Epiblog for the Feast of St John of the Goths

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. And a momentous one. I finally got some roses, four in all, the variety being an old English shrub type, Munstead Wood (named after one of Gertrude Jekyll’s gardens, I believe.)  All it needs now is someone to dig four holes and also a bit of deft trowel work with the old slobbydosh to convert the pile of bricks into a sundial column, and Robert is your avuncular relative! There is no sign of this happening in the near future, however, owing to the lack of willing helpers, paid or unpaid. So the roses are still in their pots, the bricks are still in the back garden, and the tubs of slobbydosh covered up under the ramp.

The weather has remained odd, and of course the Midsummer Solstice has been and gone, so I have started to feel that imperceptible slant down towards the dark again. When it’s been good, like the little girl in the rhyme, it’s been very very good, but when it’s been bad, it’s been horrid. Some of the showers have been almost of Biblical proportions, only missing the addition of frogs and locusts, but often accompanied by the odd rumble of thunder, enough to send Misty Muttkins barrelling into what used to be Colin’s front room to hide from the nasty noise in the sky, curling up in her little bolt-hole on the settee and trembling until it goes away.

Matilda’s antipathy to the showers is more practical in nature. She doesn’t give a stuff about the thunder, but she does mind getting wet, and a couple of times during the last week she’s managed to misjudge it badly and end up being caught outside when a cubic ton of rain fell out of the sky. Both times she scuttled back in looking like the proverbial drowned rat, and both times, as per the long-standing Rudd family tradition, I dried her off with kitchen roll.  The squirrels are of sterner stuff, and sit out there on the decking in the midst of the storm, happily munching away on peanuts and sunflower seeds out of the bird food, carelessly casting aside the empty husks and creating a right mess.

As the end of term got nearer, Deb has been able to carve out some time to go on more extended “walkies” again with Misty and Zak. She returned the other day brandishing a red flower and a feather in her hand. “What is that called?” she asked. “A feather,” I replied, “commonly found attached to a bird.” “No,” she said, “the flower.” It was Red Valerian, and we’ve decided we’re going to have some next time I order from Norfolk Herbs. Cats like it, so at least Matilda will be happy.

The solstice itself passed almost un-noticed.  Normally, I would have liked to have stopped and marked it in some way, but life is so full-on and relentless that it was just another blur of a day, like so many others. I felt sad, afterwards, especially when I realised it might well have been one of the last good days I ever had.  Because of course, the one event which has overshadowed everything else this week, even the long-anticipated end of term, which we have all been looking forward to, was the Referendum.

On Wednesday, the night before the fateful day,I was tempted to post a link on Facebook to Laurence Olivier doing the St Crispin’s Day speech from Henry V except that all the whirly-eyed UKIP supporters would probably dimly (I use the word advisedly) recognise it as Shakespeare and automatically think, because of that, I was backing Brexit.

But it was going to be a momentous day tomorrow, I thought, and, almost as important, it would finally mark the end of this dishonest, nasty, xenophobic, Muslim-hating, knuckle-dragging (did I already say dishonest) lying campaign by Brexit.  It would also mark the end of the lacklustre and occasionally deeply stupid Remain campaign. It would also mark a week since Jo Cox was murdered.  Anyway, the great day finally arrived, and, as is my custom, I decided to stay up and watch the results as they came in.

As the early hours of the morning wore on, it became clear that the battle was already lost. People had rebutted and repudiated the Brexit myths till the proverbial cows came home, but the people had still trundled out and voted to leave on Thursday because they thought that by doing so they were going to ethnically cleanse Britain and usher in a bright new dawn where there are suddenly homes, houses and schools for everyone, and they had clearly done so with their hands firmly clamped over their ears and only removed them when UKIP issued a new racist poster or Boris blew his dog whistle about “taking Back Control” and making Britain great again.

As I had written in this blog many times, I had assumed that the lies of Brexit would prevail, and my prediction of a 65% vote to commit economic Hari-Kari and vote leave, would come true. As it turned out, in certain economically-depressed hotspots like Barnsley and Rotherham, it was higher than my estimate, at around 70%. Sadly, indeed ironically, these are also the areas that will suffer the most from the loss of EU money and investment.  Overall, it was 52% leave, 48% to remain, hardly an emphatic result. In fact, in an interview before the poll, Farage had said that he thought that if it was a close result, say 52% to remain and 48% to leave, there was a case for a re-run. I don’t hear him calling for a re-run because it’s 48% to remain and 52% to leave, though.  But, a result it was, and now we’re stuck with it.

On Friday morning, when I got up, I discovered the true extent of the damage. I was living in a country that had just decided to do the economic equivalent of shooting your parents so you can go to the orphans’ picnic. I was living in a country that was  apparently 52% racist. I got taken to task for posting this on Facebook, but then I guess that’s to be expected. The truth always hurts.

It felt like a cross between the morning after someone has died, and the morning after one of those parties where you get horrendously drunk and your friends phone you up next day and gleefully recount all the stupid things you did, and you say “I did what? No Way!”

In any decision involving the UK’s future, the economy has to be paramount. Brexit, however, had preferred to witter on about immigration. Anyone who had bothered to look into it already knew that immigration, in economic terms, has a positive effect on the economy. In terms of the Brexit argument it was a distraction, being used to whip up xenophobia in the face of economic sense. Immigrants come, they get jobs, they pay taxes.  Those jobs in turn create more jobs, and the economy grows, and with it the tax take, which is the quickest and best way out of the wasteland left by the careless bankers and their world economic crash in 2008.  It’s not migrant workers who are responsible for shortages of housing, schools and hospitals, it’s successive governments who would rather spend the money there is on bombing the Middle East and tax cuts for their cronies. It’s not the case that there is only a fixed number of jobs and once those are gone, they’re gone. That’s another Brexit myth by the way, ask any economist. In a growing economy, jobs create more jobs.

The fact is that there was not a single compelling economic argument for voting to leave that hadn’t already been comprehensively rubbished and debunked. In effect, though, overnight, we had kissed goodbye to something like £220bn of export trade with the EU single market, all of which will now have to be re-negotiated, all no doubt on much less favourable terms, but terms which will still require us to pay into the EU and still require us to accept the principle of free movement of people, except now we won’t have a say in any decision making process that affects us.  And we only have two years from the point an application is made under Article 50 to sort something out to allow it to continue, otherwise a howling great black hole will start to open up in the country’s balance sheet. Fantastic.

I suppose there must have been some Brexit voters who were gullible enough to fall for all that horse-shit about us spending £350million a week on the EU, when in fact, our membership, when all the rebates and payments back to us, and the access  to the social fund, the economic development fund, and various disaster funds such as the flood relief fund, was probably a net benefit if all that was taken into the equation.  When the EU money disappears and fails to be replaced by central government funding of our own, and when the new prime minister fails to honour the pledge to put £350m a week extra into the NHS, then perhaps the people who voted to leave out of sheer economic illiteracy might re-think, but it’s too late. As I said above, it’s the people who live in the most economically-deprived areas, the former areas of heavy industry, laid waste by Thatcher, who will feel this the most. As a protest vote, it made no logical sense It was like being angry that you live in a shitty little house with crap wiring and bad plumbing, and deciding that the only answer was to set fire to it.

Sovereignty was another illusion.  The idea that somehow, Germany and France told us what to do, and we were being forced to buy straight bananas by unelected bureaucrats in Brussels. This was all bollocks of course, but it was very pervasive bollocks. EU laws, some of which we adopt, via our own parliament, are voted on by the EU Parliament, which is that one which Farage is supposed to be a member of, although I think he’s a member of it ironically, because most of the time he doesn’t turn up, although – even more ironically - he does still claim his expenses.

Anyway, some people must have voted “leave” in the mistaken belief that somehow the Queen would  regain “sovereignty”on Friday morning (sovereignty has been exercised with our consent since January 1649 when we chopped Charles I’s head off.) Voting to leave last Thursday is not going to suddenly empower the Queen to start saying “Orf with their heads” and sending people to the Tower. If only!

I must say, I'm loving all this gorgeous sovereignty, though. I'm sitting here bathed in it. I felt it the moment I woke up this morning, like a warm fluffy blanket. Mmmm, sovereignty. Gorgeous. I might try and polish the clock with a handful of sovereignty later. Or maybe try and pay some sovereignty into my bank account. Or dig some into the garden, to make the flowers grow. Sovereignty. Yes, that was definitely what we were missing...

If you wanted the next generation of kids to grow up with the best prospect of getting a job, buying a house, getting on in life, and generally living in a stable and prosperous society, the only sane choice on Thursday was to put away your bunting, stop blindly waving that Union Jack, tell the Daily Mail where to stuff its straight bananas, and vote to stay in and try and make the best of it.  Like me, you may not have done so with a spring in your step and a song in your heart, but if we didn’t, then the lights were going out all over Europe, and we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime, in the words of Sir Edward Grey. 

In effect, some people, particularly those in the hard-pressed areas I mentioned, treated the Referendum like a protest vote, a vote against politicians who they saw as distant and uncaring.  There is some mileage in that feeling, because Labour, in particular, have been guilty, since the days of Tony Blair, of neglecting their core white working class roots and chasing middle class voters in marginal constituencies. They took the working class for granted, and the working class, who have seen their services and local infrastructure ravaged by Cameron and Osborne in the guise of “austerity”, finally snapped and lashed out at the nearest target, egged on by the likes of Farage and Johnson with their specious claims to be able to make things better for them.

