Epiblog for the Feast of St Luke

It has been a busy fortnight in the Holme Valley, one which contained publication of not one, but three books, and the official launch of a fourth - a sort of “here’s one I did earlier”.  But more of that, later. On the home front meanwhile, life goes on, pretty much as before. Matilda has been sleeping on the old settee in the conservatory, basking in the unexpected October sunlight, although for the last few days, that’s not been so much in evidence. 

Zak has been staying over again, and has been curled up on his dog bed, wuffiting in his sleep and twitching his way though various adventures in his dreams, and Misty has been trapping back and forth in that way Border Collies do, keeping everyone in order, barking her head off whenever someone comes to the door, and occasionally patrolling the garden as well.  The reason why Zak has been staying is that, unfortunately, Ellie has been ill, necessitating an overnight stop at the vets, and a combined course of painkillers and antibiotics thereafter. While she is, thankfully, apparently, now on the mend, it meant that she needed special care on her own at home, so Zak was boarded out with us.

The squirrels and the birds have also been present, as always, although I haven’t seen the old guy lately, and I hope he is alright. Something is certainly demolishing the bird food on the decking, and if it’s not the squirrels, my money is on the badger, though I haven’t seen much of her, either. Judging from the amounts of food being consumed she must weigh about 19 stone by now.  I bet the decking wobbles every time she walks across it.

Debbie was totally preoccupied with the run-up to her “observation” at College, which went, in the end, like a breeze, thankfully, and a huge black cloud has been lifted from her life.  The sheer amount of effort involved in the preparation of meaningless paperwork that nobody will ever so much glance at again, however, amazed me, and continues to do so. No wonder people are leaving teaching in droves. It’s one of the two professions – the other being the NHS - where everybody off the street (not to mention meddlesome politicians) thinks they can do the job better than the professionals, and in order to satisfy the likes of the Daily Mail, a forest, a veritable thicket, of paperwork, observations and targets has sprung up all around, just so the politicians can cover their arses. I am not saying that there should be no regulation whatsoever – clearly there has to be something to stop the hospital window cleaner putting on a white coat and pretending to be a consultant - but in its present state, it’s so grossly overburdening that it’s actively preventing the “good practice” it’s supposed to promote.

As for me, I’ve been fighting battles on several fronts. Last Sunday, notably, four days before Debbie was due to be “observed”, the hard disk on her laptop died. For six hours, I tried everything I knew (which isn’t much, and a more competent software engineer could probably have done what I did in half the time) to get it going again, to no avail. That six hours was also the time set aside for doing the Epiblog, so it never got done.  I was touched and surprised that a number of people got in touch with me by other means to check if I was OK, because they had noticed that the blog hadn’t appeared.  I tried to catch up and write it in odd moments during the week, but it didn’t work out. There were plenty of odd moments, but they were all crammed with incident, and no time for quiet, reflective musings.

As well as the new books appearing on or around National Poetry Day, there was also a mad rush of publicity to organize, with my other leg, and meanwhile, we had yet more woes with the camper van. On the Tuesday of last week, the week that should have had the missing Epiblog, Debbie had trouble with it overheating and all the warning lights came on. By the time she got to Dewsbury, it smelt like it was about to burst into flames. She phoned me up and I told her to let it cool off while she was teaching, then top it up with water immediately before she set off home, and try and nurse it back.  Fortunately, she did make it home in one piece, but the next day, the garage confirmed that (yet again) the camper had been the target of vandalism, and the coolant hoses had been cut. 

I was furious, because one of the coolant hoses had only been replaced just after we got back from Arran, on 4^th September, because it had finally blown owing to wear and tear of having probably been on there since 1986, and now that new hose had been cut. Although the hose on the other side wasn’t in bad nick, the garage did ask me at the time if I wanted both hoses doing while they had it in bits, and I said no, on the grounds of keeping the cost down. So at least that was one good decision I’d made – otherwise it would have been two new hoses that had been maliciously severed.

