Epiblog for the Second Sunday in Lent

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. But before I tell you about it, I’d just like to say a few words about why I started my petition https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/120545

This is pure selfishness on my part, but the reason I am putting it here is that, because people have been sharing it on Facebook and Twitter, inevitably people have asked questions and raised points about it, and, rather than try and get round them all individually, especially given the limitations of Twitter for long conversations, I thought if I posted some of my reasoning here, it might help with the frequently asked questions and to provide some background. Plus, in future, I can just link to this blog when someone asks a question I know is answered here.

For those who have already signed the petition and are anxious to crack on and find out what new disasters have befallen us this week, if any, please feel free to skip the next two or three paragraphs.

Firstly, the existing animal welfare legislation is rooted in Victorian times, where attitudes to animals were completely different. True, a horse might expect to be worked to death, or a pit pony would spend its life underground and never see daylight, but the idea of deliberately killing an animal “just for fun” was relegated to a hard core of psychopaths.  So we have a situation where successive laws have come down and been amended through the years, based, for instance, on the principle that a dog is essentially a working animal, and a cat is nothing more, in law, than a household chattel.

Currently the Animal Welfare Act allows for 26 weeks as the maximum custodial sentence in cases of the severest, intentional cruelty, with malice aforethought. However, all too frequently we see cases of people who have inflicted wilful violent cruelty on animals either walking free from court, or with the most minimal punishments. Magistrates have told me that one of the reasons they don’t go for the severe end of the punishment scale, is that it will just be overturned on appeal, which is to my mind another symptom that the whole attitude towards animal welfare and deliberate animal abuse needs revising and strengthening.

I am not anticipating that, if this ever did reach the statute book, it would become the de facto legislation for prosecuting all cases of animal abuse. I see it as rather like a nuclear deterrent, something you hope will be rarely, if ever used. Maybe once or twice a year, for high-profile cases. I want it to be sitting there on the statute book in the hope that the next time a gang of yobboes thinks its funny to kick a dog or cat to death, or to set fire to an animal sanctuary for a laugh, they might just think twice, and think again.

As to the length of the sentence, I could have said, a life for a life, or 10 years minimum or an even longer sentence, but that would have limited the chance of large numbers of people signing it. I may well agree with you that more draconian measures would be preferable. I have written before that one possible just punishment would be to do to the abuser whatever they did to the animal they killed, and that once you had set fire to a few yobboes and thrown them off the car park roof, cases of deliberate animal cruelty would decline appreciably. However, such remedies aren’t available to us, so I tried to go for a term which would still be seen as a deterrent, commensurate with the suffering caused, but reasonable enough that people would sign in large numbers. I imagine anyway that if it ever did become law, there would be several attempts to dilute the penalty, by vested interests.

Finally, I would like to touch on a couple of those vested interests, fox hunting, and useless animal experiments. It’s been pointed out to me that, the way my petition is framed, it would be possible to bring a prosecution against either a fox hunt or an animal experiments laboratory, as both can on occasion be said to have deliberately  caused cruelty and death to animals with no heed to the animal’s suffering, and with malice aforethought. Good. I have not made exceptions for these two despicable activities because I would like to see the law challenged in both cases, as part of a wider re-assessment of society’s whole attitude towards animals.

Anyway, that’s enough of the soapbox, so back to the week that was. As I said, it’s been a busy old week in the Holme Valley. The weather has been kinder in that at least we’ve seen a bit of sunshine, here and there, but it’s also been frosty, and on some days windy and rainy. A real mixed bag, in fact. The snowdrops are now out, but the daffs are still stubbornly refusing to flourish their brazen trumpets.  The squirrels and the birds have been busily nibbling their way through the contents of several dishes of bird food,

Matilda is no fan of changeable weather, especially as she’s been caught out by one or two showers this week and has had to be hand-dried with kitchen roll on her return.  The most amusing thing is when she goes to the door when it’s actually raining, and dithers on the threshold, letting “I dare not” wait upon “I would” like the cat i’the adage, as Shakespoke might have put it.  I have told her several times that I do not control the weather, and that if I did, it would be warm and sunny every day, but it goes in one ear and out the other.

