Epiblog for the 4th Sunday of Epiphany

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. Maisie’s book on the cult film Withnail and I continues to cause excitement across large swathes of Cumbria, having been featured in a double page centre spread in the Carlisle News and Star. The resulting demand has led to me adding “packing up orders” to my multifarious and various tasks list. It’s also been the week when we render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, in the form of completing my online tax return for the Inland Revenue, so they can spend it wisely on commissioning reconnaissance aircraft for the RAF, then pulling them apart with bulldozers before they have ever flown. Actually, I can’t quite see George Osborne as Julius Caesar, but on the other hand, all it would need is a laurel wreath and a toga, and the Ides of March is coming up soon…

I sat with my laptop, logged on, input all of the figures and, like the Oracle at Delphi, it pronounced that Lo! I owed them £27.80. I am almost sure this is wrong, because to be honest for a lot of the time I was pressing buttons and answering questions at random when I didn’t understand the question and/or didn’t know the answer, on the grounds that if I was really going to provide the information they asked for, it would take me years, even assuming I could get upstairs to the office, which I can’t.

Anyway, £27.80 a year is but a small price to pay to keep these leeches off your back, so I duly despatched them a cheque. Later in the week, I received my SSP payslip from my paid employment, and on it was a tax refund of £26.60, so in fact the whole exercise cost me a net £1.20. I hope the government uses my £1.20 wisely. It could keep the demolition of the Nimrods going for ….ooooh… five seconds?

The weather is awful, as usual. Either cold and dreary or cold and bright, but cold, whatever. Sometimes, when I think back to the times I have spent sitting in the sun, whether on Arran, in the Lake District, or at home out on the decking, it seems so improbable and remote that I ever did those things, or that I will ever do them again, that I could easily be thinking about a different person.

Tig’s most energetic act this week has been once again to embark on a couple of long meandering “walkies” with Grandad. Considering the condition of his heart, and the fact that he stubbornly refuses to take a mobile phone with him when he goes, concern was expressed about what would happen if he keeled over somewhere out in the remote countryside. His answer was that the dogs would go for help. I wouldn’t count on it, ever since the time when I fell over and Tiggy nicked the cheese and onion pasty out of my hand while I was lying flat on my back.

Other than that, Tig’s only action of note this week has been suddenly deciding to bark at the ambulance crew who came to take me for physio. I could understand it if it was the first time they had called, but I have been going three weeks now and she has never batted an eyelid before. Either there was something about this particular crew she didn’t like, or she really is going gaga and she’d only just noticed them.

Kitty, meanwhile, has developed a new game. She jumps up on my knee and actually stays there while I bool the wheelchair round the kitchen. She really looks as if she’s enjoying the ride, too, though I have to be careful not to corner too fast, or she digs her claws in. It reminds me of the time when Montaigne said “When I play with my cat, how do I know that she is not passing time with me rather than I with her?” [The original quotation, in 17th Century French, sounds much more impressive, by the way].

Other than that, our life remains a bizarre mixture of “Edwardian Farm” [about the only difference between us and the re-enactors is that we haven’t started using candles for lighting – yet!] and the busy social whirl of people coming round to the house to either offer me help and advice, and/or pick me up and drop me off somewhere else, like a parcel. In fact, I remarked to Debbie that our social life has improved so much since I have been in the wheelchair, it’s a pity that she gave my dinner jacket to Oxfam. [This was some months ago, even before I went into hospital. I was mildly discomfited at the time, but consoled myself at the thought of some guy wearing it while wandering around a Somalian village saying “cocktail, darling?” to everyone he meets].

One morning during the week, I got up to find that the stove had gone out. Disaster! Unfortunately the "economy" coal we are using is a bit of a misnomer, in that it burns more quickly than Homefire Ovals [I told you I could bore for England on the subject of coal]. While I steeled myself for the task of raking out all the ashes and re-lighting it, I warmed my hands over a lit gas-ring. On the kitchen counter I noticed a dry Ryvita which Deb had left, so I made my breakfast of it. So there I was, freezing cold, in a wheelchair, crouched over a gas ring, trying to warm my hands, while eating a dry Ryvita. Life just doesn’t get any better than this, really, does it?

