Epiblog for the Winter Solstice

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley, and a bruising one. I don’t know whether it is just because I’m getting older, and/or more feeble, but everything seems to be so full-on and relentless these days. It’s not helped by bad weather, either: usually it’s just at the point where I have finally got comfy and warm in my bed that the alarm goes off and it’s time to swing my legs over the edge and get up in the cold and dark while listening to the rain lashing the windows.

Matilda is no fan of it either, and has been spending more and more time indoors. In fact, I think there was a day last week where she slept for something like 20 hours and didn’t go out once! How I envy her that 20 hours sleep. In one sense it’s a good problem to have. We haven’t been so busy on the bookselling front since 2009, but it brings with it the increased picking and packing. Anyway, if and when everyone eventually pays up for all these books they’ve been ordering, it will probably all have been worth it.

Deb, by contrast, has now finished teaching for this term and thus has been free to roam the hills with Misty and Zak in tow, except of course that the end of term coincided with the weather taking a nosedive, so walks have been rather restricted. Not that the wet, bedraggled mutts care, they are quite happy loping along through mud and rain, and if Misty can find a nice wet cowpat to roll in, then so much the better; her day is complete.

The squirrels and the birds are still chomping their way through the enormous bag of sunflower seeds kindly donated by the Winchelsea clan, and we seem to be feeding half the squirrel population of the Holme Valley at the moment.  I was quite startled the other day to look up and see a very large, very black hooded crow perched on the decking rail. It was tilting its head this way and that, taking a wary view on whether it was going to be safe to jump down and investigate the dish. In the end, it decided against it, and took off with several lazy flaps of its huge black wingspan. I watched it go, gaining height over Park Valley Mills, and wondered if it would be back. Just in case, I found some stale bread and skimmed it into the garden proper, figuring that it would be more likely to land where things weren’t so closed in.

Sadly, the other reason why Deb’s perambulations have been restricted to the immediate locality is that the camper van has had yet another expensive trip to the garage. For some time now it’s been leaking on and off, and given that we were going to try and get away in it for a couple of days, we decided that we’d better bite the bullet and do something about it. Prime suspect was the seals around some of the windows, which are the original ones from 1986 and have never been replaced. There are some places where they do let dribbles of water in, but recently, given the weather, which meant in effect that the camper van has been parked in the equivalent of a car wash for days on end, the situation inside had got much worse, with the carpets getting sodden as well. Clearly something was not right, and this week we found out what it was: the body panels behind the grille had developed a lacy, holey-er than thou tendency which gave them the consistency of Swiss cheese.

There was nothing for it but to take them out, and have two new panels welded in their place. Two rather expensive panels, as it turned out, but it had to be done.  Compared to the Niagara-like torrents that were being forced into the footwells and thence into and under the floor panels, not to mention the electrics, every time the van was driven on the rain, the miserable little trickles being let through by the odd dodgy seal were neither here nor there. So it had to be done, sadly, and now we’re back on the same schtick as before, with the dehumidifers to drive out the remaining damp.  This, of course, comes on top of the fact that the insurers are still dragging their feet about the latest bout of vandalism and so for the moment we have had to stand that bill. The situation would have been much, much worse without the incredible kindness of some friends of ours who have been helping with the transport situation. I won’t name them for fear of embarrassing them, but the last few days would have been even more stressful without their help.

It’s been the sort of week, in fact, where mechanical things have had their revenge on us, generally. I said last week that the final few days before the Solstice are usually the ones where the really heavy stuff comes at you unexpectedly out of the undergrowth, and this week was true to that adage. On the very last day of term, with Deb needing to print her resources and set off for the final class of 2015, the damn printer ran out of ink and then refused to acknowledge the replacement cartridges.  Deb cursed me, and I cursed it, and a good time was had by all.  I complained that it was so dark I couldn’t see what I was doing, so she switched on the clip-on light and the bulb blew. You get the idea.

Even when things went right, there was still a slight hint of the wrong about them. The battle with Kirklees Council is finally over, and I am now on what is called the “assisted bin list”. In the month since the bin was last emptied, there had been no option, once the bin itself was full, but to stack the rubbish in black bin bags next to it.  I was concerned that, if this wasn’t collected before the next scheduled collection, these would be missed, and we would have a pile of bin bags at the end of my wheelchair ramp all over Christmas, so I contacted them, and was pleased to be told that they did plan to come and take them away specially, now I was on the list.  This duly happened, but they also took away the black bin bag where I was creating some leaf mould for the garden (in the approved manner, as demonstrated on the BBC by Monty Don) so now I have to start all over again. I had thought I had moved it far away from the rest of the rubbish for it to be obviously not part of the same imbroglio, but clearly I was wrong!  Still, it’s no great matter, apart from the cost of the Garotta, and there is certainly no shortage of fallen leaves to go at.