However, it was still a case of criminal damage and vandalism, to add to the one back in March. So it was back to the police with yet another crime number, then to the insurance company with yet another insurance claim. Fortunately, owing to the kindness of the people who so generously donated the money which was going to be used for replacing the window seals, we had the cash in hand to fund the repair while we waited for the insurance company to pay up (they still haven’t) but it was yet another enormous tranche of time which I could have spent doing other, more profitable, and dare I say it, even perhaps more enjoyable things.

As to why our vehicle in particular is the target of this sort of thing, I am at a loss.  Unless it’s the local branch of UKIP, the EDL, or the BNP, I can’t think it’s anyone I’ve upset with this blog – and even then it would be quite a testimony to the sting of my attack if I’d inspired them to get up at three o’clock in the morning, just for the purposes of inflicting revenge. I can’t imagine Debbie or her family upsetting anyone – she’s too busy teaching anyway – and, unless it’s someone who’s seen me trundling around in my wheelchair, and thinks that (because of the Junta’s propaganda) I’m some sort of dole-wallah benefits cheat who needs to be taught a lesson, the conclusion I’m reluctantly forced to accept is that it’s some idiot walking home from the pub who does it just because he can.

The police, sadly, were less than interested this time, and an altercation ensued on the phone with their call centre when I threatened to procure an illegal firearm and shoot anyone I found tampering with the van. For this I was told that the conversation would be recorded and reported to police officers. Fine, I said, at least it might get their attention. They did, however, redeem themselves slightly when I had a long phone call from a PCSO a couple of days afterwards, who assured me that he would personally look into it, and that there would be drive-by surveillance on our property. I have no idea what effect that will have, and in the end we will still probably have to spend money we shouldn’t have to, beefing up our external security yet again. I could, actually, quite cheerfully murder the little scrote who has inflicted this on us, assuming it’s the same person every time, and I guess that makes me a bad Christian.

Meanwhile, the hard disk saga rumbled on. On Monday, Colin the computer wizard manifested himself among us, and pronounced that the disk was indeed deader than tank tops and sideways-ironed flares. He left clutching the deceased laptop under his arm, as it would need a new hard drive and major surgery. True to his word, two days later, he was back again, and he had certainly done a good job on it. Stripped of all the various crap that had stuck on it during the years, and pared back to basics, it was like getting off a bike and into a Ferrari. Unfortunately though, there was still the job of spending hours copying files back onto the (new) hard drive from various backup disks, and that work once more fell to yours truly to carry out.

So. Not much fun, and not much time, either. Anyway, we ended the fortnight with the van once again running and the computer once again running, though I would have preferred it, obviously, if both of the had been running all along. With all this going on, the outside world mostly passed me by. There was a story which particularly caught my eye about a wild pig in the Australian outback that stole some beer from a camping–ground, got drunk, and then picked a fight with a passing cow. Oddly enough, this was balanced in the week just gone by a story from England this time, about a bow-tie wearing pet duck which is kept in a pub.  It walked into the bar (cue for a joke, there) had a drink, and picked a fight with a passing dog.

Pissed and belligerent animals/fowl notwithstanding, the rest of the news was inordinately depressing. The Tory party had their conference in Manchester, and delegates seemed surprised to find that quite a lot of people hated their guts. The fact that they had to hold the event behind a security barrier dubbed “the ring of steel” and that the conference organizers advised delegates not to venture out into the world at large while they were still wearing their conference badges, should have been a big clue, but then again, these people were bone-headed enough to vote Tory in the first place.

The demonstrators, in some cases, sadly, played into the hands of the Tory media, spitting at the delegates and, in one cases, egging one of them on camera. I don’t agree with throwing eggs at politicians. I would never waste a good egg on a Tory, but in any case, once you start throwing eggs, or spitting for that matter, you’ve lost the argument. You make it easy for the likes of Boris Johnson to dismiss an entirely legitimate protest as “a bunch of crusties with nose rings”.  However, although I don’t agree with it, or sympathise with the people who did it, you can see how, hated as the Tories are, things like eggings happen. 

