Epiblog for the Second Sunday After Easter

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley, and a completely ostrobogulous one.

Ostrobogulous, and shitnastic, to the nth degree. A week when everything I have touched, every device I rely on, seems to have either blown up, caught fire, or just slid gently off the table and laid down on the floor emitting a feeble, electronic, death-rattle.

And it rained. The gardens need the rain, apparently. They’re welcome to it. The trees are coming along nicely, more and more catkins, and now the Rowan has fresh green leaves, which is no surprise, considering they’re being constantly watered. The clematis is in bud, now, as well as the magnolia. Monday was the best morning, which is not something you can usually say of any week, and I woke up to the note of a wood-pigeon, coo-cooing just outside the window.

While the April showers hammered down in between the all-too-brief bursts of sunshine, and Kitty slumbered on beside the fire, inside the house, carnage raged. The phone handset cradle was the first to go. It has given up recharging the phone, and the reason for this is, as I discovered when I took it apart to look, a wire has come loose inside and unless I can find the solder and the soldering iron sometime soon, it is “Fouquet dans Le Touquet”. Now we are reduced to alternating the handsets and taking each one upstairs onto the one remaining cradle for a day or so, while we use the other one. Inevitably, given the stress she’s currently under, there are days when Debbie forgets and leave both handsets upstairs, so I am left with only my expensive, emergency-only mobile for a day.

Brenda and Freda continue their nocturnal visits, and it has now got to the stage where if one of them comes early, I put out a second sitting for the other one, before I go to bed.

In the midst of all this, a parcel of books went AWOL on its way back from a school in Ilford where one of our authors had been performing poetry. It did, eventually, turn up, but only after hours (which felt like days) spent tracking it. In case you want to know which courier to choose if you, too, wish to experience the effect of dropping a valuable package down a bottomless pit filled with piranha fish, never to see it again, the courier was Hermes, though, given their propensity for, and proximity to, cock-ups, perhaps they should consider re-branding as “Herpes”.

But by far the biggest mechanical disaster this week has been the total write-off of Debbie’s mother’s car, owing to some benighted pondlife having sprayed cavity foam insulation up the exhaust for a lark. Debbie's mother's car was parked on our "drive" while she was away, and when Debbie came to start it up on Monday night, to go and collect Granny from the Station, some "humorist" had squirted expanding cavity insulating foam up the exhaust, which had set rock-solid. Debbie collected her Mum in the camper,instead, and then we phoned the garage – who were still there, at 19:40hrs, but all they could do was tow it. The next morning they phoned her to say her car was completely knackiepooed, a total write-off, because a reconditioned engine and a whole new exhaust system would cost more than the car's worth (or rather, more than a comparable new car) so she's been completely in bits about this and is probably now going to spend the weekend filling in insurance claims forms.

The PCSO who eventually came round to talk to me about it (I reported it, because it happened on our property) was a nice enough young bloke, and I have been given a crime number and everything, but so far my efforts to get the police to fingerprint the car have been in vain, despite spending a long time trying.

Since this blog is at least supposed to be nominally religious or at least spiritual in its aim, I should perhaps at this point say how hard it is to forgive people like this. In fact, it’s completely impossible, which is why I am not a very good Christian – or, possibly not even a Christian at all, given what I would happily do to them. `Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord, I will repay’. Well, all I can say is, Big G, if you’re listening, and the fiery pit really does exist and they really do end up there, get the biggest, butchest, demon in hell to give them an extra prod with the pitchfork, from me, just to make sure they are done to a turn, like.

The week ended with a similar malfunction to the phone handset, only this one came to my attention when Debbie stuck her head into my “bedroom” on Friday morning and barked, in full-on “Raus, Raus” mode, “Why isn’t the printer working?” interrupting rather a pleasant dream involving Fiona Bruce and Anita Rani arm-wrestling for the exclusive right to present antiques programmes on TV.

Several answers sprang to mind (the most obvious being “which printer?” as there are two). I did consider “I don’t know, why is the printer not working?” in a sort of “Mistah-Bones, whuffo did de chicken cross de road?” cod accent, but a sixth sense told me this would not be appreciated, so instead I struggled into my clothes and transferred to my wheelchair as fast as I could, and then came trundling through like the Seventh Cavalry, to the rescue. The printer thought it had a paper jam, even though it hadn’t, a “malady most incident” to HP Printers, I’m afraid. [Although in fairness, we did have one, once, which was displaying “paper jam” and which turned out, on inspection, to have one of Tiglet’s gravy bones - a small proprietary brand of dog biscuit - unaccountably wedged in its mechanism.]

I was quite pleased to note, while fixing the printer with one hand, that the chiming clock, which had unaccountably stopped ticking the day before, despite being fully wound, and which I had squirted with “Double T Penetrating Oil”, was still going, and had been overnight. I remarked on this to Debbie, cheerfully.

“Why are you talking to me about a CLOCK?” she snarled querulously over her shoulder, slamming the door on the way out. Thank you, AQA, thank you GCSE. I got a similar response when I asked if there was any chance we might go up to the Flouch to see if there were any new lambs and look out for Lapwings. She asked me why I wanted to go and look for Lapwings, and somehow the answer that “I like their grebey little heads” seemed strangely inadequate. Perhaps I should try getting them to enrol for a GCSE.

