Epiblog for the Fourth Sunday of Epiphany

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley, but before I proceed to talk about it, I would just like to make one thing clear. Squirrels do NOT hibernate, despite the tendency of well-meaning bloggers to write about them doing so.  Anyway, weather-wise it’s been a pretty dismal week, with rain and gales, and sometimes, for a change, gales and rain.  There were a couple of days where it was vaguely sunny for a while, but it was always only that bright, pale, counterfeit gold of January sunshine, that you know isn’t going to last.  Yesterday, I got up, and it was sleeting. Then it stopped, and the sun came out. Then the sky darkened, and it hailstoned. Briefly. Then the sun came out, then the next time I looked, it was sleeting again.

Deb’s brother, his wife and my little cousin were here, because Chris has kindly been doing some decorating for us (of which more later) so we were all huddled round the stove, chatting and (in Adam’s case) playing games on his phone, with the occasional pot of tea, while Debbie took Zak and Misty out and left us to it.  When she got back she said it had been snowing hard, and sticking as well, up above Meltham, but back at our level, it had turned to heavy rain.  Needless to say, Deb and the dogs were all bedraggled to buggery and needed to warm up and dry off.

Matilda has been spending more and more time sleeping of late. When she does go out, she still likes to sit on the decking, surveying her domain, and expressing a vague interest in the squirrels by chattering her jaws at them (in a threat that both she, and the squirrels, know she is powerless to execute) but by and large, in this weather, she happily dreams her way through the week, occasionally waking to stretch or make little squeaky noises, then curl back round and resume dreaming about whatever it is cats dream about.

As for us, we have decided to bite on the bullet and get on with the long term plan to sort out the kitchen. Long term as in so long term you would probably need time lapse photography to see any movement, and what movement there is, is on a truly glacial scale. However, every so often, the tectonic plates collide and shift, and the master plan lurches on another few feet towards its final objective.

This has been one of those weeks. It all started with the floods, oddly enough. When I saw that the people who had lost everything in the Calder Valley were appealing for free second hand washing machines and fridges, and the like, it spurred me on to offer them our old fridge. I was going to put it on Freecycle, anyway, one day, but the fact that there were actually people saying they needed it, spurred me on, and booted it up the batting order. Once that was gone, collected by the burly man who picked it up like a child and bundled it into the back of his car, this left the space behind it, because the new fridge was much smaller, and went elsewhere.

This is the space, now earmarked for a pantry, which Deb’s brother has kindly rubbed down, primed, filled, and papered for us. Then he’s coming back to paint it, following which all we need is some kind of rudimentary shelving, and much of the food-related clutter can be stashed away.  As a result of this, I spent some considerable time on the mind-numbingly tedious task of going through the Crown colour charts online at B & Q’s web site, trying to find the colour to match the existing walls.  I have done this so you don’t have to, but believe me there are 13 pages of yellows.  I was amused by the names of some of the colours (Custard Cream, anyone?) but I think ours is probably “Buttercup”. Meanwhile, Debbie has found a Welsh Dresser on Ebay (don’t ever Google for Welsh Dresser with safe search turned off, and never under any circumstances for Welsh undresser. Take it from me.) It always amazes me that you can find furniture on the internet. None of that going down to “Sellit & Soon” on Holderness Road, paying cash on the nail for a walnut radiogram, and then borrowing a handcart to trundle it home! Ebay has Welsh Dressers. And possibly Welsh undressers, and even cross-dressers, but don’t go there. I am not a cross dresser, though I have been known to get annoyed if I can’t find any clean socks.

We hope (or at least I do) that the end result of all this potential chaos, when the Welsh Dresser is delivered on Friday by two burly rude mechanicals, who may or may not be Welsh, we will once more be to contribute to a better standard of life, untroubled by running over errant packets of Bisto in my wheelchair, or never being able to find any carrots.  The final piece in the jigsaw will eventually be getting a smaller sink, again to enable me to get in and out more easily, and possibly mounted on a lower unit, to make it easier for me to do the washing up. I shall be very sorry to see the double Belfast sink go, but I guess the practicalities of the situation are undeniable.  Still, maybe we can sell it back to the plumber, to defray his bill!

Thus, it has been an eventful week. With my other leg, I have been fighting a battle once more to get my bin emptied, and matters came to a head on Tuesday and Wednesday. The black bin, which had been missed for two collections on the go, was rammed to the gills, and piled up beside it were about a dozen bin-bags that had accumulated since then. We aren’t profligate with our rubbish, we recycle whatever we can, and the food waste, such as doesn’t go in the dog or the cat, go into my home-made composters. But nevertheless, such are the mores of our times, when it comes to packaging, that even a relatively frugal household of two people, a cat and a dog accumulates rubbish at an alarming rate. It looked like one of those news shots of the “Winter of Discontent” that they always wheel out when dreary politicians are arguing that we don’t want to go back to the 1970s. [As an aside, I would be quite happy to go back to the 1970s, or at least my 1970s. The girls were fine, the ale was brown, as Hilaire Belloc might have said if he were here right now, the summers were all scorchingly hot, and the music was a blast. I could still walk (in fact I could run) and I spent a lot of time playing cricket. What’s not to like?]

So it was that I ended up on Tuesday having to get shouty-barmy with the council and threaten to stop paying my Poll Tax if the bins weren’t emptied that day.  Our scheduled collection day is a Wednesday, so to be honest, I expected them to ignore me and come on Wednesday as normal, but to actually empty it this time. However, on Tuesday a little bin wagon turned up and they actually emptied the black bin. Let joy abound, I thought, as I heard them crashing about in the driveway. Imagine my surprise, dear reader, when I went out to put the bin back in its appointed slot (I can just about tow an empty wheely bin, more or less, in my wheelchair, but a full one is way beyond my feeble strength) and found that they had indeed emptied the bin, but had left all the bin bags. Maybe they thought they were my entry for the Turner Prize. Maybe the dustmen were two Corinthians short of a Bible. I don’t know.

Debbie insisted, against my advice not to bother, in picking up all the loose bags and putting them in the empty bin itself, thus creating, once more, a full bin. Back to square one. Fortunately, a second set of dustmen did come on the appointed day, and lo, they emptied the bin. And there was rejoicing in heaven, and the dead awoke and showed themselves to many. Selah. I know – before you tell me – it’s a first world problem, and I should be glad I don’t have to scavenge through a gigantic midden of my own shit, as the poorest have to do in India, and this is of course all very true. I’m just conscious of not having much time or strength left, and I would rather use what I have, if at all possible, for something more useful than howling fury at Kirklees Council, just to get them to do something right, for the first time of asking, that I pay them for.

Another piece in the jigsaw puzzle of Huddersfield actually becoming a third-world problem, on the grounds that 21st century medical care will be potentially harder to obtain in an emergency, is this ongoing imbroglio of the closure of first the accident and emergency department and Huddersfield Royal, and then the hospital itself.  The campaign has been rumbling on, but the organisers, notwithstanding the fact that yes, they are volunteers, have made some major tactical errors. The focus should be on raising awareness of, and garnering signatures for, the online petition, while preparing a detailed rebuttal of the CCG’s plans. Instead, they have introduced the massive diversion of a paper petition, which guarantees nothing, and does not have any status as such. I became convinced that people were signing the paper petitions (which were originally only intended to mop up the people who were not computer savvy and/or online) thinking that they were contributing to the online total because both totals, paper and online, would be added together. I tried to point out to the organisers that this needed flagging up, and they ignored me.  As if to prove the point, I asked my sister-in-law, who is both computer savvy and online, on Saturday, if she had signed the petition, and she said yes, she’d signed it in her local post office.  No, says I, the online petition. What online petition? (She has now signed it.)

The Facebook page the campaign is running is also a shambles, with people asking the same questions over and over again because the organisers can’t or won’t put up a pinned FAQ post at the top.  They are, however, planning to have a pop concert in Greenhead park. Yep, that should sort it.  I’m not ditching the campaign per se – I have written to the CCG asking them if they factored in a figure for the additional deaths that would occur in their risk assessment of the nearest A & E for the Holme Valley being over in Halifax, and if so what was the figure. If they didn’t, then they are probably guilty of some sort of neglect, a failure to carry out due diligence, or something.  So, either they do have a figure, in which case they are basically saying that X additional deaths would be acceptable (!) to save the costs involved, or they didn’t factor in a figure, in which case, if they didn’t consider this crucial factor, how can we put any faith in any of their proposals?

