Epiblog for Rogation Sunday

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley, as the laggardly Spring struggles to bloom and catch up with the calendar. The spirit of hope and positivity engendered by Owen’s visit last weekend carried over into the week, bolstered by the effect of the longer lighter evenings, and I actually got stuck into the 46 things on my “to do” list and achieved some of them. There is corn in Egypt yet. It’s amazing, really, what a relatively small change such as tidying the garden can have on your entire demeanour. It’s another illustration of what Malcolm Gladwell calls “the tipping point” – where eventually, the power of gradual change brings about a transformative effect on a much larger scale.

The catkins on the trees grow more prolific daily, and the decking is already scattered liberally with fallen ones. Sadly, the plants which we discovered had survived the wreck of the plastic greenhouse in the gales did indeed turn out to be (presumably self-seeded) Shepherd’s Purse and not Oregano, so I won’t be sprinkling them over my pizza any time soon, but still, that was a minor setback in the greater scheme of things.  Brenda, meanwhile, continues to be a regular visitor, so much so that, at the end of the week, when we weren’t there to do it in person, we made arrangements for Granny to feed her, as well as Matilda.

The finer weather has continued to stimulate the birds and the squirrels. I wouldn’t be surprised to find a queue of them waiting outside the conservatory door one morning, waiting patiently to be fed. The unaccustomed summer also seems to have awoken the insects. I picked up one of my socks the other morning, to put it on, and found that it was already occupied, by a large and drowsy bee, which extended a leg and waved feebly at me, as if it was asking for help.  I emptied out a box of Omeprazole and decanted the bee into the empty box, which enabled me to wheel through the house from Colin’s side to the conservatory door, before setting the hapless insect free on the decking. It immediately crawled, weakly, on top of a fallen catkin, and began shagging it for all it was worth.

When Matilda, who has, I am pleased to say, now discovered the outside world big-style, asked to be let out a short while later, I was a bit trepidacious in case all my efforts to save its little apian life were going to be negated by her catching and eating it, but, even as I opened the door, it took off, and flew away in a ponderous, lumbering, somnolent arc, obviously refreshed by its recent encounter with pollen. In Matilda’s case, it’s almost as if now, having discovered the outside world exists, she’s anxious to make up for lost time.  I can’t believe it’s already 8 months this week since she came to us, and Kitty died.  I suppose we’ll have to get around to assigning her a nominal birthday at some point; she may already be ten years old, for all we know. 

She continues to be not in the least bit grateful that we saved her life, however, still treating the place like a cat hotel.  She has developed some limited “cute cat” characteristics, such as rolling on her back and squeaking when she wants a tumjack-furfle, but this is balanced by instances of back-sliding, as on Thursday, when she scratched Cary, my NHS wheelchair assessor, who attempted to befriend Matilda during her annual visit. 

Cary, by the way, thinks that Ronnie the Raven, who was outside in the trees while she was here, may just be Connie the Crow.  Talking of strange birds (not you, Cary) it was also on Thursday that I thought I saw the treecreeper which Owen had spotted. I thought at first it was a squirrel creeping head downward down the trunk of one of the trees, until it suddenly flew off sideways. So I am pretty sure it was the treecreeper – either that, or I am hallucinating flying squirrels, and it’s time I reviewed my meds.

The other, much less welcome feature of the outside world this week has been the constant racket from the demolition work at Park Valley Mills down in the valley bottom. Perched as we are, half-way up the slope, directly above them, we have the proverbial bird’s-eye view of the destruction, and get the full force of the noise. They have got planning permission to demolish half-a-dozen empty old industrial units and build half-a-dozen empty new industrial units.  This is called “regeneration” apparently, according to Kirklees Council, and it’s on a par with the Ancien Regime paying people to dig holes in the road and then fill them in again.

