EPIBLOG FOR THE FEAST OF ST FRANCIS OF ASSISI, ST ETHELBURGA OF BARKING, ST LUKE THE EVANGELIST, AND SS CRISPIAN AND CRISPIANUS, AND ALL SAINTS’ DAY

It hath beene a busie month in ye olde Holme Valley. I’d like to regale you with a cycle of amusing and acutely-observed anecdotes, funny in themselves, but also with a moral for the world at large. Ha ha, fat chance! The last four weeks have been a classic demonstration of the phenomenon known widely as SSDD – same shit, different day.  Problems with technology have dominated; every piece of electronic equipment in the place seems to have taken it upon itself to break down, blow up, or catch fire, leaving me to struggle to repair it while also writing a press release, or doing the accounts, or laying out a book, and, with my other leg, simultaneously tap-dancing on a peanut (salted, of course).

So, I started typing this on 4^th October, and today is the 28^th, If he were still alive, today would have been my dad’s 99^th birthday. For some reason, this makes me even more determined to finish this blog, which is now becoming more like a bloody diary. Although since I typed those words, ir is now November 2nd.

This constant delay is a classic demonstration of how having to deal with technological crap elongates every potentially simple task to breaking point. Whatever did we do before all these computers? Oh, yes, we spent the time instead writing up the information twice into leather bound ledgers twice, using a dip pen. As a dip pen aficionado myself, I’m starting to think that’s yet another way in which the olden days were better.

The animals have been, very sensibly, keeping their heads down and keeping out of the way. Keeping their heads down literally, in Matilda’s case, as, now 17, she spends an increasing amount of time asleep in the recliner chair by the stove. The dogs, too, seem to be snoozing more now that it’s getting “back-endish”, as they say round here, and autumn’s coming on.

I can’t say I’m looking forward to this winter. I hate winter anyway, but this one is set to be a doozie. We can look forward to the prospect of a comeback tour from the Covid virus, plus of course the joys and revels of a no-deal Brexit, with lorries stacked up on the M20 and shortages of food, coupled with hikes in price for any items still in stock. I hope against hope that I’m wrong.

Meanwhile, Covid festers on. Disaster, shambles, other descriptions are available. To be fair to Boris Johnson (that’s about the only time I will ever type those words, so make a note of them) he’s way out of his depth, and trying to steer a course between conflicting interests (is it better that people die, and the economy survives, or vice versa?) and is hemmed in by equally clumsy and incompetent cabinet members, not to mention a special advisor who seems to think that government guidelines don’t apply to him, even though he probably wrote them. What is needed is someone with the courage to decide and stick to one course of action, instead of trying to do both.

As I think I said in my last blog, it’s getting increasingly hard to satirise government advice on Covid. The last time I tried, I even imported the stream-of-consciousness speech from “Waiting For Godot” by cutting and pasting it into the cod government statement I was writing, and even then, it made more sense than the official mish-mash of local rules and regulations which just led to confusion about what you were supposed to be doing with who and when.

Of course, hindsight makes everything clear, and I was as guilty as anyone of not taking it seriously, describing it as “an obscure strain of Chinese ‘flu” at the outset. However, I would have expected the government, stuffed with advisors and backed by massive computer resources (a k a MS Excel 2003, as it turned out... ) to have sussed it out much more quickly than a lone 65-year-old Yorkshire hairbag in a wheelchair. Anyway, I grew up very quickly when people started dropping off the twig in large numbers.

Looking back now, from six months into the future, for me at least, I’d sum it up as follows. We (as a country) were slow off the mark in many ways; shutting schools, locking down, supplies of PPE, and generally thinking it through, listening to medical experts, and developing an exit strategy. While it drove some people crackers, the lockdown does seem to have worked (though many say it had no effect and in fact what caused the figures to go down was just the first wave of the virus running its course).

We started to get better organised – better late than never – the Nightingale Hospitals, the correct PPE in sufficient quantities, finally extending help and testing into care homes, and so on. Then the wheels started to come off. Boris Johnson, like his even worse orange counterpart in the US, is a maverick with a disdain for facts and a skimpy grasp of truth and reality. Like many politicians these days, the first thing he asks himself is not “is this the right thing to do?” but instead “how will this play in Peoria?” – except for “Peoria”, in his case, read “leafy suburbs full of Tory voters”. 

As far as I can see, the two main bugbears were giving in to pressure to re-open pubs, and, indeed, schools, and particularly the disastrous decision, once the daily “cricket score” of deaths had started to fall, to devolve the next set of lockdowns to local authorities. Now, I freely acknowledge that there are many dedicated and skilful people working in local government, but there are also some layers of administration that are incapable of fixing a pothole in under a decade.  I wouldn’t go so far as to say I wouldn’t trust them to run a bath, but... oh, go on then.

