Epiblog for Twelfth Night

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley.  The week that contained the last days of 2013 and the start of a new year. Out with the old, in with the new.  The weather, meanwhile, has gone completely batshit, with Britain being lashed by gale after gale after gale after gale, with torrential rain and flooding.  As I have said many a time before, anybody who thinks that climate change hasn’t caused some serious and probably irrevocable problems with the weather obviously hasn’t looked out of the window lately.

Matilda agrees with me about the weather 100%, and I have promised her that if daddy ever sells enough books to get rich, we will all go and rent Robert Graves’s house in Majorca every year from September until March, or near offer. In the meantime she is reduced to meowing plaintively at me to make the rain stop, as she looks mournfully out of the conservatory door at it sheeting down outside, and then going to stick her head out of the cat flap to see if it’s any better on that side of the house. (It wasn’t).

The weather was preoccupying us because we were hoping to get away in the camper for at least New Year’s Eve, and Debbie was hoping to do her climb every mountain, ford every stream bit, and maybe even bivvy out on Harrison Stickle. Needless to say, none of this happened, because the combination of 50mph winds and needle-sharp, freezing cold horizontal rain turned the Lake District into something resembling a car wash, only not so pleasant.

In a similar exercise to Matilda sticking her head out of the cat flap to search for better weather, I took to forsaking the BBC weather site and looking at Metcheck, on the grounds that their weather might be better, in the same way that farmers and fishermen have their own special weather forecasts because they get up earlier than the rest of us and spend a lot of time wearing waterproof trousers.  Eventually, I hit upon the web site of the mountain weather information service, offering detailed forecasts for climbers and hill-walkers. I logged on to it gleefully, hoping for some concessions from the weather-gods, only to find the worst weather forecast for the Lake District that I have ever read anywhere. All that was missing was fire raining from the heavens, a plague of boils, and a murrain on the cattle, but the rest of it was pretty much all there.  There was one bright spot – my eye fell on a sentence that said, “risk lightening” – which had to be a good thing, surely, until I read it again and saw it actually said “risk lightning”. Ah. Not so good, then.

So, we were officially hors de combat, confined to barracks, but Debbie was not going to have her outdoors adventurous spirit quelled. I noticed she was reading The SAS Survival Manual, which is always a bad sign. On New Year’s Eve itself, she set up her new camping cooker on the decking outside, rigged up a tarp over it, got the stove going, and cooked burgers (real) for her Dad and burgers (veggie) for her and myself.  Meanwhile, I kept the chip pan going until everyone had had chips beyond their wildest dreams.  New Year’s Eve is normally the worst, most loathsome, horrible night of the whole year, when all there is to do is to remember all the people and the animals you’ve lost, and all the people whose lives you have screwed up, and get more and more pissed while you nurse your regrets like open wounds. But this year, we had quite a jolly time, to be honest, and much to my surprise – even little Adam, who spent most of New Year’s Eve playing Grand Theft Auto 5 on his laptop, in the conservatory (but without the rope, pistol or lead piping). Still, the way things are going in the UK, a thorough grounding in GTA5 will probably stand him in better stead in years to come than any amount of poodlefaking Government job creation schemes for non-existent jobs.

The midnight “bongs” came, and I went outside and swept out the old year, and let in the new, then went down to the end of my ramp and trundled back, bearing a piece of coal. Not so much first-footing, as first trundling.  There were fireworks, but mainly, thank God, in the distance, and Misty’s DAP collar and the Canicalm and the pet remedy all seemed to have done their work. So, somehow, unbelievably, and from a platform of very low expectations, New Year’s Eve passed without a hitch, no animals were lost, there were no arguments, and, to be honest, not much in the way of a hangover the morning after, which turned out to be a blessing.

