Epiblog for Easter Sunday

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. Somehow, we have stumbled through the morass to Easter, and for Debbie at least, a well-deserved break. The weather has turned better, as well. Unsurprising, I suppose, given that the calendar at least tells me we are past the Equinox, and we have just put the clocks forward to British Summer Time, but given the weird, topsy-turvy nature of the climate at the moment, I wouldn’t be that surprised if it snowed.  Anyway, the snowdrops are hanging on and the daffodils are nodding nicely.

The birds and the squirrels are also busy about their business, and we have now had the ceremonial opening of the door to the cat flap in what used to be Colin’s kitchen, so Matilda may now come and go as she pleases.  In winter, we keep it shut and she goes in and out of the conservatory door, on request. Mainly because if it’s left open on cold winter days, the wind that started life in Siberia, blasted the Urals, howled across the Great North German Plain, picked up a bit of moisture as it crossed the North Sea, and eventually reached Huddersfield, howls through the cat-flap and whistles round my ankles, giving me frostbite.

Not that Matilda has materially altered her lifestyle to take advantage of her new-found freedom, although she did make an unusual (for her) foray into the newly-cleared bits of the front garden, sniffing and exploring as she went.  Misty Muttkins and Zak, meanwhile, have benefited from the fact that Deb is now on holiday, to the extent of doing an 18-mile walk on Friday and an 11-mile walk yesterday, up Wessenden. The latter was curtailed by the sudden deterioration of the weather, including horizontal hailstones, which led to all three of them jogging the last mile and a half back to the van.

As for me, I have been attempting to tie up loose ends. I currently have more loose ends than a Ned Sherrin tribute act, so it’s not a small job. Crowle Street Kids, We’ll Take The String Road, and The Bow of Barnsdale have all seen some work done on them this week. In addition, in what is laughingly described as my spare time, I have received and potted out the first of this year’s herbs (a task made half an hour longer than it should have been because the UK Mail courier just dumped the box outside the door, blocking my wheelchair ramp, and buggered off without knocking or ringing the bell).

I’ve also carried on my campaign of writing letters to charities who number among their patrons Tory MPs who voted to cut ESA by £30 per week, to point out that they are being used for self-promotion by people who really do not share their aims and ambitions, and what do they intend to do about this anomaly? My petition, meanwhile, is languishing at about 1100 signatures, so if I am going to do anything to get to the 10,000 mark where the government is obliged to respond, I need to so some self-promotion of my own! I’ve also started a massive spreadsheet of all the jobs which need doing to the house, and although it is a daunting list, it does at least give us something to focus on. Just looking at it makes me feel tired, though, and I can’t actually do any of it, just project-manage!  Oh well, they also serve who only brew the tea. 

Obviously the whole week in the wider world has been dominated by the news filtering through from Brussels of the latest terrorist outrages there.  The law of unintended consequences meant that this overshadowed, and obliterated in the media, the news which would undoubtedly have otherwise dominated the air waves, of the continuing savage in-fighting in the Tory party about Europe, and the fact that people are starting to question the competence of the “Chancer” of the Exchequer, George Osborne.  By the end of the week, he was hanging on by his fingernails, having done several U-turns, and his budget had more holes than a moth-fancier’s vest, but once more the little weasel managed to get away with it. Just.

It is all starting to unravel, though. Nicky Morgan, the education secretary, failed spectacularly to interpret a graph she was shown on Newsnight, and was heckled and mocked in song when she tried to address the NUT conference. Questions are still being asked about Iain Duncan Smith’s sudden departure and the dubious motives behind it; his successor has been revealed as one of the “pray-away-the-gay” brigade, who believes people with same-sex tendencies can be “cured” by this method, and Cameron himself has done a bunk to Lanzarote. I don’t blame him for wanting to get away from Boris Johnson. If I were in his situation, I would be thinking of somewhere much further away from the poisonous haystack of hate, a man who would undoubtedly crack a joke as he watched the guards herd the partisans into a cattle-truck.

America’s version of Johnson, Forrest Trump, felt the need to comment on the events in Brussels to the effect that “Belgium is a city that needs to get its act together”, a sentence which shows he has as much grasp of geography as George W Bush and should therefore do very well, and that the answer to Belgium’s terrorist problems was “more waterboarding”.  It’s a very depressing thought that the only person who now has a prayer of stopping this man is Hillary bloody Roddam Clinton.

I have no words to describe the people who caused the explosions in Brussels. Well, I do have words, but they certainly aren’t fit for a mixed audience on Easter Sunday. Mindless medieval deluded murdering bastards doesn’t even come close. If there is a hell, I hope they went straight there, and were met and welcomed by 72 demons. Each.  Seeking to find out why they did it, would, of course, be viewed in some quarters as also seeking to excuse or somehow mitigate the action, when in fact it is nothing of the sort. I can seek to understand the psychological flaws, the greed for power, and the mean, penny-pinching self-serving “I’m alright, Jack” cocktail that made Margaret Thatcher wage war on the working classes, and still be bitterly opposed to it.

Seeking to understand why this happened is important, because even at this late stage, when we are so far off the beaten track that we are in danger of sinking into the grimpen mire forever, there might just, still be a way back.  I remember the days when there were only about twelve “Islamic” fundamentalists in the whole world. They lived in a set of caves in Tora Bora and spent most of their time chewing their own beards and arguing about the meaning of the Haddith, and whether it really was 72 virgins or 72 sultanas, something which I, too, would probably want qualified before I started to strap on a suicide vest.

Then came 9/11, and specifically, the West’s reaction to 9/11. There was no attempt there, either, to explain or understand why, and take informed action to gain revenge.  With George W Bush in charge, that was probably inevitable. If they had just stopped at invading Afghanistan, that would have been understandable, as a response, but  it would still have undermined international law and the will of the UN. What made it much worse, however, was the decision to then invade Iraq, instead of just letting Saddam Hussein’s regime implode.  The fact that there were no WMD, and the whole thing was a political sham, concocted by Bush and Blair was not lost on the thousands of people who subsequently flocked to join Al-Qaida. The subsequent misguided interventions in Libya, Egypt, and the attempts to meddle in the Syrian civil war have compounded this an hundredfold.  Now, most of the Middle East is in flames, and every nutter east of the Euphrates (and a good many west of the Euphrates, if it comes to that) is queuing up to blow themselves to bits, and to take as many of us with them as they can.

The people who let off these bombs want the hate to continue. They have absolutely no other aim. Their crackpot organisation peddles death by cherry-picking bits of their creed which seem to promote Jihad and ignores all others. They have waxed fat by being indulged by some of the states surrounding Syria, who have found it convenient for one reason or another to ignore them – Turkey, for instance, is quite happy to see ISIS killing the Kurds, because it saves them the job.  They have also waxed fat because their numbers have swelled exponentially by our actions as their recruiting-sergeant.

And, of course, every time something like this happens, there are the inevitable calls for revenge, which only ratchets the cycle of violence up another few gears. Even if we in the UK put our entire public spaces into lockdown with armed police and troops on every corner, even if we sacrificed the last few remaining shreds of our civil liberties to surveillance and snooping, you still wouldn’t stop these people. Closing the borders is a naïve response in a situation where home-grown terrorists such as the 7/7 bombers can be recruited, groomed and supplied from outside the UK.

It is not only the official knee-jerk responses which ISIS are hoping to provoke. They must have rubbed their hands with glee at the news reports of 40 year old Glasgow shopkeeper Asad Shah being killed in the street outside his shop. They must have chortled at the thought of the Muslims being abused on the bus and asked to justify the Brussels outrage – they must have rocked with mirth at the Twitterstorms that erupted condemning ordinary Muslims for something which they do not have the power to change, however much they want to. And they do want to.  Imagine if the Westboro Baptist Church took over the Church of England and started beheading people for getting the flower rota wrong or serving dry sherry instead of sweet.  And imagine further if the Westboro Baptist Church was the only voice of “Christianity” that the media ever listened to, and your own words of rage and condemnation at the appropriation of your faith, to justify outrageous acts which are several nautical miles away from being “Islamic” or even “religious”, in any sense of the word you or I would understand, were ignored, excluded or twisted by the media to make it seem as though you said something else entirely.

One thing is for sure, though, the Brussels bombings will have made it even more certain that Britain will vote to leave the EU and Cameron will lose the referendum, and his job.  Those who hate refugees, and would like to see them and their children die, such as Katie Hopkins, were quick to jump on the bandwagon and claim that the terrorist outrages were part of the refugee crisis, before it emerged that the bombers had been living in Belgium for some time, and hadn’t just blown in from the Macedonian border.  But an attack like the ones in Brussels is all grist to the mill for the “let ‘em sink” lobby.  There is no doubt, by the way, that ISIS are seeking to exploit the refugee crisis which we have created for their own ends, which is yet another reason why there needs to be a chain of proper screening and reception centres for legitimate refugees all along the trail from Syria to western Europe, a properly-managed process of integration done on a pan-European basis. Apart from anything else, if these safe havens were created and known to those fleeing the Syrian war, then you might be more justified in drawing conclusions about the refugees who didn’t seek the help freely offered. The state of chaos at the moment, though, is meat and drink to the likes of ISIS.   Also of course, ending the Syrian war would stem the flow somewhat, but that still leaves the problem of people who were born here, lived here all their lives, and are now sufficiently radicalised/deluded (delete as applicable) as to want to cause mayhem on home soil.

