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.
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