Consequently, Matilda has not been impressed. I don’t know if she’s ever been out in snow before, but she took a few tentative steps in it this time, did a Charlie Chaplin skidding U-turn and quickly skedaddled back inside. Since then, she’s not moved far from her chair, onto which she has (I noticed) dragged Eric the catnip mouse for company. She’s also taken to nesting on my bed next door, but only when I am not in residence. This week she was the lucky, indeed some would almost say spoilt, recipient of a Red Cross parcel from her Auntie Maisie, containing two new crocheted blankets and a small stuffed hedgehog toy.
This takes her total of toys to three, the catnip mouse Eric, the Big Mouse, and the hedgehog, plus three ping-pong balls, current whereabouts unknown. So it was rather a surprise when, one morning during the week, Debbie saw Matilda hoick a small new potato out of the veg rack and start batting that around the conservatory floor with her paws and pouncing on it. I didn’t witness the incident at first hand, but apparently, Debbie said, the cat was most indignant at being deprived of her new plaything. Debbie put the potato back in the veg rack without identifying it in any way, so undoubtedly one of us will have subsequently eaten it. Still, at least it will have been sterilised by boiling. I say “surprise” above, but of course it won’t really be a surprise to anyone who has ever seen a child get an expensive Christmas or Birthday present, cast it aside, and start playing with the box it came in.
Freddie and Zak, who are currently staying with us while Granny does one of her “Good Queen Bess” royal progresses to the Solent, absolutely love the snow, and every time I let them out into the garden, they run about madly, criss-crossing each other’s path like a demented version of the Royal Signals motorbike display team, and barking insanely for no reason.
Debbie took them both off for a walkies down to Armitage Bridge cricket field in the snow, and Freddie obviously decided he’d had enough because he ran off and came home early, ending up howling like the Hound of the Baskervilles (albeit a smaller point size – he’s only a 9pt Baskerville, though he is bold) outside the back door, to be let in. I wondered about the fact that he’d come back alone, and thought I had better phone Debbie on her mobile, in case she’d slipped and broken her leg or something, or fallen down an old mine shaft, and Freddie had done a “Skippy” to raise the alarm. She was about five minutes from home when she answered:
“I wondered where the little bugger had scuttled off to!” she said. He’d had enough of the snow and the cold, and had voted with his feet, re-tracing his steps. I told her about the howling. “That’s because he knows he’s going to get his arse kicked for abandoning us!” In fact, his punishment – such as it was – when Debbie returned, was to be given his tea early, then wrapped in a fluffy dog-towel and laid in front of the stove to dry off, where he steamed gently for the next hour.
Freddie stopped briefly to cock his leg on the hard-packed snow on the decking the other morning, and then tried to do that thing that dogs do, of scratching the earth with his back legs – but because of the slippery, hard-packed snow, his legs were going nineteen to the dozen underneath him and getting no purchase – he looked for all the world like a cartoon dog. Usually, I am pretty pro- Freddie and pro-Zak, but if this carries on much longer, I may actually need Pro-zac.
Talking of medication, feeding time continues to be problematic, as demonstrated on Tuesday when Freddie ate Matilda’s food, complete with her last worming tablet. It doesn’t seem to have done him any harm – actually I have no idea whether wormers are generic or whether there are specific cat and dog wormers – something I must look up…one day. The point is, however, that Matilda still goes unwormed, because Freddie, the greedy little git, got in there and hoovered up the remains before I could stop him, so now I have to send off for another load of worming tablets.
The coal is going down at an alarming rate, as you might expect in such bitter weather; the draught excluders are holding their own, apart from Slippy, who is still on compassionate leave, having counselling after allegedly suffering sexual abuse at the paws of Nigel. Meanwhile, like Nic Jones’s whalermen, we huddle round the little pot stove, and struggle off to work each day, through the icy wind and sleet.
And still it snows. Another week has gone, or almost gone, and already it’s the middle of January. One of the few compensations for being in this wheelchair is (I suppose) that at least I will have to try very hard if I want to fall over and cut my head open now, whereas before, when I was tottering about, it was so easy that I managed it quite spectacularly, two winters in a row. There is another, linked, compensation, too; I no longer have to set off on mornings like those we had this week, and drive 26 miles through Jackson Bridge or Hade Edge or Crow Edge to get to the office and spend hours on end in a little room with a high window with bars across it, dealing with people who I thought at the time were friends and colleagues, which was the price I paid for 21 years of relative financial freedom.