 The problem with the patchwork of local controls, apart from being inherently confusing, is that the virus isn’t locality-specific, nor is it time-specific. It doesn’t just work nights, so why the arbitrary 10pm curfew. And it’s not specific to any locality.  It’s not as if the virus is heading up the M61 and sees the signs for Bolton and stops in its tracks.

 Opening the schools and universities is another decision that seems to have produced mixed results. Especially the latter; whoever thought that it would be a good idea to gather together hundreds of young people, some of whom think they’re immortal anyway, and that masks are for other people, stuff them in halls of residence (which, in my day at least, were a significant repository of mislaid virginity) letting them all infect each other, then dismissing them all at Christmas to the four corners of the realm so they can be the local equivalent of “Typhoid Mary”? I did, however, manage a grim smile when I heard that the students who were under lockdown in Manchester have been complaining that the food parcels they have been given during their enforced stay are poor quality. These days, it seems students expect polenta, quails’ eggs, and ciabatta rolls. When I was at university, the standard student diet was pot noodles (sometimes with additional pot) crisps, and Mars bars, washed down with copious draughts of heavily subsidised beer (Brakespears at 22p a pint) and shots to match. Clearly universities these days are a pale shadow of their former selves. Or at least the students are. Lightweights.

If it wasn’t potentially tragic, the Covid situation could almost be funny. Certainly, gallows humour is my own defence against it. If you sat and thought about the actual implications, it quickly becomes unthinkable. And of course, the more ridiculous and contradictory the instructions are, the more people’s confidence is undermined, to the extent that they start to ignore even the sensible bits, assuming they can be bothered to work it out in the first place.

The lack of confidence issue isn’t helped by Boris Johnson’s various oracular pronouncements about things which are clearly never going to happen, such as his million-moonshot testing programme, his recruitment of Covid Marshals (remember them?) and the “world-beating” track and trace system, which appears to be running under Excel 2003. Perhaps it would work better if they used dip pens and wrote everything up twice in a leather-bound ledger. (Mind you, I have heard that the US missile defence system runs under Windows XP, and that they had to change the password to “password” so Trump could remember it. This is entirely believable, but I have absolutely no proof that it’s true).

Now, finally, we have the 3-tier system, but again, it’s locality-based and inconsistent – and it’s down once more to local authorities to enforce. What is needed is a simple, nationwide message that is capable of being enforced. Does the phrase “Take back control” ring any bells, Boris? The opposition (ie the Labour Party) is completely bloody useless. What they need is a lot less Kier Starmer and a lot more Kier Hardie. At the moment, the only real opposition is Marcus Rashford, Andy Burnham, and the Archbishop of Canterbury, and I expect Solskaer will play all three of them up front at Old Trafford on Saturday.

 One of the more dryly amusing aspects of the Coronavirus crisis (probably about the only one) is listening to people who previously objected to Muslims wearing the Hijab now indignantly insisting that Muslims should wear face-masks at all times. Actually, if you ask me, the Burkha is the ideal anti-Covid garment. However, a more disturbing aspect of the news being Corona, Corona, Corona day after day, is that other stories, which in different circumstances would have undergone much more scrutiny, now seem to go through “on the nod”, unexamined and unchallenged.  One such being the news that, according to new guidelines from the Department for Education, schools should not use materials that put forward an “anti-capitalist” message. That will make teaching about Jesus throwing the moneylenders out of the Temple a bit of a hot potato in RE lessons, not to mention the rich man, the camel and the eye of the needle, and, indeed, the parable of the Good Samaritan.

 If I were the sort of person who habitually wore a tin-foil hat, I might be moved to opine that this is all part of a concerted, co-ordinated push back by the powers that be against the likes of Occupy, Extinction Rebellion (who have now been re-classified as “terrorists”) and the protesters against the needless destruction of ancient woodland landscapes by the morons in charge of building HS2. Let’s hope there are still enough trees left when it all goes tits up, to string up those responsible.

 It’s also become increasingly clear to me that this government, which knows the price of everything but the value of nothing, has shown its innate contempt for the arts by means of its fatuous poster campaign that suggests that ballet dancers (all notorious anti-capitalists, of course) should retrain as computer engineers. Because the government views the purpose of education as being to turn out people who do what they’re told, work in call centres, and don’t ask awkward question about how we seem to always be able to afford to scatter Paveway guided bombs (a snip at $40,000 a pop) across the Middle East, but there’s never any money for free school meals.

I actually went on to the government re-training web site and worked my way through the online questionnaire. I wasn’t trying to spoof it, I really did answer every question as honestly as I could. At the conclusion of the exercise, it recommended I should re-train for a career in the emergency services. So, that’s that sorted the. All I need now is to rig up a flashing blue light on my wheelchair and practise shouting “Nee-Nar, Nee-Nar” in a loud, confident, penetrating voice.

Another issue which is being at least partially masked by the Corona media smokescreen is that we seem to be sleepwalking towards the cliff edge of a no-deal Brexit. In an announcement which at any other time would have topped the news agenda, they announced that a government has no duty to ensure continuity of food supplies. So, there you are. If things go badly, we’re all just three meals away from anarchy and guarding your home-grown potatoes with an AK 47.