In fact, it’s been a poohey week all round. I have two jobs, as you know, one which I love, but which brings in little to no money [publishing books] and one which brings in the money [digital printing and direct mail]. This week, I heard that the latter job may be coming to an end. Times are hard, government cutbacks, economy in recession, and if you have to make somebody redundant, I guess the obvious target is the guy who’s been off ill for five months and is now in a wheelchair. So, while we wait to see how that particular nest of vipers develops, we’re up against it a bit. No money coming in, other than what Deb earns from teaching and my newly-acquired DLA, is going to make paying the mortgage a tad problematic in months to come.

So, it’s backs to the wall time, and I have been trying to fortify myself by reading Horatius by Macaulay. It’s old hokum in many ways, the story of Horatius who, with his two companions, held off the hordes of Lars Porsena of Clusium and stopped him for long enough for the Romans to demolish the narrow bridge over the Tiber and save the city, but nevertheless, it’s the sort of stirring stuff you need at times like these. Especially with the news of potential redundancy coming hard on the heels of last week’s MD diagnosis.

Then out spake brave Horatius,
The Captain of the gate:
‘To every man upon this earth
Death cometh soon or late.
And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers,
And the temples of his Gods

Well, “facing fearful odds” is about right. The odds of getting another job at age 55, in a wheelchair, in the teeth of a recession, with the government planning to up the unemployed by 600,000 with their campaign of cuts, must be fairly high. When I haven’t been reciting Macaulay to myself, I have been manically humming “The Good Old Way” which differs in many ways from the hymn I talked about last week in that it wasn’t written by a gentle advocate of the still small voice, but in fact by someone called John Adams Grenade. A great name for a great, rousing hymn.

John Carr, writing about Grenade in 1857, in his “Early Times in Middle Tennessee” described him as follows:

“He embraced religion and joined the Methodists in the county of his nativity. It was deeply impressed upon his mind that he was called to preach the gospel; but rejecting the call, he lost all religious enjoyment. In the fall of 1798 he removed with his brother-in-law to Tennessee, and settled a few miles from the place where I lived, on Goose Creek, in Sumner county, and there I became acquainted with him. He learned there was circuit-preaching in the neighborhood, and made his appearance at meeting shortly after his arrival in the country.

At that time, he was the most pitiable human being upon whom I ever rested my eyes. His agony of soul was so intense that he scarcely took food enough to support nature, and the effects of his abstinence told plainly upon his health and physical condition in general. He was not deranged, but was in a state of desperation about his soul. He said that once he had enjoyed religion, but he feared mercy for him was clean gone for ever. Nevertheless, he constantly pleaded with God for mercy through Jesus Christ. Days, and weeks, and months together he spent in the wild woods, crying for mercy, mercy, MERCY! In his roamings the Bible was his companion always. His horse, which he sometimes rode to meeting, seemed almost to understand his situation. I have met him after he had started to meeting, when his horse was feeding by the roadside, while he sat with head upturned and hands raised towards heaven, praying God to have mercy upon him; and all the while he seemed unconscious that he was 'on horseback. Great pains were taken with him by preachers and people.

Quite naturally, his case excited sympathy, which was much increased among those who perceived he had been well raised and educated, and that he was endowed with an uncommon poetical talent. In fact, he was a born poet, and during his dreadful depression, he composed pieces of poetry, the publication of which now would quite astonish the world.”

Apart from the horse, and the poetry, he could have been writing about me, this week. But there’s something about "The Good Old Way", with its no-nonsense, back-to-basics assertion that despite the trials and vicissitudes of life, “I have a sweet hope of glory in my soul”. It grounds you, when something awful happens, and for me, after the numbness, always comes the anger, and the grit. I like to think of George Hirst, when Wilfred Rhodes joined him at the wicket in the Oval Test of 1902 against Australia, forever immortalised as “Jessop’s match” because of “The Croucher’s” bravura innings, that brought Wilfred Rhodes to the crease to join Hirst with just one wicket in hand and 15 runs still required for victory.

