Epiblog for the Feast of St Francis of Assisi

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. Autumn is setting in now, the mornings are crisper, and the leaves outside my window are definitely turning. There’s also a carpet of freshly-fallen ones at the end of my ramp; in fact, the entire driveway needs them all sweeping up and adding to my burgeoning compost-heap. I haven’t however, seen the old squirrel for a few days now, though the others have been busy enough, and we’ve also had the usual pigeons, tits (Google crawler, please note) a robin, and even, on one occasion, a Nuthatch.

Despite the unseasonable sunshine, which has been very welcome, if not very warm, Matilda has now more or less taken up permanent residence on the settee in the conservatory, on her little woollen Maisie-blanket. She does still go outside, but only to do her necessaries, and maybe for a half-hour or so at dusk, to patrol round and check there are no foreign cat interlopers in her immediate kingdom.  Despite this self-limitation of her abilities, I have to say she seems happier at the moment than at any time since we saved her from the chop in 2012.  She does still have occasional bouts of hissy-fits and stand-offishness, but then so do I.  The other night, she was on the armchair next to me when I was working late. Deb and the dogs were already in bed, and I thought it was getting a bit nippy, so I took off my desert scarf and wrapped her in it, as I used to wrap Freddie in it on cold nights when we were off in the camper van. She was still there, snuggled in it when I came trundling through the next morning.

We’ve got Zak staying with us as well this weekend, as Granny is in Cambridge, and he’s once more slotted perfectly into the routine of going for a long walk over the moors with Deb and Misty of an afternoon, and coming home to a hearty meal and a warm fire in the evening.  The other day, they were up on Wessenden and Debbie saw a bloke in the distance dressed in what she could only describe as “a wizard’s robes” complete with pointy hat. He was too far in the distance to catch up with him and investigate further, and the dogs seemed unconcerned, but we speculated later about what he could have been doing up there and who he was.  As Sherlock Holmes once memorably said, once you have discounted the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth, so, discounting the possibility that he was the Wessenden Branch of the Ku Klux Klan, or a hallucination brought on by Deb’s low-carb diet, I can only surmise he must have been some sort of Wiccan, Pagan or Black Magician.  Anyway, since then he has been absent, despite my determinedly singing “You’re off to see the Wizard, the Wizard of Wessenden”, every time they set off to go walkies.  Perhaps the Wiz of Wess was having a waz, who knows. 

The big news on the college from this week is that Debbie, in addition to her new role in sniffing out radicalisation wherever it may be found, is now also obliged to embody “British Values” in her teaching.  British Values, capital B, capital V. This is yet more subtle anti-immigrant doublespeak by the Junta, the implication being that anyone who doesn’t automatically and willingly embrace these British Values (capital B, capital V) must therefore be either a dangerous extremist radicalised Jihadi, a potential terrorist, a left wing Trot Corbinista fellow traveller, or possibly all of the above.

We were discussing what these “British Values” might be the other day, and I came up with a simplified version. If you want to teach someone “British Values”, this is what they have to do.

1. Talk about the weather all the time

2.  If in doubt, make a pot of tea

3. Learn to queue, and

4. Entertain completely unrealistic hopes about the prospects for the England football, cricket, and rugby teams.  And Andy Murray, depending what nationality we think he is that week.

It will also help if you learn the following phrases by heart, and use them whenever possible:

“Mustn’t grumble!”
“I’m afraid it’s going to spoil itself later”
“Oh, well, the gardens need it”

“Mathematically, we could still qualify”

“It’s that fine rain that really wets you”

“Come on, Tim!”
“More tea, vicar?”

“We can still go through on penalties” and
“Fondant fancy, anyone?”

Also, you should learn two important things. If you are ever invited to play cricket, the only safe stroke to make on any wicket in England is the forward defensive stroke. It was good enough for Trevor Bailey and Geoffrey Boycott, and it’s good enough for you. And secondly, if you are walking down the street, late for a job interview perhaps, and carrying a take-away coffee, and some clumsy oaf barges into you, the correct response is always to apologise, even if the scalding coffee has run down your wrist and spoilt your best shirt.

