It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley.
New week, new storm, seems to be the rule these days, and this week it was
Storm Henry’s turn. With predictable
results. The rain it raineth every day, as Feste was always fond of pointing
out at the drop of a lute. I seem to
remember, though, that a few weeks ago we had Storm Jason, so either we’re now
naming storms without reference to alphabetical order, completely at random, or
I imagined it. It’s quite likely that I imagined it.
Matilda treats every storm the same way, these days, she
suspends operations, comes indoors, and curls up on one of her many
Maisie-blankets in one of her many favourite sleeping places. She’s doing it
now, in fact, although it hasn’t been that bad a day, so far. In fact, whisper
it not in Gath, publish it not in the streets of
Ashkelon, but there was almost a spring-y feel
to things when I went out earlier to put the rubbish in the bin. Maisie’s
indestructible daffodils are coming up again near Russell and Nigel’s mosaic,
in the garden, and in the front garden there are several burgeoning clumps of
snowdrops – Fair Maids of February. I’ve a feeling that we haven’t seen the
back of winter yet, but I am starting vaguely to think about putting in an
order for this year’s herbs.
The birds and squirrels are busy as usual, another sign that
spring may be just around the corner. In a week’s time, traditionally, they
pick their mates for this year, at least according to Chaucer. As I type this there is a big fat wood pigeon
eating out of one side of the dish of bird food and a squirrel eating out of
the other. They are even taking it in turns – first the squirrel has a go, then
it backs off and the pigeon gets some – I suspect, though, this is more to do
with mutual fear and mistrust than good table manners.
Misty has had some longer than usual walks this week as it’s
what the College refer to as “review week” so some of Deb's classes have been
cancelled in favour of meetings instead, for which, of course, she gets paid
less! Fewer classes means less prep, which means more time for doggy walkies,
so at least someone benefited.
Mention of Nigel, above, also reminds me that this week has
seen some significant events and anniversaries.
On 2nd February, it was eight years since Nigel died. He
chose a significant day for his transit to cat heaven, because of course that
date also marked the festival of Candlemas, the feast of St Brigid, and Imbolc,
the pagan festival that marks the mid-way point between the winter solstice and
the equinox. So it was all go, except that we didn’t particularly celebrate any
of them! It was also Groundhog Day, where Puxatawney Pete, the groundhog, who
has been busy carving out a second career as Donald Trump’s hair, emerges from
his hole in Pennsylvania, and either forages around, or gets surprised by his
own shadow and scuttles back into his lair, presaging another six weeks of
winter.
It was also Groundhog Day, where Puxatawney Pete, the
groundhog, who has been busy carving out a second career as Donald Trump’s hair,
emerges from his hole in Pennsylvania, and either forages around, or gets
surprised by his own shadow and scuttles back into his lair, presaging another
six weeks of winter. And yes I think I did that joke at this time last year as
well, which is sort of ironic in a groundhoggy sort of a way. The British version of the legend is the old
weather-saying of “If Candlemas Day dawns bright and clear, there’ll be two
winters in the one year!” I must admit I missed dawn on Candlemas Day itself,
so I have no idea what is going to happen (no change there, then).
Actually, that’s not true. I do know one thing that’s going
to happen, which is that the government, or more specifically the Prime
Minister, will carry on coming out with ever-increasing torrents of bovine
excrement as he tried to bluff his way through the forthcoming EU referendum.
It’s all about looking tough, you see, which means, given the corner he’s
painted himself into, coming out with the sort of xenophobic claptrap and
hate-speech that most appeals to the white van men of bigot Britain. So it’s open season on any soft target that
can’t hit back. This week, it was
disability, which is apparently a lifestyle choice.
Yes, David Cameron, you have seen through my cunning plan to
choose two parents who possessed dodgy genes, which led to me choosing this
nice comfy wheelchair to bool around in, and led to me choosing not to sleep
for longer than an hour at a time before the pain and cramp in my legs wakes me
up again. And I would have gotten away with it, but for you pesky Tories. If you ask me, David Cameron has made a
lifestyle choice to be an irritating, pink-faced, millionaire who makes a habit
of telling lies every time he opens his mouth, and he needs to be weaned off
it.
In the week when we were being told we were scroungers in
order to keep the knuckledraggers of the right feel secure in the
misapprehensions to which they have become accustomed, news emerged of an MP
who had remembered to claim 49p for a carton of milk on expenses, but omitted
to mention the additional £400,000 in income he’d received that year. Somehow,
it slipped his mind, what with having to remember about the 49p and everything.
