Epiblog for the Feast of St Maughold

It has been a busy fortnight in the Holme Valley. The week leading up to Easter itself, or Holy Week as it is sometimes known by people more devout than me, was blessed with particularly warm and clement weather, which was simultaneously welcome (after winter’s rain and endless gales) and irritating, because I couldn’t do what I really wanted to do, which was to join wholeheartedly in Debbie’s self-proclaimed holiday, and womble off into the distance in our trusty (not to mention rusty) VW camper van.

There were several issues; firstly, the stuff which I had to do regarding books – particularly stuff which I had promised to do, specifically to a deadline; then there was all of the tedious stuff which I had to do for us, and for our own well-being, such as accounts and checking the bank balance, and boring tedium of that ilk, and finally there was my own state of health, particularly feeling under par, constantly tired, and with a distinct lack of energy for anything approaching loading up a camper van for a road trip.

Granny had already volunteered to come and take over our house, feed the illusory badger, and look after Matilda, so that wasn’t an issue, as such.  We had no worries about leaving her behind, she is quite happy here, insofar as she can ever be described as happy, given that she invariably fixes you with a sour, evil glare glare, bares her teeth and flattens her ears to her head, ready for a fight, is quite capable of hissing at you for no reason whatsoever, and might even sink her teeth into you, at the slightest provocation. The cat is pretty scary, as well.

Debbie was saying that if we didn’t go away by Wednesday, it wouldn’t be worth gong at all. Her Easter holidays come to an end on Monday 28^th April and in any case there was a huge stack of marking and general preparation, so at least the last weekend of the holiday would have to be sacrificed to unpaid work in order for her classes to happen next term. She had already spent some of the holiday emailing work and crib sheets to some of the dingoes in her classes who couldn’t be arsed to turn up regularly in term time and who have now realised, with panic gripping their breast, that they haven’t a prayer of passing the exam unless they spend all Easter cramming.

Mind you, when it comes to Kirklees college and their policy of paying people six months in arrears, to a certain extent all work for them is unpaid work.  This is not restricted to Kirklees either – a friend of mine was told (on the eve of the Easter weekend, so there was absolutely nothing that could be done about it until the Tuesday) that she was only gong to be paid for 188 hours instead of 395 or some such similar number. There must be a special course in ineptitude and incapability which college admin staff have to pass in order to get a job there.

So, anyway, there were several practical problems stopping us making an immediate getaway: my own “to-do” list, see above, plus the rather prosaic but nevertheless disturbing fact that the downstairs loo was still “backing up”. Long experience as a householder has taught me that if you leave or ignore plumbing problems, they only get worse. There is no such thing as a self-solving problem when it comes to plumbing.  I didn’t want to go away and come home to a major disaster where Granny was flailing a yardbrush and fighting with rampaging Douglas Hurds all over the house.  In other, but unconnected news, we were also waiting for the mobile optician to get back to us about what he was doing with Debbie’s glasses, which she now needs for driving and watching TV.  And to top off all of this, I was suffering from a sudden and painful flare-up in my cellulitis.

Cellulitis is an inflammation of the connective tissue between cells and in my case it manifests itself in painful and irritating patches of red, inflamed skin, cramps and shooting pains up my legs. All of which makes sleeping for any prolonged length of time almost an impossibility, and on Tuesday night I had one of the worst nights of (non) sleep in my life, waking up on Wednesday morning after finally doing off for about ten minutes and looking and feeling like a boiled owl.  I had a really bad “do” with cellulitis just after I came out of hospital, in early 2011, and on that occasion it had to be zapped with anti-biotics. But the two subsequent flare-ups had more or less sorted themselves out, and had died away of their own accord. This current one was proving more troublesome, though, and on Wednesday my enthusiasm for going off in the camper had hit a new low.  Mainly because I was worrying about a) getting everything done and b) going off at all, as a concept, in my current state – if I couldn’t sleep, or was gong to have a medical emergency, it was probably better to do it at home rather than half way up some God-forsaken goat-crag covered up with bugger all, sheep and heather.

I still had three manky old anti-biotic tablets left from my last stay in hospital, so I rang my sister and asked her – out of the benefit of her nursing experience – whether these were likely to help in any way, and she concluded that as they were the wrong sort, and out of date to boot, no they probably wouldn’t.  There wasn’t a cat in Hades’ chance of getting any proper antibiotics before the Easter break, so I decided that, if I wasn’t going to let Debbie down yet again, the only way was to “man up” and “clog on through”. I made myself a pot of English Breakfast Tea, took a deep refreshing draught, and started to work down the “to-do” list.

Getting John the Plumber to attend to the loo proved surprisingly easy. One of the charges that is often levelled at pornography is that t gives a totally unrealistic impression of the time it takes for a plumber to come around to your house, but on this occasion, within about ten minutes of my having spoken to him on the phone, John’s massive bulk appeared in the doorway like a genie from a lamp.  And I didn’t even have to change into a see-through nightie. He was brandishing two white plastic containers, overprinted with a skull-and-crossbones motif, and other dire warnings in many languages. “I’ll put this down for now,” he declared, jovially, “and I’ll be back at nine in the morning to see if it’s worked and the plumbing Gods have been kind to me.” Having deployed his sinister depth-charges, he left as swiftly as he had arrived. I ploughed steadily on with my work, pausing only to print out the camper loading checklist [devised by yours truly after many years of forgetting mission-critical crucial items] and the various pages about routes and mountain weather forecasts, etc.  The remainder of Wednesday passed me by, in a dull haze of pain.

Thursday found me a little brighter, and John was as good as his word, so I was up and about “betimes” as Samuel Pepys might have said, and let the plumber in, at the appointed hour.  The plumbing Gods had not accepted his offering, however, so he spent the next hour doing whatever it is plumbers do with a blocked loo when they have to revert to “Plan B”. I don’t know, and I don’t want to know. Eventually, he pronounced it restored to health and sanitary excellence, and, having packed away his gear, he accepted a steaming mug of tea and settled down for a chat.  His surprising news was that he was retiring, so this would be his last visit to us.  I suppose it was inevitable, but even so, it felt, in a minor way, like the passing of some sort of era.  We wished him well, and a long and happy retirement on the Isle of Wight, his destination of choice, and told him if he was ever back this way to call in, the kettle would be on.  However, for the moment, like Napoleon, Ray Davies and Abba before him, he had met his Waterloo.

I was making inroads with the other stuff, Debbie was getting together things to load on to the camper, and the plan was coming together. Though I still didn’t feel 100%, it did at least seem as though we were making progress, and we decided to get as much done as we could and the set the alarms for an early start and get going in the morning.  Elsewhere in the country, the Queen was doubtless distributing the Maundy Money to some fortunate pensioners, it being Maundy Thursday, but as far as I could see, this fact went completely unreported by the BBC.

Good Friday, however, was a bit of a setback. On the plus side, the optician came round to our house and dropped Debbie’s glasses off, which solved one problem. On the downside, I felt much worse again, and slept through my alarm.  I felt lousy and said as much to Debbie, but I could see she was upset at the prospect of yet another day’s delay. Good Friday is always a day of contemplation for me, and for as long as I can remember, I have made a point of reading Good Friday 1613, Riding Westwards, by John Donne. I don’t do the whole sackcloth and ashes and fasting thing, but as it happened on this particular Good Friday, I didn’t feel up to doing much other than sitting around staring into space, so it fitted in well. Compulsory contemplation, courtesy of my bodily state.  Debbie, meanwhile, was getting on with what she could. I am little practical help anyway, although I can pile stuff on the tray of my wheelchair and trundle it out to the camper in the driveway to save her a few trips.

