Epiblog for the Feast of St Maximinus of Trier

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. It is a fine day today, and a Bank Holiday weekend, and despite crocking myself yesterday potting out marigolds, I have a stack of house-related tasks to do this afternoon, so this might end up being a slightly curtailed blog. It’s a lush summer’s day, warm enough to have the conservatory door ajar and the cat flap door open, so Matilda has been coming and going at will, and we’ve let the coals in the stove go right down. I might even (gasp!) let it go out altogether so I can give it a good clean out before re-lighting it.

Misty and Zak are off over at Dovestones with Debbie (no doubt it will be swarming over there today, but she wanted to do a decent length walk, since half-term has freed her temporarily from the shackles of having to prepare stuff for next week, and I don’t blame her. If I could walk, on a day like today, I’d be off striding the hills as well. )  We, the crocks, that is Ellie and me, are left at home to make do and mend. Well, I am making do, and mending, Ellie is snoozing in the armchair and doggy-dreaming.

The squirrels haven’t been much in evidence today, nor the birds, though both were busy during the week. Perhaps they’ve all gone to the seaside for the day.  Of the badger, we have seen little to nothing, but this could be because the badger is disgusted at our putting out some low-carb pasta substitute for it, which Debbie misguidedly purchased in Holland and Barrett.  I cooked it up for her, we both tried it, and agreed it was unspeakably vile, with a texture like boiled up rubber bands. We both looked at each other. Badger? Badger. However, Brenda was equally unimpressed, and the stuff was all still there the next morning. Eventually, it went into the compost.  Not a success.

As for me, amidst all the work, I actually did a couple of hours of gardening yesterday, which has seriously crocked me for today, but on the other hand, I enjoyed it, yesterday, an unplanned couple of hours potting on and pottering, sitting outside in the sun, listening to the aimless warblings of a blackbird. In fact, yesterday was quite a good day all round. Chris came and painted out the pantry, so that at least is nearing completion; the gardening was done, as above; I made some Camembert tarts; I cooked tea for everybody, including Granny, who came over, and topped it off by watching Hull City qualify for the Premiership next season by beating Sheffield Wednesday 1-0. My sort of day.

We might as well enjoy the good times while we have them, I guess. In three or four weeks it will be Midsummer’s Day, and then it’s downhill all the way. I can’t say I am looking forward to next winter. With the UK out of the EU, and Boris Johnson as prime minister, things are going to be very bad, especially on the economic front. And with Trump as president, there is a very good chance of waking up one morning to a nuclear wasteland.  So there’s not really a lot to look forward to. This could be the last good summer. Make the most of it.

Johnson published a statement this week, as head of the Brexit campaign, on the recent immigration figures. (Not quite sure who appointed him that, by the way, and he may find that when Cameron goes, the remaining evil Tories unite in a “stop Boris” movement. Mind you, what a choice anyway. It’s like having to choose if you want to be gassed, shot or strangled). The entire text is a confection of near-truths and outright lies.  Like UKIP, he is very careful to say things which leave a “gap” so that the gullible listener can fill it in with his own interpretation. I’ve noticed he does this a lot.  For instance, there is a passage in the statement which reads:

Britain benefits from cultural influences from abroad, I'm pro-immigration, but above all I'm pro controlled immigration. People of all races and backgrounds in the UK are genuinely concerned about uncontrolled immigration and the pressure it's placing on local services.

Johnson here is talking specifically about EU immigration to the UK, which is predominantly white, but he knows that many of his listeners and followers will take that statement as being a commitment to stop brown people coming here.  People hardly ever ask the question, of course, about why there aren’t enough resources to go around. It would be perfectly possible for there to be enough social housing to go around – restoring the housing stock sold off by Thatcher would be a start.  And building more schools instead of privatising the ones we’ve got. What is it costing to bomb Syria and to keep creating more and more refugees? The “pressure” on local services is created by George Osborne and Eric Pickles starving them of money, and the lack of housing is directly attributable to government spending priorities.  He goes on:

People have every right to question why we can't control our borders. We need to answer those concerns by taking back control of those borders.

We already have control of our borders though. Does the word “passport” ring any bells? True, we could fill in the tunnel, close our borders altogether, and pull up the drawbridge, but by doing so we would lose more than we gained, since – contrary to popular opinion – immigrants make a positive net contribution to the economy overall. True, you can probably, if you work for the Daily Mail, find the odd exception, but by and large, they come here, they get a job, they work, they pay taxes.  And the work is often work that nobody else wants to do, at rates which are pitifully low by UK standards, but a small fortune if you come from a Godforsaken village in Romania where feral goats wander the streets.

He continues:

We cannot control the terms on which people come and how we remove those who abuse our hospitality. This puts huge pressure on schools, hospitals and housing. It is exploited by some big companies that use immigration to keep wages down - and it is striking that the pay packets of FTSE 100 chief executives are now 150 times the average pay of people in their firms.

The Tories are entirely responsible for the low-pay culture in the UK. They have constantly eroded workers’ rights and put the pressure on people to accept any crappy low paid job that comes along on a zero-hours contract. True, the issue that a teacher from Romania can earn more packing carrots in a veg plant in Skelmersdale on minimum wage and unsocial hours than they can teaching at home in Romania is something that the EU has to address.  If we leave, we will not be in a position to have our say in that process.  But for Boorish Johnson to bang on about big companies causing inequality when his party is a friend of those same big companies and has helped them do it, is the height of hypocrisy. Once again, he talks about pressure on schools and housing. Easily solved. Build more schools, build more affordable homes.  Again, there is the unspoken – and incorrect - assumption that it is immigrants who are taking up the social housing, when most of them choose to rent in the private sector.

Finally he talks about the EU court of human rights.  In two separate places he says:

and the European Court has ultimate control over our immigration policy.

And

The rogue European Court now controls not just immigration policy but how we implement asylum policy under the Charter of Fundamental Rights.

The European Court of Human Rights is nothing to do with the EU. The European Court of Justice is the final arbiter of EU Law (but not national law). By deliberately conflating the two, Johnson is being deliberately imprecise and hoping to awaken latent anger in the white van man population about asylum seekers who couldn’t be deported because they had a cat, and other such mythical non-stories. In fact, our asylum system is pretty brutal, and has more than once deported people to their “own” countries where they have died for lack of medical aid, and/or because they were sent back to dangerous situations where people were waiting to try and kill them.  The Home Office have even started, now, harassing long term overseas residents with indefinite leave to remain, in some cases, just to look “hard” in the eyes of Daily Mail readers.  Johnson’s use of the word “rogue” in the above passage s a touch of which Goebbels himself would have been proud.  Really, Boorish, if you want “rogue”, just look in your mirror.

The haystack-haired one has occupied too much space in my brain this week. Suffice it to say that Dr Andy Williamson, founder of both Democratise, and Democracy UK, said in his blog that leaving the EU was “somewhere on a scale between bat-shit crazy and economic suicide”. Johnson also makes reference in his statement to the pending decision about whether to let Turkey join the EU.  He omits any detailed mention that his own great grandfather was in fact, er, Turkish.  I don’t think we should be letting these posh Turkish upper-class twits come over here, taking away work that could be done by posh English upper-class twits.

Cameron must have been glad of the distractions of the Euro campaign this week though. At least it stopped people talking too much about the 20 or so Tory MPs that are now the subject of police requests for extensions to the deadline on prosecutions for expenses fraud. Not to mention the fact that 700 of the refugees which we have helped to cause drowned in the Mediterranean in the last three days, some of them entire families. And still the boats keep coming.

I’ve been thinking a lot about family, this last week, mainly as a consequence, I suppose, of the “family” weekend we had last weekend.  I have now amassed a reasonable collection of little (and not so little) nephews and nieces on my wife’s side; Adam, Chloe, Luke, Katie, Holly, Ben, Isobel.  They haven’t got a vote on June 23^rd, but they are going to be the generation which has to sort out the mess. We’ve already left them one festering bag of poo in the form of climate change, now it looks like we’re going to top it off with a side order of xenophobic economic disaster. 

