Epiblog for Christmas Eve

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley, and a bitterly cold one. When I wrote, in the Epiblog for the last Sunday in Advent, that General Winter was merely re-mustering his forces for another assault, it didn’t need Julian Assange and Wikileaks to confirm it for me. In fact, we had no leaks of any description, because the incoming water was frozen on Colin’s side, and the outgoing water pipes were equally frigid on our side. So, we could get water in one house, but to get rid of it, we had to go “next door”. Once the washing up had been done, the dirty water had to be baled into a bucket and carried into Colin’s kitchen to be tipped down the sink.

It reminded me of an article I read once when I was living in my little flat in the Caledonian Road in Chichester, about “the ideal kitchen”. Apparently one of the tell-tale signs that your kitchen was less than ideal was “too great a distance between the sink and the washing machine”. Since, at the time, the “washing machine” was in the laundromat in Eastgate Square, about half a mile away, I was forced to conclude my kitchen was not ideal.

Just on the offchance that the drought was caused by something other than the weather, I phoned Yorkshire Water to ask them. Needless to say, it was the temperature. In fact, they have had so many thousands of people phoning with similar queries that they ended up “front ending” their call centre with a recorded message saying, in effect, “just blow them with a hairdryer”, and if it’s anything else, stay on the line.

The animals are no fonder of this weather than I am. Kitty has taken to her cat bed in the hearth, apart from cross-legged dashes into the garden to wee, and occasional speculative forays to her food-bowl. Any other attempt to separate her from the source of heat would probably require a crowbar and heavy lifting equipment.

The dogs haven’t been so bad, except that Tiggy flatly refused to go walkies with Grandad on Thursday, looking on pityingly while Zak and Freddie ran round and round in excitement, tail-chasing and barking. I guess when you reach the age of 98, you have probably done all the frisking in the snow you are going to do, or want to do. Freddie, in particular, has taken to running round and round the garden and barking constantly for no reason, as a result of which, Debbie has no doubt taught the neighbours several new expletives that did not previously feature in their vocabulary.

Grandad’s frisking in the snow is done more from a sense of duty than anything else these days as well, and is book-ended by long sessions of warming himself at the stove in our kitchen, both before and after. He was saying, ruefully, to me, this week, that he used to run through this sort of weather in just shorts and a singlet, but these days he has had to add a hoodie and tracky bottoms, which, coupled with his hesitant, shuffling gait, now make him look more like an elderly opportunist car thief than the cross-country champion he once was. Mind you, I have a lot of room to talk, I look a lot more like Ironside than I used to.

Granny, safely ensconced with Becky, Adrian and family in Southampton, has been fretting about him being on his own, and ringing him up with daily bulletins of tasks, including detailed instructions on how to turn on all the hot taps and run water down the pipes to prevent their house suffering the same fate as ours. This is her current preoccupation, having replaced her previous one that her train would get stuck in the snow en route and she would spend Christmas in a siding near Daventry, having to wear a silver foil blanket, join in impromptu sing-songs with complete strangers and pee in a bucket (not necessarily at the same time).

Once the frozen pipes worry has passed, she will seamlessly replace it with another. She would worry about not having anything to worry about. I have tried telling her that 98% of the stuff you worry about never happens, and it is the unexpected thing that gets you, like when Aeschylus was walking along a road in Sicily that day, and a high-flying eagle, spotting his bald pate, thought “that rock would be ideal to crack the shell of this rather succulent tortoise in my talons” and the rest is history. Or at least, Aeschylus was. And he was the father of tragedy. Now that really is ironic, if anybody cares to point out the difference to Alanis Morrissette. (Although I admit, it would have been more ironic if he had owned a tortoise sanctuary)

Grandad is not the only vulnerable adult, apparently - I am also one, at least if the attention currently being lavished on me by the NHS is anything to go by. This week alone I have had two physio visits, a checkup by the marvellously gung-ho OT, and two separate assessment visits for temporary ramps, plus the ramps themselves turning up at lunchtime on Christmas Eve. Any fears which I may have entertained about being cut off and left to my own devices once I had left hospital have been shown to be entirely groundless! In fact, in her last phone call to me, the physio also reminded me that I must ring the GP if those childblains on my toes got any worse. (Although since I found it difficult to get the attention of anyone at the surgery when I was dying on the sofa of peritonitis, I doubt that childblains would cut it with them, it would have to be at least gangrene, I would have thought, but hey, what do I know, eh?)

Though everybody else seems to be worried about me, I seem to have got to a worry-free place, at least for a day or so. It’s Christmas, and nobody expects much of me, apart from cooking Christmas dinner, which I enjoy anyway, and can do with one hand tied behind my back. It’s a bit like being “officially” off school ill, when your feeble excuse has been accepted by officialdom, or “officially” snowed in, when you have phoned the office and told them that you’ve been stuck on the slip road for ages and had no choice but to turn back, and then you click your mobile off and snuggle back down under the duvet and watch the flakes drift past the bedroom window while some ancient academic on Radio 4 is whittling on to Melvyn Bragg about newts.

I’ve added a couple of new bits to my morning routine now as well, such as looking out for the morning star just before dawn. I’ve started doing this as a response to feedback from a previous Epiblog when I wrote about watching the sun rise. I wasn’t aware, but apparently Bede wrote a poem about it:

“Christ is the morning star, who when the night
Of this world is past brings to his saints
The promise of the light of life & opens everlasting day”

Which is inscribed on his tomb in Durham Cathedral. I’ve always liked Bede, since the days when I had to study such wonderful epics as “Aelfric’s Homily on the Life of King Oswald” for the Old English special paper of my degree. I like him as well for being from Jarrow, a name which for me will be forever a socialist touchstone since the Jarrow Crusade of 1937. In fact, I like all of those saints of the North-East, especially the ones with silly names such as Saint Willibrod!

So, out of respect to St Bede, Ellen Wilkinson, and the brave men who marched to London to protest against unemployment, I’ve taken to watching out for the morning star as well. Any more of this astronomy and I may have to start wearing a monocle and move to Selsey, Bill.

There are a few apples left on John’s apple tree, outside my “bedroom” window, and the birds come and peck at them, for much needed sustenance, just as the sun is rising, usually, so I now have a morning tableau of the tracery of the black branches, the dun birds, black or brown, the yellow apples, the grey and silver sky as a backdrop, and sometimes, alongside the sere yellow of the apples, a bright golden orange caught in the boughs, as the sun itself rises. If my paints weren’t currently stuck in the back of the car, up at the garage, I might have had a go at rendering it on paper.

Debbie wondered why John never harvests all his apples, and it did occur to me that if God is indeed conscious of the fall of every sparrow, maybe he was instrumental in making John forget to gather the last few fruits, every autumn, so that they are left on the tree, and the birds can have some food at Christmas. It sounds far-fetched, until you remember all those other, much more complex symbiotic relationships in Nature which nourish both host and parasite. I don’t know, maybe Darwin and Richard Dawkins are right, and John just evolved to a state of the required forgetfulness.

We’ve been helping supplement the diet of the birds anyway, in this bitter weather, with the usual fat balls and nuts. Plus the leftovers of several meals, the crusts of burnt toast, etc. Debbie surprised me by telling me, one morning during the week, that she had been watching the little Robin who regularly comes to the decking for a feed, and he had been chased off it by a Jay. I was quite surprised by this, because I believed (wrongly, as it turns out) that the Jay was migratory. Anyway, the conundrum was solved when the “Jay” came back for seconds, and she pointed it out to me. It was a wood-pigeon. Still, as I said on the occasion of her colourful description of Canada Geese on Derwentwater (big, ####-off ducks) if I wanted world-class bird recognition skills, I’d have married Bill Oddie.

And so we come to Christmas, a time of year at our house when the pigeons, turkeys and, indeed, geese are all equally welcome at the feast, as guests rather than ingredients. I am typing this Epiblog on Christmas Eve rather than Boxing Day for two reasons, the first being that I always feel much more “Christmassy” on Christmas Eve than I do on Boxing Day, as Christmas “proper” always starts for me with the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols, though this year’s has continued the rather depressing tendency of recent years to elbow out the old singalong favourites and replace them with weird atonal Latvian folk-melodies that sound like Benjamin Britten on at the wrong speed. The second reason is that I know that if I write something on Boxing Day itself, it is bound to become dominated by a diatribe against fox-hunting, and, much as I remain bitterly and implacably opposed to those who feel that their right to enjoyment includes setting a pack of dogs onto another animal, and much as I remain convinced that if fox-hunting had been a working class sport, it would have been outlawed 150 years ago, this is not the time. There are battles ahead, in 2011, that may be one of them, who knows.