The news today, Easter Sunday, which should be a day of hope, renewal and resurrection, makes grim reading. Tony Blair has said that using British ground troops is the only way to defeat ISIS militarily. There is so much wrong with that statement that it would take another, second, Epiblog, to nail it all. Defeating ISIS militarily is no use at all if the next day someone from Slough sets off a bomb at, say, St Pancras station.  And in any case, for every one of them you kill, a hundred more spring up in their place.  And why British ground troops in particular, when there are other, much nearer, countries, some of them armed by us anyway, in our continuing mission to turn the middle east into a battleground, who could take on the burden. God save us from armchair warriors who want to fight to the last drop of someone else’s blood. Blair should also pause to reflect that we beat the Irish rebels “militarily” in the Easter Rising in Dublin, 100 years ago this weekend, shot all their leaders, and we then carried on fighting the “defeated” rebels for the next century, near enough.

Cameron, meanwhile (or someone writing on his behalf and claiming to be him) has an article in the papers saying that Britain is a Christian country and should stand up for Christian values. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: I would take Cameron’s pronouncements on “Christian values” more seriously if he sold all he has, and gave it to the poor. I could write for a long time on how Mr Cameron and his cronies have been responsible for the erosion and destruction of some of those Christian values he claims to hold so dear: love, mercy, compassion. “Love thy neighbour as thyself” is a core Christian value, but it doesn’t seem to apply when “thy neighbour” is an orphan Afghan refugee child incarcerated in the shit and filth of the camps at Calais.  Cameron could do well to read, learn, mark and inwardly digest the story of the Good Samaritan.  Then go, thou, and do likewise.

Anyway, it is perhaps uncharitable to be so cynical about Mr Cameron on Easter Sunday. Maybe (a chilling thought) he really means it, and he is trying his best. I have attempted, once again, to reflect on Easter, and its meaning for me, and to be honest, I am no nearer. But then again, I am no further away. Easter has neither confirmed nor denied by beliefs, such as they are, poor fledglings sheltering from the storm of the world.  I am not a Biblical scholar, but from my own reading and attempting to follow the various skeins of thought, I do believe, I think, in the existence of the historical Jesus and the story of his crucifixion under Pilate. But whether or not he was the son of God, or God incarnate, is another story. I’m also aware, of course, having read The Golden Bough at an early age, of the similarity of the story of Christ’s resurrection with other death-and-resurrection religions across the middle east in ancient times.  As I have said before, it could even be that all of these are re-tellings  at several removes, of one Ur-event, the original of which has been lost and is now only reflected in these scattered fragments.

Notwithstanding that the historical Jesus probably existed, did he rise from the dead, and if he did, did it have any significance for the rest of us? If not, then we have been living a 2000-year delusion, albeit one which has produced some of the most sublime and beautiful art known to humankind – and also some of the most savage and cruel wars. No-one can prove it either way, which makes it simply a matter of faith. You are saying, in effect, I know this to be true, but I have no way of knowing how I know it to be true, or of explaining it. This may be derided as unscientific, but since when did that actually mean anything? Science is constantly evolving, and we now possess masses of knowledge about all sorts of things that we didn’t know two, or three hundred years ago. Who is to say that in future, the assertion that inside all of us is a spark of the uncorrupted divine and that our spiritual quest is to find it, and follow it back to its source, will not be scientifically proven? And if it is, will it make it any the less awesome?

On Good Friday, a sombre day as always, I made a point of reading the two texts I try and read every Easter – Goodfriday 1613, Riding Westward by John Donne, and the anonymous Anglo-Saxon poem, The Dream of the Rood, which tells the story of the crucifixion from the point of view of the cross.  Both are astonishing works of poetry, not least because of the time they were written. We think of the Anglo-Saxons as blundering around in hairy smocks and sandals, quaffing mead and living in mud huts, but the sophistication embodied in the idea of telling the story of Christ’s death by using the voice of the cross itself gives the lie to this straight away. And Donne’s dazzling use of imagery of the spheres, the poles, and playing with the notion of facing and turning away from God, is a tour de force of his “metaphysical” skill.

I can only speak personally here, but I’ve always found them to be much more “useful” as contemplative texts than the straightforward Bible story of Jesus’s arrest, trial, crucifixion and resurrection. Sometimes you can communicate something via poetry that has an extra dimension, that just doesn’t fit into prose, however flowery or well-known. T S  Eliot’s assertion, channelling Juliana of Norwich, that “all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well” makes no sense whatsoever when you take it out of the context of Little Gidding. Clearly we live in a world where all shall not be well. I shall not even be well, at least not in this body, with its wonky genes and its slow decaying. And yet, read in the context of the poem, it is strangely comforting.

I am, to a certain extent, going round in circles here. Treading a winding stair I have trodden many times before. Maybe it would help me to understand if I just made a simple, bald, statement of what I have come to believe, this Easter time,  and leave it at that.

Nothing that we see is real. Modern physics confirms this. In that scenario, there could just as well be other worlds, other dimensions, which, suddenly, makes the idea of heaven a lot more believable. In fact, modern physics asserts that there definitely are such dimensions.  God is something to do with the idea of time, and the concept of being outside of time, which brings us back once again to the idea of a limitless eternal universe containing everything that is, was and ever shall be, world without end, amen, in a way I just don’t have the words or the intellectual capacity to explain.  Jesus probably existed, but if he was the “son of God” or God incarnate, and he died for me, why did God, starting out with a blank canvas at the big bang, decide to have it work out that way, when with a simple “shazam!” he could have repaired the damage of original sin at any time?  I feel we do all have a spark of the other, the divine, in us, but what this signifies, again I am at a loss to explain, other than that it is some sort of lodestone to leading a good life and aligning yourself with your spiritual destiny.  Do I believe that every word of the Bible is true and is the word of God, and a manual by which you should live your life? No, I’m afraid I don’t.

So, there you are. A poor collection for half-a-century of wondering, since those days when I used to sit on top of Granny Fenwick’s old air-raid shelter and wonder what was on the other side of the sky. Theologically unsound, possibly heretical, and vague and woolly just where it needs to be precise and scientific. These fragments have I shored against my ruin – Eliot, again.  Part of the problem is that you come to the very boundaries of language. On the one hand, it’s preposterous to claim that someone got up, took off their shroud, put their shoulder to the stone, rolled it away, and wandered off, leaving behind a couple of angels to explain the situation to any well-wishers.  But in a universe where (in certain circumstances) things can be in two places at once, and time can run backwards, is it that much more odd?  As to who he was, and how and why he did it, that, of course, is a much bigger and more un-provable question.

There is a knowledge of the feeling, though, as well as a knowledge of the intellect. I have written before about the absolute blast of what I can only call divine power that emanated from a piece of the true cross, in Holy Cross Abbey, in Ireland, when I stood before it in 1998. I had a similar epiphany in Chartres Cathedral in 1988. The intensity of both experiences has seared them into my memory. I know, intellectually,  that the “piece of the true cross” was probably nothing of the sort. The original “piece of the true cross” which had been the inspiration for the founding of the Abbey in the 1200s, vanished when the Abbey was sacked and ruined during Cromwell’s Irish campaign of the 1650s, and the one I saw was an “authenticated” relic sent from the Vatican in 1969. All very “Father Ted” and easy to make fun of.  But I was there, my friend, and you were not. I knew it by my feelings, and my only explanation is that somehow, through its time of being a focus of prayer, it had inexplicably been imbued with something which then resonated with me.

Such intensity of feeling is rare, and few and far between, and probably that’s just as well. In both cases, too, it was connected with places of pilgrimage, which is one of the reasons why I find myself to be so perpetually preoccupied with Santiago de Compostela. I seem to have strayed a long way from Easter, though, and the women in the garden looking for Jesus and finding he’d just left.  I’m not even sure now, what my point was, which is one of the reasons why, when asked on official forms for my religion these days, I tend to put “Lapsed Agnostic/Chapel of Rest”. I can’t believe in Easter for you, I can only tell you what I believe, and I’m not even very good at that.  Anyway, let’s hear it for the cross, the erstwhile Elder tree, the star of The Dream of The Rood, and an under-appreciated and necessary part of the story, if you believe it had to happen that way, as indeed is Judas, the necessary betrayer, without whom none of it would have been possible.

The Elder is traditionally both the tree from which Christ’s cross was made, and the tree on which Judas hanged himself, as in P J Kavanagh’s poem, Elder

Judas was surely a fragile man

To hang himself from this 'God's stinking tree'.

This has given rise to the folk-customs prevalent in the West Country that it is unlucky to bring Elder indoors, and that “he who burns Elder, sees the Devil”, or, as it has also been put, “He who burns Elder, skins a sheep!” Various parts of the Elder have been used historically for medicinal purposes, though, to cure everything from bronchitis to constipation, and of course, you can make wine out of its berries, so it’s not all bad.

Coming back to my beliefs, though, I believe we are in for a battering from Storm Katie tomorrow, and that Easter Monday is going to be a washout. It’s actually having quite a good attempt at blowing a hooley outside, right now. Matilda scuttled off next door at the first crack of thunder, and Deb phoned to say they had been forced back to the van by hailstones like golf balls and a thunderstorm at Wessenden, so I am expecting them back and in need of warming and drying very soon now.  When I give over writing this, I am going to put the kettle on, which is always the English response to any crisis. The extra hours of daylight next week will be welcome, even if all we do is use them to sit and look at the rain. At least Big G has done me the favour of watering in my herbs.

