Epiblog for the Second Sunday of Lent

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. I billed it last week as the week from hell, and it didn’t disappoint. There have been days this week when I wondered what the hell was coming next, and when it did arrive, I wished I hadn’t bothered wondering.  Days when I sprinkled the Canicalm on Misty’s food and seriously considered topping off my breakfast cereal with a generous dose of it, as well.

The animals have, I supposed, been the least affected by the comings and goings and vicissitudes of fortune.  Matilda has been coming and going more or less as normal, apart from the day she got caught in a hailstorm, a circumstance over which she was most unimpressed.

The dogs have been around their usual circuits, doing their usual things: rooting in the undergrowth, snuffling in the leaves and, in Ellie’s case, licking an unattended Ryvita which Debbie had unfortunately left unattended on a plate within her reach. Fortunately Debbie saw her do it, otherwise she would never have known. It looks as though Ellie has inherited Zak’s official mantle as the “snapper-up of unconsidered trifles” – and, indeed, unconsidered Ryvitas.

The birds and squirrels have been continuing their ongoing banquet on the decking. I had actually made some Hare Bari Kebabs (a sort of cauliflower, potato and pea vegan pakora) last week. These are known in our household variously has Hari Kari Kebabs, Care Bare Kebabs or Hari Krishna Kebabs. Anyway, there were four left, and, as they were hanging around, and not wishing to poison anyone particularly, I added them to the dish for the birds and the squirrels, having crumbled them up first. I thought the birds would benefit from the flour which had absorbed the fat and the oil.

It didn’t take long for the first squirrel to arrive and assess the situation. It obviously worked out that underneath the top layer of Hare Bari Kebabs, there was wild bird food in the rest of the dish. It then proceeded to remove each one of the pieces of kebab carefully from the dish, cast them aside, and rummage through the remainder, looking for the sunflower seeds. I reminded it that in this house, you shut up and eat what you are given  It took absolutely no notice.

Shakespeare once wrote something to the effect that when sorrows come, they come not in single spies, but in battalions, and that has certainly been true, in a week which has seen whole armies of sorrows on the march.  As if we didn’t have enough to deal with, it’s been the revenge of the computers.  Last Sunday, the Epiblog was late because I spent the afternoon backing up 53,000 files, after having a computer disaster of gigantic proportions on Sunday morning which required the deployment of a windows startup disk.  I thought I had sorted it, but no, on Thursday it recurred, and this time the startup disk didn’t work.  I had potentially lost four days’ work at that point, and I was not a happy man. I hadn’t exactly started the week in a sunny mood, either.

By the end of Thursday, I went to bed mentally totting up the cost of a new laptop, plus all of the replacements or upgrades for the software I would end up having to buy again. Not surprisingly, it was a restless and fitful night.

I was up and about early on Friday for a variety of reasons. Having had another fruitless try at getting Windows to load properly, I ended up calling Colin, our mobile computer expert. He was here in about 10 minutes, though to be fair, he was already in the area with another client, he diagnosed that it was actually probably a hardware problem with the laptop’s keyboard (I’ve written a few million words on it, so he may well be on to something) and within minutes he had popped it out and was delving about in the innards underneath. He connected it all up again, apart from the bit that had been causing the trouble, plugged in an external keyboard (of which we have at least three lying about, fortunately) turned it off, turned it on, and hey presto, here I am.  At a cost of under £50.00, for which he will also throw in bringing and fitting a new integral keyboard for the laptop next week, it’s a lot cheaper than a new machine, which would inevitably have had the hated Windows 8 as its OS, and I haven’t lost everything.

If you are in the Holme Valley, Huddersfield, or the general Cleckhuddersfax area, I cannot recommend this man highly enough. He also let Matilda out for me while he was here, as she had, unusually for a visitor, graced him with her presence and come through from Colin’s to see what all the fuss was about.  So, that was one bullet dodged, and the first thing I did was to back everything up. Again.

That was the last bit of good news this week. Unfortunately, in the early hours of Saturday morning, Deb’s dad, who had been ill for a while and had been back in hospital for a week or so, died in his sleep at Huddersfield Royal Infirmary.  It’s still too early to start philosophising about an event which we haven’t properly taken in, and in any case, in his last days, he was adamant that he didn’t want any fuss, but obviously I can’t let the fact go completely unremarked.

It wasn’t until Deb and I had already been together for a while that I met her Dad, and once I had met him, I could at last understand where Debbie had inherited her quirky characterfulness from, as it had previously been a mystery to me.  He certainly was a character, as the many posts on the Holmfirth Harriers Facebook page in tribute to him will attest.  His running career also encompassed Longwood Harriers, and for a considerable while, he held their marathon record.  He had the misfortune, purely as an accident of history, to have been in the prime of his own running career at exactly the same time as a plethora of other athletic heroes were having theirs. Had he not been a contemporary of Derek Ibbotson and his ilk, he may well have run for England, or even Great Britain.  He could, almost certainly, had he “majored” his Irish granny, have run for Ireland, but England was his preference.

He was also, which surprised many people, an intelligent bloke, who was more than capable of holding his own in a discussion with anyone on a wide variety of subjects. I only say this because people don’t automatically think of athletes as being well-read and well-informed, though he certainly was. I didn’t always agree with him, but he could put forth and structure an argument, when he chose to.

In his latter days, following his retirement from “active” running, he still followed races both near and far, and became almost as well known as a spectator, as he was when he actually competed. He also loved going out for a run, or, latterly, a walk, himself, with one or other of the many dogs, especially Lucy, with whom he did have a special bond, and whose death deeply affected him, and then with Zak, whom many Harriers will remember as possibly the only canine spectator at their Leeds Road training sessions.  I had to break it to Zak that I would have to be his honorary Dad now. He was singularly unimpressed, but at least he gave paw.

There are people who knew him much better than me, who can eulogise him much better than I can. But, like Alf Tupper, he was the Tough of the Track, and, like Alf Tupper, he often caught people by surprise, both on and off the course, especially those who underestimated his face value.

Because his birthday was only a day or so separate from Burns Night, and because I celebrate Burns Night because of my mother’s Scottish blood (though I’m not entirely convinced it wasn’t just Ribena) we had, once or twice combined both celebrations, and during one such meal round at our house I read him the poem The Song of The Ungirt Runners, by Charles Hamilton Sorley, the poet who was killed, like so many other poets, in the First World War.

