Epiblog for the Fifth Sunday of Epiphany

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. The weather has turned wet and wild, with rain drumming on the conservatory roof for hours on end. Black nights, full of rain and wind, that is what this winter has become, for me. Dull, cold days, when you never see the sun.

This week also saw the third anniversary of Nigel’s death. Three years, can it really be that long since the old furry ginger lad closed his great green eyes for the last time? It is, though. And, to be honest, given that he was old and ill anyway, it’s probably for the best that he didn’t live on to take part in the awful times we’re now experiencing. His time had come.

This was a week of rejection. It has finally sunk in that my colleagues in the direct mail printing world don’t want me back. So, while stinging and smarting from that, I have been doing what anyone else would do in the circumstances, and applying for jobs, and on Thursday I had my first job interview since October 1989, and my first ever one in a wheelchair.

And on Saturday, I opened a letter telling me that I hadn’t got the job. So for a day and a half, I was allowed to live in the delicious land of might-have-been and imagine that I had put up a good performance on the day, which clearly wasn’t the case, since they must have rejected me more or less the instant I had got back into the lift! The word “bastards” has never been far from my lips since that letter dropped on the doormat.

Since July 2010, I have lost the ability to walk, been diagnosed with Muscular Dystrophy, and lost a job. Plus the car has blown up. For the last two months I have been perpetually cold and tired, and probably, if truth was told, clinically depressed, and frightened as well.

I think it’s about time I took command of this situation. Well, I have made a start by telling the garage to fix the car. I don’t know yet quite how we’re going to pay for it, but that’s another issue. I am getting quite used to jumping off cliffs and not knowing if there’s a trampoline or rocks at the bottom.

I’ve also started work on another novel featuring Glasson, the protagonist of The Nine Quines. So now, simultaneously, I am working on laying out Zen and the Art of Nurdling, writing Catheter Come Home and Dora Darley is my Darling, as well as this new, as yet un-named novel, when I should be doing publicity mailshots, 2010 accounts, and laying out Revudeville and Hampshire at War. Oh, and now, applying for more jobs.

Fortunately, the animals, poor mutts that they are, don’t realise the pickle we’re in. Actually, it’s worse than a pickle, it’s more of a chutney. But for the moment, Kitty and Tig are happy enough to scoff their tea and lie by the fire and keep warm, which is the sort of thing you would expect an elderly dog and cat to do in the circumstances, to be honest. Kitty continues to jump on my knee and even sleeps there now, purring away happily while I trundle the wheelchair back and forth. I can’t bear to think that, if the worst comes to the worst, we could have to give Kitty back to the CPL and Tig would have to go and live at Granny’s while we look for somewhere to rent.

There are still a few twists and turns before we get to that impasse, however. We could sell Colin’s half of the house, move everything back into this side, and hope that the revenue accruing, less the cost of the building work necessary to turn it back into two houses, is enough to pay off our mortgage and other debts. Then all we would have to do is find money for food and monthly bills. Either way, it’s going to be a bitter spring, and a rough and rocky road ahead, and I may have to reconcile myself ultimately to being stuck in this blasted wheelchair for the rest of my life, and living off benefits, in a different place to this. So I doubt we will see Arran again this year, or indeed the Lake District, any time soon.

So far, I have spent 600 words or more wallowing in self-pity, so I suppose it’s about time to look at the Collect for this Sunday and try and work out what all this stuff means. If there really is a God, and I am not just imagining these feelings, what is the purpose of this process of stripping away the old life I used to inhabit, layer by painful layer, and what, if anything, is going to replace it? I say “if anything” because, to be quite honest, some days, at the moment, I can’t really see the point in continuing. And normally I am the first one to rally and say, “oh well, there’s always somebody worse off than yourself” – well, that may be true, it is true, but it doesn’t make me feel any better. Not any more. I just feel sorry for those poor sods as well.

I must confess I don’t understand the prescribed reading for this Sunday from the Book of Kings, which appears to be a description of the prophet Elisha carrying out an early form of mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. All very fine and dandy, but, like much else in the Old Testament, potentially gaga and irrelevant. The Gospel, from Mark 1, has Jesus wandering around Capernaum, proclaiming in synagogues and casting out demons. Again, pretty much what you’d expect him to do, really. The psalm, psalm 142, struck a familiar note, though. The psalmist could have been describing my situation, right now.

