Epiblog for St Dotto's Day

It has been a busy week-and-a-half in the Holme Valley. It began with the snow still stubbornly lying on the ground. Gradually, day by day, hour by hour, it vanished, melting away. It felt like having to prise winter’s grip from round your throat, finger by icy finger.

Matilda viewed the glacial pace of seasonal change with an imperious gaze of disdain, bordering on contempt, in that way that only cats can. The weather hasn’t actually physically prevented her going out for the odd, brief scuttle, but it’s cold, and unpleasant, and Matilda is a cat that likes sleeping, preferably somewhere warm. A philosophy to which I, too, would readily subscribe, right now.

The lingering snow has, however, meant that the birds and the squirrels have seemed especially grateful for the bread and the peanuts we’ve been putting out, although of course I have no way of knowing this or measuring their gratitude, other than the speed with which they demolish our offerings, and then hang around, looking for more.

Tuesday night is badger night, at least it seems to be the night when Brenda can most be relied on to make an appearance.  Perhaps she goes to the gym other nights, or has evening classes.  She didn’t disappoint this week, in fact, she, too, seems to be particularly appreciative of the fare on offer (nuts and raisins in her case, plus a couple of chopped up bananas that had gone black, and some home-made pakoras/samosas that were no longer fit for human consumption.) She got quite enthusiastic while stacking that lot away, stomping and clattering around on the decking, hoovering up the loose, scattered peanuts, and signifying her gratitude by pushing the empty tin bowl around with her head.

I’ve noticed that dogs do that, as well, at the end of a particularly toothsome repast, and, as I’ve written previously, I think it would enliven human formal dining if we also adopted this method of showing our appreciation for what we have just been truly thankful.

On the human front, there was little of significance to note, at least in the early part of the week. On Wednesday, Granny set off on one of her periodic peregrinations, visiting the younger elements of Debbie’s extended tribe of outlaws, and Zak and Freddie, therefore, were once more entrusted to our care.  There was just enough snow left on the cricket-field at Armitage Bridge, apparently, for Zak to do his usual careening, skidding turns, rolling over and covering himself with the frozen, crispy, powdery ice-crystals.

Earlier in the day, Debbie had decided to call in at Holland and Barratt in town, en route from dropping her mum off at the station, and had announced her intention of downloading a £3.00 off voucher from the internet for that very purpose.  This should have been so easy as to not be worthy of comment. But first, it failed to print for some reason – no problem, apparently, all you needed was the actual number off the online voucher. Easy enough. She copied it on to a piece of paper, then promptly set off, forgetting to take the piece of paper with her.

Fifteen years ago, at a time when Debbie and I both had exactly the same model of mobile phone, in my haste and flapdoodle leaving the house late one morning, I picked up her phone, by mistake. A little later on that same morning, her phone received a text from my phone at home; it said,

“Turdbrain, you have got my phone.”

I am pleased to report, dear reader, that this week, only 15 years later, I was able to repay that slight by sending Debbie an appropriate riposte, when I texted her,

“Turdbrain, you forgot the Holland and Barratt voucher!” together with the voucher number.  Despite this, she still forgot to mention it at the checkout. Good job it’s valid until April 30^th.

By Thursday, by dint of keeping my head down and largely ignoring the rest of the world, I had completed a surprisingly large number of the gnarly, horrid, boring, scut-work tasks which I had been putting off (for months, in some cases) having realised that you can only take displacement activity so far. You can run, but you can’t hide.  Debbie, meanwhile, was wittering about going off somewhere in the camper on another “adventure”, which could only mean one thing: we were in for another bout of “sticking out dark nights, alone.”

This meant that we’d have to find someone to look after Matilda. Cometh the hour, cometh the man, or in this case, the woman, in the shape of Katie the Holme Valley Doggy Nanny. A couple of phone calls later, and a short transaction and handing over the conservatory key, and Matilda’s needs for the weekend were assured. This just left us the loading up of the camper, and on Friday at 5pm, we set off, finally, arriving at our usual spot on Walney Island just under three hours later.  Before we left, Debbie presented me with the first half of my birthday resent, a bumper sticker for my wheelchair which read “On an adventure, before dementia.”  The first night in the camper always seems cold, and this was no exception. The Inuit have a way of grading how cold nights are by how many dogs you need to sleep next to, in order to keep warm. Hence the band name “Three Dog Night”. Friday was definitely a three dog night, but sadly, we only had two.

