Epiblog for Palm Sunday

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. Spring seems to be finally declaring an interest, but it is still stubbornly cold, and March isn’t giving up those leaden skies without a fight.  One of Maisie’s indestructible daffodils is in bud, a single splash of yellow amongst the dreary dun brown of the remains of winter’s ravages. The green is getting greener, between the trees, but I still don’t think we’ve reached that stage “bytuene Mersh and Averil, whan spray beginneth to springe”.

Now that it’s been just about warm enough to have the cat flap in Colin’s side door open all the time, Matilda has been growing used to coming and going as she pleases, although she does still also go to the conservatory door to be let in and out as well.  The optimum solution would be to have a cat flap cut into the conservatory door, but at £289 (because it involves re-glazing the entire panel) it’s a long way off, yet.

Actually, a dog-flap would be a better investment, since Matilda's needs could be encompassed within such a structure anyway and it would save me having to trundle over there and let the wolf-pack of Misty, Zak and Ellie out into the garden to do their necessaries. As it is, they stream out across the decking, barking their stupid heads off and tumbling all over each other down the steps into the garden. Zak and Misty have been doing the usual route-march over the moors from Dove Stones to Chew Valley Reservoir, but Ellie has been excused, owing to only having little legs.

Deb herself is getting demob-happy, counting down the four remaining days of teaching next week until Easter sets in.  In case you doubt her current state of demob-happiness, pause to consider that we were watching Inspector Montalbano for about twenty minutes on Saturday night with one of us under the misapprehension that we were watching Wallender. And it wasn’t me.  The disparity only emerged when, noting the prominent role of Luca Zingaretti, Debbie observed that, in this episode, Wallender was taking a long time to put in an appearance. Some times I worry about  that girl.

One of the many personal challenges I had to overcome this week was the saga of the wheelchair wheel.  For some days, I have been concerned because it had seemed to me that I must be losing strength in my arms, especially in my left arm - the evidence being that the wheelchair was becoming harder and harder to propel, especially on that side. Ruling out a sudden and dramatic weight gain (I have been more or less stable at the “lard mountain” stage of physique since my discharge from hospital in 2010 when I gradually put back on the weight I had lost in the exertion of nearly dying) the only other option was deterioration in my arms. This was very depressing, because ultimately, once I lose that, I am also looking at losing the ability to transfer independently. So it has been a constant worry, at the back of what passes for my mind these days, depressing me every time I thought about it. 

There is a school of thought that says you should always look for the simple answer that’s right under your nose, before considering anything more complicated.  This became evident to me on Wednesday night when I looked down at the little front “bogie” wheel of the wheelchair on the left-hand side, and noticed that the large heavy-duty screw that holds it in place was sticking out at a weird angle, and the front wheel had collapsed to one side and was chafing on the housing that holds it in place.

My joy at realising that the difficulty in propelling myself wasn’t due to my encroaching decrepitude, but rather to the fact that the wheel must have been gradually going out of true and rubbing for days, slowing me down by “binding” on the housing, was tempered somewhat by the fact that unless I did something pretty soon, the screw/axle would come out altogether, the wheel would collapse, and the wheelchair would probably pitch me out on to the floor.  I gently edged over to the box where I keep the Allen keys and reached down, picking up the pouch and shoving it in my pocket.

Very slowly, I then edged myself round so I was facing in the opposite direction. I didn’t have the option of doing it quickly, anyway, as the wheel was jammed solid and it was like driving with the brakes on. Torn between having to use force to get anywhere at all, and not wanting to precipitate the very disaster I was trying to avoid, eventually I made it next door, and I was able to “park” alongside the closed commode, and shuffle sideways on my “banana board” off the wheelchair onto the aforesaid thunderbox.

Once I was out of the wheelchair, I tipped it on its back and I could see immediately what the trouble was. The wheel is actually held in place by two reciprocating screws, one from either side, that tighten somehow into each other. So although I could push the offending article back in place with my fingers and, using the Allen key that fitted, get it finger-tight, there was no way of actually “nipping it up”. Then I remembered that my dad’s old penknife had a saw attachment on it that ended in two “prongs”. Fortunately, the end of the saw fitted in the other side of the double-ended axle screw.

So it was, dear reader, that I became possibly the only person in history to fix a wheelchair wheel with an Allen key and a penknife, with perhaps a soupçon of my father’s engineering genes, while seated on a commode. So far, the repair seems to have held, but I had better keep an eye on it and/or get it checked out at my next wheelchair appointment. It’s a minor escapade, but, having sorted it, it felt briefly as if I’d been that bloke who climbed out onto the wing of a Wellington bomber over Essen and put out the burning engine with a fire-extinguisher.

So I was feeling pretty pleased with myself at having dodged that particular bullet, and scored a small victory, especially after the disaster on Monday, when the garage came to pick up the camper van. I’ve let the story run ahead of itself, so I need to catch my breath and re-wind a bit here so we’re all on the same page again. Debbie went out to the camper in the driveway on Sunday evening intending to just go down the road to the garage and put some diesel in it, preparatory to setting off to college on the Monday morning.

She had come back inside, saying that she was having some difficulty with the lock, and  couldn’t open the door, and also that one of the tyres looked a bit flat. I suggested that she shouldn’t try and force it, and that I had better get the garage to come and look at the lock, as they had done some work on it as part of the vehicle’s recent visit to the garage for its MOT in February (the old lock was a bit feeble and wobbly, and they’d fitted a replacement linkage inside the door) because I didn’t want to pay again for work we’d already had done in February, if it had gone again so soon.

The garage man came down on Monday teatime and, looking at the vehicle in the daylight, he confirmed that it had been the subject of vandalism while parked at our house. Specifically: three of the tyres had been slashed and the other one deliberately punctured. There had been an attempt to jemmy the driver’s door, and in addition superglue had been poured into the driver’s door lock. Superglue had also been squirted into the lock on the filler cap. The hoses to both front brakes had been cut, and both front brake callipers pulled down away from the point where they connect to the brakes.

I didn’t want to leave it in situ for another night in case whoever it was decided to come back and finish the job, so I agreed that they should tow it up to the garage and they’d lock it up there for me for the night.  In the meantime, I reported the damage to the police, and they attended on Monday evening and took a statement.  On Tuesday morning, before the garage opened properly for business, West Yorkshire Police and scenes of crime officers attended and went over the vehicle, confirming the damage and taking photographs.  I was given a crime number and it’s now in the hands of the insurers. And there I draw a veil over the sorry proceedings, which will no doubt rumble on with mountains of paperwork for weeks to come, except to observe that if I ever get within an axe-swing of the bastards who did it, they will be going home in an ambulance, with their windpipe in their coat pocket. I don’t do forgiveness.

Of course, while I have been battling this overwhelming tide of ordure from all sides, the outside world has taken the opportunity of my temporary distraction to go completely insane.

It’s not been all bad news. David Cameron has announced that he doesn’t want to serve a third term. This rather presumes on his part that he will get a second term, bringing to mind the old joke about thieves breaking into the Kremlin and stealing next year’s election results. You shouldn’t count your chickens, Dave, me old pal, me old beauty. One in the hand is worth two in Kate Bush. Or something.  Given the swingeing welfare cuts that the Blight Brigade are planning if they do manage to get he chance to inflict five more years of austerity nuclear winter on us, it’s rather a pity he has to have a second term, let alone a third. Maybe he doesn’t, but I am not holding out any hopes.

Meanwhile, under local anaesthetic and with the reluctant facial expression of a bulldog chewing a wasp, the Director-General of the BBC announced that they were sacking Jeremy Clarkson. He didn’t actually add the words “reluctantly, because we can’t think of any other way out of this mess, without seeming to excuse his boorish behaviour, although God knows we’ve tried” but the subtext came through good and strong. It was the most unconvincing statement of wanting to do something since Tony Blair declared in favour of banning fox-hunting, then abstained in the Commons vote.

Anyway, the end result was that the buffoon in question received some sort of just desserts, for doing what would have earned you or I instant dismissal for gross misconduct, had we lamped someone in our place of work.  Cue the endless procession of dismal apologists popping up on the news saying things like “It’s just Jeremy, that’s how he is…” If you .think they had a point, try substituting “Adolf” for “Jeremy”. But these people live in a world where they believe everything has been spoiled by woolly-minded, weak-kneed liberalism, where you can get away with any form of bullying, violence, or hate speech by labelling it “banter” – a world where the way to react to women is to  treat ‘em mean and keep ‘em keen;  a world where the fox enjoys it.  Yes, how much better it must have been in medieval times, before political correctness, when if a household employee failed to provide hot food on demand, you could just behead him, and throw another slave on the fire.

