Epiblog for St Jerome's Day

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley, watching the rain fall. God obviously pulled out his bathplug and flushed his loo simultaneously this week, because the entire contents of heaven’s water-tank in the attic crashed down on the West Riding of Yorkshire over the course of three days. “The rain, it raineth every day”, as the bard put it in “Twelfth Night”.

Fortunately, being abut 200 feet up on the side of a 45 degree valley slope, we are not prone to flooding. We get the slightly more startling, but less damaging phenomenon of rivers forming across the garden, as the water drains down into the River Holme. Apparently, otters (of all things) have been spotted frolicking in its waters, and if this is true, I bet they had some gala days this week. Elsewhere, of course, it was the usual misery. A narrow-boat sank at its moorings on the Yorkshire Ouse, because the waters rose too far, too fast, and no-one was there to slacken off its mooring rope. Desperately sad, as I like narrow-boats, and canals, although not as much as Deb, who often says she’d like to live on one. Perhaps she’s changed her mind after seeing that on the news. Whatever other perils might beset our house, weather wise, it is unlikely to sink with all hands to the bottom of a canal. Touch wood.

The weather has brought out the predictable political name-calling on all sides, with cuts to council budgets being cited as a (probably correctly attributed) cause of lack of flood defences. Several people have suggested that there should be a “national flood defence fund” into which we all pay. I have news for these people; there is, already - it’s called Income Tax, it’s just that The Blight chooses to spend it on firing missiles at Libya and giving tax cuts to the insanely rich, instead.

Something which I find particularly irksome whenever I have to do a VAT return. This week I finally signed off the 2011 year-end accounts, a tragedy as usual, and also had to grapple with the online VAT-return submission page of the Inland Revenue, hampered by the fact that the ID code and password had died at the precise instant when the motherboard of my previous laptop was fried by the lightning surge. My resentment at having to do this inherently boring and meaningless crap is invariably heightened by the knowledge, as I said in last week’s blog, that big companies, who can afford to pay, are actually being let off paying left, right and centre, simply because HMRCE can’t be arsed to take them to court.

While the rain has been busy turning the conservatory windows into a car-wash, complete with the attendant noise, Matilda’s introduction to the outside world, in the form of the garden, has been necessarily delayed somewhat, but yesterday, with the advent of a brighter, clearer day, she did, finally, take her first tentative steps out onto the decking, outside the conservatory door, accompanied by Deb. Ears back, and belly close to the ground, she slunk along, and crept warily round the corner, ready to skedaddle back to safety at the slightest threat. And so did the cat. Eventually, they both tired of it and came back inside, where it was warmer. Debbie’s efforts to show Matilda the cat flap, by leaving her outside on the decking while she nipped back in and round to the inside of the cat flap to call her through it, were undermined somewhat by the fact that whenever Debbie nipped back in through the door, Matilda did likewise, and despite her substantial bulk, she can run faster than Debbie, having twice as many legs and less wind resistance. Somehow, I get the feeling that teaching Matilda to use a cat flap is going to be a long, tedious exercise. I get the feeling that teaching Debbie to use it will also be.

Recently, she’s taken to lying on the rug in front of the stove in the evening, her extensive undercarriage basking in the heat, eyes blissfully shut and front paws drawn up under her chin. (No, this bit really is about the cat).

Matilda’s trepidation doesn’t extend to nocturnal rambling, however; she’s taken to exploring more and more at night, now we’ve given her the run of the house, so much so that she woke me up this morning, wandering round yowling at the top of her porky little voice for no reason. Unfortunately, although it was technically “this morning”, it was actually 4.45AM this morning. I came through when I got up properly (much later) fully expecting to find a present of a deceased rodent, which is what I thought, at the time, would be the most likely cause of such caterwauling, but there was no victim stretched out on the rug, so God alone knows what she was doing. Unless, of course, we haven’t found it yet, and will nose it out behind the arras, in days and weeks to come.

All in all, she is a strange little being, totally different to how the vets described her, and there’s a long, long trail a-winding before she ever comes up to Kitty’s standard, if ever. But then perhaps I’m being too harsh. At one point, I probably thought that Kitty would never come up to Russell’s standard, but the truth is, actually, they’re all different, all individuals. And at least we saved her from the needle (assuming the vets were even telling the truth about that bit, which, in my state of post-Kitty emotional trauma, I never thought to question).

Deb’s working week has settled into a bit of a groove, now, though I still worry about the miles she is doing, servicing eight different venues, especially this week, with roads being closed all over the county and cars being abandoned in standing water. Because she likes to keep things topical, to gain her students’ interest, she often bases literacy lessons on things that have been in the news, and she chose to do one about the scandal over the intimate photos of the Duchess of Cambridge, which worked very well, and provoked a lively lesson, so much so that her line manager, who happened to be sitting in, asked if she could borrow the presentation to use the same material in another class that she taught, elsewhere. Debbie naturally agreed, and emailed the file over that same evening.

A couple of days later, Deb received an email back from her manager, Kate, thanking her, and telling her that she’d used the presentation, and it had been a great success. In fact, the class were more than usually attentive, especially at the start of the lesson, when Kate put the opening slide up on the whiteboard for all to see, and found that Debbie had entitled it, in large letters, “Kate topless photos”. (Debbie replied, saying that she hoped the class hadn’t been too disappointed).

As part of the ceremonial re-opening of the old cat flap, yesterday, I had to go through, discomboomerate, and generally sift and sort the last three archive boxes that came out of the old camper, last weekend. More of my mum and dad’s stuff, this time, though nothing particularly special, or drastic. Nothing, that was, until I opened an envelope and found a copy of my mum’s death certificate, and the bill for her funeral (£490, in 1986, which I guess was about par for the course). I’d seen it before, of course, at the time; I was actually there at the real event itself, which was many times worse than suddenly being jolted back there by opening a manila envelope in a box of archives, but nevertheless it did set me back on my metaphorical heels, somewhat, to come on it so unexpectedly. I’ve also found some delightful, joyful things as well, things of great interest. The difference is, I suppose, that the documents from (say) 1886, are a lot more remote and a lot less raw than those from 1986, and I was not present for the former, although no doubt they were just as momentous and emotional for these who were. As I said last week, time sifts all our trials, terrors and turmoils to stacks of paper. Then the paper itself crumbles and goes. What will survive of us, is love, as Pa Larkin said. Perfick.

I am glad that I have come to the end of sorting out these boxes of archives from the old camper. I feel that in some ways, the stacks of old paper have been drawing the very strength and energy out of me, but you can’t keep everything for ever. Or anything, for that matter, as time has taught me, on several occasions.

Talking of archives, today is St Jerome’s Day, apparently, according my calendar of saints. St. Jerome, who was born Eusebius Hieronymous Sophronius, very wisely changed his name to something much more memorable and easier to get onto a cheque guarantee card, and became one of the most learned of the Fathers of the Western Church. He was born about the year 342 at Stridonius, a small town at the head of the Adriatic, near the episcopal city of Aquileia. His father, a Christian, took care that his son was well instructed at home, then sent him to Rome, where the young man's teachers were the famous pagan grammarian Donatus and Victorinus, a Christian rhetorician. Jerome's native tongue was the Illyrian dialect, which brings us back again to Twelfth Night, and the rain it raineth every day, but in Rome he became fluent in Latin and Greek, and read the literatures of those languages with great pleasure.

