It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley.
I know I say that every week, but this week it’s been especially true. Last
Sunday, I woke up to the keening of gulls and the shushing of the waves
breaking on the beach at Dougarie, beside Kilbrannan Sound, on the west coast
of the Isle of Arran. From this (and
from the absence of two weeks of Epiblogs) you will deduce that Debbie
succeeded in her plan to declare a snap “second holiday” and whisk us all back
there, for just over a week.
Was it worth it? Well, it was a quixotic gesture, and of
course, in the limited time available, there wasn’t the opportunity to do all
that she’d planned, but on the whole, yes, it probably was. The dogs enjoyed
it, anyway. The downside was that, by
spending something like 16 days of August, plus the last week of July, on
Arran, I’d created a massive self-inflicted backlog of work, a fact that was
rather weighing me down as the van droned steadily southwards, homewards, past
Kilmarnock, Dumfries, Carlisle, Penrith, Preston, Manchester, and then home.
Deb had made good time in getting back – something like five
and a half hours, plus dog-comfort stops – so we were actually back, after
dropping off Freddie and Zak at their own house, in time to sit n the van and listen to The
Archers in the driveway of our house, before commencing unloading, something
which Matilda seemed to find extremely confusing, as she was pacing about next
to the van, yowling for us to get out, go inside, and feed her.
The old home town looked the same, as the song has it. A few of the plants had been completely
waterlogged, and it looks like we have lost the bergamot and the bronze fennel,
in the herbs section, but otherwise we seemed to have escaped any great
disasters. At least there was electricity.
I lit the stove and fed the cat, making sure I got those two tasks the
right way round, Deb went off to have a shower, and I cooked us some chip
butties for tea, and that was more or less that.
Monday was a rude awakening. Deb was required at College for
some of this pre-registration stuff that they expect everyone to pitch in with.
I was rather sceptical about this beforehand, since they have cut her hours
right back this year, but she did it anyway, to show willing, and came back
that evening with the news that there may be some additional hours gong after
all, so it was probably a good job that she made the effort to attend – right
place, right time, that sort of thing. I
said that we’d need every extra hour they could cram in. I’m not sure why, I
must have had a premonition.
Matilda seemed pleased enough to see us back, although now
she is going in and out of her own catflap, and coming and going more or less
as she pleases, her contact with us is very much on her terms, not ours, and
usually involves feeding time or snuggling up on the foot of my bed. Doubtless that will change as the days grow
colder, wetter and rainier. Misty seems
to have accepted her return to the comforts of home, and taken it in her
stride, though I am sure for the first few days she was wondering where the
beach had gone, and why there was no-one willing to play “stones” with her.
Meanwhile, I was bashing on with getting together the
figures for 2012’s accounts, the most urgent of the many urgent tasks on my
list, in view of the fact that Companies House would fine me if I didn’t file
before the deadline. Debbie had a
training day on Tuesday at Dewsbury, so Misty and I spent a thoroughly exciting
day snoozing (her, and occasionally me) and punching numbers into spreadsheets
(sadly, just me). Deb was back at teatime, and,
later that night, going out to fetch something she’d left in the vehicle, came back in and reported that the camper van
was sitting in the driveway in a massive pool of its own oil. Fantastic. Just what we needed. Another massive
bill, a torpedo in the financial engine-room.
It was too dark by then to look at the problem overnight, so we decided
to re-assess it in the morning.
Morning came, as mornings do, and the light of day confirmed
that we had indeed got our own miniature version of the Exxon Valdes disaster going
on at the front of the house. There was
nothing for it but to phone the garage. Clearly it would be inadvisable to try
and start the van up without any oil in the engine, so they would have to come
to us. Which they did, confirming the
melancholy news that the actuator on the turbo – a part that cost approximately
£30, had seized in the “on” position, causing a build-up of pressure inside the
engine that had actually blown a hole right through the casing of the
end-housing, spraying oil all over the drive.
Given the drastic, indeed catastrophic, nature of the fault, I suppose
we should be grateful that the faithful old camper got us all home from Scotland (and
Debbie back safely from Dewsbury) before it decided to blow up. Had it gone
half way up Glen Chalmadale, or on the String Road, we’d have had no option but
to be towed home there and then.
