Epiblog for the Feast of St Juliana of Norwich

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. Sadly, this week, Spring failed to live up to its earlier promise, and instead of getting warmer, the weather seems stuck in a default “cold and grey” mode, with occasional fleeting glimpses of sunshine, and a horrendous downpour on Wednesday, leaving me fearing for the well-being of my herbs, although as it turned out, the drainage holes I’d drilled into the tubs did their stuff, and they dried the soil out as the rainwater passed through.

There’s been no need to water the garden, then, which seems to be coming up quite nicely, even where we don’t want it to! But the clematis is in bud, and there are flowers on the magnolia, so it’s not all bad news.  Matilda has been dodging the showers, and the birds and squirrels have been dodging Matilda, rather more successfully.  Actually, she almost came unstuck during the week when she was out on the decking and I heard a tremendous racket coming out of the tree that overhangs nearest to the conservatory door. I trundled over to see what was going on, and found myself being eyeballed by a raven, of all things, who was telling Matilda, and anyone else who would listen, how unimpressed he was with the cat preventing him coming down for some bird seed.  I must admit, I thought ravens were exclusively carrion birds, but nevertheless, that is what I saw.

Matilda, for her part, was eyeing up the raven with a sort of “come and have a go if you think you’re hard enough” look, and I could only foresee this ending one way – badly, with Matilda being borne off in its talons towards Castle Hill.  I opened the door, the raven flew off with enormous, slow, wing-beats, Matilda scuttled in and stuck her face in her Felix bowl, and we all went back to whatever it was we had been doing before we were so rudely interrupted.  As I type this, she is once again sprawled out in her little favourite sunny spot on the decking, snoozing, with her legs stretched out on the warm wood.

Misty, Zak and Ellie have all had a fairly uneventful week, for them. Because it was a teaching week, Deb hasn’t been on any long expeditions, just a couple of ten milers or so.  Ellie’s been sticking her snout down mole and rabbit holes in the time honoured terrier fashion, and has come back a couple of times with a black face instead of the usual brown and white one.  She also suffered a slight contretemps when she ran, barking, into a large puddle in one of the fields on her walk, and suddenly found that it was a lot deeper than she thought when it came up to the tops of her legs.

Freddie used to have that trouble as well, in snowdrift and in puddles, and Friday, as well as being the 70^th anniversary of VE Day, we also the first anniversary of his death. I’ve written many words in many books about little Fred, about how he used to sleep, in his last few trips with us, on the front seat of the camper van, wrapped up in my desert scarf. I’m glad he made it to Arran, that one last time in 2013. For a little dog, he climbed some big mountains, and was never daunted by any of them.  I suggested to Debbie that we should think of some appropriate way of marking the anniversary, and her suggestion was that, for that day, whenever we saw a squirrel on the decking, we should hurl ourselves against the glass of the conservatory door, barking, but in the end we went with my idea of lighting some T-lights.  Matilda has had a very close encounter with a squirrel, actually, this week because she had been watching “cat TV” (ie sitting just inside the conservatory door and lashing her tail and chattering at the squirrels and birds outside) and she must have dropped off, while in the meantime, a daring squirrel came right to the other side of the glass and started hoovering up some spare sunflower seeds.  Because the decking is lower than the threshold on the outside, it wasn’t immediately obvious it was there, so when Matilda woke up from her snooze and looked out of the window again, it came as a considerable shock to her when a squirrel popped up an inch from the end of her nose, albeit separated by a double-glazed door. She did that thing that cats sometimes do when startled, of jumping upwards and backwards at the same time, with all four paws off the ground at once. The squirrel skedaddled.

I’m pleased to report an apparently happy outcome to the saga of Poppy, the stray black cat in the garden, who has now been taken on by the neighbours as a fully-accredited auxiliary pet, and has been down to the vets and neutered, courtesy of the Cats’ Protection League.  I have to report, in the interests of even handedness, that this is the first occasion since 1992 when I have actually called on the Cats’ Protection League and they have actually helped, but in this case at least, they, and my neighbour, are to be commended for their actions.

As for me, I haven’t yet been re-homed, though I am sure Debbie has it on her to-do list, but in the meantime, I’ve been keeping busy editing books, doing various marketing tasks, accounts, sorting out boxes of old stuff, and also doing yet more gardening. I am now working on setting up the left hand side of my ramp, with three more planted-out tubs, and to that end I managed to procure a 6 ft  by 3 ft willow hurdle, which I intend to paint white and then mount onto the wall behind the tubs, to reflect light.  Debbie came out and watched me giving it the first coat, with an amused look of tolerance.

“I was going for the old, distressed, weatherbeaten look,” I said, by way of explanation.

