Epiblog for the Feast of St Matthias

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. A week of two halves, in fact. Sadly for us, the half of the week when it was if not unseasonably, then at least seasonably warm and sunny, was also the half of the week where we were without the camper van and stuck in for days waiting for the plumber to come. By the time we got the van back, and the plumber had finally been, the weather had changed round to dull, cold slate-grey days with a biting wind and snow in the air, and kayaking was out of the question. There’s little point in driving for two-and-a-half hours to Walney Island to watch the seals when it’s too cold, grey and foggy to even see the Island.

So we stayed by the fire and frowsted instead, and I caught up on long-overdue jobs and tended my fire and cooked tea and fed Matilda, and brought in more coal, and carried on with the innumerable boring tasks of daily life. This time, I timed the coal order just right, we were down to a third of a bag when the new order came. And I even remembered to give them the cheque for once, and the coalman didn’t call me “Mr Judd” for once, so I guess that was a result all round, really.

Matilda’s been curled up asleep on my bed for the cold days, though she did spend some time watching the birds and squirrels on Cat TV through the conservatory door on the two fine days. Apart from that, the only time we've noticed her is when she’s been busy waking the whole house by constructing a three-metre anti-tank berm in the cat litter tray at 4AM.

The van needed its gearbox rebuilding, which is every bit as bad as it sounds, and it still doesn’t drive properly. It’s very difficult to get it into second and sometimes it decides for itself it’d rather be in neutral and pops out again. The garage claim it’ll settle down. We’ll see.

Squirrels and birds aside, the big wildlife event of the week was the return of Brenda the Badger (or very near offer) who returned to the decking on Monday night and swiped all the remaining bread left out on the bird table. We were alerted to her presence by the strange antics of Matilda, who decided to desert the side of the fire and the warm hearth and scuttle across the floor as if she was on a mission.

“What the hell’s up with her?” said Debbie, and crossed quickly yet stealthily to the door, so as not to spook either the cat or whatever it was that was outside.

“Oh, it’s the badger,” she said, in a matter-of-fact voice like you might say “Oh, it’s the milkman” - or even the coalman. Unfortunately, all of the badger-cam equipment was packed away over the summer, before we went to Arran, after Brenda stopped visiting on a regular basis, so I didn’t get any pictures, though Debbie took some on her phone, and some video. If indeed it was the same badger, she looked in remarkably good form, considering the foul winter we’ve had.

So of course, on Tuesday night, I set it all up and I put the remains of the pasta bake with tomato and herb crust, all mixed up with a topping of dog food out on the decking specially, and sat there waiting. Needless to say, she failed to turn up. On Wednesday morning, when I rose, bleary-eyed, the tomato and herb bake was still there, though it was just possible some of the dog food had been nibbled. I suppose it’s comforting to know that my food doesn’t taste of slug. At least not sufficiently to interest a badger.

The way things are going, even vegetarian food might end up having slug in it, if it doesn’t already. I found myself wondering with growing incredulity whether there is any food that doesn’t have horse in it? I’m even starting to worry about horseradish sauce. They missed a trick actually, they should have used zebra, because it’s much quicker to scan it through the checkout and it reduces labelling costs. I sometimes wonder what people think did go into a burger that costs 15p or whatever – it’s hardly likely to have been a prime-fed Aberdeen Angus bull, entertained on a daily basis by Scottish matadors waving tartan blankets and allowed to die of natural causes (the Bull, not the Matadors). As Gez Walsh wryly observed in his blog this week, “value burgers mainly consist of lips and genitals, which reminds me of a girl I used to date”.

I don’t know why the big supermarkets are acting so surprised that this has happened; with their relentless, cut-throat pressure on suppliers to drive down prices more and more in search of ever-cheaper food to gain the competitive edge, sooner or later it was bound to happen – a supplier, or a supplier’s supplier, somewhere down a long and complicated “food chain”, decides to cut a few corners, and the result is Shergar-burgers. The food supply chain, as exposed in the recent news events, has dreadful animal welfare implications anyway, but then we’ve known that since the advent of turkey twizzlers. Maybe even before. I’m still haunted by the turkey massacres at the time of Bird Flu. If DEFRA gets involved in the crisis, God help us, at that point we are really screwed.

I’m reliably informed (by some geezer I heard talking on the radio the other day with about 48K of my RAM, while the rest of my brain was busy multi-tasking elsewhere) that the amounts of horse-tranquiliser in the tainted burgers is minimal and you’d have to eat a veritable mountain of the stuff before feeling any effects, by which time obesity and cardio-vascular heart disease would probably have got you anyway. If you ever wanted to feel a similar effect to horse tranquilisers without any of the potential health hazards, you could always listen to old recordings of Desert Island Discs, of course.

By the end of Tuesday we had finally had the visitation of the plumber, and for once, it was to our advantage. Instead of needing a PCB costing nearly £200, it only needed a micro-switch costing £70 to fix Colin’s boiler. So we were ahead of the game there, although it was more than cancelled out by the gearbox rebuild on the van. Nevertheless we made plans (or rather Debbie did, by declaring it an official compulsory holiday whether I liked it or not) to go off seal-spotting on Wednesday.

So of course, Wednesday dawned grim and grey and cold – not a day for kayaking in fact. More a day for tea and crumpets by the stove. And so the weather has remained. As I type this, I am wearing leg warmers over trousers tucked into thick socks, a long sleeved base layer with a hoody over the top, a scarf, and a buff fleece hat.

Wednesday brought not one, but two unexpected visitors. I was busily plodding away at last year’s accounts, as valid an exercise in deceased equine flagellation as making a Tesco value burger, when there was a rattle at the door, and in walked Bernard, bearing three bottles of his Old Hand Bank Farm Strong Sweet Apple Wine in a carrier bag. We installed him by the fire and I was just about to break off and put the kettle on for a pot of tea when he brandished one of the bottles and asked if I felt like a “drop of this”, instead. I agreed warily, knowing from experience how strong home-made wines can be, and I wasn't wrong. It was beautiful, like liquid gold, but with the kick of a buckaroo.

I had been feeling quite ill, cold and shivery up until that point, but by the time I had finished my first glass, I was both glowing and rubicund. I remember waxing eloquently under its influence, but I have no idea what about. I’m only surprised I didn’t start singing. Whatever was in Bernard’s wine, if NASA ever decides to have another go at launching the Space Shuttle, and they are casting around for a suitable fuel, they could do a lot worse than beat a path to Upper Hand Bank Farm. His work as a sower of anarchy done, Bernard eventually departed cheerfully, and I slept like a drugged child for an hour before having to wake up and carry on, reluctantly and blearily, doing the accounts.

The other visitor was much more fleeting – a young urban fox that flitted across the decking on Wednesday night and stole the bread I’d put out for Brenda. This definitely wasn’t Freda, of yore, it (he or she) was much smaller and didn’t hang around. Since then, we’ve seen neither, though the bread has subsequently been cleared from the bird table on a couple of occasions overnight.

It hasn’t been a week of unbroken bucolic ramblings, though; once again, I made the mistake of looking at the news from the wider world. Lea Williams, a homeless man, was found battered to death on Hove seafront, next to a pitch-and-putt course, on February 11th. Police apparently said he suffered a sustained and brutal attack with a heavy, blunt object. This bitter weather always makes me think of people who are forced to sleep rough, and this was a sobering reminder that they face dangers other than hypothermia. With the economy on its way to hell in a handcart, I fear there will only be more of this sort of thing, purely because, statistically, there will be more homeless. All we can do at the moment is enumerate them, and offer condolences to anyone they have left behind, but one day, I fervently hope and pray, those responsible will be brought to justice, and not only those responsible for this crime, but also those responsible for the greater crime of wrecking the economy and causing unemployment, homelessness and lack of opportunity, while gleefully asserting that because the “figures” “show” there are “more people in work”, everything is hunky-dory and tickettyboo. (“In work” that is, according to some cack-handed half-assed definition where a two hour a week McJob in a distribution centre somewhere at 3 in the morning, take it or lose your benefits, apparently counts in some way as “work”)

As if that wasn’t bad enough, I then logged on to Facebook and found a picture of a dog in the pound somewhere in Coventry where they were appealing for someone to give it a home because it was due to be put to sleep on 22nd February. He didn’t even have a name, or if he did, no-one knew it, and no-one had bothered to name him, probably because that would have made administering the lethal needle even harder. He was just one of the 7000 or so unwanted dogs that die in that situation in the UK every year. I don’t know what happened to him; he surfaced briefly in the maelstrom of Facebook, and was gone again. I did click on the picture, and it seemed that a couple of people were willing to offer him a home, so maybe it worked out well. I guess I could find out, if I really wanted to, but I almost don’t, in case it’s yet more bad news.

