Daffodils at Christmas

As we boarded the turbo-prop plane that took us to Guernsey for Christmas, there beside the door on the fuselage was a notice that informed us that for each passenger it would on take-off inject an average of 10.5 kg of CO2 into the atmosphere. This seems an awful lot to me, but evidently it is supposed to be something to be proud of. Anyway we landed on the splendid new runway at Guernsey, which is able to take jets. When they take off one even gets a good whiff of them at our daughter’s house over a mile away; no doubt they deliver plenty more of the dodgy stuff into the atmosphere, but they get the hard-pressed worthies of Guernsey to London ten minutes quicker, and should a chap happen to be making a million a year, time must be rather valuable!

Guernsey is a beautiful island and the weather was a whole lot kinder than in Ireland and the north of England. Going down the sheltered hill into St Peter Port from the south, there were already quite a few daffodils out, before Christmas! There are plenty of sweet and environmentally aware people there, and much talk of ‘a sustainable future’ and so on. Meanwhile there are three cars for every two adults on that small island, many  of them great big gas-guzzlers entirely inappropriate for the narrow roads. No matter, petrol’s not taxed!

‘The States’ is what they call the Government there, duly elected democratically. Funny thing is that any real islander whom I met grumbles about it no end. “How’s it going J….?”  “Fine, still battling the Gestapo!”  He was very fed up about the new marina in St Sampson’s; blokes that used to keep their wee boat on a running mooring there for 70quid a year are now expected to stump up 500 or so for a berth on the pontoons. Another friend mentioned the fancy new police station, court house, gaol, helicopter and flashy cars - “but the policing was much better when you had  a few bobbies doing proper community policing! Some good people get elected, but they don’t seem to be able to change anything. The place is run by the Masons!”

Everyone was complaining about the new Condor ferry ‘Liberation’, which let a lot of people down in the run-up to Christmas because it was not fit to battle the gales. It’s a trimaran but apparently has an awful corkscrewing motion when it gets lively and, like the big catamaran that was withdrawn from the Dun Laoghaire/Holyhead run, has to be regularly inspected by divers for cracks below the waterline. If it does succeed in the end, Condor ferries will reap the profits - but not to worry, the States has underwritten the loan on it. It’s the new whizz form of capitalism that we’ve seen in action so much lately: profits go to the capitalists, liabilities go to the tax-payer.  Bankers love it!

I was asking an old boy about it all, when I fell in with him walking the cliffs. He was one of those lonely old widowers, who made me feel young with his wheezing, but full of stories. He was a few years older than me anyway, and had witnessed the liberation of the island as a small boy. “Well what can you expect, Guernseymen had to scratch a living any way they could. That Saumarez crowd got the best property on the island from Queen Elizabeth I because they were on the ball rescuing a couple of ships laden with gold robbed from the Spaniards, and delivering it to Herself in London.

“The Bailiffs and top men made big money towards the end of the war, exchanging millions of Reichsmarks and gold robbed from Jews (or their corpses) for Pounds Sterling. The Germans actually kept meticulous records, which were taken away by the British after the war, but nothing was heard of it after….”

It’s a proud boast these days that ‘everything is kept within the law’, and lawyers on the island earn a fortune by making sure of it. The place is awash with money that has been kept safely and legally out of the hands of those greedy taxmen. But in spite of that and of all the expenditure on big projects of doubtful benefit, besides the fact that the States are not in debt, I read in the Guernsey Press of ‘a radical new tax plan that would see islanders working until they are 70, an end to family allowances and a cap on how much the States can take in total in taxes and charges.’

Sounds like a Tory Government on steroids! However, according to an old lady from Sark, the battle on that island with the Barclay brothers seems to be winding down. The islanders’ reflexive tactic of wearing them down and frustrating them has apparently reached a point where the Brothers have fallen out and one of them has lost interest. Meanwhile they have four newly refurbished (and empty) hotels on Sark. The Brothers were hoping to bring visitors in from France direct, but this bright idea ran foul of the need for customs officers to supervise it. Not being in the EU evidently does have its disadvantages! To get to Guernsey, that particular retired widow has to stump up the full 30pound fare….

