Epiblog for St Swithun's Day (or "High Tea at High Tae")

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. Probably. I haven’t actually been here for much of it, not since Tuesday morning. I know I said last week that I was leaving this blog aside for a while, and I am really going to do that, after this week, because I have a list of things a yard long to do (I might actually give you a list, later on) but, in the meantime, like Colombo (or St Columba, or something) there’s just one more thing.

I re-read the stuff I wrote last week, and I was struck that it seemed rather a downbeat ending to a series of postings chronicling a period of struggle that has, to be honest, has had its ups as well as its downs, so I’ve decided to try and square it up with one more posting, to even it out, to leave a straight edge. I employ the same principle with pies, flans and quiches, actually, because those last little portions always look so lonely, sticking out like that.

Anyway, I digress. For some time now, we’ve been wondering what, if anything, is going to happen about holidays now I am in a wheelchair, and also what to do about our venerable old VW camper van, The Arran Silkie. It was all very well when it was just a relatively expensive anachronism, sitting in the driveway, but now it’s become our sole vehicle with the demise of the Berlingo, it’s equally essential for getting Debbie to her teaching classes and ferrying me about, and we’ve been forced to put money into putting right various things that were wrong with it. With the result that, although it still doesn’t look much, it is probably in better mechanical nick now than it has been for a long while.

All of which has led us to talk about going back to Arran. As I wrote last week, a year ago, on St Swithun’s Day, I keeled over with acute peritonitis (which, until then, I always assumed was just a dodgy Greek football team) and got carted off to HRI, just four days before we were due to set off for Arran. So, through no fault of her own, Debbie lost her holiday, and her kayaking trip. She hasn’t been kayaking now for over a year, and in my present state I am absolutely no help to her, unable to do the task I used to perform, of standing in between the cradles with the rack hanging down the side of the van, and guiding the nose of the boat onto them, as she fed it in from one side. Since the Berlingo died, we have still got its “Hydraglide” kayak carrier, which was a lot easier to use, but it’s in pieces in our front room, so that’s not a lot of help.

There had been talk of her giving up altogether, which, naturally, I was against, but the fact remained, that if she was ever going kayaking again, we would have to find some way in which she could, single handed, get 22kg of extruded tupperware kayak on to the top of a 2.5 metre high camper van, by herself.

Fortunately, there was a solution. Kari Tek, who fitted the original kayak carrier to the camper van in 2005, has, in the interim, grown and flourished. As a company, they now also sell the kayaks themselves, and a wide range of accessories, so that you can now take your credit or debit card for a day out at the seaside at Ayr, visit their rather smart little showroom, buy a rack, buy a kayak to put on it, and still be back home in time to go online to Interflora and send the Bank Manager’s widow some flowers, and a little note saying it must have been very sudden, and you were sorry to hear, etc, etc.

Specifically, we’d noticed that they do a natty little improved version of the original “push me/pull you” version of the rack, now incorporating an integral winch, which takes all of the hard work out of lifting the kayak up to roof height, and would mean that Debbie could go kayaking again. That left but two imponderables, could they do it on our vehicle, and could we afford it?

For a long while now, we’ve been pondering the imponderables, and trading emails with them, back and forth, establishing fairly quickly that they could do it, and we’d narrowed the cost issue down to, “well, depending how much of the existing rack we can salvage, cannibalise and re-use, it won’t cost any more than a new one!”

The other problem, though, was timing. Debbie’s brother had already caused an alteration to the time of year when we would normally have gone to Arran, by fixing his wedding to Claire for the week after next. The WEA teaching term didn’t officially end til next Monday, which is very late in the year, and Kari Tek themselves have a big engineering job they do for a local sawmill (they don’t just do kayak-carriers, they do other types of engineering metal-bashing as well) for the first two weeks in August, booked up solid, so that really only left this week, or next, and next was perilously close to the big wedding.

So it was that, on Tuesday morning, I found myself making and taking a succession of phone calls with Kari-Tek, and, as a result of that exercise, and various emails of scanned drawings, we were finally in possession of a price. Now, this next bit is going to sound like I am carping about high prices, but I am not, because although the price was more than we were expecting, the product, the value, and the service were all also correspondingly high. But it was still a shock to the system, even though it did include coffee and chocolate biscuits when we got there (“how did you blag those?” said Debbie, when she returned from looking round the showroom). Especially given the age of the vehicle we were proposing to have it bolted onto. I jokingly said to Deb that, if it didn’t work out, we could always put it on Ebay as “kayak rack with camper van attachment”, but she wasn’t amused, and a full-blown, toys-out-of-the-pram domestic seemed imminent.

