Epiblog for the Second Sunday of Lent

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. It could almost be spring, but I don’t want to actually say the words, for fear of banishing the spell. The Archers have finally got around to appointing a flood warden (it’s David Archer, if you cared. No, me neither.)  Just when the rest of the country is finally drying out and that bloke in Muchelney has finally been able to recover what was left of his submerged car.  In our garden, the remaining standing plastic greenhouse has been reduced by yet more gales to a "tattered Arras", but on the plus side, the snowdrops are holding their own and, this morning, I looked out of the conservatory window and found that the remainder of Maisie’s indestructible daffodils by Russell’s mosaic had come into flower. “Faire daffadils, we weep to see ye haste away so soon”, as Robert Herrick might have said if he were here right now.  The ones in the stone trough at the front are in bud, as well.

Matilda and Misty have been vying for patches of sunlight on the conservatory rug. On at least a couple of days, it was so warm that we had the conservatory door open,  allowing Misty to wander in and out at will, something that she hasn’t been able to do since last summer.  Freddie and Zak have been to stay this week as well,  Zak benefiting from a couple of 13-mile walks with Deb and Misty, and Freddie getting to sleep in his brand new fleecy dog bed, in front of the stove. Matilda has been looking enviously upon it and coveting it, and it can only be a matter of time until we find Freddie sharing it with her, possibly against his will.

Debbie has been preoccupied with John Steinbeck’s use of language to convey emotion in the characters of George, Lennie and Curley’s wife. Yes, it’s GCSE exam season again, building up to the point where they all go mission-critical around exam time.  Tin helmets and NCB suits are the order of the day. It’s about time they started doing some decent books for GCSE English though. The chief virtue of Of Mice and Men seems to be its brevity.

I’ve been ploughing steadily on. Everywhere I turn there are mountains of things needing to be done, but all I can do is to make every moment count and try and knock off the ones with the biggest payoff each day. Unfortunately, the stock problem reared its head again, I have got book layout work coming out of my ears, the VAT return was due, I still have to pursue Kirklees College over Debbie’s pay arrears, and somewhere I’m supposed to find time to do some marketing.  It’s a symptom of the fact that we’re slowly recovering, I suppose – it’s better being busy than sitting here watching the wind blow the cobwebs, but it’s the relentless nature of it that sometimes gets wearing. It’s like being charged by the North Koreans, you mow down the front row and behind that there’s another one, and another one behind that, all singing Gangnam Style.  Before you know it, another day of your life has gone by and you lie there listening to the sound of your tired bones singing you to sleep.

I finally completed the first stage of my art giveaway this week, which is, I suppose, some kind of achievement. In the end we’ve offered about half the found portfolio in return for donations to Rain Rescue, Mossburn Animal Centre or The Freedom of Spirit Trust for Border Collies, and about half of what we offered has been taken up. Debbie, who thinks that all art is pretentious crap, especially mine and Lucian Freud’s is delighted that some space has been freed up, and the prospect of any of my stuff being framed and stuck on the wall here has considerably lessened. I guess I should take some comfort in being in good company.  I would love to find some way of painting full-time, but I can’t see it as a route to paying off my debts before I die, somehow.

The only mildly amusing bit of news that has percolated through to me from the outside world this week was that the fire station in Downham Market, Norfolk, burned down because it a) caught fire and b) didn’t have a sprinkler system. Downham Market is where my Rudd ancestors came from, and is a place for which the phrase “Normal for Norfolk” might have been invented, so I wasn’t entirely surprised by the story.  I hear they have requested emergency cover from Trumpton.

Other than that, it’s been pretty bleak and bloody. In a variation on the famous opening of George Orwell’s 1940 essay The Lion and The Unicorn, as I type these words, civilized men in a far away country are conspiring to kill me.  There seems to be a perception that the crisis in the Crimea has gone off the boil, but today’s referendum on whether or not to become Russian might well see it all kick off again next week. Mr Putin is already in a grumpy mood because thieves broke into the Kremlin and stole next year’s election results, and he doesn’t want to waste any more money on printing.  Joking aside, though, it’s no laughing matter if they go ahead and turn the gas taps off, especially since Margaret Thatcher saw fit to dispose of our own indigenous energy reserves underneath our very feet, as an act of political vandalism.

I was reminded of this because the week saw the 30^th anniversary of the outbreak of the miners’ strike in 1984.  I wasn’t involved at the time – I only moved to Barnsley in 1989, and our fight, at the time, was against the Poll Tax and the final round of pit closures in 1992. I never met Arthur Scargill, though I did march behind him, and a number of pithead union banners, and the Bishop of Wakefield (Nigel McCulloch, at the time) in a demonstration against closing the pits, in 1992. I was struck once more, watching a documentary on the dispute, by how bloody it all was at the time. Not only the violent confrontations on both sides, but also things such as people going hungry and kids being sent to bed without any supper. Thank God things have improved in the last thirty years…er…oh.

Trade Union disputes also featured in the news this week because of the deaths of Bob Crow and Tony Benn. Bob Crow’s untimely demise at the age of only 52 serves to remind us of the transitory nature of life. If I may be allowed to quote Mr Gordon Sumner, “how fragile we are”. Or, as the Anglo Saxons preferred it, “lyf is leone” – life is lent, not given.  Tony Benn’s death was, to a certain extent, more expected, in that he was 88 and he had recently been very ill, but nevertheless it was another hammer blow to the aims and aspirations of all those who struggle for justice and fairness in a society which is increasingly making war on the poor, the old, the ill, and the disadvantaged. I was reminded, bizarrely enough, of one of the times England’s football team crashed out of the World Cup. The morning after, when all around was defeat and demoralisation, I stuck two of those plastic St George flags on the car windows and drove to the office. One of my colleagues happened to mention that it was a bit late, putting up the flags the day after we’d been ignominiously trounced, and I replied that I thought that it was precisely the time when we should have been flying the flag.  To show we may be down, but we are not out. I get knocked down, but I get up again.  That’s what we have to do now. Parts of this country in the last four years taken more of a shitkicking than they did in the miners’ strike. It’s time to turn round, and fight back. And if that means we have to stoop and build up Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land, with worn-out tools, then so be it.

To do this, however, we need a more effective opposition. Well, just any opposition, really. I wonder where we can find one, given that it’s only a year till the 2015 election. By his pronouncement, this week, that Labour would not consider a referendum on Europe if elected, Miliband has once again shown the former white working class core Labour voters that he doesn’t give a stuff about their concerns.  Every time Labour does this, it drives the people they ignore more and more into the arms of UKIP, who claim to have all the answers. It’s no good wishing the EU wasn’t an issue – the hateful spew of vile bigoted propaganda issued by the Junta since 2010, which has done much to inadvertently boost UKIP’s prospects, has made it an issue, like it or not. As with the debate over benefits, what is needed on Europe is to take on the Junta’s agenda and defeat it, not to concede the field of battle without a shot being fired.  All Ed Miliband has done is to add a few thousand disgruntled ex-Labour voters to UKIP’s tally in 2015, to add to the many thousands of disgruntled ex-Tories who had already decided to vote for them.

