Epiblog for Advent Sunday

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. Or so I have been told. Here, in hospital, it has been largely warm and boring. Rather like a desert island or a luxury cruise with no view and no palm trees. Unfortunately, all of the urgent tasks I brought in with me are now either stuck or exhausted, and everything urgent which needs doing now resides on the big computer at home, awaiting my return.

In fact, several urgent things await my return home, starting with the weather. Apparently, one day last week, it was so cold in our kitchen, Debbie was sitting there in front of the stove, with her coat on, and her hood up, and she could still see her own breath, apparently. So, going home is a potential challenge in many ways.

Tiggy and Kitty have been regularly joining Debbie on the bed, and inter-species co-operation has apparently resulted in shared body-warmth, although even this has had to be re-inforced by the presence of Jim, the trusty hot-water-bottle. I don’t know how Zak and Freddie are reacting to the current snowfall. Earlier on this year, when we had all those weeks and weeks of freezing weather, or so it seemed, Zak ran about in it, barking (in many ways, as dogs go, he is actually completely barking) but poor Freddie, being a small terrier and only about 9 inches off the ground, suffered with the ice and snow adhering to his chest fur, poor wee dote.

So, this year, Granny has said the search is on for anyone who can knit him a coat that will go round his underneath as well. She has in mind some sort of tubular affair, with holes for his legs, and made out of that oily wool that fishermens’ guernseys are made of. I suggested to her that she should go the whole hog, and get someone to make him one with the “pattern” of the nearest port (probably Hull or Grimsby). All of the fishing ports up the east coast used to have their own design of “gansey” as they were known. The purpose was twofold; to uphold their loyalty to their own home port in the fierce rivalries that ensued between ports over such things as catches, and also a more sad, practical use, in that if an unidentified body was washed up, the gansey at least told the discoverers the port of origin of the unfortunate victim.

It remains to be seen whether Freddie will get his dog-jersey, or indeed if the weather will continue to make such garments necessary. I doubt it will be in place before I get home. If it isn’t, perhaps we could ask the lucky constructor if she (I assume it will be a she) will do a double-or-quits offer, and knit me one, as well. It could even be just a larger version of Freddie’s, a knitted tube with holes for my arms and legs. Who knows, it might catch on!

As you can see from the way my mind is wandering, I have a lot of time on my hands at the moment in hospital. As I said, all the urgent tasks which accompanied me are now done, all I am doing is marking time, literally (in the standing hoist where I am learning to walk again) and metaphorically, in that I am now working on next year’s projects. And yet I feel strangely unsettled, stirred up, still, but without knowing why.

I am like some ageing knight of the shires, who sees his old armour hanging in the hall and gathering dust, but knows somehow that it will need to be taken down, polished, and used maybe one more time, although the actual call has not yet come, and he knows not where the battlefield will be.

At this time of the year, the shortest day, the Solstice, assumes a special significance for me. It marks a turning point in the year, midwinter, as far as I am concerned. After that, there is a brief spell of rest and feasting, and then it is time to strap on the armour, take up the shield, and set forth on the quest of 2011, whatever that may be. It would be much easier if, when God calls you to do something, he left an intelligible message, instead of just a holy post-it saying “call me back”.

“Midwinter” also makes me think of snow, and “In the Bleak Mid Winter”, but also of T. S. Eliot’s lines on Little Gidding about “Midwinter spring is its own season”. I feel at the moment as though I am in Midwinter Spring, suspended between one year and the next.

But now, for now, it is Advent, and there is a reason to celebrate. Two reasons, if I get home in time for Christmas. One of the things that has sustained me in this long sojourn in this place, has been the presence of friends and family, both those who have actually visited in person, and those who have kept in touch via the web. In fact, without the internet and the laptop, with its trusty dongle, I would have been so isolated, I would truly have feared for my sanity. The web allows us to pull together a community around us in the same way that the Ferrar family did in the 1630s in real life. In fact, in many ways, I find the distinction between real life and the web is increasingly irrelevant, as people cross the borders from one to the other. When Chief Seattle said in 1855 that:

“Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together. All things connect.”

He was of course speaking of the web of nature, and the way all things in it depend on all other things. However, his words are strangely prescient for the online age. Nicholas Ferrar, founder of the original Little Gidding community, also recognised the value of friendship and community, when he wrote to his cousin Arthur Woodnoth on 10th May 1630:

“Do not interrupt that web of friendship which I hope might otherwise prove a pattern in an age that needs patterns”

I have certainly felt the web of friendship, especially when my internet message board postings about my lack of protein led to fellow message board users, bearing parcels of protein-rich food, appearing at my bedside. It would be interesting to attempt a community like Little Gidding today, although of course both the original community and the 20th century attempt to revive the ideal were not entirely successful.

