Epiblog for the Feast of St Vincentia Gerosa

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. It really has, with me buzzing round like a B. A. F., trying to finish off books before we go away in July, and Debbie embroiled in the last throes of the exam season.  The weather continues to be dull and warm, a bit like The Isle of Wight. (Only kidding, my IOW chums). I do wish we could see some sunshine, though, I would happily sacrifice a couple of degrees off the temperature in return for a few days of blazing sunshine. As it is, we’ve had another week of days where it looks like it’s going to absolutely bang it down any minute.

Matilda has now settled into her summer routine of rising with us in the morning, and going and sitting by her dish in the anticipation of a sachet of Felix. Then, with breakfast out of the way, it’s out onto the decking and unless it starts raining, that’s her gone for a couple of hours. She usually appears back at the door (despite the fact that she has a cat flap which is held permanently open by a bit of string looped round the door handle) sometime around mid-morning, for her elevenses, then it’s back out again and lying in the warmest place she can find, glaring at the squirrels that she is too lazy/comfortable to get up and chase. This continues until teatime, when she returns for another light snack, before going out again and returning about the time it starts to get dark, for supper, following which she usually puts herself to bed on the settee in Colin’s front room, and I close the door to the cat flap. It’s a tough life, being Matilda.

Misty’s done two walks of over fifteen miles this week and one of eighteen, and when Deb has been unavailable for such yompings, Granny has kindly stepped in and given her a spin round the park for an hour with Zak and Ellie. She has actually been a lot calmer over these summer weeks, apart from the time she ran off at the sound of a well-struck cover drive from the nearby cricket field. She’s probably saving it all up for one spectacular act of disobedience/stupidity when we’re on Arran.

When I haven’t been desperately trying to finish off the stack of books waiting to go to press, this week, I’ve been wrestling with the twin problems of the camper insurance and the house insurance, both of which fall due at around this time of year. It’s a first world problem, sure, and I could be a lot worse off, but once more my dealings with the insurance industry have only sought to confirm why so many people just give up and drive around uninsured, and live in houses without any buildings or contents cover. One thing I don’t understand is, if my call is so bloody important to these people, why are they keeping me on hold for 25 minutes playing me Mozart’s Rondo a La Turk, rendered by a mad Chinaman on a xylophone, before picking up the phone? I’d hate to think what happens to people whose calls, for one reason or another, they deem unimportant.

Still, last week was but a mere bagatelle compared to what awaits me next week when, as well as trying up more loose ends than you’d find in a string factory, I also have to start in on preparing for going away – beginning with the famous “holiday checklist” that comes into play every year at about this time.  There’s a quotation in Shakespoke somewhere – I forget exactly which play – to the effect that, once you’ve decided to do something unpleasant, the period between deciding to do it and actually carrying it out, is much more unpleasant than the deed itself.  All I can say is, he must have been readin’ ma’ mail!

Of course, next week might yet contain several heffalump traps that surprise all of us, especially if the banking system stops working on Tuesday. I reckon we have enough tins in the house to keep us going for a couple of months, provided we don’t mind off combinations like grapefruit on a bed of red kidney beans, but it’s no joking matter, really. Last time we were teetering on the brink of an international financial crisis, Gordon Brown, who had, I admit, many faults – arrogant, boorish, bad at communicating, vile temper, etc. – stepped in and took control, and probably saved us all from having to queue in the streets to catch loaves of bread thrown from the back of army lorries.  This time around, the crisis will be managed by George Osborne, God help us. If that doesn’t make you want to start digging a fallout shelter in the garden, nothing will.

It may yet all come to naught, but we should do well to bear in mind that these days all the banks are linked to all the other banks globally and they are all in bed with each other: if banks start failing in Greece, and the whole electronic spiders’ web starts to unravel, who can say where it might end up?  The concept of “a far away county, of which we know nothing” just does not apply any more, and we should also, perhaps, remember, that 101 years ago today, another crisis in the Balkans that ultimately turned very nasty was initiated in Sarajevo, when Gavrilo Princip assassinated the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie.

The government, if I may dignify the Blue Blight with a title it has never deserved, and will never, has been busy trying to save money, although their efforts have been less concerned with staving off the effects of a crash in the Greek economy, than in continuing to wage a doctrinaire war on the poor, the ill, and the disadvantaged, under the general heading of “austerity”.

Homelessness is on the rise, by any sensible standard, and however much the Blight Brigade would like to re-classify the definition of poverty so it looks as thought they are doing something about it, when in fact all they are doing is moving the goalposts.  They are eyeing child tax credit as a possible area for welfare cuts, despite promising before the election that they would leave it alone.

And that is not the only pre-election promise which has been broken. Before the election, every time you turned on Look North it was to find either Cameron or Osborne blethering on about the “Northern Powerhouse” and how they would electrify the railway line between Manchester and Leeds to that you could arrive at your destination five minutes before you’d set off, and much more in a similar vein. This week, it’s been cancelled. The official word is “paused”, which is a new one on me. It’s now gone into my own personal lexicon of euphemistic bullshit, along with “let go” for “sacked”, and “client acceptors” instead of “bouncers”.

One of the cruellest and most niggardly, penny pinching cuts is the abolition of the Independent Living Fund, which costs £1.2billion a year, a figure which is massively dwarfed by the amount which goes unclaimed in entitled benefits during the same period.  But the Tories aren’t doing it to save money, they’re doing it because they believe really, deep down, that disabled people belong in the workhouse, along with the other shirkers and parasites, but it would be far too risky to actually say so, even in the current climate of compassionless xenophobia which they have spent five years weaving out of lies and rumours, smoke and mirrors.  So they are trying to achieve the same end by stealth: the current fund is ring fenced. When the funding is transferred to local authorities, it will not be ring-fenced. Local authorities, such as Kirklees for example, are already feeling the impact of savage, disproportionate cuts to the money they receive each year from central government. Kirklees will not be able to afford lollipop ladies from next April. What chance is there, then, that the people who this change will affect, will simply find their care package continuing as before? I’d estimate that it’s about as likely as tripping over a pile of rocking horse shit, or finding an intact snowball in hell.  The result will be inevitably that some people will be forced to give up their current independence and go into care, and others may be forced back on the charity of friends and family to take up the burden.  In Tory eyes, this is a result. They have waged war on the disabled at one remove, in such a way as they can wash their hands of it and blame someone else when it goes Brustenauf. The money is almost irrelevant.

Almost as big a scandal was the way in which the BBC barely reported the DPAC demonstration against the ILP being scrapped, even though several dozen people in wheelchairs took over the lobby of the House of Commons and almost found their way into the chamber at Prime Minister’s Question Time. On the BBC Six O’ Clock evening news, it merited about 20 seconds, in between a package about whether Mo Farah ever took drugs (he didn’t apparently) and some endangered bloody south seas turtle!  Well, as I said after the election, at least we now know who our enemies are, and it looks like the BBC can’t be relied upon, either.  Two words – “charter” and “renewal”.

Theresa May, meanwhile, who is currently impersonating a Home Secretary, ratcheted up the xenophobia another few notches this week by announcing that from April 2016, only non EU immigrants earning more than £35,000 pa would be allowed indefinite leave to remain in the UK.  Perhaps the most sinister thing about this proposal is her wording:

“…in future, we will exercise control to ensure that only the brightest and best remain permanently."