The rain is on our lips,

We do not run for prize.

But the storm the water whips

And the wave howls to the skies.

The winds arise and strike it

And scatter it like sand,

And we run because we like it

Through the broad bright land.

Anyway, he’s gone, and, although he wasn’t a particularly religious man or a Bible-believer or anything like that, I think he hoped that, in the world to come, he’d be jogging along over the moors with Lucy at his heels, and maybe with little Freddie as well, trying to keep up, huffing and puffing along behind, as fast as his little terrier legs will carry him.  That’s how I’d like to think of Mike, wherever he is now,.  Running because he likes it, through the broad, bright land.

Other than that, it’s been a pretty normal sort of week. Par for the course. Apart from the iceberg, the Titanic wasn’t a bad ship, either.  The entire internet, it seems, spent the whole week arguing about what colour somebody’s dress was, while kids were still dropping like flies in Africa from entirely preventable causes, such as lack of clean drinking water.  Madonna (remember her?) was capering about in a cape on stage at the Brits, surrounded my male dancers who were definitely not gay despite being naked from the waist up and dressed as horned, green, Satanic fauns.  One of them grabbed her cloak and tugged at it, intending, a la Bucks Fizz in Eurovision, to reveal a much skimpier costume underneath (had I been there, I’d have been shouting “keep ‘em on”).

Unfortunately, the cape was made of sterner stuff, and Madonna came off with it. Off the podium, that is, doing a full “Humpty Dumpty” down the stairs.  Still, she got up and finished the song, so it wasn’t all good news. It reminded me of What A Swell Party This Is…

Have you heard about poor Blanche

She got hit by an avalanche

Game girl, though, she got up and finished fourth.

The Brits has always been known, though, for carefully-choreographed car-crash television, from Mick Fleetwood and Samantha Fox’s buttock-clenchingly bad attempt at being joint hosts, to Chumbawama tipping an ice-bucket over John Prescott, to Jarvis Cocker baring his arse at Michael Jackson, the latter definitely a risky enterprise, if you ask me.  So, who knows if Madonna did it on purpose or not. All I know is that you never see Madonna and Maradonna in the same room at the same time, and I, for one, think that is something worthy of further investigation.

It could just be, of course, that the “material girl” was caught out because her cloak had just too much material.  Meanwhile, the row in the UK about poverty and living standards rumbled on.  As I said last week, the Junta were really rattled by the jolly old, good old Church of England telling it like it was about the unfair, divisive, and hurtful policies of “austerity” driving people into poverty and then punishing them by denigrating them for being destitute.  The fact that it had got under their skin and stung them was confirmed this week when, in a spiteful piece of “The Empire Strikes Back” type publicity, the government pointed out that the Church of England employed people at less than the “living” wage.

Justin Welby, much to my disappointment, apologised in various media interviews. Had I been the Archbishop of Canterbury, I would have said “the living wage is still higher than the minimum wage, and we constantly look to improve the working conditions of our colleagues. What about all those minimum wage and zero hours contracts jobs “created” by the Blight Brigade?”

I might have gone on to quote Matthew 7, verses 1-5:

Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again. And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?  Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye? Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye.

Or, indeed, that quotation from one of Michael Foot’s speeches

''We are here to provide for all those who are weaker and hungrier, more battered and crippled than ourselves. This is our only certain good and great purpose on earth, and if you ask me about those insoluble economic problems that may arise if the top is deprived of the initiative, I would answer: to Hell with them. The top is greedy and mean and will always find a way to take care of themselves. They always do.'

The greedy and mean were certainly at it again this week, with both Jack Straw and Malcolm Rifkind caught out by yet another of these “fake sheikh” type “stings” by a combination of Channel 4 and The Daily Telegraph.  When will these politicians learn? It just goes to show the utter contempt with which they regard us, the electorate that put them there.  And we can’t even say that we’ve got the finest politicians money can buy, because most of them are lazy, inept, stupid non-attenders who are at best, past-masters of “present-eeism”, when they can even be bothered to turn up and saunter through the odd lobby.  And if Ed Miliband is suddenly so keen on MPs having no other employment, why didn’t he sign my 10 Downing Street petition to that effect, when I started it a year ago?

Jack Straw apparently wanted £5000 per day, or possibly per hour, I can’t remember now, while Rifkind was claiming he had to take on this work because he couldn’t manage on £67,000 per year. Iain Duncan Smith, however, says people can live on £53.00 per week, although he has always refused many challenges to do just that. Come on, Tories, make your mind up. Unless of course, IDS meant “poor people can live off £53.00 a week”. The Commissioners who will be – completely undemocratically, as they are government-appointed commissars of the sort we once used to tease the Russians about – running Rotherham Council for the next four years can't manage on £53.00 a week. They are being paid £800 a day. There are five of them, so that is £4000 a day, or, to put it another way, £1,460,000 a year. I can’t help but wonder if, instead of cutting the rate support grant to the bone and beyond, Eric Pickles had been willing to invest that sort of money five years ago, say in children’s services in Rotherham, the outcome might have been different. As it is, Rotherham’s taxpayers, indeed all taxpayers, are being treated to the sound of the stable door being shut with a resounding clang, by someone they didn’t even get the chance to choose to do the shutting, and they’ll now have to pay for new hinges on top! Great result.

The government (if I can justify them with that grand a title) don’t care about places like Rotherham, of course, not until and unless something happens there that creates a situation which can be manipulated to political advantage, regardless of whether or not it will actually solve the issue. That’s when they shake the magic money tree and hey presto, enough cash to buy a giant elastoplast.  They don’t care about any of the people their policies hurt and damage. You have only got to look at rough sleeping.

Rough sleeping has risen by over 50% across England under the rule of the Junta from 1,768 people in 2010 to 2,744 in 2014.  Despite Boris Johnson’s promise that he would end rough sleeping in the capital by 2012, the number of homeless people in London has almost doubled from 415 to 742 people between 2010 and 2014. And, of course, that’s only the documented cases, the people who actually got counted, and doesn’t include the vast army of sofa-surfers, or those who, on the particular night of the census, managed to get lucky and find a bed in a hostel for once. This is based on a government set of statistics as reported by the homeless charity, Crisis, who also pointed out that homeless people are 13 times more likely than the rest of us to be the victims of crime, and the average age of death if you are homeless is just 47.

