Epiblog for Whit Sunday

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. Summer has finally burst over us, at last, coating everything with thistledown and blossom, dust and sunburnt warmth. The Clematis is its own constellation of pinkwhite stars improbable against the deep blue of a flawless sky. The trees are a million greens as their leaves dance and dither in the soft wind.

“Give me a land of boughs in leaf,
A land of trees that stand;
Where trees are fallen, there is grief;
I love no leafless land”

Says A. E. Housman, and he should know. Or, if one poet isn’t enough for you, how about Andrew Marvell’s

“Annihilating all that’s made
To a green thought, in a green shade”

After a couple of days of “scorchio”, even Kitty has realised, as it finally permeated her furry little walnut of a brain, that the getting of heat was not longer confined to the precincts of the stove, but in fact there were lovely warm sunny windowsills, chairs, even the decking outside was hot. Not just warm, but hot under her paws, where the sun had scorched it. She delighted in the discovery, and is like a cat ten years younger than her age, and this week has probably spent more time out of doors than in the previous six months!

She still looks as though she’s asking me to light the fire before I go to bed, though, and the other night, worried that she might be cold without the stove, I spread out the two new crocheted cat blankets that arrived in the post for her in a huge parcel from her Auntie Maisie, and then wrapped my scarf round her to keep out any draughts. She purred her approval, and was still there, in exactly the same position, when I came through the next morning, so my improvised cat-nest obviously did the trick. In fact, at one point, it looked like I was going to have to do like Mohammed did with the sleeve of his garment, and cut the scarf in half to avoid disturbing her. The reason I thought of Mohammed was that the scarf is one of those arab ones with the little knots along the edge, which I was delighted to find is called a “tagelmust”, which is far too good a word to be wasted on a scarf.

Grandad’s been ranging far and wide with Zak and Freddie, although by the weekend, Freddie, grumbly old codger that he is, had had enough of the heat and refused to go walkies, preferring to lie with his head on a cushion. Not even the mention of squirrels would rouse him. He’s earned the right to refuse, after all – he’s 84 in human years.

Brenda the badger and other semi-official denizens of the night have been rather more conspicuous by their absence. I do not know much about the habits of badgers, but I would imagine that, being nocturnal, and the earth being cool, they will stay underground during the day and that now, if I want to actually see her demolish the food I leave out, it would involve me staying up til two and three o’clock in the morning, which I am simply too tired to do.

The squirrels, however, have been very active, taunting Freddie, foraging in the garden and on the decking every day. I have said it before, that I know they are essentially tree-rats and I know they are single-handedly responsible for the demise of our own native red squirrel, but grey squirrels are impossibly cute. There’s one with a very distinctive marking, that regularly comes to the decking to steal the bread I put out for the birds. It has a dark patch of fur under its right eye, so it looks like it’s got two eyes on the same side of its head, one above the other. I have named him Isaiah, because, as I said to Debbie “one eye’s higher than the other”.

Notwithstanding what Eliot said about cats, the naming of squirrels is even more complex. Carey and the team down at wheelchair services, whose offices are down in the valley bottom, below our garden, share many of the same squirrels with us, and have named them all. I can’t remember offhand what they are all called, but I recall Rusty, Dusty, and Wilbert Whitear, who sounds like a Viking chieftain but is actually … a squirrel.

I’ve been having some trouble with one of the wheels on my wheelchair recently and I had occasion to phone up Wheelchair Services to arrange an engineer to call, and they were on voicemail. “Probably all out squirrel-spotting” observed Debbie, mordantly.

Not everybody shares mine and Carey’s view of squirrels. Bernard, my erstwhile compatriot in Calderdale Royal, came to visit during the week, bearing gifts as usual, in this case leeks and rhubarb from his farm, and while we sat having a cuppa and setting the world to rights, Isaiah appeared on the decking. Bernard denounced him as a tree-rat, and Isaiah continued nibbling at whatever he’d stolen from the bird food. For a moment I thought Bernard was going to emulate Freddie and hurl himself against the glass door of the conservatory, barking, but the opportunity passed.

Deb has been shepherding her various charges through various exams, and looking forward to half term. She was preparing a lesson about “informative text” and asked me why it was that the Queen ascended the throne in February 1952 but wasn’t crowned until June 1953. I explained that Coronations take a lot of organising, there’s the crowds to consider, the days are short and cold in February and people are less inclined to stand and cheer; plus, the Archbishop of Canterbury has to consult his diary. It’s not as if the heads of state who need inviting can come over at a moment’s notice, either. I mean, Malawi probably hasn’t got much on, but I would imagine that the diary of the President of the United States is pretty booked up weeks in advance. I agreed with her, though, that it was easier in the old days when the monarch simply wrested the crown of the bloody, severed head of his predecessor, on the battlefield, and jammed it on his own.

We’ve even been planning our camper van trip to the Hebrides later in the summer, if it happens. I say “if” because, like everything we do, it’s characterised by last minute panics, lack of forward planning, and frequent changes of plan. I had gone so far as to draw up a tentative itinerary, and show it to Debbie, which was probably a mistake, because she immediately started picking fault with it, and the Calmac brochure had to be re-consulted. She was disappointed to find that you can’t take cars to Iona.

“That’s because they want people to walk there. It’s a very special place.”

“Why, what is there to see there?”

“The ancient Christian ruins.”

“I don’t need to go to Iona to see that, I’m married to one.”

The latter half of the week was dominated by preparations for Owen’s visit. Owen, my school-friend from Wales, is the honorary Master of the Works when it comes to our continuing struggle to set this house to rights and make it more habitable for me in my wheelchair. This time around, we had a hit list of tasks which included trying to empty out the old camper van. Although the pressing issue of this decaying hulk in the driveway had been circumvented (literally) by Owen’s building of the ramp, it still needed doing, not least because inside it were boxes and boxes of books from my previous house moves that ultimately needed bringing in and shelving.

Owen’s list also included fitting a new door, repairing some damaged floorboards, and stuff like that, but this sort of thing is meat and drink to him. He can whip a door off its hinges in the time it takes to boil the kettle, and before you know where you are, he’s planing away at it and there’s a blizzard of shavings and then it’s hup! Hey presto! Buzz buzz buzz buzz and the screws are back in place. So it proved this visit, and by Saturday afternoon there was only the issue of the books and the camper to be resolved. The previous night we’d passed a convivial evening, and Owen had been telling us about his own wildlife encounters at home, where he’d observed a Pine-Marten coming out of his workshop one morning, sniffing at a pile of logs in his yard, and then sauntering off, completely uncaring, into the woods. It emerged during this conversation that Debbie thought a pine-marten was a type of bird, until I reminded her that we’d actually seen one in Scotland – she’d remarked it with the immortal exclamation “Oooh, look! A stole!”

It was another hot day, and I was looking forward to seeing some old friends again in the book-boxes. I sat in the driveway, tape-gun at the ready, and the plan was that Owen would bring the boxes out to me, one by one, I’d have a look inside and see what I wanted to rescue immediately, then re-box the rest, which were going to be stacked in the garage where he’d created new room for them by taking a carload of our rubbish to the tip. That was the plan. However...