And, in a further development which probably came as a surprise to those who naively believe that “politics” has no part in the campaign to save our A & E, the local MPs announced that they had secured a “debate” in Westminster Hall on Tuesday on the issue. These “debates” are the sideshow affairs where the government shunts off contentious or hot issues – such as whether Donald Fart should be banned from Britain – and there is no debate actually in parliament, nor is there a vote.  The local MPs look good, because they will get a couple of soundbites on Look North, and the government will trundle out the permanent under-secretary for paperclips at the Department of Health to say that this is entirely a local matter. End of. And then, when and if the online petition does gain 100,000 signatures and is considered for a debate in parliament proper, it will be a case of “Oh, we’ve already done that one, haven’t we…?” You mark my words.

Wednesday also brought with it, as well as the dustmen, Holocaust Memorial Day, with its emphasis this year on not just standing by and letting evil things happen. Coincidentally, it also brought (to me at least) the stories of the asylum seekers who were being forced to wear red wristbands to make them immediately identifiable, as indeed did the standard issue red front doors on the accommodation they have been given in Middlesbrough. Unfortunately, the local fascists, knuckledraggers and yobboes also made that connection, and have been singling out those houses to throw eggs, dog crap, and other nasty things at the said front doors. At least it was red wristbands and not yellow stars, yet. When they came for the asylum seekers, I did not speak out, for I was not an asylum seeker. And while it was all going on, on Wednesday, David Cameron stood up at Prime Minister’s Question Time and referred to Labour allowing in “a bunch of migrants” from Calais.

I didn’t think it was possible for me to hate the glossy-haired, dish-faced pig-botherer any more than I do, but I surprised myself when I saw him braying those words on TV, with all the other Tory yahoos cheering him on.  If there had been a brick anywhere to hand at that moment, Debbie would now be scouring Ebay for a new TV.  I’ve been told this week that I should lighten up. Look at the viral clip of the panda rolling in the snow, stop reading The Guardian and start reading The Sun (in fact, I read neither). So, how do I even begin to approach this in a light-hearted way. I suppose the overbearing, staggering hypocrisy of the situation would be funny, if it weren’t tragic.

It is, worth, though, taking a step back and looking at the entire process, coolly and dispassionately.  Syria is a total basket case, the more so since the Russians made their ill-judged intervention which will undoubtedly lengthen the conflict.  You have every chance of being bombed, starved, or blown up by ISIS. It’s no wonder that people are fleeing like never before.  So if you can get away, you pay your savings or whatever you managed to scrape together to someone who sends you off over the Med in an overcrowded leaky boat with a dodgy engine. Some of you, at this point, will die (this week, one lot of 18 and one of 40) by drowning, as your boat either sinks, or is sunk (I don’t suppose the Greek coastguard are that bothered about investigating themselves).

If you make it this far you then cross Macedonia and get as far as you can en route to your chosen destination in Europe. If you do reach The Jungle at Calais, even though your children were “refugees” in Syria, or in Lebanon, they are now part of “a bunch of migrants” according to the British Prime Minister. Apparently your worth as a human being alters magically according to your geographical location and how deep in the doodoo the Prime Minister is at the time. Well, I have news for you, Mr Cameron, any man’s death diminishes you, because you are involved in mankind, and if a clod or pebble is washed away, it is exactly the same as if a manor of thy friends were.  Therefore seek not to send for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee. The thing is, it’s all fuss and bluster anyway. For all his dog-whistle rhetoric, aimed at the likes of UKIP, he can’t do anything about EU immigration, even though he might want to. Whether or not he will manage to alter this before the EU referendum is a moot point.  But it won’t stop his posturing frothing xenophobic blethering.

Conditions in The Jungle are appalling at the moment, by all accounts. In fact, none of the various camps holding refugees anywhere along the trail leading back to Syria is a picnic, right now.  The standpipes in the Jungle are potentially infected with e-coli, there are harmful levels of bacteria, caused by the vast piles of rubbish which attract rats, and the weather is cold and grim. It puts my minor difference with Kirklees council into perspective. The Macedonian camps have had snowstorms. All over Europe, the walls are going up against the refugees, and now Denmark has decided to start seizing their valuables. Next stop, gold teeth and spectacles.

So, no, I haven’t really lightened up.  Sorry about that. Anyway, we’ve made it through another week, somehow, and the ceremonial emptying of the cupboards and moving of the little sideboard has taken place, much to the detriment of this blog, because, in trundling back and forth with jars of Marmite, pickles, honey and peanut butter, not to mention olives, cornichons and gherkin spears for hours this afternoon (the sideboard had to be emptied before it could be moved) I have tired myself out, and now I am struggling to finish this today.  Today is the fourth Sunday of Epiphany, and the text for today is one of my all-time favourites: 1 Corinthians 13. Here it is in the full fat, high-tar King James 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.

Clement Attlee, of course, once famously said, of charity, in 1920, that

Charity is a cold grey loveless thing. If a rich man wants to help the poor, he should pay his taxes gladly, not dole out money at a whim.

Which is perhaps a more appropriate text for Google than for anyone else. But I have always understood that the “charity” in the Corinthians text also embraces ideas of compassion and love. An acknowledgement that any man’s death diminishes you, because you are part of mankind. I am not a scholar of Aramaic, or Hebrew, so please feel free to correct me – I’m on about as firm ground here as I was with the squirrels.

Maybe it is time for me to put away childish things once and for all, and concentrate my energies, such as they are, on the things that really matter to me.  Firstly, to safeguard the well-being of those I care for, as much as possible, secondly to oppose bad and unjust things wherever I see them.  The problem with lightening up, with having fun all the time, is that it takes away the necessary contrast that has to be part of, well, part of life, really… “if all the year were playing holidays, to sport would be as tedious as to work”, as Shakespeare says in King Henry IV part 1.

So, as we’re on the eve of the second month of the year (one twelfth of 2016 has already gone, how scary is that?) and I’m starting to look for the snowdrops in the garden, the “fair maids of February”, I may be forced to confront an unwelcome truth. However much I might want to pull up the drawbridge, especially on a night like tonight when the stove is roaring away and the rain is driving down outside and the cat is curled up on her crocheted Maisie-blanket on the chair, only opening one eye from time to time to glare balefully at Debbie for making a noise, rattling the shovel when putting the coal on the fire, and Misty the dog is curled up on her dog bed, snoozing, I don’t think I can. Not while there are still lost animals, lost people, hungry people, and wrongs to right. How can I complain about my rubbish when the plague that is The Jungle still exists? It’s an itch I have to scratch.  If disengagement works for you, then fine, I would never condemn you for it, but perhaps it’s being so miserable that actually keeps me going! Go thou, and do likewise.

Epiblog for the Third Sunday of Epiphany

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley, and we’ve seen the first really cold snap of the winter. The snow has all gone, melted away within a day of falling, unless you want to go and look for it on top of Wessenden or West Nab, in which case feel free, send me a postcard, and if you see Debbie and Misty up there, tell them to come home, where the stove is nice and warm.

I thought I was going to be in more pain and discomfort than it actually turned out, but the two or three really cold days were still unpleasant.  The weather was great, don’t get me wrong, with beautiful blue skies and crisp clear almost Alpine air, especially in the mornings – it was just the temperature I had issues with!  The nights were cruel, though, and I couldn’t help but think of all the lost and abandoned animals, and the lost and abandoned people, come to that, who would be desperately trying to keep themselves warm until dawn.

Matilda hardly ventured out at all, other than to do her necessaries in the garden, and despite the sunshine. It was quite amusing to see her tip-toeing gingerly through the remains of the snow, then getting fed up of cold feet and making a run for it back to the door to be re-admitted to the relative warmth of the conservatory.

Despite the fact that they should, by rights, all be hibernating by now, the squirrels have actually been more in evidence than of late – presumably some of their other normal sources of food are denied to them, so they have been falling back on the birdseed and other stuff that we put out. As have the birds, with blackbirds, pigeons, and at least one robin being the most frequent visitors.

After last weekend’s escapade in the snow, the walkies for Misty (and occasionally Zak) have been less eventful this week, although as I said above, the higher you get up on the hills and the moors, the more likely you are to find stubborn pockets of snow resisting the few weak rays of the sun.

Other than that, it’s been a pretty straight up and down sort of a week. I spent it planning, doing accounts, working on books, and dressing up like a Michelin man in fleecy hoodie, hat, scarf, leg warmers, et al.  Plus two hot water bottles.  I find that, much to my surprise, I seem to have committed to about 17 projects this year, although admittedly some of them are mine, so they can always be shoved down the batting order if things start to get a bit sticky. Either way, it’s a scary prospect, but on the other hand, it’s the only way out of the mess I landed in back in 2010, so, close ranks and carry on. Forward, the armoured brigade!

