Epiblog for the First Sunday After Trinity

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. The promised “heatwave” kept us waiting, but I have to say, out of grudging respect to the weatherman, it has arrived at last, at least if the rest of Sunday remains as fine as it promises to be, as I sit here, with the conservatory door open to the garden, writing in my notebook with my Gillott “dipper”, and looking out onto what seems to be a canopy of a million sun-dappled green leaves, as “our” trees merge with the ones on the valley slope, falling away, down towards the river and Park Valley Mills. As Andrew Marvell put it, far better than I ever could:

“Annihilating all that’s made
To a green thought, in a green shade”.

If this weather carries on for more than a day or two, I confidently predict the headlines will be “Phew what a scorcher!” and “Met Men Say There’s More To Come!” accompanied by the obligatory pictures of benighted fools frying eggs on the pavement in Trafalgar Square.

Up til today, though, it has still been dull, cold and rainy, a state of affairs which has frequently led to Kitty invading my bed at night, like a small, furry, heat-seeking missile. The Poles Apart must have taken to turfing Spidey out at night again, as well, as I have encountered him visiting us on two separate occasions this week, once when he had just come in through the cat-flap and he gave me a cursory glance when I said his name, prior to ignoring me and continuing upstairs to his little nest amongst the pile of my shirts in the spare room; and once when I had just transferred onto my wheelchair in the morning, and was, therefore, temporarily blocking his path to freedom, forcing him to wind sinuously between my wheels and legs, so close that, as on previous occasions, I could almost have reached down and stroked him.

I said to Debbie that maybe we should put a card through their door or something, telling them not to worry, and that he’s taken to sleeping in our house at night, and she replied that if they were that worried, they wouldn’t let him stay out in the first place, or at least they’d be out there looking for him.

Tig has had an uneventful week. Her lead has gone missing, it will no doubt turn up amongst the maelstrom of dogs and Granny, next time Freddie and Zak come to visit. They all tend to be interchangeable anyway, the dogs as well as the leads. Other than that, she has been snoozing on the new arthritis-friendly, fleecy dog bed (Tig, not Granny). It really does seem to give some comfort to her creaky old bones, and she sprawls on it with such a blissful expression sometimes that I have actually considered ordering the largest size (St Bernard/Great Dane) and putting it on my bed, for myself.

Looking back over the week, it seems to have been a catalogue of narrowly-avoided disasters and hasty repairs. Chief amongst these was my electric bed breaking down on Wednesday night. It had first showed signs of not being very well on Tuesday, when I was using the handset and trying to lower it, so that I could then slide onto it, using my banana board, employing the effect of gravity. The “foot” end of the bed resolutely refused to obey the handset, so the whole thing ended up sloping at 45 degrees. Clearly unacceptable. Even if I could have got onto it at that angle, I wouldn’t have been able to sleep on such a tilt, even “head-to-foot”. I shouted to Debbie and she came in and surveyed the problem. I admitted to her that I was at a loss what to do. She wasn’t. She drew herself back and then launched a flying, Jackie Chan-style kung-fu kick at the foot of the bedstead. I pressed the relevant button on the remote, and hey presto! The foot end responded and went down to its correct height. Result, I thought to myself, while making a mental note never to get in the way of one of those kicks, when Debbie is having a bad day.

However, the respite proved only temporary, and on Wednesday night it malfunctioned in exactly the same way, and this time, nothing would budge it. No kung-fu, not even unplugging it at the wall then plugging it in again, to re-set it. Nothing. I am a firm believer in the dictum that you only need two tools in life, Duct Tape and WD-40 “Rocket” Oil. If it moves, and it shouldn’t, you use the Duct Tape. If it doesn’t move, and it should, spray it with Rocket. Even this failed to shift it, though, so at 1.05AM I admitted defeat, gave up, and took the decision to sleep in my wheelchair. I ended up having about four hours of the worst sleep I have had since being in hospital.