Unfortunately, during the decade and a half that the van has sat there, while I was labouring under the delusion that the “camper” half of it was watertight and my books were safe, this was not the case. Two separate leaks had rendered many of the boxes unrecognisable, and likewise the books within. Some of them were so bad, said Owen, that you couldn’t tell where the boxes ended and the books began, or vice versa.

We still had to stick to the plan, but instead of it being a joyful occasion and a reunion with some companions of my past, it was a sorrowful acknowledgement, box after box, of the casualties and losses, which mounted inexorably as the afternoon progressed. I haven’t made a detailed count as yet – we modified the plan in the end to just putting the worst ones straight in a bin bag – and it’s not on a par with the burning of the library at Alexandria, for instance, as some of the losses can be replaced – but it still depressed me, and upset me to think that if I’d thought on, as they say round here, instead of just assuming they’d be OK, I might have saved them all. As it is, about a half to two-thirds of the books I have been accumulating all my life are now unrecognisable mush.

Kitty doesn’t like house alterations and general demolishment, so had made herself conspicuously absent during all the traipsing back and forth, the hammering, the drilling, and the banging of doors. It was only when Owen began to roll up his sleeping bag, preparatory for his journey back to Wales, that he found there was a cat nesting at the bottom of it.

And so it came to Saturday night, and we were finally able to relax a bit, loosen our stays, and watch England lose against Norway (no, not Eurovision, but football, and we narrowly avoided snatching defeat from the jaws of victory with the sort of forgettable, lacklustre performance for which England abroad has become famous). Having exhausted the entertainment possibilities of muddied oafs (or, since it was Norway, muddied Olafs) I flipped the channel and found myself in the middle of “Lord of the Rings”, with the instantly-recognisable figure of Ian McKellen as Gandalf fighting off various Orcs and Nazguls.

“We are NOT watching Harry bloody Potter!” declared Debbie, and – unwittingly – for once, she was absolutely right. Wizard recognition has never been her strong point.

In one of these channel hopping forays, I glimpsed, briefly, with the sort of horrified fascination usually reserved for crashes on the other side of the motorway, the Eurovision Song Contest. I had heard that there was an act appearing called “The Russian Grannies”, who were strongly fancied to run away with the event, and I blessed my good fortune in changing channels just as they were about to commence their number, Only to find, on its conclusion, that apparently I had been watching “Jedward”. The next performer on stage was from Moldova, which prompted Debbie to ask “are these made up countries, or what?” The Moldovan candidate had what looked like a wire coming out of the back of his head, and his backing singers moved as though they, too, were wired up to 240 volts AC. He was a bit like a gay Ricky Martin, if such a thing were possible.

I didn’t stay up to watch the voting, however, since I could have told you weeks ago who would vote for who, and lo, so it proved. I think it was Cyprus who were kind enough to save Englebert from the ignominy of “un point”, but by then I was past caring and went to bed. I was looking forward to settling down under the duvet with Peter Ackroyd (not personally, you understand, I am simply re-reading “Hawksmoor”) when the power went off, and the burglar alarm in the Lodge over the road started blaring into the night. I was in such a state of catatonia that I even slept through that.

This morning, eventually, the power came back on again, followed a couple of hours later by the internet (Virgin Media’s super-fast status confirmed yet again, ho, ho, this time, the dingoes were even late for their own power cut!) In the meantime, I had commenced sorting out the boxes of photographs uncovered in yesterday’s excavations of the old camper. Three hours later, I had reduced three boxes to, er, three boxes, but I had at least looked at every photograph in every folder and made a perfunctory initial sort of what was, actually, in some cases, photographic gold dust.

Here was my whole life laid out in front of me. Pictures of me from school days, pictures of me at college, pics from the Phillimore years, trips to Scotland, the Lakes, Paris and the Dordogne. If anybody ever wants to do an illustrated history of Steve Rudd, everything you need is in those boxes. Inevitably, there is sadness there, also, in the pictures of people I will never see again, for one reason or another. There was also an interesting cache of old family photographs which I had totally forgotten about, which sort of went some way to softening the blow of the loss of so many books.

That is life, in many ways, though. The things you thought you could rely on, like the books still being there, and still being OK, turn out to be problematic and unreliable, and the stuff you’d completely forgotten about turns out to be full of unexpected gems. And, as I’ve often said before, things you thought you had to worry about turn out to be insignificant, whereas things you gave to heed to at the time come back to haunt you, again and again.

On the plus side, the “house renovation project” has moved significantly forward, and I suppose I won’t need as many bookshelves for my office-library as I thought. In one way, it’s a bit depressing that my entire life to date can be condensed into three A4 boxes of photos, but on the other hand, at least I still have them. You can never quite get all the little balls into the middle of life’s maze, though. Like the trendy vicar in “Beyond the Fringe” says, there’s always a little bit in the corner you can’t reach. Or, as A. E. Housman again put it:

When first my way to fair I took
Few pence in purse had I,
And long I used to stand and look
At things I could not buy.

Now times are altered: if I care
To buy a thing, I can;
The pence are here and here's the fair,
But where's the lost young man?

Where’s the lost young man? He’s in these boxes, captured in slices of 1/60th of a second at F8, in sunshine like we don’t get these days (except we have this week) with other people who all went their separate ways and in places he will never revisit, each of those photos a thin, translucent slice of time, but as full of meaning and colour as a stained glass window. Photos of friends, some of whom are now old friends, familiar as bookends; as Paul Simon says:


Preserve your memories, they’re all that’s left you.

Talking of stained glass reminds me that it is Sunday, and once again I should make my customary enquiry of Big G as to why he hasn’t been around much of late. In fact, I think, if my reckoning is correct, that today is Whit Sunday. A quick check online suggests that “Whit Sunday will not occur in 2012” but that can’t be right, surely? I know that, this year in particular, we’re all being coerced into compulsory celebration next weekend, in honour of the Jubilympics, but even so, Whitsun as a concept, a time when, according to one online encyclopaedia:

In Estonia and Finland eggs are dyed as at Easter because their hens don’t lay eggs until this time. In Germany the day is called “Pfingsten” and pink and red peonies, called “Whitsun roses”, are the symbols along with the birch trees. The English refer to the holiday as Whitsunday with reference to the white garments worn on Pentecost by the newly baptized. Some churches lower a carved dove into the congregation and call this “swinging the Holy Ghost”. Cattle are decorated and an overdressed person is said to be “dressed like a Whitsun ox”.

should not be allowed to go unacknowledged. So, I am acknowledging it here and now, and if I’ve got the wrong Sunday I’m sure my many ancestors will take me to task for it in the hereafter, once I’ve shown them their photos and asked them to identify themselves, that is. I don’t have any pink and white roses, but I’ve got a thousand flowers of Clematis.

Meanwhile, another week of work awaits the hands, brain and heart. But there’s still Sunday evening to look forward to, and working out how to pay for the latest repair to the present camper van (front suspension, don’t even ask) can wait til tomorrow. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. If I’ve gone all “King James”, it’s probably under the influence of a small, black morocco bound volume with a metal clasp and thin india paper, which I found in amongst the photo stash. It is the Bible which belonged to Sarah Walker (nee Harper) my Great-Grandmother. In the front, it is inscribed in immaculate copperplate:

Sarah Ann Harper, Being a new year’s gift from her affectionate Grandfather, John Adamson, January 1865.