If that phrase, about the brightest and best, sounds familiar to you, but you just can’t place it, it was also used by Paul Nuttall, the deputy head of UKIP, in that speech which, unmemorable on its own terms, achieved considerable viral notoriety when satirised by the comedian Stewart Lee in a coruscating routine which could briefly be found all over the internet.  Yes, although Nuttall’s position was that the “brightest and best” Romanians should stay in Romania, whereas May is saying that we only want the brightest and best, nevertheless, a phrase from the UKIP armoury of bigotry has crossed the floor, to be picked up by the Tories.

I suspect, in fact I hope, that, like many other Tory pronouncements on immigration, this is one which is mainly intended to get Daily Mail readers slavering with excitement, and will prove unworkable in practice. What about the people already here? Will it be applied retrospectively?  At what point will the test be applied? After all, people change jobs, and salaries can go up as well as down.  Will ILR be tied to income, then? So if you lose your £35K job, do the Home Office put you back on the next plane to what Nigel Farage would doubtless call “Bongo-Bongo Land”.  However it works in practice, it makes no sense whatsoever to be contemplating stifling the supply of immigrant labour to the NHS, which is just one effect these proposals will have. Not unless you are contemplating a scenario where the NHS no longer exists in its present form…oh, hang on…

The government has got to be seen to talk tough on immigration for several reasons of course.  By our blundering stupidity in foreign policy since 2001, but especially in the lunatic intervention of the “Arab Spring”, which has achieved precisely nothing and has rendered North Africa a basket case and a safe haven for those who mean to do our country and its nationals deadly harm, as we have seen this week, with yet another massacre by an adherent of the insane medieval death cult, ISIS, against British holidaymakers in Tunisia.

And the end result is that we have the RAF, at God alone knows what cost, mounting missions to fire missiles costing £400,000 to £800,000 each, to destroy a Toyota Hilux truck somewhere in the Syrian desert, worth approximately £1500, plus its ISIS occupants, each of whom will automatically be replaced by ten others, some of them volunteers from this country. Yet apparently we don’t have to money to allow disabled people an independent life any more.

All of this is lost, however, on the people who post on Facebook and the like that Muslims must “resist radicalisation” and “integrate more”. I doubt that seeing Amir Khan on TV wrapped in a Union Jack is going to take the edge off having your house blown to brick-dust, along with several of your family.  Is it any wonder that, faced with the choice of being blown up by the USAF or being blown up by ISIS, the ones who decide not to join ISIS leg it from the war zone as fast as possible, and try and find a safe haven in Europe? Is it any wonder that youthful idealists listen more to the persuasive propaganda of the ISIS puppet-masters than their own parents or Imams? I repeat. The entire crisis of refugees in the Mediterranean, and the current situation in Syria, has all been brought about by our meddling, and the sooner we realise we’re in a hole, and stop digging, the better.

I could go on. I frequently do. But to be honest, I am tired, and I have a stack of domestic chores to do today, and in any case, I am not saying anything I haven’t said a thousand times before, to no avail. Plus, it’s actually not a bad day – much better than the weather forecast said it would be – and Debbie has joined Matilda out on the decking, and is doing a stack of final exam marking to be handed in on Tuesday. I wonder if they would get better results if she let Matilda mark them? Who knows. I hope Ostrich Karahi gets an A, though.

Today, for what it’s worth, is the feast day of St Vincentia Gerosa, who lived from 1784 until 1847 and, together with Bartolomea Capitanio, founded the Sisters of the Charity of Lovere. Lovere is in the Lombardy region of Italy.  Apparently Catherine, as she was born, was left struggling with the family business single-handed, when several of her relatives died in quick succession. She prayed, and used what money she had on charitable works in the parish, becoming involved in organising meetings, retreats, and a practical school to teach the poor girls of the parish domestic work, so as to improve their prospects, something which will probably be in the next Tory manifesto, if they get to hear about it.

In 1824, she met Bartolomea, who also ran a school, and they decided to join forces and found the Sisters of the Charity.  Bartolomea died nine years later, but Vincentia carried on until her own death in 1847, by which time additional branches of the charity had been set up in Milan, Venice, Roverdo, Bergamo, and Arco, plus several other smaller groups in Lombardy.  I’ve attached some Lombardic music to the end of this blog, just to give you some local colour.

She was canonised by Pope Pius XII in 1950. Her sainthood seems to rest entirely on a life devoted to prayer and charity, with spooky miracles thin on the ground, but then she did live through the age of reason, which must have had some impact, even on a country with such a romantic soul as Italy.

I’m not quite sure what lesson her life speaks to me. Probably keep plodding on, do a little more each day, and you’ll get there in the end. Set against that, though, I have to remember what W B Yeats said: too long a sacrifice, makes a stone of the heart. I sometimes wonder if that is what has happened to me.  I have become so inured with struggling against the same 17 intractable problems,  and never getting anywhere, that I have become dulled to everything else. The alternative is even worse, though. Chucking it all in would mean not only letting myself down,  which I could probably cope with – after all, it wouldn’t be the first time – but also letting down those who believe in me and count on me to keep going, some of whom have four furry legs. Plus there’s the financial side of it. If I can just hold it all together for another five years or so, then I stand a much better chance of  handing on a debt-free future to Debbie. Of course, if the banking system goes bang on Tuesday then we’ll be living off mandarin oranges in brown Windsor soup, but on the plus side, mortgages and overdrafts will also be things of the past, and there’ll be no internet, so I will be writing this blog on stretched goats’ vellum, made from the finest stretched goats in the British Empire.

In the meantime, there are plants to be watered, tarts to be made, and dogs to be fed, when Debbie eventually gets back from Binn Lane (one wonders how it got such a romantic name), and then perhaps I might do something for myself this evening, such as copy out a pedigree or two.  Yes, it’s just one white knuckle ride of excitement here. Big G, in case you’d forgotten the original rationale behind this blog, remains stubbornly elusive, though I will, of course, have several hours to attempt to re-connect with him while I am sitting at the side of Kilbrannan Sound waiting for the return of Debbie and Misty, either together or separately. “What’s that, Misty? Debbie’s fallen down the old mine shaft?”

Epiblog for Midsummer

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley.  The weather remains stubbornly un-summery, despite the fact that today, as I am writing this, it is the Midsummer Solstice. So, once more, summer is now coming to an end, before it has even really started.  In its defence, it has been quite warm, apart from one day (I forget which) where we were, apparently, four degrees below the average June temperature, according to the weather-man. This means that Matilda has been venturing out for more prolonged periods, though she seems to spend most of the time when she is outside snoozing on the decking.

The three squirrels who we appear to be feeding single-handed are all well, hale and hearty, and so far have continued to elude Matilda’s attentions, when she can be actually bothered to scuttle across the decking to attempt to catch them.  Most of the time, she just lies there like Bagpuss, yawning occasionally, and watching them from afar.

Misty has had Zak’s company this week, at least for the latter part of it, and they’ve all been off up Wessenden Moor doing walks of 12 miles or so on a daily basis, with Deb in the lead.  Despite that, Misty appears to be growing more portly of late, so it’s going to be back to the healthy working dog food, or “Muttnuts” as we call them, leavened perhaps with the odd carrot.

