Epiblog for the Feast of St Aelric

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley, and a frustrating one. Not just the weather, which remains stubbornly dull and showery, but also the fact that almost everything I have attempted this week has either gone wrong, blown up, caught fire, or groaned and slipped to the floor in a dying heap. 

It’s been one of those weeks when you begin to think that either you aren’t speaking English any more or that everyone else has suddenly developed hearing problems, and/or the government is putting something in the reservoirs to make everyone stupid.

The only thing which I managed to achieve without a hitch was to organise the delivery of some more herbs from Norfolk Herbs; they arrived on Tuesday, so now I  am the proud owner of a variety of funny-looking plants with names like Alecost, Horehound, Good King Henry, Dittander, and Lady’s Bedstraw.  But even this was tinged with disappointment, because they arrived on Tuesday, a very fraught day when I was unable really to give them my full attention, apart from unpacking them and lining them up outside alongside my wheelchair ramp, and giving them a good blasting with the water sprayer, then leaving them to it.  Dittander is a very versatile herb, in that it can be used apparently as a substitute for horseradish and also to treat leprosy.  Not, I hope, at the same time.

Anyway, I’m not the only one who has had a fraught week. Debbie ended up doing three or four hours of unpaid extra work on Monday, as exam fever gripped the college, and she was deluged with people wanting last-minute help, advice, and to finally hand in work which they should have completed back in January, and which she has been asking them about for so long she gave herself laryngitis.  Twice.  Like me, she has had a mixture of “buffet and rewards”. A candidate who she expected to be a slam-dunk for a pass actually failed because he didn’t turn over the exam paper and therefore, poor bloke, didn’t see the questions on the other side, with disastrous consequences for his percentage. On the plus side, one of her tough, uncompromising, take-no-shit learners at an outreach centre wrote her a poem, which she presented Deb with on Thursday, by way of saying how much Debbie had helped her.  Sometimes, it’s things like that that make all of the random crap, the endless observations, the reorganisations, the smart targets nobody ever looks at, and the “please re-apply for your own job or tick here for voluntary redundancy” letters from HR almost worthwhile.

Of course, it being the exam season, the ink jet printer decided to die on its arse on Wednesday morning, just at the point when Debbie had a huge stack of stuff to print out and take in to college at lunchtime. I was jerked out of a very pleasant dream where the Archbishop of Canterbury and I were judging the swimsuit round of a beauty contest, by Debbie barking round the edge of  the door about the #### printer not working, so I got up as quickly as I could, and hastened to help.  It turned out to be an interesting little conundrum, because the printer was working one minute, then not the next. By a process of elimination, I narrowed it down to loose wires inside the USB cable. In fact, at one point, I plugged it in to a USB slot on my laptop and you could see it flickering on and off on screen as the connection fizzed. 

Naturally, we didn’t have a spare cable – that would have been too much like forward planning – but I did manage to bodge the existing cable by winding gaffer-tape around it so it no longer wobbled at the point where the lead came out of the USB connector, and thankfully that was enough to hold it together until Friday, when the two replacement leads I had ordered off the internet arrived.  

As if that wasn’t bad enough, also on Wednesday, I suddenly realised, with a chill of horror, that, when Colin repaired the great email disaster and re-installed Outlook, he’d only set up one of my five email accounts! So the mail for all the other four was  still sitting up there in cyberland on the various servers; aaagh! An hour later, and I had managed (after a prolonged struggle in the case of Virgin Media) in getting Outlook talking to them all again, and had downloaded all of the waiting email. It wasn’t as bad as I had feared – there were only 175 unread emails, and most of them were spam which I was able to block-delete but even so, it was a couple of hours out of my day that I wasn’t expecting. 

In the midst of all this chaos, the animals have been keeping their heads down and keeping out of the way. Matilda has had an uneventful week, dodging the showers and sniffing the new herbs, particularly the Catnip and the Red Valerian.  Other than that, she’s had a simple, uncomplicated few days, alternating between chomping her way through a box of Felix during the week, and sleeping on the foot of my bed, but only when I’m not in it. 

Zak doesn’t care what the weather is like as long as Grandad takes him walkies, and a couple of times he’s come back wet through, when they’ve got the timing wrong, but tired and happy. Freddie’s been pottering about, and even accompanied them on a couple of days, just to stop his old joints seizing up altogether. I felt a bit mean one time, when I said “squirrels!” as loudly as I could (we are convinced he’s getting deafer and deafer) and he leapt off the settee and rushed to the door, little suspecting it was only a ruse to get him to go walkies!  Poor mutt. He’s also had a couple more episodes like the one he had that weekend at Walney, where he seems to go into a complete trance and nothing will attract his attention or make him move. It’s a bit like he’s having some sort of fugue or something; the other night, he just stood at the top of the steps leading down into the garden for about twenty minutes before he seemed to shake himself awake and remember what he’d gone out to do.  I suppose it’s inevitable, given his age, but it’s still sad. 

A quick Tour d’Horizon will give you the rest of the animal news: Maisie’s ferals, Bill and Sunshine, are still not placed in a shelter anywhere. After several dozen fruitless phone calls and emails this week, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s easier to get your kid put down for Eton than it is to get two feral cats into a cat shelter in South Yorkshire.  Everywhere that might be able to take them and socialise them with a view to their eventual re-homing is rammed to the gills, with a waiting list.  At the same time, though, at least some doggies are being re-homed. We found this out when yet another prospective replacement for Tiggy was snapped up by someone else before we could get there this week. Back to the drawing board.

The birds and squirrels must all be on their holidays, with the exception of Mr Popinjay, who I suspect is actually about four or five different jays, who can be relied upon to come around for peanuts.  Meanwhile, Brenda (or somebody) continues to eat the stuff I put out for her each night. 

The other major thing that went wrong this week was Nelson Mandela.  No disrespect to the great ex-leader, who did so much to fight apartheid, but he really screwed up my press release about Gez Walsh’s flash mob.  The flash mob in question was with the kids of Swallow Hill Community College in Leeds, who descended on Briggate in Leeds on Wednesday to perform “Thriller” in tribute to Michael Jackson, who died four years ago that day.  Personally, I think that all of the effort which they put into it was deserving of high praise and recognition. As Gez said, it would make the kids’ day, especially as the school itself isn’t exactly over-endowed with high status academy-style recognition, though the kids and the teachers are both the proverbial salt of the earth.  They aren’t a performing arts college, they aren’t the Kids from Fame, and if they do have a career on TV, it’s probably going to be CCTV, but for a few brief moments, all the work they’d put in came to fruition, all the efforts of their teacher, driving round in her own time to get the parents to sign permission waivers, all the bullshit about risk assessments and the like, was forgotten, and they did their thing. 

I’d already sent out one lot of press releases, and on Monday I sent them again, to try and raise some sort of media enthusiasm, then followed up by phone. Look North, the regional TV News programme from the BBC, said they hadn’t made any decisions what they were going to cover on the Tuesday, because they were “keeping their options open, because of Nelson Mandela.” I wasn’t aware of any specific Leeds connection with Nelson Mandela, and in fact suspected they may have been confusing him with Charlie Williams, but anyway, I bit my tongue, rather than arguing. 

Calendar, the ITV regional news programme, has a “news hotline” which is basically a voicemail to stop people like me bothering the presenters when they are putting on their make up.  I doubt anyone ever listens to it. I might leave a message on it that Brantingham Pond has dried up, one day, just to see what happens.

BBC Radio Leeds were also playing the “Mandela gambit”, but at least promised to phone me back after their morning meeting on the Tuesday. I do have “form” actually, for killing off well-known public figures in the pursuit of publicity for Gez Walsh: back in 1997 I had a mass press sendout planned to promote “The Spot on My Bum”, release date set for 1st September that year. On  the evening of 31st August 1997,  however, Henri Paul decided to drive Princess Di home via the Pont D’Alma. The rest is history, as, indeed, was my press release, unfortunately. 

I am no stranger to the world of media priorities. I remember once when I was appearing on a show on Radio Sheffield where we discussed the week’s news topics, and the host handed me a list of the authorised BBC news agenda topics which we were permitted to discuss. He didn’t actually say that going off piste would result in me being faded out by the producer, but the inference was there. 

However, I digress. The day dawned, and Tuesday found me madly tweeting a link to the press release on our web site to all the presenters on Look North, Radio Leeds, Calendar and the journalists on the Yorkshire Post and the Yorkshire Evening Post. I then did a blanket search on Twitter for anything related to Leeds and sent them it as well. I may even have sent one to Leeds Castle, which is in Kent. Oh well.  Radio  Leeds did turn up, did an interview, and took some footage, which ended up on their Facebook page. 

