Epiblog for the First Sunday in Advent

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. Not helped in any way by the fact that the weather has now changed from cold and rainy to cold and, er, colder. So far, we haven’t seen any snow, but it can only be a matter of time, if it carries on like this. There’s already a white blanket covering the “Sleeping Warrior” on the hills of Arran, according to the Arran Banner’s photos on their web page. Winter’s baring its fangs and circling, waiting to strike.

We’ve reacted to the colder days by burning yet more coal, as you do. More of that later. As John Betjeman wrote:

The bells of waiting advent ring,
The tortoise stove is lit again

Except that it’s been such a crap year, weather-wise, ours was never really allowed to go out! Ours isn’t – technically speaking – a tortoise stove anyway, and I used to think that was because it only has one pane of glass in the window, whereas your proper tortoise stove has an oval window split into several panes, so that the effect is like looking at the shell of a tortoise. Hence the name. In fact, “Tortoise” was a trade name for the stoves manufactured in North America by Charles Portway in the early 1800s. As the modern day Portway web site states:

The beauty behind the success of Portway’s stove was in their efficiency. The stoves burned so slowly that they extracted the maximum amount of heat from the fuel. The stoves were named ‘Tortoise’ stoves and proudly produced with the motto ‘Slow but Sure’ displayed on the front. It was the first heating appliance to offer fuel efficiency as a major selling point making its role in the development of our industry of great significance today. Robert Higgs, the chief executive of the Heating and Ventilating contractors association argues the Portway was the “founding father of energy efficiency”.

Portway’s stoves were used to heat churches and halls as well as homes and 19th Century stoves displaying the iconic ‘Tortoise’ trademark can still be found today, making it one of the oldest, most resilient products in the history of heating.

Who am I to argue with the chief executive of the heating and ventilating contractors association? Now we’ve got that cleared up – to business. It has indeed been a busy week. For the humans, anyway. We haven’t seen much sign of Freddie or Zak, because the fine cold days have seen them going out with Grandad, and the wet cold days have seen them – very sensibly – sheltering at home!

Matilda is another of the same. She’s been out once or twice, but now he has, finally – and it took her long enough – worked out where the warmest spot in the house is (Kitty’s old bed, based on a bin-bag of shredded paper with a couple of Auntie-Maisie-crocheted cat blankets on top, in the hearth) she is reluctant to stir far from it. She does have a holiday home, in the form of a cardboard box in the old office upstairs, where she goes and sleeps when it all gets too much for her and she can’t take any more of the warmth, the cuddles, and the magically-refilling cat food dish.

Debbie had, as usual, a full week of teaching, apart from Thursday, when she was forced by the college to cancel her classes to take part, instead, in some compulsory training, for which she will be paid only a third of what she would have got for actually teaching that day. Not what you’d call a result.

I, however, had a good week, work-wise, getting a lot done on Thursday by the simple expedient of putting Lynyrd Skynyrd on at pain-threshold level and ignoring the phone and people at the door. Also, the publicity for “Granny Fenwick’s Recipes and Remedies” is finally starting to bite, in the form of an invitation to go to Hull on Friday to be interviewed about the book on James Hoggarth’s afternoon show.
All of which sounded fine in principle, but proved a bit more problematic in practice. Debbie had said we’d go in the camper, and I thought if the opportunity presented itself, once I had done the interview, we might be able to find somewhere to park up and I could sit in the camper and guard it from traffic wardens while Deb looked round the shops. Well, that was the plan. Unfortunately, the traffic and the M62 had other ideas. It is becoming well-nigh impossible to get anywhere in a reasonable time these days, and Hull was no exception. So we ended up being 25 minutes late. Debbie made good use of the extra time by admonishing me for being an idiot and telling me that I should “give up writing bloody stupid books that nobody reads” and other pithy observations of a similar nature.

I was assuming that I was going in to pre-record an interview for transmission at a later date, but in fact what I’d failed to register was that it was actually supposed to be live, and as a result, when I got there they grabbed me straight away and within more or less a couple of minutes of entering the premises, I was being plonked in front of a microphone, the record that had been playing (bizarrely enough, “Ride a White Swan”) had finished, and I was on air.

Once the interview was over, I found myself back in reception and ‘phoned Debbie on her mobile to come and get me, which again was a good idea in theory except that, not knowing Hull, she’d just had to drive off somewhere at random after dropping me outside the studio door, and she had no idea now a) where she was or b) how to get back to where I was.

Cursing myself for being an idiot who lacked forward planning skills, I had no option but to wait until she eventually threaded her way back around the one-way system and pulled up outside. She was not a happy bunny, and to be honest I didn’t blame her. Her mood wasn’t improved, either, by our getting caught in the rush hour clag of traffic leaving Hull. I was already feeling rather subdued because Friday, being November 30th, was – unbelievably – where did those years go? – the twentieth anniversary of Sylvester being killed, outside the back of our house in Barnsley. It may seem strange to some to mark so significantly the death of a cat, but it’s also to do with all the stuff that’s happened to me over the last two decades, as well as marking another year’s passing since his untimely and unhappy death.

Many of our journeys these days have the air of a world war two bomber crew setting off on a suicide mission, and this one continued in a similar vein because as we were travelling back along the M62, infested with peak-hour congestion and road works, the van’s clutch began to slip, and we limped home eventually after a journey lasting slightly over two hours. So that’s another problem for next week; on the other hand, though, there were already three orders for Granny Fenwick on the web shop by the time we got home, and no doubt more to come next week.

