It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. The nights are certainly drawing in now, as
Debbie discovered when she found herself getting back to the camper with the
dogs in the dark, a couple of times this week. It’s been another crushing week,
work-wise, with one book launch out of the way, and another two looming on the
horizon. Then there’s National Poetry
Day, around which we hope to hang two more, and that just leaves two for
Halloween or thereabouts and one which doesn’t really have anything to tie it
to. Either way, it’s going to be work, work work. Deb has also picked up an extra class, so,
once more, after going round the loop of “I’m afraid there are no hours for you
this year”, back in the summer, it now turns out she’s doing more or less the same
as last year, but with the added pleasure of an observation in October.
Marvellous. As I said to her at the
time, in any negotiation, always ignore the first offer.
The aliens seem to have given us the real Matilda back, as
she seems to have finally reconciled herself to the fact that we are back from
Arran (or forgotten that we ever went away) and abandoned her new-found
clinginess, in favour of her previous practice of ignoring us unless she wants
feeding or feels the need to hiss at somebody.
She’s also been staying in a lot more, in fact yesterday I was moved to
suggest that someone should check her pulse, as she was curled up on the settee
in the conservatory from about noon until after midnight, when we went to bed. I did hear her moving about in the early
hours though, and constructing what sounded like a major civil engineering
project in her litter tray, so obviously she was still with us. She’s also adopted the practice of observing
the squirrels and birds through the closed door of the conservatory, as it is
warmer inside, especially on those bright, crisp mornings we’ve been having of
late.
The squirrels and birds are busy, as you would expect at
this time of year. They seem grateful for the bird seed I put out, especially
the squirrels, who rummage through it looking specifically for the sunflower
seeds. There’s one particular old squirrel I noticed who comes down from time
to time. He’s only got one eye and his ears are torn, and his tail is thin, not
bushy. He also walks with a peculiar sideways, crabbed motion, as if the wires
joining his brain to his back legs are twisted. Obviously someone like me who
has had a brush with the grim reaper. I haven’t seen him for a day or two, and
I hope he’s alright.
Zak and Ellie were with us for a few days, midweek, and Deb
decided to give Ellie another go at a longer walk. They’ve been regularly doing
13, 14 miles without her, but Deb thought she would give her a try on a
10-miler, and she apparently acquitted herself very well, though when she got
back, she ignored her tea and jumped straight up on the chair, still wearing
her harness, and fell fast asleep, snoring. Poor little dog.
We’ve also had visitors this week, both expected and
unexpected. The expected one was Owen, who called in on Wednesday on his way
back to South Wales from Dundee, to collect
and take back some surplus stock of books that had got here by mistake. When he arrived, he had a conspicuous bright
red Hazel O’Connor style streak in his hair, which he explained was due to it
coming in contact with some wet paint while he had been decorating the communal
parts of his son’s flat. It was actually quite well executed and if Adam Ant
was still looking for people to form a backing group, Owen would have been a
shoo-in.
While he was here, he also took the opportunity to put up
the string of prayer flags we brought back from Arran,
which are now fluttering bravely out of the reach, I hope, of the squirrels who
stole the previous lot. We were having a
mug of tea and generally putting the world to rights, when a knock came on the
door – Owen went and there was my neighbour on the doorstep. If she noticed his
hair, she was too polite to comment – or perhaps she thought it was a fashion
statement.
“Excuse me, have you lost a small white dog, only she’s in
my house?”
I looked over to the chair where Ellie had been snoozing. No
Ellie. I apologised, and Owen offered to go and retrieve her, and a few minutes
later, returned with her under his arm, like a parcel. She must have got out
through the cat flap and decided to take herself off for a one-way walkies,
which is one of her specialities, unfortunately. So, for the remainder of her
sojourn that day, the cat flap door remained firmly closed, not that Matilda
was bothered, as she was curled up asleep with her nose in her tail, see above.
The unexpected visitors took the form of Scott from Arran, and the police, of whom more later. Scott arrived
on Friday morning and kept us entertained with his tales of Arran since we came home, and of the year he spent
in Australia.
Sadly, since his return, he is feeling that there aren’t really any job
opportunities on Arran for him, and thus he
will, like so many other young people from the Western Isles, have to leave and
try and make his fortune on the mainland.
