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.
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