The other problem with egging your opponents is that the egging becomes the focus of the story – this allows people like Theresa May to get away with jaw-droppingly chilling speeches, attempting to re-define the terms of asylum and immigration. In the midst of the biggest refugee crisis since the second world war she outlined plans to harden her heart (if that were possible) and reduce the numbers of people given safe haven on our shores. I realize that ad hominem attacks can be counter productive, but I have to say, if I had a dog with a face as miserable as Theresa May’s, I’d shave its arse and teach it to walk backwards.

The fact is, still, that, however much the Tory yahoos at conference bay their approval from the floor, Theresa May can do absolutely nothing about immigration from Europe while we are still members of the EU. It was, however, the week when the UK withdrew the last ship dedicated specifically to saving the refugees. It was also the week when fifteen children drowned off the coast of North Africa.  Meanwhile, Alex Wild of the Taxpayers’ Alliance, who apparently lives in France and doesn’t, er, pay any UK tax, suggested that it was time to cut the benefits paid to pensioners.  Some pensioners, he said,

"won't be around to vote against you in the next election and the other point is they might have forgotten by then. If you did it now, chances are that in 2020 someone who has had their winter fuel cut might be thinking, 'Oh I can't remember, was it this government or was it the last one? I'm not quite sure.' "

Well the thing is this, Mr Wild, this is the thing. I hope you live to be a hundred and you end up with some sort of debilitating disease, existing on cat food on toast in a garret in Hastings, scared to put the heating on, because the Tories followed your advice and cut the winter fuel payment. Hypothermia is too good for you. It would be too quick:  a merciful release. I want you to be cold, and I want you to suffer. For a long time. And I want you to remember precisely who it was who suggested the cut that caused you so much pain, misery and discomfort.  And once again, I guess that makes me a bad Christian.  What would Zeus do, though? Warm him up with a thunderbolt, I would hope.

Cameron rounded off the conference with a direct, personal attack on Jeremy Corbyn.  Probably because Corbyn rattled him by addressing a meeting of the CWU just down the road during the actual conference itself, thus breaking the long-standing convention that party leaders don’t pee on each other’s doorstep during the conference season.  Cameron ended his speech by saying

We cannot let that man inflict his security-threatening, terrorist-sympathising, Britain-hating ideology on the country we love.

Security threatening is a laugh, coming from the party whose criminal stupidity has left us without an aircraft carrier on the high seas until 2017 or 2020, and squandered £100m in reversing the decision to use a CATOBAR system, going back to the original STOVL configuration for both new ships.  Not to mention the cuts (to the bone and beyond) of the UKs land forces.  Terrorist-sympathising rests entirely on Corbyn’s statement, taken out of context, that the death of Osama Bin Laden [without being put on trial] was a tragedy. Of course, the Tories always leave out the bit in brackets. Britain-hating? Well, I leave that one up to you. If wanting everyone to have a job, a home, a health service, and a good school is Britain hating, then I guess I must hate Britain too.

Compassion and common sense are in short supply these days, thanks to Cameron and his ilk, so I guess it falls to me to respond in kind to David Cameron: Mr Cameron, we cannot allow your divisive, economy-threatening, banker-sympathising, disabled-hating, pig-sticking ideology to continue to destroy the country I love.  See, two can play at this game.

If we needed any confirmation that this country is on the slippery slope to becoming the sort of dog-eat-dog, shop-thy-neighbour, I’m-alright-jack society where people pass by on the other side when they see those less fortunate than themselves lying in the gutter, then a particular instance in the last fortnight should convince any waverers. One of my Facebook friends was in London when she saw a young lass fall off her motorbike. Several people, to their credit, gathered to help. My friend has first aid training, and quickly ascertained that the rider has probably broken her leg. She did what she could to help make her comfortable and reassure her until the ambulance came: all the while, because they were still partially in the road, they were being hooted at and abused by motorists because their precious car journeys were being delayed by a few seconds.