“Are we talking about you, or the hurdle?” was her reply.

The other big domestic event of the week was my trip to Huddersfield Royal Infirmary, for my six-monthly check up, to see how much further I have deteriorated.  I almost didn’t make it, because when the ambulance man came, apparently I was down on his paperwork as being ambulatory, when in fact I should have been designated as a “Wheelchair One”. Free the wheelchair one! The vehicle had a perfectly adequate tail-lift, but the problem was that this single tick in the wrong box on the ambulance control system meant that I wasn’t insured for the journey. No insurance = no travel. One twenty-minute mobile phone call by the ambulance man to control later, and all was sorted. I was loaded on board in the usual sack of spuds fashion, and apologised to my fellow-travellers for the delay in their journey.

I got to discussing the world in general (it was election day, after all, though I had already voted, by post) and setting things to rights. I mentioned Hull, and his ears pricked up He, too, had been born in the city. Whereabouts? I enquired – only to be told “Bean Street”.  Bean Street was where Granny Rudd and my Dad and Auntie Mavis were living in the 1920s and 30s. It was there that the unfortunate George Hill Cooper, Granny Rudd’s father, finally gave up the struggle against the strange voices and sounds in his mind, and stuck his head in the gas oven, with fatal consequences.  My compatriot in the ambulance was born in 1928, he said, which meant he must have been living there when my Dad, aged 7, was living in the same street.

He told me he’d been back to Hull, recently, to look up the old place, and I said I imagined he’d found it greatly altered, to which he agreed.  Bean Street’s alterations began on the night of 14^th/15^th March 1941, when a German parachute mine, jettisoned by a Luftwaffe plane from KG54, probably a Junkers JU-88 based at St Andre-en-Evreux in France, blew half of Bean Street to brick-dust and crap, causing what the official war diary called “extensive domestic damage”, killing nineteen people and injuring twenty-two.  One of those made homeless that night was Granny Rudd, but it’s an ill mine that blows no good, because eventually her lack of a house led to her being given a prefab, on Sweet Dews Grove off Newbridge Road, where yours truly entered this world ten years after the war ended.

When we commemorate VE day, we think of course of the sacrifices of the military and emergency services personnel during those five dark days, but we shouldn’t overlook the very real fear, privation and hardship undergone by the civilians, such as both my grandmas. By now, anyway, we’d reached the hospital, and I have to say, my first sight of the brand-new outpatient facility at Acre Mills, a former wire-works which has been taken over by HRI and fitted out as a drop-in centre, was very impressive.  During my consultation, which consisted mainly of my detailing the various ways in which I could no longer do things which I could do previously, I happened to mention that my wheelchair was also a bit the worse for wear, but that this was only to be expected, as I had taken it up to Arran a few times.

Anna, Dr Naylor’s registrar, exclaimed that she went to Arran every year on holiday as well. Her husband’s family have a holiday flat there at Corriegills.  As I had previously observed to Harold from Bean Street in the bus on the way in, it’s a small world, though I shouldn’t like to have to paint it.  Unfortunately the journey home didn’t prove so entertaining or trouble-free, as there was some sort of ambulance crisis on and I was stuck there waiting for about two and a quarter hours in the “transport lounge”.  Oddly enough, yesterday, when I had all but forgotten the trip, I got a text asking me to rate them on how likely I am to "recommend them to a friend"!  Dear Friend, if you too are lucky enough to contract a life-limiting genetic disease, why not try Huddersfield Royal Infirmary outpatients for that (possibly) once in a lifetime experience. They've got a Costa Coffee and everything. Or you could always let the Fire Brigade have a crack at curing you! This is why the NHS is short of money. Too much of this poodlefaking nonsense sucking up the budget.

The NHS has been much on my mind in a more general sense this week, of course, because of the election. The election was a disaster, as predicted, but at times like this, you do find yourself casting around for the odd scraps of good news in amongst the gloom. True, we are still saddled with Katie bloody Hopkins, but on the plus side, Esther McVey lost her job, and I truly hope she gets sanctioned unless she can prove that she was actively looking for work at 9AM tomorrow.  And of course, the Liberal Democrats (an oxymoron if ever there was one) met their Waterloo, or rather, their Stalingrad, and deservedly so. I cheered as each domino fell.  The Junta is no more. Plus there is every chance of the rebellious Scottish Nationalists kicking large holes in any attempts to impose “austerity” by the Blight Brigade.  Nigel Farage failed in his bid to be elected.  Paddy Ashdown may well have to eat his hat, live on TV.  (That would make a good “Masterchef” challenge… Paddy has cooked his hat three ways…)

And of course, although it may not seem like an advantage, it is – the enemy is now in plain sight. No more chindit-ing around in the jungle, deciding to strangle the first-born of every voter in an attempt to keep the benefits bill down, then sending out a Liberal Democrat to make the actual announcement. We know who the bad guys are, they are there for all to see, we know what they think and what they’re going to try and do. No more Lib Dim figleaves and obfuscation. The enemy is in the field, on the plain before us, drawn up in serried ranks like the Orcs and Nazguls at Helm’s Deep. Fire up the War-wolf.

