Epiblog for St Valentine's Day

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. The weather has turned a bit brighter, but also a bit colder. Better than all those grey dreary drippy days of rain, but a bit of a shock to the system when it’s bright sunshine one minute and hailstoning like buggery the next. Maisie’s indestructible daffodils are continuing to flourish in both their locations, although neither clump has yet “begun to peer, with hey the Doxy o’er the dale”. The snowdrops in the front garden are just starting to show white flowers, and the whole feeling is of having reached a tipping point, that from now on it’s only a matter of time. But there’s still plenty of opportunity for winter to have one last snarl – it was snowing up at Diggle when Deb was up there with Misty, yesterday.

Not that Misty minds, it’s all the same to Misty. I wish I could somehow tap into her Border Collie resilience and energy; I could certainly use it right now. I’ve developed a niggling little pain in my ankle which has been preventing me from sleeping even more than usual. Or even less than usual, if you see what I mean, so I have not been at my best this week, not that my best is that good to start with, these days.

For me, it’s been yet another week of battles. The sort of week when you end up with lots of things half done and nothing actually completed. I can truly say “I haven’t half got a lot done this week!” It’s also been yet another of those weeks when things have blown up, stopped working and generally slid  to the floor and died. One of the things that rather crucially stopped working (or at least working properly) was the stove. We were sitting there with it roaring away and suddenly there was the sound of a soft “flump” which could only have been a major fall of soot. It didn’t all come straight out into the room because the Morso stove has a “baffle plate”, sometimes known as a “throat plate” which covers almost the whole of the inside of the firebox, at the top.

The idea of this is to channel the smoke and fumes into a narrow gap and promote the stove drawing up the chimney. However, with what as clearly a large bucketful of soot now sitting on top of it and blocking off any airway to the stove-pipe and thence the chimney, it was clearly a non-starter, and instead, the smoke and its accompanying deadly fumes started to come back into the kitchen. Fortunately, this was one occasion where having a decrepit old house which is full of draughts and holes worked to our advantage, because although things did get fuggy for a while, they never achieved that crucial concentration needed to be lethal.  However, it was a problem, and we had no choice but to let the fire go out overnight.

I had already phoned the chimney sweep, who last came five years ago, and, resisting the temptation to ask him if he was finding it easier to get apprentices now the Tories are back in office, fixed up for him to come and sweep the flue on 15^th February, the earliest available appointment. Meanwhile, he advised, I should “let down the baffle plate” and try and clear the obstruction behind it, as it could be dangerous. I don’t like letting anybody down, and I certainly wasn’t looking forward to letting down the baffle plate. A fitful night’s sleep ensued, where I dreamed that I had promised to take the baffle plate to the zoo, and then not turned up. Eventually, the cold dawn came, Debbie accelerated away to college, leaving me listening to the whine of the turbo fading under Lockwood Viaduct, and I was forced to confront the now-cold grate.

As it happened, as so often happens, in fact, I discovered the solution by accident. I had already cleared all of the ashes and cinders out of the grate and put them in a zinc bucket. I found that, by leaning forward in my wheelchair as far as I could and reaching up inside the firebox, I could just about grasp the front edge of the plate. I waggled it, tentatively, and was rewarded with a small, trickling avalanche of soot and what looked like loose mortar falling into the grate. Because the plate is curved, and rests on top of the firebricks, when I pulled it down at the front, it raised up at the back, opening a small gap through which the blockage was able to pass. True, it was at about the rate of sand passing through an hourglass, but it was infinitely preferable to taking out the plate, finding myself ankle deep in soot, and then not being able to get it back in place again afterwards.

