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.