Epiblog for St Olaf's Day

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. Our plans to get the camper van ready to go off to Scotland have been forced to take a step backwards rather than forwards this week, as the relatively simple task of getting the boiler changed over and working again has so far confounded the plumbers on two separate days. It’s rapidly developing into the sort of saga Esther Rantzen used to feature on “That’s Life” for those of you old enough to remember it.

Don’t worry, though, this is not going to develop into one of those “and so we rang the gas board” consumer rants. I’ve already been there and done that, with my web page “Norwich Union stole my ceiling” several years ago now when those East Anglian insurance swindling oxygen thieves refused to pay up for the fallen plaster. One of the unfortunate legacies of owning your own house is that you are responsible for every disaster, for every bit that crumbles and falls off, and all of the battles you have to engage in to get it fixed again.

We’re back to TS Eliot and the fight to restore that which has been lost, for two weeks running, which I guess sort of proves his point. Anyway, the plumber is coming back tomorrow to finish off the very last of the work, and maybe we can salvage enough time out of the delay to get away for a fortnight or so in the general direction of Scotland, provided I can organise Kitty also going on her holidays to the Cattery at Honley for the same time. That’s another job for next week to add to my “to do” list, which currently has 27 urgent things on it today ranging from “empty bin” to “set up accounts in TurboCash”.

Speaking of Kitty, she hates all of the disruption and chaos caused by workmen in the house, with the hammering and drilling, and went missing for long periods of Tuesday and Wednesday. Actually, I am not overly fond of it myself. She was probably only out in the garden somewhere (or possibly upstairs in the old office, except she seems to have ceded that particular part of her territory to Spidey from next door, who can frequently be found curled up asleep on one of the old cat beds up there) but even so I was concerned that she wasn’t going to come back any time soon. However, by teatime on each of the two days in question, hunger and the desire to sit next to the stove, even though it wasn’t always lit, had overcome her natural reticence, and she was back in her accustomed place, either on the settee or on Zak’s chair in the conservatory.

She’s been enjoying the unaccustomed warm weather, and has, according to Debbie, developed a liking for drinking out of the pond for some reason, despite her having a nice bowl of clean water to sip from at any time she chooses, day or night. She seems to draw the line at stalking her own prey, however – various birds and squirrels come and go as they please, helping themselves to the bread and peanuts, and she never even lifts an eyebrow. Cat treats are so much easier to catch – you just go and sit by your bowl, looking hungry.

But she doesn’t like domestic DIY disasters, and neither do I. Actually, one surprising consequence of my writing last week about the doorknob coming off in my hand was that someone, a very kind dear person who reads this blog, actually sent me a doorknob in the post. It was a different kind of knob, and I am interpreting it as a charitable gesture and not an ironic comment on my own knobness, but either way, I quite like the principle of people reading what I have suffered and then rushing to rectify it, so, if you’re all paying attention, by way of experiment this week I’d like to write about my Ferrari with the nude model in the passenger seat being broken, and all of the money vanishing from my bank account. Cheers. I’ll be waiting behind the door for the postman.

Anyway, as I write this, as a result of Debbie’s general penchant for home demolishment, several kitchen units are in bits in the garage, and the fridge is in the front room. It’ll all get resolved in the end, either that, or we’ll end up on the next episode of “Half-Built House”.

In the midst of all the chaos and destruction, I’ve been trying to edit books with one leg, write some new stuff, do some publicity, and set up the new accounts. We have finally decided to ditch Sage on the grounds that it’s too expensive to upgrade to a version which will work on Windows 7, and still won’t give me the royalties reports I need because it treats payments as a lump sum and doesn’t split them down by line items. Still smarting from the loss of Adobe Pagemaker, I’d only contemplate paying for a Sage upgrade if they’d actually fixed the royalties thing, and even then only if someone shot me with a tranquilising dart to dull the pain of writing the cheque, but it doesn’t do it anyway, so I won’t.

In what laughingly counts as my spare time (usually the 20 minutes per day between getting into bed and falling asleep) this week I’ve been reading Painted Shadow, the extremely exhaustive and very well-written biography of Eliot’s first wife, Vivienne Haigh-Wood, by Carole Seymour-Jones. The author’s contention is that Vivienne Eliot was much maligned and misunderstood, both in her lifetime, during the period she was actually married to him (1915-1947) for the last nine years of which she was committed to a private asylum in North London, and afterwards, by various biographers and writers on Eliot who have gone along with the generally received interpretation that Vivienne was neurotic, depressive and possibly mentally ill. Seymour-Jones argues that in fact she was as “sane” as the next person, or would certainly have been viewed as such today (indeed, Vivienne’s own brother said as much on visiting her) but that it suited Eliot, who had already fled the marital home some years before, and the Haigh-Wood family, to have her shut up.

This is another example, I suppose, of that process I wrote about last week (inspired by St Mary Magdalene) about the distortion of people by history, and the semi-mythical status which is attained by people who did actually (potentially) once exist, the different versions of them, depending who’s doing the asking, who’s setting the questions, and who’s writing down the answers. It seems to be a fairly universal process, it applies to commoners and Kings – there is a widespread movement to re-assess King Richard III as a good bloke really, and King Olaf of Norway, who became St Olaf of Norway, was a Viking pirate during his lifetime, known as Olaf the Fat, died in battle at Stiklestad in 1030, and was only canonised in the 1100’s after various miracles were attributed to him, the chapel of his shrine eventually becoming Trondheim Cathedral.

History, especially mythologised versions of ancient history, for which there are few if any records, is at the mercy of the interpreters. Ironically enough, for someone who was at least complicit, if not active, in the “authorised version” of his wife’s “illness”, Eliot actually wrote about this process, in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” – about how our impression, our ideas of one poet or writer are inevitably viewed through the prism of everything that has happened since, and that they must have appeared in a very different light to their contemporaries:

No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of æsthetic, not merely historical, criticism. The necessity that he shall conform, that he shall cohere, is not one-sided; what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new. Whoever has approved this idea of order, of the form of European, of English literature, will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past. And the poet who is aware of this will be aware of great difficulties and responsibilities.

It goes beyond individuals, of course: it also applies to entire countries, peoples and nations, and their collective mythos. Thus, almost everyone famous in legend who has ever died is not actually dead, they are only sleeping, and will come back to help us in England’s hour of need – King Arthur under Glastonbury Tor, Francis Drake in his hammock down below, listening for drumbeats, Elvis in his chip shop in Kilmarnock.

Sometimes, we even embrace these myths ourselves without appreciating their full significance. Everyone has heard of King Alfred burning the cakes, Canute trying to turn back the tide, Robert the Bruce and his spider, or Lady Godiva riding naked through the streets of Coventry, but very few people know the back story. In Lady Godiva’s case, she apparently did it to protest against the punitive taxes levied on the people of the town by her husband Leofric, and he, jesting, said he’d reconsider, but only if she rode naked through the streets first.

I mention Lady Godiva specifically because – as part of the so-called “cultural Olympiad” which runs alongside the official Olympic Games – a six foot high puppet of “Lady Godiva” has set out on a journey from Coventry to London, powered by a team of cyclists, and dressed in an embroidered coat created by a team of glass and textile artists from across the West Midlands.

A mythologised, Merrie-England, pick and mix version of the past also featured very strongly this week, in the form of the Olympic opening ceremony. I am afraid I come at this from the standpoint of someone who doesn’t believe in the Olympic ideal, at least not as it is currently manifested, and who is very wary of patriotism being made compulsory, especially as the idea of “patriotism” espoused by The Blight and their myrmidons is much different to mine. But even assuming that you accept the questionable premise that the Olympics “needs” an opening ceremony in some way, this was not the one I would have come up with, given a blank sheet of paper and a seven year run-up. I’ve written extensively on the Olympics elsewhere in my other blog, and why I think it’s a bad idea and an excuse to impinge on civil liberties, so there’s not a lot of point in re-hashing it here.

I was, however, truly amazed to hear the opening ceremony described as “left-wing” by the MP for Cannock Chase, Aiden Burley. Obviously Mr Burley is the sort of person by whom the term “left-wing” is automatically used as a term of abuse, but even so, left-wing?

A truly left-wing "Opening Ceremony" would have had Isambard Kingdom Branagh shoving the Great Ormond Street volunteers up his chimneys after the child catcher Andrew Lansley had sold off Great Ormond street to the local Workhouse. But I guess they are hanging on to that idea for the next Tory manifesto.