So, anyway, that was the week that was. A week when we all came face to face with the final frontier, even Leonard Nimoy. A week when we all had to face up to and acknowledge the transitory nature of life, that knowledge that we all carry round with us, like a pebble in the shoe, as soon as we become old enough to realise it.  Today is St David’s day, and it’s also the feast day of the lesser-known, but splendidly-named, St Suitbert of Kaiserswerdt.  I have absolutely no idea who he was or what he did, and to be honest, even St David seems a bit irrelevant, right now.  Spring may be coming, it’s true, but right now, there is a sad time to be faced and endured, so my own feelings are more grounded in Lent than in joyously celebrating Maisie’s indestructible daffodils, which come before the swallow dares, and take the winds of March with beauty, as Perdita says in A Winter’s Tale.

Today is also the second Sunday of Lent, so I turned to the Lexicon and found that amongst today’s “set texts” is Mark 9: 2-9, which contains the account of the Transfiguration.

And after six days Jesus taketh with him Peter, and James, and John, and leadeth them up into an high mountain apart by themselves: and he was transfigured before them. And his raiment became shining, exceeding white as snow; so as no fuller on earth can white them. And there appeared unto them Elias with Moses: and they were talking with Jesus. And Peter answered and said to Jesus, Master, it is good for us to be here: and let us make three tabernacles; one for thee, and one for Moses, and one for Elias. For he wist not what to say; for they were sore afraid. And there was a cloud that overshadowed them: and a voice came out of the cloud, saying, This is my beloved Son: hear him. And suddenly, when they had looked round about, they saw no man any more, save Jesus only with themselves.

I’ve always been a great “fan” of the Transfiguration, at least of one particular representation of it, that painted by Guiseppe Cesari, also known as the Cavaliere d'Arpino, on a wood panel, in Italy in the 16^th century. It hangs in the Ferens Art Gallery in Hull, which is where I first saw it. It had been recently cleaned that day, and the colours blazed forth and bathed me in their light. I’ve been back many times to see it, I’ve even stood in front of it and sketched it, but nothing can compare with that first moment. The moment when I not only loved the painting, but realised that what it meant was that “art” was not only for the great and the good, but also for a snotty kid from the slums like me.  I’ve reproduced it at the top of this blog, but nothing compares to the original.

I was also impressed by the Biblical account of the Transfiguration. Not because I think it’s literally true, though who knows what visions may be wrought by the power of the collective unconscious between a group of people who believe strongly enough in their substance, but by what it meant. Or what I thought it meant.

What it means to me, what the Transfiguration says to me, is it speaks of the possibility of sudden, blinding change, of revelation that there is something else, a world of pure light and goodness beyond. We only get a glimpse, and the curtain drops again, and you look around and all the angels and prophets have gone, and there’s just you, alone on the mountain. First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is.  Then life goes on, and you’re back to peeling potatoes or putting out the ashes.  But, without mixing my metaphors or pickling my prophets, with the Transfiguration, you have had a chance, like Moses, to peep over into the promised land.  Backed up by a promise, in the form of a spooky voiceover by Big G in the Bible account, that there is something there, after all.

If it’s not too blasphemous a thought, that’s how I’d like to think of Mike: not dead, but transfigured, along with Lucy, running through the broad, bright land. The promised land.  Sit terra tibi levis.

Epiblog for the First Sunday in Lent

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. The weather has turned grim, grey and grotty, apart from a few sunny, frosty mornings, and with the return of the damp in the air, the pain in my shoulder has returned once more, although it’s not the immediate, nagging pain I suffered over the summer, more of a dull ache, but it’s still tedious, nevertheless.

The birds and the squirrels have well and truly woken up, however, and are busy preparing for the spring.  When I put some food out for the birds this morning, the first two customers were two chubby squirrels who immediately started rummaging through the grain, looking for sunflower seeds, like two grannies at a jumble sale looking for bargains.  Having stacked away a considerable quantity each, they retired from the field, presumably to sleep it off, and left the remains to the birds. Later on, while I was busy with some filing (I had got up early in anticipation of a courier delivery which didn’t actually materialise until twenty past two, and it seemed a shame not to put the time to good use) there were two squirrels, whether the same two or a different two, I know not, chuffing around on the roof of the conservatory. God alone knows what they were doing, but from the way they were clomping around up there, I would guess at clog dancing.

All this activity has been extremely entertaining for Matilda, amounting as it does to the equivalent of a box set of “cat TV”.  Most days this week she’s spent a considerable time with her snouty face pressed against the inside of the conservatory door, chattering, growling and swishing her tail at the antics of various squirrels, pigeons and other specimens of ornithological interest.  It’s harmless enough, because despite her show of aggression, there is absolutely zero chance of her catching one of them in the wild, as both the squirrels and the birds are faster than her, and the birds have the additional advantage of being able to fly.  She’s made the most of the finer weather when it’s been on offer, but she did the world’s shortest ever cat expedition this afternoon when Debbie let her out in the wind and the rain and she was back at the door yowling to come in almost before Deb had closed it behind her.

Ellie and Zak have been staying for a couple of days this week, so Misty has had some canine companionship, and Ellie has been able to take over the important task of keeping an eye on the squirrels while Matilda is otherwise engaged, curled up in a tight ball asleep on the settee in Colin’s front room, with her tail over her nose. As it’s been half term, Debbie’s been able to get in some good walking with the dogs, off in the wild blue yonder, where there is miles and miles of bugger all, covered up with peat and heather.  They did the Crowdon Horsehoe, and Misty managed to lose the metal tag with her microchip ID number on it. This isn’t a major disaster, as her name and address tag, which is separate on her collar, also says “I am chipped, please scan me”, but it’s another addition to a list of things to do which is already a yard and a half long, to organise a replacement. Zak takes such excursions in his stride, but I think little Ellie may have found the two successive days when they did eight miles and thirteen miles respectively to have been a shock to the system. She certainly wasted no time hoovering up her tea and putting herself to bed, when they got back each time.