Half an hour of waggling had yielded about half a bucket of what looked like a mixture of loose mortar, soot, ash and maybe crumbled brick. It didn’t bode well for the health of the chimney generally, but that’s a question for the sweep. In the meantime, I was tempted to give it a go and re-light the fire, because I was as bored doing the waggling as you are reading about it, and I was also getting tired.  However, I felt as if there was still more soot up there, so I decided to carry on. It was then that I had my second brainwave. Instead of leaning forward and waggling the plate by hand, I stuck the little hearth shovel up inside the firebox. It has a notch in it caused by some nameless mishap in the past, and by engaging the notch with the edge of the plate, I was able to waggle it quite comfortably from a normal seated position.

Another twenty minutes of waggling, and I was done in. The bucket was full, as well, so it would have to do. Tentatively, I screwed up a bit of paper, put it in the empty grate, and lit it. Eureka! The smoke went up the chimney. It was then the work of about twenty minutes to re-lay and re-light a fire, and a further half an hour to bag up the grunge and trundle out to the dustbin with it.  I looked at my watch once I had cleaned up. Ten past ten. Time to start work for the day!

Matilda was as pleased as I was to see the fire back on again. She’s been feeling the cold, I think.  I’m starting to come to the conclusion that maybe the vets were wrong and she was actually older than nine when we rescued her, because she’s certainly slowed down a lot, of late.  It could be that she’s just got used to having a succession of warm chairs and beds covered with purpose-made crocheted cat blankets of course. That might have something to do with it.   In any event, most days the squirrels and the pigeons come and go unmolested. Actually, a couple of nights last week the dish that had the bird food in it had been completely cleaned out and moved a considerable distance on the decking overnight, so I am wondering if the badger has been coming back.

One cat which has been in the news this week is Huddersfield’s own railway cat, Felix, who has been given her own hi-vis jacket and a badge to confirm her official status as head of rodent control at Huddersfield station. It made great copy for The Huddersfield Examiner, of course, and even went briefly viral on social media, but I just hope it doesn’t make her a target for the sort of mindless violence that Missy the bus-stop cat may have met with. A station is a dangerous enough place for a cat, as it is.

My official government petition to try and beef up the UK law against cat (and dog) cruelty, by introducing a five year sentence as a deterrent for a new offence of “animal murder” is currently languishing in the doldrums with 412 signatures out of a possible 100,000. Still, you could look at it another way. It’s had almost 500 signatures in just over a week, and it runs until August 11^th.  So if it keeps up that rate… well, who knows.  I had hoped for some re-tweets from animal-loving celebrities on Twitter, but so far my hopes are in vain. Someone who has 800,000 followers on Twitter could make such a difference just by clicking a couple of buttons on their phone, but obviously that’s too taxing for them. I understand. It must be very tiring counting all that money. I’m surprised they don’t have someone to do it for them.

One petition that I noted did actually do rather well (in that it went from zero to 100,000 in about four days!) was the one demanding Jeremy Hunt resumes negotiations with the BMA about the strikes by junior doctors over their new contract. I will forebear from making the obvious joke about Mr Hunt out of respect for the Sabbath, but he really does seem to be going out of his way to be an unpleasant, hubristic, well, what can I say? Blockage? Especially when it emerged that apparently a deal had been close, and he then vetoed it, thus virtually guaranteeing the strike went ahead on Tuesday.  Clearly he is either very stupid, or he has an agenda – actually, belay that comment, because the two aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive.  I have to declare an interest here. My sister works in the NHS; the NHS saved my life in 2010; I have also had occasion to thank them since then.  True, the NHS isn’t perfect, and people have ridiculous expectations of it sometimes, fuelled by a media which prints whatever the Tories tell it to print, setting up the NHS to fail.  I can see, also, a background shift in the NHS – what used to be “wheelchair services” is now “Opcare”. What used to be the Community Rehab Team is now “Locala”, and I can’t believe either of those two organisations are charities.

I repeat. The NHS is being set up to fail, in order for it to be dismantled in direct contradiction not only of the will of the people but also of the Tory manifesto in 2010, not that that particular document was worth the effort of flushing down the bog.  Crises are being engineered deliberately in the NHS by the government, in order for the public to be “softened up” to things such as the closure of A & E departments on the spurious grounds of cost. How much extra is it costing to use external companies instead of the internal resources that were already there. How much did the “tendering” exercise cost? How much was spent on TUPE payments?

