Epiblog for St Egwins Day

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. Christmas came and went, rather a muted affair, in all, both of us being so tired in ourselves we were happy to just let it wash over us. We did make an effort and drag the table out for Christmas dinner itself, but other than that, we’ve been content to just coast along and spend some time doing things we wouldn’t normally do when we’re on the usual term-time treadmill.

The weather has been nothing to write home about, and indeed there was no need to write home about it, since we were already at home, and experiencing it at first hand. So at least I saved the cost of a stamp. Sometimes it has been cold and windy, sometimes cold and raining, and sometimes, just for a change, cold, windy and raining. In between times, on the odd bright days like today, Matilda does her daily scuttle out onto the decking, cowers down, looks around, craning her neck, eyes wide with a mixture of terror and curiosity, then scuttles back in again, when something scary happens, such as the wind blowing the branches about.

Underneath, though, under all the dead leaves and the blown-over pots and the fallen branches and the plastic greenhouse still resting at a drunken angle where the wind shook it about then tossed it aside, something is stirring. Something not unlike Spring. At the moment, it’s just a twinkling of an inkling, but there’s a definite sense, some mornings when I look out of my window as I’m transferring into my wheelchair, of the cogs having moved, the gears having shifted. I’ve even seen one or two squirrels scooting about along the bare branches, looking for food. The birds, too, have been busy at the bird feeder, with many small tits helping themselves to the contents. [Google: do you even read this stuff?]

Matilda’s default position, her favourite place at the moment, when she’s not curled up in what is now beginning to be referred to as “her” armchair with Big Mouse and Flat Eric, (her sum total of toys having recently been increased by 100% over Christmas), is just inside the conservatory door, watching the birds and squirrels, where she stays for hours. It’s become known as Cat TV, as in “Matilda’s watching Cat TV again.”

We were all grateful for Christmas, which has turned out, materially and financially, to be considerably better than we feared at one time, and so far, touching wood as I type this, nothing new seems to have fallen off the camper van recently. Obviously, there will be changes and challenges ahead, we’re not out of the woods yet, but at least we have a few quiet days of refuge before it all starts up again.

Unfortunately, the news on the Elvis front isn’t so positive. He’s still pretty much the same, and we’ve agreed with Kerrie to leave him at Danewalk until after the New Year – he’s due to go back to the vet next week, and if the vet signs him off, then he’ll be dropped off with us on the way back. That’s the plan, at the moment, anyway. The idea is that will still give him a few more days to bond with us before term starts again and it all kicks off. It’s very frustrating, but we have to do what’s best for the dog. He’s obviously not responding well to the English winter, but then which of us is? The other day when I rang to check on his progress, Kerrie said that he’d just put himself to bed in their laundry basket, which seems to me quite an intelligent way of keeping out of the draughts. I may even try it myself.

Once again, as with last week, I have no particular witty badinage or dialogue to report as having passed between myself and my wife, we have both been too busy re-charging our batteries and over-indulging for that sort of thing. Although I am normally the cook of the house, and as such, was responsible for the Mock Turkey or “Murkey” Christmas dinner, we did, this week, actually co-operate on a meal and cooked several elements of it together. A very fraught experience, which is unlikely to be repeated any time soon! Though the meal itself (spinach curry, onion bhajis, apple and cilantro chutney, and mushroom rice) turned out fine.

For me, it’s been a bit of a strange week as well. I have been doing stuff which I want to do, instead of stuff I have to do, which is great, and I could easily get used to it, except that it will come as a rude awakening when I have to get back to normal. Also, I have tried to enjoy the week as much as I can, though it has been overshadowed by the fact that tomorrow is New Year’s Eve, the worst night of the whole year. I have never understood why people celebrate New Year’s Eve. I have watched its approach this year with a mixture of loathing and trepidation. I have never much minded being alone at Christmas, because it’s sort of a holy time – difficult to explain, but not in the conventional sense – a contemplative time. Before Deb and I got together, I spent some truly memorable, truly peaceful Christmases entirely on my own, including one memorable occasion when I did my year-end accounts on Christmas day!

But New Year’s Eve is a different beast. It’s the gateway, the Hellmouth through which we have to be harrowed to be able to enjoy next Spring and Summer. It’s got all of the enforced, compulsory bonhomie of the worst excesses of commercial Christmas, without any of the redeeming features of that festival. It’s another year to add to the burden of years you carry on your back, it’s a time to reflect on all that you set out to do a year ago, and have failed to achieve, and it’s, above all, a time when the ghosts and regrets and the people and animals who are no longer with you cluster round and come back to haunt you. I’m not surprised that, faced with that lot, people choose to get hammered to dull the pain. And it carries with it the inevitability of mortality.

But surely, you are probably saying, it’s also a time for looking forward, for planning new things? That’s as maybe, but it’s not much of a compensation, especially in this miserable, cruel, penny-pinching, nasty little country with its inept, evil and stupid government, and the economy on the skids, sliding ever further down the slope of the valley of death. And – to a certain extent – while I will still dream and have dreams, it does become very wearing, very deterring, when you look back and think what high hopes you had – of helping to re-home animals, for instance, or of trying to combat homelessness – and you realise that your impact on those two topics alone has been minimal to non-existent. “Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart”, as Yeats said.

There have been some brief sparks of light, of goodness, in all the darkness and despair: 10-year old Grace McNulty of Wakefield, who lost her father in an accident in August, decided to get her mum to open up their café at Christmas and serve meals to 150 homeless people as a memorial to him. I wish I had a similar capability within me for making good things out of the emptiness and futility that sometimes besets me.

So, if you are looking for an uplifting message to take forward into the new year, I’m afraid I don’t have one. The best I can come up with is “close ranks, and carry on” but that doesn’t really buck you up when you know you’re potentially marching into an artillery barrage and barbed wire. None of us likes this crazy war, Wilmot.

Or rather, this phoney war. I call it that because this business of just doing what I want to do pleasant enough as it’s been is not sustainable and must come to an end, soon. Still, even with New Year’s Eve hanging over me, I’ve done some interesting stuff this week. Interesting to me anyway. Because of that thing about the world going to end, according to the Mayans, I started reviewing my own life, last week, as I wrote about at the time, wondering what, if anything, people would say about me, think of me, remember of me. The Mayans proved to be a busted flush, as we all know, but the process that they kicked off has led to me this week dragging out and attempting to organise all of the family history material that I’ve accumulated but not had time to do anything with.

Therefore, instead of doing accounts and invoicing people and writing the “new titles” page for the web site, this week, I’ve had my head stuck in the archives. And I have made some spectacular progress. Of course, to many people, family history is as dull as the proverbial ditchwater, and of no interest whatsoever. Yet it’s also social history, the history of the sort of “unwritten” people who didn’t get to feature in governments or official documents. I’ve been hooked on doing family history, and have researched the family in a ramshackle way, ever since the day I saw my great-uncle Harry’s name cast into the bronze panel of the war memorial at Brough crossroads, and began to wonder what the letters R.F.A. stood for, and where and why he had died in 1917. That particular journey led me, after many footsteps, to the military cemetery at Etaples, France, with its sad acres of Portland stone headstones, stretching away over the landscaped sward to the horizon in all directions. As Blake said – I have given you the end of a golden string, only roll it into a ball… I am the sort of person who can never resist following a loose thread to see where it leads.

And family history is so damn easy these days. Even though I am not one of those who says disparagingly that “everything is on line” – it isn’t, and some of what is there has to be treated with care and respect – yet the difference between the olden days (1980) when I first started doing family history, and now, is quite remarkable in some cases. Instead of having to go to the actual repositories, a great deal of them have now put at least the catalogue and in some cases, the primary records themselves, on line. So it was that, in a space of about three hours of googling, searching and downloading this week, I now have a complete record, with crew lists, ship numbers and owners, of every trawler in which my Great-Grandfather, Thomas Henry Rudd sailed out of Hull between about 1884 and his death in 1906. Why is this important, in any wider sense? (I can almost hear Debbie’s famous comment on The Mary Rose – “who cares why it sank?” – echoing in the background).

It’s important, I think, for the light it sheds on the trawling industry generally. Looking at the lists, year on year, it’s obvious that there was no set career path. He starts off by being listed as a fourth hand, then works his way up to third hand, bosun, second hand, and skipper. But then we see him going to sea as second hand or bosun in ships he’d previously skippered, so it’s pretty obvious that the owners must have sort of said “you, you and you, take that ship to Iceland” or words to that effect, and the crew were happy to grab whatever came along. There’s also an ever-present sense of the danger of fishing in the North Sea in a side-winding steam trawler. The six-monthly returns are required to mention any major incidents, and stories of masts crashing down, people being washed overboard, engine failures 180 miles off Spurn, and collisions in fog are all there, all in ships Thomas Henry was on at the time. There is even a case of an engineer being caught up in the ship’s engine while repairing it, and dying as a result.

Whatever else he may have been, Thomas Henry must have been both tough and resourceful. Maybe a small tiny echo of the resourceful gene has been handed down to me, I don’t know, but as far as going to sea is concerned, these days I draw the line at the Arran Ferry.

I also managed to find out, in passing, though this was much more recent history, the source of the bomb that demolished the houses on the opposite side of Alexandra Terrace where I used to live in Hull, from 1959-1965. That bomb site opposite our house was my daily vista and playground. In winter, we played football on it, and on Guy Fawkes night, a huge communal bonfire used to blaze on it. In summer, it was our version of Lords, or the Oval (or – more likely – Headingley) with wickets painted in whitewash on the factory wall, and a certain degree of care had to be employed when batting, so as not to hit any of the washing on the communal washing lines, or to smash any windows. The uncertain bounce of a tennis ball on cracked concrete also meant that, if you wanted to spend any time as all at the crease, you had to develop the forward defensive stroke, pretty much the pre-requisite for batting anywhere in England, actually, since many of the wickets even on county grounds can be a bit bomb-sitey on occasions.

