It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley, and one that almost saw the demise of this trusty old laptop, which would have left me no alternative other than to scribe these words out on a sheet of stretched goat’s vellum (I won’t stretch things too far by shoehorning in the stretched goat joke yet again at this juncture, just imagine it’s there, OK?) and nail them, rather like Martin Luther, Lex Luthor, or even Luther VanDross, to the door.
Fortunately, the damage to the laptop is confined to its screen, which we think can be repaired, ultimately, although at the moment, I am using the big screen from Debbie’s computer upstairs in the office, plugged in as an auxiliary. It may well be, that if the screen is going to cost hundreds of pounds to fix, then a cheap flat screen is the more viable option anyway.
It happened on Tuesday night: I had been working on stuff (as usual) and job applications, and trying to stem the endless tide of email, and so on. It had become time for tea, so I closed the laptop lid and carefully propped it up on its end, out of the way, or so I thought, leaning against the sofa.
At some point during my preparation of whatever culinary masterpiece I was engaged upon (the experience was so horrible that even recollecting it has wiped the crucial details from my memory) Granny arrived with Zak and Freddie, who we were babysitting for the night. Somehow, in all this seething mass of milling dogs and people, Debbie got up off the sofa to do something, caught the laptop with the toe of one of her size 10 commando boots, and knocked it over onto its lid. The fearful crack which ensued silenced the room as if it had been a pistol shot, then I called her a clumsy clodhopping gallumphing great moose, and she said it was my fault, and that it shouldn’t have been left where people could trip over it, adding for good measure that since I had been “clanking around like Ironside”, I smelt of “old people, cats, and leakages”.
After that free and frank discussion we all felt much better, and the rest of the evening passed in semi-monastic silence, though the dogs all bore a worried expression, and Tiggy kept raising a sympathetic eyebrow in my direction.
Wednesday dawned worse. At that point, of course, I didn’t know it was only the screen, and I thought I had lost the laptop and everything on it, since backups are about as rare around here as watering holes in the Atacama desert. While I was trying to find a mobile computer repair bod online on Yell.com, using Debbie’s little notebook, which only had the iffiest of connections to the outside world, Deb let Tiggy out into the garden. The next thing I saw was that Butch, the large and frankly unpredictable dog from next door, had got her pinned up against the conservatory door. Butch has "form" in this respect, because he's had a fight with Tiggy in our garden when he’s got out unattended before, and on that occasion he bowled her over and left teethmarks on her. Bearing in mind she’s 98 in human years, she wasn’t going to put up much of a fight.
Anyway, Deb was out of earshot so I trundled over to the door, clanking like a tank with the urgency of it all, and managed to wedge it open enough for Tig to scuttle back inside and escape, at which point it then looked as if Butch was going to try and follow, so I stood (or should that be sat?) my ground and stared him down. He had a prototype snarl on his face and for a few seconds I thought he was going to jump at my face but fortunately he realised from something in my demeanour that, had he attempted it, it would have been his last mortal act on this earth, and instead, he slunk off. Either that, or he didn’t fancy the idea of that much iron in his diet. So I shouted at the top of my voice to my neighbour to keep his ######## dog under control, and keep it in his garden, shut the door, and came back in.
Then, just after I had got back on to trying to sort out the laptop, Deb was outside at the front of the house getting in some coal and I suddenly heard a gigantic kerfuffle from that direction, with Deb shouting "#### off!" at the top of her voice. It turned out Butch had gone round the side of the house, reappeared at the front, and was now chasing Kitty in the front garden. Deb said she thought that Kits had escaped, but where to she didn't know. Faced with Debbie in full berserker Valkyrie mode, the dog had wisely turned tail and fled. I was all for phoning the next door neighbour there and then and ripping him a new one, but in the interests of peace and harmony, Debbie stopped me. A couple of times she went back outside to look for Kits, but couldn't see her anywhere around. I was scared she'd been hurt and couldn’t get back to us or something, or worse, that she was now lying dead somewhere under a bush with her neck snapped.
Glumly, I carried on working, thinking the worst, until, eventually, after about an hour and a half, she reappeared, with her head, ears, and whiskers absolutely covered in cobwebs, Wherever she'd hidden, no one else had been there for a l-o-o-o-n-g time. At least, not with a duster. So, all’s well that ends well, I guess, but as I said to Debbie, as soon as this current imbroglio over jobs, wheelchairs and money is sorted, a high priority needs to be beefing up the fence between us and them. Like Robert Frost once said, “good fences make good neighbours”.
