Epiblog for the Feast of St Jude

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. We blunder on, ever deeper into the mire of autumn. The weather’s starting to get a bit of bite to it, especially during the latter half of the week, and the trees are now more or less completely stripped of leaves, or so it seems, at any rate, from the massive heaps of them everywhere. Trying to sweep them off my ramp is a thankless task, of the type characterised by the pithy Norfolk saying “you’m farting against thunder, Bor!”

Monday morning dawned, spawning a day of disasters. Debbie was getting ready to drive over Wessenden to drop down to Stalybridge that way, the previous week’s route via Holme Bridge having proved a bit of a duff effort, with massive traffic queues at Tintwistle. She was hoping that her class of trainee footballers would put in a solid session, because the time allotted for the course by the college is ridiculously short. On her way out she forgot her phone and her lanyard, and in coming back in for them, she managed to pull the handle off the door, passing it to me, leaving me holding it and contemplating the devastation left by her sudden exit.

When I came back in after having fixed it, nithered to the bane and desperately seeking warmth in front of the fire, Matilda was busy exercising herself by batting her little woolly koala round the floor in the conservatory, which at any other time would have been amusing, but became even more annoying when somehow she managed to hoick it into the second tier of the free-standing veg rack, and then proceeded to try and clamber in after it. Having evicted her and retrieved her toy for her, I settled down to try and finally get on with some work. I put ZZ Top on very loud, at almost pain-threshold level, and refused to answer the door for the rest of the day.

Tuesday brought with it a clutch of couriers, the first one of whom pulled off the door handle. While I was sitting there mending it again, three other couriers arrived, one to collect and two deliveries, and the coalman came and delivered the winter order. I was surprised that they’d made it with that delivery, because when I’d rung up and placed the order, the woman at the coal yard said it had been going totally manic ever since the BBC weather man had mentioned the possibility of snow. I felt slightly guilty for adding to her workload, because it was precisely that which had spurred me on to ringing them, as well.

Yesterday the soundtrack to my determination to get down to work had been ZZ Top, today it was Tom Waits, and I was struck by that line in “Heartattack and Vine” where he sings:

“Don’t you know there ain’t no devil, that’s just God when he’s drunk”

- a line which I felt rang very true, this week. In the afternoon, I was visited by the chief head honcho of the Occupational Therapists, who was to conduct a review of my progress, or lack of it. It turns out that my legs may well be permanently bent, unless I have either botox and/or an operation, well, one on each leg, actually, which may well then not have as positive an outcome as hoped, because at the end of the day, what’s to stop me ending up back in the same state afterwards. She did make some comments and suggestions which might be worth following up, such as Quinine Sulphate tablets for the pain and cramps, which I now have to follow up with my GP. All of which left me feeling a bit gloomy, to be honest.

I decided I needed a blast of positivism, logical or otherwise, so this time I put on Keith Marsden singing “Prospect Providence” a song which makes its chorus out of a litany of all the Mills that used to stand in Marsden’s home town of Morley.

“Prospect, Providence, Perseverance, Albert, Valley and Crank;
I served me time in the dust and grime, with never a word of thanks
Oh the wages were poor and the hours were long and the gaffers was hard, lads, hard;
But the last time’s coming thank God coming soon, when I’ll walk up that damn mill yard!”

This doesn’t sound like a particularly positive song, and it probably isn’t, all things being told, but I view it as such because of the resonances it has with my own life. I have walked up that damn mill yard for the last time, or to be more accurate, the damn mill yard has come to me. So that was Tuesday.

Wednesday, however, brought better news, in that the Government has finally, at last, caved in to common sense and postponed the badger cull. This was actually quite a sneaky move, because by doing so, they had headed off a potential embarrassment in the debate which had been forced in Parliament on Thursday, and in which it looked certain that they would be defeated. However, a victory by any means is still a victory, and the postponement gives another six months or so to argue for the cull to be abandoned altogether. What staggered me, though, was the reason advanced for the ban, that there were many more badgers than Defra had realised, so culling 70% of them would not be physically possible in the time available this year!

So, it turns out that a cull which was proposed for political reasons, in the face of scientific evidence that it wouldn’t work, which the government’s own spokesman admitted on BBC Radio 4 that they didn’t know whether it would work or not, was in any case hoist on the petard of there being far more badgers than Defra realised. It really does take the concept of “shambles” to a whole new level, and maybe next time we should get Fred Karno’s Army in to do it – the result would probably be slightly more organised, and certainly funnier than leaving it to a combination of Defra and the farmers.

By now, of course, it had somehow become Thursday without me noticing, the way busy weeks do, and I was still bathing in the warm satisfaction of the afterglow of the badger cull being postponed when this time, I pulled the damn door handle off, when closing the door after coming back in with some coal. Fortunately, after all the practice this week, I can now put it back together in a couple of minutes, in the same way that those display teams used to do with the field guns at the Royal Military Tattoo.

By now, it was Thursday evening and Deb had limped home, exhausted, for the start of half-term, with the news that it sounded like “something was scraping” underneath the camper van. So that, I think, is next week’s problem, though it may well be the one that stops us going up to Dumfries and Galloway for a couple of days in the vehicle in question, if push comes to shove, as the time will have to be spent, instead, on making it roadworthy and safe for Debbie’s navigation of the mountain passes between here and Stalybridge, high on a hill with a lonely goat turd, yeay odleeay odle-lee.

Friday also saw the arrival of Freddie and Zak, who have come to stay over half-term while Granny makes one of her regular royal progresses down to the Solent to visit various children, inlaws, aunties and nephews with birthdays. Matilda greeted both dogs by hissing at them in a friendly manner then going behind the sofa and growling, though she is actually getting used to them to the stage where she now largely ignores them unless they look at her, at which point she goes into the cat version of the full Robert de Niro “You lookin’ at me?” routine.

Anyway, we all settled down to a state of armed neutrality verging on mutual assured destruction, and, because I am working on this book of my Grandma’s wartime recipes, I was entertaining the dogs by singing “Run, Rabbit, Run” to them while I worked, especially the line about Friday is rabbit-pie day. Freddie gets quite excited when you mention rabbits, in fact the only word that gets him more exercised is “squirrel”, so when I was singing about them, he started looking for these rabbits in the conservatory. I used to know an archaeologist in Nottinghamshire who taught his dog to run off down the garden barking madly if he shouted “Tebbits!” and I tried it on Freddie, with predictable results:

“Freddie! Tebbits! See ‘em off!”

“Woofwoofwoof woof woof!”

Our gay badinage was interrupted by the sound of someone pinging me on Skype on the computer and I saw to my surprise that it was Bernard asking for a friend request! Bernard is 90, or thereabouts, and was in the next bed to me in hospital for several weeks in that dreary autumn of non-recovery in 2010. At the time, he pooh-poohed new technology and he told me that I spent too much time on the internet. Obviously he had now undergone a similar process of conversion to that undergone by Debbie, who once denounced the internet as “a giant electronic anorak” and now spends all her time surfing on Ebay. Anyway, the electronic hologram of Bernard and I had a cosy little chat, and he ended by giving me a demonstration of how he played the harmonica with Dave, his dog “joining in”. Great stuff. I only wished I’d had the presence of mind to record it somehow. No doubt we would have had a doggy choir joining in at this end, as well, were it not for the fact that Grandad had arrived earlier and taken them out walkies. There is something about “free reed” instruments that really drives dogs bonkers, it must be something to do with the type of noise they make.

So, having survived a torrid week, somehow it got to be Saturday, and I still had a list of tasks a yard and a half long – accounts stuff, work on new books, trying to organise for us to go and see Elvis in his foster kennels at Ferrybridge, you name it. By Saturday night, by the time I’d fed everyone and done the washing up, it was all I could do to stay awake long enough to put the clocks back for a much-needed extra hour’s sleep.

