Epiblog for Baggis Day

Third Sunday After Trinity (Baggis Day)
It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley, as we run up to St Swithun’s day, and, once again, the weather remains cool, rainy and cloudy. Debbie says it’s warm and humid out in the garden, but obviously I only have her word for this. I think we have to accept that, because of climate change, we now have only two seasons in the UK, Winter, and Autumn.

The week began with fine weather, and with us sitting out on the decking last weekend, around the chiminea, listening to John next door serenading us with Supertramp’s greatest hits, and me observing that now I was listening to Supertramp, but soon I might be one.

Later that evening, Debbie spoke to John over the fence, while she was ticketyboo-ing round the garden, after I had gone in. Apparently he enquired after my health, and Debbie filled him in on the details. “Well,” he said, after a pause to let it sink in, “at least Steve’s got a brain.” I’m still trying to work out exactly what he meant, and indeed why having a brain should be such an advantage. Most of the time, mine is about as much use as a door-stop.

Tig and Kitty have had their usual sort of a week. They have now taken to eating each other’s food, and to be honest, it’s probably not worth trying to correct it. Sometimes they even swop bowls in mid-meal, as if by some pre-arranged signal. In Kitty’s case, it is a mixture of greed and opportunism. If she could hold a pen and type, she would be an ideal candidate for a career in the banking industry, or perhaps working for News International. In Tig’s case, it is probably more evidence of her increasing gaga-dom, poor old dog, as in the instance of her yet again getting confused and trying to get into my bed one night during the week. She just can’t get her head around the fact that there are now two beddies, one upstairs and one downstairs. I made my usual remark to Debbie about “gaga old bitches who wander round the house at night because they can’t find their way to bed” before adding the usual codicil of “and then there’s the dog”, and received the customary Agincourt salute for my efforts.

On Monday (this next bit will sound like a song by Flanders and Swann, but bear with me) the Yorkshire Water Meter Man came to call, and in less than 45 minutes we were the proud possessors of a brand, spanking new water-meter, which should at least save us some money.

I asked the guy who did it if they made him fit meters all day long.

“Yes,” he said, “it gets pretty boring.” Then he looked at me in my wheelchair and added, bless him ,“but I guess you’d happily swop with me!” He wasn’t wrong. To complete the full set of “utilities bingo” Npower finally got round to sending us a replacement key for the gas meter box outside, so we can at last read the meter and get on with the tedious task of reclaiming the credit which has seemingly built up on our account.

On Tuesday, rather than participate in the meeting with Peter the Handyman about the home improvements list and what the council are planning to do to the house provided we can raise £1956.54 over a period of time, Debbie decided instead that she would climb the trees in the garden and begin to lop the branches that are causing the difficulty over potentially receiving a digital TV signal from Autumn onwards. So it was that, at the end of the meeting, to say goodbye to Debbie, Peter had to go into the garden and shout up into the branches. She asked him, by way of reply, to hand her up the long lopper thing with the shears on the end, which she had left on the ground for some unaccountable reason. He apparently said

“What are you doing up there?”

To which she was apparently very tempted to reply, “Baking a cake!”

He came back in, shaking his head.

“You wouldn’t get my wife up a tree like that.” I reassured him that actually, in Debbie’s case, too, she was much more often “out of her tree” in oh so many ways, and this was an exception.

Peter didn’t want to be involved in the council works (too big a job, not his core skills, fair enough) but he did leave me one storming idea for a thinner ramp, which doubled back on itself. This would, at a stroke, remove the necessity to empty out the old camper van, and provide access not only to the side door but also to the front door and down into the front garden. It was such a good idea, that I wished I had thought of it, and I sent it to the council in the form of a drawing, which they subsequently rang me up about.

They wouldn’t do Peter’s design, because it didn’t comply with building regulations. OK, then, I said, what about if we took the issue of the ramp out of the equation altogether, got Peter to build this ramp, and you just did the rest of the modifications inside the house? No, they wouldn’t start on that footing, because if they did so, it would be tantamount to encouraging the building of a ramp that didn’t comply with building regulations.