As if a million people signing a petition to reinstate Clarkson was not sufficient evidence that the entire nation had gone bonkers, we also had the rather grotesque spectacle of the re-burial of Richard III’s bones in Leicester Cathedral, and the self-styled “Ricardians” in the congregation at the corresponding service in York Minster throwing a hissy-fit because the sermon mentioned the rival proceedings 150 miles away.  I have had some dealings with the Richard III Society in my previous job, trying to organise a prospectus leaflet being mailed out in one of their newsletters, and I have to say that their entire membership, insofar as I have interacted with it, gives a convincing impression of being several stops past Barking, and well off the bus route. 

A lot of egos could have been salved, and  I daresay a lot of money saved as well, if, instead of the elaborate ceremony, the TV people had just run the original film of the archaeological dig, backwards, with a muted soundtrack of “Land of Hope and Glory” underneath.  He could have had a nice corner of the car park, a little space all of his own, complete with yellow chevrons and a symbol meaning “Reserved for Dead Monarchs Only”, where ordinary members of the public could have placed floral tributes, teddy bears, and semi-literate messages of condolence.

The dominant news of the week though, which it has been impossible to ignore, is that it seems that the co-pilot of a German Wings/Lufthansa flight from Barcelona to Dusseldorf, under the influence of depression, locked the pilot out of the cockpit and then flew the plane deliberately into a mountain in the French Alps, killing himself and everyone else on board.

This is the sort of tragedy that shakes your faith, and no mistake. Once again I find that I have no answer to the massive question it poses, of why Big G, if he was there and on watch, allowed such a thing to happen.  Saying it’s all part of God’s plan just doesn’t cut it. Who would want to worship a being, an entity, that incorporated such things in its plan?  Although I suppose if God is really an omnipotent eternal force that contains everything that ever was is, and shall be, worshipping it is pretty futile anyway, since the last thing it needs is our puny adulation.  So, once more, I am forced onto the back foot, and all I can say is “God knows”. I guess that you could put up a case for saying that suffering is necessary in some degree, because otherwise how would the human condition ever recognise happiness, except by contrast. It reverts to one of those quasi-philosophical “big” questions of the kind we used to sit up and argue about late into the night at college, boosting the profits of Nescafé, before we knew any better – which would you rather have, a full life or a happy one? Though I reckon if you asked the relatives weeping in the airport lounge for their loved ones, you might get a “Jeremy Clarkson” in reply, and deservedly so.

Katie Hopkins, meanwhile, has vowed to leave the UK if Labour are elected in May. So, folks, you heard it here first. My standing as an independent candidate in the Colne Valley is only ever going to take votes away from the opponents of the Blight Brigade. So I won’t be standing as an independent for the Bolshy Party at the election; instead, I will be voting Labour, not because I believe in, or support in any way, Ed Miliband, who has been a disaster zone as leader of the opposition since 2010, but simply to get rid of the Blight Brigade and, now, as an added bonus, to get rid of Katie bloody Hopkins! And I urge you all to do likewise. True, if it works, Ed Miliband will be Prime Minister, so it’s not all good news, but maybe there’s a way we can work around that. And, just pause to think again about the massive advantage: Katie Hopkins will be gone! Gone! Ding, dong, etc.

Meanwhile,  my comment about UKIP last week seems to have provoked a response from one of my dearest, longest-standing correspondents and readers of my blog: I wrote:

"is there any UKIP candidate, anywhere, who isn’t either nutty as a fruitcake, racist, bent, homophobic, or perm any three from four?" 

And she asked:

Don't bent racist nutty homophobic fruitcakes deserve a voice too? I thought that's what democracy meant.  

Well, yes, they do. But they should publish a manifesto that says clearly that they are bent, racist, nutty, homophobic fruitcakes, and stand on that platform, instead of pretending to be a serious political party. 

And so we came to today, as if through a maze of thickets, arriving at Palm Sunday.  I always have a problem with Palm Sunday, the bitter-sweet juxtaposition of the entry of Jesus in triumph into Jerusalem, and the inevitability of the downfall that was to follow, with the final twist in the tale, for those who believe it, of his eventual victory over death. It marks the beginning of one of the most significant weeks in the Christian year, containing Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Easter Saturday.

Sometimes they strew His way,
And His sweet praises sing;
Resounding all the day
Hosannas to their King:
Then “Crucify!”
is all their breath,
And for His death
they thirst and cry

Jesus rode into Jerusalem on a donkey, or a colt, depending on which version and/or translation. The colt option is to do with “fulfilling ancient prophecy” – a catch-all explanation used in Bible interpretation for anything strange, wacky or odd, in the same way that archaeologists always attribute anything they can’t otherwise explain to “ritual” usage. Commentators who favour the donkey option point to it as a symbol of peace, whereas if Jesus had entered Jerusalem on a horse, that would have been seen as martial and warlike.  I like the donkey option – there’s a pleasing symmetry with the donkey that carried Jesus to Bethlehem in his mother’s womb, which has also been noticed by U A Fanthorpe in her poem What the Donkey Saw:

No room in the inn, of course,
And not that much in the stable
What with the shepherds, Magi, Mary,
Joseph, the heavenly host –
Not to mention the baby
Using our manger as a cot.
You couldn’t have squeezed another cherub in
For love or money.

Still, in spite of the overcrowding,
I did my best to make them feel wanted.
I could see the baby and I
Would be going places together.

Palm Sunday is always a difficult concept for me to grasp. Not so much the volatile behaviour of the crowd – anyone who has ever done anything that exposed them to public gaze or approbation knows how quickly the mood can change from “enthusiastic band of supporters” to “angry mob baying for blood”.  What I struggle with is the necessity of it all.  As I’ve written many times before, the first time I ever learnt the Easter story, at primary school, almost my first thought was “well, if Jesus is the all-powerful Son of God, why doesn’t he just get down off that cross and smite the Romans into the middle of next week?” I could just see him striding into Pilate’s chamber and knocking him flying off his chair with a swift backhander, his bare Roman legs flailing as he lands in a heap with his bowl of soapy water on his head.

Fifty-odd (coughcough) years later, I still struggle with it. It’s all part of the same knotty problem that prevents me forgiving, I guess. Jesus didn’t do revenge, and although he had the power to stop it happening, he allowed himself to be sacrificed, acknowledging the need for suffering in the world by weeping over Jerusalem as the city came in sight, an event known as the “Flevit super illam”, referenced in the Gospel of Luke, 19:41.

So, for theological reasons I really don’t comprehend, Jesus, who was both God and man simultaneously, chose a full life over a happy one, and suffered under Pilate and was crucified, in the words of the Apostles’ Creed. This explanation requires the help of a member of the audience, the necessary betrayer, in the form of Judas. If you allow this as the explanation, this sort of stacks up, but it’s never really explained why Big G had to do it this way, when with a single “shazam” it could all have been put right. Once more, I find myself questioning God’s motivation and motives. If you believe it, we’re back to “love unknown” again.

It seems to come down to the fact that the grit in your eye is needed to ensure that you appreciate being able to see again when it’s gone. That the pebble in the shoe which we call Death is a necessary companion on the road of life, and that loss, and pain are necessary in order to allow us to be happy and flourish by contrast.

Anyway, we have already reached Palm Sunday and the start of Holy Week. A week which will end with me turning sixty. How did that ever happen? Well, I can truly say that I’ve had a full life, not a happy one, though I didn’t necessarily choose it – except by default, by making bad decisions!  Still, as Shakespeare said: “If all the year were playing holidays, to sport would be as tedious as to work.”

I am, however, going to attempt something by way of sport this afternoon. Not in the sweaty jockstrap sense of the word, but, after the week I've had, in the sense of doing something for myself for a change, just for a couple of hours. Some painting, and some baking, and maybe a further perusal of the herb nursery’s catalogue. If it ever gets warm and stops raining, there is much work to be done outside, and even in the time it has taken me to type this, the daffodil that was in bud in the first few paragraphs has opened fully, a single brave banner waving in the wind and rain outside, summoning me into next week, and into the battle.

