Epiblog for the Feast of St Cunegundes

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley, the first week of the rest of our lives, after the closure of Mustardland.  The weather does seem to have turned milder though, so it’s not all bad news.  Some beautiful crisp silvergolden mornings have happened, where the sun on the other side of the valley just rises at the right angle to flood my bedroom with warmth at a few minutes before eight in the morning, a most welcome development, when I think of all those dark winter mornings when I watched the slow transit of the morning star along the horizon through the patterns of frost on the inside of my window, before steeling myself to swing my legs out into the cold.  I daresay winter will have another go, but for the moment, for us, it’s like being allowed to shelter in a little sunny cove after days and days of battling raging storms.

As is customary at such times, I’ve been taking stock, compiling a bit of a damage report, and laying plans for the weeks ahead.  I’ve already lamented about the garden, in previous weeks, so I will cut that bit short. Let’s put it this way, it’s no better. It hasn’t had a visit of the gardening fairy in the last seven days. In fact, it’ll need about a cubic kilotonne of fairy dust sprinkling on it before it starts to show any effect.  There are, however, some encouraging signs. Apart from the indestructible daffodils of recent note, there are other hopeful portents. A fern thing (you can see that botanical identification isn’t my strong suit) which I saved from an overgrown hanging basket in Colin’s front garden last year and re-potted has survived all the icy blast and the snow and the rain and the wind that blew its little plastic protective cloche God knows where (it’s missing and I can’t find it at all since the snow melted), and is happily flourishing in the lee of the garage. And a thing that looked a bit like a larger version of groundsel but with hundreds of tiny, star-like white flowers (again saved from Colin’s side, last spring) which I thought had died off over the winter, is showing a mass of new green growth in its tub on the decking. And the snowdrops have come up, only two months late, but better late than never!

Unlike Perdita in The Winter’s Tale, I can’t say my garden is full of flowers which Proserpina, frighted, has let fall from Dis’s wagon, but there are one or two green shoots here and there.  Just a little green, like the colour when the spring is born…

“Fair daffadils

That come before the swallow dares, and take

The winds of march with beauty.”

The advent of the better weather has even led to Matilda spending more time out of doors and – hold the front page – roll on the drums -  extending her territory. She has now been as far as the propped-up gate at the back corner of Colin’s, she’s been on top of the pile of bricks in the corner between Colin’s and John’s, and she’s been under the shed, our side.  Her favourite place though, remains, even when the door is ajar, allowing her to come and go as she pleases, to be sitting just inside it, watching the comings and goings of the birds and squirrels out on the decking with an intent fascination She is definitely what Van Morrison would have called a “dweller on the threshold”, as was Baggis before her.

The lighter, slightly longer days have provoked a burst of activity from the birds and the squirrels. A few times this week, I have been working away and heard what I thought was someone rustling among the coal sacks out in the lobby, and it turned out to be birds pattering on the transparent roof, gathering fallen twigs and moss and bits of leaves from out of the crevices, presumably for lining their nests. A couple of embryonic rook nests have appeared high up in some of the trees out the back. I mentioned it to Debbie, and she was most indignant – “But we need the twigs, for starting the fire”

“So get up there on the roof and fight the rooks for them!”

There have been no more confirmed badger sightings, though once or twice a flash of something perhaps more fox-y has made a foray past the darkened windows, and then darted back after seizing a crust of the birds’ bread or similar. If it was a fox, I don’t think it can have been Freda of yore, because it looked altogether much smaller younger and quicker.  Maybe it’s one of her cubs.

On the damage report front within the house instead of outside it, the boiler which we thought was fixed isn’t, it’s still either constantly on or constantly off, so it looks like I will be putting the kettle on again for the plumber next week, and Debbie’s laptop developed a bout of electronic amnesia which meant it failed to recognise any printers, so that had to be dealt with, by means of a system restore.  And her old laptop has started turning itself off at random again.

And to cap it off, though in truth it belongs nether to house or garden, being in the driveway most days, the camper van is still very unsure of itself, doesn’t like going up a gear, and is having trouble going through the motions. I know the feeling.  Also, there is no Kitty this spring, of course, which is the biggest piece of individual damage on the damage report.