They’ve also been doing their best to keep the focus on Brexit away from any economic consequences,  and purely on immigration instead. Priti Patel, who is anything but, is another government member who is becoming impossible to parody, because as soon as you do, she goes and says something even more bonkers. Despite her own origins, she is currently playing to the lunatic fringe gallery, especially on the subject of asylum seekers, with a series of ideas which are, in some cases, beyond satire.

A while ago, some wag of a commentator on the internet, whose details I forget now, circulated a satirical post about building a floating wall in the English Channel to deter asylum seekers. Last month, up pops Priti with the same idea. For real, this time! She’s also floated (no pun intended) the ideas of using disused ferries moored off the English Coast, or shipping them out to Ascension Island or probably, for all I know, Tristan Da Cunha. Sometimes, when listening to this twaddle, I think I have fallen through a gap in reality, into the 18^th century, when ne’er do wells were confined offshore on the English Prison Hulks, or transported to distant primitive colonies (no offence intended, Australia). If they do succeed with Priti’s plan, no doubt in a century or so, Tristan Da Cunha will have a world-beating test cricket team.

Recently, the comedian Frankie Boyle said of Ms Patel that she was the sort of person who would unplug your life support system to charge her mobile phone. Personally, I think this is imputing a degree of empathy and compassion to her which she does not possess. One blow from Priti could break a swan’s wing.  It can only be a matter of time until Katie Hopkins is appointed to the Home Office as a special advisor. Meanwhile, the boats keep coming, and the people drown. Refugee lives matter, even though people on Twitter regard them as flotsam.

On that related note, I’ve shied away from getting involved in the entire black lives matter imbroglio, because, as my driving instructor told me back in 1985 when I was learning to drive, you should never accelerate into a narrowing gap. By this I mean that the whole discussion is infested by people who could start an argument in an empty room, and also people who will seize any opportunity to get offended on behalf of others, even when the others concerned probably neither know, nor care.

The primary booby-trap and snare is, of course, the accusation of racism – sometimes even for merely questioning the basic premise behind the movement. Many attempts to try and get to the reasoning and origins on which it’s based is dismissed out of hand as being “racist”. The slur of racism is, unfortunately, often used as a “fire blanket” to smother further debate. Personally, I don’t think racism describes it anyway: we are all members of the human race, homo sapiens, regardless of the pigmentation of our skins, but, as I’ve frequently said, for a long time now, we will only have cracked the issue when people no longer feel any need to comment on someone’s colour.

[Anti-semitic, as a slur, is, of course, used in the same manner, as a generic insult to silence anyone who dares to question the Israeli government’s treatment of the Palestinians –or, indeed to undermine someone who you are supposed to be supporting as your leader. Given the quasi-fascist machinations of those who would rather have let the tories back in than their own party, it can’t be long before “Tribune” changes its name to “Der Starmer”].

Black Lives Matters owes its origins to the massive discrimination against black people in the fractured, divided society that is the US today. We have to bear in mind that it is only something like 150 years since slavery in the US was abolished, and only about 50 years since Rosa Parkes refused to sit in the back of the bus. There has always been a disturbing undercurrent of economic and social discrimination against black people, but it has become much more ugly in the last four years, by President Trump, who has, either by design, sheer ineptitude, or a mixture of both, stoked up the fires, provoked division and disharmony, and refused to condemn activities of far-right groups, or their underlying agenda.

As with any society, the cross section of the US population covers a very wide spectrum, including irrational people with mental health issues; the problem with the US is that the sheer numbers of people generally means that even 1% of the population is a significant number, all seemingly with access to assault rifles. The US police are also armed, and that in itself alters the dynamic of police-work and renders trigger-happy tragedies more likely.

Finally, much has been made that the most recent victims of police shootings have not exactly been saints themselves, having been involved with crime one way or another. But then that’s because, in part, many black kids grow up corralled into destitute areas with poor prospects and education, where often the only career choices are guns, robbery, violence, and drugs. They can’t bear all of the blame on the occasions where this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, especially as the pivotal presence of guns in American life is strongly upheld by the NRA and their powerful political lobbyists. Before anyone gets the bag on about it, I am NOT saying that ALL black kids grow up to be gun-toting drug-dealers and gangsters. And in the case of those that do, the economic deprivation that drives the issue is not the fault of the kids, but of the failings of generations of politicians more concerned with polls than with policies. Likewise, by and large, the police are NOT all trigger-happy bigots

The more I think about it, the only logical, defendable, almost theological explanation is that ALL lives matter. Now, I know that the phrase “All Lives Matter” has been appropriated by people who use it in a very pointed way, to have a dig back at Black Lives Matter. This is what I mean by polarization, by division. It spreads beyond the usual hotheads and the lunatic fringe on either side of the argument, and before you know it, you’ve got riots on your hands, and then some supremacist nutter drives a truck into the protestors, the President refuses to condemn it, and the tension ratchets up and up, notch by notch. Reasonable debate is replaced by mere “whataboutery”.