There are disadvantages, too: but we’ve already been through those, oh so many times before. Lately, reading back over the last few weeks, they seem to have been weighing rather heavily on me. The inevitability of the situation, or rather the solidity of the situation, seems overwhelming at times when set against the fleeting, chimera-like shreds of what I used to, on a good day, call faith. January is a miserable month anyway, it’s usually when we get our bad weather, and everybody’s totally brassic, you have to do your tax return and spring, let alone summer, seems a long way away, although Maisie’s daffs in the garden are coming up, perhaps unwisely in view of the weather.
“Where is summer? The unimaginable zero, summer?”
Asks T. S. Eliot in “Little Gidding”. Where indeed, T. S. To misquote Shelley – “if winter comes, spring can be far behind.” At the moment we’re in the middle of a truly Shakespearean cold snap –
“When icicles hang by the wall, and Dick the shepherd blows his nail
And Tom bears logs into the hall, and milk comes frozen home in pail
When blood is nipp’d, and ways be foul, then nightly sings the staring owl;
To-whit! To-woo! A merry note! While greasy Joan doth keel the pot”
All very true, except that it’s me that does the nail-blowing, the coal (not log) bearing, and the keeling of any greasy pots. Tom, Joan, and Dick the Shepherd were not available. The part of the owls was, however, played by the owls, who have been giving it big licks in the trees out the back for a few nights recently, while during the day:
“All aloud the wind does blow, and coughing drowns the parson’s saw
And birds sit brooding in the snow, and Marian’s nose is red and raw…”
We must be feeding the entire bird population of the Holme Valley at the moment, given the rate at which they demolish anything we put out on the bird table. Large tits, small tits (see what I did there, Google?) jays, black birds (come on Google, I’m really trying to get up the rankings here) and pigeons. Maybe soon there will be chicks (last chance, Google!) Still, it’s cheap amusement for Matilda. Cheaper than a video of a fish tank, anyway.
And more amusing than watching the news, much more amusing, in fact, as it seems we’re just about to open up yet another front in the unwinnable, self-sustaining, self-fulfilling “War on Terror”, this time in North Africa. This one is particularly close to my heart, because I had a part (a very small part – ooer, Missus) in raising the funds to build a well, in Ende, in Mali, in 1993, via a festival organised in Sheffield in that year, to benefit Tree Aid, a festival of which I was one-quarter of the organising committee. Or possibly one-fifth, it’s all a bit hazy, twenty years on!
I’ve always wanted to go and see “my” well. I found a picture of it on the internet. But since the rebels of Al Quaida in the Sahel are currently having the shit bombed out of them in Diabaly, which is even nearer to the capital than Ende, Mali, I have to assume, is off the map for the moment. In fact, a quick check on Tripadvisor reveals the following:
From the U.S. State Department: The U.S. Department of State warns U.S. citizens against all travel to Mali at this time because of fluid political conditions, the loss of government control of Mali’s northern provinces, and continuing threats of attacks and kidnappings of Westerners in the north of the country. Mali’s path toward stabilized legitimate governance has clarified considerably since the March 21 military coup, and in particular with the installation of an expanded interim government on August 20. Effective August 29, the Department of State is lifting the Authorized Departure of non-emergency personnel and all eligible family members of U.S. Embassy personnel. While the security situation in Bamkao is improving, the country faces continued challenges including food shortages, internally displaced persons, and the presence in northern Mali of factions linked to Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM)
And that was probably before all of this Algerian malarkey. It’s all very depressing. There used to be about twenty of these fundamentalist wingnuts, living in a cave in Tora Bora and dreaming of re-establishing the Caliphate and Sharia Law. Since 2001, it’s like we have embarked on a deliberate policy of creating as many radicalised hotheads as we possibly could. Afghanistan was, I suppose, just about justified, as originally envisaged, but now it’s turned into a morass that claims the lives of our forces, and all the Taleban have to do is sit and wait for us to go home. To say it wasn’t thought through is an understatement. Then there is Iraq. I wrote at least two full length essays on that war, trying to explain why I thought it was the wrong war, at the wrong time, against the wrong target, so I won’t rehash them all here.
