Home thoughts from home

I hope you'll forgive me if I bring my blog down to domestic matters while the tragedy of the Japanese earthquake aftermath continues to unravel. The immensity of the death and missing toll (17,000) and number who are homeless (over a million), the collapse of infrastructure, the sub-zero temperatures and the unfolding nuclear power station disaster - no wonder their Prime Minister, Naoto Kan, described it as the country's worst catastrophe after the 2nd World War and said that the whole nation would have to rebuild from scratch.

The home story that heated my sub-collar area most was the report that Westminster City Council have dreamed up a scheme to make it a criminal offence to give food or drink to homeless people and to fine people sitting on the streets £500. It's variously surmised that this is the first step to clearing up the streets of London before the 2012 Olympics, or preempting the expected increase in homelessness following changes in housing benefits. More charitable people wonder whether the council might have plans to provide shelter and food to the nearly 150 homeless in the area. Watching David Cameron giving his statement about Libya in the Commons today, I noticed sitting on the front bench next to Nick Noddy Clegg, Sir George Young, Leader of the House and Lord Privy Seal, who once famously, or infamously, defined 'the homeless' as "people you step over when you leave the opera". Words like "whoever gives one of these little ones even a cup of water" came to mind and the reward, as far as I understood, wasn't a criminal charge. I'm not quite clear whether this is already a by-law or being considered. I sincerely hope it's the latter and will be dropped with the contempt it deserves.

Yesterday the BBC published research they'd commissioned from 'a leading firm of accountants' about the new rate of student loans. They concluded that if a student took out a loan over three years of £39,000 and had above-average pay-increases, he'd end up paying more than double what he borrowed. Apparently, according to the minister, this is half way between a credit card debt and income tax, and is "a good deal". It certainly is for the government. But I imagine loan sharks say the same!

I was pleased to see internecine strife amongst journalists when Panorama did a programme on the dark arts, in particular practised by The News of the World. This involved illegal phone tapping and computer hacking. A bit disturbing was the alleged obtaining of police information with money. Scotland Yard, we were told, had reopened the case. Hopefully they will be rigorous even in examining themselves.

And finally in the week when the BMA (the doctors' professional association) Council voted for a withdrawal and reshaping of the government's NHS Bill I was interested to learn that Richard Branson already owns a number of GP practices. I assume it's through Virgin Healthcare. I don't think my local practice could be improved, nor the services I receive, but I can believe that he might do a good job running services - though, come to think of it, I'm not sure that Virgin gives us a better service on our phones than the good old Post Office phone service used to. However the image isn't bad!

"Your surgery's either got it or it hasn't."

Cameron's War

So we are going to get involved in, or above, Libya. I have to confess that I agreed with Simon Jenkins' scepticism about military intervention. He argued that once you get involved you are inevitably sucked in further and further, because failure is not an option. "That Britain has been fighting and not winning two wars already in Muslim countries seems to teach nothing in Libya.... If the rebels win it should be their victory, emerging from a new balance of power inside Libya. If they fail, they must fight another day. There is no good reason for us to intervene. However embattled they feel, Obama and Cameron should find other paths to glory" (Guardian 9th March). That was until Thursday when I heard the Syrian writer and broadcaster, Rana Kabbani.

Rana Kabbani

She was contributor to that day's Letters to the Arab World on Radio 4. It was a series in which five writers from North Africa and the Middle East considered the momentous events that are reshaping the Arab world. As the political and cultural landscape shifts around them, these authors and thinkers use open letters to reflect on the consequences for the region and for its people. She addressed hers to the 81-year old Riad al-Turk, a Syrian dissident artist and activist who after 20 years of imprisonment by the Assad régime is now in hiding. For me it was an eye-opener. She talked about the reality and brutality of the oppression by the dynastic régimes of the Arab world, describing the inhumane conditions Riad had to endure. Contrary to popular western belief, Arab people are not apathetic under tyranny. The north African uprisings this year have not come out of the blue; they are the culmination of a harshly suppressed longing and working for freedom. She used, I think, the phrase, "the prison cells which are our Arab nations". Now they are at last breaking out. It's a moving and revealing piece. Rana Kabbani's letter  