All of which has more or less led to me sitting amongst the wreckage, presiding over the chaos like a cross between Nero and Miss Havisham, without any of the redeeming features of either. Somewhere along the line there was a stand up row (except I was sitting down) over the phone with Barclays about whether I could deduct something for paying off the loan three months early (I want to, they disagree). I said that when the loan is discharged I want my personal guarantee back because I want to set fire to it in front of the bank manager, and maybe him as well. He said `we’re recording this call, you know,’ and I said `good.’ – that sort of thing. I am so tempted to deduct 10p off the final payment, and then watch them try and get it to close the loan.

Debbie’s battle with the AQA marking continues, and now, of course, she’s got something else to worry about, because the debate’s already started about what courses will/won’t be running from September 2012 onwards. It wouldn’t be so bad, if there was only one organisation was involved, but with Debbie currently working for three, with possibly a further one on the horizon, planning who’s going to be taught what, when and where, is like doing a three dimensional jigsaw wearing boxing gloves and a blindfold. Meanwhile, the grim grind of the existing marking goes on, and unless it’s something to do with AQA or GCSE, she isn’t interested right now. From what little I have managed to glean about the manoueverings over next term’s courses, it’s a case of “Mr Arse, may I introduce you to Mr Elbow?” It now turns out that the GCSE course may run next year after all, and my only comment on that was that no barge pole is long enough.

All these car shenanegans, of course, have meant that Freddie and Zak have been spending some unplanned quality time with us again, both during the week, and this weekend. The squirrels, knowing that Freddie is safely shut in behind half an inch of double glazed conservatory door, have been positively taunting him, with their improbable high-wire routines, skipping along from branch to branch of the high bendy saplings, while he howls his fury at them and paws at the door. God alone knows what he would do if I actually let him out to chase them, except disappear into the woods down the valley out the back for hours, and have to be retrieved by a search party of able-bodieds.

I’ve decided that’s what you lot are, by the way, all you bipeds, striding confidently around the place, you’re “able-bodieds”, and with adequate training, care and skill, you could be taught a wide variety of meaningful rudimentary tasks.

Sadly, that sort of language isn’t as preposterous as it should be, especially when you substitute the word “disabled”. As each day passes, I have become convinced that there is a deliberate government policy to attack specifically the disabled, and specifically those on benefits. It’s as if they have sat down after the election, and invented “Apocryphal Benefits Man”, someone who looks a lot like Ricky Tomlinson, sits on the sofa all day, sipping tramp-strength Kestrel, watching a widescreen plasma TV, pausing only to sire another unemployable hoodie now and then to drain further the coffers of the equally anecdotal “hard working family”. And then proceeded to spend considerable time, effort, and taxpayers’ money since the election in perpetrating the myth that all disabled people on benefits are like this.

Apparently, Chris Grayling and Iain Duncan Smith are “mystified” at the demonisation of the disabled under this government. As Sue Marsh has perceptively pointed out in her blog, they should maybe try reading their own Department’s press releases:

Have you ever wondered how it is that the Daily Mail & Express (other brands of toilet paper available) seem so intent on victimising sick and disabled people?

Ever wondered how it is, that monthly benefit fraud rates, released by the DWP are always written up in such an inflammatory way? Why national media only ever print the government lines. Chris Grayling, minister for employment, says he is “bemused” by it. Maybe Iain Duncan-Smith can clear up this mystery?

Meet his special advisers : Susie Squire former Taxpayers Alliance until May 2010. For those who don’t know already, The Taxpayers Allowance are huge Tory donors, regularly accused of simply being a Conservative front. They’re not exactly on the Liberal, one-nation side of the Tory fence either. More your rabid frothing side. A quick scroll through their website will tell you everything you need to know, but they regularly attack disability benefits and those who receive them.

And SpAd No.2 : Phillipa Stroud : Remember the name? Yep she was the politician who thought she could pray-away-the-gay! She sees homosexuality as a “demon” that needs to be driven out of a person. Accordingly, she set up her own “church” to carry out this important work. Do click on these links, they’re fascinating. As I read through, I wondered if she should be allowed anywhere near Westminster at all.

One can only begin to imagine what someone like Stroud might think of the disabled. No doubt we have demons of our own. It’s not so long ago since people thought disabilities were the outward sign of some inner corruption or evil. Now, surely the profiles of these two women might go some way to explaining just why, yet again today, we see misleading press releases leading to misleading stories?

At one end of the spectrum, the vile river of garbage spewing from the DWP leads to the grim, grotesque idiocy of people being declared fit for work by Atos and then dying of cancer three weeks later. At the other, darker end of the spectrum, it leads to people deciding they can no longer go on, and, sadly, deciding to do something about it. People such as Mark and Helen Mullins. People such as Darrowsgirl. I never knew Darrowsgirl, although we apparently posted on the same messageboard on the internet, but this week, in the course of an online conversation, I was shocked to discover that she had – apparently – taken her own life, almost six months ago.

Now, I’m aware that this next bit may sound creepy, but, once it had been brought to my attention, it niggled at me: it seemed almost as if in some way I had been “negligent” in not noticing at the time. [In my defence, I also felt the same way when another poster on that same messageboard died recently, albeit of natural causes, and in his case it was worse, because he had actually sent me a message when I was in hospital, offering to help out and bring me things, and somehow it got lost in the wash and never got replied to.] Anyway, I followed from thread to thread in the way that the internet allows you to do, these days, and found that she had been fond of greyhounds, and wanted to sell up and live on a canal boat. What a tragic waste of a life, of a dream.

I would like to take the politicians responsible for these policies, and sit them down in a room, and, if her death was in any way attributable to people with mental illness being demonised by this government, in any way at all, however small their contribution, I would like to say to them "I hope her spectre haunts you to the end of your days. I hope you never sleep again. I hope you are punished for all eternity for your part in her sad demise. You disgust me. You disgust me."

