Epiblog for Midsummer

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley, and quite a nasty one, actually. The weather remains the dominant feature, being a) wet, and b) rainy. This week has marked the passing of Midsummer, always a sad time for me, because winter depresses me, and punishes me, and I look forward to my summers, because they redeem me and reward me. And if I don’t get a summer, then I feel that all of my sufferings through the long cold dreary dark months have been in vain, and the thought of the nights now getting longer again, and all the horrible cold and darkness and God knows what perils lying ahead, has been the single most depressing note this week. A monotonous, depressing note, underscored by the rhythm section of the rain drumming on the conservatory roof, day after day. Mytholmroyd has been flooded, Marsden has been flooded, everywhere has been bloody flooded. It’s at times like this that I’m glad we live 250 feet up the slope of a valley.

As well as a depressing week of weather, it has been difficult in other ways. The 19 volt transformer for my laptop blew a fuse (well, actually, it more sort of blew up, a fuse would have been fixable) on Tuesday, which meant that I was without the computer all day Wednesday until Deb went and got me another one on her way back from teaching. I think I’m now on the third charger for this particular machine and I am seriously considering ordering in a spare so that next time it goes bang, I won’t lose a whole day’s production.

The accounts pile grows ever higher, in inverse proportion to my willingness to do anything about it, but I am going to have to, and soon, because the deadlines for Corporation Tax and Companies House filing will be here before I know it. And the blasted Annual Return is due on 13th August.

In the middle of all this rain (probably on the day when a month’s rain fell in 24 hours, according to the weather forecast, anyway) the door decided to stick so badly in the hole, against the jamb, that it was impossible to move. Indeed, it was jammed (or even jambed?) in so tightly, that I thought we’d need to call out a locksmith, figuring (erroneously) that the lock had broken. I was reminded of the saying that “love laughs at locksmiths” but I didn’t get the opportunity to test it out, because Debbie decided that “amor vincit omnia” and yanked the bloody handle so hard it nearly came off in her hand; she did, however, manage to free the door, so once again I was able to come and go as I pleased.

By far the worst bit of the week, though, was Kitty being ill on Thursday. I hadn’t realised how unguarded, how dependent, I had become on that little cat. If you’d asked me, I would have said well, in truth, she’s an old cat, and I’ve hardened my heart to the inevitable. And I would have been lying, because on Thursday morning, when she threw up twice then staggered to the doorway between ours and Colin's, then just crouched there, so I couldn’t get through in my wheelchair and I had to scoop her up and bring her back, I suddenly realised how desperately unprepared for anything like this I actually was.

All that morning, I worked away on the dratted VAT return, affording it even less attention than I usually do, while Kitty was semi-wrapped in a towel in Zak’s armchair in the conservatory, with a hot water bottle alongside her. By early afternoon, I’d resolved that somehow, I was going to have to get her to the vet, or get the vet to her, one way or another. By then, she’d got out of the chair, and was sitting/lying on the rubber mat just inside the conservatory door. A couple of times, I trundled over and actually opened the door, thinking she might want to go out. It was of course, absolutely pissing it down, and she showed no interest in moving whatsoever, in fact she barely acknowledged my presence.

I prayed, of course; it would never have occurred to me not to, because whatever else, I do believe in the power of the mind to influence what we perceive as reality, and there’s no harm in asking, even if you’re never quite sure whether anyone’s listening or not. I prayed to God, Jesus, St Francis of Assissi, St Padre Pio (because having a scary Italian monk with the gift of bi-location on your team is never a bad thing) St Gertrude of Nivelles (patron saint of cats) and I also rang the vets and fixed an appointment for her (the cat, not St Gertrude) not knowing at that stage how she was going to get there. I posted on Facebook asking people to send her vibes and good wishes, and just for good measure I put the statuette of Bast, the Egyptian cat god, (which came originally from Granny’s house) nearby, in a position where it could “watch over” her. I was taking no chances, covering all bases.

By the time 4.30pm came, loads of kind people, several other “cats” and a tortoise had all posted on Facebook wishing her well. Granny arrived, with the bedraggled dogs, to dry off, after dodging the showers on their daily “walkies”. And, amazingly, Kitty was sitting up, taking notice, and looking out of the door. Whatever it was seemed to have left her, let her be. Granny opened the door, and the cat walked out onto the decking, squatted down and started drinking rainwater which had accumulated in one of the empty plastic planters. Then she came back in and went to her food bowl. It was literally as if she had woken from a trance, and I wondered afterwards whether she’d had some kind of neurological “episode” or something, lasting several hours.

Anyway, since then, she’s continued to improve, and as I type this, is fast asleep on the sofa by the fire, in her usual default mode. I don’t deny it shook me, though, much more than I expected, and I hope against hope that it isn’t a case of the Almighty preparing me for something bad in little stages, the way the engineer just gives the metal a “kiss” to the grinder first, for positioning, before showering sparks everywhere.

There have been some vague moments of amusement and levity amidst the gloom of what has otherwise been a lousy week. Late on Sunday night, while watching the ashes of the fire go down and half-watching Dan Cruickshank on the TV, and trying to decide which was the more interesting, we were suddenly startled by a clatter from outside on the decking and Debbie jumped up and went to the door saying she'd just seen something with "big white wings" swoop down and across.

I can only assume it was a Barn Owl (ruling out the possibility of angelic visitation, via Occam's Razor) that had seen something scuttle across the decking and had thought, "Aye aye, I'll have that!"

On Monday morning I looked out of the conservatory door, and saw that the broom handle which Deb had left propped up at the end of her gardening labours the previous day has been knocked askew, which was probably the noise we heard, but - even more exciting, there were what looked like three round, hard, black objects on the table with the bird feeder! Owl pellets! Result!

So, I was busy logging on to the internet and frantically googling for pictures of owl crap when Debbie came back into the room and I said, "Darling, something very exciting has happened..." she let me tell her the whole story of the owl pellets and how we could boil them down to find the bones of little mousies contained therein, and then said...