On a more serious note, though, there are some British Values I rather would like to see made compulsory, but unfortunately, they seem to have been rather eroded of late.  I’m talking about outmoded ideas like compassion, respect, and looking out for the underdog. Oh, and justice, and a fair trial, kindness to animals, and giving people a fair chance. All that sort of stuff.

I’m afraid in this country, these days, there isn’t much scope for that sort of thing. Take Bournemouth, for instance. You would think, wouldn’t you, that if anywhere embodied the sort of solid, British values we should be teaching these pesky foreigners, it would be Bournemouth? Solid Victorian villas, monkey puzzle trees, B&B, paddling in the sea with a knotted handkerchief on your head, sandcastles, deckchairs, fish and chips.

Yet it seems that in Bournemouth, Donald, a two month old baby that had been living in a car with its homeless parents, has died. And while we pause to let that sink in, perhaps we should also note, that, also in Bournemouth, presently, a homeless, 37-week pregnant, mother is living in a tent in a graveyard.

Claire Matthews, who runs the Hope for Food soup kitchen in the town, said baby Donald’s parents were “grief-stricken”, and they had nothing left to live for. The soup kitchen (another British Value we really shouldn’t have in the 21^st century) have offered to pay for his funeral expenses.  In the other case, the couple in the churchyard, Claire Mathews highlighted, there is some hope of a place in a mother and baby unit, but this is complicated because the mother has mental health issues and taking up the place would mean splitting up the family. So they carry on rough sleeping, and no doubt soon we will be hearing of another little tragedy, another life snuffed out before it had hardly begun. Welcome to Britain under canvas – for those who are lucky enough to even have a tent.

But will we even hear about it? Why, even now, isn’t the death of baby Donald front page news on every media outlet in the land? If he’d been abused by a “feckless” mother, or burnt alive by a father attempting a benefits scam by setting his own house on fire, the likes of the Daily Mail would be boiling over with froth and indignation, gnashing their teeth and chewing their own beards in anger, queuing up to write about the “vile product of benefits Britain”. Somehow, it seems “vile product of Tory local government austerity cuts” isn’t such a good story.

And where are all those people who keep complaining and posting on Facebook that we should “look after our own” before we do anything for the refugees (as if it had to be either/or in the first place, which is a false dichotomy) Come on, then! Here’s your chance! Here’s some of “our own” living in a tent in a graveyard in Bournemouth. Who’s going to be first to offer them a room, eh? No, I thought not.  Woe unto ye, Pharisees.

Homelessness will not be resolved until Local Authorities are allowed, nay, positively encouraged, to build more social housing stock. Yet only last week, Britain’s housing association chiefs and the Junta negotiated an agreement enabling the Tories’ plans to extend the right-to-buy and its associated discount to housing association tenants to go ahead without any parliamentary scrutiny whatsoever. Dave Hill, writing about this in The Guardian, said that it was opposed by both Labour and Tory councils in London and that the business community thought it was “bonkers”.  Bonkersness, something politicians of all stripes are often known for, is usually described in “British Values” terms as “eccentricity”.  Not all eccentricity is harmless, however.

Homelessness is not a British Value, capital B, capital V, nor should we mutely accept it as the norm. An Englishman’s home is his castle, and all that.  That’s all very well, as long as an Englishman actually has a home to start with.  Or, if you are an MP who wants his moat cleaning on expenses, a castle. Yet this government, if I may dignify it with a name it doesn’t really deserve, is currently considering cutting the Homelessness Prevention Grant in next month’s spending review. This is the money which Local Authorities can access from central government to provide mediation, outreach and debt advice to try and prevent homelessness at the point where it’s just about to happen.  Perhaps someone should remind George Osborne that compassion for those worse off than yourself also once used to be a British Value. Capital B, capital V.  