As you have probably gathered, we didn’t get away in the camper, mainly owing to reasons such as lack of time, lack of energy, and bad weather. The weather here at home hasn’t been anything to write home about, and indeed we were already at home, so why bother wasting a stamp; the weather in the Lake District was even worse, though, and I am glad to say that Debbie saw the logic in not climbing a 3000 foot mountain in the driving rain only to find that when you get there, wet through and frozen stiff, the summit is in fog and you can’t see further than the end of your nose.

As for me, I put the time to good use, and although I haven’t yet done anything about publicising any of it, I laid out and sent off to press the reprints of all the missing Gez Walsh Potty Poets books, The Spot on My Bum, The Return of the Spot, Someone’s Nicked My Knickers, and Parents, Zits and Hairy Bits. Plus, in a completely different, and much more serious, vein, I’ve been working on a new collection from a young writer with an astonishing amount of talent and potential, Philippa Crundwell, called Seventy Beats. Watch this space, as they say.

The wheelchair man came and fixed my wheelchair (in the driveway, I’d forgotten he has a phobia of dogs) so I am no longer typing at a 45 degree angle. And with my other leg, this week, by dint of ignoring various issues that seemed to think they were crises, but I disagreed, and the sky hasn’t fallen in, yet, as a result, I managed to pull together some work on one of my own books, We’ll Take The String Road, now expanded to include 2014’s Arran trip.  I also fixed the vacuum cleaner. Well, I say “fixed”, all that it needed was a shard of a broken plate removing from half way up the flexible hose, where it had gathered various other elements of chip fat and gunge to cause a blockage.  The potsherd was a result of my having dropped the plate in the first place, and Debbie having hoovered it up. I had hoped, when I saw the plate heading for the tiled floor, that it would bounce, as bone china is reputed to do , but sadly, this proved not to be the case, and it shattered into several hundred pieces of pottery shrapnel, in the full-on Greek taverna approved manner. One of which later became wedged in the vac hose and stopped it working. Yes, it’s just one white-knuckle ride of excitement round here.  I have measured out my life in coffee spoons.

I’ve been ignoring the outside world, too, while I’ve been busy getting on with stuff, but there are some stories that inevitably filter through from the daily round, the bundle of “telegrams and anger” that passes for the country we’re forced to live in.

UKIP have continued their stick-on comedy election campaign with their prospective candidate for Great Grimsby asking in the context of a pre-election debate “what happens when the renewable energy runs out.” You can’t buy stupidity like that, you have to be born with it. As Bernard wryly observed during his most recent visit to me, “When you’re dead, you don’t know you’re dead, it’s the people around you that are affected, troubled, and saddened by it. It’s the same when you’re stupid”.  I was discussing it with Debbie and she said, with her ‘teacher’ hat on, that surely the idea of renewable energy running out was an oxymoron. To which I replied that the woman was not only an oxy moron, but a silly cow to boot.

Actually, I do her a disservice, maybe. There is a possibility  - a certainty, some would say - that the sun will one day turn into a supernova and burn us all to a crisp. It could already have happened, as light from the sun takes 8 minutes and 20 seconds or so to reach the Earth, so the sun could have blown up eight minutes ago and we wouldn’t know until…..arrrrrgh!

OK, admit it, I had you going there.

I do think, though, there is a correlation between fascism and stupidity, the more I study the antics of UKIP.  Well, it’s not only UKIP, to be honest, there’s also the EDL, the BNP, Britain First, Chelsea football fans, you name it.  ISIS are a crowd of medieval mumbo-jumbo merchants, suet from the neck up, as are the Taliban.  The essence of fascism is coercion by force to adhere to a set of values that are simply not up for discussion, no matter how much you point out their failings of interior logic. Please note, I am not having a go at Islam here, in general, merely at the people of all religions who refuse to discuss their beliefs and seek to impose their will on others, unwillingly. It’s not the exclusive province of radical Islam, either – this week the Pope said that transsexual people were as dangerous as a nuclear weapon, or something similar.  Well, pardon me, I know that UKIP think that gays cause flooding, but I have yet to see a transsexual wipe an entire city from the face of the earth and leave fallout that lasts for thousands of years.

The same thing, the fascism = stupidity equation, was also true of the Nazis. All of their best generals, people like Rommel and Guderian, were Nazis in name only, along for the ride. People such as Goering, and indeed Hitler himself, liked to think of themselves as master tacticians and intellectuals, but in truth, they hardly troubled the scorers.  We should be grateful, I suppose, that Hitler was such a meddlesome, megalomaniac duffer at battle tactics – if he had continued bombing the RAF on the ground while they were refuelling, in 1940, instead of switching to a carpet bombing Blitz on London, and if he’d ignored the Russian front instead of capriciously switching in 1941 and initiating Operation Barbarossa, the outcome of the last war might have been very different. One can only hope his present-day acolytes self-destruct in a similar manner, but without taking several million innocent lives with them.

It may seem fatuous, and indeed disrespectful, to compare the present day Junta’s treatment of the poor, the ill, the unemployed, migrants and asylum seekers to the Holocaust. Nobody is suggesting rounding up all the unemployed or people on benefits, and putting them in special camps, not yet, anyway, though Katie Hopkins did suggest last year that they should be forced to wear some outward mark denoting their status, in a bid to win the oxy moron award for 2014.  We should not forget, however, that people have died as a result, as a direct result, of the policy of “austerity” and the deliberate targeting of people on benefits by the DWP and their agencies, ATOS, and, latterly, CAPITA.

In case you thought I was being melodramatic about the way in which the war on welfare is going, the Tory faction of the Junta this week re-announced their policy of workfare for all 18-21 year olds in long term unemployment, and the withholding of benefits from people with drug, alcohol, or obesity problems.  There is an argument to the contrary, that these people need additional help, to be able to kick their unfortunate addictions and start on the long road back, but that doesn’t pander to the Daily Mail myth that all people on benefits are living high on the hog at the expense of “hard working families”, when in fact quite a lot of hard working families are working hard at crappy jobs where the pay is so low they have to have it topped up by, er, benefits.