Then there’s the Arab Spring. Well, what a marvellous success that has turned out to be. Replacing one set of murderous bastards in Libya with another, different set, ditto in Egypt, and now the attempt to do the same in Syria is all going shitshaped, with Al Qaeda rushing in to fill the resulting power vacuum, as they will now do at every opportunity. When will we ever learn?
I am not arguing for complete disengagement – if it were possible, I would be, but we’ve let the Genie out of the bottle, and Christ alone knows how we’re going to get out of this one, now. If we had deliberately set out to create a worldwide crisis where religion and politics is all tangled up in one huge Gordian knot, we couldn’t have done it better. Exponents of “realpolitik”, including my MP, to whom I wrote complaining that we were wasting money on firing missiles at Libya when we were closing libraries here at home, would say that we should do what we can, and if the result is replacing one set of repressive, murderous bastards with another – different – set, that doesn’t matter, as long as the second set is bought, paid for and in our pockets. Of course, a certain Osama Bin Laden used to fall into that category, at one time. And we certainly shouldn’t kid ourselves that “regime change” has anything to do with “democracy”.
God knows where all this is leading; it can only be a matter of time till “mission creep” sucks us in, and of course every British National Party, UKIP, EDL and similar supporter has been refreshed and renewed by this week’s events into asserting that we have to crush Muslims wherever they are found, and similar. I get fed up – to be honest – of trying to explain that there are thousands, millions, of Muslims who just want a quiet life and to get on with it, not all Muslims are fiery-eyed zealots with headscarves and Kalashnikovs, it’s only ever the wingnuts who get on TV, etc, but it’s turning into a dialogue of the deaf.
The Junta has been so successful with its denigration of immigrants (without ever being truthful about – or even referring to – the role of the EU) that there is now a popular belief that thousands of Muslim asylum seekers/immigrants/economic migrants (the people who promote this theory are usually incapable of making the distinction) who just have to rock up at Dover Docks and they get given a free house, a free car, and a plasma TV. It’s all bullshit, of course, but it’s very effective bullshit. As I have been told more than once … “but hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people think like this…” to which my response is usually that just because hundreds of thousands of people have hateful and ill-informed opinions and sleepwalk through life believing everything the Blight spoon-feeds them via the media, it doesn’t mean I have to.
There are answers, but the options are closing off fast. The answers would require a blog posting several times longer than normal, gathering together everything I have ever written about the subject of “integration” but the danger is now that a combination of events, and the Blight, the Junta with its deliberate policies of division will mean any solution I suggest is overtaken by events.
It’s always tempting to go for the easy option, the gut reaction. I was asked more than once to sign online petitions requesting the death penalty for those found guilty of the Delhi bus rape, recently, and I refused to do so, on the grounds that I am morally opposed to the death penalty in any circumstances. So I haven’t been doing very well, really, because as a moral relativist, I should really have been thinking that there are maybe situations where the death penalty is not only appropriate, but necessary, and maybe this was one of them, but I searched what passes for my conscience these days and I still couldn’t. It’s easy to shout for the death penalty if you are not the executioner, but I would imagine that actually having to pull the lever, then to try to get to sleep that night, and look at your face in the mirror the next morning is a different matter.
But yes, I have been doing it all wrong, lately. It’s alright for me to prattle on about Jesus and forgiveness, but I am spectacularly crap at it. I’m in danger of becoming the man who shouts “If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s intolerance!” Wasn’t I posting just a few weeks ago that I’d like to see the coal thieves get their hands chopped off, or something? How does that make me more of a moral arbiter than an Islamist Wingnut of the Thames Ditton branch of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade? It doesn’t, really. In fact, the Koran does say that the hand of a thief must be cut off if certain conditions are fulfilled. But again, here I struggle – one of the conditions for hand amputation is if the item(s) stolen have to have actual worth:
“The stolen property should be something of worth, because that which is of no worth has no sanctity, such as musical instruments, wine and pigs.”
