The coming of the milder, kinder weather has revealed the true extent of the damage to the garden, though. All the leaves that have been shredded off the trees by the autumn and winter gales are plastered all over everything in a disintegrating brown mulch. I realise that this is probably ecologically very good for the soil, and if I were Monty Don, I would probably dig them in and give the earthworms a treat. But I am not Monty Don, nor was I meant to be. When it comes to gardening, I am probably more like Don Corleone, with occasional forays into Don Quixote.
I have, however, been looking at it and trying to plan what we are going to do with it this (I almost typed “next”) year. Especially now that this year seems to have arrived. In fact, I have been trying to get down to planning all sorts of things this year. I have a business plan to write, maybe two; I have to plan what work we’ll be able to do on the house, if any; I have to plan what we’re going to do in the garden this summer – and, judging from last year, it will involve irrigation channels, paddy fields, and a hosepipe ban – and I now have to plan Uncle Phil’s itinerary, as he is coming over from Australia in May!
Matilda, of course, has no idea what year it is anyway, but seemed relatively unfazed by the fireworks on New Year’s Eve, and has passed the week in her usual manner, batting flat Eric and Big Mouse around the floor, playing with her ping-pong ball (originally a set of three, two of which she’s lost already) watching Cat TV out of the conservatory door, and sleeping. That just about sums it up, apart from the occasional excursions into civil engineering in the cat litter tray.
As far as Elvis goes, he’s still pretty much the same, apparently, so we’re still a dog down on the deal. Maybe there’ll be better news next week.
We actually saw New Year in quietly, at home, as we were both too tired, really, to do anything else. I did the usual Granny Fenwick thing of sweeping out the old year, and ushering in the new, and I came back in with a piece of coal – not so much first footing, as first trundling.
The next day dawning bright and fine, Debbie declared it a holiday and we took Zak and Freddie off to the Macclesfield Canal, where Debbie did two hours of highly symbolic kayaking in a bitter, biting wind, and I stayed in the camper under a blanket with the dogs and wrote some more of The Bow of Barnsdale Bar. Though the wind was absolutely perishing, it was a fine day, and there were even a couple of narrowboats chugging up and down, and loads of people walking along the towpath, some with dogs, all blowing away the cobwebs of Christmas and New Year’s Eve, no doubt. When Debbie got back and loaded up the boat, she offered the dogs the chance of walkies. Freddie voted with his paws by turning round, curling up into an even tighter ball and snoring. Zak got out briefly, for about as long as it took him to realise how cold it was, and then turned tail and came back, jumped up on the bed, and joined Freddie. So we drove home, to where the nice warm fire is.
When I haven’t been planning stuff this week, I have been skiving off from real work by doing the family history. It’s all the fault of the Mayans, as I said last week. Anyway, convulsed into action in a futile quest to find out who I really am before I am extinguished by some cosmic (or even domestic) catastrophe, I’ve actually made a huge amount of progress in sorting out the morass of chaos that my notes had descended into. I did a phone interview this week about Granny Fenwick’s Recipes and Remedies with a journalist from the Hull Daily Mail and she asked me if there were any plans for a follow-up, and I realised that there probably is enough material for a full family history, though who would read it, apart from the Fenwicks of course, is anyone’s guess. Another potential snag is that, for the sake of completeness, in writing such a book I would also need to do Debbie’s family tree, and at the moment some of her family still live in it.
I have long suspected that all of the news is pre-recorded at this time of year to allow journalists the same Christmas holiday as the rest of us, but obviously The Hull Daily Mail was still working at any rate. You could be forgiven for thinking that the rest of the news this week had been randomly generated by a rogue news application, though.
I had already written in previous blogs about the way in which the Church of England was going out of its way to appear stupendously irrelevant and make itself a laughing stock over the issue of women bishops. This week, to my horrified amazement, they topped it off with an even more bizarre pronouncement about gay bishops – we can have gay bishops, apparently, but only if they keep one foot on the floor or cross their fingers while having sex. Failure to observe this simple rule of Canon Law will bring the Chastity Inquisition (I bet you didn’t expect that) abseiling through the window on a zip-wire, hurling a smoking thurible into the room, and shouting “Step away from the KY Jelly!”
