It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. I’ve officially given up on summer this year. There’s been no answer to the council ramp letter – perhaps they all died when they read it, it was certainly intended to have that effect. We’re now in touch instead with the handyman guy who did the plumbing fix, who is coming back on 5th July to have a look at the scale of the operation. Plan B is clicking in to place, but is now, sadly, delayed by the fact that he has to go on holiday for two weeks first. Sadly for us, obviously, not for him.
Anyway, there may be a late flurry in the weather, who knows, this year; the sort of Autumn where the bees get fooled into thinking “warm days shall never cease” because “Summer has o’erbrimmed their clammy cells”, but I am not holding out any hopes. In fact, Maisie is already knitting Freddie a winter coat, which will be presented as part of Granny’s birthday celebrations on August 8th. Quite how come it works out that it’s Granny’s birthday, but Freddie who gets the present, is a mystery to me, but I guess it’s just another case of “sic biscuitus disintegrat”.
This coming week sees Midsummer day, of course, and back in January, when the days were struggling to get lighter, and I watched and charted Tiggy moving round the conservatory rug as the feeble patch of sunlight moved slightly each week, taking her with it, I speculated to myself where she might have reached by Midsummer day, but I had totally failed to factor in the effect of her new fleecy dog bed, specially designed to offer comfort to old, arthritic doggies, which has interrupted the normal motion of the heavens to such an extent that she now seeks it out in preference to any patch of sun, not that there have been many patches of sun to choose from, of late.
Kitty is a simpler, less complicated being in many ways; the changing seasons, for her, are simply a matter of being either warmer or colder, and adjusting by seeking out an appropriate niche somewhere in the house, in close proximity to a heat source, to while away her winter days, dreaming catty dreams. This coming winter, God willing, she will have the choice of both her cat bed in the hearth near to the stove, and her new crocheted cat blanket from her Auntie Maisie, so she should be, in the modern parlance, “well sorted”. Spidey has been conspicuous by his absence this week. I don’t know if the Poles Apart next door have finally realised the extend of his nocturnal ramblings and “grounded” him, but we did – at one point – hear the sound of pre-scrap caterwauling coming from down the bottom of the garden, one evening, so maybe that was him, squaring up either to the Interloper, or a passing fox. I actually thought Kitty was involved, and shouted to Deb, enjoining her to go and rescue our cat, until she wearily pointed out to me that Kitty was, in fact, at that precise moment, sprawled along the back of the conservatory armchair with all her legs dangling down, like a furry antimacassar.
Deb is another one who has been looking forward to the winter. “Looking forward” in the technical sense, rather than eagerly anticipating, because discussions have already been taking place about what she will teach next term. It looks like, if everything happens, and continues after the first crucial weeks, she will end up with about fifteen to nineteen hours’ work a week, at least to start with, which should help to maintain the separate locations for the wolf and the door, for a while, provided we can get through the fiscal drought of July and August. She’s now been given the two AQA-approved Oxford Anthologies from which apparently the texts (or some of them) are to be chosen, and I took great delight, on flipping through one of them, in informing her of the presence of Shelley’s Ozymandias, a poem which she loathes, from her days of having to study it herself at school. Oh well, says I, at least this is your chance to get your own back. Actually, I quote like it, as a poem, although it is a bit of a one-trick pony.
With the imminent ending of her various current courses, she’s been surprised to be the recipient of presents from two of them, who have clubbed together to buy her a necklace and earrings set (in one case) and a day’s paintballing (in another). I asked her if she’s going to take up the paintballing, and she said, “Only if I’m allowed live ammo”. So I left it at that. Still, it shows they hold her in high regard, though there was a certain irony in the accompanying card from her literacy class being inscribed “Thanks for all you’re help” [sic]. I said she should have put a big red ring round it and handed it back to them. That, or detention.
It has also been a week of further strange and more unexpected gifts. The unexpected came in the form of three packets of poppy seeds from Maisie, which I am hoping to persuade Debbie to plant around Russell’s mosaic and Nigel’s resting place in the garden, although of course poppies are another harbinger of autumn and a sign of summer’s fading. Even more unexpected was the revelation that someone has apparently left a suitcase full of magazines (content unspecified, so I don’t know whether it is The Entymological Journal or Danish Porn Vets On The Job) on Granny’s doorstep. She lives quite near to a busy bus stop, so it could be that someone was waiting for the bus, put the case down, because it was heavy, then absent-mindedly boarded the bus without it. Or that the magazines were meant for a neighbour, but the donor mistook the house, or any number of explanations. Anyway, I told her to put the contents and the case on Ebay. I rest my case.
