Epiblog for Trinity Sunday

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. The weather remains capricious (more on that story, later) but there are, at least a couple of flowers on the clematis, and many more in the form of tightly-folded buds, waiting to burst out when the clematis, in some unknown signal, sends the message to itself that the time is right.

Matilda is definitely a fair-weather cat.  Although she’s now going outside on a fairly regular basis, she still refuses to go out if it’s wet [unlike Kitty, who used to scuttle reluctantly out in the rain, do her necessaries, then get back to the fire as soon as possible]. And she still hasn’t worked out how to use the cat flap.  Sometimes, when I look at her, she has a particular absent, semi-vacant countenance and a glassy stare that tells you that she is undoubtedly the product of generations of in-bred farm cats with extra toes, cats whose father was also their cousin and whose mother was also their aunt.

Animal welfare was a fairly significant concern for me this week.  I received an email alert from one of the many “Stop the Badger Cull” groups to which I subscribe, reminding me to have one more go at “badgering” my MP about the fact that the cull won’t work, and that DEFRA needs to think again. [That would, of course, imply that DEFRA thought in the first place, which is by no means certain].  Conscious of the fact that, because I feed her and have semi-tamed her, by the reasoning of Antoine de Saint Exupéry at least, I am now responsible for Brenda, I decided to email my MP.  Of course, by that reasoning, I am also responsible for several squirrels, three jays, a carrion crow, a thrush, a blackbird, a bedraggled robin and a miscellaneous collection of tits [Google spider, please note] but DEFRA aren’t currently planning to kill them… yet.

I pointed out all of the obvious flaws in the cull strategy, which I have stated many times on both my blogs and which can be widely found everywhere from Brian May to the badger trust. I also added a few extra bits, pointing out that the Tories weren’t exactly flavour of the month at the moment, and they needed another PR disaster like they needed a spare arsehole (I am paraphrasing here, but not much) and finally tossed in a googly to the effect that, since the existing TB test was only being done because it was foisted on us by Europe, I may have to hold my nose and vote UKIP at the next election if they promised to get rid of it. [Not that I would ever vote for that particular bunch of closet crypto-fascists until the day the Devil went past the window on a skateboard because Hell had frozen over, but you have to use whatever subterfuge you can. In a dirty fight, sometimes you have to fight dirty.]

Much to my surprise, he rang me up. It may have been the magic word “UKIP” which did it, in which case I offer the advice for what it’s worth. Anyway we had quite an amiable chat about why the badger cull wouldn’t work – he did actually vote against the cull, last time – and, despite the fact that I am implacably opposed to almost everything he believes in, we did at least agree on one thing, that UKIP is a single issue party that hasn’t even really thought through its single issue.

Maisie, meanwhile, discovered that her new house came with two unexpected lodgers, feral cats who come over the wall from the Cemetery. I tried to offer what help I could, passing on the numbers and details of contacts who might be able to help her, and as we go to press she was attempting to borrow a cat trap in order to get them to the vet. I have to say that, notwithstanding that they are maxed out at a local level, the national numbers I rang for the Cats Protection League were anything but helpful or informative, and I am definitely cutting the donation to the CPL out of my will when I revise it, which I must do soon. Alfred Wainwright, mapper of Lake District walks, put it quite succinctly, in a book he wrote back in the 1990s.

“The general apathy of the public towards domestic animals is also appalling. Dogs are thrown out of cars on motorways, kittens dumped in plastic bags on rubbish tips, and few care. The church, professing concern and care for all God’s creatures, does nothing.  The human race has nothing to be proud of in its treatment of fellow creatures, unable to protect or defend themselves, nothing at all. We are guilty, and stand condemned. We should hang our heads in shame.”

Zak and Freddie, the other animals on my watch, haven’t been in evidence much this week, but Freddie did do something strange/amusing on Tuesday. I let him out onto the decking, and he came back after his foray into the wilds of the garden but, instead of coming back in straight away, he sat down and started looking out over the valley – it was like he had suddenly noticed the arm of the big digger swinging away down in the factory demolition site in the valley bottom, and for some reason, he found its repetitive arc of action fascinating.  Eventually, he got bored and came back in, but it was weird while it lasted.  The demolition work, meanwhile continues, as noisy and annoying as ever.

Uncle Phil, having re-acclimatised himself to the UK and re-acquired his taste for traditional ale [not that I think he ever really lost it] has recovered from his jet lag, and departed on Tuesday morning on his way to the Lake District, where the idea is that we would hook up with him again at some point next week, during half-term.

Wednesday was a frenetic day for a number of  reasons – I had my annual physio assessment, and the herbs I had ordered arrived.  In the meantime, the punctured tyre on my wheelchair was judged to be terminal, so Clarks the wheelchair bods had to take it away for fixing, which meant that I spent Wednesday in my clunky old spare wheelchair, wishing I wasn’t, and generally hurting and aching.

Meanwhile, the saga of the door handle coming off (which came to an end when Owen fitted new door furniture and two large grab-handles) has now been replaced and supplanted in our affections by the saga of the spare keys. Timpsons in Huddersfield have now had two goes at cutting a spare key for the outside door, a task which is seemingly beyond them, even with the original key to copy off.  I’d like to report some witty, humorous twist in the tale whereby the impasse was solved by the means of a coup-de-theatre, but, sadly, all that happened in reality was that Granny has now had two wasted trips into town to try and sort it, and the key has gone back in the post to the shop with a request for a refund. It’s only £7.00, but it’s not the principle of the thing, it’s the cost!

One of the herbs which arrived was catmint. We had two catmint plants last year, neither of which survived the winter. One was dug up by Spidey, next door’s cat, and carried off into the driveway. Although I found it, and re-potted it, it was never the same again.  The other one, out on the decking, was chomped first by Kitty and then latterly by Matilda, so by the time it was deluged by the autumn rain, it was nothing but sticks and twigs. I tried to put the new catmint plant out of Matilda’s reach but on Thursday I felt sorry for her and offered her a couple of leaves I’d snipped off it. She went totally bananas over them, sniffing them, rolling over onto them, then finally eating them, before proceeding to an amazingly energetic washing session followed by one of her “mad half hours” where she charges around aimlessly.  So, not only is our cat the product of cat incest, she’s now also on drugs.

Thursday saw the arrival of my niece Chloe’s knitted teddy bear,  which I hope will be able to be passed on to her very soon, if indeed the outlaws haven’t already done so. It arrived with an unexpected surprise. When my old  knitted teddy bear was restored to its original 1950s condition, the brilliant lady who restored him sent him back with another bear, made of brown wool, which got christened Lulu. This time, Chloe’s bear arrived with two small bears, part brown like Lulu, part cream like Lumpy (I mean, they had different coloured heads, bodies and legs) - mixed race teddies, in fact. Maybe the knitter was onto something, and these small teddies with their cream head, brown body, cream arms, and brown legs, or vice versa, are a symbol to hold onto in these troubled times. Except that if you tried to suggest as much, no doubt some idiot would be bound to compare them to “golliwogs” and misrepresent their motives.

Anyone who still seriously thinks we haven’t screwed the pooch when it comes to the British climate only needs to look at Friday as an example of how bizarre things are these days, weather-wise.  Horizontal rain and howling winds – we’d already had showers of hailstones in the week – and all this at the end of May, supposedly the warmest, sweetest month. The tub of petunias blew over and started rolling around the decking, and the other plastic greenhouse, not the one which Owen lashed in place last time he visited, but the one which had the strawberries in it last year, was picked up bodily by the wind and ended up lying on its front, wedged against the chiminea. God alone knows where it would have finally come to rest but for the fact that the chiminea was heavier than it was, and held it in place. Debbie donned her waterproof and ventured out onto the decking to stand the petunias up and move them to a place where they couldn’t be blown over again, and pick up the greenhouse. For a moment, as she struggled with it, I had visions of it taking off with her still clinging to the legs, an accidental balloonist, but she managed to wrestle it and get it under control.

It has been a “big” week for news, as you will undoubtedly know, unless you live under a stone on the Isle of Rockall. I have inevitably been affected by what happened, as everyone has, one way or another. But there were other stories in the news as well, one staggering one in particular.

The staggering story was that police in Redbridge, which used to be in Essex but is now a London Borough policed by the Met, have mounted a sustained planned operation against homeless people sleeping in a disused public baths and have confiscated, amongst other things, their sleeping bags and food parcels given to them by the Salvation Army. Now, I am normally one of the first to say that the police do an excellent job in difficult circumstances, unarmed, and in a world increasingly clogged by paperwork and bullshit, at a time when resources are being cut. My great-grandad was a police superintendent, two of my great-uncles served in the force, as did two uncles and a cousin who is still a civilian police support worker.

But I am absolutely mind-boggled as to what the police were trying to achieve here. Apart from the misuse of scarce resources, did someone really think that by taking away a homeless person's sleeping bag this would encourage them to put down a deposit on a semi or something? It defies logic. The police have issued a statement since, claiming that the facts were not as reported in the local press. Well, that’s as maybe, but part of that statement says that the issue of homeless people has often been raised as a matter of concern by local residents and businesses. I can’t help but feel that maybe somebody should have done something before now. Treat the disease, not the symptoms.

One thing that did go largely unreported in the outside world was that Iain Duncan Smith’s dishonest and misleading use of statistics has finally caught up with him in that he has been hauled in front of a committee of MPs to explain his department’s, er, “cavalier” use of statistics to give the impression that all benefits claimants are “scroungers”, something which it has been doing largely with the connivance of a press who are willing to swallow everything they are told without questioning it. I hope he gets the good mauling he deserves, but I am not holding my breath.

Oh, and the BBC finally abandoned its digital management initiative after wasting £100million of licence-payers’ money. I wonder how many Archers message boards that would have kept open?

But obviously the overriding story, the inescapable outside world story of the week, was the murder of drummer Lee Rigby on a normal English street in Woolwich.