Mr Hunt, meanwhile, has mad staring eyes and is seemingly untroubled by self-doubt.  At the end of the week it is difficult to know what he could have done to make himself more unpopular – gassing kittens perhaps, or wringing the necks of cute budgerigars. But you can see, he obviously doesn’t give a stuff. Like the Rum Tum Tugger, “he will do what he will do, and there isn’t any doubt about it”.  As Mark Steel said this week, writing in the Independent, if Jeremy Hunt was the Minister for Circuses, within a fortnight, the clowns would be on strike.

Personally, I am hoping that Mr Hunt has made a major tactical blunder with his tactic of riding roughshod over reason and common-sense. The fact that there are now two separate government petitions, one calling for Hunt to resume negotiations and another calling for a vote of no confidence in him, and that both these petitions have well over 100,000 signatories as I write, cannot have escaped David Cameron.  Cameron has his hands full at the moment thinking of new lies to tell to the media about refugee camps on the Sussex Coast if we leave the EU, in order to quieten down the Euro-skeptics and the UKIPpers and stop them baying at the moon. The last thing he wants right now is a rumpus in his own back yard about the NHS. I hope that he’s thinking about an early re-shuffle, which he could use to shunt several critics of the EU back to the back benches, and also, as an added bonus, shunt Mr Hunt into a post more commensurate with his talents. I would suggest O/C Latrines, The Falkland Islands. A new health secretary would then be a perfect pretext for the government to resume negotiations without seeming to lose face or back down.

Whether Cameron actually has the foresight to see this, however, is a moot point, as he is currently obsessed with trying to woo white van man bigot Britain with dog-whistle pronouncements about migrants being denied benefits and dire warnings about  migrants setting up camps on the bowling greens of Hove.  The people he is aiming at are incapable of differentiating between “migrant” and “Muslim” and don’t realise that he is talking about EU migrants. They are also incapable of differentiating between “migrant” and “asylum seeker” – with the sort of logic that would make an amoeba look like a towering intellectual giant, these are the people, let us not forget, who blamed Muslims for the unexploded bomb at Victoria Station, as chronicled last week.  Cameron knows that to stop them putting their cross in the “no” box, he has to say anything, do anything, to make it look as if he is being tough on migrants, however preposterous or untrue. If you don’t believe me, just start listening to some of the stuff he will come out with between now and the referendum, whenever it is.

It’s been a bad week to be a refugee. France, one of the richest countries in Europe and one that has done very little, compared with Germany, say, to shoulder the burden of the refugees from the Syrian war, is now contemplating bulldozing about half of the “Jungle”, the massive sprawling refugee camp outside Calais, and forcing the inhabitants to go and live in government hostels… made from old shipping containers! You’d think the country which gave the world so much civilization in the form of literature, art, and fine cuisine, could at least run to some prefabricated huts, but hey, that might be too much like establishing an example of the kind of permanent refugee resettlement/screening/integration camps which I have been asking for ever since this torrent of humanity started its desperate attempts to escape.  Greece, meanwhile, has been told by the EU to shut its borders, and a NATO fleet, no less, has been despatched to the Eastern Mediterranean. Its mission is somehow to target the people traffickers who are responsible for getting the refugees over the sea to Greece – although how they will do this without destroying the boats, which are full of people, see above, remains to be seen.  If they were truly serious about decreasing the flow of refugees, they could be enforcing a no-fly zone over Syria, and stopping any more bombing. It is the bombing (specifically the Russians bombing moderate anti-Assad groups which in turn strengthens Assad’s position so he can do more indiscriminate barrel-bombing in turn) which is prolonging the war and making the Syrian refugee crisis worse.