Going back to Hull was a strange experience. The more so because I had expected it to stir emotions that didn’t actually appear. I made the usual mental “nods” to places I had known and which had known me – Peggy Farrow Lane, Welton Hill, Beckside, Grand Dale, Hesslewood Foreshore, and so on. But I was either too psyched up for the interview (beforehand) and too tired (afterwards) for it to make much of an impression.

Hull did, however, look rather dowdy. The famous pub, The Earl de Grey, long recognised as one of Hull’s roughest and most characterful, was boarded up and semi derelict, as were quite a few shops along Hessle Road on the way in. Hull has always had a slightly parochial, backwater feel to it. Philip Larkin recognised it when he wrote his poem “Here”

Here domes and statues, spires and cranes cluster
Beside grain-scattered streets, barge-crowded water,
And residents from raw estates, brought down
The dead straight miles by stealing flat-faced trolleys,
Push through plate-glass swing doors to their desires -
Cheap suits, red kitchen-ware, sharp shoes, iced lollies,
Electric mixers, toasters, washers, driers –
A cut-price crowd, urban yet simple, dwelling
Where only salesmen and relations come

There are no trolley-buses any more, though they did enliven my childhood, especially watching the massive sparks that used to fly from the power lines whenever they came to a junction and changed direction. The raw estates are still there (I spent my adolescence on one of them) but there’s precious little grain in the streets – or, indeed, very few barges on the river.

I found myself thinking that the current state of the economy had not been kind to Hull. But then none of us is doing brilliantly at the moment – it reminds me a bit of Gildas, writing in The Ruin of Britain:

“the subject of my complaint is the general destruction of every thing that is good, and the general growth of evil throughout the land…”

We may not quite have got to the stage of:

“Lamentable to behold, in the midst of the streets lay the tops of lofty towers, tumbled to the ground, stones of high walls, holy altars, fragments of human bodies, covered with livid clots of coagulated blood, looking as if they had been squeezed together in a press; and with no chance of being buried, save in the ruins of the houses, or in the ravening bellies of wild beasts and birds”

But with Cameron, Clegg, Osborne and Cable in charge (at least nominally) it can only be a matter of time.

Saturday was spent largely catching up on things which I should really have done on Friday, and I did actually, once again, make some progress, which surprised me, simply by making a list, and sticking to it, and not starting something until I had actually finished the previous thing. I was beginning to think that the week wasn’t turning out too badly. Matilda seemed to be her usual happy little soul, content to watch birds from a position of warmth inside the conservatory door. Debbie had crossed off another week’s teaching towards the end of term without too much mishap. True, the clutch was worrying, but that was next week’s problem.

The plan to get the fence put up for Elvis next weekend was coming together. I had managed, despite my total lack of independence and the fact that the brakes on my left wheelchair wheel had begun to malfunction, to get to Hull and back and do an important interview. OK, it hadn’t been a perfect week, but still, it was Saturday. Deb was going out to visit one of her old school friends, and no doubt they would spend the evening splitting a bottle of wine and deciding that all men were bastards. I was left alone to work, and Matilda was keeping me company. I was warm, calm, and – relatively – contented.

So it was with considerable surprise that I found, when I went out at 11.30 on Saturday night to bring in the final load of coal for the day, and keep the stove in overnight, that the entire stack of coal bags had been stolen, apart from two full ones and an oddment with just a bit left in it. Presumably they had forsaken those bags because they were too near the door, and lifting them might have made a noise which could have been heard in the kitchen, where I had been alternately cooking, watching TV and chatting on Facebook most of the evening.

The coal was all there when Debbie went out to visit her friend at 8.30pm, and gone when she came back at 11.30 or thereabouts. So at some point in those three hours, a person or persons unknown had made off with 10 x 25KG bags of coal, or a quarter of a metric tonne, costing just over £100.00 – which is also, I discovered this morning, exactly the value of the excess on our home insurance. This was almost all of the delivery I had taken in on Thursday, in anticipation of the wintry weather to come. They had used our wheely-bin to transport it from the place between my wheelchair ramp and the garage wall where it was stacked, presumably up to the road, where they must have had a van or similar, and to add insult to injury, they’ve nicked the wheely-bin as well!

I was in two minds about whether or not to report it to the police, as it probably wasn’t worth an insurance claim, but in the end I did so, using West Yorkshire Police’s new number for non-urgent crime, 101. This number is flagged up on their web site with “If a crime is in progress and there is danger to life, please hang up and re-dial 999.” I could probably have worked that bit out for myself.

The actual 101 menu, when you get put through, is front-ended with one of those automatic recorded messages that gives you a number of choices, one of which was, rather startlingly, “This system will connect you to the West Yorkshire Police. If you would prefer another police force, press 1”. I wasn’t aware that citizen choice in the public services extended that far – I briefly toyed with the idea of pressing “1” and then asking for Interpol, or possibly the Surete – Inspector Maigret would have tracked down my missing coal in no time. But in the end, I struck with the tried and tested.

The guy who answered the phone patiently entered up all of my details, including for some bizarre reason, my date of birth – maybe I will get a birthday card next year from the Chief Constable or something – before telling me in a bored monotone that he would pass on all the details to our local police station.