It’s been a poignant week on the animal front anyway, because it was the anniversary of the death of Phil’s cat, Reggie, on 23rd February. I can’t believe that ten years, ten whole years have passed since Reggie left us, but the calendar cannot lie. Sometimes it only feels like ten days, sometimes it feels like ten centuries. RIP little Reggie, anyway, you were remembered, even on a cold grim day like Saturday, with minute flakes of snow floating past my window. I gave Phil a Forsythia bush to plant over Reggie’s grave in the garden at Wombwell, and, unlike Shula Archer, I am not in two minds about Forsythia, I like to think that its brief, glorious burst of colour is a metaphor for the life of little Reggie, the cat that lies beneath it, and the joy he brought to all who knew him in his brief time in this dimension here with us.

The other sad fact dictated by the calendar is that this could well be the last week of The Archers Message Board. The petition to halt its closure eventually gathered 1417 signatures, and people were still signing, even as it was closing on Thursday night. Without the arbitrary deadline necessitated by the BBC’s desire to pull the plug on Monday, no doubt far more signatures would have been forthcoming, but for now, we have to go with what we’ve got..

I’ve nothing really to add to the epitaph for the boards I wrote last week, except to say that I hope it turns out to have been premature. Despite the large numbers of people signing the petition, inevitably there have been others who have already drifted away, folding their tents in the night, and (perhaps less edifyingly) some who have returned after a long absence to gloat over the threat to the boards, and to settle old scores, drawn like circling sharks to the blood in the water.

I would prefer to think of Mustardland, if it goes, as something like the field full of folk – not Langland’s. but A.G. MacDonnell’s, in “England, Their England.”

…in a few moments all the men were talking and laughing together. Nobody listened very much to anybody, but they all seemed to be in raging, towering spirits. They threw their weapons down apparently at random, and pulled books and scrolls and parchments and pieces of paper out of their pockets and chattered away and declaimed and recited; and suddenly and queerly and instinctively Donald knew that they were all poets. Once there seemed to be some sort of alarm sounded, for they all sprang to arms with inconceivable rapidity, and ranged themselves in battle array and handled their jumble of weapons in a manner that was the complete reverse of carelessness and amateurishness. When it was found to have been a false alarm, they shoved their weapons away again—one, a little fellow, stuffed a great meat-axe casually into one coat-pocket and hauled a quarto volume out of the other, and one arranged his Hotchkiss machine-gun into a three-legged table and sat down on the ground and began to write a poem upon it—and fell to talking and laughing and scribbling and shouting and declaiming.Donald gazed and gazed upon the enchanted scene. Time did not move. The clouds above him were motionless. Even the sun, surely, had given up its mad race with eternity.

That’s how I’d like to remember it, and to think of it, only a click away. To put down truly what Mustardland means just to me alone, notwithstanding what it means to all the other many thousands of people who have posted there (and the BBC still haven’t said over what period their figures are based) would probably mean I’d have to cut and paste several of my books into this Epiblog in their entirety, which in itself would probably take us past the 12 noon Monday deadline. It’s taught me the value of friends, and the holiness of the heart’s affections. I’ve said it all last week, anyway. I will miss this place, if it goes. But today, as I type, the fat lady is unsung, the jury is out, and everything is still in the hazard. I always operate on the assumption that until someone actually says “no”, the answer is “yes”, and people who know me have said in the past that the surest way to get me to do something is to tell me not to do it. Rather more unkindly, it’s also been said that if there was a big red button with a notice saying “do not press”, I would be the one who pressed it, just to see what happens. Guilty as charged.

Whoso beset him round, with dismal stories
Do but themselves confound, his strength the more is.

We’ll see. Anyway, the people who took this decision don’t care about things you can’t measure, like help, and companionship, and laughter, and comfort. They care about glibness, and efficiency, and getting a significantly worse service for a slightly lower cost, in the name of progress. The country is infested with them. They are Thatcher’s children, and they know the price of everything and the value of nothing. They are the people who make you log on to the internet and look things up instead of writing to tell you or providing a phone number where you can ring up and speak to a real person about something. These are the people who, when something goes “tits up” because of their penny-pinching, cost-cutting, budget slashing, don’t-give-a-stuff attitude, and someone vulnerable, or young, or both, dies because of their cuts, wave a shroud in Parliament, hold an enquiry to kick the difficult questions into the long grass, promise that “lessons will be learned”, and then carry on exactly as before.

They are the people who say we must cut costs, and then file expenses claims totalling £31,000 in six months. What they really mean is you must cut costs, or we will cut your costs on your behalf, without consulting you or caring if you live or die. Everything has to be justified for these people, everything is questioned. It’s never enough that something is good, and fulfilling, in its own right, it has to be “profitable” as well. I could understand such reasoning in the corporate empire of a rapacious capitalist robber baron such as Rupert Murdoch, but not in the precincts of a public service broadcaster with a guaranteed income from a compulsory viewing and listening tax, and a remit to inform, engage, educate and entertain.

As Ed Pickford writes, in “Workers’ Song”:

In the factories and mills, in the shipyards and mines
We've often been told to keep up with the times
For our skills are not needed, they've streamlined the job
And with sliderule and stopwatch our pride they have robbed

Actually, on reflection, I suppose it’s possibly a good thing that these people don’t recognise any of the intangible virtues that can’t ever have a value in a millionaire’s ledger, because if they did ever “get” the concept, their next act would probably be for the miserable, miserly bastards to try and charge us for them in some way. Thirty pieces of silver is probably the going rate.

Which brings me neatly to today. Today is the Feast of St Matthias the Apostle, who took over from Judas after the Crucifixion. Taking over from Judas Iscariot must’ve been a tough gig. A bit like when you get a new job and, on the first day, you say, more to make conversation than anything else, “So, what happened to the previous guy?” and everyone coughs nervously, looks away, and pretends to be busy with the filing.

According to old tradition, St. Matthias's Day is said to be the luckiest day of the year. This is because Matthias was the saint who was chosen by lot to replace Judas Iscariot. It has therefore been seen as a good day on which to buy lottery tickets or to participate in similar activities. So get on down to Ladbrokes!

Judas is probably much more interesting than St Matthias, who is prone to the type of treatment that often befalls those who step into previously illustrious shoes, in the same way that Gordon Brown was nowhere near as good as Tony Blair, and Ed Miliband is even worse than Gordon Brown, if that’s possible, and none of them was a patch on Clement Atlee, Hugh Gaitskill, or Harold Wilson. In the same way that Ronnie Wood was never as good as Brian Jones. Judas had a pivotal role in Christianity, as the necessary betrayer, of course, a concept I have written about before. Without Judas (or someone like him) Christianity would not, could not, have happened. Quite why Big G chose to organise the redemption of all mankind in such a strange and bizarre manner, when, as an all powerful, omnipotent, eternal being he could have just woken up one morning, gone “Shazam!” and put everything to rights is one for the theologians. It’s one of the most troubling questions you are ever likely to encounter in your life, along with if God exists, how do you explain a world of suffering, Celine Dion and Simon Cowell?

In fact, why even bother to go through all this rigmarole in the first place? God could have created Adam and Eve perfect, not bothered to create the serpents at all and Jesus could have had a lie-in. The only people suffering in that scenario would have been several Indian Fakirs and Whipsnade Zoo. This, the issues of relative morality, and the question of forgiveness, are all stones in my path to belief, and I daresay they will continue to preoccupy me for whatever time I have left on Earth, whether Mustardland stays or goes.

Put bluntly, it all comes down to whether you think there’s something in it, or whether you think it’s all bollocks. There are many, many dark days when I think it’s all bollocks, and random bad things happen for no reason; homeless people get murdered, unwanted dogs are put down, people end up in wheelchairs through no fault of their own. On the days when I don’t, I have come to the conclusion that it’s maybe best viewed symbolically. If God is all consuming and all powerful, then the concept must by definition include the idea of evil, like the speck of grit in the oyster that generates the pearl. Otherwise God would be less than God, which could not be possible. The problem is that you can only think about this sort of thing for so long before your head starts to hurt. The Pearl, though, has been a symbol of perfection for mystics ever since the Middle Ages and the anonymous poem “Pearl” in the Gawain manuscript:

Pearl, peasaunt to princes’ paye
To clanly clos in gold so clere…

People have actually asked me (pleadingly, in some cases) if I will give up writing this sort of stuff, if Mustardland closes. The answer is no, because the questions that prompt it won’t go away, whatever the BBC does, and even if nobody else read it, I’d still write it, to try and get straight in my own head what I am supposed to be doing here and why. If anyone has any ideas what Big G has in mind for me, please send them in, on a postcard. Meanwhile, I’m stuck with Woody Guthrie in “Tom Joad”.

