Epiblog for the Feast of St John The Apostle

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley.  Even though it contained two or three days of supposed rest and holiday. I say “supposed” because in the end, with the exception of Christmas Eve, Christmas didn’t seem much like Christmas this year, for reasons which I will go into presently.  Actually, I can deal with one of those reasons straight away: the weather. In the same way as we no longer have stifling, sweltering summers where the oak trees give a deep bank of shade to the cows gathering at the field edge to flick away the horse-flies, and the hay-makers lie amongst the stooks, swigging cider from stone costrils in the cool of the evening, we no longer have those winters where the frost glistens on the road and the snow lies deep and crisp and even and the shepherd drives his flock bleating at the cold up the rutted lane with their breath steaming, to get them into the lambing shed. Now we have a) wind, and b) rain, and sometimes both together.

And so it proved this week, with the usual results. Matilda hardly ventured out of the house, the dogs came back wet, smelly and bedraggled. Debbie came back wet smelly and bedraggled. The dogs lay in front of the fire, steaming themselves dry and farting quietly in their sleep, while Debbie… Debbie went upstairs, and got changed.  The squirrels and birds don’t know its Christmas, of course, but we did give them a Christmas dinner of sorts, the last of the black sunflower seeds and a huge pile of bird seed. The squirrels especially must have been desperately hungry, because even when the wind was blasting them with sharp needles of horizontal rain, they were there at the dish, doggedly feeding.

As for me, once I had waved off the last courier on 23^rd December, my focus switched to sorting out domestic stuff. We haven’t yet managed to formulate a plan for getting off in the camper over this holiday period, largely because it’s a bit difficult loading up to set off on a trip when the weather is like a car-wash. At least the camper itself is a whole lot more watertight than it was, something for which we remain grateful.  Also on December 23^rd, just to show that even “first world” problems have a habit of coming back and biting you on the bum, the dustmen failed to take the bin, so obviously the news that I am on the assisted bin list has not filtered through to the rank and file of Kirklees Council. I can see I am going to have to deploy my Ray Mears bushcraft skills and tempt the bin men down the drive with another carefully-crafted bin bag brimming with luscious, prime, Monty Don leaf mould.

Just as I was beginning to think that Old Nobodaddy had no more tricks up his sleeve, on the day before Christmas Even, the bolt holding the arm on to my wheelchair sheared suddenly, which meant that I had developed a drastic list to the right.  A phone call to the emergency repairs line initially fell at the first hurdle, when in the middle of the little spiel about leaving a message at the sound of the “beep”, it cut to a continuous tone and disconnected me.  However, a friend suggested I should have another go, so I did, and got through that time, leaving a message. I still didn’t expect anything by way of response, but, sure enough, at 10.30AM on Christmas Eve, a van pulled up outside and a man with a toolbox came in an fixed it for me. He even stroked Matilda’s head successfully for a while, until she spat and hissed at him.  Once more, the NHS confounded my expectations, but in a good way this time, and equilibrium was restored.

I listened to the festival of nine lessons and carols from King’s College chapel, which for me normally marks the start of “official Christmas”, and it is true, Christmas Eve was a really good time, a time to be thankful, as we sat by the stove, the dogs and Matilda safely inside. The bottle of brandy which is kept for largely medicinal purposes was broached, and we roasted some chestnuts on the open stove, something we only ever seem to do at Christmas.  Only two things marred the proceedings for me, one being the general vague feeling that out there, in the car wash, in the howling wind, were people with no homes and lost animals, and there was nothing I could do about it, and the second, more practical concern being that, in crunching down on a particularly cremated bit of chestnut, I seemed to have set my dodgy molar off.

And so it proved. Overnight, despite blasting it with Paracetamol, I had about an hour’s sleep. It was entirely my own fault. I do tend to neglect dentistry, and where teeth are concerned, it is invariably a case of “a stitch [or a filling] in time, saves nine.” Obviously it’s more difficult to get to the dentist for me these days, and finding a dentist who will do NHS work anyway is an increasing conundrum.  Either way, none of that helped me in the watches of the night, when I lay there trying to get to sleep.

So I spent Christmas day dozing in my wheelchair, clutching various hot water bottles, and my traditional Christmas dinner was a mushroom cup-a-soup.  By the evening, it was starting to wear off, or at least be kept in check by repeatedly bombing it with painkillers, so I cooked us a better meal which included pretend beef strips, stuffing balls, and mushrooms stuffed with Granovita mushroom paste (the latter an experiment but it worked surprisingly well, putting them in the oven with the stuffing).

Because I was “out of the loop” in more ways than one, and because in any case at Christmas the news tends to be abbreviated to five-second clips of the Pope on his balcony, the Queen, and the Archbishop of Canterbury, I hadn’t really been following the outside world with any great attention.  Some stories, however, could not be ignored: the rain was not just nasty, inconvenient and unpleasant, it also meant floods. More floods for the poor people in the Lake District, who had only just recovered from the last lot. And new floods for the Ribble Valley and for Calderdale, not to mention Leeds and Manchester city centres.  Sadly, some of the people whose businesses were flooded in Mytholmroyd in 2012, and have been unable to secure insurance since,  have now lost everything a second time, and are facing ruin.

Mr Cameron has apparently held a “conference call” meeting of COBRA, the James-Bond-named government committee that kicks in whenever something goes badly wrong. Tomorrow, he will visit the affected areas himself, to see the devastation caused by cutting funding for flood defences at first hand.  While it is better that he goes to see the disaster in person rather than remaining in London, platitudes and expressions of sympathy will only go so far.  There is one thing the government could do which would be fairly easy and would probably be cheaper in the long run than dealing with this catastrophe through the normal channels.

They should, firstly, define the specific geographical disaster area. That ought to be fairly easy to do on a map – just look for the bits currently underwater.  Then within that area, the government should announce that it is going to be the insurer of last resort.  There will be three types of casualties in business and domestic terms – people who could have got insurance but never bothered, people who couldn’t get insurance even though they wanted to, because of the previous floods, such as the bakery in Mytholmroyd now flooded for the second time in three years, and people who did have valid insurance in place.

Taking the last category first, the insurance industry is going to be overwhelmed by this. It will be months if not years until some claims are settled. In these cases, the government should advance a disaster grant to these people of up to 75% of the policy value, straight away, on the understanding that this would be repaid when the insurers eventually pay out.  This would mean that, instead of being stuck waiting, people could start to get their homes, business and lives back together within a few days, safeguarding jobs in the case of businesses. This would be cheaper than paying out unemployment benefit for months on end.

The second category, the people who had tried to get insurance but were refused, would have to be helped out by the provision of soft loans, repayable in chunks. Again, the idea would be to get the help in place quickly, to get things started up again, to safeguard jobs as before, and again, I contend it would be cheaper in the long run than trying to deal with the consequences of the floods through the normal channels.

What to do with the people who could have insured their homes and businesses but didn’t, is a problematic issue. Maybe they should be discussed on a case-by-case basis. But even if they were ignored completely, then at least two thirds of the problem would be being addressed, and a damn sight more quickly than leaving it to the likes of the Norwich Union.

