Epiblog for the Feast of St Herman the Cripple

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. September seems to be zipping by at an alarming rate, although it’s still been warm, or it’s seemed to be warm, at any rate. It could just be me being febrile. It would be easy to be febrile at the moment, being me.

Matilda has still largely ignored the weather, in fact she seems to be spending much less time outdoors.  Given that she was allegedly 9 when we got her, and we’ve had her 4 years, she’s 13 now, which is 65 in human years, so maybe we can expect that she’ll slow down a bit.  Not that she seems troubled in any way, in fact, as Debbie remarked, if anything, she’s been clingier and much more friendly since we got back from Arran.

Misty, too, has settled back down into the routine of home life, with the beach, Kilbrannan Sound, and games of stones being but a distant memory.  She is, however, seemingly content to potter around the garden, snooze in the sun, and go on long walks up on t’moors with Deb and Zak, when the latter is available, although at human age 63, he’s also slowing up a bit as well. Still, he managed a 14-miler during the week. Good dog.

The production of new books continues to be fraught and shitnastic, although it’ll all come out in the wash, no doubt. College, for Deb, is the same as ever, swift to chide and slow to bless.

So, all in all, it’s pretty much par for the course and business as usual here, and nothing much to report. To be honest, I’m not entirely sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. Sadly, it’s pretty much business as usual in the world at large as well.  The fragile ceasefire in Syria exploded in a welter of flame as the Russians bombed an aid convoy. Or maybe it was the Syrians. Or both. Or, since they each denied any responsibility, maybe it was the fairies.

David Cameron announced that his career after politics will be giving after dinner speeches about austerity at £50K a pop; Jeremy Hunt’s lawyers argued that he is “not to be held accountable for what he says in the rough and tumble of parliament”.  Jeremy Corbyn once more trounced an opponent in a leadership contest, increasing his lead from 59% last time to 60% this time, despite his opponents gerrymandering the electorate and disallowing anyone who they thought wouldn’t vote for Owen Smith, on all sorts of fabricated precedents.  A kid died in Calais, trying to stow away on board a lorry to get to his brother in England. 115 migrants died when their boat overturned off the coast of Egypt.  And Mary Berry announced that she wouldn’t take part in the next series of The Great British Bake Off, a story which the BBC thought was much more important than all the rest, judging from its prominence in the news agenda.  Well, that and Brad and Angelina, whoever they might be.

It wasn’t all bad news in the press though: a woman found a message in gold marker pen scrawled up the inside leg of the underpants she had bought her husband from Primark, and automatically assumed that this was evidence that he was having an affair.  Why, God alone knows.  If you were having an affair with someone, communicating with them by writing letters in gold felt pen in their underpants is a tad insecure.  It turned out to be a message from a Primark worker in India. Probably saying “Help, I am prisoner in an underpant factory.”

It was also the week that a woman travelling from London to Skipton on a Virgin train took photos of the two able bodied businessmen types who refused to get out of the seats she had reserved because she was disabled, leaving her to stand all the way.  The photos found their way on to Facebook, and incredibly, as well as sharing her justified anger at these two drones, there were those who sought to take issue with her about it.  She should have sat in the special disabled seats near the door, apparently.  Which were also full. And to be fair, she had paid for the seats that she’d reserved, and she should have been able to sit in them.  One of the men later contacted the press to say he hadn’t moved because she “didn’t look disabled”.  I think the NHS should sign up these psychics who can diagnose people on sight without going through the tedious seven years of doctor training. Think of the money we would save. It might even come to £350million a week, which we could spend on the NHS instead. Oh, hang on…

I actually blame the Paralympics.  Don’t get me wrong, I have the greatest respect for the people who throw the discus with their teeth and do one-legged triathlons, and Tanni Grey Thompson and all that, but basically, all that the media do is to use it as an example of how they think all disabled people should behave. It perpetuates the myth of the deserving and the undeserving poor. If it were expressed in terms of race instead of disability, it takes us back to the deep south of the USA in the 1950s and the difference between good negroes and “uppity” ones.

