28th November 2014

I have recently been receiving emails and text messages announcing that today will be, and indeed now is, Black Friday.

I know what Good Friday is but what on earth is Black Friday?

Where did the idea come from?

I guess that like most things it came from America.

Apparently the name originated from the fact that most retailers operate in the red for most of the year and only begin to see profits during the Christmas shopping period.

Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, is the start of the Christmas shopping period and the point at which for retailers red turns to black.

It is also a day when bargains are announced, shops open early and the rush to spend money overcomes common sense.

According to my newspaper one shopper interviewed leaving a store with a new vacuum cleaner commented that she had really wanted a TV but they had sold and as she had to have something she bought the vacuum cleaner, she didn't need it, but it was heavily discounted.

I guess when she gets it home she will switch it on only to be disappointed that there are no pictures just a loud humming noise.

Another entrepreneurial shopper with a number of TV's in a shopping trolley was seen offering them for sale along the queue outside the store.

Cost me £250, yours for £350, £300 for cash.

Of course the British don't celebrate thanksgiving, after all what America celebrates is independence ............. From us!

So not a lot to celebrate!

But inevitably what America does today will in time find its way over here so who knows maybe in a year or two we will start celebrating thanksgiving by deep frying a turkey in an oil drum?

Of course we won't know what we are celebrating but, hey! Any excuse for a party?

Maybe if UKIP has its way with Mr Cameron, or the Tories outflank him and Britain is persuaded to leave the EEC or Brexit's as the newspaper headlines have it, then we could make the Thursday before Black Friday, Thanksgiving,

Free, Free at last!

Of course it may be that leaving Europe plunges us into economic uncertainty, that European Markets collapse, business abandons the UK to headquarter in Europe and we experience financial meltdown, in which case we may not be so thankful after all and as the pound in our pocket shrinks, we may not have much to spend on Black Friday.

Indeed if retailers rely on it to kick start their profit surge then those without money to spend on TV's and vacuum cleaners might find that Black Friday rapidly becomes Red Friday when the credit card statements arrive.

Apparently church attendance on Sunday continues to decline although Cathedrals report increasing numbers attending mid week services. That is certainly true in Carlisle where I occasionally celebrate a mid week communion service.

It is interesting to see how the regular faces are joined by a group of those who attend because they are in town or just visiting the Cathedral and often by a larger group who stand outside the circle and observe, as though they were witnessing some strange arcane ceremony that they vaguely recall having heard about.

Which of course they are.

Of course attendances pick up at Easter and at Christmas.

Both are times of the year when not only do people need to shop, for chocolate eggs, for special celebratory meals and for presents, but they are times of the year when the shop's close for the religious holidays. As my old prayer book suggests these were Red Letter Days in the Churches year and in the Calendar the dates were often highlighted in Red to illustrate that these days were indeed high and holy.

So arcane rituals involving bread and wine recalling the beliefs and worship of previous generations change over time and are replaced by other arcane rituals, Good Friday becomes Black Friday and Red Letter days are announced monthly by the arrival of the credit card statement

23rd November 2014

There is something extremely sad and disturbing about the thought that people are turning to UKIP to give them back their country.

Which country is that exactly?

I was born before the NHS had been established.

Before the Kingdom of Bevan had been established.

I was born into a grey and forbidding country where there was rationing, privation and where my childhood sleep was disturbed by the sound of Mill Workers Clogs on the cobbles outside our house, as they headed to the Medlock Mill to begin their morning shift.

My old man was not a dustman, as Lonnie Donegan's was, but my Maternal Grandfather was.

My Paternal Grandfather had died before I was born, probably as a result of having been gassed in the trenches in France, meaning that my father had to leave school at 14 to become the family breadwinner, and that later his sister had to care for my Grandfather who ended her days in a bed in my Aunt's living room because ill and immobile as she was their was little or no public provision for the care of the elderly.

In my first school I was given sheets of scrap paper to write on and was told that I would be given an exercise book when my handwriting was good enough.

I left that school without ever receiving an exercise book.

Just a couple of personal examples which make me clear that that is a country I do not want back.

Not for myself and not for my children and grandchildren.

Nostalgia is not what it used to be.

But what are these nostalgic people recalling about the country of the past that makes them think that UKIP can return it to them?

When I walked home from school with friends we tried to imagine the future.

The jobs that we might have.

The income that we might earn.

In the 1950's we set the bar at £1000 a year.

If we could find a job paying £20 a week then we would surely have a comfortable life?

As I type this blog on a lap top, which corrects my spelling as I go along, I can reflect that I am fortunate that I don't need an exercise book.

If I order a book that I have seen reviewed and which I think I might like to read I can order it on-line, a concept unimaginable in the 1950's, and it will be delivered tomorrow.

If I want to listen to a particular piece of music I can listen to it immediately.

These are relatively simple, almost trivial, examples of the transformations that have happened in our social and community lives in the past seventy years, but there are countless other examples some more important, some essential.

Low cost air travel making for affordable holidays. Dramatic improvements in diet. The shelves of the supermarkets filled with goods. Health care provided free at the point of need.

