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.