Epiblog for St Catherine's Day

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley, as the winter weather begins to bite. We’re well on the slippery slide to Christmas now, and everything’s stepped up a notch as business deadlines loom – not only nice ones, such as new books coming out, but also nasty ones, such as year-end figures and tax returns. Meanwhile, sitting here each day working away and looking out of the conservatory windows, I can see what remains of the garden being shredded by the gales and soaked even more by the relentless rain. Cold, short, dark, wet days.

The only redeeming features of the weather have been a couple of sunrises this week which were truly, spectacularly, beautiful. Because it’s got round to that time of year again, I can see, on a clear dawn, the morning star gleaming just above the tree-line as the horizon starts to lighten. Then the whole sky becomes flushed with an improbably, angry red, such that if I were to actually sit down and paint it, and show you the result, you would say that I’d over-egged the pudding; finally, it resolves itself to pale blue with strips of white cloud barred, even gilded, with gold, colours of an almost heraldic purity.

This happened on at least two mornings last week – at least it happened on two days when I was lucky enough to be awake at that time to see it. I say “lucky”, because of course the reason why I was awake to see it was because I’d had yet another bad night’s sleep, with a combination of cramp and feeling cold. On balance, I was glad I saw both the dawns in question, though I would rather have woken early from choice, and after a deep refreshing sleep. Still, like Karine Polwart says, you have to find joy where you can.

Matilda continues snoozing her way through winter, with occasional forays to the litter tray and the food bowl, and even more occasional ones outside. We’ve never actually had a cat that hibernated before, but she comes pretty close. Still, she’s a simple little soul, and her version of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is a small, compact triangle of food, warmth, and the occasional tumjack-furfle.

Freddie and Zak come and go, a bit like the women in the room, talking of Michelangelo, except that they are male, and don’t er, talk, so that’s where this week’s TS Eliot allusion breaks down, folks, and we abandon it at the roadside and tramp on, regardless. At the moment, as I type this, Zak is away at a road race with Debbie’s dad; merely spectating, as far as I know, and not joining in. Freddie, as befits his elder status, has been excused parade and is snoozing on the rug, front and centre before the stove, his little rabbit-foot back feet sticking out like drumsticks, just begging for someone to pop a cutlet-frill over his toes.

Debbie’s toes, meanwhile, are hidden from view inside her new “vegan” commando boots (presumably as worn by vegan commandos the world over). I hesitated before asking her if this meant she was going commando. She did, however, buy the Royal Marines Survival Guide while we were on holiday. I hope that this is more use than the SAS survival guide she bought the year before, which recommended that the best way to catch a wild pig was to sneak up on it while it was asleep. I know all’s fair in love and war, but I would have expected something a little more sturm and drang from the SAS, for God’s sake – they could at least have abseiled in on a zip wire, hurling thunderflashes. Except that would have woken up the pig.

Deb has been steadily accumulating camping gear on Ebay, including a camouflage poncho which is big enough to go over both you and the rucksack you are carrying. Very useful in this weather, except the other morning when she needed it she couldn’t find it, which I suppose just goes to show how effective it is.

As for me, I have been sending out books, and making lists (but, unlike Santa, not checking them twice – not yet, at any rate) and phoning people up to say did they get their review copy, and if so did they like it, and would they please just, for 30 seconds or so out of their busy day discussing last night’s Strictly, care if I lived or died? This year, of course, I also have Skype, and I had thought about doing some of the calls that way, especially to the broadcast media outlets. The only problem being that the background would give away the fact that I was sitting in the kitchen by the stove, and not in an office.

While this is not necessarily a deal-breaker, it did occur to me that there is a potential market for drop-down background screens for the discerning Skype-er. You could just pull a string before dialling the call, and behind you a realistic “background” drops into place. You could have several varieties of interchangeable background, depending who you were calling, and why: “busy office”, “woodland glade” and “Turkish brothel” spring to mind. There may be others. Oh well, if the books never take off, there’s a field I can diversify into. Although to be honest, if the books never take off, then I will probably diversify under the railway arches in a cardboard box, rather than into a field.

I haven’t been taking much notice of the outside world this week, for obvious reasons of business and busy-ness. Port Talbot Steelworks is losing hundreds of jobs as another huge lump falls off our economy and vanishes beneath the waves. Oh, and the Church of England voted against having women bishops.

If nothing else, I should be grateful for this bizarre and perverse decision having confirmed for me, in my own mind, that I am not a Bible-believing Christian. Listening to some of the arguments of members of the House of Laity, citing Old Testament authorities for their belief that everything should stay just as it always is was and ever shall be, thank you very much, made me realise that I would be quite happy to keep the four Gospels and chuck the rest of the Bible away, except that to do so would mean losing some remarkable and sonorous 17th century prose, even if most of it is about the voice of the Lord causing the hinds to calve and discovering the thick bushes.

Some of the protestations by these men, and unbelievably, women, to me, carried the same unconvincing ring when they said “But we’re happy to have different roles” as when women who have been abused say “Honestly, it’s absolutely nothing, I walked into the door”, or when people in favour of fox-hunting claim the fox enjoys it, or fly-by-night literary festivals decamp with £360.00 worth of books, take five years to pay and say “the cheque is in the post”, or report you to the police when you try and chase the debt.

The problem lies in the refusal of the traditionalists to give way and allow the Church to move with the times, so it can put this minor, absolutely irrelevant issue which everyone but the hidebound can see does not matter in the slightest, to bed and get on with the real work of building the New Jerusalem on earth. Maybe it would be better all round if the powers that be in the Anglican Church just accepted that there will never be any compromise ground between what is now, essentially two separate churches still under one umbrella, and allowed each half to go its separate way. Maybe that would be kindest all round, especially when the compromise on offer was “flying bishops” for those misogynist parishoners and clergy who felt uncomfortable at the idea of submitting to the authority of a mere woman! Although the term “flying bishops” does conjure up some wonderful mental images of men in copes and mitres standing round a brazier and holding up illuminated placards saying “Official Episcopal Picket” [try saying that when you’ve had a few!]

Anyway, the Church of England became a lot less relevant for me, and I suspect many others, this last week, and a shade more incomprehensible. And I have to say, it made me both angry and sad. Sad for poor old Rowan Williams, who is well off out of it, especially since new Archbishop Justin Sidebottom seems hell-bent (no pun intended) on reprising the rows and schisms all over again, but this time about “gay marriage”, for the next God knows how long, and angry that while all this poodlefaking nonsense over meaningless diversions is taking up the Church’s time and resources, congregations are dwindling, people are in desperate need of spiritual leadership, people are undergoing physical hardship, hunger and homelessness, and abroad, people are dying simply for lack of clean water. Oh, and the Middle East is once again in flames, as extremist religious wingnuts indulge in tit-for-tat violence while civilians on both sides crouch in fear of death by high explosives.

So, well done, the Church of England, you had an open goal and you hit the corner flag. You belong in the great canon of “boobies who should, and could, have done better, really”, along with Gordon Brown and that bloke who missed the crucial penalty in Italia 90.