It may well have been less traditional than some people (including me, actually, given that you accept the rather questionable premise that the Olympics needs an "opening ceremony" at all) would have hoped. It may well have been dismally populist with an undue prevalence given to the likes of Dizz E Rascal, whoever he might be. It may well have been a partial, and extremely loopy, selective prism of (largely English) history, with token contributions from Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales - and why oh why did they choose "Jehovah" over "Calon Lan" - confusingly intercut with CGI episodes including some feeble attempts at humour, and featuring the compulsory modern dance troupes and drumming which have to be part of any "cultural experience" in the UK today, by law.

But left wing? I don't think so. A truly left wing gesture would have been to cancel the opening ceremony and use the money to keep the libraries schools and hospitals safe from The Blight and the likes of Aiden Burley. Or give the 7 million to Water Aid or something. But nobody in the UK in any position of power would have the guts to do that.

And while we are speaking of the mythology of “our” collective history and culture, I wonder how many of the 29million people who watched the choir sing Blake’s “Jerusalem” with a misty eye (the viewers, not the choir) realised that it was written by a supporter of the French Revolution, a supporter of free love and unbridled sexuality, and a man who considered the established churches and their oppression as “dark, Satanic mills,” an author who wrote elsewhere that:

Oothoon describes a utopian future time of free love, where she can catch girls for Theotormon and lie “on a bank & view their wanton play/ In lovely copulation bliss on bliss.” This is a vision of a future time when “Love! Love! Love! happy happy Love!” can be “Free as the mountain wind”

As Professor Christopher Rowland, a Professor of Theology at Oxford University, has argued the quotation from the Bible which Blake used to underscore the original text of what became “Jerusalem” in the preface to “Milton” (Numbers ch. 11, v. 29: "Would to God that all the Lord's people were prophets.") includes

everyone in the task of speaking out about what they saw. Prophecy for Blake, however, was not a prediction of the end of the world, but telling the truth as best a person can about what he or she sees, fortified by insight and an "honest persuasion" that with personal struggle, things could be improved. A human being observes, is indignant and speaks out: it's a basic political maxim which is necessary for any age. Blake wanted to stir people from their intellectual slumbers, and the daily grind of their toil, to see that they were captivated in the grip of a culture which kept them thinking in ways which served the interests of the powerful.

Plus ca change. Still, I expect the organisers didn’t read further than the line about “Chariots of Fire”. The legend on which the rhetorical questions in Blake’s lines are is that Jesus actually visited the West Country and specifically Glastonbury, with Joseph of Arimathea. There is a saying in Somerset – “as sure as our Lord was at Priddy”. Also at Priddy, an otherwise unremarkable spot in the Mendips, a carol sung by the children of Priddy begins: "Joseph was a tin merchant, a tin merchant, a tin merchant”, and goes on to describe him arriving from the sea in a boat.

I see that Jesus has somehow sidled unnoticed into this Epliblog, yet again. Apart from being St Olaf’s day, today is apparently, according to the Lectionary, the eighth Sunday after Trinity, so we seem to be well into what the Church of England loves to call “Common Time” – or, as the rest of us know it, 4/4.

As it turns out, the Old Testament text for today is apparently the Song of Solomon, which is another instance of something completely random having been included in the canonical version of the Bible, although William Blake would undoubtedly have liked it, and probably did. It’s supposed to be an allegorical representation of the love between God and the Church, apparently.

I am the rose of Sharon, and the lily of the valleys.
As the lily among thorns, so is my love among the daughters.
As the apple tree among the trees of the wood, so is my beloved among the sons. I sat down under his shadow with great delight, and his fruit was sweet to my taste.
He brought me to the banqueting house, and his banner over me was love.
Stay me with flagons, comfort me with apples: for I am sick of love.
His left hand is under my head, and his right hand doth embrace me.
I charge you, O ye daughters of Jerusalem, by the roes, and by the hinds of the field, that ye stir not up, nor awake my love, till he please.
The voice of my beloved! behold, he cometh leaping upon the mountains, skipping upon the hills.
My beloved is like a roe or a young hart: behold, he standeth behind our wall, he looketh forth at the windows, shewing himself through the lattice.
My beloved spake, and said unto me, Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away.
For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone;
The flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land;
The fig tree putteth forth her green figs, and the vines with the tender grape give a good smell. Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away.
O my dove, that art in the clefts of the rock, in the secret places of the stairs, let me see thy countenance, let me hear thy voice; for sweet is thy voice, and thy countenance is comely.
Take us the foxes, the little foxes, that spoil the vines: for our vines have tender grapes.
My beloved is mine, and I am his: he feedeth among the lilies.
Until the day break, and the shadows flee away, turn, my beloved, and be thou like a roe or a young hart upon the mountains of Bether.

Great stuff. I haven’t a Scooby what any of it means, and by the time Solomon (or the author, if indeed they are not one and the same) starts burbling on about “take away the foxes, the little foxes”, I am not sure he has, either. I just hope there were enough mushrooms to go round, so everyone else could see the foxes as well. Nevertheless, and notwithstanding its complete gagadom, in a strange way it is very compelling, a bit like Open University programmes used to be when you came in from the pub, late at night. It all seemed to make sense at the time, in its own terms. I like the sound of The Rose of Sharon very much, and I hope to see it one day. Even if I have to shew myself through the lattice. Later verses (5:3) include “I have taken off my dress, why should I put it on again?” Why indeed? Let me introduce you to Mr Blake.

Anyway, summer has come to these magical mythical isles, and to the Holme Valley. Next week brings yet more banging, sawing and hammering, and maybe, just maybe, the possibility of getting ready to go on holiday, who knows. In the meantime, tomorrow, I will be waiting for the plumber. In the conservatory, with the lead piping.

Epiblog for St Mary Magdalene's Day

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. It really has, believe me. Which is why I am starting to write this at twenty five minutes to midnight on Sunday night. All sorts of things have happened this week, some good, some bad, some thrilling, some tedious. The weather seems to have picked up a bit, anyway. I still refuse to believe it’s really summer, though, although there have been some days during the week when it has stopped raining for about 45 minutes, and then yesterday and today, it hardly rained at all.

Which is just as well, really, because some of the tubs of herbs and marigolds which I planted out over the last two weekends have become more like bowls of soup than tubs of herbs. However, the warmer weather this weekend has finally meant that we’ve been not only planning to sit out on the decking of an evening, but we actually achieved it once, of which more later.

The imminent prospect of sitting-out had meant that Debbie spent a considerable amount of time sweeping down the decking and putting out T lights in little holders, so that when we did sit out there of an evening, we could be surrounded by a fairyland of twinklings. So she was considerably miffed when she came back into the conservatory, turned round, looked out, and saw a grey squirrel making off with one of the aforementioned T lights with it in its jaws, as it disappeared up the trunk of one of the major trees. Either the squirrel was taking it home to feed the family, or there’s a little drey there somewhere that’s got T lights and probably some joss sticks, and one of those white round paper and wire lampshades, with lots of squirrels lying around a bong and going “Wow, man”, like Neil off The Young Ones.

This of course was on a day when Freddie wasn’t here, or he would have been barking himself into a paroxysm at the effrontery of the T light theft, at the conservatory door. Having said that, either Freddie’s losing his power, or the squirrels have realised that, as long as he’s shut in, he can’t reach them, because this week, when one of them was on the decking taunting him, instead of skedaddling when he rushed over there to bark at it, it stood its ground and even came nearer to the door, which baffled him somewhat. I don’t know whether this was a particularly gung-ho squirrel or what, but Freddie’s barking became even higher and more frantic and querulous, as though he was saying to the squirrel, “Please run off up the tree, just to humour me, please…” while Zak broke his chairborne slumbers for just long enough to cast a pitying look in his direction.

Kitty’s been inhabiting Zak’s chair more or less continuously whenever he’s not been here, because it’s in a nice warm sunny spot in the conservatory, although as I type this, she is once more curled up into a tight ball of cat, nose in her tail, on the sofa next to the stove.

