A Refusal To Mourn?

The murder of Fr. Jacques Hamel has once more sharply crystallized for me the problem of pain and suffering in the universe. Here was a man in his 80s who had spent his life as a priest in the service of others, of his community, and of God, and that service has now been repaid by his brutal murder by two psychotic thugs, ironically acting out of what they would have said were “religious” motives. How could this be allowed, in a world created, curated and loved by a benevolent and loving creator?

We have to take an initial decision at this point, and that decision is whether to even bother trying to make some sense of this, or whether to just throw up our hands in despair and disgust, and just walk away, denying that there is any logic, order, sense, justice or compassion in the universe. In short, there is no God, and very bad things happen at random to good people, for no reason whatsoever.

I choose to try and make sense of it, for reasons primarily connected with some experiences in my own past which I can only describe as mystical. It would take me an additional 10,000 words at this point to explain fully what I mean by these, and even then you may well still feel I am deluding myself. So for now you will have to take my motives at face value. I’m going to try and make some sense of it, even though it leads to some conclusions I’m not exactly comfortable with.

But first we need to look at definitions: what is this “world” which we believe should contain logic, order, sense, justice and compassion. I suppose we mean, by this, reality.  The issue is, though, that reality, the things I can see, hear, feel, smell, or touch, is not what it seems. As modern physics tells us, nothing in reality is “real” in any objective sense.  Everything is electromagnetic energy.  Plus, it only exists when we look at it. Furthermore, modern physics tells us that even time itself, in certain circumstances, does not behave in a linear manner. In certain weird circumstances, when mathematically analysed, time can seem to stand still, or even go backwards!

And also, we need to consider what we mean by “God”. The personage who allegedly “allows” all these bad things to happen. One conclusion I’ve come to, over the years, is that God, if it is anything, is not an old white bloke with a beard who sits on a cloud, judging the quick and the dead (although we might come back to judgement later on, as well).  God, as C. S. Lewis has written, is outside of time. I would go further and say that God might even be the antithesis of time. God is limitless eternity, a concept which I find hard to comprehend. Time, on the other hand, is what limits us, what makes us human, makes us mortal.  Whereas, when we feel the most in tune with the divine, the infinite, we often describe our experience as being “timeless”. All of the experiences I mentioned earlier were of that nature.

This is where we come back to modern physics. You’ll have to bear with me while I assemble this.  John Gribben, in his book, Schrodinger’s Kittens, has posited a theory that what we call reality is actually a very small part of everything that ever was, is now, and shall be.  If I was traditionally religious at this point, I might add, “world without end, amen” at this point.  Over this vast and endless tapestry, we run our small lens, the little magnifying glass of time-bound consciousness, propelled by time. But in fact, if we could but step back and take our noses away from the individual threads we are following, we would see all around us, stretching away in every direction for ever, what God sees, what God knows.  We would become part of eternity, we would become one with God.

The interim conclusion of this direction of thought takes me to an initial implication: that an infinite entity, which is outside of time completely, and contains everything, is clearly going to encompass concepts of logic, order, sense, justice or compassion which will be completely alien to our own human ones which we are attempting to graft on to it.

Since Gribben wrote his book, physics has also moved on, as well.  We now have, literally, added dimensions.  I haven’t the skill, the language, or the maths to explain this fully, because I was such a dumbass at school in those subjects, but to explain this fully, you need to understand the uncertainty principle, and the collapse of the wave function.  These are concepts you will really need to go away and look up, but basically they relate to the choices we make, and the fact that, until you observe something, you don’t really know where it is.

If you have something that could be in one of two places, it remains potentially in that state until you look for it. Once you find it and measure its position, all the other probabilities of its fate vanish, and your reality then proceeds from that point.  And so it proceeds, choice by choice, millisecond by millisecond. For every choice you make, physicists can write an equation, a “wave function”, which shows the probability of that choice’s outcome.  Once you make your choice, the wave function for all the other options collapses, closing off all the other alternatives.

Or does it? Because we now have the “many worlds” theory. There’s now an idea that when you make your choice make your measurement, or whatever, all the other options and their wave function, as the maths would have it, don’t in fact collapse, but carry on in another of many, indeed, of an infinite number of, alternative universes, where every other possible permutation of events and choices is played out, but because we, as humans, as mortals, are time-limited, we can’t see them.

We’re back again with John Gribben and his vast tapestry of everything that ever has happened, is happening now, and will happen, but now it’s multiplied by an infinite number of slightly different tapestries, relating to slightly different worlds, created by slightly different choices of events. An infinite number of universes, in fact, including one where Hitler was killed in the First World War and never actually became Fuhrer. I can't do umlauts (see also Schrodinger).

But we are bound by time. Why is this? If I were religious, at this point, I’d say the limitation of the process of enduring things in time is the mark of a fallen universe. Heaven knows no time, and there was no time in Eden. And, talking a neo-platonist view of the issue, those moments, those moments when we feel closest to the divine, are the ones where we feel most timeless.

What does all this mean for God, though. Well, even though we can’t work out why things have to be this way, and it makes no sense in human terms, any God that can create, inhabit, sustain, and be this infinite many faceted thing that I can’t even begin to describe must, by definition, have very different ideas of logic, order, sense, justice or compassion to those we have, as I said above.

In this universe, Fr. Hamel was brutally, cruelly, and unjustly murdered, but in other universes, he lives on still. In another universe, in fact, he may be the Pope. And so on. I’m not intending to be flippant here. His death was, by any definition a tragedy, especially the one which says that tragedy is a waste of good. In this reality, the time-bound reality we all inhabit, his death was an abomination. A senseless abomination.

To a God who sees the bigger picture, though, this seemingly-senseless tragedy may be cancelled out in some way by Fr Hamel’s life in other universes. While this is superficially comforting, and strangely akin to the well known Henry Scott Holland sermon on “Death, our King of Terrors”, where he talks about death being just as if someone had gone into the next room, it does have disturbing implications.

If there is an infinite number of alternative universes, it also implies a world where Fr Hamel was run over crossing the street as a child, one where he died in the war, one where his father was late for a date and never even met his mother, and so on.  In fact, if there is a world, an alternative universe where what we might call our consciousness is united with what we call God for all eternity after our physical death, once removed from the shackles of time, then there also may be a universe where that consciousness is permanently excluded from God, from the infinite everything. If I were religious, I might call the first one heaven, and the second one, hell.

But the idea that the infinite number of universes must contain absolutely every possible permutation of everything is maybe again an example of us trying to impose human ideas of symmetry and logic on the infinite universe. If God is God, whatever it is, it has the power to mould infinity in a way beyond our understanding. In the same way as we edit our own reality in this world by making choices and moving on, perhaps once we have left time behind, that editing process is done on our behalf, done for us, by the abiding and eternal entity behind everything. How could God, an infinite good, allow any evil optional universes. But this is where I came in: here I go again, with my limited human concepts of what “good” and “evil” means.

If it is the case, though, I don’t believe that this editing is done on the basis of how “moral” or otherwise we’ve been in this life. I don’t believe in “one size fits all” morality.

I’ve strayed well beyond physics here. If anyone wants a friendly, approachable, easily understandable, yet non-condescending explanation of some of the concepts of the physics behind this, you could do a lot worse than reading Teaching Quantum Physics To Your Dog, by Chad Orzel.

Meanwhile, back here in this dimension, of course I am not refusing to mourn the death of Fr. Hamel. I do take some comfort from the possibility that somehow, somewhere, he goes on, but then I have to deal with the implications of that, and meanwhile, his death in the real world has massive and profound implications for the way we all live. We’re currently fixed in a spiral of violence and nobody can tell where it will end. The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity, as Yeats put it in The Second Coming.

I’ve got to the end of this now, and I am still not sure what I was trying to say, or indeed if I managed to say it.

If one of the possible universes is one full of limitless, eternal light, though, I wish the soul (another debate is to be had there, about what we mean by that) of Father Hamel to rest there in everlasting bliss, whatever else may result from any other outcomes.

Requiscat in Pace.

