Epiblog for St Chad's Day

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley, but there are some signs of spring at last.  The snowdrops in the garden, and Maisie’s indestructible daffodils, to name but two. And yet again, we’ve had some more of those days where even though it’s raining, it’s also sunny at the same time.  Or it’s raining on one side of the valley and sunny on another.

Predictably, we didn’t get away in the camper van. Not this time.  There were several reasons for this; the weather forecast for the Lake District was worse than here, and there’s little point in leaving a cosy hearth in a place where the weather is relatively mild and occasionally sunny, to go and sit in a tin box on Walney Island watching the rain sheeting down and listening to it drumming on the camper roof.  While we have been away in the camper in winter before, notably one night in Borrowdale when it was minus 13, and a weekend I remember in November in Galloway where we lay awake all night listening to the gale force wind howling through the wire hawsers of the kayak rack, it does have to be something special these days to drag us out. Especially when Debbie wants to climb mountains and the weather says there’s only a 30% chance of a cloud-free summit.

The overriding reason, though, was that we were both still feeling totally blitzed from the cold/flu thing, and we just didn’t have the energy to get all the gear together and get it on to the camper.  We’re both now at the stage where the cold itself has gone, but every so often a wave of fever washes over you and everything goes woozy and you just have to stop for half an hour or so.  I’m not surprised it’s poleaxed Deb, she has been running on empty for weeks now, and I suppose in my case it’s an inevitable consequence of my condition.

Deb has managed to get out for some walks, though, accompanied by Misty and also by Zak, when she can borrow him. And they have climbed some hills, albeit local ones. Generally speaking they all return from these forays plastered with mud up to the elbows, looking like a first world war re-enactment society, so everybody has to stand on the mat and be towelled down before they can proceed any further.

Matilda is more circumspect about her journeys to the outside world, especially since one of her bolt-holes to get out of the rain, the “good” plastic greenhouse, blew off the decking, over the rails, and into the garden during the recent gales. Deb has gathered the bits of it and stowed them under the deck, in case we can ever put it back together again, but now Matilda is reduced to cowering under the tarp which protects the camp cooker, until someone comes to let her back in. 

She’s also taken to wandering round the house at night, yowling. I don’t know why she does this, it’s not because she’s hungry, though she does stack away the Felix at an alarming rate. I think she just wants the reassurance that she hasn’t been left on her own, because when I snarl at her to shut up, generally she does so, and we can all get back to sleep. If only she would sleep in/on the bed like a normal cat, she need never feel lonely again, but who knows what does on in her little furry crinkly walnut of a brain.

Other nature-related news this week includes the fact that the owls seem to be back. Well, strictly speaking, I am not sure they ever went away, but the other night, they were giving it some stick in the trees that fall away downhill behind our garden. We had the TV on, watching Law and Order, and I kept hearing this hooting going on, which eventually led me to ask if it was on TV.  Debbie looked at me pityingly and asked what an owl would be doing in the squadroom of the Manhattan Special Victims Unit, and I had to admit she had a point. Deploying the mute button confirmed that, while Detectives Stabler and Benson had fallen silent, Olly was indeed still telling his mates loudly about the mice he’d eaten, dropping pellets and rotating his head through 360 degrees, and all the other things owls do so well. So, we have owls. Or at least, an owl.

I’ve been feeling a bit flat this week, to be honest, what with the wishy-washy after effects of being ill, the oppressive nature of the mountain of work I have allowed to build up, and the feeling of time slipping through my grasp without anything significant being achieved. I have been ploughing steadily on, wherever and whenever I could actually get on with any specific task, grappling with laying out books and also the complexities of email marketing.  Sometimes, though, I feel like I am just shooting into the brown, whistling in the dark, whatever, and I want to go away and live in a Yurt in the woods with only the owls for company, and weave my own bread and bake my own curtains. I blame Thoreau.

I did sort of get my own back for the owl debacle when I was showing Debbie a book I’d bought online. A history, with photos, of Elloughton, Brough and Brantingham, where I grew up, by Denny Lincoln. It came out in 1998, apparently, but somehow I had missed it until now, despite the fact that it mentions my family and even quotes my cousin Joyce. The quotation in question is about when they were bombed out of their house in 1943 by a Luftwaffe parachute mine that missed Blackburn’s aircraft factory and landed in Skillings Lane instead, taking off the front of the house and blowing the front door through the house and into the back garden.  Auntie Nancy flung herself on Joyce and the two boys and probably saved them from serious injury or even death as their home disintegrated around them. Uncle Bert was out on ARP duty, and their lodger, upstairs, slept through it all!