But for now, it’s Christmas Eve. It’s been a hell of a year, but the corner has been turned, at least that particular corner. The days will get longer, whatever else happens, whatever battles lie ahead. But for now, it’s a time for peace, rest, and reflection. And maybe time for going out later on (at least metaphorically)into the stable (which we don’t have) at midnight, to see if, as in Hardy’s poem, The Oxen, the animals (which we don’t have)are kneeling.

“So fair a fancy few believe
In these years! Yet, I feel,
If someone said on Christmas Eve
“Come; see the oxen kneel

“In the lonely barton by yonder comb
Our childhood used to know,”
I should go with him in the gloom,
Hoping it might be so.”

So, “hoping it might be so”, I wish you, from the snow-deep Holme Valley, a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

Epiblog for the 4th Sunday in Advent

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. The ice and snow that was infesting the roads and pathways when I came home from hospital has all gone – for now. I suspect, though, that this is not a complete rout of General Winter, he is not defeated, he has merely made a tactical retreat, a withdrawal, and even as I type this he is regrouping his forces in the chilly North to batter us again, with renewed vigour. As was proved on Saturday morning when I woke once more to find a dusting of snow turning the trees in the garden a shocked, ghostly white.

For now, though, during the past week, I have been welcoming the warmer temperatures and the unaccustomed sunshine, as have the animals – well, the dogs, at any rate. Tiggy even ventured out for a stately and sedate “walkies” with her old Grandad on Friday, once he had safely returned from his tests at Sheffield Hallamshire. Since his own recent spell of bad health, he’s become more of a walker than a runner, so Tiggy, at 98 in human years, is actually more suited to his current pace than Freddie or Zak, who charge about all over the place. Mind you, as a result of his latest set of tests, Grandad has apparently been prescribed Viagra, so his pace may improve as a result. His running days may not be over yet. Just as long as he doesn’t take up the relay!

Kitty’s spent most of her time this week in her cat bed, on the hearth, next to the stove, for obvious reasons, given the temperature outside, compared to the temperature there. In fact, one night during the week, a hot coal fell out of the front of the grate and singed the edge of the fur fabric “wall”, and all she did was raise a weary eyebrow, while Debbie swiftly retrieved it with the tongs and flipped it back into the flames. Probably a little too close to re-enacting the book of Isaiah in the comfort of your own home.

In the meantime, in the gap between the snowings, Debbie’s students finally took their weather-delayed literacy tests, and they all passed! Yes, her first ever “real” class got a 100% pass rate. Mind you, when she speaks, even I listen.

As I said above, this bright, hard, cold, clear weather is bound to change to something murkier and nastier fairly soon, judging by the forecast, so we’ve been trying to lay plans to forestall the siege, ordering more coal from the coalyard for a start. We are now the proud possessors of 250 kilograms of Homefire, our current brand of coal, having moved on from Taybrite. I had no idea that all these different types of coal even existed, before we got the stove. Now, I could lecture on them, with illustrations. Actually, this latest batch of coal has been stacked somewhere where my wheelchair will not allow me to go an look at it, so I find it difficult to imagine how much coal 250KG actually is. Indeed, because I can’t verify its existence independently, I guess to me it’s sort of “Schrodinger” coal, neither here nor there, neither burnt nor unburnt, until it’s carried in, a scuttle at a time, and converted to heat before my very eyes.

Assuming that things go on even though you can’t see them, or, alternatively, doubting that they do, has been preoccupying me for a lot of the week. Doubting, especially. Like the coal that falls out of the fire, my belief that I will get out of this chair and walk again, and soon, has been pretty quick to cool and diminish on occasions. The weather at this dark time of the year doesn’t help either. I can imagine, I suppose, if I try, the brightly lit, well-heated hospital ward, but now, even after only ten days at home, I find it difficult to imagine that I was ever part of it. Likewise the positive attitude which it engendered, though there are some people who still bring it out in me, my Occupational Therapist, for one, who has gung-ho, go-getting, can-do attitude in bucketloads, if not scuttlefuls. It’s the time in between that drags, though. The thousand and one things that you realise you can’t do any more, or at least, you can’t do for the moment. That, and the uncertainty, of knowing I can’t walk now, but not knowing if this is only a case of “not yet.” Schrodinger steps, that won’t be believed until they’ve been experienced.

Of course, in many ways, we all live our whole lives in the land of “not yet”, and so we all come to anticipate things, in the same way that Advent anticipates Christmas. You light an additional candle every week, or you cross off a day on the calendar, or you make a mark on the wall of your prison cell, or whatever, to indicate that another period of time has passed. Imagining, and believing, that life was carrying on at home, even when I was not there, was what kept me going all the time I was stuck in hospital, especially during those very long nights when I couldn’t sleep.

As I lay there, in the graveyard hours of the night, looking at the single, soulless, orange sodium bulb, in the single street light, which was all I could see against the ink black sky outside, I would think of the rest of the “family”, all lying safe in bed at home. Zak would no doubt have usurped my side of the bed and be curled up on my pillow – after all, he does that even when I am here, with the result that several times in the night at times when he has been staying over, I have woken up with a dog on my head.

Tig would not have given up her most favoured place in the middle of the bed to visitors. Freddie, in obedience to his deep-rooted terrier genes, would have burrowed completely under the duvet, where he would remain blissfully inert, apart from occasional rabbit-dreaming twitches, until morning. And, at some point in the night, Kitty would no doubt have crept onto the foot of the bed, under Zak’s watchful gaze, and curled herself round against the nearest warm haunch.

Meanwhile, outside in the trees, the tawny owls would be calling to each other, and the foxes in Lockwood Cemetery might be barking their strange, unearthly nocturnal sounds amongst the gravestones. The garden would be quiet, empty except for a passing snuffling hedgehog or a lumbering badger, perhaps, but not both at once!

It was at that point I usually started crying, and I could almost feel as if I was actually strapped to the bed, trying to raise my useless legs and get them to move independently, such was my utter feeling of helplessness. I had to make a conscious effort always at that point to wrench my focus back onto the streetlight, a blank impersonal sentinel, there to keep me company til dawn, while at the same time wishing fervently that “dawn” would hurry up and get her arse in gear, rosy-fingered or not.

Now, however, ever since I have been at home, even on days when I don’t have to, I have taken to watching the sun rise, because where my “downstairs” bed is situated, the window is facing almost due south-east, and, if I wake up early enough (not difficult, with cold nipping at your extremities, even with two hot water bottles) I can see first the very subtle change in the blue of the sky to a lighter violet, then a glimmer of light all along the horizon, and finally, if I am lucky, the fiery orange ball of the sun itself, cresting the tree line on the far side of the valley.

I like to feel a sort of communion at that moment with everyone else who has been up and about early, and waiting for, longing for, the dawn that they must sometimes have doubted. From the lone shepherd (and his faithful border collie) in the lambing shed, with his thermos flask of tea, now cold, looking up with bleary eyes for confirmation that the long nocturnal watch is over, to the night-shift workers waiting outside the factory gate for the bus home, anticipating breakfast, then a warm bed, to the homeless and the rough sleepers, who know from the sunrise that at least the bitter temperature on the streets will rise by a few vital degrees.

I must admit, that I was in two minds whether this blog – or at least this part of this blog – belonged here, or in The Bolshy Party. I find it increasingly difficult to separate religious indignation at something I consider an abomination, from political indignation in the same circumstances. Since coming back home from hospital, I have been trying to decide what to do about the Rooftree web site, given that I have discovered apparently it is “ours” til March 2012. I had previously thought I had only bought www.rooftree.org.uk for a year, in November 2009 and that it would have expired. Picking up the threads again on my return home, I find I bought it in March 2010, for two years. I must have had a rush of blood to the head that day, or I was anticipating great things, or both.

Of course, the coalition government has no intention of commandeering disused sites and building affordable prefabricated homes on them, in fact their policies are directly antithetical to the idea. Cut to the bone, and the devil take the hindmost. It is no wonder, then, that homeless organisations all over the country are either experiencing, or predicting, an increase in rough sleepers and the homeless as a direct result of government policy. So this leaves me in a bit of a quandary with Rooftree, since it is supposed to be non-party-political.