While I was cogitating this and trying to get to grips with kick-starting some of the stalled projects from last year, two of our authors, meanwhile, have been working on a project for helping the Calder Valley Flood appeal. Which also involves a book!  Gez Walsh and Joel Duncan, who are respectively the Official Poet Laureate and Official Young Poet Laureate of Calderdale, are running an open competition for poetry and prose submissions from the schools in the Calder Valley affected by the floods.  Not only did the floods cause major disruption to the education infrastructure, with some schools being forced to close or amalgamate for the period of the clean-up, but there was also the psychological effects of the events of Boxing Day and beyond.

The idea is that the winning entries will all be published by us in a book, provisionally entitled Floods of Tears and Laughter, which will chronicle the experiences of the students concerned and will be sold to raise money for the flood appeal.  The idea has already been enthusiastically received by a couple of schools, with one head teacher emailing out to all her contacts just on the strength of being told about it on the phone!

Anyway, it’s early days yet, but I guess I had better revise the figure to 18 projects, as we are hoping to get this title out of the way before Easter.  The sooner the book is out, the sooner it can be garnering contributions for the fund. Even if it only ends up raising £4. 2s. 6d, that’s £4. 2s. 6d. they didn’t have yesterday. So, watch this space, I think is what I am saying.

It seems that we are not the only ones who are concerned with the welfare of schoolkids, however. This week the government announced a new web site where parents would discover the crucial signs to watch out for if they wanted to know if their child had been “radicalised”. Apparently these include spending lots of time online, being uncommunicative, and not bothering to change your clothes or something, which probably means 99.99% of all teenagers are “radicalised” by that yardstick. In fact, I may even be a bit “radicalised” myself. Mummy, mummy, I’m being groomed!

It really smacks of two things, desperation, and paranoia. Oh, and pandering to the Daily Mail, I suppose. Sadly, we can only expect more of this sort of thing, because, in the run up to the EU referendum, Mr Cameron will be doing his level best to appear tough on Muslims, though this will invariably be couched in terms of “tough on terrorism” or “tough on immigration”, as if they are one and the same, in order to out-Kipper the Kippers of UKIP and prevent the disaster (for him) of a vote for Britain to leave the EU.  In case you think I am joking about the level of paranoia, a Muslim schoolkid in Leeds this week was investigated by police after he handed in a piece of homework which included the sentence “I live in a terrorist house” and the school called the anti-terrorism line. As it turned out, it was a “terraced” house, and the child was guilty of nothing worse than malapropism, but I wonder whether the school would have pressed the panic button  so readily if he had been a white kid called Wilf?

Or, if further evidence were needed, both of Cameron’s two-way-facing duplicity, and of the anti-Muslim paranoia, you need only look at the Prime Minister’s announcement that Muslim women will be forced to learn English and if they don’t they will be at risk of deportation.  This, again, is a sop to the white van men of bigot Britain. What Cameron will not say, is that actually this will have a minimal effect on immigration from the EU, because they way things stand there is absolutely nothing stopping the entire population of Kracow, for instance, moving here tomorrow and taking over Droitwich, if they want to. Nor do I see any indication that Polish women who don’t learn English will be deported.

Nope, it’s playing to the stereotype that can be heard in every pub, in every taxi, on every building site throughout the land. There’s millions of ‘em comin’ over ‘ere, takin’ our jobs, getting free council houses and large screen tellys, and they’re all plotting to blow us up or murder us in our beds, etc etc.  This is what’s behind the petitions on the government web site to “stop all immigration until ISIS is defeated”. Ho ho, that’s a good one, if only it was that simple.  The really ironic thing is that the people who are most likely to vote rabidly in favour of Muslims being forced to learn English are the ones you see posting things on social media like “We want are [sic] country back!” – the people who say “could of, would of, should of”, who don’t know the difference between “there”, “they’re” and “their”.  In an even more supreme piece of irony, even topping the fact that the knuckle-draggers of the EDL don’t know the difference between “lose” and “loose” the Home Office itself announced the policy on its web site, and spelled “language” as “langauge”. Typos are the curse of every writer, and yes, these things happen, but even so, you would have thought that someone would have checked that particular announcement, very carefully.  I shake my head at this idiocy and I wonder idly what would happen if Spain passed a law requiring all the English expats on the Costa Del Sol to learn Spanish, or be sent home?

But, for now, it’s open season on Muslims so the government can be seen to be tough against a general background of xeonophobia. And no-one cares. Well, actually, that’s not entirely true. This week, the Bishop of London, the one whose name escapes me but who looks exactly like John Peel, said that Church of England clergy should reach out to those of the Muslim faith by growing beards. I’m not sure quite how this sits alongside the Church’s various pronouncements on women bishops, but perhaps stick-on comedy whiskers and tubes of stage glue will be provided, backed up in the longer term by testosterone injections?  I am not entirely sure that the Church should be concerning itself with the need to embrace swarthy, Middle Eastern men with facial hair, I mean what would Jesus do? Oh, hang on…

This would be funny, in fact the whole Islamophobia vs reach out by growing a beard debate would be, were it not for the fact that, behind it all, though it’s no longer “news” of course, the boats are still coming, and people are still drowning. Two boats capsized (or were capsized, maybe?) off the coast of Greece this week, with over 40 deaths. According to Gabriel Andreevska, conditions at the Gevgelija camp on the Greek/Macedonian border are dire – bitter cold, snow and ice, lack of food, lack of warm clothing.  Coincidentally, it being Holocaust Memorial Day soon, I happened to catch a TV programme yesterday about the film units that were sent in by the allies in the immediate aftermath of the liberation of Belsen, Auschwitz and Dachau, to capture for all time the horror of what had taken place and make sure it never happened again.  Part of that mission included bringing home to the German people what had been going on, just up the road, in some cases.

Of course, in Nazi Germany, you were likely to end up with a bullet in the back of your head if you raised any objections, and in fairness, the Germans did have at least one go at getting rid of Hitler, but it is in the human nature sometimes to “watch the wall, my darling, while the gentlemen go by”, not to ask too many awkward questions, or, in Biblical parlance, to pass by on the other side. The same thing is happening today with the refugees. Obviously on a smaller scale, and no-one has gotten around to the idea of mass extermination of refugees quite yet, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see it pop up in a speech by Donald Trump if the US election goes down to the wire.  And yes, that is a joke, but let’s hope it stays a joke.

By far the biggest story of the week here in the Holme Valley, however, has been the shock news of plans to close the A & E department at Huddersfield Royal Infirmary, demolish the building entirely, and replace it with a much smaller unit dedicated to planned procedures only on a different site.  If these plans go ahead, in future, all urgent cases will go to Calderdale Royal Hospital, the other half of the Calderdale and Kirklees NHS Trust.  This is a perfectly good hospital, which already has a busy A & E, and it is about six miles further on from Huddersfield town centre.  Oh well, no problem, I hear you cry.  The problem, which is a problem, is that this distance is as the crow flies. What the NHS needs is a highly trained, dedicated flock of patient-carrying crows. Who needs the air ambulance anyway?

However, the NHS does not have such a capacity of corvids, though I dare say the local crows will have a busy time of it anyway, probably feeding off the ones who didn’t make it to A & E within the “Golden Hour”. That six miles between the hospitals might as well be 60 miles, or 600, if your ambulance is stuck in traffic on the Elland by-pass.  Plus, of course, those of us who live out in the boondocks to the south west of town already have a potential 15-20 minute ride (even in an Ambulance with the sirens going) to get to HRI from the Holme Valley. The same will be true of people who live out to the north and east of town, in places such as Mirfield. Maybe they should consider issuing everyone in the Holme Valley who has a dodgy ticker with one of those James Bond jet back-packs so they can make their own way to Calderdale Royal and rise above the occasion.

Joking apart, however, it is a ludicrous proposal. As I said above, Calderdale’s A & E is already busy – indeed, A & E departments all over the country are under massive strain – and the knock on effect of taking away the A & E at Huddersfield will undoubtedly increase pressure on Calderdale Royal and other neighbouring NHS Trusts such as Barnsley and Wakefield. Huddersfield is one of the largest towns in England with a massive student population. It all comes down to costs, of course. Costs and cuts, and it is a sorry tale when you look back to see how the hell they got into this mess in the first place.  Calderdale Royal was built under the PFI (Private Finance Initiative) a famously dodgy smoke and mirrors deal originally invented by the Tories but perfected under Tony Blair’s New Labour regime, whereby the public got their new hospital, but on the never-never, in a secret deal which meant they had to pay for it, well, basically forever.  No-one actually knows what is in the contract, apart from those who signed it, and in the interim years three things have happened.

