It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley,
and one with yet more wind and rain. I don’t know if we are actually going to
get any real snow this year, although usually if we do, it comes at the end of
February or the beginning of March. I’m hoping we can get by with a mild
winter, although “mild” is a relative term when the country is being lashed and
trashed by a rolling Atlantic gale every two days, with no hope of respite or
letup.
We’ve been so lucky, so far, touch wood, compared to Devon
Somerset and Cornwall,
not to mention Dorset, Oxfordshire and the Welsh Marches. David Cameron has now officially taken
personal charge of the flooding crisis, like a latter day Cnut (subs, check
spelling) which means we are all doomed.
They should do what Labour did in the great drought of 1977 and appoint
a minister specifically for it. The day Denis Howells was appointed Minister
for the Drought, that summer, it promptly pissed down, and continued to do so
for the next six weeks; I know this, because I was hitch-hiking from Hull to Bridlington on
that very day.
Here, the week started bright and sunny, for Monday and
Tuesday at least, and Matilda was almost basking in the pale sun as it filtered
in through the conservatory windows. She’s discovered that spot on the rug
where Tiggy used to lie around this time of year, where what sun there is, is
concentrated onto one spot. I reminded her of that proverb I quoted in last
week’s blog, about the cat that lies in the sunshine in February will creep
behind the stove in March, and she blinked at me, and yawned.
Wednesday saw the weather back-sliding into wind and rain
again. The poor garden never looks its best at this time of year, but now the
days are getting slightly longer, I can see the extent of the damage the gales
have done, and it’s definitely worse than last year. The entire vista looks like it’s been sprayed
with mulched leaf-mould from a high-pressure hose, and the pond is full of the
muck. So much so that on Wednesday, when
she went out into the garden to do her necessaries, Misty failed to notice that
the pond even was a pond, fell in it,
and came back plastered up to her shoulders with vile, brown, pongy mud and
bits of leaves. A Border collie may be cheaper if they ever re-introduce the
dog licence, on the grounds that she’s only black and white, but keeping the
“white” bits actually looking white
at this time of year is a full-time job, akin to painting the Forth Bridge.
As time passes, Misty is becoming more settled and less
nervy, overall, fireworks notwithstanding. It’s hard to believe we’ve had her
for seven months or so now. She is still
completely random in some of the things she does (the mad collie-dog agility
chase through the house every morning, incorporating jumping onto and off my
bed, for instance) but her recall and behaviour off lead is getting back to
something like where it as before she was scared out of her doggy wits back in
November. Considering that she is such a
good natured little dog overall, she seems to have a knack of inspiring a level
of terror completely out of proportion to what damage she could actually
achieve.
So it was on Monday, when Father Jack brought the camper van
back from the garage, newly welded and MOT-ed, and I found myself negotiating
with him around the edge of the lobby door, he being unwilling to come any
further into the kitchen.
“I’m afeared of your dog; I think he might bite me,” he
said, sounding for all the world like an extra from James Herriott or Heartbeat. If he’d also used the word
“vitnery”, that would have clinched it. As it was, he left a happy man, clutching his
cheque, albeit still afeared. Then, on Wednesday, the man from Clarks came to fix my wheelchair and asked me to keep
Misty under control. I assured him that the worst she would do was probably
hi-five him into a state of catatonia in the hope of being given a dog-treat,
as hi-fiving for dog treats is currently Misty’s favourite thing in all the world. Anyway, my wheelchair is restored to health,
even if I’m not, with two functioning brakes, and I am no longer leaning
drunkenly to one side (except for those occasions when I am, actually, drunk) or
in danger of losing one of my wheel-rims.
Friday was cheered up by the arrival of some knitted leg
warmers from Auntie Maisie, who has been prodigious in her efforts to knit us
all into a state of warmth this winter, bless her. Leg warmers may well be
deader than tank tops and sideways-ironed flares in fashion terms, but
nevertheless they are an essential item of clothing for surviving a wheelchair
winter. However much I thrash about,
rave incoherently, and stamp my feet during the day (and this varies, depending
how stupid other people are being) I can never get the blood sloshing around my
body and keeping the extremities warm like I used to when I was up and lauping
around. Consequently, I spend a lot of
my time sitting in draughts, of which our house has many, and getting nithered
to the very bane, as Father Jack might have said if he were here right
now. The other year, I actually got
frostbite on my feet. Maisie made me
some leg warmers last year which I wore more or less to destruction, so these
new ones arrived just in time. Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow.
Talking of Auntie Maisie, her indestructible daffodils now
look as though they might be about to actually come into flower, although I
haven’t seen the snowdrops in the garden yet this year. There has also been lots of activity from the
birds, and the squirrels seem to have woken up. So, it seems everybody is under
the impression that Spring has sprung. All we need for a full set is Brenda the
Badger. Let’s hope that we’re not all going to get a short, sharp shock in
March.