In the past, when someone has died as a result of government ineptitude, I have accused the opposition, whoever they happened to be at the time, of “shroud waving”, when they have stood up and used a particular case as a basis of demanding a pointless official inquiry. But I can see now that if we are ever going to beat the evil of homelessness, it is going to take something horrible such as people dying of hypothermia in the snow to get it up this boneheaded government’s agenda, and we are going to have to wave shrouds ourselves to do it. My only hope is that there are not too many shrouds to wave, before someone who can do something about it, takes notice. Are you listening, Grant Shapps?

Somehow, I seem to have got almost to the end (hooray, I hear you cry!) of this week’s Epiblog without mentioning either TS Eliot or Big G. The Eliot text for study this week, if we are having one, must surely be The Journey of The Magi:

"A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter."

Eliot concludes the poem by having the narrator compare the all-transforming importance of the birth of Christ to the effect of a death – everything old had changed, or as Yeats said in another context,

“All is changed, changed utterly
A terrible beauty is born”

Maybe that is what we need. To blast away the jingling bells and jingling tills and the dreadful false bonhomie of Christmas that would clothe and feed the homeless when there was no room in the inn by shoving them in a stable, but then shut it up in mid-January and turn them back out into the snow.

Maybe we need, instead of a normal dawn one day, or instead of the year’s deep midnight on St Lucy’s day, a dawn of transforming power, a blast of thunder across the sky, filled with celestial song and feathered wings and gold and silver and limitless, luminous, light, to give us a glimpse of how we can build the next world, in this world, so that the shepherds, abiding in the fields and the night workers abiding at the bus stops, and the poor, and the homeless will know their vigil is ended and their wait is over.

The collect for this Sunday seems to be getting on towards the right idea:

Lord, raise up (we pray thee) thy power, and come among us, and with great might succor us; that whereas, through our sins and wickedness, we be sore let and hindered, thy bountiful grace and mercy, through the satisfaction of thy son our Lord, may deliver us; to whom with thee and the holy ghost be honor and glory, world without end.

So, next week sees the Solstice and the start of the heartbeat of summer, in the same way that the whole oak tree is curled within the nutshell of the acorn when it falls into the mud one dull autumn day and takes root. Although we will have turned a corner, there are dark days ahead still. We are no longer in Kansas, Toto. But, as has been pointed out to me by a very astute man, whom I only know online, but whose opinion I value nevertheless, this, my current predicament, is also my opportunity for change. As Sidney Godolphin said in his 17th century Metaphysical poem on the Magi (the wacky Jacobean spelling is all his, by the way, in case you thought my keyboard was suddenly defunct)

“Ther is noe merrit in the wise
But love, (the shepheards sacrifice).
Wisemen all wayes of knowledge past,
To th' shepheards wonder come at last,
To know, can only wonder breede,
And not to know, is wonders seede.

So, what can I bring him, poor as I am? I am not a shepherd, and therefore have no lamb. If I were a wise man, I could do my part, but I think we’ve already established that wisdom has been a stranger to much of my life, often playing second fiddle to gut instinct. If I was a worker, I would toil and slog, but what I can I offer, this, my blog. So, talking of gut instinct, here’s an idea! Perhaps if you can think of anyone who can do anything to help the homeless, in an official capacity, this Christmas, and beyond, we could try and start the rumble of that transforming thunder, by forwarding them a link to these words.

Epiblog for the Third Sunday in Advent

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. The week began with me in hospital, expecting to go home on Tuesday. However, as viewed from the perspective of Sunday night, several variables could have affected this. I had sort of painted myself into a corner in my dealings with the social workers about discharging myself. I could self discharge on Tuesday, but in doing so, I would be saying, in effect, that I had no need of the continuous care package – or at least that is what I had been told. I, however, had made not one, but two counter-proposals, the ideal one being that they should sign off my social care package before Tuesday. That would be my ideal solution; as an alternative, I told them that I had agreed with my family for them to stand in locus of the carers, until such time as the real carers became available. Who would have thought that leaving hospital could be so complicated.

That was the position on Sunday night, after a convivial visiting time (with added stout) and another meeting of the Kamikaze Ground Staff Reunion Club (aka Peter, Bernard and Myself). I knew I would be sad to leave these lads (actually both of them are older than me!) behind when I went, and I would be sad, in a way, to leave this rotunda, this strangely-shaped, circular ward, part of the old Halifax Poor People’s Hospital, having done service both for the wounded soldiers of World War 1 and also as a maternity ward, and now, finally, facing closure on December 21st, despite being chosen as Ward of the Year in the hospital’s internal awards for 2010.

As with any location though, it is always as much about the people as the venue, and I would also be sad to leave some of the people as well, the front-line staff who have coped so excellently with my many quirks and foibles. In an ideal world, I would have a door in the back of the wardrobe, like the one that led through to Narnia, and I would be able to travel through it at will and find myself back in Ward 10 with all my chums. But, sadly, that is not to be. On Monday night we had my “official” sendoff, the previous one on Sunday having been the dress rehearsal, and a good time was had by all.

Tuesday eventually dawned, as Tuesday always does, and I began the process of packing up my physical belongings, and my mental baggage as well, in readiness for the journey, which, although only ten or twelve physical miles, was also going to be the crossing of a vast gulf in terms of adjustment – of that I was sure. It was made worse for me, in some way I can’t really explain, by the fact that by the time the ambulance came to take me home, it was already after dark, and we were suddenly trundling through a freezing cold, dark winter’s night. A greater physical contrast to the safe, well-lit, massively-overheated hospital ward you could not imagine, and I have not been “too warm” since! We reached our house and the ambulance lady took one look at the sheet-ice rink along our garden path and outside the door, and called for backup. Eventually, a second ambulance person arrived in a jeep and between them they manouvered me into the house.

After 145 days in hospital, I was expecting it to be weird returning home, but I wasn’t anything like prepared for the sheer weight of the wave of “weird” that crashed over me as I sat there. For the first time, in some ways, my plight, which had seemed as unreal as the rest of life in hospital, was now confirmed. I was confined to a wheelchair. “Besieged” is the correct word, literally confined to a seat. My universe had shrunk to being in one of either three places: bed, wheelchair, or riser/recliner, spread across two rooms. I am pleased to be able to say I have never had a dark night of the soul, but on Tuesday night I certainly had a dark night of the body.

I had expected, also, that one of the manifold pleasures of coming home would be that the animals would be pleased to see me, and although I wasn’t expecting to be mobbed, I did perhaps anticipate the odd muzzle nuzzle or whiskery kiss. In fact, Tiggy briefly raised one doggy eyebrow in my direction in recognition, before going back to sleep with a huge sigh. Maybe it was relief that I was home, maybe not. Kitty was wandering round yowling for food, since I had arrived at feeding time, but I can at least report that she has subsequently sought out my lap in the chair (though perhaps merely as a source of body-warmth).

Since then, things have gradually improved, as we have worked out ways to do things which don’t involve either a) massive upheavals of furniture and/or b) Debbie having to do everything. Things have been moving on the followup/backup front as well, with visits from the Occupational Therapist and the Social Care team, and also a phone call from my GP. So, on this occasion at least I can’t fault the seamless transition of the NHS. Sometimes, however, the transfer of the information itself hasn’t been so seamless. As Debbie was showing the Social Care team into the house, through to the room where I am based, one of them asked if I was her Grandad! [Perhaps 145 days in hospital has aged me more than I know] and the GP sent me a sick note with my name spelt wrong which signed me off for two months with two things I don’t currently have [“neurological problems” and “bowel obstruction”] – all very odd. We have also had a letter from the “Community Accessibility Team” to say they will be getting round to coming out to look at our house with a view to fitting ramps in “approximately 14 weeks”. I love the use of the word “approximately”. My first thought was to write back and ask them to specify if it would be morning or afternoon, but I contented myself for now with merely asking if “weeks was a “typo” for days.

And so we come to Sunday. The snow has melted, and today, for the first Sunday for more than four weeks, I have not sat in the little Chapel, listening to Lily or Gordon pounding the keys to provide music for a well-known Advent hymn, or looking up at Dame Nelly Wallace and the Good Samaritan. It’s not as if all mention of Christmas has been excised from my life, though, far from it, because once more I am now being exposed to the delights, or horrors, of television advertising! God, what a farrago of conspicuous consumption, enticing people to spend more than they have on more than they need, gorge themselves and beggar-thy-neighbour. I like a good feast and a drink as much as the next fellow, but the sheer naked crassness of these awful products of some addled mind that would have you believe you aren’t a complete human being unless you open the latest version of “Donkey Kong” on Christmas morning really puts me in touch with my inner puritan. If I see just one more Marks and Spencer Christmas advert, I may just change my name to “PraiseGod Barebones” denounce the ungodly, and sail off to the New World – except of course, over there it is even worse. Anyway, I look like the bloke at the top of the page whenever it comes on.