The last time I checked, there were at least two women on Facebook who are actually called Gay Bishop, and the news that they are no longer allowed to have sex is going to come as a bit of a shock to them. Although, judging from their profile pictures, it may just end up being the de jure confirmation of a situation which already existed de facto.
I have heard all the arguments on both sides of this case about the Bible says this and the Bible says that and my answer is, I am afraid, rather simple. The Bible says God is love. And I say that you can make the Old Testament mean anything you want it to mean. If you took it literally, you wouldn’t be able to have a ferret kebab while wearing a spandex body-suit. And we’d still be stoning people. Church of England, listen! You are arguing about a massive irrelevance. Those who want to believe that women and gay people are second-class beings in some way should perhaps find an island somewhere, and go and live there. Meanwhile, Church of England, the rest of you, there is work to be done, and souls to be saved, in this world. Stop wittering about people's sexuality and get on with it.
The Junta certainly isn’t going to save the souls of the supposedly second-class. No sooner had my jaw been re-wired after the gay bishops farrago, than Westminster Council announced that it was thinking of making people who it judges are too fat perform some exercises before they will be paid any benefits!
My first reaction on hearing this was that it would make a great theme park. Perhaps a suitable location in Westminster could be flooded and turned into “Doleworld” where, instead of porpoises, seals, orcas and other aquatic creatures, benefit claimants in Speedos, Budgie-Smugglers and Matalan Tankinis could jump through hoops, balance beach balls on their noses, and perform tricks for the diversion of the rich people who live there.
My second reaction, which, I have to say, followed on quite swiftly from the first, was that anyone who can’t afford to pay the exorbitant and grandiose demands of the energy companies for heating this winter because their benefits have been stopped by Westminster Council, should keep warm and get some exercise by setting fire to… Westminster Council. I am sure that quite a few of the homeless people they’ve persecuted over the years will hold the matches for you. To the burghers of Westminster I would say, appropriately enough for Twelfth Night:
“Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?”
The stage is now set for some latter-day Swift to come along and write “A Modest Proposal for Feeding the Landed Gentry off the Bodies of the Corpulent Sturdy Beggars” or some such pamphlet, but it seems The Daily Mash has already scooped the pool with their suggestion that benefits claimants should each wear a headset and be remotely controlled by a member of the Middle Class, who knows what is best for everybody.
As I have said before, I am fine with the idea of a Benefits Card provided MPs also participate by having an Expenses Card, so that the rest of us can see that they are spending our money wisely on staplers and folders from Rymans, and not frittering it away on moat-cleaning. After all, we are all in this together, or so we’re always being told.
However, even as I typed those words, I realised that the MP Expenses Card would probably be a non-starter, because if the Tories win the next election, I can see people on benefits will be having to clean out the moats of the toffs for free, in return for their dole money, while their friends watch and bray with laughter, all the time scoffing canapés and swilling champagne.
The sad thing is, though, that all this lunacy does have a darker side. The constant drip drip drip of denigration of people whose circumstances have taken an unfortunate turn by Iain Duncan Smith, a man who refused to be moved from his post at the last reshuffle so he could go on grinding the faces of the poor into the dust, is having an effect. A TUC-commissioned poll showed as much this week. Most of the pronouncements of the TUC are (rather fittingly) completely crackers, but this one had rather a ring of truth about it. Of the people surveyed, the figure they came up with for the proportion of the total welfare budget spent on unemployment benefit was 48%. The actual figure is 3%. And the total they came up with for the amount of the budget lost in fraud was 27%, when the actual figure is 0.7%.
It just goes to show that if you repeat a lie often enough, and loudly enough, people will believe it rather than believing the truth. A lie can be half-way round the world before the truth has even got its trousers on, as the saying goes. I can’t remember if that was said by Churchill, Hitler or Stalin, but no doubt somebody will write in and tell me. The first correct answer wins a doorknob.
