Epiblog for the Second Sunday of Epiphany

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. What can I say about the weather that I haven’t said a hundred times before in oh so many ways? I hate it. I hate winter with its cold dark darkness and its dark coldness. I tolerate the winter sunshine, particularly on snow or frost, for its brief, transitory beauty, but that’s about it. The rest of it, the succession of leaden-footed days when it feels like you are living in a Tupperware box inside the freezer, you can keep it. The only good thing you can say about this week to be honest is that it did at least turn a shade dramatic, with the high wind overnight, shaking the branches of the trees in a truly demented fashion, flinging rain against my window, and flapping the cat flap all night long and keeping me awake, as if an army of phantom cats was tramping back and forth through my downstairs bedroom.

I lay there on Saturday morning in bed, having previously woken at 4.30AM (now a regular occurrence, for some reason) and at dawn, wanting to get out of bed, but at the same time being aware of how cold the tip of my nose was, and thinking yet again of Alan Hull’s “Winter Song”.

When the wind is singing strangely, blowing music through your head
And your rain-splattered windows make you decide to stay in bed
Do you spare a thought for the homeless tramp who wishes he was dead
Or do you pull your bed-clothes higher, dream of Summertime instead,
When Winter.... comes howling in.

When Winter comes howling in. Well, it certainly did that day, every time the door was opened to let either Tig or Kitty (briefly) into the garden. Debbie has even taken to shouting at the wind “Give up! We want some coal left!” every time it howls up the chimney, because, of course, the more it blows, the more the stove burns up. I, meanwhile, have definitely been dreaming of summertime, instead.

Deb’s had a busy week, too, what with her teaching classes starting up again, and the deadline of Friday for her to hand in her written piece of work for her MA. Since she was bound to be busy, I thought I was helping, when I put together yet another online order for the week’s shopping from Sainsburys and submitted it Tuesday lunchtime, for delivery on Wednesday. So I was quite surprised when she came back from her familiarisation visit to her Dewsbury class on Tuesday afternoon, clutching many, many bright orange carrier bags.

“You didn’t tell me you were going to Sainsburys on the way back!”
“Well, you didn’t tell me that you were placing an order.”

So it was that we became the proud possessors of four tubs of caramelised red onion humous, and eight bottles of diet tonic water. Plus two of everything else, including two bags of broccoli florets. In fact, it was easier in the end to list what we didn’t accidentally duplicate. We should definitely go on “Mr and Mrs”.

One of the things we didn’t duplicate was bog rolls, but fortunately Debbie had included this humble yet essential item on her list. I looked at the packet, and it proudly announced that it was Sainsburys basic bog roll “for everyday use”. Which sort of implies that there are times when, sitting on the loo, you want something more celebratory. “What the hell, bring it on, let’s push the boat out: I am having my wedding anniversary dump. Break out the ’79 quilted stuff!” It reminds me of those dopey “serving suggestions”, like the one on the front of the packet of “biscuits for cheese” which shows a biscuit with a lump of cheese on top of it, just in case you felt adventurous and were considering trying to stick the cheese to the underside of the cracker with an extra-large gobbet of margarine.

Debbie has had a mixed week. No sooner had we had the news of her success with the Kirklees job, gaining her two additional classes in Dewsbury, than we heard that one of her Halifax classes was being cancelled because not enough people had enrolled. So, one step forward, half a step back. First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is.

She spent most of the week closeted in the conservatory, which she has sort of kitted out as a little study in the five months I have been away in hospital. However, because of the limited storage space in the kitchen proper, we also need to use the conservatory cupboards in some cases for storing vegetables, so you occasionally get the effect of a teetering pile of books on adult literacy, topped off, in rather surreal fashion, with a cauliflower. I mentioned this to her and all she said was “Look, it’s a work in progress, right?”

This was also the week in which I had my first physio session for five weeks, which established that I could still move my legs, stand, and take steps, but little else. I have come to the conclusion that, despite the army of well-meaning people who are tasked with my continuing progress, the only way I am ever going to stand up and walk again is if I just do it, and keep on trying to do it, however many times I fall over and crunch myself in the process. Coming back from physio, I noticed from the back of the ambulance that the hardware shop at Longroyd Bridge was now (according to the notice in its window) selling “invisible nails”, which must be a bit of a bugger when it comes to stocktaking. Shades of “I can’t find my camouflage net.”

I arrived back to find Debbie in a state of ferment, because BBC Radio Cumbria had been on the phone, wanting to interview Maisie about Withnail and the Romantic Imagination at 10AM Friday, and needed an answer by 1pm. I rang them back and told them yes, we would be delighted, thanks, on the grounds that even if Maisie couldn’t do it, I could put on a falsetto voice and pretend to be her. Anyway, it turned out she could, and did, in fact, turn in a barnstorming performance, but it meant that Thursday afternoon and all of Friday were devoted to letting booksellers in Cumbria know about it, by means of emails and a hastily-conceived mailshot.

Unfortunately, Friday coincided with Debbie having to hand in her written module for her MA course, and thus it was rather a high pressure day all round, especially as the printer decided to run out of toner at teatime. By the end of the day, the tension had got too much for me, and I let rip with a two minute rant about how I hated winter, hated the wheelchair, hated the cold and dark, was fed up with everything, etc etc etc. It wasn’t very grammatical, it was liberally peppered with expletives, and it just sort of petered out, but it came from the heart. Fortunately, Debbie thought it was funny, and I must admit, even I felt better at the end of it. But I was still in a wheelchair.

