Epiblog for the Second Sunday in Advent

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley, and when I say busy, I do mean busy. Another week has zipped by, and already it is almost a year since poor old Tiggy died. I can’t believe that it’s zipped by so fast. The year, that is. And the week, of course, come to that.

Weather-wise, we’ve all been suffering from this perishing cold. Winter is definitely biting now, and the local weather report says it’ll be even colder next week. Just when I need to organise a haircut. It’s been beautiful to see the frost on the trees and the grass down in the valley on the mornings when I’ve been awake early enough to see the sun come up over Berry Brow, but not so beautiful to go out there in it, and try and shovel coal out of a bag where it’s all stuck together with frost! I’ve seen a couple more beautiful dawns, as well, but overall I would still trade them for a winter in Majorca, I think. I could always look at pictures of a typical English winter dawn on the internet, and think myself lucky I wasn’t experiencing it for real.

Deb, too, has been feeling the effects of winter, particularly in those early mornings where she has to pour kettles of hot water on the windscreen of the camper and use an entire can of de-icer just be able to see out into the pre-dawn dark as she heads out to some godforsaken outreach centre in the back of beyond, or Birstall, as it is sometimes known. Because the heater in the van is so old and feeble, she’s also taken to making a hot water bottle first thing, and driving along with it stuffed between her and the seatbelt. In the medieval life we live, spring redeems, but winter punishes.

Matilda, too, dislikes the cold, and has spent most of the week on the bed by the hearth. No change there, then. We’ve discovered that, despite being an elderly cat of some nine years, she likes playing with old shoe laces and quite happily does star jumps to try and catch them. Strangely enough, she seems to prefer the shoelace on its own, to the shoelace with flat Eric, her catnip mouse, tied to the end of it. She’s still very reluctant to venture far outside, and like Debbie, she still growls and scuttles off upstairs whenever somebody she doesn’t like comes to the door.

The week started with a visit from Lucy, who had come to borrow some humane rat traps, which we have had hanging around for years, having acquired them at some point in the past when we feared (needlessly, as it turned out) an infestation by humane rats. While we are always glad to see her, we were especially so when she left us a jar of her home-made plum jam and her whisky marmalade, both of which I have subsequently tested for strength and taste, and to which I can award a five-star review.

Unfortunately, the week then plummeted to a new low when the coal thieves returned on Tuesday night and stole another two bags, this time out of the re-order I’d been forced to place on Monday. What had happened was that when the new coal arrived, I had managed to make space in the porch for five bags out of the re-order, but the other five had to go outside, although I asked the coalman to stack them right next to the porch wall, and we also slit the bags so that if any were picked up, coal would start to come out of them.

When I went back out later, and saw that two of the new bags were already missing, I lost it, and went totally batshit. I got on the phone to the police again and told them that somebody was obviously watching our house, for all I knew, they were out there now, and would be coming back for the rest, and that now my total losses in monetary terms for the two crimes were over £120.00 – not a great amount of money to some, but since we’re struggling for survival at the moment, quite a dint in our skimpy cash flow.

Then I went and got the axe, and sharpened it, and took that, and my mobile phone, and Debbie’s kayaking torch, the one with the 200 foot beam, and went and sat by the remaining sacks to guard them until the police came. I must admit, when I wrote last week about sticking out dark nights alone, I was thinking more metaphorically than literally. I didn’t feel very confident of my ability to inflict a lot of damage on them, if they came back, I was hoping that my presence alone would be a deterrent, though I did have a few practice swings with the axe, more to keep me warm than anything else, while metaphorically screaming the Fenwick war cry. I couldn’t do that for real, I was saving it for the moment when they came around the corner of the garage.

In the event, it was actually the police who came around the corner of the garage first, an hour and a quarter later, and found themselves coned in my torch-beam. So we all went inside and I went through the details with them, and before they left, they very kindly brought in the three remaining bags and re-stacked them with the ones in the porch, so I could still get by to the door, just. They also brought in my aluminium wheelchair ramps, the ones I use to get in and out of the camper, which had been out there as well.

Up until then, Tuesday had been a good day. Gez came round with the proofs of his new novel, Changes, and I had a quick chat with him about the amends and what needed doing. Just as we were finishing up, the bell outside dinged and I went to the door to find Mark, Carol and Scott from the Isle of Arran standing on the doorstep! They were down here visiting family, and called by for an all-too-brief meeting on their way back. They also introduced themselves to Freddie and Zak, who I was dog-sitting for the day. Freddie growled (his default greeting for everybody) and Zak looked nervous (his default setting for every social situation).

All this talk of dogs brings me to the latest development in the Elvis saga. In order to provide the necessary barrier to his escapist tendencies which the animal rescue people had specified, we’d settled on willow screening rather than a donking great wooden fence, primarily on the grounds of cost. Also, speed of erection was a consideration, and I make a point of mentioning that word specifically for the benefit of Google’s web-traffic bots. As indeed, I do with the word “bots”. Anyway, this was ordered on Thursday, and due on a next day delivery on Friday. I didn’t want to order it too far in advance in case the rolls of willow screening went the same way as the coal, there being no way I could store 24 yards of willow screening and seven 5’ 6” fence posts in the house anywhere.

