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.
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