It
has been a busy fortnight in the Holme
Valley
This is all very well, but once again, this week, I have found myself being swept away in the flood. So, Sunday comes and goes, and is followed by Monday, then Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday vanish in a blur, and here I am, on Sunday, at teatime, just sitting down to write. Days flash by at the speed of light, as Ewan McColl might warble right now if he were standing next to me. Except that whatever I’m drunk on, these days, it certainly isn’t the joy of living.
This is all very well, but once again, this week, I have found myself being swept away in the flood. So, Sunday comes and goes, and is followed by Monday, then Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday vanish in a blur, and here I am, on Sunday, at teatime, just sitting down to write. Days flash by at the speed of light, as Ewan McColl might warble right now if he were standing next to me. Except that whatever I’m drunk on, these days, it certainly isn’t the joy of living.
The
thing is, writing this blog hasn’t changed a damn thing. Bad things still
happen, however much I rave about them. It almost makes me wonder if I stopped
writing it for a while, I would wake up and find that 2016 had all been a
horrible dream. Just think, no Brexit, no Trumps. But, sadly, life is not a game of bridge.
I do have some momentous news to impart, in fact. Not that it has had any impact either way on the delay in posting the blog, but nevertheless, here it is. The squirrels are back. I am not entirely sure that they are the same squirrels, but nevertheless they have been helping themselves gratefully to the peanuts I put out this week, more in hope than in any expectation of them being eaten. And, of course, I was never certain that it was the same squirrels anyway, even back in the olden days when they used to come on a daily basis because they had the house under squirrel surveillance.
I do have some momentous news to impart, in fact. Not that it has had any impact either way on the delay in posting the blog, but nevertheless, here it is. The squirrels are back. I am not entirely sure that they are the same squirrels, but nevertheless they have been helping themselves gratefully to the peanuts I put out this week, more in hope than in any expectation of them being eaten. And, of course, I was never certain that it was the same squirrels anyway, even back in the olden days when they used to come on a daily basis because they had the house under squirrel surveillance.
The
weather continues cold and nasty, in fact Friday brought sleet and even some
flecks of snow. Matilda has been curtailing the time she spends outside, and
replacing it with time spent curled up on her duvet, or, when Debbie is
teaching, keeping Debbie’s chair next to the stove warm. Misty doesn’t mind the weather, but we’re now
into those dark days where every night brings a barrage of fireworks, and Misty
has to have all sorts of red flashing LED contraptions clipped to her harness,
in case she runs off. (See below!)
It’s
not just fireworks, either. During the week someone decided that they would
stage an impromptu bonfire and burned down the cricket pavilion on Woodfield
Sports Ground, down the road. I was woken up by the crackling of the fire and
the popping of the sparks at about 6.45AM. My first thought was the house was
on fire, then that John’s house next door was on fire, then that John’s shed
was on fire, but by the time I’d collected my wits put my specs on, and sat up
in bed to have a good look, I could see that the dull orange glow of the flames
was behind the trees, not in front of them. I couldn’t think of anything nearby
in that direction that could be so spectacularly on fire (I had momentarily
forgotten about the pavilion) so I assumed it must be something much bigger on
fire – Berry Brow flats, perhaps – further away. Wearily, I reached for my
mobile to call it in, but before I had chance to dial, a massive cohort of
various fire appliances thundered by on the road outside, blue lights going and
sirens blaring. (I know! At 6.45AM!)
A
neighbour posted some pictures she’d taken on Facebook the next day.
Apparently, according to Granny, it was a listed building, but it had been
empty and just used for storage for a while – the future of the sports ground
has been up for grabs anyway, and at one point there was a proposal to build
houses on it. No doubt now that the unseen firestarter has done the potential
developers a favour, we shall see it re-emerging. It’s a bizarre coincidence
that this week also saw Newsome Mill, another empty, listed building, on a site
prime for developing, going up in flames and being demolished the very next
day, because the remains were “unsafe”. Yet the old Kirklees College
Fortunately,
no-one was injured in either incident, and they did at least have the effect of
knocking the combined wall to wall coverage of Children In Need off the local
TV for a while. The national TV is, however, constantly preoccupied with events
across the Atlantic , as more emerges on the
chaos and lack of planning in Trump’s team for the handover from Obama in
January. More evidence, if more evidence was needed, that he never expected to
win. But win he did, and now we’re stuck
with Forrest Trump. President Fart, the star spangled blunder. Personally, I
would rather have Donald Duck than Donald Trump. I don’t have a horse in this
particular race, though, my only concern is that someone should keep the
blundering bombastic booby well away from any nuclear buttons.
