Epiblog for Baggis Day

It has been a busy couple of weeks in the Holme Valley. Sadly the weather has turned dull and rainy for the last few days which is a tad depressing, considering Midsummer has already been and gone. I hope that this isn’t an indication that we’re heading for one of those summers where the weather transits seamlessly from Spring to Autumn without anyone particularly noticing.

Misty is enjoying the summer, anyway, now that Deb’s term has ended and thus longer and usually more frequent walkies are on offer, often accompanied by Zak (though not Ellie, whose little leggies can’t cope with mountaineering).

Matilda, meanwhile, has been ligging around and occasionally yawning in a Bagpuss fashion at the squirrels when they are being particularly rowdy and knocking over the dish with the peanuts.  Brenda the Badger seems once more to have forsaken us, though we do now have an additional house guest in the form of Deb’s Uncle Phil from Australia. Unlike the badger, though, he doesn’t wander around on the decking in the early hours looking for peanuts. Or if he does, it must be at times when I am asleep.

I have been up and down of late, health-wise. This damn infection in my hand still makes it difficult to hold either a pen or a paintbrush, or to type. Plus, on some days when I feel particularly infected, the world seems to bulge and blare around me, sometimes stuffed with a deadening layer of cotton wool that reduces reality to the background noise which is being drowned out by the drumming of my blood. I do feel it’s slowly getting better, but I wish it would get its skates on.

In the wider world, the weird phony war in parliament goes on. Theresa May finally managed to cobble together an agreement of sorts with the fruitcake fundamentalist terrorist sympathisers of the DUP. And the best bit was that it only cost us, the taxpayers a billion pounds. Just say that a few times. A billion pounds. A thousand million pounds. At a time when nurses are having to use food banks and firefighters need extra part time work to keep going. A billion pounds, just so that Theresa May can cling on a few months longer before the electorate places a well-deserved boot squarely in the arse of her thousand pound trousers.

Just think what they could have done with that billion pounds. They could have mounted 200 bombing raids on Syria. Oh, wait, they’re doing that already. They could – of course – have lifted the public sector pay freeze that has capped the pay of nurses, firefighters and police at 1% per annum, while inflation has been eroding the value of fixed incomes. They didn’t. They just managed, with their new friends in the DUP who have been so successful at administering public money in the management of heating schemes in Northern Ireland, to defeat the Labour motion. And they cheered.

They cheered. Remember that, in days to come. They cheered. Remember it when they come round your house campaigning in the next election. Remember it the next time they’re on the news when there’s been some dreadful terrorist outrage or a massive disaster and as usual the fire brigade the ambulance service and the police have had to pick up the pieces. Remember it when they’re on camera crying crocodile tears and expressing their admiration for the emergency services. They voted to continue to cap the pay of those same emergency services. And then they cheered themselves. They actually bloody cheered.

One of the major reasons why people voted to leave the EU last year was that they believed Boris Johnson’s lie that there would be an extra £350m a week for the NHS. Clearly this is never going to happen. However, it will not be such a problem now that Mrs May has apparently discovered that there IS a magic money tree after all.

Whether or not Arlene Foster of the DUP was a deserving recipient of the first harvest of £1bn from the tree is a moot point. I would rather give it to the NHS. My reasons for this are as follows:

Arlene Foster has never held the hand of a dying patient. Arlene Foster has never had to explain to grieving relatives that there is no brain stem activity and the only option is to turn off the life support. Arlene Foster has never had to catch an hour’s fitful sleep on a makeshift bed in a storeroom during an 18 hour shift. Arlene Foster has never had to argue with a drunk in A & E whose cut ear is dripping blood all over her and the floor. Arlene Foster has never had to wipe the shit off the arse of an incontinent geriatric. Arlene Foster has never had to answer the same question 7 times in an hour from a patient suffering from dementia. Arlene Foster has never had to try and focus on the medication records while dropping off to sleep. Arlene Foster has never had to complete 13 different bits of paperwork before she’s even allowed to go on the ward and treat somebody. Arlene Foster has never been asked, year on year, to “do more with less” for a 1% pay rise. Arlene Foster doesn’t have a boss who is trying to sell off a vital public service to the highest bidder.

Even assuming for a moment that you thought that people whose job it is to confront armed terrorists when your only weapon is a baton, or to plunge head first into a burning building to try and save a victim trapped by fire, or to piece together the shattered bones of a road traffic accident victim while simultaneously making sure that someone’s looking after the relatives weren’t worth a pay rise, there is another quite simple explanation why austerity is useless. It doesn’t work.

At the risk of sounding like Max Bygraves (never a good thing) I want to tell you a little story. Let’s take it out of the realm of politics and the UK and imagine for a moment I am an apple farmer and I owe somebody 1000 apples. I incurred the debt because they originally helped me plant out the orchard, lent me their rotavator, and even threw in some bags of compost. But now, they want their 1000 apples. And, as it happens, through no fault of my own, it’s just rather a bad time at the moment, and my apple farm has been hit by a few unexpected expenses.

I’ve got a choice at this point. In these days when there is denial of the existence of a magic money tree, I can choose, for instance, to be cautious, because I think it will help me to cling on to my farm longer. So I take caution to a fairly extreme level. I cut down half of my apple trees, so I don’t have to buy so much fertiliser. I make a quick buck selling off the apple logs to people with wood burning stoves, but then of course the logs are all gone. I’m producing fewer apples, and I can handle the workload myself, so I give old Jim, who used to help me out, his P45, and carry on alone. I can’t repay the 1000 apples, of course, since I’m growing even fewer than I was when I made that deal. But I give my debtor some apples, to keep him going, and he says that’s fine, he’ll let it ride longer, but in the end he now wants 1500 apples not 1000.  And so it goes, getting worse and worse and more and more unsustainable until one day I have no option but to chop down the remaining trees, pay my debtor what I can, go bust, and start sleeping under the railway arches. Where there was once an orchard is now a wilderness of austerity, brambles and tree stumps.

Or, I could do this, instead. I look around my orchard. Well, I owe 1000 apples. How could I repay that and still carry on growing enough to sell as well. Clearly, I need to produce more apples! I have the room to do it, but what about the cost? I sit down and produce a carefully-costed plan, and take it to the bank, asking to borrow enough to buy some more sapling trees, some more fertiliser, additional crates, and to hire a rotavator to dig up the new area. Everyone says I am barmy! Borrowing yet more money! But somehow I persuade the man to lend me the money. After all, he knows that if I fail, he can always take away my farm.

The new crops of apples start to come through into the system and make a difference. Soon, I am making inroads into the debt I owe and starting to pay back the 1000 apples. Old Jim is delighted with the extra hours and decides to spend some of his increased pay on taking his wife away for the weekend. The hotel they go to for their break therefore gains extra money that they, in turn, can invest in growth.

I’m starting to pay back the bank as well. Jim’s nephew has just left college and is looking for a summer job, so I take him on. He’s a hard worker and soon the apples are flying out of the door. He comes up with new ideas as well – apple juice, apple sauce, apple chutney, artisan cider – all of these are ways of using up apples that aren’t high-grade enough to sell as fruit. We’ve now paid back the 1000 apples, established loads of new retail outlets, and we’re working on launching the cider. We will have paid the bank back by the end of the year. Jim’s nephew is hoping to buy his first car. The local second hand car lot will gain from that additional profit, which they can re-invest for growth, and so on.