Channelling Brian Hanrahan, I’m not going to say how many pounds left the bank account this week, but I counted them all out, and I hope, one day, to count them all back. I’m not going to say, because someone will inevitably pop up with “Oooh! How did you afford that, when you are supposed to be poor, and on benefits?” The short term answer is that Debbie raided her own meagre savings, and supplemented it with some money her Mum gave her for her birthday. I am hoping to replace it out of my redundancy settlement, eventually, which I spent 21 years of my life earning, in a little room with four bars over the window, while everyone else was outside having fun. It means Barclays will grab a little bit less than the whole sum, and if that is the price of my wife, who has stood by me through thin and thin, being happy and going kayaking again, so be it. Selah.

Having solved the price problem, all we had to do was pack up and go. Sounds simple, doesn’t it? One immediate issue, however, which had to be surmounted, was the spare tyre. When the garage had had the vehicle last week, to look into the oil pressure, for some unaccountable reason they had left the spare tyre inside the back of the camper, rather than on its bracket, underneath. I had queried this, and Father Jack replied that it was “so that Debbie could get to it easily, if she had a puncture.” I suspected the true reason had more to do with lack of forward planning, but anyway, we had arranged to swing by the garage on the way up to Scotland and have them pop it back where it should be.

So it was, therefore, that, once Deb had managed to push me up the ramps and into the side door, I had to squeeze past it and transfer by banana board on to the front seat, which, fortunately, rotates in the VW T25 “Wedgie” camper. Very fortunately, in our case, because, in rotating it, Deb found my rosary, which had been lost since I came out of “Broadmoor”, back in May. I say “lost”, although “mislaid” is the more correct term, in that we knew it was in the camper somewhere, just not precisely where. I was overjoyed at this slice of luck, and hoped it was a good omen for the trip as a whole.

We weren’t so lucky with the garage, though. They were obviously busy, but they could definitely see Debbie standing there, hopping from one foot to the other, trying to attract someone’s attention. And they knew we were coming, because I had phoned them up and warned them. Eventually, after about twenty minutes, and not in the best of tempers, she stomped back to the van, got in, started it up, and drove back to our house, where she then heaved the spare tyre out of the side door into the driveway, booled it round to the front of the old camper, and covered it over with a plastic tarp to prevent it being nicked by passing weightlifters, before resuming her position behind the steering-wheel, and swinging us out onto the road, northwards-bound, at 5pm!

Clearly, we were never going to reach Ayr in one go, but we had made an arrangement by phone to break the journey and park overnight in the yard at Mossburn, the animal sanctuary in Dumfries and Galloway run by Juanita, who has become a great friend of ours, ever since the days of the Foot and Mouth crisis, when we stayed up all night sending emails to every MP about its fate, as it was threatened with extinction as part of the “contiguous cull” policy. It was gone 8pm by the time we trundled through the gate, but Juanita had prepared a huge meal for us, and there was red wine opened on the table. Max, from the Archers messageboard, was also stopping by, as part of her search for suitable premises from which to launch her forthcoming religious retreat.

If I said “a convivial evening ensued” it would be a massive understatement, as it was one of the best evenings I, personally, have had in a long time. Fun, as a concept, has been absent in my life of late, and God alone knows how bleak it must have been for Debbie.

So, let us say a good time was had by all. Even Tig, who discovered she was attracted to older “men” when Juanita’s faithful Oliver, 20 years old and counting, wandered in and sniffed her bottom. It was love at first sniff, and before long they were snoozing together on the kitchen floor, legs straight out in all directions.

How they slept through us all carousing, laughing, and singing, I don’t know. The talk ranged from Santiago de Compostella, through Douglas Bader, to manifestations of St Padre Pio, and back again, broken occasionally by Hilaire-Belloc-like excursions into songs, some of which we all knew, and some of which we didn’t. Eventually, we had to go back to the camper, or we would also have been asleep on the kitchen floor, legs straight out in all directions, but apart from the absence of the long-haired girl with the dulcimer (who was sorely missed) it was pretty near to the description of heaven I wrote about in last week’s blog.

