Dispensing Witan Wisdom Since The Days of King Eggbound The Unready...

Not to mention "Left-Wing Pish"

Sunday 29 September 2013

Epiblog for Michaelmas


It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley, but at least we’ve made some progress.  The weather’s been quite warm, as well, and we’ve even seen some sunshine, to be treasured and savoured like the last drops of a particularly expensive and fine dessert wine, as we won’t have much more of it this year.  It’s a shame, really, that there wasn’t some way of automatically declaring a holiday and going off somewhere in the camper van, but both Debbie and I have responsibilities to fulfil, tiresome as it is.

So, this week, I have been largely reduced once again to watching the sun outside rather than basking in it.  Meanwhile Debbie has been trundling back and forth between college and outreach centres, but at least nothing else has fallen off the camper (yet).

Matilda’s been taking full advantage of the last bloom of summer, wandering around on the decking and coming in and out through her cat flap.  Come the evening, though, when the dark starts drawing in (and it’s getting earlier now, day by day) and it starts to get cooler, she can always be found curled up in a jumble of cat blankets, on the foot of my bed.  Next week, she’s due to go back to the vet for her annual jabs. I can’t believe that we’ve had her a year, but we have. A year and three weeks, in fact. The years get shorter as you get older, proof, if any were needed, that all time is entirely subjective.

Misty, meanwhile, continues to entertain and amuse. Debbie’s plan to tire her out by taking her on longer walks doesn’t seem to be working, I am afraid.  She’s quite capable of doing a ten mile walk and still coming back home from it with enough surplus energy to run a small power station, which is more than you can say for Debbie.

She still insists on asserting her dominance over Zak in the pack order by sitting on him at every opportunity. Poor old Zak settles down with a heavy sigh and accepts his fate, or eventually gets off the chair and lies on the dog bed instead.  Freddie, meanwhile, sleeps through it all.  Misty’s also got this strange habit of flattening out the cushions before she flops down on them, and on Saturday night, she managed to fold the dog bed over twice before sitting on it. Debbie reckons that we ought to be able to harness this quest for neatness and folding, by training Misty up to carry out a wide range of domestic duties. I have actually read, on a Border Collie training web site, of an owner who trained his dog to go around the house picking up discarded laundry and putting it in the laundry basket, but I suspect that, with Misty, you might not get your own knickers back. Which could, of course, be an adventure in itself.

As a borderline collie capable of committing completely random acts of unexplained stupidity, Misty at least ensures that life is never predictable. For some reason, on Thursday, she seemed to want to investigate Colin’s side of the house every fifteen minutes, and I got tired of calling her back. Something was obviously spooking her in the kitchen, but I couldn’t see or hear anything out of the ordinary. Anyway, I got fed up of calling her back, so I decided to go and investigate. I trundled my wheelchair through the connecting door and found her in Colin’s front room, with, to my surprise, no signs of her having caused any obvious chaos, apart from her having eaten Matilda’s cat food.

So I turfed her out, and she disappeared back through the connecting door. Because we were/are in the process of doing up the house, a process which has been grievously delayed by my illness, but is still proceeding, albeit at a glacial place, there are numerous places where DIY stuff is just sort of “dumped” all around the house.  One of these is a spare door, which is due to go on upstairs somewhere, but which at the moment is just propped up on our side of the door through to Colin’s. Unfortunately, on coming back into this side of the house, Misty dislodged it somehow, and it fell at 45 degrees across the open doorway, neatly trapping me next door. 

My mobile was on charge in the kitchen, so summoning help was out of the question. Not that there was anyone to sumo, especially. My first attempt to shift the rogue door on my own confirmed to me that it was too heavy, so I resigned myself to an afternoon’s captivity until Debbie came home at teatime to rescue me.  However, eventually, by taking the tray off the front of my wheelchair and sort of bending forwards, wedging my upper half under the door, I was able to shift its weight and stand it back up again, freeing myself.  I trundled back into the kitchen, and Misty lifted a quizzical eyebrow at me as much as to say “What kept you?”

All too soon, it was Friday, but this week, Friday wasn’t a cause for panic about office work left undone, but instead a cause for celebration, because Owen was coming to help us with some more work on the house.  My energy levels were pretty low, and I was a bit concerned that I wouldn’t be able to be as much help as I normally am, even though that is never much help to start with. Fortunately Owen was more than able to compensate for my lack of va-va-voom, and by the end of Friday the door catch had been fixed, the stove had two new firebricks, a new baffle plate, a new riddling grate, and a new door glass, and was already showing signs of increased efficiency; the gaps between the boiler pipes down behind the stud wall in the kitchen had been filled in with plaster, and the errant wall socket mounted on the MDF cladding.  Owen called it a day at that, and I cooked a meal for us all, accompanied by a bottle of beer or two, which we consumed sitting convivially around the refurbished stove.

On Saturday we followed it up by tidying the back downstairs room in Colin’s, where my bed is, doing a quadripartite division of the contents into four categories: keep, skip, charity shop, and Ebay. In between times, we discussed anything and everything, as we always do when we get together, ranging from how local authorities make methane out of landfill to why the electricity companies are getting away with highway robbery, and the dual language road signs in Wales, to name but a few. I didn’t learn until after he’d left for home on Saturday, that, on the latter score, there is apparently a proposal to rename the Welsh village of Varteg, up the valley from Pontypool, “Farteg”, because there is historically no letter “v” in the ancient Welsh alphabet. I really do hope they get that one adopted,  so it can join the short but select list of places such as Twatt, in the Orkneys, Condom, in France, Intercourse, Pennsylvania, and that village in Austria whose name won’t get past Blogger’s profanity filter, as locations where young men flock to have amusing photographs taken by their friends.

Meanwhile, a fashion show in Paris, hosted by one Nina Ricci, who I must confess I have never heard of, was invaded by two women from the Ukrainian feminist group FEMEN, who mounted the catwalk (one of them was punched by one of the models, who must have had an extra stick of celery that morning, to raise the energy - anyway, sisterhood is powerful, I guess.)

Having been evicted from the event, they then decided to extend further the cause of feminism and oppose the objectification of women by posing topless outside the building, for a group of (exclusively male) photographers. Is it just me, or am I missing some irony here? Nope? Just me, then.

The outside world’s news hasn’t impinged much on the Holme Valley, to be honest. But I did want to clarify what I wrote last week about martyrdom, especially in the aftermath of the Kenyan shopping mall massacre, by people who would probably describe themselves as “martyrs” – wrongly, in my opinion. To my mind, martyrdom is a specific and narrow instance whereby you lose your own life for your beliefs, and no one else is harmed.  So, in that sense, the song I used to finish off last week’s posting, The Ballad of Jean Desprez (which is actually a first world war poem by Robert Service, set to music by Country Joe MacDonald, of all people) wasn’t a very good illustration of martyrdom, since, although at the end he ensures his own certain death, he does so by shooting the German officer, which, in martyrdom terms, is a case of “close, but no cigar.” It’s still a good song, though.

There have been a lot of people rushing to condemn religion as a whole in the wake of the Kenyan atrocity; personally, I think blaming “religion” – such a wide term as to be meaningless – is like blaming the National Trust for Scotland because people occasionally fall off Ben Nevis.  The point is that the people who go up mountains and fall off them to their deaths are frequently there in circumstances where they have been advised not to go into the hills that day, in the same way as the people who kill other people for belonging to the “wrong” religion or the “wrong” God, are doing so despite the advice of their own holy book’s teaching. Or to put it another way, Al-Shabaab or whatever they are called have about as much to do with the religion of Islam as the Westboro Baptist Church has to do with Christianity. 

The problem is not religion per se, but people cherry-picking, taking “religion” or “religious” ideas and warping them to justify violence, often for ends which are actually, and actively, political, but it is easier for the mad mullahs to whip up a frenzy of support by threatening impressionable followers under the pretext of compliance being something connected with their religious duty.  And we, of course, contribute to this frenzy by invading their countries and bombing them, abroad, and at home, by the media, whenever they need a “Muslim” comment on anything, making sure they seek out the most extreme, fundamentalist, wingnut, someone who is already two stops past Barking and well on the way to Stratford-Atte-Bow, and presenting them as if they are “the voice of the Muslim community”.

So, the outside world is a mad, random, depressing place. No change there, then. I was also a sad place this week, because we lost another ally, acquaintance and even, yes, friend, although I never met the bloke. Bob is dead. No, not Bob the Wizard, though this Bob of whom I speak was, in his own way, a wizard, conjuring spells out of pixels and machine code, to bring about marvels and help create the Mustardland message board, hosted by Peet, to which many people migrated when the BBC mistakenly and stupidly shut down its own version of it.  The tributes to Bob and his work stood at eight pages, last time I looked, and no doubt more will have been posted by today. It’s a strange idea, feeling sorry for the death of someone you never met in person and never really knew, but it’s entirely symptomatic of our age – an age when I learned of the death of one of my distant cousins by text message.  I said something to the effect of I could imagine Bob crossing over into geek heaven and being greeted with an enormous “Windows Fanfare” along the lines of Bunyan, where Pilgrim crosses over and all the trumpets sounded for him on the other side.  I was corrected by someone who pointed out that it would have been for Bob, an Ubuntu fanfare, which would indeed have been much more fitting.

