It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. The week when Winter, like the Empire, struck back. It’s rare these days that I see one of my decisions vindicated and generally agreed to be a smart move, usually these days it’s just the opposite, in fact, and - since one of my longest standing hobbies and pleasures in life has been proving people wrong - I find it irksome to be constantly questioned by all and sundry.
So it was especially gratifying to me that the last (I hope) coal order of the winter was delivered on the Friday before the snow came on the Wednesday. I know, I really should get out more. I’d debated the pros and cons of ordering more coal, because it’s not cheap, but events, for once, proved me resoundingly and crushingly correct.
I don’t know why I was being so self-satisfied, really. It is a reasonable punt that any time there is a bank holiday in prospect, the Good Old British Weather takes a nosedive, temperatures plummet, icy blasts whistle down from the Arctic, the country grinds to a halt, and the news bulletins are full of vox pops from people who only popped out for a loaf of bread and a pint of milk and got stuck in a snowdrift for seven hours because the council hadn’t gritted, and/or that perennial media favourite, the nutter who was so desperate to get to the office, come what may, that he harnessed up the family Labrador to a skateboard and sledged in from Thames Ditton, while the rest of Britain simply woke up, took one look at the weather, muttered “nah”, and pulled the duvet back over their heads.
So it was on Wednesday, when Winter gave its last dying snarl and I opened my eyes to see snowflakes floating past my window. For a few hours, the garden and the immediate locality was transformed: snow became blossom, and blossom became snow, and it was impossible to tell one from the other. The catkins on the Alder outside my window each became encased in a transparent blob of ice, as if they might have been prehistoric catkins preserved in amber, or found at the bottom of the glacier with Oetzi the Iceman, deep in the crevasses of the Tyrol.
Zak and Freddie loved the snow, and rushed round barking aimlessly when I let them out into the garden, doing skidding turns, rolling over, and coming back in with snow on them, to have breakfast and then steam gently by the fire. Kitty, however, was less impressed, and remained solidly welded to the cat blanket on the bin bag in the hearth, only venturing as far as the food dish. She was, like me, glad of Debbie’s industriousness in collecting fallen wood.
Because we have Zak and Freddie staying at the moment, until Granny’s triumphant return from her royal progress to Southampton, feeding-time has become more complicated, but basically what it boils down to is that Kitty eats Freddie’s dog food, Freddie eats Kitty’s cat food, and then Zak, having had his own tea, comes round and demolishes everyone else’s leftovers. I suppose as long as they all get something, that’s what counts.
Plus we now have at least two additional mouths to feed, in the form of Brenda the badger and Freda the fox. This assumes that it’s the same animal each time, of course, there could be a whole horde (insert appropriate collective noun) of them out there, working out a feeding rota. Freddie and Zak are blissfully oblivious of the al fresco animal drive-thru diner taking place out on the decking. In fact, on Saturday night, I will swear blind that Freda’s eyes met Zak’s as she pressed her nose up against the glass of the conservatory door to ask if there were any seconds (or what’s for pudding) and he did absolutely nothing. Freddy snoozed on in front of the fire, grumbling and farting in his sleep.
We’re still no nearer getting another dog. Hazel very kindly sent me a link to a potential dog on the West Yorkshire Dog Rescue pages, I banged off the email form to them that same night, expressing an interest, nothing. Of course, they probably have already re-homed her somewhere else, or they deem us to be unsuitable for some reason, and I’d like to say that the people who run animal sanctuaries are often hard-pressed, saintly individuals juggling a myriad of responsibilities and decisions that would terrify an archbishop. But sometimes, when I try and say it, it comes out as `it wouldn’t have hurt the mutton-tugging gongfermours just to send a two line reply!’
Freddie and Zak, the caught-off-guard dogs that they are, remind me of the letter written by a young Edward II to one Louis D’evreaux,and quoted in Ian Mortimer’s “A Time Traveller’s Guide to Medieval England”, where Edward promises to send Louis `some misshapen greyhounds from Wales, which can well catch a hare if they find it asleep, and running-dogs which will follow at an amble”.
I’ve been reading this book on and off since Friday, when I was given it for my birthday, by Granny (she arranged for it to be delivered before she left for the Solent). It’s a truly wonderful book, and I was chortling away to myself reading about the Sumptuary Laws, which were passed in 1367 or thereabouts, and which specified what you could and could not wear in public, according to your wealth and status in society. Debbie asked me what I was chuckling over, and I told her about how, under these laws, only certain people were allowed to wear garments trimmed with weasel, while peasants were forced to wear disgusting rags that were probably caked with shit and dung. She gave me a long, cool, appraising stare and said,
“I see you’re still living the medieval dream, then.”
