Epiblog for the Feast of St John The Dwarf

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley.  Gradually, now, autumn’s taking hold, and it’s getting colder. I doubt we’ll get much more done in the garden this year now, and I’ve more or less resigned myself to hunkering down for the winter in terms of outside jobs. There have still been bright days though, or to be more accurate, bright periods during some of the days - usually, frustratingly, coinciding with the days Debbie is teaching and I’m up to my ears in the proverbial muck and bullets.

There has still been no sign of the squirrels. I am beginning to think that something nasty must have happened to them while we were away on Arran, which I hope isn’t the case. Matilda, meanwhile, has been going out now and again, but she’s found herself a new perch, in a corner of the front room, on the duvet that we take when we go off in the camper van,  snoozing there for most of the day. As I said last week, she’s now officially, at 13, an elderly cat, and elderly cats tend to stay indoors anyway.  I am still keeping a watchful eye.

Misty and Zak, meanwhile, have had some reasonably long walks, despite the demands of teaching on Debbie, and the weather which has frequently been inclement at just the wrong time. They don’t care about inclement weather, of course, in fact I’m convinced that Misty doesn’t count it a proper walk unless she finds some disgustingly aromatic dung to roll in, and comes back plastered with mud up to her armpits. Mind you, neither does Debbie.

I still have the last three stubborn books to go to press, and they are inching along at a glacial rate. Next week will be crucial in that respect, because after half term sets in, it will be marketing marketing marketing, all the way to Christmas.

Always assuming the world makes it as far as Christmas, what with Putin rattling the sabre and the UK parliament (such as it is) responding in kind.  Not that it makes one jot of difference, because Putin knows that unless someone was actually prepared to stick a missile in one of his aircraft to enforce it, there is absolutely no chance of a no-fly zone this year, next year, sometime, or never. As if to prove the point, Putin has routed two of his warships, en route to the Mediterranean, via the English Channel this coming week. Strangely, I found myself agreeing with Boris Johnson of all people, twice in the course of that debate. Or rather, I should say, since I was calling for these things long before he was, he found himself agreeing with me. I am glad the mop-headed clodpoll is finally seeing the light. There should indeed be a no-fly zone over Syria, and there should indeed be demonstrations outside the Russian Embassy – and outside the American Embassy, since they seem intent on ramping up the unnoticed war which has been festering in the Yemen, by firing cruise missiles at rebel radar sites. And there should be demonstrations outside the Saudi Embassy, about the destruction and famine they are causing in that very war, and there should be demonstrations outside the Department of Trade and Industry, because we are selling the Saudis the arms which they are using to bomb their own people into a state of perpetual famine.  Boris Johnson stopped short of mentioning all but the first, obviously because there is only room in his brain for one idea at a time. Which is presumably why he never mentions the extra £350million a week to the NHS, these days.

Actually, the way the pound is going at the moment, £350million a week will probably buy two second hand bedpans.  The currency markets were in turmoil again over “Brexit”, and will no doubt continue to be so until someone in “government” takes control and steadies the ship. Theresa May, bless her, has announced in advance the date for invoking Article 50, in effect giving the gnomes of Zurich almost six months to be panicked. Meanwhile, Johnson, Davies and Fox, the three blind mice of Brexit policy, run round aimlessly, trying to avoid having their tails cut off with a carving knife by Theresa May whenever they say something that contradicts government non-policy over Brexit, a non-policy which consists largely of doing nothing, but doing it with a gallant, plucky heart, and trusting that it will all come out alright in the end and there’ll be blue birds over, the white cliffs of Dover, tomorrow, just you wait and see. Because after all, we are British.

Meanwhile, confusion reigns, and into this vacuum of inactivity, fools rush in, where angels fear to tread. Stephen Lopresti, who is MP for Bristol, apparently, has suggested that British business should form a consortium to raise the necessary cash to re-commission the currently-mothballed Royal Yacht, Britannia, and use it to spearhead a new export drive, in a sort of 21^st century version of “send a gunboat”.  I can just hear the response… “Dear British Trade Delegation, I was intending to buy my widgets from my usual supplier just down the road as they are good quality, yet low in cost, and his close proximity means that they can deliver quickly. But now you have turned up in this wonderful yacht, I have changed my mind and will order your much more expensive British widgets that have to be flown half way across the world to get them here…” Yeah, right.