Epiblog for the Fifth Sunday of Lent

It has been another busy week in the Holme Valley.  Two things have been happening, gradually and almost imperceptibly, this week. The continued burgeoning of the spring, as the green haze between the interlaced branches grows slightly more defined each day, and the gradual return to what passes for normal life after the relative turmoil of the weeks that contained Mike’s death, and then his funeral. A “settling back down” process that includes picking up from where I left off, getting back in the “old routine”, and at the same time, knocking things off the “to do” list, including such mundanities as telling the AA and the TV Licensing authorities, that he is no longer with us.

The weather has remained stubbornly cold and grey, although we have at last got some sun today. I have been thinking of ways to resurrect he wreckage of the garden, which has suffered especially badly this winter. In fact, if I wasn’t sitting here typing this, I would be preparing some troughs and planters and clearing away the wreckage of what remains from last autumn. One small glimmer of horticultural hope was evident his week – the lemon catnip in the trough on top of the outside gas meter, which I had given up for dead, is putting forth new shoots from the base of the old, withered sticks.  Maisie’s indestructible daffodils are fluttering and dancing in the breeze, in the approved Wordsworthian manner, but still refusing to flower. Given some of the temperatures we had midweek, I don’t blame them. I was sorely tempted to hibernate, myself.

Matilda’s been spending more time outdoors, though, grim grey skies notwithstanding. She does come back through the cat flap as evening falls, however – or more correctly, as the temperature falls. I was looking for her the other night when I went to bed, and I actually found her burrowed into my sleeping bag, which I have been using as a counterpane on the especially cold nights when my knees keep me awake, by singing to each other of their pain.

The dogs have had their usual quotas of treats and walks, including little Ellie, who has begun compensating for the forced route marches across the moors in the dark by getting up early with the rest of us, going out into the garden to do her stuff, and then coming back in and going straight back up to bed again for another couple of hours!

This was also the week that contained both the Equinox and the eclipse, the former more welcome than the latter, although the latter hardly troubled the scorers in that it was largely obscured by cloud. I doubt I will see the next one: if I am still around in 2026, I will be even more of a basket case than I am now. Inevitably I found myself thinking back to standing in the car park at the office in 1999 when I saw the last total eclipse of the sun. We had all turned out to watch it, under the pretext of a fire drill, in an almost carnival atmosphere display of camaraderie (or so I thought: had I been gifted at that time with the foresight of what would have come to pass by the time I saw the next eclipse, instead of going inside back to my desk when it was all over, I should have turned on my heel and started walking. And carried on walking.)

Anyway, that was the eclipse that was, or, rather, that wasn’t, by and large. In listening vaguely to the BBC news coverage of the event, which recommended wearing a colander on your head so as to avoid looking directly at the sun, I was reminded of John Donne’s lines about:

On a huge hill,
Cragged, and steep, Truth stands, and he that will
Reach her, about must, and about must go;
And what the hill's suddenness resists, win so;
Yet strive so, that before age, death's twilight,
Thy Soul rest, for none can work in that night.
To will, implies delay, therefore now do:
Hard deeds, the body's pains; hard knowledge too
The mind's endeavours reach, and mysteries
Are like the Sun, dazzling, yet plain to all eyes.

Actually, it has been a week when wearing a colander on your head has often seemed like a good idea, eclipse or no eclipse.  Dealing with the task of untangling the legal spag bol that follows someone’s death has often left me wandering in a strange parallel universe where nobody seems to understand plain bloody English any more. There have been several times in the last few days when I felt like one of those medieval scholars who tried to compile Indices Indicorum, and went bonkers in the attempt. I’m with Gloucester in King Lear when he says:

These late eclipses in the sun and moon portend no good to us. Though the wisdom of nature can reason it thus and thus, yet nature finds itself scourged by the sequent effects.

Quite so, Gloucester me old pal, me old beauty. It’s certainly been a week of bizarre conversations. It’s probably Mercury Retrograde or something, I haven’t checked, but what else could account for the conversation between me and Admiral Multicar about transferring the insurance on Mike’s car:

TINA: Hello, this is Tina from Admiral Multicar, and may I take your name, please?
ME: Steve
TINA: And may I call you "Steve" during this conversation?
ME: Well, it *is* my name, so I guess, yes.

I was torn between "No, I would like you to call me 'Daddy'" or "You may address me as 'O Mighty Hierophant, Dread Lord of the Dark Armies'" but in the end, we went with Steve.

I did manage to get a cheaper quote than the one from Adrian Flux, though. For the money Adrian Flux wanted, I would have expected a free, anatomically correct Baby Adrian Flux toy, or even the man himself to pop round of a Sunday morning and wash the car.

Even my conversations with my spouse, normally so well-tempered and even of tone, were not immune:

Deb: Who's that on the telly?
Me: Sister Rosetta Tharpe.
Deb: Sister Rosetta Fart?
Me: Tharpe. They had to cut her leg off.
Deb: Why?
Me: Because it had gone black.
Deb: But she was black.
Me:  Yes, but the leg was blacker.

Where's Alan Bennett when you need him? Still, the Equinox is a welcome signpost on the road to summer, especially as I seem to have spent a lot of time this last few winter months battling darkness, both internal and external.

The feeling that I have somehow fallen through the Earth’s crust, down a rabbit hole, into some weird, Alice-in-Wonderland universe hasn’t been merely confined to hearth and home this week. The snippets of news that filter through to me here from the wider world have also been tinged with absurdity.  People have told me I have a “thing” about Rachel Reeves, because I am always having a go at her. I don’t. I’m always having a go at her, because every time she opens her mouth, out pops something stupid, something that is likely to further damage Labour’s already wafer-thin, slim chances of dislodging the Junta in May and avoiding us having to suffer five more years of austerity nuclear winter.  Here’s the deal, Rachel: I’ll be nicer, if you’ll be smarter.

This week she chose an interview in The Guardian to announce that Labour would, if it managed to grasp the levers of power, act to reduce the numbers of food banks (how? And without putting anything in their place?) because Labour did not want to be seen to be the party of the welfare state. “We are not the party of people on benefits. We don’t want to be seen, and we’re not, the party to represent those who are out of work,” she said, adding: “Labour are a party of working people, formed for and by working people.”

Here we go again. All people on benefits are scroungers, untouchables in the new caste system of the deserving and undeserving poor, invented by the Blight Brigade and now taken up by Rachel Reeves, twanging her banjo to a tune called by Cameron and Iain Duncan-Smith.  I’ve heard Jim Reeves, and I’ve heard Rachel Reeves, and I know which I prefer.  Well, if the Labour Party won’t stand up for the weak, the oppressed, the ill and the unemployed, I guess that really does just leave The Church of England as the only opposition to the horsemen of the Westminster apocalypse.  Meanwhile someone should point out to Rachel Reeves something that she should already know: lots of working people are also on benefits.

It’s not just the Labour Party nationally that is on the side of corporate “efficiency” and heartless bureaucracy, it’s also evident in local government. Hard on the heels of Hull City Council trying to prevent the homeless from being fed, which I wrote about last week, this week brings the case of Robbie Clark, a 96 year old war hero and survivor of the “death march” inflicted by the Nazis on prisoners of war in the dying days of the conflict in 1945, who is being pressured by Brent Council to move out of his home in Burnt Oak, North London, sell up, and spend his remaining days in a care home, which both he and his family say would destroy his freedom and dignity and probably shorten his life.  The council likes things in neat little boxes, and in fact, bureaucrats the world over simply love shoehorning people into solutions that don’t quite fit, especially if they can put a tick in a box at the end of the exercise.

The dilemma faced by Mr Clark, and many like him, isn’t exclusively a “labour party” problem of course. In fact, the real villain is probably Eric Pickles, and the government of which he is a part (I originally typed ‘prat’, and was sorely tempted to let it stand.) By cutting central government funding to local authorities to the bone and then beyond, Pickles and his ilk have forced these hard choices on – disproportionately – mainly Labour local authorities, and created a nationwide crisis in funding home care for the elderly.  And yet (I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again) somehow, we can always find money for hugely expensive missiles and the gallons and gallons of aviation fuel necessary to deliver them to some hillside on the Syrian border in order to destroy an ISIS Toyota pickup truck worth £1500 on “We Buy Any Car.com” – OK, £2,000, if it’s insured by Adrian Flux.