I can’t see any way in which their prospects won’t be harmed by us leaving the EU.  There is no way on God’s green earth that we are going to be able to negotiate trade agreements with the rest of the world on day 1, assuming that the rest of the world was even interested.  The financial services sector will probably move en masse from London to Frankfurt – when was the last time you saw a banker display loyalty? We’ll still have to abide by the rules of the EU single market and accept free movement of people if we want to trade with the EU as a non-member, and worst of all, the UK economy will be at the mercy of people in the UK parliament who want to remove the last vestiges of workers’ rights, create even more misery with “austerity”, make more people homeless, and sell off the rump of the NHS.  Anyone who thinks that the “no” campaign will immediately start pumping £350million a week extra into the NHS if they win, is living in fairyland. So for the sake of Adam, Chloe, Luke, Katie, Holly, Ben and Isobel, and not for my sake, as I shan’t live to see the whole of the period of destruction and chaos that a leave vote would set in train, I will be voting to stay in on June 23^rd. Not with a song in my heart and a skip in my step, because I am no fan of the corrupt, bloated EU, and would love to see it transformed, but simply because it is the lesser of two weevils.

Today is almost the end of May, a month which has passed, as I predicted, without me really noticing it going.  And it is also the feast of St Maximinus of Trier.  Amongst the many subjects which come within his saintly “brief” are perjury, losses at sea, and destructive rains, so it looks like he might be handy to have around this summer, in view of the latter.  Maximinus of Trier was a bishop (of Trier, in Germany) from 332AD, and was born in the splendidly-named town of Silly, near to Poitiers in France.  He died in 347AD. He spent a lot of time fighting against the Arian Heresy, and in his spare time, he worked miracles.  For me, I am afraid, I can no longer remember what the Arian Heresy was. It’s a bit like the Schleswig-Holstein question, only three people ever understood it: one’s dead, one’s mad, and I’ve forgotten.

For some reason, in religious iconography, St Maximinus is portrayed in his bishop’s attire, carrying a book and a model of the church, and accompanied by a bear, which legend has it that he trained to carry his bishop’s pack, when travelling.  Much about his story is confused, however, primarily because in the Middle Ages his story got mixed up with another Maximinus, Maximinus of Aix, who is mentioned in the gospel of Luke and who is reputed to have carried Mary Magdalene to Aix en Provence, in a miraculous boat with no rudder and no mast, following which she disappeared into the nearby wilderness, and was only re-discovered by Maximinus just before her death. This in itself may be a re-telling of a similar story in which the same thing happens to the Magdalene, but this time her companion is St Zosimas of Palestine.

The cemetery outside the northern gate of Trier, where St Maximinus was buried, became a place of pilgrimage, owing to the alleged miracles occurring there, and eventually the remains of further bishops were interred nearby, leading to the founding of a church dedicated to St John the Evangelist on the site, which later transmuted into St Maximin’s Abbey.  Like many such foundations, it went through several changes. It was destroyed by the Normans in 882AD, then rebuilt, lasting until the end of the 17^th century, when it was rebuilt.  In 1802 it was “secularised” and it was heavily bombed in the second world war and largely demolished, thus putting an end to what had been one of the oldest continuous religious foundations in Europe.

Once more, I find myself largely unable to draw any inspiration from the story of Maximinus of Trier, except to admire the bit about the bear, which is almost certainly one of the least true parts!  The historian in me would love to know more about the man’s life and the whole period. I’m pretty sketchy on English history at that time, let alone German, but we only have the sources we have, barring some miraculous discovery of a lost manuscript bound up into the binding of a later book. This is not as fanciful as it sounds, by the way. Parchment was expensive, and sometimes difficult to come by, and there have been several well-attested instances of palimpsests and incunabula from ancient books turning up incorporated into the bindings of more modern (relatively speaking) ones.

For my part, I shall be carrying on next week trying to create palimpsests and incunabula of my own, whether we get away in the camper van or not, because now is the crucial time of year for getting books off to press and I have got my work cut out. Sometimes by my own dawdling, like today when I could have been writing a jacket blurb and I potted out two comfrey plants instead, and sometimes through people mucking me about, not doing what they were supposed to, making unreasonable demands, and generally behaving quixotically.

I am still praying, is, I suppose, the good news this week . I actually finished off my pleasant day yesterday by listening, on the internet, to, of all things, Sister Wendy Beckett on Desert Island Discs in 2012.  I wasn’t overly impressed by her music choices, apart from one of them, but I learned that she goes to bed at 5pm, and rises just after midnight to spend seven hours in prayer.  I can’t even begin to conceive of what that life must be like, and what praying for seven hours straight must be like, not, for that matter, what it must be like to only speak once a day, to thank the person who brings your food.  Yet she describes it as an existence which many people would see as akin to being in solitary confinement, as a life of “unimaginable bliss”. 

She said, and I can see some truth in this, that the “wee small hours” of the night, between midnight and daybreak, are a time when lots of people are praying, even including some people who don’t think they are praying at all.  Clearly, I have a lot to learn about prayer. It is true of me, though, that I feel more disposed to attempt to pray on those nights when everyone else is asleep and I am just winding up my own day before I, too, turn in for the night. I am in control of the house, and lock up, while carrying on some sort of rudimentary service of Compline inside my head. The Lord grant us a quiet night. Be vigilant, for your foe stalketh like a mighty lion, seeking whom he may devour, and all that stuff.  It’s a very evocative time of night.

Last night, as I sat there listening to the programme, trying to focus my own thoughts, one of the choices of music was Regina Coelis, in a plainsong version, that doesn’t seem to be available on Youtube, though I have discovered many similar ones.  Youtube also offered me, as an alternative, Never Gonna Give You Up, by Rick Astley. Go figure.

You could probably write off what I am about to describe as auto-suggestion. It was late at night, it had been a good, fulfilling day, drink had been taken, I was tired, and I was also concerned by the many concerns that, like the poor, are always with me.  How long have I got left, and how best to use it, what’s going to happen to those I care about when I am no longer here to care about them, on this plane at least,  how will they get on if the country ends up in a quagmire of disaster, and what about all the people out there now with no homes, and all the lost animals… I started to be affected by the music. In a profound way. I seemed to understand that the music spoke to some eternal truth, that made my own passing transience somehow less hard to bear.

It was music that made me think of old stone and green fields, of sunshine warming old cloisters, of the warmth and spices of the Middle East as if I might have been part of a crowd craning my neck to see Christ ride into Jerusalem. It is virtually impossible to describe, because I am defining it in terms of my own experiences, which will not, of course, be yours. It was also redolent of getting home from school in summer, doing my homework, and then going out for a ride on my bike. There was a particular spot I went to often, and the end of Sands Lane, off Elloughton Road, where you could stand under the shade of the green, dappled horse-chestnut leaves and look out over a green-gold meadow, where there were sometimes horses grazing.

Annihilating all that’s made

To a green thought, in a green shade.

I can see now, reading back the previous paragraphs, that it is jumbled garbage that comes nowhere near expressing what I thought.  The track on Youtube is just a fragment. The one on DID seemed to go on much longer, although I am trying to indicate that it was one of those occasions where time seemed largely irrelevant.  I wouldn’t have put money on Desert Island Discs as a path to spiritual enlightenment, but you never know, do you? C. S. Lewis decided Christ was his saviour in the course of a family outing to Whipsnade Zoo.  I could, of course, go back and find the same podcast, and play it again, but I am almost scared to, in case this time, it just seems normal, and I can’t feel that

All shall be well, and

All manner of thing shall be well,

Like I could last night.

Anyway. That is the nearest thing I have had to a “religious experience” for a long time. I know, I should get out more. Now Debbie is back with the dogs, which need feeding, as does she. Dovestones was heaving, apparently, “like bloody Blackpool” according to Deb. So I guess it’s time to buckle to and get on with the mundanities of life in general.  Bank Holiday tomorrow or no Bank Holiday.

Epiblog for Trinity Sunday

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. I knew it would be, I said it would be, and it was. Summer is still with us, after a fashion, though the end of the week has been marred by showers – well, I say marred, but it has saved me having to water the tubs of herbs and flowers.  So far, it hasn’t knocked the flowers off the clematis, either, though there don’t seem to be as many of them as there were last year.