Epiblog for Palm Sunday

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. I hardly dare believe that winter might finally be losing its grip, and I am trusting in spring, but keeping my powder dry, just in case. After all, there once was a cricket match in Buxton in June where snow stopped play. Derbyshire has always been a bit of an alternative universe, though.  But the snowdrops have been out for weeks now, the daffodils, that “come before the swallow dares, and take the winds of March with beauty” as Shakespeare might have put it, indeed did put it, are out, and there’s just the faint hint of what the Harley Lyric Alysoun calls “bethuene Mersh and Averil, whan spray beginneth to springe”.

The squirrels and the birds are certain that it’s spring, and are getting on with putting back the nutrition that surviving winter has taken out of them. We’ve had all the usual suspects, blackbirds, pigeons, a robin, plus the other day, I saw a sparrow come down to the bird-food dish, now quite a rarity, although when I was nobbut a lad, every hedgerow was full of their brawling, eager presence. I mentally reassured it that it apparently held a special place in the mind of God, according to the Gospel of Matthew at least:

Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? and one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father.

So, there’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow (where have I heard that before!) Whatever the reasons for their decline, Matilda isn’t one of them. I was a bit worried this week that she was really slowing down because she spent most of the day sleeping in the conservatory, on the woolly blanket Maisie made her, which is spread over one end of a little settee that catches what sun there is. I have come to the conclusion, though, that she is just being a cat, and doing catty things.  She does revive and wake up towards dusk, and goes out for a patrol around the decking and the garden.  I think she might have just adjusted her daily routine because Zak’s staying with us, and we’ve also had one or two bits done to the house this week.

Yes, with the coming of spring, we have decided once again to try and grasp the nettle of “home improvements” and pick up from where we got to last time the bug bit us. The alternative is sinking further and deeper into a morass of clutter. Part of the problem with our house is that there are lots of little things wrong with it, but joiners and the like want big jobs they can get their teeth into, and charge a whole day for.  Anyway, this week we decided that the time had come to take on some of the larger tasks.

The front garden was the first, on Wednesday. Martyn the gardener took off some more of the dead branches of the trees, and also cleared both sides of brambles and ground elder. The last time it had been done was when Owen had a go at it, out of the goodness of his heart, with hand tools. Martyn was more mechanised, and hit it with a ground level Blitzkrieg by taking it off with hedge clippers.  So, at least that will be in check for another few months. There is still tons to do, however.

While he was sawing and grubbing away outside, the joiner arrived and I showed him the list of jobs, which he then took away with him, promising to estimate on them as soon as possible. Finally, on Friday, the plumber came to change over our old double Belfast sink for a new one, so that I can get in and out of the kitchen more easily.  This has been an absolute boon and a blessing, although I will miss the old sink, as it was much more convenient sometimes to have two basins side by side. Anyway, currently it’s languishing in the garage, awaiting a new home somewhere as yet undefined.

The dogs, meanwhile have had a relatively uneventful week. Apart from last night, that is.  Because Debbie had been watching the rugby, it had got rather late in the day for going off and yomping over hills and mountains high in the camper van, so instead she took Misty and Zak on a more conventional trundle, round what is known as “the circuit” – basically, out of our house, turn left, go down Big Valley into Armitage Bridge, climb up out of Armitage Bridge on carriage drive to Woodhead Road, walk along Woodhead Road back towards Huddersfield, until you get to Lockwood Bar crossroads, turn left on to Meltham Road, and then walk back up to the house, crossing under Lockwood Viaduct on the way.

Lockwood Viaduct is a massive Victorian structure that spans the valley and carries the line from Sheffield to Manchester. As Debbie and the dogs were plodding along in the dark, heading for home, they came under the viaduct and came face to face with a woman who stopped them and asked them if there was any way of getting “up there” – pointing to the viaduct. Ever helpful, my wife started to say “I think there are some steps, somewhere…” before “twigging on” and realising that the woman seemed in something of a state, and she wasn’t wearing a coat.  Anyway, they talked for about half an hour and eventually Debbie was able to phone her partner (the woman’s phone was out of juice) and he came down and collected her, allowing Debbie, Misty and Zak to continue home.  Whether she was sufficiently distraught to have actually climbed the steps to the top of the Viaduct parapet and then actually do anything silly while she was up there, remains what Donald Rumsfeld would call an “unknown unknown”, but I was glad, for one, to think she had met Debbie. As I said to Deb when she had recounted the tale, “We don’t have much money, but we do see life.”

By the end of the week, we both felt as if we’d spent the day in a tumble drier, so we shut all the doors, got the house warm, fed the dogs and the cat, and fell to discussing the next stage of what we are planning to do with the camper van.  Coincidentally, Father Jack at the garage had rung up to say that another of his customers would be disposing of their VW camper van, a T4 model, in September, and were we interested.  They sent some pictures of it to my phone and yes, it was indeed a nice van. There were only three problems - the timing was wrong, in that if we were looking for a new vehicle, summer is the time; we couldn’t afford it anyway, and I am not entirely sure that the interior layout of the T4 would be suitable for my wheelchair shenanigans.  Still, it was a nice thought, and I thanked them.

Wheelchair shenanigans have been very much in the public mind this week as well, with the resignation of Iain Duncan Smith in the wake of the budget. The budget itself was pretty much as I expected, the same voodoo reverse-Robin-Hood economics, take from the poor and give to the rich. On top of the £30.00 per week cut in ESA, they were also going to cut PIP, the new “Personal Independence Payment” which is already a poor replacement for the old DLA, as the DWP are using the migration process to winnow out perfectly good claimants purely for the purposes of economics.

If there was any doubt on this matter, one has only to read the heartfelt plea of one of the victims of this process, published on social media this week.  I will quote it in full.

Good news from Camp Cameron; in three weeks time I will no longer be disabled.

You may have seen mention here or on Instagram about my almighty battle to keep my little cottage. The battle should not be so mighty; a simple case of switching me from the DLA, (the old disability benefit for which I was assessed and awarded), to PiP (Cameron's new disability benefit).

This morning I found out that my claim has been unsuccessful; I am not considered sufficiently limited by my condition to receive state support. Further, as of April 2016 my disabled status will be revoked.

Under the new system I must wait a further 8 weeks until I am allowed to launch an official appeal. It is called the mandatory reconsideration period. It means the same people will assess the same evidence again and they are allowed to take two months to do so. I am allowed to submit no further evidence nor have any advocate speak on my behalf.

I have been applying for this benefit since Nov 3rd. I asked how I should cover my rent in such a period? I was advised to vacate the one bedroom property I have occupied for five years and be sheltered in homeless accommodation whilst they make their decision. Being legally homeless is the only way to receive social housing within the first 12 months. I have been further advised that a hostel bed will be easier to find for me if I rehome my dog. When their attention was brought to the fact I am bedbound for long periods they suggest a women's refuge will 'reduce my chance of being attacked' and that I 'get on with' applying as beds are 'competitive'.

Though ill and cognitively compromised, I am a fairly smart woman with a excellent support network, above average negotiation skills and a reasonable education (and clearly some good self esteem, haha). This is not the case for many sick and disabled people in this country who undertake this fight alone. I have had my situation verified by case workers, lawyers, doctors and members of my community. I have gathered letters, had phone calls made on my behalf, attended all appointments and returned all correspondence and my claim has been denied.

Over the five month application period I have had to find ways to cover a £500pm shortfall myself. I have done this through a combination of overdraft/credit cards and resourceful cost cutting. I reduced my food outgoing by 50%, downgraded my internet and phone packages, stopped using the oven, cut back on supplements which are vital to the maintenance of my health. I have done a winter with no heating, sleeping in jumpers, spooning the dog. Unsurprisingly my health has declined.

It is well known that more than 50% of disability decisions are overturned at tribunal. Introducing a mandatory wait for tribunal is a shocking and woefully under-publicised discovery. Another two months, another £1000 shortfall, another eight weeks and news from all departments that funding is further cut for 2016. The reason they can vote for a £30 p/w reduction for existing recipients is because they simply can't imagine £30 being a significant sum of money. They can't see £30 as a week's food budget or two months of electricity.

Let us not forget that the Tory MPs who voted for these cuts and this system are the very same ones who happily trousered their own pay rise and who are always eager when there is a photo-opportunity to be had with a disability charity in their constituency. I have started going through the list of Tory MPs who voted for the ESA cut and, where any of them have links with charities, writing to the charity to point out the disparity of such an association. I hope they are all disowned. If not, people will only draw their own conclusions, and the charity will be tainted by association.

The woman, Rachel Schmitz, quoted above is not alone: one of the things to be said in favour of social media is that it does allow sometimes for the pure, unfiltered message, the authentic voice. Here is another such, this time taken from a “Twitter” thread and stuck together:

A lot of us were saying pre-2010 that a Tory win would mean the suffering of a lot of disabled people. Very few people believed us. They promised that disabled people would be protected, that we need to care for the most vulnerable in society (as they still are). They got around it by claiming enormous levels of fraud, that we have an easy life while others are struggling. Instilling an us vs them.

Despite it being known to be lies, destroying the lives of so many already suffering, they continue even now to do the same. The divide and conquer rhetoric has weaved its way through our society, people can’t wait to vent their anger at someone they’ve seen standing up out of a wheelchair or carrying shopping, having no clue as to their ailments.

The press know this and feed it with stories of scroungers, light on facts and instead full of speculation. MPs pile in by talking about people ‘taking advantage’, feeding it more. Rather than stand up for us, when the average person speaks of ESA/PIP, the first thing they talk about is ‘if you’re GENUINELY disabled..’