Talk of “the normal channels” of course, brings us back to flood defences. In July 2012, the Guardian revealed that almost 300 “shovel-ready” flood defence projects, which had been in line for funding, had not been built owing to “austerity” budget cuts. The Environment Agency, the executive arm of DEFRA that deals with flooding, lost 1700 jobs between January and October 2014, and that is on top of the 1150 lost since 2009. I don’t have the breakdown of how many of these people were hands-on shovel-wielders, but even if they were all pen-pushers you can’t make those sort of cuts without some impact on the overall efficiency of the service.

Charles Tucker, chairman of the National Flood Forum, which represents hundreds of affected communities, said, in January 2014, almost a year ago:

"It's about joined-up thinking. With joined-up thinking, you don't cut the staff at the EA who manage flooding and maintain flood assets. With joined-up thinking, you don't keep cutting local council capability to deal with the new flooding responsibilities they've been given."

Owen Paterson, who was the Environment Minister at the time of the previous floods, described criticism of flood defence budget cuts as "chuntering" and "blather" and said "difficult decisions" had been forced on ministers by the "dire economic circumstances" left by the last Labour government. I wonder if he’s now wishing he’d paid more attention to the chuntering and blather, two things on which he was always an expert, anyway.  The cost of the abandoned schemes in Yorkshire and Lancashire was £17million, or to put it another way, about twenty Storm Shadow missiles.

Because even in the season of peace and goodwill to all men, we can still find money for expensive bangs in the desert. And it seems that, soon, we may have to add Sangin to the target list again, as well, because, as predicted, and not just by me, the Taleban in Afghanistan have realised that their plan of just waiting until all the western troops had gone home, and then coming out to play, can now be put into action. And if we don’t now go back and defend it again, then the politicians will have to admit they were wrong the first time, and the British service personnel who died out there gave their lives in vain. Which they will never do.  Meanwhile, the refugee boats keep coming, with seven children and six adults drowning this Christmas week, when their boat capsized off the Greek coast.

In the wider world, the Christmas spirit seems to have been generally lacking in the actions of officialdom. Exeter City Council was forced to admit 57 separate instances of having confiscated tents from homeless people over the last 18 months. But it’s OK, because “after seven days, the homeless can reclaim their property”. What a pointless, pettifogging, piss-poor performance.  A Muslim family of 11, meanwhile, was barred from flying out to Disneyland from the UK for a Christmas holiday by the US Department of Homeland Security, who gave no reason for their actions, which resulted in an outright loss of the family’s air fares.  David Cameron has promised to “look into it”. Apparently. 

And Myrtle Cothill, a 92-year-old pensioner, is facing deportation and the prospect of dying alone and far from her family, because of the new, tighter, “Adult Dependant Relative” or “ADR” immigration rules introduced by the Junta in 2012 to keep the likes of the Daily Mail happy.  Severely ill, she has been told she must return to her native South Africa, where she has no remaining relatives, instead of being allowed to remain in the UK and be cared for by her daughter. It’s not just her, either – many other families with elderly relatives face a similar dilemma, and not all of them achieve the sympathy and the coverage from the UK press, because not all of them are white.

It’s been a week sadly lacking in Christmas bonhomie, in some quarters then, and many people, in the flooded areas and elsewhere, have once more been banging on about how we should look after our own first and about how this is a Christian country, etc, etc.  Mostly people who only ever attend church three times in their life and for one of those events they were dead anyway. Mostly people who would happily demonstrate their Christian principles by leaving a refugee lying in the gutter and passing by on the other side.  They still don’t get it that it’s not either/or and that “our own” includes all of humanity.  But it doesn’t do to start asking awkward questions about why we can’t ever find the money for flood defences when we can always find the money for bombs, or why we can’t find the money to feed and house everyone, but we can always find the money to create more homeless, more refugees. If you start asking questions like “well, why can’t it be like Christmas every day?” people will deride you as being “left-wing” and “socialist”, as if those words were insults.

Anyway, somehow we have blundered through Christmas and come out at the other side, and today is the feast of St John the Apostle.  Otherwise known as St John the Evangelist, and St John the Divine, assuming that they really are all the same person and that it was the same John who wrote the Book of Revelation while in exile on Patmos.  John the Apostle was the younger brother of James, son of Zebedee. Such is the grip that the mind-rotting influence of The Magic Roundabout had on my entire generation, that I had to fight quite hard to resist the temptation to type the word “boing!” after Zebedee’s name.  Zebedee, James and John were fishermen, which instantly makes them appeal to me, coming as I do from a line of descent that leads back to Thomas Henry Rudd, who met his demise off the coast of Portugal.  What would Thomas Henry Rudd do maybe doesn’t have the same ring as what would Jesus do, but as a touchstone it’s often seen me through some tricky times.  Jesus referred to James and John as Boanerges, which translates as “Sons of Thunder” and, coincidentally, was actually also the nickname of my second ever motor bike.

John is the patron saint of authors, love and fidelity and has often been associated with the symbol of the eagle. He died of old age in Ephesus, aged 94, in AD 100, or alternatively he was martyred by the Jews, depending who you believe and which John they think they are talking about.

The story of John, for all its uncertainties, is too well known for me to bore you here with its re-telling, He was there or thereabouts at almost every significant event in the life of Christ, the Transfiguration, the Crucifixion, the Garden of Gethsemane, the Last Supper, and it was to John and Peter that Mary Magdalene ran, on finding the empty tomb of Jesus. His Gospel, if indeed he wrote it, contains the highest concentration of first-hand eye-witness type accounts of the doings of Jesus, reading as if the author was really present.

As a writer, for me, he veers from being scary to being impenetrable.  I once had to read John 1 (“In the beginning was the word, and the word was God, etc”) aloud in church, back in the days when I was in the Boys’ Brigade. A truly terrifying experience, made all the more so because the bad angel on my other shoulder was always tempting me to segue into Surfin’ Bird by The Trashmen (Have you heard, about the bird, bird bird bird, the bird is the word, etc). I made it, but only just. Then there is the Book of Revelation, with its fiery lakes and Tower of Babel and lamb of God and seven seals and all that malarkey. What are we to make of that, apart from possibly a hat, or a brooch? Like all such predictions, and “futurology”, it’s always possible to find some details that fit contemporary events. You can even do it with Nostradamus. But perhaps John isn’t intending to tell us exactly what will happen at the Apocalypse, blow by blow and word for word, but rather to try and write the un-writeable, by opening his mind, and thus ours, to just one vision of how the unthinkable might pan out?

My main problem with John is with the Evangelism. I am still not entirely sure that Evangelism is a good thing, or at least not in every instance. Letting people find out and decide for themselves has to be preferable.  The problem seems to arise, for me, when adherents of one religion seek to impose their views on others, especially if those views come with a rigid, inflexible, one-size-fits-all, morality attached.  So, for this reason alone, John would be a problematic figure for me to come to terms with, because the older I get, the less I believe in evangelism as a way of solving anything. Far better to lead by example, surely, than to coerce people under the threat of damnation?

I find myself preferring Jesus’s simple commandment to love one another, or St Paul’s words from 1 Corinithans, which always resound for me, especially in the original King James full fat high tar version:

Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.  And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing. And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing.

Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up,  doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil;  rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth; beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things. Charity never faileth: but whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away. For we know in part, and we prophesy in part.  But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away.

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.