Big sigh. Where to start unravelling such a mess? The most obvious place to begin is, I suppose to express regret and condolences for such a young life cut brutally short.  A wife deprived of a husband, a child suddenly fatherless, and a wider family in mourning. [In passing, and apropos of this, I wonder if the family actually wanted that obviously distressing – for them, I mean, as well as for us – press-conference, or whether they were herded into it, while still in a shellshocked state, by a media hungry to serve up victims as its audience sits down to their early evening meal.]

Trying to look at it in the round, and see the bigger picture, the two questions that seemed to prompt themselves most obviously to me were, why did this happen, and what can we do to make sure it never happens again?

Why did it happen? In bald terms, because two young men [assuming here from the point of view that they were happy to be filmed doing it and made no attempt to flee the scene, hanging around for the police to turn up, that they won’t be pleading ‘not guilty’ when it comes to court] seem to have taken it upon themselves to kill an off-duty soldier as some sort of misguided protest against British military involvement in Afghanistan, primarily, even though they were not Afghans, nor even originally Muslims.  Quite what they hoped to achieve by this is open to question. “We want to start a war in London”, one of them is reputed to have said.  They believed, like all such deluded individuals, that the religion they profess allows killing in its name, and that an attack on one Muslim is an attack on all Muslims, everywhere. There is little point in me calling this attitude deluded, however, or pointing out its obvious flaws, doctrinally speaking. The sad fact is, there are people who have reached such a level of fanaticism that they believe the end justifies the means, and that two wrongs do make a right. And not all of them are Muslims.

Perhaps a more fruitful approach then, is to ask why they believed this. For all the vilification of “Radical Islam” by the media, the Government, the likes of UKIP and the EDL, and from the taxi driver and the man down the pub, it’s not a question I hear put very often.  We’re told by the Prime Minister that it’s simply the case that “these people hate our way of life” over and over again. But why do they?

I’d like to advocate two or three linked reasons why, for a start. Although each of these in turn, also prompts further whys. As Graham Swift says in Waterland, often, when you start out on this process, of trying to unravel skeins of history, you end up with just a succession of whys until they all merge into one long whywhywhy – but we have to try, if we’re ever going to get anywhere with this problem.

I should say one thing, quite clearly, at the outset. Seeking to understand why something happens, in order to perhaps suggest ways of stopping it from happening again, is NOT the same as agreeing with it, or making excuses for it. Just so we are clear on that point, in case there are any supporters of EDL knee-jerk type responses reading this.

I’m leaving aside the most obvious reason – that one that’s always there, like a piece of grit in your shoe, that sometimes, random bad shit happens for absolutely no discernible reason at all, and we have a hard time squaring that with some ideas of God – or at least I do.

So let’s start with the phenomenon of religious fanaticism. I’m being careful to distinguish this from religion per se, though if you have read other stuff I have written, you’ll know that I do struggle with the concept of any church peddling a one-size-fits-all morality, because I don’t think morality works like that.

There are those who would contend that Islam in itself is a violent, backward and barbarous religion, prone to fanaticism, and therefore all Muslims are likely to be violent and cruel.  This is basically the view of people like The English Defence League, and their favourite newspaper, The Daily Mail.

I would contend that this is not the case.  While it is possible to pick through the Koran and find verses that seem to support this view, we have to remember, for a start, that we are dealing with a text that wasn’t originally written in English, and which is very widely open to interpretations, both formal, in terms of things such as Hadith, and Fatwas, and informally, by gullible young men with highlighter pens and Imams with potentially inflammatory web-sites.

I should also say, at this point, that it’s perfectly possible to find similar “hellfire, brimstone and damnation” passages in the Old Testament, and probably in the Torah as well, for all I know.  And of course there have been instances of Christians killing people because they held the “wrong” beliefs, from the Crusades to the Cathars to the Spanish Inquisition to the people who shoot abortionists still, even now, in the USA.

So what is it that makes religiously fanatical people “radicalised”?  Not religion as such, but a mixture of the erroneous belief that “your” God is the “only true God” and that any disagreement with this, particularly if it manifests in an attack on “your” religion, should be resisted with, and replied to with, violence.  This was the sort of thinking that manifested in the hard-line Wahabi Muslims such as Osama Bin Laden, who objected to the presence of US bases in Saudi Arabia, and which led ultimately to the massive tragedy of 9/11.

Since that fateful day, we [by which I mean the West generally and specifically the UK following Amercia’s lead] seem to have done everything we can to increase the numbers of radicalised hotheads with a grudge against us.  Nobody expected Bush to turn a blind eye to the events of 9/11, but the way in which he set about exacting revenge on the part of the USA has had massive repercussions for all of us. For a start, the global nature of “the war on terror” which we signed up to feeds directly into the supposed grievance that an attack on one Muslim is an attack on all Muslims.  In that respect alone, we have acted as a recruiting-sergeant for Al-Qaida, especially when you add Guantanamo Bay into the mix.  A legal [in international law] declaration of war on the states of Afghanistan and Iraq would have been a better option, but then the Geneva Convention might have had something to say about the use of depleted Uranium, cluster bombs, and Drones. Not to mention locking people up without trial for 12 years, torture, and extraordinary rendition.

So now, at the tail-end of this adventure, when the Taliban know that eventually we are going to fold our tents and leave, the government is still sending hard-pressed and probably under-resourced young men and women into Afghanistan simply to be professional targets. I have nothing but respect for the skill, dedication and training of the British army. We have, in my opinion, probably the best army in the world. But I have nothing but contempt for the spineless politicians who want to squander this precious resource on an unwinnable endgame, and who refuse to acknowledge that if you go into other countries and kill people, some of them are going to get mad enough to have a go back at you in return, especially when you are now allowing Drones over Afghanistan to be controlled from a bunker on an air base in Lincolnshire.

For reasons which will become clear later in this blog, I’ve been reading Alfred Wainwright’s Memoirs of an Ex-Fellwanderer this week, and one passage in particular leapt out at me – especially as Wainwright wrote it long before September 11^th, 2001:

The world is sick, and getting worse…few seem to give two hoots about the old virtues of pride and dependability, and respect for others. Violence and terrorism and vandalism are rampant. Clever men are engaged in the devising of instruments of mass destruction… religion proclaims a cure for all the ills of mankind, but has turned sour. Stupid people of different faiths and dogmas are slaughtering each other all over the world. The Sermon on the Mount is a dead duck.

If he thought that then, God alone knows what he’d make of the mess we’re in today. Sadly, I also have to say that the media has much to answer for here; for a start, whenever something like the Woolwich atrocity happens, they home in on people like Anjem Choudary and give them a prime-time platform to spout his views, as if he somehow speaks for all Muslims everywhere, instead of a very small sect nowhere in particular.  Then White Van Men all over the country see what they think is “some Muslim bloke on the telly” wittering on about Sharia Law, and the re-establishment of the Caliphate, and so it goes, and so it goes…

They are also very quick to report acts of “terror” in a way which I can only describe as biased, I’m afraid.  As Dr Gavin Lewis of Manchester noted, in a letter to the Independent:

National statistics show that about 300 people die from knife attacks every year. Few of these cases fit the media’s priorities, which to many appear racist, jingoistic and hypocritical.

Last month, 75-year-old Mohammed Saleem Chaudhry was fatally stabbed returning from prayer, in what police believed was a racist attack.

Theresa May did not recall Cobra. BBC News24 did not fill hours of air time asking local people if they felt safe (from whites). Newspapers did not print letters telling the “white” community to get its house in order.

Two wrongs don’t make a right, and I would rather Lee Rigby and Mohammed Chaudhry were both still with us and going about their business, but the difference in coverage between the two stories is, as Dr Lewis points out, quite telling as to where the media’s priorities lie.

In between times of heightened tension, the press, particularly the Daily Mail, are happy to make sure the embers of hatred remain smouldering, fanning them with stories about “asylum seekers who can’t be deported” and who are “benefit scroungers”. These stories are always written in a manner which has only a nodding acquaintance with the truth, and the paper often seeks deliberately to conflate Asylum Seekers, Immigrants and Muslims in what passes for the minds of its readers.

When the media aren’t splashing tragedy all over the front page, or “exposing” some other wrong supposedly perpetrated by Muslims, they are fond of saying that Muslims must “integrate”.  I’ve tried to show above how we are driving Muslims precisely away from any idea of integration and instead making them easy prey for the shadowy manipulators who want to “radicalise” them, but, on the other foot, I find that actual ideas of what could be done to “integrate” Muslims are rather thin on the ground. Instead, we’ve gone down a route of multi-cultural co-existence and even, in my opinion, some rather mistaken positive discrimination.  I’ve said before that this, in its more extreme forms, at least, does more harm than good, in that it hands a supposed grievance to the likes of the bigots in the EDL, a stick with which to beat us – that somehow, “Muslims” are getting some sort of special deal.

We need to face up to areas where there is a need for rational and informed discussion about some aspects of the Muslim faith.  And both sides must be unafraid to discuss these, without fear, favour or Fatwah.  The Muslim attitude to women* is one of these areas, especially in the light of recent “grooming” scandals, and also the issue which I particularly have with them, of ritual Halal slaughter of animals. I am not in favour of Halal Slaughter, but then I am not in favour of any animal slaughter, be it Halal, Kosher, “humane” or whatever.

*If we are able to discuss the issue of Muslim attitudes to women, by the way, it shouldn’t get bogged down with the distraction of whether or not they should be veiled. Left to itself, if everyone stopped banging on about Burkhas, this matter would be a self-solving problem in three generations. What girl wants to dress exactly the same way as her Grandma? The veil is a symptom of lack of opportunity and lack of equality for Muslim women, it should not be mistaken for the disease itself.

So, having looked at some of the causes, what can we do to stop it all happening again?  Knee-jerk reactions, such as burning down Mosques or attacking ordinary Muslims in the street as they go about their business, will only make matters worse.  Politicians who misuse statistics and rhetoric to make grandiose and misleading statements about immigration will only make matters worse, especially as the only party who claim to be able to do something about it are closet-Fascists in waiting. Fading politicians who use the opportunity to lay flowers at the impromptu shrine to Lee Rigby as a photo-opportunity will not help (Nick Griffin and Boris Johnson please note).

