions when words fail me, but this is one of them. Well, actually, I can think of several words, all of them derogatory and obscene. I will, however, store it away for the next time I hear some braying ass wibbling on about “workshy” people on benefits.

Grant Shapps, for instance.  Alleged internet fraudster (which he denies) and alleged chairman of the Conservative Party, (which he admits to), Mr Shapps is the Jeffrey Archer de nos jours.  This week, he has been reported as saying that said he would not give money to people sleeping rough, as “you don’t know how that support is going to be used”. This is very true, I mean, they might spend it on food or a bed for the night. What he is getting at, of course, is that mainstay of Tory policy, the sturdy beggar, the undeserving poor. The person who takes your handout and spends it on something you don’t approve of.

For some reason, probably because I once replied with a sarcastic note to a previous enquiry, I am now on the Junta’s spam email list for donations, and this week I received the following, ostensibly from Mr Shapps, which reads as follows:

Steve - there are now just 100 days until the next election. 100 days before Britain chooses between David Cameron or Ed Miliband as Prime Minister. Between competence or chaos. Between going forward - or going back. Over the next few months, we'll be giving everything we've got to win the fight for Britain's future. And I need you on our team, Steve. So today, I'm asking you to support our campaign by giving whatever you can - so we can reach the voters that will decide the most important election in a generation. We need to tell them about our plan to guarantee a Britain where hard work is rewarded, a Britain where everyone who wants to work can find a job - and a Britain that lives within its means, so our children and grandchildren aren't burdened with mountains of debt. But we can't do that without your support. So please donate whatever you can today - and let's win the fight for Britain's future.

How can I put this in a way he will understand?

Mr Shapps,  I would rather take a cheese grater to my scrotum, then slice off a chunk of one of my buttocks, varnish it, and offer it for sale in the window of a provincial antiques shop. In the words of the late, great John Noakes, "Get down, Shapps!" You see, in the same way as you believe giving money to rough sleepers will only lead to them spending it on things you personally disapprove of, I think the same way about you and your cronies.  You say you want the money for “a plan to guarantee a Britain where hard work is rewarded, a Britain where everyone who wants to work can find a job,” but what you actually want it for is to give it away to your rich chums, or to buy more missiles to fire at Syria, while you are simultaneously closing Sure Start centres and libraries.

According to CHAIN (Combined Homelessness and Information Network), an organisation funded by the Greater London Authority, rough sleeping in London has risen from just over 2000 in 2009/10, to just over 4000 in 2012/13. I don’t know if there are any more recent figures available, and in any case these figures don’t take account of the much larger transitory population in temporary accommodation or “sofa surfing”, but I doubt very much these figures will have dropped. You can probably also extrapolate from London’s experience similar trends in other major cities such as Birmingham, Manchester, and Glasgow, although London does tend to be a magnet for the homeless, so other places may not show 100% increase in the way London has. But even so.  Of course, Grant Shapps didn’t create this situation himself, although he was housing minister for some of the time, so some of it happened on his watch. He was aided and abetted by an unholy triumvirate of Cameron, Iain Duncan Smith, and George Osborne, propped up by the Liberal Democrats. I think we should make a note of these names, against the day when indictments may be drawn up.

Osborne himself was photographed while visiting a brewery this week in such a way that his finger, from the hand down by his side, looked for all the world like a shrivelled male appendage.  I suppose the existence of such a picture proves once and for all, if proof were needed, that Osborne is not to be trusted with organising social events in breweries, something which many people have suggested may be the case for a long, long time.

Speaking of people whose urine skills in a fermentation environment may also be called into question, this week’s UKIP gaffe related to prospective parliamentary candidate Mark Walker, who posted a link on his Facebook page endorsing an article written by Golden Dawn the far-right Greek party, which referred to the “plague” of inter-racial marriage.  Walker has been suspended by UKIP, and his candidate’s views must have come as a shock to Nigel Farage, the party’s leader, who has a German wife. But I repeat my question of last week, where do they find these turnips? And how many times can they deny that the ugly face of racism and fascism that peeps out from behind UKIP’s façade is not the real face?  In a week which has contained Holocaust Memorial Day. It behoves us to remember that fascists who start out by suspending people on paper usually end up by suspending people on meat hooks and piano wire.