It must have been a very different, very claustrophobic terrace when, instead of that wide open space opposite our front door, there would have been another row of houses facing us. All of that complicated matrix of streets that huddled between Alexandra Dock, the Railway and the ceaseless traffic grinding along Hedon Road were narrow, small, dark little houses, almost jammed in back to back, all built en masse in the 1880s to barracks the army of workers needed to keep the docks and the railway fed with labour. So in a sense, that unknown airman of Luftflotte III who erased a row of eight houses with a single bomb on the night of 7th May 1941 did us a favour, giving us a relatively open space for our games 18 years later, though I doubt any of the inhabitants of numbers 9-16 Alexandra Terrace would have thanked him. They were probably aiming for the docks, or the railway; the former would be an undershoot, the latter an overshoot, but on the other hand, it may have been a random jettison. Hull was a favourite place to get rid of any left-over bombs for Nazi planes which had just been raiding Sheffield or Bradford, Manchester or Leeds. On balance I think it’s more likely to have been a deliberate attack in this case, though, because of the significance of the date. Between 7th and 9th May 1941, Hull suffered its most severe concerted attacks of the whole war; hundreds of people were killed, several air raid shelters suffered direct hits, and the entire gas and telephone systems of the city were out of action for many hours.

I guess that, coming from that kind of area, with those kinds of ancestors, if you believe that we are all a product of our own and our family’s past, I ought to be made of tougher stuff, and not sitting here today feeling so wimpy about the future. New Year’s Eve seemed a much more certain time, back in those days, when I was allowed to sit up and listen to all the ships in Alex Dock blowing their hooters on the stroke of midnight. All I can say now is that maybe if I didn’t have all those ghostly generations marching behind me and with me, I’d probably be even more of a gibbering wreck! I do take something from them though. I take the post-war zeal of the people who rebuilt our country on the bombsites; I take the determination to build a new Jerusalem in England’s not so green and not so pleasant land. Those are givens. But I still can’t feel in any way confident about 2013. As far as the future is concerned, God knows. Which is, rather neatly, the title given by Minnie Louise Haskins to her poem that was used by George VI in his Christmas broadcast to the Empire in 1939:

“And I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year: “Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown.” And he replied: “Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the Hand of God. That shall be to you better than light and safer than a known way.” So I went forth, and finding the Hand of God, trod gladly into the night. And He led me towards the hills and the breaking of day in the lone East.”

I have to say that, for me, at the moment, the most difficult bit of that would be the bit about “finding the hand of God”, but maybe I’ve just been looking in the wrong places.

Today is the feast of St Egwin, whose name at first calls to mind an Anglo-Saxon typo, but was in fact a person in his own right. Born of what passed for royal blood in the 7th century, Egwin entered a monastery and was enthusiastically received by royalty, clergy and the people as the bishop of Worcester. As a bishop he was apparently known as a protector of orphans and the widowed and a fair judge. This is all straight up-and-down stuff if you are going to be a Saint, of course.

The clergy, however, saw him as overly strict, and brought a case against him. Bitter resentments arose, and Egwin made his way to Rome to present his case to Pope Constantine. The case against Egwin was examined and annulled. I have to say that at this point I am starting to warm to Egwin, since one of the few remaining pleasures in my own life is proving people wrong.

Upon his return to England, he founded Evesham Abbey, which became one of the great Benedictine houses of medieval England. It was dedicated to the Virgin Mary, who had reportedly shown Egwin where a church should be built. He died at the Abbey on December 30, in the year 717. The standard hagiography reports that, following his burial, many miracles were attributed to him; the blind could see, the deaf could hear, the sick were healed. So far, so saintly. We could do with a few more like him today. It would certainly ease the burden on the NHS.

Having contemplated St Egwin, I think I have probably come to a conclusion. I don’t mean that I have decided anything, far from it. Not that sort of conclusion, just an ending. St Eggnog the Unready didn’t, I am afraid, inspire me to any great revelations.

Still, once we’ve got through New Year’s Heave, with all its emotional pitfalls and Heffalump traps, there are some potential bright spots on the horizon. It is getting lighter in the afternoons. This will be my first New Year’s Eve since Kitty died, and also our first one with Matilda. Seasons turn, things change. It can’t stay this cold for ever. Spring is coming. We just have to keep holding on, and hoping. Come on then, you ragtag bag of ancestors, get fell in! Lend me your ganseys and your oilskins. Close ranks, and carry on. Forward, the armoured brigade. Tread gladly into the night, and head for the breaking of day in the lone East. Keep tight hold of your dreams, because there are people out there who would take them away from you if they could. I may not be able to find the hand of God, but at least I’m still looking. Meanwhile, yes, add another year to my own ancestral brackets, but let’s leave the right bracket open for a while yet, if possible, please.

Happy New Year, everybody, and may it turn out to be, if not better than we hoped, at least not as bad as we feared.

Epiblog for the Last Sunday in Advent

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. Term finally came to an end, and the world didn’t. Judging by the performance of the Mayans, I think they must be also running Kirklees College. The weather has either been cold and wet, or slightly warmer, and still wet. I am assuming that the fact that it has been pissing down relentlessly since August and the entire country is sodden from the 14 bazillion cubic kilotonnes of water that have cascaded from the sky in the last few days will inevitably mean that there will be a hose-pipe ban next summer.

I was interested to see that apparently some high-falutin’ panel of climate change boffins has announced this week that this is it, from now on, we will have warm, wet summers and cold, wet winters. I have been saying for ages now that we only have two seasons in this country any more, Spring and Autumn, and while it is always gratifying to be proved correct on any subject, the shine fades a bit when you realise the implications – at least it does for those of us who remember hot summer days with bright blue skies and fluffy white clouds, the sort of summers we used to have, as described by T. H. White in “The Once and Future King”:

It was July, and real July weather, such they had in Old England. Everybody went bright brown, like Red Indians, with startling teeth and flashing eyes. The dogs moved about with their tongues hanging out, or lay panting in bits of shade, while the farm horses sweated through their coats and flicked their tails and tried to kick the horse-flies off their bellies with great hind hoofs. In the pasture field, the cows were on the gad, and could be seen galloping around with their tails in the air.

Anyway, that sort of weather was definitely not in evidence this week, and I can honestly report that no animals have been galloping around with their tails in the air, unless you count Matilda, en route to the ever-refilling food bowl. She’s acquired a new perch this week, because Debbie has moved the table from the conservatory more into the kitchen, preparatory for Christmas dinner, and brought down one of the armchairs from our former bedroom, and put that in the Conservatory. The idea being to provide extra seating for when the in-laws come around on the day itself.

We’re always short of seats in our house, because whenever visitors arrive there’s always an animal on every chair, and you have to turf them off if you want to sit down. So it seemed a reasonable assumption that Debbie’s action would indeed make it easier to find a seat. Reasonable, that is, until Matilda decided to claim the new armchair for her own, and have it as a sort of additional holiday home, as well as her bed in the hearth and the settee where Kitty used to roost next to the fire.

The news on the Elvis front is not so good; he’s still coughing and still on anti-biotics. This presents us with a bit of a dilemma. The Quixotic, heart-rules-the-head solution would be for us to pile me into the camper van and beetle over to Knottingley, pick him up, and bring him home for Christmas. But would that be the right thing for Elvis? At least where he is he is surrounded by people who he feels familiar and comfortable with, and if he came here, while still being ill, he would have to cope with the adjustment and possibly separation anxiety, plus he would be pitched into the mayhem and chaos of Christmas and all that it entails (extra people, extra dogs). In case you think I am exaggerating the chaos of Christmas, by the way, I am typing this to a mixed background of Carols from Kings on Spotify interspersed with Debbie banging nails into a skirting board, preparatory to painting the new panelling in the still-unfinished corner of the kitchen. Elvis, mate, you’re better off out of it.

Well, maybe. Who knows, there is a day yet for us to change our minds, but at the moment the inclination is to let sleeping poorly doggies lie, rather than drag him out of an environment he’s comfortable with at a time when he’s below par. Several people have suggested that Elvis may well be, long term, the sort of dog that is good at emptying wallets. Certainly Freddie, when Granny first got him, had so much wrong with him that the vets probably saw his name in the appointments register and immediately phoned the Ferrari dealership and booked a test drive. There are dogs like that, and Freddie was one. But, twelve years later, he’s now a fairly low maintenance dog, and he’s had a happy and fruitful little life. So I don’t want to write Elvis off without giving him a chance, and in any case, so what if he is a lame duck, I specialise in lame ducks, just ask any duck with mobility problems. I am a duck chiropodist-cum-physiotherapist. In fact, I may even be a lame duck myself.

I’ve also been (mildly, but nevertheless, the feeling was there) criticised for adopting a dog that came from a dog rescue in Cyprus when there are 7000 unwanted dogs a year being put down in this country. Obviously animal cruelty and neglect is, sadly, a global phenomenon, and not confined to any one country. Also, at the point where we first became interested in Elvis, it wasn’t actually apparent to us that he had been rescued in Cyprus. The first number we rang to enquire about him was somewhere in Halifax, in fact. And it’s not as if I haven’t striven to make a fuss about the numbers of unwanted dogs being put down; I have spent a lot of time this year writing letters (most of which will be ignored) to people such as DEFRA, the Dogs’ Trust, and the RSPCA urging a no-kill policy and that the Government should act as the “owner of last resort” when all else fails. At the end of the day, whatever dog we chose also had to be the right dog for us, and a worthy successor to Tiggy, and Elvis is the nearest we’ve found so far, after a considerable period spent searching, - in that respect, it would have been true whether he had come from Manchester or the Moon, Cyprus or Castleford.

So, while Elvis won’t be lonely this Christmas, it looks like he will still be in the care of Kerrie and her family for a few days longer yet.

Other than that, and the relentless rain, that’s all the news that’s fit to print, this week, really. I wish I could report some humorous quiddities or witty exchanges with my wife and others, but it’s been a strangely downbeat week, definitely end-of-term-y and – if the Mayans were to be believed, rather end-of-world-y as well.