Perhaps that is what I am being called to do, although if so, I feel certain Big G has dialled a wrong number, as our house is rather smaller than the Manor at Little Gidding, and we don’t have a church in our back garden, and these days the planning department are a lot shirtier than they were back in the 1630s. The community at Little Gidding only worked, I think, because of the exercise of compassion and support, cutting people a bit of slack, and giving them the benefit of the doubt if they seemed to be having a hard time. Until recent years, these rather “British” qualities used to be prevalent in society at large. Perhaps it would be a good idea if we could inculcate them once again, then we might justifiably claim to have created “The Big Society”.

I have been inside the church at Little Gidding. It is barely longer or wider than a railway carriage. On a winter’s evening, at evensong, say on the feast of Nicholas Ferrar on 4th December, you could imagine the entire household at prayer, crammed into the tiny pews. Their breath would have been streaming in the cold as they crossed the garden from the house, summoned by the single bell. Their rosy faces would have been soft in the candlelight inside the church, their rustic voices blending in harmony as they chanted a psalm. It must have felt like they were all on board a tiny ship, afloat on the vast ocean of the midwinter night.

What I do intend to do, however, assuming I get home in time, is to have some sort of midwinter feast to give thanks for my physical salvation. A spiritual as well as physical feast, perhaps. Nicholas Ferrar wrote the following during an arduous sea-voyage, but it accurately sums up my own feelings as well:

“If the good Lord be merciful unto me, and bring me safe home again, I will all the days of my life serve Him in His holy Name and exhorting others ; yea, in His tabernacle, and in His holy sanctuary will I serve Him, and shall account the lowest place in His house better and more honourable than the greatest crown in the world.”

I have, in previous years, actually toyed with the idea of clearing out an entire room at home and making a suitable environment for an actual Christmas feast, spreading straw on the floor and procuring from somewhere a refectory table and some benches. Then we could truly sit and feast, while the snow outside lay deep, and crisp, and even. However, even if I do manage to achieve this in real life, and so far, my wife has, very sensibly, always vetoed the idea whenever it comes up, sadly, I fear that the modern-day equivalent to T. S. Eliot (?Simon Armitage) is unlikely ever to write a poem about us!

So, for now, I will take my lead from Hilaire Belloc’s drinking song about winter on the Sussex Downs. I’ll settle me down in Steyning to sing/Of the girls I’ve met in my wandering/And all the things I’ll do in Spring/ Which no man shall deny. I’ll continue to walk past the suit of armour in the hall (I wish we actually had one, both a suit of armour and a hall) We will deck the hall (which in our case we have not got) with boughs of holly, and the door shall stand open for the unexpected guest, the homeless person or the long lost friend, the cat flap will work for the abandoned cat, seeking warmth, food and shelter, there shall be a place by the fire for the unwanted, abandoned, lost dog, and a full bowl for him, or her, with treats; all in the spirit at least, if we can’t afford it yet in the real world, but the webs of the worlds may yet mystically intertwine, and we shall believe that in our imaginary barn, on Christmas Eve, the imaginary oxen are kneeling.

And I am determined of one more thing: this year, there WILL be room at the inn.

Epiblog for Stir-up-Sunday

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. Sadly, though, I haven’t been there to see it. I am still a resident of the Calderdale Royal Hospital, in Salterhebble, Halifax, in the West Riding of Yorkshire. I have been in hospital since 15th July, about nineteen weeks, give or take a tedious hour or two.

These blogs (this one, and The Bolshy Party) have been seriously neglected by me over the summer. As far as The Bolshy Party goes, again sadly, I have been too weak until recently to resume castigating the Tories and the miniTories lite for their hateful campaign of cuts against the poor. As far as this blog is concerned, I could have filled it several times over with my experiences about the NHS, but I have been collecting them together in note form, because I think they might eventually make a book. So the Epiblogues have gone unwritten.

Home is, as far as I know, still more or less in one piece, and Tiggy and Kitty are still leading happy little lives – if a little more elderly and sedate than previously. Freddie remains his feisty little terrier self, and Zak is now recovering from his own injury over the summer, when he was winged by a car and had his leg broken. The fur has grown back, and he now only occasionally holds his foot up. Deb, of course, has had the hardest task; keeping the house going while I have been stuck in here, while at the same time coping with a massive paradigm shift and career change, going from 21 years as a residential social worker to a new life as a teacher of adult literacy, and trying to find a job doing it, as well, in the teeth of the coalition’s “Blitzkrieg” assault on adult and further education; plus she has had to deal with some of the daily domestic disasters which might have normally fallen to me, mainly involving battles with the stove, many past examples of which I have chronicled in previous Epilogues and “Here Endeth The Epilogue”.