Epiblog for the Feast of St John Boste

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. And, I have to say, a scorching one. It’s been really great to be able to sit outside and feel the sun warming through my old, achy bones. In fact, everyone seems to like this weather. Matilda has been ligging about outside, stretching luxuriously, and only coming in finally at about 11 O’clock when it has cooled off and she decides she wants feeding. Because we’ve had all the doors open all day, Misty and Zak have been wandering in and out at random. In fact, Misty has developed a new game of going out into the garage, out of the back door of the garage onto the decking, and then along the decking to the conservatory door, and back into the kitchen. Repeat as required.

We’ve seen one or two squirrels but by and large, they seem to be away and elsewhere, probably sunbathing somewhere, high up in the waving treetops.

Deb has been keeping herself busy by thinning out some of the trees, partially in an exercise to improve the amount of light, and partly to take out some of the dead wood. This is still an ongoing project, but on three separate days last week I sat out and sawed up the cut branches into smaller pieces, so they could be stored, and used for kindling next winter.

I was interested to see if I could do this, since I know my upper body is getting weaker, but in the end, I managed about an hour and a half on each of the separate days, before I was forced to give up and come in. I kept myself going by drinking pints of lime cordial out of a pewter tankard, and I must admit I found myself wishing it was cider.  Even more amazingly, on two out of the three days, I didn’t suffer afterwards, but on the third day, unlike Jesus, I did find it very difficult to rise again. Judicious application of paracetamol to the digestive system, and thence distribution to the nervous system, solved the problem for a while.

It’s been a great week, though, weather wise, and also I now have nine lavender bushes to go in my formal garden, when we get it built. It reminded me several times of the description of July from The Once and Future King by T H White.

It was July, and real July weather, such they had in Old England. Everybody went bright brown, like Red Indians, with startling teeth and flashing eyes. The dogs moved about with their tongues hanging out, or lay panting in bits of shade, while the farm horses sweated through their coats and flicked their tails and tried to kick the horse-flies off their bellies with great hind hoofs. In the pasture field, the cows were on the gad, and could be seen galloping around with their tails in the air.

In fact, it’s been so good that we have, on a couple of occasions, questioned whether it’s worth the effort to actually spend several days getting the camper ready and going off to Arran. It’s not that we don’t want to go, it’s the effort of getting everything together, and also the fact that it is quite agreeable just having days where, yes, I still have to work, but Deb can be pottering in the garden, or carrying out tree surgery, or cooking on a fire-pit outside on the decking. The problem is of course if we don’t go to Arran, then come that dreary period between November and February, we’ll feel cheated.

So we’re in a bit of a bind, really. A bit like the anonymous Anglo-Saxon poet who wrote The Seafarer, where he talks about the cuckoo singing, luring the sailor away from home, and off down the sea-road, since that was the sign that the summertime was here, and thus the time for long sea voyages.

I hope you noticed, by the way, that when I mentioned tree surgery back there, I saved you the tedious joke about wanting to be a tree surgeon but being unable to stand the sight of sap. Maybe I should have made more of it, because there has been very little in the way of jokes this week in the wider world at large. Not many laughs at all.

Theresa May has announced that the UK will not invoke Article 50 and begin the formal process of Brexit from the EU this year. Meanwhile in the background, nastiness rumbles on, on all sides.  A UKIP councillor in Kent made a social media posting calling for remain voters to be killed in order to speed up the process of exit. He later claimed this was a joke, although I guess you had to be there. You never know with UKIP. I get the feeling that the policy making process in this party of the irrelevant is to make some sort of outrageous statement, then, if it’s howled down and ridiculed, claim it’s a joke, but if it isn’t, it goes in the next manifesto. 

Continental snottiness has continued as well, with Spain saying it will veto any Brexit negotiations that don’t hand back Gibraltar, and the French doing one of their many work-to-rules, this time on border checks on UK tourists crossing over from Dover, leading to 10 hour delays. Welcome to the brave new world of Brexit. I don’t know why there is any particular rush to invoke Article 50 anyway. People like me, who voted “Remain” in order to safeguard the economic future of our country, had to put up with 41 years of Brexiteers whinging about imaginary news stories concerning straight bananas and the EU forcing everybody to sing “Baa Baa Ethnic Sheep” or be taken to the European Court of Human Rights (which has nothing to do with the EU, but that’s another story.)

I sense, however, a further souring of the mood, if such a thing were even possible. I ventured to ask, on Boorish Johnson’s Facebook page, if someone could give me a date on which the £350million a week extra will start to be paid into the NHS. It seemed a fair question. A perfectly reasonable question. After all, Old Haystack-Hair had spent the previous three months driving round England in a big red bus with that very same promise plastered all down the side. For asking, though, I was told to stop nit picking, and get on with helping to make Britain great again! Sorry chum, not my circus, not my monkeys. It’s going to be bad enough for me and mine when the economy starts tanking, don’t expect me to clean up your mess as well. Britain was, and is, still, great. It’s just suffering from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the foot. And my definition of greatness doesn’t involve doing up my tie and signing the national anthem. Anyway, I intend to carry on asking the question until someone gives me an answer, although I suspect I already know what that will be.

All this talk of “taking back our country” and “making it great again” has been replicated, indeed even amplified, in the USA this week with the coronation of Donald Trump as the republican party candidate. He and his supporters continue to preach hate and division, leavened with generous dollops of racism and sexism, while outside in the streets, the whole country seems to be a hair’s breadth away from a full scale racial war.

This week in Miami, police shot and wounded a man, who was black, who was lying on his back in the road, with both his arms raised in surrender, and who was shouting “don’t shoot me”.  The reason he was in the road was because one of the people who he cared for, who suffers from Autism, was sitting in the road and would not get up. He had ventured there to try and recover him. When asked about the incident afterwards, the police apparently said that it had been a mistake, and they’d actually been trying to hit the other guy, the Autism sufferer!

I do, seriously, fear for America, especially if Trump comes to power. He is talking about unilaterally withdrawing from NATO. He’s said he wants to make Muslims wear badges so they can be identified in the street. And of course, he wants to build his bloody wall. It’s tempting to laugh about it and say he is a complete nutcase, a fruitcake, but as history tells us, there is a long and depressing list of people who were originally written off as buffoons who then went on to cause untold misery and suffering for millions. I hardly need make the obvious analogy with 1930s Germany.  And so, once again, Oh America my friend, and so once again, you are fighting us all. How did you come, to trade the fiddle for the drum, as Joni Mitchell might have asked at this point, if she were here right now.

Back here, the Labour Party continues its attempts to make itself a completely unelectable laughing stock. The Tories must be chortling into their cornflakes. Angela Eagle has dropped out. Not so much landed as crashed and burned. Now we have Owen Smith, so the Labour leadership contest is starting to look like the choice between Woody Allen and Obi-Wan-Kenobi, except that Woody Allen is a lot funnier, and a lot more talented, than Owen Smith.  And of course, all the while this is going on, the Tories are having a free ride of it, and, Brexit notwithstanding, we now have one of the most right-wing cabinets of recent years.

As it happens, thanks to the mindless “this is what you were doing/saying a year ago” feature on Facebook, up popped, this week, a quotation from John McDonnell, in the context of last year’s election contest. He was speaking in the House of Commons against the Tory proposals on the Welfare Bill.

I make this clear: I would swim through vomit to vote against the Bill, and listening to some of the nauseating speeches tonight, I think we might have to. Poverty in my constituency is not a lifestyle choice; it is imposed on people. We hear lots about how high the welfare bill is, but let us understand why that is the case. The housing benefit bill is so high because for generations we have failed to build council houses, we have failed to control rents and we have done nothing about the 300,000 properties that stand empty in this country. Tax credits are so high because pay is so low. The reason why pay is so low is that employers have exploited workers and we have removed the trade union rights that enabled people to be protected at work. Fewer than a third of our workers are now covered by collective bargaining agreements. Unemployment is so high because we have failed to invest in our economy, and we have allowed the deindustrialisation of the north, Scotland and elsewhere. That is why the welfare bill is so high, and the Bill does as all other welfare reform Bills in recent years have done and blames the poor for their own poverty, not the system.

It’s a sad fact that, fifteen months later, the fruitcakes of UKIP had successfully managed to blame all of these ills, the real causes of which are set out so clearly above, on immigrants, and set off a chain of events that will lead us all into a very uncertain future.