Sadly of course we have it within our gift to ensure that each and every one of us can benefit from these improvements but choose not to do that.

Indeed the current Government continues to wage a war of attrition on those who rely on public support in the form of welfare whilst offering what appear to be unfunded tax cuts to those they choose to call 'hardworking'.

The rise and rise of Arturo Ui suggests that amongst some people nostalgia is mistaking the past for a pleasant land and decrying the achievements of the present.

What no-one appears able to explain is how UKIP will at one and the same time give people their country back whilst ensuring that all the benefits of life in the present are maintained.

UKIP will never form a Government, almost all of its policy proposals are either unfunded or unaffordable, whilst the policies themselves are contradictory.

And none of this is to mention the most significant achievement since 1945, the continued commitment of the nations of Europe to work together to ensure that the two wars which tore Europe apart in the past will never happen again, apart from its role as an economic community the EEC is a project for peace and as such is crucial to our continued well being as a community of nations.

The other issue which bedevils our public life and seems central to this myopic vision of the country of the past, immigration, has been addressed fairly and squarely in the USA by President Obama, in according residence rights to those who have settled without papers.

America of course was built on immigration.

In the past of course ours was a nation of emigration as the economically dispossessed or the convicted left to start new lives in New Worlds and as they did so the colours of the world map reflected British colonial expansion, now reflected in what we call a Commonwealth of Nations.

What UKIP cannot understand, it seems, is that immigration makes a powerful contribution to the continued 'commonwealth' of our developing and enriching way of life as our contemporary cultural and economic wealth continues to increase as we become renewed and energised reinventing  ourselves along the way as a Global Nation.

It has become a cliche but perhaps the best response to the challenge of UKIP and those who offer it comfort at the Ballot Box is a gentle reminder of the perils of nostalgia:

The past is history, the future is a mystery, but today is a gift that is why it's called the present.

11th November 2014

Armistice Day.

How to reflect on Remembrance 100 years since war broke out in Europe and 96 years before a troubled peace was declared?

Of course we don't hear much from this Government about the big society any more, but that is not surprising, just as we don't hear much about hugging hoodies, vote blue turn green or any of the other phrases which turned out merely to be empty rhetoric.

Of course what we do hear is the constant litany of austerity.

And interspersed between the constant barrage of attacks on immigrants, welfare claimants and the poor, the continual rumbling about Europe.

When in 1918 the Armistice was signed the clear up began. Famously whilst the allies debated what might be done, the good burghers of Ypres just got on and rebuilt their city.

A British army chaplain, The Revd Philip Thomas Byard (Tubby) Clayton began to think about what  might happen next.

His brainchild, Talbot House in Poperinghe, would in time close as the troops were withdrawn and begin to settle back down to civilian life with their families as they resumed the jobs that they had left to go to war five years earlier.

Surprisingly, Talbot House is still in existence as a centre dedicated to peace and as the home base of the Belgian grouping of Toc H, the organisation that Clayton started after he too had returned to England, first to train ordinands for ministry in the Church of England, in Knutsford, Cheshire, many of whom had discovered their vocation in the trenches, and then as Vicar of All Hallows in London.

Starting with what today we might call a data base, i.e. the friendship roll signed by the thousands who found respite, refuge and fellowship in Talbot House, Toc H in signallers code, during the war.

Clayton wrote to suggest that contact should be renewed and those who had survived the war years should dedicate themselves to service in memory of those many thousands who had lost their lives.

In this way Toc H began life as a voluntary organisation committed to serving local communities, it became the single largest source of 'volunteers' in Britain. although as older members commented to me, they kept their membership of Toc H as a hidden light and served as volunteers of whatever organisation they represented from the Red Cross to the Samaritans.

Clayton knitted this army of volunteers together through a concept known as The Four Points of the Compass:

To Love Widely,
To Build Bravely
To Think Fairly, and,
To Witness Humbly

So Toc H was built around a challenge to its members to commit themselves to Friendship, Service, Fair Mindedness and what Clayton, very much in the mind set of a later Archbishop, William Temple, saw as the secular expression of The Kingdom of God.

When I was appointed as Director of Toc H in 2000,  my father commented, don't know a lot about it but it seemed to try to 'do good by stealth' which fits with Clayton's own aphorism, one of many, 'Do something useful every day but don't get found  out'.

I always saw Toc H as an expression of what, under New Labour, active communities might be about or later what was meant by David Cameron's big society.

My time with Toc H ended and I am now able to relax and write my blog in my dressing gown!

But as I reflect on this anniversary of Armistice I am reminded that the idea of Europe sprang from the dream that nations should not, would not, could not tear themselves apart ever again, Europe represents a vision of a truly big society.

But watching the evening news on TV, reading my newspaper, listening to the poverty stricken debates between the parties, watching as we are threatened with separation, disintegration and diminishment as a nation I wonder what is needed to make this Armistice a true anniversary of a better way of living, a better way of thinking, a better way of sharing each others burdens?

Clayton's Four Points of the Compass might not be a bad place to start.