Epiblog for the 5th Sunday of Lent

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley, and yes, I am still in the Holme Valley, though not at home in the Holme Valley. As predicted, the call came, and I was admitted to the Oakmoor Intermediate Care Facility on Monday. The ambulance arrived to take me over an hour late, so for most of Monday morning there was just me and Kitty, sitting by the fire. I was surrounded by three bags of various possessions, and, at the time, only one of us was purring with contentment. It was a cold, blustery day, a combination of March winds and April showers, all at once, all served up on the same plate, or rather as a succession of “snacks”, as each successive belt of weather was driven over from the west by the strong wind.

Deb had already gone off teaching, in a futile attempt to beat the Ofsted inspectors to Horton House. Futile because, as it turns out, they said they were going to arrive at 11AM and turned up at 9.30AM, a tactic beloved of auditors the world over. Still, she managed to hand in her file without being accosted, observed, or asked any awkward questions, and beat the proverbial hasty retreat. I strongly suspect, as I said to her at the time, that despite her having to hastily concoct all this additional detail to satisfy the requirements of a potential audit, in fact, nobody will ever look at it, and it will just gather dust somewhere on someone’s shelves for a few years. Which is quite sad, because it was a promising work of fiction from a new author. It reminds me of when I re-wrote the ISO9000 operating procedures and at the end of each one I inserted the sentence, “please email me on receipt of this to tell me whether you prefer grey squirrels or red squirrels, together with your reasons.” Only one person, on a company-wide distribution list, sent me an email saying, “What’s all this about squirrels?”

Although it is only a mile or so from our house, Oakmoor felt much further. As the ambulance perambulated slowly up the road to Netherton, gradient and oncoming traffic permitting, I noticed that the stand of elms lining the western side of the road, already gnarled and twisted over the years into fantastical shapes, seemed to have taken one hell of a battering over the winter, with branches hanging off and a lot of dead wood on the ground. I meant to mention it to Debbie, she would be onto it like a rat down a drain, if she thought that there was free “kindling” for the stove. [Actually, such has been the unseasonably warm weather this week, that Deb has apparently let the stove go out, deliberately, at home, which means that Kitty has taken to joining her in bed, as a protest at no longer having a cosy hearth to curl up in, overnight.]

My first impression of Room 39 at Oakmoor, my current abode, was that it was like a Travelodge, but without the illicit sex. In terms of treatment, though, it is very rigorous, almost fundamentalist, which is good, because it’s what I need right now. I have been assessed, several times, poked and prodded by a very nice lady doctor, weighed, and generally logged, photographed and annotated. [I assume the photo is in case I escape, and will look good on a wanted poster, since it makes me look like a dangerous axe-murderer.] I have also had two demanding sessions of physio per day, and I have had my feet done.

The latter was a bit of a surprise, since I knew the podiatrist personally, as it turned out, back from my folk club days, although I had no idea of her calling or vocation til she walked through the door wearing the NHS uniform on Tuesday. I asked her how she got into foot-doctoring and she said that originally, as a teenager, she had wanted to be a vet, but had discovered she was – unfortunately – highly allergic to cats, dogs, and, strangely, "some types of goat". I tried to cheer her up by saying that at least in her present job she would never have to have any of her patients put to sleep. She smiled, wanly, and continued filing my toenail.

Wednesday was my birthday, which also involved physiotherapy (no time off for celebrations here) in that I was trussed up in a tight green corset with sheepskin-lined straps and hoisted up off the bed by a strange apparatus, and prior to that, I had had my leg muscles manipulated by two young ladies in tight-fitting uniforms. To be honest, that doesn’t happen every day, in fact, it doesn’t happen every birthday, so I was already on a high. Debbie came by later, bearing home-produced birthday card, complete with deliberate typo (Happy 65th Birthday! Very satirical!), and she also brought the dog and some wine. Because of the relaxed attitude to visiting here, we were able to spend a convivial evening in Room 39 watching Manchester United versus Chelsea, featuring the spud-faced nipper, Wayne Rooney, who missed a golden chance when he scored by not blowing a kiss into the same camera he had abused earlier in the week. Still, as I observed at the time, “Wayne Rooney” and “presence of mind” are seldom found together on the same page, let alone the same sentence.

For my birthday, Debbie bought me a tub of Mason's Dog Oil, as recommended to Jo my physio by the rough old miners up in Wakefield that she used to treat. This traditional Yorkshire remedy was originally developed to be rubbed onto greyhounds to make them go faster. They then started using it on themselves. I have been using it four five days now and I have to say it does seem to remove aches and pains almost instantly. If it carries on working well on me, eventually we will try it on Tiggy, which is the right way round for animal testing, as far as I am concerned.

Tiggy seemed a little disorientated by seeing me in a strange context, but after a bit of wandering around, she managed to flake out on the floor and go to sleep for the duration of the match (she supports Wolves, naturally). Debbie also became disorientated by the strange context, later, when trying to leave and go home, getting herself and Tig stuck between two sets of automatic double doors, both of which locked automatically behind them, and having to summon the night staff with the “help” buzzer on the wall to let her out!