I know that, in a capitalist society, Mr Marks and Mr Spencer do need to advertise their expensive chocolates, ready meals and underwear, and they are only doing what all other retailers do, participating in the annual festival of corporate and individual gluttony which Christmas has become for many. There has to be something wrong, not with them, but with the system, that allows them to do it, offering cashmere jumpers while homeless people are dying of hypothermia under bridges this winter. I always come back to Alan Hull [RIP]’s wonderfully cutting words in “Winter Song”

“When the turkey’s in the oven and the presents are all bought
And Santa’s in his capsule, he’s an American astronaut
Will you spare a thought for Jesus, who had nothing but his thoughts
Who got busted for just talking, and befriending the wrong sorts
When winter comes howling in...”

I’ve been attempting to counteract the corrosive effect of the likes of Morrisons, Aldi and M & S, by continuing my re-reading of Eliot’s Four Quartets as a spiritual exercise, and this week I am down to the last one, The Dry Salvages. The Dry Salvages is the only one of the locations written about by Eliot that I haven’t visited, which is not surprising since it is a group of rocks in the sea off the coast of New England. There is much in The Dry Salvages about the sea, but it starts off with a river.

“I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river
Is a strong brown god”

In Eliot’s case, it was the Missouri, of course, in mine, the Humber. The Humber is certainly a strong brown god, and like Marvell I have complained by its tides, and like Larkin I have travelled along its banks by train, “where sky and Lincolnshire and water meet”. One of the things I am most scared of about this whole wheelchair scenario is that I will never see Brough Haven and the Humber again, or Walney Island, or the Firth of Clyde, Lamlash Bay, or Kilbrannan Sound. Or even the Lake District. Whilever I am besieged by my own legs, there is always the chance that the mutant neurons will be victorious, and that instead of shedding the wheelchair like a chrysalis when I am strong enough to walk and drive again, I will be stuck here forever, “confined to a wheelchair” and massively dependent on others for the rest of my life, despite my pictures of Douglas Bader and Padre Pio, and my rosary beads, and my increasingly desperate prayers to Big G to give me my legs back.

I guess I am having a bad week. And I can’t settle to Eliot, with all these multifarious distractions. I can’t even settle to television. I have given up trying to watch Midsomer Murders just now because Debbie is hitting the boiler with a rubber mallet. I haven’t asked why. Not while she has the mallet in her hand. Mind you, Debbie hitting the boiler with a rubber mallet is probably preferable as Christmas viewing to “Kirstie and Phil’s Perfect Christmas”, River chuffing Cottage, or Nigella.

I think Eliot was having a bad week when he wrote The Dry Salvages as well, but then it has always been my least favourite of the Four Quartets, despite the nautical genes that must be somewhere in my makeup from Thomas Henry Rudd, Hull fisherman, who died off the coast of Portugal and was buried at sea off the coast of Morocco, in 1906:

“Also pray for those who were in ships, and
Ended their voyage on the sand, in the sea's lips
Or in the dark throat which will not reject them
Or wherever cannot reach them the sound of the sea bell's
Perpetual angelus.”

Or indeed his brother, Great-great Uncle Ernie, who was a big shot in the Trawlermens’ Union, apparently. I don’t think his genes are a problem. I’ve got those, alright.

I realise that “confined to” can also be read as “liberated by” and everything is always comparitive. Compared to the alternative, I am, as my surgeon said to me after the operation, “a very lucky man”, after all. And it’s Sunday, Johnny Kingdom is on later, I am sitting by the stove, I have a cup of coffee at my elbow, I am warm (sort of, when the draught excluder remembers to do its job) and tonight there will be vegan sausages and rumbledeythumps for tea, cooked by yours truly, possibly with a small glass of red wine, since we sailors must always guard against scurvy by keeping up our vitamin C levels, especially in a maritime area such as The Holme Valley. I am not out in the cold, with nowhere to go and no hope of food or company. So maybe I should give up whingeing and do something with this unexpected Christmas gift, the rest of my life. If only I knew what:

“These are only hints and guesses,
Hints followed by guesses; and the rest
Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.
The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation.”

So, on the third Sunday of Advent, Gaudete Sunday, I should be rejoicing at “The Lord who is now nigh and close at hand”, not that he’s answered my calls since Tuesday, but perhaps he’s busy elsewhere, and while I have been catching up on lost sleep, like Luke’s shepherds, he’s been catching up on lost sheep, people who need it more than I do, to be honest.

And if I do have to use this wheelchair for longer than anticipated then maybe I need to remember to do it in good heart, catch the end of the rope which life has thrown me, and sing the old sea-shanty that goes:

We’ll row the old chariot along,
We’ll row the old chariot along,
We’ll row the old chariot along,
And we’ll all hang on behind!

Bearing in mind, always, that

The chariots of God are twice ten thousand,
even thousands upon thousands;
the Lord is among them.

Epiblog for the Second Sunday in Advent.

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley – probably. Sadly, however, I am still stuck in Salterhebble, which is nearly as bad as being sleepless in Seattle, in its own way... “Stuck inside of Calderdale with a mobile phone again,” as Bob Zimmerframe might have put it.

All that is stopping me going home is the lack of someone’s signature on an official document. I have been waiting for this for two weeks now. I realise, of course, that signing official documents is no small thing. It must be done with due weight and consideration, and not undertaken lightly.

First, you have to go into the forest and gather some oak galls, then pound them in wine vinegar to make your ink; then you have to catch a goose, pluck one of its wing feathers, carve the stem of it into a nib shape with a very sharp knife (a pen knife, in fact) and stick it into hot sand, to harden it so that you can write with it. Finally, you need a sheet of stretched goats’ vellum, always assuming that there is a convenient stretched goat to hand.

You now have all you need to sign away someone’s life, as in the case of Charles I or Mary, Queen of Scots, or to draw up a will or a charter, or to record the daily round of baptisms, marriages and funerals in your parish. At least, that is how they used to do it in those dusty old parish registers I used to pore over in the Humberside County Record Office, documents that had lain in some East Yorkshire parish chest in the vestry for four hundred years or so, before I came to study family history.

Historians of the future (if any) studying my release from hospital will not have such a tactile experience. All I am waiting for is one signature on a laser-printed document. One sheet of A4 paper is all that stands between me and home. Well, that and the snow. Advent has decided to wear its traditional raiment again this year. White is the colour this season, lying crisp and cold on field and fold, discomfiting the sheep and the lowing beasts. And, in a slightly less biblical phrase, bringing travel chaos to West Yorkshire.

Despite the snow, though, my hospital gear has been delivered at home. We are now the proud loaners (but not owners) of a hospital bed, a commode, two banana boards, and a riser/recliner chair, the latter of which list has already been christened as a scratching post by Kitty. She likes the embossed, embroidered velour fabric, apparently. If she carries on, she is going the right way to end her days as a Davy Crockett hat.

The dogs have mixed reactions to the snow. Zak charges across the cricket field at Armitage Bridge, doing Charlie Chaplin-style skidding turns at every opportunity. Tig tolerates the snow, plodding through it, doing her “I’m a faithful old dog, I am” routine. It is amazing, though, how her speed increases at the proximity of home, a warm fire, and dog treats. Freddie hates the snow and ice, because it gets stuck in his fur and makes him cold, so half the time he worries at it with his teeth.

The snow’s been disrupting Debbie’s teaching, too. Her first ever class of examinees should have sat their test on Thursday night, but, because of the snow, it has been postponed for two weeks. So now the learners have two more weeks to forget what she has taught them. Oh well. I have also been studying. In my case, still reading “Four Quartets” as a devotional exercise. That phrase makes it sound like something unpleasant, like wearing a hair shirt or one of those spiked Opus Dei garters sported by Ruth Kelly and the scary albino monk from The Da Vinci Code. In fact, far from a penance, it has been a pleasure to re-read what I regard as the crowning achievement of T. S. Eliot’s poetic career, and to see new things in it. (I always think that the hallmark of a really great poem is that you can take something new from it at every reading.)