Anyway, it is all posited on the dubious premise that it will, somehow, bring mythical jobs to the Holme Valley, a questionable premise, but enough to sway gullible councillors anxious to be seen to be doing something – anything- in the face of the Junta’s class war.  It’s the mill’s money to waste, I guess, but my beef is not so much the noise itself - annoying though that is, you expect some noise from a demolition site – it’s the way they schedule it, with the noisiest work taking place consistently between 7.30 and 8.30AM, and by early afternoon, the whole site is as quiet and deserted as Aberdeen on a flag day.  Given that, these days, because of my bent legs and tight muscles, and the resulting crams, I can only sleep for about half an hour at a stretch before waking up and having to change position, I tend to guard my sleep rather jealously these days, and, while I do try and get up and do a “normal” working day as much as my condition allows, there is a big difference between waking up naturally of your own accord at 7.45AM and being suddenly jolted out of a wonderful dream, where two blonde girls in swimsuits are throwing a beach-ball to each other in slow motion, by a huge rending crash like the trump of doom, accompanied by the tinkling descant of shattering glass.  The Council, to whom I’ve complained, are powerless to do anything to compel these idiots to tone it down, so I have replied that in that case, we might as well just stop paying our council tax then, and call it quits. No reply.

Talking of demolition, the outside world continues its mad whirl of pointless destruction, crumbling about our ears. Syria is being “redeveloped” by the Israeli air force, and, back here in Blighty, the decimation of the Tory and Lib Dem council candidates by UKIP proved conclusively that the political agenda in this country has now lurched sharply to the xenophobic right. This is a direct consequence of the Junta’s own relentless propaganda against immigrants and the disadvantaged, labelling them all as “scroungers” who use up scarce resources that could go to “hard working families”.  Now, this has come back to bite them on the bum, because it’s fuelling support for UKIP, who threaten to be even more nasty to the “scroungers” than the nasty party itself.  It would be funny if it wasn’t a tragedy for England. 

Faced with UKIP stealing his clothes, Cameron didn’t even have the guts to stick to his guns. A few weeks ago, he was calling UKIP a party of “loonies, fruitcakes, and closet racists”. That statement is possibly the only thing David Cameron has ever said in his life that I totally agree with, but he’d already changed his tune on Friday, saying that UKIP voters should be respected (presumably while scheming behind the scenes to out-UKIP UKIP in 2015). Nick Clegg, meanwhile, buoyed up by a massive 325 votes in South Shields at the by-election, seventh place, and a lost deposit, merely said that the Lib Dems are “on a journey”. They are indeed. It’s a one-way ticket to the abattoir.

Anyway, there will now be a Gadarene rush to the right, to out-bigot the bigots and out-Pugwash the pirates, and England, my England, the society of peace, tolerance, dignity, fairness, and respect, will be the poorer for it, yet again. I cannot begin to express my contempt for the people responsible for this mess.  Jonathan Portes has pointed out, in his blog, Not The Treasury View, that there were sound economic reasons at the time for Tony Blair to have signed the A8 agreement. But nothing was made of these at the time, or since, by the current Labour leadership, which merely whines about how “we made mistakes on immigration”.  This automatically hands the Tories a stick with which to beat Labour – that they “opened the floodgates”.

Then you get Cameron with his immigrant-bashing “there’s millions of them over here taking out jobs our houses and our flat screen TVs” shtick, eagerly repeated by the dogspittles in the press, as part of his class war agenda. Apart from anything else, their fundamental dishonesty in pretending that this issue has nothing to do with Europe, and their stupidity in refusing the grasp the nettle and deal with it before now, has created the perfect storm, and breathed electrified life into the dead corpse of the BNP, now reincarnated as Faragenstein’s Monster; turned from a relatively harmless set of amusing eccentrics who didn’t like the EU insisting on straight bananas, into fascists in lounge suits and twinsets. Great result.

And so it came to Saturday, the eve of Rogation Sunday, and, in keeping with the ancient tradition of Rogation-Tide, Debbie decided that we would also push the boundaries, by setting off in the camper van for a mini-blitz on the Lakes, specifically starting with our normal camping spot on Walney Island. We like it there because nobody bothers you, it’s good for kayaking and seals, and it’s near enough to the Lake District National Park, but without all the hassle of having park rangers tap on your windows and say “you can’t do that there 'ere” as has happened to us in the past, notably at Borrowdale.

We set off at ten to six on Saturday evening. It was warm and sunny at home, and, as we loaded up and made our final preparations, leaving Matilda to the tender care of Granny, in return for our taking Freddie and Zak, it felt as if summer had finally arrived. Almost, if not quite.  It was, as Wordsworth might have said, and indeed did say, in other circumstances, “a beauteous evening, fine and free, the holy time is quiet as a nun”.  Obviously, he never got to meet Debbie’s family.