So, if you voted “leave” for any of the above reasons, then I am afraid, my friend, you have been misinformed. As I said in last week’s blog, though, this was a vote from the heart, not the head, and the main issue affected by that “heart not head” mentality was immigration. So the issue of racism does come into it, I’m afraid.  Not everyone who voted to leave was racist. As I said above, some were misguided, some ill-informed, and all had been consistently lied to by Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage.  I do recognise that there is a spectrum of racism amongst the people who voted to leave. Sure, not everybody is off the scale to the extent of those who filled Twitter with a stream of revisionist hate and talked about Jo Cox having been stopped from filling her constituency with more “sub-humans”.

I’ve been surprised, in discussing this, over the number of people I know and otherwise respect,  who were going to vote leave because of “immigration”. People who I wouldn’t have expected to. Some are Facebook friends, some are real friends, and some are even family members. This has been the worst part of the last four months. This stupid referendum, which I never asked for and which was totally unnecessary, has caused so much hurt and division.

I’ve seen postings on Facebook where people have been saying they’re going to go through their friends list and “unfriend” anyone who voted the opposite way to them. I won’t be doing that, but feel free to unfriend me if you think I have been too harsh in labelling the Brexit campaign racist and intolerant. If you voted for it, you were allying yourself with Dominic Peacock, whose reaction to Jo Cox’s murder was that he would “donate the steam off his piss”; allying yourself with the people who organised the light plane towing a “Vote Leave” banner that buzzed the Jo Cox memorial service on Wednesday; allying yourself with the people who took to Twitter to express their approval of Jo Cox’s murder because of her views on refugees.  You’re lining up with the people who say, “I’m not racist, but…”

I’m not suggesting you support these people 100%. But you are, nevertheless, giving them support. Personally I am unhappy with them having the oxygen of publicity. I’m not that happy about them having oxygen, to be honest.  And if I’ve called someone racist who thinks that slur is undeserved, and that they had a really good, solid, copper-bottomed reason to vote leave which wasn’t ultimately rooted in the lies and racist drivel of people like Farage and Johnson, and hasn’t already been debunked several times in the run up to the vote, I’d love to hear it.

Meanwhile, you’re in the same camp in broad terms, with the bloke from Barnsley who was interviewed by Channel 4 on the day after the poll, when Barnsley had voted 68% to leave:

It’s all about immigration. It’s not about trade or  Europe or anything like that, it’s all about immigration.  It’s to stop the Muslims coming into this country. Simple as that. To stop immigration. Right. The movement of people in Europe is fair enough, but not from Africa, Syria, Iraq and everywhere else, it’s all wrong.

Or the 82-year-old fishmonger from Romford, also on Channel 4 news:

I’m not racist because racist means being against the black people. I ain’t got nothing against black people. But if them Turks come over ‘ere, they’ll bleed us dry.

There are some absolutely great people in Barnsley, who would give you the shirt off their backs. But there are also some narrow-minded shitheads who have a family tree that they still live in. I remember being roundly abused to told to “#### off back down south” in 1989, when I was living in Carlton, and a neighbour had locked his wife out of the house on a freezing cold night during the course of a “domestic”.  Purely because we opened our back door and asked her if she was alright.  Barnsley is a town where the pubs are separated from each other by other pubs, and people make withdrawals from the bottle bank. A few years ago there was a proposal to re-model Barnsley and turn it into a faux Tuscan Hill Town, by building a large wall round it, and I have to say, I think that building a large wall round Barnsley would be a very good idea, for all sorts of reasons. I'm from Hull, by the way, so "#### off back East" would have at least been more geographically correct.

I can tell you now, though, that, if Boris Johnson is successful in his quest to pull up the drawbridge and fill in the tunnel, then instead of EU immigrants,  it’ll be you and yours who are working all hours on seasonal fixed term zero hours contracts instead, at the same shitty wages they used to pay the migrant workers, except that for them (because they came from a village in Romania with feral goats wandering in the streets) it was a fortune, whereas for you, it’s breadline and a trip to the food bank.

It won’t make any difference, though, because the people who voted to leave had swallowed Johnson and Farage’s vision of plucky little Blighty, keeping calm and carrying on. Put out more flags, and keep the aspidistra flying! Back to a Britain of comical cockney chimney sweeps who all sound like Dick Van Dyke and waifs and strays dying of rickets in the gutter.  Back to a Britain of good old Barnes Wallace inventing the bouncing bomb in his garden pond. We’ll show those bally Jerries!  Never mind, we will still lead the world in, er, something, and I’m sure the gas board will understand if you tell them you’ll pay the bill when we manage to strike a trade deal with Tierra Del Fuego.  You’re probably thinking I’m exaggerating here, but sadly, there are people who do really think like this, and some of them are members of my family.  That’s what UKIP has done. Thanks UKIP.

Where do we go from here, though? Is it down to the lake, I fear? [See what I did, there?]  I had no particular brief for, or love of Europe as a concept. By “Europe” here I mean the European political project. I am all in favour of the single market, and I don’t have a particular issue with the free movement of people. I think the Euro was a really stupid idea, and still is, and I am glad that Gordon Brown kept us out of it.  In fact, I suppose you could sum up my position by saying that I think , up till Thursday, our semi-detached status from Europe, retaining our own money supply and with our various rebates and opt-outs, represents probably the best membership deal we could have, or rather it was a pretty good platform from which to press for further reform to benefit the UK.

I’ve been absolutely staggered by the bare-faced outright lies told by the Brexit campaign. “We spend £350million a week on EU membership.” We don’t. The true figure is something like £161m when all the rebates are taken into account, and even that then gives us access to inward investment from people wanting to access the single market, and access to various EU funds such as the social fund, the economic development fund, and disaster funds such as the flood relief fund.  “Turkey is on the verge of joining the EU.” No it isn’t, not by a long chalk. “People will be able to travel from the Syrian border all the way to Calais.” No they won’t, various states have already closed their borders and set up detention camps in response to the current refugee crisis. “If we weren’t in the EU, we’d be able to spend £350m a week on the NHS instead.” Yeah, right, I can see that happening, with the Tories out to dismantle and privatise it. But in any case, we have control of our own money supply. If we wanted to, we could spend £350m a week extra on the NHS right now. I don’t notice any Tory voices raised in a clamour for increased NHS funding though.  It was all lies, I’m afraid.

But for now, we have kissed goodbye to about £220bn of exports a year to the Single Market, and we need to find something to plug that hole, and quick.  “We’d easily be able to strike trade deals with the rest of the world and we could still trade with the single market even if we weren’t in the EU,” said Brexit. They made it sound like an afternoon’s work. From the point where an application to leave is made under Article 50, the process takes two years. That is two years of economic uncertainty, stagnation and lack of confidence, lack of investment, and pressure on the pound.  Germany and France, in particular, will be in absolutely no hurry to strike any sort of deal with the UK, post-Brexit. It is in their interests not to, after all. If the UK is allowed to waltz away, and then everything carries on much as before, with no apparent dire consequences, this will send what they consider to be the wrong message, and feed the incipient groundswell of the right wing in both those countries towards their own “Frexit" and "Gerexit” movements.  And that is the last thing the EU wants. It wants to be able to point to Britain as an economic basket case and say “look, this suffering is what happens when you turn your back on the EU!” It’s already started, the French and German official snottiness, with Britain being excluded from the summit discussing Brexit in Brussels next week. There is much, much, more snottiness to come, believe me.

So, like Norway, we’ll probably get stuck with still having to pay into the EU and still having to accept the principle of free movement of people, only we’ll have lost our previous seat at the negotiating table where we could have had some influence on these decisions.  As for trade deals with the rest of the world, they, too, will be in no hurry to sign anything. By voting to leave  the EU, Britain has telegraphed to the rest of the world that it is now in a situation of desperately needing to sign up trade deals elsewhere, and the longer it is left by the countries with whom we want to trade, the more they can delay, the better the terms they will get from us, as desperation sets in further. 

The short term turmoil on the international money and stock markets will settle down eventually. Dramatic as the plunge in the pound sterling was, as the news of the Brexit vote came through, its wild yo-yo-ing was largely the result of international currency speculators cashing in. What we really need to worry about is the gradual depreciation over time, as existing trade seeps away, and is not replaced by inward investment.  If the pound falls consistently, imports will become more expensive, and food and other prices will rise. The cost of living will rise. A weak pound is good for exports, but it’s sod all use if there are no export agreements in place. 

As the economy starts to erode, hastened by the loss of EU money and investment, unemployment will rise, and the tax take will fall, giving the government even less leeway to replace lost EU money from our own resources. As it is, they have only pledged to keep certain EU inspired payments going from our own resources until 2020, and what’s the betting that, as the crunch starts to bite, that promise will be downgraded to an aspiration. It’ll start slowly, here and there. A few redundancies, a company closing down, then the other companies that were part of their supply chain start to feel the pinch, and they start to shed jobs and retrench, and so it goes. Less disposable income in the economy means people will cut back on items seen as luxuries, including books. Putting my own business at risk. I’ve managed to weather out two or three recessions in the 25 years I have been doing this, but I have a feeling that the next one will make the Thatcher and the Major years look like a walk in the park. There are some big decisions to be made. We’ve already been discussing exit plans, involving possibly re-locating to somewhere leass expensive and more peaceful, cashing in our chips and downsizing, getting out before it all comes crashing down around our ears.

There may yet be a few rolls of the dice, though, before it comes to that.  I have no sympathy for Cameron, who brought this entirely upon himself, as I said.  But he may in the end have been smarter than he looks. He is stepping down in October, but he has not invoked the procedure under Article 50 for an application to leave. He is going to hand that particular bag of snakes to his successor, whoever that is. By this mechanism he has in effect bought the UK an extra three months for some sort of face-saving deal to be accomplished, or at least the start of one. The new leader, (who will be elected by Tory MPs, not by the likes of you and me, how’s that for undemocratic) may well feel that they also aren’t in too much of a hurry to invoke Article 50 either, since once that application goes in, the clock is ticking on the two year countdown.