Today, when I woke up, my first thought was not that I was feeling much more rested, or even an hour’s worth more rested, but that, were he still with us, this would be my father’s 91st birthday. Can it really be twenty whole years next year since he died? Sadly, it would seem it can. It’s also (though I never knew this when my Dad was alive) the feast of St Jude (not to be confused with Judas Iscariot, or even Jasper Carrott) the patron saint of lost causes. (May I just say, in passing, how supremely organised it is of the church in general to have a patron saint of everything. I’ve remarked before how amazing it would have been to have been present at the meeting where Big G dished them all out, with all the saints who got cats, dogs and guinea pigs smiling smiles of smug self-congratulation, while all the people like Jude who got “lost causes” “women with difficult labours” “boils” or “iguanas” muttering into their beards and looking thunderous.)

St. Jude, known as Thaddaeus, was a brother of St. James the Less, and a relative of, and was one of the 12 Apostles of, Jesus. So at least Big G was keeping it in the family.

Ancient writers tell us that he preached the Gospel in Judea, Samaria, Idumaea, Syria, Mesopotamia, and Lybia. According to Eusebius, he returned to Jerusalem in the year 62, and assisted at the election of his brother, St. Simeon, as Bishop of Jerusalem.

He is an author of an epistle to the Churches of the East, particularly the Jewish converts, directed against the heresies of the Simonians, Nicolaites, and Gnostics.

Jude was the one who asked Jesus at the Last Supper why He would not manifest Himself to the whole world after His resurrection. Little else is known of his life. Legend claims that he visited Beirut and Edessa, and was possibly martyred with St. Simon in Persia.

It seems he had “form” with regard to lost causes and is invoked in desperate situations because his New Testament letter stresses that the faithful should persevere in the environment of harsh, difficult circumstances, just as their forefathers had done before them. He is also frequently pictured, in Icons and religious painting, with his hair on fire and carrying a club. Presumably he is looking to use the club on whoever set his hair on fire, although the alternative explanation is that the flames are a reference to his having been present at the Pentecost.

Certainly, if someone in spiritual authority over me had set my hair on fire (even if only by accident, as a by-product of being visited with the Holy Spirit) handed me a club, and told me that I was in charge of desperate remedies and lost causes, I, too, would probably be churlish and unresponsive. I say this because the only times I have ever seriously prayed to Saint Jude for intercession have been, to allow me to walk again (see under botox, above) and to save Kitty’s life, neither of which happened. There are those, however, who swear by him, as evidenced by the occasional notices thanking him which are published in the broadsheet newspapers by grateful seekers of his help whose prayers have been granted. I realise that it is supposed to be one of the conditions of saying the Novena to St Jude that you promise, should your request be successful, to publish and praise his name, but how can they be so sure that St Jude reads The Daily Telegraph? And how does he read it without setting it alight?

Looking beyond the symbolism, I suppose the lesson we’re meant to get from St Jude is never give up. I don’t know why my prayers weren’t answered on those two specific occasions. Perhaps St Jude tried his best, but it was one of those cases where there ain’t no Devil, but God had a load on that day. Or a hangover. Or perhaps I didn’t pray hard enough, or in the right frame of mind, or whatever. Prayer does, apparently work. There are even random scientific tests where plants that have been prayed over and flourished considerably more than other plants in exactly the same conditions that weren’t. I don’t know. So maybe what we’re supposed to think is that just because prayer doesn’t work sometimes, it doesn’t mean that it won’t work every time, if you can follow my navigation through all the double negatives there.

And to be undaunted. My dad was never daunted, and at his funeral we had “To Be A Pilgrim” with that verse about “who so beset him round, with dismal stories/ do but themselves confound, his strength the more is”. I’d hope to have inherited that from him, at least, even though his engineering genes don’t seem to have been passed on, apart from a peculiar facility for re-attaching handles to doors.

So what am I saying here? Don’t despair, I suppose. We’re heading into that dark tunnel between now and the shortest day, but it will get light again. Like St Jude, I feel that last week I have also undergone a Baptism of Fire, and there are indeed many things in my life and work that can certainly be despaired of. Last year’s sales figures, to name but one. I need to take that spirit forward with me, and maybe also be more like my dad, whose normal response to any domestic engineering disaster would be to simply acknowledge it by saying something like “that’s queer!” and then reach for a screwdriver, his mind already working on how to fix it.

There you go then. St Jude, who can apparently take a sad song, and make it better. Remember to let her into your heart, and me as well, while you’re at it. As Cromwell said, trust in God, but keep your powder dry:

his truth shall be thy shield and buckler.

Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night; nor for the arrow that flieth by day;

Nor for the pestilence that walketh in darkness; nor for the destruction that wasteth at noonday.

A thousand shall fall at thy side, and ten thousand at thy right hand; but it shall not come nigh thee.

Anyway. Time to get on with my chores, I guess, and fetch in the coal, before it gets dark at 4pm. Oh, bugger, the handle’s come off. That’s queer!

Epiblog for the Feast of St John of Bridlington

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley, full of things to do, and lists of stuff. I’ve managed to stick to my daily routine, though, dovetailing it around Deb’s teaching. Get up, bomb up the stove (or re-light it, if it’s gone out overnight) feed Matilda, put the kettle on, trundle outside to fill up the coal scuttles and put out the bin and/or the ash, plus any recycling, bring back the coal, feed the cat again because by now she’s forgotten she’s already had one breakfast, make coffee for me and Deb unless she’s already gone, make breakfast, wash up, water the plants, then switch on the computer. Then the day’s work really starts.

The unaccustomed sunshine (even though tinged with frost on some days) continues. The weatherman on BBC TV’s Look North is predicting an “Indian Summer” for next week, so I would check your galoshes and make sure you know where your Sou’wester and raincoat are, if I were you.

Of course, now that we have had Jay round to do his annual clearing out of the gutters, no sooner had he finished than next day the leaves fell off the trees. All the leaves, off all the trees, in the whole garden. I had a half-hearted attempt at sweeping them off my ramp with the big broom, but it was a bit like Canute trying to turn back the tide, so I left it. Next day the area I’d swept was deep in leaves again, what it really needs is one of those leaf-blowers.

Matilda appears to be a child of the sun, especially in the way she does that thing that Tiggy also used to do, lying in the patch of sunlight on the conservatory rug, and moving around the rug as the sun moves. She doesn’t seem to be that adventurous, as cats go – she’s been outside a few times now, almost every day, in fact, but other than venturing tentatively to the top of the decking stairs and teetering on the edge of them as if she is considering actually going down into the garden, she usually turns tail and comes back in after about five or ten minutes, and then resumes her snoozing in the sun. We’re actually wondering if she was an inside cat in her previous home, or whether the six weeks or so she spent in a kennel at the vets has robbed her of any desire to explore the outside world. She hasn’t mastered the cat flap, though, although she has worked out how to use Russ and Nige’s tunnel.

She still keeps odd hours, as well, getting up at 4.45AM to skitter round on the bare boards, mewing loudly to let us know that she’s still there. If she chose to, she could have slept on the bed anyway, and been warmer, and known I was there, but obviously that idea hasn’t yet lodged in the crinkles of her tiny little furry walnut of a brain.

This morning she was tucking into her second breakfast, and I was admonishing her and saying that if she ate too much, she would go bang. I turned to Deb and said, “I don’t know why she eats so much, it’s not as if she does anything during the day.” Debbie gave me one of her cool, appraising stares and said, “Ring any bells?”