That will be easy to achieve, the last bit, I mean, because this week I once more managed to screw up the online supermarket order and bought 4KG of carrots instead of 4 carrots, by the simple expedient of forgetting to alter the box on the web site from KG to individual items.  The first notion I had that something was amiss was when the delivery man said “Don’t mind me asking, but have you got a horse?”

I must get into the habit of checking the order more carefully before pressing the button to buy the stuff, but the trouble is that, like everything else I do, I do it in such a hurry and a flapdoodle, owing to pressure of work, that things get overlooked.

My efforts at ordering twelve aubretia plants for the hanging baskets were also thwarted, but this time by Jerseyplants direct.com or whatever they are calling themselves this week. As discussed in previous blogs, they have a fairly catholic interpretation of the term “direct” which is defined in their lexicon as “despatched overland on a three-legged donkey led by a blind muleteer”. Anyway, this week, the box marked “live plants, keep this way up”, finally arrived on Wednesday, and I opened it eagerly, to find it contained three foxgloves, three lavender, three echinacea and three something else which escapes me now. Plus a note saying sorry, they were unable to process my order for twelve aubretia and they hoped this would do instead.  So, dear reader, beware. If you order a standard rose tree from Jerseyplants direct.com, you could end up with a cactus.

One thing I did manage to achieve this week was to get my will witnessed, so it is now once more legal and above board. The second witness was Lucy, of the Holmfirth Harriers, who kindly dropped round to do the honours just before Sainsbury’s dropped the carrot bombshell on Saturday.  Debbie, of course, in her cross-country days, used to be in the Harriers, back in those heady years when her Dad used to push her out of the door and force her to go training in the freezing rain.  On Saturday, she was just on her way out of the door with Misty and Zak when Lucy arrived, but they did have a brief conversation in passing about running.

I broached the idea that Debbie ought to take it up again, and she agreed that now she was in the veterans’ class, she might win something again. My suggestion of “Dog Most Like Its Owner” was met with scorn and derision.  Anyway, that’s one thing I have achieved, one thing to cross off my list of things to do, and I have saved Debbie the cost of £275.00 which is what you have to pay to the Probate Court nowadays to obtain a grant of probate when someone dies intestate.

I am pleased to be able to report, also, that, pursuant to my mention of it in last week’s blog, I have indeed now been added to the Facebook group of the local Labour Party, so obviously my mention of it had the required talismanic effect.

Other than that, I have little of interest to report (no change there, then). I am continuing to write up the family history notes, which I hope will eventually become a book called [working title] Forgotten Forebears. I also sent Maisie’s book on how to write up family history, Family Fables, to press this week, so that’s another one off the list.  With my other leg, I have been doing what I can on Crowle Street Kids.

It’s good to see Crowle Street Kids taking some shape again, after it languished rather, partly owing to my having been ill and it losing its place in the queue of books I was getting ready for press in 2010. Since then, it’s been pretty full-on, and I’ve had to work on the project in odd moments of what passes for my spare time. But, given enough years, a drop of water will eventually bore through any rock, and we are getting there.

Increasingly, these days, I find myself thinking that I didn’t know how happy I was, when I was a kid who had next to nothing.  With things, come other things, such as worries, debts, responsibilities. In those days when it was just me and Nuvnuv against the world (some days, it feels it still is) I could run up and down, kicking a ball, I could bat for hours pretending to be Geoffrey Boycott, and no one cared. As long as I turned up for meals. Even school didn’t seem irksome – an impressive gothic building (been demolished 45 years, now) with large windows. I used to watch the dust motes floating in the sunbeams while we sang “Jerusalem” or “Glad That I Live Am I” to the tune of “Waters End”.

Working on the family history, I have been re-visiting and re-discovering some of what I already knew, by going through old newspaper reports. I found, for instance, again, the report of the death of Thomas Fenwick in 1923, when he was run over by a steamroller while working on road-works on Ferriby High Road.  For some reason, Debbie seemed to think this amusing, and I suppose there is a case that at least the family could have saved a bit on the funeral by simply burying him in a large envelope. However unlucky Thomas Fenwick was, though, he was nowhere near as unlucky as the bloke I read about this week in Adrian Grey’s excellent little book, Crime and Criminals in Victorian Lincolnshire, where he recounts the tale of a man who was wandering around, jaywalking in fact, drunk in the streets of a Lincolnshire village, when he was run over by a horse and cart belonging to the magistrate.  Some days, you should just stay in bed.

Reading the various newspaper reports in that book, it is clear that in those days there were a lot more police and they were much more willing to investigate things – such as the theft of a pound of tea, or a hawker selling old potatoes labelled as new potatoes – he’d taken old potatoes, washed them, and sprinkled them with peat. Hardly seems worth the trouble. Imagine trying to get a crime number for that, these days.

One criminal who has been getting away with, if not exactly murder, at least telling whopping porkies, is Lord Freud. Readers of previous blogs will know that I care little for either the man, or his compassionless, hard-faced stance on food banks.  This week, he has been lying to parliament about the Bedroom Tax.

What he said was:

My Lords, looking at the position in the round, people move from low-cost social housing to higher cost private housing, but that allows another family who may have come out of private housing to go into social housing. You have to look at the bill as a whole, and the saving on this particular part of the bill [my emphasis] is running at £0.5billion a year.

Yet, as Joe Halewood has pointed out, according to figures from the DWP, 462,896 households are affected with an average weekly deduction of £14.93. This comes to £360,608,052, which is already £1.39billion short of the claimed “saving”. Plus, this is only half the balance sheet – when people (such as the Birdi family, about whom I wrote last week) are forced out of their home by welfare “reform” they end up being re-housed in emergency accommodation paid for by the local authority. It has been estimated that up to £60billion extra has to be found for this, which, if taken into account, reduced Lord Fraud’s supposed saving even further.

In fact, the IFS estimates that the Bedroom Tax and other welfare “reforms” foisted on us by the Blue Blight have collectively increased the housing benefit bill by £1billion and produce no savings at all. Again, see Joe Halewood’s blog for the detailed analysis.  Halewood also points out that Lord Fraud announced in the same parliamentary session that some 22,000 people had either downsized or moved out of social housing to the private sector. In fact, the breakdown is 19,000 downsizing and 3,000 approx moving to the private sector, but Lord Fraud chose to announce the figure as a lump to avoid detailing the embarrassing fact that 19,000 is a smaller figure than in any of the previous 8 years – ie the bedroom tax is having no affect on that aspect of the housing market.

Politicians cherry picking statistics to prove a non-existent case by poodlefakery, smoke and mirrors is nothing new of course, Iain Duncan Smith has been doing it for the last five years. But if my ancestors could be transported for seven years for stealing a bushel of barley to feed their children, then I think Lord Fraud could at least be put in the stocks, or flogged, or something, for lying to parliament.

In fact, let’s stick Jeremy Hunt in there alongside him. This week, Hunt (where’s James Naughtie when you need him?) made the outrageous assertion that NHS midwives murder babies. I kid you not. Obviously, the remark was made within some sort of context, as much as his wild-eyed utterances ever have context, but even so, as the minister responsible for the service, if what he claims is true, then he is responsible, and should resign. If it is not true, which I am sure is the case, then, as the minister responsible, given his obvious feeble grasp of the issues and his fleeting acquaintance with reality, he should resign. Resign. Resign. Resign. 