There is nobody at the next election for people on the left who distrust the whole EU political project to vote for. I won’t vote UKIP, because I know that their stance on the EU is in fact a thinly disguised veneer behind which lurks a much nastier idea: round up anybody vaguely brown and deport them all to Bongo-Bongo Land.  But there are many others who are not so discerning. Meanwhile, just in case we were in any doubt as to their true intentions this week the Blight Brigade passed a law which allows them to close a local hospital by executive order, against the wishes of the local community. This is because they were beaten twice in the courts trying to do it under existing legislation, so they just changed the law, to make what they want to do legal.  They aren’t alone in this of course, Labour passed legislation in 2002 to make the previous year’s illegal contiguous culls for Foot and Mouth retrospectively legal.  The Junta were supported in their efforts to further trash the NHS by the Liberal Democrats, so remember that, at election time, when the Lib Dem candidate tells you he went into politics to “make a difference” – what he meant was “make a difference to the availability of healthcare in the UK”. And not in a good way.

People were queuing up in the media to pay “tribute” to Bob Crow and Tony Benn, in a manner reminiscent of the aftermath of Nelson Mandela’s death, when those who would cheerfully have seen him hanged in real life surged onto every media channel, brandishing their onions and lauding him as a statesmen whose like we would never see again.  The BBC commissioned the following poem on Bob Crow, from the performance poet “Atilla the Stockbroker”, and then refused to broadcast it on the grounds of “balance”:

There was a man who held his ground.
Fought every inch, and won the day.
His legacy, his members’ lot:
Good work conditions, decent pay.
By Tories and their tabloid dupes
And those who seek more than their share
Just like Millwall, his favourite team,
He wasn’t liked, and didn’t care.
But those who worked in transport knew
Their leader stood right by their side.
No management could lay them low:
They wore their union badge with pride.
He spoke for passengers as well:
Safety, not profit, always first.
Opposing fatal funding cuts -
Paddington, Potters Bar the worst.
Bob Crow. A boxer’s grandson, he:
Led with the left and packed a punch.
The bosses knew he’d take them on:
No smarmy smile, no cosy lunch.
We need more like him, that’s for sure:
Upfront and honest to the last.
He bargained hard and kept his word.
A union leader unsurpassed.
As zero hours contracts grow
And bosses offer Hobson’s choice
Let us not mourn, but organize:
Get off our knees and find our voice!
This man worked hard for workers’ rights:
A fair wage, a safe, steady job.
So join a union and stand firm.
That’s the best way to honour Bob.

Whatever you think of its merits (or otherwise) as verse, it goes to show where the BBC’s true loyalty lies. Of course, all these people who go on about what a good thing Mrs Thatcher was, and talk about Union “dinosaurs” and “back to the 1970s” totally fail to acknowledge that, had our own native industries been allowed to grow and flourish instead of being angrily stifled, there would have been forty years of growth and development and innovation; they talk as if it would simply be a case of going back in a time-warp to the days of beer and sandwiches at 10 Downing Street, three black and white channels on the TV, and everyone driving around in Ford Anglias.

The Union barons of the 1970s are often denounced as being greedy and rapacious. Last week, IPSA, the body which oversees Parliamentary ethics at Westminster, released data showing that between October and November 2013, MPs made over 3,300 claims for expenses totalling £4.5 million.

This data covered 61 days and showed:

•On average, 541 claims made DAILY
•Each Claim was, on average, £135
•£73,300 claimed in expenses DAILY

Hmmm. Anyway, we have all made it to today thank God, and apparently, according to the Lectionary, it is the Second Sunday of Lent, and violet vestments are in order.  Sadly, the only violet garment I possess is an Australian “Lizard under the Moon” T-shirt, and I had already got dressed this morning, before I read the Lectionary, so I shall have to remain inappropriately attired. I hope Big G will cut me some slack.  In the absence of an appropriate saint for today, I appear to have given up saints for Lent, so I turned instead to the recommended Bible texts which we should, apparently, be studying today. Some of them (eg St Paul’s letter to the Romans) are – I must admit – rather dense and impenetrable. I’m sure this is my fault, rather than St Paul’s, but I glazed over when he started talking about circumcision and uncircumcision, and the best I could manage was a feeble joke about reading it in the hope of picking up some tips, a witticism which I may yet discard on the grounds of taste.

Psalm 24, however, was much more to my liking, prefiguring Christ’s entry into Jerusalem:

Lift up your heads, O ye gates;
even lift them up, ye everlasting doors;
and the King of glory shall come in.
Who is this King of glory?
The Lord of hosts, he is the King of glory. Selah.

It’s the “Selah” in the King James Version that does it for me. Every time. So much so that I am thinking of appending it to every email and letter I send. “Dear NPower, I am stopping my direct debit in your favour. Selah.”

But the passage that most held my attention was the description of the Transfiguration in Matthew 17: 1-9.

And after six days Jesus taketh Peter, James, and John his brother, and bringeth them up into an high mountain apart,  and was transfigured before them: and his face did shine as the sun, and his raiment was white as the light. And, behold, there appeared unto them Moses and Elias talking with him. Then answered Peter, and said unto Jesus, Lord, it is good for us to be here: if thou wilt, let us make here three tabernacles; one for thee, and one for Moses, and one for Elias. While he yet spake, behold, a bright cloud overshadowed them: and behold a voice out of the cloud, which said, This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased; hear ye him.  And when the disciples heard it, they fell on their face, and were sore afraid.  And Jesus came and touched them, and said, Arise, and be not afraid.  And when they had lifted up their eyes, they saw no man, save Jesus only.

Assuming Matthew wasn’t making this up entirely, after a few hookahs too many, or whatever they had in those days, assuming Jesus hadn’t changed the water into wine while they weren’t looking, for a lark, this is a description of something between a mass hallucination and a supernatural experience. Like everything else to do with religion whether you believe in Jesus in the first place, and then go on to believe that he was transfigured in some way in front of his followers, is purely an act of faith. But it has set me thinking about the concept of transfiguration as a whole – about how a thing or a place or a person can suddenly become completely different.

For me, the concept is linked to art, because one of my favourite paintings was also in itself a transfiguration, for me. It was both literally and metaphorically a Transfiguration, because it was the painting of that name, by Giuseppe Cesari, in the Ferens Art Gallery, in Hull. I have appended it to the top of this blog. [I realise, by the way,, this is the second time in as many weeks that I have mentioned the Ferens. It’s a bit like buses, I’m afraid, you wait ages, then two come along at once]. 

