It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. Once more the weather has been alternating. Raining when it’s warmer, frosty when it’s colder, though the frost is more photogenic. Unpleasant either way. The house is cold again, despite the stove roaring away, each week consuming the average output of the South Wales coalfield at its height, or (more likely today) the South American coalfield. Or so it seems.
Every time I look at the stove, I get this mental vision of happy, rubicund Welsh miners, flashlights on their helmets, marching in step on the way to the pit, led by the colliery band, pickaxes over their shoulders like the Seven Dwarves, although in my reverie, they are singing “Cwm Rhondda” and not “Hi Ho”.
In reality, of course, since the days of Thatcher, Major, and Heseltine and their demolition of our own home-grown capacity for energy production, the coal these days probably does come from Australia or Brazil or somewhere, and is probably mined by exploited “minors” rather than miners. It wouldn’t surprise me if they flew it into Heathrow in a jumbo jet. Never mind, we didn’t really want that tedious layer of ozone filtering out all that lovely sunshine, did we?
But I digress. The weather, yes. Nondescript to ghastly, as befits winter’s last desperate few flings of the dice. The day I become a rich man of independent means, I will immediately set in train arrangements to live somewhere hot and sunny where they still allow you to drink, and have a thriving local viticulture, from 1st November to 1 March every winter, and this diary will then come to you from some bodega or cantina, while the dun, fallow brown fields of the Holme Valley are covered with a blanket of snow, ticked around the edges by the dark stitching of dry stone walls.
Cato the Elder was apparently one of the first people to write about viticulture as a science, though I am told his text starts off well and then deteriorates in the later chapters into the latin equivalent of “You’re my besht matesh”, or, as he might have said, “vos es meus optimus amicitia” – I know it started with Hic and ended with [sic] anyway. The style of writers being affected by alcohol is more common than you think. I once got drunk on Grappa, the favourite tipple of Ernest Hemingway, and ever since then, I have understood why he wrote in very short sentences.
For now, though, we’re stuck here. No wine, no sunshine. The animals, God bless them, hate it as much as I do. Kitty stubbornly refuses to go out in the cold and sometimes has to be physically picked up and deposited outside the conservatory door; otherwise she will just stand in the doorway, sniffing the air and creasing up her eyes at the rawness of the wind and the cold, before making a dash back to her cat-bed in the hearth. I don’t blame her: the draughts in our house are like daggers, they have sharp points, and you can almost see them glinting out of the corner of your eye.
Tiggy has had an adventurous week, too, and has been a brave doggie, having been to the vets to have a (thankfully, non-threatening) growth removed from the side of her mouth, under a general anaesthetic, no mean feat at the human equivalent age of 98. She came back on Wednesday evening, and promptly turned her nose up at the special treat I had organised for her (a can of meatballs for her tea). Eventually, but only after having ensured that there was nothing better on offer, she deigned to eat it. She’s a contrary old dog, but I was glad to see her back, and so apparently unaffected by the experience.
Debbie has had an exhausting week. With her new teaching schedule, she has made what Granny Fenwick would have called a rod for her own back, now that she is teaching on a Thursday at crack of dawn in Dewsbury and then again on a Thursday evening in Halifax, it becomes a very long day. Last Thursday night, she got back, crashed out, and fell asleep on the sofa, so Kitty, sensing her opportunity, climbed on her comatose form, and promptly curled around and went to sleep as well, being at the same level as the front of the stove, and therefore toasting her whiskers.
It was a touching scene, and as I looked across, I must confess I was moved to observe what a unique miracle she is, from her wonky nose to her rasping tongue, her mad glaring eyes, her claws, her old, bony limbs with their threadbare fur, twitching while she is asleep, snoring, and dreaming of dismembering some hapless victim. Then there’s also the cat.
As with Tiggy, medical matters loomed large for me this week, because it was the week when I finally discovered the outcome of the tests which I had while still in hospital, to determine the long-term prognosis of my condition, whatever it finally turned out to be. Since that day in October when I first had the tests, my intrepid little capsule of blood has been on a pilgrimage worthy of the relics of any saint, first to Leeds and then to Newcastle, in search of an answer, and the results had finally come back to my Doctor at Huddersfield, like a homing pigeon that arrives back after being missing for several weeks and having been given up for lost. I didn’t have to go to the vets to find out what was wrong with me, I went to HRI, after my physio session (though I have considered asking the vets to sort me out on several previous occasions, when I couldn’t get a GP appointment!)
