Epiblog for Pentecost

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. The weathermen have decided that (largely because of the dry spring) some parts of the country are now officially suffering from a drought. A fact I reflected on several times during the week, in an increasingly mordant frame of mind, as I listened to the rain drumming ceaselessly on the conservatory roof. We now seem to be locked permanently into a pattern of cold, nasty winters followed by cool rainy summers. Anyone who still doubts that something strange is happening to the weather, call it climate change, call it what you will, is either a wilful denier or bind, deaf, and mad.

Tig has been feeling the cold to such an extent that, twice this week, she lay so close to the halogen heater that her fur started to singe. This was only evident, the first time she did it, when Debbie suddenly bellowed “NO!” and sprang up from the sofa to drag Tiggy away from the source of the heat. She had actually seen the smoke start to rise from Tig’s hind-quarters, and acted accordingly. The house was filled with the pong of burnt dog-fur for hours afterwards.

To try and mitigate any discomfort that Tig must have been feeling, I’ve put two dog-rugs (each sort of a fleecy square, imprinted with a pattern of paw-prints) one on top of the other, on the conservatory floor, and she has taken to lying on these, but with her back end actually under the conservatory armchair. Three times now, in total, she has actually got herself stuck under there, and I have had to bool over in my wheelchair, grab her by the collar or the scruff of her neck, and pull, to help her extract herself and stand up.

Kitty is bemused and bored by all this. At least when she can be bothered. Her usual reaction to the unseasonal cold has been to curl up in a tight ball on the crocheted cat blanket that her Auntie Maisie made her, and go to sleep. Meanwhile, Spidey’s nonchalant usage of our house as a cat pied-a-terre and bed and breakfast continues. The other morning, I was sitting on the edge of my bed getting dressed when he came strolling through, completely unconcerned, and exited via Kitty’s cat flap. I actually called his name, and not unkindly, but he completely ignored me, in the way that only cats can.

Debbie and her mother have been preoccupied with the preparations for my brother-in-law’s looming wedding, in July. Debbie, who normally buys her clothes from Ebay or Oxfam, was dragged out round the shops by her Mum to look for wedding clothes (fruitlessly, as it turned out). When they returned, weary and footsore, four hours later, my innocent enquiry as to whether she had opted to go for the traditional hat or the more daring fascinator, was met with the traditional two-fingered response. I was telling Debbie’s mother about the ferret kits advertised on Freecycle, and she, too, assumed that the “kit” element was some sort of self-assembly option, oblivious to the fact that if Ikea did make flat-pack ferrets, the instructions would be incomprehensible, and you would end up with a spare leg left over at the end, that didn’t seem to fit anywhere. The ferrets, bless them, make a much better job of it, aided by the unknowable marvel of the creation of new life, of course.

My own week has been, at best, mixed. I have spent much of it on the phone, trying to drum up business for books. If the books are to be my sole source of income, I need to do some serious work. The target is a two-step one; firstly to build it up to the point where it can not only repay Barclays but also give me the permitted amount that I am allowed to earn each week, to supplement my patchy and irregular benefits. Then to build it up to the stage where it replaces the benefits, by paying a proper living wage, comparable to what I earned from my other directorship before it was made redundant. I say “it”, but, of course, we all know they really mean “me”. The latter will be a tough call, because until July 2012, Barclays still have first call on any spare cash, to repay the last of the overdraft facility they capriciously took away from us in July 2005.

It still mattered, but it didn’t matter as much, while I was previously earning money from my other job, because at a pinch, if push came to shove, and the orders for the books didn’t quite cover it, out of that money we could just have found enough for Barclays each month. Now that money has vanished and dried up, it’s left a big gaping hole in the finances through which a cold wind howls daily, and which I spend almost every waking hour trying to plug, by my renewed efforts to sell more books.

Hence my rising and continued anger when Kirklees decided this week finally, that, because of my assets (which are more like millstones than assets, in any meaningful sense of the word) I didn’t actually qualify for a grant for the ramp, and therefore, after six months of farting about, they wouldn’t be building it.

The annals of humankind are littered with many examples of crass stupidity. Virgin Media’s customer services department, for instance, daily elevate the concept of “stupid” to the level of an art form. The generals at Balaclava, with their vague and woolly orders (and their vague and woolly cardigans with Raglan sleeves) were stupid in ordering the Light Brigade to charge the Russian guns. But this week, their calculation of my “assets” means, in effect, Kirklees has wasted six months of my life and kept me confined under house-arrest by false pretences. It is possibly the single most stupid act I have witnessed this year.