The squirrels and the birds are as busy as ever, and we think the badger is still coming – at least intermittently – because the bird food and stale bread does go down from time to time, although that, of course, could also be because of squirrels hoovering up the previous night's uneaten badger-food, from first light onwards.

Matilda has been out and about, when the weather permits, and has also been using the cat flap. Not quite as nature and the cat flap designers intended, because she still hasn’t mastered, at the age of thirteen, the art of pushing it open with her head, like proper cats do, and thus it has to be held open with a bit of string, looped around the door handle. It’s good, though, that the weather has been warm enough to have the internal door to Colin’s side lobby open, giving access to the cat flap, without an icy blast from the Arctic via the Urals whistling around my ankles. It’s also been good to be able to have the conservatory door open onto the decking, allowing Matilda and Misty Muttkins to wander in and out at will.

Unusually, this week, for us, who hardly ever go anywhere and hardly ever see anyone, it has been a week of visitors. Owen made one of his customary daring forays out of Wales, appearing like the Fairy King in a pantomime in our midst, and accomplishing great things. In the short space of time he was here, he mended a door, mended the tray on my wheelchair, mended the wheel (the new wheel, out of which a screw had fallen, and which should, quite frankly, have been attended to by wheelchair services, prior to fitting it) blew up my tyres, cleared off the remaining soil from the stone flagged tiles in the front garden, cleared off the weeds, brambles and ground elder from the strip at the side of the drive, which was supposed to have been done by the missing-in-action, now presumed dead, gardener, trimmed the overgrown laurel bushes, converting the lopped branches to logs, loaded up the camper with two loads of miscellaneous crap which they took to the tip, helped me to sort the majority of the boxes of books which had been stored in the old camper van and which were all stacked in the garage, helped Debbie move two kitchen units, helped me re-stack some of the stock of books in Colin’s front room, mended the shovel, and gave the stove an overhaul. It was all a bit of a blur, and at times I felt as though I was in an episode of DIY S.O.S.

It would take a separate blog, running to several thousand words, to even come close to enumerating what a help this man has been to us.  The words “above and beyond the call of duty” don’t even come close. The thing is, it’s not just the work, and the getting things done, but it’s also – and this is just as important – the positive effect of having someone to gee you up and knowing that there is someone else on your side, and you aren’t just blundering on alone, further and further into the mire, which is often what   it feels like in my life.

Unbelievably, we did, also, find some time for general conviviality and relaxation, on Thursday evening, involving preparing and eating a meal, banking up the stove, opening several bottles and generally chewing the fat and reminiscing about the old days, school, and teachers. We have heard the chimes at midnight, Master Justice Shallow.

Before Owen’s arrival on Thursday,  I was having a bit of a disaster day. I committed the major tactical blunder of attempting to clean the top of the cooker. The “blunder” element consisted of two separate parts – firstly, the time it took, two hours, though to be honest, I was feeling so pissed off with books and everything to do with books, I willingly spent that time and would much rather, at that point, have been up to my elbows in grease than editing a manuscript – and secondly, in having dropped an open bottle of bleach, which means we now have a relatively small very clean patch of tiles. And no, I didn’t go on to clean the rest of them, in case you wondered.  At one point, I decided to stop for a cup of tea, and caught myself in the act just as I was on the point of adding bleach to it instead of milk. I actually had the bleach bottle in my hand, with the top off, and I was just reaching the tipping point when I realised what was going on.

The disaster zone continued: the previous day, I had survived a “gas leak” which turned out to be nothing of the kind. I was sitting in the kitchen, beavering away, when my mobile rang. It was Deb, calling from college to say that, when she had left for work that morning, she thought she had noticed a distinct whiff of gas around the area of the gas meter just outside the lobby. Could I investigate further and call it in. I duly trundled into the lobby and sat there, sniffing. Nothing. Despite the fact that I couldn’t smell anything even remotely like gas, I thought it was better to be safe than sorry, especially with our luck: if the house did blow up, the gas board would probably try and charge us for the gas consumed in the explosion.

I searched online for a non-urgent gas leak reporting number, but the only ones I could find were for emergencies. So I phoned in, reluctantly, and rather sheepishly explained that I didn’t want to waste anyone’s time, but… the woman who answered was very sympathetic and not at all unhappy about sending someone round right away, just in case. Thus it was on Wednesday that the gas man came to call, in the words of Flanders and Swann.      

There was no leak. It was probably the boiler venting gas fumes when it kicked in, which it does for safety reasons, apparently.  But, in the course of taking the cover off the gas meter, the gas man also moved the planter trough which contained the comfrey plant which I’ve been nurturing through the last two or three winters. I specifically asked him to put it back on top of the gas meter when he’d finished, as I can’t lift it up there myself from my sedentary position. He assured me he would, and indeed, when he left, that he had.  When I went out later, the comfrey trough was still sitting on the end of my ramp, and on top of the gas meter cabinet was a tub of marigolds.

Life in a wheelchair is full of infuriating little irritations like these. Having to go on bended knee and ask people to do stuff that I used to be able to do myself doesn’t come naturally to me. Oh well, I thought, even though the gas man doesn’t know his comfrey from his marigolds, I can always ask Owen to swop them over when he comes.  When I was taking the bin out to the big dustbin on DisasterThursday morning, however, I noticed that the comfrey was getting one hell of a battering from the wind in its current position. If I could just move the trough round, it would be shielded by the bins. So I trundled down to where it was, attempted to reach down and gently move it round, and succeeded only in tipping it over, so that all the soil fell out and the stem of the comfrey plant snapped off at ground level.  I felt disproportionately sad at this. It was like losing an old friend.

So, all in all, Thursday morning was a bit of a bummer. Owen returned to Wales on Friday evening, briefly “crossing in the hallway” with Debbie’s sister, who was staying until this morning, having come to see baby Luke, and having neatly disposed of her own children and husband to a combined scout/camp/beaver jamboree. The weekend progressed, and a good time was had by all, involving meals out and family visits, and the opening of further bottles. Today, after she’d left for the station, Deb’s sister in law popped in for a cuppa!

Having used up our entire annual quota of visitors in just one week, I haven’t been paying attention to the alarums and excursions of the outside world.  Suffice it to say that the Great Confusion of the “Brexit” debate rumbles on. As time progresses, anecdotal evidence suggests that the defeat for Cameron will be even heavier than I first thought. Asking around in the family and about the intentions of their friends and workmates indicates that there are two distinct groups, people who have already decided to vote to leave and people who have not yet made up their minds. Given that a proportion of the latter will also decide to vote to leave, you begin to see the scale of the problem.  The polls which give the “remain” campaign a lead must be wildly wrong. Committed “yes” voters are few and far between.

As I wrote recently, maybe even as recently as last week, the roots of this disaster (and economically, a no vote will be an economic disaster, make no mistake: the poor, the weak and the vulnerable will suffer, and anyone who thinks the money "saved" will be spent on the NHS instead of tax breaks for the rich and bombing the Middle East is in cloud-cuckoo land) go back a long way, much further than the current migrant/refugee crisis, which is throwing immigration into such sharp focus. Although that crisis has not helped.  They go further back than “austerity” which also has not helped, with the impression that there are not enough resources to go around, when the problem is really the government having the wrong spending priorities. The problem's root lies in the impression of the EU as being a nest of meddling bureaucrats, where all bananas must be straight by law, an organisation that wants to stop us dwye-flonking, morris dancing and cheese-rolling, ban the flag of St George and make it illegal for fat white blokes in vests to sit outside pubs singing about Inger-lund, while they watch the football team lose on penalties.

This idea of Europe is so ingrained that, basically, Brexit can get away with any old crap, and it goes unchallenged. The latest panic story is “what if there is another Greek debt crisis?” The implication being that we are pouring money away down some sort of bottomless plughole to support Greece, when in fact we are not in the Euro, thanks to that charmless boor Gordon Brown, and it’s France and Germany who have borne the pain in terms of toxic Greek debt, and the lender of last resort is the ECB and not the Bank of England.  Nor does the money go directly to Greece, either, as most of it goes direct to the banks that are owed it.