Never mind that you might be aching in every limb, feeling like crap, and that you’ve nearly fallen off your banana board that morning. The taxi driver’s happy to point out that he saw a bloke in a wheelchair do the 1100 metres last night – so why aren’t you?  It must be, implicitly, because the disabled bloke who can do the 1100 metres is a good disabled, whereas you are an uppity disabled, and possibly a benefits scrounger, to boot.  Or, as I was once told when I asked, en route to a meeting in the University of Manchester, “Oh, yes, there’s a lift. It’s round the corner and up the stairs!” The government feted the paralympians. The government that has stopped the benefits of hundreds of thousands of disabled people, declared them fit for work when they were dying, and driven them, in some cases to suicide over abominations like the Bedroom Tax. Yes, that government.

The race parallel still holds true. I don’t doubt there are probably people around in this country who would like to make the bad disableds, the uppity disableds, sit in the back of the bus. America, of course, has its own problems with race pure and simple, and they’ve also been impinging on my consciousness.  Carolina is in flames.  Black Lives Matter are out on the streets.  I have been taken to task, ticked off, no less, for saying “All Lives Matter”. People claim that saying “All Lives Matter” is in fact incipiently accepting the oppression of black people, and they quote Martin Luther King’s Letter From Birmingham Jail.

“We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor, it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct action campaign that was “well timed” in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word “Wait!” It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This “Wait” has almost always meant “Never”. We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that “justice too long delayed is justice denied.”

I appreciate that, and I have never been an oppressed black man, though as I have tried to indicate above, being a disabled is giving me a bit of a grounding in it. The police don’t routinely shoot disableds in the UK, though, like they do back people in the USA, but give it time.

I read an article that claimed that basically, before the police in America started shooting black people, nobody said “All Lives Matter”. I must say I take slight exception to the article's statement that "nobody said that all lives matter before black people were being shot". How the hell does the author know what I said and when? I lobbied against the Iraq war in 2002. Because I could see it was the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time for the wrong reasons and a lot of innocent people were going to get killed. As it happens, in that particular case, brown people. So I guess even then I was saying brown lives matter. I also thought that our politicians here in the UK were culpable in putting our service personnel in harm's way for no reason. So you could say that was me saying khaki lives matter. I've consistently lobbied for animal welfare and an end to cruelty against animals since at least 2000, so I was saying animal lives matter. I've campaigned against the senseless deaths of refugees fleeing the Syrian conflict and the inhuman treatment of those that do manage to make it to Europe without drowning. So there I'm saying Syrian lives matter.

I appreciate that the particular racial tensions in America (fuelled by the inflammatory statements of people like Donald Trump and the apparently trigger-happy responses of some police personnel) have taken "Black Lives Matter" to a whole new meaning in the context of current events. There is also the issue of the USA's attitude to the ownership and possession of personal firearms, a problem which it seems wilfully blind to, despite Obama pointing it out again and again. The prevalence of guns leads inevitably to increased use of guns.

But to say that people like me who regard ALL life as sacred and something to be cherished, nourished and encouraged in a peaceful environment are somehow doing so out of a misguided and incipiently racist  reaction to the justified anger of the Black Lives Matter campaign, is a bit simplistic. Please don't presume to pigeonhole me on the evidence of your mistaken assumptions about my beliefs.

Anyway, my rant is over and it’s time to put away the soapbox for another week, because today is Sunday, and the feast of St Herman the Cripple. Actually, we narrowly missed St Padre Pio, by two days, so if I’m still alive in 2018, we’ve got that to look forward to. A scary Italian monk with stigmata and the gift of bilocation.  What’s not to like?

Meanwhile, we’re back with Herman the Cripple, who was born in an age not known for political correctness. See also under William the Bastard.  He was born disabled in Altshausen, Swabia. He was so terribly deformed he was apparently almost helpless. He was confined in  Reichenau Abbey beside Lake Constanz in Switzerland, in 1020 when he was seven, and he spent all his life there. He became known to scholars all over Europe, wrote the hymns Salve Regina and Alma Redemptoriis Mater as well as poetry, a universal chronicle, and a mathematical treatise. He died on September 21 1054 and is sometimes called Herman Contractus.

He would probably have been labelled a good disabled and, who knows, ATOS may even have left him alone.