Which, I guess, brings me back to the rescue efforts and the floods. It’s always the incredible generosity and spirit of the people who turn out and help at times like these that helps to restore your faith in the indomitable nature of the human spirit. Charity in this context means “love”, and not just the sort that is concerned with providing soup kitchens, but a real, abiding concern for the well-being of our neighbour.  Lack of government help notwithstanding the way the communities and the emergency and voluntary services have turned out and worked together is more of an advert for the principles of Christianity than any number of evangelical billboards asking where will you be on Judgement Day.

In an odd concatenation of reality and fiction, in the BBC’s long-running radio 4 “soap” The Archers, the character Lynda Snell has just, rather improbably but joyously all the same, been re-united, on Christmas Eve, with her own dog, Scruff, presumed drowned in the Ambridge flood back in March.  At the same time, however, we shouldn’t forget that many real-life pets will be in peril because of these floods, and this is happening at a time when all the rescues and shelters are already under pressure and facing their own Christmas rush as unwanted pets are dumped in the coming weeks.  Perhaps we should consider the MOD putting a couple of Storm Shadows on Ebay and giving the money to Rain Rescue.

Anyway, I am typing this to the sound of the staccato pattering of yet more rain on our conservatory roof.  Any moment now, I expect, the dogs and Debbie will be back, soaked to the skin yet again from another excursion in the dark.  So I have got to get ready to “look after my own”, by putting the kettles on and bombing up the stove.  Half of York is under water tonight, apparently, and all I can think of to do, right now, is to pray for them, and for their pets and animals, and pray for those trying to rescue them.

Epiblog for the Winter Solstice

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley, and a bruising one. I don’t know whether it is just because I’m getting older, and/or more feeble, but everything seems to be so full-on and relentless these days. It’s not helped by bad weather, either: usually it’s just at the point where I have finally got comfy and warm in my bed that the alarm goes off and it’s time to swing my legs over the edge and get up in the cold and dark while listening to the rain lashing the windows.

Matilda is no fan of it either, and has been spending more and more time indoors. In fact, I think there was a day last week where she slept for something like 20 hours and didn’t go out once! How I envy her that 20 hours sleep. In one sense it’s a good problem to have. We haven’t been so busy on the bookselling front since 2009, but it brings with it the increased picking and packing. Anyway, if and when everyone eventually pays up for all these books they’ve been ordering, it will probably all have been worth it.

Deb, by contrast, has now finished teaching for this term and thus has been free to roam the hills with Misty and Zak in tow, except of course that the end of term coincided with the weather taking a nosedive, so walks have been rather restricted. Not that the wet, bedraggled mutts care, they are quite happy loping along through mud and rain, and if Misty can find a nice wet cowpat to roll in, then so much the better; her day is complete.

The squirrels and the birds are still chomping their way through the enormous bag of sunflower seeds kindly donated by the Winchelsea clan, and we seem to be feeding half the squirrel population of the Holme Valley at the moment.  I was quite startled the other day to look up and see a very large, very black hooded crow perched on the decking rail. It was tilting its head this way and that, taking a wary view on whether it was going to be safe to jump down and investigate the dish. In the end, it decided against it, and took off with several lazy flaps of its huge black wingspan. I watched it go, gaining height over Park Valley Mills, and wondered if it would be back. Just in case, I found some stale bread and skimmed it into the garden proper, figuring that it would be more likely to land where things weren’t so closed in.

Sadly, the other reason why Deb’s perambulations have been restricted to the immediate locality is that the camper van has had yet another expensive trip to the garage. For some time now it’s been leaking on and off, and given that we were going to try and get away in it for a couple of days, we decided that we’d better bite the bullet and do something about it. Prime suspect was the seals around some of the windows, which are the original ones from 1986 and have never been replaced. There are some places where they do let dribbles of water in, but recently, given the weather, which meant in effect that the camper van has been parked in the equivalent of a car wash for days on end, the situation inside had got much worse, with the carpets getting sodden as well. Clearly something was not right, and this week we found out what it was: the body panels behind the grille had developed a lacy, holey-er than thou tendency which gave them the consistency of Swiss cheese.

There was nothing for it but to take them out, and have two new panels welded in their place. Two rather expensive panels, as it turned out, but it had to be done.  Compared to the Niagara-like torrents that were being forced into the footwells and thence into and under the floor panels, not to mention the electrics, every time the van was driven on the rain, the miserable little trickles being let through by the odd dodgy seal were neither here nor there. So it had to be done, sadly, and now we’re back on the same schtick as before, with the dehumidifers to drive out the remaining damp.  This, of course, comes on top of the fact that the insurers are still dragging their feet about the latest bout of vandalism and so for the moment we have had to stand that bill. The situation would have been much, much worse without the incredible kindness of some friends of ours who have been helping with the transport situation. I won’t name them for fear of embarrassing them, but the last few days would have been even more stressful without their help.

It’s been the sort of week, in fact, where mechanical things have had their revenge on us, generally. I said last week that the final few days before the Solstice are usually the ones where the really heavy stuff comes at you unexpectedly out of the undergrowth, and this week was true to that adage. On the very last day of term, with Deb needing to print her resources and set off for the final class of 2015, the damn printer ran out of ink and then refused to acknowledge the replacement cartridges.  Deb cursed me, and I cursed it, and a good time was had by all.  I complained that it was so dark I couldn’t see what I was doing, so she switched on the clip-on light and the bulb blew. You get the idea.

Even when things went right, there was still a slight hint of the wrong about them. The battle with Kirklees Council is finally over, and I am now on what is called the “assisted bin list”. In the month since the bin was last emptied, there had been no option, once the bin itself was full, but to stack the rubbish in black bin bags next to it.  I was concerned that, if this wasn’t collected before the next scheduled collection, these would be missed, and we would have a pile of bin bags at the end of my wheelchair ramp all over Christmas, so I contacted them, and was pleased to be told that they did plan to come and take them away specially, now I was on the list.  This duly happened, but they also took away the black bin bag where I was creating some leaf mould for the garden (in the approved manner, as demonstrated on the BBC by Monty Don) so now I have to start all over again. I had thought I had moved it far away from the rest of the rubbish for it to be obviously not part of the same imbroglio, but clearly I was wrong!  Still, it’s no great matter, apart from the cost of the Garotta, and there is certainly no shortage of fallen leaves to go at.

Anyway, it was all very tedious but it kept us occupied at least, at this darkest time of the year, when it gets dark at three o’clock. I really miss the sun in wintertime here, the more so now since the climate has deteriorated to the extent that we only have two seasons, spring and autumn, varying slightly in the severity and the level of the flooding. As I said last week, the government’s answer to green issues is to cancel subsidies for renewables and vote to allow fracking to undermine the geology of our national parks.  The more I see of government decision making, the more I am convinced that they are all on drugs.  As, indeed, are the inhabitants of the small town in America that voted not to have a community solar energy generating facility this week “in case it sucked up all the sunshine”.  And you wonder where Trump gets his supporters from.

It’s been a poignant week in many ways for those of us who sort of think our national energy production, however it is engineered, should be under our own control. Deep coal mining ended with the closure of Kellingley Colliery.  Before I comment on the whys and wherefores of energy, though, I would just like to say that the timing of this really stinks. You would have thought they could have just kept things going for another six weeks or so, instead of laying off the entire workforce a week before Christmas.  It’s a savage kick in the teeth for the professionalism and the dedication of the miners who kept production going up right to the bitter end.  Before the general election, back in May, you couldn’t throw half a brick in Yorkshire without it hitting some damfool Tory politician whittling on about the “Northern Powerhouse”.  What price your Northern Powerhouse now, George Osborne, when the nights are cold and dark and there’s no prospect of work in the long weeks stretching ahead?

