Epiblog for St Patrick's Day

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. We are now officially “bythuene Mersh and Averil, whan spray beginneth to spring”- lapsing into Middle English there, for a moment, in case you thought my keyboard had gone funny.  Not that there is much sign of the spray beginning to spring, at least not at the moment. The weather has gone completely bonkers, and we’ve had four seasons in one week, if not in one day.

The week began with the snow making a comeback, and bitterly cold draughts everywhere within the house. Noting that we were down to three bags of coal, reluctantly I administered a local anaesthetic to myself and signed a cheque for yet another coal order.

Matilda and the doggies haven’t been liking it much. It’s OK for the brief moments when the sun shines, but hail followed by rain followed by cold winds is not their cup of tea, or Felix, or Winalot, if you see what I mean. Matilda’s been curled up on the Maisie-blankets at the foot of my bed, and the dogs, when they have been here, have been curled up with their noses in their tails. Zak on his armchair with Tiggy's old quilted winter dog-coat spread out over him, and Freddie on the settee wrapped in a Sheffield Wednesday towel with a hot water bottle, -odd, that, I always thought he supported Huddersfield Town, what with him being a terrier - and me sitting in my wheelchair two feet from the stove with another hot water bottle stuffed down the front of my Berghaus fleece.

Our own quest for a new dog has more or less stalled, but may also be about to take an unexpected twist, because Grandad is finding it more and more difficult, on medical grounds, to take Zak out, and one option that has been discussed is Zak coming to live here, so that I would be able to let him out in the garden to exercise himself to a certain extent during the day, and then whenever Grandad feels up to it, he can come and pick Zak up from here.  God knows how this will pan out; Zak is a pretty confused dog as it is, but who knows, time spent in regular human company might help him to become more generally adjusted, who can tell?

Notwithstanding the lack of spray beginning to spring, there is still evidence of a vast stirring in the undergrowth, of something happening, at least with the birds and the squirrels. Every morning now, as I am getting up, I can see them in the branches outside my window, and every time I put out some stale bread or some peanuts, they come flocking like never before, or so it seems. I don’t know whether there are really more of them, or just that the existing ones have got a bit tamer. Either way, it’s a full-time job feeding them.

Brenda has also been visiting, if it is indeed Brenda, and I’ve also seen what I thought was a young fox-cub in the garden once or twice.  If it is Brenda, she’s become a lot less regular in her habits since last year. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to get any pictures, largely because of the time it takes to rig it all up, and the fact that I can’t really justify sitting up half the night on the offchance that a badger might put in an appearance.  Still, the food seems to be disappearing. The fox-cub may in fact be a figment of my imagination, I have only seen it a couple of times, and then only out of the corner of my eye.

The coal was delivered bright and early Tuesday morning. So bright and early, in fact, that I was still in the midst of my ablutions, but that was no problem, because Debbie was up and about and let him in, and he stacked it neatly in the usual place.When I came through I said to her:

"Did I just hear the postman?"

"No, it was the coal being delivered"

"Oh. That's early. Did you give him the cheque?"

"What cheque?"

"That cheque on the table in the envelope with 'Ace Energy Ltd for coal delivery, give to driver' written on the front! That cheque!"

"How was I to know you'd written a cheque?"

"Who do you think pays for the coal? The coal fairies?"

In retrospect, this was probably an unwise retort, but anyway, my bruises are healing nicely and in a couple of weeks, I’ll be right as rain. Meanwhile, I posted them the cheque. So the coal arrived, the stove stayed in, and the fire stayed lit and kept us warm, and, unlike the Vatican, we achieved all of this with smokeless fuel.

I can’t let the week pass without commenting briefly on the white smoke from the Vatican chimney. Mainly because I want to bang on about how zeitgeisty I was last week. No sooner do I start whittling on about St Francis of Assisi last week, than the new Pope decides to call himself Francis I. How weird is that? But anyway, yes, the white smoke. If they lived in Kirklees, the Cardinals would be getting a snotty letter and a visit from the council, threatening them with an ASBO under the clean air act.  It’s early days yet on the new Pope front, he’s a bit of an unknown quantity; in fact, he hasn’t even been installed yet. That happens next Tuesday, and no doubt, half-way through the ceremony, a paper-clip wearing a mitre will pop up and say, “You appear to be attempting to install a new Pope – do you want help with that feature?”