They have miscalculated the hours Debbie works, totally missing the point I made to them that her earnings are in term time only. They have based to value of our property on a totally spurious guesstimate, and ignored the fact that, even if we were able to release any equity in it, this would go straight to Barclays, because of the personal guarantee they made me sign in 2005. I have written them a three-page stinker, pointing out these and other errors. We will have to see what comes of it. The other stupidity, of course, is that if the application for the ramp had been submitted and taken in conjunction with all the other works that need doing to the house in order to make it “disabled-friendly”, then we would more than qualify; I only opted to progress the ramp application first, because I wanted it to be dealt with quickly, so I didn’t miss yet another summer. [Although I am not missing that much at the moment, and was tempted to put the word “summer” in quotation marks.] And so that Debbie no longer has to struggle and hurt her back, heaving me like a sack of spuds, teetering along the temporary ramps. Idiots.

Also this week, I was formally handed over to the Community Physio Team, and it became clear, from the tenor of the meeting, that they have now officially given up any hope of me standing up again, and my life from now on is in a wheelchair. They’ll come back and monitor me from time to time. When I think about this for long enough, the sense of being trapped is so strong, I have to wrench myself away and do something – anything – to take my mind off it. So near, but yet so far. I’d like to say I still haven’t given up, I’d like to invoke Douglas Bader and St Padre Pio and all the rest of them, but I am not sure I have the strength. And I don’t particularly like the person it has turned me into, an old, nasty man with an angry temper, who spends too much of his time clinging on to old dreams.

The only small good thing which has happened this week is that I have discovered a web site that sells calligraphy supplies. Including facsimiles of Victorian Steel nibs as originally manufactured by Joseph Gillott. In fact, I am sitting writing this in the conservatory, watching the rain fall on the garden (again) and using a “dipper” with a faux-Gillott nib. I like writing with a dipper, it makes me feel as if I am Dickens or Thackeray or someone with actual talent. There used to be a very funny Victorian joke about Joseph Gillott, that went:

“Why is Mr Gillott a wicked man?”
“Because he makes people steel pens, and tells them they do write!”

I guess you had to be there.

This has also been the week when Church and State collided in rather spectacular fashion. Rowan Williams’s tour d’horizon of the current political landscape was widely reported as the Archbishop attacking the Government, although he was equally questioning about Labour’s efforts to provide a credible alternative. Needless to say, my Mother-in-Law and I profoundly disagreed on the effect of the Government’s policies and the legitimacy of their mandate, but then she thinks it’s possible to glue together bits of a ferret. Notwithstanding, Rowan Williams has a perfect right to speak out, as a moral leader, about the fear and paranoia engendered by the Government’s slash-and-burn, divide-and-rule tactics.

And it does show up the current Labour opposition in a very poor light, when the man who is currently asking the most cogent and searching questions about Government policy and its effect on the poor, the needy and the disabled, is the Archbishop of Canterbury. If he keeps this up, I might have to start going to church again. More power to his crozier.

So, this week, the contemplative life has been headline news, as the Government, stung by legitimate criticism, went into full attack-dog rebuttal mode. But what should I have been reading, instead of cheering on Archbishop Rowan? What should I have been bending my attention towards, this rainy Sunday, which once more finds me woefully unprepared?

Well, it is Whitsun today, Whit Monday tomorrow, by rights, but we already did Whitsun. Nevertheless, the readings today are all on the theme of people being filled with the Holy Spirit in one way or another.

Acts 2.1 – 21, is the actual description of the disruption of the meeting of the disciples by the experience of something totally outside of their experience.

And when the day of Pentecost was fully come, they were all with one accord in one place. And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting. And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.

And there were dwelling at Jerusalem Jews, devout men, out of every nation under heaven. Now when this was noised abroad, the multitude came together, and were confounded, because that every man heard them speak in his own language. And they were all amazed and marvelled, saying one to another, Behold, are not all these which speak Galilaeans? And how hear we every man in our own tongue, wherein we were born?

Parthians, and Medes, and Elamites, and the dwellers in Mesopotamia, and in Judaea, and Cappadocia, in Pontus, and Asia, Phrygia, and Pamphylia, in Egypt, and in the parts of Libya about Cyrene, and strangers of Rome, Jews and proselytes, Cretes and Arabians, we do hear them speak in our tongues the wonderful works of God. And they were all amazed, and were in doubt, saying one to another, What meaneth this? Others mocking said, These men are full of new wine.

But Peter, standing up with the eleven, lifted up his voice, and said unto them, Ye men of Judaea, and all ye that dwell at Jerusalem, be this known unto you, and hearken to my words: For these are not drunken, as ye suppose, seeing it is but the third hour of the day. But this is that which was spoken by the prophet Joel; And it shall come to pass in the last days, saith God, I will pour out of my Spirit upon all flesh: and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams:

And on my servants and on my handmaidens I will pour out in those days of my Spirit; and they shall prophesy: And I will shew wonders in heaven above, and signs in the earth beneath; blood, and fire, and vapour of smoke: The sun shall be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood, before the great and notable day of the Lord come: And it shall come to pass, that whosoever shall call on the name of the Lord shall be saved.