Media outlets that drip-feed Government anti-immigration hate propaganda and who give zealous “religious” hotheads a platform while ignoring or sidelining the views of the vast majority of ordinary Muslims, will only make matters worse.  And, I’m afraid to say, mindless, unquestioning, “my country right or wrong” patriotism will not help. We should get out of Afghanistan now, before any more of the young lives of our dedicated and professional servicemen are wasted on the vanity of politicians. (Or even worse, former politicians).  Arming the very types of people in Syria who we are fighting in Afghanistan will not help.  And resurrecting defunct anti-libertarian legislation to snoop on everyone’s emails and phone calls under the guise of national security is sheer political opportunism, and that will not help either.

So, we could start out along the road of making sure it never happens again, by doing none of the above.  But that alone will not be enough.  We have to rise to the challenge and not let this unimaginable tragedy for the family and friends of Lee Rigby spawn yet other, further, wider unimaginable tragedies elsewhere. And we (our politicians specifically) must be truthful and face up to the causes of these atrocities.  In the wake of Woolwich, a former soldier who had served in Afghanistan posted the following on one of the many internet forums discussing the crime:

It should by now be self-evident that by attacking Muslims overseas, you will occasionally spawn twisted and, as we saw yesterday, even murderous hatred at home. We need to recognise that, given the continued role our government has chosen to play in the US imperial project in the Middle East, we are lucky that these attacks are so few and far between.

It is equally important to point out, however, that rejection of and opposition to the toxic wars that informed yesterday's attacks is by no means a "Muslim" trait. Vast swathes of the British population also stand in opposition to these wars, including many veterans of the wars like myself and Ross, as well as serving soldiers I speak to who cannot be named here for fear of persecution.

Yet this anti-war view, so widely held and strongly felt, finds no expression in a parliament for whom the merest whiff of boot polish or military jargon causes a fit of "Tommy this, Tommy that …" jingoism. The fact is, there are two majority views in this country: one in the political body that says war, war and more war; and one in the population which says it's had enough of giving up its sons and daughter abroad and now, again, at home.

For 12 years British Muslims have been set upon, pilloried and alienated by successive governments and by the media for things that they did not do. We must say clearly that the alleged actions of these two men are theirs alone, regardless of being informed by the wars, and we should not descend into yet another round of collective responsibility peddling.

Indeed, if there is collective responsibility for the killings, it belongs to the hawks whose policies have caused bloodbaths – directly, as in Afghanistan and Iraq, and indirectly in places as far apart as Woolwich and Boston, which in turn have created political space for the far right to peddle their hatred, as we saw in the immediate aftermath of the Woolwich attack.

What we must do now is straightforward enough. Our own responsibilities are first of all to make sure innocents are not subject to blanket punishment for things that they did not do, and to force our government – safe in their houses – to put an end to Britain's involvement in the vicious foreign occupations that have again created bloodshed in London."

Amen to that. And as a nation, we need to show our true colours – stand up and speak out against extremism, and seek to understand why it happens -  remembering the compassion, respect and tolerance for which we have been known, as a country and a nation, throughout the centuries.  Otherwise, we will end up being just as bad as the murderous cowards who killed Lee Rigby, and I like to think my country is greater than that. Not greater in military might, not greater in xenophobia, but greater in the things that matter.  So don’t be afraid, let them show, Great Britain, your true colours are – as the song says – beautiful like the rainbow. And that’s why I love you.

After such a heavy week, I was looking forward to the weekend. Phil had already let us know he was settling in to his hotel in Keswick, and we were readying the camper van to enable us to join him in the Lakes over the long bank holiday weekend.  However, as usual with us and the camper van, things didn’t exactly run to plan.

Friday was always going to be a shitnastic day, weather-wise and otherwise. Debbie had declared her intention of getting off to the Lakes in the camper van as soon as possible, but as soon as we saw the weather, we decided that it was much more sensible for her to use up the day on some of the preparation and paperwork she has to do for College over half-term anyway, and to review the situation when we wake up to better weather and kinder skies on Saturday.

If I had to sum up the weekend that I have just endured, it was a weekend dogged by bad decisions, and not all of them were ours.  In order to meet the insane and grandiose demands of the College, Debbie had decided that first of all, so she could go off with a clear conscience, she must go up to College and have a meeting with this woman who has been wittering on at her about standardisation and “special marking” that she wants Debbie to do.  So Debbie spent two hours on the Friday, going up to the College, finding somewhere to park, parking up and then locating this particular woman’s room.  Only to have a meeting with her where she discovered that the “special marking” was, in fact, just, er, marking, of the sort Debbie had been doing already, anyway.

The loss of Friday as a travelling/preparation day to these timewasting idiots meant that we were obliged to travel up on the Saturday, instead, and thus spent the hottest and sunniest day of the Bank Holiday weekend, mostly on the M6.  Granny and Grandad had decided that they didn’t want to lend us Zak and Freddie for the weekend, so we were dogless, for the first trip in ages.  Meanwhile, the inshore waters forecast for Great Ormes Head to the Mull of Galloway, consulted prior to our leaving, had promised gale force winds later on the Sunday, so Debbie had decided to leave the kayak behind.

Also before we left, I had my eye on a potential rescue dog to be our new pooch, a small German Shepherd called Lottie. [Actually, the dog rescue web site described her as “small” although there was nothing else of note in the pictures online to give an impression of her true scale, so you couldn’t really tell if she was little, or, pace Father Ted, just far away]. Anyway, I had decided to ring up and see if we could take her on a four day introductory seaside holiday, to see if she “gelled” with us and our way of life – but unfortunately, the rescue centre had already decided to re-home her with somebody else.

When we got there, on Saturday, I decided to try and plug in the portable CD player we’d brought with us, which Debbie had unearthed from somewhere, and I rigged up the transformer and the universal lead into the cigar lighter on the camper’s dashboard. Not knowing the correct voltage, I decided to give it a blast at 19v, and it decided to make a crackling popping noise and emit a feeble wisp of smoke. So, not a successful repair, I think is the conclusion we were meant to draw from this short episode.

Of course, despite the forecast, Sunday at Walney Island was a fine, warm sunny day and Debbie, kayakless, was reduced to watching a seal frolic offshore, via her binoculars, instead of frolicking out there alongside it, while the silver wavelets of the Irish Sea danced and sparkled.  To cheer her up, I decided to suggest going to look around the shops in Ambleside, reasoning that there would be shiny things a-plenty to delight her bright, beady, magpie eye and matching attention-span.  Unfortunately, the cheeky thieving bastards who are in charge of Ambleside’s car parks had decided not to let you park free with the blue badge. Instead, you pay for the first hour and get the second hour free! Neither of us had any change or any real money at all, so, after that brief sojourn in the car park, we drove back out of Ambleside again and all the way back to Walney, with me in particular seething and vowing to look up, when I got home, whether this was actually discriminatory or not.

Debbie lit a huge fire and cooked the usual vegan barbecue on it; spuds in baco foil in the ashes, carrot and coriander sausages, and kebabs of mushrooms, courgettes and peppers on skewers. We were rewarded by seeing a spectacular moonrise as the embers of the blaze died away, and I thought I saw a light on the very distant horizon that could only have been the lighthouse at Puffin Island, off Pen Mon.  Again, I made a mental note to check the bearing on our Imray Irish Sea Chart when we got home.

Monday dawned fair and bright, with hot sunshine at 6AM. Unfortunately, it then did a complete reversal of the old Granny Fenwick dictum of “rain before seven, fine before eleven”, because by 11AM, the sea was crashing and boiling, surf hissing up the beach, and the rain lashed down the van windows. We decided to up sticks and go to Keswick to hook up with Phil. On the way we needed to get some diesel, so Deb pulled into the 24 hour Asda service station in Barrow-in-Furness. Because there was a queue, she switched off the ignition rather than burn what little fuel we had left, and when the time came to turn it back on again – nothing. It was deader than a dead thing. It was a Dodo amongst camper vans, nailed to its perch and gorn to meet its maker.

Time to call out the recovery bods. A couple of phone calls located the relevant 0844 number, connecting me to a bloke in a distant call centre.  I bet it wasn’t pissing down and blowing a gale there.  He addressed me throughout as Mr Hunn, and I didn’t bother to correct him, just gave him the basic details of what had happened,  As I was about to ring off, a thought suddenly occurred to me, that if it wasn’t repairable at the roadside, my status might present a problem in getting me actually home.

ME: Oh, I nearly forgot. One of us is a wheelchair user.

CALL CENTRE BOD: Have you got a spare tyre?

ME: Well, I’ve put on a few pounds since I came out of hospital, but why do you ask?

CALL CENTRE BOD: You said you needed a wheel change

By the time we had worked out the language differences, it was time to call Asda and let the shop know we were clogging up their petrol station, which I  duly did, and they despatched a stolid, solid, large lad in a full head-to-foot suit of high-vis waterproofs, to our aid, who patiently pushed the camper to a less obstructive place with me still inside it!

Eventually, the recovery truck turned up and the issue was located – the blade on the end of the earth wire to the starter motor had become so old and cronky and full of corrosion, that it had dropped off, that very morning.  He couldn’t bodge it, but he did get us going again, by the simple expedient of him holding the bare wire so it made contact with the casing of the starter motor, while Debbie cranked the ignition.  The only problem then was, if the engine stopped, it wouldn’t start again, unless someone performed the same service, or it was somewhere where it could be bumped. So we had no option really but to go home, go directly to home, do not pass go, do not collect two hundred pounds.  And so we did, and the inert lump of the camper sits on the driveway as  type this, waiting for the garage to tow it away and fix it.

