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.
No comments:
Post a Comment