The point was, just when it looked most doomy and gloomy, that was just the point NOT to put up the hatches or batten down the shutters and start making people redundant. For apples, read “government tax take”. But don’t take my word for it, read Paul Krugman, Jonathan Portes, or any of the other many, many economists who said from the start that “austerity” was insane, voodoo economics.

Of course, in that second scenario, what you don’t want to do, just when you are on your way back to economic prosperity, is to decide one day on a whim to build a big wall round your farm, tell all the foreign fruit pickers to go home, and find that the countries they all came from take such umbrage at this, that they start turning back your apples at the border! Before you know where you are, you are surrounded by rotting apples and the ones on the trees aren’t worth harvesting. You might as well let them be windfalls. As in the Woody Guthrie song, the oranges rot in the creosote dumps. And as for your ex-workers, all they will call them will be deportees… just like the people who are drowned in the Mediterranean still, on a daily basis, whose names we will never know.

I know I keep coming back to Brexit like the dog that returneth to its vomit, but this week has provided yet another example of the stupidity of the Labour leadership, just at the point where the Tories are reeling on the ropes. There was a Labour amendment which was tabled to insist that the only acceptable form of Brexit was one that continued to allow us to access the single market after. Surprisingly, in view of the fact that it was eminently sensible and made sound economic sense, it was tabled by Chukka Umunna. Even more surprisingly, St Jeremy of the Corbyns sacked three Labour shadow cabinet ministers for voting in favour of it. Even more surprisingly still, both Katie Hopkins and Nigel Farage this week praised Corbyn for his “Hard Brexit” stance.

I can see I am going to have to add another one to my list of questions to which I still have not had any answer. I started the list with “why should poor people have to pay for the mistakes of rich people” in 2008, and it has been revised periodically ever since. But the latest addition is going to have to be “Why isn’t the Labour Party pushing for the softest of soft brexits?”  Someone should tell Jeremy Corbyn that when you are the leader of the Labour party and you are praised in the same week by two of the nastiest hard right commentators in the realm, you are clearly doing something wrong. And that something is that you are the leader of the opposition, but you are not actually doing any opposing.

Meanwhile, the world goes steadily more and more bonkers. It really does seem at times as if I – or indeed, as if we all – have fallen through a worm-hole in space into a weird alternative universe where everything is just slightly out of whack It reminds me of those old black and white episodes of The Twilight Zone from the 1960s.   

I had a long and interesting talk about the Grenfell Tower disaster with an old friend of mine, who has worked in the housing sector for around 40 years. His take on the issue is very illuminating and confirmed my own opinion that whoever is really responsible will almost certainly never be punished because some of them are actually dead. If the terms of the Grenfell enquiry were to be truly and accurately framed, they would involve a savage and damning indictment of social housing policy in the UK since 1979.

He said the root of the issue is management of the properties, coupled with social engineering (sometimes deliberate, sometimes accidental) going back over almost the same four decades that he has spent in the housing industry. When Mrs Thatcher introduced the right to buy it was coupled with a ban on the councils who had sold council houses from re-investing the profits in building more council houses. Also, a disproportionate amount of the good, modern, well-maintained housing stock was sold, leaving local authorities in many cases with just the problem properties and tower blocks.

Plus, whereas previously, council housing may have contained a wider mix of people with differing incomes and abilities in the past, when the aspirational owners were encouraged to buy their home, it had the inevitable result that those left behind in council housing, in the worst properties, were the least aspirational and most disadvantaged tenants. In effect the poorest of the poor where ghettoised, and Thatcher kick-started the process of dividing society and creating the very “underclass” that so many of her supporters deride even today.

Labour could have reversed or at least halted that process. They had from 1997 to 2010 to do something about the situation, and they didn’t. So, naturally, things got worse. If you add into the recipe the mixture of decreased budgets year on year for “proper” maintenance, ie effective and safe maintenance, because of “austerity” since 2010, plus the buck-passing arms-length management techniques of quangos, plus the fact that the people left in the worst social housing are now those with the least influence, so they are ignored (gone are the people capable of exerting pressure because they know someone on the council, or they have a child who might be a solicitor or something) then inevitably, somewhere, an accident is waiting to happen. Mix them together and what do you get, bippity boppity boo…

At times like this I sometimes turn to poetry to try and make sense of something that defies rational explanation and in the case of the Grenfell disaster I seem to have settled on A Refusal To Mourn The Death By Fire of A Child In London by Dylan Thomas. The first time I read this poem I was rather taken aback by what I thought was its brutal ending. But then I was young and stupid. Thomas’s answer to the senseless death of a young girl in the London Blitz seems at first shocking but does it make as much sense to maintain that death is part of a natural process and therefore whatever made the person still continues, even if only as constituent parts. Of course in many ways, explaining a poem is like explaining a joke, it kills it stone dead: so perhaps it’s better to let the words speak for themselves and hope they might bring someone some comfort.

The majesty and burning of the child's death.
I shall not murder
The mankind of her going with a grave truth
Nor blaspheme down the stations of the breath
With any further
Elegy of innocence and youth.

Deep with the first dead lies London's daughter,
Robed in the long friends,
The grains beyond age, the dark veins of her mother,
Secret by the unmourning water
Of the riding Thames.
After the first death, there is no other. 

Grenfell Tower casualties, meanwhile, are being accused of "complaining too much" and apparently are still having rent taken out of their bank accounts in some cases despite being deceased, plus survivors of the disaster are being sanctioned for not turning up at the job centre. To the DWP it’s clearly a pathetic lame excuse that your house burnt down and your family died. It’s only a matter of time before ATOS declare the victims fit for work and stick their ashes in an egg timer.

Still if we grow stale and weary over the state of domestic politics, there is always the glorious spectacle of Trump! At first I thought his wacky, random utterances and his weird “Tweets” were just part of a clever strategy to enrage the left and speak over the heads of everyone to the cast of Deliverance which makes up his core demographic, at least when they are not playing the banjo. But no. In fact, he’s just bonkers. Mad as a box of badgers. There’s no point in satirising him when he undercuts it at every turn by being even further off the bus route than anything the satirists can make up. Please, America, do something about him. All we can do is to take a deep breath and keep repeating the words of Cromwell to the Rump Parliament. Or should that be the Trump parliament?

You have sat too long for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go! And stand not upon the order of your going.

Last Wednesday was the feast of St Erfyl. The date of her death is unknown, and her claim to fame is that she founded the chapel at Llanerfyl in Powys. St Erfyl was supposedly a daughter of the better-known St Padarn. This church is the only dedication to her in Wales. The current church of St Erfyl was rebuilt in 1870 but contains the remains of a shrine dating back to the 15th century The churchyard is circular and contains, amongst others a gravestone which has been dated to the 5th or 6th century and which is inscribed in Latin:

HIC [IN] / TUM(V)LO IAC/IT R[O]STE/ECE FILIA PA/TERNINI / AN(N)IS XIII IN / PA(CE)

  

('In the grave here lies Rhostege daughter of Padarn, 13 years, in peace'). Quite how she goes from Rhostege to Erfyl is a mystery to me. But then Welsh generally is a mystery to me. The Clwyd Powis Archaeological Trust also identified a site of a possible holy well, known as Fynnon Erfyl, just down the hill from the churchyard, although its remains are now apparently difficult to locate on the ground.