This, again, is the forgiveness trap, of course. How can you even begin to forgive a government that does this to people?

Mental health has, to a certain extent, always had something of a stigma attached. In my defence, when I use terms such as “loopy” and “gaga” in my own writing, I am usually decrying the bizarre actions of people who claim to be sane, or at least “sane” enough to stand for election and think they know what’s best for the rest of us. And I’d also like to say, here and now, that I am (probably) mentally ill. I’ve thought for a while now, that I am probably suffering from depression, and let’s face it, googling dead people isn’t exactly the balanced and considered action of someone who is what a “hard working family” would probably call “normal”. Nor is chronicling the minutiae of your life in a weekly blog, weird and funny as it often seems.

I’ve written before about “The Black Fog”. For Churchill, and Nick Drake, what I call The Black Fog [note the capitals] was the “black dog”, but I don’t buy that. “Black dog”, is friendly. I’d quite like a black dog, to be honest. The Black Fog [those capitals again] is the feeling that there’s nothing left, that you’ve been running on empty for so long, and nobody notices, nobody cares. That this is it, this is all there is, that things will never get better and you will just go on grinding away until the day when all your energy, all your reserves, all your hope are gone, and you reach that bleak and howling place where The Black Fog is so dense, it collapses in on itself like a Black Hole. The Black Fog is, of course, made blacker and more pea-soupier by a government that tells you (and everyone else who will listen) that it was your fault you got lost in The Black Fog in the first place.

There are, however, some things we can do. When I feel it starting to get on top of me, I compartmentalise. I concentrate on the task in hand. I get on with things. It doesn’t matter what, to be honest, God knows there is enough stuff lying around here needing fixing after a week like last week. Not giving The Black Fog more importance than it deserves, is a way of keeping it at bay.

The second thing is not to worry. These days I do what I can do, and I can what I can’t. 99% of the stuff we worry about never happens anyway. The example I always used to quote is that you can be worrying about whether your job is safe, or how you’ll pay the mortgage, and then a badger falls off the roof onto your head one morning as you go out of the door. This metaphor was intended to convey the unpredictable “left-field” nature of events, though, since the advent of Brenda, it has, in my case at any rate, become more statistically likely, so I may need to find something even more outrageous and unlikely to not worry about!

The third thing is, and this was a big step forward, this realisation, that we are not alone in the fog. If you shout out, then we’ll hear each other. There are lots of us in The Black Fog. Some of us are lucky, and only pass through it fleetingly, like when you’re driving along a country lane late at night and suddenly mist envelops your car like a wraith, causing you to slam on the brakes, and then it’s gone, as quickly as it came. Some of us spend days in it, like becalmed mariners. But everybody’s been in it, even if they won’t admit it. Shout, and I’ll be there, and I’ll shout, and you’ll be there. Like in that poem by A. E. Housman;

if you come to a road where danger

Or guilt or anguish or shame's to share,

Be good to the lad that loves you true

And the soul that was born to die for you,

And whistle and I'll be there.

Clearly, the government isn’t going to crumble under the single-handed assault of one wizened old Yorkshireman in a wheelchair, though they will get slaughtered at the upcoming local elections. The problem is the lack of a viable alternative. The Opposition, to get elected, has to pander to exactly the same mythical white van man Daily Mail tendency, and is unlikely to be any more compassionate towards disabled people than the present gang. So, fourthly, we may have to get through by using unconventional support networks, possibly for the foreseeable future, or maybe even bypass the system altogether, and go and live in the woods, and bake our own curtains and weave our own bread.

Whatever, the government will sneer, smear and deride, because that’s what governments do, especially this one. But we are able to resist. While I was writing this, I was listening to various random tracks on Spotify, and up popped L. J. Booth’s song `The Ox That Pulls The Cart’, which is about, amongst other things, how the USA, a superpower, was defeated in Vietnam by – basically – a society of peasant farmers.

Never underestimate

The ox that pulls the cart

The iron will

Of the humble heart

So, a week that began with me watching a fat wood-pigeon preening himself amongst the new boughs outside my window, looking for all the world like an 18th-century cleric, with his purple-grey front and his white collar, fluting his harmless “take-two, taffy, take-two” call on a calm Monday morning, ended, by Friday, with a Raven pacing about on the decking like a centurion in gaiters, tilting his head from side to side, his gimlet eye seeking out the broken shards of Ryvita I’d put out earlier. Even Freddie thought twice about barking at him.

Let’s see what next week brings. I’ve been too busy to read my Bible this week, as you may have gathered. I hope Big G has got my six. I hope someone has. When it comes to The Black Fog, we’re all just Chindits in the jungle. Close ranks, and carry on. Comms check. I’m still here. I got your six. If winter comes, can spring be far behind? The sun’s comin’ over the hill. I will not go down under the ground. Roger that.

Epiblog For The First Sunday After Easter

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. The weather stubbornly refuses to turn warm and sunny again, as it is obviously waiting for Monday and the end of the Easter Holidays. Then, when everybody’s safely back at work, it’ll be scorching hot, just you wait and see. In the meantime we’ve had a succession of days when it starts out grey and gloomy, as though you were living in a tupperware box, then brightens up a bit, just enough to encourage Debbie to take her folding deckchair out onto the decking, then it clouds over and before you know it, rain is drumming on the conservatory roof with the ferocity of a demented Michael Flatley, wishing he’d progressed onto “Traditional Irish Dancing, Volume 2: Use of the Arms”

Despite frequent drenchings by what Chaucer called “Aprille, with his shoures soote” [spellcheckers weren’t a significant feature of medieval manuscripts] the garden is once more exhibiting signs of that miraculous re-growth that happens every Spring. More and more catkins are appearing on the trees, the Magnolia by the pond has some hard, white buds, and the trees down the valley slope behind our house have a fine, green, froth about their bare branches, young leaves that turn into a bright, light green haze, when viewed from a distance.

