Quack Remedies

This is going to be another short one, I'm afraid, for reasons which will become apparent. Although Inexplicable does feel I tend to be a bit prolix.
For some time I have been lacking in energy and have been suffering with pain and stiffness in my hands, knees, and ankles. This has now been diagnosed as rheumatoid arthritis, which frankly is a relief to know what is wrong with me.
Something else has become very apparent to me - you wouldn't believe the array of quack remedies there are for arthritis, all intended to make desperate people with an unpredictable illness spend money on things which won't make them better.
In fact when the doctor asked me if I have a family history of arthritis I had to tell him that my mother always claimed to have it (she didn't) and drank cider vinegar every morning to make it better (the real reason was to turn my stomach at breakfast), to which in later years glucosamine (this was to add to the illusion that she was very ill and needed to take these remedies) was added. What my mother actually had is something which will now never be diagnosed, but I have my own ideas.
Her sister also claimed to have had either rheumatism or arthritis and to have had a miraculous recovery as a result of wearing a copper bangle.
What all of these 'remedies' have in common is that they don't work. Now let me explain what I mean by not working. If you drink cider vinegar, believing it will work, for what you think is arthritis (but may actually just be random aches and pains) you may feel a genuine benefit and may proclaim that this is a miraculous cure. That does not mean it has worked - that is the placebo effect. For cider vinegar and these other remedies to work in the emprical scientific method, they would have to reliably and measurable have a statistically significant effect a statistically significant number of times when all other variants have been controlled. Plus they would have to keep on doing this time and time again. In reality they don't. They *only* have the placebo effect.
What does this have to do with me, a practitioner of witchcraft and magic, surely the most quack thing ever invented? Well I'm not about to say cast a spell *alone* for your recovery from any illness. Yes, great, cast spells, pray, do whatever you do for whatever illness you have. The magical thing here is the mindset with which you approach your illness and its treatment (I mentioned this before when I went to hospital for something else, I'm a poor old hag). And the mindset is this: turn up to appointments, get the prescriptions, take the medication, talk to your doctor if there's a problem. Ffs what is it with people that they won't engage with the universe in *every* way to ensure their own health? For myself I'm currently feeling the best I've felt in weeks because I'm full of steroids, and because they're not going on for ever I don't have a problem with that. I will also be happy to take the actual treatment they're going to prescribe me, which is actually chemotherapy. I am satisfied that this is an evidence-based treatment which will optimise my quality of life and I personally only buy vinegar to clean out the dishwasher with. A pox on those who make false promises of these quack remedies and make money out of scared people with scary illnesses.
The magical mindset here is that I am going to go straight to acceptance and deal with it. The other magical mindset is that I have to act in accord myself, and behave as if I need to be looked after (even more than usual lol). True to form in the witch's world my employers have chosen to be dicks at this moment and although the doctor suggested I have a couple of weeks off work I was going to negotiate with them until my manager made a flippant remark about milking illnesses and asked me to come in at the weekend. She has since sent a grovelly text in response to my reply but once I get a GP appointment she'll be getting a certificate for as long as I feel I need one. Bitch. I come first, and that is the mindset which is going to make me live a long healthy life (surrounded by the bruised and battered remains of the people who don't support that resolution).
The Psychobitches video isn't perhaps related to the subject of the blog, but then this is my blog and you can't expect it to make too much sense.

Hidden City: The Birmingham Oratory

 These are pictures of some of the internal rooms at the Birmingham Oratory - the room where the fathers have recreation in the evenings and obviously the refectory. I'm surprised at how austere the recreation room is and at how much like a monastery the refectory feels like. The Oratory was of course where Blessed John Henry Newman lived, whom I have touched on a couple of times here, and indeed his own rooms are kept as they were when he was alive and there are lots of pictures of them, but you don't get to see the Oratorians' domestic quarters. 
Image source

Spirit of Place: 1901 Postcard from Birmingham

And of course nothing has changed since then, either in favourable comparison to the capital or in slumminess! That said Inexplicable has a soft spot for the Old Square and this card shows what the houses were demolished to build.