Although Wednesday was, technically, a holiday, I had in fact planned to do quite a lot of work.  Thursday was going to be a good day, weather-wise – the only one that week, but Wednesday’s forecast was unutterably crap, so I didn’t feel I was missing anything.  However, I had reckoned without Freddie. Debbie had already taken Misty out and I was surprised to hear the door go after only half an hour. I assumed at first they’d just given up because of the weather, but it was actually Granny, bearing Freddie in her arms, wrapped in his little sheepskin coat.  They’d been setting off to take both Zak and Freddie walkies, but he’d had a bad “do” and almost keeled over at the outset, so could she leave him here, where at least he’d be warm and have someone to keep an eye on him, until they’d finished exercising Zak, then we’d take it from there.

Between us we arranged him on the settee, and folded his little coat up under his head so that he’d be at a comfortable angle.  He was breathing very raggedly when Granny left, so I told him to pull himself together and that nobody dies on my watch, and I lit a red candle for healing on the hearth and started saying prayers to St Roche over him.  After about three-quarters of an hour, he seemed to have calmed down and was sleeping more peacefully.  Debbie had procured some cooked ham for the dogs as a treat for New Year’s Eve and there was a bit left, so I shredded it and then held it under his nose. He seemed interested, so I handfed it to him, bit by bit. Eventually, Granny came back and she managed to squirt come water down him with a syringe, because he seemed thirsty.  He looked a lot better, though, so she wrapped him up in the sheepskin fleece again and took him home.

I didn’t sleep well on Wednesday, dreading that we would wake up to a phone call announcing Freddie’s overnight demise. He’s been such a part of the last fourteen years, with his little chocolate-button nose and his Yoda ears, and he’s also, in animal terms, the last link to the old days, the days when I could drive up to the Lake District and do a painting while Debbie climbed Helm Crag with Freddie and Tiglet in tow. I fell asleep mentally enumerating all of the mountains he had climbed.

Thursday dawned, as Thursdays do, to the news that Freddie was in fact considerably better, and had breakfasted off corned beef. However, a precautionary vet consultation has been arranged for Monday. We had more or less abandoned our own plans to go off for the day, reasoning that if the worst did happen, we’d be needed around home. In the end, Debbie and her Dad took Misty and Zak over Butternab, and Misty came home with a raw graze on her leg. Marvellous! I was starting to get pissed off with 2014. Anyway, we decided to keep an eye on it, and I amused myself mentally setting aside an undefined but large sum of money involving vet consultations, infections and injections.

By the time it got to Friday, I was beginning to wonder what else the new year had in store, which was probably unwise. It never does to provoke fate.  Regular readers of this blog, if there are any, will recall that last year, my sister and I applied to the Ministry of Justice for licences to exhume the cremated remains of my Mum and Dad, plus Granny Fenwick and Auntie Maud, all of whom currently repose underneath a “memorial tree” in a cold, dark, neglected corner of the Northern Cemetery in Hull, where no-one ever goes any more. We both felt the time had come to maybe scatter their remains somewhere which was more “meaningful” to them in real life, such as the hedgerows along Elloughton Dale.

Before Christmas, I chivvied up the Crematorium because I had seen that they had cashed our cheque to cover the cost of this exercise, but we had still not heard from them or from the Ministry of Justice that the procedure could go ahead. They replied that the Ministry of Justice would be contacting me directly about it.

Christmas having been and gone, on Friday I last heard from the Ministry of Justice, and the outcome is that they have granted the application for us to exhume the ashes of my mum and dad, but NOT granted permission for the ashes of Gran or Auntie Maud to be removed, because of the refusal of two of my cousins to sign the forms.  This leaves us at a bit of an impasse because the whole idea of doing this was to scatter Gran, Mum and Dad up Elloughton Dale so they would be together up there. Now I’ve got to discuss with my sister whether we still go ahead with our bit of it.

So, that is where we were at, as of 3rd January. Oddly enough the news arrived on the anniversary of mum’s death, 28 years ago. Still, they say that the essence of comedy is timing! As it stands, unless the two objectors change their minds, or we can appeal against the decision and overturn it, that is it, for the time being.

I spent Friday busily writing letters and doing admin and planning. I brought the bank reconciliation up to date. It’s never a pleasant task, but it was ether that or the cat litter tray, and the bank seemed more likely to sublimate my anger.  By the end of the day, though, I was starting to feel truly drained. Maybe Saturday would finally see 2014 turn for the better, and I could actually get some work done.

