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!