This will, no doubt, eventually result in a visit from a couple of bored CPOs who will advise me on home security and probably suggest, as several people have already said, that we should really get a lockable coal bunker. If the police do suggest that, I am going to say that I will get a lockable coal bunker if they will catch the buggers who stole our coal and bring them to me so that I can lock them up in the said lockable coal bunker, and they can stay there until hell, Hull, Halifax, Huddersfield and the Humber all freeze over.

I know the proper Christian thing to do to these people is to forgive them. But right now, what I wish for them is that the stolen coal will set their bloody house on fire, and if they perish in the blaze, so much the better, as long as any children and animals escape. No doubt my anger will have cooled in a few weeks. Of course, this sort of crime may well have a genuine economic basis – it might well be someone who just couldn’t afford to heat their own house, who saw our stack of coal bags, and mistook me for a plutocrat. The way energy companies are allowed to hoick their prices willy nilly by 12% or so on a whim, it wouldn’t surprise me at all.

The stupid thing is, that if someone did knock on the door and say “I’m desperate and I haven’t got any coal for a fire to warm the kids at home”, I’d probably have given them a bag. But instead, here I am sitting thinking murderous thoughts, and thinking as well, that I don’t really like living in a country where people are driven by economic circumstances to go out and nick stuff. And I don’t really like the feeling of living under siege conditions, because of course we have to replace the stuff that’s been nicked, and if they are keeping tabs on the house, then that lot will probably go as well. The man from the police call centre asked me if I wanted to crime publicised in the local press and I said no, because I think to do that would be tantamount to sticking a target on my head or putting an advert in The Huddersfield Daily Examiner to say “free coal at this address”.

The problem is that we haven’t anywhere really to store large amounts of coal where I can access it without it being in a place where it can be seen. All the places where it can be stacked out of sight, are also places where I can’t reach, which would once again involve Debbie lugging buckets of coal around, and set us back 18 months.

The only good thing to come out of it is that today, Debbie has brought in the remaining logs and has now stacked them at either side of the stove to dry them out. Which does at least lend the heart a pleasing symmetry. Which is where I hope the bastard who stole our coal ends up.

So today, the first Sunday in Advent, has been rather a muted affair, and I haven’t got much done, other than looking at security lights, gates, alarms, CCTV cameras and razor wire. I am kidding about the razor wire, but it is unutterably tedious to have to do this when I could have been doing something more profitable and even productive or creative. Tomorrow I have a massive to-do list, starting with cancelling my hospital follow-up appointment in order to create the time to do all of the other things I need to do. I won’t need rocking by the time I get to bed tomorrow night, I suspect.

As well as the first Sunday in Advent, it’s also my little sister’s birthday.

She’s decided to take leave of a relatively safe career in the NHS, and take up doing photography as a profession. I’m really impressed with her enterprise and enthusiasm, and I like to think my dad will be smiling down on her efforts as well. I’m looking forward to her threatened visit, so I can catch up will all her gossip, and if it happens to be a day when Freddie’s here, he can re-enact his famous midnight invasion of her sleeping bag.

I did wonder, in honour of my sister, whether I could find a suitable saint to write about, one whose feast day shared her birthday. However, they all seem to be a rather unprepossessing crop, the best of the bunch probably being St Chromastius, who was a bishop in the early church, and was praised by St Jerome, and died in AD 406. He was also a friend of St John Chrysostom, whose works still remain an impenetrable mystery to me, I am ashamed to say. Apparently, some of St Chromastius’s commentary on the Gospel of St Matthew is still extant.

He was, apparently, one of the most celebrated prelates of his time and was in active correspondence with his illustrious contemporaries, St. Ambrose, St. Jerome, and Tyrannius Rufinus. He managed to become involved in all of those rather dreary heresies that so beset the early church, rejecting the “false doctrine” of Origen and opposing Arianism. So, basically, he seems to have spent most of his life writing about religion and arguing with people, mostly by letter. Hmm. Sounds familiar.

Anyway, he’s the best of a bad bunch, so maybe it is better to concentrate instead on Advent and look forward to Christmas. I haven’t thought much about Christmas today, or indeed, up to now, but I suppose I had better make a big long list of all the things I need to do between now and then. I’ll add making my Christmas to-do list to the list of things I have to do tomorrow, if that’s OK, even though in doing so I realise I am getting more and more like one of those medieval scholars who tried to compile Indices Indicorum, and they all went mad.

What have I learned, this week? That it’s one step forward, two steps back. That just when you think you are making ends meet, someone goes and moves the ends. Very seldom does the beginning accord to the end. That you can be worried about all sorts of stuff, but the real threat always comes from a direction you never expected. That it’s possibly a mistake to go back to somewhere you haven’t been for at least three years, and only intermittently before that, and yet expect to find streets and people just as they were forty years ago. That I am very bad at forgiving people (actually, I knew that one already) and that I have a lot of things to do between now and Christmas. (No change there, then). The bells of waiting Advent ring, for you and now for me. Oh death where is thy sting-a-ling-a-ling, oh grave, thy victory?

Better get the tortoise stove lit, I suppose, unless some bugger’s nicked the coal again.

Epiblog for St Catherine's Day

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley, as the winter weather begins to bite. We’re well on the slippery slide to Christmas now, and everything’s stepped up a notch as business deadlines loom – not only nice ones, such as new books coming out, but also nasty ones, such as year-end figures and tax returns. Meanwhile, sitting here each day working away and looking out of the conservatory windows, I can see what remains of the garden being shredded by the gales and soaked even more by the relentless rain. Cold, short, dark, wet days.