The sun transformed even the prosaic landscapes of the M6. The gorse (or whin, or broom, depending where you come from) was glowing yellow, and the landscape was punctuated every so often with a heartstoppingly-bright white magnesium flare of cherry blossom from an isolated tree.

I was torn between reciting “Lovliest of trees, the cherry now” and singing “The Yellow’s on the Broom”:

When yellow's on the broom
When yellow's on the broom
I'll tak' ye on the road again
When yellow's on the broom

I ken ye dinna like it, lass,
Tae winter here in toon
For the scaldies aye miscry us
And they try tae put us doon
But it's hard to raise three bairns
In a single flea-box room
So I'll tak' ye on the road again
When yellow's on the broom

I'm weary for the springtime
Tae tak' the road yince mair
For the plantin' and the pearlin'
And the berry fields of Blair
We'll meet up wi' oor kinfolk
From a' the country roon'
When the ganaboot folk tak' the road
And the yellow's on the broom

So in the end, I did both, much to Debbie’s annoyance. The snoozing dogs on the back seat remained indifferent.  The other bit of botanical news was that, as well as Wordsworth’s bloody daffodils, which are everywhere in the Lake District at this time of year, there was also quite a lot of celandine, another flower which inspired Wordsworth to some truly forgettable lines:

There is a Flower, the Lesser Celandine,
That shrinks, like many more, from cold and rain;
And, the first moment that the sun may shine,
Bright as the sun himself, 'tis out again!

We made good time up the motorway and, after a brief stop off at Booth’s supermarket, Ulverston’s premier tourist attraction, to take on provisions, we finally crossed over the bridge from Barrow and onto Walney just as dusk was falling. Debbie was still entertaining faint hopes of camping up and building a fire to cook the vegan sausages and burgers she had just liberated from Booths. Sadly, it was not to be.  When we rounded the final corner of the incongruous, inconspicuous little lane which leads down to the beach, it was to find that another camper van had already usurped “our” pitch on the headland. Oh bugger.  Undaunted, we trundled further along the track and found another spot, just off to the left and among some slightly longer grass, and decided to call it quits at that. The sausages and burgers got cooked on the camping gaz stove instead, in the big skillet; the dogs resigned themselves with manly sighs to the fact that they were only having dog food, and, once everyone had been fed, and we were all feeling suitably replete and sleepy, we settled down to our respective quarters of the bedding arrangements, and embarked on the first night of the trip sleeping in the camper.

Probably because it was warmer this time, and also, unlike last time, we were not kept awake by the howling wind and drumming rain, we all slept soundly, long and well. Eventually, Rogation Sunday itself dawned, and, while waiting for the kettle to boil for our Sunday morning coffees, I surveyed the weather. The threatened fog had failed to materialise, and the reason for that, I was guessing, was the strength of the wind, which was building itself up to a full-strength, sou-westerly gale. Not a day for kayaking, or, if you do go, make sure you write your name and phone number on your paddle with a waterproof felt-pen. Any fog that had had the temerity to try and form overnight would, by now, be blowing over the rooftops of Oslo.  The rolling breakers of surf crashed relentlessly, and the murky horizon gave no indication of the presence of Blackpool Tower, the Mountains of Snowdonia, or the Isle of Man, all of which can normally be viewed in the distance from this very beach on a clear day (ie one where it’s obviously just about to piss down with rain).

The plus side of this “fresh breeze”, as Admiral Beaufort would undoubtedly have described it, was that it was driving away the rainclouds, keeping them high and hurrying them along before they had any chance to drop their soggy contents on us. The good weather continued after lunch, so we took advantage of the forecast having been wrong and bowled along in the burgeoning sunshine, en route for Coniston, where Debbie and Zak were planning to ascend the Old Man. Lucky old man.  Freddie, being 80+ in human years, is already rather an old man, so he was excused mountain-climbing duties these days, though he did make it up Gummer’s How (milking the sympathy vote from each passing group of ramblers) the day after my birthday, which is more than I did. Coniston was heaving with walkers of all shapes, sizes, ethnicities, religions and sexualities, a veritable walking parade of the entire “Go Outdoors” catalogue.