I have an old wooden crucifix which came from I know not where, but at the moment it’s wedged into the corner of a box in my bedroom, and towards the middle of the afternoon, I trundled through there in my wheelchair and composed myself for yet another attempt at prayer, for those I cared about and that Matilda and the house would be OK while we were away.  I had just settled when there was an almighty crash from the kitchen.  I trundled back to investigate and found that the old biscuit tin where I keep my acrylic paint tubes had slid to the tiled floor, disgorging its contents all over the place, entailing half an hour’s work in picking them all up and putting them back.  Not exactly the veil of the Temple rending, but enough to interfere with my contemplation.

Easter Saturday marked a complete volte face from the gloom of the preceding day and we both set to with a will, determined to get off in the camper that day, shit or bust, as the saying goes.  Finally, finally, things were coming together, and by teatime we were ready to roll. I was loaded up, the camper was loaded up, and the dogs were loaded up. I say “dogs” in the plural, because along the way we’d acquired Zak, who was coming on holiday with us to give Granny a bit of a break while she was looking after Matilda.  Deb got into her stride with the driving, and we were soon bowling along the M62, then the M61, then the M6.  The roads were relatively empty, and we made good time.  I noted that the iffy junction at Greenodd on the A590 had been replaced by a roundabout, so Cumbria County Council must have been busy over the winter.  Soon we were on the outskirts of Barrow, and rumbling past the English Heritage sign for Furness Abbey, where the medieval knights sleep on in their strangely modern looking Eric Gill style art deco tombs.  A further surprise awaited us on Walney – the approach road to the beach slipway where we normally park up is usually in an appalling state, with axle breaking moon craters, but someone again had been busy during the dark days of winter, and had filled them in!  We found a level bit and settled down for the night. It had been a long, long day.

Easter Sunday found me listening to a skylark, high in the air over the next field, soaring and singing like the very spirit of Christ ascending, except I know that this is theologically inaccurate.  Breakfast and dog-feeding were quickly despatched, and Debbie took Misty and Zak down on the beach for a game of “stones”, a simple pastime where she throws pebbles and they attempt to bring them back.  Misty isn’t very good at this; it was during a game of “stones” on Arran that she brought back a dead jellyfish. Nearly right.  Before we drove away, I tried to log on using the “dongle” supplied by Everything Everywhere, and found I must have missed a small asterisk and the words “except for Walney Island” somewhere in their literature. The dongle was deader than tank tops and sideways-ironed flares. Oh well, five days without the internet seemed actually quite a pleasant prospect.

We were setting off on an expedition because Debbie wanted to break in her boots on a climb of Gummer’s Howe, which is only a little pimple on the face of the Cumbrian landscape, but she wanted to make sure that nothing was wrong with any of her kit before trying anything more spectacular.  On the way out of Barrow we passed the posters for the cheap and cheerful local shops, including one that claimed they always had “1000s of rugs in stock,” adding underneath, rather unsuccessfully, “Rugs! Rugs! Rugs!” Further along, at Lindal in Furness, there were half a dozen chickens browsing and pecking just on the grass verge at the roadside; presumably they had escaped from the smallholding on the other side, and crossed the road - but who knows why?

The woods at the side of the road were hazed with bluebells, which I hoped sincerely were the English ones and not the Spanish interlopers. Either way I felt properly “springy” for the first time this year.  Gummer’s Howe was duly conquered. It only takes about half an hour to get up there anyway, but Debbie had stopped at the top to brew up some coffee on her meths stove, almost causing a brush-fire in the process.  I was struck by how few people there were around, but thinking about it, I put this down to the fact that this year, Easter and the May Day holiday were so close together that people had obviously chosen the later one on the grounds that the weather was probably going to be better.

Back at Walney, Debbie was contemplating lighting a camp fire, until I pointed out the sign that indicated that  we were parked up on top of the high pressure gas pipeline. I had visions of Huw Edwards gravely intoning “And now over to our reporter, who is actually live on the scene of the Walney Island gas disaster, where emergency services are struggling to stop the conflagration engulfing the nearby nuclear submarine shipyard…” So we cooked tea inside the camper instead.

Out of the blue, after tea, Debbie asked me “So where does Lazarus come into it, then?” I explained that Lazarus doesn’t figure in the Crucifixion, he was just some other guy that Jesus raised from the dead.  Jesus had a couple of practice runs, one on Lazarus, and then one on Jairus’s daughter, before winding himself up for the big Cahuna.  We got on to discussing what Easter actually was, and I sort of ran through, as best as I could, given my own doubts, ignorance, and limited knowledge, the Christian theology of the whole thing.  Deb was scornful of the description of Good Friday as being “good”, which brought to my mind the old joke about Jesus, when asked, saying “Well, actually, now you mention it, I have had better Fridays…”

It would have been too windy for a fire anyway. By now, the wind was truly roaring outside, and the camper was rocking on its springs. It was going to be a wild and woolly night, that was for sure.  We decided that discretion was the better part of valour and burrowed into our various sleeping bags, duvets and blankets, settling down to ride out the storm.  At some point in the early hours, I was woken by the gale keening and howling through the steel hawsers of the kayak hoist on the van roof.

I lay there listening to it, and the drumming rain, and wondered if it was doing the same at home, and if so, whether all the roof tiles where still on. I offered up a fervent prayer to St Gertrude of Nivelles, and anyone else who might be listening, that Granny had remembered to prop the cat flap open, and that Matilda had found it, and remembered how to use it, so that she was safe and warm inside the house and not out in all the wind, rain, muck and fury raging outside the camper at that precise moment.

Easter Monday was slightly calmer, and once we’d established that we hadn’t been blown into the sea, breakfast was quickly accomplished, followed by dog-feeding and the now-compulsory game of “stones”.  We were starting to get into the camper routine again, which was a help, but already we needed some stuff that we hadn’t foreseen, particularly water, since the dogs had drunk their own weight in H2O since we’d arrived. An expedition to Booths in Ulverston filled the gaps, but at the expense of trashing anything in the way of a timetable for hill-walking.  Instead, when we got back, Debbie took Misty and Zak off on a beachcombing walk along the shoreline, right down to the southern tip, which is fenced off as a bird sanctuary, and back again.

As we were on site earlier than we had thought, Debbie announced her intention of lighting a fire, although it was starting to get windy again. To facilitate this, instead of stopping on the shoulder of the road, near to the new high-pressure gas pipeline sign, we motored on up the track to the higher ground at the end near the navigation beacon on the cliff.  As it turned out, the prospect of a gas explosion might have kept us warmed up a bit.  The wind gradually rose yet again, sending sparks fleeing into the darkness.  Unfortunately, it was far too windy to cook the food properly, so Deb had to abandon the idea of cooking over the open fire, and pass the ingredients back to me, inside the van, to finish off on the gas rings. In the process, she managed to kick over her bottle of beer and Zak took advantage of the confusion to snaffle some vegan “chicken nuggets” off one of the plates. It was quickly turning into one of the most disastrous meals we had ever attempted al fresco. A fact which was confirmed the following day when Debbie found that, unbeknown to her the night before, a spark had burned a perfect circular hole in one of her best airs of “camping trousers”.

“Easter Tuesday” brought better weather, and with it wagtails, oystercatchers, lapwings, and skylarks.  In fact, the brightness almost caused a bit of heat-haze along the horizon, which meant that for once on a Walney trip we didn’t see the Isle of Man, or the mountains of Snowdonia looming like the gigantic prow of a distant battleship on the horizon.  Debbie had been researching the possibility of two different ridge walks around the Coniston range, and we decided that today we’d check it out on the ground, so that, come the morrow, she’d be able to get straight off. If it hadn’t been smack in the middle of the National Park teatowel belt, we’d have contemplated trying to find somewhere nearer at hand to camp overnight.