Look North did actually send a static camera, but when Elaine, Gez’s colleague, approached the guy and asked if he was up for an interview, he just said “No”, turned his back on her, and stomped off, apparently. They didn’t use the footage, preferring to concentrate that night on devoting a large proportion of the programme to their performance at the Royal Television Society awards. Right, fine, good.  The Yorkshire Post apparently wrote a two-sentence piece on it, which I have been unable to find anywhere on line.

It sort of makes you think that the kids would have got more coverage if they had lived up to the stereotype everybody has of them, stabbed a passer by, then nicked the BBC Leeds Radio Car and burnt it out somewhere. 

Meanwhile, oblivious of the chaos he was causing, Nelson Mandela stubbornly started recovering.  After the flash mob was over, I sent Gez a text that said “OK, Nelson, you can let go now!” He didn’t reply at my feeble attempt at cheering him up, because I guess, like me, he was pissed off at the way it all panned out.  I don’t know why I should be so surprised. It was just a reminder of the media’s priorities, and that bad news is always more newsworthy than good news, which is why nearly every Look North bulletin starts with a car crash and then goes on to feature a tragic toddler dying of something incurable and hard to spell.

There was plenty of bad news around this week, and you didn’t have to look far for it. It was plastered all over the media on Wednesday, in the form of George Osborne’s spending review statement, including the announcement that benefit claimants would be forced to learn English (or "lean" English, as Andrew Selous MP unfortunately tweeted).

The thing is, though, as is so often the case when you start to do a forensic analysis of the premise on which these decisions are made, you find that the story is actually quite different to that suggested by the blaring headlines in The Daily Mail.  “100,000 jobseekers forced to learn English or lose their benefits” it trumpeted on Wednesday, or thereabouts.  Suspicious of this dodgy-looking round figure, I decided to look into it. Four days later, I am still no nearer finding out where that figure comes from.  I suspect, it’s another case of the DWP having done a sampling exercise of a small data set, which has then been extrapolated by either them, or the Daily Mail, and presented of a fact which is typical of all claimants. That’s what they usually do.

On the way, I’ve discovered that there’s absolutely no strong evidence that there are hundreds of thousands of idle immigrants who can’t speak English at all, living off benefits in Britain. The most recent census data, published in March, shows that there are about 138,000 people in England and Wales who can’t speak a word of English. While you could argue that, from a social cohesion point of view, that’s still too many, nevertheless as it stands it’s 0.3% of the population. 

There are no published figures that I can discover for how many of these 138,000 are claiming benefits – it appears to be yet another of those statistics which it would be really useful to know, but which the Government, perversely, does not collect.  A DWP study published last year, however, gives a figure of 371,000 of the 5.5 million people claiming working age benefits in the UK (approx 6%) were born outside of the country – however, of a random sample of 9,000 of these, about half of the sample were found to be UK citizens. 

So once again we have a ladle full of statistics soup, which is about as meaningful in real terms as the EU sprout regulations.  It gets better – or worse, depending how you look at it.   The very same DWP study also found that those born abroad were significantly less likely to claim benefits than those born in Britain.  The then employment minister, Chris Grayling, a man who probably spends his spare time sticking pins into wax models of asylum seekers, was forced to admit, grudgingly and possibly through clenched teeth, "We've yet to establish the full picture. It may be that there isn't a problem right now." But you won’t see that in 72pt bold on the front page of the Daily Mail.

So this suggests that only a very small proportion of the 138,000 non-English speakers are likely to claim benefits. And of those, an even smaller proportion are likely to fail to turn up to classes when required to do so. Plainly, the figures, and the announcement, are bollocks. But it’s bollocks that has done its job, because who, apart from nitpicky warty old cynics like me, is going to bother to unpick all this tissue of crap and expose the vapid bogus appeal to dog-whistle politics which is what it’s really all about? Certainly not the people who post on Facebook things like “stop all there [sic] benefits and send them all home”.  When it comes to addressing the constituency of people who think a homophone is something Graham Norton uses to ring up Gok Wan, the government’s work is done. 

It’s possible, of course,  that the measure is not aimed at a mythical group of claimants who can't speak any English at all, but at a different group whose poor English is a barrier to them getting work. They may well be “strivers” rather than “scroungers” (by the Junta’s definition, anyway) and they may well welcome the extra provision of English classes for them. But again, you won’t see that on the front age of the Daily Mail. 

And you won’t hear the Labour Party point it out, either, since they have entirely conceded the argument, and the battleground, to the Tories.  George Osborne stood up in Parliament this week and announced that in 2015 we are giving Belgium £1M to help do up the site of the Battle of Waterloo in time for the 200th anniversary.  This, for me, was a genuine WTF? moment.  We’re closing libraries and museums, we can’t afford to keep the lights on, local council services are being decimated, and we’re giving away a million pounds for this? I know that, in government expenditure terms, a million pounds is chickenfeed, and I am the first to argue for the importance of the study of history, but even so. A million pounds. 

And, to make matters worse, he used it as an excuse to make a cheap political point about Labour, which wasn’t even very funny. I don’t think I have ever hated the odious little squit as much as I did at that moment, and had there been a house-brick within reach,  right there, right then, the TV screen would now be a smoking heap of broken glass. 

The Labour Party, meanwhile, just sat there like puddings and took it.  It’s beginning to look to me like they’ve already conceded the 2015 election, either deliberately or accidentally, by saying that, after the next election, they will be more Tory than the Tories. If we really had been discussing the Battle of Waterloo, the current Labour attitude to opposition is like Wellington and Blucher turning up to fight Napoleon, each wearing a silly hat, each with their hands stuffed in their waistcoats, and the other arm round a girlfriend called “Josephine”. 

The next day, the salt of the cuts was rubbed further into our wounds, by the announcement of the Queen’s pay rise.  Now, I'm a monarchist. I believe in the idea of a monarchy - amongst other reasons because it's a constitutional bulwark against the idea of having (for instance) President Thatcher, President Blair or President Cameron. I also think that as a person, the present Queen has dedicated her entire life to her duty as she sees it, and she should be acknowledged and given respect for that.

BUT

I'm afraid, in an era when the government is waging all-out war on the poor, the ill and the disadvantaged, and we're all being told that we've got to eat bread and scrape for a decade to come, or lump it, the sort of funding increases announced this week, coming a day after that braying jackass Osborne announced further plans to wreck the economy and make people's lives a misery, is, putting it frankly, taking the piss. Once could almost say, the Royal Wee. 

As far as Labour is concerned, I despair.  This week, I happened to catch Ken Loach’s film, Spirit of ’45, on Film 4, a semi-documentary about the formation of the Welfare State by political giants such as Clement Attlee and Nye Bevan.  It should be required viewing for the current Labour front bench, particularly Ed Miliband and Ed Balls. On a loop. Til they get the message.  Or until their eyes start to bleed, whichever is the sooner.

And so we came, eventually, at the end of a fraught week, to Sunday.  There are in fact a number of saints and similar holy men and women commemorated on 30 June. For a start, it is the Feast of the Holy Martyrs.  These are also called “The Protomartyrs of Rome” Accused of setting fire to Rome by Nero (a man who knew what he was talking about in the pyromania stakes)  some of them were burned as living torches at Nero’s evening banquets, some were crucified, and some were fed to wild animals.  So you blame someone for something which is actually your fault, then devise novel and bizarre ways of bumping them off. I believe the DWP and ATOS have been taking notes.  

However, other than their rather grisly mode of demise, there isn’t really a lot to say about them.  So I started to look more widely, for a more relevant, more well-documented saint whose feast day is 30 June, and came up with St Airick.  Despite sounding rather like an air freshener,  St Airick is at least an English saint. It turns out that he is also known as St Aelric, or even in some cases, St Eric.

For the sake of avoiding any more confusion, I’m going to refer to him as St Aelric, because apart from anything else, “St Eric” is going to get mixed up with St Goderic or St Godric, whose story is entwined with that of St Aelric, as we shall see.  In fact, St Aelric’s chief claim to fame is that he was St Godric’s companion, or rather St Godric was his.  In fact, St Godric was St Aelric’s deathbed companion, in the 12th Century.

