Matilda has been taking advantage of the unaccustomed, mellow sunshine, and has ventured still further, extending her territory, the way cats do, to the extent that she’s now found her way down the steps and into the garden. Far from being the mighty battle-maiden we were led to believe she was, however, she’s still scared stiff of the slightest little thing; it only takes Butch, next door’s dog, to bark, or a plane to go overhead droning its way down towards the little airstrip at Crosland Moor, anything out of the ordinary, in fact, to send her scuttling back inside for safety.
She’s also a cat that likes her home comforts, and she shares at least that much with Kitty – a propensity for food, and for sleeping on the settee in front of the stove, and a disinclination to go out in the rain. The first fall of the raindrops is enough to bring her skittering back through the door. Her food habits only differ from Kitty’s in that, whereas Kitty liked to eat little and often, Matilda eats large and often. And when she does chose to exercise, she does it at unorthodox times of day (for some reason, 5.45AM seems to be the optimum time for batting the little woolly koala round on the bare floorboards next door, a time which could not be better for making a clatter and a galumphing racket, the rest of the house being quiet, still, and, in my case, trying to bloody sleep!)
Now that she’s grown more accustomed to the outside world, we’ve also opened up the other cat flap, the one on Colin’s side of the house, but so far she has been defeated by its technical wizardry, in that she doesn’t seem to realise that you have to push the flap with your head to get through it and out into the garden. The one on “our” side of the house, which Russell and Nigel used to use, is just a tunnel through the breeze block wall, basically, and doesn’t have a flap as such. It was with a certain amount of trepidation that I agreed we should open up the Colin’s side cat flap, given that the aperture is quite small, and the cat is quite large; I had visions of her getting stuck, and us having to phone up Owen to come up from Wales and take the door off in order to free her. But, like 99.99% of the things we worry about, this has not, of course, happened, because she hasn’t even been able to work out how to use it in the first place!
Freddie and Zak have been round to stay a couple of times, and gradually their mutual hostility to Matilda is turning grudgingly to tolerance, via apathy. Actually, Zak has been pretty apathetic throughout, up til his last visit, when he suddenly seemed to register for the first time a) that there was a cat in the room and b) it wasn’t Kitty. It was like he’d suddenly woken up and thought “bloody hell, you’ve got a new cat!” For the rest of his visit, he was watching her all the time, ears up, sniffing, wanting to be friendly, whereas of course Matilda just growled at him, constantly, from behind the settee.
Debbie’s teaching continues to gather momentum. She has picked up yet another class this week, teaching Functional Skills English to a class of thirty 16-year-old trainee footballers in Stalybridge. However, as usual, information and support from the College has been sketchy to non-existent, the route from home to the venue there is high, hazardous and treacherous, over the Woodhead Pass, which closes at the first flake of snow each winter, and the learners are apparently resistant to being taught and don’t see the point, so it sounds like a heady brew. If the class continues, I predict that they will grow to either love her or hate her, and if anyone can take all of that raging testosterone in hand and mould it to higher purposes, I am sure my wife can. She has more testosterone than the rest of them put together.
Although, having said that, she blithely announced this week that the clock had stopped and she couldn’t get it working again, denouncing it gleefully as a piece of crap on which I should not have wasted out money on Ebay. It turns out she was trying to wind up the chiming mechanism and not the timekeeping mechanism, and when I directed her to the correct hole, the clock not only allowed itself to be wound up, but hey presto, started ticking again and has kept perfect time ever since. As I said to her, like so much else in life, it is a case of getting it in the right hole. Her reply is regrettably unsuitable for publication on the grounds of extreme obscenity, although it did fill me with optimism that, if the footballers try it on, they will get as much as they give.
One consequence of autumn, indeed, one iconic sign of autumn, is that, round here at least, and especially in our garden, the leaves have suddenly fallen, so that my wheelchair ramp is a carpet of crisp rustling, and lighting the stove has suddenly become a lot easier because there is any amount of fallen twigs lying around in the driveway just waiting to be gathered up. I can’t believe the speed with which time’s zipping by this year. Already it’s half way through October, and people are starting to talk seriously about Christmas. I looked up on my calendar of Saints to see which Saint we were going to talk about today, and I have to say, they are a singularly dull and uninspiring lot, apart from the obvious comic potential of St Manakus and St Bernard of Arce, both of whom have feast days today. And very silly names. So I am forced to fall back on the liturgical year, it being the twentieth Sunday after Pentecost, apparently.