The garden’s coming on, though there’s still a long way to go with the various projects, and some of them are going to need outside help. The rain that has turned the pots and tubs into quagmires has actually benefited some other plants, Rain is not universally bad for gardens, not by a long chalk. The Comfrey plant, for instance, that has been standing out in the garden still in its pot, waiting to be planted in, ever since we bought it, has almost doubled in size through constant watering from heaven above. Similarly the Great Mullein (aka Aaron’s Rod, for all you D H Lawrence fans out there) is also sprouting, triffid-like, despite Debbie’s attempts to kill it.

My bluebell seeds have arrived, but the time for planting them isn’t right at the moment, so they are stored in a safe place. The other stuff which I ordered at the same time also arrived, so this week I’ve planted out wild garlic, broom, and foxglove seeds, none of which interested Debbie till I told her that foxgloves were poisonous because of their containing digitalis, at which point she made a mental note to use it to finish me off.

The same place also does things like Meadow Cranesbills and Devil’s Bit Scabrous, which is a plant worth growing merely for its very silly name alone, before you get around to its multifarious benefits both to humans and butterflies alike. Apparently it has a very short root or something and the story is that the Devil got so jealous of the plant’s many uses and healing properties that he took a huge chunk off its roots by biting it. And if you believe that, how do you feel about the Liberal Democrat manifesto?

Those were some of the pleasant things in the week. The unpleasant ones included, but were not necessarily limited to, the door handle coming off in my hand. This was the outside door, onto my ramp, which has been horribly swollen by the pissing deluge that has passed for a miserable summer so far. While other people might have seen this as merely a minor technical hiccup, for me it was a major problem, because once more I was back to not being able to get in or out under my own steam.

I found myself manically humming (Bob, not Thomas) Dylan’s lines from Desolation Row:

Yes I got your letter
About the time the doorknob broke
When you asked how I was doing
Was that some kind of joke

As Debbie and I spent a morning not only looking for the relevant tools but then also using them to dismantle the plate on the other side so we could work out how it all fitted together again. The little spring (a sort of tensioned, clover-leaf affair) that goes around the inside of the handle and actually holds it in place, was the worst bit. It’s the sort of job that would be a cinch if the human body was actually equipped with three hands, but it’s an absolute bugger when you’ve only got two, and you have to try and hold the whole assembly steady with your left hand while attempting to coax the spring over it with the screwdriver held in your right. After about 35 minutes of cursing I managed it, but I’d got one of the bits inside the handle the wrong way round, so the handle went up, not down, and I had to take it all apart and start again. After about another hour, we had the handle re-assembled and screwed back into place, hey presto, the door worked, and it hasn’t malfunctioned since. It was, however, a morning of my life I will never get back

Usually, at times like this when we’re feeling really low, Bernard turns up on the doorstep, and this week was no exception. Bernard is an 87 year old demon king/fairy wizard who turns up in a puff of smoke like a Deus Ex Machina whenever we most need him, usually bearing gifts – this time it was 1.1KG of blackcurrants from his farm. I subsequently stewed these in a big pan with some sugar and then put them in Kilmer jars, and tonight I had some, mixed with three huge dollops of Greek yoghurt and honey, and they were truly Elysian in concept. Truly Olympic blackcurrants, except I expect McDonalds have probably copyrighted those words. Wonderfully tart.

Sadly, I had to report to Bernard that one of the tubs of herbs he left behind for us on his previous visit, the sage, had indeed succumbed to mildew and was no more. Sage is basically a Mediterranean plant that likes hot, sunny weather, such as you get in, for instance, the Mediterranean; which makes it well-nigh impossible to grow in Huddersfield, in an October summer like the one we’ve just had. It’s one of the two high-profile casualties of the weather, the other being the strawberry plant. I even tried spraying the sage with a solution of baking powder, which is supposed to be an all-purpose natural remedy against mildew spores. It isn’t.

Apart from these infrequent islands of calm and tranquility, the remainder of the week has been uniformly bloody, and many, many times I have been murmuring Eliot’s lines from East Coker about:

There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious.

He muss’ be reading’ ma mail. Finally, on Saturday, we decided we’d have a meal then just sit out on the decking and chill out, maybe light the chiminea, light the T lights, apart from the ones stolen by the squirrels, and just generally appreciate a balmy summer’s night. But before then, we had but one final gardening task to accomplish, putting together the lightweight modular polythene covered greenhouse which Debbie had bought at B & Q for £9.95 on special offer. This is supposedly where we are putting our tomatoes when they finally grow large enough to be allowed outside on their own.

However, because it was £9.95, reduced from something very silly, we weren’t sure that all of the bits were there. One crucial bit which was definitely missing when we unpacked it all, was the instructions. Anyway, we did the best we could, with me cursing B and Q, because it definitely seemed to be short of some connectors and one green tubular bit. By dint of me modifying the design as we went along, we did actually manage to put it together, after a fashion. As we were congratulating ourselves on this triumph over adversity, Debbie finally unrolled the zip-up polythene cover that goes over the whole thing, and there, tucked inside it, were the instructions, which told us that we’d done the whole bloody thing wrong and so we had to break it all down and start again. See also under door handles.

Anyway, we did eventually get it put together, and we did then have tea, and we did then sit out on the decking, with the chiminea whiffing away burning the leftover barbecue charcoal from last year’s summer holiday, waste not, want not. It was quite warm, and with the influence of a bottle of wine which cost all of £3.65 (or approximately one-third of a greenhouse) we were officially feeling no pain. Outwardly, at least. In my case I was still in a fairly sombre and reflective mood because it was two years to the day since my life-saving operation at Huddersfield Royal Infirmary, in the safe hands of Mr Subramamian; the operation after which he came and told me “Mr Rudd, you are a very lucky man.”

I didn’t feel much like a lucky man on that bittersweet Saturday night as we sat there. Lucky compared with someone who is unlucky enough to be dead, I guess, but not as lucky as someone who can still walk. Lucky to be still sitting out on the decking, but unlucky no longer to be sharing it with Tiggy. And so it goes. Nobody is ever truly lucky or unlucky, without some leavening speck of the opposite condition, I guess, just as nobody truly knows they’re being happy till the moment is passed and they reflect on it from the perspective of relative sadness. In the circumstances, I did what I hope any sane person would do. I drank my wine and enjoyed the fire and the T lights. I had half-hoped that, as darkness fell, Brenda would come bumbling up the steps from the garden to join us, but alas it was not to be.

The words of Mercury are harsh after the songs of Apollo, as the Bard so truly commented, and today dawned bright and early for me, with my having promised to clear out The Cupboard Under The Sink. This is because the plumbers are coming (we hope) on Tuesday (we hope) to fix the boiler (we hope) so we can once more have hot water in the kitchen sink without having to boil a kettle first. Clearing out The Cupboard Under The Sink was my contribution to the enterprise, since I am useless at DIY, but on the plus side, since being in the wheelchair I am more or less the right height for clearing out low cupboards. The Cupboard Under The Sink proved to be every bit as terrifying as its capitalised description suggests; three hours later I was covered in spiders (dead) and dust (probably alive, eeeewww) and I had discovered two interesting things about The Cupboard Under The Sink - these being that a) despite being like Dr Who’s Tardis and being a lot bigger inside than it looks, it is still very boring and b) we currently own 25 unused light bulbs, mainly because every time Debbie finds herself in the hardware shop, a little light bulb comes on over her head and she buys some light bulbs. As completer-finishers go, she is the ideal person to write the History of the Galapagos Islands, turtle by turtle. While I agree that there is a certain virtue in stockpiling, there comes a point where having all your working capital tied up in lightbulbs becomes counter-productive. Mind you, with The Blight attempting daily to usher us back into an era of universal darkness, they may yet come in handy.

After lunch, I gave in to sybaritic pleasures again, which is why this Epiblog is late: I sat outside in the sun and copied out a massive family tree pedigree going back to 1679 for one of my cousins. I promised her I would do it, and I thought if I didn’t make the effort before we set off on holiday to Scotland, then it would vanish back into the morass of crap on my desk, never to re-surface for many a week. So I set up with my pens and my bottle of ink, sharp pencil and eraser, and ruler, and set to work. The original was done on a dye-line copier (as used for “blueprints”) back in 1980, and has had other annotations added to it over time by me. It’s far too big to photocopy, so the simplest thing seemed to be to just reproduce the section she wanted. Not for the first time, I found myself reflecting how easy Kitty’s life is, compared to mine – her family tree would consist of a single line with “Cuddles” at the top and “Kitty” at the bottom. More than that is not known. Actually, if you gave Kitty a family tree she would probably just climb up and live in it, a bit like people in South Yorkshire.