Politics would indeed be bleak at the moment were it not for the stick-on comedy gold of UKIP’s catalogue of gaffes.  Seemingly the EU does have its uses, because UKIP MEP Janet Atkinson’s chief of staff was apparently caught out this week in the act of trying to persuade a restaurant to artificially inflate the bill, on the grounds that the EU always paid up without question. Needless to say, she joined the ranks of the suspended. I repeat my question of earlier blogs: is there any UKIP candidate, anywhere, who isn’t either nutty as a fruitcake, racist, bent, homophobic, or perm any three from four?

I haven’t even bothered discussing the budget this week, I have one simple question. Why should anyone believe a word George Osborne says, when he has missed every target he set himself in 2010, and is now having to resort to some very precise forms of words, subtly altered from his former rhetoric, if not outright lies, about when the austerity will end (is it 2026 now?)  If you believe that, how do you feel about the Tooth Fairy?

So, somehow this week, we’ve arrived at Sunday, the fifth Sunday of Lent, already.  I can’t believe it will soon be Easter, and that on Easter Monday I shall (Big G willing) attain the big six-oh.  Obviously, given all that’s happened in the last few days, the event at the moment seems to have taken on more of the aspect of a tombstone than a milestone, as I have been revising my will, as the one I made more than a decade ago is now massively inappropriate and out of date. I did actually do a draft, and I also revised the music and readings for my funeral, a copy of the list now being lodged safely with my sister, who is much less likely than Debbie to lose it and put me out for the dustmen in a bin bag, instead.  I did actually contact the firm of solicitors I used for the first one, asking for an update on the costs of revising it. I received a very kind, informative reply by email from a lady called Gemma, and it was only when I was just re-reading my answer to her various points, prior to clicking “send”, that I noticed that it was actually signed “Andrew”. Either it was a quirk of the Microsoft Outlook “send email on behalf of” feature, or Andrew enjoys being Gemma at the weekends. I assume that transvestism in solicitors is quite common: it must start with all that having to wear wigs and black tights. De minibus non curat lex.  Unfortunately, the estimate turned out to be eye-wateringly expensive, so I may have to sharpen up a quill pen, find some stretched goat’s vellum by accosting a passing goat, and go it alone.

Anyway, yes, the fifth Sunday of Lent, and, having reviewed and discounted today’s Saints as a motley crew unworthy of cyber-space, I turned instead to the specified readings in the Lectionary in search of spiritual enlightenment. These include John 12: 22-30, where Jesus discusses his potential fate:

Philip cometh and telleth Andrew: and again Andrew and Philip tell Jesus.  And Jesus answered them, saying, The hour is come, that the Son of man should be glorified.  Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.  He that loveth his life shall lose it; and he that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal. If any man serve me, let him follow me; and where I am, there shall also my servant be: if any man serve me, him will my Father honour. Now is my soul troubled; and what shall I say? Father, save me from this hour: but for this cause came I unto this hour.  Father, glorify thy name. Then came there a voice from heaven, saying, I have both glorified it, and will glorify it again.  The people therefore, that stood by, and heard it, said that it thundered: others said, An angel spake to him.  Jesus answered and said, This voice came not because of me, but for your sakes.

On the one hand, Jesus seems to be alluding to the cycle of death and re-birth that preoccupies my own mind so much every Spring.  Last year’s dung and decay is dug into the soil, and the seeds that were ripped from their pods and branches by the ruthless winds of winter begin to put forth timid shoots, so the whole thing can begin again, as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be.  I’ve written before about the concept of the “necessary betrayer”, and that Jesus couldn’t have done it without Judas, and here it seems almost as if Jesus is talking of death as a kind of “necessary precursor”, a handmaid to life.

Yet at the same time, he is obviously falling prey to the same sort of thoughts that often beset me, in the watches of the night. Do I really have to go through with this? Is there not some other way?

There must be some kind of way out of here

Said the Joker to the Thief

at the beginning of All Along The Watchtower.  Father, save me from this hour.  Or as Shakespeare puts it;

The lowest and most loathed life

Which age, ache penury or imprisonment bestow on man

Is but a paradise to what we fear of death.

I’m paraphrasing: I may have misremembered it, but you get the gist.  It takes a considerable leap of faith to embrace death as the necessary precursor, a leap that I doubt I could make in my soul, even if I could still leap in real life. And despite the fact that he had, himself, just raised Lazarus, even Jesus needed a “bracer”, in the form of an angel voice booming out of the sky, telling him to man up and pull himself together, and I have to say that in my own case, angel voices have been rather conspicuous by their absence of late. I wish sometimes I was like Blake, who, although he was undoubtedly as mad as a bucket of badgers, did at least have the compensation of seeing angels at every street-corner, sitting on the roofs of buildings and preening their wings.

Any angel that gets lumbered with the job of bracing me against my inevitable fate must have been very naughty in a previous life (if that’s not too theologically questionable) or at least misguided. Yet, sometimes, I do hear the voices of the angels, quite often, pace T S Eliot, down the path we did not take, or I will find myself somewhere indescribably beautiful, such as a wood by the side of Coniston Water, in springtime, with the feeling that maybe the angels were here, but they left just before we arrived.

Still, as I sit here contemplating my own upcoming completion of the sixth decade of my life, I find myself falling back once more on the small things that make up my existence these days.  Fetch in the coal, cook the food, feed the dogs, feed the cat, plant your herbs and watch them grow; gather twigs, light the fire.

Who sweeps a room as to thy lawes

Makes that, and th’action fine,

as George Herbert would say if he were here right now.  Yes, a retreat is not the same as a rout. We’ve explored as far as we can today, and now it’s time to start falling back. Falling back, and hoping maybe a passing angel will catch me. 

Epiblog for Mothering Sunday

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. The weather has at least turned quiet, although we’ve had a succession of grim, grey days when it’s been like living inside a Tupperware box.  Although the temperature stubbornly refuses to climb, and the daffodils are still only in bud, we have at last opened the cat flap up again, so Matilda can come and go as she pleases – all winter, we’ve been letting her in and out of the conservatory door -  even though doing so causes an evil draught to whistle around the wheels of my wheelchair.

Matilda has been greatly appreciative of this development and I suppose it proves, apart from anything else, that cats must possess some sort of ability to remember things, as she clearly knew what it was and what to do with it, from the first day it was re-opened. Now all we need is some warmth and some sunshine. At least it saves me having to trundle to the conservatory door seventeen times a day to let her in/out, or sit waiting impatiently while she dithers on the doorstep.

The birds and squirrels have also been busy, helping themselves to the seed and bread I put out, and gathering nesting material. There is just the faintest green tinge, a green haze, almost not there, in amongst the trees as we look out across the valley, which tells me that we must be about to enter that time described in the Harley Lyric Alysoun as “Betwene Mersh and Averil, whan spray beginneth to springe”.     

Misty has had an eventful week, shepherding and rounding up not only Matilda (who ignores it and saunters past under Misty’s nose with her tail in the air)  but also Zak and Ellie, who are still staying with us. For poor little Ellie, this has come as a bit of a shock to the system, as, with the regular mealtimes and the 13-mile route marches, coupled with the early starts on Debbie’s teaching days, she must feel as if she has joined the army or something. The other night, Misty was curled up on the mat in front of the stove and Ellie joined her, with her head resting on Misty’s rear haunch, where she promptly fell fast asleep.

The week has been dominated, of course, by the preparations for Mike’s funeral, and by the event itself. By prior arrangement, I didn’t actually go up to the crematorium, but stayed here, instead, minding the dogs. I had discussed it with Debbie and various family members, and it was as much a case of practicalities as much as anything else. If I go anywhere at all, these days, it has to be planned like a military operation, and I would have had to be stuck in the aisle or at the back or something, and to be honest, I felt that Debbie and her family probably had enough to concern them on the day without having to remember to parcel me up and transport me hither and yon. Plus, my presence would have limited their choice of where to go afterwards, and I thought it was important that Deb had a chance to be with her family.

