Epiblog for the Feast of St Fulbert of Chartres

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. And it did snow, but not at ground level. More of that later. Actually, ground level has been pretty balmy, but not, as Radio Leeds’s recent weather forecast had it “barmy” – well, no more so than usual.

It’s good to see the sun again, and the light evenings have also done a lot to alleviate the black moods of recent weeks. Maybe we are finally through winter, after all. There have been lots of ye olde traditional April showers, though, some of them made of hailstones.  Yesterday when I was out on my ramp planting things, Matilda came wandering around from the back garden and started winding round me an rubbing her chin on the corners of the planters, sniffing the flowers.  “Do you want to come in?” I asked her, and she totally ignored me, then toddled off back into the front garden. Half an hour later, when I was just about finishing up, the sky was looking awfully black over Will’s Mother’s, and I felt the first sharp stinging pelts of rain – I was half way up my ramp when a ginger, black and white streak overtook me, dived under the wheelchair, and inside.  By the time I got in, she was lying in front of the stove, grooming herself.

The squirrels and the birds have been busy as usual, and it looks like we have a couple of wood pigeons nesting in the big laurel tree in the front garden again. I was watching them go back and forth during my “rest breaks” when I was planting things.  Enforced rest breaks, as I had comprehensively managed to knacker myself! The biggest surprise, however, was when we were watching Match of the Day last night and Brenda (or very near offer) appeared on the decking and proceeded to hoover up all the bird seed that the squirrels had left. Of course, we have no way of knowing if it really is the same badger, and I felt slightly trepidacious that she might make her way round to the front and finish off her din dins by digging up and masticating all the plants I had previously spent two hours planting, but I checked this morning and they are all OK.  So, that was a bit of a “turnip for the books”.

Zak is, now, technically, back at home, since Granny’s return, but he still gets included on long distance cross-country yomps if he wants to go. Ellie is more or less permanently excluded from route march duties these days, because she really can’t manage the distances without having to be carried for the last five miles, but Zak is up for it, and game.  So this week Debbie has been making the most of the last week of the Easter holidays and cramming in as much time as possible on the hills.  By and large these excursions have been enjoyable.  Misty managed to lose her dog tag on Monday, up on Wessenden – God alone knows how she does it, that was the second one – so a replacement had to be procured, toot de sweet and PDQ. Thank the Lord for the internet. By Friday she was once more fully labelled.  Debbie has even been running the odd mile or two during these walks, which the dogs seem to enjoy, once they got the hang of it.  Several people have apparently stopped and made a fuss of Misty, saying how “cute” it is to have one blue eye. Right.

Anyway, yesterday it all came unstuck. They set off from here at about 2.30pm in bright but cold sunshine.  About half way round the walk, it started to get dark and threatening up aloft, and pretty soon it was hailstoning. Deb, fortunately had taken her wet weather gear, and decided to press on. As they got higher, the hailstones turned to snow.  This was the same weather that, back at base camp, Matilda was scuttling up the ramp to get away from, but given the altitude difference, ours was liquid whereas theirs was solid! By the time she got back to the van, she had to use both hands to get the key in the door as she was completely numb, then sit there with the heater going for a while before she could even drive home. The dogs were bedraggled as ever, but a few minutes with a dog towel and they were fit to wolf down a tin of “Butcher’s Dog” and some Muttnuts apiece.  So, a good time was had by all, eventually, when they had thawed out.  If you want any snow, it’s on the top of Wessenden. Send me a postcard.