She’s been in a crabby mood all week because of her GCSE marking having prevented us, so far, from setting off anywhere in the camper van. Well, that, and the weather. And the dribbly little oil leak from the crankcase, which will eventually have to receive the Extreme Unction from Father Jack, up at the garage. She was so annoyed with me at one juncture that she asked me to “turn down” the chiming clock (I switched it to silent, without arguing) and her sole contribution to one of the many – and increasingly tenuous – Titanic centenary documentaries on TV was to ask `why didn’t they all just jump off the ship onto the iceberg?’
Anyway, by Friday, we’d reached an uneasy impasse for my birthday, and I had a really enjoyable day, doing what I wanted, for once, instead of what I had to do, as is more usually the case. And of course, it being Good Friday, this involved me making my annual reading of “Good Friday 1613, Riding Westwards”, by John Donne. A poem of such staggering complexity and insight, and vivid imagery, it’s hard to conceive of it being written 399 years ago, but it was.
I try to read it at least once a year. In fact, I should read more of Donne and Herbert, just to remind myself what truly excellent poets they were. I get the same feeling when I hear music by Handel. How could something so fresh, so vivid, so complex, have been written so long ago? Or similarly, the weird music of Gesualdo, whose “Tenebrae Responses” I have also been listening to this week. I vaguely knew about the Tenebrae service as a part of Easter or of Holy Week, but I didn’t know the detail. Apologies if I now proceed to tell you something you know already, but this is what Wikipedia says about it:
In the Roman Catholic Church, Tenebrae is the name given to the celebration, with special ceremonies, of Matins and Lauds, the first two hours of the Divine Office, of the last three days of Holy Week. Originally celebrated after midnight, by the late Middle Ages their celebration was anticipated on the afternoon or evening of the preceding day in most places. The principal Tenebrae ceremony is the gradual extinguishing of candles upon a stand in the sanctuary called a hearse. Eventually the Roman Rite settled on fifteen candles, one of which is extinguished after each of the nine psalms of Matins and the five of Lauds, gradually reducing the lighting throughout the service. The six altar candles are put out during the Benedictus, and then any remaining lights in the church. The last candle is hidden beneath the altar, ending the service in total darkness. The strepitus (Latin for "great noise"), made by slamming a book shut, banging a hymnal or breviary against the pew, or stomping on the floor, symbolizes the earthquake that followed Christ's death, although it may have originated as a simple signal to depart. Following the great noise, the candle which had been hidden from view is returned to the top of the hearse, signifying the return of Christ to the world with the Resurrection, and all depart in silence.
Wow. It sounds like a blast, if that’s not too trivial a response, and I hope one day I can see it, preferably to the music of Gesualdo, and in somewhere like Santiago Di Compostela.
Easter is normally a hopeful time of year for me, but so far this Easter, possibly because the weather turned on us and rent us, like the crowd turning on Jesus after Palm Sunday, possibly because we’re both tired (and I am tired of being in this wheelchair) possibly because everywhere you look in our house there are mountains of things that need doing, and that’s only the tangible stuff, the offline stuff that you can actually see and pick up and touch, it doesn’t include the online stuff with its account balances and figures with too many noughts the wrong side of the decimal point.
So if you came here looking for a life-affirming Easter message, I’m afraid I don’t have one. Did Jesus die for me, Steve Rudd, 57, balding, overweight, invalid feeder of itinerant badgers and weaver of words? I don’t know. Who moved the stone? I don’t know, but modern physics has much to tell us about the appearance of so-called reality and the ability of thought to move things – and doesn’t it say in the Bible somewhere that prayer can move mountains? I don’t know. I prayed that I would be able to walk again, and I prayed that my dog would get better, and neither happened. I don’t know why. Maybe, like Eric Morecambe playing Grieg for Andre Previn (who shares his birthday with mine, along with Paul Daniels, Ian Paisley, and the late, lamented Greenjewel of Dublin, who often used to laugh with me about it online) I am saying all the right prayers, but in the wrong order, or something.
You either believe it or you don’t. That’s all there is. And if you believe it, you believe it because you feel it, not because you can prove it. You know it, but you can’t explain it, and someone else’s knowing and believing may be different to your knowing and believing. My faith is not your faith is not her faith is not their faith. Faith is like love, everybody does it slightly differently. No tittering at the back.
Personally, I think, as I wrote this time last year (and probably the year before that) that something happened. I can’t begin to understand why, but sometimes, like Dean Jocelin in “The Spire”, I am permitted to feel the presence of the angels, and sometimes, also like Dean Jocelin, I am made to suffer for it.
Maybe my no longer having Tiggy, and still being stuck in the trundling treadmill, is all part of some cunning master plan that Big G hasn’t vouchsafed to me yet. I can only observe that I wish he wouldn’t be so bloody opaque sometimes. A few clues would be good. After all, what am I supposed to deduce from an empty tomb? Could it be something as simple as rebirth and forgiveness, springing from the bright green grass of springtime, like the pale luminous golden primroses in a medieval tapestry?
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