So we came to today, Midsummer’s Day, and I fell to reflecting on everything I had lost this year. It probably is also Saint Somebody-or-Other’s day, if anyone cares to look, but I must say I don’t feel like it, right now.  Right now, I feel physically and mentally worn out, all the more so when I consider the vast heap of things which will need doing before we set off for Arran in the camper van.  I never look forward to going on holiday, because of all the preparation, and even when we get there, it usually takes me a few days to get used to the fact, before I start considering whether I should be enjoying it.  Either way, this Midsummer Night’s Eve, I won’t be offering to give my Bottom.

But this year, especially, with all the hoohah surrounding Mike’s estate, the business of having to move the books to a new warehouse in Wales, and the consequent knock-on effect of me falling behind with my book work to the extent that now I have to finish off three whole books before we go away, all seem to have conspired to knock the stuffing out of me. In one sense, I could do with a break, if only to sleep in late without a courier banging on the door, but at the same time, once we’re back from Arran, it’ll already be the dog-days of late summer, and before we know where we are, the slow descent into dark days and bad weather, which starts from today, will be quickening up, and sending us hurtling towards Christmas.

It seems a long while since I had one of those moments when I was convinced that all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well, and I could really use one right now, but I expect Jesus is off somewhere on his holidays. And if God really is everything, everywhere, eternally, then that means he/she/it also contains a lot of things which I might find very unpleasant, and this is clearly incompatible with the Christian idea of a benign and loving creator.  Something which makes it more difficult than it used to be for me to excuse the worst excesses of random nastiness by saying that we don’t fully understand the mind of God.

I’m sorry that this isn’t what you came here for, but increasingly, these days, threatened on all sides by people who, in varying degrees, mean me and my business – and by inference, Debbie and the animals – no good at all, I find myself more and more in an embattled, pull-up-the-drawbridge mode, and less and less inclined to dole out spiritual comfort.  It’s nothing personal, it’s just that spiritual comfort suddenly seems to be in very short supply, and most of what I can scrape together, I need for my own devices.

Next week promises stirring times, especially if you live in Greece, or work in the banking sector, but as far as I’m concerned, I shall be ploughing steadily on, feeling slightly cheated, mourning the loss of a summer that never really was, hoping as always for better weather, and keeping an eye out for steamrollers. At the end of the day, dark night of the soul or not, what option do we have? Without winter, we can’t have midsummer, without midsummer, we can’t have winter. This is it, this is your life, whether you are Eammon Andrews or a druid dancing at dawn. Glad that I live am I, I guess, but only just. Close ranks and carry on.

Epiblog for the Feast of St Nennus

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. There is only a week of summer left, and of course, we haven’t actually had a summer – not in the sense I would recognise, of a period of at least a week, preferably two, where the weather is sustained and steady, hot enough for us to have the conservatory door open all day, let the stove go out, and for Granny to come in from the garden fanning herself and saying how mafting it is.

I must confess to feeling a bit cheated by this succession of dull days, with occasional rain – true, it saves me having to water the tubs and troughs, and despite it all, one of the Ceanothus bushes is putting forth bright blue flowers, but nevertheless I want a real summer, one like T H White describes in The Once and Future King:

It was July, and real July weather, such they had in Old England. Everybody went bright brown, like Red Indians, with startling teeth and flashing eyes. The dogs moved about with their tongues hanging out, or lay panting in bits of shade, while the farm horses sweated through their coats and flicked their tails and tried to kick the horse-flies off their bellies with great hind hoofs. In the pasture field, the cows were on the gad, and could be seen galloping around with their tails in the air.

The unseasonably dull weather has meant that Matilda has been making use of her new cat-blanket from her Auntie Maisie. This is a new soft yellowy-cream one, and she likes nothing better than to jump up on to it when it’s spread out on the settee, and give it a thorough kneading before curling round on it and hiding her face under her back leg (the cat, not Maisie).

The squirrels grow more and more blasé and totally unfazed by the presence of the cat. If it carries on like this the inevitable result is that there will be a squirrel evolutionary tragedy. The other day, I happened to look up and there was Matilda just inside the conservatory door, and outside on the decking not one but three squirrels all sitting on their hind legs, in a line, with their paws holding sunflower seeds up to their mouths, looking for all the world like the Andrews Sisters.

Misty, however, has decided to take up living dangerously. No sooner had I finished writing last week’s Epiblog when my mobile phone rang. I fished it out of my pocket and answered it. It was Debbie.

“Your stupid dog has run off again.”

What had happened was that one of the paths they had been on, heading up towards Blackmoorfoot Reservoir, turned out to be within earshot of a local cricket field. Misty has heard the iconic sound of the British “summer”, the clack of leather on willow, and in her crinkly little brain, had identified it as the sound of a firework, and taken off. Once a collie dog decides to run, that’s it. Unless you’re Usain Bolt, another collie dog, or you have a quad bike to hand, forget it. Muttkins may not be the sharpest tool in the box, but she’s certainly the fastest over the measured mile.

Fortunately, while Debbie and I were discussing what best to do, as Debbie didn’t have an unlimited amount of time to stay up there searching, because she had a stack of college marking and prep to do, a woman turned up in Debbie’s eyeline, waving at her.  She told me to hang up and she would ring me back, and when she did, five minutes later, it was with the news that this woman, who had also been walking her own dogs, had seem Misty come barrelling up the path towards her and had managed to secure her.  Her first words to Debbie were “Have you lost a border collie?”

So, that was that. Muttkins went straight back on the lead, and walked home in disgrace, while I silently gave thanks that once more, a kind providence had rescued her. But now we have to add cricket to the long list of the many things she is frightened of.

On Monday morning, in a development of which Flanders and Swann would no doubt have approved, the gas man came to call. It was a pre-arranged visit, as he had come to do the annual service on the boilers, without which their guarantee is invalid, and therefore we are obliged to have them “seen to” each year on the anniversary of their installation. That part of the operation went very well, and was soon concluded, but unfortunately, I then happened to mention that, when Debbie was using the shower at the same time as the cooker was on, the boiler in this kitchen made a deep, rather troubling “hoo, hoo, hoo” sound, redolent of a 14 stone wood pigeon, and once, when it had been doing this, all the gas rings had gone out.

“Ah, it sounds like you have got low gas pressure! I’ll check it out.”

Sure enough, no sooner had he got the lid off the gas meter box outside than he was back to tell me that the pressure was only something like 12% of what it should be.  And he couldn’t fix it because the meter, and – more likely – the pipe where the blockage, whatever it was – resided, belonged to British Gas.  In a twinkle, he had phoned their emergency number, and identified himself by his Gas Safe number (a bit like being a member of the Secret Seven or the Knights Templar or something) and they were on their way.

“What happens now?” I asked.

“They have to attend within two hours. Don’t worry, I’ll stay here till they arrive.”

So I had the company of John the plumber for considerably longer than I had anticipated. When they eventually came, it turned out that the bloke who was tasked with it had been John the plumber’s apprentice when he himself used to work for British Gas, so soon they were gassing about old times (see what I did, there?). Anyway, it turned out that they would have to disconnect the gas, which they duly did, and I put a kettle of water to boil on top of the stove.

“I’ve had to call out the cavalry,” Gary the apprentice told me, “once they’ve sorted you, they’ll tell me and I’ll come back and put you on again.” And with that he was gone,. And John the plumber with him.  So I sat there reflecting on how this had initially seemed quite a good, ordinary day, the sort of day during which much might be achieved, and now it was unravelling and turning to poo before my very eyes.