And so we came to Sunday, and Michaelmas, or the Feast of St Michael and All Angels. It’s also the feast of St Grimoaldus and of St Hripsime, both of whom I briefly toyed with and rejected, despite their silly names. Nothing much is known about Grimoaldus and Hripsime was yet another victim of the Roman persecutions and was roasted alive then had her tongue cut out. I think we’ve done enough on martyrdom for the time being. St Michael was victorious in defeating the rebellious angels and throwing Lucifer out of Heaven. As for the spiritual stuff this week, I am not sure I buy into the concept of a war in Heaven, other than symbolically. The problem for me has always been that if Big G is the essence of goodness, all knowing and all-powerful, a) how did evil occur in Heaven and b) how come God didn’t hear of it and squish it?  I realise that the idea of St Michael leading an army of victorious angels and winning a battle is an allegorical concept, stemming from the medieval view of the world of Heaven mirroring the earthly world, with the same sort of ranks, divisions, thrones, principalities, and powers. But I still struggle with the theology behind it. I suppose a theologian might say that if God is to encompass everything, then by definition that must also include evil, because if God didn’t include evil, then by definition again, he/she/it wouldn’t be omnipotent and wouldn’t be God.  It is the speck of grit in the oyster that leads ultimately to the “pearl pleasaunt to prince’s paye”.

Also, as I think I may even have said before, “good” and “evil” are concepts viewed from a human perspective, which is not necessarily God’s perspective. An entity which is capable of taking on itself the sins of the world, outside time for all eternity, may well have different and unknowable aims and objectives to those by which we govern our own lives and judge ourselves and others. Putting it bluntly, God may find it perfectly morally acceptable to sweep away thousands of people n a Tsunami, for reasons completely lost on us.  Indeed, if God is in fact an infinite amplituhedron pulsing away behind everything that ever was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end, amen, then the concept of reason (as we conceive it) itself may well be alien to God.  Does this mean that, because God may do “bad” things for no “reason” that God itself is bad? Who judges God? It’s not as if there’s an independent regulator called Godsted.

Anyway, Michaelmas is technically the Feast of St Michael, who is the patron saint of grocers, mariners, paratroopers, police, chivalric knights, and sick people, but, strangely enough, not men’s underwear.  As a “quarter day” (corresponding to “Lady Day” on 25 March)  it was also the beginning and the end of the husbandman’s year, the time when the bailiff or the reeve went round the tenant farmers and collected their rents; a time for getting in the last of the harvest, battening down the hatches, and looking forward to winter. The last sheaves would be gathered into a corn dolly, which would be kept carefully through the dark, cold weeks ahead, and then ploughed under again in the new year, giving it back to the land which bore it, in order to maintain continuity of the crops.   The grain was stored in granaries, the fish was salted away, ready for winter, the Equinox had been and gone, and days were getting shorter.

Fairs were held at Michaelmas, and a “stubble-goose” was often roasted – the “stubble” in the name referring to their being stubble-fed at the end of harvest.  Sometimes, a goose would also be offered in part-payment of, or even in lieu of, rent, if cash was in short supply. Other traditions link the eating of Michaelmas geese to the fact that Good Queen Bess was allegedly eating roast goose when the welcome news arrived of the defeat of the Spanish Armada, and thus it became a tradition of rejoicing. As Gascoyne wrote in 1575:

"And when the tenauntes come
    to paie their quarter's rent,
They bring some fowle at Midsummer,
    a dish of fish in Lent,
"At Christmasse a capon,
    at Michaelmasse A goose,
And somewhat else at New-yeres tide,
    for feare their lease flie loose."

The historian Blount is quoted, in Brand’s Popular Antiquities, as saying:

that "goose-intentos" is a word used in Lancashire, where "the husbandmen claim it as a due to have a goose intentos on the sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost; which custom took origin from the last word of the old church-prayer of that day: 'Tua, now quæsumus, Domine, gratia semper præveniat et sequitur; ac bonis operibus jugiter præstet esse intentos.' The common people very humorously mistake it for a goose with ten toes."

I guess you really had to be there.  Ginger was also a popular spice to be incorporated in recipes around Michaelmas – I suppose it makes sense to try and warm yourself up a bit, before winter proper sets in. On the Isle of Skye, the Michaelmas custom used to be to process through the villages, and each family would bake a particularly large Michaelmas loaf, full of additional ingredients, called a “Michaelmas Bannock”, and everyone in the house that night, be they family or visitor, was obliged to partake of it.

Many of these traditions and customs have fallen out of use, though the word “Michaelmas” also survives in the names of University and Law terms, in the elections of local government officers, and in Michaelmas daisies (Aster Tradescanti).  Old Michaelmas (because of the vagaries of changes in the calendars over the years) used to be celebrated on October 11th, after which day you were no longer supposed to pick blackberry bushes. This is because, by tradition, when there was war in heaven and St Michael and his army of archangels defeated Lucifer and cast him out, he fell to earth on October 11th and landed in a bramble-bush, cursing it. [The Yorkshire tradition says he spat on all the brambles, while in Cornwall, he is said to have peed on them. Take your pick. Or pick your own, as the sign says. ]

Milton seems to think it was summer when Lucifer was chucked out of heaven, in Paradise Lost, though, and let’s face it, he should know:

thrown by angry Jove
Sheer o're the Chrystal Battlements: from Morn
To Noon he fell, from Noon to dewy Eve,
A Summers day; and with the setting Sun
Dropt from the Zenith like a falling Star,

In Kidderminster, Worcestershire, there was a Michaelmas tradition called “The Lawless Hour” where a bell rang, following the election of the local dignitaries for the year, and, for the following hour, people were free to roam the streets and pelt each other, and the said dignitaries, during their procession, with cabbage-stalks and apples. I’d quite like to see that one brought back, actually. Meanwhile, in Bishop’s Stortford, Old Michaelmas Day (see above) was celebrated as “Ganging Day”, another excuse to indulge in public mayhem, here described in a newspaper report dating from 1787:

"On the morning of this day, called Ganging-day, a great number of young men assemble in the fields, when a very active fellow is nominated the leader. This person they are bound to follow, who, for the sake of diversion, generally chooses the route through ponds, ditches, and places of difficult passage. Every person they meet is bumped, male or female; which is performed by two other persons taking them up by their arms, and swinging them against each other. The women in general keep at home at this period, except those of less scrupulous character, who, for the sake of partaking of a gallon of ale and a plumb-cake, which every landlord or publican is obliged to furnish the revellers with, generally spend the best part of the night in the fields, if the weather is fair; it being strictly according to ancient usage not to partake of the cheer any where else."

I’ve been to Bishop’s Stortford. There isn’t much to do there, which probably explains it. Actually, it occurs to me that some of these ancient customs, particularly the ones mixing alcohol, disorder and rowdiness, these days now take place every Friday night in most town centre precincts.  Some towns had specific “hiring fairs” where farm workers would gather to seek employment for the coming year. At Sturbridge Fair, on the outskirts of Cambridge, a leather glove, six feet tall and filled with cotton and wood chips, was hoisted aloft to mark the fact that King John had granted permission for the event to take place in 1211. The glove being a symbol of the handshake of trust. These hiring fairs were called “Mop” fairs in the Midlands, because of the Midlands dialect word for a “tuft” – a Mop. Prospective employees would wear about their person a tuft or “mop” to show their particular skills, so that would-be employers could find the trade they were seeking at a glance – shepherds sported a tuft of wool, thatchers, some strands of straw, carters, a tuft of whipcord, and so on. These are the types of events which Hardy captured so well in The Mayor of Casterbridge and Far From the Madding Crowd.

I wonder what my “Mop” would be? A quill stuck in my lapel, I suppose, or a bit of paper. Not that it’s anything but academic. In the nineteenth-century, in my condition, I’d probably have been carted off to the workhouse or the asylum, as a Pauper Lunatic, and – given that it’s the Tory party conference, next week, I fully expect them to announce they are bringing that policy back if they win the next election.

Meanwhile, next week for me will be yet more of the same, albeit in a slightly more amenable habitat, thanks once again to the tireless work of Owen, who has been a true friend to us.  There’s still some hatch-battening to be done, and all the usual stuff as well, but we’ll see where we get to. We can only do what we can do. 

It’s a time for balancing and squaring up, clearing up and setting straight, and getting ready for the challenges of winter. But it’s also a time when we might have a couple more warm days, maybe to sit and sip some cider in the sun, catching its light in the glass.  It’s a time for Misty when she can walk with Deb on blowy days beside the reservoir under lowering skies, which is where she is right now. Or, more likely, they’ll be on their way back home. It’s getting to dusk, so I had better go and put the kettle on, and add some more coal to the stove, then I suppose it’ll be time to decide on what we’re having for tea.  All is safely gathered in, ere the winter storms begin.

Sunday 22 September 2013

Epiblog for the Feast of St Phocas



It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. One of those weeks when stuff comes at you from all sides, and it’s a bit like the Chinese army in the Korean War, you mow down the first row of them but behind that there’s another, and another and another… when old Shakeyspoke said that troubles never come as single spies, but in battalions, he never spake a truer word, forsooth.

I had already accepted that this was going to be a shitnastic week from the very start, what with my accounts to finish off and books to lay out and the usual daily round of tedious things to attempt in the never ending process of putting and keeping the house in order; plus, it was the first week Debbie was back teaching “properly”, and thus for much of it I was thrown back on my own resources.