The only redeeming features of the weather have been a couple of sunrises this week which were truly, spectacularly, beautiful. Because it’s got round to that time of year again, I can see, on a clear dawn, the morning star gleaming just above the tree-line as the horizon starts to lighten. Then the whole sky becomes flushed with an improbably, angry red, such that if I were to actually sit down and paint it, and show you the result, you would say that I’d over-egged the pudding; finally, it resolves itself to pale blue with strips of white cloud barred, even gilded, with gold, colours of an almost heraldic purity.

This happened on at least two mornings last week – at least it happened on two days when I was lucky enough to be awake at that time to see it. I say “lucky”, because of course the reason why I was awake to see it was because I’d had yet another bad night’s sleep, with a combination of cramp and feeling cold. On balance, I was glad I saw both the dawns in question, though I would rather have woken early from choice, and after a deep refreshing sleep. Still, like Karine Polwart says, you have to find joy where you can.

Matilda continues snoozing her way through winter, with occasional forays to the litter tray and the food bowl, and even more occasional ones outside. We’ve never actually had a cat that hibernated before, but she comes pretty close. Still, she’s a simple little soul, and her version of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is a small, compact triangle of food, warmth, and the occasional tumjack-furfle.

Freddie and Zak come and go, a bit like the women in the room, talking of Michelangelo, except that they are male, and don’t er, talk, so that’s where this week’s TS Eliot allusion breaks down, folks, and we abandon it at the roadside and tramp on, regardless. At the moment, as I type this, Zak is away at a road race with Debbie’s dad; merely spectating, as far as I know, and not joining in. Freddie, as befits his elder status, has been excused parade and is snoozing on the rug, front and centre before the stove, his little rabbit-foot back feet sticking out like drumsticks, just begging for someone to pop a cutlet-frill over his toes.

Debbie’s toes, meanwhile, are hidden from view inside her new “vegan” commando boots (presumably as worn by vegan commandos the world over). I hesitated before asking her if this meant she was going commando. She did, however, buy the Royal Marines Survival Guide while we were on holiday. I hope that this is more use than the SAS survival guide she bought the year before, which recommended that the best way to catch a wild pig was to sneak up on it while it was asleep. I know all’s fair in love and war, but I would have expected something a little more sturm and drang from the SAS, for God’s sake – they could at least have abseiled in on a zip wire, hurling thunderflashes. Except that would have woken up the pig.

Deb has been steadily accumulating camping gear on Ebay, including a camouflage poncho which is big enough to go over both you and the rucksack you are carrying. Very useful in this weather, except the other morning when she needed it she couldn’t find it, which I suppose just goes to show how effective it is.

As for me, I have been sending out books, and making lists (but, unlike Santa, not checking them twice – not yet, at any rate) and phoning people up to say did they get their review copy, and if so did they like it, and would they please just, for 30 seconds or so out of their busy day discussing last night’s Strictly, care if I lived or died? This year, of course, I also have Skype, and I had thought about doing some of the calls that way, especially to the broadcast media outlets. The only problem being that the background would give away the fact that I was sitting in the kitchen by the stove, and not in an office.

While this is not necessarily a deal-breaker, it did occur to me that there is a potential market for drop-down background screens for the discerning Skype-er. You could just pull a string before dialling the call, and behind you a realistic “background” drops into place. You could have several varieties of interchangeable background, depending who you were calling, and why: “busy office”, “woodland glade” and “Turkish brothel” spring to mind. There may be others. Oh well, if the books never take off, there’s a field I can diversify into. Although to be honest, if the books never take off, then I will probably diversify under the railway arches in a cardboard box, rather than into a field.

I haven’t been taking much notice of the outside world this week, for obvious reasons of business and busy-ness. Port Talbot Steelworks is losing hundreds of jobs as another huge lump falls off our economy and vanishes beneath the waves. Oh, and the Church of England voted against having women bishops.

If nothing else, I should be grateful for this bizarre and perverse decision having confirmed for me, in my own mind, that I am not a Bible-believing Christian. Listening to some of the arguments of members of the House of Laity, citing Old Testament authorities for their belief that everything should stay just as it always is was and ever shall be, thank you very much, made me realise that I would be quite happy to keep the four Gospels and chuck the rest of the Bible away, except that to do so would mean losing some remarkable and sonorous 17th century prose, even if most of it is about the voice of the Lord causing the hinds to calve and discovering the thick bushes.

Some of the protestations by these men, and unbelievably, women, to me, carried the same unconvincing ring when they said “But we’re happy to have different roles” as when women who have been abused say “Honestly, it’s absolutely nothing, I walked into the door”, or when people in favour of fox-hunting claim the fox enjoys it, or fly-by-night literary festivals decamp with £360.00 worth of books, take five years to pay and say “the cheque is in the post”, or report you to the police when you try and chase the debt.

The problem lies in the refusal of the traditionalists to give way and allow the Church to move with the times, so it can put this minor, absolutely irrelevant issue which everyone but the hidebound can see does not matter in the slightest, to bed and get on with the real work of building the New Jerusalem on earth. Maybe it would be better all round if the powers that be in the Anglican Church just accepted that there will never be any compromise ground between what is now, essentially two separate churches still under one umbrella, and allowed each half to go its separate way. Maybe that would be kindest all round, especially when the compromise on offer was “flying bishops” for those misogynist parishoners and clergy who felt uncomfortable at the idea of submitting to the authority of a mere woman! Although the term “flying bishops” does conjure up some wonderful mental images of men in copes and mitres standing round a brazier and holding up illuminated placards saying “Official Episcopal Picket” [try saying that when you’ve had a few!]