I can’t say I’m looking forward to the coming week, but then, these days, I very rarely am.  At least the Labour Party might now stop behaving like dicks, and unite against the common enemy, but I’m not putting any money on it. I’ve made some progress with the eikons, having got to the point where I only have to do two eikons, a triptych and a panel, and then I’m up to date with all the requests and promises I made over the summer!

Somehow, these days, it seems that painting eikons is the only sane response to the lunacy of this world. Last Sunday, Rachel Emec and Chris Paris, two blameless and harmless individuals who were returning to the UK after delivering aid to the refugees in The Jungle, in Calais, were arrested at Dover and held by the anti-terror police at the port. They were held incommunicado for several hours before being released without charge.  Naïve as I am in the ways of state harassment, I was surprised to read this, but subsequent research during the week has established that this sort of hassle is routine for people returning from the camps.  It cannot be right. It is an absolute scandal.

Anyway, it’s late and I’m tired. It may even technically be Monday. So I’m going to knock it on the head and go to bed. Everyone else is asleep anyway, and I think it’s high time I joined them.  I find myself getting increasingly frustrated these days that whatever I do seems to make no difference, but I guess I just have to fall back yet again on good old Si Kahn. It’s not just what you’re born with, it’s what you choose to bear. It’s not how big your share is, it’s how much you can share. And it’s not the fights you dreamed on, but those you really fought. It’s not just what you’re given, it’s what you do with what you’ve got.

Epiblog for the Feast of St Richardis

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley.  Term has started with a vengeance, and there is a hint of Osted in the offing, which has sent the college into a tizzy. Already timetables are being altered as well, and there is a general air of the shakedown cruise about the place. Plus of course she has to simultaneously “embed” “British values”, such as democracy, free speech, freedom of expression, etc, while also covertly, simultaneously, employing the government’s “prevent” strategy to shop anybody who might use their British values of free speech to voice the idea that we shouldn’t be bombing, for example, Syria, as  a potential radical. Consequently Deb has been run ragged during her first week of real teaching, and fell asleep within twenty minutes or so of getting home on Thursday. I am so not looking forward to a winter of this.

Actually, barring one or two blips, the weather was kind to us this week, in that we had a lot of sunshine, some of it even warm, though the mornings now have a cool crispness to them until the sun manages to burn it off. On some mornings, when I look from my bedroom window through the trees down the valley, the sun catches the shiny metal roof of the new factories down at Park Valley Mills in such a way that if you squint a bit, it could be the sunlight glistening on the water of a distant lake, or even the sun on Kilbrannan Sound, glimpsed through the trees from, say, Imachar Brae.

One blip in particular in the weather came on Tuesday night when we had the most appalling thunderstorm. I noticed it getting prematurely dark and thought that it was a bit odd.  Then I noticed the lightning fluttering around the horizon and thought “Uh-oh!”.  A few seconds afterwards, the thunder started. At the first crash overhead, Matilda leapt vertically out of the chair and twizzled round in mid air, Tom-and-Jerry style, with her feet already running when she hit the ground, and skedaddled into Colin’s.  Misty, meanwhile, was running back and forth, her eyes wide with fear, until she settled on her bed behind the chair, trembling. Then there was one Godalmighty crash right overhead, and Misty vanished next door as well.  The drumming of the rain at the height of the storm was so loud it drowned out the TV.  Fortunately, 45 minutes later, it had passed on, to perturb someone else.  Sadly, however, it more or less finished off the last of the herbs in tubs, already ravaged by the slugs during our absence, and now lost at sea, drowned where they stood, like the boy on the burning deck.

Matilda continues her quest to become an indoor cat.  Since we have been back from Arran she has been a lot more “clingy” and hardly goes out at all.  She may well re-adjust.  We shall see. The squirrels are conspicuous by their absence. Perhaps they have all hibernated (please don’t all write in again, I do realise now that squirrels don’t hibernate).

I sometimes wish I could hibernate. There is nothing I can say about the outside world this week that I haven’t said a thousand times before, and it has made no difference.  The refugees are still suffering terribly, those that don’t die en route. There is a fragile cease-fire in some parts of Syria.  Donald Trump is still a monumental cock. The British government still has absolutely no idea what to do about Brexit, and the Labour party is still tearing itself apart instead of being the Opposition.  UKIP has a new leader. Some woman. Farage celebrated the end of his term in office by taking a nude dip off a beach in Dorset. Sadly, however, just like John Stonehouse and Reggie Perrin before him, he came back.  Dogs and cats are still dying in the shelters simply for lack of a good home to go to.