But never mind. Put out more flags. Pippa Middleton is engaged, and we are going to make Britain great again. Yeah, right. Actually, a story was reported from a lake in Suffolk this week which summed up, for me, the very essence of Britishness in many ways. A model boat club’s members are in the habit of sailing their (in some cases very expensive) scale model yachts on the local lake. However, also on the lake lives a swan, in fact, probably more than one, no doubt with attendant cygnets. This swan doesn’t like the model boats, and so far has attacked and sunk eight of them. Outraged, the model boat club has written to the Queen to complain, because by ancient statute, the Queen owns all the swans in England, and there is in fact a member of the Royal Household called the Swan-Upper, whose primary duty is to manage the movement of young swans up and down the reaches of the Thames near Windsor. It dates back probably to Henry VIII, who was quite partial to consuming swan, chips and mushy peas of a Friday night, while he was deciding whose head to snick off the following week.

It really does have it all, though. Outraged middle-class hobbyists, the clash with nature, the appeal to the Crown by ancient statute, the whole storm-in-a-teacup-ness of it all. It would make a great 1950s Ealing comedy, with Alec Guinness as the Hon. Sec of the Boat Club, and Dame Edith Evans as The Queen. No wonder foreigners shake their heads at the sheer inexplicableness of the English character. As if voting for Brexit wasn’t enough. Anyway, my vote is with the swan, but then I have always supported the right to arm bears.

The patriotic spirit, if you can call it that, was also present this week at the funeral of 95-year-old Stewart Cooney, a former gunner in the RA, who served in the Second World War and who had died, alone, with no family, in a nursing home. There was the by-now-common appeal on social media for people to go to his funeral, and a predictably large turnout ensued. I may have been in a cynical and warty mood that day, but I found myself thinking it was a pity that none of the people putting comments like “RIP brave soldier” on Facebook, or turning out to watch the ceremony, didn’t give so much as a stuff when he was alive and probably lonely and alone in the nursing home. But then that’s just me. Actually, though, it isn’t. John Pudney says something very similar in Johnny Head-In-Air:

Fetch out no shroud
For Johnny-in-the-cloud;
And keep your tears
For him in after years.

Better by far,

For Johnny the bright star,

To keep your head,

And see his children fed.

This is not to denigrate the actions of Mr Cooney in the war, of course. My dad was also in the Royal Artillery, as it happens, which is probably what actually caught my attention about the article in the first place. And, as my dad would no doubt be the first to say, if he were here, and I so wish he was, if it hadn’t been for his generation and the sacrifices they endured to stop Hitler in his tracks, I wouldn’t be able to sit here today making sarky comments about what passes for the government.

Anyway, this is supposed to be a religious blog, although I don’t see, personally, how you can separate religion out from everything else and keep it in a little bubble. Those who express concern about my spiritual well-being will be pleased to know I have managed to do two eikons this week, in between sawing up wood and editing manuscripts. I think my efforts might have had more success if I’d edited the wood and sawed up the manuscripts, but again, that’s just the Grinch in me speaking.

I wasn’t ever intending to do one of them, and doing it delayed me finishing the other, but the news of nine people being killed at random in a McDonalds, of all places, in Munich, by some deranged wingnut with a gun, once more brought into focus for me the question of where was God in all of this. He can’t have nodded, blinked, or turned his back, because he just doesn’t do that. It’s not in the job description. So once more I was forced to conclude, against my will, that it must all be part of some vast plan of which we are unaware. It must be a bloody odd plan, though, or we only see the very bad bits.

Or, of course, there is no God, and bad shit happens at random to good people for no reason. At times, I could almost believe this. But then I think of those all-too-infrequent times in my own life when I have known beyond all doubt that, in the words of Juliana of Norwich, all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well, and in my darkest moments I cling to this, with all the fervour of a shipwrecked sailor clinging to a lump of flotsam.

Being preoccupied with these sorts of thoughts led me on, in the way my thoughts often do, to the refugees who have drowned in the Mediterranean, nameless and unmourned.  Ten days ago, the bodies of four adults and two children were washed up on Lesbos, after their dinghy apparently capsized.  Once again, I thought, where was God when this was happening, and I recalled the passage in Luke 8: 22-25 where Jesus is in the boat with the disciples and a storm springs up, and they wake him, and he quells the winds and waters. What if Jesus was in the boat with the refugees? And once I had thought it, I had to paint it. It’s now being auctioned in favour of The Hummingbird Project, a Buxton-based charity that sends supplies and aid out to the refugee camps, so even if they get £10 for it, that’ll be £10 they didn’t have this morning.

Today is, I discover, the Feast of St John Boste, who was a Catholic martyr and one of the “Forty Martyrs” of England and Wales.  When I say “Forty Martyrs” to myself out loud, it is very tempting to hear it as “Four Tomatoes” and get into a sort of Two Ronnies “Four Candles” vibe. I must be in a fey mood, today.

Anyway, the story of St John Boste is a reminder, perhaps, that we shouldn’t be too precious in our haste to condemn the excesses of zealots such as ISIS and the like. We have our own skeletons, and our own cupboards.  John Boste had the misfortune to live through the years of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, when people were often forced to change their religion more often than their underwear. It is almost inconceivable today that all this once happened in the name of religion. I may well have doubts about whether the blood and wine at communion actually does become the literal body and blood of Christ at the moment of consecration, but I can safely say I have never felt the slightest urge to wield an axe and decapitate those who say it does.

Of course, it wasn’t just religion. Power, and politics came into it, too. Ever since Henry VIII had decided to go it alone with the Church of England, there was always the threat, sometimes real, sometimes perceived, of a Catholic backlash and invasion.  

Boste was born at Dufton, in what was then Westmoreland, and was educated at Oxford. Following conversion to the Catholic faith, he went to Reims, in France, where he was ordained in 1581.  At a time when being a Catholic priest was a treasonable offence punishable by death, he worked undercover in the North of England, saying mass clandestinely for recusant families and their households.

He managed to carry out this very dangerous undercover existence for just over a decade, but he was eventually betrayed and captured. He was taken to London and tortured, including being put on the rack, and then returned to County Durham, where he was hanged, drawn and quartered on 24^th July 1594. His head was placed on a spike at Durham’s Framwellgate, but later stolen by person or persons unknown.

Boste’s execution seems to have been both brutal and botched. According to contemporary accounts, he sang the Angelus as he mounted the ladder to the scaffold, and his last words were an attempt to assert the primary nature of his mission:

My function is to invade souls, not to meddle in temporal invasions

Unfortunately that wasn’t going to butter any parsnips in a country riven with xenophobic paranoia, where to be a Catholic at the time was automatically to be an enemy of the state. The executioner cut the rope after only a brief time of hanging, and Boste fell to the ground, where the remaining elements of the sentence were swiftly carried out, ending up with his body being hacked into four quarters and his head being displayed for the crowd.

So, yes, ISIS don’t have the monopoly on brutal murder in the name of religion. Obviously 400 years of “development” and “progress” separates us from the grim days of the reformation, whereas the likes of ISIS are still stuck in the bad old days, or so we like to think, at any rate.  It’s never that simple though. In the bad old days of our dark ages, it was the Muslim world that kept the collective wisdom of Greece and Rome safe from being lost, and looking at Donald Trump’s potential vision of America in the future, I think you could quite easily be forgiven for thinking we’d somehow wound time backwards to the era of the Salem witch trials.

Considering it’s been, overall, quite a good week, in that I have achieved things, and we have been blessed with good weather to boot, I should really be in a better mood than I am today. Partly, of course, it’s because of that dilemma I described earlier: not wanting to deprive Debbie of the holiday she deserves, but feeling depressed, oppressed, and apprehensive about the prospect of going away. Well, not the going away, as such, but the mountain of preparation which must fill next week, if we are to get away anywhere at all.

So, next week will be a busy week in the Holme Valley as well, and I also really ought to do something about my petition, which closes on 6^th August and still needs 87,000 more signatures to be considered for a debate in parliament.

Right now, though, it’s a peaceful Sunday afternoon, if a little overcast, and I have an eikon to varnish and some lavender bushes to plant out. So I think I’ll leave it there for this week. If you are looking for inspiration, I don’t seem to have that much to spare, but if I were you, I would take solace in small things, these fragments we can shore against our ruin. Meanwhile, I’ll be listening out for the cuckoo.