Not that it’s awful so many of us are dying, often by our own hand. Not that we’re losing homes, losing our care, being dragged through hell. Nope, instead ‘well as long as you’re NOT faking’. We know what they think of us, what you think of us. We’ve heard you loud and clear. It’s always “I didn’t mean you, you’re okay, it’s THEM” They’ll even speak to you about how they saw their neighbour doing this and that “they’re the ones I mean, the people who are faking”. They have no idea of the state of our health but feel they’re in a position to judge.

I’ve had it. I used my disabled badge when spouse drove me to the shops. Someone wrote into the local paper aghast at someone so blatantly “abusing” it simply because I was young, the car was sporty (an MR2), and they couldn’t see what was wrong with me. I was so crushed. People are watching us all the time, waiting for us to do something to justify saying “FAKE DISABLED!”, taking pictures of us.. Is it any wonder we’re getting anxious about leaving the house? Going out terrifies me at times. There were enough obstacles already without having to try and avoid unwarranted suspicion.

I’ve been followed, spat on, had my chair moved without permission, spoken down to, verbally abused… and all *because I’m disabled*. This is what all this rhetoric does, what it culminates as. Hate crimes are skyrocketing because of it.

So it came as something of a shock on Friday, when Iain Duncan Smith, the man responsible for this situation, suddenly resigned, claiming, in the wake of the Budget, that:

"I am unable to watch passively whilst certain policies are enacted in order to meet the fiscal self-imposed restraints that I believe are more and more perceived as distinctly political rather than in the national economic interest"

There are two possible explanations for this bombshell. One is that he has seen the light, and that he was in fact always Mr Nice Guy, but he was possessed by the demon spirit of George Osborne, and has no recollection whatsoever of strangling all those pensioners and forcing Bedroom Tax victims to jump under lorries. He finds himself (a bit like the Liberal Democrats when they realised they were doomed in the 2015 election) in a state of having had a sudden epiphany. Or a bit like someone who wakes up the morning after a particularly memorable party, with a hangover the size of Estonia, and their friend rings them up and fills them in on what happened. “What? I did what? I jumped up and punched the air in triumph when the cuts were announced? No way! I declared them fit for work and two hours later they died? You’re kidding me!…” and so on.

People do have epiphanies, of course, and there is more joy in heaven over one sinner that repenteth, and all that.  The Sun had a typical Sun headline for Cameron: ‘Beware the IDS of March’, and the other explanation, continuing the Roman theme of the Sun headline that will be lost on 99% of its readers, is that IDS is lining up to be the Brutus to Cameron’s Julius Caesar.  We should be under no illusions that Cameron is now toast. Maybe with a side of Caesar salad, but toast nonetheless. You could almost feel sorry for him.  His cardinal error was to ignore the old maxim of the medieval Chinese warriors in, those manuals like The Art of War by Shih-Tzu – “never start a battle which you are not sure of winning”.

He didn’t have to include the referendum which will now be his undoing in the manifesto. Or if he did, he didn’t have to go ahead with it. There are plenty of other things that will damage the national interest – turning all the schools into academies for instance, or selling shares in the bailed out banks at a £22 billion loss to the exchequer, which were not in any manifesto, but which they are pressing on with regardless. He only came up with the idea of the referendum to try and negate the electoral pull of UKIP, and he must now be bitterly regretting that he didn’t just let UKIP supporters carry on gnawing at their walking-sticks and howling at the moon, and just put up with the occasional defections of some appalling old Bufton Tufton Tory MP in a Barbour, whom nobody had ever heard of anyway.

But no, he’s called it, and he’s going to lose.  He’s going to lose because, in the great confusion, which both sides have deliberately engendered to make it easier for them to lie about the concept of Brexit, the message about the benefits of remaining in Europe, and the fact that you can only reform an organisation from within, have been swamped and sunk like a boatload of refugees in the Med, by thinly-veiled racist rhetoric from the “no” camp on immigration.  Thus, on 23^rd June, every racist granny and white van man bigot in the country will vote for Brexit not on the basis of better economic prospects for the UK outside of Europe (because there are none) not on the basis of increased security (it will be worse) not on the basis of keeping the good legislation on human rights, employment and the environment from the EU, but on the mistaken premise that leaving the EU will make it easier to keep out brown people and stop them being given benefits, free TVs and free council houses.

Cameron’s party was the author of much of this rhetoric in the first place, until they found it was actually feeding and giving succour to UKIP, and tried to back pedal it a bit. So they find themselves in a bit of disarray, facing both ways at once, and against a background of Osborne having to down grade forecasts and announce yet further missed economic targets. Small wonder then, that IDS, seeing his moment, should plunge home the dagger, for entirely personal and self-advancing reasons, while claiming a pious conversion. Either he’s after Cameron’s job himself, or he knows that Boris Johnson will be PM in the autumn and Johnson has promised him the role of Chancellor.  As I said, it is almost possible to feel sorry for Cameron, who has revealed himself to be a tactical nincompoop, announcing last year that he would resign as PM in the course of this parliament (mistake # 1) and then holding this bloody referendum when he didn’t have to (mistake # 2).

Just pause to think about that, dear reader, for a moment. When Cameron is choosing curtains this autumn, for his cosy little retirement home in Witney Scrotum, the PM of Great Britain will be Boris Johnson and the President of the USA may well be Donald Trump. Time for a re-make of Dumb and Dumber? The Tories are rattled, though, make no mistake. The febrile atmosphere within their ranks caused by Cameron haplessly re-igniting the Euroskeptic days of the 1990s which exasperated John Major into calling them “bastards” and telling them to “put up or shut up” has been made even more poisonous by the benefits cuts debate and Osborne pressing on into the valley of economic death, even though he is now the only person in the country who believes that “austerity” is working.

Nicky Morgan, the remarkably ineffective education secretary, who makes even Michael Gove look like a towering statesman, flounced out of an interview with Sky News this week after 24 seconds because the interviewer asked her about the conflict between what Osborne said about benefit cuts (“we are committed”) and what she had said on Question Time the night before (“the cuts are just an idea”).  They are fighting like rats in a sack, no doubt, behind closed doors.  She did well to flounce, actually, because otherwise someone might have asked her the awkward question “what happened to the title deeds of the schools which have become academies and what will happen to the title deeds of the schools which will become academies?

Local authorities are forced to hand over the title deeds of schools which become academies, and are not fiscally compensated for this. Title deeds, like everything else in life, have a value, and the monetary value of the title deeds of the schools privatised thus far has been estimated at £10 billion. Yet Michael Gove, in response to a freedom of information request, said that he had “no recollection” of any title deeds. So £10 billion of public assets has been transferred out of public ownership and has vanished into a black hole, just like that, at a time when we are so short of cash to spend on bombs and rockets that we are slashing benefits, and no one says a dickey-boo?  Yoo-hoo! CPS! Director of Public Prosecutions! Sleeping on the job again?

Today is Palm Sunday , and as I’ve written at least once before on the very well-known story of Jesus riding in triumph into Jerusalem, only for those same crowds that previously cheered him, to turn and demand his crucifixion a few days later. I am not enough of a Biblical scholar, either, to get to the bottom of whether or not Jesus chose an unbroken colt for his triumphal entry in order to fulfil ancient prophecy, except to say that whenever people in the Bible do anything completely wacky or random, the excuse is that they are usually fulfilling ancient prophecy.  Instead, I’d like to think about Easter as a time for renewal, and as my text, I am not taking something Biblical, but instead, a poem, The Stare’s Nest By My Window,  from Meditations in Time of Civil War by W. B. Yeats.

The bees build in the crevices
Of loosening masonry, and there
The mother birds bring grubs and flies.
My wall is loosening; honey-bees,
Come build in the empty house of the stare.

We are closed in, and the key is turned
On our uncertainty; somewhere
A man is killed, or a house burned.
Yet no clear fact to be discerned:
Come build in the empty house of the stare.

A barricade of stone or of wood;
Some fourteen days of civil war:
Last night they trundled down the road
That dead young soldier in his blood:
Come build in the empty house of the stare.

We had fed the heart on fantasies,
The heart's grown brutal from the fare,
More substance in our enmities
Than in our love; O honey-bees,
Come build in the empty house of the stare.

The “stare” in this case being Yeats’s Irish poetical way of saying “starling”.  On one level, it’s a simple nature poem, describing the bees using the abandoned nest of a starling on a ledge outside the window of Yeats’s room at Thoor Ballylee.  A hundred years ago next Sunday, however, in Dublin, the Easter Rising of 1916 started, and began a process which led first to the civil war in question, then the decades of sectarian strife and murder in the North.  Yeats is making a heartfelt plea for regeneration and renewal.  The bees are a metaphor for all the people who need to come back, because they had previously turned their backs on the troubles and the violence, and work together to rebuild Ireland.

It seems to me a very good analogy for the situation we now find ourselves in. We’ve had something akin to a civil war (albeit undeclared, people have still died, however) since 2010, and maybe, just maybe, now it is all starting to come apart at the seams and there will be an opportunity for growth and rebuilding again. We’ve fed the heart on fantasies, alright. The fantasy that austerity will produce growth, to name but one. Nobody has yet satisfactorily explained to me how, if you owe someone 100 apples, you pay them back by cutting down the orchard. And the heart has indeed grown brutal on the fare – as a society, we are less compassionate and forgiving than I can ever remember in my lifetime.

If renewal comes, however, it will need to be more than simply a matter of economics and politics. It needs to be a spiritual renewal, as well, a re-focusing on the things that really matter, like compassion, mercy, respect, humanity, and it needs to embody the virtues espoused by the Good Samaritan.  Now is the hour. Spring is a time of renewal and rebirth, and, if you believe in him, a time when Jesus produced the ultimate game-changer, a comeback that would put even Elvis in the shade.  Talking about a revolution, says Tracy Chapman, starts with a whisper.  It ends with the honey-bees, building in the empty house of the stare.

