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.