Also due on Friday was the “new” cooker. New to us, that is, a result of one of Debbie’s forays on Ebay. We’d had to get rid of the old range cooker which we’ve had for about twelve years, because it’s just too large for the kitchen, especially as I now need more space with my wheelchair and everything, and in any case, about the only time it ever got used to its full capacity was when I cooked Christmas dinner on it. The rest of the meals through the year, I could probably have done with a baby Belling, to be honest.

The gas fitter had been round on Thursday night to disconnect the old range, so our evening meal on Thursday consisted of crumpets toasted on the fire. I was slightly disconcerted that the people who had said they were coming for the old range from Freecycle had not turned up, but they emailed me to say they’d be there at 9.30 on Friday morning, so I thought nothing of it. I was more disconcerted that Debbie said that when she’d coasted into the driveway, the camper van engine had died on her, and no amount of coaxing would get it to start again. It had come to rest in a place that would make it at least inconvenient, if not downright bloody impossible, to squeeze through carrying a range cooker. Oh, soddit.

So began Friday, a day of battle that will remain forever etched in my heart. On the one side, ranged against me, were the dark forces of evil and chaos that swirled all around us. I had to make sure I got rid of the old cooker before the new one came. I had to get the gas fitter to come back and connect the new one. I had to take delivery of several rolls of willow screening and seven large fence posts, and I had to get someone to come and move the camper van and rescue it up to the garage for further investigation. At least two of those had to be done before the new cooker arrived or the old one went. On my side, I had me, with a mobile phone, a laptop and a landline, plus Debbie, plus Matilda for a while, at least until the first person knocked on the door, at which point I knew that she would flee the field of battle, growling to herself as she went.

The first problem was the camper, but we had a stroke of luck there. Debbie tried it again, on spec, and the engine fired, and caught, so she managed to back it out of the driveway and more or less park it at the kerbside on the road, before it died again, this time for good. At least it was out of the way of the cookers.

The next problem was that the people from Freecycle hadn’t turned up, and it was over an hour past the time they’d specified. Sadly, I didn’t have a mobile number for them, despite having asked for it twice in previous emails, so I began a series of increasingly desperate emails telling them in effect to get their arses down here if they still wanted it. At noon, I gave up, and offered it to the second person on the list, who gratefully accepted it, on behalf of his daughter. Unfortunately though, he was in Stockport, and there was no way, he thought, that he could make it before the new cooker arrived.

By now, I had hit upon a cunning plan. But before I had time to implement it or do anything to inform Debbie, the willow screening arrived. I went out to find the courier gleefully stacking it on my wheelchair ramp. I explained to him my predicament, and asked him if he wouldn’t mind just carrying it through the kitchen and out onto the decking, a journey of some half a dozen steps. “Can’t do that, mate, it’s only supposed to be door to door”. Eventually, we compromised, and he stacked it in the porch, already crammed to the gills with bags of coal, a process which took him longer, and caused him more hassle, than if he’d just done what I asked in the first place.

Making a mental note never to order from that place again, I trundled back in and, when she came in from the garden, told Debbie what had happened. As you can imagine, she was most impressed at having to move the stuff herself.

No sooner was that diversion out of the way, than the garage came to pick up the van, and we were left contemplating the wreckage in a sort of “now, where were we..” sort of way. Debbie was trying, ineffectually, to clean the area behind the old range, which was still plugged in, and she must have happened to touch an especially frayed bit of the old flex, because the next minute she let out a huge scream, sprang upwards, and landed flat on her back beside me, as a result of getting a brief taste of 240 volts AC. I had no idea what had happened at first, until she had recovered enough to tell me, but between us we managed to unplug it at the mains and I phoned the guy who was on his way from Stockport to tell him about the frayed flex problem just in case it made a difference It didn’t, thankfully.

By now, the arrival of Pickfords was imminent, and there was no time to tell Debbie my idea, so I just got her to hide out of the way until after they had gone. When they knocked on the door, a few minutes later, I invited them in and showed them the old range. Putting on my best, Oscar nominated “tragic cripple Steve” performance, I explained that I’d been let down by the people who should have moved it out of the way, and was there any chance, even the minutest, that they might feel sorry enough for me to shift this one first?

After my previous experience with Tuffnells Parcel Express over the willow screening, I wasn’t hopeful, but as it turned out they said “Yeah, no worries, mate”, bent down and picked up the range as lightly as if it had been a cardboard box, and bore it out of the house shoulder-high, just like a coffin. Two minutes later they were back with the new one, plonked it down, and hey presto, sign here. Now all I had to do was get the gasfitter to come back.

I was dialling his number, when he walked in the door. He’d remembered that I’d told him the delivery time, and had turned up on spec, slightly early, but had gone to sleep in his van for 20 minutes and woke up when he saw the Pickfords lorry. In ten minutes, the new cooker was connected and in place.

Just as the gasfitter was leaving, Brian from Stockport arrived for the old range, and John the gasman helped him get it into the back of his people-carrier. Result!