If you are wondering, by the way, why the government is apparently so short of money, the quick answer is, they aren’t. Whether or not you get government money depends on who is asking, and what they want it for. It’s very important for the government to be able to carry out extra-judicial executions of people who don’t embrace British Values (capital B capital V) by drone strike, without the tedious bother of going through due process of law, so if you are, say, the arms consortium led by French manufacturer Thales, say, developing the Watchman Drone, say, and you find that the order for 54 of these drones placed by the then Labour Defence Secretary John Reid in 2005 at an expected cost of £800m, still hasn’t been delivered, is running late, and although it was supposed to be operational from 2013, won’t now be available until 2017, at a cost of £1.2billion, no problem! But - Homeless Prevention Grant? You must be joking, sunny Jim.  I wonder how many homeless hostels in Bournemouth they could have built for £1.2billion? Note, as well, that this is not the current drone. The one we are currently using to re-inforce British Values is the Reaper drone. I have tried (and failed) to find out how much the current Reaper drone programme is costing, at a time when we can scarcely afford to keep the lights on in schools.

Mention of the due process of the law reminds me that I also discovered this week that apparently you have to now pay for “using” the courts, even if your “use” of the court is not because you got up one day and thought, I know, I’ll hack on down to the Old Bailey and have a go at being Perry Mason, it even applies if your “use” of the court is because you’ve been “had up” for something.  This impinged on my consciousness this week when I heard of magistrate Nigel Allcoat resigning after he was censured for paying £40.00 out of his own pocket towards the spiralling costs of a destitute asylum-seeker who had just appeared before him in court.  The defendant was up before the beak for defaulting on a previous fine, and had then, automatically, clocked up £180 in court fees, by virtue of his being done for non-payment of the first fine. Since asylum seekers are not allowed to earn money or work while their appeal is being considered, it was unclear how he was ever expected to clear this debt, and the situation was bound to get worse.

Allcoat, who had been a magistrate for 15 years, realised the absurdity of the situation and decided to make a contribution.  He was suspended by the Ministry of Justice and resigned so he could speak out on the matter.

“I wanted to show what British justice meant, to show him the character of this country is actually compassionate… What can someone do in that situation, when you tell them they need to find £180 or they will go to prison, but they cannot work? They could steal the money? Commit another crime? That would cost the state even more money to have him put in prison. It costs more to keep someone in prison than to send a boy to Eton.”

Ah, but the thing is, Mr Allcoat, had this chap actually gone to Eton, and then no doubt on to Oxford, then he would have been imbued with proper “British Values” and would no doubt have been able to sing the National Anthem.  Who knows, he might even have found himself a cosy little Civil Service billet in the Ministry of Justice, thinking up damfool legislation that treats defendants and plaintiffs like supermarket customers, and eventually disappears up its own fundament, in the logical conclusion of a fast-track system for “10 offences or less”[sic].  Instead he had the misfortune to draw a bum ticket in the lottery of life, and be born in one of those places we’ve been using for target practice since 2003. The bounder.  If only he’d known about Magna Carta. Er, oh.

Sadly, there will now be many more like him, since Russia decided this week that it would pile in and start bombing Syria as well. President Putin (not gay) is clearly a dangerous, deranged psychopath, so he will fit in well with the other combatants in the Syrian mess.  It takes me a few minutes to work it out these days, but I think I’ve got it.  The US were bombing Syria originally in support of the forces that were trying to topple Assad. Then the forces that were trying to topple Assad split into the bad guys (ISIS) and the not-quite-so-bad guys.  So now they are trying to only bomb the bad guys and miss the not-so-bad-guys.  The UK is doing the same thing as the US, and for the same reasons, the only difference being our planes are older, and we can’t really afford it, but hey, it’s only money. Plus, it apparently slipped Mr Cameron’s mind to tell parliament that we were doing it in Syria when they thought we were only doing it in Iraq. The French joined in purely so they would have a say in the post-apocalypse outcome, although the way that is going, their “say” may be merely limited to a gasp of “Mon Dieu!”as Paris vanishes under a mushroom cloud; and the Russians are bombing everyone, because they don’t give a stuff. The only people the Russians aren’t bombing are the pro-Assad forces, which in turn takes the pressure off them and allows them to drop more barrel-bombs on their own people.  My, what a long paragraph.

