It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley.
Winter has begun to bite with a vengeance, culminating in last night’s
snowfall. Actually, Debbie (and Misty)
went to the snow, before the snow came to us, because it had already snowed up
on top of West Nab when they were up there on Friday (in fact, it was still
snowing when they were up there, but more of that later).
As you might expect, with the coming of the colder days, the
birds and squirrels have been even more frantically helping themselves to the
bird seed from the dishes out on the decking. When I have difficulty swinging
my legs out from underneath the warm duvet on the mornings when Debbie sets off
for her 12-hour teaching days, before dawn, I have to think of them waiting to
be fed and use that thought to bolster my feeble willpower. I truly hate this
cold, dark, miserable time of the year, and I wish I could hibernate.
At least the squirrels and birds have been able to do their
loading up with life-saving food unmolested by Matilda, who has spent most of
the week curled up with her nose in her tail on the settee in the conservatory,
or alternatively watching their comings and goings from the warm side of the
windowsill, on the inside. She may be old and slow, but she’s not dumb. There
was one particularly frosty morning in the last couple of days when she went to
the door to be let out and I obliged. She stopped in her tracks half way across
the decking when she realised she had made a massive tactical error and was now
experiencing a temperature similar to that of a walk in freezer, turned tail
and came straight back.
Misty doesn’t mind the snow at all – Border Collies are
amongst the hardiest of breeds in that respect, but she did almost come a
cropper, as did Debbie, on Friday. As I said, they went up West Nab, which is
normally a straight up, straight down sort of a ramble, but they had reckoned without
the whiteout at the top. A combination of snow and fog saw them temporarily
lose their way, and they ended up doing a partially-unintentional three-mile
detour to get back to the road, which included having to scale a dry-stone wall
with a snow-filled ditch on the other side. They were over an hour late getting
home, and I gather that it was very character-building, and now both their
characters are fully-built.
As for me, I have been desperately trying to keep warm – the
Maisie-knitted leg warmers and the Polartec fleece hat have re-appeared, plus a
second hot water bottle behind me in the wheelchair, and the Whitby
Hand-Warmer. I am afraid if it is a choice between being the epitome of
sartorial elegance or stopping my nadgers freezing off, I choose the latter.
Inevitably, I suppose, at this time of year, thoughts tend
to turn to happier, warmer times, or at least mine do. Particularly, actually,
in my case when I heard of the death of David Bowie. I was almost immediately
transported back to “The Jivery” at College, our own feeble attempt at a disco,
where I bopped, along with my girlfriend du jour, to “Jean Jeanie”. (Or Jean
Genet, as the French students called it.) Yes, dear reader, the shameful truth
must emerge. I did, bop. And I was probably wearing a cheesecloth shirt and
orange cotton loon pants as well. I’m not proud of what I did. And maybe it is
time at last to confront these crimes against fashion and taste, but I did once
bop to Bowie,
and I found myself this week in a strange elegiac, almost confessional
mood. I was never a particular fan, even
though most of his backing band came from my home town of Hull. (In fact, there was a skit going round
on Facebook this week to the effect that the Hull Daily Mail’s headline on Bowie’s death would be ‘Singer with
Hull Band Dies’, along the lines of the Aberdeen
Daily Press’s apocryphal ‘Titanic Sinks, Aberdeen Man Saved’ – but sadly,
it was not to be.)
My own proclivities, even at that early age, were tending
towards folk music, having already been (as I saw it) an intellectually
superior being for liking “Progressive” rock in the 6th form. Fairport,
Trees, The Incredible String Band, that sort of thing. Jethro Tull were
suspiciously electric, though. In an act of pure musical snobbery, I disowned
Marc Bolan when Tyrannosaurus Rex changed to T. Rex, stopped singing “Salamader
Palaganda” and switched to “Hot Love”. But nevertheless, Bowie was
one of those icons, along with people such as Joni Mitchell and Dylan, whose
music provided the soundtrack to my life, and so I mourned his demise in a sort
of passive way, regretting that another of my touchstones had gone.
Music has been on my mind in several forms this week. There
was, of course, the debate in parliament about whether England should
have its own national anthem. Blake’s
Jerusalem, which is always trotted
out at the first sign of this discussion surfacing is, in fact, a closely-argued
plea for free love, which you might expect from someone who made a habit of
sitting in the garden in the nip, along with his wife, reading bits of Paradise Lost to her. I often wonder if
all those worthy WI ladies in floral
hats realise what they are singing about in those lines wishing for arrows of
desire. Maybe they should take a sneaky peek at that statue of St Teresa of Avila!
Billy Connolly always favoured Barwick Green, the theme tune to The Archers, which – being an instrumental – would at least save
footballers the embarrassment of pretending to mumble the words to God Save The
Queen. If you asked me seriously, I suppose something like I Vow To Thee My Country might do,
especially as its words actually remind whoever sings it that there are greater
things than misplaced patriotism and nationalism. My overwhelming feeling on
the subject, however, was that MPs ought to be doing something better with
their valuable time. We’re embroiled in an expensive war, half the country is
underwater, China’s economy is tanking and likely to drag us all down with it,
kids are going to bed hungry, homeless people are dying in the streets, and MPs
are debating… the national bloody anthem?