On Saturday morning, I had made a pot of coffee and I was going to do pretend bacon sandwiches for Debbie’s breakfast, and bubble-and-squeak for mine.  Before we indulged, though, we both decided to check our email. Debbie said, “My computer keeps playing videos for adverts even though I haven’t got anything open.”

Wearily, I asked her to pass me the computer, and my worst fears were quickly confirmed. Somewhere, somehow, she had picked up a “something” that had hijacked her internet browser and was even now opening up multiple copies of Internet Explorer, each of which was connecting directly to some crappy adware site downloading (and uploading) God alone knows what.  I opened up Task Manager and started killing them off, but it was a bit like space invaders. Every time I got caught up on them, another twenty would appear. It was like being charged by the North Koreans, you machine-gun the first row and behind that there’s another, and another…

By now, I’d chopped the internet connection and started full scans with Malwarebytes and AVG.  Both of these took a couple of hours, AVG found about half a dozen things wrong, and Malwarebytes found 147.  So, I deleted the lot, and, more in hope than certainty, I re-started the machine, only to find that half of Windows seemed to be missing, it wouldn’t recognise the wireless router, and the screen and the volume controls refused to answer.  Bad, bad, bad. I fell back on my next option, a system restore, back to the time before the blight descended (shame that doesn’t also work in politics).  Nope, it wouldn’t let me do a system restore.  

By now, I was extremely tired, pissed off and angry, with an incipient headache growing behind my eyes. I wasn’t going to be beaten, though. I created a windows 7 boot disk on my machine, then booted Debbie’s laptop up with it in the DVD drive and used that to create a system restore.  That worked at the second attempt, but then of course I had to run the Malwarebytes scan again to pick up the 147 pieces of crap it had found first time around, and delete them all over again.  Eventually, at 7.30pm, her machine was back to normal, and I had lost an entire day’s work. What a waste of dog-farts! If the virus-writing bastard who had wasted my entire day had been within my reach at that moment I would quite cheerfully have embedded the wood-axe in his skull.

However, the wood-axe was already in use, as it turned out, because Debbie had decided to cook her own tea, for once, on the camping stove, on the decking, but without the lead piping or professor Plum.  This was to be baked potatoes, seared tofu, and grilled button mushrooms and garlic cloves on skewers, cooked over the open flames.  This latter delicacy we developed while cooking al fresco on the Isle of Arran, and they are known (for some reason since lost in the mists of Kilbrannan Sound) as “orphans on sticks”.  I’d already done her pretend bacon sarnies with my other leg, while waiting for the anti-virus scans to run, so I concentrated instead on my bubble and squeak. It seemed the only sensible response to the week I’d had.  There are very few things in this world that can’t be put right by a plate of bubble and squeak. Oh, yes, and I had a tax return reminder from the Inland Revenue.

I have been knee-deep in my own version of Jericault’s Raft of the Medusa all week, so I haven’t (truly haven’t) been following the news this week, apart from the storms. A giant rubber duck which was part of the new year celebrations exploded in Taiwan, in what the BBC described as “unexplained circumstances”, as if there might actually ever be a rational explanation for such an occurrence, and Pope Francs apparently got a bit ticked off when he rang a group of nuns in Spain at random to wish them “happy new year” and got their answering machine instead. "What are the nuns doing that they can't answer the phone?" he is reported to have asked. To which the obvious answer is, screening for nuisance cold callers!

Oh, yes, and Michel Gove has decided that the first world war wasn’t such a bad thing after all, it was very character-building, and we should all be proud of our nation’s role in creating the circumstances that made possible the slaughter of millions of young men along a muddy ditch stretching from Dunkerque to Verdun. Apparently, to suggest that the needless deaths and sacrifices of those four years were anything other than entirely rational and necessary is in some way “left wing”, a term which itself has apparently become a legitimate term of abuse in itself, at least in the lexicon of certain bug-eyed Gollum-lookalike arriviste politicians.