Last week I wrote about Little Gidding and the sense of community, and the week before about Burnt Norton and the importance of doing good when you have chance to. As Si Kahn puts it in his song “What You Do With What You’ve Got”

“It’s not the fights you dreamed of
But those you really fought
It’s not just what you’re given
It’s what you do with what you’ve got.”

Spookily enough, this week’s sermon in the hospital chapel featured Ivor Novello’s song “The Land of Might-Have-Been”. Since Novello wrote this ten years before Eliot and Emily Hale visited Burnt Norton, I wonder if there is any chance that Novello’s words were jingling residually around in Eliot’s brain, that day as he walked in the rose garden?

“Somewhere there’s another land
Diff’rent from this world below
Far more mercifully planned
Than the cruel place we know”

This week, I have been re-reading “East Coker”, and thinking of the importance of family. Eliot’s family originated there, and set out for the New World from that sleepy Somerset hamlet. I have actually been to East Coker church, where Eliot’s ashes are interred, following the same route as Eliot did when he visited:

“…the deep lane
Shuttered with branches, dark in the afternoon,
Where you lean against a bank while a van passes,
And the deep lane insists on the direction
Into the village…”

In his own quest for his “roots”, he reaches the conclusion that

“In my beginning is my end”,

a sentiment which is revived, both in the poem itself and in his memorial stone in the church, as

“In my end is my beginning.”

In terms of my own family history, these lines (which Eliot adapted from the last words of Mary, Queen of Scots, coincidentally) have added resonance for me, because one of the things I have now had provisionally confirmed, during my long stay in hospital (though finding this out was neither the cause, purpose or intent of the stay) is the presence in my family history of Muscular Dystrophy, and the likelihood that it may indeed be the cause of my own underlying mobility problems.

It is potentially a hard thing to discover that the family you are proud of, the genetic tapestry which has produced you, over the centuries, may be flawed or holed, or unravelling at the edges. I have always drawn inner strength from the fact that I am descended from the Fenwicks, with their proud Jacobite tradition in the North-East, but some of them, undoubtedly, maybe even my own mother, passed on this debilitating gift to me. It is like finding that the water in a familiar and trusted well suddenly tastes brackish, but this is not the fault of the well-diggers. You can’t choose your relatives, and, however embarrassing your family are, they are still your family.

It has not been a sudden, blinding revelation, as I have lived with the encroaching effects of my legs not working properly since the late 1970s, in the days when I first began turning the parchment pages to find those elusive donors of my genetic profile. I had long suspected that the previous diagnosis of “a childhood polio” for my troubles was questionable, especially since no-one who was around in my childhood, including me, could ever remember me having had polio.

The Rudds, of course, my father’s stock, were all blissfully healthy Norfolk yokels. Well, as healthy as you could be in those days, what with rickets and an agricultural depression every other year. I could imagine them being like the dancers depicted in East Coker:

“Rustically solemn or in rustic laughter
Lifting heavy feet in clumsy shoes,
Earth feet, loam feet, lifted in country mirth
Mirth of those long since under earth”

One such agricultural depression undoubtedly drove them to Hull, where there was trade, commerce and industry, and where you could be your own man and bid farewell to “turmut hoeing” in the fog and frost and touching your forelock to the Squire of Saham Toney. I have been to Saham Toney church, and stood on the very spot, before the altar, where my ancestors would have stood to be married, and imagined the village choir and the church band intoning rustic harmonies, but, sadly, there are no commemorative blue plaques there commemorating famous Rudds. Because there aren't any!

I think, though, that if I want my own true “East Coker” moment, it would not be travelling back to rural Norfolk, nor up to the Borders in search of Jacobite Fenwicks, it would be to go back to the wide suburban avenues of Hull, where my parents both lie. Hull has changed amazingly since I used to live there. It has undergone that process described by Eliot where:

“In succession
Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,
Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place
Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass.”

But the cemetery behind Chanterlands Crematorium is relatively unchanged, with its trim acres of gravestones and its public memorials to people killed in the Hull Blitz and the R38 airship disaster, and if I want a timeless moment I will go there and stand by the rose tree that covers the ashes of my parents with its municipal shade, and wish them well in the realms of limitless light.

So far, God has been a bit absent from this Epiblog. This is partly because I know he wants something from me, but I don’t know what. He left a message, asking me to get back to him. So I am waiting until his purpose becomes clear. Like the reason why God should arrange for my family to pass me defective genes, it is one of those questions which I suspect I cannot answer at the moment, because my nose is too close to the tapestry to see the whole pattern.

It has been suggested that my purpose might have something to do with writing. It has also been suggested (by my wife, actually) that I have no purpose whatsoever, and that when I come home from hospital, I will just be a supernumerary mouth to feed, and a drain on the household resources! Any suggestions as to what I could do, would be gratefully received, especially as going home in a wheelchair makes me feel a lot less useful than I used to be. Will I ever stand on the shores of Kilbrannan Sound again? I know, of course, that it is better to have a full life than a happy one, and that unalloyed joy would soon pale, as Prince Harry says in Shakespeare’s Henry IV part 1

“If all the year were playing holidays,
To sport would be as tedious as to work”

But it would be good to think that something pleasant lies ahead, after 2010.

Perhaps I could be a prophet, like John the Baptist, living in the wilderness on wild honey and locusts. I am not too sure about the locusts, though: I prefer my grasshoppers free-range. I think I would have to have a pact with the locusts similar to the one I currently have with the fish. If I don’t eat them, they won’t eat me. Wearing a suit of camel hair sounds quite swish though. Hardly vegan, of course, unless the camel died of natural causes, and there is the problem of what to do with the humps. But I am sure that a talented designer could make Humphrey’s humps and mine coincide in the making up of the garment.

Whatever I do, I mustn’t lose sight of the objective. We heard today in the sermon about how God apparently strives in his kingdom to bring about a state of perfection between man and nature:

The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them. And the cow and the bear shall feed; their young ones shall lie down together: and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. And the sucking child shall play on the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put his hand on the cockatrice' den. They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain: for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the LORD, as the waters cover the sea.

And that, I guess, is what we are all looking for. Each of us is a small brick in the kingdom of God, and eventually, every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill laid low. What my part is in making the crooked straight and the rough places plain, I do not know. In the meantime, though, in this quiet period before Christmas, for me at least, I will draw sustenance from my roots and prepare myself for what happens next. As for 2011, I will have to draw on Eliot one last time, for now.

“Here or there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise”

And in the meantime, I will post a picture of a leopard and a wolf enjoying each other's company. Well, almost. And in the meantime, as it almost says in the Book of Timothy, God is working his porpoise out.

Epiblog for Advent Sunday

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. Or so I have been told. Here, in hospital, it has been largely warm and boring. Rather like a desert island or a luxury cruise with no view and no palm trees. Unfortunately, all of the urgent tasks I brought in with me are now either stuck or exhausted, and everything urgent which needs doing now resides on the big computer at home, awaiting my return.

In fact, several urgent things await my return home, starting with the weather. Apparently, one day last week, it was so cold in our kitchen, Debbie was sitting there in front of the stove, with her coat on, and her hood up, and she could still see her own breath, apparently. So, going home is a potential challenge in many ways.

Tiggy and Kitty have been regularly joining Debbie on the bed, and inter-species co-operation has apparently resulted in shared body-warmth, although even this has had to be re-inforced by the presence of Jim, the trusty hot-water-bottle. I don’t know how Zak and Freddie are reacting to the current snowfall. Earlier on this year, when we had all those weeks and weeks of freezing weather, or so it seemed, Zak ran about in it, barking (in many ways, as dogs go, he is actually completely barking) but poor Freddie, being a small terrier and only about 9 inches off the ground, suffered with the ice and snow adhering to his chest fur, poor wee dote.

So, this year, Granny has said the search is on for anyone who can knit him a coat that will go round his underneath as well. She has in mind some sort of tubular affair, with holes for his legs, and made out of that oily wool that fishermens’ guernseys are made of. I suggested to her that she should go the whole hog, and get someone to make him one with the “pattern” of the nearest port (probably Hull or Grimsby). All of the fishing ports up the east coast used to have their own design of “gansey” as they were known. The purpose was twofold; to uphold their loyalty to their own home port in the fierce rivalries that ensued between ports over such things as catches, and also a more sad, practical use, in that if an unidentified body was washed up, the gansey at least told the discoverers the port of origin of the unfortunate victim.