Anyway, the election of a new Pope had very little impact on the remainder of our week, which unfolded as usual, with a catalogue of disasters.  The camper van’s gearbox had failed to “settle down” as the garage had predicted, and it was still popping in and out of second gear at random. So, it was back up to the garage for further investigation.  Colin the computer man had to be contacted because of Debbie’s laptop running slowly, like a cludgebucket full of clarts, in fact. He promised to come on Friday, and, as I had to go back to Calderdale Royal Infirmary on Thursday, I had arranged with the plumber to come on Friday as well.

My trip back to Calderdale was a bitter-sweet experience, to be honest; the actual reason for my attendance was to be assessed for botox injections to straighten out my legs. The fact of sitting in a wheelchair for so many hours in the day means that the muscles in your legs go what the physio calls “chair-shaped”. This means that you can’t straighten your legs in bed, so you go into cramp, or at least I do, and you can’t sleep for more than twenty minutes or so without having to turn over.

Unfortunately, the neuro-surgeon who assessed me for the procedure took the view that my consultant and the physio were both wrong, and that injecting me with botox would actually make me worse – because what you are doing is equalising up the forces pulling on my knees by making the strong muscles weaker, rather than the weak muscles stronger.  So that was that, back to square one.

It was strange, though, going back to somewhere where I’d spent almost six months of my life.  I almost didn’t make it back there at all – on her way out on Thursday morning, first thing, Debbie pulled the door handle off, and I had only just re-attached it in time for the ambulance man to come in and get me.  I didn’t see any of the staff who had nursed me in 2010 – in fact, the old rotunda, where I was, isn’t even a ward any more, it’s been closed down and the staff dispersed to the more modern areas of the hospital. But, as I say, it was bitter-sweet.  On the way back, I fell to talking to the ambulance driver, and found that he restored VW camper vans in his spare time, a fact which I filed neatly away in the lumber-room attic of my mind, in case of very bad news from the garage. On the sweet side, I saw my first crocuses, huge blocks of them, on the verges near Greenhead Park; on the bitter side, the funny little DIY shop that used to sell “invisible nails” has gone. Empty and boarded, another casualty of the insane economics of the madhouse, of which we will no doubt hear more when Osborne gets up on his hind legs and starts braying about there being no alternative, on Budget day.

So that was Thursday, totally wasted, by the time I got back. I looked forward to catching up with things on Friday, which turned out to be a mistaken apprehension, because Friday was a disaster, all things considered.  The camper needed a new set of gear rods and a membrane, which generated another huge bill.  On the plus side, the parts are genuine VW parts, and guaranteed for a year, which is just as well, because the way it’s going, we may have to sell up the house and live in the camper.

Debbie’s laptop, by the time Colin looked at it, was diagnosed as having had some sort of “event” on 28th February, which had left its hard disk littered with errors and detritus, and in his opinion, the easiest thing to do was to just back up everything, then wipe it and re-install Windows from scratch.  Ouch. On his way out, he pulled the door handle off.

About the only bright spot was that the plumber was quickly able to diagnose and rectify the fault with the boiler. The timer clock was exactly 12 hours out, so it had been coming on at 7pm instead of 7am, and at 11am rather than 11pm.  Once he’d sorted that (free of charge, top man) it now seems to be behaving itself – so it was just the switch after all, rather than anything more sinister.

By the end of Friday, Deb was feeling ill again and went back to bed for three or four hours, so I was left sitting in the wreckage of the day, with only Zak and Freddie for company, til Granny arrived back at 9pm to pick them up.  She felt a bit better on Saturday though, and was able to get up in time to watch the rugby, culminating in the debacle of England being trampled by Wales and managing to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in Cardiff. Still, according to the commentary, when I could hear it over Debbie screaming obscenities at the TV,  Wales appeared to have not only Katherine Jenkins, but also Aled Jones playing for them, so we were obviously doomed from the outset.

