It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley.
Summer continues, after a fashion, and one half of this year’s plant order from
Jersey Plants Direct has finally arrived. Some marigolds. The ground cover
roses which I ordered are, however, still in transit somewhere. As with last
year’s order, Jersey Plants Direct’s idea of “direct” seems to be “direct via Oslo after being
despatched on a three-legged donkey with no sense of direction.”
Still, these are first world problems, but I would like to
put some sort of effort into the garden this year. The gardener who was
supposed to be coming back to do part two of the great clean-up and prune is
currently missing in action, but since I had to explain to him what ground
elder was the first time he came, it’s probably no great loss. Meanwhile,
Debbie, fuelled by the consumption of a bottle of Old Rosie cloudy cider,
cleared off half the overgrown flags in the front garden, with the result that
at least now when the ground cover roses do get here, they will have somewhere
to go.
The trees down the valley are a glorious green, now, and
teeming with birds and squirrels. The badger, too, is still an occasional
visitor. She missed a couple of nights when it was really hot, but since then
she seems to have been most nights, though we don’t always see her. There are flowers coming on the magnolia and
the clematis. So, provided it doesn’t snow in June or something crazy like
that, perhaps winter really is behind us.
Matilda has now got into something of a summer routine, especially
on mornings when Debbie goes off teaching for the day. Deb lets her out onto the decking first
thing, and this results in her “morning patrol”, whereby she stalks up and down
on the decking and sits glaring into the garden. The squirrels, undeterred,
come and steal the bird food anyway, while her back is turned. Then she will come to the door to be let
in/go to the door to be let back out again throughout the morning.
Afternoons are spent snoozing, either out on the decking in
a patch of sun, if it’s a hot day, or in the kitchen in the armchair near me
while I’m working. Then she wakes up about teatime, has some Felix, and goes
out for another stalking/patrolling session until she gets fed up, usually
about 9.30pm, comes to the door to be let in, and, after having supper, curls
up either in the kitchen chair or on the settee in Colin’s, and that’s it for
the night. Oddly regular for a cat,
since cats are by nature contrary and capricious little creatures who delight
in doing the unexpected and sometimes even the unwanted, but then that’s what
litter trays are for!
Still, she’s a simple enough little soul, and seems quite
happy with her life. It’s hard to think sometimes that we’ve had her nearly
four years, but four years it is. It’ll be three years on July 3rd
since we got Misty Muttkins. Some days
it feels like it was only yesterday, some days it seems like they have been
here forever.
Deb’s counting down the hours till the end of term, and I am
still mired in the same 17 intractable problems, apart from that one of them
was (sort of) solved this week when the wheelchair repair man came on Monday
and changed over my tyres. For two pneumatic ones. The previous ones were
solid, and it seems odd going back to rolling through life on a cushion of air.
The problem is, though, that air-filled tyres are more generally prone to
disaster, and originally the powers that be decreed I should have solid tyres
because they got fed up of having to come out and fix punctures! So, we shall
see. The only other odd thing which has happened this week is that my thumb has
swollen up, all around the joint. Until you develop a big, hurty thumb, you
don’t realise how many of life’s daily tasks you need an opposable thumb for.
It hurts to hold a pen, or a paintbrush, and it sort of hurts to type, although
I only use my thumb for the space bar. If it doesn’t go down soon, I may have
to involve the NHS, perish the thought.
All this talk of the end of term serves to highlight, as
well, that it is only about six weeks to the end of term, and to midsummer,
when the nights start drawing in again, and to the dreaded Brexit poll that
seems to be dominating the news everywhere we look these days. You can’t turn on the TV without seeing
Boorish Johnson blundering about in a shopping centre somewhere, brandishing a
Cornish pasty and wittering on about taking back control, whatever that means.
The level of utter drivel and appalling meaningless crap
being uttered by both sides in the Great Confusion surrounding the referendum is
truly staggering. Cameron compounded his
tactical error in calling the referendum in the first place, by using some
really stupid scare tactics at the outset, which now means that when the Bank
of England and the IMF make some actually quite serious statements about the
possible economic downturn that will follow when we vote to leave, the impact
of these are blunted, because the Brexiteers simply label it as more of
“project fear”.
Actually, much as it sticks in my craw to say it, and much
as I am no great fan of the EU in its present state, I am afraid the Bank of
England and the IMF statements both seemed to make sense. By losing this referendum the Tories could
finally kill off the stuttering, patchy and unsatisfactory little shoots of
growth that began to appear when Osborne abandoned “austerity” briefly and
stopped carpet-bombing the economy. The
world’s trade is slowing down anyway, China is tanking, the US is up to its
goolies in debt, manufacturing here is slowing, and it is positively the worst
time to be going out on a limb and setting off into the economic unknown. What is needed is a prolonged period of
government investment on much-needed public projects to get real jobs for real
people earning real money and putting it back into the economy to grow it and
grow the tax-take.
The level of debate in the Brexit campaign is equally dire.