Nothing anybody does seems to make a difference. Labour activists protest until the cows come home about the damage this pantomime of a leadership election is doing to the party, but Owen Smith and the PLP carry on regardless.  I have signed petition after petition against the treatment of the refugees. I have argued until I was almost blue in the face against Brexit. I have constantly belittled and ridiculed Nigel Farage (that wasn’t all that difficult, to be honest).  You do all this and still it looks like Americans are going to be mad enough to vote for Trump, and the government here extends the badger cull. Oh, and apparently we’re also fuelling the war in Yemen and starting the beginnings of another refugee crisis there, by selling arms to Saudi Arabia.  Boris Johnson is probably too stupid to have realised this yet, even though he is Foreign Secretary, nominally, but then I doubt he will do anything different once they tell him.

Our own week, however, took a more positive tone at home at least, when Owen arrived on Thursday evening for a couple of days and did some more work on the house for us. For a long while, the decking has been giving us cause for concern. It is almost 20 years old and there were quite a few places where, without intervention, it was going to be the case that in due course someone might suddenly vanish and plummet into the garden below.  Over the course of two days, Owen lifted the “dodgy” boards and replaced them all, and, total star that he is, also dealt with the joists that had developed cellular rot. 

This was a complication nobody had expected, but fortunately a trip to B & Q provided the materials and by the time he left on Saturday afternoon, everything was back in place and I have to say, the decking looks as good as new.  Better, in some places. More importantly, we aren’t going to lose anyone down a hole through it giving way.  We owe Owen so much for all the help he’s given us in the past, but that alone has not only saved us hundreds of pounds but also, maybe more importantly, has preserved the amenity of the decking as a nice place to sit under the canopy of the trees in summer, listening to the tawny owls calling each other sleepily in the woods, and watching the stars appear overhead, as the sky darkens.  These things are important.

And so we came to today.  Today is the feast day of St Richardis, Holy Roman Empress and erstwhile wife of the splendidly-named Emperor, Charles the Fat.  Born in Alsace in 840AD, she married Charles in 862.  As Holy Roman Emperors go, Charles had rather a hard time during his tenure of the role: the Normans were becoming bolder and more aggressive, making incursions along the French coast, and inland.

As if that wasn’t enough, by about 887AD, Charles had started to develop symptoms of what can only be described as madness, in the absence of any more specific diagnosis available at the time. This didn’t just involve seeing things on the sideboard that weren’t actually there, it effectively prevented him from carrying out his duties.  Various contenders sought to exploit the resultant power-vacuum, and, in an effort to undermine Bishop Liutward, who was seen as a potential threat and possible successor, other factions suggested to Charles, possibly in one of his unhinged moments, that Richardis had actually been unfaithful to him, with the Bishop.

Instead of laughing it off with a quip about bishops only being able to move diagonally, Charles flipped and sentenced Richardis to trial by ordeal, specifically trial by fire.  It is not recorded precisely how, but Richardis survived this, which meant, automatically, that she was deemed innocent, and with the help of her family, she retreated to the abbey at Andlau, which she had previously founded in around 880AD. There she lived out her days, dying on 18 September 895AD.

Of course, that wasn’t the end of it. The basic tale of her life was already being embroidered into the stuff of legend.  One version of the story of her trial by Charles the Fat has him accusing her for ten years, at the end of which she finally loses it, dons a shirt impregnated with wax, and walks barefoot into the fire, which refuses to ignite or harm her in any way. She then wanders into the forest,  where she is visited by an angel, who tips her off to look out for a significant message from a bear (why couldn’t the angel just tell her?). Further on, she sees a bear scratching in the soil on the banks of the river at Val d’Eleon, and it is there that she decides to build the monastery of Andlau.  Right.