It is, of course, the King James version. In 1865, religion was full fat, high tar, with all the knobs, bells and whistles. I will have a proper look at it later. But in the meantime, there are cats to be fed, pots to be washed, and rhubarb to be boiled, and all those snapshots of my life until this evening, and all those Victorian and Edwardian lovers who walked the parish bounds at Whitsun-tide in their Sunday best, falling in love, having their Whitsun weddings to inspire gloomy old Philip Larkin, and then passing down their wonky genes to me, will have to just be patient and wait in the pages of history, for me to get back to them, one way or another.

Epiblog for the Sixth Sunday of Easter

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. Another week of cold damp days, with spring trying to fit itself in somewhere around the edges. However, as I type this, on Sunday morning, there are signs of the sun finally trying to break through, and Paul Hudson on Look North has promised us “a taste of summer” next week. We’ll see. That noise you just heard was the devil going past the window on a skateboard, by the way. I did (briefly) have the cricket on the radio on Thursday while I was working, so that’s one of the sounds of summer, albeit one that, like modern summers themselves, isn’t as good as it used to be in the old days. And it’s true to say that somehow the green-ness of the summer does suddenly seem to have come upon us. Must be all that rain.

Kitty is another who remains unconvinced about summer. She’s ventured as far as sitting under the folding caravan in the driveway once or twice, before realising the inherent pointlessness of such an action, and returning to the ambit of the stove. Zak and Freddie continue to make feeding time more complicated than it need be. On Friday night, Zak had some of Freddie’s and some of Kitty’s, as well as his own. Freddie had some of Kitty’s and some of Zak’s as well as his own. Kitty had some of Freddie’s, as well as her own. I tried to encourage her to have a few morsels out of Zak’s dish as well, then everybody would have had some of everybody’s, in a perfect symmetry of feeding confusion, but of course, being a cat, and a contrarian one, she refused, stubbornly, to do so, and the moment passed.

I’m pleased to report that Brenda the Badger appears to be alive and well, and I have now seen her again with my own eyes, after a long period of just putting out food and seeing it gone the next morning, I can confirm there is still a badger, and she’s still eating food, which gave me a cause for quiet celebration.

Debbie has also been celebrating this week, after a fashion, although any celebration must, of course, be muted, because as far as the exam situation goes, we’re not out of the woods yet, and of course there’s the continuing uncertainty over what courses she’ll be teaching in September, and where. But there was, set against this, the fact that, during this week, she’d reached another birthday.

I’m not going to tell you how many years old she is, but, like Brian Hanrahan, I counted them all out, and I counted them all back again. Or at least it feels like it. Still, we were able to achieve a little oasis of calm on the night itself, we cooked a reasonable meal (well, I cooked a reasonable meal, she ate it) and what passes for a convivial evening these days ensued.

She was especially taken with her present, one of those special forces type maglite torches (except this one was a Heider with a Cree LCD. It projects a beam of 260 lumens over a distance of 200 metres, and I thought it might come in useful for kayaking expeditions when she forgets how far it is to row back and ends up coming home in the dark). So far, however, all she has used it for is to cone me in the beam of light and shout “You’re under arrest!” Still, it keeps her out of worse mischief.

It is, actually, quite an impressive piece of kit, I took it out into the driveway the other night and illuminated several startled owls with it, high in the trees in Lockwood Cemetery. I felt a bit like the kid in the Lemonheads song, “Rudy with a flashlight”,

“Playin’ out in the yard;
Shining it straight up,
Straight at the stars.”

Other than that, it’s been another week of exams, treadmill, and carrot juice, sadly without any vodka.

I could really have done with the vodka this week as well, as it’s been a particularly trying week, another one of those when everything that could go wrong, did go wrong. Culminating in the day the baffle plate fell out of the stove. The baffle-plate is the thing that deflects the heat of the firebox and stops the cast-iron top of the stove from cracking. The one that fell out in two pieces isn’t the original, it was last replaced in 2004, so this one’s lasted almost 8 years. Eight winters. When that plate was put in, we still had Russell, Nigel, Dusty and Tiggy. It just goes to show that everything changes in the end; even the thickest cast-iron boilerplate will burn through. Given time.

But maybe I should take comfort from that – because that is the same process that means that eventually, something as weak as a drop of water can bore straight through the heart of the hardest stone, given time. Decay can be beneficial, in the right circumstances, and if you don’t believe that, you’ve never had a glass of wine, then. So on those days when I feel as weak and ineffectual as a drop of water (and such days are legion) all I have to do is keep on keeping on, and I’ll break through eventually, even if it is on a geological timescale!

Things go in cycles, I guess. The old baffle-plate had had its day, and needed to be replaced. So I ordered a new one, then had the fun of fitting it this morning. With the new baffle plate fitted (after a prolonged battle) and the stove now working again, all was well, except that while I was putting it in, a chunk fell off one of the inside firebricks, (I had to shove it under the stove with the poker because it was too hot to pick up bare-handed) so we now need a new firebrick as well (sigh) but I'm tipping that can wait til summer (if summer ever arrives) when we let the fire go out altogether. I can also confirm that my dad's old army trick of shovelling the hot coals into a bucket and then back into the stove afterwards to re-light it does actually work. Just don't do what I did, and absent-mindedly try and pick up a red hot metal coal scuttle full of glowing coals by the handle! Ouch.

Grandad has taken the dogs walkies, Kitty has moved seamlessly onto the old towel I spread out to stop dust from the ash getting onto the cushions. Brenda (or somebody) ate the food I put out last night. Things move on. The companions I had on that day in 2004 when I put the last baffle-plate in have also moved on, although I do feel they are all still with me in many ways, and I give thanks that some of them are still with me in what we often refer to as “real life”.

On the day when the new baffle-plate arrived I was busy building databases to market books to a wider audience, and to be honest, I wasn’t doing it very well. I was also listening to Archie Fisher sing about how he was “born in the shadow of a Fairfield crane” and the strange concatenation of hearing him sing about the shipbuilding industry - definitely heavy metal - at the same time as I unpacked and held in my hands a very heavy, deliberately-wrought piece of metal that could easily have been a very small part of a very large battleship brought sudden vivid memories of my home town of Hull, and of my dad. Of course, Hull never had a shipbuilding industry as such, not like the Clyde or the Tyne, although there was a small shipyard in Hessle where I went to school (Dunstons) and trawlers were built up further the river at Goole. But the cranes on Alexandra dock that I grew up in the shadow of, were for unloading cargo from all over the world, not for building ships in the first place. Timber, grain, iron, oil. And in any case, my dad made aeroplanes, not ships, but the contrast was just as stark for me. My dad built things, now I build databases. My data will never fly, in any sense of the phrase.

“It was tears that made the Clyde”, sings Artie Fisher, and he may well be right about that. It was tears that made the Humber, in some years, as well. 1968, for instance, when three trawlers, the Saint Romanus, the Kingston Peridot, and the Ross Cleveland, were all lost within the months of January and February that year.
I was only thirteen then, and despite those awful tragedies, the world still seemed a very certain sort of a place, full of truths and reliable things. Now the weeds grow along the riverbank, the slipway is gone, and soon, even the humming heart of the factory itself where my dad spent over twenty years on the night shift, may be silent and empty. Things have changed, you see. We don’t make anything, any more.