The first things I felt and heard when I woke up on Saturday, the morning of my fifty-eighth birthday, was the warm sunlight streaming through the windows of the camper, and the twittering of a skylark, rising and falling high aloft above the next field.  Not exactly a Chelsea morning, where the sun pours in like butterscotch and sticks to all your senses, a la Joni Mitchell, but a very near offer.  I am no expert on skylarks, and I guess the odds are fairly heavily stacked against it being the same one I wrote my poem about, but, nevertheless, it was a Walney Island skylark, if not the Walney Island skylark. And at that moment, it stood, or rather it soared and sang, as an archetype of all skylarks, everywhere.

We had our usual slow, achey start after the first night in the camper van. Added to the cold of the previous night, the hard, unyielding boards of the rock-and-roll bed test your sinews in unfamiliar ways, not all of them pleasant, until you get used to it. Still, it seemed a bright day, possibly the best day so far this year, weather-wise. The breeze was keen, just balancing on the edge of being more than a breeze, more like an offshore easterly. But the sun was shining, it wasn’t actually snowing and it seemed – at least to me and the skylark – as if spring had come at last.  Debbie popped the side door of the camper, Zak loped off into the grass, and Freddie scuttled after him, like a small arthritic wombat.

Eventually, after breakfast-stroke-lunch, Deb decided to get ready to go kayaking. Since Debbie getting ready to go anywhere (even if it’s just to the shops, to look at all the shiny things twice) takes at least two hours, not counting the mandatory 20 minutes added time for general faffing about at the end, I wasn’t expecting anything to happen soon, so I spent the time instead scrutinising the other inhabitants of our little headland.  Nearest to us was a white ford transit camper van of some description – what looked like a home-made, rather than a commercial conversion.  I watched as its driver carefully parked up. A middle-aged bloke who looked a bit like John Shuttleworth emerged, followed by a thin, brown greyhound, which, now it’s written down, looks to be rather a contradiction in terms.  The greyhound’s owner, who I later discovered was called Les, then proceeded to delve in the back of his vehicle and emerged clutching what looked like a home-made TV aerial on the end of a long pole, which he proceeded to erect (steady, the Buffs) and began walking around, muttering into a walkie-talkie.

By now, I was beginning to wonder if we had unwittingly stumbled into some kind of surveillance operation,  but if we had, it was subverted by the greyhound, who I subsequently discovered was called Thomas, and was actually a whippet, bounding in through the open side door of the camper and proceeding to demolish whatever food Zak and Freddie had left in their bowls.  An apologetic Les came shambling over to retrieve him, and we fell to talking. It turned out that the walkie-talkie was actually a hand-held VHF which worked in either frequency or channel mode.  Les, it seemed, was by way of being a bit of a radio ham. That morning, he’d been chatting to people up at the north end of Walney, on the Isle of Man, across Morecambe Bay, and, just before Thomas made his foray into our domain, some walkers, high up in the Pennines somewhere.

I was interested in this stuff, not because I am an anorak who spends too much time closeted away in one room (I am, but that wasn’t why I was interested) because we’d often considered VHF for when Deb is out in the kayak on her own, but we’d been put off by the high cost and the attendant rigmarole. But, said Les, these hand-held sets he was using were only about £40 on Amazon, and you didn’t need to take the standard test to be able to use them.  I made a mental note to investigate further, in view of Debbie’s upcoming birthday.  She, meanwhile, was finally ready to launch, and she paddled off into the distance, in search of some seals to bother. It was now the warmest part of the day, and I settled down on the back seat of the camper, accompanied by two warm, snoozing dogs, to carry on writing my next book.

I must have dozed off, however because I was suddenly awakened by a crackle of static outside and the sound of a walkie-talkie conversation.  At first, I thought that Les had come back, until I saw a high-vis yellow waistcoat with “Police” written on it go past the side window of the van.