I have written many words on the inadequacies of Ed Miliband, and I don’t want to re-visit all of them here. He made several serious tactical blunders, both in his period of “opposition” and in the campaign itself. These included; not offering a referendum on Europe, and thereby cutting off any hope of the working-class voters who had defected (I almost typed ‘defecated’) to UKIP ever coming back; failing to counter the repeated Tory lie that a) Labour had left the economy in a mess and b) the Tories had fixed it, neither of which is true; meekly accepting the Tory frame of reference on things such as the Benefits Cap; apologising for things which weren’t his fault; and actively campaigning with the Tories against the SNP during the referendum, an act which was, for the Scottish Labour Party, on Thursday, the equivalent of being sent “over the top” on July 1^st 1916, and with a similar outcome.

Ed Miliband proved to be the Tim Henman of Labour, a man with the killer instinct of Bambi. We needed someone with the intellect and vision of Clement Attlee and the street fighting pugnacity of John Prescott, and what we got was the exact opposite. I’m sorry if this sounds harsh. It’s actually nothing I haven’t said before, many times, and if the Labour Party has listened when he was up, I might not now be kicking him when he’s down.

But whatever reason, the botched Labour campaign and the failure specifically to counter the Tory lies has landed us with five more years of doom. Five more years of food banks; five more years of austerity; five more years of welfare cuts affecting the most needy and vulnerable; five more years of the bedroom tax and the benefits cap; five more years of the NHS being dismantled, brick by brick; five more years of crappy low paid zero hours pretend jobs on zero hours contracts that have to be topped up with in-work benefits; five more years of people dumping their pets or having to take them to the shelter because they can no longer afford to keep a cat or a dog; five more years of hatred and xenophobia, of vans driving round telling brown people to go “home”; five more years of people being declared fit to work by Atos and then dying of cancer; five more years of rising homelessness; five more years of the disabled being demonised and labelled as scroungers, five more years of the NHS being dismantled, and five more years of people starving to death with £2.60 in their bank account because their benefits have been sanctioned. Anyone who voted Tory yesterday voted for that, and I hope it comes back to bite them and theirs, in spades redoubled.

Oh, and the return of fox-hunting. Meanwhile, if anyone can think of a suitable use for the Ed stone, answers on a postcard please.  For Labour there is much work to be done, but we can at least take some comfort from the fact that, even though they have an overall majority (just) the next parliament is not going to be plain sailing for the Blight Bridgade. They will split on Europe, and I am sure Cameron will soon get fed up of being harangued by Nicola Sturgeon. Prime Minister’s Question Time is going to be entertaining.  The Labour Party, meanwhile, needs to pick a new leader who can catch the Tory lies on the wing and ram them straight back down Cameron’s throat. I am seriously considering joining the Labour Party, but of course if I join anything, I lose my independence to comment.  One thing that the Labour Party should do, immediately, from day 1, is put down a marker by abandoning “pairing”.  Pairing is where two MPs on opposing sides agree to be mutually absent for certain votes, so that they can both be elsewhere doing other things.  In any other industry or job, this would be the sort of thing that the papers used to call “Spanish Practices” and it should be illegal.  Make the Tories work for every vote. Once they have had to fly back from Brussels a few times in order to vote on the Statutory Instrument for the Rother and Jury’s Gut Water Catchment Board, the wheels might start to come off.

Cameron has declared his support for the idea of a Margaret Thatcher Memorial Museum and Library. Presumably with Margaret Thatcher memorial spikes in the doorway to stop the Margaret Thatcher memorial homeless sleeping there.  Anyway, I don’t know why he’s bothering. On the evidence of Thursday’s vote, the whole country is turning into the Margaret Thatcher Memorial Museum.  Perhaps the Ed stone can be repurposed and used in the foundations somewhere, in recognition of his small but crucial part in that process.

