Epiblog for the Fifth Sunday of Lent

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. Spring seems to be happening, stealthily, around us. Each morning when I’ve looked out of my bedroom window there seems to be a few more fuzzy catkins open on the branches outside, that have been bare and cold all winter. I even saw an early bee, bumbling and fumbling around on them, the other day. I also evicted a bee (the same one?) that had somehow gotten into the house and was trying to escape by head-butting the window. Maybe it was from Scotland or something, who knows, anyway I eventually caught the benighted creature and let it go, out of the conservatory door, where it promptly buzzed off without a word of thanks. It had taken 45 minutes to manoeuvre it into a cup and cover it with a piece of cardboard, a process complicated by the fact that one of us could fly and one of us couldn’t even walk.

Even the grey mornings this week have eventually turned to sunshine, albeit pale and watery in some cases, but enough to tempt Kitty away from her cat-bed (or `bin-bag’ as they are more commonly known) in the hearth, and onto Zak’s (formerly Tiggy’s) fleecy dog bed in his chair in a sunny spot in the conservatory.

The badger has been active as well, coming most nights for the food we leave out for it, although it seems to have definite dietary likes and dislikes; we were told badgers like bananas, ours doesn’t, but he does hoover up nuts and raisins with gusto and relish. Sadly, my attempts to photograph him have only met with limited success, part of the problem being that we never know precisely when he’s going to turn up, and of course it’s always, er, dark, when he does. I want to explore setting up a badgercam, and I have already rigged up a power point off the one that runs the TV in the conservatory, now I just need to find out how to set the web cam for low light and motion sensor settings, and then we’re in business. I might have a crack at it later on. God knows, it will come as welcome relief from the dreary tasks that have been stacked up for me next week, most of which involve people persecuting me, or trying to, over money.

Debbie’s still gargling gallons of carrot juice, yesterday I made her another batch, using about 3 kilos of carrots to produce three bottles of carrot juice and spending about 90 minutes cleaning the filter on the juicer afterwards. As an activity, it’s right up there with watching paint dry. Still, if it gets her through to the Easter break, I guess it’s time well spent, she’s been running on empty for weeks now with all of this damn teaching stuff.

As for me, I am usually glad at this time of the year, “Bytuene Mersh and Averil, whan spray beginneth to springe”, but this spring has been tinged with a bitter-sweet sadness for me because Tiggy’s not around to feel the growing warmth of the sun on her back or sniff the flowers in the garden. The daffodils are out by Russell’s grave, as well, but I’ve still not seen any crocuses, I don’t think they’re going to come up this year, maybe the badger ate the bulbs. This year, though, these days at any rate, I feel more and more like the deranged creator of some rambling old ruin, maybe even part of the ruin itself, looking at the broken down walls and the fallen pillars and the faceless statues and trying to make some sense of what used to be, and what is, in the same way that W B Yeats viewed the wreckage of Ireland after the civil war and incited the bees to return and build in the empty starling’s nest by his window:

The bees build in the crevices
Of loosening masonry, and there
The mother birds bring grubs and flies.
My wall is loosening; honey-bees,
Come build in the empty house of the stare.

We are closed in, and the key is turned
On our uncertainty; somewhere
A man is killed, or a house burned.
Yet no clear fact to be discerned:
Come build in the empty house of the stare.

We’re still no nearer getting another dog, largely because I have no means of transporting Pepper, the would-be dog in question, from Carmarthen to the Holme Valley. My problem is that organising such a transportation requires energy and commitment, two commodities in scarce supply in my life at the moment, and I have – of course – no means of travelling independently. So I wander around like a hermit with the clap instead, curating the museum of my own downfall.

The news from the wider world, such of it that reaches me, is no cheerier. In the budget, the Chancellor of the Exchequer has managed to cock a snook at the poor and the disadvantaged by reducing the tax bill for millionaires while simultaneously mugging old grannies of their pensions, while the unannounced, un-manifesto-ed Health and Social Care Bill has been railroaded through in the teeth of medical opposition, to dismantle the National Health Service. You expect this sort of sneaking, conniving, lurking yet blatant evil from the Tories of course, it’s what they do, but I am constantly amazed by the behaviour of the Lickspittle Democrats who prop them up – they must be so desperate for power that they’re happy to say, along with Groucho Marx, “These are my principles; if you don’t like them, I have others!”

