Epiblog for the Feast of St Enogatus

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. And another cold one. The weather man on Look North has been preparing us for this snow since Friday, so we have been hunkering down and expecting it, and no doubt the purveyors of rock salt and snow chains have been counting up their profits as they trouser tenner after tenner off the back of it. So, of course, it hasn’t snowed. It’s a bright, brilliant, crisp Sunday morning, and it’s absolutely freezing, probably literally, if the draught whistling round my ankles while I type this is anything to go by. The sky is the colour of a biscuit-thin china duck egg, and the rain filling all of the waterlogged pots and troughs on the decking has a glazed meniscus of ice.

I did think it was starting to snow last night, when I went out last thing at about 11.30 to take the rubbish out and lock up. It was that sort of very fine, very cold snow that touches your face like the brush of feathers from an angel’s wings, but it wasn’t laying, and it must’ve actually warmed up during the night (at least in relative terms it’s still decidedly parky!) Maybe my face was, in fact, just being brushed by the feathers of angels' wings.

Speaking of draughts, this week we have doubled the number of draught-excluders, and we now have one at each door to this room, and still the cold finds new ways to seep in, so that once you move out of the cosy ambit of the stove, it’s like Captain Oates opening a door and stepping out into the blizzard. What I really need is some 1980s leg warmers, or puttees. I may experiment later by wrapping my legs in bubble wrap and gaffer-tape. I asked Debbie if she would bring Slippy, the third draught-excluder, down from upstairs (yes, our draught-excluders each have names, how twee is that, on the twee scale?) and she replied that there was a problem: he needs vacuuming first, because he is still covered in ginger fur from when Nigel used to “shag him”, as she put it.

I doubt Nigel’s interest was actually sexual, since he, too, was a member of the Counter-Tenors, his pompoms having long resided in a glass jar somewhere at Greenside Veterinary Surgery in Mapplewell, it was probably more to do with the warmth and comfort of fur-fabric, but anyway, until Slippy is rehabilitated from his ordeal at the paws of Nigel, he remains, as a draught-excluder, hors de combat.

So, we’ve largely spent the week huddled in front of the stove, and the store of seasoned logs has gone down, as has the stack of coal bags in the porch, as we’ve tried to keep the weather at bay. The poor birds have been out looking for nuts, bread, anything really. I put out a couple of mouldy muffins the other day and it was like a scene out of Hitchcock. The squirrels, too, seem to be active, hanging off the bird feeders in the trees and making forays onto the decking in search of anything vaguely edible.

The news on the Elvis front is not brilliant. He’s still on antibiotics, he hasn’t been signed off by the vet, he's also got an ear infection, and he’s not coping well with stuff. So he’s still at Danewalk for the time being, where they know him and can care for him more effectively. In the meantime, Zak and Freddie have been staying with us until today, Sunday, when they went home at lunchtime, via a crisp walkies in the woods with Grandad.

This has made feeding time rather complicated. Zak will basically eat anything. Freddie is a fussy feeder – his favourite food in the whole world being freshly cooked mince (yes, spoiled at home, I agree) or, if he can’t get that, cat food. So you can begin to grasp the nature of the problem. Matilda’s state of armed neutrality and mutually-assured destruction with Zak and Freddie doesn’t really extend to sharing communal meals, and also she needs a worming tablet (more of a precaution than anything, although she has been drinking out of the disgusting muddy water in the aforementioned flooded pots on the decking, which is a common source of poolworm infection in cats, I gather).

So, feeding them all, at more or less the same time, making sure everyone has something, and making sure everyone, ideally has their own food, is a bit like solving one of those maths problems I could never do in school, where a man sets out in a van, drives 35 miles at 20 miles an hour then stops for lunch and you have to work out when he will overtake the cyclist who left Penney Hassett at 10AM on the road to Borchester. Zak will only eat his food if the bowl is put down in exactly the right place where he is always fed when he comes here. Put the bowl anywhere else, and he will jump off his chair, go to it, sniff it, and then jump straight back on the chair again, leaving the food untouched.

Freddie likes to have a couple of mouthfuls out of his own bowl, having first checked that there is nothing better on offer, then to stroll over to Zak’s bowl and have a couple of mouthfuls out of there. Zak, meanwhile, seeing Freddie’s bowl unguarded – even though it is Freddie’s bowl, and in the “wrong” place – slinks off his chair and goes and finishes up Freddie’s leavings. Freddie, meanwhile, is busy removing the gravy bones and other biscuits from the general mixture in Zak's bowl, one by one, and bringing them back to the carpet in front of the fire, one by one, and sitting there and crunching them up, one by one. He probably expends more in energy than he gains in nutrition, but at least it keeps him occupied.