Although “Black Lives Matter” is probably not strictly meaningful as a phrase (more of that later) I can see how they came up with it. The phrase is born of the belief that black people in the US always come off worst at the hands of the law enforcement services. I can’t blame them for coming to that conclusion, given that there are some cohorts of the US police who refer to black-on-black violence and crime as “NHI” – no humans involved. BLM have a point; they have a legitimate beef. True, sometimes an armed cop has to make a split-second decision whether or not to shoot if he believes his life is threatened. Inevitably, some will get it wrong. However, there is a big difference between that situation and suffocating someone with a nine-minute chokehold caused by a knee on their neck.

I’m not entirely convinced, either, that the BLM movement translates that well to the UK. There are some who would say that I can’t appreciate the issues fully because I am tainted by that elusive quality, “white privilege”. When I was growing up in Alexandra Terrace, our front door opened directly onto a bomb site which was often littered with broken glass, half-bricks, and dog shit. We had an outside privy, a dolly-tub and a mangle for laundry, a tin bath in front of the fire, and a bloody great gap between the skirting board and the floorboards in the front room, caused by wet rot. My only toy was a stuffed rabbit, made from old socks, filled with rags, and shirt buttons for eyes. White privilege. Yeah.

Anyway; I’m not saying that black people in the UK haven’t also suffered discrimination. From the casual “racism” which faced the Windrush generation (No blacks, no dogs, no Irish) through Enoch Powell, to those dreadful 1970s situation comedies, and even here today. There have also been a number of high-profile incidents with the police, and firearms, not to mention the riots in Brixton, Toxteth, and other places. So let’s be honest: there is some history of oppression there, and they DO have a point.

However, and this is where, sadly, I part company with the general ethos of BLM. I think, in this country at least, it’s also become a bandwagon for people with other “racial” axes to grind, specifically the people who want to re-write and revise history which they see as not only biased, but as a continuing injustice which must be rectified.  So, we have statues being torn down and vandalised, in the pursuit of the questionable aim of securing an “apology” for previous historical misdeeds.

We can’t judge people who lived in a previous era by the (hopefully) more civilized standards of today. Bear-baiting, wife-selling, or ducking witches are all now confined to the dustbin of history, and rightly so. Yet in their time, they were the norm for some people. Child labour, infant mortality, hanging, drawing, and quartering, there are loads of examples of things which our ancestors engaged in which most, if not all, people today would find abhorrent. One of these being, of course, slavery.

To get, or even ask for, an apology for slavery is a bit of a dead letter. Of course it’s dreadful that it happened; the William Wilberforce museum in my home town of Hull had horrific diagrams of how slaves were chained together head to toe in confined spaces below decks, diagrams which used to give me, as a slightly claustrophobic child, nightmares. I feel desperately sorry for the people who suffered such awful treatment, but it’s not my part to apologise to them. Had I been there at the time, I would have tried to stop it.  It’s the same with the reprisals carried out against the clans after Culloden, a subject I’ve had many a ding-dong about with various Scottish people. My ancestors in those times were most probably Jacobites and recusants. Had I been there, I would probably have been fighting against the Redcoats, not for them.

Another reason I think that asking for this sort of apology is, ultimately, an empty victory, is that the events of the times were inevitably more complex and nowhere near as clean-cut as they now appear. Sadly, people are very rarely wholly good or bad, and actions and motivations are often multi-faceted and open to interpretation. Some of the abolitionists themselves owned slaves. British sea power was used at various times to protect the slave trade and then later to police it. The government had to pay substantial sums in compensation to domestic slave-owners in the UK in order to get the abolition legislation through. Also, many of the slave-owners in the UK were not exclusively nasty to black people: the people who worked in their mills and factories were also, in an age where labour and life were cheap, lived in a similar sort of bondage, though sometimes their chains were economic rather than iron.

Many historical figures were often a mass of contradictions and pragmatic behaviour. Churchill, whose statue also suffered in the would-be iconoclasm of the BLM protests was a washed-out backbencher and a functioning alcoholic when he was catapulted into power in the fight against Nazism. From some hitherto unknown depths he managed to dredge up the energy and the leadership and the rhetoric to inspire a nation to victory. Yet he was also responsible for the chaos of the Gallipoli campaign in 1915, sent in troops to break up a miners’ strike in Tonypandy in 1911, and sanctioned the destruction of Dresden by Bomber Command in 1945. Had Churchill not done what he did in 1940-1945,though, anyone attempting to deface or vandalise a statue today in a Nazi-ruled Britain would have had a very short future.