For my part, I’ll be carrying on with my own personal plan to renew our immediate environs and try and improve them a bit and reverse some of the depredations caused by years of neglect, some of which was avoidable, some not.  I need to get my herbs in the tubs, and I am going to try and plant some roses – it’s long been a dream of mine to have a rose-garden.  Still, like the song says, along with the sunshine, you have got to have a little rain, some time.  And there’s always the work, and the accounts, and the etcetera, etcetera.

Still, as I type this, on the day of the Equinox, and at 19 minutes past 5 in the P.M., it’s still light outside. Debbie and the dogs will be back soon, though, so it’s time for me to empty the bin and put out the ash, fetch in some coal and put the kettle on. But underlying these mundane tasks I do feel, at least, today, in spite of all the grim nastiness of the world, a faint note of hope for a change – a faint murmuring of honey-bees gathering for summer? Honey bees, come build in the empty house of the stare.

Epiblog for the Fifth Sunday in Lent

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. For the first time today, it really felt almost "springy" as I sat at the open conservatory door, putting out some bird food for the squirrels, and for those birds quick enough to get there before the squirrels do. Actually, this week I have come to suspect the squirrels of nefarious activity, because one end of the string of Tibetan prayer flags that usually flutter over the decking, had become detached and was lying instead in one of the (as yet unplanted) planters. The squirrels have “form” for nicking the prayer flags for nesting material, and it’s about the right time of the year. Two years ago, they made off with a whole string of prayer flags, much to Debbie’s ire and chagrin. They managed to drop one of them, a red one, as they fled her tirade of abuse, and it snagged half way up in the branches of one of John’s apple trees, next door. I can see it from my bed, every morning, when I am getting up, and I make a point of looking for it and mentally saluting the intrepid squirrel that stole it.

They are unlikely to be deterred from prayer flag theft by Matilda, who, despite the fact that the weather does seem to be getting warmer, and one or two of Maisie’s indestructible daffs are now “flutt’ring and dancing in the breeze” as Wordsworth might say, were he not currently deceased and 150 miles away, has spent much of the week sofa-surfing, and indeed is doing so as I type, oblivious to the fact that the sun is out, the birds are chirping, and Spidey, next door’s big shaggy tabby cat, is prowling around our garden, seeking whom he may devour.

Misty, meanwhile, is in the dog house, metaphorically at least. We don’t have an actual dog-house, the whole house is a dog-house, maintained and managed wholly for the comfort and satisfaction of its canine occupant. Misty’s particular Misty-meanour this week is that she has lost yet another expensive strobe light which somehow she managed to detach from her harness while yomping across Wessenden Head with Debbie and Zak.

On the self-same trip, Debbie later discovered, she must have pulled the lead accidentally out of the pouch on her belt while she was getting out her torch, so that, too is lost, no doubt to be puzzled over by archaeologists in years to come. In monetary value, the main constituent, a length of “Dyneema” was minimal, but the two carabiners, one at either end, were probably worth a fiver apiece, so all in all, it was an expensive trip! Thank God the nights are getting lighter, and for a few months we will be able to scale back on our single-handed sponsorship of the dog strobe light industry.

So, not quite spring, but springy enough to make me think I should be ordering some more herbs. The soil in the tubs and planters, though, is still very cold and wet and I was interested to hear Monty Don say on Gardeners’ World that putting down a bin bag would help it warm up and dry out. Since we seem to have enough bin bags under the sink to last us until well into the next century, I might nick a few and give it a try.

Other than that, the week has been dominated by work and illness. Well, not exactly illness, more the usual pain and discomfort of Plantar Faciitis, which has made yet another comeback.  Still, there are others worse off than me, and I mustn’t grumble.  The work landscape has once again been dominated by Crowle Street Kids, a book which I have decided I must now finish off before it finishes off me. Since I began the concerted effort to get it edited up for press, last month, enormous strides have been made, but there is still masses to be done.  And, unfortunately, because history is a matter of record as much as of opinion, I can’t just make it up as I go along, like I could if I were writing a novel. Every fact, every date, has to be laboriously checked.  If it were a novel, by now I would have just said “sod it” and written a scene where a dinosaur comes through the wall and eats them all.

Meanwhile, the house project plods on. The tree surgeon/garden clearance bod makes his first visit on Tuesday next. I will spare you the joke about “I wanted to be a tree surgeon, but I couldn’t stand the sight of sap”. The plumber is on Friday, following which I should be able to get in and out of the kitchen without it having been such a tight squeeze. Plus she (yes, the plumber is female) has promised to put us in touch with a joiner, although this has yet to materialise. But, as with Crowle Street Kids, it’s a case of, you knock off one lump of detritus only to find another two hiding behind it.  Sometimes I think the best solution is to just hire a massive skip, stick everything in it, and start again. Except I am getting a bit old for starting again.

And, of course, we don’t have unlimited budgets and resources for this kind of thing. Something which can only get worse now the government, bless them, have forced through their cut of £30.00 a week in ESA. Fortunately, we will be slightly cushioned from the blow by a number of other factors -  Deb’s hours, and the fact that we live a frugal, basically medieval lifestyle where we don’t do anything massively extravagant and our holidays consist of tootling off in the camper van rather than jetting away to Miami or Ibiza.  But there will be – as with the foot pain – many people worse off than me.

When I sit down objectively and try and consider the mind set of the architects of these cuts, I find very quickly that I am into territory where words fail me. Even the obscene ones don’t really begin to do justice to the intense blind hatred I feel for these… well, I suppose we have to be charitable and call them people.  The cuts in ESA will bring in, in all, about £1.2billion in savings in the course of this parliament.  MPs’ expenses are currently running at about £100m a year, so in the same period we could save £400m simply by making the buggers pay their own way, the same as the rest of us have to.  It costs the taxpayer about £7m a year to subsidise the food and drink in the bars and restaurants of the House of Lords and the House of Commons. Four more years of that will rack up another £28million, which could be saved and put to the better use of making life more bearable for those with crippling diseases.  I hardly need mention the cost of the bombing campaign in Syria to date, which has achieved nothing and probably already cost more than the projected saving to be made by cutting ESA on its own.

But the government forced it through, for what Tanni Grey-Thompson called “ideological” reasons. It will “encourage” them to “look for work”, because of course, employers are falling over themselves to employ people whose presence will necessitate expensive modifications to their premises. The pretext used was that it was financially necessary for the good of the country. Yeah, right.  The whole financial policy of this pathetic lather of scum that has settled on the country is based on the false premise that there is no money left, because Labour spent it all.  Yet there’s always money for war. There’s always money for awarding themselves a pay rise, and there’s always money for expenses.  The sheer hypocrisy of braying Tories who pay themselves £74,000 a year, and claim expenses and, in many cases have lucrative second and third jobs as barristers, consultants, directors, or journalists at the same time as they are milking the public purse for all they can squeeze out of it, the spectacle of these vampires and leeches queuing up to vote for cutting the meagre dole given to people who can’t work because they are dying, makes me physically sick.  It would do the whole loathsome colony of them good to wake up paraplegic one morning.

There are some of them for whom a special circle of hell should be found, however. Mere suffering is not enough. These include the 26 Labour MPs – yes, that’s right, Labour MPs, who failed to turn up and vote against the measure.  The government would still have won, just, but it speaks volumes to me about the current poor level of opposition that these people just couldn’t be bothered to try. They include people like Chuka Ummuna, who has probably spent more time this year fighting Jeremy Corbyn than he has taking the Tories to task. I hope the good people of Streatham will remember his failure to turn up and speak for the most disadvantaged amongst them, when de-selection time comes around.

Four more people who deserve to be turned on a slow spit in Hades for all eternity while being prodded by large hairy demons with pitchforks, to see if they are done yet, are Philip Hollobone, Sir Edward Leigh, Philip Davies, and David Nuttall. They are the four Tory MPs who employed a tactic known as “filibustering” to talk for hours about nothing at all of interest, in order to deny Caroline Lucas’s NHS Re-Instatement Bill (which would have reversed all the Tory efforts at dismantling the NHS since 2010) the time to be debated in parliament.

All four of these MPS are admirably suited to the task in hand when it comes to filibustering, since they regularly drone on for hours about nothing at all of interest, but usually, it doesn’t have such a critical impact on the lives and welfare of their constituents. Once more, their deeds should be remembered when election time comes around, and, with a reluctant sigh, as the demons scenario probably won’t happen, or if it does, I won’t be there to see it, I would settle, as second best, for them having a medical emergency at 4AM on a deserted country road on a day when they have forgotten to charge their mobile. As long as it’s not mercifully quick. I want them to suffer.

You may think, reading this, that I am especially angry this week, and you’d be right. Apart from all the crap that infests my own life, and the pain in my bloody ankle, I am more than a little incensed about “Clean For The Queen”.  This particular excrescence had more or less passed me by until I heard some of the (fictional) characters in The Archers, that cunningly-disguised bulletin from the Ministry of Propaganda, talking about it last Sunday. I looked it up online, and almost the first thing I found was a picture of what I first took to be Jo Brand carrying a bottle of Domestos and a feather duster, and standing next to a big purple poster. It actually turned out, on closer inspection, to be Michael Gove. Possibly an unwise choice to front up the campaign, since it will take a lot more than a festher duster and a bottle of Domestos to clean up the massive pool of doodoos he has left behind him in his ministerial career.

