It has been a busy fortnight in the Holme Valley. So busy, that this Epiblog for the third Sunday of Easter only actually started to be written on Monday night. Today is the following Thursday, and I’m still writing it! Ideally, given the choice, I wouldn’t want to undergo another week like last week unless I really had to. The previous week was, as I said in my last blog, both shitnastic and ostrobogulous. In my catalogue of disasters last time, I was so carried away with the extent of my various misfortunes, that I forgot to include the lergy which possessed me for a day and a half, and the extremely stupid act of almost chopping the end off one of my fingers with an axe, while attempting to create some firewood. Anyway, the lergy passed, and the wound on my fingertip healed, each to be replaced in their turn by other turmoils.
Last week, I had to go to the hospital, for a fairly meaningless (or so I thought) followup to the gall stone problem I had back in September 2011. Fairly meaningless, or so I thought. Hmmm. Well. I spent a long time waiting in a corridor, dozing in my wheelchair, underneath a large sign on the pharmacy serving-hatch that said “Surgical Outpatients Is Behind You”. I was so tempted to take out a felt pen and add “Oh no it isn’t!”
When I finally got to see the redoubtable consultant, the man himself, he startled me somewhat, by saying that he wanted to take out my gall bladder as a precautionary measure. I must admit, I was somewhat taken aback by this. I mean, if you are going to start lopping bits off your body as a precautionary measure, where do you stop? I might get athlete’s foot. Am I going to saw my own leg off? I do have an axe, I suppose. Someone needs to do a cost/benefit analysis here. Anyway, I said yes, at the time, because it was easier than arguing, and I had a lot of work to do back at home. There’s an 18 week waiting list, so there’s still lots of time for me to change my mind. I mean, they can’t pursue me and make me have my gall bladder removed (or can they? Cue sinister laughter!)
So, in a slightly shell-shocked state of mind, I found myself back in the corridor, waiting this time for the porters to take me, like the parcel that I am, back to the rather quaintly named “discharge lounge” (a windswept lobby where people wait for ambulances to come and take them away, ha ha.) I noticed a chap loitering near the “Oh no it isn’t” notice, and in the same instant, he noticed me, and came over to chat, like you do.
After what seemed like several years, though in reality was probably only fifteen minutes, he had told me how he’d once been diagnosed with terminal cancer but had attended a faith healing service and had been healed by the power of Jesus in return for his renouncing sin and accepting the Lord as his personal saviour. The inference being, of course, that my being stuck in a wheelchair was because of my sin, and I, too could be cured by throwing myself on the mercy of the Saviour. This rang bells with me. It was more or less the same message that Adam the Ford Transit man was saying (at great length) in the driveway not so long ago. There can only be two explanations for this. Either these people are correct, and God sends ever more unlikely minions in his attempt to get me to take notice of his message, or alternatively, I have a “nutter magnet” concealed somewhere about my person. I still can’t decide which.
My main problem with the premise of these people is that a) they believe the Bible literally, probably including all the bits about not eating shrimps or ferrets (that’s Heston Blumenthal stuffed, then) and b) their idea of “sin” includes drinking. Now, I am no longer a heavy drinker, apart from anything else, the economics of it no longer work in my current situation. But I can’t believe Jesus, who once turned water into wine, if we are to believe what we read in Holy Writ, would begrudge me the odd glass of Montepulciano D’Abruzzo. Plus, if you believe the Bible literally, there are no cats in heaven, which would make it a very dull place.
Talking of cats, Kitty has continued to remain closely attached to the stove. As indeed have we all, these cold, greygreen, rainy days. Spring is happening, but very slowly. Despite the wettest drought since records began, in the last few days, in fact, since I last wrote this blog, the green haze of buds on the trees down the valley had burgeoned to a green froth of new leaf, and John’s apple trees in his orchard next door are in pink blossom. So, spring is still displaying its usual profusion, purity, and purpose, it’s just dodging between the showers, like the rest of us. While the squirrels have been taking advantage (much to Freddie’s chagrin) Kitty has remained unmoved (literally) by the advent of Spring.