In any case, you can’t just go around tearing down statue s of people you don’t like, because it’s against the law.  I would dearly love to go down to Westminster and take a sledgehammer to the statue of that old bag Thatcher. But it’s against the law. Although this government treats the law with contempt, tries to circumvent it, and even occasionally breaks it (see under “No-Deal Brexit”) nevertheless the law is still all that stands between us and anarchy. If you don’t like a statue, campaign to get it changed by using the democratic process, under the rule of law. If we don’t have a society ruled by the law, then the ultimate end result is people sitting in trees, throwing rocks at each other.

The other thing I find slightly illogical about the desire to topple statues of questionable historical figures is that if you remove that marker, that representation, from public view, it seems to me, with all my white privilege (!) that you’re also removing the focus of what should be a continuing debate. Surely it’s better to leave the statue in place, so that you can take your children to see it, tell them about the evils that the person depicted committed, and say “this is what happened in the bad old  days, Things are maybe a bit better now, but one sure way of sliding back there is to airbrush history and stifle the discussion”.

I also have a semantic problem with the phrase “Black Lives Matter”. Not in its original context, where those who coined it use it as a shorthand version of “Dear  trigger-happy police, the lives of black people are just as valuable, especially to their loved ones, as those of white people, yet many more black people are shot, often seemingly without good cause. Please acknowledge this problem and deal with it”. I agree, BLM is much shorter and snappier.

The issue I have is that if something “matters”, then it must matter to somebody, and what matters and what doesn’t has to be decided by someone. I’m very uncomfortable, for instance, with the idea of politicians deciding who matters and who doesn’t, especially on a basis of colour, wealth, social standing, political or religious beliefs, or whatever. Politicians (or worse, mobs) deciding who matters and who doesn’t, leads ultimately to gas chambers and death camps.

The only logical fallback I can personally think of, given that whatever it is that judges the “mattering”, is that all lives matter to God. This blog is already over 4000 words, so we will come back to what God actually is, another day, if that’s OK. Just bear with me for a paragraph or three.  If we are to go down this route, however, a better phrase would be “all life matters” to God. Shakespeare’s King Lear, lamenting the dead Cordelia, asks plaintively “why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life, and thou no breath at all?”. In Matthew 10, 29-31, the well-known verse about the sparrow appears:

“ Are not two sparrows sold for a cent? And yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father. But the very hairs of your head are all numbered”

But if all lives matter to God, do all lives matter equally to God? The two verses from Matthew which mention sparrows both go on to say that God cares for man even more. And there are various OT references to man having dominion over the animals. Interestingly, though, Andrew Linzey, in his book “Animal Theology”, does not equate “dominion” with domination, preferring to argue rather that because animals have a lesser capacity than man for thought and reason, “dominion” means that the duty of man to protect them and provide humane stewardship is correspondingly even greater.

If you go down the route of all life mattering equally to God, then we have to imagine a seething mass of life, where the minuscule spark of life that animates dustmites and even the Corona virus matter equally along with Malcolm Muggeridge and Sister Wendy Beckett. You’re very close to the belief of Metempsychosis, the transmigration of the soul on death, which originated in Western thought in ancient Greece and which also underlies Eastern religions where you are reincarnated up the chain of beings, unless prevented by bad karma, until at last you break through to Nirvana.

Even if you discount that idea (and I’m not saying it’s wrong – whatever floats your stoat) and stick with the idea of specifically all human life mattering equally to God, then that still leads you into strange territory where the lives of people such as Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Thatcher, Chairman Mao, Harold Shipman and Jack the Ripper all matter just as much to God as that of the Pope or the Archbishop of Canterbury or those of the whole canon of saints. Bonkers as it may sound, unless God really does judge people in some way in the afterlife, again, it seems to me that there isn’t any other conclusion that fits.

The idea of a judgemental God as a bloke with a white beard, on a golden throne, has never really chimed with me. I think we should be wary of imputing too many human characteristics to God.  It’s part of the same argument as “why does God permit suffering and pain in the world?” The more I’ve thought about this, the only conclusion that seems to make sense is that God’s priorities, whatever God is, are not the same as ours, and we cannot know or guess the mind of God. It seems to me that a force (I see it rather as a force than a person) that is everlasting and omniscient and outside of time, and can take upon itself the sins of the world, is unlikely to embrace our human ideas of fairness and justice. So, reluctantly, with every word sticking in the throat, if that’s the case, then Hitler matters.

We seem to have been on a long ramble. If you’ve got this far, congratulations, it took me four weeks. I also, on reflection, think that it reads in part as if I am not in favour of “Black Lives Matter” – so maybe I should point out that I don’t have any issue at all with people pointing out the discrimination and prejudice, it’s just the nomenclature I find odd, and – as I said a few thousand words ago – I think protests should be within the law.

I wonder what the various saints whose days have passed by in the interim would make of all this. St Ethelburga would probably be too busy climbing up her golden chains to heaven, whereas St Francis of Assisi would probably say that animal lives matter. St Luke would be getting used to an NHS that is more driven by lucre than Luke, these days, because of politicians, and SS Crispin and Crispianus would remain as two relatively unknown shoemakers, had it not been for Shakespeare and Henry V. Although I think we could probably do with some of that St Crispin’s Day sentiment over the next four weeks. Yes, we now have a lockdown, announced during the last few paras, and no, I am not going to do a substantial re-write of a 4000+ word blog just because Boris Johnson has finally woken up and smelt the coffee.