So, of course, there hasn’t been much time for spiritual reflection, as you can see. “Excellently tart”, as a description, could equally be applied to St Mary Magdalene, whose saint's day it is, apparently, today – at least in her early days. I haven’t had chance to check today’s date in the Lectionary to see what other observances are due beside this, but I sort of became interested in the Mary Magdelene cult and got sidetracked by the internet, as you do. Among the little-known facts about my previous life is that I once made a pair of notice boards for St Mary Magdalene’s Church in Brighton, back in the prehistoric days when I used to be able to do such things. Me and St Mary go back a long way. And she’s still around – just up the road from us is an old lane called “Magdale”.

Actually, the depiction of St Mary Magdalene as a “tart with a heart” was largely the invention of Pope Gregory in AD591 when he decided, in the course of a homily on the Gospel of Luke, that she was obviously a prostitute. Hmm. Who’s the person dressing up in skirts and surrounding themselves with hunky young priests, Gregory? Anyway, since then, she’s suffered even further at the hands of people such as Martin Scorsese and even Dan Brown, who more or less decided that she was Jesus’s girlfriend. Later, in Ireland, the “Magdalene Laundries” were used by the Catholic church in one of its less impressive manifestations, for the rehabilitation, or more likely incarceration, of “fallen women”.

The people of Medieval Provence decided that the “wilderness” where St Mary Magdalene supposedly spent many years living as a hermit following the Ascension of Christ was in the South of France, for some reason. The veneration of her relics also got mixed up with the Cathar heresy (in Medieval Provence, what didn’t?) and there’s even a tradition that she is buried in a cave on Iona. The area around La Sainte Baume has been especially prominent in the display of relics pertaining to St Mary Magdalene, including her skull, in a golden reliquary, which is processed through the town of St. Maximin on the saint’s day - and it has even diversified into touring relics, something the Catholic church seems to go in for these days, and she could certainly teach St Swithun (see last week) a thing or two about travelling, according to the La Sainte Baume web site:

August 2009 The relics go on pilgrimage for evangelization with the new travel reliquary (the folded size fits airline carry-on dimensions) to various cities in the Diocese as well as Toulouse, Lyon and Paris before returning to La Sainte Baume.

The idea of the folding travel reliquary (suitable for airline carry-on luggage) definitely belongs in, or may even stem from, an episode of “Father Ted”.

Oddly enough, I was thinking about the way in which people’s personae are adapted and distorted, even appropriated, throughout history (and how they change according to who is doing the writing and recording) while I was copying out the pedigree for Cousin Joyce. With a quasi-religious figure such as St Mary Magdalene, of course, there is much more likelihood of this taking place; nobody is going to venerate the relics of my ancestors (though, if you are interested, we’ve got plenty of them in our loft) or get aereated about the precise details of their lives, or whether they even existed or not, or indeed try and trace my bloodline back to King Dagobert. But nevertheless, history is written by the victors, and the rich people are – by and large – the ones who got remembered. For most of the people in that family tree pedigree, there are three bare dates: birth (or baptism) marriage, and death (or burial). Sometimes, the middle one is omitted. There’s nothing like a family tree stuffed with agricultural labourers, blacksmiths and fishermen to make you feel at once that you are an insignificant cog in a long mechanism of history, and also that you are nowhere near as useful, productive, or able as they were. All I know about them is their names and their dates, and in some cases an occupation. I do, however, feel their combined weight, in tiers above me, pressing me down into the earth from time to time.

And I wonder whether some future historian or genealogist might look at my dates on a family tree and, if so, what they will think of my life and its rather questionable achievements. Not much, I imagine.

Anyway, these thoughts seem to have led me down a rather melancholy alley, so perhaps it would be best to turn around re-trace my steps. Tomorrow a new week beckons, with all sorts of nasty things that need sorting out before I can even go on holiday. The fight to recover what has been lost and found and lost again. You can’t choose your family, and you can’t choose your ancestors. As Thomas Grey said:

Let not Ambition mock their useful toil
Their homely joys, and destiny obscure;
Nor Grandeur hear with a disdainful smile,
The short and simple annals of the poor.

The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power,
And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave,
Awaits alike the inevitable hour.
The paths of glory lead but to the grave.

So, come on, all you Colins and Hobbinols, nameless carrot-crunchers and swede bashers; you gave me these genes. Plod beside me now and tomorrow, as I plough my narrow furrow towards the horizon.

Epiblog for St Swithun's Day

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. And, of course, a rainy one, leading up to St Swithun’s Day, which is today. For the benefit of overseas readers, who may not be familiar with the cult of St Swithun, there is a tradition here in Olde Englande that whatever the weather is like on St Swithun’s day, it will remain in that vein for the next forty days. So, in a miserable pissing wet summer like this one, I’d be inclined to go online and order a snorkel and some flippers. The “real” St. Swithun was an Anglo-Saxon Bishop of Winchester, back in the days when Kings all had names like “Aethelbarg” and “Eggbound the Unready”, and is credited with several miracles after his death, so much so that his body had been dug up from its original grave, where he had requested when he died, on 2 July 862AD, that he was not to be buried within the church, but outside in a “vile and unworthy place”, and moved to a new tomb inside Winchester Cathedral, in the year 971, even before the Norman Conquest. In an early example of Old English Franchise Marketing, the powers-that-be decided to spread the joy by detaching his head, which went to Canterbury, and an arm, which went to Peterborough, to be venerated as relics in each case.

St Swithun's day if thou dost rain
For forty days it will remain
St Swithun's day if thou be fair
For forty days 'twill rain nae mair

Actually, having said that, St Swithun’s day so far has dawned both fine and fair, though it dulled over just as I started to type this week’s blog. Perhaps God is even now searching his cupboards for thunderbolts. Kitty, replete with several breakfasts, is curled up asleep in the sun, in Zak’s armchair in the conservatory; Zak himself is probably out with Grandad somewhere, lauping up Saddleworth Fell, with Freddie huffing and puffing along in the rear. We’ve not seen much of them since they joyfully greeted Granny on her return from Swithun-Land, aka Hampshire, on Thursday. To say they were pleased to see her is an understatement – Freddie did his usual “circus dog” act, tottering around on his hind legs and jumping up, all he needed was a cake-frill round his middle to complete the picture, and even Zak, not usually the most vocal of dogs, was jumping around and going “woof!” in a dark, baritone voice that surprised both us, and him.

Of the unofficial animals there hasn’t been much sign, and to be honest, since I am trying to conserve/build my energy levels and catch up on sleep in anticipation of setting off on holiday in a couple of weeks or so, I haven’t been inclined to sit up all night badger-watching. I did note though, that this week the High Court has (sadly and idiotically) thrown out the legal challenge by The Badger Trust to stop The Blight from culling badgers in a futile attempt to halt bovine TB. I sometimes think DEFRA will not be happy until every square inch of England’s green and pleasant land is concreted over, hosed down, and disinfected, and turned into a giant cow factory so that Tescos and their like can wallow in the profits from cut price milk while forcing small farmers out of business. This not only makes me want to carry on feeding Brenda, it makes me want to adopt her as my legal child.

The rest of the garden is teeming with squirrels and birds, all of which are ignored by Kitty as she slumbers on, regardless. She even slept through Spidey, next door’s cat, removing a catnip plant I’d planted out in a tub of herbs alongside the garage, and attempting to make off with it. I’ve re-planted it this morning (the herb, not the cat) and I think I probably need to move the tub to a more cat-proof location!

The garden transformation project continues apace; now that Debbie has almost finished teaching (her last class is on July 19th) she has been trying to spend more time out there. As well as the new little pond, we’ve planted out several alpines and other small plants in between the rocks which she placed in a circle (called, tentatively, Russ-Henge) around Russell’s mosaic, to mark Baggis Day last week. The project has gained impetus, also, because the Humax TV digital box (a pile of crap, don’t ever buy one) has now given up showing CBS Reality Channel, thus depriving her of her daily diet of shows about forensic science, CSI, Unsolved Mysteries, True Crime and Missing Persons. (If Debbie ever got around to advertising for a partner in lonely hearts, she’d be much more likely to put “GSR” than “GSOH” as a requirement.) The scenario reminds me more and more of that cartoon were the husband arrives home after work and says to his wife “The house looks very clean, darling, was the internet down today?”