There isn’t actually as much in the way of information about St Aelric as I had first thought – but I did find an online prayer forum, where you could make and upload an online prayer to St Aelric.  Once you have formulated your prayer, you then have to fill in an anti-spam “captcha” before you can click on "submit", because obviously, St Aelric gets lots of spam, and he has to make sure you’re not selling him Viagra, fake Rolexes, or payment protection insurance

The friendship between St Aelric and St Godric was based at Wolsingham, in what is now County Durham.   St Aelric was actually born in Norfolk, however, so there’s always the outside chance that he went from Walsingham to Wolsingham, which would be neat, and possibly even funny, in a strangely muted sort of a way.  In medieval times, Wolsingham was apparently a holy place, as well as being the home to Aelric and Godric, who also founded Finchale Abbey. The town is even recorded as the site of a miracle, where a young girl was killed in an accident involving a horse but her life was miraculously  restored. Apparently, however, if you go to Wolsingham today and look for Holy Wood, all you will find it is the site of an executive housing estate.

In many ways, St Godric is actually a lot more interesting than St Aelric. He’d already done many pilgrimages round the Mediterranean before he went to live with St Aelric.  It was on his return to England that he went to live with St Aelric, for two years.  After Aelric’s death, Godric made one last pilgrimage to Jerusalem, where he arrived at the Temple Mount and took off his shoes, swearing never to wear sandals again, and returned home barefoot.  Back in County Durham once more, Godric persuaded Ranulf Flambard, the Prince-Bishop of Durham, to allow him to live as a hermit at Finchale, next to the River Wear. There he remained, allegedly, for sixty years, and the local prior obligingly “screened” his visitors and only let through the ones Godric wanted to see, though these did apparently include St Thomas A Becket (then just plain Thomas Becket) and Pope Alexander III, if tradition is to be believed. 

Finally, if St Godric is not your particular cup of holy tea, and you are still looking to wring the last drop of anything vaguely spiritual out of my ramblings, then you could always reflect on the fact that according to the Lexicon and the Book of Common Prayer, this is also the Sixth Sunday after Pentecost and green vestments are in order, if you feel like dressing up. 

I must admit, I don’t feel very spiritual, these days. I’ve become embroiled again in what Yeats called “the foul rag and bone shop of the heart” or “the fury and the mire of human veins” – but what is the alternative? Are we supposed to turn a blind eye to the suffering and the anger and the injustice, and just go on chanting a Te Deum? What do we do about the abandoned animals chucked out of cars because their owners can’t afford the food and vet bills? What do we say to the single mother whose benefit has been cut? What do we say to the queues outside the food banks? – Don’t worry, you’ll get your reward in heaven? Well, that’s as maybe, but if the meek are going to inherit the earth, I’d like to see them start to get their fair share pretty damn soon now, thank you very much. It would be nice if they didn’t have to die first. I believe in life before death. Probably more, these days, than I do in an afterlife.

Despite which, dead people have been on my mind this week; one dead person in particular, the FESG who I wrote about two blogs ago. I don’t know why she is haunting me so much right now.  Well, actually, I think I do. It’s not haunting in the COTEP sense of the word, prickles down the back of your neck, look up and see a ghostly face pressed against the windowpane type of haunting. It’s because I think I have projected on to her all of my regrets, my fury and my frustration at no longer being able to do stuff that I used to do, and she’s become a sort of symbol, a rebus that stands for all of that loss and regret. I suppose that’s better on blaming it on a living person (not that blame is the right word, really) and at least if she’s no longer with us (at least in this dimension) then no one who is currently alive can feel threatened by it or unjustly compared to.

Methought I saw my late espoused saint,

As Milton said:

Came vested all in white, pure as her mind:
Her face was veil'd, yet to my fancied sight
Love, sweetness, goodness in her person shin'd
So clear, as in no face with more delight.
But O as to embrace me she enclin'd
I wak'd, she fled, and day brought back my night.

I suppose anyone who insists on sitting up late at night listening to Harvest by Neil Young, and reading the manuscript of a ghost book which has been submitted this week, is bound to get these sort of feelings, now and then.  Nothing to see here, folks, move along.

As well as looking back, something I do lots of these days, I am also looking forward to next week, because it seems, during the time that I was writing this Epiblog (in my head, over the last few days) that one intractable and long standing problem which has beset us for 18 months or so may actually be moving towards a conclusion. Tiggy’s successor. The more astute of my readers will have noticed that the picture at the top of this particular blog is not actually St Aelric, but a small female collie dog called Misty, and we believe that she may be coming to live with us, and to be our next dog, following a visit today when we went to see her at the collie dog sanctuary. Nothing much is known about her; she was found tied up with wire by the side of a road. But the people at the Freedom of Spirit Trust for Border Collies rescued her and took her in, and - to be honest, considering that she has every right to snarl with anger at the raw deal she's had from us humans up to that point - she has a really sweet nature.

She wouldn’t be a candidate for a pet of ours unless there was something odd about her, and in her case, it is that she suffers from the genetically inherited condition of heterochromia – her eyes are two different colours, one brown, one blue.  So, in terms of “her song”, we have a choice between “Play Misty for Me” and “Don’t it Make My Brown Eyes Blue”.  Still, David Bowie suffers from the same thing and it hasn’t done him any harm. Plus, if they ever do reintroduce the dog licence, she’ll be cheaper, because she’s black and white.

I have kept relatively quiet about this, because on the last couple of occasions when I’ve blithely announced that it looks like we’ve got a new dog, it’s all gone pear-shaped at the last moment. Indeed, things with Misty could still suffer a slip in the cup/lip interface department. But, as of tonight, we’re quietly hopeful.

Anyway, another week beckons, and we’ll be needing a reference from our vet, and so on, and so on.  But she’s a sweet little dog, and she jumped up into the camper van and made herself at home today, as if she already lived there.  It might just be the start of another era. She’ll never be another Tiggy, but then we wouldn’t want her to try and be anything other than herself, and she’s different enough for it to make a difference, if you see what I ‘m getting at.

In the meantime, would you believe, it’s somehow got to be the last day of June, and – because of the visit to see Misty today – I haven’t done any gardening, apart from to water everything.  There is a time to weep, and a time to mourn, and a time to rejoice, and the wheel goes round and comes full circle. A time to laugh and a time to cry, like the song says. And sometimes, like today, a time to maybe do a bit of both, on the quiet.  And who knows where the time goes, eh? Who knows where the time goes?

Epiblog for the Feast of St Audrey

It has been a busy week in The Holme Valley.  A week of comings and goings.  Although we haven’t always been blessed with sunshine, at least it’s been warm, something for which my knees have been duly thankful. It’s even got to the stage where, on a couple of nights, I had to throw the duvet off because I was too warm, something which would have seemed unthinkable back in the depths of winter (ie March) when the whole country was a deep-frozen popsicle, and everywhere you looked it was Narnia all the way to the horizon.

The thing that’s most disturbed my sleep pattern, however, has been the continued unholy racket from the demolition of the old units down at Park Valley Mills.  The people carrying out this work are only supposed to do it from 0730 hours to 1730 hours, but this stricture, which the council seems unable to enforce, despite repeated complaints, doesn’t prevent  the morons from starting up a jackhammer at 6.45AM and carrying on until past 6 in the evening. 

On the mornings when they (invariably) wake me up just as I am drifting off to sleep having finally got my hips and knees into a comfortable position, I usually lie there praying for an industrial accident to bring the site to a halt. Nothing serious, no deaths or anything like that, just something that involves the Health and Safety Executive shutting down the operation for 18 months or so.  Sadly, so far, my evil vibes are having no apparent effect, so the next thing is to start sticking pins into a wax model of a dumper truck, I guess.

Anyway, it’s been hot. Damn hot, Carruthers. Hot and humid.  Not as humid as back home in Darwin – Uncle Phil’s home, anyway, where he informed us there’s a night-time low of 24dec C.  But still, we agreed, humid for Huddersfield, in the same way that having an extra toe is “normal for Norfolk”.

Talking of incest, Matilda has managed to avoid any further aquatic adventures, although she still looks a little grubby around the undercarriage from the dried mud which clung to her fur after her previous misadventure. She’s taken to flopping out on the decking, or sometimes on the cool soil of the semicircular flower-bed next to Debbie’s plastic deckchair in the garden.  Other than that, she has had a relatively blameless, uneventful week, though she is definitely a cat that decides when and where she will be furfled, under her own terms. Over-familiarity or excessively-prolonged tickling on the tumjack, for instance, is met eventually with hisses and claws, however much she might have rolled over invitingly and squeaked her approval in the first place. Mind you, I’ve known some girls like that.

