Epiblog for 13 February 2010

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley, and rather a sad one.

The weather remains cold and dull, and once again we found ourselves contributing to the profits of the coal yard by having to place an order for a further 20 bags of coal. Surely that will see us through to Spring? I have been waiting for the signs of spring, which for me are the snowdrops and crocuses, but they are singularly absent from our garden at the moment. The only sign of hope on the Spring front is that I've noticed now, when I leave the warehouse at about 6pm on an evening, there is a faint glimmering of the remains of the sunset along the western horizon.

Tiggy and Kitty don't like the cold any more than I do. As I type this, Tig is decorating the rug in front of the stove, her legs stretched out and twitching from time to time in dreams of doggy bliss, while Kitty is actually wedged behind me, between me and the back of the chair, manically purring for all she is worth, as if that will in some way generate more heat from some sort of internal furry dynamo.

At least the snow has gone. For now at any rate - I doubt we have seen the last of it, but at least when it snows at the back end of February or early in March, it never sticks for long. The garden, though, looks as if it has been under the sea for a long time, everything looks flattened, dead and brown, but I know that in eight weeks or so it will already be rampaging in all its outrageous green glory; we really must get someone to cut it back for us this year, before we lose control of it totally. What we need is a landscape gardener.

And a competent mechanic. On Monday, the suspension of the car started making an ominous twanging noise, which did not bode well, but I had no option other than to drive it 29 miles to the warehouse and 29 miles back again. By Tuesday, I was sort of hoping it would have magically fixed itself somehow overnight, but sadly the mechanic fairy must have had this week off, and it therefore needed expert attention, so I drove it up to the garage, where Father Jack (the owner of the garage, so called because of his uncanny resemblance to the Father Ted character) pronounced that the coil spring had snapped and wound itself round the rest of the suspension.

"It's like spaghetti junction up there", was his laconic comment.

Still, most problems go away if you throw enough money at them, and in this case "enough money" was £528. Plus some coppers. Ouch, ouch, and triple ouch. At least I was able to pick Debbie up from the station on Wednesday night, on her return from that well known branch-of-Homebase-lookalike, the University of Bolton. She's now signed up for an MA, which means that she will eventually be more qualified than me. I may have to sign up for a doctorate, just to remind her that her proper place in life is cooking the tea!

It's not been a good week for cars. On Thursday, Debbie's Mum was just pulling away from the kerb outside her house when a woman in a sports car appeared round the bend at 50mph and pranged her front wing. Thankfully, she was unhurt, but the car may be a write-off.

All of that paled into relative insignifcance though, because Thursday also saw the sad death, at the early age of 48, in Dublin, of Greenjewel, one of my Facebook friends, and a fellow poster on the Archers' Message Board. It is a strange thing to feel upset and bereft about someone I only ever "knew" online, and never met in real life, but we used to swop messages from time to time (one particular sequence that sticks in mind is about the people we shared our birthday with - Andre Previn, Ian Paisley and Paul Daniels, as we were both born on 6 April). I knew about her work in the field of cat rescue as well, as she was one of these selfless and saintly individuals who dedicate time and effort to trying to rescue and re-home unwanted and feral cats. She was also active in the fields of music, and landscape garening, which she did to an accomplished and professional level, apparently. She died as she was on the verge of moving to her dream home, in the rural west of Ireland. It was a particularly cruel thing to happen to someone who seemed to be on the verge of new, exciting vistas in her life.

The tribute threads to her on The Archers alone run to hundreds of postings already, as I write this, there are also hundreds more on Twitter, where she was a regular correspondent with, it seems, most of the online community in Ireland. All of them say the same thing, all across the face of the internet, that her postings and messages were always warm, witty, funny and caring, and that she will be missed by many, many, people whose lives she touched in some way, and the world is the worse for her passing.

Obviously, there will be those who actually met her, knew her in real life, her real life friends and family, who will miss Greenjewel the person, as opposed to Greenjewel the online entity. I can't begin to imagine what they must be going through, because Friday was black enough for me as it was, and I had never spoken to her, other than via a keyboard.

I was trying to explain what I felt about it to a fellow Archers poster, and all I could come up with was to quote the lines from Rosemary's Sister, by Huw Williams:

And you fly high, your dreams are all in vain
One moment we are laughing, and the next we cry with pain

Maybe life is just random, meaningless, pointless, and shit happens. Maybe there is a pattern which we cannot see or discern in our present state, when we see "through a glass, darkly". Sometimes I think one thing, sometimes another. We will never know, one way or another, at least not in this life, which is where faith comes into it I guess. You can rage against the randomness, but at the end of the raging, you are still stuck in the human condition, what Yeats called "the foul rag and bone shop of the heart". Or you can close ranks and carry on, and accept that there is a greater plan of which you know nothing, but that Greenjewel's death was at the right time for that plan, however wrong, unreasonable and unjust it seems to us.

The only good that can come out of it, that I can see, is that people are already making donations to her cat charities in her memory. Greenjewel has now gone before. But that doesn't mean that she has ceased to be. Every time some wet, cold, bedgraggled, abandoned kitten is rescued from a building site, given a warm home and a full cat dish brimming with Felix and with Brekkies, Greenjewel will be there. Every time a feral cat is trapped, neutered, and returned to the wild, Greenjewel will be there. Every time some poor cat that has been mistreated and potentially damaged is redeemed by the actions of some group of committed individuals, Greenjewel will be there.

In Spring, it is usually easier to believe the latter than the former, to believe that life does have some meaning, when you see the annual miracle of growth and regeneration take place, but then sometimes you stand in the conservatory and look out over the garden, in its brown and bedraggled state, and you think, "what we need right now, is a landscape gardener".