Epiblog for the First Sunday in Advent

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley.  November is my least favourite month of the year and this year is proving no exception. (My favourite month is May, in case you were wondering.) Wind and rain, severally and together, and the added frustration of the two and a half days of fine, still weather being wasted by people who were booked to come and do stuff, but who never turned up.

I realise this is a first-world problem, and it’s not as if I have to trundle down to the water-hole with a jerry-can on my head, or cower in a cellar trying to avoid being bombed, but even so, with it being the busiest time of the year for books, plus the fact that I am in the throes of the second massive insurance claim in six weeks, when you organise for someone to come and do the gutters and they don’t turn up two days running, it all goes to diminishing my already-limited stores of energy even further.  The bloke who was supposed to come and estimate on some garden clearance was the other no-show.  We’ve had one estimate for the gates, but not the other, and the security light people still haven’t answered my email asking questions about their proposed installation.

So, there you have it. With all these people so eager to work, it’s hardly surprising we’re in the midst of an unprecedented economic recovery and boom. Er, oh.  The animals, meanwhile, have both had a fairly normal week, for them. Matilda has managed to time her forays (by and large) to avoid the sort of hammering from the rain she got last week, although she still has that amusing habit of, having turned her nose up at the prospect of going out via the conservatory door, then heading round to the cat flap in Colin’s kitchen and sticking her head out, to see if it’s also raining on that side of the house.

The squirrels haven’t been much in evidence, again, I suspect, because of the weather. I assume they have been hanging on for dear life, as their home sways and threshes in the wind.  Misty, meanwhile, has become accustomed to night-marches and coming home drenched. She’s a Border Collie, and they eat that sort of thing for breakfast, metaphorically speaking. (Literally, she has Muttnuts). Debbie, of course, is obliged to accompany her, in full wet-weather gear, so now we have the situation where, on returning from a walk, both the dog and Debbie shake off the excess rain and then steam gently together in front of the fire.  One good thing about the rainy weather is that it keeps at bay the idiots letting off fireworks, so Misty hasn’t been so troubled, although I am still putting Canicalm into her food, because it needs to build up over a period of time.

As for me, well, I am just taking it a day at a time. What I don’t get done one day is then added to the list for tomorrow, out of which, as usual, I pick the things that are going to have the most “payoff” and attempt them first. It always feels like a war of attrition at this time of year, and at the moment, all the more so, since we seem to have a real war of attrition going on in the outside world.

The Junta announced their proposals for “beefing up” security here in the wake of the Paris attacks, which included recruiting 2,000 more spies and 10,000 troops capable of being deployed on the streets in the event of a terror attack here. This is all grist to the mill of those, like ISIS, who want to see our traditional freedoms eroded and replaced by a climate of snooping and suspicion. It makes it much easier for them to prey on gullible people and convert them to their way of thinking.  It also blurs the distinction between, and the responsibilities of, the police and the army, and raises fairly fundamental questions about who is in control of keeping the Queen’s peace in the realm, not that this will bother Cameron at all.  Quite how all this will be squared with the ongoing cuts to the armed forces and the police generally, remains to be explained.

Meanwhile, film emerged which apparently seems to show the Greek Coastguard (although probably not acting in an official capacity) trying to sink a boat load of refugees in the Mediterranean, something which is being reported with increasing frequency. And yet the boats will keep coming, and people will still drown, and there will be more of them if we start bombing as well.

Back at home, the debate rages on about whether or not to join in the bomb-fest over Syria in an official capacity.  The clamour for this to happen, as a knee-jerk reaction to the Paris attacks, has been fuelled by the likes of the Sun, with its inflammatory headline that “one in five Muslims supports ISIS”.  This poll was based on a tiny “representative” sample of 1,003 people in a telephone survey.  The media are past masters at this sort of thing, aided of course by compliant pollsters and loaded questions, or at least ambiguous ones. There are about two million Muslims in Britain, so I would like to know at least the detailed methodology used by the polling firm, Survation, supposedly independent but at least one of their team used to work for Sky Betting, which is another arm of the Murdoch empire, which of course has been in cahoots with David Cameron from “time immoral”.

But now this dodgy statistic has entered public consciousness, or at least what passes for public consciousness in the case of people who read the Sun.  A much more unexpected boost to the campaign of hatred and vilification of Muslims generally was provided by the decision of Digital Cinema Media – which handles most of the UK's cinema advertising and is owned by Odeon and Cineworld – to ban a cinema advert showing various people, including the Archbishop of Canterbury, no less, reciting the Lord’s Prayer, on the grounds that it “might offend people”. 

This sort of pussyfooting around on the grounds that people might be offended, or even worse, taking action because you are pretending to be offended on behalf of someone who couldn’t actually give a stuff, feeds the agenda of the far right, and the Daily Mail (often one and the same thing) with the myth that people, OK let’s be frank, Muslims, are getting special preferential treatment, in this, a Christian country. You can almost, on a quiet, still day, hear them bleating about it from here.  The fact that most of the people who bang on about this being a Christian country never set foot in church from one year’s end to the next is totally lost on them.

Anyway, given that it is Sunday, and the first Sunday in Advent, to boot, here is the Lord’s Prayer, in Old English, so you can have fun working out which bit is which, from your knowledge of the modern version. And if you can’t remember the modern version, kindly forbear from commenting on ecumenical matters until you have gone away and learned it.

Fæder ure þu þe eart on heofonum;

Si þin nama gehalgod

to becume þin rice

gewurþe ðin willa

on eorðan swa swa on heofonum.

urne gedæghwamlican hlaf syle us todæg

and forgyf us ure gyltas

swa swa we forgyfað urum gyltendum

and ne gelæd þu us on costnunge

ac alys us of yfele soþlice

Against this background of hate and mistrust, Mr Cameron set out his case for bombing Syria, invoking all the usual shibboleths about it making us safer here at home, when it will have exactly the opposite effect. He failed to answer any questions about what support there will be on the ground, what political negotiations will take place alongside any military action, what the final aim is for stability in the region and what long term post conflict planning has taken place regarding the rebuilding of Syria's infrastructure and democracy after these attacks. Apart from that, it was a pretty good speech, but then apart from the iceberg, the Titanic was a pretty good ship.  I suspect, myself, that the answers to those questions are, taking them in order, none, none, don’t know, and none, but this is a government which, above all, thinks it needs to be seen to doing something, however wrong-headed and ineffectual, not to say downright harmful, to appease the baying lynch-mob whipped up by the media.  See under “badger cull”.

With all this warlike tub-thumping going on, the stage was set for the leader of the opposition to tear into Cameron and state, clearly and unequivocally, the case against.  He did so, but sadly, he did it with all the oratorical fire of a furtive geography master giving out homework. It has not been a good fortnight for Jeremy Corbyn. He simply must harden his carapace, and specifically, resist the temptation to respond to any question with a defence of his complete political philosophy going back to the year dot. Short, sharp, and snappy, and if it’s none of their business, tell them so.  On the subject of whether or not the police should shoot to kill if caught up in a terrorist incident, all he had to say was “that would be an operational matter to be decided on the day by the specialist, trained, armed officers responding. It is impossible to generalise.” Instead we got into some kind of woolly debate about whether lethal force could ever be morally justified that was probably more suited to The Moral Maze than a news interview.

Similarly, on not bombing Syria. As I have said before, Corbyn needs to get some “cry” into his voice. He needs to bellow hatred from time to time. Gentle, consensus-based politics will only take you so far. And assuming that it is possible to make your argument over the heads of a hostile media to the great British public at large, and that they have the intelligence to work it out, is a big mistake.  He has to stop giving hostages to fortune. Stop talking so much, and start shouting some more, especially at the various Quislings in the shadow cabinet who are attempting to use his rather inept handling of the Syria crisis as an attempt to undermine him, because they are struggling to understand the precise meaning of “elected with an overwhelming 59%”.

So, it’s been a grim week in the world at large.  Normally, I would be seeking out some kind of good news, feelgood story that restored my faith in humanity somewhat, and indeed there was one such story this week, although it didn’t start out that way. Someone shared a story from the Nottingham Post to my news feed about a stray cat which had been handed in to the vets at Ruddington, that village famous for its history of Framework-Knitting. Sadly for the cat, when they scanned his chip, it was registered in Poland, which meant that there was no way of verifying that he had been brought into the country properly, which in turn meant either quarantine, which was the costly option at £350, or being put to sleep, unless his owners came forward.