It turns out that, because of some dodgy genes (as opposed to dodgy jeans, £8.99 from Mr Buyrite) I am indeed suffering from fascioscapularhumeral muscular dystrophy, which is easy for you to say, as I said the consultant at the time. It didn’t really come as a shock, to be honest, because we’d already suspected as much, it was more like finally finding out the name of that irritating unwanted guest who you have noticed hanging around for a while now. My genes, if you imagine them as a train, are missing a few carriages off the end. I blame Richard Branson.
On the way back from HRI in the ambulance transport, the radio was playing “Spirit in the Sky” by Norman Greenbaum, which was possibly a bit off-message for West Yorkshire Metropolitan Ambulance Service. Although I wasn’t shocked by my diagnosis, or by Mr Greenbaum’s opinions on “when I die and they lay me to rest”, I did feel the need to mark the occasion in some way, so I got Debbie to unearth the dusty old unused china teapot, buffed it up, washed it out, and made myself a pot of Twining’s English Breakfast tea, even though it was 2.45pm. As the Americans say, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with English cuisine, provided you eat breakfast four times a day.
Meanwhile, irrespective of the long term prognosis, in the short to medium term, plans to get back to something like full-time work are proceeding, but often at the pace of a glacier rather than a river. At this rate, it is looking like February before I will be fit or able to do it, probably just in time for the next instalment of the big freeze. In fact at the moment, I feel a bit like one of those archaeological exhibits that they find entombed in a glacier in the alps, still with the remains of what they ate or drank 3,000 years ago [in my case, it would be English Breakfast Tea, obviously].
It’s been two weeks now since, under the influence of that week’s Collect, I said I was watching out for doves and listening for spooky voices. I have actually, officially, given up. I hereby give notice to the Almighty, in case he is listening, which I sometimes doubt. This week’s Collect, in my feeble attempt to follow the liturgical year, seems to be all about John the Baptist being arrested and Jesus wandering around the shores of Galilee telling people to rise up and follow him.
It actually brought to mind one of my favourite hymns, “Dear Lord and Father of Mankind”
In simple trust, like theirs who heard
Beside the Syrian sea
The gracious calling of the Lord,
Let us, like them, without a word
Rise up and follow Thee.
The hymn is apparently from a poem called "The Brewing of Soma" by the American Quaker poet, John Greenleaf Whittier, [that's him at the top] and the tune, which I always thought was based on a traditional English folk-song called “The Riverside” is, in fact, apparently, “Repton” by Parry, who also wrote, of course, the most popular setting of “Jerusalem”. Whittier was known for writing in favour of the abolition of slavery, and recruited Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to the cause. His home, in Amesbury, Massachussetts, is a national monument.
It seems very odd that such an “English” hymn could have such a transatlantic origin, although of course, New England originally came from old England, I guess.
“Simple trust” is probably what I need. The type of faith that could indeed persuade you, or someone like me, with the genes of fishermen in my body, however defective, to beach your boat for the last time, lay down your net and creel, and go and follow in the footsteps of this stranger with his weird ideas about loving each other and forgiving people and the meek inheriting the Earth, not to mention his curing the lepers and creating wine out of water. You can see why they did it.
Whittier’s poem contrasts the Vedic Priests becoming intoxicated by drinking Soma, their ritual drink, with the method for contact with the divine as practised by Quakers: sober lives dedicated to doing God's will, seeking silence and selflessness in order to hear the "still, small voice" described in I Kings 19:11-13 as the authentic voice of God, rather than earthquake, wind or fire.
If I don’t have simple trust, then I am stuck here, I guess, and the only progress that I have made this week, is that, unlike most people, I now know what I am dying of, although of course, it is a slow-burning disease and a cardiac arrest could just as easily see me face-down in the sprouts at Christmas dinner one year. “You never know the minute or the hour”, as Blind Willie McTell sings.
Simple trust is what could make me get up out of this wheelchair, but to do it would take a leap of faith comparable to that of a skydiver as he exits the hatch, that his parachute will open. Faith that, if I did decide never to go back to the office, but instead to try and make a career as a writer in the next fifteen years, before the FSHMD makes me too decrepit to do anything, or to try and get Rooftree instated as a charity, or both, I will have the simple trust that “the Lord will provide.”
So, we’ve had some of winter, and its stormy winds; we’ve had an earthquake (there was one in Glen Uig only this week) and I am sitting by the fire, typing this. Could it possibly be that, in this idea of “simple trust”, and all that it entails, I am hearing a still small voice?
Breathe through the heats of our desire
Thy coolness and Thy balm;
Let sense be dumb, let flesh retire;
Speak through the earthquake, wind, and fire,
O still, small voice of calm
If it really is, of course, then it’s the scariest thing to have happened this year. It has implications I can’t even begin to guess at yet. Like John Greenleaf Whittier, I am quaking in my boots. But I am listening.
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