My own week has been another one of slogging away on the phone. “Deceased equine flagellation”, is how I described it to one friend during an email. In between this mind-crushing, character-building, soul-destroying [delete as applicable] necessary groundwork for selling books, I have been deduping databases with my other leg and doing accounts in my sleep. In fact, I should be doing the VAT return even now, instead of writing this. Oh well.
Part of the necessary groundwork has also been the grasping of thorny old nettles which have been allowed to overgrow for too long. Specifically, the thorny old nettle of people who owe us money. I never enjoy being “Mr Nasty” in these circumstances, but the sad fact is that it has to be done, because there are some people, bookselling chains mainly, who will take the piss and never pay you for anything unless you get to the stage where you threaten to go nuclear and get medieval on their ass. Anyway, in amongst the sundry debtors was an outstanding sum for a literary festival, mentioning no names (coughcoughMorleycoughcough). I have had a go at getting this money back before, but the problem is that the only contact details we had are c/o the Town Hall. The books were actually supplied on sale or return anyway, and I have long suspected that the true answer to this conundrum lies in the presence, somewhere in a Town Hall cupboard, of a dusty box of unsold “returns” that somebody has forgotten to tell us about or arrange to be picked up. If that is the case, we would have them back like a shot, toot de sweet, and say no more about it, especially as the said box is likely to contain copies of titles that are now out of print and I could turn straight round and sell for ready money.
Anyway, I cobbled together what I thought was quite a reasonable letter, in the circumstances, given the vintage of the debt, and duly posted it off, together with a statement, to the only address we have, marked “please forward”. One day, during the week, in the midst of all my outbound phoning, I put the handset down and it rang, almost immediately. Eagerly, I seized it, anticipating a sale on the other end.
“Hello, this is PC ------------, from Morley Police Station here. We’ve been handed a suspicious letter, by the Morley Literature Festival. They said they got a similar letter this time last year, which they binned, and they think it’s some kind of scam.”
Momentarily taken aback, I refrained from asking him whether he thought I looked like a Nigerian with a trunk full of money, or indeed whether scammers had a habit of putting their real phone number on their letters. Instead, I filled him in on the details of the transaction, adding for good measure that I was glad to hear he had caught up with the scoundrels who had stolen our books, but that I wouldn’t be pressing charges, provided they either paid up and/or returned the “overs”. He chuckled at this, and speculated that their suspicions had apparently been aroused by the fact that my letter had not seemed “official” enough, so I enquired whether it would be “official” enough if I got my solicitor to write the next one, and he agreed to convey the substance of our exchange back to the Morley Literature Festival, and we parted as friends.
The only other break in my relentless phone campaign this week was on Wednesday morning, when I was called in to the local Job Centre for a work-related interview in connection with my claim for ESA. Whereas many might have dreaded such a summons, I actually welcomed it, apart from the hassle of getting down there and back, because I had a page and a half of questions which I wanted to ask, around the issues of permitted work, self-employment, training and help, how Debbie’s hours might affect anything due to me, etc. In short, all the information I needed to make an informed decision about whether or not the course I am considering for our financial future is the right one.
It turned out that getting down there, and getting back, were the least of my worries. Because Debbie was out teaching, I had to get a taxi, and the taxi bloke, from Mount Taxis in Huddersfield, was a model of kindness and efficiency, and a credit to his firm. I would have no hesitation in recommending Mount Taxis to anyone on this basis. I hope that he receives some well-deserved recognition for being a true "gentleman of the road". Sadly, owing to the current financial situation, I couldn’t bestow the sort of pourboire his conduct deserved.
The ESA interview itself was a bit of a let down and an anti-climax. It turned out that the answer to all my questions was that I should ring the 0845 number (the solution to so many of the questions posed by modern life) and ask them, because the bloke “interviewing” me wasn’t trained to give such advice. He did, however, update my record on their system to the effect that I had attended the interview, and we corrected the obvious error that it said I did not have a driving licence. As far as the training goes, “everything was changing” and they would ring me in about a month’s time when details came through, but mostly it would be stuff about how to write your CV. I had asked about Sage Accounts. Were I uncharitably minded, I could observe that my hour amongst the pot plants, modern open plan desks and screaming toddlers was mainly for the benefit of ticking DWP boxes, rather than being any practical help. But we did establish that I could earn up to £95 per week without it materially affecting my situation, which is obviously the next step. To do that, of course, means upping turnover by £950 per week, at trade values, or £1900 a week at cover price. Ouch. Oh well, the journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step.