My problem with that is the definition of “worth”. As a vegetarian, music-loving wine-bibbler, those things all have great worth to me. I like pigs. They are as intelligent as three-year old children, less trouble, and much more appealing. Which is why, I suppose, I am not a Muslim. Or an anything, really. I’m a Violent Irrational Quaker, a Lapsed Agnostic, strictly Chapel of Rest. But it’s not for the want of trying. As I said last week, I have been grappling with these issues seriously now for eight long years, and getting nowhere. Well, actually, getting somewhere, but nowhere anywhere near a conclusion. The conclusion is that there never will be a conclusion. Because in the end it is an act of faith. Which makes the rather smug pronouncements by the adherents of Richard Dawkins on his Official Richard Dawkins Facebook Page look rather stupid, really.
It’s all too easy to deride organised religion – I should know, I do it all the time, especially when it needs deriding, whether it’s the Pope trying to cover up child abuse or the Church of England saying that gay bishops can only move diagonally. But what these smug gits, sorry, “ardent followers of Richard Dawkins” fail to appreciate, is that there is a world of difference between mocking the foibles of organised religion (and incidentally overlooking any good it might have done) and the direct experience of something other than physical “reality”. Claiming that science-based atheism is “better” than religion is like claiming that engineering is better than dancing.
Fine, go ahead, be an atheist, but there’s no need to be so damn nasty about it: just don’t ram it down my throat, as Linda Lovelace said to Chuck Traynor. These people, with their seeming desire to attack every aspect of religion, not just the bad bits, are as depressing an example of zealotry as the extremist Christians on the other side who refuse to believe in dinosaurs or insist on wearing bloody crosses. Once again I find myself (as with the Muslims) of being the voice of reason in the middle saying hey, let’s cut each other a little slack – and when you get to the stage where the voice of reason is me, then you know things are really bad. The Islamist extremists and the far right are squaring up to each other, the fundamental Christians and the sneering atheists are squaring up to each other – it’s like the countdown to Armageddon, and Armageddon outa here!
It’s no wonder that I find myself looking back more and more on the days of my childhood, when everything seemed possible and everything seemed inexorably bound to lead to progress and improvement. I found, last week, on Youtube, the opening sequence to “Fireball XL5”, which I used to watch when I was eight years old. We truly thought, back in those days, that by now we’d all be wearing space suits and taking our holidays on Mars. Harold Wilson was wittering on about the white heat of technology, and space seemed even nearer to me than it did to many of my schoolmates, since my dad worked at a factory that made jet aeroplanes.
Looking at it now, fifty years later, three things sprung out at me (apart from the fact that we were easily pleased in those days because we knew no better - I doubt my 8-year-old nephew Adam would sit through it!)
a) in the opening credits – “Supermarionation” - I am tipping that is where the creators of Super Mario got the name from. I haven’t checked, but no doubt someone will prove me either right or wrong
b) How incredibly phallic Fireball XL5 is - something totally lost on me in 1963, or at least something I didn't connect with at the time. And
c) The takeoff mechanism of Fireball XL5 is exactly the same as that of a Doodlebug. At first, I sort of thought that maybe this was something to do with Wernher Von Braun going to work in California after the war (don’t ask me how) but it turns out that Fireball XL5 was actually made in Slough, of all places.
Whatever its faults though - and it is easy now to scoff at the idealism of the 1960s when technology was supposed to be the answer to everything, giving us lives of leisure and electricity too cheap to meter – it was an era when anything and everything seemed possible, and progress seemed assured. How different to the home life of our green and pleasant land. These days, rockets usually mean high explosive. We’re back to Wernher Von Braun again – “I reach for the stars, but sometimes I miss, and hit London.”
“Don't say that he's hypocritical
Say rather that he's apolitical
"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down
That's not my department," says Wernher von Braun”
And so we come to Sunday, the Feast of St Sebastian. If there is a lesson to be learned from the life of St Sebastian, it is surely to stay well clear of The Archers, something which I have been carrying through in my daily life ever since they mistakenly, stupidly and unnecessarily killed off Nigel Pargetter by chucking him off the roof on New Year’s Eve 2011. Because he is commonly depicted being tied to a tree and shot with arrows, this has given rise to one or two common misconceptions, the first being that his last words were “one Hundred and eighty”, and the second that this was the cause of his demise. In fact he survive the arrows, was nursed back to health, and then rather unwisely indulged in some personal criticism of the Emperor Diocletian, which lead to him being clubbed to death.