I was reading this to Deb and mentioned that the crater left by the mine was 80 feet by 30 feet, apparently, according to the author.  Debbie asked me if that was how big the bombs were, and I patiently explained that no, the actual bombs were much smaller and the apparent disparity between the size of the bomb and the eventual size of the crater was down to the fact that the bomb detonated and blew up on impact. The clue is in the title. I don’t know if she really thought this, or if she was just winding me up, but who knows what does on in her little furry crinkly walnut of a brain.

So, anyway, like I said, a flat week. Except for one wonderful high spot, when on Tuesday at 6pm, Cary, my wheelchair services lady, brought round some old canvases that her mum had purchased for her painting before she died, plus her mum's old easel, a custom-made wooden box (made by her dad for her mum) of oil paints, thinners and media, plus some brushes, and various other goodies. I was truly touched, not only by the generosity of the gift in material terms, but also because some of these things (eg the box and easel) are heirlooms.

She replied that she's been following the "art giveaway" and that she wants me to put them all to the best possible use, raising funds for Mossburn, Rain Rescue and FOSTBC. So there you go. I was totally blown away by this gesture. Top lady.  Now, of course, the responsibility falls upon me to use them wisely,  not that I need any encouragement, as again I have spent much more time painting this week than I really should, and while doing it, I have been as happy as a pig in archives, to the detriment of my burgeoning “to do” list, and next week I really do need to stop fannying about like Fotherington-Thomas and get down to some real work!

I have also been watching quite a lot of TV, especially about the first world war, which is all over the BBC at the moment, for obvious reasons. Debbie and I argue about the causes of the first world war (well, it  makes a change from whose turn it was to pay the gas bill) but I maintain that it was certainly not helped by rivalry over naval power and empire, military brinkmanship,  unwise treaties, and the speed and ease with which armies could be mobilized, compared to wars of previous centuries.  So it was with a considerable amount of trepidation that I looked upon the unfolding events in Ukraine this week.

No sooner has the Winter Olympics at Sotchi come to an end, than Mr Putin reverts to type and in a desperate attempt to assert his masculinity and prove he is not gay, he sends in several plane loads of no doubt heterosexual Russian commandos and special forces, to seize the airport and protect the Crimean bases of the Russian fleet. In response, Ukraine mobilizes its army in turn.  Thank God we haven’t gone and signed any treaties this time around that might have committed us to safeguarding Ukrainian neutrality, like we had for Belgium in 1914.  Ah. Er, except for The Budapest Memorandum, which sounds like it might be a book by Tom Clancy, but is in fact an agreement signed in 1991 by Bill Clinton, John Major, Boris Yeltsin and Leonid Kuchma - the then-rulers of the USA, UK, Russia and Ukraine. It promises we will protect Ukraine's borders, in return for Ukraine giving up its nuclear weapons. A definite brown-trouser moment. I think it’s time to check if that old air raid shelter on the Isle of Arran is still for sale.  Those of us who thought John Major would go down in history  merely for the cones hotline and shagging Edwina Currie may yet be forced to think again.

Not that the Crimea has a monopoly on crackpot politicians with dangerous right-wing views. Torquay, of all places, was invaded this week by the lunatic fringe of UKIP. Actually, UKIP is a party where the fabric and the fringe are the other way on.  Normally the fringe is something narrow along the edge. In UKIP we have a party which is 99% lunatic fringe.  Although Nigel Farage, bless him, did say one thing this week which is absolutely, 100% true, and with which (whisper it not in Gath, publish it not in the streets of Ashkelon) I absolutely, 100% agree with him.

Farage told members attending the party conference that because Britain is unable to challenge freedom of movement within the EU the government is "conning the public that we have a degree of control over this". I agree with him because I was saying this even before he was.  However, I totally disagree with his proposed solutions for it, coming as they do with a generous but subtle leavening of BNP-lite racism and bigotry, but you can’t deny he is right, and the sooner mainstream politicians stop posturing and farting about and actually start to deal with that problem, the better, because at present there is a dangerous  power vacuum which is in grave peril of being filled by UKIP, giving us a country where women are compelled by law to clean behind the fridge, gay people are put in the stocks for causing localised flooding, and anyone vaguely brown is deported to Bongo-Bongo Land.