Misty has also developed an unwillingness to leave her cosy and warm bed and go out into the garden to do her necessaries, when the weather is bad.  This is odd, because she thinks nothing of yomping miles across the moors in all kinds of foul sleet and snow in the company of Deb. Obviously somehow, in the crinkly recesses of her furry little tennis ball of a brain, she differentiates between “walkies” mode and “garden” mode.

The garden is actually in a terrible state, and one of the things I must do, and sooner rather than later, is sort it out. I made a start this week by compiling a list of “house” jobs that need attention, but most of the outside ones will have to wait until it stops raining, and not just for a couple of hours, but for a couple of weeks.

In the meantime, I have been bashing on with the books. It has been half-term, which also gave both of us a much-needed rest from the punishing routine of early starts. And we’ve had the chimney swept, which means the stove is suddenly several degrees more efficient, and we’ve all been a bit warmer. He was a personable enough bloke, very efficient and very good at keeping the mess to an absolute minimum. It was the first time I’d met him in person (I was in hospital the last time the chimney got swept, in fact, I organised the sweeping of it from my hospital bed) and I asked him if he ever got asked to go to weddings.  He does, surprisingly enough in these materialistic, un-superstitious times, but he doesn’t go. Only to family weddings, and even then, in a suit, and not dressed as a sweep. Oh well.

Despite my deliberate attempts to keep busy and ignore it, the outside world has been intruding into my life, even if only via the ever-present and increasingly-depressing medium of the television news. A couple of neatly-bracketed stories which particularly caught my attention related to how, back in 1990, Peter Walker, the senior Tory cabinet minister, tried to persuade Thatcher to charge Poll Tax to the homeless, and this week the DWP asked a boy who was born with no arms and no legs to prove that he was disabled. There is thirty years of caring, compassionate Conservatism, summed up for you and tied with a little blue bow.

But all the talk this week has been about the EU, and “Brexit” – and it’s much worse than I anticipated.  A week is a long time in politics, as Harold Wilson once famously observed, and this week has been a particularly long-one for the pig-bothering Prime Minister. A week of the long knives, in fact.  Cameron seems to have bungled this business of allowing cabinet ministers to campaign in favour of “Brexit”, and while at this time last week, I was entertaining vague notions that he might have the balls to do a spring re-shuffle, get rid of the anti-EU faction, and “accidentally” defenestrate Jeremy Hunt in the process, clearly that’s not now going to happen.

Because of the paucity of the “deal” he has managed to secure, Cameron is now in a much weaker position and his whole career is now staked on the outcome of the referendum – so much so that there are those who say he was doomed either way.  I have no sympathy for him. He brought it upon himself. He didn’t have to include the EU referendum in his manifesto for the last election, he only did it to spike the guns of UKIP. He didn’t have to announce so far in advance that he was planning to step down. Both major tactical blunders. Still, whatever the outcome for him, he will come out of it very nicely, thank you, and much more comfortably than any of his victims.

In fact, the seeds of the imbroglio currently facing our beloved leader go back six years. It must have seemed a slam-dunk, back in 2010, to blame the immigrants.  It doesn’t matter particularly what for. The Tories set out from day 1 to pump out anti-immigrant propaganda, in the same was as they pumped out anti-disabled propaganda.  What they didn’t foresee is that the specific anti-immigrant propaganda also fed UKIP support, and in fact, it probably acted as a recruiting sergeant for the kippers, as the government, for all its rhetoric, was believed to be weak, compared to UKIP’s non-specific, but nevertheless dire, sabre-rattling about immigration.  Having realised they had made a boo-boo and let the UKIP genie out of the bottle, the only thing they Tories could do at the last election to try and rein in the monster their propaganda had created and nurtured, was to out-Kipper the kippers, and thus the idea of an in/out referendum was born.  It must have seemed a good idea at the time, but then he blundered into the Syrian conflict, which was already creating millions of refugees, and made it worse. Suddenly, the kippers are able to point at the poor desperate refugees in the Jungle at Calais, and use them to scare maiden aunts in Leamington Spa into voting no. So Cameron has to be seen to be even tougher than UKIP, and so it goes on.

I said at the time of the last election, when totally false allegations about immigration were being used as political missiles by all sides, that the winner of the election would probably be the party who voted to string up asylum seekers from the nearest lamp post, and I am beginning to think I was right.