Meanwhile, on the big island to the north, the main battle is warming up. We were quickly reminded of another example of that whizz modern form of capitalism that I mentioned, and its failure, when we took the train from Manchester Airport to Chester; of the three train journeys in Britain that we have made in 2015, this was the second that failed to run smoothly and on time; our connecting train was simply billed as cancelled as we stood on the platform awaiting it! Yet I read that in fact the British Government has spent much the same amount as the French on its railways this year, ‘privatised’ as they may be!

While we were in Guernsey, in memory of Victor Hugo who was exiled there for many years and loved the island, we watched the film of Les Miserables.  It’s fairly true to the original as far as I remember (having read the novel about 50 years ago). It’s a powerful story, but it’s a pity that he muddles the Kingdom of Heaven up with the Revolution, the Democracy or whatnot. One would have thought he had seen enough of the first French Revolution to have learnt that Heaven is always way beyond any such efforts! And yet, neither can it be said that they are completely unrelated; the desire for social justice and the love of truth do sometimes point in the same direction. Indeed, if this Corbyn effort is to get anywhere, it will need all the spiritual energy it can muster; in order to rouse a sufficient majority of the British populace from the torpor of tv, consumerism, cynicism and anxiety, it would help enormously to get that relationship right!

Tra-di-da, and a Happy New Year to ye all!       

Advent Hope, 2015.

Happy Christmas to you all, from Guernsey!

There is such a lot of madness around in the world these days that it’s hard to know how to deal with it. For a poor scribbler like myself, it must be a forlorn hope that my few words can make even the least little contribution to straightening things out. Our minds are all but buried under whole avalanches of words. You may well ask, on what basis do I venture to add yet more, and ask you to read them? I can only tell you that these little pieces come into my head in the early hours, unbidden, and I feel impelled to share them.

What have they got to do with the Gannetsway? Well, Europe is rather too big a mouthful for me. I could not begin to keep track, for instance, of the politics and media of all the countries of Europe, and neither would I have the interest to do so. But, on the other hand, my own country of Ireland, and indeed Great Britain, are too, well, insular by themselves. The essential Gannetsway countries of Ireland, Great Britain, France, Spain and Portugal, taken together with the catholic sea, provide me with a patria, a portal to the universal, which suits me; in my inadequate way, I try to follow what goes on here and use this basis for taking my fixes, my triangulation.

  
Still preoccupied with Islam and Isis, this piece at least ends on a more hopeful note than it begins!

Advent Hope, 2015.

I have previously expressed my dismay at the way in which the aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle was dispatched in response to the Charlie Hebdo massacre. President Hollande, making scant progress with his economic and social objectives, seems to believe he has to counter the threat from the National Front with rushing about the world, his jour de gloire come round, thumping the drum for all his allies to join in the bombing of Syria.

Not to be outdone, the House of Commons has voted to do so as well. We don’t have to look far for conclusive evidence that their leading men have lost the plot, with the honourable exception of Mr Corbyn and those who voted with him. Both the Foreign Secretary and his Shadow saw fit to compare the battle with Isis with the Hitler War, and actually compared the sending of bombers to Syria with the Battle of Britain! Quite frankly, from the point of view of ‘the Few’ who fought that battle, and as it happens I knew one of them, this can only be described as impertinent. They fought, and many lost their lives, in a desperate battle against a threat of imminent invasion, and it was the invaders who were doing the bombing.

They were battling against the odds, but this Syrian affair is entirely asymmetric. The massively superior resources and technology of the advanced nations are pitted against a few crazed men, whose principal asset is indifference to human life, their own included. This needless to say is not a weapon that bombs can destroy; what they do do is promote the conditions on which that attitude thrives.  The terrorists are left with even less to lose and more hatred of the West. From the point of view of protecting our own populations from terrorist attack, the bombing is likely to be counter-productive. It is the proverbial stick stirring the wasps’ nest.

However, Arabs may already have plenty of understandable reasons for hating us. Beyond the matter of Israel, and divers problems like the fact that the developed world bears the responsibility of slowly cooking them by way of global warming, we exercise a cultural kind of colonialism that strikes at their religion and culture, their very operating system.