The Russians and the US are supposedly co-operating so they don’t mistakenly bomb each other, but it is my painful duty to observe that they don’t have a great track record in this regard.  On 3^rd October the US bombed a Medicins Sans Frontieres run hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, killing at least nine people, despite medics at the site ringing the US Department of Defense for over an hour and telling them to stop. It doesn’t bode well.  It’s all getting a bit too Dr Strangelove for my liking, and I find myself actually praying (yes, I know!) that nobody will go and stick a missile in a MIG by accident.  I have no idea what Putin is trying to achieve, and his actions will only have the effect of pouring petrol on a bonfire. However, I doubt he is overly concerned about British Values, living as he does in a “democracy” where thieves can break into the Kremlin and steal next year’s election results. One thing’s for certain, though, the flow of refugees will undoubtedly increase.  And meanwhile, the boats keep coming, and people carry on being drowned.

If there is a nuclear holocaust, there may well be some delays in publishing the next blog, but at least Jeremy Corbyn won’t be to blame, as he came out this week and – possibly unwisely – gave a straight answer to a straight question, that if he was Prime Minister, he would never use our “independent” nuclear deterrent, which is of course independent in a rather specialised use of the word, in that if the time comes, the US president will ring us up and tell us to press the button.

I discovered this week (as part of the “fallout” from Corbyn stating his position) that in the event of a nuclear strike on the UK and it ceasing to be “a viable state” (some would argue we’ve already reached that point) the captain of whatever nuclear sub was at sea when that happened would try and pick up BBC Radio 4, and if they failed to do so for three days in succession, would then go to a locked safe, open it, and take out a letter from the Prime Minister of the day, telling them what to do.  Presumably in Corbyn’s case his letter would say “try Classic FM instead” but either way, we had better hope that The Archers is as indestructible as it seems, and even if the real English countryside was toasted to a nuclear crisp, they’d still be playing Barwick Green in Borsetshire, and talking about possible swine flu in Neil’s weaners at Hollowtree on a tape loop, even if no-one but the submarines could hear them.

We will, of course, shortly be bombarded by yet another “British Value”, that of “wearing your poppy with pride.” It is so depressing to note how, year on year, Poppy Day becomes increasingly the subject of a tug-of-war between the government, who want to misappropriate it and hijack it to inculcate a sort of faux patriotism that automatically brings with it the baggage of supporting our troops and tacit approval of our misguided actions in delivering a catastrophic foreign policy at the point of a missile, and the fascist organisations like Britain First who are all over Facebook, sharing if you wear the poppy with pride and pocketing the money they raise from Poppy-related merchandise, while the British Legion is seemingly powerless to stop them, even though it is almost certainly fraud.

I object to anyone telling me why I should wear my poppy, and so this year, alongside the traditional red poppy from the RBL, I will be wearing a white poppy from the Peace Pledge Union, and a purple poppy from Animal Aid, in memory of all the innocent animal victims of war. I’ll probably weave them into a gay little corsage and stick it in my hat. Either way, it covers all bases. Fair play, you see, a traditional British Value. 

I’m still in several minds about Trident. Obviously in an uncertain world, we need something to defend ourselves, and while Trident is no use against the single dedicated terrorist, it is some sort of a threat to the rogue states that harbour and foment international terrorism. It also guarantees us a certain international status (although it shouldn’t). If our idiot politicians hadn’t spent the last fifteen years smacking every wasps’ nest they could find with a stick, we wouldn’t need it so much. We can’t really afford it, although the government wastes huge amounts of money on totally unnecessary things, money which could be better deployed elsewhere.  In my perfect world, starting from here, by the time the procurement process of Trident was ready to sign off, we’d have somehow achieved a world where we didn’t need it, but at the moment we seem to be going in precisely the opposite direction.

Another British Value, capital B capital V, is that we are apparently a nation of animal lovers.  If you wanted a classic illustration of the combination of Olde English flummery and tradition, with our affection for animals, you could note the recent story that the new High Sheriff of Rutland has just exercised his hereditary right to drive a flock of his sheep across London Bridge, free of charge or any toll.  Andrew Brown, who holds the post and lives in Caldecott, has also become a Freeman of the City of London by virtue of his appointment, and thus joins the privileged elite who are able to drive their sheep over the Thames and into the City without having to pay anything for their crossing.  The tradition dates back to the 12^th century, when ordinary people had to pay a fee for the privilege, and the Freemen of the City were awarded an exemption.

