The thing that’s most disturbed my sleep pattern, however,
has been the continued unholy racket from the demolition of the old units down
at Park Valley Mills. The people
carrying out this work are only supposed to do it from 0730 hours to 1730
hours, but this stricture, which the council seems unable to enforce, despite
repeated complaints, doesn’t prevent the
morons from starting up a jackhammer at 6.45AM and carrying on until past 6 in
the evening.
On the mornings when they (invariably) wake me up just as I
am drifting off to sleep having finally got my hips and knees into a
comfortable position, I usually lie there praying for an industrial accident to
bring the site to a halt. Nothing serious, no deaths or anything like that,
just something that involves the Health and Safety Executive shutting down the
operation for 18 months or so. Sadly, so
far, my evil vibes are having no apparent effect, so the next thing is to start
sticking pins into a wax model of a dumper truck, I guess.
Anyway, it’s been hot. Damn hot, Carruthers. Hot and
humid. Not as humid as back home in
Darwin – Uncle Phil’s home, anyway, where he informed us there’s a night-time
low of 24dec C. But still, we agreed, humid
for Huddersfield, in the same way that having an extra toe is “normal for Norfolk”.
Talking of incest, Matilda has managed to avoid any further
aquatic adventures, although she still looks a little grubby around the
undercarriage from the dried mud which clung to her fur after her previous
misadventure. She’s taken to flopping out on the decking, or sometimes on the
cool soil of the semicircular flower-bed next to Debbie’s plastic deckchair in
the garden. Other than that, she has had
a relatively blameless, uneventful week, though she is definitely a cat that
decides when and where she will be furfled, under her own terms.
Over-familiarity or excessively-prolonged tickling on the tumjack, for
instance, is met eventually with hisses and claws, however much she might have
rolled over invitingly and squeaked her approval in the first place. Mind you,
I’ve known some girls like that.
When it has been hot and sunny, it’s reminded me of the
description of July weather from The Once and Future King, by T H White.
It was July, and real July weather, such they had in
Old England.
Everybody went bright brown, like Red Indians, with startling teeth and
flashing eyes. The dogs moved about with their tongues hanging out, or lay
panting in bits of shade, while the farm horses sweated through their coats and
flicked their tails and tried to kick the horse-flies off their bellies with
great hind hoofs. In the pasture field, the cows were on the gad, and could be
seen galloping around with their tails in the air.
Zak and Freddie came to stay on Thursday, as Granny and
Uncle Phil departed southwards that day, on a massive round trip to see all the
extended family relatives in the South of England, a journey taking in
Wiltshire, Southampton, Portsmouth, Eastbourne,
and then home via Cambridge.
Assuming they get back under their own steam, rather than on an AA low-loader,
we expect them to return next weekend.
Meanwhile Grandad has been exercising Zak (or possibly vice-versa) and
Freddie has been allowed to opt out on days when his poor old leggies will only
allow him to totter into the garden. So
far the dogs haven’t moved around with their
tongues hanging out, but they have been lying around panting, especially
Freddie, who finds hot weather bothersome.
Of the remainder of my self-selecting menagerie, I have little
to report. Brenda is still coming, we assume, though with the short nights and
the late sunsets at this time of year, we reckon it must be around 2AM and none
of us has the energy to stay up in order to confirm this. All that we can say
for certain is that something creeps
up the steps from the garden in the middle of the night and eats the
combination of peanuts and leftovers which I put out on the decking each
evening. For all I know, it could be the neighbours.
Likewise, the birds seem to have largely forsaken my
offerings, apart from the jay(s) who persist in hanging around and bothering me
for peanuts, and the small tits (Google spider, please note) on the hanging
bird-feeders. I don’t know what happened to that tatty little Robin who used to
hop around. Do Robins migrate? He’d managed to survive all winter, the cold and the icy blast, he'd lost a few feathers, and he was a
proper little ragamuffin. Maybe he’s hibernating, or whatever Robins do in the
summer, or he’s got a contract to pose for Christmas cards or something. I miss
him, though. Some days last winter, his was the only friendly face I saw.