Anyway, it was all very tedious but it kept us occupied at least, at this darkest time of the year, when it gets dark at three o’clock. I really miss the sun in wintertime here, the more so now since the climate has deteriorated to the extent that we only have two seasons, spring and autumn, varying slightly in the severity and the level of the flooding. As I said last week, the government’s answer to green issues is to cancel subsidies for renewables and vote to allow fracking to undermine the geology of our national parks.  The more I see of government decision making, the more I am convinced that they are all on drugs.  As, indeed, are the inhabitants of the small town in America that voted not to have a community solar energy generating facility this week “in case it sucked up all the sunshine”.  And you wonder where Trump gets his supporters from.

It’s been a poignant week in many ways for those of us who sort of think our national energy production, however it is engineered, should be under our own control. Deep coal mining ended with the closure of Kellingley Colliery.  Before I comment on the whys and wherefores of energy, though, I would just like to say that the timing of this really stinks. You would have thought they could have just kept things going for another six weeks or so, instead of laying off the entire workforce a week before Christmas.  It’s a savage kick in the teeth for the professionalism and the dedication of the miners who kept production going up right to the bitter end.  Before the general election, back in May, you couldn’t throw half a brick in Yorkshire without it hitting some damfool Tory politician whittling on about the “Northern Powerhouse”.  What price your Northern Powerhouse now, George Osborne, when the nights are cold and dark and there’s no prospect of work in the long weeks stretching ahead?

It’s not just the miners, either. As with the Redcar steelworks, it’s the large number of local shops and ancillary services that depend on the miners’ wages to fuel the local economy.  Now, all that, too, will begin to be eroded by the knock-on effect.  And for what? At the end of the day, we are being told that the pit is “uneconomic”, but by whose standard? As with any accounting calculation, you get the answer you want, depending what you factor in and what you leave out.  Yes, it may well be cheaper to import coal from half way across the world than to ship it eight miles down the road from Kellingley to Drax, but does that factor in security of supply? Does it factor in the increased benefits caused by unemployment? Does it contain some provision for the loss of trade to local businesses? No, it does not.  It does condemn the Venezuelans or the Chinese or the Chileans or whoever it is who are the current flavour of the month to dig it out under appalling conditions for sweatshop wages, though. No doubt the Junta would have been happy to keep Kellingley open if the British miners would abandon all of the health and safety advances of the last hundred years, and go back to the sort of wages that were paid at the time of the Preston Strike or the Ashton Famine.

I am sure I am not alone in finding the uncertainty of supply an issue worthy of much greater concern than is currently being expressed. We are still reliant on coal for power stations, even though those are currently being phased out. It’s a long way from South America, and it’s an uncertain world. In addition, we’re now beholden to the Russians for our gas, the Saudis for our oil, and the energy companies are all owned and run by concerns based outside of the British Isles. Finally, like an eerily glowing cherry on top of a very unstable cake, we will be allowing the Chinese to build and run power stations in the UK. I mean, what could possibly go wrong?  And all the while, we’ll be potentially destroying the best parts of our green and pleasant land by fracking underneath them, downsizing subsidies for renewables, and thousands and thousands of tons of mine-able coal will be sealed away under a concrete cap at Kellingley while the people who could have mined it are being put through hoops and having their benefits stopped by the DWP. I am inevitably reminded of the words of Aneurin Bevan:

“This island is made mainly of coal and surrounded by fish. Only an organizing genius could produce a shortage of coal and fish at the same time.”

Kellingley wasn’t the only closure announced this week, either. The Northern Refugee Centre in Sheffield is set to shut its doors in the new year because of a £150,000 gap in its funding, which it has found itself unable to fill, despite being helped by lottery grants and a private trust fund. £150,000 is about 18% of the cost of just one Storm Shadow missile of the type we are currently potentially firing at Syria. To create more refugees, who then run the risk of drowning in the Mediterranean or being turned away at the gates of what is rapidly becoming fortress Europe. It’s about as far away from an integrated, end to end managed process as you could wish to be, and still be in the same universe.  And there are now apparently 100,000 Syrian rebel fighters who "more or less share the same aims as ISIS", although this figure could be just as much a fairy tale as Cameron’s 70,000 “moderates” who show no signs of rising up or sweeping anyone from power.

And so we came to today, a fine day, a soft day at last, as Stanford would no doubt have called it. Debbie and the dogs did 11.4 miles round Black Hill, and got back at 6pm. Did it rain up there, I asked, conscious of the fact that it had been banging it down for half an hour here while they had been away. No, it didn’t rain at all. It hailed. Ah, right. The only casualty of the trip was that Misty had managed somehow to lose the little red LED light that clips on to her harness (so she can be located when she runs off in the dark).  Losing the clip-on light is annoying, but it’s better than losing the dog, although with Misty there’s always a possibility of doing both.