Nobody knows really whether this is a good thing or a bad thing. If by some miracle a deal is struck that allows us to continue trading with the single market without us being totally shafted and ending up still having to pay into the EU and still having to accept free movement of people, but having totally lost any ability to influence any decisions, then it will prove to be one of his few wise moves.

He has also, by refusing to invoke Article 50, rather neatly shafted Boorish Johnson and Michael Gove. By putting the onus for initiating the actual legal process of leaving the EU on to his successor, he has, in effect, handed that successor, whoever he or she may be, the political equivalent of a Turdburger with a large order of flies.  That was why, at the Leave celebratory press conference, Johnson and Gove looked like somebody whose rabbit had died and they couldn’t sell the hutch on Ebay.

I never wanted this stupid referendum, though.  David Cameron should have stood up to the hectoring bullying of UKIP and told them to sod off. If they wanted Britain out of Europe, get enough MPs to form a government (currently they have 1) and then have a go chum. But until then, suck it up.  But he didn’t. He decided to have his John Major put-up-or-shut-up moment, with the following, mostly predictable, results:

UKIP’s stance has been “legitimised” by the fact that someone appears to be taking them seriously. [God alone knows why, they only have three policies, leave Europe, send the brown people “home” and bring back smoking in pubs. Mind you, that is obviously enough for some people.] Boris Johnson, who wants Cameron’s job, has been given a tremendous career boost by being allowed to become the figurehead of the Brexit campaign [Who chose him to lead it, anyway?] and used it to further his personal ambitions. A vicious, nasty, bitter campaign, dividing communities and even families has been waged, and these divisions will not go away for a long time; they will rankle for months or years in some cases. Instability and uncertainty over the outcome have flatlined growth at home and we have suffered in the foreign exchange markets as well as people remove their money from our economy by the van-load. Oh, and a politician has been brutally murdered for just going about her business.

So, well done, Mr Cameron. A staggering concatenation of tactical errors, from calling it in the first place, to then heading up a remain campaign that focused on the negatives of leaving without sufficient leavening of the positives of staying.  In your defence, Mr Cameron, which is a phrase you won’t hear very often from me, so make the most of it, you were caught on the hop by the eagerness of the Brexit camp to make up any old lies and rubbish they could think of, and thus your campaign has been, at every step of the way, one of rebuttal rather than being one jump ahead.  It may also have been a tactical error to allow your erstwhile colleagues such free rein to campaign against you, though once the die was cast, I suppose you didn’t have much option, and watching the Tory party tearing chunks out of each other and fighting like rats in a sack has been one of the few satisfyingly entertaining parts of the whole process, except that now, sadly, it looks like the wrong set of rats has won.  Apologies to any rats that might be reading this, for the comparison I just made, by the way.

Friday seemed, from a political point of view, to be a bit, er, well, just…odd. We had Cameron’s resignation speech, then Donald Trump landing by helicopter in Scotland to be greeted by protests, Mexican flags and a Mariachi band, then giving a speech where he mentioned the Turnberry lighthouse and seemed to think, briefly, that he was in Florida – an easy mistake to make in Ayrshire. Boorish Johnson’s press conference seemed strangely muffled. Just more of the same tosh, really leavened with ill-concealed regret. Farage, however, made up for all the rest. It was a victory, he said, “without a shot being fired”. Except of course for those three shots last week that cut down Jo Cox in the street in Birstall, but then he’s already disclaimed any responsibility for the part his racist poster had in inflaming the mind of the alleged. He also suggested that from now on, 23^rd June should be declared a bank holiday.  

He has a thing about shots being fired – back in 2014, for reasons best known unto him, he called for the relaxation of the handgun ban, which had been enacted in the wake of the Dunblane massacre. But the most significant thing he said, so far, was that he thought the pledge by the official leave campaign to spend an extra £350m a week on the NHS had been a “mistake” and he distanced himself from it.  And so it begins.  Another of the “leave” cabal, whose name escapes me because he’s such a memorable chap, has said he “doubts if there will be much real difference in immigration”, while Nigel Evans MP has declared 23 June to be our “Berlin Wall” moment, although I’m not clear whether he meant building it, or pulling it down. 

The Brexit debacle has had other unforeseen consequences as well.  Labour, or rather those bits of the PLP who still haven’t come to terms with the fact that their version of Blairism is now about as popular as a pickle on a babke, responded with a leadership challenge, just the ticket when there is a greater need than ever to unite against the evil Tories. Not for nothing is Margaret Hodge, the author of this misguided intervention, the member for Barking.

Scotland has also been plunged into turmoil and ferment, because as a country it voted en bloc to remain, and, as with many other matters, it does not feel bound to accept the majority decision of the UK.  This means that we’re now shaping up for a re-run of the Scottish Referendum, which I have to say fills me with the deepest joy at the prospect of months stretching ahead of the same dreary arguments about currency union and defence, and all the other things that bedevilled Alex Salmond’s wafer-thin attempt at confecting a vision of Scottish “independence” in 2014. This time around, Scotland is going to have to apply to join the EU and the Euro, with all the delay and uncertainty that this implies. Otherwise they will be stuck with using someone else’s currency without control of the money supply, which is very bad news and definitely the worst of two weevils. This show will run, and run…

I’m feeling very tired and defeated today. I feel the country I knew, the one I grew up in, slipping away and being replaced by something much, much, worse. But I will just say this. Excepting my immediate family and very close friends, who I will of course try and help whatever happens, don’t come crying to me if you voted to leave and in six months or a year’s time there’s a howling recession which threatens your business, your job, your partner’s job, or both; don’t blame me if you still can’t get an appointment with the GP; don’t blame me if your kids’ school is still overcrowded and over-subscribed; don’t blame me if there’s absolutely no change in immigration – as I have tried to explain many times, this would be a good thing; don’t blame if  the library shuts; don’t blame me for the cancelled trains and the potholes in the street; don’t blame me if there’s a run on the pound and your investments and pensions are now worth a brass farthing; don’t blame me if you suddenly find you’re suddenly now working for the same crappy low rate that Pavel from Poland used to get for packing strawberries. The festering sore of Euroskepticism which has been eating away at what passes for the heart of the Tories for twenty years has finally burst, and we are all now showered with the pus.

I’m so angry with Brexit’s stupidity right now that I almost don’t care what happens to their supporters afterwards, when they are struggling with the consequences of their misplaced faith in people such as Nigel Farage. They will have brought it upon themselves. As Shakespeare says, “the injuries that men themselves procure, must be their schoolmasters.” Nigel Farage called the result a victory for ordinary, decent people. Christ help us all if the leave vote represents the ordinary decent people  Well this is supposed to be a religious blog.

Yes, God help the rest of us. I want my country back as well, and it’s not a country that belongs exclusively to UKIP and its fifty shades of racism.  The Brexit campaign talked about putting the “Great” back into Great Britain. The things that made this country truly great – compassion, sympathy, respect, sharing, caring, reason, philanthropy, discourse – are those which have been most damaged by this whole sorry episode.

Don’t come crying to me. I voted to stay and try and make the best of it.  You brought it on yourself.  Don’t come crying to me, I’ll be too busy trying to survive to listen to your remorseful witterings . Thinking about our future, and the future of the business, on Friday, I was reminded of Kipling’s lines, from If,

If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken

Twisted by knaves, to make a trap for fools

And see the things you gave your life to broken

And stoop, and build ‘em up with worn-out tools…

He wrote some exceedingly good poems, as well as baking exceedingly good cakes, and I found another one of his, that could actually have been written with Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage in mind:

I could not dig; I dared not rob:
Therefore I lied to please the mob.
Now all my lies are proved untrue
And I must face the men I slew.
What tale shall serve me here among
Mine angry and defrauded young?

If and when he becomes prime minister, Johnson will have to deal with the consequences not only of the angry and defrauded young, but the angry and defrauded old, when they realise they’ve been sold a pup and nothing has changed, except we’re all a lot poorer. Well, most of us. Johnson’s already stashed his loot. Still, at least Nigel Farage has finally managed to legislate his party of crackpots and obsessives out of existence, and make himself irrelevant. Well, even more irrelevant.  

I keep seeing posts in my news feed trying to paint the people who voted to remain in the EU as "bad losers", who are in favour of democracy except when it comes up with the "wrong" result. There is a whole argument to be had about whether the mechanism of a referendum has any part in a parliamentary democracy, and a whole nother one on whether Cameron was right to settle for a straight majority instead of insisting on a "significant" percentage, but he didn't and that's that. That ship has sailed. We've had the referendum, and we're stuck with the result, for worse or worse.

I think the people who are posting these things have missed the point. Most of the posts I have read from people who voted to remain are, in one way or another, simply expressing dismay, shock, horror, and what I can only characterise as "bereavement" to a greater or lesser degree.  That degree is compounded when we see people who voted to leave going on social media and admitting that they didn't have the first scooby what they were voting for, or why. If they'd have known, they'd have voted remain. FFS! If you are going to screw up the entire economy for two generations, at least have the decency to Google about it first, you numpty. 

As to the people who made more "informed" choices to vote leave, I suspect their finger-pointing at the postings of people who feel truly bereaved by the result is (maybe subconsciously) an attempt to respond to feeling conned or being called out for supporting the racist lunatic fringes who voted leave "to keep the Muslims out of Britain" by voting alongside them. Or they now realise that they voted for a lie, and what's more, a lie that had actually been comprehensively debunked weeks ago, if they cared to look it up.