Epiblog for the Feast of St Hedwig of Poland

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. This will be a short blog, as I have some eikon painting to finish off, and later, when Debbie gets back with Misty and Zak, we’re planning to do some gardening, as summer seems finally to have come, at last. It’s July, of course, the holiday month, so it’s only right and proper. Even the squirrels seem to have gone on holiday, as they haven’t been around much. Maybe they have a second tree somewhere that they go to from time to time, in the same way that people in Hampstead who live in a council house have another council house in Wales that they go to at weekends.

Matilda has been enjoying the outdoor life and making the most of it – although, for Matilda, making the most of it involves nothing more than extending the time that she spends curled up and semi-snoozing under the overhanging fern next to the large planter on the decking. She likes it there, she can watch the world come and go, and no effort on her part is required apart from occasionally to get up, stretch herself in the way cats do, and toddle through the open door to sit expectantly beside the magically-refilling cat food bowl.

Misty, and to a lesser extent Zak, have also been finding that having the conservatory door open all the time is something outside their normal range of experience.  Misty seems to relish being able to go out on to the decking and check that all is well there, in the way Border collies do. Zak is content to sprawl out on the dog-bed, chilling, just maybe keeping an eye on the door from time to time, in case anyone comes through it who might have a treat for him, or want to take him walkies.

As for us, we the humans, we’ve been trying to rebuild our strength. Next week we really do need to start serious holiday preparations if we are going to get off anywhere at all in the camper this summer, let alone Scotland. The trouble is, as always, that when it’s peeing down with rain nobody feels like traipsing in and out carrying stuff, getting gear together, organising food, and all the other tedious chores that make preparing such a bind, and yet when it’s fine, you feel that the day would be better spent in a little light gardening, or in my case doing some baking, or painting eikons, anything, really, rather than traipsing in and out carrying stuff, getting gear together, organising food, and all the other tedious chores that make preparing such a bind! What will probably happen is what has happened in previous years – we’ll get to a point where we say right! And then we will start in earnest. But I think we’re a few days off yet.

I’m still ploughing on though and making progress in getting rid of loose ends. Of the four books I was working on simultaneously a month ago, one is published, one is at press, one is at final page proof state and I am proof reading the fourth (at about 100 of 399 pages done so far). So, I felt a small pat on the back might be in order. Of course, as always, the real challenge is to turn that work into money, with sales this autumn and running up to Christmas.

Always assuming we still have an economy. Or even a country. It’s been one of those weeks when my reaction to events in the outside world has ping-ponged wildly between “OMG” and “WTF”, if I may deploy two rather over-used computer keyboard acronyms.

On Monday, Andrea Leadsom, the wicked witch of the Brexit, pulled out of the Tory leadership race, leaving Theresa May unopposed. After a short period of head-scratching, and much consultation of the rules, the 1922 committee (which sounds obviously wonderfully democratic, doesn’t it) decided that meant she’d won, and was now Prime Minister. Well, not exactly there and then, because Cameron wanted one more day to have a go at Prime Minister’s Question Time, and to pop round to the Palace and say goodbye to the Queen.

By Wednesday, however, I found myself living in a country committed to a Brexit I didn’t vote for, with a Tory government I didn’t vote for, led by a Prime Minister nobody voted for. I can only hope all these people who voted to leave the “undemocratic” EU are revelling in all this “control” they have wrested back!

May then caused a blip on the internet on Thursday evening when she appointed Boris Johnson foreign secretary. I kid you not.  Thousands of twitter users in the ISIS network were no doubt left scratching their heads and wondering what the hell was wrong with Twitter and had another bit of Michael Jackson died or something.  The first reaction in our household, once I had restored my lower jaw to its right and natural place, was that it must be a joke. But, sadly, no. Boris. Johnson. Is. The. Foreign. Secretary.  I was moved to speculate what the rest of her cabinet would look like; Vlad the Impaler in charge of the NHS, perhaps, with Gary Glitter as the Education Minister?

There is also going to be a separate ministry just for Brexit, headed by David Davies, a man who, apparently, until May of this year, had no idea that it was not possible to negotiate with EU states singly to establish separate trading agreements, the negotiation must be en bloc with all of them. This doesn’t bode well for his future in the job. But apparently we have opened trade negotiations with Canada. So we need to buy shares in thermal underwear manufacturers, except that these days, they’re all in Bombay, not Bradford.  Davies says we will invoke article 50 this year, May says she is in no hurry and will wait until the time is right. It’s nice to see the government speaking with one (or two, or three…) voices.

Boris’s new career got off to an eventful start with an evening event at the French embassy in London on Bastille Day, during which he immediately went off message to stress that EU nationals in the UK would be allowed to remain provided the arrangement was reciprocated by the EU (I can’t believe he had discussed this with May in the 90 minutes between being appointed and opening his fatuous mouth). His reward for this was being roundly booed by the audience.

All of which was quite amusing, in a clownish, buffoonish sort of way, except that then the next two days intruded real events into the slightly Ruritanian atmosphere, in the form of a mass-murder in Nice and a failed Turkish coup.

Because I was having massive computer problems (thanks, Bill Gates and your sodding windows update) on Friday morning, I had no idea that some maniac had used a hired lorry as a weapon and mown down 84 people until well after lunchtime.  By then, the attack was already being linked to ISIS. In fact, the same process was going on that happened after the Orlando attack – even though there were strong indications that the perpetrator might have been some sort of unhinged wingnut with a bee in his bonnet who was a few Corinthians short of a Bible and not particularly “Islamic” or “Jihadi”, people have been quick to rush to judgement. He may well turn out to have been “radicalised” whatever that means, although he didn’t apparently get flagged in any French police records other than for routine offences. ISIS claimed responsibility, but then, like Mandy Rice-Davies, they would say that, wouldn’t they?

Nigel Farage, speaking from his new standpoint of complete irrelevancy, blamed the refugees, conveniently ignoring the actual nationality of the perpetrator. But Nigel Farage in any case is now just yet another superannuated bar-room bore.  Not that I ever cared what he said when he was leading the Barmy Party.  I don’t know what Trump said about it, when his aides had explained to him where Nice was, but no doubt the NRA said that the tragedy could have been prevented if everybody else in the crowd had also had a truck.

Even while France was still counting the cost, Boris was no doubt disturbed by a further late-night phone call from his “Sir Humpreys” at the FCO to tell him that Turkey was imploding. As it happened, the coup fizzled out, and the elected dictator Erdogan has spent the last two days making sure that anyone vaguely connected with the events has been exterminated. This is the country that (according to the Brexit campaign) was on the verge of joining the EU. I think not.

The prize for bewildering and semi-tragic stupidity though, has to go to the Labour Party. I am so glad I resigned when they voted to bomb Syria, and also that I didn’t re-join in order to re-vote for Jeremy Corbyn in the re-run of the leadership re-election.  At a time when the Tories are basically about to give the green light to the Brexit campaign to make the poorest and most disadvantaged in our country pay the price of the economic chaos which is going to be unleashed; at a time when lunatics are causing mayhem in the name of “Islam” even though nowhere in the Koran does it say “hire a lorry and run over 84 people”; at a time when a strategically important ally on the edge of Europe is in meltdown, the Labour Party NEC spent most of a day closeted away like the College of Cardinals, trying to decide whether to allow Corbyn’s name to even be on the ballot!

The more I see of the finagling and the shenanigans surrounding the Labour leadership, the more I am convinced that someone has been putting LSD in the tea urn at Labour Party HQ.  I’m increasingly reminded of that Monty Python sketch about the Judean People’s Liberation Front and the People’s Front for the Liberation of Judea. We’ve just had one very public evisceration of a political party in the form of the Tory squabbles over Europe, and now Labour seem keen to follow suit.  All these differing interpretations of arcane rules of who can and can’t be on the ballot, which local parties can and can’t be allowed or trusted to meet, which members can be suspended for writing satirical poems about members of the PLP, or for displaying “eye-rolling and negative body language” remind me of medieval theologians arguing about how many angels could dance on the head of a pin, or the ones who tried to compile Indices Indicorum and all went mad.