By the end of Friday I was drained, though, and although I had envisaged cooking a vast celebratory feast for us on the new stove, it turned out in the end to be chip butties, which was about all we were up to. And Saturday was still to come.

Saturday morning saw the arrival of Andrew and Dave from the Danewalk Kennels who had been sent by Kerrie to put up the Elvis-fence. With Debbie helping where she could, and me manning the teapot, they grafted for four hours in the freezing cold, and also overcame the massive underestimation of the number of fence posts needed, by improvisation. I will need at some future point to order another five fence posts, preferably before the next load of gales hits us, but nevertheless, we now have an Elvis-proof fence. Elvis himself, sadly, is under the weather a bit at the moment, having suffered a tinge of kennel-cough and having to go back on to anti-biotics, so we’ve agreed with the kennels to leave him in their care until he’s completed that treatment. Strangely enough, it’s now looking as if he might arrive almost exactly on the anniversary of Tig’s death. Maybe it’s her influence, from up there in doggy heaven, that’s arranged this neatness of timing, that the successor dog arrives a year after her death. It’s usually a year and a day, in folk songs and nursery rhymes, isn’t it.

The camper van news was not so good. Another massive bill, because the problem is that the alternator relay had burnt itself out (almost catching fire on its way to the garage) and that in turn had knackered the alternator. Ouch. Just when I thought we might be getting in front a bit, this happens. Oh well, one step forward, two steps back, as the Italian army says.

So it came to Sunday, the second Sunday in advent, no less. Advent is all supposed to be about looking forward to Christmas, and I haven’t really given it a thought, as yet. As a child, I always looked forward to Christmas, especially Christmas Eve, for some reason, which was always more magical, for me, than the day itself. This year, when I think about Christmas, all I can think of are those people who aren’t looking forward to Christmas. The lonely, the suicidal, and the homeless, out in the cold; the animals in the shelters and pounds; the feral cats, out in the cold, and the turkeys in the turkey-sheds. One can only hope that the latter have no inkling of how their short, unhappy lives will soon be brutally ended.

Some of these categories, the homeless and the abandoned animals, for instance, are, of course, almost a direct consequence of the economic policies being followed by our so-called “Leaders” another tranche of which was unveiled last Wednesday. Their answer to the fact that the economy is holed below the water-line, and sinking fast, is to steer straight for the iceberg, full speed ahead, while jettisoning the weak, the poor and the needy in order to keep those in first class happy.

What a sad, nasty country we have become, when we’re already looking at what budgets at home can be chopped so we can fire missiles at Syria next year, and the elections show that the government’s dog-whistle pronouncements on immigration have been so successful that UKIP is now off the leash, off over the horizon in full cry, and refusing to come back to heel. The unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable, as was once said of another similarly unpleasant spectacle. This Junta, this blight, is another reason why I can’t ever be a proper Christian. How can you forgive a raging hypocrite like George Osborne? You are supposed to start by “hating the sin, but loving the sinner”, but how do you do that when, in his case, the sin and the sinner are indivisible?

So I can’t say I am looking forward to Christmas, nor indeed to 2013, particularly. I find myself these days living more and more back in the days when I was what passed for happy. I haven’t read my Bible or my Book of Common Prayer for a while now, but in the absence of any particularly wacky saints to celebrate today, I turned to the Collect for today to see what it was that I was supposed to be reading and hearing.

Amongst the various prayers, Psalms and readings is 2 Peter 3: 11-14;

Since all these things are to be dissolved in this way, what sort of persons ought you to be in leading lives of holiness and godliness, waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God, because of which the heavens will be set ablaze and dissolved, and the elements will melt with fire? But, in accordance with his promise, we wait for new heavens and a new earth, where righteousness is at home.

Or, as I prefer it, from the full-fat, high-tar King James version:

Seeing then that all these things shall be dissolved, what manner of persons ought ye to be in all holy conversation and godliness. Looking for and hasting unto the coming of the day of God, wherein the heavens being on fire shall be dissolved, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat? Nevertheless we, according to his promise, look for new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness. Wherefore, beloved, seeing that ye look for such things, be diligent that ye may be found of him in peace, without spot, and blameless.

I could certainly do with some fervent heat right now, not only the spiritual kind, but also the actual! But I take this to mean that while (according to the Bible anyway) it is not impossible that one day we will wake up and find the sky on fire, God on his throne hurling thunderbolts hither and yon, and demons with horns, red tights and pitchforks prodding George Osborne in the backside as they usher him towards the burning lake, nevertheless, we should not cease striving to make things better here, in the meantime. We shall not cease, from mental strife, nor shall our swords sleep in our hands, and all that. So with that in mind, instead of my usual vaguely appropriate piece of music from Youtube, I’ve attached instead a small quelquechose, a harmless maggot of a piece that I put together in what is laughingly described as my spare time, to try and help RAIN Rescue.

God alone knows what next week will bring, but at least right now,
on Sunday teatime I’m not out in the cold with the abandoned animals and the homeless people, and I thank him for that small mercy.

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.