This year, it began when she lit the stove for the first time in the autumn. It had run fine up to the day we had stopped using it at the start of the summer, but when she re-lit it in October, using coal which had been specially ordered, it kept going out. After replacing several parts, which, admittedly, needed replacing anyway, including the baffle plate, which baffled her as much as it once baffled me, it still kept going out. Then, last Wednesday, she had a new batch of fuel delivered. Suddenly, the stove works fine. It was the coal, and not the stove. Oh well, the new parts will do it good and prolong its life, I thought, and then finally we had the chimney swept by the chimney-sweep, who says he thinks the problem is the chimney-pot. Whatever the cause, we could really have done with the money in the bank.

The imbroglio of the stove reminded me once more of Heraclitius’ remark that you can never jump in the same river twice; the river has the same name and general location, but the water that makes it up is entirely different, second by second. Like Trigger’s brush in “Only Fools and Horses”, which was a good brush because it had only had four new shafts and three new heads. So it will be when I go home. Parts of it will be different. The pattern of life has moved on.

One way in which life has changed for me, while I have been in here, has been that I started going to the regular Sunday service in the Chapel. The chapel is a remarkable small space, notable for its Jesus Mafa poster of The Good Samaritan on the wall and for the coloured glass memorial behind the altar to Sister Sheila Wallace, whoever she was, and in my febrile imagination, she will always be Dame Nelly Wallace, which is what I thought I was seeing when I first read the inscription.

Every week, the picture of the Good Samaritan strikes me, and every week, I see new things in it. Only last week, it was pointed out to me that in the picture of course, since the point of these pictures is that all the characters are depicted as Africans, in this picture, the Samaritan would be Muslim, which seems quite apposite in the current climate of bigotry and xenophobia that infests England at present.

Two weeks ago, we had the Rememberance Service on Sunday morning in the Hospital Chapel. Last week, it was “Stir Up Sunday”, or the Feast of Christ the King, as it is more correctly known, for those of you without a Christmas pudding to stir. The day was glorified by steely winter sunshine, burnished silver rather than golden, and fleeting, of course, as the short days determine. I have missed so much sunshine this summer and autumn, that I felt very sad at its brief flourishing, and the advent of the long dark night.

Still, you have to take joy where you can, as Karine Polwart sings. “I can find joy, in the sound of the rain”. I know what she means: I can see God in the sparkle of sunlight on a wave. I can even see God in the knowledge that it is Sunday afternoon, the sun is shining, the kettle is on, the window is open to the garden, and it will soon be teatime. I can cook a meal as an offering to God, or stir a pudding, if it comes to that.

One thing I do have in here, is lots of time on my hands, in between physiotherapy sessions. I have found myself once more reading T S Eliot’s Burnt Norton, with its complex, shifting rhythms and deliberations on the nature of time and eternity, coupled with speculations on “what might have been”, in connection with his visit to the gardens there. He visited the house with Emily Hale, with whom he had probably been in unacknowledged love all of his adult life; I say “unacknowledged, because I mean, of course, unacknowledged to himself.

It seems pretty certain that Emily Hale thought that she meant something to him, especially when, after he suddenly and unexpectedly married his secretary in 1958, Emily locked all his letters to her (over 1000, in twelve boxes, measuring 5.5 cubic feet) in the Princeton University Library, sealed until 12 October 2019, a date which will presumably see Eliot scholars the world over braced in their starting blocks. In return, Eliot burnt all of hers to him.

But in 1934, when they strolled together through the rose garden at Burnt Norton, and looked down into the empty concrete pools, all of that was, of course, far in the future. As Eliot himself noted, in another context, “between the intention, and the action, falls the shadow”. Or, to put it another way, life is an uncertain business, so you might as well eat dessert first.

After this year, I don’t need to be told that twice, not after the year I’ve had. That’s why I have got a new list of 17 things I intend to do when I get out of hospital. It started out as 15 things, but two more got added – eat more patties, and re-home a torty. Torty cats are completely mental, and provide good entertainment value for their owners with their bonkers antics. In an ideal world, of course, one would have a black and white cat, a torty, a ginger, and a tabby. And one would see God in their replete repose and happiness.

