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.”
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