It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. The ice and snow that was infesting the roads and pathways when I came home from hospital has all gone – for now. I suspect, though, that this is not a complete rout of General Winter, he is not defeated, he has merely made a tactical retreat, a withdrawal, and even as I type this he is regrouping his forces in the chilly North to batter us again, with renewed vigour. As was proved on Saturday morning when I woke once more to find a dusting of snow turning the trees in the garden a shocked, ghostly white.
For now, though, during the past week, I have been welcoming the warmer temperatures and the unaccustomed sunshine, as have the animals – well, the dogs, at any rate. Tiggy even ventured out for a stately and sedate “walkies” with her old Grandad on Friday, once he had safely returned from his tests at Sheffield Hallamshire. Since his own recent spell of bad health, he’s become more of a walker than a runner, so Tiggy, at 98 in human years, is actually more suited to his current pace than Freddie or Zak, who charge about all over the place. Mind you, as a result of his latest set of tests, Grandad has apparently been prescribed Viagra, so his pace may improve as a result. His running days may not be over yet. Just as long as he doesn’t take up the relay!
Kitty’s spent most of her time this week in her cat bed, on the hearth, next to the stove, for obvious reasons, given the temperature outside, compared to the temperature there. In fact, one night during the week, a hot coal fell out of the front of the grate and singed the edge of the fur fabric “wall”, and all she did was raise a weary eyebrow, while Debbie swiftly retrieved it with the tongs and flipped it back into the flames. Probably a little too close to re-enacting the book of Isaiah in the comfort of your own home.
In the meantime, in the gap between the snowings, Debbie’s students finally took their weather-delayed literacy tests, and they all passed! Yes, her first ever “real” class got a 100% pass rate. Mind you, when she speaks, even I listen.
As I said above, this bright, hard, cold, clear weather is bound to change to something murkier and nastier fairly soon, judging by the forecast, so we’ve been trying to lay plans to forestall the siege, ordering more coal from the coalyard for a start. We are now the proud possessors of 250 kilograms of Homefire, our current brand of coal, having moved on from Taybrite. I had no idea that all these different types of coal even existed, before we got the stove. Now, I could lecture on them, with illustrations. Actually, this latest batch of coal has been stacked somewhere where my wheelchair will not allow me to go an look at it, so I find it difficult to imagine how much coal 250KG actually is. Indeed, because I can’t verify its existence independently, I guess to me it’s sort of “Schrodinger” coal, neither here nor there, neither burnt nor unburnt, until it’s carried in, a scuttle at a time, and converted to heat before my very eyes.
Assuming that things go on even though you can’t see them, or, alternatively, doubting that they do, has been preoccupying me for a lot of the week. Doubting, especially. Like the coal that falls out of the fire, my belief that I will get out of this chair and walk again, and soon, has been pretty quick to cool and diminish on occasions. The weather at this dark time of the year doesn’t help either. I can imagine, I suppose, if I try, the brightly lit, well-heated hospital ward, but now, even after only ten days at home, I find it difficult to imagine that I was ever part of it. Likewise the positive attitude which it engendered, though there are some people who still bring it out in me, my Occupational Therapist, for one, who has gung-ho, go-getting, can-do attitude in bucketloads, if not scuttlefuls. It’s the time in between that drags, though. The thousand and one things that you realise you can’t do any more, or at least, you can’t do for the moment. That, and the uncertainty, of knowing I can’t walk now, but not knowing if this is only a case of “not yet.” Schrodinger steps, that won’t be believed until they’ve been experienced.
Of course, in many ways, we all live our whole lives in the land of “not yet”, and so we all come to anticipate things, in the same way that Advent anticipates Christmas. You light an additional candle every week, or you cross off a day on the calendar, or you make a mark on the wall of your prison cell, or whatever, to indicate that another period of time has passed. Imagining, and believing, that life was carrying on at home, even when I was not there, was what kept me going all the time I was stuck in hospital, especially during those very long nights when I couldn’t sleep.
As I lay there, in the graveyard hours of the night, looking at the single, soulless, orange sodium bulb, in the single street light, which was all I could see against the ink black sky outside, I would think of the rest of the “family”, all lying safe in bed at home. Zak would no doubt have usurped my side of the bed and be curled up on my pillow – after all, he does that even when I am here, with the result that several times in the night at times when he has been staying over, I have woken up with a dog on my head.
Tig would not have given up her most favoured place in the middle of the bed to visitors. Freddie, in obedience to his deep-rooted terrier genes, would have burrowed completely under the duvet, where he would remain blissfully inert, apart from occasional rabbit-dreaming twitches, until morning. And, at some point in the night, Kitty would no doubt have crept onto the foot of the bed, under Zak’s watchful gaze, and curled herself round against the nearest warm haunch.
Meanwhile, outside in the trees, the tawny owls would be calling to each other, and the foxes in Lockwood Cemetery might be barking their strange, unearthly nocturnal sounds amongst the gravestones. The garden would be quiet, empty except for a passing snuffling hedgehog or a lumbering badger, perhaps, but not both at once!
It was at that point I usually started crying, and I could almost feel as if I was actually strapped to the bed, trying to raise my useless legs and get them to move independently, such was my utter feeling of helplessness. I had to make a conscious effort always at that point to wrench my focus back onto the streetlight, a blank impersonal sentinel, there to keep me company til dawn, while at the same time wishing fervently that “dawn” would hurry up and get her arse in gear, rosy-fingered or not.