I am not a great fan of funerals anyway (who is?) so I wasn’t upset by this arrangement, as long as the family didn’t think I was being disrespectful.  My last memories of both my mother and my father were of seeing them in their coffins on the day of their respective cremations, and it took me a long time to banish those sad images from my mind’s eye and replace them with happier ones, although I did eventually manage to do so, and I suppose whilever I didn’t actually participate in the event, I can imagine that one day we’ll hear a car door slam in the drive, Zak’s ears will prick up, and we will hear Mike’s voice round the door saying “Come on, Zak, it’s time for training!” .

There was a very good turnout from the Holmfirth Harriers and Longwood Harriers,  which no doubt would have chuffed him no end, and apparently the service went well, with no hitches.  We had our own little service here: I lit some incense, and played The Joy of Living, Sound The Trumpets, and The Song of The Ungirt Runners, and I broke out the dog treats and the doggies had some each. Our own service, however, was interrupted twice, once by an idiot at the door trying to sell me cavity wall insulation, and once by the district nurse who had come to stick a needle in my arm as it was 12 weeks since my last iron injection, apparently. Who knew? Apart from her, of course.
       

Anyway, that was Mike’s sendoff, and it was probably one he’d have appreciated. I would like to bet even now he’s arguing with God and annoying the angels by asking for his meals at odd times of the day and night. In between running through the Elysian Fields with Lucy, Freddie and Tiggy in tow.

I’ve been largely ignoring the outside world this week, deliberately, inasmuch as it is possible to do so. Some things, however, are impossible to tune out. Jeremy Clarkson has been suspended, which cheered me up somewhat, until I realised it was only on paper and didn’t actually involve a length of rope with a knot in it.  The depressing thing is that more people have signed the petition for him to be reinstated after allegedly lamping a BBC producer than have signed many of the more worthy petitions on the go at the moment, including the one urging the continued funding of cancer drugs.

It just goes to show where, as a nation, our priorities now lie, especially as the Prime Minister apparently also spoke up in Clarkson’s defence. I am not entirely sure that Clarkson is actually the boorish, laddish buffoon he appears to be: it’s a carefully-crafted persona intended to press the buttons of the compassionally-challenged viewers of Top Gear, something he does supremely well. Whether he actually believes that public sector workers should be shot, or that reciting “eeny meeny miny mo” on air is acceptable, or that Gordon Brown is a “one-eyed Scottish idiot”, he knows that his viewers do, and he panders to their idea of what he is. Anyway, it’s all a storm in a teacup (or possibly a wine-glass, if reports are to be believed) because even if the BBC do let him go, he’ll just pop up on Sky TV or Channel 4, peddling the usual dismal crap.

Someone else who has been busy peddling dismal crap is Nigel Farage, who floated, in a recording of a forthcoming documentary for Chanel 4, that UKIP, if it ever got to power, would scrap much of the framework of race relations and racial discrimination legislation in Britain.. Although he was quick to row back from the specifics of this when quizzed by subsequent reporters, it was actually a very clever piece of kite-flying. If it’s not too mixed a metaphor, he has managed to blow the dog whistle and gain the attention of the many ill-informed bigots who think that there’s too many of ‘em over here taking our jobs and putting pressure on our resources, and all they have to do is rock up at Dover docks to be handed a set of car keys, a council house and a widescreen TV. All of which is complete bollocks of course, but  Farage, like Clarkson, is a wolf in boor’s clothing, and he knows his audience – probably better than they do, since voting for a party who have no policies and can’t actually deliver on their main raison d’etre, isn’t exactly indicative of self-knowledge or self-awareness. 

Labour, of course, are still failing to make a dent in even the Tories, let alone UKIP. William Morris outlined his vision for a socialist future in News From Nowhere. With Ed Miliband doing his best to impersonate Gussie Fink-Nottle, it seems that the best we can expect from Labour is newts from nowhere.

Meanwhile, in my home town, hard on the heels of the disgraceful “Beggars Can Be Choosers” posters, comes the news that Hull City Council's environmental health officials have contacted Hull Homeless Outreach to say they are breaching food hygiene regulations by serving the food at St Mary's Church in Lowgate.

Sarah Hemingway, of the charity, told the Hull Daily Mail:

"Environmental health called us out of the blue to tell us we couldn't serve hot food anymore because we don't meet the criteria. They told us they would prosecute if we carried on. We have been providing curries and sausage casseroles, which are cooked by our volunteers at home. Now we are not even allowed to provide sandwiches made by volunteers. This has left us deeply frustrated, as about 50 people come to our soup kitchen on each of the two nights we are here. For some, this is the only chance of a hot meal they get each week. How can us serving this food be any worse than them having to rummage around bins for something to eat?”

Because the charity doesn’t actually own a kitchen, the environmental health officers think there are concerns over the potential for food poisoning. This now leaves the charity in the position of only being able to serve tea, coffee, and tinned soup to its customers.  This is the mealy-mouthed jobsworth official prodnose “explanation” provided by the apologies for humanity who are determined to implement this stupidity against all reason and common sense:

"Following a complaint from a member of the public, advice was provided to the Hull Homeless Outreach team and any issues were cleared up at a meeting yesterday. The company has not registered the business, there were no catering facilities at the church and there was cooking of food in a number of home environments that were similarly not registered and that are likely to be inadequate. It has been agreed that hot beverages, tinned soup heated up at the church in a soup kettle, bread and pack-ups of wrapped, shelf stable short-life products can be provided until suitable fixed premises or a mobile catering unit is provided."

Well, a) the “member of the public” who complained should be ashamed of themselves and I hope they choke on their next meal, and b) since when has the provision of charity to those less fortunate than ourselves been a “business” which as to be “registered”. Have these people really nothing better to do than to prowl the streets like Nazi gauleiters checking to see if people’s papers are in order?

The charity’s director, James Bowie, summed up their predicament:

"We are shocked by this move. We take food hygiene very seriously, particularly as we are dealing with vulnerable people. When our volunteers cook the food at home it is brought here and served immediately. We have been doing this for about a year and we have never had any problems. Also, our service users are used to the routine and any changes to that can have serious welfare issues. We are considering a number of options and have looked at buying a cheap catering trailer. St Mary's is planning to install a kitchen but that is all subject to funding and some way down the line. Whichever way you look at it, it will cost money and we aren't a funded organisation. We would appeal to anyone who may have suitable kitchen premises to let us know."

They have now had to start a fundraising appeal, via Facebook. So, there you have it. Another boneheaded decision from a local authority that obviously sees homelessness as something to be managed, swept under the carpet, pushed away to somewhere else, so it becomes someone else’s problem. Go, move, shift.  Normally I am a great defender of the public services, but examples like this make me think maybe Jeremy Clarkson has a point. When I hear someone speaking of “hot beverages” and “shelf-stable pre-packed products”, then I reach for my revolver, to paraphrase Herman Goering.

But then, what did I expect, from a country that grows more bigoted and intolerant every day. Look at the furore over the “Inclusive Mosque” event at St John’s church, in Waterloo, London, which is believed to be the first full Islamic prayer service ever held within the Church of England. Canon Giles Goddard was approached by a Muslim organisation about holding an event to mark International Women’s Day. He said:

We are offering a place for people to pray so it made absolutely perfect sense … we should be offering places to pray, we are the Church of England. They could have gone to a community centre I suppose, but they loved being in a church, they were just really pleased and delighted to have the welcome and it was very moving really, It is the same God, we share a tradition.”

I have often said as much. The world’s religions are like a group of partially sighted men clustering round an elephant. Each of them is trying to describe it, interpret it, from their own particular standpoint, but none of them realises that it is, in fact, al part of the same elephant.

The event began with a traditional Muslim call to prayer but the main worship was led by a Muslim woman, Dr Amina Wadud. At the end, Canon Goddard read Psalm 139, telling the congregation:

“This is from the Hebrew scripture … we all share these great traditions, so let us celebrate our shared traditions, by giving thanks to the God that we love, Allah.”

For this particular act of outreach, he has been castigated and told he may have broken canon law. He has also, which will no doubt count as a black mark against him for all eternity, upset the readers of the Daily Telegraph.  That would be an ecumenical matter, as Father Dougal would doubtless say, but personally I don’t see why you can’t wander into any sacred space and say a prayer to your God, whether it be God, Allah, Jehovah, Shiva, or the Great Sky-Turtle A’tuin (sex unknown). RIP, Terry Pratchett, by the way.