Having checked out Coniston, we ended up tootling round to the east side of the lake, passing Ruskin’s former house at Brantwood. While Debbie took Misty and Zak off for a brief stroll through the woods, I sat and contemplated the lake, feeling the movement of the trees all around me in a great cloister, a nave of swaying wood. A forest is a living organism. It loses old trees, but young ones grow in the gaps. It is in a constant state of flux. Just as Heraclitus said you can’t step into the same river twice, in the same way you can’t walk through the same forest twice, and the Coniston forest I was visiting was both the same and not the same as the one from which I had watched Debbie kayaking across the lake in 2009. 

A massive tree, hundreds of years old, finally decays, succumbs, dies and falls.  Its logs provide warmth for the limbs of mankind, puny men with puny lifespans. Men whose ancestors saw it long ago, as a green stripling. Lichens grow on its corpse, and insects feast on it as it crumbles to mulch over many more years. But the other trees still remember it, respect its gap, and mourn its passing, in the sound of the autumn gales moaning through their branches. And even the young saplings coming through in the green join in with a shrill descant as summer sighs over them, even though they don’t know why.  A forest puts you, and everything else, in perspective.  I thought of the trees, and their timescale, and of Freddie, and the short lives of dogs, the dogs we’ve loved and lost, seemed, in comparison, like fleeting sparks from Debbie’s camp fire.

Eventually, Deb returned with Misty and Zak, both bedraggled from a swim in the lake. We went back to Walney, continuing via the road that runs down the east side of Coniston Water, the quiet, narrow road which is such a contrast to the red A-road that runs up the other side to Torver.  When we got back and had fed and settled the dogs, we had an impromptu meal of couscous with mushrooms, shallots, and chopped up veggie sausages, which actually looked and tasted in real life a lot better than it sounds on paper. 

Wednesday morning dawned bright and breezy, but with the odd bit of rain in the breeze.  The shoreline was intermittently sunny, then dull.  There was even a bit of surf. I had upped my self-administered dosage of Paracetamol and had a slightly better night.  I had also managed to get through to the repeat prescriptions helpline at the surgery and order some more Furosemide for Friday. Wednesday lunchtime found us once more back in Coniston, parked up in the old station car park, because we couldn’t find the one at the start of the actual Walna Scar Road, the start for Debbie and the dogs’ proposed walk. It turned out later that the grid reference on the web page Deb had printed off beforehand is wrong.  Also, the car park is actually marked on the 1:25,000 OS map but not on the 1:50,000 one. All very odd, but, sadly, par for the course.

The idea of this walk was to “bag” several Wainwrights in one go. There are 214 of them, so if you actually set out to do each one as a separate, discrete climb, it would clearly take you some time to do them all. But by “ridge walking” – climbing one of them, then walking along the ridge to take in the other peaks of the same “range” you can get six or seven in one walk, especially when they cluster closely together, in the Langdales for instance.  Deb, Zak and Misty duly embarked on their walk, which was actually 13 miles in all and which took in seven of the fells around Coniston, but not The Old Man; today, though, they were doing the shortened version, which was only nine miles.  While they were gone, I painted my picture of “St Padre Pio taking St Roche’s Dog to the Vet”, and practised being silent. Teach us to care and not to care, teach us to sit still, as the man once said. It was still fine when they got back at 6.30pm but Debbie was in no hurry to repeat the camp fire debacle again, so instead we had vegan burgers and chips.

On Thursday, I was first out of my sleeping bag and got the kettle on for the early morning cuppa. I popped the side door of the camper. Three of the windfarms off Walney Island were just peeping out of the top of a sea-fret or Haa. There were three of them, and the way their blades were angled made them look like crosses, and just then, the early morning sun caught and glinted on the blades, fleetingly for a second or two.  There was no time to get it on my phone, it was seared onto my retina. I just had to remember it. And then paint it.

We were off earlier than usual; we had driven away by noon, because Debbie was off to do the 13-miler they hadn’t done yesterday. I wasn’t expecting them back until about 7.45pm which would make it a very short night, and no prospect of a fire.  Once more, however, pushing the envelope was Deb’s undoing, and she was actually an hour later, which meant I ended up listening to Tom and Kirsty’s non-wedding on The Archers on my own. I felt strangely affected by it, by the gap between expectations and reality, even though it is only a radio soap. “Between the intention and the action, falls the shadow”. There was also some “not good” news from home. Freddie is “failing”, apparently, and has stopped eating and drinking. During the afternoon I dozed, then painted a picture of the young trees at Coniston and tried to get down on paper the one of the windfarm/beach at Walney island  with the wind-farms emerging from the fret or Haa. We were so late back to Walney that it was all I could do to boil a vast pan of instant noodles for supper before falling asleep, and I hadn’t even climbed any mountains.  Between them, they had bagged seven Wainwrights in the day, including some whose names read like wonderful poetry; Weatherlam, Swirl How, Dow Crag, and Grey Friar.

Friday marked the beginning of our return to the real world, which we assumed had been going on in our absence – for instance, I noticed that the UKIP posters for the Euro Elections had started to appear in Barrow in Furness. Despite the shadow of fascism like a dark and nasty stain on the day, we managed to shrug it off and prolong the trip a little longer and traverse the face of the Lake District, retracing our steps past Coniston, and then on to Ambleside and Keswick. There was still no internet access, thanks to the dead dongle from Nothing Everywhere, which would have been more use as a butt-plug, but it was a fine spring morning in England, now that April’s there – sunshine, cherry blossom, the birds making the greenwood ring with a silvery chorus, green spray everywhere and the young lambs in almost every field, beautiful, innocent miracles, mercifully oblivious of the dreadful fate that awaits them. What was it W B Yeats said – a terrible beauty is born?

There was no further news of Freddie, but because of problems with the in-car phone charger I may have missed a message or messages.  When we got to Keswick I speculated on whether this was the first time we had actually been back there since I had been out of hospital, and we decided that it probably was. I thought of doing yet another painting of Skiddaw, but it was totally obscured by mist, so I would have been painting from memory, and my art gear remained stowed on the shelf over my head.

Deb took the dogs down the river for a final game of “stones” and then left them (and me) snoozing while she walked into Keswick town centre to do some shopping. By law, whenever she comes to Keswick she has to look at everything in the camping shops twice, especially the shiny things. She currently has her eye on a two-pronged Nordic camping fork which she has seen on the internet (not literally, though having seen the instrument in question, I can see it would be an easy task to accomplish!) and she also wants some Nordic trousers, whatever they might be. I can only hope it’s not that garish kit the Norwegian curling team wore. She was back by six, and two and three quarter hours of misty moisty motorway later, we rolled into the driveway at home. I busied myself lighting the fire, and making a fuss of Matilda, who was, in her own catty way, also urging me to light the fire.  Fire lit, cat and dogs fed, I fixed us some supper and then, almost before I knew it, I had succumbed to the soft embrace of my own familiar mattress.

Saturday was spent unpacking and catching up, and somehow, now, it has come to be Sunday and the feast of St Maughold.  Appropriately enough, given our recent trip, Maughold is associated with the Isle of Man.  Maughold was supposedly originally an Irish freebooting pirate who was converted to Christianity by no less a personage than St Patrick himself. He died in 448AD.

One persistent local legend tells how Maughold tried to make a fool out of Patrick. Maughold had placed a living man in a shroud. He then called on Patrick to try to revive the supposed corpse. Patrick placed a hand on the shroud, and left. When Maughold and his friends opened the shroud, they found unfortunately, that the man had died in the interim. One of Maughold's friends, Connor, went over to Patrick's camp and apologized to him. Patrick rather sportingly returned and baptized all of the men assembled including the man who had died, who immediately returned to life. Patrick then criticized Maughold, saying he should have been helping his men and giving them an example so they could be leading good lives, and told him he must atone for his evil.