It turns out, this week, apparently, that Brexit may not even be legal, or at least the way the government was going to implement it may not be. There is actually a crowd-funded legal case going through the courts at the moment, challenging various aspects of what the government intends to do.  The problem lies in the fact that Article 50 (a document which, as I have said before, was written on the back of an envelope in about ten minutes because nobody ever dreamed it would ever be used in earnest) blithely says that the country wishing to leave should decide to do so “under its own constitutional conventions” – but our constitution is largely unwritten (one of its greatest strengths) -  and therefore nobody knows whether the referendum result can be actioned simply by the executive power of the government, or after due scrutiny by parliament, or after scrutiny and a vote, or what. So now the judges must rule on it. What’s the betting they refer it up to the European Court!

The harsh economic realities of Brexit – or at least the potential harsh realities, if it is bungled by the government, started to become clearer this week, with the great Marmite Famine of 2016. As famines go, it had nothing on the 1845 potato blight, but nevertheless it made the papers, and possibly may indicate some of the more serious issues that lie ahead. Presumably Unilever (which apparently makes Marmite) must take their profits and convert them into dollars, and having done so, because of the parlous state of the pound, they discovered that there weren’t as many as they usually are. Panic ensued. Presumably they went back to Tesco and asked them to do something about it, and presumably Tesco told them to bugger off. With the result that Marmite vanished from the shelves, momentarily, until a deal was stitched up at the 11^th hour, presumably to pass the price increase on to Tesco’s customers in a couple of weeks or so when everyone has forgotten about it.

Most of the news, though, this week, has been verging on the bizarre. Donald Trump continues to be a raving caricature, a purple and orange Rumpelstiltskin on a mission to make America “grate” again. He may well have been outed as a pervert and a paedophile, if you believe the most extreme allegations, and to some people these revelations are a sign of hope. Surely, they say, Trump cannot survive this? I wish I was so sure. I think a lot of the people who will trundle out and vote for Trump will do so precisely because he comes across as a “good ole boy”, and some of the things he is alleged to have done, are precisely the things that certain of his supporters would have liked to have done. So, it could end up being a lot closer than anyone thinks. Why some women and some black people are thinking of voting for Trump, however, remains a mystery to me – it’s like turkeys voting for Thanksgiving.

Once again, it has been a week when it would be very easy to become depressed, even though there have been some weird and maybe even slightly funny stories. Depending on your viewpoint, of course. The weirdest story is these bloody idiots dressing up as clowns and scaring people. Nobody quite knows why, but as crazes go, amidst all the people who are only doing it for a laugh, it does of course provide plenty of potential for people with more nefarious intentions to join in.  So far, the incidents reported have been relatively minor, but the police seem to be keeping a close eye on it, and there is always the potential for some idiot who thought it was funny to dress up as a clown to be on the receiving end of being lamped for their trouble, or worse. Given that the craze actually started in America, it’s surprising that no scary clowns over there have been mistakenly shot by the police. Presumably because clowns have predominantly white faces.

The sole laugh of the week (for me, anyway) came when the BBC Breakfast News announced that they would be running a piece on Nicola Sturgeon’s renewed bid for a second bill on Scottish independence, but in the background, showed a clip of the escaped gorilla from London Zoo, munching its way through a bunch of bananas. Nicola Sturgeon, whatever you think about her, does seem to have something of a sense of humour (she will need it, in the coming months, trying to work out what the hell Theresa May is trying to do, especially as she doesn’t know herself) so perhaps she saw the funny side. The BBC later said they had apologised. Presumably to Ms Sturgeon and not the gorilla.Whether Nicola Sturgeon likes bananas is an unknown quantity at this moment.

That was it, I’m afraid. The rest was bleak, and it can only get bleaker. On 24^th October, a week tomorrow (I’m writing this late Sunday night) the French authorities have said they are going to begin the task of demolishing the Jungle, the unofficial refugee camp outside Calais.  The fate of the unaccompanied children, at the time I am writing this, is still undecided.  Meanwhile, on 14^th October, the 950^th anniversary of the Battle of Hastings, funnily enough, Holly Kal-Weiss, a volunteer with a car-load of aid destined for the camp was stopped at Folkestone and denied entry to France on the grounds of her being a threat to French national security!

This is part of a pattern of harassment of aid shipments by both the French and the British authorities – two or three weeks ago I reported how Rachel Emec had been detained at Dover, then released later without charge, on her return from delivering aid, this time by the British anti-terror police.  Kal-Weiss then drove to Dover and tried to board a ferry for France instead, and was again turned away, as were several other volunteers trying to deliver aid that day.