As for us, you will have gathered that we failed to get away in the camper van to the Lakes, as threatened. Actually, using the word “failed” implies that we tried, which to be honest, we really didn’t.  There were several reasons for this – as explained last week, to load up the camper you need a nice day, but nice days are also the best days for taking the dogs out on the moors. Then there is the fact that both of us are probably more tired and run-down than we think, and it does take a considerable mental effort to get everything ready even for a short trip. Finally, there was the uncertainty over the weather. We tend to use the MWIS (Mountain Weather Info Service) which is usually very accurate, but the downside is they refuse to forecast more than three days ahead. The forecasts from MWIS were almost universally gloomy for the Lakes, and, indeed, the general BBC forecast promised at least showers and possibly more prolonged rain.  We did the equation – is it worth the effort of spending a day getting everything ready, driving for almost three hours, then watching the rain come down like stair rods, then getting up the next day at an ungodly hour to climb a mountain in the rain, only to find that when you have got there, the summit is in cloud and there’s nothing to see except for a cairn ten feet away.  We decided that no, it isn’t.  If this sort of thing happens in the context of a longer holiday, well, that’s maybe different, but it’s not worth making a special journey just to be disappointed.

This week also marked my 61^st birthday, which was a bit of a sombre occasion, to be honest.  A long while ago now, I had a premonition that I would die at the age of 62. I don’t know why, or where it came from, but it has lodged with me, like a pebble in my shoe, ever since, and of course, if it comes true, then that is next year. Eeek. But I haven’t done loads of things that I intended to, including finishing off several books currently in the pipeline.  On the other hand, it could all turn out to be bollocks, and I will end up 92 and senile, like Auntie Maud.  The odds are against it, though. I noticed when I was doing my gardening, how much harder it was this year than last year, and how I got tired much more quickly. The gardening itself was a result of my birthday treat, a trip to the garden centre, which ended up with us coming home with two trays of plants, even though we only went for the “Five Alpines For A Tenner” special offer.  Mindful that I am approaching borrowed time, it didn’t seem such an excess. Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, and all that, or in this case, Alpines.

You never know when life is going to bowl you an unpredictable googly, or even a chinaman.  That must be pretty much what David Cameron is feeling this week, at the end of possibly the worst week yet of his premiership.  I have no sympathy for the man. His hubris in thinking he could decide and announce in advance the time of his going, and in calling a referendum when he didn’t need to, means that he is largely the author of his own misfortunes.  And then on top of that comes the revelations about the tangled nest of offshore investments in Panama and his own involvement in the imbroglio.

I wasn’t shocked at all by the extent of the financial shenanigans that seems to have been going on. Warty old cynic that I am, I tend to assume that they are all in it up to their Savile Row armpits anyway. They are all at it, like a fiddler’s elbow.  We don’t have statesmen any more, we have self-serving technocrats who entered politics to make a difference to their own bank account.  In that respect, Cameron is no more or less guilty than any of the others who took the piss by claiming for moat cleaning on expenses, flipped their second homes, or employed their wives as non-executive secretaries while also drawing three other lucrative salaries by keeping on their previous jobs while being an MP (Yes, Boris Johnson.)

The difference for me is in the level of hypocrisy. Again, I don’t suppose I should be surprised by this, either, but I do, currently, find it breathtaking.  Here is a man who has never had to struggle, whose father’s questionable dealings featherbedded him through Eton and Oxford, the latter affording him the opportunity to undertake the initiation rites of various student clubs which allegedly involved burning £50 notes in front of homeless people. Here is a man who, from 2010 onwards, together with that little weasel Osborne, the Chancer of the Exchequer, has been lecturing us all about the need for “austerity”, how we are “all in it together”, how we must “live within our means”. Here is a man who has presided over an evil regime that has driven people to suicide over the bedroom tax, allowed people to starve because their benefits have been cut, a man whose minions have taken away the independence of thousands of disabled people under the pretext of switching them from DLA to PIP, including one of our “paralympic” wheelchair contenders, yet who has always and invariably come down on the side of the big companies like Google and Starbucks and Boots and Amazon, for whom paying your taxes seems to be optional.