The quest for another dog goes on. We decided that Missy wouldn’t be the right dog for us, after all, much as she is a lovely little animal who will make somebody a wonderful companion, and will soon be snapped up for a new home, despite the massive over-supply of would-be pets at the moment. She just didn’t bond with us, or even seem to take any notice of us. Debbie has now found a depressed dog called Elvis, on one of the many web sites she frequents, who is currently in a foster home in Ferrybridge, of all places. Independently, I had found Daphne, a strange wiry-haired beast who looks a bit like a koala and has been rescued by Rain Rescue in Rotherham, but unfortunately she can’t be visited at the moment as she has kennel cough and in any case, there are other people interested in her.

I was vaguely amused at the thought of ending up with a household where the pets are called Matilda, Elvis and Daphne, especially as we would not actually have been responsible for naming any of them. Elvis’s story is an interesting one, and points up the fact that animal welfare and especially dog abandonment is not just a UK phenomenon. He was actually rescued by an outfit called Cyprus Pride, a title which, when I first heard it, conjured up visions of gay people marching through the streets of Nicosia, but is in fact an animal rescue charity run by two individuals, Michael and June, who have been selflessly rescuing stray dogs and cats in Cyprus for over 10 years, existing mainly on donations and, like Blanche Dubois, on the kindness of strangers. Two more candidates for the order of the SSS, and I hereby place the ceremonial jiffy bag on my head and utter the appropriate Latin in order to canonise them.

Anyway, if we are to meet Elvis, it can’t be before next Friday, because of Deb’s teaching. Part of me really wants to own a dog named Elvis, just so that I can let him out into the garden to do his necessaries and then announce “Elvis has left the building.”

Elvis has been one of the few bright spots, one of the few diversions, in a week stuffed to the gills with work, work, and more work. Usually I have the radio choogling away in the background while I am hammering at the keys, but this week I’ve been resorting to music, mainly because the news from the real world is so awful, and full of glaring double standards. Gary McKinnon is not to be extradited, which is, I suppose, good news of a sort, and Theresa May, although she doesn’t know what day it is, does seem to have done something right, probably by accident. I cannot help but reflect, though, that had Gary McKinnon been called Mohammed Osama Jihad Suicide-Vest McKinnon, the outcome would have been very different. Similarly, Malala Yousafzai, child victim of the Taliban, has been flown to the UK to be treated in a hospital in Birmingham, by the same Home Office that is trying to deport Roseline Akhalu and which deported Ama Sumani.

49-year-old Roseline Akhalu originally came to the UK in 2004 on a Ford Foundation scholarship to do a masters degree in development studies at Leeds University. Shortly afterwards she was diagnosed with end-stage renal failure. In 2009 she had a successful kidney transplant but needs regular hospital check-ups and immunosuppressant drugs. Since then, she has been battling attempts to remove her from the UK, even though consultants at St James hospital in Leeds have warned that she could die within a month if she is returned to Nigeria, where there is no guarantee of similar drugs and treatment.

Ama Sumani, the Ghanaian “overstayer” deported by UKBA officers from a Cardiff hospital in a wheelchair in 2008, was successfully sent back, despite the fact that she was receiving kidney treatment that was not available in her own country. Sumani’s deportation was denounced by The Lancet as an act of ‘atrocious barbarism’ and became the object of a major campaign to try and prevent it and she died less than two months after returning to Accra.

Sometimes, hypocrisy and glaring double standards are just laughable, such as when various members of the Junta, fond of declaring that “we’re all in it together”, revile us as “plebs”, or refuse to sit with us in the second class carriage of a train. Sometimes, as with the above examples, they are just tragic, and grossly wrong. But of course, at the moment we are “ruled” (albeit chaotically badly and haphazardly, with no plan and no direction) by a set of people whose raison d’etre is to enshrine the practice of looking down upon the lower orders, as they see them. What is depressing is that this attitude, which was satirised by Orwell in The Road to Wigan Pier, when he wrote about people believing miners kept coal in the bath, and also derided by J. B. Priestley, still persists into the 21st century. As Priestley wrote:

“…there arrived a rumour that some miners were actually acquiring pianos. Miners with pianos! Oh – the solemn protests, the sarcastic comments! It was as if some huge law of nature, welded into the very structure of the universe, had been impiously defied.”

In a week when it emerged that some MPs were getting round the expenses regulations by renting out their homes to each other while they lived somewhere else, I have a message to these people, and it comes from someone who, though not of their ilk when he uttered these words, was later revered even by the likes of Margaret Thatcher:

“Let me point out to the Conservative Party, and those who are associated with them, that there is in this country a great democracy, millions of whom are forced to live their lives under conditions which leave them stripped of all but the barest necessities, who are repeatedly urged to be patient under their misfortunes, repeatedly urged to wait year after year, and Parliament after Parliament, until, in the due workings of the Constitution, some satisfaction is given to their clamant needs, all the time this great audience is watching and is learning from you, from those who have hitherto called themselves “the party of law and order” how much they care for law, how much they value order when it stands in the way of anything they like!”

Thank you, Winston Churchill. At the time Churchill uttered those words, in a parliamentary speech in 1913, he was unsure if he was a Liberal or a Tory. At least Nick Clegg, if he is remembered for nothing else, which is quite likely the way he is going, has made sure nobody will ever be plagued with similar doubts in the future.

Priestley’s book, The Edwardians, which I have been re-reading this week, quotes the above speech and also contains, inter alia, a picture of the Fabian Society’s stained glass window. It is a curious object, and one which has apparently been the subject of much conspiracy theory online. It was originally commissioned by George Bernard Shaw, who was an atheist, and it is a sort of secular parody of the stained glass windows in churches. Much as I find GBS to be a bit tiresome (on cricket for instance: someone told him that England had been successful in the test in South Africa and he apparently enquired what they had been testing…ho ho) nevertheless, the idea is a complete hoot. It shows Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Shaw himself, and even H G Wells, whose status at that time as a semi-detached member of the group is denoted by the fact that he is thumbing his nose at the rest of them.

Webb and Shaw are hammering at a disc on which the globe is superimposed, and in a shield alongside them is the motto “pray devoutly, hammer stoutly”, while above the whole window is inscribed across the top “Remould it nearer to the heart's desire!” which is from Fitzgerald’s translation of Omar Khayam:

Dear love, couldst thou and I with fate conspire
To grasp this sorry scheme of things entire,
Would we not shatter it to bits, and then
Remould it nearer to the heart's desire!

Strangely, the window was never picked up by Shaw in 1910 when it was finished, and ended up in 1947 being installed in Beatrice Webb House in Leith Hill, then was stolen in 1978, surfaced in Arizona of all places, in 2005, came up for auction, was purchased back by the Fabian Society, and is now at the LSE, appropriately enough, in the Shaw Library.

Some of the web sites devoted to the (to me, fairly obvious) symbolism of the Fabian Society Window are well off the bus route and two stops beyond Barking. I won’t bother quoting them, they are easily enough found, just Google for wingnuts. According to them, the wolf in sheep’s clothing depicted on the shield behind Sidney Webb is a reference to Barack Obama, which (if true) displays remarkable prescience on the part of George Bernard Shaw. Oh, and the Fabian Society is of course a secret, subversive communist organisation, a bit like a cross between the Hellfire Club and the Moonies. What? The Fabian Society is a bit like the Church of England, and about as dangerous. Far from having any wide-ranging and coherent plan, subversive or otherwise, it’s a sort of innocent diversion, like train-spotting or stamp collecting.

It was not always thus, of course, there was a time when the Fabian Society was truly radical. There was a time when Bowie made good albums. There was even a time when Tony Blair was a socialist, though that last one has never been conclusively proven or independently verified. Still, the best thing you can say for the Fabian Society and all its earnest, plunking pamphlets about the condition of the labouring classes, is that what passed for its heart is in what passed for the right place. A state of affairs totally absent from the current political landscape.