Still, at least the Christian community in the UK can take comfort from one thing that’s happened this week. TV Chef Delia Smith has weighed in on the side of the religious and started a campaign to fight back at attacks on the church by militant atheists. Those of us who have heard and seen her half-time tirade at Norwich City via the public address system, at a time when she was allegedly troubled by the addition of small quantities of trifle to her sherry, know just what a scary prospect this development represents, but really it can only make matters worse. The problem is that the entire debate is bedevilled (oops, no pun intended, you can have that one for free) by the tendency of the media (and hence White Van Man in general) to draw GENERAL inferences from PARTICULAR instances.

So you get some sort of whirly-eyed "Christian" who wants "the right" to re-paint his council van with a fresco of the last supper, wear a six inch bling crucifix on the outside of his overalls, and hand out tracts in work time, and when his employers say, er, wouldn't it be a good idea to sort of mix in some er, work with all this proselytising, somewhere along the line, suddenly the Jerry Springer the Opera Rent-a-mob are out in the streets with their pitchforks and tumbrils, giving Christianity a bad name. Do these people really think that God, with a mind capable of supporting the weight of the entire infinite cosmos, cares about whether two gay men sleep together in a bed-and-breakfast?

But of course, there is always a tiny vocal media-savvy group of loopy fruits who are happy to get offended on everyone else's behalf and object to gay marriage, and it only takes one or two mainstream clergy to fall (or jump) into the same soup and there you have the perfect recipe for Richard Dawkins, another media-savvy equally unrepresentative anti-Christian (I nearly stopped short when typing that last word!) to use the platform gleefully afforded him by the BBC as Darwin's prophet on earth, and rubbish all Christians, and all religion, off the back of the actions of a few misguided individuals who would be better employed picking up leaves.

Exactly the same thing happens with Islam, you get some benighted fool, the fundamentalist equivalent of Citizen Smith (Freedom for Kabul!) who thinks it's a merry jape to burn a poppy on remembrance day, and suddenly the media is all over him like a rash, which of course makes it a slam-dunk for the EDL, the BNP, UKIP, and the mad colonels in Gloucestershire who read the Daily Telegraph, to claim that the country's gorn to the dogs, etc etc etc chiz chiz, continued p 94, until they start foaming at the mouth and fall over backwards.

I am not saying that the Church shouldn't speak out on social and moral issues, but it's the dogmatic insistence on morality being applied in a doctrinaire fashion inflexibly across all situations, just because it says so in a mouldy old heap of goatskins somewhere, a heap of goatskins which can be interpreted several ways in any case, which, as a moral relativist, I find regrettable, and which plays into the hands of atheists and fundamentalists alike, and which makes me tend, if anything (I am not a member of any Church, and described myself on my hospital surgery form as a `Lapsed Agnostic') towards the Church of England, which used to, at any rate, be more of a hobby than a religion, and the chief harm it caused was that you might occasionally get a dry sherry when you asked for a sweet one. But even the Church of England, bless it, has been getting its cassocks in a twist about gay marriage, which is probably why Rowan Williams has finally decided he’d prefer to be cleaning the juicer, and I don’t blame him.

It’s the inflexibility of extremism which sits ill with me alongside my own perception of the awesomeness of what God must be. Do I believe that Jesus died for me, personally? Sometimes, sometimes not. Some days, I think `why would he bother?’ But the problem is that people get obsessed with the idea of spreading the good news, even if you don’t want to hear it, or are quite happy with your own version of good news, your own path to God. It’s like the over-zealous Boy Scouts, helping old ladies cross the road, even if they didn’t want to go, and while they’re there, will in any case probably be mugged by the Chancellor of the Exchequer.

Supposed Christians behaving in an uncaring, unGodly, unChristian fashion is not the exclusive property of the Church of England, of course, or indeed of the UK. Over in New York another prime example is occurring. Fr Lino Gonsalves, at St James’s Church in the city has decided to get rid of a colony of feral cats which lives in the church grounds by starving them out, ordering the caretakers not to feed them. This despite the fact that local feral cat welfare groups have been managing the colony, trapping the cats, neutering them, and returning them to the wild. Refusing to put out food for the colony will only destroy its stability and even if it is dispersed, new feral cats from elsewhere will move in, and the whole cycle will have to start again, only this time the feral cats will be once more capable of breeding, so in fact the outcome will be worse. Plus, the feral cat groups argue, if the caretakers at St James’s are allowed to get away with this (albeit under duress, there is evidence that in some cases they have been ignoring the Church’s stricture and feeding the cats anyway, apparently) then this would set a precedent over the whole city of New York, causing distress and suffering to many more colonies that at the moment exist in a kind of uneasy stasis, fed by volunteers.