Eventually, another, larger, British Gas van arrived, with a crew of two, and once I’d shown them where the gas meter was and told them to knock if they needed anything, I left them to it. The kettle was vaguely tepid. I could have murdered a cup of tea.  As I settled down to work again, I heard the sound of pneumatic drills starting up outside. Whatever the cause of the “blockage” it was taking some shifting. I fished out my mobile and called Debbie to warn her not to run over any gas men as she pulled back into the drive, as it would create lots of paperwork and delay the gas being reconnected.

Eventually, Debbie arrived back from college and delivered a short peroration on how unacceptable it was not to be able to have a vegan bacon wrap for breakfast, owing to lack of gas, see above, and then fell asleep, even as the pneumatic drills lulled her on the way to dreamland.

By teatime, the cavalry had done their stuff. They quizzed Debbie about whether we had had any building work or new pipes laid, although to be honest they could have just taken a look around and answered their own question. Our house looks like it hasn’t had any building work since it was built in 1936, and it probably hasn’t. Anyway, there had been a leak at the point where the pipe to our house left the main outside in the road. They had fixed it, and had notified Gary the apprentice to come and re-connect the gas meter. Within three hours.

Finally, at 7pm, yet another British Gas van pulled up, bearing not Gary the apprentice but yet another British Gas man whom I had never seen before, who not only re-connected the gas meter, but also, very professionally, put back the planter on top of the gas meter box with the Comfrey and the Lemon Catnip growing in it. So ended Monday, a day when I felt I had made the personal acquaintance of most of the staff of a major public utility. I suppose it is safer now the low pressure is fixed, but I couldn’t help but wish I’d kept my big mouth shut.

It’s very difficult to keep your mouth shut when you hear of such criminal stupidity as the Government selling off yet more of the family silver, in the form of our 80% stake in RBS. When we bailed them out, we apparently paid £5.00 per share, but we will be lucky to get £3.61 a share now, apparently.  George Osborne, axeman and woodcutter-in-chief, said that

 "It's the right thing to do for British businesses and British taxpayers. Yes, we may get a lower price than that was paid for it - but we will get the best price possible.”

Bear in mind, this man is in charge of the economy. Scary, isn’t it? The sale will realise probably £13bn, so you would think, wouldn’t you, that this could be used to prevent the necessity of cutting the £12bn from the benefits bill which the Tories have already promised us. You would think so, but no.  And they are already eyeing child benefit, which they said before the election would be safe.

Another cruel and doctrinaire cut is the abolition of the Independent Living Fund, which previously allowed the severely ill and disabled to live some sort of independent life outside of an institution.  The government would claim, of course, that they are not cutting it – the money remains the same, more of less, but the responsibility for it has been transferred from central to local government.  The point to note, however, is that currently the fund is ring-fenced, but the sneaky bastards have removed this safeguard then transferring the responsibility for it to local authorities.  So there is nothing to stop the council using the money to fill in potholes if we are ever unfortunate enough to get another Tour de France, of for Councillors’ expenses, or indeed just using it for general funds as the rate support grant is cut every year by Eric Pickles, especially in an act of spite against Labour-administered areas.

If you would like to read an upsetting account of how this will affect a particular victim, you could do a lot worse than read the recent article by Aditya Chakrabortty in The Guardian of June 8^th, about Paula Peters and how she will be hit by these changes.  The article is too long to quote in full, but it does serve to point out very clearly the hypocrisy of David Cameron, attempting to use the memory of his disabled son to make out that he is some sort of champion of the disabled, while all the time presiding over this meanness and brutality.  Chakrabortty sums up the last five years in one trenchant paragraph:

In 2010 Cameron and Osborne trained their sights on people like Paula, thanks to a chain of three choices. First, they chose to try to wipe out the deficit, rather than spur growth. Second, they chose to do this not by raising taxes, but almost solely by spending cuts. Finally, ministers decided they had to slash welfare, but couldn’t take money off pensioners – all that inevitably meant hacking back support for children, or people with disabilities.

But of course, sympathy for the likes of Paula Peters is in short supply, in this Britain that the Blue Blight Brigade has created, this every-man-for-himself, compassion-free zone, where it’s OK to step over your neighbour as they lie bleeding in the gutter, in fact, shouldn’t they be at work? It’s totally unacceptable to hard working families to have people lying there bleeding with their curtains drawn, there should be a phone number you can ring to shop them to the authorities – oh, hang on, there is.

In fact, sympathy in general is in short supply. Witness the reaction, on social media and elsewhere, to the story of the Birdi family. They gained some sort of dubious fame by being one of the first, if not the first, families to be evicted as a result of the Benefits Cap.

When they were being evicted, their seven year old daughter asked a very pertinent question: “Where will we live?” The Birdis are now reliant on food banks to survive.  Sonny and Heidi Birdi have seven children aged between two and 11, and used to enjoy a household income of £60,000 pa. Not from benefits, this was when he used to have a lucrative job which gave them a lifestyle including holidays abroad, trips to Disneyland and designer shopping. In 2012, Sonny underwent several kidney operations followed by a heart attack and was left with no option but to resign.

His wife said:

“It really riles me when people say ‘you shouldn’t have that many children if you can’t afford them’. When we had our kids we were earning around £60,000 a year, were both working and didn’t rely on benefits. We were surviving fine but because of the Benefits Cap we are now unable to pay the rent.”

The family how live in a temporary three bedroom home provided by the council. Both the Birdis paid tax and national insurance throughout their career.  The Benefits Cap ultimately cause their undoing because their rent on their previous home of £795 pcm, became unaffordable.

There are those who say that the Birdis should have saved during the good times, set aside something just in case, and so on. Maybe they should – but they were living the Thatcherite dream of having everything here and now with no thought of tomorrow, and those people who are now queuing up to throw stones at them from the moral high ground would a) probably have done exactly the same thing and b) support a party which has this sort of conspicuous consumption as its ethos – after all, even an economic duffer like George Osborne would have no trouble in balancing the books if everyone in the country was spending money like it was water and there was no prospect of a drought. You can’t have it both ways.

But of course the Birdis are a ready made example for the yellow press of what we have come to think of as “the undeserving poor”, and as such are to be pilloried.  We should never forget, also, that Labour voted in favour of the Benefits Cap, to their eternal shame.  The fact is that nobody is safe from the vicissitudes of fortune, as I know only too well.  Before 2010, I was the director of two companies, and owner of a house that was comfortably appreciating in value, then bang! one day the credit crunch, and meanwhile, I end up in hospital for six months, coming out in a wheelchair having been made redundant in my absence and now the proud possessor of a life-limiting condition.  And no, I didn’t salt away as much as perhaps I should have done, and now I live from hand to mouth on Disability Living Allowance, which will no doubt eventually be targeted by the Blue Blight.

Talking of Labour, I do appear to still be a member of the local branch, although not of the Facebook Group of the local branch, which is obviously some sort of inner sanctum, holy of holies, where they are busy plotting David Cameron’s downfall in secret. If only.  Still, as someone who apparently does have a vote in the election, I have now been courted by email by three of the prospective candidates, Liz Kendall, Yvette Cooper and Andy Burnham, and have replied to all three ticking them off and giving them a proverbial flea in the ear for not being nearly as “oppositional” as they should be.