And, of course, inevitably, there was further proof in the hoohah which arose following the victory of Nadiya Hussain in The Great British Bake-Off on BBC TV. Her crime? She wore a hijab. Cue the inevitable “she only won because she’s a Muslim” postings on social media. Er, no. She won, because in the opinion of Paul Hollywood and Mary Berry, because she cooked better cakes.  Not that success in the eyes of Paul Hollywood and Mary Berry is in any way to be confused with success in real life.  What happened to generosity of spirit, cutting the underdog a bit of slack?

Actually, I am sad to say that I have also contributed to this polarisation, this hardening of attitudes this week, following the appearance of Michelle Dorrell on BBC TV’s Question Time, complaining to Tory minister Amber Rudd (no relation, I am very pleased to say) that the Tories were going cut her child benefit by £243 per week, despite the fact that she had voted Tory in the election.  One has to wonder what these people thought they were voting for.  They remind me of turkeys saying “hang on, no-one mentioned Cranberries!”

There was a very mordant article in Private Eye this week, satirising people who thought that voting for benefit cuts wouldn’t affect them, but rather northerners, Muslims, and guests on the Jeremy Kyle show.  As I said at the time of the 2015 election, anyone who voted Tory voted for five more years of ”austerity”; five more years of welfare cuts affecting the most needy and vulnerable; five more years of the bedroom tax and the benefits cap; five more years of the NHS being dismantled, brick by brick; five more years of crappy low paid zero hours pretend jobs on zero hours contracts that have to be topped up with in-work benefits; five more years of people dumping their pets or having to take them to the shelter because they can no longer afford to keep a cat or a dog; five more years of hatred and xenophobia, of vans driving round telling brown people to go “home”; five more years of people being declared fit to work by ATOS and then dying of cancer; five more years of rising homelessness; and five more years of people starving to death with £2.60 in their bank account because their benefits have been sanctioned.  Anyone who voted Tory voted for that, and I hope it comes back to bite them and theirs, in spades redoubled.

So, I found it difficult to sympathise with Michelle Dorrell, especially as she is exactly the sort of person who would undoubtedly bang on about “immigrants get all the best houses” and “we should look after our own first”, despite never having been anywhere near a homeless shelter in their life.  I do, however, feel sorry for her kids.  For calling her criminally stupid I have been called out myself, for lacking in compassion. My initial response was that I am fed up with unilateral compassion. I will be as compassionate to these people as they would be to me. I’ve spent five years since 2010 being told I was some sort of unworthy scrounger, leeching off the hard working taxpayer, by people like Michelle Dorrell who looked down on me because I’m now ill with something they can’t cure, despite the fact that from 1976 until 2010 I was that hardworking taxpayer and paid in shedloads of PAYE, NI and Corporation Tax which various governments wasted on firing missiles at Godforsaken breeze-block villages in the desert instead of building schools, hospitals and affordable houses here at home.  Now these people suddenly find themselves in George Osborne’s gunsights, and I can’t really raise that much in the way of sympathy.

But, on mature reflection, I suppose I really should try.  Otherwise what am I but another part of the hardening and polarising which is taking place on every level across our society since the Tories decided on a divide and rule policy while simultaneously telling us we were all in it together. I suppose that, by refusing to feel sorry for Michelle Dorrell, I am being a bit like those motorists who hooted at the girl lying in the road. It is her fault, in that she brought it upon herself by voting for a set of economic vandals motivated by a psychopathic desire for class war, but she wasn’t the only one gullible enough to fall for Tory lies, and some of the blame must also lie with the Labour Party for meekly accepting that lie, and letting it run. At least the new shadow chancellor seems to have belatedly looked up “opposition” in the dictionary and started to “oppose” Osborne’s insane charter of fiscal responsibility or whatever damfool poodlefaking cockamamie name it goes under this week.  It’s a pity that 21 of his colleagues felt unable to join in, but they can always join the Lib Dems – they will then need two phone boxes in Truro to meet in, instead of one.