As to the mass “workfare” programme for 18-21 year olds, I have said this before and I’ll say it again. Once you abandon the principle of one universal system which treats all claimants the same, once you start creating sub-divisions into the deserving and the undeserving poor, then I am afraid that is a step down the road to deciding that this or that section of society is not “worth” supporting with benefits, it is a step down the road to identifying these people with a special badge and keeping them corralled in camps.  And as we all know, the journey of a thousand miles starts with but a single step.  You mark my words.  First they came for the obese and the drug addicts, and I did not speak up because I was not obese, or an addict; then they came for the 18-21 year olds…

Thankfully, there are still some people in our society who have the courage and the guts to speak out against the nasty injustices of the evil Junta, and propose an alternative. I don’t mean the Labour Party, which fell ill under James Callaghan and died under Tony Blair. Ed Miliband and his miliband of merry men are about as successful at opposing the Junta as a gnat trying to sting a battleship. No, I mean the good old Church of England, the nearest thing to an opposition we have got at the moment.  This week the Bishops took some time off from moving diagonally, and instead released a round-robin letter, a “Pastoral Letter” for the 2015 election, condemning the politics of “austerity” and pointing out almost in words of one syllable that those who could least afford it are being asked to bear the burden.

“There is a deep contradiction in the attitudes of a society which celebrates equality in principle yet treats some people, especially the poor and vulnerable, as unwanted, unvalued and unnoticed,”

This is something which has been so self-evident for the last three or four years that it hardly bears saying. Nevertheless, they seem to have annoyed the Tories in general and Iain Duncan Smith in particular, which is never a bad thing.  If the Church of England was a political party, right now, I think I might even vote for it.

This week marked the release of the news that Lucy Glennon had died on 29^th January. I say “the release of the news”, what I mean is that I was too busy looking the other way to notice it until I saw an online obituary. Lucy Glennon suffered from Recessive Dystrophic Epidermolysis Bullosa, which you have to admit, knocks Facioscapularhumeral Muscular Dystrophy into a cocked hat when it comes to diseases with outlandish wacky names. It’s actually a very nasty condition which renders the skin incredibly susceptible to damage even from the ordinary wear and tear of everyday life.  Lucy Glennon lived a life of pain, exacerbated by the idiocy of having the Damoclean sword of benefits cuts hanging over her for the final years of her life. She was 28 when she died, and she wrote with great humour and courage in blog postings and articles about being forced to move out of her two-bedroom flat because of the changes in her housing benefit and a muddle, not of her own making, over her DLA. Her early death was due to her condition, and not directly caused by the Junta’s policies, but one thing’s for sure, the constant battles and uncertainty she had to endure didn’t make it any easier, and her story should be required reading for anyone who thinks that being incurably ill, in pain, and on benefits, is a doddle.

But, of course, as the Blight Brigade would have us believe, people on benefits are apparently leaching the country dry, which is why there is no money for any of the things we used to have, like libraries and Sure Start centres. The bishops’ letter describes it as “game-playing, to claim that anyone who cares about the impact of austerity on the most vulnerable members of society is … careless about the extent of national indebtedness”.

Well, if it’s a game, it’s not a very entertaining one, and the result is always rigged. Councils across the north of England are finding out around now how much they have to cut this year to take account of further reductions in central government funding, not that this stops them from indulging in grandiose gestures when there is a bike race to be underwritten out of the public purse, and now we find this week that the absurdly-named “Tour de Yorkshire” is going to receive £800,000 of public funding, so we can obviously find magic money down the back of the sofa somewhere, when it’s a case of civic junketing and New Years’ Honours.

If anyone doubted the way in which the disadvantaged are treated as a problem to be airbrushed out of the picture in these times of “austerity”, one need look no further than Selfridges in Manchester, which has become the latest building in a town centre to install spikes to deter rough sleepers from using its doorways to shelter at night. So, in the bewildering cacophony of 21^st-century retailing, they have at least made one decision easy for me – boycott Selfridges.  You sort of half expect compassionless brutality from a set of rapacious moneygrubbers like Selfridges. But the people who should really be hanging their heads in shame this week are Hull City Council, who put up a series of posters in the town centre targeting rough sleepers with the strapline “Beggars Can Be Choosers”, implying once more that living rough and being forced to beg on the streets is some kind of lifestyle choice.  It shows yet again how insidious the propaganda which has been pumped at us since 2010 has been. It’s quite simple, as I have said before, these days we are all just three bad decisions away from being on the streets, and with the current set of clowns in charge, they don’t even have to be your bad decisions! So, think on, Hull City Council. There but for fortune, goes you and I.

So, after a mixed week, we staggered on to Sunday, and, as I said earlier, I was up and about startlingly early, and looking forward to knocking some of the tedious tasks off my “to do” list, and maybe even get around to something a little more recreational, but sadly, my computer had other ideas and started displaying all of the symptoms of a hard disk that is not very well at all. I cursed myself that, with everything else I’d achieved during the week, I hadn’t found the time to back up my files.  Eventually, with the aid of a Windows recovery boot disk and several hours of frustration and chewing my own beard, I’d got it to boot up and run various diagnostics and scans. I also backed up about 53,000 files onto an external hard drive, so that if it does go “brustenauf” next week, at least my work will be safe, although setting up a new machine would definitely not be on my “to do” list, all other things being equal. Next week is going to be horrid enough as it is.

Today is the first Sunday of Lent, and it certainly felt suitably purgatorial.  This means, of course, that the week also contained Ash Wednesday, a suitably sombre day, as it turned out, and one where I made a point of re-reading T S Eliot’s poem of that name, in the same way that every Good Friday, I try and read Good Friday 1613, Riding Westward, by John Donne.

And pray to God to have mercy upon us

And I pray that I may forget

These matters that with myself I too much discuss

Too much explain

Because I do not hope to turn again

Let these words answer

For what is done, not to be done again

May the judgment not be too heavy upon us

Because these wings are no longer wings to fly

But merely vans to beat the air

The air which is now thoroughly small and dry

Smaller and dryer than the will

Teach us to care and to not care

Teach us to sit still.

Eliot’s remorse for “what is done, not to be done again” was probably related to the breakdown of his marriage to Vivienne Haigh-Wood, a process which eventually led to Eliot, aided by Vivienne’s brother Maurice, having her committed to a mental institution in 1938.  He had already left her (“deserted” her, as she would have it) in 1933, three years after Ash Wednesday was published.  My own remorses are much more prosaic. If anyone’s going to be committed, it’ll probably be me, the way things are going.  That’s not to say I haven’t let people down in the past, even the quite recent past, by not being there when needed, by hurting people as a result of bad decisions or letting hubris get in my way… been there, done that.

