Matilda’s still spending more of her time out of doors, as
well you might when it’s sticky and clammy and you are forced to wear a
compulsory fur coat. She is still no nearer catching any of the squirrels,
either. She could have a great career as a Bagpuss tribute act. Poor little
dote, though, she’s going to miss us while we’re away. If we ever get away.
Misty, Zak and Ellie have all had various walks, treats and
meals, Misty because she lives here and the other two because Debbie always
believes in treating doggie guests as equals. The only problem with these much
longer walkies is that Ellie really can’t hack it as she just isn’t built for 15
miles of rolling moorland, so she has to go separately on her own. She’s only
got little legs, bless her.
The last week seems to have gone by in a blur for me. Like
the weather, I, too, seem to be locked into a pattern, especially when it comes
to holidays. The preparation for going
on holiday is always stressful and depressing, nobody does my work for me while
I am away, so there’s always a massive backlog when I get back, and there’s
always the chance of losing the odd pet and/or the odd person, given Debbie’s
insistence on climbing every mountain and fording every stream. Plus of course, every year the holiday more
or less coincides with one or two “significant” ie depressing, anniversaries.
Baggis Day, which we celebrate every year in honour of our
former cat, Russell, aka Baggis, reminds me that on the 9th July
2005, while Deb was kayaking in Brodick bay and we were out of range of all
mobile phones, the poor little cat was dying at
Donaldsons, after Granny had found him, keeled over, when she came to
feed him that morning. He was, and still is, the best bad cat in the world,
something he excelled at for all his 15 years of life, and he is still
remembered. And St Swithun’s Day, July 15th, this year, will be the fifth anniversary of my
dash through the streets of Huddersfield to
the sound of the blue lights and the ambulance siren, en route to having my innards re-assembled, followed by six months
in hospital, followed by officially discovering I had Muscular Dystrophy. 29th August will mark three years
since Kitty died, two days after we got back from Arran
that year. So all in all, it’s not a
happy time of year, and I could do without it.
You could be forgiven for wondering why I bother to go at
all, and I do sometimes wonder and ask myself that very question. I do enjoy it when I’m there, although it
usually takes a few days to slough off the feeling that I should be doing
something and learn to appreciate, once more, the virtue of doing nothing at
all. Plus, of course, my winters are
very long, and the thought of not getting away at all, and instead spending
July and August doing more of the same, watching summer fade and die around me,
and marking the encroaching cold and darkness, without having had at least a
break from the norm, is probably even worse. So, in short, if I don’t go, I’ll
wish I’d gone, and if I stayed at home, Debbie would probably go anyway on her
own (well, taking Misty) and then I would still be worrying about them, but
from a distance of about 250 miles, which is even worse.
The other thing which having an annual holiday at this time
brings home, especially one in the camper van, is how much my condition has
deteriorated in the preceding twelve months.
At home, there is no doubt that life is easier for me, with everything
more or less set up to facilitate the use of the wheelchair, and with my
profiling bed. In the camper there are no such refinements, and the bed is hard
and unyielding. This is not all bad news: a hard bed is actually better for my
spine, but the struggle to transfer four times a day – bed to wheelchair,
wheelchair to front seat, front seat to wheelchair, wheelchair to bed, takes
its toll and is always fraught with the possibility of falling off and doing
myself some damage and/or having to call an ambulance.
You could also be forgiven for thinking that God doesn’t
want me to go on holiday this year, either – my tooth, of all things, flared up
painfully during the week. One of those big, back, lower mandible molar wisdom
thingies. I don’t know if it’s sprung a leak or what, but there is absolutely
no time to go and see the dentist and get it fixed up. It’s so long, anyway,
since I have been, that I bet the surgery has closed down, or at least I have
fallen off their list. And of course,
right on cue, the camper van has decided to play up.