The more I look at the news, actually, these days, the more I find myself shaking my head in disbelief. It seems that the US National Security Agency has been snooping on the Yahoo webcam chats of millions of people. A leaked GCHQ report into this practice, which found its way into the media, stated, rather plummily:

"Unfortunately … it would appear that a surprising number of people use webcam conversations to show intimate parts of their body to the other person"

I don't know which I find more disturbing, actually: the thought of NSA analysts trawling through millions of images of one-handed mouse clickers with their faces contorted at the moment of bliss, in the hope of finding someone naked but for a suicide vest; or the fact that this particular specific use of web cams seems to have come as a surprise to GCHQ! A sub to "Beautiful Agony" would have been cheaper, quicker, and probably more educational.

Also leaked this week were a set of compliance reports by Natural England’s badger cull monitors. They showed that some badgers killed in the plot culls were shot in the wrong body area including the head, or were wounded. Two of them were wounded, chased, and had to be shot a second time. In one case five to 10 minutes elapsed between the first and second shot. We’ve already established that the culls were ineffective and that they were expensive – for what it cost to kill each badger, they could have put them up at the Ritz for 11 days – and now we have, officially confirmed, that it was cruel and inhumane as well.  Despite this, however,  George Eustice, the Farming Minister, is reported to have said the Government would not be duty bound to follow the advice of its independent expert panel, and that the cap on licences to kill in England, currently restricted to 10 per year, could be lifted!

Should we be surprised? Not really. The Junta likes killing defenceless targets. I think they actually get off on it.  This week, as part of Iain Duncan Smith’s continuing blitzkrieg on the ill, the DWP sent a letter to a woman in Lancashire who has been in a coma for two months, suggesting she should up her game and make more effort to find a job! Quite right, too, lazy article, lying there all day – the least she could do is apply to be an extra in Casualty.  The letter was condemned by her MP, Labour member Simon Danczuk, which sounds as it should be, until you remember he is the twonk who suggested there was nothing wrong with making fresh claimants wait an extra fortnight. Given Labour’s lamentable lack of anything which might be construed as opposition, I expect Rachel Reeves to pop up any day now saying she totally approves of the DWP’s letter and that if elected in 2015, Labour would go further, and insist that the ashes of dead pensioners should be used by the council to grit the roads in icy conditions, as the country simply can no longer afford to pay them for doing nothing.

And so we came to Sunday, the feast day of St Chad. Chad, who lived from 634-672AD, is the patron saint of Mercia, Lichfield, and astronomers.  Most of what we know of St Chad comes from the writing of the venerable Bede, who in turn got it at first hand from the monks of Lastingham, where both Chad and his brother Cedd were abbots.

St Chad appears to have originally been Irish, and was trained by St Aidan at Lindisfarne, then spent some time in Ireland with St Egbert. At the time when St Chad was flourishing, the Benedictine Rule was spreading across Europe, and there was still a dichotomy in Britain between the Celtic version of Christianity and the Roman version, including over when Easter was to be celebrated, and the style of monastic tonsure. I know life was short, nasty and brutish in the 7^th century, but wouldn’t it be nice today if all we had to argue over was different hairstyles and the dates of official holidays? 

The early church in the area was deeply intertwined with the ruling Northumbrian dynasty and another of Chad’s brothers, Caelin, introduced Ethelwald to Cedd.  Ethelwald, a nephew of King Oswiu, had been appointed to administer the coastal area of Deira. Caelin suggested to Ethelwald the foundation of a monastery, in which he could one day be buried, and where prayers for his soul would continue, and according to Bede, Ethelwald, practically forced on Cedd a gift of a desolate place at Lastingham, near Pickering, on the North York Moors, and told him to build his monastery there.

By 664AD, Cedd has died of the plague and Chad succeeded to the position of abbot at Lastingham. Apparently he would break off reading whenever a gale sprang up, and call on God to have pity on humanity. If the storm intensified, he would shut his book altogether and prostrate himself in prayer. During prolonged storms or thunderstorms he would go into the church itself to pray and sing psalms until calm returned. His monks obviously regarded this as an extreme reaction even to English weather and asked him to explain. Chad explained that storms are sent by God to remind humans of the day of judgement and to humble their pride, which these days we can probably refer to as the UKIP position. He would have had his work cut out this last winter.