And this is only the start of it. We still have three months of this crap to come. Part of Cameron’s trouble is that his propaganda ministry, aided and abetted by a supine and unquestioning media, has firmly planted in the psyche of white van man bigot Britain the idea that “there’s too many of ‘em, coming over ‘ere, takin’ our jobs and using our resources and being given the keys to a council house and a flat screen TV, claiming benefits paid for by hard working British taxpayer families”.  That myth – and it is largely a myth – has taken such a pervasive hold, particularly amongst people who don’t (or can’t, because they lack the intellectual capacity) differentiate between legal immigrants, asylum seekers, people who are British but have a different ethnicity, Muslims, illegal immigrants, refugees and terrorists. To the people who this message appeals to, all those categories are just “em”. There’s too many of ‘em.

To unpick the myth takes lots of words, hardly an ideal remedy in an age of soundbites and limited attention-spans.  The whole issue of benefits for migrants for instance, applies to EU migrants, who are more likely to be white than brown. Research has shown that migrants most often go into the private rented housing market, and not into social housing. Asylum seekers can’t claim benefits.  Newspaper columnists who have written about immigrants being given free cars, TVs and council houses have actually been caught out and forced to print an apology – but it’s never the same size or the same prominence as the original lie. When you start to unpick the minutiae of the problem, it is much more complex. There are reciprocal arrangements, for instance, governing British migrants who live in other EU countries. These types of “benefits“ are hardly ever mentioned.  Instead, we are going to be treated to three months of the unedifying spectacle of Cameron and Farage arguing about who can be the most beastly towards the child of a theoretical Polish economic migrant. Generously larded with “dog-whistle” statements (I will be charitable and call them statements, but they will be mostly lies) on refugees and Muslims, all aimed at keeping the pot boiling.

This is what our once-great country has descended to. And when Cameron loses the referendum, he will resign, and Boris Johnson (Britain’s answer to Donald Trump, although we’ve forgotten precisely what the question was) will become Tory leader and ipso facto Prime Minister. He will no doubt commence building a giant fence round the entire British coastline, with machine gun towers every 100 yards. Only then will the freedoms our fathers and grandfathers fought for in 1940 be safe. Oh, hang on…

Start digging that fallout shelter now.  You heard it here first. Whether the boss is Cameron or Johnson, the message is going to be that we’re standing firmly with the priests and the Levites, happy to pass by on the other side while the refugees suffer. Johnson may pose as a bumbling maverick but in reality he is a ruthless right-wing ideologue who idolises Margaret Thatcher.

Given what I have just written, you might think I am in favour of unrestricted immigration and the EU as it currently stands. I am not. The EU as it currently stands is a corrupt, self-serving organisation that needs reforming over a period of years to wean it off its bloated political ambitions towards “ever closer union” and back to the idea of it being a “Common Market” which is what I thought I voted for back in 1975, last time we had a referendum. But you can’t reform an institution from the outside.  I also think we should have control over who we let in to the country, which might seem at first sight like I am taking the same stance as UKIP. Where I differ, however, is that the people I would let into the country are probably precisely the types of people Nigel Farage would seek to exclude. Given that Jeremy Hunt is making a complete Horlicks of the NHS, we can’t afford to be picky about not letting in doctors for instance, just because they happen to have brown faces. The same applies to any other skill that is in short supply in the UK.  And, indeed, we should stand up for the beliefs that made this country great, and let in more refugees.

This very day, as Gabriela Andreevska writes:

the Greek-Macedonian border will be closed for Afghani people as of today. ONLY Syrians and Iraqis with valid passports/IDs will be allowed to seek asylum. For the hundredth time, this constitutes a BLATANT VIOLATION of the Geneva convention and many other international laws and agreements. It is a state of lawlessness where Fortress EU dictates atrocities and Macedonia and the other Balkan states readily execute its orders. In doing so, the Balkan states are just as blameworthy, becoming accomplices in this mass suffering of thousands of people stranded at the borders and obligated to have recourse to smugglers or walk on foot across countries to seek refuge.