He
seems to be saying several contradictory things simultaneously at the moment,
as random thoughts pop into his head. He’s only going to spend part of the week
at the White House, preferring his flat in New York America China
Oh,
but, Steve, I hear you saying. You are being unkind, and mean, and attacking
these people personally, for their looks and demeanour, instead of engaging
with their policies. Well, if President-elect Fart can get away with mocking a
disabled reporter, and nobody gives a dickeyboo, and people still voted for the
bewigged moron, tough shit. If you can’t take it, Donald, me old Fartknocker,
you shouldn’t dish it out. And engage? Engage? You can’t “engage” with stupid.
You can only stand well back and watch the car crash and try and make sure no-one you care about is hurt in the wreck. It would be funny, were it
not for the fact that we all might be burned to a thermonuclear crisp by this
jerk of a would-be Walter Mitty. It would be funny if every meathead in the
rust belt and the Bible belt hadn’t immediately felt validated by Fart’s
victory to start painting graffiti of swastikas and “Make America White Again”,
and committing hate crimes, which are now soaring in the US
And
so once again, Oh America
And
so once again you are fighting us all…
The
standard of reporting in the Fart-supporting media over there is truly
appalling. This week, Fox News captioned a picture of Nigel Farage as “UK
Opposition Leader”. Dear Fox News.
A short note from Britain
(that funny little island in the North Sea )
Nigel Farage is NOT the leader of the opposition, he is not even a member of
parliament, despite trying on several occasions. He is a member of the European
Parliament, an institution he despises so much that he has no option but to
carry on taking his salary and expenses from it, even though he never turns up
and does any work, preferring to blether on about how he hates foreigners,
refugees, and brown people generally. Got that? Good.
Actually UKIP are in deep, deep doodoo. In the
middle of a leadership election (is it the third or the fourth, I have lost
count) and leaching money, they are finally coming to realise their own
irrelevance. Once the EU money they were claiming in the form of salaries and
expenses goes, that will be it. Goodnight, Vienna UK
And,
as this shambolic and chaotic year draws to a close, the shambolic and chaotic
piecemeal case-by-case approach to Brexit continues. The only person, out of
all the deadbeats and no hopers in Theresa May’s cabinet, who seems to have
grasped the seriousness of the situation is Philip Hammond. Boris Johnson is still living in some kind of
Boys’ Own parallel universe where we’ll all muddle through in the end because
we’re British, dammit, and we’ll all ingeniously invent the steam-driven biro in
our garden sheds and then sell it to Mexico and Canada or something. This
rather naïve mindset was exposed by an Italian minister with whom “Boorish” was
having a bit of argy-bargy. “You’ll have to allow our demands because you want
to sell us Prosecco,” said Johnson, to which the Italian replied that he may
well sell less Prosecco to one country, but Britain
So,
there are probably some rocky times ahead, as Hammond has already been flagging
up that we should be managing our expectations about the Autumn Statement which
he is soon due to deliver. Apparently his habit of bringing the three Brexit
stooges, Fox, Davies and Johnson, back down to earth and making people
generally face economic reality has made him unpopular in Cabinet. I have no
brief for austerity, I think it is a massive economic mistake and as I have said
many times, if you owe someone a cartload of apples, you will never repay them
by taking a chainsaw to the orchard. But the wary Hammond Buckingham
Palace
There
is much justifiable anger that such sums are being bandied about when the use
of food banks is off the scale and people are sleeping under bridges and in
shop doorways. It’s not actually as simple as it’s being painted – the Palace
is part of the Crown Estate, and the reigning monarch is allowed to live in it
in return for doing all those state banquets and similar malarkey. The Crown
Estate does, now, pay tax and also generates an income from tourism. It’s sort
of analogous to the government investing in a tourist attraction it already
owns, rather than simply handing a very rich old woman a Euromillions style
lottery win so she can do up her own house at our expense.
