It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley.
It really has, with me buzzing round like a B. A. F., trying to finish off
books before we go away in July, and Debbie embroiled in the last throes of the
exam season. The weather continues to be
dull and warm, a bit like The Isle of Wight. (Only kidding, my IOW chums). I do
wish we could see some sunshine, though, I would happily sacrifice a couple of
degrees off the temperature in return for a few days of blazing sunshine. As it
is, we’ve had another week of days where it looks like it’s going to absolutely
bang it down any minute.
Matilda has now settled into her summer routine of rising
with us in the morning, and going and sitting by her dish in the anticipation
of a sachet of Felix. Then, with breakfast out of the way, it’s out onto the
decking and unless it starts raining, that’s her gone for a couple of hours.
She usually appears back at the door (despite the fact that she has a cat flap
which is held permanently open by a bit of string looped round the door handle)
sometime around mid-morning, for her elevenses, then it’s back out again and
lying in the warmest place she can find, glaring at the squirrels that she is
too lazy/comfortable to get up and chase. This continues until teatime, when
she returns for another light snack, before going out again and returning about
the time it starts to get dark, for supper, following which she usually puts
herself to bed on the settee in Colin’s front room, and I close the door to the
cat flap. It’s a tough life, being Matilda.
Misty’s done two walks of over fifteen miles this week and
one of eighteen, and when Deb has been unavailable for such yompings, Granny
has kindly stepped in and given her a spin round the park for an hour with Zak
and Ellie. She has actually been a lot calmer over these summer weeks, apart
from the time she ran off at the sound of a well-struck cover drive from the
nearby cricket field. She’s probably saving it all up for one spectacular act
of disobedience/stupidity when we’re on Arran.
When I haven’t been desperately trying to finish off the
stack of books waiting to go to press, this week, I’ve been wrestling with the
twin problems of the camper insurance and the house insurance, both of which
fall due at around this time of year. It’s a first world problem, sure, and I
could be a lot worse off, but once more my dealings with the insurance industry
have only sought to confirm why so many people just give up and drive around
uninsured, and live in houses without any buildings or contents cover. One
thing I don’t understand is, if my call is so bloody important to these people,
why are they keeping me on hold for 25 minutes playing me Mozart’s Rondo a La Turk, rendered by a mad
Chinaman on a xylophone, before picking up the phone? I’d hate to think what
happens to people whose calls, for one reason or another, they deem
unimportant.
Still, last week was but a mere bagatelle compared to what
awaits me next week when, as well as trying up more loose ends than you’d find
in a string factory, I also have to start in on preparing for going away –
beginning with the famous “holiday checklist” that comes into play every year
at about this time. There’s a quotation
in Shakespoke somewhere – I forget exactly which play – to the effect that,
once you’ve decided to do something unpleasant, the period between deciding to
do it and actually carrying it out, is much more unpleasant than the deed
itself. All I can say is, he must have
been readin’ ma’ mail!
Of course, next week might yet contain several heffalump
traps that surprise all of us, especially if the banking system stops working
on Tuesday. I reckon we have enough tins in the house to keep us going for a
couple of months, provided we don’t mind off combinations like grapefruit on a
bed of red kidney beans, but it’s no joking matter, really. Last time we were
teetering on the brink of an international financial crisis, Gordon Brown, who
had, I admit, many faults – arrogant, boorish, bad at communicating, vile
temper, etc. – stepped in and took control, and probably saved us all from
having to queue in the streets to catch loaves of bread thrown from the back of
army lorries. This time around, the
crisis will be managed by George Osborne, God help us. If that doesn’t make you
want to start digging a fallout shelter in the garden, nothing will.
It may yet all come to naught, but we should do well to bear
in mind that these days all the banks are linked to all the other banks
globally and they are all in bed with each other: if banks start failing in
Greece, and the whole electronic spiders’ web starts to unravel, who can say
where it might end up? The concept of “a
far away county, of which we know nothing” just does not apply any more, and we
should also, perhaps, remember, that 101 years ago today, another crisis in the
Balkans that ultimately turned very nasty was initiated in Sarajevo, when
Gavrilo Princip assassinated the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie.
The government, if I may dignify the Blue Blight with a
title it has never deserved, and will never, has been busy trying to save
money, although their efforts have been less concerned with staving off the
effects of a crash in the Greek economy, than in continuing to wage a
doctrinaire war on the poor, the ill, and the disadvantaged, under the general
heading of “austerity”.
Homelessness is on the rise, by any sensible standard, and
however much the Blight Brigade would like to re-classify the definition of
poverty so it looks as thought they are doing something about it, when in fact
all they are doing is moving the goalposts.