When I first found my way into the Ferens, and stood in front of this painting, many years ago now, as a callow youth from the slums of East Hull, I was not only transfigured, but transfixed. I didn’t understand the painting then, in terms of subject matter, and I even didn’t understand the complexities of its construction and composition until much later, when I stood in front of it and sketched it for myself,  under the watchful eye of a museum guard – but, nevertheless, I knew, somehow deep down, that it was important, these figures and their strange aerial ballet. It meant something. Apart from anything else, it meant that art was not something that “wasn’t for the likes of us” – I could appreciate it, as much as the next man.

I guess what I’m groping at is that behind the idea of transfiguration lies the further ideas of hope, renewal, and that anything is possible. Shortly we’ll once more be in the period “bythene Mersh and Averill, whan spray beginneth to springe” and the woods around here will be transformed and transfigured by a new raiment of green. Maybe that’s the key. Maybe that’s what has been missing in my own life. A bit of transfiguration.

One of my online friends circulated an illustration on Facebook this week of the many and various reasons why people were admitted to a particular lunatic asylum in 19^th Century America. Apart from the fact that some of them are almost scarily whimsical (“woman trouble”) I noted that the first two on the list:

Bad habits and political excitement

Kicked in the head by a horse

Were almost a perfect summary of how I currently feel.  But maybe transfiguration is possible, and somehow, painting seems to be the key.  I could, of course, be reading this all wrong, and in any case, financially, I have no option but to keep on with the books and try and turn things around. But the concept of transfiguration is maybe what could stop it all seeming so damn pointless, as it has been of late. Now, I see through a glass, darkly – but then, face to face. Or, as T S Eliot put it in Little Gidding:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

So, for the first time in many weeks, I take some personal hope into the days to come.  The possibility of transfiguration. Well, it works for me. But for now, I have to go and get the coal in, and transform the fire, as the coals have sunk low while I was trying to write this, and the clouds have swallowed the sun.  And then I think I will transform some spuds into chip butties for tea. As the Zen masters were fond of saying: “after enlightenment – the laundry”.

Epiblog for the Feast of St Bosa of York

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley.  I almost daren’t say it aloud, but there is a possibility – I put it no higher than that – of spring just around the corner. The owlies are hooting at night, the birds and squirrels are active during the day, the pale silver sun of February is finally percolating through to March, the snowdrops are nodding in the wind, and I am certain that every time I turn my back, Maisie’s indestructible daffodils add another half-an-inch to their stature. The only harbinger of spring that I haven’t actually seen so far is Brenda the badger. I hope she’s OK – given the disturbance and noise nuisance caused by those morons demolishing the derelict bits of Park Valley Mills last autumn, I wouldn’t blame her if she’d upped sticks and moved to Brockholes. I almost did the same thing myself.

Matilda is relishing the opportunity afforded by all this springtime activity to sit inside the conservatory door, tail swishing and teeth chattering as she drools over the tasty-looking birds and squirrels helping themselves to stale bread and peanuts, only a few feet away. Occasionally, as a variant, she will actually go out on to the decking and sit just a few inches away from the dish, wondering where the birds and squirrels have all gone.  When she tires of these pursuits, which are inevitably fruitless, she can be found curled up and snoozing on her Maisie-blanket, in the armchair net to the TV in the conservatory.

Misty’s another who likes sunny spots, and she’s taken to sleeping in that sunny patch on the rug in the conservatory, exactly where Tig used to lie curled up. I like the pleasing continuity of that.  I have tried to get Misty interested in going out onto the decking to get some sun, on warmer days, but for some reason she doesn’t seem to associate outdoors and sleeping, she thinks that outdoors is reserved solely for walkies. Maybe it’s a border collie trait. I even tried to encourage her by saying “Squirrels! In the garden!” and then, when that failed, “Rabbits!” and, eventually, “Tebbits!” At the latter, she let out a feeble whimper, turned tail and fled. I don’t blame her, he has that effect on me as well.

She did, however, perform one useful and semi-heroic deed during the week, and one which proved she can do the border collie thing, if she chooses to. I was looking after Freddie and Zak on Tuesday evening. Freddie went to the door, which is what he normally does when he needs to do his necessaries, and I let him out onto the decking. As I watched him toddle down the steps and vanish into the gloom of the garden, I was simultaneously thinking he’s still not in bad nick for 108 or whatever he is in human years, and wishing I had a torch, so I could track his progress further. 

Also wishing that either Debbie (teaching until 9.30pm) or Granny (at Jonathan’s) were here to go down into the garden and check he was OK.  Minutes passed, each one seeming like several hours, and still he didn’t come back up to the door. Twenty-five minutes later, just as I was reaching for the mobile to tell Granny, reluctantly, that I had lost her dog, he came creaking up the steps, each one an obvious effort. Thank God. My relief was short-lived, however, because Freddie seemed to be oblivious to his whereabouts, and instead of coming to the door, he started wandering across the decking towards the other set of steps at the far side. Where the hell was he going? Shouting was no use, since he’s so deaf these days, so I flung the door open and said to Misty, “Go and find Freddie!” Much to my surprise, she went and did the sheepdog thing – she went round Freddie, on his far side, then dropped onto her front paws in front of him. Suddenly he seemed to snap out of his reverie, turned round, and headed for the door, with Misty behind him.  I don’t know why she can’t do it all the time, but whatever, she earned her Muttnuts that day. 

In other news, we narrowly dodged a bullet this week. Well, not so much a bullet, as a bung, and we're not talking expenses here. On Monday when Debbie set off for college, the camper engine made a strange rattling noise then gave an enormous backfire, before settling down to its normal rhythm. As she was already late, she drove off without investigating further.  On her return, however, she found a blackened and sooty lump of cavity wall insulation lying in the driveway. Someone must have tried to sabotage the van by squirting insulation foam up the exhaust, probably over the weekend while it was parked up in the driveway. Debbie had actually been very lucky that the evil little scrote who had done it had failed to vandalise it properly and the pressure had blown it out of the end of the exhaust pipe, instead of travelling back to the engine and knackering the piston rings, as happened with Debbie’s mum’s car when someone did it to her.

Our finances are so precarious that we probably would not have been able to carry out the expense of an engine rebuild and thus we would have lost not only our vehicle, but also any means of transporting me about or going on holiday. So I reported it to the police, and duly gave a statement to a PC who came around to discuss it with me on Friday morning. He asked me if I had any idea who had done it, and I was forced to admit that no, I didn’t, and that furthermore, if I did know, I would send Debbie’s brother and some of his mates round there with baseball bats to break his arms. Which probably wasn’t the wisest thing to say in the circumstances, but which at least was the truth. I don’t do forgiveness. In fact, I hope that the bastard responsible can feel my anger and fury boring into his back, right between the shoulder blades.

The police interview was rather surreal because the constable they sent had an earpiece in, and they no longer have those radios that everyone can hear, the ones that crackle and mutter all the time, but he must’ve been getting messages from base direct into his ear, because he kept drifting off into unrelated conversations and staring into the distance. Either that, or he was PC Tourettes of the Attention Deficit Disorder Squad.  He left with a promise that they would ask the beat officers to pay special attention to our house, which is something, I suppose.