Previously during the week (Sunday night, to be precise) Debbie had been fretting about getting her stuff prepared in time for her class on Monday, where she was due to have an “observation” by more senior staff, and it had got so late that she had ended up kipping downstairs on the sofa, as it wasn’t worth going to bed. I had asked her at the time how she had fared, and she had said it had been fine, apart from the birds, who she described as “bloody inconsiderate”, pattering about on the conservatory roof and cawing at each other very loudly at 3.30AM. They proved equally “inconsiderate” to me at dawn on Thursday, and so it transpired that I was awake and about early, and on the phone to my OT at 8AM.

Once more, however, the NHS proved itself to be the very model of efficiency and organisation, and by 10.30 there was an engineer on site and looking at it, and by 11AM it was fixed, and he was on his way to the next hapless soul in possession of an emergency. I can’t fault that. It turned out, in the end, to have been a problem with the handset, in fact, which is a sealed unit anyway, and not repairable, so no amount of Duct Tape or WD-40 would have helped. It still doesn’t explain the kung-fu kick, though.

The other major repair and renewal effected by Debbie this week was to the pouffe which she had bought, a rather fetching black leatherette plastic style object, on which she is wont to rest her feet while using her laptop. One of the legs had become loose, which meant it was leaning at a bit of a drunken angle, so she tried to straighten it by whacking it with a big hammer, but, owing to its overall gimcrack construction, this only made matters worse. So we now have a crazily-inclined black pouffe with one wonky leg, which ticks so many diversity and equality “boxes” I am surprised that Kirklees Council haven’t awarded us a grant for it on the spot.

The council has, though, sadly, been rather lacking in the grants department, and not at all munificent. They finally responded to the three-and-a-half page “stinker” I wrote them about the ramp, in the form of a phone call from yet another (different) surveyor, wanting this time to come around and survey all of the house to enumerate all of the “disabled-friendly” stuff that needs doing, including, once more, the ramp. I went through the story to date with him on the phone, because, as I was at pains to point out, I didn’t want to waste his time, and, more importantly, I didn’t want to waste my time. I asked him again how they had come to the conclusion that we were too rich to qualify for the ramp alone, and he said he didn’t know, but he did have a note of the figure that we would be expected to contribute to the overall cost of the works, so I asked him what it was, and he said £10,392.83.

What!?!? There was a moment’s stunned silence and then I said, when I had recovered my composure, that there were only two ways in which such a figure could be arrived at, either the “model” they used to calculate it didn’t take into account the many and varied debts I had enumerated in my letter, or there was an error somewhere in the calculations. Either way, it was clear there was no point in him coming round, I said, as even if I did by some miracle ever possess £10, 392.83, it would go straight to Barclays, as a significant step down the road to getting them off my back.

A couple of days later, I had another call, from a different bloke yet again. There may have been an error in the calculations, and they are coming round on Monday for a meeting to discuss it. I said fine, I am in all day and every day (with heavy emphasis) so we left it at that. Watch this space, as they say. In any event, Peter the handyman will be back off his hols in a week’s time, so we will at least be able to progress plan B.

In fact, despite my sarcasm on the phone, I have actually managed to escape the house once this week, for the first time since Bank Holiday Monday. By dint of Debbie dragging me out and down the temporary metal ramps then shoving me up them again, into the back of the camper, she managed to convey me to the pub at Salterhebble, which sells, surprisingly, a quite passable glass of Jennings’ Cumberland Ale. The occasion was a convivial meeting of the Kamikaze Ground Staff Reunion Club, with my comrades from Ward 7 at Calderale Royal, Bernard and Peter, and Peter’s partner Margaret. We naturally fell to reminiscing about what had happened to all the nurses and the other patients who had been in at the same time as we had.

Bernard, a level-headed and practical man, surprised me with quite a poetic analogy. He said he’d always pictured us, in our little enclave, as the crew of a Lancaster Bomber, flying on through the cold winter nights, looking always towards the end of our “tour” and our release. He himself was the flight engineer, I was apparently the navigator, because of my possession of the laptop, and Peter, who was nearest the door, was the tail-gunner. It was a natty, touching little simile, and one which neatly captured the shared plight and comradeship of our stay as guests of the NHS.