Last week, I wrote that I would be watching out for doves and listening for spooky voices, in my continued quest to find out what all this wheelchair-related crap actually means. Yes, it is a chance to re-evaluate my life, yes, I can change to direction I am going in, yes, yes yes, but to what avail? What choice, what guidance? Needless to say, both doves and spooky voices have been absent. Though the birds in the trees running down to the valley have certainly been busy this week, as they prepare for the run-up to St Valentine’s Day, the day when traditionally, according to country lore, they pair off for the Summer. As Chaucer puts it, in "The Parliament of Foules":

On every bough the briddes herde I singe,
With voys of aungel in hir armonye,
Som besyed hem hir briddes forth to bringe;
The litel conyes to hir pley gunne hye.
And further al aboute I gan espye
The dredful roo, the buk, the hert and hinde,
Squerels, and bestes smale of gentil kinde.

So far, of the list given by Chaucer, I’ve only seen the birds and the squirrels, unless you count Kitty as a “beste smale of gentil kinde.” But, nevertheless, the bird activity does seem to be increasing. It’s a while since I read that Chaucer poem, with its weird references to Scipio Africanus and its problematic dating (there are fifteen extant versions and no one can work out which is really the original, apparently) but I was struck again by the very first line:

The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne

The life so short, the craft so long to learn, in other words. Ars longa, vita brevis. A well-known, well rehearsed saying, but one that has taken on an added poignancy for me, since I realised that I really don’t know if I am ever going to stand up properly again. It led me on to read “Sailing to Byzantium” by W.B Yeats again:

“That is no country for old men; the young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees
Those dying generations at their song
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas …”

Especially the bit where he says:

“An aged man is but a paltry thing
A tattered coat upon a stick …”

And pleads with the “sages”

“Consume my heart away, sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal,
It knows not what it is …”

“Fastened to a dying animal” sums up perfectly how I see my predicament at the moment. I am sorry for all this self-pity, but I used to climb mountains. I used to play cricket. I used to open the batting, for God’s sake. I am not asking to fly like the birds, just to be able to totter from room to room again.

Yeats’s answer to the decay of his mortal body is of course the “artifice of eternity” in the poem, as evidenced by the gold mosaics, which he views as the consummate art of the Byzantine period, and the artificial birds constructed by “Grecian goldsmiths” of “hammered gold, and gold enamelling” for the amusement of the Emperor. I quite like mosaics, I have actually constructed one, and it was very hard work, I can tell you. And painful, cutting your fingers on the smalti every time. And coincidentally, my search to find out what the Collect was for this, the second Sunday of Epiphany, led me, via John the Baptist’s description of Jesus as “the lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world” to a description of a mosaic in the Church of Sts Cosmas and Damian, that depicts not only Christ, but the Twelve Apostles, as sheep. Jesus, however, gets to be a sheep with a halo, standing on slightly higher ground, just so you know who is in charge.

According to Martin Warner, writing about them in the Church Times:

“The churches in Rome that commemorate the early Christian martyrs of that city are decorated with mosaics that illustrate the theme of triumph through suffering. They graphically suggest a shared identity between Jesus and his disciples, who are all illustrated as sheep. This commonality between teacher and disciples was foretold by Isaiah: “Ours were the sorrows he was carrying . . . and by his wounds we have been healed” (Isaiah 53.4,5).

The sixth-century mosaics in the church of Sts Cosmas and Damian are among the earliest of these. They depict the 12 apostles as lambs attendant upon Jesus, the chief lamb, haloed and standing on an outcrop of rock from which flow the four rivers of paradise in the new creation.”

Since a picture is worth a thousand words (or two thousand of my drivel) I’ve stuck a picture of this at the top of the page. I don’t understand about the triumph through suffering bit, because all I see is suffering, and if I had my way, every innocent lamb born this spring in the cold and the snow would live a long and happy life and only ever die of natural causes. I cannot conceive of anyone being capable of looking into the innocent, trusting eyes of a lamb, and then consigning it to an abattoir, any more than I could consign a member of my family to one.

But that’s just me, I guess. Out of sorts with myself and the world. Slightly drunk, watching the miserable rain hammer down on the conservatory, feeling sorry for myself, feeling sorry for the lambs, whose very innocence seems to single them out for a brutal and nasty end, and wishing things were otherwise. Not understanding, not seeing. I’ve been at this point before, and I recognise the landmarks. It’s not exactly 40 days in the wilderness, but it could be. I know that I would be quite happy to see St Valentine’s Day tomorrow if that was possible, the day when, according to the traditional English folk song

“Birds begin to prate”
and

“Dame Durden and her maids and men are all together met”

So we carry on, but only because we have no option. And, since we seem to be ending on a downer, or at least I am, we might as well go the whole hog and close off this Epiblog, which has turned into a bit of a “poetry corner”, with one by Gerard Manley Hopkins that sums up this week perfectly, for me.

Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend
With thee; but, sir, so what I plead is just.
Why do sinners' ways prosper? and why must
Disappointment all I endeavour end?

Wert thou my enemy, O thou my friend,
How wouldst thou worse, I wonder, than thou dost
Defeat, thwart me? Oh, the sots and thralls of lust
Do in spare hours more thrive than I that spend,

Sir, life upon thy cause. See, banks and brakes
Now, leavèd how thick! lacèd they are again
With fretty chervil, look, and fresh wind shakes

Them; birds build--but not I build; no, but strain,
Time's eunuch, and not breed one work that wakes.
Mine, O thou lord of life, send my roots rain.

Except for the rain, he’s bang on. Don’t send me rain. Instead, in the words of those well-known theologians Morecambe and Wise, “Bring me sunshine! I looked for "Dame Durden" online but couldn't find it amongst the extensive Copper Family repertoire, even though it's one of theirs, so you will have to make do with "When Spring Comes in" instead.

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