Mind you, what else would you expect from this crowd of
deadbeats, misfits and boobies? It also emerged this week that all the records
of MPs’ expenses prior to 2010 have apparently been shredded. On whose
authority is not clear to me, but I bet whoever did it claimed for the
shredders on expenses. There are those who say I don’t have a good word for
MPs. This is not true. I have a very
good word for them, it’s just not a word you would normally use on the Sabbath.
They really just don’t get it, do they? Maybe they will when they are finally
swinging from a Westminster
lamp post, but even then, I have my doubts. Mr Cameron, in his role as
apparently our chief elder and better, has been dishing out advice on parenting
to all and sundry, including, presumably, how to avoid forgetting your daughter
and leaving her in the pub by mistake. He’s also been forced to admit that
there are not as many friendly fighters in Syria as he first thought. This is
something which many people said at the time, of course, but there is
apparently no system in place to haul someone back to the House of Commons who
has obviously lied in a debate for their own ends and give them a public
roasting. The best we can hope for is a Chilcot-style enquiry in a decade or
so, to get to the bottom of the biggest foreign policy debacle of the 21st
century. Meanwhile, the bombing
continues, the refugees are still fleeing, drowning, and freezing to death in
the camps. That is if they have managed to escape from places such as Madaya in
the first place.
The freezing weather hasn’t really been helping much at
home, either. The long, dismal clean-up after the Calder Valley
floods has been continuing, and now, people who have damp, empty houses are
having to cope with the addition of sub-zero temperatures. There are also signs that the camaraderie and
co-operation which marked the early days of the fight back against Mother
Nature’s excesses are starting to wear a bit thin. Concerns have been voiced
about the slow administration of the relief grants, and that some people are
still unaware of what financial help they can obtain. There are now two
different funds, one of which is specifically aimed at getting businesses back
up and running, but even so, of the 1200 businesses in the Calder Valley
expected to have been affected, only 74 have actually received help to date, for
a variety of reasons. It is perhaps worth reflecting at this point that the
catering in the House of Commons has spent £275,221 on champagne since 2010.
The Calderdale Rising fund has benefited by a single
donation of £100,000 from the Daily Mail,
of all people. As one wag on Facebook observed, “maybe they thought that we
were being flooded by immigrants.” It turns out, though, that it is the readers of the Daily Mail who have contributed. In bits and bats and widows mites,
rather than the Harmsworths and Rothermeres unbracing their wallets and letting
the moths see some daylight. It is inevitable, I suppose, that there will be a
certain amount of bitterness and acrimony, and some of it with good cause, but
I suppose the ideal would be to focus it on those who really deserve it – the
insurance companies being slow to send in loss adjusters, the people insisting
on surveys costing £500 before the applications for future flood mitigation
will be considered, the spivs and chancers going door to door trying to obtain
money from people for work and services they don’t want, the utilities and
phone companies continuing to charge for non-existent services, and the
would-be looters.
Either way, it would be a shame if that initial idealism and
real “all in it together” attitude were to be lost, as it really did seem to be
something special at the time. There is no doubt, either, that the recovery
phase will be a long-haul process, lasting months, if not years. In the
outcome, there will be losers as well as winners. There is also the issue of
the initial adrenaline rush having worn off. It’s a bit like when you fall over
and crock yourself. For a while, the shock numbs the pain, it’s only the next
day when you see the bruise and feel it aching.
That’s what I think is happening now with the Calder Valley.
Plus, of course, there is a lot of winter, and a lot of rain, still to come. As
one Hebden Bridge blogger mordantly observed, “The
first time it happened, we got Prince Charles, this time it was Prince Andrew.
Next time, they’ll probably just send seven dwarfs and a Nolan sister.” Hebden
Bridge is, famously, the most Lesbian town in England, and had UKIP not been so
busy of late attempting to “assassinate”
Nigel Farage – at last, a UKIP policy we can all get behind – I would have expected them to have made much of
the connection between gayness and localised flooding. As it is, it has been left
to those with a puerile sense of humour, such as yours truly, to make the jokes
about “protective dykes”.
One area where dykes, protective or otherwise, will be less
welcome from this week is now the Church of England. I much preferred the
Church of England when it was more like a hobby than a religion, a bit like Midsomer Murders, but without the
violence, as a friend of mine described it. It’s very disturbing when it
suddenly goes all medieval and starts excommunicating large parts of itself, in
an attempt to avoid a schism by creating another schism. I really thought this
thing about gay Christians had been put to bed a long while ago (no pun
intended) but now, once again, people are cherry picking which bits of
Leviticus they want to apply in an attempt to dictate what other people do in
the bedroom. At least the ferrets will
be safe, I suppose, but it really is very depressing.