At least when you’re busy, time passes relatively quickly, and from the point of view of the weather, I wasn’t missing a great deal by not sitting outside, except possibly a bad dose of rust and mildew. Some of the nights during the middle part of the week were actually a bit chilly chilly nip nip, so much so that when I went to bed, instead of taking that as her cue to jump off and begin her nocturnal prowlings, Matilda actually snuggled down deeper into the nest of old jumpers and crocheted cat-blankets at the foot of my duvet, and began purring contentedly.  This meant I had to sort of insinuate my legs into the bed to one side of her, but on the plus side, at least she kept my feet warm.  She only stayed an hour or so each time, and in the morning she was wandering around in the kitchen, yowling for food as usual, presumably having spent the night next to the stove, but maybe she is becoming more socialised at last.

As far as bad weather is concerned, rain is water off a dog’s back to Misty, she doesn’t seem to mind getting wet through and frozen stiff. It must be those sheepdog genes kicking in. Deb’s been keeping to a fairly strict regime of walks with her, not so much for Misty’s benefit alone, but also for hers – she’s decided that, as she got fit while scrambling over the mountains of Arran this summer, she wants to keep it up, and she’s even talking about doing the Three Peaks challenge with Misty. What Misty thinks about this, remains unrecorded at present but she’s a good little dog when it comes to walking, and will go all day if asked.  Tiggy would have done the same, but Freddie would probably be looking at the small print in his contract to see if he can resign. With Misty, we are, after all, talking about the dog here that, after a 10.9 mile walk on Arran which included climbing Goatfell, nevertheless still wanted to play “stones” on the beach that night, when we got back to our campsite at Dougarie at 10PM.

One bright spot in an otherwise bleak week happened on Thursday teatime, when I was hammering away at my keyboard (trying to get caught up, as usual) and suddenly there came a frantic knocking at the door. As the road outside has got busier and busier over the seventeen years we’ve lived here, and there have been one or two nasty accidents, I sort of half expected to find some hapless victim on the doorstep, covered in blood and asking to use my mobile. Instead, it was a short, swarthy courier who looked a bit like a cross between Austin Powers and a hobbit, wearing a high-vis waistcoat. He thrust a small, heavy cardboard box into my hands.

“Zis for you. Yes.” It was a statement, not a question, so I accepted it, and asked if it needed to be signed for.  English was obviously not his first language but he did manage to fling back “No, is no problem” over his shoulder as he scuttled back down the ramp as fast as his furry little feet would take him.  Given the speed of his departure, it did occur briefly to me to check whether the box was ticking, but in fact no sound issued from within, so I can only assume that he was behind schedule, and had to get back to the Shire before the Orcs caught up with him.

The box, meanwhile, puzzled me. It could be the envelopes I was expecting, but it felt too heavy for that. Wielding my medieval-style dagger of a letter-opener I managed to hack my way into it, and found to my delight it was three jars of home-made produce from my cousin Freda, in Fintona, County Tyrone; plum and pecan conserve, apple and red tomato chutney, and honey, apple and lemon sauce.  Having subsequently sampled them all, I can report back that they were/are all delicious, and indeed so far I have tried the chutney on meals as various as pasta bake and cheese on toast. I also tried the chutney on some pongy French "Pied d’Anglepoise" cheese, and it was absolutely divine. Misty was begging for crumbs so I gave her the toast crust with a bit of the melted cheese still on it. “There’s so much fat in that, you’ll have to do seven laps of the cricket field to get rid of it!” I laughed, and Debbie cast a hard look in my direction: “Fifty laps for you, then!”

Anyway, the week ground on, as weeks tend to do these days, with more bad days than good, and we got to Friday, which was in itself an achievement. And at least Debbie wasn’t teaching that day, so she could at least take it relatively easily. The day took an uplift though, when I had an unexpected text from my sister to say that she and Gary, her husband, were coming back down country on their way home from being on holiday at Richmond-in-Swaledale and were we open for visitors? I texted back hurriedly to say we were, and they duly arrived about noon, together with Sophie the Labradoodle. The last time I had seen anything quite as big and woolly as Sophie, it was a new-born calf in a field at Jackson Bridge.  Sophie met Misty and Misty met Sophie, and Misty decided to jump up in the chair and hide behind Zak for safety, while Freddie snored resolutely on through it all.

Eventually, Debbie’s dad arrived to take Zak and Freddie out for their walkies and the house was suddenly 50% emptier of dogs.  It was great to see Mandy and Gary, and to meet Sophie, and sad that they only had time for a flying visit, as they had to get back down the M1 before the usual Friday afternoon clag started. As it was, it still took them a further five hours to get home. Nevertheless, before they went, tea was drunk, and the conversation ranged from the likely prospects of Northampton Town FC to the likely disposal of dead relatives (the saga of the Crem de la Crem is still going on – see previous blogs for details).  Still, it was an unexpected and pleasant break in the relentless working week.

When Granny decided that she had to go home, however, she discovered that she could no longer find her glasses. A search of the kitchen and the conservatory ensued but to no avail. Fortunately, she had a spare pair here, and wore those for driving home.  Later on, I noticed her glasses were in the fruit bowl on the conservatory table. So I sent her a text saying: YOUR GLASSES ARE IN THE FRUIT BOWL, which has to count as one of the strangest and most surreal texts I have ever sent. A couple of days later, she phoned to say she couldn’t find her handbag at home, so I suggested to Debbie that she should check the fruitbowl, a suggestion which was received rather ungratefully, if I may say so.

Later, we watched the BBC’s history of country music, which was slightly confusing for me because until that programme, I hadn’t realised that Garth Crooks and Garth Brooks were in fact two different people. I am afraid I have form for this sort of thing; for a long time I thought Sheryl Crow and Shania Twain were the same person. If I’d thought about it, I ought have wondered, I suppose, how Garth Brooks managed to finish a concert, black up and still have time to scurry round to the “Match of the Day” studio.

Debbie had decided to declare Saturday a holiday, it being the only day when we might have a prayer of going off for the day in the camper van and so we spent Friday night discussing where might be feasible, and looking at various weather forecasts on line. Unfortunately, despite the BBC’s weather forecast (often found filed under “fiction”) that “summer would make a reappearance” this weekend, in fact the weather was poo in the Lake District, poo over the Three Peaks, poo at Malham, and misty and murky with low cloud over Mam Tor, Kinder Scout, and Ladybower. Which didn’t leave a lot of choice, really. The best of the weather seemed to be in the Holme Valley, in fact, so we ended up with Deb and Misty going for a walk around Holmebridge and Brownhills Reservoir, ending up back at Wessenden, while I stayed here and got on with some (yet more) work.

I’ve not been paying much attention to the news from the world at large, it’s the usual mixture of horror and garbage, I suppose. The Director of Public Prosecutions suggested new guidelines for sentencing “benefit cheats” on Monday, with sentences of up to ten years. [This is more than some of the sentences currently handed out for things such as rape and manslaughter.] The next day, Channel 4 reported that the DPP had been awarding massive tax-free golden parachutes to staff who had left, once more leading me to ask who exactly are the cheats and scroungers here?

Meanwhile, the Liberal Democrats have been holding one of their massively irrelevant conferences, in Glasgow of all places, where they try and pretend they haven’t been propping up The Blight for the last three years and making it possible for them to continue their ceaseless war of attrition on the ill, the poor and the disadvantaged.  The Liberal Democrat angle is that, apparently, if it hadn’t been for them, the Tories would have been even worse, which sort of ignores the fact that, without the votes of the Lib Dems, the Tories wouldn’t have been able to do any of it! But even if it was true, it’s a bit like being mugged by two robbers only to have one of them turn round afterwards and say to you “You’re lucky I was here – without me helping him mug you, he might have killed you!”

We’re now entering the febrile, pre-election “phoney war” where both major parties [and the Liberal Democrats] will be making increasingly grandiose promises of free school meals, tax breaks, and a Polish plumber in every bathroom. Even the Labour Party has finally woken up to the meaning of the word “Opposition” and said they will repeal the Bedroom Tax. Despite this, I am afraid the next election will still be about which set of drongos we loathe the least, leavened with an unhealthy slug of racist xenophobia.

And, as if politics wasn’t bad enough, the most depressing story of the week was, for me, the news that the two guard dogs which had been assigned to The Duke of Cambridge while he was stationed at RAF Valley on Anglesey have been put down, now he has left the service. The MOD’s response to the shitstorm of criticism that erupted was that one of the dogs was ill and the other was too unstable to be re-homed, which sort of begs the question, for me, that if they were that bad, why were they being used as guard-dogs in the first place?

I never believe anything I read in the papers either way, these days, unless I have written it, but obviously the principle of Cui Bono applies (or should that be Cui Bonio in this case?) It is in the MOD’s interests, having been caught out, to make the most of the dogs' unsuitability. They were obviously considered suitable up to the point where HRH "retired". There are rescues I know of that would have taken on an aggressive dog and tried their best with it but obviously there's aggressive and aggressive, and nobody at the MOD is going to go against an official statement. I'd just like to be certain that every avenue was explored and I sincerely hope these dogs didn't just fall through the crack because somebody couldn't be arsed to go an extra mile. I have my doubts. RIP, Blade and Brus, and indeed RIP all the other unwanted strays in the pounds who have been put down this week as part of the 7,000 unwanted dogs a year that die needlessly in this damn unfeeling compassionless country of ours.

