Epiblog for the Feast of St Elmo

It has been a busy half-week in the Holme Valley. We limped back from Furness at the tail end of what turned out to be - from our point of view – Blank Holiday Monday, fully expecting that we would get the camper van fixed in fairly short order on Tuesday morning, when the world opened up for business again. After all, it only needed a small “spade” type connector grafting on to the end of the existing earth lead, and then the lead re-attaching to the starter motor solenoid. What could possibly go wrong?

Well, the weather, for a start.  It plunged into a damp, dreary, depressing succession of days that made me feel once again like somehow we’d skipped summer and gone straight to October, notwithstanding that the clematis was opening yet more buds on a daily basis, only to have the petals knocked off by the rain.  However, unlike garden centres, garages are not weather-dependent, so I rang them on Tuesday morning and managed to catch Father Jack, the owner, as he was just opening up.  “We’re closed today,” he said, and I pointed out that the fact he was standing there talking to me on the phone would seem to suggest otherwise.

“Oh, I’m only here looking at a taxi. We worked all day Sunday on a massive job, so we’re shut today.” Chewing my beard with frustration, I arranged that they would recover it from the driveway on Wednesday morning instead.  Meanwhile, Matilda mournfully mewed, as she watched the piddling rain making puddles on the decking. I assured her that, if ever the day comes when I am in charge of the weather, things will be very, very different, and Yorkshire will be like California, but without the crazy people. Or should that be “and” without the crazy people? She has amused herself in the meantime by nibbling at the catmint while teetering precariously on the back of Zak’s armchair, so much so that I was obliged to move the herb in question to a more cat-inaccessible place, otherwise I could see a disaster in waiting.  So, not only do we have a cat who is a product of incest, but she has now acquired a drug habit. I suppose I should be grateful it’s only catmint, and not meow-meow.

Anyway, Wednesday morning came, as Wednesday mornings do, and Father Jack and an electrical underling in blue overalls duly appeared in the driveway, like a couple  of Shakespearean rude mechanicals from one of the later comedies, that no one has actually laughed at, apart from possibly A. L. Rowse, since 1598. They got the engine cover off, and immediately did that sharp intake of breath thing that you just know betokens very bad news of a vehicle-related nature. Mr Furness Recovery Man had told us that the connector had come off the end of the lead: a simple enough and not very costly job, that would take about twenty minutes to fix, provided you had the right sort of connector. Oh no, that would have been far too simple. The connector on the end of the earth lead was intact, the one that had fallen off was the one housed on the side of the solenoid. Result, a new starter-motor, costing £208.00. Ouch.  Still, there was no option but to get it done. Leaving it for a few days and scouring every scrapyard in West Yorkshire might have saved us £100.00, but with a thing like a starter motor it either works, or it doesn’t, and there’s no guarantees and no telling that when you get one from the scrappers, you aren’t simply replacing junk with junk.

They brought it back at teatime, just when I was in the midst of preparing Brenda’s evening repast, so I ended up having to explain to Father Jack how yes, we have a visiting badger that comes for her tea most nights and yes, I do now make a habit of putting something out for her specifically.  It was either that, or try and make out that I was planning to serve Debbie leftovers and peanuts, in a tin dog-bowl, for dinner.

He was duly amazed. “I’d love to see a badger. I’ve never seen a real one. People are very cruel to them, you know.” I told him I knew. “And does it come right up to the door?” I assured him that Brenda did, indeed, have her evening meal out on the decking outside the conservatory. I proved this by showing him the pictures of her, stored on my laptop.

“It must come up the steps, then!”

I concurred that, yes, disregarding other possible routes such as abseiling from the roof, or descending in a small badger-sized alien spacecraft, this was indeed most probably the way in which Brenda accessed her food.  As Sherlock Holmes once said to Dr Watson, when you have discounted the impossible, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truth.

“Well, I’d still love to see it!”

“You’ll have to come back at a quarter to ten one evening, then,” I replied, possibly unwisely.  Even I was now starting to tire of this badger-related discussion by this point, but fortunately, his lift arrived at that precise moment and “tooted” outside, so he went on his way, clutching his cheque, amazed, smiling and chuckling to himself and saying “Well, I never,” like Mr Tumnus wending his way back to Narnia.