The fact that the real message of Christmas is being obscured by a barrage of secular hype and drivel surrounding the “festivities” is once again manifest in the Christmas television ads, which have started to appear with all the ghastly relentless, drip-drip-drip horror of Chinese water torture. People all over the country will be either about to put themselves in hock for shit that they don’t really want or need, or resisting the peer pressure to do so and being made to feel like Scrooges, Grinches, bad parents or party-poopers for daring to think there might be other, deeper meanings to Christmas than tinsel, fairy lights, artificial snow, Marks and Bloody Spencer and “Rockin’ around the Christmas Tree”. And of course, the worst is, that I am part of it as well. People do give each other books at Christmas, however much I might try and subvert the genre I am pastiching. My own economic survival, and that of our hearth and home, depends on sales, until such time as someone pays me to do something more meaningful than sit here scribbling, or I decide to go off and live in the woods and bake my own curtains and weave my own bread.

The only way I can really square it with myself, I suppose, is to try and cut down our own consumerism (never conspicuous to start with) and make sure that we don’t indulge in any of the false bonhomie, “Christmas for the sake of it” stuff. If I do give someone a present, however pitiful and small, at least it’s truly meant, and given, and not because I felt obliged to.

As far as my own Christmas list is concerned, none of the things I want for Christmas could be wrapped up and given on Christmas morning, and I am trying to wean myself off yearning for “things” anyway, and only buying and using what I have to, as the bare minimum. Though I did receive a thoughtful and unsolicited gift of some fingerless gloves this week in the post. I haven’t had any door knobs for a while, however, and I have given up altogether looking out for the Ferrari.

Today is “Stir up Sunday”, the day when traditionally, you should begin preparing your Christmas pudding. The name arises from the Collect for the day, which is:

Stir up, we beseech thee, O Lord, the wills of thy faithful people; that they, plenteously bringing forth the fruit of good works, may of thee be plenteously rewarded; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The idea being, according to that source and fount of all knowledge, Wikipedia, that:

“Supposedly, cooks, wives and their servants would go to church, hear the words 'Stir up, we beseech thee, O Lord...', and be reminded, by association of ideas, that it was about time to start stirring up the puddings for Christmas.”

I bet the person who wrote that sentence voted against women bishops.

As well as being “Stir up Sunday”, it is also the feast of St Catherine, and at the risk of re-inventing the wheel, I did actually research her, or rather, more specifically, the customs and rituals associated with her day, and was surprised to find that they were legion.

St. Catherine's Day is still widely celebrated in modern-day Estonia where it marks the arrival of winter and is one of the more important and popular autumn days in the Estonian folk calendar. It is a day of celebration for the women in Estonian culture.

There are other food traditions associated with the day as well. A traditional celebration of St Catherine's Day, which has apparently “seen something of a revival in modern times”, is the baking of 'Cattern Cakes' in honour of St Catherine. The rise of the internet has assisted in this process, as recipes have become more readily available. The key ingredients are bread dough, egg, sugar, lard or butter, and caraway seeds. Whereas, in Canada, St. Catherine's taffy is made by French Canadian girls to honour St. Catherine, the patron saint of unmarried women. St. Catherine's Day is sometimes known in among French-Canadians as "taffy day," a day when marriage-age girls would make taffy for eligible boys. Marguerite Bourgeoys, a founder of the Notre-Dame de Montréal and an early teacher in Ville-Marie, the colonial settlement that would later become Montreal, is credited with starting the tradition as a way of keeping the attention of her young pupils.

Much as I might experience language difficulties with French-Canadian girls, unless it is Kate and Annie McGarrigle singing “Heart Like A Wheel” or “Complainte pour St Catherine”, nevertheless, like Mayor Adam West, I am “a man who likes his taffy”, so I am all in favour of this one.

I mentioned Estonia above, and the customs for the Estonian St. Catherine’s Day are generally associated with the kadrisants (kadri beggars) or kadris, similar to the traditions practised elsewhere in Europe on St. Martin’s Day. Both require dressing up and going from door to door on the eve of the holiday to collect gifts, such as food, cloth and wool, in return for suitable songs and blessings. See also under “begging”, as practised by my ancestors and others.

On Estonian farms, minding the herds and flocks was primarily the responsibility of women and therefore, St. Catherine’s Day involves customs pertaining to shepherding. On St. Catherine’s Day, in order to protect the sheep, shearing and weaving were forbidden and sewing and knitting were also occasionally banned. In addition, apparently, “both men and women may dress up as women”, although of course that is something that is open to the more adventurous amongst us all year round, and not just on St Catherine’s Day, the only exception being if you are a woman who wants to be an Anglican bishop.

In France on St. Catherine's Day, it is customary for unmarried women to pray for husbands, and to honour women who have reached the age of 25 but haven't married—called "Catherinettes" in France. Catherinettes send postcards to each other, and friends of the Catherinettes make hats for them—traditionally using the colours yellow (faith) and green (wisdom), often outrageous—and crown them for the day. Pilgrimage is made to St. Catherine's statue, and she is asked to intercede in finding husbands for the unmarried girls lest they "don St. Catherine's bonnet" and become spinsters. The Catherinettes are supposed to wear the hat all day long, and they are usually feted with a meal among friends. Because of this hat-wearing custom, French milliners have big parades to show off their wares on this day. More a case of “who wants to be a milliner” than “phone a friend”, I guess.

An English traditional rhyme for the day says:

St Catherine, St Catherine, Oh lend me thine aid,
And grant that I never may die an old maid.

Because, quite clearly, your success or failure as a woman is only defined in relation to your husband. We laugh now at these quaint old customs, yet the sentiments underlying them also underpin the Christmas TV adverts that assert that Christmas can only happen if “Mum” plays her usual role of hunter-gatherer-present-buyer-chief-cook-and-bottle-washer, and the beliefs of the Laity of the Church of England, who probably think something similar, but with an added reminder to make, and stir, a Christmas pudding while they’re at it. Still, as American religious fruitcake Pat Robertson has pointed out:

Feminism is a socialist, anti-family, political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.

I gather he’s going to be the new Bishop of Bath and Wells. The old one was better, of course, he used to eat babies.

As I said above, most of the things on my Christmas list, such as it is, are things you might pray for, rather than expect to find wrapped up under the tree on Christmas morning. Except that praying doesn’t always seem to work. In fact, sometimes it can feel like you are praying into the void, and bad shit happens anyway, because Big G doesn’t share our ideas of “good” and “bad”, “fair” and “unfair”.

I was already disenchanted with the doctrinaire and inflexible nature of religious morality in general, before the Church of England shot itself in the foot, and my prayers may well have suffered as a result, since really all I can pray for with any conviction is that the people I care for (both two- and four-legged) will continue to be protected from harm, happy, warm and well-fed, that the souls of the departed will somehow be at rest in whatever you like to call “heaven”, that someone will do something about the homeless, these bitter winter nights, and that I will continue to have the strength to do what is necessary day by day, to keep the whole show on the road and not let down those who depend on me, but to lead us out of debt and to a place of relative safety.

And so I find myself here once again, standing on the cliff of faith, looking out into the dark for a glimpse of a lighthouse, and trying to work out what, if anything, Big G could want from me in return for my part in this bargain. Assuming he’s even listening, which seems a big assume, some days.