Clearly there is no “religious” message that we can glean from the unknown life and unknown death of St Erfyl, not at this great distance from the days of her life. Except, I suppose, that there is the blind devotion which has kept people coming back to the spot for maybe 1500 years to pray, or whatever their equivalent is, and maybe – if there really was a holy well – for even longer than that. “You are here to kneel where prayer has been valid” – as T S Eliot said of Little Gidding.

Given my own medical situation, and the limited outlook it inevitably entails, I often wonder what the archaeologists of the future will make of us, today. Will, for instance, the Grenfell Tower disaster still be remembered in 1500 years’ time. It damn well ought to be – if it was, then maybe for once the crap that gets trotted out at every such juncture, that “lessons will be learned” might actually prove to have been true. Somehow, I doubt it.

What will our shrines be in 1500 years from now – or even 500 years? In a world where the ancient 850 year old Al-Nuri mosque in Mosul can be reduced to rubble and the Taliban can get away with dynamiting ancient Buddhist statues, sometimes I wonder. Yet there does seem to be something in the human psyche which draws us to specific places, even if all that is left there now is a jumble of weathered stones on a grassy, wind-swept moor. The ancient stones on Machrie Moor on the Isle of Arran have stood for thousands of years and no-one knows who put them there and why. People visit them today for different reasons to those of the people who built the circle, yet you would need a soul of iron not to feel… something, when you stand there in their shadow.

The thing is, for me, I suppose, that I cling on to the idea that although my faith (such as it was) has been seriously damaged by all sorts of factors yet it hasn’t been completely extinguished, and there are special places for me where it feels stronger – like being plugged into a re-charger. Is it too fanciful to suppose there are locations where it is possible to feel closer to the spark of the divine inside you? What is it that makes us gravitate to a particular place to commune with the world beyond the word? 

Anyway, as you have probably gathered, I started this blog on 5th July, was overtaken by events, and it’s now 9th July and St Erfyl’s day, bless her, has been and gone.

Today, Sunday, is also Baggis Day, 12 years ago to the day that Russell, a.k.a. Baggis the cat, died. His deeds and doings are legendary and Here Endeth The Epilogue is full of them. Stealing an entire piece of brie off the Christmas dinner table, depositing a live frog from the pond in Debbie’s lap, breaking his leg and then climbing on top of the wardrobe while he was supposed to be recuperating, and last but not least, swallowing a GPO parcel band that had to be dug out of him by the vet at a cost of £127 plus VAT. He has his own shrine, in the form of the mosaic I did of him that marks his resting place in the garden, where eventually he was joined by Nigel, his partner in crime, Dusty and Kitty the ladycats, and even Adam’s hamster, Henry. It’s a peaceful little corner, but, like everything else it will pass, and maybe archaeologists in years to come will find a fragment of his mosaic and mis-date it as Roman. (Although I have to say the Romans were better craftsmen and that was, and will be, my first, last, and only mosaic).

The year is passing. Soon it will be time to pack everything into the camper van and set off for Scotland more in hope than expectation of getting there. Time’s passing, life’s passing, and I find myself increasingly at odds with the world, or to explain how I feel about being, as one of my college tutors once put it (he was talking about Beowulf) a fly-speck on the mirror of eternity.

Dylan Thomas again –

And I am dumb to tell a weather's wind
How time has ticked a heaven round the stars.

Still. It’s looking like a good day, and everyone is at the seaside, apart from me and Matilda. I think it’s time to mix up some paint and put the kettle on.

Epiblog for the Feast of St Marina

It has been a busy fortnight in the Holme Valley. My work crisis is getting worse and worse, so it’s just as well that the weather at the start of June has been shitey, otherwise I would have been feeling really hard done by if I was sweating away over the bank rec or Crowle Street Kids, while everyone else was out in the sunshine enjoying themselves.  As it is, I just felt mildly aggrieved.

I truly don’t know how I am going to get everything done before the looming mid-July deadline.  My main problem at the moment is lack of sleep. It’s not that I’m burning the midnight oil at both ends or whatever the current metaphor is – it’s that when I do actually go to bed, I can no longer get that deep refreshing sleep that I used to have for hours on end, because my legs go into cramp or pins and needles. So these days at most I sleep for about an hour before my body wakes me up and I have to change position. It’s a bit like being a porn star, only they change position every couple of minutes (allegedly, m’lud).  Plus, parts of my body have become angry, red and swollen. (My thumb. Keep quiet at the back!)

So, if I could just find a way of working during the day when I’m asleep in my wheelchair when my body shuts down on me, I’d be fine. In the meantime, the following beings automatically get more sleep than me: Matilda, Misty, and even Debbie, now we’re into the exam season and there’s no class prep to do.

Matilda has recently taken to sleeping on the decking during the day, now that the weather is turning warm again. At first, the squirrels were wary of this new development, but now they have resumed their feasting on the peanuts we put out in what used to be Freddie’s dish, having worked out that the most she is likely to do is to stretch in their general direction, arch her back, and emit a huge fishy yawn, before settling back down again in the sun.

It’s ironic that Freddie’s old food bowl is now providing sustenance for the squirrels when all his life was spent barking in a paroxysm of hate at them whenever he saw one through the conservatory door. As the Gawain poet puts it – “very seldom does the beginning accord to the end”.

Misty has been enjoying the prospect of more face-to-snout time with Debbie now that the exam season is upon us and there is no more tedious preparation to be done.  She’s still obliged to go in for her allotted hours (Debbie not Misty, though to be honest, the college never checks lanyards and probably wouldn’t notice) but those hours are now spent making sure that people turn up, get to the right room where the right exam is taking place, and put whatever it is Deb has been dinning into them for the last year into practice.  Come to think of it, being a Border Collie, Misty would be ideally suited to rounding the up and herding them in, with a nip to the calf for any tardy latecomers.

In other news, Brenda is back! This is quite strange, actually, as in previous years she’s only visited us from about the end of March to the end of May. It could always be a different badger, of course, but she’s been on the last three nights in a row now and hoovered up a combination of leftovers we put out for her and peanuts the squirrels have left behind.  So we’ll have to see how this goes on. We are into a whole new badger game.

Also, since I last wrote a blog, we have of course had the general election. Oh what a night... My first thought on the morning after, though, was where we MIGHT have been had not the Parliamentary Labour Party spent the last four years attempting to undermine Jeremy Corbyn, which meant in effect that he was always fighting the election with one hand tied behind his back.

Now is not the time for recrimination but history will judge these people and it won't be a case of community service. Just the opposite in some cases. Still, here in the Colne Valley we have a new MP and I hope that she starts as she means to go on by aiming for the goolies and stopping this insane closure of Huddersfield Royal's A&E Department.

As for Corbyn, the man is a limpet. Speaking as a stubborn old bugger myself, I recognise a master of stubborn old buggery when I see it, and he could do stubborn old buggery at the Olympics if stubborn old buggery were an Olympic sport. If he does eventually become PM, and takes the lead on negotiating Brexit, I look forward to the Europeans scratching their head in puzzlement and saying "Mon Dieu" and "Mein Gott" and stuff like that during the Brexit talks. Unlike May, who just wanted her anti-immigration stance rubber-stamped at the expense (literally and metaphorically) of the Single Market.