He brought two welcome gifts from his dad, a CD of Phil Rambow and a
book which has just been published by Feis Arran, concerning the remnants of
the Gaelic culture on the Island. I was especially taken with the Gaelic
proverbs, including one that translates as “It is only at evening that the
hooded crow pisses”, which I took to be their sort of equivalent of the opera
not being over until the fat lady sings.
I may have to start randomly introducing it into conversations in a
knowing, gnomic fashion. Either way, it
was a top present and I must write and thank them.
The visit of the police was rather harder to explain. To
backtrack slightly, the Arran Silkie,
although parked in our own driveway, at the end of March, was the target of
vandalism that left it with four slashed tyres, two cut brake pipes, a damaged
door lock, damaged brake calliphers and superglue in the petrol cap lock.
Needless to say this produced a huge bill and a wrangle with the insurers, who,
thankfully, paid up most of the cost in the end. Because of the cut brake
pipes, the police were involved, and in the course of discussions with the
local PCSOs they did, at least, kindly promise to check up on the house if we
were away for a long time in the summer.
At the end of July, I texted the number the PCSO had left
with me and told them we were setting off on holiday. Of course, that was the
day the dashboard caught fire 600 yards up the road and we were forced to turn back, then were delayed setting
off by a further week or so. In all the hoo hah, I had forgotten to untext the
police, so I was quite surprised one day during the week of enforced waiting
for the van’s electrics to be fixed, when I was sitting in the kitchen
working, to receive a text from the PCSO saying “Dear Mr Rudd, I have checked
your house and everything seems to be OK”. I resisted the temptation to text
back and ask if they’d seen the grey haired burglar in the kitchen, sitting in
my wheelchair and using my laptop, and left it at that.
Anyway, fast forward to Saturday afternoon, and once more I
am sitting there in the kitchen working when there is a sharp rat-a-tat-tat at
the door. Debbie was off up on the moors
with Misty, so when I opened the door and saw a policeman standing on the end
of my wheelchair ramp my first thought was “Oh, God, what’s she done now?” but
he set off on a different tack:
“I’m sorry to bother you. We’re attending a lady who is
having breathing difficulties further up the road and I wondered, is the house
next door to you occupied, and do you know who the owner is?”
“Do you mean number 113?”
He did a quick mental count up in his head before he replied
“Yes”.
“It’s ours,” I said “It’s all one house inside.”
“Ah, right. It’s just that there seems to be a dead rabbit
in the front window.”
Several possibilities crossed my mind, the first being that
it was Matilda, until I remembered she was still firmly welded to the settee in
the conservatory, see above. There was the outside possibility that one of the
other neighbourhood cats had caught a rabbit, brought it through the cat flap,
and released it, only for it to expire on the windowsill. Then I remembered.
“Ah, I know what you mean. It’s a carved wooden elephant, lying on its side.”
“Oh,” he said “Now I think about it, it did have a bit of a tusk. Oh well, sorry to have bothered you, sir.” With that, he made to go.
“Ah, I know what you mean. It’s a carved wooden elephant, lying on its side.”
“Oh,” he said “Now I think about it, it did have a bit of a tusk. Oh well, sorry to have bothered you, sir.” With that, he made to go.
“What about the woman with the breathing difficulties, can
we do anything to help?”
“Oh, no sir, it’s all under control, I have four paramedics
on the scene”.
And so he left. And I came back in, slightly puzzled, and
resumed work. Discussing it with Deb later, I could only surmise that he’d been
killing time outside while the paramedics did their stuff, and had gone for a
stroll and noticed Deb’s wooden carved elephant and jumped to the conclusion
that this was one of these animal horror houses where the RSPCA go in and find
a dead rabbit, 14 mummified cats and a deceased pensioner whose legs have been
nibbled away from the knee down, still sitting in the chair watching a burnt
out TV. If so, a carved wooden elephant must, by comparison, have seemed rather a
disappointment, though it will undoubtedly have saved him a great deal of
paperwork.
As I said to Debbie, we don’t have much money, but we do see
life. Sadly, sometimes, however, life is
random, pointless and bloody heartless instead of being mildly amusing and
quirky. The refugee crisis is worsening
in Europe, as once again, no one is managing
the process and countries have now started shutting their borders unilaterally.