Today, when I finally finished this, which will probably be the last one for a while, is All Souls’ Day, the day when we remember the vast armies of the dead. It was also the day when the poverty-stricken urchins of the village went from house to house begging for pennies and “soul cakes”

The lanes are very dirty

Me shoes are very thin

I’ve got a little pocket

To keep a penny in

If you haven’t got a penny,

A ha’penny will do:

If you haven’t got a ha’penny

Then God help you.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. Stay safe and happy. Good luck. I’ll see you on the other side.

27th September 2020: The Feast of St Vincent de Paul

It hath beene a busie weeke in ye olde Holme Valley.  

Today, September 27^th, is the Feast Day of St Vincent de Paul. I’m not going to write about him at length, though, because I “did” him a while ago in my old blog. But, as a brief refresher, you may care to know that he is the patron saint, inter alia, of: charities; horses; leprosy; lost articles; Madagascar; prisoners; Richmond, Virginia; and volunteers.

 So, if your luggage goes missing on a flight to Madagascar where you were heading to volunteer in an animal hospital for horses with leprosy, you now know who to call. Actually, he’s onto a good thing being the patron saint of charities AND also a charity in his own right. It’s a bit like an accountant charging someone for sending them an invoice. I know about the St. Vincent de Paul charity because I once went out with a girl who turned up one day at mine wearing a spectacularly beautiful summer dress. Since she herself was spectacularly beautiful even when NOT wearing a dress (especially when not wearing a dress, in fact) the overall effect was dazzling, and I said so. She told me she had got it from Vinny de Paul in Brisbane. (This was in England, I hasten to add. She had returned, like a boomerang, to these shores.) Owing to my general ignorance of feminine apparel, I just assumed it must have been some sort of designer outlet, and was even more impressed when I found it was a charity shop. In those days, of course, poverty forced us into being “vintage” before “vintage” was even a thing. See also under “upcycling”. But that was long ago, in another country, and besides, the wench is dead. Actually, she lives, Master justice Shallow; it’s ME that’s dead (almost)

So, what have I been doing with myself? Well, apart from generally decaying, which is, in itself, quite medieval, I’m still doing pretty much the same things in the same way, sadly, often with the same results. I’ve been writing and editing books, painting, gilding eikons, and hand calligraphing letters. The latter has become more of a necessity of late, as arthritic gout has turned two of my fingers into something resembling corkscrews. But, otherwise, still living an old draughty house almost a century old, too large to heat, so huddling by the stove, surrounded by trees.

Actually, the stove needs some serious TLC but the parts alone will cost over £250, and that’s without whatever the sweep will charge for coming along, dismantling it, sweeping the chimney, then putting it all back again afterwards.  The other day I was burning some incense from Prinknash Abbey, painting an eikon, and listening to Gregorian Chant, and you can’t get much more medieval than that. True, the chant was courtesy of Google music via the spectacularly-dim Alexa, who claims not even to be able to find Stanford’s Mag in G, but then at least she only speaks when spoken to, unlike all the other women in my life.

Other than that, the main issues surrounding my own personal circumstances are mainly to do with health. I’ve now got a powered wheelchair, which is a great easement. On the debit side, I was diagnosed with a combination of heart failure and atrial fibrillation, in May 2019. In the period between 19^th May 2019 and 4^th January 2020, I spent, in all, 19 weeks in hospital, spread over six admissions. I noted several things about the NHS, the main one being how many people from different nationalities were propping it up. If they all high-tailed it home, post-Brexit, we will be up shit creek without a poodle. Still, I was lucky to be there in spring 2019 as opposed to spring 2020. Yes, I had the plague before it was even fashionable.

Meanwhile, in the background, while I was worrying about my foreground, the Labour Party managed to lose an election despite the fact that they had one of the most visionary leaders since Wilson, somehow, unaccountably, Boris Johnson has become prime minister, we’ve seen the rise of Black Lives Matter and Extinction Rebellion, and the mindless destruction wrought by the development of HS2 through England’s ancient woodlands, and the prospect of Johnson somehow managing to lob a final spanner into the unsatisfactory cobbled-together Heath Robinson apology for a deal he invented on the hoof a couple of months ago.  And of course the refugee boats keep coming, and people are still being left to drown. It saddens me that, if anything, things have got even worse since I wrote that sentence in many blogs during 2017.

 All of these are probably worth at least one blog posting of their own, but they’ll have to wait for now, or we’ll be here all day. As far as Corbyn is concerned, he had only two faults, but both of them were fatal to his prospects. As a decent man, he fell into the trap of assuming that just because someone asked him a question, he was obliged to answer it, and furthermore, in the era of Instagram and Whatsapp, that the answer always had to be a reasonably-argued debate at length. Boris Johnson, meanwhile, just hid in the fridge and yet still won the election, something  which probably says as much about the electorate as it does about Johnson.  

