Epiblog for the Fifth Sunday of Lent

It has been another busy week in the Holme Valley.  Two things have been happening, gradually and almost imperceptibly, this week. The continued burgeoning of the spring, as the green haze between the interlaced branches grows slightly more defined each day, and the gradual return to what passes for normal life after the relative turmoil of the weeks that contained Mike’s death, and then his funeral. A “settling back down” process that includes picking up from where I left off, getting back in the “old routine”, and at the same time, knocking things off the “to do” list, including such mundanities as telling the AA and the TV Licensing authorities, that he is no longer with us.

The weather has remained stubbornly cold and grey, although we have at last got some sun today. I have been thinking of ways to resurrect he wreckage of the garden, which has suffered especially badly this winter. In fact, if I wasn’t sitting here typing this, I would be preparing some troughs and planters and clearing away the wreckage of what remains from last autumn. One small glimmer of horticultural hope was evident his week – the lemon catnip in the trough on top of the outside gas meter, which I had given up for dead, is putting forth new shoots from the base of the old, withered sticks.  Maisie’s indestructible daffodils are fluttering and dancing in the breeze, in the approved Wordsworthian manner, but still refusing to flower. Given some of the temperatures we had midweek, I don’t blame them. I was sorely tempted to hibernate, myself.

Matilda’s been spending more time outdoors, though, grim grey skies notwithstanding. She does come back through the cat flap as evening falls, however – or more correctly, as the temperature falls. I was looking for her the other night when I went to bed, and I actually found her burrowed into my sleeping bag, which I have been using as a counterpane on the especially cold nights when my knees keep me awake, by singing to each other of their pain.

The dogs have had their usual quotas of treats and walks, including little Ellie, who has begun compensating for the forced route marches across the moors in the dark by getting up early with the rest of us, going out into the garden to do her stuff, and then coming back in and going straight back up to bed again for another couple of hours!

This was also the week that contained both the Equinox and the eclipse, the former more welcome than the latter, although the latter hardly troubled the scorers in that it was largely obscured by cloud. I doubt I will see the next one: if I am still around in 2026, I will be even more of a basket case than I am now. Inevitably I found myself thinking back to standing in the car park at the office in 1999 when I saw the last total eclipse of the sun. We had all turned out to watch it, under the pretext of a fire drill, in an almost carnival atmosphere display of camaraderie (or so I thought: had I been gifted at that time with the foresight of what would have come to pass by the time I saw the next eclipse, instead of going inside back to my desk when it was all over, I should have turned on my heel and started walking. And carried on walking.)

Anyway, that was the eclipse that was, or, rather, that wasn’t, by and large. In listening vaguely to the BBC news coverage of the event, which recommended wearing a colander on your head so as to avoid looking directly at the sun, I was reminded of John Donne’s lines about:

On a huge hill,
Cragged, and steep, Truth stands, and he that will
Reach her, about must, and about must go;
And what the hill's suddenness resists, win so;
Yet strive so, that before age, death's twilight,
Thy Soul rest, for none can work in that night.
To will, implies delay, therefore now do:
Hard deeds, the body's pains; hard knowledge too
The mind's endeavours reach, and mysteries
Are like the Sun, dazzling, yet plain to all eyes.

Actually, it has been a week when wearing a colander on your head has often seemed like a good idea, eclipse or no eclipse.  Dealing with the task of untangling the legal spag bol that follows someone’s death has often left me wandering in a strange parallel universe where nobody seems to understand plain bloody English any more. There have been several times in the last few days when I felt like one of those medieval scholars who tried to compile Indices Indicorum, and went bonkers in the attempt. I’m with Gloucester in King Lear when he says:

These late eclipses in the sun and moon portend no good to us. Though the wisdom of nature can reason it thus and thus, yet nature finds itself scourged by the sequent effects.

Quite so, Gloucester me old pal, me old beauty. It’s certainly been a week of bizarre conversations. It’s probably Mercury Retrograde or something, I haven’t checked, but what else could account for the conversation between me and Admiral Multicar about transferring the insurance on Mike’s car:

TINA: Hello, this is Tina from Admiral Multicar, and may I take your name, please?
ME: Steve
TINA: And may I call you "Steve" during this conversation?
ME: Well, it *is* my name, so I guess, yes.

I was torn between "No, I would like you to call me 'Daddy'" or "You may address me as 'O Mighty Hierophant, Dread Lord of the Dark Armies'" but in the end, we went with Steve.

I did manage to get a cheaper quote than the one from Adrian Flux, though. For the money Adrian Flux wanted, I would have expected a free, anatomically correct Baby Adrian Flux toy, or even the man himself to pop round of a Sunday morning and wash the car.

