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.