Of course, these frightened, friendless children, many of whom have seen more war and terror in their short, young lives than the rest of us will see in a lifetime, several lifetimes, are apparently wanting to come here to claim benefits and take away our jobs, our council houses and our hospitals. All 379 of them. And the people who think like that are seemingly content to sleep soundly in their beds while these kids are out in the cold, in harm’s way, facing an uncertain future at best, and God alone knows what else. But it doesn’t matter, because we’re British, aren’t we, and it’s all going to be alright. So we’ll pull up the drawbridge, and pull up the duvet, and snuggle down to dream of the days when Britannia ruled the waves and the Russians would have had to stay holed up in the Crimea.

It reminds me of Orwell’s description in Homage to Catalonia, of returning from the Spanish Civil War.

And then England--southern England, probably the sleekest landscape in the world. It is difficult when you pass that way, especially when you are peacefully recovering from sea-sickness with the plush cushions of a boat-train carriage under your bum, to believe that anything is really happening anywhere. Earthquakes in Japan, famines in China, revolutions in Mexico? Don't worry, the milk will be on the doorstep tomorrow morning, the New Statesman will come out on Friday. The industrial towns were far away, a smudge of smoke and misery hidden by the curve of the earth's surface. Down here it was still the England I had known in my childhood: the railway-cuttings smothered in wild flowers, the deep meadows where the great shining horses browse and meditate, the slow-moving streams bordered by willows, the green bosoms of the elms, the larkspurs in the cottage gardens; and then the huge peaceful wilderness of outer London, the barges on the miry river, the familiar streets, the posters telling of cricket matches and Royal weddings, the men in bowler hats, the pigeons in Trafalgar Square, the red buses, the blue policemen--all sleeping the deep, deep sleep of England, from which I sometimes fear that we shall never wake till we are jerked out of it by the roar of bombs.

Complacency has often been our undoing in the past. We blundered into two world wars in the 20th century on the assumption that it would all be over by Christmas. Now, it is highly likely that some refugee children might be put in greater danger, and maybe even die of our complacency.  There were many people here in the 1930s who were complacent when Hitler was on the rampage, but at least back then we were still compassionate enough to take in the Kindertransport.  Father Dominic Howarth, writing in Independent Catholic News, has said:

For the children at Calais this is a hideous situation. Unaccompanied, more than 800 are in the camp, and 387 of those have been documented as having relatives in the UK. For months, their fate has been the subject of political wrangling, even after Lord Dubs fought and won Parliamentary approval for action to be taken. That was in May. The hopelessness of the waiting meant they tried to make their own way across the channel, and at least three have been killed. They were run over by lorries or - in one particularly appalling case - froze to death within a lorry carrying frozen goods. This week - finally - it does seem as if the children with relatives here can come to the UK. There are many more who do not have relatives in the UK, and who - when the camp is bulldozed - will be ever more vulnerable. As a Christian, when I see the teenagers running around the Calais Jungle, I am always minded of Christ's words: "It is to such as these that the Kingdom of Heaven belongs." What are we doing, and what are our Christian leaders in France and the UK doing, that hundreds of children are abandoned and alone, right in front of our eyes?

Suffer little children.  Father Howarth is referring obliquely to the passage in Matthew 19: 13-14 where:

Then were there brought unto him little children, that he should put his hands on them, and pray: and the disciples rebuked them. But Jesus said, Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven.

You would think, wouldn’t you, in a country which is ostensibly Christian (people who hate Muslims and begrudge them even being here and leading ordinary lives and trying to raise a family and just get on in life are always banging on about this being a “Christian” country) – you would think that there would be some leeway, some compassion given, some concern for the underdog. You would think, perhaps, that the Home Office (prop. Amber Rudd, no relation thank God) would be thinking “how can we best deploy the Christian virtues of compassion and mercy in this Christian country?” But no.  When Jesus said "suffer little children" he meant it in the sense of "allow". It seems that when the Home Office says suffer, little children, they mean it literally. 

Not only is the fate of the Calais children still undecided, but today I heard a story which, in its own way, because it is a one-off personal story, maybe tops even that.  May Brown, 23, who lives in Dorset, was diagnosed with leukaemia last year. She needs a stem cell donation, and she and her husband were delighted to hear that her sister, Martha, who is Nigerian, was a perfect match – especially as several other avenues had already been tried and proven to be unsuitable.