The only comedy in the news this weekend was provided, predictably enough, by UKIP, in the shape of the wonderfully named Godfrey Bloom, who, in the course of one single day at the UKIP conference, managed to a) thwack Channel 4 reporter Michael Crick over the head with a UKIP brochure because he asked Bloom why there were no black faces on the cover and b) suggest that all women who fail to clean behind the fridge are “sluts”. The word “slut” does actually have an original meaning of someone who is less than fastidious with the housework, and the more modern idea, of it being someone who helps out the prostitutes at busy times, has only been grafted on to it relatively recently. Sadly, however, Bloom’s defence that he meant it in the original definition only goes to show that the vocabulary (and therefore one may assume the attitudes) of UKIP are still stuck in the 1950s. I wonder if he calls the waitress over by banging his tankard on the table and shouting “Wench!” I’m afraid that UKIP is getting a bit like Oscar Wilde’s definition of ignorance as a “delicate, exotic fruit” – touch it, and the "bloom" is gone.  Mind you I suppose people found the Brownshirts comical, at first.

The news story that most caught my eye, though, was that scientists (or mathematicians, or both I’m not entirely sure) have discovered a thing called the Amplituhedron. Apparently it’s a major breakthrough in quantum physics and I have no idea exactly what it is or how it works, so I am quoting verbatim, here:

…the term amplituhedron describes a class of theoretical geometric object defined within an infinite-dimensional space known as the Grassmannian that dramatically simplifies calculations of particle interactions of some quantum field theories. Amplituhedron theory challenges the notion that space-time locality and unitarity are necessary components of a model of particle interactions, as opposed to properties that emerge from some underlying phenomenon.

All got that? Good. The implications of this discovery are, apparently, apart from massively simplifying the business of computing particle interactions from hundreds of Feynman diagrams to one unified equation, that space and time may just be an illusion, something I [and many others] have long suspected. We’re sort of back to John Gribben now – yet again – where there is just this “thing” that is actually everything that ever was, is and shall be, and maybe that’s the amplituhedron.  Or – as Juliana of Norwich said back in 1338, about a small thing the size of a hazel nut which contained everything, shown to her by God in a mystical vision prefiguring this discovery by a few centuries;

And in þis he shewed me a lytil thyng þe quantite of a hasyl nott. lyeng in þe pawme of my hand as it had semed. and it was as rownde as eny ball. I loked þer upon wt þe eye of of my vnderstondyng. and I þought what may þis be. and it was answered generally thus. It is all þat is mad. I merueled howe it myght laste. for me þought it myght soden ly haue fall to nought for lytyllhed. & I was answered in my vnderstondyng. It lastyth & euer shall for god louyth it. and so hath all thyng his begynning by þe loue of god.

I shall be watching the development of the idea of the amplituhedron with great interest and very little comprehension.  So far, I have got Bob the wizard telling me “We are all one, and we are all contained in a point of light”, the Kabbala with its idea of “ain soph aour” or “limitless light” sparking off the whole universe, Juliana of Norwich and her hazel-nut, and now the Amplituhedron. One day they may all merge into focus with a single click of the kaleidoscope, and what we now see through a glass, darkly, we will see then, face to face.

And so we came to Sunday, and the Feast of St Phocas the Gardener. I must admit, once again, that St Phocas attracted me initially because of his extremely silly name. My only regret is that he has no apparent connection to the Scilly Isles, otherwise it would have been totally perfect for someone with a puerile sense of humour and hidden shallows, such as myself. Unfortunately, he came from a place with very little comic potential, Sinope, which is in present-day Turkey. Despite such a nondescript origin, he is now the patron saint of gardeners, sailors, hospitality, agricultural workers, boatmen, farm workers and field hands, gardeners, husbandmen, mariners, market-gardeners, sailors and watermen. Like most martyrs, Phocas is – regrettably - mainly famous for the manner of his death, which took place in 303AD.

His work, when he was alive, was cultivating a garden near the city gate of Sinope, combining the quiet and meditative nature of the work of cultivation with the exercise of daily prayer. He shared the fruits (and probably vegetables) of his labours with the poor, and offered shelter to travellers in the area who had no place to stay.

Needless to say, such largesse soon came to the notice of the authorities, in that particular area, the Romans, who were pagan. During the persecutions of Diocletian, it was probably not a good idea to stand out too much. In the manner of authorities the world over, they decided Phocas was too good to live, and decided to do him in. Soldiers were despatched to carry out the evil deed and, on nearing Sinope, they actually stopped at Phocas’s door, and accepted his offer of lodging, unaware that their host was the very man they had been sent to finish off; while at his table, they spoke openly of their mission. During the night, Phocas kept his vigil in prayer and even dug his own grave.  The next morning, he confessed to the soldiers that he was indeed the man they had been sent to kill. At first, ashamed by his humility and charity, they offered to go back and tell their superiors they had looked for Phocas, but could not find him, but in the end they gave in and beheaded him. It’s a striking story, and a more startling example of seizing the moral high ground you could not wish for. However, some scholars think it is actually a fusion of the lives of three men with the same improbable name: Phocas of Antioch, Phocas the Bishop of Sinope, and Phocas the Gardener.

Whatever the truth, St Phocas’s patronage of seafarers is marked in the custom of mariners to serve Phocas a portion of every meal; this was called "the portion of St. Phocas." This portion is paid for by one of the ship’s company and the price of it is given to the captain. When the ship comes into port, the money is distributed among the poor, in thanksgiving to their patron for a successful voyage. There is apparently a similar practice among sailors in the Black Sea of giving food offerings to an invisible supernatural entity known as the Klabautermann. St. Phocas is mentioned in W.H. Auden's poem, Horae Canonicae: Sext, where Auden describes the single-mindedness and concentration of someone who is a master of their art, whatever the art is: 

How beautiful it is,
that eye-on-the-object look.
To ignore the appetitive goddesses,
to desert the formidable shrines
of Rhea, Aphrodite, Demeter, Diana,
to pray instead to St Phocas,
St Barbara, San Saturnino,
or whoever one's patron is,
that one may be worthy of their mystery

This is only a passing mention in a work which is really about the nature of concentration on single-mindedness, but nevertheless, it’s good to see old Phocas getting a mention, isn’t it?

The story of St Phocas fills me with a sort of vague dread that I would ever be put in a similar situation.  Like these stories that you hear of people who offer to take the place of terrorist hostages or who fling themselves in front of their family – or sometimes even complete strangers – to take the bullet that was meant for them.  In relatively modern times we have the example of St Maximilian Kolbe. He was a Polish Franciscan who provided shelter, like St Phocas, only in this case to refugees from the Nazis.

On 17th February 1941, he was arrested by the Gestapo and imprisoned in the Pawiak prison. On 28th May of that year, he was transferred to Auschwitz.  In July 1941, three prisoners absconded, and by way of a reprisal the Nazi authorities picked 10 men at random to be starved to death in an underground bunker.  When one of the men begged for mercy, shouting out about his wife and children, Kolbe volunteered to take his place. In the bunker, Kolbe celebrated mass each day and whenever the guards checked on him they found him calmly regarding them. After a fortnight, he was the only survivor, so the guards hastened his death by injecting him with carbolic acid. The man whose life he saved lived on until 1995, surviving Auschwitz and, later, a spell in Sachsenhausen, and was present at Maximilian Kolbe’s canonisation.

How does one who professes to believe in the ideas of forgiveness and mercy even begin to relate to these stories?  If the Christian doctrine is to be believed, of course, these people are simply following the example, either consciously or unconsciously, of Jesus, who (metaphorically) took a bullet for all of us, though I still can’t work out why it had to happen that way.  And my faith – despite the odd flashes of reassurance - is nowhere near strong enough for me to choose consciously to die for a complete stranger.  Put us not to the test.  Suddenly we’re back in the territory of Masefield’s poem:

I have seen flowers come in stony places
And kind things done by men with ugly faces
And the gold cup won by the worst horse at the races
So I trust too.

I suppose that if you have to accept that, if we each have the capacity within us to do extremely bad things if we’re cornered or the relevant buttons are pushed, then the same must apply that somewhere we have a spark of extreme good, a spark of that divine light, that can be tapped in mission-critcal cases; the soldier who throws himself on the hand grenade to save his comrades, or the pilot who stays at the controls of the doomed plane long enough to allow his comrades to parachute to safety or to avoid crashing on the school, or the fireman who rushes back into the burning building one time too many.  I also know that I very much doubt that I could ever do any of it, and I pray that I will never be asked to.

Meanwhile, my piddling little problems are, for me, sort of put into perspective by the last few paragraphs, I suppose. A bit of the side has fallen off my wheelchair. It just sheared off, coming away in my hand the other morning, so that will now need fixing. And this week marks the Equinox, so from now on it will get darker and colder, entering a long, scary three-month "tunnel" that will only end with the Winter Solstice and the start of the return of the light.  There is so much to do, almost all of it either stressful and/or boring, but at least nobody’s asking me to die in their place, I guess. There are no soldiers marching along the road outside, looking to carry out reprisals. Yet.

