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.