Even my conversations with my spouse, normally so well-tempered and even of tone, were not immune:

Deb: Who's that on the telly?
Me: Sister Rosetta Tharpe.
Deb: Sister Rosetta Fart?
Me: Tharpe. They had to cut her leg off.
Deb: Why?
Me: Because it had gone black.
Deb: But she was black.
Me:  Yes, but the leg was blacker.

Where's Alan Bennett when you need him? Still, the Equinox is a welcome signpost on the road to summer, especially as I seem to have spent a lot of time this last few winter months battling darkness, both internal and external.

The feeling that I have somehow fallen through the Earth’s crust, down a rabbit hole, into some weird, Alice-in-Wonderland universe hasn’t been merely confined to hearth and home this week. The snippets of news that filter through to me here from the wider world have also been tinged with absurdity.  People have told me I have a “thing” about Rachel Reeves, because I am always having a go at her. I don’t. I’m always having a go at her, because every time she opens her mouth, out pops something stupid, something that is likely to further damage Labour’s already wafer-thin, slim chances of dislodging the Junta in May and avoiding us having to suffer five more years of austerity nuclear winter.  Here’s the deal, Rachel: I’ll be nicer, if you’ll be smarter.

This week she chose an interview in The Guardian to announce that Labour would, if it managed to grasp the levers of power, act to reduce the numbers of food banks (how? And without putting anything in their place?) because Labour did not want to be seen to be the party of the welfare state. “We are not the party of people on benefits. We don’t want to be seen, and we’re not, the party to represent those who are out of work,” she said, adding: “Labour are a party of working people, formed for and by working people.”

Here we go again. All people on benefits are scroungers, untouchables in the new caste system of the deserving and undeserving poor, invented by the Blight Brigade and now taken up by Rachel Reeves, twanging her banjo to a tune called by Cameron and Iain Duncan-Smith.  I’ve heard Jim Reeves, and I’ve heard Rachel Reeves, and I know which I prefer.  Well, if the Labour Party won’t stand up for the weak, the oppressed, the ill and the unemployed, I guess that really does just leave The Church of England as the only opposition to the horsemen of the Westminster apocalypse.  Meanwhile someone should point out to Rachel Reeves something that she should already know: lots of working people are also on benefits.

It’s not just the Labour Party nationally that is on the side of corporate “efficiency” and heartless bureaucracy, it’s also evident in local government. Hard on the heels of Hull City Council trying to prevent the homeless from being fed, which I wrote about last week, this week brings the case of Robbie Clark, a 96 year old war hero and survivor of the “death march” inflicted by the Nazis on prisoners of war in the dying days of the conflict in 1945, who is being pressured by Brent Council to move out of his home in Burnt Oak, North London, sell up, and spend his remaining days in a care home, which both he and his family say would destroy his freedom and dignity and probably shorten his life.  The council likes things in neat little boxes, and in fact, bureaucrats the world over simply love shoehorning people into solutions that don’t quite fit, especially if they can put a tick in a box at the end of the exercise.

The dilemma faced by Mr Clark, and many like him, isn’t exclusively a “labour party” problem of course. In fact, the real villain is probably Eric Pickles, and the government of which he is a part (I originally typed ‘prat’, and was sorely tempted to let it stand.) By cutting central government funding to local authorities to the bone and then beyond, Pickles and his ilk have forced these hard choices on – disproportionately – mainly Labour local authorities, and created a nationwide crisis in funding home care for the elderly.  And yet (I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again) somehow, we can always find money for hugely expensive missiles and the gallons and gallons of aviation fuel necessary to deliver them to some hillside on the Syrian border in order to destroy an ISIS Toyota pickup truck worth £1500 on “We Buy Any Car.com” – OK, £2,000, if it’s insured by Adrian Flux.

Politics would indeed be bleak at the moment were it not for the stick-on comedy gold of UKIP’s catalogue of gaffes.  Seemingly the EU does have its uses, because UKIP MEP Janet Atkinson’s chief of staff was apparently caught out this week in the act of trying to persuade a restaurant to artificially inflate the bill, on the grounds that the EU always paid up without question. Needless to say, she joined the ranks of the suspended. I repeat my question of earlier blogs: is there any UKIP candidate, anywhere, who isn’t either nutty as a fruitcake, racist, bent, homophobic, or perm any three from four?

I haven’t even bothered discussing the budget this week, I have one simple question. Why should anyone believe a word George Osborne says, when he has missed every target he set himself in 2010, and is now having to resort to some very precise forms of words, subtly altered from his former rhetoric, if not outright lies, about when the austerity will end (is it 2026 now?)  If you believe that, how do you feel about the Tooth Fairy?