So, we came to a rather dull Sunday, and the feast of St Nennus. Nennus was an Irish saint, who succeeded St Enda to the two monasteries on the Isle of Arran and the Isle of Bute, thus continuing and perpetuating the Arran/Aran confusion that you see more or less everywhere. Arran is a small island in the Firth of Clyde, next to the Isle of Bute. In outline, it looks almost exactly like David Cameron eating a peanut.  Aran is the island off the west coast of Ireland where they knit Aran sweaters, listen to plays by J M Synge, and revel in being the prototype for Craggy Island in Father Ted.

Now, it would appear that, in this case, we are talking Father Ted and not Lamlash Bay, because the original confusion seems to have been based on an entry in Butler’s Lives of The Saints, which says of St Nennus:

HE was of the family of the O’Birns. In 654 he succeeded St. Endeus upon his demise in the government of the great monastery of the isles of Arran, which formerly were two, before the name of Bute was given to one of them. The festival of St. Nenus has been always kept with great solemnity in many parts of Ireland.

I think Butler has got his string bag inside out, is confusing Arran with Aran, adding a spurious “r”, and dragging the Isle of Bute into it for no reason. There are extensive ruins of a monastery on the Aran isles, one formerly associated with St Enda, and none at all on Arran off Scotland.  So I’m sticking out for Craggy Island. No doubt if I’m wrong, several people will write and tell me.

I am almost glad that nothing is known about St Nennus, as I don’t feel in the least bit spiritual today. I have to face the unpalatable conclusion that my own faith, such as it ever was, seems to be steadily eroding in the face of the unrelenting nastiness and random cruelty of the world. I still believe most of what I always believed, but – most days at any rate – I no longer feel it. I still pray, although admittedly these days only in moments of extremis, such as when Misty went missing, but I am not sure what I am saying, or who, if anyone, is listening.  Dull days do me no good.  All work and no pray makes Steve a dull boy.

I don’t want to stop writing this blog, because apart from anything else, the mental discipline of sitting down to produce it on a Sunday afternoon is still, I think, good for me – if not for you, dear reader.  I also think that, who knows, something approaching faith may return, in due course. Who knows? A few sunny days in a row, news that a couple of missing cats have been found safe and well, Downing Street struck by lightning, any and all of these could put me in a much better mood.  My aubretias are due on Wednesday, having presumably been sent overland by Jerseyplants direct on a three-legged donkey led by a blind muleteer, so again, Wednesday promises to be a better day, provided it doesn’t pee down with rain.

So I go on, bumbling and Mickawbering my way through life. I know I should be following my own  advice, counting my blessings, and cherishing every moment, and that I have friends who are willing to help me out by driving half the length of the country to deliver some books, and friends willing to type up the drivellings I send them in the post, but right now I could, literally, just curl up and go back to sleep.  I guess I have to accept that it is not the sole purpose of Big G to put me in a good mood, that he has other fish to fry, and that if I don’t like it, I should listen to the thumping on the sky and just suck it up, buttercup.  I have to recognise again that, like the Shepherd of the Downs, I want no riches, or wealth from the crown.  Teach me to care, and not to care – teach me to sit still.

But, oh, wouldn’t it be nice if the rain stopped and the sun came out and England won a cricket match and the kettle boiled and there were cucumber sandwiches with the crusts cut off and fresh scones for tea with jam and cream (jam on first) and a pot of steaming Assam tips, and the papers were full of pictures of people frying eggs on the pavement and skinny-dipping in the fountains of Trafagar Square, and headlines saying “Phew! What a Scorcher! Met Men Say There’s More To Come!” and all the doors and windows open to the garden, and the sound of leather on willow from across the meadows – actually, no, cancel that last bit, we don’t want the dog to run off again.

Oh well, we can dream, I guess.  If I was to pray for anything next week, on a personal basis, apart from the usual stuff about an end to war, death, famine and disease, and unlimited funds for donkey sanctuaries, it would be for less hassle. The less I am hassled, the more I can do. The more I can do, the more good I can do.  Who knows, that might actually be the road to getting rid of this feeling that the older I get, the better I was.

Until then, it’s time to bomb up the fire and watch the rain come down, the flag of Free Tibet in the garden hanging limply on its flagpole and the darkness under the trees already coalescing into something resembling the gloom of twilight, not officially due for a few hours yet.  I wish I had some better news, but at least we haven’t all perished in a massive gas explosion and then been sent a bill for the gas.

Epiblog for the Feast of St Willibald

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. We said farewell to May, the best month of the year, and now already a week of June has gone, and two weeks from today it will be Midsummer. This year is ripping by at an incredible pace, and there is still so much to do before I can even contemplate going on holiday.

In the meantime, though, the weather was half reasonable to decent, the sun shone, even when the weather forecasters said it wouldn’t, and I cracked on as best I could with the massive backlog of things that had accrued while I was laid low with flu.

Matilda has been sprawling out on the decking, in the sun on the cooler days, and in the shade on the warmer ones.  She came as near as she has ever come to catching a squirrel this week, and I am afraid to say that I had a hand, albeit unwittingly, in the almost-demise of the said rodent.

The fact is that the squirrels have been getting rather too tame for their own good, coming down to help themselves to the bird food I put out in the metal dish on the decking, and hunting through it for sunflower seeds. Unfortunately for the squirrel in question, this new-found friendliness to the human race was almost replaced by natural selection in action.  Matilda went to the conservatory door and asked to be let out with the usual cracked plaintive mew. Neither Matilda or I had noticed there was a squirrel just outside the door, busy stuffing its face, and the squirrel, rather unwisely, because of its relaxed attitude, didn’t scoot off when the door opened, as they used to do.

Consequently, Matilda came face to face with a squirrel about six inches away. I watched in horror, but fortunately the squirrel was just a second or so quicker to latch on to the situation, evade her lumbering lunge, and leg it. The bird seed went all over the place, and Matilda spent the next half hour pacing up and down the decking, swishing her tail in irritation. I’ve often wondered, if the country is really overrun with grey squirrels, why Felix don’t make grey squirrel flavour cat food, but perhaps it’s just as well they don’t, as I wouldn’t like her to get a taste for the real thing.

Misty doesn’t have to seek out her prey, of course, since her food is brought to her attention at least twice a day, with dog treats in between to mitigate any intermittent hunger pangs that might strike.  Now that Deb is recovered somewhat from her own bout of the foul, germ-ridden lergy, it’s been back to normal for Misty, who has done 35 miles in the last two days over the moors with Debbie and Zak.  Even for a border collie, a breed of dog with legendary reserves of energy and a willingness to spend all day on the fells, she slept soundly those two nights.  As did Deb and Zak.

I haven’t been sleeping so well, but slowly the after-effects of cold and flu are leaving me, not as quickly as I would have liked, but I still feel a hell of a lot better than I did ten days ago, when I was contemplating phoning an ambulance and asking to be taken away.  With her half-term holiday having been neatly wiped out by the flu, Debbie is once more back in harness with a vengeance, as it is now exam season, and she’s been busy entering people online to make sure that they get in the right room at the right time with the right exam paper. As the college is a multicultural institution in a multicultural area, frequently her students are blessed with names which to English ears may sound rather strange and odd. She was doing her exam entries the other day and suddenly murmured “Ostrich Karahi”. A short cross-porpoises conversation then ensued whereby I was labouring under the mistaken belief that this was the name of one of the exam candidates, and chortling about the silliness of such a “monicker”, until Deb put me straight by saying that it was a recipe that had popped up while she was surfing the net. I guess you had to be there, although why she was looking at Ostrich Karahi, when she is a vegan, will have to remain a mystery.

