Epiblog for St Swithun's Day (or "High Tea at High Tae")

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. Probably. I haven’t actually been here for much of it, not since Tuesday morning. I know I said last week that I was leaving this blog aside for a while, and I am really going to do that, after this week, because I have a list of things a yard long to do (I might actually give you a list, later on) but, in the meantime, like Colombo (or St Columba, or something) there’s just one more thing.

I re-read the stuff I wrote last week, and I was struck that it seemed rather a downbeat ending to a series of postings chronicling a period of struggle that has, to be honest, has had its ups as well as its downs, so I’ve decided to try and square it up with one more posting, to even it out, to leave a straight edge. I employ the same principle with pies, flans and quiches, actually, because those last little portions always look so lonely, sticking out like that.

Anyway, I digress. For some time now, we’ve been wondering what, if anything, is going to happen about holidays now I am in a wheelchair, and also what to do about our venerable old VW camper van, The Arran Silkie. It was all very well when it was just a relatively expensive anachronism, sitting in the driveway, but now it’s become our sole vehicle with the demise of the Berlingo, it’s equally essential for getting Debbie to her teaching classes and ferrying me about, and we’ve been forced to put money into putting right various things that were wrong with it. With the result that, although it still doesn’t look much, it is probably in better mechanical nick now than it has been for a long while.

All of which has led us to talk about going back to Arran. As I wrote last week, a year ago, on St Swithun’s Day, I keeled over with acute peritonitis (which, until then, I always assumed was just a dodgy Greek football team) and got carted off to HRI, just four days before we were due to set off for Arran. So, through no fault of her own, Debbie lost her holiday, and her kayaking trip. She hasn’t been kayaking now for over a year, and in my present state I am absolutely no help to her, unable to do the task I used to perform, of standing in between the cradles with the rack hanging down the side of the van, and guiding the nose of the boat onto them, as she fed it in from one side. Since the Berlingo died, we have still got its “Hydraglide” kayak carrier, which was a lot easier to use, but it’s in pieces in our front room, so that’s not a lot of help.

There had been talk of her giving up altogether, which, naturally, I was against, but the fact remained, that if she was ever going kayaking again, we would have to find some way in which she could, single handed, get 22kg of extruded tupperware kayak on to the top of a 2.5 metre high camper van, by herself.

Fortunately, there was a solution. Kari Tek, who fitted the original kayak carrier to the camper van in 2005, has, in the interim, grown and flourished. As a company, they now also sell the kayaks themselves, and a wide range of accessories, so that you can now take your credit or debit card for a day out at the seaside at Ayr, visit their rather smart little showroom, buy a rack, buy a kayak to put on it, and still be back home in time to go online to Interflora and send the Bank Manager’s widow some flowers, and a little note saying it must have been very sudden, and you were sorry to hear, etc, etc.

Specifically, we’d noticed that they do a natty little improved version of the original “push me/pull you” version of the rack, now incorporating an integral winch, which takes all of the hard work out of lifting the kayak up to roof height, and would mean that Debbie could go kayaking again. That left but two imponderables, could they do it on our vehicle, and could we afford it?

For a long while now, we’ve been pondering the imponderables, and trading emails with them, back and forth, establishing fairly quickly that they could do it, and we’d narrowed the cost issue down to, “well, depending how much of the existing rack we can salvage, cannibalise and re-use, it won’t cost any more than a new one!”

The other problem, though, was timing. Debbie’s brother had already caused an alteration to the time of year when we would normally have gone to Arran, by fixing his wedding to Claire for the week after next. The WEA teaching term didn’t officially end til next Monday, which is very late in the year, and Kari Tek themselves have a big engineering job they do for a local sawmill (they don’t just do kayak-carriers, they do other types of engineering metal-bashing as well) for the first two weeks in August, booked up solid, so that really only left this week, or next, and next was perilously close to the big wedding.

So it was that, on Tuesday morning, I found myself making and taking a succession of phone calls with Kari-Tek, and, as a result of that exercise, and various emails of scanned drawings, we were finally in possession of a price. Now, this next bit is going to sound like I am carping about high prices, but I am not, because although the price was more than we were expecting, the product, the value, and the service were all also correspondingly high. But it was still a shock to the system, even though it did include coffee and chocolate biscuits when we got there (“how did you blag those?” said Debbie, when she returned from looking round the showroom). Especially given the age of the vehicle we were proposing to have it bolted onto. I jokingly said to Deb that, if it didn’t work out, we could always put it on Ebay as “kayak rack with camper van attachment”, but she wasn’t amused, and a full-blown, toys-out-of-the-pram domestic seemed imminent.

Channelling Brian Hanrahan, I’m not going to say how many pounds left the bank account this week, but I counted them all out, and I hope, one day, to count them all back. I’m not going to say, because someone will inevitably pop up with “Oooh! How did you afford that, when you are supposed to be poor, and on benefits?” The short term answer is that Debbie raided her own meagre savings, and supplemented it with some money her Mum gave her for her birthday. I am hoping to replace it out of my redundancy settlement, eventually, which I spent 21 years of my life earning, in a little room with four bars over the window, while everyone else was outside having fun. It means Barclays will grab a little bit less than the whole sum, and if that is the price of my wife, who has stood by me through thin and thin, being happy and going kayaking again, so be it. Selah.

Having solved the price problem, all we had to do was pack up and go. Sounds simple, doesn’t it? One immediate issue, however, which had to be surmounted, was the spare tyre. When the garage had had the vehicle last week, to look into the oil pressure, for some unaccountable reason they had left the spare tyre inside the back of the camper, rather than on its bracket, underneath. I had queried this, and Father Jack replied that it was “so that Debbie could get to it easily, if she had a puncture.” I suspected the true reason had more to do with lack of forward planning, but anyway, we had arranged to swing by the garage on the way up to Scotland and have them pop it back where it should be.