As the solstice (and the apocalypse) approached, I was already in a doleful mood. I don’t do winter very well (something it seems I have in common with Elvis) and the day before the day itself marked the four-year anniversary of the death of Dusty, that most bonkers of cats, whose bonkers-ness lives on in family lore and legend, even to this day.

These days I find myself living more and more back in the times when I was either young, or happy, or both. I make no apologies for this, there are much worse things to be than a harmless old booby with his best years behind him, trundling towards the grave. Contemplating your potential demise at the hands of a prehistoric Mexican calendar-maker does tend to concentrate your mind, and I found myself thinking of all the people I would like to see, at least one more time, before the world went bang and vanished in a flap. John Donne’s poem The Relique was rumbling round inside my head:

When my grave is broken up again
Some second guest to entertain
(For graves have learned that woman-head
To be to more than one a bed),
And he that digs it, spies
A bracelet of bright hair about the bone,
Will he not let'us alone,
And think that there a loving couple lies,
Who thought that this device might be some way
To make their souls, at the last busy day,
Meet at this grave, and make a little stay?

There were some unexpected highlights in my review of my life to date. Especially vivid in my memory, for some reason, was the recollection of going carol singing round Brough and Elloughton with the Methodist Church in the late 1960s. I wasn’t a Methodist, as it happens, but the Boys’ Brigade, of which I was a member, was permanently attached to the Methodist Church in Brough, and as such, we got drafted in to help the choir when they used to do their evening fundraising forays, round the larger houses of the villages.

That particular year, I recall, it had actually snowed, at Christmas as well. I tell you, we used to have much better weather in the olden days. Well, more appropriate weather, anyway. Snow is great on a Christmas card. We tramped through the drifts, to the extent that the snow soaked through my Spanish suede fell boots and made my socks soggy, but for some reason I didn’t mind the cold – it was all about the camaraderie of traipsing up someone’s long and winding snowy gravel driveway then assembling round the porch of some large imposing residence with leaded windows and stained glass, waiting for our cue from Mr Lusby, the choirmaster, and then commencing one of the many well-known first lines that were guaranteed to make the hairs rise on the back of my neck. Hark, the Herald Angels Sing. While Shepherds Watched their Flocks by Night. All the slow, old, dreary carols that everybody knows, but in our frosty a capella renditions all seeming new and fresh to my ears. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was 14 years old and apparently living in a Thomas Hardy novel.

For some reason, probably because I had subconsciously absorbed the contents of one of those “Nation’s Favourite Christmas Records” programmes that seem to infest every TV channel at this time of year, my review of my existence to date then fast-forwarded to my time at Chichester, and coming into the shop one morning and telling Wendy, my assistant, that apparently there was going to be a massive concert at Wembley in aid of the Ethiopian Famine, organised by Bob Geldof, of all people. I remember the idealism of Band Aid, back in the days when we thought it really was possible to use music to “Feed the World”. To be fair, I’ve never abandoned the idea of feeding the world, it’s just that these days I tend to do it one meal at a time, and on a smaller scale. Maybe my “world” has shrunk a bit.

In any event, the sky didn’t catch fire, the magnetic polarity of the Earth was never reversed, and we all woke up the next day and carried on. It seems that the Mayans are about as good at organising apocalypses as the leaders of our current Junta. Slightly worse, in fact. Still, it provided some harmless amusement, especially to those like me with a puerile sense of humour who found the name of the French sacred site, Bugarach, buttock-clenchingly funny.

The Solstice itself is always a solemn day for me anyway. Not necessarily in a religious sense, I don’t smear myself with woad or dress up as Herne the Hunter or anything, it’s more the sense of marking a way-point, a place of passage. The ancient Chinese divinatory text, the I Ching, associates trigram # 24 with the Winter Solstice – The Return

Thunder within the earth:
The image of the turning point
Thus the kings of antiquity closed the passes
At the time of solstice.
Merchants and strangers did not go about,
And the ruler
Did not travel through the provinces.

As the Wilhelm Reich translation puts it. I did do my usual thing of lighting a candle and leaving it burning all night, and it was still alight the next morning, if one can take that as any kind of portent. Speaking of portents I was very struck by something one of my online friends posted about being out clearing up in their garden and finding a shuttlecock wedged high in the bare branches, a reminder of the long days of summer. I immediately saw it in my mind’s eye as a symbolic comet, its trajectory tending back towards summer, looking for all the world like the one in the Bayeux Tapestry.

The lines from Andrew Marvell’s “The Mower to the Glow-Worms” came back to me, where he talks about

“Ye country comets that portend
No war, nor Prince’s funeral…”

This “comet” being a portent of the fact that summer has been, and will come again, at what Eliot called “the still point of the turning world”. Real comets, the ones that hurtle endlessly through space on orbits we shall not see again in our lifetime, leaving trails of frozen boulders and ice millions of space-miles long, have been seen as portents ever since the dawn of civilization, and some people believe that the “star” which the Magi followed to Bethlehem and the manger may in fact have been a comet. Calendars and heavenly portents seem to have gone together this week, in a week when the Earth was either going to be vaporised or turn on its poles again, ready to herald the start of the inexorable progress towards next summer. (I use the word “summer” here in the full knowledge that it may not turn out to be one, see above under rain and hose-pipe bans).

Apparently 2013 is set to be a bumper year for comets, with not one but two making an appearance in the night sky, including one which will be visible in November 2013 and is promised to be “brighter than the moon”. Quite what this portends, if anything, I don’t know. Comets haven’t been a particularly good omen, historically speaking, especially for the many employees of the well-known electrical store of that name, which closed its doors for the last time on 18th December.

This week, the nearest thing to a portent I have seen with my own eyes is the blue lights of what I took to be a large number of emergency vehicles over on Woodhead Road, on the far side of the valley, in the darkness, and then, when I looked again, it was merely the string of blue fairy lights which Debbie had put up the other day, reflected in the conservatory window. I’m glad I was mistaken. We’ve all had enough trauma for one year.

So, it has come to this; we’re almost there. The Christmas inn. The lost traveller’s welcome, when the passes are closed for the solstice. And is it true? I have no idea. I cannot prove that Jesus was born in a manger in Bethlehem 2012 years ago. In fact, I think I am right in saying that such historical records as there are, would tend to prove quite conclusively that he wasn’t. It’s possible of course that the four Gospels do contain some sort of distorted, slightly garbled version of something that actually happened, given that they were written down long after the events described in them actually occurred. As John Betjeman said, in that Christmas poem I love so much:

Provincial public houses blaze
And Corporation tramcars clang,
On lighted tenements I gaze
Where paper decorations hang,
And bunting in the red Town Hall
Says 'Merry Christmas to you all'

And London shops on Christmas Eve
Are strung with silver bells and flowers
As hurrying clerks the City leave
To pigeon-haunted classic towers,
And marbled clouds go scudding by
The many-steepled London sky.

And girls in slacks remember Dad,
And oafish louts remember Mum,
And sleepless children's hearts are glad,
And Christmas morning bells say 'Come!'
Even to shining ones who dwell
Safe in the Dorchester Hotel.

And is it true? and is it true?
The most tremendous tale of all,
Seen in a stained-glass window's hue,
A Baby in an ox's stall?
The Maker of the stars and sea
Become a Child on earth for me?

And even if Jesus was really born, lived and died, in Palestine all those years ago, what does that mean? What exactly are we celebrating here, especially in a world where there seems to be so little to celebrate, a world of homelessness and animal cruelty and human suffering and war and privation for many, many people on Earth? Do we believe he was the Son of God and if so, why didn’t he – why doesn’t he – do something about that sorry litany?

The stock answer is that Big G, for some reason, now only chooses to work via humankind. I have no idea why. I can think of several people and/or situations that would be vastly improved by being struck by lightning or smitten by a thunderbolt from on high. Instead, he leaves it to people like me to write snotty letters to the papers or to Government departments that ignore me. If I am supposed to be some sort of conduit for the Holy Spirit, all I can say is perhaps he should have chosen more wisely.

It’s not always wasted effort though – words do have power, and sometimes you get lucky, and string them together in the right order, and they become like a spell, and work independently of your utterance of them. I used to be able to write words in Government tenders that would convince people to move hundreds of pallets of publications from one end of the country to the other, when my bids were successful. All of that’s gone now, of course, and on reflection I don’t think I’d include it in my pre-apocalypse recap of my life's edited highlights; though I probably thought I was happy at the time, subsequent events proved otherwise.

But I did have another small vote of confidence this week, when my cousin rang me to say that she’d received the copy of “Granny Fenwick” that I sent her. It had arrived on a day when she was feeling really low and isolated – she’s recently moved to an area of Kent where she knows very few people, and was missing the fact that her children, who used to live only five doors away from her in Croydon, could no longer pop in and out. She told me on the phone that she’d walked for two miles into the nearest town and two miles back again, her eyes streaming with tears, then she had got home and found my book waiting on her doormat, and it had totally transformed her day and made her feel much better. So I did make a small difference, and it was worth doing that book just to be able to send it to her so it arrived at the point where she needed it most.

All of which is a big digression from Christmas. So maybe I should just end by saying that I wish you, dear reader, whoever you are and wherever you are, and how much or how little of this stuff you believe, and however you celebrate the event, the very best that the festive season can offer for you and yours, and a happy, healthy and more prosperous 2013 for all of us.

Epiblog for the Third Sunday in Advent

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. And a cold one. Very cold, in fact, despite the fact that we are still burning the coal faster than the Peruvians can dig it up, and every conceivable log from the garden and its immediate surrounds, including the ones our neighbour’s son (the landscape gardener) kindly donated to us, has been chain-sawed up and are now seasoning in various locations throughout the garage and elsewhere.

Matilda has had a traumatic week. Because of the cold, she’s been spending most of her time on the bed in the hearth, sometimes to her peril. The wrought-iron chestnut roaster hangs on a nail just above her resting-place, like the sword of Damocles. The other day she was so blissed out with the heat from the stove that she stretched out all her legs and flexed her toes, catching the edge of the chestnut roaster, which then fell off the hook, and onto her. It was the fastest, and the furthest, I have seen her move for some considerable time.