Today is, as well as being the feast day of St John of Bridlington (though some traditions celebrate St John on 9th October), Trafalgar Day, when we celebrate the last time we beat the French at anything, and when England expects every man to do his duty. I am always stirred and impressed when I recall Lord Nelson’s famous last words, “How the hell am I going to climb that bloody column with only one arm?”

St John of Bridlington, who lived from 1319 to 1379, has become the patron saint of fishermen, and, for some reason, is also the patron saint of women undergoing a difficult labour, which seems a bit of a strange specialisation, and the combination of the two, piscatorial and gynaecological, even more bizarre.

He was born plain John Thwing in the village of Thwing, which nestles in the Wolds nine miles inland from Bridlington, in 1319, and became a student at Oxford. Joining the Augustinians at Bridlington, he served as prior for seventeen years until his death. He was canonized in 1401.

In his lifetime, say the standard hagiographies, he enjoyed a reputation for great holiness and for miraculous powers. Reputedly on one occasion he succeeded in changing water into wine, which definitely makes him my kind of saint. One day, five seamen from Hartlepool in danger of shipwreck called upon God in the name of His servant, John of Bridlington, “whereupon the prior himself appeared to them in his canonical habit and brought them safely to shore”. After his death the news of various miracles attributed to his intercession spread, and eventually Pope Boniface IX, canonized him. [I’ve always been rather disappointed that there’s never been a Pope Uglymug.]

At the Reformation, Henry VIII was asked to spare the magnificent shrine of the saint, Bridlington Priory, but of course it was destroyed in 1537. The nave of the church, restored in 1857, is all that now remains. At All Saints Church, Thwing, there is a window showing St John of Bridlington and St Cecilia [This is, at least, a more conventional window than the Fabian Society one, though not so entertaining]. There is a St John Street in Bridlington named after him, an old thoroughfare linking the "Old Town" that grew up around Bridlington Priory with the quayside community of fishermen and traders. At the church of St Andrew, Hempstead, a wooden panel showing John of Bridlington depicts him holding a fish, and in episcopal robes, though he never served as bishop. At least it doesn’t show him assisting with a difficult delivery, which is something we should all be grateful for.

So, that is Saint John of Bridlington, not to be confused with St John of Beverley, who is a very different kettle of fish. I have no idea what lessons St John’s life holds for me, except that, perhaps, if given the opportunity, I ought to branch out into gynaecology. Obviously, what I lack in formal training, I am more than happy to make up for in enthusiasm and practice.

I do know about Bridlington, though, because it is that area of the Yorkshire coast, where some of my earliest ancestors inhabited, and of course, the ancestors have been on my mind during a week when I’ve been working on a book strongly featuring the recipes, remedies and household hints of my grandmother. Her mother was a Harper, who were related to the Adamsons of Hunmanby, one of whom, John Adamson, was the village blacksmith in the 1670s.

No doubt there will be fresh challenges to come next week. It never stops coming at me from all sides these days, and my problems seem to be like the Chinese army, you mow down the first row of them and behind that there’s another, and another, and they just keep on coming. Dark nights are on the way, next weekend the clocks go back, and we enter that long, dark scary tunnel that leads to the solstice and the turning of the year. I need to be strong in the face of adversity, and take my lesson from John Adamson, and – maybe - from the Fabian Society – pray devoutly, hammer stoutly, and never give up until I have moulded something which is nearer my heart's desire. Only by this will I be remembered.

Epiblog for the Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. At least the ceaseless rain appears to have stopped drumming down, day after day, for the first time since about June, or so it seems. It’s been replaced by a succession of soft, golden days, crisp and bright in the morning, with occasional patterings of showers. Despite the fact that Autumn is my least favourite season, I do at least prefer these sorts of autumn days to the miserable, dank, damp foggy ones. Forget the mists, I’ll stick with the mellow fruitfulness, thanks.

Matilda has been taking advantage of the unaccustomed, mellow sunshine, and has ventured still further, extending her territory, the way cats do, to the extent that she’s now found her way down the steps and into the garden. Far from being the mighty battle-maiden we were led to believe she was, however, she’s still scared stiff of the slightest little thing; it only takes Butch, next door’s dog, to bark, or a plane to go overhead droning its way down towards the little airstrip at Crosland Moor, anything out of the ordinary, in fact, to send her scuttling back inside for safety.

She’s also a cat that likes her home comforts, and she shares at least that much with Kitty – a propensity for food, and for sleeping on the settee in front of the stove, and a disinclination to go out in the rain. The first fall of the raindrops is enough to bring her skittering back through the door. Her food habits only differ from Kitty’s in that, whereas Kitty liked to eat little and often, Matilda eats large and often. And when she does chose to exercise, she does it at unorthodox times of day (for some reason, 5.45AM seems to be the optimum time for batting the little woolly koala round on the bare floorboards next door, a time which could not be better for making a clatter and a galumphing racket, the rest of the house being quiet, still, and, in my case, trying to bloody sleep!)

Now that she’s grown more accustomed to the outside world, we’ve also opened up the other cat flap, the one on Colin’s side of the house, but so far she has been defeated by its technical wizardry, in that she doesn’t seem to realise that you have to push the flap with your head to get through it and out into the garden. The one on “our” side of the house, which Russell and Nigel used to use, is just a tunnel through the breeze block wall, basically, and doesn’t have a flap as such. It was with a certain amount of trepidation that I agreed we should open up the Colin’s side cat flap, given that the aperture is quite small, and the cat is quite large; I had visions of her getting stuck, and us having to phone up Owen to come up from Wales and take the door off in order to free her. But, like 99.99% of the things we worry about, this has not, of course, happened, because she hasn’t even been able to work out how to use it in the first place!

Freddie and Zak have been round to stay a couple of times, and gradually their mutual hostility to Matilda is turning grudgingly to tolerance, via apathy. Actually, Zak has been pretty apathetic throughout, up til his last visit, when he suddenly seemed to register for the first time a) that there was a cat in the room and b) it wasn’t Kitty. It was like he’d suddenly woken up and thought “bloody hell, you’ve got a new cat!” For the rest of his visit, he was watching her all the time, ears up, sniffing, wanting to be friendly, whereas of course Matilda just growled at him, constantly, from behind the settee.

Debbie’s teaching continues to gather momentum. She has picked up yet another class this week, teaching Functional Skills English to a class of thirty 16-year-old trainee footballers in Stalybridge. However, as usual, information and support from the College has been sketchy to non-existent, the route from home to the venue there is high, hazardous and treacherous, over the Woodhead Pass, which closes at the first flake of snow each winter, and the learners are apparently resistant to being taught and don’t see the point, so it sounds like a heady brew. If the class continues, I predict that they will grow to either love her or hate her, and if anyone can take all of that raging testosterone in hand and mould it to higher purposes, I am sure my wife can. She has more testosterone than the rest of them put together.

Although, having said that, she blithely announced this week that the clock had stopped and she couldn’t get it working again, denouncing it gleefully as a piece of crap on which I should not have wasted out money on Ebay. It turns out she was trying to wind up the chiming mechanism and not the timekeeping mechanism, and when I directed her to the correct hole, the clock not only allowed itself to be wound up, but hey presto, started ticking again and has kept perfect time ever since. As I said to her, like so much else in life, it is a case of getting it in the right hole. Her reply is regrettably unsuitable for publication on the grounds of extreme obscenity, although it did fill me with optimism that, if the footballers try it on, they will get as much as they give.