One, Calderdale Royal and HRI joined together to become the Calderdale and Kirklees NHS Trust, Calderdale bringing its debt with it to the party. Two, the debt has grown massively to become a howling black hole which threatens to suck in everything around it and which is, in the modern parlance, “not sustainable”.  And three, we now have a government which is hell-bent on breaking up the NHS into small, manageable pieces that can be hived off to its chums in the private healthcare world, using whatever levers and crowbars it can lay its hands on to achieve this, and set against a background of cuts all round.

Because of the illiterate, voodoo economics of Thatcherism, which attempts to run the country as if it was a corner shop in Grantham, everything has to pay its way, everything has to make a profit, and we have to live “within our means” (until there’s a war in the Middle East, then suddenly there’s an emergency fund down the back of the sofa to pay for all those missiles).  The fact is that the government, we the country, have control of our own money supply. They could, if they wished, print enough money to buy Calderdale Royal out of this iniquitous contract, likewise all the other PFI deals. The money could then be recouped out of the substantial savings this would make in NHS costs over the next say, 20 years. The reason they don’t do this is entirely political, it has nothing to do with economics.  The decision to put this plan out to public consultation was actually taken by the local clinical commissioning group or CCG.  But we shouldn’t be under any illusions whose finger is on the trigger of the gun that is being held to their head.

The government is doing, in fact, what it has done ever since 2010 – cuts at one remove, cuts at arms length, right across the public sector. The process goes like this – the government gives the decision-making power to a local body, eg the council. It then immediately cuts the budget to that organisation because we have to be sustainable and “live within our means”, according to the Blessed Margaret,  putting the organisation, whatever it is, a council, a CCG, a QUANGO, or whatever, in an impossible position. The organisation is the one that catches the flak, the cuts get made anyway, and the government says “nothing to do with us, Guv.” Government by abdication, cutting the public services by remote control, and if it all goes wrong, there will be a public enquiry, heads will roll at the organisation concerned, and lessons will be learned.

The local Colne Valley MP, Jason McCartney, has come out strongly in favour of the campaign to save A & E at HRI, which has prompted some to say that this campaign is so important, it should be above politics, as it concerns us all. That is all very fine and dandy, until you remember that he, or at least his party, have had a large hand in creating the very situation which has now become a crisis of unsustainability. As local historian Edgar Holroyd-Doveton said:

Conservatives MPs and our local MP Jason McCartney, voted for the budget down in London, and when this means £170 million a year less for Kirklees, then blames the councils ‘labour’ administration for the cuts.  Jason McCartney, voted for the National Policy Framework which reduces building on brown field sites, and then blames the council for the extra development on green belt.  Jason McCartney fully supported all the Conservatives bills that restrict NHS expenditure and led to the set-up of the parameters that Clinical Commissioning Group has to work in. The government imposed the review on the commissioning group…. Who now, of course are totally to blame (along with digs and fingers pointed at doctors). In fact blame anyone and everything but the Conservative government. And meanwhile the Conservative MPs are of course 'very concerned' when posing for photographs back in the Constituency where the voters are.

Anyway, there is now a web site, and there has been a demo at the CCG meeting and a rally, no less, in St George’s Square in Huddersfield yesterday, around the life size bronze statue of Harold Wilson in the plaza in front of the station.  I would have dearly loved to have gone, but because of the timing, if Deb had taken me down in the camper, Misty would have missed her walkies, and at the end of the day, though it’s a nice romantic idea to think of me manning the barricades and singing We Shall Overcome, in real life, I can perhaps do more good for the cause from my desk here.

I don’t often do this, because if I gave in to the idea in general, this blog would just become a mish-mash of hyperlinks, but this is the link to the official government petition to prevent the A & E closing. They are trying to get to 100,000 signatures. If it hadn’t been for Huddersfield Royal, five years ago, I would have been disappearing up the chimney at the Crem de la Crem. So if you’ve ever liked anything I’ve written, or laughed at any of my gags, please consider signing it if you haven’t already done so. Thank you.  The petition is here: https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/118690

And so we came to today, at the end of a packed week.  To be honest, I looked at the collection of Saints whose feast-day is celebrated today, and none of them grabbed me.  I am beginning to think that maybe the stories of the saints are losing their appeal for me, or at least the vast majority of them, the sort who were bishop of somewhere or other for twenty years and then died, or the mad Columban missionaries sailing around the Western Isles trying to convert the Picts and getting their heads snicked off for their trouble.  So I have to fall back on the fact that this is apparently the Third Sunday of Epiphany, and turning to the texts appointed for today I find that one of them is the bit from St Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians that comes just before my favourite section, about seeing through a glass darkly, and all that stuff. This is 1 Corinthians 12 –

For as the body is one, and hath many members, and all the members of that one body, being many, are one body: so also is Christ.  For by one Spirit are we all baptized into one body, whether we be Jews or Gentiles, whether we be bond or free; and have been all made to drink into one Spirit.  For the body is not one member, but many.  If the foot shall say, Because I am not the hand, I am not of the body; is it therefore not of the body? And if the ear shall say, Because I am not the eye, I am not of the body; is it therefore not of the body? If the whole body were an eye, where were the hearing? If the whole were hearing, where were the smelling? But now hath God set the members every one of them in the body, as it hath pleased him. And if they were all one member, where were the body? But now are they many members, yet but one body.  And the eye cannot say unto the hand, I have no need of thee: nor again the head to the feet, I have no need of you. Nay, much more those members of the body, which seem to be more feeble, are necessary:  and those members of the body, which we think to be less honourable, upon these we bestow more abundant honour; and our uncomely parts have more abundant comeliness.  For our comely parts have no need: but God hath tempered the body together, having given more abundant honour to that part which lacked: that there should be no schism in the body; but that the members should have the same care one for another. And whether one member suffer, all the members suffer with it; or one member be honoured, all the members rejoice with it.

I feel sure that John Donne must have had this text rumbling around in his mind when he wrote his wonderful sermon about no man being an island.  No doubt the Corinthians groaned inwardly every time they heard the flap of the letterbox go, but St Paul has seized upon a brilliant metaphor for the campaign to save our local A & E. We can’t all be the fiery orator, we can’t all be the patient, plodding, eye-for-detail person who nitpicks through the official proposal and teases out the lies, we can’t all be banner-painters, or placard-wavers, or garnerers of online signatures, but together we can accomplish much more than each of those people separately can.

As I’ve said many times, a football team with no forwards and eleven goalkeepers would find it hard to win matches (though, given their current run of form, Manchester United might consider giving the idea a whirl) and it’s no good abstaining because, according to Milton, anyway, in one of those sonnets he knocked off in between sterilising all those nappies, “They also serve who only stand and wait”.  I guess this is the rejoinder to my musings about being a hermit last week. The life contemplative might seem superficially alluring, but even the decision not to take part in life, in politics, in spirituality, is still a decision, nevertheless.  We are all part of the body, every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main, and all that, and the death of a refugee in the Aegean, the death of a patient on the way to A & E, the death of a homeless person in the precinct, diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind.  Whether I like it or not.

And, as I am involved, I guess I had better try and do something, although it would be a hell of a lot easier if Big G would a)  work out what my purpose is and b)  somehow communicate it to me.  It’s not that I have given up hope of it ever happening, but I would sort of like to know what it is I am supposed to be doing while there’s still time to do it. Yesterday would have been Deb’s dad’s 78^th birthday, and it’s only about four weeks to the first anniversary of his death. If I needed reminding that time is zipping by, that alone ought to be enough.

But, as it happens, I don’t need reminding.  So, tomorrow, everything will start up again and I already have three potentially difficult phone calls to make in the morning. Still, I might as well get all the pain over with at once. One to the garage to book in the camper for its MOT, One to a bookshop who seems to think payment is an optional extra that they can opt out of, and one to the cleansing department of the local council to ask them why, since I am apparently on the assisted bin list, my driveway now looks like a re-run of the winter of discontent because the bin wasn’t emptied – again.