Maisie’s efforts to get her two feral felines re-homed are
still getting nowhere. In the meantime, she’s continuing to feed and water
them, and is going to get the builders working on her new house to construct a
cat-shelter out of left-over bricks, etc., which is probably something more
permanent than many homeless humans could expect. I still fail to understand
how massive organisations such as The Cats’ Protection League and the RSPCA can
sit on huge piles of money at their head offices and yet the local branches are
struggling, and leaving messages on the ansaphone saying that they aren’t
taking any more cats, because they are full.
Maisie even offered Sunshine and Bill Sikes to me, but
there’s no point, because in their present state, even assuming they could be
trapped and brought over to Huddersfield, we couldn’t keep them in for weeks on
end, with Matilda and the doggies to consider, and if Sunshine and Bill were to
get into the garden they’d be down in the woods out back before you could say
“Felix”, and all that effort which Maisie has put into befriending them and
socialising them so far would be wasted. So – all suggestions gratefully
received. All that is needed is to get them into a shelter somewhere, and get
them put up for re-homing. In the meantime, Maisie bashes on, heroically, more
or less on her own. And I feel sorry for them, and for her. But especially for
the cats. Any cat’s death diminishes me, for I am involved in catkind. As John
Donne might have said.
Speaking of temporary shelters in the garden, Debbie has
been practising her camping skills and putting up a shelter made of a tarp in ours. Whereas you or I might think of a tarp as a bulky, oily thing which
secures a load of wood to the back of a lorry, in fact the “tarp” scene is
absolutely humming amongst the wild camping/survivalist/ outdoors
fraternity. Debbie’s tarp, which she
ordered over the internet, is a special lightweight one (ie a small piece of expensive
green gabardine-y material with metal eyelets as opposed to a larger, cheaper one) and came complete with an
instruction DVD where a Ray-Mears-lookalike shows you how to drive your
trekking pole into the ground, run a guyline from it, and anchor your tarp with
tent pegs. As I pointed out to Debbie, I
remember camping with the Boys’ Brigade in bell-tents, and ever since those
days, the three little words that mean so much have been “sewn-in groundsheet”.
Anyway, she is determined that next time we go off in the
camper, she is going to sleep outside, in the bivvy-bag, under a tarp, rather
than inside, in the bed, under a duvet. I said “Send me a postcard.” In
preparation, she has also been learning how to tie knots, including all the ones
which again took me back to my days in the BB, the ones with improbable names,
such as “clove hitch”, “bowline on the bite”, and “sheepshagger on the bend”.
If only I had met her when I was 13, she would have been the perfect girlfriend,
and we could have started fires by rubbing things together.
On Friday, she decided to put all this into practice and,
while I was engaged in the perfectly normal suburban activity of cooking a veg
curry (mushroom Madras, if you are interested) she took her tarp into the
garden, set it up, gathered some twigs, sprinkled them with Maya dust, got out
her firestarting flint and tinder, lit a fire, boiled some water on it, and
brewed herself a cup of tea. Yes, she’s just a firestarter, a twisted
firestarter. In the middle of this, apparently one of the neighbours came out
into their garden and said very loudly, wanting to be overheard, “It absolutely REEKS of cannabis out
here!” before going back inside and slamming the door.
In view of this obvious mistake, I may have to go around there and break
it to her that she has actually been smoking small twigs and kindling all these
years, and should ask her dealer for a refund. It does, however, if true, probably explain why
she is so uptight all the time.
Deb came in when it started spotting with rain, the
lightweight, and also because the curry was ready. I chided her for not staying
out there all night, and suggested that if she did so, she was likely to wake
up and find she was sharing the bivvy-bag with a badger. Still, I shouldn’t be too hard on her, she
deserves a bit of fun. She still has no idea if the College are going to offer her
any hours, come September. The whole place was in uproar on Thursday because of
the lecturers striking against the “restructuring”, and Debbie got up at crack
of dawn as usual to drive to Birstall to do her outreach session, only to find
that some gooneybird there had told the class that it wouldn’t be taking place
that day, because of the strike, and sent them all home, despite the fact that
Deb herself had previously told them it definitely would! Anyway, if the work
isn’t forthcoming in September, we could all be living under a “Basher” in the
woods, so maybe the knot experience will come in handy after all.