And now that, unlike the birds that flock in our garden, I am unable to “beat my wings”, now that I am indeed, as Eliot would say, “an aged eagle”, I find myself  thinking back on those times with the intention, perhaps, of doing some sort of penance but also, perhaps, to try and understand why I did what I did, at the time.  Maybe I should try and write it out of my system, as a Lenten exercise, since in some cases it won’t be possible to apologise in person to those involved, even if I knew where they are right now.  The Collect for today has, amongst the readings, the chapter in the Gospel of Mark where Jesus spends forty days in the wilderness being tempted by Satan. Even for someone like me who has difficulty with the literal interpretation of the Bible, I have often been puzzled by this episode, and why it was necessary at that particular juncture.  Perhaps it’s meant to be symbolic of the need to overcome the inner “Satan” in order to concentrate on the divine “spark” within.  In my case, my own temptations would not be the world, the flesh, the devil, but the torment of not being able to go back and put right what I previously did wrong. To care, and not to care.

Eliot returns to precisely that theme in Little Gidding, when he writes:

And last, the rending pain of re-enactment

Of all that you have done, and been; the shame

Of motives late revealed, and the awareness
Of things ill done and done to others' harm

Which once you took for exercise of virtue.

Then fools' approval stings, and honour stains.
From wrong to wrong the exasperated spirit

Proceeds, unless restored by that refining fire

Where you must move in measure, like a dancer.'

Well, Thomas Stearns, me old pal, me old beauty, my dancing days are over, except mentally, perhaps.  Tomorrow, I shall be remembering a sad occasion which was not of my doing, in that it is 18 years by the date since Phil’s cat, Reggie, didn’t come home one night and was found by Phil next day at the side of the Wombwell by-pass. So, tomorrow is Reggie day, black-bright little imp that he was, and he lives on in our memory and, over the years, in many passwords.

Which brings me back to computers, and this one. While I’ve been picking my way though this blog, it’s behaved itself, more or less, so it’s been a long day and I’m going to quit while I’m ahead, lock up, and fetch in some coal. Good night all, and possibly sundry.  Tomorrow shall be my dancing day.

Epiblog for the Feast of St Onesimus

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley.  The weather has at least calmed down, and entered what the weather forecasters rather quaintly refer to as a “quiet phase”, as if having worn itself out snowing and blowing a gale, the weather has overtired itself and is having to have a little lie down. In practical terms, that means the equivalent of living in a Tupperware box, with grey skies and cold days.  When the sun does occasionally make its presence known, it’s with the feeblest of glimmers, what Bob Copper once referred to as “the counterfeit gold of February sunlight.”

Still, it’s better than snow and ice, and there are encouraging signs that things are starting to happen on the Spring front in general.  The snowdrops have increased their numbers since last week, and Maisie’s indestructible daffodils have been joined by their more elusive brethren, the ones that got left behind beside the pond when we thought we’d dug them all up, so we shall soon have, in a few weeks, daffodils front and back.

Matilda has been spending an increasing amount of time out of doors, and when she’s not actually outside, she’s again been indulging in her second favourite pastime, that of sitting just inside the closed conservatory door, bird- and squirrel-watching.  The birds have been very busy, and seem to be increasing in numbers every day. This week of course included Valentine’s Day, the day on which wild birds traditionally choose their mates for the coming year:

For this was on Seynt Valentynes day,

Whan every foul cometh ther to chese his make,

Of every kinde, that men thynke may;

And that so huge a noyse gan they make,

As Geoffrey Chaucer tells us in The Parliament of Foules. But we don’t have to take his word for it: the traditional English folk song, Dame Durden, as sung by the Copper family, takes place:

…on the morn of Valentine,

When birds begin to prate,

Dame Durden and her maids and men

Were all together met…

I didn’t see any particular evidence of the birds choosing their mates on Saturday, but Matilda did choose that day to go missing from 11AM until 7PM, thus lending further credence to the “other house” theory. Wherever her other house is, they are not feeding her, because when she got back she demolished two sachets of Felix, back to back, straight off the bat.

Misty has been joined in the latter half of the week by Zak and Ellie, who have come to stay while Granny is on another one of her Elizabethan progresses through the southern portion of her realm.  So on Friday and Saturday, Debbie set off with Misty and Ellie attached to her via Dyneema ropes and karabiners, with Zak trotting obediently behind.  They did at least seven miles each time, which is meat and drink to a border collie like Misty and a large dog like Zak, but poor little Ellie, trotting along on her little terrier legs, slept very soundly, both days, after eating a huge meal on her return.  She’ll have to do a lot more training before she conquers her first Wainwright.

I’ve had mountains of my own to climb this week, mainly comprising paperwork, which seems to multiply exponentially the moment you turn your back on it.  It doesn’t matter whether you’re a geologist or a genealogist, you look away for a moment and when you look back, a whole new range of administrative alps has thrust itself upwards, obscuring the horizon.

This has not been made any easier by the fact that the socket that holds the right arm of my wheelchair in place has malfunctioned (I think the bolt holding it on to the frame has sheared) so my wheelchair tray is listing at about 25 degrees, left to right. I have rung up to get the chap who repairs NHS wheelchairs to come and fix it, which is normally a five minute call at worst, but this time the number was unobtainable. Following a tedious round of phone tag table tennis, I eventually found out that “wheelchair services” has been taken back “in house”, as part of the continuing dismantling of the NHS, no doubt. Finally in possession of the right number, I dialled it, only to find it was an ansaphone.  Eventually they rang me back, and it seems the earliest it can be fixed is Monday.  Truly marvellous.  So I am typing this at a slant, which is probably why it will seem even more biased than usual. My old chum, Bernard, bless him, descended on us like a deus ex machina this week and cheered me up considerably, and even he tried to have a go at fixing it, but without drilling out the sheared bolt, we were stuffed.

I consoled myself with watching the final episode of the re-run of Smiley’s People, the 1982 televisation of the John Le Carré book, which has been re-shown on BBC Four over the last four or five weeks. I feel a connection with the book because I bought it in hardback the day it came out, and I actually met John Le Carré (briefly, and eminently forgettably, for him) when he gave a lecture at Hull University, following its publication.  Anyway, it was good to renew my acquaintance with Alec Guinness’s masterly portrayal of George Smiley. Debbie, however, was not a fan. When it finished, I mentioned to Deb that I quite fancied visiting Switzerland (where the final episode was largely set). “Good idea,” she said, “that’s where Dignitas is, isn’t it?”