Which brought us, of course, inevitably, to Sunday, and the feast of St Patrick. Which gives me a reason to write about Ireland, for a change. It’s a long while since I’ve been there, and I wouldn’t mind going again.  But it’s a long way to Tipperary, it’s a long way to go. Writing about Holy Cross Abbey last week reminded me of that trip in 1997, a trip when we also visited Thoor Ballylee, the tower near Gort, in Co. Galway, where W. B. Yeats and his family lived from 1921 to 1929, having bought it for £35.0s.0d. in 1916 from the estate of Lady Gregory.

It’s now a museum, dedicated to Yeats, with the usual memorabilia, first editions, and a visitor shop. Amongst the memorabilia is a painted board which says:

I, the poet William Yeats,

With old mill boards and sea-green slates,

And smithy work from the Gort forge,

Restored this tower for my wife George.

And may these characters remain

When all is ruin once again.

“George” being Georgie Hyde-Lees, whom he married in 1916, on the rebound after having been rejected by both Maud Gonne and her daughter, Iseult. Yeats described the ground-floor chamber as “the pleasantest room I have yet seen, a great wide window opening over the river and a round arched door leading to the thatched hall”. It became not only a home for him, but also a symbol in his poetry, and, in some ways, a symbol of Ireland itself.

By the time we visited in 1997, I was already getting pretty decrepit, and couldn’t make it up the winding stair to Yeats’s writing room, but the whole place was, nevertheless, imbued with his brooding presence. The winding stair itself became central to his symbolism, as did the antique Japanese sword he kept, and wrote about in  his collection Meditations in Time of Civil War, noting that:

Two heavy trestles, and a board
Where Sato's gift, a changeless sword,
By pen and paper lies,
That it may moralise
My days out of their aimlessness.
A bit of an embroidered dress
Covers its wooden sheath.
Chaucer had not drawn breath
When it was forged. In Sato's house,
Curved like new moon, moon-luminous
It lay five hundred years.

Various interpreters of Yeats have seized on his fascination with this artefact and built interpretations on it that suggest he was familiar with the ideas of Zen. I was one of these, once, when I first read the poem he wrote that starts:

If I make the lashes dark
And the eyes more bright
And the lips more scarlet,
Or ask if all be right
From mirror after mirror,
No vanity's displayed:
I'm looking for the face I had
Before the world was made.

Because, of course, “what is the face you had before the world was made?” is one of the Koans, the gnomic riddles, questions without real answers, asked by the Zen Masters of their pupils in an attempt to prod their mind into a state of enlightenment. These days, though, I’d class the poem alongside the one that asks “What then, cried Plato’s ghost, what then?” as its chorus, and I think Yeats is talking about the experience, common to all religions, of the “timeless moment”, the realisation of eternity, the mystical, felt-rather-than-understood point where you stand, for instance, in Holy Cross Abbey, and realise for a second or two, although you aren’t conscious of the time, at the time, that everything all exists, always has and always will and then it’s gone again, and you snap back into time once more.

Van Morrison, no less, has also “written” a song which contains the same image – well, to be honest, it starts off with the Yeats poem and then veers off piste into repetitive rambling, as do many of his other songs, now I come to think about it. Carla Bruni, Mrs Sarkozy as was, has also covered it. I’m not sure how far that knowledge takes us towards a state of enlightenment.

Yeats lived at Thoor Ballylee through some politically turbulent times, the aftermath of the Easter Rising and the turmoil of civil war following the establishment of the Irish Free State. I’ve written before about the sequence Meditations in Time of Civil War, especially the pivotal poem The Stare’s Nest By My Window, where he compares the state of Ireland during and after the conflict to the bees building a hive in the abandoned starling’s nest outside the window.