Now I know that, in reality, grey squirrels are only rats with very good PR but I must own up to a certain warmth towards them, at least to the ones in my immediate vicinity. They’ve been bouncing around in the upper branches of the trees in the garden and in the woods behind, and just as I was getting up the other morning, I noticed one actually balancing on a fairly thick branch literally just outside the bedroom window, peering straight in at me, while nibbling a nonchalant nut. Its little chops were palpitating nineteen to the dozen, as it took absolutely no notice whatsoever of the wild-eyed, spiky-haired apparition at the window, safe in the knowledge that it was a lot faster than I was, and wheelchairs can’t climb trees.
The birds have been busy as well. The woods behind our house are teeming with them. I’ve even heard a woodpecker, I think, but I’ve not seen him yet, and no, there’s no sign of the first cuckoo (unless you count me.) We do, however, have a regular clientele around the bird table, and this has come to include a raven, a massive, black, brooding beast of a bird, that perches on the railings of the decking or paces around outside, as much as if to say “Where’s my breakfast?” As I said last week, even Freddie quails when confronted with Ronnie the Raven, although, to her credit, Kitty takes absolutely no notice of it whatsoever.
The other day, she was sleeping on the warm corner of the settee nearest the stove, when she woke up, got up to stretch, then staggered and almost immediately fell over, sort of writhing on the cushion, in what looked for all the world like some sort of neurological episode. “Oh Christ!” I thought, “the cat’s having a fit!” and trundled over to help her, only to discover that somehow, she’d got her dew claw caught in the metal ring of the name tag on her collar. Five seconds’ worth of squirming in my arms, and I had freed it and restored her somewhat ruffled dignity. Enough for her to curl around and go back to sleep, anyway.
The other members of the unofficial menagerie come and go. Brenda hasn’t been much in evidence, but that’s mainly because I’ve been to damn busy to set up the badgercam and look for her. Freda I have seen, once or twice, like a grey shadow flitting across the decking to the food dish and away again, so quickly that she could almost have been a hallucination, a ghost-fox in the dusk. According to Antoine de Saint-Exupérey’s maxim, I’m now responsible for a cat, a fox, a raven, several other miscellaneous birds, oh and an occasional badger. I guess an occasional badger is a bit like an occasional table. Sometimes it’s there, sometimes it isn’t, usually just when you need it the most.
So, the natural world is safely teeming around us in the annual miracle of spring. Debbie came back from a walk with Zak and Freddie and said she’d “nearly trodden on a robin” which is quite an achievement. No doubt the fields up at the Flouch will be displaying their usual springtime pattern, which I characterised as “sheep, sheep, barlam, lapwing”, but I haven’t seen the lapwings this year…yet.
One of the reasons for this is that, obviously, I now have to rely on Debbie to transport me hither and yon, and these days, she’s just too damn tired to go lapwing-spotting. And I don’t blame her. She has spent the last ten days solidly mired in the unutterable boggage of the AQA marking scheme for GCSE English. I have seen some monumental examples of verbal goulash in my time – I’ve even perpetrated some – but ye Gods, and little fishes, the AQA marking scheme for GCSE English would baffle a Chinese lawyer from Philadelphia. Debbie has been struggling with this stuff for weeks, and I have watched helplessly as these idiots have drained her life of energy and fun. Thankfully, help has been at hand, very useful help, offered by kind people, some of them Mustardlanders, whose blushes I will spare by not naming them here, they know who they are, and I hope they know how thankful I am for their aid.
The situation, which started out as a little cloud on the horizon, no bigger than a man’s hand, and eventually turned into a howling vortex that sucked the life and energy out of both of us, came to a head on Sunday. We were coming to the end of yet another “lost weekend”, thanks to AQA, but without the anaesthetising effects of alcohol. While the rain lashed the windows, drumming ceaselessly on the conservatory roof, driving home inexorably the fact that we’re in a drought of a type we’ve never actually experienced before, one where it pisses down all the time, relations between us deteriorated to such an extent that I was on the verge of snatching all the papers out of Debbie’s grasp and throwing them on the back of the fire.