Maybe because of this, he has become the patron saint of librarians and archivists, although the Amercian Catholic Saints directory says that:

“He acquired many worldly ideas, made little effort to check his pleasure-loving instincts, and lost much of the piety that had been instilled in him at home. Yet in spite of the pagan and hedonistic influences around him, Jerome was baptized by Pope Liberius in 360AD.”

I actually did a painting of St Jerome, once. It was when I found out that he was patron saint of librarians, and it seemed such a wacky idea (what do librarians need protecting from, anyway – card indexes falling on them, perhaps) that I decided to do a painting of St Jerome and his pet kipper. It was going to be one of a series, but I haven’t done the rest yet. Anyway, I much prefer my idea of St Jerome to any of the more conventional depictions, so I have used it to head up this particular blog. There’s no particular reason why St Jerome should have acquired a pet kipper, except I suppose it’s the sort of thing you might end up doing if you make little effort to check your pleasure-loving instincts.

Apparently, St Jerome once said "it was my custom on Sundays to visit, with friends of my own age and tastes, the tombs of the martyrs and Apostles, going down into those subterranean galleries whose walls on both sides preserve the relics of the dead." Here he enjoyed deciphering the inscriptions. He definitely sounds like somebody not to get stuck in a lift with, and his definition of pleasure loving instincts obviously differs from most people’s, yet, on the other hand, isn’t that what I have been doing myself, this last fortnight? Not necessarily the tombs of martyrs and Apostles, but certainly descending into the subterranean galleries whose walls preserve the relics of the dead.

I’ve written before about how fascinating cemeteries can be, especially those huge Victorian necropoleis (apparently that is the correct Greek plural, though I confess I had to look it up) that can be found in the decayed centres of almost every large northern city in England. Thomas Hardy, of course, famously used to take visitors down to Stinsford churchyard, some five miles east of Dorchester, “to see the interesting inscriptions on the tombs”. In due course, Hardy joined them, or at least his heart did, having been excised prior to the cremation of the remainder of his remains, which were interred in Westminster Abbey. Clare Tomalin, in her excellent book on Hardy, “A Time-Torn Man” [which always, unfortunately, brings to mind an image of Tony Robinson] relates the legend that Hardy’s heart was kept overnight, prior to its interment, at his cottage, in a biscuit tin, and that the cat got at it. If Hardy’s cat was a nocturnal wanderer like Matilda, I can well believe it.

Anyway, I digress. Having got as far as today, and having given St Jerome his due by devoting three hours of my life that I won’t get back, yesterday, to sorting out my family’s archives, I must get down to some proper work next week, no matter how depressing or tiring the prospect seems. I hope St Jerome will be suitably propitiated.

Fascinating as archives are, and as much as this time of the year makes me want to curl up in the middle of a large bundle of warm, musty old parchment and sleep until I am awakened by the first rays of spring sunshine, I have got to buckle on my armour and get going.

I have felt out of touch with the world of prayer, out of touch with spiritual things generally, since Kitty died. Well, if truth were told, since long before that. My main problem, apart from the obvious ones about forgiveness and the proselytising nature of organised religions, is the feeling that nobody is listening. That I am standing on the edge of the cliff of faith, hallooing into the fog, and no echo returns. A sign would be nice, one in a while.

Which is why I was startled, yesterday, by a small piece of the shopping brought back by Debbie. She’d helped me get rid of a load of my old financial records from 1984-1989 by burning them on the fire (in retrospect, I should just have put them all in the green bin – anybody wanting to steal my financial identity would be in for a nasty shock) and at the end of the exercise, she demanded, as payment, that I make pizza for tea. Small problem, no pizza bases, so she trundled off to Sainsburys to get some. While she was there, I remembered something else we’d need, and phoned her on her mobile to add it to the list, which is how I came to be unpacking, amongst other items, a jar of “Capuchin Capers”!

I was struck by the title, especially as Padre Pio was a Capuchin. Messages in the shopping is a bit of an obscure, occult way of receiving instructions from the great beyond, but stranger things have happened. Anyway, I quite like “Capuchin Capers” as a title. If I don’t use it as the title of my next collection of Epiblogs, I think it should be a “Carry On, Padre” film, with Bernard Bresslaw as the bilocating Italian monk.

But even stranger than that, was this passage, which I came across in a book I’ve been re-reading this week. I won’t reveal the author till the end, but as I read it, I became more and more convinced that these words were being aimed specifically at me. And that, even though I have read the book at least two or three times before, this was the first time that I had actually seen the words, and taken them in:

“The mentality which urges you never to anticipate, never to count your chickens before they are hatched, is wrong all to blazes. Let your anticipation run riot, plan and dream of things far above your grasp, reach after them in your imagination even when reality is receding, think about them always. Plan new achievements, and set about achieving them. Failure and disappointment simply don’t matter; go ahead with your dreaming, let your enthusiasm run away with you. You were made to rise and soar, and come down to earth with a bump, and rise and soar again. If you accomplish nothing else, you’ll have kept the rot and the rust away. Let me warn you: it’s the practical people who stay rooted on the earth, who make the money. But it’s the dreamers who touch the stars.”

The author of those stirring inspirational words is not some mystic guru of the new age, but a rather grumpy old git of the old age, no less than Alfred Wainwright, author of the Lake District walking guides, writing in "A Pennine Journey", in 1938. Although he did not know it at the time of writing that book, which lay neglected by him for many years and was not published until 1986, by which time he was famous, he was of course, to make a great deal of money from his dream of a set of handwritten, hand-drawn guidebooks, something no truly sane author would have contemplated. And to his credit, old anti-social curmudgeon that he seems to have been, he gave most of his millions away to animal welfare shelters in the Lake District.

So, what am I to make of these mixed messages, if St Padre Pio has truly been tampering with the shopping and Alf Wainwright is really telling me to get my arse in gear? I have no idea, but maybe it really is time I started dreaming again. Tread softly, Matilda, for you tread on my dreams…

Epiblog for St Padre Pio's Day

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. Truly a busy one, with Deb back for her first full week of real teaching (assuming all the classes continue, she has two and a half hours more teaching this academic year than last, which is good from a financial point of view, but the prep and the marking are, I predict, going to run her ragged) and me grappling with 2011 year end accounts.

These days, I can’t even remember what I did last week, let alone in 2011, so thank God we’ve got computers, but of course I still have to tot it all up, make it balance, tie it up in a metaphorical bow, and send it down the line to the accountants. I’m not saying that small business (or indeed, any business) should be free of all legislation whatsoever, but I would like someone to take a look at the legislation that fines you a non-refundable £1000 if you don’t submit a Corporation Tax CT600 return, even if there is no tax to pay! Whatever happened to the presumption of innocence? Or failing that, HMRCE, if you’re going to do it to the likes of me, do it to bloody Vodaphone and all these other tax-avoiding bastards that UK Uncut is always complaining about.