I argued a while ago now that the only way in which this crisis would be
averted would have to be by some kind of pan-European response that sees a
temporary, but managed, derogation from the Schengen agreement which allows
free movement of people inside the Euro zone, in tandem with a process for
scaling out agreed quantities of refugees on a formula based on land mass,
population density and resources, and the establishment of humane transit
centres where these people could be assessed, properly documented, checked
medically, and prepared for the next stage of their transition. None of this is happening, except that the
closure of borders is derogation from Schengen by definition, but is being done
in such a way that it will inevitably provoke violence.
And, of course, when pictures of dead children are replaced
in the fickle media a few days later by pictures of live refugees rioting, this
produces the inevitable backlash at home – not that it needed much provoking in
the UK, where attitudes to immigration and asylum have been hardened by five
years of xenophobic Tory propaganda which helped fuel the rise of UKIP. Thank
God there are people around like Gabriela Andreevska, who has apparently begun a
single-handed effort to hand out food and water to refugees in Croatia, or that
British couple who have been trying to help the dozen or so boatloads of
refugees that make it to Lesbos every day.
John Betjeman’s caricature of the
woman praying in Westminster Abbey, in his 1940 poem of that title, seems,
unfortunately, to be on the verge of making a comeback here in England, or at
least her attitudes do:
Keep our Empire undismembered
Keep our Empire undismembered
Guide
our Forces by thy hand
Gallant
Blacks from far Jamaica
Honduras and Togoland.
Protect
them Lord, in all their fights
But
even more, protect the Whites.
Think
of what our country stands for
Books
from Boots and country lanes
Free
speech, free passes, class distinction
Democracy,
and proper drains.
Lord,
keep beneath thy special care
One-eighty-nine,
Cadogan Square.
We can only expect to see more of
this sort of thing in the run up to Remembrance Day, of course. The 75th anniversary of the Battle
of Britain has already given it a brief
airing, especially when Jeremy Corbyn, the new leader of the opposition, didn’t
sing the National Anthem at the memorial service. I have long been uneasy anyway about the
mixture of religious pomp and military celebration. What happened to “Blessed
are the Peacemakers”? And I say this as
a monarchist (or at least a believer in the idea and institution of a monarchy,
as a bulwark against having arriviste politicians as president).
I have to say, also, that the
National Anthem is unutterably dreary. France, Italy and Poland have all got
better anthems, and there is undoubtedly a case for letting the Welsh have Land of My Fathers, the Scots Flo’or O’ Scotland (though Caledonia by Dougie MacLean would be
much better) and the Irish, well, probably alternate weeks of The Wearing of the Green and The Ould Orange Flute or something, or
at a pinch, Danny Boy, while we have
either Barwick Green, Jerusalem, or I Vow to Thee my Country, though even
the latter is a queasy mix of religion and nationalism.
Jeremy Corbyn refused to sing the
National Anthem because of his beliefs and principles, and I have to say that I
would rather have someone who believes in something and stands up for it,
however difficult this may make life for them, rather than just bellowing along
with the rest of the herd, even though you don’t believe a word you’re
singing. As has been pointed out several
times, it’s not as if everyone who fought in the second world war was a
Christian who believed in the monarchy, anyway.
My own father had only a very rudimentary faith (probably where I get it
from) and a marked aversion to singing in public, especially at funerals and the
like. He never went to church from one
year’s end to the next, and, like most of our family, his only contact with
organised religion would have been attending the crematorium services of other
family members. That didn’t prevent him and his mates and a few million others
from stopping Hitler in his racks.
No doubt it will all surface again
when Corbyn wears a white poppy on Remembrance Day. Personally, I would wear all three – a red
poppy to remember those of my family who didn’t survive, especially the first
world war, a white poppy to express the hope for peace and no more wars, and a
purple poppy to recall the animals who suffered and died in war zones, through
conflicts sparked by us, a supposedly superior species. No doubt this year we
will see, once again, the government trying to appropriate Poppy Day for
political ends, with the subtle peer pressure of “if you don’t wear a poppy you
can’t possibly be patriotic or support our troops” and the much less subtle
attempts of fascist organisations such as Britain First to misrepresent what
the struggle against Nazism was all about.
Believing that God is on our side
and we have a divine right to blow people to smithereens does, unfortunately,
tend to reduce us to the level of the likes of ISIS,
as that is precisely the affliction they suffer from. And the more it goes on, the more likely we
are to see it visiting us back here at home. Once again, we seem to be
re-visiting the 1930s as in C Day Lewis’s 1938 poem, Newsreel.