It remains to be seen whether Freddie will get his dog-jersey, or indeed if the weather will continue to make such garments necessary. I doubt it will be in place before I get home. If it isn’t, perhaps we could ask the lucky constructor if she (I assume it will be a she) will do a double-or-quits offer, and knit me one, as well. It could even be just a larger version of Freddie’s, a knitted tube with holes for my arms and legs. Who knows, it might catch on!

As you can see from the way my mind is wandering, I have a lot of time on my hands at the moment in hospital. As I said, all the urgent tasks which accompanied me are now done, all I am doing is marking time, literally (in the standing hoist where I am learning to walk again) and metaphorically, in that I am now working on next year’s projects. And yet I feel strangely unsettled, stirred up, still, but without knowing why.

I am like some ageing knight of the shires, who sees his old armour hanging in the hall and gathering dust, but knows somehow that it will need to be taken down, polished, and used maybe one more time, although the actual call has not yet come, and he knows not where the battlefield will be.

At this time of the year, the shortest day, the Solstice, assumes a special significance for me. It marks a turning point in the year, midwinter, as far as I am concerned. After that, there is a brief spell of rest and feasting, and then it is time to strap on the armour, take up the shield, and set forth on the quest of 2011, whatever that may be. It would be much easier if, when God calls you to do something, he left an intelligible message, instead of just a holy post-it saying “call me back”.

“Midwinter” also makes me think of snow, and “In the Bleak Mid Winter”, but also of T. S. Eliot’s lines on Little Gidding about “Midwinter spring is its own season”. I feel at the moment as though I am in Midwinter Spring, suspended between one year and the next.

But now, for now, it is Advent, and there is a reason to celebrate. Two reasons, if I get home in time for Christmas. One of the things that has sustained me in this long sojourn in this place, has been the presence of friends and family, both those who have actually visited in person, and those who have kept in touch via the web. In fact, without the internet and the laptop, with its trusty dongle, I would have been so isolated, I would truly have feared for my sanity. The web allows us to pull together a community around us in the same way that the Ferrar family did in the 1630s in real life. In fact, in many ways, I find the distinction between real life and the web is increasingly irrelevant, as people cross the borders from one to the other. When Chief Seattle said in 1855 that:

“Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together. All things connect.”

He was of course speaking of the web of nature, and the way all things in it depend on all other things. However, his words are strangely prescient for the online age. Nicholas Ferrar, founder of the original Little Gidding community, also recognised the value of friendship and community, when he wrote to his cousin Arthur Woodnoth on 10th May 1630:

“Do not interrupt that web of friendship which I hope might otherwise prove a pattern in an age that needs patterns”

I have certainly felt the web of friendship, especially when my internet message board postings about my lack of protein led to fellow message board users, bearing parcels of protein-rich food, appearing at my bedside. It would be interesting to attempt a community like Little Gidding today, although of course both the original community and the 20th century attempt to revive the ideal were not entirely successful.

Perhaps that is what I am being called to do, although if so, I feel certain Big G has dialled a wrong number, as our house is rather smaller than the Manor at Little Gidding, and we don’t have a church in our back garden, and these days the planning department are a lot shirtier than they were back in the 1630s. The community at Little Gidding only worked, I think, because of the exercise of compassion and support, cutting people a bit of slack, and giving them the benefit of the doubt if they seemed to be having a hard time. Until recent years, these rather “British” qualities used to be prevalent in society at large. Perhaps it would be a good idea if we could inculcate them once again, then we might justifiably claim to have created “The Big Society”.

I have been inside the church at Little Gidding. It is barely longer or wider than a railway carriage. On a winter’s evening, at evensong, say on the feast of Nicholas Ferrar on 4th December, you could imagine the entire household at prayer, crammed into the tiny pews. Their breath would have been streaming in the cold as they crossed the garden from the house, summoned by the single bell. Their rosy faces would have been soft in the candlelight inside the church, their rustic voices blending in harmony as they chanted a psalm. It must have felt like they were all on board a tiny ship, afloat on the vast ocean of the midwinter night.

What I do intend to do, however, assuming I get home in time, is to have some sort of midwinter feast to give thanks for my physical salvation. A spiritual as well as physical feast, perhaps. Nicholas Ferrar wrote the following during an arduous sea-voyage, but it accurately sums up my own feelings as well:

“If the good Lord be merciful unto me, and bring me safe home again, I will all the days of my life serve Him in His holy Name and exhorting others ; yea, in His tabernacle, and in His holy sanctuary will I serve Him, and shall account the lowest place in His house better and more honourable than the greatest crown in the world.”

I have, in previous years, actually toyed with the idea of clearing out an entire room at home and making a suitable environment for an actual Christmas feast, spreading straw on the floor and procuring from somewhere a refectory table and some benches. Then we could truly sit and feast, while the snow outside lay deep, and crisp, and even. However, even if I do manage to achieve this in real life, and so far, my wife has, very sensibly, always vetoed the idea whenever it comes up, sadly, I fear that the modern-day equivalent to T. S. Eliot (?Simon Armitage) is unlikely ever to write a poem about us!

So, for now, I will take my lead from Hilaire Belloc’s drinking song about winter on the Sussex Downs. I’ll settle me down in Steyning to sing/Of the girls I’ve met in my wandering/And all the things I’ll do in Spring/ Which no man shall deny. I’ll continue to walk past the suit of armour in the hall (I wish we actually had one, both a suit of armour and a hall) We will deck the hall (which in our case we have not got) with boughs of holly, and the door shall stand open for the unexpected guest, the homeless person or the long lost friend, the cat flap will work for the abandoned cat, seeking warmth, food and shelter, there shall be a place by the fire for the unwanted, abandoned, lost dog, and a full bowl for him, or her, with treats; all in the spirit at least, if we can’t afford it yet in the real world, but the webs of the worlds may yet mystically intertwine, and we shall believe that in our imaginary barn, on Christmas Eve, the imaginary oxen are kneeling.

And I am determined of one more thing: this year, there WILL be room at the inn.

Epiblog for Stir-up-Sunday

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. Sadly, though, I haven’t been there to see it. I am still a resident of the Calderdale Royal Hospital, in Salterhebble, Halifax, in the West Riding of Yorkshire. I have been in hospital since 15th July, about nineteen weeks, give or take a tedious hour or two.

These blogs (this one, and The Bolshy Party) have been seriously neglected by me over the summer. As far as The Bolshy Party goes, again sadly, I have been too weak until recently to resume castigating the Tories and the miniTories lite for their hateful campaign of cuts against the poor. As far as this blog is concerned, I could have filled it several times over with my experiences about the NHS, but I have been collecting them together in note form, because I think they might eventually make a book. So the Epiblogues have gone unwritten.

Home is, as far as I know, still more or less in one piece, and Tiggy and Kitty are still leading happy little lives – if a little more elderly and sedate than previously. Freddie remains his feisty little terrier self, and Zak is now recovering from his own injury over the summer, when he was winged by a car and had his leg broken. The fur has grown back, and he now only occasionally holds his foot up. Deb, of course, has had the hardest task; keeping the house going while I have been stuck in here, while at the same time coping with a massive paradigm shift and career change, going from 21 years as a residential social worker to a new life as a teacher of adult literacy, and trying to find a job doing it, as well, in the teeth of the coalition’s “Blitzkrieg” assault on adult and further education; plus she has had to deal with some of the daily domestic disasters which might have normally fallen to me, mainly involving battles with the stove, many past examples of which I have chronicled in previous Epilogues and “Here Endeth The Epilogue”.

This year, it began when she lit the stove for the first time in the autumn. It had run fine up to the day we had stopped using it at the start of the summer, but when she re-lit it in October, using coal which had been specially ordered, it kept going out. After replacing several parts, which, admittedly, needed replacing anyway, including the baffle plate, which baffled her as much as it once baffled me, it still kept going out. Then, last Wednesday, she had a new batch of fuel delivered. Suddenly, the stove works fine. It was the coal, and not the stove. Oh well, the new parts will do it good and prolong its life, I thought, and then finally we had the chimney swept by the chimney-sweep, who says he thinks the problem is the chimney-pot. Whatever the cause, we could really have done with the money in the bank.

The imbroglio of the stove reminded me once more of Heraclitius’ remark that you can never jump in the same river twice; the river has the same name and general location, but the water that makes it up is entirely different, second by second. Like Trigger’s brush in “Only Fools and Horses”, which was a good brush because it had only had four new shafts and three new heads. So it will be when I go home. Parts of it will be different. The pattern of life has moved on.