I popped open the sliding door and said, “Good afternoon”, in my best, BBC announcer voice.  The inhabitant of the said high-vis vest was a slight-ish young lady with a firm demeanour, who was called ”Officer 2217”, according to her collar number.  I assumed that we were about to get the “Now move along, no overnight camping” speech. Because of Debbie’s pathological refusal to use campsites, we’ve had hassle like this before. Usually from private security rather than the law, though, and once, in Scotland, wild camping notwithstanding, from the ghillie of the Knockbrex Castle estate.

“We’ve had reports from a concerned member of the public of a lone kayaker entering the sea here, and we wondered if you knew anything about it.”

Clearly she had worked it out from the kayak rack hanging down the side of the van. Watch out, Hercule Poirot. I explained that my wife was indeed out sea-kayaking and seal-molesting, she was indeed on her own, but she had been doing it since 2005, in some pretty inhospitable environments, and was not only experienced, but she had a GPS, a PFD, a mobile phone, a map, and even a hand-pump on board.  I offered to call Deb’s mobile, which I did, but of course, it bombed out, because there was no signal out in the wilds of Walney.  Anyway, the upshot was, I ended up telling Officer 2217 my name, and Debbie’s name, and our address, and the fact that we were there because today was my birthday, and that I didn’t like pina coladas, or getting caught in the rain, and she only left after I double-dyed promised her to ring 101 and check in when Debbie got safely back.

The visit of the police had unsettled the dogs. In fact, it had unsettled me. As I later said to Debbie, it was quite an original gift for her to arrange to have me questioned by a policewoman on my birthday. Thank God I didn’t mistake her for a strippogram.  Anyway, the only way Debbie can top that off next year is probably to have me arrested or something. We shall see.  But meanwhile, Freddie was whining at the door to go out, so I allowed him to exit, and Zak followed. Five minutes later, having watered the hedgerow, Zak was back by my side, on the bed. Freddie, however, was nowhere to be seen. So, taking stock, I now had a (potentially) missing wife and an (actually) missing dog. Both of which, if the worst came to the worst, I would have to answer for, to Debbie’s mother. Not good.

Plus, it was actually knocking on time for Deb to have returned, and there was no sign of her. I briefly considered phoning the police to say “that experienced sea kayaker I told you would be OK actually does seem to be missing after all, and while you are at it, could you also search for a small terrier called Freddie?” Suddenly, Freddie’s whiskery little face appeared at the door.  Thank God. Perhaps he’d just had a senior moment and wandered off for 45 minutes.  Senior moments can sometimes last that long. On an adventure, before dementia.  Anyway, I told him in no uncertain terms to get the hell back inside now, and fortunately he heard me, and obeyed.

That just left Debbie. Eventually, at about ten to eight, I saw a little dot come round the headland.  As it grew nearer, I confirmed via the field-glasses that it was indeed my errant spouse.  She was nithered to the bane when she got back, and had seen “many” seals, all of whom had been “massive buggers”, hauled out on the shore at the south point of Walney. I then told her about my day, and she listened incredulously.

“What is wrong with these people? Too much time on their hands?”

“Don’t knock it,” I said, “you might be glad of it, one day.”

By the time she’d managed to put the boat back on the rack, she was completely done in, and frozen stiff, so I boiled up the kettle and made a couple of hot water bottles for her, and in doing so, realised that the gas bottle was on its way out. There was just enough in it to heat up a hasty birthday meal of vegan hotdogs, tinned spuds and yet more noodles.

Sunday was a day of frustrations, by and large.  The main problem we had was that, in order to continue to be able to cook, have hot drinks, and hot water bottles, we needed to find somewhere that sold bottled gas. Of the correct sort (butane camping gaz) in the Furness Peninsula, on a Sunday.  That is your mission, should you choose to accept it. We did also have the Trangia with us, and I had boiled the water for our morning coffee on it, but in doing so, had dangerously lowered our supplies of meths. So, one way or another, we were losing the ability to cook. 