So, it would seem that at least the establishment, with all its reliance on pomp and ceremony and hereditary privilege, does at least uphold the British Value (Capital B, capital V) of kindness to animals. After all, the Queen has corgis, doesn’t she? True, her husband seems to believe that you need to keep your 12-bore handy, because you have to be cruel to be kind sometimes, and her eldest son would rather like to be allowed to rip foxes apart during an afternoon spent crashing around the countryside on horseback like some kind of medieval yahoo, another Quainte Olde English British Value that the government wants to bring back (next stop bear-baiting, wife-selling, and stuffing orphans up chimneys) but I suppose we have to cut them a little slack, close our eyes and count to 10, and remember that, whatever the foibles of its present incumbents, the Monarchy is at least a useful constitutional bulwark which has stopped people like Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair from causing even more havoc and mayhem as President after their respective stints as Prime Minister.

Then along comes Princess Michael of Kent and declares that animals don’t have rights “because they don’t vote”.  OK, that’s another one to just leave lying there for a few seconds while it sinks in.  So, it’s open season on anything that doesn’t pay taxes. Right.  Let’s start by hunting down Apple, Vodafone, Starbucks, Google and Boots then. I’m not particularly bothered if we use the traditional red coats, horns and a pack of dogs to rip them to pieces method, or lock and load with a full metal jacket. I’m easy either way, or so the girls all tell me.  Perhaps we could get the heads of the respected CEOs tastefully mounted and stuck on the wall somewhere.  She’s great entertainment value, is Princess Michael.  I remember her comments that they had had to cut back just like the rest of us, because they didn’t have so many dinner parties and didn’t always get the caterers in when they did. You can’t buy “gaga” like that, it takes generations of in-breeding.

And of course, we’re such a nation of animal lovers, and we value this particular “British Value” so highly, that every year, 7000 unwanted and abandoned dogs are put to sleep in local authority pounds and kennels because no-one wants to re-home them.

I seem to have a bee in my bonnet about British Values (capital B, capital V) but if I do, it’s because of the massive, jaw-dropping, buttock-clenching hypocrisy this programme represents. Democracy in other countries is OK, as long as the people elect the leaders we want them to elect. If not, the bombs start falling. Here we are, with a government that has presided over – indeed, caused – discord and division and inequality at home, seeing fit to lecture people on democracy when deals are done to flog off the housing stock without parliament even getting a sniff at them. We see fit to lecture people on British justice yet we suspend people who are trying to demonstrate its basic values and virtues. We bleat on about fair play and championing the underdog while we spend the money that could be used to give the underdog a home on firing missiles at Syria instead, to create more refugees. We are so much in favour of the underdog, with our “British Values” that we’re only accepting 20,000 of them, over five years, and only then because David Cameron fleetingly rediscovered his long-lost sense of shame when that kid drowned (one of many).  We’re so in favour of the underdog, that we deport them even when they’re dying of cancer, or likely to be shot back in their own countries, or even, on some memorable occasions, both. We’re so in favour of the underdog that we label them scroungers and spend money that could be used to feed the people who are starving, in our land of plenty, on vans, driving round the streets, painted with the message “brown underdogs go home”.   We’re so in favour of the underdog, that we turn a blind eye while 7,000 real, canine, underdogs are destroyed each year. Oh yes, British Values. Capital B. Capital V.

Of course, I have to watch my step as well. These are the days when, under British Values, a mentally-confused 14 year old kid can be simultaneously a) on a government anti-radicalisation programme while b) being secretly groomed by ISIS handlers and c) sentenced to life for merely plotting an attack which was foiled.  I realise there will be those who will disagree with me, and say that he deserved it, and certainly, had the attack gone ahead, I would have had no compunction whatsoever in banging him up for conspiracy, and I am not saying he should have escaped scot-free in this case either, but I am still markedly uneasy with the “thought crime” of merely thinking about committing an act of terrorism, and more specifically with the severity of this particular sentence.  Obviously the intention here was to set a precedent, to draw a line in the sand, to fire a warning shot, pick your own clichés: I can’t help but think, though, that such a draconian sentence will only, in the long term, be counter productive. And any society where you can be locked up for life merely for intent, doesn’t seem to have much to do with British Values as far as I can see.