I hasten to assert, at this juncture, that I am a monarchist. At least, that is to say, I believe in the institution, as a way of thwarting the ambitions for total power often held by arriviste politicians who mean us no good.  If you think that, constitutionally speaking, the Queen is a bad thing, I invite you to consider the relative merits of the following people as alternate “Heads of State”: Tony Blair, Margaret Thatcher, Boris Johnson, David Cameron… you see my point?

So, as an institution, I favour the monarchy, whatever I might think about the personal shortcomings of some of its current incumbents, with their penchant for dismembering foxes or their predeliction for ski-ing while the rest of us at home are skidding on un-gritted streets, fracturing our hips and being slowly transported to A & E, assuming it’s still open when we get there.  I also think the Queen, for all her privilege, has a difficult hand dealt her, sometimes. Often she is damned if she does, damned if she doesn’t, as in the current imbroglio over whether she said what she is supposed to have said about Brexit.  But she is a shrewd and seasoned political operator, and I cannot believe it was her decision to lend her name to “Clean for the Queen”.  It’s probably more likely that some appropriately beribboned equerry with a plumed hat and a sword, some “Sir Alan Fitztightly”, of the Royal Household, thought it would be a charming idea without considering the fallout, or informing the Queen, and for his laxity, now she has found out about it,  is currently learning all about the culinary preferences of ravens, in the Tower of London.

How can I put this kindly? “Clean for the Queen” is a cynical attempt, by people who obviously think we’re stupid, to get the accumulated piles of litter, rubbish and other crap cleared away from neighbourhoods which have been blighted with such problems because of Tory cuts in street-cleaning, based on the false premises of “austerity”.  And to get people, hard-pressed people, to do it for free, in their own time, by trading on their residual patriotism and respect for Her Majesty, who, in truth, probably had little to do with it. Still, at least those of us in wheelchairs are nearer the litter to start with, and saved all that tedious bending down.

So this is what it boils down to, this is now the message from the government to the governed. Do as we say, not as we do. We will vote to take away your healthcare, and make you worse off, while at the same time we’re pissing away several hundred bankfuls of money a day, blowing up the middle east in the name of freedom and democracy and forcing women and children to drown while in the process of fleeing for their lives. Oh, and if you could find the time to pick up some litter in between struggling to survive, we’d be grateful, well, not exactly grateful, more… patronising.  In the words of Dick Gaughan’s Fifty Years From Now:

In the meantime, keep your trap shut, and bear it with a grin

And do your starving gracefully, or else we’ll run you in.

What with idiot politicians in this country, refugees suffering in camps all across Greece and the Balkans, and Donald Trump inciting his supporters at rallies to raise their right arms to him in a Hitler salute to express their allegiance, it’s been a very depressing week.  Sunday itself is now, for me, about the only calm oasis in the whole week. That is, I suppose, more or less how it should be, but I do sometimes look back fondly to those days when there was an expectation that generally things would get better, and not worse.

Today is the fifth Sunday of Lent, and today’s text is John 8: 1-11, the story of the woman taken in adultery.  In the full fat, high tar prose of the King James version, it reads as follows:

Jesus went unto the mount of Olives.  And early in the morning he came again into the temple, and all the people came unto him; and he sat down, and taught them. And the scribes and Pharisees brought unto him a woman taken in adultery; and when they had set her in the midst, they say unto him, Master, this woman was taken in adultery, in the very act. Now Moses in the law commanded us, that such should be stoned: but what sayest thou? This they said, tempting him, that they might have to accuse him. But Jesus stooped down, and with his finger wrote on the ground, as though he heard them not. So when they continued asking him, he lifted up himself, and said unto them, He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her. And again he stooped down, and wrote on the ground. And they which heard it, being convicted by their own conscience, went out one by one, beginning at the eldest, even unto the last: and Jesus was left alone, and the woman standing in the midst. When Jesus had lifted up himself, and saw none but the woman, he said unto her, Woman, where are those thine accusers? hath no man condemned thee? She said, No man, Lord. And Jesus said unto her, Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more.

On one level it’s a story of entrapment – the Pharisees are seeking to put Jesus on the spot. If he refuses to uphold the law of Moses, that is contrary to their teaching, and if he condemns her, it shows him as being lacking in the very compassion and forgiveness that he preaches. In effect, he nimbly turns the tables on them by inviting anyone who feels they are without sin, simply to cast the first stone.  The subtext though, is about condemnation. People like me, who spend a lot of time condemning the excesses and the stupidity of the rich and powerful, had better be pretty sure of their own stance, Jesus is saying.

Before I start writing all that stuff about how I wish them ill, and could never forgive them, I had better be pretty sure that I, myself, am without blemish.  And of course, I can’t be sure of that. I have done stupid things myself, and hurt people I would never have dreamed of hurting. So far as I am aware, none of my stupidity has actually resulted in anyone dying because of my pride, hubris and hypocrisy, but I have still done bad things, sometimes to good people, who didn’t deserve it. If it’s any consolation, I have punished myself for it as well.

We’re back with my old adversary again. Forgiveness. So I guess that makes me, once again, a bad Christian, if indeed I am one at all, these days. I have tried – I have really tried – but I can’t do it. If they would at least, be honest about their intentions instead of dressing it up as being for our own good, at least there wouldn’t be the added layer of hypocrisy to strip away first.

I can’t reconcile the Christian idea of forgiveness with the world as it currently is. All that forgiveness means, to me, is that people who should be called to account for their wrongdoings get away scot-free.  Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord, I will repay – that’s all very well, but I see no evidence of it happening, either. It only works if you believe that these people will get their come-uppance in the next world, by which time it will be a bit late. So once more I’m driven to an unsatisfactory conclusion, a familiar impasse.

It all gets very repetitive after a while, and it can’t be much fun for you reading it, either, to be honest. Maybe I should put the time I usually spend writing this blog to better use doing a painting, planting some herbs. We’d probably all be happier. Better that, than to keep coming back like the dog that returneth to its vomit.

We shall not cease from exploration,

and the end of all our exploring

will be to arrive where we started

and know the place for the first time.

Says T S Eliot in Four Quartets.  If only. In fact, I think it’s probably only the residual glimmer somewhere at the back of my mind that insists that one day I might just understand how to square the circle and reconcile Christianity with "church and state", how to forgive those who are at war against the very people they should be protecting, that keeps me from just walking away from what remains of faith.

Most of the time, though, these days, I feel as if I am reliving the same week over and over again, and no doubt next week will be “another of the same” as it used to say in auction catalogues.  Not exactly the week before Easter, but the week before the week before Easter – I don’t think there’s a song for that one, though. Monday comes around, and with it the phone, the emails, the list of things to do, the problems, the challenges.  A peaceful Sunday evening in prospect is what I need, once I have fed the dogs and the humans, and possibly the cat, if she deigns to come in.  Time to stop adding headache to foot ache, and put the kettle on.

Epiblog for Laetare Sunday

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. Spring continues to spring, but in what many would regard as a cantankerous, half-assed, and unwilling way. One or two of Maisie’s indestructible daffodils have now actually flowered, and joined the massed ranks of the snowdrops. Unfortunately, for them, their emergence coincided with being blasted by Storm Jake, the latest in the series of now strangely personified bad weather which seems to be washing over the British Isles in dismal waves, and will no doubt continue until September, by which time we will be feeling the stinging lash of Storm Willibrord.

Wednesday was a case in point. It started out reasonably bright, but eventually the sky turned as black as Satan’s furry underpants, and at about 10.30 there was the most enormous crack of thunder. Matilda not only woke up, but in the process of doing so jumped about a foot into the air, quite an achievement for a large Bagpuss of an unathletic cat, and when she landed, she skedaddled into Colin ‘s front room and stayed there.  The squirrels and the birds, on the other hand, redoubled their efforts to clean out the bird food dish, as if they knew what was coming!

Meanwhile, outside, the weather had started doing its pieces. I was quickly saving stuff on the laptop in case the house got struck by lightning or something, but there was no further thunder. Instead, it bucketed down with hail, then sleet, then briefly snow, before fairing up later on in the day.  Friday saw another similar procedure, but this time the snow was more prolonged and it did stick, at least until well into the afternoon, when it started to turn to rain.

With all this rain around, I was relieved that the new gutter man, as opposed to the old gutter man who failed to make two appointments, never actually turning up for either, and the old, old gutter man, who is in prison, apparently, did actually pull up outside on Saturday morning, complete with all his gear. He stayed two hours, and I have to say he did a very thorough and competent job, and only charged £20 more than the old, old gutterman used to charge, three years ago.  Anyway, at least now, when it comes down like stair rods, the rainwater goods, such as they are, will at least carry the water away, instead of allowing it to pool in the gutters at the blocked points and then potentially ingress into the house. So, I guess that counts as a small victory.

Set against that, we almost had a massive defeat, on Saturday. To tell the story in its entirety, it is necessary to explain that Zak and Ellie have been staying with us for the last couple of days, as Granny has been house-sitting for another family member who has two cats that don’t like doggies.  Anyway, Debbie decided on Saturday that she had had enough of frowsting indoors and wanted to set off on a famous five type adventure. She had been watching videos about K2 and Everest on Youtube, which is never a good sign.  Ellie, however, is not a suitable companion as a mountain-dog, because she is only about nine inches high at the shoulder. She’s willing, and determined, and has a great heart, but physical reality kicks in after a few miles and she has to be either dragged or carried.