Having
said that, there is absolutely no doubt that it gives out all the wrong
messages. It’s an extension of that meme that comes around at the time of the
state opening of parliament about a woman in a gold hat encrusted with precious
jewels sitting on a gilded throne and making a speech about austerity. It does
the monarchy no favours either, especially when the government fails to make
the case properly. I would assume that
the work, whatever it is, has been put out properly to tender, and is deemed to
be absolutely necessary by whoever is in charge of stopping the royal palaces crumbling
into dust. For me, it’s not so much a
question of the money being spent here, as of similar sums not being spent elsewhere. If we can afford £369m to refurbish Buckingham Palace
Yesterday,
when I started writing this blog, was the feast of St Edmund the Martyr, the
man who put the "St Edmunds" into "Bury St Edmunds". He was a martyred king of the
East Angles. He became king in 855AD at the age of fourteen and began ruling Suffolk Suffolk Bury
St. Edmunds
However,
it was the actions of one particular wolf, of the domesticated variety, viz and
to whit, Misty Muttkins, border collie of this parish, that comprehensively
sabotaged any attempt to finish it off and post it. Debbie was up one of those nondescript little
lanes between Blackmoorfoot Road Felks Stile Lane Colne Valley
High School
Eventually,
Deb had to give in – by now it was dark – so she phoned me to alert me to the
fact that the dog might come home on her own, and to keep a lookout, then she
trudged wearily through the woods and down through Beaumont Park and thence
home, calling all the way and hoping against hope that Misty would just pop up
out of the undergrowth. No such luck. And no dog waiting at home when she got
back, either. We re-grouped over a cup of tea and then she set off in the
camper van, leaving me at home posting Misty as missing, while she went for a stooge
round and tried to spot her. It was a
dark night, sadly, and Misty is one of those dogs that, when spooked, tends to
go to ground. By 10.30PM, Deb had to admit defeat and drive home.
The
most depressing thing was that there were no calls on either of our
mobiles. Both their numbers are on the ID disc
which Misty wears on her collar and the fact that nobody had called us on
either of them meant that wherever she was, she probably hadn’t been found yet.
There was nothing for it but to hunker down and wait. While Debbie had been out looking, I’d rigged
up the wired cam in the lobby with a long USB extension under the door. This
meant that I could sit in the kitchen and keep a watch on the conservatory door
in person and the front of the house and the driveway via the camera. I
resigned myself to a long night. Deb had to go to bed at 1AM as she had to get
up today to do all her prep for tomorrow’s classes – needless to say, she would
have four hours of prep time to catch up time which she’d just spent searching
for Muttkins.
So
it was left to me and Matilda. Although they won’t do anything about it, I rang
the police and gave a description of her in the form of a “lost property
report” in case she turned up as an RTA. I rang the local vet’s emergency 24
hour number in case she had been brought in injured – no she hadn’t. I rang the out of hours mobile for the Dog
Wardens and reported her as missing so that if she was handed in they could
match her up with us as quickly as possible (her microchip actually goes back
to the collie dog sanctuary we got her from, as it is a condition of re-homing
from them). And then, accompanied by the redoubtable Matilda asleep on Debbie’s
chair next to the stove, I started watch.
I think I managed to say awake until about twenty to five, and then, inevitably, I dozed for a while. There was no sign of activity on the camera or in the back garden, for hours on end. I made a mental note of the possible scenarios as I watched. Either she had been hit by a vehicle and was dead, or she was still in whatever bolt-hole she’d burrowed for herself when fleeing the fireworks. Or someone had found her and taken her in for the night. Or someone had found her, and the reason they weren’t calling was that they were going to put her up for sale for drug money on Gumtree, or she was even now working her way back home now everything was quiet. I was pretty confident that she could find her way back home, as it was a walk that she had done many times with Debbie. All she would have to do is to pick up a scent.
As it turned out, my confidence in her navigational skills was entirely misplaced. At 7.15AM the phone rang and it was a very kind and good man called Peter, who lived in Slathwaite, or Slawit, as the locals call it. He’d been out with his own dog at 6.30AM and had noticed Misty wandering aimlessly around Slawit trying her best to get run over. So he’d secured her on the same lead as his dog, taken her home, fed her, read the number off the tag, and then phoned. He even offered to drop her back, on his way to work, which he duly did. I told him how grateful we were, and he told us not to worry, as a dog owner himself he knew how important dogs were to their owners. He wasn’t wrong there.