The Nottingham Post suggested in their article that the latter outcome was the more likely, because the vets could not fund the cost of the quarantine. Now, I know that the feckless owners should have come forward and claimed him, and I know that vets have lots of money (although they aren’t a charity, true) but I rang the vets in question and offered a donation of £20 towards his quarantine costs. All we needed was 16 other people to offer the same, and William (it turned out this was his name) would be saved. The vets promised to ring me back with details of how to donate, and in the meantime, I shared it on my own Facebook page. By mid-morning it was clear that William was out of danger.  They had, as a result of people sharing the Facebook appeal in the same way as I did, offers of about £850, including a couple of people who offered to underwrite the entire cost.  So William went into quarantine, to be re-homed, eventually, and the surplus donations went to a small, local cat rescue in Nottingham.

It sounds like a win-win situation, and for William it was, but we shouldn’t forget that he was the one who was lucky enough to make it into the papers.  Such is the magnitude of the stray cat crisis that there are many more who don’t get that far, and of course we haven’t even got as far as the cat rescue January Sales yet, when pets bought unwisely as presents are turned out of doors and left to fend for themselves.  Still, it was a start, and about the only nugget of brightness on an otherwise gloomy horizon.

And so, somehow, we staggered through to today, the first Sunday of Advent.  I have to say that, given the international situation, it doesn’t feel particularly celebratory. It doesn’t seem as if the people that walked in darkness have seen a great light. It doesn’t seem like a world where every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill made low, the crooked straight, and the rough places plain. For me, right now, it’s more like the scenario Yeats described in The Second Coming:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity…

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

It seems to me more than ever, we have a choice. By we, I mean of course, the world at large as directed by our leaders, elders and betters, or so they would have us believe. We can either continue down the path which leads, ultimately, to a “Christian” versus “Muslim” world war (the quotation marks because neither of those labels is representative of the faith concerned, but that is inevitably how it will be packaged and sold) or we can pause, take a breath, and try and work out if there is another way.

Those great, resounding passages from the Book of Isaiah, which everyone quotes at Advent, and which always sound so much better in the full-fat, high-tar King James version, seem to be groping towards a world of peace, though much of the text of Isaiah is cluttered with obscure references to conflicts which the Lord will end, one way or another, usually violently, by smiting.  This is the sort of thing that makes Isaiah, indeed the whole of the OT, such a problematic prospect for me, but – at the risk of doing what I often accuse others of, and cherry-picking from the Bible to prove a specific point – who wouldn’t look forward to the prospect of a world where

The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them. And the cow and the bear shall feed; their young ones shall lie down together: and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. And the sucking child shall play on the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put his hand on the cockatrice's den. They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain: for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the LORD, as the waters cover the sea.

This seems to me to be the starkest choice we have had for some time.  We can either go down the route which leads to some rough beast slouching towards Bethlehem, or we can choose to believe that

unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counseller, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace.

Believing in itself is not enough, however. Dreadful things have been done in the past by all religions, on the simple premise that they believed very strongly that what they were doing at the time was right.  I am the last one you should ask to interpret the Bible, but the important point seems to be the ideas that the birth of Jesus represents: innocence, redemption, the possibility of another way, leading to an ultimate state of happiness. Nobody is saying it is going to be easy, because even Jesus’s journey had to go through the via dolorosa, the way of sorrows, before his eventual triumph, if indeed it ever happened at all.  But even if you contend that the entire Bible is simply a myth, nevertheless, it is possible for a myth to be ideas-driven, and the ideas of innocence, forgiveness, redemption, and peace are all implicit in the story of the birth of Christ.  That, and the fact that he chose to appear “with the poor and mean and lowly” as the carol has it.  Out in the stable, cast out from the inn. In the refugee camp, under a plastic sheet, sleeping on cardboard.

So, that seems to be the point we have reached.  I have given up praying for our “leaders”, and these days I only pray for those whose well being matters to me and mine, plus a sort of generic attempt to beam good vibes in the direction of lost and abandoned animals and lost and abandoned people. My prayers for our leaders became a parody, and usually ended up with me praying for them to be struck by lightning, which is not exactly how it’s supposed to work.  But this week I have been thinking maybe I should start up again, maybe we all should, and pray that they will see what I can see in the choice before us.

Bombing will result in the deaths of yet more innocent people, even if it kills some ISIS fighters as well.  I’m especially concerned that it will kill children.  I have come to think more and more that it is the children of the world who are now our only hope of getting out of this mess.  As I wrote in the letter I sent to my MP on the subject:

I am coming to the end of my life, but I have, currently, six young nieces and nephews, with a seventh due next year. These kids are already growing up in a world where war is the norm, and we are already going to be handing on all sorts of massive problems to their generation to solve – climate change, to name but one. For their sakes, and for the sake of the children everywhere, in the refugee camps, sleeping beside railway lines in Macedonia with only a sheet of cardboard to keep out the bitter cold, or cowering in a cellar in Syria, trying to shelter from the rain of high explosive, or the children going to bed hungry here in the UK because of “austerity”, please either vote against the proposals or at least abstain.

It ‘s going to be a nasty week next week, a muddle on all sorts of fronts. Weather, books, things that need doing urgently, stress, hospital appointments, and the struggle to make the garden more secure.  Tonight will, I hope, be the calm before the storm – we can lock the doors, bank the fire up, shut the stormy weather outside, and try at least to give thanks for the gifts we have, and how lucky we are. We can also reflect on how the wrong decisions, either our own, or someone else’s can put all of that in peril, and how quickly it could all fade away.  And we can, I suppose, try and keep focused on the light, whether it’s the spark of innate goodness buried in everyone, the star over the manger, or the faint flickering of a solstice candle against the deepest, darkest day.

Epiblog for Stir-Up Sunday

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley, and one in which winter finally bared its teeth and snarled. Anyone who doubted that the weather is getting more extreme (not necessarily because of global warming, but climate change definitely seems to be happening, however much people with vested interests argue about the odd degree on a thermometer) need only to have stood on our decking and watched the trees down the valley reeling from the savage punches of wind gusting up to 70mph. 

It was probably only the fact that most of their leaves had already gone that prevented major losses in terms of swathes of felled and uprooted woodland.  As it was, they thrashed and bent, but didn’t break. The rain was once again nearly horizontal, cold and needle-sharp. I know this because it got me a couple of times during the week, and even the trundle down the ramp to the dustbin and back left me wet through and shivering.

The Arun tumbles in his bed,

And gusty gales go by

When branches bare on Burton Glen

And Bury Hill is whitening,

I’ll drink strong ale with gentlemen

Which no-one can deny, deny,

As Hilaire Belloc might have said, if he were here right now.  And for once, I believe the south country did have it just as bad as us.

Yesterday, Deb took Misty out for a walk up Dove Stones, while I looked after Zak, Ellie, and Matilda.  Zak, because he has injured his paw and isn’t allowed to go walkies. Ellie, because she is only nine inches high and white, and is therefore apt to get lost in snowdrifts, and Matilda because her default position these days is curled up on a Maisie-blanket of choice with her nose in her tail.  She did the world’s quickest retreat this week, when she made the major tactical error of going out onto the decking just as it was raked by a gust of wind-borne rain like machine-gun fire. One second she had her tail up and was heading in one direction, then a quick mid-air volte face, and she was coming back with her tail down and her ears flat.  She didn’t move from the sofa for the rest of the day.

While I was listening to Zak and Ellie snoring in harmony on their respective beds, Deb and Misty were battling the elements up on the peaks. There was snow – the first of the winter – and ice underfoot.  Misty decided that she had heard something that spooked her and set off, crossing the stream and going down the other bank. Debbie followed, trying to call her back, and finally realised there was nothing for it, but she, too, would have to ford the icy stream to have any chance of catching up with Misty. Reluctantly, and gingerly, she did so, getting thoroughly wet in the process. When she got further down, she saw Misty, who had at least waited for Deb to catch up, but in the process, the dog had re-crossed the stream and was once more on the opposite side to its owner. Deb tried to entice Misty back over to her side, but the daft mutt now seemed strangely reluctant to make it a hat-trick and cross for the third time.  Eventually, finally, she did, and the walk was swiftly concluded.

When she got back, and I had heard the tale recounted, I gave her an extra ration of Canicalm. The dog, not Debbie. There’s nothing like a good, solid bolting of a stable door, is there? Zak polished off the food which Misty had left, including the Canicalm, and considering he is a pretty laid-back dog at the best of times, I’m surprised it didn’t tip him over into “comatose”. There have been several times when I could have quite happily dosed myself with Canicalm this week, as, on top of the normal Christmas marketing farrago, the vandals have been back again.

On Friday morning, Father Jack came down from the garage to pick up the camper and take it away for investigation of a leak which had been causing a small puddle to accumulate inside the front passenger footwell. This is the precursor to a much bigger job which involves fixing the seals on all the windows.  He dropped off the loan car and picked up the keys. Pulling out of the driveway he saw a bus coming, and thought better of it. He put his foot on the brakes and nothing happened. The pipes had been cut once again.