When it has been hot and sunny, it’s reminded me of the description of July weather from The Once and Future King, by T H White. 

It was July, and real July weather, such they had in Old England. Everybody went bright brown, like Red Indians, with startling teeth and flashing eyes. The dogs moved about with their tongues hanging out, or lay panting in bits of shade, while the farm horses sweated through their coats and flicked their tails and tried to kick the horse-flies off their bellies with great hind hoofs. In the pasture field, the cows were on the gad, and could be seen galloping around with their tails in the air.

Zak and Freddie came to stay on Thursday, as Granny and Uncle Phil departed southwards that day, on a massive round trip to see all the extended family relatives in the South of England, a journey taking in Wiltshire, Southampton, Portsmouth, Eastbourne, and then home via Cambridge. Assuming they get back under their own steam, rather than on an AA low-loader, we expect them to return next weekend.  Meanwhile Grandad has been exercising Zak (or possibly vice-versa) and Freddie has been allowed to opt out on days when his poor old leggies will only allow him to totter into the garden.  So far the dogs haven’t moved around with  their tongues hanging out, but they have been lying around panting, especially Freddie, who finds hot weather bothersome.

Of the remainder of my self-selecting menagerie, I have little to report. Brenda is still coming, we assume, though with the short nights and the late sunsets at this time of year, we reckon it must be around 2AM and none of us has the energy to stay up in order to confirm this. All that we can say for certain is that something creeps up the steps from the garden in the middle of the night and eats the combination of peanuts and leftovers which I put out on the decking each evening. For all I know, it could be the neighbours.

Likewise, the birds seem to have largely forsaken my offerings, apart from the jay(s) who persist in hanging around and bothering me for peanuts, and the small tits (Google spider, please note) on the hanging bird-feeders. I don’t know what happened to that tatty little Robin who used to hop around. Do Robins migrate? He’d managed to survive all winter, the cold and the icy blast, he'd lost a few feathers, and he was a proper little ragamuffin. Maybe he’s hibernating, or whatever Robins do in the summer, or he’s got a contract to pose for Christmas cards or something. I miss him, though. Some days last winter, his was the only friendly face I saw.

Maisie’s efforts to get her two feral felines re-homed are still getting nowhere. In the meantime, she’s continuing to feed and water them, and is going to get the builders working on her new house to construct a cat-shelter out of left-over bricks, etc., which is probably something more permanent than many homeless humans could expect. I still fail to understand how massive organisations such as The Cats’ Protection League and the RSPCA can sit on huge piles of money at their head offices and yet the local branches are struggling, and leaving messages on the ansaphone saying that they aren’t taking any more cats, because they are full.

Maisie even offered Sunshine and Bill Sikes to me, but there’s no point, because in their present state, even assuming they could be trapped and brought over to Huddersfield, we couldn’t keep them in for weeks on end, with Matilda and the doggies to consider, and if Sunshine and Bill were to get into the garden they’d be down in the woods out back before you could say “Felix”, and all that effort which Maisie has put into befriending them and socialising them so far would be wasted. So – all suggestions gratefully received. All that is needed is to get them into a shelter somewhere, and get them put up for re-homing. In the meantime, Maisie bashes on, heroically, more or less on her own. And I feel sorry for them, and for her. But especially for the cats. Any cat’s death diminishes me, for I am involved in catkind. As John Donne might have said.

Speaking of temporary shelters in the garden, Debbie has been practising her camping skills and putting up a shelter made of a tarp in ours. Whereas you or I might think of a tarp as a bulky, oily thing which secures a load of wood to the back of a lorry, in fact the “tarp” scene is absolutely humming amongst the wild camping/survivalist/ outdoors fraternity.  Debbie’s tarp, which she ordered over the internet, is a special lightweight one (ie a small piece of expensive green gabardine-y material with metal eyelets as opposed to a larger, cheaper one) and came complete with an instruction DVD where a Ray-Mears-lookalike shows you how to drive your trekking pole into the ground, run a guyline from it, and anchor your tarp with tent pegs.  As I pointed out to Debbie, I remember camping with the Boys’ Brigade in bell-tents, and ever since those days, the three little words that mean so much have been “sewn-in groundsheet”.

Anyway, she is determined that next time we go off in the camper, she is going to sleep outside, in the bivvy-bag, under a tarp, rather than inside, in the bed, under a duvet. I said “Send me a postcard.” In preparation, she has also been learning how to tie knots, including all the ones which again took me back to my days in the BB, the ones with improbable names, such as “clove hitch”, “bowline on the bite”, and “sheepshagger on the bend”. If only I had met her when I was 13, she would have been the perfect girlfriend, and we could have started fires by rubbing things together.

On Friday, she decided to put all this into practice and, while I was engaged in the perfectly normal suburban activity of cooking a veg curry (mushroom Madras, if you are interested) she took her tarp into the garden, set it up, gathered some twigs, sprinkled them with Maya dust, got out her firestarting flint and tinder, lit a fire, boiled some water on it, and brewed herself a cup of tea. Yes, she’s just a firestarter, a twisted firestarter. In the middle of this, apparently one of the neighbours came out into their garden and said very loudly, wanting to be overheard, “It absolutely REEKS of cannabis out here!” before going back inside and slamming the door.  In view of this obvious mistake, I may have to go around there and break it to her that she has actually been smoking small twigs and kindling all these years, and should ask her dealer for a refund. It does, however, if true, probably explain why she is so uptight all the time.

Deb came in when it started spotting with rain, the lightweight, and also because the curry was ready. I chided her for not staying out there all night, and suggested that if she did so, she was likely to wake up and find she was sharing the bivvy-bag with a badger.  Still, I shouldn’t be too hard on her, she deserves a bit of fun. She still has no idea if the College are going to offer her any hours, come September. The whole place was in uproar on Thursday because of the lecturers striking against the “restructuring”, and Debbie got up at crack of dawn as usual to drive to Birstall to do her outreach session, only to find that some gooneybird there had told the class that it wouldn’t be taking place that day, because of the strike, and sent them all home, despite the fact that Deb herself had previously told them it definitely would! Anyway, if the work isn’t forthcoming in September, we could all be living under a “Basher” in the woods, so maybe the knot experience will come in handy after all.

In the meantime, I have once more been looking at the dog re-homing websites, conscious of the fact that, if we don’t get moving soon, we will be looking at the possibility of a dogless holiday trip in the camper, assuming that we ever get away, of course.  It is heartbreaking, though, to look at all these poor dogs in the pound,  and read their sad stories. When I had identified two or three possibles, I said to Debbie that they ought to have web sites like this for humans – then she could put me on one:

“Steven is 58 human years old, and finds himself in reduced circumstances through no fault of his own. His coat is mangy and threadbare, he can no longer go walkies, and his eyesight isn’t what it used to be. He needs a forever home with an owner who is  experienced in handling and training fat old evil-smelling drunkards.”

One of the dogs we were looking at was perfect  - at least from the description -  a collie cross called Jess.  I mentioned her to Deb and read out the blurb about her, only to discover that she suffers from “occasional post-spaying incontinence.”  Debbie replied that one incontinent person in the house was more than enough.  Does she mean me? Surely not.  Still, we may yet find ourselves driving off to Scotland in the camper, singing “Jog along Jess, hop along May” after Vashti Bunyan, except her version was “Bess”.  That song, which she wrote about setting off to the Hebrides in a gypsy caravan, with a horse and two dogs, always makes me think of us going off in the camper, especially the bit about “It’s a long road, and weary are we, bubble up kettle and make us all some tea”. In fact, I played it again while I was writing this, and was surprised to note the verse about

“There lived a dog in London town

With one ear up and one ear down”

Because the photo of Jess on the dog web site showed her in precisely that pose. Maybe it’s an omen. Spooky!

Unwanted animals overflowing the sanctuaries, unwanted people growing in number on the street.  Boris Johnson was forced to admit this week that he’d miss his targets for reducing rough sleeping in London altogether. The latest annual figures show that 6,437 people were seen rough sleeping in 2012-13, compared with 5,768 the previous year, a 13% rise year on year and an increase of 62% since 2010-11. Homelessness charities said the problem was likely to get worse as a result of cuts to welfare and local authority budgets, and called on Johnson to take action. Good luck with that.  And, as eny fule kno, the official figures are only the tip of a much larger pyramid, because they don’t take account of the people who are sofa-surfing.

