Epiblog for St Roch

It has been a busy couple of weeks in the Holme Valley. Life goes on. We’re all still here. Just – but more of that later. Last Thursday, I had a visitor, and last Saturday, another! My social life, speaking as a parcel, is looking up no end.

Yes, a parcel I remain, sadly, as the saga of the Ramp (now dignified by an initial capital letter) has ground to an unhappy close, with Kirklees Council deciding, after weeks of filling in forms and supplying proofs of destitution, that we apparently don’t qualify for the grant after all, so even our “initial contribution” of £1956.54 was wrong. Or something. I have given up with these people. The good news is, that because I have a “degenerative condition” I can apply again at some point in the future, when I have got worse!

Given that the application form this time around was 28 pages long and contained questions such as “Are you now or were you ever a prisoner of the Japanese?”, I would rather hack my own toes off with a rusty knife and serve them up on toast to next door’s cat than give those inept, miserable bastards the satisfaction of screwing up my life by taking up vast acres of time, raising my hopes, then dashing them again, as they have done twice now. If they really want to make a difference to the “Streetscene” as it says on their letterhead, perhaps they could go outside and fill in a few potholes.

Talking of next door’s cat, I am happy to report that Spidey, like the poor, is also with us, yea, even to the end of time, it would seem, as he blithely uses the cat flap and comes and goes as he pleases now, quite regardless of the presence of a large hairy Yorkshireman sitting up in bed and watching him. I suppose the next stage will be the said large hairy Yorkshireman discovering that Spidey is actually sharing the said bed with him, if it gets any colder.

But I digress. Visitors. My first honoured guest was the Vicar, for tea, on Thursday. Martin, as we shall call him, for that is his name, has been promoted to look after two parishes round here, and his church is just up the road, but by a strange quirk of ecclesiastical cartography, we actually belong in the parish of Golcar, which is miles away. Anyway, that didn’t stop Martin making a welcome visit on Thursday, for tea, and bringing his little 10-week old puppy, Seth, who promptly went round and polished off all the dog food he could find in all the pet bowls around the kitchen. He’s a growing boy, little Seth, and unbearably cute, as well.

We roasted the chestnuts, which Debbie had got at the market last weekend, on the fire, and put the world to rights, aided by Granny, who dropped in on her way across the valley. I was delighted to be able to achieve one of my ambitions and use one of my all-time “must say” phrases, for real. “More tea, Vicar?” That only leaves “Follow that car”, “Not so fast, Dhakarumbha!” and “Take that, you bastard!” and my life will be complete.

Martin told us of his translation from the life of a hospital chaplain, bright-lit, ordered, self contained, to his work now, looking after two large parishes, semi-rural in nature, with just him and Seth rattling round in a huge, gloomy 1930s vicarage. It all sounded a bit Jane Austen to me, and I told him so. He replied, rather startlingly, that he had considered the issue and had agreed to give short term shelter to a family of Zimbabwean asylum-seekers, who were otherwise homeless.

The fact that he is putting up an otherwise homeless family of Zimbabwean Asylum Seekers in his otherwise huge and echoing Father-Ted style vicarage, makes him a top banana, in my book. It’s also an incredibly Christian act of charity. In contrast, I must say, to the attitude of some members of the Church of England to the “Occupy” protestors, which I have had cause to complain about, latterly the Dean of Sheffield, who seems determined in his opposition to their attempts to create a fairer, more just society, a situation from which we must draw our own conclusions.

Meanwhile, of course, Kitty continues her own “Occupy” protest, occupying the bin bag full of shredded financial papers (donated by Granny for the purposes of lighting the fire) in the corner of the hearth. Actually, I think she would protest more if you tried to take the bin-bag away, which is why it remains in situ.

I discovered - as well - there's actually a local Asylum Seekers' support group, which I didn't know about, but that they've also been contact with one guy, an Eritrean who was also homeless. He's likely to go off the radar because his living arrangements fell through.

Now I don't know about you, and I don't know about him, his rights and wrongs, I suspect he's a mixture, like the rest of us - other than that he's a human being, like us, two arms, two legs, shaves in the morning, some mother's son, that sort of stuff. A long way from home, and not a friend in the world, right now. Yeah, according to the hard of heart, those who had a compassion bypass at birth, he should go back whence he came, yadda yadda.

But it looks pretty dark out there right now, outside, and it's cold tonight, even here, inside my kitchen, writing this, sitting next to the stove, and the drumming on the conservatory roof tells me it's raining as well, and I just want to know, all you people who go on about this sort of stuff, are you happy with him being out there, alone, in that? Irrespective of his rights and wrongs, just tonight, don't you think there might just be a better way to treat a fellow human being? You may think he shouldn't have come here, and he deserves all he gets, but could you really harden your heart to that extent?