One consequence of autumn, indeed, one iconic sign of autumn, is that, round here at least, and especially in our garden, the leaves have suddenly fallen, so that my wheelchair ramp is a carpet of crisp rustling, and lighting the stove has suddenly become a lot easier because there is any amount of fallen twigs lying around in the driveway just waiting to be gathered up. I can’t believe the speed with which time’s zipping by this year. Already it’s half way through October, and people are starting to talk seriously about Christmas. I looked up on my calendar of Saints to see which Saint we were going to talk about today, and I have to say, they are a singularly dull and uninspiring lot, apart from the obvious comic potential of St Manakus and St Bernard of Arce, both of whom have feast days today. And very silly names. So I am forced to fall back on the liturgical year, it being the twentieth Sunday after Pentecost, apparently.

Today is also the anniversary of the Battle of Hastings, 1066, the one date everyone but David Cameron knows, that fateful encounter on Senlac Hill that ended the rule of Harold Godwinson and brought “Norman wisdom” to our shores. I always think “Senlac” sounds rather like a proprietary brand of laxative, and I would imagine if you were a Saxon house-carl, on foot, facing a heavily armoured Norman cavalryman with a long sharp spear charging down the hill towards you, it probably had a similar effect.

I’ve also been looking round for October folklore and rural traditions. I love the yearly calendar of customs and traditions that mark the salient points of the year, especially as they hark back to a semi-arcadian rural existence when it always seemed to be harvest time, skies were blue, clouds fluffy, high and white, and people were more in touch with the earth and nature. I know, that last bit sounds as if I’ve been reading too much Thomas Hardy and watching too much “Wartime Farm” and I am aware, of course, that rural life in Victorian and Edwardian England, and even in the 30s, 40s and 50s, was nowhere near as pleasant as people like H. E. Bates would have us believe.

Anyway, my gleanings so far on the folklore and weather front include:

Rain in October
Means wind in December.

When birds and badgers are fat in October,
Expect a cold winter

When berries are many in October
Beware a hard winter.

In October dung your fields
And your land its wealth shall yield.

If ducks do slide at Hallowtide,
At Christmas they will swim;
If ducks do swim at Hallowtide
At Christmas they will slide.

Always will there be twenty-nine fine days in October.

If the October moon comes without frost,
expect no frost till the moon of November.

We’ve already had the frosts, of course, so the last one’s negated anyway. There are, indeed, loads of berries around this year, and not only in the Holme Valley. When we were on Arran, back in August, there were so many thick, heavy clusters of berries on the rowan trees up there that I remarked on it at the time to Debbie.

Unfortunately, my all-time favourite, “red sky at night, the shepherd’s hut’s alight” doesn’t seem to have made it to the final cut.

Mention of badgers above reminds me, sadly, that not all of them will be waxing fat this autumn, since The Blight has announced the cull of up to 70% of badgers in the pilot areas of Gloucestershire and the South-West. The idiocy of this approach, which will do absolutely nothing to halt the spread of bovine TB (and which has been roundly condemned and rubbished by several eminent scientific authorities, none of whom remotely resemble balaclava-wearing hunt saboteurs) was aptly summarised by a recent correspondent to The Independent

“Badgers are not the source of bovine TB but just one of the hosts of the causative organism, Mycobactrium bovis; the other major host is cattle, and three-quarters or more of TB cases are attributed to spread from other cattle. So even eliminating all badgers (which the pilot culls cannot achieve anyway) wouldn't get near halting the spread of the disease.”

The hapless government spokesman on BBC Radio 4 (12/10/2012) said that after all of this, they don’t even know if it’s going to be successful! Yet 70% of the badgers in the areas will be dead, to pay lip service to the farmers, to make it look as if the government is doing something, and for a “solution” which even its proponents refuse to claim with any certainty that it will work!

Still, what do you expect from a party whose leaders are capable of standing up at their conference and quacking out duck-billed platitudes about how

“We're not going to get through this as a country if we set one group against another, if we divide, denounce and demonise.”

And then in the next breath, virtually, goes on to say

“Where is the fairness, we ask, for the shift-worker, leaving home in the dark hours of the early morning, who looks up at the closed blinds of their next door neighbour sleeping off a life on benefits?”

Er, if that isn’t dividing and demonising, then I don’t know what is. Several things have happened to me this year that have shaken my faith and occasionally doubt the existence of God and a higher scheme of justice than is obvious to we mere mortals: the fact that George Osborne can utter those words and not immediately be struck down by a thunderbolt is one of them. I suppose all you can do is to shrug and file him away with earthquakes, tsunamis and other disasters that bring misery to hundreds of thousands of people, and for which there seems no explanation compatible with the idea of a loving and rational deity. As Chandler said, maybe God has off-days, like the rest of us, but he must’ve been having a real balloolie the day he created George Osborne.

And as for Jimmy Savile, don’t even get me started. I said all I really want to say on the subject last week, but even so I have been staggered and horrified by the sheer industrial scale of his apparent misdemeanours, so much so that grim humour set in, and I was moved to observe that had he displayed similar energies in any other field, other than predatory sex offences, he would probably have won an award. Then of course it occurred to me that this is exactly what he did do – his frenetic charity fundraising activities were the flip side of the frenetic energy he seems to have put into abusing people, and, as I said last week, he was obviously a darker and more complex, more unlikeable character than many of us realised.

As I write, however, there are still many unanswered questions – who knew about it, and when, who turned a blind eye, did he act alone, and did anyone actively help him, or help to shield him from the consequences of his actions, and finally, of course, could it happen today, indeed is it happening today? I wonder how many of those questions we’ll ever really find the answers to, especially the question of whether he had help?

At times during last week, it seemed to me almost as if I was the only person in the UK who’d been a teenager in the 1970s who hadn’t been assaulted by Jimmy Savile; I know one thing, though, if I had been one of his victims, and had suffered in silence and been ignored and told to stop being silly for all those years, then I wouldn’t consider my claim to be truly vindicated until I had answers to each and every one of those questions.

Being unable to find a suitable saint to celebrate today has inevitably driven me back to the Biblical texts which the Lexicon deems appropriate for this day in the church’s calendar, one of which (Mark 10: 17-24) contains a lesson for Mr Osborne:

And when he was gone forth into the way, there came one running, and kneeled to him, and asked him, Good Master, what shall I do that I may inherit eternal life? And Jesus said unto him, Why callest thou me good? there is none good but one, that is, God. Thou knowest the commandments, Do not commit adultery, Do not kill, Do not steal, Do not bear false witness, Defraud not, Honour thy father and mother. And he answered and said unto him, Master, all these have I observed from my youth. Then Jesus beholding him loved him, and said unto him, One thing thou lackest: go thy way, sell whatsoever thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come, take up the cross, and follow me. And he was sad at that saying, and went away grieved: for he had great possessions. And Jesus looked round about, and saith unto his disciples, How hardly shall they that have riches enter into the kingdom of God! And the disciples were astonished at his words. But Jesus answereth again, and saith unto them, Children, how hard is it for them that trust in riches to enter into the kingdom of God!

Today, then, has been a day largely of contemplation, and reading, a total contrast to yesterday. Yesterday was one of those golden, luminous October days when the colours seem to sing, and the last remnants of the high cumulus clouds of summer are being blown about a blue sky like the rags of a defeated army’s tattered standards. And for five hours or so I forgot the dreary tasks which are stacking up for me next week, and forgot the endless hive of ideas buzzing around inside my head, and, once I had been parcelled up in my wheelchair and shoved up the ramp into the camper van, almost forgot the presence of the wheelchair itself, because we were off on the road!

Not this time, kayaking or seal spotting, but, in fact, on a mission, bound for an animal shelter at Bawtry, of all places, to view a potential pooch. I was going to say, a replacement for Tiggy, but that would be not only incorrect, but wrong on other levels, too, there never will be a replacement for Tiggy, she was a one-off. Still, Debbie had noted this small dog as being one which seemed to fit some of our criteria, and we phoned the rescue centre to see if she was still there, and she was, so we decided that unless we went and saw her, we would never know.