Fire-bud,
smoke-blossom, iron seed projected –
Are
these exotics? They will grow nearer home:
Grow
nearer home – and out of the dream-house stumbling
One
night into a strangling air and the flung
Rags of children and thunder of stone niagaras
tumbling,
You’ll
know you slept too long.
I’ve thought long and hard and I
can’t see anyway in which God could
endorse one side at the expense of another in any conflict. I think Bob Dylan
nails it:
If God’s on our side,
he’ll stop the next war
Coincidentally (or maybe not) in the same week as the Corbyn
national anthem hoo-hah erupted, an announcement was made about the
effectiveness of the bombing campaign against ISIS.
According to the defence secretary, the RAF strikes in the 11 months since
September 2014 have killed 330 ISIS fighters.
Leaving aside for a moment that for every one killed, we've
probably radicalised another half dozen nutters hell-bent on revenge, the
missiles we have been firing at them cost about £800,000. Assuming we got lucky
and took out all 330 with one missile, that is £2424 per ISIS fighter killed,
not counting the ongoing costs of maintenance, aviation fuel, pilots' wages
etc. [Obviously, some of these are costs we would have anyway, though I suspect
we're using a lot more fuel than we would be doing in peacetime] If it took two missiles, then that goes up to
£4848 per ISIS fighter killed, and so on. Surely there must come a point where
it would be more cost effective to get their bank details and offer them ten
grand each to become Buddhists. OK, maybe not, but apparently there's no money
for schools, hospitals, libraries etc. I wonder why?
Corbyn has been the focus of intense media scrutiny again,
as a rattled establishment and their newspaper poodles try anything and
everything to distort the message and smear him, since they can’t defeat him on
the economy. The latest revelation is
that Jeremy Corbyn and Diane Abbott had a “fling” in the 1970s, after Corbyn
had been divorced. Man has sex with
woman, shock horror sensation. Actually,
it shows how out of step with the political establishment Corbyn was, even back
then, because while he and a woman were engaging in consensual heterosexual
sex, the Tory cabinet of the time stand accused of either engaging in and/or
covering up the abuse and possibly murder of young boys from children’s homes.
Typical Corbyn contrarianism.
And so we came to Sunday, a grey day that couldn’t ever
really decide if it wanted to sunshine or not, and the feast day of St John
Houghton, the first person to be martyred in England under the persecution of
the monasteries by Henry VIII.
Born in Essex in 1487, he left Cambridge with degrees in canon law and civil
law and was ordained in 1501, becoming a parish priest. From this, he went on to become a Carthusian
monk, a novice at the London Charterhouse, until 1516. He was then prior of the Beauvale Carthusian
Monastery in Northampton
and of the London Charterhouse. In 1534,
he became the first person to oppose Henry VIII’s act of supremacy, and was
imprisoned, along with the Blessed Humphrey Middlemore. When the king relented and modified the oath
to include the words “insofar as the law of God permits”, John and several
other of his monks felt this would be sufficient to permit them to sign it,
thus securing his release. Following
this, however, the remaining members of the Charterhouse were forced to sign
the modified oath by troops who arrived there with that express purpose.
On February 1st, 1535, parliament – or probably Henry – moved the goalposts asnd now required that everyone must now sign the original oath, unaltered. St John, together with St Robert Lawrence and St Augustine Webster, asked Thomas Cromwell, Henry’s chancellor, for an exemption, and were immediately arrested and put on trial for treason.
Because
of his vows, St John Houghton refused to speak in his own defence in court and
refused to co-operate with the proceedings or sign anything. Despite the gravity of the charge, the jury
reported that they could find no actual evidence of malice to the king, so Henry
threatened them in turn with arrest on the same charge, leaving them no option
but to bring in a verdict of guilty of treason.
St
John Houghton was hanged, drawn and
quartered at Tyburn on 4th May 1535, alongside the Blessed John
Haile and three others. His corpse was then chopped into pieces which were put
on display at various locations around London
as a warning to
others.
The National Anthem didn’t exist in Tudor times, of course,
but nevertheless there was the expectation of absolute loyalty to the idea of
church and state when under Henry they became one and the same. Henry was but
one of a succession of monarchs who were not at all fazed, with God on their
side, by the idea of employing extreme violence against people who disagreed
with their views on religion – although in Henry’s case it may have been more
out of expediency and the desire to produce a male heir, than out of any
genuine religious conviction, in much the same way that the people who squeal
loudest today when someone refuses to sing the National Anthem probably never
attend church from one year’s end to the next, and couldn’t recite the Lord’s
Prayer, let alone the Nicene Creed.