Patrick punished him by placing him in a coracle without oars. Maughold drifted to the Isle of Man, where two of Patrick's disciples, Romulus and Conindrus, were already established. He is said to have been chosen as bishop, succeeding Romulus and Conindrus, by the Manx people, after he had spent time on the island as a hermit. He is still remembered today on the Isle of Man for his kind disposition toward the Manx natives, and his name lives on in the local topography - several places on the island, including Maughold parish, Maughold Head, and St. Maughold's Well are named after him.

So, there we have St Maughold, whose chief claim to fame seems to have been to prove that St Patrick could be a bit of a bastard, when he wasn’t busy driving the snakes out of Ireland. If you are ever moved to visit St Maughold’s Well, this description from 1874 gives you some idea of what to expect:

After leaving the churchyard at the north-east corner, and crossing a field, the stranger, by searching a little, will find St. Maughold’s Well, which is situated directly above the sea, a little way down the north cliff, half hidden by gorse and grass. Those who have had their expectations raised will be rather disappointed. The well is in a dilapidated and neglected condition. A few stones form a square, open to the north, and within the inclosure is a small scooped stone into which the water flows from the rock, but so slowly that it is hardly perceptible. The water is no doubt chalybeate. The stone or rock which formed the saint’s chair is overgrown or destroyed, for there is no such to be found. It is not altogether unlikely that, nearly fourteen hundred years ago, at this very font, St. Maughold administered the baptismal rite. He is said to have blessed the well, and endowed it with certain healing virtues. It was formerly much resorted to by women for its health-imparting qualities. The water was imagined to derive additional efficacy if drank sitting in the saint’s chair, which was scooped out of the adjacent rock. For many ages it has been the custom for the natives to make a pilgrimage on the first Sunday in August to drink of its waters, and even now, on that day, the young people in the neighbourhood pay holiday visits to the spot.

I don’t derive much spiritual sustenance from the Legend of St Maughold, but, strangely enough, partly I suppose because of the enforced lack of the internet, I did have a more contemplative time than I had anticipated this Easter.  I didn’t feel lonely, even when left on my own for long periods of time, although I can see that it would also be an absolute hoot to organise a “camper van convention” and somehow get all of our friends and Debbie’s family together in a camper convoy and all sit around the camp fire carousing and singing pirate songs.  Maybe next year.

My musings on the crucifixion have left me none the wiser, though I did find some time for prayer, which I put to use partly in praying for the best outcome for Freddie, whatever that may be. As I type this, he is still a sort of Schrodinger’s Dog, poised and hovering between this world and the next. He will be sorely missed if and when his time does come. He may only be about a foot tall, but he has the great heart of a timber-wolf.  The only consolation is that he has had a great life, for a little mutt who was originally picked up ill and neglected and made well and strong and given toys to play with, dog treats, balls to chase, mince and chicken, and a soft bed to lie on, in front of a warm fire.  So yes, I have been contemplating the fleeting nature of happiness, life as a spark, and wondering – as I always do – where the sense of it lies.  Life is lent, as the Saxons said – lyf is leone – and “between the intention and the action, falls the shadow”. I didn’t really need Tom Archer to remind me of that, I have seen enough of it in my own life.

And yet, and yet, I come back to those moments – the visionary gleam of the sunlight on the blades of three distant wind-turbines, poking out of the sea-mist, and the living cathedral of the great forest, sighing all around me. Figments and fragments, maybe, but also glimpses beyond a veil? Was there one, or two sets of footsteps across the sand?

Next week will be back to the grim old grind. I doubt the seventeen intractable problems will have been solved while I have been away. I think the intractable problem fairy has had the week off, too. But at least while I am struggling with everything in the days to come, I can pause once or twice and think of the hills and the trees and the sea – not exactly crazed with the songs of Arabia, but perhaps with an ear cocked for the sound of the waves on the sands at Walney.

Epiblog for Palm Sunday

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. Busier than most, in fact, because we were simultaneously trying to get all the marking for GCSE up to date before the College Easter vacation (Deb) trying to get the College to pay Debbie the back pay they owe her from nine months ago (me) trying to get caught up with editing and sending books off to press, because we are hoping to get away in the camper van for a few days over Easter (me) and trying to co-ordinate various things needing to happen for a visit by Owen on Friday (again, me).

In comparison, the animals have had a leisurely time of it. Matilda’s days are filled with snoozing on the chair in the conservatory, in the sun, on her Maisie-blanket; snoozing on the settee next to the stove overnight on another (different) Maisie-blanket, or sitting on the decking in the unaccustomed, bright, Spring sunshine, blinking.  With occasional breaks for stacking away sachets of cat food, that is more or less it.  Once or twice Misty has tried to “round her up” but Matilda is capable of quelling such presumptuous behaviour with a single baleful glare, or, occasionally, a witheringly pitying look.

Misty is enjoying Spring, especially the novel concept of going for walkies in the daylight. She also charges round the garden at top speed, doing her customary three circuits when I let her out first thing in a morning, especially if I have stoked her up first by singing “Run, Tebbits, Run, Tebbits, Run, Run, Run” to the tune of the old Flanagan and Allen favourite.  Actually, thinking about it I could work it up into a whole verse:

“Run, Tebbits, run, Tebbits, run, run, run;

Claiming expenses was fun, fun, fun;

But bang! bang! bang! goes the revolution’s gun,

So run, Tebbits, run, Tebbits, run, run, run!

Yes, it has a certain jejune insouciance, as Brian Sewell might say.  When she hasn’t been flaked out in a patch of sunlight on the conservatory rug, Misty has been coveting Freddie’s bed, which of course is empty most of the time, when Freddie is at home.  This came as a surprise to me, as I had fully expected it would have been Matilda who, by now, had claimed “squatters’ rights”, but no, Misty beat her to it.  This despite the fact that it’s actually a little too small for her, and to get in it she has to curl round in a tight ball, with her nose in her tail.

Anyway, their blameless little lives continue, whatever their foibles, and the highlight of Misty’s day is when she sees Debbie preparing to depart on a “walkies”, even though she doesn’t know the actual word, and therefore doesn’t respond to it.  And, of course, my blameless little life continues as well, for the moment anyway, thank God.  This week has largely been spent editing Blood in the Air, the first Kari True fantasy novel, and by Thursday I had spent so long in a world of elves, demons, and mages casting spells that I was actually glad to get back to real life, or what passes for it, and – without wishing to give out any plot spoilers – I was almost as relieved as the elves when they managed to close the portal that had opened up to another dimension and stop all the bad stuff coming through.  “Elves have left the building”, I muttered to myself as I turned over the last page of the manuscript. It certainly gave a whole new dimension to the idea of “elf and safety at work”.

The Saxons, of course, recognised the concept of someone being “elf-shot”, which was their way of describing anyone who was suffering from some unexplained malady of the mind or body, or both – that they had been unknowingly pierced by an arrow shot by elves, and this had turned them fey.  By the end of the week, I was certainly feeling elf-shot, if not shell-shocked (but sadly, not Michelle Shocked). By the way, when I googled for “elf-shot” to refresh my memory of the definition, it also included all of the results for “self-shot” which was quite startling, especially as I had “safe search” turned off at the time.

But at least on Friday, like Snow White, I woke up feeling happy (other dwarfs are available, see under dwarf conifers) because Owen was due to visit.  It had been a while since he had graced our humble abode, having been grappling with various issues on his own homestead front since then (most of them involving drainage and, specifically, dealing with the four million cubic tons of rain which the weather dumped on Wales last winter).  He was here for a little over 24 hours, but in that time he managed to: fix the saggy steps on the decking; dismantle and disassemble both the dead plastic greenhouses;  put up some new trellis; fix the leaky guttering over the conservatory door; dig all the brambles out of the front garden; unclog the gutter over the lobby which had been causing damp down the wall; and, of course, fix the tray on my wheelchair, so I am now typing this on the proverbial level playing field, rather than the previous drunken slope, caused when the 25KG bag of coal fell on me, some weeks ago now.