I cannot pretend to understand the mindset of the Church on this matter. Of course, according to official Catholic doctrine, animals don’t have souls, and all I can say to that is that anyone who’s ever been owned by a cat knows this to be patently untrue, and to echo whoever it was that said if there are no cats in heaven, then I don’t want to go there.

As I write this, more than 700 people have emailed the church, the Archdiocese of New York, and the Vatican, to complain about this. I was one of them, and if you’re interested, you can be one of them too. At first, the Archdiocese were trying to make out that they had agreed to meet with the feral cat welfare groups, whose policies of trap-neuter-return have been endorsed by the Mayor of New York and the ASPCA, when this was not the case. This is the text of my most recent email to them:

Dear Archdiocese of New York.

I am surprised not to have had even an acknowledgement from you about my previous email concerning the inhumane treatment of the feral cats at St James Church by one Father Lino Gonsalves, who is apparently attempting to kill them by starvation. I am also concerned to learn that you are apparently telling callers who ring you to express concern about this matter that you are working with the Mayor's Programme to resolve the matter, when this is not the case and you haven't even agreed to meet with them. Could you kindly point me out the bit in the Bible that says it's OK to lie through your teeth when you are caught out doing something bad, to get the heat off for a bit? Only I thought Jesus had a downer on that sort of thing.

As for the animals, I don't have to remind you, surely, of Humphry Primatt's 1776 work Dissertation on the Duty of Mercy and the Sin of Cruelty to Brute Animals, where he says:
"pain is pain, whether it be inflicted on man or beast, and the creature that suffers it, whether man or beast, being sensible of the misery of it while it lasts, suffers evil; and the sufferance of evil, unmeritedly, unprovokedly, where no offence has been given; and no good end can possibly be answered by it, but merely to exhibit power or gratify malice, is Cruelty and Injustice in him that occasions it" [capitalisation as in original text]
He goes on to say, in the same book:
"Now, if amongst men, the differences of their powers of the mind, of their complexion, stature, and accidents of fortune, do not give any one man a right to abuse or insult any other man on account of these differences, for the same reason, a man can have no natural right to abuse and torment a beast, merely because a beast has not the mental powers of a man."
In short, animals - and this includes feral cats - are all God's creatures and are placed in our trust and stewardship. And abuse of that power (as in the case of the behaviour of Fr Gonsalves) is evil. I'm sorry, but there it is. Primatt ends:
"We may pretend to what religion we please, but cruelty is atheism. We may make our boast of Christianity; but cruelty is infidelity. We may trust to our orthodoxy, but cruelty is the worst of heresies."

So - given that the Catholic Church isn't exactly brimming over with positive PR stories at the moment, worldwide, are you happy that one of your churches seems to be in the keeping of someone whose actions would seem to make them, if you accept the views of a distinguished theologian, an evil atheist heretic? I hope not, but since you don't acknowledge or reply to emails, I have to assume you are.

I accept that you might have trouble struggling with Humphry Primatt, so I can make it even simpler:

"The righteous person regards the life of his beasts" - Proverbs 12:10
"His tender mercies are over all His creatures" - Psalm 145:9
The Bible gives several instructions on animal welfare:
• A person must feed his animals before himself (Deuteronomy 11:15)
• An animal's suffering must be relieved (Deuteronomy 12:4)
Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. - Matthew 6:26
Are not five sparrows sold for two pennies? Yet not one of them is forgotten by God - Luke 12:6
Anyway, you are probably thinking well, he's 3000 miles away, what can he do about this? So here's what I am going to do:

a) stop at once any donations to any charities connected with the Catholic Church and tell them it is because of this situation and tell all my contacts to do likewise
b) start a tourism boycott of New York because of this situation. Don't think this is an empty threat, by the way, I have done this before over hedgehog-culling in Scotland, badger-culling in Wales, and seal clubbing by the ignorant Canadians. It tends to get media attention, if nothing else.
c) write about you in my blog. You won't like it.

Oh, and of course, continue to pray to Almighty God and St Francis of Assisi that St James Church New York suffers a lightning bolt of such proportions that the clergy decide to see sense, instead of behaving with stubborn, uncaring, unChristian stupidity.