OK, God, I think I finally understand my mission now. You want someone to make a heroic gesture, to go out there and take one for the team. To try and explain the idiotic decision over women bishops for instance. You want someone to go around at night and make sure all the doors are locked, then (metaphorically or literally, you're not that fussy)to go on up, out of doors, (last one out locks up) and to keep watch, out on to the hill at night and lie out in the heather, sticking out dark nights alone, keeping vigil, keeping watch, and make sure that everyone’s alright, then go home when your shift is done, in the blood-red, blue-and-gold-barred winter dawn and finally get to make yourself a steaming cup of tea; unless the Lord keep the city, the wakeman waketh in vain.

You want someone who’s able to find that the fledgling bird your work colleagues rescued when it fell out of its nest and kept in a shoebox has died in the night, and to give it a lonely yet reverential burial, as deserving of a unique work of creation, but then still be able to go back to them with a smile in the morning, and bluff your way out of it, and say you took the lid off, and it flew away, free and happy. Take one for the team.

You want me to carry on praying for the welfare of everyone on an increasingly long and growing list, including Freddie, Zak, Matilda, and all the dead animals whose Tiggyness, Dustyness, Kittyness, Nigelness and Baggisness lives on somehow somewhere, even though I prayed equally hard, if not harder, for you not to take them in the first place. Even though there’s no discernible effect, apart from if I stopped praying for all these people, they might be even worse off than they are now!

Yeah. Take one for the team, just like Jesus did. Stick out dark nights alone, just like Thomas Thornhill my ancestor did in his shepherds’ caravan. Just like the shepherds in Estonia, watching over the flock so that sheep may safely graze, while the moon gets frost on it and the stars twinkle cold as points of ice. You want someone to justify the ways of God to man, and the ways of man to God. God alone knows why, out of all the people you could have asked, you chose me, I have absolutely no idea; but I’ll do my best.

Alright, I’ll take a chance. I’ll do my best, but in return, in this rather one-sided bargain, with your weird ideas about what’s fair and just, for a change, you’ll have to get off your Godly arse and do some things for me. World peace and clean water, for a start.

We’ll come back to the Ferrari later.

Epiblog for St Juthware's Day

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. The weather has been finer, but colder. They keep saying on the weather forecast on the local TV that it’s going to be another mild day for November, but nobody told my bones, and they hum and sing and crackle to themselves sometimes, especially if I sit too long in one position or get too far away from the stove. I’m hopeful that this Quinine Sulphate stuff will help, if it ever gets here.

Matilda, too, has not been straying that far from the stove, and when she does go out in the garden, the black and brown and orange splodges of her fur match almost exactly the black and brown and orange splodges of the fallen leaves, so much so that if she lay down amongst them, you would be hard put to tell where the cat ended and the leaves began, or vice versa.

Last Sunday evening, for some reason best known to herself, Matilda was rubbing her chivvy-chin on the ornamental dog made of sheet metal and springs (it's an ornament, we got it from the garden centre, yonks ago, and it sits on the floor next to Zak’s armchair) Somehow, she got her collar caught on the curl at the end of its tail, spooked herself and tried to run off, of course the metal dog was now attached to her, and followed her, clattering across the carpet.

As she passed me, gathering speed in panic, doing a passable imitation of a “Skimmington Ride”, I grabbed for her and missed, but caught the dog, which had the effect of putting strain on the collar, - fortunately one of those safety ones that is designed to snap apart if the cat snags it on anything - which is exactly what happened. The dog was left in my hand, the collar went flying off to one side and Matilda disappeared out of the room. Later, she crept quietly back, minus collar, and once more resumed her place on the beddies at the side of the stove. I retrieved the various bits of the collar from the various dark corners where they had landed, and found that, in any case, she appeared to have also lost the little ID barrel bit that screws in place and holds the piece of paper that says “I am Matilda, I am microchipped” and gives her address. So that’s £1.98 she owes me, for starters, and we’ll have to get her a new one.

The saga of Elvis rumbles on. We’re now in detailed discussion about the type and style of fence that it would be necessary to put across the back of the garden before they will entrust Elvis the hound-dog into our care. To be fair, they are willing to offer us physical help in the form of what have been described as two brawny males, quote unquote, to put it up, once I have sourced the materials. And, to be even more fair, we were thinking about screening off the view across the back anyway, next Spring, because the mill down in the valley is going to be having some building work done and I thought it would be an opportune time to screen out their noise.

Having said that, though, it’s an extra thing to fit in and organise, that I wasn’t expecting to have to fit in and organise, at a time six weeks before Christmas when I have one new book at press, another going next week, and an “instant book” on Amazon to do ready for release this month also. That’s why, this week, I have been reduced to searching online for willow hurdles and willow screening rolls, fence posts and other such accoutrements, with my other leg. Given the limited time I can spare to deal with this, and the short days at this time of year, I’d be surprised if it gets sorted this side of Christmas, to be honest.

Other than that, nothing much seems to have happened this week. This is both a good thing, and a bad thing. Generally, in our lives, when “things” “happen”, this usually means bad things, unexpected things, costly things. So from that point of view, I should be glad of a quiet week. However, also this week, nothing “good” has happened either – I haven’t achieved much, despite spending all day and every day struggling with the same little knot of intractable problems, and my “to do” list looks pretty much the same at the end of the week as it did at the beginning. Deb has had a similar week, with some wins and some losses. The College has finally woken up to the fact that someone who lives in Stalybridge was teaching a class in Dewsbury for them, and someone who lives in Huddersfield was teaching a class in Stalybridge, and arranged a swop. At the same time, though, the Calderdale class looks like it is coming to an end, which will mean a net loss of £140 a month for her. Ouch. The Dewsbury class also brought its own sting in the tail.

To teach it, Debbie needed to mug up on a document that was allegedly available on the College’s “Staff Portal”. This has never worked properly for her when logging on from home, and on Friday afternoon this was no exception, as she wasted three and a half hours of her life that she will never get back, talking to various assistant factotums in IT support who eventually, painfully slowly, identified that it was a password issue. However, re-setting the password also proved to be about as quick and enjoyable as 18th-century dentistry (“I can’t reset it from here, I’m ILT, I’ll have to put you through to IT”) and once it was re-set, all it enabled her to do was to discover that the document she had been told was there, actually … wasn’t. “Shambles” is far too kind a word. How OFSTED ever awarded them a “2” escapes me, unless it was marks out of 100, and even then that would have been over-generous.

So, a week of very little achievement all round, and one which left me feeling tired and drained. I hate this time of year anyway, and this week was no different. We’re all in that long, dark tunnel that leads to 2013. Sometimes – many times, in fact, this week - I have felt like Jack Brotherhood in “A Perfect Spy” who got his medal “for sticking out dark nights, alone”.

And so we come to Sunday.

On this day (18th November) in 1105, Maginulfo was elected as the Antipope and took the name of Sylvester IV. I must admit I like the idea of an Antipope. Why not? Everything has its opposite – Christ and Antichrist, matter and anti-matter, pasta and antipasta. Seems almost natural to me. Anyway, eventually, Sylvester was persuaded to submit to the authority of the “real” Pope of the time, and, unusually for those days, was allowed to live out the remainder of his life in peace, without being hung, whipped, barbecued or crucified or having his head put on a spike in the name of religion. Which is unusually lenient, as persecution on religious grounds is much more the norm, then, as now.