At this point Mr Cameron solemnly accuses the likes of Mr Corbyn (and myself) of ‘sympathising with terrorists’.  We are told that they ‘reject our values’; but precisely what are these values that they reject? I noticed a typical western reporter actually citing homosexual marriage in there, along with, it may be inferred, the rest of the ‘progressive’ agenda, such as our ‘rights’ to divorce and abort babies. Having disposed of fidelity, as of the permanent, generative and heterosexual aspects of marriage, we also apparently feel free to dispose of its offspring, and this is all supposed to be a matter of ‘western values’? But these are not values at all; rather they are anti-values. As a result there is in fact an appalling spiritual void at the heart of contemporary culture, that manifests itself in all kinds of self-destructive behaviour, which hardly need to be enumerated.

Real values are such as truth/honesty, justice/mercy, fidelity/peace, sustainability and life itself; and as a matter of fact they may be cherished by people of all faiths and none. However deeply buried, they are present in all human beings, even the Isis crowd; the task of people of good-will is to seek them out, especially in their enemies, and see what can be done to apply them to the horrendous difficulties of actual living. We may then be surprised by the potential for joyous transformation in us all. It is in the struggle to realise true values that friendship is formed and brotherhood discovered.

On the other hand it is painful for anyone to find that some people are intent on sweeping away their version of value. Admittedly, the fact being that breakdowns occur between differing narratives of what is of value, the first thing that anyone in a state of war does is to deprive the other side of their humanity, by denying them any true values, as opposed to our own good selves. In this case, we must first of all get very clear about what our values really are, and then go on to doing our best to appreciate those of our opponents and seeing if it is possible to find common ground.

For my part, I believe that it would help the West’s case no end if we junked the anti-values of the progressive agenda. It is precisely these that give power to Muslim fanatics: they have found our Achilles’ heel and how to prick it. Furthermore, the West’s amnesia about theology complicates the problem of conversing with Muslims no end. The sane way to tackle our problem with them is to begin by renewing and redoubling dialogue with them.  They are the only people who can effectively deal with their own fanatics, as we have to deal with ours.

Perhaps the worst feature of the whole business is that one suspects the likes of President Hollande and Prime Minister Cameron know very well that the reasons they put forward for sending their bombers are bogus. These reasons seem to me to have more to do with prestige and influence and selling arms and not letting the Russians have it all their own way than anything else. There is the risk that the West will be sucked into a war behind the Sunnis, while the Russians and eventually the Chinese fall in with the Shias; the world shambled into the First World War on an equally bizarre basis! I don’t really understand the Shia/Sunni thing, but once one tries to identify the Kingdom of God with any earthly set-up, one is bound to run into this kind of problem.

Let us try to clarify the real issues.  I am no theologian, but just possibly a seaman’s eye is good for spotting the essential ones, rather than submerging them in oceans of words. One such matter of metaphysics has to be the question, ‘what comes first, the acorn or the idea of an oak tree?’ Scientifically and logically, it would seem, it has to be the idea, and how can one account for this but by believing in God? Thus far, we can agree with our Muslim friends; but whereas they may be stuck in the desert with nothing but the idea of fresh green growth to torment their minds, we in Europe have it everywhere under our noses, even if we fail to give it the appreciation it deserves. However, in the very same reciprocal movement, in the same dynamic relationship between God and his creation, during Advent Catholics sing a wonderful old hymn to Our Lady, which includes the incredibly tight Latin words: ‘Tu quae genuisti, natura mirante, tuum sanctum genitorem.’   I make bold to render them inadequately: You who bore, with nature looking on astounded, your own holy creator.

It would seem to be impossible for Muslims to accept the paradoxical mystery of the Incarnation, whereby Almighty God became a humble human being who died on the Cross; however, this difficulty does have its counterpart in the difficulty that Western civilisation has with the absolute and transcendent authority of God.  Perhaps being a seaman also helps me to imagine what effect the desert has on people, the sea being a kind of desert; and surely, whatever else it is, Islam is primarily a religion of the desert; a land where the sun, that most powerful physical image of God, burns in the sky but little grows; it may be contrasted with temperate Europe, where the sun is often obscured by cloud but lots of things do grow upon the land.

We may insist that God in his mercy does not choose to assert His authority by force, and it is not for any human being to do so;  we may reserve the right to resist any such attempt, meeting force with force if necessary. Much closer to the spirit of Jesus it is, in humility and mutual forgiveness, to work hopefully for that realm of truth, peace and justice which some call Islam, some the New Jerusalem or the Kingdom of God!

Joe Aston,   December, 2015.