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.