She’s also come face to face with Spidey, next door’s cat, at last. Fortunately for both parties, there was a closed, double-glazed conservatory door between them at the time. He was outside on the decking, she was inside where she likes to sit, watching the birds on the bird-feeder high up in the tree. Not that this prevented Matilda from arching her back, fluffing up her tail like a bog-brush, and finally emitting the full repertoire of terrifying growls and hisses which the vets had assured us she possessed.

They were right after all, as it turned out, about both the volume and venom of her utterances, but it took Spidey to provide the inspiration and focus for them. He, however, remained in place, taunting her, completely unimpressed by Matilda “doing her pieces” at him through the glass door, and, after a sort of cat-shrug which was the body language equivalent of “are you quite finished?” he wandered off on his merry way.

Debbie now has her sights firmly fixed on the end of term, and we just need the van to hold out long enough to make it to next Thursday night, when she officially finishes. It’s been a bitter-sweet week for her, and indeed for me, because it’s marked the first anniversary of Tiggy’s death, and also I have been working on the preparations for the advent of Elvis. At one point, it looked as though he would actually arrive on the actual anniversary of Tig’s death, St Lucy’s Day, 13th December, but in the end it seemed better to allow him a few more days to recover, which will also give Deb’s mum time to get Zak and Freddie’s injections topped up and to give everybody the best possible start, without infecting each other.

The lady from the kennels is over in Huddersfield on Mondays and Thursdays anyway, so rather than make a special journey, it looks like the sensiblest option is to bring him next Thursday, which will also coincide with the end of term, so he’ll have time to get used to both of us before the routine of Debbie being out for most of the day four days a week kicks back in again in the new year. That’s the plan, anyway.

We wanted to mark the anniversary of Tiggy’s death in some way, but in the event, it was an evening pretty much like any other. I did, during the day, when I was working on my own, stop to put on The Joy of Living by Ewan McColl, and blub my way through that, especially the lines about

You filled all my days
Kept the night at bay
Dearest companion

Which always makes me think of her. But in the end, we didn’t really need to make a special effort to remember Tig, she is still a “household word” and often still spoken about as if she’s still alive and just gone out into the garden or down for a snuffle in the woods out the back, a sort of canine equivalent of Canon Henry Scott Holland’s “death is nothing at all.” We remember her all day and every day. Good dog, Tig.

By Thursday night when I was finished doing the washing up, I was so cold I not only jammed my microfleece buff down over my head, but I also wrapped the spare yashmak from my pile of clothes next door round my ears and my head. By the time I had finished, I looked like a cross between Mother Theresa, Lawrence of Arabia, and Touche Turtle. Debbie cast me a disdainful look:

“You look just like an old woman!” she pronounced.

“So do you, dear, but tomorrow, I can take off my yashmak!” I replied. Rather foolishly as it turned out. So, that will be no sex for a month, and sleeping in the dog kennel for me, then.

Unfortunately, it hasn’t been a week of unrelieved humour and gay badinage. Paypal saw to that. On 6th December , I had received an email from Paypal saying that my account had been limited (ie frozen) by Paypal. This meant that – two weeks from Christmas – I could not take orders for our books on my web site www.kingsengland.com. The reason advanced for this by Paypal was that, apparently, our site at the time made it possible for people from Iran, Syria, and The Sudan to order books from us, and this contravened some guideline or sanction or other set by the US Department of Defense.

I immediately told them to bugger off and also to learn how to spell “defence”, saying that as a UK citizen, and a subject of Her Britannic Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, I was not under the jurisdiction of US Law. Paypal’s reply to this was that this requirement is enshrined in Paypal’s terms and conditions, to which I must have signed up. I then asked them to point to the precise part of their terms and conditions that says this, and told them that they may in fact be acting ultra vires, and they ignored me.

Against my better judgement, I actually went into the back end of our Actinic web shop and geographically limited the countries we ship to, excluding those to which Paypal objected, and also geographically limited the payments we can accept to exclude those countries. Paypal, however, then objected to the fact that it was still possible for people in those countries to go on the web site and create an account, even though, once created, they couldn’t do anything with it!

I even checked with Actinic, who make the web shop software, and they confirmed in writing that this drop-down menu is not editable. I am not prepared to ditch Actinic and start again with another shopping cart – I have spent over a year building up the site, there are many thousands of Actinic sites, and many thousands of them use Paypal and/or Paypal virtual terminal. My preferred solution, I told them, would be that Paypal used some common sense for once and un-limited my account.

The whole thing was a complete farrago of nonsense anyway – we do not sell to those countries, and never have done so, and probably never will. We sell books on English history, and children’s books, and things like that. So, as you can see, we are hardly a hotbed of international terrorism. I even thought of sticking a few pictures of rockets and bazookas on the site, just to see if Paypal noticed.

So a week of lost sales went by, and Paypal did nothing to sort things out. In the meantime, I reported them to the Luxembourg banking authorities and made an official complaint about you to the UK Financial Services Ombudsman. Eventually, in desperation, I resorted to using Facebook to kick up a stink about it, finding the names of Paypal senior executives on the net, looking up to see if they had a Facebook account, then if they did, personal messaging them with details of my problem with their damfool company, copying in their friends for good measure.

I told them: “You are taking food from my mouth. That doesn't matter, I will survive, I have survived worse than Paypal. But you are also metaphorically taking the food from the mouths of my wife and my cat, and I will NEVER forgive you for that, as long as I live, and I will make it my business from this day forth to see that Paypal suffers.” I don't do forgiveness.

Eventually, the mindless morons at Paypal who “review” this sort of thing saw my point, caved in and restored access to our account, but that was a week of my life I won’t get back. But it is a salutary warning to any small business that relies solely on Paypal for its web sales. Beware. These people are idiots, no, worse - they are idiots with a manual strapped to their chest. Unthinking robots, who would march straight off the edge of a cliff, if it was company policy. They don’t care about their customers, they don’t communicate with their customers, they are totally unresponsive to the needs of their customers, and they get uppity when you point all this out to them.

The whole organisation should be disbanded for incompetence and put to work doing something more socially useful, like picking up litter or drilling the little holes in the end of toothbrushes. I wouldn’t even trust them to get that right, though, since on last week’s performance they would be intellectually and organizationally incapable of daubing shit on the walls of a khazi.

Eventually, I got them to specify the clause in Paypal's T & C's which justified them limiting my account:

9.1 Restricted Activities. In connection with your use of our website, your Account, or the Services, or in the course of your interactions with PayPal, a User or a third party, you will not:Breach any law, statute, contract, or regulation (for example, those governing financial services including anti-money laundering, consumer protections, unfair competition, anti-discrimination or false advertising)

Now the first thing that strikes ME about this is the vagueness. ANY law? Do they mean ANY law, ANYWHERE in the world? There are probably laws in some backward countries that require me to take heretics out into the desert and stone them to death. Am I risking my Paypal account by not doing so?

Or, as I suspect, do they mean any US law? In which case, they do not have any jurisdiction in the EU or the UK. And as far as I know, I wasn't breaking any UK or EU law with my site. All very strange, very woolly and very, very unsatisfactory.

I know one thing though, that if I was ever going to take anyone out into the desert and stone them, it would be bloody Paypal.

As I said, I spent a lot of my week justifying what I was doing to various people who didn’t give a stuff if I lived or died. “Justifying” is also the word for what typesetters do when they make the right hand margin of a block of text a straight one, like the left margin. So I have actually, one way or another, spent more of the week justifying than I thought. And here I am at the weekend, justifying the ways of God to man, or vice versa. Better people than me have tried of course, including Old Blind Milton, who went on to invent sterilising fluid.

Before going on to the topic of the third Sunday of Advent, though, I would also like to report that this week I have been the victim of random acts of kindness. First of all, during the epic struggle with Paypal across the many pages of Facebook, several of my friends piled in and stuck up for me, posting supportive messages, and if you were one of them, and I omitted to thank you properly at the time for your support, then please consider yourself warmly thanked now.

Then, at the weekend, a parcel of unsolicited knitting arrived from Auntie Maisie, including a completely beezer Doctor Who scarf, in electric blue and white, which I have immediately appropriated, a woolly hat, and a knitted bolero waistcoat which was intended for Debbie but which Granny has adopted. Brilliant stuff.

Talking of Granny, she, in turn, handed on a bag of windfall apples which she’s been given, and which were surplus to her own requirements, and during the week, I got two meals out of that bag of windfalls, so again I was very grateful for that gesture.

The most startling gesture of kindness, though, came in the form of a windfall of a different sort, from one of my online friends who is also a reader of my books, and who has been a massive source of help and support in promoting my work throughout the year. I won’t embarrass them by naming them publicly, but their incredibly generous gift meant the difference between being able to pay the garage bill for the alternator and still being able to have a reasonable Christmas, or having to choose one or the other, which was where we were before they stepped in. Plus, I was able to pay a little bit of it forward in the form of small donations to Mossburn and to Rain Rescue.

It was completely unexpected, and came completely out of the blue, but I would like to acknowledge the kindness behind it, and also to a certain extent, I hope, the belief in my writing. It can be a lonely furrow, sometimes, and knowing that even just one person can see the point in your continuing does make a difference. I don’t write for adulation, I write because I seem to have to, but it’s still good to see the welcoming flash of the lighthouse when you are out alone at sea in the dark and a storm is coming. Thank you.

In the wider world, it’s been a grim week for news. The focus in the establishment media here in the UK has once again switched to immigration as a topic, with the release of the headline figures from the 2011 census. In an incredibly stupid piece of clumsy journalism, the main BBC news that night led with three headline pronouncements from the newsreader; that immigration had gone up; that the number of self-described “white British” had fallen, and that a growing percentage of the population regarded themselves as having no religion, Norwich, for some reason, being the “Godless capital of the UK”, at 43% heathen.