Sadly, I hear news of Polish people in Huntingdon and Peterborough having had cards pushed through their door written in Polish, calling them "Polish vermin" and telling them to go home. And in Liverpool, a gang of Polish builders were surrounded by jeering yobboes chanting at them to leave the UK. I fear this is only the start, now the pond life of Britain First and their ilk have had their warped view of the world validated, as they see it.

The thing is that democracy actually works best when you have an informed electorate and when politicians actually stick to the promises they made. Some of the promises made by the vote leave campaign are already vanishing into thin air. When politicians are as cynical and deceitful as this, it damages everybody's respect for democracy - in fact, it damages democracy itself. It happened after the 2010 election,  when the Tories lied about not dismantling the NHS, and it happened after the 2015 election, and it is happening again now. Don't be surprised if people are pissed off. This time, they haven't even let a decent interval pass before telling people "Ha ha, we had our fingers crossed behind our back the while time."

Boorish Johnson and Michael Gove realise that they are now stuck with carrying through the thing they conned 52% of the 72% who voted into voting for, and Cameron has handed them the political equivalent of a bucket of nuclear waste. .

As Churchill once said (I am paraphrasing here, feel free to look up the actual quotation) democracy is a terrible system, but all the others are even worse. I think there's a lot of truth in that. So no, I *don't* want to keep re-running the referendum until we get the "right" result, that's what they do in Russia and China. You've made your bed, and we've all got to lie in it. But don't expect me to be happy about the lies and stupidity of the vote leave campaign and its supporters. I wouldn't even have had the *first* referendum, but we are stuck with it because Cameron thought he was bloody John Wayne for one afternoon, and to be honest I view the prospect of a potential second referendum with the same warm glow of anticipation as I would view bowel surgery in the woods with a dirty stick and no anaesthetic, or 18th century dentistry.

No, make Boorish Johnson prime minister and Gove Foreign Secretary, and pack them off to Brussels for a 2 year round of Brexit negotiations which will be right up there in terms of enjoyment with an IRA punishment beating.  At least it will stop them causing any more mayhem here at home. And while they are there, let them reflect on Hosea Chapter 8 verse 7:

For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind: it hath no stalk: the bud shall yield no meal: if so be it yield, the strangers shall swallow it up.

Speaking of more spiritual matters, today is the feast day of St john of the Goths. Despite his rather wacky title, he didn’t have dozens of piercing, a sallow complexion, dark clothes, and Doc Martens.  He was a bishop, in southern Russia, Bishop of the Goths, in fact. He defended the use of sacred images at the time in which the neighbouring Byzantines were embroiled in the Iconoclast Controversy. When the Khazars invaded the region, John was driven into permanent exile. He died in 800AD.

I’ve become quite interested in Icons/Eikons (I prefer the Greek spelling) in recent days, since I was gifted some old reclaimed wood, in the form of offcuts of tongue and groove pine floorboards. Rather than chop them up and use them as kindling, I decided to have a crack at painting Eikons on them, in what is laughingly described as my spare time. I have to say it has brought me a lot of comfort. I am hoping that one of the ones I finished last week, of a Madonna and Child behind barbed wire in a refugee camp, may be auctioned in favour of a refugee charity.

I’ve also been thinking a lot about time, and the uses to which I put that time. On a number of levels. It’s not possible to stop and give up a business overnight, and certainly not one that you have put 27 years and counting of your life into. But I do need to carve some time out of somewhere to plot a way out of the coming morass, and it’s not as if we were making money hand over fist to start with, on the long, slow, painful road back from my illness in 2010.

Plus, although I don’t like to think about it overmuch, there’s also the more general issue of how much time I have left, and what I want to spend that time doing. Nothing much is going to change overnight, and obviously I have projects that I am committed to completing, which I will do to the best of my ability.  But after that, who knows. My time could be better spent raising money for animal charities and refugees. When the business began, one of the prime movers for it in my mind was philanthropy. I wanted to be someone like Wainwright, who could make a stack of money out of selling guidebooks and then use it to start an animal sanctuary somewhere. Sadly, it never quite worked out that way, and often I’ve been a recipient of charity rather than a donor to it.

I originally started this blog, in one of its previous incarnations, as an attempt to come to terms with my own maundering ramblings and witterings about my struggles to believe in a God who seemed to be largely absent, especially when needed to prevent something going horribly wrong with disastrous consequences. I have been writing this blog for over a decade, about twelve years in all, and I am still no nearer.  In fact, in my struggle to reconcile church and state, I am even further, even more convinced of the need for a spiritual revolution in the body politic.  And I am still no nearer being able to forgive people, in fact, the more I see of the people who would hurt me and mine, and take the food out of the mouths of my dog and cat, the more determined I am to see them suffer, which isn’t really a very Christian attitude.

So, I think I am going to call a halt for a while, and re-assess. If we are going to get any sort of a holiday this year, there is a hell of a lot to do anyway, before we go away, not least arrange the house sitting rota so that Matilda does not starve.  But the three hours or so I spend writing this on a Sunday afternoon can, at the moment, be put to a myriad of better uses.  We’re in a new, unkind, nastier, pettier country, and I need to take some practical business steps to safeguard the future. If I need to try to reconcile my religious doubts, I’ll do it by painting an Eikon, and if I feel up to it, I’ll use the time to sort out some stuff to go to the charity shop as well, for the refugees or the poor lost dogs and cats in the pounds.

Right now, I have a gooseberry pie cooling off in the oven, and some rain-battered herbs to stake up outside. Life goes on. Sort of.  It’s life, Jim, but not as we know it. So here's two cheers for England to see you through: not quite dead, but certainly hanging by a thread.

Epiblog for Midsummer

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. The premature end of summer, which has morphed seamlessly into autumn before we’ve even reached Midsummer’s Day this year, has put an end to gardening and outdoor tasks for now, and the sundial remains unbuilt. Some of the herbs seem to love the rain, however, and the Comfrey in particular has gone from unremarkable seedling to giant Triffid in just a few days. The rose garden is also on the back burner, as Jersey Plants Direct decided that they would beg my pardon, they never promised me a rose garden. Well, they did, actually, but I got a refund instead, which is not nearly as romantic. No barge pole is long enough for some people.

Matilda has taken badly to the deterioration in the weather, pacing about, yowling, and lashing her tail in frustration when it’s absolutely peeing it down, or sitting by the conservatory door and glowering at the squirrels, who seem undeterred by the rain in general, robbing peanuts and bird food out of the dish.

Misty has also been undeterred by the rain in general, although Debbie’s thoughts on having to go “walkies” during what is rapidly becoming the Monsoon season are generally less blasé.  Several days occurred when they both came back drenched, both dried off, both demolished their food, and both fell asleep by the stove. It really is redolent of October, especially in the colder evenings, with the coal banked up.

In the wider world, it has been a week bookended by tragedies, but in between, the filling in the sandwich if you like, it was bizarre beyond the limits of weirdness.  The referendum is now an Alice-in-Wonderland world, completely devoid of reality. George Osborne announced that, in the event of a “Brexit” he would have to levy an emergency budget featuring everything bar a guest appearance by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Why do the remain campaign do this? All it does is make it easy for more sober, more considered, more correct, but equally alarming economic forecasts to be similarly dismissed.  Especially when, if there is a Brexit vote, Osborne will no longer be the chancellor anyway, and in any case, he has missed every target he ever set, so why should anyone believe him now. 

Economically, a Brexit would be a car crash. Worse, it would be a motorway pile up, but Osborne, by crying wolf, has once more made the work of his opponents easier for them.  Because they knew it would never happen, several senior Tories on the Brexit wing of the party immediately issued statements condemning Osborne’s further cuts and proposed additional austerity. Truly, irony has eaten itself.

Sadly, the levity of the week, if you can call it that, was also leavened with some nastiness. The pantomime which is the Euro 2016 football tournament has continued to rumble on.  Off the field, small groups of “fans” from England and Russia have continued their running feud, despite the dire warnings fro the organisers that disqualification is hanging over both teas like the proverbial Sword of Damocles.  Video has also emerged on social media of England “fans” mocking refugee children who were begging in the street, making them catch coins thrown down on the cobbles, and in one case, drink a bottle of beer. On the field, Roy Hodgson finally abandoned his policy of determinedly playing only the second XI, brought on Vardy and Rashford, and, as a result, England accidentally won against Wales.  

In response to the condemnation of the initial rioting, some England fan forums have been quick to point out that it is not all England fans who are acting in this disgraceful way, only a lunatic fringe, who are in no way representative of the England fan base as a whole. To which the obvious riposte is, this is also true of Muslims. Now you understand the difference between a terrorist and a Muslim.

The distinction is lost on people like Nigel Farage, however, who continued to campaign for Brexit in a way which was totally free of all logic and reason. But then, logic and reason have no place these days in the Brexit debate.  On Wednesday, he decided to major on the way the EU affects the British fishing industry, by the simple expedient of renting a river cruiser and leading a flotilla of fishing craft up the Thames in the general direction of parliament.

Despite his apparent espousal of the cause of British fishermen, however, Nigel Farage has only attended something like two of the 42 meetings of the EU Fisheries Committee held since he became an MEP. We know this because it was shouted by no less a personage than Sir Bob Geldof, who appeared in the midst of the Brexit Fleet in a similar, separate, rented river cruiser, complete with loud hailers and stereo speakers blasting “I’m In With The In Crowd”.