So it was, therefore, that, once Deb had managed to push me up the ramps and into the side door, I had to squeeze past it and transfer by banana board on to the front seat, which, fortunately, rotates in the VW T25 “Wedgie” camper. Very fortunately, in our case, because, in rotating it, Deb found my rosary, which had been lost since I came out of “Broadmoor”, back in May. I say “lost”, although “mislaid” is the more correct term, in that we knew it was in the camper somewhere, just not precisely where. I was overjoyed at this slice of luck, and hoped it was a good omen for the trip as a whole.

We weren’t so lucky with the garage, though. They were obviously busy, but they could definitely see Debbie standing there, hopping from one foot to the other, trying to attract someone’s attention. And they knew we were coming, because I had phoned them up and warned them. Eventually, after about twenty minutes, and not in the best of tempers, she stomped back to the van, got in, started it up, and drove back to our house, where she then heaved the spare tyre out of the side door into the driveway, booled it round to the front of the old camper, and covered it over with a plastic tarp to prevent it being nicked by passing weightlifters, before resuming her position behind the steering-wheel, and swinging us out onto the road, northwards-bound, at 5pm!

Clearly, we were never going to reach Ayr in one go, but we had made an arrangement by phone to break the journey and park overnight in the yard at Mossburn, the animal sanctuary in Dumfries and Galloway run by Juanita, who has become a great friend of ours, ever since the days of the Foot and Mouth crisis, when we stayed up all night sending emails to every MP about its fate, as it was threatened with extinction as part of the “contiguous cull” policy. It was gone 8pm by the time we trundled through the gate, but Juanita had prepared a huge meal for us, and there was red wine opened on the table. Max, from the Archers messageboard, was also stopping by, as part of her search for suitable premises from which to launch her forthcoming religious retreat.

If I said “a convivial evening ensued” it would be a massive understatement, as it was one of the best evenings I, personally, have had in a long time. Fun, as a concept, has been absent in my life of late, and God alone knows how bleak it must have been for Debbie.

So, let us say a good time was had by all. Even Tig, who discovered she was attracted to older “men” when Juanita’s faithful Oliver, 20 years old and counting, wandered in and sniffed her bottom. It was love at first sniff, and before long they were snoozing together on the kitchen floor, legs straight out in all directions.

How they slept through us all carousing, laughing, and singing, I don’t know. The talk ranged from Santiago de Compostella, through Douglas Bader, to manifestations of St Padre Pio, and back again, broken occasionally by Hilaire-Belloc-like excursions into songs, some of which we all knew, and some of which we didn’t. Eventually, we had to go back to the camper, or we would also have been asleep on the kitchen floor, legs straight out in all directions, but apart from the absence of the long-haired girl with the dulcimer (who was sorely missed) it was pretty near to the description of heaven I wrote about in last week’s blog.

Wednesday dawned hot and sunny. So much so, that I had to sit up in bed and open the slotted window at the side over the grill, just to get a bit of through draught and stop us all cooking! Max had already set off on her house-hunting trail, and Juanita was busy about the farm, so we made a quick cup of coffee, got ready, and set off ourselves, down the road to Lochmaben, looking for the turning to Dumfries, thence to pick up the road that would lead, eventually, to Ayr.

It was a truly gorgeous July day, and the hedgerows were strewn with rose-bay willow herb, campion, dead-nettle, and lush bracken. The farmers were all busy as well, and I quickly lost count of the numbers of tractors and trailers active in fields along the way, making hay, literally, while the sun shone. We seemed somehow to have left behind a countryside at home where it was still March, and stepped through the back of the wardrobe into a strange weather-Narnia, where it was real summer, at last. As T. H. White wrote, in The Once and Future King:

It was July, and real July weather, such they had in Old England. Everybody went bright brown, like Red Indians, with startling teeth and flashing eyes. The dogs moved about with their tongues hanging out, or lay panting in bits of shade, while the farm horses sweated through their coats and flicked their tails and tried to kick the horse-flies off their bellies with great hind hoofs. In the pasture field, the cows were on the gad, and could be seen galloping around with their tails in the air.

We droned on through the heavy air, the camper lumbering along like a bulbous, somnolent bumblebee. Eventually, the countryside gave way to a town, or at least a more substantial settlement than the single-street villages we had hitherto rumbled through. But this one was strangely quiet, New Cumnock, and every house and shop seemed to be boarded up. It used to be a mining town, but since the end of deep coal excavation, it has contracted in population from 9,000 to 3,000, with massive unemployment and social problems. Looking it up later, I found that the boarded up houses were probably some of the many awaiting demolition. Thank you, Margaret Thatcher, and goodnight.

Anyway, we were soon back into open country, and before I really knew it, rolling through the gates of Kari-Tek’s workshop yard. They came out to greet us in force, and, as well as the aforementioned tea, coffee and biscuits, produced ladders, gantries, drills, bits of long metal which presumably formed part of the eventual rack, and set to work. After four hours of honest toil in the blazing afternoon sun, they had done it. The old rack was removed, the new one in place, it had been demonstrated to Debbie so that she knew how to use it, the J-cradles had been repositioned, and we had “shot the breeze” briefly, talking to Ann and Geoff about kayaking, and how they once encountered a nuclear sub in the channel between Largs and Cumbrae.

So, it was teatime, and we faced the choice of whether to hard-arse it all the way back in one go, and get home around midnight, probably, or to take up Juanita’s kind offer of a second night’s sojourn in the yard. It didn’t take long to decide on the latter, but first we had a detour to make. It seemed perverse to have come this far and then to turn back without at least a glimpse of the Isle of Arran, so we turned right instead of left, and ran down into Ayr, following the coast road out to the ancient harbour of Dunure.

It was a glorious evening, up on the Heads of Ayr, the sort that Wordsworth probably had in mind when he wrote about it being calm and free, and the “holy time” being “quiet as a nun”. I doubt he ever rode in a camper van to Dunure, though, but we got his drift. We parked up in the very same layby where we had stopped on 14th July 2009, one year and 364 days previously, on our last trip to Arran, and looked out over the same scene.