Anyway, these hands have been idle too long, it is time to stop using my pen solely for the pursuit of my own vanity, and commence using it again for the glory of God, or at least to bear witness to injury and injustice, so that they may perhaps be rectified. Yes, Stir-up Sunday has got me stirred up. I will soon be going home, back to the Holme Valley, where there is much that needs to be done. It may not be the same valley, it may not (says Heraclitus) be the same river, but sadly, there are still some of the same things that need to be done, albeit maybe in a different way – to justify the ways of God to man, and perhaps even vice versa.

It would be silly to say I have enjoyed the summer of illness. I haven’t. In many ways it has been disappointing, frustrating, saddening, worrying: I almost died, after all. But I have also had rest and (reasonably, overall) good food, and I feel my strength growing again in every limb. I may have simply swopped one set of stresses for another, but it doesn’t seem that way at the moment.

Time is moving on. Things are changing. The solstice, the shortest day, is only three weeks or so away, and after that, we turn again, like tender plants, to the light. For now, though, I am seeing the hand of what some may call God in the bright sunbeams that briefly pierce stony grey skies of November, calling me, in some way I don't yet quite understand, to do something familiar in a revolutionary manner, and something different in the same old way.

Epiblog for St George's Day

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. Even though the days have been warm, even sunny on occasion, we’ve left the stove lit. Eventually, though, probably when we’ve worked our way through the last few bags of coal, we’ll finally let it go out, and then I can clean out the inside of it thoroughly, we can dump the ashes and the clinker on the path that runs along the rear boundary of the garden, and I can blacklead the grate and polish the glass, and then that will be it, until the autumn.

We really ought to have the chimney swept over the summer as well, and then stovepipe re-seated and re-grouted. We say that every year, of course.

Kitty has, perversely, now that the days are growing warmer, taken to sleeping on the bed again. We never did discover where she had been sleeping all that time during the bitter cold and snow. Probably, when I tidy out the office over the summer, I will find that she has made a nest by burrowing into some priceless manuscript or artwork.

Tiggy likes the sunshine, probably because it warms up her old bones and reduces the aches and pains of her arthritis. I know how she feels. It is good to feel real warmth, from the sun. A bit of a reward for all those winter days.

Already, though, it’s half way through April, and the brief, transitory glory of Spring is happening all around me in a way which is impossible to fix. It is like grasping at rainbows. Every morning when I wake up these days I look out of the bedroom window at the burgeoning catkins on the pussy-willow tree, a hectic, yellow-green against a vivid brilliant impossibly blue sky that might have been painted by Maxfield Parrish.

Each day as I pass there, the four cherry trees outside the old chapel on Taylor Hill Road are ever more shocking bursts of pink and white blossom, like a freeze-frame of an explosion caught on a fast shutter-speed camera.

Easter has been and gone. Probably even the Greek Orthodox Church has had Easter now, and they are usually about 10 days behind the rest of us with many major religious festivals, probably because they never bothered to download the updates to the calendar in Microsoft Outlook. I have to admit, with their habit of wearing gold-encrusted nighties, their silly hats, their mad beards and their habit of calling each other “Metropolitan” and “Archimandrite” , they aren’t actually, all that Orthodox! Or, to put it another way, if that is orthodox, I would hate to be wacky!

Later in the week, I found myself down in Staffordshire for a meeting, which broke up early in the afternoon, so I had the rest of the day to make my meandering way back to the office. In one sense, the decision I made was a foolish one, because I never did make it back to the office that day, partly because I took a wrong turning and ended up adding an enormous loop to the trip, partly because the roads were slow anyway, and partly because, when I got to the M1 itself, finally, it was chock-a-block with traffic.

I have to admit though, that it was also partly because I didn’t want to get back. It was a fine spring day, perfect china-blue sky and fluffy white clouds, the sort of Spring day in England that Browning probably had in mind when he wrote “Home Thoughts from Abroad” about the brushwood bole being in tiny leaf. I tootled along through country lanes, winding streets of half-timbered houses and old stone churches, out into the country again, looking at the grass verges, their bright green studded and interspersed with the vivid yellow of daffodils, dandelions and even, on occasion, primroses.

I found myself trying to think of a word to describe it and “verdant” was the best one that came to mind. I felt similar to George Orwell’s character, George Bowling, in Coming Up For Air, when he manages to escape his humdrum office life and sets off for an adventure in his car. I vaguely considered detouring to Lichfield to see the cathedral, on a whim, but decided that I had better press on regardless, on my meandering progress across the face of England. My wrong turning was at the old stone bridge at Wolseley Bridge, where I took a right instead of crossing over the river and then turning right.