This just invites the likes of the BNP, the EDL, and UKIP, and all of the other mad colonels in Much-Barking-on-The Lune to make a connection between the three that doesn’t necessarily exist. Much of the growth in immigration in the period has been from Eastern European countries, especially Poland, which is at least nominally Catholic. The decline in the importance of the Church is caused in part by complex issues such as the breakup of the family, and the message that is pumped out at people by the advertising industry every day that you are only a success as a person if you have the latest phone, the latest Ipad, and a new sofa from Dfs or similar. The Church of England hasn’t done itself any favours in the relevancy stakes recently either, with its constant wrangling over gay marriage and women bishops. Rarely have I seen such a mighty blunderbuss discharged with such devastating effect directly into the marksman’s foot.

And the growth in people who are not “white British” but other hybrids of British is presumably down to precisely the type of integration which certain sections of our society are accused of not doing enough of. It sometimes seems to me that Muslims, in particular, are damned if they do and damned if they don’t.

When some fundamentalist wingnut in Southampton or Reading decides to declare a one-man jihad, he gets prime time in the media to demand Sharia Law and the restoration of the Caliphate and witter on about the supremacy of the Muslim culture. If I called for the restoration of the Druids, I doubt it would make it on to the six o’clock news. Yet the relevance, and the amount of people who would agree with me is probably equivalent in both cases. But when people of different ethnic backgrounds do attempt to integrate and adopt the British way of life, people in right-wing, racist political parties go on and on about coffee-coloured Britons and the “mongrelisation” of our culture!

This is not a political blog, I already have a political blog, not that I have much time to write in it these days, and I doubt I could remember the login details, but I have to say, in passing, that it was very depressing to see the leader of the Labour Party making a speech this week in which he tried to out-bigot the bigots. “Admitting” that Labour made “mistakes” over immigration is not going to ease tension or reduce the racial and religious divides in our society. I have very few expectations of Mr Miliband as Labour leader, and even then, I am frequently let down, but to hear him trying to dance to Cameron’s dog-whistle in a feeble attempt to garner some “me too!” votes at the next election is most unedifying. Where is the rational, sane, impartial discussion on the subject; who is going to rebut the media lies and stereotypes; who is going to stand up and talk about one of the major problems with any immigration policy, that the EU political project denies us control over our own borders anyway? Not Ed Miliband, that’s for sure – he’s too busy doing the work of the bigots for them.

I’d already decided I’d had enough with the week’s bad news when the first reports started to filter in about the school shooting in Connecticut. Several people have pointed out that it’s unfair to tar all Americans with the same brush and to automatically assume that they are all rootin’ tootin’ banjo-plucking rednecks who, at the drop of a hat will “go postal” and spray the area with an AK-47 before turning the weapon on themselves. I know they aren't. But it does seem to happen with an awful sense of inevitability, every two years or so. So much so that it almost makes you wonder if the wall to wall media coverage has already sparked the idea in the next one, but we won’t hear about that until another clutch of kids or students is cut down in a hail of lead, next autumn sometime.

I don’t suppose, looked at in the round, although it's probably a faster-paced and more relentless society in many ways, more pressured, that there are any more irrational scary people in the US than in the UK. Pound for pound, man for man. The difference seems to be the access to guns, for which the US must thank the NRA and the gun lobby, which clings resolutely to the “right to bear arms” as part of the Constitution, for the provision of a well-ordered militia, or whatever the phrase is. Just in case the Brits come back and try to land some tea at Boston Harbour again. If it wasn’t tragic, it would be hilarious. It’s like the gangsters in Moss Side justifying sniping at each other and lobbing hand grenades on the grounds that Napoleon might invade any minute!

Ever since the advent of Sarah Palin, I have said that I, personally, am in favour of the right to arm bears, so they can shoot back, and nothing that I have seen since leads me to think that there is any other answer other than to make the private ownership of guns illegal except under carefully licensed conditions, as in the UK. If a farmer needs a shotgun to keep down vermin on his land in Godforesaken, Wyoming, fair enough, provided he locks it up when not in use. Nobody needs a handgun or an assault rife in the home. Whether or not President Obama has the guts to do anything about it, however, remains to be seen. Even the massive tide of public sympathy for the victims is not enough to stem the outpourings of the Obama-haters on right-wing US media and messageboard forums.

For someone who purports to believe in God, random acts of violence of this nature bring great difficulty. We’re right, slap bang up against the old “if-there’s-a-God-why-does-he-allow-such-things-to-happen” question. I know you are probably reading this thinking, go on, then, argue your way out of this one. I’ll tell you now; I can’t explain it. I don’t know. As I have said many times before, the mind of God is almost certainly beyond human understanding. Whatever God is, if it is at all, it has very different ideas to us about concepts of justice and fairness. But then it has an infinite number of multiverses to run, for all eternity, so maybe that changes your perspective. I don’t know. Maybe there isn’t a God, and random bad shit happens for no reason.

One of the message boards I post on from time to time (though less and less these days, because it has become, essentially, a dialogue of the deaf) did, however, have a very interesting post. The author was concerned with the issue of how do you explain to children about this sort of occurrence, when they see it plastered all over the TV, as they inevitably will? The answer was that quotation from Fred Rogers which she posted:

"When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, "Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping." To this day, especially in times of "disaster," I remember my mother's words and I am always comforted by realizing that there are still so many helpers – so many caring people in this world."

America, and the world in general, may well have moved on since Fred Rogers’ folksy homespun charm in Ted Rogers’ Neighbourhood was a regular feature on US TV, but I think that what he said is still essentially true.

It is obviously a stupid and simplistic claim to say that God sends down disasters simply in order to strengthen the human spirit, but nevertheless there is a something that always wants to behave altruistically in the human makeup in these circumstances. There is an instinct to help, to hearken back to the good. People come together and hold vigils and hold concerts and fundraisers and give freely of their time and their efforts to try and make things better. It always seems to be just at the point where things are darkest and bleakest that the white shoots of hope push blindly upwards through the muck and the crap of humankind’s worst excesses, to re-establish love and peace.

We see it in the efforts of those who tried to help after Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans , Hurricane Sandy in New York, and similar disasters elsewhere. So much money was donated after the Tsunami, that the charities even ended up giving some of it back to the donors. We see it in the way people organised concerts for the relief of famine in Africa. You see it in the volunteers who go out and take soup and sandwiches to the homeless, or to the people who will spend their nights in the freezing cold setting humane traps to catch lost or feral cats so they can be re-homed. You see it in the people who rescue dogs from a sentence of death in the Council Pound. It’s even there in the soldier who throws himself on the grenade to save the life of a comrade, or the teacher who confronts a gunman to save the lives of the kids, even though it costs hers.

Others have noticed it, too – in that Masefield poem I am fond of quoting, he speaks of

Kind things done by men with ugly faces

And of course, good old Gerard Manley Hopkins is always telling us

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs

Whether God, like Gordon Brown, is just clearing up a mess he caused in the first place by his clumsiness or ineptitude, or whatever, or whether God is having a bad hair day as described by Raymond Chandler or whether you believe that we are like flies to wanton boys to the Gods, and “they kill us for their sport”, there is little prospect of understanding it fully. If you believe that despite all of the random crap that happens – or if you believe that, for every random act of evil, there is a balancing random act of kindness somewhere that cancels it out, if you believe at all, then the best you can do is repeat, alongside the unknown author of Desiderata:

Whether or not it is clear to you no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.

And if you don’t believe me, this week, I wouldn’t blame you. And even if you did, when faced with the death of a five-year-old, it’s little consolation. I have come to this point this boundary, this liminal edge, this cliff-top, so many times, and I still don’t know the answer. We see "through a glass, darkly." I know that I feel something, sometimes, but, like Gloucester in King Lear, I am essentially blind, and I don’t even know if it’s a real cliff or not:

How fearful
And dizzy 'tis, to cast one's eyes so low!
The crows and choughs that wing the midway air
Show scarce so gross as beetles: half way down
Hangs one that gathers samphire, dreadful trade!
Methinks he seems no bigger than his head:
The fishermen, that walk upon the beach,
Appear like mice.

And so we came to Sunday, the third Sunday in advent, and once we’d listened to Desert Island Discs and I had established for Debbie’s benefit that no, Sister Wendy Beckett isn’t the one that plays the guitar, that was Dominique the Singing Nun and yes she is dead (Dominique, not Sister Wendy) I was once more able to sit down and re-commence writing this blog.

As always, when I have been to the edge of the cliff and re-traced my steps, I find myself counting my blessings. For all of the stress and irritation of my dealings with the idiots at Paypal, nobody died. OK, I may have threatened at one point to cut off their goolies with an axe, but that was just me getting their attention. Nobody actually died, like they did in Connecticut. This Christmas I will have the benefit of two things I didn’t have last Christmas, hot water to the kitchen sink, and a stove with a workable oven. And yes, I am in a wheelchair and I have a life-limiting disease, but then as one of my dearest online friends pointed out in a cheery email, life itself is a life-limiting disease.

It’s Sunday lunchtime, and we’re here again. Deb’s prepping for next week’s classes, Matilda is asleep on the settee, and for the first time in a year, I have done an online supermarket order which included dog food. This is the darkness just before the dawn. Next week sees the Solstice, when we come to the end of this long dark tunnel we’ve been trudging down ever since Hallowe’en, and – if we’re spared – we can look forward to celebrating Christmas in slightly better style than we were expecting, with Elvis and with Matilda.

The Solstice candle, that spark of light that marks the start of next Summer, will be lit, the tortoise stove will be providing us with warmth, and there will be food on the table. Yes, we will miss those who can’t be here, for whatever reason. But we really are, compared to many, especially those who mourn the untimely loss of a child today, incredibly lucky.

Epiblog for the Second Sunday in Advent

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley, and when I say busy, I do mean busy. Another week has zipped by, and already it is almost a year since poor old Tiggy died. I can’t believe that it’s zipped by so fast. The year, that is. And the week, of course, come to that.