Inspired by my recent resurging interest in art, and as an antidote to the essential unproductivity of the police interview, I then decided to knock one of the other tasks off my to-do list. For ages now I have been meaning to ring the Ferens Art Gallery in Hull and to ask them if they still sell those postcard reproductions of some of the highlights in their collection. When Hull was a lot nearer, and I was a lot more mobile, I used to pop in and buy them, but for the last two decades that hasn’t been possible.

The first obstacle was to get past Hull City Council’s call centre and actually speak to someone at the gallery, which took 8 minutes, 52 seconds of a conversation with a bloke called Stuart and/or a combination of various types of hold music.  Eventually, he admitted that he didn’t know the answer to my question and he couldn’t put me through, so he gave me a direct number.

Which turned out to be wrong. Well, it was sort of the right department, but not the gallery itself. Fortunately, this time around, the person who answered the phone had more idea what was needed, and after I explained my quest for the second time, put me through to the Ferens Art Gallery switchboard, who, in turn, transferred me to the shop. Yes, they did sell the postcards. And no, they didn’t sell them online, they didn’t have an online shop, although they had recently discussed it at a meeting. Well, I suppose this is Hull, where the internet is in black and white and only on for three afternoons a week.

So I said, do you have a list that I could send you an SAE to send out to me, and she said no, you have to send us in a list of what you want. I might just do that, starting with world peace and unlimited funds for donkey sanctuaries.  What a waste of dog farts.

The week contained a couple of milestones that marked the passage of winter and the potential coming of spring – shrove Tuesday and Ash Wednesday, neither of which we particularly marked. I think we ended up having vegan burgers and chips on pancake day, which is even less appropriate than one of my erstwhile colleagues in a previous job, who used to celebrate “hash” Wednesday by cooking corned beef hash for her family.  Ash Wednesday, for me, always makes me think of the T S Eliot poem, especially as I am, now, myself, an aged eagle, still trying to stretch its wings. And of course, the fact that spring is coming also means that time is passing me by, but I can’t have it both ways, I suppose; the only ones of us who are privileged to dwell in a land of perpetual unchanging summer are those of us who have gone before, all gone into the world of light, as Henry Vaughan put it. Talking of whom, today, 9^th March, would have been Tiggy’s 18^th birthday, if only dogs lived that long. There is an argument, also, that living in a land of perpetual summer would in itself become boring, that you need change to give you light and shade. Which would you rather have, a full life or a happy one?  Well, given the way my own cup has been running over in recent years, I think, right now, a happy one!

There is every danger, however, that we may all experience a full life, possibly fuller than we wanted, the way things are kicking off in the Ukraine. It’s been a case of waking up every morning and checking the radio to find out if we are at war yet. The parallels to the build up to the Great War are scary. The same combination of aggressive powers jockeying for position, a far away country of which we know nothing, and international treaty obligations that could snare us into a conflict that nobody wants. All that is missing is some modern day Gavrilo Princip, a wild-eyed fanatic to provide the spark that lights the blue touch-paper, and retire. One of my correspondents, Mark Harwood, drew attention to the complete lack of irony in Britain and the UK warning Mr Putin (who is not gay, by the way) about the concept of national sovereignty and how it was wrong to invade another country just because you didn’t agree with the election results and you wanted to change the regime. One wonders how Putin got the idea that it was OK in the first place?  I wonder if Mr Blair or Mr Bush might have any views on it?

Actually, there was some poetic justice this week, courtesy of the predictive text on Channel 4 news’s subtitles – Matt Frei on screen referred to the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, whereas the subtitles read “so gay lover of…” tempting one to add “Mr Putin”to the unfinished sentence.  Another public figure who had difficulty this week was the Pope, who unwittingly dropped the F-bomb while getting lost in translation and attempting to deliver a speech n Italian, not his first language, from the Vatican balcony. Unfortunately, instead of saying “caso”, which was in the script, he said “cazzo”, which apparently means something very rude in Italian. Still, he got our attention.  As did the Elvis Bus Pass party, a one-man political organisation, David Laurence Bishop, also known as Lord Biro, whose policies include legalising brothels with a 30% discount for OAPs, and who found himself unaccountably beating the Liberal Democrats in the local council elections in Nottingham. This speaks volumes for the popularity of the yellow Quislings, who have spent the last three years helping the Tories grind the faces of the poor, and no doubt Nick Clegg, as a committed European, muttered “cazzo” to himself as he kicked the table leg and left the building.

Other than that, the news has been nasty and depressingly predictable. It emerged that Patrick Rock, the 62-year old former deputy head of David Cameron’s number 10 policy unit, had been arrested on February 13^th accused of possessing images of child pornography. While it is of course the case that Mr Rock has not been found guilty of any crime and must therefore be considered innocent until proven otherwise, what does interest me about the case is the three week gap between the event and the news of it emerging, three weeks during which the Daily Mail suddenly started running a series of articles stirring up tenuous old allegations against  Harriet Harman, Jack Dromey, and Patricia Hewitt arising from the connection between the National Council for Civil Liberties and the so-called “Paedophile Information Exchange.” If I was of a suspicious and cynical disposition, I may have formed the conclusion from this, now that the arrest of Mr Rock has become public knowledge, that Captain Cameron, up on the bridge and seeing some heavy weather and potential enemy action ahead, got on the voicepipe to Stoker Dacre in the engine room at the Daily Mail, and ordered up a smokescreen, tonto pronto.  Cameron’s official explanation for his own silence was that he didn’t want to prejudice the case. Unlike those occasions, for instance, when a Labour MP is arrested because of allegations of suspected expenses fraud.  Perhaps a more charitable explanation is that Mr Cameron was just too busy mugging up on the concept of sovereignty, so he could lecture Putin.

Meanwhile, the food bank argument rumbled on. I used to think that the Junta would only see sense if and when someone died as a result of their policies, but I suppose that the Mark and Helen Mullins case should have disabused me of that erroneous assumption. Certainly, sympathy has been in short supply from the Blight Brigade over the case of Mark Wood. The inquest into his death was told that he died of starvation, four months after his benefits were cut. 44-year-old Mr Wood weighed 5st 8lbs when he was found dead in August 2013. He had been told the previous April that he was fit for work, despite having been previously diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, OCD, and a wide range of phobias. His housing benefit and employment support allowance were taken away, leaving him just £40 a week disability living allowance to cover all of his costs.

The coroner ruled that his death was probably "caused or contributed to by Wood being markedly underweight and malnourished" and his doctor testified that given Wood's body mass index, it was not possible for him to survive. Mr Wood’s  sister Cathie Wood described her brother as a "sweet and gentle" person:

"When the police found him, there was very little food in the house, just half a banana and a tin of tuna, I would like Iain Duncan Smith to stop talking about this as a moral crusade, and admit that this whole process of reassessing people for their benefits is a cost-cutting measure. I want David Cameron to acknowledge the personal costs of this flawed system. This is not just someone being inconvenienced – this is a death," she said.

