Epiblog for the Feast of St Thomas a Becket

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. Not, for once though, busy with the normal busy-ness of business, but this week, with the business of Christmas.  The weather has alternated between poor and mild. We weren’t going to be allowed to enjoy a quiet Christmas and Boxing Day without getting a good old drubbing from the weather-gods first.  As with the last few storms, we were lucky and missed the worst of it, or rather, the worst of it missed us.  Others were not so fortunate, with homes flooded across the Home Counties and widespread loss of power.

The transport system, faced with the wrong sorts of trees on the line, failed to cope as usual, leaving people with the prospect of spending Christmas on Euston station.  (I tried to work in an ear-related “Euston-station-tube” in at that point, and failed.)  In one sense, being flooded at Christmas is no better/worse in purely material terms than being flooded at any other time of year, but given the high-pressured, driven nature of life these days, the loss of any opportunity to spend a few days together and take some quality family time out is to be regretted.  Somehow, it always seems worse at Christmas – I am reminded of my erstwhile assistant Samantha, at Phillimore, who once memorably declared “Christmas is a bad time of the year to have your leg off.”

Anyway, we managed to avoid mislaying any crucial limbs, and spent the festive season “quietly, at home”, to borrow a phrase often found in obituaries.  On Christmas day itself, Debbie took Misty and Zak for a twelve mile walk over Dove Stones, to blow away some cobwebs, in the unaccustomed calm and sunshine. “A soft day, at last”.  I felt less “Christmassy” on the day itself; for me, the most evocative time of the festival is always Christmas Eve.  I try and make a point of listening to the traditional Nine Lessons and Carols, even though if I was choosing, they would be a lot different, and I try and watch the midnight Eucharist on TV, while imagining the imaginary oxen in the imaginary barn on the imaginary farm we don’t have, kneeling in honour of an imaginary Christ-child. Imaginary to them, I mean (and also, sadly, sometimes to me). My only other concession to the traditions of the season has been to watch the end of “Love Actually”.  I have to say that, warty old cynic that I am, the scene where Colin Firth’s character proposes to Aurelia has me going every time. Who’d a thought it, eh? Mind you, the fact that Aurelia is played by the divine Lucia Moniz probably has some bearing on proceedings. The Monday before Christmas had also brought a fleeting visit from Bernard, who brought us a beautiful plant and two bottles of his home-made strong sweet apple wine, which is wonderful stuff and guaranteed to warm the heart of your cockles.

Because Granny has been on one of her royal progresses to view/spoil/shower with presents various grandchildren in the South of England (thereby heading directly into the “worst weather” zone, but arriving thankfully, unscathed) we have been looking after Freddie and Zak this week, which has made feeding times more problematic. Freddie now has to have a daily tablet for his wheezy chest, which worked fine at the beginning of the week, because Granny had left some chopped ham to wrap it in. Later in the week, when the ham was all gone, hiding the pill in his food was less successful, because he always seemed to leave the chunk with the tablet stuck in the middle, almost as if he could somehow tell. Then, in that situation, the challenge is to get to the dish and pick it up before either Misty or Zak scoffs it, tablet and all.

The same also applies with Misty’s “Canicalm”, although it’s not such a disaster if one of the other dogs eats it, as it’s only herbal, and its effect is cumulative.  Zak could probably do with it anyway, and Freddie has reached such a state of chilled-outness that you couldn’t tell the difference, whether he’d had it or not. All of them also show an unhealthy interest in Matilda’s food – unhealthy for them, that is, if they get too close; they are likely to be met with a glower, then a hiss.  When not quelling rebellious canines with a single look, Matilda has divided her time more or less equally between sitting out on the decking birdwatching (the good days) and being curled up on the settee or on “her” chair in the warm (the bad days). The dogs, of course, ignored their expensive toys on Christmas Day, being more interested in the packets of dog treats kindly sent by their Auntie Linda.  However, since then, Misty has shown some regard for her new “lunker”, at least for as long as it took to pull the label off it with her teeth (30 seconds).

Debbie, temporarily freed from the constraints of college, has been reading up on all the Ray Mears/survivalist/bushcraft books, and is talking about “going off in the camper for a few days” over New Year, a prospect which I have to admit fills me with dread.  I have temporarily lost my sense of adventure, I guess, but like the flood victims, probably, what I most want to do at this time of the year is sit by a roaring fire frowsting and carousing, because that’s what Christmas (and its predecessor, Yule) is for.