And if, like me, you aren't happy with it, maybe we should put pen to paper, maybe we should put finger to keyboard, hand to plough, foot to accelerator, pen to chequebook, whatever, tomorrow, and start the long tedious process of doing something about it, and finding him, and bringing him in somewhere warm?

The truth is, despite government-inspired, divide and rule propaganda to the contrary, that asylum seekers are not entitled to cash help from the government and they are not able to claim benefits. However, while we take forever to sort out their applications (which is not the fault of the seeker) they have the right to be able to survive and live directly on a hand to mouth existence for the very basics they need to survive.

Despite what is reported in papers such as the Sun and the Daily Mail, taxpayers do not fund this directly, it comes from an EU fund that supports asylum seekers/refugees who go to any EU state. People living in limbo like this do not have a quality of life, as they are not allowed to work or do anything to improve their situations, and of course they have the Damoclean Sword of deportation always hanging over their heads, often to somewhere dangerous to which they have actually no connection.

Speaking of quality of life, my second visitor of the week was Owen, from South Wales. He of the free stairlift. He was appalled to hear of the council decision and he is going to come and build me a ramp, and fix the door which is hanging off its hinges, and chip back the 5mm lip of concrete with a chisel, so, after this weekend, I will be able once more to exit and enter my own house of my own free will, without being carted in and out like a sack of spuds. It won’t exactly conform to building regulations, but do you know what, Kirklees Council, if you object to that, then you can stick it up your arse, second shelf! It will be a year come 7th December, that I have been a virtual prisoner in my own home.

This will still leave me without a disabled-friendly downstairs bathroom and loo, but Owen seems to think he can sort out something at the foot of the stairs, a sort of bench-seat to allow me to transfer on to the stairlift, then I will once more be able to go upstairs, if it works, and sleep in the same bed as my wife, (yes, and my dog!) for the first time in 18 months.

Except that it may be too late to sleep with my dog on the bed, because for a couple of nights at the weekend, we all had to camp out down here, in the kitchen/conservatory, with Tiggy on a blanket and panting for her life, because she took a sudden turn for the worse. She is fifteen, going on sixteen (with apologies to the King of Siam) and when she had that cancerous growth removed from her lip at the start of September, the vet advised us then that there may be secondary tumours, and to watch out for “clinical signs”.

One such clinical sign was on Saturday, when she keeled over on her way back from her water bowl and lay on her side in obvious distress. We already had some Rimadyl from the vet for her, and we managed to get some of that down her, plus some Furosemide, and she calmed down, while Debbie knelt by her side, stroking her gently and soothing her by saying anything that came into her head. Eventually, we got her to lie on her dog bed, and on Saturday night and Sunday night, with an emergency trip to the vet surgery to pick up some steroids and anti-biotics in between, we all bedded down in here like Anglo-Saxons in the mead hall, me sitting up in my chair all night and Debbie with the duvet, pillows and sleeping bag.

Given that we already had every form of conventional veterinary medicine on our side, I started looking on the internet for “prayers for sick dogs” and discovered, via the magic of Google, that dogs have their own patron Saint, St. Roch. Apparently he was cast out for curing people of the plague by making the sign of the cross over them, and went and built himself a hut of leaves and branches in the forest, where he would have perished had not a spring of fresh water suddenly welled up at the site, and one of the hunting dogs of a local nobleman found him and started feeding him by bringing him bread rolls.

So, in addition to praying to Big G himself for Tiggy to recover, I prayed to Padre Pio, St Jude, and St Roch. I am not choosy, any Saint will do in a crisis, and at a push I’ll even make do with one of those Egyptians that looks a bit poochy from the neck up, and walks sideways.

By Sunday night, we’d more or less said our goodbyes to Tiggy, and I was remembering all the many miles we’d travelled together, how she’d been to Ireland, and up Scafell, and Snowdon, how she’d been up Goatfell on Arran and swum in nearly every lake in the Lake District, how she’d plodded the entire towpath of the Lancaster Canal when Debbie kayaked it the other year. She’s been part of our lives for fifteen years, and her going will leave an immense and unbridgeable gap in our lives. There will never be another dog like her, and we’ll always remember her.

Desperate, on Sunday night, wondering whether to call in the vet, we rang Juanita at her animal sanctuary for help, and she sympathised too, because Oliver, her 20-year-old dog, with whom Tiggy shared a snooze under the table during our memorable St Swithun’s Day visit, had finally died, back in September. Debbie made me promise not to blub when I phoned Juanita, then made the mistake of playing “Auld Lang Syne” by the Tannahill Weavers just before I made the call, with the result that I “roared like a bairn”, the whole time. Juanita’s advice was, as always, sound, and helpful. We had two choices, either let nature take its course or call the vet in, and in effect those may become one choice, when it comes to the time to finally let her go.