Anyway, having checked out all of the obvious causes of loss of signal (fat pigeon sitting on the arm of the satellite dish) and waggling all the leads, then turning it off then on again at the wall, we have now reached the limits of my “fix-it” knowledge with the Humax box, the next step is to go hunting for the manual and try and read it. What’s the similarity between the Humax Manual and the Tower of Babel? God alone knows where it is, and it’s in 27 different languages.

Considering this week contained a Friday 13th, I approached it with some trepidation, but the actual day itself proved largely free of disasters and tragedies. Except we ran out of matches. It seems odd that, in the 21st century, something so primitive as fire should still play a part in our lives, but – foolishly – on Saturday morning, I let the stove go completely out overnight and had no means of re-lighting it. Idiot. That meant I had no means either of lighting the cooker, therefore no cup of coffee, til the Sainsbury’s man arrived to deliver the grocery order at 11AM. I even tried Debbie’s boy scout Ray Mears steel striker thingum, but even in a house as scruffy as ours, I couldn’t find any dried moss in the kitchen (there’s probably every other sort, though) to use for kindling.

Saturday, as a day, turned out like one of those dreams where you have to do something important, but every time you try and do it, something else trivial happens to stop you, in this case feeding the cat, putting away the shopping, and lighting the fire, to name but three. By the time I had finished, I was in such a waggledance that I wouldn’t have been surprised to find I’d lit the shopping, fed the fire, and put away the cat. The “something important” was sorting out Debbie’s pay claims for the courses she’s been teaching, and trying to work out her holiday pay, which is calculated by a labyrinthine mechanism that makes the Duckworth-Lewis method look like a primary-school maths lesson. You calculate the total number of hours, multiply that by 19.49 and then multiply the result of that calculation by 21.43%. Or something. Then you take away the number you first thought of, and the answer’s a lemming.

St Swithun’s day is, of course, a significant anniversary for me, in that it is precisely two years to the day since the two burly ambulance men picked me up and carted me off in their ice cream van with the pretty blue lights, en route to Huddersfield Royal Infirmary, and all which that entailed. Two years! Where have they gone? Perhaps even more scary, it is a whole year now, since we called in at Mossburn Farm on our way up to Ayr to get the kayak rack fixed, the first significant long trip for me in the camper since I have been in the wheelchair, and the first time I had seen the mountains of Arran (albeit in the distance, from Dunure on the Heads of Ayr) since I fell ill. A year has gone since that day when we all sat around Juanita’s table, carousing and drinking wine, while the dogs snoozed under our feet. Tiggy and Oliver are no longer with us, though I like to think they still run free, in the constellation of Sirius, which is where doggy heaven is located, as eny fule kno.

So, of course, this has been a bittersweet week for me, and once again one which has found me, for the second week running, pondering on what I have gained (if anything) and what I have lost (much), and also where I’m going, where we’re all going. I’m not going to list out all the things I used to do that I can no longer do. Some of them, I hope to eventually regain. In some ways, almost dying has had a good effect – on my writing, for instance. So much so, that Debbie frequently says I should do it more often.

The country, as I wrote last week (and probably the week before) is another week deeper into the mire. The scary thing now is that there seems to be a complete consensus amongst the political classes that the expectation that things will continue to improve for the majority of ordinary people is a thing of the past, and we’re ultimately heading back to squatting round bonfires and guarding our own potato crops from marauding bands of brigands. That is the logical conclusion of a process which begins with “government by abdication of responsibility”, which is what we are currently being forced to endure. Everything bad is “not their fault” say the politicians, and they are powerless to prevent the worst excesses of its impact. Not that they ever tried very hard, or cared.

Reading again, this week, A. N. Wilson’s biography of Hilaire Belloc, I have been struck, time and time again, by the parallels between the state of England now and in the run up to the 1906 general election that produced the “Liberal landslide”. [This was for the Liberal Party, back in the days when the liberals were good guys and had some principles, unlike the lickspittles, poodles and bag-carriers that make up the present party.] Belloc said, in one of his campaign speeches for he South Salford constituency:

“England is at a turning point. Society is trembling with a desire to produce a new and better England. But it cannot be done without raising great sums of money and without putting burdens on the rich … You are either going to push the great weight of social reform and democracy over the edge and send it down on the other side, or you are going to allow it to slip back on yourselves and crush you!”

Belloc later became disillusioned with the horse-trading and political fudge and compromise over (guess what) reform of the House of Lords, and eventually ended up not standing again, partly out of disgust that the “opposition” was nothing of the sort. (Although his ideas of how the Lords should have been reformed were equally as wacky as the status quo, and he did, in his later years, become a fan of Mussolini, as indeed was Miss Jean Brodie!)

“Balfour and Asquith have come to an understanding which the country in general may not be told, but which is now fairly generally known. By this understanding all real attack on the House of Lords will be prevented.”

Plus ca change.

There comes a time when you have to turn and face your demons, though, and do something about it, a time to move on, to step forward, to do what you can do; possibly, we may be going to Scotland, and one day, we might have another dog. If we went to Scotland, with another dog, we wouldn’t ever forget Tiggy, or all that she meant to us, of course. Turn again, Whittington; turn, turn turn. There is a time for every season under heaven. A time to cry, and a time to refrain from mourning. A time to reap, and (importantly) a time to sow.

That is why I bought some bluebell seeds as an act of faith, this week. It’s sort of a miniature version of St Swithun or one of these other medieval bishops starting to build a cathedral. Bluebells flourish in the spring, of course, so by buying them now, when we’re almost at the fag-end of summer, to be followed no doubt by a dismal dank autumn and a dark cold winter of discontent, I’m showing my faith that they will come up, that there will be a spring. If you like, that they will come up, that there will still be a garden for them to come up in, and someone will enjoy them, even if I myself am not around to see it, for whatever reason.

An act of faith. At the end of it, that’s all that you can do. The faith of Freddie, waiting at the door for Granny’s return. The faith of the despairing, who nevertheless say “it’ll be alright”, even though it patently won’t. The faith of the English, who “mustn’t grumble” about the weather. The faith that the Blight may be lifted and dispersed. The faith that there might just, somehow, be some sort of hidden sense behind the jumble and the muddle. Or as W H Auden said in “September 1939”, on the eve of war:

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

Amen to that. Show an affirming flame. Now where did I put those matches?

Epiblog for Baggis Day

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. Things on the computer front have more or less returned to normal, with some glowing exceptions. Actually, “glaring” is probably more accurate a description. I still haven’t managed to connect up my mobile phone to my laptop, and I have discovered that Adobe Pagemaker 7 no longer works with Windows 7 (or at least the program works, it just won’t let you create a postscript file at the end of it, which is probably even more annoying.) I am also still discovering missing cookies and passwords, and Smart PDF creator doesn’t seem to be working properly. Apart from that, everything seems to be working again. Apart from the Iceberg, the Titanic wasn’t a bad ship, really. Still, in a world where 800 million people don’t even have fresh water, I don’t know what I’m complaining about, really.

We, of course, have had fresh water a-plenty this week. So much so that I was busy looking online to see if I could source some gopher-wood. An ark three hundred by fifty by thirty cubits would require a fair bit of gopher-wood, I am guessing. I have no idea what gopher wood even is. It’s a good job Noah took two gophers in the ark, otherwise we wouldn’t have any left today, when we really need it. I could quote Genesis 6: 13-22 at this point, but I do occasionally get emails from people who say they prefer the Epiblogs when there is more poetry and less Bible-bashing, so I might just leave it at the reference and move on to Stanley Holloway instead:

One day Sam were filling a knot hole
With putty, when in through the door,
Came an old man fair reeked i'whiskers
An th'old man said good morning I'm Noah.

Sam asked Noah what were his business
And t'old chap went on to remark,
That not liking the look of the weather
He was thinking of building an ark.

Not exactly T S Eliot, but much more appropriate to this last week than “The Dry Salvages” [actually, the Dry Salvages themselves are pretty wet, since they are rocks off the coast of Massachussetts.]

It rained and it rained for a fortnight
It flooded the whole countryside,
It rained and it still kept on raining
'Til th'Irwell were fifty miles wide.