Still, all of these are first world problems, as I am the first to point out to myself. No doubt it’ll be another week of editing, packing, doing accounts, leavened by the occasional turning out of cupboards as part of the spring cleaning (I have set myself the target of at least an hour of housework every day – this is over and above the stuff I normally do, things like clearing out the disaster area under the sink, for instance. I don’t know how long I can keep this up, but, as George Herbert said in his hymn:

A servant with this clause,

Makes drudgery divine:

Who sweeps a room as to thy laws

Makes that, and the action fine…

So, maybe that’s my task – at least for the foreseeable – to make drudgery divine. In which case, I had better make a start, because Debbie has brought back a very muddy Muttkins who needs her tea, and has just announced her intention of going up and getting into the shower while still wearing her walking boots, as the only way to get the mud off them. Three peeping toms have already handed themselves in to police for counselling.  Time to batten down the hatches then, once I’ve fed the dog, bombed up the fire, and made some tea. Tomorrow will be here soon enough, and even though the song says tomorrow is a long time, it’s not at all, really.

Epiblog for the Feast of St Anthony The Abbot

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. Winter has begun to bite with a vengeance, culminating in last night’s snowfall.  Actually, Debbie (and Misty) went to the snow, before the snow came to us, because it had already snowed up on top of West Nab when they were up there on Friday (in fact, it was still snowing when they were up there, but more of that later).

As you might expect, with the coming of the colder days, the birds and squirrels have been even more frantically helping themselves to the bird seed from the dishes out on the decking. When I have difficulty swinging my legs out from underneath the warm duvet on the mornings when Debbie sets off for her 12-hour teaching days, before dawn, I have to think of them waiting to be fed and use that thought to bolster my feeble willpower. I truly hate this cold, dark, miserable time of the year, and I wish I could hibernate.

At least the squirrels and birds have been able to do their loading up with life-saving food unmolested by Matilda, who has spent most of the week curled up with her nose in her tail on the settee in the conservatory, or alternatively watching their comings and goings from the warm side of the windowsill, on the inside. She may be old and slow, but she’s not dumb. There was one particularly frosty morning in the last couple of days when she went to the door to be let out and I obliged. She stopped in her tracks half way across the decking when she realised she had made a massive tactical error and was now experiencing a temperature similar to that of a walk in freezer, turned tail and came straight back.

Misty doesn’t mind the snow at all – Border Collies are amongst the hardiest of breeds in that respect, but she did almost come a cropper, as did Debbie, on Friday. As I said, they went up West Nab, which is normally a straight up, straight down sort of a ramble, but they had reckoned without the whiteout at the top. A combination of snow and fog saw them temporarily lose their way, and they ended up doing a partially-unintentional three-mile detour to get back to the road, which included having to scale a dry-stone wall with a snow-filled ditch on the other side. They were over an hour late getting home, and I gather that it was very character-building, and now both their characters are fully-built.

As for me, I have been desperately trying to keep warm – the Maisie-knitted leg warmers and the Polartec fleece hat have re-appeared, plus a second hot water bottle behind me in the wheelchair, and the Whitby Hand-Warmer. I am afraid if it is a choice between being the epitome of sartorial elegance or stopping my nadgers freezing off, I choose the latter.

Inevitably, I suppose, at this time of year, thoughts tend to turn to happier, warmer times, or at least mine do. Particularly, actually, in my case when I heard of the death of David Bowie. I was almost immediately transported back to “The Jivery” at College, our own feeble attempt at a disco, where I bopped, along with my girlfriend du jour, to “Jean Jeanie”. (Or Jean Genet, as the French students called it.) Yes, dear reader, the shameful truth must emerge. I did, bop. And I was probably wearing a cheesecloth shirt and orange cotton loon pants as well. I’m not proud of what I did. And maybe it is time at last to confront these crimes against fashion and taste, but I did once bop to Bowie, and I found myself this week in a strange elegiac, almost confessional mood.  I was never a particular fan, even though most of his backing band came from my home town of Hull. (In fact, there was a skit going round on Facebook this week to the effect that the Hull Daily Mail’s headline on Bowie’s death would be ‘Singer with Hull Band Dies’, along the lines of the Aberdeen Daily Press’s apocryphal ‘Titanic Sinks, Aberdeen Man Saved’ – but sadly, it was not to be.)

My own proclivities, even at that early age, were tending towards folk music, having already been (as I saw it) an intellectually superior being for liking “Progressive” rock in the 6^th form. Fairport, Trees, The Incredible String Band, that sort of thing. Jethro Tull were suspiciously electric, though. In an act of pure musical snobbery, I disowned Marc Bolan when Tyrannosaurus Rex changed to T. Rex, stopped singing “Salamader Palaganda” and switched to “Hot Love”. But nevertheless, Bowie was one of those icons, along with people such as Joni Mitchell and Dylan, whose music provided the soundtrack to my life, and so I mourned his demise in a sort of passive way, regretting that another of my touchstones had gone.

Music has been on my mind in several forms this week. There was, of course, the debate in parliament about whether England should have its own national anthem. Blake’s Jerusalem,  which is always trotted out at the first sign of this discussion surfacing is, in fact, a closely-argued plea for free love, which you might expect from someone who made a habit of sitting in the garden in the nip, along with his wife, reading bits of Paradise Lost to her. I often wonder if all those worthy WI  ladies in floral hats realise what they are singing about in those lines wishing for arrows of desire. Maybe they should take a sneaky peek at that statue of St Teresa of Avila!

Billy Connolly always favoured Barwick Green, the theme tune to The Archers, which – being an instrumental – would at least save footballers the embarrassment of pretending to mumble the words to God Save The Queen. If you asked me seriously, I suppose something like I Vow To Thee My Country might do, especially as its words actually remind whoever sings it that there are greater things than misplaced patriotism and nationalism. My overwhelming feeling on the subject, however, was that MPs ought to be doing something better with their valuable time. We’re embroiled in an expensive war, half the country is underwater, China’s economy is tanking and likely to drag us all down with it, kids are going to bed hungry, homeless people are dying in the streets, and MPs are debating… the national bloody anthem?

Mind you, what else would you expect from this crowd of deadbeats, misfits and boobies? It also emerged this week that all the records of MPs’ expenses prior to 2010 have apparently been shredded. On whose authority is not clear to me, but I bet whoever did it claimed for the shredders on expenses. There are those who say I don’t have a good word for MPs. This is not true. I have a very good word for them, it’s just not a word you would normally use on the Sabbath. They really just don’t get it, do they? Maybe they will when they are finally swinging from a Westminster lamp post, but even then, I have my doubts. Mr Cameron, in his role as apparently our chief elder and better, has been dishing out advice on parenting to all and sundry, including, presumably, how to avoid forgetting your daughter and leaving her in the pub by mistake. He’s also been forced to admit that there are not as many friendly fighters in Syria as he first thought. This is something which many people said at the time, of course, but there is apparently no system in place to haul someone back to the House of Commons who has obviously lied in a debate for their own ends and give them a public roasting. The best we can hope for is a Chilcot-style enquiry in a decade or so, to get to the bottom of the biggest foreign policy debacle of the 21^st century.  Meanwhile, the bombing continues, the refugees are still fleeing, drowning, and freezing to death in the camps. That is if they have managed to escape from places such as Madaya in the first place.

The freezing weather hasn’t really been helping much at home, either. The long, dismal clean-up after the Calder Valley floods has been continuing, and now, people who have damp, empty houses are having to cope with the addition of sub-zero temperatures.  There are also signs that the camaraderie and co-operation which marked the early days of the fight back against Mother Nature’s excesses are starting to wear a bit thin. Concerns have been voiced about the slow administration of the relief grants, and that some people are still unaware of what financial help they can obtain. There are now two different funds, one of which is specifically aimed at getting businesses back up and running, but even so, of the 1200 businesses in the Calder Valley expected to have been affected, only 74 have actually received help to date, for a variety of reasons. It is perhaps worth reflecting at this point that the catering in the House of Commons has spent £275,221 on champagne since 2010.

The Calderdale Rising fund has benefited by a single donation of £100,000 from the Daily Mail, of all people. As one wag on Facebook observed, “maybe they thought that we were being flooded by immigrants.” It turns out, though, that it is the readers of the Daily Mail who have contributed. In bits and bats and widows mites, rather than the Harmsworths and Rothermeres unbracing their wallets and letting the moths see some daylight. It is inevitable, I suppose, that there will be a certain amount of bitterness and acrimony, and some of it with good cause, but I suppose the ideal would be to focus it on those who really deserve it – the insurance companies being slow to send in loss adjusters, the people insisting on surveys costing £500 before the applications for future flood mitigation will be considered, the spivs and chancers going door to door trying to obtain money from people for work and services they don’t want, the utilities and phone companies continuing to charge for non-existent services, and the would-be looters.