Anyway, that’s enough about accounts. It’s bloody boring doing it, let alone writing about it afterwards. The weather has been mostly fine, apart from a few wittering showers, but there’s definitely an edge to the air now, despite the green and gold sunshine dancing through the trees down the valley slope, particularly in the evenings and first thing in the morning. “Early nip of changeful Autumn”, as Betjeman once perfectly described it. And the evenings are drawing in, of course.

The morons repairing the factory roofs down at the Mills in the valley bottom have redoubled their banging and clanging as they struggle to finish getting the cladding on before the autumnal wind and rain begins in earnest. I know that a certain amount of disruption is inevitable when building work is taking place, but this crew of miscreants never speak to each other when they can shout at the top of their voices instead, never lower anything gently to the ground, preferring to chuck it with as much force as they can muster, so it lands with a resounding clang you can hear in Wakefield, constantly leave the engines of delivery vehicles running, and have generally been a blight on what has (fortunately for them) been a summer where we were not able to sit out in the garden much anyway, because of the weather. However, they invariably managed to make a racket on the few occasions when we were able to do so, showing a fine insouciant carelessness and absolutely no consideration for the presence of nearby houses.

The same people now have a planning application in to demolish five units on the site and replace them with another five, more or less on the same ground plan. Whether these units are the same ones as they have just had re-roofed is unclear. Nothing would surprise me, but given the noise they made re-doing the roofing, it doesn’t bode well for the long term.

According to the assessment they have made as part of the planning application, there are no badgers in the woods behind our house, which will certainly come as a shock to Brenda, and is one erroneous assertion (among many others, no doubt) that will, at least, be easily refuted by sending them a picture of her scoffing peanuts on our decking, of which we have dozens, taken over several months. As if she didn’t have enough to worry about, with this idiot government wanting to kill all the badgers as well as the rest of us.

The issue is not, in this case, what should be done instead of killing the badgers, although successive governments have had plenty of time to address themselves to the issue and successive Governments have funked it, preferring to duck the issue rather than tackle it while it was still a slow-burning fuse rather than a full-blown crisis – the issue is that this particular proposed solution won’t work, will cause a lot of suffering amongst the animal population, and particularly to this noble breed of creatures who are supposed, after all, to be protected, and may even lead to shootouts in the woods of Gloucestershire (and elsewhere) by torchlight, as the lampers come up against the hunt saboteurs, which can only end in tears.

Still, what can you expect from a government that is an amalgam of Nick Clegg, who seems to think now that any ratted-on broken promise can be absolved simply by singing about it three years later on Youtube, and who will (deservedly) vanish into the oubliette for this at the next election, and double-dyed bastards like the Chief Whip, who launched a tirade of abuse (including allegedly referring to him as a “pleb”) at a policeman who wouldn’t open the security gate to Downing Street, to allow him to push his bike through:

“Open this gate, I’m the Chief Whip. I’m telling you — I’m the Chief Whip and I’m coming through these gates.”

This attitude, which reminds me of nothing so much as the doctor in “Fawlty Towers” sitting there at the breakfast table shouting “I want my sausages! I’m a doctor, and I want my sausages!” over and over again, seems to have come as a surprise to some people. I’m afraid, as Cyndi Lauper might have said, it’s a case of “I see your true colours” but not, this time, in a good way.

In other news, the world has been in flames because of offended Muslims, who have been handed a perfect opportunity for flag-burning and rioting by some idiot making a film which was calculated to have that very result, so that people with a vested interest in creating disharmony and global conflict can then in turn react against the reaction in a growing cycle of violence designed to “teach them a lesson”. I honestly don’t know which is the more stupid group; the people who put this anti-Muslim propaganda out there in the first place, the rent-a-mob goon squad who will go and burn down the embassy after Friday prayers because their Mullah (who hasn’t seen the film either) told them to, or the BBC, for doing its usual trick of picking one of the more obscure Muslim wingnuts and asking him to condemn it, which of course he will not do, because he is the self-appointed leader of the Thames Ditton branch of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade (pop. 11) but is treated by the media as if he somehow speaks for all Muslims everywhere, which then in turn leads all of the various meatheads who hear him on air to don their Union Jack underpants and start posting on the internet that we should deport and/or imprison anybody who looks a bit er… brown. It’s all very, very depressing.

Anyway, I have decided, in fact I have made what might be called an “Old Year Resolution”, since there are only 90 days or so left till Christmas, not to spend so much time correcting the misapprehensions of halfwits on message boards about Badgers and Muslims, and to use the time thus saved to get on with campaigning directly for a better outcome. Our local MP may well be a Tory placeman who probably eats badger on toast for breakfast but he’ll be getting a lot more letters in future.

On a happier note, Matilda, meanwhile, has been extending her territory, now we’ve let her through into the rest of the house from the couple of rooms she’s been kept in, up till now, so she’s spent several evenings trapping around upstairs, apparently, and woke Debbie up at 2.30am one morning, but, strangely, declined Debbie’s offer to join her in the beddies. As I said last week, early days yet, she’s still finding her paws. A few more nips of changeful autumn, and she’ll be the hot water bottle of our dreams. Meanwhile, Matilda is reminding us on her rambles that cats are essentially nocturnal. We were fortunate in that respect with Kitty, although of course we didn’t realise it at the time, because her interpretation of the word “nocturnal” was to sleep through the nocturnal bits of it.

More than once during the past week, I have felt as though I had dropped through a time-warp into an alternative universe, or at least a different decade. Knowing that Owen was due for a visit this weekend, on the Sainsbury order this week I added four cans of beer, and it occurred to me that it was the sort of thing that might appear in 18th century account books – "To paying the workmen in beer, 7 shillings and sixpence..."

Then the coal merchant rang to ask “would it be convenient to deliver this afternoon” which sort of made me think I’d slipped into the 1930s, and I should be listening to a Bakelite radio and saying “Now look here, old chap” to people.

Granny has been round a couple of times, so we have seen Freddie and Zak, albeit briefly, because of the need not to spook Matilda until she’s got well and truly used to the place, and the occasional presence of dogs. She (Granny, not Matilda) very kindly brought me a carrier bag of old jiffy bags, which is the sort of gift that goes down very well in our household, since I had several books to pack up and send off. At the bottom of the carrier bag, I found a pair of her specs that she had lost years ago, and hastened to tell her that this long-standing mystery was at last resolved. However, I spent most of a morning ringing her on her previous mobile number, not her new one, and was left, when I eventually realised, wondering who was the greater old biddy, her or me. She’s still marginally ahead in that race, not only in advancing years, but also for turning up at our house with odd footwear on, one walking boot and one ordinary shoe, because she had been distracted by her cousin phoning her while she was getting the dogs ready to go out.

Owen duly arrived on Friday at lunchtime, and by the time he left on Saturday at teatime, he had fixed the tray on my wheelchair, which had begun to droop again, by the simple expedient of packing it with washers between the screws and the under-plate, so it is now better than new; taken up, and chopped up, the rotten floorboards in the lobby and laid new ones, put up several pictures and a curtain rail, fitted and tested the ramps which he has made for me to get over the conservatory threshold and out onto the decking, chopped up or sawn up several old doors, helped us empty out the last remains of the stuff in the old camper, taken off the outside door and shaved the edge off it so it doesn’t stick in the wet, and done two trips to the tip with Debbie (and brought her back again). All I did was spectate, and even I was exhausted. If ever a man earned his 7/6d of beer, he did, and we cooked an enormous meal and caroused on Friday night. I don’t really remember much of it, except that at one point I was reciting poetry aloud, so it must have been a good evening.