In the meantime, I have once more been looking at the dog
re-homing websites, conscious of the fact that, if we don’t get moving soon, we
will be looking at the possibility of a dogless holiday trip in the camper,
assuming that we ever get away, of course.
It is heartbreaking, though, to look at all these poor dogs in the
pound, and read their sad stories. When
I had identified two or three possibles, I said to Debbie that they ought to
have web sites like this for humans – then she could put me on one:
“Steven is 58 human years old, and finds himself in reduced
circumstances through no fault of his own. His coat is mangy and threadbare, he
can no longer go walkies, and his eyesight isn’t what it used to be. He needs a
forever home with an owner who is experienced
in handling and training fat old evil-smelling drunkards.”
One of the dogs we were looking at was perfect - at least from the description - a collie cross called Jess. I mentioned her to Deb and read out the blurb
about her, only to discover that she suffers from “occasional post-spaying
incontinence.” Debbie replied that one
incontinent person in the house was more than enough. Does she mean me? Surely not. Still, we may yet find ourselves driving off
to Scotland
in the camper, singing “Jog along Jess, hop along May” after Vashti Bunyan,
except her version was “Bess”. That song,
which she wrote about setting off to the Hebrides in a gypsy caravan, with a
horse and two dogs, always makes me think of us going off in the camper,
especially the bit about “It’s a long road, and weary are we, bubble up kettle
and make us all some tea”. In fact, I played it again while I was writing this,
and was surprised to note the verse about
“There lived a dog in London
town
With one ear up and one ear down”
Because the photo of Jess on the dog web site showed her in
precisely that pose. Maybe it’s an omen. Spooky!
Unwanted animals overflowing the sanctuaries, unwanted
people growing in number on the street.
Boris Johnson was forced to admit this week that he’d miss his targets
for reducing rough sleeping in London
altogether. The latest annual figures show that 6,437 people were seen rough
sleeping in 2012-13, compared with 5,768 the previous year, a 13% rise year on
year and an increase of 62% since 2010-11. Homelessness charities said the
problem was likely to get worse as a result of cuts to welfare and local
authority budgets, and called on Johnson to take action. Good luck with
that. And, as eny fule kno, the official
figures are only the tip of a much larger pyramid, because they don’t take
account of the people who are sofa-surfing.
In a related, and more local example, Barnsley Council has
been issuing summonses for people who can no longer pay the Council Tax.
Sometimes, you know, you just blink your eyes and it’s like you’re back in 1990
all over again. This time around, it’s because the welfare “reforms” imposed by
the Tories and the mini-Tories have brought a whole lot of people into the
realms of paying Council Tax when previously they were exempt, or had it paid
for them. Now they have to find extra funds
to pay, out of a budget that in many cases is borderline anyway.
Sheffield Council is another which has, this last week,
shamefully doing the Tories’ work for them, by prosecuting people who can’t pay
their Council Tax, because of central Government policies. Eric Pickles is getting a free ride at the
moment, because he sits there in Whitehall, smug in his vast office, administering his part of the death of a
thousand cuts, and passing the grief of it
on to the local authorities (disproportionately more in
Labour-controlled areas) and forcing them to then cut local resources and
services while saying all the time “It’s nothing to do with me!”
Well it is. It’s everything to do with him, and I would like
to see Councils, especially ones in Labour-controlled authorities, grow some
balls for once and just pass a motion refusing to set a rate, in the same way
as Hatton did in Liverpool in the 1980s. Instead
of tacitly agreeing to Tory cuts at one remove, send a message back that enough
is enough. If we have to have temporary chaos in local government in order to
hand the problem straight back to Pickles and wipe the smug grin off his face,
so much the better. Like lancing a boil,
the sooner it’s done, the sooner it’s over.