In other news, President Putin is certifiably mad, but then we all knew that, didn’t we? At least he’s not gay. Firing cruise missiles from the Caspian Sea into the midst of the Syrian conflict is obviously going to wrap the whole thing up much more quickly and with minimal loss of life, isn’t it? It almost goes into the “you couldn’t make it up” category, along with the woman who sued her nephew because he hugged her so hard that he broke her arm, or the Walmart store in Alabama which displayed bottles of “gun oil”(a gay sex lubricant, M’Lud) on the gun counter instead of the gay sex counter or wherever it should have been on display.  

In fact, the older I get, the more difficult it becomes to separate out the news into “real” and “skateboarding duck” categories. Whenever we send out a press release, we live in fear of two things, a member of the Royal Family dying and/or a skateboarding duck. The death of a member of the Royal Family is obviously going to knock everything else off the news for days, and the best one we ever achieved in that regard was sending out the PR for Gez Walsh’s second book on 31^st August 1997, the day when Di died, Dodi died and the Dodo was already extinct.  We have also, in our time, accounted for the Queen Mother and Nelson Mandela with our press releases. Gez has suggested that instead of just sending them out, we should get it all ready, then contact the Royal Household and say “how much to not send it out?”

The skateboarding duck is my shorthand for one of those cutesy “and finally” stories which now also tend to go viral on the internet and once again, everyone is talking about the cute duck, instead of your story. If the duck wore a bow tie, got drunk and picked a fight with a passing dog, so much the better (for the story) or the worse (for us).  It used to be quite easy to spot these stories a mile off, but these days I could turn on the TV and it would seem perfectly natural if the newsreader said that a duck wearing a bow tie had got drunk, broken into the Kremlin and launched a nuclear missile at Damascus, while Putin was busy arm-wrestling with Sergei Laverov (or “so gay lover of…” as the BBC subtitles once called him.)

So, after two weeks of what has often felt like being stuck in a tumble drier along with half a stone of pebbles, we have arrived at today, the feast of St Luke. This is the St Luke to whom authorship of one of the four Gospels is attributed, along with the Acts of the Apostles, though obviously, at this great distance in time, very little of what is known about him is hard fact, and is mostly inference and informed conjecture. The description of him as a doctor, for instance, would seem to imply a certain degree of social standing: however, it was also not uncommon for families to educate their slaves in medicine, so that they could have an in-house on-call physician. I gather this is where Jeremy Hunt got the idea for his new contract. Luke is also the patron saint of painters, which is easy for you to say, and he is often depicted painting pictures of Mary, although there is absolutely no foundation in fact for this – or at least none has been discovered so far.

It’s generally assumed that Luke was a gentile, and was born in Greece, although the early church historian Eusebius says Luke was born at Antioch.  His Gospel shows a definite interest in explaining the message of Christ to gentiles: it is only in his Gospel that we find the parable of the Good Samaritan, for instance. He is the patron saint of doctors and physicians, and is often portrayed in art in the company of an ox or a calf, as they were symbolic of Christ’s sacrifice.

Obviously the story of Luke’s travels with St Paul is pretty well-known and it would probably be a waste of pixels simply to re-tell it here. It is interesting, though, to note the differences in his Gospel, as compared with the other three.  For a start, it contains six miracles and eighteen parables not found elsewhere in the Gospel story.  Various commentators have suggested that Luke’s gospel is shot through with concern for the poor and for social justice.  The story of Lazarus being ignored by the rich man, and the quotation of Jesus saying “Blessed are the poor”, rather than the “poor of spirit” as it appears elsewhere. It is only in Luke’s gospel where we find Mary, in the Magnificat, saying of God that:

He hath put down the mighty from their seats,
and exalted them of low degree.
He hath filled the hungry with good things;
and the rich he hath sent empty away.

He is also the author (if indeed they were his words) responsible for framing the scriptural parts of the Hail Mary prayer – “Hail, Mary, full of grace” and “Blessed art thou amongst women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus”. 

The themes of forgiveness and mercy are also found throughout Luke’s work. It is only in Luke’s Gospel that the stories appear of the Prodigal Son being welcomed back by his overjoyed father and of the forgiven woman washing the feet of Jesus with her tears. His default position is always that of someone who loved the poor and always saw the possibility of hope, forgiveness and redemption.  No-one really knows what happened to Luke: some reports state that he was martyred, others that he lived a long and fulfilling life, finally dying, in Greece, of old age. 