Today is also the anniversary of the Battle of Hastings, 1066, the one date everyone but David Cameron knows, that fateful encounter on Senlac Hill that ended the rule of Harold Godwinson and brought “Norman wisdom” to our shores. I always think “Senlac” sounds rather like a proprietary brand of laxative, and I would imagine if you were a Saxon house-carl, on foot, facing a heavily armoured Norman cavalryman with a long sharp spear charging down the hill towards you, it probably had a similar effect.
I’ve also been looking round for October folklore and rural traditions. I love the yearly calendar of customs and traditions that mark the salient points of the year, especially as they hark back to a semi-arcadian rural existence when it always seemed to be harvest time, skies were blue, clouds fluffy, high and white, and people were more in touch with the earth and nature. I know, that last bit sounds as if I’ve been reading too much Thomas Hardy and watching too much “Wartime Farm” and I am aware, of course, that rural life in Victorian and Edwardian England, and even in the 30s, 40s and 50s, was nowhere near as pleasant as people like H. E. Bates would have us believe.
Anyway, my gleanings so far on the folklore and weather front include:
Rain in October
Means wind in December.
When birds and badgers are fat in October,
Expect a cold winter
When berries are many in October
Beware a hard winter.
In October dung your fields
And your land its wealth shall yield.
If ducks do slide at Hallowtide,
At Christmas they will swim;
If ducks do swim at Hallowtide
At Christmas they will slide.
Always will there be twenty-nine fine days in October.
If the October moon comes without frost,
expect no frost till the moon of November.
We’ve already had the frosts, of course, so the last one’s negated anyway. There are, indeed, loads of berries around this year, and not only in the Holme Valley. When we were on Arran, back in August, there were so many thick, heavy clusters of berries on the rowan trees up there that I remarked on it at the time to Debbie.
Unfortunately, my all-time favourite, “red sky at night, the shepherd’s hut’s alight” doesn’t seem to have made it to the final cut.
Mention of badgers above reminds me, sadly, that not all of them will be waxing fat this autumn, since The Blight has announced the cull of up to 70% of badgers in the pilot areas of Gloucestershire and the South-West. The idiocy of this approach, which will do absolutely nothing to halt the spread of bovine TB (and which has been roundly condemned and rubbished by several eminent scientific authorities, none of whom remotely resemble balaclava-wearing hunt saboteurs) was aptly summarised by a recent correspondent to The Independent
“Badgers are not the source of bovine TB but just one of the hosts of the causative organism, Mycobactrium bovis; the other major host is cattle, and three-quarters or more of TB cases are attributed to spread from other cattle. So even eliminating all badgers (which the pilot culls cannot achieve anyway) wouldn't get near halting the spread of the disease.”
The hapless government spokesman on BBC Radio 4 (12/10/2012) said that after all of this, they don’t even know if it’s going to be successful! Yet 70% of the badgers in the areas will be dead, to pay lip service to the farmers, to make it look as if the government is doing something, and for a “solution” which even its proponents refuse to claim with any certainty that it will work!
Still, what do you expect from a party whose leaders are capable of standing up at their conference and quacking out duck-billed platitudes about how
“We're not going to get through this as a country if we set one group against another, if we divide, denounce and demonise.”
And then in the next breath, virtually, goes on to say
“Where is the fairness, we ask, for the shift-worker, leaving home in the dark hours of the early morning, who looks up at the closed blinds of their next door neighbour sleeping off a life on benefits?”