Fortunately, there wasn’t an accident, but there could easily have been, and it could easily have been to Debbie. Once again, I’m afraid, cutting someone’s brake pipes is tantamount, to attempted murder. Anyway, on top of everything else, we now have the police involved again, another huge insurance claim to fight (God alone knows what our premium is going to be next year) and the various defensive measures which we were instigating as a result of the last attack are now once more up at the top of the batting order, and I have spent more time than I can spare, really, talking to CCTV companies, fitters of security lights, and wreakers of wrought-iron gates with sharp spikes on top.  If we have to turn this house into a modern day version of Crac de Chevalier, we will.  The police are coming to take a statement at teatime today, anyway.

So, if this Epiblog ends up rather shorter than normal, I hope you’ll forgive the brevity. It makes a change from my usual going on and on and on and on.  I haven’t paid much attention to the outside world this week, for obvious reasons, but I would have had to be mad, deaf, and blind to have missed the massive anti-Muslim backlash after the Paris shootings. It encompassed everyone from the Prime Minister downwards, if indeed you can use the word “downwards” in that context.  Given the doings and deeds of the current Junta, I often feel the only way is “up”.  Amongst the wackier suggestions were a petition on the government web site calling for the UK to close its borders immediately (started by a British ex-pat who spends six months of every year in Spain, go figure…) and a proposal that all Muslims in the UK should be rounded up and interned in camps on remote islands off the west coast of Scotland. Presumably the fact that the younger generation of those islands has left those very isles because of there being no accommodation and no jobs, means that there’d be a readily available Scottish labour force to take the place of the interned Muslims in running the shops, takeaways and substantial parts of the NHS throughout the north of England.

Lest we should think this is just random craziness, however, we shouldn’t forget that Donald Trump, would-be president of the USA, has suggested that Muslims should all have to wear badges in public, so that non-Muslims can recognise them.  Now, why does that have a familiar ring to it? He was speaking against the background of the US Congress trying to pass a bill that would have put an end to the US saying “bring us your poor, your huddled masses”, in effect closing the country to refugees from religious persecution on the grounds that letting them in might damage the interests of those already living there. Go tell it to Geronimo.

What cracks me up about all this is that nobody routinely asks Christians to justify/condemn the outrages of nominally-Christian nutters. When a family of three Muslims was shot dead in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, back in February, did anyone ask the Archbishop of Canterbury for a statement condemning the shootings? I’m not saying he wouldn’t willingly have given such a statement, but the point is, no one asked.  Yet as soon as ISIS, who actually have about as much to do with Islam as I do with pole-dancing, pull the trigger, there is outrage not only at the deed itself, but also because “ordinary” or “moderate” Muslims don’t “condemn” the deed. The fact is, they often do – the Muslim Council of Britain issued a swift condemnation, to name but one – but it’s never news.  The people the media seek out for comments on these sorts of events are always the Anjem Choudharys or the Omar Bakris of this world. It’s like asking the late Rev. Ian Paisley for a comment on ecumenical matters in Ulster.  Plus, what exactly are moderate Muslims supposed to do to stop ISIS anyway – as one of them “tweeted” rather memorably this week, he can’t even get a text back from a girl he fancies, so how do we expect him to stop an international terror organisation?

Mr Cameron’s answer to the problem is (predictably) more bombing. Spurred on, no doubt, by Bomber Hammond, the Defence Secretary, who seems to think he is Guy Gibson. This time, it seems, they are not even going to bother with that tedious issue of getting parliament’s approval. Well, it turned out we were already bombing Syria by means of embedded forces anyway, and parliament didn’t know/wasn’t told about that, either, so I don’t suppose it makes much odds in Cameron’s eyes. He even went so far as to say that he wasn’t entirely convinced that we needed a UN mandate to start dropping HE on Raffa from 20,000 feet.  Because, after all, it worked so well last time, didn’t it? This morning, however, the government has slightly shifted its position and is now saying that they will only call a vote in parliament on bombing Syria when they are sure of winning such a vote, which means that they’ve more or less said that the action they are calling for at present doesn’t have anything like the universal popular appeal they claim it does.

This, coincidentally or not, happened when Mr Cameron has been asking for the Prime Minister to have his own personal jet, a sort of “Air Force One” for the UK. The supposed justification, in these times of “austerity” being that it will somehow save the taxpayer money. Obviously he’s never heard of Ryanair or Easyjet. Actually, he knows full well that it won’t be cheaper, it’s simply that he’s painted himself into a corner in terms of security where it’s no longer possible or advisable for him to use scheduled flights.  I do, however, have a suggestion: since Mr Cameron’s apparently so eager to bomb Syria, perhaps his new jet could be fitted with bomb racks so he can deliver additional value for money to the taxpayer by carrying out the raids in person, instead of endangering the lives of British service personnel in yet another misguided foreign-policy adventure.

I’m often asked, when I write like this, well, what would you do? How would you solve the situation? For a start, it cannot be solved by bombing. Even with the best will in the world, bombing as a strategy will not defeat ISIS for two reasons. One, even the smartest smart bomb in the world, backed by the best intelligence, will get it wrong. Innocent civilians will be killed – are already being killed, in fact. The more people who are bombing, the more refugees – it’s a simple equation. And the more innocent people who are killed, the more potential there is for the shadowy figureheads behind ISIS to radicalise the remainder, the grieving relatives, who now have a grievance as well as a grief. Give them an AK-47 and what have you got? Bippity boppity boo.

The other reason is that you can’t bomb an ideology. If you are at war with a state, a country, as we were with Nazi Germany for instance, you engage their armed forces, you blockade them, you bomb their factories, communications and means of production, and eventually, the powers that be in that state lose control of it, it ceases to function as an entity, and you invade and take over the running of the conquered country.  But ISIS aren’t a state, they are scattered pockets of death-obsessed lunatics with heavy weapons, living cheek-by-jowl with civilians in the ruins of Syria, which ceased to be a functioning state a while ago. The whole Syrian adventure has been a masterclass in how to get it wrong. So much so that we have gone from trying to undermine Assad by arming the rebels to desperately trying to shore him up with new bombing raids.

So the first thing that needs to happen is everybody needs to stop bombing Syria. In fact, there needs to be a complete cease-fire and a no-fly zone. This needs to be able to be sustained for long enough for a massive humanitarian effort on the ground in Syria itself, to stem the flow of refugees at source. The problem is, however, that ISIS won’t listen to any of this. They want one thing and one thing only, to take over the Syrian state and run it as a quasi-medieval Taleban fiefdom.  The only answer to that one seems to be that, before the no-fly zone and cease-fire can take place, that there needs to be a massive ground effort to put ISIS back in its box, at least for the time being, or push it back to areas where it can be contained.  I do not think, however, that it should be UK or American or even EU troops doing this – I’d like to see a Saudi Arabian effort, backed by the approval of the UN.

Saudi Arabia has been sitting on the sidelines. We know they have some of the most sophisticated military equipment in the world, because we sold it to them. They need to sort out the mess on their doorstep, go in and restore order. If that means Assad has to stay on for the time being, so be it, the important thing now is to stabilise the country enough for a cease-fire and humanitarian aid.  This is not a perfect solution. We have faffed about and tinkered with Syria so much that we’re now in a situation where there are no good options any more, only bad ones – and this seems to be the least bad one. Obviously, as there is no direct border, it would also involve the co-operation of Jordan and Iraq.

Saudi Arabia gets away with murder at the moment, in terms of disengagement, looking both ways, and duplicitous hypocrisy. And sometimes, it gets away with murder literally, as well. This week, Ashraf Fayadh, a Saudi poet, was sentenced to death by an “Islamic” court in Saudi Arabia for renouncing Islam.  He has already spent two years in prison after a visit from the religious police for “smoking and having long hair”.

This is apparently an English translation of the poem he wrote, which is being used as evidence of his apostasy:

Asylum: To stand at the end of a queue…

To be given a morsel of bread.

To stand! Something your grandfather used to do... Without knowing the reason why.

The Morsel? You.

The homeland: A card to put in your wallet.

Money: Papers that carry images of Leaders.

The Photo: Your substitution pending your return.

And the Return: A mythological creature… from your grandmother’s tales.

End of the first lesson.

If we stand by and watch the Saudis executing people for writing poetry, good or bad, it matters not, then we can truly abandon all pretensions as to civilisation. And if this isn’t proof that the Saudis have far too much time on their hands, and would be much better off employed sorting out ISIS, then I don’t know what is.