Recipes have been much on my mind this week. Particularly ones involving leeks, because the curse of Sainsbury’s online shopping has struck again. For those of you unfamiliar with the concept, the web site allows you to buy loose veg in one of two ways, either “per item” or “per kilo”, depending which “box” is ticked when you specify the quantity required. A couple of years ago, I fell foul of this when I intended to order a kilo of sprouts but, being a doddery old fogey, forgot to tick “kilos” instead of items, and thus received a single sprout in amongst my shopping, with a bar code label for 5p attached.

This time around, I did the opposite: intending to order two leeks, I seem to have forgotten to change the tick from “kilos” to “items” and thus ended up with 2KG of leeks when the delivery came on Saturday.  So far I have eaten two of them.  Other than that, Saturday was a remarkably productive day: I potted out 24 plugs of marigolds, made 12 jam tarts, and copied out a huge pedigree of the Fenwick and Walker families onto 112gsm drafting paper, for one of my cousins.

From this you will deduce that I’ve still been infected by the family history bug. I have, in fact, been spurred on by various things, not least the scary passage of time, into trying to organise the huge ragbag of notes and family trees that I have accumulated into some semblance of order.  The last thing I need to be doing now, to be honest, with all the work I have got on, is to be beginning another project, but on the other hand, time is against me, and if I don’t start now, it may be too late. Family history is a never-ending story, of course, and you can never say you’ve “done” it, but I want to try and find out as much as I can, while I still can. In my various perambulations through the records, I’ve already encountered a Lazarus Fenwick, which is the sort of name that Ostrich Karahi would no doubt find screamingly funny, if he/she existed.

The outside world rumbles on,  meanwhile, despite my best endeavours to ignore it. Greece has reached an agreement with the rest of the EU that it can have another three weeks of fun in the sun before it defaults on its debts and the Acropolis comes tumbling down.  Meanwhile, here at home, the Labour Party leadership contest has been briefly enlivened by the advent of Jeremy Corbyn as an anti-austerity candidate. Of course, he’s still got to be nominated by 35 MPs, so it’s unlikely that he’ll end up on the final ballot paper – more’s the pity, since the other candidates are all lacklustre nonentities who seem to be intent on continuing to kow-tow to the Tories and go along with their every whim.  “Labour is the party of work” says Liz Kendall, subtly echoing the Tory agenda that those on benefits are scroungers. “The Mansion tax is the politics of envy” says Burnham.  Can you believe these people? Where is the fire, the opposition? Where is the willingness to cause trouble for the Tories? Who was the last Labour MP to be arrested on a demo?

The local Labour Party has stubbornly refused to add me to its Facebook Group, and I can’t get to any meetings because of my wheelchair, so I have not idea what the word on the street is about this in these here parts. I hope that they are as outraged by the lack of choice and the absence of a clear alternative as I am, but I doubt it, somehow. We may never know.

Mr Cameron, in the meantime, is busy growing a second opposition party within his own ranks, with towering intellectual giants such as John Redwood and Owen Paterson forming a Britain First wing of the Tories, determined to exit the EU whatever the referendum democratically decides. They must have been taking lessons from the SNP, who have a similar attitude to Scotland – it’s a separate country when it suits them, unless it comes to a matter of finance and subsidies, in which case they are happy to take their seats at Westminster.

So, with the prospect of Cameron having his arse nipped by UKIP, Nicola Sturgeon and now, it would seem, members of his own party, it’s not all bad news, especially if it all blows up in his face in the near future. It will, at least, be more entertaining than contemplating five or ten more years of Tory nuclear winter foisted on us because the Labour Party has forgotten what it is for and no longer has a heart, balls or brains.

I should not be celebrating yet another defeat for a Labour council, but I was pleased to see this week that Hackney had backed down on its plans to fine rough sleepers up to £1000 for the crime of being homeless in a public place.  It was a shameful, stupid idea in the first place, worthy of the worst excesses of Westminster council under Dame Shirley Porter, and those Labour politicians, yes, I repeat, Labour politicians, who thought of it, should hang their heads in shame.

Lack of shame is a pre-requisite for participation in public life these days of course and George Osborne is no exception. This week he announced plans to raise £1.5BN to “pay down the deficit” by selling the government’s remaining stake in Royal Mail. I’ve written hundreds of words – probably thousands – on why you can’t “pay down” the deficit like you can a credit card, and why privatising Royal Mail is a bad idea (in a nutshell, while it was still a semi-public body. Royal Mail had the universal delivery obligation – ie, it cost the same to send a first-class letter to Stornoway as it did to send one next door. Now it has been removed from public ownership, now it is no longer The Queen’s Mail, it has nothing to stop it pricing its products according to the type of delivery or collection required, which is bad news for businesses and consumers living in areas of the UK which Royal Mail considers “remote”. They have been wanting to do this for years, you mark my words.)  So, that’s another asset gone in order to maintain the Tory party’s smoke and mirrors fiction that the economy is on the mend. Here we go again, trying to repay a debt of apples by cutting down the orchard. I wonder what will be next? The NHS? Oh, hang on…  

If anyone is expecting me to comment with a tribute on the death of Charles Kennedy, by the way, I’m afraid you are going to be disappointed. It’s always sad when someone dies young, before their time, even when it’s largely self-inflicted, and obviously I feel sorry for his widow and child. And it is true that, as a politician, he was refreshingly human and honest, unlike the current crop of cardboard cutouts who daren’t even break wind without asking a focus group if it’s OK to do so.  But for the last five years, Charles Kennedy had been happy to have been part of a Junta that propped up the Blight Brigade and enabled them to make war on the ill, the old, the unemployed, and immigrants. I’ll save my sympathy, if it’s all the same to you, for the woman who walked under a lorry because she couldn’t pay her bedroom tax, or for Mark and Helen Mullins, or for those people who starved to death with £2.30 in their bank account and an empty fridge, because the DWP had stopped their benefits on a whim and a pretext.

And so we came to today, the feast of St Willibald. Another man with a name for Ostrich Karahi to chortle at, although in his day, it was not nearly so odd – he is next in the Saints’ calendar, and not to be confused with, Saint Willibrod. Willibald was born at a time (700AD) and a place where being canonised was almost a family business – the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Wessex. His brother was St. Winibald and his sister St. Walburga. His mother was related to St. Boniface, who apparently ordained Willibald into the priesthood.

There is one major source for the life of St Willibald, called The Hodoeporicon of Saint Willibald, which he dictated on his death-bed to an Anglo-Saxon nun called Huneberc, in the Abbey of Eichstätt in Bavaria around 787AD.  The cathedral in the present-day town of Eichstätt still holds his shrine and his relics today.

Largely, Willibald is remarkable today for the extent of his travels, assuming of course that everything he told Huneberc is true, and that she herself resisted the temptation to embroider. His vocation is supposed to have come about when his parents prayed for his recovery from a debilitating illness that threatened his life when he was only three years old.  As part of the “deal” was that if God spared him, Willibald would have a monastic life, as soon as he was able to do so, he entered the abbey at Bishop’s Waltham in Hampshire.