Kitty has remained by the stove for most of her waking hours and all of her sleeping ones, as the nights have been cold. Since I’ve been deprived of the traditional harbinger of Spring, the crocuses in the front garden, which seem to have vanished in the time I was away in hospital, I will only truly believe it’s Spring when it gets warm enough for Kitty to move from the hearth. She also continues to complicate feeding time by insisting on eating Freddie’s dog food, while he eats from the cat dish. My latest tactic is to wait til they’ve started, then whisk the dishes from under their noses and swop them over. But it doesn’t always work; sometimes the animal swops along with the dish, sometimes both of them end up eating from the same dish, with Freddie growling under his breath at Kitty, between mouthfuls, while she ignores him and chomps on, regardless. Oh, for an uncomplicated, un-fussy feeder like Zak, who gratefully demolishes everything you put in front of him, licks his lips, then looks around for more, or, failing that, anyone else’s leftovers.

Freddie and Zak have enjoyed the last week of their holidays. Neither of them has actually seen or acknowledged Freda the Fox or Brenda the Badger, despite, in Freddie’s case, almost coming face to face with Brenda through the glass of the conservatory door. Freda and Brenda have been constant, if unpredictable visitors. The pictures have been few and far between, unfortunately, because they’ve taken to turning up at mealtimes (human mealtimes, I mean, their life is of course one extended meal) and I can’t leave the badgercam permanently set up. I have been slightly concerned on a couple of occasions, when they haven’t shown, that they are OK, because, as Antoine de Saint-Exupéry said in “The Little Prince”, you are responsible for what you tame.

Debbie, meanwhile, has been unable to fulfil her aim of getting off somewhere and kayaking, partly because the weather has been so unpredictable, partly because the camper has an irritating dribbly oil leak from the crankcase that will have to go to Father Jack at the garage and receive his benediction sometime very soon, but mostly because of the GCSE marking which is making her life a complete misery, and which she has vowed never to saddle herself with again. And the people to blame for this are undoubtedly AQA, with their insane wittering gobbledeygook that is supposed to pass for marking criteria and who, when challenged about their inability to find their own arse using both hands and a wing mirror, say things like “Well, it was supposed to be implicit in what we wrote…” Here’s a tip, AQA, next time you write some exam guidelines, don’t be implicit, don’t be oblique, don’t wrap it up in a Joycean stream of consciousness or Proustian Henry-James ramblings, just say what you bloody mean, and then me and my wife might get a holiday for once!

As a break from the ceaseless grinding away at the lathe of AQA, Debbie’s main outing has been to push me up the road some days, to the postbox, when there have been books to send off to people, or even letters, on those rare occasions I still write them. This little jaunt came unstuck on Wednesday, however, when the book I had packed up to send was too big to go in the postbox. Noting that the collection was just about due, at 17:45, I suggested to Debbie that we wait by the postbox and simply hand it to the postie, explaining that it was too big for the slot, when he came to empty the box. So we sat there like a pair of lemons until five to six, at which point Debbie got fed up and said “Sod this, we’re going home!”

As we got almost back to our house, Debbie turned and, looking back up the road, saw that the postman had now arrived at the box, and was busy scooping its contents into a sack, while his van sat there, engine running. She turned me round and started pushing me back again, but we both realised that we were never going to make it in time, because he’d already locked the pillarbox again and he was stowing the sack in the back of his van.

“Push me across the road!” I said, and she proceeded to do so. As the postman drove towards us, we were now on the same side of the road as him, so it would have been easy for him to pull in, and allow Debbie to hand the parcel to him through his passenger window. All I had to do was flag him down. I brandished the parcel at him, holding it out at arm’s length to show him the many expensive stamps adhering to it. I’d like to say he stopped, took it, and went on his way with a cheery “Gawd bless yer, Guv’nor”, but what actually happened was that the stupid blind fool of a postman drove straight past, apparently seeing nothing odd in the sight of a bearded loon in a wheelchair gesticulating wildly, flagging him down, and holding a parcel out into the road. Perhaps he’s used to people lining his route and waving him on his way, a bit like the Queen on a Jubilee tour, but with parcels and letters instead of flags and bunting. [We did, however, successfully waylay his colleague, the day after, who not only arrived at the appointed time, but took the offered parcel without demurring. The problem that day was persuading Debbie that it would work a second time, when the first attempt had been such a catastrophe.]

Other than that, I have been living the medieval life, at least according to Ian Mortimer’s book that I mentioned last week. I thought this the other morning as I went out for the coal. Note my twigs, gathered from stuff that had fallen down out front when I went down the ramp for the coal. Woolly hat (check) Dung-encrusted clothes (check) gathering fallen wood (check) carrying a heavy burden of fuel in a pointless expenditure of energy in a futile quest to stay warm (check) ... welcome to my medieveal world theme park. Later, we'll be lighting candles, chanting prayers, and dying of something nasty that could be prevented by a better diet and modern drugs!

When I posted this on Facebook as my status, someone suggested eating grit and toasting rats on sticks. I can’t catch the rats these days, but I suppose grit is at least a vegan option.