"Well, I've preached for the Lord for a mighty long time
I've preached about the rich and the poor
But us working people got to all stand together
Or we ain't got a chance anymore."

Meanwhile, I have been looking for a suitable piece of music with which to end this week’s blog. “Those Were the Days, My Friend” was an early contender, as was “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue”.

But in the end, I settled for the defiant last stand of the Diggers, the crazy madcap band inspired by Winstanley, who had the idea that the Earth, like Mustardland, should be a common treasury for all, and saw their harmless and peaceful community scattered to the five winds by the forces of power and privilege. I have a soft spot for the Diggers. If I wasn’t a lapsed agnostic violent Quaker, I think I’d be a digger. The Diggers went over the hills to glory. People are still singing about them, nearly 400 years later. Everybody has long forgotten the name of the man who closed them down.

You diggers all stand up for glory, stand up now!

Epiblog for The Feast of St Finan

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. The snow has gone, but it may yet be back. In the meantime the garden, stripped bare of its white blanket, looks like a section of the Somme battlefield that has been subsequently sprayed with slurry. It’s going to take a lot of work and effort this year to get it back even to where we were last July, let alone improve on it.

One surprise for me, though, was that yet more of Maisie’s indestructible daffodils have survived. When Debbie dug out the new little pond last summer, she pulled up what she thought was all of the daffodil bulbs. These were the ones that I then absent-mindedly slung in the stone trough in the front garden, and which sprouted determinedly as if to spite my neglect and forgetfulness. But there was obviously an even harder bunch, that must’ve evaded Debbie’s trowel altogether, because they are now once more resolutely coming up in between the standing stones of Russ-Henge, the vertical rockery that Deb constructed around Russell’s mosaic.

In a week when the entire planet was threatened with the catastrophic impact of an asteroid big enough to flatten London, and a meteor shower in Russia injured 900 people, it is strangely comforting to know that, if such a chaotic, apocalyptic event did occur, and wipe out life on Earth, there would still be two clumps of Maisie’s indestructible daffodils left for the next Wordsworth to write about, once he’d evolved enough to drag himself out of the slime of the ocean.

The birds have welcomed the withdrawal of winter, even though the retreat may only be temporary. I’ve been trying to put out extra stuff for them (suet blocks and nuts) as they have obviously been suffering. The squirrels (one of whom may have been Wilbert Whitear, famous squirrel of yore) have also been extremely grateful for the scraps from our table, and seem to have developed quite a taste for stale ciabatta. Next thing you know, they’ll be drizzling it with olive oil and asking to see “today’s specials”.

All of which has provided hours of entertainment for Matilda. Her reaction to the birds is really odd. Occasionally she will see a blackbird, or a scruffy little wagtail out on the decking, pecking away at the bread, and she’ll lower her belly, flatten her ears, and scuttle to the door, tail lashing. But when she gets there, unlike Nigel, who used to utter all sorts of fierce little trimphone noises and paw at the door, jaws slavering, when Matilda gets there, she just sits up and watches them, head on one side, for hours on end sometimes. This, coupled with her general dislike of/disinterest in the outside world, leads me to think more and more she must have been a house cat in her previous life.

She’s got me well trained, though; I now have an automatic routine of making up a cat bed for her at the foot of my own bed when I get up every morning, and placing Mr Hedgehog carefully to one side, to await her arrival. She is also most definitely nocturnal, and frequently wakes me up, galumphing about in Colin’s front room in the wee small hours. She has this thing she’s started doing where she sets off in Colin’s front room, tears along through the front room our side to the bifold doors, through the bifold doors, across the kitchen and into the conservatory, executing a perfect Charlie Chaplin skidding u-turn at the door on the polished floorboards, then re-tracing her pawsteps. If there are any obstacles placed in her path (eg a box) she will “show-jump” straight over them. I think it must be all the horse meat in her beef Felix senior that’s changing her genetic makeup from within. (In passing, I should just say that the more I hear about meat-processing in general, the gladder I am that I became a vegetarian in 1986. And that, given DEFRA’s previous performances in similar crises in recent years, it can only be a matter of time before they order a precautionary cull of all horses, in case one falls into a mincer by mistake).

Zak and Freddie are still well and flourishing, though we haven’t seen much of them this week. On the snowy days they stayed at home (very sensibly, so did I) and on the fine days they’ve been out with Grandad, ranging far and wide. Several people have asked for news of Elvis, and sadly, the latest news is that he’s still pretty much the same, which has sort of led us to wonder about the wisdom of taking him on at all, not necessarily from the monetary point of view, though obviously we can do without huge vet bills, but more from the point of view of having to deal with having a permanently ill dog around the house, with Debbie teaching four days a week and me in a wheelchair. Things like the sheer practicalities of having to take him to the vet. In fairness, the people at the Kennels have offered to help with vet transportation, but I can’t really keep ringing up and expecting them to come over from Castleford just to take Elvis to Donaldsons. Anyway, maybe the better weather will bring better news of him.

Debbie has been making occasional forays on to the other dog rescue sites once again, and came up with a potential replacement, in the form of a blind Labrador. Once she had fielded my question about “does it come with a little human on a harness to lead it round?” I realised she was serious. I don’t think she’s really grasped the concept. Tempting as it is to take on every lame duck in the duck pond, there comes a point where others have to shoulder some of the burden. In any case, we were once turned down as being unsuitable for re-homing a three legged cat, so maybe we should lower our sights and go for, say, a stick insect with asthma.

Debbie has made it to half term, anyway, but not without some idiot observer marking her down in class for not making it clear to her (the idiot observer) which were the students and who was the classroom assistant. My comment was (apart from this is just the sort of crap that infests education and drives good teachers away) that if the observer can’t tell the difference between a student and a classroom assistant, what the hell are they doing observing anything anyway? Maybe they should give the job to a blind Labrador instead, or give the observer a little man in a harness to lead her around and point out the classroom assistants.

The van was not so lucky. No sooner had I come round from the general anaesthetic and the tranquilising dart had worn off from signing the huge cheque for its MOT, than the driver’s door lock collapsed. This was not so much of a tragedy, but nevertheless it needed fixing. Deb could get in and out of the sliding side door – in fact she frequently does anyway – but in the case of an accident this may not have been an option. So, with a world-weary sigh, I arranged for the garage to come and pick it up and fix it on Friday. Father Jack from the garage duly appeared, like the Demon King in a pantomime, and took the keys and drove off in it. Five minutes later, he was back, on foot. He had got to Big Valley Garage, on the bend near Armitage Bridge, and the gearbox had collapsed. So it, and him, were towed to Crosland Moor, where it now sits as we speak. Current estimates for repairing the damage range from £500 to £800. We shall see. We’re in a bit of a bind, really – the problem is that if we did get shot of The Arran Silkie, something which emotionally I would be very loath to do, we could only really afford to replace it with something like-for-like, and a similar second-hand T25 Wedgie off Gumtree or something like that may well come with its own interesting mechanical quirks and foibles. At least with the Silkie, unlike Tesco burgers, we know what’s gone into it.

So I guess I had better sell some more books! This week at least, The Hull Daily Mail finally decided to publish the long-delayed feature on Granny Fenwick’s Recipes and Remedies. At least in the printed newspaper version they did; when I asked them if they were also going to upload the story online, on to their web site, they said no, “because it’s not hard news”, so I told them I would make a point of also stabbing somebody, next time I published a book. Hull has actually been in my thoughts quite a lot this week, because This Is Ull (the independent online rival to the “official” Hull Daily Mail, also published my short story Sunday Girl, and I’ve carried on working (in fits and starts) on another story I started, called Rabbits Aren’t Rationed, based on a kid’s experiences in wartime Hull.

