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!
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