He also tackled an emerging problem which had only just begun to trouble us – the downstairs loo backing up. Prosaic as it may seem, it was, in fact, potentially quite serious. Apparently, according to Owen, who had lifted the outside drain cover and looked into the matter (in both senses of the phrase – ewrgh!) there was probably a blockage in the public sewer which could, also, potentially trouble other people along the road, so it had to be reported to Yorkshire Water, which I duly did.  The issue was that if the sewer was blocked, then the water could be escaping under the house and undermining the foundations, causing a gigantic sinkhole that would swallow our house, and open up a supernatural portal to the otherworld, from which demonic “Douglas Hurds” would issue and take over the garden.  

Nothing more could be done that day, however, and, since our house, in common with M. Lautrec, has “Toulouse”, it was not a major problem. Yorkshire Water had my mobile number and said they would send someone round to look.  So the rest of the evening was given over to quaffing, carousing, and catching up on old stories, and a good time was had by all.

The next day, at just gone 7AM,  I was ligging abed with a slight hangover, and having a rather pleasant dream where Gwyneth Paltrow had asked me if I wanted to help her define “unconscious coupling” then passed out naked on my sofa, when my mobile rang. It was Yorkshire Water. They would be “on site” as they rather professionally termed it, in twenty minutes. Argh! Shit! (Literally) There was no time to lose. In fact, there was no time, Toulouse! I had just about struggled into my clothes, slid across on my banana-board into the wheelchair, and trundled through in the kitchen, when I heard the “beep-beep” of the reversing warning on their wagon outside.  Fortunately, Owen was already up (well, it was 7.20AM) and outside in the front garden digging up brambles, so he intercepted them and showed them the damage.

Half an hour later, they were on their way.  There was good, and bad news. The good news was that they had put a camera on a string down the hole and the public drain was clear. So there was no immediate prospect of the house disappearing overnight into another dimension, and therefore I didn’t need to do a crash course in Elvish magic to close the portal again. The bad news was that this meant the blockage was somewhere between the charmingly-named soil stack, and the loo. And was definitely our problem.  Undeterred, Owen set about dismantling the soil-stack, which was definitely above and beyond the call of duty. From there, he “rodded” back into the house, but whatever it was still resolutely refused to shift, despite Debbie doing an impromptu trip to Wickes to purchase fifteen feet of a wire divining rod thing in the form of a “flexible drain cleaner”.

By now, Owen was running out of time, so he had to set off back to Wales, leaving us to phone John the plumber in the morning.  Whoever has been eating polyfilla then crapping in our downstairs loo has a lot to answer for.  It ain’t me, babe, oh no no, it ain’t me babe, it ain’t me you’re looking for, as Robert Zimmerframe would doubtless say, if he were here right now.

As I said at the time, it’s all part of the perils of being a householder, and, in a sense, we’re lucky to have a house to hold.  Especially as the bedroom tax eviction notices have already begun to be issued. One person who won’t have to worry about the bedroom tax, or about having to live on fresh air because a benefit she relied on has been “sanctioned”, is the former Culture Secretary, Maria Miller. I’d like to say she did the right thing and resigned this week, but in fact it’s truer to say that the continued screams of rage at her illegal greed finally reached the ears of the Prime Minister, who, fearful of the damage she could do to his election prospects, and for no other reason, certainly no moral reason, reluctantly prized the keys to her ministerial red boxes out of her grasping evil fingers.  Even then, she gets away with financial murder.  She defrauded us out of some £45,000 of taxpayers’ money, was forced, grudgingly, to repay £4,800, and then received a severance payment of £17,000 in lieu of notice when she resigned as a minister! So all in all, I make it that she is £58,200 or so up on the deal.  If anyone doubted that there’s one law for them and one for us, then try this simple experiment. Resign from your job, then toddle down the labour exchange, tell them you want to make a fresh claim, you left your last work voluntarily, and ask them for your £17,000 cheque. Let me know how you get on.

It’s becoming clear to me that there is a small, but persistent, group of hard-core scroungers who are leaching this country of taxpayers’ money, contributed by hard-working families to the public purse, and giving nothing back to society in return. Many of them have never had a proper job or done a stroke of hard work in their lives. They don’t want to work. They have no interest in earning a living, as they are quite happy with their featherbedded, scrounger lifestyle funded by the rest of us.  They are supposed to turn up and sign in at least once a week, but they rarely do – in fact, some have set up complicated agreements with others to sign in on their behalf, or to enjoy mutually-agreed absences. This is what used to be derisively known as “Spanish Practices”, back in the 1970s, when it was the print unions such as NATSOPA and the NGA doing it. However, there is a way of identifying these people and dealing with them. Not by using ATOS, not by checking to see if their curtains are closed all day, it’s much easier than that – they all have the initials “MP” after their name.

Owen happened to mention that on his way here he had actually passed Kellingley Colliery, which, as I type these words, could have only days left before the gates are padlocked for good, throwing 800 miners onto the dole.  At this time last week, there was some talk of Cameron and the Blight Brigade undergoing a Damascene conversion and  actually getting involved in plans to save the pit. I thought at the time this seemed pretty unlikely, and so it has proved. In fact the deal is a loan of £10million of taxpayers’ money to provide a “managed closure” for the pit.  Quizzed on a local news programme during the week as to why the government was able to magically throw £squillions of “taxpayers’ money” at failing banks, but would not similarly intervene in the case of Kellingley and our only other two deep-coal pits, a politician (didn’t catch his name, but he is the suit responsible, apparently) said they had looked at it and there wasn’t sufficient taxpayer interest in any plan to keep the mines open.

Everyone agrees there are at least another 15 years of coal reserves at Kellingley alone. Can someone direct me to the interest to the taxpayer, when 20% of our energy needs still rely on coal, in closing our own reserves and denying them to ourselves, turning 800 taxpayers into 800 “dole-wallahs” overnight, in an area of high unemployment and low prospects, not to mention the knock-on effect of their loss of spending power on the wider community of local shops, businesses and suppliers, and handing the levers of power (literally) to unscrupulous gas oligarchs in the mode of Vladimir Putin (not gay) and coal shipped in from places like South America where the miners work in appalling conditions, often under-age and with no safety legislation?

The only reason it is “cheaper” for our power stations to buy foreign coal while British miners are put out of work is that the market is rigged, the same way as it was rigged in 1992 in the “dash for gas” that saw the last round of major pit closures by Heseltine.  The government could address this, for instance, by putting an import tax on cheap foreign coal, and using the ring-fenced revenue from this to subsidise the eventual managed decline of our own reserves, encouraging the swifter development of clean coal technology and the development of fossil fuel alternatives, perhaps even engineered on the same sites to make use of the skilled workforce.  But they won’t. The chances of the Junta pulling that one off are about as likely as those of Cameron deciding he’s a Buddhist.

One story which has vanished from the media is that of Yashika Bageerahti, who has been dropped like a red hot brick. Clearly she was last week’s deportee, darling.  One aspect of the story which interests me to the point where I believe it is worthy of further examination is the reason why Air Mauritius changed their mind between the Sunday, when they refused to carry her on a deportation flight, and the Tuesday, when they were seemingly happy to do so in the face of a howl of protest and subsequent boycott. Clearly some pressure had been applied – but where, how, and by whom? Legally, Air Mauritius were just as able to say no to the Border Agency on the day of Yashika’s deportation as they were on the Sunday, so what had changed in the interim? Being a crotchety old busybody, I rang Air Mauritius’s PR department and asked them precisely that question, saying I wanted to post their side of the argument on my blog, for balance.

