Epiblog for the Feast of St John Chrysostom

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. Arran seems but a distant memory, although we have only been back about four weeks, but they have been four weeks crammed with activity – some good, some not so good.  Uncle Phil’s holiday is drawing to a close and he will be leaving us next week and heading back to the sub-tropical climate of Darwin, which will be a culture-shock for him after all these crisp, bright, golden autumn mornings we seem to have had (when it’s not actually raining).

In the meantime he’s been making the most of it, including accompanying Deb and the dogs on a moorland hike up to Stoodley Pike during the week. (The dogs in this instance excluded Ellie, who would probably have had to climb it by being carried in someone else’s rucksack, if she’d gone.)  College assessments have also begun in earnest, which meant that Deb was missing for most of Tuesday and Wednesday, so Granny stepped into the breach and took Misty and Zak down the field and up into the park and the woods.

I think the badger (or something similar) has been trying to munch my wallflower plugs, as on more than one occasion in the morning, the cover on the trough has been pushed to one side, and some of them appear to have been nibbled. Either that, or there’s a twelve-stone slug out there somewhere. The wallflowers themselves have developed a yellowish tinge, which is apparently because the soil is too acid and needs the addition of lime.

Matilda has had a quiet week of squirrel-watching and snoozing. I don’t know whether it’s because her increasing maturity has mellowed her somewhat, or whether she is still feeling neglected after we were gone so long on Arran, but her “clinginess” since we got back still persists, to the extent that she now spends a lot of time curled up in the armchair next to where I am working and snores and dreams her way through several hours of the day. I could, of course, just be flattering myself – it might be that the autumnal drop in temperature also has something to do with it.

Her watching of the squirrels and birds, too, has now become more of an indoor occupation, as she squats on the doormat and looks at them through the closed conservatory door rather than actually joining them outside on the decking as she used to do in summer. The squirrels themselves, meanwhile, have been as busy as I am, preparing and storing away food for winter. We haven’t put out the new prayer flags which we got from Arran yet (the previous set were stolen by squirrels last winter) but I saw one of the little buggers trying to nick the 3 foot by 4 foot flag of Free Tibet the other day.

We shouldn’t forget, though, that the grey squirrel is, at the end of the day, merely a rat with a very good PR agency, and that they invaded and drove out our native red squirrel (a couple of which I was lucky enough to see on Arran on holiday, as they still have them there). One of successive waves of invaders, in fact, and another potential threat was flagged up this week.

Britain is being invaded, apparently, by foreigners. Foreign moths, to be precise. The convolvulus hawk-moth, which has a wingspan of 10cm and is addicted to wine and tobacco, or to be more specific, the nectar of the tobacco plant, is becoming more and more prevalent in the UK and has been seen as far north as Shetland. ‘It has already been an amazing year for moth immigration and such activity usually peaks in early autumn,’ said Richard Fox of the Butterfly Conversation Trust.

These huge moths, or, as Matilda would no doubt call them, “winged snacks”, have been featured in the media as the latest scare.  Apart from the fact that, given their alleged proclivities, they would probably be too pissed and out-of-breath to munch their way through your undies anyway, unless your knickers smell of tobacco nectar, you are probably safe. Mine don’t – in fact they would stun any moth within half a mile, so I am not overly concerned.

The real refugee crisis, though, is nowhere near as funny.  David Cameron announced that Britain would take 20,000 over the next five years, or, putting it in context, the same quantity that Munich recently took over a weekend. Plus, of course, the refugees we are taking, bona fide fugitives though they undoubtedly are, and not in any way to diminish the horrors they may have been through, are the ones who have already reached the relative safety of the camps in Lebanon’s Bekaa valley. It’s better than nothing, but as a reaction to the sight of the dead bodies of children being washed up on every beach in the Mediterranean, it’s pathetic.  Thank God for the unofficial networks of support and aid for the refugees which are springing up all across England’s green and pleasant land.

At least there are people who, thank God, recognise the need for some concrete action. I have been constantly reminded, during the coverage of the refugee crisis, not only of Shakespeare’s “Full fathom five thy father lies/of his bones are coral made” and the refugees having undergone a “sea-change” either way, whether they made it safe ashore or not, but also of Donne’s famous sermon:

No man is an Iland, intire of itselfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as  well as if a Manor of thy friends or of thine  owne were; any mans death diminishes me,  because I am involved in Mankinde;  And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.