I know that the daffodils are coming along nicely because I
got the chance to examine them in close detail while preparing the glass
recycling for collection. Kirklees
Metropolitan Borough Council, may God strafe them for this, decided to stop
collecting glass for recycling in our area in April 2013, at the same time as
they put the council tax up by £2.00 a month.
Consequently it tends to accumulate, and we’ve only had two real trips
to the bottle bank since, one when Owen was here, and one when I gave the
blokes who cleaned out the gutters last year an extra £20.00 to take it all
away and dump it. I had the bright idea of getting rid of at least some of it
by separating out the wine bottles and putting them on Freecycle, figuring that
they might be of use to amateur winemakers. Debbie won’t let me make home-made
wine any more, partly from the fear of explosions and partly because the last
batch I made tasted like rats’ piss, with an aroma of peasants’ feet.
This makes it sound like there were hundreds of wine
bottles, but in fact there was enough to fill a couple of cardboard boxes. What
there was, though, was another couple of boxes worth of clear glass bottles,
very similar, which had previously held the organic carrot juice which Debbie
quaffs on a regular basis, in an attempt to be able to see in the dark and be
as orange as Clint Eastwood. Anyway, I
put the whole lot on Freecycle, and an arrangement was made for some woman who
expressed an interest in them to come and collect them on Thursday. So, on
Thursday morning, which was, thankfully, bright and clear, albeit freezing, I
spent two hours of my life separating them out from the rest of the glass
recycling (it never ceases to amaze me how much stuff is still packaged in
glass, when plastic must be both cheaper and lighter) and boxing them up ready
for her to arrive.
I had asked her whether she was a winemaker, and she had
replied that no, she wasn’t; she wanted them for an artwork. I was quite interested in this remark, and
looked forward to quizzing her about it more when she arrived. Which she never
did, of course. I should have known. My only previous experience with Freecycle
was exactly the same. Freecycle is a
nice idea, but until they make the bids legally enforceable, like they are on
Ebay, it’ll always be a complete waste of dog farts, run by superannuated
hippies with the organisational skills of a bloody Womble. Of course, it banged it down with rain
overnight on Thursday which meant that on Friday morning I spent another two
hours of my life picking the bottles up and putting them back in the crates
with the rest of the glass, and sweeping up the mushy remains of the
boxes. This is my life, these days, I am
beset by idiots who hang on my every move like dingleberries.
Talking of which, the saga of the book stocks rumbles on. I
now have a list of the stock which needs moving, but when I asked for the
further detail which would enable me to get it actually moved, namely the
number of pallets and the number of loose boxes, and what each title was packed
in (ie 12s, 24s, 80s etc) I was told this wasn’t available. I am still puzzling
as to how they managed to come up with the fact that there were 903 copies of
Arthur Mee’s Hertfordshire just by looking at the pallet. Either their warehousing skills have improved
enormously to the stage where they have evolved psychic powers, or they used
X-Ray specs or something, who knows. It is, however, another bloody thing that will need sorting out next week, just
when I feel like spending the time painting, something that I feel like doing
increasingly these days, partly for the calm it brings me when everything else
around me is a raging ball of chaos, and partly because of an obsessive need to
chronicle my life while I still can.
My plans to give away all my old artwork, however, have not
been progressing as quickly as I may have hoped. One reader of this blog
compared what I was trying to do (give away all my old paintings and drawings
in return for donations to Rain Rescue, Mossburn, or The Freedom of Spirit
Trust for Border Collies) to Princess Diana auctioning her old dresses for
charity. I think that’s over-egging the pudding, to be honest, but I would like
to see them do some good, and I’d rather they were up on someone’s wall, even
if it’s only covering a damp patch in the downstairs loo, than mouldering away
in a portfolio somewhere.
The problem has been finding the portfolio. We found a portfolio
this morning. It looks very similar to mine. In it were... four A2 colour
posters of tooth decay, clearly a left over from the day when Granny used to
visit schools as a travelling tooth fairy and mental dental hygienist. [Big sigh]. So it's not my portfolio, which is now officially lost, including all its
contents, and which has not been seen for four years. Also lost is a framed
painting of Skiddaw and a massive attempt at a medieval "Doom"
painted in oils on a plywood board that was originally a pallet top. Debbie
denies putting any of it on the fire while I was in hospital, so, in the words
of the late, great, Toyah Wilcox, it's a mystery, it's a mystery, I'm still
searching for a clue... as they say in all the best ad campaigns, watch this
space. If I do decide to stand as an independent at the next election, I might
get offered the post of Minister Without Portfolio.
Once again, it’s been a week when there has been so much
going on here, that news from the outside world has had a job to filter through
into my consciousness. I did hear that Mark Harper, the immigration minister,
architect of the “immigrants go home” placard vans, has been forced to resign
for er, employing an, er, illegal immigrant.