The remaining boxes from the camper contained, inter alia, some more of my Gran’s stuff, and, indeed, some of Auntie Maud’s papers and belongings, which were even more interesting. I really must find time, somehow, amidst all the chaos, to scan in some of the old photos before they deteriorate, and so I can share them with the rest of the family. I sometimes think my paperwork is a complete buggers’ muddle and anyone who has the joyous task of sorting out the tangled skein of my belongings after my demise will probably just shovel it all into a skip out of sheer frustration, but Granny Fenwick’s takes some beating. You are just as likely to find (for instance) the baptismal certificate of one of her older siblings bundled up with the milk receipts from 1971. This means that there is no alternative but to open up every piece of paper and look at it, very carefully.

Auntie Maud died, largely gaga, in 1976. I used to go and do her garden for her in the summer vac when I was at College. I knew she’d been married, and it hadn’t worked out, but the story was brought back to me with renewed poignancy when I found, in the biscuit tin which Gran had dedicated to her sister’s relics, her marriage certificate, from 1916, and, only a few milk receipts away, the slip on paper on which the police had recorded the melancholy information of her estranged husband having been found dead in a cheap lodging-house in Castleford (no jokes about not being seen dead in a cheap lodging-house in Castleford, please). It was a salutary reminder that our ancestors were real people after all. In between posing in their Sunday best for these stiff, formal, fading photographs, they lived and they loved, and they lost as well. We strive and we struggle and our lives end up as mouldy pieces of paper mixed up with old brown photos and milk receipts in a biscuit tin. We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep. Which brings me back around to Big G and stuff, why we’re here at all, and why we bother.

Today is St Padre Pio’s day. At last, after what seems like weeks of obscure Turkish virgins being fed to the lions, finally a saint I know a little bit about! I have long been a fan of this scary Italian monk, with his stigmata and his ability to be in two places at the same time, so much so that I had a picture of him beside my bed in hospital, and on more than one occasion was asked by various doctors, nurses, ambulance men and the like, because of some apparent resemblance they could see, but of which I was unaware, if it was a picture of me. I usually told them it was a picture of my dad. It was simpler than explaining my apparent devotion to a deceased Italian who apparently had stigmata. Katja, the Polish nurse, of course, knew who he was all along, having come herself from a Catholic country, and often shared a knowing smile if she happened to overhear such an exchange.

St Padre Pio spent most of his life in Pietrelcina, near Bari, Italy, living a life of what might even be described as mundane holiness, celebrating mass, meeting people, counselling them, having visions; that sort of thing. Word of his presence began to spread and even his death in the late 1960s hasn’t stopped it growing into a massive shrine and centre of Catholic pilgrimage. Some eight million visitors each year throng the little village of San Giovanni Rotondo in southern Italy where the friar lived; only the shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico attracts more pilgrims. While I might have my own reservations about the medieval nature of all this sort of thing, especially the gift shops with the glow-in-the-dark statues and the like, nevertheless, it comes down, once again, to a matter of faith – something obviously happened, and you are left with a choice whether you believe Padre Pio’s visions and stigmata were a collective delusion or a manifestation into the physical world of something more ethereal.

I am seriously interested in this gift of bi-location – not only because it would be very useful for me to learn how to be in two places at once (I could be writing this in one dimension and simultaneously doing the VAT return in another) but also because it ties in so neatly with the idea of alternative realities – again, it’s a matter of faith, though – you either believe that a scary Italian monk somehow managed by years of holiness and meditation to set aside the veil of what we call reality, or you don’t. I find myself constantly regretting that I dropped physics like a red hot brick in the third year of school, and that I was such a duffer at maths, because otherwise, I might understand a bit more of the science behind m-theory and string theory. Padre Pio, when questioned about it, described the ability as “an extension of the personality”.

There’s no doubt, at least in my mind, that what we call reality is no such thing. Anyone who’s read the last chapter of John Gribbin’s Schrodinger’s Kittens and understood it (it took me four readings) can’t fail to be challenged by the conclusion he arrives at; that everything that was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, always exists and always has existed and always will, and all we are doing is moving the dim, under-lit, distorted fisheye lens of our limited consciousness in this life across a minute part of this infinite tapestry.

The ability to change the apparent nature of reality by an effort of will, which may not even be a conscious effort, may also explain the supposed visions of St Padre Pio experienced by American pilots in the second world war, when they were instructed to bomb Pietrelcini: the article in Fortean Times on Padre Pio’s life neatly summarises the story

Allied pilots based at Bari, in southern Italy, were flying sorties into Nazi-held territory during a search for a cache of weapons hidden somewhere in the area of San Giovanni. In their approach to the town, several pilots reported seeing an apparition in the sky in the form of a monk with upheld hands. They also described some sort of ‘force-field’ that prevented them flying over the target rendering them unable to drop their bombs.

According to Bernardo Rosini, general of the Aeronautica Italiana, and part of the United Air Command at the time, one after another mission returned to base reporting the same apparition. Initial mockery gave way to apprehension and, eventually, an incredulous US commanding general decided to take up a squadron under his personal command with the same result. Bombs from all the sorties obliterated the surrounding area, but not one fell on San Giovanni Rotondo. The American general, not one to be made a fool of lightly, determined after the war to go to this little town and seek out the monk blessed with special powers who was known to live there. On entering the Capuchin monastery, he saw a group of friars and immediately recognised among them Padre Pio as the one who had appeared in the sky. Immediately Pio went to greet him, put a hand on his shoulder, and is reported to have said: “So it is you, the one who wanted to do away with us all.” According to Renzo Allegri, the general knelt before him in awe and subsequently converted to Catholicism.

St Padre Pio was not without his detractors. Several people dismissed him as a fraud, claiming the stigmata which afflicted his body were self-inflicted, and at one point, the Vatican even authorised the “bugging” of his confessional to try and gather evidence of his alleged misdeeds. He was never in good health, and frequently suffered fevers and high temperatures which were in some way connected with transcendental and ecstatic states. During these episodes, he had visions, including, on one occasion, a vision of naked dancing girls sent by the Devil to tempt him. A more worldly soul would probably have kept quiet about that one, especially with people waiting in the wings to find any convenient stick with which to beat him. But of course, opprobrium and suffering were all grist to his holy mill, as he believed that the secret of holiness lay in enduring suffering.

"The life of a Christian is nothing but a perpetual struggle against self; there is no flowering of the soul to the beauty of its perfection except at the price of pain"

I often struggle, personally, with this sort of attitude, especially when I feel that organised religion tells us to endure suffering and be reconciled to a life under the yoke and the whip (but not, God help us, the Chief Whip) as an alternative to actually doing something to make life better in this world. Every time I am suffering, be it physically from the aches and pains of being in this damn wheelchair, or mental anguish at the loss of a well-loved family pet, for instance, all I wish is that it was over as soon as possible. Suffering, like accounts, is not only painful, it is also boring, although other people’s sufferings may well be worse, or more poignant. My problem is, spiritually, that even when I am contemplating how Auntie Maud must have spent the years polishing Arthur’s picture and wishing he would come back, the endless Sunday afternoons of empty regret, how sad, how terrible it must have been for her, nevertheless, still, a part of me is thinking “I wish to God I wasn’t stuck in this chair” I can’t see the point of Auntie Maud’s suffering, and I can’t see the point of mine, either. But that’s just me being selfish, I guess.