The sun was low enough to be sparkling on the water. The improbable “currant bun” shape of Ailsa Craig was away to our left. Further over, I could see distant blue smudges that were the tip of the Mull of Kintyre and the islands of Campbeltown Loch, and then all along the horizon in front of us, the misty blue mirage of Arran itself, its jagged peaks, and the more softer, rounded flanks of Holy Island, in front of Lamlash, and its gradual sloping to the south, ending with the lighthouse, a tiny speck at that distance, sticking up on the platform of Pladda. If he’d been looking out of his window, and using very powerful binoculars, I could almost have waved to Donald in his little chandlers’ shop on Lamlash pier. Except for the 14 miles of the Firth of Clyde in between, of course.

It was a curiously solemn moment. Especially so, since I had doubted I would ever see Arran again. Seeing it is not the same as getting there, of course, and after a while, the feeling of “so near, but yet so far” and the intensity and general sadness of the situation began to overwhelm me. I understood, probably for the very first time, truly, what A E Housman meant when he wrote that short poem:

Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.

Soon, it was time to pack all our troubles back into our old kit bag, and smile smile smile through the tears, in my case anyway, and hit the trail back to Mossburn. Such were the vagaries of the road system of Ayr and Galloway, that the journey back took over two hours, and I learnt a valuable lesson as a navigator, that the shortest route back in miles is not always the quickest route back in time. That was why we ended up not reaching Mossburn until gone 10pm. Well, that, and an unscheduled stop at Tesco Extra at Dumfries, where Debbie went in to see if they had any vegan beer and some cheap cooked meat for Tig to have her tablets with, and came out an hour later having done most of our weekly shop!

Thursday morning developed into yet another blazing hot day. I spent a considerable time watching one of Juanita’s ferrets sunning itself at the front of its enclosure, before we “got up” properly, and opened the side door of the camper. Debbie wheeled me down the ramps, and we lounged about in the sunshine, drinking coffee. Tig was mooching around in the long grass, and eventually found herself a comfortable patch in which to lie, in the shade of one of the parked-up horse-boxes. In fact, she was, quite literally, in clover, as the meadow grass was full of it, and of groundsel, burnet, plantain, and other humble plants whose names I once knew but can no longer remember.

The cockerel we had heard crowing earlier made an appearance, pecking its way round our wheels and under the camper. One of its chickens joined in, and then, in a rather surreal development, a pig wandered by, to see what was going on. Tig hadn’t minded the chickens walking round her, but she moved out of the way of, and kept a wary eye on, the pig.

Before we set off, I made a pre-emptive visit to the loo across the other side of the farmyard, and on my way back, the pig came trotting over to greet me, then looked, for one brief, heart-stopping moment, as if it was going to jump up on my knee and try and join me in the wheelchair. Given our likely combined weights, I doubt the wheelchair would have survived the experience. It would have been tricky explaining it to Wheelchair Services, but at least drawing the sketch of what happened, for the purposes of the insurance claim form, would have been amusing. Later, while we were borrowing a corner of Juanita’s kitchen table to prepare and consume an ad hoc brunch of the perishable stuff which wouldn’t have survived the journey back, a goat wandered in and tried to steal the onion bhajis. Admonished by Juanita, it calmly turned away and wandered back out again. Mossburn is that sort of place.

Prior to my odd encounter with the pig, I had come to a conclusion, a definitive node in the strand of thought which I had been teasing at and puzzling out for the whole trip. A farmyard in Dumfries and Galloway may seem like a strange place to have an Epiphany, but I have had them in stranger.

I had proved to myself that life in the wheelchair and life in the camper were not incompatible, nor were they mutually exclusive. It could be done. And although the effort cost Deb dear (in pocket as well as energy) we had had a break, a holiday, of sorts. Maybe we would get to Arran, and maybe I should keep on with the standing aid and the weights and keep on trying to get up out of this wheelchair.

Because, despite placing the tea lights on Russell’s mosaic in the pattern of the constellation of the plough, and despite all that has happened to me since St Swithun’s day 2010, it wasn’t the end of the world, in any sense. Not yet, at least, and that is all any of us can say, not yet. In that sense, I was no better, or no worse, than anyone else.

Because, for a time, I had forgotten that I was in a wheelchair, or, to be more accurate, for the first time, really, the fact of my “wheelchairness” had dwindled from being the all-consuming, all-powerful, be-all and end-all of everything, to a merely tiresome irritation. I had realised that I had been doing the very thing that I was ironically accusing others of doing, in fun, when I describe myself in their words as a “disabled raspberry” and “tragic Steve” – only seeing the wheelchair, and not the person.

Yes, there are lots of things I can no longer do, but I am not the sole inhabitant of the land of lost content, not by any means; many other people can also list things they can never do again. I am not a wheelchair, I am a free man. And though I still don’t understand it, somehow this is all apparently bounden up in Big G’s plan. (Not big G-plan, which is to do with furniture, do keep up at the back!)

And now I really must get some work done. I mean it this time. Those year-end accounts won’t cook themselves, you know!

Epiblog for Baggis Day

Third Sunday After Trinity (Baggis Day)
It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley, as we run up to St Swithun’s day, and, once again, the weather remains cool, rainy and cloudy. Debbie says it’s warm and humid out in the garden, but obviously I only have her word for this. I think we have to accept that, because of climate change, we now have only two seasons in the UK, Winter, and Autumn.

The week began with fine weather, and with us sitting out on the decking last weekend, around the chiminea, listening to John next door serenading us with Supertramp’s greatest hits, and me observing that now I was listening to Supertramp, but soon I might be one.

Later that evening, Debbie spoke to John over the fence, while she was ticketyboo-ing round the garden, after I had gone in. Apparently he enquired after my health, and Debbie filled him in on the details. “Well,” he said, after a pause to let it sink in, “at least Steve’s got a brain.” I’m still trying to work out exactly what he meant, and indeed why having a brain should be such an advantage. Most of the time, mine is about as much use as a door-stop.