Well, we’ve all been through dark times, then, and since. There may be trouble ahead, these things go in cycles. The fact that the Euro may be about to go “bang” has even reached the Holme Valley. But I do know one thing:


“Now I've sat in the school from nine till four
And I've dreamed of the world outside
Where the riveter and the plater watch
Their ships slip to the Clyde
I've served my time behind shipyard gates
And I sometimes mourned my lot
But if any man tries to mess me about
I'll fight like my father fought”

So. Take heed, and think on. Not much God this week, I’m afraid. This is probably one of those times when there’s only one set of footsteps on the beach, and I think it’s just me, but in reality, it’s me being carried by him. Still, I’ve had worse. I’ll get through it. Tomorrow is another day, and the rain is still dropping on to the stone, drop after drip after drop. One day.

In the meantime, though, that thought, in the dark times between the midnight and the dawning, doesn’t stop me wishing I was a fool for you again. I see lovers holding hands and sighing, and hang my head for shame of doing wrong. As the man says; and to be honest, I can’t put it any better. I wish I was a fool for you again. One day. Maybe.

Epiblog for the Fifth Sunday of Easter

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. The late, cold spring continues, with occasional outbreaks of sunshine in defiance of the weather forecast. Then it’s gone again, as fleetingly as it came. Maybe they could all club together on Look North and get Paul Hudson a new piece of seaweed. At least the wettest drought since records began looks to be finally coming to a close. The fact that roads are impassable in several areas, 97 rivers have a flood warning on them and a pub at Linton-on-Ouse has been completely surrounded by water and cut off from civilisation for two weeks has finally got through to Yorkshire Water, who have cancelled their plans for a giant whitewater rafting complex in the staff canteen. Mind you, I think Linton-on-Ouse has been cut off from civilisation in general, and for a lot longer than a fortnight. But that’s another story.

Despite the crappy weather, Kitty has begun venturing outside. The other day she left the confines of the stove and went and sat on the decking, sort of basking in the sun, such as it was, and turning her head first one way and then the other, a bit like humans do when they wake up with a crick in the neck and they do that rotating thing with the head, while they stretch. God knows what she was at. Then she sniffed a few times, sharpened her claws on the fence posts, decided she’d had enough excitement for one day, and asked to go back inside.

The birds have been busy, helping themselves to bread, especially the rather cheeky jay, but they all vamoose when Ronnie the Raven swoops down. I guess he’s not too picky about his prey – or rather, the problem is that he is too picky, full stop, and they know it! Meanwhile, the Great Mullein is coming up, the Rowan is in blossom, the Magnolia is in flower, and the Clematis in bud. If only it would just bloody well get warm!

I haven’t seen either Brenda or Freda in person for a while now, but the night before last, Debbie saw both of them in the garden, in quick succession, within 15 minutes of each other. I must admit, it was a relief to me to know that they were OK. I know, I should not become so attached to wild animals, because there is never any guarantee that you will ever see them again, and, come to that, barring distinguishing marks, how do you know you are looking at the same one every time, anyway? What I call “Brenda” could actually be a succession of different badgers, maybe not even related!

The late, cold, spring gives me another conundrum, as well. By forward-projecting, I know that we will run out of coal around Thursday next week. I have already done two oders which I blithely told the coal yard would be the last one of the year, and then had to eat my words and backtrack, placing a further order. Surely the weather is going to turn warm at some point, given that it’s only something like six weeks to Midsummer’s Day?

Officialdom, in one form or another, dominated my week. For some time now, I’ve been trying to register online for VAT, which has become compulsory for all VAT-registered entities, the only exceptions being those who have a fundamental objection to computers on religious grounds. I could try telling the HMRCE that I think the internet is a limb of Satan, but, given that I currently manage three blogs, my own and four other Facebook pages, have two twitter accounts and am responsible for two web sites as well as informal tech support to my wife and Mother-in-Law (click on the mousey’s left ear!) they may find this strains my credibility somewhat. Anyway, they wrote to me earlier on in the week, telling me that I had successfully passed the first stage of this long and arduous process, and that now I must “follow the instructions overleaf”. Eagerly, I flipped the sheet of paper over. Yes, you guessed it, the other side was blank. So I am currently doing nothing, but doing it creatively, and rather brilliantly, even though I do say so myself.

The other manifestation of officialdom was the NHS, as I had to attend at the HRI for a day on Wednesday. They very kindly picked me up in a patient transport minibus thing, with a tail lift for my wheelchair, which was great, except that as we were rumbling through town on the way to the hospital, the radio was warbling the 1978 Andrew Gold hit Never Let Her Slip Away, with its chorus about:-

“I love her…
I’m hoping that I never re-cover…”

Thanks, Andrew. Actually, I am rather hoping that I do recover, if it’s all the same to you. I wonder if the Yorkshire Ambulance Patient Transport Service has a compilation CD of “songs suitable for depressing patients” since they once also played me “Goin’ up to the Spirit in the Sky”. Sadly, it would seem, for Andrew, he got his wish, and died in his sleep in June 2011. He was only 59.

The day at the hospital was both bizarre and ironic. Bizarre because my discussion with the consultant veered off piste into discourse about whether you could really trust an artist who didn’t use his real name, citing Jack Vettriano as an example. I contended that if you wrote off people who published/performed/created under an assumed name, you would have to get rid of a lot of stuff, from Bob Dylan to George Orwell. I sort of got the impression he thought this would be no great sacrifice. I tried telling him that I had published two novels as Harry Fenwick, but he just smiled indulgently at me, as if I’d asked for a Werther’s Original.

The other bizarre/ironic aspect of my hospital sojourn on Wednesday was that it was the day the Huddersfield Daily Examiner published the review (by Hilarie Stelfox) of Catheter Come Home, the book I wrote about my six months in the hands of the NHS. And of course, the inevitable happened. One of the nurses said “Ooh, I recognise you, you’re that bloke that’s in the Examiner tonight!” Before I could confirm or deny it, a couple more of them had arrived and begun discussing it over my inert form (I was on a trolley at this point) Nurse # 1 gleefully informed Nurse # 2 that I had written this book “and it’s all about us, and the NHS!” Nurse # 2 looked at me with a steely eye, and said, somewhat threateningly, I thought, “All good, I hope?” I swallowed, smiled weakly, and nodded.

So, fate had contrived it that I was in the middle of the people I was writing about the day the existence of my book had been officially acknowledged by the Huddersfield Daily Examiner, which was ironic in a way that even Alanis Morrisette would understand. Of course, in Huddersfield, nothing exists or has any significance until it has been in the Huddersfield Daily Examiner, and its reach and influence is total. I am sure there are people in Golcar or Milnsbridge who look in the Examiner to see if their obituary is in there or not, before deciding whether to get out of bed in the morning. So it was that, later on in the week, when I rang the garage to see if the part had come for Debbie’s windscreen wipers, their first words were “Oooh, Steve, you are a famous man!” I felt a bit like Lord Byron, the day after he published Don Juan, when he woke up, and “found himself famous”. Just a bit, mind. And of course, Lord Byron never made it into the Examiner, so nyer to him!