My favourite saying of St Padre Pio, though again it is one I fail dismally to live up to, is:

Pray, hope, and don’t worry. Worry is useless. God is merciful and will hear your prayer. Prayer is the oxygen of the soul.

I think that I must be suffering from oxygen starvation, if that is the case, because I haven’t attempted to pray for anything or anybody since the three days solid I spent praying for Kitty to recover, prayers which went, sadly, unanswered. Pray, hope, and don’t worry. Well, it’s all very fine and dandy for St Padre Pio, he’s had his prayers answered, he’s had the last laugh, he’s run the course of his life on earth and ended up not in a biscuit tin, but in a massive, purpose-built basilica. Meanwhile, here on earth, it’s the autumn equinox in the Holme Valley, the garden’s looking very brown and dun, and the stove needs me to put on more coal, while, outside, the evening draws on, and the summer that never was turns to September in the rain.

Epiblog for St Euphemia's Day

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. Seamlessly, the summer that never was is transiting into Autumn, by degrees. So the sun is still warm, when it shines, but its light has a mellowness that I only ever notice at this time of year, it’s the colour of Monbazilliac. Which reminds me, one day I must save up and buy another bottle of Monbazilliac, just in case any of these people who habitually send me doorknobs in the post are reading this.

So, it’s been windy, but warm; there has been some rain, but, conversely, maybe even perversely, ever since we got back from Arran, it hasn’t absolutely pissed down like it did all summer. There is so much to do in the garden, especially re-potting seedlings and herbs that I hope to nurture indoors over the winter, so as soon as I have posted this Epiblog, I will be up to my elbows in John Innes before you can say “Monty Don”.

Matilda continues to find her feet. Finding Matilda’s feet is not a difficult task, because they are enormous. In fact, if the old wives’ tale about being able to tell the eventual size of a kitten from the size of its paws is correct, Matilda should be about 12 feet high, a veritable Calico Cat lioness. I can only hope that, at the age of 9, she has probably stopped growing. Given the preponderance we have for turning every animal in our possession into a furry barrel, and given that Matilda has already progressed quite a distance down that road all on her own accord, the signs are not good.

Yesterday, she met Zak and Freddie for the first time. Zak trembled and stayed in the chair he calls his. She didn’t bother him, and he didn’t bother her. Freddie, who is getting on in years and probably elderly and confused, seemed to want to make friends, however, which earned him a hiss and several growls for his trouble, and – when he didn’t get the message – Matilda then reinforced it by rising from her bed and advancing on him, in full-on “Mighty Battle Maiden” mode, until Debbie grabbed Matilda and Granny grabbed Freddie. Poor old Freddie. Maybe he thought it was Kitty. Still, it’s early days yet. At least when Matilda does start going out in the outside world, if she does happen to meet one of the other inhabitants of the neighbourhood, she will be hard enough to stand her ground. I only hope that I don’t eventually find her dragging in recently deceased squirrels through the cat flap.

The month of September has found us both immersing ourselves in our work. Debbie has four classes to prepare for next week, and will be doing some tutor mentoring on Friday, so she has a full week ahead. As for me, I’ve got such a stack of work to do that it tires me just thinking about it. But in a sense, that’s good, in that it stops me brooding over Kitty. It is, however, stultifyingly boring for the most part, especially doing the year end accounts for 2011, which I have to submit soon, to avoid being fined by Companies House. I must make a note one day to find out if MPs are automatically fined for missing a deadline for submitting detailed schedules of what they spent on (say) paperclips in the previous year; somehow, I suspect not.

Anyway, I chose this crazy life, and I must dree my weird, as they say, north of the Border. Although when I chose this crazy life, it was never intended to have this outcome. Had I known then, what I know now, the outcome would have been very different. And maybe somewhere, in an alternative universe, it was, and is. But you have to start from where you are. I must admit, I have had some unexpected difficulty in coping with the advent of Matilda; on the one hand, the house would be very bleak and empty without any animals at all, but on the other hand, I can’t help but feel it’s all very sudden, very soon. I could have done with a bit more time to mourn Kitty properly, although of course there was no time to do anything other than say “Yes, we’ll have her”, otherwise she wouldn’t be here at all. In any sense of the word “here”. It seems a bit unfair on Matilda, as well. As Bernard, bless him, pointed out to me when I was complaining that I thought Matilda wouldn’t be anything like the companion of my midnight writing hours that Kitty turned out to be, “Give her a bloody chance, lad, she’s only been here two weeks!”

So, a couple of nights ago, I enticed Matilda up into Zak’s armchair after Debbie had gone to bed, settled her down, and gave her a good talking to. I told her all about Kitty, and I actually said sorry to her for not appreciating her. I told her that now she was here, come what may, she was our cat, and I would use my strong right arm to protect her, whether holding sword or pen. She yawned, blinked, then curled round and put her nose under her tail.

Sword or pen; it does seem a bit like wartime at the moment. Maybe it was like this, all those years ago, back in September 1939. The phoney war. That autumn when we were at war, but not at war. The real battles lay ahead, but for now it was a case of take down the lanterns, bring the chairs in from the garden, shut up the summerhouse, put up blackouts, mine the beaches, and Dig for Victory. I’ve been thinking a lot about that era this week, because I’ve been thinking about my Gran, one of two, both sadly no longer with us, but in this case my mother’s mother, Sarah Jane Fenwick, born Sarah Jane Walker in 1888 in Hailgate, Howden.

It all started when we cleared out the old camper van. The old camper van in the driveway, when it ceased to be driveable, was used by us as a repository of boxes of “stuff” from my old house. However, that description might give you the slightly misleading idea that the boxes of “stuff” had been opened and inspected as recently as 1996, when we moved here. In fact, some of them were from my flat in Chichester, and had never been opened or unpacked from the move to Barnsley in 1989. And some of them were boxes of stuff from my Dad’s house, when it was cleared out after his death in 1992, and some of those boxes were boxes of “stuff” from my Gran’s flat, when it was cleared out after her death, in 1980.

So, in a sense, it came as no surprise to me when I opened one of the boxes and found, along with a hoard of old photographs, the old brown biscuit tin that used to sit on the mantelpiece at her old house in Ladywellgate, Welton, when I used to go and visit her as a kid and – if I was on my best behaviour – occasionally be given a ten shilling note. (A long bus-ride from Hull, 10 miles out into the country, it seemed like a whole day’s adventure in those days, courtesy of East Yorkshire Motor Services). It never occurred to me, during those visits, to ask what was in the biscuit tin; at the time, I was more preoccupied with being allowed to play in the garden and climb on top of the solid, substantial, brick-built air raid shelter that still stood there. That in itself was a risky business in short trousers, often resulting in skinned knees or grazed shins, not to mention incurring the wrath of my mother for messing up my best visiting clothes.