But it is still a massive hassle, and preoccupied me for
much of the remainder of the week. Well, that and last year’s accounts, which
were probably just as big a disaster, albeit not so messy. The garage man brought a massive can of oil
with him, topped up the level in the engine with as much as he could cram in,
and then set off to try and get to the garage before it all came out of the
bottom. He just made it, apparently. As
it stands at the moment, we’re still waiting on a final total, but if the
camper is to be saved, it will be at a considerable cost, which will have repercussions
on our hand-to-mouth existence for months to come.
Still, at least we are better off than the Syrians. Once
again, it seems that as soon as we go away on holiday, and I take my eye off
the ball, the world goes completely gaga.
On a purely practical level, I fail to see how lobbing in a few more
bombs from outside into that strife-torn country, and killing a few more
Syrians, will prevent Syrians from killing Syrians. What it needs is for the UN, for once, to
live up to its name and its purpose, and to impose a cease-fire on all sides so
that humanitarian aid can be administered.
Even allowing for the questionable premise that Assad was responsible
for the chemical attack being true (why would he, though, when he was winning
already and mindful that if he used chemical munitions, it would only
complicate and delay his eventual victory over the rebels?) if the US simply
joins in on the side of the rebels and removes one set of vicious unprincipled
murdering bastards with another set who are slightly more amenable to the USA,
that is merely repeating the same mistake we, the west, have made in
Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Egypt. How many more dead children, how many more
wild-eyed young zealots in suicide vests, how many more body-bags, how many
more flag-draped coffins being carried down the loading-ramp of a Hercules on
the tarmac at Brize Norton will it take, before we acknowledge this? The simple
fact is that intervening on one side or the other does not save lives, it
simply determines which set of innocent civilians will be butchered – “ours”,
or “theirs.”
Vladmir Putin is not someone I would have immediately
thought of as the voice of reason, but he has enunciated exactly the same
concerns. I am not naïve enough to think that he has the best interests of the
Syrian people at heart, as his regime, too, has been fuelling the conflict with
arms and materiel on the side of the Assad regime. But nevertheless, the question still stands –
why would President Assad use chemical weapons, when it was contrary to his own
best interests to do so, and the fact that Vladimir Putin is a homophobic
little weasel, undemocratically “elected” under questionable circumstances and
comes from a background in state-sponsored torture, terror and repression,
doesn’t make the question itself any less valid.
The Russians, of course, have seized on parliament’s refusal
to let Cameron blindly follow Obama in bombing the shit out of Syria as evidence of Britain’s diminished standing and
general unimportance in the world. This
totally ignores the irony that it is precisely this sort of democratic control
over the excessive exercise of brutal, despotic power that makes us (still,
just, on a good day) the good guys, or at least better than the Russians. What would happen if the Russian
parliament voted against Putin’s desire to (for instance) bomb Chechnya? A
one-way trip to the Gulag, and a bullet in the back of the head for anyone
entering the “No” lobby, that’s what. It’s a bit rich being pulled down by a country
where thieves can break into the Kremlin and steal next year’s election results.
We may have invented the neatly-furled
brolly, but it took the KGB to stick a poison needle in the end of the ferrule.
We have Jimmy Choo, they have Rosa Klebb. I could go on. I frequently do.
Britain
may well have declined since the days when Britannia ruled the waves – for all
sorts of reasons, and in some ways it isn’t a bad thing. Having said that, even though successive
governments seem to have gone out of their way over the last 25 years or so to
trash the economy for reasons of party politics and economic illiteracy, and to
limit our own personal freedoms, and even though our great institutions of
health and education are currently under pressure like never before, we don’t
yet have millions of people starving while our corrupt rulers export all the
grain, and we don’t yet have the situation where anyone who criticises the
government is denounced and taken away in the middle of the night by a goon
squad from the secret police. Assuming
you can afford a new car, you can go out and buy one, you don’t have to wait
four years for it to turn up, only to find that when it does, it’s a brown Lada
with a cracked headlight and two square wheels. Not quite. Not yet.
I don’t want to get into the battle of literature and
culture that David Cameron started in his speech; a country’s culture is a
product of that country’s history and ethos.
And while it’s tempting to say that all Russian plays are long, dreary,
gloomy sagas about the family cherry orchard being sold off and given to an
anarcho-syndicalist collective of local peasants, English literature also has
some spectacularly depressing moments.