Anyway, somehow we have blundered through the mire of idiocy to yet another Sunday, and this week I could have had my fill of symbolic and portentous days and anniversaries to write about. Today is the feast of St Brigid (she has alternative spellings but I have democratically decided we’re going with that one.) Tomorrow is both Candlemas, the Christian festival that marks the mid point of winter, half way between the Winter Solstice and the Vernal Equinox, when Mary presented Jesus at the Temple, and it’s also Groundhog Day, of course, up there in Puxatawney. And finally, St Brigid’s day is also connected with the pre-Christian Celtic festival of Imbolc, one of the four main festivals of the Wiccan year, the others being Beltane (May) Lughnasadh (August) and Samhain (November).  It was widely believed to be unlucky to bring snowdrops, the “fair maids of February”, into the house before St Brigid’s Day/Candlemas.

So, whether you enjoy spotting small furry animals and predicting the weather by their actions, or you just enjoy lighting candles, or you feel like wrapping yourself in goatskins, dancing round a fire and pretending to be Herne the Hunter, this weekend has something for you!  I wrote about the weather-lore aspects of Candlemas last year, but to recap, briefly the idea is:

If Candlemas Day dawns bright and clear

We’ll have two winters, in the one year.

The same idea holds true in Pennsylvania, where if the groundhog catches sight of his shadow in the sunshine, and scuttles off back down his hole, that means there’s more snow to come. In Germany, they have a similar tradition, but about a badger.  Anyway, that’s enough about Groundhog Day.  The same idea holds true in Pennsylvania, where if the groundhog catches sight of his shadow in the sunshine, and scuttles off back down his hole, that means there’s more snow to come. In Germany, they have a similar tradition, but about a badger.  Anyway, that really is enough feeble Groundhog Day jokes. It’s getting to be like déjà vu all over again, as Yogi Berra once said.

St Brigid has also been identified with pre-Christian cults and beliefs, and there is of course a long tradition of Christianity simply taking over and appropriating not only pre-Christian rituals and dates, but also their actual sites, on which they then built these new-fangled things called “churches”.

The cult of St Brigid, as a harbinger of Spring and as a fertility goddess, was especially strong in rural Ireland, where on the eve of her feast, she was said to visit houses on the eve of her feast and bless those within. Special foods were cooked such as dumplings or colcannon (mashed potato mixed with shredded cabbage) and sometimes an extra portion was set at the table for the saint herself. Occasionally the ceremony went as far as a bed being made up for St Brigid, and a person impersonating the saint would circle the house three times, carrying an armful of rushes, then knock three times on the door for admittance. The rushes went to make up the saint’s bed, or were woven into symbolic “Brigid Crosses”.

Sometimes, a white wand of birch wood was left by the saint’s supposed bed, said to symbolise the wand with which St Brigid touched the hedgerows and made them white again, but with blossom this time, not snow.  Occasionally people left strips of cloth or items of clothing outside for St Brigid, and when these were retrieved the following day, they were supposed to be charged with the power to bless and to cure ills.  The ashes of the fire were also examined the next day, for signs that Brigid had visited, which is now taking us spookily near to the idea of Santa Claus coming down the chimney. The Brigid Cross is difficult to describe in words, but it is woven almost in a similar shape to a swastika, and in Western Ireland the cross would often be the centrepiece of an outer ring of rushes, a bit like the native American “dream catcher”.  The crosses were often hung over doors and windows, to protect the buildings and those who inhabited them from misfortune in the coming year.

The other aspect of St Brigid which was often celebrated was her association with holy wells. This still survives today, not only at recognised sites of pilgrimage but also in unlikely places such as place names: “Bridewell” for instance, is another reference to St Brigid, who was also known as St Bride.  Kirkbride and Kilbride also commemorate Brigid.

So, from a weather point of view, at least, if we want to be shot of winter and all that it entails, we need to pray for rain tomorrow and a dull day. I haven’t actually seen the weather forecast for next week, but I am tipping it will be bright and cold, with more snow to come, so that’s us sunk, then.

Of course, by now, you are probably tutting and shaking your head about “superstitious rubbish” and are about to hit the comments button and tell me there was a real, historical St Brigid, St Brigid of Kildare.  There was indeed, she is the patron saint of babies; blacksmiths; boatmen; brewers; cattle; chicken farmers; children whose parents are not married; children with abusive fathers; children born into abusive unions; the Clan Douglas; dairymaids; dairy workers; fugitives; infants; Ireland; Leinster; mariners; midwives; milk maids; nuns; poets; the poor; poultry farmers; poultry raisers; printing presses; sailors; scholars; travellers, and watermen. But not wheelybins.  So, with a fairly comprehensive portfolio and a life which stretched from 453 to 524AD, approximately, there does seem to have been an actual person, an Irish nun, called St Brigid.  A significant number of commentators do believe, however, that several of the attributes of the pre-Christian Brigid have been grafted onto the actual saint, either deliberately, accidentally, or a mixture of both. There is a church in Lumiar, Portugal, which claims to have the relic of the skull of the actual St Brigid, but even if correct, this proves nothing. The miracles which are attached to Brigid are often of a domestic nature, and involve healing.