For me, it was a rather emotional journey, because part of it followed the route I used to take when I had a job that entailed me going to an office every day, before I was ill. I was amazed to see how many of the places I used to pass through looked rather shabby, and decayed – small shops that had obviously shut down, mines and pipeworks that were shutting, pubs that had already closed and pulled their last pint. This, of course, is the consequence of the economics that says if you owe someone a hundred apples, it is possible to repay them by chopping down the orchard. The economics of the Mad Hatter’s tea party, which requires you to believe six impossible things before breakfast, then get up and inform on your neighbour if their curtains are still drawn at 6.30AM, slave all day for a wage cut or a pay freeze, exchange your birthright of employment legislation for a mess of pottage comprising shares in a company that might be closing anyway, then come back home and fortify your house, sitting in wait for the marauders whom you may, now, legitimately attack once they set foot on your own property. Oh happy day. Welcome back to the middle ages. Grilled rat on a stick, anyone?

Nature, however, was showing her best, her truest colours, with the leaves just turning, to yellow, and pale, and hectic red as Shelley might have said if he’d been there at the time. The Stocksbridge bypass is still there, I’m pleased to report, although there was no sign of the spectral monk in any of his usual haunts. For most of the journey, it was hot and sunny, better weather than the so-called “summer”, in fact, and the sun coming in through the big wide windscreen, the pleasant temperature caused by the heater being on “feet”, the steady drone of the engine, and the even steadier drone of Debbie reciting everything I’ve ever done wrong and why, more or less sent me off to dreamland, but I woke up just in time to navigate the last bit, down an unmade road off a narrow lane. The potholes were spectacular, and I cautioned Debbie not to let the expensive, new, petrol tank ground on any of them, as it would be just our luck to wipe it off on a rock the week after we’d paid £648 to have it re-fitted.

We made it to the car park, and Debbie dismounted to do a recce, eventually returning with the news that, to save unshipping me in the wheelchair with getting out the ramps and all that it entailed, we could drive up to the hardstanding outside their reception, and they’d bring the dog out to us, so I could look at her as well.

Which they duly did. She was a good little dog, looked a bit like a GSD crossed with a collie (“she’s got collie ears”, the kennel-maid said) and she is currently called “Missy”, although she has no idea of the fact, and doesn’t respond to the name. Sadly, she didn’t really respond to anything, apart from dog treats, which the kennel-maid administered at regular intervals, and for which the dog duly sat and sort of gave paw, although it was more honoured in the breach than the observance.

All in all, it was very disappointing, and we drove away rather downhearted. We did actually fill out a form declaring an interest in her, while we were there (which was altogether more interest than she demonstrated in us!) but really we only did that because apparently it was a pre-requisite to adopting any dog from there, and could only be done by personal application, but to be honest I am not sure she’s the dog for us, and it would be unfair to her to take her on in those terms, unless, like Matilda, it was a case of either that or the chop, so we will probably email them tomorrow and tell them to scrap the application.

The trouble is, I have this sort of vision of us rocking up at an animal sanctuary somewhere and seeing a dog in a corner somewhere, perhaps looking a little sad and neglected, who will look up and see us, and wag her tail, and come over to us and jump up to be patted. That is exactly what Tig did when Debbie went down to Marina Kennels that day almost seventeen years ago, and that is what I’d hoped would happen yesterday, but it didn’t. Perhaps I am being unrealistic and setting the bar too high, I don’t know.

So, anyway, it’s been a sort of harvest-home type week, a week of all being safely gathered in, of only venturing out when necessary, getting on with things behind the scenes, and, today, settling down, after writing this, with a pot of tea and maybe some crumpets, in front of the stove, while Matilda snoozes away on Tiggy’s old fleecy dog-bed, and the crespuscular shadows of dusk are stealing across the garden. A week of battening down the hatches, ready for the storms that will undoubtedly come, as Alan Hull sang in Winter Song:

“When winter’s shadowy fingers first pursue you down the street
And your boots no longer lie about the cold around your feet
Do you spare a thought for summer, whose passage is complete,
Whose ruins lie in ashes and whose ashes lie in heat
When winter, comes howling in…”

Time to tidy up the garden, time to put the fields to the plough. Time to bank up the fire and put the kettle on. It’s nearly dark and in a fortnight, at this time, it’ll be even darker still, when the clocks go back. The ploughman homeward plods his weary way, with the heavy horse’s harness jingling.

“Iron-clad feather-feet pounding the dirt
An October day towards evening”

Epiblog for St Osyth's Day

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. One of those weeks when you look at your “to do” list at the end of the day and it’s still got 41 things on it, though they aren’t the same 41 things that you started with – you have done 12 of the old ones during the day, and gained 15 new ones. That sort of week, we all have them, I’m sure.  The weather’s gradually been getting colder as well, at least overnight. I’m starting to feel that chill when I swing my legs out of bed in a morning, accompanied by that feeling that I’d rather stay under the duvet for five minutes longer, if at all possible.

Matilda has taken to sleeping on the settee in the kitchen, now that she’s realised that this is actually the warmest spot in the house, which is also the reason why Debbie can usually be found there whenever she’s a) at home and b) not asleep in bed.

She’s also been outside a few more times, albeit under closely supervised conditions (the cat, not Debbie) and she has, independently, learned to use the cat flap.  She’s also met Freddie and Zak again, both of whom rather genteely and painedly  ignored her bad manners to the visitors, in the form of her sitting behind the settee instead of on it, and growling at them from time to time.  Still, as I keep saying, it’s early days yet.

Perhaps the most alarming thing that she’s begun doing, however, is playing. I was sitting working away the other morning, waiting for the kettle to boil, the house was quiet, tranquil and peaceful, when suddenly I heard this enormous galumphing racket of Matilda thundering up and down on the bare floorboards next door.  On investigating further, I discovered that she’d found (of all things) a small grey woolly koala bear about two inches long, and was batting it around the floor, chasing it, squatting down and pouncing on it, as if it was a mouse that she’d slain with her very own claws.  I have no idea where it came from, I imagine Debbie picked it up somewhere in her travels (possibly Australia, during her round-the-world trip with her mum in 2004, the clue being that it was a koala). I also have no idea where it is now, because I left her to it, and carried on working, to the background of her clumping and thumping about.  One thing is for sure, though, whatever Matilda’s capacity as a “mouser”, if our house is ever unfortunate enough to suffer infestation by small woolly koalas, we have nothing to fear.

I recounted the details of Matilda’s skittering about to Debbie, later, ending with “Why are all our animals so weird?” I was bemoaning the fact that every animal we’ve ever had has had eccentric tendencies of some sort or another. It’s a question a bit like “Why does the nutter on the bus always sit next to me?”

Debbie paused a while and then said, “You are the nutter on the bus, dear!”

 

Anyway, that was the week that was. As usual, these days. A white-knuckle ride of excitement, mainly comprising filling in forms, phoning up people who don’t care if I live or die, and dealing with couriers who don’t come when they are supposed to. It’s been a busy week for orders and book packing, and I’ve been getting together books to go out to the two main wholesalers in the UK, Gardners and Bertrams, and receiving other books back, from schools where authors have been doing poetry input, so it’s been all hell and no notion, and of course, the inevitable happened, it was only a matter of time after all – one of the couriers pulled the handle off the door. Again.