I'm not sure quite how it changed my attitude, but I think it was to see that this whole thing is important, and that actually it's to do with freeing prisoners unjustly held in captivity, as well as preventing the slaughter of innocent lives. Maybe it will go down in the UK as "Cameron's War" (and in France as "la guerre de Sarkozy"), and at the moment it seems to have got off to a good start with the announcement in Libya of a ceasefire - not that I'd trust the wily old fox Gaddafi. However to give M Sarkozy his due he did stick his head above the parapet in denouncing Gaddafi, recognising the rebels in Benghazi and rattling his sabre, and David Cameron came on board fairly soon on the diplomatic front - as Sir Humphrey might have said, a courageous decision. 

Typhoon: lined up against Col Gaddafi's forces

Of course this isn't the end of the story. In all the twists and turns that Muammar Gaddafi will undoubtedly perform in order to retain power, I am sure there will be more blood to be shed. And then, if he ultimately is toppled from power, there will still be questions hanging over us, notably where will we stop? Bahrain has imported (our ally's) troops to suppress their "prison-cell" breakers. Yemen has fired on theirs. We've seen unrest in many of "the prison cells which are... Arab nations": Algeria, Morocco, Jordan, Iran, Saudi Arabia (who, incidentally, are lined up for our most advanced combat aircraft, the Typhoon). Will we be as assiduous in support of their uprisings as we have been in Libya? Simon Jenkins has a point. We need to pray for our politicians.

To end, a quote I recently came across: “Although the world is full of suffering, it is also full of the overcoming of it” (Helen Keller).

Local scenes and global perspectives 2

I must say I was having something of an argy-bargy with God over the weekend. It doesn't happen often, but last week's events got under my skin. That documentary about Kibera in Kenya, as you'll have gathered, moved me a lot. A million people crammed into one and a half square miles of mud huts with corrugated tin roofs, with communal toilets (up to 1000 sharing) with open sewers running down the centre of the alleys, awful child mortality. As Angela Rippon commented, "Here 'hand-to-mouth' literally means hand to mouth." Lennie Henry was lodged with five orphans, living in squalor, and couldn't take it. He was so upset that he broke the 'rules' of the film and asked to buy them a house with his credit card. It was an expensive house (£800) for Kibera, but hardly a palace. Samantha Womack was put with a young mum who worked as a prostitute to support her children and extended family up-country. Contrary to my expectations I understood why she did so, and how Jesus loved and forgave 'sinners'.

"Why, God, don't you get out your celestial credit card and rehouse the whole lot of them?" Actually, I know there is something much larger, more systemic, than bad housing conditions behind places like Kibera. My friend, Katie, recently wrote from holiday in Cape Town, that she "has been blown away by the poverty in the local township here... 40.000+ people crowded into a small space....." And, of course,  I know that God doesn't use American Express and doesn't bale out every result of human or satanic folly. That's something to do with free will, isn't it? I guess one of his questions is "Why don't you feed, or house, this multitude?"

Tsunami debris (Photo: Reuters/Kyodo)

And then came the earthquake happened off northern Japan, and its devastating consequences started to dawn us like the tsunami it caused, so that now Japan holds its breath lest a plutonium reactor melts down and explodes. Already the radiation levels have increased 100 miles away. Tens of thousands of people are dead or missing as the tsunami swept all in its irresistible path. And, what's more, the Tokyo stock market has plunged. I've heard it all described as "an act of God", an instance of the awesome power of nature, an example of the limits of the most sophisticated human technology, and the result of Adam and Eve's fall from innocence.... I find it very hard to understand as either the first or the last of those. I don't think we can thank God for the good things about it, such as the tsunami not causing damage in other Pacific Rim countries, if we rule him out of the bad parts. And while I'm happy to believe that "the whole creation has been groaning with the pains of childbirth until now", as Paul of Tarsus put it, it feels too simplistic a correlation to make to primal sin.