The bees build in the crevices
Of loosening masonry, and there
The mother birds bring grubs and flies.
My wall is loosening; honey-bees,
Come build in the empty house of the stare.

There was no way at the time that Yeats could have known just how long and how bitter the struggle to rebuild his country would be.  Even today, seventy four years after his death, Ireland still has to have two national anthems when the rugby team plays, one for Northern Ireland, and one for the Republic. True, our visit in 1997 was a lot more peaceful and a lot less fraught than my previous one in 1984, when there were checkpoints and armoured cars and soldiers with Armalite rifles everywhere, and the bloody Queen Mother, bless her, decided to visit the province on the day we wanted to cross the border into Donegal, which had a similar effect on the security forces to that produced in wasps (or bees, come to that) by prodding their hive with a sharp stick. But there are still people who want to use bullets rather than ballots to change the face of the country, although, thank God, their numbers have declined.

I’ve written before about devolution, and what a disaster it has been both for the United Kingdom as a whole, and for each of its constituent parts. We have a Welsh assembly whose chief function seems to be the licensed murder of wildlife and livestock in futile gestures to appease the farming lobby, and a Scottish assembly that has given us the current dogs’ breakfast that is the imbroglio over the Scottish referendum, but I do feel that maybe there should be a little asterisk somewhere so that what I’m actually saying is “devolution has been a disaster* except, maybe for Northern Ireland”.

I realise that in setting down these thoughts I will possibly offend or discomfit at least three of my friends north of the border, but I hope if they re-read this they will realise that actually every word has been carefully considered to have what I think are their best interests at heart. The trick, it seems to me, is “how do we ensure the continued independence and wellbeing and growth of the Scottish people and Scotland while also continuing to ensure the continued wellbeing and growth of the UK as a whole?”

Although the issue has been obfuscated by all sorts of party politics and vested interests, I do believe that it is possible to achieve that aim, although what I am suggesting will be viewed initially as anathema by some people whom I count as my friends. I hope my own loyalty to Scotland is not in any doubt. I have been going to Scotland on holiday since 1971, over 40 years ago. All my adult life, in fact. My ancestors, the Fenwicks, were on the side of the Jacobites. “Sir John Fenwick’s the flo’or amang them” is piped by smallpipers both sides of the border, Ettrick shepherds in shepherds’ check, in memory of Sorrell, the sequestered horse that resulted in William of Orange’s death when it stumbled on a molehill, leading to much quaffing of Drambuie and toasting of “The Wee Gentleman in Black Velvet”. When it comes to Scottish culture, I can quote Rabbie with the best of them, I can recite the Selkirk Grace on Burns Night (and I cook a mean vegan haggis) and I even know my Hugh MacDiarmid. So, as an “eemis stane in a yowdendrift”, I hope you will respect my bona fides.

If I could, I would wind back the clock and apologise for Culloden and the Highland Clearances. Not least because it would take the wind out of the sails of Alex Salmond. And that could never be a bad thing. But I can’t. Even though my ancestors were probably on the losing side, I can’t. We have to start from where we are.

At the last election, Alex Salmond won a mandate from Scotland for a referendum on independence.  Which probably was rather a “brown trouser” moment for him, since previously, up to that moment his political stance had been posited on the sort of vague idea of “Scotland shall be free … er … one day” That was perfect for Alex Salmond, while it lasted, because it was the optimum mix that allowed him to surf a wave of vague, unfocused anti-English casual racism that is extremely prevalent in some parts of Scotland.  The Braveheart tendency, which is normally expressed these days by supporting whoever England happens to be playing at either football or rugby. “Anyone but England”.  That should be the SNP’s motto. Unfortunately for him, the people of Scotland seemed to have called his bluff.