Weather-wise, we’ve all been suffering from this perishing cold. Winter is definitely biting now, and the local weather report says it’ll be even colder next week. Just when I need to organise a haircut. It’s been beautiful to see the frost on the trees and the grass down in the valley on the mornings when I’ve been awake early enough to see the sun come up over Berry Brow, but not so beautiful to go out there in it, and try and shovel coal out of a bag where it’s all stuck together with frost! I’ve seen a couple more beautiful dawns, as well, but overall I would still trade them for a winter in Majorca, I think. I could always look at pictures of a typical English winter dawn on the internet, and think myself lucky I wasn’t experiencing it for real.

Deb, too, has been feeling the effects of winter, particularly in those early mornings where she has to pour kettles of hot water on the windscreen of the camper and use an entire can of de-icer just be able to see out into the pre-dawn dark as she heads out to some godforsaken outreach centre in the back of beyond, or Birstall, as it is sometimes known. Because the heater in the van is so old and feeble, she’s also taken to making a hot water bottle first thing, and driving along with it stuffed between her and the seatbelt. In the medieval life we live, spring redeems, but winter punishes.

Matilda, too, dislikes the cold, and has spent most of the week on the bed by the hearth. No change there, then. We’ve discovered that, despite being an elderly cat of some nine years, she likes playing with old shoe laces and quite happily does star jumps to try and catch them. Strangely enough, she seems to prefer the shoelace on its own, to the shoelace with flat Eric, her catnip mouse, tied to the end of it. She’s still very reluctant to venture far outside, and like Debbie, she still growls and scuttles off upstairs whenever somebody she doesn’t like comes to the door.

The week started with a visit from Lucy, who had come to borrow some humane rat traps, which we have had hanging around for years, having acquired them at some point in the past when we feared (needlessly, as it turned out) an infestation by humane rats. While we are always glad to see her, we were especially so when she left us a jar of her home-made plum jam and her whisky marmalade, both of which I have subsequently tested for strength and taste, and to which I can award a five-star review.

Unfortunately, the week then plummeted to a new low when the coal thieves returned on Tuesday night and stole another two bags, this time out of the re-order I’d been forced to place on Monday. What had happened was that when the new coal arrived, I had managed to make space in the porch for five bags out of the re-order, but the other five had to go outside, although I asked the coalman to stack them right next to the porch wall, and we also slit the bags so that if any were picked up, coal would start to come out of them.

When I went back out later, and saw that two of the new bags were already missing, I lost it, and went totally batshit. I got on the phone to the police again and told them that somebody was obviously watching our house, for all I knew, they were out there now, and would be coming back for the rest, and that now my total losses in monetary terms for the two crimes were over £120.00 – not a great amount of money to some, but since we’re struggling for survival at the moment, quite a dint in our skimpy cash flow.

Then I went and got the axe, and sharpened it, and took that, and my mobile phone, and Debbie’s kayaking torch, the one with the 200 foot beam, and went and sat by the remaining sacks to guard them until the police came. I must admit, when I wrote last week about sticking out dark nights alone, I was thinking more metaphorically than literally. I didn’t feel very confident of my ability to inflict a lot of damage on them, if they came back, I was hoping that my presence alone would be a deterrent, though I did have a few practice swings with the axe, more to keep me warm than anything else, while metaphorically screaming the Fenwick war cry. I couldn’t do that for real, I was saving it for the moment when they came around the corner of the garage.

In the event, it was actually the police who came around the corner of the garage first, an hour and a quarter later, and found themselves coned in my torch-beam. So we all went inside and I went through the details with them, and before they left, they very kindly brought in the three remaining bags and re-stacked them with the ones in the porch, so I could still get by to the door, just. They also brought in my aluminium wheelchair ramps, the ones I use to get in and out of the camper, which had been out there as well.

Up until then, Tuesday had been a good day. Gez came round with the proofs of his new novel, Changes, and I had a quick chat with him about the amends and what needed doing. Just as we were finishing up, the bell outside dinged and I went to the door to find Mark, Carol and Scott from the Isle of Arran standing on the doorstep! They were down here visiting family, and called by for an all-too-brief meeting on their way back. They also introduced themselves to Freddie and Zak, who I was dog-sitting for the day. Freddie growled (his default greeting for everybody) and Zak looked nervous (his default setting for every social situation).

All this talk of dogs brings me to the latest development in the Elvis saga. In order to provide the necessary barrier to his escapist tendencies which the animal rescue people had specified, we’d settled on willow screening rather than a donking great wooden fence, primarily on the grounds of cost. Also, speed of erection was a consideration, and I make a point of mentioning that word specifically for the benefit of Google’s web-traffic bots. As indeed, I do with the word “bots”. Anyway, this was ordered on Thursday, and due on a next day delivery on Friday. I didn’t want to order it too far in advance in case the rolls of willow screening went the same way as the coal, there being no way I could store 24 yards of willow screening and seven 5’ 6” fence posts in the house anywhere.

Also due on Friday was the “new” cooker. New to us, that is, a result of one of Debbie’s forays on Ebay. We’d had to get rid of the old range cooker which we’ve had for about twelve years, because it’s just too large for the kitchen, especially as I now need more space with my wheelchair and everything, and in any case, about the only time it ever got used to its full capacity was when I cooked Christmas dinner on it. The rest of the meals through the year, I could probably have done with a baby Belling, to be honest.

The gas fitter had been round on Thursday night to disconnect the old range, so our evening meal on Thursday consisted of crumpets toasted on the fire. I was slightly disconcerted that the people who had said they were coming for the old range from Freecycle had not turned up, but they emailed me to say they’d be there at 9.30 on Friday morning, so I thought nothing of it. I was more disconcerted that Debbie said that when she’d coasted into the driveway, the camper van engine had died on her, and no amount of coaxing would get it to start again. It had come to rest in a place that would make it at least inconvenient, if not downright bloody impossible, to squeeze through carrying a range cooker. Oh, soddit.

So began Friday, a day of battle that will remain forever etched in my heart. On the one side, ranged against me, were the dark forces of evil and chaos that swirled all around us. I had to make sure I got rid of the old cooker before the new one came. I had to get the gas fitter to come back and connect the new one. I had to take delivery of several rolls of willow screening and seven large fence posts, and I had to get someone to come and move the camper van and rescue it up to the garage for further investigation. At least two of those had to be done before the new cooker arrived or the old one went. On my side, I had me, with a mobile phone, a laptop and a landline, plus Debbie, plus Matilda for a while, at least until the first person knocked on the door, at which point I knew that she would flee the field of battle, growling to herself as she went.

The first problem was the camper, but we had a stroke of luck there. Debbie tried it again, on spec, and the engine fired, and caught, so she managed to back it out of the driveway and more or less park it at the kerbside on the road, before it died again, this time for good. At least it was out of the way of the cookers.

The next problem was that the people from Freecycle hadn’t turned up, and it was over an hour past the time they’d specified. Sadly, I didn’t have a mobile number for them, despite having asked for it twice in previous emails, so I began a series of increasingly desperate emails telling them in effect to get their arses down here if they still wanted it. At noon, I gave up, and offered it to the second person on the list, who gratefully accepted it, on behalf of his daughter. Unfortunately though, he was in Stockport, and there was no way, he thought, that he could make it before the new cooker arrived.

By now, I had hit upon a cunning plan. But before I had time to implement it or do anything to inform Debbie, the willow screening arrived. I went out to find the courier gleefully stacking it on my wheelchair ramp. I explained to him my predicament, and asked him if he wouldn’t mind just carrying it through the kitchen and out onto the decking, a journey of some half a dozen steps. “Can’t do that, mate, it’s only supposed to be door to door”. Eventually, we compromised, and he stacked it in the porch, already crammed to the gills with bags of coal, a process which took him longer, and caused him more hassle, than if he’d just done what I asked in the first place.

Making a mental note never to order from that place again, I trundled back in and, when she came in from the garden, told Debbie what had happened. As you can imagine, she was most impressed at having to move the stuff herself.

No sooner was that diversion out of the way, than the garage came to pick up the van, and we were left contemplating the wreckage in a sort of “now, where were we..” sort of way. Debbie was trying, ineffectually, to clean the area behind the old range, which was still plugged in, and she must have happened to touch an especially frayed bit of the old flex, because the next minute she let out a huge scream, sprang upwards, and landed flat on her back beside me, as a result of getting a brief taste of 240 volts AC. I had no idea what had happened at first, until she had recovered enough to tell me, but between us we managed to unplug it at the mains and I phoned the guy who was on his way from Stockport to tell him about the frayed flex problem just in case it made a difference It didn’t, thankfully.

By now, the arrival of Pickfords was imminent, and there was no time to tell Debbie my idea, so I just got her to hide out of the way until after they had gone. When they knocked on the door, a few minutes later, I invited them in and showed them the old range. Putting on my best, Oscar nominated “tragic cripple Steve” performance, I explained that I’d been let down by the people who should have moved it out of the way, and was there any chance, even the minutest, that they might feel sorry enough for me to shift this one first?

After my previous experience with Tuffnells Parcel Express over the willow screening, I wasn’t hopeful, but as it turned out they said “Yeah, no worries, mate”, bent down and picked up the range as lightly as if it had been a cardboard box, and bore it out of the house shoulder-high, just like a coffin. Two minutes later they were back with the new one, plonked it down, and hey presto, sign here. Now all I had to do was get the gasfitter to come back.

I was dialling his number, when he walked in the door. He’d remembered that I’d told him the delivery time, and had turned up on spec, slightly early, but had gone to sleep in his van for 20 minutes and woke up when he saw the Pickfords lorry. In ten minutes, the new cooker was connected and in place.

Just as the gasfitter was leaving, Brian from Stockport arrived for the old range, and John the gasman helped him get it into the back of his people-carrier. Result!

By the end of Friday I was drained, though, and although I had envisaged cooking a vast celebratory feast for us on the new stove, it turned out in the end to be chip butties, which was about all we were up to. And Saturday was still to come.