I looked on my right hand, and beheld, but there was no man that would know me: refuge failed me; no man cared for my soul.

I cried unto thee, O LORD: I said, Thou art my refuge and my portion in the land of the living.

Attend unto my cry; for I am brought very low: deliver me from my persecutors; for they are stronger than I.

Bring my soul out of prison, that I may praise thy name: the righteous shall compass me about; for thou shalt deal bountifully with me.

Yep. Check check check. All the above applies. Especially the bit about asking for deliverance, which I have to say has not been forthcoming. Mind you, of course, sometimes I think that I embody Big G with too much humanity. I may be guilty of anthropomorphising God. After all, if you are the creative motor that drives the whole universe including everything that ever was or ever shall be, I guess that piffling human ideas of justice and reward might not be top on your list, especially as we don’t have the capacity to even understand the list, or why he wrote it in the first place.

It is quite startling to think what God’s “to do” list might look like:

Create World
Fowls of the air
Do Creeping things
Gardening/put up fence round orchard
Snake repellent (B&Q)
Speak to Adam
Flood earth (NB don’t forget the Unicorn)
Brief Jesus re mission.
Manna/Fish Fingers x 5000

Either way, it’s pretty clear to me this week that God’s priorities are different to mine, especially his priorities for me. I also don’t understand the final bit of the Collect, which is once again, another chunk of 1 Corinthians, verses 16-23:

For though I preach the gospel, I have nothing to glory of: for necessity is laid upon me; yea, woe is unto me, if I preach not the gospel!

For if I do this thing willingly, I have a reward: but if against my will, a dispensation of the gospel is committed unto me.

What is my reward then? Verily that, when I preach the gospel, I may make the gospel of Christ without charge, that I abuse not my power in the gospel.

For though I be free from all men, yet have I made myself servant unto all, that I might gain the more.

And unto the Jews I became as a Jew, that I might gain the Jews; to them that are under the law, as under the law, that I might gain them that are under the law;

To them that are without law, as without law, (being not without law to God, but under the law to Christ,) that I might gain them that are without law.

To the weak became I as weak, that I might gain the weak: I am made all things to all men, that I might by all means save some.

And this I do for the gospel's sake, that I might be partaker thereof with you

I freely confess that I find this contradictory and confusing, like much of the Bible. Nothing new there, then. Am I “preaching the Gospel”? Hardly, since most of the time I don’t understand what is being said to me or what is being asked of me. But if I am, am I doing it willingly or out of necessity? And what’s that about being all things to all men? That is precisely what I am not – and probably why I didn’t get the job. I am not good at dissembling and pretending to be something I am not.

Whoever it was who wrote the letter to the Corinthians (was it Paul?) has a very different approach to me. I will not pretend to be something I am not. If it means that I am unable to share the Gospel with anybody because of that, tough shit. If the Gospel is meant to get you, it’ll get you some other way, and not by listening to me wittering on about my week in the Holme Valley, dealing with an endless stream of disasters visited on me for reasons I am unable to fathom.

So there you go. I have reached the same point, I think, as I reached when I stopped writing the Epilogues in Here Endeth The Epilogue. I honestly do not know where I am going from here. Ironically, in the week that contained Candlemas Day (or, as it is better known, Groundhog Day) I am suffering from Vuja De. I have never been here before, and I have no idea what is going to happen next. I am an old and bitter man with nothing to say and no answers.

I’ve been consoling myself by listening to some of my favourite brass band music this week. Trying to find some reservoir of strength to draw on, something that will get me back to something like the person I once used to be, instead of this shell I am now inhabiting. I must admit, I am stirred somewhat by the great inspiring romantic names of the brass bands – the poetry of the Grimethorpe Colliery Band, the Brighouse and Raistrick brass Band, the Black Dyke Mills band, and the Besses O’The Barn.

But, as W H Auden once observed, in his poem “In Memoriam, W B Yeats”

Poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper

So, why bother? I may as well save my strength for the struggles to come. In the meantime, despite the fact that we know that it almost certainly won’t be alright in the end, I fall back on the talisman of the brass band playing Cwm Rhondda.

Guide me, O thou great redeemer, pilgrim through this barren land.