As I have said before, I am no fan of the EU. I like my bananas like I like my Liberal Democrats: bent, and yellow. Personally, I think the Euro is a really bad idea. It’s like having a hospital full of patients and giving them all the same medicine, regardless of what is wrong with them. Some will thrive, some will die. The situation is exacerbated by the fact that one or two of the patients should never have made it through A & E anyway. But it has little or no bearing on whether or not we should remain in the EU. If the Greek economy does collapse, yes, our trade directly with Greece may well be affected, but that would be the case whether we were in or out of the EU.

The often-quoted figure of £350 million a week which it costs Britain to contribute to Europe is also flawed. It takes no account of the rebate negotiated by Thatcher, or the effects upon the UK of inward investment resulting from our membership, or the access by the UK to funds set up by the EU for specific purposes, eg for economic regeneration, or flood relief.  But you try telling that to the dyed-in-the-wool, union jack underpants wearing, white van man, and the response will be at best a blank stare and at worst a bunch of fives. A Labour MP was forced to apologise this week for labelling someone from the “leave” campaign as a “horrible racist”. I don’t know why Labour has developed this fetish for apologising unnecessarily.Tell it like it is.

This was also the week of the Queen’s speech, when Her Majesty is required to sit on a golden throne, wearing a diamond-encrusted crown, and read out George Osborne and David Cameron’s lectures on how we should all be tightening our belts.  It’s not her fault, but it doesn’t make it any less annoying. Still, she is the sovereign, and much has been made by the Brexit campaign of the concept of sovereignty, and of the need to “regain control” and “take back our country” as if the entire UK was the private property of Nigel Farage and some new age travellers had suddenly started squatting in the arboretum.

It’s worth spending a little time unpicking these concepts of sovereignty and taking control, and fortunately for me, because I am not a constitutional lawyer, nor will I ever be, Professor Adam Tonkins of Glasgow University, who is a constitutional lawyer, publishes a very interesting blog called Notes From North Britain, which examines such issues. The entire article “On Sovereignty” is far too long to quote in full, but here are three or four key passages:

The Brexiteers’ demand that we take control is fuelled by a sense that, within the EU, the UK has lost its sovereignty, that it is beholden to a higher power—the power of Brussels—and that the magic of sovereign freedom can return to these shores only if we vote leave. It strikes me that both the Nationalists’ and the Brexiteers’ claims to sovereignty are misplaced and, moreover, are misplaced for the same basic reason.

Federalism as in the USA, union as in the UK, and confederal arrangements as in the EU are each designed to pool and share. These are not surrenders of sovereignty to a higher power, but investments in sovereignty in order to protect and enhance it. In Scotland we know the arguments backwards, because we spent two long years thinking of nothing else: of how we are safer, stronger and more prosperous inside the UK than we would be outside it.

Component parts of a greater whole do not lose their distinctive identity by agreeing to pool and share. Texas is still Texas as Québec is still Québec. And agreements to pool and share can always be undone. But, just as union requires two (or more) consenting parties, so does disunion. The UK cannot just walk away from the EU regardless of the rights and interests of the other 27 Member States, just as Québec has no unilateral right to secede from Canada. If sovereignty is shared within the United Kingdom, so too is it shared between the United Kingdom and our international partners, not least the European Union.

Of course it is the case that the UK, like all Member States of the EU, must obey (“give effect to” would be more accurate) European law. This is because we voluntarily agreed to do so when we joined the EU in 1972. But it is also that case that we are under legal obligations with regard to EU law because and only because UK law says so (this is clear as a matter of case law and statute alike). Moreover, the European Union is a creature of limited legal competence: it has only those powers the Member States have assigned to it under the Treaties. If it exceeds those powers it is acting unlawfully. If (as we do) we have the right to leave the EU; if (as it does) EU law takes effect in the UK because and only because UK law so provides; and if (as it does) the EU has only those powers assigned to it by the Treaties (amendment of which requires the unanimous agreement of all Member States), then what sovereignty is it we’ve lost and needs returned from Brussels?

Take control, they say. We already have control. We, along with the other Member States, control the powers the EU has. We control the way in which EU law takes effect in the UK. And, if we consider that EU law has been unlawfully adopted, or that the EU has exceeded its powers, we can say so.

Like the Scottish Nationalists, the Brexiteers misunderstand the nature of sovereignty in the modern world. The reality of power is that it is shared. No-one exercises it absolutely. Everyone, even the most powerful, is constrained by law, by the need to seek agreement, by consent.

This would be the case for Scotland even if it left the UK, just as it would be true for the UK even if it leaves the EU… The Brexiteers’ case suffers from the same fatal flaw. If the UK wants access to the EU’s single market we’d have to abide by its rules whether we are a Member State or not. Yet, without being a Member State, we’d have no influence at all over what those rules are. We’d still be dependent on Brussels but we’d no longer share power with our partners in Europe. We’d no longer be at the table. We’d no longer be playing our part in shaping and drawing up those rules. Yet we’d not be able to escape them. That’s not control: it’s subjugation.

That is a long passage, even in my abridged version and it bears reading and re-reading. Such is the paucity of the debate on both sides, however, that I have not seen these issues explored in this way until now, and even then, it is being done not by either of the official campaigns but by a distinguished but relatively unknown constitutional lawyer. Properly explained, it blows all the Brexit rhetoric about taking back control and sovereignty to smithereens. But who is going to explain it to the people who are going to vote to leave because they believe Brexit’s claptrap and think there are too many brown people and they want bent bananas, Morris Dancing, and the flag of St George on demand? No-one, it seems.

Perhaps the most unintentionally humorous incident of the Brexit campaign this week was Michael Heseltine calling Boorish Johnson “unbalanced”. When you are called “unbalanced” by someone who once jumped on the table in the House of Commons, picked up the mace and whirled it around his head, then you know you really are several steps beyond Barking and well on the way to La La Land.

Today is Trinity Sunday, which, sadly, has nothing to do with Wakefield Trinity, otherwise I could have reprised all those Eddie Waring jokes from a decade ago. I know as much about theology as I do about constitutional law, and therefore if you have come looking for a detailed exposition of how God can be at one and the same indivisible yet manifest him/itself in the person of Jesus or of the Holy Ghost, in all honesty, you are probably in the wrong place. I guess the short answer is if you are God, you can do whatever the hell you like (no pun intended) and if that includes things which are completely incomprehensible to our understanding (and in my experience it frequently does) then we have to just suck it up, buttercup. One of these is the ability to be both one thing, or any one of three things, at one and the same time.  Yes, it makes my head hurt, as well.

Thomas a Becket (1118–1170) was consecrated Archbishop of Canterbury on the Sunday after Pentecost  and subsequently, he ordained that the anniversary of the day of his consecration should be held as a new festival in honour of the Holy Trinity. This was the beginning of Trinity Sunday.

It is a shame, really, that today is not the feast day of St John Bosco, about whom I have been learning this week. St John Bosco was protected by a large grey dog which he called “Grigio” and which used to appear in times of maximum peril to the saint, such as when he was menaced by two thieves on the road, and Grigio appeared and drove them off. If I did not know better, I would say that Grigio is in fact a Padfoot, and the whole story is a pleasant fusion of Catholic tradition and folklore. And much more interesting than trying to unpick the mysteries of the Holy Trinity. But it isn’t St John Bosco’s feast day, and I am completely unable to examine the mysteries of the Holy Trinity, other than to say, with Donne, that mysteries are like the sun,

On a huge hill,

Cragged and steep, Truth stands, and he that will

Reach her, about must and about must go,

And what the hill's suddenness resists, win so.

Yet strive so that before age, death's twilight,

Thy soul rest, for none can work in that night.

To will implies delay, therefore now do;

Hard deeds, the body's pains; hard knowledge too

The mind's endeavours reach, and mysteries

Are like the sun, dazzling, yet plain to all eyes.

