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.