I would just like to say, though, how especially
disappointing I found Barnsley Council’s attitude, in particular, although it
didn’t surprise me. Barnsley Council are the people who caused me to be
arrested and held in a police cell for half a day back in 1992 for non payment
of the Poll Tax. I’d like to say it was
a wholly political act, not paying, but in fact it also stemmed in part from
the break-up of my then relationship and the financial difficulties which
ensued from this. Not that this stopped Barnsley Council from sending its
licensed goons, in the form of Rossendale Certified Bailiffs (one of the many
bloated cancers that has grown fat on the grimy arse of local government
finance policy) to bang on my door at 11 O’clock at night to shout “MR RUDD, I
HAVE A WARRANT FOR YOUR ARREST” through the letterbox. They also pretended at
first to be police officers, which I think is actually, sort of, er, kind of
illegal.
As it was, I didn’t open the door to them, but agreed to
voluntarily surrender myself at a police station the next morning, which I duly
did, after first making arrangements for someone to feed Russell and Nigel in
case I didn’t come back. I was arrested
and cautioned, and told I would appear before the Magistrates. After most of a day
in the cells, I was given the opportunity to buy my freedom by writing a cheque
for the arrears, which I did. Fortunately the bank didn’t bounce it, even though there was no money in the account, or I
would, presumably, still be languishing in that very cell, or one like it. But it left me with
an overdraft that took three years eventually to clear completely. So, I have
no love at all for the fat burghers of Barnsley. Mahogany from the neck up. And now they’re helping the Tories to grind
the faces of the poor and disadvantaged. Like they need any help. I don’t know how many Councillors there are
on Barnsley Council, but from what I remember, the railings round the Council
Offices have quite a lot of spikes on them. One Councillor’s head on each of
those spikes would be my idea of a "poll" tax.
Nothing much seems to have changed since 1936, when George
Orwell mentioned Barnsley Council’s grandiose marble headquarters in “the Road
to Wigan Pier”
‘The foundation stone
was laid on Thursday, 21st April, 1932, by the then Mayor, Councillor R. J.
Plummer, and the building was formally opened by H.R.H. the Prince of Wales,
K.G., on Thursday, 14th December, 1933… from the designs of Messrs. Briggs and
Thornley, Architects, Liverpool. The Contractors were Messrs. T. Wilkinson and
Sons, of Sheffield (foundation); Mr. Chas. Smith (stonework up to ground floor);
Messrs W. Thornton and Sons, Liverpool
(super-structure.) The cost of the site (including demolition) was £12,445; the
cost of the building was £136,252. From
“The Official Guide to Barnsley”, issued by the authority of the Barnsley Town Council. NB. that total cost of new Town
hall was £148,697 and was incurred at a time when the town admittedly needed
over 2000 houses, not to mention public baths.
Still, at least the Church of England has once more proved
it is a far more effective and hard-hitting opposition than the Labour Party,
when Archbishop John Sentamu said this week that tax avoidance is like robbing God.
One obvious solution would be for John
Sentamu to be our next prime minister, and for Ed Miliband instead to become
Archbishop of Canterbury a job for which his constant havering and
prevarication make him eminently suitable.
Ed Miliband has recently declared that there will be “no
return of the Labour greybeards” if he wins in 2015. A senior Labour source
said there were no plans whatsoever to bring back veteran former ministers.
“There will be no return of the greybeards,” the source declared. “Ed wants to
put across a message of change as we head for 2015.” Given that the “change” he
has in mind is to be more like the Tories than the Tories, I don’t think he
needs to worry. I can feel the electoral apathy from here. The Labour Party,
however, should be thinking about who its next leader might be, if they aren’t
going to do the obvious thing and ask John Sentamu, although I suspect our next
Labour Prime Minister is currently still at school. Sadly.