Er, if that isn’t dividing and demonising, then I don’t know what is. Several things have happened to me this year that have shaken my faith and occasionally doubt the existence of God and a higher scheme of justice than is obvious to we mere mortals: the fact that George Osborne can utter those words and not immediately be struck down by a thunderbolt is one of them. I suppose all you can do is to shrug and file him away with earthquakes, tsunamis and other disasters that bring misery to hundreds of thousands of people, and for which there seems no explanation compatible with the idea of a loving and rational deity. As Chandler said, maybe God has off-days, like the rest of us, but he must’ve been having a real balloolie the day he created George Osborne.
And as for Jimmy Savile, don’t even get me started. I said all I really want to say on the subject last week, but even so I have been staggered and horrified by the sheer industrial scale of his apparent misdemeanours, so much so that grim humour set in, and I was moved to observe that had he displayed similar energies in any other field, other than predatory sex offences, he would probably have won an award. Then of course it occurred to me that this is exactly what he did do – his frenetic charity fundraising activities were the flip side of the frenetic energy he seems to have put into abusing people, and, as I said last week, he was obviously a darker and more complex, more unlikeable character than many of us realised.
As I write, however, there are still many unanswered questions – who knew about it, and when, who turned a blind eye, did he act alone, and did anyone actively help him, or help to shield him from the consequences of his actions, and finally, of course, could it happen today, indeed is it happening today? I wonder how many of those questions we’ll ever really find the answers to, especially the question of whether he had help?
At times during last week, it seemed to me almost as if I was the only person in the UK who’d been a teenager in the 1970s who hadn’t been assaulted by Jimmy Savile; I know one thing, though, if I had been one of his victims, and had suffered in silence and been ignored and told to stop being silly for all those years, then I wouldn’t consider my claim to be truly vindicated until I had answers to each and every one of those questions.
Being unable to find a suitable saint to celebrate today has inevitably driven me back to the Biblical texts which the Lexicon deems appropriate for this day in the church’s calendar, one of which (Mark 10: 17-24) contains a lesson for Mr Osborne:
And when he was gone forth into the way, there came one running, and kneeled to him, and asked him, Good Master, what shall I do that I may inherit eternal life? And Jesus said unto him, Why callest thou me good? there is none good but one, that is, God. Thou knowest the commandments, Do not commit adultery, Do not kill, Do not steal, Do not bear false witness, Defraud not, Honour thy father and mother. And he answered and said unto him, Master, all these have I observed from my youth. Then Jesus beholding him loved him, and said unto him, One thing thou lackest: go thy way, sell whatsoever thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come, take up the cross, and follow me. And he was sad at that saying, and went away grieved: for he had great possessions. And Jesus looked round about, and saith unto his disciples, How hardly shall they that have riches enter into the kingdom of God! And the disciples were astonished at his words. But Jesus answereth again, and saith unto them, Children, how hard is it for them that trust in riches to enter into the kingdom of God!
Today, then, has been a day largely of contemplation, and reading, a total contrast to yesterday. Yesterday was one of those golden, luminous October days when the colours seem to sing, and the last remnants of the high cumulus clouds of summer are being blown about a blue sky like the rags of a defeated army’s tattered standards. And for five hours or so I forgot the dreary tasks which are stacking up for me next week, and forgot the endless hive of ideas buzzing around inside my head, and, once I had been parcelled up in my wheelchair and shoved up the ramp into the camper van, almost forgot the presence of the wheelchair itself, because we were off on the road!
Not this time, kayaking or seal spotting, but, in fact, on a mission, bound for an animal shelter at Bawtry, of all places, to view a potential pooch. I was going to say, a replacement for Tiggy, but that would be not only incorrect, but wrong on other levels, too, there never will be a replacement for Tiggy, she was a one-off. Still, Debbie had noted this small dog as being one which seemed to fit some of our criteria, and we phoned the rescue centre to see if she was still there, and she was, so we decided that unless we went and saw her, we would never know.