So far, no reply. I mean it, though. The Archdiocese have since, slowly and grudgingly, agreed to a meeting on Tuesday with the feral cat workers, and we will see what ensues from that. George Bernard Shaw, no less, once memorably said that `man’s inhumanity to man begins with man’s inhumanity to animals’, and I guess that means that, as of now, St James’s Church, the Archdiocese of New York, and the Vatican, all stand this day in favour of man’s inhumanity to man. I could go on and quote other subtle and distinguished theologians such as Andrew Linzey, to point up the paucity of the Church’s stance on this still further, but it’s much easier (and shorter) to come out with it and say they are behaving like a bunch of arses and deserve to be punished, if not in this world, then the next. Meanwhile, Big G, how are we doing on that lightning bolt? Better make it three!

Still, that’s enough Bible-bashing for one week. I don’t know what the Collect is for today, I haven’t looked it up, and if that makes me a bad person, so be it. Next week it is Palm Sunday of course, and the start of the process of Jesus’s betrayal and painful ordeal, two subjects I do know something about. Meanwhile there is work to be done, accounts to be written up, words to be knitted together, books to be laid out, herbs to be potted, carrots to be juiced, dead wood to be gathered up, mosaics to be glued, paintings to be varnished, stones to be carved, and wives, dogs, cats and badgers to be fed. Not necessarily in that order, though. Honey-bees, come build in the empty house of the stare.

Epiblog for the 4th Sunday of Lent

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. A busy fortnight, in fact. Last Sunday I started writing this in the warm, bright cocoon of the camper’s cab, feeling the unaccustomed warmth of the spring sun beating down on me through the big glass, while I sat, absentmindedly `gongoozling’ at the regular procession of narrowboats going along the Peak Forest canal, which Debbie was busy kayaking.

Back at home, with the lifting of winter’s fell pall, I can see the garden and the surrounding area around our house much more clearly now, rather than through a glass, darkly. It is like when the smoke clears finally after a long battle, and you get to count the survivors and see who’s still standing.

Of course, everywhere I look now, I see that there is much to be done. The garden alone needs a massive clearance project. I have great plans for it, but first, all the dead debris of winter needs clearing out of the way. Some of it, such as dead branches and fallen wood, will be easy, because I can pick them up without needing anyone’s assistance, and we’ll just saw them up or chop them up and store them to use next winter. Other things, like the dead camper van, which still needs clearing out and disposing of, although Owen’s ramp neatly circumvented the problem, will take longer to sort out, and be more problematic.

Still, everything gets done in time, and once you have come to embrace the idea of gradual change, things become much less daunting. I have Maisie to thank for opening my eyes to this. Before I was in a wheelchair, I was a great one for the grand projects. I still am, in a sense, but nowadays I realise that grand projects are made up of small steps, and small steps in turn slot together to become tasks, and you can then bundle together these larger tasks into a grand project. The power of gradual change. The hardest thing, is to start. The journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step. But then you do start, and you do a little bit each day, and eventually you get to what Malcolm Gladwell calls `The Tipping Point’, where suddenly, great, transformational change becomes possible. The biggest obstacle to making a start is often the idea that a project must be achieved at one session, at one sitting – it doesn’t.

Anyway, I digress. The bottom line is, there’s a lot that needs doing, and I must make a start. I did, in fact, achieve some minor successes during the week already. Change of a gradual nature. I’ve fitted the new riddling plate to the stove, for instance, the first time I have ever accomplished this task from a wheelchair, and I must admit it was tricky, operating at the full stretch of my arms, straining forward. Still, I did it, and several other tedious domestic tasks which have been hanging around. The great mountain of books that need editing, laying out and sending to press has diminished by a few inches, as well.

Kitty, too, has been feeling the stirrings of spring. She even followed me outside a couple of times when I went out to get the coal in, and she’s been out on the decking at the back, as well, sharpening her claws on the posts and sniffing all around the areas where the badger has been. Badgey himself hasn’t been back in a way that allows for photographs since the memorable night when I took 13 shots of him and Debbie got some video clips of him on her phone. He’s now taken to calling in the early hours of the morning, on his way home to his sett, as opposed to the early evening, on his way out. I guess it’s the badger equivalent of a kebab on the way home from the pub. Either that or he’s out there in the dark sitting under the hedgerow, thinking, `I wish they’d hurry up and go to bed, I am bloody starving!’