The Mortimer book has actually given way this week to an even funnier, more entertaining one called “You Are Awful, But I Like You: A Traveller’s Guide to Unloved Britain” by Tim Moore. Maisie recommended it, and I wasn’t disappointed. I’ve had a crack at writing one or two offbeat travel books myself, but I take my hat off to this man, who is an unacknowledged master. Not least because he decided to perform his odyssey through the closed down, derelict industrial estates and areas of terminal economic decline in an Austin Maestro called “Craig”. It is a truly wonderful book, but if I had to pick out one sentence as a pearl, it would be his cripplingly-funny description of the sound of the Maestro’s engine as being “like a skeleton wanking inside a biscuit tin.” I’ve been boring Debbie by alternately snorking at this and reading bits of it out to her, earning me several funny looks and severe reprimands. But it is a very funny book, and I wish I’d written it.

This is pretty much what’s passed for fun, in a week of VAT returns, accounts, marking, book editing, and deceased equine quadriped flagellation, otherwise known as “marketing”. In the middle of it all, my laptop adapter died, but, unlike Jesus, it was beyond resurrection, so Debbie was duly despatched to Argos for a new one.

Mention of Jesus brings me neatly, of course, to matters spiritual. It’s the time between Easter and Pentecost now, which, as I wrote last year, is when Jesus was off on his holidays, surfing on Gallilee, before starting his comeback tour at Whitsun, and the disciples were left holding the fort and trying to believe that what they’d seen on Easter Sunday was really real, as much as anything in human reality is really real. This week, I have sort of felt like they must have felt. A bit all at sea, really, but not in a good way. A bit like the passengers on the Titanic must have felt, really, You think you have put your trust in a certainty, you think you are on solid ground, then something happens to pull the rug out from under you – or in their case, the deck. I definitely know that feeling.

But what I do find inexplicable, other than that there is, there must be some sort of design behind it, is the way that the human spirit shines through it. The disciples kept the faith, and were rewarded. Even though the ship was sinking, the band played “Nearer My God to Thee”, and even though the garden was neglected for two years, the Magnolia is in bud, the Great Mullein is starting to come up again, and there is a green, frothy haze of spring renewal amongst the bare branches of the saplings down the valley.

And no, I am not going to end with Celine Dion.

Epiblog for Easter Sunday

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. The week when Winter, like the Empire, struck back. It’s rare these days that I see one of my decisions vindicated and generally agreed to be a smart move, usually these days it’s just the opposite, in fact, and - since one of my longest standing hobbies and pleasures in life has been proving people wrong - I find it irksome to be constantly questioned by all and sundry.

So it was especially gratifying to me that the last (I hope) coal order of the winter was delivered on the Friday before the snow came on the Wednesday. I know, I really should get out more. I’d debated the pros and cons of ordering more coal, because it’s not cheap, but events, for once, proved me resoundingly and crushingly correct.

I don’t know why I was being so self-satisfied, really. It is a reasonable punt that any time there is a bank holiday in prospect, the Good Old British Weather takes a nosedive, temperatures plummet, icy blasts whistle down from the Arctic, the country grinds to a halt, and the news bulletins are full of vox pops from people who only popped out for a loaf of bread and a pint of milk and got stuck in a snowdrift for seven hours because the council hadn’t gritted, and/or that perennial media favourite, the nutter who was so desperate to get to the office, come what may, that he harnessed up the family Labrador to a skateboard and sledged in from Thames Ditton, while the rest of Britain simply woke up, took one look at the weather, muttered “nah”, and pulled the duvet back over their heads.

So it was on Wednesday, when Winter gave its last dying snarl and I opened my eyes to see snowflakes floating past my window. For a few hours, the garden and the immediate locality was transformed: snow became blossom, and blossom became snow, and it was impossible to tell one from the other. The catkins on the Alder outside my window each became encased in a transparent blob of ice, as if they might have been prehistoric catkins preserved in amber, or found at the bottom of the glacier with Oetzi the Iceman, deep in the crevasses of the Tyrol.

Zak and Freddie loved the snow, and rushed round barking aimlessly when I let them out into the garden, doing skidding turns, rolling over, and coming back in with snow on them, to have breakfast and then steam gently by the fire. Kitty, however, was less impressed, and remained solidly welded to the cat blanket on the bin bag in the hearth, only venturing as far as the food dish. She was, like me, glad of Debbie’s industriousness in collecting fallen wood.

Because we have Zak and Freddie staying at the moment, until Granny’s triumphant return from her royal progress to Southampton, feeding-time has become more complicated, but basically what it boils down to is that Kitty eats Freddie’s dog food, Freddie eats Kitty’s cat food, and then Zak, having had his own tea, comes round and demolishes everyone else’s leftovers. I suppose as long as they all get something, that’s what counts.

Plus we now have at least two additional mouths to feed, in the form of Brenda the badger and Freda the fox. This assumes that it’s the same animal each time, of course, there could be a whole horde (insert appropriate collective noun) of them out there, working out a feeding rota. Freddie and Zak are blissfully oblivious of the al fresco animal drive-thru diner taking place out on the decking. In fact, on Saturday night, I will swear blind that Freda’s eyes met Zak’s as she pressed her nose up against the glass of the conservatory door to ask if there were any seconds (or what’s for pudding) and he did absolutely nothing. Freddy snoozed on in front of the fire, grumbling and farting in his sleep.