Why am I not surprised? You have only to read Mortimer Feinberg’s book Why Smart People Do Dumb Things to
realise that hubris can blind the political classes (featherbedded and
sheltered as they are from the vicissitudes of life) to ordinary, everyday
common sense. The Junta has been very vocal about pressing for the maximum
penalties in the case of people caught out dong what Mr Harper has been doing,
so it will be interesting to see if a prosecution is forthcoming. Maybe they’ll deport him. O/C Latrines, Falkland Islands, is vacant at the moment, I hear.
Meanwhile, the Home Office continues to dog and harass
Mariam Harley Miller, whose appeal is now pending (see last week’s blog for a
link to the petition against her deportation) and Isa Muazu continues to
languish in the Harmondsworth detention centre, while Theresa May has seemingly
escaped parliamentary censure for wasting taxpayers’ money on a futile attempt
to deport him on his own private jet in the middle of the night, despite that fact
that his hunger strike had left him blind and unable to stand. Maybe Mariam Harley Miller should ask Theresa
May if she wants any cleaning doing.
I have, however, finally had a reply to my letter to my MP,
Jason McCartney, about the likelihood of a start date for the enquiry which
Parliament voted for into the effects of benefit cuts on poverty. As you may
recall, Parliament voted very emphatically that such an enquiry should take
place. He says:
The backbench debate
on welfare was initiated by Labour MP Michael Meacher, Conservative MP Peter
Bottomley, and Liberal Democrat MP John Hemming. As far as I know none of the
details of any inquiry have been released, and as it was not business in
Government time, Ministers are not compelled to take any action.
So, there you have it. Parliament clearly expresses its
will, and the Government is going to ignore it. This leads me on to another
question. If the Government is not compelled to take notice of the will of
Parliament as expressed quite clearly in the overwhelming vote for an inquiry,
and Parliament is not able to enforce that will on the Government, what use are
any of the buggers? Let’s just save some money, disband the lot of them, and
turn the House of Commons into a shelter for the homeless. It would be a much more productive use of the
building, especially given Shelter’s current estimate of 80,000 children in the
UK either homeless or in temporary accommodation, and the situation neatly
summed up in the 21st December edition of the satirical magazine Private Eye:
In 2011 Grant Shapps,
then housing minister and now Conservative Party chairman, announced the
solution to this problem: give local authorities the flexibility to offer
homeless families a tenancy in the private rented sector.
Alas, the number of
families accepted as homeless since the election is up by 34 percent – a rise
fuelled by the shortage of social housing, cut in housing benefit and, er, the
high cost of private rents. The private rented sector is in fact the fastest
growing source of homelessness. The number of families becoming homeless after
losing a private assured shorthold tenancy has more than doubled in England in the past three years, and more than
quadrupled in London.
With the supposed
solution to homelessness itself fuelling homelessness, the effects of the
coalition’s latest wheeze are likely to be bleak: an extra £100m announced in
the autumn statement to spend on increasing Right to Buy sales – which will get
rid of any remaining social housing even faster.’
It’s not been all bad news this week, though. A client of
one of the Trussell Trust’s food banks was given a new pair of boots by one of
the workers there, who noticed on his regular visits that his footwear was disintegrating.
Each small and random act of kindness is
a brick in the wall of the new Jerusalem. The collie dog and the guinea pig belonging
to the family whose house was wrecked in a gas explosion in Clacton
were found, miraculously, still alive in the rubble and wreckage. The dog began barking when a rescue dog,
Reqs, was deployed on the search, which goes to show that the old adage is
true, the best way to find a lost dog is with another dog.
Woosie the cat was returned to his rightful owners, after being
missing for three years. He had been living as a semi-feral in the grounds of a
Ginster’s Pies factory near Plymouth,
where workers fed him tidbits and sandwiches.
For some reason, after three years they decided to catch him and take
him to the local vet for a check up. The vet discovered Woosie was
microchipped, and the rest is history.
What Woosie himself thought about having to leave the enclaves of the pork
pie factory and go back to a mixture of ordinary wet and dry cat food is not
recorded, but his owners did say he had gained a lot of weight in his absence
and was “considerably heavier” now than when he went missing.
Zak the Chihuahua
is another one who’s been piling it on, but in his case he definitely needs it,
and it’s all part of his recovery. He was found, abandoned, frozen almost to
death, and starving, in a cardboard box on 22nd January, and taken
to East Midlands Dog Rescue, who immediately took him to their vets. For a few
days his fate was uncertain, but in the meantime, because his picture had been
posted on Facebook, he went “viral” and the vets and the dog rescue have been inundated
with people sending him dog treats, toys, blankets, and offers of good homes
for him when he is strong enough.
