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.
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