This time, though, when I reassembled it and screwed it back on, I did what I should have done the previous times I’d had to fix it, and made sure I’d pulled enough of the shaft through from the other side, also packing it round the inside with (of all things) a bit of foil from a cat food wrapper, which was the nearest thing to “shim” that I had to hand, so it went back on with a much tighter fit and less of a tendency to “waggle” and, touch wood, it’s stayed on ever since. I offer the above tip to you for what it’s worth (probably around £4 2s 6d) in case a courier ever pulls your knob off.

It’s also been a depressing week, to be honest, when news from the outside world has filtered in to the Holme Valley, possibly more so than usual, or maybe I have had the radio on more this week, in preference to music (my usual choice as a background to tasks of mindless tedium, such as compiling email mailing lists). Some of this news percolating through from the outside world has been grim, some of it comic. Some of it, grimly comic, such as the fiasco over the West Coast Main Line, which would be funnier if it wasn’t costing the taxpayer £14m to sort out. One thing that can be said for the Junta is that they are now officially worse than Mussolini, because at least he made the trains run on time.

This dovetailed neatly with the Labour Party Conference, affording them yet another open goal and this time, they almost managed to hit the corner flag. From the content of Miliband’s speech, he may even have been reading my blog from time to time, but why oh why did he opt to do that thing that all media-hungry wannabee apparatchik party leaders do, of delivering it like he was the compere of a games show? If ever a speech needed to be delivered (nay, thundered) with gravitas, from a lectern, podium, or even a pulpit, that was it, but instead, Miliband capered about the stage, flapping his hands like Larry Grayson.

By far and away the grimmest and most obvious manifestation of life outside the Holme Valley, outside our little world of home, hearth and garden, was the constant presence, on every news bulletin, of little April Jones, and her abduction and supposed murder. 

As I sit here, writing these words, a man has been charged with both these crimes, and the police had taken the highly unusual step of naming him even before charges were laid. Presumably because they have the difficult task of risking compromising any eventual trial against the chance that by naming him, someone will come forward with additional information that will help find the missing child.

I am not going to start naming names on here, because there has been more than enough speculation already and I don’t know the people involved, only what the police and the media see fit to tell us. It looks to me that the police are going to have to go to court with whatever they’ve got, barring the miracle of April turning up alive somehow, in a wardrobe, like Shannon Matthews, or, as now sadly seems much more likely, her body being found.

Ill-informed speculation about trials such as these just makes it more likely that, sooner or later, a major court case will be stopped in its tracks and a guilty person will get off on a technicality, simply because their defence team is able to convince a judge that a fair trial is impossible because of media and internet speculation.  You can’t blame a judge in those circumstances, they can hardly charge Facebook with contempt of court, though it would be interesting to see them try.

I mention Facebook because the need for restraint was, of course, totally lost on the online social networks community. Facebook was awash with febrile speculation of the sort that almost sank the Joanna Yeates trial and which surfaced again a few weeks ago over the death of poor young Tia Sharpe.  The unedifying spectacle of a cyber-lynch-mob, complete with pitchforks and fiery torches, baying, in mis-spelt words and with common grammatical errors, for torture, castration, and the return of the death penalty, leavened with a dash of xenophobia. (“I bet whoever done it isn’t even English”.)

If ever there was a line from the poetic canon of the last few hundred years to sum this up perfectly, it is in W. B. Yeats’s “The Second Coming”, when he writes:

“The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity”

What these people are failing to grasp is that paedophilia and child abuse is a disease.  There is some flaw in the psychological makeup of these individuals, something maybe that inhibits them from forming relationships with the normal age groups one might expect, and drives them to do it, whatever, regardless of the risks and penalties.  Even if you decorated every lamp-post in the country with a swinging paedophile, burnt them out of their homes, and took out a few paediatricians along the way, just for good measure, it won’t stop paedophilia itself. 

This makes it sound like I am making excuses for these people, I am not. But you can seek to understand something, even unpleasant things such as child abuse, without agreeing with it or condoning it. In fact, I contend that if we understood it better,  particularly if we understood and did something about the root causes, there would be less of it. But we have to understand that these people are like junkies, they will lie to their nearest and dearest to get their next fix.

Obviously, we have laws in this country, to protect children from being exploited in this way, and it is right that they should be applied, and applied rigorously, consistently, and justly.  Ultimately there are people in whom this disease is so virulent that they are a danger to children, and society must be protected from that danger. We also have a society, though, that combines an unhealthy paranoia for the welfare of children from threats that may or may not exist, and which robs children of their own childhood sometimes – the idea of the dangerous stranger, when in fact, most abuse happens within a family or other trusted setting – with the premature sexualisation of children, and a society that links together fame, wealth and sexuality, often in completely inappropriate ways, and is encouraged to do so by a culture and media that blasts it at kids, 24/7.  When my 13-year old cousin can post a video on Facebook of a rapper with a lyric that includes the wonderful line, “suck it, bitch”, clearly something is amiss.

Add into this heady conconction the breakup of established social and family values, and the pressures of economic deprivation and hardship, and you have a very nasty brew indeed. “Kill the pedo” is a seductively simple message, but maybe we should be looking at some of the ingredients of the stew more closely in the first place, rather than just wiping the mess off the stove every time it boils over.  It won’t be easy, because it’s the equivalent of shining a forensic torch into the dark mind of somebody (potentially) like Ian Brady, and we may well find out unpleasant things about ourselves in the process, because there are all sorts of abuse, not all of them sexual, not all of them perpetrated on kids, but it must be done.

Of course, it also boiled over this week in the form of the imbroglio about Jimmy Savile.  In this case, speculation is not subject to the same legal constraint, because the “defendant” is currently deceased.  It’s difficult, as well, to know what the victims will gain from the exposure, except to get it off their collective chests after all these years and try to achieve some sort of “closure”. I rather fear as well, that there was an element of their being exploited by the makers of the documentary programme, for prurient and sensationalist effect.  I found myself thinking that the real questions arising from the affair were who else knew, what did they know, and when did they know it, and above all, why didn’t they do anything about it?

The fact that the BBC officials apparently said, when confronted with the allegations not “are they true?” but “do the papers know about this?” speaks volumes.  There is a possibility, I suppose, that the victims might be able to make some sort of financial claim against the estate for compensation, but I think that if I were in their shoes, no amount of what I’d see as tainted money would give them back the years of self-torment for what they have been through. 

So, it’s all been pretty heavy stuff, and by the time Thursday and Friday came around, I was actually feeling pretty depressed in general about the state of humanity and the world we have created. This happens every so often, I find, I get depressed simply by watching the news too much or too often, especially the bad news, which is all the news seems to be, these days.  I found myself looking up and re-reading poems that means something to me in such circumstances, such as “On Dover Beach” by Matthew Arnold, especially

“…the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.”

Arnold was writing at a time when he felt that the “the sea of faith” was at a low ebb, because the Christian religion was under threat. God alone knows what he’d think today.  There are those who look specifically to religion (in its broadest sense) to make people more morally aware on issues such as child abuse, but this is immediately discredited by those occasions when organised religion itself becomes part of the problem rather than part of the solution, by providing a platform and opportunity for it to take place, then refusing to condemn it properly afterwards.

Also, the answer isn’t simply to revert to more traditional modes of priesthood and marriage. In the same way that women priests and bishops are perfectly capable of providing spiritual guidance and gay people are perfectly capable of loving one another, so abuse still happened back in the days when all marriage was strictly heterosexual and all vicars were men. The Daily Mail and the Telegraph might take the view that divorce, free love, women bishops and gay marriage cause child abuse, but if there is a role for organised religion in this issue, for me, it needs to be much more difficult, and much more subtle, how to teach people to seek for spiritual guidance to be able to recognise the moral rights and wrongs in a wide variety of differing moral circumstances, rather than getting bogged down in a “one size fits all” morality that concentrates too much on who is allowed to do what to whom and after how many weeks, months or years.