"You don't mean those three black olives I chucked out for the birds this morning?"

Grrr. Next time she has tapenade, I am going to make it with owl pellets. Even if they're not vegan. Even if I have to send away for them.

Debbie has been much exercised by the antics of Isaiah and his mate, the other squirrel, who have taken to swinging off the bird feeder in an attempt to empty it of peanuts, sometimes both at the same time, from opposite sides. The usual gaggle (insert collective noun of your choice) of “ordinary” birds has been around as well, though I haven’t personally seen much sign of Brenda or of Freda lately. Maybe they’ll return in the autumn, when the nights are darker and the food scarcer.

Deb’s also been having trouble seeing the football on TV, complaining that we ought to get a bigger screen one. Apparently you should be sitting 1.5 times the screen size of the TV away, for the optimum effect. So if you have a 40-inch screen, you should be sitting 60 inches away from it, and so on. Debbie measured it backwards, working out the equation from where she normally sits and calculating how big the new screen would have to be: 11 feet across, so clearly a rethink is necessary. I suggested a visit to the opticians would be cheaper than installing a home cinema screen, or just turf Zak out of his chair when the football’s on, and got a funny look for my trouble. By this time I was tuning her out, and she announced that she was going to B & Q to look for “one which was bigger than 30 inches”.

“What? A TV?” I queried, only half listening.

“No, a Bow-Saw, of course.” Of course. Obviously I’d missed a few yards of dialogue while I was away with the budgies. Anyway, it’ll all be academic soon, as it’ll be over for another four years tonight, when England have lost to Italy.

Gardening has been much on our minds, although, again, the weather has prevented us actually doing much. But the week was brightened on Friday by the arrival of Bernard and his granddaughter Rachael, bearing four pre-planted tubs of herbs for me, including chives, parsley, thyme, mint and sage. A truly excellent and generous gesture, typical of the man. I am truly lucky to have friends such as Bernard and Owen who have helped me so much and usually appear like the fairy king in a pantomime, just at the point when I am at my lowest, and need rescuing, which seems to happen with increasing frequency these days.

I met him when he was in the next bed to me in hospital and we kept in touch. He's a great character, 89 and still going strong, he has a dog called Dave and an armoured car in his barn on the farm where he lives; it's a Ferret Scout Car that he's restoring.

He also once found a cache of explosive when diving on a wreck off Mull and they tried setting it off on the beach to see if it would still ignite! Disappointingly - from his point of view - it didn't, so they put it in an oil drum, under water, which apparently stabilises it, and he took it home. When he last moved house, he thinks he forgot to take it with him to the farm, so if you hear a big bang from West Yorkshire, it means that the new owners have found it!

Anyway, we’ve made it to Sunday, again, which feels like quite an achievement after a week like the one just gone. It’s been quite a productive day, as well, I’ve re-potted some Fennel and Deb’s strawberry plant, the one with real strawberries on it, and I’ve sorted out Granny’s bag of camera leads.

Debbie was in a glum mood because her chainsaw wasn't working, and by good fortune I happened to note that the chain was on the wrong way round, so once I'd pointed that out and we'd changed it round (me holding the chainsaw while she dismantled it enough to re-site the chain, then re-tension it again) it worked, and she was happily chainsawing up logs from the trees she's lopped in the garden, while I made her crumpets for breakfast. There's nothing like listening to the Archers Omnibus Edition with a chainsaw in bits on a spread-out newspaper in the middle of the rug. How different from the home life of our own dear Queen!

I’ve sort of lost my way in the Liturgical Year, however much I’ve suddenly been bothering Big G again this week. (Hi, remember me? Sorry I’ve not been in touch! Please save the life of my cat!) But I gather it’s the third Sunday after Pentecost, and also St Rumbold’s day. I don’t know much about St Rumbold, who was martyred by two men whom he had accused of “wickedness”, which may have been a good career move but in practical terms doesn’t strike me as entirely wise. I have, however, managed to find my way to the Lexicon for today, which includes, inter alia, the story of David and Goliath, and Job 38, 1-11.

I have felt a bit like Job myself this week, about the only thing I haven’t yet had is a plague of boils, and probably the only thing that’s prevented that particular indignity is the amount of garlic I’ve consumed! I was struck by the chosen passage though, because like all of the King James Bible, it’s full of poetry:

Then the LORD answered Job out of the whirlwind, and said, Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge? Gird up now thy loins like a man; for I will demand of thee, and answer thou me. Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? declare, if thou hast understanding. Who hath laid the measures thereof, if thou knowest? or who hath stretched the line upon it? Whereupon are the foundations thereof fastened? or who laid the corner stone thereof; When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy? Or who shut up the sea with doors, when it brake forth, as if it had issued out of the womb?

When I made the cloud the garment thereof, and thick darkness a swaddlingband for it, And brake up for it my decreed place, and set bars and doors, And said, Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further: and here shall thy proud waves be stayed?

Stirring stuff, indeed. Maybe Big G has been speaking to me out of the whirlwind, this week, and I haven’t really been listening. What was that, something about a bow saw? Oh, a bow of burning gold, I see. Well, the thing is, your Godship, much as I’m grateful for your help with Kitty, I’m still unsure what my part is in all this. Just tell me in words of one syllabub what it is you want me to do. And, of course, don’t forget, I’m stuck in a wheelchair. I do identify with Job, though, and I think he had a bit of a tough time of it.

But then we all are, at the moment. On TV this week they featured the poignant story of a former builder, himself now unemployed and homeless, attending a soup kitchen run by a Yorkshire homeless charity in a chapel building that he actually helped to build, back in the days when he was in employment, before he lost everything.

There is nothing new under the sun, of course. Back in 1904, Joseph Rowntree, the Quaker, was writing:

Much of current philanthropical effort is directed to remedying the more superficial manifestations of weakness and evil, while little thought or effort is directed to search out their underlying causes. The soup kitchen in York never has difficulty in obtaining financial aid, but an enquiry into the extent and causes of poverty would enlist little support.

