Epiblog for the feast of St Gondolphus of Metz

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley.  A week in which we have, sadly, been brought back down to earth with a bump.  There is much to do, and most of it needs doing straight away, and all at once. I did manage to take a couple of hours out to plant out some wallflower plugs in the tubs alongside my wheelchair ramp, which I hope are going to give us some late colour this autumn, and on Saturday afternoon we all went on a mini-expedition in the camper van up to the romantically-named Binn Lane, part of the National Trust Marsden Moor estate (of which more later) but apart from that, it has just been drudge drudge drudge all week. 

Debbie finally found out what her new timetable will be for the next academic year, and even had to go into College to take part in enrolment, so there was definitely the feeling of everything starting up again, coupled with an autumn crispness in the air, although the mornings have been bright enough. I made sure this time around to cover the young wallflower plants with glass, at least until they become established, not only as a precaution against the rapacious slugs that inhabit our garden, but also in case of an early nip of unseasonable frost.

Matilda marked a milestone this week, as 4^th September was the third anniversary of her coming to live here. She celebrated her official birthday by going out on the decking, growling at another cat, watching the birds and squirrels, and sleeping in a patch of sunlight on the settee in the conservatory. Pretty much a normal Matilda day, in fact, punctuated by frequent visits to the magically-refilling food bowl.  She had noticed the change in temperature, though, and now spends on average more time inside than outside during the day.  She knows, as we all do, that summer is slipping away and leaving us.  She’s also three years older, and considering that she was nine that week when we saved her from the chop, that makes her now twelve, or sixty years old in human terms, the same age as me.  In fact, thinking about it, my own day is often spent snoozing, punctuated by visits to the feeding-bowl, so maybe it’s a sixties thing. Still, sixty is the new forty, or so they say.

I’d like to say the dogs have had an uneventful week, and, while Zak, who is currently staying with us, has been – as usual – no trouble at all, saying that Misty has had an uneventful week would be a blatant lie.  As I mentioned above, by Saturday, I was feeling so ground down with year-end accounts, plus ten new books to get out before Christmas, plus the ongoing camper van woes – on top of everything else, it has also needed a new coolant pipe as one side had corroded, leaking coolant and causing the warning light to come on – that I readily accepted Debbie’s suggestion that I accompany them on their run up to Binn Lane at Marsden.

We parked up in the designated National Trust “turning circle” at the summit, and Deb prepared to take Misty and Zak for a walk while I settled down to do some writing, perhaps even to be inspired by the impressive natural amphitheatre of the moors spread out before me, with the reservoir down in the valley looking the size of a postage-stamp from this height. There was no doubt about it, it is a place redolent of wild, desolate beauty. 

Anyway, I started working after Deb and the dogs had set off at 5.30pm, knowing I had a couple of hours until their planned return. 7.30pm came and went, but it’s not unknown, shall we say, for Debbie to have an elastic view of time, in fact, in her previous job, they always used to tell her that things were happening half an hour earlier than they actually were, so they did all turn up for the said event at the same time.  In any case, I was entertained and diverted for half an hour by a magnificent sunset that glowed behind the stark outline of the dark hills all around and gently dimmed from incandescent gold to dull red.

By now, though, it was past eight, and I was beginning to think that something might possibly be amiss. I decided to leave it till 8.30pm and call Deb on her mobile if they still weren’t back.  At 8.20pm, Debbie and Zak turned up, the downside being that this meant she ended the walk a dog down on what she had started it with.  They’d been about twenty minutes away, when something – a sound Deb and Zak had not even heard – had spooked Misty, and she had run off.  The problem was that it had happened quite near to a major “junction” of several possible paths, and although Debbie had spent half an hour or so going in various directions, shouting and calling for Misty, and encouraging Zak to “go seek” her, eventually, with darkness falling, she’d had to give up and come back to the van, in the hope that Misty had run back before her. But this time, she hadn’t.

All of which left us in a bit of a quandary. If she was still heading back, we didn’t really want to be leaving the car park just yet, in case she turned up. On the other hand, if she really was lost, the sooner we got home and put her details on dogslost.co.uk and set the relevant armies marching to look for her, the better.  Plus there was always the crazy notion that somehow, she might find her own way home. Admittedly, it was a lot nearer, but the first time ever that she ran off, when spooked, from Castle Hill, she did find her own way back, albeit at 2.30am.  We decided to give it half an hour, so Debbie put the kettle on and made a cup of tea for us, and a hot water bottle for herself, since she was nithered to the bane after wandering around in the gloom looking for Misty. Meanwhile, I kept winding down the window every couple of minutes, bellowing her name, and blowing the dog whistle as hard as I could.

I was half way down my cuppa when my mobile phone rang. “Have you lost a dog?” Yes, indeed we have, I said – have you found one? It turned out that the caller, a bloke called Bob, had been parked up at Wessenden watching the same spectacular sunset as I had, and had noticed this mad psychotic collie dog jumping up at an empty car. Reasoning she might be lost, he had, very sensibly, let her into his own car (the car park there is right next to the road) but he didn’t have his phone with him.  So he had driven to the pub, which seemed to me to be an eminently sensible solution to any dilemma an Englishman might face, and had borrowed his mate’s mobile to call us, and let us know that Misty was safe in his car in the car park of The Swan at Meltham. I thanked him profusely and – having ditched the remains of the tea out of the side window – buckled up and made ready as Deb was climbing into the driver’s seat. Twenty minutes later we were all reunited, although Misty seemed rather unconcerned by the whole thing.  We both thanked Bob again, and he told us that he used to have a dog that ran off all the time as well, so he knew what it was like.  Mentally, I was giving thanks to whatever power for the good had led Misty into Bob’s safe hands, instead of a potentially much worse fate, and also reflecting once again that the metal tag with all her details on, which dangles from Misty’s collar was the best £6.00 I ever spent.

We made short work of getting home and pulling up the drawbridge, once we had unloaded. I fed Matilda and the dogs, with extra dog treats, and made Debbie some pakoras and myself a chip butty. I had previously said that, as an antidote to the shock, when we got back I was going to have a pint of gin and tonic, without the tonic, but I was too tired even to do that. For some reason, Match of the Day wasn’t on, so we went to bed.

Trying as they were, all our problems this week were very much first world problems. Looking at the wider world, with the refugee crisis still raging across the Mediterranean, the Middle East, and Europe, I found myself reflecting on this as I lay in bed, grateful that once more, we had all made it safely home, and, indeed that, for all its faults, we had a home.

The publication of the picture of the dead child, Aylan, lying inert on the shoreline where his body had been washed up, has certainly moved the debate on refugees up a gear, although this wasn’t the first picture of a drowned refugee child to have made its way into my “news feed” on social media, by any means. Sometimes a single picture can do that, though. It shows how powerful photography is as a medium, especially in an age where a few clicks of a mouse can send an image viral.  There have been similar pictures before. I remember the horrific pictures from the Biafran war in Nigeria in the late 1960s, and of course there is the Nick Ut photo of Vietnamese girl Phan Thị Kim Phúc, running screaming down a road in Trang Bang in 1972, her skin flayed by napalm.

I was reminded also of a lesser-known but equally controversial photograph, which also won its photographer a Pulitzer prize – “Vulture and Child”, which was taken by Kevin Carter at the height of the famine in South Sudan in 1993. It shows an emaciated girl trying to crawl towards a feeding centre. In the background, a few yards behind her, an African black vulture has landed and is watching her feeble struggles with a beady eye, biding its time.  After the photograph was originally published in the New York Times, thousands of people contacted the paper asking how they could help, and whether the girl survived and made it to the feeding station.  Her fate remains unknown, but Carter was haunted by the images he saw in Sudan – he was not allowed to pick up the child and remove it to safety because they were forbidden to touch famine victims for fear of spreading disease – and he killed himself just three months after winning the prize.

If the photograph of Aylan has succeeded in doing what these other photos did, and stirring up a whirlwind of action and protest, then perhaps his tiny little candle of a life may not have been snuffed out in vain. I have my doubts, however. A poll of this xenophobic rat-hole of a country created by the Tory Junta’s propaganda revealed that 76% of the people asked are still so brainwashed by the shit being drip-fed them by this apology for a government that they still think we should do nothing to help. In a response to one of his constituents (which the recipient posted on social media) my local MP even suggested the possibility of military action in Syria “to make it safe for the refugees to return” which would be a great way of solving the problem, much in the same way that pouring petrol on it is a great way to put out a fire.

Then we have Peter Bucklitsch, who managed to persuade 2500 misguided souls to vote UKIP at the last election, declaring that Aylan’s death was a result of “queue jumping” and that his parents were “greedy for the good life in Europe”.  This provoked a predictable – and entirely justified – howl of protest from most sides, with many people pointing out that the refugees who are putting their lives in the hands of these people-smugglers don’t up sticks, leave their homes and everything behind them, and pay over their life savings in many cases, just on the whim that life might be better claiming JSA in a bed-sit in Droitwich. Plus, with a good old English name like “Bucklitsch”, I’d think twice before banging on about migrants, but hey, that’s just me, I suppose.