So, it’s been a week for pressing on, keep calm, don’t panic, and other aphorisms of austerity. None of us likes this crazy war, Wilmot. The busy week has ended with a couple of pleasant days, though. Deb’s sister, Becky, has come up from the sunny south for family visits, including seeing new baby Chloe, and has brought with her a small but terrifying cyclone of movement called Holly, aged three. The last time I saw my niece in law Holly, she was nobbut a babe in arms, but in the intervening time, she’s turned into a neverending bundle of activity powered by enough energy to keep the lights on in a small Baltic state for a year or two.

They arrived at teatime on Saturday, and I had already been deputed to cook tea for everyone, which quickly turned from one meal into four, because immature little girls are often faddy about what food they eat, which explains why Debbie said she didn’t want the pasta bake done in the oven, but would have a baked potato and beans instead.  She was off out on a pre-arranged, uncancellable girlie night round at one of her friends, so she needed to do the carb loading thing to give her the stamina to complete the marathon of opening all those bottles of wine and declaring that all men were bastards.  Holly was much easier to feed, she had a plate of peas (her choice, and apparently her current favourite) and a yoghurt to finish. 

As you will know, dear reader, my mission in life, according to Debbie, is to fatten up everyone around me so that I don’t stand out so much, but on Saturday night, I didn’t need any help, because somehow the idea of Debbie having baked potatos got grafted on to the rest of the meal, so I ended up doing baked potatos for everybody, as well as the pasta bake.  Nutritionally, this is the equivalent of having a bread sandwich, but everyone seemed to enjoy it, and there was a large enough portion left over for Granny to take home for Grandad’s supper, which made it a win all round.

The dogs had dog food and wolfed it, no surprise there, and the cat had cat food for once, rather than the normal arrangement where they all eat each other’s. They must’ve been on their best behaviour. Even Zak, whose appetite for love and cuddles had previously been thought to be unlimited, seemed slightly startled by the determined way he was continually patted and petted by Holly, and repeatedly gave paw in an attempt to be just allowed to go to sleep.

The remainder of the evening was spent entertaining Holly: first we drew on the etch-a-sketch and then we progressed to drawing on scrap paper and we drew Brenda the Badger, Freddy Fox, Zak the dog, Maurice the Mole, Matilda,  and, for some unaccountable reason, the sparkly plastic drinking cup which Holly has her juice out of at mealtimes, a line drawing of which was introduced into the exhibition as a late addition, at the patron’s request.  When I say “we” drew them, I mean of course that I drew them, while Holly hopped from one foot  to the other chuckling “More! More!”.

Then we made a paper aeroplane, and flew it across the room. Several times. Several dozen times, if truth were told.  Then we had the story of Pete, who lives in the cottage in the woods and wants to go bowling, and goes out into the forest and meets a wolf, and says “Mr Wolf, will you come ten-pin bowling with me?” and Mr Wolf says “But I only have paws, not hands!” and then Pete meets a bear and says “Mr Bear, will you come ten-pin bowling with me?” and Mr Bear says “But I only have paws, not hands!”, and then Pete meets a badger and well… as Bryan Ferry says, dim the lights, you can guess the rest.  By then, it was time for Holly to go to bed, and time for me to start the washing up.

I drew a Moose on Holly’s etch-a-sketch and left it on the settee where she would find it in the morning.  By then, Debbie had returned, minus the actual bottle of wine with which she had departed, although she still had the contents of it, conveniently stored in her bloodstream, and demanded a chip butty while she watched Match of The Day, which I’d recorded earlier for her.  While I was cooking it for her, she picked up the etch-a-sketch, looked at my drawing of a moose, marked it with 3 out of 10, and added a speech bubble containing the word “parp!” issuing from its bottom.  Remind me again which one is the three year old?

Finally, before trundling off to bed, I put some nuts and raisins out for the badger, more as a gesture than anything. By then, I was far too tired to care if the badger came and ate them or not, but something had demolished them by this morning.