It’s warm and sunny in the garden, unexpectedly (those fictional weather forecasts with an unexpected twist at the end again) – in fact, the sun this afternoon is exactly the same colour as my cousin’s wonderful honey, lemon and apple chutney, so I think I am going to trundle out and take a look at some of my herbs, like old St Phocas, while it’s still light enough to do it.


Sunday 15 September 2013

Epiblog for the Feast of St Catherine of Genoa



It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley.  I can scarcely believe it’s a fortnight since we left Arran. In some ways, I can close my eyes and think myself back there in an instant, then at other times, it seems like a distant memory from another life. Such are the vagaries of human recall.  I have very little news of any consequence to report this week, because I have had my head down, working, getting caught up on my enormous self-created backlog. I’m now at the stage where if it weren’t for the trees in the way, I could see the wood at the end of the tunnel, or something. It wasn’t helped by the accountants asking me for a whole heap of additional stuff which took me ages to get together. I wouldn’t mind having to provide this level of detail (under the threat of being fined for non-compliance by HMRCE and Companies House) if it was applied with the same rigour across the board. To MPs, for instance.

Anyway, don’t get me started, or we will be here all night. Let’s talk about something non-controversial, at least for a while. The weather has been dull as the proverbial ditchwater all week, and it looks, today, as I type this, as though we’re heading into the first of the usual equinoctial storms, as gales and rain appear to be heading down from the North. Matilda has been distinctly unimpressed, on the mornings when I have opened the conservatory door for her to go out on to the decking, and she has been almost splatted on the head by a massive drip of rainwater from the guttering. Like every other cat we’ve ever had, she thinks I am personally responsible for the weather, and complains long and loud to me that she is no longer able to spend most of the day round the corner, in front of the garage, in her little garden suntrap where she curled up for hours on end, this summer.

I think Misty, meanwhile, is still confused by the fact that someone seems to have stolen her beach, and she can no longer go out and play “stones” first thing in the mornings. She has, however, had the compensation of some long, blustery walks up Castle Hill, or through the woods to the quarry, or, yesterday, along the canal bank to Milnsbridge, where she managed somehow to fall in the canal and had to be fished out by Debbie. We don’t have a very good track record with that stretch of canal. The first time Zak saw it, it was covered in a film of green algae, and he thought it was just a continuation of the grass, and kept on running. He was quite surprised, to say the least.  Misty seems to be settling back into a routine, anyway, which can only be a good thing, though she still does have the odd aberration: the other night, instead of following Debbie upstairs to bed, she jumped on the end of my bed, the other end of which was already occupied by Matilda, and a Mexican standoff ensued, which Debbie had to referee. She, and Matilda, were very impressed, as you can imagine.

Debbie’s been girding her “lions” ready for the start of teaching proper, which all kicks off from tomorrow, but unfortunately the game of playing academic sillybuggers has already begun, in that she was asked to cover a class last Monday, spent all of Sunday preparing for it, and then got there to find it had been cancelled! Dear Mr Arse, allow me to introduce you to Mr Elbow.  I was tempted to type things can only get better, but I resent giving Dr Brian Cox the oxygen of publicity.

I know you are all dying to know the outcome of the imbroglio over the camper van, so I will keep you in suspenders no longer. At the time I was writing last week’s Epiblog, it was all over the garage floor in pieces, and there was some doubt – some considerable doubt, actually – about whether those pieces would ever go back together again. It was definitely in the “all the King’s horses and all the King’s men territory”. Fortunately, during the week, a solution did eventually present itself.  Owing to the kindness of others, and negotiations with the garage, we arrived at a compromise, whereby it was agreed that the urgent problem with fitting a new end housing would be tackled straight away, and the other problems they had discovered, some of which they admitted were to do with stuff they had fixed previously, would be re-done by them, at a later date, on a pro-bono basis.

This meant that we could (just) afford to pay the still rather eye-watering bill for the repair that was absolutely and immediately necessary, and keep the camper on the road. So all was well – sort of, anyway, until the garage man came round to collect the cheque, and Misty, misunderstanding his friendly hand reaching out to pat her on the head, gave him a “collie dog nip” on his left knee! Argh! I apologised fulsomely, and, luckily, he was very good about it. The fact that I’d just handed him an humungous cheque probably sweetened the situation somewhat, but even so, Misty… Actually, you can’t really blame the dog. If I’d been through some of the things she’s probably been through, I’d want to rip the throat out of every representative of the species responsible, never mind give them a sharp nip on the patella. It’s probably my fault - I should have told her to go on her beddies and stay there, but she was wandering round, sniffing him, and wagging her tail, good as gold, until he made the fatal mistake of a sudden gesture. No doubt the next garage bill will include a charge for a pair of trousers. And/or possibly a new leg.

So the camper rumbles on, like the rest of us, into an uncertain future. Watch this space. In fact, rumbling on has been the order of the week. The crisis in Syria rumbles on, and I had two separate mobile phone calls from Unicef acknowledging my donation to their Syria appeal this week. This is odd, because a) I didn’t recall donating and b) if I did donate, I’d like the money to go to Syria, and not to paying some pongo in a call centre in Droitwich to phone me up about it.  I might well have texted them £3.00 in a moment of weakness, and when I get a minute, I will check my phone. Or Deb might have picked up my phone and done it, but either way, it’s a salutary warning. The money you give to Unicef does not get to the people you think you are giving it to.  Ethiopiaid is another, similar organisation.  As it happens, I do remember giving them some money. I got a mailer from them, and I printed out my usual letter saying basically, look, we’d like to help, but at the moment we’re a charity case ourselves, and we’re so brassic that the church mice hold collections for us, so I’m sorry we can’t donate on this occasion. As I folded this up to put it in the envelope to send back to them, I noticed 63p in loose change lying around on the table, so I scooped that up and put it in the envelope. This week, they have written me a letter thanking me for my donation of £0.63, which is an act of crass idiocy because the postage alone will have cost them the thick end of 50p, and by the time you add on the stationery, and their time, they will have lost money on the deal! This is yet another reason why these days, (or at least in the days when we were still able to give to charity) I only gave to those causes which were small and local, and where I knew that all or most of the money went to the cause itself, and not on poodlefaking administration.

Talking of poodlefaking administrators, this week I also heard back from the Press Complaints Commission about my having reported the Daily Mail to them, for its disgusting coverage of the Philpott case [“Vile Product of Welfare UK”, in case you’ve forgotten].  I wasn’t the only person to complain of course, there were thousands of us. But, despite this, the PCC has ruled that (inter alia):

The article acknowledged the fact that Mr Philpott’s case was an extreme example, and the Commission did not consider that the article had suggested that his conduct was representative of welfare claimants as a whole. Whilst the Commission noted the complainant’s position that it was unclear which of Mr Philpott’s characteristics were being referred to in suggesting that these were widespread, it did not consider that this had resulted in the article being significantly inaccurate or misleading. The columnist’s view, that tens of thousands of welfare claimants were “scroungers” and his view that these individuals’ lifestyles constituted an abuse of the system, was clearly distinguished as an expression of his opinion.

To be honest, I didn’t really expect much else. The head of the PCC is Paul Dacre, who also, coincidentally, happens to be the editor of the Daily Mail. Draw your own conclusions.  And, in the wider sense, the Daily Mail is a newspaper with which I would not sully my arse by using it as bog-paper. But nevertheless, it would seem that you can say what you like about whom you like, as long as you make it clear that it’s an expression of your opinion. So the Daily Mail can write article after article suggesting all welfare claimants are feckless scroungers who should be made to wear yellow stars and herded into camps (and probably will do, come election year) and as long as it’s clearly set out as a matter of opinion, the PCC will sit on its hands and do nothing.  I would, therefore, like to clearly set out my opinion, that the journalists who draw money under false pretences by recycling any questionable old shit that Iain Duncan-Smith cares to lob them, should be set to work breaking rocks in a quarry till they apologise, in person and in print, to everyone who they have traduced unfairly by association with Philpott. 

And in any case, who are the real scroungers? Consider the following list:

A Chinon armchair: £331
A Manchu cabinet: £493
A pair of elephant lamps: £134.50
A Loire table: £750
A birch Camargue chair: £432
A birdcage coffee table: £238.50
A dishwasher: £454
A Range cooker: £639
A fridge-freezer: £702
A Kenwood toaster: £19.99
A cot mattress from Toys ‘R’ Us: £34.99
8 coffee spoons and cake forks, £5.95 each

These are just some of the items claimed on expenses by Michael Gove MP, the current education secretary, who is known for pontificating about too much being spent on welfare, and “living within our means”. These items were claimed for his second home, using the additional costs allowance. Then in 2006, Michael Gove bought himself a house in his constituency at a cost of  £395,000. He charged taxpayers £13,259 for the move, plus over £500 for a night at the Pennyhill Park Hotel and Spa. He then flipped his second home allowance to the house in his constituency, and routinely claimed the maximum amount MPs were entitled to claim from the Additional Costs Allowance: £22,110 in 2006-2007, and £23,083 in 2007-2008. Further proof, if proof were needed, that we’re all in this together, of course.