Or perhaps the money was just resting in his bank account, who knows.
If anyone was in any doubt at all about the depth and scale
of the stupidity of the people who think all Muslims are terrorists and
everyone on benefits is a scrounger, one only had to take a look at the
Facebook Page of the British National Party on the day an old unexploded world
war two bomb was found at Victoria Station in London and brought proceedings to
a halt until it could be defused. Given
that the BNP is, in any case, so far to the right that it’s four stops past
Barking and well off the bus route, its utterances usually come with a pinch of
froth and spittle anyway, but they excelled themselves this time, with post
after post blaming the UXB on “Muslims”.
Yes, those fiendishly cunning Muslims. First they learn
German and manage to knock up some Luftwaffe uniforms, then they find out how
to build a replica of a Heinkel III and somehow fly it backwards in time 76
years to bomb London
from the air. Gor’ blimey, guv’nor, we’ve got our work cut out with this
lot. And while all this was going on, as
if the Lords of Misrule were somehow abroad and having a field day, a high
court judge declared Lord Lucan officially dead. I don’t know if anyone took the opportunity
of checking the judge’s pulse, while
they were at it.
I only ask because I seem to have been taken to task for
being critical of the judiciary, specifically, being critical of their habit of
handing down lenient sentences to people who deliberately kill and injure
animals for “fun”. It arose out of the
incident of Missy the Bus-Stop cat, which was a cat that used to make a habit
on sleeping at a specific bus-shelter in Leigh Park near Havant, where it had
become a regular fixture and was greeted, and petted by many travellers and
commuters. Sadly, this weekend, it was discovered in a badly-injured state and
had to be put to sleep. The presumption was, at the time, that yobboes were
responsible, although there is now also a theory that she may have been struck
by a passing car.
I was angry when I read about it. Especially if it was the
yobboes who did it. I make no apologies for calling them yobboes, in fact, I
have called them much worse, but out of respect for the Sabbath, we’ll stick at
yobboes. I’m talking about the sort of
people that – a while ago now – burned down the stables of Barnsley Riding for
the Disabled; the people who set fire to Manchester Dogs’ Home; the
dog-fighting rings; the people who think it’s funny to chuck hedgehogs out of
tower block windows.
At the moment, under the Animal Welfare Act, the maximum
sentence that can be handed down in cases of extreme cruelty and causing the
death of an animal deliberately is a 26 week custodial sentence. All too often, however, this is lessened to
community service and/or a fine. This is
no deterrent. Part of the problem is
that the existing laws are rooted in outdated 19th century attitudes
to animal welfare, in an era when life generally was brutish and nasty and
animal life didn’t really matter except insofar as it affected economic factors
– the loss of a working dog or a horse, for instance. In the last 150 years, notwithstanding that
the Tories want to scrap the welfare state and the NHS, get people begging in
the streets again and stuff children back up chimneys, we have made great
strides in legislature concerning human welfare, but animal welfare is still
stuck in the era of the steam train and the public hanging.
A cat, for instance, is regarded as merely a chattel, from
the point of view of its ownership in law, and a dog is not much better. The only
reason that you have to stop and find out who the owner is, if you run over a
dog, is that you have potentially done them some economic harm, if it was a
working animal. This sort of outmoded
approach to framing the law needs to be fast-forwarded. So I have started an official government
petition (link here) to put a new offence on the statute book, of animal murder,
which brings with it, on conviction, a minimum jail term of five years with no
remission or parole, automatic entry on a new “animal offenders’ register”
along the same lines as the existing sex offenders’ register, and a lifetime
ban on keeping animals or partaking in any employment connected with animals.
To date, it has garnered 198 signatures – for a government
response (which will inevitably take the form of ‘the existing legislation is
sufficient’) it needs 10,000, and for a full debate in parliament, 100,000. So
there is a way to go yet. But the journey of a thousand miles starts with a
single step. A magistrate pointed out to
me that the reason they don’t hand down tougher sentences is that “they just
get overturned on appeal” which leads me to question “why is the original tough sentence seen as unjust?” and the only
answer I can come up with is that our existing laws have led us to accept the
insidious assumption that animal life is somehow not worthy of protection.
Ultimately, that is what has to change, but at least if the CPS have a tough
new deterrent to use in the very worst cases of premeditated cruelty, leading
to the death of an animal with malice aforethought, then this is a step down
that road.