This morning, Holly arrived in the kitchen bright eyed and bushy-pony-tailed, and after a breakfast of toast followed by yoghurt raisins, demanded yet more entertainment. Matilda had very wisely decided to put herself to snoozing on the foot  of my bed, well out of everyone’s way. So this time we started off with the paper aeroplanes, but with the addition that I now had to draw in Holly as the pilot, with all of the passengers (Lumpy, Lulu, NuvNuv, Freddie, Zak, Brenda the Badger, Granny, and Auntie Debbie, for some reason). Then we had to do another one with NuvNuv as the pilot, and Holly as a passenger, but the remainder of the cast unchanged. Then we flew them for what seemed like a few days, then we did Lumpy and Lulu doing sit ups and aerobics, and NuvNuv burrowing behind me in my wheelchair every time Holly went “boo” and “frightened” him.  Then Becky, Granny and Holly all went shopping, and peace descended at last.

So,  anyway, by the time I sat down to write this, I felt as if I had already spent three hours in an industrial tumble-drier, being shot-blasted. They go home on Tuesday morning. It’ll be fine. A month in a sanatorium somewhere, and I’ll be back to what passes for normal. Lulu, Lumpy and NuvNuv may well need a few weeks in intensive care; Lumpy and NuvNuv haven’t been played with like this for half a century, and Lulu never.  Still, in a sense, it’s good to see them giving enjoyment, and maybe one day when I am gone into a strange and distant land, Holly might give them all a home if they turn up lost and homeless on her doorstep; if not for herself, then for her kids.

Other than family concerns, it’s been a strange, introspective sort of a week, dealing with all sorts of long-neglected jobs which I have finally got down to on the list of things to do.  With the demise of Mustardland, I have spent more time than is probably good for me on Facebook, which is no real substitute for The Archers, and not much of a one for real life, either. The main thing that seems to crop up on Facebook these days seems to be a combination of lost dogs and lost children, usually accompanied with a request to “please forward”.

I click on these things in the hope it might do some good, as I suppose anybody does.  You would think that with 52 million (or is it 52 billion – what’s the difference anyway?) people on Facebook, someone somewhere would have seen and recognised the lost bloody dog when it popped up on their news stream. It’s also a conscience thing, I guess, you feel that by sharing the news of the missing dog or the missing child (I’m afraid the two are sometimes interchangeable in our world) that somehow you’ve clicked up a brownie point, you’ve done some good in the greater scheme of things. It reminds me of that web site you could go to and click once a day and they’d send a bag of rice to some starving Africans; you got a little warm glow for a couple of seconds, then forgot about it.

But it’s not the same for everybody; as one of my Facebook friends said this week, she didn’t need the news of all these missing dogs and children, she had enough unpleasantness and trauma in her own life without them adding to it. This set me back, with the thought that maybe I had unwittingly been alerting other people to things which they would find upsetting, in the mistaken hope of doing some good.  An interesting conundrum of Facebook netiquette. Since there’s no way of selectively sharing things on Facebook (at least that I’m aware of) I decided that the next best thing would be if, the next time I saw one of these “lost dog” or “lost cat” messages, I found the appropriate page for the dog pound or local authority kennels in the area where it was missing, and put the link on their web site or Facebook page instead of just "sharing" it.

Missing children are a bit more complex, because there are potentially more reasons why they go missing, and it’s not as if someone went to the shops, tied their kids on a lead to a post outside the supermarket, then forgot and came home without them (except in places like Dewsbury, where it probably is). Children can – and do – leave home of their own accord and for their own reasons, not always happy ones, in fact not often happy ones.  I’m always conscious anyway that I’m forwarding these things on trust, in fact we all are.  What’s really sad, and an indictment of our society, is that people feel (often correctly) that going on Facebook is the quickest way of finding a missing kid, one way or another.  Even sadder still is that sometimes the lost kid they are trying to find through Facebook is trussed up inside a roll of lino in their attic.

So what do we do? The dog pound solution won’t work for kids. Forwarding it to the local police force is pointless. The local police force already know about it.  If it was one of my kids missing, or little Hollie, I would want to know that everybody was out there trying to find him or her by whatever means Facebook included. But then I would hope I’d not be daft enough to let a toddler wander the streets at dusk. Anyway, what’s done can’t undone, but I think my friend is right, and maybe I need to be a bit more circumspect about spreading doom and gloom in future. It’s amazing how insensitive one can be with the heady combination of a Facebook account and too much missionary zeal.