A big part of the problem, as I have often said before, is that politicians are so removed from life’s ordinary pressures and tasks, that they’ve forgotten what it’s like to be us.  Denis Healey died this week. I once met him. Well, I say met, he was coming up the steps at King’s Cross underground and into the main line station, while I was going the other way. Our eyes met, then we did that very British thing of each trying to get out of each other’s way. He was wearing a camel-hair coat and carrying two what looked like very heavy briefcases, one in each hand. He’d probably travelled across London from Westminster on the Victoria line, carrying them. No doubt he was looking for a train to Leeds, to get back to his constituency for the weekend (it was a Friday night).

I thought at the time, and I still do now, how healthy it was for democracy that this bloke, who might have been Chancellor or Foreign Secretary at the time, obviously had no problems about mixing with the great unwashed and travelling by tube. If it were to happen at all today, it would be as part of a carefully-staged photo opportunity.  There are lots of politicians anyway who fail to acknowledge anywhere north of Leeds anyway.  This week, the steelworks at Redcar, which was previously under threat because its owners wanted to mothball it, went belly-up as its owners called in the administrators.  Of course, you also have to factor in the knock-on effect on the local economy of those businesses who supplied the steelworks: from the authorised sub-contractors to the tea-and-sandwich van at the factory gate. 1700 jobs have been lost, and you would have thought, wouldn’t you, that this might be the sort of asset that the government could maybe take over, and keep going, given that we need steel for all sorts of things – or that it could have been the focus for a managed change of use to a nationalised facility manufacturing items necessary to help us win the war against climate change.  It is a situation which is crying out for imaginative, visionary solutions. But the government has thrown £80million at the problem to help people re-train and get other jobs. There are no other jobs. There will be a surfeit of self-employed window-cleaners and gardeners in Redcar this winter. And contrast £80million with the £1.2billion racked up by the Watchman Drone so far.

It’s a mad old world, and it’s getting madder. But at least today, the sun is shining, it’s a peaceful Sunday morning and The Archers is burbling away on the radio, so at least no one will be launching a Polaris missile any time soon. It’s also the feast day of St Francis of Assisi, of all people.

Francis was born in Umbria, Italy, in 1182. A rich cloth merchant called Pietro Bernardone came back from a sales trip to France to find his wife had given birth. Apparently the event wasn’t particularly unexpected, but what did annoy him was that his wife had already baptized the child, calling him Giovanni, after John the Baptist. Pietro wanted a son who would become a merchant like himself, so he had him re-named Francesco, in homage to France, his biggest sales market.

As the young Francesco grew, he enjoyed a life of privilege and wealth, and in his teens he became involved in living a life of excess and drunkenness, partying till dawn. He also fulfilled his father’s expectations of him, however, travelling and falling in love with France. However, life as a merchant was not enough. He wanted the glory of battle, and to become a knight.

He got his chance when Assisi declared war on the neighbouring city-state of Perugia, but unfortunately it didn’t go well.  At the end of the battle, the field was littered with the corpses of the troops from Assisi. Francesco survived, but was thrown into a dungeon, where he spent a year imprisoned until he was ransomed and returned home.

Despite this experience, he was not deterred from his wish to pursue a military career, and when the chance came to join the Fourth Crusade, he jumped at the chance, commissioning a wonderful new suit of armour and a decorated cloak. One day out from Assisi, though, he had a troubling dream, in which God told him that he had got it all wrong and commanded him to return home.