The more I see of politicians and politics in general, the
more I am becoming convinced that they are not only all evil and corrupt, but
that they are also all dangerously-deluded fantasists as well. Twenty or thirty years after we first armed
the Taleban in Afghanistan, as a power play against the might of the then
Soviet empire, and in the process, created a power base for Islamic fanaticism
which was subsequently turned back against us, it turns out we are finally
talking to them, or at least attempting to.
The justification from the politicians for the needless
deaths of British and US personnel in that benighted conflict is apparently
that there have been no terror threats directly from Afghanistan since our invasion in
2002. No, because they now come from Reading and
Leeds instead, and from Somalia
and from Mali, and from Pakistan, and from anywhere, in fact, where our
actions in Afghanistan
have radicalised yet more idiots to acts of hate. To pretend that there is no link is either
stupid, wilfully misleading, or criminally negligent and uncaring. Or all of
the above. And we’re about to create another nest of vipers by giving arms to
the Syrian rebels in the same way as we initially armed the Taleban all those
years ago. No wonder Marlene Dietrich
sings “when will they ever learn?”
And so we came to Sunday, and the feast of St Ethelreda. St
Ethelreda is also, rather confusingly, St Audrey, for those who like to confuse
foreigners with idiosyncratic English spellings and pronunciation. She actually started out as Æthelthryth (or
Æðelþryð) and was probably born in Exning, near Newmarket
in Suffolk, in
about 636AD. She was one of four daughters of Anna of East Anglia, all of whom
became founders of religious institutions, which has to be some kind of family
record. Through her other she belonged to the splendidly-named dynasty of the
Wuffingas, the ancient kings of East
Anglia, though most of their records, being
kept in the monasteries in the region, were destroyed in the Danish incursions
prior to the Norman conquest.
Æthelthryth made an early first marriage in around 652AD,
when she would have been only 16, to Tondberct, chief or prince of the South Gyrvians. The “Gyrvians” was just another word for
the “Fenmen”. She managed to persuade her husband to respect her vow of
perpetual virginity that she had made prior to their marriage. Once more, I
have to observe, we’ve all met girls like that. I was going to type we’ve all “come
across” girls like that, until I realised it was probably inappropriate in the
circumstances.
Upon his death in 655AD, she retired to the Isle of Ely, which she had received from Tondberct as a
gift. She was subsequently re-married, however, in 660AD, at a more matronly
age of 24, this time for largely political reasons, to Ecgfrith, King of
Northumbria. Unfortunately for both parties, Ecgfrith wasn’t such a strong
believer in vows of perpetual virginity, and, despite having apparently
originally agreed to the idea, by 672AD, at which time she would have been 36
and (in Saxon terms) getting on a bit, he decided he’s rather have a bit of ye
olde rumpy-pumpy and attempted to enlist the help of St Wilfred, then just
plain Wilfred, Bishop of York, to persuade her to change her mind. When this
failed, he attempted to remove her from her cloister by force, causing her to
flee back to Ely with two of her faithful nuns. She was saved from the
attentions of her pursuing husband by either a miraculously high tide which
lasted for seven days, or a miraculously-growing ash-tree which sprung from her
staff when she planted it in the ground, depending which improbable legend most appeals to you.
Ecgfrith eventually got fed up and went and married someone
else, a woman called Eormenburg, and expelled Wilfrid from his kingdom in 678AD.
According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Æthelthryth, meanwhile, founded a
double monastery at Ely in 673AD, which was later destroyed in the Danish
invasion of 870AD.
St Æthelthryth eventually died of an enormous and unsightly
tumour on her neck, which she gratefully, and rather sportingly, in the
circumstances, accepted as Divine retribution for all the necklaces she had
worn in her early years. Throughout the Middle Ages, a festival, called "St.
Audrey's Fair", was held at Ely on her feast day. The exceptional shoddiness
of the merchandise on offer there, especially the neckerchiefs and lace-work,
contributed to the English language the word "tawdry", which is a corruption of "Saint Audrey." Having said that, at this time, the
Puritans of eastern England
had a downer on anything lacy, as being a bit too flamboyant, in any case.