Still, not even the prospect of a few additional miles could dampen my mood, on such a lovely day. Eventually, I came to a long straight road that led through a place called Newchurch. The name seemed vaguely familiar, and then I remembered that this was the place that had been the setting for a bitter struggle for six years or so between a local farming family, who were mass-breeding guinea pigs for animal experimentation, and members of an animal welfare activist group who were trying to stop them.

It had been a very ugly case, with no real winners. The family in question gave up the business, but three of the activists were jailed for twelve years and one for four years, on charges connected to conspiracy to blackmail. During the campaign, the body of the grandmother of one of the farmers had been stolen from its grave in the local churchyard, and found dumped in woodland some time later. Although this was never actually proven to have been the work of the activists who were jailed, nevertheless it must have influenced their sentencing, which was draconian and out of all proportion compared to other lesser sentences being handed out for far greater crimes. Obviously the authorities were determined to make an example of the four ringleaders, but in effect they have turned them into martyrs.

And thirteen years on, after Labour’s election pledge of a Royal Commission on vivisection in 1997, we’re still waiting, animal cruelty is still going on all around us and now – thanks to the credit crunch – we once more have the spectacle of homeless people surrendering their pets to animal sanctuaries for adoption, having had their houses reposessed.

A shadow had passed over my day, but I drove on, back out into the sun, along the arterial roads, past fields already starting to yellow with rape, overlooking the cooling towers of distant power stations. Apparently there are more power stations along the course of the River Trent than any other River in England. Someone told me that once, and I have just tried to verify it as a fact, and failed, but nevertheless it is certainly true that you can’t throw a half-brick round there without hitting one.

The week ended with St George’s day, and I drove to the office doing my usual count up of the new lambs in the fields around the crossroads at The Flouch. Sheep, sheep, baa-lamb, lapwing. It has a sort of rhythm to it. I like the lapwings, the way they stand on point, on guard over their nests, their grebe-y little heads jutting, trying to act dead hard when in fact, all they can do if the eggs are threatened is flutter up into the air and then do a “dead leaf” dive bomber drop on the would-be predator. I have seen one relentlessly dive-bomb and drive off a fat old raven that was stalking across the field towards its young, waddling like an alderman wearing gaiters, and the lapwing swooped again and again, until the raven eventually gave up. So maybe they are not so feeble after all.

When I got home that night, Debbie said “I didn’t know there was an England match on”

“There isn’t, as far as I know”
“Well, I have seen loads of cars with England flags on them today”
“It’s St George’s day, that’s why!”
“Oh”.

Later, I became embroiled in a couple of online message board arguments about whether it is possible to be patriotic about England without descending into the territory normally inhabited by the likes of the BNP and UKIP. I have long said that it is, and I resent the thought that anyone who says positive things about England is automatically labelled a bigot and a little Englander.

It is possible to love England – not necessarily a case of “my country, right or wrong”, though. And there are indeed hard times in Old England, like the song says, and probably harder to come. I wonder what St George would think of England today, I mused, as I looked back on my week of journeying through its green and pleasant land. There are certainly a lot more dragons to slay. Starting with the five in the Beveridge report, poverty, idleness, ignorance, want, and need.

I have a vision of all the regions of England uniting in a mass national demonstration of the need to end unemployment and to give our politicians a wake-up call, to give this great country back the jobs it needs. Cornishmen and sturdy men of Devon, marching up from the West Country, singing “Trelawney” and carrying the flag of Kernow, picking up support from Wiltshire, Dorset and Somerset as they go. Skilled tradesmen in Birmingham, Staffordshire, Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire, whose hand-eye coordination is genetically inherited from the time when the Midlands was the workshop of the world. Dour Yorkists and Lancastrians, from the former areas of coal, steel, wool, and cotton, marching together side by side. Cumbrian farmers with their lean, sparing frames and their thousand-yard stares. Geordies and Mackems, who for so long have glowered at each other from opposite banks of the Tyne, treading resolutely in step down the A19, united in their steely purpose. And all converging on parliament square. I’d like to see them try and stop that demonstration.

It’s sad that we have to go back to the idea of Jarrow Marches, but if whoever wins the election is determined to make poor people pay for the mistakes of rich people, which is very much what it looks like will happen, whoever gets in, then someone needs to show them that there is another way.

As I said in another blog:

Feed the hungry. House the homeless. Treat the sick. Teach the Children. Cherish the animals. End the Wars. Punish the Guilty. Fulfil the spirit.

It is not rocket science. All that is lacking is the political will, and every valley shall be exalted and every mountain and hill made low. The crooked straight and the rough places plain: the crooked straight, and the rough places plain.

Or, to put it more succinctly:

Cry God for Harry, England and St George!