That last story was inspired by the saga of the restoration of Lumpy. Lumpy was a knitted teddy bear, made for me by Granny Rudd, some time around 1955-1960, and in his recent years he had become a bit decrepit. He’d already had one “makeover” courtesy of a great friend of mine, a while ago (perhaps even as long as a decade) but his latest problems were more what an architect would probably call “structural”. He was, in short, unravelling, in several places. At this point, step forward one of the members of the Archers message board, who is also one of my Facebook friends. I don’t want to name her and embarrass her, but she has done a brilliant job! She patiently deconstructed him, unpicking every stitch, and de-stuffed him. Then she machine-washed him and hung him out to dry. Then she patiently knitted patches in matching wool which she sourced herself, and patched them in. Then she sewed him back together again and re-stuffed him, adding stuffing of her own. He was ready to be couriered back to me! So this week I organised a courier pick-up and the box duly arrived. When I opened it, I found to my surprise that Lumpy has gained a female companion, Lulu, also knitted by Lumpy’s repairer, to the original 1950s pattern, which she had sourced online! I feel as if a small part of my childhood has been reclaimed, and Lumpy and Lulu are currently on display in pride of place. So Lumpy is good for another fifty years, even if his owner is unravelling on a daily basis. Who knows, he may eventually pass to a new generation, since Debbie’s family are still actively procreating. It would be good if somehow he could. Little Chloe and her Mum are now home from hospital, and Granny has been batting round like a B.A.F seeing to them generally, but unfortunately, in her haste to drop the dogs off on Thursday night, she did manage to end up with the door handle in her hand, but no longer attached to the door.

So Friday started with that to fix. On Thursday, which was of course St Valentine’s day, I had marked the event in the traditional manner by singing the traditional English folk song, Dame Durden, with its verse about

Twas on the morn of Valentine
When birds begin to prate
Dame Durden and her maids and men
Were all together met.

It is important to keep these old traditions going, which is why this week, on Shrove Tuesday, we had pasta with garlic bread. No doubt Gemma and her family continued to celebrate “hash” Wednesday by having corned beef hash. Also on Thursday, I had organised a courier to come and pick up some books which needed to go off to Gardners in Eastbourne. And they failed to arrive. So I did what I usually do in this sort of circumstance, went totally batshit at them and told them there would be a new courier on Monday. The effects of the online bollocking must have got through, because I had no sooner finished fixing the door handle on Friday when there was a knock at the door.

I was expecting the plumber, who is due to come back one day (but then so is Jesus, and probably on a similar time-scale) with the missing bits of Colin’s boiler, but no, it turned out to be a courier. I had previously spent a lot of the morning banging my head against the brick wall that is Parcel Monkey customer services, and being told that it would now be Monday before the order was taken away, so I was quite surprised to see him. I trundled out and (using my normal voice, though I was very tempted to lapse into Stephen Hawking, which I have decided to do from now on to get rid of double glazing salesmen, Jehovah’s witnesses and other passing evangelists) I asked him who he was:

Courier: City Link, Mate, got a parcel to pick up
Me: Where were you yesterday then?
Courier: I don't know nowt about that Mate!
Me: Well, the parcel's here, but it's still got yesterday's label on it, does it matter?
Courier: No. [Takes parcel and departs, pulling the door handle off]

Ten minutes later, I was just finishing screwing the brass plate that holds the handle in place on the front of the door, yet again, when a white van pulled up and a different bloke with a clipboard, a PDA and a high-vis jacket came trolling up the drive.

Courier: Courier: City Link, Mate, got a parcel to pick up!
Me: aaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrgggggggggggggggh!
You're 10 minutes too late, the courier that set out from Normanton yesterday has just reached us and driven off with it!
Courier: Oh, right mate, I'll just put it down as "nowt to collect"
Me: Don't pull the door handle off on your way out! [Thankfully, he didn’t]

All of the foregoing events, however, in a busy and crowded week, have been dwarfed and put into ultimate perspective by one overriding and dominant announcement that has rocked the world. No, it wasn’t the Pope announcing his resignation: given that the two prime contenders to take his place are aged something like 79 and 80, I don’t expect much to change there. It was the peremptory and high-handed diktat from the BBC that the Archers Message Board is to close.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, the Archers Message Board is not just a place where you can get your childhood teddy bear repaired. It is much, much more. To paraphrase Bill Shankly, the closure of the Archers Message Board is not a matter of life and death, it’s much more serious than that.

The thing is, I believe (and I am not alone in this, the online petition I set up to protest about this closure has garnered 1000 signatures in its first three days) that this action by the BBC is not only arbitrary and counter-productive, but may also be in contravention of the BBC's Royal Charter.

The messageboard truly is a unique online community. This message board has meant a great deal to me. I’ve found friends here, I’ve had solace and advice. I’ve seen pets rehomed and rescued via this MB, people given financial help, people given counselling, you name it – it truly was a unique coalescence of experience. It has seen me through the loss of four cats and a dog over eight years, and through my illness and subsequent diagnosis with Muscular Dystrophy. I daresay there are many others who have been helped by it, as I have, and comforted by its presence.

At least three couples I know of have met and got married after starting to chat to each other on the boards. You have only got to look at things like the Cancer Copers and the Mental Health threads in The Village Hall to see what a brilliant resource and help this has been for people - many of whom are ill or are carers themselves, and rely on the social hub of the message board.

When I was ill in hospital for six months in 2010, I came round from one operation to find I had been sent a massive bunch of Mustard coloured sunflowers - then Amy, one of the posters, did an enormous detour on a journey from Brighton to Skipton to come and bring me some books and a basket of fruit. When I was having trouble getting enough protein in my diet and I couldn't shake off the odoema, two message board members separately came to visit me with high protein snack food and one sent me a tin of home-baked Oxfam famine biscuits! That is the sort of place Mustardland was, and is.

The BBC are proposing to cut the message board on financial grounds, claiming that the numbers of regular users has fallen “below 1000” – yet 1000 people signed my petition in just three days! Their argument is that there are other places on the internet where people can meet and gather, which is also true, but none of them has the cachet and the feeling of security which many of the more elderly posters appreciate and which comes from the site being part of a trusted organisation, the BBC.

For me, this has also become an issue of how the BBC spends our money, raised by the compulsory licence fee. The BBC have saved about £4. 2s. 6d. in relative terms by chopping something that meant a great deal to a great many people. You only have to look at the comments on the online petition to see this: I have challenged the BBC to publish the figures on which this decision was based, and so far they have failed to do so.

I used to be a defender of the BBC, and of the licence fee, but in closing I have to say that even in commercial terms, the decision of the BBC to chop the messageboard is deeply flawed. What other organisation, given such a source of feedback and interaction with the prime users and customers of its product, would choose to ditch it in favour of Facebook and Twitter!

In short, the message board is a source of friendship, solace, companionship, help, advice and support for a great many people and represents a unique online community of the sort the BBC should be fostering, not closing, if it truly wishes to interact with its listeners, as per the terms of the Royal Charter.

So, it looks like in many ways, it may be the end of an era. Unless the BBC recant, and sack the person whose idea it was, then it will merely be the end of an error. Obviously, I would also like to say that the BBC management do a difficult job in balancing responsibilities and giving their customers what they want. I'd like to. But every time I try, it comes out as "these people should be set to work breaking rocks in a quarry, until they see the error of their ways".

For saying this, and similar things, this week, I was criticised for, in effect, pretending to be a Christian while simultaneously displaying a most un-Christian attitude to those with whom I disagree. Those weren’t the exact words, but that was the sentiment. Several things are wrong with this, firstly amongst them that I don’t claim to be a Christian. I gave up going to Church because I don’t like the idea of a one-size-fits-all overarching moral code which is applied inflexibly in every circumstance. Sometimes it’s the right thing to do, sometimes it isn’t. And I also gave up going to Church because I couldn’t reconcile the idea of forgiveness with what I saw happening – specifically at the time, the mistaken and misguided war on Iraq and all that it entailed. How could anyone forgive Tony Blair and George Bush? Not to mention that subsequent politicians have been even more devious and evil.

So I never claimed to be a Christian, at least not for the last few years. I don’t think the Old Testament is the revealed word of God, I think it’s rambling, incoherent, frequently contradicts itself, and is open to multiple interpretations. I do believe Jesus existed, but I have problems with the theological idea of the incarnation and of “accepting him as my personal saviour” or whatever the phrase is. I don’t know what I am. I’m a lapsed agnostic violent Quaker. I believe, for instance, in the principles of sustainable forestry, yet everywhere, every day, I see people walking the earth who really deserve to be beaten about the head with a piece of 4 x 2. So yes, guilty as charged. Well, guilty not as charged, but guilty all the same. I’ve come to the conclusion that my concept of forgiveness and retribution is more of the pagan variety – do unto others as you would have them do unto you sort of works, but with me, it’s more if you attack me and mine, prepare to get the same back, in spades redoubled.

This is the sort of thing that was preoccupying my thoughts on Ash Wednesday, typically a day of brooding self-examination and introspection. Well, that, and chasing up the plumber. He eventually promised to come back on Friday, as I said above, and I warned Debbie to get up early, unless she wanted to find herself sharing the shower with him, in some sort of bizarre homage to Dallas, or those 1980s porn movies that always seem to start with a young girl in her nightie answering the door to a man in overalls, carrying a toolbox (or so I am told). Anyway, he failed to turn up, so it’s another weekend of bracing cold showers. Good job the snow melted.