Brenda has indeed been availing herself of the free cuisine this week, along with at least three jays, several squirrels, various other miscellaneous birds, and a collection of small, medium and quite large tits, bouncing and swinging on the hanging bird feeders [come on Google rankings, do your stuff!] I regaled Debbie with the tale of Father Jack’s hitherto unsuspected passion for badgers, and she said that maybe we needed an A-board outside – “Badger Watching, £25 per hour, discounts for parties!” Given the size of the bill from the garage, it’s certainly worth considering.

We suffered an animal death in the wider family this week, unfortunately, with the loss of poor little Henry, the hamster belonging to my little nephew Adam. Because they don’t have space in their garden to bury him with full hamster honours, he is going to be interred here, by Granny, who has apparently arranged an entire hamster funeral ceremony. I have racked my brains for appropriate music, but could only come up with “Tulips From Hamster Jam”, which presupposes poor little Henry the Hammy would be buried in Colin’s flower bed.  Nervous, fear-at-bay, whistling-in-the-dark joking apart, it’s the first real life-lesson for little Adam I guess, that life is sometimes not a bowl of cherries, or even a bowl of ferrets.  Sometimes the wheel is still spinning, but, if you believe Nietzsche, the hamster is dead. RIP Henry, in lux aeternam (I can never spell that).

The only other significant development on the animal front was that Maisie has managed to borrow a cat trapping crate and catch one of the two ferals living in her garden, which has now been to the vets and checked over. It was already neutered, it was female, and it wasn’t chipped. There was no real option to release it back into the wild, though Maisie is continuing to feed them both, and is talking of constructing cat shelters from upturned plastic crates.  I have reminded her once again of the old Chinese proverb, cat that starts off living in garden ends up sleeping in bed.

I have been singularly unimpressed by the way the Cats Protection League have just left her to it, and I will be making appropriate downward adjustments to any future donations in that direction if I ever get back to the stage when I am able to donate to charity again, and I’ll be taking them out of my last will and testament. It’s sad to see the CPL, a charity I’ve always supported in the past, going the same way as the RSPCA. Too many funds concentrated in head office, becoming fat and bloated and losing touch with reality and with its core objectives, to the point where its branches on the ground are so ineffectual they can’t actually help someone who needs their help. Tell me I’m wrong.  Prove I’m being too harsh, CPL, go round there and trap the other cat.

I haven’t seen anything of Freddie or Zak this week, owing to the crappy weather keeping them at home, but I’m informed they are both well and happy. In any case, most of Thursday was taken up by my hospital appointment. I’d wondered what this was about, and it turned out in the end to be my consultant following up on the recent abortive foray to Calderdale Royal where I was told that botox injections wouldn’t help unbend my knees.  The NHS was functioning at full blast as usual; the clock in the Department of Elderly and Geriatric Medicine [which, to Debbie’s continued merriment, I apparently come under the care of] was stuck at 10 minutes to 8, and I remembered, with a sudden flashback, that this is what used to happen when I was in hospital and they ran the big scanner which screwed up all the automatic clocks within range.  I’d forgotten it until then, and the sudden realisation brought home to me again all those weeks I’d spent in the place with a new immediacy.  There was some debate about whether, and how, I should be weighed, given that I couldn’t just get up and sit on the scales.

Everyone agreed that it was a pity I couldn’t. Especially me. Anyway, faced  with a choice between hoisting me and dumping me on the scale, or “forgetting” to weigh me and hoping that the doctor didn’t notice, they very wisely chose the latter.  The actual consultation went well.  As usual, I spent more time talking to this particular doctor about cricket than I did about my condition. Like me, he was horrified that England had not enforced the follow-on at Headingley, and like me, he thinks the Australians will be a different matter altogether.  Sometimes, our consultations remind me of the old joke where a patient goes to the doctor and says, “Doctor, I’ve got a cricket ball stuck up my arse!” and the doctor says “How’s that?” and the patient says “Don’t you start!”

Another hospital appointment successfully concluded, then, and some different drugs to try, to combat the pain and cramps in my legs while sleeping. The doctor said, while writing out the prescription, these will also lower your blood pressure, so you may find you go dizzy if you stand up suddenly. (I don't think that will be an issue, somehow). I can only assume he was following a script.  I noticed when he was writing out the prescription that he didn’t do the little Rx mark in one corner, which I was always told doctors put on a prescription as a prayer to Horae, the Egyptian God of health.  He hadn’t heard of it, which rather worried me. I assumed he was a real doctor, but I asked him to add it anyway, on the grounds that I needed all the help I could get!