Rescue in Japan with body-bags (Photo ABC Australia)

I guess it's just part of inhabiting a planet formed as ours was. And a consequence of rising populations and increasing urbanisation, so that although the incidence of earthquakes hasn't noticeably increased, their human effects have become more catastrophic. We have an odd instinct to blame when disasters occur, blame someone or something for things going wrong. Blame whoever built nuclear power station on seismic fault lines, blame whoever built cities on them (though I gather that humans have chosen to live in such places from the beginning), blame authorities who allowed it all, and in due course blame someone for failures in rescue operations and in the reconstruction effort.

Photo © Ian Salisbury

And then today I've heard that another of my lovely young friends has cancer. Give us a break. Maybe it's copping out, but I'm cornered into concluding, as I was about my illness, that God is love (for which I have good evidence), but that love is far more incomprehensible than I'd imagined - so that somehow personal and international catastrophes both fall within that love, as does rescue from them. So I move backwards from Psalm 135.6, "Whatever the Lord pleases, he does in heaven and on earth, in the seas and all deeps", to Psalm 131.1, "O Lord, my heart is not lifted up... I do not occupy myself with things too great and marvellous for me."

We certainly live in a mysterious and beautiful universe. This is a picture I was sent last week of the moon over the North Pole, with the sun just above the horizon. I understand the moon has recently been nearer than usual.

(Unknown source)

Local scenes and global perspectives 1

On Thursday evening, I watched the second part of Comic Relief: Famous, rich and in the slums. Again it was touching and moving. Again it moved me to tears - and hopefully to action. It certainly moved me to reflection. More of that anon.

Not mine! From Wikipedia

Meanwhile it's been quite a week. It was framed by visits from two friends who have had cancer and amazingly better, one who's had brilliant chemo and the other who's not had treatment. Those were two good news stories. Another small one was when my physio, Lesley, visited on Monday and checked me over, and gave me the thumbs-up. She reckoned I was no worse than four months ago - just need to keep an eye on my posture. Good news. On Tuesday it was back to the dentist to decide what to do about the troublesome molar (or perhaps premolar). Whatever treatment (extraction or root filling) would require visits to Oxford, as the little local clinic doesn't have sufficient back-up if complications arise - which is likely since it's been pushed sideways. So I've opted to have it out and be done with it. We now await the summons from the hospital, hopefully before too long as the antibiotics which have held the infection at bay ran out at the weekend.

On Wednesday we had our joint Oxfordshire/South Bucks MNDA meeting in Thame about benefits, like DLA, Carers' and Attendance Allowance. A really good service provided by the Department of Work & Pensions, this, their outreach: we certainly learned things we didn't know before, which were pleasant surprises. I asked the chap about the future of the benefits. The answer was, if I got it right, that from 2013 all the disability allowances will stop being self-assessed and will be assessed by doctors employed by the DWP. The idea must be drastically to cut the number of disabled claimants in order to justify the expense of employing all those medics, I reckon. They want to catch the abusers of the system, such as the woman who claimed and then played golf... apparently. I doubt whether there are that many of them, but I may be wrong.

My genuinely disabled artist friend, Katherine Araniello, pointed out an article by Lucy Mangan in the Weekend Guardian, We're in a right state, in which she reflects on the experience of being temporarily mildly disabled. She describes vividly what it's like (similar, I thought, to early MND) and the unexpected acts of kindness she keeps experiencing from individuals. "It makes me wonder, though: what happens to all this kindness and compassion when we move beyond the individual level? It clearly dissipates at some point. I'm fascinated, truly, by the fact that a government is elected by people and made up of people, yet so lacks the empathy or sympathy of the average person that it can blithely cut the benefits that mitigate the sociocultural disadvantages of disability – the enforced isolation, the extra expense (of minicabs, of having to go to the most accessible rather than the cheapest shops) – and reformulate the rules of qualifying so that it seems every applicant is assumed to be a fraud until proven otherwise."  