So, a devolution vote there must be.  I have to say at this juncture, that if it was up to me, I wouldn’t have started from here, but if we have to, personally I think England should also vote on whether Scotland breaks away. I just don’t buy this self-determination for indigenous races argument which is the basis for Scotland deciding on its own. We’re all such a genetic hotchpotch in these islands, who is to determine what being “Scottish” truly means? I think the road to devolution down which we were set by Tony Blair in the run up to the 1997 election has led to all sorts of anomalies and precedents, it’s created divisiveness and ill-feeling, it’s fed extremism and xenophobia in both Scotland and England, and it’s landed us with, amongst other things, the West Lothian question.  Anyway, good luck, Scotland, if you decide to go your own way, though quite what you are going to do for a currency, armed forces, a diplomatic service, etc., etc., is a mystery to me.

It’s impossible to look at the history of Ireland, or Scotland, for that matter, and ignore the effect of hundreds of years of conflict in the name of religion.  In many ways, the history is the conflict. It’s also well nigh impossible to pick it apart in a sensible fashion, since it’s mired in what Slugger O’Toole calls “Whataboutery”, whereby each side on the sectarian divide can top the other side’s stories of past atrocities, going back to when Adam was a lad. It strongly resembles Israel versus Palestine, in that respect.  The late Alastair Hulett, writer of Among Proddy Dogs and Papes, said of his song:

Sectarianism is a blight on the working class that keeps us divided against each other and thus much easier to keep in our place. Divide and rule is as simple as it is effective.

He sings:

And the old men lilt how the blood was spilt
On the banks of the river Boyne
Three hundred years of hate and fear
Clutched like a miser's coin.

The sectarianism in both cases is also a clash between Church and State. The laws of the State prohibit rioting and murder, but there have been those, who, even recently, have been all too ready to cite “religious” authority as a reason for carrying out acts that have all too little to do with “religion” as I would understand it. To my mind, “my religion, right or wrong”, is just as bad as “my country, right or wrong.” This is not to say there aren’t also those in the Irish religious communities, who, like Cardinal Cahal Daly, have spoken out against violence and extremism.

The Roman Catholic church does have a lot to answer for, historically, in Ireland, not least the Magdalene Laundries, and a failure – both recently and in the past – to investigate and punish those involved in child abuse, and to turn them over to the authorities. It has become a bit of a rubric in the public’s imagination, though, these days, to imagine that paedophilia is rampant, that it’s the “norm” in the Catholic church, and that every priest must, ipso facto, be some form of kiddy-fiddler.  It’s now got to the stage where the idea is firmly wedged in the public mind, alongside the notion that everyone on benefits is a scrounger and that all immigrants have to do is rock up at Dover Docks to be given a free council house, a plasma TV and a wad of M & S Vouchers.  It’s probably going to take some shifting, judging from the reaction to the news story this week about the Catholic Archbishop of Durban, Wilfrid Fox Napier, who has been criticised from several sides for having described paedophilia as a “psychological illness, not a criminal condition".

The South African cardinal told the BBC that people who were themselves abused as children and then abused others, needed to be examined by doctors. Personally, I think there is a debate to be had around this topic, especially in such areas as the premature sexualisation of children and the pressures put on them to conform to their peers. And at the end of the day, if you do get a better result from locking someone up in a secure hospital and trying to treat them, than  you do by locking them up in a prison cell and letting them out in exactly the same state as when they went in, surely society wins as well?

He is, of course, entitled to his view, and he was, as far as I can see, speaking for himself rather than for his Church, but his Church does have views on the subject of sexuality, and they are often inflexible and doctrinaire. This is why I don’t get on with “organised religion, anymore, why I am a lapsed agnostic violent Quaker.  There is a difference, however, between religion and faith. One of my Facebook friends, posted this on her page this week, in a discussion about atheism, and it’s so spot on, summing up exactly what I think, that I have nicked it, shamelessly, word for word:

It's not a question of needing religion. It's a question of having faith in God. This is something many atheists do not seem to get. I hate most manifestations of organised religion with a passion…but my relationship with the God I believe in and you don't is central to my life and my being. Religion and faith in God are two different things which may sometimes coincide. Nobody who is capable of rational thought would say that you need "religion" to have "morals". That just isn't the point. I do not differ from you (atheists) in that I have morals. I differ from you in that I believe in God.

I hope she won’t mind. If I say she’s a sweetie, she’ll probably forgive me. 