It was through the medium of the said megaphone that we learned of Farage’s poor attendance record, possibly the only part of the whole proceedings that fleetingly touched fingertips with what we would normally recognise as reality. Farage, instead of commandeering a megaphone of his own and starting a slanging match (something I would have put money on him doing, actually) retreated under the canopy of his boat, where there were Union Jack deckchairs all set out ready for use, and lit a cigarette.  When questioned about this by a journalist, he said he thought the doctors had got it wrong about smoking. It is not entirely clear if he was joking, or whether he believes, along with Gove, that we have all had enough of experts. For a few bizarre minutes, the entire EU referendum campaign was dominated by two millionaires in rented boats circling each other tentatively on the muddy Thames, one haranguing the other through a megaphone.

Because neither of the leaders of the respective flotillas had inherited the glorious maritime tradition of Nelson, the encounter ended inconclusively, more like Jutland than Trafalgar. While the river boats were circling ponderously in the brackish, turgid water of the Thames, the fishing boats were being “buzzed” by a small number of RIBs (Rigid Inflatable Boats, powered by outboard motors). They responded by spraying the boats and their occupants with water from the bilges. Amongst those in one RIB, who got soaked in the process (along with her family) was Jo Cox MP, the Labour member for Batley and Spen.

The next day, she must have travelled up to her constituency, to do one of the regular MPs’ surgeries which are held all over the country and give MPs a chance to interact with the people who voted them in.  While she was engaged in this, in Birstall Library, my wife was busy teaching her outreach class in a location less than a mile away, and based on the very estate where the alleged suspect is said to own a home.  Had it not been the exam season, Deb might well have hung around giving feedback, as is her usual custom, and had she done so, could have probably been transiting the area just as Jo Cox was being shot and stabbed in the street. I shudder to think of it. As it was, Jo Cox’s murder was taking place just as Debbie rolled safely back into the driveway at home, but it was still too close for comfort.  I couldn’t begin to think what it must feel like to answer a phone call and be told that your wife has just been shot and stabbed in the street. But that is what happened to Brendan Cox on Thursday afternoon, and he then had to break it to their children.

But who is responsible for Jo Cox’s death? It all depends what you mean by “responsible”.  There has been a definite attempt, in the two or three days since the event, by those who have come to realise that their hate and fear mongering may have contributed to the state of the assailant’s mind, to downplay any “political” aspects to the killing. Normally, when I hear that sort of apologia being uttered, I immediately think that what they are really saying is “Oops, I have been busted, and now the shit is about to hit the fan.”

Thus, we find that the people who are saying this sort of thing the loudest, like a repetitive mantra whose chief aim seems to be to drown out any discussion, are those who don’t like being called out on their actions in the referendum campaign, actions which may well have pushed someone vulnerable enough to be susceptible to the febrile atmosphere of hatred and xenophobia, to try and do something about it.  The same things have been said (about “keeping politics out of it”) on a couple of other online forums I read – one about the proposed closure of the A & E Department at Huddersfield Royal Infirmary and one about the flooding in Calderdale.

In both cases, the people who are saying “let’s keep politics out of this” are people who probably voted Tory in the election and are now embarrassed that it is coming back to bite them on the bum. Them, and the rest of us.  So any mention of Tory meddling with the NHS and the destabilising effects of PFI cannot be discussed. Any mention of Tory cuts to the Environment Agency putting flood defences in peril cannot be discussed. So it is with Jo Cox, as those with most to lose by being identified as part of the process that led up to her killing fall over themselves in their haste not to be implicated, and any mention of the political dimensions to the death of Jo Cox, cannot be discussed.

The assailant was a mentally disturbed loner, end of.  But I’m sorry, that is not the end. The same people who are saying this are probably the ones who would be the first to be baying for blood if it had been, say, Boris Johnson who had been shot and stabbed in the street by an assailant shouting “Allah-uh Akhbar”, instead of “Britain First”.  But it seems that the rule of thumb is Muslim assailant = ISIS terrorist, whereas white, right wing assailant = mentally disturbed loner.  In the week’s other tragedy, which happened as I was writing my blog last Sunday, the mass shootings in a nightclub in Orlando, Florida, there is a similar double standard, the irony there being that the individual in question may well have been first and foremost a disturbed individual with a thing about gay people, but in this case he was appropriated by both ISIS and Donald Trump (for different reasons, but still quite an achievement) for political ends, as an example of “Muslim Terrorism”.

The people who killed Lee Rigby were also mentally ill, but that didn’t stop the likes of Britain First using the case to tar all Muslims with the same brush, and misappropriating the posthumous “approval” of Lee Rigby from beyond the grave, against the wishes of his family.  Mr Boot, meet Mr Other Foot.  Britain First, the political group, were frantically backtracking all day Friday, claiming that even if the assailant had shouted “Britain First”, it could have been part of a longer, rhetorical, question along the lines of “shouldn’t we put Britain first?” Well, if you believe that, tell me again how you feel about the tooth fairy.  In court on Saturday, charged with the crime, the alleged assailant apparently said “Death to Traitors! Britain First”, which I would say puts him firmly in the “Brexit” camp.  When I wrote, in last week’s blog, about the exchange witnessed by one of my friends in the supermarket, where a remain voter was jocularly referred to as a “traitor”, little did I suspect just how far that particular canker had spread.

The prime burden of responsibility for the death of Jo Cox  falls upon the person who killed her.  A man has been arrested and charged, but not yet tried or convicted of her murder.  There has been much speculation about whether the suspect in custody has links to far right groups or not, and whether he shouted “Britain First” as he stabbed and shot his alleged victim.  I am trying to be careful with my nomenclature and terminology here as I have no wish to prejudice future legal proceedings and make it easy for a smart defence counsel to point to the overwhelming speculation on social media as a means of his client being denied a fair trial.

Any tragedy, any catastrophe, usually has multiple causes. It is rare for one single cause to be the root of it. The Space Shuttle that blew up in mid air over Florida was the result of cheap rubber “O” rings and freezing temperatures.  Hillsborough was a combination of a late surge in fans being ineptly handled followed by a failure to appreciate the gravity of the situation and a consequent delay in deploying the emergency services. The Titanic suffered from the bad luck of scraping an iceberg rather than hitting it square on, and then the loss of life was exacerbated by inadequate use of the lifeboats, such as there were on board, and other shipping mis-interpreting her distress rockets as fireworks. In Jo Cox’s case, it featured at least all of the following, plus perhaps other factors of which we are, as yet, unaware.

Unprecedented levels of hatred and xenophobia, especially against refugees and immigrants, being whipped up in the referendum campaign by the lunatic fringe of the Brexit campaign. However uncomfortable that may make them feel, and personally I hope it does, the whirly-eyed zealots of the far right can't escape *some* responsibility.

A local MP with a high profile commitment to helping refugee causes, who made a point of being "present" in the community that elected her.

Seemingly, someone with a number of issues (as yet unknown and specified) which may well have been inflamed by the two above

The fact that (unlike cabinet ministers or politicians in other countries) our MPs by and large are accessible through the means of surgeries and the like and are not, generally, chauffeured around in armoured limos and surrounded by bodyguards.

The killing of Jo Cox is bound up with multiple strands of irony. By several accounts, the man who has been charged with the offence was a “loner”, and fighting the effects of loneliness was one of the causes which she cared passionately about. If he is indeed found guilty, he may misguidedly have killed someone who was trying (albeit indirectly) to help him, and people like him.

                                                                                   

Then there is the issue of the way in which the public view their elected politicians.  You couldn’t throw half a brick on the internet on Friday without hitting someone who was singing the praises of our hard working, diligent MPs. Previously, these MPs were the people who were described (often by me) as lying, venal and corrupt.  I, too, have been guilty of making flip jokes about there not being enough rope, or enough lamp posts in Westminster, especially at the height of the expenses scandal, but again, as with Muslims, as with members of far-right groups, there is a whole spectrum of behaviour and belief, ranging from respectable to completely-off-the-scale four stops beyond Barking and well off the bus route.  They are not all the same.There, I have said it. I've recanted.

The irony here being that, by all accounts, Jo Cox was a diligent and a hardworking MP, proud to serve the community that bore and raised her, and happy to be able to make a difference for her constituents.  She wasn’t some purple-faced old buffer with a glassy stare who only turns up at Westminster once in a blue moon and is rarely seen in his constituency except when he is installing his ornamental duck house, claimed for on expenses, on his moat. One bad apple does not imply a rotten barrel, with MPs, nor with England fans, and, sadly, probably not even with Britain First, though the irony of people deriding their rather hurt social media postings to the effect that the whole group should not be judged by the actions of one individual was totally lost on them.   

But in the case of UKIP, they cannot evade the fact that, on the very morning Jo Cox was killed, Nigel Farage was busily unveiling his latest referendum poster, which showed a winding river of brown people stretching back into the distance and over the horizon.  Superimposed on the image were the words “Breaking Point”.  I caught a brief clip of him being interviewed at the unveiling. He was speechifying, as usual, and he was actually saying “all these people will end up at Calais and they will all be getting passports and coming here…” or words to that effect.  As it happens, the image was a stock photo of refugees fleeing the Syrian conflict.  Who knows what really happened to these people in the picture.  Most of them are probably in refugee camps in Lebanon, Macedonia or Turkey. Some of them will have drowned.