The poll brought some interesting entrances and exits: Vince Cable is back! At least he is until the staff in the Twickenham Home for the Terminally Confused notice he's missing at roll call, recapture him and tuck him back up under a tartan rug in the TV room with a cup of tea and a hobnob. "Do you know who I am?" "Ask Matron, Dearie, she'll tell you!" Alex Salmond is gone. The loathsome Ether McVey is back to continue her self imposed mission of driving poor people to their deaths along with her partner in crime, Duncan-Smith the Impaler.  Nick Clegg is gone, and looked like someone whose rabbit had died and he couldn’t even sell the hutch. No amount of hubris, chagrin, or schadenfreude, however satisfying it was, will ever make up for the damage he did by propping up the Tories for five years, enabling (inter alia) the Bedroom Tax suicides.

Since the election, we’ve had the edifying prospect of Theresa May clinging on by her fingertips, sacking her election advisors, and trying to get into bed with the DUP and thus endangering the Good Friday agreement in Northern Ireland. This, from a woman who had the nerve to tick off Corbyn for having been allegedly soft on terrorism! Woe unto ye Phairsees and hypocrites. One unexpected upside of the self-inflicted gunshot wound in Mrs May’s foot has been seeing the likes of Polly Toynbee, Matthew D’Ancona, John Rentoul, Dominic Lawson, Uncle Tom Cobley and all, lining up to say they were wrong about Jeremy Corbyn.  Once again, one wonders where Corbyn would be right now had he not had to fight an election campaign with these commentators repeating the same dismal predictions over and over again like a parrot with Alzheimer’s.

Further evidence of the immense cockup which May has foisted on herself emerged when it came to light that the Queen’s Speech will have to be re-scheduled, partially because the DUP are still arguing whether to burn Papists at the stake or have them hung, drawn and quartered, and partially because it clashed with the start of the Brexit negotiations. I hear that they had also booked the local Brewery for a piss-up on the same day.  Her latest wheeze is to plan for a two year legislative programme so there won’t need to be a Queen’s Speech next year, the excuse being that Brexit is so much more important than everything else and therefore we need to concentrate on it. It’s so important, in fact that nine weeks of what could have been preparation time were wasted on an unnecessary election.

Nevertheless the Brexit negotiations start tomorrow, and we are up La Creek Du Merde, Sans Padeil. As Ian Dunt put it, writing on Politics.co.uk

So they have confirmed it. Britain will start talks with the EU on Monday. We are now about to go into the most challenging negotiations since the Second World War with no government, no overall aim, no plan to achieve it, no functioning department to deliver it, no confidence at home or abroad with which to pass it, no trade expert capacity to negotiate it, and no time to manage it. This is beyond even the bleakest warnings of Remainers in the days after the vote. We must now face the very real possibility of an unmitigated disaster with very severe damage to our quality of life and a painful spectacle of humiliation on the international stage.

I don’t think I could have put it better, or more succinctly. I do find myself wondering what would drive anyone who is what we used to call “working class” to vote for the Conservatives.  Since “austerity” came in in 2010, we have reduced the ranks of the police by 19,000 and the armed forces by 40,969.  We’ve also got rid of 3,230 mental health practitioners, 343 libraries, 64 museums and 214 playgrounds. 

The whole rationale for “austerity” was to get rid of debt and stabilise people’s economic prospects. There are now roughly 900,000 people employed on zero hours contracts, the national debt has risen to £0.7 trillion, the number of food parcels given out by the Trussell Trust has gone up to 1.2 million, and the official total of rough sleepers stands at 4134, although that is almost certainly way too low as it doesn’t take into account people who are homeless but “sofa surfing” or relying on other informal arrangements that could break down at any moment.

Austerity was also the lever which drove the DWP in its arm’s length campaign using ATOS to drive people off benefits and into suicide aided by a supine and complicit press who were happy to find the odd extreme example of someone gaming the system and present it to gullible readers or viewers as the norm.  The precise figure of these may never be known, as the DWP had to be dragged kicking and screaming and beaten over its collective head with several FOI requests even to release the figures of those who died after being declared “fit for work”.

And now, apparently, because Theresa May botched the election, and is flailing around looking for any sort of political lifejacket before she goes down for the third time, “austerity” is at an end.  Oh, so that’s alright then. Could I just ask, though, was it worth it? Well, was it?

We could certainly have done with the extra police in the aftermath of the recent atrocities in Manchester and London, and indeed in preventing further such outrages.  We could have done with the extra firefighters that Boris Johnson got rid of when he was mayor of London this week, when Grenfell Tower caught fire in Kensington.  I’m not going to add another huge dollop of words to the many millions that have already been written about this dreadful event. I’ll confine myself to two or three general observations.

I’m no expert, but it seems to me that coating a building with something that, when it catches fire, goes up like a Roman Candle, was never going to end well.

The vacuity and stupidity of some of the people – especially celebrities – who have been brought in to comment on the tragedy is jaw-dropping. Lily Allen, being interviewed on Channel 4 news, claimed that the true death toll was being “hidden” and asked why the full death toll figure could not be released straight away.  Er, well, Lily, it’s because teams of firemen have to sift through every bit of ash and rubble and decide whether what they are looking at was once a coffee table, a Cornish pasty, or a person. It’s nasty and gruesome work. And that takes time, because it has to be done professionally, and with dignity. And sadly, horribly in fact for the grieving survivors, some people may never be found, it would seem.  Why on earth John Snow didn’t put her right, God alone knows!

And finally, the bleatings of those who say that it’s too early to draw conclusions and we must be careful not to “politicise” the event.  This is the default stance of those who think their policies may have contributed to the scale of the disaster, of course.  In truth, there is probably some blame to be apportioned on all sides, and I hope that any inquiry gets to the bottom of who decided – for instance – to use cheaper, more flammable materials, and why. The Boris Johnson 2014 cuts to the fire service must also be given their due weight, especially any damage this caused to the fire brigades’ largely unseen work of fire prevention and advice.

It seems to me though that the Grenfell Tower disaster is also symptomatic of the whole culture of government and management in the UK today – symptomatic of an outsourced, hands-off, freewheeling attitude to legislation that’s always looking to dismantle “red tape” and “free us” from the perils of excessive legislation. We don’t need experts! We can see that this block of flats looks nice and new and shiny! We don’t need sprinklers! Too expensive (this, in a country currently spending £508,000 per mission on bombing Syria to no avail) And in any case, only poor people live there! And if it all goes to hell in a handcart, we’ve set up a Quango to manage it, so they can take the blame, not us!

This is a mindset you see over and over again right across the public services.  We shouldn’t be surprised, if we allow the government to play Russian roulette with public safety in the name of “austerity” and penny-pinching if the occasional shit/fan collision happens. If you light enough fuses, you shouldn’t be surprised by the odd explosion.  Didn’t David Cameron promise a bonfire of regulations? Well now we’ve got one. Very seldom does the beginning accord to the end. We should be careful of bonfires. The Nazis made a bonfire out of books that eventually led to Churchill making a bonfire out of Dresden.