“Why did you have to get involved with all this crap?” I asked, bitterly, “why couldn’t you just have had an affair or something instead? It would have put less strain on our marriage, and at least you’d have had some fun while it lasted!”
She replied with words to the effect that if I stopped “clanking around like Ironside” and “got a real job”, then she wouldn’t have to work like a dog. So we left it at that, and each of us bent back to our task. But when this is all, finally, over, I am going to gather up all of the miscellaneous notes and rough drafts and copies and crappy standardisation documents and fatuous AQA marking scheme manuals, every scrap of paper that spewed from them and still infests our house, and is the physical manifestation of their mental blight, and I am going to burn the bloody lot, inside a giant wickerwork exam moderator, high up on the wildy, windy moors somewhere. I may even invite Kate Bush. Then, and only then, will we be cleansed.
Meanwhile, my head has been so cabbaged by the atmosphere of black doom and turmoil that I almost put cat milk in my tea the other day. Apart from the fact that it’s had the lactose (which cats don’t metabolise very well) taken out, I don’t suppose it would have done me any serious harm. It may even have been an improvement. Being able to lick my own bottom would certainly imply a degree of flexibility which my present wheelchair-bound status doesn’t permit, and burying my poo in a hole in the garden would imply that I could actually get into the garden, and while engaged in my ablutions, I could also do some weeding and put in some bedding plants.
I’ve had little opportunity to notice what is happening in the wider world over the last fortnight. This has been a time when the people who have criticised me in the past for writing about mundane, self-centred domestic matters with no wider relevance, would have had a point. I noted with melancholy that stamps had finally gone up, and Royal Mail, who obviously fail to recognise that when you are in a landscape of declevity, you should cease delving, have been running an ad on Facebook with the headline “Stamps are Forever”. No, Royal Mail, it’s diamonds that are forever, though with the current price of postage, I can see how the confusion must have arisen.
Meanwhile, the economy continues blundering into the valley of death, with the four horseman of the apocalypse urging it along, cannon to the right of them, cannon to the left of them, all the while insisting there is no plan B. I’ve said it hundreds of times. The economy is like an orchard. If you owe somebody 100 apples, you will never repay them by sawing branches off the very trees that are supposed to provide you with fruit. But talking to the likes of Cameron, Clegg and Osborne about this is a true dialogue of the deaf. When it comes to gardening metaphors, this government is Pol Pot rather than plant pot, more pestilence and paraquat, than Percy Thrower.
Cameron has other fish to fry anyway; no doubt by the time this hits the streets, the local elections will have been and gone, and I will be very surprised if there isn’t some sort of cosmetic reshuffle to ditch Jeremy Hunt, who was apparently in charge of a department where he had absolutely no idea what the special advisor he had appointed was up to, or who he was in contact with, or what about, preferring to retain a judicial impartiality and distance from him, and concentrate instead on the much more important task of swanning about and looking like a male model for Littlewoods. Yeah, right. And if we believe that, how do we feel about the Tooth Fairy? I fully expect David Cameron’s office to release a statement any day now to the effect that the Tooth Fairy has the full confidence of the Prime Minister, but that the proper forum for any judicial examination of the supernatural aspects of dentistry should be the Leveson Enquiry.
So, there you have it. I do read the papers, you see, and I don’t always flip the remote when Channel 4 news comes on, though I must admit that’s mainly because of Cathy Newman. Sometimes, I even shout as loudly at that prat Cameron as I used to at Thatcher and Major, even though that was twenty years ago.
