It has been a busy
week in the Holme
Valley. Summer seems to have come to stay, at any
rate, although still with the odd shower.
In fact, one way or another, I seem to have had to deal with quite a few
"odd showers" this week, mentioning no names, cough cough Kirklees College
cough cough.
Still, it’s been
good to have some days when we could have the door open to the decking and let
Zak and Misty wander in and out at will. It’s been so warm in the conservatory
that Zak, in particular, has been flopped out in the shade, panting, barely
able to summon the energy to flick an ear at a passing fly. Misty comes back
from a 14-mile walk with her tongue lolling and empties the water-dish at one
draught, then does that thing where they go round and round a few times before
dropping down onto her bed like a sack of spuds. Mind you, so does Debbie.
Matilda’s been
extending the time she spends outdoors, as well. Although this consists mainly
of filling the time she spends out of doors doing the same things she used to do
indoors, ie sleeping in a variety of improbable poses, depending how warm it
gets. The coming of summer does seem, however, to have awakened some of the
more residual cat instincts, buried deep in her DNA, in that, twice last week,
she actually chased something – the first, a magpie, the second, a
squirrel. She hadn’t a prayer of
catching either, both had long gone before she lumbered anywhere near them (the
magpie up into the trees, where it chattered and chided her, and the squirrel
up onto the fence, where it remained, flicking its tail and taunting her, in
the same way they used to taunt Freddie) and the effect was comic rather than
scary, like seeing a cow on the gad. But
she tried, bless her. Then gave an
enormous fishy yawn, and settled down again under the cool shade of Deb’s
tarpaulin.
Brenda the badger,
if indeed it is she, continues to call at random, although I haven’t seen her
this year in the flesh (or the fur). All
I can say with any certainty is that someone ate the pakoras I put out the
other night. It could have been the
neighbours for all I know.
So, we doddle
on. Thank God half term is looming
again, and Deb will at least get a brief respite from all this crap about
standardisation and grades and marking and all the other grunge that she has to
do before she can actually teach anybody anything. There is talk of getting
away in the camper van at half term, although this is dependant on me getting
the garage to look at some of the minor snags on the garage list next week –
fixing the driver’s window handle and tightening the fan belt, to name but two.
It also depends on the weather, and, indeed, on whether Deb ends up being just
too knackered to load the camper and go.
As for me, I have
had the usual week of chipping away at the various millstones which hang around
my neck. It becomes boring re-telling it after a while, so just take it as
read. If it ever changes, I’ll let you
know. We did have some cause to
celebrate, albeit in a muted fashion, on Thursday, because it was Debbie’s
birthday, and I cooked her a tofu and mushroom risotto and a salade Niçoise, albeit without the egg
or the tuna, but any boisterous revelry was curtailed by the fact that she
would have to go into College the following day.
Friday was,
therefore, largely stolen by Kirklees
College, and Friday
evening marred by the fact that the bolt on the arms of my wheelchair had gone
yet again. Not the bit that Owen fixed, that remains steady as a rock – but the
actual socket where the arm itself seats in.
This is beyond my capacity to fix on-site, so it looks like I will have
to call it in on Monday morning, and then wait around for them to come and mend
it.
On Saturday, for
once, I found myself watching the FA Cup final on TV. Normally, I don’t have a
lot of time for premiership football. There
is far too much money lavished on the top echelons of the game, especially on
the players, who, these days, have about as much loyalty to, and connection
with, the team and the faithful fans who put them there as the local MP does
with his or her constituents. Don’t get me started on what’s wrong with
football in this country, or we will be here all night. Suffice it to say that
I hope Roy Hodgson has saved the FA some money by booking 14-day economy return
tickets.
But, nevertheless,
the FA Cup final is an occasion, and all the more so this year because I had a
horse in the race, or a dog in the fight, whatever metaphor you care to employ,
because for the first time in their 110-year history, a team from my hometown, Hull
City, the “Tigers”, so called because of their black and amber kit, were at
Wembley, contesting for the trophy against the mighty Arsenal. There was no denying that Hull City were the
underdogs – Arsenal had already had a bus painted in their team colours for the
victory parade, two days before the match. The ITV commentators were biased as
hell in their match description, and, even before the end of extra time, with
City trailing 2-3, the engraver was already putting Arsenal’s name on the trophy.
