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: