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

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. And a wild, woolly, and windy one too. On Friday night it was like that Ted Hughes poem

This house has been far out at sea all night

The woods crashing through darkness, the booming hills …

On Saturday morning we awoke to some minor damage in the garden (a very heavy shrub in an equally heavy pot had been tipped over, and all the plastic chairs on the decking were all piled in a heap at one end, as if cuffed there by the angry sweep of a giant hand. There are a couple of tiles off Colin's roof) but all in all we got off lightly, compared to Carlisle, where they are probably still reading this by candlelight, and of course, compared to the Tsunami.

Bizarrely, the council chose Saturday morning to remove (at 9.15AM, using angle grinders) to metal and glass bus shelter just up the road from us. Deb slept through this and when she got up, an hour or so later, I was able to kid her on for some considerable time that it had actually blown away in the storm.

The animals dislike this weather even more than we do, if that is possible. This week, all four cats have subtly realigned their territories in response to Dusty having claimed ownership of our bed. Nigel has swopped sides completely, and now sleeps in the spare room in Colin's side, or, in extremis, under the heated towel rail in Colin's bathroom. Russell remains firmly lodged in the armchair nearest the stove, rejecting all attempts to evict him. Kitty is on her designer cat bed in the music room (not that we've had time for music). Kitty and I now have a new routine when it's time to feed her.

Me: "What do we want? Whiskas. When do we want it?"

Kitty "Naow"

Earlier in the week, before the stormy weather struck, we had a couple of spring-like days, when I found myself inexplicable singing Dowland's "Fine Knacks for Ladies" as I drove to the warehouse to do the stock-take. This led on to thoughts of another itinerant pedlar, Autolycus, and I found myself reciting

"When daffodils begin to peer

With hey, the doxy, o'er the dale …"

I haven't seen any daffodils yet, though the three pots of daffodil bulbs that Maisie gave us last year seem to have thrived on frost, snow, rain, and neglect, and are showing green shoots on the decking. Fair daffodils, that come before the swallow dares, and take the winds of March with beauty: I haven't seen any crocuses, yet though, my own personal harbinger of spring. According to Autolycus, the red blood reigns in the winter's pale. No, I have no idea what it means either, but it may be worth bearing in mind.

Last week, Russ the Puss went back to the vet and it was good news, he has again put on weight and now tops off the 3KG mark. All we have to do is keep stuffing him with food and with kidney tablets.

Tig also accompanied us to the vet, having gained an infection of the nether regions, dogs being so much more disgusting than cats. So she now has tablets too, four a day, which takes to five the number of pills we are currently pushing down various furry gullets. Kitty soon will need her 6 mothly rodent ulcer shot, and the vets have just put down a deposit on a place in the country. It's called Shropshire.

On Friday, Maisie gave us a large, leather-bound Bible dated 1885, as a thank you for some help on a problem with Windows 95 (don't even ask, don't even go there). It's a substantial tome, beautiful to handle, and, handling it, I recalled a notice I once saw outside of a church in a town I drove through, way back when.

"If Jesus is the answer, what is the question?"

Probably "What would you say if you accidentally dropped this Bible on your foot?" would fit the bill.

The fact that this Bible somehow found its way on to the secondhand books market is a bit of a sad reflection on how we treat our religious heirlooms, though. In the same week, I happened to see a programme on TV about Salisbury Cathedral in which one Jonathan Meade referred to it as a monument to the credulous. And I had another concrete illustration of the state of decay of general "religious knowledge" when speaking to one of the young girls at the warehouse. We were talking about the calendar and anniversaries, etc, and she said she was looking forward to Pancake Tuesday. I said, yes, but after that comes Ash Wednesday, and she said that that was pretty tasty too. Puzzled, I tried to tease out what she meant. Apparently her and her family have always had corned beef hash on "Hash Wednesday" as they knew it. I suppose it makes a kind of sense. Pancake Tuesday, Hash Wednesday. At least they didn't smoke Hash, merely ate it.

It just goes to show though, what we've lost in the last twenty or thirty years. Only a million people go to church now, and I'm not one of them. Things like the Tsunami don't help, challenging people's faith and bringing to the fore the question that always troubles me, too: why doesn't a compassionate God intervene in the world to stop suffering?

As I said last week, I have been having arguments about this all across the internet. One of the most powerful arguments for the existence of God in this respect was on a message board where someone had posted the message "why didn't God intervene in the Tsunami?" and someone had put underneath - "How do you know he didn't?" While we don't like to think that it could have been even worse, nevertheless, when we wake up to the damage that just a minor storm in the middle of England can do, when we think about the awesome power of grinding tectonic plates that can knock the whole Earth an inch off its axis, it makes you realise that we are up against some pretty serious forces here.

And that's before you add in the human element. What if giving aid to the Tsunami victims prevents Blair and Bush from invading Iran and starting a third world war. In that scenario, God has taken upon itself the guilt and responsibility for 150,000 deaths to save the lives of millions. The bottom line is, no one can know, and it comes down to a leap of faith. Waves can be a force for good, for renewable energy. They can even be an expression of love, as Florizel says to Perdita in A Winter's Tale:

When you do dance, I wish you

A wave o’ the sea, that you might ever do

Nothing but that.

Or Yeats's fiddler, who, when he plays on his fiddle in Dooney, folk dance like the wave o' the sea. Everything goes in waves, like Nigel Mazlyn Jones says in Wave on Wave:

And then a wave comes …

So I handled this Bible, two years older than my Grandmother, and unlike her, still with us, and opened it at random, like you do: this is what I found - I kid you not.

"God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Therefore will we not fear, though the earth be removed, and though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea; though the waters thereof roar and be troubled; though the mountains shake with the swelling thereof. "

Now that is decidedly spooky. Almost as spooky as now, when I am sitting at the top of the house listening to the wind groan and rumble through the trees outside and the doors clattering each time it gusts, because they won't shut properly and every time the wind moves in, the house breathes like a living being, slumbering in its sleep and muttering in a dream.

I don't mind Big G giving me signs when I have asked for them, but that was definitely taking liberties with our relationship.

I suppose I am being told to ride the wave, that every situation, no matter how apparently hopeless, also carries with it the seeds of its opposite. No matter how bad it seems at the moment, if you are stuck under some plastic sheeting in Sumatra or miserable in a flooded house in Carlisle, if you are remembering a lost and well-loved pet, as I know Sean is tonight, or staring for the umpteenth time at a duplicated letter of rejection, things will get better, and then another-nother wave comes. Or, as the Zen masters put it:

"Sitting quietly, doing nothing, Spring comes and the grass grows by itself"