Nevertheless, it is an enquiry much needed, much overdue. An enquiry that should turn its searching light onto every crevice of the crumbling edifice of our society, and see what can be saved, and what can be stripped out and made anew. Gird up now thy loins like a man; for I will demand of thee, and answer thou me. Why, in the year of our Lord Two Thousand and Twelve, are we allowing such evils to continue to flourish? Who hath laid the measures thereof, if thou knowest? or who hath stretched the line upon it? Whereupon are the foundations thereof fastened? or who laid the corner stone thereof?

When we know the answers to that, we can start fixing it. And maybe we can get the builders back to laying the corner stone, instead of queuing up for soup.

So, for my part, tomorrow I start another David and Goliath week, with various Goliaths, in the form of Barclays Bank and Virgin Media, to name but two, deserving of a well-aimed sharp slingshot between the eyes, but tonight, now, here and now in England, as T S Eliot might have said, I’m going to feed the household, then watch the football.

And give thanks to Big G that we’re all still here to partake. And though we’re now on the long road to Christmas, there’s still a bit of the summer wine left to sample, I hope, in the summer wine country.

A soft day, at last, thank God, as Winifred Letts and Charles Villiers Stanford might have said if they were here right now:

A soft day, thank God!
A wind from the south
With a honey'd mouth;
A scent of drenching leaves,
Briar and beech and lime,
White elderflower and thyme,
And the soaking grass smells sweet,
Crushed by my two bare feet,
While the rain drips,
Drips, drips, drips from the eaves.

Epiblog for the Second Sunday after Trinity

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. I’m more or less reconciled now to the fact that we’re not actually having a summer this year. Summer has been cancelled, owing to the “drought”. If wet, in the Village Hall. Next stop, the dreary procession of summer Sundays in “common time”, leading to Advent and Christmas. God, how depressing.

I can’t believe there are still people who whistle in the dark and say there’s nothing wrong with the weather, when you only have to look out of the window to see it’s totally crocked. I'm sick of it. Confined to barracks all the time, I can't do anything on the garden, the whole place is a bloody quagmire, and it's still bloody raining on and off... everything's cancelled, every day is 10/10 cloud. It’s cold, windy, and it's like living in a bloody tupperware box, half the time in this country. I want some SUN!

To add insult to injury, I hear that, in a country in where it pisses down all the time anyway, and in a world where 884 million people don't have access to clean safe water, we are apparently planning to spend £27 million on artificial rainclouds at the Olympic Opening Ceremony. Truly, the lunatics now rule the asylum. Maybe a better use of £27 million pounds would be to donate it to Water Aid.

With the “drought” has come flooding again, as well. Not only is it the wettest drought ever, it’s also now affecting people’s lives and livelihoods once again. The Vale of York, in particular, has suffered, I gather. There’s nothing new under the sun, of course (or under the rainclouds) since Andrew Marvell was writing about the flood plains around Nun Appleton back in the 17th century.

Then, to conclude these pleasant Acts,
Denton sets ope its Cataracts;
And makes the Meadow truly be
(What it but seem'd before) a Sea.
For, jealous of its Lords long stay,
It try's t'invite him thus away.
The River in it self is drown'd,
And Isl's th' astonish Cattle round.

Kitty doesn’t like the rainy weather any more than I do. As I type this, she’s curled in a tight furry ball with her nose in her tail, on the corner of the sofa nearest the fire, which is lit, unbelievably, despite it being June, and only a week to Midsummer. Although we’ve been letting the fire go out overnight and then relighting it the next day (in the hope that one day, we won’t have to) it’s been so cold some nights that I’ve taken to making her a fresh hot water bottle as I go to bed, and wedging it in under her blanket. Poor old sock that she is, she seems to appreciate it.

Zak and Freddie, too, have had their ramblings curtailed by the endless succession of rainy days, and the dark squally nights have made it impossible for me to see if it’s still Brenda who eats the badger-food. The birds and squirrels come during the day, vying for the stale bread on the bird-table on the decking, and Isaiah seems to be a regular now, sitting there with his little pouches munching away at a piece of crust. Ronnie the Raven returned this week as well. We still haven’t managed to entice him down to the floor of the decking; instead, he grips the handrail with his talons and paces up and down it, glaring around him, feathers so black and slick, they are almost purple.

Other than that, we’ve very little news to report, really. We’ve acquired a new kettle, which actually passes for some sort of event in this household, so sad are our lives these days. A 3.5 litre whistling kettle, in fact, in British Racing Green, my favourite colour (at least for cars and kettles). It’s such a donking great monster, an uber-kettle, that I have dubbed it “Whistler’s Mother”, because it’s the mother of all kettles, and I’ve taken to filling it with water, boiling it up, then turning the gas ring down just to “simmer” so it’s always chirruping away in the background and, should the need arise, I can have boiling water almost instantly, by the simple expedient of flipping the control knob round to “full”. For some reason this infuriates Debbie, who barged past me the other day, leaned over and turned the gas off, saying,

“We don’t need boiling water. Nobody is going to give birth right now.”

“How can you be so sure?” I asked, and earned a funny look for my trouble.

In tandem with the arrival of the new kettle, I’ve also re-discovered the cafetiere, and with it, some of the taste for (real) coffee which I lost in hospital, when the appalling instant brew served up under that description in HRI tasted like tar mixed with engine oil, and not in a good way, like Lapsang Souchong tea. We were discussing coffee the other day, and I said to Deb that I’ve always had a hankering to try that “civet cat poo” coffee, where the civet cat eats the beans and they pass through its system undigested, and people then root about afterwards in its poo for these valuable and gourmet items, which they then grind and make into coffee in the normal way.

Debbie, of course, was immediately on her vegan high horse, claiming this was exploitation of the civet cat. How could I know, she asked, that the civet cat wanted me to do that with its poo? I replied that I doubted the civet cat had much of an opinion on the matter, adding that if someone ever felt moved to make a tasty and stimulating beverage out of my poo, I would be flattered.

