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”!
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