Tempting as it was to wax lyrical on the subject, I thought about it briefly, then decided that whenever I write about the Pontiff, I always end up making jokes about inflatable Popes and I have done it all before, so this time, I cast about to find out what Saint’s day it was today. I was briefly excited to find it was St Anselm’s Day, but this seems to be a different St Anselm to the one who was Archbishop to William the Conqueror, was exiled twice, and who came up with, amongst other things, the Ontological Proof of the Existence of God. This was one of the first philosophical/theological tracts I read, at the age of 18, and I have struggled with it ever since. On the one hand, the Platonist in me wants to accept the idea that there must be an absolute good, a gold standard of good, which is God, against which all other good is measured, by degrees, whereas the moral relativist in me says that the same action which is “good” in one set of circumstances can be “bad” in another. The action in itself does not possess innate goodness or evil, it is the circumstances and the outcome which make it so.

From this flows all of my disenchantment with, and distance from, organised religion, which sits firmly on the premise that it is possible to have a unified code of good and moral actions which suits every circumstance, and, when enforced by strong-arm tactics of the “my God is righter than your God” variety, leads, on an individual level to much sadness and mental anguish, and on a larger level, to “religious” wars and persecutions. I cannot believe that God cares whether we believe that the wine becomes blood, for instance, yet people have gone to the stake for saying it either does, or doesn’t. I can’t believe that God, with everything he’s got on his plate, gives a stuff either way whether gay marriages are celebrated or not. All I know is that if I were God, there would be mornings when I would wake up, look at the world with all its bickering and hatred and missiles and tanks and rockets and poverty and hunger and homelessness, and cruelty, and babies dying every 7 seconds for want of clean water, and I would be very, very tempted either to smite the idiots who said they were doing all of this in my name, and/or set the snooze button on my heavenly alarm for another millennium or so.

But, as it turns out, that St Anselm’s feast day isn’t til April 21st – the arm wrestling with St Anselm will have to wait five months or so, then. So I ended up looking again, and I find that today is apparently St Juthwara’s day. She was a British virgin and martyr from Dorset who lived in the 6th century AD. The authorised hagiography says:

Her name is how she is known in Anglo-Saxon, apparently a corruption of the British Aud Wyry (meaning Aud the Virgin), the name by which she is known in Brittany. She was said to have been the sister of Paul Aurelian, Sidwell of Exeter and Wulvela but this is hotly debated.

St Wulvela is, of course, not to be confused with St Vuvuzela, the patron saint of South African football supporters.

John Capgrave [1393-1464] writing in Nova Legendia Angliae, says that Juthwara was a pious girl who fell victim to a jealous stepmother [shades of Cinderella] who often prayed and fasted and gave alms. After the death of her father, she began to suffer a pain in her chest. At this point the story becomes rather surreal, because the wicked stepmother recommends that Juthwara should apply a soft cheese to each breast, and then tells her own son, who was apparently called Bana, that Juthwara is pregnant. He feels Juthwara’s underclothes (with, or without her consent) and, unable to distinguish between lactation and Lymeswold, strikes off Juthwara’s head.

She, of course, immediately picked up her own head, a la St Osyth, and a spring of water appeared where she fell. The son repented, and founded a monastery. The site of these miraculous happenings was identified as Halstock, in Dorset, from the contemporary spelling of Halyngstoka, and in the summer of 2012, the parish church of St Mary acknowledged this link by adding St Juthware to its dedication. Rodney Legg, in “Legging it in Dorset”, writes:

The public house sign in the centre of Halstock used to show a Saxon lady carrying her head. ‘Ye Quiet Woman’, as she was in the time of landlord William Worley, is said to be Juthware – now called Judith – who was decapitated by her brother in Judith Field on a hill north of the village. Her martyrdom features in the Sherborne Missal, that remarkable illuminated manuscript, and the beheading of royal wife Anne Boleyn inspired the similarly named Silent Woman at Coldharbour near Wareham. Halstock’s hostelry, sadly, was delicensed in the 1990s.

After her death, Juthware’s remains were translated to Sherborne Abbey, where they continued to be venerated until the Dissolution. She is depicted in the Great East Window of Sherborne Abbey, in company with her sister Sidwell. Her traditional emblem is a round soft cheese and/or a sword, which is unsurprising, given the prominence which both objects held in her short and presumably unhappy life.

And what lessons am I supposed to draw from the life of St Juthware? Beware of confusing cheese with lactation, and keep away from sharp objects, I suppose. It is interesting, though, to note the parallels in the story with other martyrdoms and beheadings of a similar nature – you could almost come to believe that there was some lost original, some ur-version, now lost, some uber-myth, that underlies them all. Perhaps those scholars who say that behind all this Christian symbolism there lurks an earlier acknowledgement of the Celtic cult of the severed head may have a point, although I was thrown out of a tutorial at College for suggesting precisely that same thing about the beheading of Bertilak de Hautdesert in “Gawaine and the Greene Knight”. In the interests of preventing a similar tragedy to St Juthware’s ever happening again, maybe I need to take it upon myself to institute random bosom-examinations of nubile maidens for traces of dairy products. Who knows.

That would certainly be more entertaining, and possibly a more fruitful use of my time than what I have really got lined up for next week. More sticking out dark nights alone, when I am the only one awake in the fox-hole. There is an old saying that there are no atheists in fox-holes, and I would like to believe it is true, although Big G has been noticeable by his absence of late, if you see what I mean. Sometimes we all wonder if it really is just us, watching out on the perimeter, eyes straining forwards into the dark, and at those times all you can fall back on is the words of that well-known theological commentator, Mr Bruce Springsteen – “No retreat, Baby, no surrender.”

Epiblog for the Feast of St Martin

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley, with Debbie stumbling through the Ofsted visitation like a shell-shocked zombie. In the end her classes were unvisited, uninspected, another instance of that truism which I have often pointed out in these pages that 98% of the things we worry about never happen anyway or if they do happen happen in a way which is totally different to how we imagined it would be. But telling Debbie not to worry about her teaching is like telling the sun not to rise, or the waves not to come in.

The weather continues to be mostly cold, dark and miserable, such brightness as there is usually being confined to a brief burst of golden brilliant, crisp morning sunlight, before the day then dips into dim, hazy cold and darkens to chilly night. Frowsting weather, weather for toasting crumpets by the fire, weather for hot soup, or tea with a nip of rum or brandy. Sadly, we have all of the above ingredients except for the rum and brandy.

One person who knows all about toasting by the fire is Matilda, who has spent a second week consisting of alternating between Kitty’s bed in the hearth, her cardboard box in the office, or the food bowl. She has shown no inclination whatsoever to want to go outside, the nearest she gets is sitting at the conservatory door watching the birds on the bird feeder. These often include small tits. [Google, are you listening?] Freddie and Zak have gone home again now, but before they went, they did get to meet Elvis, who came to carry out his home inspection, complete with Kerrie, his handler, on Friday.

The first thing he did was hoover up the leftover dry food in Zak and Freddie's dishes, then he polished off Matilda's leavings, then he went on a sniffathon, but he seemed to get on well with Freddie and Zak, and he went for an explore round the garden on a lead, and he sat on the settee by the stove, and allowed himself to be ear-furfled by all and sundry. Generally, he seemed happy enough though. Funnily enough, the fact that he looks a bit like Tig, which didn't seem to matter at all when we saw him in the kennel environment, was quite affecting when he was actually sitting here, in places where she used to sit.