So, I was feeling pretty down by the end of the week, pretty depressed.  This has affected my workload as well, both business and domestic. I still haven’t got all of the archives from the old camper sorted out, I still haven’t finished my indexing job,  I still haven’t finished the books I have been working on, and I still haven’t done this year’s costs or next year’s budget.  But at least I’ve fixed the doorknob. 

I was mindlessly surfing the Archers message board when I came upon the mental health thread, a place I don’t often venture, not out of a sense of squeamishness, more out of a notion of my own inadequacy, if I am only just managing to keep the lid on, what use am I to anybody else?  This time, reading anew some of the postings on there from people, about their lives and what they were going through, I was struck by two things: firstly, the sheer heroism of some of these people, who are somehow managing to face down and grapple with their demons, day after day, and not cave in, not crumble under the strain, and secondly, how small and trivial my own troubles are, in comparison.  True, my knees ache, I hate being in this bloody mobile birdcage of a wheelchair, I’m probably mildly depressed myself, and I often don’t know where my next doorknob’s coming from, but I take my hat off, literally and metaphorically, if you like, to the magnificent copers in that thread.

I realise, by the way, that the above sentence will probably result in a postbag of yet more people sending me doorknobs. Please don’t; I appreciate the gesture, but it’s not actually the lack of a knob that’s the problem, as the woman bishop said to the actress.

For all that it’s a bad, bad, naughty world, where mad, bad, random stuff happens, yet, time and time again, the indefatigable, indomitable nature of the human spirit comes shining through, be it in the copers and the carers, the thousands of volunteers who turned out to scour the hills and look for April Jones in foul, appalling weather, and the selfless souls who spend their time rescuing unwanted animals.

I mention the latter because, also in my mindless trawling of the net when I was feeling oppressed by grim reality and unable to concentrate on what I should be doing, I also hit upon Rain Rescue’s Facebook page, and the story of Cleo the dog.  Cleo is a dog which Rain have had in their care for about three months now, during which time, in foster care, she’s grown progressively more lame.

She’s a simple soul, according to Rain, she likes nothing more than cuddles and being allowed to sit on the settee. From her picture, she looks like a slightly chubby, chunky, biscuit-coloured golden retriever.  Anyway, Rain have had her assessed by their vets, and it’s not brilliant news – she’s got trouble with her cruciate ligaments, and needs an operation costing about £1400 before she’s able to walk again, and even then, there’s no absolute guarantee that it will be a success, and poor Cleo still might end up having to be put to sleep as the kindest option.

It’s a dreadful dilemma for the people at Rain, and I don’t envy them it. £1400 will put a massive dent in their small, hand-to-mouth cash flow, especially at the time when they’re just about to take on an extra commitment or gamble, depending how you view it, of opening up their first charity shop, in Sheffield.

At the moment, as I write this, on Sunday 7^th October, she’s due back at the vets early next week for another assessment, so let’s all pray to St Roche for a good outcome, the best one for Cleo and her quality of life, whatever that is, and I hope personally, it’s for another miracle of rejuvenation. If Rain Rescue do decide to go ahead with the operation, perhaps they should consider an appeal to the idiot this week who paid £44,450 at auction for a pair of Daniel Craig’s (apparently unwashed, ewww) swimming trunks that he wore in some James Bond film or other, because clearly that person has more money than sense.

And so we came to Sunday. Because it has been such a lousy, depressing week, and because we realised that the weather can only get worse from now in, and because the clocks go back soon, and because Debbie looked at the weather forecast, the Inshore Waters Forecast and the tide tables for Walney Island and pronounced them all to be favourable, we decided to declare today a holiday.  We’ve driven here in the camper, collecting Debbie’s dad, and Zak and Freddie en route.  Debbie is off kayaking and frolicking with the seals, Debbie’s dad is off and frolicking with Zak and Freddie along the beach, and I am not frolicking, but in fact writing these words in longhand in a ring-bound notebook, to type them up later, while in front of me the unaccustomed sun sparkles on the see and I survey the vast sweep of the horizon, bounded at the left by Morecambe Bay and Blackpool Tower, a distant lump of Anglesey and the Snowdon mountains in the middle, dead head, all of sixty miles away, and on the right, away over my right shoulder, the Isle of Man in the far distance, looking much as it must have looked to the Vikings, windfarms notwithstanding.

Talking of Vikings reminds me that today is St Osyth’s day.  Previously, all I had known about St Osyth is that there is a village of that name in Essex, where people very recently were claiming to have seen a lion on the loose, which turned out in the end probably to have been a golden retriever like Cleo, or larger.  I have, however, brought with me some extensive research on St Osyth (the person) as opposed to St Osyth (the place), and I can report that despite the place being in Essex, St Osyth (the person) was not an Essex girl, but was born in Quarrendon, which was then in the Kingdom of Mercia, but is now, rather more prosaically, in Buckinghamshire.  Osyth was the daughter of a Mercian sub-king called Frithwald, and she was the niece of both St Edith and St Edburga of Bicester, so perhaps sainthood ran in the family, like relics.  Either that, or the entry level requirements for sainthood were more lax in those days.

She was raised in a convent in Warwickshire under the guidance of St Modwen and, unsurprisingly, considering the influences on her life up to that point, had decided to become an Abbess.  Daddy, however, had other ideas, and she was married off to Sighere, King of the East Saxons, in Essex. After Sighere’s demise, she finally achieved her ambition, establishing a convent at Chich, in Essex, of which she became the first Abbess. Only to be murdered by marauding Vikings in 700AD.

Somehow, in the way things did in those days when there was no official story and everything was a re-telling of a re-telling of a re-telling, the Martyrdom of St Osyth became attached not to Chich, where it happened, but to the Holy Well at Quarrendon, where she was born, and further embellished, some versions recounting that she picked up her own severed head and walked to the nearest convent with it under her arm, before collapsing in a heap. Had she really been from Essex of course, the severed head would have had lipstick, Abbess or no Abbess.

Her burial site, at St Mary’s Church, Aylesbury, became the site of so many unofficial pilgrimages that in 1500 the Pope of the day (why does that phrase conjure up an image of Gary Lineker?) issued a decree that her bones should be dug up and reburied elsewhere, in secret.  Confusingly, though, they were never actually buried at the Priory of St Osyth, which was merely dedicated to her when it was founded during the reign of Henry I.

So, what can we learn from the life and death of St Osyth, apart from the obvious warning not to stand too near to Vikings with large, sharp axes?  The answer is, I suppose, not much. She lived in a time when life was nasty, brutish and short, and random, nasty, bad things happened. A bit like today, really, especially in Essex.  We really don’t know enough about her, and in fact, had she not been of relatively noble birth, we would know even less, probably nothing at all. 

As I said above, the qualities required for admission to sainthood have changed a lot since the Anglo-Saxon era.  These days, the Catholic church, which is in charge of that sort of thing, has a procedure, with strict rules, which would-be saints have to follow after their earthly demise, a well-defined path including miracles and beatification, as you progress up the hierarchy towards sainthood.  It was all a lot more haphazard, way back when.

I’ve come to a conclusion though, while writing this. Sainthood is far too good to be wasted on the dead. I think there should be some recognition here and now, and I don’t see why it should be an exclusively religious thing either, so I hereby found the Order of the SSS (Steve’s Secular Saints) and I am going to start creating my own. If it makes you happier, I can stick a jiffy bag on my head, and do it all in Latin.

So, for all the good people striving to do good deeds in a naughty world, for all the copers, the carers, the searchers and the rescuers, be it of lost animals, lost people, or lost souls, this one’s for you. The night is long, especially after a week like last week, but take heart, take hope: the sun’s coming over the hill.