There are still two or three things Labour could do to make themselves look even more stupid and unelectable, but they are almost there, not quite, but as near as makes no difference. The PLP should pass a motion to change the name to The Paedophile Party or something equally repugnant; they should instruct all their members to lob half bricks on sight at passing kittens, push old ladies off the pavement and into fast moving traffic, and to grow an beard and then daub it with their own excrement.  Maybe they could strip off, smear their bodies with woad, and sacrifice a baby on College Green or something.  Either way, they are as near to being completely stupid, useless, ineffectual, crap, irrelevant and idiotic as it is possible for one parliamentary Labour party to be. They have elevated “stupid” to the status of an art form.  Although, to keep the contest of who can best be the intellectual equivalent of a breeze block alive, on the Tory side, Andrea Leadsom, despite having had the political equivalent of Dorothy’s house fall on her, has risen, vampire-like, to say that there shouldn’t be male nannies because they might just be paedophiles.

So, it’s been a foul week in the world, and I am in a foul mood with it. Plus I seem to have developed, possibly as a result of trying to cut corners and get everything finished off, the gift of blundering forward, putting my foot in it, and upsetting people. Usually the ones I would least wish to offend.  Perhaps someone has been putting LSD in my tea-urn as well.

Today is the feast of St Hedwig of Poland. Hedwig was the Queen of Poland and has been described as “a model of faith”. She was the daughter of King Louis I of Hungary, ascending the Polish throne at the age of only thirteen. She married Jagiello of Lithuania, but only after he became a Christian, and then actively promoted Christianity in Lithuania.  She was born in 1373, and died in 1399, so she didn’t have much time to make an impact. As well as being the patron saint of Queens, well, someone has to be, I suppose, she is also invoked as the patron saint of a united Europe, which is quite spooky, given the week we’ve just had.

To be honest, I know very little about the history of Christianity in Lithuania, and I am now at the age where, like Homer Simpson, every time I learn something new, it pushes some old stuff out of my head, so I don’t suppose I’ll be rectifying that any time soon.  My devotions, such as they are this week, have been the usual round of solitary prayer and, in what is laughingly described as my “spare time” painting eikons.  We had an all-to-brief but nevertheless very welcome flying visit from Owen this week, who brought me a dozen panels of reclaimed timber from his own timber store at his home in the Brecon Beacons, so I have been busy working on two or three at once.  Much to the amusement of my wife. I happened to venture aloud, the other day, that I wondered what the collective noun for eikons was. “In your case, it’s a ‘shite’,” she replied.

It’s also been yet another week of anniversaries. They do tend to cluster at this time of year. So much so that July is probably not only the holiday month but also the anniversary month.  This week it’s been St Swithun’s day, where, by ancient tradition, whatever the weather is like on that day, so it will remain for the next 40 days.  It’s a significant anniversary to me, not because of my fanatical devotion to obscure, weather-predicting Anglo-Saxon saints, but because on that day, July 15^th, six years ago, I was carted off to Huddersfield Royal Infirmary in an ambulance with the blue light and the siren and all, for an operation which saved my life and repaired a perforated intestine.  It was when my body failed to respond in the weeks that followed to the physio needed to get me back on my feet, and it was investigated further, that was when I got my official diagnosis of Muscular Dystrophy. Or, to be more correct, since there are several sorts, Facioscapularhumeral Muscular Dystrophy. Well, if you are going to have an incurable disease you might as well have one with a long wacky name that only you and about another 1000 people in the UK suffer from. One likes to keep it exclusive, darling.

So I have been a little too preoccupied with my own plight, this week, to wonder where God was when that bastard in Nice was driving down the pavement and mowing down innocent bystanders.  Not that I could have explained it if I’d had the entire week to do nothing other than contemplate it. The danger is, as well, that our humanity is becoming compromised by the regularisation of these vents. Well, mine is, obviously I can’t speak for you. But it happens over and over: it starts with unconfirmed reports and posts on social media. Then the dreadful tragedy unfolds, then the forces of “law and order” eliminate the perpetrator, then the commentators and politicians have their say while everyone picks up the pieces and buries the dead, people change their status on Facebook to commemorate the lost, and we all sit and wait apprehensively for the next one.

I haven’t got time today to go into why it should be, to go back to first principles and ultimate causes. I suspect, in any event, that the ultimate cause lies in what Christians might call “a fallen universe” coupled with our inability to understand the mind of God, which refuses to bend logically to our human definitions of right and wrong. All of this is of no comfort whatsoever to someone who has had their loved ones shot, blown up or run over, and, what’s more, it opens up huge theological questions to which I have no answer, and to which there may be no answer.

Especially on a day like today when there’s gardening to be done. All I can think of at times like the baffling febrile hopeless despairing ones we are currently enduring, is to concentrate on the small victories, the unasked-for random acts of kindness, the help that came from an unexpected quarter, and affirm in the face of all evidence to the contrary, that these are the things that matter and the things that will continue to matter, and that all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well. “What will survive of us, is love”.

Epiblog for the Feast of St Veronica Giuliani

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. The weather seems to have settled into a routine, and so do we. Next week we really must start “griddling our lions” and begin preparations for the Scotland trip, but for now, it’s been a time of furiously tying up loose ends, punctuated by odd moments of tranquillity, baking, painting and gardening.

Gardening is of course weather-dependent, and the weather has not always obliged. Debbie has actually rigged up two tarpaulins over the decking right outside the conservatory, so that in theory she can sit out there even when it’s raining. This hasn’t yet been tested out in practice, only in theory, at least not by Debbie. Matilda, however, is a different matter, and whenever she has been outside she scuttles under the tarp as the first raindrops fall, and sits there looking smug and self-satisfied, as only a cat can do, especially a cat who seems to think she thought of the whole idea in the first place.

The squirrels and the birds have been back from time to time, but Matilda ignores them, because she  has a nice sheltered spot where she curls up, next to the planter that has a big overhanging fern, which serves to deflect the raindrops that come in at an angle, and miss the tarp. All in all, I’d say Matilda has got it sussed.

Misty has been on various walks and runs, although nothing particularly new or spectacular. Her highlights of the week so far have included rolling in a cow pat, and lying down to cool off in a stagnant puddle of mud, the latter of which exploits led to her being given an impromptu shower with the hose pipe that someone had kindly left attached to the tap at the top end of Lockwood Cemetery. Considering the  liking that order collies seem to have generally for rolling in disgusting substances, you have to wonder why God/evolution/whoever designed them with gleaming white bits.

In the wider world, talking of filth and mire, the Tory leadership crisis goes on, as does the Labour leadership crisis. There is a real sense now of the country drifting out of control, with no leadership whatsoever on any side. David Cameron has gone off to Lanzarote on holiday and left us all to it. In this Tory version of Game of Thrones, Michael Gove was eliminated. I enjoyed typing those words so much, I am going to do it again. Michael Gove was eliminated.  Oh, and over in the UKIP corner, Nigel Farage resigned as leader. Having created chaos, anarchy, and spoiled the prospects of an entire generation, possibly an entire nation, he decided that his work here was done, and he did a Johnson.  Goodbye and good riddance. Flush hard, it’s a long way to the outfall.

Before he went though, he did have one last bleat. Theresa May, jockeying for position in the leadership contest, has been making hawkish noises about getting rid of EU nationals living in the UK, post-Brexit. Farage, who has a German wife, complained about this announcement. This is the man, let us pause to remember, who a fortnight ago was standing in front of a poster showing an alleged and largely photoshopped “swarm” of immigrants that were reducing the UK to “Breaking Point”.  Spot the difference, Oh yes, all the people on the “Breaking Point” poster were brown. That must be it.

Who would ever have thought, though, that Theresa May would turn out to be the best option for anything. She has been made so by the scary loopiness of her sole remaining opponent, Andrea Leadsom, who, until recently, was known as Andrea who? She is turning out to be the UK’s answer to Sarah Palin, although God alone knows what the question was. Frankie Boyle has suggested, rather brilliantly, that Andrea Leadsom was cooked up by Nazi scientists in an effort to counteract Dame Vera Lynn. One thing is certainly true. If Theresa May is a hawk, then Andrea Leadsom has the air of a pterodactyl nursing a secret sorrow.

The Labour Party, meanwhile, continued bickering amongst themselves. After all, it’s so much easier than actually opposing all the things that are wrong with this country to act like an extended family at loggerheads at a wedding reception or a Christmas dinner where none of them gets on, nobody really wanted to be invited, and some of them haven’t spoken to each other since some obscure row about Barbara Castle’s hairdo at conference in 1953.