A spokesman for Atos Healthcare, who carried out the assessment, said: "We carry out assessments as professionally and compassionately as possible." Which means not very professionally and compassionately at all, it would seem.  Meanwhile, a DWP spokesman added: "A decision on whether someone is well enough to work is taken only after thorough assessment."

Yeah, right. Well, you can blather on about mitigating circumstances, you can say well, he was just some nutter, you can say he should have sought help, you can blame his family, you can say that he was a scrounger and his illness was imaginary. You can say all of the many and myriad heartless things that those who have had a compassion bypass will no doubt trot out to try and divert attention away from those who were responsible, but the overriding fact remains – his benefits were stopped, and then he was allowed to starve to death in a land of plenty, and that is just plain wrong, and someone should pay for it, not just politically at the next election, but criminally. In religious terms, of course, this week sees the start of Lent, and sadly, it would seem that this year,  there may be some people out there – quite a lot of people, actually, whose abstinence during the coming weeks may not be voluntary, and we need to be looking out for them.

Someone who is trying to do something about that is Ransford Amoah, who will be fasting throughout Lent in an attempt to raise awareness of food poverty in Britain. He said:

Lent this year begins on 5 March. From that day until Palm Sunday I'm not going to eat any food. I'll have a glass of fruit juice in the morning, some vegetable stock in the evening and make sure to keep hydrated but otherwise I won't be eating anything at all. This will be a time of study, prayer, my regular work and attempting to highlight the growing crisis of hunger in the UK.

A person going without food in Britain is not new but, for some reason, it's only just becoming news. According to Oxfam half a million people accessed a food bank in the past year, and those I've met who have used them – and those who refer them in the first place – confirm that by the time people get to a food bank they've often already missed several meals.

He adds, tellingly,

Fasting is practised by many religions, in many different ways. In the Christian tradition, rooted in its Jewish cousin's practices, fasting has a strong and regular role in bringing the individual to a place where they understand their complicity in an unjust system and where they draw closer to God and to their neighbour. Well, our neighbour is hungry (in my case that is literally true, I've just discovered someone's been sleeping in our garden this week).

When Jesus began his ministry of liberation for the poor and dispossessed he spent 40 days in the wilderness and fasted. In these stories, fasting was not a stunt but rather a sign. Fasting can point the way to a greater compassion and help us demand that something be done to stop this crisis in its tracks. This is why we're inviting you to join us by signing up to a National Day of Fasting on 4 April by registering at endhungerfast.co.uk. We can all help: whether you are spiritual, religious, or just that wonderful thing called "human".

And so we came to Sunday, and the Feast of St Bosa, and a bright, fine, hard, spring day.  St Bosa died in 705AD, and, strangely enough, he was involved n the events surrounding last week’s saint, St Chad, which gives a strange sense of continuity I don’t think we’ve ever had to concurrently running saints before. St Bosa was a bishop of York who was praised by the Venerable Bede. Starting out as a monk at Whitby Abbey under St Hilda (not literally, although you never know…) he was consecrated a Bishop by St Theodore in 678AD, going on to become the Bishop (effectively Archbishop) of York when St Wilfred was exiled by King Aldfrid in 691AD.  Apparently he was a man of unusual merit and sanctity, according to Bede, but the actual grounds for his sainthood see rather thin and sketchy.

In fact, if we were looking for saints this week, possibly the best candidate might indeed be Ransford Amoah.  As for my prospects for Lent, the “crabbed lentoun” as the Gawain poet calls it, look pretty much as before. Thank God, so far, we haven’t been driven to the desperate state of not having enough to eat, but it’s all so precarious, when something like an act of mindless vandalism and a huge garage bill could alter everything overnight. The bad news is I am gong to have to call a halt to the painting – I’ve got accounts tasks to do, as well as a VAT return, a mountain of book layout work to do, and the issue of the disposal/dispersal of the stock has reared its ugly chops again. So I doubt I’ll have time for much in the way of prayer and reflection. However, on the plus side, the missing art portfolio has now been found, so I can at last start giving away my early artworks in return for donations to Mossburn Animal Centre,  Rain Rescue, and the Freedom of Spirit Trust for Border Collies. Other than that, it’s looking very much like the mixture as before, with only the distant glimmer of Easter as the light at the end of the proverbial tunnel, that may yet turn out to be the proverbial oncoming train.

I think I have to largely accept, because the wreckage of it is lying around me everywhere in plain sight, that my spiritual life is currently in a state of disrepair. In fact, in many ways, this blog is turning out a lot like the first world war, starting out full of idealism and fire and it’ll be all over by Christmas, and ending up as day after day of grim, meaningless attrition. This is, of course, at least partially down to me – as Richard Bach is fond of pointing out, you are never given a problem without also being given the key to its solution, and this is true in my case. I could sell up everything, impose a radical change on my life and the lives of those for whom I am responsible, and go and live in a Yurt in the woods. But that would be like admitting I was wrong with everything I have tried to do in my life, or at least in recent years. And it would be so tiring, I quail at the thought of it.

So, in the meantime, I concentrate on keeping hearth and home together, welcome the lengthening days, and wearily, I begin to make plans to rectify the damage that yet another winter has done to the garden, and to me.  To stoop, and build ‘em up with worn out tools, as Mr Kipling has it.  Talking of which, it might be time to put the kettle on, this Sunday teatime, and see if we have any exceedingly good cakes. And meanwhile, accounts, stock and editing notwithstanding, I’ll try and do what I seem to be best at, and keep the home fires burning.

Epiblog for St Chad's Day

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley, but there are some signs of spring at last.  The snowdrops in the garden, and Maisie’s indestructible daffodils, to name but two. And yet again, we’ve had some more of those days where even though it’s raining, it’s also sunny at the same time.  Or it’s raining on one side of the valley and sunny on another.

Predictably, we didn’t get away in the camper van. Not this time.  There were several reasons for this; the weather forecast for the Lake District was worse than here, and there’s little point in leaving a cosy hearth in a place where the weather is relatively mild and occasionally sunny, to go and sit in a tin box on Walney Island watching the rain sheeting down and listening to it drumming on the camper roof.  While we have been away in the camper in winter before, notably one night in Borrowdale when it was minus 13, and a weekend I remember in November in Galloway where we lay awake all night listening to the gale force wind howling through the wire hawsers of the kayak rack, it does have to be something special these days to drag us out. Especially when Debbie wants to climb mountains and the weather says there’s only a 30% chance of a cloud-free summit.

The overriding reason, though, was that we were both still feeling totally blitzed from the cold/flu thing, and we just didn’t have the energy to get all the gear together and get it on to the camper.  We’re both now at the stage where the cold itself has gone, but every so often a wave of fever washes over you and everything goes woozy and you just have to stop for half an hour or so.  I’m not surprised it’s poleaxed Deb, she has been running on empty for weeks now, and I suppose in my case it’s an inevitable consequence of my condition.