Tig and Kitty have had their usual sort of a week. They have now taken to eating each other’s food, and to be honest, it’s probably not worth trying to correct it. Sometimes they even swop bowls in mid-meal, as if by some pre-arranged signal. In Kitty’s case, it is a mixture of greed and opportunism. If she could hold a pen and type, she would be an ideal candidate for a career in the banking industry, or perhaps working for News International. In Tig’s case, it is probably more evidence of her increasing gaga-dom, poor old dog, as in the instance of her yet again getting confused and trying to get into my bed one night during the week. She just can’t get her head around the fact that there are now two beddies, one upstairs and one downstairs. I made my usual remark to Debbie about “gaga old bitches who wander round the house at night because they can’t find their way to bed” before adding the usual codicil of “and then there’s the dog”, and received the customary Agincourt salute for my efforts.

On Monday (this next bit will sound like a song by Flanders and Swann, but bear with me) the Yorkshire Water Meter Man came to call, and in less than 45 minutes we were the proud possessors of a brand, spanking new water-meter, which should at least save us some money.

I asked the guy who did it if they made him fit meters all day long.

“Yes,” he said, “it gets pretty boring.” Then he looked at me in my wheelchair and added, bless him ,“but I guess you’d happily swop with me!” He wasn’t wrong. To complete the full set of “utilities bingo” Npower finally got round to sending us a replacement key for the gas meter box outside, so we can at last read the meter and get on with the tedious task of reclaiming the credit which has seemingly built up on our account.

On Tuesday, rather than participate in the meeting with Peter the Handyman about the home improvements list and what the council are planning to do to the house provided we can raise £1956.54 over a period of time, Debbie decided instead that she would climb the trees in the garden and begin to lop the branches that are causing the difficulty over potentially receiving a digital TV signal from Autumn onwards. So it was that, at the end of the meeting, to say goodbye to Debbie, Peter had to go into the garden and shout up into the branches. She asked him, by way of reply, to hand her up the long lopper thing with the shears on the end, which she had left on the ground for some unaccountable reason. He apparently said

“What are you doing up there?”

To which she was apparently very tempted to reply, “Baking a cake!”

He came back in, shaking his head.

“You wouldn’t get my wife up a tree like that.” I reassured him that actually, in Debbie’s case, too, she was much more often “out of her tree” in oh so many ways, and this was an exception.

Peter didn’t want to be involved in the council works (too big a job, not his core skills, fair enough) but he did leave me one storming idea for a thinner ramp, which doubled back on itself. This would, at a stroke, remove the necessity to empty out the old camper van, and provide access not only to the side door but also to the front door and down into the front garden. It was such a good idea, that I wished I had thought of it, and I sent it to the council in the form of a drawing, which they subsequently rang me up about.

They wouldn’t do Peter’s design, because it didn’t comply with building regulations. OK, then, I said, what about if we took the issue of the ramp out of the equation altogether, got Peter to build this ramp, and you just did the rest of the modifications inside the house? No, they wouldn’t start on that footing, because if they did so, it would be tantamount to encouraging the building of a ramp that didn’t comply with building regulations.

It could all be academic now anyway. If things go badly wrong, I might end up spending far more time in the open air in coming months than I had previously anticipated! Be careful what you wish for, etc.

Speaking of matters academic, Debbie had to attend some GCSE training run by AQA on Friday. The only interesting thing to come out of this is that apparently she doesn’t have to use the AQA-approved anthologies which they provide to choose the poetry, and this could have sort of rendered my brilliant model compare-n-contrast between The Charge of the Light Brigade and Mametz Wood obsolete overnight. Oh well…

There is – as always – a gnat in the Germolene, though. In a masterstroke of planning, Calderdale Adult Ed have scheduled both GCSE English and Fastrack English on the same night, come next term, and Deb is supposed to be teaching them both. So unless she can emulate St Padre Pio and appear in two places at once, they will have a problem. She notified them of this, and they are allegedly having a meeting on Monday to sort it out, except that it will probably clash with another meeting, or something. Watch this space.

On her way back from the training, she went shopping and bought a Gola sports bag. Unaccountably, they gave her a bag to take it away in. I said she should have asked for a bag to take away the bag with the bag in it. Earlier, on doing the VAT return, I had taken her to task for always putting the same amount of diesel in the camper. The problem is that you end up with several receipts, all for £40.00, say, and entering them up gets very confusing. I asked her if it might be possible to do, for instance, £39.95 one day and next time, £38.97 or something.

“Oh no!” she replied. “It always seems fuller somehow when you put a round amount of pounds in it”. Long pause from me. “O….K….”

And so it came to Friday teatime and I started writing this, at least a day earlier than I normally would have. I started today, rather than on Sunday, because it was a year to the day since I cooked and ate that lethally-significant stir-fry, and then collapsed with abdominal pains. Today, Saturday, it is six years to the day since Russell, the Baggis Cat, died, after he keeled over and Granny rushed him to the vet, while we were hundreds of miles away on Arran.

As it turned out, with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, the pains of last year would have happened anyway, stir-fry or no stir-fry, because my bowel had perforated, and I was in the throes of acute peritonitis.

I can’t believe it’s a year – or six years, for that matter. In both cases, in many ways, the events are still vivid, but in other ways it seems a much longer time ago, and maybe even something that happened to a different person. (Hah! He speaks truth there.) I can’t really remember bits of the Lake District that I used to know like our own backyard. Keswick, for instance, which we haven’t visited since May 2010.

It’s not just me that’s affected, either. Debbie hasn’t been kayaking for over a year now, although that is only partly to do with the fact that I can’t help her any more, there’s also the issue of our no longer having a suitable vehicle for quick, easy trips, and in any case she needs the weekends in term time now to do the prepping for her teaching stuff.

Anyway, it was definitely my fault that she didn’t get a holiday last year. So, a year on, what have I learned? Or six years on, come to that. I often think that day in July 2005 was the day when it all started to unravel, to come apart, when we came back to bury Russell and then the week after, Barclays fired their first salvo over taking away the overdraft, the beginning of a long campaign of attrition that crippled our business, and which we won’t see the back of til 2012.

For a while, following my sojourn in the bosom of the NHS, last year, I thought I had rediscovered my faith, but now I am not so sure. As I wrote last week, I came out of hospital inspired with so many high hopes, most of which have been dashed or at least remain dusty and unfulfilled, and, to be brutally honest, there have been many days during this essentially botched Spring and Summer when I have pondered whether it wouldn’t have been better all round if I had karked it a year ago.

