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!