The houses were soon under water
And folks to the roof had to climb,
They said t'was the rottenest summer
As Bury had had for some time.

The rain showed no sign of abating
And water rose hour by hour,
'Til th'only dry land were at Blackpool
and that were on top of the tower.

Which just about sums up the past week. On Friday, the day when we had a month’s worth of rain in 24 hours, there was actually standing water in our garden, the first time I have ever seen that particular phenomenon. We’re half way up the side of the Holme Valley. At the front of the house, the road is higher than the house, and there was already a river of water running from Huddersfield towards Netherton by mid-morning. But the standing water was really startling. It was actually raining faster than the water could drain away out of the garden and down the slope. And not just for a few minutes, either; it went on for hour after hour, and I’ve never seen anything like it, for rain.

It’s gone way beyond what my Uncle Ron used to call “freak weather”, it’s now so weird it’s almost boring, so I’ll shut up about it. Everywhere’s flooded, it’s pissing down all the time, and everything, including Summer, is cancelled. The climate is screwed. Which is a shame, because we’re supposed to be setting off in the camper van, soon.

The animals don’t like it either. Zak and Freddie have been bored shitless by sitting watching the rain fall hour after hour, in the vain hope that it will break for long enough for a quick walkies. Freddie in particular hates being turfed out into the garden to do his “necessaries” and scuttles off with bad grace, grumbling and muttering as he goes. Kitty (who was once memorably mistaken for Russell by Debbie and told in no uncertain terms to get out of that ***** tree, when she was still "Colin's cat") just stays by the fire and sits it out until she can’t wait any longer, then makes a mad dash through the cat flap. She came back the other day absolutely soaking wet with a glistening raindrop on the end of every hair, and proceeded to have an elaborate wash which lasted for hours in order to dry herself! That’s cat logic for you – only a woman would understand it. Actually, my mother used to dry Ginger, our old cat at home, with kitchen-roll, when he came in out of the rain. Not that he was spoilt or anything.

Freda and Brenda must be on their holidays, I think, but meanwhile, the birds and the squirrels have been competing for the stale bread and peanuts. The squirrels have now got the lid off the bird-feeder and emptied it, on more than one occasion. The other day, Debbie was sitting out on the decking and I heard her raise her voice, but couldn’t catch what she said, so I trundled to the door and I asked her what she wanted. She replied that she had been talking not to me, but to a squirrel that was attempting to steal some peanuts. Righty-ho, says I, in the sort of tone of voice that implies I am smiling nervously while simultaneously backing away, and am going to find the timetable and look up the trains to Colney Hatch. At which she became indignant:

“I can talk to squirrels, can’t I?” she said, in a querulous tone of voice.
“Of course you can,” I replied, “it’s when they start talking to you that you need to worry!”
“Well, I’d get more bloody sense out of them than I do out of you!” Ooof! Crosscourt winner, game set and match, Oh I say.

Our gay badinage was interrupted by a knock at the door, and it turned out to be the young relief postman. His colleague (whom he was relieving) had told him that it was OK to just open the porch door and put anything too large for the letterbox inside the porch, but neither of them had reckoned with the way in which the door had swollen grossly in the rain. He thought the door was actually locked, which is why he’d knocked on it. Between us, me on the inside pulling, him on the outside shouldering it, we got it open and I thanked him. He was sorry for disturbing me but “you can’t go round kicking people’s doors in!” Which is very true of course. If he wanted to do that, he should have joined the Police and not Royal Mail. Mind you, the way The Blight is going, their next wacky idea will probably be to amalgamate the Police and Royal Mail, so the postman kicks your door in, hits you over the head with a truncheon, then gets you to sign for a parcel.

The parcel in question turned out to be quite mysterious. It contained a wonderful pair of hand knitted turquoise and white “tadpole” socks, obviously from Maisie, since her handwriting was on the outside of the jiffy-bag, but there was no covering letter – instead, there was a compliment slip from her estate agents. Weird. I could only speculate whether, somewhere, there was an equally puzzled estate agent poring over a letter that said “Dear Ruddicles, hope you like the tadpoles!”

I haven’t really mugged up on the Liturgical Year this week, because this Sunday is Baggis Day. The actual anniversary of the death of Russell, the Baggis Cat, as he was known, for reasons lost in the mists of time and the various crinkly bits of Debbie’s brain she no longer uses, is actually tomorrow, the 9th July. Seven years ago tomorrow we were standing at the side of Kilbrannan Sound on the Isle of Arran, listening to a mobile phone call from Deb’s Mum telling us that the vets had had to let him go, his time had come.

Since that day, we’ve always celebrated his life on the anniversary of the date, or failing that, on the nearest Sunday, and today is no exception. Over the years, it’s grown to encompass also remembering the others who’ve passed the same way, Nigel, and Dusty, Lucy (Deb’s Mum’s dog) and now, of course, Tiggy. This will be the first ever Baggis Day without her. The Sainsbury’s man delivered the weekly groceries yesterday and, in making conversation with him, as you do, I happened to mention that I hoped the weather kept up as we had a celebration of sorts planned on Sunday and we hoped to sit outside on the deck.

“Oh, really,” he said, “what’s the occasion?”

It briefly flashed across my mind to explain to him about Baggis Day and how it was a celebration of all the love and companionship provided by wonderful animals over the years but I wasn’t sure he’d “get” the concept, so I just mumbled something about a “family anniversary” and left it at that. Some people don’t get it, they don’t understand pet loss, or pet bereavement. I wouldn’t be without a companion animal. The best way in which I can describe it, is that if my life is the main melody, then the various pets we’ve had have always enriched the tune by providing the descant and harmony. In fact, there have been some times when I haven’t particularly felt like singing, and thy have always picked up the music and carried it on, until I’ve finally come back round and begun to join in again.

Anyway, if it ever did come to building an ark, I’d make damn sure they were on board, but I recognize that not everybody feels that way. Whether it’s right to question the depth or sincerity of another person’s grief over the loss of a pet, of course, is a moot point; to the person feeling the grief it is real, and poignant, and at the end of the day, which if us has a piece of paper that says they have been appointed the official moral arbiter of what counts as “valid” grief or not.

As I’ve said many times before, with the monotonous regularity of the rain falling throughout an English summer, I’ve come to the conclusion that what’s needed is a massive re-evaluation of our relationship with animals of all types, one that puts their needs and their welfare at a much higher premium than has hitherto been the case. If old Noah could do it with pitch and gopher-wood, think what we might achieve with modern technology and know-how (although I strongly suspect that pitch and gopher-wood are, in fact, among the main ingredients of Windows 7). And, for the avoidance of any doubt, because I feel this way about animal welfare, it doesn’t automatically follow that I am going to give up campaigning against the injustices of infant mortality in the third world, or the treatment of refugees, the homeless, or asylum-seekers. It’s not either/or. I see it as all part of the same progression. As Mahatma Gandhi said, “The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.” – Or, if you prefer, George Bernard Shaw, who said “Man’s inhumanity to man begins with man’s inhumanity to animals.”

There I go, getting on my soapbox again (makes mental note to check if the soapbox is of gopher-wood). If I care not for the animals, I am a sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. Last Thursday, I was privileged to see a grey squirrel closer than I think I have ever seen one before, as it sat on the decking, just outside the door, munching away on some peanuts left uneaten by the birds. It didn’t occur to me until afterwards that the half an hour or so I spent watching the exquisite delicacy with which it deftly handled each nut in turn and its cheerful little jaws munching away nineteen to the dozen, must have coincided almost exactly, time-wise, with Squigs’ funeral. And, for once, it wasn’t raining. Weird that.

I wouldn’t go so far as to call it a “sign” – although the medieval and 17th century Cabalists and Neo-Platonists would have had us believe that there were “correspondences”, throughout nature, and that maybe “my” squirrel was the harbinger of a perfect, archetypal squirrel, elsewhere. I was trying to find a concise example of this doctrine – perhaps backed up by a quotation from Andrew Marvell or Henry Vaughan – but I got sidetracked, as you do on the internet, and ended up reading this, on the Wikipedia article about Emmanuel Swedenborg:

Swedenborg states that there is a correspondence between, for example: thought and speech, between intention and action, between mind and body, and between God and creation. Correspondence is a causal relationship (i.e., thought is the cause of speech, intention is the cause of action).