It’s been a busy week in the outside world as well, or at least in those bits of it which percolated through to my little introspective bubble, beside my fire in the Holme Valley, watching the birds building next summer, twig by twig, in trees now budding leaf by leaf.

The Catholic church has been given a good kicking in the aftermath of the Pope’s resignation. It’s an easy target, of course, the symbolism of the Papacy; I’ve often been part of it, with my talk of wearing a jiffy-bag on my head. The Pope, with his gold lame robes and his Wizard of Oz ruby slippers, is easily lampooned. In my own defence, I hope that, as a lapsed agnostic violent Quaker, I don’t single out any religion for particular ridicule, I like to think I take the piss out of the excesses of all of them.  Even the fact that the Church of England doesn’t have any excesses, and that its idea of a Fatwah would be to offer you sweet sherry when you had asked for dry, is funny in itself.

There’s often, though, an automatic linkage between the pomp and trappings and the incense of the Catholic church, and the idea that every priest in a dress is somehow involved in child molesting and paedophilia. It is as prevalent an idea in the public mind as the idea that the country is full of illegal immigrants who are all over here taking our jobs and using up our scarce resources.  The short step from supposed incense to supposed incest is very tempting for some.

I’m no apologist for child abuse, and the Catholic church has done itself no favours in failing to stamp on it hard, early and often when it has occurred, but somewhere, somehow, along the line, some account should also be taken of the millions of Catholic priests who haven’t molested children, who’ve gone out to spend their lives in filthy, malaria-ridden jungles and opened clinics and fed children and taught them to read. In this country, I’m against faith schools, by and large, because I think they perpetuate inequalities of all sorts, but in a country where the choice is between a “faith” school and no school, it seems to me that the choice is obvious.

When I see the words “Catholic Priest” I don’t automatically think “child abuser”; I think either of Father Ted, or Dom Vincent McNabb.  Father MacNabb was an interesting character, worthy of a book in his own right. Vincent McNabb was born on 8 July 1868 at Portaferry in what is now Northern Ireland. His life was, in many respects, uneventful, in that he spent 58 years as a member of the Dominican order, doing what Domincans do, preaching, teaching, and looking out for the poor and needy.  He died in 1943 and is buried in Kensal Green Cemetery – no doubt, as Chesterton wrote in his poem, going to Paradise “by way of Kensal Green”. He walked everywhere, never owned a chair, slept on the floor of his cell in preference to his bed, and became a familiar figure in the environs of his London priory, with his crudely made black habit and the hobnailed boots he habitually wore.

Inevitably, stories cluster around such a larger than life figure, though it is not possible in some cases to separate out those which are purely anecdotal.  After his death, neighbours of one particular incapacitated and poverty-stricken old woman in his parish wondered what had happened to the old woman who used to turn up every week and scrub her floor for her. It only later emerged that the “old woman” in question had actually been Fr. McNabb.  These sorts of stories, of course, make it all too easy to see McNabb as some kind of humourless ascetic zealot, but in fact he was possessed of a ready wit.   One of his diversions was to go and preach at Speaker’s Corner, where he was often the target of hecklers. One particular old woman in the crowd one day shouted out to him:

“If you were my husband, I would put poison in your tea!”

Without missing a beat, McNabb replied,

“Madam, if I were your husband, I would drink it!”

McNabb, influenced by Rerum Novarum, saw the idea of distributism as an extension of his charitable work among the poor.  McNabb’s idea that those who lacked religion and were also poor in material terms should have their parlous state remedied in both regards was echoed by Belloc and Chesterton, both of whom he knew and influenced.

You can take the view, as I do, that in a perfect world, charity would be unnecessary because the government should look out for and help the poor and the underprivileged, but in an era when the government is actively at war with the poor and the underprivileged in this country, perhaps we need a few more like Father Vincent MacNabb.