Apologies

The Pope has issued an apology for the frankly disastrous way he has bollocksed up pissed on peoples trauma mishandled the appointment of a bishop in Chile. To cut a very long story short, there have been accusations made that the bishop in question was party to sexual abuse in the 1980s. *I* knew that these accusations had been made, so frankly there was no excuse for Il Papa to claim not to have known about it, which was exactly what he said. The protests actually in the cathedral at the bishop's installation should have warned him that the faithful (and good for them) were not happy. Instead he claimed to have no awareness of these accusations, despite other people having made it plain that these had been given to him in writing. He has now stopped denying knowing about it and has apologised for not believing these accusations. In fact he didn't even need to believe them, he only needed to get it investigated and decide whether it was prudent to proceed with the installation of that bishop given the strength of public feeling. What a creep.
So, having got the event which has prompted these meanderings out of the way, of course I'm going to pass comment on the fact of his having apologised, which is that of course the apology is bullshit. If he was ever going to be sorry about this, the situation wouldn't have arisen in the first place, and that is the problem with all apologies.
The origin of my problem with apologies is that I believe them to issue from the post-Judaeo-Christian society which surrounds us. Where else would we have got the idea from, that saying sorry about something will in some way make it better? In the Christian tradition there is a great tradition of confessing and expressing sorrow (obviously the mechanics vary between different flavours of Christians) and having the wrong done (they call it a sin) somehow wiped off the slate and forgotten. Sometimes there is a requirement of some sort of recompense either to God, or to the person you have wronged, or some requirement of performing some pious act in token of your true contrition.
All of this is, in my humble opinion, not only wrong but downright dangerous, because when these ideas of sorrow come into contact with human nature it becomes twisted into the idea that we can basically get away with it. This is exactly the twisted idea of contrition which has infested our modern culture. Politicians, bankers, ... it's a bit difficult to think of a group of people who haven't apologised publicly of recent years.
I don't know what these apologies are supposed to achieve (apart from to give an appearance of human decency to the apologiser), but my favourite analogy of what is wrong with apologies is the famous one of the broken plate. Break a plate, the idea goes, and then apologise to it. The plate remains in its broken state and the apology has not changed anything for it.
The shortcoming of the broken plate is the reality that if you apologise to a person they then might decide to forgive you for what you have done. (Although the phrase 'Pope Francis, we forgive you for appointing a man accused of abuse as our bishop and then ignoring us when we protested about this, but now it's all okay and you just carry on' is a phrase which it's frankly rather difficult to envisage anyone saying.)
I don't like the idea of forgiveness (I have written about this repeatedly here) because it encourages the idea that things we do can be undone. I think the common modern Pagan idea that the things we do will influence our own future, including beyond the grave, is a much healthier was of seeing the effects of our actions. It encourages a greater awareness of the importance of our actions. Naturally we can all make mistakes or whatever, so it isn't possible never to offend anyone, never to be in the wrong, never to make a misjudgement, but in smaller events as in events which hit world-wide media, an intention to do the right thing is a way of ensuring we don't end up apologising, which is the sign that we are not living intentionally.
And the way to know whether what we are doing is right, is to examine the exact signifcance of our actions. Actions speak louder than words, and (it's an easy example so I'm going to run with it) ignoring major protests about the appointment of a particular man as a bishop would indicate that you don't care about those people's opinions. Once again it returns to an examination of the nature of power, which so often indicates what is going on in a situation. Not only power between people, but our own power to do what we will and not to be expected to apologise.

Weighing up

Sometimes things go quiet, and that is reflected in my posting here. The wise witch uses these to recuperate ready for whatever ridiculousness is coming next.
These times are turning points but it is as if the witch is at the centre of the turning bit. My problem colleague is off on long term sick. I am still looking for another job rather lackadaisically, since I want something I like.
But the main sign for me that things are turning is that I have a number of illnesses going on, and illness is the universe's frequent way of communicating to us. It is telling me to slow down and think about it, and thus I am.
It's quite nice not to be surrounded by drama, it just feels rather strange!

It may seem as if I've gone quiet. Naturally this is not the case and I'm frantically busy behind the scenes. I just look as if I'm resting.