It’s not just the miners, either. As with the Redcar steelworks, it’s the large number of local shops and ancillary services that depend on the miners’ wages to fuel the local economy.  Now, all that, too, will begin to be eroded by the knock-on effect.  And for what? At the end of the day, we are being told that the pit is “uneconomic”, but by whose standard? As with any accounting calculation, you get the answer you want, depending what you factor in and what you leave out.  Yes, it may well be cheaper to import coal from half way across the world than to ship it eight miles down the road from Kellingley to Drax, but does that factor in security of supply? Does it factor in the increased benefits caused by unemployment? Does it contain some provision for the loss of trade to local businesses? No, it does not.  It does condemn the Venezuelans or the Chinese or the Chileans or whoever it is who are the current flavour of the month to dig it out under appalling conditions for sweatshop wages, though. No doubt the Junta would have been happy to keep Kellingley open if the British miners would abandon all of the health and safety advances of the last hundred years, and go back to the sort of wages that were paid at the time of the Preston Strike or the Ashton Famine.

I am sure I am not alone in finding the uncertainty of supply an issue worthy of much greater concern than is currently being expressed. We are still reliant on coal for power stations, even though those are currently being phased out. It’s a long way from South America, and it’s an uncertain world. In addition, we’re now beholden to the Russians for our gas, the Saudis for our oil, and the energy companies are all owned and run by concerns based outside of the British Isles. Finally, like an eerily glowing cherry on top of a very unstable cake, we will be allowing the Chinese to build and run power stations in the UK. I mean, what could possibly go wrong?  And all the while, we’ll be potentially destroying the best parts of our green and pleasant land by fracking underneath them, downsizing subsidies for renewables, and thousands and thousands of tons of mine-able coal will be sealed away under a concrete cap at Kellingley while the people who could have mined it are being put through hoops and having their benefits stopped by the DWP. I am inevitably reminded of the words of Aneurin Bevan:

“This island is made mainly of coal and surrounded by fish. Only an organizing genius could produce a shortage of coal and fish at the same time.”

Kellingley wasn’t the only closure announced this week, either. The Northern Refugee Centre in Sheffield is set to shut its doors in the new year because of a £150,000 gap in its funding, which it has found itself unable to fill, despite being helped by lottery grants and a private trust fund. £150,000 is about 18% of the cost of just one Storm Shadow missile of the type we are currently potentially firing at Syria. To create more refugees, who then run the risk of drowning in the Mediterranean or being turned away at the gates of what is rapidly becoming fortress Europe. It’s about as far away from an integrated, end to end managed process as you could wish to be, and still be in the same universe.  And there are now apparently 100,000 Syrian rebel fighters who "more or less share the same aims as ISIS", although this figure could be just as much a fairy tale as Cameron’s 70,000 “moderates” who show no signs of rising up or sweeping anyone from power.

And so we came to today, a fine day, a soft day at last, as Stanford would no doubt have called it. Debbie and the dogs did 11.4 miles round Black Hill, and got back at 6pm. Did it rain up there, I asked, conscious of the fact that it had been banging it down for half an hour here while they had been away. No, it didn’t rain at all. It hailed. Ah, right. The only casualty of the trip was that Misty had managed somehow to lose the little red LED light that clips on to her harness (so she can be located when she runs off in the dark).  Losing the clip-on light is annoying, but it’s better than losing the dog, although with Misty there’s always a possibility of doing both.

I’ve cheated a bit today by calling this the Epiblog for the Winter Solstice because of course that’s tomorrow, not today, and today is technically the fifth Sunday of Advent. However, it’s probably near enough for jazz, and to be honest I derive more inspiration from the fact that after tomorrow, it will begin to get lighter again.  Today is also seven years to the day since Dusty, our old Torty cat, died.  We never knew exactly how old she was, because she was already a mature cat when Colin died in 2000 and we inherited her and Kitty from him.  She was pretty ancient when she finally expired, at least from her physical appearance, but, like all Torty cats, she was bonkers to the bitter end, barmy to the last. Of all the cats we ever had, she was the only one about whom I have ever had to write a letter of apology to the neighbours. Bless you, little Dusty, causing mayhem in cat heaven no doubt.

And as for us, we’ve reached the Solstice. A time for looking forwards as well as back.  As usual at this time of year, we have both plans for next year, and regrets about the year gone by. It hasn't always worked out as we'd planned. Very seldom does the beginning accord to the end, as the Gawain-poet says.  I’d like to think we’re looking forward to Christmas, but as I said last week, it’s caught us so unprepared this year that, to be honest, right now, I don’t feel in the least bit Christmassy, and I can’t fail to feel the irony this year of celebrating the story of a Middle Eastern couple finding themselves sheltering in a stable without a proper roof over their head. In the modern version of the story, Mary and Joseph would be Syrian refugees and the star in the East would, of course, be a Paveway guided bomb.

And you find yourself (or at least I do) pondering the same old questions, the ones that always cluster round my head at this time of year. Is it true? Is any of it true, and if it is, why?  Sir John Betjeman summed it up much better than I can, succinctly, in the last few lines of his poem, Christmas:

And is it true,
This most tremendous tale of all,
Seen in a stained-glass window's hue,
A Baby in an ox's stall ?
The Maker of the stars and sea
Become a Child on earth for me ?

And is it true ? For if it is,
No loving fingers tying strings
Around those tissued fripperies,
The sweet and silly Christmas things,
Bath salts and inexpensive scent
And hideous tie so kindly meant,

No love that in a family dwells,
No carolling in frosty air,
Nor all the steeple-shaking bells
Can with this single Truth compare -
That God was man in Palestine
And lives today in Bread and Wine. 

That, as they say, is the $64,000 dollar question. No doubt by Christmas Eve I might have got into the spirit a bit, but for now, it feels like that time described in the ancient Chinese Book of Changes, the I Ching, hexagram 24: The Return

Thunder within the earth:

The image of the turning point.

Thus the kings of antiquity closed the passes

At the time of solstice.

Merchants and strangers did not go about,

And the ruler

Did not travel through the provinces.

The winter solstice was celebrated in China as a time of rest and recuperation, and that’s a lot what it feels like to me, after a bruising year.  Sadly, not everyone is around to celebrate with us. It’s hard to believe that it’s almost ten months since Debbie’s dad died, but it is.  And of course, Dusty and Kitty themselves have given way to a new order, later incumbents who, in Matilda’s case at least, are, thankfully, just as bonkers.  I suppose it must count as some sort of achievement that we’re all more or less here at more or less the end of another year, doing more or less all the same things in more or less the same way, though it doesn’t feel as though that in itself is any cause for celebration.  It does feel, though, as in some ways all the animals and all the people that we have lost are still with us, somewhere very near, it’s just that we can’t see them.