So, that was the weekend that was. Lack of an internet connection prevented me posting this from Walney on Sunday. I sort of get the impression that mobile phones and internet connections have yet to discover Walney Island and vice versa.  Now I am looking forward to a week of catching up, watching it rain when I could (and should) be gardening, hardly daring answer the phone in case it is another huge bill on the camper van front, and hardly daring to turn on the TV in case the powder keg of simmering hatred following the Woolwich murder has exploded again. 

Still, Matilda seemed quite pleased to see us. And today is the feast day of the Blessed Robert Johnson, but sadly, I found when I looked him up that he was not who I thought he was, being a martyr of the reformation, hanged drawn and quartered in 1582.  That figures though – everyone knows that the real Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil in return for the ability to play like an angel.

Epiblog for the Feast of St Dunstan

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. If I had to sum up the view from my window now, it is, suddenly, green. The trees have finally come into leaf, at last, and the leaves all float together outside my window rippling in the breeze like a green sea

“Annihilating all that’s made
To a green thought, in a green shade…”

We could still however, do with it being a lot warmer, and with it stopping raining now and again.  When we have had the sun, it’s been almost possible to believe in the existence of summer – notwithstanding that it’s only four or five weeks to Midsummer.  The changeable weather has continued all week. When it’s been good, it’s been very, very good, but when it’s been bad, it’s been horrid.  Matilda’s been taking her chances with the showers, and sometimes she’s been unlucky, causing me to deploy the “dry the cat off with kitchen towels” strategy.

Feeding the birds has also been rather inhibited by the showery weather. Several times, I have put bread out for them only to find it turned to mush half an hour later by a sudden downpour.  Still, fortunately, there appear to be enough grubs and worms around at this time of year to keep them happy when it’s raining.  There are definitely three jays, at least three; a huge, fat wood pigeon, several smaller birds such as blackbirds, thrushes and a rather bedraggled robin; various even smaller birds clustering on the hanging feeders, and a gang of three squirrels who co-operate on overturning the dish so they can steal the peanuts more easily and efficiently.  The squirrels, too, have now taken to coming right up to the door and looking in, if no food seems to be immediately forthcoming.

If it does turn into a lush, full-blown summer (which is still in doubt) it will, sadly, only increase the feeling that I get every year around Midsummer, that

That is no country for old men; the young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees
Those dying generations at their song;
The salmon falls, the mackerel crowded seas,
Fish, flesh and fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born and dies…

According to Yeats, in Sailing to Byzantium.  He goes on to say,

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick …

Which is also a feeling I get every summer now as the cherry blossom goes and the clematis is already in bud.  Still, the primrose blooms, the cowslip too, as it says in the old songs, and an old scarecrow is still good for some things, even if it’s only feeding a badger.

Brenda continues her nocturnal visits – at least I assume she does; something or someone eats the tea I put out for her. I have seen her once during the week, but when it’s dark and rainy, she is actually quite difficult to spot, even though she is just outside the door, and in any case I have been too busy to mount a badger-watch 24/7 just on the offchance that she might appear.

There have been a couple of other exotic visitors this week, one expected, one less so.  On Thursday I was ploughing my lonely furrow, adding email addresses to databases, a task which is right up there with watching paint dry on the white-knuckle excitement scale, so I was extremely happy to be visited by Bernard, looking hale and hearty three days after his birthday, and bearing largesse in the form of three more bottles of his home made sweet apple wine.  Conscious of the fact that he had to drive home again, and I had a lot of database work to do that afternoon, we didn’t – on this occasion – give in to the temptation of opening one of them straight away, to "test" it. I told him they would be very welcome, as we had another visitor due, Uncle Phil from Australia, an even more exotic migratory phenomenon, in that it’s all of five years since he last flew to these shores.  

Bernard asked me to tell Phil that he wasn’t a great fan of Australian wines, and I promised to do so.  Phil is a fairly phlegmatic chap, so I can’t imagine it’s going to rock his world. Nothing much seems to.  Bernard also thinks I am wasting my money ordering any more herbs this year. He, too, like Owen, thinks that there just isn’t enough sun out there alongside the ramp where I am planning to make the raised beds. Well, I have ordered the herbs anyway, so we’ll see who’s right. The horseradish grew perfectly well in its tub out there on top of the gas meter last year, until it drowned in the endless deluges while we were away on holiday.

Phil duly arrived, surprisingly un-jet-lagged (if that’s even a word) after being on a plane almost 24 hours and changing at Singapore and Munich. There’s obviously something to be said for having a phlegmatic attitude, especially when you put yourself in a position where you are at the whim of long-haul airlines.  He also looks well, and happy, and didn’t seem to mind that the temperature here was only about a third of what he’d left behind in sub-tropical Darwin.

Still, I almost managed to adjust that difference in heat for him, in a fairly dramatic way, on Saturday evening I was sitting in the kitchen, tying away at some drivel or other, Debbie was surfing Ebay (for Portaloos, no doubt, see below) and Phil was out with Granny and Deb’s extended family enjoying the finest Chinese meal that Huddersfield can offer, when I began to notice a strange, smoky sort of smell pervading the room.  I asked Debbie if she could smell it too, and she agreed, eventually, that she could indeed.  But where the hell was it coming from? We checked all the obvious suspects – had something fallen out of the stove and onto the hearth, was it an electrical wire shorting out somewhere? Nope, nothing. It was only when wisps of smoke started to appear, curling around the edges of the door of the plate-warmer oven that we realised that somehow its particular knob on the cooker had been knocked into the “on” position. Fortunately, all that it contained was ovenproof dishes and baking trays but you should have seen the immense cloud of foul, evil-smelling smoke that billowed out when I yanked the door open.  Nothing that a few minutes with both the front door, the kitchen door and the conservatory door wide open couldn’t cure, but a narrow squeak, all the same, and a pongy one.

Debbie, meanwhile, has been looking forward to half term and the possibility of getting out in the great outdoors again. Now that Phil’s here, they’ve been hatching plans to meet up in the Lakes and do the whole of the High Style Ridge, ending up on Haystacks.  Debbie (and Freddie and Tig, actually) have both already done Fleetwith Pike and Haystacks, but if she takes Zak, it will be his second to fifth Wainwrights, depending how far they get along the route. We shall see.

In preparation for the trip, she found herself looking at Youtube videos reviewing various outdoor products and somehow found herself looking at portable camping toilets. I had very little inkling that these things existed, let alone that there are hundreds of video clips “reviewing” them on the internet.  The typical clip starts with a butch, hairy American survivalist, complete with bandana, backpack and rifle, striding out of the woods and declaring heartily to camera something along the lines of “Hi, I’m Brad Monobrow, and when I’m out hunting for Bigfoot, I always take the [insert name of particular portable bog he is promoting at this point] with me!”

Why? Just shit in the woods, man! Bears do it, bees do it, even educated fleas do it! Anyway, while Debbie was diverting herself looking at these mobile khazis, including one that you could hook onto the bumper of your pickup (presumably while parked, rather than when changing lanes on the Santa Monica Freeway) I was busy packing up twenty copies of Hampshire Hauntings and Hearsay for Gardners, the first of what I hope will be many orders for it.  When I had finished, Debbie exclaimed “That’s not very sturdy!” I took issue with her, pointing out that each individual packet of books was wrapped separately and the remaining space inside the box was full of void-filler. She gave me a pitying look. “I was talking about this toilet.”

But, dear Reader, if you want a cheap laugh, there are hundreds of these bloody things on Youtube. It kept Debbie amused for hours; at one point she murmured “Five inches? I can’t sit on anything that small!” One can only hope that she was still looking at the toilets and hadn’t moved on to Brad Monobrow Nude dot com. There were so many potential answers, all of them obscene, that I ended up not being able to choose between them.

It’s been such a whirlwind week of visitors, work, windy weather, wine, (but sadly no women or song, as yet) wheelchair repairs (flat tyre) and miscellaneous boggage that I haven’t really been taking notice of the outside world, with one notable exception, the sad, sad story of Stephanie Bottrill, who walked out in front of a lorry on the M6 at the age of 53, committing suicide because, according to the note she left, she could not find the additional £80 a month she would have to come up with as a consequence of the Junta’s “bedroom tax”.

The minister at her funeral, I noted, deplored the fact that people were making “political capital” out of her death.  While I feel desperately sad for her family, having lost my own mum at the relatively early age of 57, I don’t see how it’s possible to ignore the fact that, as with others who have died as a direct result of the Blight’s austerity policies, there is a political dimension to this tragic death. What are we supposed to do, just turn our backs and say, oh well, shit happens, ordure occurs?  Every man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved with mankind. Does that ring any bells?

Of course, the Junta has refused to comment on the matter, saying that they don’t comment on individual cases. Strange, that, because I could have sworn that when the Philpott tragedy happened, the Blight were all to quick to get up on their hind legs and blame it all on benefit scroungers.

I would just like these people – Iain Duncan-Smith, George Osborne, David Cameron, Nick Clegg, Danny Alexander – and those who support them - to look themselves in the face, in the mirror each night, and tell themselves it was honestly worth it and they are happy with the way things are going. That the miserable, dribbling little spurts of the economy before it crashes back to earth again, and the contagious air of gloom and destruction they have breathed on the country with their misbegotten policies, were worth it.  That the worries of the people who don’t know if they’ll have a job this time next month were worth it. That the stress and the anguish of the people dragged through unfair and politically motivated “assessments” by the likes of ATOS were worth it.  That the homelessness and the repossessions were worth it. That the sudden and dramatic rise in hardship benefit payments as a result of the Blight’s own policy was worth it.  That the deaths of Mark and Helen Mullins, Karen Sherlock, Richard Sanderson, Paul Willcoxson, Paul Reekie, Elaine Christian, Stephen Hill, David Groves, and now Stephanie Bottrill were worth it. That they are pleased with the way things are going.  Because, you see, I think that even one death in the misguided cause of the pursuit of the materialist dream of a booming capitalist society is one too many, even if it did mean we were all rolling in it, coining loadsamoney, and the streets were ankle-deep in gold dust, which we’re not.