The only really good news for me on the spiritual front this week is that I found myself praying again.  Quite unexpectedly.  While I was left to my own devices, over the weekend, I was almost startled to find my inner voice giving thanks for my friends, and for the work that had been done, and for the fact that we were warm enough, had enough food, and had a roof over our heads, and expressing a wish that the litany of people for whom I used to pray on a regular basis, plus one or two recent additions, should have their welfare safeguarded, and be healthy and happy. Not much, I suppose, and unexpected, but then it is often the case that when you finally give up looking for something you have lost, that is precisely the point at which you find it. First you get the earthquake, then the wind (paaarp) then the fire, and finally, the still small voice.

One of the things prayer will do, says Sister Wendy Beckett, is to show you the truth about yourself, and that is something many of us would go a long way to avoid. Perhaps that is why I find it so difficult to pray these days.  Because it would also mean an acceptance and an admission of my situation, which I find difficult to accept and admit.  The most spiritually fulfilling and poignant times in my life, however, have been those when the distinction between the supplicant and the listener had been unclear. There was no longer a “me” who prayed, but some sort of sense of timeless unity with a something that knew what I was going to pray for already. And also know what I had already prayed for, and what I would be praying for tomorrow. In that respect, prayer didn’t show me the truth about myself except in the sense that I had actually become one with whatever it was I was praying to, however fleetingly. Or perhaps that was precisely the truth about myself that I was meant to discover.

My petition has now almost 11,000 signatures, and has been waiting almost a fortnight for an official government response.  I don’t really know why it has taken them so long to write “the existing legislation is sufficient”, but maybe they are actually taking it seriously. I doubt it, somehow, but you never know.  The overwhelming sadness of the week, apart from the loss of the comfrey plant, was the loss of the books from the old camper, the ones which had deteriorated beyond the point where they could have been rescued/repaired.  The saddest one being a small edition of Marvell’s poems and satires, originally bought second hand in the bookshop in the Whitefriargate Arcade in Hull, and dating from 1926. I opened it, and it crumbled away, page by page, as I thumbed through it.  I parted from it and dropped it into the bin bag muttering the Zen mantra about “let it go with both hands”.

Actually, doing anything with both hands right now might prove to be problematic, because at the moment I am suffering from an extremely painful, swollen thumb joint on my right hand. It would be impossible to miss me if I was hitch-hiking, but other than that, it is a complete pain, literally. It is amazing how much stuff you need your thumb for. You don’t realise until you don’t have one, but at least I have temporarily halted the ceaseless march of human evolution by ceasing to use an opposable digit.

Next week, though, will be a week where having a full compliment of working digits would be a useful attribute, though, especially for typing, and generally living in a digital world, and therefore I may have to end up consulting with the local surgery about my thumb. Hopefully, they should be able to give me the thumbs up (see what I did, there?) and order will be restored once more. May is zipping by at a terrifying rate, and in my rather depressed state last week I appear to have omitted to mention Whitsun altogether. Which was rather remiss of me. This week, with the help of others, I might just have recovered a little of my purpose, so I will now plug that gap in the blog with this mention of Whitsuntide, even though these days the only people, other than me, who remember it, are fans of Philip Larkin.

Epiblog for the Feast of St Bertha

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. Summer continues, after a fashion, and one half of this year’s plant order from Jersey Plants Direct has finally arrived. Some marigolds. The ground cover roses which I ordered are, however, still in transit somewhere. As with last year’s order, Jersey Plants Direct’s idea of “direct” seems to be “direct via Oslo after being despatched on a three-legged donkey with no sense of direction.”

Still, these are first world problems, but I would like to put some sort of effort into the garden this year. The gardener who was supposed to be coming back to do part two of the great clean-up and prune is currently missing in action, but since I had to explain to him what ground elder was the first time he came, it’s probably no great loss. Meanwhile, Debbie, fuelled by the consumption of a bottle of Old Rosie cloudy cider, cleared off half the overgrown flags in the front garden, with the result that at least now when the ground cover roses do get here, they will have somewhere to go.

The trees down the valley are a glorious green, now, and teeming with birds and squirrels. The badger, too, is still an occasional visitor. She missed a couple of nights when it was really hot, but since then she seems to have been most nights, though we don’t always see her.  There are flowers coming on the magnolia and the clematis. So, provided it doesn’t snow in June or something crazy like that, perhaps winter really is behind us. 

Matilda has now got into something of a summer routine, especially on mornings when Debbie goes off teaching for the day.  Deb lets her out onto the decking first thing, and this results in her “morning patrol”, whereby she stalks up and down on the decking and sits glaring into the garden. The squirrels, undeterred, come and steal the bird food anyway, while her back is turned.  Then she will come to the door to be let in/go to the door to be let back out again throughout the morning.

Afternoons are spent snoozing, either out on the decking in a patch of sun, if it’s a hot day, or in the kitchen in the armchair near me while I’m working. Then she wakes up about teatime, has some Felix, and goes out for another stalking/patrolling session until she gets fed up, usually about 9.30pm, comes to the door to be let in, and, after having supper, curls up either in the kitchen chair or on the settee in Colin’s, and that’s it for the night.  Oddly regular for a cat, since cats are by nature contrary and capricious little creatures who delight in doing the unexpected and sometimes even the unwanted, but then that’s what litter trays are for!

Still, she’s a simple enough little soul, and seems quite happy with her life. It’s hard to think sometimes that we’ve had her nearly four years, but four years it is. It’ll be three years on July 3^rd since we got Misty Muttkins.  Some days it feels like it was only yesterday, some days it seems like they have been here forever.

Deb’s counting down the hours till the end of term, and I am still mired in the same 17 intractable problems, apart from that one of them was (sort of) solved this week when the wheelchair repair man came on Monday and changed over my tyres. For two pneumatic ones. The previous ones were solid, and it seems odd going back to rolling through life on a cushion of air. The problem is, though, that air-filled tyres are more generally prone to disaster, and originally the powers that be decreed I should have solid tyres because they got fed up of having to come out and fix punctures! So, we shall see. The only other odd thing which has happened this week is that my thumb has swollen up, all around the joint. Until you develop a big, hurty thumb, you don’t realise how many of life’s daily tasks you need an opposable thumb for. It hurts to hold a pen, or a paintbrush, and it sort of hurts to type, although I only use my thumb for the space bar. If it doesn’t go down soon, I may have to involve the NHS, perish the thought.

All this talk of the end of term serves to highlight, as well, that it is only about six weeks to the end of term, and to midsummer, when the nights start drawing in again, and to the dreaded Brexit poll that seems to be dominating the news everywhere we look these days.  You can’t turn on the TV without seeing Boorish Johnson blundering about in a shopping centre somewhere, brandishing a Cornish pasty and wittering on about taking back control, whatever that means.

The level of utter drivel and appalling meaningless crap being uttered by both sides in the Great Confusion surrounding the referendum is truly staggering.  Cameron compounded his tactical error in calling the referendum in the first place, by using some really stupid scare tactics at the outset, which now means that when the Bank of England and the IMF make some actually quite serious statements about the possible economic downturn that will follow when we vote to leave, the impact of these are blunted, because the Brexiteers simply label it as more of “project fear”. 

Actually, much as it sticks in my craw to say it, and much as I am no great fan of the EU in its present state, I am afraid the Bank of England and the IMF statements both seemed to make sense.  By losing this referendum the Tories could finally kill off the stuttering, patchy and unsatisfactory little shoots of growth that began to appear when Osborne abandoned “austerity” briefly and stopped carpet-bombing the economy.  The world’s trade is slowing down anyway, China is tanking, the US is up to its goolies in debt, manufacturing here is slowing, and it is positively the worst time to be going out on a limb and setting off into the economic unknown.  What is needed is a prolonged period of government investment on much-needed public projects to get real jobs for real people earning real money and putting it back into the economy to grow it and grow the tax-take.