I reassured Debbie that at least she wouldn’t have to do much in the way of map reading, just let herself be carried along by the press of the crowd, like you do at the January sales or when leaving a football match because Newcastle are losing 5-0 at half time.  Personally, I blame Alfred Wainwright. And the parents, since a fair few of the booted and anoraked passers-by were kids who, in ten years time, would be boring their own respective spouses with tales of how their parents always used to drag them off on holidays to the Lake District and make them climb mountains when they’d rather have been at home, TWOC-ing cars or playing on their X-Box.

Coniston is famous for three things, Donald Campbell, John Ruskin, who turned down the chance of being buried in Westminster Abbey in favour of interment there (not in person, obviously) and Swallows and Amazons. The mountain which Debbie and Zak were about to ascend, The Old Man of Coniston, appears in Ransome’s Swallowdale, thinly disguised as “Kangchenjunga” – yes, I know there is also a real Kangchenjunga, in the Himalayas – I suggest you take it up with Arthur Ransome.

The shops, as we passed through the town’s narrow streets, were doing a roaring trade, and I found myself wondering, as I have often done before about these places, what it must be like actually to live in a tourist town, where for four months of the year it goes totally manic and for the remaining eight it’s dead as a dodo, you never see a soul and you haven’t got a hapenny to scratch your arse with. It must breed resentment, however uncalled-for; I said to Debbie that I wondered how many of the shopkeepers were subconsciously thinking “there’s nothing here for you – these are local mountains for local people!”

Unfortunately, I had forgotten that her driver’s side window was wound fully down, and a bloke walking past, who only caught the last, rhetorical flourish of my speech, obviously thought it was aimed at him, and turned round and gave me a funny look.  It’s just a gift I have.

Anyway, it was Rogation Sunday, and Debbie and Zak set off o their mountaineering adventure, while Freddie snored and sorted, climbing mountains in his dreams, and I settled down to write this Epiblog. The term “Rogation”, I have discovered, comes from the Latin verb “rogare”, meaning “to ask”, because the Gospel for the previous Sunday (John 16:24) apparently contains the words “Ask, and ye shall receive.” So now we know.  Rogation Sunday marks the start of a period of the liturgical year which encompasses Ascension Day and its successive “Ember Days”.  The word “ember” in that context is nothing to do with fire, it derives from the Saxon “ymbre”, or round about, so again the idea is of getting up from your hearth where you have frowsted all winter long, and going out into the world, to check out the boundaries.

In historical times, Rogation Sunday was marked by fasting, and farmers often had their crops blessed. A significant feature of the Rogation ceremonies was the “beating of the bounds”, where a procession of parishioners, led by the priest, churchwardens, and choir, would progress round the boundaries of the parish, and pray for its protection. This also had the useful function of setting boundaries for the young men of the parish, to prevent them straying and causing trouble, lest they should end up on the wrong end of a birch-twig!  Rogation Sunday is also known as “Gang-day” – the derivation from the  Old Norse word “gang”, meaning “to go”, as in the place name “Summergangs” – and it’s also called “Chestnut Sunday”.

As I sat there in the front seat of the camper, writing steadily away in longhand, watching the endless procession of folk going past the windows, I almost felt as if I was part of some modern-day Rogation. All these people who had been at their desks or in their houses all winter, watching the rain and the snow hurl themselves at the windows, were now coming out to test their boundaries. In Saxon times, the call of the cuckoo brought out the desire of the seafarer to set forth on journeys, as in the poem The Seafarer, from The Exeter Book. The relevant passage has been translated by –among others – Ezra Pound:

Yet longing comes upon him to fare forth on the water.
Bosque taketh blossom, cometh beauty of berries,
Fields to fairness, land fares brisker,
All this admonisheth man eager of mood,
The heart turns to travel so that he then thinks
On flood-ways to be far departing.
Cuckoo calleth with gloomy crying,
He singeth summerward, bodeth sorrow,
The bitter heart's blood.

As I sat there, in Coniston, amongst the twittering bird-notes, I too, may briefly have heard the cuckoo’s notes.  Or maybe I misread my notes, and I was just feeling a bit cuckoo.