Grim humour has sometimes been very necessary this week. UKIP have at least done their best to keep us entertained. They do add to the gaiety of nations, although perhaps that’s not the most appropriate phrase for Rev. George Hargreaves, who has been parachuted into the Coventry South constituency as UKIP’s candidate in May. Rev. Hargreaves apparently wrote the song “So Macho” for Sinitta in the 1980s, but despite this major contribution to the canon of gay disco anthems, and despite having a former flatmate who died of AIDS, Rev Hargreaves had a previous attempt to be elected when he campaigned (for the Scottish Christian Party, which he founded) on a platform which included proposals for the reinstatement of Section 28, banning of gay adoption and the prohibition of ‘acceptance or approval’ of homosexuality in diversity training, outlawing embryo research and introducing mandatory Christian religious education into schools.  He has also campaigned to have the dragon removed from the Welsh flag, because it is a symbol of Satan, apparently.  I’m not sure, as I type this, how much of this bilge is actually official UKIP policy, but since Nigel Farage tends to make it up as he goes along, neither is he.  One thing’s for sure, Rev Hargreaves must have graduated magna cum laudae from the UKIP fruitcake academy that year.

Meanwhile, in Thurrock, UKIP councillor Robert Ray has been banned from driving for 19 months and fined £1,160 at Basildon Magistrates’ Court, and, yes, you guessed it – suspended, after admitting drink driving following a party last June. It must have been a good party, because he was double the legal alcohol limit when he was arrested by police after asking them, “Do you know who I am? I am a prominent councillor, I know the police commissioner.” I find myself wondering what happens when it gets to the stage where UKIP has more suspended members than members.

UKIP are undoubtedly stick-on comedy gold, although of course deep down they are just as sinister as all the rest of them, possibly more so.  We should be thankful they are such an inept bunch of clowns. To re-enact the Holocaust, they would need to make the trains run on time, which is clearly beyond their capabilities.  Sadly, the Junta have proven more efficient at killing people off.  Andrew Sherratt, of Stoke-on-Trent, died last week after having his disability benefits stopped by Hanley Jobcentre, despite his being terminally ill.  And earlier this month, a coroner ruled on the case of Malcolm Burge, 66, who faced a bill of £800 because of a payments mix-up by Newham Council. With a bank balance of only £50, he took the only way out he could see when his repeated letters to the Council were ignored because they were engulfed with a massive caseload of Housing Benefit-related queries caused by “austerity” policies.

On 23^rd June 2014 he drove to Cheddar Gorge in Somerset, parked up, and ignited a 20-litre can of petrol in the passenger footwell.  He suffered 100 per cent second-degree burns to his body, and was rushed to hospital by air ambulance, but he could not survive his injuries. He died at 5AM the following day.

Following the coroner’s ruling of suicide, the DWP acknowledged this week that it has reviewed 49 cases where employment benefit recipients were “sanctioned” – having their payments stopped for a period of weeks or months after failing to comply with the rules – and subsequently died. Esther McVey, the employment minister, this week told MPs no link had been found between the deaths and the sanctioning policy. She told the work and pensions select committee: “We ensured that we followed all of our processes correctly.” Yes, well, quite. In fact, there’s your trouble, as the Dixie Chicks would no doubt say if they were here right now. Perhaps it’s time to re-think having a “process” which cuts people off from benefits to which they are entitled for no good reason, then drives them to the brink of suicide and beyond? Just a thought.

When street trader Tarek al-Tayeb Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire in Tunisia in December 2010, as a protest against the repressive, harsh policies of his government, the Junta generally hailed it as a heroic gesture, and indeed it was one of the key moments in the Arab Spring, that led to us meddling in yet more Middle Eastern countries with all of the attendant expense and no discernible benefit. What I can’t understand is why someone who sets himself on fire in Tunisia is a hero, whereas someone who does the same thing, and for many of the same reasons, in Cheddar Gorge, doesn’t even merit a public enquiry. Perhaps Cameron is playing his cards close to his chest, and planning a surprise missile strike on the Department for Work and Pensions. We can but hope.

Double standards from politicians are nothing new, of course. In the same way as it came as no surprise to me when Lord Fink (a wonderful name, redolent of Bertie Wooster’s chum, Gussie Fink-Nottle) was shown to be avoiding tax. My default position with the political establishment is that, to a greater or lesser degree, they are all at it, and they are all lying, in the same way that I always assumed the NSA was bugging everybody anyway. Having said that, a spectacular example of double standards has occurred this week. Compare and contrast, as it used to say on exam papers, the reaction to the murders by (at least nominal) Muslims of the cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo with the reaction to the murders this week of three Muslims, in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, by a self-confessed white atheist.

The victims, all shot in the head, execution-style, were identified as Deah Shaddy Barakat, 23, and his wife, Yusor Mohammad, 21, of Chapel Hill, and her sister, Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha, 19, of Raleigh, North Carolina.  Craig Hicks, 46, whose Facebook profile read “atheists for equality” and who had posted pictures of himself toting a loaded .38 calibre revolver, turned himself in to authorities, and has now been charged with three counts of first-degree murder. I may have missed the parades along the Mall in Washington DC to protest about the killings and to call upon white atheist militants to integrate with society. I may have missed Richard Dawkins being quizzed on prime-time TV about whether it’s acceptable to have atheists being radicalised and then turned loose in society. I probably missed the politicians, strolling arm in arm for yet another photo opportunity linked to violent murder, as they did in Paris. I must have missed the BBC sending a planeload of correspondents to report direct from the scene.  I certainly missed the bit where the NRA says there are too many guns in the hands of irrational people in the USA, and they plan to lobby for stricter control. Yes, I certainly missed that bit.  Anyway, I’ll say it here and now: Je Suis Deah Barakat.