So here we all are, shut up in our inn, with a warm fire, good food, and the company of animals, because the Emperor has closed the passes. Out there in the vast darkness, the candles of Solstice are flickering a message of hope and light. It would be nice to think that snow will fall on Christmas Eve, and that all the refugees will be warm, fed, and clothed, and that all the lost animals will be found or rehomed, and that the shepherds will look up at the cold stars and suddenly see the astonishing sight of the whole sky lit up by angels, and that the animals will kneel in their stalls at midnight as Thomas Hardy wrote in The Oxen:

So fair a fancy few would weave
In these years! Yet, I feel,
If someone said on Christmas Eve,
"Come; see the oxen kneel,

"In the lonely barton by yonder coomb
Our childhood used to know,"
I should go with him in the gloom,
Hoping it might be so’

I would, too. I would indeed go, hoping it may be so. In the meantime, though, however you are planning to spend the festive season, and whoever you are planning to celebrate it with, and wherever, I’d like to wish you the very best Christmas for you and yours, and raise a festive glass to toast for health, wealth and happiness for all of us in 2016.

Epiblog for Gaudete Sunday

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. It finally turned colder, as well, which made the wind and the ceaseless rain all the nastier.  Our garage roof is going to need some serious, and probably expensive, attention, but in the meantime it’s a case of plug the gaps and pray for it to fair up.

Needless to say, none of the animals likes the weather. Matilda complains to me about the rain, as if I can do anything about it.  She sits just inside the conservatory door, watching it come down in sheets, until her little bladder must be feeling the strain, then she scuttles off, with her ears flat to her head and her tail down, returning about 90 seconds later and meowing to be let back in, now.  Consequently she has spent rather a lot of the last week curled up and snoozing on one or other of her various Maisie-blankets, on her favourite perches either in the kitchen, the conservatory, or Colin’s settee.

She did make one notable break with tradition however, when she climbed up on the conservatory windowsill because she saw Spidey, next door’s cat, daring to cross her decking, on some feline mission or other, and she started doing her pieces at him through the window. Spidey, who is made of sterner stuff, ignored her, and carried on his way.

Meanwhile, she squirrels and the birds have had an unexpected early Christmas, in the form of a red cross parcel from the Winchelsea branch of the family, containing not only cat and dog treats for the official pets, but also peanuts and sunflower seeds for the unofficial ones. They have been very grateful for these this week, and the squirrels in particular have been holding parties on the decking to celebrate. We’ve also had dozens of birds down, including Jays, drawn by the peanuts. Normally, I only ever see Jays in the spring and summer.

Debbie has also been forced to curtail her forays somewhat by the weather. Well, a combination of the weather, the cold and the darkness.  The dogs, of course, being dogs, have no sense of time. To a dog, there is little difference between an hour in the woods on the way to Blackmoorfoot, and a thirteen mile route march over West Nab, except in the degree of tiredness and muddiness at the end of it.  Misty came back absolutely plastered with mud on at least two occasions, and Ellie at least once – and of course, being a white dog, she shows it much more.  Ellie is quickly tired, being only about nine inches high, and it’s quite amusing to see how quickly she falls asleep after getting back, being rubbed down with the dog-towel, scoffing her tea, and getting warm by the fire.

Deb has a variety of layers of clothing to keep out the cold and wet and her latest wheeze is that she has started wearing cycling leggings as well as all the other wet weather gear.  This necessitates a period of preparation similar to that of a medieval knight donning their hauberk, chain mail and armour, before being winched onto their horse, and a similar “decommissioning” period on returning.  The cycling leggings are, for some reason, a men’s size. On removing them the other night, she held them up and said “These are supposed to be short-to-medium men’s. How would a short-to-medium man get into these?” I replied that I supposed he would start by offering to buy her dinner, which earned me one of her funny looks. 

We were not the only ones affected by the rain of course. Other people got it much worse than we did. We’re fortunate in that way, living 250 feet up on the slope of a valley. When the water does collect on Meltham Road, it simply drains straight through the garden, en route to the River Holme and, ultimately, to the Humber and the North Sea.  But the floods in Cumbria, which I touched on briefly last week, turned out to be absolutely horrendous and worse in some cases than the previous ones only a few years ago. Some poor people were now being flooded out for the second time in four years.

I’ve said this before, and no doubt I will say it again: if we have money to bomb Syria, we have money to build proper flood defences, and dredge the rivers properly, to boot.  All this week, while people in Cumbria were watching the brown sludge ruin their kitchens and living rooms, politicians in some swanky Parisian hotel were arguing about whether or not there should be a quarter percent more or less on emissions targets. How much longer can we go on ignoring the reality that the climate has already changed, probably irrevocably, and it is time to drastically accelerate the issue of what we are going to do about that inescapable fact?

There are people who say I haven’t a good word for this government, which is actually not true: I have several very good words for them, but none of them are suitable for deployment on the Sabbath, or in a blog that does not have an 18+ rating.  Once more, we had the spectacle of the Prime Minister visiting the stricken areas and promising that something should be done, when he has presided over a government that has cut the money for flood defences and abandoned subsidies for developing wave and wind power.  Still, when it comes to hypocrisy, nothing is too much trouble for the man, especially when there are floating voters (literally in this case) to be won over.

The least that the government could do in the circumstances is to act as an “insurer of last resort”, as I have written previously – give people who can prove they have the insurance in place immediate cash grants now, so they can get on with rebuilding the lives, on the grounds that the money would be repaid to the government out of the insurance money when the claim is eventually settled by the slow, tardy, foot-dragging, and probably overwhelmed, insurance industry, six months down the line.

The only heartening thing about the whole imbroglio is the way in which ordinary people have, once again, stepped up to the plate and begun organising their own network of donations, fundraisers and physical help with the clean-up, stepping into the vacuum left by politicians.  Since then, though, we have – regrettably – had yet more rain.  Still, it’s not all bad news – Britain has, according to the man currently masquerading as the Chancellor of the Exchequer, “got its Mojo back” now that we are bombing Syria. I’m sure it will be a great comfort to the flooded out people of Keswick, Carlisle and Cockermouth, that Britain .has got its Mojo back. I’m sure it will delight the Syrian families digging through rubble to find the corpses of their children, that Britain has got its Mojo back.  I’m absolutely certain that it will have been a great comfort to Ali Alsaho, fleeing the Syrian bombing together with his family, who all drowned in the Aegean last week, including his youngest child, just 20 days old, to know that Britain has got its bloody Mojo back.  And, of course, the more Britain gets its Mojo back, the more the boats will keep coming, and the more people will drown.

The drownings have been – according to reports as reliable as any others from the area – exacerbated by the efforts of Turkish coastguards to sink migrants boats wherever they feel they can get away with it.  This in turn is a result of the deal quietly struck at the beginning of December whereby Turkey got three billion Euros and a commitment to accelerate the negotiations for Turkey’s EU membership in return for a commitment to sealing its borders and turning back refugees. This is happening in tandem with a policy of racial profiling currently in force at the borders of a number of Balkan countries (including Macedonia, Serbia and Croatia) that bar entry to all refugees apart from those from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.

The proponents of these measures point to the fact that detaining the refugees in camps in Turkey while they can be screened and properly assessed is no bad thing, and neither is sealing the Turkish border. But the border is only being sealed to refugees, not to recruits travelling in the other direction, and there is no end-game solution to what happens, post-camp incarceration, to those who do make it to Turkey. It is a far cry from the integrated, managed, process which is needed. It amounts to the rest of the EU in effect pulling up the drawbridge and dumping the problem on Turkey.