Well, Gove, allow me to put you in detention and give you some extra history cramming, you revisionist little Fotherington-Thomas.  Firstly the Great War was a horrible, and inevitable, accident. Like all horrible accidents, it had multiple causes. Firstly, a growing rivalry in trade and Empire-building, in which, I am afraid, our country, like it or not, was just as complicit as the dastardly Hun.  Then a race to re-arm, and build battleships. I will give you a clue, it wasn’t the German public demanding the commissioning of eight new “dreadnaughts” – “We want eight, and we won’t wait!” doesn’t really work in German.

We also have to acknowledge the roles of railway timetables and canned food. To take the latter first. For centuries, wars in Europe had been seasonal affairs, generally held in the summer, and the armies lived off what fresh food they could carry, augmented by what they could scavenge off the land they were crossing at the time. At the end of summer, wars usually petered out, as the combatants on both sides faded away and made their way back home to get the harvest in.  Once canned food had been invented, this was a game-changer. Now war could take place all year round.

Then we have the railways. By the time that the European powers were thinking of winding up to having a bit of a ding-dong in 1914, the railway network was so well developed, and augmented by the long-distance telegraph, that it was perfectly possible to mobilise your army and have it in position at the “front” in three days. More to the point, the publication of timetables meant that your potential enemy could work that out as well, and if he was going to mobilise on a Thursday, then you had better damn well mobilise yours on a Wednesday, to be ahead of the game.  Into this heady mix, held together by treaties that possibly none of the signatories ever intended to be taken seriously, we introduce Gavrilo Princip and the archduke Ferdinand. In the carriage, with the pistol. Light the blue touch paper and retire.

Now, Gove, I hope you are paying attention, because I am going to introduce you to one of these “heroes” you were prating on about in the Daily Mail. His name was Harry Fenwick. He died in hell, they called it Passchendaele. Royal Field Artillery, “RFA – ready for anything”, they used to say. He was gassed in the third battle of Ypres, indistinguishable in tactics from the first two. Blundering stupidity, by generals who were determined to fight to the last drop of someone else’s blood. He lingered, and died a few days later at the base hospital at Etaples.  I have been there, and found his grave, along with countless thousand others.  You can find his name on the war memorial at Brough Crossroads.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud 
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest 
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Don’t ever tell me that, in remembering his undoubted bravery and mourning the stupid, pointless, and needless loss of Harry Fenwick’s life, I am being in some way “unpatriotic”, you little scrote.  And you may also like to note that the bull-headed stupidity of the victorious allies in grinding down the defeated Germans with massively-onerous conditions at the Treaty of Versailles created precisely the perfect conditions in Germany to promote and sustain Adolf Hitler, so that twenty years after the war to end all wars, it had to be fought all over again. 

And so we came to Sunday. I was tempted to cheat with the date, and gave in to the temptation, because Monday is the feast of the Epiphany, whereas this Sunday is merely the feast of Saint Cera, Saint Gaudentius, and Saint Roger. None of these particularly inspires me, to be honest.  Although St Roger was a follower of St Francis of Assissi, which would at least allow me to bang on yet again about animal welfare. Because, of course, this is the month when the animal sanctuaries have their Christmas rush. Unfortunately, this year, they don’t start off with any spare capacity, either, because they were already rammed to the gills before Christmas set in.  Something has to happen. Animal sanctuaries can’t carry on being like Mrs Malone in Eleanor Farjeon’s poem.  There isn’t room for another.

Clearly we’re not going to see the economy pick up any time soon, despite Osborne’s protestations to the contrary. And there’s no doubt that the more people struggle, the more they will abandon animals, all other things being equal.  Personally, I would go without my own food to see that Misty and Matilda got fed (and Debbie, of course, he added, hastily) but the main issue is paying the mortgage.  At one point last year we had just £56 left in the bank account. That is skating on very thin ice, especially if another major financial camper van disaster happened. If we lost our house then we, too, would probably have no option (because of the lack of private rented accommodation willing to tolerate pets) but to hand back Misty to the Border Collie Trust and Matilda to – well, Lord knows where, really, since we rescued her off death row ourselves.  So you can see how it happens.