Here at home, there have been the usual stories which, when you first look at them, you aren’t quite sure if they are serious or if they emanate from the growing number of spoof satirical web sites designed to poke fun at the great and the good.  George Osborne has injected millions of pounds into the MPs’ hardship fund.  Yes, you heard me right. It’s apparently a fund that exists to help out MPs who fall into straitened circumstances when they reach retirement, and they are down to their last lecture tour, consultancy fee, or book deal.  And yes, these are the same MPs who are allowed, while they are MPs voting themselves 11% salary increases, to also keep their lucrative additional jobs as stockbrokers, lawyers, broadcasters, you name it.

They have also been filibustering again. The news report showing loathsome back-bench Tory MPs talking without allowing interruption to deny, this time, the teaching of first aid to children by deliberately running out of time, was also notable for the fact that it showed there were only about a dozen people in the whole chamber.  In any other job, if you only turned up when you felt like it, fiddled your expenses, and carried on extensive alternative employment while still drawing your salary, you would be on a “disciplinary” faster than you could say P45, and rightly so. It’s high time there was a minimum attendance requirement for MPs and a ban on them having any other paid employment while they are serving in parliament. 

Two things have happened, though, this week, that have restored my battered faith in humanity somewhat.  The first was the story that the workers on oil rigs in the North Sea off the coast of Scotland have been rescuing exhausted owls which have been turning up and roosting on their rigs – presumably after flying 30 or 40 miles over open sea, probably after being disturbed by bad weather.  When the owls are well enough, they are airlifted back to the mainland and released back into the wild.

The second is a more personal tale. One of my friends on Facebook, we’ll call him Peter, lives in Paris and was an unwilling bystander when the French police and special forces stormed a flat in his neighbourhood during the week, and the gang responsible for planning the previous week’s shootings attempted to blast their way out and were (mostly) killed.   Despite all this mayhem going on two streets away, Peter has taken in an injured cat with a poorly leg. Sinbad, for that is the mog’s name, used to live with a bloke called Nasser, who was forced to move, but couldn’t take the cat with him. Peter has not only offered the cat a home but paid for its leg operation. The vet, too, only charged half of the normal rate and waived his consultation fee.                    

So, there are good people around, it’s just getting harder to see them, I guess. Anyway, today is Stir-Up-Sunday, the last Sunday before Advent, when you are supposed to come home from church, inspired by the collect for today,

Stir up, we beseech thee, O Lord, the wills of thy faithful people; that they, plenteously bringing forth the fruit of good works, may of thee be plenteously rewarded; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

And begin feverish preparations on your Christmas pudding, with the whole family joining in the stirring and each making a wish as they go. The pudding should always be stirred from East to West, in homage to the three wise men who came to visit Jesus. Pudding preparations notwithstanding, it sounds like a good prayer for our times. We could certainly do with people bringing “plenteously” forth  the “fruit of good works”, especially after so many bad ones. It’s a prayer, for once, I could gladly join in with.  As for the wishes, where do I start?

That war won’t be allowed to escalate, that people will realise that not all Muslims are terrorists and not all terrorists are Muslims. That a way can be found to disengage with Syria, stop the fighting, and administer aid.   That the refugees and the homeless are housed and the hungry are fed. That the missing animals come home, or, failing that, are found and are re-homed. I could add, that the people who keep vandalising our van fall down a list shaft, but then that would make me as bad as they are.  Perhaps the fact that I can realise that means I am evolving, or my long-dormant sense of forgiveness is.  But then again, when I think about what could have happened to Debbie if she’d tried to drive it, then I have no good wishes for these people – the kindest thing I could wish for is for what they tried to do to us to happen to them – for their evil intentions to rebound on them, with whatever consequences.

Anyway, that’s a long list for  Big G to work down, especially when he’s already got his hands full elsewhere. So I am not expecting anything dramatic to happen any time soon.  But then, like the glimmers of winter sunshine in the midst of the November storms, like the good deeds of the owl rescuers and the cat-rescuers in the midst of the unrelenting bad news, perhaps we need to remember, and cling onto, that there are nuggets of hope, twinkling in the dross at the bottom of the gold miner’s pan, or like the bright sixpence at the bottom of the Christmas pudding mix. Because if ever there was a time when we needed

the dearest freshness deep down things;                

And though the last lights off the black West went    

Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—          

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

It’s now.

Epiblog for the Feast of the Blessed Richard Whiting

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. Plus we have had the first of the real winter storms, although it’s still been unseasonably warm. In fact, it’s been the warmest year since whenever or something, but then anyone with half a brain can see that the climate is screwed, probably to the point of no return.

The wind and rain during the week has wrecked the trees, and there are now very few leaves left on the bough. Most of them are strewn “thick as autumnal leaves in Vallambrosa” and no sooner do I pick them up and put them into bin bags to make leaf mould for next year, than another golden snowdrift covers my wheelchair ramp.

I did notice though, on Saturday morning, when I was grubbing around getting ready and transferring into my wheelchair, that the red prayer flag which the squirrels stole last autumn, and which had unaccountably become lodged in one of John next door’s Cotoneaster trees, was still there. Against all the odds. It had been previously hidden by the leaves of other trees obscuring it, but there it was – the red flag flying here. Maybe it’ll see me through this winter as well. I hope so.

There are broken twigs, too – quite substantial ones, which, in my medieval life, I gather up and break into short lengths to use as kindling for the stove. So, all in all, the weather has been wild. And woolly. The birds and the squirrels have been hoovering up anything I can put out for them, and who can blame them? It must be hard for them to find food elsewhere when the weather’s so bad.

The squirrels, in particular, I’ve noticed, when they come down to the dish of bird food, have abandoned their previous dainty habit of picking up one sunflower seed at a time, and nibbing it as genteelly as a guest at a New Yorker book launch might nibble a canapé. Now, they put both their hands into the dish and pick up handfuls of grain, stuffing it into their bulging cheeks as fast as they can macerate it with their sharp little teeth. I haven’t seen the old squirrel for days now, though, and I fear that the worst has happened to him. Sleep well, old warrior, in squirrel Valhalla.

The pigeons have been down as well, pecking their way through, methodically, but the most impressive sight was on Saturday morning when I came back in from putting out the composting to see three huge crows lumbering around on the decking, just outside the conservatory door, taking it in turns to feed from the dish. Matilda was eyeing them up from the safety of the padded armchair six feet from the stove, her eyes glittering and her tail swishing. “I’d steer clear of them, if I were you,” I told her.

She’s actually been spending more and more time indoors now, which is only to be expected, given the foul weather. Plus, she is getting on a bit. Given that she was nine when we got her, she must be coming up to twelve this year, which is 60 in human years, same as me. There is also the issue of the fireworks. No sooner had we got Guy Fawkes safely out of the way than we start in on bloody Diwali, so it’s been like bomb alley out there again these week, every night as soon as dark falls.

She got particularly spooked on the night before Diwali, Tuesday, when I had just let her out onto the decking as a particularly loud salvo went off, just across the valley. I actually heard her growl from the other side of the conservatory door and I opened it to let her back in. In fact, she would probably have come through the door if I hadn’t opened it first – somewhere, deep in the crinkly recesses of her furry little walnut brain, the Cheetah genes kicked in and she probably touched 90mph in her transit to her little hidey-hole in the front room. I’ve never seen her move so fast, twelve or not.

Unfortunately, though, fireworks are still the bane of our lives, especially where Misty is concerned. On Saturday she was spooked by bangs of some description up on the moors above Meltham while out walkies with Debbie. Cue Debbie spending at least an hour out of her life wandering across the bleak landscape in driving cold, horizontal rain, like a latter-day Catherine Earnshaw, shouting the dog’s name at the top of her voice. Finally, just when she was about to give up hope, Misty emerged from the undergrowth up ahead and rejoined the walkies as if nothing had happened.

By this time, though, Deb was wet through, and on the verge of hypothermia, so she was not overly impressed when she then ran out of diesel on the way home. Fortunately she had enough in the system, once the van had stood for a while and it had settled, to start it again and just coast down the hill to Meltham, where there is a Morrisons, with a petrol station.

So, she got home in the end and both Deb and Misty were soaked. Deb, being a human, can dry herself, but I helped get Misty’s harness off and tried to dry her as best I could with kitchen roll. A while later, after she’d had her tea, she went to the door, and we let her out into the garden, to do her necessaries, at about 7pm. Five minutes came and went. No dog. Ten minutes came and went. No dog. Preparation of tea was suspended. Twenty minutes came and went. No dog. After half an hour, I was getting ready to put her on dogslost.co.uk, after having shouted myself hoarse out the front and out the back. The ‘phone rang. It was the start of a familiar conversation.