Nevertheless, Debbie is sharpening up her carbon steel survival knives and reading up on how to start a fire by rubbing two boy scouts together and all the stuff that goes with it.  She asked me the other day if I liked mints, to which I replied that, yes, they helped to counteract various disagreeable tendencies in my innards, and why did she ask? It turns out that survivalists/bushcraft enthusiasts in America use a particular size of mint tin, from mints known as “Altoids” or something similar, to keep their “every day carry” kit in.  Debbie was considering ordering some of these mints for me, purely because she wanted to use the tin.  I have to say that, if there is ever some sort of economic/ecological catastrophe that destroys society, I don’t really want what remains of the human race’s future to be in the hands of the sort of people who would buy a tin of mints, throw away the mints and keep the tin. Debbie, meanwhile, has her nose deep in the SAS Survival Guide. No good can come of this.  I hope that the weather comes to our rescue, as long as it inflicts no further misery on anyone else undeserving.

As for me, I have been indulging myself in the unaccustomed pastime of painting. I can’t really justify the time, to be honest, but on the other hand, there comes a point where doing the repetitive tasks and dealing with the everyday trammels of commerce – necessary as it is – just can’t be done any more, even by brewing a pot of industrial-strength “real” coffee and switching on the autopilot, which usually gets me by, on a bad day.  So I have done some stuff in acrylics, and some sketching for future projects.  I must admit that it felt good to be back in the “zone”, again, that contemplative space where only painting can take me.  I love acrylics. It was a major epiphany for me, discovering acrylics after years of dithering about with water colours, where if you made a mistake, you had to struggle to turn it into a cloud, which was quite a challenge if you were painting a bowl of petunias.  In acrylics, if you make a mistake, you just blappy it out with another layer over the top. Sorted! I first learned of this by reading something Jack Vettriano said, and I never even wrote to thank him.

As is usual at this time of year, the news from the outside world consists of a heady mixture of things released under the 30-year rule, stuff that the Blight Brigade is trying to hide by smuggling it out when everyone is looking the other way, and the doings of religious leaders.  I did note, however, that the spirit of satire in the UK press is alive and well. The Times named George Osborne as “man of the year”! The wicked scamps. A Parthian shot. Of course, there is just a teensy tiny outside chance that they might actually have meant it, and “man” is actually spelt “p-r-a-t”.  In which case, if George Osborne is the “man of the year” then I’m definitely a Dutchman. Van der Damm, naar der Mundt!

Other than that, it was the incense and mitre brigade that was – once again – providing the only true and authentic opposition to the Junta. I have no idea what was in Ed Miliband’s Christmas message, except that it probably contained an unfunded promise to be more Christmassy than the Tories (not hard, since their idea of Christmas is probably to give the pauper lunatics in the workhouse ten minutes off from picking oakum on Christmas day).  The bishops of England and Wales, meanwhile, were urging people not to neglect the “urban outcasts” of society, and Rowan Williams, God bless him, weighed in to the food banks debate by labelling the words and attitude of Iain Duncan Smith as “disturbing”. In Rowan-Williams speak, that is about as devastating a criticism as it is possible to make. And one which is so richly deserved.

Just in case you thought the Junta would ease off for Christmas, one of the cases about whom I have written previously, Mariam Harley Miller, received a letter from the Home Office on Christmas Eve, telling her to quit the country.  Whether or not this means that her appeal is officially over, or whether it’s just some low-pay-grade temp sending out a standard letter, unaware that the case was even under review, it still took some of the glitz off Christmas for her – well done, the Home Office.  “Goodwill to all men” ring any bells? And of course, lest we forget, Isa Muazu will have spent Christmas languishing in a hospital bed at the Harmondsworth detention centre. Et in terra, pax hominibus.

Today is the feast of St Thomas à Becket, quite appropriately, since it seems that, once again, as in his day, we have to rely on “turbulent priests” to put the case for justice and righteousness.  Let’s hope in this case it turns out better than in did in 1170, when four knights anxious to curry favour with Henry II took his moaning that he wished that someone would deal with the troublesome cleric rather too literally, rode to Canterbury, and lopped the top off Thomas’s head like a hard-boiled egg, on the steps of the high altar of Canterbury Cathedral.  The story of Becket’s life has become so well-known, especially via the prism of T S Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral, to make it hardly worth repeating. It is, in microcosm, the conflict between church and state.