I have to say, as well, I don’t understand this business of not “politicising” things. It’s not like there are two separate things – politics and real life. I came up against the same thing over Huddersfield’s A & E. I have been vociferous in the campaign to stop it being closed and merged with that of Calderdale, and have been castigated for my “political” postings about it. Well, the problem has arisen because the government wedded to “austerity” has been unable to find the money to pay off the PFI debt, and has handed the entire shit sandwich to the local clinical commissioning group leaving them no option but to recommend a cost-saving merger. If that’s not political, what is? The cuts weren’t implemented by the fairies, were they?

This week has also seen the anniversary of the murder of Jo Cox, and a well deserved award of a George Medal for the 78-year-old ex miner who jumped on the back of Thomas Mair in an attempt to intervene in the attack and who was stabbed by Mair for his trouble. That medal will, obviously, never bring Jo Cox back, but it was a brave act deserving of some form of official recognition. Mair has never opened up about the precise trigger for his actions, but given that the Leave campaign’s “Nazi” poster with the hordes of brown people who were, according to Farage “heading for Calais” was published that very morning, and had been all over the breakfast news, you have to wonder. Again, beware of lighting bonfires you can’t control. Although in this case, maybe Farage’s actions went beyond recklessness and shaded into malice.

Today, if you were at all interested, is the feast of St Marina. St Marina the Virgin, in fact.  She flourished in Bithynia in the eighth century, and apparently served God under the habit of a monk, apparently with extraordinary fervour.  She died about the middle of the eighth century. Her relics were somehow translated from Constantinople to Venice in 1230, and are venerated there in a church which bears her name. A portion of her relics has also found its way to Paris, where there is also a St Marina’s church.  There is a variation of some sort in her feast day, which is celebrated on 18 June in Paris and 17 July in Venice. So you pays your homage and takes your choice.

It seems slightly perverse, though, to be wimbling on about saints and relics in a world which is growing increasingly mad by the hour.  I haven’t even mentioned Donald Trump in this blog so far, a man who is clearly as mad as a runaway pram full of burning poodles, but he’s still there. Well, at Mar-A-Lago, probably, given that it’s the weekend. And the UK – especially on hot summer days - is still gripped with that kind of phoney-war complacency that Orwell pictures so vividly in Homage to Catalonia when he returns home after escaping Barcelona:

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.

I fear that Orwell might have been more accurate than he thought though I am hoping the bombs will be at worst economic ones.  That will be bad enough. There are bad times just around the corner.

And where does that leave us, the people of faith. I almost chuckled at trying to shoehorn myself into that category. I think it’s best in my case to view it as a convenient shorthand for “people who have become convinced there is more to life, the universe and everything than a new sofa from DFS every Christmas and two weeks on the Costa Blanca every July. You come to a cross roads early on in that particular journey, the journey of faith, where you either conclude that life is completely meaningless, everything dies and bad shit happens to good people for no reason, or you conclude that there must be some reason, some structure underlying everything, but you have absolutely no idea what it is, and nor does conventional “organised” religion help you in any way – because, when mis-applied, it can often add to the bad shit that happens to good people for no reason, rather than taking it away.

So you set off down that particular leg of the crossroads and if you are lucky you reach a state where you can be more or less happy with two things. One, that something exists which does underlie everything and two, that in your present state for some unknown reason you are precluded from knowing what that something is.

When an appalling disaster happens though, people inevitably ask where God was in all of this. If there is a God, how could he, she, or it, let this happen? As I have said many times before, if you accept that the concept of God has to encompass everything that is was or shall be, then clearly its ideas of “justice” and “fairness” are going to be very different from ours.  Where is God in a disaster? In the actions of the emergency services, the helpers and those who donate to the disaster fund. Why do we have to have a disaster to bring out the best in people? That’s a question for God, but I would say I have seen gestures of quiet unacknowledged and unsung heroism in all situations of life, and the unbidden smile, the friendly gesture that comes out of the blue, the unexpected act of kindness are all things which I take to be at least “something” in action. So is the making of inspired music or art to glorify the golden spark of “something” that seems hard-wired deep inside us. And if you can philosophically admit a God that contains everything and yet is infinite in space and time, then our distinction between “alive” and “dead” is meaningless to God. The dead are still with us, and we are with them.

None of this would be of any comfort to the bereaved, however, nor would I expect it to. We fall back on conventional utterances of saying the same thing – my Mum and Dad are in heaven, or we deploy good old Henry Scott Holland and say that their absence is just as if they had gone into another room. Oddly enough, that is probably exactly what it does look like to God, if my theory is correct. In my father’s house are many mansions…

There’s no denying though that the world is full of madness and stupidity and tragedy. God’s counter to it is the rescuer who plunges into the burning building, the bystander who tries to stop a murder taking place, and the reason why things have to be done that way is a mystery to me as much as it probably is to you.

And to be honest, on this Sunday afternoon a week before Midsummer (how this year is rolling relentlessly on) I don’t think I can get any further down that leg of my crossroads, and who knows, I may even double back. Debbie is going to take Misty Muttkins out in the sun, Matilda is asleep on the decking in the sun and soon I am going to take my place in the sun, just for a little while, as I trundle myself to the back door and sit there painting and looking out over the tangled and neglected vista.  If I have come to any conclusion, I suppose, it’s that acts can have unexpected good consequences, as well as unexpected bad ones.  Very seldom does the beginning accord to the end. Life is an uncertain business. Eat dessert first, especially if it’s ice cream. Stop to smell the roses. And remember, if at first you don’t succeed, then sky-diving probably isn’t for you.

Epiblog for the Feast of St Boniface

It has been a busy few months in the Holme Valley. Winter ended. Spring has come and gone. Summer is here – at least according to the calendar, though you could be forgiven for doubting that, given the weather.

There’s not much to report, in general terms, since I last had time to sit down and write a blog. The squirrels have been actively demolishing stale bread and peanuts. Matilda has established a limited routine of short outside excursions to make the most of the daylight, though she’s taking the chance wherever she can to curl up somewhere warm and go to sleep for a few hours at a stretch. Sensible cat.

Misty has been enjoying some longer walkies of late, since we’re into the exam season and Deb no longer has to spend acres of her free time doing unpaid preparation for classes, marking, etc. All in all, it’s been a low-key, end-of-termy atmosphere all round. As the old Chinese proverb has it though, beware of living in interesting times. Ellie decided to test our combined resources the other week and cause a major missing dog alert scare.

She decided she would go for a walk and escaped through the cat flap, unnoticed. We had just got to the "where's Ellie?" stage, with Debbie ransacking the house from top to bottom, when her mobile rang. I picked it up and answered it.
"Hello, have you lost a little white dog?"
"Yes, as it happens we have. Have you found one?"
"Yes, she was in my garden down here in Armitage Bridge, digging a hole in a flowerbed"
"Ah, right. Sorry about that."
"Do you want me to tie her up?"
"You can give it a try, but it never stopped Houdini."
Twenty minutes later the disgraced escapologist dog was once more ensconced on the blanket on the sofa and told by Debbie to stay there and not move, on pain of death.