Anyway, the Church of England became a lot less relevant for me, and I suspect many others, this last week, and a shade more incomprehensible. And I have to say, it made me both angry and sad. Sad for poor old Rowan Williams, who is well off out of it, especially since new Archbishop Justin Sidebottom seems hell-bent (no pun intended) on reprising the rows and schisms all over again, but this time about “gay marriage”, for the next God knows how long, and angry that while all this poodlefaking nonsense over meaningless diversions is taking up the Church’s time and resources, congregations are dwindling, people are in desperate need of spiritual leadership, people are undergoing physical hardship, hunger and homelessness, and abroad, people are dying simply for lack of clean water. Oh, and the Middle East is once again in flames, as extremist religious wingnuts indulge in tit-for-tat violence while civilians on both sides crouch in fear of death by high explosives.

So, well done, the Church of England, you had an open goal and you hit the corner flag. You belong in the great canon of “boobies who should, and could, have done better, really”, along with Gordon Brown and that bloke who missed the crucial penalty in Italia 90.

The fact that the real message of Christmas is being obscured by a barrage of secular hype and drivel surrounding the “festivities” is once again manifest in the Christmas television ads, which have started to appear with all the ghastly relentless, drip-drip-drip horror of Chinese water torture. People all over the country will be either about to put themselves in hock for shit that they don’t really want or need, or resisting the peer pressure to do so and being made to feel like Scrooges, Grinches, bad parents or party-poopers for daring to think there might be other, deeper meanings to Christmas than tinsel, fairy lights, artificial snow, Marks and Bloody Spencer and “Rockin’ around the Christmas Tree”. And of course, the worst is, that I am part of it as well. People do give each other books at Christmas, however much I might try and subvert the genre I am pastiching. My own economic survival, and that of our hearth and home, depends on sales, until such time as someone pays me to do something more meaningful than sit here scribbling, or I decide to go off and live in the woods and bake my own curtains and weave my own bread.

The only way I can really square it with myself, I suppose, is to try and cut down our own consumerism (never conspicuous to start with) and make sure that we don’t indulge in any of the false bonhomie, “Christmas for the sake of it” stuff. If I do give someone a present, however pitiful and small, at least it’s truly meant, and given, and not because I felt obliged to.

As far as my own Christmas list is concerned, none of the things I want for Christmas could be wrapped up and given on Christmas morning, and I am trying to wean myself off yearning for “things” anyway, and only buying and using what I have to, as the bare minimum. Though I did receive a thoughtful and unsolicited gift of some fingerless gloves this week in the post. I haven’t had any door knobs for a while, however, and I have given up altogether looking out for the Ferrari.

Today is “Stir up Sunday”, the day when traditionally, you should begin preparing your Christmas pudding. The name arises from the Collect for the day, which is:

Stir up, we beseech thee, O Lord, the wills of thy faithful people; that they, plenteously bringing forth the fruit of good works, may of thee be plenteously rewarded; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The idea being, according to that source and fount of all knowledge, Wikipedia, that:

“Supposedly, cooks, wives and their servants would go to church, hear the words 'Stir up, we beseech thee, O Lord...', and be reminded, by association of ideas, that it was about time to start stirring up the puddings for Christmas.”

I bet the person who wrote that sentence voted against women bishops.

As well as being “Stir up Sunday”, it is also the feast of St Catherine, and at the risk of re-inventing the wheel, I did actually research her, or rather, more specifically, the customs and rituals associated with her day, and was surprised to find that they were legion.

St. Catherine's Day is still widely celebrated in modern-day Estonia where it marks the arrival of winter and is one of the more important and popular autumn days in the Estonian folk calendar. It is a day of celebration for the women in Estonian culture.

There are other food traditions associated with the day as well. A traditional celebration of St Catherine's Day, which has apparently “seen something of a revival in modern times”, is the baking of 'Cattern Cakes' in honour of St Catherine. The rise of the internet has assisted in this process, as recipes have become more readily available. The key ingredients are bread dough, egg, sugar, lard or butter, and caraway seeds. Whereas, in Canada, St. Catherine's taffy is made by French Canadian girls to honour St. Catherine, the patron saint of unmarried women. St. Catherine's Day is sometimes known in among French-Canadians as "taffy day," a day when marriage-age girls would make taffy for eligible boys. Marguerite Bourgeoys, a founder of the Notre-Dame de Montréal and an early teacher in Ville-Marie, the colonial settlement that would later become Montreal, is credited with starting the tradition as a way of keeping the attention of her young pupils.

Much as I might experience language difficulties with French-Canadian girls, unless it is Kate and Annie McGarrigle singing “Heart Like A Wheel” or “Complainte pour St Catherine”, nevertheless, like Mayor Adam West, I am “a man who likes his taffy”, so I am all in favour of this one.

I mentioned Estonia above, and the customs for the Estonian St. Catherine’s Day are generally associated with the kadrisants (kadri beggars) or kadris, similar to the traditions practised elsewhere in Europe on St. Martin’s Day. Both require dressing up and going from door to door on the eve of the holiday to collect gifts, such as food, cloth and wool, in return for suitable songs and blessings. See also under “begging”, as practised by my ancestors and others.