When you look at all the lunacy and idiocy in the world which is masquerading as politics, and I haven’t even mentioned Donald Trump yet, it seems by comparison an act of pure logic, reason and sanity that apparently somebody is working on a full size floating replica of the Titanic, and that they hope to launch it in 2018.  Haven’t they seen the film? I don’t know if they are also working on a full-scale replica of the iceberg, or indeed a full scale replica of Kate Winslet, but one of the classic definitions of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result this time.  Maybe they should offer it to the French, to have it moored off Calais as a floating hostel for migrants.

As you have probably gathered, I am out of sorts this week and I don’t have a good word for anybody, as least not one that I can use on a Sunday. Apart from the fact that my ankle feels like I am wearing a leg iron, my petition is languishing in the doldrums, I have a mountain of things to do (or more accurately half-do) most of which are to placate people who frankly don’t care if I live or die, and this is punctuated by the occasional crisis which requires me to be wheelchair Superman and solve it by doing something boring tiring and dirty (see under baffle plate). And I am cold, I am fed up of being cold, and I want it to be spring.

Actually, we have reached a small landmark along the road to spring today, in that it is St Valentine’s Day, traditionally the day when the birds meet to choose their mates for the coming year, as in The Parliament of Foulys, although nobody seemed to have told the wood pigeon, that seemed more interested in the bird food than any avian hanky-panky.

‘Twas on the morn of Valentine

When birds begin to prate

Dame Durden and her maids and men

Were all together met…

as the old Sussex folk song has it.  So yes, it is a day of love, romance and harmony, allegedly.  In actual fact, there is very little hard evidence for a St Valentine, or at least one who is fitting to be the patron saint of lovers.  It isn’t even certain whether to commonly-accepted story of Valentine’s life refers to just one person, or is in fact a concatenation of two (or more) separate legends about different people.

The generally accepted version is that Valentine was the former bishop of Termi, a town in the Italian region of Umbria.  Valentine was placed under house arrest by a judge, for being Christian, and, in an early case of what has later to become known as Stockholm syndrome, fell to discussing his faith with his captors. The judge decided to test out the claims of this so-called “Christianity” and commanded that his adopted daughter, who was blind, should be brought before Valentine.  Valentine immediately laid his hands on the girl and restored her sight, and rather shaken by this, the Judge asked Valentine what he should do now.  Valentine told him to throw away all his idols and fast for three days, following which he would be baptised.

The Judge, in somewhat of an excess of zeal, not only did what Valentine asked, but freed all the other people who were being kept prisoner under his authority because they were Christians.  This sort of thing could not be allowed to continue and Valentine was arrested again and this time sent to Rome.  The emperor at the time was Claudius II, who initially got on well with Valentine.  You have to give Valentine points for trying, although clearly he did not know when to stop, because his next wheeze was to try and convert the emperor himself to Christianity.  Claudius II failed to see the humour in the situation, and made a fairly compelling counter-proposal, straight out of the Jeremy Hunt manual of negotiating tactics – either Valentine would renounce his faith, or he would be beaten to death with clubs, then beheaded. Valentine in turn took a huff and refused, which led to the sentence being carried out, outside Rome’s Flaminian Gate, on 14^th February 269AD.

In the same way as there may have been more than one Valentine in real life, a similar situation has arisen with his relics: his skull, crowned with flowers, is exhibited in the basilica of Santa Maria, in Rome. Some bits of him which were found when the catacombs of St Hippolytus were excavated in 1836 are also currently in Rome, and in that same year, a reliquary said to contain St Valentine’s blood was taken to Dublin by an Irish priest, Fr John Spratt, where it remains in Whitefriar Street Church in that city.  There are also relics of St Valentine in St Anton’s Church, Madrid, which have been on display since 1984, and a further relic of St Valentine was found in 2003 in Prague. There’s more – a silver reliquary said to contain a fragment of St Valentine’s skull is in a Catholic church in Chelno, Poland, and other bits or alleged bits of the deceased saint can be found in Roquemaure, in France; in Vienna; in Malta, and, perhaps most improbably, in a church in the Gorbals district of Glasgow.  Putting them all back together would probably be like assembling flat-pack furniture: at  the end, you would have a couple of fingers, a metatarsul and a vertebra or two left over that you didn’t know what to do with.