Twenty years ago. Twenty years. Two decades. I’ve been thinking a lot about the last twenty years, because this week marked the twentieth anniversary of my father’s death. Twenty years! Where have they gone? They’ve gone the same way as the year which has unaccountably passed since I came home from Oakmoor (or “Broadmoor”, as we called it). All gone, like Vaughan said, into the world of light, and I alone sit lingering here. I was a different person then, surrounded by other different people, all with our different dreams and desires. Very seldom does the beginning accord to the end, as the Gawain poet says. My mum and dad’s ashes are both buried together in Hull, and I haven’t been there for a long time, maybe too long. The location is, in a way, irrelevant. I carry them all with me, in my heart, wherever I go. The fact that their physical remains are beneath a tree, which I hope is in spring blossom, in the vast park of the dead that is the Chanterlands/Western Cemetery complex in Hull, is not really significant in that way.
I’ve written before about my penchant for cemeteries, especially the huge Victorian ones found in the heart of so many of our Northern industrial cities. I used to turn up at Leeds University Folk Club deliberately early, back in the day when I used to play there, just to wander around Beckett Street Cemetery and look at some of the amazing 19th century tombs, blackened with the soot of ages, grandiose statements by, and on behalf of, merchants and fettlers, with their stovepipe hats and their fob watches and their confident muttonchop whiskers, people long since gone from anyone’s memory, and only extant now in the notes of family historians.
The Western Cemetery in Hull, incorporating Chanterlands Crematorium, is another such place, with its memorials to the dead of the Hull Blitz and the R38 airship disaster, and its acres of paths, accessed by a massive pair of gates. The older part of the Cemetery, to the east of Chanterlands Avenue, is even more impressive. It was there that I found, one day, totally by accident, the grave of my ancestor Tom Fenwick, Humber Pilot. The more “modern” area is to the west: that maze of paths, grass, trees and marble is where my mother and father’s ashes lie, along with the remains of Hull’s shadowy armies of those who have tramped on ahead down the road of time.
They aren’t “there”, of course, in the same way that a physical person is “there”. Visiting the cemetery doesn’t mean that you are “remembering” them any more significantly; in fact, I think that remembering someone significantly is to remember their ways, their turn of speech, and to carry forward the love and the spirit and the humour and the good things they taught you as you yourself progress further along the road, with their unseen presence at your side, guiding you along the right way. Just in the same way that simply standing in a church doesn’t in itself make you a Christian, any more than visiting a garage makes you a motorist, or standing in a stable makes you a jockey.
All the same, I would like to go back there sometime, and maybe have a look at what can be done to make the area around “their” tree a little less utilitarian and continue the tradition that my dad established, when it was just my mum’s ashes buried there, of planting bedding plants around its trunk. I’d like to think of them both looking on, and being pleased at that. How feasible it is remains to be seen, but in the Zen tradition of “how is it far, if you can think of it?”, in a way, now I’ve had the idea, the alyssum is already planted there and blowing, a startling flash of white.
Meanwhile, what of the next twenty years? The Brontës used to play a game, around the table, of guessing where each of them would be in a year’s time, then two years and so on. In their case it was a fairly easy process of deduction, since their dark, damp and tubercular Rectory in Haworth was very handy for the churchyard (another haven of black Victorian tombs) which surrounded it. They’d no doubt have been amazed at the idea of Kate Bush, as indeed many of us are, and probably more so at the prospect of wind turbines at Top Withens.
I don’t know what the next twenty years holds, and indeed there may not be twenty of them. That’s why it’s important to fill the unforgiving minute, as Mr Kipling said, in between batches of buns. These days, I don’t mortgage today to tomorrow. I have, after all, got nothing to lose, and I know that I must try to stop regretting and hankering after things I can no longer do, people I can no longer see, and concentrate on what new can be achieved. Sometimes you can never go back – quoth the raven, nevermore – what you have to do is keep the things that were good, and carry them with you as you go. And don’t worry, I guess, since 99% of the stuff you worry about never happens and in twenty years time, it could all be 100% irrelevant!
In the words of The Two Gilberts, whose wacky repertoire of scratchy 1920s novelty musical hall songs on 78rpm discs seems strangely apposite to my mood today, in that, like life itself, their songs are often absurd, rather meaningless, and totally random: “No-one knows what lies before us, so let’s all join in the chorus/Do shrimps make good mothers? Yes, they do!”
No comments:
Post a Comment