“We’ll get ‘em by singles, Wilfred”, Hirst is reputed to have said. And so they did. As an example of Yorkshire grit [Hirst was from Kirkheaton, just a few short miles from where I am sitting typing this] I can think of no better. It ranks with Cromwell saying to his men, “Trust in God, but keep your powder dry”.

When I wrote, in the previous Epiblog, before Christmas, about the suit of armour in the hall waiting to be taken down and dusted off one last time, I could never have dreamed it would potentially be for this particular battle, against someone who has been a former ally of some 21 years. Against people who I thought were friends as well as colleagues. It just goes to show the unpredictability of life. And when I wrote about looking for signs and listening for spooky voices, this wasn’t exactly the message I had in mind, in the same way as the prophet Jeremiah probably didn’t expect to be told, in one of the readings for the 4th Sunday after Epiphany:

See, I have this day set thee over the nations and over the kingdoms, to root out, and to pull down, and to destroy, and to throw down, to build, and to plant.

That sounds scary, as well. Iconoclastic, in fact – in time of the breaking of nations, and all that. Although it is balanced out a bit by the next reading, from Psalm 71:

Be thou my strong habitation, whereunto I may continually resort: thou hast given commandment to save me; for thou art my rock and my fortress.

A rock and a fortress is certainly what I need right now, given that the old one seems to be crumbling beneath my feet. The last reading for this Sunday, from the Gospel of Luke, contains the wonderful line about “physician, heal thyself”, and I am coming to realise that if I am going to get myself out of this, it is no good waiting for a fiery chariot to descend from the sky and drop me a rope-ladder, there is only one person now who can turn this around, me. Yours truly, the author. At the end of the day, if you want something doing, etc. In the same way as Horatius, maybe I am realising that my hour has come. And it is better to live one day as a tiger than a thousand years as a sheep. So, “bring me my spear, O clouds unfold!” And all that.

But there is one final lesson for me from this Sunday’s reading, which is in 1 Corinthians 13:1-13:

Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing. And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing. Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, Doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil; Rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth; Beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things. Charity never faileth: but whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away. For we know in part, and we prophesy in part. But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away. When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.

This is actually one of my favourite passages – so much so that I have left instructions for bits of it to be read at my funeral. But I was a bit puzzled by it turning up to accompany the Collect for the 4th Sunday of Epiphany. Where does it fit in?

I think the answer is that, whatever else I do, to get me out of the pickle I now find myself in, I shouldn’t lose sight of the most important things. We have actually been here before. When I wrote, in one of the very first Epilogues, about sitting up on top of the roof of the world, on the hills above Rochdale, on the eve of that crucial bank meeting in 2004 when they took away our overdraft on a whim, that what really matters is “charity”. As Larkin said – “what will survive of us, is love.”

So. Even if I do end up jumping off the bridge and plunging into the foaming Tiber, never to be seen again, even if I do fail to put anything in place of the missing income, and thus lose this house, and we have to move away from this green valley which has become home to us for the last fourteen years, and leave behind Russell, Nigel and Dusty sleeping in their long resting places in the leafy garden, I must not lose the capacity for love and charity.

But for now, it’s time to gird my “lions” and work on the old Fenwick battle cry. I still have one business to run, and that in itself could, eventually provide the shortfall in income. And talking of “Charity”, what about Rooftree? At least I still have a home – for the moment. There are other jobs to apply for. The Volscians are at the gates, but the wolf is not yet at the door. The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong. Big G has blown a distant trumpet, though, and I must hasten towards the sound of tumult.

I’ll leave the last word to John Adams Grenade:

Our conflicts here though great they be
Shall not prevent our victory

Bring it on.