Either way, it would be a shame if that initial idealism and real “all in it together” attitude were to be lost, as it really did seem to be something special at the time. There is no doubt, either, that the recovery phase will be a long-haul process, lasting months, if not years. In the outcome, there will be losers as well as winners. There is also the issue of the initial adrenaline rush having worn off. It’s a bit like when you fall over and crock yourself. For a while, the shock numbs the pain, it’s only the next day when you see the bruise and feel it aching.  That’s what I think is happening now with the Calder Valley. Plus, of course, there is a lot of winter, and a lot of rain, still to come. As one Hebden Bridge blogger mordantly observed, “The first time it happened, we got Prince Charles, this time it was Prince Andrew. Next time, they’ll probably just send seven dwarfs and a Nolan sister.” Hebden Bridge is, famously, the most Lesbian town in England, and had UKIP not been so busy of late attempting to “assassinate”  Nigel Farage – at last, a UKIP policy we can all get behind – I would have expected them to have made much of the connection between gayness and localised flooding. As it is, it has been left to those with a puerile sense of humour, such as yours truly, to make the jokes about “protective dykes”.

One area where dykes, protective or otherwise, will be less welcome from this week is now the Church of England. I much preferred the Church of England when it was more like a hobby than a religion, a bit like Midsomer Murders, but without the violence, as a friend of mine described it. It’s very disturbing when it suddenly goes all medieval and starts excommunicating large parts of itself, in an attempt to avoid a schism by creating another schism. I really thought this thing about gay Christians had been put to bed a long while ago (no pun intended) but now, once again, people are cherry picking which bits of Leviticus they want to apply in an attempt to dictate what other people do in the bedroom.  At least the ferrets will be safe, I suppose, but it really is very depressing.

This is what happens when you try and use the Old Testament as a moral handbook on how to live your life. Perhaps it’s worth just thinking about the provenance of the Old Testament – bits of it began life as a desert survival manual for the Children of Israel, and other bits of it were excluded altogether at the Council of Nicea. Then there is the issue of translation. Unless you are fluent in Aramaic, and can tease out the provenance of, and meanings inherent in, the original text, it is probably a bit futile claiming things are an “abomination” without knowing the original word which was thus translated.

But there is a wider issue. God is love, we are told, Jesus told his disciples that he was giving them a new commandment, love one another. Love thy neighbour as thyself. I am no theologian, but I am guessing that Big G, with everything else on his plate right now, and everything that ever was and shall be, world without end, amen, probably takes a fairly top level, hands-off approach on love, and doesn’t want to get too involved in the specifics of who does what to whom. Obviously the innocence of children needs to be protected, but apart from that, surely what counts is that we create more love in this world, before we finally leave it, than that with which we entered.

I said something like this the last time the issue came up and I will probably say it again (and again, and again). Dear Church of England, in much the same way that MPs surely have something more urgent to debate than the national bloody anthem, why don’t you put aside the issue of gay clergy and concentrate your still-formidable resources instead of solving the fact that people see religion as irrelevant, that materialism means more than spirituality, that there is poverty, hunger, starvation and war abroad and at home, and then, when you have sorted all that lot out, then you can have a nice conference somewhere warm and sunny where you can all debate the relevance of gay ferrets and shellfish in Leviticus until you turn blue in the face, foam at the mouth and fall over backwards. Send me a postcard. But don’t expect to see me at Evensong until you stop being such a set of bedknobs and broomsticks.

Mention of God and such topics brings me to the fact that somehow we have made it through to another Sunday, and the Feast of St Anthony the Abbot, no less. St Anthony the Abbot lived in the desert, wore goat skins, ate only bread and drank only water, and spent his life in contemplation as a hermit, living to the age of 105.

One day, at the age of 18,  in church, he listened to a reading of Matthew 19:21:

"Jesus said unto him, If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come and follow me.”

Apparently, on hearing those words, he walked out the door of the church there and then, and gave away all his property except what he and his sister needed to live on.  That was not the end of it, though. On hearing Matthew 6:34,

“Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.”

he gave away his remaining possessions, put his sister in a convent (with or without her consent is unclear) and went to live a life of praying, fasting, and manual labour!

So, what am I to make of the life of Anthony the Abbot, apart from possibly a hat, or a brooch (keep those Airplane references coming!) My first reaction is that I wish I had the guts to do likewise. Life these days is a lot more complicated, though.  Someone was talking about this recently, online, in the context of writing a novel. It’s so much more difficult these days, what with all the distractions. All Dickens had to do was to eat grilled mutton chops and go to public executions, whereas these days we have 24/7 media and a million other distractions. Substitute “living the life of a hermit” for “writing a novel”, and you have my dilemma. All St Anthony the Abbot had to do was pack up his sister in a large box and courier her to the nearest convent, then he was free to wander about in the desert wearing goatskin underpants (hairy side out – it gets warm in the Middle East) and give up washing and shaving. If I did it today, social services would start taking an interest.

Still, it would be good, like Thoreau, to go and live in the woods, and suck the marrow out of the bones of life while I still can. On the other hand, though, I think it’s something more fundamental that prevents me. I’m scared. I don’t mind admitting it. I’m scared, specifically, that if I were to take that leap of faith, there would be no-one there to catch me, and until I have worked on my faith and repaired it, I guess I will just have to keep on keeping on in the furrow I am ploughing, or the rut, if you want to be unkind. I console myself that “they also serve who only stand and wait” but it’s not much consolation really, when you think that the sands of time are slipping away and I may not have that much time to achieve my dreams, whenever I have decided what they are, always assuming I can even do that. A land of milk and honey, and being fed by locusts or something. Even a dog that brought bread rolls, like the one St Roche had, would do, at a pinch. I could be a hermit, all other things being equal. I already have the beard.

One of my friends once said a very significant thing to me, though. It was “never underestimate the power of gradual change” – change doesn’t have to be bish bash bosh, yesterday we did that, today we do this… it’s the commitment to change that matters – once you have decided on that, then you can put the new you, the new regime, even the New Jerusalem, maybe, into place gradually, brick by brick. The journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step, and all that. So, from tomorrow, I shall be wearing goatskin underpants, assuming I can catch a goat. But right now, I have had a mobile phone call from Granny, who is heading back in the camper van from Wessenden, in the company of Debbie and three frozen dogs that will need thawing out, telling me to put the kettle on, so that is what I am going to go.  And as for next week, sufficient is the evil thereof. Or something.

Epiblog for Plough Monday

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. And when I say “busy”, I mean “busy”. We have all been suffering from something called “first week back” syndrome, which basically means that from 9AM on Monday 4^th January, the phone and the email kept up a relentless barrage of everybody wanting everything all at once. Including things they could have asked, or sorted, back in November.  Mind you, I am also guilty of that, on occasion.

Deb was back at College as well, so dog walking was curtailed to shorter trips, and of course, this coincided with a turn for the better in the weather, with colder, brighter days replacing all that damn rain. Well, not completely, it has still rained more or less every day, just not continuously.  Misty doesn’t really notice the difference in the length of the walkies, but then dogs don’t really have much of a sense of time.  She still follows the same regime when she comes back. Harness off, towelled down, Muttnuts and “Butchers Dog” for tea, then steaming gently by the fire. 

Misty has, however, transgressed from the straight and narrow this week, literally. With Debbie teaching all day at College on Wednesday, Granny took Misty, Zak and Ellie up to the park. The minute the car door was opened, Misty heard something that spooked her, and off she went, straight over the edge of a 20 foot ornamental rockery.  Fortunatley, the Victorians had a habit of building ledges half way down their rockeries – perhaps they had mad collie dogs in the 19^th century, too – and Misty came to rest on the said edifice, about half way down. Unhurt, but reluctant to return to the bosom of her companions.  This left Granny two choices. Having deposited Zak and Ellie back in the car to avoid them also going AWOL, she was then faced with the option of a) abseiling down from the top and then rock-climbing back up, clutching a collie-dog, or b) legging it down the ornamental path in a big wide zig zagging circle to arrive at the foot of the rocks, then trying to entice Misty down the rest of the way, assuming that Misty was still on the ledge when she got there.

She was saved from either of these desperate choices by the intervention of a kind lady who was also walking her dog, which was also a collie.  While Granny kept watch from the top, the said dog-walker went round the long way, appeared at the bottom, and then, with no more ado, climbed up to where Misty was sitting, picked Misty up in her arms, and made her way gingerly back down. Misty treated the whole thing as a great adventure of course, even though the rest of us aged a couple of years in the space of a single afternoon.