Anyway, the NHS wants my gall bladder (presumably to make it into a brooch or a silly hat) and to be honest, were it not for the fact that I would have to spend some time in hospital to achieve this, and breathe in a general anaesthetic from which I might, like Andrew Gold, “never re-cover”, I’d be inclined to let them do it. But since those two hurdles do have to be part of the course, I’m not so sure. The alternative is, of course, that I might develop another gall stone (or two) and it might turn into Ascending Cholangitis again. And while that would, alongside Fascioscapularhumeral Muscular Dystrophy, be something else to shout at call centres about (Put me through to a supervisor straight away! I’m in a wheelchair and I’ve got Ascending Cholangitis!”) it does have the unfortunate side effect of, er…death, if you carry on ignoring it. So, as I said in my last blog, I’d reluctantly agreed, thinking that, with a waiting list of 18 weeks, it could be a “distant elephant” for a while yet, and I could pretend it didn’t exist.

Which is why I was surprised when they rang me up and asked me if I wanted it doing on Thursday!

“What happened to the 18 week waiting list?” says I.

“We’ve had a cancellation,” was their reply.

Anyway, I said no. Not this time, thanks very much, but keep me in mind. There’s a great business opportunity there for someone, you know, with all these cancellations – lastminuteoperation.com, where you could log on and browse from a selection of other people’s cancelled operations, and pick one you fancy. Penis extension at Torquay general? It’s very nice at this time of year. Christmas, however, is a bad time to have your leg off.

By the time the weekend came around, of course, my review was, by then, wrapping chips somewhere, or being used to line a cat litter tray, such is the ephemeral nature of fame. Meanwhile, I was struggling to catch up, as usual, with a multiplicity of neglected tasks. On Friday, my “to do” list had 41 things on it, and by the end of the day, I’d achieved some of them, but others had been added by events that had cropped up along the way, so the tally at close of play stood at 35. I must get some serious editing done next week.

One of the things we did get around to, at long last, was to start clearing out the downstairs front room which is going to be the new office. We both grafted away at this for most of Saturday, with Debbie taking four Shaker-style chairs down to the Christian African Relief Trust and me going through various boxes of stuff and getting spiders in my beard and cobwebs in my hair. One of the things I uncovered was a box of old photographs and negatives from the 1970’s including my first ever trip to Scotland, the Knoydart peninsula, in 1971. I know I resolved last week to try and look forward, towards building new things, rather than dwelling on the life I lost on 15 July 2010, but I couldn’t help lingering over some of these shots, and I must do something, somehow, to get them scanned in, or otherwise preserved in a more permanent form.

I suppose it’s the difference between acknowledging your past and accepting that it’s the road map of how you got to where you are now, with all its diversions and wrong turnings – in Facebook terms, your timeline, and hankering after it, yearning to go back to a time when you were actually someone else, and make a different decision at that point, based on what you know now. I can think of many, many times when I should have – for instance – told someone I cared about them, because I never got the chance to do it again, many many things I would run through in a different way if I ever got the chance to do it again. But, of course, we never do, because life is a one-way mirror.

Sometimes, our path is set for us, almost, defined by a single event. Today is apparently the feast day or Our Lady of Fatima, celebrating the events between May 13 and October 13, 1917, when three Portuguese children received apparitions of the Virgin at Cova da Iria, near Fatima, a city 110 miles north of Lisbon. Mary asked the children to pray the rosary for world peace, for the end of World War I, for sinners and for the conversion of Russia. Two of the children died early on in life, but the third, Lucia dos Santos, became a Carmelite nun and died in 2005 at the age of 97.

Obviously, once you’ve apparently seen something as awesome as the Virgin Mary, being a nun seems the obvious career choice. Out of the three things they prayed for, I guess they have definitely got one (the end of the First World War) and half-achieved one – the conversion of Russia, though why this should be important beats me – and we’re all still working on number three, world peace, despite people as diverse as Gandhi and Geri Halliwell lending their support.

Seeing what happened to these kids makes you realise the crucial importance of religion in upbringing, and indeed in shaping your life generally. I’m not entirely comfortable with the story of Fatima, though I am fascinated by it. I always wonder how much the vision of the children was appropriated by the adults around them, and how much the children willingly went along with it, because let’s face it, who doesn’t like being told they’re special in some way?

It harked back, for me, to the discussion I had had with Hilarie Stelfox, much of which didn’t make it into the finished article, about the importance of religion and how it had kept me going in hospital, and I told her that I had been originally baptised into the Church of England, had almost become a Catholic at University, had read reasonably widely in Zen Buddhism and Taoism, paganism and magick, and described myself on my census form as a “lapsed agnostic”, although what I believe these days is probably nearer to the Quakers than anyone else, apart from my obvious problems with forgiveness and violence. If there was a sect called “The Violent, Unforgiving Quakers”, I’d be right in there, slam-dunk.

Meanwhile, I keep blundering on. I can’t forgive people, that’s the bottom line, and I can’t be doing with organised, inflexible morality. I can’t forgive David Cameron, for instance. The more I see of this lousy government, the more I am reminded of Cameron and Rupert Murdoch as a ventriloquism act, with Rupert’s arm wedged up Cameron’s chuff until his eyes lit up. Now that arm has been summarily and peremptorily removed, all we are left with is the empty dummy. How can you forgive people like David Cameron, George Osborne, Nick Clegg, Tony Blair, Margaret Thatcher? It is easier stuffing a camel through the eye of a needle.

So, I’m an angry old man who doesn’t do forgiveness, a product of my past. Like Martin Luther, here I stand, I can do no more. I’m just trying to get along, like Paul Simon says in An American Tune:

“Tomorrow’s gonna be a brand new working day
And I’m trying to get some rest,
That’s all I’m trying just to get some rest”

Actually, I would quote the lyric of the entire song if I could, because it’s all apposite to how I feel at the moment. Anyway … rest. Rest, that, and looking forward to going on holiday to the Hebrides this summer. There are seals, basking sharks and otters to be spotted, photographed, and maybe painted, and they all understand me a damn sight better than some humans do – because, after all, it does say in the Bible, “do unto otters as you would have them do unto you”!

Epiblog for the Fourth Sunday of Easter

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley, catching up on tasks that had been neglected during the period when nothing mattered if it wasn’t to do with AQA marking, and generally sweeping up the wreckage, physical and emotional, of the ill-advised foray into the realms of GCSE. I finally posted last week’s Epiblog on Thursday, and to be honest I have got so out of kilter with writing them now, that I don’t know whether that one was four days late or eleven days late. Anyway, it’s the Monday after the fourth Sunday, so here I am, writing another one.

