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!