And yes, City did
lose. Although they might have actually nicked it – they had a header nodded
off the line, with the Arsenal goalie beaten, and late on, after another piece
of suicidal goalkeeping, one of the Hull
forwards flashed the ball just wide of a gaping open goal. When they went two
goals ahead, right at the start of the game, setting a new record for a cup
final in the process, I had my fears that it wouldn’t last. I spent many thin Saturday afternoons in the
1970s standing on Bunkers Hill at Boothferry
Park, watching them
snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, and, in the end, so it proved. But in losing the match, they won a hell of a
lot more. After yesterday, everybody knows where Hull is now. Never mind
Tigers, they came out fighting like lions,
and they gave Arsenal one hell of a scare. Maybe people will think twice now
before they make snarty remarks about Hull
being a fish dock at the end of a railway siding. The Crowle Street Kids are
coming, ready or not. And the first one
up before the beak when the revolution comes will be Leona Lewis, for crimes
against music, specifically murdering Abide
With Me, with one case of God Save
The Queen also taken into consideration.
Football aside, I have been trying to avoid news from the outside
world. The febrile political climate engendered
by next Thursday’s EU and local elections has created what my father would
undoubtedly have called a “silly buggers’ outing”. UKIP continues to go from strength to
strength, despite having completely untenable policies, a hypocritical buffoon
for a leader, and an executive membership and prospective candidates composed
entirely of people for whom the phrase “I’m not racist, but…” could have been
invented.
People often make the mistake of labelling UKIP’s policies as racist,
when in fact, technically, most of them are not. The people who write the policies are very
careful not to say exactly what they mean. It’s not the policies that are racist, it’s the membership, as often as not. Fresh from being shredded on-air this week in
an interview on LBC where he was quizzed about whether his dislike of hearing
foreigners not speaking English extended to his German wife (an exchange which
led to his spin doctor bursting into the
on-air studio, waving his arms in an attempt to end it) Farage has had to deal
with the effusive UKIP
candidate Heino Vockrodt, who sent an
email to the London council to which he wants to be elected, claiming a row of
shops in his area “looked like Helmand Province now” and referred to cases where “Muslims are
grooming children to be sex slaves under the eyes of the authorities”. With a name like Heino Vockrodt, he
obviously has a long and distinguished English ethnicity, of course, and the
fact that it sounds like the sort of name a Waffen-SS war criminal might have
sported is, probably, completely
coincidental.
Sanya-Jeet Thandi, a
young lady who was formerly prominent amongst the party’s UK Asian supporters,
has left UKIP this week, claiming that the party is tapping into crude racism
and xenophobia. Er, yes, correct. Anyone
who joins UKIP thinking otherwise is so dumb they should maybe consider booking
in to Jonestown for a Kool-Aid convention.
Farage contends that
these are all just “isolated incidents” and that his candidates are not
actually racist, sexist and homophobic, but it happens so often, and with such
frequency that you start to wonder whether the “isolated incident” would be to
find someone who wasn’t. As well as
Godfrey Bloom with his pronouncements on fridge hygiene, the councillor who
said that gay people cause localised flooding because God is angry, the
prospective candidate in Kent who has a Nazi Junkers Ju-87 Stuka dive-bomber
tattooed on his arm and an email address that includes the word “stukaboy”, and
the UKIP donor who said that women should wear skirts in order to give men
erections, there was also John Sullivan, who wrote on Facebook in February:
'I rather wonder if we shot one 'poofter'
(GBLT whatevers [sic]), whether the next 99 would decide on balance,
that they weren't after-all? We might then conclude that it's not a matter of
genetics, but rather more a matter of education.'
Apparently UKIP’s LGBTG wing were outraged by this! I was amazed to
find that UKIP even has an LGBTG
group. It’s a bit like discovering the Hitler Youth had a section devoted to
Judaic Studies.
Despite this, however, and despite the fact
that UKIP could only carry out their promise of withdrawal from Europe if they
won an overall majority in a UK general election, hundreds of thousands of
people, maybe even millions, racist grannies and white van men who believe that
all immigrants who rock up at Dover Docks are automatically handed the keys to
a council house complete with plasma TV, will turn out and vote for this set of
clowns on Thursday, because the Tories started the wave of xenophobic hate
which UKIP is now surfing, and the Labour Party has done absolutely nothing to
engage with it and turn it back. It’s
all very, very depressing.