So, back at my desk, I resumed my “Tour of the Whole Island of Great Britain” by ringing round the country, speaking that day mainly to librarians and schools, as it happens. As I dialled each number, my mind formed a mental picture of the place I was contacting, maybe those wide placid meadows between the M1 and the river Trent, where the black and white cows graze on, oblivious of the shadowy cooling-towers in the hazy distance; maybe the craggy coast of Cornwall, where King Arthur’s Tintagel perches on the cliff like an improbable stone eagle, a whole castle crouching ready to take flight in a Mervyn Peake fantasy; or that library in Leicester that looks like a pork pie, built on the rotunda principle, sitting in the middle of a roundabout in Melton Mowbray; a primary school tucked away amidst the grandeur of the Lakeland mountains; or ringing a primary school in Cheriton, as I did on Wednesday, where the Royalists and Parliamentarians clashed in 1644. Who knows but there might be two kids sitting in that school, in a class today, the best of friends, whose ancestors fought on separate sides that desperate day 367 years ago, when there was “hot action” with the musketeers in Cheriton woods, and the narrow Hampshire lanes proved too much for the Royalist heavy cavalry, the “London Lobsters”.
Increasingly, though, as I go about my diurnal round, these days, I can see two Englands. I See Two Englands is of course the title of a rather famous book (at least at the time it came out). In 1939, the writer H V Morton set out to record his impressions of England at the outbreak of the second World War. It was undoubtedly a dark time in our history, one of the darkest we have faced in the last couple of hundred years, comparable with the days in the early 1800s when Napoleon strode the cliffs of Boulougne, eyeing us up for his next conquest, as he blazed through Europe.
I’ve been thinking about England a lot this last week, and the title of Morton’s book keeps sticking in my mind. Because it seems to me that today more than ever we are at a similar crossroads. OK, we aren’t at war (well, we are, actually, in all but name) but it’s not just that. Well, that’s part of it, but we seem increasingly these days to be at a crossroads where we have a choice of two Englands.
We can either have an England where we have tolerance and freedom and justice, or we can have a narrow-minded, petty, penny-pinching shop-thy-neighbour England where you are only allowed to have thoughts if they are the same as those approved by Conservative Central Office. You can either have an England where we have freedom of speech, within the rule of law, however uncomfortable that might sometimes have to be, or you can have and England where some things are unsayable and taboo, where you are only allowed to agree with the narrow band of opinions held by the government and the tabloid press, only ever allowed to tick the box marked “yes”. It started with arresting people because of things they might do. It carries on with government agencies watching you to see if you deviate from the norm, and the ceaseless assault on people who are ill, disadvantaged, or unemployed, while for the rich and the governing classes, it is very much business as usual.
So, do we want an England where people live in a climate of fear, and England where you have to watch your Ps and Qs or you might be denounced by a neighbour via an anonymous government tip-off line, an England where unemployment is growing, where prices are rising to rip-off levels; an England where the soup kitchens are working full blast and they still can’t keep up with the demand; an England where homes are repossessed and jobs are lost, just to keep the banks and markets happy? Or do we want an England where people are valued for what they are worth as people, not as units of economic production, and valued as people, not according to their state of health or their economic circumstances? An England of shortages, unrest and riots, or an England of peace and prosperity under the common law, dating back to the days of the Witan? Well, I have decided which England I am working for, I just have to persuade others to continue struggling for it as well. I think it’s worth fighting for. You may say I am a dreamer, but I’m not the only one. The Archbishop of Canterbury agrees with me.
Which brings me neatly to religion. Today is Trinity Sunday, and as promised, despite my busy week, I have settled down today, with the suitably mindless backdrop of The Cowboy Junkies (The Trinity Sessions, how appropriate) on Spotify, to explain the mysteries of the Trinity. In 1873. a group of young men from the local Holy Trinity Church formed the Wakefield Trinity Rugby League club. One of the initial forces in the game, Trinity won the Yorkshire Cup four times in nine years and was one of the initial 22 clubs to form the Northern Union after the acrimonious split from the Rugby Football Union in 1895. It was beloved, latterly, of people such as Eddie Waring. Waring provided rich resource for impersonators like Mike Yarwood, who helped immortalise catchphrases such as "early bath", "up and under" and "poor lad" –the latter from his unforgettable commentary after Don Fox missed a last-minute conversion that would have won the 1968 Challenge Cup final for Wakefield Trinity, but handed the game to their opponents instead.