They are eyeing child tax credit as a possible area for welfare cuts,
despite promising before the election that they would leave it alone.
And that is not the only pre-election promise which has been
broken. Before the election, every time you turned on Look North it was to find either Cameron or Osborne blethering on
about the “Northern Powerhouse” and how they would electrify the railway line
between Manchester and Leeds to that you could arrive at your destination five
minutes before you’d set off, and much more in a similar vein. This week, it’s
been cancelled. The official word is “paused”, which is a new one on me. It’s
now gone into my own personal lexicon of euphemistic bullshit, along with “let
go” for “sacked”, and “client acceptors” instead of “bouncers”.
One of the cruellest and most niggardly, penny pinching cuts
is the abolition of the Independent Living Fund, which costs £1.2billion a
year, a figure which is massively dwarfed by the amount which goes unclaimed in
entitled benefits during the same period.
But the Tories aren’t doing it to save money, they’re doing it because
they believe really, deep down, that disabled people belong in the workhouse,
along with the other shirkers and parasites, but it would be far too risky to
actually say so, even in the current climate of compassionless xenophobia which
they have spent five years weaving out of lies and rumours, smoke and
mirrors. So they are trying to achieve
the same end by stealth: the current fund is ring fenced. When the funding is
transferred to local authorities, it will not be ring-fenced. Local
authorities, such as Kirklees for example, are already feeling the impact of
savage, disproportionate cuts to the money they receive each year from central
government. Kirklees will not be able to afford lollipop ladies from next
April. What chance is there, then, that the people who this change will affect,
will simply find their care package continuing as before? I’d estimate that it’s
about as likely as tripping over a pile of rocking horse shit, or finding an
intact snowball in hell. The result will
be inevitably that some people will be forced to give up their current
independence and go into care, and others may be forced back on the charity of
friends and family to take up the burden.
In Tory eyes, this is a result. They have waged war on the disabled at
one remove, in such a way as they can wash their hands of it and blame someone
else when it goes Brustenauf. The
money is almost irrelevant.
Almost as big a scandal was the way in which the BBC barely
reported the DPAC demonstration against the ILP being scrapped, even though
several dozen people in wheelchairs took over the lobby of the House of Commons
and almost found their way into the chamber at Prime Minister’s Question Time.
On the BBC Six O’ Clock evening news, it merited about 20 seconds, in between a
package about whether Mo Farah ever took drugs (he didn’t apparently) and some
endangered bloody south seas turtle!
Well, as I said after the election, at least we now know who our enemies
are, and it looks like the BBC can’t be relied upon, either. Two words – “charter” and “renewal”.
Theresa May, meanwhile, who is currently impersonating a
Home Secretary, ratcheted up the xenophobia another few notches this week by
announcing that from April 2016, only non EU immigrants earning more than
£35,000 pa would be allowed indefinite leave to remain in the UK. Perhaps the most sinister thing about this
proposal is her wording:
“…in future, we will exercise control to ensure that only
the brightest and best remain permanently."
If that phrase, about the brightest and best, sounds
familiar to you, but you just can’t place it, it was also used by Paul Nuttall,
the deputy head of UKIP, in that speech which, unmemorable on its own terms,
achieved considerable viral notoriety when satirised by the comedian Stewart
Lee in a coruscating routine which could briefly be found all over the
internet. Yes, although Nuttall’s
position was that the “brightest and best” Romanians should stay in Romania,
whereas May is saying that we only want the brightest and best, nevertheless, a
phrase from the UKIP armoury of bigotry has crossed the floor, to be picked up
by the Tories.
I suspect, in fact I hope, that, like many other Tory
pronouncements on immigration, this is one which is mainly intended to get
Daily Mail readers slavering with excitement, and will prove unworkable in
practice. What about the people already here? Will it be applied retrospectively? At what point will the test be applied? After
all, people change jobs, and salaries can go up as well as down. Will ILR be tied to income, then? So if you
lose your £35K job, do the Home Office put you back on the next plane to what
Nigel Farage would doubtless call “Bongo-Bongo
Land”. However it works in practice, it makes no
sense whatsoever to be contemplating stifling the supply of immigrant labour to
the NHS, which is just one effect these proposals will have. Not unless you are
contemplating a scenario where the NHS no longer exists in its present form…oh,
hang on…
The government has got to be seen to talk tough on
immigration for several reasons of course.
By our blundering stupidity in foreign policy since 2001, but especially
in the lunatic intervention of the “Arab Spring”, which has achieved precisely
nothing and has rendered North Africa a basket case and a safe haven for those
who mean to do our country and its nationals deadly harm, as we have seen this
week, with yet another massacre by an adherent of the insane medieval death
cult, ISIS, against British holidaymakers in Tunisia.