There is a kernel of truth in the idea of a better life, though, even though Mr Bucklitsch has definitely got his string bag inside out if he thinks that is the sole motivation for refugees trying to get to Europe. Whatever immediate solution is put in place, people are not going to stop coming until some massive long-term answers are put in place in their own countries. In fact, in the case of Syria and ISIS, it may take a century to rectify the situation.  What is needed is to create prosperous, conflict-free countries which are capable of being rebuilt for the benefit of their citizens, together with an end to the long-term grievances and inequalities which have fed radical Islam. Then, and only then, will ISIS wither on the vine. This will take many, many years of patient work, and there is also an unexpected enemy, in the form of climate change.  So, if we want to end the refugee trail, we must also be working to stop the entire equatorial belt of Africa from becoming an arid, featureless, inhospitable desert. It didn’t feel like it here in chilly Britain, where we’ve had a lousy summer, but globally, apparently, 2015 was the warmest year ever.  Ever.

Apart from war, the other main driver of the refugee surge is famine. Even in Syria, the initial protests against Assad were caused by farmers and other rural dwellers being displaced and forced off their land by drought (climate change again) and into towns, where their impoverished condition led to anti-Assad protests that were then battened onto by the West in a piggyback attempt to produce an “Arab Spring” in Syria.  Then Al Qaeda piled in on the other side, and became ISIS, and the Russians started supporting Assad, and – well, put them together and what do you get, bippity boppity boo, as the song says.

So, We were at war with ISIS in Syria and Iraq, but we were only allowed to actually bomb them in Iraq, although it later turned out that in fact we’d been covertly bombing them in Syria all along (against the sovereign will of Parliament) it was just that David Cameron didn't think it important enough to tell anyone about it. We’d supported the anti-Assad rebels as part of the Arab Spring, then when we found out that some of them were in fact Al Qaeda under another name, we tried to support the “good” Syrian rebels while simultaneously not supporting the bad guys, except when they strayed into Iraq and started killing people there, at which point they all became the bad guys and we bombed them anyway.  Sometimes we get it wrong because although we have smart bombs they aren't smart enough to tell if the people on the ground are in favour of Western democracy or not and all these damn foreigners dress the same in the desert.

The RAF’s ageing fleet of Tornados, based out in Cyprus, are busily flying missions at God alone knows what cost and firing off missiles that cost £800,000 a pop, while at home we are struggling to keep the libraries and the “Sure Start” centres open. In fact, it would probably be a lot cheaper, and have the same end result, if they brought the Tornados home and got them to fire the missiles directly at the libraries and the “Sure Start” centres. It would, at least, save on aviation fuel and demolition costs, and if a few working class children get accidentally immolated in the blast, it would also get the child benefit bill down, which should please Iain Duncan Smith.

Given that this is going to be a long-term problem, I would also once again question why there is such a lack of resource, especially in housing and the NHS. Did I pay my taxes from 1976 when I got my first real job, until 2010, when I finally became too ill to work properly, to buy bombs to drop on the Middle East to create yet more Jihadis? Seemingly I did.  I see a lot of comments on social media about how “we don’t even have the resources to cope with our own people” – and in some ways this is true – the figure for homeless families being forces out of London by the benefits cap has gone up 27%, apparently.  But what I don’t see is people asking why this should be so, why should it be either/or, in a country where we could afford it if we wanted to. This is because every politician of every party, with the possible exception of Jeremy Corbyn, has come to believe the self-perpetuating rhetoric of “austerity”.

And yet, although it’s supposedly the case that there is no money, the government can always find ways to squander it on quixotic schemes like extending the badger cull, which will have absolutely no effect on bovine TB but which will considerably deplete the public purse. Figures released this week showed that the cost so far of the cull has amounted to around £7500 per badger killed. I have made this comparison before, but I will carry on banging on about it until someone listens – the starting cost of a room at the Ritz in Piccadilly, London, is £382 per night. For what it’s cost to kill them, the government could have put up each badger at the Ritz for 19 nights. And if you don’t think that’s a criminal waste of money, well, go and get your moat cleaned.

If there has been one glimmer of hope this week, in amongst all the gloom and depressing reaction of the politicians to the crisis (has anyone even begun to think about setting up a pan-European summit to produce a formula based on land mass, population density and resources, to ensure “fair” distribution of the refugees? Has anyone begun to think about the need to establish properly-run official transit and migration camps to replace the home-made shanty towns like “The Jungle”? No, and, er, no) one tiny chink of light in the gathering darkness of the refugee storm, it has been the reaction of individual people all over the UK who have ignored the government’s dithering and who have started, either individually or in concert with existing charities and humanitarian efforts, to collect clothing, food and other essentials to be given out at Calais and elsewhere.

It reminded me of Dunkirk. In the same way that, in 1940, the call went out and small boats crossed the Channel and somehow managed to effect the miraculous rescue of 300,000 British troops, so now we have a situation where people are setting out, not in small boats this time, but via the Channel Tunnel or taking their cars on the ferry, crammed to the roof with food and warm clothes, and all over the country a network of collections is springing up which has largely ignored or circumvented “official” channels and has just got on with it. When I think of “England”, this is the sort of thing I think of. Not the England of the Lords and Commons and the Fitzalan Pursuivant Extraordinary walking backwards down a red carpet in front of the Queen, impressive as that is as a spectacle; not the Union Jack or the tower of Big Ben or the Houses of Parliament; not the red London buses or the last night of the Proms or Land of Hope and Glory.