Thankfully, we have all survived the self-enforced gap in these chronicles of our days, and we are all more or less still here in more or less the same places, physically and spiritually, doing more or less the same things.

When I stopped writing this blog, back in November, it was really to do with pressure of work as much as anything else. What used to be an entertaining intellectual exercise on a Sunday afternoon (for me, at least – I can’t speak for my readers!) had turned into a bit of a tyrannical regime. Partly because the more I wrote, the less difference it seemed to make. I’m not naïve enough to assume that anything I write is going to change the world, but I was dismayed to see the evil seeping out of the shadows on all sides. The Brexit vote gave a great boost to that process, legitimising casual racism and xenophobia and seemingly making it acceptable to say (and in come cases do) things which ten years ago would have been unthinkable.

This was followed by the election of Trump. Although he has turned out to be a disastrous ignoramus who thinks the job is part-time and buggers off to Florida to play golf at every opportunity, he, too, has turned over a lot of stones and allowed the unspeakable and the vile to emerge, blinking into the light. It doesn’t matter that half the time he doesn’t seem to know what he’s doing from one minute to the next, he’s enabled, among other things, white supremacy. Last week, two nooses were found in two separate museums of African-American history in the States, having been presumably left there by someone who thought they were “making America great again”.

And the thing was, no matter how much I wrote about this, and pointed it out, and derided it, even mocked it, it still happened, and it happened in greater and greater volume. Anyone who pointed out the obvious fact that Brexit (especially Brexit without access to the single market) was an economic car crash waiting to happen, was labelled a traitor or an enemy of the people.

In an atmosphere like that, it seemed to me that the best thing to do was to spend the four hours or so I normally spent on a Sunday writing my blog, on actually fighting the things I was against, rather than just writing about them. So that is what I did.

So we came to the beginning of 2017. I watched the New Year come in with some trepidation, as a while ago now, I had a premonition that I would die in 2017. So far, I have survived the first five months of that fateful year. But, as they say, there is corn in Egypt yet.

The year began, on the Brexit front at least, with Theresa May insisting that she had all the mandate she needed for the withdrawal, thank you very much, and she was prepared to spend large amounts of government money fighting the court case brought by Gina Miller in an attempt to make sure that parliament at least had a say in the matter.

Then the courts ruled in favour of the right of parliament to scrutinise the Brexit deal, and May was forced to concede that there would have to be a debate. The government came up with the most pathetic, three paragraph Brexit Bill, which was voted through by the Tory majority. That would be enough, then. Theresa May announced that she was going to be difficult, in advance, never a good negotiating tactic, and that if the Europeans started to be difficult in return, she would just walk away. She also threatened them with non-cooperation on security matters. Since we were always going to walk away, one way or another, that wasn’t a very smart tactic either.

Government policy was going to be, it emerged, to kiss goodbye to the principle of access to the single market, because that would also entail accepting the principle of free movement of people. Theresa May was basically pandering to the Daily Mail, here, especially those of its readers who don’t like brown people very much, whether they were born here or not, and who are incapable anyway of grasping the difference between EU and non-EU migration. Not to mention the difference between refugees, asylum seekers, economic migrants, and people who are actually British but who have a different skin tone to Miss Marple.

Post-Brexit, access to the single market is absolutely essential, crucial, to our economic wellbeing. Why? Because we have nothing to put in its place. If May had any sense whatsoever, she would be doing whatever she could to try and secure a deal that was as close as possible to what we had before people were led astray by the lies of Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage. She clearly does have sense. She’s an intelligent woman. But she’s looked at the situation, and she’s thought well – if I am “against” immigration, it’ll play well with my semi-literate supporters. So I’ll go with that. She’s gambling my economic future – and yours – on getting back in for another five years. The single market amounts to 40% of our service industry exports. Where are we going to replace that from?

So. Anyway. Theresa May has now called a general election, even though she didn’t have to. Why?

There’s more than one answer to this.

Firstly, she always does the opposite to what she says she will do. She wants “the best possible Brexit for Britain”, then she chooses the worst possible option. She wants to help the families that are “just about managing”, then pilots a batch of welfare reforms including the rape clause. She says she won’t call a snap election, then she calls one. Do we sense a pattern developing here?

“No, I would never in any circumstances sell my granny,” followed by “the sale of my grandparents was the only democratic step available to implement the will of the people, who voted marginally for me to sell my granny into slavery…” Smells like May spirit.

There were, at the time she announced the poll, currently 30 Tory MPs under investigation of one sort or another for election fraud. That was more than the government’s majority. So, by calling this election (and they are ALL standing again, the brass-faced cheek of it!) she was hoping that it’ll all be swept under the carpet. As it turned out, she needn’t have bothered, because when push came to shove, the CPS was unable to locate its seed pods and also mislaid several crucial vertebrae, and the end result featured more whitewash than my local branch of B & Q. I do hope the electorate in the constituencies concerned will be taking notes about how many “central office” workers are battlebussed into their constituency this time around, because as sure as hell, Channel 4 will be.

Then there’s Brexit. The most obvious reason, in Brexit terms, is that she realises this is it. It will only go downhill from here. She has triggered article 50, and the ponderous machinery of the EU giving us a good (and well-deserved) kicking for leaving has only just commenced. As it lurches into action and progresses over the next two to five years (depending who you believe) and things get worse, as they grind us down, and the true scale of the economic catastrophe of Brexit hits home, her ratings will plummet. Nobody will remember that she was once an advocate of “Remain” (once again an instance of her flip-flopping, by the way). Given that things are on the economic slippery slope to Shitsville, Arizona, it makes sense to call the election now, for her, at any rate. It’s the opposite to Labour in 1997. Things can only get worse.

What it boils down to at the moment is that a woman has called an election to give herself a mandate which until very recently she denied to her last breath that she needed, a mandate to get what she calls the best deal for Brexit, which, if she has her way, will remove our access to the single market, and which will then actually be the worst deal for Brexit.

Who should we vote for, then? Clearly, not her!

Well. This is an election which is overshadowed like none before it, by the subject of Brexit. Irrespective of your voting history, or your or your family’s tradition of tribal voting history, it’s quite simple.

If you think Brexit is a horrendous mistake that’s going to damage your prospects and those of your children and possibly your grandchildren (even if you originally voted for it and have changed your mind as it’s become apparent what a balls-up it will be) then vote tactically in your constituency to cause maximum damage to the Tories and keep them out. Even if that means voting for the Literal Dimwits, see below. Just hold your nose and do it. The fewer seats the Tories get, the less damage they can do. If Theresa May is seeking a mandate to wreck the UK economy by leaving the EU on the worst possible terms, then deny her that mandate.

This will not however derail Brexit, because the Labour Party are also committed to the process. One unexpected bonus of a Labour victory is that Corbyn is a stubborn old git (witness him clinging on like a limpet despite the Blairites’ attempts to dislodge him). They should send him in to do the negotiations.

It’s highly possible, though, that Labour will lose the election. This is yet another reason why May has gone for it now. The feebleness of the opposition. They (Labour) have passed up a great opportunity by not coming straight out and saying “Vote for us and we will reverse Brexit”. They have played the entire Brexit thing wrong, though, right from the very start. And the blame for that particular tactical ineptitude does rest, largely with Jeremy Corbyn.