Deb has managed to get out for some walks, though, accompanied by Misty and also by Zak, when she can borrow him. And they have climbed some hills, albeit local ones. Generally speaking they all return from these forays plastered with mud up to the elbows, looking like a first world war re-enactment society, so everybody has to stand on the mat and be towelled down before they can proceed any further.

Matilda is more circumspect about her journeys to the outside world, especially since one of her bolt-holes to get out of the rain, the “good” plastic greenhouse, blew off the decking, over the rails, and into the garden during the recent gales. Deb has gathered the bits of it and stowed them under the deck, in case we can ever put it back together again, but now Matilda is reduced to cowering under the tarp which protects the camp cooker, until someone comes to let her back in. 

She’s also taken to wandering round the house at night, yowling. I don’t know why she does this, it’s not because she’s hungry, though she does stack away the Felix at an alarming rate. I think she just wants the reassurance that she hasn’t been left on her own, because when I snarl at her to shut up, generally she does so, and we can all get back to sleep. If only she would sleep in/on the bed like a normal cat, she need never feel lonely again, but who knows what does on in her little furry crinkly walnut of a brain.

Other nature-related news this week includes the fact that the owls seem to be back. Well, strictly speaking, I am not sure they ever went away, but the other night, they were giving it some stick in the trees that fall away downhill behind our garden. We had the TV on, watching Law and Order, and I kept hearing this hooting going on, which eventually led me to ask if it was on TV.  Debbie looked at me pityingly and asked what an owl would be doing in the squadroom of the Manhattan Special Victims Unit, and I had to admit she had a point. Deploying the mute button confirmed that, while Detectives Stabler and Benson had fallen silent, Olly was indeed still telling his mates loudly about the mice he’d eaten, dropping pellets and rotating his head through 360 degrees, and all the other things owls do so well. So, we have owls. Or at least, an owl.

I’ve been feeling a bit flat this week, to be honest, what with the wishy-washy after effects of being ill, the oppressive nature of the mountain of work I have allowed to build up, and the feeling of time slipping through my grasp without anything significant being achieved. I have been ploughing steadily on, wherever and whenever I could actually get on with any specific task, grappling with laying out books and also the complexities of email marketing.  Sometimes, though, I feel like I am just shooting into the brown, whistling in the dark, whatever, and I want to go away and live in a Yurt in the woods with only the owls for company, and weave my own bread and bake my own curtains. I blame Thoreau.

I did sort of get my own back for the owl debacle when I was showing Debbie a book I’d bought online. A history, with photos, of Elloughton, Brough and Brantingham, where I grew up, by Denny Lincoln. It came out in 1998, apparently, but somehow I had missed it until now, despite the fact that it mentions my family and even quotes my cousin Joyce. The quotation in question is about when they were bombed out of their house in 1943 by a Luftwaffe parachute mine that missed Blackburn’s aircraft factory and landed in Skillings Lane instead, taking off the front of the house and blowing the front door through the house and into the back garden.  Auntie Nancy flung herself on Joyce and the two boys and probably saved them from serious injury or even death as their home disintegrated around them. Uncle Bert was out on ARP duty, and their lodger, upstairs, slept through it all!

I was reading this to Deb and mentioned that the crater left by the mine was 80 feet by 30 feet, apparently, according to the author.  Debbie asked me if that was how big the bombs were, and I patiently explained that no, the actual bombs were much smaller and the apparent disparity between the size of the bomb and the eventual size of the crater was down to the fact that the bomb detonated and blew up on impact. The clue is in the title. I don’t know if she really thought this, or if she was just winding me up, but who knows what does on in her little furry crinkly walnut of a brain.

So, anyway, like I said, a flat week. Except for one wonderful high spot, when on Tuesday at 6pm, Cary, my wheelchair services lady, brought round some old canvases that her mum had purchased for her painting before she died, plus her mum's old easel, a custom-made wooden box (made by her dad for her mum) of oil paints, thinners and media, plus some brushes, and various other goodies. I was truly touched, not only by the generosity of the gift in material terms, but also because some of these things (eg the box and easel) are heirlooms.

She replied that she's been following the "art giveaway" and that she wants me to put them all to the best possible use, raising funds for Mossburn, Rain Rescue and FOSTBC. So there you go. I was totally blown away by this gesture. Top lady.  Now, of course, the responsibility falls upon me to use them wisely,  not that I need any encouragement, as again I have spent much more time painting this week than I really should, and while doing it, I have been as happy as a pig in archives, to the detriment of my burgeoning “to do” list, and next week I really do need to stop fannying about like Fotherington-Thomas and get down to some real work!

I have also been watching quite a lot of TV, especially about the first world war, which is all over the BBC at the moment, for obvious reasons. Debbie and I argue about the causes of the first world war (well, it  makes a change from whose turn it was to pay the gas bill) but I maintain that it was certainly not helped by rivalry over naval power and empire, military brinkmanship,  unwise treaties, and the speed and ease with which armies could be mobilized, compared to wars of previous centuries.  So it was with a considerable amount of trepidation that I looked upon the unfolding events in Ukraine this week.

No sooner has the Winter Olympics at Sotchi come to an end, than Mr Putin reverts to type and in a desperate attempt to assert his masculinity and prove he is not gay, he sends in several plane loads of no doubt heterosexual Russian commandos and special forces, to seize the airport and protect the Crimean bases of the Russian fleet. In response, Ukraine mobilizes its army in turn.  Thank God we haven’t gone and signed any treaties this time around that might have committed us to safeguarding Ukrainian neutrality, like we had for Belgium in 1914.  Ah. Er, except for The Budapest Memorandum, which sounds like it might be a book by Tom Clancy, but is in fact an agreement signed in 1991 by Bill Clinton, John Major, Boris Yeltsin and Leonid Kuchma - the then-rulers of the USA, UK, Russia and Ukraine. It promises we will protect Ukraine's borders, in return for Ukraine giving up its nuclear weapons. A definite brown-trouser moment. I think it’s time to check if that old air raid shelter on the Isle of Arran is still for sale.  Those of us who thought John Major would go down in history  merely for the cones hotline and shagging Edwina Currie may yet be forced to think again.

Not that the Crimea has a monopoly on crackpot politicians with dangerous right-wing views. Torquay, of all places, was invaded this week by the lunatic fringe of UKIP. Actually, UKIP is a party where the fabric and the fringe are the other way on.  Normally the fringe is something narrow along the edge. In UKIP we have a party which is 99% lunatic fringe.  Although Nigel Farage, bless him, did say one thing this week which is absolutely, 100% true, and with which (whisper it not in Gath, publish it not in the streets of Ashkelon) I absolutely, 100% agree with him.