The other problem Corbyn had throughout his tenure was that half his own party was conspiring against him at any given time. So all his attempts to do anything were hampered by having to drag these deadbeats along in his wake, like a nappy filled with doody. I hope they’re happy that they’ve potentially gifted the Tories another five years in power. Idiots.

And then there’s America, of course. Like many others, I suspect, in the time since I last wrote a blog, I’ve watched from across the pond, as Trump has gone from bad to worse, from a mere vampire to a raving Antichrist, His transformation has also spread across America, riven by racial hatred and division, driven by his phobic desire to reverse everything  Obama achieved, and his own toxic stupidity, much of which he has fomented with his dog-whistle policies aimed via Twitter at white supremacists, climate change deniers, evangelists, and fruitcakes. And now he’s even making noises about staying on in November whatever the election result! Meanwhile California and Oregon are in flames. And so once again, America my friend, you are fighting us all, how did you come, to trade the fiddle for the drum, as Joni Mitchell might say, if she were here right now.

 Anyway, little did I think back in January, when I came home as a weak shivering starveling, that the whole country (indeed, the whole world) would be stumbling into an unparalleled plague year. Again, very medieval, but without any robust Chaucerian humour. It’s like Brexit said “Ha, I just can’t wait to bugger everything up and bring the country to its knees!” and Corona Virus replied, “Hold My Beer...” I’ve tried, in my own feeble way, to satirise the government’s haphazard, contradictory and confusing advice around the Covid-19 outbreak, an uneasy amalgam of medical advice from Boffins and doctors who don’t always agree amongst themselves anyway, and whatever lie pops into Boris Johnson’s head when cornered. As it is, at the moment, every time Johnson opens his trap, my bollocksometer goes off the scale.

The trouble is, though, that when you employ the reductio ad absurdum and come up with something patently zany and off-the-wall, you were likely to find it being announced the next day from the Downing Street lectern as official government policy! The only deliciously ironic thing, dripping with Schadenfreude, is that between them, Johnson and Sunak have been forced to give away sums which totally dwarf the modest proposals in Labour’s last manifesto, and which were derided at the time by the Bullingdon bullies as being likely to bankrupt the country and lead us into (gasp! Shock horror!) “socialism”.

 I’d like to say that the government is doing a good job of balancing the competing objectives of public safety via lockdowns without trashing the economy forever.  I’d like to, but it’s chaos. It’s a combination of ping-pong (or wiff waff in Johnson’s argot) and pinball. U-turns alternate with cock-ups – notably the ramshackle “track and trace” debacle  (the app will only work with the latest version of Android or IoS, apparently) the infamous exams algorithm, and the seemingly unexpected fact that loads of people returning to work, schools, and university would produce a spike in the demand for tests. Plus the re-opening of the pubs, of course. Add to that the people who cannot, or will not, wear a mask, and the lack of forward planning about how and by whom mask-wearing was to be enforced. Mix ‘em together and what do you get? Bippity-Boppety-Boo.

What is needed is someone to take back national control, issue clear advice, sort out the logjams with test and trace, and not descend into the sort of confidence-destroying, contradictory ineptitude caused by letting local authorities decide their own local lockdowns for local people, and the rules governing them.

So. It looks like we’re in for an interesting few weeks between now and spring 2021. Hope for the best, but plan for the worst. It’s quite likely that I’ll be moving house and also making some major changes to the business, Covid permitting of course. At worst, we’ll have a winter which will be remembered in history for a deadly spike in Corona virus cases, food shortages, transport chaos and political turmoil. In the words of John Bright, the Chartist, speaking in parliament in February 1855, “The angel of death has been abroad throughout the land; you may almost hear the beating of his wings.” Let’s hope not.  And when all this Corona malarkey is over and done with, there needs to be the most massive, incisive, fearless independent inquiry into this fiasco. Don’t witter on about the cost, it will be a fraction of the money wasted on useless PPE, apps that don’t work, stupid advisory letters that make no sense, and algorithms that anyone with an atom of sense could have predicted wouldn’t work –without needing to use an algorithm to do so.

In fact, if the cost of an enquiry – a proper one, where nobody accidentally deletes the names of the guilty from their laptop – becomes an issue, I will personally take a leaf out of Colonel Tom’s book and do 100 lengths of Meltham Road, from here to the post box, to raise money towards the sum required. It would still be easy to satirise the current mess of conflicting Covid rules, but what’s the point? The story is beyond satire. It’s crossed the media equivalent of the event horizon of a black hole, it’s right up there with the “and, finally” story of the skateboarding duck.