On Estonian farms, minding the herds and flocks was primarily the responsibility of women and therefore, St. Catherine’s Day involves customs pertaining to shepherding. On St. Catherine’s Day, in order to protect the sheep, shearing and weaving were forbidden and sewing and knitting were also occasionally banned. In addition, apparently, “both men and women may dress up as women”, although of course that is something that is open to the more adventurous amongst us all year round, and not just on St Catherine’s Day, the only exception being if you are a woman who wants to be an Anglican bishop.

In France on St. Catherine's Day, it is customary for unmarried women to pray for husbands, and to honour women who have reached the age of 25 but haven't married—called "Catherinettes" in France. Catherinettes send postcards to each other, and friends of the Catherinettes make hats for them—traditionally using the colours yellow (faith) and green (wisdom), often outrageous—and crown them for the day. Pilgrimage is made to St. Catherine's statue, and she is asked to intercede in finding husbands for the unmarried girls lest they "don St. Catherine's bonnet" and become spinsters. The Catherinettes are supposed to wear the hat all day long, and they are usually feted with a meal among friends. Because of this hat-wearing custom, French milliners have big parades to show off their wares on this day. More a case of “who wants to be a milliner” than “phone a friend”, I guess.

An English traditional rhyme for the day says:

St Catherine, St Catherine, Oh lend me thine aid,
And grant that I never may die an old maid.

Because, quite clearly, your success or failure as a woman is only defined in relation to your husband. We laugh now at these quaint old customs, yet the sentiments underlying them also underpin the Christmas TV adverts that assert that Christmas can only happen if “Mum” plays her usual role of hunter-gatherer-present-buyer-chief-cook-and-bottle-washer, and the beliefs of the Laity of the Church of England, who probably think something similar, but with an added reminder to make, and stir, a Christmas pudding while they’re at it. Still, as American religious fruitcake Pat Robertson has pointed out:

Feminism is a socialist, anti-family, political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.

I gather he’s going to be the new Bishop of Bath and Wells. The old one was better, of course, he used to eat babies.

As I said above, most of the things on my Christmas list, such as it is, are things you might pray for, rather than expect to find wrapped up under the tree on Christmas morning. Except that praying doesn’t always seem to work. In fact, sometimes it can feel like you are praying into the void, and bad shit happens anyway, because Big G doesn’t share our ideas of “good” and “bad”, “fair” and “unfair”.

I was already disenchanted with the doctrinaire and inflexible nature of religious morality in general, before the Church of England shot itself in the foot, and my prayers may well have suffered as a result, since really all I can pray for with any conviction is that the people I care for (both two- and four-legged) will continue to be protected from harm, happy, warm and well-fed, that the souls of the departed will somehow be at rest in whatever you like to call “heaven”, that someone will do something about the homeless, these bitter winter nights, and that I will continue to have the strength to do what is necessary day by day, to keep the whole show on the road and not let down those who depend on me, but to lead us out of debt and to a place of relative safety.

And so I find myself here once again, standing on the cliff of faith, looking out into the dark for a glimpse of a lighthouse, and trying to work out what, if anything, Big G could want from me in return for my part in this bargain. Assuming he’s even listening, which seems a big assume, some days.

OK, God, I think I finally understand my mission now. You want someone to make a heroic gesture, to go out there and take one for the team. To try and explain the idiotic decision over women bishops for instance. You want someone to go around at night and make sure all the doors are locked, then (metaphorically or literally, you're not that fussy)to go on up, out of doors, (last one out locks up) and to keep watch, out on to the hill at night and lie out in the heather, sticking out dark nights alone, keeping vigil, keeping watch, and make sure that everyone’s alright, then go home when your shift is done, in the blood-red, blue-and-gold-barred winter dawn and finally get to make yourself a steaming cup of tea; unless the Lord keep the city, the wakeman waketh in vain.

You want someone who’s able to find that the fledgling bird your work colleagues rescued when it fell out of its nest and kept in a shoebox has died in the night, and to give it a lonely yet reverential burial, as deserving of a unique work of creation, but then still be able to go back to them with a smile in the morning, and bluff your way out of it, and say you took the lid off, and it flew away, free and happy. Take one for the team.

You want me to carry on praying for the welfare of everyone on an increasingly long and growing list, including Freddie, Zak, Matilda, and all the dead animals whose Tiggyness, Dustyness, Kittyness, Nigelness and Baggisness lives on somehow somewhere, even though I prayed equally hard, if not harder, for you not to take them in the first place. Even though there’s no discernible effect, apart from if I stopped praying for all these people, they might be even worse off than they are now!

Yeah. Take one for the team, just like Jesus did. Stick out dark nights alone, just like Thomas Thornhill my ancestor did in his shepherds’ caravan. Just like the shepherds in Estonia, watching over the flock so that sheep may safely graze, while the moon gets frost on it and the stars twinkle cold as points of ice. You want someone to justify the ways of God to man, and the ways of man to God. God alone knows why, out of all the people you could have asked, you chose me, I have absolutely no idea; but I’ll do my best.

Alright, I’ll take a chance. I’ll do my best, but in return, in this rather one-sided bargain, with your weird ideas about what’s fair and just, for a change, you’ll have to get off your Godly arse and do some things for me. World peace and clean water, for a start.

We’ll come back to the Ferrari later.