But if Labour are massacred at the election, it won’t ALL be Corbyn’s fault. There is also the small matter of the Parliamentary Labour Party having spent the last four years trying their very best to undermine him. If Corbyn does lose, they will be at least as much to blame as he is. And somehow, they should be punished for it. At least Corbyn is having the sense to try and position himself as an anti-establishment, anti-elite candidate, having seen how it worked for Trump. But he seriously needs to up his game. The trouble is he’s obviously a fundamentally nice, honest straight-up sort of a guy, and this works against him in a political world where, to succeed, you have to be a lying venal evil corrupt shyster.

The Liberal Democrats are against Brexit, so theoretically, anyone who thinks Brexit (or at least Theresa May’s version of it) is insane should vote Lib Dem, shouldn’t they? Well. Yes, on the face of it, if you could but trust them. However. Last time, they said they wouldn’t put up tuition fees. Then they U-turned on that, and spent five years propping up the Tories while they waged class war on the ill, the old and the disadvantaged. So, handle with extreme care, especially as their leader is a religious fruitcake. If a large number of people vote Lib Dem just because they want another referendum on Brexit, then the Tories especially if their majority is reduced again, will just subsume the Lib Dems into another coalition and the second referendum will be quietly abandoned.

In case you were still toying with the idea of voting for the Tories, though, I just thought I’d list a few of the things you’ll be voting for if you do.

Further cuts. Anyone who thinks that there is going to be an extra £350m per week for the NHS after we leave the EU is living on the Planet Deluded. It was a lie. If we leave the EU without access to the single market, which is what Theresa May wants, and the economy tanks, which it will, the tax take will drop, and they will not even be able to meet their current spending commitments, let alone guarantee the replacement of EU grants which we used to get with direct government grants from Westminster. So, well done, turkeys, you voted for Christmas.

In fact, if you are voting Tory, you’re also voting to disband the NHS. Let’s hope you’re in excellent health and/or a member of BUPA.

You’re voting for the dementia tax, to take away your home to pay for your care in old age.

Homelessness, including of ex-service personnel.

Food banks.

Kids going to bed hungry.

Women having to prove they were raped in order to claim child benefit.

Selling Arms to the Saudi Arabians to be dropped on starving children in the Yemen.

Bombing the Middle East for no reason and creating more terrorists at home and more refugees.

Letting said refugees drown in the Mediterranean, once they have been created.

The return of fox hunting.

Culling badgers to keep farmers happy even though it will do sod all to stop Bovine TB.

To name but a few. I mean, fine, if you’re OK with any or all of the above, then go ahead. Let me know how you sleep at night. If at all.

Meanwhile: for the rest of us. Vote however you must to stop the Tories. UKIP are irrelevant, although they’re now unashamedly showing their true racist colours (which they denied last June when Farage published that poster that led Thomas Mair to kill Jo Cox) with their proposed burkha ban. The Greens are hopelessly woolly and idealistic, and you can’t trust the Lib Dems. They say one thing, then do another. But if you do have to vote Lib Dem because they’re the only ones likely to beat the Tory in your constituency, well, I guess we just have to hope for the best.

If the Tories get back in then you are giving Theresa May a blank cheque to accept the worst possible deal for Brexit. She would rather harm the economy than upset the Daily Mail and its readers over the issue of free movement. That will damage your prospects and the prospects of your children, if any, and the prospects of the country as a whole. Theresa may is NOT a stable and strong leader, she is a weather vane who goes whichever way the wind blows, and she has the limited tactical skill of Roy Hodgson, as well as looking increasingly like him, in a bad light. And her hair looks like it was cut by the council. You may think I am being nasty and trivial, and resorting to personal insults. Just go and have a look at the way the Tory campaign has been targeting Corbyn. If you can’t take it, Theresa, you shouldn’t dish it out.

Britain is better than this. It’s not too late. Get shot of them, or at least stop them causing any more harm, and maybe the rest of us can sit down over a nice cup of tea and start the monumental task of sorting out this immense avalanche of Brexit crap that David bloody Cameron’s stupidity and hubris has landed us with.

This election has also been overshadowed, of course, by the terror attacks in Manchester and London, and as I type this there are still three says to go during which there could be still further atrocities. The people who are carrying them out are doing it because someone (presumably whoever radicalised these wingnuts in the first place and told them to go out and do their duty for Allah) wants to disrupt the democratic process. ISIS, if it is ISIS, would dearly love to see the entire country in lock-down, yet more hatred and division between the Muslim community and the rest of society, and the election cancelled. However, I am sceptical about the formal involvement of ISIS. It seems much more likely to me that these people were “radicalised” and took matters into their own hands, leaving ISIS to claim the credit.

In the wake of the Manchester attack, Corbyn was criticised for suggesting that we should try and understand the reasons behind this type of murderous act, in order to cut it off at the root cause. He drew attention to our foreign policy, and was roundly vilified for this. The media, particularly the BBC for some reason, have been biased against Corbyn from the outset, and generally the standard of debate in this campaign has been appallingly bad, especially in programmes the BBC have hosted, such as Question Time which had a room packed with rabid Tory supporters salivating at the prospect of Corbyn refusing to be the first one to launch a nuclear strike! So in one sense, the reaction Corbyn got, with people calling him a sympathiser and an appeaser, was to be expected.

Despite that, however, he was dead right. Until someone starts to look seriously at our actions in the Middle East and starts to question our motives and our objectives, and whether or not these are being achieved, we will never get to the bottom of ISIS-inspired terror acts and we will never have a coherent strategy for stopping them. There is a difference between seeking to understand something, to know why it happened, and condoning it, despite what Theresa May would have you believe.

Can anybody tell me, right now, why we are still bombing Syria? The underlying justification, of course, is the bombing in Syria is part and parcel of the ongoing policy of meddling and regime change that has been going on ever since Tony Blair took us into Iraq on George W Bush’s coat tails in 2003. Iraq ended up a basket case, a cradle for ISIS. Libya is now a seething soup of anarchy, a failed state, a breeding-ground for extremists and people-traffickers. Syria is the worst one yet: not least because for a while, we were trying to help the “moderate” Syrian dissidents to unseat Assad, which of course is also what ISIS wanted, so we were on their side militarily, if not ideologically. We also sell lots of arms to Saudi Arabia, at least some of which end up by various circuitous routes in the hands of ISIS.

But back to the original question: what are we trying to achieve. The RAF carry out their extremely expensive bombing missions with skill, bravery and professionalism. The current rate of child benefit is £34.40 per week for a family with two children. A six-hour bombing mission on Syria costs £508,000, based on a Tornado clocking up £210,000, 4 Paveway guided bombs at £22,000 each (the same ones we’re currently selling to the Saudis so they can use them on the famine-hit rebels in the Yemen) and 2 Brimstone Missiles at £105,000 each. In other words, the cost of just one bombing mission would pay that family’s child benefit for 14,767 weeks, or 283 years!

But surely it would be worth it if we achieved something? However, spending £508,000 to destroy a Toyota pick-up truck approx value £1500, plus six occupants, say, doesn’t make economic sense. It’s gaga. It doesn’t make military sense either: each of those six will be celebrated as martyrs and replaced by six more, or maybe sixty more. There will be plenty of new video footage of dead children, in Aleppo and elsewhere, to be skilfully edited and shared online by those shadowy people who will use it to radicalise the stupid, hard of thinking, and mentally ill young men who actually carry out these barbarous acts in the name of a warped version of something they don’t really understand but follow in blind faith.