It could all be academic now anyway. If things go badly wrong, I might end up spending far more time in the open air in coming months than I had previously anticipated! Be careful what you wish for, etc.

Speaking of matters academic, Debbie had to attend some GCSE training run by AQA on Friday. The only interesting thing to come out of this is that apparently she doesn’t have to use the AQA-approved anthologies which they provide to choose the poetry, and this could have sort of rendered my brilliant model compare-n-contrast between The Charge of the Light Brigade and Mametz Wood obsolete overnight. Oh well…

There is – as always – a gnat in the Germolene, though. In a masterstroke of planning, Calderdale Adult Ed have scheduled both GCSE English and Fastrack English on the same night, come next term, and Deb is supposed to be teaching them both. So unless she can emulate St Padre Pio and appear in two places at once, they will have a problem. She notified them of this, and they are allegedly having a meeting on Monday to sort it out, except that it will probably clash with another meeting, or something. Watch this space.

On her way back from the training, she went shopping and bought a Gola sports bag. Unaccountably, they gave her a bag to take it away in. I said she should have asked for a bag to take away the bag with the bag in it. Earlier, on doing the VAT return, I had taken her to task for always putting the same amount of diesel in the camper. The problem is that you end up with several receipts, all for £40.00, say, and entering them up gets very confusing. I asked her if it might be possible to do, for instance, £39.95 one day and next time, £38.97 or something.

“Oh no!” she replied. “It always seems fuller somehow when you put a round amount of pounds in it”. Long pause from me. “O….K….”

And so it came to Friday teatime and I started writing this, at least a day earlier than I normally would have. I started today, rather than on Sunday, because it was a year to the day since I cooked and ate that lethally-significant stir-fry, and then collapsed with abdominal pains. Today, Saturday, it is six years to the day since Russell, the Baggis Cat, died, after he keeled over and Granny rushed him to the vet, while we were hundreds of miles away on Arran.

As it turned out, with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, the pains of last year would have happened anyway, stir-fry or no stir-fry, because my bowel had perforated, and I was in the throes of acute peritonitis.

I can’t believe it’s a year – or six years, for that matter. In both cases, in many ways, the events are still vivid, but in other ways it seems a much longer time ago, and maybe even something that happened to a different person. (Hah! He speaks truth there.) I can’t really remember bits of the Lake District that I used to know like our own backyard. Keswick, for instance, which we haven’t visited since May 2010.

It’s not just me that’s affected, either. Debbie hasn’t been kayaking for over a year now, although that is only partly to do with the fact that I can’t help her any more, there’s also the issue of our no longer having a suitable vehicle for quick, easy trips, and in any case she needs the weekends in term time now to do the prepping for her teaching stuff.

Anyway, it was definitely my fault that she didn’t get a holiday last year. So, a year on, what have I learned? Or six years on, come to that. I often think that day in July 2005 was the day when it all started to unravel, to come apart, when we came back to bury Russell and then the week after, Barclays fired their first salvo over taking away the overdraft, the beginning of a long campaign of attrition that crippled our business, and which we won’t see the back of til 2012.

For a while, following my sojourn in the bosom of the NHS, last year, I thought I had rediscovered my faith, but now I am not so sure. As I wrote last week, I came out of hospital inspired with so many high hopes, most of which have been dashed or at least remain dusty and unfulfilled, and, to be brutally honest, there have been many days during this essentially botched Spring and Summer when I have pondered whether it wouldn’t have been better all round if I had karked it a year ago.

If I had, I hope I would have gone to heaven. And I’d be there now, with my Dad, my Mum, Gran and Auntie Maud, and all the Fenwick clan, and the Rudds I never knew, with their seamens’ jerseys and their pipes of baccy. I might have learned some new shanties. Not to mention the sheer bliss and joy of seeing Russell again, and Ginger, Nigel, Dusty, and Lucy the dog.