Now we know why. Because, while he was fond of telling us to do one thing, he was party to – and at least knew all about, even if by then he had ceased to benefit personally – this seamy world of offshore tax evasion slush funds that seems to have underpinned and given scope to his very existence. That is what sticks in my craw. At least be honest about your actions and your motions. Don’t lecture a single mother in a high rise flat who is going without her own food to make sure her kid gets fed, on the need to tighten her belt, while simultaneously trousering another month’s dividends. Don’t stand up at the Lord Mayor’s banquet and lecture us on the need to be “competitive” when you’ve never had to graft for an honest penny in your life.  As it is, the revelations which he has finally, reluctantly, divulged have been hedged about with ifs and buts and ands, and couched in linguistic sophistry of the “I may have slept with that woman but I did not inhale” variety. Just be straight. Just be honest. If it’s even in your DNA.

Anyway, as I say, I have no sympathy for the man.  Apart from anything else, at the end of a week where most people would have been quite happy to don their tin hat and get down the foxhole, he has sailed straight into yet another massive row, this time about using public money to make a partisan case for Britain to remain in Europe.  I should say, at this point, that when it comes to Brexit, I am of the “reluctantly, we should stay in, but things have got to change” camp. I view it a bit like Trident – left to me, we wouldn’t even be starting from here, but because we’ve painted ourselves into a corner by our own stupidity over two decades of stirring up trouble for ourselves, it now looks like we have no damn option. Don’t expect me to be happy about it, though.

But there is a separate principle involved here. This government in particular has a track record of being laissez-faire over what are allowable limits of expenditure (look at the election expenses of certain key constituencies in the 2015 election, for another example of a visitation from the Panama Accounting Fairy) and they have done this over and over again – churning out what is essentially Tory propaganda from the COI, in the guise of public information leaflets. There is also the issue with this particular leaflet in that it purports to be the government’s official view on something where there can be no official government view, because half the bloody government disagree with every word of it.

One thing is for certain though. If any further independent confirmation was needed, which it probably isn’t, in all honesty, the speed with which the government petition against this leaflet topped the 100,000 signature mark is yet another symptom of how heavily the government is going to lose the EU referendum. To a certain extent, leaving aside the issue of why hold the referendum in the first place, the government can’t be blamed for the “perfect storm” of issues which are all conspiring to cloud the importance of the referendum decision – immigration, the refugee crisis, so-called “Islamic” extremism (to some people, these are all one and the same) international trade and protectionism (especially in view of China trying to kill off our steel industry) et al. Whatever the reasons, though, and most of them are entirely spurious, and are only nourished by a heady, noxious brew of racism, xenophobia and hatred served up by the Daily Mail, Britain will vote to leave and there will be some very dark times ahead.  Unfortunately, as with general elections, the people who took the time to look into things in more depth and realised the perils and the pitfalls, will be sabotaged by the people who voted to leave because they don’t like brown people. Thank God, at least, that Gordon Brown, although he may have been an insensitive, boorish, copper-bottomed booby, had the sense to keep us out of the Euro.

All of this has led for calls for Cameron to resign, which I find rather puzzling. If Cameron resigns, which he won’t anyway, not before the referendum, whatever further revelations or happenings ensue, but if he did, all that would happen is that there would be a leadership election amongst the Tories, and Cameron would be replaced by Boris Johnson. Since this is going to happen in the autumn anyway, why bring it forward. Why suffer before you have to?

Mr Cameron is not the only person having his DNA scrutinised this week, when it emerged that the Archbishop of Canterbury’s father is not actually his father, if you see what I mean. Without trying to sound too “Darth Vader” about it, his father was actually Churchill’s last private secretary, Anthony Montague Browne, and not Gavin Welby, whom Archbishop Justin had always believed to be his biological father. Certain tabloids (in spirit if not in actual format) have sought to make great play of this, but I can’t help but wonder which is the greater of the sins of the father – being brought up thinking you are someone else’s kid, or being brought up by someone whose dad made bazillions of pounds in offshore deals that you not only initially refuse to acknowledge, but which never seemed to have prevented you from lecturing the rest of us on thrift and frugality.