In a related, and more local example, Barnsley Council has been issuing summonses for people who can no longer pay the Council Tax. Sometimes, you know, you just blink your eyes and it’s like you’re back in 1990 all over again. This time around, it’s because the welfare “reforms” imposed by the Tories and the mini-Tories have brought a whole lot of people into the realms of paying Council Tax when previously they were exempt, or had it paid for them.  Now they have to find extra funds to pay, out of a budget that in many cases is borderline anyway.

Sheffield Council is another which has, this last week, shamefully doing the Tories’ work for them, by prosecuting people who can’t pay their Council Tax, because of central Government policies.  Eric Pickles is getting a free ride at the moment, because he sits there in Whitehall, smug in his vast office,  administering his part of the death of a thousand cuts, and passing the grief of it  on to the local authorities (disproportionately more in Labour-controlled areas) and forcing them to then cut local resources and services while saying all the time “It’s nothing to do with me!”

Well it is. It’s everything to do with him, and I would like to see Councils, especially ones in Labour-controlled authorities, grow some balls for once and just pass a motion refusing to set a rate, in the same way as Hatton did in Liverpool in the 1980s. Instead of tacitly agreeing to Tory cuts at one remove, send a message back that enough is enough. If we have to have temporary chaos in local government in order to hand the problem straight back to Pickles and wipe the smug grin off his face, so much the better.  Like lancing a boil, the sooner it’s done, the sooner it’s over.

I would just like to say, though, how especially disappointing I found Barnsley Council’s attitude, in particular, although it didn’t surprise me. Barnsley Council are the people who caused me to be arrested and held in a police cell for half a day back in 1992 for non payment of the Poll Tax.  I’d like to say it was a wholly political act, not paying, but in fact it also stemmed in part from the break-up of my then relationship and the financial difficulties which ensued from this. Not that this stopped Barnsley Council from sending its licensed goons, in the form of Rossendale Certified Bailiffs (one of the many bloated cancers that has grown fat on the grimy arse of local government finance policy) to bang on my door at 11 O’clock at night to shout “MR RUDD, I HAVE A WARRANT FOR YOUR ARREST” through the letterbox. They also pretended at first to be police officers, which I think is actually, sort of, er, kind of illegal.

As it was, I didn’t open the door to them, but agreed to voluntarily surrender myself at a police station the next morning, which I duly did, after first making arrangements for someone to feed Russell and Nigel in case I didn’t come back.  I was arrested and cautioned, and told I would appear before the Magistrates. After most of a day in the cells, I was given the opportunity to buy my freedom by writing a cheque for the arrears, which I did. Fortunately the bank didn’t bounce it, even though there was no money in the account, or I would, presumably, still be languishing in that very cell, or one like it. But it left me with an overdraft that took three years eventually to clear completely. So, I have no love at all for the fat burghers of Barnsley.  Mahogany from the neck up.  And now they’re helping the Tories to grind the faces of the poor and disadvantaged. Like they need any help.  I don’t know how many Councillors there are on Barnsley Council, but from what I remember, the railings round the Council Offices have quite a lot of spikes on them. One Councillor’s head on each of those spikes would be my idea of a "poll" tax.

Nothing much seems to have changed since 1936, when George Orwell mentioned Barnsley Council’s grandiose marble headquarters in “the Road to Wigan Pier”

‘The foundation stone was laid on Thursday, 21st April, 1932, by the then Mayor, Councillor R. J. Plummer, and the building was formally opened by H.R.H. the Prince of Wales, K.G., on Thursday, 14th December, 1933… from the designs of Messrs. Briggs and Thornley, Architects, Liverpool. The Contractors were Messrs. T. Wilkinson and Sons, of Sheffield (foundation); Mr. Chas. Smith (stonework up to ground floor); Messrs W. Thornton and Sons, Liverpool (super-structure.) The cost of the site (including demolition) was £12,445; the cost of the building was £136,252.  From “The Official Guide to Barnsley”, issued by the authority of the Barnsley Town Council. NB. that total cost of new Town hall was £148,697 and was incurred at a time when the town admittedly needed over 2000 houses, not to mention public baths.

Still, at least the Church of England has once more proved it is a far more effective and hard-hitting opposition than the Labour Party, when Archbishop John Sentamu said this week that tax avoidance is like robbing God.  One obvious solution would be for John Sentamu to be our next prime minister, and for Ed Miliband instead to become Archbishop of Canterbury a job for which his constant havering and prevarication make him eminently suitable.

Ed Miliband has recently declared that there will be “no return of the Labour greybeards” if he wins in 2015. A senior Labour source said there were no plans whatsoever to bring back veteran former ministers. “There will be no return of the greybeards,” the source declared. “Ed wants to put across a message of change as we head for 2015.” Given that the “change” he has in mind is to be more like the Tories than the Tories, I don’t think he needs to worry. I can feel the electoral apathy from here. The Labour Party, however, should be thinking about who its next leader might be, if they aren’t going to do the obvious thing and ask John Sentamu, although I suspect our next Labour Prime Minister is currently still at school. Sadly.

The more I see of politicians and politics in general, the more I am becoming convinced that they are not only all evil and corrupt, but that they are also all dangerously-deluded fantasists as well.  Twenty or thirty years after we first armed the Taleban in Afghanistan, as a power play against the might of the then Soviet empire, and in the process, created a power base for Islamic fanaticism which was subsequently turned back against us, it turns out we are finally talking to them, or at least attempting to. 

The justification from the politicians for the needless deaths of British and US personnel in that benighted conflict is apparently that there have been no terror threats directly from Afghanistan since our invasion in 2002. No, because they now come from Reading and Leeds instead, and from Somalia and from Mali, and from Pakistan, and from anywhere, in fact, where our actions in Afghanistan have radicalised yet more idiots to acts of hate.  To pretend that there is no link is either stupid, wilfully misleading, or criminally negligent and uncaring. Or all of the above. And we’re about to create another nest of vipers by giving arms to the Syrian rebels in the same way as we initially armed the Taleban all those years ago.  No wonder Marlene Dietrich sings “when will they ever learn?”

And so we came to Sunday, and the feast of St Ethelreda. St Ethelreda is also, rather confusingly, St Audrey, for those who like to confuse foreigners with idiosyncratic English spellings and pronunciation.  She actually started out as Æthelthryth (or Æðelþryð) and was probably born in Exning, near Newmarket in Suffolk, in about 636AD. She was one of four daughters of Anna of East Anglia, all of whom became founders of religious institutions, which has to be some kind of family record. Through her other she belonged to the splendidly-named dynasty of the Wuffingas, the ancient kings of East Anglia, though most of their records, being kept in the monasteries in the region, were destroyed in the Danish incursions prior to the Norman conquest.

Æthelthryth made an early first marriage in around 652AD, when she would have been only 16, to Tondberct, chief or prince of the South Gyrvians. The “Gyrvians” was just another word for the “Fenmen”. She managed to persuade her husband to respect her vow of perpetual virginity that she had made prior to their marriage. Once more, I have to observe, we’ve all met girls like that. I was going to type we’ve all “come across” girls like that, until I realised it was probably inappropriate in the circumstances.

Upon his death in 655AD, she retired to the Isle of Ely, which she had received from Tondberct as a gift. She was subsequently re-married, however, in 660AD, at a more matronly age of 24, this time for largely political reasons, to Ecgfrith, King of Northumbria. Unfortunately for both parties, Ecgfrith wasn’t such a strong believer in vows of perpetual virginity, and, despite having apparently originally agreed to the idea, by 672AD, at which time she would have been 36 and (in Saxon terms) getting on a bit, he decided he’s rather have a bit of ye olde rumpy-pumpy and attempted to enlist the help of St Wilfred, then just plain Wilfred, Bishop of York, to persuade her to change her mind. When this failed, he attempted to remove her from her cloister by force, causing her to flee back to Ely with two of her faithful nuns. She was saved from the attentions of her pursuing husband by either a miraculously high tide which lasted for seven days, or a miraculously-growing ash-tree which sprung from her staff when she planted it in the ground, depending which improbable legend most appeals to you.

Ecgfrith eventually got fed up and went and married someone else, a woman called Eormenburg, and expelled Wilfrid from his kingdom in 678AD. According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Æthelthryth, meanwhile, founded a double monastery at Ely in 673AD, which was later destroyed in the Danish invasion of 870AD.

St Æthelthryth eventually died of an enormous and unsightly tumour on her neck, which she gratefully, and rather sportingly, in the circumstances, accepted as Divine retribution for all the necklaces she had worn in her early years. Throughout the Middle Ages, a festival, called "St. Audrey's Fair", was held at Ely on her feast day. The exceptional shoddiness of the merchandise on offer there, especially the neckerchiefs and lace-work, contributed to the English language the word "tawdry",  which is a corruption of "Saint Audrey." Having said that, at this time, the Puritans of eastern England had a downer on anything lacy, as being a bit too flamboyant, in any case.

