Epiblog for St Osyth's Day

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. One of those weeks when you look at your “to do” list at the end of the day and it’s still got 41 things on it, though they aren’t the same 41 things that you started with – you have done 12 of the old ones during the day, and gained 15 new ones. That sort of week, we all have them, I’m sure.  The weather’s gradually been getting colder as well, at least overnight. I’m starting to feel that chill when I swing my legs out of bed in a morning, accompanied by that feeling that I’d rather stay under the duvet for five minutes longer, if at all possible.

Matilda has taken to sleeping on the settee in the kitchen, now that she’s realised that this is actually the warmest spot in the house, which is also the reason why Debbie can usually be found there whenever she’s a) at home and b) not asleep in bed.

She’s also been outside a few more times, albeit under closely supervised conditions (the cat, not Debbie) and she has, independently, learned to use the cat flap.  She’s also met Freddie and Zak again, both of whom rather genteely and painedly  ignored her bad manners to the visitors, in the form of her sitting behind the settee instead of on it, and growling at them from time to time.  Still, as I keep saying, it’s early days yet.

Perhaps the most alarming thing that she’s begun doing, however, is playing. I was sitting working away the other morning, waiting for the kettle to boil, the house was quiet, tranquil and peaceful, when suddenly I heard this enormous galumphing racket of Matilda thundering up and down on the bare floorboards next door.  On investigating further, I discovered that she’d found (of all things) a small grey woolly koala bear about two inches long, and was batting it around the floor, chasing it, squatting down and pouncing on it, as if it was a mouse that she’d slain with her very own claws.  I have no idea where it came from, I imagine Debbie picked it up somewhere in her travels (possibly Australia, during her round-the-world trip with her mum in 2004, the clue being that it was a koala). I also have no idea where it is now, because I left her to it, and carried on working, to the background of her clumping and thumping about.  One thing is for sure, though, whatever Matilda’s capacity as a “mouser”, if our house is ever unfortunate enough to suffer infestation by small woolly koalas, we have nothing to fear.

I recounted the details of Matilda’s skittering about to Debbie, later, ending with “Why are all our animals so weird?” I was bemoaning the fact that every animal we’ve ever had has had eccentric tendencies of some sort or another. It’s a question a bit like “Why does the nutter on the bus always sit next to me?”

Debbie paused a while and then said, “You are the nutter on the bus, dear!”

 

Anyway, that was the week that was. As usual, these days. A white-knuckle ride of excitement, mainly comprising filling in forms, phoning up people who don’t care if I live or die, and dealing with couriers who don’t come when they are supposed to. It’s been a busy week for orders and book packing, and I’ve been getting together books to go out to the two main wholesalers in the UK, Gardners and Bertrams, and receiving other books back, from schools where authors have been doing poetry input, so it’s been all hell and no notion, and of course, the inevitable happened, it was only a matter of time after all – one of the couriers pulled the handle off the door. Again.

This time, though, when I reassembled it and screwed it back on, I did what I should have done the previous times I’d had to fix it, and made sure I’d pulled enough of the shaft through from the other side, also packing it round the inside with (of all things) a bit of foil from a cat food wrapper, which was the nearest thing to “shim” that I had to hand, so it went back on with a much tighter fit and less of a tendency to “waggle” and, touch wood, it’s stayed on ever since. I offer the above tip to you for what it’s worth (probably around £4 2s 6d) in case a courier ever pulls your knob off.

It’s also been a depressing week, to be honest, when news from the outside world has filtered in to the Holme Valley, possibly more so than usual, or maybe I have had the radio on more this week, in preference to music (my usual choice as a background to tasks of mindless tedium, such as compiling email mailing lists). Some of this news percolating through from the outside world has been grim, some of it comic. Some of it, grimly comic, such as the fiasco over the West Coast Main Line, which would be funnier if it wasn’t costing the taxpayer £14m to sort out. One thing that can be said for the Junta is that they are now officially worse than Mussolini, because at least he made the trains run on time.

This dovetailed neatly with the Labour Party Conference, affording them yet another open goal and this time, they almost managed to hit the corner flag. From the content of Miliband’s speech, he may even have been reading my blog from time to time, but why oh why did he opt to do that thing that all media-hungry wannabee apparatchik party leaders do, of delivering it like he was the compere of a games show? If ever a speech needed to be delivered (nay, thundered) with gravitas, from a lectern, podium, or even a pulpit, that was it, but instead, Miliband capered about the stage, flapping his hands like Larry Grayson.

By far and away the grimmest and most obvious manifestation of life outside the Holme Valley, outside our little world of home, hearth and garden, was the constant presence, on every news bulletin, of little April Jones, and her abduction and supposed murder. 