Characteristically, in previous years, as soon as term has
ended, we’ve let the garage give it the once-over, on the principle that a
stitch in time saves nine, and it’s always potentially easier to get stuff
fixed around here than in the wilds of Scotland where the only option
might be to take a tow truck back home.
This year, however, I thought we could maybe do away with even that
expense (a service is about £150.00) because it’s been behaving itself and it
was only up at the garage back in March when they had it in to repair the
vandalism. So, of course, a couple of
days this week, it’s refused to start.
The battery, however, according to the RAC man, anyway, is OK, and it’s
holding its charge. Which means of course the worst of all possible outcomes,
some little niggling electrical problem is draining the battery and it will
take ages to find and cost gazillions to fix.
As it stands at the moment, they’re coming to take a look at it tomorrow
morning, and I am praying very hard for a good outcome.
Deb, meanwhile, has been getting together what gear she can,
and enjoying the unaccustomed feeling of freedom brought on by not having
deadlines for lesson plans and creating resources. As I’ve said before, the ideal career for her
would probably have been something in the armed forces, except she has trouble
remembering the points of the compass, and may often be heard muttering “Never
Eat Shredded Wheat”, let alone the phonetic alphabet beyond C-Charlie. The other day we were watching something on
TV and there was a recruiting advert for the RAF reserve or some such, and she
actually said she’d often thought of something along those lines. Based on our life to date with the camper, I
could presumably expect a mobile phone call to say she was lost and could I
look something up on Google streetview for her, or that her Tiger Moth had run
out of petrol at 20,000 feet.
The only other happenings for me this week of anything
approaching significance were that I more or less established beyond reasonable
doubt that I have accidentally burned the fair copy handwritten final draft of
We’ll Take The String Road, because I am an idiot, and my brain is now like
Homer Simpson’s in that every time I take in something new, it pushes out some
of the old stuff, and I found the missing envelope of family history research
going back to 1980, so once more I have been reunited with some very dead
ancestors without having to bother to have to do the research all over again.
Calling it an envelope, actually, is like calling the Hindenburg a blimp: the
envelope in question is actually one of those big, old, basketweave gusseted
manila jobs, a dreadnought, a battleship among envelopes, absolutely crammed with stuff from the days when “online” was
something that happened to wet washing, and if you wanted to trace your
ancestors, you had to spend hours poring over old documents or using the
microfilm readers, in a library or search room.
Spending hours tracing the details of long dead people and
wishing to imagine enjoying their company may seem odd, but when you look at
some of the dead people in question, and compare them to some of the living
people around at the moment, you begin to understand the attraction. The Chancellor of the Exchequer is definitely
one who pales by comparison, especially after this week’s budget. Thousands of words have already been written
on the budget and thousands more will be: I don’t intend to add significantly
to that mountain, you’ll be pleased to know. My observation is limited to
noting how cynical and divisive it was.
Despite the fact that Osborne
repeats the mantra about us being all in it together until he starts foaming at
the mouth, in fact, the Blight have been practising "divide and rule"
since day 1 of the last parliament. All of that rhetoric about "people
sleeping away their lives on benefits with their curtains closed while hard
working alarm clock Britain goes off to work" should have been debunked by
Labour but instead it's taken hold, and now the Tories have just enshrined the
division, with a budget which seems to be rewarding people for working and
punishing those on benefits.
So, the choice facing the Labour Party now is a stark one. Does it, a la Liz Kendall, Rachel Reeves and others of that ilk, go along with the Tory world view, and hope to pick up some crumbs from the table of the floating voter, or does it try and unite the country behind a radical alternative vision to show that there is another, better, way. Get it wrong, and Labour will be out of power until 2025 or later.
In fact, what Osborne has done is to shift the burden of dealing with low incomes onto the private sector. Quite what happens when the “recovery” tanks in 18 months and living wage private sector jobs become rarer than rocking-horse shit, is a moot point. Employers in the private sector are going to think twice (or more) before creating jobs where they are forced to pay people £9/hr. Meanwhile, benefits in real terms are frozen for four years, and the benefits cap is lowered, for, I believe, the first time, disproportionately for people outside of the capital.