So, that is what I have been doing this week, in what is
laughingly called my “spare time”. And
somehow, another week has whizzed by, and it’s Sunday again. Sadly, in the time I have been typing this,
the day which started out so promising, weather-wise, has deteriorated to such
an extent that I expect shortly there will be drowned-rat Debbie and two soggy
doggies barrelling through the door and competing to get next to the stove and
steam themselves dry. So I had better
get a move on and deal with the main event of the evening, as Kent Walton used
to say in his intros – the fact that this day is the feast of St Richard of Wessex.
I got quite excited when I saw it was St Richard because
initially I was confusing him with Richard of Chichester, who is a different St
Richard, and whose feast is celebrated on June 16th as “Sussex Day”.
Oh well. An easy mistake to make, what with them both being saints, and both
being called Richard, and all.
Today’s St Richard is also known as St Richard The Pilgrim, and
he was supposedly born in Wessex, and thought to have been both the brother in
law of St Boniface and the father of St Willibald, St Winnibald, and St
Walburga. So it was definitely a family business, especially so in that one of
Richard’s early miracles was the cure, through prayer, of his son Willibald, at
the age of three, when the child fell seriously ill.
Although of noble blood, Richard renounced all his titles
and set sail with two of his sons from Hamble, near Southampton on the Solent estuary, on a pilgrimage. This was in about the
year 721AD. Landing in France, they made their way to Rouen,
where, after a brief stay to regroup, they started out along the pilgrim route
to Rome, and thence to the Holy
Land, their ultimate destination, stopping to pray at shrines and
holy sites en route. Unfortunately, Richard never reached his destination. He
fell ill in the town of Lucca, in Tuscany, and died there.
He was buried in the Church
of San Frediano in that
town, and almost immediately, miracles began to be reported at the site of his
tomb.
The main source for this information is a single volume,
written some time between AD 761 and AD 786, a chronicle of the expedition
written by Richard’s niece, Huneburc of Heidenheim, and continued by Willibald,
Richard’s son. Willibald eventually
became bishop of Eichstatt and took some of Richard’s relics back there with
him on his return journey. His cult is still particularly strong in the area of
Heidenheim and at Lucca,
his original burial place.
Normally, I struggle to find a particular lesson appropriate
to my situation in these tales of the old saints, most of which seem to follow
a somewhat formulaic pattern. But there
are two aspects of this story that, this week in particular, struck home. The
idea that life is a pilgrimage, and the concept of having the faith to set out
on a journey that you know you might not finish. Given that a step is roughly a yard (or it
was, when I could still walk) and a thousand yards is a mile, more or less,
then 100,000 steps is 100 miles, or roughly the distance from here to
Walsingham! In terms of my animal petition as a pilgrimage that may fail before
it reaches its destination, I have done 198 yards!
I do often think of life in terms of a pilgrimage, whereby
we undergo the privations of journeying and put ourselves out, and force
ourselves to forsake the familiar hearth in order to learn new things about
ourselves and about others, and develop.
I had in mind, before I was ill, to do one or two real pilgrimages, and
one of my favourite books, to the extent that I am now on my second copy of it,
is Cees Van Nooteboom’s Roads To Santiago. Although ostensibly about Spain, like all
good travel books it’s as much a tour through the internal landscapes of the
author’s mind as it is a guide to all the cathedrals, monasteries and Black
Madonnas.
And, in the same way as Nooteboom can chronicle an internal
pilgrimage while actually being on a real one, I’ve come to understand, these
last five years, that I can chronicle and create an external pilgrimage simply
by going on an internal one. In a sense, the actual pilgrimage “experience”
becomes superfluous. I could do with some sun, obviously, but as far as
privations go, I carry my own with me these days (it’s a lifestyle choice,
don’t you know?) and I am constantly breaking into new, and potentially scary
territory. Plain food? Lack of sleep?
Been there, done that. Every winter is a pilgrimage, into which I set off with
just the faith that I am going somehow to make it through the darkness and
emerge, blinking, like Puxatawney Pete, into the pale February sunshine. Give me my scallop shell of quiet, as Sir
Walter Raleigh, cloak dangler and inventor of the smoking potato, once wrote:
Give me my
scallop-shell of quiet,
My staff of faith to
walk upon,
My scrip of joy,
immortal diet,
My bottle of
salvation,
My gown of glory,
hope's true gage;
And thus I'll take my
pilgrimage.
The only thing that’s been a bit lacking on my pilgrimages
has been the spiritual enlightenment at the end of it, but perhaps I’m not
there yet. So, fare forward, pilgrims,
and keep right on to the end of the road, even if your destination is literally
and metaphorically “round the bend.”
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