It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley,
and rather a sad one in some ways, as we have now passed Midsummer, and can
only expect things to get colder and darker from now on. As someone who lives
from summer to summer, and sees winter as purgatory to be endured, there’s
always a sad sense of time passing on the summer solstice, well, for me at any
rate.
All seasons are alike to Matilda, of course, since her life
consists of sleeping punctuated by meal breaks, though she has spent quite a
lot of time outdoors this week, as we’ve tended to have hot, sultry, dull days,
where she finds a shady spot outside and snoozes there all day, instead of on
her Maisie-blanket on the chair. Now that term itself is winding down, and the
GCSE classes have come to an end, Deb has more time to take Misty out for
longer rambles, as opposed to a quick spin round the park, up into the woods,
or down the cricket field, so they’ve been doing 11-mile route marches once
more, much to Muttkins’s delight. In fact, she gets so fussy when she thinks
she’s going walkies, by the time they actually set off she’s probably already
done at least a quarter of a mile, just in running back and forth to the door.
Debbie is, of course, demob-happy, and deservedly so. This
has been a gruelling enough academic year without the additional issue of her
pay arrears and all the attendant unpleasantness, and now of course she is
already starting to worry that this furore over not being paid will adversely
affect her chances of being offered any hours next term. I have told her not to
worry, because I am pretty sure the College makes a habit of not paying any of its part time hourly-paid tutors
until they threaten to come down in person and beat the door in, so my mildly
sarcastic dunning letters and “final demands” will have seemed tame by
comparison.
Other than that, Debbie’s main preoccupation over the last
few days has been getting to grips with her new phone. Given that it took us two and a half hours
just to get the back off the bloody thing so we could put the battery in, I
could see that was going to be a bad omen, and so it has proved. It was not
helped by Sony’s lack of a printed manual, the stingy bastards, though you can
download one from the internet and print it out at your own expense, but the
phone still does random things and surprises her, and occasionally me, into the
bargain. Last night I had gone to bed and was asleep when at 12.30AM my mobile
started ringing. Given that a mobile
phone call at that time of night usually means bad news, I groped my way to
consciousness and answered it, only to find it was Deb from the other side of
the connecting wall, having mistakenly pressed a button on the touch-screen to
call back a missed call from me, earlier in the day. She apologised, and I went
back to sleep. The one good thing she
has discovered about it is that she can get the internet on it, specifically
Ebay, so she can now sit and surf for shiny things wherever she is, 24/7
As well as being sad at the passing of summer this week, I’m
afraid to say I have also not been very well. My latest lot of blood tests from
the hospital appear to be reasonably normal, but apparently I am deficient in
Iron, and Vitamin B12, and this will have to be rectified, first by means of
injections and then tablets. None of
which stopped some foul bug invading my system on Thursday and laying me low.
Only metaphorically – I did actually get out of bed and made it as far as the
wheelchair, but all I did all day was snooze and sneeze and doze and ache, and
I was about as much use as a fart in a colander. Friday was just as bad, and it
was only yesterday that I started to feel a bit more like myself again. I could
have done without it, to be honest. I hate the inconvenience of being ill, and of course it played havoc with my
“to do” list.
So I haven’t been paying a lot of attention to the outside
world, to be honest. Tens of thousands of people – some say up to fifty
thousand – marched through London
yesterday to protest against “austerity”, an event which went totally
unreported by the BBC, to its lasting shame.
Of course, if Black Bloc had smashed a few bus shelters, it would have
been top of the bulletin. For all the wrong
reasons.
Meanwhile, Nick Clegg has vowed to re-create a truly
independent Liberal Party once again. Ha. Good luck with that. And the DWP have
been caught out yet again fiddling the figures, cherry-picking and publishing
selective statistics. So, no change there, then. Perhaps the most significant story of the
week was that some wag or humorist managed to hack the official “Twitter” feed
of the Labour Party and posted a “tweet” promising a new Labour policy of a
free owl for everybody. Not only was this amusing in itself, but several
hundred people apparently said that if this
was ever to become official Labour policy, they would definitely consider
voting Labour. Which really ought to
give Ed Miliband food for thought, on a number of levels.
Iraq
continues to descend into a shambolic mess. Obama has sent several hundred
“special advisors” to “guard the US Embassy”, which translates as “Navy Seals”
to harass ISIS’s supply lines and carry out
decapitation missions. Cameron has been
too busy mugging up on Magna Carta to join in. He seems to think that the
values of Magna Carta should now be the ones that underpin the teaching of
“British values” in schools, which is quite ironic, given the Junta’s
consistent attempts to undermine it and dismantle its hard-won privileges for
the common man.
And of course, England crashed out of the world
cup. Personally, I had very low expectations of the England team in this contest. If
they were going to win, they would have had to beat some, or all of the
following: Germany, Holland, Italy,
Argentina, Brazil. Not going to happen. We can’t defend, we’re turgid and boring in
midfield, and we have nobody who can score goals. On the plus side, though, Joe
Hart knows all of the words to God Save The Queen.
Notwithstanding England’s hasty and ignominious
exit, we shall, nevertheless, continue to have the World Cup served up for
breakfast lunch and tea. The slots are already booked, sadly. In any case I am
not sure I am comfortable with an international sporting event which has been built
on misery and evictions, but I suppose I should have managed my expectations.