So, somehow this week, we’ve arrived at Sunday, the fifth Sunday of Lent, already.  I can’t believe it will soon be Easter, and that on Easter Monday I shall (Big G willing) attain the big six-oh.  Obviously, given all that’s happened in the last few days, the event at the moment seems to have taken on more of the aspect of a tombstone than a milestone, as I have been revising my will, as the one I made more than a decade ago is now massively inappropriate and out of date. I did actually do a draft, and I also revised the music and readings for my funeral, a copy of the list now being lodged safely with my sister, who is much less likely than Debbie to lose it and put me out for the dustmen in a bin bag, instead.  I did actually contact the firm of solicitors I used for the first one, asking for an update on the costs of revising it. I received a very kind, informative reply by email from a lady called Gemma, and it was only when I was just re-reading my answer to her various points, prior to clicking “send”, that I noticed that it was actually signed “Andrew”. Either it was a quirk of the Microsoft Outlook “send email on behalf of” feature, or Andrew enjoys being Gemma at the weekends. I assume that transvestism in solicitors is quite common: it must start with all that having to wear wigs and black tights. De minibus non curat lex.  Unfortunately, the estimate turned out to be eye-wateringly expensive, so I may have to sharpen up a quill pen, find some stretched goat’s vellum by accosting a passing goat, and go it alone.

Anyway, yes, the fifth Sunday of Lent, and, having reviewed and discounted today’s Saints as a motley crew unworthy of cyber-space, I turned instead to the specified readings in the Lectionary in search of spiritual enlightenment. These include John 12: 22-30, where Jesus discusses his potential fate:

Philip cometh and telleth Andrew: and again Andrew and Philip tell Jesus.  And Jesus answered them, saying, The hour is come, that the Son of man should be glorified.  Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.  He that loveth his life shall lose it; and he that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal. If any man serve me, let him follow me; and where I am, there shall also my servant be: if any man serve me, him will my Father honour. Now is my soul troubled; and what shall I say? Father, save me from this hour: but for this cause came I unto this hour.  Father, glorify thy name. Then came there a voice from heaven, saying, I have both glorified it, and will glorify it again.  The people therefore, that stood by, and heard it, said that it thundered: others said, An angel spake to him.  Jesus answered and said, This voice came not because of me, but for your sakes.

On the one hand, Jesus seems to be alluding to the cycle of death and re-birth that preoccupies my own mind so much every Spring.  Last year’s dung and decay is dug into the soil, and the seeds that were ripped from their pods and branches by the ruthless winds of winter begin to put forth timid shoots, so the whole thing can begin again, as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be.  I’ve written before about the concept of the “necessary betrayer”, and that Jesus couldn’t have done it without Judas, and here it seems almost as if Jesus is talking of death as a kind of “necessary precursor”, a handmaid to life.

Yet at the same time, he is obviously falling prey to the same sort of thoughts that often beset me, in the watches of the night. Do I really have to go through with this? Is there not some other way?

There must be some kind of way out of here

Said the Joker to the Thief

at the beginning of All Along The Watchtower.  Father, save me from this hour.  Or as Shakespeare puts it;

The lowest and most loathed life

Which age, ache penury or imprisonment bestow on man

Is but a paradise to what we fear of death.

I’m paraphrasing: I may have misremembered it, but you get the gist.  It takes a considerable leap of faith to embrace death as the necessary precursor, a leap that I doubt I could make in my soul, even if I could still leap in real life. And despite the fact that he had, himself, just raised Lazarus, even Jesus needed a “bracer”, in the form of an angel voice booming out of the sky, telling him to man up and pull himself together, and I have to say that in my own case, angel voices have been rather conspicuous by their absence of late. I wish sometimes I was like Blake, who, although he was undoubtedly as mad as a bucket of badgers, did at least have the compensation of seeing angels at every street-corner, sitting on the roofs of buildings and preening their wings.

Any angel that gets lumbered with the job of bracing me against my inevitable fate must have been very naughty in a previous life (if that’s not too theologically questionable) or at least misguided. Yet, sometimes, I do hear the voices of the angels, quite often, pace T S Eliot, down the path we did not take, or I will find myself somewhere indescribably beautiful, such as a wood by the side of Coniston Water, in springtime, with the feeling that maybe the angels were here, but they left just before we arrived.

Still, as I sit here contemplating my own upcoming completion of the sixth decade of my life, I find myself falling back once more on the small things that make up my existence these days.  Fetch in the coal, cook the food, feed the dogs, feed the cat, plant your herbs and watch them grow; gather twigs, light the fire.

Who sweeps a room as to thy lawes

Makes that, and th’action fine,

as George Herbert would say if he were here right now.  Yes, a retreat is not the same as a rout. We’ve explored as far as we can today, and now it’s time to start falling back. Falling back, and hoping maybe a passing angel will catch me.