Given the staggering success so far of my existing Government e-petition to reform the nature of MPs’ employment and make their jobs more relevant to, and connected to, the real world, I am thinking along the lines of starting another one to try and change the situation where, in times of economic crisis, domestic pets can end up getting put out with the rubbish.

This is a difficult one to boil down into something that people can easily read, sign and agree with, though. There is a whole raft of issues involved.  It seems inevitable to me, though, that the starting point would have to be the introduction of some form of registration for dogs, along the lines of DVLA for cars.

I would like to see the introduction of compulsory microchipping for all dogs within a set time period of their birth or acquisition. So in other words, it would be for the person acquiring a dog from whatever source to ensure that it is microchipped, or if not, to have it chipped. If you make it so that dogs have to be microchipped from birth, and back that up with punishment for non-compliance, however, this may lead to the unintended consequence, at least at first, of greater quantities of dogs being abandoned or even killed rather than incurring the cost of chipping (for instance if a bitch has a large and unexpected litter) so care must be taken in ensuring that in solving one problem, you don't create another, different, problem. 

Further to this, if it must also be made an offence to fail to get your dog microchipped by a set date, and a further offence for failing to keep details on a database current, punishment should, however, be only one side of the coin. There is also a massive need for education and a general revision of the attitude towards dog ownership – indeed, pet ownership as a whole - in the UK on all sides. Care needs also to be taken when framing any legislation also not to disadvantage the homeless (many of whom have companions in the form of dogs) the disabled, and people who are suffering from the Government's cack-handed economic policies by being made unemployed and forced onto benefits. There should be a recognition that chipping is a social good and a willingness by the Government to "chip in" and underwrite the cost of chipping in such cases, recognising that responsible pet ownership is a common social good... but given the current attitude of class war espoused by the Blight Brigade, this is unlikely to happen.

Microchipping all dogs will not make dog owners more responsible in itself, or prevent people or animals from being attacked, but it does at least provide enforcement agencies with a tool to identify owners who may have been irresponsible or cruel to their pet. Unfortunately it will still do nothing to deter the desperate or cruel people who will dump their pets on the roadside, or treat them even worse, to avoid having to have them chipped in the first place, which is why there needs to be a social chipping exemption, see above.

Also, compulsory microchipping alone will not hold owners to account and if this is to be effective then it must be part of a wider annual dog registration scheme where owners’ details be centrally held in an up to date Government-run or independent database. However, the construction and upkeep of such a database should not simply be handed by the Government to an "outsource" agency such as Atos or Capita, for several reasons

(a) If the government is going to give out large amounts of money for creating and maintaining this database it would be better being run by the three major animal welfare charities with an interest in dogs in the UK, the RSPCA, the Dogs' Trust, and Battersea Dogs' Home, with government financial support. Or a combination of them and the microchipping companies. Not only would this be a better use of any funding but also it would ensure that the scheme is run by people with an interest in animal welfare rather than a multinational PLC who just treat it as a cash-cow. Plus, Capita and Atos have not exactly distinguished themselves so far. If the likes of Atos were entrusted with the job, I could foresee a situation where a dead three legged sheepdog was declared fit for work. Plus the RSPCA and the Dogs’ Trust could do something to earn their donations for a change.

(b) the creation of a Government DEFRA quango to oversee the registration and the upkeep of the database would allow the Government off the hook by enabling them to pass any blame down the line - I would like to see the control, and the responsibility, ultimately, rest with the Government so that they can't just deal with the problem at arms length and kick it into the long grass by blaming the Quango if things go wrong (as Governments have done so often over many other issues in the past).

This could then provide money so there are proper resources for local authorities and the police to support those owners trying to do the right thing and target the disproportionately small proportion of irresponsible ones who cause the majority of the problem. Although of course, it could be argued, that local authorities and the police should have the resources to do this in any case, and indeed would do but for the Junta's unequal apportioning of rate grant cuts to Local Authorities in the name of “austerity”.  As well as funding the "social" microchipping of dogs for those who can't afford it, the money resulting from this scheme, assuming it is cash-positive, should be hypothecated towards dog welfare and not swallowed up in the general "tax take" and used to buy missiles to fire at Libya, Iran, Syria or whoever. We do not want to see the situation degenerate into that akin to the Road Fund Licence for cars, which was supposed to be for the upkeep of the UK's roads but which is now swallowed whole by the treasury.