Now, however, ever since I have been at home, even on days when I don’t have to, I have taken to watching the sun rise, because where my “downstairs” bed is situated, the window is facing almost due south-east, and, if I wake up early enough (not difficult, with cold nipping at your extremities, even with two hot water bottles) I can see first the very subtle change in the blue of the sky to a lighter violet, then a glimmer of light all along the horizon, and finally, if I am lucky, the fiery orange ball of the sun itself, cresting the tree line on the far side of the valley.
I like to feel a sort of communion at that moment with everyone else who has been up and about early, and waiting for, longing for, the dawn that they must sometimes have doubted. From the lone shepherd (and his faithful border collie) in the lambing shed, with his thermos flask of tea, now cold, looking up with bleary eyes for confirmation that the long nocturnal watch is over, to the night-shift workers waiting outside the factory gate for the bus home, anticipating breakfast, then a warm bed, to the homeless and the rough sleepers, who know from the sunrise that at least the bitter temperature on the streets will rise by a few vital degrees.
I must admit, that I was in two minds whether this blog – or at least this part of this blog – belonged here, or in The Bolshy Party. I find it increasingly difficult to separate religious indignation at something I consider an abomination, from political indignation in the same circumstances. Since coming back home from hospital, I have been trying to decide what to do about the Rooftree web site, given that I have discovered apparently it is “ours” til March 2012. I had previously thought I had only bought www.rooftree.org.uk for a year, in November 2009 and that it would have expired. Picking up the threads again on my return home, I find I bought it in March 2010, for two years. I must have had a rush of blood to the head that day, or I was anticipating great things, or both.
Of course, the coalition government has no intention of commandeering disused sites and building affordable prefabricated homes on them, in fact their policies are directly antithetical to the idea. Cut to the bone, and the devil take the hindmost. It is no wonder, then, that homeless organisations all over the country are either experiencing, or predicting, an increase in rough sleepers and the homeless as a direct result of government policy. So this leaves me in a bit of a quandary with Rooftree, since it is supposed to be non-party-political.
In the past, when someone has died as a result of government ineptitude, I have accused the opposition, whoever they happened to be at the time, of “shroud waving”, when they have stood up and used a particular case as a basis of demanding a pointless official inquiry. But I can see now that if we are ever going to beat the evil of homelessness, it is going to take something horrible such as people dying of hypothermia in the snow to get it up this boneheaded government’s agenda, and we are going to have to wave shrouds ourselves to do it. My only hope is that there are not too many shrouds to wave, before someone who can do something about it, takes notice. Are you listening, Grant Shapps?
Somehow, I seem to have got almost to the end (hooray, I hear you cry!) of this week’s Epiblog without mentioning either TS Eliot or Big G. The Eliot text for study this week, if we are having one, must surely be The Journey of The Magi:
"A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter."
Eliot concludes the poem by having the narrator compare the all-transforming importance of the birth of Christ to the effect of a death – everything old had changed, or as Yeats said in another context,
“All is changed, changed utterly
A terrible beauty is born”
Maybe that is what we need. To blast away the jingling bells and jingling tills and the dreadful false bonhomie of Christmas that would clothe and feed the homeless when there was no room in the inn by shoving them in a stable, but then shut it up in mid-January and turn them back out into the snow.
Maybe we need, instead of a normal dawn one day, or instead of the year’s deep midnight on St Lucy’s day, a dawn of transforming power, a blast of thunder across the sky, filled with celestial song and feathered wings and gold and silver and limitless, luminous, light, to give us a glimpse of how we can build the next world, in this world, so that the shepherds, abiding in the fields and the night workers abiding at the bus stops, and the poor, and the homeless will know their vigil is ended and their wait is over.
The collect for this Sunday seems to be getting on towards the right idea:
Lord, raise up (we pray thee) thy power, and come among us, and with great might succor us; that whereas, through our sins and wickedness, we be sore let and hindered, thy bountiful grace and mercy, through the satisfaction of thy son our Lord, may deliver us; to whom with thee and the holy ghost be honor and glory, world without end.
So, next week sees the Solstice and the start of the heartbeat of summer, in the same way that the whole oak tree is curled within the nutshell of the acorn when it falls into the mud one dull autumn day and takes root. Although we will have turned a corner, there are dark days ahead still. We are no longer in Kansas, Toto. But, as has been pointed out to me by a very astute man, whom I only know online, but whose opinion I value nevertheless, this, my current predicament, is also my opportunity for change. As Sidney Godolphin said in his 17th century Metaphysical poem on the Magi (the wacky Jacobean spelling is all his, by the way, in case you thought my keyboard was suddenly defunct)
“Ther is noe merrit in the wise
But love, (the shepheards sacrifice).
Wisemen all wayes of knowledge past,
To th' shepheards wonder come at last,
To know, can only wonder breede,
And not to know, is wonders seede.
So, what can I bring him, poor as I am? I am not a shepherd, and therefore have no lamb. If I were a wise man, I could do my part, but I think we’ve already established that wisdom has been a stranger to much of my life, often playing second fiddle to gut instinct. If I was a worker, I would toil and slog, but what I can I offer, this, my blog. So, talking of gut instinct, here’s an idea! Perhaps if you can think of anyone who can do anything to help the homeless, in an official capacity, this Christmas, and beyond, we could try and start the rumble of that transforming thunder, by forwarding them a link to these words.
No comments:
Post a Comment