But to  Farage, it’s all grist to his racist mill. And the scary thing is, people are believing him.  A chilling article by Polly Toynbee in The Guardian this week (not my normal fare, but all sorts of things have been popping up in my news feed after the Jo Cox murder) reported on an MPs’ surgery by Margaret Hodge in East London, where the subject of Brexit came up. Every UKIP lie was produced in the course of the discussion, and each one was debunked by Hodge, and demolished. But at the close of the meeting, people were still saying they were going to vote leave, in the face of all facts and reason.  Facts no longer matter. Because it’s a vote with the heart, not the head, and UKIP have captured the emotional argument with their unsupported assertions and now, with the latest poster, sadly, with their naked racism. 

By and large, I am pretty hard on UKIP members, but I guess, like England football supporters, Muslims, MPs and the members of far-right groups, there is a broad spectrum of membership there also, ranging from people who simply feel disillusioned about the state of the country and (wrongly) believe UKIP can fix it, to obsessive racist loners with a bee in their bonnet about refugees who might have just seen Farage’s latest poster on Thursday morning, and decided, spurred on by its message, to play their own part, by taking direct action.  And to my mind, if that is proven to be the case, ever, then UKIP, although they cannot be held directly responsible, are at least culpable, and guilty of recklessness.

Farage was offered the chance on morning TV to express sympathy for the death of Jo Cox and instead used the interview to defend his racist poster and paint himself as a victim of political hatred. That really does tell you all you need to know about him.  So well done, Mr Farage, with your odious quasi-nationalism. It starts with the waving of flags, and ends with a woman lying dead in the street.

What do we do about this, though? I know it’s a cliché, often spouted at such times, but what would she want? Feeling very angry, on Thursday night, I signed an online petition calling for the referendum to be postponed. On mature reflection (as it says in all the best wills) I wish I hadn’t. Because if democracy means anything it means allowing the processes which underlie it to happen, and let the chips fall where they may. Only holding elections when you are sure of getting the result you want is the sort of thing they do in Russia and China, and I think we’re better, in our political traditions, than that. Not much better, of late, but I still think the referendum should go ahead, and let the chips fall where they may.

One area which does bear some scrutiny, though, is the status of the group Britain First. As I said, I am not, generally, an advocate of banning things, but maybe it is time to make an exception with this organisation.   Britain First is an organisation that consistently pumps out vile, anti-Muslim propaganda, and seeks to paint all adherents of that faith with the same brush. In the past, it has carried out “direct actions” including Mosque invasions.

I am well aware that Britain First is merely a decorative border on the edge of the  lunatic fringe of the right-wing movement in general in the UK, in the same way that a group like, for instance, Al-Mujaharoun was the lunatic fringe of Islamic opinion. However, we were quick enough to disband and proscribe that organisation, and similar ones, and I think that, in terms of equality of response if nothing else, the time has now come to do the same to Britain First.

I realise that there is a counter argument which says that banning solves nothing, and it is better to keep these people in plain view, where their actions may be more easily scrutinised for unlawful activity, but the precedent has now already been set, and for me, it is now a case of “what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander”.

Britain First, even if not directly responsible for the death of Jo Cox (and I accept that no organisation can control the action of its supporters 100%, even if the suspect did turn out to have been a member, which is still an open question) are nevertheless, with others, generally responsible for stirring up the poisonous mixture of hate and xenophobia which is currently killing off all of the British values of tolerance, compassion, and sympathy for the underdog which we used to hold so dear, and which made this country the special place it once was.

It is the feast day of various saints today, including the splendidly named St Deodatus, but somehow it doesn’t seem right, this week, to be writing about ancient church history when events have taken place which have challenged the very ideals of Christianity and the very roots, indeed, of faith. Well, my faith, anyway. Where was God when Jo Cox was being killed? Why is evil constantly triumphant? What possible part of a planned universe managed and run by a benevolent caring God who allegedly loves mankind so much that he was willing to sacrifice a part of himself in the form of his only son, to save mankind, could allow this to happen?

The standard answer (theologically, although I paraphrase) is that we live in a fallen universe and we have free will. So although God must have known, being omniscient and omnipresent, that Jo Cox would have been killed, and indeed knows the minute and the hour for all of us, he did not do anything to stop it happening, for reasons best known only unto the mind of God.

This has never made much sense to me, and has been a major stumbling block all my religious life. Especially since God, faced with a blank canvas, could re-shape and re-frame the world any way he wanted.  I accept that I will never know the  mind of God, at least not in this lifetime, and I accept that I have occasionally had experiences, which some may call “religious” where I have – inexplicably, and in a way it is impossible to explain – felt that “all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well” but even so, God’s mind must be bloody strange if something like the death of Jo Cox is acceptable to it.

The other often-advanced argument is that some good will come of the death of Jo Cox. Well, that may well be so. I know there is a tendency when someone young and bright dies before their time, especially a young woman, to re-write their past in a more “saintly” light. It’s the Princess Diana syndrome. Jo Cox didn’t feature particularly prominently on my radar before her death, but from what I have gleaned since, she seems generally to have already been a force for good, so why God felt it necessary to allow her death to create “good” out of it is a mystery to me. You got me there, Big G.

It is tempting, after thoughts like those, to fall into the pit of thinking that nothing has any meaning, and the world is truly random and chaotic, part of a Godless universe. I suppose the only mitigating factors, the consolations, are things such as the bravery shown by her sister in reading out her very moving public tribute, the way in which Jo Cox’s assistant tried to comfort and help her as she lay dying and the attempts by the 77 year old ex-miner, the have a go hero who got stabbed for his trouble, to prevent the murder taking place. Always look for the helpers, as the saying goes.  As Jo Cox herself said, in her maiden speech:

Batley and Spen is a gathering of typically independent, no-nonsense and proud Yorkshire towns and villages. Our communities have been deeply enhanced by immigration. While we celebrate our diversity, what surprises me time and time again as I travel around the constituency is that we are far more united and have far more in common with each other than things that divide us.

In a sense, she was merely echoing John Donne, four hundred years earlier, in his Meditation VII from Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions:

No man is an Iland, intire of itselfe; every man

is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine;

if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe

is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as

well as if a Manor of thy friends or of thine

owne were; any mans death diminishes me,

because I am involved in Mankinde;

And therefore never send to know for whom

the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.

Odd as it may seem – maybe because it was so “close to home” in some ways – I do feel “diminished” by the death of Jo Cox, a person I never knew. Oddly and personally diminished, an additional dimension to the sheer anger at the fact it happened and the despair about the way in which the country is going.  Maybe we just have to cling on to the fact that people tried to help, and that, despite the heart growing brutal in some cases, there is still more that unites us than divides us.

Next week, for good or ill, is the referendum. At times like those we have endured in the past few days, I tend to find myself rummaging mentally though the ragbag of poetry I keep in my head, looking for a talisman, a touchstone, that will help me to make sense of it all  Poetry makes nothing happen, as W H Auden once memorably said about the Spanish Civil War, but it does help sometimes in the struggle to make sense of those times when bad things happen to good people for no apparent reason.

For the last few weeks, thinking especially about the climate of hate engendered by the Brexit camp, I have had The Stare’s Nest By My Window by W. B. Yeats going round and round inside my head. The poem was written in the bloody aftermath of the civil war which led eventually to partition in Ireland in the 1920s.  The bees outside Yeats’s window at Thoor Ballylee are building a hive in the remains of an empty nest left by starlings, but on another level, Yeats is using the poem as a heart-felt cry for reconciliation, and for people to co-operate, to build something new in Ireland out of the wreckage of war, in the same way that the old nest is being re-used by the bees.

We have fed the heart on fantasies
The heart’s grown brutal on the fare

More substance in our enmities

Than in our love. O honey bees,

Come build in the empty house of the stare!

Whatever the outcome of the referendum, there is going to be a massive need for people to all pull together and make things better. If we vote to leave, economically, that task is going to be well-nigh impossible. Even if we stay in, it should be a massive wake-up call for Cameron and Co and the EU generally. The status quo is not an option.  I fear, however, that we may be in for dark times ahead. If we vote to leave, and – as they almost certainly will – things get worse, not better, for the people who voted to go, in the misguided hope that there would be more hospitals, more schools, and fewer brown people, and these people wake up on June 24^th and don’t find themselves basking in a warm glow of sovereignty, whatever that means, and its just as difficult to see your GP, the roads are just as busy, the schools just as crowded, and the economy is tanking, so there is even less money to fix these things, eventually, that anger will surface, and find a way to manifest itself, to the detriment of us all.

And of course, next week there is the Midsummer Solstice, and everything starts to tip back down towards autumn, towards decay, shorter days and colder nights. “Summer’s lease hath all too short a date” as the Bard has it.  Somehow, today, this Sunday teatime in England, with clouds overhead and a light rain falling, seems to be the eye in the hurricane, the calm before the storm. In what is laughably described as my spare time, last week, I took to painting yet again, and also to baking. So I am going to close now, and make what seems to me to be the only sane response to the mad world I seem to be trapped in. I’m going to paint an eikon, and then make a strawberry flan. Or vice versa.

Epiblog for the Feast of St John of Sahagun

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley, even though summer does seem to have come to an end, somewhat prematurely, is it’s still nine days to the solstice.  Sadly, though, the warm and humid weather of last week has well and truly broken, at least for the moment.  Before it did, we had a very pleasant barbecue last Sunday evening, outside on the decking. The first time I had been out there, using the ramps which Owen so kindly constructed for us, this year. That, together with starting writing it too late in the day, was one of the reasons why last week’s blog was so late.

Anyway, a pleasant time was had by all, and the mobile little barbecue thingy that Debbie bought from IKEA to take on holiday with us when we go off in the camper performed very well, browning vegan sausages, pretend prawns, and rashers of faux-bacon, all of which were accompanied by a big bowl of salad, chopped and mixed by yours truly.  Half way through, Granny arrived with Zak and Ellie, having walked them over in the warm of the evening. There was plenty to go around, so she ended up staying as well.  Eventually, however, she felt the pull of home, and tottered off into the night, faithful poochies at her heels, as always.