Once more I find myself teetering on the brink between commenting on my own life and commenting on the world at large. As usual, I am on the horns of a Dalai Lama. Which is more important, my spiritual life or the fact that there’s suffering and injustice in the world? And what do we do about the fact that some religions are seemingly content to womble along and ignore the suffering and injustice on the premise that it will all be corrected in the next world. It’s the same dilemma that currently preoccupies The Archers of all things: do they raise £35,000 to restore the church organ, while there are dossers sleeping rough in the bus shelter. 

Not everyone in an organised religion is content to sit on the fence and equivocate, however.  According to the BBC News Magazine web site:

A Spanish nun has become one of Europe's most influential left-wing public intellectuals. This year, thousands have joined her anti-capitalist movement, which campaigns for Catalan independence, the reversal of public spending cuts and nationalisation of banks and energy companies.

The nun in question is Sister Teresa Forcades, the unlikely star of local television chat shows, plus Twitter and Facebook.  The people who have signed up to the movement she started, Proces Constituent, which has signed up around 50,000 new members alone this year, are mainly non-believing atheists of a left-wing persuasion. Her 10-point programme calls for:

• A government takeover of all banks, and measures to curb financial speculation.
• An end to job cuts; fairer wages and pensions, shorter working hours and payments to parents who stay at home.
• Genuine "participatory democracy" and steps to curb political corruption.
• Decent housing for all, and an end to all foreclosures.
• A reversal of public spending cuts, and renationalisation of all public services.
• An individual's right to control their own body, including a woman's right to decide over abortion.
• "Green" economic policies and the nationalisation of energy companies.
• An end to xenophobia, and repeal of immigration laws.
• Placing public media under democratic control, including the internet. [I am not entirely sure I agree with her here –  for me, part of the power of the internet is that politicians have tried, and failed, to understand or control it]
• International "solidarity", Spain leaving NATO, and the abolition of armed forces in a free Catalonia.

Sister Teresa also believes the Roman Catholic church should be thoroughly modernised for the 21st Century including a welcome for women priests and gay people allowed to serve openly in the church. She admires Gandhi, and some of the policies of the late Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, and Bolivia's Evo Morales. She also advocates the economic model of Benedictine nuns creating useful goods to sell. I must admit, I am all in favour of the Benedictine order creating produce to sell, especially if the produce in question is Benedictine. Needless to say, Catholic bishops loyal to the Vatican have been criticising her radical stances on everything from abortion to banking, but for now at least, her own bishop at home has allowed her to continue. We shall see.

I was interested in this story of a feisty woman going her own way in the church because today [Sunday 15th September] is the feast of St Catherine of Genoa. That’s Genoa as in, “my wife went to Italy!” “Genoa?” “Of course I do, I’m married to her!” St Catherine of Genoa [Caterina Fieschi Adorno, 1447 – 15 September 1510] was a saint and mystic, admired for her work among the sick and the poor, and remembered because of various writings describing both these actions and her mystical experiences. She spent most of her life and her means serving the sick, especially during the plague which ravaged that city in 1497 and 1501. She died in 1510.

I was struck by the resonances with what I wrote last week about pantheism, and about those moments when you know inexplicably that all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well, in the words of Juliana of Norwich.  It is this direct personal experience of the otherness of what some might call the Almighty that seems to be at the core of the mystical experience. Or rather not the otherness, but the unity with the otherness, where in fact you come to the realisation that everything is all one, and you too are part of it. Sometimes there is no place where “you” ends and the rest of it begins, which is very like the Buddhist concept of Satori. We’re getting into territory here where words themselves start to break down and become less than useless, because the Tao that can be described is not the Tao.

In the same way that the Zen writings describe people experiencing Satori as literally shaking with fright and with beads of sweat appearing on their brows, Catherine’s experience of God and purgatory is not pretty, or comfortable, and not for the faint-hearted. She consistently uses the metaphor of a refining fire, for the process of stripping away everything that prevents the soul from uniting with what she calls God.

Sin's rust is the hindrance, and the fire burns the rust away so that more and more the soul opens itself up to the divine inflowing.

When gold has been purified up to twenty-four carats, it can no longer be consumed by any fire; not gold itself but only dross can be burnt away. Thus the divine fire works in the soul: God holds the soul in the fire until its every imperfection is burnt away and it is brought to perfection, as it were to the purity of twenty-four carats, each soul however according to its own degree. When the soul has been purified it stays wholly in God, having nothing of self in it; its being is in God who has led this cleansed soul to Himself; it can suffer no more for nothing is left in it to be burnt away; were it held in the fire when it has thus been cleansed, it would feel no pain. Rather the fire of divine love would be to it like eternal life and in no way contrary to it.

The same image of the refining fire is also used by Eliot in Little Gidding, from Four Quartets, though his prime source is probably Dante.

From wrong to wrong the exasperated spirit proceeds,
Unless restored by that refining fire
Where you must move in measure, like a dancer.

Catherine was converted by a mystical experience during confession on 22 March 1473; her conversion is described as an overpowering sense of God's love for her. After this revelation occurred, she abruptly walked out, without even finishing her confession. This, instead, marked the beginning of her life of close union with God in prayer, without using the more common forms of prayer such as the rosary. She began to receive Communion almost daily, a practice extremely rare for those outside of the clergy in the Middle Ages, and she underwent further remarkable mental and mystical experiences.

You can interpret “an overpowering sense of God’s love” to be something akin to the oneness felt by the Zen pupil when he realises Satori. I don’t think I have ever experienced what the Zen masters would call Satori, in the same way as I don’t think that those moments, those times when I have felt an increased sense of oneness with the universe have been truly mystical experiences. Partly because you begin to realise the enormity of what you are thinking, what you are experiencing, and then shy away from it – or at least I do. But if ever I had the courage to continue down the road to Satori, the road to the life-transforming mystical experience beyond which there is no return to the old “you”, that is the path I would look to go down.

St Catherine’s mystical experiences led her to change her life, and the lives of those around her, because she began offering unselfish service to the sick in a hospital at Genoa, in which her husband joined her after he, too, had been converted. He later became a Franciscan, but she joined no religious order. He and Catherine decided to live in the Pammatone, a large hospital in Genoa, and to dedicate themselves to works of charity there, and she eventually became manager and treasurer of the hospital. She died in 1510, after a prolonged illness with many days of pain and suffering as she experienced visions and wavered between life and death. For the last few years of her life, following the death of her husband in 1497, Catherine, who had previously defined her relationship with God as one of “interior inspiration”, agreed to have a spiritual advisor, in the form of one Fr Marabotti, who compiled her Memoirs.

She was actually declared a saint on the strength of her writings alone, especially on purgatory, as this excerpt from a 2005 paper presented to the Renaissance Symposium at the University of Mississippi sets out:

Purgatory, however, was more than a doctrine for Catherine; it was also a metaphor for her daily life. As described in her vita, "She saw the condition of the souls in purgatory in the mirror of her humanity and of her mind, and therefore spoke of it so clearly. She seemed to stand on a wall separating this life from the other, that she might relate in one what she saw suffered in the other" (ch.37). Yet this description does not fully capture the nature of her experience of purgatory, since it does not mention the way God, according to the vita, made a purgatory out of her body (ch.38).

In Catherine's life, purgatory manifested itself in an unusually strong antagonism between spirit and flesh, an antagonism so great that it made her physically ill. As the vita explains, "When the spirit found itself obliged to yield somewhat to humanity, if it had not been restrained by a divine power, it would have reduced that body to dust, to obtain the liberty to be entirely occupied with itself; and the body, on its side, would rather have endured a thousand deaths than suffer so much oppression of the spirit" (ch.38). It is not inappropriate therefore to say that Catherine underwent her purgation in this life, rather than in the next.

So what am I saying here? Why am I so interested in this dead Italian?  We seem to have a situation where someone had an experience of God [check] which inspired them to do something [check] and who took their inspiration direct from a relationship with God without the church as the intermediary [check].  In this respect, Sister Teresa Forcades is another of the same, and I wouldn’t be surprised if she didn’t become St Teresa Forcades one day.

We seem to have someone whose direct mystical experience of God seemed to them to bridge this world and the other [standing on the wall, looking over into purgatory] in a way that reminds me very strongly of some of my own experiences, or rather, what some of my own experiences could have been like, if I had had the courage to allow them to progress, mindful of their implications, instead of ducking the issue:

Love bade me welcome, yet my soul drew back
Guilty of dust and sin

As George Herbert puts it.  But what does it mean? We can’t all be mystics, surely, or it would be like a football team with eleven wingers, all winging it. Very entertaining to watch, for those few minutes while you have the ball at your feet, the wizard of dribble, but who organises the midfield, the defence, and the goalkeeping?  

Good old Milton has one answer:

Patience, to prevent
That murmur, soon replies, "God doth not need
Either man's work or his own gifts. Who best
Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state
Is kingly: thousands at his bidding speed,
And post o'er land and ocean without rest;
They also serve who only stand and wait."

So maybe we should be content to be one of those who only stand and wait. Not everybody gets to the mountain top and peeps over into the promised land.  As long as the standing and waiting doesn’t become an end in itself, and you remember why you’re standing and what you’re waiting for, I guess.