He had decided to pursue plan B with regard to my legs, and prescribe me a drug that will relax the involuntary nervous system of my spinal cord overnight. The disadvantage is that apparently it might make me too incapacitated to even get out of bed, which is something I just can’t risk, so I have been too scared to take any of it since Thursday, and am now resigned to ringing the hospital on Monday and telling them I am too chicken to take my medicine!

In the meantime, I’ve been tending my herbs whenever the time allows, and making plans to transfer the ones that are doing very badly or very well into larger pots. I’ve already done it to the Rosemary, that was so root-bound its roots were draggling out of the holes in the bottom of the pot it came in.  I find myself lapsing into the persona of my alter ego, a 17^th Century herbalist, which is, I guess what I’d really like to be, probably called something like Aloyisius Crumbuckett.

Who, from his private garden, where
He lived reserved and austere,
As if his highest plot,
to plant the bergamot.

As Marvell wrote in An Horatian Ode Upon Cromwell’s Return From Ireland.  Although in that poem, Marvell very cleverly means exactly the opposite of what he says, since the Bergamot is also known as “The Pear of Kings”, and Marvell is very subtly saying that Cromwell has ambitions on the crown itself.  This, combined with the sympathetic portrait of Charles I on the scaffold: 

He nothing common did, nor mean

Upon that memorable scene

Could well be a reason why Marvell sent so much time out of the way at Nun Appleton, Sir Thomas Fairfax’s seat near York, as it may have been too dangerous in London! [Having said that, until and unless someone comes up with a foolproof dating of all of Marvell’s manuscripts, many of which are problematic, this must remain conjecture, although most people who have an opinion on the matter agree the Horatian Ode must have been written in the three weeks between Cromwell’s return from Ireland – the clue is in the title – and his departure northward to make war on the Scots.]

Keeping clear of London is still sound advice, even today, especially in a week when the “English Defence League” and the “British National Party” have been threatening to march through the city as a consequence of the sad death of Lee Rigby, even though the dead drummer’s family have issued a statement specifically stating that they didn’t want to see reprisals. As it turned out, on the day, far more people turned out to protest against the first day of the ill-starred and misguided badger cull, than turned out to support the EDL and the BNP, giving rise to wonderful news headlines such as:

“Far right extremists chased through London by women dressed as badgers”

Somehow, that fact that more people turned out to  support the badgers than the EDL gave me a bit of a glimmer of hope that we, the British, might just come out of this after all, without society descending into anarchy and civil war as backlash follows backlash. That, and the mixed race knitted teddies. I definitely think every kid born in the UK should be given a mixed race teddy (as described in last week’s blog) as a reminder that we are all parts of a whole, and the whole is greater than the parts.  Oh, and the fact that an EDL march on a mosque in York ended up with them being invited in for tea and biscuits, again, a very English solution to a bitter impasse.

Having said that, the remaining news which percolated through to the Holme Valley from the outside world has been almost uniformly depressing.  Over half a million people are now relying to a greater or lesser extent on food banks; the Tories floated the idea of charging people for extra GP visits, or curtailing them – and quickly scuttled back in retreat when a shitstorm of righteous protest rubbished the idea; Dumfries and Galloway Council is, meanwhile, trying to evict a woman and her severely-disabled son from a house in Stranraer which the very same council spent £60,000 converting to make it accessible for her and her kid, because she can’t afford the bedroom tax!

And the DWP has been up to its shenanigans again, declaring people fit for work who then go on to commit suicide. A group of activists has now decided that this may be illegal under the Suicide Act of 1961, which makes it an offence to intentionally procure someone’s suicide, or words to that effect, and they hope to make the DWP legally accountable. I have to say they have about as much chance of succeeding as Huddersfield Town have of winning the European Champions’ League, but at least they’re trying to fight back.

At times such as these I tend to fall back on poetry, and one poem I have found myself reading again this week is The Stare’s Nest By My Window by W. B. Yeats.  Yeats wrote the poem, using the symbol of the empty nest of the starling outside his window, after the brief and bloody civil war that followed Irish partition in the 1920s, as a passionate plea to the Irish Diaspora to return to the country and help rebuild it after the depredations of a century of famine, exile and – eventually – civil war, but it was spookily resonant, for me, of the situation we currently find ourselves in.

The bees build in the crevices
Of loosening masonry, and there
The mother birds bring grubs and flies.
My wall is loosening; honey-bees,
Come build in the empty house of the stare.

We are closed in, and the key is turned
On our uncertainty; somewhere
A man is killed, or a house burned,
Yet no clear fact to be discerned:
Come build in the empty house of the stare.

