Epiblog for the Sixth Sunday of Epiphany

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. I have stepped up my applications for jobs, to the extent that I can now fill in one of these on-line agency “vacancies”, together with covering letter and statement of suitability for the post, in about half an hour. The trouble is, with these, it is very much a case of quantity, not quality. You throw enough mud at the wall, and some of it will stick. I am not convinced that half of them are “real” jobs anyway, I suspect some of them are cunning ploys to get you to “register” with this or that online job search agency, so they can bombard you with shit and spam forever after, world without end, amen. I was going to say they are a necessary evil, I suppose, but in fact they aren’t. They may be evil, but unlike traffic wardens, say, they are totally unecessary, a bunch of idiot middlemen who get in the way.

Talking of idiots who make you do extra work for other people, I was surprised to find that two of the applications so far are demanding that I send documentary proof, in the form of scanned copies of things like my passport or birth certificate (one of which has expired, the other lies I know not where) to prove that I am eligible to work in this country. This is because of the requirements of the Borders and Immigration Act or something, which has now thrown the onus on to employers to check the eligibility of their employees, a job that used to be the Government’s, of course. Presumably this leaves the UK Borders Agency more free time to do what it is they do best, ie pull two year old kids from their parents’ beds at the crack of dawn and deport them to countries where they are likely to see their close relatives gunned down by a government goon squad. Well, we wouldn’t want to get in the way of such important work, would we?

I’ve been so busy with this plethora of blasted forms that I have barely noticed what the weather has been like this week. Wet, cold and dull, is the closest I can approximate to it, I think. Neither Tig nor Kitty has shown any inclination to venture far outside, and I can’t say I blame them. The dark nights seem to be sticking around as well, although it is now light, just about, after 5pm, and the first faint glimmers of dawn are around 6.50 in the morning. I see these more often than not, but, since the skies have been so cloudy of late, I don’t see the stars that go with them. Even though the return of the dull rainy windy weather has meant that temperatures have risen, we’ve still had to place another interim order for more coal (a mixture of economy doubles, supatherm and homefire ovals, if you were even vaguely interested, which I guess you aren’t) so the Chilean miners will be putting down the deposit on their holiday homes on the coast as we speak.

It’s also been a grim week because it’s the anniversary of Greenjewel’s death. I can’t believe it’s been a year since she died and I can’t believe all that’s happened in that time. It was good to see the tributes on The Archers MB, and that she is definitely not forgotten. I toyed with the idea of trying to update my own tribute, but in the end I decided I couldn’t improve on what I wrote this time last year, on here.

Kitty’s latest trick, following on from jumping up on my knee and riding round with me on the wheelchair, is now to settle down and go to sleep there, which is all very well for the first hour or so, til the pins and needles becomes unbearable, and I have to reluctantly turf her off. I say "reluctantly" because she is warmer than a hot water bottle and also, unlike a HWB, she doesn’t cool off, although she does need refilling from time to time, not with boiling water, but with cat food.

Despite their reluctance to stray far from the warm fireside, Kitty and Tig do at least have the freedom to wander where they will, a freedom currently denied me by this bloody wheelchair. This week I have been trying to procure quotations for concreting a ramp up to the door at our side of the house, since the proposed long-term solution of a ramp to the front door of Colin’s half seems to be permantly stuck in bureaucratic mud for reasons I don’t fully comprehend, but which are probably to do with Kirklees not wanting to spend any money on me until it is absolutely definitely positively confirmed that I am going to be stuck in a wheelchair forever. I suppose I should be grateful that their reluctance signifies that at least there is still a glimmer of hope, and overall, I am of course grateful for the efforts of all the many people and entities I am targeted by in their continued zeal for my welfare. These are just some of them (there may be others I have forgotten):

Occupational Therapists
Physiotherapists
District Nurses
Wheelchair services
Stores and Equipment
Whatever the people are called who do the ramps and the long-term adjustments to the house if these become necessary
The hospital (who still see me as an out-patient)
The GPs (who probably still see me as a nuisance)
And finally the Social Care people, whose budget this current attempt at an interim concrete ramp is going to come from, on the grounds that it is preventing my having a normal social life not being able to get out of the house and being confined to just two rooms, and always either in the wheelchair, or in bed.

I didn’t have a normal social life before, of course, hence the Somalians getting my dinner jacket via Oxfam, but I am not bothering to tell them that. There are much more important considerations to getting out of the house, to do with freedom and independence. At the moment I have less freedom of movement, and less space, than a prisoner in a maximum security jail. Certainly I have less variety in my surroundings. I know that, in the words of Lovelace, the Cavalier Poet,

“Stone walls do not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage
Minds innocent and quiet take them for an hermitage”

But even so, sometimes the only thing that stops me screaming aloud in anguish about the prospect of never seeing the Lake District or the mountains of Arran again, is the blind, irrational hope that somehow, somewhere along the line, things will all come right again. But at the moment I am an encumberance, a parcel, something that trundles between two rooms, and if it does need to travel further, has to be lifted and hefted, signed for, strapped down in the back of a taxi, and wheeled into reception at the other end. The days when I could just say,”Sod it, I’m going painting!” and get up and into the car and drive off in to the sunshine, are gone, long gone. They are all part of “the land of lost content” a kingdom that grows bigger every day, or so it seems, with each new realisation of things I now can’t do.