High wind, and unpredictable outbursts have also featured this week on the other side of the Atlantic, but rather than being in the weather forecasts, they have been a feature of the presidential campaign, in the form of Donald Trump. The fact that Donald Trump apparently admires the views of Katie Hopkins should tell us all we need to know about the man. He also wants to ban all Muslims from coming to the USA if he is elected, which will make some diplomatic visits rather problematic, but I don’t think he’s thought that one through. Perhaps he would receive the Saudi delegation at Guantanamo Bay, or some other suitable neutral venue.

It is all too easy to satirise Donald Trump. For a start, his name is a synonym for “fart” in England, and then there’s the hairstyle, a comb-over confected with L’Oreal and Elnette which looks like a bewildered ginger guinea pig has staked a claim to the top of his head.  But despite the fact that the man is a buffoon with hateful, half-baked, ill-informed, neo-Nazi opinions, he’s ahead in the polls. One simple reason for this is that we’re forced to assume that large numbers of Americans share his appalling prejudices and misconceptions, and of course the media laps up every controversial faux pas and regurgitates it ad nauseam, encouraging Trump to then do it again and again, because it keeps his face on the news. In that respect, he has learned a lot from Katie Hopkins.

There’s also an effect which you might call the Thatcher Shadow, which is a phenomenon that happens in British elections as well. People claimed, before the event, to pollsters and the like, that they would not vote for a leader like Thatcher, they didn’t like her, they disagreed with her policies etc. But they were lying to the pollsters, and in the confessional privacy of the polling booth, they put their X against the old bat’s name because, secretly, she both confirmed and allayed their primitive fears.  The same thing happened at the 2015 general election with Cameron and the economy. The ditherers, having expressed their doubts, in the end, plumped en masse for the lie that the Junta was a safer bet, economically speaking.  I have no doubt whatsoever that the polls in Amercia mask a similar phenomenon a “Trump Shadow” effect that means in reality, he is even further ahead than people think.

One of the mercies of the long, strangulated process that is a presidential election in the US is that there is still a way to go before we see Trump struggling to contain his hairdo during a bleak inauguration in Washington DC.  There is still time for him to trip up, implode, crash and burn, or whatever.  But it is going to take a concerted effort to stop him, especially as the more he goofs up, the more the electorate seem to love him.  He has perfected (as did the Junta here in 2015) the art of the simple lie. He will make America great again. There is a section of society that is responsible for all America’s ills.  For him, it’s the Muslims.  Eighty years ago, when Hitler was saying the same sort of things to the Germans about Germany (many of whom also professed to dislike him, but voted for him when it came to the stick and lift- the "Hitler Shadow") the scapegoat was the Jews. And we all know how that ended.  It is no good mocking Trump’s appearance or his name, although it is very easy, and very satisfying to do so. What people need to do is to start enunciating some simple truths, as loudly and maybe even as bizarrely as Trump is coming out with his Trumpery. Rebut, rebut, rebut, and hope the message gets through.

The media need to stop being so complicit and start asking some questions as well. If Trump had to face the sort of  hostile media that Corbyn gets here in the UK on a daily basis, he would be a busted flush by now.  It  doesn’t help that the media in the USA all start with a right of centre bias, at least the broadcasting media such as Fox news. The same thing happens here in the UK. There was a big Muslim march for peace in Syria this week, but you won’t have seen it on the news.  If only they’d had the foresight to set fire to a wreath of poppies beforehand, they would have had camera crews swarming round them like ants on a nest.

Somehow, anyway, today, we have reached the third Sunday in Advent, Gaudete Sunday. “Gaudete” means “rejoice”, and so today is a day for rejoicing.  The name comes from the introit for today,  which is taken from Philippians 4:4,5: "Gaudete in Domino semper" ("Rejoice in the Lord always").  It is also St Lucy’s Day, which, before they started buggering about with this new-fangled modern calendar in 1754, was the shortest day of the year, leading John Donne to write

It is the year’s midnight, and it is the day’s

Lucy’s who scarce seven hours herself unmasks

As it happens, I do have occasion to rejoice today, if only out of relief.  I am not at liberty to write about the medical issues affecting those who are close to me, but suffice it to say that for a few weeks now, I have been dealing with a shadow myself, nothing to do with Trump, Thatcher or Hitler, but evil enough, and trying to keep that shadow at bay. Of course, when you have to deal with this kind of threat, it’s easy enough to say “put it out of your mind” and “don’t worry” and that perennial Granny Fenwick favourite, “never trouble trouble, till trouble troubles you,” but nevertheless, it is there, always, out of the corner of your eye. In the words of T S Eliot:

Between the intention, and the action,

Falls the shadow.

This was the week when I knew what it would become apparent whether the shadow really was the shadow we all fear, or something less, but still concerning, and I am pleased to say, it proved to be the latter.  Had it been otherwise, I think I may well have given up writing this blog altogether, as with the last vestiges of my already-tattered faith shredded, I could not in all honesty pretend that it would be anything other than hypocritical of me to carry on trying to justify the ways of God to man, not that I was ever much good at that, and often wondered why Big G did not pick some task more in line with my abilities, such as emptying the celestial privy.  With luck, that may be still to come, I guess.

Fortunately, it didn’t come to giving up the blog (or should that be unfortunately, for the 17 people who regularly read it?) anyway, for the moment, I am plodding on, putting one foot in front of the other (metaphorically, obviously) on the pilgrim’s way which is life, and I am not out of the woods yet, not by a long chalk.  But for the moment, some muted rejoicing is perhaps in order, in conjunction with today.  So it was that yesterday, I found myself hand-illuminating a handwritten herbal, while Prinknash Abbey incense wafted across the room and some random monks warbled a plainsong out of the CD. There was also a candle alight in the hearth, but I was working by the aid of a clip-on lamp, so I hadn’t completely fallen through a time-warp into the 11^th century, though it was a close-run thing.  Anyway, that is what passes for rejoicing in our house, that and re-arranging the kitchen cupboards.

The whole experience has led me once again, though, to examine my response and the nature of prayer. Obviously I prayed for a good outcome, and it would seem, superficially, that my prayers were, on this occasion, answered.  Yet there have been other occasions when I prayed for exactly the same thing, and came away disappointed. Four years ago today, our wonderful, faithful, lovable, tolerant old dog, Tiggy, died, and I prayed just as much then for her as I have for my friend over the last few days.  It seems, then, that prayer is, as I’ve observed before, much more than simply taking a shopping-list to God and asking for items 3, 5, 7 and for a bonus, one off the top and two off the bottom.  God chooses what prayers to grant, for reasons best known to God, and if we don’t like that, down here in the lowest, darkest obscurity, what are we going to do about it? Or, alternatively, Big G chooses which prayers to answer because he isn’t really listening, or because he’s preoccupied elsewhere, or there is in fact nothing at all there to listen to your witterings, out there in the void between the stars, and random bad (and good) things happen for no reason, which is what an atheist would say.

In one sense, there would have been no rationale in my giving up the remains of my faith, such as they are, were my particular prayer not to have been answered, any more than for any other prayer. I could argue that this prayer was especially important to me, but it seems that the issue is which prayers are important to God, see above. My wishes don’t come into it, which I suppose brings me back to “thy will be done”.  In which case, is it worth praying at all? Out of the context of the Christian religion, I have known Wiccans who believe that by focusing positive energy on a specific task, a beneficial outcome can be achieved, simply by the power of the mind, and it’s true, I think, that we’ve actually only scratched the surface of what the human psyche can achieve, and that many things which are today thought of as pyschobabble, magic, and mumbo-jumbo will, in times to come, simply have become part of accepted science.