We’re still no nearer getting another dog. Hazel very kindly sent me a link to a potential dog on the West Yorkshire Dog Rescue pages, I banged off the email form to them that same night, expressing an interest, nothing. Of course, they probably have already re-homed her somewhere else, or they deem us to be unsuitable for some reason, and I’d like to say that the people who run animal sanctuaries are often hard-pressed, saintly individuals juggling a myriad of responsibilities and decisions that would terrify an archbishop. But sometimes, when I try and say it, it comes out as `it wouldn’t have hurt the mutton-tugging gongfermours just to send a two line reply!’

Freddie and Zak, the caught-off-guard dogs that they are, remind me of the letter written by a young Edward II to one Louis D’evreaux,and quoted in Ian Mortimer’s “A Time Traveller’s Guide to Medieval England”, where Edward promises to send Louis `some misshapen greyhounds from Wales, which can well catch a hare if they find it asleep, and running-dogs which will follow at an amble”.

I’ve been reading this book on and off since Friday, when I was given it for my birthday, by Granny (she arranged for it to be delivered before she left for the Solent). It’s a truly wonderful book, and I was chortling away to myself reading about the Sumptuary Laws, which were passed in 1367 or thereabouts, and which specified what you could and could not wear in public, according to your wealth and status in society. Debbie asked me what I was chuckling over, and I told her about how, under these laws, only certain people were allowed to wear garments trimmed with weasel, while peasants were forced to wear disgusting rags that were probably caked with shit and dung. She gave me a long, cool, appraising stare and said,

“I see you’re still living the medieval dream, then.”

She’s been in a crabby mood all week because of her GCSE marking having prevented us, so far, from setting off anywhere in the camper van. Well, that, and the weather. And the dribbly little oil leak from the crankcase, which will eventually have to receive the Extreme Unction from Father Jack, up at the garage. She was so annoyed with me at one juncture that she asked me to “turn down” the chiming clock (I switched it to silent, without arguing) and her sole contribution to one of the many – and increasingly tenuous – Titanic centenary documentaries on TV was to ask `why didn’t they all just jump off the ship onto the iceberg?’

Anyway, by Friday, we’d reached an uneasy impasse for my birthday, and I had a really enjoyable day, doing what I wanted, for once, instead of what I had to do, as is more usually the case. And of course, it being Good Friday, this involved me making my annual reading of “Good Friday 1613, Riding Westwards”, by John Donne. A poem of such staggering complexity and insight, and vivid imagery, it’s hard to conceive of it being written 399 years ago, but it was.

I try to read it at least once a year. In fact, I should read more of Donne and Herbert, just to remind myself what truly excellent poets they were. I get the same feeling when I hear music by Handel. How could something so fresh, so vivid, so complex, have been written so long ago? Or similarly, the weird music of Gesualdo, whose “Tenebrae Responses” I have also been listening to this week. I vaguely knew about the Tenebrae service as a part of Easter or of Holy Week, but I didn’t know the detail. Apologies if I now proceed to tell you something you know already, but this is what Wikipedia says about it:

In the Roman Catholic Church, Tenebrae is the name given to the celebration, with special ceremonies, of Matins and Lauds, the first two hours of the Divine Office, of the last three days of Holy Week. Originally celebrated after midnight, by the late Middle Ages their celebration was anticipated on the afternoon or evening of the preceding day in most places. The principal Tenebrae ceremony is the gradual extinguishing of candles upon a stand in the sanctuary called a hearse. Eventually the Roman Rite settled on fifteen candles, one of which is extinguished after each of the nine psalms of Matins and the five of Lauds, gradually reducing the lighting throughout the service. The six altar candles are put out during the Benedictus, and then any remaining lights in the church. The last candle is hidden beneath the altar, ending the service in total darkness. The strepitus (Latin for "great noise"), made by slamming a book shut, banging a hymnal or breviary against the pew, or stomping on the floor, symbolizes the earthquake that followed Christ's death, although it may have originated as a simple signal to depart. Following the great noise, the candle which had been hidden from view is returned to the top of the hearse, signifying the return of Christ to the world with the Resurrection, and all depart in silence.

Wow. It sounds like a blast, if that’s not too trivial a response, and I hope one day I can see it, preferably to the music of Gesualdo, and in somewhere like Santiago Di Compostela.

Easter is normally a hopeful time of year for me, but so far this Easter, possibly because the weather turned on us and rent us, like the crowd turning on Jesus after Palm Sunday, possibly because we’re both tired (and I am tired of being in this wheelchair) possibly because everywhere you look in our house there are mountains of things that need doing, and that’s only the tangible stuff, the offline stuff that you can actually see and pick up and touch, it doesn’t include the online stuff with its account balances and figures with too many noughts the wrong side of the decimal point.

So if you came here looking for a life-affirming Easter message, I’m afraid I don’t have one. Did Jesus die for me, Steve Rudd, 57, balding, overweight, invalid feeder of itinerant badgers and weaver of words? I don’t know. Who moved the stone? I don’t know, but modern physics has much to tell us about the appearance of so-called reality and the ability of thought to move things – and doesn’t it say in the Bible somewhere that prayer can move mountains? I don’t know. I prayed that I would be able to walk again, and I prayed that my dog would get better, and neither happened. I don’t know why. Maybe, like Eric Morecambe playing Grieg for Andre Previn (who shares his birthday with mine, along with Paul Daniels, Ian Paisley, and the late, lamented Greenjewel of Dublin, who often used to laugh with me about it online) I am saying all the right prayers, but in the wrong order, or something.