Wednesday dawned hot and sunny. So much so, that I had to sit up in bed and open the slotted window at the side over the grill, just to get a bit of through draught and stop us all cooking! Max had already set off on her house-hunting trail, and Juanita was busy about the farm, so we made a quick cup of coffee, got ready, and set off ourselves, down the road to Lochmaben, looking for the turning to Dumfries, thence to pick up the road that would lead, eventually, to Ayr.

It was a truly gorgeous July day, and the hedgerows were strewn with rose-bay willow herb, campion, dead-nettle, and lush bracken. The farmers were all busy as well, and I quickly lost count of the numbers of tractors and trailers active in fields along the way, making hay, literally, while the sun shone. We seemed somehow to have left behind a countryside at home where it was still March, and stepped through the back of the wardrobe into a strange weather-Narnia, where it was real summer, at last. As T. H. White wrote, in The Once and Future King:

It was July, and real July weather, such they had in Old England. Everybody went bright brown, like Red Indians, with startling teeth and flashing eyes. The dogs moved about with their tongues hanging out, or lay panting in bits of shade, while the farm horses sweated through their coats and flicked their tails and tried to kick the horse-flies off their bellies with great hind hoofs. In the pasture field, the cows were on the gad, and could be seen galloping around with their tails in the air.

We droned on through the heavy air, the camper lumbering along like a bulbous, somnolent bumblebee. Eventually, the countryside gave way to a town, or at least a more substantial settlement than the single-street villages we had hitherto rumbled through. But this one was strangely quiet, New Cumnock, and every house and shop seemed to be boarded up. It used to be a mining town, but since the end of deep coal excavation, it has contracted in population from 9,000 to 3,000, with massive unemployment and social problems. Looking it up later, I found that the boarded up houses were probably some of the many awaiting demolition. Thank you, Margaret Thatcher, and goodnight.

Anyway, we were soon back into open country, and before I really knew it, rolling through the gates of Kari-Tek’s workshop yard. They came out to greet us in force, and, as well as the aforementioned tea, coffee and biscuits, produced ladders, gantries, drills, bits of long metal which presumably formed part of the eventual rack, and set to work. After four hours of honest toil in the blazing afternoon sun, they had done it. The old rack was removed, the new one in place, it had been demonstrated to Debbie so that she knew how to use it, the J-cradles had been repositioned, and we had “shot the breeze” briefly, talking to Ann and Geoff about kayaking, and how they once encountered a nuclear sub in the channel between Largs and Cumbrae.

So, it was teatime, and we faced the choice of whether to hard-arse it all the way back in one go, and get home around midnight, probably, or to take up Juanita’s kind offer of a second night’s sojourn in the yard. It didn’t take long to decide on the latter, but first we had a detour to make. It seemed perverse to have come this far and then to turn back without at least a glimpse of the Isle of Arran, so we turned right instead of left, and ran down into Ayr, following the coast road out to the ancient harbour of Dunure.

It was a glorious evening, up on the Heads of Ayr, the sort that Wordsworth probably had in mind when he wrote about it being calm and free, and the “holy time” being “quiet as a nun”. I doubt he ever rode in a camper van to Dunure, though, but we got his drift. We parked up in the very same layby where we had stopped on 14th July 2009, one year and 364 days previously, on our last trip to Arran, and looked out over the same scene.

The sun was low enough to be sparkling on the water. The improbable “currant bun” shape of Ailsa Craig was away to our left. Further over, I could see distant blue smudges that were the tip of the Mull of Kintyre and the islands of Campbeltown Loch, and then all along the horizon in front of us, the misty blue mirage of Arran itself, its jagged peaks, and the more softer, rounded flanks of Holy Island, in front of Lamlash, and its gradual sloping to the south, ending with the lighthouse, a tiny speck at that distance, sticking up on the platform of Pladda. If he’d been looking out of his window, and using very powerful binoculars, I could almost have waved to Donald in his little chandlers’ shop on Lamlash pier. Except for the 14 miles of the Firth of Clyde in between, of course.

It was a curiously solemn moment. Especially so, since I had doubted I would ever see Arran again. Seeing it is not the same as getting there, of course, and after a while, the feeling of “so near, but yet so far” and the intensity and general sadness of the situation began to overwhelm me. I understood, probably for the very first time, truly, what A E Housman meant when he wrote that short poem:

Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.

Soon, it was time to pack all our troubles back into our old kit bag, and smile smile smile through the tears, in my case anyway, and hit the trail back to Mossburn. Such were the vagaries of the road system of Ayr and Galloway, that the journey back took over two hours, and I learnt a valuable lesson as a navigator, that the shortest route back in miles is not always the quickest route back in time. That was why we ended up not reaching Mossburn until gone 10pm. Well, that, and an unscheduled stop at Tesco Extra at Dumfries, where Debbie went in to see if they had any vegan beer and some cheap cooked meat for Tig to have her tablets with, and came out an hour later having done most of our weekly shop!

Thursday morning developed into yet another blazing hot day. I spent a considerable time watching one of Juanita’s ferrets sunning itself at the front of its enclosure, before we “got up” properly, and opened the side door of the camper. Debbie wheeled me down the ramps, and we lounged about in the sunshine, drinking coffee. Tig was mooching around in the long grass, and eventually found herself a comfortable patch in which to lie, in the shade of one of the parked-up horse-boxes. In fact, she was, quite literally, in clover, as the meadow grass was full of it, and of groundsel, burnet, plantain, and other humble plants whose names I once knew but can no longer remember.

The cockerel we had heard crowing earlier made an appearance, pecking its way round our wheels and under the camper. One of its chickens joined in, and then, in a rather surreal development, a pig wandered by, to see what was going on. Tig hadn’t minded the chickens walking round her, but she moved out of the way of, and kept a wary eye on, the pig.

Before we set off, I made a pre-emptive visit to the loo across the other side of the farmyard, and on my way back, the pig came trotting over to greet me, then looked, for one brief, heart-stopping moment, as if it was going to jump up on my knee and try and join me in the wheelchair. Given our likely combined weights, I doubt the wheelchair would have survived the experience. It would have been tricky explaining it to Wheelchair Services, but at least drawing the sketch of what happened, for the purposes of the insurance claim form, would have been amusing. Later, while we were borrowing a corner of Juanita’s kitchen table to prepare and consume an ad hoc brunch of the perishable stuff which wouldn’t have survived the journey back, a goat wandered in and tried to steal the onion bhajis. Admonished by Juanita, it calmly turned away and wandered back out again. Mossburn is that sort of place.

Prior to my odd encounter with the pig, I had come to a conclusion, a definitive node in the strand of thought which I had been teasing at and puzzling out for the whole trip. A farmyard in Dumfries and Galloway may seem like a strange place to have an Epiphany, but I have had them in stranger.

I had proved to myself that life in the wheelchair and life in the camper were not incompatible, nor were they mutually exclusive. It could be done. And although the effort cost Deb dear (in pocket as well as energy) we had had a break, a holiday, of sorts. Maybe we would get to Arran, and maybe I should keep on with the standing aid and the weights and keep on trying to get up out of this wheelchair.

Because, despite placing the tea lights on Russell’s mosaic in the pattern of the constellation of the plough, and despite all that has happened to me since St Swithun’s day 2010, it wasn’t the end of the world, in any sense. Not yet, at least, and that is all any of us can say, not yet. In that sense, I was no better, or no worse, than anyone else.

Because, for a time, I had forgotten that I was in a wheelchair, or, to be more accurate, for the first time, really, the fact of my “wheelchairness” had dwindled from being the all-consuming, all-powerful, be-all and end-all of everything, to a merely tiresome irritation. I had realised that I had been doing the very thing that I was ironically accusing others of doing, in fun, when I describe myself in their words as a “disabled raspberry” and “tragic Steve” – only seeing the wheelchair, and not the person.

Yes, there are lots of things I can no longer do, but I am not the sole inhabitant of the land of lost content, not by any means; many other people can also list things they can never do again. I am not a wheelchair, I am a free man. And though I still don’t understand it, somehow this is all apparently bounden up in Big G’s plan. (Not big G-plan, which is to do with furniture, do keep up at the back!)

And now I really must get some work done. I mean it this time. Those year-end accounts won’t cook themselves, you know!