But in turning the idea of prayer, and the worth of prayer, over and over again in my mind, as I have been doing on recent days, it has brought me once again to the same old gnarly paradox that I have come up against before, again and again – is there anybody there, actually listening?  Tiggy was a good dog, beyond veterinary help, and maybe prayer was not enough alone to save her. It would have needed a miracle, and there’s a waiting list. My friend had the resources of the NHS, so that at least must count for something.  But the paradox remains – as Eliot says in Little Gidding

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time

And in truth I know I shall never resolve the paradox, not here, not in this twittering world, as Eliot called it. You just have to be grateful for what you have, and cherish it while you can, I guess, which is another thing I have come to learn from praying.  Hug those you love while you are able to hug and while they are able to be hugged.If you are lucky, if you are very lucky, like George Herbert, you might annoy God enough with your prayers to "hear one crying 'Child'" and you will reply "My Lord."

Anyway, Deb and the dogs are back, and it’s time to dry off those wet, muddy, furry legs with a towel. The dogs will need seeing to as well, so I’m going to pack this up and resume my domestic chores. We stand on the brink of a new week, the darkest week of the year, the week that contains the run-up to the Solstice.  I’m not particularly looking forward to it, at least not from that point of view, as in my experience the dark always has a couple of last-minute googlies up its sleeve, although it will be good to know that, however vestigially small the amount, the light will be growing again in strength, from a week tomorrow. Another turning point will have been passed. As Yeats said, “gyres run on”.   

The van is going to the garage tomorrow, to have its seals inspected, so when that’s done, there will be at least one dry place to shelter from the rain. Our garage, with its roof, is – I suspect – going to be a much bigger job.   I don’t think I have ever been so unprepared for Christmas in so many respects as I have this year, so – for instance – if I normally have sent you a Christmas card by now and you haven’t had it, don’t despair. Don’t give up. Like mine, one day, your prayers might be answered!  In the meantime, here’s some music to remind me what a good dog Tig was, and how lucky I am right here, right now, to have three wet clarty dogs to clean.

Epiblog for the Second Sunday In Advent

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley, and a turbulent one. I always feel anyway, at this time of the year, as if I am clinging on by my fingertips, waiting for the Solstice and the return of the light. There are nameless terrors out there in the dark, or so it feels.  All the more so this past, sombre week, with its storms and its rumours of war.

The storms themselves, the actual physical storms rather than the psychological depression that they seem to batten on to, passed over us and left us relatively unscathed. The garden is, of course, absolutely waterlogged, and there are a couple of bits of trellis wagging about in the breeze.  So far, the shed hasn’t blown away, and, much to my surprise, the re-attached string of Tibetan prayer flags and the flag of Free Tibet itself are still waving proudly over the decking, although there were several mornings last week when I would have expected them to be far away, wrapped round a lamp post in Skelmanthorpe.

The storms have even had a positive effect in one area – there are so many dead twigs, blown down out of the trees, littering the garden, the driveway, my wheelchair ramp and the decking, that there is now no shortage of kindling for the stove. The downside of the roaring wind is that the fire “pulls” strongly, and we are going through coal at an alarming rate – as I type this we have nine days’ supply left, and will need another order before Christmas, which is more annoying from a cash flow point of view than anything else, but it’s still cheaper than switching on the central heating!

The dogs have had to put up with foreshortened walks, but even then have been coming back soaked and muddy.  Matilda has been spending only a few minutes out of doors at a time, and instead sleeps curled up in a tight round ball on one of my old jumpers, on the settee under Colin’s window, or on one of her many Maisie-blankets, in the kitchen chair or the conservatory, venturing forth only as far as the food dish.  The squirrels have been taking advantage of her semi-hibernation, or maybe it was just hunger and desperation that drove them to come down to the dish of bird food outside the door even in the teeth of the storm, when rain was pelting at them and the wind ruffling their fur as they hunched, munching for all they were worth.  I know they are technically vermin, they are just rats with a good PR agency, etc, but all the same I found myself wishing I could bring them inside and dry them off a bit.

The other downside to the storms, which is also irritating, is that we’ve been unable to make any progress with the various tasks that need doing to put the security in place to stop the camper being vandalised again, especially as the police investigation seems to have petered out somewhat.  Just chasing up people for estimates, and the insurance company, takes up an inordinate amount of time, before you get on to having to chivvy up people who promise to turn up and do stuff, then don’t – the gutter men and the garden clearance bod being two cases in point.  And we’re still waiting for the second estimate on the gates, and the camper needs its seals doing and yes, this is all very boring, so I will shut up about it. It even bores me, and I have to actually do it, so God alone knows, you must find reading about it unutterably tedious.

Not that the outside world was any more inspiring. Quite the contrary, in fact. It was, of course, the week when parliament voted to bomb Syria, despite the fact that only evil can come of such an action.  I wrote about this at some length last week (and probably the week before). As I was working on my usual list of stuff, I actually had the Syria debate on the TV, live on the parliament channel, burbling away in the background.  As the debate progressed, one thing became clear: there is no doubt that there is an evil death cult active here, an enemy within, which is hell-bent on destroying everything we hold dear, causing fear and distress to UK citizens, and is a very real and present threat to the most cherished values of our society.  But that's enough about the Conservative Party, what about ISIS, eh?

Well, “debate” is probably dignifying it with a status it doesn’t deserve, but as MP after MP stood up and said a) ISIS is dreadful and b) doing nothing is not an option, followed by c) therefore we must bomb them, I found myself thinking that if these really are the brightest and best 650 people in the country, then we are sunk without trace and might as well give up and open a whelk stall on Clacton Pier. I also found myself wondering if there was some way in which a network of heating ducts could be installed above the chamber, to pipe all this hot air so that it could be used to heat the homes of pensioners this winter.

The thing is, I was with them, mostly, on point a) and point b) ISIS are dreadful, a fanatical, off-the-scale sect of total wingnuts to whom death (their own or someone else’s) is merely an irrelevance, a fly-speck on the mirror of history. And, because of our foreign policy, there are a lot more of them than there used to be, and they hate our guts. And no, doing nothing is not an option, but where the proponents of bombing fell down, again and again, was in their wilful insistence that the only two choices were bombing or doing nothing. Chief amongst the peddlers of this dodgy syllogism was our own dear Prime Minister, who, on the eve of the debate, called those who opposed bombing “terrorist sympathisers”. So far, by my counting, he has had 14 separate opportunities to apologise for this slur, and refused each one. You should be very careful of starting a war of name-calling, Mr Cameron, because I can think of several names to call you, most of which involve pigs and genitals. People who live in glass houses, and all that.

There is much that could be done, however, to diminish and “degrade” ISIS without reaching for the high explosive option. They are getting their funds and selling their oil across a porous border with Turkey. The Turkish government needs to be told in no uncertain terms that the Nelson touch, putting the telescope to the blind eye, isn’t acceptable. The border needs closing, the funds need to be cut off, and the flow of arms and recruits halted.  Someone needs to tell the Saudis to pull their weight and stop using the arms we sold them on a war in the Yemen which is providing yet more recruits for ISIS.  All of this, and more, plus diplomatic pressure, should be done, but of course none of it would allow David Cameron to stand at a lectern in Downing Street looking like a “war leader” in the mould of his hero and mentor, Margaret Thatcher.  If Cameron really wants to kill off ISIS, he should just get Iain Duncan-Smith to declare them fit for work.  That usually kills off disabled people.