One way in which life has changed for me, while I have been in here, has been that I started going to the regular Sunday service in the Chapel. The chapel is a remarkable small space, notable for its Jesus Mafa poster of The Good Samaritan on the wall and for the coloured glass memorial behind the altar to Sister Sheila Wallace, whoever she was, and in my febrile imagination, she will always be Dame Nelly Wallace, which is what I thought I was seeing when I first read the inscription.

Every week, the picture of the Good Samaritan strikes me, and every week, I see new things in it. Only last week, it was pointed out to me that in the picture of course, since the point of these pictures is that all the characters are depicted as Africans, in this picture, the Samaritan would be Muslim, which seems quite apposite in the current climate of bigotry and xenophobia that infests England at present.

Two weeks ago, we had the Rememberance Service on Sunday morning in the Hospital Chapel. Last week, it was “Stir Up Sunday”, or the Feast of Christ the King, as it is more correctly known, for those of you without a Christmas pudding to stir. The day was glorified by steely winter sunshine, burnished silver rather than golden, and fleeting, of course, as the short days determine. I have missed so much sunshine this summer and autumn, that I felt very sad at its brief flourishing, and the advent of the long dark night.

Still, you have to take joy where you can, as Karine Polwart sings. “I can find joy, in the sound of the rain”. I know what she means: I can see God in the sparkle of sunlight on a wave. I can even see God in the knowledge that it is Sunday afternoon, the sun is shining, the kettle is on, the window is open to the garden, and it will soon be teatime. I can cook a meal as an offering to God, or stir a pudding, if it comes to that.

One thing I do have in here, is lots of time on my hands, in between physiotherapy sessions. I have found myself once more reading T S Eliot’s Burnt Norton, with its complex, shifting rhythms and deliberations on the nature of time and eternity, coupled with speculations on “what might have been”, in connection with his visit to the gardens there. He visited the house with Emily Hale, with whom he had probably been in unacknowledged love all of his adult life; I say “unacknowledged, because I mean, of course, unacknowledged to himself.

It seems pretty certain that Emily Hale thought that she meant something to him, especially when, after he suddenly and unexpectedly married his secretary in 1958, Emily locked all his letters to her (over 1000, in twelve boxes, measuring 5.5 cubic feet) in the Princeton University Library, sealed until 12 October 2019, a date which will presumably see Eliot scholars the world over braced in their starting blocks. In return, Eliot burnt all of hers to him.

But in 1934, when they strolled together through the rose garden at Burnt Norton, and looked down into the empty concrete pools, all of that was, of course, far in the future. As Eliot himself noted, in another context, “between the intention, and the action, falls the shadow”. Or, to put it another way, life is an uncertain business, so you might as well eat dessert first.

After this year, I don’t need to be told that twice, not after the year I’ve had. That’s why I have got a new list of 17 things I intend to do when I get out of hospital. It started out as 15 things, but two more got added – eat more patties, and re-home a torty. Torty cats are completely mental, and provide good entertainment value for their owners with their bonkers antics. In an ideal world, of course, one would have a black and white cat, a torty, a ginger, and a tabby. And one would see God in their replete repose and happiness.

Anyway, these hands have been idle too long, it is time to stop using my pen solely for the pursuit of my own vanity, and commence using it again for the glory of God, or at least to bear witness to injury and injustice, so that they may perhaps be rectified. Yes, Stir-up Sunday has got me stirred up. I will soon be going home, back to the Holme Valley, where there is much that needs to be done. It may not be the same valley, it may not (says Heraclitus) be the same river, but sadly, there are still some of the same things that need to be done, albeit maybe in a different way – to justify the ways of God to man, and perhaps even vice versa.

It would be silly to say I have enjoyed the summer of illness. I haven’t. In many ways it has been disappointing, frustrating, saddening, worrying: I almost died, after all. But I have also had rest and (reasonably, overall) good food, and I feel my strength growing again in every limb. I may have simply swopped one set of stresses for another, but it doesn’t seem that way at the moment.

Time is moving on. Things are changing. The solstice, the shortest day, is only three weeks or so away, and after that, we turn again, like tender plants, to the light. For now, though, I am seeing the hand of what some may call God in the bright sunbeams that briefly pierce stony grey skies of November, calling me, in some way I don't yet quite understand, to do something familiar in a revolutionary manner, and something different in the same old way.

Epiblog for St George's Day

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. Even though the days have been warm, even sunny on occasion, we’ve left the stove lit. Eventually, though, probably when we’ve worked our way through the last few bags of coal, we’ll finally let it go out, and then I can clean out the inside of it thoroughly, we can dump the ashes and the clinker on the path that runs along the rear boundary of the garden, and I can blacklead the grate and polish the glass, and then that will be it, until the autumn.

We really ought to have the chimney swept over the summer as well, and then stovepipe re-seated and re-grouted. We say that every year, of course.

Kitty has, perversely, now that the days are growing warmer, taken to sleeping on the bed again. We never did discover where she had been sleeping all that time during the bitter cold and snow. Probably, when I tidy out the office over the summer, I will find that she has made a nest by burrowing into some priceless manuscript or artwork.

Tiggy likes the sunshine, probably because it warms up her old bones and reduces the aches and pains of her arthritis. I know how she feels. It is good to feel real warmth, from the sun. A bit of a reward for all those winter days.

Already, though, it’s half way through April, and the brief, transitory glory of Spring is happening all around me in a way which is impossible to fix. It is like grasping at rainbows. Every morning when I wake up these days I look out of the bedroom window at the burgeoning catkins on the pussy-willow tree, a hectic, yellow-green against a vivid brilliant impossibly blue sky that might have been painted by Maxfield Parrish.

Each day as I pass there, the four cherry trees outside the old chapel on Taylor Hill Road are ever more shocking bursts of pink and white blossom, like a freeze-frame of an explosion caught on a fast shutter-speed camera.

Easter has been and gone. Probably even the Greek Orthodox Church has had Easter now, and they are usually about 10 days behind the rest of us with many major religious festivals, probably because they never bothered to download the updates to the calendar in Microsoft Outlook. I have to admit, with their habit of wearing gold-encrusted nighties, their silly hats, their mad beards and their habit of calling each other “Metropolitan” and “Archimandrite” , they aren’t actually, all that Orthodox! Or, to put it another way, if that is orthodox, I would hate to be wacky!

Later in the week, I found myself down in Staffordshire for a meeting, which broke up early in the afternoon, so I had the rest of the day to make my meandering way back to the office. In one sense, the decision I made was a foolish one, because I never did make it back to the office that day, partly because I took a wrong turning and ended up adding an enormous loop to the trip, partly because the roads were slow anyway, and partly because, when I got to the M1 itself, finally, it was chock-a-block with traffic.

I have to admit though, that it was also partly because I didn’t want to get back. It was a fine spring day, perfect china-blue sky and fluffy white clouds, the sort of Spring day in England that Browning probably had in mind when he wrote “Home Thoughts from Abroad” about the brushwood bole being in tiny leaf. I tootled along through country lanes, winding streets of half-timbered houses and old stone churches, out into the country again, looking at the grass verges, their bright green studded and interspersed with the vivid yellow of daffodils, dandelions and even, on occasion, primroses.

I found myself trying to think of a word to describe it and “verdant” was the best one that came to mind. I felt similar to George Orwell’s character, George Bowling, in Coming Up For Air, when he manages to escape his humdrum office life and sets off for an adventure in his car. I vaguely considered detouring to Lichfield to see the cathedral, on a whim, but decided that I had better press on regardless, on my meandering progress across the face of England. My wrong turning was at the old stone bridge at Wolseley Bridge, where I took a right instead of crossing over the river and then turning right.

Still, not even the prospect of a few additional miles could dampen my mood, on such a lovely day. Eventually, I came to a long straight road that led through a place called Newchurch. The name seemed vaguely familiar, and then I remembered that this was the place that had been the setting for a bitter struggle for six years or so between a local farming family, who were mass-breeding guinea pigs for animal experimentation, and members of an animal welfare activist group who were trying to stop them.

It had been a very ugly case, with no real winners. The family in question gave up the business, but three of the activists were jailed for twelve years and one for four years, on charges connected to conspiracy to blackmail. During the campaign, the body of the grandmother of one of the farmers had been stolen from its grave in the local churchyard, and found dumped in woodland some time later. Although this was never actually proven to have been the work of the activists who were jailed, nevertheless it must have influenced their sentencing, which was draconian and out of all proportion compared to other lesser sentences being handed out for far greater crimes. Obviously the authorities were determined to make an example of the four ringleaders, but in effect they have turned them into martyrs.