Because Matilda was in her little box up in the office, asleep, for the duration of his visit, and we didn’t think it was a good idea either to wake her up specially or, even worse, to let Elvis go and wake her up specially, we let her sleep on, but we don’t really have any lasting concerns on that score: where he is now, Elvis lives with 13 cats, and by the time Zak and Freddie went home, Matilda had begun studiously ignoring them, so if she does the same with Elvis, and he’s indifferent to cats, we should be home and dry.

Friday was a busy day, and I didn’t get much done, what with tidying up ready for Elvis’s visit, then the visit itself, and before that, Bernard turned up out of the blue bearing some dried cornflowers and lavender for Debbie, and a copy of his niece’s book on Mirfield for me, which he is hoping we’ll be able to help sell through our web site. Still, it was good to see him again, however briefly. And by the end of Friday it was good, also, to all sit round our own fire again and give thanks that we’d all survived another week, more or less. As I write this, a complication has arisen over whether we can be allowed to take on Elvis, over the security or otherwise of our garden, and we’re now once more back to the negotiating stage over this new development. We shall see.

On Saturday morning, we decided that we had better get the tomato harvest in which didn’t take long because there are but two, only one of which is red. Anyway, we ate the ceremonial tomato, or rather Debbie did, sliced up on her breakfast crumpet, on top of some bruschetta topping. I can’t help but feel that, given all the care and attention that has been lavished on producing that one tomato over the summer, its passing should have been marked with more ceremony, perhaps being paraded around the Quad first on a silver salver by liveried footmen in tabards singing Latin graces. Anyway, there it was, gone.

Talking of ceremony, I also discovered on Saturday that we have a new Archbishop of Canterbury. The new Archbishop of Canterbury said he was amazed to be given the job, and his first reaction on hearing the news was “Oh No”. Well, given his views on gay marriage and the inevitable irrelevant infighting over the issue that will now proceed to rive the Church apart and stop it doing what it actually should be doing, that made two of us.

Saturday evening marked the eve of Remembrance Day and we found ourselves somehow watching the choir of military wives singing in the Albert Hall. I asked Debbie if she would consider joining a choir to sing about how much she was missing me if I was posted overseas. She replied that given my vast bulk, no one would post me anywhere, let alone overseas, because they wouldn’t be able to afford the postage or find a big enough box. So that told me.

Primarily, of course, today is Remembrance Sunday, and it falls, this year, actually on 11th November. As each year goes by, though, I find myself becoming more and more conflicted over the ideas behind this event. On the one hand, obviously I want to remember people like my Great Uncle Harry, of the Royal Field Artillery, who I never knew, gassed at Ypres in 1917 or Deb’s relatives William Evans of the Suffolk Regiment, died of wounds in 1915, or Jack Ross DFC, lost in his Hurricane over the Irish Sea in January 1942

But it also seems to me that a new agenda has been subtly grafted on to the arrangements, a veneer of the same sort of compulsory patriotism that marred the Olympics. The subtle pressure that says, in effect, that commemorating the fallen on Remembrance Day now comes “bundled” with the assumption that you are also supporting “Our Troops” and you are therefore, ipso facto, behind the current operations in Afghanistan.

This is a “mission creep” too far, for me. While I regret the loss of life and admire their skill, professionalism and bravery, I do think in many ways our forces out there are just being used now as “professional targets” in an unwinnable war, to save the faces and the reputations of the politicians that put them in harm’s way in the first place, and who have the hypocritical gall to stand before the Cenotaph in Whitehall carrying wreaths.

I have never been particularly in favour of the Afghanistan war, the more so now it also involves indiscriminate loss of civilian life and drone attacks (increased tremendously during the Obama presidency). To do the job properly in Afghanistan would require massive resources and a garrison force in perpetuity, both of which the politicians (of all parties) know would be politically unpopular, indeed impossible, especially as it might involve increasing taxation to pay for something like that, in a time of austerity and defence cuts. So they send our troops into the valley of death in an unwinnable conflict, with shortages of equipment asking them to die in a vain attempt to impose “western values” on a country in the grip of violent medieval thugs who are quite happy to shoot a girl in the head just because she wants to go to school.

There is so much wrong with Afghanistan, and none of it can be solved with bullets and bombs. And these same politicians who ask our armed forces to carry out this mission impossible, when the soldiers and airmen come back, perhaps having lost a limb or having suffered other injuries, and they leave the service or are even, sometimes, made redundant, these same politicians leave it to charities to pick up the pieces, when people develop mental problems, suffer from stress, or even lose their livelihood and become homeless.

So no, I am afraid – I will wear my poppy, but I will wear it for my own reasons, and not because I am in favour of war in Afghanistan. In many ways, like Iraq, it was the wrong war, in the wrong place, at the wrong time, and for all the wrong reasons. It is, in many ways, appropriate that poppies grow in Afghanistan, as they grew in Flanders almost a century ago, because our casualties there are being sacrificed in the same mindless way as the First World War soldiers were, and for similar vague hopes and aspirations. Lions led by donkeys, I am afraid.

I also tend to think, at this time of year, of my Dad and what his war experience would have been like. Physically, at any rate, he was lucky enough to come through the whole five years of struggle against Hitler unscathed, apart from the partial deafness (caused by the guns) which he suffered from for the remainder of his days. I think of what it must have been like for him, sitting up there on the cliffs at Fairlight with his ack-ack unit. Probably a bit like life in general, I suppose, long periods of relative inactivity and boredom, interspersed with a few seconds of blind panic, terror and danger.

I’ve actually done a certain amount of research around the subject, because I wanted to use the material in an as yet unfinished family history project, and there is actually a substantial body of stuff on the Hastings area in wartime, both official accounts, web sites compiled by amateur military historians and oral history and memoirs by people who were there at the time.

Although the pressure eased after the end of the Battle of Britain, when Hitler turned his attention eastwards to attack Russia, the south coast towns such as Hastings still remained very much in the danger zone for the remainder of the conflict.

A change of tactic occurred in March 1942 when fighter-bombers were modified to carry bombs. This resulted in what were called “tip-and-run” raids whereby, as the name suggests, the German fighter-bombers would sneak in fast and low, drop their bombs and then high-tail it back to France. The first tip-and-run raid on Hastings occurred on 17th May 1942 when four Messerschmidt 109s circled the town, machine-gunning the streets in the West Hill area. Twenty-eight year old Constance Ethel Torrance was killed when a bullet penetrated the window of her house, at 60 St George's Road. Formerly Constance Ethel Beale, she had been born in 1914 to Richard Beale and his wife Lydia, whose maiden name was Lydia Nice, and had married Jack Torrance in 1938.

It was on 17th October 1942 (which was also Granny Fenwick’s birthday – she would have been 55 that year) when Feldwebel Karl Hermann Niesel of Jagdgeschwader 26 set off in his Focke-Wulf 190 in a “tip and run” raid on Hastings. Sadly for Hermann, or “Uncle Hermann” as he was known by his family, he came to the attention of two Hawker Typhoons of No. 486 (New Zealand) Squadron. The following extract is from the combat report of P/O Thomas and Sgt Sames "A" Flight No.486 (NZ) Squadron (AIR50/160) and tells the brief, sad and unromantic story of his demise.