“Excuse me, have you lost a dog?”

“Yes! Have you found one?”

She was at the Railway Inn in Berry Brow. I thanked the very kind bloke (who was called Vic) for looking after her. God alone knows what must have spooked her enough to have made that distance in half an hour (including crossing the A616) but there it was. I’m guessing fireworks. Wearily, Debbie set off in the camper to retrieve her. When they got back, she was very quiet and chastened, and curled up on her bed behind the settee. (The dog, not Debbie).

Actually, there have been several times this week when I could quite happily joined her. The world has been a bleak and scary place during the last seven days. One of the few bright spots is that it seems that David Cameron has been caught out once more making up statistics to back up his case, this time on immigration. If there is one area where we need clarity and objective assessment, it is on immigration figures. However, not only does the government not collect them accurately and in a timely manner, but they selectively cherry-pick one or two figures, which really need anyway to be understood in the context of other figures, and they distil them into one simple soundbite which they then plaster all over a complicit media. They do it on the subject of benefits as well.

By the time the official watchdog catches up and raps them over the knuckles, the game has moved on. Plus, of course, any retraction or correction somehow never seems to achieve the prominence of the original story. I find it difficult to come up with a single word for what Cameron is doing. I toyed with “massaging” or “being selective” or “manipulating”, or “cherry-picking”, but in the end I settled on “lying”.

There is a curious disconnect within Cameron’s makeup which I have never really been able to pin down. To have said some of the things he has come out with, especially since the election, he must either be incredibly naïve and stupid, or incredibly duplicitous. This week, an exchange of letters between Cameron and the head of Oxfordshire County Council found its way into the public domain. Cameron, whose constituency lies within the county, had written a letter to the head of the council, basically asking him if it was not possible to make cuts in such a way that wouldn’t impact so much on front line services. The council leader replied with a step by step rebuttal, pointing out that the council had already been cut tot the bone and beyond in some areas, and there was literally nothing more to be done.

The letter, which takes apart Cameron’s claims one by one, is six pages long, and too long to quote in full here. The text of both Cameron’s letter and the council leader’s reply are readily available online. George Monbiot, writing about it in the Guardian, picked out one particular instance (again, an instance of dodgy statistics):

Again and again, he exposes the figures the prime minister uses as wildly wrong. For example, Cameron claims that the cumulative cuts in the county since 2010 amount to £204m. But that is not the cumulative figure; it is the annual figure. Since 2010, the county has had to save £626m. It has done so while taking on new responsibilities, and while the population of elderly people and the numbers of children in the social care system have boomed. Now there is nothing left to cut except frontline services.

I have no particular brief for George Monbiot, by the way. I once wrote him a letter ticking him off for something he had got wrong, and he never replied. Lately, his plat du jour has been wittering about the erosion and flood damage caused by run-off from farmers’ fields. But in highlighting this story, he may just be on to something. However, it still doesn’t answer the question of whether David Cameron is really too stupid to realise the effect of his own cuts (and these are on a council which has been relatively protected against the effects of “austerity”- imagine what a Labour-supporting northern council must be getting) or whether he knows full well and is just going on with a brass-faced assertion that white is black, up is down, etc, etc, on the grounds that if he repeats it often enough, people will believe it.

This was also in evidence when he stood up an announced the summary execution of “Jihadi John” in a drone strike on Thursday. Apparently the ISIS bogey-man had been taken out by a missile from an American “Reaper” drone. (Although, bizarrely, we were told that a British drone also “helped” in the operation in some unspecified way. Perhaps it held the other drone’s coat, I don’t know.) I have absolutely no sympathy for the fate of Jihadi John and I regret his passing not one jot.

BUT

The manner of it - extrajudicial execution by drone strike - does raise some very serious questions which seem to have been completely ignored by the media and the government. Again, either David Cameron does not understand these issues, which makes him stupid, or he knows full well what they are, and continues regardless, which makes him wilfully evil. Good for Jeremy Corbyn to have the guts to raise it, knowing full well that his words will be twisted and misinterpreted by the media in their ongoing campaign of personal vilification

It is this - we are not legally at war with anyone. We are at war, obviously, we are at war with a particularly virulent strain of Wahabi fundamentalism, and have been since 2001. But we aren't at war with a STATE. We never declared war on Afghaistan, or Iraq, or Syria - so the killing of "enemy combatants" by drone is, under international law, illegal.

Apart from the fact that international justice is now whatever the USA says it is, there is no process, and people are likely to find themselves vapourised at the press of a button, it's the precedent it sets. If you can kill someone with a drone in Syria without due process what's to stop the government doing it here? And not only against ISIS, but against anyone they don’t like? The precedent has been set, the Rubicon has been crossed, and we are now in uncharted territory. Plus of course, reducing Jihadi John to a smear of strawberry jam on the wallpaper has probably already recruited another 1000 or so wannabes who will be wanting to replace him.

Kate Allen, the head of UK Amnesty International, has written a blog on this which explains the situation much better than I can. It is too long to quote here in full, but this is the crux of it:

"When I tweeted last night about Amnesty’s alarm at the news that the UK has been conducting summary executions from the air, I was met with a barrage of replies. A large number of those replies said simply; these people deserved to die.

The principle of the rule of law does not require the subject to be likeable in order to be protected by it. Indeed, it is obviously most necessary when they are not. Security is a justifiable aim of any government and it is clear that we are talking about people who frankly revel in jeopardising that security.
But the legal question is this: is the threat they pose to the UK, from Syria, one that can justify the suspension of the rule of law and the dismissal of the very concept of accountable justice?

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

Judging by the recent fawning over the Chinese head of state during his visit to the UK, I would imagine the Junta wouldn’t bat an eyelid if Beijing started executing dissidents by drone strike. After all, cheap steel seems to outweigh human rights every time.

I didn't particularly want to log on to Facebook on Saturday morning. I normally look forward to having a quick squiz round to see how my friends are doing over the first cup of tea of the day, even though these days I have to wade through reams of memes to find the odd nugget that says a cat has had kittens or a kid has passed an exam, or people I know have had a great holiday. I once did an informal audit of my Facebook friends and a surprisingly high proportion of them were dogs and cats. There’s even a tortoise.

I knew, though, that on Saturday morning, Facebook would be full of hate - that amongst the perfectly reasonable and heartfelt expressions of sympathy for the victims and families affected by the outrage in Paris overnight, there would also be people seeking to use this as an "I told you so", to claim that the refugees are in fact an army of ISIS on the march and they are coming here next, and we should close all our borders, not accept any migrants, and send 'em all home, look after our own first, etc etc zzz zzz zzz contd. p. 94.

I could, of course, just hide these posts and conclude that, since somehow I've acquired quite a lot of friends on Facebook, in that sample there will inevitably be one or two clodpolls who believe everything Britain First comes out with. But really, hiding it isn't the answer.

Leaving aside for the moment that we don't yet know who has done this, though we all assume it is some kind of “would be Islamist in name only fascist gang of cowards”, let's just go with that assumption and list a few things out. I always find that helps.

Not all terrorists are Muslims
Not all Muslims are terrorists
Not all refugees are Muslims
Not all immigrants into the UK are Muslims, in fact, given the preponderance of economic migration from eastern Europe, probably most of them are Catholics!

Examining the theory that there are ISIS terrorists mixed up in the refugee stream:

France has not been taking refugees. And, if it comes to that, we're only taking 20,000 over five years. The 7/7 terror attacks in London were carried out by people who were home-grown radicals. But, even assuming somehow that an ISIS death squad had managed to get in with the refugees, even if they were moving around within the Schengen area, the most dim-witted border guard would have noticed the guns and grenades at one or other of the many borders they would have had to cross to get to, say, Germany and thence to France, especially in a crowd of people who otherwise have only the rags they stand up in.

There are women and children in the refugee stream, by the way, it is just not reported as prominently in the media. Also, a common pattern is for the man to set off and find somewhere safe, then send for his family.

The people who are desperately trying to reach Greece are actually FLEEING FROM precisely the people who fired the shots and threw the grenades last night. But supposing the meatheads are right, and there are terrorists in the refugee stream, that points up even more the fact that the whole process needs to be much better MANAGED by the EU, with transit camps, screening, medical checks, etc as I have been arguing all along. At the moment, it is haphazard, random, and chaotic. Because, with the possible exception of Angela Merkel, EU politicians have been blowing and puffing hot air and jockeying for domestic advantage rather than getting on with sorting out the biggest humanitarian crisis since the second world war. Yes, David Cameron, I do mean you.

