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.