You either believe it or you don’t. That’s all there is. And if you believe it, you believe it because you feel it, not because you can prove it. You know it, but you can’t explain it, and someone else’s knowing and believing may be different to your knowing and believing. My faith is not your faith is not her faith is not their faith. Faith is like love, everybody does it slightly differently. No tittering at the back.

Personally, I think, as I wrote this time last year (and probably the year before that) that something happened. I can’t begin to understand why, but sometimes, like Dean Jocelin in “The Spire”, I am permitted to feel the presence of the angels, and sometimes, also like Dean Jocelin, I am made to suffer for it.

Maybe my no longer having Tiggy, and still being stuck in the trundling treadmill, is all part of some cunning master plan that Big G hasn’t vouchsafed to me yet. I can only observe that I wish he wouldn’t be so bloody opaque sometimes. A few clues would be good. After all, what am I supposed to deduce from an empty tomb? Could it be something as simple as rebirth and forgiveness, springing from the bright green grass of springtime, like the pale luminous golden primroses in a medieval tapestry?

Epiblog for Palm Sunday

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. The fragile spring is still holding, and, as I type this, on the first day of April, I kid you not, the morning is crisp, fresh and sunny, and the daffodils are out in the garden. I have given up on the crocuses, I think something, either the frost, or the badger, or both, must have got at them. Phil’s home-grown garlic that he gave us is also thriving, out on the decking, and I must get my own herbs sown into pots today, I’ve put it off far too long. Of course, with the Easter break having finally arrived for Debbie, the long-range forecasters are now threatening snow on high ground over the Easter weekend. Great start to the summer. The cherry tree in the garden of The Lodge, over the road, already looks like it’s covered in snow, a dazzling, shocking, profusion of exploding blossom. So I have been reciting, in turn and turn about, this week:

`Faire daffadils we weep to see ye haste away so soon’

and

`Loveliest of trees, the cherry now’.

Kitty’s been ranging further and wider with the coming of the warmer weather, venturing outside and also spending lots of time on the sunny conservatory window that only she can access, even using Zak’s head as a stepping stone to get up there, while he was sleeping soundly on the fleecy dog-bed he inherited from Tiglet. I have been thinking of Tiggy more and more, this week, how much she loved this time of year, when the sun warmed her tired old bones, and how I prayed when I was ill, and then again when she was ill, that she’d be granted just one more spring. Alas, it was not to be, and we came through the winter with 25% of our household depleted.

Depleted, and likely to remain so. I wrote last week that my efforts to adopt another dog had stalled for a variety of reasons, mainly owing to the distance between us, and the sanctuary where I’d found her, on the internet, in West Wales. The result of my piece was that two Mustardlanders contacted me separately, both offering help to transport Pepper the dog from Carmarthen to Huddersfield. Choking back real tears of gratitude, I gratefully accepted both offers in principle. It now all hinged on whether the dog sanctuary would waive their rule which says that prospective owners had to visit the sanctuary in person.

Eagerly, I emailed them that very question, only to receive the crushing news that Pepper had already been rehomed, elsewhere. I was slightly miffed that, given that they already knew we were interested in her, they hadn’t contacted me when the alternative offer came up, but ultimately I suppose that if it’s a choice between someone near at hand who’s willing to take the dog on the normal basis, and someone far away who wants to do something weird, odd, strange and out of the ordinary, they chose the easy route. But it was a bitter disappointment, nevertheless, and something I never expected, coming out of `left field’, as they say over in the Colonies.

Freddie and Zak are completely useless as guard dogs. They would have much to learn from the geese of ancient Rome. On Saturday night, while they were both within ten feet of the door, the feeding dish outside on the decking was visited in fairly quick succession by the fox, then the badger, then the fox again, coming back to see what, if anything, had been left by the badger (he was out of luck, the badger doesn’t `do’ leftovers!). Freddie and Zak snoozed on, oblivious by the fire, their heads across their paws, replete with Beefy Chub and `Chomping Chicken’ dog treats, twitching their paws and dreaming of dog stuff. Probably of foxes and badgers.

As we now have temporary custody of the family doglets, Debbie and her dad will share the dog exercising duties until Granny returns from her diamond jubilee progress to the shores of the shining Solent in sixteen days’ time, and yesterday he’d been given a lift by one of his old running mates to see a road race in Liverpool, of all things, so it fell to Debbie to take them. She also took a bag with her, it being her intention to gather fallen branches to use as kindling for the fire during her meanderings. There’s always loads of naturally fallen wood around the garden and in the woods out back, down the valley towards the River Holme, and I’ve often thought that given enough time and energy, we could cut the coal bill considerably. The trouble is the time it would take to collect it all would probably negate any saving in monetary terms. See also under `carrot juice’.

She got as far as the cricket field in Armitage Bridge, and she was doing really well on the wood gathering front, when she spied what would have been, as she described it, `the perfect stick for the fire’. She was just about to add it to her hoard of twigs and branches (Zak and Freddie were happily elsewhere, snuffling in the undergrowth) when what she also described as `a meaty-looking Rottweiler’ appeared out of nowhere and beat her to it. She briefly considered wrestling the stick from its jaws, and it too seemed inclined to play, but the sudden appearance of its equally meaty-looking owner meant she had second thoughts, unusually for Debbie, finally concluding that it was undignified for a woman in her mid-40s to be seen grappling in public with a Rottweiler over a stick, so she was reduced to having to watch, seething silently, while the Rotty trotted off obediently with its prize.