Old Irritable Bowel IDS has been caught out telling porkies again this week, this time by Channel 4’s Fact Check Blog, which took him to task for inaccurate assertions on the growth of Child Benefit claims under the last (inept, shambolic) government, as opposed to the present (inept, shambolic) government. When confronted with the evidence that the figure asserted of 58% was actually more like 8%, the DWP Press Office apparently said that the 58% figure represented the official figures after an “adjustment” had been made, and promised a “clarification”. If Channel 4 ever gets that clarification, I will bare my arse in Woolworths’ window.
I don’t know why I should be so surprised at this. It’s what governments do, and they’ve been doing it a long time. What I really resent, I suppose, is that they take me for a Duggie, and they think I am stupid enough to believe it. Whatever else happens this year, I won’t be holding my breath for an outbreak of sanity.
So, yes, it’s the start of the year. Lots of planning to do. And it’s also the Feast of the Epiphany, which in the Orthodox Eastern Church is actually Christmas, because, in addition to wearing gold-encrusted jiffy bags, all looking like members of ZZ Top, and having wacky names like The Archimandrite of Alexandria, they also run to a different calendar to the rest of Christianity. As I’ve said many times before, if they’re Orthodox, I’d like to see the Oddfellows.
At this time of year, with all these lists to be made, it really can feel as if (in the words of the REM song) you are pushing an elephant up the stairs. (By the way, if you think the REM song is an annoying earworm, try having “Bump the Elephant”, as suggested to me by Meen Bonkers, one of my Facebook friends, this week. Or rather, don’t, you’ll never rid your synapses of the damn thing.) There is simply an overwhelming weight of things to be done, to be sorted out, to be planned. And at the same time, it’s the last knockings of the Christmas festivities – Twelfth Night. Yes, by Saint Anne, and ginger shall be hot i’the mouth, too!
It’s a bitter-sweet sort of a day. In fact, it’s been a bitter-sweet week, really. I couldn’t help but think of Kitty, who was here last New Year’s Eve and not this one. Then January 3rd was the 27th anniversary of my mother’s death. 27 years! Can you even believe it? And then, in the course of doing the family history research, I stumbled across something online that really shook me up. It was one of those bizarre coincidences that sometimes make you winder if there really is such a thing as coincidence or if Jung was right, and everything really is all connected up to everything else in a vast web of synchronicity.
I’d been looking at the Rudd family notes and I remembered that back in 2005, I’d briefly been in contact with an Albert Rudd who was apparently connected with Great Uncle Ernie, who was something to do with the Trawlermens’ Union in Hull, which had offices on West Dock Avenue. I was having trouble fitting the various bits of the tree together, a task made more difficult by the fact that the Rudds made a habit of not calling people by the names they were Christened with, and that there were at least two Alberts and at least two Ernests, an Albert Ernest and an Ernest Albert. Not so much the importance of being Ernest, but the importance of being the right Ernest.
Anyway, I thought it was time maybe to get in touch with Albert again, and see if he could shed any light. I didn’t have his address to hand, however, but I thought I more or less knew it, and the name of the road where he lived in Hornsea was relatively unusual, so I thought I’d just do a quick Google and check the postcode, then I could bang off a letter to him. The search led me not to his address, but – sadly – to an online version of his obituary notice. He died in 2006. That, however, was not the really sad or bizarre thing.
The really sad and bizarre thing was that, underneath Albert’s obituary notice was another one, with an unusual surname that I recognised. It was for the mother of a girl I used to know when I worked in Beverley in the late 1970s, the era I wrote about in Sunday Girl. As I read it, its true import sank in, in that it listed all the offspring in the usual format – “Mother of…” and amongst those listed was “the late Vanessa”.
So Vanessa was dead. I knew her when I worked in the bookshop. She was never my girlfriend or anything like that; at the time when I knew her, I was already in a relationship, albeit a long-distance and rather sporadic one, and Vanessa actually progressed from being a customer to being an acquaintance to being a friend without passing through that awkward nexus of having to decide whether to have a fling with her or not. She was a student teacher, and, like me at the time, she used to ride a little put-putty motorbike, and we used to talk about bikes and other things. She was bright, she was funny, and she was quite pretty. In other circumstances, I could have been quite tempted. She’d probably have run a mile! She used to hang about with all of us from the bookshop, or at least those of us who were all more or less the same age. She even signed my leaving card when I moved from Beverley to Chichester in 1980. And now she’s dead. In fact, she must’ve died at some point between 1980 and 2006, when her mother’s notice was dated.