If I had, I hope I would have gone to heaven. And I’d be there now, with my Dad, my Mum, Gran and Auntie Maud, and all the Fenwick clan, and the Rudds I never knew, with their seamens’ jerseys and their pipes of baccy. I might have learned some new shanties. Not to mention the sheer bliss and joy of seeing Russell again, and Ginger, Nigel, Dusty, and Lucy the dog.

I’ve also been pondering what heaven must be like. If we each create our own niche of heaven, the way that modern physicists tell us that we each create our own reality as we go along, on the hoof, and if the heavenly universe follows that pattern, I would imagine it as a large, rambling, English country house, full of interesting rooms stuffed with strange knicknacks, comfy armchairs, and old books. It’s always midsummer, of the sort we used to have, and the french windows from the library are open to the garden on a stifling June afternoon with the heady scent of stocks and wallflowers. Everything is underscored by the music of Handel, at ambient levels, drifting, coming and going on the soft breeze.

There’s a box maze and a herb garden, and girls with long hair wander round, barefoot, dressed in Laura Ashley dresses and carrying dulcimers. It’s always 3.45pm, and someone’s just brought in a tray of English Breakfast Tea and a delicious assortment of heavenly sandwiches and home-baked cakes, butter, jam, cream and scones. Paradoxically, there is always an open, full, bottle of red wine at your elbow, and a crazed crystal goblet from which to drink it. There’s the distant sound of church bells across a meadow as the ringers practice, and the click, clock and clack, and distant shouts, of cricket being played on the green. You are looking forward to communal feasting in the great hall tonight, where there will be a fire of woodsmoke and incense, with candlelight on the portraits, music, poetry, and song. In the meantime, your favourite cats are always within reach, plump, sleek and contented, and there are dogs snoozing on the rug.

Since heaven must, by definition, be out of time, I am not sure, in my vision, whether I would have been aware that a year had passed. By then, Debbie and Tig and Kitty would have moved on, and found comparable love elsewhere, or at least I’d like to think they would have. Kitty definitely would have, she is always on the lookout for anyone who can wield a can-opener.

But I didn’t. Kark it, I mean. “They are all gone into the world of light, and I alone sit ling’ring here”. And I am left wondering, about my faith, and about the logic of carrying on with this blog, at least on a weekly basis. There are only so many ways I can say that my tenuous faith, never strong to start with, might have briefly flourished in adversity, and has now crashed back again into a state approaching despair at the prospect of being stuck in this wheelchair. I still haven’t solved the problem of homelessness, either, although (thanks to my having been mugged by Zen Internet in questionable circumstances for £77-odd taken from my bank account without my knowledge while I was lying in a hospital bed) I do still own the www.rooftree.org.uk domain for another year.

I haven’t managed to feed everybody, despite my fine words in the Christmas Epiblog that this time, there would be room at the Inn. When I got to this point while writing Here Endeth The Epilogue, I remember quoting that Gilbert O’Sullivan song about

As I sip my Napoleon Shandy
Eating more than enough apple pie
Could I glance at my screen and see real human beings
Starve to death right in front of my eyes…

That was five years ago, not one, so it’s quite depressing really, to look at the pictures of the famine in the Horn of Africa on TV, and realise that the world is still crocked. Not only that, but I am now crocked, with it. So, it’s not a good place to be now, either the world, or my world, come to that. Half the world is spying on each other and twisting each others’ words in the pursuit of power, and the other half is dying from a lack of food, clean water and sanitation. If they are lucky enough not to be in a war zone.

I suppose I should, once again, count my blessings. Meter or no meter, at least we have clean water. The NHS creaks a bit at the joints, but at least I can get seen by a doctor, eventually. We do have food in the cupboard. By comparison with the women sitting at the edge of the road in Somalia or South Sudan, breaking stones for a living, I am incredibly well off. Perhaps I should be using what time is left to me to try and ensure that those who are responsible for their plight are the ones who end up breaking stones by the side of the road.

But how? As usual, the Disasters Emergency Committee has issued the customary appeals, and no doubt, as usual, the great British public will respond. I was tempted, at one point, to type in this week’s Epiblog something like “if you have ever enjoyed what I have written up to now, and you want to show your appreciation, and you were going to donate to DEC anyway, add on a quid for me, and I’ll see you right one day.”

But, on reflection, it sounded a bit wanky and arrogant, and in any case I am not sure how much of this aid will reach the people who need it anyway, and how much good it will do. My experiences in dealing with Oxfam, for instance, in the past, have led me to the conclusion that in many ways, it is on a par with Tescos, and driven by similar motives. I can give you chapter and verse if you want, but this is probably not the time, or the place. Plus, there is the issue of donating to a fund that, when faced with the massive amount of public donation and goodwill after the Tsunami appeal, decided to return the surplus to the donors, instead of having the foresight to open up a bank account somewhere and stick the money in it, in the sure and certain knowledge that when disasters come, they come not as single spies, but in battalions, and that it would always come in useful one day. Now they have to do it all over again, which doesn’t strike me as the best logistical outcome.

Anyway, as well as my failures on the wider scene, I have failures nearer home to worry about, which is another reason for taking a break from the blog. There is urgent, and serious work to be done on the business, if it is going to ever achieve the levels it needs to. Fortunately, thanks to the incredible generosity of one of my dearest friends, two free sessions of “financial planning advice” have turned up, but to make the most of these, I need to take the problem by the scruff of the neck and give it a good shaking. I don’t know how it will turn out, but it will be hard work, and it will take lots of time, lots more time than I have hitherto apportioned it.