I think I managed to say awake until about twenty to five, and then, inevitably, I dozed for a while. There was no sign of activity on the camera or in the back garden, for hours on end. I made a mental note of the possible scenarios as I watched. Either she had been hit by a vehicle and was dead, or she was still in whatever bolt-hole she’d burrowed for herself when fleeing the fireworks. Or someone had found her and taken her in for the night. Or someone had found her, and the reason they weren’t calling was that they were going to put her up for sale for drug money on Gumtree, or she was even now working her way back home now everything was quiet. I was pretty confident that she could find her way back home, as it was a walk that she had done many times with Debbie. All she would have to do is to pick up a scent.
As it turned out, my confidence in her navigational skills was entirely misplaced. At 7.15AM the phone rang and it was a very kind and good man called Peter, who lived in Slathwaite, or Slawit, as the locals call it. He’d been out with his own dog at 6.30AM and had noticed Misty wandering aimlessly around Slawit trying her best to get run over. So he’d secured her on the same lead as his dog, taken her home, fed her, read the number off the tag, and then phoned. He even offered to drop her back, on his way to work, which he duly did. I told him how grateful we were, and he told us not to worry, as a dog owner himself he knew how important dogs were to their owners. He wasn’t wrong there.
There
were times, during the night, as I sat there watching nothing happening on the
camera that I’d set up, when I had more or less decided that, if Misty didn’t
come back, that was it. That was the end of things. This year has been
unutterably bloody awful, an endless struggle against things going wrong. I have
lost count of the number of things this year that I thought I had fixed, only
to have them come flapping loose again in the wind. Doing the same things over and over again yet
hoping desperately for a different outcome is generally held to be a mark of
insanity of some sort or another. I felt like giving up on everything. What is
the point of striving to do better all the time: indeed, what is the point of
even striving, full stop, when bad shit happens to the people and things you
love, for no reason? As I said on Facebook earlier, I think lots of people
frequently do question whether life is a struggle worth continuing, as I do,
especially in the face of continual kickbacks, it's just that until something
like this happens, we keep quiet about it and just get on with stuff. Yes, I
did pray for Misty to be returned, paradoxically, even while I was thinking
this. I was clutching at straws, but I prayed, in the watches of the night, to
St Roche, patron saint of dogs, and to Big G himself. I wish I could say I felt
confident that something/someone was listening.
And
I suppose that, at the end, I did get
her back. Whether that means I should
continue watching the things I gave my life to broke, and in Kipling’s words,
stoop to build ‘em up with worn-out tools, is a moot point. I am grateful
today, obviously I am. But mostly, to be honest, I just feel drained, and a bit
numb, which tends to be my default setting these days. Anyway, the weather has turned viciously wet
and cold, with the odd rumble of thunder mixed in. I finally feel, having dozed
much of the afternoon that I can start on the task list I had at 9AM. So I
suppose I had better get on with it. I’m sorry this is a blog devoid of
inspirational poetry but to be honest, I am not feeling very inspired right
now, and the thought of tackling the nasty and boring things I had put off from
last week makes me even less so.
I suppose I should take two things from it, though. One was the degree of kind support shown by Facebook people and people on sites like Streetlife and Doglost, in spreading the message that Misty was missing and the second being the kindness of Peter, the good Samaritan who found Misty and took her to his house. Sometimes it is found in the unlikeliest of places, this kindness that binds human to human. As John Masefield said:
I have seen flowers come in stony places
I suppose I should take two things from it, though. One was the degree of kind support shown by Facebook people and people on sites like Streetlife and Doglost, in spreading the message that Misty was missing and the second being the kindness of Peter, the good Samaritan who found Misty and took her to his house. Sometimes it is found in the unlikeliest of places, this kindness that binds human to human. As John Masefield said:
I have seen flowers come in stony places
And kind things
done by men with ugly faces
And the gold cup
won by the worst horse at the races,
So I trust too.
And if I do give thanks in some way for Misty’s return, I suppose it will have to be yet another eikon of St Roche to be auctioned for Rain Rescue, so I can try and pass on Peter’s good deed, pass it forward to other dogs less fortunate than ours.
And if I do give thanks in some way for Misty’s return, I suppose it will have to be yet another eikon of St Roche to be auctioned for Rain Rescue, so I can try and pass on Peter’s good deed, pass it forward to other dogs less fortunate than ours.
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