Saturday morning saw the arrival of Andrew and Dave from the Danewalk Kennels who had been sent by Kerrie to put up the Elvis-fence. With Debbie helping where she could, and me manning the teapot, they grafted for four hours in the freezing cold, and also overcame the massive underestimation of the number of fence posts needed, by improvisation. I will need at some future point to order another five fence posts, preferably before the next load of gales hits us, but nevertheless, we now have an Elvis-proof fence. Elvis himself, sadly, is under the weather a bit at the moment, having suffered a tinge of kennel-cough and having to go back on to anti-biotics, so we’ve agreed with the kennels to leave him in their care until he’s completed that treatment. Strangely enough, it’s now looking as if he might arrive almost exactly on the anniversary of Tig’s death. Maybe it’s her influence, from up there in doggy heaven, that’s arranged this neatness of timing, that the successor dog arrives a year after her death. It’s usually a year and a day, in folk songs and nursery rhymes, isn’t it.

The camper van news was not so good. Another massive bill, because the problem is that the alternator relay had burnt itself out (almost catching fire on its way to the garage) and that in turn had knackered the alternator. Ouch. Just when I thought we might be getting in front a bit, this happens. Oh well, one step forward, two steps back, as the Italian army says.

So it came to Sunday, the second Sunday in advent, no less. Advent is all supposed to be about looking forward to Christmas, and I haven’t really given it a thought, as yet. As a child, I always looked forward to Christmas, especially Christmas Eve, for some reason, which was always more magical, for me, than the day itself. This year, when I think about Christmas, all I can think of are those people who aren’t looking forward to Christmas. The lonely, the suicidal, and the homeless, out in the cold; the animals in the shelters and pounds; the feral cats, out in the cold, and the turkeys in the turkey-sheds. One can only hope that the latter have no inkling of how their short, unhappy lives will soon be brutally ended.

Some of these categories, the homeless and the abandoned animals, for instance, are, of course, almost a direct consequence of the economic policies being followed by our so-called “Leaders” another tranche of which was unveiled last Wednesday. Their answer to the fact that the economy is holed below the water-line, and sinking fast, is to steer straight for the iceberg, full speed ahead, while jettisoning the weak, the poor and the needy in order to keep those in first class happy.

What a sad, nasty country we have become, when we’re already looking at what budgets at home can be chopped so we can fire missiles at Syria next year, and the elections show that the government’s dog-whistle pronouncements on immigration have been so successful that UKIP is now off the leash, off over the horizon in full cry, and refusing to come back to heel. The unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable, as was once said of another similarly unpleasant spectacle. This Junta, this blight, is another reason why I can’t ever be a proper Christian. How can you forgive a raging hypocrite like George Osborne? You are supposed to start by “hating the sin, but loving the sinner”, but how do you do that when, in his case, the sin and the sinner are indivisible?

So I can’t say I am looking forward to Christmas, nor indeed to 2013, particularly. I find myself these days living more and more back in the days when I was what passed for happy. I haven’t read my Bible or my Book of Common Prayer for a while now, but in the absence of any particularly wacky saints to celebrate today, I turned to the Collect for today to see what it was that I was supposed to be reading and hearing.

Amongst the various prayers, Psalms and readings is 2 Peter 3: 11-14;

Since all these things are to be dissolved in this way, what sort of persons ought you to be in leading lives of holiness and godliness, waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God, because of which the heavens will be set ablaze and dissolved, and the elements will melt with fire? But, in accordance with his promise, we wait for new heavens and a new earth, where righteousness is at home.

Or, as I prefer it, from the full-fat, high-tar King James version:

Seeing then that all these things shall be dissolved, what manner of persons ought ye to be in all holy conversation and godliness. Looking for and hasting unto the coming of the day of God, wherein the heavens being on fire shall be dissolved, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat? Nevertheless we, according to his promise, look for new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness. Wherefore, beloved, seeing that ye look for such things, be diligent that ye may be found of him in peace, without spot, and blameless.

I could certainly do with some fervent heat right now, not only the spiritual kind, but also the actual! But I take this to mean that while (according to the Bible anyway) it is not impossible that one day we will wake up and find the sky on fire, God on his throne hurling thunderbolts hither and yon, and demons with horns, red tights and pitchforks prodding George Osborne in the backside as they usher him towards the burning lake, nevertheless, we should not cease striving to make things better here, in the meantime. We shall not cease, from mental strife, nor shall our swords sleep in our hands, and all that. So with that in mind, instead of my usual vaguely appropriate piece of music from Youtube, I’ve attached instead a small quelquechose, a harmless maggot of a piece that I put together in what is laughingly described as my spare time, to try and help RAIN Rescue.

God alone knows what next week will bring, but at least right now,
on Sunday teatime I’m not out in the cold with the abandoned animals and the homeless people, and I thank him for that small mercy.

Epiblog for the First Sunday in Advent

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. Not helped in any way by the fact that the weather has now changed from cold and rainy to cold and, er, colder. So far, we haven’t seen any snow, but it can only be a matter of time, if it carries on like this. There’s already a white blanket covering the “Sleeping Warrior” on the hills of Arran, according to the Arran Banner’s photos on their web page. Winter’s baring its fangs and circling, waiting to strike.

We’ve reacted to the colder days by burning yet more coal, as you do. More of that later. As John Betjeman wrote:

The bells of waiting advent ring,
The tortoise stove is lit again

Except that it’s been such a crap year, weather-wise, ours was never really allowed to go out! Ours isn’t – technically speaking – a tortoise stove anyway, and I used to think that was because it only has one pane of glass in the window, whereas your proper tortoise stove has an oval window split into several panes, so that the effect is like looking at the shell of a tortoise. Hence the name. In fact, “Tortoise” was a trade name for the stoves manufactured in North America by Charles Portway in the early 1800s. As the modern day Portway web site states:

The beauty behind the success of Portway’s stove was in their efficiency. The stoves burned so slowly that they extracted the maximum amount of heat from the fuel. The stoves were named ‘Tortoise’ stoves and proudly produced with the motto ‘Slow but Sure’ displayed on the front. It was the first heating appliance to offer fuel efficiency as a major selling point making its role in the development of our industry of great significance today. Robert Higgs, the chief executive of the Heating and Ventilating contractors association argues the Portway was the “founding father of energy efficiency”.

Portway’s stoves were used to heat churches and halls as well as homes and 19th Century stoves displaying the iconic ‘Tortoise’ trademark can still be found today, making it one of the oldest, most resilient products in the history of heating.

Who am I to argue with the chief executive of the heating and ventilating contractors association? Now we’ve got that cleared up – to business. It has indeed been a busy week. For the humans, anyway. We haven’t seen much sign of Freddie or Zak, because the fine cold days have seen them going out with Grandad, and the wet cold days have seen them – very sensibly – sheltering at home!

Matilda is another of the same. She’s been out once or twice, but now he has, finally – and it took her long enough – worked out where the warmest spot in the house is (Kitty’s old bed, based on a bin-bag of shredded paper with a couple of Auntie-Maisie-crocheted cat blankets on top, in the hearth) she is reluctant to stir far from it. She does have a holiday home, in the form of a cardboard box in the old office upstairs, where she goes and sleeps when it all gets too much for her and she can’t take any more of the warmth, the cuddles, and the magically-refilling cat food dish.

Debbie had, as usual, a full week of teaching, apart from Thursday, when she was forced by the college to cancel her classes to take part, instead, in some compulsory training, for which she will be paid only a third of what she would have got for actually teaching that day. Not what you’d call a result.

I, however, had a good week, work-wise, getting a lot done on Thursday by the simple expedient of putting Lynyrd Skynyrd on at pain-threshold level and ignoring the phone and people at the door. Also, the publicity for “Granny Fenwick’s Recipes and Remedies” is finally starting to bite, in the form of an invitation to go to Hull on Friday to be interviewed about the book on James Hoggarth’s afternoon show.
All of which sounded fine in principle, but proved a bit more problematic in practice. Debbie had said we’d go in the camper, and I thought if the opportunity presented itself, once I had done the interview, we might be able to find somewhere to park up and I could sit in the camper and guard it from traffic wardens while Deb looked round the shops. Well, that was the plan. Unfortunately, the traffic and the M62 had other ideas. It is becoming well-nigh impossible to get anywhere in a reasonable time these days, and Hull was no exception. So we ended up being 25 minutes late. Debbie made good use of the extra time by admonishing me for being an idiot and telling me that I should “give up writing bloody stupid books that nobody reads” and other pithy observations of a similar nature.

I was assuming that I was going in to pre-record an interview for transmission at a later date, but in fact what I’d failed to register was that it was actually supposed to be live, and as a result, when I got there they grabbed me straight away and within more or less a couple of minutes of entering the premises, I was being plonked in front of a microphone, the record that had been playing (bizarrely enough, “Ride a White Swan”) had finished, and I was on air.

Once the interview was over, I found myself back in reception and ‘phoned Debbie on her mobile to come and get me, which again was a good idea in theory except that, not knowing Hull, she’d just had to drive off somewhere at random after dropping me outside the studio door, and she had no idea now a) where she was or b) how to get back to where I was.

Cursing myself for being an idiot who lacked forward planning skills, I had no option but to wait until she eventually threaded her way back around the one-way system and pulled up outside. She was not a happy bunny, and to be honest I didn’t blame her. Her mood wasn’t improved, either, by our getting caught in the rush hour clag of traffic leaving Hull. I was already feeling rather subdued because Friday, being November 30th, was – unbelievably – where did those years go? – the twentieth anniversary of Sylvester being killed, outside the back of our house in Barnsley. It may seem strange to some to mark so significantly the death of a cat, but it’s also to do with all the stuff that’s happened to me over the last two decades, as well as marking another year’s passing since his untimely and unhappy death.

Many of our journeys these days have the air of a world war two bomber crew setting off on a suicide mission, and this one continued in a similar vein because as we were travelling back along the M62, infested with peak-hour congestion and road works, the van’s clutch began to slip, and we limped home eventually after a journey lasting slightly over two hours. So that’s another problem for next week; on the other hand, though, there were already three orders for Granny Fenwick on the web shop by the time we got home, and no doubt more to come next week.