King Oswiu eventually got around to asking St Chad to become bishop of Northumbria, stepping into a prolonged and complicated wrangle over who should succeed to the post, some of the earlier contenders having also succumbed to the plague. The successor should really have been St Wilfred, but Bede seems to imply that Oswiu got fed up of waiting for Wilfred to return home after his ordination, and decided to step in and take action.  The designation of bishop of Northumbria eventually spread to include York. Chad spent his time travelling and preaching, but he was soon to fall foul of the continuing rivalry between Celtic and Roman Christian traditions.

In 669, a new Archbishop of Canterbury, Theodore of Tarsus, sent by Pope Vitalian arrived in England. He immediately set off on a tour of the country, bent on tackling abuses and rooting out unorthodox practice. He instructed Chad to step down and Wilfrid, who had by now returned, to take over. According to Bede, Theodore was so impressed by Chad's humility that he did at least confirm his ordination as bishop, while still insisting he step down from his position. Chad retired gracefully and returned to his post as abbot of Lastingham, and  Wilfrid now became bishop of the Northumbrians at York.

There was, however, to be one last twist. Later that same year, King Wulfhere of Mercia requested a bishop. Wulfhere had converted to Christianity, but  Archbishop Theodore refused to consecrate a new bishop. Instead he recalled Chad out of his retirement at Lastingham. Chad was consecrated bishop of the Mercians and of the Lindsey people, meaning more or less the whole of modern Lincolnshire was under Mercian control at that time.

Chad's responsibilities centred on the middle Trent and lower Tame, the area around Tamworth, Lichfield and Repton but Wulfhere donated land at Lichfield for Chad to build a monastery. It was because of this that the centre of the Diocese of Mercia ultimately became settled at Lichfield. The Lichfield monastery was probably partly staffed by monks from Lastingham, including Chad's old retainer, Owin.

There was also an outpost in Lindsey, referred to by Bede as “Ad Barwae”. This is probably Barrow upon Humber: where an Anglo-Saxon monastery has been excavated. This was easily reached by river from the Midlands and close to an easy crossing of the River Humber, from Winteringham to Brough Haven, or from South Ferriby to North Ferriby [although these days it crouches under the shadow of the Humber Bridge] allowing rapid communication along surviving Roman roads with Lastingham. Chad remained abbot of Lastingham throughout his life, and rotated his time between that monastery and the communities at both Lichfield and Barrow on Humber, covering difficult terrain, with woodland, heath and mountain over much of the centre and large areas of marshland to the east. Chad worked in Mercia and Lindsey for two and a half years before he too died of plague. Yet St. Bede considered that Chad's two years as bishop were decisive in the conversion of Mercia.

St Chad died on 2nd March 672, and was buried at the Church of Saint Mary which later became part of the cathedral at Lichfield, but in true saintly fashion, he couldn’t just die, it had to be a major production number.

Bede says that Owin the retainer was working outside the oratory at Lichfield. Suddenly, Owin heard the sound of joyful singing, coming from heaven, gradually coming closer until it filled the roof of the oratory itself. Then there was silence for half an hour, followed by the same singing going back the way it had come.

An hour later, Chad called him in and told him to fetch the seven brothers from the church. Chad gave his final address to the brothers, urging them to keep the monastic discipline and then he told them that he knew his own death was near, speaking of death as "that friendly guest who is used to visiting the brethren". He asked them to pray, then blessed them and dismissed them. Owin returned a little later and saw Chad privately. He asked about the singing. Chad told him that he must keep it to himself, but that the angels had come to call him to his heavenly reward, and in seven days they would return to fetch him. So it was that Chad weakened and died on 2nd March, which remains his feast day.

St Chad appears to have been one of those saints who, like St Cuthbert, continued travelling after death. According to Bede, Chad was venerated as a saint almost immediately after his death, and his relics were translated to a new shrine at Lichfield. He remained the centre of an important cult throughout the Middle Ages. The cult was commemorated in two places - his tomb, in the apse, directly behind the high altar of Lichfield cathedral; and more particularly his skull, which was kept in a special Head Chapel, above the south aisle.

At the dissolution of the Shrine during the Reformation, in about 1538, Prebendary Arthur Dudley of Lichfield Cathedral removed and retained some relics, probably a travelling set.  [Shades of the reliquary designed as carry on luggage for air travel, which might have come from Father Ted but was actually used in the case of St Therese of Lisieux]. These relics were eventually passed to Dudley’s nieces, Bridget and Katherine Dudley, of Russells Hall. In 1651, they reappeared, when a farmer Henry Hodgetts of Sedgley was on his death-bed and kept praying to St Chad. When the priest hearing his last confession, Fr Peter Turner SJ, asked  the old farmer why he called upon Chad. Henry replied, "because his bones are in the head of my bed".

