Journal Entries
Epilogue for 16th January
Posted Jan 17, 2005
It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. I know I always tend to start that way, these days, but it really has been a busy week this week, with long term planning and only 50 weeks to go until Christmas! (now there is a cheery thought). It's also been a week of storms and problems. The "storms" bit is self-explanatory really.
We have lain abed listening to the wind crashing about in the trees outside, woken to find discarded branches in the driveway, driven through rain so hard that the windscreen wipers could barely cope, even on double click, and in the midst of all this, the engine on the faithful old car has decided to develop a serious head gasket problem, and is going off to the garage at Crosland Moor to be fixed tomorrow. I will be without it for three whole days and will no doubt feel like my legs have been cut off, even though Phil has boldly stepped into the breach and offered to chauffeur me to the warehouse and back. Just as well really, as stocktaking's still not finished, and the VAT return is once more overdue.
Tig, Freddie and Lucy have been as eager to venture forth for their daily "constitutionals" as ever. Deb and her mother, less so, especially when the wind is pelting horizontal sleet across the valley. The cats have been reluctant to leave the house except where absolutely necessary, but mainly spend their time drowsing and dreaming in various chairs and other warm places scattered throughout the house, whiskers twitching and paws trembling as they stalk the mouse of their dreams. Dusty has now firmly taken over our bed, Nigel has retaliated by seizing control of the armchair in the spare room,
Russell remains as near to the fire as he can get without singeing, and Kitty, well Kitty has a variety of places where she may be found, but not when she has to go to the vet. Twice this week, at the sight of Debbie approaching bearing the cat-carrier to get her inside to take her to Donaldsons for her quarterly "rodent ulcer" jab, Kitty has legged it through the cat flap. Of course, today, when Debbie was collecting the ironing from Colin's side of the house, where should Kitty be, safe in the knowledge that vets don't open on a Sunday, but curled up inside the open abandoned cat carrier, fast asleep and purring.
I've been working on the S P B Mais book, the web site, the accounts, and doing some marketing, turn and turn about, so I have been shamefully neglectful of things like emails and message boards. I know for instance, that one of the founding members of my I-church group has recently suffered a sad loss, of her mother, and coincidentally, Jonty from the Archers' web site has just lost his mother as well. I hope both of them realise that they can email me if they need anything, although I have done precious little to offer any condolences. In my experience of these things, when my Mum died in 1986 and my Dad in 1992, it's not so much at the time that it hits you. For me, in both cases, making the arrangements and sorting out the funeral etc was something which carried me along, it was only afterwards that I sat down and tried to come to terms with the loss. I went through many mornings of waking up not having remembered my dad had died, and then it suddenly hitting me. Sometimes I had dreams where I had long conversations with him, and occasionally I still do, sometimes he is bizarrely present in modern circumstances, chatting to people he never even knew.
You can also be angry with them for dying. My sister and I ransacked my dad's house, convinced he would have left us a note at least to say goodbye, but we never found one. In the end, we came to assume that maybe he thought he had more time than he did. It's a completely illogical reaction, it's the mind saying "now you've really landed me in it, what am I going to do". The important thing is to deal with it without feeling guilty. The other thing that happens is you blame yourself. If only you had done this or that, but in fact, it's usually not your fault, believe me. They would not want you to beat yourself up, if they could tell you this, they would want you to get on with your life and remember their love and their life in the best way you can.
The only consolation I can offer is that - again, in my own experience - the hurt does fade after a while and is replaced with regret, yes, but also affection, and remembrance. Especially remembrance. I constantly think how my mother and father would have reacted to situations I now find myself in, and in that way, they live on, through my definition of them. Strange as it may seem, I find myself laughing about what I know they would have said or done, if they had been in the situation I was at the time. My mother, for instance, was a big fan of country and western music. At the time she was alive, my sister and I both thought this was a bit naff, and used to pour scorn on people like Jim Reeves and Slim Whitman.
Yet, here I am, nineteen years later, driving to work this week with Martin Simpson on the cassette deck singing about Patsy Kline and "Hawkshaw" and the boys, in the wonderful "Love Never Dies". In one of the verses, the singer describes how the guitar he has given Hawkshaw survives the plane wreck that killed Patsy Kline (it must have been absolute murder driving across America in the 1950's dodging all these plummeting country and western stars falling out of the sky in their malfunctioning planes - look out! It's the Big Bopper! Over there! Buddy Holly! Behind you! Jim Reeves etc etc. Think of the insurance premiums.)
"Love never dies, lust loses its shine for sure
Friendship can fade or be forced to a close
Frost follows clear skies in the flatlands I come from, but
At that Arkansas truck-stop, love never dies"
Late last year, when the father of one of my ex's died, I sent her an email which said what a good bloke I thought he was (he was, he offered to set me up in business with a small shop, back in the 1980s, foolishly at the time, I said I would rather plough my own furrow) and I ended by saying that love never dies, and if you believe that, then you have to believe that the love that we felt for these people who have gone on before, and the love they felt for us, is still in the world somewhere, and we can still tap into it and use it.