I shouldn’t torture myself by doing it, but I have been playing "The Joy of Living" by Ewan MacColl, and the bit where he sings:

"Farewell you northern hills, you mountains all goodbye
Moorland and stony ridges, crags and peaks goodbye
Glyder Fach farewell, Cul Beag, Scafell, cloud-bearing Suilven
Sun warmed rock and the cold of Bleaklow's frozen sea
The snow and the wind and the rain of hills and mountains
Days in the sun and the tempered wind and the air like wine
And you drink and you drink till you're drunk
On the joy of living"

I can’t get past that verse without crying. I am also not convinced that he sings “Scafell”, I think it might be “Goatfell” which is the highest mountain on Arran, and anyway it fits the scansion, so my mind inevitably makes the substitution.

In the meantime, I fill in application forms for jobs I will struggle to get to, even if I get past the interview stage, and continue wrangling with what I guess I must now call my former employer. I have said before, that when it comes to vulnerability, we are all just three bad decisions away from being on the streets. What I didn’t realise, til this cropped up, was that hey, the bad decisions don’t even have to be yours!

A couple of nights during the week, I stayed up late, once because I was writing the next Glasson novel and once because Channel 4 had unaccountably scheduled a programme with Jon Snow about wartime painters of the 20th Century at 2am. God knows why they show this stuff in the middle of the night when only weirdos and insomniacs can see it, given the dross that they pump out at prime time, but still. Anyway, I was expecting large helpings of Stanley Spencer and that is what I got, so I was happy for a while. I was also happy to hear that the tawny owls in our trees seem to have made a comeback, for several nights now I have heard their call and response, with the male hooting and the female "scritching" in reply. Bless their little owly souls:

“When blood is nipped, and ways be foul
Then nightly sings the staring owl,
To whit, to woo, a merry note
While Greasy Joan doth keel the pot.”

Mention of souls of course leads me to observe that I have had little time for religious contemplation this week, in fact I dithered over whether to even bother writing an epiblog, since I have nothing to say that is of any use to me, let alone anyone else, and I have even held off sending emails to people to whom I owe one, because time after time it just descends into a dirge of angry complaint by me against God or whoever is at fault for my current fallen state.

Anyway, having decided to look at the Bible passages which our elders and betters in the Church of England have ascribed for study today, I wondered vaguely if any of them would be connected with St Valentine’s day. Answer, no. A quick search reveals that nobody really knows who St Valentine was, except that he may have been a Roman martyr, killed for marrying Christian couples in the regign of the emperor Claudius II and buried under the Appian Way. Or he may have been an eastern Orthodox bishop. Or something. Either way, “his” flower-crowned skull is exhibited in a basilica in Rome somewhere (but then, whose isn’t) and his relics are also in a box in the Birmingham Oratory (not the most romantic of cities, to say it’s St Valentine). The thing with these relics and saints and stuff like that is that usually there are so many of them, that it you did actually open the box and re-construct St Anthony or whoever, you would be bound to have some bits left over at the end, the odd tibia or collar-bone, a bit like those puzzling little spare widgets in the boxes of flat-pack furniture from Ikea.

For me, then, Valentine's Day remains the day when the birds choose their mates, as in Chaucer, and the day when Dame Durden and her maids and men are all together met, as in the old folk song.

So, having established that St Valentine was primarily of interest to the greetings card industry and no-one else, I turned to the Collect for the Sixth Sunday after Epiphany, though God knows why. The theme this week seems to be leprosy. In the Old Testament passage, 2 Kings 5, I discover that:

“Naaman, captain of the host of the king of Syria, was a great man with his master, and honourable, because by him the LORD had given deliverance unto Syria: he was also a mighty man in valour, but he was a leper.”

Following a misunderstanding with a servant maid (how many times have we heard that before!) the Syrians sent Naaman off with a few changes of raiment, ten silver talents, and six thousand pieces of silver, to go and see the King of Israel and ask to be cured. But when the King of Israel read the letter “he rent his clothes, and said, Am I God, to kill and to make alive, that this man doth send unto me to recover a man of his leprosy?”

Which is fair enough I suppose. We’ve all done it, when you open a gas bill on the same morning you have just trodden barefoot on an upturned three pin plug en route to the bathroom for instance. Though in my case it’s usually the gas bill that gets “rent”, rather than my jarmas.