Even though there was no real cult which associated the concept with him, over the years, the idea has battened on to St Valentine that he was the patron saint of lover and lovers.  The modern-day commercial, schmaltzy St Valentines day goes back to the fanciful suggestions of 18^th and 19^th century antiquaries, who picked up on alternative strands of the legend which see Valentine marrying Christian couples in secret, and marrying couples so that the husband would not have to go to war, both of which would have been frowned upon in times of the persecution of the Christians.  However, there is a folk-belief, which goes back to the middle ages, of Valentine being associated with the birds choosing their mates on this particular day, and ipso facto, because in medieval literature birds are often used as metaphors for other, human activities, Valentine became associated with humans choosing their mates as well. (See The Owl and The Nightingale, which is in fact an extended debate about the relative virtues of art and philosophy, despite the fact that the nightingale spends a large part of the poem telling the owl off for “shitting down behind the settle”) It hasn’t escaped the notice of scholars, either, that St Valentine’s Day falls smack in the middle of the Roman festival of Lupercalia, and it may be yet another instance of Christianity having taken over a much more ancient ritual and appropriated it for its own ends. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss, as The Who might say, if they were here right now and not 50% deceased.

So, where does that leave me, I hear you cry, and what has all this stuff to do with the price of bread. Well, as I wrote last week, I suppose, without love we are as a sounding brass or tinkling cymbals, and love is certainly fairly critical to the New Testament, at least.  All you need is love, said the Beatles, and all you need to do is to love your neighbour as yourself, said Jesus, who was (according to John Lennon) almost as popular.  We could certainly do with a bit more love in the world – well, a lot more, if it comes to that – and Valentine’s Day could certainly do with a re-balancing away from the pink cards and the roses and the chocolates and the sexy underwear and back maybe towards the idea that there is actually more than one type of love. 

I was looking for a suitable piece of music to append to this Epiblog and I originally considered Springseason by Amazing Blondel, but in view of the theme of Love, I actually settled on Everything Possible by Fred Small, which has a lot to say about love, especially in the chorus where a parent addresses their child:

You can be anybody you want to be,
You can love whomever you will
You can travel any country where your heart leads
And know I will love you still
You can live by yourself, you can gather friends around,
You can choose one special one
And the only measure of your words and your deeds

Will be the love you leave behind when you’re gone

This sums it up, more or less, for me.  I’m an unlikely apologist for this weird Middle Eastern cult that is based on creating more love than you started with, but that seems to be the corner I have painted myself into, this week.  And yes, I know that the same obscure Middle Eastern cult has also, in the dim and distant past, been responsible for people being strung up, then cut down while still alive, then cut into chunks and boiled in barrels of tar, simply for believing that the bread and wine either does/does not actually turn into the body and blood of Jesus, delete as appropriate depending who is on the throne at the time, but I would contend that the people who did that had probably rather lost the plot, and substituted fanaticism for love.

Which, of course, inevitably leads me to loving thine enemy, and forgiveness and all that, which is usually the point where I admit defeat. To be honest, I don’t think that this week is going to be any different, either, so maybe this is the point where I get down out of my pulpit and start to prepare for next week’s farrago of nonsense. Well, maybe not tonight, not yet. It feels like a sort of low-key, muted sort of an evening is coming on, and maybe I’ll do some painting later on.  I might spend some time trying to get my head around the fact that they have apparently discovered waves in gravity this week, something I still don’t fully understand. Tomorrow the phone will be ringing and the emails will be pinging and the chimney-sweep will be banging on the door, and already half of February is gone.