A barricade of stone or of wood;
Some fourteen days of civil war;
Last night they trundled down the road
That dead young soldier in his blood:
Come build in the empty house of the stare.

We had fed the heart on fantasies,
The heart's grown brutal from the fare;
More Substance in our enmities
Than in our love; O honey-bees,
Come build in the empty house of the stare.

I don’t know how we’re going to do it, but, metaphorically speaking, I do feel we too need Yeats’s solution – the metaphorical honey bees of regeneration. A swarm in May is worth a load of hay, a swarm in June is worth a silver spoon, as the old saying goes.

And so we came to Sunday. Casting around for a suitable saint whose feast day falls today, I first lit upon St Bodfan, but despite his reassuringly silly name, he didn’t really live up to expectations. He died in the seventh century and was the patron saint of Ahern, in Gwynedd, Wales. His chief (and only) claim to fame is that he allegedly saw the formation of Beaumaris Bay in a natural inundation, and became religious as a result of this. There’s not a lot to do on Anglesey, so this tale may well be true.

Further research, however, produced the much more promising St Elmo.  Now, you are going to have to bear with me for a minute here, while I get my Elmos in a row.  There are two St Elmos, you see, both of whom started out as St Erasmus. Erasmus of Formiae, and Erasmus of Antioch.  Both got their names shortened to Elmo (or, even more confusingly, Ermo, on occasions) and their lives got so mixed up that in some early accounts they all get rolled into one, so at one minute “our” St Elmo was being persecuted by the emperor Diocletian in Rome, and the next minute he’s morphed into the “other” St Elmo, and is living as a hermit on Mount Lebanon and being fed by ravens.

Untangling the two Elmos was already a hell of a job, before Jim Henson came along and created a third Elmo, a large fluffy orange muppet in Sesame Street. For the purposes of disambiguation, I’m going to disregard him altogether, even though he is possibly the more lovable of the three. There is also Erasmus of Rotterdam, of course, who is also absolutely nothing to do with this Epiblog, though I was very tempted to put his picture at the top, instead of the real St Elmo. If it helps in any way, I have it on reliable authority that there is only one Harry Redknapp.

St Elmo (our St Elmo) is the patron saint of mariners, and is also responsible for “St Elmo’s Fire”, that weird electrical phenomenon that causes a blue haze of electrical charge that gathers in the masts and rigging of ships during bad storms. It is generally believed to be a good omen, but of course we only have the word of sailors who have seen this happen in a storm and survived, in support of this particular assertion. 

St Elmo died circa 303AD, and as well as being venerated as the patron saint of sailors he is also the patron of abdominal pain, colic and stomach cramps, women in labour, and pests in cattle, so I suppose we should pray to St Elmo that the Government sees sense over the badger cull, especially during the Opposition debate on Wednesday, and in the Cromwellian spirit of trust in God, but keep your powder dry, it wouldn’t hurt to back up the petition to St Elmo with a letter to your MP.

St Elmo is also one of the Fourteen Holy Helpers, saintly figures of Christian legend who were venerated especially in Central Europe as intercessors, even though they sound like a Marvel Superheroes Comic. In some versions of his legend, he is depicted with his intestines wound around a naval windlass, because that was one of the versions of the method of his martyrdom – although others assert that his affinity with sailors arises from his continuing to preach even though he was narrowly missed by a thunderbolt. This then led to sailors invoking him in their prayers when they were in similar peril during storms at sea, and thus the idea of St Elmo’s fire was born.

The martyrdom of St Elmo was quite extensive, at least according to Jacobus de Voragine in the Golden Legend.

“When the persecutions of the Emperor Diocletian began, Erasmus was called before a judge, beaten around the head, spat upon and ‘besprinkled...with foulness.’ He was then beaten with leaden mauls until his veins broke and burst. Erasmus suffered all of these punishments with tremendous willingness. Erasmus was then thrown into a pit of snakes and worms, and boiling oil and sulphur were poured on him but `he lay therein as he had lain in cold water, thanking and loving God.’ Then thunder and lightning came and electrocuted everyone around, save Erasmus. Thus the saint was protected from the lightning. Diocletian had him thrown in another pit, but an angel came and slew all the vipers and worms.”

“Then came the Western Roman Emperor Maximian who was `much worse than was Diocletian.’ Erasmus would not cease preaching the Gospel, even though he was `put into a pan seething with rosin, pitch, brimstone, lead, and oil, [which were] pour[ed] ... into his mouth, [from] ... which he never shrank.’ A searing hot cloak and metal coat were both tried on him, to no effect, and an angel eventually carried him away to safety."