Although the Church of England is in many ways more like a
hobby than a religion, and we’ve given up the idea of snicking off people’s
heads because they do/don’t believe in transubstantiation (in this country at
least – some of the more evangelical members of the worldwide Anglican
communion have rather robust views on gay marriage, for instance, and of
course, outside the confines of the Anglican church, ISIS’s raison d’etre is behading infidels) this
is nevertheless why I find it difficult to support the idea of the conjunction
of church and state. Perhaps if we were
allowed to render unto Caesar that which was Caesar’s, then people would be
freer to follow their own hearts when it came to spiritual matters, and not be
castigated for refusing to be forced into a one-size-fits-all religious
straitjacket that is increasingly used to impute and impart a set of beliefs in
the efficacy, necessity and even desirability of war which is completely at
odds with the Platonic idea of God as the holy spark of divine redemption and
goodness that can be found somewhere in all of us.
All of which is very heavy for a Sunday teatime, but then
these days, even in the little oasis I have created for myself in the time between
finishing this blog and the starting of the dark Satanic mills again on Monday
morning, there’s still a sense of the heaviness going down elsewhere. Et in arcadia ego. What right do I have
to sit here dozing by my stove when the nights are drawing in and the lights
are going out all over Europe and there are people sleeping out in the open on
bits of cardboard next to railway lines, or trying to carry their sleeping
child through forests of barbed wire when they themselves are almost dropping
from hunger and fatigue? Today,
at least 13 refugees were killed when their inflatable
dinghy collided with a cargo ship at sea between Greece
and Turkey.
Six of those who died were children and another 13 people are still missing.
But what can we do? Specifically, in my case, in my
situation, very little, apart from sorting out some stuff to send off, and
continuing to write about the problem and arguing against the entrenched and
selfish attitudes engendered by the press, the Home Office, and the DWP. As individuals, though, we can band together
and circumvent the official channels – which seem to be clogged with mud anyway
– and carry on sending food and clothes and carry on raising funds and donating
where possible. It’s not how big your share is, it’s how much you can share, as
the song says. And we just have to
accept that the media are much more obsessed with whether or not a 66-year old
politician is willing to mouth and mumble along with an 18th century
dirge stuffed with questionable theology and promoting, ultimately, a linkage
of religion with state-sponsored terrorism, than with a daily human tragedy
which is just going to get worse and worse. And still the boats keep coming.
Once again, we find ourselves in the situation at the end of
Auden’s September 3rd, 1939:
All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie
The romantic lie in
the brain
Of the sensual man in
the street
And the lie of
authority
Whose buildings grope
the sky
There is no such thing
as the state
And no-one exists
alone
Hunger allows no
choice
To the citizen or the
police
We must love one
another or die.
Defenceless under the
night
Our world in stupor
lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the
just
Exchange their
messages:
May I, composed like
them
Of Eros and of dust
Beleaguered by the
same
Negation and despair
Show an affirming
flame
All we can do, I guess, is do what we can do, and keep on
keeping on.
Anyway, next week stretches ahead, containing, I believe,
the equinox, which marks the start of that long dark descent into the
underworld which only turns back at the Solstice. Deb has just bombed up the
fire, and Misty is watching the rugby – or at least she was until she was
scared off by New Zealand’s haka. The nights are drawing in, and it
is time for frowsting by the stove. Next week will be fairly mission-critical
for getting books out in time for Christmas, not to mention finishing off the
VAT return which has been hanging around like a bad smell. And I have a dead
rabbit to polish. Also, the surgery
recently sent me a repeat prescription of the two drugs I now have to take all
the time, Omeprazole and Furosemide, but this time it only contained two week’s
supply, instead of the usual two months.
Either it’s a mistake, or they know something about my life expectancy
that I don’t, but either way, it’s tomorrow’s problem.
For now, though it’s time to make a hot water bottle and
frowst awhile, and, since Matilda shows no sign whatsoever of moving off her
little Maisie-blanket on the settee, to shut the cat flap door and stop off at
least one of the many draughts that have once more returned to beset the house
all winter. There may even be a hooded crow, peeing in the garden. Yes, it’s just one
white-knuckle ride of excitement, here.
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