Are you happy, George Osborne, that these people died for your route out of “austerity” - the possibility of a new curtain shop in the precinct – a thing that anyway, under your policies, looks never likely to happen? And if you have any shred of decency and shame and contrition left in you, and you aren’t happy about it, just when are you going to go, and clear the way for someone else to have a crack at mending what you smashed?

And so, somehow, unaccountably, once more we arrived at Sunday, and the feast of St Dunstan. At last, a saint I know something about, but only because, in a former life, I was fairly obsessed with Glastonbury and the Arthurian legends.  As with many figures from a time when few could write or read and records were often transmitted orally, Dunstan is a figure with some question-marks against his chronology. The anonymous author of the earliest biography of him places Dunstan's birth during the reign of King Athelstan, while Osbern, writing later, fixed it at "the first year of the reign of King Æthelstan", 924 or 925AD. But this date doesn’t fit in with other known dates of Dunstan's life and scholars therefore assume that Dunstan was born c. 910AD or maybe slightly earlier.

It is said that he was born at Baltonsborough, Somerset, near to Wells. The church in the village today bears his appellation. There is apparently some debate, though, as to whether the village itself should be re-named “Ballsbury” – not particularly for comic effect, but because some people apparently think that is the more correct pronunciation. Dunstan was the son of Heorstan, a nobleman of Wessex. Heorstan was the brother of the bishops of Wells and of Winchester, so Dunstan’s career path may well have been influenced from an early age.

Osbern's life of Dunstan, written in the 11th century, relates that his mother, Cynethryth, was a pious woman, and that a messenger miraculously told her of the saintly child she would bear. She was in the church of St Mary on Candlemas day, when all the lights were suddenly extinguished. Then the candle held by Cynethryth was as suddenly re-lit, and the others present lit their candles at this miraculous flame, thus foreshadowing that the boy "would be the minister of eternal light" to the Church of England, says Osbern.  I guess you see what you want to see.

Anyway, at the time of Dunstan’s youth, the ruins of Glastonbury Abbey were inhabited by Irish monks, and Dunstan went and studied under them. Even at that young age, he was enthusiastic about the prospect of the Abbey being restored. While still a boy, Dunstan was stricken with a near-fatal illness and effected a seemingly miraculous recovery- this was to happen again later in his life, and it raises the possibility that he might have had some sort of ongoing condition that accounted for these episodes.  Even as a child, he was noted for his devotion to learning and for his mastery of many kinds of artistic craftsmanship.  He became so well known for his devotion to learning that he was summoned by his uncle Athelm, then Archbishop of Canterbury, to enter his service, and was later appointed to the court of King Athelstan.

Having finally arrived at court, Dunstan soon became a favourite of the king and this soon riled some other members of the court who were jealous of his popularity. They hatched a plot to disgrace him and Dunstan was accused of witchcraft and black magic. The king ordered him to leave the court and, as Dunstan was leaving, his enemies ambushed and attacked him, beat him severely, bound him, and threw him into a cesspool. Possibly a low point in his career, one cannot help but remark.

He managed to extricate himself and make his way eventually to Winchester, where he entered the service of his uncle, Ælfheah, Bishop of Winchester. (“The servants’ quarters are down that corridor, Dunstan, you’ll be, er, wanting to freshen up after your journey.”) Being chucked in a privy was no joke, by the way  – medieval chroniclers have several accounts of people drowning when their privy’s rickety structure gave way beneath them. Unlike Brad Monobrow, though, there was no one to film it and put it on Youtube.

The bishop of Winchester tried to persuade Dunstan to become a monk, preferably in a distant abbey, downwind of the palace, but Dunstan was doubtful whether he had a vocation to a celibate life. The answer came in the form of an attack of swelling tumours all over Dunstan's body. This ailment was so severe that it was thought to be leprosy, though it was more probably some form of blood poisoning caused by being beaten and thrown in the cesspool. It may even have been a recurrence of his mysterious childhood disease, we shall never know.  Whatever the cause, it changed Dunstan's mind. He took Holy Orders in 943AD, in the presence of Ælfheah, and returned to live the life of a hermit at Glastonbury.

Against the old church of St Mary at Glastonbury, he built a small hermit’s cell (as used by small hermits the world over) five feet long and two and a half feet deep. It was there that Dunstan studied, worked at his handicrafts, and played on his harp. It is at this time, according to a late 11th-century legend, that the Devil is said to have tempted Dunstan.  There are two separate legends of the Devil having tangled with St Dunstan.  The first tells of a day when Dunstan was approached by the Devil while Dunstan was busy with his metalwork.  The Devil attempted to tempt Dunstan to evil pleasures but Dunstan pulled his red-hot tongs from the furnace and saw the devil off by tweaking him on the nose with them. This is commemorated in this old folk rhyme:

St Dunstan, as the story goes,
Once pull'd the devil by the nose
With red-hot tongs, which made him roar,
That he was heard three miles or more.

The second legend also takes place at the metalworks, and the Devil again approached Dunstan, this time riding his horse.  The Devil requested that Dunstan should shoe his horse but Dunstan instead attached a shoe to the hoof of the devil.  In return for releasing him, Dunstan made the Devil promise to never enter a house where a horseshoe hung over the door.  It is from this story that we get the legend of the lucky horseshoe, though this may be a Christian appropriation of an earlier pagan belief.

These legends are also the origin of Dunstan’s saintly attributes being a man holding a pair of smith's tongs, with a dove hovering near him and a troop of angels before him. He is the patron saint of metalworkers, as you might expect, and also of armourers, blacksmiths, blind people, gold workers, goldsmiths, jewellers, lighthouse keepers, locksmiths, musicians, silver workers, silversmiths, and swordsmiths. St Dunstan’s feast day, 19th May, is also the reason why the Assay Office year for the purposes of Hallmarks, runs from 19th May to 18th May every year.  He is said to have worked both as a silversmith and in the scriptorium while at Glastonbury.

In fact, Dunstan became famous as a musician, illuminator, and metalworker.  Lady Æthelflaed, King Æthelstan's niece, made Dunstan a trusted adviser, and on her death she left him a considerable fortune, which he used later in life to foster and encourage a monastic revival in England. About the same time, his father Heorstan died and Dunstan inherited his fortune as well. His sphere of influence grew, and on the death of King Æthelstan in 940AD, the new King, Edmund, summoned him to his court at Cheddar and made him a minister.

Sadly for Dunstan, life at Cheddar was anything but gorgeous; his position of royal favour fostered jealousy among other courtiers and again Dunstan's enemies succeeded in their plots. The king was prepared to send Dunstan away, but had his mind forcibly changed when he was out hunting stag in the Mendip forest.  Edmund became separated from his attendants and pursued a stag at great speed in the direction of Cheddar Cliffs.  The stag jumped blindly over the edge, followed by the hounds, and Edmund’s horse would not stop, and looked set to join them.  It is said that he remembered, at that very moment, his harsh treatment of Dunstan, and made a promise to God that if his life was saved, he’d make amends; his horse came to a halt, teetering on the very edge of the precipice.

Giving thanks to God, Edmund returned to his palace, and, presumably pausing only to change his breeches no doubt, he called for St. Dunstan, and together they rode straight to Glastonbury. Entering the church, the king first knelt in prayer before the altar, then, taking St. Dunstan by the hand, he gave him the kiss of peace, led him to the abbot's throne and plonked him on it.

Dunstan went to work at once on the task of reform. He had to both re-create monastic life and to rebuild the abbey. He began by establishing Benedictine monasticism at Glastonbury.  He then went on to rebuild the Church of St. Peter, the cloister, and to re-establish the monastic enclosure. A school for the local youth was founded, and soon became the most famous of its time in England. Plus, in addition to the monastic works, a substantial extension of the irrigation system on the surrounding Somerset Levels was also completed.

The next few years saw fluctuations in Dunstan’s fortunes, as he was caught up in the various struggles for supremacy and succession by contending factions in the ruling caste.  Edmund was assassinated and succeeded by Eadred. The ebb and flow of power and influence at this time in English history was quite complex, and was tied in with the policy on unification and reconciliation with the Danelaw.  As often happens in political power struggles, subsidiary conflicts are rolled up into the mix, and old scores are settled or traded off at the same time.

For nine years Dunstan's influence was dominant, during which time he twice refused the office of bishop (that of Winchester in 951AD and Crediton in 953AD) but in 955AD, Eadred died, and the situation changed again. Eadwig, who then came to the throne, was young and headstrong and quarrelled with Dunstan almost from the start. King Eadwig's reign was marred by conflicts with his family and with Dunstan. Although Dunstan managed to escape, he saw that his life was in danger. He fled England and crossed the channel to Flanders. Fortunately for Duncan, his exile was not a lengthy one. Before the end of 957, the Mercians and Northumbrians revolted and drove out Eadwig, choosing his brother Edgar as king of the country north of the Thames. Edgar's advisers recalled Dunstan and, on the death of Coenwald of Worcester at the end of 957AD, Oda appointed Dunstan to that see.

In October 959, Eadwig died and his brother Edgar was finally accepted as ruler of Wessex. One of Eadwig's final acts had been to appoint a successor to Archbishop Oda, but his first choice had died of cold in the Alps, en route to Rome to claim his honour. As soon as Edgar became king, he vetoed Eadwig’s second choice and the archbishopric was then conferred on Dunstan.

Dunstan went to Rome in 960, and on his return, he at once regained his position as virtual prime minister of the kingdom, enabling him to push forward his reforms in the English Church.  Monasteries were built, and in some of the great cathedrals, monks took the place of the secular canons; in the rest the canons were obliged to live according to rule. The parish priests were compelled to be qualified for their office; they were urged to teach parishioners not only the truths of the Christian faith, but also trades to improve their position. The laws of the state were reformed and extended. Trained bands policed the north, and a navy guarded the shores from marauding Viking raids.