Anyway, today has brought us to Sunday, which is the fourth Sunday in Lent, apparently, Year B, according to the Lectionary. I must admit, I have not been particularly inspired by the choice of Saints’ days available today, nor indeed by the Bible readings specified in the said Lectionary, most of which seem to relate to Moses sticking a golden serpent on the end of a stick and raising it up. I guess you had to be there.  I confess, I may be feeling a bit jaded as far as the afterlife is concerned, in a week which contained not only Mike’s funeral, but, having been spurred on by that event, me also digging out and starting to revise my own will and funeral arrangements, to make sure that, when I go, I don’t leave an absolute bugger’s muddle of spag bol for Debbie to untangle.

What I did notice, though, was that one of the hymns specifically chosen as being appropriate for today was My Song Is Love Unknown, written by Samuel Crossman in 1664 and these days most often sung to the tune composed by John Ireland (1879-1962) a fine composer in his own right (he did Amberley Wildbrooks) and also a student of Charles Villiers Stanford, whose “Mag in G” has echoed around many an ecclesiastical edifice.

My song is love unknown

My saviour’s love for me

Love to the loveless shown

That they might lovely be 

Oh who am I

That for my sake,

My Lord should take frail flesh, and die?

“Love unknown” is an interesting phrase in the context, because for me it encapsulates my own understanding of the nature of divine love – i.e., it’s a complete mystery to me!  The questioner, who sits so sly, to quote W H Auden, will ask “why does the God you worship allow suffering and illness, why does he allow people to kill and torture each other in his name, and why did he have to sacrifice his only son to redeem the world from sin, when he doesn’t seem to have done a very good job, does he?” and when I have caught my breath, I can only say a) I don’t worship him, I respect him at best, and sometimes I am thankful when things turn out better than I thought, b – love unknown, c) I can only assume they are punished for it in an alternative universe, but don’t make the mistake of confusing misguided violent zealotry with religion, and d) – love unknown.

The more perceptive of you, those that are still awake by this point, will note that I am relying on “love unknown” for the answer to two of those questions. In other words, I have no idea, other than that for some reason there seems to be an unfathomable aspect to the relationship between me and what he Victorians would probably call “My Maker” that I simply cannot work out. Except to say that it’s probably something to do with a very large elephant, of which I am only seeing a very small part.  For now, I see through a glass darkly, but then, face to face.

Who, indeed, am I, that Jesus should sacrifice himself in human guise on my behalf? And how does all that work, anyway? In my darkest hours, I dismiss it as hogwash, or at best a regurgitation of a number of widely-prevalent regeneration myths, from Tammuz to Baldur.  Then I remember that, since what we think of as reality is absolutely nothing of the sort, there must be something else, that underpins everything. I have struck the board, and cried “no more”, like George Herbert, and then I hear the voice calling “child”. Where I then go off at a tangent is that I can’t see any way in which it could also encompass morality, especially in a world where I believe there is no such thing as absolute morality.  Either way, it doesn’t help, so allow me to declare now, once and for all, that if God does love me, I have absolutely no bloody idea why, nor do I know why he cares to show it in such obscure ways, and nor do I expect I will ever find out, this side of the bright portal of death.

It is also mothering Sunday here in the UK, the day when, traditionally, indentured female servants were allowed time off to visit their mothers. I imagine the Tories will probably have something similar in their manifesto. The day has set me thinking again about my mother, whose funereal image that I mentioned above has now been replaced by those of happier times. I wonder how she’s getting on in heaven, and, indeed, if we all manufacture our own heaven on the hoof, on another plane, in the same way as physicists tell us we all make up our own reality as we go along in this world, what her heaven would be like? I hope she’s up there, listening to Jim Reeve and Slim Whitman, with a pot of tea on the go and Ginger the cat on her knee, looking forward to a session of bingo, or even a live performance by Morecambe and Wise, if the dead can “do” live performances in heaven.  It’s nice to think that a small part of heaven looks just like the saloon bar of The Fox and Coney at South Cave in the 1950s, with my mother at the piano playing In The Mood.

I have to say, also, that if we do all make up our own reality as we go along, then I really ought to have made up a better one for myself, next week, with two book launches to organise, two (different) books to lay out, and a VAT return to complete. It’s going to be a busy week in the Holme Valley. But then I guess you already knew that.

Epiblog for the Feast of St John of God

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. Even busier than last week, and full of sad tasks, which have had to be fitted in around what passes for normal life.  The weather started out unkind and finished clement, with the temperatures on the rise and some actual warmth in the sunlight for a change. It has (at least for the moment) stopped hailstoning. 

While the weather was busy doing its pieces earlier in the week, we did have some quite spectacular hailstorms, with hailstones the size of frozen peas bouncing up off the decking. They came on very suddenly, as well – one minute, poor little Matilda was sitting on the decking basking in a bit of pale sunshine, then the skies darkened and bang! down it came, sending her scuttling for the door.

She’s not had a good week, to be honest. On the same day (I think it was Thursday) she was the victim of two cat-astrophes, only one of which was her fault. That was when she fell off the settee.  She’d been hard, fast asleep, under the influence of the stove, which I had cranked up to counteract the cold draughts that infest this house. At some point she awoke and decided to jump off the settee, but managed to get her claw caught in her little woolly blanket and was unable to free it in time before gravity took hold and she landed like a sack of spuds on the carpet.  She got up, shook herself, then walked into the conservatory and sat down on the mat there, and gave herself the most thorough wash, with a slightly injured air of “of course, I meant to do that, all along.”

Then, later in the same day, she went to the door of the conservatory and asked to be let out, so I trundled over and opened it for her, and she started doing that dithering in or out thing that cats do so well, of rubbing her chin on the edge of the door, two legs outside, two still inside, and sniffing the air. Misty, meanwhile, must’ve heard me unlatch the door from her recumbent position on the settee in Colin’s front room, and came barrelling through, on a mission, to get to the garden or bust. I don’t know if she actually trod on Matilda because it all happened too fast, but either way she was barged out of the way and scuttled back between the wheels of my wheelchair, into the house. When Misty had come back in, I went in search of Matilda and found her curled up on her settee in Colin’s. Making sure that no permanent harm had been done, I gave her a handful of cat treats and she rewarded me with a baleful glare.

She’s not very good at cat stuff, generally, apart from sleeping and eating, the poor old bagpuss that she is. Yesterday, when the sun actually was quite warm on the decking, she was lying out there like lamb on salad, washing herself and occasionally purring, wedged between two planters, while the blackbirds came and went only five feet away, emptying the dish of stale brown bread I had but out for them. Once or twice, Matilda looked vaguely interested, and swished her tail, but even as I watched, she would lose the plot and go back to licking her own stomach, or scratching behind her ear with her back foot.  It was obviously too much trouble to go hunting prey, when not twenty feet away was a warm bed and a food dish that magically refills itself on demand.

Because it was a fine day on Friday, and because (for a variety of reasons) Debbie was up and about earlier than normal, she decided to take Misty and Zak over to Dove Stones, and they ended up doing a 13-mile walk. All through the winter, especially during the firework season, Misty has been walking on the lead, attached to Debbie by a length of dyneema and clipped on by a karabiner. It was such a nice day on Friday, that Debbie felt like doing a bit of a scramble, so, at the foot of the rocks actually on top of Dove Stones, she unclipped Misty and told her to stay there with Zak, while she climbed up to the top.  Having reached her goal, Debbie looked down to see Misty legging it, off back in the direction from which they had come.  Shouting was no good, so Debbie had to do a rapid descent, and then, back at ground level, round up Zak, who, good boy that he is, had obeyed orders and waited patiently, and then set off in pursuit of Misty.

Debbie was hoping that Misty would have stopped at the river bank to wait for them, but in fact when they got there, Misty was actually in the river, lying down and cooling off, and showed no immediate sign of wanting to resume taking part in the walkies. She did eventually allow herself to be coaxed out without Debbie having to wade in and get her, but it was apparently a close-run thing. So she came back home in disgrace, at least until it was time to break out the dog-treats.

The coming of warmer weather has once more led to Deb thinking about getting away in the camper van. Because her last class now ends on a Thursday lunchtime, theoretically it would be possible to set off on a Thursday afternoon and not have to get back until Sunday lunchtime. Theoretically. In practice, however, it would require energy levels and a degree of organisation hitherto unknown. We shall see. I’d actually like to see the mountains of the Lake District again, even if we got no further than that.