It was arranged, therefore, that Debbie would take Zak and that Ellie would stay behind, as Granny would pop back and take her for an hour or so, chucking sticks on the playing field. Thus is was that Ellie, who looked crestfallen at being left out – at least until I distracted her with a dog treat -  found herself in the same fortunate position as those people who bought a ticket for the maiden voyage of the Titanic but turned up ten minutes after it had sailed.

Debbie set off in the camper with her two more-than-willing companions. No press-ganging was needed.  Granny came and took Ellie off, showing her delight by scampering and wuffiting as she went. I was left contemplating the grey, monolithic, unforgiving slab of text that is Crowle Street Kids, slowing inching, at a glacial rate, towards publication.

My mobile rang. It was Debbie. I should say, at this juncture, that it is a well-known and acknowledged fact by all who know her, that any expedition Debbie takes on has a constant propensity to turn into an episode of I Survived at any moment. This one was no exception. She had decided to go up West Nab in search of still-lying snow. She found it. In great quantities, much more than she was expecting.  She decided to coast in to the side of Wessenden Head Road, tuck the van in nicely so that it was slightly off the road, and set off on the climb from there. All went well until it got to the 'tucking in' bit. The van and the snow between them conspired to tuck it in very well. As she edged off the road, what she thought was solid snow gave way with a loud crunch, and the front nearside wheel went down into a hidden ditch, tipping the van over at an angle of about 30 degrees and burying the side door in a snow drift to a level just below the window.

Attempts to reverse out proved fruitless, serving simply to dig a larger hole in the snow.  The traction mats which we carry were deployed, to no effect. What she was lacking, however, was a shovel, but she improvised, using the lid of a plastic caddy that we normally keep the loo rolls in when we are off on a trip!  What does give me heart in the circumstances is that several people actually stopped and offered to help.  Two were almost successful, but the first of these only had a little sports car and had to give up before he burnt out his clutch trying to heave the rather solid bulk of the T25 out of the ditch.  The second bloke had a small jeep type vehicle, which was at least a 4 x 4, and he succeeded in shifting it a few inches before our two rope broke, so he, too, had to give up, as he wasn’t carrying one of his own.

It was at that point that Debbie had called me. I called the RAC and after being on hold for a mere 22 minutes, listening to recorded messages about how important my call was and how they were very busy so could I possibly just look at their web site instead and stop bothering them, I finally got through to a human being and rang it in. They said they were experiencing delays of up to 90 minutes. Right… I rang Deb back and she said it was too cold to wait in the van, and too uncomfortable sitting at a 30 degree angle anyway, so she was going to get the dogs out of the tailgate and go up West Nab anyway, because, ironically, that was the best way of warming up.

This, in fact, is what she did, although there were still a couple of twists in the tale. As he jumped down from the tailgate, Zak misjudged it and landed, up to his chest, in an 18 inch puddle of mud and slush, that had been created by Debbie churning up the snow trying to reverse out.  When they came back down to the van, they only had a few minutes to wait before the RAC man, who had come from Bradford, for some bizarre reason, finally arrived. However, by that time, Debbie’s hands were so cold that she dropped one of the van keys in the same 18-inch deep puddle of mud and slush, and had to take her glove off, squat down, and scrabble for it. Fortunately she found it, otherwise they would all still be up there.  Anyway, it was but an inkling of a twinkling for the RAC man to attach the hook from his steel hawser to the rear towing bracket on the van, and pull it out backwards, until it emerged with a plop, like a reluctant molar.

Needless to say, when they returned, there was much boiling of water for hot water bottles, hot coffee, [Debbie] plus towelling down of wet dogs, removal of soggy dog harnesses, and general steaming by the fire followed by chomping through a hearty bowl of Muttnuts and “Butcher’s Dog”.  [Zak and Misty].

So, a narrow escape. And, to a certain extent, a first-world problem. They were never really in any danger, as such, and the worst that could have happened would have been damage to the suspension, and the RAC man declared it fit to drive, so, no real harm done. We are lucky to be able to laugh about it.

It’s certainly been one of the few things to laugh about this week. The meaningless crap from both sides on the EU referendum and “Brexit” debate rumbles on, each side seeking to make the most of The Great Confusion for their own devices, instead of actually telling the truth.  One of the most sober and measured assessments of the likely economic consequences of leaving was published this week in The Economist, as you might expect. Sadly, it is not good news for the “better off out” brigade, but most of the people who will vote no are most unlikely to read The Economist anyway, and will vote no because they think, as racists, that by doing so they are keeping out brown people and somehow reclaiming “their” country. The whole areticle (too long to quote in full) is here, http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21693568-david-cameron-will-struggle-win-referendum-britains-eu-membership-if-he-loses?frsc=dg|a and is well worth a read. Apologies for the long and messy hyperlink – I don’t normally hotlink from this blog, but I think everyone should at least  read, learn, mark, and inwardly digest the implications set out in it, before they decide how to vote.

Not that the EU has been especially useful or anything this week. It’s been the same old, same old, especially where the refugee crisis is concerned. The French have been simultaneously demolishing “The Jungle” outside Calais and threatening to export it to Saltdean if Britain pulls out of the EU. Perhaps someone needs to remind them of how many refugees from Hitler’s conquest of France in 1940 were able to carry on the fight against fascism from a base in Britain, notably a certain Charles De Gaulle.  And, if it comes to that, how many people died on the beaches of Normandy so that the modern-day French could have the freedom to behave like a set of petulant tossers over the refugee crisis today. If it wasn’t so grim, it’d be ironic.  I remember when we all felt deep and real empathy for France and for the French at the time of the Charlie Hebdo massacre, and we all wrote about how it was important to stand up against bullying, to stand for freedom and for liberty, equality and fraternity. Well, having watched the scenes coming out of Calais this week, I can only say Je Ne Suis Pas Charlie. Not  any more. Not in my nom de plume dans le bureau de mon oncle.

Mark Steel, writing about it in The Independent, was suitably scathing:

But as well as dignity there’s the security, and the French government says they’re moving the refugees to better accommodation, so they’re just helping them along by gassing them, like an enthusiastic branch of Pickfords. Whenever I’ve moved house, I’ve infuriated myself by dawdling and going back indoors to check I’ve not forgotten anything, and often wished the removal men would give me a hand by whacking me with truncheons and snapping my arm in three places.

A spokesman for the French prefecture – the state body that ordered the evacuation – described the event as a “humanitarian intervention”. That makes sense, because when you see CRS riot police gassing refugees as their kids scramble away through the mud, the first thought that comes to mind is: “I bet that’s what Florence Nightingale would have done.” The first area of the camp demolished was the part that contained the health centre and makeshift school – and there’s nothing more humanitarian than knocking down annoying places like that.

I envy him his detachment and his mastery of the reductio ad absurdum. It makes his piece all the more effective. I am afraid I just can’t do it these days. Instead, I get a red mist before the eyes and am filled with incoherent rage to the extent that I want to go outside and shout at the passing traffic. I am seriously thinking though that it is time to consider boycotting French produce, French products and French services.

The problem is wider than just France’s reprehensible attitude, however. It is an issue which has shivered faultlines throughout the whole EU. The EU’s attitude seems to be that it is now best to confine the refugees to Greece, despite the fact that Greece’s economy is tanking (or had everyone forgotten the ‘Grexit’ crisis?) and that one of Greece’s few profitable income streams, tourism revenue, is being hammered as people cancel proposed Greek holidays in their droves for fear that the refugees will have nicked all the sunbeds.

There are Greeks, and there are other Greeks. The refugee crisis in Greece itself has provoked a variety of responses, from the Greek coastguard trying to sink migrant boats through to people actively trying to help with humanitarian aid. If I were Greek, right now, I would be very tempted to take a pair of industrial-sized bolt cutters up to the Macedonian border fence, chop a 16 foot hole in it and then say to Macedonia that it was their problem now, and good luck. If the Macedonians had any sense, they’d do likewise, and so on.

Instead though, we have just the opposite. A hardening of attitudes and a closing of borders that has left some commentators howling with fury.  Wieke Löwenhardt writes

I can't grasp it anymore. If you really, really let it all sink in, you can only get utterly depressed, ripped, torn up, shocked, aggressive, outraged, mad, distressed and infuriated. Think for one moment of where they are now when you take a bite, step into the comfort of your home or the warmth of your bed. When you use your passport for anything. When you cross borders without being noticed. How on earth is it possible that people call me an activist when it is out in the open what is happening here?

How can we not inform ourselves, help in any way, raising awareness, giving money, helping there or here, bury our heads in the sand, in ignorance? How can we not shout it out? How can we pretend this is just a minor thing happening or it is out of our hands? Why are we now, one year+ talking about flying newcomers in? How can we not feel responsible for all of this? For giving our children no moral values and not educating them? How can we not see what will happen? What the consequences for their future and the future of us all will be?

Gabriela Andreevska writes in a similar vein:

Humanitarian aid? - How many sandwiches will it take us to open these gates?
- How many croissants to appease the crying infants, men and women stranded in the mud at the Greek-Macedonian border? How many croissants to give them the "right documents"?
- How many pairs of socks to fight for the freedom of movement of the thousands of people with disabilities sleeping in despair tonight next to the razor wire?- How many gallons of water in nicely wrapped aid packages to wash away the blood on our hands?

To anyone that has ever asked me how they can help, please join us in protests, civil resistance, petitions, campaigns, direct and indirect action...If we wish to "help" these people (or rather, fight together WITH them in solidarity like sisters and brothers), we must not limit ourselves to humanitarian aid. If humanitarian aid does not go hand in hand with activism aimed at structural changes, it is only further feeding the exploitative, oppressive system creating refugees and migrants in the first place! Speak out. Resist. Fight. Because being silent is not an option. Because being silent is being an accomplice!