And thirteen years on, after Labour’s election pledge of a Royal Commission on vivisection in 1997, we’re still waiting, animal cruelty is still going on all around us and now – thanks to the credit crunch – we once more have the spectacle of homeless people surrendering their pets to animal sanctuaries for adoption, having had their houses reposessed.

A shadow had passed over my day, but I drove on, back out into the sun, along the arterial roads, past fields already starting to yellow with rape, overlooking the cooling towers of distant power stations. Apparently there are more power stations along the course of the River Trent than any other River in England. Someone told me that once, and I have just tried to verify it as a fact, and failed, but nevertheless it is certainly true that you can’t throw a half-brick round there without hitting one.

The week ended with St George’s day, and I drove to the office doing my usual count up of the new lambs in the fields around the crossroads at The Flouch. Sheep, sheep, baa-lamb, lapwing. It has a sort of rhythm to it. I like the lapwings, the way they stand on point, on guard over their nests, their grebe-y little heads jutting, trying to act dead hard when in fact, all they can do if the eggs are threatened is flutter up into the air and then do a “dead leaf” dive bomber drop on the would-be predator. I have seen one relentlessly dive-bomb and drive off a fat old raven that was stalking across the field towards its young, waddling like an alderman wearing gaiters, and the lapwing swooped again and again, until the raven eventually gave up. So maybe they are not so feeble after all.

When I got home that night, Debbie said “I didn’t know there was an England match on”

“There isn’t, as far as I know”
“Well, I have seen loads of cars with England flags on them today”
“It’s St George’s day, that’s why!”
“Oh”.

Later, I became embroiled in a couple of online message board arguments about whether it is possible to be patriotic about England without descending into the territory normally inhabited by the likes of the BNP and UKIP. I have long said that it is, and I resent the thought that anyone who says positive things about England is automatically labelled a bigot and a little Englander.

It is possible to love England – not necessarily a case of “my country, right or wrong”, though. And there are indeed hard times in Old England, like the song says, and probably harder to come. I wonder what St George would think of England today, I mused, as I looked back on my week of journeying through its green and pleasant land. There are certainly a lot more dragons to slay. Starting with the five in the Beveridge report, poverty, idleness, ignorance, want, and need.

I have a vision of all the regions of England uniting in a mass national demonstration of the need to end unemployment and to give our politicians a wake-up call, to give this great country back the jobs it needs. Cornishmen and sturdy men of Devon, marching up from the West Country, singing “Trelawney” and carrying the flag of Kernow, picking up support from Wiltshire, Dorset and Somerset as they go. Skilled tradesmen in Birmingham, Staffordshire, Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire, whose hand-eye coordination is genetically inherited from the time when the Midlands was the workshop of the world. Dour Yorkists and Lancastrians, from the former areas of coal, steel, wool, and cotton, marching together side by side. Cumbrian farmers with their lean, sparing frames and their thousand-yard stares. Geordies and Mackems, who for so long have glowered at each other from opposite banks of the Tyne, treading resolutely in step down the A19, united in their steely purpose. And all converging on parliament square. I’d like to see them try and stop that demonstration.

It’s sad that we have to go back to the idea of Jarrow Marches, but if whoever wins the election is determined to make poor people pay for the mistakes of rich people, which is very much what it looks like will happen, whoever gets in, then someone needs to show them that there is another way.

As I said in another blog:

Feed the hungry. House the homeless. Treat the sick. Teach the Children. Cherish the animals. End the Wars. Punish the Guilty. Fulfil the spirit.

It is not rocket science. All that is lacking is the political will, and every valley shall be exalted and every mountain and hill made low. The crooked straight and the rough places plain: the crooked straight, and the rough places plain.

Or, to put it more succinctly:

Cry God for Harry, England and St George!

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.

Epiblog for 20 February 2010

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. Winter stubbornly refuses to release its grip on field and fold. If it’s not frost, it’s snow. Chugging up the winding road out of Jackson Bridge, up onto the roof of the world, or so it seemed, with high pennines all around me, on Wednesday morning, there was snow everywhere, all over the fields, and, more startlingly, all over the road, which had not been gritted. So it was a case of playing “grandmother’s footsteps” and following very carefully in the guy in front’s wheeltracks. Steady as she goes, we’re not out of the woods yet. I don’t think we’re in Kansas any more, Toto.

Tuesday had been a subdued day, thinking about Greenjewel’s funeral taking place in Dublin. I have been trying to comfort someone else I know who has suffered a recent family bereavement, and the issue has once again been thrown into sharp relief by the death of Greenjewel. My observation that perhaps it was all part of some plan, some pattern that we are not privy to, was of little help, only provoking the observation that God must be cruel, if his plans involved premature and pointless death.

Thinking about it, I concluded that maybe part of the answer is that God’s ideas of what is cruel and what isn’t aren’t the same as ours. Plus of course, if there really are such things as multiple universes, other dimensions where in some way the person that was Greenjewel carries on, then maybe it’s all the same to an impersonal God – he, she, or it doesn’t really care what dimension you are currently in, it’s only us that feels the loss.

I was struck by a sense of the power of such an impersonal God, huge, universal and restless like the sea, and I found myself recalling Donne’s Holy Sonnet

“Batter my Heart, Three Person’d God”

With an image of the sea battering the land, huge waves crashing, with all the impersonal force God can muster, and woe betide anything that gets in the way. Scary, but also a source of potential comfort, if you know that the force in question is on “your” side, like the slaves used to sing to comfort each other in “Mary Don’t You Weep”

“Pharoah’s armies got drownded”

So, that was Tuesday, And then came Wednesday, and the snow.

Well, I made it to the office, obviously, and back again, and several more days too, or I wouldn’t be sitting here writing this on a bright, almost Alpine, Saturday morning with the sun glistening on the ice in the bird-bath. Yes, the sun is shining, but we’re not out of the woods yet.

Nor is the economy. Wednesday was a day of contrasts. Barclays have made record profits. Thanks largely to the fact that the entire banking system was propped up by the likes of you and me, when it looked likely to fall off Canary Wharf and into the River Thames in October 2008. True, Barclays actually refused Government help directly, largely because if they had taken it, it would have come with strings attached, or so they thought at the time. The ”strings” have been shown since, by the actions of other banks, to have had all the actual restrictive force of fine black cotton.

But, directly helped or not, Barclays has still benefited from the fact that the banking sector was propped up by taxpayers, however indirectly. As a former Barclays customer who still has an outstanding grievance against them, I was not best pleased by the news. At least Dick Turpin wore a mask. My mood was deepened by reading a post on one of the online forums I frequent, concerning animal welfare, from someone who fosters stray cats, who had been at the cat sanctuary and had seen the heartbreaking spectacle of a family having to come in and surrender their pet cat for adoption, because they were about to be made homeless as a result of the credit crunch.

This cannot be right. This cannot be allowed to happen, and to those who say it’s just the system, well the system is wrong, and it needs changing. Where is the compassion, where is the humanity? If all we are is ticks in a millionaire’s ledger, then we might as well give up now and turn our faces to the wall.

We look in vain though, for any spiritual leadership, any sign from the heads of the various denominations that might tell us there is more to life than getting a new sofa from DFS. The church is too busy riving itself to pieces over whether there can be women bishops or gay clergy. As if there were not a hundred thousand more important things it could be concerning itself with.

One group of people who won’t be getting new sofas from DFS, or anywhere else for that matter, is the 1700 workers laid off from the Corus Steel Plant at Redcar, which has been mothballed this week because of lack of orders. This is going to cost the taxpayer gazillions of pounds in benefit, and the whole place will become an economic wasteland for three generations, if what happened to the coalfields after MacGregor is anything to go by. It would probably be cheaper for the government to pay the workers to keep the steelworks open. Apart from anything else, we need a source of our own steel, and we need, as a nation, to feel that the words “Made in England” can still be stamped into some metal object, somewhere.

We need something to raise us up. We need some comfort, some direction. We need to see some justice. We need to see Pharoah’s army get drownded. We need to rediscover what is right, and what is wrong. What matters. We need to see the poor and needy comforted, and if this means that those who can afford it have to give a little bit more, so be it. We need some spiritual leadership. We need to find that family, and give them their house and their cat back. We need to house the rest of them, and quickly. Time is short, the nights are cold. We need something to raise us up, and it needs to be Made in England, made to last, and made soon.