In fact it’s sometimes worse! A typical example of this is the press headlines
about the EU seeking to “ban” the British cuppa and the British slice of toast. It turns out that there was a draft EU
proposal in 2014, which was leaked at the time, and which is currently stalled
anyway, to restrict the power of some domestic electrical items such as kettles
and toasters, in at attempt to cut electricity usage as part of the battle
against global warming. Nobody was talking about “banning” the cuppa, or the
slice of toast, they were talking about making a proposal which could go a
small way to meaning that your child didn’t have to wear a smog mask to go to school
in summer. There is nothing to stop
people using a less powerful kettle to make a cup of tea, or indeed a less
powerful toaster to toast their bread. Or do it on a toasting fork in front of
the fire, and put the kettle on the gas stove, if you have one. The entire
story is, to put it bluntly, bollocks, yet somehow it’s being shared on social
media as if it was gospel, along with the straight bananas, baa baa ethnic
sheep, and all the other crap that never was, but which comes gargling out of
the mouths of various scary-eyed zealots who are continually frothing on about
“taking back control”.
Sadly, a simple lie is much easier to put across than a
detailed unpicking of the actual issues, which is how the Tories won the 2015
election by lying about the economy, and how they are going to lose this
referendum because of the likes of UKIP lying to people that in some undefined
way, which you won’t hear either Farage or Boorish Johnson explain, because
they can’t, because it’s bollocks, see above, voting to leave will somehow rid the country of brown people,
restore cricket on the green and spinsters cycling to matins, and bring back
clipped privet hedges, clipped British accents, and the casual racism of the
1950s. As Oscar Wilde makes Lady
Bracknell say in The Importance of Being
Ernest, “ignorance is such a delicate, exotic flower; touch it, and the
bloom is gone…”
It really is enough to make you start seriously checking out
those disused air raid shelters on the Isle of Arran that were for sale the
other year. When you look at well,
basically any political statement these days, 90% of it is utter crap. Sadiq
Khan, London’s
new Labour mayor, chose to attack his party leader instead of concentrating on
the victories Labour has achieved since Corbyn was elected. Mind you, he is not
alone in this, in the Labour party and the BBC.
Cameron, meanwhile, was caught on camera telling the Queen how
fantastically corrupt Nigeria
and Afghanistan were, on the
eve of those very countries attending an, er, anti-corruption conference in London. This is the same David Cameron, in case you
were wondering, whose party is now under investigation or at least being
proposed for investigation, in about ten, or is it fourteen, constituencies,
for election fraud. Taxi for Mr Kettle!
Living in this corrupt, xenophobic, narrow, nasty,
semi-derelict country is enough to make you want to turn into a contemplative,
and coincidentally, today is the feast of St Bertha, who did just that, giving
away all her possessions and becoming a hermit near Bingen, on the Rhine, in
Germany, following a visit to Rome, after she founded several hospices for the
poor after her pagan husband was killed in battle and she devoted herself to
raising her son Rupert as a Christian.
Rupert died when he was twenty, and Bertha spent the remaining 25 years
of her own life there as a hermit. She
is not to be confused with St Bertha of Kent, who was a different St
Bertha, or indeed with Big Bertha, which was a WW1 German artillery piece
mounted on a railway truck.
Certainly, the more life goes on like it has been doing the
more the thought of going off to live in a hut in the woods and bake my own
curtains and weave my own bread becomes more and more appealing. Even if my premonition doesn’t come true, I
can’t have that much time left, and do I really want to spend it adding up
accounts to see how far behind the line we are when everybody else is outside
in the sunshine enjoying themselves. The
reason why this blog is so late today is because it’s Deb’s birthday and,
instead of writing a blog, I spent the evening cooking a celebration meal for
Deb, and her Mum, the guest of honour, and yes, I had some of it too, and very
nice it was, to say I’d cooked it.
Today has been a long (and badger-less) day, though, and I
am clearly no more spiritually developed than I was last week, or even last
month. I wish I could write you a blog one day that says I have seen it all,
and it is true, a bit like Henry Vaughan, and that I understand it, and this is
how it works.
I saw eternity the
other night
Like a great ring of
pure and endless light
But these days are largely empty and void. As I have said before, I don’t think that I
am having a dark night of the soul, but right now, with my aches and pains and
my constant, nagging tiredness, it seems definitely like a dark night of the
body. Even the voluptuary sweetness of
the May time – loveliest of trees, the cherry, now – seems devoid of any
spiritual aspect this year. In the words
of W B Yeats, too long a sacrifice makes a stone of the heart. Still, as the
old Zen saying has it, a blossom, falls whether or not there is anyone there to
see it.
A flower falls whether
we love it or not, and weeds grow whether we love them or not, and the peach
blossom smells gorgeous, even when we are not around to smell it.
I’m obviously not helping anyone with this blog, least of
all me, and I don’t know why I am still doing it, to be honest, when I look at
how much the last five years has stripped from my already shaky belief-system
and faith. So I apologise, dear reader, if I have led you up the garden path,
or you came here seeking some solace I was unable to provide today. The fault
is definitely mine, not yours. Whatever you are looking for, stop looking for
it, then you will probably find it. I wish I could follow my own advice,
sometimes!
The only good “external” news this week really has been that
my petition topped 10,000 signatures, and thus is now guaranteed a response
from the government, which will be interesting, although I could probably write
it now, myself… blah blah blah existing legislation is sufficient blah blah
blah. Well, we’ll see.
Meanwhile, it’s gone midnight already and another week of
work beckons to my hands. We have heard the
chimes of midnight, Justice Shallow. Jesus, the days that we have seen. Thank
you for reading the quasi-religious ramblings of a tired old hairbag. I’m not
about to become an atheist or anything, not just yet, because to be honest the
universe is far too big and mysterious a place for there not to be something
behind it, and there is so much that atheism would leave unexplained. But I do
wish Big G would stop being so bloody opaque. Just tell me what you want me to
do, and I will have a crack at doing it.
Just tell me.
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