As I sit here, writing these words, a man has been charged with both these crimes, and the police had taken the highly unusual step of naming him even before charges were laid. Presumably because they have the difficult task of risking compromising any eventual trial against the chance that by naming him, someone will come forward with additional information that will help find the missing child.

I am not going to start naming names on here, because there has been more than enough speculation already and I don’t know the people involved, only what the police and the media see fit to tell us. It looks to me that the police are going to have to go to court with whatever they’ve got, barring the miracle of April turning up alive somehow, in a wardrobe, like Shannon Matthews, or, as now sadly seems much more likely, her body being found.

Ill-informed speculation about trials such as these just makes it more likely that, sooner or later, a major court case will be stopped in its tracks and a guilty person will get off on a technicality, simply because their defence team is able to convince a judge that a fair trial is impossible because of media and internet speculation.  You can’t blame a judge in those circumstances, they can hardly charge Facebook with contempt of court, though it would be interesting to see them try.

I mention Facebook because the need for restraint was, of course, totally lost on the online social networks community. Facebook was awash with febrile speculation of the sort that almost sank the Joanna Yeates trial and which surfaced again a few weeks ago over the death of poor young Tia Sharpe.  The unedifying spectacle of a cyber-lynch-mob, complete with pitchforks and fiery torches, baying, in mis-spelt words and with common grammatical errors, for torture, castration, and the return of the death penalty, leavened with a dash of xenophobia. (“I bet whoever done it isn’t even English”.)

If ever there was a line from the poetic canon of the last few hundred years to sum this up perfectly, it is in W. B. Yeats’s “The Second Coming”, when he writes:

“The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity”

What these people are failing to grasp is that paedophilia and child abuse is a disease.  There is some flaw in the psychological makeup of these individuals, something maybe that inhibits them from forming relationships with the normal age groups one might expect, and drives them to do it, whatever, regardless of the risks and penalties.  Even if you decorated every lamp-post in the country with a swinging paedophile, burnt them out of their homes, and took out a few paediatricians along the way, just for good measure, it won’t stop paedophilia itself. 

This makes it sound like I am making excuses for these people, I am not. But you can seek to understand something, even unpleasant things such as child abuse, without agreeing with it or condoning it. In fact, I contend that if we understood it better,  particularly if we understood and did something about the root causes, there would be less of it. But we have to understand that these people are like junkies, they will lie to their nearest and dearest to get their next fix.

Obviously, we have laws in this country, to protect children from being exploited in this way, and it is right that they should be applied, and applied rigorously, consistently, and justly.  Ultimately there are people in whom this disease is so virulent that they are a danger to children, and society must be protected from that danger. We also have a society, though, that combines an unhealthy paranoia for the welfare of children from threats that may or may not exist, and which robs children of their own childhood sometimes – the idea of the dangerous stranger, when in fact, most abuse happens within a family or other trusted setting – with the premature sexualisation of children, and a society that links together fame, wealth and sexuality, often in completely inappropriate ways, and is encouraged to do so by a culture and media that blasts it at kids, 24/7.  When my 13-year old cousin can post a video on Facebook of a rapper with a lyric that includes the wonderful line, “suck it, bitch”, clearly something is amiss.

Add into this heady conconction the breakup of established social and family values, and the pressures of economic deprivation and hardship, and you have a very nasty brew indeed. “Kill the pedo” is a seductively simple message, but maybe we should be looking at some of the ingredients of the stew more closely in the first place, rather than just wiping the mess off the stove every time it boils over.  It won’t be easy, because it’s the equivalent of shining a forensic torch into the dark mind of somebody (potentially) like Ian Brady, and we may well find out unpleasant things about ourselves in the process, because there are all sorts of abuse, not all of them sexual, not all of them perpetrated on kids, but it must be done.

Of course, it also boiled over this week in the form of the imbroglio about Jimmy Savile.  In this case, speculation is not subject to the same legal constraint, because the “defendant” is currently deceased.  It’s difficult, as well, to know what the victims will gain from the exposure, except to get it off their collective chests after all these years and try to achieve some sort of “closure”. I rather fear as well, that there was an element of their being exploited by the makers of the documentary programme, for prurient and sensationalist effect.  I found myself thinking that the real questions arising from the affair were who else knew, what did they know, and when did they know it, and above all, why didn’t they do anything about it?

The fact that the BBC officials apparently said, when confronted with the allegations not “are they true?” but “do the papers know about this?” speaks volumes.  There is a possibility, I suppose, that the victims might be able to make some sort of financial claim against the estate for compensation, but I think that if I were in their shoes, no amount of what I’d see as tainted money would give them back the years of self-torment for what they have been through. 