Meanwhile, apparently we have what is called a “Zombie Parliament”,
apparently. Given that the definition of a zombie is a terrifying undead
creature who brings death and destruction and inspires fear and loathing, I
would contend that actually, we’ve had a zombie parliament since at least 2010,
and if it came to that, I’m not entirely sure that Blair actually appeared in
any mirrors. Anyway, this is a zombie
parliament for another reason, apparently, in that they have run out of
legislation. By the time they get back
from their extensive summer break, paid for by us, it will be the conference
season, and then the state opening of parliament, followed six months later by
the election. So in one sense, we should be glad the Junta aren’t actively
seeking new ways to grind the faces of the poor, but sadly, we will still have
at least twelve months of the same old same old – as a token of which, Iain
Duncan Smith has once again come to the attention of the UK Statistics
authority for basically lying and cherry-picking from government statistics to
“prove” a hypothesis that is completely unconnected.
I noticed also that the idea that flooding is
caused by gay people was once again given an airing this week, this time by the
leader of the Christian Alliance, whatever that may be. It sounds a bit like a
religious building society. Once again,
I despair. Let me ask the question one more time: do you really think that an
infinite eternal being with the capacity to take on all the suffering of the
world and somehow manage everything that is, was and shall be for ever and ever
amen, is really concerned about what two gays get up to in a bed-and-breakfast
in Berkhamsted?
Mention of God reminds me that this is supposed to be a religious or at
least a spiritual blog, though these days, increasingly, I find myself raving
in the wilderness like a hermit with the clap.
Anyway, eventually we reached Sunday, and the feast of St Elgiva of
Shaftesbury, who died in 944AD. She was
yet another of these Saxon saints who was both holy, and a member of the
nobility. Wife of Edmund the first, she was the mother of both Edwy, King of
the Saxons, and Edgar, King of England. She eventually became a Benedictine nun at
Shaftesbury, a foundation originally begun by Alfred the Great and one to which
her mother had also been greatly attached.
When she died, she was buried there, and almost immediately miracles at
her tomb began to attract attention. Lantfred of Winchester, writing some
thirty years after her death, in the 970s, told of a young man who travelled
from Wiltshire to keep vigil at the tomb, in order to be cured of blindness.
The implication being that by that time the location was already well-known as
a place of potential healing. Her cult
as a saint continued to flourish and she crops up in mentions in pre-Conquest
litanies and Calendars of Saints. She is
also described as a saint in at least one text of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and
in 979AD her resting place at Shaftesbury was still so well known as to ensure
that the remains of her murdered grandson Edward the Martyr were exhumed and
also brought to Shaftesbury Abbey.
William of Malmesbury managed to confuse her, in a text on the Abbey’s
early history, with Ethelgifu, King Alfred’s daughter, and the original Abbess,
though this misinterpretation itself may be down to the fact that not all his
writings on the subject have survived, so he may have meant something else
anyway. Despite its importance and,
indeed, its Royal patronage, little remains of Shaftesbury Abbey today. The
Saxon buildings gave way to Norman
ones and even those today are in ruins, save for a walled garden and a
museum.
Isn’t that just the story of England, though? Generations pass
and buildings rise and fall, and places that used to be massively important are
now nothing more than a few humps of stone in a field beside a motorway. We’re
back to East Coker again:
In my beginning is my end. In succession
Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,
Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their
place
Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass.
Old stone to new building, old timber to new
fires,
Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth
Which is already flesh, fur, and faeces,
Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf.
Houses live and die: there is a time for
building
And a time for living and for generation
And a time for the wind to break the loosened
pane
And to shake the wainscot where the field
mouse trots
And to shake the tattered arras woven with a
silent motto.
In my beginning is my end. Very true, and something that I think about a
lot, notwithstanding that outside my window as I type, it’s a beautiful May
evening and the cat is snoozing on the decking with not a care in her world,
and Debbie is down with the dogs at the cricket field, and soon I’ll re-light
the stove and put out the Badger’s tea, and feed the mutts, and feed us, then
maybe settle down to some more painting.
It sounds idyllic, but like all paradises, it contains a serpent, the
serpent of time, twisting away out of reach: in a month from now, it will be
Midsummer. And that will be half a year
gone. But hark my heart, like a soft
drum, beats my approach, tells thee I come, said Henry King, and some days I
know of what he speaks. The utterly terrifying thing is that, irrespective of
the howling mess of chaos in my in-tray, some day there will not even be an
in-tray; maybe not even a decking, not even a cricket field. And where will I
be, then. I really must make my peace with Big G.
At times like these, all you can do is fall back on the knowledge that
it’s not yet. Our lives are a succession of not yets, into which we need to
pour as much heart and soul and spirit as we can. Be like Hull City,
and live every day as if you were a tiger.
And if there’s someone you care for, don’t wait until they’ve shut that
door, tell them now, and then tell them some more, tell them how much you love
them.
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