I can’t spend all my days in a state of permanent ecstasy, I have things to do and promises to keep. What I suppose I must do is accept the limited glimpses I get now and again, and, in the interim, be one of those who also serves.  But is that a compromise too far? Where do I draw the line? Would it be better if I did actually give in to my tendencies, open up some of these metaphorical unanswered direct personal messages from Big G and spend the rest of my days wearing a hair shirt and raving to the sky in a cave somewhere? I complain long and loud (like Matilda about the rain) when he doesn’t call, but when he does leave a message, it seems I’m scared of the content!

It would certainly be a very different world if we all sold all that we had, gave it to the poor, and headed off into the wilderness, but would it be better, or worse? Or, indeed, just different? And what about those times when I don’t feel close to Big G, when I feel silent and morose and bolshy? Those times when I must stand and wait.What do you do then, if you're in a cave, half way up a mountain, like St Molaise on Mullach Mor?

Still, there’s a lot of serving, and standing and waiting to do, whatever. I noticed, during the wind and rain this afternoon, that one of the greenhouses has now got a hole in the top, so really what it needs doing is either re-covering or taking to bits and disposing of. I’ll add it to my list.  There are dozens of these minor outdoor jobs that need doing, battening down the hatches before winter howls through the garden again.  The weather today would certainly have tested any pantheist. It’s hard to believe that “the world is full of the grandeur of God” when you see your greenhouse being shredded before your eyes.

And, as well as the minor outdoor jobs, there are some major indoor ones, like all the books I am supposed to be working on, plus last year’s accounts, plus the forms I still have to fill in to tell the crematorium what I want doing with my parents’ ashes.  So that’s next week sorted, then. And at least we’re all here, Sunday teatime, gathered round the stove, the dog steaming slightly from the rain, Matilda snoozing, and the camper van parked outside in the driveway.  I suppose we must be thankful for these small mercies, and remember that without the humdrum, we can’t properly evaluate our experience of the exceptional.  Thank God, I need to go and get some coal in, then.

Sunday 8 September 2013

Epiblog for the Feast of St Disibod



It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. I know I say that every week, but this week it’s been especially true. Last Sunday, I woke up to the keening of gulls and the shushing of the waves breaking on the beach at Dougarie, beside Kilbrannan Sound, on the west coast of the Isle of Arran.  From this (and from the absence of two weeks of Epiblogs) you will deduce that Debbie succeeded in her plan to declare a snap “second holiday” and whisk us all back there, for just over a week.

Was it worth it? Well, it was a quixotic gesture, and of course, in the limited time available, there wasn’t the opportunity to do all that she’d planned, but on the whole, yes, it probably was. The dogs enjoyed it, anyway.  The downside was that, by spending something like 16 days of August, plus the last week of July, on Arran, I’d created a massive self-inflicted backlog of work, a fact that was rather weighing me down as the van droned steadily southwards, homewards, past Kilmarnock, Dumfries, Carlisle, Penrith, Preston, Manchester, and then home.

Deb had made good time in getting back – something like five and a half hours, plus dog-comfort stops – so we were actually back, after dropping off Freddie and Zak at their own house,  in time to sit n the van and listen to The Archers in the driveway of our house, before commencing unloading, something which Matilda seemed to find extremely confusing, as she was pacing about next to the van, yowling for us to get out, go inside, and feed her.

The old home town looked the same, as the song has it.  A few of the plants had been completely waterlogged, and it looks like we have lost the bergamot and the bronze fennel, in the herbs section, but otherwise we seemed to have escaped any great disasters. At least there was electricity.  I lit the stove and fed the cat, making sure I got those two tasks the right way round, Deb went off to have a shower, and I cooked us some chip butties for tea, and that was more or less that.

Monday was a rude awakening. Deb was required at College for some of this pre-registration stuff that they expect everyone to pitch in with. I was rather sceptical about this beforehand, since they have cut her hours right back this year, but she did it anyway, to show willing, and came back that evening with the news that there may be some additional hours gong after all, so it was probably a good job that she made the effort to attend – right place, right time, that sort of thing.  I said that we’d need every extra hour they could cram in. I’m not sure why, I must have had a premonition.

Matilda seemed pleased enough to see us back, although now she is going in and out of her own catflap, and coming and going more or less as she pleases, her contact with us is very much on her terms, not ours, and usually involves feeding time or snuggling up on the foot of my bed.  Doubtless that will change as the days grow colder, wetter and rainier.  Misty seems to have accepted her return to the comforts of home, and taken it in her stride, though I am sure for the first few days she was wondering where the beach had gone, and why there was no-one willing to play “stones” with her.

Meanwhile, I was bashing on with getting together the figures for 2012’s accounts, the most urgent of the many urgent tasks on my list, in view of the fact that Companies House would fine me if I didn’t file before the deadline.  Debbie had a training day on Tuesday at Dewsbury, so Misty and I spent a thoroughly exciting day snoozing (her, and occasionally me) and punching numbers into spreadsheets (sadly, just me).  Deb was back at teatime, and, later that night, going out to fetch something she’d left in the vehicle,  came back in and reported that the camper van was sitting in the driveway in a massive pool of its own oil.  Fantastic. Just what we needed. Another massive bill, a torpedo in the financial engine-room.  It was too dark by then to look at the problem overnight, so we decided to re-assess it in the morning.

Morning came, as mornings do, and the light of day confirmed that we had indeed got our own miniature version of the Exxon Valdes disaster going on at the front of the house.  There was nothing for it but to phone the garage. Clearly it would be inadvisable to try and start the van up without any oil in the engine, so they would have to come to us.  Which they did, confirming the melancholy news that the actuator on the turbo – a part that cost approximately £30, had seized in the “on” position, causing a build-up of pressure inside the engine that had actually blown a hole right through the casing of the end-housing, spraying oil all over the drive.  Given the drastic, indeed catastrophic, nature of the fault, I suppose we should be grateful that the faithful old camper got us all home from Scotland (and Debbie back safely from Dewsbury) before it decided to blow up. Had it gone half way up Glen Chalmadale, or on the String Road, we’d have had no option but to be towed home there and then.

But it is still a massive hassle, and preoccupied me for much of the remainder of the week. Well, that and last year’s accounts, which were probably just as big a disaster, albeit not so messy.  The garage man brought a massive can of oil with him, topped up the level in the engine with as much as he could cram in, and then set off to try and get to the garage before it all came out of the bottom. He just made it, apparently.  As it stands at the moment, we’re still waiting on a final total, but if the camper is to be saved, it will be at a considerable cost, which will have repercussions on our hand-to-mouth existence for months to come.

Still, at least we are better off than the Syrians. Once again, it seems that as soon as we go away on holiday, and I take my eye off the ball, the world goes completely gaga.  On a purely practical level, I fail to see how lobbing in a few more bombs from outside into that strife-torn country, and killing a few more Syrians, will prevent Syrians from killing Syrians.  What it needs is for the UN, for once, to live up to its name and its purpose, and to impose a cease-fire on all sides so that humanitarian aid can be administered.  Even allowing for the questionable premise that Assad was responsible for the chemical attack being true (why would he, though, when he was winning already and mindful that if he used chemical munitions, it would only complicate and delay his eventual victory over the rebels?) if the US simply joins in on the side of the rebels and removes one set of vicious unprincipled murdering bastards with another set who are slightly more amenable to the USA, that is merely repeating the same mistake we, the west, have made in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Egypt. How many more dead children, how many more wild-eyed young zealots in suicide vests, how many more body-bags, how many more flag-draped coffins being carried down the loading-ramp of a Hercules on the tarmac at Brize Norton will it take, before we acknowledge this? The simple fact is that intervening on one side or the other does not save lives, it simply determines which set of innocent civilians will be butchered – “ours”, or “theirs.”

Vladmir Putin is not someone I would have immediately thought of as the voice of reason, but he has enunciated exactly the same concerns. I am not naïve enough to think that he has the best interests of the Syrian people at heart, as his regime, too, has been fuelling the conflict with arms and materiel on the side of the Assad regime.  But nevertheless, the question still stands – why would President Assad use chemical weapons, when it was contrary to his own best interests to do so, and the fact that Vladimir Putin is a homophobic little weasel, undemocratically “elected” under questionable circumstances and comes from a background in state-sponsored torture, terror and repression, doesn’t make the question itself any less valid.

The Russians, of course, have seized on parliament’s refusal to let Cameron blindly follow Obama in bombing the shit out of Syria as evidence of Britain’s diminished standing and general unimportance in the world.  This totally ignores the irony that it is precisely this sort of democratic control over the excessive exercise of brutal, despotic power that makes us (still, just, on a good day) the good guys, or at least better than the Russians. What would happen if the Russian parliament voted against Putin’s desire to (for instance) bomb Chechnya? A one-way trip to the Gulag, and a bullet in the back of the head for anyone entering the “No” lobby, that’s what.  It’s a bit rich being pulled down by a country where thieves can break into the Kremlin and steal next year’s election results.  We may have invented the neatly-furled brolly, but it took the KGB to stick a poison needle in the end of the ferrule. We have Jimmy Choo, they have Rosa Klebb. I could go on. I frequently do. 