A while ago now we made a “Misty Muttkins Woof Woof Woof There’s Someone At The Door!” bingo card of all the people she barks at, and this week I have to say she scored a full house when we had a tall, uniformed UPS man with a Moin Ali beard and a clipboard.  Zak, by contrast, is much more laid back, usually literally, on the dog bed he has now claimed as his. The only thing that seems to arouse his ire is when Debbie hoovers. Like nature, Zak abhors a vacuum. Debbie rather unkindly said that this is because her Mum never hoovers, so Zak had never seen one before. Sisterhood is powerful.

Talking of sisterhood, Matilda has been demonstrating universal peace and love by getting into fights with neighbouring cats. On Tuesday I heard an almighty kerfuffle going on outside on the decking, and I let Misty out, as this is the quickest way of separating the combatants, when they are two cats. One woof and they both skedaddled in opposite directions.  Matilda returned, shortly afterwards, to the door, with her tail the size of a bog brush, and one of the other cat’s toenail claws embedded in her nose, in the middle, right between her eyes, sticking out like the horn of a unicorn. Attempts to get her to come near enough for me to remove it failed, as they always do when a cat actually knows you want it to come to you. It is only when you are finally inking in the last words on a vellum scroll that the cat will come in from the garden, walk across your work, and rub its head on you.  Somewhere in the archives of my last real job, unless they have thrown it out, which is quite likely, there is a flow chart I drew of the order processing system, digitally signed by the muddy little toes of Russell, who walked across it one day when I was drawing it out at home.

Anyway, eventually she sat on the carpet and had one of those prolonged washes cats have when their dignity has been disturbed, as well as their fur, and she managed to remove the errant toenail herself, during that process. You can take the cat out of Huddersfield, but you can’t take Huddersfield out of the cat. I think she gets it from Debbie, who, in her younger days, didn’t count it a successful night out in Town unless you had had a fight in a kebab shop after closing time, and woke up the next day with someone’s toenail embedded in your head.

Meanwhile, I have diverted myself from the tedium of running year-end reports by working on the design of jackets for this year’s books. I am so disorientated by the change in the year that I keep referring to them as “next year’s books!” Mind you, if this year goes like last year, some of them might well end up being next year’s books, but we shall see.

All of this assumes that there will be a next year, of course. As I said in my last blog, sometimes it seems as though we are living in the era of the final apocalypse. The floods in the Calder Valley have gone down – for now, but the long, dreary clean-up continues. Questions, too, are beginning to be asked, along the lines of those which I posed in last week’s blog, about the slowness of the official response, and why the burden has fallen on so many volunteers and unofficial co-ordinators. There are those who view such questions as inappropriate or insensitive, at a time when people are still struggling to dry out and clean their homes and businesses, and rebuild their lives, but nevertheless it needs asking.  I repeat what I said last week – I am not decrying or calling into question in any way the efforts of the volunteers, they performed miracles, as witnessed by anyone who followed the Flood Action Group’s Facebook page – the question is, why should they have had to do so?

The short answer is, of course, that, in the absence of any long term official help once the immediate danger was past, in the absence of a national disaster emergency Civil Defence force, if the volunteers hadn’t done it, then nobody would.  This is, of course, typical of the way in which government works these days – we elect people to ensure that the basic needs of safety and law and order are met, and they abdicate the responsibility by outsourcing the work, or ignoring the problem until a charity is forced to step in, because the government is playing brinkmanship with people’s livelihoods, and in some cases, lives.

This is especially true in the case of the homeless. Homelessness has always been a political football, and never more so than today, when the Junta’s “austerity” programme has massively increased the numbers of people with no home, many of whom are also reliant on handouts from food banks. I am a follower of several homelessness groups on Facebook and noticed this week a particularly poignant posting by one of them, based in Wolverhampton.

This morning, one of our friends on the streets, Hayley, was found dead on Queen Street in Wolves city centre. Our teams of volunteers had come to know Hayley quite well and are very saddened by this news. This sadness is shadowed by a sense of anger too however. It is an absolute disgrace that in 2016, there are incredibly vulnerable people living rough on our streets and are not only homeless but also contending with all sorts of health issues - mental, physical and emotional. I am not going to turn this into a rant but I would like people to be aware that people who are on our doorstep ARE dying NOW! We will be out as usual tonight but we know that the mood amongst the homeless community will be a sombre one.

I second that emotion, as Smokey Robinson might say, if he were here right now. And why NOT turn it into a rant? Rant away! It’s only by ranting and continuing to rant, these days, that you can get anything done in this country, because until the smug, self-serving, self-satisfied bastards are brought face to face with the reality of the consequences of their actions, and they are scared into thinking that people might actually do something unpredictable and dangerous out of their righteous anger, then nothing will happen. MPs will go on having three houses, two of them empty at any given time, while people like Hayley, whoever she was, are dying in the frozen precinct.

Anyway, back in the Calder Valley, people are realising it is going to be a long hard road to get back to where they were on Boxing Day, and reaction of various sorts is starting to set in.  Prince Andrew, no less, the Grand Old Duke of York, has been to visit, and see for himself the floods at first hand. He observed, apparently, that there was a lot of water, everywhere.  I know that the royals are damned if they do, and damned if they don’t, in that if he’d stayed away entirely, there would have been people who accused the royals of not caring.  However, his cavalcade of limos apparently caused a traffic gridlock in Todmorden and Hebden Bridge, and, to make matters worse, one of the limos managed to clip a small dog, which had managed to survive the floods, only to be dinged by a Daimler. Fortunately, apparently, it was none the worse for wear.  I would have had more respect for Prince Andrew if he’d got out of the limo, put on his wellies, and helped to clear some drains, but hey, what do I know, eh? What do I know?

The mainstream media has also – belatedly – picked up on the way in which the massive volunteer effort united some sections of the local community which had previously been at least strangers, if not potential adversaries. In an article in The Guardian, the title of which contained the phrases “How floods united the North” and “Chefs bearing curries, refugees with sandbags” that newspaper documented some of the more bizarre aspects of the relief effort – the “samosa runs” of hot Asian food from Bradford charities to be handed out to flood refugees and volunteers alike at the various “hubs” set up in the stricken towns, the Syrian refugees filling sandbanks, and the former member of Combat 18 who went up to a Sikh cooking curry on a camp cooker at one of the hot food distribution points, and, with tears in his eyes, shook the bloke’s hand and apologised for thinking badly of him and his kind in the past.

Officialdom has now begun to take over some of these previously voluntary actions, not always in the most appropriate or efficient way, however, or so it would seem. The council announced that there would be a process of applying for match-funded grants from a central government “pot” of up to £2m, for business premises damaged in the floods. The announcement was made on Friday lunchtime, and the deadline for applications is tomorrow. It reminds me of those Rotten Borough elections in the 19^th century where they used to keep moving the ballot box round the constituency, from pub to pub, to prevent too many people from voting.  And there is now an “official” fundraising single, sales of which will benefit the flood relief fund. It is by Cannon and Ball. Make of that what you will. With a bowl of warm water, you could choose from either a fruit bowl or an ashtray, depending if it’s the 6 inch or 9 inch version.

The idea that there is a choice between giving aid overseas and giving aid to “our own” which has been rumbling along behind all the fundraising efforts this week, has been given a new lease of life by the India announcing that it had 10 space missions planned this year, leading people to ask why we are giving overseas aid to a country that has a space programme at the same time as street-urchins and beggars living in appalling poverty. The short but harsh answer is that the Indian government’s aspirations are such that, if the UK government chopped all the aid tomorrow, and the NGOs could no longer channel it to India’s poor and needy, the Indian government would not immediately abandon its plans to launch sixteen satellites and put the effort into poor relief instead – it would carry on its merry, sweet way and let the beggars starve. We know this, and they know that we know this, and in that respect, the Indian government is just as bad as ours, abdicating responsibility and indulging in brinkmanship with the poor as pawns in the game.

Fortunately, overall, the UK government spends 0.7% of its income on international aid. Less than 1%. And – bringing the argument back into the realm of the floods - the government has failed to apply for millions available from the EU to help cope with flood emergencies, because it is not politically expedient for David Cameron to be seen going cap-in-hand to the EU at a time when he is trying to appear tough and anti European to appease the hairy-handed wannabe-UKIP supporters who keep him awake by howling at the moon if they don’t get their regular fix of Daily Mail xenophobia.  So people in Yorkshire are denied help for the good of the Tory party, or at least that faction of it currently led by David Cameron.

