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.