“P/O. G. G. Thomas (Yellow 1) and Sgt. A. N. Sames (Yellow 2) airborne 13.15 hours for Coastal Patrol Beachy Head - Dungeness. At 13.25 hours when flying East to West at 500 feet about half a mile inland they observed two FW 190s flying roughly NE over the sea at 20/30 feet and about one and a half miles ahead. Yellow 1 saw a bomb burst in the town[Hastings]. The enemy aircraft then turned port due South and out to sea where they split up, one flying SE at sea level and the other continuing South at about 20/30 feet followed by Yellow Section flying at 345/350 a.s.l. Yellow 1 opened fire at long range with several short bursts of cannon fire and noticed slashes in the sea short of the enemy aircraft which immediately started to weave.

Yellow Section closed to within 500 yards and enemy aircraft began a spiral weave. Yellow 1 opened fire again with several short bursts and observed strikes on the side of the fuselage. The enemy aircraft pulled up violently and then winged over to port and down to sea level right across Yellow 2's line of fire, then straightened out and climbed up slowly. Yellow 2 fired three more short bursts striking fuselage and engine.

A jet of flame burst from the starboard side of the engine, the hood was jettisoned and parts of the enemy aircraft fell away and it turned over and fell burning into the sea, disappearing immediately. In the meantime the other aircraft had escaped in the direction of France. Yellow Section returned to the English coast and on approaching Hastings at about 6/700 feet were fired upon by coastal guns without effect”

Yes, regarding the bit about the British coastal guns firing at their own planes, it was probably my Dad! He always used to tell me that they fired at it first, whatever it was, then looked it up afterwards.

Hermann Niesel was the youngest but one of seven children; he had five older sisters: Edith (1907), Johanna (1908), Herta (1910), Ruth (1911) and Irma (1912) and one younger brother Karlheinz (1920), who died 1922, two years old. Hermann Niesel was not married and had no children, he was betrothed to a girl called Hanni Kuhne. They intended to marry after the end of the war. Hanni was a Red Cross Sister during the hostilities.

Hermann’s progression in flying was probably typical of many young men in the Luftwaffe, learning at first with a glider on a gliding field near Hirschberg (now Jelenia Gora), and becoming a flight instructor for gliders by the beginning of 1934. Then he went into the Luftwaffe, and he was in the Spanish Civil War with the Condor Legion. After the war Silesia was given to Poland and the Niesels were relocated, like many more of the German population in Silesia.

I’ve given his story in some detail to show, I suppose, that, contrary to the cardboard cut-out “Squareheads” and “Huns” that filled the war films and comics of my childhood, he was a real person, and his loss in the English Channel, with no known grave, was no doubt mourned by other real people. True, he had just dropped a bomb on Hastings, and that also killed real people, just as we dropped bombs on Germany, because they had dropped them on us, and so on. Niesel’s attack hit Pevensey Road, Warrior Square, and St Columb’s Church, killing two civilians and wounding 16. And given the chance, no doubt he would have done to the pilots of those two Typhoons what they did to him. And meanwhile, down below on the cliffs, my Dad was busily trying to kill all of them, even the ones on his own side!

It just goes to point up the absurd tragedy of war. Here you have two people born within a year of each other, Constance Torrance and Hermann Niesel. You can almost imagine them growing up, falling in love; meanwhile, over the other side of the world, two young New Zealanders are growing up, learning to fly, and the chain of events, the skein of sequences, somehow contrives to bring them all to Hastings, 70 years ago, where Constance is struck one day by bullet fired through her window from a German plane on 17th May, and Hermann is brought down off the seafront by a stream of cannon shells on 17th October. Jack mourns for Constance and Hanni mourns for Hermann, and the people who knew and loved the civilians he killed mourn their dead, and you take all that pain and extrapolate it across all of the other losses and the mourning and you begin to question even the very basic premises that underlie it all, even though, admittedly the Second World War was, from our point of view, the nearest thing to a “just” war that we have experienced, because it was about more than merely curbing Germany’s territorial intentions, it was about stopping Hitler’s insane one-man mission to enslave the planet. But even so the waste, the waste…

The military theme continues with today’s saint, St Martin of Tours, or “Martinmas”. His feast day marked the time when the harvest was complete (well we did pick the only ripe tomato) and hiring fairs were held so that agricultural labourers could seek new posts for the following year.

St. Martin of Tours started out as a Roman soldier. He was baptized as an adult and became a monk. It is understood that he was a kind man who led a quiet and simple life. The most famous legend of his life is that he once cut his cloak in half to share with a beggar during a snowstorm, to save the beggar from dying of the cold. That night he dreamed that Jesus himself was wearing the piece of cloak he had given away. Martin heard Jesus say to the angels: "Here is Martin, the Roman soldier who is not baptised; he has clothed me."

From the late 4th century to the late Middle Ages, much of Europe, including the UK, engaged in a period of fasting beginning on the day after St. Martin's Day lasting for 40 days, and called "Quadragesima Sancti Martini", or "the forty days of St. Martin." On St. Martin's eve, people ate and drank very heartily for the last time before they started to fast. This period of fasting was later shortened and became what we now call “Advent”.

There are many weird and wacky customs associated with St Martin, including, historically, sacrificing cockerels in Ireland. Also in Ireland, no wheel of any kind was to turn on St. Martin's Day, because Martin was thrown into a mill stream and killed by the wheel and so it was judged to be not right to turn any kind of wheel on that day.

In some parts of the Germany, Netherlands and Belgium, children make their own lantern and go door to door with the lantern, and sing St. Martin songs, in exchange for sweets, a follow—on from the “Souling” for soul-cakes we talked about last week.

St Martin is also credited with a prominent role in spreading wine-making throughout the Touraine region and facilitating the planting of many vines. The Greek myth that Aristaeus first discovered the concept of pruning the vines after watching a goat eat some of the foliage has been somehow transferred to Martin. Martin is also credited with introducing the Chenin Blanc grape varietal, from which most of the white wine of western Touraine and Anjou is made. And very nice it is, too; before it became too expensive to buy, Touraine was one of my favourites.

Because of this element of being thankful for the fruits of the earth, and its association with the end of harvest and preparations for winter, St. Martin's Feast is much like the American Thanksgiving (celebrated on the 4th Thursday in November) a celebration of the earth's bounty. Because it also comes before the penitential season of Advent, it is seen as a mini "carne vale", with all the attendant feasting and bonfires. As at Michaelmas on 29 September, goose is eaten in most places (the goose is a symbol for St. Martin himself. It is said that as he was hiding from the people who wanted to make him Bishop, a honking goose gave away his hiding spot). I can only assume the same method was employed when picking the new Archbishop of Canterbury.

In many countries, including Germany, Martinmas celebrations begin at the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of this eleventh day of the eleventh month. Bonfires are built, and children carry lanterns in the streets after dark, singing songs for which they are rewarded with candy. Many of these associations are obviously graftings of pre-Christian pagan ceremonies or events, and the result is a curious mixture now, where the pagans have surrendered the Martinmas Bonfires to the Christians, who have in turn rendered them up to Guy Fawkes, and the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month has now been appropriated as the formula for the Armistice.

In some regions of Germany, the traditional sweet of Martinmas is "Martinshörnchen", a pastry shaped in the form of a croissant, which recalls both the hooves of St. Martin's horse and, by being the half of a pretzel, the division of his cloak with the beggar. Another widespread custom in Germany is bonfires on St. Martin's eve, called "Martinsfeuer." In recent years, the processions that accompany those fires have been spread over almost a fortnight before Martinmas, but previously, the Rhine River valley, for example, would be lined with fires on the eve of Martinamas.