Anyway, there will, sadly, be even more of a "hardening of hearts" because of this outrage. It was a process which had already begun, as compassion fatigue sets in, but it will now be hastened by politicians such as David Cameron and Theresa May, not to mention Farage, posturing about immigration and telling lies in order to make themselves look good/electable in the eyes of the Daily Mail. And all the white van man Sun-reading morons who make up Bigot Britain will be even more sure that they need to "send 'em all back where they came from".

ISIS want this sort of reaction, because they don't care if petrol is poured on the bonfire. They love death and carnage, they thrive on it. But the really sad thing is that now, all refugees are likely to be tarred with the same brush, and because of the reaction of the "send 'em home" brigade, people – possibly children, will die of hypothermia and hunger this winter in the refugee camps because of this attack. Well, because of this reaction to this attack. And the boats will carry on coming, and people will drown.

I know two people who live in Paris, one purely through Facebook, and another, a girl I used to work with, back in the day. I'm glad to say they are both safe. It goes without saying that I feel desperately sorry for anyone in Paris this morning who is having to cope with the worst news that could have happened to their loved ones and families. I can only hope that people will pause and reflect before making a bad situation even worse by blaming refugees for this appalling atrocity.

By the way, I don't think the Paris atrocities were "revenge" for the killing of Jihadi John - these things take months to plan and I wouldn't be surprised if, when the truth emerges about who dunnit, it wasn't being planned well before the refugee tragedy even started. What does concern me, though, is the speed with which an apparently intact passport was found “in the vicinity” of one of the dead suicide bombers. The passport has been immediately seized upon as proof that the refugees are in fact an army of Jihadis on the march, because it shows that the holder passed through the Greek island of Leros and claimed asylum there.

I am normally the last person to believe internet conspiracy theories. Usually, as with the case of the “faked” moon landing or the idea that the Twin Towers were actually dynamited and not brought crashing down by the impact of two hijacked airliners, for them to be correct, it would require an unimaginably high number of people to have all been “in” on the secret and to have kept quiet for years. Human nature just doesn’t work like that. But I would like to hear the answers to some questions about this passport.

Is it possible for someone to be blown to pieces by a suicide bomb, yet for the passport to have survived? Exactly how near to the body was the passport? Is it real, or a fake? Did it show any signs of having been in an explosion? Was the bomber actually the same person as the holder of the passport? Or is it possible it was stolen? Those who have most to gain from it being a genuine Syrian passport carried by a genuine Syrian terrorist are of course those (including Mr Cameron) who want to step up our bombing campaign in Syria. I wouldn’t put it past French intelligence, for instance, to “find” a passport that strengthens the case for French involvement in an enhanced Syrian campaign. Yet it appears from the latest reports this morning that at least some of the plot may have been carried out from a terrorist cell based in Belgium. So when do we start bombing Brussels? (This is for all those Christmas dinner sprouts! Take that!)

These unanswered questions will not stop the rush of the Gaderene Swine to blame all refugees for the crimes. The Facebook page of David Cameron himself has comment after comment of the “send ‘em all home” variety, interspersed with “bomb the Middle East flat” and exhortations for the UK to go in “with boots on the ground” and “clear the whole region”. Others, elsewhere on the internet, are even more brutal: “Take the nearest Muslim to the vet and have them put down”. Says one charming correspondent.

As well as being a boon to the right-wing anti-immigration movement, and a boon to ISIS, who would, to be honest, have claimed responsibility even if they hadn’t done it, this atrocity is also grist to the mill who say that “all this is caused by religion”. It’s actually exactly the opposite. It’s caused by people trying to impose their belief-system by force. That has absolutely nothing to do with the true nature of religion, establishing a contact and a relationship between that which is “you” and the awesome power that drives everything for ever. The problem is that over the years, humanity has allowed religion, essentially a spiritual quest, and morality, the basis of laws and everyday living, to become one and the same thing, using various questionable texts from the time of Christ to justify their actions. Thus, the send ‘em all home brigade, who only ever go to church to hatch, match and despatch, harp on about the clash of cultures, claiming that Britain is a Christian country.

It is nothing of the sort. When I see the hedge fund managers sell all they have and give the proceeds to the poor, then I will believe this is a Christian country. When I see the meek inherit the earth, then I will believe this is a Christian country. When I see the children fed, and the swords beaten into ploughshares, then I will believe this is a Christian country. When I see the refugees having their wounds bound, being given alms, and put up at an inn, instead of being left in the ditch while people pass by on the other side, then I will believe this is a Christian country. Until then, woe on ye, Pharisees, you whitened sepulchres.

Whatever the final outcome, though, the Paris massacre will not be good for the genuine refugees. If, as looks likely, it is now inevitable that the Schengen Agreement will be abandoned and once more border controls will go up all over Europe. This is actually something I said I hoped would happen, but in tandem with the establishment of reception centres, medical and other screening, and a quota system to apportion refugees according to the host country’s resources, population density and other factors. Now, it looks as though we shall get the former without any of the latter, and fortress Europe will develop a siege mentality that will leave those fleeing conflict in an even worse position.

Today seems an appropriate day in some ways to reflect on mayhem and carnage being carried out in the name of “religion” as it is the Feast Day of the Blessed Richard Whiting, who, on this day in 1539, was dragged through the streets of Glastonbury tied to a hurdle, then hanged, drawn and quartered on top of Glastonbury Tor, because, as the last abbot of Glastonbury Abbey, he had resisted its sequestration by the Crown at the time of the dissolution of the monasteries. Henry VIII was another one who confused (perhaps deliberately) religion and morality, only in his case, he wanted his own morality, even if that meant making up his own religion as he went along. He would not have been out of place in ISIS. Someone should maybe tell them that the rest of the world has moved on almost half a century.

As for me, I am actively counting the days until the emphasis starts to swing towards the light again. I don’t like actively wishing my life away, but on the other hand, these dark miserable days, full of domestic challenges and news of disasters, are no good for my mental health. In the same way that problems always seem more manageable with a cup of tea in your hand, if it’s fine and sunny outside and you can go and sit in the garden, even for just a few minutes, and centre yourself, then you can come back refreshed and renewed, and have another go.

I have great plans for the garden in 2016. I know I say this every year, but this year I am really going to make an effort. At the moment, it’s a seething mess of leaf-mould. If I can, I’d like to put my plans into effect at long last, because I think that, at times like these, it’s important to do something to redress the balance, however small. My planting half-a dozen roses is not going to stop the next ISIS attack, but ultimately, if there were more roses than guns, the world would be a better place. (Not if there was more Guns ‘n’ Roses, though.)

I happened (by accident) upon the writings of Brian Bates this week, and specifically his exploration of the concept of “Wyrd” which occurs often in Anglo-Saxon (Old English) poetry and which is usually translated as “fate”. Two quotations in particular stood out:

Nothing may happen without wyrd, for it is present in everything, but wyrd does not make things happen. Wyrd is created at every instant, and so wyrd is the happening.

Wyrd existed before the Gods and will exist after them. Yet wyrd lasts only for an instant, because it is the constant creation of the forces. Wyrd is itself, constant change, like the seasons, yet because it is created at every instant it is unchanging, like the still center of a whirlpool.

And

The pattern of wyrd is like the grain in wood, or the flow of a stream, it is never repeated in exactly the same way. But the threads of wyrd pass through all things and we can open ourselves to its pattern by observing the ripples as it passes by

I was particularly struck by the similarities between this interpretation of “Wyrd” and the Confucian idea of the Tao, the watercourse way. Plus, of course, that idea of wyrd being created at every instant, just in the same way that John Gribben and other proponents of his theories claim that we create “reality” on the hoof, choosing one out of an infinite variety of possible universes at each millisecond of time. It’s wyrd in all senses of the world when the Germanic philosophies of the dark ages, the Tao, and string theory all come together in one unlikely concatenation, but at he same time, for me, strangely, it offers hope – hope that there is a choice, and we’re not all just hurtling down pre-destined metalled ways to our doom. Time is inexorable, but we have a choice what to do with it.

And then, of course, on Friday, I was moved to look up, once again, the final stanza of Auden’s poem, 1st September, 1939.

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.


A time like this puts us to the test. We can either use our “wyrd” to join in the general rush to denigrate all refugees for the actions of seven terrorists, or we can stand strong, and, alongside the people of Paris, “show an affirming flame”

.

Epiblog for Remembrance Sunday

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. And a windy one, and a wet one, come to that. Everywhere is now coated in a deep layer of wet dead leaves. On the plus side, this means leaf-mould beyond our wildest dreams, except that I have temporarily run out of bin-bags and need to get some more on the next Sainsbury’s order, but once these arrive I can scoop up the dead foliage and set it a-mouldering and a-mulching to my heart’s content.  There should be no shortage of compost next year. Unfortunately, I also need some lime, to counteract the acidity of our soil, and that only comes in 17KG tubs, so I am loath to order any in case the courier leaves it somewhere where I can’t move it to get my wheelchair past!