What Cameron should have said was that we still (just about, on a good
day) believe in democracy, fair play and equal opportunities for everyone, the
rule of the law, respect and care for the ill and vulnerable, and sympathy for
the underdog. He’d have been lying, in
his case, of course, because his lips would have been moving, and that's how
you tell when a politician is lying. But
the sentiment is still valid, even if insincerely expressed, and all of those
salient virtues are absent from Russian society. Anyway, that’s enough about the bloody
Russians. They should wind their neck in, and stick to what they are good at:
The Song of the Vulgar Boatmen and Samovar over the Rainbow.
Meanwhile, here in the Holme Valley,
summer is coming to an end. I’ve noticed a couple of times the “early nip of
changeful autumn” has been present in the air, and the other day it was so dark
at 5.30pm that I thought I’d fallen asleep and the clock had stopped. There’s a lot to do in the garden, as well,
before winter sets in properly. The
stove will need an overhaul, and I will need to order some coal next week, the
first order of the autumn. It also needs
a new set of front bars, and a new riddling-plate, since the old one has broken
into two halves and is now only back in place because I had to let the fire go
out so I could wedge the two bits side-by-side back into the hole.
So that’s another task on my already-burgeoning “to-do”
list, which also includes, now I am back at what passes for my desk, dealing
with all the tedious paperwork of progressing the exhumation of the ashes of
various family members buried under a “memorial tree” in the Northern Cemetery
in Hull. Still, after five days of my
life which I won’t get back, doing year-end accounts and struggling with
exploding vehicles, fixing the stove and clearing out the ashes sounds
positively enthralling – even though it is actually two tasks, and not one, as
you might think if you casually read that last sentence back.
And so we come to Sunday, and the feast of St Disibod. I
must admit, there were other saints whose feast days also fall upon 8th
September, whom I might just as easily have chosen, but I had to pick St
Disibod, if only for his extremely silly name. Mind you, in 619AD when he was
born, it was probably as sensible as Wayne or Kyle today. Actually, maybe
they’re not very good examples… Still, Disibod, also known as Disen, or
Disibode, was an Irish bishop who died in 700AD. He was unsuccessful as a missionary in his
native Ireland, so moved to Germany, where
he founded a monastery on a hill near Bingen, which became known as
Disibodenberg. Unsurprisingly, as that translates back into English as “the hill
of Disibod”. No less a personage than St
Hildegard of Bingen came to live there in due course, and, around 1170AD,
composed a life of St Disibod which is still the prime source of what little
knowledge we have of him.
According to Hildegard’s Life, Disibod came to the Frankish
Empire in 640AD as a missionary, accompanied by his followers Giswald, Clemens
and Sallust, which I have to say sounds for all the world like a firm of
accountants. They were active in the Vosges and Ardennes,
until, guided by a dream, Disibod built a cell at the confluence of the rivers
Nahe and Glan, the location of the later monastery of Disibodenberg.
Hildegard of Bingen, with her ecstatic visions, her music and
her writings, is worthy of an Epiblog all of her very own. Her association with
the Disibodenberg had ended in 1147AD, when she took a decision, with 18 of her
acolytes, to move to a new site and founded the monastery at Rupertsberg. The Disibodenberg site remained in the hands
of the Cistercian Order until 1559, when a decline set in, and by the 18th
Century, only the ruins of the original foundation remained. The site is currently owned privately by
Ehrengard, Baroness of Racknitz, who has established an international
foundation to preserve and protect the ruins which you can apparently look
around, for a fee of five Euros. There is also a winery. It sounds like my kind
of place, and if I ever do make my long promised/threatened pilgrimage to Germany in
search of my lost half-brother, I must include it on my itinerary,
provided can get some mug to push my
wheelchair up the “berg” part of the journey.
As far as my own spiritual development is concerned, such as
it is, I suppose a Sunday teatime on a day in early autumn, when the nights are
starting to draw in, and I have just dumped another shovelful of coal on the
fire, is as good a time as any to stop and take stock. When I wasn’t looking out at the mountains
and the sky and the sea, or watching in the short summer night they have in
that part of the world for the comforting gleam of the red can buoy at
Carradale Point across the Sound, I spent a considerable amount of time reading
Mere Christianity, by C. S. Lewis. I am
not going to spend the rest of this blog doing a sort of “I. A. Richards
practical criticism” on it, but it is a book which – though dated in part,
especially in its language on issues such as homosexuality and marriage – is an
excellent discourse on some of the knottier problems of theology and belief
that have occupied me for many a weary night of “blear-eyed midnight toil”. Especially since it was written n 1942, at the
height of the Second World War, in part to explain what it is we were “fighting
for”, itself a concept with which I struggle. I had read extracts from it before, in fact, I
have included extracts of it previously in this blog, but reading it from the
start, in order, with few or no distractions to stop me half way down the page
and make me lose the thread, was a help to me, though I am still none the wiser
on the difference between begetting and creating.