As well as being Rogation Sunday, Sunday was also the feast of St Etha of Crayke, a man who may well never have existed.  Crayke is a small village near York, and was gifted by Ecgfrith, the Saxon King of Northumbria, to St Cuthbert, and the Monastery of Lindisfarne, in 685AD. The rationale for its particular favour was that it was supposed to have been used by Cuthbert as a stopping off point in his frequent travels between Lindisfarne and York.

Some sources go further, and assert that Cuthbert founded a monastery there, which lasted for 200 years, though there is absolutely no archaeological evidence for this, and – if it were true – the time-frame would coincide with both the Viking occupation of York in 867AD and the attack on the Vikings by Ella, another of the Saxon Kings of Northumbria, in 883AD. It seems highly unlikely that any monastic edifice in the middle of a war zone would have survived unmolested, notwithstanding the remoteness of Crayke in those days, deep in the ancient forest of Galtres.

The Saxons finally recovered control of Northumbria in 948AD when the last Danish King, the rather prosaically-named Eric, was defeated by the Saxon King Eadred at the Battle of Castleford. Crayke, however, seems to have remained at least under Viking control, being surrendered back to the Saxon Bishop of Durham by Earl Thured only in 990AD. In the Domesday Book of 1086 it is recorded as a possession of the Bishop, and there is no mention of a monastery.

Nevertheless, Simeon of Durham, (1060-1140) writing much later of course, asserts both that the monastery existed and that, living in close proximity to it, was an anchorite or hermit named Etha, who “led an angelical life” and died there in 767AD. So, as with many other early saints of the Church, at a time when the entry requirements were much more lax, it would appear that doubt over your very existence is not necessarily an obstacle to canonisation.

By this time, Debbie and Zak had returned, just in time to hear The Archers on the car radio, Debbie currently having taken to listening to it, more or less at the same time that I stopped, when they chucked Nigel Pargetter off the roof.  Zak was still very sprightly, and would no doubt have gone straight back to the summit, if asked, but Debbie eased herself gingerly back into the driver’s seat and declared that she was “so unfit”, and she must “get in some serious training”.

Back at Walney, she gathered some driftwood and lit the delayed fire from yesterday. Sadly, much of her previous litter-cleaning efforts had been negated by morons dropping a whole new layer of detritus along the fence in the last four weeks, but this time she was too tired to pick it up and burn it, so we just cooked the vegan stuff and some roast spuds in baco-foil done in the embers, and three or four skewers of mushrooms, peppers, roast garlic and courgettes, and that was more than enough to send us off to dreamland.

Monday, when it dawned, became rather a timeless day.  Sitting in the camper van, basking in the unaccustomed sunlight and warmth (especially on Walney Island) and listening to the twitter of the skylarks, I watched the sparkling light twinkling on the waves of the Irish Sea, making it look like the Adriatic.  The dogs were both flopped out in the long grass; Freddie snoozing and snoring, Zak occasionally rolling over on his back in a burst of dog-ecstasy. He really loves it there, chasing up and down the beach, barking at the waves.  Debbie, still stiff after her encounter with the Old Man, had her breakfast outside in the sunshine, after all three of them had been down on the sands together for an hour’s beachcombing that produced a haul of interesting shells, which Debbie intends to turn into a mobile of some description (this, I must see).

Freddie was reluctant to set out on the “beachcombing” walkies for some reason, so Debbie picked him up bodily and carried him off, Zak trotting to heel. He must have liked it, though, because apparently when she placed him back on all four paws, on the ground at the top of the slipway, he wagged his tail enthusiastically, in a way suggesting  that this, from now on, was his preferred way of going “walkies”.

Blackpool Tower, and what I took to be (probably) Heysham Nuclear Power Station, were just about visible across Morecambe Bay, in the wobbling heat-haze. Let’s hope no-one in Heysham presses the wrong button, and the “illuminations” remain confined to Blackpool.  While I waited for Debbie to get ready to set off, I tried to connect to the internet via the Orange Dongle and Debbie’s little netbook, and was rewarded by a brief squawk of recognition by the Orange GRPS 3G mobile network, before it died on its arse and vanished, so the Epiblog went unposted for another day.