Anyway, Elisha hears that the King’s been rending his clothing again and asks why, and eventually this leads to Elisha telling Namaan to go and bathe in the River Jordan seven times. Namaan, who sounds like a querelous old bat, comes back with “Are not Abana and Pharpar, rivers of Damascus, better than all the waters of Israel? may I not wash in them, and be clean?”, at which point, had I been Elisha, I would have been tempted to say, “Yeah, yeah, whatever.”

But, after much argybargy, he relents and, surprise surprise, he “dipped himself seven times in Jordan, according to the saying of the man of God: and his flesh came again like unto the flesh of a little child, and he was clean.” So there you go, I like a story with a happy ending. I love “Abana and Pharpar” by the way. If I ever start a firm of solicitors, that is what I will call it.

The Gospel passage is about lepers as well. The passage is from Mark 1:40-45. Jesus cures a leper and, perhaps wisely in view of events, tells him to keep quiet about it.

“See thou say nothing to any man: but go thy way, shew thyself to the priest, and offer for thy cleansing those things which Moses commanded, for a testimony unto them.”

But of course, the leper blabs to all and sundry:

“He went out, and began to publish it much, and to blaze abroad the matter, insomuch that Jesus could no more openly enter into the city, but was without in desert places: and they came to him from every quarter.”

Which proves, if anything, that in “Saviouring”, as with any other line of business, there is nothing worse than creating a demand you can’t satisfy. Before you know where you are, the lepers will be setting up online forums and posting about your poor customer service, and how they waited in all afternoon to be cleansed, but nobody turned up.

Whatever this is about, I am not getting it. The other New Testament passage is from 1 Corinthians 9:24-27, which I sort of thought I “got”:

“Know ye not that they which run in a race run all, but one receiveth the prize? So run, that ye may obtain. And every man that striveth for the mastery is temperate in all things. Now they do it to obtain a corruptible crown; but we an incorruptible. I therefore so run, not as uncertainly; so fight I, not as one that beateth the air: but I keep under my body, and bring it into subjection: lest that by any means, when I have preached to others, I myself should be a castaway.”

I wish I could bring my body to subjection, At the moment, the reverse is true. My body is bringing me to subjection. I think the message is to me, if any, to concentrate on the fights that need to be fought, and not “beat the air”. To concentrate on the main prize, getting up and walking once again. The race is not always to the swift. It’s not the fights you dreamed of, but those you really fought, and all that.

Which just leaves the Psalm. I must admit, I had not really taken much notice of the Psalms before I started this run of Epiblogs. Apart from “The Lord’s my shepherd” which of course is known to all of us lapsed agnostics, strictly Chapel of Rest. But for the second week running, reading the Psalm (Psalm 42 in this case) was like being slapped round the head with a Craster Kipper.

“As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God.
My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God: when shall I come and appear before God?
My tears have been my meat day and night, while they continually say unto me, Where is thy God?
Why art thou cast down, O my soul? and why art thou disquieted in me? hope thou in God: for I shall yet praise him for the help of his countenance.
O my God, my soul is cast down within me: therefore will I remember thee from the land of Jordan, and of the Hermonites, from the hill Mizar.
Deep calleth unto deep at the noise of thy waterspouts: all thy waves and thy billows are gone over me.
Yet the LORD will command his lovingkindness in the day time, and in the night his song shall be with me, and my prayer unto the God of my life.
I will say unto God my rock, Why hast thou forgotten me? why go I mourning because of the oppression of the enemy?
As with a sword in my bones, mine enemies reproach me; while they say daily unto me, Where is thy God?
Why art thou cast down, O my soul? and why art thou disquieted within me? hope thou in God: for I shall yet praise him, who is the health of my countenance, and my God.”

Again, it could have been written by me, now, this week, with the rain drumming and the owls hooting, beleagured at my own hearth, beset by troubles at every hand. The only difference is the psalmist resolves “I shall yet praise him” whereas I am not so sure. I fear I may be in an abusive relationship with Big G. Bad shit happens, but still I go back. I show the bruises in public, but claim I walked into the door again, like Luka. Maybe it is time to ask him to put up or shut up. Send me a sign. Or, as Donne put it so much better in his Holy Sonnet:

BATTER my heart, three person'd God; for, you
As yet but knocke, breathe, shine, and seeke to mend;
That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow mee,'and bend
Your force, to breake, blowe, burn and make me new.
I, like an usurpt towne, to'another due,
Labour to'admit you, but Oh, to no end,
Reason your viceroy in mee, mee should defend,
But is captiv'd, and proves weake or untrue.
Yet dearely'I love you,'and would be loved faine,
But am betroth'd unto your enemie:
Divorce mee,'untie, or breake that knot againe;
Take mee to you, imprison mee, for I
Except you'enthrall mee, never shall be free,
Nor ever chast, except you ravish mee.

"That I may rise and stand" - Amen to that. So, I am waiting to be ravished. And that’s official.