Already it’s May, my favourite month of the year, we’ve had May Eve and we all rode a white swan like the people of the Beltane (well, I didn’t, but you get the drift…) and, surprisingly, this weekend, allowing for the fact that it’s a Bank Holiday, which normally automatically brings sheeting rain and forked lightning, it’s actually been quite balmy, mild and sunny. So much so that, yesterday, I got Debbie to heave me out onto the decking like a sack of spuds, and I spent some time pottering, aided and abetted by Kitty, who seemed to appreciate having company as she prowled up and down, sniffing the scents carried on the unaccustomed warm breeze, and sharpening her claws on the fence posts. Pottering is, of course, what you have to do before you can start gardening. It is a necessary precursor. In my case, it involved rescuing a pair of secateurs which had been left outside all winter and therefore had rusted to buggery [and are now dunking in some Double T Penetrating Oil], and replacing the missing screw in the broom handle so that the head was held on by two screws, not one, and no longer rotated at random when you attempted to sweep up with it. What was it Kipling said about stooping to build things up with worn out tools?

Today, however, it’s back to traditional Bank Holiday weather and Kitty is by the stove, curled round in a tight ball with her nose in her tail, Zak is in his armchair in the conservatory, snoozing, dreaming and trembling, and Freddie is sprawled on the rug, front and centre, snoring next to the hearth, while we all listen to the cold greygreen rain on this cold greygreen day, drumming on the conservatory roof. Confined to barracks. Rain stopped play. The wettest drought on record continues, and the chairman of Yorkshire Water is even now adding the bubble-bath to the brimming log-flume jacuzzi in the corner of his office, while Carole King warbles “It might as well rain until September” softly over the company tannoy.

The birds are still busy about their purpose. The robin has been around, hardly surprising given that it’s still winter, there have been several blackbirds, a sparrow or two, and a jay that comes down and makes off with disproportionately large chunks of bread. Then, every so often, they will all look round and vanish at once, skedaddling up and away into the branches of any tree that will provide safe have, as Ronnie the Raven swoops down and starts pacing about, cocking his head from side to side, searching out prey or food, he’s not fussy which, with his black bead of a deadly eye. I fully expect, one day, to see him flapping off into the distance with Freddie firmly grasped in his talons.

The other members of my irregular menagerie come and go. I haven’t seen much of Brenda the Badger, although I have seen evidence of her, in the form of food being eaten, and the dish having been shoved around in an energetic and enthusiastic manner. She never was very good at keeping set hours, and of course now it’s light in the evening until quite late, she doesn’t come at 10pm like she used to. She probably comes at 2AM, when it’s properly dark, and I’m afraid I just don’t have the stamina to sit up and wait. Freda the Fox has been around once or twice, but she was always a fleeting visitor anyway. Don’t expect firm promises from foxy Freda. Now you see her, now she’s gone. I’ve known some women like that, come to think of it, and they were usually foxy, too…

Talking of foxy women, take my wife … please! No, only kidding, she’s improved dramatically since the curse of AQA has been lifted from her life, though she’s still counting down the hours to half-term, when she can go a-kayaking again, weather permitting, of course. In fact, if the rain carries on, she’ll be able to go a-kayaking without leaving the garden. Maybe even without leaving the kitchen.
It would be good to go a-kayaking again. Not that I, myself, ever kayaked, I am the support vehicle. Or at least I used to be, back in the days when we would get up ridiculously early (for us) on a Sunday, make sandwiches and flasks of tea, heave the Necky Manitou up on the hydraglide rack on top of the old Citroen Berlingo, strap it down, and then Tiggy would jump in, up onto the back seat, anxious not to be left behind, as we headed up the M6 to the Lakes. More often than not, we almost packed one or more of the cats by mistake, as well.

I often think of those days, and how to get them back, or if not those days, other days like them. I’ve started making a list – another dog, another car (one that I can drive) and the energy and wherewithal to do it all over again, stooping to build it up with worn-out tools, are all high on the agenda. As is planning a holiday this year, which involves, first of all, a massive calculator-and-spreadsheet exercise to find out if it will be cheaper to buy individual tickets between the islands of the Hebrides, or one all-encompassing Caledonian MacBrayne Island Rover. Then making a huge list of everything we need to take with us, then packing it all into the camper, which is, in its own way, another worn-out tool.

The other thing that needs tools, right now, worn out or not, and building up, is the garden. The poor weather has stopped me getting outside as much as I’d have liked to since Owen built my ramp, but I have got as far as searching for short-handled gardening tools that can be used from a wheelchair, and Ceanothus-puget-blue on various bulb and plant selling sites. I’ve also spent some time Googling for trellis, and alyssum, which makes me an alyssum-seeker, so I expect Theresa May will try and deport me, any day now. [By the way, am I alone in thinking that if ever there was a woman who needed days-of-the-week knickers, it is Theresa May?] I have big plans for the garden, but it remains to be seen if they will come to fruition [did you see what I did there?] as it relies on the sun shining and the black fog dispersing, and also on us having the money to pay someone to come and do the bits of it that I can’t do.

Maybe by doing a combination of all these things, then I can achieve an approximation of where I’d like to be, with a tidier house and garden, and the ability to go off on kayaking/painting/writing expeditions again, with a dog. Sadly, it will have to be a different dog, it will never be Tiggy, but a dog, nevertheless. I am not afraid of hard work, but the prospect of the effort and turmoil which will be necessary even to get to this stage, stretching ahead like a rocky road full of traps and pitfalls, tires me and depresses me. I must remember that you have to eat an elephant one bite at a time, and I must take comfort in the power of gradual change, get rid of the mountains of junk which litter my life at every turn, and then one day I will see Helm Crag again, and Helvellyn, and Derwent Water and Cat Bells, Skiddaw and Blencathra, and the whole of the North-West will be my garden. I can’t do it all at once, I can’t do it on my own, but ultimately, I hope, I can do it. Mountains to climb, before I can even see the mountains. Many rivers to cross. First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is.

So, I’m going to make a start, by putting the kettle on and listening to Harry Lauder, a man who knew much more than I ever will about roaming in the gloaming. Watch and learn, laddie, watch and learn.

Epiblog for the Third Sunday After Easter

It has been a busy fortnight in the Holme Valley. So busy, that this Epiblog for the third Sunday of Easter only actually started to be written on Monday night. Today is the following Thursday, and I’m still writing it! Ideally, given the choice, I wouldn’t want to undergo another week like last week unless I really had to. The previous week was, as I said in my last blog, both shitnastic and ostrobogulous. In my catalogue of disasters last time, I was so carried away with the extent of my various misfortunes, that I forgot to include the lergy which possessed me for a day and a half, and the extremely stupid act of almost chopping the end off one of my fingers with an axe, while attempting to create some firewood. Anyway, the lergy passed, and the wound on my fingertip healed, each to be replaced in their turn by other turmoils.

Last week, I had to go to the hospital, for a fairly meaningless (or so I thought) followup to the gall stone problem I had back in September 2011. Fairly meaningless, or so I thought. Hmmm. Well. I spent a long time waiting in a corridor, dozing in my wheelchair, underneath a large sign on the pharmacy serving-hatch that said “Surgical Outpatients Is Behind You”. I was so tempted to take out a felt pen and add “Oh no it isn’t!”

When I finally got to see the redoubtable consultant, the man himself, he startled me somewhat, by saying that he wanted to take out my gall bladder as a precautionary measure. I must admit, I was somewhat taken aback by this. I mean, if you are going to start lopping bits off your body as a precautionary measure, where do you stop? I might get athlete’s foot. Am I going to saw my own leg off? I do have an axe, I suppose. Someone needs to do a cost/benefit analysis here. Anyway, I said yes, at the time, because it was easier than arguing, and I had a lot of work to do back at home. There’s an 18 week waiting list, so there’s still lots of time for me to change my mind. I mean, they can’t pursue me and make me have my gall bladder removed (or can they? Cue sinister laughter!)