Epiblog for St Juthware's Day

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. The weather has been finer, but colder. They keep saying on the weather forecast on the local TV that it’s going to be another mild day for November, but nobody told my bones, and they hum and sing and crackle to themselves sometimes, especially if I sit too long in one position or get too far away from the stove. I’m hopeful that this Quinine Sulphate stuff will help, if it ever gets here.

Matilda, too, has not been straying that far from the stove, and when she does go out in the garden, the black and brown and orange splodges of her fur match almost exactly the black and brown and orange splodges of the fallen leaves, so much so that if she lay down amongst them, you would be hard put to tell where the cat ended and the leaves began, or vice versa.

Last Sunday evening, for some reason best known to herself, Matilda was rubbing her chivvy-chin on the ornamental dog made of sheet metal and springs (it's an ornament, we got it from the garden centre, yonks ago, and it sits on the floor next to Zak’s armchair) Somehow, she got her collar caught on the curl at the end of its tail, spooked herself and tried to run off, of course the metal dog was now attached to her, and followed her, clattering across the carpet.

As she passed me, gathering speed in panic, doing a passable imitation of a “Skimmington Ride”, I grabbed for her and missed, but caught the dog, which had the effect of putting strain on the collar, - fortunately one of those safety ones that is designed to snap apart if the cat snags it on anything - which is exactly what happened. The dog was left in my hand, the collar went flying off to one side and Matilda disappeared out of the room. Later, she crept quietly back, minus collar, and once more resumed her place on the beddies at the side of the stove. I retrieved the various bits of the collar from the various dark corners where they had landed, and found that, in any case, she appeared to have also lost the little ID barrel bit that screws in place and holds the piece of paper that says “I am Matilda, I am microchipped” and gives her address. So that’s £1.98 she owes me, for starters, and we’ll have to get her a new one.

The saga of Elvis rumbles on. We’re now in detailed discussion about the type and style of fence that it would be necessary to put across the back of the garden before they will entrust Elvis the hound-dog into our care. To be fair, they are willing to offer us physical help in the form of what have been described as two brawny males, quote unquote, to put it up, once I have sourced the materials. And, to be even more fair, we were thinking about screening off the view across the back anyway, next Spring, because the mill down in the valley is going to be having some building work done and I thought it would be an opportune time to screen out their noise.

Having said that, though, it’s an extra thing to fit in and organise, that I wasn’t expecting to have to fit in and organise, at a time six weeks before Christmas when I have one new book at press, another going next week, and an “instant book” on Amazon to do ready for release this month also. That’s why, this week, I have been reduced to searching online for willow hurdles and willow screening rolls, fence posts and other such accoutrements, with my other leg. Given the limited time I can spare to deal with this, and the short days at this time of year, I’d be surprised if it gets sorted this side of Christmas, to be honest.

Other than that, nothing much seems to have happened this week. This is both a good thing, and a bad thing. Generally, in our lives, when “things” “happen”, this usually means bad things, unexpected things, costly things. So from that point of view, I should be glad of a quiet week. However, also this week, nothing “good” has happened either – I haven’t achieved much, despite spending all day and every day struggling with the same little knot of intractable problems, and my “to do” list looks pretty much the same at the end of the week as it did at the beginning. Deb has had a similar week, with some wins and some losses. The College has finally woken up to the fact that someone who lives in Stalybridge was teaching a class in Dewsbury for them, and someone who lives in Huddersfield was teaching a class in Stalybridge, and arranged a swop. At the same time, though, the Calderdale class looks like it is coming to an end, which will mean a net loss of £140 a month for her. Ouch. The Dewsbury class also brought its own sting in the tail.

To teach it, Debbie needed to mug up on a document that was allegedly available on the College’s “Staff Portal”. This has never worked properly for her when logging on from home, and on Friday afternoon this was no exception, as she wasted three and a half hours of her life that she will never get back, talking to various assistant factotums in IT support who eventually, painfully slowly, identified that it was a password issue. However, re-setting the password also proved to be about as quick and enjoyable as 18th-century dentistry (“I can’t reset it from here, I’m ILT, I’ll have to put you through to IT”) and once it was re-set, all it enabled her to do was to discover that the document she had been told was there, actually … wasn’t. “Shambles” is far too kind a word. How OFSTED ever awarded them a “2” escapes me, unless it was marks out of 100, and even then that would have been over-generous.

So, a week of very little achievement all round, and one which left me feeling tired and drained. I hate this time of year anyway, and this week was no different. We’re all in that long, dark tunnel that leads to 2013. Sometimes – many times, in fact, this week - I have felt like Jack Brotherhood in “A Perfect Spy” who got his medal “for sticking out dark nights, alone”.

And so we come to Sunday.

On this day (18th November) in 1105, Maginulfo was elected as the Antipope and took the name of Sylvester IV. I must admit I like the idea of an Antipope. Why not? Everything has its opposite – Christ and Antichrist, matter and anti-matter, pasta and antipasta. Seems almost natural to me. Anyway, eventually, Sylvester was persuaded to submit to the authority of the “real” Pope of the time, and, unusually for those days, was allowed to live out the remainder of his life in peace, without being hung, whipped, barbecued or crucified or having his head put on a spike in the name of religion. Which is unusually lenient, as persecution on religious grounds is much more the norm, then, as now.