For me, it was a rather emotional journey, because part of it followed the route I used to take when I had a job that entailed me going to an office every day, before I was ill. I was amazed to see how many of the places I used to pass through looked rather shabby, and decayed – small shops that had obviously shut down, mines and pipeworks that were shutting, pubs that had already closed and pulled their last pint. This, of course, is the consequence of the economics that says if you owe someone a hundred apples, it is possible to repay them by chopping down the orchard. The economics of the Mad Hatter’s tea party, which requires you to believe six impossible things before breakfast, then get up and inform on your neighbour if their curtains are still drawn at 6.30AM, slave all day for a wage cut or a pay freeze, exchange your birthright of employment legislation for a mess of pottage comprising shares in a company that might be closing anyway, then come back home and fortify your house, sitting in wait for the marauders whom you may, now, legitimately attack once they set foot on your own property. Oh happy day. Welcome back to the middle ages. Grilled rat on a stick, anyone?
Nature, however, was showing her best, her truest colours, with the leaves just turning, to yellow, and pale, and hectic red as Shelley might have said if he’d been there at the time. The Stocksbridge bypass is still there, I’m pleased to report, although there was no sign of the spectral monk in any of his usual haunts. For most of the journey, it was hot and sunny, better weather than the so-called “summer”, in fact, and the sun coming in through the big wide windscreen, the pleasant temperature caused by the heater being on “feet”, the steady drone of the engine, and the even steadier drone of Debbie reciting everything I’ve ever done wrong and why, more or less sent me off to dreamland, but I woke up just in time to navigate the last bit, down an unmade road off a narrow lane. The potholes were spectacular, and I cautioned Debbie not to let the expensive, new, petrol tank ground on any of them, as it would be just our luck to wipe it off on a rock the week after we’d paid £648 to have it re-fitted.
We made it to the car park, and Debbie dismounted to do a recce, eventually returning with the news that, to save unshipping me in the wheelchair with getting out the ramps and all that it entailed, we could drive up to the hardstanding outside their reception, and they’d bring the dog out to us, so I could look at her as well.
Which they duly did. She was a good little dog, looked a bit like a GSD crossed with a collie (“she’s got collie ears”, the kennel-maid said) and she is currently called “Missy”, although she has no idea of the fact, and doesn’t respond to the name. Sadly, she didn’t really respond to anything, apart from dog treats, which the kennel-maid administered at regular intervals, and for which the dog duly sat and sort of gave paw, although it was more honoured in the breach than the observance.
All in all, it was very disappointing, and we drove away rather downhearted. We did actually fill out a form declaring an interest in her, while we were there (which was altogether more interest than she demonstrated in us!) but really we only did that because apparently it was a pre-requisite to adopting any dog from there, and could only be done by personal application, but to be honest I am not sure she’s the dog for us, and it would be unfair to her to take her on in those terms, unless, like Matilda, it was a case of either that or the chop, so we will probably email them tomorrow and tell them to scrap the application.
The trouble is, I have this sort of vision of us rocking up at an animal sanctuary somewhere and seeing a dog in a corner somewhere, perhaps looking a little sad and neglected, who will look up and see us, and wag her tail, and come over to us and jump up to be patted. That is exactly what Tig did when Debbie went down to Marina Kennels that day almost seventeen years ago, and that is what I’d hoped would happen yesterday, but it didn’t. Perhaps I am being unrealistic and setting the bar too high, I don’t know.
So, anyway, it’s been a sort of harvest-home type week, a week of all being safely gathered in, of only venturing out when necessary, getting on with things behind the scenes, and, today, settling down, after writing this, with a pot of tea and maybe some crumpets, in front of the stove, while Matilda snoozes away on Tiggy’s old fleecy dog-bed, and the crespuscular shadows of dusk are stealing across the garden. A week of battening down the hatches, ready for the storms that will undoubtedly come, as Alan Hull sang in Winter Song:
“When winter’s shadowy fingers first pursue you down the street
And your boots no longer lie about the cold around your feet
Do you spare a thought for summer, whose passage is complete,
Whose ruins lie in ashes and whose ashes lie in heat
When winter, comes howling in…”
Time to tidy up the garden, time to put the fields to the plough. Time to bank up the fire and put the kettle on. It’s nearly dark and in a fortnight, at this time, it’ll be even darker still, when the clocks go back. The ploughman homeward plods his weary way, with the heavy horse’s harness jingling.
“Iron-clad feather-feet pounding the dirt
An October day towards evening”
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