“I’d be horrified!” she replied, though it was unclear from the context whether she was thinking of my poo, or hers, at that point.

She’s been much exercised this week by the need to do something about her laptop (computer, I mean, her actual “laptop” is surprisingly compact for a woman of her age) and she got as far as going into town yesterday to look at some. She came back saying that she’d seen one that she thought might do.

“How much RAM has it got?” I asked.

“I don’t know, but it’s purple, and it’s shiny.”

I shouldn’t mock, really. She’s coming up to the end of term, poor lass, and shepherding her various broods of chicks through their exams, while trying to fill in job applications for September with her other leg. On Friday, she was trying to hoover up, and Freddie kept getting in the way, so she yelled at him to “Get in the ******* CONSERVATORY!” from which I was forced to conclude that she thinks Freddie’s vocabulary, as well as “walkies”, “beddies”, “sit” “give paw”, “doggie treat”, “squirrel” and “come and get your tea”, now also includes the words “*******” and “conservatory”. I still maintain he responds more to the tone than the content, however.

Other than those few flashes of what passes for humour, it’s been a pretty humdrum week. My mobile phone packed up, and Virgin tried to stiff me for £139 to get out of my contract, because they wouldn’t give me another handset to replace the one which had died. So I bought a second-hand one online, one with buttons rather than a fancy touch screen, and told them to sod off. That seals it though, we are moving away from Virgin as a provider as fast as I can organise it. As I said at the time, losing my virginity was a lot more fun first time around.

And so Sunday came around, and I’ve actually done some good in the garden today, re-potting herbs and rescuing the enormous geranium that Bernard gave me, which had become totally pot-bound. It’s now in a much bigger tub, and looks a lot happier. I felt useful, as well, for a change, doing something which I could do, and which I knew how to do. Growing things and feeding people is never wasted effort, not in my book, anyway. And by people, of course, I include people like Brenda the Badger and Isaiah the Squirrel.

There is something literally “grounding” about getting the earth on your hands and something satisfying about seeing a row of seedlings you’ve just planted out, like small green soldiers on parade. Something that makes you feel part of the cycles of growth and rebirth, sowing and harvest. Especially on a peaceful Sunday teatime, when it’s finally stopped raining, and you have finally managed to get down to some of the tasks that needed doing outside. I noticed that the strawberry had some small, green berries on it, and I told Deb that we had some strawberries coming.

“What, real ones?” (I’m still trying to work out what she meant.)

Of course, I’m not the first person to think of the metaphor of England as a garden. Later on in “Upon Appleton House”, Marvell laments the change that has come over England (in his case, because of the desolation of the Civil War and interregnum) and looks back to a happier, pastoral age:

Oh Thou, that dear and happy Isle
The Garden of the World ere while,
Thou Paradise of four Seas,
Which Heaven planted us to please,
But, to exclude the World, did guard
With watry if not flaming Sword;
What luckless Apple did we tast,
To make us Mortal, and Thee Waste.

Unhappy! shall we never more
That sweet Militia restore,
When Gardens only had their Towrs,
And all the Garrisons were Flowrs,
When Roses only Arms might bear,
And Men did rosie Garlands wear?
Tulips, in several Colours barr'd,
Were then the Switzers of our Guard.

Anyway, for all my railing against the weather, it will take more than me to change it, and for all my petty irritations and boring life, for all my semi-drowned garden, I suppose I should be lucky I don’t live somewhere like the Sahel, where a real drought (as opposed to our, stick-on comedy wet one, largely an invention of the media and the water companies) is gripping the people in a deadly embrace. 18 million people are on the brink of disaster, including 1 million children at risk of starvation. But urgent appeals for help are being met with deafening silence. Only a targeted and overwhelming demand for action can stop this catastrophe.

The UN says millions of lives could be destroyed unless $1.5 billion in aid is channeled immediately, but governments have pledged less than half the required sum. The countries who can make all the difference are the US, Japan, France and Germany, but they’re stalling, according to Senegalese musician Baaba Maal, who has started a petition on Avaaz's Community Petitions website to appeal to the world for help. In days, world leaders will gather in Brussels to discuss the Sahel - if they decide right there and then to pledge their fair share, disaster may be averted.

As you may know, if you’ve read anything I have previously written on the subject, I am sceptical about the effects of overseas aid, especially when there is so much that needs fixing here at home. Aid so often seems self-perpetuating, existing merely to keep people like Oxfam in business, ending up in the pockets of corrupt regimes instead of with the people who need it, or going to countries that claim not to be able to feed their own people, yet which have space programmes and missile control systems.

But in this situation, what do you do? It’s like finding an abandoned dog on your doorstep. You might wish it was otherwise, you might curse and blast the owners for being thoughtless and cruel, you might point to the fact that you already gave, last year, a donation to various animal charities; you might campaign for the reintroduction of the dog-licence, but in the meantime, there’s a hungry pooch that needs feeding, and a warm bed by the fire. So what do you do? Which of us has the hardness of heart to close the door and ignore the pitiful whining outside?

And it’s the same with this appeal, which you may have gathered, seems to have got under my radar. You might wish they lived elsewhere, you might wish they’d developed more sustainable methods of agriculture, you might fervently hope that eventually they’d develop a system where the politicians aren’t all crooks or warmongers (some hope of that, when we ourselves are still trying and failing!) but in the meantime, kids are starving. What do you do? Which of us has the hardness of heart to close our ears to the cries of the hungry?

Anyway, Baaba Maal’s petition is here:

The UN has only received 43 percent of the $1.5 billion needed - it’s a shortfall of gargantuan proportions, so every signature could, potentially, add to the pressure on developed countries to fulfil their promises.