Either way, on two or three occasions now, although we’ve not seen him, the food’s been comprehensively hoovered up by something in the night, be it badger, fox, squirrel, or a combination of all three. The spring isn’t yet far enough advanced for Kitty to stay out at night and find out, she makes a point of returning pretty damn pronto to her cat bed on the binbag of shredded paper in the hearth. Either that, or Zak’s furry dog bed, left to him by Tiglet in her will, in the chair in the conservatory. The other day, granny came round with Freddie and Zak, and he came barreling in, only to stop dead in his tracks at the unaccustomed site of a feline usurper in his seat. You could see his little brain working while he tried to decide what to do, and eventually he curled up on the rug just in front of the chair, and the second Kitty moved away to go to her feeding-bowl, he was up and on it, like a rat down a drain.

Debbie’s quest for health via the unlikely medium of carrot juice continues. I remain unconvinced about the economic basis of the project, since we’ve discovered that it takes something like 1.5KG of carrots to produce 70cl of carrot juice. If you truly costed in the electricity to run the juicer, and my time in setting it up, prepping the carrots, running the juicer, and cleaning it all down afterwards (especially the latter), it’s almost certainly much cheaper and a lot less hassle all around to just buy the stuff in bottles from Sainsburys. However, I am always overruled on this one by Debbie’s invoking of the law that says women are always right, so home-made carrot juice it is.

There has also been a hiccup in the just-in-time supply of the carrots themselves. At the start of yesterday, we had two 1.5KG bags and one 1KG bag in stock, and I translated the two larger bags into juice and bottled the result, using up all the available empty bottles (both of them!) I figured that Debbie might want some more carrot juice midweek, so I mentioned casually to her that if she was going in to town (which she said she was) that she might want to stop off at Lidl and get some more carrots. Now, I freely admit, I didn’t actually specify a quantity, but I had in mind say, a bag or two. Enough to make another batch of juice say, Wednesday, to see her through the week. Meanwhile, the Sainsbury’s man delivered our weekly order and I saw to my surprise that I must’ve already been operating in `Mystic Meg’ mode when I had placed the order, because I’d also added another kilo of carrots. You can guess what happened next. Debbie arrived back from the shops bearing 4KG of carrots, which had been on special offer at Lidl for some reason. It is the same stockpiling instinct that once led to her accumulating 22 tins of baked beans, before I took over the shopping. Anyway, we now have enough carrots to go into commercial production of the stuff, and if there’s a world shortage of carrots, or a run on the carrot commodities market, we caused it. Sorry.

Water, of course, is the other constituent of carrot juice (unless you prefer it neat and undiluted, as some purists do) and water has also been on our agenda this week. Yorkshire Water rang up wanting me to carry out an actual physical reading on the water-meter under the sink, on the grounds that they thought the electronic gizmo in it (which allows them to actually monitor our consumption of the stuff without sending a little man with a torch and a clipboard round) must be on the blink. Not so. The physical reading confirmed that we had, in fact, used very little water. (This isn’t actually surprising, because there’s only two of us and a cat, and we’re careful with the stuff, never washing the camper from one holiday to the next, and using ‘grey’ water to water the plants, for instance.) I explained to the man in their call centre that I was a very old smelly disabled raspberry in a wheelchair who never washed, and he seemed to accept this as a likely explanation. For my part, it was simpler than going into our philosophy of life, especially as the discussion would inevitably have led, eventually, to carrot juice. Coincidentally, Debbie has signed us up for Water Aid, at a dizzying £2.00 per month. No doubt this will result in yet more items of my wardrobe being worn by people in Uganda, as happened to my dinner jacket, but I was staggered when she told me that people in Africa have to live for a whole day on the water which we flush away in a single pull of the toilet chain.

“Pull it twice, then, and give them a treat!” I cried, earning me one of her funny looks. It does make you realise, though, what a precious resource water is, and how clean water could transform the prospects for infant mortality. We’re not going to solve it overnight, but I guess Debbie’s £2.00 is a step, a small brick in the process of building a larger well. Gradual change. And of course, while there’s all this work to be done, the Church, and especially the Church of England, is concentrating on the process of self destruction over the supposedly crucial issues of gay clergy and women bishops. Whoever the eventual successor to Rowan Williams turns out to be, his sole contribution to bringing clean water to the dying children of the world will probably be to sit in the House of Lords and help the government vote through their proposals to use water-cannon against the likes of the St Paul’s protestors.