Why do ISIS want this? They want to re-establish a caliphate for their type of “Islam”. They think that an attack on one Muslim is an attack on all Muslims. They believe that the western way of life is corrupt, immoral and irreligious (they may have a point there). Of course, you may feel their views are several stops beyond Barking and well off the bus route, but that is irrelevant. They’re the ones who believe it, and they’re the ones with the bombs, knives, and out of control vehicles.

There is depressingly little analysis when these sort of things happen. The media and politicians simply state “they hate our freedoms” and leave it at that. The world of social media is immediately besieged by people demanding a backlash, ranging from the ignorant and ill-informed, like Donald Trump and Katie Hopkins, to the more sinister dark forces of the far right who want to use attacks like this to divide off and limit the Muslim community on the grounds that, as they would say, all Muslims are potential terrorists. Actually, since Katie Hopkins, in a since-deleted tweet after the Manchester attack, called for a “final solution”, maybe she belongs in both categories. Either way, it cost her her job at LBC, and deservedly so.

But what should we do? When something like this happens, what lessons can be learned? The standard response is we must get tougher, and “moderate” Muslims must do more. Meanwhile, we all change our Facebook statuses. This is not necessarily a criticism – sometimes the wave of compassion and sorrow that sweeps across Facebook is the only way in which some people can register sympathy with the victims and horror at the actions of the perpetrators. It would be good, though, if from time to time, Facebook acknowledged that bombs are killing children all over the world especially the Middle East, and very few, if any, of them are remembered with a mass status-change on Facebook, even though many of them will have been killed with British-made munitions.

For what it’s worth, I think that all the getting tougher in the world will be of minimal use until and unless we stop bombing Syria ourselves, put a massive diplomatic effort in to persuade others to do likewise, stop selling arms to people who pass them on to ISIS, and work internationally through diplomatic channels to cut off the funding which fuels much of the activities ISIS carries out.

As far as the “moderate” Muslims are concerned, the media needs to start realising that every time something like this happens they should give the “moderate” Muslims a platform to actually say their piece. Unfortunately, the headline “moderate Muslim condemns violence” doesn’t pull as much weight as a Jihadi pronouncement or a Fatwah from some wingnut who has about 12 followers and is in no way representative of Islam as a whole. The BBC, sadly, has a track record of giving shouty-barmy fruitcake extremists with a relatively small following a disproportionately large platform for their hate-mongering – Nigel Farage springs to mind.

When you ask most people what they mean by “getting tougher”, they come up with things like banning the Burkha or curtailing immigration. Neither of these things seems particularly relevant to the situation to me. If a bomber had carried a bomb in from Pakistan under her Burkha, you may have a point. But as it stands, you are looking at the actions of disaffected “radicalised” young men. Other ways of “getting tough” often advanced are more legal powers, new laws, and more police. In fact, we have a whole raft of knee-jerk, anti-libertarian legislation in place, some of it dating back to the days of Tony Blair. We need to be very careful before we set off down the road of creating yet more thought-crimes without due process and with ever stronger sentences. There is a much more cogent argument to be made for more resources, though this is the most embarrassing part of the situation for Mrs May, since she spent most of her time at the Home Office instituting swingeing cuts in front-line police numbers.

This, again, though, needs to be handled with care. The end of that road is a shop-thy-neighbour police state with barbed wire all around the coastline and machine-gun towers at 50 yard intervals. Then we will have given away our few remaining freedoms, trading them for an illusion of safety, and ISIS will have won. On that subject, as well, I have seen calls for retaliation to go into the Middle East and “take them out”, which is, of course, exactly the type of reaction they are seeking to get out of us. Nothing would please them more than to see British troops engaged in hand to hand fighting in the rubble of the suburbs of Syria’s ancient cities. We have to face this fact. We will never defeat ISIS militarily. Even if Trump drops the big one, which would be a disaster in so many ways. But then he is a disaster in so many ways.

Meanwhile, here is a small lesson from history, to those who feel they can scare us with bombs. In 1941, the Luftwaffe bombed Manchester. Manchester came back, stronger than ever. In 1996, the IRA bombed the Arndale Centre in Manchester. Manchester came back, stronger than ever.

The Manchester attack and the horror in London are full of raw grieving and sorrow for all those people affected. Nothing will ever make it better for those who have lost friends and family. But make no mistake, whoever was responsible. Manchester will come back, stronger than ever.

From 7 September 1940, just over a year into the war, London was systematically bombed by the Luftwaffe for 56 out of the following 57 days and nights. They dropped about 45,000 tons of bombs on the capital. By the end of May 1941, 43,000 people had been killed and over a million houses damaged. Over 750,000 tons of rubble was removed from the capital over a six-month period and used as hardcore for the runways of the RAF bases which were springing up all over East Anglia. London survived, and came back, stronger than ever. Make no mistake, whoever was responsible. London will come back this time, stronger than ever.

Anyway, today is the feast of St Boniface, whom I have already “done” on this blog a year or so ago, so there doesn’t seem a lot of point in recording the details of his martyrdom once again today. Martyrdom, in any event, is a two-edged sword. The people who carried out the attacks I have just been writing about would have no doubt called themselves martyrs. Martyrdom can be heady wine. St Boniface and his companions were the victims in the case of his martyrdom, and I suppose you could draw a distinction between martyrs who died selflessly for their faith, and “martyrs” who died selfishly, taking innocent people with them.

As for me, I haven’t been venerating any martyrs particularly, of late. The pressure of work and the additional tasks involved in trying to get our house sorted out before I become too decrepit to either take part in the process or benefit from it, has taken up even the time I used to spend painting eikons, although I have managed to fit in one or two. Easter, which I do normally find to be a spiritual time of the year, passed almost unnoticed, in a blur of activity and a whine of power-tools. I have done two (unfinished) of the Stations of the Cross which I promised to do at the start of the year. I don’t pray much any more, either, other than when I remember. Probably the most spiritual thing I do these days is listen to music. Last Sunday I was reading the Lord’s Prayer in Latin while listening to Allegri’s Miserere, which is pretty full-on and hardcore in terms of my Medieval life. Then I went out and gathered some herbs for tea and some twigs for the fire. All it needed to top it off was some bowel surgery with a twig and a tasty meal of plague rats on skewers.

I started typing this on Saturday, and it’s now 7.30pm on Monday, and various inhabitants of the house are looking at me with the sort of look that says “where’s my tea”, so I guess I had better get on and do it.

It’s odd to think that, 73 years ago tonight, lots of brave men were bobbing about feeling seasick in landing craft of a choppy English Channel, waiting to land at dawn on the shores of occupied Europe and begin the process of ridding the world of fascism. For now, at any rate. No doubt Britain First will be urging us to remember the Normandy veterans tomorrow.

Whatever happens this week, we need to keep on keeping on. I’m not going to say “keep calm and carry on”, because I prefer “close ranks”. God alone knows what else this week holds, what other horrors, but at the end, we still need to stick together, and celebrate small victories. We are building a cathedral, one stone at a time.