I had very few expectations of Justin Welby, and by and large I haven’t been disappointed. But then Rowan Williams was always going to be a hard act to follow, and to give Archbishop Justin credit, he has in the past publicly criticised the effects of “austerity” and the need for food banks, and the government’s pitiful response to the refugee crisis. At the same time, he has presided over dithering about the treatment of gay clergy and same-sex marriage, so there’s still room for improvement.  Whatever else he can and could control, these days, though, he couldn’t control who his mother chose to give her affections to before he was born, and therefore attempting to use this to chip away at him in the press is about as pointless, misleading, and futile as much of the other stuff printed by the same papers.

Mention of Archbishops reminds me that I am supposed to be writing about spiritual matters.  So I hasten to remind you that today is the feast of St Fulbert of Chartres.  Fulbert was a poet and scholar who was born in Italy between 952 and 960AD (the precise date being uncertain) He studied at Rheims, in Northern  France, under the guidance of Gerbert of Aurillac, who later became Pope Sylvester II.  In 1003, he returned to France, rising to become Bishop of Chartres in 1007. He wrote at least a couple of dozen poems which have survived, and many letters, including one to the Duke of Aquitaine, ticking him off about the duties of a feudal lord. He also wrote hymns and contributed to theological debate.  Perhaps his greatest challenge came in 1020AD, however, when the old cathedral burned down and he devoted his remaining years (he died in 1028) in building a new one, which was eventually completed in 1037.  Fulbert, sadly for him, was never recognised as a proper saint, but his feast is celebrated locally under a special dispensation. Unfortunately, the cathedral he built only lasted until 1194, when it was also consumed by flames. Having learned their lesson, the clergy then built the beginnings of what became the present gothic cathedral, using stone this time.

The present cathedral does contain some of Fulbert’s influences, however. For a start, he is buried there, and one of the many impressive stained glass windows is a depiction of the Tree of Jesse, showing the ancestry of the Virgin Mary, in a reflection of Fulbert’s devotion to her, and the importance generally of Chartres as a Marian shrine and centre of pilgrimage.  Since 876AD it had been the repository of the supposed Sancta Camisa, the cloak worn by the Virgin Mary at the time of the nativity, although this has only been a significant factor in pilgrimages to Chartres since the 1200s.

I have a soft spot for Chartres because, as I wrote last week about Chartres and Holy Cross Abbey, it is one of those places where I have had something like a religious experience.  The combination of the cool gloom after the heat outside, the stained glass with its myriad colours being projected onto the labyrinth on the floor of the nave (they had cleared away the chairs to allow pilgrims to trace the pattern) and the general air of holiness which pervaded everything all conspired together to make time stop for a moment – or possibly longer. I was not a pilgrim – well, not specifically – I was a day tripper, a curious follower of guidebooks, but I came out transformed but a glow that lasted for several days before fading. Similar, in fact, to Yeats:

My fiftieth year had come and gone,
I sat, a solitary man,
In a crowded London shop,
An open book and empty cup
On the marble table-top.
While on the shop and street I gazed
My body of a sudden blazed;
And twenty minutes more or less
It seemed, so great my happiness,
That I was blessed and could bless

Thinking back about that last visit to Chartres, especially now, around my birthday, I am still puzzled by its significance. Apropos of nothing much, I have also been busy reading a self-administered birthday present, How To Teach Quantum Physics To Your Dog. Despite its slightly wacky title (the author is actually a professor of hard sums or similar at some US university) and the premise that it’s actually a dialogue between the owner and his dog about the things that preoccupy dogs (chasing squirrels and rabbits, scoffing treats) it is a good basic grounding in the general principles of Quantum Physics for dummies like me who dropped physics like a red hot brick in the third year.

I have to admit, though, to having to read several bits of it twice, notwithstanding the folksy quips about dogs and their behaviour. Some of it brought me up short as well, resonating with me in all sorts of unexpected ways, which is how I come to be dragging it up now, when I am talking about Chartres Cathedral.  I was reading the chapter in particular about multiple universes and the “many worlds” theory, and in particular, decoherence, which is a concept I hadn’t previously come across.