And the end result is that we have the RAF, at God alone
knows what cost, mounting missions to fire missiles costing £400,000 to
£800,000 each, to destroy a Toyota Hilux truck somewhere in the Syrian desert,
worth approximately £1500, plus its ISIS occupants, each of whom will
automatically be replaced by ten others, some of them volunteers from this
country. Yet apparently we don’t have to money to allow disabled people an
independent life any more.
All of this is lost, however, on the people who post on
Facebook and the like that Muslims must “resist radicalisation” and “integrate
more”. I doubt that seeing Amir Khan on TV wrapped in a Union Jack is going to
take the edge off having your house blown to brick-dust, along with several of
your family. Is it any wonder that,
faced with the choice of being blown up by the USAF or being blown up by ISIS,
the ones who decide not to join ISIS leg it from the war zone as fast as
possible, and try and find a safe haven in Europe?
Is it any wonder that youthful idealists listen more to the persuasive
propaganda of the ISIS puppet-masters than
their own parents or Imams? I repeat. The entire crisis of refugees in the
Mediterranean, and the current situation in Syria, has all been brought about
by our meddling, and the sooner we realise we’re in a hole, and stop digging,
the better.
I could go on. I frequently do. But to be honest, I am
tired, and I have a stack of domestic chores to do today, and in any case, I am
not saying anything I haven’t said a thousand times before, to no avail. Plus,
it’s actually not a bad day – much better than the weather forecast said it
would be – and Debbie has joined Matilda out on the decking, and is doing a
stack of final exam marking to be handed in on Tuesday. I wonder if they would
get better results if she let Matilda mark them? Who knows. I hope Ostrich
Karahi gets an A, though.
Today, for what it’s worth, is the feast day of St Vincentia
Gerosa, who lived from 1784 until 1847 and, together with Bartolomea Capitanio,
founded the Sisters of the Charity of Lovere. Lovere is in the Lombardy region
of Italy. Apparently Catherine, as she was born, was
left struggling with the family business single-handed, when several of her
relatives died in quick succession. She prayed, and used what money she had on
charitable works in the parish, becoming involved in organising meetings,
retreats, and a practical school to teach the poor girls of the parish domestic
work, so as to improve their prospects, something which will probably be in the
next Tory manifesto, if they get to hear about it.
In 1824, she met Bartolomea, who also ran a school, and they
decided to join forces and found the Sisters of the Charity. Bartolomea died nine years later, but
Vincentia carried on until her own death in 1847, by which time additional
branches of the charity had been set up in Milan,
Venice, Roverdo, Bergamo,
and Arco, plus several other smaller groups in Lombardy.
I’ve attached some Lombardic music to
the end of this blog, just to give you some local colour.
She was canonised by Pope Pius XII in 1950. Her sainthood
seems to rest entirely on a life devoted to prayer and charity, with spooky
miracles thin on the ground, but then she did live through the age of reason,
which must have had some impact, even on a country with such a romantic soul as
Italy.
I’m not quite sure what lesson her life speaks to me.
Probably keep plodding on, do a little more each day, and you’ll get there in
the end. Set against that, though, I have to remember what W B Yeats said: too
long a sacrifice, makes a stone of the heart. I sometimes wonder if that is
what has happened to me. I have become
so inured with struggling against the same 17 intractable problems, and never getting anywhere, that I have
become dulled to everything else. The alternative is even worse, though.
Chucking it all in would mean not only letting myself down, which I could probably cope with – after all,
it wouldn’t be the first time – but also letting down those who believe in me
and count on me to keep going, some of whom have four furry legs. Plus there’s
the financial side of it. If I can just hold it all together for another five
years or so, then I stand a much better chance of handing on a debt-free future to Debbie. Of
course, if the banking system goes bang on Tuesday then we’ll be living off
mandarin oranges in brown Windsor soup, but on the plus side, mortgages and
overdrafts will also be things of the past, and there’ll be no internet, so I
will be writing this blog on stretched goats’ vellum, made from the finest
stretched goats in the British Empire.
In the meantime, there are plants to be watered, tarts to be
made, and dogs to be fed, when Debbie eventually gets back from Binn Lane (one
wonders how it got such a romantic name), and then perhaps I might do something
for myself this evening, such as copy out a pedigree or two. Yes, it’s just one white knuckle ride of
excitement here. Big G, in case you’d forgotten the original rationale behind
this blog, remains stubbornly elusive, though I will, of course, have several
hours to attempt to re-connect with him while I am sitting at the side of
Kilbrannan Sound waiting for the return of Debbie and Misty, either together or
separately. “What’s that, Misty? Debbie’s fallen down the old mine shaft?”
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