Only kidding. Even I can’t shoehorn a theological treatise out of a history of Wakefield Trinity RLFC, though it would be fun to try. Instead, I open up the Lectionary, looking as always for something to make me feel better, understand Big G’s plans for me, and/or explain why, six months later, I am still stuck in this bloody wheelchair.
The selection of texts for today surprised me, to be honest. It starts with Ye Bible, page 1. The creation of everything. Genesis 1:1-2:4a:
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day. And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so. And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.
And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so. And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good. And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so. And the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind: and God saw that it was good. And the evening and the morning were the third day. And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years: And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so.
And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also. And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth, And to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good. And the evening and the morning were the fourth day. And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven.
And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good. And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth. And the evening and the morning were the fifth day. And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so. And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and God saw that it was good. And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.
So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth. And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat. And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat: and it was so.
And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day. Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made. And God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it: because that in it he had rested from all his work which God created and made.
I was going to cut that down, and edit it, but to be honest, you have to really let it flow on to appreciate the full magisterial glory of its prose. Clearly I don’t believe, like Soapy Sam, that the world was created one Tuesday afternoon in 4004 BC. But equally, I don’t see that this text is necessarily antagonistic to our modern scientific view of the origins of the universe. The separating of the light and dark, for instance, for me, has connotations of the differentiation of matter and anti-matter, something that still keeps modern physicists awake at night. I can see in that passage, a shorthand description of the process of evolution. And, although some have chosen to interpret the term “dominion” over the animals to include a licence to kill, God seems quite emphatic that man is intended to be a fructivore. Of course, that’s where all the trouble starts, but nevertheless it’s nice to know that vegetarianism is a Neo-Platonic ideal which we can aspire back to. Oh, and God (or whoever took dictation from him) is obsessed with bloody whales, but then we knew that from last week’s reading.
So why do we start at the very beginning, apart from the fact that Julie Andrews says it’s a very good place to start? I think maybe because that “the beginning” and “the end” are both portals to eternity, and may be only concepts that have any specific meaning from our own temporary standpoint. If I carry on developing this theme, this Epiblog will grow into a book, and it will incorporate Schrodinger’s Kittens by John Gribben crossed with T S Eliot in Four Quartets, so maybe you had just better cut out the middleman and read them, instead. Then we can all have some crumpets at teatime, instead of one o’clock in the morning. It’s something to do with the idea (which my mind struggles to encompass) of God simultaneously including all the different aspects of God. The Hebrew Kabbalah also attempts to codify this phenomenon, going as far as to draw a diagrammatic representation of all of the different aspects of God, descending from the ultimate Godhead “Ain Soph Aour”, or limitless light, down to the physical world, which we inhabit. People spend their entire lives studying this staggeringly simple mind-map of the universe, and I am not pretending to have any special knowledge of it, which puts me a little lower than Madonna, if not a little lower than the Angels. See below.
Psalm 8 continues and amplifies the same theme of the relation of God, man and nature. And I quote it again, also, because it reminds us where we are supposed to sit – a little lower than the angels. Maybe we should be trying to live up to that, when framing political policy that shapes the future of our country.
Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings hast thou ordained strength because of thine enemies, that thou mightest still the enemy and the avenger. When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained; What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him? For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honour. Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands; thou hast put all things under his feet: All sheep and oxen, yea, and the beasts of the field; The fowl of the air, and the fish of the sea, and whatsoever passeth through the paths of the seas.
2 Corinthians 13:11-13, the third text, is St Paul signing off, and laying down his quill (or stylus?) at last, and the Corinthian Post Office cancelling their planned Christmas overtime. Whereas the last of the four, Matthew 28:16-20 is another signoff, but this time from Jesus himself:
Then the eleven disciples went away into Galilee, into a mountain where Jesus had appointed them. And when they saw him, they worshipped him: but some doubted. And Jesus came and spake unto them, saying, All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth. Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost: Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and, lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world. Amen.
So there we have it. The beginning and the end. The Alpha and Omega, in one neatly bookended selection. As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end. I “get” the general concept of the Holy Trinity, although “three in one” always sounds to me rather like a proprietary cleaning product, a sort of sanctified Cillit Bang, and as I have said before, when I start to think about eternity for long enough, my head hurts and I feel like a dying star being dragged into a black hole. For ever and ever, amen. The dying stars flame the brightest, the bright stars flame the briefest.
I guess my duty, my mission, should I choose to accept it, which will, inevitably, one day self-destruct, is to make the most of every fleeting minute, then, as the heavens turn and the sun reaches its height only to decline then rise again, for ever and ever amen, winter and summer, as a slightly-lower-than-misguided Angel, until the day my light joins once more with the limitless.
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