(Actually, the government might find they run out of water for their cannons, as apparently we have yet another drought in prospect. God alone knows what happened to all that snow that was lying around for 17 weeks the other year, perhaps the water companies have a secret stash somewhere, in an underground reservoir, in case of nuclear holocaust or something. In fact, the way things are going, as well as flushing the bog for Africa we might have to organise coach trips to go down to East Anglia and pee on the vegetables. As it happens, the Co-op carrots have a picture on the front of the man who grows them, down in Suffolk, he’s called Oliver Bartlett apparently, so it ought to be possible to locate and irrigate his carrot fields, thereby neatly closing the loop. Though it may make the subsequent juice taste funny).

And what of me in all this feverish activity? Well, I am still at odds with church and state. The latter is more easily explained, when you hear about things like the government’s proposals to cut unemployment by making it easier to sack people! What next, cutting hospital waiting lists by handing out doses of strychnine? I did actually once write to the Chancellor of the Exchequer telling him he had a face I would never tire of punching, but I am, in fact, so very tired of punching them, (in print, of course) I wish they would just fall over dead, now, and call an election, so that we could at least start, belatedly, to build something more worthwhile from the ruins they have created. But who would replace them? What is it Kipling said about “stoop to build ‘em up with worn out tools?” Harsh, but fair; that is a very unkind way to refer to Mr Miliband, however true.

The Church, given the issues I mentioned above, and the way that the Bishop of London managed to face two ways at once over the St Paul’s occupy process, which stirred such fury in me the last time I visited these pages, has hardly ever seemed less relevant to me than it does right now. I shall be very sorry to see Rowan Williams go, because I think he’s done a very good job of holding it all together, despite the efforts of closed-minded fundamentalist idiots on both sides of the argument, but I can understand how he must feel – there’s only so long you can keep the lid on a pressure cooker, or, as W. B. Yeats put it, so much better than me,

“Too Long a sacrifice, will make a stone of the heart.”

Well, it looks like the Anglican pressure cooker is yet another thing that’s run out of water, and is about to boil dry. Whoever his successor is, they will find Rowan Williams a hard act to follow.

It’s St Cyril’s day today, and he apparently once said, "Make your fold with the sheep; flee from the wolves: depart not from the Church." I haven’t actually prepared a “Bible” bit for this Epiblog, because I am all “bibled out” this week, for reasons which will become apparent. My problem is, as ever, with people who want to impose the will of God, or – even worse – their interpretation of the will of God, onto others, by force if necessary. Ultimately, such blind fundamentalism in religion leads to the Spanish Inquisition, it leads to the sort of excesses perpetrated by people in Ireland who would probably, nevertheless, have claimed to be followers of St Patrick, yesterday’s saint, it leads to people firebombing abortion clinics, and it leads to people flying airliners into skyscrapers, and I want no part of it. Use the brain God gave you to think out morality for yourself. Find your own way to God. “On a huge hill, cragg’d and steep, truth stands, and he that would find it, about must, and about must go.” So said John Donne, a St Paul’s clergyman who would undoubtedly have been on the side of those in the tents, especially the young, pretty, female ones.

So I found myself in a difficult position this week, when I discovered that Adam had finally fulfilled his promise to come and take some spare parts off the old camper (to use on the transit he’s restoring). This is Adam the mattress man, not Adam the first man, and I had promised him the pick of the rustheap late last year. When he had finished his dismantlings, we fell to talking and it turns out that Adam is a born-again, Bible-believing Christian. Maybe Big G sent him to give me a wakeup call, I don’t know, but we ended up talking in the driveway for two hours while he tried to convince me by reading from his Bible (and leaving me three tracts) to turn away from my sins and accept Jesus Christ as my personal saviour.