Tiggy, of course, had other ideas, and promptly confounded us by not dying. As I speak, pausing to touch wood and offer up yet another hasty orison in the general direction of St Roch, she has responded well to the new medication and is back to how she was before she had her “episode”. We, however, have aged about 50 years apiece, and are totally drained, but at least each remaining day we have her is a blessing, and there’s no telling, when you think about it, that any of us will be here this time tomorrow.

Conventional depictions of St Roch, I remarked, also show him with a wound on the thigh in more or less the same place where, I noticed (on finally going to bed for the first time in 48 hours) I currently have a wound on my thigh, from pouring boiling water on it when I was trying to fill up the hot water bottle, which is a touch too near stigmata for comfort, and at least spooked me!

It’s not been a good news fortnight then, and I was hoping that the weather would at least get better (it didn’t) or that something would happen in the world at large to lift my gloom – any light at the end of the tunnel?

So, finally, today, to end a week of gloom, we had the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s formal statement on how we are doing. Well, it was all supposed to be worth it, wasn't it, this wrongheaded, doctrinaire, primrose path to disaster, it was all going to come right because the magic economy fairy was going to sprinkle trickledown dust on the private sector and it would magically burgeon, creating health, wealth and happiness, and we would all be so “ankle-deep in gold dust” that throwing some of it to the grateful urchins and charities who would be doing the work which the government had washed its hands of would be funded to the max, and stuffed to the gills with smiling big society volunteers, who would make Hare Krishna “chuggers” look like manic depressives.

Yeah right. It was all supposed to be worth it. If it's not hurting, it's not working, and we're all in this together. So. let's have a look, then. Has all that grief and pain of the last 18 months been worth it? Have all the redundancies been worth it? What about the people made homeless? That worth it? What about all the people taking their pets to the animal sanctuary - or worse, turning them out of doors, because they can't afford to keep them any more? What that worth it? What about Mark and Helen Mullins? Worth it? Was it worth all the pain and suffering George Osborne, David Cameron and their lickspittles have inflicted on us?

Do we have a rosy, glowing economy, with a bright future of sunlit private sector vistas and happy green uplands where finches and fairies skim between the trees? Has it worked? Or - if not yet, might it work very soon, if we could just cling on with the last vestiges of our fingernails?

No. It hasn't.

and

No, it won't.

And the worst thing is, not only do I know this, and knew all along it would never work, but Osborne and his acolytes know it too: because you can't artificially divide the economy into public and private, four legs good, two legs bad, however much you put your propaganda machine into overdrive and set everybody at each other's throats with divisive, demonising divide and rule tactics. It's the economy, stupid, as William Jefferson Clintstone once memorably observed, and it all depends on each other.

And despite that, they've chosen to wreck the economy. And wreck people's lives, futures and prospects along with it. Seventy years ago, they would have been shot for treason. How times change.

If I start to think about the dismal state the country is in for long, a red mist starts to descend, sometimes, and if I then go on to link it to my own situation, it is often, sadly, followed by a black mist. I haven’t really written before about the black mist, because I think writing about it gives it strength, and gives it a claim on you. Ideally, I would choose not to name my demons, in case I become attached to them, or vice versa. The black mist doesn’t have a name, though occasionally, through the black mist, you can hear forlorn voices sobbing, and crying “Nevermore!”

Nevermore the trip to the Lake District with Tig snoozing in the back of the car and the kayak sitting on its hydraglide on the roof, Deb snoozing in the passenger seat and Ewan MacColl warbling “The Manchester Rambler” on the CD player. Nevermore being able to walk from one room to the next. Nevermore the sunshine and happiness. Nevermore the sitting by Derwentwater and painting, nevermore the financial security, nevermore the self-worth of being able to provide for yourself and others, nevermore your friends, nevermore your independence, nevermore your usefulness. Once Tiggy really has gone, and it can only be a matter of time, nevermore, nevermore, nevermore. A few more years of this struggle and then - ?

And at times like this, when the black mist is at its worst, I feel like getting all of my tablets, and all of Tiggy’s tablets, and every tablet in the damn house and washing them down my neck with a bottle of whisky. There is no doubt in my mind at all that Debbie would be better off if I was dead, provided the insurance policy pays out on suicides. Her financial woes would be over, and she is still young enough to find someone else to love and take care of her.

You could say it is faith that has stopped me. So far, at any rate. Faith, and a lack of whisky. Faith that things will get better, and that there is a lesson from little Seth, that old dogs go, and eventually young dogs come along to take their place and the world turns, and whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should. You could say it is sheer stubborn-ness: why should I be the one who gives in, when the guilty, the people responsible for this mess, from God downwards, to the “colleagues” who so kindly organised my redundancy, to the idiots in government who are trashing the economy, go unpunished? You could say it is my desire to prove everyone else wrong, that I was right all along. You could say that while Tig still needs me, while Kitty still needs feeding, and while there’s still a few wrongs to be righted, I had better keep going.

Personally, I honestly do not know. But for the moment, the black mist seems to have receded.