And so we came to Sunday, which is the Feast of St Finan of Lindisfarne. Appropriately enough, in a week containing Ash Wednesday, Easter, and specifically the date of it, was a great preoccupation of St Finan. Until I began researching him for this Epiblog, I had assumed that St Finan was the inventor of the haddock, but sadly, this proved not to be the case. He was, in fact, an Irish monk, who trained in Iona, and was specifically chosen to succeed St Aidan. The Venerable Bede, writing in his Ecclesiastical History, describes him as an able ruler, especially in connection with his work on the conversion of the Northumbrian kingdom. He built a cathedral “in the Irish fashion, employing hewn oak with an outer covering of reeds” which he dedicated to St Peter. One way or another, he was also responsible for the foundation of St Mary’s, at the mouth of the River Tyne, Gilling, on the site of King Oswin’s murder (indirectly, via Queen Eanfled) and of course the great abbey at “Streanaeshalch”, or Whitby.

Oswin was related to St Oswald, also slain in battle, and the subject of Aelfric’s Homily on the life of King Oswald, which I had to learn by heart for my final exam in Old English in 1976 (which was a lot nearer the Dark Ages than today is) and bits of which I can still recite today if you press the right buttons.

Finan converted Penda, King of the Mercians, in itself no small feat, since it was Penda who had been responsible for King/Saint Oswald’s death, and gave him four priests, including the first Bishop of the Middle Angles and Mercia. Given the unpredictability of the world in general in those times, and the likelihood of the Mercian King recanting and sticking a spear in your gizzard, those were brave men.

Whitby abbey, which also featured last week, for its involvement with St Trumwin, was the scene of the famous Synod in 664AD that finally fixed the way of calculating when to celebrate Easter. Previously there had been two different systems, the Paschal and the Roman, which meant that sometimes King Oswin was busy celebrating Easter by one set of rues, while Queen Eanfled was still stuck in Lent, on Palm Sunday.

By and large, since those days, the dating of Easter hasn’t been such a controversy, though there have been various subsequent attempts to fix or standardise it. Anyway, this week it was Ash Wednesday, and the start of Lent. Given the wearing nature of the week, the attrition of it all, I’ve never felt more like T S Eliot’s “aged eagle” than I did this Ash Wednesday.

Because I do not hope to turn again
Because I do not hope
Because I do not hope to turn
Desiring this man's gift and that man's scope
I no longer strive to strive towards such things
(Why should the aged eagle stretch its wings?)
Why should I mourn
The vanished power of the usual reign?

Why indeed? All this controversy over the message board has reinforced one thing this week. It’s better to do something than do nothing, even if doing something does lead to regrets and a realisation that you’re no longer the person you used to be. Which in itself can be a good thing and a bad thing.

Because these wings are no longer wings to fly
But merely vans to beat the air
The air which is now thoroughly small and dry
Smaller and dryer than the will
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still.
Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death
Pray for us now and at the hour of our death.

Teach us to sit still. That at least is something I know something about. I’ve done quite a lot of it in he last two years. Teaching us not to care is a different matter, however, and something I find almost impossible, especially when faced with arrant, ignorant stupidity, yes BBC, I do mean you.

Because I do not hope to know again
The infirm glory of the positive hour

Well, it may well be that the Nasty Nigels of this world will get their way and close the message board. The odds are in their favour, after all. But they won’t get their way without a fight. Anyone who objects to me campaigning to save the Archers Message Board has obviously made the fundamental mistake of thinking that I give a shit about their opposition. For the avoidance of any doubt, I don’t give a shit, I don’t take shit, I am not even in the shit business. In the time it’s taken me to type this Epiblog, another 50 or so people have signed the petition. I’ve been playing the Stan Rogers track, The Mary Ellen Carter, a lot this week. It has resonances for me. The message board has been, in many ways, like a ship. She’d saved our lives so many times, living through the gale:

For we couldn't leave her there, you see, to crumble into scale.
She'd saved our lives so many times, living through the gale
And the laughing, drunken rats who left her to a sorry grave
They won't be laughing in another day
And you, to whom adversity has dealt the final blow
With smiling bastards lying to you everywhere you go
Turn to, and put out all your strength of arm and heart and brain
And like the Mary Ellen Carter, rise again.

So we’re going into next week, what may be the final week of a message board that I’ve been part of for the last eight years, and which has given me three books. When I first started posting, Russell, Nigel, Dusty and Kitty were still alive, and Tiggy was nobbut a young stripling of a pup. Now they are all gone, gone into the world of light, and I alone sit lingering here, in Lent, reflecting that, as Bede might have said, “lyf is leone”. Still, it’s better to live one day as a tiger than ten thousand years as a sheep. Bring me my spear, O clouds unfold, bring me my chariot of fire! Up, guards, and at ‘em. Forward the armoured brigade! A Fenyke, A Fenyke!

Epiblog for the Feast of St Trumwin

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. [I almost typed “busty!” I wish! - Mind you, it could only help my Google ratings.] Anyway, winter continues, in the meantime. Winter draws on, as the old saying has it. As I sit typing this, trying to ignore the inane nonsense of the Omnibus Edition of The Archers warbling away in the background, it has already started to sleet. In fact, looking across the valley, the trees on the slope up towards Woodhead Road are already partially obscured by a veil of white

Weather apart, the week didn’t start well. In fact, for all the good I did on Monday, I might as well have gone down to the zoo and watched the monkeys masturbating, or the sneaky lemurs turning up their own central heating. In business terms, it was a one step forward, two steps back day, including the warehouse “losing” 400 books, I hope only temporarily. I then topped it off when, in short succession, having given up on the deceased equine flagellation and turned to cookery, I managed to burn my hand on the stove and drop my pizza when taking it out of the oven. The way it’s going, Matilda will not only outlive me, but will probably leave a larger estate, considering that she now owns Flat Eric, Big Mouse, Mr Hedgehog and four ping-pong balls, one of which jingles, plus three crocheted Maisie-blankets, and she’s only been here since September.

Tuesday brought more snow, and I was very glad of the leg-warmers which arrived the other week. I have said it before, but I look even more than ever like a superannuated monk as I sit here typing this with my hoodie up, especially on those days when Debbie lights a joss stick and we are all swathed in the heady smell of “incest”, as it is known in our house. I may break into plainsong at any moment. Granny brought the boys round at the end of their walkies; Zak curled up in his armchair, steaming quietly to himself, giving paw to anyone who passed within his ambit. Poor old Freddie’s getting on a bit now, and he doesn’t like the snow, even with his little coat. According to Granny, he’s started getting to the point where he starts doddering and falling over backwards. So I let him jump up on the settee, even though he was wet and bedraggled, and wrapped him up in a dog-towel. He still seemed to be lacking something, though, so I made him a hot-water bottle, and wedged it down between the cushion and his back. He seemed to appreciate this, and eventually drifted off into a twitchy sleep.

Hot water has been much on our minds this week, because the boiler in Colin’s side of the house seems to be on the blink. We tried to put it on to combat the possibility of frozen pipes, as I said to Debbie that a few quid extra on the gas bill was a better option than a large additional bill, from the plumber. Unfortunately, my judgement on this issue was on a par with my other decisions this week, and it turned out (when the plumber came) that the timer clock on the boiler, and the thermostat on the shower had both gone to the happy hunting ground, for ever and ever, amen. So now we’ll have a few extra quid on the gas bill, and a large additional bill from the plumber – this in a week where the camper van is already up at the garage for its MOT. The way things are going, we’ll have enough bills to open a platypus sanctuary.

It would have been too easy, of course, if it had been merely the timer, but when he came back on Wednesday, John the plumber confirmed that – sadly – that alone hadn’t fixed it, and it needs a new PCB as well. Aaargh. Still, on the plus side, before he left, John did re-stack the several bags of coal that had fallen over (almost onto my foot) in the lobby that morning, and he took away to post the signed contract for my first two digital books: in two or three weeks’ time, Catheter Come Home and Granny Fenwick’s Recipes and Remedies will be on Amazon. What will they think of next! He’s a good bloke, though, and I am going to add him to my rag-tag band of Crusaders when we eventually get around to embarking from Shoreham to cross the main to Outremer and re-take France for the English Crown.

Matilda also had a shock on Wednesday. She was at her usual station just inside the conservatory door, watching out for the birds on Cat TV as usual, when a squirrel just popped its head up on the other side of the window. For a moment, they were snout to snout, with only a pane of double glazing between them, then the spell was broken – Matilda sprang back, and the squirrel skedaddled.