But the Home Office has apparently said it is “not satisfied” that her sister Martha would be a “genuine visitor” or that she had the necessary funds to cover the costs of the trip. May Brown has pledged to fund the visit, and said her schoolteacher sister, who has two children in their native Nigeria, has no wish to stay in the UK. May Brown is said to be distraught at this development, and I am not surprised.  A Home Office spokesperson said: “We are sensitive to cases with compassionate circumstances, but all visa applications must be assessed against the immigration rules. The onus is on the individual to provide the necessary supporting evidence to prove they meet the requirements.” Oh, just sod off, Home Office, before your doublespeak actually kills someone.

So, there you have it. We live in a country where the Home Office will deny medical help to a person suffering from leukaemia because they are scared of some infinitesimally-small risk of the donor going "rogue" and turning into an illegal immigrant after they have donated their stem cells. Because, let’s face it, if the Daily Mail got wind that we were letting in stem cell donors from Nigeria, or unaccompanied child refugees at risk of abuse or worse, well, there’d be hell to pay, wouldn’t there?  I mean, it might even derail Brexit. What?  Not to worry, May Brown, it’ll all turn out alright in the end, because we’re British.  Although unless someone at the Home Office has an outbreak of reason and common sense, you might just die of a mixture of our complacency and our xenophobia. But, we are British! Never forget that. 

This is the sort of crap that makes me want to apply for Dutch citizenship. Van Der Damm, Naar Der Mundt. It makes me ashamed to be born part of this shitty, botched, sham apology for a theme park, obsessed with baking cakes and dancing on TV, with its food banks and its substandard housing, its people starving from benefit cuts, and its dying NHS and its lying politicians, and its shopping precincts, swimming in piss, vomit and lager, that we used to be able to call a country.  It reminds me of J B Priestley talking about the disadvantaged kids of Rusty Lane, West Bromwich:

There ought to be no more of those lunches and dinners, at which political and financial and industrial gentlemen congratulate one another, until something is done about Rusty Lane, and about West Bromwich. While they still exist in their foul shape, it is idle to congratulate ourselves about anything. They make the whole pomp of government here a miserable farce. The Crown, Lords and Commons are the Crown, Lords and Commons of Rusty Lane, West Bromwich... and if there is another economic conference, let it meet there, in one of the warehouses, and be fed with bread and margarine and slabs of brawn. The delegates have seen one England, Mayfair in the season. Let them see another England next time, West Bromwich out of the season. Out of all seasons, except the winter of our discontent.

And there should be no more crowing about Brexit, and “taking back control”, and “sovereignty”, and £350 million pounds a week extra being given to the NHS, until someone sees sense and lets in May Brown’s sister so she can donate her cells.  We are not a great country any more, and have no claim to be, until someone who can do something about it, realises that true greatness relies on compassion alone.  And the person responsible for the original decision denying her access should be set to work breaking rocks in a quarry until they see the error of their ways and repent.

Actually, that is much better put in 1 Corinthians 13: 1-4,

Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing. And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing.

So, yes, Home Office, you “whited sepulchre”, this means you. I hope you can sleep at night.  No. Actually, I don’t. I hope your sleep is even worse than mine.  I’m often woken up nowadays in the middle of the night by pain in my knees and by cramp and pins and needles. I hope your dreams, however, are nightmares, disturbed by the screams of the people you have denied help and sanctuary. Over and over again.

Sunday was the feast of St Baldric, a rather unremarkable abbot, and now it’s past midnight, and I am still typing, it’s technically Monday, and the feast of St John the Dwarf, an early Egyptian desert father.  Neither of them is particularly remarkable as an example of saintly piety, but you have to admit that their names offer immense comedic possibilities. I  am sorry to be so irreverent, but to be honest, in the world as it is at the moment, sometimes irreverence is the only answer. I would like to think God has a sense of humour, and if you doubt that, just look at the duck-billed platypus.  He certainly needs a sense of humour right now, these days, something God has in common with Nicola Sturgeon.

I don’t know where I’m going any more. Other than to my grave, sooner or later. On the one hand, I have found some peace, and – I like to think, anyway – done some good by painting eikons. But I’m not so stupid as to not realise that, in the terms of the good old Norfolk vernacular, I am merely “farting against thunder”. No eikon has ever yet stopped a war. So why do I carry on? This is not a rhetorical question, by the way, I really would like an answer! Why do I carry on, like some latter-day Milton, trying to justify the ways of God to men, when half the time, I am no longer sure I believe in any of this stuff anyway, and “the best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity”, to quote Yeats. Beats me. Answers on a postcard, please.

Goodnight.