So, in a slightly shell-shocked state of mind, I found myself back in the corridor, waiting this time for the porters to take me, like the parcel that I am, back to the rather quaintly named “discharge lounge” (a windswept lobby where people wait for ambulances to come and take them away, ha ha.) I noticed a chap loitering near the “Oh no it isn’t” notice, and in the same instant, he noticed me, and came over to chat, like you do.

After what seemed like several years, though in reality was probably only fifteen minutes, he had told me how he’d once been diagnosed with terminal cancer but had attended a faith healing service and had been healed by the power of Jesus in return for his renouncing sin and accepting the Lord as his personal saviour. The inference being, of course, that my being stuck in a wheelchair was because of my sin, and I, too could be cured by throwing myself on the mercy of the Saviour. This rang bells with me. It was more or less the same message that Adam the Ford Transit man was saying (at great length) in the driveway not so long ago. There can only be two explanations for this. Either these people are correct, and God sends ever more unlikely minions in his attempt to get me to take notice of his message, or alternatively, I have a “nutter magnet” concealed somewhere about my person. I still can’t decide which.

My main problem with the premise of these people is that a) they believe the Bible literally, probably including all the bits about not eating shrimps or ferrets (that’s Heston Blumenthal stuffed, then) and b) their idea of “sin” includes drinking. Now, I am no longer a heavy drinker, apart from anything else, the economics of it no longer work in my current situation. But I can’t believe Jesus, who once turned water into wine, if we are to believe what we read in Holy Writ, would begrudge me the odd glass of Montepulciano D’Abruzzo. Plus, if you believe the Bible literally, there are no cats in heaven, which would make it a very dull place.

Talking of cats, Kitty has continued to remain closely attached to the stove. As indeed have we all, these cold, greygreen, rainy days. Spring is happening, but very slowly. Despite the wettest drought since records began, in the last few days, in fact, since I last wrote this blog, the green haze of buds on the trees down the valley had burgeoned to a green froth of new leaf, and John’s apple trees in his orchard next door are in pink blossom. So, spring is still displaying its usual profusion, purity, and purpose, it’s just dodging between the showers, like the rest of us. While the squirrels have been taking advantage (much to Freddie’s chagrin) Kitty has remained unmoved (literally) by the advent of Spring.

Now I know that, in reality, grey squirrels are only rats with very good PR but I must own up to a certain warmth towards them, at least to the ones in my immediate vicinity. They’ve been bouncing around in the upper branches of the trees in the garden and in the woods behind, and just as I was getting up the other morning, I noticed one actually balancing on a fairly thick branch literally just outside the bedroom window, peering straight in at me, while nibbling a nonchalant nut. Its little chops were palpitating nineteen to the dozen, as it took absolutely no notice whatsoever of the wild-eyed, spiky-haired apparition at the window, safe in the knowledge that it was a lot faster than I was, and wheelchairs can’t climb trees.

The birds have been busy as well. The woods behind our house are teeming with them. I’ve even heard a woodpecker, I think, but I’ve not seen him yet, and no, there’s no sign of the first cuckoo (unless you count me.) We do, however, have a regular clientele around the bird table, and this has come to include a raven, a massive, black, brooding beast of a bird, that perches on the railings of the decking or paces around outside, as much as if to say “Where’s my breakfast?” As I said last week, even Freddie quails when confronted with Ronnie the Raven, although, to her credit, Kitty takes absolutely no notice of it whatsoever.

The other day, she was sleeping on the warm corner of the settee nearest the stove, when she woke up, got up to stretch, then staggered and almost immediately fell over, sort of writhing on the cushion, in what looked for all the world like some sort of neurological episode. “Oh Christ!” I thought, “the cat’s having a fit!” and trundled over to help her, only to discover that somehow, she’d got her dew claw caught in the metal ring of the name tag on her collar. Five seconds’ worth of squirming in my arms, and I had freed it and restored her somewhat ruffled dignity. Enough for her to curl around and go back to sleep, anyway.

The other members of the unofficial menagerie come and go. Brenda hasn’t been much in evidence, but that’s mainly because I’ve been to damn busy to set up the badgercam and look for her. Freda I have seen, once or twice, like a grey shadow flitting across the decking to the food dish and away again, so quickly that she could almost have been a hallucination, a ghost-fox in the dusk. According to Antoine de Saint-Exupérey’s maxim, I’m now responsible for a cat, a fox, a raven, several other miscellaneous birds, oh and an occasional badger. I guess an occasional badger is a bit like an occasional table. Sometimes it’s there, sometimes it isn’t, usually just when you need it the most.

So, the natural world is safely teeming around us in the annual miracle of spring. Debbie came back from a walk with Zak and Freddie and said she’d “nearly trodden on a robin” which is quite an achievement. No doubt the fields up at the Flouch will be displaying their usual springtime pattern, which I characterised as “sheep, sheep, barlam, lapwing”, but I haven’t seen the lapwings this year…yet.

One of the reasons for this is that, obviously, I now have to rely on Debbie to transport me hither and yon, and these days, she’s just too damn tired to go lapwing-spotting. And I don’t blame her. She has spent the last ten days solidly mired in the unutterable boggage of the AQA marking scheme for GCSE English. I have seen some monumental examples of verbal goulash in my time – I’ve even perpetrated some – but ye Gods, and little fishes, the AQA marking scheme for GCSE English would baffle a Chinese lawyer from Philadelphia. Debbie has been struggling with this stuff for weeks, and I have watched helplessly as these idiots have drained her life of energy and fun. Thankfully, help has been at hand, very useful help, offered by kind people, some of them Mustardlanders, whose blushes I will spare by not naming them here, they know who they are, and I hope they know how thankful I am for their aid.

The situation, which started out as a little cloud on the horizon, no bigger than a man’s hand, and eventually turned into a howling vortex that sucked the life and energy out of both of us, came to a head on Sunday. We were coming to the end of yet another “lost weekend”, thanks to AQA, but without the anaesthetising effects of alcohol. While the rain lashed the windows, drumming ceaselessly on the conservatory roof, driving home inexorably the fact that we’re in a drought of a type we’ve never actually experienced before, one where it pisses down all the time, relations between us deteriorated to such an extent that I was on the verge of snatching all the papers out of Debbie’s grasp and throwing them on the back of the fire.

“Why did you have to get involved with all this crap?” I asked, bitterly, “why couldn’t you just have had an affair or something instead? It would have put less strain on our marriage, and at least you’d have had some fun while it lasted!”

She replied with words to the effect that if I stopped “clanking around like Ironside” and “got a real job”, then she wouldn’t have to work like a dog. So we left it at that, and each of us bent back to our task. But when this is all, finally, over, I am going to gather up all of the miscellaneous notes and rough drafts and copies and crappy standardisation documents and fatuous AQA marking scheme manuals, every scrap of paper that spewed from them and still infests our house, and is the physical manifestation of their mental blight, and I am going to burn the bloody lot, inside a giant wickerwork exam moderator, high up on the wildy, windy moors somewhere. I may even invite Kate Bush. Then, and only then, will we be cleansed.