Me trying to explain decoherence is going to be a bit like the blind leading the blind, and I am open to correction, but basically, as I understand it, it goes like this (much abridged and minus any equations) – Schrodinger’s famous cat, in its box, is both alive and dead until someone opens the box and measures it.  Chad Orzel, in the dog book, uses the example of two boxes, one of which contains a dog treat and the other which doesn’t.  Once you open a box, you immediately know where the dog treat is – it’s either in the box you opened, or it’s in the other one, depending what you found.

At this point, according to Schrodinger, the “wave function” of the other particle collapses at that moment.  Once it's been measured, that's it. However, earlier, Einstein had observed that there was something he dubbed rather un-classical-y as “Spooky Action At A Distance” by which one particle affects another even though their locations are different. To get around this, they came up with the concept of “decoherence”, which basically severs the connection almost instantaneously once one particle, or cat, or dog treat or whatever is observed.

Nobody knows what decoherence is, and it is generally accepted, apparently, that it’s a very poor explanation. Yet, nevertheless, like much of quantum physics, even though it appears totally illogical and defies all reason, it does seem to be what happens. Except that, in the many worlds theory, the explanation is that decoherence still happens, but that the other particle (cat, dog treat) carries on, but in another, parallel universe.

I realise this is a very tedious and not very good, long-winded explanation.  And you could be forgiven for thinking well, what has this got to do with Chartres Cathedral? I’ll try and explain.  When I visited Chartres, in 1987, my mother had only been dead a year, and I had already had one experience which, when recounted, sounds totally prosaic, to do with seeing sunlight flickering on a rain-puddle in Loughborough (see, I told you it was prosaic) which convinced me, in a way I could not begin to explain, that my mother lived on, somewhere, somehow.  That day in Chartres Cathedral was another of the same, as it used to say in auction catalogues.  I had never heard of the many-worlds theory then, but it sort of fits what I felt.  

The many-worlds theory has been parodied in a cartoon cited by Orzel where the professor is standing in front of a board full of equations, in the middle of which is says, on a separate line, “and then a miracle happens”.  But what if this is true? Maybe not a miracle as such, but something that can only be explained in “religious” language, rather than the language of physics.  Maybe, just maybe, decoherence is the grit in the oyster, the apple in the fall, the thing that binds us to the human condition and stops us being able to see the whole picture. If you are still with me, and I wouldn’t blame you if you had given up and put the kettle on several paragraphs ago, maybe decoherence is consistent with the neo-platonist view of the 17^th century. And maybe what happens, in that moment when time seems to stop, for me and for other people who have had similar experiences, is that for some unknown reason, decoherence doesn’t kick in, and we get a glimpse of everything – or at least of what’s on the other side of the curtain. Or at least we know it’s there.  And of course, if decoherence was placed into the mechanism of our universe, then who placed it there?

Thinking about this sort of thing makes my head hurt, and I am writing it and know what’s coming next, so God alone knows what it’s doing to you having to read it.  Next week is (as usual) going to be a busy week. Deb will be back teaching, and I will be trying to solve the same 17 intractable problems that I take with me wherever I go.  It’s been a good break, these last two weeks, though the main benefit for me has been a few hours’ extra sleep. My petition is relentlessly stuck on 1167 signatures, and I have some letters to answer from charities who think it’s acceptable to allow people who have actively voted to cut ESA to their members by £30 pw to continue to be their patrons. I intend to ask them if there is anyone who they wouldn’t take money and patronage off? Josef Mengele? Jack the Ripper?

But, regrettably the main focus will be on work and money, the two bugbears of my existence. I need to up my game, as the modern expression has it, if I’m going to get these books out to their deadlines, particularly Crowle Street Kids, which is, unbelievably, almost ready.  It’s also coming up to my favourite time of the year, when the primrose blooms, and cowslips too, as the song has it.  Soon we will be the other side of Easter, and into what the Church likes to call “Common Time”. This time next year, if I’m spared, it will be not so much Common Time as “borrowed time”, so I need to get my skates on. But first, a cup of tea.