Tempting as it was to wax lyrical on the subject, I thought about it briefly, then decided that whenever I write about the Pontiff, I always end up making jokes about inflatable Popes and I have done it all before, so this time, I cast about to find out what Saint’s day it was today. I was briefly excited to find it was St Anselm’s Day, but this seems to be a different St Anselm to the one who was Archbishop to William the Conqueror, was exiled twice, and who came up with, amongst other things, the Ontological Proof of the Existence of God. This was one of the first philosophical/theological tracts I read, at the age of 18, and I have struggled with it ever since. On the one hand, the Platonist in me wants to accept the idea that there must be an absolute good, a gold standard of good, which is God, against which all other good is measured, by degrees, whereas the moral relativist in me says that the same action which is “good” in one set of circumstances can be “bad” in another. The action in itself does not possess innate goodness or evil, it is the circumstances and the outcome which make it so.

From this flows all of my disenchantment with, and distance from, organised religion, which sits firmly on the premise that it is possible to have a unified code of good and moral actions which suits every circumstance, and, when enforced by strong-arm tactics of the “my God is righter than your God” variety, leads, on an individual level to much sadness and mental anguish, and on a larger level, to “religious” wars and persecutions. I cannot believe that God cares whether we believe that the wine becomes blood, for instance, yet people have gone to the stake for saying it either does, or doesn’t. I can’t believe that God, with everything he’s got on his plate, gives a stuff either way whether gay marriages are celebrated or not. All I know is that if I were God, there would be mornings when I would wake up, look at the world with all its bickering and hatred and missiles and tanks and rockets and poverty and hunger and homelessness, and cruelty, and babies dying every 7 seconds for want of clean water, and I would be very, very tempted either to smite the idiots who said they were doing all of this in my name, and/or set the snooze button on my heavenly alarm for another millennium or so.

But, as it turns out, that St Anselm’s feast day isn’t til April 21st – the arm wrestling with St Anselm will have to wait five months or so, then. So I ended up looking again, and I find that today is apparently St Juthwara’s day. She was a British virgin and martyr from Dorset who lived in the 6th century AD. The authorised hagiography says:

Her name is how she is known in Anglo-Saxon, apparently a corruption of the British Aud Wyry (meaning Aud the Virgin), the name by which she is known in Brittany. She was said to have been the sister of Paul Aurelian, Sidwell of Exeter and Wulvela but this is hotly debated.

St Wulvela is, of course, not to be confused with St Vuvuzela, the patron saint of South African football supporters.

John Capgrave [1393-1464] writing in Nova Legendia Angliae, says that Juthwara was a pious girl who fell victim to a jealous stepmother [shades of Cinderella] who often prayed and fasted and gave alms. After the death of her father, she began to suffer a pain in her chest. At this point the story becomes rather surreal, because the wicked stepmother recommends that Juthwara should apply a soft cheese to each breast, and then tells her own son, who was apparently called Bana, that Juthwara is pregnant. He feels Juthwara’s underclothes (with, or without her consent) and, unable to distinguish between lactation and Lymeswold, strikes off Juthwara’s head.

She, of course, immediately picked up her own head, a la St Osyth, and a spring of water appeared where she fell. The son repented, and founded a monastery. The site of these miraculous happenings was identified as Halstock, in Dorset, from the contemporary spelling of Halyngstoka, and in the summer of 2012, the parish church of St Mary acknowledged this link by adding St Juthware to its dedication. Rodney Legg, in “Legging it in Dorset”, writes:

The public house sign in the centre of Halstock used to show a Saxon lady carrying her head. ‘Ye Quiet Woman’, as she was in the time of landlord William Worley, is said to be Juthware – now called Judith – who was decapitated by her brother in Judith Field on a hill north of the village. Her martyrdom features in the Sherborne Missal, that remarkable illuminated manuscript, and the beheading of royal wife Anne Boleyn inspired the similarly named Silent Woman at Coldharbour near Wareham. Halstock’s hostelry, sadly, was delicensed in the 1990s.

After her death, Juthware’s remains were translated to Sherborne Abbey, where they continued to be venerated until the Dissolution. She is depicted in the Great East Window of Sherborne Abbey, in company with her sister Sidwell. Her traditional emblem is a round soft cheese and/or a sword, which is unsurprising, given the prominence which both objects held in her short and presumably unhappy life.

And what lessons am I supposed to draw from the life of St Juthware? Beware of confusing cheese with lactation, and keep away from sharp objects, I suppose. It is interesting, though, to note the parallels in the story with other martyrdoms and beheadings of a similar nature – you could almost come to believe that there was some lost original, some ur-version, now lost, some uber-myth, that underlies them all. Perhaps those scholars who say that behind all this Christian symbolism there lurks an earlier acknowledgement of the Celtic cult of the severed head may have a point, although I was thrown out of a tutorial at College for suggesting precisely that same thing about the beheading of Bertilak de Hautdesert in “Gawaine and the Greene Knight”. In the interests of preventing a similar tragedy to St Juthware’s ever happening again, maybe I need to take it upon myself to institute random bosom-examinations of nubile maidens for traces of dairy products. Who knows.

That would certainly be more entertaining, and possibly a more fruitful use of my time than what I have really got lined up for next week. More sticking out dark nights alone, when I am the only one awake in the fox-hole. There is an old saying that there are no atheists in fox-holes, and I would like to believe it is true, although Big G has been noticeable by his absence of late, if you see what I mean. Sometimes we all wonder if it really is just us, watching out on the perimeter, eyes straining forwards into the dark, and at those times all you can fall back on is the words of that well-known theological commentator, Mr Bruce Springsteen – “No retreat, Baby, no surrender.”