They referred me to another number for their press office, which either rings out or is constantly engaged.  If there was pressure, it must’ve come from the Mauritius government, rather than from ours – since we had already done everything we could. What on earth could have persuaded the Mauritian authorities to lean on their airline in that manner.  Well, one answer is of course, a large bag of money. Or a large suitcase of money.  Or a large crate of money, depending how corrupt/skilful at negotiation the Mauritius government was. Interestingly, I find that there has been some international criticism of the UK’s DFID for channelling UK foreign aid to Mauritius via opaque offshore trusts and similar mechanisms, rather than more transparent channels. This makes it very difficult to see where the aid is going, and how much of it is “aid” that ever actually finds its way to anyone who wants aiding. 

I wouldn’t know the Mauritian government from the Martian government, but a person of cynical disposition might look at this and conclude that one scenario which fits the bill is that the UK DFID offered Mauritius a sudden and additional package of “aid” channelled via a trust accessible to members of the Mauritian government in return for them leaving on Air Mauritius to change their stance and fly Yashika’s deportation flight.  If I were an investigative journalist, that is the trail I would be following, and also wondering if this is the only instance where this sort of transaction has taken place, or have there been others? Clearly, if this was the case, it would require the government in Mauritius to be as corrupt, uncaring and venal as our own, so no doubt they will want to issue a statement saying that nothing of the sort ever took place. I wonder if the Port Louis branch of Staples sells shredders?

There are some times when I really do think I am gong to have to send the Blight Brigade a bill for having my jaw re-wired, and one such happened this week when David Cameron claimed to be a Christian and that he was doing God’s work. In his Easter Message (since when the hell did he have an “Easter Message”) he claimed in effect that it was Jesus who started the Big Society, and that Easter is about more than just chocolate and eggs.

“The Bible tells us to bear one another's burdens,” he is reported to have said. This, from a man who is guilty of promoting an ever widening gap in our society whereby the brunt of austerity is borne by those least able to do so.

I really don’t know where to start with this claim: perhaps a good place would be Matthew 23:27

Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men's bones, and of all uncleanness.

Followed up by Acts 23:3

"God will strike you, you whitewashed wall! You sit there to judge me according to the law, yet you yourself violate the law by commanding that I be struck!"

I would love to know what is remotely Christian about presiding over a government that has dismantled the NHS with no mandate to do so; that has wilfully pursued economic policies which have deliberately caused unemployment, bankruptcy and homelessness; that has made the poor and the ill into pariahs by means of vicious, untrue and divisive propaganda; that has encouraged and fomented racism; that has used taxpayers’ money to fire missiles costing £800m a time at Libya when that money could have been used to alleviate child poverty at home; that has introduced in effect internal repatriation via the bedroom tax; that has driven people to suicide and starvation because their benefits were stopped, and that has consistently robbed the poor to give to the rich, in a bizarre reversal of the Robin Hood philosophy? Where is the “love to the loveless shown, that they might lovely be”?

If that’s Christian, then give me King bloody Herod every time. To paraphrase Ian Hislop on another occasion, if David Cameron is a Christian in anything but self-applied name in order to lever out a few more percentage points in the polls, then I am a banana.  If Cameron is anything, he reminds me of an old pagan king of Britain, old King Coel (who became King Cole in the nursery rhyme). As you may recall, he was a merry old soul who called for his pipe and he called for his bowl and he called for his fiddlers three. Or in this case, his fiddlers 650-3, their elbows sawing manically back and forth while they sign expenses form after expenses form, and Rome burns about their, and our, ears.

Anyway, this brought us to Palm Sunday, one of my favourite times of the year. As I said at the head of this blog, next Sunday, Easter, we may well be off in the camper somewhere in the wild, woolly-arsed regions of the North, where men are men and internet connections are considered an effeminate irrelevancy. So there may/may not be a blog next Sunday, or there may be a double one the week after.  I suppose David Cameron might be thinking of himself as Jesus, riding to power in triumph one day, and hated by the crowd the next, but I have to say, unlike Jesus, he only has himself to blame.

Jesus, on the other hand, was called upon by God, who was also Jesus and vice versa, to “take one for the team” and die for all of us.  You can begin to see why I find theology so taxing. Particularly as I have never been able to find a convincing answer to why it had to be done that way.  But this is old ground, I have been over it many times. Once you accept that for whatever reason God either failed to foresee the fall of man or allowed it to happen anyway, knowing full well what the consequences would be, then felt that the only way out of that impasse was to become man, suffer a human death, and then defeat that death by rising again, the idea of Judas as the necessary betrayer – in fact the man who made the whole thing possible – becomes perfectly sensible In fact, we should maybe be singing “stand up, stand up for Judas”.

I must admit, when I first read the Bible stories as a child, I was astounded when it came to the crucifixion, that Jesus didn’t just use his super-powers to get down off the cross then and there and zap the Romans, in the same way as the heroes of the comics I read at the time did to Germans, Martians and Fuzzy-Wuzzies, depending if you were talking about Tough Duff the Commando (I have no idea if he wore underwear, before you ask) Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future, or The Wolf of Kabul. You can see how I grew up warped.  Since then, I have learned, I suppose, that there are other types of victory, other than obvious ones, and that Jesus appears to have been playing a long game.  On the other hand, it is possible to be so subtle that the majority of people miss your point and have to have it explained to them.

As with any event in the Bible, it is possible to interpret Palm Sunday in a whole spectrum of ways.  There is the literal, historical, this really happened style of interpretation, which sets out to establish that a man called Jesus existed at that time, and rode into Jerusalem that Sunday on an unbroken colt in order to fulfil ancient prophecy and identify himself as the Messiah. (As a general rule, in  the Bible, whenever something inexplicable happens, you can usually put it down to some wacky ancient prophecy being fulfilled). Then there is the mythological, James Frazer’s Golden Bough type interpretation, which says it’s all meant to be symbolic, pointing to other resurrection myths in other cultures. Then there is the atheist interpretation, which usually involves at some point the word “bollocks”.

I’m sorry if you came here looking for the answer to that. I don’t know. The best I can manage is that we will never know the mind of God in this plane of existence. I must admit, such is the lamentable state of my own faith, these days, marred by my hand-to-mouth existence, my busy-ness, and by the lack of any exterior guidance, that quite often I find myself wavering between those two extremes. I suppose the best I can say is that next week, Holy Week, in fact, I might – if I am carried off like a parcel in the camper van when Debbie declares a holiday – find the time to meditate and catch up on a few prayers. I owe big G a long prayer, explaining my absence on parade, but then I guess he already knows that, if he is actually listening. In the meantime, I guess if Palm Sunday does have a lesson for me, on a very basic level, it is enjoy it while it lasts, because you never know when things are going to turn nasty.  You never know the minute or the hour. The kettle is on the stove, the cat is on the settee, and Jesus is on his donkey, riding into Jerusalem. The ripeness is all.

Epiblog for the Fifth Sunday of Lent

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley.  I am beginning to think that maybe we are through winter after all. Certainly the coming of the lighter nights makes a big difference, at least to me it does, although I haven’t quite come to terms with it yet – I tend to be working away, thinking it’s about 4.30pm, and then I look at my watch and find it’s almost time for The Archers!

Misty and Matilda are now becoming more used to the conservatory door being open and thus allowing them to wander back and forth at will. Matilda has also taken to using her cat flap again, a fact which I discovered when I went through to my downstairs bedroom and heard her mewling behind the lobby door to come in. She must’ve gone out of the conservatory, round the side of the house, and in through the cat flap, only to find the inner door shut. God alone knows how long she’d been sitting there, but the idea of going back out of the cat flap, retracing her pawsteps, and coming back in through the conservatory had obviously never occurred to her.