Eventually I made contact with a guy who comes round to your house and fixes laptops and comps, and he came round to have a look. Using his instructions, we connected it up to a remote screen, (actually, I did already know how to do this, but I had forgotten), and he's coming back next week to see if he can take it apart and fix it. In a worst case scenario I might be without it for two weeks (eeek!) but at least I have backed everything up and saved it, better late than never, eh?
Apart from their adventurous Wednesday, the animals have had their usual leisurely week. I have noticed how Kitty, whenever you say something to her, almost always answers back. Unfortunately, since none of us speaks cat, we have no idea what she’s saying, though the general tone is always both querulous and cantankerous. Spidey, next door’s cat (next door the opposite way to Butch) has been coming in through Kitty’s cat flap at night and sleeping in our spare bedroom again. I fully expect it to come down one morning and ask to see the breakfast menu. Apart from her tussle with Butch, Tig has been putting on her usual “I’m an old, deaf dog, me” act, hobbling around, at least until she hears the tantalising rustle of a packet of dog-treats being unwrapped, then somehow she manages to magically twinkle across the kitchen floor in a nano-second and stand there, tail wagging in anticipation.
For myself, it was a week of staggering tedium. The bright spot being that I finally got Zen and the Art of Nurdling off to press (now all I have to do is update the whole web site and then do loads of publicity for it). This only leaves me Catheter Come Home and Dora Darley is My Darling to finish of my own books, and then I’ve caught up with the massive backlog caused by me being in hospital. Not counting new stuff, or long-term pot-boilers and tinkerers, of course. And the four books by other people that somehow I must find time to lay out soon.
The dull spot of the week is still being stuck in the wheelchair. That, and the fact that Kirklees have still not approved the expenditure of £540 for the necessary concreting works, or come up with the spondoolies, means I have once again been confined inside, apart from my excursion to Physio on Thursday. Mind you, even though the weather has been milder, it’s still been cold and rainy, as opposed to just rainy, and I could have sworn I heard the weather man say something about flakes of snow again, last night, but I was only listening with 48K of my RAM, and missed the gist of it.
It has been lying heavily upon me, as I try and stand and maybe kid myself that I am getting a little higher off the seat every day. The consultant asked me, the last time I went to hospital, if I had given the wheelchair a name yet, and I told him I hadn’t, on the grounds that you don’t name an animal you intend to send to the abattoir as soon as possible. In fact, what I would really like to do when I am finally up and walking about again [and I don’t want to diss St Jude here, but if he could spend a little less time trying to extinguish the sideburns and a little more time interceding on my behalf, I’d be more inclined to place that small ad] is to take the wheelchair to Salisbury Plain, set it up on the brow of a tank range, ask the Army if I could borrow a bazooka and a couple of PIAT rounds, and blast the holy crap out of it. Amen.
Which brings me back to religion. Again. And the texts for this week, the eighth Sunday after Epiphany. Oddly enough, and in a feeble attempt to be serious for a moment, there does seem to be an element of reassurance about these bits of the Bible. Maybe I have been ranting too much and not listening enough. Or, once again, am I kidding myself?
The O. T. text is Isaiah 49, 8-16. I must say, resoundingly gaga though most of the Old Testament undoubtedly is, I do love the language and the rhythms of the King James Bible:
That thou mayest say to the prisoners, Go forth; to them that are in darkness, Shew yourselves. They shall feed in the ways, and their pastures shall be in all high places. They shall not hunger nor thirst; neither shall the heat nor sun smite them: for he that hath mercy on them shall lead them, even by the springs of water shall he guide them. And I will make all my mountains a way, and my highways shall be exalted.
And of course the line about the highways being exalted gives me a thrilling echo of that Handel aria about “Every valley shall be exalted”, once again. I have said it before, but Handel as a composer definitely had a broadband connection to God, even though broadband wouldn’t be invented and mis-sold by the likes for Sky and Richard Branson for some two hundred years hence. On a more mundane note, I guess one of the reasons why Kirklees haven’t gotten round to my bit of concreting is probably because, after the winter frost and potholes, the highways are anything but exalted, and that is where their priorities and their manpower are being employed first.
