Epiblog for the Feast of St Veronica Giuliani

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

False witness not to bear be strict;

And cautious, ere you contradict.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Epiblog for Misty's Birthday

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Epiblog for the Feast of St John of the Goths

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Twisted by knaves, to make a trap for fools

And see the things you gave your life to broken

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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