I’ve also been pondering what heaven must be like. If we each create our own niche of heaven, the way that modern physicists tell us that we each create our own reality as we go along, on the hoof, and if the heavenly universe follows that pattern, I would imagine it as a large, rambling, English country house, full of interesting rooms stuffed with strange knicknacks, comfy armchairs, and old books. It’s always midsummer, of the sort we used to have, and the french windows from the library are open to the garden on a stifling June afternoon with the heady scent of stocks and wallflowers. Everything is underscored by the music of Handel, at ambient levels, drifting, coming and going on the soft breeze.

There’s a box maze and a herb garden, and girls with long hair wander round, barefoot, dressed in Laura Ashley dresses and carrying dulcimers. It’s always 3.45pm, and someone’s just brought in a tray of English Breakfast Tea and a delicious assortment of heavenly sandwiches and home-baked cakes, butter, jam, cream and scones. Paradoxically, there is always an open, full, bottle of red wine at your elbow, and a crazed crystal goblet from which to drink it. There’s the distant sound of church bells across a meadow as the ringers practice, and the click, clock and clack, and distant shouts, of cricket being played on the green. You are looking forward to communal feasting in the great hall tonight, where there will be a fire of woodsmoke and incense, with candlelight on the portraits, music, poetry, and song. In the meantime, your favourite cats are always within reach, plump, sleek and contented, and there are dogs snoozing on the rug.

Since heaven must, by definition, be out of time, I am not sure, in my vision, whether I would have been aware that a year had passed. By then, Debbie and Tig and Kitty would have moved on, and found comparable love elsewhere, or at least I’d like to think they would have. Kitty definitely would have, she is always on the lookout for anyone who can wield a can-opener.

But I didn’t. Kark it, I mean. “They are all gone into the world of light, and I alone sit ling’ring here”. And I am left wondering, about my faith, and about the logic of carrying on with this blog, at least on a weekly basis. There are only so many ways I can say that my tenuous faith, never strong to start with, might have briefly flourished in adversity, and has now crashed back again into a state approaching despair at the prospect of being stuck in this wheelchair. I still haven’t solved the problem of homelessness, either, although (thanks to my having been mugged by Zen Internet in questionable circumstances for £77-odd taken from my bank account without my knowledge while I was lying in a hospital bed) I do still own the www.rooftree.org.uk domain for another year.

I haven’t managed to feed everybody, despite my fine words in the Christmas Epiblog that this time, there would be room at the Inn. When I got to this point while writing Here Endeth The Epilogue, I remember quoting that Gilbert O’Sullivan song about

As I sip my Napoleon Shandy
Eating more than enough apple pie
Could I glance at my screen and see real human beings
Starve to death right in front of my eyes…

That was five years ago, not one, so it’s quite depressing really, to look at the pictures of the famine in the Horn of Africa on TV, and realise that the world is still crocked. Not only that, but I am now crocked, with it. So, it’s not a good place to be now, either the world, or my world, come to that. Half the world is spying on each other and twisting each others’ words in the pursuit of power, and the other half is dying from a lack of food, clean water and sanitation. If they are lucky enough not to be in a war zone.

I suppose I should, once again, count my blessings. Meter or no meter, at least we have clean water. The NHS creaks a bit at the joints, but at least I can get seen by a doctor, eventually. We do have food in the cupboard. By comparison with the women sitting at the edge of the road in Somalia or South Sudan, breaking stones for a living, I am incredibly well off. Perhaps I should be using what time is left to me to try and ensure that those who are responsible for their plight are the ones who end up breaking stones by the side of the road.

But how? As usual, the Disasters Emergency Committee has issued the customary appeals, and no doubt, as usual, the great British public will respond. I was tempted, at one point, to type in this week’s Epiblog something like “if you have ever enjoyed what I have written up to now, and you want to show your appreciation, and you were going to donate to DEC anyway, add on a quid for me, and I’ll see you right one day.”