I have to accept that there’s a lot about life which I don’t like and I can’t immediately change. Not my life, as such, for once, I’ve wittered on enough about that recently. Life, the world, generally. Stuff. Things like drones in Syria, being used to target protestors by what can only be government forces. Where did they get these drones? There are only three sources I can think of, the UK, the USA, or Israel. Apparently “freedom of information” requests to establish our provision of drones to overseas regimes go unanswered. Things like the Church of England riving itself to pieces (once again, sigh) over who is allowed use the word “marriage”. Things like the 7000 unwanted dogs a year dying on “death row” in local authority dog pounds and sanctuaries that have no money left to feed them.

And just because you fix as problem once doesn’t as I’ve often found in life, mean you’ve fixed it forever. Back in 2005 when Geldof and Bono bearded the G8 leaders in their lair and made them promise to do loads of stuff, some of us thought then that perhaps, just perhaps, this was the first glimmerings of something different, an F H Bradley type glimpse of an underlying reality behind a façade, however much we might have been suspicious of the motives of fading pop stars whose careers needed boosting. But now, in Africa, we’re back in the same pickle, and we’re having to stoop to build it up with worn-out tools, whatever “it” turns out to be. Or, as Hilaire Belloc put it in “The Path To Rome”.

Much after a beginning is difficult, as everybody knows who has crossed the sea, and as for the first step a man never so much as remembers it; if there is difficulty it is in the whole launching of a thing, in the first ten pages of a book, or the first half-hour of listening to a sermon, or the first mile of a walk. The first step is undertaken lightly, pleasantly, and with your soul in the sky; it is the five-hundredth that counts.

I don’t know what the answer is, except to manage our expectations of life and to brace ourselves for the five-hundredth step, that moment when we hit the “wall”, in life’s Marathon; and I have no answers sometimes to the cruel meaninglessness of life. Especially when you hear of the unexpected death of a good person. I know that nobody is wholly good, the same way as nobody is wholly bad, but the person I’m thinking of, news of whose sad death reached me today, was someone who I could tell, even though I never met her face to face, spoke to her on the phone only once or twice, exchanged emails with her, and “knew” her mainly through her various postings on a message board we both frequented, would go out of her way to help both animals and people, even at cost to herself. An academic of substantial erudition and standing, she freely offered me help and advice with something I was working on last year when it would have been very easy for her to say no. Not only offered to help, but also to contact others on my behalf to find answers to my queries.

So what lesson am I supposed to draw from this? As I’ve said before when something like this happens, perhaps the only “good” that will come out of it is that people will do something positive, something as “good”, in whatever terms, as she was, in her memory. For my part, I’ve already decided what I intend to do, as an answer to the random idiocy of the universe, but I’m not sure how to frame it yet. In the meantime, I won’t tire you with rehearsing once again the arguments about whether the presence of suffering in the world makes the existence of God more or less likely; as I’ve said before, God’s idea of suffering must be a lot different to ours, and his existence is not a matter of proof, but of faith.

I was prompted to mention (above) the 7000 unwanted dogs killed every year because of a typical reaction by her to a thread I started back in January. It was a public thread on a public message board and it’s still there to read now (I know, because I just checked) for anyone who doubts her generous spirit. She said:

“Please forgive my worried brevity. What is the fastest way I can contribute over a w/e and what/how much money is needed to save these lives?”

And that is so typical of her, as I “knew” her. No humming, hawing or havering, if she could help, she would. Although regarded by many as a “cat” person, she had herself recently acquired and given a home to a small dog. Just as typical is the straightforward way she signed off one of her first ever messages to me:

“Must go and deal with the black bin now and put it by the gate.”

Well, life goes on, I guess. Someone else will have to put out the bin. But the animals she cared for and the people she cared for have all lost a doughty champion tonight, and she will be sorely missed by many. RIP.

Epiblog for The First Sunday After Trinity

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. With the departure of Owen back to Wales and the official end of summer, as the weather once more turns to storm and tempest, and no more Bank Holidays now til the end of August, the focus has once more turned to work inside the house, and catching up on the ever-present paperwork and the to-do list.

Kitty’s “to-do” list probably reads something like A) wake up B) have breakfast C) snooze by the fire D) repeat steps A, B, and C, above, as necessary. She’s been aided in this by the fact that we, too, have been feeling the cold enough to re-light the stove. As I sit typing this, for the second week running, I’m wearing a fleece top, a hat and a scarf indoors, although at the moment I don’t actually have a hot water bottle [that may change, though, later].

We haven’t seen much of Zak and Freddie, the weather keeping them nearer to home, or rather keeping Granny nearer home, which amounts to the same thing, since where she goes, they go.

My unofficial menagerie has dwindled to a few birds, the jay being notable by its presence, and Isaiah the squirrel, who has been visiting every day to take advantage of Freddie’s being elsewhere and raid the bird food. Brenda hasn’t actually been seen in person for a few weeks now, but someone or something comes and eats the food in the early hours of the morning. I hope it’s still Brenda, but I am so knackered by the end of the day these days that sitting up and watching for badgers til the early hours is just not on the cards at the moment. I keep the faith, though, and keep on putting out the food, I hope she gets at least some of it.

Debbie’s been busy catching up as well, now that half-term is upon us. However, we have still managed some house and garden related tasks. We’ve been to the garden centre and replaced some lost plants. Possibly most importantly, from the point of view of my mobility, Debbie, and later Jonathan and, indeed, Granny, bless her, moved the massive stack of old bricks down the side of Colin’s so that I can, now, get all the way out of the drive of our side, across the front of the house, down Colin’s side, and, with the addition of a decking ramp (to be constructed), into the garden for the first time in two years. I’m looking forward to planting the new Ceanothus near Russell’s mosaic, as that was one of the things on my hospital “bucket list”.

I’ve also planted some herbs in seed trays and they’re currently in the process (I hope) of germinating in the collapsible polythene greenhouse. If the weather forecast for next week is to be believed, though, we’d better watch out that it doesn’t live up to its name!