One of the things I have had to do for this financial planning thingum is talk about my “vision” for the business. I wasn’t aware that I had a “vision”. Joan of Arc used to have visions, and we all know what happened to her. But in response, I said what I said to one of my (then, sadly, no longer) friends, back in 1998, that I started the business as “a Golden Ship for me and all my friends to ride in”. Several bad decisions later (not all of them mine, but enough to make a difference) we’re holed around the waterline, pumping like mad, and I have also seriously screwed up the lives of several people who were mad enough to want to sail with me for the voyage. The financial advisor sent me an email about the figures she needed from us that ended with “Sent from by Blackberry” and I was oh so tempted to type, on the bottom of my reply, “Sent by a Raspberry…”

Then there’s also the issue of how, when, and if we are ever going to get to Arran again, and several rivers to cross if we are going to achieve that particular objective. Since it might be our last holiday for a while, if we can keep the camper van on the road long enough for the Silkie’s final long voyage, I need to devote time to that as well. That is the least of the many things I owe Debbie, having bolloxed up her holiday last year. I would like to be able to take Tiggy to Kildonan Beach one more time as well. She loves it there. I say “one more time”, because she went to the vet this week as that warty thing on the side of her mouth has started to grow back again, and we were considering whether she needed yet another operation.

“Well,” said Jeremy the Vet, “It’s six months since she had the last one, and six months is a long time in the life of a dog. At her age, she might not be around in six months’ time”. Oh. Thanks. True, of course, but rather brutal to Debbie. Anyway, when it comes, that will be another one of the many challenges to surmount.

Before I start on all this, though, we might have a celebratory sit out on the decking tonight, around the chiminea, singing songs and telling stories of the glory days of Russell the cat and his many doings. And we’re going to light some tea lights and arrange them on his mosaic, in the pattern of the constellation of the plough. If I do inadvertently accidentally trigger the Apocalypse or something, I apologise. Look at it this way, it’s more fun than being raptured, and you won’t have to get up tomorrow and wash the car.

No doubt Big G will be relieved that events down here have conspired to stop me banging on the ceiling for a while, in a futile attempt to gain his attention. St Padre Pio and St Jude can each book their week by the sea with a clear conscience, and Jesus can practice his surfing skills, though to be honest, if you can already walk on water, that is cheating ever so slightly.

If everything goes well, I might be able to pick up the threads in the autumn, and, as Richard Bach said, you are never given a dream without also being given the means to make it come true: you may have to work for it, though. But I have to accept now that it is time to fold up the tents and steal way, not a rout, but a retreat, in hopes that we live to fight another day. If it all goes wrong, of course, my next post will be from underneath the railway arches somewhere (subject to internet access, and being able to find a dongle in a skip behind Morrisons).

Happy trails, everyone. Au reservoir.

Epiblog for the Second Sunday After Trinity

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley, and a week in which I have become resigned to several things. Resigned, but not reconciled. One of these being, most obviously perhaps, that the zenith of Midsummer has passed, and, inevitably, the days are shortening and the darkness is growing again, albeit almost imperceptibly at the moment.

I’ve also has to come to terms with the underlying reality of my employment and financial situation, as I have spent the week trying to sell books with one leg while adding up spreadsheets with the other. Spreadsheets with more holes in them than a moth-fancier’s vest, in some cases. And I have had to come to terms with the fact that it will be a long, long time, if ever, until I walk again, or even go upstairs in my own house.

Someone, one of my online friends, said, complimenting me, this week, that I wasn’t in the least bit “whiney” about my plight. Well, believe me, this week I have so many whines, I could open a vineyard.

Anyway, all of the above is an interesting little load to take on board, but at least there are still a few compensations, such as sitting on the decking on Saturday morning, having persuaded Deb to heave me over the step, savouring the sunshine and what’s left of summer, and starting to write down these thoughts with my Gillott “dipper” on the grounds that setting it out in looping copperplate in a ring-bound notebook lends this crap an air of spurious authenticity! It was a welcome oasis in a week of struggles.

Not everyone has struggled this week, of course. Tiggy has struggled to stay awake, I suppose, sometimes, having consumed one too many doggie treats and settled down on her fleecy dog-bed with a satisfied, post-prandial sigh that soon turns into deeper snoring. I had charge of all three dogs, briefly, the other morning, when Granny took Mike, Debbie’s dad, to Sheffield for his hospital appointment, the latest in a series of many. So, naturally, in my capacity as “mine host”, I offered them all a doggie treat. Tiggy accepted hers graciously, even delicately, then tottered back to her bed, to consume it in comfort. Freddie got up, sniffed his, declined it, glared at it, glared at me, then turned round and settled down in a huff, resuming sleeping, but this time with his back to both the offending object, and to me. Zak’s dog treat vanished down his gullet without touching the sides, and he wagged his tail for more. He then went on to eat the remains of Tiggy’s tea from the night before, still in her bowl, and the cat food which Kitty had left, before licking his lips and settling down, curled in the comfy armchair in the conservatory. He’s still a growing dog.

I mentioned to Debbie that Zak doesn’t seem to distinguish between his food and other food, to him it’s all just “food”. I ventured the opinion that he may have been starved by the people who mistreated him as a puppy, before he was rescued and re-homed on Granny. She replied that he’s like all animals, they eat what’s in front of them because they never know where their next meal is coming from. I said that this was a philosophy which I also espoused:

“Yes,” she retorted, “and look where it’s got you!” Then she gave me one of her funny looks, and the matter was closed.

Kitty has had an uneventful week in the way that only cats can. Sleeping, eating, yawning, stretching, purring. All the usual stuff, in fact. Actually, at one point during the week, I did wonder if she had somehow acquired the Padre Pio gift of bilocation. I was working away on one of my many tedious spreadsheets, and I vaguely registered, with the untuned portion of my brain, the sound of cat food being munched in the corner of the kitchen, behind me. It took a few more seconds to register that whoever was chomping their way through the cat food, it wasn’t Kitty, because she was curled up asleep in a tight furry ball on her cat-blanket.

In the time it took me to half-turn the wheelchair and shout “Oi!” the culprit had skedaddled through the bifold doors, thence to the cat flap and the great beyond. Not Kitty, and not Spidey, either, though he has waltzed in and out during the week with his customary gay insouciance. Not even the Interloper, who hasn’t been seen since the day Kitty stood her ground and saw him off. No, this was a different cat again, small, grey-black, and pretty nimble and quick, so obviously a youngster. I told Debbie about it later, and she said we might as well just put up a sign outside that says “Cat Hotel”.