We also have to address the issue of “dangerous” dogs, which is also germane to the discussion - any dog, in the wrong hands could bite or injure another person or animal and the focus should not always be on the breed or type of dog.  Breed - specific legislation does not address one of the main problems – irresponsible dog ownership.

Even as it stands, more could and should be done to improve dog welfare for all dogs seized by the police and reduce the costs of enforcement. For example:

(a) deadlines should be set for expert witnesses (on both sides) to examine and produce reports about the dogs.

(b) well-socialised dogs that have been seized should be allowed to be re-homed to suitable responsible owners if their present owners are irresponsible, and

(c ) dogs who will never be returned to their owners, or are unsuitable for re-homing, for example those used in dog fighting, should be allowed to be put to sleep only as a very last resort and then only if it is in their own best interests to do so.  It is well known that 7000 unwanted dogs a year die on "death row" in local authority sanctuaries, and this legislation - indeed all animal legislation - should aim to reduce this not increase it.  At the end of the day the Government could end this scandalous waste of animal life simply by acting as an "owner of last resort" allowing many animals that are currently put down for no other reason than lack of a suitable owner, to live out their lives in peace in an animal sanctuary. The Government already acts as a "banker of last resort" and an "insurer of last resort" to the financial industry, and animals are, arguably, a much more deserving case than the bankers and hedge fund managers who landed us with the credit crunch.

And of course it should always be remembered that this proposed approach is not a panacea, because there will always be a hard core of animal abusers who ignore it just as they ignore any other existing animal welfare legislation. The only answer to that is stricter sentencing including custodial sentencing and the use of lifelong bans on animal ownership for the worst offenders (and those who break the fox hunting ban, if it comes to that.) I’ve long said, and not entirely in jest, that if judges sentenced animal abusers to the same treatment as they meted out to the animals they hurt, maimed, crippled or killed, the problem would quickly disappear, once a couple of yobboes had been dropped off the roof of the car-park or given the Jang Song-thaek treatment.

Anyway, when I’ve distilled the bones out of it, I’ll try and turn it into something that people can sign up to and/or vote for. No-one dies on my watch.

If anyone were in doubt about the causal link between economic depression/austerity and an increase in social disorder, homelessness and cruelty to animals then you only have to look at the instance at Fergus Wilson, who with his wife Judith owns nearly 1,000 properties around the Ashford area of Kent, and has sent the eviction notices to 200 tenants, who are on benefits, saying he prefers eastern European migrants who default much less frequently than single mums on welfare.  Happy New Year.

As “Keith Ordinary Guy”, who writes a daily letter of complaint to David Cameron, commented on his social media page:

It is no surprise to read that landlords are giving up on the poorest people in society and are evicting people on benefits. This comes as a direct result of government policy and lies squarely at your door. With no social housing available and no private landlords prepared to take them on, there is no option but homelessness and once homeless there is no way for people to seek work or better themselves in any way. Perhaps some will be placed in bed and breakfast lodging at much greater cost than if they had been supported in rented accommodation, but everyone thus placed will be someone or a family in distress. This is life in Tory Britain and your abandonment of the poor. This is the life of many in the most unequal country in the western world.

New year is traditionally a time for resolutions, but sometimes I think “revolutions” would be more appropriate.

Anyway, tomorrow is the feast of the Epiphany.  It’s also the day when the whole of the UK struggles reluctantly back to work after the Christmas break, so no doubt  will be woken at 7.30 in the morning, if I’m not already awake, by the demolition noise from Park Valley Mills.  In England, the celebration of the Night before Epiphany is known as Twelfth Night and was the traditional time for mumming and wassailing. I may have mentioned this before, dementia-riddled old fart that I am, but Granny Fenwick could remember the days when she was a child and the “Vessel-Cuppers” as they were known in Welton, came around begging “for pence, and spicy ale”.  The origin of actual word “wassail” was from the Anglo Saxon Wæs hæl, which meant good health and was not, as some might suppose, an early reference to the West Indies fast bowling attack. The yule log was left burning overnight on Twelfth Night, and the charcoal remaining from it was kept until the following Christmas, to kindle next year's yule log, as well as a traditional custom intended to protect the house from fire and lightning.