We’ve also been moving more stuff around in the creation of my new downstairs “office”, and it was in the course of one of these sessions of going through old stuff and sorting it out into the categories of “keep” or “ditch” that I found several copies of a massive family tree that I’d drawn out in 1979, one that goes back, in fact, to 1679, on one of its lines. Since I haven’t been able to get to any of my family history research stuff since before I was ill (first, because I was too busy, then because I was ill, then because I couldn’t get upstairs, then – after Owen fixed that one – because I was too busy again) I looked at these with considerable interest. So much so, in fact, that I was tempted into going online and augmenting the detail with new stuff. It’s a common misconception, though, that family history is all available on line these days, it only really applies to the post-1837 civil registration GRO indexes and the censuses, 1841 to 1911. Once you get beyond that, you still have to go back to the county record office and look at the original records (or maybe microfilms of them) for Barton in the Beans or Great Snoring or East Coker, unless you’re fortunate enough to find someone else has already done it.

I was quite impressed, though I say so myself, with the amount of legwork I’d done, back in the days when the internet was just a glimmer in Bill Gates’s eye and the TV was black and white and only on three days a week, and Ena Sharples was still stuck under the viaduct in Corrie. [That’s “Corrie” as in Coronation Street, not the small village on the Isle of Arran, by the way. That Corrie doesn’t have a viaduct, although it does have a wooden seal, perched on a rock in the harbour].

Once again, I was struck by the dichotomy between the two halves of my own particular makeup – the Rudds, on my father’s side, a large, sprawling family, originating in Downham Market, Fordham, and Hilgay Fen, drawn, like iron filings to a magnet, by the thriving, bustling, boom town of Hull in the mid-Victorian era, then to the docks, in the instance of great-uncle Ernie, who rose to be secretary of the Humber Amalgamated Steam Trawler Engineers and Firemen’s Union, and even in some cases, to the waves themselves, in the case of my great-grandfather, who was buried at sea after dying on board his ship, far from his home on Hessle Road, off the coast of Morocco, in 1906.

The Fenwicks and the Walkers were, by contrast, largely landlubbers, with the exception of Thomas Fenwick, who became a Humber Pilot. They were useful things like plumbers, glaziers and bricklayers, and, lawdy lawdy, how we could do with some of them (or at least their genes) right now. They were things like postmen and policemen and ploughmen, “farm servants” and grooms. They came, and tilled the soil, and lay beneath, as Tennyson might have said, in fact did say, but not specifically about my ancestors. Yet it was this, the more socially-acceptable side of the family tree (the Rudds were always viewed slightly as ne’er-do-wells) that supplied, somewhere along the line, the faulty, wonky, genetic mapping that has now ended me up in this wheelchair.

And which, if truth is told, probably mean that my own stay on the family tree, before I fall off the twig, is perhaps going to be potentially shorter than it otherwise might have been. I’ve been feeling my place in history fairly keenly since I rediscovered this document, fascinating as it is, sometimes when you look at the family tree you can feel the weight of all those dead people up above you, pressing down on your shoulders, the responsibility you carry. Especially at a time when we’re about to run up to the summer solstice and the turning of the year towards winter and darkness again, without really ever having had a summer. Maybe I should have drawn my pedigree diagram the other way up, with me at the top, then, like Newton, I could have been the one standing on the shoulders of giants.

Coincidentally, this week, I’ve been reading Lyndall Gordon’s book on T. S. Eliot. A truly excellent if weighty tome (literally, I have to prop it up on the pillow beside my head to read it in bed. I know I studied the man for three years already but in those days the lit crits were by people like Helen Gardner, F. O. Matthiessen, Northrop Frye, and B. C. Southam, so I thought I’d better catch up on something more recent, and of course this led to me re-reading once again the Four Quartets, especially, in view of the family history angle, and my ruminations last week on the nature of the English landscape, East Coker:

In my beginning is my end. In succession
Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,
Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place
Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass.
Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires,
Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth
Which is already flesh, fur, and faeces,
Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf.
Houses live and die: there is a time for building
And a time for living and for generation
And a time for the wind to break the loosened pane
And to shake the wainscot where the field mouse trots
And to shake the tattered arras woven with a silent motto.

Is an introduction that could have been specifically written with genealogists in mind, I suppose. As is the passage which says:

Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
There is a time for the evening under starlight,
A time for the evening under lamplight
(The evening with the photograph album).
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.

Sometimes, if I am fortunate, I can look at the family tree (or at least contemplate my place in it) and feel not terror at the demise of everybody and everything, but instead almost love, not necessarily for the family, but the sort of comfortable, generalised, accepting love that comes of long habituation. The same sort of frisson I can get (sad git that I am) from reading those copperplate names in the flyleaf of Grandma Walker’s Bible. The family tree – yours and mine – is both a symbol of transitory living and yet of permanence; a paradox, maybe the same type of eternal glory that Wordsworth saw “dwelling in the light of setting suns”. The moment comes, and goes, like fleeting sunlight. Or, in the words of Ezra Pound, in his Cantos:

A blown husk that is finished
but the light sings eternal
a pale flare over marshes
where the salt hay whispers to tide's change.

I suppose it comes down at last to accepting my place in history, such as it is: when Eliot says that

Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,
Are removed, destroyed, restored

I can empathise with that, since our house has appeared in several of those categories, having crumbled, been extended, destroyed and restored, but not necessarily in that order!

Anyway, it’s tired, I’m late, or vice versa, and I haven’t even touched on the Trinity yet, though maybe the idea of change creating permanence, or vice versa, has something to do with it. All I am capable of at this time of night is to say, along with John Henry Newman

May He support us all the day long, till the shades lengthen, and the evening comes, and the busy world is hushed, and the fever of life is over, and our work is done! Then in His mercy may He give us safe lodging, and a holy rest, and peace at the last!

And top it off with tonight’s collect from the Online Lectionary, which apparently ends with Matthew 11.28-30

Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.