Sadly, that is not the only time the Rhine Valley has been lined with fires, there were quite a few, less happy occasions between 1939 and 1945 when it was ablaze from end – see also under Coventry, Rotterdam, Hull, the East End of London, Hamburg, and, finally, Dresden. I wonder whether Hermann Niesel ever ate Martinshornschen, or watched Martinsfeuer.

So, anyway, today I have been mostly meditating on the futility of war, which ought to be a no-brainer. Well it is a no-brainer, all meditation is. Am I against war? When you look at the absurdities of it, the random evil of it, yes, as a concept, I conclude I am, apart from, perhaps, the need to stop another Hitler or to defend our country against unprovoked aggression, but for me, the latter stops at the White Cliffs of Dover, and doesn’t extend to misguided foreign adventurism that comes with a heavy price tag.

Maybe St Martin, paring off half of his cloak and giving it to a frozen beggar, could be a paradigm for a new kind of armed forces, more emergency services than armed services. God knows, with all the freak weather happening all over the world, there is a need for it. War is a failure of the political process, and the people who are stopping us beating the swords into ploughshares and stopping us clothing the beggars and feeding the hungry are not the soldiers. By and large, our soldiers, sailors and airmen did, and continue to do, their best. They’ve proved, by and large, to be as humane as possible in Afghanistan when dealing with wounded opponents or allies, at a terrible cost sometimes, when the injured ally turns out to be not injured at all, and not an ally.

I don’t begrudge the soldiers, sailors and airmen their Remembrance Day, and I don’t blame them. I blame the politicians.

Epiblog for the Feast of St Birstan

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley, and one of my least favourite weeks in the whole calendar, given that it contains both Halloween and the start of November, my least favourite month in the whole calendar. Its only redeeming feature, as a week, being that it also contains half term, so at least Debbie has not had to venture out in the cold and the frost to far flung exotic places such as Stalybridge. That pleasure is still to resume, next week. The weather forecast for any places where we did want to go, however, was so poohey that we abandoned the idea of getting off in the camper, full stop. The only good thing that can be said about last week is that no-one has pulled the door handle off…yet.

The squirrels are conspicuous by their absence, Brenda and Freda seem to have gone to ground, though there are still a few birds hanging around the bird feeder and the table on the decking, especially small tits. [I have emphasised that particular species in a shameless attempt to entice Google’s web crawler spider program to pick up the words for when people type them into search engines, and potentially increase dramatically the number of readers of this blog. Many of them will, of course, go away disappointed, but it’s the hits that count.]

Things will resume next week with a vengeance, in fact, because Ofsted are now threatening to visit the college, which has thrown the whole college admin staff into a flat panic, as they may well have to actually do something to justify their existence, which will be a new experience for many of them. Deb is hoping that Ofsted will largely bypass her; she can’t really envisage them setting off mob-handed to the sort of run-down tin sheds on Godforsaken housing estates to provide “Outreach” in the hinterland that education forgot, just on the offchance of catching her out without a risk assessment or something.

Nevertheless, just in case, she has been boning up on all of this stuff which everybody on the staff is supposed to carry round in their heads with them at all times, including personal evacuation plans for students with mobility problems and ethnic diversity training manuals. She was bemoaning the latter in a phone call to Granny only yesterday, who replied “Never mind, at least it will earn you some brownie points.” I don’t think she’s really got the hang of this diversity idea, somehow. [Before you all email in to tell me, I know that the “brownie” in brownie points refers to small girl scouts rather than any supposed ethnic origin, but why pass up the opportunity for a feeble and possibly tastelessly offensive joke at my Mother-in-Law’s expense? And, let’s face it, I could have made a joke about my having a “personal evacuation plan” featuring Senna Pods. But I spared you that one.]

The animals don’t like the weather any more than I do. Zak and Freddie have been disputing the ownership of Zak’s armchair. While Zak vacates it temporarily to snaffle Freddie’s breakfast (or whatever he has left of it) Freddie nips in behind him and jumps up into the chair. This morning, it was so cold that Zak got back into the armchair regardless of the fact that Freddie was already in it, and after a degree of shuffling round and settling down, they reached an accommodation that allowed them to share their body-warmth to maximum effect.

Matilda, meanwhile, has been spending most of her time curled up and sleeping on Kitty’s old bin-bag/beanbag of paper shreddings in the hearth, on which we have spread out her new crocheted blanket from her Auntie Maisie, and she seems duly appreciative of this. In the last 24 hours the only time she has moved from it has been to visit the food dish.

It has been pointed out to me by several people that I have sort of introduced Elvis into proceedings without either relating any of his history or indeed continuing the story by telling what happened when we went to meet him, so please allow me to rectify that omission. Elvis was a stray who was rescued from the side of a road in Cyprus, where he was living – or rather slowly dying – by scavenging. He had the lungworm infection very badly, and there is no doubt in my mind that his life was saved by those selfless saints of Cyprus Pride, June and Michael. Shipped back to England, Elvis racked up an £1800 vet bill, and his life hung in the balance for many months, but he pulled through, albeit at the loss of some of his lung mass. He will be susceptible to kennel cough for the remainder of his days. Nobody really knows how old he is.

The journey to the kennels at Ferrybridge was a horrendous one, of the sort I used to hate when driving. I was very glad Debbie was at the wheel. Mile after mile of roadworks along the M62, 50mph average speed restriction, and heavy traffic bunched together in rain and spray, all the way. Eventually the impressive bulk of Ferrybridge’s cooling towers indicated that it was time to turn off, and despite following the directions provided to the letter, we drove past the kennels twice, once from each direction, reasoning [incorrectly, as it turned out] that this couldn’t possibly be the entrance.

Once we got there, the staff were very welcoming and even produced a cup of steaming coffee for me! They also produced Elvis, who jumped up into the camper van and started sniffing around. Kerrie, who is in charge of him, and indeed, seemingly the whole establishment, says that, because of his background history as a one-time scavenger, Elvis is still very food-motivated and may not know when to stop eating. Debbie cast a meaningful glance in my direction. She thinks that, like Nigella, I am one of those people whose mission in life is to fatten up those around me so that I don’t stand out so much. [I wonder if Nigella has problems with scavenging, and her husband catches her with her head in the bin and has to shout “Oi! Nigella! No! Get back on the Stairmaster!”]

In the same way that Bruce Springsteen is a perfectly ordinary American with someone else’s shoulders, Elvis is a perfectly ordinary little dog with Fred Basset’s ears. Still, despite his slightly odd external appearance, and his extensive [and expensive] medical history, we warmed to him, and I think the feeling was mutual. We are being inspected this coming Friday to see if we come up to the exacting standard necessary for re-homing a dog. Given our well-ordered and entirely conventional household, what could possibly go wrong?

That was at the very start of the week, of course, and since then it has gone downhill, as I said. I’ve not been that well, either, physically, I mean, I think I had a tinge of flu. Well, a tinge of something, anyway. The age of “shivery” is not yet dead. The weather kept the would-be trick or treaters away on Wednesday, though, and so far it’s been so quiet on the firework front, that I am wondering whether it’s another sign of the times. The people currently in Parliament have finally triumphed over the man who wanted to blow it up, by wrecking the economy to the extent that nobody can afford fireworks any more. Meanwhile, I sat clutching a hot-water bottle, gritted my teeth, and got on with the stuff I absolutely positively had to do – anything else is next week’s problem.