The cornerstone of Eliot’s play is the Christmas morning sermon given by Becket, which divides the two halves of the play, and is, essentially, a meditation on the nature of martyrdom. He talks about the meaning of the term “peace”, as in peace on earth, and Eliot gives him this speech:

Reflect now, how Our Lord Himself spoke of Peace. He said to His disciples: "My peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you." Did He mean peace as we think of it: the kingdom of England at peace with its neighbours, the barons at peace with the King, the householder counting over his peaceful gains, the swept hearth, his best wine for a friend at the table, his wife singing to the children? Those men His disciples knew no such things: they went forth to journey afar, to suffer by land and sea, to know torture, imprisonment, disappointment, to suffer death by martyrdom. What then did He mean? If you ask that, remember that He said also, "Not as the world giveth, give I unto you." So then, He gave to his disciples peace, but not peace as the world gives.

The problem I have is that I want both. I do want the peace the world gives, with England at peace with its neighbours, the swept hearth, and all that – in fact it sounds a lot like our Christmas. But at the same time I can see what Becket was getting at (or rather what Eliot was getting at) – Jesus is with the tortured and the imprisoned and the disappointed, or he should be, though the attitude of St Paul’s Cathedral to the Occupy movement would tend to suggest otherwise. I have to declare a sneaking liking for “the peace the world gives”, as well.  

The point that Eliot was getting at is the same as that which underlies U. A. Fanthorpe’s poem, The Wicked Fairy at the Manger:

My gift for the child:

No wife, kids, home;
No money sense. Unemployable.
Friends, yes. But the wrong sort –
The workshy, women, wimps,
Petty infringers of the law, persons
With notifiable diseases,
Poll tax collectors, tarts;
The bottom rung.
His end?
I think we’ll make it
Public, prolonged, painful.

Right, said the baby. That was roughly
What we had in mind.

 

I’m tired, and I am not looking forward to 2014. Especially if it’s going to be another bruising year of oppression and work with no reward.  I hate New Year’s Eve anyway, it’s the most loathsome night of the whole year, and if it were not for the fact that I feel an obligation to Granny Fenwick to stay up till midnight then sweep the old year out of the porch, I’d just drink a bottle of whatever was available, then go to bed. Tomorrow is another day.  As it is, this year, I may have to do the sweeping out the old year bit metaphorically, because I might be freezing my nadgers off in the camper van up at Walney. We shall see.

If I had a New Year wish, I’d make it what I wrote back in 2005 in “Here Endeth the Epilogue”.  That, in the words of the great Christmas poet Roy Wood of “Wizzard” fame, I wish it could be Christmas every day:

I wish it could be Christmas every day. I wish that we could keep that spirit and pay it forward through 2005.  If I require anything of 2005, I would settle for reports of truces breaking out all over the world, of hungry people being fed, of sad people being given a meal, a fire, a pet to cuddle, some human warmth and charity. In a world where even Santas have to have police checks, 2005 no doubt has some fairly dismal things in store for us and ours. Things that will test us, and our beliefs, situations we’d rather not be in, places where it would be oh so easy to cross by on the other side. We can retaliate though. Every time in 2005 somebody does something mean-spirited or bad within your sight and hearing - say to them “shame on you, it’s Christmas”.  Even if it’s July 29^th.  Every time in 2005 you see someone needing a hand up, or a good feed, say to them “I can help you, - it’s Christmas.”  Even if it’s April 6^th . Every time you are asked to turn your back on all the things that make each one of us the incalculable and never-to-be-repeated beings that make up this crazy old world, say “No, I can’t do that - it’s Christmas, and I will give, give, and give again, until the need for giving, and for forgiving, is removed from the face of the Earth.” Even if it’s May 15^th .  Or December 2^nd , or January 6^th .  Then it really would be Christmas every day, and we’ll have gone a long way towards having something to really celebrate on December 25^th.”

So, there you have it.  I wish you all the best for the New Year, and who knows, maybe it will be better than we think.  We’ve travelled the many a weary mile, and all that. For now, I’m managing my expectations, keeping my powder dry, reserving my opinions, keeping my options open, and stuffing earplugs down Misty’s ears in preparation for Tuesday. Pass the Canicalm, matron!