Meanwhile, my head has been so cabbaged by the atmosphere of black doom and turmoil that I almost put cat milk in my tea the other day. Apart from the fact that it’s had the lactose (which cats don’t metabolise very well) taken out, I don’t suppose it would have done me any serious harm. It may even have been an improvement. Being able to lick my own bottom would certainly imply a degree of flexibility which my present wheelchair-bound status doesn’t permit, and burying my poo in a hole in the garden would imply that I could actually get into the garden, and while engaged in my ablutions, I could also do some weeding and put in some bedding plants.

I’ve had little opportunity to notice what is happening in the wider world over the last fortnight. This has been a time when the people who have criticised me in the past for writing about mundane, self-centred domestic matters with no wider relevance, would have had a point. I noted with melancholy that stamps had finally gone up, and Royal Mail, who obviously fail to recognise that when you are in a landscape of declevity, you should cease delving, have been running an ad on Facebook with the headline “Stamps are Forever”. No, Royal Mail, it’s diamonds that are forever, though with the current price of postage, I can see how the confusion must have arisen.

Meanwhile, the economy continues blundering into the valley of death, with the four horseman of the apocalypse urging it along, cannon to the right of them, cannon to the left of them, all the while insisting there is no plan B. I’ve said it hundreds of times. The economy is like an orchard. If you owe somebody 100 apples, you will never repay them by sawing branches off the very trees that are supposed to provide you with fruit. But talking to the likes of Cameron, Clegg and Osborne about this is a true dialogue of the deaf. When it comes to gardening metaphors, this government is Pol Pot rather than plant pot, more pestilence and paraquat, than Percy Thrower.

Cameron has other fish to fry anyway; no doubt by the time this hits the streets, the local elections will have been and gone, and I will be very surprised if there isn’t some sort of cosmetic reshuffle to ditch Jeremy Hunt, who was apparently in charge of a department where he had absolutely no idea what the special advisor he had appointed was up to, or who he was in contact with, or what about, preferring to retain a judicial impartiality and distance from him, and concentrate instead on the much more important task of swanning about and looking like a male model for Littlewoods. Yeah, right. And if we believe that, how do we feel about the Tooth Fairy? I fully expect David Cameron’s office to release a statement any day now to the effect that the Tooth Fairy has the full confidence of the Prime Minister, but that the proper forum for any judicial examination of the supernatural aspects of dentistry should be the Leveson Enquiry.

So, there you have it. I do read the papers, you see, and I don’t always flip the remote when Channel 4 news comes on, though I must admit that’s mainly because of Cathy Newman. Sometimes, I even shout as loudly at that prat Cameron as I used to at Thatcher and Major, even though that was twenty years ago.

Twenty years ago. Twenty years. Two decades. I’ve been thinking a lot about the last twenty years, because this week marked the twentieth anniversary of my father’s death. Twenty years! Where have they gone? They’ve gone the same way as the year which has unaccountably passed since I came home from Oakmoor (or “Broadmoor”, as we called it). All gone, like Vaughan said, into the world of light, and I alone sit lingering here. I was a different person then, surrounded by other different people, all with our different dreams and desires. Very seldom does the beginning accord to the end, as the Gawain poet says. My mum and dad’s ashes are both buried together in Hull, and I haven’t been there for a long time, maybe too long. The location is, in a way, irrelevant. I carry them all with me, in my heart, wherever I go. The fact that their physical remains are beneath a tree, which I hope is in spring blossom, in the vast park of the dead that is the Chanterlands/Western Cemetery complex in Hull, is not really significant in that way.

I’ve written before about my penchant for cemeteries, especially the huge Victorian ones found in the heart of so many of our Northern industrial cities. I used to turn up at Leeds University Folk Club deliberately early, back in the day when I used to play there, just to wander around Beckett Street Cemetery and look at some of the amazing 19th century tombs, blackened with the soot of ages, grandiose statements by, and on behalf of, merchants and fettlers, with their stovepipe hats and their fob watches and their confident muttonchop whiskers, people long since gone from anyone’s memory, and only extant now in the notes of family historians.

The Western Cemetery in Hull, incorporating Chanterlands Crematorium, is another such place, with its memorials to the dead of the Hull Blitz and the R38 airship disaster, and its acres of paths, accessed by a massive pair of gates. The older part of the Cemetery, to the east of Chanterlands Avenue, is even more impressive. It was there that I found, one day, totally by accident, the grave of my ancestor Tom Fenwick, Humber Pilot. The more “modern” area is to the west: that maze of paths, grass, trees and marble is where my mother and father’s ashes lie, along with the remains of Hull’s shadowy armies of those who have tramped on ahead down the road of time.

They aren’t “there”, of course, in the same way that a physical person is “there”. Visiting the cemetery doesn’t mean that you are “remembering” them any more significantly; in fact, I think that remembering someone significantly is to remember their ways, their turn of speech, and to carry forward the love and the spirit and the humour and the good things they taught you as you yourself progress further along the road, with their unseen presence at your side, guiding you along the right way. Just in the same way that simply standing in a church doesn’t in itself make you a Christian, any more than visiting a garage makes you a motorist, or standing in a stable makes you a jockey.

All the same, I would like to go back there sometime, and maybe have a look at what can be done to make the area around “their” tree a little less utilitarian and continue the tradition that my dad established, when it was just my mum’s ashes buried there, of planting bedding plants around its trunk. I’d like to think of them both looking on, and being pleased at that. How feasible it is remains to be seen, but in the Zen tradition of “how is it far, if you can think of it?”, in a way, now I’ve had the idea, the alyssum is already planted there and blowing, a startling flash of white.

Meanwhile, what of the next twenty years? The Brontës used to play a game, around the table, of guessing where each of them would be in a year’s time, then two years and so on. In their case it was a fairly easy process of deduction, since their dark, damp and tubercular Rectory in Haworth was very handy for the churchyard (another haven of black Victorian tombs) which surrounded it. They’d no doubt have been amazed at the idea of Kate Bush, as indeed many of us are, and probably more so at the prospect of wind turbines at Top Withens.

I don’t know what the next twenty years holds, and indeed there may not be twenty of them. That’s why it’s important to fill the unforgiving minute, as Mr Kipling said, in between batches of buns. These days, I don’t mortgage today to tomorrow. I have, after all, got nothing to lose, and I know that I must try to stop regretting and hankering after things I can no longer do, people I can no longer see, and concentrate on what new can be achieved. Sometimes you can never go back – quoth the raven, nevermore – what you have to do is keep the things that were good, and carry them with you as you go. And don’t worry, I guess, since 99% of the stuff you worry about never happens and in twenty years time, it could all be 100% irrelevant!

In the words of The Two Gilberts, whose wacky repertoire of scratchy 1920s novelty musical hall songs on 78rpm discs seems strangely apposite to my mood today, in that, like life itself, their songs are often absurd, rather meaningless, and totally random: “No-one knows what lies before us, so let’s all join in the chorus/Do shrimps make good mothers? Yes, they do!”