In principle, I have no problem with any of this. Largely, I do try and live by the Commandments. Largely, however, I do think vast tracts of the Old Testament are completely gaga, and said as much. When he asked me, outright, “Do you believe Jesus died for you?” my best answer was that I accepted that something weird must’ve happened back then, for an unknown obscure carpenter to still be remembered 2000 years later. I was on better ground with the sins. I don’t think I do sin, much. At least nothing like when I was a lying cheating bad person in the past, out of control and driven by my own demons to the extent where I caused much pain to others. I got all that pain back, on my own head, in spades redoubled, so I can tell you Karma works, anyway. I don’t do it these days, I don’t say “yes” when I really mean “no”. I try and tell it like it is. I still drink, when money allows, and I still lust, because let’s face it, in my position it’s the nearest thing to actual physical fulfilment! I don’t bear false witness, I don’t covet my neighbour’s Ox, or Ass, mainly because he doesn’t have any farmyard animals in his garden. I do feel a pang at the fact that what I regard as “my next dog” is still stuck in a sanctuary in west Wales, though. But apparently, moral relativism is not enough, and unless I turn away from my sins, I will be cast into the fiery lake. I tried to explain that I thought that God, and Jesus in particular, stood for forgiveness, and Adam assured me that in his speeches in the Bible, Jesus backed up the Old Testament view of morality. I said that at the time Jesus was preaching, “The Bible” as we currently know it didn’t exist, it was confected at the Council of Nicea in 325AD, but Adam told me that apparently The Dead Sea Scrolls confirmed everything that was in the Old Testament and they existed before Jesus did.

By now we were going round in circles, so I offered to give him one of my books so he could read it, see where I was “coming from” and then perhaps return at a more appropriate time so we could discuss it further, ie not in the driveway. This had the effect of him abruptly curtailing his effort at conversion, telling me that there was only one book he ever read (brandishing Bible aloft) and disappearing back into the cab of his van. I guess that’s the last I’ll ever see of him, unless he wants some more car bits. It’s not the first time that’s happened. Flourishing a Steve Rudd book at them also banishes Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses. For guaranteed results, try and charge them the cover price.

I may have been uncharitable to him in this description. I may have been unkind in my description. I am sure he means well, and it could yet turn out, at the day of reckoning, that he’s right and I’m wrong. By then, with a burly red demon sticking a red hot pitchfork into my arse and shepherding me towards eternal doom, it will be too late to argue. But I can’t believe God meant that. Am I wrong in thinking that if I try my best to believe in him, live ethically, and justify the ways of God to man even though at times they seem completely gaga, that he won’t just cut me a teeny bit of slack, if I am truly sorry for all the bad I have done in my life. If so, then the two hours I wasted trying to explain why I was a moral relativist to someone whose ears were closed to me, could have been better employed in planning how to get a clean water pipeline to the remote sub-Saharan desert. I think there’s a lesson in that for the Church of England. You can call it the parable of the flusher, if you like, and right now, I don’t care if it makes me, in the eyes of the fundamentalists, an “enemy of the cistern”!

I commend to the next Archbishop of Canterbury, whoever he or she may be, the poem by Philip Larkin on the subject of water:

Epiblog for the Second Sunday of Lent

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. Unseasonably warm, as well, and maybe, just maybe, we’ve seen the back of winter. Though it may yet turn round and snarl at us over its shoulder, on the way out of the door. The daffodils are coming up alongside Russell’s grave in the garden (and his mosaic is covered in bright green moss, which I must get rid of, or at least get someone else to get rid of). “Faire daffadils, that come before the swallow dares, and take the winds of March with beauty”. The snowdrops are out in the front. Still no crocuses though.

The other day it was so mild and balmy that Kitty actually left the crocheted cat bed on the bin-bag of shredded paper on the hearth, where she has hibernated for most of the winter, and ventured outside onto the ramp with me, when I went to get some coal. She sniffed the air, had a look at the garden, then twinkled back inside as fast as her little leggies would go, back to the fire. I know what she means. Everywhere I look around outside, there are jobs which need doing, beds than need weeding, leaves and dead vegetation that need clearing, blown-down twigs and branches that need gathering for the stove. It makes me tired just thinking about it and planning it. This year I am going to grow herbs in pots on the decking, I have got as far as getting hold of the seeds.

We’re still no nearer getting another dog, though Zak and Freddie visit me quite often and are rewarded with treats and ear-furfles. I’ve identified one or two “possibles”, one of which is in Wales, but getting her from Wales to here is problematic, especially since I have no way of travelling independently of Debbie and I can’t really ask her to spend a weekend driving to Carmarthen and back when she only just survives a week of teaching, comes back and crashes out on the settee every Friday without fail.

Meanwhile, I finished my painting of Tiggy, and it’s hanging on the chimney breast as I type. It would have been her birthday on Wednesday 7th March, she would have been 16.

Debbie’s been majoring a detox and healthy living/eating programme of late, trying to do something about the toll which teaching extracts from her body and mind each week. The other morning, she announced to me that someone had told her that almonds were good for your memory, but she had forgotten who. Her latest “fad” is carrot juice, which she has decided is the answer to all the world’s problems. If only that were true. It doesn’t seem even to be the solution to all her problems, but she carries on resolutely glugging the stuff.

