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.