h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley now that I am back on what passes for my feet, with mountains of undone work everywhere I look. There's nothing like spending a week in bed for making your in-tray look like an explosion in a paper factory. This week we have seen the first snow of the winter, as well, much to the chagrin of the cats, who have glared balefully at me every morning as if I am personally responsible for the stuff. If only they knew that my first reaction to snow is to reach for my flame-thrower!

With the coming of the cold weather, Colin's central heating has been blasting out with renewed vigour, making the spare bedroom the warmest place in the whole house, which probably explains why Debbie found Nigel, Russell and Dusty all sharing the spare bed the other morning. A true triumph for central heating as a force for reconciliation. Only Kitty was missing from the lineup, probably because she was demolishing a dish of cat food downstairs at the time.

Tig and Fred love the snow of course, and go plunging down between the trees behind the house, barking excitedly and rolling in the stuff, chasing snowballs and generally coming back glowing, panting, with their tongues lolling. As does Debbie, whose ideal day in the snow, as a responsible 39 year old residential social worker, is to try and interest the dogs in tobogganing.

To me, the snow - or rather the ice that comes with it - is just another obstacle. If I fall over and break my ankle, two businesses go down the tubes quite rapidly, so I have to be extra careful when it snows. Snow has a habit of reminding me of my limitations. In fact, pretty much in the same way as illness does. It's not so much the illness, as the boredom, and the way in which it forces you to admit your humanity. This was brought home to me when the doctor asked me to submit a sample, on the conclusion of my antibiotics run, to make sure I really was cured. There is little in life more humiliating than "doing a sample", except possibly, handing it in. So it was on Friday that I did my duty, watched by an attentive audience of Dusty and Kitty (wow, how did he manage that?) and bore my burden back into the office. I was looking for an envelope - after all, I couldn't just hand the thing in. I wondered what the correct protocol was: should I do a covering letter, ending with "enc". In the end, I settled for a comp slip, on which I scrawled "as discussed".

I can only hope that Dr Spencer took it in the spirit in which it was intended. No word has come back, so for all I know, it is still sitting on a shelf somewhere, or lying in an in-tray. Oh, the shame of being mortal.

I suppose, actually, that lots of people have to endure much more humiliating things, experiences in the course of an illness, and I shouldn't be so squeamish about the body and its functions: but I cannot help but feel, like Yeats, that my heart is "fastened to a dying animal", and at times like this I have to make a special effort to remember that mortality may not be everything, even though

"An aged man is but a paltry thing

A tattered coat upon a stick,

Unless soul clap its hands and sing

And louder sing for every tatter in the mortal dress…"

So, I have spent the week looking for intimations of immortality, not easy in a month like November, devoted to death and decay. In the pre-Christian Celtic calendar, November was Samhain, the month of death, when the cattle were slaughtered and their bones burnt to scare off the evil spirits. These bone-fires were eventually taken over by Guy Fawkes and his cronies, but their origins are a lot older, and they lie in the very understandable fears of mortals who feared the monsters, Grendel and the rest, who lived "out there", outside of the warm circle of the camp fire around which they huddled in their mead-halls and villages.

Bede likens the life of a man to a sparrow flying through the mead-hall: it comes in at one end, out of the darkness, flies through the warm lighted hall, and then back out the other end, back into the blackness and rain. Not much comfort there, for those seeking a more comforting view of the relationship between life and eternity.

So what can I take comfort in, as I sit at the top of the house, listening to the dark trees whispering and the rain falling? What can I point to, that makes us more than just a hamburger on legs, with a limited sell-by date? Art, I suppose. And the occasional flickering flame of decency and civilization, such as the banning this week of fox-hunting (even though Tony Blair had to be virtually anaesthetised to agree to it). So another cruel inequality goes the same way as bear-baiting and shoving kids up chimneys. Yet at the same time, for every good deed in the world, I could name a dozen naughty ones.

We think that Paradise and Calvary,

Christ's cross and Adam's tree, stood in one place ;

Look, Lord, and find both Adams met in me ;

As the first Adam's sweat surrounds my face,

May the last Adam's blood my soul embrace

Twenty years on, we are still having to make charity records in an attempt to feed everybody in Africa, yet we can always find seemingly bottomless pits of money to fund wars. Wouldn't it be nice for once, as Mark Steel has pointed out, if the warmongers had to make a record and sell it to raise funds to start a war, while the feeding of Africa and the ending of wars was taken as read as the natural task of governments? And how many people will stop at buying Band Aid 20 feeling that they have done their bit to stop famine in Darfur, making it a Band Aid by nature as well as by name?

I am out of sorts with the world this week, more so than any week this year. It feels like a week for pulling up the drawbridge and letting the world sort itself out. But that won't make me feel any better, because like all humanity, I carry with me the seeds of my own destruction. You can run, but you can't hide, eventually, you have to turn and face your own beastliness. I am fallen, like all humanity, I am reduced to the sum total of what I can consume and excrete.

The only hope, the only way out of this, is Christmas. In four weeks' time the wavering spark of light at the end of winter's tunnel starts to grow (and glow) stronger again, as we contemplate the impossible possibility of redemption. I don't feel in the least bit Christmassy, I have taken to shouting at Christmas adverts on the TV, and asking people why it can't be Christmas every day (and getting lots of funny looks for my trouble). But underneath all the tinsel and the crap, is there a glimmer of hope? Sometimes you have to just blindly carry on, even when there is no hope, like the Magi in T S Eliot's poem:

Then the camel men cursing and grumbling

And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,

And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,

And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly

And the villages dirty and charging high prices:

A hard time we had of it.

At the end we preferred to travel all night,

Sleeping in snatches,

With the voices singing in our ears, saying

That this was all folly.

Give me the blind faith to keep on driving forward when all seems folly. Give me a star to follow. We are all human, mortal, we are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking for the stars.