In 480AD, the historical Brigid is said to have founded the religious institution at Ciall Dara, later Kildare, a site which became a centre not only for worship and spirituality but also arts and crafts, manuscript illumination and metalwork. Giraldus Cambriensis, writing of the Book of Kildare, which was produced there, called it simply the most stunning piece of illumination he had ever seen, saying of it: "all this is the work of angelic, and not human skill". Sadly, the Book of Kildare disappeared at the time of the Reformation, so we will never know, unless it turns up on “Antiques Roadshow” one Sunday night.  The Reformation also saw the breaking of Brigid’s splendid tomb near the high altar at Kildare, and the dispersal of her relics that ended up with her supposed head being in Portugal (having got there via Austria).

Superstitious rubbish or not, the lesson I take from the stories of St Brigid is one of simple faith. There is a lot to be said for it, but it is a neglected art, in these days when we live lives which are essentially disconnected from the seasons and their effects, and we can get mange tout flown in by jet from Kenya, at God knows what damage to the ozone layer.  Spring redeemed, Winter punished, and those who lived lives more closely linked to the cycle of the year, in Western Ireland and elsewhere, knew the importance of doing things right, and doing them at the right time, if you wanted your crops to grow.  Whether or not they had supernatural help from St Brigid is a moot point, but the fact that they believed they did seems to have seen them through. I sometimes wish I could sacrifice or mortgage some of my urbane cynicism for a few hours of certainty, faith and belief. Not for nothing do you need to become as a little child to enter the Kingdom. Unfortunately, these days, I am more likely to be found with a camel wedged tight in the eye of a needle.

Faith is not the same as proof, something which is worth bearing in mind in a week which has seen Stephen Fry set down a record of what he would say to God, if he met him. As far as I can see, there’s no corresponding article by God about what he would say if he met Stephen Fry, but once again, the idea of religion and the spiritual life is staggering under a burden of proof that it can never discharge. You either believe, or you don’t, and that’s that.  It’s like appreciating Jane Austen, or supporting Hull City: you either get it, or you don’t.  I can try and tell you about my own struggles, but they will be different from your struggles. I don’t want to fall into the trap – as described by the Zen masters – of getting you to look at the finger pointing at the moon, rather than the moon itself.

Strangely enough, the thing that bolstered my own on-off faith this week was not a religious text, but rather a poem, Death Is Smaller Than I Thought, by Adrian Mitchell. A Facebook friend drew my attention to it, and I recommend it to you, especially:

Nowadays, in good times or bad,
I sometimes ask my Mother and Father
To walk beside me or to sit with me
So we can talk together
Or be silent.

They always come to me.
I talk to them and listen to them
And think I hear them talk to me.
It’s very simple –
Nothing to do with spiritualism
Or religion or mumbo jumbo.

It is imaginary.
It is real.
It is love.

And though not a word of it can be proved by scientific experiment or in a court of law, that nevertheless sums it up for me: when talking about his dead mother and father, Mitchell is echoing that other great statement of twentieth century defiance of death, by Philip Larkin at the end of An Arundel Tomb – “what will survive of us, is love.”

Tomorrow is a poignant anniversary for me, also because it is seven years since our old ginger cat, Nigel, died. He was a quiet, almost studious cat, the thinking man’s cat, who went about his business unfussily, doing Nigelish things in Nigelish ways, and he died in his favourite chair, warm, fed and happy, on a Saturday night while Match of the Day was on. We should all wish for such a quietus, but I do still miss the old sock.  Anyway, no doubt at some time, tomorrow, in the midst of battle, sorting out the woes of half the world from my wheelchair, I will pause and remember him.  And also pause and reflect that I feel that whatever was Nigel went on, and still goes on, somewhere else.  That at least is an area of simple faith over which I have no trouble, however many people call me out as being delusional. I have been called worse things.

So, rain or snow, we carry on. We close ranks, and we carry on into the second month of 2015.  But for now, I have just witnessed the return of two hungry dogs that will need towelling down, to remove the icicles clinging to their fur following a circuit of Blackmoorfoot, then feeding. So I am off to cherish the smells of wet dogs and dog food. Ewww.