I have heard lots of people talk about “we should look after our own first” and “But this is a Christian country”, usually people who didn’t give two hoots about “our own” last week and who only go to church to “hatch, match, and despatch.” But these people are our own.  Any man’s death diminishes me. If a refugee is washed away, Europe is the less, as much as if a manor of thy friends or of thine owne were. There but for fortune, as it says in the song, goes you or I.

Cameron has not had a good week. Not only was he caught out by a microphone he thought was switched off, saying Yorkshire people hate each other (we don’t, David, we just hate you) he has also had to contemplate the possibility of some real opposition for once, and he was forced onto the back foot in parliament, trying to defend the drone strikes that killed two would-be jihadis in the conflict against ISIS in Syria.  I should preface my remarks by saying that I have absolutely no sympathy for anyone who takes up arms against their own country and goes off to a war zone to put themselves in danger in that manner. The people who were killed thought of themselves as enemies of the UK, and in any legal conflict, governed by the Geneva convention, they deserved what they got.

The problem I have with drone strikes (apart from the cost, at a time when we allegedly can’t afford to keep the libraries open at home – a more cost-effective solution, given the numbers of people who have died after having their benefits removed by the DWP, would be to get ATOS to declare ISIS “fit for work”) is the precedent they set.  I am not an international lawyer – in fact, I am not a lawyer of any sort, but you don’t have to take my word for it anyway, Kate Allen, the director of Amnesty International, commented on her blog:

International law prohibits arbitrary killing and limits the lawful use of intentional lethal force to exceptional situations. In armed conflict, only combatants and people directly participating in hostilities may be directly targeted. Outside armed conflict, intentional lethal force is lawful only when strictly unavoidable to protect against an imminent threat to life. In some circumstances arbitrary killing can amount to a war crime or extrajudicial executions, which are crimes under international law… The principle of the rule of law does not require the subject to be likeable in order to be protected by it. Indeed, it is obviously most necessary when they are not. Security is a justifiable aim of any government and it is clear that we are talking about people who frankly revel in jeopardising that security. But the legal question is this; is the threat they pose to the UK, from Syria, one that can justify the suspension of the rule of law and the dismissal of the very concept of accountable justice?

Amnesty is concerned that if we allow this to become the norm, we could have countries all over the world conducting aerial executions of perceived enemies on the basis of secret, unchallengeable evidence. Would we honestly be so relaxed if this was an announcement from Moscow, or Beijing, or Pyongyang or Oceania?

The USA has, of course, been carrying out summary execution by drone strikes for a while now, ever since the response of President Bush to the dreadful events of 9/11 [another anniversary marked this week, although to my mind the recollections of it – at least the public ones – seemed strangely muted, as though fourteen years were more than a lifetime away] international law has been enforced by the detonator of a missile, and it is whatever the USA says it is. In that respect, the fact that we have joined them publicly in this practice is no great shakes, except, as I said, for the precedent it sets. It can only be a matter of time until the category of “bad guy who we decided was a threat so we took them out without bothering with all that tedious judicial nonsense” gets extended to other groups of people David Cameron doesn’t like. Yorkshire people, perhaps?

One person who I am betting Cameron wishes he could drop a drone on and get away with it is Jeremy Corbyn, who scored a decisive victory with 59% of the vote to become the leader of the Labour party. It’s worth noting, too, in view of the fact that there was much carping in the Marsh from the people who objected to Jeremy Corbyn having principles, ideas and policies, that people were just joining as “supporters” and paying £3.00 just to vote for him, that his majority was across all sections of the party electorate and not just the £3.00-ers.

So, now it seems that we have a leader of the opposition who actually knows the meaning of the word, unlike his predecessor, and unlike the other three candidates.  As expected, the predicted, and entirely predictable, Tory attacks began almost before the dust had settled, branding Corbyn as a threat to the economy and a threat to national security.  The Tories are rattled, underneath all the bluster and hoohah, because they know that their free run, of having a Labour leader who implicitly agrees with austerity and all that implies, has come to an abrupt end.  Corbyn represents the aspirations of an anti-austerity movement which seems to be still growing – 10,000 people have joined the Labour party in the day since he was elected.  They can’t get him on the economy, he has got them bang to rights, and the game is up, hence the reliance on ad hominem attacks and smears. There’ll be five more years of this, so he, and we, had better get used to it. They also know that he has the thick end of five years to make himself electable and to convince the electorate, so they are making as much hay as they can out of him being “unelectable”, as if there was going to be a general election tomorrow.