I have had my head down, working, this week, so I haven’t been keeping up with the news, but one issue where the cacophony of babbling did manage to penetrate my self-imposed bubble, because it was impossible to turn on the TV or the radio without hearing someone wittering about it, was “Gay Marriage” and the vote in Parliament. I have to say two things at the outset. I am not gay, I am not in the gayer, they won’t have me, - no good with soft furnishings, though I can cook and sew a bit. Secondly, I have been married now for sixteen years or so, and – though it’s been fun – I wouldn’t ever describe it as gay.

The whole thing centres on who can use the word “marriage” and to be honest, I’ve never thought that any section of society has an exclusive lien on any part of the language. Semantically, it’s like saying you can’t use the word “trout” if you are a lesbian. I’ve always thought that what matters in this life is that you increase the overall amount of love in the world. I know that sounds feeble and rather hippy, but there you are. Like Joni Mitchell (one of my persistent touchstones on matters of human relationships) says, what really matters is:

“We don’t need no piece of paper from the City Hall,
Keeping us tied and true”

Once you realise that, then no amount of posturing denial from antediluvian Tory backbench MPs can take it away from you, however much they stand up and blether on about it. Flesh-eating zombies are known for feeding off brains, and, from what I saw of the Parliamentary debate on the TV news clips, there are going to be a hell of a lot of hungry zombies wandering around Westminster. Too bad the council stopped the soup runs.

“The Bible” is always advanced as a reason why not by the opponents of such measures (see also under Gay/Women Bishops) and the more I hear it, the more I reaslise that I simply can’t believe that the Bible (especially the Old Testament) is the word of God revealed. It’s rambling, it’s self- contradictory, and does God really care if I wear raiments of mixed cloth?

It seems to me that it would be perfectly possible to follow all the observances, all of the tenets of the dietary laws and such, and still be a complete bastard. It was this sort of thinking that first led me down the road to moral relativism. If the Old Testament had been the only thing that survived, I would certainly have a lot more trouble being a troubled, lapsed, agnostic violent Quaker than I already do. The only good thing about the Old Testament is that the bad guys usually get smitten. Pharaoh’s army got drownded, as the song says. That is one aspect of the Old Testament I would like to see more of in modern-day society. Smite the buggers who spend our money on having their moats cleaned, for a start.

Thank God Jesus came along and swept it all away with one simple commandment to love one another. Love is not love, which alteration finds, true enough, but love is love is love and nobody can say their kind of love is worth any more or is more holy or pure than anyone else’s kind of love. Well, they can say it, but I don’t believe them. You know it when you see it, like the grass coming green again in spring.

The week finally ended for us on a warm and positive note, though, with the birth of yet another niece, another addition to the next generation of Debbie’s family. Little Chloe entered the world at 8.30pm on Thursday night. As in the Larkin poem (Born Yesterday) I found myself wishing her all the conventional things, and of course, all the unconventional things which Larkin hits on, which make the poem so effective:

May you be ordinary;
Have, like other women,
An average of talents:
Not ugly, not good-looking,
Nothing uncustomary
To pull you off your balance,
That, unworkable itself,
Stops all the rest from working.
In fact, may you be dull -
If that is what a skilled,
Vigilant, flexible,
Unemphasised, enthralled
Catching of happiness is called.

Her birth also instilled in me a renewed feeling that maybe I should get off my backside – ha! that’s easy for me to say – and actually start to do something once again, to try and make the world a better place for little Chloe, and all the others of her generation, Adam, Katie-Elizabeth, Ben, Hollie and Ryan. And, as in previous years when I’ve contemplated the births of each one of her cousins, I have, this week, spent a considerable time reflecting on the sort of world she’ll grow up in, and what influence I could have in shaping it for the better, for all of them, in my own limited time left here.

My sensibilities were heightened in that regard, I suppose, because this week I have spent a lot of time working on the mammoth index to Hampshire at War, and I’ve also been reading (again) A Moment in Time by H E Bates. So I have been pretty much immersed in the war,one way or another, and the idea of a fight to save everything worthwhile about what I suppose we have to call “civilization” and “culture”. The problem being, of course, whose values? Whose culture are we fighting for? I remember my Dad hearing me listening to “Masters of War” by Bob Dylan, and him remarking that it was all very well these people being anti-war, but he hoped Bob Dylan realised how many people had died so he could sing that song. At the time, I felt suitably chastened. Had we been having the conversation today, of course, I’d probably have said something like yes, but there are wars and there are wars, and I would rather war was the absolute last resort, as opposed to the default setting for resolving any conflict of ideals, religions or cultures, which is the more we seem to have slipped into of late.

Maybe the answer is just to pick a set of basic things on which we can all agree, and strive towards those by whatever means possible. It worked reasonably well back in 1945. So I hope that Chloe’s life will be free from Beveridge’s five great evils; Squalor, Ignorance, Want, Idleness, Disease, and I hope, as I said above, apart from the usual stuff, that she’s happy in whatever she does. I’d like her to grow up in an England of tolerance, justice, and fair play, a compassionate society, underpinned by respect, and by live and let live. I’d like her to be able to see the countryside, the hills, the dry stone walls, the sheep. I’d like her to discover the churches and chapels, and appreciate them for the buildings, even if she disagrees with their message. I’d like her to watch cricket, drink real ale, and listen to brass bands. I’d like her to have a knitted teddy and a rabbit made of old socks. After all, I had both, and I turned out OK, didn’t I? (Didn’t I?)

Who knows, maybe she will, though, so far, you could say I’m describing a nephew, more than a niece! But maybe by the time she is old enough to consider such matters, perhaps gender stereotyping will have moved on. And I’d like her to be kind to animals. Who knows, maybe eventually, together, Chloe and her sisters and brothers may succeed in building a world where (in the words of the Facebook meme) a chicken can cross the road in peace without having its motives questioned. On a more serious note, what I don’t want to see is her growing up in a nasty, bigoted, hateful society that’s heading straight back to the days of Patience Kershaw, and we’re going to have to do something about making sure that doesn’t happen.

Who knows? God knows, I guess, but if he does, he ain’t telling. And today is the Feast of St Trumwin, who, according to the usual sources [I almost typed “the usual suspects”] was Bishop of the Southern Picts in Scotland in 681; he worked from the monastery of Abercorn on the Firth of Forth. When King Egfrith was killed by the Picts in 685, Trumwin and his monks had to flee the area, and he retired to spend his later years as a monk in Whitby Abbey, before dying of natural causes in the early 700s.

The Venerable Bede, no less, in his Ecclesiastical History, tells us that, in 681, Saint Trumwin was appointed bishop over the southern Picts by Saint Theodore and King Egfrith. Archbishop Theodore of Canterbury had divided the Northumbrian diocese governed by Saint Wilfrid into three parts (a bit like Caesar and Gaul being quartered into three halves,) establishing the sees of Deira, Bernica, and Lindsey. Three years later, two more were created, for Hexham and on the Firth of Forth to govern the Pictish lands recently conquered. This one became the seat for Trumwin, who organised his see at the monastery of Abercorn and later founded a separate monastery at Lothian on the Firth of Forth. Trumwin also accompanied Theodore to Farne to persuade Saint Cuthbert to be consecrated bishop of Hexham.

In 685, King Egfrith was killed by the Picts in the disastrous battle of Nechtansmere (identified variously as either Dunnichen in Angus or Dunachton on the shores of Loch Insh) which marked the start of the disintegration of the hegemony of Northumbria, and Saint Trumwin and all his monks had to flee south or face either slavery or death at the hands of the Picts. King Egfrith rather unwisely allowed his armies to be drawn into the environs of a Pictish fort by following a feigned retreat on the part of the Pictish leader, and got a spear in his gizzard for his carelessness, as did most of his army.

The bloody aftermath of the battle, where the Picts allegedly continued burying their dead far into the night by torchlight after the daylight had failed, has occasionally been seen by subsequent observers, as a ghostly re-enactment. According to the web site “Uncovering Scotland”, a Miss F E Smith was walking home from a cocktail party in 1950, having crashed her car into a ditch en route, when she saw the torches and ghostly figures moving across the supposed battlefield:

Miss Smith saw moving torches to her right a mile away on Dunnichen Hill. She saw more figures 50 yards away in a field to her right. Her dog was with her at the time of the incident and he began to react to the figures and growled at the lights, indicating fear on his part. The woman thought she could make out the forms of Pictish warriors carrying the torches. The men were dressed in tights and roll-necked tunics with a roll at the bottom. The lights she saw gave off a red glow, rather than a yellow or orange one. This was typical of the torches that the Picts would have used. Wood taken from resinous roots of Scots fir trees emitted a red colour when they were lit.