I’ve cheated a bit today by calling this the Epiblog for the Winter Solstice because of course that’s tomorrow, not today, and today is technically the fifth Sunday of Advent. However, it’s probably near enough for jazz, and to be honest I derive more inspiration from the fact that after tomorrow, it will begin to get lighter again.  Today is also seven years to the day since Dusty, our old Torty cat, died.  We never knew exactly how old she was, because she was already a mature cat when Colin died in 2000 and we inherited her and Kitty from him.  She was pretty ancient when she finally expired, at least from her physical appearance, but, like all Torty cats, she was bonkers to the bitter end, barmy to the last. Of all the cats we ever had, she was the only one about whom I have ever had to write a letter of apology to the neighbours. Bless you, little Dusty, causing mayhem in cat heaven no doubt.

And as for us, we’ve reached the Solstice. A time for looking forwards as well as back.  As usual at this time of year, we have both plans for next year, and regrets about the year gone by. It hasn't always worked out as we'd planned. Very seldom does the beginning accord to the end, as the Gawain-poet says.  I’d like to think we’re looking forward to Christmas, but as I said last week, it’s caught us so unprepared this year that, to be honest, right now, I don’t feel in the least bit Christmassy, and I can’t fail to feel the irony this year of celebrating the story of a Middle Eastern couple finding themselves sheltering in a stable without a proper roof over their head. In the modern version of the story, Mary and Joseph would be Syrian refugees and the star in the East would, of course, be a Paveway guided bomb.

And you find yourself (or at least I do) pondering the same old questions, the ones that always cluster round my head at this time of year. Is it true? Is any of it true, and if it is, why?  Sir John Betjeman summed it up much better than I can, succinctly, in the last few lines of his poem, Christmas:

And is it true,
This most tremendous tale of all,
Seen in a stained-glass window's hue,
A Baby in an ox's stall ?
The Maker of the stars and sea
Become a Child on earth for me ?

And is it true ? For if it is,
No loving fingers tying strings
Around those tissued fripperies,
The sweet and silly Christmas things,
Bath salts and inexpensive scent
And hideous tie so kindly meant,

No love that in a family dwells,
No carolling in frosty air,
Nor all the steeple-shaking bells
Can with this single Truth compare -
That God was man in Palestine
And lives today in Bread and Wine. 

That, as they say, is the $64,000 dollar question. No doubt by Christmas Eve I might have got into the spirit a bit, but for now, it feels like that time described in the ancient Chinese Book of Changes, the I Ching, hexagram 24: The Return

Thunder within the earth:

The image of the turning point.

Thus the kings of antiquity closed the passes

At the time of solstice.

Merchants and strangers did not go about,

And the ruler

Did not travel through the provinces.

The winter solstice was celebrated in China as a time of rest and recuperation, and that’s a lot what it feels like to me, after a bruising year.  Sadly, not everyone is around to celebrate with us. It’s hard to believe that it’s almost ten months since Debbie’s dad died, but it is.  And of course, Dusty and Kitty themselves have given way to a new order, later incumbents who, in Matilda’s case at least, are, thankfully, just as bonkers.  I suppose it must count as some sort of achievement that we’re all more or less here at more or less the end of another year, doing more or less all the same things in more or less the same way, though it doesn’t feel as though that in itself is any cause for celebration.  It does feel, though, as in some ways all the animals and all the people that we have lost are still with us, somewhere very near, it’s just that we can’t see them.

So here we all are, shut up in our inn, with a warm fire, good food, and the company of animals, because the Emperor has closed the passes. Out there in the vast darkness, the candles of Solstice are flickering a message of hope and light. It would be nice to think that snow will fall on Christmas Eve, and that all the refugees will be warm, fed, and clothed, and that all the lost animals will be found or rehomed, and that the shepherds will look up at the cold stars and suddenly see the astonishing sight of the whole sky lit up by angels, and that the animals will kneel in their stalls at midnight as Thomas Hardy wrote in The Oxen:

So fair a fancy few would weave
In these years! Yet, I feel,
If someone said on Christmas Eve,
"Come; see the oxen kneel,

"In the lonely barton by yonder coomb
Our childhood used to know,"
I should go with him in the gloom,
Hoping it might be so’

I would, too. I would indeed go, hoping it may be so. In the meantime, though, however you are planning to spend the festive season, and whoever you are planning to celebrate it with, and wherever, I’d like to wish you the very best Christmas for you and yours, and raise a festive glass to toast for health, wealth and happiness for all of us in 2016.