The government was temporarily deflected from grinding the faces of the poor this week by having to attend to the business of the Eastleigh by-election. Beastly Eastleigh remained Liberal Democrat, just, by a margin as narrow as the skin of Chris Huhne’s teeth.  With the Tories and UKIP trying to out-bigot each other, the anti-Liberal hatred was divided for once, so they managed to survive.  Just. It does however, open up the awful prospect of a Tory-UKIP coalition at the next general election.  While it is vaguely satisfying to see the Tories, who have spent the time since the last election pumping out anti-immigrant propaganda, bitten on the bum by something which has come back to haunt them, it does have disturbing implications.

“They have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind”. True enough. Hoist, in fact, with their own petard. However, the reality of UKIP clambering over the Tories in Eastleigh to reach second place is that it means that more and more people are coming to believe the Tory lies on immigration, and more and more people seem to think that UKIP would be even harder than the Tories. I’m not quite sure why this is a mystery to David Cameron; if you spend three years binding on about mythical illegal immigrants under the bed who have eaten all our porridge, while simultaneously saying (because of our obligation to the EU)  “but we will catch some of them and give them a darn good talking to”, then someone else comes along and says “we will catch them all and chuck the buggers out” the outcome is as predictable as one of Hollie’s stories. If you invent imaginary bogey men, you have to be prepared to appear to be willing to slaughter them. Even if the whole thing is a tissue of fantasy anyway.

The fact that the electorate seems to believe this is indeed worrying. Not only for the next election, which will be fought on immigration-related soundbites, but for the sort of world little Hollie and her contemporaries will grow up in. As I said above, the kid could power a small Baltic country, which is a strange coincidence, because St. Cunegundes, whose feast day this is, is the Parton Saint of Lithuania. Well, somebody had to be, I suppose.  As the standard online hagiography has it:

The father of St. Cunegundes was Sigfrid, first Count of Luxemburg. After a pious education, she was married to St. Henry, Duke of Bavaria, who, upon the death of Emperor Otho III, was chosen King of the Romans. St. Cunegundes was crowned at Paderborn in 1002. In 1014 she went with her husband to Rome and became Empress, receiving together with him the imperial crown from the hands Pope Benedict VIII. Though married, she lived in continence, for, with her husband's consent, she had made a vow of virginity before marriage.

Various people apparently raised eyebrows at this state of affairs, and accused her of “scandalous conduct”, so, to prove her innocence, she walked over pieces of red-hot iron without injury. Her husband, Henry II, died in 1024, leaving her comparatively poor, because she had given away nearly all her own wealth in charitable works. In 1025, on the anniversary of his death, and on the occasion of the dedication of a monastery which she had built for Benedictine nuns at Kaffungen, she clothed herself with a poor habit, adopted the veil, and entered that same monastery. Her chief occupations apparently consisted of prayer, reading, and manual labour, to which the Monty Python fans among us will almost certainly have mentally added “nice red uniforms, and a fanatical devotion to the Pope” – I  know I did. Thus she spent the last fifteen years of her life. She died in 1040, and her body was carried to Bamberg, in what is now modern Germany, where it was laid near that of her husband, St. Henry.  Once again, as with Vincent MacNabb, a life where large chunks of it were given over to the relief of the distress of the poor and needy.  Faith, Hope, and Charity, and the greatest is charity.

Inevitably, this weekend, my thoughts have turned to what Holly will achieve in her lifetime.  Her elder sister, already writing stories of several hundred words out of her own head and the age of eight, is clearly a gifted and talented child, and her elder brother also.  She seems to love animals (as Zak will attest, she loves them whether they like it or not) and she laughs a lot and is happy. If she can at least keep those attributes, and grow up to be wise, loving, kind and compassionate to those less fortunate than herself, then my atoms can circle Alpha Centaurii in a hundred years’ time safe in the knowledge that Nuvnuv and Lumpy were passed on into safe hands.

In the meantime, like Joni says, there’s:

Just a little green, like the colour when the spring is born;

There’ll be crocuses to take to school tomorrow

Just a little green, like the nights when the Northern Lights perform;

There’ll be icicles, and birthday clothes, and sometimes there’ll be sorrows…

And, also in the meantime, I have promised (rather foolishly, I fear) to tell her a story when she gets back later, called “The Bear Who Didn’t Like Porridge”, so I had better prepare for it, by going to lie down in a darkened room.