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.