In 973, Dunstan's career reached what was probably its peak, when he officiated at the coronation of King Edgar. Edgar was crowned at Bath in an imperial ceremony devised by Dunstan himself and which still forms the basis of the present-day British coronation ceremony. That old wheel of fortune was turning again, though; Edgar died two years after his coronation, and was succeeded by his eldest son Edward (II) "the Martyr". The succession was disputed and the resultant unrest led to a determined attack upon the monks, the protagonists of reform. Throughout Mercia they were persecuted and deprived of their possessions, and the realm was in serious danger of civil war. Three meetings of the Witan were held to settle these disputes, at Kirtlington, at Calne, and at Amesbury. At the second of these, the famous scene occurred where the floor of the upstairs hall where the Witan was sitting gave way, and everyone except Dunstan, who clung to a beam, or stood serenely on a beam, depending who you believe, fell into the room below, and several were killed. This was subsequently “spun” as Dunstan being miraculously saved as a result of his many virtues.

In March 978AD, King Edward was assassinated at Corfe Castle, and Æthelred the Unready, his contender for the throne, became king.  At the new king’s coronation on 31st March, 978AD, Dunstan addressed him in stern tones of solemn warning. He criticised the violent act which had made him king, and prophesied the misfortunes that were shortly to befall, but in reality, Dunstan's influence at court was ended. He retired to Canterbury, to teach. He visited the shrines of St Augustine and St Æthelberht, and there are reports of a vision of angels who sang to him heavenly canticles. He worked to improve the spiritual well-being of his people, to build and restore churches, to establish schools, to judge lawsuits, to defend widows and orphans, to promote peace, and to enforce respect for purity. He practised his crafts, made bells and organs and corrected the books in the cathedral library.

On the eve of Ascension Day 988AD, a vision of angels apparently warned Dunstan that he would die in three days. On the feast day itself, in his last address, he announced his impending death and wished his congregation well. That afternoon, he chose the spot for his tomb, then took to his bed. On Saturday morning, 19 May, he caused the clergy to assemble. Mass was celebrated in his presence, then he died. Dunstan's final words are reported to have been, "He hath made a remembrance of his wonderful works, being a merciful and gracious Lord: He hath given food to them that fear Him."

He was accepted as a saint shortly afterwards, and canonised in 1029.Until eclipsed by Thomas a Becket, he was literally England’s favourite saint, and his feast was ordered to be kept solemnly throughout the land.  Any actual tombs or shrines devoted to him, however, are long gone. The original tomb in Canterbury Cathedral perished in a fire in 1174, his relics being translated at the time to a new tomb in the rebuilt cathedral.

The monks of Glastonbury claimed that during the sack of Canterbury by the Danes in 1012, Dunstan's body had been carried for safety to their abbey. The monks of Glastonbury Abbey, however, would claim anything to increase the tourist trade, hence the story about  the tomb bearing the “Hic Jacet Arcturus” inscription and shielding the bodies of Arthur and Guinevere.

This story about Dunstan was disproved by Archbishop William Warham, who opened the tomb at Canterbury in 1508 and found Dunstan's relics still to be there. Within a century, however, this shrine was destroyed during the English Reformation. As indeed was Glastonbury Abbey, its last Abbot, Richard Whiting, being dragged through the streets of the town on a hurdle, in November 1539, and hanged, drawn and quartered on top of Glastonbury Tor by the agents and iconoclasts of Thomas Cromwell. 

Looking back over the life of St Dunstan, I am struck by two things, one of which is possibly more significant than the other – he led a life which was strangely fragmented in many ways, from being a hermit to being almost a politician, and secondly, the way in which the relative importance of some of the places associated with him has changed since his times. Cheddar, where the court was, is these days best known for coach trips disgorging (pun intended!) into the car park at Wookey Hole. And Calne, scene of the fateful synod where the floor gave way, is a sleepy Wiltshire market town, which later became notable for wool and bacon.

If Saint Dunstan has done one thing for me this week, it is that he’s made me want to find my copy of Anglo Saxon Towns of Southern England by Jeremy Haslam, and generally re-awakened my interest in Glastonbury.  As well as being the home to one of the largest cash-extraction businesses in England, Glastonbury Festival (free love, man! free music! only $500 a ticket!), the town is of course, the repository of much general New-Age weirdness and kookiness these days. In the same way that people say that if you shook America, everything loose would end up in California, in England it’s Glastonbury.

But on a wider level, I find it difficult to get really enthused about Dunstan. His long and complicated life is, I suppose, of interest to those who study the fluidity and mobility of Anglo-Saxon society in the last years of the kings of Wessex, though even then, for all his willingness to take on manual jobs, he was still of noble caste. I had to simplify all his twists and turns and politicking behind the scenes considerably, to dumb it down into the preceding few paragraphs. People write whole books about the hegemony of the Royal House of Wessex in the late Saxon era.  But in any case, for all his aligning with this or that faction, in the greater scheme of things none of it mattered, because eventually, along came the Normans and took over the lot.  Similarly, for all his attempts to rebuild Glastonbury Abbey, it’s a ruin again, today, thanks to Henry VIII and his inability to keep his orb and sceptre in his codpiece.  It’s a classic illustration of the dictum that 99% of the stuff we worry and care about never comes to pass anyway, and it’s the unpredictable 1% that creeps up and hits you behind the ear with a lead-filled sock.  So why worry?

Even his tomb was destroyed, his shrine erased from the fabric of the Church. We’re in Ozymandias territory here folks, and if I was feeling gloomy, I’d say it points to all human endeavour being ultimately futile, although what it really points to is the simple fact of everything always being in a state of flux, like the atoms of Heraclitus. No man can jump into the same river twice, and suddenly we find ourselves here again, where, in the words of Eliot, 

There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again.

Dunstan’s fight with the Devil is regarded as purely folklore in modern analysis, as we have long since (most of us, anyway) abandoned the idea of a smoky Old Nick in person with his horns and forked tail and the cloven hooves, steaming and hissing and reeking of sulphur, like the pan-warmer oven. It is, I suppose, possible to regard it as an allegory for the fight which all of us have to endure, on a daily basis, to recover what has been lost in the sense of suppressing the innate evil in our fallen nature (to express the idea using Christian terms - Freud would come at it with different words, and from another angle) and to aspire back to the spark of divine goodness I wrote about last week.  I certainly don’t believe that the Devil exists – not in those personified terms, anyway, any more than I believe that “God” is an old geezer in a nightshirt, sitting on a heavenly throne.  But I do believe that all of us carries within us, as well as the God chip, the capacity to do evil, if we allow it to become manifest.  Some people – most people – manage to contain it or sublimate it, whereas others are not so successful.  Some become mass murderers, and others go into politics and get other people to do their murdering for them. Or just enact policies that they know will lead to weak and vulnerable people dying, David Cameron.

But, yes, St Dunstan. There you have him.  More lives than a cat – hermit, contemplative, writer, illustrator, metalworker, builder of Monasteries, politician, archbishop, all rolled into one, and finally a saint. A true Renaissance man, 500 years too early. (This description brought to you by someone else who has occasionally been referred to as a Renaissance man, on account of my being equally unable to carry out a wide variety of disparate tasks.)

I would be failing in my self-imposed duty as a soi-disant religious commentator (think Eddie Waring in a dog-collar) if I didn’t also note in passing the Feast of Pentecost, and/or what we used to call Whit Sunday before various governments started buggering about with the Bank Holidays.  I did a pretty extensive piece on Whitsun and Pentecost last year, and the year before. I can’t believe yet another year has gone by, flashing past at the speed of light.

Whenever I think of the idea of the Holy Spirit enthusing me, these days, I get very tired, and find myself saying, along with W. B. Yeats:

O Sages, standing in God’s holy fire

As in the gold mosaic of a wall

Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,

And be the singing-masters of my soul.

Consume my heart away, sick with desire

And fastened to a dying animal

It knows not what it is

Yeats is writing, on one level at least, about the idea of eternity as conveyed by a perfect piece of art. Religious art in this case, the mosaics and eikons of Byzantium. The mechanical birds of the Byzantine Emperor Theophilus, who, according to legend, had just such artefacts made. It is every poet’s wish to be granted a body immune to death and to be allowed to sing forever. Well, that’s the received wisdom, anyway. I guess I’d be happy to be an irrelevant tattered coat upon a stick, a scarecrow a while longer yet.  What’s that line in Browning, something about “and hold your hand a while longer…”?

Yet I will but say what mere friends say,
Or only a thought stronger;
I will hold your hand but as long as all may,
Or so very little longer!

It’s not looking likely that I will be touched by the Holy Spirit any time soon. Monday is definitely shaping up to be a Paraclete-free zone, with nary a whiff of the dove descending.  The last time I did any speaking in tongues was when I dropped the coal-scuttle on my foot.  I have to phone up wheelchair services and break the bad news to them that just pumping up the tyre hasn’t worked. It needs a new inner-tube and gubbins, I guess. I have to get those databases of schools finished and sent out.  I have to take delivery of twelve boxes of Hampshire at War: an Oral History 1939-1945, and I have no idea right now where these are going to go. I need to tell the surgery that I have almost chomped through the vast stack of Furosemide they managed to accumulate here by double-prescribing me last year, and I’ll be needing some more.  I have to oversee the camper going off to the garage, to have the final few things on its snags list fixed.  I have to create a big list of all the book marketing that needs doing before the end of the school term, and, even scarier, I then have to do it! I have to do the final corrections for Turned Out Nice Again, write the blurb, stick it on the jacket, and send the whole shebang off to press.  Then it’s on to Mac and The Lost Tribe. The next VAT return needs starting. Plus there’ll be mouths (and beaks) to feed – people, cats, dogs, squirrels, badgers, and birds. It doesn’t leave much time for contemplation.  In any case, in my experience, glimpses of the divine, the other, are just that.  Odd drops of nectar from the honeycomb of heaven, percolating through when you least expect them. The rest being what Hardy called "neutral-tinted haps and such."