So, at the end of a sombre week, which also included the VE Day celebrations, though these were largely lost in the static of the fallout from the election disaster, we came to today, the sixth Sunday of Easter, apparently.  It was also the week, though, which contained (on Friday) the feast day of St Juliana of Norwich, and it is to her that I have dedicated this Epiblog, even though her feast was two days ago. Or in three days' time, according to the Catholic calendar. No offence to Jesus or anything, but this part of the gospels and the readings for these various Sundays between Easter Sunday and the start of what the church calls “Ordinary Time” are all full of him going round infusing people with the holy spirit and stuff like that, but the air of painstakingly putting something together again after a massive defeat, rebuilding structures from the bottom and trying to create something even greater than what has been lost, is a bit too close to home and a bit too raw. Juliana of Norwich, however, is just the ticket, at least for me she is, at a time when I feel my spirits need re-balancing.  Especially in a week where I have felt more than usually belligerent and unforgiving.

I was particularly interested in her writing on sin. Unlike conventional theologians of her time, Juliana of Norwich believed that sin arises from ignorance or naivety, rather than some innate evil, latent within us all. She ties sin together with the idea of failure, and that when we learn, we have to fail, and when we fail, that’s where the sin comes in, and the pain we endure because of our mistakes is an earthly echo of the pain Jesus suffered on the cross.  Thus, those who suffer become closer to Christ.  She also preached that there was no wrath in God, but it was more the case that God sees us as we will be when we are perfected, when our souls are finally free from the hindrance of sin because our learning process is completed.

I am drawn to Juliana of Norwich because of her direct experience of God as expressed in her writings. On those odd occasions when I have felt a similar, although much more feeble connection, it is summed up perfectly by her saying that

All shall be well,

And all manner of thing shall be well.

But I struggle with the idea that the people in this world who commit evil, in which I include the incoming government, do so because it is all part of some sort of learning process to do with their spiritual development.  Especially as there is no or little evidence of them learning from their mistakes or undergoing any anguish, crucifixion-related or otherwise.

However, the other thing I find startling about Juliana of Norwich is her pre-figuring of the same sort of explanation of the universe as being God and vice versa, as is sometimes advanced by modern-day physicists: that there is something which was, is now and ever shall be, over which we move the lens of consciousness to make up our own version of “reality” on the hoof as we go along. This theory, expounded by John Gribben amongst others, is also present in Juliana’s most famous passage of revelation, once you strip away the flowery language.

And in this he showed me a little thing, the quantity of a hazel nut , lying in the  palm of my hand, as it seemed. And it was as round as any ball. I looked upon it with the eye of my understanding, and thought, 'What may this be?' And it was answered generally thus, 'It is all that is made.' I marvelled how it might last, for I thought it might suddenly have fallen to nought for littleness. And I was answered in my understanding: It lasts and ever shall, for God loves it. And so have all things their beginning by the love of God.  In this little thing I saw three properties. The first is that God made it. The second that he loves it. And the third, that God keeps it.

I came to her writings via T S Eliot, who draws extensively on her during the Four Quartets.  In Little Gidding he uses the “all shall be well” quotation and the “grounds of our beseeching” passage.

Whatever we inherit from the fortunate

We have taken from the defeated

What they had to leave us—a symbol:

A symbol perfected in death.

And all shall be well and

All manner of thing shall be well

By the purification of the motive

In the ground of our beseeching.

Eliot, too, was obsessed in the Four Quartets by “what might have been”, a concept also embraced by Juliana’s “nutshell”, and a concept which has been much on my mind this week. I intend to re-read the whole of Juliana of Norwich over the next few days, as clearly there are things in it that I didn’t see the first time around.  Sin as a learning curve, for instance. But, at the end of a bruising week, and having once more opened Four Quartets to chase up the Juliana references, I couldn’t help but notice the lines in East Coker about:

…every attempt

Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure

Because one has only learnt to get the better of words

For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which

One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture

Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate

With shabby equipment always deteriorating

In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,

Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer

By strength and submission, has already been discovered

Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope

To emulate—but there is no competition—

There is only the fight to recover what has been lost

And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions

That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.

For us, there is only the trying.

Normally, by this point, I might or might not have come to some sort of spiritual resolution, and maybe give a hint of looking forward to next week. However, at this juncture, I seem to find myself more and more looking back.

The people who came back from the war in 1945 and voted in Atlee in the Labour landslide knew exactly what they wanted. A land fit for heroes. Their parents had been promised it after the carnage and slaughter of Flanders in the first world war, and then had it snatched away again: this time, they were determined. The NHS, education, nationalisation.  No return to the 1930s with its hunger marches, unemployment, and soup-kitchens. 

Now we find ourselves in a similar position. There are undoubtedly going to be some very dark days ahead for those of us who also believe in life before death. A huge, ignorant, brutal and uncaring army is drawn up before us on the field of battle, and they are set on destroying every advance in decent society in the last seventy years. If you ask me, we owe it to the memory of those who stopped fascism in its tracks and built the Welfare State, to buckle on our armour, and go out there and do it all again.

There is only the fight to recover what has been lost

And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions

That seem unpropitious.