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.
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