As indeed would Miss F E Smith, probably, had anyone been unwise enough to approach her resinous body with a naked flame that evening.

Trumwin, meanwhile, went to Whitby Abbey, where he was welcomed by Abbess, Saint Elfleda. One thing about these saints, they looked after their own. There he lived out his last days in "austerity to the benefit of many others beside himself" (Bede). Trumwin's relics were translated during the 12th century with those of King Oswy and Saint Elfleda, something which always amuses me when I read it – this business of digging up relics and passing them around always makes me think of that portable reliquary that was used for St Bernadette of Lisieux on her recent world tour, specifically manufactured to be the right size to be carry-on hand luggage on an aircraft. It could have come straight from Father Ted, as I have observed before.

So that was Saint Trumwin, and to be honest, apart from the austerity bit, I am not sure why he’s even a Saint. The selection process toughened up a lot in the last few years. We’ve still got problems with the Picts wanting to go their own way, though, and that’s another knotty problem that Chloe and her generation will have to deal with. If I started branching out into a general discussion about the threat to Scotland which Alec Salmond’s own particular brand of “independence” represents, this blog would be twice as long and, if that is even possible, four times as boring. I do hope, though, that, whatever happens with Scotland, Chloe will one day go there and appreciate its beauties. As Fred Small says:

You can be anybody you want to be
You can love whomever you will
You can travel any country where your heart leads
And know we will love you still

You can live by yourself, you can gather friends around
You can choose one special one
And the only measure of your words and your deeds
Will be the love you leave behind when you're done

As to me, next week, I have another week of more of the same. If sitting around in your hoodie being austere and writing manuscripts counts for anything, then maybe I have more in common with St Trumwin than I realised. At least in the time it’s taken to put this blog together, the snow has turned to sleet, and then to rain, and it’s finally stopped raining. The stove is ticking away, the cat is asleep on her chair with Big Mouse, and the TV is just warming up so that Debbie can watch the Six Nations and shout at the men playing with odd-shaped balls. Is there honey still for tea? Do the bees even know they’re being expoited? Who knows, but I might as well go and put the kettle on, just in case.

Epiblog for the Feast of St Blaise

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. The weather decided to substitute one kind of cold unpleasantness for another. The snow was all hosed away on Sunday, by horizontal, torrential rain, which was good – but then the winds came. We were lashed by gale after gale, as the tail of a massive Atlantic low swept across the country. Obviously, we had it nowhere near as bad as places like the Hebrides, where the power went off and didn’t reappear for some hours, and when it did, for a while thereafter, it was on and off more times than Madonna’s knickers. But the garden here has had a terrible pasting, and it looks like it’s been sprayed with brown muck – the mess of all the dead leaves that were already on the ground before the snow came. The cast-iron ornamental heron sculpture has been blown over and is lying forlorn on its side next to the pond, and the plastic greenhouse is leaning over at an angle reminiscent of a drunk hanging on to a lamp post. One of the glass t-light holders that was hanging from a hook on the guttering of the conservatory has been blown down and shattered all over the decking. It’s a grim prospect to think of all the work that will have to be put into it to get the garden back to how it was last summer.

To make it worse, I haven’t seen the snowdrops this year – the “fair maids of February” that have usually made their appearance by now, nodding in the keen wind. I don’t know enough about gardening to know if it’s possible for snowdrops to just die out, but they’ve come up every year we’ve been here so far, without human intervention of any kind, in fact they have previously seemed to thrive on neglect. Maybe they’re just late. As for crocuses, there’s definitely no trace. Which is a shame, because I always take the sight of the first crocus to be the harbinger of Spring. Still, maybe they’ll come up yet, like the snowdrops.

One thing that has survived the destruction of winter is Maisie’s daffs, which were originally planted next to Russell’s mosaic. When Deb dug out the new, smaller, pond, this summer, the daff bulbs were lifted, and I was going to store them and then put them back in when the weather was better. But at the end of a long day of gardening last autumn, when I was feeling tired, instead I just laid them rather haphazardly in a square concrete planter just at the end of my ramp, and slung a bit of soil mixed with compost over them, fully intending to come back and do the whole thing of taking them and wrapping them in newspaper, but, in the way that things do, it got forgotten in the hurly-burly of autumn – forgotten entirely, in fact, until this week when the snow melted and I saw green shoots coming up. The indestructible daffs have survived and colonised their new home – helped, no doubt, by the shelter afforded them by the bulk of the old camper van, which is now an empty hulk, awaiting its final disposal as time and weather allows. So it’s not all bad news on the garden front, this week; despite the Holme Valley being ravaged by the sort of storms that wouldn’t have been out of place on the surface of Pluto, I have managed to grow some daffs. By accident.

Matilda’s been largely opting out of the weather, in favour of her new adopted place of rest, namely the foot of my bed, just where the morning sun streams in through Colin’s back window downstairs. In fact, she has got me so well trained now that, when I get up in the mornings, I make sure that there’s a cat-sized hollow dented into the duvet, then I spread out first one, then the other, of the two Maisie-blankets on top of it, then add Mr Hedgehog so she won’t feel lonely, and leave it all ready for her whenever she cares to jump up there and curl round. Not that she’s spoilt or anything. Other than that, for her it’s been a week of bird-watching from (as she sees it) the relative safety of behind the conservatory door, where those fierce birds can’t get her, an occupation occasionally disturbed by Freddie hurling himself past her and crashing into the grass every time he sees a squirrel.

Freddie and Zak went home on Friday, having – I think – largely enjoyed their stay. Zak was exceptionally fussy and kept giving paw as I trundled past him into the conservatory. It can get very wearing if you are doing something such as putting the shopping away, which involves multiple trips, but he means well, poor soul. Once during the week he “gave” one of his hind paws by mistake, and then looked worried when I accepted it, as much as to say “there’s something not quite right here, but I just can’t put my finger on it”. I saw a TV programme this week which indicated that a dog’s brain is just one-tenth the size of a human brain, but the part of a dog’s brain which is to do with smell is 80 times larger than the corresponding part of the human brain. This may well be true of Zak. The remaining crinkles of his furry little walnut are almost certainly taken up with random acts of food-snaffling, finches and fairies. Freddie’s brain is mostly full of dog treats, mince, smells and squirrels, I should think.

Granny returned, anyway, and they went home. For some reason, she has started to take an active interest in grammar, of all things, and rang me up the other day while I was still in bed (and Debbie was in the shower) to ask me how to spell “voyeur”. I didn’t ask why. I recounted this to Debbie, who then promptly accused me of always asking her how to spell things when I was sitting here writing, and I replied that it was because if I was into a good bit, I didn’t want to lose my train of thought, and she said my train of thought was more of a sleeper than an express. I was just about to make a smart remark which involved her thought processes and the late, great Dr Beeching, but thought better of it.

Anyway, somehow we all made it to the weekend, apart from the camper van, which is up at the garage for serious life-saving surgery in order to satisfy the insane and grandiose demands of the Ministry of Transport. Saturday was an interesting day in the year’s calendar, February 2nd marking a variety of ceremonies and anniversaries. For me the most poignant one is that it marked five years since Nigel, our old ginger cat died. I can’t believe it, but it really is five years. He died at home, in his favourite armchair, in the warm, curled up asleep, just as Match of the Day was coming on. As I have observed before, we should all wish for such an end, but I still miss him, poor old ginger odd sock that he was. In fact, Matilda shares some of his vocal trills and other odd characteristics (sudden bursts of stiff-legged galumphing, run-like-a-chicken activity across any wooden floor for instance) so in some ways, the spirit of Nigel lives on.

February 2nd is also Candlemas, in the Christian calendar, although it’s probably grafted on to the Celtic ceremony of Imbolic, one of the four great ceremonies of their year, the others being (correct me if I’m wrong) Beltane, which always makes me think of Marc Bolan, Lughnasa, and Samhain. Candlemas in folklore is often connected with weather-related sayings and prophecies. A traditional rhyme says:

If Candlemas be fair and bright,
Winter has another flight.
If Candlemas brings clouds and rain,
Winter will not come again.
If Candlemas Day is bright and clear,
There'll be two winters in the year.

