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.