In St Patrick’s time, Ireland was known as Scotland, in the Dark Ages, which weren’t really dark, it’s just that we don’t know much about them.  It must have all been very confusing. And dark.  To mix up the murky mess even more, many scholars subscribe to the theory that there were not one, but two St Patricks, but that at least one of them was a Scot who was captured and taken to Ireland.

These days, of course, St Patrick’s day is an occasion to dye the Guinness green, and for people to celebrate their “Oirishness” by dressing up in outlandish costumes and getting completely blitzed to the sound of diddly-diddly music.  In the same way that Manchester United fans get more and more fanatical the further away from Manchester they actually live, so the most “Oirish” of the “Oirishness” is to be found in places like Australia and America, where the likes of NORAID used to like “the ould country” so much they raised funds to help blow it up. 

Admittedly, and obviously, the Irish diaspora has also played a part in distance lending a certain enchantment to the view. Anyway, sadly, he probably didn’t drive the snakes out of Ireland, because the fossil record apparently shows there weren’t any there to start with, although, as with Joseph of Aramathea at Glastonbury, there is a legend that his staff sprouted and took leaf when it touched Irish soil. Although other sources say this took place at Aspatria (literally “the ash tree of St Patrick”). He may or may not have used the symbol of the shamrock, with its three leaves, to deliver a parable on the concept of the Holy Trinity.

In historical times, people would wear “St Patrick Crosses” on their hats or clothing, either embroidered or made from paper. Jonathan Swift, writing to Stella, back home in Ireland, in 1713, mentions the custom in London:

The Irish folks were disappointed that the Parliament did not meet to-day, because it was St. Patrick’s Day; and the Mall was so full of crosses that I thought all the world was Irish.

I wonder what he would have made of green Guinness, shamrock bunting, and inflatable shillelaghs. Probably a hat, or a brooch. So, anyway, that’s St Patrick, and a very happy St Patrick’s day to all Irish folk, everywhere. And I hope it’s not too long before I get back there again, to the mysterious land of mists, mountains, and moving statues, where the dark Mourne sweeps down to the sea.

But for now, I have a much more mundane set of tasks to concentrate on, next week.  I’ll be watching the rooks and the squirrels building their nests, not in the empty house of the stare, but in the bare branches of the garden. I’ll be doing my accounts, editing books, and no doubt shouting at the TV when the idiot of a Chancellor delivers a Budget of gross mismanagement on Wednesday, and I’ll be watching the Pope being installed, and, in view of the news about the knees, I’ll be concentrating on the Zen aphorism that:

"Life is a bridge, therefore build no house upon it."

And I’ll be looking for the face I had, before the world was made.

Meanwhile, to be honest, there is so much great music from and about Ireland, that I was spoilt for choice for this week’s “closer”.  First of all, I thought of Bob Davenport singing “The Blarney Stone”, purely for kitsch value.  Then of course, there is the incomparable  Mary Black, who, although she is coming physically more and more to resemble Mrs Doyle from Father Ted, has still contributed some amazing stuff to the canon, notably “Song For Ireland”.  Both of those, and indeed, the gorgeous Maureen Nic Armfluff, whose songs go round and round my head on repeat most days, could easily have clinched it.  Not to mention Ralph McTell singing about how it’s a long long way from Clare to here. In the end, it was taking me so long to decide, so I bunged them all in, an unprecedented St Patrick’s Day playlist.

But then, it’s not every week that a new Pope is elected. Especially a Pope who apparently likes to live the simple life, and who travels by bus.  He may well be a sprightly, dynamic young 76-year-old, and he may well be a traditionalist, and a Jesuit (so watch out for the enemies of the Vatican being bumped off by an albino monk wearing an Opus Dei spiked garter) but he has washed the feet of twelve AIDS victims, I suppose. And, like two feminists doing the washing up, it is, at least, a start. A Pope on the bus, just like one of us. Habaemus Papam, in Omnibus Princeps. Which prompts the question, what if God was one of us?