The modern shrine of St. Æthelthryth, containing the relic of her hand, is at the Roman Catholic Parish church in Ely, St. Etheldreda's. Originally when her grave was relocated some years after her death, by her sister, Seaxburh, the body at that time was found to be uncorrupted, and the clothes intact. She was re-buried, at that point, in a white Roman sarcophagus which had been appropriated for the purpose from the ruins at Grantchester, primarily because it looked to be about the right size. Oh well, waste not, want not.

Quite what I am supposed to take from the life of St Audrey is still unclear to me.  Avoid sub-standard neckwear, I suppose.  The obvious lesson is that we’re supposed to admire her purity and her vow of perpetual virginity.  Well, good for her, the little goody two-shoes. It reminds me of the time an interviewer once said to me, publishing your first book must have been the most exciting day of your life, and I replied “you obviously weren’t there the day I lost my virginity!”

The theological equation is of virginity with purity, but it’s often seemed to me that such a straightforward interpretation concentrates almost exclusively on physical purity, and ignores spiritual purity. Some of the nastiest, most vacuous people I have ever met have probably been virgins, or very near offer, whereas I have known more than one person of – shall we say – questionable conventionally moral virtue in the physical department, who nevertheless was very kind to me and treated me well. Sort of taking a pattern from Mary Magdalene, I suppose. Nor should we confuse chastity with fidelity. Fidelity means different things to different people, and like all morality, is composed of shades of grey, and different strokes for different folks. Being an old hippy, I tend to  think what counts is whether or not you increase the overall amount of love in the world.

Anyway, that’s another week gone, and with it, the midsummer solstice. Now, of course, it’s just a long, slow, gradual decline into autumn and winter again, with the days getting shorter. The rain from last week’s showers has already knocked most of the petals off the clematis. However, we’re not through with summer yet, we may have some more fine days before we have to batten down the hatches. Spookily enough, this week, at the height of midsummer, with the summer breeze blowing through the trees, my next hospital appointment letter arrived, with an appointment for a clinic on December 19^th.  Two days before the next solstice, when the days are short and the “nichts are lang and mirk” as the song has it. 

Each day I wake up takes me a day nearer that date of course, and I mark it by punching out my daily doses of medication through the advent calendar of their foil packaging. This always assumes that I don’t decide to have an early Christmas and take them all at once.  I don’t like to think that far ahead. Apart from anything else, the amount of work potentially contained in those twenty-four weeks makes my head spin.  And not only the work, but the decisions I have to make, on which many things depend. Christmas is coming. It’s a long road, and weary are we.

Decisions, decisions; starting with the decision of how and where we go off in the camper van this summer.  Last year, owing to a combination of my hubris, bad choices, and the ineptitude of the cattery, Kitty died, so I’m not overly anxious to repeat any of the experiences of that holiday.  Sitting here typing this on a wet Sunday in the Holme Valley, with the omnibus edition of The Archers warbling away in the background,  listening to the rain steadfastly plopping into Brenda’s empty dish, just outside the door, and the drips from the overarching, wind-moved trees rattling down onto the conservatory roof, it seems, to be honest, like summer has already fast-forwarded; I’m finding it difficult to hold in my mind the vision of the ribbon of road leading ahead and the huge green mountains and the blue sky and the sun sparkling on Kilbrannan Sound, and making it look like the Adriatic, and the heat-haze wobbling the thick air.  Still, the cuckoo calls the seafarer to the whale-road, and I daresay we’ll end up going somewhere, even if it’s only a wet weekend at Walney. The way I feel right now, I’d count it a success if we ended the holiday with the same number of live pets as we started it.  In the meantime, today, I’m going to potter around and re-pot some herbs, and take some time out to say goodbye to summer, with all its fleeting sweetness.  But first, I’m going to pot some tea. I’m afraid that’s the best, and only, pot in the house!  Bubble up, kettle.

Epiblog for the Feast of St Benno

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley.  Sadly, summer didn’t last, so we’ve moved to a succession of showery, unsettled days where it’s hot and bright one minute and then peeing down the next.  Before the weather deteriorated and started to get holes in it, I did manage a full afternoon of gardening last Sunday, potting out various herbs into larger containers, planting out some of the strawberries which Jan, my erstwhile physio, left for us, and generally tidying up the decking.

I re-planted two of last year’s tubs, this time around with Lobelia and one with Trailing Verbena, but this time (having learned my lesson when we went on holiday last year and everything drowned in the torrential monsoon while we were on Arran) I’ve taken the precaution first of punching a row of six holes in the back of each rectangular tub, to promote drainage, using a bradawl and a lump hammer. I bet Monty Don has never gardened using a bradawl and a lump hammer.

There’s still a long way to go, though. Gardening is one of those activities where every task you accomplish prompts six other, new, dependent tasks.  In the end, I was thwarted in my attempts to get all the tubs and planters re-planted, not by lack of plants or lack of tubs, but by lack of soil, and it had got too late in the day to ask Debbie to go and fill a wheelbarrow full from the garden.  Still, there’s always next Sunday.

Matilda has been complaining loud and long about the rain, whenever she gets caught outside in a shower. I have told her that there’s no point in complaining to me, I don’t control the weather, and if I did, it would be warm and sunny all day long, but she doesn’t listen.  It only takes a few raindrops to bring her little face to the conservatory door, mewing to be let in.

On Monday morning, Uncle Phil and Granny had departed for Edinburgh, on the next stage of his royal progress through our island realm, and Debbie had gone off teaching in Dewsbury. All was peace and calm until Matilda decided, true to her dim-and-distant-incest-cat genes, to fall in the garden pond.  She came in absolutely filthy and bedraggled with mud and that green stuff that floats on stagnant water, and I spent the next three hours trying to entice her to come near enough to me for me to be able to clean her and dry her with kitchen roll.  This process was complicated by several things – firstly, that I was in a wheelchair and she wasn’t, and secondly, that she would come near enough to allow herself to be touched for a short while, then it was like a switch flipped in her head and she suddenly realised that she was being petted in a place and/or manner she disapproved of, and the purr changed to a hiss and a growl, and she lashed out at me.  Fortunately she only caught me once, but after that I had to give up and go and wash and clean the bloody scratches.

So, dear reader, if you fancy a diverting afternoon of pointless activity which not only wastes your time and leaves you nursing a physical injury, I recommend getting hold of a wheelchair from somewhere, sitting in it, then  trying to clean mud off a cat that doesn’t want to be caught and cleaned.

Matilda was on my mind for other reasons as well. Until the weather took a nosedive on Thursday, Debbie was vaguely talking about getting off for a couple of days (Friday and Saturday nights) in the camper. This would have necessitated getting in touch with The Doggy Nanny to come and feed her while we were away, since there were no other options, and it fell to me to contact her and ask about her availability. The only problem was I couldn’t remember her phone number, so was reduced to Googling. For some reason, I had it in my mind that she was called Katie Holmes, when she is actually called Katie Porter. Don’t ever Google for “Katie Holmes Doggy” or at least not with safe search turned off.

Brenda came by on Monday night for her badger repast; in fact, I think she’s been most nights, though because the gloaming is still glimmering until after 10PM at the moment, I suspect she waits until one or two o’clock in the morning. This is what happened last year, she started coming later and later, and then we didn’t see her in the autumn at all.

Tuesday was  cooler, with rain. I was doing accounts, so I didn’t really care. In fact, I find it easier doing accounts when the weather is foul; at least it means I’m not sitting there fiddling with spreadsheets when everyone else is out enjoying the sun, as often seems to be the case. Eventually, I got to the stage where I needed a break, so I went and did something more fulfilling instead – composting. I had been meaning for some time to see if I could construct a small composter out of a used water-bottle from the camper.

These 5-litre water bottles tend to stack up because we buy them when we’re away and there’s only so much water you can carry around in a camper van – anyway, I cut the bottom out of one of them and turned it upside down, then filled it with some cabbage stalks and a mouldy onion and a cucumber that had gone a bit manky, just to get it going – plus a  generous leavening of dead stalks and root matter from last year’s dead herbs. Then topped it up with water and a dash of Tomorite, and left it to cook. The idea is that when it’s all mulched down, I can unscrew the cap and drain off the liquid, then turn it upside down, tip out the gunk, and dig it in.