I was interrupted in my thoughts by a text from my sister, telling me that BB King was on TV at the moment, live from Glastonbury, on BBC 4. I texted her back to say that unfortunately, BB King had unerringly chosen for his performance a night when I was in the pub, and in any case, I could only receive BBC 4 when I was wearing Princess Beatrice’s fascinator. She texted me back to say that she was surprised to hear that I wasn’t wearing a fascinator, out to the pub.

Speaking of texts, I had intended to get ahead of the game by looking up today’s texts on Saturday, but in fact another convivial evening (two in a row!) at home ensued, and this prevented me from doing my Bible study. I cooked a meal, which consisted of Penne Pasta, over which we had a tomato based sauce containing chunks of chopped up vegan sausage and onions clarified in olive oil, to which I had added basil, rosemary, paprika and garlic. I also knocked up some garlic bread to go with it. While it was cooking, I divided off some of the pasta and mixed it up with Tig’s mixer in her bowl, along with some shredded strips of pork luncheon meat (bought at the cheap shop as dog treats, and needing using up) and four or five chopped hot dog sausages out of a tin I found in the fridge.

The cat had already been fed, and had a saucer of longlife UHT milk, which she stuck her face into and hoovered up, leaving a milky halo round her whiskers, the dog wolfed her tea down, and Deb and I shared the pasta and the garlic bread, a bottle of cheap vino collapso was opened, and a good time was had by all.

It sort of felt like a “count your blessings” evening, with Thomas Tallis’s Spem in Alium on the CD player, Tig snoring on her fleecy bed, and Kitty curled up and snoozing on her crocheted cat-shawl. So I did. I am still here, I thought.

Instead of looking up the Lectionary for the First Sunday After Trinity, and the start of that long haul for the Church through "common time" towards autumn, as it ploughs on for Christmas, I reflected instead on the fact that Midsummer has come and gone, and that in two or three weeks it will be a year since all this shit first hit me and knocked my old life sideways into a cocked hat. It seemed a good time to pause and reflect (and already, sad to admit, I have started to lay out these blogs, this period of my life, into another bloody book) – to reflect on how I got here, and where I go next.

Do I still believe in Big G, although all of my three seasons of desperate prayer to him/her/it, and to St Padre Pio, St Jude, and anyone else who would listen out for the rattle of my Rosary, has all proven fruitless, and I will, probably, never walk again?

Yes, I suppose I still do, although I must confess I am as much in the dark now as I ever was about his intentions for me, and my part in the greater scheme of things. As I sat there on Saturday evening, listening to Pace Mihi Domine, by the Hilliard Ensemble with Jan Garbarek, music so intensely, sublimely, plangently beautiful that I want it at my funeral, I could only fall back on those lines from the Desiderata:

“And whether or not it is clear to you
No doubt the universe is unfolding as it should”

Well, that’s as maybe. Maisie, reading last week’s Epiblog, commented that I am “obviously turning into a trendy vicar and need to take a B. D.” Discovering that this was a reference to a Bachelor of Divinity and not, as I had assumed, some sort of proprietary tonic powder, I actually looked it up, online, to find out the cost by distance learning, and the answer was “too much to even contemplate”. In any case, who would listen to me, and how much would it cost to build a ramp up to a pulpit! Still, Big G sometimes chooses strange messengers (that’s “strange” in the sense of “unexpected”, Maisie, if you are reading this week’s; I didn’t mean to imply you were strange in any other ways!)

But a trendy vicar wouldn’t neglect his Bible study, would he, bibbling wine instead, committing the sin of accidie and having to fill in with a recipe instead? Surely that sort of thing went out with the Dissolution of the Monasteries, or at least the 18th Century “Squarsons”?

Well, whatever lies ahead for me, and it is very unclear at the moment, it is clear at least that my old life is gone for good. We’re not in Kansas any more, Toto. Though I have managed, so far, to hold on to the precious things and the precious people, both furry and non-furry. (If you are reading this, and you don’t know which category you fall into, a good acid test is whether or not you regularly bury your poo in the garden and whether you can lick your own bottom.)

So, I should be thankful for small mercies, grateful for my lot. It could be worse. I might be a one-legged Cambodian orphan. Close ranks, keep calm, and carry on. Or, as Padre Pio apparently was fond of saying, pray and don’t worry.