Britain may well have declined since the days when Britannia ruled the waves – for all sorts of reasons, and in some ways it isn’t a bad thing.  Having said that, even though successive governments seem to have gone out of their way over the last 25 years or so to trash the economy for reasons of party politics and economic illiteracy, and to limit our own personal freedoms, and even though our great institutions of health and education are currently under pressure like never before, we don’t yet have millions of people starving while our corrupt rulers export all the grain, and we don’t yet have the situation where anyone who criticises the government is denounced and taken away in the middle of the night by a goon squad from the secret police.  Assuming you can afford a new car, you can go out and buy one, you don’t have to wait four years for it to turn up, only to find that when it does, it’s a brown Lada with a cracked headlight and two square wheels. Not quite.  Not yet.

I don’t want to get into the battle of literature and culture that David Cameron started in his speech; a country’s culture is a product of that country’s history and ethos.  And while it’s tempting to say that all Russian plays are long, dreary, gloomy sagas about the family cherry orchard being sold off and given to an anarcho-syndicalist collective of local peasants, English literature also has some spectacularly depressing moments.  What Cameron should have said was that we still (just about, on a good day) believe in democracy, fair play and equal opportunities for everyone, the rule of the law, respect and care for the ill and vulnerable, and sympathy for the underdog.  He’d have been lying, in his case, of course, because his lips would have been moving, and that's how you tell when a politician is lying.  But the sentiment is still valid, even if insincerely expressed, and all of those salient virtues are absent from Russian society.  Anyway, that’s enough about the bloody Russians. They should wind their neck in, and stick to what they are good at: The Song of the Vulgar Boatmen and Samovar over the Rainbow.

Meanwhile, here in the Holme Valley, summer is coming to an end. I’ve noticed a couple of times the “early nip of changeful autumn” has been present in the air, and the other day it was so dark at 5.30pm that I thought I’d fallen asleep and the clock had stopped.  There’s a lot to do in the garden, as well, before winter sets in properly.  The stove will need an overhaul, and I will need to order some coal next week, the first order of the autumn.  It also needs a new set of front bars, and a new riddling-plate, since the old one has broken into two halves and is now only back in place because I had to let the fire go out so I could wedge the two bits side-by-side back into the hole.  

So that’s another task on my already-burgeoning “to-do” list, which also includes, now I am back at what passes for my desk, dealing with all the tedious paperwork of progressing the exhumation of the ashes of various family members buried under a “memorial tree” in the Northern Cemetery in Hull.  Still, after five days of my life which I won’t get back, doing year-end accounts and struggling with exploding vehicles, fixing the stove and clearing out the ashes sounds positively enthralling – even though it is actually two tasks, and not one, as you might think if you casually read that last sentence back.

And so we come to Sunday, and the feast of St Disibod. I must admit, there were other saints whose feast days also fall upon 8th September, whom I might just as easily have chosen, but I had to pick St Disibod, if only for his extremely silly name. Mind you, in 619AD when he was born, it was probably as sensible as Wayne or Kyle today. Actually, maybe they’re not very good examples… Still, Disibod, also known as Disen, or Disibode, was an Irish bishop who died in 700AD.  He was unsuccessful as a missionary in his native Ireland, so moved to Germany, where he founded a monastery on a hill near Bingen, which became known as Disibodenberg. Unsurprisingly, as that translates back into English as “the hill of Disibod”.  No less a personage than St Hildegard of Bingen came to live there in due course, and, around 1170AD, composed a life of St Disibod which is still the prime source of what little knowledge we have of him.

According to Hildegard’s Life, Disibod came to the Frankish Empire in 640AD as a missionary, accompanied by his followers Giswald, Clemens and Sallust, which I have to say sounds for all the world like a firm of accountants. They were active in the Vosges and Ardennes, until, guided by a dream, Disibod built a cell at the confluence of the rivers Nahe and Glan, the location of the later monastery of Disibodenberg.

Hildegard of Bingen, with her ecstatic visions, her music and her writings, is worthy of an Epiblog all of her very own. Her association with the Disibodenberg had ended in 1147AD, when she took a decision, with 18 of her acolytes, to move to a new site and founded the monastery at Rupertsberg.  The Disibodenberg site remained in the hands of the Cistercian Order until 1559, when a decline set in, and by the 18th Century, only the ruins of the original foundation remained.  The site is currently owned privately by Ehrengard, Baroness of Racknitz, who has established an international foundation to preserve and protect the ruins which you can apparently look around, for a fee of five Euros. There is also a winery. It sounds like my kind of place, and if I ever do make my long promised/threatened pilgrimage to Germany in search of my lost half-brother, I must include it on my itinerary, provided  can get some mug to push my wheelchair up the “berg” part of the journey.

As far as my own spiritual development is concerned, such as it is, I suppose a Sunday teatime on a day in early autumn, when the nights are starting to draw in, and I have just dumped another shovelful of coal on the fire, is as good a time as any to stop and take stock.  When I wasn’t looking out at the mountains and the sky and the sea, or watching in the short summer night they have in that part of the world for the comforting gleam of the red can buoy at Carradale Point across the Sound, I spent a considerable amount of time reading Mere Christianity, by C. S. Lewis.  I am not going to spend the rest of this blog doing a sort of “I. A. Richards practical criticism” on it, but it is a book which – though dated in part, especially in its language on issues such as homosexuality and marriage – is an excellent discourse on some of the knottier problems of theology and belief that have occupied me for many a weary night of “blear-eyed midnight toil”.  Especially since it was written n 1942, at the height of the Second World War, in part to explain what it is we were “fighting for”, itself a concept with which I struggle.  I had read extracts from it before, in fact, I have included extracts of it previously in this blog, but reading it from the start, in order, with few or no distractions to stop me half way down the page and make me lose the thread, was a help to me, though I am still none the wiser on the difference between begetting and creating.

One passage stood out for me, though, as I watched the slow pageant of clouds over the Mull of Kintyre, or the wheeling arc of a seagull out over the waves, or the eternal granite immobility of the hills of northern Arran – Goatfell, Beinn Nuis, Beinn Tarsuinn, Cir Mhor, et al – and it was this, on the difference between the Christian God, who is outside of the world, and the beliefs of pantheism:

“Pantheists usually believe that God, so to speak, animates the universe as you animate your body:  that the universe almost is God, so that if it did not exist He would not exist either, and anything you find in the universe is a part of God.  The Christian idea is quite different.  They think God invented and made the universe – like a man making a picture or composing a tune.  A painter is not a picture, and he does not die if his picture is destroyed.  You may say, ‘He’s put a lot of himself into it,’ but you only mean that all its beauty and interest has come out of his head.  His skill is not in the picture in the same way that it is in his head, or even in his hands.”

I found myself thinking that the idea of God “animating the entire universe” that phrase he uses, is almost exactly what I believe, how it happens for me, in those times when I believe that Big G is actually there at all. And by “there”, I suppose I do mean here, there and everywhere, by definition, with apologies to Lennon and McCartney. So, if I have to be anything,  maybe this means I am a lapsed agnostic violent Quaker pantheist, strictly chapel of rest. But of course that’s a lot easier to believe on a day when you are appreciating the beauty and majesty of the summer sky over the Scottish landscape. 

Such a moment happened for me two weeks ago, at Lochranza, as I looked across the bay and saw a perfectly “ordinary” stand of trees transformed by just the way the sun fell on the verdant grass behind them at that very moment, with the light dancing on the water in front. I thought then, what a glade to be buried in, what a place for your last rest on earth, where the deer come and browse, and the sheep nibble the grass, and the birds sing in the branches overhead. "All shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well..."  Then, as I continued to watch, the light changed, the sun slanted the shadows differently, the effect passed, and time began to tick once more.  I am not stupid or naïve about belief, however – if my pantheism holds true, it must also embrace the Dies Irae, the wrath of a God, in the teeth of a howling winter gale, a blizzard, or a violent storm at sea.  

What the pantheist view of Big G does do, is to remove the idea of the old guy with a beard sitting up there somewhere beyond the clouds on a throne, judging the quick and the dead.  It makes morality your own decision, your own responsibility, though, interestingly enough, Lewis had an angle on that which I had not previously considered, which is that he posits the existence of an accepted and mutually agreed standard of “good” or “correct” behaviour from which we may deviate, or fail to reach, but which everyone agrees is nevertheless there. He links this to God, and there is perhaps something in the Platonist or Neo-Platonist view that this is the spark of God the good in us all, down here in this fallen world, to which we must hark back.  I think, however, that the “harking back” is not such a simple black and white process, and that morality consists sometimes of shades of grey (but not, you will be pleased to know, Fifty Shades of Grey).

Anyway, I have been admonished before now by “real” philosophers who read this blog and tell me not to worry my ugly old head with such matters, as I am not properly trained to deal with them, so I will shut up and leave it at that. I haven’t forgotten my idea of doing a “something” with what remains of my life, but my first responsibility s to pay my debts and keep everything going.

So, I am back at my desk, back at the plough, back at the wheel, nose to the grindstone, use whatever cliché you find most apposite.  When I think about the massive, oppressive amount of work I have to do between now and Christmas it is very easy to become dispirited, so next week  am going to try and carry with me in my heart, into the cold days ahead, the probably theologically questionable but still warm, peaceful and nurturing feeling of the spirit of… something… suffusing all nature:

“Oh chestnut tree, great-rooted blossomer
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole;
Oh body swayed to music, oh brightening glance,
How can we tell the dancer from the dance?”

And if it helps, I offer this as a consolation to you too. As Robert Zimmerframe once memorably said, "I'll let you be in my dreams, if I can be in yours."