But yes, this was the week when the wind got up, the rain came down, and the leaves came off.  I found myself thinking of that Gerard Manley Hopkins poem that starts:

Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you wíll weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow's springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What héart héard of, ghóst guéssed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

A cheery little number, but nevertheless appropriate for this time of year. On Saturday, the weather really felt like the end of the world was nigh. At about 11.40AM it was as black as Satan’s knickers outside, the wind sprang up, and horizontal rain was lashing across the decking. The string of prayer flags which Owen kindly put up for me in the balmy days of September became detached at one end, and was flailing and whipping about in the wind like something demented, possessed.  Matilda went outside for all of five seconds before turning tail and fleeing back to the warmth of the padded armchair six feet from the stove.  She is still in it now, as I write, although she has moved a couple of times in the last 24 hours, mainly to make the short trip to the saucer of Felix on the conservatory floor.

Misty, Debbie and Zak (who stayed over for a couple of nights) have been coming back in the cold and dark from their daily route-marches over t’moors, plastered up with mud and wet through, including one memorable occasion when Debbie apparently slipped off a stepping stone and ended up sitting on her backside in a fast-flowing, icy, stream. Nice.  The dogs think this is all great fun, and Misty has come to recognise the early signs of Debbie getting ready to go walkies, trotting back and forth to the door in the mistaken belief that it will somehow speed things up.  Zak, when he’s here, picks up on this vibe and joins in, so for at least twenty minutes before any dog-walking expedition actually sets off, my wheelchair is like a tiny island in a sea of milling dogs.

This is also officially the firework season, of course: I know this because, in common with at least 10,000 other people, I signed a government petition to restrict or ban the use of fireworks other than in organised displays, on the grounds of the distress they cause to dogs, cats and other animals. Because more than 10,000 had signed, the Junta was forced to respond, which it did, rather snootily, by saying:

We are aware that fireworks can cause distress to animals. Restrictions on the general public’s use of fireworks, and permitted noise levels, already exist and we have no plans to extend them. Current firework regulations allow fireworks for home use to be sold during the traditional firework periods of Bonfire Night (15 October – 10 November), New Year’s Eve (26 December – 31 December), Chinese New Year (the day of the Chinese New Year and three days immediately before), and Diwali (the day of Diwali and three days immediately before).

What is staggering to me about this bland response to me is that the “traditional firework period of Bonfire Night” apparently officially extends from October 15^th to November 10^th. When I was a child, it was, er, Bonfire Night.

You could question, I suppose, the premise that it’s a good idea to celebrate the downfall of Guy Fawkes at all, especially as in some places,  Lewes for example, it’s still tinged with the Protestant vs Catholic sectarianism that has tainted so much of our recent history. But then, on the other hand, if there is nobody left to recall who Guy Fawkes was, and what he did/didn’t do, there’s also a danger that we not only forget the lessons of history, but that we might even be forced to re-live some of the more unpleasant ones.  The same argument applies to Remembrance Sunday. As it stands, if some politician comes along and says “I know, let’s round up all the Jews and gas them”, or “Let’s dig a huge trench right across Northern France and then sit in it for four years lobbing poison gas shells at each other”, there’s still somebody, or a few somebodies, who will say, “Hang on, remember what happened last time?”

Perhaps the Junta should conscript Guy Fawkes into their benighted “British Values” campaign as an example of how things can go wrong when you become so radicalised that you want to settle international arguments with domestic high-explosive.  Because that’s what ISIS do, isn’t it? They blow up innocent people in order to try and force a political/religious settlement.  Whereas this week, Michael Fallon, the defence secretary, argued that the UK should bomb Syria (which we’re doing anyway, but not in an “official” capacity) and blow up innocent people in order to try and force a political/religious settlement. Oh, hang on…

Actually, in the case of the government, it’s not so much ignorance of the lessons of history, as a wilful refusal to learn the lessons of history, even though they know exactly what those lessons are. It’s almost as if, in some areas, in some perverse way, they are determined to repeat those actual mistakes because they don’t care about the consequences, when compared to the chance of staying in power for ever and/or creaming off yet more money for the rich.

There is a concept called Godwin’s Law, which states that in every and any given political argument, someone will inevitably drag in the Nazis as an example of why a given idea is wrong or evil. It happens so regularly, that, as a rhetorical gambit, it has become almost discredited. This is fortunate for the government, because they ignore several of the lessons of Nazi Germany, and nobody picks them up on it. Scapegoating specific communities as the cause of all that is wrong with society, for instance. These days it’s the Muslims, although it’s often (apart from the “immigrant go home” vans) a very subtle and insidious kind of propaganda, whereas in Weimar Germany it was the Jews, and was expressed in much more blatant terms.

Not just the Jews, of course. Disabled people were also a target, and I found myself enlightened as to the true, chilling extent of this by a blog posting I was directed to this week.  This was on a blog called Granite and Sunlight, written by a disability activist in Scotland on the subject of “Aktion T4” which was the Nazi’s term for the systematic eradication of disabled people.  What had prompted the piece was the outrage when Sioux Blair-Jordan, a Labour member and disability rights campaigner, had said in her speech at the Labour conference that if David Cameron gets his way over replacing the EU commission on Human Rights with his own, home-cooked “Bill of Rights”, disabled people may as well walk into the gas chamber today.

I have paraphrased those words, but that is the gist of it, and it provoked a howl of outrage from the media, who thought it was probably going too far (hah! They should talk) to make such outlandish and untrue statements (unless they are something about Jeremy Corbyn) and also from official Jewish bodies who seem to think in some cases that the Holocaust is their own personal property and only they are allowed to get upset about it. This is not to detract from the fact that they did suffer. Horribly and unimaginably. But they weren’t the only ones.

Aktion T4 began with propaganda: “[£200,000] is what this person suffering from a hereditary defect costs the People’s community during his lifetime. Fellow citizen, that is your money too.”  This is actually a translation, with modern-day equivalent sum inserted, of the text of a Nazi poster of the 1930s. However, it could easily have been a Daily Mail headline from last week. The entire blog is too long to quote in full (though it is well worth reading) but the crux of the article is set out thus:

Many such items of propaganda were distributed, citing the cost of supporting disabled people to the taxpayer, how many healthy people could be fed and housed for the price of just one ‘Hereditary Defective’ (the title of a particularly brutal propaganda film showing the worthlessness of the life of a sick person). But before the move towards ‘mercy killing’ was the push towards resentment, something we in the UK should recognise. Germans were told that the state could do more to help them if it wasn’t for all the ‘defectives’ they had to look after. They were told that it was their business, because it was their taxes paying for it.

After the last 8 years of government (it started well before the Conservatives took office in 2010), most disabled people have either been or have known victims of members of the public demanding to know why they have a Blue Badge. When told they have no right to private medical information, the response is always the same: ‘I pay for you to live, my taxes keep you alive.’ Some go on to explicitly state that they have the right to know that any given disabled person is doing as much as they can to ‘get better’, and I’ve seen it argued multiple times that this should include access to medical records to show that they are ‘trying’. The Germans were given first the resentment, and then the salve to let them believe their hardened hearts were actually kind ones: the push for mercy killing.

That this was actually carried out, on a large scale, is beyond doubt. Obviously it was nothing like the scale of the systematic extermination of the Jews, but it still happened.  The blog continues:

None of this could have happened without the initial propaganda campaign. The Third Reich managed to successfully change the narrative from disabled people being part of the population (before access to modern medical care, disability was common and accounted for) to their being worthless drains on society, and that it would be better for everyone – the people paying the bills and the poor, suffering souls – if they were put out of their misery. They needed both resentment and dehumanisation for it to work, and they created both easily with insidious campaigns which are mirrored in every major newspaper in the UK today.

So, yes, not so much ignoring the lessons of history as deliberately seeking a pattern from the fascist era and repeating it today.  I don’t believe that there will be camps built into which disabled people are systematically herded, but the DWP has been quite successful at killing people as a result of benefit sanctions, and wilfully refuses to confront the scale of its own carnage. You could argue that there is a moral difference between driving someone to suicide and rounding them up and gassing them.  Just in the same way, maybe, as you could argue that there’s a slight moral difference between an innocent bystander, a child perhaps, being blown up by ISIS and the same child being blown up by one of our bombs. You could argue it. And good luck with that one.