Now, I was holding the very same biscuit-tin in my hands, wondering what was in it, and turning it round curiously. I prised it open. At first, I thought it was full of letters, but as I removed each piece of paper, I realised what I had were in fact, empty envelopes, most of which had things scribbled on the back in Granny Fenwick’s handwriting. I read a few of them, and realised they were her recipes! Gold dust! Much, much better than a tin of old white fivers. I remember her cooking with great fondness. She used to make wholesome, delicious food, particularly her baking, savoury and sweet, from bacon and egg pie (which today would be called a quiche, I guess) to the traditional Yorkshire curd cheese cake. I have been blithely telling people all these years that my Granny was a great cook, and she used to make things up as she went along, and just throw stuff together and it all worked, when in fact here was the evidence that she noted things down meticulously and always went by the book. I have no way of knowing where she got the recipes from: they may have been handed down by her mother, the redoubtable Great-Grandma Walker, or they may have been noted down from other books, or off the sides of packets and tins of ingredients, or out of magazines. Judging from the dates on the readable postmarks, they were from the time after 1928 when she had separated from Grandad Fenwick, and was living in Elloughton Dale Cottages with such of her daughters as remained unmarried, a dwindling number as three of them were to become wartime brides, leaving only my mother (the youngest), who didn’t marry my father until 1955.

There are also various household hints and remedies – if a cat washes over its ears, it is going to rain; badly smeared glass can be cleaned with a burnt cork dipped in salt, and many others in a similar vein. We laugh at such fancies these days, but they are a reminder of times when people did perhaps live in a more harmonious way with nature, observing its times and seasons, and in their make-do and mend philosophy, of using old socks to make covers for new shoes to prevent them being scuffed, and the like, they presage in many ways the green and self-sufficiency ideas that characterised the growth of environmental issues in the 1970s. Sadly, I doubt very much that anyone will be picking through notes found in a biscuit tin dating from 2012, and finding handy hints on how to recycle your broken I-pod as a door-wedge.

Much of the make-do was a product of wartime, of course, dipping your legs in gravy browning to look as though you were wearing stockings and the like. I doubt there was much in the way of a social life in Elloughton in the 1940s, and most of Granny Fenwick’s gravy browning probably went to making gravy, though at least they were spared the attentions of the Luftwaffe, who used to make sure they jettisoned any unused bombs on Hull on their way back to base, after a long night spent bombing the crap out of the West Riding. There was an anti-aircraft site at Riplingham Crossroads, though, intended to defend Blackburns’ aircraft factory and the flying school, a manifestation of war which must have been near enough to have rattled Granny Fenwick’s windows while she was busy helping defeat Hitler by making plum jam in the only saucepan that hadn’t been turned into a Spitfire. It would have been too neat an outcome to have had my father manning it, though; at the time, his anti-aircraft gun was 250 miles away, on top of the cliffs at Fairlight, and he was more concerned with the welfare of his mother, Granny Rudd, back home in Hull, who was rendered homeless in March 1941 when a German parachute mine took out the family home, and most of Bean Street, just off Hessle Road, killing 16 people and injuring a further 22.

Maybe we could do with re-discovering some of that wartime ingenuity to make things go further and last longer, to reverse, or at least slow down, the relentless cycle of consumerism and demand. If The Blight continue their own personal blitz on Britain’s economy, we may have to. If the climate continues its seemingly-inexorable progress towards the hell-in-a-handbasket that is “global warming”, we may be forced to confront these unpleasant realities about the unsustainable nature of the way we’ve been living. The paradox is, of course, that to get us out of the global trough, the slough of economic despond, governments could do with us all starting to buy stuff we don’t want, don’t need, already have or can’t afford, all over again. But there isn’t an inexhaustible supply of petrol to chuck on the bonfire. There isn’t even an inexhaustible supply of petrol, which is another problem. However, there may be an answer in that the entire area surrounding recycling and sustainability in itself presents a business opportunity. A British recycling industry, making sustainable products to help with sustainability, sustainably, could provide jobs and export technology to the rest of the world. But it needs a push from the top. In the war, when the AA guns were banging and crashing from the White Cliffs of Dover to the Yorkshire Wolds, we invented radar in about two years from a standing start. To my mind, the situation regarding climate change is just as grave, today, as the threat posed by Nazism in 1940. We need a few more “action this day” type memos from Number 10, but the problem is that DEFRA, whose pigeon it is, are much more interested in killing badgers (needlessly, and to no avail) than in saving the planet.

My calendar of Saints tells me that today, 16th September, is St Euphemia’s day. Pausing to reflect that “Euphemia” would have been a good name for Matilda if she hadn’t been Matilda, I hastened to look up St Euphemia (ooer, that sounds rather naughty) on the internet.

St Euphemia it seems, was a martyred virgin of Chalcedon. She lived in the 3rd century AD. She was the daughter of a senator named Philophronos and his wife Theodosia, in Chalcedon, located across the Bosporus from the city of Byzantium (modern-day Istanbul). From her youth she was consecrated to virginity. I have known many girls like that throughout my life. Or so they told me, anyway.

The governor of Chalcedon, Priscus, had made a decree that all of the inhabitants of the city take part in sacrifices to the pagan deity Ares. Euphemia was discovered with other Christians who were hiding in a house and worshiping the Christian God, in defiance of the governor's orders. Because of their refusal to sacrifice, they were tortured for a number of days, and then handed over to the Emperor for further torture. Euphemia, the youngest among them, was separated from her companions and subjected to particularly harsh torments, including the wheel, in hopes of breaking her spirit. It is believed that she died of wounds from a wild bear in the arena under Emperor Diocletian, although some sources say that it was a lion.

Eventually, a cathedral was built in Chalcedon over her grave. She is, apparently, credited with solving one of the major heretical disputes in the Orthodox Church, from beyond the grave: the holy Patriarch Anatolius of Constantinople proposed that the Council of Chalcedon submit the decision of the Church dispute about whether Jesus had a dual nature, divine and human in one body, or a single, divine nature, to the Holy Spirit, via the medium of St Euphemia, whose wonder-working relics had been discovered during the Council's discussions. The Orthodox hierarchs and their opponents wrote down their confessions of faith on separate scrolls and sealed them with their seals. They opened the tomb of Saint Euphemia and placed both scrolls upon her bosom. Then, in the presence of the emperor Marcian (450-457), the participants of the Council sealed the tomb, putting on it the imperial seal and setting a guard to watch over it for three days.

After three days the patriarch and the emperor in the presence of the Council opened the tomb with its relics: the scroll with the Orthodox confession was held by St Euphemia in her right hand, and the scroll of the heretics lay at her feet. St Euphemia, as though alive, raised her hand and gave the scroll to the patriarch.
The account continues, rather drily:

“After this miracle many of the hesitant accepted the Orthodox confession, while those remaining obstinant in the heresy were consigned to the Council's condemnation and excommunication.”

While I agree, it does have echoes of “all those who didn’t just witness a miracle report to the torture chamber at 0900 hours tomorrow” nevertheless if we could but find a similar figure in this country, we could use her to resolve all sorts of disputes, from whether or not to have gay women lesbian skateboarding bishops to the result of the boat race or the outcome of the next election. My only fear is that the job would be given to someone inherently untrustworthy, such as Margaret Thatcher, and she certainly caused more than enough trouble while alive.