Eventually, tootling around, we found ourselves at Booths in Ulverston, and Debbie decided to nip in and do some shopping, emerging clutching the second half of my birthday present, a bottle of Grappa.  Grappa is the fiery Italian brandy made from grape-skins and is the main reason why Ernest Hemingway wrote in very short sentences.  Stringing long, complicated skeins of words together is not an option with Grappa, and it was probably also a major factor in his last novel being unfinished.  The quest for camping gaz had proved fruitless, however, and we decided to cut our losses and head back, via a quick look at Furness Abbey. I was interested in Furness Abbey because I had seen some photos of the tombs of the knights in full armour which they have there, apparently one of only eight locations in the country where such effigies may be found. 

I had known of the Abbey previously. At one time, Furness was second only to Fountains in the Cistercian Abbey prosperity league table in the UK, and the monks of Furness Abbey built the castle on Piel Island to monitor and control trade between Furness and the Isle of Man.  Furness Abbey is also supposed to be spectacularly haunted, by a White Lady, by a spectral monk who climbs a now-demolished staircase and therefore appears to float away in front of you, by the ghosts of a pair of doomed lovers, one of whom was lost at sea, and by a headless monk who gallops through the main archway on a black horse, signifying death to whoever sees him. There is even a long-distance footpath, The Cistercian Way, dedicated to the historical importance of the monks.

None of these was in evidence, sadly, that Sunday, and Debbie couldn’t find the tombs either. It turns out that they were inside the museum, which she didn’t enter because it cost £4.00.  I asked her to check if they had any postcards of the tombs. She said they hadn’t.  So we left them to it. I’d like to say that on the way out we saw a spectral monk climbing an imaginary staircase, but we didn’t.

Debbie proposed to solve the cooking crisis by building a fire and barbecuing various vegan delicacies, including carrot and coriander sausages, on it.  The building and lighting of the fire wasn’t a problem. There was plenty of driftwood on the beach. Soon she had a massive blaze going, but by the time it had died down enough to cook on, the wind was getting up enormously.  The dogs decided that if being campfire doggies came with added hypothermia, they’d chose the duvet in the camper, thanks, and both joined me inside. By this time, we’d cooked and eaten, and, given that the wind was, if anything, stronger than ever, and that it was freezing cold and pitch black outside, I expected Debbie to come in, too, but for some reason she decided to embark on a self-imposed litter-pick by torchlight, picking up and burning a wide variety of discarded items left by previous less scrupulous campers on the spot, and burning whatever she could find. (Although she did it out of pure stubbornness at the weather, it did actually look much cleaner around the camp site the next morning. I suggested that she sends an invoice for three hours cleaning to Barrow in Furness District Council.)

When she did eventually join us inside the relative warmth of the camper, she tried to play a CD and the CD player packed up, obliging us to listen instead to Nigel Kennedy on Classic FM, talking about how hard it was for the early violinists to keep in tune. “Because the strings were gut, this made it very difficult…” intoned Nige, to which Debbie added “Especially for the cat.” All in all, it had been a frustrating and aimless day, redeemed only by the fact that I had seen my first lapwing of the spring.

The wind moaned around us all night, rocking the camper on its springs like a boat at moorings, and by Monday morning, it was, if anything, stronger. This was annoying, as I had expected it to do the usual thing and blow itself out by dawn.  Breakfast had to be cooked one item at a time, on the Trangia, with the last of the meths, which made it a prolonged affair. Not for the first time was I tempted just to drink the meths and cut out the middleman.  After breakfast, Debbie took the dogs for a very bracing walk along the beach. Someone was buzzing around in a helicopter overhead – probably Prince William, looking for a lost lone kayaker.  Snowdonia was appearing and disappearing on the far horizon, and I felt that rain was in the offing.