Misty has been in the doghouse once or twice, notably on Monday. I was talking to Granny and Grandad, who had brought her back from her walkies, and during the course of the conversation I noticed that Misty was pushing something round the kitchen tiles with her head, pausing only to stand on it while she licked it furiously. What the hell was it? Closer inspection revealed that she had helped herself to the remaining butter, still in its paper, which had been in the butterdish on the front of the cooker.  It was my fault, I suppose, in that I had left it within reach of the dog, but I had no idea she’d nick it.  By the time we’d noticed what she was doing, most of the butter had gone and what remained was largely smeared across her snout. She retreated behind the settee to wash herself until not a speck of it remained.

Other than that little gem, Monday was a thankless day. Misty was about the only person who was happy with my efforts that day, and even then it was only because of an oversight on my part rather than anything consciously attempted. As I recall saying at the time, it was the sort of day when you could crap out a golden egg and someone would complain it wasn’t silver. If the highlight of the day was the dog stealing the contents of the butterdish, you can pretty much guess what the rest of it must have been like.

Then the weather decided to turn weird on us, and we descended into a sort of semi-permanent “foggy day in Olde London Town, gor blimey guv’nor it’s a pea-souper and no mistake”. This got the TV weathermen very excited, because apparently it was all to do with dust being blown up from the Sahara. So much so that, whichever side you watched, they were there, wittering on about the Sirocco and unusual atmospheric conditions when all you wanted to know was “will it rain?” In the midst of all this autumnal gloom, the printer cartridge died unexpectedly, so Debbie had to leave for Dewsbury stupendously early, not just because of the fog, but also to allow time for her to print out the stuff for her class at college beforehand.

It had been quite promising up to the point where someone turned the sun off. The air felt warm around me as I went down my ramp, though it had been windy enough to knock a scatter of catkins off the trees outside, and strew the decking with them.  Thursday also dawned grim, grey and grotty, but at least Thursday morning brought a courier with a jiffy bag of ink jet cartridges, so we were back in business again. The fog was not only depressing, but cold and clammy, though.  I frowsted by the fire with the animals, awaiting Deb’s return. Freddie was visiting, and I could see Matilda coveting his warm, soft, fluffy, comfy bed on the carpet in front of the stove, and it was obvious there was a massive internal debate going on in her crinkly little walnut of a brain about whether or not to invade it and settle down next to him.

Brenda (or whoever it is that comes n the middle of the night and eats the food I put out) continues to grace us with her presence. I have taken to scouring the house now each evening, in search of potential badger food, and I was trundling through the kitchen with two fairly manky bananas on my wheelchair tray, when Debbie accosted me and said “I’m not eating those!” to which I replied that this was correct, she was not eating those, unless she had a stripey head, powerful claws, and spent long periods underground.  

We did, however, find one thing that the badger refused to eat – Lloyd Grossman Balti Sauce. This is not surprising, because it is truly foul.  Generally speaking I prefer to build curries from scratch,  but because I was pushed for time on Wednesday I made use of a jar of this stuff, which we had somehow misappropriated from somewhere. After a few tentative mouthfuls I found myself saying, in my best Lloyd Grossman voice “what sort of person, would make a sauce like this…” The substantial leftovers went in Brenda’s dish, and were all still there untouched, the next morning, so eventually, I spread them on the garden, saying to myself, in true hippy mantra fashion “we give this food back with thanks to the earth which bore it” and vowing never to touch the stuff again.  Sorry, Lloyd.  I don’t know what it is with these “celebrities” and sauces and dressings. Paul Newman thinks he can do salad cream as well.

By Thursday, the printer was working again, as I said, and Debbie was up and about betimes, churning out stacks of handouts before setting off for Dewsbury. She left the house in her customary “Tasmanian Devil” whirlwind of activity, balancing rucksacks, carrier bags, lanyard and badge, mobile phone, and packet of sandwiches made by yours truly the night before. I heard the accelerating roar of the camper engine grow fainter as she disappeared down the road towards Lockwood, and eventually silence reigned. Ten minutes later she was back, blustering in, flinging the door back on its hinges, and cursing the garage in a spectacular and inventive way that made me want to cover Misty’s ears.  Matilda hid under the table as Debbie rampaged about, looking for the multi-tool. She’d tried to wind the window down, briefly, while driving along, and the winder had come off in her hand, leaving the window half-way.  Not only was it unpleasant driving along in the cold smoggy fog with your window open, but there was also the larger problem of security parking at the other end.  So she had no option but to turn round and come back for the wherewithal to fix it. Fifteen minutes of cursing and swearing, f-ing and blinding at the garage later, and she was on her way again. How long the temporary repair will hold is anyone’s guess, so that’s another job for my list next week, to get the garage to look at it properly.  I had, meanwhile phoned the college to say she’d be late, and the ABE department was on voicemail. I waited until just after nine and phoned them back. A person answered this time, and I passed on the message, adding that this was probably already in hand, as I had left a voicemail message earlier. “Oh, we never play them back”. Right. Fine. Good. So that was a complete waste of dog-farts, then.

As indeed is much of my dealings with the college these days, who still owe Debbie some back pay, going back to September 2013 in some cases.  Fine, no problem, we’ll just fund Kirklees College for nine months to the tune of several hundred pounds. Apparently “it is not the business of the payroll department to chase up missing or delayed pay claims forms” or so I have been told, in no uncertain terms. So, that’s all clear then.  And here was me thinking that the word “payroll” was significant.  I heard this week that Michael Schumacher had been showing occasional flashes of consciousness and rousing himself briefly from his comatose, vegetative state. Whatever they are giving him for it, they need to administer some to the payroll department of Kirklees College while they are at it.

Talking of Mr Schumacher veering off piste and ending up in the doo doos, George Osborne, who has done more or less the same thing with the economy, announced a goal of “full employment”, this week. I am not sure if it was actually announced on April 1^st, but it might as well have been, in a week which saw the announcement of the closure of the remaining deep coal pits in Yorkshire.  As I said last week, Thatcher is dead, but Thatcher-ism, sadly, lives on. Cameron promised to look at the situation, but also cautioned against using “taxpayers’ money” as if the miners who will be thrown on the dole are not themselves also taxpayers, who will then be forced to claim JSA, which is also “taxpayers’ money”.

Taxpayers’ money is actually a curiously elastic concept, the morality of which changes depending who it is who’s spending it and what they are spending it on. If you are Maria Miller, the Culture Secretary, it’s fine to fill your boots with taxpayers’ money to the tune of £45k or so, while claiming for a second home that actually isn’t actually er a second home, and when you are found out, you can employ every bullying, delaying tactic to obfuscate the enquiry, and then you can repay just £4800, make a 30-second apology to Parliament, and that’s alright then, everything’s ticketty-boo.  If you are Robert Barlow, of Merseyside, who died last November aged 47 while suffering from a heart defect and brain tumour, clearly you are  welfare scrounger, leeching on the taxpayer.  After all, that can surely be the only explanation why he was deemed fit to work by benefits assessors Atos, despite doctors at the time urging him to have a heart transplant.  Either that, or Atos are a bunch of incompetent uncaring compassionless swine, I suppose. That might also explain it.

Talking of incompetent, uncaring, compassionless swine, except that I quite like pigs, actually, DEFRA announced this week that the badger cull would not be extended, owing to the dismal failure of the pilots.  It has also been claimed, though I have been unable to verify this independently, that none of the 2000 or so badgers killed in the culls last year actually had the m.bovis virus.  Just when it seemed at last that an outbreak of common sense was taking place, however, up popped Princess Anne to suggest that badgers should be gassed, because it’s a “nicer” death than being shot. I speak as a supporter of the Royal Family here, when I say that Her Royal Highness has definitely got her string bag inside out. 

