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

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley, work is as unrelenting as ever, but at least we can celebrate the end of the dreary month of November. We really are counting down the days to Christmas now, when we can give up hanging on by our fingernails, turn off the computers, and have a rest for a couple of days. I am so tired some mornings that I just lie there too tired to sleep, waiting for the alarm to go off, and amusing myself by going through a sort of damage-check exercise like they do on warships after they have been in battle. (Ankle - check, knee, check, wind direction and strength…)

This week has been marked by the visit of my new-born little niece, Katie Elizabeth, and her sleep-deprived parents, as part of their royal progress through the North of England to show her off to both sets of grans and grandads, prior to returning to the warmer climes of the South coast for what will be her first ever Christmas. In the last Epilogue, I suggested that her career might be in freeing turkeys. I wish to revise this. Seeing her sturdy little frame, and having heard her practising her arias at regular intervals through the early hours of the morning, I know now that she is definitely going to be an opera singer when she grows up! Talk about Nessum Dorma.

We managed to get the plumbing fixed temporarily - pending another visit on 10th December or thereabouts - so at least Katie Elizabeth, Becky and Adrian had water (hot and cold) and heating. No sooner had they left though, on Thursday morning, than the stove decided to go out. This new coal is very prone to clinker and I dug out a huge nugget of the stuff, which had choked off all the air supply to the fire. I was loath to throw it away, but since the demise of That's Life, the market for vaguely amusing pictures of odd shaped domestic objects has declined somewhat. Perhaps I could put it in for the Turner Prize. Anyway, this episode led to my kneeling on a freezing cold floor in the ghostly pre-dawn light of a frosty Thursday morning, cursing and trying to re-light it, while Tig and Russell looked on with an air of, "Hurry up, we're cold. And you still haven't fed us yet".

Russell is still taking the tablets, provided they come liberally wrapped in chicken breast, and seems to be livelier than of late. Just as well, as he goes back to the vet to be jabbed, checked and weighed again, this week. His one setback came during Wednesday, when he did a spectacular bout of projectile vomiting, accompanied by the sort of disgusting heaving noises only puking cats can make, all over my guitar. I don't know if you have ever tried fishing gobbets of cat-sick out of the sound hole of your acoustic guitar with chunks of kitchen roll. I would imagine few people have. Debbie suggested I leave them in there, that my playing would sound better with some muffling and, as they eventually dried out and hardened, it would add a pleasant percussion effect, not unlike marraccas. I was reminded of that old joke about "what do you call a drunken Spanish guitarist? - Segovia Carpet!"

Dusty, Kitty and Nigel have all been vying for the coveted spots in the bathroom on Colin's side of the house where the hot pipes go under the floorboards to the heated towel-rail. By coincidence I heard this week that Holly Hunter, no less, is to star in a play in the West End called "By the Bog of Cats". I could give her plenty of tips. (In passing, I also heard that her attempt at an Irish accent is off the Dick-Van-Dyke scale of awfulness. Let's hope she doesn't get savaged by the critics in the same way as Pia Zadora did when she played Anne Frank. Her performance was universally adjudged to be so dismal that it is said that in act II, when the Nazi stormtroopers burst in to search the house, several people in the audience shouted "She's in the attic!")

I've been immersed in the literature of the 1930s and 40s this week, working frantically on Hampshire at War, reading with delight the final draft of the biography of SPB Mais which we are publishing next spring, including his epic battle with the Southwick Urban District Council to allow cricket on Southwick Green, and listening to Patrick Stewart reading J. B. Priestley's wartime "Postscripts" on BBC Radio 4, which in turn drove me back to re-read "English Journey". Just before I go out and order some plus fours, spats, and a bakelite radio I should also point out, though, that I have been working on the update for the web site as well. So it's not all "2LO Writtle, this is Daventry calling."

I have also been looking at 19th century censuses, because we have had another breakthrough on the tracing Debbie's Mum's family history front. What a marvellous source these documents are: all of Victorian society laid out for all to see, the rich man in his castle, the poor man at the gate. Once every ten years, since 1841 and with the exception of wartime, the whole of our society has been counted and listed, in the same way that the Romans wanted to count everybody in Judea, as it says in the Gospel of St Luke: "A decree went out from Caesar Augustus, that a census be taken of all the inhabited earth. This was the first census taken while Quirinius was governor of Syria" I could not help but contrast this rather bumbling, paternalistic approach with the sinister developments currently surrounding ID cards in this country. Of course, there are plenty of people who do see the advent of ID cards as pretty small potatoes, including the Vicar who wrote to "The Independent" this week, pointing out that if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear, and citing in support of this, John 8:32, "And the truth shall set you free". I wonder if anybody has told him yet that those words are also the motto of the US Central Intelligence Agency!

I am not particularly interested in debating the politics of this in this forum. In any case, I am writing more in a church mode than a state mode right now. There's a time and a place, etc. My own views are well enough known anyway, but the situation has been brought home to me this week because I have been corresponding with a very dear friend who is an American citizen whose leave to remain in this country is under question by the Home Office even though she wants to make the UK her home, and I could not help but contrast the bitter and prolonged struggle which has been causing her stress all this year, with the nineteen days in which applications on which Mr Blunkett's flunkies sprinkle their fairy dust seem to sail through the system. The truth shall set you free. But what is truth? said jesting Blunkett.

Freedom and responsibility is always a difficult balancing act. God knows everything that is going to happen - allegedly - but has decided to stand by and watch, in order that we might learn, and progress, and he can see what a fist we make of it. Freedom in society needs to be tempered with wariness, in the climate we find ourselves. There are, undoubtedly, seriously unbalanced people out there who would dearly love to disrupt our systems, kill our loved ones at random, and thus make their point about how much they hate us. As Orwell said: "Men sleep peacefully in their beds at night because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf."

But equally, we need to be wary of going too far in the other direction, of creating a climate which sacrifices the very freedoms we cherish, in the name of some form of spurious idea of security. A society like 1930s Germany, as described by Pastor Martin Niemoller:

First they came for the Jews

and I did not speak out, because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for the Communists

and I did not speak out, because I was not a Communist.

Then they came for the trade unionists

and I did not speak out, because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for me

and there was no one left to speak out for me.

I wonder what would have happened in Palestine a millennium or so ago, if the Romans had had ID cards. Herod would certainly have found his task a lot easier.

The unfairness of the situation with my friend possibly being deported, brought to my mind the passage on the "Two Englands" from Arthur Mee's "Who Giveth Us The Victory" in 1918:

"Two Englands there are, the heavenly England that leads the world in liberty and humanity and good government, the England of Alfred and Drake and Cromwell and Gladstone; and the appalling England at our doors, with a hundred thousand taprooms thriving on misery and ruin and disease, with landlords growing rich on slums, with children creeping hungrily to school. It is for the nobler England that our armies fight and die; the baser England is not fit to die for. It is the England of our vision that we live for; but about us everywhere is that other England, established in conceit and selfishness, strengthened and stimulated by the bitter mockery of our social system, tolerated and sustained by the cynical indifference of the masses of the people."

Or, as Alan Hull wrote in "Winter Song"

"The turkey's in the oven, and the presents are all bought

And Santa's in his capsule, he's an American astronaut

Will you spare a thought for Jesus, who had nothing but his thoughts

Who got busted for just talking, and befriending the wrong sorts"

For centuries, England and its ideals of liberty, humanity, and good government have been both a beacon of hope and a shelter for people who were disadvantaged elsewhere and allowed to come here and flourish and contribute to the greater whole. Whatever the whys and wherefores of how we now come to be so hated, Christmas is no time to be saying there is "no room at the inn".