The quest for bottled gas continued. Phoning one of the numbers off the fascia sig of one of the closed places we’d visited on Sunday produced the information that Bardsea Leisure Park sold camping gaz, so we set off along the coast road out of Barrow, threading our way through the town in order to do so. We passed a forlorn ice-cream van, parked up. “Hoagie’s Ices, often licked, never beaten!” was the optimistic slogan. I imagine sales were slow that day.  There is inevitable post-industrial decay in Barrow, and if BAE ever goes, that will be it, goodnight Vienna. But alongside the boarded-up pubs (“Thanks for the last twelve years” in a handlettered notice in the window) there are neat streets of pebbledashed cottages that wouldn’t look out of place in one of the much more chic seaside establishments. I wondered whether any of these houses was ever lived in by Nella Last, whose wartime diaries, via Victoria Wood, finally put Barrow on the map for many people.

Bardsea Leisure Park is situated next to a vast Victorian cemetery – another  kind of leisure park – on the outskirts of Ulverston. On the road in, we passed a Buddhist Temple, and then later, a Buddhist Monk, striding along in purple robes.  A Buddhist on the Cistercian Way is a nice metaphor for ecumenical matters, but I bet he was absolutely freezing, unless he was wearing a thermal base layer.  The bottled gas and meths problems solved, we trundled into Ulverston itself. There wasn’t much of the day left, so Deb decided she would take the dogs up the singular hill that dominates the town, accessible via Ford park, and topped off with a white obelisk like a lighthouse.  I managed to navigate her to the park using just the one-inch OS map, and remarked on my achievement to her.

“Yes, well, you are used to things that only measure an inch.”

Having checked out the park, which was full of dog no-go areas and notices saying all dogs on a lead beyond this point and various other prohibitions, Deb decided on a whim that we would go instead and have a look at Grange-Over-Sands. I think the name conjured up for her a little seaside jewel with a prom and golden beaches where the dogs might frolic.  On the way there, we passed through Cark, which turned out to be quite appropriate, because at that point I chose to turn on the radio for “PM”, and found that Margaret Thatcher had carked it.

The whole news bulletin was turned over to tributes and remembrances.  Apparently Nick Clegg, who is in many ways her demon love-grandchild, had said that she had made “a unique and lasting impression” on British politics. This is true; much in the same way as Bomber Harris made a “unique and lasting impression” on Dresden. I felt no elation on her death. She had been stricken with dementia for years, apparently, and much as Debbie might joke about it being my turn next to go gaga, I saw enough of people with dementia while in hospital never to wish it on my worst enemy. Not for nothing do we joke about what we fear most. So I wouldn’t be cracking open a bottle of fizz, although I imagine the pubs in Goldthorpe still haven’t closed their doors. Nor did I join in the wishes of George Galloway, who apparently tweeted that she would “burn in hell”. If Margaret Thatcher has gone to hell, she’ll be busy closing down the furnaces.

Sadly for the British people, Margaret Thatcher’s core values are very much still with us. Divide and rule; middle class "strivers" are "better" than working class "scum"; workers’ rights and wages should be curtailed, with the threat of unemployment as the weapon of choice; the treasure-house of the nation’s core industries should be converted to shares and sold off to the highest bidder, regardless of the national interest; the rich should be richer and the poor poorer, and all of the foregoing shall be presented (with the aid of a supine and willing press) to the British public as in some way being “freedom of choice”.

This is her legacy, and it’s alive and well in the policies of both major political parties, and the loony fringes such as the Liberal Democrats and UKIP.  This is her true legacy, under which we still suffer.  In fact, for legacy, read yoke.  They may well have “thrown away the mould” when they made Margaret Thatcher, but it grew back, spore by spore, in the form of Tony Blair, David Cameron, George Osborne, Nick Clegg, Nigel Farage and Ed Miliband. Tories to a man.

Because of Margaret Thatcher, money and profit are all that matters now, and are the acknowledged yardsticks by which “worth” is measured.  Because she said that it’s basically OK to barge your way to the front, to climb over anyone’s face, to send your own family an invoice for cooking their breakfast, we now live in a money-obsessed, bigoted, xenophobic, uncaring, every-man-for-himself, shop-thy-neighbour country, where there is no decency and no respect, where there truly is no such thing as society, whether or not there was when she did or didn’t utter those words; a country where, if they could think of some way of metering it, they would privatise the very air you breathe.  It wasn’t Clement Attlee who gave us the likes of Mick Philpott; it was Margaret Thatcher, and all she stood for. Where there was love, she sowed hatred; where there was faith, she sowed doubt, where there was hope, despair, where there was light, darkness, and where there was joy, sadness.