Going back to Hull was a strange experience. The more so because I had expected it to stir emotions that didn’t actually appear. I made the usual mental “nods” to places I had known and which had known me – Peggy Farrow Lane, Welton Hill, Beckside, Grand Dale, Hesslewood Foreshore, and so on. But I was either too psyched up for the interview (beforehand) and too tired (afterwards) for it to make much of an impression.

Hull did, however, look rather dowdy. The famous pub, The Earl de Grey, long recognised as one of Hull’s roughest and most characterful, was boarded up and semi derelict, as were quite a few shops along Hessle Road on the way in. Hull has always had a slightly parochial, backwater feel to it. Philip Larkin recognised it when he wrote his poem “Here”

Here domes and statues, spires and cranes cluster
Beside grain-scattered streets, barge-crowded water,
And residents from raw estates, brought down
The dead straight miles by stealing flat-faced trolleys,
Push through plate-glass swing doors to their desires -
Cheap suits, red kitchen-ware, sharp shoes, iced lollies,
Electric mixers, toasters, washers, driers –
A cut-price crowd, urban yet simple, dwelling
Where only salesmen and relations come

There are no trolley-buses any more, though they did enliven my childhood, especially watching the massive sparks that used to fly from the power lines whenever they came to a junction and changed direction. The raw estates are still there (I spent my adolescence on one of them) but there’s precious little grain in the streets – or, indeed, very few barges on the river.

I found myself thinking that the current state of the economy had not been kind to Hull. But then none of us is doing brilliantly at the moment – it reminds me a bit of Gildas, writing in The Ruin of Britain:

“the subject of my complaint is the general destruction of every thing that is good, and the general growth of evil throughout the land…”

We may not quite have got to the stage of:

“Lamentable to behold, in the midst of the streets lay the tops of lofty towers, tumbled to the ground, stones of high walls, holy altars, fragments of human bodies, covered with livid clots of coagulated blood, looking as if they had been squeezed together in a press; and with no chance of being buried, save in the ruins of the houses, or in the ravening bellies of wild beasts and birds”

But with Cameron, Clegg, Osborne and Cable in charge (at least nominally) it can only be a matter of time.

Saturday was spent largely catching up on things which I should really have done on Friday, and I did actually, once again, make some progress, which surprised me, simply by making a list, and sticking to it, and not starting something until I had actually finished the previous thing. I was beginning to think that the week wasn’t turning out too badly. Matilda seemed to be her usual happy little soul, content to watch birds from a position of warmth inside the conservatory door. Debbie had crossed off another week’s teaching towards the end of term without too much mishap. True, the clutch was worrying, but that was next week’s problem.

The plan to get the fence put up for Elvis next weekend was coming together. I had managed, despite my total lack of independence and the fact that the brakes on my left wheelchair wheel had begun to malfunction, to get to Hull and back and do an important interview. OK, it hadn’t been a perfect week, but still, it was Saturday. Deb was going out to visit one of her old school friends, and no doubt they would spend the evening splitting a bottle of wine and deciding that all men were bastards. I was left alone to work, and Matilda was keeping me company. I was warm, calm, and – relatively – contented.

So it was with considerable surprise that I found, when I went out at 11.30 on Saturday night to bring in the final load of coal for the day, and keep the stove in overnight, that the entire stack of coal bags had been stolen, apart from two full ones and an oddment with just a bit left in it. Presumably they had forsaken those bags because they were too near the door, and lifting them might have made a noise which could have been heard in the kitchen, where I had been alternately cooking, watching TV and chatting on Facebook most of the evening.

The coal was all there when Debbie went out to visit her friend at 8.30pm, and gone when she came back at 11.30 or thereabouts. So at some point in those three hours, a person or persons unknown had made off with 10 x 25KG bags of coal, or a quarter of a metric tonne, costing just over £100.00 – which is also, I discovered this morning, exactly the value of the excess on our home insurance. This was almost all of the delivery I had taken in on Thursday, in anticipation of the wintry weather to come. They had used our wheely-bin to transport it from the place between my wheelchair ramp and the garage wall where it was stacked, presumably up to the road, where they must have had a van or similar, and to add insult to injury, they’ve nicked the wheely-bin as well!

I was in two minds about whether or not to report it to the police, as it probably wasn’t worth an insurance claim, but in the end I did so, using West Yorkshire Police’s new number for non-urgent crime, 101. This number is flagged up on their web site with “If a crime is in progress and there is danger to life, please hang up and re-dial 999.” I could probably have worked that bit out for myself.

The actual 101 menu, when you get put through, is front-ended with one of those automatic recorded messages that gives you a number of choices, one of which was, rather startlingly, “This system will connect you to the West Yorkshire Police. If you would prefer another police force, press 1”. I wasn’t aware that citizen choice in the public services extended that far – I briefly toyed with the idea of pressing “1” and then asking for Interpol, or possibly the Surete – Inspector Maigret would have tracked down my missing coal in no time. But in the end, I struck with the tried and tested.

The guy who answered the phone patiently entered up all of my details, including for some bizarre reason, my date of birth – maybe I will get a birthday card next year from the Chief Constable or something – before telling me in a bored monotone that he would pass on all the details to our local police station.

This will, no doubt, eventually result in a visit from a couple of bored CPOs who will advise me on home security and probably suggest, as several people have already said, that we should really get a lockable coal bunker. If the police do suggest that, I am going to say that I will get a lockable coal bunker if they will catch the buggers who stole our coal and bring them to me so that I can lock them up in the said lockable coal bunker, and they can stay there until hell, Hull, Halifax, Huddersfield and the Humber all freeze over.

I know the proper Christian thing to do to these people is to forgive them. But right now, what I wish for them is that the stolen coal will set their bloody house on fire, and if they perish in the blaze, so much the better, as long as any children and animals escape. No doubt my anger will have cooled in a few weeks. Of course, this sort of crime may well have a genuine economic basis – it might well be someone who just couldn’t afford to heat their own house, who saw our stack of coal bags, and mistook me for a plutocrat. The way energy companies are allowed to hoick their prices willy nilly by 12% or so on a whim, it wouldn’t surprise me at all.

The stupid thing is, that if someone did knock on the door and say “I’m desperate and I haven’t got any coal for a fire to warm the kids at home”, I’d probably have given them a bag. But instead, here I am sitting thinking murderous thoughts, and thinking as well, that I don’t really like living in a country where people are driven by economic circumstances to go out and nick stuff. And I don’t really like the feeling of living under siege conditions, because of course we have to replace the stuff that’s been nicked, and if they are keeping tabs on the house, then that lot will probably go as well. The man from the police call centre asked me if I wanted to crime publicised in the local press and I said no, because I think to do that would be tantamount to sticking a target on my head or putting an advert in The Huddersfield Daily Examiner to say “free coal at this address”.

The problem is that we haven’t anywhere really to store large amounts of coal where I can access it without it being in a place where it can be seen. All the places where it can be stacked out of sight, are also places where I can’t reach, which would once again involve Debbie lugging buckets of coal around, and set us back 18 months.

The only good thing to come out of it is that today, Debbie has brought in the remaining logs and has now stacked them at either side of the stove to dry them out. Which does at least lend the heart a pleasing symmetry. Which is where I hope the bastard who stole our coal ends up.

So today, the first Sunday in Advent, has been rather a muted affair, and I haven’t got much done, other than looking at security lights, gates, alarms, CCTV cameras and razor wire. I am kidding about the razor wire, but it is unutterably tedious to have to do this when I could have been doing something more profitable and even productive or creative. Tomorrow I have a massive to-do list, starting with cancelling my hospital follow-up appointment in order to create the time to do all of the other things I need to do. I won’t need rocking by the time I get to bed tomorrow night, I suspect.

As well as the first Sunday in Advent, it’s also my little sister’s birthday.

She’s decided to take leave of a relatively safe career in the NHS, and take up doing photography as a profession. I’m really impressed with her enterprise and enthusiasm, and I like to think my dad will be smiling down on her efforts as well. I’m looking forward to her threatened visit, so I can catch up will all her gossip, and if it happens to be a day when Freddie’s here, he can re-enact his famous midnight invasion of her sleeping bag.

I did wonder, in honour of my sister, whether I could find a suitable saint to write about, one whose feast day shared her birthday. However, they all seem to be a rather unprepossessing crop, the best of the bunch probably being St Chromastius, who was a bishop in the early church, and was praised by St Jerome, and died in AD 406. He was also a friend of St John Chrysostom, whose works still remain an impenetrable mystery to me, I am ashamed to say. Apparently, some of St Chromastius’s commentary on the Gospel of St Matthew is still extant.

He was, apparently, one of the most celebrated prelates of his time and was in active correspondence with his illustrious contemporaries, St. Ambrose, St. Jerome, and Tyrannius Rufinus. He managed to become involved in all of those rather dreary heresies that so beset the early church, rejecting the “false doctrine” of Origen and opposing Arianism. So, basically, he seems to have spent most of his life writing about religion and arguing with people, mostly by letter. Hmm. Sounds familiar.

Anyway, he’s the best of a bad bunch, so maybe it is better to concentrate instead on Advent and look forward to Christmas. I haven’t thought much about Christmas today, or indeed, up to now, but I suppose I had better make a big long list of all the things I need to do between now and then. I’ll add making my Christmas to-do list to the list of things I have to do tomorrow, if that’s OK, even though in doing so I realise I am getting more and more like one of those medieval scholars who tried to compile Indices Indicorum, and they all went mad.

What have I learned, this week? That it’s one step forward, two steps back. That just when you think you are making ends meet, someone goes and moves the ends. Very seldom does the beginning accord to the end. That you can be worried about all sorts of stuff, but the real threat always comes from a direction you never expected. That it’s possibly a mistake to go back to somewhere you haven’t been for at least three years, and only intermittently before that, and yet expect to find streets and people just as they were forty years ago. That I am very bad at forgiving people (actually, I knew that one already) and that I have a lot of things to do between now and Christmas. (No change there, then). The bells of waiting Advent ring, for you and now for me. Oh death where is thy sting-a-ling-a-ling, oh grave, thy victory?

Better get the tortoise stove lit, I suppose, unless some bugger’s nicked the coal again.