Farage told members attending the party conference that because Britain is unable to challenge freedom of movement within the EU the government is "conning the public that we have a degree of control over this". I agree with him because I was saying this even before he was.  However, I totally disagree with his proposed solutions for it, coming as they do with a generous but subtle leavening of BNP-lite racism and bigotry, but you can’t deny he is right, and the sooner mainstream politicians stop posturing and farting about and actually start to deal with that problem, the better, because at present there is a dangerous  power vacuum which is in grave peril of being filled by UKIP, giving us a country where women are compelled by law to clean behind the fridge, gay people are put in the stocks for causing localised flooding, and anyone vaguely brown is deported to Bongo-Bongo Land.

The more I look at the news, actually, these days, the more I find myself shaking my head in disbelief. It seems that the US National Security Agency has been snooping on the Yahoo webcam chats of millions of people. A leaked GCHQ report into this practice, which found its way into the media, stated, rather plummily:

"Unfortunately … it would appear that a surprising number of people use webcam conversations to show intimate parts of their body to the other person"

I don't know which I find more disturbing, actually: the thought of NSA analysts trawling through millions of images of one-handed mouse clickers with their faces contorted at the moment of bliss, in the hope of finding someone naked but for a suicide vest; or the fact that this particular specific use of web cams seems to have come as a surprise to GCHQ! A sub to "Beautiful Agony" would have been cheaper, quicker, and probably more educational.

Also leaked this week were a set of compliance reports by Natural England’s badger cull monitors. They showed that some badgers killed in the plot culls were shot in the wrong body area including the head, or were wounded. Two of them were wounded, chased, and had to be shot a second time. In one case five to 10 minutes elapsed between the first and second shot. We’ve already established that the culls were ineffective and that they were expensive – for what it cost to kill each badger, they could have put them up at the Ritz for 11 days – and now we have, officially confirmed, that it was cruel and inhumane as well.  Despite this, however,  George Eustice, the Farming Minister, is reported to have said the Government would not be duty bound to follow the advice of its independent expert panel, and that the cap on licences to kill in England, currently restricted to 10 per year, could be lifted!

Should we be surprised? Not really. The Junta likes killing defenceless targets. I think they actually get off on it.  This week, as part of Iain Duncan Smith’s continuing blitzkrieg on the ill, the DWP sent a letter to a woman in Lancashire who has been in a coma for two months, suggesting she should up her game and make more effort to find a job! Quite right, too, lazy article, lying there all day – the least she could do is apply to be an extra in Casualty.  The letter was condemned by her MP, Labour member Simon Danczuk, which sounds as it should be, until you remember he is the twonk who suggested there was nothing wrong with making fresh claimants wait an extra fortnight. Given Labour’s lamentable lack of anything which might be construed as opposition, I expect Rachel Reeves to pop up any day now saying she totally approves of the DWP’s letter and that if elected in 2015, Labour would go further, and insist that the ashes of dead pensioners should be used by the council to grit the roads in icy conditions, as the country simply can no longer afford to pay them for doing nothing.

And so we came to Sunday, the feast day of St Chad. Chad, who lived from 634-672AD, is the patron saint of Mercia, Lichfield, and astronomers.  Most of what we know of St Chad comes from the writing of the venerable Bede, who in turn got it at first hand from the monks of Lastingham, where both Chad and his brother Cedd were abbots.

St Chad appears to have originally been Irish, and was trained by St Aidan at Lindisfarne, then spent some time in Ireland with St Egbert. At the time when St Chad was flourishing, the Benedictine Rule was spreading across Europe, and there was still a dichotomy in Britain between the Celtic version of Christianity and the Roman version, including over when Easter was to be celebrated, and the style of monastic tonsure. I know life was short, nasty and brutish in the 7^th century, but wouldn’t it be nice today if all we had to argue over was different hairstyles and the dates of official holidays? 

The early church in the area was deeply intertwined with the ruling Northumbrian dynasty and another of Chad’s brothers, Caelin, introduced Ethelwald to Cedd.  Ethelwald, a nephew of King Oswiu, had been appointed to administer the coastal area of Deira. Caelin suggested to Ethelwald the foundation of a monastery, in which he could one day be buried, and where prayers for his soul would continue, and according to Bede, Ethelwald, practically forced on Cedd a gift of a desolate place at Lastingham, near Pickering, on the North York Moors, and told him to build his monastery there.

By 664AD, Cedd has died of the plague and Chad succeeded to the position of abbot at Lastingham. Apparently he would break off reading whenever a gale sprang up, and call on God to have pity on humanity. If the storm intensified, he would shut his book altogether and prostrate himself in prayer. During prolonged storms or thunderstorms he would go into the church itself to pray and sing psalms until calm returned. His monks obviously regarded this as an extreme reaction even to English weather and asked him to explain. Chad explained that storms are sent by God to remind humans of the day of judgement and to humble their pride, which these days we can probably refer to as the UKIP position. He would have had his work cut out this last winter.

King Oswiu eventually got around to asking St Chad to become bishop of Northumbria, stepping into a prolonged and complicated wrangle over who should succeed to the post, some of the earlier contenders having also succumbed to the plague. The successor should really have been St Wilfred, but Bede seems to imply that Oswiu got fed up of waiting for Wilfred to return home after his ordination, and decided to step in and take action.  The designation of bishop of Northumbria eventually spread to include York. Chad spent his time travelling and preaching, but he was soon to fall foul of the continuing rivalry between Celtic and Roman Christian traditions.

In 669, a new Archbishop of Canterbury, Theodore of Tarsus, sent by Pope Vitalian arrived in England. He immediately set off on a tour of the country, bent on tackling abuses and rooting out unorthodox practice. He instructed Chad to step down and Wilfrid, who had by now returned, to take over. According to Bede, Theodore was so impressed by Chad's humility that he did at least confirm his ordination as bishop, while still insisting he step down from his position. Chad retired gracefully and returned to his post as abbot of Lastingham, and  Wilfrid now became bishop of the Northumbrians at York.

There was, however, to be one last twist. Later that same year, King Wulfhere of Mercia requested a bishop. Wulfhere had converted to Christianity, but  Archbishop Theodore refused to consecrate a new bishop. Instead he recalled Chad out of his retirement at Lastingham. Chad was consecrated bishop of the Mercians and of the Lindsey people, meaning more or less the whole of modern Lincolnshire was under Mercian control at that time.

Chad's responsibilities centred on the middle Trent and lower Tame, the area around Tamworth, Lichfield and Repton but Wulfhere donated land at Lichfield for Chad to build a monastery. It was because of this that the centre of the Diocese of Mercia ultimately became settled at Lichfield. The Lichfield monastery was probably partly staffed by monks from Lastingham, including Chad's old retainer, Owin.