Of course you couldn’t have a stick without a carrot, and yesterday, as well as turning the remains of Friday night’s risotto into pakoras, by the addition of gram flour, chillies, minced ginger, and curry spices, then shallow frying them in a smittick of oil in a big cast-iron skillet, I also juiced two and a half kilos of carrots to provide two and a half bottles of carrot juice, an occupation of such quixotic pointlessness that I would only consider undertaking it for those I cared about most deeply. So, if I ever serve you carrot juice, or any juice for that matter, especially `elephant juice’ which apparently looks just like `I love you’ when you say it to a lip-reader, then you’ll know you have a special place in my heart, dear reader.

You couldn’t have a carrot without a donkey, either, and of course today’s Palm Sunday, when Jesus is supposed to have ridden in triumph into Jerusalem on a donkey. Again, in my current phase of trying not to take the Bible too literally, at mild peril to my immortal soul and any passing kittens, I haven’t bothered quoting the chapter and verse, but it’s all there in the Bible, go and look if you want to.

Talking of kittens in mild peril, as far as I am aware, the Archdiocese of New York has met with the feral cat groups over the imbroglio surrounding the feral cat colony at St James’s Church (see last week’s Epiblog) but I haven’t heard of the outcome yet, so we’re not out of the woods by any means. Meanwhile, I have had a fundraising email, from the feral cat group, asking for donations and promising to teach me how to bottle-feed a kitten. Unfortunately for them, such is the financial situation at present that I, like Yeats, have nothing to offer but my dreams, and I doubt in any case they would pay for me to fly to New York to learn something I already know how to do (although in fairness, it’s usually me that gets sustenance from a bottle, these days).

Other events in the wider world still occasionally filter through to me here in my semi-rural incarceration. Hard on the heels of mugging old Grannies, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, God bless his addled little bonce and may he have an epiphany soon before he does too much more damage, has put VAT on hot pasties now, the take-away staple of many a white-van-man’s lunch. So, the hard-pressed working man’s meal costs more, while the millionaires are invited to dine at 10 Downing Street (in return for more substantial donations, which ensure that government policy is influenced in their favour). That’s always assuming the hard-pressed working man can afford, or even find, the petrol to put in his car to go to work in the first place. Or find the work, for that matter. I don’t know how we have the cheek sometimes to try and export `democracy’ to the rest of the world, when we don’t even live in one.

Then as well as the great fuel shortage that wasn’t, and the eye-watering increase in the cost of postage stamps as Royal Mail was finally allowed to charge a realistic market price for the universal delivery obligation, to make up for the decades of underinvestment and plundering by successive governments and the stripping away of its most lucrative markets in a botched attempt at part-privatisation. Sometimes when I look at the world at large these days, it seems more and more that every day is April Fools’ day, and the jesters have taken over the court.

So, on this quiet, sunny, Palm Sunday, I’ve tried to do a bit of withdrawal and contemplation. I can get back to grappling with the accounts tomorrow, a meaty Rottweiler of a problem if ever there was one, and I might have a look later on for another dog. Back to the drawing board, or, more appropriately, since it will be an online search, back to the message board. But just for now I have been having another go at getting to the essence of what Palm Sunday is all about. Betrayal is a subject I am, sadly, familiar with. I have been, in my time, both the betrayer and the betrayed, and neither are experiences I would care to repeat, at least in their worst incarnations. But there are degrees of betrayal, as there are degrees of love, and sometimes there is even the concept of a necessary betrayal, where a good person does some bad things for a good outcome.

I am not saying that you should do whatever needs doing by any means necessary, and that anything goes, because that way lies complete amorality. Rather I am saying that in some situations, the good and right thing to do at the time is different to what it might be in a similar situation at another time or in another place. This is completely different to amorality, in fact it is quite an awesome responsibility, to have to decide morality for yourself, with the guidance of the good inside of you, on a situation by situation basis. Some people would say that is precociously taking the mantle of God upon yourself, I say it is being guided by the hand of God as you go about your business. The Church says you should always do the same thing, irrespective of the situation, which is one reason why I don’t go to Church anymore.

In the world of moral relativism, perhaps Judas is a necessary betrayer, and as such, should be congratulated for bringing about the Resurrection and all that springs from it. Always assuming that you accept a) that Jesus actually lived and b) that he died for your sins, as your personal saviour, something with which I still find it difficult to grapple. Perhaps, like the Rottweiler, I get the wrong end of the stick. Some days I expect things to be easy, I get tripped up at every step of the way (only metaphorically, sadly!) the people I thought I could rely on turn on me and let me down. And I let others down, in turn, sometimes, to my shame, out of casual laziness.

But isn’t that just life anyway? The dog you thought you could count on has already been re-homed elsewhere, the stick you were eyeing up to burn on the fire is snaffled from under your nose by a passing Rottweiler? Multiply that up the chain of “what might have been”, and there you have life writ large. The people you thought were your best friends shop you to the authorities or cast you out, and the crowd turns on you and you end up being crucified. Betrayal and disappointment are all part of the cycle, cogs in the cosmic machine, unpleasant as they are, but they are necessary for us to have forgiveness and fulfilment, in the same way as the cherry tree in the garden of the cemetery lodge is blazing with a heart-stoppingly beautiful effusion of incandescent pink blossom nourished by the bones of the dead.

So maybe I need to stop nursing the hatred of my various betrayals, put down the burden of my sorrow for those betrayals I myself am responsible for, and enjoy the blossom while it lasts. It’ll be a long time gone. The summer is coming, dogs or no dogs, the open road is calling, and all the Lakes and all Scotland lies spread out before us, like precious treasures arrayed on a green and blue quilt.