If there is one ray of hope in all of this, it is that the EU seems to have finally stirred its stumps and set out a plan allocating aid to Greece to build proper camps to house and assess the migrants. Six months ago, I agued for this very solution, in fact I said there should be a pan-EU effort to set them up in all the countries along the migrant route. It’s great to know I was ahead of my time in something, but not so great when you think how many people have died in the interim. And of course, the same EU that is proposing this is also giving the green light to France’s destruction of The Jungle.  To underline the seriousness of this paradox, 18 people died by drowning off the Greek coast today, and Macedonia introduced still tougher border checks and controls. It’s a bad time to be a refugee.

George Osborne, meanwhile, here at home, hinderer-in-chief of the economy and soothsayer of self-generated, self-fulfilling austerity doom, has raised his head above the mire of Brexit-related crap to opine that “driverless lorries” would be a good thing for Britain’s crowded congested motorways. Driverless lorries, championed by an aimless man, who has missed every target, every goal, set for him since 2010. What could possibly go wrong? He has also criticised the appointment of ex-Channel 4 journalist Paul Mason as an economic advisor to the Labour opposition.  Describing Mason as a “Marxist” [and since when did that become a term of insult?] Osborne quipped that Mason, who does look disconcertingly like Jeanette Winterson in a certain light, only got the job “because Chairman Mao was dead and Mickey Mouse was busy”. All I can observe, in response to this, is that, given Osborne’s dismal performance, if Mickey Mouse was busy, it must have been because he was busy advising George Osborne at the time.

Talking briefly of fascism, as I did when I mentioned De Gaulle just now, I should also pause to note that Donald Trump has continued his Hitler-esque rise still further in pursuit of the Republican ticket in the US elections this November. It is a scary thought indeed that, if things continue in their present vein, this time next year, Trump could be president of the USA, and Boris Johnson prime minister of the UK.  I read a very cogent piece of analysis during the last few days that put its finger exactly on why Trump is getting such a rave response. It is because his support is coming from people who feel that their aims, aspirations and even, in some cases their rights, have been impugned and ignored by politicians of either party whose origins lie in the educated, patrician elites, and what Trump has tapped into is the anger of the “ordinary guy” at not being listened to. Now Trump has said he is listening, and they are flocking to his rallies to hear him talk of making America great again, which to them means the freedom to carry guns and to indulge in casual racism.

We had the same thing in the UK with UKIP stealing the core white working class vote when Labour abandoned it in favour of wooing middle England. Although in that case, it manifested itself in a misty eyed longing for the days of the 1950s when hedges were clipped and so were accents, and it was perfectly acceptable to put a notice in the window of a lodging house saying “No coloureds”.  In America at the moment, it seems that Trump’s supporters are exhibiting a misty-eyed longing for either the 1960s, when “coloureds” had to sit in the back of the bus, or indeed the 1860s, when they were all safely corralled on plantations.  This is the conclusion of the article. I wish I could remember who it was by and where I read it, but it makes sober reading:

Fascist movements build their base not from the politically active but the politically inactive, the “losers” who feel, often correctly, they have no voice or role to play in the political establishment. The sociologist Émile Durkheim warned that the disenfranchisement of a class of people from the structures of society produced a state of “anomie”—a “condition in which society provides little moral guidance to individuals.” Those trapped in this “anomie,” he wrote, are easy prey to propaganda and emotionally driven mass movements. Hannah Arendt, echoing Durkheim, noted that “the chief characteristic of the mass man is not brutality and backwardness, but his isolation and lack of normal social relationships.” In fascism the politically disempowered and disengaged, ignored and reviled by the establishment, discover a voice and a sense of empowerment.

There is no doubt that there are dark days ahead. As for me, these days, I just take things one day at a time.  I feel, often, a bit like one of those blokes in the films Debbie watches about Everest. You plant your ice axe in the snow, transfer your weight on to it, and heave yourself one more step towards… what?

Well, towards today, I suppose. Today is Laetare Sunday, or the Fourth Sunday in Lent.  It derives its name in the same way that Gaudete Sunday does, from the first lines of the introit for today’s services.

Laetare Jerusalem: et conventum facite omnes qui diligitis eam: gaudete cum laetitia, qui in tristitia fuistis: ut exsultetis,et satiemini ab uberibus consolationis vestrae. Psalm: Laetatus sum in his quae dicta sunt mihi: in domum Domini ibimus.

Rejoice, O Jerusalem: and come together all you that love her: rejoice with joy, you that have been in sorrow: that you may exult, and be filled from the breasts of your consolation. Psalm: I rejoiced when they said to me: "we shall go into God's House!"

It is also “Mothering Sunday” – not to be confused with Mothers’ Day, the second Sunday in May, and an American invention dating from the early 1900s. Mothering Sunday, because it is always the fourth Sunday in Lent, which depends on Easter, which is a moveable feast, varies from year to year in the date on which it is celebrated. Easter Sunday, which is early this year, is three weeks away!  Originally it is thought that it became known as Mothering Sunday because of the custom of people to make pilgrimages back to their “mother” church on that day, or at least to the church where they were baptised.  Later, with the growth in domestic service, particularly in Victorian Britain, it became a Sunday when indentured servants were given the day off so they could visit their families.

It is also, traditionally, a day when the austere regime of Lent is allowed to relax a little: Simnel cakes may be baked (originally as a gift to be taken home to the family) and the clergy wear rose-coloured vestments as opposed to the normal violet ones worn during the remainder of Lent.

The traditional olde English idea of Mothering Sunday has been merged with the brash commercialism of the American holiday that even though they are on two different dates, these days confusion reigns and they are both the trigger for a relentless bombardment of crap advertising from all directions.  Especially so these days, since we are followed and tracked wherever we leave a footprint in the crisp, fresh snow of cyberspace. It doesn’t worry me these days. My mother died in 1986, at the horribly early age of only 57, from cancer.  I could not miss her any more or feel sorrier for her loss than I already do.  But it must be hard for those only recently bereaved, and those who have not yet come to terms with their grief, to have the cyber-equivalent of someone constantly pushing leaflets under your door, reminding you of something you’d rather remember in your own way, on your own terms.

I’ve actually been thinking quite a lot about my parents of late, because I have been striving to finish off Crowle Street Kids before it finishes me off.  It’s also kept my mind occupied in another week dominated by ankle pain and plantar faciitis. I don’t intend to write about the pain. Pain is boring, and other people’s pain is twice as boring, but it has been preventing me sleeping to the extent that I have been nodding off in the middle of the afternoon.  It’s sort of a follow on (the train of thought, not the ankle pain) from my meditations last week about Deb’s dad.  Sometimes, when I think back to those days in Alexandra Terrace, it seems like I am looking the wrong way down the telescope of time at a completely different person. How the hell did that snotty-nosed little urchin who used to play at “archaeologists” with Trevor Tozer and dig up the bomb site opposite out house, ever grow up to be me?

We had three choices of play areas, the bomb site, the school playground (during school hours only unless you fancied bunking up over wrought-iron gates and playing tag with the caretaker) and the disused cemetery. Can you imagine it today? Mummy, can I go and play in the disused cemetery? Yes dear, but I insist on dropping you off there in the 4 x 4 you can’t be too careful.  And yet, somehow, I survived. Survived being a kid with my duffle coat unbuttoned, the hood on my head, the arms held out at 45 degrees, running along the street making a noise like a Vulcan V-Bomber.  Survived the culture shock of moving to Brough, passing the 11+, and the even bigger culture shocks of going away to university, being unemployed and then getting a “real” job.  I guess in the “Everest” metaphor, that must have been about Base Camp, if the analogy holds.

Now, of course, as I approach the summit, and my breath is getting thinner, I realise what good companions I had in the parents I have now left behind on the sunlit lower slopes.  I won’t say they fitted me for everything life has to throw at me. I have also said, and done, things which would have horrified them, and usually, in those cases, it’s turned out that my headstrong stupidity caused me and others pain, and their reaction, had they been there to react at the time, of horror, would have been the correct one. I should have listened.

So, anyway, Mum. Although you are not around in person this mother’s day, you are as much “with me” as you ever were and are.  After all, paraphrasing Henry Scott Holland, what if you had been here and had just gone into the next room, somewhere very near, perhaps next door? I wouldn’t be able to see you then, but you wouldn’t be any the less to me. And although you gave me these dodgy genes that are now wreaking their own special brand of havoc, you also gave me life and the eyes with which to see it, and the skills, together with my Dad, with which to interpret it, make some sense of it, in as much as anyone ever can, and plot a course forwards. So don’t worry about the dodgy genes thing, I know you didn’t do it on purpose.

Meanwhile, somehow, it’s become 6.30pm. Matilda just went to the door, so I booled over there and opened it to let her out. She took one sniff of the dark frosty evening and went back to her bowl instead. Ellie is curled up on the chair next to the fire. Deb and Zak and Misty are presumably on their way home from wherever they managed to climb this afternoon, and the RAC are on speed-dial, just in case.

I don’t feel I have achieved much this week, to be honest, and I will really have to up my game in the next few days.  Easter may well be a ray of hope to look forward to, on Laetare Sunday in the middle of lent, but it is also a massive deadline. For all sorts of things. Still, I know what my mother would do right now if she were here, and I intend to follow her example. She would do what Granny Fenwick, and no doubt Great Grandma Walker would have done. Put the kettle on.