The correspondence between spiritual and natural things extends to all objects in the physical world. Light corresponds to wisdom because wisdom enlightens the mind as light enlightens the eye. Warmth corresponds to love because love warms the mind as heat does the body. The various animals in creation correspond to the various affections in man. Ultimately, all things correspond to and symbolize qualities in God.

Which is sort of what I had in mind. The idea that everything is everything and affects everything else, and that all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well, took a step nearer scientific reality this week, with the discovery of the long-predicted Higgs Boson, and the further scientific underpinning of the idea that everything is connected and what counts is influencing the world for the better by paying it forward, and increasing the store of love and compassion, whether for an animal, a person, or whatever. If everything really is connected to everything else, then it makes assertions such as those put forward by certain Church of England Bishops, including the Bishop of Carlisle, that the bad weather and the floods are some sort of judgement on the arrogant conduct of mankind, seem slightly less wacky. When Bishop Dow says

"This is a strong and definite judgment because the world has been arrogant in going its own way," and "We are reaping the consequences of our moral degradation, as well as the environmental damage that we have caused."

He’s not really saying anything that James Lovelock hasn’t already said in Gaia. If we were more accepting and lived more in harmony with everything else, and had more respect and compassion (and I am a fine one to talk, being the founder member of the Violent Unforgiving Quakers, but hey) then perhaps the world, and all that it contains, wouldn’t be in such a bloody mess. Tomorrow, I might make a start on that ark. Or maybe not the ark itself, but the covenant of the ark (see what I did there?) A covenant to try and release a few more doves, and see if they come back with olive branches. I certainly fit the job description for Noah, just don’t make me mount Arafat.

And for the rest of today, we’ll be celebrating Baggis Day; feel free to raise a glass alongside us, to the pets of your own household, past, present and future.

If fine, outside in the garden, with tealights twinkling in the gloaming on Russell’s mosaic, if wet, inside by the fire, with incense burning and Officium on the CD player. And may he purr in lux eternam.

Epiblog for Stand Sunday

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. The weather continues to be startling. It is not unknown in the UK in June to get the odd thunderstorm. In the summers of my childhood there used to be some summer days when the heat built up enormous confections of white clouds like meringues, in a bright blue sky, until, around teatime, the air turned humid and muggy and suddenly a rip of lightning down the sky and a resounding clap of thunder would bring refreshing rain. That, however, is completely different to the Monsoon season, which is now what we seem to have to endure, until it starts to rain again, then gets colder, and snows. Great.

I have a particular downer on the thundery weather this week. Because it led ultimately to the demise of my faithful old laptop, which I had used for the last four years and on which I have written many (if not all) of the previous series of Epiblogs. Last week, when I was talking about feeling like Job, I didn’t realise that God must have been listening, and decided to pursue the analogy. But he obviously was. So a lightning strike on Thursday, during a spectacular overhead storm, spiked the electricity supply and fried the motherboard. I always feel it’s better to get some sort of reaction to something you’ve written, even annoyance – if that were the choice, I’d prefer antipathy to apathy – but this is taking things a bit too far. Being struck by lightning is probably God saying he’d rather you did RomComs or Bodice-Rippers than question Him or the Bible; I confidently expect next week’s Epiblog to contain boils, locusts and frogs, the way things have been going lately.

So, of necessity, this might turn out to be a slightly shorter posting than normal (cheers were heard resounding through the realm) as there is much to do, today, in setting up the new machine which I was inevitably forced to buy. Colin the computer man is coming back tomorrow to set up the internet and everything, but meanwhile there’s software to locate and re-install, printers, peripherals and drivers to sort out, and it is all utterly tedious.

And of course, as old Shakespoke tells us, sorrows come not as single spies, but in battalions, which is probably why I got a 19-page medical assessment form to fill in this week. I have duly despatched it back whence it came, complete with damfool questions about whether or not I am pregnant. It contains the same questions and the same information – almost exactly – as the form which another part of the DWP sent me two weeks ago, and which I also have to fill in. Again. Nothing much has changed since the last time I did these forms – I’m a bit deader, a bit more decrepit. I am not now, nor was I ever, a prisoner of the Japanese. I can understand why Dorothy Parker, the doyenne of the Algonquin, used to preface each new, unwelcome development in her life with “what fresh hell is this?”

The animals, bless them, have been blissfully oblivious of all this turmoil. Kitty seems to have returned to her normal self, insofar as there is anything normal about her. Zak and Freddie have been going out with Grandad and dodging the showers, by and large, apart from one spectacular error of judgement yesterday when they thought they were taking advantage of a fine spell and, ten minutes later, the sky had turned as black as Doomsday and hailstones the size of Brussels sprouts were bouncing off the decking. Fortunately, it turned out, when they returned, they’d managed to get under some trees and shelter.

As Shakespeare says in Richard II, which I happened to catch the broadcast of, on the BBC:

“Small showers last long, but sudden storms are short”

We’ve still got the stove lit, at least in the evenings, and Kitty seems particularly grateful for this. As, indeed, we are. I even ended up lighting the fire the day that the weather forecaster on Look North had said was going to be the warmest day of the year so far – mainly because it wasn’t, it was cold, grey and rainy. Back to the weather-map

In between the showers, we’ve been getting on with the garden, and I’ve been re-potting herbs and watching seedlings come up under the propagator – including the tomatoes. On Gardener’s Question Time it said that the best thing for tomatoes is sheep-poo, squashed into a Hessian sack and then immersed in water. Chacun a son gout; I prefer salad cream on mine.

The birds and squirrels have all been on parade as normal, but Brenda and Freda are more conspicuous by their absence, these days. Although we did hear what we thought was Brenda clattering about on the decking very late the other night, but by the time I could get over to the window and check, there was nothing to be seen. The bird feeder had two mischievous squirrels on it the other day, clinging on like Quasimodo on the clappers of Notre Dame, as the wire container was set swinging to and fro.

Debbie is finally coming to the end of a gruelling year of teaching, although one of her classes continues until July 19th, and, as previously reported, she ends the academic year with the future uncertain, with offers of hours and courses being made, then withdrawn, then made again, and all the while the deadlines are passing for other jobs which she could have applied for. I have been trying to convince her to apply for them anyway, because at the end of the day, having two job offers on the table and having to decide between one of them, is a much better prospect than having no job offers at all. Because I don’t know who reads this (I suspect, nobody) I won’t prejudice her future career by paraphrasing my comments on the whole situation. I may have said something along the lines of I considered it to be slightly barmy, although I actually did it in the original Anglo-Saxon.

It is a strange idea, feeling nostalgic about losing an old friend such as the laptop, but it did feel like that, like losing a companion that had been with me all the way though my stay in hospital, a machine which contained scans of photos going back to 2005, and which may now have vanished into the ether forever, depending whether Colin has been able to salvage any data from the hard disk. Its last sentient act as a laptop was to file my first ever online VAT return, and I have to be grateful to it for that, if nothing else. If it had gone bang before doing that, I’d have had to do the whole shebang over again. As it is, I’ve still lost all the password and login details, but fortunately I have got until the end of September to sort out that particular conundrum.

Of course, it would seem from a casual reading of the above, that it’s been pretty much business as usual, and that even the disasters are business as usual, par for the course with us, but nevertheless the underlying reality is that summer is passing, time is passing. Today it is twenty-two years – twenty-two years! – since I launched the reprint of Arthur Mee’s Derbyshire up at the tramway museum at Crich, an anniversary which, together with the loss of my favourite laptop, in itself the latest in a long succession of losses, some more bitter than others, but each taking a small (or large) part of me with them, has meant I have spent a lot of time this week pondering on change, and the nature of change, and the possibilities of renewal.

That Sunday at Crich Tramway Museum, twenty-two years ago, I was a young and sprightly lad of some thirty-five summers, and I got to meet, and present a book to, no less a personage than the Lord Lieutenant of Derbyshire (who was, at the time, Colonel Sir Peter Hilton , KCVO, MC, DL, JP). Because it was what they call “Stand Sunday” at Crich Stand, the Lord Lieutenant was wearing his full dress uniform, including the hat with plumed feathers and the sword! He’d obviously come straight on from the remembrance service they have there every year on the Sunday nearest to 1st July, at the memorial to the Sherwood Foresters, the local regiment, beside the Tower on top of Crich Hill. Either way, it made a splendidly Ruritanian tableau. I only wish I had been wearing something equally flamboyant, perhaps a suit of Lincoln Green with red tights, but the truth is much more prosaic: a two-piece charcoal-grey lounge suit. He asked me to write in the book for him, to sign it, and it didn’t seem to faze him in any way that I wasn’t actually Arthur Mee, so in his library at Idridgehay, there remains to this day, probably, the only Arthur Mee King’s England volume signed by the publisher! At least I’d like to hope so.