I hadn't read that by Thursday when I went to the Churchill Hospital to talk to trainee clergy about my experience on both sides of degenerative illness and disability, or I might have quoted it to them. As I might have foreseen, I broke down talking about the church family and especially my own family's unconditional love, but I hope, nonetheless, that it gave them some insight to what it's like. Of course they asked some tricky questions, like what's the most helpful approach to people like me - to which the answer is to notice us as people, not to come up with the 'right words'. Rachel Marsden, the MND Centre archangel, also spoke and mentioned some of the things not to say, such as "I know how you feel" (No, you don't) and "Something good will come out of this" (It may not, and anyway my problem is now). Sadly, not many of them bought my books! Recession-hit ordinands? After us there was a panel of hospital chaplains, who I felt were less than clear about euthanasia, with one exception - though admittedly they were speaking pastorally rather than ethically. Perhaps they should watch Katharine Araniello's films and listen to her experience. Her latest one is sardonically funny and yet deeply serious: "'Follow Me on My Journey To Die' follows Gem, a flamboyant artist whose plan to commit suicide captures the attention of the masses. Not only does she have Turner Prize committee in her sway but also the London fashion scene which has been hit with a euthanasia craze."Katherine Araniello's website

Katherine Araniello performing

And so with visitors on Friday and breaking news from Japan, I sank exhausted to watch an afternoon of rugby, which certainly woke me up. In fact it was an extraordinary weekend of internationals: Italy beating France by a single point in Rome, Wales beating Ireland with a try which contravened Rule 19.2 after a quick line-out with a new ball (!), England beating Scotland after a dubious sin-binning, a fox on the pitch and the referee injured with a torn calf muscle! It looks as though England are on course for the Grand Slam (beating all the other teams in the 6 Nations) unless Ireland pull off a miracle in Dublin on Saturday, two days after St Patrick's Day.

Converted

I've been converted! I know you'll rejoice with me. Yesterday I watched all the way through Comic Relief 2011: Famous, Rich and in the Slums - Part 1 on iPlayer. I wanted to watch because it looked as though it would remind me of the time I spent in 1967 in Pumwami, which was then the slum area of Nairobi. (I have to say I remember it as being nothing as bad as Kibera today.) Fortunately I watched it while Jane was out, because it had me moved to tears, and I still feel embarrassed when I blub.

Now I've always been a bit sceptical about Comic Relief and very sceptical about "reality" TV shows. And here, basically, were four broadcasting celebrities being stranded for a week (with cameramen of course) in Kibera, the biggest slum in Africa, on the edge of Nairobi, capital of Kenya, "for Comic Relief". The celebs were Angela Rippon, Lennie Henry, Samantha Womack and Reggie Yates. But despite the publicity photo it wasn't either jokey or mawkish or sensational. Each of them had their own clothes and possessions removed and were supplied with second-hand Kibera clothing. They were given the equivalent of £1.50 each and an 8-foot square corrugated shack each and left to cope, like the Kiberans have to. It's a programme you need to watch because there's no way in which I can do justice to it, the open sewers running down the alleys, the latrines shared shared by up to 1000 each, the matter of factness of death (one in five children don't reach the age of five), the commitment of the parents, often on their own. The four celebs were torn between reporting and identifying with their neighbours, and the end the 3rd-generation Kiberan who'd arranged their contacts himself was overwhelmed by the emotion which he and other slum-dwellers habitually suppress in order to survive.

It was a remarkable programme. And I could understand why someone this morning said her immediate reaction was to make a donation. I shall have to watch Part 2, of course, although part of me would rather not. But these are our neighbours.