We’ve also been discussing where to go on holiday, assuming we ever get there. Debbie, following the links from various Youtube videos where deep-voiced and deadly serious Americans with names like Brad Monobrow teach you survival skills and how to crap in the woods without spooking the bears, has been looking at films of Alaska. I said that if I wanted to be freezing cold and bored stiff, I could just stay at home, and that my ideal holiday involved Mediterranean sunshine and looking at ancient ruins, to which she replied that I could just stay at home and look in a mirror. So it’s probably going to be the Isle of Arran, yet again, it being one of the few spots on the globe about which we can agree.

I’ve also always fancied going to look at the Crusader castles in the Middle East, but obviously with all of the current carnage in Syria, I think I’ll have to cross that one off my bucket list for the foreseeable. Mr Cameron, God strafe him, has been pontificating about Middle Eastern terrorism again this week, in a speech where he said that non-violent extremists are just as bad as ISIS.  I assume that he meant people like Anjem Choudary, who wind up other, more gullible people, to go off and perform “radical” acts, often, as in the case of Lee Rigby, with dreadful, devastating consequences, while never themselves stepping outside the boundaries of the law.

But it you take it to its extreme, Cameron’s pronouncement is actually quite sinister. We already have legislation where just thinking about committing a terrorist atrocity can be counted as a crime, and we already have secret courts where, in some circumstances, the accused is not even allowed to know what it is that they have been accused of. If you start adding to that the possibility of criminalising someone merely for their words, you are setting a dangerous precedent. Much as I would like to see some of these radical Imams brought to account, or at least challenged, we do already have existing laws and mechanisms to carry this out, without adding yet another degree of “thought crime”.

What’s to stop the government, or any government, for that matter, deciding one day that simply disagreeing with them counts as “non-violent extremism”. I’ve written things before now where, in the heat of some particular passion, I have even mentioned that there are plenty of cobbles in Downing Street, and plenty of windows in Number 10.  I’ve written that I would like to see done to animal abusers, if caught, tried and convicted by a due process, whatever it was they did to the animal they hurt. Is that non-violent extremism? Here we all are again, another week later. First they came for the violent extremists, and I did not object, because I was not a violent extremist... and in any case, who defines “extremism”? Some of the worst injustices in our society demand, indeed cry out for, “extreme” solutions, though not violent ones. The housing shortage, for instance, can only be tackled by an extreme programme of social housing to replace the stock flogged off by Thatcher in her programme of social engineering and class war.  There is a great danger, if we are not careful, of extremism being defined as “anything which is not Tory policy”.

Cameron is desperately trying to put up any fuss and bluster that he can, of course, because there are three major areas where, electorally, he is very vulnerable. Three major lies, three enormous porkies promulgated by the Junta: the economy, the NHS, and immigration.

Cameron was goaded into making his unfulfillable promise on immigration because of the proximity of UKIP snapping at his behind. I can only assume that he looked on it as the lesser of two evils, and hoped that something would turn up. In fact, whilever we belong to the EU, there is sod all that Cameron, or UKIP, or any other politician can do about immigration, it’s just that UKIP are consistently better at manipulating the smoke and mirrors to give the impression they can, especially to people who will happily vote for them without knowing a single one of their policies.

The economy is apparently on the road to recovery, if recovery means that earnings have finally clawed their way back to where they were in 2009, and if recovery means millions of low-paid “jobs” on zero-hours contracts that have to have their wages topped up by in-work benefits; if recovery amounts to being fuelled by an unsustainable property boom initiated by George Osborne when even he finally realised that “austerity” wasn’t working. This was the government that was going to have done away with the deficit in the life of this parliament, and which now hails it as a triumph that it has been “halved”, which is also a lie, or at best, a very specific statistical interpretation to put the best gloss on things. This is the government that increased borrowing, missed all its forecasts and targets, and lost us our triple A rating.  No wonder they want to talk about anything else, or pretend Labour caused the problem in the first place.

Then we have the NHS, where Cameron lied yet again. No top down reorganisation, the NHS is safe in our hands. Yeah, right. The tooth fairy still exists, and Snow White is a virgin.  How do you feel about Santa Claus?

Given this lamentable crock of “achievements”, why aren’t Labour scoring point after point after point off the Junta at every end and turn? Probably because they are too busy trying to flog commemorative tea towels to raise funds. I kid you not. This week I had an email from the Labour Party, asking me if I want to buy one of their limited edition teatowels.

"Wow — the way our vintage election poster tea towels are being snapped up, it seems there's going to be one in every home in the country! Haven't got yours yet? Now's the time: they're strictly limited edition."

Clement Atlee said "vote Labour and we'll give you the National Health Service, education for all, and social housing to replace the homes lost to wartime bombing"

Ed Miliband says "vote Labour and we'll give you a limited edition teatowel." Jesus wept.

Other than that, it’s been a wacky old week in the political sphere, with one MP declaring an abiding belief in astrology and another one suggested that MI5 should try and recruit the next generation of spies from the members of Mumsnet. As one Mumsnet subscriber pointed out “yes, because people who can’t resist pathologically typing their every passing thought into an online message forum would obviously make great spies.” Personally, I am sceptical about the effectiveness of astrology, but then, as an Aries, I would be. Archaeologists from the York Archaeological Trust have found a 2,600-year old ossified human brain in the artefacts found in the dig of a pit in Heslington. Now they just have to return it to the UKIP voter who lost it.   

It may well belong to UKIP MEP David Coburn, who got into a fight (not literally, only verbally) with the audience on BBC TV’s Question Time programme, when he lost it after he was slow-handclapped during a debate on immigration and housing, and called the audience “bourgeois”, and “Greens”.  Those insults were really meant to sting!  Actually, he must have been having an off day, because he has previously talked about Nicola Sturgeon as having “mad scary eyes” and compared Scottish Tory leader Ruth Davidson to porridge.  Mind you, since when did “Green” become an insult (actually, I can answer that: probably about the same time as “left-wing” did – we’re back to labelling anyone who disagrees with the Blight Brigade as being dangerous extremists, again.

One person who would undoubtedly have been labelled as a dangerous extremist if he were around today in 21^st century Britain is St John of God, whose feast day we have arrived at, today. I should feel a specific affinity with him, because he is, amongst other things, the patron saint of booksellers. In fact, though, I often, and always, mix him up with St John of the Cross.  So, for the avoidance of any doubt, I am talking about St John of God, here, feast day March 8^th.  Unusually, March 8^th was also his birthday, in 1495, as well as the day of his death in 1550.

He was born João Duarte Cidade in the District of Évora, Portugal, and he was the son of André Cidade and Teresa Duarte, a once-prominent family that had fallen upon hard times but still retained religious faith. When he was eight, he disappeared from home, and was supposed to have been kidnapped by a visiting cleric.  According to the original sources for his hagiography, this meant that his mother died from grief following the traumatic event and his widower father joined the Franciscans.

The young St John of God then became a homeless orphan in the streets of Oropesa, a town near Toledo. He was eventually taken in by one Francisco Mayoral, and earned his keep as a shepherd caring for Mayoral’s sheep.  This arrangement lasted until he was 27 years of age, but then, under pressure from Mayoral to accept his daughter’s hand in marriage, instead, St John joined a company of footsoldiers who were fighting for Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor, against the French at Fontarabia. He became embroiled in a scandal there, when it was discovered that a large store of captured treasure he was supposed to have been in charge of guarding, had been ransacked and much of it was missing. On the principle of the person who is nearest must be guilty, whether they did it or not, he was sentenced to be hanged until a more tolerant officer managed to intervene and have him pardoned.

St John then returned to the farm and to his shepherding duties, which he undertook for another four years, until he again enlisted, this time with a troop under the command of the Count of Oropesa, who was setting off to fight the Turks in Hungary. This was the start of an 18-year military career which took John all over Europe.

When the Count returned, triumphant, his forces landed in Galicia, and St John took the opportunity to go back to his home village. Learning of the fate of his parents from an aged relative, he decided to turn his back on the place, as he no longer had any ties to it. He returned to Spain and found work again as a shepherd, near to Seville. It was probably during the time he spent there, contemplating his life while camped out on the hillside with his flock, that he began to formulate his desire to go to Africa, and fulfil God’s purpose for him, as he saw it, as perhaps a martyr. In any event, he wanted to go to the Portuguese territory of Ceuta, located in what is now present-day Morocco, with a vague plan to work to free enslaved Christians in that locality.

