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!
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