One Tory MP, though, this
week, has at least spoken out for a specific group of people whom he feels are
underprivileged and whom he considers should be given special treatment,
because they are struggling. MPs.
A man who some have tipped as a future Tory leader, Adam
Afriyie MP, has claimed it is
“impossible” to raise a family on the £67,000pa which an MP earns, and
has put forward the idea, in an interview with Chat Politics, that, instead, MPs should not be given a salary and audited expenses but an “allowance” of up to £225,000 to spend
however they want.
There are some people who are so far out that they are
almost back in again. You feel like buying a Ouija board just to be able to ask
them what colour the sky is on their planet, and do they ever do day trips back
to the real world, to try and contact the living? I have heard of “one stop
beyond Barking and well off the bus route”, but this bloke has long left
Stratford-Atte-Bow behind, and is heading for Harwich at a rate of knots. Actually, though, I have a theory. He’s not
that out of touch. He made his millions from hi-tech communications, after all.
He’s just a smug rich whingeing Tory bastard thumbing his nose at the poor, the
old and the ill because he can, because a load of selfish morons who are the
spiritual heirs of Margaret Thatcher voted to put him in a position where he
can say yah-boo-sucks to the rest of us, and he’s exercising that privilege in
the way only a compassionless unfeeling boor could do. That’s my theory,
anyway.
Other than that, life has pretty much rumbled on without me
noticing it, this week, although I also noted the demise of Yanis Varoufakis, the Greek finance minister who
was sacked my the Greek PM in the wake of the referendum, presumably as some
sort of sacrifice in order to smooth the way in any future negotiations. I just
think it’s sad that someone who was a potential character should be eased out of the frame, with the compliance of his boss,
whom he also considered a friend, simply because his unorthodox methods and
attempts to actually solve an intractable crisis and achieve something in the
face of near-universal intertia seem to have rubbed the bean-counters in suits,
the faceless accountants, up the wrong way. But then, I have been in that
situation myself, so perhaps I’m identifying too strongly with him. Either way,
I’m afraid the Greek PM has now lost a lot of my respect, but I doubt that
he’ll lose any additional sleep over that, when he already has an overdraft the size of
Mount Olympus, and what did I expect anyway –
the man is a politician, after all.
And so we came to
Sunday, which is St Veronica’s Day. It’s also the anniversary of the Battle of the Boyne, of
course, but I’ve never seen the rationale in celebrating 350 years of divisive
sectarianism, so I’ll leave that to the people with the drums, the bowler hats
and the sashes. St Veronica is the
patron saint of laundry workers and photographers, for reasons which will
probably become obvious in due course.
She was allegedly a pious woman of Jerusalem
at the time when Jesus was busy turning the world upside down, not to mention
the tables of the bankers. The legend
which attaches to her is that she was so moved with pity when she saw Jesus
carrying his own cross to his place of execution, that she offered him her
veil, so he could wipe his forehead. Jesus accepted the gift, and held it to
his face. When he gave the veil back to its owner, his image had been
miraculously transposed on to the cloth, a la The Turin Shroud, I guess.
There is, as with
almost all early saints, some doubt and confusion about this. There are those
scholars who say that the “Veronica” refers to the veil, and not its owner, and
that it derives from the Greek word “icon” and the Latin for “true”, vera. Thus it was the veil that was the
“vera icon”, not the woman who owned it. By the 13th century, the
term was being used for the relic venerated as a true relic of Jesus in Rome, but it has long
since gone.
Whatever she was
called, she is not referred to by name in the relevant passage in any of the
four Gospels, and that well-known modern theological expert Mr Mel Gibson chose
in his film The Passion of the Christ,
to call her “Seraphia”. The incident has
become associated with the sixth Station of The Cross, and has been depicted in
art many times.
