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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