In some more antiquarian copies of the King James Bible, of course, the typographers actually still used the long “s”, which looks like a lower case “f”, which gives some parts of the text, such as:
Can a woman forget her sucking child, that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb? yea, they may forget, yet will I not forget thee
an additional emphasis which I am sure Isaiah never intended. The Psalm, Psalm 131, is only three verses long – not so much a Psalm as a haiku. Actually, I should not make fun of the very precise and thoughtful eastern art of haiku. Expressing yourself in just seventeen syllables can be very diffic. Despite its brevity, here is an edited highlight:
Lord, my heart is not haughty, nor mine eyes lofty: neither do I exercise myself in great matters, or in things too high for me. Surely I have behaved and quieted myself, as a child that is weaned of his mother: my soul is even as a weaned child.
Maybe that is my problem. I do exercise myself in great matters. And in my wheelchair, lots of things are too high for me, including the Marmite, which was in the cupboard over the sink, so that when I wanted crumpets with Marmite this morning I had to knock the jar off the shelf with a walking stick, then catch it one-handed in mid air before it splintered to smitheroons on the Double Belfast. Given that I had been working on publicity for Nurdling, the temptation to throw it straight back in the air and shout “Howzat!” was almost overwhelming.
But no, I haven’t behaved and quieted myself. My soul is not that of a weaned child, it is that of a child screaming for its bottle, red-faced with tantrums, and with good reason. A feed of God is long overdue. Big G please take note.
St Paul, meanwhile, is still writing to the Corinthians, who, if they had had any sense, would have either nailed up their letterbox, or moved, or both. 1 Corinthians 4:1-5 tells me:
Let a man so account of us, as of the ministers of Christ, and stewards of the mysteries of God. Moreover it is required in stewards, that a man be found faithful. But with me it is a very small thing that I should be judged of you, or of man's judgment: yea, I judge not mine own self. For I know nothing by myself; yet am I not hereby justified: but he that judgeth me is the Lord. Therefore judge nothing before the time, until the Lord come, who both will bring to light the hidden things of darkness, and will make manifest the counsels of the hearts: and then shall every man have praise of God.
Yeah, Paul, whatever. I know, 41p for a first class stamp. Criminal, isn’t it? Fair enough, he that judgeth me is the Lord. I will take my chance with that, but I might have one or two comments of my own, in a spirit of 360 degree feedback. I wrote, back in December, that I have never, thank God, had a dark night of the soul, now I am not so sure. And if Big G’s answer to my complaints about being stuck in this wheelchair and sending round saints with fiery barnets to argue the toss is to tell me not to be so judgemental, and to be quiet and behave myself like a weaned child, then I foresee a parting of the ways ahead, and me logging on to "compare the creator .com" to consider my options. Maybe I am being too hard on the old duffer though. He's had a bad week too, picking up the pieces in Christchurch. And I am certainly better off than any of the victims.
As always, though, the New Testament passage is more hopeful and redeeming, being the famous passage from the Sermon on the Mount, related in Matthew 6:24-34:
No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon. Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment? Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they? Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit unto his stature?
And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: And yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. Wherefore, if God so clothe the grass of the field, which to day is, and to morrow is cast into the oven, shall he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith? Therefore take no thought, saying, What shall we eat? or, What shall we drink? or, Wherewithal shall we be clothed? (For after all these things do the Gentiles seek:) for your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things.
But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you. Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.
Now, there speaks a reasonable man. I can take admonition from Jesus. He always seems to find just the right note. He could have had a fantastic career in Human Resources if he’d been around today. This is probably a question for theologians, but why can’t God be more like Jesus? Oh, how I wish it was true, though: how I wish I did have the faith to give up worrying about tomorrow and whether or not I will be standing up or still sitting here. It’s true, I cannot add one cubit to my stature by worrying about it. And it’s very true, the fowls of the air do seem to get by – that speckledy thrush from last week has been back at the bird table again, and certainly in our garden, the grass is thriving. As are the tares and thistles, but that’s another story.
That passage actually reminds me of Donne, in “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning” where he says:
“Oh how feeble is men’s powre
That if good fortune fall
He cannot add one single houre
Nor a lost houre recall”
So, OK, maybe Big G and I are back on speaking terms again. We’ve had a rocky patch. But I can’t live on promises forever. Like W B Yeats once famously wrote, “Too long a sacrifice, makes a stone of the heart.” But I guess another week won’t hurt me. Much.
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