The single most depressing aspect of Wednesday’s vote, however, was not the Tory yahoos and red-faced, sweaty, blustering buffoons, bullies to a man, cheering and salivating at the prospect of firing very expensive Brimstone missiles at the already shattered infrastructure of Syria and pissing away yet more money we can ill afford in yet another pointless and costly Middle East fireworks display, it was the fact that 66 MPs from the Labour party chose to vote with them. By Thursday morning I had already decided that I could no longer be a member of the same party as these loathsome people, so I resigned. I chopped my membership card into sixteen pieces and posted it back to Corbyn with a covering letter saying how unimpressed I was by his habit of tackling every question like a geography teacher patiently explaining longshore drift to a thick pupil.  If he doesn’t get his act together soon and start ripping into Cameron, and into the Tories in his own shadow cabinet, I suspect mine will not be the only resignation.

The fallout from the vote has taken several forms. A smiling “Bomber” Fallon has already been on a glad-handing visit to RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus, where the planes flying the sorties are based, photo-opportunities at the ready.  And a bloke carrying a large knife attempted to behead a fellow-passenger at Leytonstone tube station in east London, shouting “This is for Syria!”. Fortunately, he was tasered by the police and subdued before he could finish. John Cryer, the MP for Leytonstone, who, to his credit, did vote against the bombing, has said that he doesn’t believe that the attack was linked to Wednesday’s vote, which leads me to wonder exactly what part of “This is for Syria” he is struggling with. 

Hilary Benn’s speech, summing up the case for bombing, on Wednesday, has been widely hailed as being one of the great speeches in parliamentary history, when in fact it consisted mainly of flim-flam with a generous leavening of claptrap. All he did was to make the same point a) point b) point c) progression as all the others, with a brief incursion into history, dragging in the Spanish Civil War. Oddly, although he used that conflict in the context of bombing Syria, he omitted to mention Guernica.  And a charity poster being displayed on the walls of the London underground to raise money for winter clothing for Syrian refugees fleeing the bombing promises that for every £3.00 raised, the government will match that amount.  So we’re creating the problem and solving it, simultaneously! There’s now also a Facebook page called “Bayonet The Calais Migrants”, and one of the American presidential hopeful nonentities has called for all Americans to carry guns, on the grounds that it would “soon deal with these Muslims”. Clearly, the lunatics are well and truly in control of the asylum. And if you doubted that, Bournemouth council’s remedy for homelessness in the borough is now to play bagpipe music through the tannoy at the bus station overnight, to drive rough sleepers elsewhere. I sincerely hope that the person who thought that one up never has another uninterrupted night’s sleep for the rest of their miserable life.  

Somehow, in all the gloom, we have got to today, staggering on, and found ourselves arriving at the second Sunday in advent. Supposedly, Advent is the time when we are meant to look forward to Christmas and the celebration of the birth of Jesus, and reflect back on what that means for us and ours, but to be honest, I find very little to look forward to, the way the world is currently framed. Normally, at this time of year, I would be reading and quoting John Betjeman’s

The bells of waiting advent ring

The tortoise stove is lit again,

And all that jazz. This year, it is more like Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold:

Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! for the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

There are some bright spots, I suppose, but even those only exist because of adversity. As I type these words, Keswick, a town I know very well and love, is largely under water because of the floods caused by Storm Desmond. I have been following it online because I know people who live in Keswick and was wondering how they were getting on, and it seems that there has been a massive outpouring of community spirit in the town and neighbour helping neighbour in this time of adversity.  To look for the spirit of Christmas in a flooded Cumbrian tourist town  might seem a bit perverse, but it’s beginning to look a lot like the spirit of Christmas to me. I only hope we’ve got enough money left in the national kitty after paying for bombing the shit out of Raqqa to build some better flood defences from now on.  That really would be “looking after our own”.  Given Cameron’s preference for bombing as a panacea for all ills, however, we are more likely to hear him announcing air strikes on Borrowdale.

So, yes, you don’t find me in a good mood this evening and yes, we have no bananas. Tomorrow, of course, it all starts up again. I suppose I should be glad that, on the books front at least, we seem to be much busier than last year, but the thought of all the deadline-bound tasks that I have to do before Christmas just makes me immensely weary.

But mostly it is the absence of any justice, peace and goodness in the world.  Without wishing to get too apocalyptic about things, sometimes it really does feel as if we are entering “the last days”.  One aspect of Advent is that it also looks forward to the Second Coming of Christ, when the quick and the dead shall be judged, and all that this entails.  If God is truly outside of time altogether, as I have tried to argue before, then it explains for me at least the words of today’s reading from 2 Peter 3:14

But, beloved, be not ignorant of this one thing, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. The Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some men count slackness; but is longsuffering to us-ward, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance.  But the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night; in the which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up.  Seeing then that all these things shall be dissolved, what manner of persons ought ye to be in all holy conversation and godliness,  looking for and hasting unto the coming of the day of God, wherein the heavens being on fire shall be dissolved, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat?  Nevertheless we, according to his promise, look for new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness. Wherefore, beloved, seeing that ye look for such things, be diligent that ye may be found of him in peace, without spot, and blameless.

If I was looking to persuade myself, against all evidence to the contrary, that there would one day be a new heaven and a new earth, where every valley shall be exalted and every mountain and hill laid low, the crooked straight, and the rough places plain, then I suppose the places to look for the presence of Jesus, or at least, if not Jesus in person, for the presence of the chip of holiness that we all carry, hard-wired to our motherboard, would be in these small and random acts of kindness.  Jesus is in the refugee camps, Jesus is wherever the tea urn is dispensing cheer and a volunteer hands a warm dry blanket to flood victims.  After all, if the Christmas story is to be believed (on whatever level on a scale between literally and total myth) Jesus didn’t enter to world the first time around with a fanfare and a blare of trumpets. He caused a small stable to be bathed in celestial light for a few hours, then quietly got on with being the Messiah. Even at his most triumphant, entering Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, he was riding a donkey.

So, if we want evidence, and today I certainly do, that all is not yet lost, and that there might be a chink of light at the end of this long dark tunnel, full of nameless terrors, I guess that is where we must look, once again. To the people gathering supplies and donations for the refugees, to the people daily striving to do at least one good thing. “Always look for the helpers”. It may well be that if Jesus literally comes again, it will be as a thief in the night, or it may be that these sorts of small acts are what Peter had in mind. The act of kindness that goes unnoticed, except that, when you next put your hand in your pocket, your watch is still there and has been joined by a purse of coin.

And as for the rest, from misguided warmongering MPs to gun-toting presidential candidates to Britain First, well, I know I should, by rights, pray for them, but to be honest, these days I only just have strength to pray for my family and my animals (and the rest of the family’s animals: it’s a long list) so I'll just have to mentally consign the rest of them to Limbo – or I would do, if the Pope had not abolished it, which came as a great shock to several Jamaican dance halls.

I am not getting anywhere fast with convincing myself, though, not today. Maybe tomorrow, if the rain doesn’t rain and the sun shines and the wind drops and some things that desperately need achieving finally get achieved, who knows. But tonight it’s yet another time, when Deb gets back with the dogs, for battening down the hatches, banking up the fire, and pulling up the drawbridge.