The level of debate in the Brexit campaign is equally dire. In fact it’s sometimes worse! A typical example of this is the press headlines about the EU seeking to “ban” the British cuppa and the British slice of toast.  It turns out that there was a draft EU proposal in 2014, which was leaked at the time, and which is currently stalled anyway, to restrict the power of some domestic electrical items such as kettles and toasters, in at attempt to cut electricity usage as part of the battle against global warming. Nobody was talking about “banning” the cuppa, or the slice of toast, they were talking about making a proposal which could go a small way to meaning that your child didn’t have to wear a smog mask to go to school in summer.  There is nothing to stop people using a less powerful kettle to make a cup of tea, or indeed a less powerful toaster to toast their bread. Or do it on a toasting fork in front of the fire, and put the kettle on the gas stove, if you have one. The entire story is, to put it bluntly, bollocks, yet somehow it’s being shared on social media as if it was gospel, along with the straight bananas, baa baa ethnic sheep, and all the other crap that never was, but which comes gargling out of the mouths of various scary-eyed zealots who are continually frothing on about “taking back control”.

Sadly, a simple lie is much easier to put across than a detailed unpicking of the actual issues, which is how the Tories won the 2015 election by lying about the economy, and how they are going to lose this referendum because of the likes of UKIP lying to people that in some undefined way, which you won’t hear either Farage or Boorish Johnson explain, because they can’t, because it’s bollocks, see above, voting to leave will  somehow rid the country of brown people, restore cricket on the green and spinsters cycling to matins, and bring back clipped privet hedges, clipped British accents, and the casual racism of the 1950s.  As Oscar Wilde makes Lady Bracknell say in The Importance of Being Ernest, “ignorance is such a delicate, exotic flower; touch it, and the bloom is gone…”

It really is enough to make you start seriously checking out those disused air raid shelters on the Isle of Arran that were for sale the other year.  When you look at well, basically any political statement these days, 90% of it is utter crap. Sadiq Khan, London’s new Labour mayor, chose to attack his party leader instead of concentrating on the victories Labour has achieved since Corbyn was elected. Mind you, he is not alone in this, in the Labour party and the BBC.  Cameron, meanwhile, was caught on camera telling the Queen how fantastically corrupt Nigeria and Afghanistan were, on the eve of those very countries attending an, er, anti-corruption conference in London.  This is the same David Cameron, in case you were wondering, whose party is now under investigation or at least being proposed for investigation, in about ten, or is it fourteen, constituencies, for election fraud.  Taxi for Mr Kettle!

Living in this corrupt, xenophobic, narrow, nasty, semi-derelict country is enough to make you want to turn into a contemplative, and coincidentally, today is the feast of St Bertha, who did just that, giving away all her possessions and becoming a hermit near Bingen, on the Rhine, in Germany, following a visit to Rome, after she founded several hospices for the poor after her pagan husband was killed in battle and she devoted herself to raising her son Rupert as a Christian.  Rupert died when he was twenty, and Bertha spent the remaining 25 years of her own life there as a hermit.  She is not to be confused with St Bertha of Kent, who was a different St Bertha, or indeed with Big Bertha, which was a WW1 German artillery piece mounted on a railway truck.

Certainly, the more life goes on like it has been doing the more the thought of going off to live in a hut in the woods and bake my own curtains and weave my own bread becomes more and more appealing.  Even if my premonition doesn’t come true, I can’t have that much time left, and do I really want to spend it adding up accounts to see how far behind the line we are when everybody else is outside in the sunshine enjoying themselves.  The reason why this blog is so late today is because it’s Deb’s birthday and, instead of writing a blog, I spent the evening cooking a celebration meal for Deb, and her Mum, the guest of honour, and yes, I had some of it too, and very nice it was, to say I’d cooked it.

Today has been a long (and badger-less) day, though, and I am clearly no more spiritually developed than I was last week, or even last month. I wish I could write you a blog one day that says I have seen it all, and it is true, a bit like Henry Vaughan, and that I understand it, and this is how it works.  

I saw eternity the other night

Like a great ring of pure and endless light

But these days are largely empty and void.  As I have said before, I don’t think that I am having a dark night of the soul, but right now, with my aches and pains and my constant, nagging tiredness, it seems definitely like a dark night of the body.  Even the voluptuary sweetness of the May time – loveliest of trees, the cherry, now – seems devoid of any spiritual aspect this year.  In the words of W B Yeats, too long a sacrifice makes a stone of the heart. Still, as the old Zen saying has it, a blossom, falls whether or not there is anyone there to see it.

A flower falls whether we love it or not, and weeds grow whether we love them or not, and the peach blossom smells gorgeous, even when we are not around to smell it.

I’m obviously not helping anyone with this blog, least of all me, and I don’t know why I am still doing it, to be honest, when I look at how much the last five years has stripped from my already shaky belief-system and faith. So I apologise, dear reader, if I have led you up the garden path, or you came here seeking some solace I was unable to provide today. The fault is definitely mine, not yours. Whatever you are looking for, stop looking for it, then you will probably find it. I wish I could follow my own advice, sometimes!

The only good “external” news this week really has been that my petition topped 10,000 signatures, and thus is now guaranteed a response from the government, which will be interesting, although I could probably write it now, myself… blah blah blah existing legislation is sufficient blah blah blah. Well, we’ll see.

Meanwhile, it’s gone midnight already and another week of work beckons to my hands.  We have heard the chimes of midnight, Justice Shallow. Jesus, the days that we have seen. Thank you for reading the quasi-religious ramblings of a tired old hairbag. I’m not about to become an atheist or anything, not just yet, because to be honest the universe is far too big and mysterious a place for there not to be something behind it, and there is so much that atheism would leave unexplained. But I do wish Big G would stop being so bloody opaque. Just tell me what you want me to do, and I will have a crack at doing it.  Just tell me.

Petition to create a new offence of "Animal Murder"

As my petition has now topped 10,000, signatures as of today, 10^th May 2016, I am, as promised, setting out, in this special one-off blog post, a much more detailed explanation of my reasons for starting the petition, and what I hope to achieve by it.

Perhaps the best place to begin is with the text of the petition itself, as it currently appears on the HM Government petitions web site.

Create a new offence of "animal murder" with a minimum of 5 years on conviction.

Our animal welfare legislation dates from times when deliberate killing of pets & other animals was a rarity, and is too often interpreted leniently by judges. This new offence, plus a lifetime ban on keeping animals, plus entry on a new animal offenders' register, would be a significant deterrent.

The number of high-profile cases of animals being deliberately killed, seemingly just for "fun", highlights the way the current legislation is simply not acting as a deterrent to the sort of people likely to carry out these acts. A new offence of "Animal Murder" with a minimum sentence of 5 years in prison on conviction, no remission or parole, backed up by placement on a new "animal offenders' register" and a lifetime ban on keeping animals, should redress the balance, once available to the CPS

One of the shortcomings of the government petitions web site is that it only allows you a very few words to explain what it is you are petitioning for, and what you are trying to achieve. Those two paragraphs above represent the maximum wordage you are allowed on the site when setting up a petition, and obviously they go nowhere near the amount of detail which is necessary to explain such a complicated concept as animal welfare.

My decision to start the petition is one that has been at the back of my mind for some months, if not years, as I have seen, and been critical of, instance after instance of lenient sentences being handed down by the judiciary and magistracy to people who have deliberately injured and killed animals “for a laugh”. The actual trigger that made me put pen to paper (or, more accurately, finger to keyboard) arose out of the incident of Missy the Bus-Stop cat, which was a cat that used to make a habit on sleeping at a specific bus-shelter in Leigh Park near Havant, where it had become a regular fixture and was greeted, and petted by many travellers and commuters. Sadly, at the beginning of February 2016, it was discovered in a badly-injured state and had to be put to sleep. The presumption was, at the time, that yobboes were responsible, although there is now also a theory that she may have been struck by a passing car.

I was angry when I read about it. Especially if it was the yobboes who did it. I make no apologies for calling them yobboes, in fact, I have called them much worse, but out of respect for the mixed nature of my readership, we’ll stick at yobboes.  I’m talking about the sort of people that – a while ago now – burned down the stables of Barnsley Riding for the Disabled; the people who set fire to Manchester Dogs’ Home; the dog-fighting rings; the people who think it’s funny to chuck hedgehogs out of tower block windows.  I wouldn’t be so presumptuous as to label my proposed law “Missy’s Law”, though others have done so, because sadly there are many thousands of “Missys”, and not just cats – dogs, horses, farm animals, small mammals and rodents, all of which suffer mindless and needless cruelty at the hands of idiots.