Somehow, we have managed to lose three weeks of February already, and it is the Second Sunday in Lent.  I omitted to mention Ash Wednesday, a week ago last Wednesday, though I did read the Eliot poem on the day, as I always do, and in the same way as I try to always read Donne’s Good Friday 1613, Riding Westward on Good Friday.  To be honest, I never find Lent very inspiring. I am fond of quoting the Gawain-poet’s lines about “After the Christmasse, comes the crabbed Lentoun…”  It’s not the act of giving things up, God alone knows I have given up so many things in the last six years that a few more either way won’t make a lot of difference. It’s more that I find Lent boring. Not even Lent, really, more this time of year. When will it ever get warm? When will it ever stop raining? So much of what needs doing on the house relies on it being warm and sunny enough outside to get it done.  At the moment, I feel I am marking time.

I’m not short of tasks, of course. If I can’t get on with one thing, I just go down to the next one on a (very long) list. But it’s not necessarily the important stuff that gets done. The readings for today, particularly the one from Genesis and the one from Philippians, are all about being patient and waiting for God’s purpose to work itself out. So there is no help or consolation there, particularly, and as for today’s saints, well, apologies to anyone who feels a special affinity with any of them, but they are a motley bunch.

Sometimes, all you can do is close ranks and carry on. The petition is up to 747 signatures, anyway, so at least that is plodding along. What it needs is a re-tweet from someone with hundreds of thousands of followers, but I am not living in hopes. The other main problem with me, spiritually speaking, at the moment, is I am so tired. Physically and mentally tired.  And there is so much bad news in the world, even on the home front, my cousin’s little dog is very ill as I am writing this, and his little life is in the balance, so any prayers to St Roche for the well being and recovery of Jazz the Border Terrier will be gratefully received.

I suppose for me if there is a lesson in Lent it’s not so much to do with self-discipline and denial and abstinence and giving things up, its value lies in reminding me that not all days can be filled with fun, excitement, and achievement. As the song says, some days are diamonds, and some days are stone, and if it were not for days and weeks like these, then the good times would seem dull themselves, by comparison.

I think, also, it’s a time for planning and re-focusing, and remembering that time is probably shorter than you think. Certainly shorter than I think. Lancelot Andrewes, the 17^th century bishop who was one of the prime movers behind the King James version of the Bible, wrote this specific Lenten prayer.

O remember what my substance is; that I am:
dust and ashes, grass and a flower,
flesh and a wind that passeth away,
corruption and a worm,
like a stranger and a sojourner,
dwelling in a house of clay,
days few and evil, today and not tomorrow,
in the morning and not so long as till evening,
now and not presently,
in a body of death,
in a world of corruption,
lying in wickedness.
Remember this.

While that’s a bit sturm and drang, especially on a day like this, it does behove us (well, it behoves me, at any rate) to get on with the things that need doing. So, next week, I will be doing just that. Donne preached a Lenten sermon which seemed to be saying the same sort of things about the fleetingly short time we have to accomplish anything:

BUT WE ARE NOW in the work of an houre, and no more. If there be a minute of sand left, (There is not) If there be a minute of patience left, heare me say, This minute that is left, is that eternitie which we speake of; upon this minute dependeth that eternity: And this minute, God is in this Congregation, and puts his eare to every one of your hearts, and hearkens what you will bid him say to yourselves: whether he shall blesse you for your acceptation, or curse you for your refusall of him this minute: for this minute makes up your Century, your hundred yearess your eternity, because it may be your last minute.

Andrewes preached a sermon on Ash Wednesday, 1619, which is generally acknowledged to have been a major source for Eliot’s poem of the same name.  His use of a circular structure for the sermon, and his language, such as the instruction to turn to God, was picked up by Eliot who began his poem, “Because I do not hope to turn again”.  Here is Andrewes:

And reason; for, once a year, all things turn. And, that once is now at this time; for, now at this time, is the turning of the year. In Heaven, the sun in his equinoctial line, the zodiac, and all the constellations in it, do now turn about to the first point. The earth and all her plants, after a dead winter, return to the first and best season of the year. The creatures, the fowls of the air, the swallow and the turtle, and the crane, and the stork, “know their seasons,” and make their just return at this time, every year. Every thing now turning, that we also would make it our time to turn to God in.

So, there you go. Big G is telling me it’s time to be a little patient. Everything in its turn. To every time, there is a season, and all that.  The trouble is, I never was a little patient, not even when I was in hospital and had to have the bed extended.  Whether or not it is clear to me, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should. I just wish it would get a move on.