Speaking of Kitty’s blanket reminds me that I have had a request to provide the “recipe” or pattern or whatever it is called, from someone who reads this blog on I-church, and I did actually try and reply, but if she never got it, or indeed for anyone else who might want it, but didn’t like to ask, this is how Maisie did it.

CROCHETED BLANKET: For anyone who can crochet, this is probably best known as a "granny blanket". You make a short chain of about 6 single crochet and fix it into a ring. Then crochet four "shells" (= three treble crochets + one single chain) INTO THE MIDDLE of the ring. Then you just repeat and repeat until you've used up all your wool! The corners are formed by making TWO shells into the space at the corner so each row is larger than the last. I finish blankets off with a few rows of double or single crochet (depending on how much wool is left) as this gives the outer edge a bit more strength. This is very basic stuff which a beginner's book on crochet will explain better, with pictures.

So, there you have it. I hope it makes sense. I don’t speak crochet, it might as well be Croatian for all the head nor tail I can make of it.

My other visitors this week have been possibly even less helpful than the mystery cat, and certainly less entertaining. The council came for their long-anticipated meeting on Monday. Grateful as I was for them coming round, it turned out their motives were not entirely altruistic, because as well as the money-man and the Occupational Therapist, they also brought with them the surveyor, who would have had to come anyway, to do a survey at some point. So they were definitely mob-handed. Kitty was elsewhere and Deb was out teaching, so on “my” side I had Tiggy, who slept through the whole thing, and my Mother-in-Law, who had arrived in the midst of proceedings to see if Tiggy wanted to go walkies (she didn’t, she wanted to go sleepies).

The good news was, it turned out that they had indeed made a slight error in the calculations, because of the difference in the way in which they had worked out Debbie’s minuscule but variable earnings. I was pleased to hear this, but I wasn’t building up my hopes, because “our” contribution had previously been assessed at £10,392.83. So, it came as a considerable shock to me to find that, under the “re-calculation”, our contribution is now apparently £1956.54. I took a deep breath, about to question how such a presumably minor error could result in a difference of £8,463.29, but then I checked myself. If I questioned such a seemingly-random outcome, who knows, the next calculation might decide that we owed them £27,826.91, or any other figure you can pluck out of the air. So I shut up.

£1956.54 is still a lot of money if you don’t have it, but it’s the contribution to the whole scheme, not just the ramp. Plus, it might be do-able in that we may be able to negotiate with the contractor to pay it in “chunks” over four or five months, out of my DLA, to cover the debt, and we can even put forward our own preferred contractor, so we could even try and have the work done, or at least project-managed, by Peter the Handyman.

The bad news is that, obviously nothing is going to happen very soon, even if we decided we do want the ramp doing as part of a new plan (plan Z, I think it is, we’re up to now) so I am still resigned to sitting out on the decking, and getting out of the house only when Debbie can be bothered to shift me like a sack of spuds on a pallet-truck. And the “new” plan means I have to resign myself to living on the ground floor, and never go upstairs again, as their intention is to alter the house and make it completely disabled-friendly downstairs. While this is the most practical, and indeed undoubtedly the cheapest solution, it means also that I have to resign myself to sleeping alone (apart from the cat, on cold nights) for the rest of my days. Another thing to become reconciled to, in this week of resignations (are you listening, David Cameron?)

Anyway, we left it at that, the council and me: I told them to get on with whatever paperwork they needed. We can always tell them to stuff it if Peter comes back from his holidays and thinks of a better plan (Plan Z-a, perhaps). The ramp is still the most important aspect for me, while there are still some shreds of summer left.

The final visitor was the Cable Guy. No, not Jim Carrey, that would at least have been more tinged with celebrity stardust. This cable guy was actually, technically speaking, a satellite dish guy, anyway, and he came on Thursday to do the installation of the Government-approved, part-funded digital switchover to 21st century TV equipment, as opposed to the current arrangement, which has valves that date back to John Logie Baird. We have paid for this, the second-cheapest option (naturally) at least a month ago, but such is the waiting list that they have only just got around to us. It was obvious more or less from the start that it wasn’t going well. He huffed and he puffed and he didn’t exactly blow the house down, but he did heave a huge drum of cabling around on the decking, borrowing our extended ladders that Debbie had left propped up against one of the trees in the garden, and making lots of noise with a very large drill. Eventually, he came clomping back in through the open conservatory doors.

“Problem, mate!”

He explained that, because the dish needs a clear line of sight from the top corner of the house, next to Colin’s bathroom window, to the distant constellations “dying in the corner of the sky” where the satellites live, and there were branches in the way, it wouldn’t work. Several branches, actually, belonging to several large trees. I asked him if his remit included shinning up there and cutting them off, but sadly, it seemed it didn’t owing to the stringencies of health and safety. Not that H & S seemed to be an issue when he was borrowing our ladder, to save himself the trouble of having to get his off the roof of his van, but hey, what do I know, eh?

So we both agreed to mark up his paperwork as “installation incomplete” and he went on his merry way, on the understanding that we would call his office when the offending dendrites had been lopped.

After he had gone, I was left to musing about which was worth more to me, the leafy canopy of a million myriad greens or the questionable fare served up by the BBC and the other channels. At least with a satellite dish, I would be able to watch BBC4, the channel where the BBC currently hides all the good stuff on the grounds that it is more elitist to broadcast them on a station named after the number of people who can actually receive it. One advantage of the satellite dish, if we do go down that route, is that it comes with a subtitles option that allows you to turn on some kind of descriptive on-screen labelling during programmes. This would be very useful, and would save me hours of time explaining the plots of detective thrillers to Deb, if it has subtitles that say “he’s one” or “that is the same guy who was in the supermarket”.

So, that was the week that was. Apart from those towering highlights, it was the usual same old same old. Dealing with idiot couriers who not only pick up the wrong box of books but then relentlessly deliver it even though on-line in their helpful little “Live Chat” window they assured you it was on its way back to the depot, and fixing the vacuum cleaner, which turned out to have a blockage in the hose caused by a paper clip which had attracted, and wound round itself, an enormous clump of dog fur. Tiggy came over, inquisitively, to see what I was doing, so when I had put the hose together again I made her stand there while I vacc-ed all the loose fur off her. Good, patient dog that she is, she let me do it, and cut out the middledog.