Eliot wrote a suppressed poem (in one of his early notebooks, The Inventions of the March Hare) which was only published after his death, called The Love Song of St Sebastian. Scholars argue over the dating of the poem, and Eliot himself nicked half his own title for The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock, which started modern poetry in 1917 in exactly the same way as the Beatles started sexual intercourse in 1963, while I was busy watching Fireball XL5.
Eliot’s poem is certainly strange, and has led to much speculation about the poet’s own sexuality, but as I read it, it is definitely heterosexual, at least in content if not in intent, because the poet adopts the voice, the persona of St Sebastian, addressing St Irene of Rome, who nursed him back to health after the arrows incident, alternately declaring his feelings for her and at the same time saying he should have strangled her, for preventing his martyrdom. Whether or not it was really addressed to Jean Verdenal (Mort Aux Dardenelles, 1915) and whether or not Eliot had feelings for the man, and ever acted on them, is really taking us in to the territory of “how many children had Lady Macbeth”, - does it add anything to the interpretation of the poem? Lyndall Gordon and Carole Seymour-Jones have both shown that Eliot flirted with homosexuality, maybe even with homosexuals, but in the 1920s, those days of “masculine women and feminine men”, this may have been a lifestyle choice in the circles which he inhabited.
“And when the morning came
Between your breasts should lie my head.
I would come with a towel in my hand
And bend your head beneath my knees;
Your ears curl back in a certain way
Like no one’s else in all the world.
When all the world shall melt in the sun,
Melt or freeze,
I shall remember how your ears were curled.
I should for a moment linger
And follow the curve with my finger
And your head beneath my knees---
I think that at last you would understand.
There would be nothing more to say.
You would love me because I should have strangled you”
Saint Sebastian is a popular male saint, as in “popular among men”, with distinct homoerotic overtones, at least in some of the historical depictions of him, so any day now I expect the Synod to chuck him out, and he is the patron saint of athletes, soldiers, and, rather sportingly in the circumstances, archers. No hard feelings, eh, lads? He is also invoked as a protector against the Plague. As a saint and martyr, he falls into that period where the early Christian church was being persecuted in Rome, probably by the same sort of people who, these days, would post facetious Facebook messages in support of Richard Dawkins.
As I’ve tried to outline above, though, being prepared to die for your beliefs and principles can be a sign of big trouble for the rest of us. Maybe we need to redefine martyrdom so it’s a lot less chic, a lot less fashionable, a lot less smart. So maybe the smarter thing to do is to try and engage, cut people some slack, try to understand, and maybe, heaven forfend, to live and let live, and agree to differ. Be a smarter Martyr. Someone please tell Al Qaeda, Opus Dei, the house of Laity of the Church of England, the Westboro Batist Church, and the Official Richard Dawkins Facebook Page. Blessed are the cheesemakers, for they shall make cheese. These are my principles, if you don’t like them, I have others. We laugh at Groucho Marx for saying this, but maybe he had a point.
As for me, next week, maybe it’s time I stopped fannying around and feeling sorry for myself, and got stuck back into some things that need getting stuck back into. (Is that even grammatical?). I’ve been like a fart trapped in a colander these last few weeks, so many holes I don’t know which one to choose for best.
Anyway. Despite the fact that the last time I organised a festival, the single thing that it achieved is now (twenty years later) potentially being bombed to shit in a war zone, I am thinking of organising another one! Maybe to raise money for Rain Rescue and/or a homeless project. Or both.
In honour of this particular part of the Holme Valley, I am thinking of calling it “Lockstock”. If I build it, they will come. That’s all I have at the moment, a name. A name, an idea, two sleepy dogs, and a fire to mend. Or maybe several fires to mend. It’s a long road, but the pilgrimage of a thousand miles starts with a single step, and in many ways, life itself is a secular pilgrimage. My armour is dented, and needs a polish, my scallop shell is next door somewhere, and my staff is in the lobby. Rocinante, my wheelchair, is old and creaky – or maybe it’s just me. None of us likes this crazy war, Wilmot. It’s time for a futile gesture, and possibly a needless sacrifice. It won’t be easy. Who’s with me, then?
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