There was also an outpost in Lindsey, referred to by Bede as “Ad Barwae”. This is probably Barrow upon Humber: where an Anglo-Saxon monastery has been excavated. This was easily reached by river from the Midlands and close to an easy crossing of the River Humber, from Winteringham to Brough Haven, or from South Ferriby to North Ferriby [although these days it crouches under the shadow of the Humber Bridge] allowing rapid communication along surviving Roman roads with Lastingham. Chad remained abbot of Lastingham throughout his life, and rotated his time between that monastery and the communities at both Lichfield and Barrow on Humber, covering difficult terrain, with woodland, heath and mountain over much of the centre and large areas of marshland to the east. Chad worked in Mercia and Lindsey for two and a half years before he too died of plague. Yet St. Bede considered that Chad's two years as bishop were decisive in the conversion of Mercia.

St Chad died on 2nd March 672, and was buried at the Church of Saint Mary which later became part of the cathedral at Lichfield, but in true saintly fashion, he couldn’t just die, it had to be a major production number.

Bede says that Owin the retainer was working outside the oratory at Lichfield. Suddenly, Owin heard the sound of joyful singing, coming from heaven, gradually coming closer until it filled the roof of the oratory itself. Then there was silence for half an hour, followed by the same singing going back the way it had come.

An hour later, Chad called him in and told him to fetch the seven brothers from the church. Chad gave his final address to the brothers, urging them to keep the monastic discipline and then he told them that he knew his own death was near, speaking of death as "that friendly guest who is used to visiting the brethren". He asked them to pray, then blessed them and dismissed them. Owin returned a little later and saw Chad privately. He asked about the singing. Chad told him that he must keep it to himself, but that the angels had come to call him to his heavenly reward, and in seven days they would return to fetch him. So it was that Chad weakened and died on 2nd March, which remains his feast day.

St Chad appears to have been one of those saints who, like St Cuthbert, continued travelling after death. According to Bede, Chad was venerated as a saint almost immediately after his death, and his relics were translated to a new shrine at Lichfield. He remained the centre of an important cult throughout the Middle Ages. The cult was commemorated in two places - his tomb, in the apse, directly behind the high altar of Lichfield cathedral; and more particularly his skull, which was kept in a special Head Chapel, above the south aisle.

At the dissolution of the Shrine during the Reformation, in about 1538, Prebendary Arthur Dudley of Lichfield Cathedral removed and retained some relics, probably a travelling set.  [Shades of the reliquary designed as carry on luggage for air travel, which might have come from Father Ted but was actually used in the case of St Therese of Lisieux]. These relics were eventually passed to Dudley’s nieces, Bridget and Katherine Dudley, of Russells Hall. In 1651, they reappeared, when a farmer Henry Hodgetts of Sedgley was on his death-bed and kept praying to St Chad. When the priest hearing his last confession, Fr Peter Turner SJ, asked  the old farmer why he called upon Chad. Henry replied, "because his bones are in the head of my bed".

He instructed his wife to give the relics to the priest, and they found their way to the Seminary at St Omer, in France. After the persecution of Catholics had lessened somewhat,  in the early 19th century, the relics found their way to Sir Thomas Fitzherbert-Brockholes of Aston Hall, near Stone, Staffordshire. When his chapel was cleared after his death, his chaplain, Fr Benjamin Hulme, discovered the box containing the relics, which were then examined and presented to Bishop Thomas Walsh, Vicar Apostolic of the Midland District in 1837 and were enshrined in the new St. Chad's Cathedral, Birmingham, opened in 1841, in a new ark designed by A. W.  Pugin.  At the present time, the remaining relics, some long bones, are now on the high altar of St Chad’s RC cathedral in Birmingham, and have been authenticated as 'true relics' by the Vatican authorities. Just as well, after all their travels and travails.

Since 1919, an Annual Mass and Solemn Outdoor Procession of the Relics has been held at St Chad's Cathedral, on the Saturday nearest to his Feast Day, 2nd March. In folklore, St. Chad's Day is traditionally considered the most propitious day to sow broad beans in England, so I hope you have got yours in. I haven’t, but I must remember to add a tin to the next Sainsbury’s order, in his honour.

So, ladies and gentlemen, I give you St Chad.  Again, I think, at such a distance it is difficult to see what made him saintly, especially at a time when religion and the struggle for political hegemony in an emerging nation were so inextricably mixed. By Bede’s account though, he was a humble man, preferring to walk everywhere rather than to ride, and I was struck in that respect by his likeness to Fr Vincent McNabb, of whom I have written in previous blogs. He used to tramp round the streets of his London parish wearing a cassock and army boots, ministering to the poor, and he once wrote:

"Buy boots you can walk in. Walk in them. Even if you lessen the income of the General Omnibus Company, or your family doctor; you will discover the human foot. On discovering it, your joy will be as great as if you had invented it. But this joy is the greatest, because no human invention even of Mr. Ford or Mr. Marconi is within a mile of a foot."

And of course, St Chad’s premonition of his own death is echoed by Fr McNabb’s last sermon, delivered to his wartime congregation at the Sisters of Mercy in 1943:

"And now dear sisters, I have some very good news for you. This is the last time I shall be speaking to you together in this chapel. You know in these days everyone is being called up.... I too have been called up!... And for what? To the King of Kings, and that not for the duration but for Life Everlasting! The words of the Psalm, Rejoice at the things that were said to me - with joy I have entered the House of the Lord, are filling my heart with joy."

Well, dear reader, let’s hope we can all avoid getting called up, in either the wartime or the religious sense, a little while longer. If I can just hold out and do a few dozen or a few hundred more paintings, while I can still hold a paintbrush, and before the cataracts which the optician blithely mentioned kick in,  I can at least raise some more money for “my” charities and do some good with what remains of my life. You may think, as I do sometimes, that this is a bit of a comedown – has my life really come to this – but on the other hand, you know what they say; before you criticise a man, you should walk a mile in his shoes – then, when you do criticise him, you will be a mile away. And, more crucially, you will also have his shoes.

Painting is strangely liberating, though, and of course in my case, I won’t be walking anywhere in anyone’s shoes any time soon, bitter-sweet as it would be to hear ATOS declare me fit, if I could do so.  No, next week’s work beckons the hands, and no doubt it will be another week when I find myself wondering, along with Morrisey, why I give valuable time to people who don’t care if I live or die. I was looking for a job, and then I found a job, and heaven knows I’m miserable now. And it’s somehow already St Chad’s day, and I haven’t got my broad beans in yet.  Still, we press on. I’ve often said life is like a pilgrimage, but Vincent McNabb says it’s more like a sermon:

"Some people say, I do not like sermons . I never go to hear a sermon. They do not know that these very words are themselves a sermon. They do not realise that every deed done in the sight or hearing of another is a preached sermon. The best or the worst of all sermons is a life led.

So I guess I had better get on with this sermon called life, and hope and pray that we’re not reading the next instalment in a fallout shelter. Heaven knows I’m miserable now, but heaven has also sent me a mission to paint, I guess. It’s too early to say if this is the answer to the question I’ve been asking in many different ways since 2010, but, as the Zen masters say – sitting quietly, doing nothing, spring comes, and the grass grows by itself.