So, it’s all been pretty heavy stuff, and by the time Thursday and Friday came around, I was actually feeling pretty depressed in general about the state of humanity and the world we have created. This happens every so often, I find, I get depressed simply by watching the news too much or too often, especially the bad news, which is all the news seems to be, these days.  I found myself looking up and re-reading poems that means something to me in such circumstances, such as “On Dover Beach” by Matthew Arnold, especially

“…the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.”

Arnold was writing at a time when he felt that the “the sea of faith” was at a low ebb, because the Christian religion was under threat. God alone knows what he’d think today.  There are those who look specifically to religion (in its broadest sense) to make people more morally aware on issues such as child abuse, but this is immediately discredited by those occasions when organised religion itself becomes part of the problem rather than part of the solution, by providing a platform and opportunity for it to take place, then refusing to condemn it properly afterwards.

Also, the answer isn’t simply to revert to more traditional modes of priesthood and marriage. In the same way that women priests and bishops are perfectly capable of providing spiritual guidance and gay people are perfectly capable of loving one another, so abuse still happened back in the days when all marriage was strictly heterosexual and all vicars were men. The Daily Mail and the Telegraph might take the view that divorce, free love, women bishops and gay marriage cause child abuse, but if there is a role for organised religion in this issue, for me, it needs to be much more difficult, and much more subtle, how to teach people to seek for spiritual guidance to be able to recognise the moral rights and wrongs in a wide variety of differing moral circumstances, rather than getting bogged down in a “one size fits all” morality that concentrates too much on who is allowed to do what to whom and after how many weeks, months or years.

So, I was feeling pretty down by the end of the week, pretty depressed.  This has affected my workload as well, both business and domestic. I still haven’t got all of the archives from the old camper sorted out, I still haven’t finished my indexing job,  I still haven’t finished the books I have been working on, and I still haven’t done this year’s costs or next year’s budget.  But at least I’ve fixed the doorknob. 

I was mindlessly surfing the Archers message board when I came upon the mental health thread, a place I don’t often venture, not out of a sense of squeamishness, more out of a notion of my own inadequacy, if I am only just managing to keep the lid on, what use am I to anybody else?  This time, reading anew some of the postings on there from people, about their lives and what they were going through, I was struck by two things: firstly, the sheer heroism of some of these people, who are somehow managing to face down and grapple with their demons, day after day, and not cave in, not crumble under the strain, and secondly, how small and trivial my own troubles are, in comparison.  True, my knees ache, I hate being in this bloody mobile birdcage of a wheelchair, I’m probably mildly depressed myself, and I often don’t know where my next doorknob’s coming from, but I take my hat off, literally and metaphorically, if you like, to the magnificent copers in that thread.

I realise, by the way, that the above sentence will probably result in a postbag of yet more people sending me doorknobs. Please don’t; I appreciate the gesture, but it’s not actually the lack of a knob that’s the problem, as the woman bishop said to the actress.

For all that it’s a bad, bad, naughty world, where mad, bad, random stuff happens, yet, time and time again, the indefatigable, indomitable nature of the human spirit comes shining through, be it in the copers and the carers, the thousands of volunteers who turned out to scour the hills and look for April Jones in foul, appalling weather, and the selfless souls who spend their time rescuing unwanted animals.

I mention the latter because, also in my mindless trawling of the net when I was feeling oppressed by grim reality and unable to concentrate on what I should be doing, I also hit upon Rain Rescue’s Facebook page, and the story of Cleo the dog.  Cleo is a dog which Rain have had in their care for about three months now, during which time, in foster care, she’s grown progressively more lame.

She’s a simple soul, according to Rain, she likes nothing more than cuddles and being allowed to sit on the settee. From her picture, she looks like a slightly chubby, chunky, biscuit-coloured golden retriever.  Anyway, Rain have had her assessed by their vets, and it’s not brilliant news – she’s got trouble with her cruciate ligaments, and needs an operation costing about £1400 before she’s able to walk again, and even then, there’s no absolute guarantee that it will be a success, and poor Cleo still might end up having to be put to sleep as the kindest option.

It’s a dreadful dilemma for the people at Rain, and I don’t envy them it. £1400 will put a massive dent in their small, hand-to-mouth cash flow, especially at the time when they’re just about to take on an extra commitment or gamble, depending how you view it, of opening up their first charity shop, in Sheffield.

At the moment, as I write this, on Sunday 7^th October, she’s due back at the vets early next week for another assessment, so let’s all pray to St Roche for a good outcome, the best one for Cleo and her quality of life, whatever that is, and I hope personally, it’s for another miracle of rejuvenation. If Rain Rescue do decide to go ahead with the operation, perhaps they should consider an appeal to the idiot this week who paid £44,450 at auction for a pair of Daniel Craig’s (apparently unwashed, ewww) swimming trunks that he wore in some James Bond film or other, because clearly that person has more money than sense.