On Saturday evening, instead of my Bible study in preparation for posting this, we had another evening where we lit the chiminea and sat outside. Granny came round, bringing Freddie and Zak, so once again we were able to do our tribal thing of sitting round the fire and telling tales into the night. I looked up into the still-light sky at one point and just as I did so, a bat flitted across the field of my vision, its black silhouette twisting improbably in mid-air before vanishing. It is good to know they are still there, the bats, I mean. I often thought, stuck in hospital, of sitting outside on a summer evening and it was good to be doing it for real again. And yes, a bottle of wine was opened, a rare treat these days when my tipple of necessity, if not choice, is cheap cider. I had made some pakoras for tea, which turned out quite well, even though I do say it myself. I chopped a big red onion and fried it in olive oil along with some button mushrooms, chopped up into tiny pieces, then mixed that with mashed potato and sweetcorn, adding cumin, coriander, turmeric, chilli powder and fennel seeds, before binding the whole mixture together with garam flour and water mixed to a gungy paste. I got the oil in the pan really hot, then dropped in dollops of the mixture and flattened them til they were vaguely round, frying them hard on both sides. Nobody left any, and Granny and Deb both asked for seconds, so I take that as a vote of confidence!

It did mean, though, another week of neglecting Holy Writ. I haven’t done anything even vaguely spiritual this week, which will please at least one of my correspondents, another very great friend of mine, who emailed me in response to the bit about becoming a trendy vicar in the last Epiblog, to say that she much preferred the Epiblogs where I didn’t go on about the Bible all the time. I don’t think I am cut out for this trendy vicar lark, anyway. A trendy vicar that spent all his time making pakoras instead of studying the Bible would soon come to the attention of Pope Benny or Archbishop Rowan, I fear. Making pakoras is not justifying the ways of God to man, as can be deduced from the simple fact that Milton never cooked a pakora in his life.

Anyway, I decided I had been backsliding, so I had a quick look through today’s texts. Zechariah 9:9-12 is chock full of delightfully-loopy Old Testament King James stuff, including

Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion; shout, O daughter of Jerusalem: behold, thy King cometh unto thee: he is just, and having salvation; lowly, and riding upon an ass, and upon a colt the foal of an ass. And I will cut off the chariot from Ephraim, and the horse from Jerusalem, and the battle bow shall be cut off: and he shall speak peace unto the heathen: and his dominion shall be from sea even to sea, and from the river even to the ends of the earth.

This is supposedly the prophecy that related to Jesus riding into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, I think. Go figure. Was Zechariah a true prophet, or did Jesus know of the prophecy and make use of it by commandeering a handy unbroken colt?

Psalm 145: 8-14 largely passed me by, I must admit, apart from

The LORD upholdeth all that fall, and raiseth up all those that be bowed down.

Which I would dearly love to turn out to be true, and soon.

Romans 7: 15-25a depressed me even more;

O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?


I spend enough time thinking about death as it is, sitting here during the week, without the author of Romans reminding me. I mean, I know that this is supposed to be the point of the Bible and all, but enough death already!

But there was some redemption for the people who make pakoras, not war, in Matthew 11:16-19 & 25-30.

The Son of man came eating and drinking, and they say, Behold a man gluttonous, and a winebibber, a friend of publicans and sinners. But wisdom is justified of her children.

Well, I own up to the first two straight away, I don’t know any publicans, though, but I do know plenty of sinners, in fact I am one myself.

All of the above serves neatly to illustrate that I don’t know what I am talking about, or where to go and what to do next. I have once more reached, in my spiritual life, such as it is, a state of vuja-de: I have never been here before and I haven’t a clue what is going to happen.

I came out of hospital with high hopes. The stripping away of many of the layers of my previous life during my six months of incarceration had left me, I thought, with a new focus, and a desire to do Godly things. But, in my naivety, I had also assumed that this wheelchair malarkey was only going to be a temporary thing, and that I was soon going to be up and about again. Not so, as the resignation this week has told me. Not so, and in fact never again, for some things.

So where does that leave me? A theologian or a spiritual advisor would probably tell me that I was wrong to pray to Big G with the expectation of getting something in return. You can’t bargain with the Almighty. Maybe God’s plan, such as it is, necessitates me doing Godly things from a wheelchair. Certainly our lives have considerably simplified since I have been ill. In fact, if it gets much simpler, I might just as well let my beard grow, build a barn, start shunning people, and become Amish.

I still cling vaguely to the hope that there is some pattern, though, that there might yet be some breakthrough that will bring all this crap to an end and usher us through into a new era beyond the dismal prospects I see all around me. During the week, I had one of those dreams I have from time to time where both my mother and my father are present. These aren’t dreams about the old days, they are both present now, and we talk about what’s happening at the moment. Sure, in the dream, we all know they’re really dead, but it’s no big deal at the time. Anyway this dream ended with us all sitting around the mosaic covering Russell’s grave in the garden, on which were burning tea-lights set in the pattern of the constellation of the Plough.

I have no idea what this means. Perhaps God is telling me to become a farmer, or an astronomer, or what. When we were all sitting out on the decking on Saturday night, I was tempted to ask Debbie to light some tea-lights and arrange them in the pattern of the Plough on Russell’s mosaic, just to see what happened, whether the clouds would then suddenly part and a lightning bolt would jolt me out of my wheelchair for ever. But I didn’t.

I have mused on it for many hours though. Perhaps it means that we should get the branches lopped, so that the satellite, up there amongst the constellations, can fulfil God’s wish that I watch BBC4. Perhaps it means that it is time to plough up the graves of the past to see if there is any hope of new, fertile growth in the future. I don’t know.

As I sit here on a Sunday teatime, finishing off typing these words, I have to admit, if you came here looking for succour, I am sorry, I just don’t know. Tea lights in the pattern of the Plough. Answers on a postcard, please.