Firstly I take issue with the concept of a “nicer” death (I wonder if Harry Fenwick, who was gassed at Ypres in 1917 and died a lingering death at Etaples base hospital a few days later, thought that this was a “nicer” way to go than a bullet through the brain? Both sound pretty horrific to me.) Secondly, culling just one species in an attempt to eradicate a virus which is present in other significant reservoirs in the wild (and now also in some domestic cats) and which has a very complex method of transmission and infection dependent upon a number of variables, does not work. It wouldn’t work even if you killed every last badger in the UK.  It’s just the government thrashing around, desperate to be seen to be dong something, however ineffectual because there are lots of landowners and farmers who vote Tory. Sorry, but there you have it.  If gassing is a “nicer” death, perhaps we should test it out on freeloading MPs and minor Royals.

Badger culling is not the only area where the government is shamelessly pandering to a populist agenda based largely on myth and anecdotal propaganda. There’s also immigration, as was shown this week by the forced deportation of Yashika Bageerathi on Wednesday. She was sent back to Mauritius with two guards because her claim for asylum was denied. As a striving, popular and talented A-level mathematician, she was supposedly on the “good” side of the immigration ledger – not that I personally acknowledge the “deserving and undeserving immigrant” divide, any more than I do the deserving and undeserving poor. But given that each case is decided on its merits, one would have hoped for a bit more in the way of common sense from the Home Office. Air Mauritius, too, are entirely culpable, having refused to fly her the previous Sunday. I would love to know what made them change their mind, 72 hours later, what deal went down, and how much “taxpayers’ money” was involved. In 2010-2011 the UK Border Agency spent £28million on repatriating failed asylum seekers.

The hypocrisy of this particular case astounds me: we can fly Malala Yousafzai half way round the world and throw all the resource of the NHS at her to uphold the principle of “education” in the fight against the Taliban, but when it comes to someone in this country fearing for their well-being if deported, all the concepts of the importance of education go out of the window.

But, nevertheless, deported Yashika was, in the teeth of opposition from 178,000 people who signed a petition against it, to an uncertain future, as a purely symbolic gesture to assuage the Daily Mail white van man brigade, on a day which once more made me feel ashamed to be British.  Presumably her only way back now would be to get herself shot in the head by the Taliban. I think Facebook correspondent Andrew Moore summed it up neatly when he posted about the effect it was having on further education for foreign students.

Slow hand clap time...Well done uk government your moron pandering to the anti-immigration lobby has made you an unpleasant place and wrecks a global mega brand. This along with a dull overtone of "we don't want you", even the legitimate immigrants (me!) feel uncomfortable eg when the "go home" wagons are the best you can do... You stupid stupid buffoons.

Given Mr Farage’s tone in the recent TV debates and the way in which immigration is set to become a hot football and a political potato in the 2015 campaign, it can only be a matter of time until Princess Anne advocates gassing immigrants.  Many a true word spoken in jest.

And so we came, reluctantly, limping slightly and feeling tired and shivery, to Sunday, the fifth Sunday in Lent, and, as it happens, my 59^th birthday. According to the Lectionary, the readings for today are:

Ezekiel 37:1-14
Psalm 130
Romans 8:6-11
John 11:1-45

So I went and looked them up. I was pleasantly surprised by the Ezekiel, because it turns out to be about dem bones dem bones dem dry bones:

The hand of the Lord was upon me, and carried me out in the spirit of the Lord, and set me down in the midst of the valley which was full of bones,  and caused me to pass by them round about: and, behold, there were very many in the open valley; and, lo, they were very dry.  And he said unto me, Son of man, can these bones live? And I answered, O Lord God, thou knowest.  Again he said unto me, Prophesy upon these bones, and say unto them, O ye dry bones, hear the word of the Lord.  Thus saith the Lord God unto these bones; Behold, I will cause breath to enter into you, and ye shall live:  and I will lay sinews upon you, and will bring up flesh upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and ye shall live; and ye shall know that I am the Lord. So I prophesied as I was commanded: and as I prophesied, there was a noise, and behold a shaking, and the bones came together, bone to his bone.

And when I beheld, lo, the sinews and the flesh came up upon them, and the skin covered them above: but there was no breath in them. Then said he unto me, Prophesy unto the wind, prophesy, son of man, and say to the wind, Thus saith the Lord God; Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live. So I prophesied as he commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived, and stood up upon their feet, an exceeding great army.

Pretty good stuff. Whatever Ezekiel was on when he wrote that, I wouldn’t mind a pinch of it right now.  Psalm 130 is about calling from the depths, and the Romans passage is about the difference between the carnal life and the spiritual life. But the passage from John is possibly the most famous of the four – the raising of Lazarus from the dead:

Jesus said, Take ye away the stone. Martha, the sister of him that was dead, saith unto him, Lord, by this time he stinketh: for he hath been dead four days.  Jesus saith unto her, Said I not unto thee, that, if thou wouldest believe, thou shouldest see the glory of God? Then they took away the stone from the place where the dead was laid. And Jesus lifted up his eyes, and said, Father, I thank thee that thou hast heard me. And I knew that thou hearest me always: but because of the people which stand by I said it, that they may believe that thou hast sent me. And when he thus had spoken, he cried with a loud voice, Lazarus, come forth. And he that was dead came forth, bound hand and foot with graveclothes: and his face was bound about with a napkin. Jesus saith unto them, Loose him, and let him go.

So, two weeks before Easter we are already foreshadowing someone being raised from the dead.  It is inevitable, I suppose, given my situation and the fact that I am now in my 60^th year (which somehow sounds so much older than merely being 59) that both Ezekiel connecting the dry bones and Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead should both have resonances for me. It’s an inevitable progression, as you get older and bits start to wither and drop off. What am I, anyway? Am I just dry bones, sinew and flesh, that will stink after four days. Or is that just the shell, the husk that I inhabit, and the real me, the essential me, will be elsewhere? Why did nobody ask Lazarus what happened when he died?

The dry bones of Ezekiel have inspired both poets and painters. In 1855 Henry Alexander painted “Shall These Dry Bones Live” in the Pre-Raphaelite style, a painting which I have reproduced at the top of this blog.  And T S Eliot (who else?) alludes strongly to the passage in Ash Wednesday:

And God said
Shall these bones live? shall these
Bones live? And that which had been contained
In the bones (which were already dry) said chirping:
Because of the goodness of this Lady
And because of her loveliness, and because
She honours the Virgin in meditation,
We shine with brightness. And I who am here dissembled
Proffer my deeds to oblivion, and my love
To the posterity of the desert and the fruit of the gourd.
It is this which recovers
My guts the strings of my eyes and the indigestible portions
Which the leopards reject.

On that crucial question – shall these dry bones live?  - hangs the faith of many people. Once again I find myself in a position of unknowing. It’s a question which is fundamental to our perception of our own reality. I have been alive now for 59 years inside this mobile hamburger that trundles round each day, gratifying its desires. But is that me? And if not, then what is?

The grim reaper cut a swathe through the lives of my friends last week. Two people that I know both lost folk who were close to them, in one case even kin. I feel it behoves me to comfort them tonight, even though I am not much good at comforting myself. So I fall back on my old reasoning, which is that this thing we call reality is no more real than any other flickering mage made entirely of electro-magnetism, and  - as Bob the wizard once said, no doubt unconsciously channelling Juliana of Norwich – we are all one, and we are all contained in a point of light. Or putting it another way, if nothing is real, then everything is unreal, and, my friends, you will see your Mum again and you will see your friend again, in fact they are probably here, all around us in some dimension we can’t perceive, watching over us and wishing us well,  because heaven knows no time.

Somehow, it’s 10 o’clock and almost the end of my birthday. It’s already tomorrow in Australia, and tomorrow is another day. Misty’s asleep on the settee, Matilda’s giving herself an extended wash in the armchair next to the TV, Debbie’s working on her marking and I am just about to do the washing up before Match of the Day 2.   So I’m going to leave it there tonight. Shall these bones live? Who knows. Shall my soul live? I hope so.