Colonel Hilton, too, is gone, of course, he died in 1995. Looking him up on the internet (which in itself would have been impossible twenty-two years ago) I find that he served in the Royal Horse Artillery and was badly wounded in the Normandy campaign in 1944. The artillery is the same type of unit that my Great-Uncle Harry Fenwick joined in 1915, and with which he was serving when he was gassed at Ypres in 1917. I don’t know why the Sherwood Foresters’ Memorial in particular is the site of a service on this particular day of the year, unless it is something to do with the anniversary of the first day of the Battle of the Somme, July 1st 1916, when the allies incurred 60,000 casualties in a single day. Perhaps some East Midlands historian knows the answer.

Of course, both Harry Fenwick’s generation and Colonel Hilton’s had to endure a much greater degree of change in their lives, both of them; the one being decimated in the first ever truly mechanised world war, and the other emerging narrowly victorious in a crippling, epic struggle against fascism. My generation (starting to sound like Pete Townsend here) hasn’t lived through a World War, at least, though it was a damn close-run thing on a couple of occasions. We’ve had little wars, instead. Little wars, with big consequences. Consequences we may not have even guessed at, up to now.

In fact, the list of people who’ve exited my life in one way or another since that summer day back in 1990 is a very long and depressing one. Especially if you include the animals as well, by counting them as people, which I do. I won’t list them all here, because it wouldn’t be very entertaining, and would probably depress me even more; but I will, and do, remember them all. And usually, when I do, it’s with the same mix of emotions that Yeats writes about in Vacillation:

Things said or done long years ago,
Or things I did not do or say
But thought that I might say or do,
Weigh me down, and not a day
But something is recalled,
My conscience or my vanity appalled.

Or, in the same vein, T S Eliot in Little Gidding:

And last, the rending pain of re-enactment
Of all that you have done, and been; the shame
Of motives late revealed, and the awareness
Of things ill done and done to others' harm
Which once you took for exercise of virtue.
Then fools' approval stings, and honour stains.
From wrong to wrong the exasperated spirit
Proceeds, unless restored by that refining fire
Where you must move in measure, like a dancer

On the plus side, new people have also entered my life in those twenty two years, of course. And there are some people, some shining beacons in human form, who were with me then and who’ve managed to still be here with me, now, all those years later, and I’m very lucky to have them as friends. In fact, they more or less exactly coincide with the people who came to see me or were concerned about me when I was in hospital, whereas the people who I’d thought of as my particular friends or colleagues turned out to be anything but. Life can be odd that way, sometimes.

Anyway, it’s led to me wondering, in a wider sense, and evaluating, whether I am better or worse off now than I was back then. There are pluses and minuses, gains and losses. Of course the major disadvantage, the downer, is that I now know what’s wrong with me and I’m going to be stuck in this wheelchair. In some other ways, my life is much freer, in that I have time to work on creative projects, time I didn’t have before – though this isn’t sustainable. I can point to a line on a graph which leads to a time at some point in the medium term future where I might have to sell a house, or something. Also of course, it isn’t sustainable long-term because even if I was as rich as Croesus, there’s nothing to stop the Almighty whipping the carpet out from under my feet – or indeed zapping me with a lightning bolt.

And are we better off, as a whole, as a people? The unspoken assumption behind both Wars was that things would get better as a result; Harry Fenwick’s comrades came back to “a land fit for heroes”, although he didn’t. My father’s war, Colonel Hilton’s war, Uncle George’s war, was to stop the Nazis in their tracks, and this time around the returning soldiers made damn sure, in the 1945 general election, that things would get better, and put into train the events which led to the Welfare State, which is now under attack by the current Blight, in a way in which it hasn’t ever been threatened before.

We may well be materially better off – at least we no longer have an outside loo – but in many ways England, Britain, call it what you will, is deteriorating rapidly, and many of the things, many of the assumptions which we always tended to rely on, are now once more up for grabs, as the Blight attempts to reverse every advance of the last 75 years, while simultaneously maintaining the fiction that this is some sort of unified national effort. When in fact, there are once again two nations; a small, elite, privileged cadre that holds on to its wealth and advantage with a grim death-rigor grip, and the rest of us, who are having to scrimp and save and scrub along to keep the banking system in the luxurious usury to which it has become accustomed. We don’t have a Government any more; we have a Blight.

And, of course, as with the Olympics, anyone who attempts to raise any questions about this, anyone who has the temerity to ask why we are spending all of this money, why did we even bother, is silenced and derided by the power of the State. The first-ever Olympic “asbo” was handed down to one Simon Moore, who has been protesting about events such as the destruction of Leyton Marsh in East London for a temporary basketball training facility, and the ethics and human rights records of corporate sponsors for the games.

The statement issued on 18 June begins:

This morning at Westminster Magistrates Court, District Judge Purdy delivered his judgement on the case of the ASBO sought by the 'Commissioner of police for the metropolis' to prohibit various activities with the stated reason being the prevention of 'conduct leading to the disruption of the Olympic Games events 2012'.

Meanwhile, the Department for Work and Pensions is also doing its bit for conformity. Karen Sherlock was diabetic. Her symptoms included chronic kidney failure, partial blindness, a heart condition, and unpredictable bouts of severe vomiting. But the DWP told her to get back to work. Karen, like many other disabled people, was deemed ineligible for any kind of Employment and Support Allowance. She recently died of heart failure. As Sue Marsh wrote of her in The New Statesman

Karen faced all of this as she battled just to survive. Endless pressure, the judgement of society, the fear of destitution, the exhaustion of constant assessments and endless forms

Theresa May, a key member of the Blight’s ruling Junta, wants to revise the test of UK citizenship, apparently, to include the requirement to recite bits of Shakespeare by heart. I have no idea whether the average English Defence League yobbo can recite Shakespeare, or whether Mrs May has chosen her texts yet, but I could recommend Richard II, specifically the end of John of Gaunt’s dying speech:

This land of such dear souls, this dear dear land,
Dear for her reputation through the world,
Is now leased out, I die pronouncing it,
Like to a tenement or pelting farm:
England, bound in with the triumphant sea
Whose rocky shore beats back the envious siege
Of watery Neptune, is now bound in with shame,
With inky blots and rotten parchment bonds:
That England, that was wont to conquer others,
Hath made a shameful conquest of itself.

Or, as Wordsworth put it:

Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour:
England hath need of thee: she is a fen
Of stagnant waters: altar, sword, and pen,
Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower,
Have forfeited their ancient English dower
Of inward happiness.

I suppose we must be thankful for small mercies; at least Wordsworth never got around to writing the thing that The Prelude was supposed to be the prelude to. But he had a point. This isn’t meant to be a political blog; I already have one of those – but I find increasingly that the political and the spiritual are becoming intertwined in my own thought, and that spirituality has a place in ensuring that we can believe in life before death, as well as life after it. I don’t have any ready-made answers to The Blight. The fact is that The Blight has access to publicity channels undreamed of by any one individual, and massive budgets all paid for by the taxes they levy on us. Even those politicians who are supposed to be in opposition to The Blight, to call it to account, are useless, precisely because their end in itself is merely to be the next Blight, rather than to make life better for those who put them there. That’s why they are tinkering with crude populist xenophobic propaganda. They would do better to remember why people died in two world wars, and do everything they can to reverse the unprecedented attacks on those least able to defend themselves.

I never thought I’d live in a country where progress goes into reverse. I never thought I’d live in a country where protestors are “pre-emptively” arrested on a pretext. I never thought I’d live in a country where the authorities hound the weakest to death.

And it’s not just me who thinks this. It appears that The Archbishop of Canterbury seems to be in agreement with me. Maybe when he finally retires, I’ll send him an invitation to join with me in founding the Violent Unforgiving Quakers. Woe unto the bloody City of Westminster!