The variation on this is that, when she wandered off into the woods, Richardis found a mother bear crying over her dead cub. Richardis picks up the cub, which is miraculously restored to life, and the bear is so grateful that it, and the cub, follow Richardis everywhere from then on, which must have been at least mildly inconvenient. [Let's not invite Richardis this time, darling, she'll only bring those bloody bears with her...] Despite the fact that the chronology simply does not stack up, because the monastery at Andlau had been founded anyway, before Richardis underwent her ordeal by fire, the nuns at Andlau, in a smart marketing move (not uncommon in medieval religious institutions that relied on income from pilgrims) kept a live bear in the abbey, and allowed free board and lodging to passing bear-keepers, which sounds good on paper but in practice probably cost them very little.  As a result of these legends, however, St Richardis is often depicted in art as being accompanied by a bear.

Because of her continued veneration after her death, Richardis was canonised by Pope Leo IX in 1049AD and still lies at Andlau, although in a more modern tomb dating from 1350.  For, again, fairly obvious reasons, she is also invoked as the patron saint for protection against fire.

It’s an entertaining little tale, although I am not sure how much use it is as a moral beacon. I suppose the lesson we are meant to draw is that it was the belief of Richardis in her own innocence that protected her from the fire. I have often contended that all that “magic” is, in fact, is the alteration of what we perceive as reality by means of a massive effort of will, and there are documented cases of Indian fakirs and the like walking unharmed across burning coals. If you believe in something strongly enough, you might be able to make it happen. That, after all, I suppose, is also one of the principal reasons for prayer. Although of course prayer is supposed to be more than simply wishing for a desired outcome, however much what passes for my own prayers these days tend to degenerate into just that.  Basically, what St Richardis says to me is if you trust in your own integrity to a sufficient degree, you can sometimes achieve something in defiance of all logic and reason.

Yesterday, in defiance of all logic and reason, with thousands of urgent things screaming at me to be done, I took a day off and spent it painting eikons, including one of St Luke (patron saint of doctors) which ended up looking uncannily like Dr Harold Shipman (probably patron saint of mass murderers) and which I had to paint over and start again. At least you can do that with acrylics, there’s none of this faffing about trying to turn your mistakes into a cloud that you get with watercolours.

I’m not really sure what I was trying to achieve, though, except that I have promised several people several things that aren’t going to paint themselves and I had concluded that, pending a visit from the painting fairy, I had better get on and do them. I do get the increasing sense of drifting along, though, and not knowing exactly where I’m going.  Not on the business front, I know exactly what needs doing and by when, and I can do it, even though by turns it bores and terrifies me. It’s more the sense of what is it all for? Why am I doing this at all.  When I see the way the world is going, increasingly, these days, I am thinking that I want to become the hermit who paints eikons.  But then, by withdrawing from all of the things I have fought (unsuccessfully) for, for so long, am I simply abandoning them to their fate. But since my intervention hitherto has hardly made any difference, would my absence. Still, it’s possible for a drip of water, over many years, to bore a hole straight through a solid rock, and this is what I keep telling myself.  Keep right on to the end of the road, keep right on to the end. Peace must come.

Well, once more it’s a Sunday teatime, Deb is up on Black Hill with Zak and Misty, and I’m here with Matilda fast asleep in the armchair next to me. I’ve almost convinced myself for the moment not to grow a beard down to my knees and go off and live in a cave, but it was a close-run thing.  I still need a shot of redemption, to quote Paul Simon. I need a bit of magic, in fact. We’ll see (apart from the usual unrelenting crap and boggage) what next week brings.

Epiblog for the Feast of the Holy Cross

It has been a busy few weeks in the Holme Valley. We returned from holiday late last Sunday to find that most of the garden seems to have been eaten by slugs, and the tomato plants have drowned in their waterlogged tub.  We had a good time. As, it seems, did the slugs while we were away.  The various doings and peregrinations of our trip will be duly chronicled, when I get round to it, in a book called Arran Antics: More From The Motorhome Menace, probably next year.

Meanwhile, here we are again, happy as can be, all good pals and jolly good company.  Actually that bit is only partly true.  Some of us seem to be missing – the squirrels, most notably, who have probably moved on to fresh woods and pastures new, as Milton might say if her were here right now, which he isn’t.  Nor have I been especially good company, as I returned to face a mass of shitnastic ostrobogoulousness in the form of the year-end accounts, which have to be submitted by 30^th September.  So I spent five days with my head stuck in that.