On Thursday, the week took a nosedive. Yet more accounts, and the invoicing problem still not solved. Meanwhile, Zak ate Matilda’s food. Freddie ate Brenda’s food, probably because it had the remains of Wednesday’s soya mince in it, and no sooner had I admonished him and pointed him back towards his own dish, than I looked round and Zak had his head in it instead. So Brenda had to have peanuts, her usual fare. While I was replacing these, Freddie ate Zak’s food and Zak ate Freddie’s food. Matilda, meanwhile, had her food next door so she didn’t get any more nicked. Matilda did, however, seem to have become more reconciled to the weather, as I saw her sitting out on the decking in the drizzle, having a wash. I suppose it’s the cat equivalent of having a shower.

Friday morning saw me up and about early, as it was the day when the NHS was due to make its third attempt to deliver my new mattress. The two previous attempts having been aborted because they didn’t have the mattress and the one they tried to deliver was exactly the same as the soft, puddingy one they had some to take away.

9AM arrived, and, with it,  right on cue, a knock on the door. I trundled through and opened up to find a man with a clipboard and a small square parcel. Obviously not a mattress. “Oh! You’re not the bloke I was expecting,” was all I could think of to say. “No, he’s in the van. He’s training me up,” he replied.  “No, I meant the man with the mattress… oh, never mind.”  I signed for his parcel, which was in fact Debbie’s new camping stove, bought with the birthday money her Mum gave her. The mattress man arrived at lunchtime, so I could have had my lie-in after all. 

By the end of Friday I had written up six months' worth of receipts and my head was totally cabbaged. Amongst the receipts was a Nectar IOU, which I didn’t know what it was, and had to look up on the Nectar web site. [It’s a thing issued by BP garages when you don’t have your Nectar card on you, apparently.]  Amongst the “frequently asked questions” on the site was “My husband/wife/partner has died. Can I transfer their Nectar points on to my card?” Like this would obviously be at the forefront of your mind on such an occasion.

I read this out to Debbie and she was highly amused. I get the impression that the day I kark it, as soon as she has come back from dumping me in a bin bag at the gate, she’ll be going through my wallet for my loyalty cards.  As part of the discussion about Nectar and how much the accumulated points were worth, I quoted the line about “Money for nothing, and your chicks for free” to Debbie and it emerged that she always thought it was “Money for nothing and your chips for free”. She defended this bizarre mondegreen by saying that because the lyric went on to talk about “microwave ovens”, this justified the link with chips.  Despite having been married to her for almost 17 years, sometimes the crinkles of her brain are indeed a strange foreign land.

As mysterious, in fact, as the thought processes of our so called betters and leaders.  I was very depressed by a news report run by Channel 4 News about a British Jihadist who had gone to Syria to fight with the rebels and who had come home (presumably) in a box, having been killed in February in the conflict.  I was sorry not only for him, and for his family, but for what the whole farrago represented. He was obviously of the opinion that he was taking part in some form of Jihad. He thought, from the broadcast interview, that a crime against one Muslim was a crime against all Muslims, and it was his job to put that right. Clearly the man was a misguided idiot, but nevertheless, he believed what he believed, and was prepared to kill for it. This is the problem. And before we get too far up the slopes of the moral high ground about it, I suppose we should pause to reflect that if he’d been someone who’d gone off in the 1930s to Spain to fight for the Communists against fascism, we’d probably have been lauding him as some sort of intellectual martyr. As it was, we deride him as a jihadist. Either way, he’s still dead, another young life squandered by the people who pervert and twist the ideas behind religion.

And, of course, there are thousands of equally deluded, heavily-armed young men just like him, pouring into the power-vacuum in Syria. What started out as yet another “Arab Spring” moment (not that the Arab Spring has been a resounding success anyway, consisting mainly of us in the West pretending that our preferred set of unprincipled murdering bastards was better than the previous set of unprincipled murdering bastards we helped them unseat) has become a vicious proxy war with every shade of the lunatic fringe jockeying for position and vying for power, while Assad goes mad and gasses his own people.

So what do we do, as a world? What is humanity’s collective response? What do we propose to defuse the situation, so that these deluded young zealots will give up and go home, instead of blasting the crap out of each other, themselves, and any passing refugees, civilians and children? Do the US, Russia and China immediately agree to an emergency heavy multi-national UN peacekeeping force on the ground, a no-fly zone, and an immediate cease-fire on all sides to allow in humanitarian aid to begin to cope with the disastrous misery of the aftermath of civil war?

No. President Obama thinks it can all be solved by flooding the area with yet more arms, because let’s face it, there’s apparently rather a shortage of hot lead and hot heads in Syria, isn’t there? And we in the UK, or at least our ruling Junta who assumed power in May 2010, agree with them, craven sods that we are. In fact, William Hague’s been saying for months that what Syria really needs is a few more bazookas and rockets, and he’s willing to fight to the last drop of someone else’s blood.  Stick a turban on the warmongering bastard and he could be a mad Mullah. Morally, there’s no difference.

Talking of disintegrating and oppressive  regimes under pressure from all sides, the desperate floundering on the part of the government continues, and this week it’s been the turn of health and education to be to political footballs. The Health Secretary, Jeremy Hunt (insert your own jokes at this point) wants to “name and shame” surgeons who don’t want their results published as part of “patient choice”.  This nitpicking, accountancy-based approach to monitoring is typical of the myriad of “targets” and general bumph that infests the NHS.   Apart from the fact that you could, justifiably argue that the better the surgeon, the worse the results (because the really heroic, pioneering surgeons take on the really difficult cases, and don’t always succeed, whereas someone who decides only to concentrate on cruciate ligaments and nothing else is going to be right up there with a 100% success rate) I remain unconvinced that people want this sort of league table anyway -  when my bowel went ping and I almost died of peritonitis in 2010, the last thing on my mind as I lay on the settee in agony was logging on to “compare the bowel resection .com” and claiming my free bloody Meerkat; I was just glad that they whipped me into the nearest hospital, tonto pronto, and sorted me out. I still have no idea what Mr Submarine’s “success rate” is, even to this day. With me, it was 100%. Touch wood.

Then there is the fiasco over the heart surgery unit at Leeds General Infirmary.  The Tories have finally realised that several of their Yorkshire MPs might possibly have been at risk if they'd carried on pressing on into the valley of death with this unpopular policy in the run up to the next election. So they have suddenly decided that this process is "flawed" in some way and kicked it into the long grass. What's the betting that the completely new review will report after the next election? It’s great news for the campaigning families and the people who rely on the unit, but what a waste of funds, at a time when the NHS is strapped for cash. Still, it's only our money, isn't it? [See also under Stephen Hester]. In another political football fixture Michael Gove has been meddling again with GCSEs. Out goes the ABC and in comes the 1-8 grading system. Great; just what the education system needs in this country, yet another disruptive shakeup by an arriviste politician desperate to make his mark by tinkering around the edges rather than tackling the real, underlying problems. It must be all of, oooh, ten minutes since the last one!

On Saturday we lit the chiminea and sat out in the dusk, with Matilda stalking round the garden looking for hapless rodents to do in.  Debbie chose the music, so for once, instead of the John Rutter Requiem, or Officium by the Hilliard Ensemble with Jan Garbarek, we had Tracy Chapman.

Don’t you know, talking ‘bout a revolution,
Sounds like a whisper...
Standing in the welfare lines,

Waiting in the doorways of those armies of salvation…

While the music wafted backwards and forwards, I reflected on my losses over the last few years, personal and in a wider sense, as part of what humanity has lost – because each man’s death diminishes me, no man is an island, and all that jazz.  I also reflected, as I looked out on the tea lights twinkling on Russell’s mosaic, Nigel, Dusty and Kitty’s graves, and Henry the Hamster’s little obelisk, down in the dark green dusk garden, that Sunday 15 June would mark the passage of 798 years since King John was forced (in effect) to affix his Great Seal of State to the document which subsequently became known as Magna Carta, in the field on Runnymede Island, in 1215.

It was a strange moment, a bitter-sweet juxtaposition of the personal and the political.  Tracy Chapman warbling on about “poor people gonna rise up” and all the stuff I wrote last week about John Ball and the Peasants’ Revolt, all swimming around in what passes for my brain these days with the emotion at the loss of my various animal companions, that had stolen on me unexpectedly as we sat in the glowing arc of the firelight.  Did Magna Carta die in vain? As Tony Hancock once famously asked.  I’m not such an ignoramus to believe that Magna Carta was some sort of panacea in terms of our inalienable human rights, of course. Apart from anything else, because of a “loophole” in the medieval feudal system, it didn’t apply to Chester!