At the moment, under the Animal Welfare Act, the maximum sentence that can be handed down in cases of extreme cruelty and causing the death of an animal deliberately is a 26 week custodial sentence.  All too often, however, this is lessened to community service and/or a fine.  This is no deterrent.  Part of the problem is that the existing laws are rooted in outdated 19^th century attitudes to animal welfare, in an era when life generally was brutish and nasty and animal life didn’t really matter except insofar as it affected economic factors – the loss of a working dog or a horse, for instance.  In the last 150 years we have made great strides in legislature concerning human welfare, but animal welfare legislation is still stuck in the era of the steam train and the public hanging.

A cat, for instance, is regarded as merely a chattel, from the legal point of view of its ownership in law, and a dog is not much better. The only reason that you have to stop and find out who the owner is, if you run over a dog, is that you have potentially done them some economic harm, if it was a working animal.  This sort of outmoded approach to framing the law needs to be fast-forwarded.  So I started an official government petition (link here) to put a new offence on the statute book, of animal murder, which brings with it, on conviction, a minimum jail term of five years with no remission or parole, automatic entry on a new “animal offenders’ register” along the same lines as the existing sex offenders’ register, and a lifetime ban on keeping animals or partaking in any employment connected with animals.

Because people have been sharing it on Facebook and Twitter, inevitably people have asked me questions and raised points about it, and, rather than try and get round them all individually, especially given the limitations of Twitter for long conversations, I thought if the petition did reach 10,000 signatures, and I posted some of my reasoning here, it might help with the frequently asked questions and to provide some background. Plus, in future, I can just link to this blog when someone asks a question I know is already answered here.

Obviously, in an ideal world, I would like to correspond with, and thank, each and every one of the 10,000 people who has signed thus far, but the detail of who has signed a government petition is not available to the petitioner.  And please accept my thanks if you are reading this and you have already signed the petition.

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

Currently the Animal Welfare Act allows for 26 weeks as the maximum custodial sentence in cases of the severest, intentional cruelty, with malice aforethought. However, all too frequently we see cases of people who have inflicted wilful violent cruelty on animals either walking free from court, or with the most minimal punishments. Magistrates have told me that one of the reasons they don’t go for the severe end of the punishment scale, is that it will just be overturned on appeal, which is to my mind another symptom that the whole attitude towards animal welfare and deliberate animal abuse needs revising and strengthening. It leads me to question “why is the original tough sentence seen as unjust?” and the only answer I can come up with is that our existing laws have led us to accept the insidious assumption that animal life is somehow not worthy of protection. Ultimately, that is what has to change, but at least if the CPS have a tough new deterrent to use in the very worst cases of premeditated cruelty, leading to the death of an animal with malice aforethought, then this is a step down that road.

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

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

I would like to examine here a few of those vested interests and I will take this opportunity, while I am at it, to nail my colours to the mast regarding my own attitude to them.

FOX HUNTING

Fox hunting is already illegal at the moment, although the law is not enforced with anything like the rigour of the enforcement of the law on, say, secondary picketing.  Because of the laxity of the interpretation of the existing law, acts of cruelty towards foxes often go unpunished and are brushed off as “regrettable mistakes”.  Hunting has powerful backing, a lobby made up of rich landowners and has the tacit support of some members of the Royal Family. I have said before, and I believe this to be true, that if fox-hunting had been a working class sport, it would have been outlawed 150 years ago.  Anyway, I see no conflict between what I propose, and the existing anti-fox-hunting legislation. In fact, the presence of an additional offence which an errant terrierman or “careless” hunter could be charged with, should concentrate the minds of all concerned and help to ensure that hunting stays within the law.

ANIMAL EXPERIMENTS

I had imagined that various lobbies would seek exemptions from the legislation, including laboratories that routinely test products on animals.  Without wishing to rehearse the entire debate here about animal experiments, briefly, my own view is that they are largely useless, they only take place because the money and the funding insists on them, by ancient tradition, because nobody wants to rock the boat and ask why that should be so, and that they often cause great suffering and pain to animals, needlessly.  However, although the pain is needlessly caused, it is not recklessly caused, nor are the animals tortured over and above the normal torture they endure as a matter of course in their experimental use. This is a fine distinction which is probably lost on the animal, which still suffers anyway, but I expect the vested interests of the pharmaceutical industry to object that it threatens their cosy little merry-go-round of funding, research, nice, well-paid jobs and houses in the leafy suburbs of Oxford or Cambridge.  Again as with hunting, the very least that this legislation can do is to remind them to stick to the absolute letter of the law and ensure that any animal suffering is minimised. Meanwhile, I hope the separate, but linked fight to end all useless animal experiments will continue on another front.

ABATTOIRS

Clearly, millions of animals every day are killed simply to satisfy the human desire for meat in the diet, and this proposed legislation was never intended to deliberately target each and every instance of this. There are legally-binding rules for animal welfare in abattoirs and the meat processing industry, and indeed in animal husbandry generally, and people can already be punished for ignoring these. If my proposed new law again acts as a deterrent, and makes it less likely that meat industry workers, animal transporters, and the like will be cavalier and reckless about the welfare of the animals in their charge, so much the better. For the avoidance of any doubt, I have been a vegetarian for the last 38 years, and more or less vegan for the last seven or so, so you can take it as read that I am against all animal slaughter for meat, on health grounds, on the grounds of animal cruelty, and on the grounds that eating meat is environmentally unsustainable.

BADGER CULLING

I am on record as saying that the badger cull is a useless, costly, and ineffective way of dealing with the complex issues of bovine TB, a sop thrown to the farming industry by a government anxious to be seen to be doing something, even if that something is the wrong thing.  Following the foot and mouth debacle in 2001, the then Labour environment minister wrote into the revised animal health act the power to order contiguous culls and kill pets and farm animals in defined zones more or less at will in the name of preventing disease, thus neatly legalising (after the event) all the various illegal acts carried out by DEFRA and its  Scots and Welsh counterparts during the contiguous culls.  We now have a similar situation, where my proposed law would conflict with what is perceived as “the national interest”, defined in this case as being needlessly and expensively shooting badgers in selected areas. If my law makes the “lampers” think twice before opening fire, then so much the better. Given the long lead times necessary to bring legislation before parliament anyway, it is probable that the culls, and the government that instituted them, will have been discredited before any law such as my proposed one gets anywhere near the statute book.

In conclusion, I hope the above has clarified my position on several key points. Thank you for reading it, and if you have not already signed my petition, and feel able to do so, I would welcome your support. If you have already signed, please consider asking your friends to do so, as well.

Epiblog for the Feast of St Victor Maurus

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. Summer seems to have suddenly burst over us in the last few days, there are flowers on the magnolia tree, and all the herbs are thriving (for now!)  As I type this, the door to the conservatory stands wide open and the dog and cat are wandering in and out onto the decking, bemused at their sudden freedom to come and go as they please.

This is not such good news  for the squirrels and the birds, however, who have to take their chance and nip in for bird food when they can get it.  Still, they don’t seem to be exactly starving, so I guess they are doing alright.  This must be one of those times when it’s good to be a squirrel, high up in the gently swaying trees in the bright sunshine with just enough breeze to stop you from overheating, sighing past your perch every now and again.

For the moment, the badger seems to have become a permanent fixture, as she has now been for something like nine or ten nights in a row, lumbering across the decking to hoover up the stale bread and peanuts at more or less 10.30pm on the dot. Last night she was 5 minutes late, and I was growing quite concerned. Of course there will come a time when food which is both nearer to her sett and easier to access will become so plentiful that she will stop visiting us – that has been the pattern over the last three or four years – however, we hope we’ve got a couple of weeks yet of seeing her.