This is why you should never leave a party before the end, or else you might miss the floorshow.  It had been a terrific evening up to that point, but then the Titanic was having an absolutely spiffing voyage, until it hit the iceberg.  Attempting to negotiate my way back up the ramp, over the threshold and into the conservatory, somehow, I got stuck half way up. With the benefit of hindsight, I should have turned round on the decking, and gone up backwards, then I could have used my legs as well for additional propulsion.

Anyway, I didn’t, and though – as it says in all the best police statements – drink had been taken, the main problem was my wheels started slipping, and my arms weren’t strong enough on their own to hold me. Debbie rushed from inside to the doorway, leant out and grabbed the lapels of my fleece, all she could reach in that instant, but it started to come off over my head and the inevitable ensued. Gravity triumphed over levity, I rolled backwards, then, on “landing” on the decking, the wheelchair itself tipped over backwards, with me in it. I managed to take out a small stone ceramic owl that lights up in the dark (we only have the classiest garden ornaments, us) and one third of a garden lily. The owl was stuck back together on Monday morning, and the plant re-potted, and both are doing fine, in case you were worried.

I, however, was not so good. Stuck in the chair, on my back with my legs in the air, I couldn’t reach my mobile to summon help. There was no way that Deb could get me back in the chair on her own.  She shouted that she’d get me the house phone, and reappeared in the doorway with it. For some reason not entirely clear, but probably to do with speed and panic, instead of just coming out and handing it to me, or dialling 999 herself, she threw me the handset.  Because I was currently lying on my back like a stranded beetle, waving my legs in the air, my catching wasn’t at its best, and because it was dark, her aim was a bit wappy too. The phone struck me a glancing blow on the forehead just above the left eyebrow, and skidded off into the darkness, amongst a load of shrubs in tubs. We recovered it the following morning, surprisingly no worse for wear. Unlike my head.

Meanwhile, I had managed, by dint of wiggling my hips like Chubby Checker, to send the wheelchair one way while I rolled the other. This meant that at least I could reach my mobile. I dialled 999 wearily, and explained what had happened. I asked for an ambulance, because the last time I fell off my banana board while transferring into the chair, about two years ago, that’s what they sent. This time around, the 999 operator started asking me if I was actually injured bleeding or unconscious, and seemed unsure whether I needed an ambulance or not. All I could do was reiterate the situation, and in the end I just said send who you like, send the lifeboat if you must, but please send somebody.

A few minutes later, with commendable speed and despatch, three burly firemen knocked at the door, and were admitted through the kitchen by Debbie. Having assessed the situation, they did a “fireman’s lift”, plonked me back in the chair, and wheeled me up the ramp and into the house. I thanked them, and they left.  Upsetting though the experience was (spiritually, and literally) it did have a hidden up-side. Previously, there had been some speculation as to whether the elevated decking, now getting on for 20 years old, was going to rot through, but the fact that it took the combined weight of the aforesaid trio of burly “pompieres” plus me, indicates that it is probably a lot stronger than it looks.

The next day, I felt like crap. I had a bump on my head from the phone, bruised ribs, and I had strained the muscles in my right shoulder. Gradually, during the week, things improved, and at least it took my mind off my thumb, which has, conversely, quietened itself down a bit. I have since suggested to Debbie that maybe next time we have a barbecue, though, we should just invite the fire brigade to send along a delegation from the outset, as this would save a lot of time at the end of the evening.

Matilda has had, for her, a busy week, also, including, unusually for her, having to defend her territory. I was sitting working on Wednesday and Matilda was sprawled out like a discarded set of bagpipes on the cool floorboards in the front room. A movement out of the corner of my eye caught my attention and I looked up to see Poppy, the little black cat from next door, sitting in the middle of the conservatory rug, having no doubt come in through the open door (open because of the stifling heat).  Matilda saw her at exactly the same time, and thundered across the room. Poppy turned tail and fled, with Matilda lumbering after her. At the turn, the order was 1. Poppy, 2. Matilda, and in third place, the fat old guy in the wheelchair. A short head separated 1 and 2, and several lengths 2 and 3. I sat at the door, calling Matilda back, aided by Misty, who had come in to see what all the fuss was about.  Eventually, Matilda returned, eyes like saucers, and tail the size of a bog-brush.  As predicted, she had failed to catch the interloper, as I saw Poppy later on in our front garden.

The next day, on Thursday afternoon, Deb and I were sitting in the kitchen when Deb drew my attention to the conservatory door, which was again open. A squirrel was half way up the door jamb, clinging on like a gecko, and craning its neck to see whether there might be any additional sources of food inside.  Matilda did not need to be involved in this instance, as the squirrel in question met Debbie’s stern gaze, got the full-on gamma-ray treatment, quailed, jumped down, and fled up the tree.

As I said to Debbie, they are getting too tame for their own good, really, though they did have a rude awakening when Ellie and Zak were here on Friday. For some reason, Zak (65 in human years) suddenly decided he was affronted by a squirrel with its nose in the dish on the decking, just outside the open door. In one bound he was off and after it. The squirrel escaped, of course, but Ellie had also exited through the door, after touching the floor just once in between the armchair where she’d been sleeping and the outside world, in a manner reminiscent of the late, great Freddie, who was legendary for hurling himself at the glass whenever there was a squirrel in the garden.

Ellie is not allowed outside unsupervised, because she has a habit of turning every excursion into an adventure, and, true to form, this time, when Zak returned from his pursuit, he was alone. The previous time she escaped from out the back, she was found in the front garden of a house seven or eight doors up the road, heading resolutely towards Netherton with no obvious route plan. The time before that, she tried to get back into the house, but unfortunately it wasn’t our house, it belonged to one of the neighbours. You begin to get the idea. With some weariness, we prepared for a full scale search, possibly involving external agencies. However, Ellie saved us the trouble. When Debbie went out of the front door to start traipsing up and down the road, searching, Ellie was rooting around unconcerned in our front garden, and was unceremoniously scooped up, scolded, and replaced in the armchair, with the door from the conservatory firmly shut, after the dogs had bolted.

Sadly, that has been more or less what has passed for fun in our household this week. Last night, Granny, Adam, and the dogs came round and I made them egg and chips for tea while we all watched England draw inexplicably with Russia in Euro 2016 because of the masterly tactical move by the manager of stubbornly refusing to put our two best goal-scorers on the pitch. Mathematically, we can still qualify, as the old saying has it, but it may not come to that, and Hodgson’s cunning plan that this is such a crucial tournament that we can get away with fielding the Second XI and going out at the group stage may not be necessary, as we’re highly likely to be disqualified anyway, because of the behaviour of the England fans, sorry, thugs, in Marseilles. Calling these people fans is like calling ISIS muslims.

The fact that we seem to have somehow managed to create such an atmosphere of xenophobic bile that it has culminated in us having, in effect, exported our version of the Blackshirts to Europe, is probably another unintended consequence of the Brexit debate. Back home, here, the level of the “debate” though it hardly qualifies to be called such, has reached a new, nasty pitch this week, with only 11 days to go to the poll itself.  Actually, the Brexiteers do have a point. There is a large group of young men in Europe, who will soon be making their way to Calais, intent on entering Britain, and these people are violent, lawless, ignorant, intolerant, and intent on fostering hatred in our towns and cities. The trouble is that they are England football fans, they all have British passports, and we can’t really stop them coming back, however much we might want to.

It has got to the stage now where it seems that, on the Brexit side at least, the debate is being conducted entirely on emotional terms, with a driving force of unfocused xenophobic nationalism that is completely – and unashamedly – unconnected with facts or reality.  In this respect, it has gained a boost this week by the yet further, continuing, celebrations of the Queen’s 90^th birthday, which seems to have been going on now for about the last three years.  The whole country is decked out with Union Jacks and street parties and, while I am an admitted monarchist (because the alternatives are all much, much worse) the atmosphere it has fostered, combined with the Brexit campaign, is at least febrile, and at best, very, very weird. A friend tells me of an informal discussion she witnessed between two supermarket workers and a customer. The customer had a “Brexit” badge on her coat and one of the supermarket workers was congratulating her on it, then turned to point at her colleague and said “Oh, take no notice of her, she wants to stay in, she’s a traitor!”

Now, this is one colloquial exchange and in no way statistically significant, but that use of the word traitor strikes me as highly significant, redolent of the mindset of the Brexit supporters, and the reason why it really looks as though Britain, in 11 days time, will perform an act of insane self-harm, in economic terms, which will take two generations to repair, if indeed it can be repaired at all. Because somehow, Brexit, through a campaign which is an admitted tissue of lies, has nevertheless come to engineer it that the patriotic thing to do is to vote to leave, and anyone who thinks otherwise is a traitor.

I don’t normally link to other articles in this blog. I know that’s sort of the whole point of the internet, but I prefer if possible to use quotations and give a reference to their source, because I think it spoils the flow of reading something if you have to click off it and then read something else, and then click back again, but I will make an exception this week.  I have – in the last few days – read two articles that have more or less summed up, for me, the case for remaining. Both are very long, and challenging reads, and one at least is larded with invective, but they both repay reading. In fact, speaking as someone who was, at the start of 2016, vaguely considering voting to leave until I saw who else was in that camp, and, as a consequence, started to look into the economic implications of a “Brexit", I’d strongly recommend – especially if you are thinking of voting to leave, or still undecided – reading both of them, even though it means investing half an hour or more of your life.

https://www.facebook.com/nicholasjohncarter/posts/10153467946496736?pnref=story

and http://tinyurl.com/zt3mlkz

are the articles in question. I apologise for the F-bomb in the second one's link, but as you will find in the article, if you read it, he is even more exasperated than I am with the imminent act of collective self-harm we seem about to inflict.