I think of people sitting round a trestle table which bears a mighty tea urn and a plate of scones, knitting squares to sew together to make blankets for the refugee children who were lucky enough to get to Calais without drowning, and who now face a bitter winter of official indecision. I think of people packing boxes of tins and packets of rice, old coats, woolly hats and scarves, and the old tent they used to go to festivals in, and driving it all down to Dover. I think of people in hastily-set-up warehouses co-ordinating other people meeting up at motorway services in the middle of the night to pass on donations. That’s the England I’d like to be proud of, that’s the England my Dad fought for, manning his ack-ack gun on top of the white cliffs of the Seven Sisters, and that’s the England that’s under attack today, not from a “swarm” of “migrants”, but from “the enemy within” a small clique of powerful, greedy, and in some cases frankly evil politicians, only interested in perpetuating their own privileged lifestyle, who know they can only keep us the rest of us quiet by “divide and rule”.

Finally, and while not wishing to make light of what is obviously a grave and terrible situation, when Cameron does finally announce, with his arm twisted up his back and in the teeth of the Daily Mail, how many more asylum seekers are to be allowed into the UK, wouldn't it be funny if everyone in the UK who is currently being punished by the Bedroom Tax gave their spare room to a Syrian refugee as their "carer". It would create such a smokescreen of paperwork, appeals, bureaucracy etc that it would probably kipper that nasty little piece of thumbscrew legislation overnight.

Anyway, missing dogs and migrant crises notwithstanding, we have arrived at today, which is apparently the feast day of St Gondolphus of Metz.  He was the Bishop of Metz, in northern France, from 816AD until his death on 6^th September 823. His predecessor as bishop was called Angilram, which looks suspiciously like an anagram of “Anagram” at first sight.  Actually Angilram had died in 791AD, so there was a considerable hiatus before Gondolphus arrived on the scene.

He is a bit of a tantalising enigma as far as saints go, because virtually nothing is known of his time as Bishop, or his life and works, other than the bare dates above.  He was buried in the monastery at Gorze, in the arrondisement of Metz-Champagne, an establishment founded by the wackily-named Chrodegang of Metz in 749AD. Apparently his relics remain there, and his feast day is celebrated on this day.  The abbey has a tympanum of the Last  Judgement which is the photo at the top of this page.

So, there you have him.  Still, it didn’t take much to become a saint in those days, or so it would seem.  No doubt he did the usual stuff, praying and doing good works for the poor and all that, and at the end of the day, that’s probably all any of us can do. I came across someone this week who said, apropos of the refugee crisis, that “Christians” were keeping pretty quiet about Jesus’s status as a Palestinian refugee. I can’t say I had noticed, particularly, but then there are some who think that “Christians” are represented entirely by the Westboro Baptist Church or court officials in the Southern USA who refuse to marry gays.

If I was looking for Jesus anywhere in the current situation, I’d look for him in the tents of the shantytown camp at Calais; I’d look for him in the way in which, despite the indifference and dithering of politicians throughout Europe, ordinary people have come together to try and help whenever they can.  And I would look at the tenderness and dignity which was displayed in that photo of Aylan's body being carried up the beach. It is hard, though, to think of a benevolent God in a world which allowed Aylan, and all the other drowned kids whose pictures didn’t get in the papers, to die. Maybe, like Raymond Chandler said, God has his off-days, and God’s days are very long indeed.  One can only hope that, on occasions such as this, the “many worlds” theory is true, and there exists a world where Aylan didn’t die, but is  even now running and playing free in the sunshine, something which should be the birthright of every little kid. God knows, life closes down childhood innocence soon enough, as it is. And meanwhile, the boats keep coming, the wind is in from Africa, and last night, I couldn’t sleep.

It’s another busy week ahead for me next week, even though you wouldn’t know it  if you looked round the door right now. Matilda is asleep on the armchair, the stove is ticking away, the sun is on the garden still, just, and Deb is out on West Nab, hoping to come back with the same number of dogs she had when she left at 2.30pm.  Tomorrow will be here soon enough, though, so when I have finished writing this blog I am going to take ten minutes to have a snooze, then make a pot of tea.  The Buddhists once referred to tea as “the eyelids of Bodhidharma” and while I wouldn’t go that far, I do think, as I said to Debbie in the camper when Misty had run off, that there is no problem in the world that doesn’t look just a little bit more surmountable with a mug of char in your hand.  Chin chin.