And so we came to Sunday. Because it has been such a lousy, depressing week, and because we realised that the weather can only get worse from now in, and because the clocks go back soon, and because Debbie looked at the weather forecast, the Inshore Waters Forecast and the tide tables for Walney Island and pronounced them all to be favourable, we decided to declare today a holiday.  We’ve driven here in the camper, collecting Debbie’s dad, and Zak and Freddie en route.  Debbie is off kayaking and frolicking with the seals, Debbie’s dad is off and frolicking with Zak and Freddie along the beach, and I am not frolicking, but in fact writing these words in longhand in a ring-bound notebook, to type them up later, while in front of me the unaccustomed sun sparkles on the see and I survey the vast sweep of the horizon, bounded at the left by Morecambe Bay and Blackpool Tower, a distant lump of Anglesey and the Snowdon mountains in the middle, dead head, all of sixty miles away, and on the right, away over my right shoulder, the Isle of Man in the far distance, looking much as it must have looked to the Vikings, windfarms notwithstanding.

Talking of Vikings reminds me that today is St Osyth’s day.  Previously, all I had known about St Osyth is that there is a village of that name in Essex, where people very recently were claiming to have seen a lion on the loose, which turned out in the end probably to have been a golden retriever like Cleo, or larger.  I have, however, brought with me some extensive research on St Osyth (the person) as opposed to St Osyth (the place), and I can report that despite the place being in Essex, St Osyth (the person) was not an Essex girl, but was born in Quarrendon, which was then in the Kingdom of Mercia, but is now, rather more prosaically, in Buckinghamshire.  Osyth was the daughter of a Mercian sub-king called Frithwald, and she was the niece of both St Edith and St Edburga of Bicester, so perhaps sainthood ran in the family, like relics.  Either that, or the entry level requirements for sainthood were more lax in those days.

She was raised in a convent in Warwickshire under the guidance of St Modwen and, unsurprisingly, considering the influences on her life up to that point, had decided to become an Abbess.  Daddy, however, had other ideas, and she was married off to Sighere, King of the East Saxons, in Essex. After Sighere’s demise, she finally achieved her ambition, establishing a convent at Chich, in Essex, of which she became the first Abbess. Only to be murdered by marauding Vikings in 700AD.

Somehow, in the way things did in those days when there was no official story and everything was a re-telling of a re-telling of a re-telling, the Martyrdom of St Osyth became attached not to Chich, where it happened, but to the Holy Well at Quarrendon, where she was born, and further embellished, some versions recounting that she picked up her own severed head and walked to the nearest convent with it under her arm, before collapsing in a heap. Had she really been from Essex of course, the severed head would have had lipstick, Abbess or no Abbess.

Her burial site, at St Mary’s Church, Aylesbury, became the site of so many unofficial pilgrimages that in 1500 the Pope of the day (why does that phrase conjure up an image of Gary Lineker?) issued a decree that her bones should be dug up and reburied elsewhere, in secret.  Confusingly, though, they were never actually buried at the Priory of St Osyth, which was merely dedicated to her when it was founded during the reign of Henry I.

So, what can we learn from the life and death of St Osyth, apart from the obvious warning not to stand too near to Vikings with large, sharp axes?  The answer is, I suppose, not much. She lived in a time when life was nasty, brutish and short, and random, nasty, bad things happened. A bit like today, really, especially in Essex.  We really don’t know enough about her, and in fact, had she not been of relatively noble birth, we would know even less, probably nothing at all. 

As I said above, the qualities required for admission to sainthood have changed a lot since the Anglo-Saxon era.  These days, the Catholic church, which is in charge of that sort of thing, has a procedure, with strict rules, which would-be saints have to follow after their earthly demise, a well-defined path including miracles and beatification, as you progress up the hierarchy towards sainthood.  It was all a lot more haphazard, way back when.

I’ve come to a conclusion though, while writing this. Sainthood is far too good to be wasted on the dead. I think there should be some recognition here and now, and I don’t see why it should be an exclusively religious thing either, so I hereby found the Order of the SSS (Steve’s Secular Saints) and I am going to start creating my own. If it makes you happier, I can stick a jiffy bag on my head, and do it all in Latin.

So, for all the good people striving to do good deeds in a naughty world, for all the copers, the carers, the searchers and the rescuers, be it of lost animals, lost people, or lost souls, this one’s for you. The night is long, especially after a week like last week, but take heart, take hope: the sun’s coming over the hill.