The modern shrine of St. Æthelthryth,
containing the relic of her hand, is at the Roman Catholic Parish church in
Ely, St. Etheldreda's. Originally when her grave was relocated some years after
her death, by her sister, Seaxburh, the body at that time was found to be
uncorrupted, and the clothes intact. She was re-buried, at that point, in a
white Roman sarcophagus which had been appropriated for the purpose from the
ruins at Grantchester, primarily because it looked to be about the right size.
Oh well, waste not, want not.
Quite what I am supposed to take from the life of St Audrey
is still unclear to me. Avoid sub-standard
neckwear, I suppose. The obvious lesson
is that we’re supposed to admire her purity and her vow of perpetual
virginity. Well, good for her, the
little goody two-shoes. It reminds me of the time an interviewer once said to
me, publishing your first book must have been the most exciting day of your
life, and I replied “you obviously weren’t there the day I lost my virginity!”
The theological equation is of virginity with purity, but
it’s often seemed to me that such a straightforward interpretation concentrates
almost exclusively on physical purity, and ignores spiritual purity. Some of
the nastiest, most vacuous people I have ever met have probably been virgins,
or very near offer, whereas I have known more than one person of – shall we say
– questionable conventionally moral virtue in the physical department, who
nevertheless was very kind to me and treated me well. Sort of taking a pattern
from Mary Magdalene, I suppose. Nor should we confuse chastity with fidelity.
Fidelity means different things to different people, and like all morality, is
composed of shades of grey, and different strokes for different folks. Being an
old hippy, I tend to think what counts
is whether or not you increase the overall amount of love in the world.
Anyway, that’s another week gone, and with it, the midsummer
solstice. Now, of course, it’s just a long, slow, gradual decline into autumn
and winter again, with the days getting shorter. The rain from last week’s
showers has already knocked most of the petals off the clematis. However, we’re
not through with summer yet, we may have some more fine days before we have to
batten down the hatches. Spookily enough, this week, at the height of
midsummer, with the summer breeze blowing through the trees, my next hospital
appointment letter arrived, with an appointment for a clinic on December 19th. Two days before the next solstice, when the
days are short and the “nichts are lang and mirk” as the song has it.
Each day I wake up takes me a day nearer that date of
course, and I mark it by punching out my daily doses of medication through the
advent calendar of their foil packaging. This always assumes that I don’t
decide to have an early Christmas and take them all at once. I don’t like to think that far ahead. Apart
from anything else, the amount of work potentially contained in those
twenty-four weeks makes my head spin. And not only the work, but the decisions I
have to make, on which many things depend. Christmas is coming. It’s a long road, and weary are we.
Decisions, decisions; starting with the decision of how and where we go off in the
camper van this summer. Last year, owing
to a combination of my hubris, bad choices, and the ineptitude of the cattery,
Kitty died, so I’m not overly anxious to repeat any of the experiences of that
holiday. Sitting here typing this on a
wet Sunday in the Holme Valley, with the omnibus edition of The Archers warbling away in the background, listening to the rain steadfastly plopping into
Brenda’s empty dish, just outside the door, and the drips from the overarching, wind-moved
trees rattling down onto the conservatory roof, it seems, to be honest, like
summer has already fast-forwarded; I’m finding it difficult to hold in my mind
the vision of the ribbon of road leading ahead and the huge green mountains and
the blue sky and the sun sparkling on Kilbrannan Sound, and making it look like
the Adriatic, and the heat-haze wobbling the thick air. Still, the cuckoo calls the seafarer to the
whale-road, and I daresay we’ll end up going somewhere, even if it’s only a wet
weekend at Walney. The way I feel right now, I’d count it a success if we ended
the holiday with the same number of live pets as we started it. In the meantime, today, I’m going to potter
around and re-pot some herbs, and take some time out to say goodbye to summer,
with all its fleeting sweetness. But
first, I’m going to pot some tea. I’m afraid that’s the best, and only, pot in
the house! Bubble up, kettle.
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