It shows just how far this country has lurched to the right in recent decades, though, that the term “left-wing” is now used as an insult.  Is it  “left wing” to want everyone to have a home, a job, a good education and to be treated well when they are ill?  Is it “threatening national security” to call for a debate on the cost and legality of the drone strikes, about whether we actually need Trident or not? Is it “left wing” to ask why there are some things like wars, and extra police to suppress demonstrations, and water-cannon, that we can always find money for, but to keep the libraries open we have to have volunteers, bring-and-buy sales, and rattling the begging-bowl? If it is, call me Karl Marx.

Whether or not you agree with Corbyn (and I myself have doubts about his stance on Trident and NATO – although we need a debate on them, I rather suspect we are stuck with both of them, unwillingly in my case, for a few decades yet) his election is at least healthy for politics in the UK. Too many identikit politicians, looking like a window display at Burton’s, ends up with the inevitable conclusion that “they’re all the same” and disaffection with politics, and the political process, and all that this implies. At least now that Corbyn is in charge of the Labour party, no one can say “they’re all the same”, any more. 

Of course, Corbyn’s habit of stating uncomfortable truths, asking awkward questions and generally being straightforward and principled has also brought reaction from his own side. Never was the line from The Red Flag about cowards flinching and traitors sneering so appropriate as in the resignation, in some cases within minutes of the announcement, of the tailor’s dummies who decided they had to chuck their toys out of the pram because the days of being nice to the Tories were over. Well, they say the secret of comedy is timing. Suck it up, buttercup.  

News of Corbyn’s election sent me scurrying back to my Penguin edition of Poetry of the Thirties, edited by Robin Skelton.  I was particularly interested to re-read the extract from The Magnetic Mountain by C. Day Lewis, and I was not disappointed, because it summed up exactly what I felt:

You that love England, who have an ear for her music,
The slow movement of clouds in benediction,
Clear arias of light thrilling over her uplands,
Over the chords of summer sustained peacefully;
Ceaseless the leaves’ counterpoint in a west wind lively,
Blossom and river rippling loveliest allegro,
And the storms of wood strings brass at year’s finale:
Listen. Can you not hear the entrance of a new theme?

You who go out alone, on tandem or on pillion,
Down arterial roads riding in April,
Or sad besides lakes where hill-slopes are reflected
Making fires of leaves, your high hopes fallen:
Cyclists and hikers in company, day excursionists,
Refugees from cursed towns and devastated areas;
Know you seek a new world, a saviour to establish
Long-lost kinship and restore the blood’s fulfilment.

I wouldn’t go so far as to echo Rex Warner’s refrain in his Hymn (1937)

Come then, companions. This is the spring of blood,
Heart's hey-day, movement of masses, beginning of good.

But there does seem to have been some sort of shift in the underlying plates -  I hesitate to be so corny as to call it a sea-change, but there has seldom been such a demonstration of a popular will in my lifetime, except perhaps in the mass demonstrations against the Vietnam War, and the anti-Iraq war march in 2002. Finally the tables are starting to turn. Don’t you know, talking about a revolution sounds like a whisper.

And so we came to today – the feast of St John Chrysostom, the great preacher from Antioch whose oratory was such that it earned him the “Chrysostom” on the end of his name – it means “golden-tongued”.  He saw it as his mission in life to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable (we’re back to Jeremy Corbyn again!) as the content of his sermons (which sometimes lasted up to two hours) often upset the rich and the powerful in his diocese of Constantinople.

Originally a priestly monk in the Syrian desert, St John Chrysostom became a bishop more or less against his will, but this was at a time when disobeying the emperor was likely to earn you an appointment with your executioner. His austere manner and his refusal to join in the pomp and intrigue of the court led him into conflict with many around him, especially as he began a zealous campaign of deposing other bishops who had bribed their way into office.