There are, of course, sadly, other areas which will not be getting any help from the EU, flooded or otherwise this winter.  They contain people in a desperate state, suffering from cold, disease, and malnutrition. They are the refugee camps on the Macedonian border, and the civilians stuck in the midst of the fighting in the Syrian city of Madaya. I am not going to say that we should be concentrating on these people at the expense of those whose lives and livelihoods have been damaged by the floods in the Calder Valley. It is impossible to quantify a scale of suffering, and say that this suffering is worse, or “worth more” on some kind of “suffering scale”, than that suffering.  Suffering is suffering, and any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind.  The pain of someone who has lost their pet cat in the floods is just as acute as the pain of someone who has had to kill and eat their pet cat in Madaya, in order to stop them starving. They have already eaten all the dogs.  There have been reports of people eating grass, and leaves off trees, just to try and stay alive.

When will the bloody murderers responsible realise, and call a cease-fire? Or, failing that, if we must bomb Syria, at whatever enormous cost, then surely it is not beyond the wit of the combined military minds behind these operations to come up with a plan that threatens the besieging forces to lift the siege? Or at least to air-drop humanitarian supplies? Well, the answer is no, and no, because the besieging forces are actually Syrian government troops, reinforced by Hizbollah, and newly emboldened, no doubt, by the ill-timed adventurist intervention of President Putin (not gay: that’s official) on the side of a President in Syria who barrel-bombs his own people.  The World Food Programme relief convoy for Madaya has been delayed because of unspecified hitches, so by the time it reaches its destination, tomorrow, or possibly Tuesday, yet more people will have died.  Meanwhile, a similar situation is developing in two more besieged towns, Foah and Kefraya. Make a note of their names. You’ll see them on the news next week, accompanied by pictures of dying children, unless of course the media is distracted by Big Brother, or David Cameron taking a “tough stance” on something, or the need to run a further attack on Jeremy Corbyn or something.

Meanwhile, as with the desperate conditions in the Macedonian camps, where winter has set in with a vengeance, or in the camps at Calais and Dunkerque, where the situation has also been exacerbated by flooding, the poorest, the most vulnerable, the people who have lost everything, suffer and die this winter. As predicted.  And not just by those who are being wise after the event – there were lots of people who were wise before the event, and the politicians didn’t listen.  So, it has now got to the stage in Madaya where possibly the only hope of getting the aid convoy through is a cease-fire negotiated by Ban-Ki-Moon, the secretary general of the UN. It’s only a Ban-Ki-Moon, shining over a cardboard sea, but it’s their best chance.

Today is the anniversary of various Saints and “Blesseds” (but not Brian Blessed) including Archbishop William Laud, who was beheaded in 1645 despite a Royal pardon, which sounds a bit harsh until you remember that the King at the time, Charles I, had seen his realm shrink to the bough of an oak tree in Worcestershire, and the Puritans, our version of the Taleban, but thankfully it was 470 years ago and we got it out of our system, didn’t give a stuff what Charles I said.  I’ve chosen, however, to title this Epiblog after tomorrow, Plough Monday, traditionally the first Monday after Epiphany, where, in England, the farm workers started breaking the ground on a new year, sometimes accompanied by high jinks and black-faced mummers and similar tomfoolery.

I’ve chosen it because I would like to see several ground-breaking things happen. I’d like to see a new start in several areas.  There needs, literally, to be ground-breaking in this country. Ground-breaking to build new flood defences. Ground-breaking to build new, affordable homes and council houses for rent, not for sale. There also needs to be some ground-breaking ideas that people are worth more than profit. That everyone should have somewhere safe and warm to lay their head. That no-one should go hungry. That the community spirit which carried the people of the Calder Valley through the terrible days immediately after the flooding is worth preserving, and building upon, and spreading, if possible.  That we should give up interfering in foreign countries far away where we only make the situation worse, by creating misery and increasing the flow of refugees.  That we should spend the money we’re currently spending on bombing Syria on aid instead, either there and/ or at home. That the swords be turned into ploughshares.

That would be a harvest worth breaking the ground for. I know this is crazy, but I am going to start praying for it. Apart from writing about these problems, and signing petitions, and writing to politicians, and donating tins to the food banks, there is little else I, personally, can do.  But I think I, too, need to do some ground-breaking, some revision, some sowing of seeds in my own life. I need to take stock of what I believe, and what to do with it.  Today, tomorrow, going forward. Of course, next week, I will be back on the treadmill of work, and soon, this evening, I will be plunged back into the domestic tasks of drying off and feeding dogs, making tea (Debbie can dry herself) and baking some greengage jam tarts. I may complain, but I am lucky to have the wherewithal to do so. Later, no doubt, Matilda will come in, also yowling for food, and I will feed her.  But as I go to bed tonight, there will be kids yowling for food in Macedonia, Calais, Dunkerque, Madaya, and yes, maybe even in the Calder Valley.  I need to decide what, apart from praying, I can do about this.  Maybe we could make a start by putting all the waste land down to grow food, as we did in the war as part of “Dig for Victory”.  Distributism, and the return to craft-work, have been derided as being pseudo-bucolic in this modern era, but now people can use the internet to sell their wares, instead of having to load up a cart and take them to market, is it such a crazy idea?  What about persuading supermarkets, instead of skipping out of date food, to take it back to the distribution hub in their delivery lorries, which currently go back after delivering to their stores each day,  empty, and for the food to be there sorted and distributed to those who need it? 

As in Langland’s Piers Plowman, we have a “faire field full of folk” to work with in this country there is no shortage of skill and talent, just of the political and religious will to make it work for the common good.  Don’t take my word for it, here is A. G. McDonnell at the end of England, Their England:

Soon Donald could see that, although they walked out of step, in groups and parties, mingling with each other and changing from moment to moment, with here and there a man by himself, although in fact they did not remotely resemble the disciplined advance of an army on the march, nevertheless, every single one carried a weapon of some sort, even if it was only a cross-bow or a bill-hook or a scythe. And yet none of them wore anything that might be described as a uniform; mostly they wore black suits or shabby corduroys, and they carried their weapons in a careless, amateurish way.

The rumbling noise grew louder and more continuous. The faces of the two vanguards were now visible, and Donald saw that all the men of those two armed bodies of civilians were shaking and quaking and heaving with inexhaustible laughter. The vanguards met immediately below St. Catherine's Hill, where the road had widened out, somehow without Donald noticing it, into a great broad open space, and in a few moments all the men were talking and laughing together. Nobody listened very much to anybody, but they all seemed to be in raging, towering spirits. They threw their weapons down apparently at random, and pulled books and scrolls and parchments and pieces of paper out of their pockets and chattered away and declaimed and recited; and suddenly and queerly and instinctively Donald knew that they were all poets.

Once there seemed to be some sort of alarm sounded, for they all sprang to arms with inconceivable rapidity, and ranged themselves in battle array and handled their jumble of weapons in a manner that was the complete reverse of carelessness and amateurishness. When it was found to have been a false alarm, they shoved their weapons away again—one, a little fellow, stuffed a great meat-axe casually into one coat-pocket and hauled a quarto volume out of the other, and one arranged his Hotchkiss machine-gun into a three-legged table and sat down on the ground and began to write a poem upon it—and fell to talking and laughing and scribbling and shouting and declaiming.

I have reckoned to be some kind of Christian in the past, although I don’t believe that the entirety of the Bible is the received word of God, and I don’t believe it’s morally right to attempt to convert someone to a particular belief system, especially against their will, and nor do I think that the Church (any church) has a universal moral answer which is applicable in every situation or circumstance. I sort of believe in Jesus, at least I believe he existed, but I struggle enormously with the whole Son of God thing.  I have no answer whatsoever to the problem of evil in the world, save that God’s ideas of right and wrong must be radically different to ours, or he/she/it knows something we don’t. I do believe that people survive after they die, probably in a way to do with multiple universes and different planes of existence that we don’t fully understand, and probably never will, until it’s finally revealed to us. I do think that something listens to my prayers, sometimes.

And that’s about it. Not much with which to fare forward and plough all those muddy acres that lie ahead, but these fragments I have shored against my ruin, as Eliot said. After all, it worked well enough when Adam delved and Eve span, and there was then no Gentleman… Right now, though, all I can fall back upon is that traditional cry for Plough Monday, of “God Speed The Plough”.