Talking of Parliament, our postal voting forms turned up for the Police Commissioner elections during the week, and I filled mine in. Debbie was initially going to chuck hers on the back of the fire, until I reminded her of all those racehorses that had thrown themselves under suffragettes just so she could exercise her democratic right as her own person, and not merely as my chattel or appendage. Personally I don’t have a lot of time for the idea of the Police Commissioner as a concept. I view it as part of the general political gimmickery that despoils the simple, classical symmetry of our constitutional structure, along with devolved assemblies, regional assemblies, elected mayors, MEPs, and all the other useless claptrap which merely provides extra costly layers of bureaucracy and potential conflicts of interest.

Nevertheless, despite my misgivings, it is obviously going to happen anyway, so I wrote to all four of the people who are standing in this area asking them about their stance and policy on animal mistreatment and wildlife crime. Not one of them has replied, or even attempted to contact me by either phone or email. It is no wonder people feel disenfranchised, cut off, apathetic and cynical when we have would-be politicians like these. In the end I voted for the independent candidate, for several reasons, one being that he has a very silly name, secondly he was once a serving police officer, which is more than you can say for the others, and finally, the fact he is an independent allows me to vote without my vote being seen as a proxy endorsement of the Junta or the feeble opposition. Debbie looked in vain for a UKIP or a Green to vote for, so her form may well have ended up burnt to a crisp, suffragettes or no suffragettes, and in fact, sometimes, deliberately not voting can in itself be a political act.

As well as containing Halloween and All Saints Day, which I always recall from my schooldays because we invariably sang “For all the saints, who from their labours rest” which is a great hymn, this week also brought All Souls’ Day, or, as some cultures have it, the Day of the Dead. Personally, I don’t have much trouble recalling the dead, and I think of them every day, especially at a time of the year such as this one, when the membrane between this world and the other is sometimes demonstrably thin. I often feel like Henry Vaughan, lamenting that

“They are all gone into the world of light
And I alone sit ling’ring here…”

From a folklore point of view, however, All Souls’ Day is interesting because of the tradition of “souling”, which was essentially semi-organised, semi-institutionalised begging, where gangs of urchins would go from house to house singing their “souling” songs and wishing the well being and continued existence of everyone in the house for another year, in return for some small dole of meat, drink or money. A bit like trick or treat, but without the trick.

Several “souling” songs have been collected, and the best known one is probably “Soul Cake” which has been recorded by artists as diverse as The Watersons (good version, but monotonous and scary) and Sting (bad, very bad.)

“A soul, a soul a soul cake
Please good missus, a soul cake
An apple a pear a plum or a cherry
Or any good thing to make us merry
One for Peter, One for Paul
One for him who made us all…”

My own favourite is the Edgmond Mens’ Souling Song, collected in Shropshire and performed, inter alia, by John Kirkpatrick and Sue Harris:

‘The streets they are gotten dark, dirty and cold,
We are come a-souling, this night we’ll make bold,
We are come a-souling as well doth appear,
And all that we soul for is ale and strong beer’.

Shropshire archives has the following on its web site, drawing on the work of both Roy Palmer and Charlotte Burne:

In Pulverbatch , it is thought that the last person to keep this custom going was a Mary Ward, who died in 1853 (at the age of 101). In Hopton, Mrs Gill had soul-cakes made in her house for the souling-children until her death in 1884. In 1938, Phyllis Crawford pointed out that at Wem the ‘souling cake’ had died away, but in villages near Oswestry at around the same time, including West Felton and Llynclys, children still visited local houses. Lillian Hayward stated: ‘The soul cakes are, I believe, no longer made, but nuts, sweets, and apples are put ready for them’.

The folklore site, Mother Nature Network, takes up the story:

What is known is that by the 8th century, soul cakes were given to beggars (soulers) who would say prayers for the dead on All Souls' Eve. And the price? One soul saved per cake. In other places they were given to wandering mummers, the costumed predecessors of buskers, as they entertained on Halloween. Today's trick-or-treaters are thought to be their descendants, and soul cakes are thought to be the first treats for tricks. These days, soul cakes are generally presented as a small round cake, variously spiced, often studded across the top with a cross of currants. They are part scone, part biscuit, part teacake — and a sweet little treat harkening back to the times when souls roamed this realm and Halloween was truly a haunted night.

That sounds a little early for me, and I wonder if it's a typo for 18th Century. Anyway, I suppose I should be thankful that, dire as things are at present in many ways, I’m not yet reduced to begging. I am sitting here in front of a relatively warm stove and there is food in the house. It’s a day for counting blessings, I guess. Mind you, speaking as a scavenger, those Soul Cakes look like a very good way of saving souls…

Today is also the feast of St Birstan. It is also the feast of St Charles Borromeo, a much more well-known and conventional saint, who, despite being related to the Medicis, allotted most of his income to charity, forbade himself all luxury and imposed severe penances upon himself. He sacrificed wealth, high honours, esteem and influence to become poor. During the plague and famine of 1576, in Italy, he tried to feed 60,000 to 70,000 people daily. To do this he borrowed large sums of money that required years to repay. Whereas the civil authorities fled at the height of the plague, he stayed in the city, where he ministered to the sick and the dying, helping those in want. Worn out, he died at the age of only 46.

Fascinating as St Charles Borromeo is, however, I have decided to write about Birstan instead on the Police Commissioner principle, that he has the sillier name. In fact, St Birstan’s name is not altogether decided – in some accounts he appears as Brinstan, and with a little more effort, some culinary help, and less time spent praying, could have invented chutney 900 years before Richard Branson. Bring out the Brinstan! Birstan succeeded to the See of Winchester on the resignation of St Frithestan in May 931AD. Appropriately enough in a week which contains All Souls’ Day, Birstan, “a man of exceptional piety and charity”, was devoted to prayers for the dead and also did his best to help the poor, founding the Hospital of St John, adjoining St Swithun’s Bridge in Winchester. A Norman Chapel replaced the original in the Broadway and St. Birstan's image can still be seen in the stained glass there today. He managed to combine his interest in prayer and the dead rather neatly, by dying whilst at prayer in 934AD, after only three years as Bishop.

He is best known, apparently, for an incident which occurred some years after his death. Some time at the end of the 10th century, the Bishop of Winchester, St. Aethelwold, visited the graveyard of the Old Minster (Saxon Cathedral) at Winchester, where he was shocked to find himself being addressed by the spirit of St. Birstan, thus:

"I am Birstan, former Bishop of this town" and pointing with his right hand, "This is Birinus, who first preached here," and with his left, "This is Swithun, particular patron of this church and city".

St. Aethelwold was so impressed that he reinstated the veneration of the saint as an equal to both the better known Birinus and Swithun, though he was never much known outside Hampshire. Well, maybe all that will change now, especially if my ploy with Google comes off. In the meantime, I daresay the coming week will, potentially, give me plenty of cause to employ my own personal evacuation plan, as we struggle on in our attempts to climb out of the mire, and avoid having to go a-souling!

And no, this is not me. Nice hat, though!