He instructed his wife to give the relics to the priest, and they found their way to the Seminary at St Omer, in France. After the persecution of Catholics had lessened somewhat,  in the early 19th century, the relics found their way to Sir Thomas Fitzherbert-Brockholes of Aston Hall, near Stone, Staffordshire. When his chapel was cleared after his death, his chaplain, Fr Benjamin Hulme, discovered the box containing the relics, which were then examined and presented to Bishop Thomas Walsh, Vicar Apostolic of the Midland District in 1837 and were enshrined in the new St. Chad's Cathedral, Birmingham, opened in 1841, in a new ark designed by A. W.  Pugin.  At the present time, the remaining relics, some long bones, are now on the high altar of St Chad’s RC cathedral in Birmingham, and have been authenticated as 'true relics' by the Vatican authorities. Just as well, after all their travels and travails.

Since 1919, an Annual Mass and Solemn Outdoor Procession of the Relics has been held at St Chad's Cathedral, on the Saturday nearest to his Feast Day, 2nd March. In folklore, St. Chad's Day is traditionally considered the most propitious day to sow broad beans in England, so I hope you have got yours in. I haven’t, but I must remember to add a tin to the next Sainsbury’s order, in his honour.

So, ladies and gentlemen, I give you St Chad.  Again, I think, at such a distance it is difficult to see what made him saintly, especially at a time when religion and the struggle for political hegemony in an emerging nation were so inextricably mixed. By Bede’s account though, he was a humble man, preferring to walk everywhere rather than to ride, and I was struck in that respect by his likeness to Fr Vincent McNabb, of whom I have written in previous blogs. He used to tramp round the streets of his London parish wearing a cassock and army boots, ministering to the poor, and he once wrote:

"Buy boots you can walk in. Walk in them. Even if you lessen the income of the General Omnibus Company, or your family doctor; you will discover the human foot. On discovering it, your joy will be as great as if you had invented it. But this joy is the greatest, because no human invention even of Mr. Ford or Mr. Marconi is within a mile of a foot."

And of course, St Chad’s premonition of his own death is echoed by Fr McNabb’s last sermon, delivered to his wartime congregation at the Sisters of Mercy in 1943:

"And now dear sisters, I have some very good news for you. This is the last time I shall be speaking to you together in this chapel. You know in these days everyone is being called up.... I too have been called up!... And for what? To the King of Kings, and that not for the duration but for Life Everlasting! The words of the Psalm, Rejoice at the things that were said to me - with joy I have entered the House of the Lord, are filling my heart with joy."

Well, dear reader, let’s hope we can all avoid getting called up, in either the wartime or the religious sense, a little while longer. If I can just hold out and do a few dozen or a few hundred more paintings, while I can still hold a paintbrush, and before the cataracts which the optician blithely mentioned kick in,  I can at least raise some more money for “my” charities and do some good with what remains of my life. You may think, as I do sometimes, that this is a bit of a comedown – has my life really come to this – but on the other hand, you know what they say; before you criticise a man, you should walk a mile in his shoes – then, when you do criticise him, you will be a mile away. And, more crucially, you will also have his shoes.

Painting is strangely liberating, though, and of course in my case, I won’t be walking anywhere in anyone’s shoes any time soon, bitter-sweet as it would be to hear ATOS declare me fit, if I could do so.  No, next week’s work beckons the hands, and no doubt it will be another week when I find myself wondering, along with Morrisey, why I give valuable time to people who don’t care if I live or die. I was looking for a job, and then I found a job, and heaven knows I’m miserable now. And it’s somehow already St Chad’s day, and I haven’t got my broad beans in yet.  Still, we press on. I’ve often said life is like a pilgrimage, but Vincent McNabb says it’s more like a sermon:

"Some people say, I do not like sermons . I never go to hear a sermon. They do not know that these very words are themselves a sermon. They do not realise that every deed done in the sight or hearing of another is a preached sermon. The best or the worst of all sermons is a life led.

So I guess I had better get on with this sermon called life, and hope and pray that we’re not reading the next instalment in a fallout shelter. Heaven knows I’m miserable now, but heaven has also sent me a mission to paint, I guess. It’s too early to say if this is the answer to the question I’ve been asking in many different ways since 2010, but, as the Zen masters say – sitting quietly, doing nothing, spring comes, and the grass grows by itself.