I must admit that, much as I admire St Luke for his concern for the poor, the oppressed and the needy, I still struggle to square this with forgiving those responsible for causing that very need and oppression. I think this is one reason why I often feel so conflicted these days. I also get the impression that even if I could find it within myself to forgive people like Michelle Dorrell for saddling us with five more years of “austerity” and all that entails, they would just take my forgiveness, laugh in my face, and carry on as before.  Well, again, maybe not her, specifically, but the politicians behind it all. I should imagine that, even if they knew of my existence, Cameron, Osborne, Duncan-Smith and people like Alex Wild of the Taxpayers’ Alliance wouldn’t give a stuff if I forgave them or went to my grave hating their very guts.  Energy is in short supply with me, as well, at the moment, and it is much easier to maintain a default position of hatred than to reach out and forgive someone who doesn’t want to be forgiven, doesn’t care, and frankly, probably doesn’t deserve it. 

People will say, of course, that the act of forgiveness would really benefit me, most of all, and that I wouldn’t then be such an angry, hate-filled, bitter old man, consuming myself up inside with blind fury. But what they are missing is that some days, it’s only the blind fury that gives me the strength to push my wheels round and keep blundering forwards.  Some days, it’s only the knowledge that these people want to beset my door with wolves, to the detriment of me and mine, that gives me the strength to swing my legs over the side of the bed, instead of lying there looking at the grey rectangle of cloud through the trees.  

So, yes, forgiveness. Not as easy as it looks, and unless you are someone like St Luke, it’s very difficult to square that with concern for the victims of society. It must be very easy, if you are Boris Johnson, for instance, to forgive, and laugh off people throwing eggs at you; after all, you can afford a dozen new suits a day. It’s much harder to forgive the person who stopped your brother’s benefit, say, and started a chain of events where he died of starvation with £2.63 in his bank account.  Except that this is probably a false comparison, because you can reasonably bet that Johnson was, behind his affability and jokes, not planning forgiveness of the demonstrators at all, but something quite different, involving water cannons and baton charges. 

Should I forgive the person who cut the camper’s coolant pipes? The Bible says yes, and I say only if they paid for all the damage, picked up all the fallen leaves in the driveway, and licked every inch of the van’s paintwork clean with their tongue, and even then, the Devil would have to go past the window on a skateboard before I would even think of it. I guess that makes me a bad Christian, if indeed I still am one at all.  They say that what goes around, comes around, and that if I was to make the first move, and extend goodness and mercy even unto mine enemies, that they would do the same to me, and I say yeah, right.  Like I said, I am fed up with unilateral compassion.  It gets me nowhere. I know, as well, that the point of forgiveness is not to “get you somewhere” but that you do it for you. I wasn’t born without the compassion gene, unlike some members of the Tory Junta, but I have certainly had it knocked out of me. 

This has been a depressing read for you, no doubt, and you waited two weeks for it, as well.  If there is a ray of hope in all of this darkness that seems to be rising all around us at this time of year, it lies in the people who asked if I was OK when they didn’t get the blog. Thank you.  Meanwhile, we’re teetering on the brink of yet another week of battles, alarums and excursions, keeping on ploughing my furrow. Iron-clad feather-feet pounding the dirt, an October day towards evening. It’s already getting dark at 3pm, the clocks are going to go back next weekend, and dark times are ahead, in more ways than one.  Still, the stove is ticking away, the cat is on her settee and the dog is on her bed. Deb is getting ready to go walkies, and the rugby is set to record later.  It does give the superficial impression of a world where it would only take one little click of the kaleidoscope to make it much more pleasant and even more perfect, but it’s a click that eludes me, has always eluded me, and it’s maybe a click that was lost way back when, way up the family tree, when Adam was a lad.   Anyway, that’s the news that’s fit to print, and I’m sorry there’s no better. At least there’s scrambled egg for tea.