Since Wednesday I have had physio, physio and more physio, in between bouts of trying to write things like this, and mealtimes of course. Meals have been a little strange, I think they are fazed by the vegetarian thing again, which seems to scare the NHS. Last night at teatime I was given a buttered teacake in clingfilm which bore a label saying “vegetarian man” which makes me feel as if I should be zooming around in vest, tights, underpants and cape, with a big “V” on my chest.

Elsewhere in the big wide world of course, life goes on, we’re still bombing somebody, somewhere, delete as applicable, Portugal needs bailing out, and this of course has been eagerly seized upon as a reason why we must continue to endure the death of a thousand cuts, except they are saddled to the Euro, and we aren’t, but let’s not let facts get in the way of ideology.

This time of the year always gets me thinking about Englishness and England – we are running up to St George’s day, after all. I wonder what St George, or even King Arthur, come to that, would make of it all now? I was thinking these sorts of thoughts, sitting here in room 39, with the unaccustomed luxury of warm sunshine flooding through a large window onto a warm wooden floor, and I was wondering whether the NHS which we know and love, and which has been so good to me, would survive in anything like a recognisable form, the way poor old England is going.

I’ve been listening to Vin Garbutt a lot lately, and the lyric of “England, My England” sprang to mind:

To you that can listen, some lines I have made
Concerning the times and distress of the trade
The North is well used to the drifting of cash,
But now even London prepares for a crash;
The homeless are living out rough in the street
In houses of cardboard to keep off the sleet
They went there to better their lives, I am told
Now the pavements, their beds, are of concrete, not gold.

Vin is right, of course, and someone needs to do something about it. There are those who say, of course, that political activism and Christianity are incompatible. Because, especially, the Church of England is the establishment at prayer, so the theory goes, and when you pray for the Queen, you are praying for the status quo. I don’t necessarily subscribe to this in its entirety; while it may have been true in the 18th Century, when the Squire and the Parson were one and the same, I think you could equally say that many of the things that make the Church of England more like a hobby than a religion in many ways, also serve to curb its extremism and promote tolerance. I am sure that many – if not most – of its members believe just as strongly in a decent life for all before death, and a ticket to paradise for everyone thereafter. Nobody could accuse Bishop Bell of being in favour of the War Party. We are all going to heaven, and Kier Hardie is of the company.

And though religion has been used, undoubtedly, in the past, as an instrument of repression, at the same time, the nonconformist tradition in this country has indeed been a source of much social good, with its promotion of culture and self-education for the working classes.

There’s no doubt that we’re in a bad way, though. We can afford to bomb [insert name of this week’s misguided foreign adventure] but we can’t afford to keep the libraries open. We can afford to build schools in other countries (not that I am against building schools as such) but here at home, my wife was teaching adult literacy to kids in a converted railway-carriage!

The question is, whether it’s too far gone to get Old England back. From the unremitting bleakness of Vin Garbutt’s interpretation of England, (actually written about the previous crash and recession, believe it or not) I turned to Maggie Holland’s “A Place Called England”, which gave me a bit more of a much-needed boost, especially the ending. Although it starts out sounding pretty similar,

I saw town and I saw country
Motorway and sink estate
Rich man in his rolling acres
Poor man still outside the gate
Retail park and burger kingdom
Prairie field and factory farm
Run by men who think that England's
Only a place to park their car

But as the train pulled from the station
Through the wastelands of despair
From the corner of my eye
A brightness filled the filthy air
Someone's grown a patch of sunflowers
Though the soil is sooty black
Marigolds and a few tomatoes
Right beside the railway track

It ends on a much more defiant note:

England is not flag or Empire
It is not money it is not blood
It's limestone gorge and granite fell
It's Wealden clay and Severn mud
It's blackbird singing from the may-tree
Lark ascending through the scales
Robin watching from your spade
And English earth beneath your nails

So here's two cheers for a place called England
Badly used but not yet dead
A Mr. Harding sort of England
Hanging in there by a thread
Here's two cheers for the crazy Diggers
Now their hour shall come around
We can plant the seed they saved us
Common wealth and common ground

Yes! Bring it on. I am quoting this at length not just because I like it, but because I have decided to carry on with Rooftree. I don’t know where I am going to find the time, or the money come to that, Zen Internet, the unscrupulous,grasping ISP, having already taken payment from our account for another year despite the fact that I was still arguing the toss with them about the cost and why they were charging anything anyway, since we thought we had bought the domain (www.rooftree.org.uk) for two years. So that’s another lump of cash I’ll never see again, I might as well press on and see what we can achieve in another year, then take the site down next March. So I have uploaded all of the old pages again, and fully intend to make a nuisance of myself. Any crazy Diggers who want to come along for the journey are more than welcome.

They say you should never argue about politics and religion, so having already alienated at least 50% of my readership, I now turned to my trusty Book of Common Prayer in the hope of getting all four corners in this bout of controversy bingo.