He preached sermons which called for the wealth of the rich to be shared with the poor.  He preached against double standards in public life, and, inevitably, he, too, was “smeared” by the powers-that-be, who claimed that although modest and humble in public, he gorged himself in secret on rich wines and fine foods, and that he was secretly having sexual relations with a rich widow to whom he acted as a spiritual advisor.  Plus, of course, he had made immediate and automatic enemies in the corrupt bishops whom he had unseated.

At the time, Theophilus, the Archbishop of Alexandria, was looking to do something to counteract the growing importance of the Bishop of Constantinople and intrigued with Eudoxia, the Empress, to have St John accused of heresy and exiled. Eudoxia had already been stung by having to sit through sermons contrasting the simple values of Jesus as portrayed in the New Testament Gospels with the excesses of life at the Byzantine court. So she was only too happy to oblige, and St John Chrysostom was sent into exile, where he died in 407AD.

So, there you have it. St John Chrysostom, the Jeremy Corbyn of his day. Let’s hope for a better result this time around, though.  Last night being the “Last Night of the Proms” – an event which has become so micro-managed and packaged by the BBC to fill that hour before news at ten, as to become almost unwatchable, I did find myself listening to Jerusalem with renewed fervour.  Especially as my own chances to be part of building Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land diminish with every breath, every heartbeat.  I actually found myself chasing down alternative versions of the hymn, much as I admire Parry’s setting, even though it has been taken over by the WI, who perhaps do not appreciate that when Blake wrote about “dark, Satanic mills” it was as much a reference to the established church of the day as it was to the actual mills that were springing up on the moors all around, and that Blake’s definition of “Jerusalem” also encompassed free love in the 1960s sense of the phrase.

I found Bob Davenport’s folksy version which uses a Bampton morris tune, and that inevitably led me on to Keep Your Feet Still, Geordie Hinny, which is perhaps more apposite for the long haul of five years ahead:

Keep your feet still, Geordie hinny, let’s be happy through the night

For we may not be so happy in the day

There’s a lot more muck in the sewer yet, and the government aren’t just going to roll over and die at the election of a new leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition. But, the journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step, and, like two feminists doing the washing up, it is at least a start. That’s a joke by the way, in case you wanted to write in. Please don’t bother, unless you also know anything about fixing printers.  

I’ve written about St John Chrysostom before, a long while ago, about his assertion that no man can hurt the man who does not hurt himself, and discovering that today was his feast day led me to look briefly again at some of the things he said in his homilies:

For do not tell me that this or that man is a runaway slave, or a robber or thief, or laden with countless faults, or that he is a mendicant and abject, or of low value and worthy of no account; but consider that for his sake the Christ died; and this suffices you for a ground for all solicitude.

and

let us not summon friends only but also enemies to this common treasury of good things. If your enemy sees your care for his welfare, he will undoubtedly relinquish his hatred.

I can see the wisdom of these words, although I doubt very much my ability to carry them out. The ultimate result would be having to forgive, say the people who have been ruining the country and killing people by driving them to despair and suicide, and I just don’t think I have it in me, There is not enough forgiveness in the tank these days, not that there was ever much to start with.  But I suppose it behoves me to try. Maybe I should practice on forgiving someone considerably less evil, first, to sort of take a run-up at the big ones.

Next week stretches ahead, and to be honest, I am already feeling oppressed by it, having once more painted myself into a corner whereby I am forced to do the things I have to (year-end accounts, VAT return) instead of the things I want to (writing my books, wielding a paint brush, putting lime on my wallflowers, furfling the cat and generally goofing off in the sun which will soon be putting on its winter coat and leaving us, following Uncle Phil “down under” until next year.)

It’s far too early to start talking about a “sea-change” unless you are still protesting about the drowned refugees, and I certainly will have little time for politics next week, except to briefly acknowledge it as it whizzes past. For me, the next few weeks will be crucial to a successful Christmas, horrible as that thought is. And since one day there might be a Christmas that doesn’t include me, I have to make the best of it while I can.

I have, however, come to value the little ritual of Sunday teatime after I have finished this blog but before Debbie and the dogs return, to make a pot of tea and sit and enjoy a cuppa and a biscuit. I’m still a long way from taking tea with my enemies, though. There are three or four hours until it gets dark, as well, so I might as well make the most of it, and trundle outside to get some fresh air and check on who’s been munching the wallflowers. Tomorrow is tomorrow’s problem.