In 722AD, he embarked on a pilgrimage together with his father and his brother, St Winibald. After crossing the Channel, they arrived in Rouen, then proceeded eventually to Lucca, in Northern Italy, where Willibald’s father died.  The two brothers also fell foul of the Black Plague, but miraculously, both survived, and allegedly carried on as far as Asia. The pilgrimage had lasted for three years at this point, so in terms of timescale alone it is reasonable to assume this would at least have been theoretically possible. The journey to Asia began at Naples, where they took ship on the Mediterranean, via Sicily and Greece, and ending up in Ephesus, where they visited the tomb of St John the Evangelist. On the way back, they took in the church of St John the Baptist where, at the time, apparently, his severed head was on display as a relic for pilgrims, briefly visiting Cyprus, then ending up in Jerusalem.

After spending some further time there, Willibald took ship – obviously one which was operated on the same leisurely and relaxed principles that Jerseyplants direct employed to send my marigold plugs to me – and spent the entire winter cruising around the Eastern Mediterranean before making landfall at Constantinople.  Still in no particular hurry to get back to the English weather, he spent two years there before finally setting sail and arriving back in Naples seven years after he had left.  If he isn’t the patron saint of backpackers and people on their gap year, he damn well ought to be.

Back on Italian soil, he made his way to the monastery at Monte Cassino and there joined the Benedictine order, serving in that establishment for a further ten years. By now, Bishop’s Waltham must have seemed a distant memory.  Eventually, the Abbot was summoned to Rome by the then Pope, Gregory III, and took Willibald with him, on account of his experience as a traveller and guide.  Willibald’s traveller tales were a great hit with the Pope, who obviously didn’t get out much, and the pontiff suggested that Willibald should travel to France and Germany and convert the natives.

While travelling around Eichstätt and Thuringia, Willibald met up again with his brother Winibald, whom he had lost touch with, eight years earlier. Eventually, Willibald became Bishop of Thuringia, at the apparently early age of 41. (Actually, it only seems early to us: in the Anglo-Saxon era, when it was possible to die of a lack of dentistry in your teens, 41 would have been a venerable age to have attained. When the NHS is sold off to the highest bidder, we will of course, be able to re-align our life expectations and return to such stirring times.)

Willibald then proceeded to pull off the ultimate instance of keeping it in the family by founding the Abbey of Heidenheim am Hahnenkamm at Eichstätt in 742AD, with his brother as the first Abbot. When Winibald died, Willibald’s sister Walburga took over as Abbess.  Willibald continued to live at Eichstätt for almost another four decades, and many visitors sought him out to hear his tales of travel and adventure.

For all that, he doesn’t seem to have done anything particularly saintly, unless you count converting people, and even then, the jury is out on just how many people he converted, when and where.

Obviously, being born into a family where there were already several saints must have had a bearing on his choice of career, in the same way as the fact that James Fenwick was a plumber and glazier led to his son, also called James, being one, and his son, also called James, being one as well. Sadly, in the intervening 150 years, I only seem to have inherited the dodgy, wheelchair-dependent genes from the Fenwicks, and not the useful ones that would save me having pay £60 per annum to get the boiler serviced.

But still, it’s four o’clock on a sunny Sunday teatime in June, and I could be in a worse position. Ten days ago, I’d have put money on my being in hospital with a major chest infection, but thankfully, that seems to have been staved off.  There’s life in the old dog yet, though these days I do have the feeling, increasingly, of living on borrowed time, of the sands in the hourglass slipping inexorably down and down.  I’m going to have to make a serious effort to start cherishing every day again, especially as – somehow – unaccountably, there are only two weeks of summer left.

The travels of St Willibald also bring to mind that pretty soon it will be time to think about travelling for us, too. The camper van has been seriously under-used, this year, owing to a combination of illness and bad weather, and the idea is to try once again to get off to the Isle of Arran.  The mere thought of everything we’ve got to do before I can even think about driving off and heading for the Ardrossan Ferry is truly crushing. 

I haven’t heard the cuckoo, yet, this year, the traditional harbinger that told the Anglo-Saxon seafarer that it was time to take once more to the whale-road. This isn’t my translation, but it’s as good as any:

Orchards blossom, the towns bloom,

Fields grow lovely as the world springs fresh, 

And all these admonish that willing mind

Leaping to journeys, always set

In thoughts travelling on a quickening tide.

So summer’s sentinel, the cuckoo, sings 

In his murmuring voice, and our hearts mourn 

As he urges. Who could understand, 

In ignorant ease, what we others suffer

As the paths of exile stretch endlessly on?

And yet my heart wanders away, 

My soul roams with the sea, the whales’ 

Home, wandering to the widest corners 

Of the world…

As usual, when the subject of holidays comes around, half of me wants to go and half of me wants to stay and enjoy life here.  I always assumed, when I was younger, that I would travel – maybe not as much as St Willibald, perhaps, but maybe get to see Italy, Greece, that beach on Crete where Joni Mitchell wrote Carey, all that sort of stuff: but these days, I spend my time mentally ticking off places I know I will never see.  Yet at the same time, there’s much to be done here at home, and while the weather is pleasant (ish) and you can actually have the doors open without freezing your assets, there is much to be said for the idea of a summer of DIY and gardening.

But Debbie has heard the cuckoo (literally, on Wessenden moor, as well as the metaphorical one) so we will be hitting the whale-road at some point. I can only hope that physically, I am up to it.

Spiritually, I am in about as bad nick as I have been for some time. There used to be a sort of underlying assumption in my belief system, that things would get generally better, and it is true I do occasionally feel that still, along with Juliana of Norwich – all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well. Yet I hear of bad things happening constantly now -  almost on a daily basis, even to friends of mine – one of whom has currently lost her cat, for instance -  and this only goes to reinforce the nagging suggestion that maybe life is just random, pointless, nasty and cruel after all. I’m still no further on in my quest to dunk my mind in spiritual Daz, and another week of my life has flown past like the  Red Arrows in a hurry to get home for tea.

I must find time to stop and cherish some things in the next week, though. My idea for a rose garden has had to be postponed for another year – and to be honest, I still have a load of Aubretia plugs to put in when they eventually arrive on a slow boat from St Helier,  but maybe I need to spend some time contemplating the imaginary rose-garden, like the one Eliot wrote about in Burnt Norton:

…the roses
Had the look of flowers that are looked at.
There they were as our guests, accepted and accepting.
So we moved, and they, in a formal pattern,
Along the empty alley, into the box circle,
To look down into the drained pool.
Dry the pool, dry concrete, brown edged,
And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight,
And the lotos rose, quietly, quietly,
The surface glittered out of heart of light,
And they were behind us, reflected in the pool.
Then a cloud passed, and the pool was empty.

If only there was some way of fixing moments like that – but all too often (Eliot again) we had the experience, but missed the meaning.  I guess I shouldn’t be too chastened that we can’t live life at that heightened pitch all the time. It’s Sunday teatime, and shortly the kettle will be on. There are still a few of yesterday’s jam tarts left, and Matilda has just wandered across the decking to find a sunny spot to flop.  Life isn’t all bad – this week a kind friend sent two pet-blankets, unbidden, which are being put to good use by Tilda and by Ellie. Sufficient unto tomorrow is the evil thereof, and all that.  Meanwhile, I’m putting on a brew.  Let it come early, late or soon, I will enjoy my rose in June.