"And when this holy man came before the false gods, to which he was to be forced to sacrifice, they `fell down and broke all in pieces, and consumed into ashes or dust.’ That made the emperor so angry he had Erasmus enclosed in a barrel full of protruding spikes, and the barrel was rolled down a hill. But an angel healed him. Further tortures ensued”

“His teeth were plucked out of his head with iron pincers. And after that they bound him to a pillar and carded his skin with iron cards, and then they roasted him upon a gridiron, and did smite sharp nails of iron in his fingers, and after, they put out his eyes of his head with their fingers, and after that they laid this holy bishop upon the ground naked and stretched him with strong withies bound to horses about his blessed neck, arms, and legs, so that all his veins and sinews that he had in his body burst."

“Eventually, he was brought before the emperor and beaten and whipped, then coated with pitch and set alight (as Christians had been in Nero's games), and still he survived. Finally, according to this version of his death, his stomach was slit open and his intestines wound around a windlass."

Verdict – suicide! (Probably followed by ATOS declaring him fit for work).  In reality, some of these tortures must have surely belonged to the other St Elmo, unless our St Elmo was even harder than Henry Cooper. His relics were recorded by Pope St Gregory the Great recorded in the 6th century as being preserved in the cathedral of Formia. When the church was razed by the Saracens in 842AD, the cult of Erasmus was moved to Gaeta. He is currently the patron of Gaeta, Santeramo in Colle and Formia, and there is an altar to St Erasmus in the north transept of St. Peter's Basilica. Poussin painted his martyrdom as an altar-piece. I haven’t seen it, but if it contains all of the above, it must be a very large altar-piece indeed. Butler, in his Lives of the Saints, reported that a portion of Elmo’s relics is possessed by a nunnery near Gournay, in the Diocese of Paris.

I’m not quite sure what spiritual lesson I should learn from the life of St Elmo, except maybe not to annoy psychotic emperors, but then I knew that already. In fact, the more I read of the lives of the saints, the less clear it becomes to me how some of them were ever considered for the sainthood, or indeed whether the concept has any wider theoretical, theological validity. The doctrine of intercession basically states (I am not a theologian, so forgive my simplification) that you can pray to a saint to ask for your case to be represented to God – a bit like hiring a holy solicitor, and much less expensive than an earthly one. On the face of it, given my seafaring ancestry, my recent medical history, and my desire to find a solution to bovine TB that doesn’t involve the needless, mindless and useless slaughter of badgers, I have at least three reasons to pray to St Elmo, so I might give him a go.

I am not at all convinced that anyone ever listens to my prayers though. Every night I sign off by praying for all the ferals and the dogs in the pound, and yet their numbers grow more prolific day by day.  If anyone did listen to my prayers and grant them, the world would be a very different place, in the same way as Matilda would spend her every day in sunshine, if I only controlled the weather. Maybe I should try something more practical, like going on hunger-strike, to get God’s attention.

But, in the meantime, sadly, my prayers, and my weather, remain changeable.  May has already gone, my favourite month of the whole year. Three weeks to Midsummer, and then that’s it, the days start getting shorter, and winter’s coming.  Next week I have to do all of the things I didn’t do this week, and they are legion.  Is it too much to pray for peace in the realm, the re-homing of some feral cats, and maybe a new dog, before we go off to Scotland this summer? For the tiny soul of Henry the Hamster to be trundling his golden wheel, even now, happy in hamster-heaven, with an endless supply of sunflower seeds? Not to mention a crushing defeat for the badger cull in Parliament on Wednesday? I will seek the advice of St Elmo, and in the meantime, given that roses in June are never so sweet, as kisses in love are when true lovers meet, or so the song says, let it come early, late or soon, I will enjoy my rose in June.

The sixth month of the year, in the month call-ed June, when the weather’s too hot to be borne. That’s what the old folk song says.  Lilac time, for lilac wine. And, Little Darling, it has indeed been a long cold lonely winter, so I am going to try and make the best of the coming week, despite the fact that it contains some mind-crushingly, stupefyingly boring tasks including doing a VAT return and manually altering single quotes for double quotes throughout the entire manuscript of a 226-page book, a task which is right up there alongside watching paint dry and reading the EC Sprout Regulations. To lighten the week of work, and keep the bad news at bay, I wish us all sunshine and sparkling strawberry lemonade.  And if it does rain, just close the roof, and, whatever you do, keep the microphone away from Cliff Richard.