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.