As well as St Euphemia’s Day, today is also, of course, Battle of Britain Sunday, and it would be remiss of me not to mark it in some way, much as I have reservations (and always have had) about the fusion of acts of war with acts of religion and remembrance. As with remembrance Sunday, I find it personally more fulfilling to concentrate on the sacrifice than on the “glorification” of war, and the “endorsement” of military action by a higher power. Since my father (thankfully, or I wouldn’t have been here today to write this drivel – quiet at the back) survived the war, I don’t have a horse in this particular race, except to remember Debbie’s distant ancestor and first cousin twice removed, F/L Jack Ross DFC, who died when his Hawker Hurricane crashed into the Irish Sea in 1941. And, indeed, to remember with sadness all the other young lives of promise cut short by war, just or unjust, necessary or unnecessary.

So, as the second half of September comes in, and the autumnal Equinox looms large on the calendar, it’s time to take stock, and prepare. One day, next year, perhaps, there might be white birds over the blue cliffs of Dover, next summer, Matilda might be happy to sit out on the decking with us, like Kitty, Dusty, Nigel and Russell before her, who knows. For now, it’s time to make sure all is safely gathered in, time to batten down any hatches you can still reach. The real battles lie ahead, but for now it is a case of take down the lanterns, bring the chairs in from the garden, shut up the summerhouse, put up blackouts, mine the beaches, and Dig for Victory.

Epiblog for St Wulfhilda's Day

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. Now that we’ve come back from holiday, and the start of a new teaching term looms ahead for Debbie, the weather has – of course – turned warm and balmy. Or perhaps walm and barmy. It was pretty balmy (and barmy) when we went to Walney Island last Sunday. Given the imminence of the new academic year, Debbie had decided she wanted one last paddle of the Summer, so we loaded up the kayak, the wheelchair, the wheelchair’s inhabitant, yours truly, Debbie’s Dad, and Freddie and Zak, into the old camper van, and set off into the sunrise, looking and feeling very much like a bomber crew setting off on a mission.

Two and a half hours later, Debbie was launching her kayak into the Irish Sea, Mike was walking along the sand while Freddie trotted along behind him and Zak ran excitedly in and out of the waves, chasing and fetching sticks, and I was alternately dozing in the sun and writing my entry for the Costa Coffee Short Story Competition.

The best bit of the day was undoubtedly Deb’s kayaking with the grey seals all around her at the mouth of Walney south channel; the worst was undoubtedly coming home to an empty house with no fire in the stove and no Kitty to greet us, querulously asking to be fed “Naow”. Oh, and the camper’s oil leak is more extensive, and therefore more expensive, than we thought. It turns out it’s got to go for life-threatening surgery at the garage next week.

In the midst of maungy Monday, the pit of the week, when I was finally forced to confront the pile of unanswered emails and the general bag of ferrets that is my “to do” list, and talking of life threatening surgery, the hospital rang to say that they wanted me on 13th September, to take out my gall bladder. I’d already knocked them back once, on the pretext that I was on holiday (I was, actually on holiday, but even if I hadn’t been, I wouldn’t have had it done). Anyway, I told them “no”. The consultant’s secretary seemed a bit surprised, and I expanded on my decision by saying that my reason for saying no was that I didn’t want to die by not coming round from a general anaesthetic. At which point, I think she realised that it wasn’t worth arguing, and she said, with a weary sigh, that she’d have to take me off the waiting list and make me a clinic appointment instead, so I could discuss my misgivings with the consultant face to face. I said so be it, and we left it at that.

I suppose I should really have it done, because my GP has told me that on a how ill are you scale of 1 to 10, when I had ascending cholangitis a year ago, I reached about level 8. And of course, if I have managed to breed one massive gallstone the size of a Ferrero Rocher, then there’s always the chance of more. We’ll see.

For the moment, I had other fish to fry. Well, not to fry, and not exactly fish. More like cats. Monday saw the advent of Betty the calico cat, who was picked up from the vets by Deb and Granny at teatime that day. Betty’s first act, on being released from the cat-carrier, was to vanish behind the fridge and stay there for most of the remainder of the day. By the same time on Tuesday, she’d begun venturing out for food, and making tentative forays. Then she took to sitting under the sink. Another day passed, and she’d progressed to sitting behind the settee, then she settled down on Kitty’s old binbag bean-bag in the hearth, and now, on a Sunday morning, as I type this, she’s snoozing on Zak’s armchair in the conservatory, in the sun, having seamlessly made the transition to being “our cat”, following in the pawsteps of Kitty.

Rather too seamlessly, in some ways. I don’t blame Betty, but we are both still heartbroken over Kitty’s sudden loss, and in a way, I could have done with more space to grieve. But of course, if we had stood on ceremony and done just that, then Betty would have outstayed her stay of execution, and would now be in a body-bag. Betty is, of course, a completely different sort of cat to Kitty. Where Kitty was small, Betty is massive. Where Kitty was loud and vocal, Betty has a much more subtle repertoire of trills and chirrups. In fact, of all the cats we’ve ever had, in her demeanour, she mostly resembles Nigel, who had a similar need to communicate using words like “draaarp” and “prrrt”.

We decided pretty quickly that she wasn’t a Betty, and she didn’t answer to the name anyway. Debbie said that, given her size, her mad staring eyes, and her propensity for living behind the fridge, we should call her “Nigella” and I thought this fitted in quite well, actually, but just as I was getting enthusiastic, Debbie changed her mind. We bandied several names around, then settled on “Phoebe” as a compromise. So for a couple of days she was Phoebe, because we got her on St Phoebe’s day, but it became obvious that she wasn’t going to answer to that, either, and Granny said that Phoebe had unfortunate associations for her, because it reminded her of her Auntie Lilly, also known as Phoebe, who went mad. That must be where Debbie gets it from, then. Meanwhile, Phoebe, blissfully unaware of the controversy raging over her name, continued exploring the house and finding the warmest patch of sunlight on the rug in the conservatory, rolling over onto her back with her legs splayed out in all directions, and squeaking and purring with delight. That must be where Debbie gets it from, then.

By Saturday, it had reached the proportions of a full-blown international crisis, so in the end we wrote down all the names we’d thought of, and allocated each of them a score, according to an arcane system of our own devising, so we could finally make a decision. Eventually, we came up with a name we can all agree on… Matilda. So, from this day hence, Matilda she is. We looked it up, and it means “mighty battle-maiden”, which does seem very appropriate, given that she’s already seen off Spidey from next door simply by growling at him through the glass of the (closed) conservatory door.

So, all in all, I should be happy. We seem to have successfully assimilated a new cat into the household, although she has yet to come face to face with Zak or Freddie. We had a cat, the cat died, we have got a new cat; what’s not to like. But the problem is, it doesn’t work like that, and my delight in Matilda has been offset this week by creeping feelings of sadness and grief over Kitty, which have come unbidden upon me, in the watches of the night. Monday night was especially hard. The evening was drawing in, and it is getting very back-endish now, twilight falling at about eight o’clock, and the fire was ticking away, just enough to keep the sharpness out of the air. I’d been busy all day, and then finally packed in working at about six, and it would have been just the time to have fed Kitty (“Naow”) and then settled down for the evening. Except she wasn’t there, she was out in the garden, with Dusty, Nigel and Russbags.