When you read of stories like that, it does tend to restore
your faith in humankind, at least until you remember the mean, miserable,
callous, unthinking morons who left him out in the cold in the first
place. Well, what does around comes
around, and I wish them a complete transmission failure on a deserted freezing
motorway at 4AM. Badabing, badaboom. No doubt that makes me a bad Christian,
but to be honest I am getting fed up of waiting for Big G to dish out the
lightning bolts these days.
And so we came to Sunday, and the feast of St Eingan, a
Welsh prince and hermit, who died around 590AD.
Other variations of his name include Anianus, Einon, and Eneon Bhrenin.
There is also a tradition that venerates his feast day on 21st April,
rather than February 9th. Despite
his princely birth, in what is now Cumbria,
he left for Wales, where he
ended his days as a hermit at Llanengan near Bangor. He is said to have been a son of the
chieftain Cunedda, whose family claims no less than 50 saints. I suppose there wasn’t a lot else to do in
those days.
Eingan
was also a cousin to the great Maelgwn Gwyneth, king of Britain in North-Wales, whose father was
Caswallon lawhir, the brother of Owen Danwyn; and his mother Medif, daughter of
Voilda ap Talu Traws, of Nanconwey, near Bangor.
All of which serves to remind me, when I have found the missing portfolio, the
next thing I need to look for is my copy of Early
Welsh Genealogical Tracts, by P. C. Bartrum.
Eingan, retired to Lhyn, or Lheyn, now a deanery in the
diocese and archdeaconry of Bangor.
In that part he built a church, and spent the remainder of his days in the service
of God. He seems to have died about the year 590. St. Eingan is the titular
saint of this church, in the place which today is called Llanengan.
So, that was St Eingan, that was. Another one who was sainted, it would seem,
for being a holy and contemplative hermit, rather than for any specific acts,
actions or miracles.
I seem to say this with increasing frequency these days, but
I am not looking forward to next week.
There’s the nonsense with the stock to sort out and all the other myriad
irritations and daily chores that grind me down. Plus there’s an increasing feeling that I’m
coming to some sort of crossroads again, where I’m being asked to decide what
to do with what remains of my life. It
even affects this blog. I started writing it originally – or should I say, I
resumed writing it, as a spiritual exercise, having rediscovered some of what
used to be my faith while lying in a hospital bed, contemplating the big
questions.
I came out of hospital in 2010 zealous almost, determined to do good, whenever and
wherever I could, having being granted a reprieve from near-death. But the sad
fact is that I plunged into a morass of trying to sort out my own life and my
own future (and, ipso facto, Debbie’s
too, so that she is not left with a right old bag of mashings to sort out when
I’m gone) all of which leaves very little time for actively saving the world. I
can feel my energy levels gong down and down, especially so at this time of the
year, when just fighting winter takes up so much of my available resources.
Then there’s the time I’m forced to spend correcting the misapprehensions of
idiots. I’ve also let down friends, one in particular whom I feel sure has
written me off, justifiably, I might add,
for not being around to offer support at a crucial time.
I wrote, and still continue to write, about my own struggles
to believe in something called God, in the hope that others in a similar
situation might find them of use in some way, but even that has become
sidetracked by my reaction to the injustice and inequality I see going on
around me as the Blight Brigade inflicts class war on the vulnerable. What am I
supposed to do? Do I sit here praying
and writing about amusing things the cat has done, like some sort of modern day
St Eingan, withdrawing from the world like a hermit, while ignoring the fact
that people are being sandbagged and carted off to detention centres? Do I say
it’s no concern of mine that homeless people are freezing under bridges, or
animals being abused? Yet for all that I
bang on about it, I get the sense that I am preaching to the converted, and I
sometimes think that the time I invest each week writing this blog could be far
better spent painting pictures that could then be given away in return for
actual donations of real money that would help alleviate real animal
suffering. In an ideal world, of course,
one where I was shorn of overhanging financial obligations and where people did
hat they should do, did it right, and did it at the first time of asking there
would be no conflict, and time enough for both.
I get the feeling though, that this is not an ideal world, and I am not
that sure about the next world, either.
So, here I stand, pace
Martin Luther, or rather here I sit, on this rather bleak Sunday teatime,
pondering my future, however uncertain, however short. It feels at the moment as if the real Spring
will never come, and we’re sort of living in a phoney spring, a bit like the
phoney war. Who would have thought it
would be so hard to give things away, as well, just at a time when I need to be
simplifying my life, be it artwork or wine bottles? Oh well, next week’s
problems will still be there tomorrow, and there will be time enough for them
then. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. In the meantime, I’d best
get the coal in, bomb up the stove, put the kettle on, and maybe dream about
those distant summers, back in the days when I “by the tide of Humber would
complain” – the summers “before the war”.
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