This morning, in order to make sure Matilda had her tablet without the dogs filching it, Debbie let them out into the garden and then shut them out while she put Matilda’s food down, with the tablet crunched up in it. Needless to say, the cat had just got to the bit with the worming tablet in it when the dogs arrived back at the door and started a cacophony of barking to be let back in, so she muttered under her breath and scuttled off, growling. The tablet remains uneaten as I type.

I haven’t been keeping up with the news from the outside world this week as I have had my head too deep in the long term planning to notice. Deb’s back teaching with a vengeance, and it looks like there might be a new course in Calderdale in the offing. Just as well, because it looks as though her Tuesday morning one is on its way out. Last Tuesday, she got up before dawn, did two hours preparation and then set off in the grim greyness to some Godforsaken outreach centre north of Huddersfield, only to find she was the only one there. She hung around for a while, but no students turned up, so she gave up and came home. She was pretty philosophical about it; if they’d done it to me, I’d have hunted them down and sent them an invoice for lost sleep.

My week’s been planning, accounts, PR for Gez’s new book, Changes (mostly directed at people who didn’t care if I lived or died) and more accounts. Oh, and did I say accounts? Also, the deadline for my tax return is looming, so I did what any sensible person would do in the circumstances, and started work on writing a new story. I have, however, seen sense and got back on to some “real” work as the week progressed. I’ve also taken the plunge to convert the first two of my back catalogue titles to Kindle format – now all I need is 130 customers to download them when available, and I will have recouped the conversion cost!

The rest and recuperation we enjoyed over Christmas are but a distant memory, and we must be fast approaching “Blue Monday” or whatever it’s called, officially the most depressing day of the year. It would be very easy, if I allowed myself, to become depressed every day, the way things are going. Not just materially; in fact, things are possibly slightly better there than they were this time last year, in material terms, though it’s still one step forward, two steps back, up with the rocket and down with the stick, and we’re not out of the woods yet. It’s my spiritual side that I’m really thinking about. Yes, I do have a spiritual side, or rather I used to.

I started writing these Epilogues (now Epliblogs) in 2004, believe it or not. Eight years ago. A lot has changed in the last eight years, and not much of it for the better. And here I find myself, once again, eight years later, on the Feast of St Enogatus, wondering why I am doing this. I’m still no further on in finding answers to the questions that were troubling me then, and I’m still as lost and bewildered as I ever was. True, as an exercise in crisis management, the last eight years has been a tour de force, and several major crises have been averted. I’ve also learned a lot about desk top publishing, and have published several desk tops. But I still find myself with Thomas Hardy, in “He Never Expected Much”:

Well, World, you have kept faith with me,
Kept faith with me;
Upon the whole you have proved to be
Much as you said you were.
Since as a child I used to lie
Upon the leaze and watch the sky,
Never, I own, expected I
That life would all be fair.

'Twas then you said, and since have said,
Times since have said,
In that mysterious voice you shed
From clouds and hills around:
`Many have loved me desperately,
Many with smooth serenity,
While some have shown contempt of me
Till they dropped underground.

`I do not promise overmuch,
Child; overmuch;
Just neutral-tinted haps and such,'
You said to minds like mine.
Wise warning for your credit's sake!
Which I for one failed not to take,
And hence could stem such strain and ache
As each year might assign.

Which just about sums it up, really. I know I should be saying at this point that I’m going to achieve some of my long-term goals this year, and I should witter on about the power of gradual change, as I have done in recent years, but right now, today, I just want to work on my story and finish it, then curl up in a warm ball and go to sleep. Preferably without any more bits falling off the house, the camper, me, Debbie the animals, or my life. Preferably til about Easter. So, if you came here looking for enlightenment, I am fresh out of it today. I didn’t have an epiphany on the feast of the epiphany, and I don’t have any messages. Try Western Union. There might be a new delivery next week, if Big G gets his van mended.

I started out on Burgundy, but soon hit the harder stuff
And everybody said they’d stand by me, when the game got rough;
But the joke was on me, there was nobody even there to bluff,
I’m going back to New York City, I do believe I’ve had enough.

As the late, great, Robert Zimmerframe puts it so well. Next week, I shall be mainly managing my expectations, I guess, and looking out for those neutral-tinted haps. Who knows, maybe I’ll be pleasantly surprised. It’s my own fault that I’ve got myself into this brown study, thinking back over the last eight years, and no doubt I’ll snap out of it. I need to, because I need to be strong next week and this year, for the sake of all the people who depend on me, even if they don’t know it, including the ones who have four legs and a furry brain the size of a walnut.

St Enogatus was a bishop in 7th century Brittany, by the way; he was a successor to St Malo, and, in common with his predecessor, managed to have a town named after him. In St Enogatus’s case, one with lots of holiday cottages. Such is the wonder of the internet – you log on to look up an obscure French saint, and end up considering booking a holiday!

In the meantime,it's a Thomas Hardy sort of a day, here, just me and the Darkling Thrush, and he's the only one who knows why he's singing. If anybody finds my mojo down the back of the sofa, box its ears and send it home.