I suppose I should now go on from this to draw some sort of conclusion, some sort of observation that makes sense of that fact, but right now I can’t think of anything. I don’t really know why I am so shocked by it, except that you sort of expect all these people who you branched off from years ago to have carried on living parallel lives and to be happy elsewhere, and she isn’t.
It should be a consolation, though it probably isn’t, that today marks the feast of the Epiphany, when the three wise men, or the Magi, depending who you believe, came and found Jesus manifested to humanity, and brought him gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Mention of myrrh, though, reminds me of the story Alan Bennett told in Untold Stories about how he encountered a solitary woman in a country churchyard during one of his solitary church explorations. He complimented her on the church and its general upkeep, and she replied that they had been “having terrible trouble with the myrrh”. Puzzled by this, as it didn’t look particularly high Anglican, Bennett asked her to elucidate: she replied, as if talking to a halfwit,
“The myrrh. It’s broken doyen. Seow we hed to cut the grars in the churchyard bye hand.”
Gold, frankincense and myrrh seems an odd combination of gifts, especially as myrrh is used by the Egyptians in funerary rites. The symbolism is that both frankincense and myrrh are the coagulated gums of sap extruded by wounds in the bark of thorn trees, so there is obvious symbolism there, presaging the crucifixion and the crown of thorns. There is also the attendant symbolism that the three wise men also stand for the “old” religions’ acceptance of, and acquiescence to, the idea of Christ as the saviour. I, meanwhile, can only hope it’s true, and that somewhere in the Great Beyond, what passes for heaven, what remains of whatever was the essence of the spirit of Vanessa is happy.
The scene with the Magi around Jesus in his crib has often been depicted in art and frequently the subject of poetry. I first read The Journey of the Magi by T S Eliot at the age of 17, and loved it for years, then came to think it rather passé. Lately, I have warmed to it again, especially so after reading in Lyndall Gordon’s book on Eliot that he said he wrote it one Sunday morning after church with the aid of half a bottle of Booth’s gin. I still slightly prefer the Sidney Godolphin seventeenth century poem, however:
LORD when the wise men came from farr
Ledd to thy Cradle by A Starr,
Then did the shepheards too rejoyce,
Instructed by thy Angells voyce,
Blest were the wisemen in their skill,
And shepheards in their harmelesse will.
Wisemen in tracing natures lawes
Ascend unto the highest cause,
Shepheards with humble fearefulnesse
Walke safely, though their light be lesse:
Though wisemen better know the way
It seemes noe honest heart can stray.
It is a complex poem, with several interlacing ideas, contrasting the actions of the shepherds with the wise men. I recommend reading it in its entirety. I take issue with Godolphin there, because I think it’s perfectly possible to be both a wise man and a shepherd – as I believe some of my ancestors were – but then, reading it again, perhaps that is the poet’s point after all.
Twelfth Night in this country is a last chance for wassail and revels, under the auspices of The Lord of Misrule. In the past, people would cook Twelfth Cake, a particularly solid type of fruitcake (of the sort currently running the country) with a hidden baked bean and a hidden clove. If you found the baked bean you were lucky, and you were voted King for the day - if you found the clove, however, you were the odd one out, the butt of the joke, the village idiot for a year. Sounds a bit harsh, but I guess they made their own entertainment in those days. Other traditional fare for Twelvetide includes Epiphany Tarts, which can be made to resemble panes of stained glass by using different coloured jams.
Meanwhile the rest of us have to close ranks and carry on, like I said before. And that means planning. Tomorrow is Plough Monday, the day when traditionally the plough was paraded through the village and blessed, before the plough teams resumed work on the land for the next year. Back to work, and God speed the plough! Meanwhile, I have to get my planning done, and then – even worse – actually carry out the plans I’ve made, both for me and others! No wonder it feels like an elephant. Come on, Jumbo! Come on, Nelly! Giddyup! One step at a time!
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