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.

Epiblog for 13 February 2010

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley, and rather a sad one.

The weather remains cold and dull, and once again we found ourselves contributing to the profits of the coal yard by having to place an order for a further 20 bags of coal. Surely that will see us through to Spring? I have been waiting for the signs of spring, which for me are the snowdrops and crocuses, but they are singularly absent from our garden at the moment. The only sign of hope on the Spring front is that I've noticed now, when I leave the warehouse at about 6pm on an evening, there is a faint glimmering of the remains of the sunset along the western horizon.

Tiggy and Kitty don't like the cold any more than I do. As I type this, Tig is decorating the rug in front of the stove, her legs stretched out and twitching from time to time in dreams of doggy bliss, while Kitty is actually wedged behind me, between me and the back of the chair, manically purring for all she is worth, as if that will in some way generate more heat from some sort of internal furry dynamo.

At least the snow has gone. For now at any rate - I doubt we have seen the last of it, but at least when it snows at the back end of February or early in March, it never sticks for long. The garden, though, looks as if it has been under the sea for a long time, everything looks flattened, dead and brown, but I know that in eight weeks or so it will already be rampaging in all its outrageous green glory; we really must get someone to cut it back for us this year, before we lose control of it totally. What we need is a landscape gardener.

And a competent mechanic. On Monday, the suspension of the car started making an ominous twanging noise, which did not bode well, but I had no option other than to drive it 29 miles to the warehouse and 29 miles back again. By Tuesday, I was sort of hoping it would have magically fixed itself somehow overnight, but sadly the mechanic fairy must have had this week off, and it therefore needed expert attention, so I drove it up to the garage, where Father Jack (the owner of the garage, so called because of his uncanny resemblance to the Father Ted character) pronounced that the coil spring had snapped and wound itself round the rest of the suspension.

"It's like spaghetti junction up there", was his laconic comment.

Still, most problems go away if you throw enough money at them, and in this case "enough money" was £528. Plus some coppers. Ouch, ouch, and triple ouch. At least I was able to pick Debbie up from the station on Wednesday night, on her return from that well known branch-of-Homebase-lookalike, the University of Bolton. She's now signed up for an MA, which means that she will eventually be more qualified than me. I may have to sign up for a doctorate, just to remind her that her proper place in life is cooking the tea!

It's not been a good week for cars. On Thursday, Debbie's Mum was just pulling away from the kerb outside her house when a woman in a sports car appeared round the bend at 50mph and pranged her front wing. Thankfully, she was unhurt, but the car may be a write-off.

All of that paled into relative insignifcance though, because Thursday also saw the sad death, at the early age of 48, in Dublin, of Greenjewel, one of my Facebook friends, and a fellow poster on the Archers' Message Board. It is a strange thing to feel upset and bereft about someone I only ever "knew" online, and never met in real life, but we used to swop messages from time to time (one particular sequence that sticks in mind is about the people we shared our birthday with - Andre Previn, Ian Paisley and Paul Daniels, as we were both born on 6 April). I knew about her work in the field of cat rescue as well, as she was one of these selfless and saintly individuals who dedicate time and effort to trying to rescue and re-home unwanted and feral cats. She was also active in the fields of music, and landscape garening, which she did to an accomplished and professional level, apparently. She died as she was on the verge of moving to her dream home, in the rural west of Ireland. It was a particularly cruel thing to happen to someone who seemed to be on the verge of new, exciting vistas in her life.

The tribute threads to her on The Archers alone run to hundreds of postings already, as I write this, there are also hundreds more on Twitter, where she was a regular correspondent with, it seems, most of the online community in Ireland. All of them say the same thing, all across the face of the internet, that her postings and messages were always warm, witty, funny and caring, and that she will be missed by many, many, people whose lives she touched in some way, and the world is the worse for her passing.

Obviously, there will be those who actually met her, knew her in real life, her real life friends and family, who will miss Greenjewel the person, as opposed to Greenjewel the online entity. I can't begin to imagine what they must be going through, because Friday was black enough for me as it was, and I had never spoken to her, other than via a keyboard.

I was trying to explain what I felt about it to a fellow Archers poster, and all I could come up with was to quote the lines from Rosemary's Sister, by Huw Williams:

And you fly high, your dreams are all in vain
One moment we are laughing, and the next we cry with pain

Maybe life is just random, meaningless, pointless, and shit happens. Maybe there is a pattern which we cannot see or discern in our present state, when we see "through a glass, darkly". Sometimes I think one thing, sometimes another. We will never know, one way or another, at least not in this life, which is where faith comes into it I guess. You can rage against the randomness, but at the end of the raging, you are still stuck in the human condition, what Yeats called "the foul rag and bone shop of the heart". Or you can close ranks and carry on, and accept that there is a greater plan of which you know nothing, but that Greenjewel's death was at the right time for that plan, however wrong, unreasonable and unjust it seems to us.

The only good that can come out of it, that I can see, is that people are already making donations to her cat charities in her memory. Greenjewel has now gone before. But that doesn't mean that she has ceased to be. Every time some wet, cold, bedgraggled, abandoned kitten is rescued from a building site, given a warm home and a full cat dish brimming with Felix and with Brekkies, Greenjewel will be there. Every time a feral cat is trapped, neutered, and returned to the wild, Greenjewel will be there. Every time some poor cat that has been mistreated and potentially damaged is redeemed by the actions of some group of committed individuals, Greenjewel will be there.

In Spring, it is usually easier to believe the latter than the former, to believe that life does have some meaning, when you see the annual miracle of growth and regeneration take place, but then sometimes you stand in the conservatory and look out over the garden, in its brown and bedraggled state, and you think, "what we need right now, is a landscape gardener".

Hello

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley.

More on that story, later.