It was time to go home, but we were in no particular hurry. After taking on diesel in Barrow, we set off along the coastal route to Ulverston, the “pretty” way.  Despite the fact that the tide was out and the sea was about four miles away over the mud flats to Morecambe, the “promenade” along Rampside was a heaving mass of people and cars. Hoagie’s Ices, the ice cream van we’d seen so forlorn on our last trip, was besieged by a seething mob four deep in places.  So much so that it almost obscured his sales slogan, “Often licked, never beaten” which we’d remarked on last time around. Actually, in attempting to quote it back to Debbie, I mis-read it as “Often beaten, never licked”, which sounds very much like a description of Justin Bieber’s penis.

On the run into Ulverston, we diverted briefly to look at Birkrigg Stone Circle, near Bardsea.  It sits 448 feet above sea level in the midst of Birkrigg Common.  From there, we could take in the sunshine, the vast sweep of Morecambe Bay, blue, beige and grey stratifications of sand and water, skeining round each other, with the lumpy bluegreen hills beyond, fading to heat haze, and the spiky tower of Bardsea church poking up just over the flank of the hilltop on which the circle sits.

Debbie took the dogs off for a closer look, and I watched her go, striding purposefully up the close-mown approach path, with Zak loping along to heel like a medieval bratchet in a tapestry depicting hunting, and Freddie lumbering along behind, his reluctant scuttling gait struggling to keep up.  Eventually, I saw all three of them reach the stones. I wouldn’t put it past Freddie to have cocked his leg up. He has a track record of having defiled sites of great antiquity, having once peed in the ruins of a Roman bath-house at Ribchester.

It was a perfect bank holiday teatime, with that feeling of timelessness, of here and now and England, with the skylarks twittering a descant over the dark-voiced utterances of distant sheep.  Birkrigg is not an isolated outcrop of antiquity, though. Looking at the OS map, within a few squares of Birkrigg I found a fort, a burial chamber, prehistoric enclosures, and a homesteading.

Because it was virtually on the direct route between us and home, we also diverted briefly to look at Swarthmoor Hall. I had not, until recently, appreciated just what a pivotal role Margaret Fell had held in the history of Quakerism, and the chance to look at her 17th century home was too good to miss.  The car park looked quite small, and the way through to the house itself was under a stone arch with a date-stone of 1914 set into the lintel above. I made a mental calculation that it looked quite low, and our camper was quite high, and advised Debbie that we were better off parking outside, rather than demolishing part of Britain’s Quaker heritage. We parked up next to a nice lady who was just getting out of a shooting-brake (a definite Quaker vehicle, if ever there was one, except I guess it would have to be re-named a mediation-brake).

She came over to the window, and we "fell" to discussing Margaret.  I was very impressed by her Quaker hospitality, in that she invited us in for some cakes and tea. It was even more impressive when it emerged later in the conversation that she had absolutely nothing to do with the place, and was just a visitor herself, like us.  I was immediately awake to the possibilities for anarchy that could ensue from directing people you have never met before into the houses of complete strangers, on the misapprehension there would be tea and cakes.  Swarthmoor Hall itself had a rather 20th century “rendered” look about it, and I would have liked to explore further, but – unfortunately – by now, they were probably getting ready to close, and we were still 120-odd miles from home, with two hungry doggies to drop off at their house first.  So we bade it farewell, promising in my case to come back when I have saved up the £6.00 entrance fee for a proper look, and my cup of tea and slice of cake, of course.

The journey back was uneventful, but by the time we got back, there wasn’t much energy left for anything apart from unloading the camper, feeding the cat, and tumbling into bed.

So, that was the week that was, as the song says, it’s over, let it go. A week that included the ancient Celtic festival of Beltane, which I sort of spiritually nodded to, although I didn’t follow Marc Bolan’s strictures to the letter and ride a white swan, nor indeed did I wear a tall hat like the people in the old days, but I did welcome the advent of May, the merry month of May, my favourite month out of the whole year. It was also a week when Hull City somehow managed to shrug off their long and honourable tradition of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, and – amazingly -found themselves unaccountably back in the Premier League next season. Wagstaff, thou should’st be living at this hour!

Today, of course, as well as posting this, I have to do all of the things I should have done at the weekend! Such is life without the work-fairy. Still, it did me good to do a bit of Rogationing, and to hear the call of the cuckoo, singing of summer still to come.