Matilda greeted our return with her usual insouciance, although I do believe she has missed us, as she is once again being very “clingy” since we came back, and the first night we were home, after we had all bedded down, she roamed the house yowling, for some reason.  No doubt it will all wear off and she’ll be back to ignoring us soon enough.

Spending the thick end of four weeks on Arran has also meant we were blissfully free of television and largely free of the media generally, apart from the odd times we caught the radio news. The right wing rump of red Tories in the Labour party are still hell-bent on self-destruction in their vendetta against Jeremy Corbyn. I tell you one thing. If Owen Smith succeeds in moving the goalposts to such an extent that he actually wins, given that this means Labour will lose in 2020 anyway, I sincerely hope former Labour voters like me will take every opportunity to punish Labour at the ballot box for behaving like rats in a sack when they could have been opposing the Tories for the last year instead of trying to undermine Corbyn. I, for one, won’t forget who they are. Go back to your constituencies, and prepare for de-selection.

Despite the fact that they have a clear run at the moment, and no-one is picking them up on their many errors, inconsistencies, and general lack of direction, Theresa May’s government shows a marked inability to get to grips with “Brexit”. Even coming up with a workable definition of what it means and what comes next seems beyond them. Not surprising, since they never expected to win, even though I predicted all along that they would, simply because their lies were whoppers, delivered on a relentless scale, whereas the “Remain” campaign made the fundamental error of assuming people would vote with their head rather than their heart.  Meanwhile, we’re now in a phoney war, where every bit of bright economic news is seized on by the Brexit lobby as a sign that things aren’t that bad really, after all. Brace yourselves. Winter is coming.

Meanwhile, there’s yet another ceasefire in Syria, or maybe there isn’t by the time you read this, and maybe it will allow humanitarian aid to people who maybe won’t die just yet as a result, although it could, and should, have been allowed to reach them weeks ago but for the US and Russia being engaged in a dick-waving contest by proxy.

The refugee crisis doesn’t seem to have gone away, either. Hatie Kopkins, a woman who has said she would quite happily machine-gun the boats crossing the Med, visited the “Jungle”, the Calais camp, and was apparently tear-gassed. I find this hard to believe, or if it happened it won’t have had any effect, as she has never shed a tear for anyone in her life.  You need compassion for that.

I prefer this description of the camp, from Pamela Meade Lake, who has been running the Hummingbird Project in Buxton for a year now, sending aid to the refugees in Syria and Calais from her kitchen table with the aid of a small but dedicated band of volunteers. This week she reported back from the “Jungle”.

I was lucky enough to visit both Dunkirk and Calais camps over the last two days and have come home tonight with a head full of thoughts and images, with ideas for how we can help more and most of all with respect for the people caught up in this human tragedy.

I met a man who spent more than a week on a boat crossing to Italy from Libya. 680 people started that journey with him, when they finally landed in Europe 350 were dead. Think about that for a minute. Over half the people on the journey died. He didn't.

I talked to someone who walked across Africa escaping a bad situation the like of which we cannot imagine. I learned that smugglers insist all those boarding boats leave their shoes behind.

I learned that Libya is unsafe, a place where even buying groceries can mean you will be robbed at gunpoint for your shopping.

I was welcomed into homes, made as comfortable as possible and I was offered refreshments, kindness and respect. I saw a bed head made from a pallet and loving decorated with painted patterns. I saw gardens, made from crates with plants flowering in the late summer sunshine, and herbs, rosemary and thyme growing outside the kitchen.

The outstanding memory for me, and one that will live with me forever is of the young man I met last night. 

I was sitting in a tent feeling very welcome. Kind gentle men have hung my coat on a peg and begin to teach me Persian. Out of nowhere a young man tells his friends that I remind him of his Mum, a Mum who died in Iraq with most of his family. He asks if he can come and live with me. The tent falls silent as we all think of what he had said. I am touched beyond all feeling. Later we are leaving and there are hugs and smiles from everyone. I touch my boys face he grabs me and we hug. A Mum to son hug, a hug for all the boys who have lost their mums and for all the Mums no longer able to hug their sons. I hope he will be safe this boy I hope he gets the life he deserves. It was a boy like this that brought me to this work and tonight in a tent the circle was complete. If I live to be a hundred I will not forget him.