It’s not the first time. The Greeks, God strafe them, shot all the feral cats
in Athens in the run-up to the Athens Olympics, and the 2012 Olympics in London
saw the Junta deporting Polish rough sleepers to tidy up the East End, using a
loophole in EU law that enables people to be sent back to “comparable
conditions” – not that anybody really bothered to check.
And so we came to today, the feast of St Alban. St Albans these days always carries faintly ridiculous overtones.
I don’t know why, and I do apologise in advance to anyone who lives there. It’s
one of those places, for me, like Biggleswade, where you imagine 1930s
bungalows, spinsters cycling to matins, and old colonels in blazers and Oxford
Bags taking a Pekingese for a walk at Sunday teatime. If E F Benson hadn’t
appropriated Rye as the model for his fictional
town of Tilling in the Lucia books, St Albans would have been a good alternative, apart from
its lack of seaside.
Of course, I am doing St Albans
a massive disservice here, for in reality it has a long and noble history
stretching back to the Roman foundation of Verulamium. Legends assert that St
Alban was a Roman soldier at Verulamium, and he may even have been a
Romano-Briton. Mind you, legends assert lots of things, Legends asserted that England
could win the World Cup. Some scholars assert that Verulamium was actually part
of an enclave which resisted Roman rule, but that doesn’t really stack up with
Alban being part of a garrison there.
Whatever the truth of the matter, Alban, a pagan, is said to
have sheltered a priest who was fleeing persecution. Alban took the priest's
cloak and allowed him to escape. Roman soldiers arrested Alban, who was later
beheaded. Bede, writing in his Ecclesiastical History, dates the martyrdom to
the reign of the Emperor Diocletian, around 305AD, but modern scholars favour
around 209AD, in the reign of Septimus Severus.
A cult developed around St Alban, and the fifth-century St Germanus of
Auxerre mentions that he visited a shrine dedicated to Alban during his crusade
through Britain
preaching against the Pelagian heresy. I used to know what the Pelagian heresy
was, but I am ashamed to say I have forgotten. It has joined that huge amount
of stuff that has been driven out of my head by new stuff that has made its way
in. This is but one of the many ways in which I resemble Homer Simpson.
Bede had previously mentioned a church dedicated to St
Alban, and the supposed site of Alban’s martyrdom, Holmhurst Hill, became the site
of an Abbey, founded by King Offa (he of the Dyke, no sniggering at the back)
in the 8th Century AD. After that, the fate of St Alban’s relics
becomes more problematic. During one of the many Danish incursions, they were
said to have been transported to the Isle of Ely
for safe keeping. St Canute’s church in Odense
claims to have relics of St Alban, stolen during Canute’s raid on York in 1075. However, there is also the tradition that St
Germanus of Auxerre was rewarded for his visit by being given some of the
relics of St Alban.
And there is might have ended, because most of St Alban’s
relics were apparently scattered during the Dissolution, but a bone believed to
be a relic of St Alban, the first British martyr, was returned to Hertfordshire
by a group from the church of St Pantaleon in Cologne, Germany, and presented to St Albans Cathedral. The bone
was placed inside the restored 13th Century saint's shrine on 29th June 2002. So
there you have it. St Alban in a nutshell.
I’m not sure, as usual, that St Alban holds any major
lessons for me, other than to keep out of the way of stroppy Roman soldiers
with sharp swords, and, to be honest, I would probably have done that anyway. But the story of St Alban is indicative of
something else, I suppose – the ever changing palimpsest of the English
landscape, from Roman Town to the site of two bloody battles in The Wars of The
Roses, in 1455 and 1461, to relative
prosperity in the 18th century as a market town on several
stagecoach routes, the silk industry and the straw plaiting industry in the 19th
century. In some ways it’s a story that’s replayed across many towns in England, making
up the patchwork, the very fabric of our social and local history.
It looks like I shall shortly be off on one of my
peregrinations through that fabric again, anyway, but not southwards,
northwards this time, as the day of our departure to Arran
approaches. The camper must be packed, Matilda consigned to the care of Granny,
and my wheelchair, with me in it, pushed up the ramps to enable me to transfer
into the front passenger seat. There are
still a few weeks of summer left, I suppose, though when we get back towards
the end of August, it will be all hell and no notion again into a new term and
a new academic year.
I wish I could get enthusiastic about going off on holiday
but I am not feeling in very good nick right now, and to be honest, I worry
about having some sort of major medical emergency and screwing everything up
again, just like I did in 2010, when instead of setting off for Arran, I ended
up spending six months in Huddersfield Royal. Let’s hope not. I’ve long since
given up dreaming of waking up cured one morning, but it would be good to wake
up tomorrow morning feeling that this foul bug had quit my mortal frame and I
was back to something like what passes for normal. I don’t know how successful
I will be at maintaining this blog from the Isle of Arran, though, especially
given the staggering amount of stuff I need to take with me to work on, and the
now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t nature of internet connections on the Island. But
the road is calling. Farewell, farewell, to you who would hear, you lonely travellers
all, the cold north wind shall blow again, the winding road does call, and all
that.
So, you find me at a strangely downbeat end to a strangely
downbeat week, really. In limbo. I’ll no doubt be better tomorrow, but I am
sitting here right now, a bit like T S Eliot’s Gerontion, a dried, wizened old
man in a dry house. Eventually, I hope Deb will be back from Wessenden with
Misty in time to watch Belgium v Russia or whatever delights the TV has to
serve up for us tonight. I might even try and have something to eat, for the
first time in two or three days. Begone,
foul bugatry!
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