Still, I guess if St Dunstan managed to live a life that encompassed the twin roles of hermit and prime minister, there’s hope for me yet!

Epiblog for Ascension Sunday

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley.  Back to earth with a bump on Tuesday, and the multiplicity of boring, mundane, neglected tasks which all needed doing at once was made much worse by the fact that the weather outside was still a) hot and b) sunny.  Although the rest of the week declined rather, weather-wise, those few warm days seem at least to have topped up my batteries a bit. Not to the stage where “summer has o’er-brimmed their clammy cells”, but maybe that will come, in due course.

Matilda has been outside more and more, as she continues to explore and extend her territory. Although she’s chipped, it’s now getting to the stage where we’ll have to put her collar on her again, in case she does wander. Not everyone has a microchip scanner in the shed.  Anyway, it’s now got to the stage where only a shower will drive her back indoors, during the day.  She’s got a definite routine, now. Outside first thing in the morning, spends her time stooging around the garden, and usually now she comes back inside early in the afternoon, then sleeps on the foot of my bed, before reappearing at about 9.30pm.  If it’s raining, she varies this by sleeping on her armchair in the conservatory.  Add in a few minutes a day with her head stuck in the cat dish, stacking away the Felix Senior, and some time spent sitting inside the conservatory door swishing her tail at the birds on the decking, and that is the life of Matilda.  She’s still not in the slightest bit grateful that we saved her life. Oh well. She almost suffered a family bereavement this week, when Debbie, in one of her altered-state autopilot hoovering sessions, sucked up Flat Eric the Catnip Mouse. Fortunately, I happened to see it happen, and alerted her to the catastrophe, and much fun ensued, trying to find a grey felt catnip mouse covered in dust in a hoover bag full of, er, grey dust. No, seriously, you really should try it some time.

The birds and the squirrels are busy as usual. There seems to be at least three different jays, and not just one as I had previously surmised. I only realised this when all three of them turned up at once, looking like the poster for Reservoir Dogs, outside the other morning, in search of peanuts. For a moment, it felt vaguely threatening to be faced with three jays looking in though the window, their heads on one side, expectantly.  The squirrels have worked out that if they stand on the edge of Brenda’s dish, it tips up and spills the peanuts all over the decking, making them easier to nibble. Brenda, meanwhile, has been visiting regularly and appears to be thriving on her nightly repasts.  She seems oblivious of what is going on inside the house, even if you go over to the window and watch her chomping her way stolidly through her dish of food from a distance of only a few feet. Something which Matilda did this week, eyes like saucers and tail swishing. I don’t think she really knew what to make of Brenda. (Possibly a hat, but you’ll have to catch her first).

As I said, the week has largely been dominated by catching up with the huge pile of stuff I neglected last weekend, to go swanning off to Furness in the camper.  That in itself would have been tedious, but on top of that, we had a domestic crisis of disastrous proportions. The boiler which provides hot water and central heating to Colin’s side of the house was failing to ignite when Debbie turned everything back on again, following our return on Monday night. On Tuesday, John the plumber came, looked at the system lockout light kicking in all the time, and concluded that the PCB had gone after all. [If you’ve been following this whole dreary saga, you’ll know that he’d previously hoped to get away with just changing the microswitch, to keep the costs down for us]. He said he’d order up a new PCB, and come back on Thursday to fit it. Thursday duly arrived, as did he, and he disappeared into the bowels of what used to be Colin’s kitchen pantry next door.  While he was gone, I answered the door to the coalman, and took delivery of 12 bags of coal, which he stacked in the porch, of which carboniferous fuel, more later. Ten minutes later, John was back. “It’s bad news,” he said.  The boiler was dead. Deader than tank tops and sideways-ironed flares. Kaput. Fouquet dans Le Touquet. Deceased, defunct, fallen off its perch and gone to meet its maker. Oh shit.

So, after much heart-searching and also much wallet-searching, I reluctantly took the decision to say we’d have a replacement, and he said he’d bring one round on Friday morning at 8.30am.  I was already awake at 7.30am on Friday, because the noisy bastards down at the mills started their demolition work at 7.28am precisely (I’m keeping a log on them).  He arrived just as the kettle was boiling and I made him a brew and then tried to settle down to some work myself.  By now the demolition gang down the hill was in full swing, bang bang bang, crash, tinkle, punctuated by the chuffing of diggers and dumper trucks trundling back and forth.

Then on top of this, John started up a descant of power tool noise from next door, drilling and hammering  to create a hole through the outside wall for the new flue.  By now my head was coming out in sympathy, so I hastily swallowed two painkillers and tried to settle down to my spreadsheets. Matilda, meanwhile, was wandering around and yowling, letting me know that she was dissatisfied a) with the noise and disruption and b) with the fact that it was raining on and off. I let her out, I let her back in again. This went on until the rain became more prolonged, at which point she gave it up as a bad job.  When she came in finally, she was wet through, so I caved in and dried her off with a chunk of kitchen towel.  This means that she has now joined a long list of Rudd family cats who have been spoilt in this particular fashion, going back to Ginger at 52 Springfield Avenue, who used to regard it as his right.

Friday soon became the sort of day when you are forced to abandon any pretence of getting anything done, it just annoys you and sends your blood-pressure soaring.  An ambulance man turned up to take me to hospital, for an appointment I’d cancelled. When we were up in Furness, I got a text saying I had this appointment, and when I got back up, I rang the hospital to see what it was all about, because as far as I was concerned I wasn’t due to see anyone before February 2014. It turns out that the consultant in charge of me had booked me an appointment for a four-monthly review – two appointments, in fact, because they’d inadvertently duplicated it on 30^th May as well. So I said, OK, I’ll go to the one on 30^th May, and cancel the other, because I’m a bit pushed this week.  Obviously the message never got through to patient transport services.  The bloke who came was a bit fragged-out anyway at having had a wild goose chase, and even more so because his paperwork said I was capable of walking out to a saloon car, which is what he had brought to pick me up. 

“You want to tell them, you know. You must tell them that you’re a `Wheelchair 1’ before next time. We can’t alter it, you know. You have to tell them. There’s a big difference between being in a wheelchair and being able to walk outside and get in a car, you know…”

Oh really? No shit, Sherlock.

Then Granny arrived with the dogs, to dry them off and let them steam gently by the fire while she caught up on her email (unable to log on at home owing to Talk Talk’s now-you-see-us-now-you-don’t attempt at a comedy stick-on internet connection). By now Debbie had got up, and was wanting her breakfast, so once more the spreadsheets were on pause and the kettle was on the hob for another brew for the plumber. Then Grandad arrived, asking if I could log on for him and pay his sub to the Sky boxing channel online, because he was unable to log on at home because of Talk Talk, see above. Then John from the garage turned up, like the Fairy King in a pantomime, because he’d made a mistake on our last bill and needed a new cheque for the correct amount, which was £8.00 less expensive, so I won out slightly on that one.  By this point, I was contemplating putting up a sign outside that said “Soup Kitchen, Waifs and Strays welcome!”

Eventually, John from the garage left clutching his new cheque, having torn up the old one, John the plumber left, clutching the old boiler and a large cheque, Grandad left clutching the small piece of paper with his password and PIN number for the boxing written on it, and Freddie and Zak, panting and slobbering on their leads, pulled Granny back outside into the rain to resume their walkies, largely against her will. A silence descended. I looked around, warily, to see if there was anyone I had overlooked, still lurking. I checked under the table. Nope. It was true. They had all gone. Even the demolition gang down at Park Valley Mills had shut up for the day.  Before anyone could stop me, I wheeled through to the lobby, and turned the key in the outside door. If I had had a drawbridge, just then, I’d have raised it as well. 

I’ve been so busy this week I have scarcely noticed the outside world. I did briefly register the Queen’s Speech, no doubt hastily re-written to include bills aimed at repatriating anyone who looks a bit brown, and executing foreigners in the street, in a failed attempt to fend off UKIP. Iain Duncan-Smith has been officially censured for cherry-picking national statistics and using them out of context to try and claim his policy of war on the disabled was working, but you won’t see that on the front page of the Daily Mail any time soon, and George Osborne has apparently said that his favourite Star Wars character was “Hans [sic] Solo”. Leaving aside the fact that it’s about as unlikely as Gordon Brown bopping round the kitchen to the Arctic Monkeys, I had always seen George as more of a Cee-Threepio, myself.  Either way, he is not he droid I’m looking for.

On Saturday morning I was having a very strange dream that Sir Alex Ferguson had agreed to soap the backs of all his players in the shower (it wasn’t clear in the dream whether this was actually following a football match, or just an isolated homoerotic aberration) when thankfully I was saved from further mental trauma by being woken up by a crash from the kitchen and Debbie swearing volubly. She came barrelling through to my bedroom, declaring that the “####ing laser printer” wasn’t working. The crash had been her trying to lift the ink jet, which stands on a stand over the laser printer beneath, and dropping the stand on the laser printer. But even before that, it wasn’t working. I dressed as quickly as I could and, rubbing he sleep from my eyes, surveyed the scene. We’d changed the toner the day before, but it was still saying it was out of toner. That was solved by looking up the problem on Google, where I found that if you press the big green print button seven times in succession, it induces a factory re-set.

Having re-set the laser printer’s brain, to the extent where it now believed it did indeed have toner again, the next problem was the large black stripe down the page. This entailed dismantling the toner from the drum, finding the speck of crud that was causing the toner to stick, and broddling at it with a Q-tip until it had all gone.  Once re-assembled, the printer still stubbornly refused to print.  This one, I solved by employing step 2 of the standard tech support procedure. Step 1 is “turn it off and then turn it back on again”, which I had already tried and that hadn’t worked. Step 2 is “if step 1 doesn’t work, waggle all the leads”, and the said waggling revealed that the printer lead that goes into the printer at the back had come loose, so I shoved it back in, and … et voila! I could finally put the kettle on for my mug of English Breakfast Tea, and Debbie resumed printing out her 88-page National Literacy Strategy Document.  Of the two, the tea was by far the more stimulating.