One passage stood out for me, though, as I watched the slow
pageant of clouds over the Mull of Kintyre, or the wheeling arc of a seagull
out over the waves, or the eternal granite immobility of the hills of northern
Arran – Goatfell, Beinn Nuis, Beinn Tarsuinn, Cir Mhor, et al – and it was
this, on the difference between the Christian God, who is outside of the world,
and the beliefs of pantheism:
“Pantheists usually believe that God, so to speak, animates
the universe as you animate your body: that the universe almost is God, so that if it did not
exist He would not exist either, and anything you find in the universe is a
part of God. The Christian idea is quite different. They think God
invented and made the universe – like a man making a picture or composing a
tune. A painter is not a picture, and he does not die if his picture is
destroyed. You may say, ‘He’s put a lot of himself into it,’ but you only
mean that all its beauty and interest has come out of his head. His skill
is not in the picture in the same way that it is in his head, or even in his
hands.”
I found myself thinking that the idea of God “animating the
entire universe” that phrase he uses, is almost exactly what I believe, how it
happens for me, in those times when I believe that Big G is actually there at
all. And by “there”, I suppose I do mean here, there and everywhere, by
definition, with apologies to Lennon and McCartney. So, if I have to be
anything, maybe this means I am a lapsed
agnostic violent Quaker pantheist, strictly chapel of rest. But of course
that’s a lot easier to believe on a day when you are appreciating the beauty
and majesty of the summer sky over the Scottish landscape.
Such a moment happened for me two weeks ago, at Lochranza, as
I looked across the bay and saw a perfectly “ordinary” stand of trees
transformed by just the way the sun fell on the verdant grass behind them at
that very moment, with the light dancing on the water in front. I thought then,
what a glade to be buried in, what a place for your last rest on earth, where
the deer come and browse, and the sheep nibble the grass, and the birds sing in
the branches overhead. "All shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well..." Then, as I
continued to watch, the light changed, the sun slanted the shadows differently,
the effect passed, and time began to tick once more. I am not stupid or naïve about belief,
however – if my pantheism holds true, it must also embrace the Dies Irae, the wrath of a God, in the
teeth of a howling winter gale, a blizzard, or a violent storm at sea.
What the pantheist view of Big G does do, is to remove the
idea of the old guy with a beard sitting up there somewhere beyond the clouds
on a throne, judging the quick and the dead.
It makes morality your own decision, your own responsibility, though,
interestingly enough, Lewis had an angle on that which I had not previously
considered, which is that he posits the existence of an accepted and mutually
agreed standard of “good” or “correct” behaviour from which we may deviate, or
fail to reach, but which everyone agrees is nevertheless there. He links this
to God, and there is perhaps something in the Platonist or Neo-Platonist view
that this is the spark of God the good in us all, down here in this fallen
world, to which we must hark back. I
think, however, that the “harking back” is not such a simple black and white
process, and that morality consists sometimes of shades of grey (but not, you
will be pleased to know, Fifty Shades of Grey).
Anyway, I have been admonished before now by “real”
philosophers who read this blog and tell me not to worry my ugly old head with
such matters, as I am not properly trained to deal with them, so I will shut up
and leave it at that. I haven’t forgotten my idea of doing a “something” with
what remains of my life, but my first responsibility s to pay my debts and keep
everything going.
So, I am back at my desk, back at the plough, back at the
wheel, nose to the grindstone, use whatever cliché you find most apposite. When I think about the massive, oppressive
amount of work I have to do between now and Christmas it is very easy to become
dispirited, so next week am going to try
and carry with me in my heart, into the cold days ahead, the probably
theologically questionable but still warm, peaceful and nurturing feeling of
the spirit of… something… suffusing all nature:
“Oh chestnut tree, great-rooted blossomer
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole;
Oh body swayed to music, oh brightening glance,
How can we tell the dancer from the dance?”
And if it helps, I offer this as a consolation to you too. As Robert Zimmerframe once memorably said, "I'll let you be in my dreams, if I can be in yours."
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