On the journey, he befriended an exiled Portuguese knight and his family, who were bound out from Gibraltar to the same destination, having incurred the displeasure of the King of Portugal.  On their arrival at Ceuta, however, the knight had all of his few remaining possessions stolen, and then he and all of his family fell ill. St John of God took on nursing them, and found work to provide them, and himself, with food.  His job, building fortifications, was arduous and gruelling, and seeing the harsh treatment meted out to his co-workers by people who were, nominally at any rate, Catholics like himself, damaged his faith. A local Franciscan priest advised him not to blame the church as a whole for the excesses of some of its zealots, and suggested he should return to Spain, which he did, landing again at Gibraltar.

This began a period of hand-to-mouth existence, when he spent his days helping to unload ships’ cargoes and his nights in studying books and in prayer. Eventually, his love of books led him to become an itinerant book-pedlar, wandering round the towns of Andalusia, and all the time trying to work out what God wanted him to do with the remainder of his life.  A vision at the age of 41 is supposed to have led him to Granada, where he set up a small shop selling books and tracts.

It was in that town, on January 20^th, 1537, that he happened to hear a sermon preached by John of Avila, a major spiritual leader in the area, and it proved to be both traumatic, profound, and life-changing. St John went back to his shop, tore up any secular books, and gave away the remainder of his stock. He then began wandering the streets, bewailing his past, beating himself, rending his clothes, and repenting. He became a target for ridicule and even hostility, and was taken to the area of the Royal Hospital reserved for mental patients. Unfortunately, the treatment for that sort of thing at the time was like something out of the Tory manifesto: patients were segregated, beaten, chained, and starved.  Eventually, John of Avila, who had caused the problem in the first place, came to visit St John in the hospital, and eased his pain by telling him that his suffering had now gone on for exactly the same length as Jesus’s torments in the wilderness, forty days and nights, so it was time to give it a rest.

This seems to have marked some sort of major turning-point in his life and, on his release from hospital, he immediately began nursing the poor and the sick. At first, he carried on this ministry on the streets of Grenada, but one day, impulsively, he found a house for rent, and took on the lease of what became his first hospital.  He encountered considerable distrust from people who viewed him as basically still mentally ill, but persevered, carrying his patients to the house on his back, selling wood to raise money for food, and begging for essentials such as beds, linen and medicines, such as there were in those days. He cleaned up the patients, cared for them as best he could, and mended their clothes while praying at night. Eventually, he gained the trust and support of a network of sympathetic priests and physicians who agreed with his aims and objectives.

He was able to move his hospital to an old Carmelite monastery, where he opened a homeless shelter and immediately met with criticism from the neighbours, who said he was harbouring troublemakers. Doesn’t that sound depressingly familiar? His answer to his critics was that he only knew of one bad character in the hospital – himself!  He was not above “bending” the law to achieve a pragmatic result, however, and is recorded as having taken without permission (some would say “stolen”) a cooking pot full of food to feed a group of starving people, and having re-clothed a gang of ragamuffin street urchins in new clothes bought on non-existent credit.

His patronage, as a saint, was extended from booksellers to firefighters, when he was called one day to the Royal Hospital in Granada, which was on fire. He rushed into the inferno and led patients to safety, carrying those who could not help themselves. When the building was clear of potential human victims, he returned to the blaze, this time to save beds, blankets, sheets and mattresses by throwing them out of the windows. Finally, a decision was made by the authorities to use a cannon to blow up the burning portion of the roof, to prevent the fire, which was out of control, spreading to the remainder of the building, but before this could happen, John had climbed on the roof and used an axe to chop through the burning beams to prevent the flames taking hold.  This action almost cost him his life, as he then fell through the burning roof, but somehow he emerged from the conflagration unscathed.

His eventful existence eventually came to an end, however, when he caught pneumonia in a vain attempt to save the life of one of his companions, who had fallen into the swollen river in a time of flood, while trying to gather driftwood. St John of God died on his fifty-fifth birthday, March 8^th, 1550.  After his death, the informal circle of helpers, disciples and followers he had established to aid him in his work was approved by the Papacy in 1572 as the Brothers Hospitallers of St John of God, eventually becoming, over the centuries, the order that now has a presence in 53 countries worldwide, running over 300 hospitals, and with over 45,000 members.

Following his death, his body was initially buried in the Church of Our Lady of the Victories, and remained there until November 28, 1664, when the Hospitaller Brothers had his relics moved to the church of their hospital in the same city. He was canonized by Pope Alexander VIII on October 16, 1690, and a church was erected in 1757 to house his remains. On October 26, 1757, they were transferred to that church, now protected by the Knights of Saint John of God.

As you can probably tell from the amount of space I have devoted to telling his story, I have a lot of time for St John of God. I feel certain resonances with him.  My ancestors were shepherds. I, too, have spent a lot of time wandering around wondering what God meant for me to do. When I was 55, I died – or at least my old life did, in an experience every bit as transformatory as St John of God’s listening to the sermon of John of Avila.  I suppose that experience, and what arose out of it, has instilled in me a reminder not to talk myself out of doing things just because the outcome might be impractical, or embarrassing.  There are lots of little voices in our heads that tell us all sorts of reasons why it wouldn’t be a good idea to do this or that right now, better safe than sorry, wait, wait and hesitate. But these days, if I feel the need to speak, or act, I speak, or act. Life is not a dress rehearsal.

Where I do fall down, though, is in the lack of courage. Like the cowardly lion. To lead the life of someone like St John of God, as well as probably being able to drive an ambulance, you need a sort of complete and overarching courage to let go, to let go of everything, to let yourself fall backwards and trust that Big G will catch you. The sort of courage that makes you dash into a burning building, rather than running the other way. It was the same with St John’s modern day cognate, Fr. Vincent McNabb, who used to tramp round the houses of his poor parishioners in 1930s London, washing their kitchen floors for them.  That’s the bit I can’t do. Well, that, and the forgiveness.

Still, I’ve listed and enumerated my shortcomings often enough in this blog, and raking over old coals becomes tedious after a while. Maybe one day I will see something so blindingly obvious that my purpose will be revealed to me. Meanwhile, they also serve who only stand and wait, or who get the coal in, or feed the animals, or cook the stew. Or tend the sheep, I suppose.

Anyway, it’s got to be Sunday teatime again and – surprisingly – it’s still light, which shows, I guess, that spring is in the air, or on the wing, or something. Maisie’s daffodils, talking of Wordsworth, are nodding in the breeze, but they aren’t in flower yet. Snow is melting, the hail’s stopped pelting, as the song says. Next week contains Mike’s funeral, on Thursday, which will be a sad day, and there is still much to be done in terms of sorting out arrangements – not by me, but it still needs doing.  I finally found the text of the supposed Norman Nicholson poem I was looking for, which Mike’s death brought to mind: except it’s by Sidney Keyes, writing about Wordsworth.  

No room for mourning: he’s gone out
Into the noisy glen, or stands between the stones
Of the gaunt ridge, or you’ll hear his shout
Rolling among the screes, he being a boy again.
He’ll never fail nor die
And if they laid his bones
In the wet vaults or iron sarcophagi
Of fame, he’d rise at the first summer rain
And stride across the hills to seek
His rest among the broken lands and clouds.

As Sally Evans said to me, you could hardly find a better epitaph for someone who loved the great outdoors.  The Holmfirth Harriers have also posted a very kind obituary to him on their web site, which details his many athletic achievements. If the weather holds, and there is a chance of the camper van making it that far, we’ll try to get up to Walney next weekend. He liked it there, on the occasions when we took him and the dogs, and it would be a good place to contemplate, and to remember him. If I don’t manage to post a blog next Sunday, that’s probably why.  

In the meantime, Debbie has come back with the dogs, and has begun to cause chaos in the kitchen behind me, by preparing a smoothie whose ingredients include avocados, granny smith apples, kale and soya milk. She is intending to drink it herself, rather than give it to the dogs, but either way, it’s a potential disaster which needs supervising.  Wish me luck.