The Collect for this week passed me by, I am afraid. I don’t know why, probably because I have never been formally instructed in how all this stuff fits together, being a self taught Anglican and a lapsed agnostic, but I just can’t see the point some days, and this week’s Collect is one of those days.

This week’s Epistle is Hebrews. 9. 11. This passage seems to be defining the right by which Jesus came to redeem mankind, and as such it mirrors the themes of this week’s Gospel as well. I assume that was the idea, anyway.

Neither by the blood of goats and calves, but by his own blood he entered in once into the holy place, having obtained eternal redemption for us. For if the blood of bulls and of goats, and the ashes of an heifer sprinkling the unclean, sanctifieth to the purifying of the flesh: How much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without spot to God, purge your conscience from dead works to serve the living God? And for this cause he is the mediator of the new testament, that by means of death, for the redemption of the transgressions that were under the first testament, they which are called might receive the promise of eternal inheritance.

Yes, that’s all very well. But, I feel a “but” coming on, and it is this: one, personally I don’t believe that the deliberate shedding of the blood of bulls and goats “sanctifieth” anything. If God really does count the life of every squirrel, every vole, every sparrow as valuable, and knows the hairs on their head and accounts for every feather, then how can it be right to ever kill one of them deliberately, either for food or for sacrifice? Andrew Linzey, in his challenging book Animal Theology (challenging in the sense that, Like Middlemarch, I have never got past page 58 in trying to read it straight through from cover to cover, though unlike Middlemarch, I do try again from time to time) says:

“if, as Christians have traditionally affirmed, in Christ God is truly reconciling the world through the power of love, should not our exercise of power towards creation be shaped and motivated by this example?”

To which I say yes, of course it should. He goes on to say:

“If full weight is given to the moral exemplar of Christ, then it can be validly held that the unique moral capacities of humans demand of them a loving and costly relationship with the natural world”.

“Loving”, and “costly” go together here of course, as anyone who has ever lost a well-loved pet will tell you. Yet it need not be costly in economic terms, the grain used to feed and grow one beef animal to be made into hamburgers would feed far more people than the resulting hamburgers ever will.

I realise of course that the author of Hebrews was writing of the customs and traditions of his time, and that it is stupid trying to twit historical figures for not measuring up to modern mores. But it does raise the question, for me, of exactly how literally the Bible should be taken.

The Gospel, New Testament passage for this Sunday is St. John 8. 46. which sees Jesus once more causing trouble and consternation amongst the population at large, having what is known in this part of the world as a “barney” with a group who accuse him of being “a Samaritan with a devil”

Jesus answered, I have not a devil; but I honour my Father, and ye do dishonour me. And I seek not mine own glory: there is one that seeketh and judgeth. Verily, verily, I say unto you, If a man keep my saying, he shall never see death. Then said the Jews unto him, Now we know that thou hast a devil. Abraham is dead, and the prophets; and thou sayest, If a man keep my saying, he shall never taste of death. Art thou greater than our father Abraham, which is dead? and the prophets are dead: whom makest thou thyself?

Jesus answers once again that his authority comes from God, and the crowd are still unconvinced. They just aren’t getting this eternity/out of time idea.

Then said the Jews unto him, Thou art not yet fifty years old, and hast thou seen Abraham? Jesus said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Before Abraham was, I am. Then took they up stones to cast at him: but Jesus hid himself, and went out of the temple.

As Michelle Shocked once memorably observed, “the secret to a long life is knowing when it’s time to go”, although in this case, I find myself wondering why Jesus felt the need to hide, when he could presumably have stopped the stones in mid-air, had he chosen to do so. This is a major problem I have with the story of the crucifixion, as well; why does Jesus allow these things to happen to him, when with one bound he could have been free? Even allowing for the fact that mankind needed to be saved, why did it have to be done in this particular manner? I freely admit that this is something I don’t understand. The essential “why” of Christianity. Why God, with a blank canvas, decided that it had to be this way?

Of course, once you get to this point, you are back in familiar territory, or at least I am. Standing on the edge of a vast cliff, looking out, but all I can see is fog. Somewhere in that fog, is the understanding of the mind of God, but it is not graspable, not tangible, to me, while I still stand this side of the cliff-edge. As Donne said “On a huge hill, cragg’d and steep, truth stands”. There comes a point where you believe that there is something on the other side of the fog, or you don’t believe. It's as simple as that. If you are lucky, you might see the flash of a lighthouse, or hear a distant bell, but without the sun to drive it away, the mist remains, and even with the sun, “mysteries are like the sunne it selfe, dazzling, yet plaine to see.”

So, that’s been this week. I’ve been prodded into action. I seem to have rediscovered some of my mojo, as well as working some other muscles I haven’t used in a while (not now, Ethel!) And I am going to get to grips with this, and grab what chance I have of standing up, and standing up for what I believe in, whoever’s nose it gets up. Forward, the armoured brigade!