She doesn’t seem to
have much going for her in the way of other miracles, but she became a saint
long before the present rules about having to do intercessions and all that
stuff, so I suppose she was sort of elected “on the nod”. There are some mentions of her in the
Apochrypha, one where she is supposed to have cured the emperor Tiberius by
touching him with a cloth bearing the image of Christ, presumably the same veil,
unless she had a stack of them in the ironing cupboard at home. The devotion to
St Veronica and the holy face of Jesus was officially approved by Pope Leo XIII
in 1885.
In researching St Veronica I also discovered that the most
common “pass” used by the toreador in bullfighting is called a “Veronica”
because he holds his cape out by the corners in the same way as St Veronica is
usually portrayed holding up the veil with Jesus’s image on it.
This is possibly the single most interesting thing about
bullfighting, a crime of which I know very little, except that Hemingway waxed
boring on it, and the bull should win far, far more often than it does, see
also under the right to arm bears.
So, there we have St Veronica, Dear Reader, and as usual, I
am at a loss to take any particular inspiration from the incident. It is
interesting, however, in view of modern revelations about God and nuclear
physics, to look at any instance of images being burnt onto any material, be it
the Turin Shroud or Veronica’s veil, and to wonder about the atomic power that
would be necessary to make such a thing possible. Of course, all the scientists amongst my
readership will probably have fallen off their chairs laughing by now, pretty
much as people did 200 years ago when Benjamin Franklin wondered what would
happen if he flew his kite in a thunderstorm with a key tied to the string. I
was just moved to make the comparison by remembering those images of the
shadows of people permanently blasted into stone walls by the A-bomb blast at Hiroshima.
Of course, for that theory to be even mildly tenable,
several other things also have to be taken as read – the existence of Jesus for
instance, and the fact of his divinity (or at least that he had more static
electricity than you could shake a stick at – or a veil). None of these are
givens in my world any more, except that I am reminded once again, as I am
whenever I think of the crucifixion and of Jesus dragging that heavy cross
through the hot, sweaty streets of Jerusalem, if it really happened like that,
with the crowds jeering and the Roman soldiers spitting on him and licking him
when he fell… I am reminded of standing that day in Holy Cross Abbey in
Ireland, and feeling whatever it was that was being transmitted – that’s the
only word to use – transmitted, by that tiny fragment of wood said to be a
piece of the true cross, in its gold case on the chapel wall: the heat, the
smell, the spices, the Ras-El-Hanout, the cries of the crowd, the adobe walled
buildings, the palm trees, the shouting, the what I can only describe as the
ancient yellow sandiness of it all.
That last bit, now I’ve written it down, sounds and looks
crazy. “Ancient yellow sandiness”? What the hell? Unfortunately, sometimes you
cross burning boundaries where you can’t smuggle the meaning back to those you have
left behind. It had meaning like a dream has meaning, and when you wake up,
what seemed so powerful and important turns out to be absurd and stupid. I know, also, that I felt the same feeling
again, or a tinge of it, while I was waiting to go under the anaesthetic in
2010. But then I was probably delirious.
You pays your money, and you takes your choice. As always.
Perhaps these episodes were just my febrile imagination. Certainly, the God I
attempted to describe in last week’s Epiblog would not be compatible,
particularly with the idea of Jesus and his mission on Earth, although to be
honest, if that is the sort of thing God really is, how could we ever know the
innermost reaches of its mind, its reasoning?
Anyway, that is probably me done for the day. I should really be getting
ready to go on holiday, not sitting here writing blogs. I have done something
towards it today though, I sewed up the rip in my scarf. As ye rip, so shall ye
sew. Euripides, Eumenidies. Oh well,
it’s all Greek to me, as Mrs Merkel said.
God alone knows where I will be at this time next week, or how many teeth I will have. No change there, then.
God alone knows where I will be at this time next week, or how many teeth I will have. No change there, then.
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