But nevertheless, it was a step along the road, a significant step, towards establishing some of the absolute bedrock and cornerstones of our constitution; trial by a jury of your peers, double jeopardy, and a limit on the arbitrary exercise of power by the ultimate authority.  Is it any coincidence that many of the principles which underlay Magna Carta are once again under threat? If you allowed yourself to be gloomy about it, you could be forgiven for thinking that we’re headed back towards the dark ages.  The way in which the most extreme elements on both sides are using Lee Rigby’s murder to further their own agendas and violence is only one part o this, albeit a significant one, but I’ve written before about how we’re becoming less caring, less tolerant, less compassionate, less respectful, as a society, preferring instead to indulge in “whataboutery” and “well, you hit me first” ad hominem attacks to justify our actions. We’ve fed the heart on fantasy, the heart’s grown brutal on the fare.

Iain M Banks (or Iain Banks, depending whether you knew him for his SF or his other novels) who died recently at the unfairly-early age of 59, summed it up when he said:

The point is, there is no feasible excuse for what we are, for what we have made of ourselves. We have chosen to put profits before people, money before morality, dividends before decency, fanaticism before fairness, and our own trivial comforts before the unspeakable agonies of others.

To which you could also add, weapons before welfare.

As Alfred Wainwright said of his first ever printer, Sandy Hewitson, who gave him his first break with the printing of the Pictorial Guides to the Lake District.

Good men leave a gap when they die. No one misses the other sort

Sunday brings us to the feast of St Benno. He is the patron saint of anglers and weavers, and also alliteration. His iconographic figures include a fish with keys in its mouth and a book. The reason for the fish is a legend that, upon the excommunication of Henry IV, the bishop told his canons to throw the keys to the cathedral into the River Elbe; later a fisherman found the keys in a fish and brought them to the bishop. I have to say that, after researching St Benno, the most apt alliterative adjective is “boring”.  He lived from circa 1010AD to 1106AD, and in 1066, while we were busy being invaded, he became Bishop of Meissen, in what is now modern-day Germany.  

He got heavily involved in contemporary politics and in particular the struggle between the Pope, Pope Gregory, and the Anti-Pope, Guibert. He spent a year in prison, but I guess that was par for the course in an era where making the wrong type of sign of the cross or asserting that you had a teeny tiny (note the alliteration) doubt about transubstantiation was probably enough to get your head hacked off or find your feet warmed by flaming faggots (and we’re not talking Fire Island here).

Benno was imprisoned by Henry IV, but Henry released him in 1078 on Benno’s taking an oath of fidelity, which he failed to keep. He appeared again in the ranks of the king's enemies, and was accordingly deprived of his bishopric (which sounds very painful) by the Synod of Mainz in 1085. Benno then allied himself to Guibert, the antipope supported by Henry as Antipope Clement III, and by a penitent acknowledgment of his offences, obtained both absolution and a letter of commendation to Henry, on the basis of which he was restored to his See. In 1097 he switched sides yet again, and backed Urban II as the rightful Pope.  I don’t know about his qualifications for sainthood, but if he were alive today with his constant side-switching, ducking and diving, he’d be a slam-dunk for a career in the Foreign Office, Middle East section.

Benno did have one more stab at promoting religious intolerance and disharmony, this time from beyond the grave, via people doing it in his name, at the time of his canonisation. Although Benno's sainthood had little to do with Martin Luther's call for reform, once canonized Benno became a symbol for both sides of the reforming debate: Luther reviled him in early tracts against the cult of the saints. Catholic reformers turned him into a model of orthodoxy; and after Protestant mobs desecrated Benno's tomb in Meissen in 1539, the Wittelsbach dynasty ultimately made him patron saint of Munich and Old Bavaria. So, that is boring bloody Benno, and at this point we must drop him into obscure obliteration, in an oubliette, while giving thanks that at least there isn’t a patron saint of assonance.

Sunday – today, in fact – is also Fathers’ Day, which is probably what I really wanted to write about, I now realise, having shaken off St Benno.  Probably because it’s a hangover (not necessarily in the commonly accepted literal sense of the word) from last night, and the emotional mood of sitting there and watching the dusk come down, and missing all of the people (human and furry) who were both there and not there.  In Debbie’s music choices, at one point, the CD had switched from Tracy Chapman to Marilyn Middleton-Pollock, singing My Man, by the Eagles, a song with strangely apposite lyrics, you know, the ones that go –

My man’s got it made, now he’s far beyond the pain
And we who must remain, go on living just the same…

Words which always bring memories of the time my Dad died flooding back, for me.  There are those who see death as a final curtain, and who probably believe literally that life is a case of “just go along till they turn out the lights…” I have become more and more convinced that the definition of “reality” as being anything that you can touch, kick, taste, hear, see or smell, is a very limited one, even unworkable. I so wish I had paid attention in physics and maths at school, and had I thought that, 41 years later, I might want to know more about them for religious or spiritual purposes, who knows, I might have done. But when you are sixteen, going on seventeen, you think you’re going to live for ever. 

But even with my (very) limited knowledge of such things as String Theory and alternative universes, I can still find myself believing in a scenario where what I knew as “my Dad” still exists somewhere, just out of my eyeline.  One of the phenomena which psychic researchers often identify as a precursor to some sort of supernatural experience is called COTEP. COTEP stands for “corner of the eye phenomena”, that feeling that you are being observed by someone just standing outside of the field of your peripheral vision, and if you turned your head quickly enough, at just the right moment, you’d see them.  I was getting a lot of COTEP sitting out overlooking the garden last night. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see the glow of one of my Dad’s customary cigarettes (undoubtedly the thing that finally killed him) down in the woods beyond the fence. I wouldn’t have been at all surprised to have seen Matilda accompanied by the grey ghostly shapes of other, former cats, rustling around in the hedge bottom, or crossing the lawn with a fleetness too fast to catch.

Delusional? Mentally ill? Probably, but who’s to say what’s sane and normal anyway, in a world which grows crazier by the minute?  Or perhaps the particular combination of circumstances heightened my senses to the point that I was more attuned to having that sort of experience? Is the fault in our stars, or in ourselves, Horatio?  As I’ve said before, I carry my Dad around with me in my head all the time, anyway, and I have dreams, vivid and lucid dreams, where I talk to him, often at length, and he talks to me, and we both know he’s dead, but it’s no big deal. In fact, in the last such dream, he was much more concerned about the £15 I apparently owed him!  When good men die, they leave a gap.

This coming week holds another poignant date to do with death and loss, because 18 June would have been the birthday of my first-ever-serious-girlfriend.  Whatever else you go on to do in life, whoever else you love or ally yourself to, whatever causes and people you espouse, for a boy, there’s always something special about the FESG.  If she had lived, instead of dying tragically at the age of 23 in 1980, she’d have been 56 next Tuesday. As it is, she rests in Hessle churchyard, in a sleepy little cemetery where few people bother to wander inside, though thousands pass by each day, because only the very few more modern graves are now likely to have any living descendents or relatives to go and tend them.  She dumped me (the first of many) and broke my heart long before she died, of course, but in my head she’s still sixteen-going-on-seventeen and walking up the snicket at Brough from the bus stop in her hippy coat and her long skirt and her smock, ready to meet me and greet me with a smile in a haze of Patchouli.

So, again, as the Zen masters might say, “how is she far, if you can think of her?” As long as we can think of people who have died, as long as we can keep them in our memory, then they’re still there somewhere, and you never know, you might just turn a corner of the Astral Plane and find yourself face-to-face, or turn your head quickly enough to catch a fleeting shadow fading. Like all other matters pertaining to religion, it comes down to a question of faith.  You either believe that we’re all just sort of aminated hamburgers who just stop functioning one day and decompose into gloop, or you believe that there’s something more, and the bourn from which no traveller returns isn’t actually the end of everything. When it comes to the unutterable finality of death and loss, no-one really knows, not in this life, anyway.

So, next week beckons, and with it a stack of work. No change there, then, except that it also contains Midsummer Day, the longest day, after which the days shorten and winter’s coming.  I’m always sad at its passing.  Onwards towards harvest, and we’ll remember them when the west wind blows, among the fields of barley… But there might be a few more days of summer yet, I suppose.  I’m not quite at the stage where I’m “running so fast, I’m spinning my wheels”, but you can bet I will be tomorrow.