So, judging from the cold, clear, bright weather that marked Candlemas in the Holme Valley, we’re not out of the woods yet.
In the USA, a similar weather-forecasting tradition involves Groundhog Day. I could re-hash the Wikipedia entry about it, but it’s probably easier just to quote it in full, since it gives a fairly accurate summary:

‘Punxsutawney Phil Sowerby is a groundhog resident of Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania. On February 2 (Groundhog Day) of each year, the town of Punxsutawney celebrates the beloved groundhog with a festive atmosphere of music and food. During the ceremony, which begins well before the winter sunrise, Phil emerges from his temporary home on Gobbler's Knob, located in a rural area about 2 miles east of town. According to the tradition, if Phil sees his shadow and returns to his hole, he has predicted six more weeks of winter-like weather. If Phil does not see his shadow, he has predicted an "early spring." The date of Phil's prognostication is known as Groundhog Day in the United States and Canada. He is considered to be the world's most famous prognosticating rodent. During the rest of the year, Phil lives in the town library with his "wife" Phyllis.’

You’ll have to make up your own jokes about Gobbler’s Knob, as I have promised to try and avoid bringing too much smut into this blog. Still, as place names go, it can only increase my rankings with the search engines. People who know much more than I do about folklore have apparently written learned treatises on this tradition, linking it back through the German immigrants into Pennsylvania, to much older traditions involving badgers and other animals which were held to be similar weather-predictors in Medieval Europe. For my part, I just love the phrase “prognosticating rodent”, and have been trying to think of other occasions when I could work it into polite conversation.

And so, somehow, we arrived at Sunday, St Blaise’s day. St Blaise, despite his name, is not, sadly, the patron Saint of firemen, but of throat illnesses. Again, the internet is our friend here:

Many Catholics might remember Saint Blaise's feast day because of the Blessing of the Throats that took place on this day. Two candles are blessed, held slightly open, and pressed against the throat as the blessing is said. Saint Blaise's protection of those with throat troubles apparently comes from a legend that a boy was brought to him who had a fishbone stuck in his throat. The boy was about to die when Saint Blaise healed him.

It seems pretty obvious to me that the miracle, such as it was, consisted of St Blaise sticking his fingers down the kid’s gizzard and hoicking out the offending obstacle, but as I’ve said before, the entry requirements for sainthood were obviously a lot more lax in those days.

Very few hard facts are known about the life of St Blaise, although this has not prevented a richly-woven tapestry of conjecture and folklore being associated with him. He was supposedly a Bishop, in Sebestia, in what was then Armenia, a Roman province under the Emperor Licinius. Licinius was known to be tolerant of Christians, so whatever Blaise did to annoy him he must’ve gone out of his way to do so.

Apparently, St Blaise received a message from God to go into the hills to escape persecution. Men hunting in the mountains discovered a cave surrounded by wild animals who were sick. Blaise walked among them unafraid, curing them of their illnesses. Recognizing Blaise as a bishop, the hunters captured him to take him back for trial. On the way back, he talked a wolf into releasing a pig that belonged to a poor woman. When Blaise was sentenced to be starved to death, the woman, in gratitude, sneaked into the prison with food and candles. Finally Blaise was killed, on the orders of the Governor. He was martyred by being beaten, attacked with iron carding combs, and beheaded.

In iconography, Blaise is often shown with the instruments of his martyrdom, metal combs, and the similarity of these instruments of his torture to wool combs led to his adoption as the patron saint of wool combers in particular, and the wool trade in general. In addition, he is also the patron saint of wild animals because of his care for them. Who said men were no good at multi-tasking?

He died in the year 316AD and Marco Polo, in his travels, makes reference to a shrine dedicated to his cult in Sebestia, a shrine now long lost. In the wonderful way in which the Catholic faith continues to grade us all into the rich man at his castle, the poor man at his gate, even after death, St Blaise is now officially one of the Fourteen Holy Helpers, which sounds like it ought to be a Marvel comic devoted to super-heroes. His remains now allegedly rest at the Basilica over the town of Maratea, on Italy’s Tyrrhenian coast, where the local mountain, Mount San Biagio, is named after him. A silver statue of the Saint is processed through the town on his feast day.

In this country, the Cornish town of St Blazey derives its name from him, where the parish church is still dedicated to Saint Blaise. The council of Oxford in 1222 forbade all work on his feast day, but then in those times they were always on the lookout for a reason to down tools and broach a barrel of ale, and why not? Other churches dedicated to St Blaise may be found at Haccombe, near Newton Abbot, Shanklin on the Isle of Wight and Milton, near Abingdon. He also lends his name to a well in Bromley, which issues water considered to have medicinal properties.

In England in the 18th and 19th centuries St Blaise was adopted as mascot of woolworkers' pageants, particularly in Essex, Yorkshire, Wiltshire and Norwich. The popular enthusiasm for the saint is explained by the belief that Blaise had brought prosperity (as symbolised by the Woolsack) to England by teaching the English to comb wool, harking back again to the carding combs with which he was martyred. According to this tradition Blaise came from Jersey, in the Channel Islands. However, this legend is an example of oral tradition ending up with the string bag inside-out because it’s almost certainly an instance of confusion with a different saint, Blasius of Caesarea – Caesarea also being one of the Latin names for Jersey.

So there we have St Blaise. As to what lessons we can learn from his life, the answer is probably not a lot, although (as with St Francis of Assissi) there is of course the empathy with wild creatures and the desire for them not to suffer unduly, which I would like to think is an aspiration shared by many. Once again, as with many martyrdoms, ancient and modern, as I said last week, the situation could probably have been defused by both sides cutting each other a little slack and displaying tolerance, but I guess if you are the Emperor Lucinius, you don’t get to that position, in the decaying years of the Roman Empire, by “live and let live”. You probably err more on the side of decimating the Armenians, to be honest. And the more you are threatened, the more power seems to be slipping from your grasp, the tighter and more desperately you will cling on to it, as shown by the current antics of David Cameron and George Osborne, whose determination to press on regardless, ever deeper into the mire, is seemingly undimmed by the muddy waters lapping around his ankles.

If it wasn’t so tragic, it would almost be funny. But, sadly, it has ramifications: George Scollan, 58, had worked for Remploy, which specialises in providing work for people with disabilities, since 1973. But the factory, in Springburn, Glasgow, closed this week, with the loss of more than 40 jobs, and he was found dead on the day it closed. Colleagues said he had “lived for his job” and grown “more and more depressed” about the prospect of unemployment, according to the Black Triangle blog, which makes a point of documenting the excesses of the Junta’s war against the poor. Phil Brannan, a friend of Mr Scollan and a senior shop steward for the GMB union/Unite the Union consortium at Remploy, said: “George never claimed a day’s benefit in his life and he felt that once he had been made redundant he would be labelled as a scrounger. “Through no fault of his own, he lost his job today. The government know full well that many of these people now face long-term unemployment. It is a disgrace.”

Mr Scollan worked as an oxy-acetylene brazer, assembling wheelchairs. If only he had been able to make missiles, or knuckledusters, or guns, or bombs, his future welfare would have been assured. I suppose it was his misfortune to live under the Blight of a Junta who are dedicated not only to phasing out wheelchairs, but also their occupants, with the help of people such as Atos. Like the homeless, we will soon cease to exist altogether, hidden in plain sight by the blinding blizzard of black-is-white bullshit emanating from 10 Downing Street. Massaged away, into imaginary jobs and imaginary hostels, creatively manufactured from imaginary statistics.

Spring is, of course, inevitable (climate change notwithstanding) and eventually the snowdrops will come, and the crocuses. George Scollan won’t be around to see them, though. He’s another sad statistic, another name added to the “plaguey bill” for which the Blight is responsible. An illustration that it only takes one party in the bargain to decide that you’re going to be a martyr. At least the efforts of people such as Black Triangle will ensure that these crimes, these disgraces, are documented, enumerated and remembered. Avenging them is a different matter. Revenge is mine, saith the Lord, I will repay. I really hope I live to see the day when that repayment falls due, and those responsible receive the final demand of destiny.

As I have said before, we’re all only three bad decisions away from being on the streets, and with the current set of clowns in charge, the bad decisions don’t even have to be your bad decisions. Spring ought to be about renewal and relief, release from the dreary slavery of Winter. Some “springs” also bring political release from slavery and injustice. Not always, of course; I can remember the Prague Spring of 1968 being crushed by the Russian tanks. The so-called “Arab spring” is degenerating into chaos as we speak, and looks set to suck British troops into the maelstrom it has left in its wake. Is it too early to hope for an English Spring, with perhaps a better result? Best out of three, perhaps? Apparently so.

So once again, I’m ending on a downbeat. Winter’s obviously winding itself up to have another go, and we’re not shot of it yet. February comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb. Next week will be another week of watching, and waiting: except the Lord keep the City, the wakeman waketh in vain, though. Sitting quietly, doing nothing, spring comes, and the grass grows by itself, as the Zen masters say. Right now, I’d settle for some snowdrops, in preference to more snow drops.