So I may still not go for the razzmatazz of 18th March evening TV, and I'll still find Ant and Dec's antics in the jungle absurd, however this was real reality TV and that's not absurd. And I will no longer look down my nose at Comic Relief. I'm converted. Famous, Rich and in the Slums

Public policy affects individuals

After Wednesday morning appreciating the NHS, we mosied down to Cornerstone to meet Jean, who’s recently been diagnosed with MND, and her husband, John. What a nice couple! They’ve lived in Grove all their married life. We share a number of the same professionals, like physio, GP etc. They were waiting for a stairlift to be fitted on Thursday, which will mean Jean will be able to sleep upstairs again. It does feel better going upstairs to bed. No doubt we’ll meet up again. In fact we’ll be seeing them again next week at the local MNDA meeting in Thame - about benefits. How timely!

I wonder whether they’ll have any light to shed on Moira’s plight. She has MND much worse than me (for example she can’t speak and can’t move), and lives on her own with a son and a full-time carer. Hitherto she has had Continuing Care funded by the local NHS Primary Care Trust. Now they’ve reassessed her and decided she’s not eligible after all - interesting idea since MND is degenerative. So they say she’ll have to apply to Social Services to fund her care. That will not come cheap, of course. One wonders, naturally, whether it’s more a matter of healthcare economies than patient needs. As far as I can see she should qualify for the NHS funding for her Continuing Care on more than one priority criterion. She’ll no doubt appeal, but in a fortnight she’ll have her funding discontinued and be left fending for herself. That seems a plain injustice. Why can’t her funding be maintained until the appeal is made (within 28 days) and a decision reached? I guess there’ll be more stories like this in the months ahead as public bodies tighten their belts. The sad thing is, it’s the vulnerable who get squeezed in the process.

Dr David Starkey

On Thursday evening there was an unexpected and most welcome item on BBC1’s Question Time from Derby, where the foster-parents, Owen and Eunice Johns, live. They’re the Pentecostal Christian couple who as a result of a jointly requested judicial review were declared unfit to foster children between 5 and 8 years old, because of their views on homosexuality. The judges ruled that they were potentially harmful to children entrusted to their care. Irrespective of the rights and wrongs of their views, that does seem to exclude everyone with opinions which are not politically correct. This was sadly illustrated by the two politicians on the panel, Margaret Beckett and Ian Duncan-Smith who in particular tied himself in knots about the case. 

By contrast, popular and trenchant historian, David Starkey was clarity itself. “I’m gay, and I’m atheist,” he began, “but I have profound doubts about this case. It seems to me that what we’re doing is producing a tyrannous new morality which is every bit as oppressive as the old.” He went on to describe his early experience of being hounded as a gay man, but he said we now have a ‘liberal’ morality which is in danger of being equally intolerant. He also talked about being a gay son of a Christian mother, who passionately hated his homosexuality, and he said it did him no harm. “It made me what I am.” We live in a complicated pluralistic society, and it’s hard. But we're in danger of creating 'thought crime'. “Just having a reach-me-down, off the hanger, imposed morality is a very bad idea.” I must say I warmed to him surprisingly and found myself thinking, “There’s a wise man. Refreshing to hear an atheist defending Christians’ and everyone's freedom with such intellectual rigour.” That of course cuts both ways, including Christians not imposing their morality on atheists. Argue for by all means but not impose. It’s worth listening to the discussion on the subject: BBC Question Time re Foster Parents.

Thanks, NHS

I've specially needed the Special Needs Dental Service this week. I'd been booked in for a big xray on Wednesday in Didcot. Last week my blooming lower right 7 was playing up again, waking me up at night and preventing me from chewing. So Jane rang on Monday morning. The xray machine was out of order (a result of economies, I wonder), but we asked to see a dentist anyhow. Wednesday came. Antibiotics prescribed, and the xray rearranged in East Oxford for today. They'd just fit me in.

This morning we drove in to the incredibly impressive East Oxford Health Centre, past my old stamping ground of Cowley St John, and within 15 minutes I was dealt with - by none other than the head honcho. Nice picture of my rather decadent teeth ready to be emailed to my dentist for an appointment on Tuesday. Here at least the NHS ain't broke, but living up to its name of "service". I really hope that efforts to mend it don't prove counterproductive, as the King's Fund warned this morning. It's certainly not obvious how such a superb service could be improved, or even maintained, by GP commissioning.