In the same was as irrational wingnuts in the Muslim community are (thankfully) in the minority (although we have gone out of our way since 2001 to increase their numbers) by no means all Americans are gun-toting executioners motivated by a warped view of “religion”. To balance up Craig Hicks, we have the example of Kayla Mueller, whose death during an allied air strike, while being held hostage by ISIS, was also announced this week.  In her last letter to her parents in Prescott, Arizona, she wrote:

"I have been shown in darkness, light, and have learned that even in prison, one can be free."

which is a modern-day echo of Lovelace’s

Stone walls do not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage;

Minds innocent and quiet take them for an hermitage…

But even so, she is gone, for all her bright idealism, gone into the world of light, and we alone sit lingering here, as Vaughan put it.  And this world is a sadder place for her loss.

One way or another, it’s been a grim week, despite the first showings of maybe something approaching Spring stirring in the undergrowth.  There are some times, some days, some events, that get a hold of your faith and shake it with all the ferocity of a terrier shaking a rat.  And if that faith is only clinging by a thread, if it’s currently as transient and substantial as a spider’s web on a dew-drenched hedgerow, then it’s not going to be able to withstand much shaking.  All week I have been trying to make some sense of the death of four-year-old Mitzi Steady, killed in Bath when a tipper-truck went out of control and hit her and her grandmother on a zebra crossing.  It’s been with me all week, nagging at me, always there, like a pebble in my shoe.

Today is the feast of St Onesimus, who I originally chose out of the various saints whose feast day it is today because I knew his silly name would allow scope for making jokes about him inventing the onesie, and also give me an opportunity to poke fun at the inveterate letter-writing of St Paul. But it all seems so… feeble, so useless, in response to the tragedies represented by Mitzi Steady, Kayla Mueller, Deah Shaddy Barakat, Yusor Mohammad, Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha, Malcolm Burge, and Andrew Sharratt. It doesn’t seem right that I should come on here and make folksy, whimsical observations when these people are senselessly dead for no reason.

If anything, I should be ditching St Onesimus and, instead, putting up a spirited defence of Big G and explaining why all this was deemed necessary.  Why I should have to take one for the team is also a mystery to me, but I suppose if I try and explain why I feel there is a something, underlying everything, it comes with the territory. I was going to go on and say words to the effect of “not that God’s ever gone out on a limb for me,” and make some sort of joke about him appearing as a witness at a benefits tribunal. But of course, Christian convention would assert that God, or at least Jesus, did go out on a limb for me, quite literally, in the case of the Crucifixion.

But still, how can it justify Mitzi Steady? Better people than me have tried to explain or justify the death of a young girl. Dylan Thomas, in his Refusal To Mourn The Death By Fire of a Girl in London, takes a very uncompromising view:

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.

I wrote a couple of weeks ago about my theory that maybe God is everything that has ever happened in all possible universes, and a tragedy in this universe was balanced up automatically by a joyous occurrence somewhere else. You might call this the “Rosemary’s Sister” explanation, as in the song by Huw Williams where, despite being killed by a Doodlebug in the Blitz at the age of nine:

High upon the heavens, in a host of angels’ wings,

Rosemary’s sister will be dancing…

Which is the hopeful counterpoint to the first part of the chorus:

You fly high, your dreams are all in vain

One moment you are laughing and the next you cry in pain

Which sums up the inexplicable brutality of life.  So, we have some comfort, I suppose, in the “many worlds” theory.  It is a similar attempt to the explanation proffered by Canon Henry Scott Holland in 1910, when he wrote his sermon on the death of King Edward VII, Death, The King of Terrors, a famous extract from which has circulated ever since:

Death is nothing at all. It does not count. I have only slipped away into the next room. Nothing has happened. Everything remains exactly as it was. I am I, and you are you, and the old life that we lived so fondly together is untouched, unchanged. Whatever we were to each other, that we are still. Call me by the old familiar name. Speak of me in the easy way which you always used. Put no difference into your tone. Wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow. Laugh as we always laughed at the little jokes that we enjoyed together. Play, smile, think of me, pray for me. Let my name be ever the household word that it always was. Let it be spoken without an effort, without the ghost of a shadow upon it. Life means all that it ever meant. It is the same as it ever was. There is absolute and unbroken continuity. What is this death but a negligible accident? Why should I be out of mind because I am out of sight? I am but waiting for you, for an interval, somewhere very near, just round the corner. All is well. Nothing is hurt; nothing is lost. One brief moment and all will be as it was before. How we shall laugh at the trouble of parting when we meet again!

I first came upon this text when someone sent it to me on the death of my mother in 1986. It has been quoted dozens of times in many contexts, but this week I was prompted to read the entire text of the sermon, which I had not done before. Later on, he refers to Edward VII, lying in state.

So that black coffin harbours its black secret. But over it and round it and about it the light of Whitsuntide sweeps in to scatter all our fears. Why are we afraid? Have we not the gift of the Spirit? Has it not swept in upon us with a mighty wind? Is it not in our heart as a fire?

Well, that’s as maybe. Sometimes I feel like I do have “the gift of the spirit”, but most times these days, I don’t. I do still think there’s a something underlying everything, but I can’t describe it, or explain why it allows such things to happen, other than the fragments I have already offered – that its ideas of justice and mercy are almost diametrically different to ours and inexplicable to us.  Other than that, and the fact that at every disaster you will always see the helpers, and the indomitable nature of the human spirit gathers together and responds in a positive way, I have nothing to put forward.

The only other thing I can offer is Spring. Spring itself, the annual redemption, that rises again out of the death of, the depths of, Winter. It’s a poor consolation to say to someone who has just lost their four-year-old daughter, wiped out for no reason, that it will soon be Spring, but it may be that the message we are supposed to get from the turning of the seasons is that nothing is permanent, not even suffering and death. That people have been shown in darkness, light, and have learned that even in prison, one can be free.

Well, this has been a cheery little missive, and I find myself wondering if St Onesie might not have been a better bet after all.  Next week brings shrove Tuesday, which can only mean one thing, apart from pancakes for tea – Ash Wednesday and the start of Lent. As the Gawain poet says:

“After the Christmasse, comes the crabbed Lentoun…”

Next week also brings the promise (or should that be the threat) of going off for two or three days in the camper van, it being half term and all. A consummation devoutly to be avoided, unless the weather perks up by several tens of degrees.  But for now, it’s Sunday teatime and I have three hungry dogs, one hungry cat, and one hungry wife to feed, although the latter has just started independently on the poppadoms. Tomorrow brings the wheelchair man, the Sainsbury’s man, and possibly even the garage man, if the switch for the camper’s reversing light arrives. But today, today we have the naming of parts.