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.