Matilda has simply transferred her daytime snoozing from indoors to outdoors, and she has found herself a little sunny spot round the corner near the back door to the garage where she sprawls out in the sun in a most ungainly, unladylike fashion, with her legs going out in all directions, looking just like a hastily-discarded set of furry bagpipes.

The longer days have also meant more outings for Misty Muttkins, including, rather startlingly for the dog, Debbie deciding to get up and do a five mile run at 6am on Tuesday morning, prior to a full day’s teaching at college. It startled me, so God alone knows what the poor mutt thought. She ate her breakfast though, and then went back to sleep.  Debbie’s father’s genes are undoubtedly resurrecting themselves from the great beyond.  Misty’s also been learning to ignore the new dog-whistle, which I ordered because I hoped it would improve her recall off lead.  Debbie thinks this is a waste of time, and in the course of a discussion I said that I wondered if they did one for wives as well, to which she replied that even if they did one for husbands she wouldn’t buy one because she didn’t care if I came back or not! So we left it at that.

As for me, I am still teetering along on one good wheel and one dodgy one, at the old crinkle-crankle, expecting every moment to develop a sudden list to port and crash to the floor, raising a huge cloud of dust. However, a phone call on Friday morning brought the welcome news that on Monday, I shall be the proud possessor of not one but two new wheels on my wagon, which I hope will put an end to the problem for months if not years to come. I don’t know what they do with the old wheels, probably take them to bits and use what pieces they can in other wheels, if they’ve got any sense.

The wheels are coming off the country as well, of course, but then we said that last week.  We’ve had more missed targets than a blind archery contest, and more u-turns than a driving instructors’ convention. The latest being that apparently now, all schools will, er, not actually be forced to become academies.  Jeremy Hunt has had to give in and say he will talk to the junior doctors after all, the police force in ten or twenty counties are considering whether to feel the collar of the relevant Tory candidate for election expenses fraud, and best of all, Boorish Johnson is no longer mayor of London. Actually, that is probably a relief for him, as well as us, because it must have been incredibly difficult for the last year keeping his expenses as an MP and his expenses as mayor of London separate. People have been quick to assert that the election of London’s first Muslim mayor is only one step away from an Islamic caliphate being proclaimed in Tooting, but Mr Khan seems to me to look more like a hedge fund manager than a jihadi. I do object to him being mayor, but only because I object to anybody being mayor.  Directly elected mayors are a waste of public money, an unnecessary extra layer of local government that achieves very little. Bring back the LCC.

Jeremy Corbyn, meanwhile, has had the sort of week when you could crap a golden egg and someone would complain it wasn’t silver. In his case, usually one of his own MPs, the ones who still can’t accept the result of a democratic leadership election, six months on. If they can’t deal with the fact that Corbyn is leader, maybe they should just shut up and go and join the Lib Dems in their phone box in Truro, where they would be welcomed, no doubt, with open arms. Labour actually made a reasonable fist of the local election results, apart from Scotland, where it seems, rather depressingly, that they still haven’t learned the lesson that ignoring the issue of independence is the political kiss of death. All that sitting on the fence achieves is painful splinters in the bum.

My main engagement with the political world this week, however, has been watching as the total of signatures on my petition continues to climb inexplicably towards the magic figure of 10,000 when the government is obliged to respond. In case you hadn’t been following developments (I am attempting to try and get the law strengthened against people who deliberately go out of their way to hurt and injure animals for “fun”) here is a link to the official petition page. https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/120545  As I sit here today, typing this, it needs 209 more signatures to get to 10,000. It automatically lapses on August 6^th, so I think there is very little chance of it going on to reach 100,000 and thus becoming eligible for consideration for a parliamentary debate, but even so, I am amazed at the way the movement behind it has grown.

When I started the petition, there were just 14 supporters. Then, one day, after we had tramped along the road awhile, there were 198. Then one day I looked behind me, and, amazingly, there were 6,000 following our banner. I felt like Byron, the day hee woke up and found himself famous. No doubt some have their own agenda, and I am the first to admit that what I have proposed is not perfect. Plus, I can imagine that the government response will be largely along the lines of “go away and stop bothering us, the existing legislation is sufficient”.  Without wishing to sound too like Trelawney at this point, if they do say that, here’s 10,000 of us that will want to know the reason why.

What I intend to do, I think, rather than pre-empt it here, is to see if I can gather the remaining 209 signatures and if I do, to post a one-off blog page in the middle of next week, purely on my reasons for starting the petition and how I would see it working in practice, then I can direct any questioners to that page, and I can also (this is the crucial bit) get my response to the government’s response in to the government before they respond to me, and thus, I hope, head off some of the flim-flam and guff they will be looking to utilise to blur the issue and blunt the threat. If I can second guess what they are going to say, and scotch it before they say it, maybe it might make for a better response.  You may think that, in a world where America seems hell-bent on electing Donald Trump as its last, apocalyptic president, all this is irrelevant. Sadly, you may be right, but one does what one can.

In fact, things like that, and the fleeting good weather and the general sweetness of summer and being warm, and being able to nod off in my wheelchair sitting at the conservatory door, and trying to unpick the general tapestry of birdsong back into individual threads of particular birds calling and answering each other, has all conspired to put me in a rather carpe diem mood. Seize the day.  So I may actually do the almost unheard of and cut this blog short, and go and do something (I know not what) in the remaining sunshine, until Muttkins and wifekins get back from Blackmoorfoot, at which point I will be required to confect a salamagundi for the latter and some Butcher’s Dog “rustic feast” mixed with muttnuts for the former. I might serve them up each other’s for a laugh.

Today has been the feast of (amongst others) St Victor Maurus.  Born in the third century AD, in what is now Mauretania, he is supposed to have been a Roman soldier, indeed, perhaps even a member of the Praetorian Guard.  Despite being a Christian since his teens, this belief does not seem to have hindered his military career under the Roman empire, until it finally caught up with him in his old age, and he was arrested during the rule of the Emperor Maximian.  Maximian had St Victor tortured, including having someone pouring boiling lead over him, before the saint was finally martyred, being decapitated in Milan around the year 303AD.

According to St Gregory of Tours, from whom much of the story originates, a church was then built over the site of St Victor’s grave, and many miracles were reported there. In 1576, St Charles Borromeo had the saint’s relics removed to the (then) modern church of the Olivetan monks in Milan, where they remain to this day. 

Obviously, we have no way of knowing at this great distance in time either what the miracles attributed to St Victor Maurus were, or whether they would have occurred anyway without the added factor of having taken place at the shrine of a saint. There is a whole case to be made for the effect of what you might call “collective positive belief” – if enough people think something will happen, and then it does, that also takes us on into a decision of what reality actually is anyway, in a universe where, unless you can measure its location, you have no way of knowing where anything is. Until I see the badger, don’t forget, it is like Schrodinger’s badger – it neither exists or does not exist. Simultaneously. So even if all that happens at a “miraculous” event is that enough people convince each other that they have all seen the same collective hallucination, that in itself is scientifically interesting. Or is it one of those events which I have written about before, when the “normal” rules of “reality” are paused or set aside for some reason.  It is easy, on a day when the afternoon sunshine seems timeless, to conceive of such a moment – although T S Eliot also had one in the middle of winter, at Little Gidding church – the “moment in the draughty church at smokefall”. There’s also the question of who chooses these moments. Or what. Are we chosen to see behind the veil momentarily, and if so, why.

Of course we could all be deluding ourselves, and each other. The only difference is the faith – or lack of it – behind your emotions. There will never be a satisfactory scientific proof, it’s like trying to measure the humidity in the atmosphere with a golf club.  It doesn’t stop me coming back to it again and again, of course, especially as I feel that my own sands of time are diminishing.  The thing is though, it seems to be the case that the more you look for it, the less likely you are to find it, whatever it is.

Still, it’s time to give up these fruitless musings and get on with the doing the thing in the sunshine. I’m working on a painting project at the moment, but it’s a surprise, so I can’t be more specific, but I might go and work on that for a while. It’s a shame to waste this precious time, because the next time you look, it’s usually gone.  So. It’s time to get a wriggle on. A mad wriggle, in fact. Fa la la la la…