I gathered from the news that she is going to have some sort of lavish semi-State funeral. I vaguely wondered how much this is going to cost, at a time when we’re apparently so strapped for cash that we’re cutting benefits to the poor and the sick. If we have to have garish manifestations of state mourning, let’s find some nameless person who died, maybe while homeless, unable to claim any benefits to which they were entitled, and let’s bury them in Westminster Abbey, in The Tomb of The Unknown Benefits Claimant, and make Cameron and Osborne go there on their knees, on an annual pilgrimage. There is no shortage of candidates.

By this time, we were at Humphrey’s Point. Deb took the doggies off, on a lead, because sheep graze on the marsh there, and I dozed in the sunshine, reflecting on how difficult it was to kill off Zombies, Vampires, and Thatcherites.

Tuesday morning dawned windy yet again, and we started to pack up the camper, preparatory to wombling home. Debbie had college stuff to do, and I didn’t want to add unduly to the pile of email that would undoubtedly be waiting for me.  I regaled Debbie with the news that today was St Dotto’s day. Fatuously, I wondered aloud if St Dotto had a grotto, and if he did, whether he went there to get blotto, when he’d won the lotto.  He was an Abbott in Orkney in the sixth century, apparently. Deb had collected some interesting stones and shells off the beach, including a massive chunk of sandstone that had weathered in a pattern of concentric light and dark rings.

“It looks like the Rings of Saturn,” I said.

“Better that, than the rings of Uranus.”

We had made an early start, as we were going to stop off at Gummer’s How on the way back, to give the dogs some exercise.  Driving out of Barrow, I noticed a place that sold artificial grass. “Can you believe that?” I said. “Yes, I can,” says Debbie. “Actually, I bought a square of it before we came away. To put down in the back of the camper.” I know when I am beaten.  I kept schtum. The last time we had a similar conversation was when she brought home, unaccountably, a coir mat from Aldi, which was labelled for some reason as a “choir” mat.  As used by Gareth Malone, presumably.

Eventually, we arrived at the Forestry Commission car park at Gummer’s How, and Debbie and the doggies trotted off to conquer its massive 342 metre peak!  Gummer’s How, it struck me, was quite an appropriate name, given the news agenda. I settled down to snooze in the camper, and to write some more pages of The Bow of Barnsdale Bar.  I was forced to observe that St Dotto was having a nice day of it, so far. The Coniston range, on the distant horizon, was partially masked by blue haze, but what I could see of it implied that there were still crevices of snow at high altitude.  The trees were still bare, but here at lower level, the sun was warm, and welcome, especially through the big wide windscreen of the camper.

The next thing I knew, Debbie was rapping on the window next to my sleeping head. They were back, I’d fallen asleep, Gummer’s How was conquered, and it was time to load up two sleepy doggies and drive home.  The radio was still jammed with Thatcher memorabilia; meanwhile, in the five seconds before the pips, North Korea is apparently threatening to press the button and burn the entire peninsula to a nuclear crisp. And now Thomas Schaffernacke with the weather…

On the way back along the M62, I looked at the shapes of the remaining strands of snow, lingering on Saddleworth Moor, and was immediately struck by how much it looked like the Uffington White Horse, or the Long Man of Wilmington, one of those huge chalk figures cut into the hillside.  We arrived back to a warm welcome from Matilda, who had apparently missed us, despite the fact that most of the time, when we are here, she ignores us.  I was glad to get back, because my knee was a bit swollen. Not so much housemaid’s knee, more that if I didn’t raise it, it would eventually grow bigger than an entire housemaid.  

I lit the fire, and started typing up my notes. But by then, I had had a nip of Grappa, and I was feeling as blotto as Dotto. Short sentences. Dot and carry one.  Dot Dot Dot.  Full stop.

Tomorrow, I would grapple with three days’ accumulated emails and the invoicing and the bank rec, and I would be a year older than the last time I did them. But now it was time to dot the t’s and cross the eyes.  My bed was calling me.