Coming back only a day or so after his triumphal exit, he was the subject of much scorn and derision, but he ignored it all and took to a life of poverty. He went on a pilgrimage to Rome and begged for alms in St Peter’s Square.  He spent much of his time in a cave, praying and weeping for what he regarded as his sins.  One day, while riding in the countryside, he was confronted by a leper in the road.  Lepers in the middle ages were objects of horror, and very much to be avoided.  However, Francis dismounted and embraced the leper, much to everyone’s horror.  Riding away afterwards, he turned and looked back, and the leper was not there.  Francis always maintained that the apparition of the leper had actually been a test, set for him by God. [Oddly enough, I had only just researched this story when I heard that Gabriela Andreevska, whose work amongst the Macedonian refugees I wrote about previously, has been offering the kiss of peace to the people in the camps there, in an attempt to counter rumours that refugees are spreading disease to the West] 

Matters with his father were soon to come to a head, however. Despite the oddity of his behaviour, as his family saw it, Francis had continued to be a part of the family business. However, one day his wanderings led him to the church of San Damiano, which was in a crumbling, decayed state.  Francis heard a voice telling him to “repair the church” coming from the body of Christ on the crucifix, and, not pausing to ask whether that was with a capital C or not, began restoring San Damiano. Unfortunately, this involved selling some of his father’s stock without his permission, and diverting the resulting funds to pay for the restoration work. His father went what is generally known these days as “apeshit” over this, and hauled Francis up before the local Bishop. The Bishop ordered the money to be returned, telling Francis that “God would provide”.

That was all Francis needed to hear.  He returned the money, and there and then stripped off all his costly clothes and distributed them amongst the crowd. He declared himself no longer his father’s son, and wandered off into the woods, singing, dressed in only a thin hair-shirt.  The story of the time St Francis spent in the wilderness communing with nature is almost too well known for me to bother re-telling it – how he preached a sermon to the birds, and they all sat and listened politely until he had finished, and only then flew off; how he persuaded a wolf to stop terrorising the local village in return for the villagers making a pact to feed it, and similar stories, have been carried down through the centuries.  He begged for building stones, and apparently rebuilt San Damiano with his bare hands.

Eventually, people heard about him and came to join him and share in his simple existence. This was the genesis of what was to eventually become the Franciscan Order, although it was never its founder’s intention to start anything so “organised”.  He and his followers began trying to live their lives literally according to the Gospel, going about in pairs, dressed in rags, and preaching to anyone who would listen.  They accepted what they were given, and only actively begged when they had to.  When the local Bishop expressed incredulity at their way of life, Francis argued that, because they had no possessions, they had no need of weapons to defend them, nor were they afraid of losing what they had never had. He said that this was his definition of freedom.

People tend to think of St Francis as spending most of his time in the wilderness, communing with the birds and animals, but in fact he also travelled widely. Some of these projected journeys were curtailed by illness, or by shipwreck, but he did make it as far as Egypt in 1219, during a brief truce in the Fifth Crusade, when the Crusaders and the forces led by the Sultan, Saladin’s nephew, had fought themselves to a bloody standstill over the siege of a city on a tributary of the Nile. Francis’s rather ambitious plan was to end the conflict altogether by converting the Sultan. Although he failed in this, the fact that he and his companions were allowed to discuss it with the Sultan, having made passage through the Saracen lines, and the fact that they all returned with their gizzards intact, must be some kind of testimony to his persuasiveness and charisma. Some scholars attribute the fact that, after the fall of Jerusalem, only the Franciscans were permitted to remain in the Holy Land, to the goodwill engendered by this intervention in the name of peace.

On his return to Italy, the Franciscan Order, as it had become, had now achieved 5000 members and it desperately needed proper organisation. There were also offshoot organisations – the “Poor Clares”, a female order, and the rather unimaginatively-named “Third Order”. Francis’s simple rule of following the teachings of Jesus and walking in his footsteps was struggling to cope with the influx of followers. Having no stomach himself for the prospect of spending his remaining time on earth as an administrator, St Francis chose to step back and allow the Papacy to take over the Order.  Increasingly frail and ill from his travels, he was also battling against encroaching blindness.  His body allegedly acquired the pattern of the stigmata, the five wounds which Christ suffered on the cross.  Despite his frailty, he also managed to organise the first ever nativity scene, when he set up a real crib and real animal stalls in a church, to create a living scene so that the worshippers could contemplate the birth of Jesus in a direct way, making use of the senses, especially sight.