Saturday was by far the dullest day of the week, in more ways than one. I wanted to catch up on writing and book layout, but the boiler crisis was forcing me to look at spreadsheets and forward planning, which, although just as fictional, fell down rather in the crucial areas of plot and characterisation. I did watch the Cup Final in the background, with 48K of my RAM, but only because it happened to be on. I had no horse in the race, though I suppose it’s always better when the underdog wins.  Whoever that ensemble were at the beginning who mangled Abide With Me so comprehensively should be arrested and tried for crimes against music, though.

And so we came to Sunday. For such a busy week, full of worldly preoccupations, today has a strangely spiritual feel to it, enhanced by Debbie listening to the Archers Omnibus in the background and them all wittering on about patron saints, for some reason best left unexplored.  I find myself with an embarrassment of riches to choose from.  Today is the feast day of both St Aethelhard (d. 805AD) and St Pancras, as well as being the Sunday after Ascension Day, which was Thursday 9^th May this year.

St Aethelhard, the Abbot of Louth in Lincolnshire, was elected to the See of Canterbury in AD 790, through the influence of King Offa of Mercia who wished to find archiepiscopal support for his kingdom's interests. However, he was not consecrated until three years later. He is chiefly remembered, if he is remembered at all, for establishing the primacy of Canterbury as the leading See in England, after a prolonged struggle involving the See of Lichfield, which was resolved by the Synod of Clofesho (possibly Brixworth in Northamptonshire) in 803AD. So, despite his promising name, St Aethelhard turns out to be quite boring, unless you are a scholar of the history of the early Church and even then, he is still quite boring.

St Pancras was a teenager in Rome, who was beheaded in 304AD during Diocletian's persecution. He was only 14 years old. Despite this unpromising and difficult start in life, he went on to become a major main line railway station. I guess that is what they mean by “The Stations of the Cross”.

Which only leaves Ascension Day, I guess. The day on which Jesus is supposed to have ascended bodily into heaven.  This presupposes you believe this stuff, either literally or metaphorically, obviously. If not, then feel free to skip to the end to see who done it.  Believing it literally brings with it, for me, a lot of theological baggage about the nature of the Trinity which I am not sure I understand properly. Believing it symbolically, the Ascension of Jesus in his bodily form is supposed to symbolise the humanity of Jesus being taken up into heaven. Again, this implies an idea of heaven being “up there”, which may well have worked for those alive at the time of Christ, and indeed lasted until the telescope of Gallileo (magnifico – oh – oh – oh - oh) but, after the Apollo missions, seems in need of a re-boot.

And yet, and yet, as I have often said about these things, sometimes the mythological interpretation of these events coincides startlingly with the findings of modern science, especially modern physics. If there really are at least 36 extra dimensions, as posited by String Theory, why could not one of those be heaven – or indeed all of them.  John Gribben has written, in Schrodinger’s Kittens (a book guaranteed to make your head hurt) of “reality” being everything that ever was, is and shall be, world without end, and everything that ever might have been, all existing at once and eternally, which always chimes strongly with Juliana of Norwich saying all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well, for me.

In such a scenario, you could – just – envisage the atoms that made up the physical body of Jesus being translated somehow into another dimension, while the Apostles looked on in awe, crouched in fear on the top of the Mount of Olives. They would have no language to describe such an event, other than the language of myth.  We still do not understand how such a thing could happen. We look at it now as being one step beyond “Beam me up, Scotty” – but then lots of things which are now commonplace, accepted science, 400 years ago would have got you burnt at the stake if you had even suggested them, let alone carried them out. Witchcraft is just science we haven’t discovered yet. We know it works, but not why it works. If I had the intellectual capacity to do it, if I were Stephen Hawking, I would definitely be looking at the science behind what we regard as the religious experience, specifically the quantum science, and its implications for what we laughingly call “reality”.

C. S. Lewis, no less, when they could get him out of the back of the wardrobe and sit him back down at his desk, wrote something very similar to what John Gribben said, but without the underlying scientific scansion, in Mere Christianity:

“Our life comes to us moment by moment. One moment disappears before the next comes along: and there is room for very little in each. That is what Time is like. And of course you and I tend to take it for granted that this Time series—this arrangement of past, present, and future—is not simply the way life comes to us but the way all things really exist. We tend to assume that the whole universe and God Himself are always moving on from past to future just as we do.”

“God, I believe, does not live in a Time-series at all. His life is not dribbled out moment by moment like ours: with Him it is still 1920 and already 1960."

Elsewhere, in one of his BBC broadcasts, when talking about God being “outside of time” he makes the telling allusion that God “has all eternity to listen to the last desperate prayer of the airman whose plane is about to crash”.

Proving that there is something all around us, within us, beyond us, other than what we see, feel, hear, touch, taste and smell every day, until the day when we stop doing it, is one thing, of course – allocating it some kind of moral, judgemental authority over how you live your life is a whole different kettle of loaves and fishes.  Jesus may well sit at the “right hand” of the father, but does he really judge the quick and the dead? And should that make any difference to the way I lead my life? If Jesus does exist, and he is really listening now, outside of time, then he must know how I struggle with the doctrine of forgiveness.  He must know how much I have tried, in the past, to reconcile all of this stuff. Surely that counts for something?

I, personally, take some comfort from myths and stories. Rather than pulling them down, I am intrigued by their universal nature. Behind the story of the hero who is struck down but rises again, and will return to save us in our hour of need, be it Jesus at God's right hand, King Arthur underneath Glastonbury Tor, Drake in his hammock, “slung atween the roundshot, in Nombre Dios Bay, and dreaming arl the time o’ Plymouth Hoe”, or Elvis in his chip shop in Kilmarnock, I sense an archetype lurking.  These may well all be manifestations of some universal, unknowable truth, hard wired somewhere into the back of beyond in the crinkly bits of the human brain (you can see why I never went into neuro-surgery). A myth is a universal truth presented as an allegory. Maybe.

Whether or not you should live your live on the principle of “Jesus is coming – look busy!” as a result of this, is probably a question only you can answer.  There’s a lot to be said for trying to live an ethical life anyway, trying not to hurt people, trying not to rip people off, trying not to be a dick, or, if you accidentally do any of the above, trying to make amends because you are sorry. That’s easy for me to say of course. Not so easy to do. Difficult, in fact.  Almost as difficult as me having my own “ascension” and getting up and walking out to a saloon car.

But I come back to this idea again: there is a spark of the divine inside us, something that reacts to the world by trying to make the best of it. If I were a Quabalist, or a Neo-Platonist, I would be drawing your attention to the way in which the position of Jesus on the tree of life does indeed point the way through him to the Father – no man cometh unto the father, and all that… I’d be saying, along with Thomas Traherne, that religion and reason could be in harmony with one another based on a mystical understanding of reason—believing that reason rose beyond mere sense-perception but was "the candle of the Lord" and an echo of the divine, residing within the human soul. Reason was both God-given and of God.

And here’s John Gribben again, but this time it’s John Gribben’s ideas, In the words of Thomas Traherne, three or four hundred years earlier!

The Infinity of God is our enjoyment, because it is the region and extent of His dominion. Barely as it comprehends infinite space, it is infinitely delightful; because it is the room and the place of our treasures, the repository of joys, and the dwelling place, yea the seat and throne, and Kingdom of our souls. But as it is the Light wherein we see, the Life that inspires us, the violence of His love, and the strength of our enjoyments, the greatness and perfection of every creature, the amplitude that enlargeth us, and the field wherein our thoughts expatiate without limit or restraint, the ground and foundation of all our satisfactions, the operative energy and power of the Deity; the measure of our delights, and the grandeur of our soul, it is more our treasure, and ought more abundantly to be delighted in. It surroundeth us continually on every side, it fills us, and inspires us. It is so mysterious, that it is wholly within us, and even then it wholly seems and is without us. It is more inevitably and constantly, more nearly and immediately our dwelling place, than our cities and kingdoms and houses. Our bodies themselves are not so much ours, or within us as that is. The immensity of God is an eternal tabernacle.

If nothing else, writing about Ascension Day has spurred me on to look up one of my favourite paintings again, the D’Arpino Ascension in the Ferens Art gallery in my home town of Hull. It’s probably very bad form and bad netiquette to quote from your own blog, but I did mention it at least once before, in June 2011:

Painted on a wood panel in the early 17th Century, its colours never cease to amaze me with their brightness and freshness, especially when you think it is half a millennium old. D’Arpino’s real name was Giuseppe Cesari, and he apparently taught Caravaggio. I wish I could find a full size, high-res image of it to share with you, but sadly, the whole internet seems to contain one tiny thumbnail of it. It is a few years now since I stood in front of the original and tried to copy, in a faithful pencil sketch, every fold and pleat of the Apostles’ robes. It is an interesting mental exercise in concentration, you should try it next time you have a day to spare, it is the nearest thing to meditation I have done in a long while. And God bless old Ferens, for endowing the Gallery in the first place, so that a kid like me from the slums of Hull can look upon the fine work of an Italian craftsman from five hundred years ago.

Next week will be another busy week on the domestic front, because on Friday, Uncle Phil lands in the UK after an epic flight from Darwin, in Australia’s Northern Territory. He may notice a slight drop in temperature, which is where the coal comes in. Last time he was here was 2007, and I could still walk and drive, back then. We all went to Arran together. God alone knows what he’ll make of me this time around.  Debbie has given me a long list of chores to do before Phil comes, including cleaning the sink, the cooker, and the fridge. I tried arguing that the subjective nature of reality meant that, in an alternative universe, they were already sparkling, but this just produced a funny look.  So I am going to post this blog, put the glass recycling out, mend up the fire, put the kettle on, and get going.  In all the hurly burly though, I hope I can still find some time (in Shakey’s words) to take upon myself the mystery of things, as though I were God’s spy.