Epiblog for Easter Monday 2010

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley, cramming five days’ work into four in the run up to Easter. We are still keeping the coal-yard busy, as well. What must be our final order of the year, for ten bags of Solarbrite, was delivered on Good Friday. For once, I was at home, it being a Bank Holiday, and I actually got to meet the callow youth who has lumped over a ton of coal down our driveway on his back at various times during the winter. I commiserated with him that he was having to work when everyone else was at home. He replied that he was glad to have a job, in the circumstances. So that told me.

The last few days have been hectic with book editing, with accounts, with print estimates, with web work, and with domestic chores. With the advent of Spring, we have also decided to de-junk our house this year. We decide that every year, of course. One year, we might do it.

It still doesn’t seem officially Spring to me yet. Even though I have now finally seen both of my two “official harbingers of Spring” the snowdrops and the crocuses, it is still too cold, too windy, too raining, and the fields and trees seem to have been washed out and drained of almost all their vitality by the hellish winter – as indeed I have. It doesn’t even seem as if it’s officially like Easter. Two precious Bank Holidays down already this year, and nothing much to show for Easter – too early in the year. Time they made it a fixed holiday, even if it means the old religious one happens on a different day. That is what happened to Whitsun, after all, and it still survives in the zeitgeist.

Anyway, we fare forward, and we carry on. Not only fare forward, but fast forward, in some cases. What else can you do? Each day, as I set off last week, I found myself almost inadvertently reciting Sir Jacob Astley’s prayer on the morning of the Battle of Edge Hill in the English Civil War of 1643. “Oh Lord, thou knowest how busy I must be today; if I forget Thee, forget Thou not me”.

Some days, though, feel more like stages on a Pilgrimage. My “To Do” list at the moment contains several major projects and sometimes, when I complete part of one of them, it seems almost like another stage completed on the road to Santiago de Compostella.

April is, of course, the traditional month the embark on a Pilgrimage – “Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote, the droght of Mersh hath perced to the roote…” So far, April’s showers have been anything but “soote”, although infinitely preferable to the snow which preceded them, and which made a fleeting, valedictory, encore last week. The animals, though, have welcomed the tentative shift to warmer climates, at least Tig has remembered from last year where the sunniest spot on the conservatory carpet is, and now flops out there, rather than climbing on to her settee. Kitty still favours the cat bed in the hearth, however, as long as the stove stays lit.

So, our pilgrimage has reached the staging post of Easter. Unexpectedly early. Time to pause, and reflect on our achievements thus far this year, which in my case are frankly, meagre, mainly owing to the weather. I have at last finished painting Nigel’s memorial stone, which now marks his resting place in the garden, next to Russell’s mosaic. The latin tag “Sit tua terra levis” and his name were picked out in gold paint, and I gave it a final coat of polyurathane varnish on Easter Monday, earning myself a massive headache in the process by breathing in the fumes while I did it.

I suppose I can also count getting the embryonic version of the Rooftree web site up and running, though even in the febrile atmosphere surrounding the General Election, it has failed to excite any long-term interest amongst any of the various boobies who are presenting themselves to the electorate here in the Holme Valley, which is a crucial three way marginal seat. Still, I thought, as I listened to William Boyce’s anthem “I Have Surely Built Thee An House” on my way to work, like two feminists doing the washing up, it is, at least, a start.

Easter is a time of tombs and stones, of course. I just wish it hadn’t caught me so much by surprise this year. So much so that I haven’t really had time to carry out my usual “Easterish” tasks, such as making sure that on Good Friday I read John Donne’s poem “Goodfriday 1613, Riding Westward”

As to any more prolonged spiritual contemplation, at this busy-est time of the year, holiness has been sacrificed to business for me in a way that would have delighted the Pharisees. Like Sir Jacob, I can only hope that God did not forget me in return. So Easter came and Easter went, and Jesus did his annual trick of appearing to the faithful, some of whom failed to recognize him and some of whom refused to believe who he was. It always reminds me of that Joan Osborne song from 1995 about “What if God was One of Us” Would we be able to tell?

There is a school of metaphysics that holds that if we are not actually observing something, not noticing it, not experiencing it in any way, that it ceases to exist. But something must sustain reality when we are not there watching it, otherwise it would never reappear when we want it to. I can only conclude that what continues to uphold reality and continuity for us when we are not there to observe it in person, must be the mind of God. Like that famous but anonymous internet meme about the two sets of footprints on the beach, and the man turns to God and says why, when the going got toughest, was there only one set of footprints? Why did you desert me? And God says “I didn’t desert you. There was only one set of footprints because that was when I was carrying you.”.

What if God was one of us? I find it strangely comforting to think of God as one of us, my Holy Stalker, shadowing my stumbling progress through the crowd, or watching me battle the traffic on each stage of my daily pilgrimage to the office, even though, for the most part, I have forgotten that he is there.

Epiblog for 21 March 2010

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley, and one during which I have found myself catching up on some tasks which have previously seen me backsliding, including writing up this blog, for one.