Anyway, the accounts are calling and next week I am afraid it’s a case of back to the grind, labouring and being heavy laden with a vengeance; although I don’t have any fields to plough or nets to haul, as such, there is only something like three or four weeks of term left and then Debbie’s course will all end and then we’ll be back to the long financial drought of summer (whatever the actual drought’s doing) coupled with trying to sort out what new courses, and where, she’ll be teaching in September, so I’d better get cracking and sell some books. If it hadn’t been done already, (since it’s such a great title) I’d write one called “Collecting Dead Relatives”.

Or, as the car stickers entertainingly encapsulate it, “Genealogists Do It In Trees”.

Epiblog for the Diamond Jubilee

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. However, summer is well and truly over, as I sit here typing this and watching the dull continuous rain smear the conservatory windows and blur the spectacular flowers of the clematis so that it looks for all the world like a water-colour that’s just had the water from the brush-jar knocked all over it. Something I have done myself, many times. There are only so many mistakes that you can turn into a cloud. Unless you’re Big G, of course.

And, of course, all over the country, events which people have been working on for months in advance to celebrate the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee are being washed out. Which, whatever you think about the Monarchy, is a bit of a shame. Still, it’s an excuse for us all to display the Dunkirk spirit, though “if wet, in the Village Hall” doesn’t work quite so well if it’s a river pageant with a fly-past by the Red Arrows. Unless you leave the windows open.

Freddie has been refusing, in this weather, to go walkies with Grandad, but at the age of 84, he’s allowed to. Zak will go in any weather, he’s that kind of dog. Then he’ll come back, demolish a bowl of food, and want to go straight back out again. Mike reckons that for every mile he does, Zak does three, with his running in front, coming back, then lagging behind to sniff.

Kitty has resumed her vigil beside the stove, which we have, astonishingly for June, have had to re-light. In fact, last night, June 2nd, I was sitting beside a roaring stove, wearing a scarf, and clutching a hot water bottle. On the second day in June, yes, you heard me correctly. It is, I am afraid, a sad truth that we only have two seasons in England any more, Spring and Autumn, and anyone who still thinks that we haven’t somehow screwed the weather clearly hasn’t looked out of the window lately.

Of my more unofficial menagerie, the only ones I can report definite sightings of are Isaiah the squirrel and the jay, each of whom vies for the nuts in the bird-feeder on a daily basis. I haven’t seen Freda for weeks now, and Brenda has been conspicuous by her absence, though clearly something still comes along in the night and eats the nuts and raisins, and I don’t want to stop putting them out in case it is Brenda, at 2 O’clock in the morning. I haven’t seen Ronnie the Raven of late, perhaps he’s gone to join his comrades in the Tower of London for the weekend’s celebrations.

I can also report sightings of my wife, who has returned to the nest now that it’s half term. The GCSE class had their exam this last week, so that particular brood of little chicks has now fledged. Others, however, still linger in the breeding-box, mouths open for whatever morsels of education she can regurgitate for them. She was desperately looking for something topical to use in a lesson about informative text and skimming and scanning, during the week, so I suggested something about the Jubilee, since you can’t throw half a brick without hitting a Royal this week (and please don’t try, or MI5 will sandbag you without trial before you can say “Abu Qatadah”). We ended up Googling for “unusual facts about the Monarchy” so she could use that as the basis of a lesson on how to gather information; as well as all the ordinary unusual stuff about the Poet Laureate and butts of Sack, we also learned that the Queen has a Swan-Master, who is in charge of Swan-Upping on the Thames, and that any sturgeon found washed up on the coastline of Britain has to be offered (at least nominally) to the Monarch, because of a statute passed by Edward II, which has never been subsequently revoked.

Looking back at that paragraph, it reads as if Swan-Upping is a small village on the Thames, but it actually refers to the process of transferring swans from one part of the river to another, in order to facilitate their numbers. Like the sturgeon, it dates from the time when the Royals were partial to a bit of swan, and feasts at court consisted of dishes such as a roasted serf stuffed with a pig stuffed with a swan stuffed with a sturgeon stuffed with a covey of skylarks, or similar, and there wasn’t a vegan alternative.

I rather like to think of the village of Swan-Upping; I can imagine it, in summer, trees in leaf, a church, a red phone box, a broad market place, with one or two old pubs, perhaps once coaching inns, thatched cottages, a village green, and of course a Village Hall, (complete with a tea-urn, and bunting) where the Jubilee celebrants and slightly damp Morris Men all huddle together out of the rain, shake their umbrellas, shiver slightly, peer optimistically out of the rain-streaked windows, and say “I think it’s easing orf a bit!” to each other.

While we were considering “unusual facts about the Monarchy” and trading them with each other, Debbie was listening to the news with only 48K of her RAM, which explains why she mistook a report about asylum-seeking Tamils as “asylum-seeking camels”. When I said to her, didn’t you think it was odd that camels might want to come and live here, in this cold rainy country, she said that maybe they fancied a new life at the seaside, giving people rides. I said that if that happened, it could potentially put British donkeys out of work, and before you knew where you were, we’d have the Donkey Defence League. In fact, I think we already have. And to them, and others who would misappropriate the Union Jack, as Show of Hands say: “It’s my flag too, and I want it back.”

Class preparation notwithstanding, it’s been difficult to avoid the Jubilee and the Olympics this week, and it has almost got to the stage where you are made to feel guilty if you don’t automatically join in and celebrate. Anyone raising any doubts about whether such extravaganzas are appropriate in a time of austerity is viewed with suspicion, if not downright hostility. I have mixed feelings about it myself. Certainly I think the Olympics have moved a long way from the days of Baron de Coubertin, let alone the original Athenian ideal. So yes, maybe with the Olympics, you have a point, especially when it’s used as a pretext for pre-emptive “arrests” of potential trouble-makers by the security forces, “cleansing” the streets of the homeless, and not letting people out on bail because all the available MI5 agents are going to be busy manning missile sites on blocks of flats in Walthamstow.