This is what happens when you try and use the Old Testament
as a moral handbook on how to live your life. Perhaps it’s worth just thinking
about the provenance of the Old Testament – bits of it began life as a desert
survival manual for the Children of Israel, and other bits of it were excluded
altogether at the Council of Nicea. Then there is the issue of translation.
Unless you are fluent in Aramaic, and can tease out the provenance of, and
meanings inherent in, the original text, it is probably a bit futile claiming
things are an “abomination” without knowing the original word which was thus
translated.
But there is a wider issue. God is love, we are told, Jesus
told his disciples that he was giving them a new commandment, love one another.
Love thy neighbour as thyself. I am no theologian, but I am guessing that Big
G, with everything else on his plate right now, and everything that ever was
and shall be, world without end, amen, probably takes a fairly top level,
hands-off approach on love, and doesn’t want to get too involved in the
specifics of who does what to whom. Obviously the innocence of children needs
to be protected, but apart from that, surely what counts is that we create more
love in this world, before we finally leave it, than that with which we
entered.
I said something like this the last time the issue came up
and I will probably say it again (and again, and again). Dear Church of
England, in much the same way that MPs surely have something more urgent to
debate than the national bloody anthem, why don’t you put aside the issue of
gay clergy and concentrate your still-formidable resources instead of solving
the fact that people see religion as irrelevant, that materialism means more
than spirituality, that there is poverty, hunger, starvation and war abroad and
at home, and then, when you have sorted all that lot out, then you can have a nice conference somewhere warm and sunny where
you can all debate the relevance of gay ferrets and shellfish in Leviticus
until you turn blue in the face, foam at the mouth and fall over backwards.
Send me a postcard. But don’t expect to see me at Evensong until you stop being
such a set of bedknobs and broomsticks.
Mention of God and such topics brings me to the fact that
somehow we have made it through to another Sunday, and the Feast of St Anthony
the Abbot, no less. St Anthony the Abbot
lived in the desert, wore goat skins, ate only bread and drank only water, and
spent his life in contemplation as a hermit, living to the age of 105.
One day, at the age of 18,
in church, he listened to a reading of Matthew 19:21:
"Jesus said unto him, If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell
that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven:
and come and follow me.”
Apparently, on hearing those words, he walked out the door
of the church there and then, and gave away all his property except what he and
his sister needed to live on. That was
not the end of it, though. On hearing Matthew 6:34,
“Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow
shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the
evil thereof.”
he gave away his remaining possessions, put his sister in a
convent (with or without her consent is unclear) and went to live a life of
praying, fasting, and manual labour!
So, what am I to make of the life of Anthony the Abbot,
apart from possibly a hat, or a brooch (keep those Airplane references coming!) My first reaction is that I wish I had
the guts to do likewise. Life these days is a lot more complicated,
though. Someone was talking about this
recently, online, in the context of writing a novel. It’s so much more
difficult these days, what with all the distractions. All Dickens had to do was
to eat grilled mutton chops and go to public executions, whereas these days we
have 24/7 media and a million other distractions. Substitute “living the life
of a hermit” for “writing a novel”, and you have my dilemma. All St Anthony the
Abbot had to do was pack up his sister in a large box and courier her to the
nearest convent, then he was free to wander about in the desert wearing
goatskin underpants (hairy side out – it gets warm in the Middle
East) and give up washing and shaving. If I did it today, social
services would start taking an interest.
Still, it would be good, like Thoreau, to go and live in the
woods, and suck the marrow out of the bones of life while I still can. On the
other hand, though, I think it’s something more fundamental that prevents me.
I’m scared. I don’t mind admitting it. I’m scared, specifically, that if I were
to take that leap of faith, there would be no-one there to catch me, and until
I have worked on my faith and repaired it, I guess I will just have to keep on
keeping on in the furrow I am ploughing, or the rut, if you want to be unkind.
I console myself that “they also serve who only stand and wait” but it’s not
much consolation really, when you think that the sands of time are slipping
away and I may not have that much time to achieve my dreams, whenever I have decided
what they are, always assuming I can even do that. A land of milk and honey,
and being fed by locusts or something. Even a dog that brought bread rolls,
like the one St Roche had, would do, at a pinch. I could be a hermit, all other
things being equal. I already have the beard.
One of my friends once said a very significant thing to me,
though. It was “never underestimate the power of gradual change” – change
doesn’t have to be bish bash bosh, yesterday we did that, today we do this…
it’s the commitment to change that
matters – once you have decided on that, then you can put the new you, the new
regime, even the New Jerusalem, maybe, into place gradually, brick by brick.
The journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step, and all that. So,
from tomorrow, I shall be wearing goatskin underpants, assuming I can catch a
goat. But right now, I have had a mobile phone call from Granny, who is heading
back in the camper van from Wessenden, in the company of Debbie and three
frozen dogs that will need thawing out, telling me to put the kettle on, so
that is what I am going to go. And as
for next week, sufficient is the evil thereof. Or something.
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