The problem is, of course, that I start out with the very best of intentions, but then something crops up, and I get sidetracked. This doesn't just happen with my blogs, it is actually pretty endemic throughout my whole life. Take my car, for instance (Please take my car, so I can collect on the insurance!) I was due to take two long car journeys recently, one down to London and one to Staffordshire, but in the end, both of them had to be cancelled because of car trouble, necessitating a huge repair, and a correspondingly huge repair bill.

Writing some 700 years ago, the Gawain poet summed this up very neatly when he wrote:

Very seldon does the beginning accord to the end

Or, as T. S. Eliot puts it, rather more grimly in The Hollow Men,

Between the motion and the act, falls the shadow

In a universe seemingly goverened by uncertainty, we should not, I suppose, be too surprised. Everything has the potential to be a surprise. In my end is my beginning. Eliot adapted those words of Mary Queen of Scots to his own "ends" in Four Quartets. seeking to emphasise what he saw as the essentially cyclical nature of existence. Houses rise and fall.

Modern physics, with its theories of multiverses and unseen dimensions at right angles to reality, might well take Eliot's/Mary's phase and pluralise it. In my many ends are my many beginnings. Perhaps in another multiverse, I did manage to travel to Shropshire, stopping off, like Gawain in the poem, in the "wyldernesse of Wyrale" to "werre with Wodwos, that woned in the knarres". Who is to say?

In another multiverse, another me is happily married to my first-ever girlfriend, who in this multiverse lies in a quiet, slightly faded, slightly neglected corner of a suburban cemetery, just west of Hull.

Life is an uncertain business, especially if God, or whoever is the vast intelligence behind it all, has given us the wherewithal to manufacture just one strand of reality from all of the infinite possible strands of reality, on the hoof, second by second, heartbeat by heartbeat.

What that uncertainty means, for me, is twofold: firstly there is absolutely no point in spending your life paralysed by worry, because 98.9% of the stuff you are worrying about will never happen, or if it does, it will happen in a way which is totally different and unrecognizable to what you expect. You worry about getting run over by a bus, and one day, while you are walking down the street, looking out for buses, high above you, a red kite is struggling to hold on to a badger it has snatched from a nearby field. The badger struggles free, and falls to earth, hitting you on the head and causing you to be translated from this mortal coil like a latter-day Aeschylus, while, winded by its impact with your head but otherwise unscathed, the badger ambles off into the bushes. Never cry until you have to.

The other thing it brings home to me is that there isn't a moment to lose. Don't put off telling those that you love how much they mean to you, how much their presence in the world gladdens you, take them now and hold them close to your heart and tell them, because you never know when you will come to a sudden fork in the road.

Epiblog for 27 February 2010

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. Relentless, rainy and raw, just about sums it up. And when it hasn’t been relentless, rainy and raw, it’s been sleeting, or snowing. I was struck the other day by the fact that I couldn’t actually remember the last time when I was able to walk out of the house in the sunshine, just get into the car, and drive off somewhere, confident that I would get there without sliding off the road into a ditch, and that the car would make it there and back without breaking down. Sadly, none of these are givens any more. The car is on its last legs. It has served me faithfully this winter, always got me home, never yet left me stranded, but it now needs a new water-pump, and every time I drive it I am risking the engine seizing and causing major damage.

All of this I discovered on Saturday when with much tutting and various sharp intakes of breath, Father Jack adminstered the last rites to the water pump and told me I could drive it to London if I wanted, but if I did, it would undoubtedly sieze and turn the engine into a lump of scrap. Knowing my luck this year, he is probably right.

Work has been unrelenting as well. Tight deadines notwithstanding, I have at least managed to get down to some of the more knotty, thorny problems that I have been putting off, in some cases since before Christmas. And just as well, as we’re already two months into the year. Even if I did spend most of January hibernating from the snow.

So, “February filldyke” has been and gone and next week it is March, which comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb, or so my old Granny always used to say. It remains to be seen whether she will be proved right this year. I have a feeling March may come in, and go out, as a lion. The fireproof glass on the front of the stove has cracked as well. It’s the end of winter, and we’re all hanging on by our fingernails.

Tig has shown a marked reluctance to go walkies in the sleet and the rain, and Kitty has spent a lot of time curled round in her cat-bed on the hearth. I don’t blame either of them, to be honest.

If it’s not the weather that makes me want to hibernate, it’s the politicians. The election is here with a vengeance, even though Gordon Brown will inevitably leave it until the very last available minute to cling on to the vestiges of power. Both the main parties are lying to the electorate about the cuts that will be imposed after they gain power. The best the Conservatives can come up with is the vacuous “Vote for Change”. Change for change’s sake, can, of course, always be a change for the worse as well.

Still, amongst all this doom and gloom, there are signs. Signs of spring, I mean. The Victorian Lodge across the road, in the gateway to what was the park leading to the cemetery, has a stone trough in its garden planted entirely with snowdrops, and over the weekend these have broken out, making a dazling point of white that draws your eye, even if, when you first notice it, you are several hundred yards away, standing at our front door, like I was.

And maybe this enforced leisure of being without the car while the garagemen swarm over it and dismantle it and put it back together again, creating a huge bill in the process, is another sign. A sign that there is also a time to sit and contemplate, that we shouldn’t always be like Jehu, driving furiously in his chariot. Sometimes, sitting quietly, doing nothing, Spring comes and the grass grows by itself.