The fact that all cats are different was recognised in the Mass Observation diary of Maggie Joy Blunt, as shown in this bit, when she wrote about one of her cats, on 14 March 1947:

The cat died. Such an insignificant event. A dead cat - target for mockery, small boys, and dust. There are too many cats in the world. Why make all the fuss because now there is one less? Every cat is a miracle of independent, loveable life, if you have the eyes and the feeling to understand it as such. I have loved many cats and I expect I shall love many more. Each one becomes a friend with a distinct individuality, and the loss each time is a deeply personal one. No one else ever replaces that person exactly, but new personalities help you to forget your grief at the loss of others.

Apart from the fact that it should be “fewer” and not “less”, I agree with her entirely, and I would go further and say it’s not just cats, but, to an extent, all animals. I’ve certainly found it to be true of dogs.

So, the nights are drawing in. The owls are back in the trees on the valley-slope behind our house as well. For some reason, they’ve been very vocal this week, or maybe it’s just that I’ve noticed them more. Perversely, as I said above, now that summer’s more or less over, and all of the “fury and the mire of human veins” which constitutes a new academic year is about to kick off, the weather has, of course, turned warm and benign. Debbie has been missing Kitty’s presence as well, particularly on these sunny mornings of her last week of freedom, when she’s sitting out on the decking with her morning toast and coffee.

It’s all a bit “phoney war”, at the moment, and it’s difficult to shake off the feeling that worse, nastier times lie ahead. I’ve been out of touch with the news, since we got back, although I gather that various prominent members of the Junta responsible for The Blight were booed at the Paralympics, and serve them right, too. Oh, and Edwina Currie has complained that some people have been turning up at food banks by car. Really! The nerve of these poor people. Perhaps they should walk six miles to the food bank, carrying a rucksack, like Mark and Helen Mullins did before they were driven to suicide by the grinding pointless poverty and depression of their lives. Mrs Currie should, perhaps, pause to consider the wider question of why the hell, in 21st Century Britain, there have to be food banks at all, except that her answer is probably that there shouldn’t, and the destitute and desperate should stand in the street and beg, not forgetting to tug their forelock at every passing toff.

As far as our own phoney war is concerned, it’s very much the calm before the storm; next week teaching starts proper, and, for my part, I have only three weeks to do last year’s accounts and the next VAT return, not to mention the myriad of other tasks I’ve been neglecting because we’ve been away on holiday. I am seriously regretting every going, especially as I still maintain that, had I not put her in that damn cattery, Kitty would be alive today. But of course, the corollary of that is equally true, if Kitty had still been alive today, Matilda would be dead, because we’d never have known about her, she’d just have been part of the sad waste of unwanted animals that die alone and unheeded every year, a silent animal holocaust going on in our midst, which will only get worse, with The Blight in charge. By the next election, there could be packs of feral dogs roaming the streets. If there are, I sincerely hope they savage Edwina Currie.

So. That was the week, that was. The external world of idiocy and bluster, and me mourning a dead cat while trying to cope with a new one. Poor little Kitty, she will be missed for many a day and many a week, many a month and many a year. It seems totally unreal to me now that it was only four weeks ago that we set off on our benighted foolish Quixotic progress, and abandoned her to her fate, and, when I think back to our holiday, such as it was, it seems like a different person, not me, that sat at the side of Kilbrannan Sound watching the gannets plummet into the sea and singing “Blow The Wind Southerly” and wishing away the days until I would see my cat again.

Time turns, and the seasons turn; there is a time to every purpose under heaven. Summer turns, and changes to autumn. The leaves turn; the woods decay and fall, as Tennyson said. The old order changeth, and giveth way to the new. I have no option now but to add Kitty to the long list of regrets and mistakes that has clouded my life, and over which I brood from time to time.

The death of my cat has severely dented what little faith I had, I don’t mind admitting. At the end of the day, it does all come down to whether you believe that things happen for a reason, that there is some sort of underlying logic to this seemingly random shit, which for some reason we’re unable to understand, because we are confined to a fallen universe and the planes and angles of the dimension which bind us.

Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires,
Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth
Which is already flesh, fur, and faeces,
Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf.
Houses live and die: there is a time for building
And a time for living and for generation
And a time for the wind to break the loosened pane
And to shake the wainscot where the field mouse trots
And to shake the tattered arras woven with a silent motto.

I played the recording of Eliot reciting East Coker, the day we buried Kitty, and tried once again to reconcile her loss to what shreds remain of my belief. With what success, I honestly do not know. I freely admit I haven’t looked in the Bible for weeks now, or my Book of Common Prayer. From East Coker it is a natural progression to Little Gidding:

Last season's fruit is eaten
And the fullfed beast shall kick the empty pail.

Still, today is apparently St Wulfhilda’s day. I am surprised, actually, that we didn’t end up calling the cat Wulfhilda, but I think it’s more of a dog’s name, especially as it seems that in real life she was the Abbess of Barking. I was prompted to look up the salient facts of St Wulfhilda, and found that Agnes Dunbar's "A Dictionary of Saintly Women" (1904) has the scoop on the lady in question:

Wulfhilda was brought up at Wilton Abbey in Wiltshire, where, it is said, the King fell in love with her. It is generally said that this king was Edgar the Peaceable (though he is occasionally called Edward). Presents, messages, offers being of no avail, he gained over the lady's aunt, Abbess Wenflaeda of Wherwell who, feigning illness, sent for her niece to attend on her. When Wulfhilda arrived at the house, she found she had been entrapped; and, upon conversing with the King, she found his fervour so alarming, that she fled, leaving her sleeve in his hand, and escaping through the drains.

Immediately after this, the lady took the veil and the King, convinced of her enthusiastic goodness, thenceforth "held her as a thing enskied and sainted" and made her Abbess of Barking, giving to that monastery considerable estates. Wulfhilda bestowed upon it twenty villages of her own and founded another monastery at Horton. Both these houses, she governed with great ability and set an excellent example to the inmates. Queen Elfrida became envious and, on the death of the King, ejected Wulfhilda from her monasteries, as she had herself foretold. She was restored under Aethelred the Unready and died at Barking during his reign. Her virtues in life and the cures wrought at her tomb at Barking raised her to the level of her two great predecessors there, Ethelburga of Barking and Hildelith

I must admit, the idea of King Edgar the Peaceable trying to grope me under false pretences would be enough to make me Shawshank my way out of there as well, sleeve or no sleeve. He must have been truly appalling in some gross way, Peaceable or not, for her to consider escaping via an Anglo-Saxon drain as a viable alternative, followed by life in a nunnery. But, maybe Wulfhilda was right. The answer to spiritual happiness lies in cultivating a contemplative life. That is why you will occasionally see me, in coming weeks, sitting at the conservatory window when I should really be working, contemplating that area of the garden where Russell, Nigel, Dusty and, now, Kitty lie buried. I will be there physically, but my mind and my soul will be out in the gloaming, lying among the heather, slightly the worse for wear from single malt, listening to the sad music in my head and singing “Blow the Wind Southerly” to myself, in a world where Kitty, now a thing enskied and sainted, is still alive, back at home, in a house we haven’t yet returned to find sad and empty.