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.