Corbyn, however, continues to grow in my estimation. They should send him in to do the negotiations over our exit terms. He makes General De Gaulle with his “non” look like a vacillating waverer.  On the day Angela Eagle was threatening to launch a full-blown leadership challenge, Corbyn went to a meeting of his Allotment Association.  That’s the sort of grasp of priorities that appeals to me. I can quite honestly say, here and now, that if Eagle wins a leadership contest against Corbyn, in the teeth of opposition from the membership at large, and takes the Labour Party back to the bad old days of being in favour of benefit cuts, bombing the Middle East, and austerity, then I, personally, will never vote for them again.

Talking of Labour and the bad old days, this was of course the week when seven years of compiling a million word report stating the bloody obvious came to fruition, and the Chilcot Report was published, telling us all what we knew already.  There were no WMDs and the whole thing was George Bush’s idea, and we followed him more or less willingly down the primrose path of dalliance. On the two crucial issues which are still unanswered, 13 years later – was the war legal, and at what point did Blair know, or at least suspect, that the intelligence was faulty – Chilcot remains as mute as the Sphinx, and as enigmatic.

My own view has never changed. Iraq was the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time, against the wrong enemy, and it has made everything in that area worse. True, Hussein is gone, but the manner of his unseating undermined international law and started us off down the road of pre-emptive drone strikes and extra-judicial murder.  Not to mention ISIS. I would have had a lot more respect for Blair if he’d just said, straight off the bat, “Look, Bush is a mad bastard who won’t listen to reason, and he is going to do this anyway, and we need the US on our side, because apart from anything else, in a few years we’ll need their help to replace Trident, so we haven’t really got a lot of choice.

Blair has always maintained he never “sexed up” the intelligence, and I do believe, here, that he is telling the truth, albeit in a rather selective and duplicitous way. He didn’t actually augment anything, he just picked the best bits out of what he had on offer, uncritically, and regurgitated them, while ignoring anything that might have contradicted his case. It was entirely in the spirit of The Latest Decalogue by Arthur Hugh Clough

False witness not to bear be strict;

And cautious, ere you contradict.

His contention is, and always has been, that he only realised the intelligence was flawed much later. My contention is, and always has been, that he probably realised it quite early on in the process, and, being pragmatic because of our need of the US (see above) he chose to cherry pick only the bits that supported his case, and not to challenge or independently investigate any of those, either. No-one will ever know. Barring some miraculous Wikileak of a “smoking gun” type memo or email, all of which will in practice have been shredded long, long ago, it remains a matter between Mr Blair and his maker. Curiously, no interviewer has ever asked him that one crucial question that would go a long way towards settling it – “Mr Blair, on what day, at what time, did you first realise that the intelligence about weapons of mass destruction was a confection of fairy tales?”

In the post-Brexit fallout, arguing about the events of 13 years ago and who said what to whom and when all seems a bit, well, almost self-indulgent, with the pound in free-fall and the first signs of a creeping economic malaise as, for instance, science and technology generally began to take stock of the loss of EU grants and pan-European cooperation. Obviously it’s not self-indulgent if you had a family member who died in Iraq, or indeed, on 7/7, a direct result of Iraq and another sombre anniversary that occurred this week, but it suddenly seems a long time ago.

I wish I could say that things had got better in the interim, but the appalling surge in racist abuse on the streets, on public transport, and in shops continues here, largely because the pond life who indulge in racist abuse now feel their practice has been vindicated and legitimised by the “leave” vote. A doctor was abused in the street in his native Plymouth by a mad racist granny who accused him of “looking Polish”!

Vile as it is, at least the post-Brexit racism hasn’t yet developed into a full scale race war, of the sort it seemed – at one point at least – was going to engulf Dallas during the week.  Sadly, however, I feel that the only difference is one of scale, and of access to semi-automatic weapons. A racist fruitcake with a bee in his bonnet in this country has to be determined enough to order in the parts of a self-assembly gun by mail order, then spend hours putting the thing together, before unleashing its horror on an innocent MP going about her business. In Dallas, he could probably have walked into Wal-Mart and come out toting an assault rifle. The NRA blamed the Dallas shootings on the fact that the protest march which sparked them off was a “No Gun Zone” or some such malarkey. Go figure, as they say in Dallas.

The situation isn’t helped by commentators who have attacked the “Black Lives Matter” campaign as being in itself racist. The mistake they are making is assuming that the slogan means only black lives matter, or black lives matter more than other lives. It means nothing of the sort. It means, if it means anything, that black lives matter just as much as white lives, all life is sacred, and it would be good if we could get to a point where black people didn’t feel threatened by the trigger-happy actions of a minority – and I stress minority – of law enforcement agents who seem to have fallen into a shoot first and ask questions afterwards mentality. But that’s a bit long to put on a t-shirt. Too long, even, for a nightshirt. Like all slogans, it is capable of misinterpretation, though, and of being taken to mean whatever the listener wants it to mean. See also “Take Back Control!”

So another week of febrile dog-days slips past, and actually I have made some progress this week. I’ve got the proofs off of one book, I have seven-eighths finished another, and I’ve printed out the third, awaiting my scribblings. It’s all positive stuff, and I’ve even painted a couple of eikons as well. All I need to do is keep it up for another 10 days or so, and then we can begin a different type of struggle for survival, at the side of Kilbrannan Sound, watching the seagulls. And if you think I am exaggerating, then pause to reflect how many times a holiday with Debbie has morphed seamlessly into an episode of I Survived.

Today is the feast of St Veronica Guiliani.  She was born in Mercatelli, in Italy, in 1660, into a large family. She was one of three siblings who entered holy orders. At the age of three she was apparently already demonstrating her compassion for he poor by putting aside a portion of her food and giving away her clothes to poorer children she met. At the age of 17, in 1677, and against her father’s wishes, as he had wanted her to marry, she entered the convent of the Poor Clares at Citta di Castello in Umbria. In her early years in the convent she worked as a portress, in the kitchen, in the infirmary, and in the sacristry. At the age of 34, she became Novice Mistress, then, in 1714, Abbess – a promotion she protested against and accepted unwillingly. 

Her story is of interest to me, and maybe of general interest, because she was one of those saints who are said, like St Padre Pio, to have developed the stigmata – the actual pattern of the wounds inflicted on Christ during his crucifixion, manifesting themselves on her body in response to her life of constant prayer.  In 1694, she developed the impression of a crown of thorns on her forehead, and in 1697, the marks of the five wounds on her hands, feet, and side.

In a move redolent of Father Ted, the Bishop at the time, who must have been Umbria’s version of Len Brennan, had her removed from the convent and placed under supervision, to try and catch her out and prove that she was faking it in some way. Eventually, he was forced to conclude that she wasn’t, and she was returned to her normal duties after a period of humiliating inaction. The remainder of her life was uneventful, and she eventually died on July 9^th, 1727, still in post, in the convent.  Apparently on her death, a mark of the cross was found on her heart.

For me, the interest lies not so much in the rather grisly aspects of the daily “nuts and bolts” of her stigmata, but that she seems – on the evidence of such accounts as we have – to have been one of these people who can bring about a change in their physical circumstances or environment purely by an effort of will.  This has been a basic, fundamental aspect of man’s relationship with what you might broadly call “otherness” since the days when cavemen painted pictures of successful hunts on the walls of their caves in order to bring about good fortune. By concentrating on a successful hunt and drawing it, they were “thinking it into existence”.

This isn’t a new idea – The Golden Bough by Sir James Fraser enumerates many, many examples of this type of thinking, which seems to be very deeply hard-wired into the human psyche.  What is interesting these days, though, is that we now might just have the first glimmerings through the world of particle physics, into how it might be possible to influence the perceived world simply by a massive and concentrated effort of the will  It’ll be a long long time before it’s fully understood, but if thoughts are merely a form of electrical energy and everything that we see around us is merely a shimmering mirage of electromagnetic particles, who is to say that the one may not influence the other, and that if you think about it long enough, and hard enough, over a period of many years, somehow the atoms of the palm of your hand transform themselves from atoms of skin to atoms of blood.

