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.