The DWP did suffer one reverse in its attempts to establish the Fourth Reich this week, however, when the Trussell Trust rejected its proposal for DWP observers to be installed at food banks in order to monitor their usage and offer “advice”.  It’s pretty clear to me that any “monitoring” would involve checking up on the entitlement of people to be there, and any “advice” would probably be along the lines of “I advise you that your benefits are now sanctioned”. Well done, the Trussell Trust, for seeing off what is also the creeping institutionalisation of food banks, adding another layer of “acceptability” as they are subsumed into the DWP system, so that they become seen as the norm, and not as part of an appalling anachronism of poverty and inequality. I hope the other organisations operating food banks will do likewise, and tell the DWP  and ipso facto the Junta, to concentrate on curing the disease instead of trying to massage the symptoms.

Not that they are likely to listen, in a week when Tory MP Philip Davies (the man who thinks that disabled people aren’t “worth” the minimum wage) talked his way through a “filibuster” to prevent legislation being enacted that would have given free parking at hospitals to carers, and Tory minister Alistair Burt employed a similar tactic to prevent legislation that would have allowed the NHS to buy drugs more cheaply once their patents had expired.  He obviously cares more about expired patents than expired patients.  This, too, in the week when we learn, locally, that Slaithwaite Health Centre is likely to close because of the cuts, yet Kirklees and Calderdale NHS Trust is paying £500,000, which could have gone directly into patient care, to consultants instead, in a bid to find out… how it could save money.

People occasionally say, oh, all this stuff about the NHS being dismantled and about how disabled people are being targeted, it’s all scaremongering, isn’t it. They could do well to ponder the story of the former bus depot in Blackburn that seems destined to become the first manifestation of the new “workhouse” system.  Shamefully, the council which has signed the deal to bring this into being, Blackburn with Darwen, is Labour controlled.

The semi-derelict structure is to be transformed into a charity and recycling centre where up to 10 otherwise homeless people would live on-site, under supervision. It would be run as an arms-length operation by a charity called Recycling Lives which aims to use the revenue from the sales of recycled scrap metal, tyres, plastics, televisions, and other items will provide training, work experience, education and employment.  All this is very laudable, in some ways, but on the other hand, there are many unanswered questions: presumably these people will have to be paid at least the minimum wage, but will there be deductions for food and accommodation? How much of their attendance will be voluntary, as opposed to compulsory? And what’s the difference between people recycling televisions in a 21^st century workhouse in return for a bed and a bowl of gruel, and people picking oakum in a 19^th century workhouse in return for the same deal?  Obviously, in this weather especially, it’s better that 10 people who would otherwise have been sleeping out in the cold are under cover and presumably warm and dry – but look at the precedent it sets to the Philip Davieses of this world. This one will need watching.

So I sit here, wearing a red poppy, a white poppy and a purple poppy, and it’s Remembrance Sunday, the rather depressing end to what has been, quite frankly, a rather depressing week. Even the appearance of the television Christmas adverts has failed to cheer me up, not that it ever did, particularly, but at least there was scope for derision and sarcasm. This year’s crop are particularly lacklustre, and I have to say the rather odd offering from John Lewis would be vastly improved if somebody photoshopped in a few penguins at strategic moments in the narrative.

The red poppy is in commemoration of all those who died, the purple poppy is to remember all the innocent animal victims of war, and the white poppy from the Peace Pledge Union is worn in the fervent hope that nothing on the scale of the two world wars must ever be allowed to happen again.  Personally, I think we should have a campaign of sending white poppies to warmongering politicians, the ones who would happily fight to the last drop of someone else’s blood, in the same way that those appalling society women used to hand out white feathers to supposed “cowards” in the street in World War One.

In a week which contains both All Souls’ Day and Remembrance Sunday, I suppose it behoves me to try and clarify what it is I personally hope to achieve by remembering not only the vast armies of the dead in their abstract form, but also the individual ways in which war touched our own family: Gunner Harry Fenwick, gassed at Ypres in 1917, William Evans of the Suffolk Regiment, died of wounds, 1915, and Pilot Officer Jack Ross, DFC, who died when his Spitfire ditched in the Irish Sea on convoy escort duty on 6^th January 1942.  Traditionally, we are supposed to give thanks for their sacrifice, although I still strongly believe, and maintain, that the soldiers who lost their lives in the First World War did so not in some heroic sacrifice to uphold “freedom” but rather in the first mechanised manifestation of the wars which had plagued Europe for the previous century – all about who was to be “top dog”, with all its colonial, imperial, and economic implications worldwide.

The second world war was a different matter – yes, in that conflict, they were fighting against a malign and evil tyranny, the true extent of which didn’t become fully apparent until it was finally defeated. And yes, we do owe them a debt. They had seen how the generation which returned from the battlefields of Flanders in 1919 and 1920 was cruelly lied to, and ended up not with “homes fit for heroes” but with struggling on through unemployment, crash and depression.  They were not going to let it happen again, and in 1945 they voted in an administration that brought into being, amongst other social reforms championed by Beveridge, the National Health Service.

This is why I think it’s important to remember. Because of the contrast between what the dead of 1939-45 fought for and how it has ended up today, being stripped bare and run ragged for lack of funds; being hived off and closed down, bit by bit, by politicians who block attempts to procure cheaper drugs or free parking for carers, by politicians who are happy to have the sheer gall, hypocrisy and brass neck to wear a poppy on Remembrance Day.  Yet we can always find money for bombing people. We can always find money for bombing Syria, to create more refugees who will then drown in the Mediterranean in a desperate bid to escape a war zone.  And the boats keep coming, and the children keep drowning.

Our own state here at home is nowhere near as desperate as that of people with nothing other than the clothes they stand up in and a desire to escape conflict, but we should also remember, compare and contrast the days when we used to be abel to afford schools and libraries and hospitals paid for by the state and owned and operated by us all, for the benefit of us all.  I have often quoted Arthur Mee’s scathing words from Who Giveth Us The Victory (1918) – I quoted them last year on Remembrance Sunday - and yet still they ring true, today of all days:

“It is pitiful to think that thousands of these men had better homes in the trenches of Flanders than in the sunless alleys of our Motherland. Do thousands of children come into the world, to gasp for life in a slum; to go to school hungry for a year or two; to pick up a little food, a little slang, and a little arithmetic; to grovel in the earth for forty years or to stand in steaming factories; to wear their bodies out like cattle on the land; to live in little rows of dirty houses,  in little blocks of stuffy rooms, and then to die?”

If the sacrifice of all the war dead means anything, it should be our promise to them that things got better as a result of their dying – that they truly did give their todays for our tomorrows, and that we won’t allow that message to be twisted and we won’t let their achievements be dismantled and we won’t forget the lessons of history, nor cease to point out instances when it’s all happening all over again. Looking at what’s happening now to the world that was repaired and renewed in 1945, I find myself almost wishing that the vast, shadowy armies of the dead could somehow rise again, muster, and march on parliament, with bayonets fixed.

As always, of course, next week promises to be even busier. It includes tasks as diverse as garnering estimates for security lighting, writing three press releases for three different books, and reprinting the batch of invoices I spilt coffee over yesterday. Plus two book launches to organise, two signing sessions to organise, and a hospital appointment which is going to take out most of Thursday.  The weather will doubtless make it a sombre week, if nothing else does. It’s that time of year, I’m afraid.

And where is God in all of this? Where indeed.  Did God allow two world wars and millions of deaths, see the painful emergence here in the UK of a better, more prosperous, more compassionate society only to see it all being dismantled again since the 1980s, brick by brick? Where were the lightning bolts?  This is a time of year when reality can often seem less real, and the supernatural more natural than we think.  Yet I still can’t reconcile myself to the concept of Onward Christian Soldiers and God being on our side, the sort of jingoistic “scrag Johnny Foreigner” “they don’t like it up ‘em” remembrance that appropriates even Christianity in its subtle peer-pressure to wear a poppy and “support our troops”.

If Jesus is anywhere in all of this, he’s in the boats with the refugees, in the cellars of Syria with the children flinching at each fresh explosion; he’s in the border camps inspiring those who are collecting and distributing food and blankets. He’s with the people who are trying to stop the last remaining shreds of our once great, once compassionate Britain being unpicked. And if he’s not that quick at answering prayers these days, he’s probably got his hands full.

I’m going to cut this Epiblog short here because I’ve got other stuff to do tonight to prepare for the week to come, and try and get ahead of the game.  Plus I am expecting two drowned rats in the persons of Debbie and Misty to appear through the doorway shortly and the stove needs bombing up. But I’m also cutting it short because I don’t have any answers to why God lets things such as war happen, other than that God has his reasons, and they are not our reasons.  And having said that, there’s not much more to say, really.

Next week the poppies will all get put away again for another year, but the important thing, I think anyway, is that the remembrance continues.