Overall, of course, my own picture is still bleak, health-wise. Muscular Dystrophy is still incurable, and likely to remain so until way after I have gone through the bright portal to find what lies beyond. My legs, when the COBAN dressings are removed, look wizened, brown, and mottled, like Chandrasekhar’s bowling arm,  or like the legs on the unfortunate corpse in the cadaver tomb in Arundel Cathedral.  And my last conversation with the cardiologist went along the lines of “I wouldn’t buy any long-playing records if I were you...” So, it’s ashes to ashes, dust to dust, if the dystrophy don’t get you, the heart-attack must.

The pending seismic changes in my life also might take me away from this area, which I would be sad to leave. [There will be more to follow on this, but at the moment everything is up in the air and up for grabs, so it’s better left until speculation has coalesced into something more concrete]. Plus there’s the issue of the animals, Misty, Zak, and Matilda.  Matilda is 17 now, very thin and bony, but she still goes on her little catty way through life, day by day. It would be very cruel to uproot and relocate her.

I’ve been forced, both by events, and also the more general sense of my own mortality which Covid has, I think, engendered in all of us, to do a lot of self-evaluation over the last few weeks particularly, especially in the areas of my life concerning who I have offered my protection to in the past, and how well, or otherwise, I’ve kept my promises. I never made promises lightly, as Sting says, and I hope that those who I have let down might at least remember me, when the west wind moves, among the fields of barley.

It started when I was quite young. As I grew into some of the responsibilities of adulthood, I realised that basically, there was no way I could help everybody all the time. So I decided instead that I would choose the people and animals I would offer to shield with my strong right arm, and this would be list A. Everyone else would be on list B. My right arm actually was strong back in those days, but never underestimate the ability of a young man to appear a complete tool, and a buffoon to boot. Later in life, I had the idea of actually formalising the idea by having a chivalric Order of The Leopard. The leopard in question referred to the heraldic one of England in an attempt to wrest back a national symbol from the clutches of the far right. It was all very knotted and half-baked. Never underestimate the ability of a middle-aged man to appear a complete tool, and a buffoon to boot.  In my defence, to borrow Dylan’s phrase, “I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now”.

Telling this story has reminded me (as it always does) of the time I overheard a conversation between two of my erstwhile colleagues, Maisie and Phillip. Maisie asked him if he thought I had a “death list”. “Of course he does,” replied Phil, “it’s the phone book!” But there is a more serious side to this manic binary division of people into two lists by prejudice.

I’ve come to realise, both when I was ill for six months in 2010, and more recently, during the Covid lockdown, that it’s nowhere near as simple as that. I’d got the string bag inside out. Both when I was ill a decade ago, and all through the lockdown, many of the people on my list A were conspicuous by their absence – which is fair enough – just because I put you on some kind of list, it doesn’t mean you have to reciprocate: but what surprised me was the people who would have been on list B under my old system, came through with the goods when least expected. Of course, some of the A-listers continue to be solid gold dependable friends and family, and there’s also the issue of people, one of whom I was once very fond of indeed, who were very valued but whom I’d lost touch with for various reasons, who’ve bothered to re-contact me, or I’ve got back in touch with them because I keep hearing God banging on the ceiling and telling me to get a move on.

One of the few glimmers of hope in this unclear, uncertain future, in the same way as people have been helping complete strangers elsewhere during the Corona crisis, all across the country, is the hope that these relationships I’ve tried to revive will continue to grow and flourish, until they are as fulfilling, or even more fulfilling, than they previously were. And I really should stop pre-judging people for no good reason. For me, it’s their perceived attitude to me, rather than anything like colour, race or creed, but it’s still unsatisfactory.

Which brings me back to charity, I guess. Re-reading the parable of the Good Samaritan, it occurs to me that the Samaritan would definitely have been on list B, as far as the Pharisee who asked Christ the original question was concerned. But he was there to provide charity when it mattered. I find myself telling myself:  Go thou, Steve, and do likewise.

Welcome to my world. Bring your own Mappa Mundi

Welcome to ye new blogge. I gave up writing ye olde blogge, and tried recently to log into it again, only to be thwarted by Google/Blogger, which logged me instead into ye even older blogge, long ago discontinued. I gave up stroogling against ye mighty Google, and instead it allowed me to start up a NEW blog with my old login details,but stubbornly refuses to let me edit the "About Me" which still refers to a dog (we still have a dog, but it is a different dog) cats in the plural (all gone, now replaced by a single cat) and several musical instruments I can no longer play, and all of which are now up for sale! Meanwhile, the weather here is dull today, and May, my favourite month of the whole year, has fled and gone. Among my non-editing/book production tasks today on my to do list are: bottle some wine, gather some twigs and chop some kindling for the stove, and make some bread. Matilda is sunbathing on the decking, flat on her back with all her legs pointing in different directions. Matilda is the cat, by the way. I am full of the usual aches and pains, but I have saved some batter from last night's meal and am going to mix it with eggs to make a sort of souffle thing later, and also make up another batch of my cider vinegar herbal remedy to try and zap my bodily ills. All that's missing from a normal medieval day today is plain song and incense.