But, on reflection, it sounded a bit wanky and arrogant, and in any case I am not sure how much of this aid will reach the people who need it anyway, and how much good it will do. My experiences in dealing with Oxfam, for instance, in the past, have led me to the conclusion that in many ways, it is on a par with Tescos, and driven by similar motives. I can give you chapter and verse if you want, but this is probably not the time, or the place. Plus, there is the issue of donating to a fund that, when faced with the massive amount of public donation and goodwill after the Tsunami appeal, decided to return the surplus to the donors, instead of having the foresight to open up a bank account somewhere and stick the money in it, in the sure and certain knowledge that when disasters come, they come not as single spies, but in battalions, and that it would always come in useful one day. Now they have to do it all over again, which doesn’t strike me as the best logistical outcome.

Anyway, as well as my failures on the wider scene, I have failures nearer home to worry about, which is another reason for taking a break from the blog. There is urgent, and serious work to be done on the business, if it is going to ever achieve the levels it needs to. Fortunately, thanks to the incredible generosity of one of my dearest friends, two free sessions of “financial planning advice” have turned up, but to make the most of these, I need to take the problem by the scruff of the neck and give it a good shaking. I don’t know how it will turn out, but it will be hard work, and it will take lots of time, lots more time than I have hitherto apportioned it.

One of the things I have had to do for this financial planning thingum is talk about my “vision” for the business. I wasn’t aware that I had a “vision”. Joan of Arc used to have visions, and we all know what happened to her. But in response, I said what I said to one of my (then, sadly, no longer) friends, back in 1998, that I started the business as “a Golden Ship for me and all my friends to ride in”. Several bad decisions later (not all of them mine, but enough to make a difference) we’re holed around the waterline, pumping like mad, and I have also seriously screwed up the lives of several people who were mad enough to want to sail with me for the voyage. The financial advisor sent me an email about the figures she needed from us that ended with “Sent from by Blackberry” and I was oh so tempted to type, on the bottom of my reply, “Sent by a Raspberry…”

Then there’s also the issue of how, when, and if we are ever going to get to Arran again, and several rivers to cross if we are going to achieve that particular objective. Since it might be our last holiday for a while, if we can keep the camper van on the road long enough for the Silkie’s final long voyage, I need to devote time to that as well. That is the least of the many things I owe Debbie, having bolloxed up her holiday last year. I would like to be able to take Tiggy to Kildonan Beach one more time as well. She loves it there. I say “one more time”, because she went to the vet this week as that warty thing on the side of her mouth has started to grow back again, and we were considering whether she needed yet another operation.

“Well,” said Jeremy the Vet, “It’s six months since she had the last one, and six months is a long time in the life of a dog. At her age, she might not be around in six months’ time”. Oh. Thanks. True, of course, but rather brutal to Debbie. Anyway, when it comes, that will be another one of the many challenges to surmount.

Before I start on all this, though, we might have a celebratory sit out on the decking tonight, around the chiminea, singing songs and telling stories of the glory days of Russell the cat and his many doings. And we’re going to light some tea lights and arrange them on his mosaic, in the pattern of the constellation of the plough. If I do inadvertently accidentally trigger the Apocalypse or something, I apologise. Look at it this way, it’s more fun than being raptured, and you won’t have to get up tomorrow and wash the car.

No doubt Big G will be relieved that events down here have conspired to stop me banging on the ceiling for a while, in a futile attempt to gain his attention. St Padre Pio and St Jude can each book their week by the sea with a clear conscience, and Jesus can practice his surfing skills, though to be honest, if you can already walk on water, that is cheating ever so slightly.

If everything goes well, I might be able to pick up the threads in the autumn, and, as Richard Bach said, you are never given a dream without also being given the means to make it come true: you may have to work for it, though. But I have to accept now that it is time to fold up the tents and steal way, not a rout, but a retreat, in hopes that we live to fight another day. If it all goes wrong, of course, my next post will be from underneath the railway arches somewhere (subject to internet access, and being able to find a dongle in a skip behind Morrisons).

Happy trails, everyone. Au reservoir.