If you don’t read the articles (and by the way, despite being on Facebook, the first one is actually a well-marshalled summary of some actual facts, especially on the immigration issue) William Gadsby Peet, in the second one, made two or three particularly telling points about the ability or otherwise of a “Brexited” UK to strike new, independent trade deals  quickly enough to prevent economic chaos.  He points out that, in the event of a vote to leave, the process takes two years. That is two years of economic uncertainty, stagnation and lack of confidence, lack of investment, and pressure on the pound.  Plus an end to any existing support we get from the European Social Fund, the Europpean Economic Development Fund, and any specific disaster funds such as the flooding fund. Germany and France, in particular, will be in absolutely no hurry to strike any sort of deal with the UK, post-Brexit. It is in their interests not to, after all. If the UK is allowed to waltz away, and then everything carries on much as before, with no apparent dire consequences, this will send what they consider to be the wrong message, and feed the incipient groundswell of the right wing in both those countries towards their own “Frexit" and "Gerexit” movements.  And that is the last thing the EU wants. It wants to be able to point to Britain as an economic basket case and say “look, this suffering is what happens when you turn your back on the EU!”

As for trade deals with the rest of the world, he points out that they, too, will be in no hurry to sign anything. By leaving the EU, Britain will have telegraphed to the rest of the world that it is now in a situation of desperately needing to sign up trade deals elsewhere, and the longer it is left by the countries with whom we want to trade, the more they can delay, the better the terms they will get from us, as desperation sets in further.  I’ve written many times that I am no fan of the EU, especially as it currently operates, and in the unlikely event of the UK voting to remain, I certainly don’t see it as an endorsement of the status quo (other ageing rock bands are available). It has to change and improve, but we can only influence that process in our favour if we are at the table when the deals are made.

In any decision involving the UK’s future, the economy has to be paramount. Anyone who has bothered to look into it already knows that immigration, in economic terms, has a positive effect on the economy. In terms of the Brexit argument it is a distraction, being used to whip up xenophobia in the face of economic sense. Immigrants come, they get jobs, they pay taxes.  Those jobs in turn create more jobs, and the economy grows, and with it the tax take, which is the way out of the wasteland left by the careless bankers and their world economic crash in 2008.  If you want the next generation of kids to grow up with the best prospect of getting a job, buying a house, getting on in life, and generally living in a stable and prosperous society, the only sane choice is to put away your bunting, stop blindly waving that Union Jack, tell the Daily Mail where to stuff its straight bananas, and vote to stay in and try and make the best of it.  Like me, you may not do so with a spring in your step and a song in your heart, but if we don’t, then the lights are going out all over Europe, and we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime, in the words of Sir Edward Grey.  Liz Hurley has apparently said that she is all for voting Brexit if it means we can go back to having old fashioned high powered light bulbs, screw cap or bayonet. I’m sure that her light bulbs will be a great comfort to her, when she gets back home after queuing in the street to catch a loaf of bread thrown off the back of an army lorry. Always assuming there is any electricity to run them.

It’s not just the weather that has turned nasty with the end of the week, either. As I was typing this, listening to the jazzy, syncopated plopping of heavy drops of rain landing on the conservatory roof, news was coming in that 50 people have been shot  dead in a nightclub in Orlando, Florida, an incident seemingly unconnected with the fact that Christina Grimmie, a singer, was gunned down on Friday night in the same town as she signed autographs after a concert.  At the time of writing, though ISIS has endorsed the action, there is also a theory that it was simply the “lone gunman with a grudge against gays” theory.  Donald Trump, who is undoubtedly the Antichrist, has tweeted on the atrocity “When will we be tough, smart, and vigilant”- basically jumping the gun (no pun intended, I assure you) and blaming it on terrorists.

I know rhetorical questions are usually posed without any expectation of an answer, but in this case, Donald, in answer to your question, your idea of “tough”, will only make domestic terrorism worse, you will never be “smart”, and as for “vigilant”, unless you keep all of your citizens under 24/7 surveillance, with the total loss of civil liberties that implies, “vigilance” will not solve matters. Maybe that is the sort of society you, and your supporters, want.  Goodbye, America, it was nice to know you.

There was one little gleam, though, this week, one gleam in the gloom. Les Binns was on the news. Les Binns last crossed paths with me when, back in the day, as they usually say, he used to run a copyprint machine at the office, back in the times when I used to have a real job.  He progressed to a slightly more hazardous existence in the Army, doing one or two tours in Afghanistan, dodging bullets and IEDs.  After that, our ways had parted, though I do occasionally see things his mum posts on Facebook.  Imagine my surprise, then, to click on the news and find him being interviewed. He, now aged 42 and working in private security, had been on a lifetime trip to climb Mount Everest, and was within striking distance of the summit when he stumbled upon a female Indian climber who was having trouble with her oxygen. Further on, another climber, male, from the same expedition was also in trouble.  I have read (given that Debbie is quite keen on mountaineering) books about climbers who have gone summit blind and ignored the distress of others. You can see why.  It costs about £40,000 to climb Everest, these days.  And it must be so tempting to just pass by on the other side, and carry on plodding upwards.

Les did not. Les told his Sherpa that he wasn’t going to summit, and instead, commenced trying to help the two stranded climbers back down the mountain to safety. The woman’s life was saved. Sadly, the male climber was too far gone, and didn’t make it. Everest is a dangerous place, though not as dangerous as K2, where apparently 25% of climbers on average die on the descent.  By stopping to help these people, and changing his own planned schedule, we should not forget that Les put his own life in considerable danger. Once things start to go wrong at 29,000 feet, they don’t often magically right themselves.  So, well done, Les, you probably wouldn’t remember me if I fell off a shelf onto your head, but I am proud to once have worked in the same office as you. And in what Shakespeare called a naughty world, your good deed stands out.

Today, for all its drizzly dreariness, is the feast of St John of Sahagun.  He was born John Gonzales de Castrillo in the town of Sahagun, Leon, in Spain, and was educated by the monks of the Benedictine monastery of Fagondez. He was ordained in 1445, and at that point he resigned all of his benefices except that of St Agatha in Burgos, as a protest against religious pluralism.  He spent four years studying at the University of Salamanca, and then began to preach.

In the next decade he achieved considerable fame as a preacher, a worker of miracles, and for his ability to, as it was put “read men’s souls”.  After a serious operation, though, in 1463, he retired and became an Augustinian friar. He denounced evil in high places, and several attempts were made on his life, ending when he was poisoned on 11 June 1479, allegedy by one of two women who had taken offence at being denounced in a sermon about them living “in concubinage” with a powerful nobleman.  Not long after his death, in 1525, the process of his beatification began, culminating in October 1690 when he was canonised by Pope Alexander VIII.

Apart from the preaching and the miracles, I can sympathise with some bits of the life of St John of Sahagun, especially the bits about retiring after a serious operation (been there, done that) and denouncing evil in the rich and famous (ditto).  Other than that, though, I can only conclude, as I have been forced to do with several other saints I have researched, that the conditions for sainthood were a lot more relaxed in those days.

As for me, next week is pretty much more of the same. One of the four books I have been working on simultaneously since as long ago as I can remember, has finally gone to press. Technically, this means I should be feeling 25% less oppressed, but it doesn’t seem to work like that. Two of the four are my own projects, and it’s looking increasingly likely that I’ll have to ditch them (even though I have pre-orders for both) in favour of working on books by others. It’s the only way it’s going to happen, as other stuff is fast coming up on the rails.  Sad, but true.

Still, the end of term is approaching, which will at least be an easement for Debbie, although there is still the baptism of fire of the exams to go through, first.  It’s getting to that stage where I need to make a big list of everything that needs doing before we go away (if we even get there). But with the end of term comes the end of summer. I know the Solstice is theoretically midsummer, but inevitably I can sense a change, a downward decay in things, from then on.  The flowers of July are living on borrowed time, and the blossom of May is gone, long dispersed and dead for another year.

So, this autumn and winter is, for me, a pretty depressing prospect. At best it will be full of hard work, cold dreary weather, and struggling against the same 17 intractable problems, while having to acknowledge that I am, probably, getting weaker in my upper body. Six years on from my formal diagnosis, I’m not surprised, I suppose, but it’s another thing to worry about, even though worrying about it is futile, since it will happen whether I worry or not.

My petition https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/120545

has now got almost 12,000 signatures, so that looks like it’s headed for being another small victory,  since there is no way it will get the remaining 88,000 needed to trigger a debate in parliament before 16 August, even assuming parliament, post-Brexit, even wanted to debate it. 12,000 is still, though, a significant wodge of people who want to see the animal welfare laws strengthened.

So, in an attempt to stay sane, in addition to this crazy life I chose of trying to sell books to people who have little or no disposable income, I’ll carry on sketching, and doing the occasional thing for myself instead of others. I’ll stake up my herbs, some of which have been knocked down by the rain, I’ll polish my clock, and I’ll continue trying to implement the power of gradual change and small victories.  And I guess I’ll carry on praying for the welfare of me, mine, and those less fortunate than ourselves.  Despite the fact that my relationship with Big G seems to have become troubled over the years, we are more or less still on speaking terms.

That, at the end of the day, is all that someone in my position can do. So now I’m going to make some gooseberry tarts.