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.