If this is within all of us, this capability, though the vast majority of us never attempt it and only a fraction of those who do attempt it ever succeed, then it also chimes in with the Neo-Platonist idea of God being present within all of us, and all we have to do is to find our way back through the maze by an effort of the will, to locate that divine chip off the old block, that divine spark, and tap in to it.

It’s an interesting concept (well, it is to me, anyway, I know you probably glazed over three paragraphs ago and I don’t blame you) because it also informs my idea of prayer. If, as Sister Wendy Beckett said, prayer isn’t simply handing big G a shopping list of the things you’d like today, please, but it’s more complicated than that, it consists of tuning into the divine and then channelling it asking God in effect to “stand with you” or with others during their difficulties or trials, then that too, it seems to me, could be part of the same process, a searching within yourself for the divine.

Yesterday was Baggis Day, the 11th anniversary of the death of Russell, the Baggis Cat, in 2005. It's funny, but life changed in many ways after that summer - it was the start of the 7 year battle with Barclays Bank, to name but one - and sometimes it seems it all began to turn to shit when little Baggis breathed his last.

He was the world's best bad cat. How can I enumerate his many peccadilloes? When but a kitting, he ate a GPO parcel band that had to be cut out of him in an operation that cost £127.00. Later, he managed to break his leg and got dehydrated by sitting in the window. One day I came home from work and found him on top of the wardrobe, where he had mountaineered, despite having a cast on his leg. One day he brought in a live frog from the pond and dropped it in Debbie's lap. That was quite amusing. He used to climb the net curtains at Crookes Lane, get to the top, turn round and come back down. He once sat on my shoulder while I stood to attention for the whole of the minute's silence at the Remembrance Service on TV.

RIP Baggis, me old chum. It was only the thought that if I didn't get out of bed and go to work then you would starve that kept me going in that terrible dark winter of 1992 when I almost gave up. For that, I owe you. Well died, old cat. And yes, I do pray for the repose of the soul of my dead cat, in fact I pray for all of them, and the dogs, even though I know it is highly inaccurate in theological terms. As I’ve said many times, I am not that interested in a heaven without dogs and cats.

Next week is going to be busy as well, but then that’s no surprise. It sometimes feels as if I could do with a holiday to get over just the preparations for going on holiday. But, it has to be done, even though I have to say that right now, I am far from being in a holiday mood.

But, it’s a relatively pleasant day, weather-wise. Matilda is sunning herself on the decking, Ellie is asleep on her bed, and Zak and Misty are off up Blackmoorfoot Reservoir with Deb. It’s probably the calm before the storm, but just for now I think I need to pause and maybe do a bit of soul searching to see if I can try and recapture some of that visionary gleam. Next week will come whether I want it to or not. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.

And if I can’t do that, at least I can savour the peace of a snoozy Sunday afternoon,  Sunday tea-time, with a cup of tea, a jam tart or two with maybe a blob of vegan cream, and Wimbledon burbling, its incomprehensible commentary turned down low, in the corner.  Summer days.

Epiblog for Misty's Birthday

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. Yes, I know I said I wouldn’t be writing a blog this week, but we are living in momentous times, and I feel a certain responsibility (to whom, I haven’t a clue) to at least put down my feelings about it all, as far as it is possible to do so.  Besides. It’s the dog’s birthday.

Summer remains patchy. Sometimes you look out of the conservatory onto the garden, and it’s bathed in beautiful warm mellow July sunlight. Twenty minutes later and it’s like a January day, with rain pelting down.  Some of the herbs have suffered, as the summer wore on – mainly the ones that like warm, Mediterranean shores.

Deb’s term has now officially finished, although she’s still having to go into College at odd moments to tie up loose ends, and pick up and drop off marking, and we’re now in that weird no-man’s land where we are gathering our strength to try and get the camper back on the road and head for Arran. As I said last week, though, there is a hell of a lot to do before that can happen, so there may not be a blog next week.

I’ve also been trying to get on with some long-term planning for the rest of this year, in amongst working on the books. This is a thoroughly depressing task, having to think about what I will be doing in November when it really will be freezing cold and pissing down outside.  And then the thought that November is only three months away hits you like a bucket of cold water.

So, in odd moments, I’ve also been trying to pause and savour what’s left of the summer. Make a fuss of Matilda when she curls up on her little blanket at night, and give thanks (to whom, again I haven’t a clue) that she is safe and warm indoors, unlike all the other poor cats who are living wild and feral, or shut up in the pound with an uncertain future.

There are now three squirrels that visit regularly, and I have now got to the stage where I can actually differentiate between them, physically. I haven’t got as far as giving them names, yet, as that really would be tantamount to taking responsibility for their wellbeing in an uncertain world, and I can’t really cope with my existing responsibilities as it is. They do come and look accusingly through the conservatory door, though, when there is no bird food in the tray.

“An uncertain world” also sums up what I have felt about the wider situation this week.  I have come to realise, I suppose, on mature reflection, as it say in all good last wills and testaments, that not all of the 52% of people who voted to leave the EU did so out of racist motives. We will never know the true percentage of those who did. The explosion of racist abuse since the referendum decision was announced points to the fact that there has been an ugly underseam of racism in the country for many months now. Stoked by the government’s own anti-immigrant propaganda, until they realised that all it was doing was recruiting people to the banner of UKIP, and stopped it.  Leavened, also, with a generous sprinkling of religious intolerance towards Muslims. And yes, I know that cuts both ways in some cases.

As to the remainder, who knows? People may have mistakenly believed all that guff about the £350million for the NHS, even though Farage was quicker than Usain Bolt off the starting blocks to distance himself from it, and Iain Duncan Smith suggested that what the people who voted “Leave” thought were promises were merely “a series of possibilities”.  When pressed further on the negotiations, old Irritable-Bowel went on to say that they would be using “experts” to help, which must have made Gove choke on his cornflakes if he was watching, as he’d just spent the last three weeks telling everyone that the country had had enough of experts!

Some people, of course, voted “Leave” simply to send a “message” to the likes of Cameron that their lives were total shit, they felt overlooked, neglected, taken for granted, and all of this was true. However, that wasn’t the question on the ballot paper, and their actions were about as useful to their future prospects, and mine, as someone who sees their train is heading for a wreck, and pulls the communication cord.

Some people may have voted “Leave” because they believed Boris Johnson’s twaddle about “taking back control”, even though I am not sure he knew what he meant by it. It sounded good, though. An empty slogan from an empty vessel. This view of the EU as faceless bureaucrats in other countries controlling everything we do, is one of the points I never really understood. The Commission is appointed by directly elected ministers from the member states, the European parliament is directly elected, and the council of ministers is directly elected. So far, it all sounds pretty democratic. On top of that anything we don’t like we can veto! How is this some kind of superstate overriding our interests?

Now, thanks to a heady mixture of xenophobia, jingoism, and economic illiteracy, we will see “sovereignty returned” from the “unelected” EU to the Queen (unelected) and the House of Lords (unelected) plus a parliament headed up in the autumn by a new prime minister (unelected, apart from by a few members of the 1922 Committee).  You could not make it up.

Several people have suggested, about the referendum, that I should “stop sulking” and “admit that I lost”, so I would just like to clear up a few things. I am not “sulking”; if anything, I think I am still in shock. It takes time to process something like this, and since in any event, my main preoccupation at all times is the immediate and long term survival and prospects of my family and friends, and since this decision will have a very bad effect on those prospects and that future, you might expect me to be making plans and processing it for a while yet. And yes, probably harbouring some kind of residual resentment towards the situation I now find myself in, and the inevitable additional hassle and worry it will cause me.

As to admitting that I lost, I freely admit that. Even the people who think they “won” this referendum, have lost. There will be no winners, as they will find out to their cost.  The worst aspect of seeing it in terms of “winning” has been, of course, the massive endorsement to free range, casual racism which the result has given to those with a tendency to indulge in it anyway. They now think it’s OK in the street, in the supermarket, in schools, in shops, on the bus, on the train…

You have to hand it to Cameron. He has absolutely no intention of invoking Article 50. Hell will freeze over, and the Devil will go past the window on Bart Simpson’s skateboard, before Cameron invokes Article 50. Somehow, sometime, somebody is going to have to sit down with a large sheet of paper and some crayons, and explain this to the people who voted for Farage and Johnson. As he well knows, the trouble with Article 50 is that it was written in a way that didn’t take account of the fact that it would ever have to be used one day, because, a bit like a nuclear deterrent, the people who drafted it never dreamed that anyone would be mad enough to actually use it. It has been likened to a divorce, but that is far too amicable a simile. It’s not deciding who gets which CDs and making arrangements to visit every other weekend, it’s going to be more like coming home from work and finding your belongings in a cardboard box by the wheelybin, and new locks on all the doors.