The first attempt we had at making it, using the food processor, was a considerable disaster. I had managed to successfully order 2 kilos of carrots online from Messrs Sainsbury, having circumvented the trap which had previously led to me only obtaining one sprout instead of one kilo of sprouts. However, feeding them through the Kenwood only produced a sort of undrinkable carrot slurry, which did, however, go quite well in the carrot mash and in the pakoras I made. So, this week, I simply added some carrot juice for her when I did the usual online weekly shopping order. The night before the order was due, Debbie arrived home toting a juicer from Argos, which had cost £29.99. So far, we haven’t tried it out, since she prefers the line of least resistance, and drinking the stuff which Sainsbury’s have already gone to the trouble of juicing for her.

Anyway, one way or another, it’s going to be a juicy spring. And somehow, I’ve already missed pancake Tuesday and Ash Wednesday, and we’re into Lent. “After the Christmasse, comes the crabbed Lentoun”. I’m not sure I’ve got anything left to give up, to be honest, apart from eating and sleeping, and at the moment I do precious little of those. Still, warmer – or, more pertinently, lighter – days mean I’ll be able to get outside and tackle some of the stuff which needs doing, the bits of it I can reach from a wheelchair, at least. I’ve still got a stack of tasks a yard long that need doing inside as well, from creating juice drinks for Debbie to organising another dog to editing books to doing the VAT return to cleaning out the fridge, which I am sure contains some Japanese soldiers who don’t know the war’s ended.

Oh, and on the pet front, I must mention the imaginary badger. At 2AM the other morning Deb was ploughing a lonely furrow on the sofa (not literally, obviously, ploughing and soft furnishings don’t mix) prepping for one of her classes, and she suddenly heard a clumping and a clattering out on the decking, so she went to the conservatory door and peered out into the darkness. A badger was methodically hoovering up all of the bread I had put out earlier for the birds. When it had done with the stuff at ground level, it reared up on its hind legs and used what Debbie described as “its arms” to sweep the stuff off the bird table and munch that, also. Then it looked around, made sure there was nothing more left to eat, and wombled off down the steps, back into the garden.

I call it an imaginary badger, simply because I have subsequently sat up til 2AM on successive mornings, hoping to see it myself, but so far, the badger and I remain unintroduced. I did put out some leftover cooked pasta for it, but it spurned that particular offering, which the birds polished off the following day. Perhaps, being a badger, it prefers good solid English grub, or – of course – good solid English grubs.

While I was sitting up by the conservatory window, waiting and looking for badgers in the middle of the night, the establishment, in the form of the City of London, aided and abetted by the establishment at prayer, the Church of England, was moving against the Occupy protestors outside St Pauls. I note from the TV pictures that, when the bailiffs did drag people out of the tents and away, and the police cordon kept supporters at bay, that there were indeed people inside the tents at night, so I hope that the gutter press will be swift to publish an apology for their previous disgraceful slur, that the protestors were only part-timers who went home each day. But I am saving my breath to cool my porridge.

I haven’t any kind words for the clergy of St Pauls. In fact, I have several very unkind words for them, which, if I used them here, would probably get this blog removed from Blogger for good. You expect the City of London to do its best to stamp out the first flourishings of a newer fairer more just society, especially one that has got completely under its skin, like the Occupy movement has, but not the Church of England. I’d like to say that “they tried their best in a difficult situation” but every time I do, it comes out as “they are a set of spineless wimps who should be set to work breaking rocks in a quarry until they repent of their sins of greed and avarice and their perversion of true Christian ideals.” Anyway, clergy of St Pauls, if you are looking for Jesus at any time, he’d have been with the guys in the tents.

So, because of this, I don’t actually care what the collect is for the second Sunday of Lent, and you can stuff the book of Common Prayer. When John Sentamu shuts up bleating about the word “marriage” and when the Bishop of London, whose name I forget, but who looks a bit like John Peel, personally leads an occupation of the Stock Exchange, and when the Church of England addresses itself once more to the real problems in our society, then I’ll start believing in the Church of England again.

And if God doesn’t like it, well, stuff Him too, we’ve not exactly been on speaking terms of late. A thunderbolt or two wouldn’t come amiss.

Yes, I am angry about this. How could you tell?

It’s St Basil’s day. Like anyone cares.