My life has coincided almost exactly with the reign of Queen Elizabeth II, and, like her, I’ve seen a lot of change in the last 57 years, something which is still being brought home to me as I look through all the old photographs I uncovered last weekend, the massive task of scanning and cataloguing of which I have only just begun. The roles of the Queen, Parliament, and indeed her subjects have all undergone tremendous alteration, and not always for the better. This is not meant to be a political blog. I already have one of those, and there’s no point in saying the same thing twice. But at a time like this, it’s difficult to separate Church from state, and when you get to the point where there is an official Church of England service in St Paul’s Cathedral, the clergy of which turfed out the only people who seem to be attempting to have a discussion about inequality and justice in our country today, in favour of the City and the status quo, it does sort of make you wonder where the Church is going. I rather think Jesus would have been outside with the Occupy protestors in their tents, and not inside the Cathedral singing “I Vow To Thee, My Country”.

When you see the Church lining up in serried ranks of Bishops and Archbishops behind the sceptres thrones and powers of the Establishment at a time when poor people are suffering and being hardest hit, it does lead you to wonder why we allow an 80 year old woman in a tin hat encrusted with priceless jewels sit on a throne at the State opening of Parliament and make speeches about the need for austerity!

And yet, and yet… as Churchill once said of democracy, it’s the worst possible system, until you look at all of the others! So it is for me, with the Monarchy. I tend to dissociate the institution from its inhabitants. As an institution, the Monarchy acts as a constitutional bulwark against the totalitarian ambitions of arriviste politicians, which makes Elizabeth II worth her weight in gold just for that, alone. And if I had to celebrate anything, I would celebrate the fact that Elizabeth II has managed to thwart the designs on power of all would-be presidents for the last 60 years!

In the same way that Orson Welles in The Third Man sneered that 500 years of civilization in Switzerland had produced the cuckoo clock, you could say that 150 years of democracy in this country since the Great Reform Bill has produced Jeremy Hunt. If you are looking for someone who is totally out of touch with the fears and concerns of ordinary people, it’s the professional political class, exemplified by both major parties (and the Liberal Democrats) not the Royals, that should occupy your gaze. Maybe we should go back to direct rule by the Monarch, and put Mr Hunt and his cronies in the Tower (except they might scare away the ravens; they certainly scare me!)

So I’ll be raising my glass of “Old Cloudy” and trying not to get too many raindrops in it, this weekend, to 60 years of Ruritanian muddle and fudge. To a constitution that allows for men in tights and tabards, called things like “Maltravers Herald Extraordinary” and “Rouge Dragon”, whose chief claim to fame is the ability to walk backwards up a red carpet while carrying a crown on a velvet cushion. I’ll be drinking to all the little villages like Swan-Upping on Thames, with their village halls, their bunting and their church and pub and cricket on the green. Yes, and spinsters cycling to Matins, if it comes to that. I’ll be drinking to the steam trains and morris men and cathedral choirs and people in waders rescuing mating swans, I’ll be drinking to the fishermen of England, a-working at their nets and wondering how much Royal Mail will charge to post a sturgeon from Cromer to London. I’ll be drinking to the ancient statutes that allow the Freemen and Burgesses of the borough to graze their cattle on the Westwood, or even Vivienne Westwood. Or, if wet, in the Village Hall. Can I borrow your lawn-mower, old chap?

And I’ll be drinking to the people of England – fair, tolerant, dreamers and poets to a man and woman, and with an eye for the underdog. The ones who go out of their way to hold raffles for lifeboats, homeless dogs and feral cats. They are where the true power of England lies, or should I say WE are where the true power of England lies, this curiously shaped little Island with its leg sticking out into the wild Atlantic.

Kipling understood this, of course, when he wasn’t busy with his cakes. In his poem The Land, which is well worth a read in its entirety, he sets out where he thinks the ownership of the landscape of England lies:

Georgii Quinti Anno Sexto, I, who own the River-field,
Am fortified with title-deeds, attested, signed and sealed,
Guaranteeing me, my assigns, my executors and heirs
All sorts of powers and profits which - are neither mine nor theirs.

I have rights of chase and warren, as my dignity requires.
I can fish - but Hobden tickles. I can shoot - but Hobden wires.
I repair, but he reopens, certain gaps which, men allege,
Have been used by every Hobden since a Hobden swapped a hedge.

Shall I dog his morning progress o'er the track-betraying dew?
Demand his dinner-basket into which my pheasant flew?
Confiscate his evening faggot into which the conies ran,
And summons him to judgment? I would sooner summons Pan.

His dead are in the churchyard - thirty generations laid.
Their names went down in Domesday Book when Domesday Book was made.
And the passion and the piety and prowess of his line
Have seeded, rooted, fruited in some land the Law calls mine.

Not for any beast that burrows, not for any bird that flies,
Would I lose his large sound council, miss his keen amending eyes.
He is bailiff, woodman, wheelwright, field-surveyor, engineer,
And if flagrantly a poacher - 'tain't for me to interfere.

'Hob, what about that River-bit?' I turn to him again
With Fabricius and Ogier and William of Warenne.
'Hev it jest as you've a mind to, but' - and so he takes command.
For whoever pays the taxes old Mus' Hobden owns the land.

The land. The strange land of England; Albion, with its rain, mists and legends. And meanwhile the year, and the weather, moves on. The rain in England falls mainly in the Reign. The reign, it raineth every day. Anyway, it’s Sunday teatime, and I might just, for the second week running, open up Great Grandma Walker’s Bible at random and read a bit. I don’t know what it’s teaching me, other than to appreciate freedom and the power of redemption, and maybe to have faith that – although it is no longer granted to me to see it - the badger still ate the nuts.

I mark the passing of May – the pleasant month of May, and note with sadness that in three weeks it will be Midsummer. Next week there will be work to be done, plants to be planted, wrongs to be righted, freedoms to be defended. But for the moment, the realm is safe and peaceful. At least the little bit of it here in the Holme Valley that Her Majesty allows me to control on her behalf. And long may it remain so.