He died on October 4^th 1226, aged only 45, while listening to a reading of Psalm 142. He was reburied in 1230 under the Lower Basilica of his own church, but his tomb soon had to be hidden for fear of Saracen invaders, and it remained lost until it was rediscovered by accident in 1818.  It was re-fashioned between 1927 and 1930 and in 1978, his remains were placed in a glass urn inside the traditional stone tomb.

As you might expect with such a well-known saint, his legends have been embroidered and have grown in the telling. Because of his popularity in art and literature, his words have also been appropriated by many – and misappropriated as well. Margaret Thatcher chose to quote St Francis of Assisi on the steps of 10 Downing Street in 1979:

Where there is discord, may we bring harmony. Where there is error, may we bring truth. Where there is doubt, may we bring faith. And where there is despair, may we bring hope…

In fact, where there was harmony, she brought discord. Where there was truth, she brought error; where there was faith, doubt, and where there was hope, despair.  But that’s all blood under the bridge, now. The prayer that she was quoting begins “Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace…” and today her spiritual successor David Cameron has just said that he would demonstrate the British Value of pressing the red button to trigger a nuclear holocaust (which will no doubt earn him a swift rebuke from Obama or his successor for jumping the gun! Mind you, if Obama’s successor is Donald Trump, he would probably turn out to be the sort of klutz who would press it by accident. )

St Francis reminds me a lot of Jesus in some respects. He started out with some good ideas and people flocked to him, but eventually the status quo took over and forced him out of the very thing he had founded. In both cases, they left a legacy of a following that is still struggling today to cope with the organisation needed to perpetuate the ideas, and the ideas themselves, which tend to suggest things like giving up the idea of even having an organisation, and giving it all to the poor instead.  The wealth of the Vatican, the Church of England’s position as a major landholder.  We’re back once again with the British Values of John Betjeman’s wealthy woman praying in Westminster Abbey.

Think of what our nation stands for;

Books from Boots and country Lanes,

Free speech, free passes, class distinction:

Democracy, and proper drains.

I realise this has been a long and rambling screed, but this nonsense about all of us having to agree on a set of British Values (cap B cap V) written by Conservative Central Office has really got my dander up.  One of the most important British Values is free speech, which means just that – within the law we should all be free to say what we think, free to differ, not yoked together in some kind of pretend harmony, the orthodoxy of “we’re all in it together” when the reality is nothing of the sort.

The song says that there’ll always be an England while there’s a country lane, while there’s a country cottage beside a field of grain… I’d like to think there’ll always be an England while there are people ready to organise soup kitchens and refugee parcels and rescue and re-home cats, dogs and other unwanted animals.  There’ll always be an England while there are still people who show kindness, compassion and respect. The tea, and the weather, and the football team going out on penalties, and the red buses and the enigma of Andy Murray’s nationality are all important factors, but what really counts is that kindness.  If I could but aspire to some of the kindness displayed by St Francis of Assisi, for instance, I would be a much happier person in myself.

Unfortunately, I don’t have a kind and forgiving nature, which is why one day, they will probably come for me and lock me up as a malcontent who does not share “British Values”. At least if they do, I will get fed regularly in jail and I will be spared the huge stack of work which awaits me next week. In the meantime I might as well go out with a bang, and quote you the traditional song Hard Times of Old England, which is as true today as when it was first composed by some anonymous peasant and sung to the tune of The Roast Beef of Old England, in the aftermath of the Battle of Waterloo.   

Come all brother tradesmen who travel along

Oh pray come and tell me where the trade is all gone?

Long time I have travelled and cannot find none…

And it’s oh, the hard times of old England,

In old England such very hard times…

Our soldiers and sailors have just come from war

They fought for their king and their country for sure:

Come home to be starved, should have stayed where they were

And it’s oh, the hard times of old England,

In old England such very hard times…

Well, once again it’s Sunday teatime, and the pigeon I call Percy, the one with a distinctive white mark on his neck, is stuffing himself with bird seed, Matilda’s asleep in the chair, ignoring him, and I’d like to go on to say God’s in his heaven and all’s right with the world. I would like to, but it manifestly would not be true. And what are we to make of this weird Italian who talks to the birds and the wolves, not to mention this strange, wild-eyed Palestinian activist who said give all you have to the poor, and follow me? Not very… British… was he?