Amen to that. Amen to that.  Other than that, I was surprised to hear that Jeremy Hunt is still managing to get the Junior Doctors’ collective dander up, to the extent that a series of five day strikes were temporarily on the cards. Ho hum. All because apparently there was a “manifesto promise” to provide a “7-day NHS” (it already is).  What a pity there aren’t more politicians like Jeremy Hunt, dedicated single-mindedly to keeping manifesto promises. In this, as in his lamentable lack of management and negotiating skills, he is unique.

I had my six-monthly check up on Thursday, so I can report that the NHS is still there, at least, still battling on. However, from my point of view it looks like I was being let down easy. Instead of having a six months appointment next March, I have now gone on to an “open appointment” system, where, if I feel I need an appointment, I ring. Given that the local Clinical Commissioning Group is intent on helping the Tories dismember NHS provision in Huddersfield, I have a vision of me calling up next year sometime and a dusty telephone, covered in spiders’ webs, ringing unanswered in an empty office, unheard and unheeded by the contractors who are carrying out the demolition.

Having considered all of the above, it is no wonder that we reached the stage on Arran where we were contemplating asking Katie the cat-nanny to find a large box and courier Matilda up to us.  But we came back, reluctantly and with heavy hearts, because at the end of the day you can run and run but sooner or later, in one form or another, you have to turn around and face the music. We came back via Dumfries and Galloway, and stopped off briefly in Ruthwell, at the church that shelters the Ruthwell Cross.

That was last Sunday, and there was very much a feeling that it was the last day of summer, although nothing had been officially announced. We sat in the car park beside the church, which was locked. It is possible to get the key from the bungalow down the lane, according to the instructions tacked to the door, but we didn’t have time. So we sat and basked in the warm sunshine, Debbie brewed up a cup of tea, and we watched the slow procession of stately cumulus clouds tracking across the blue sky over the Lakeland mountains, forty miles away across the Solway Firth. Then we packed up the teabags, got the dogs back in to the camper, and from Eden wended our solitary way.  The words of Mercury are harsh after the songs of Apollo.

The Ruthwell Cross has been dated back to the 8^th century and is extremely well documented elsewhere, so you won’t find me reproducing huge chunks of Pevsner here. I first visited it back in the 1980s, because I had heard that it had, inscribed on it, some of the lines of the Anglo-Saxon poem The Dream of the Rood, in runes. I’d studied it at University and I wanted to see the real thing.

This blog is a bit of a fib, actually, because the feast of the Holy Cross isn’t until Tuesday, but because my mind is on crosses today, and it might well be Tuesday before I finish this anyway, and because today’s crop of saints are a rather motley crew, this is the Epiblog for the feat of the Holy Cross and that’s that.

And how am I feeling, sitting here, at the turn of the season, with the nights already drawing in? Well, funnily enough, I’ve been re-reading my Collected Poems by Geoffrey Hill and he has one which sums it up perfectly:

I’m tired now the whole time and yet I wish to

Take up my bed and walk:

To Compostela, for example,

Bush-hat hung round with clamshells on return:

Or ride the Gulf Stream through to Akureyri

And find a hot spring equal to my bulk

Sheltered by palm threes, bowered by frangipani

Or bougainvillia, wallowing in Icelandic

Christian Poetry till the fish come home.

Still, to every thing, there is a season, and who knows, I may yet get there. There’s also a time to every purpose under heaven, apparently. Well, the dogs have had to time to cast stones on the beach on Arran, and had the time of their lives doing it.  Sometimes, they even brought back the stone that had been thrown in the first place. Zak liked the game so much, that when we got back, we found two pebbles that he’d smuggled into the camper and somehow “buried” in the bed.  I’d like to say that I found my faith renewed by the holiday, but to be honest, I am not sure it did. There is a certain re-calibration to be had by comparing yourself to the rocks and the shore and the trees and the mountains. Probably this is why the Buddhists like Arran so much.  But as to sorting out what I believe and why, no, not really.

Now, it feels like the time to reap, the time to harvest, the time when all is safely gathered in.  I suppose there is a certain comfort to be had, sitting by the stove and watching the garden turn to shadows as the autumn pulls the fallow fields up round itself like faded brown blankets, but at the moment, a small part of me is still watching the gannets wheel over Kilbrannan Sound.  Although, for now, we are back.