Epiphany was also a day for playing practical jokes, similar to April 1^st. It was a day when the fool held court, and the Lord of Misrule ran the show.  A traditional dish for Epiphany was Twelfth Cake, a rich, dense, typically-English fruitcake, but we have already heard more than enough about David Cameron this week. As in Europe, whoever found the baked-in bean was king for a day, but unique to English tradition other items were sometimes included in the cake.

Anything spicy or hot, such as ginger snaps and spiced ale, was considered proper Twelfth Night fare, recalling the costly spices brought by the Wise Men. This is why Sir Toby Belch in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night admonishes Malvolio with:

“Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?”

And Feste the clown joins in with:

“Yes, by St Anne, and ginger shall be hot i’the mouth, too!”

Another typically-English Epiphany dessert was the jam tart, but made into a six-pointed star, intending to symbolize the star of Bethlehem, and called an Epiphany tart. The discerning English cook sometimes tried to use thirteen different coloured jams on the tart on this day, for luck, creating a dessert with the appearance of stained glass. If I was any good at baking, I might have a go at this, but the last time I made a tart, it had the appearance and consistency of a foundation stone on the M62. Granny looked at it quizzically, perched on its cooling-rack with all of the appeal of a lump of Krytonite, when she came round. By way of explanation I said, possibly unwisely “I’ve made your daughter a tart.” She gave me a funny look, and changed the subject.

The religious aspects of the adoration of the Magi have been much debated, of course.  First of all, you have to believe that Jesus existed, that he was born in a manger, that his birth was announced to shepherds abiding in the fields by angels, and that three strange Kings came out of the East, riding camels, seeking him and following a star.  Some commentators (such as Colin Wilson) have argued that the story of the adoration of the Magi is shorthand for the acceptance of the new religion of Christianity by the old, pre-existing Mithraic and/or Zoroastrian traditions. But then all religions tend to adopt, adapt and piggyback each other’s mythology, which is one more reason to think that there might, behind it all, be one, simple, overarching, archetype.

An “epiphany” in the more general sense of the word is a sudden blinding flash or realisation, that sets you on a new path, and Lord knows I could use one of those right now.  Or maybe I’ve already had one, since I seem to have accidentally saved Freddie’s life by praying – although of course we’ve no way of knowing if it really helped or not. It all comes down to faith, and Big G has all eternity to listen to my witterings, while I am, sadly, constrained by time.

So we look forward to next week. The Monday morning of the year, a whole twelve months of work stretching ahead, just to keep the show on the road.  January is a bleak, bare, bony-arsed sort of a month. After Christmas, comes the “crabbed Lentoun”.  An old friend contacted me on New Year’s Eve, briefly, via Facebook. Sadly, I was too full of bonhomie, chips and alcohol to respond properly, but I remember the gist of a discussion about whether I had any regrets.

Yes, I do. I have many regrets, not only about 2013, or the last three years, but also about life in general. I particularly regret all the times when people were counting on me to be there for them when they were going through difficult and awkward times, and I couldn’t, wouldn’t, or just didn’t. Four out of ten, must do better.  As to whether I regret being in a wheelchair, in my condition, technically no, I don’t. I regret not being able to do all of the things I used to be able to do, but I don’t regret the disease – that would be pointless. To be truly regretful about the progress of a genetic condition would imply that I regretted being born, or could have prevented my mother and father from meeting and falling in love.  I’d have to go back up the family tree, regretting each generation all the way back to the Big Bang.

So no, je ne regrette rien, at least not in that sense.  Anyway, that’s enough regrets for one day. Tonight is Twelfth Night, so let’s give Christmas one last hurrah, and wassail with spicy ale. On with the motley!