So, now the country has been saddled with a huge problem by this combination of believing in fairytales, not liking foreigners, and a romantic idea of medieval monarchy dating back to the times when Richard the Lionheart was held captive in the Chateau Gaillard.  Still, all is not yet lost, Australia, New Zealand, India, Korea, and Mexico have all said they will sign trade deals with us.  Well, OK, we've lost the export trade to the single market, but here’s the plan of action. Start doing Korma ready meals, with added noodles for the Korean market (or maybe even added poodles, they're not that fussy) Meanwhile, I'm off to round up some sheep and whittle a boomerang, as soon as I've eaten this taco.

As I have said many times, this fiasco would be funny if it weren’t so damn serious. Farage had his last “yahoo, yah boo sucks” speech at (rather than to) the EU parliament, telling them to get a proper job. (He forgot to add the bit about get a decent suit, stand up straight, do your tie up and sing the  National Anthem) His last “proper” job was as a stockbroker. By gum, it were ‘ard in them days, going down the pit in search of them elusive stocks and shares, comin’ ‘ome and sittin’ in’t tin bath in t’scullery.  They treated him with amused tolerance. They know he has just legislated himself off the edge of relevance.

But the overriding impression at home was that nobody is in charge, and no-one knows what the hell is going on.  As Michael Gove was pledging, as part of his surprise Tory leadership campaign, an extra £100m a week for the NHS from 2020 (boy, if I had a nickel for every time I’ve heard that one) on the very same day as George Osborne abandoned his target of balancing the economy by 2020.  The day Gove kebabbed Boris Johnson and consigned him to being the member for Uxbridge until he gets fed up of sorting out people’s housing benefit claims, resigns, and goes back to journalism, was indeed a good day to bury bad news. It was also a good day to bury Boris Johnson. On the other hand, is there ever a bad day?

But Osborne, though. What price austerity now? Was it worth it, George? Were the food banks worth it? Were the people who killed themselves because their benefits had been stopped in the name of austerity? Were the people who died with no food in the fridge? Was the rise in homelessness worth it, George? What about the people who were forced to move out because of the bedroom tax? Worth it? Do you look at the dismal sorry record of the last six years of austerity ruining people’s lives and livelihoods and think, yeah, a job well done. It was worth all the pain, because I hit my target of, oh, hang on… I have got no words for you, Osborne, only profanity, but I will say this. I hope everything you visited on them with your cruel and misguided policies comes back on you and yours, in spades redoubled, with the worst possible consequences. And even then you will have got off lightly.

As expected, noting the fact that the Tories were in complete disarray and the ship of state was drifting ever nearer the edge of the cliff, the Labour Party was keen to get on with the task of opposition and lost no time in opposing its own leader, with a staged non-democratic coup, consisting of the shadow cabinet resigning en masse, and blaming Brexit, although the whole thing was planned weeks ago by a group of disgruntled MPs who have thrown their toys out of the pram at the leftwards shift of the party (hugely popular amongst its membership) and now need a nappy change followed by de-selection at the earliest opportunity.

Unfazed, Corbyn simply appointed another shadow cabinet, and when some of them resigned, another lot. For a while, it was like Hull City in the old days, where you used to ring up Boothferry Park to see what time the match was, and they said “what time can you come?”.  The guy who had come in to tune the TV in the meeting room was almost offered the job of shadow secretary to the treasury, until they realised who he was.  The plotters then engineered a vote of no-confidence in Corbyn, who ignored it. You have to hand it to the man, he has balls of steel. His “well, if you want me out, you’ll have to carry me out” struck a chord with me. One of my few appealing characteristics is stubbornness. In the right circumstances, I can be stubborn for England.  When I see it displayed in such monumental quantities in others, I am filled with admiration. I almost considered re-joining the Labour Party, until I remembered that if I did, I would only have the faff of resigning all over again when they did something else stupid.

The turmoil following the “Brexit” vote has not been the only news this week, of course. We were called upon to witness the sacrifice of a group of naïve yet trusting young men, led by out-of-touch idiots with no tactical sense whatsoever, young men whose hopes of a bright future were extinguished on the field in northern France. But that’s enough about the England football team’s ignominious exit from Euro 2016, it was also the 100^th anniversary of the start of the Battle of the Somme.

It was especially poignant to see the religious service broadcast on the day from the Thiepval Memorial, in the heart of what used to be the battlefield.  Not so much for the content, but for the sheer scale of the place, the rows and rows of white crosses stretching off in every direction. Each one of those represents a life unfulfilled, children never born, previous happy times never to return. Each one of those represents someone grieving alone by the fire, knowing their loved one lies (if they lie anywhere, so many of them had no known grave, thanks to the devastating effect of high explosive artillery shells) in a muddy grave far away, unvisited. That is what war means, and that particular conflict was followed by a worse one. God alone knows what a third war in Europe would bring, and that is something that must be avoided at all costs, whatever side you voted for.

In this week of anniversaries, it’s also the third anniversary, today, of the day when, back in 2013, Deb, her dad, Freddie, Zak and me travelled up to Baildon in the  camper to pick up Misty from the collie dog sanctuary. It’s a sad comment on the transitory nature of life that two of those companions are no longer with us. Freddie died in May 2014 and Mike in February 2015.  Still, as it says in the song, we who must remain, go on living just the same.  We deliberately didn’t want to find another dog like Tiggy after she’d died, and in that respect, Misty’s been a great success.  She couldn’t be less like Tig if she tried. And her occasional forays into acts of sheer random loopiness, such as whirling round and round and barking whenever someone comes to the door, followed by her invariably treading on her food dish and sending muttnuts scattering all over the tiles, do keep us on our toes. Border collies are supposed to be incredibly intelligent and able to learn up to 150 commands. So far we have done “sit” and “give paw”, in three years.  Still, it could be worse, for her as well as us. If Em hadn’t found her tied up with a piece of wire y the side of a busy road in Northumberland that day, and handed her in to Baildon, who knows where she might have ended up.

I haven’t researched a saint for this week, because I didn’t know I was going to write this until I started writing it, but I haven’t been entirely Godless either. I have been trying to pray, although to whom, I am not sure, and I have also been painting eikons again, particularly one of St Gertrude of Nivelles which I hope to auction in favour of Rain Rescue, who are having a bit of a funding crisis with the extremely expensive vet bills being racked up by Violet, the chihuahua  currently being treated by them for a really severe case of Demodex. She is expected to make a long, if painful, full recovery, at a cost equivalent to the GDP of a small European country.   Next after that will be another Madonna of Macedonia eikon, this time for Desperate Asylum Seekers Huddersfield, who are having a charity auction in September as again, their funds are perilously low.  After that, who knows, but at least it keeps me busy and stops me sitting on the end of my ramp, raving incoherently at the passing traffic, which, at times this week, has seemed like the only sane response to an uncertain world.  

So, that’s the state of the union, I guess. Still the same as ever, slow to chide and swift to bless.  Next week I am really going to have to shift up a gear. There are books to be done. Now! I know I always say this, but this time it really is true. It’s either that, or let the monster, work, squish me like a bug.  I hope there may be some time for painting, but I doubt it. I still have an unfinished “Last Supper” to polish off, which is probably the only thing I will ever have in common with Leonardo Da Vinci.

And as for the prayers, well, who knows.  Someone very dear to me, forty-odd years ago, once said to me that every time you light a candle in church, that is a prayer. So I’ll be here with my medieval world, lighting candles, burning incense (known forever in our house as incest) and painting eikons. Yes, it seems a bit of a pisspoor response when really, I should be raging, but for now, I’m all raged out, and hurting, and not really on speaking terms with the Almighty, though, like in the song, sometimes I turn and someone’s there, sometimes, I’m all alone.  Anyway, it’s time to give La Muttkins her birthday tea, with four prayers and four candles (a phrase that sounds oddly familiar…)