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.