I’ve quoted that in extenso because it’s such a wonderfully vivid passage. First the sound of the mighty rushing wind, and the flames – as Eliot describes it, in another context

“The dove descending breaks the air
With flame of incandescent terror”

And “incandescent terror” is a great way of summing up what they must have felt. Assuming you believe of course, that this actually happened, but I come back to the idea that, as with Easter, that something must have happened, to make it worthwhile writing it down, and it lasting for 2000 years. It wouldn’t be the King James Bible, of course, without the long list of people who could all hear the words of the Apostles in their own language. And the rather po-faced rebuttal by Peter of the accusation of drunkeness. I can think of many people who have been eight sheets in the wind at the third hour of the day, and occasionally, I have been one of them.

Young men shall see visions, and old men shall dream, eh? That was very much in my mind when I read the second recommended text, Psalm 104:24-34, which starts:

O LORD, how manifold are thy works! in wisdom hast thou made them all: the earth is full of thy riches. So is this great and wide sea, wherein are things creeping innumerable, both small and great beasts. There go the ships: there is that leviathan, whom thou hast made to play therein. These wait all upon thee; that thou mayest give them their meat in due season.

For some reason, the line about “there go the ships” had me seeing visions like a young man, and dreaming like an old one, thinking of the times when I used to sit on the end of the slipway at Brough Haven and watch the coasters, the colliers and the barges, plying their way up and down the Humber. At one end lay Hull, Saltend, Spurn and the open sea. At the other end, Goole, where the river was still wide, muddy and brown, wide enough and deep enough for a substantial ship to tie up at some remote jetty and for the kids to come down on their bikes and look at it and hear the crew speaking to each other in Russian, German or Norwegian as they flung heavy ropes to each other, and the tang of tar and wet timber was sharp in your nostrils. The sun would glint on the water as if the Humber was the Adriatic or the Hellespont; the reeds and bulrushes; the cries of the seabirds, the rough, tussocky grass, I could have reached down and touched it.

For a long while I was back there, still aged ten, eleven or twelve, maybe with my Dad beside me, as we would sit for hours, occasionally passing the field-glasses back and forth as something worthy of a frame of 35mm slide film progressed across our view in a stately manner at under ten knots. When I finally jerked myself out of my reverie, it was to notice some more wonderful King James-isms further down the psalm:

The glory of the LORD shall endure for ever: the LORD shall rejoice in his works. He looketh on the earth, and it trembleth: he toucheth the hills, and they smoke.

Holy smoke, indeed. 1 Corinthians 12:3-13 seems to be about the universality of the Holy Spirit

For by one Spirit are we all baptized into one body, whether we be Jews or Gentiles, whether we be bond or free; and have been all made to drink into one Spirit.

I’ll drink to that. Cheers! Pass the new wine.

The final two readings are John 20.19 – 23, where Jesus appears again to the Apostles and breathes the Holy Spirit on them (note how I refrained from jokes about mouthwash)

Then the same day at evening, being the first day of the week, when the doors were shut where the disciples were assembled for fear of the Jews, came Jesus and stood in the midst, and saith unto them, Peace be unto you. And when he had so said, he shewed unto them his hands and his side. Then were the disciples glad, when they saw the LORD. Then said Jesus to them again, Peace be unto you: as my Father hath sent me, even so send I you. And when he had said this, he breathed on them, and saith unto them, Receive ye the Holy Ghost: Whose soever sins ye remit, they are remitted unto them; and whose soever sins ye retain, they are retained.

And John 7:37-39, which seems to be mainly about the effects of Furosemide.

In the last day, that great day of the feast, Jesus stood and cried, saying, If any man thirst, let him come unto me, and drink. He that believeth on me, as the scripture hath said, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water.

I’d like to say that reading these extracts from the Bible filled me with the Holy Spirit and made me speak in tongues, but I’m afraid it didn’t happen. After the week I’ve had, the flesh is weak, and the spirit is unwilling. That doesn’t mean I don’t believe in the idea of the Holy Spirit. I wish I could feel it. I yearn to be infused with something that would give me the strength to stand up, so I could tell Kirklees to sod off, get a job and earn some money. The next time I see anyone from the Council, you can bet I will certainly practice my speaking in tongues on them.

But something moved those men, in an upstairs room in Galilee. Something happened, something weird. And something moves us from time to time, usually at the moments when we least expect it. Which would make a dull Sunday teatime, when I am dreaming of the person I once was, and seeing him in my mind's eye, sitting in the sun, young, free, innocent, and mobile, dreaming and watching the coasters sailing off into the sunset, the ideal time for it to take me. There go the ships. So, big G, over to you.