When I lived with the girl in question, our house had six coal seams running underneath it, from the old Wharnecliffe Woodmoor colliery, which had closed long before we moved to Carlton. It was only later that I found out the rough poetry of their names: Barnsley Main, Top Haigh Moor Seam, Lidgett Seam, Beamshaw Seam, Winter Seam, and Kent Seam. We knew at the time though, from local records and what old people in the area told us, that there were still bodies under the ground in these seams, unrecoverable from the great disaster in 1936 which claimed 57 lives and was the second-worst pre-war mining disaster in Britain, beaten only by Gresford in 1934.
People used to ask me if the thought bothered me, and I have to say that it didn't. The dead have gone from us in body, and have made their final statements, their lives are sealed off from us, just in the same way as those shafts were sealed when the colliery was finally closed in 1966. But to the people who knew them, who called them husband, dad or grandad, they never left completely, they never really went away, they were always at the edge of their thoughts, just as my mum and dad are to me, now.
I am not about to say that they are just in the next room, and "death means nothing at all". It isn't that simple for me, partially because I don't have Canon Henry Scott Holland's faith. But as I have written before, the exciting discoveries of modern physics are telling us more and more that there are other places, other dimensions, where lives which have ended in this dimension may be continuing and flourishing. Maybe we can come up with a word for this. We could call it "heaven". I find this of comfort, I hope others might. And if Philip Larkin and Martin Simpson (the unlikeliest of bedfellows) both say it, then it must be true:
Love never dies.
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Latest reply: Jan 17, 2005
Epilogue for 9 January
Posted Jan 9, 2005
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"
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Latest reply: Jan 9, 2005
Epilogue for 2 January
Posted Jan 2, 2005
It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. With Christmas finally out of the way, I've been able to begin the much needed re-organisation of the office. So far I have re-organised two bin bags of filing into the recycling, so I am going well.
Tig has been troubled with a problem with one of her claws, which I think I finally solved by pulling the offending bit of old claw off the new one underneath. Ouch! Anyway, she's now moving at normal pace again. That's the trouble with furry children, they can't tell you where it hurts. Russell has been taking his tablets like a good un, and eating like a house-end, so at least from his point of view, it's a positive start to the new year. Kitty remains welded to her "cat bed" in Colin's house, especially when the central heating is on and it's snowing or hailing outside.
The surprise development over the holidays though has been the growth of Dusty into the bad ass momma cat that rules the streets, now she has taken over possession of our bed. It's been quite amusing to see Russell's eyes grow as big as saucers as he sees her emerge from under the very duvet where he was sitting not a moment before, and the other morning Dusty was under the duvet and Nigel was on top of it; he then got off and I watched him pad very warily through the office, watching out for Dusty at every step, little knowing he'd just been rolling on top of her. Not the sharpest pencil in the box. This morning I left Dusty and Nigel in a state of armed neutrality on top of our bed. Like two muggers in a late-night railway carriage, neither wanted to be the first to fall asleep, for fear of what the other might do. They'll learn.
Of course, this week, the whole holiday has been overwhelmed, by a tidal wave.
We watched the news with dropping jaws, as each day brought further statistical carnage. Unlike other previous disasters, this is also one which has been played out on the internet. So much so that I found myself locked in a bitter controversy, on a message board, with someone who asked where God's compassion was in all of this. The problem is that God's compassion isn't newsworthy, so it never gets reported. All those acts of selfless kindness, the cancer patients who go into remission, and the people who are miraculously saved from some disaster of their own making, are hardly a blip on the newsometer. Whereas disaster footage ...well, good news is no news and bad news sells news.
Also, by definition, the mind of God is unknowable to mankind. That assumes you believe God to be eternal, omniscient and omnipresent, by definition, we cannot know what God knows. Therefore, theologically, it is entirely possible that God had a reason for this act which is unknown and unknowable to us. In the same way as we cannot imagine a being that could take upon itself the guilt and sorrow of 60,000 deaths, when we know from our own experience how terrible having just one death on our conscience would be. Of course, to God, life and death presumably do not have the same meaning as to us.
But then people ask "why did his creation (man) turn out to be so imperfect". This is a question I have often asked, and the only answer I can come up with is that it is to do with free will. Although God knows that man may go astray, mankind has to be allowed the free will to make his own mistakes (such as not having a Tsunami early warning system, which I understand will probably now be one outcome of this disaster) even though God knows how it will turn out, he/she/it has allowed mankind the freedom to learn by making mistakes.
You will never "prove" God's intentions one way or another - that is why religion comes down to faith in the end. Who is to say for instance that the Tsunami warning system which will be evolved as a result of this cataclysm would not save twice as many or a hundred times as many lives in a potential future disaster? Or that God didn't intervene, in the many miracles of personal survival now coming to light?
Incidentally, all this is no comfort at all to anyone who has suffered a loss in this disaster and I am sorry for my tone if you have, and you are reading this, but I was trying to respond specifically to the theological points.
I have just spent some considerable time logging on to the various blogs available which carry news of the Tsunami relief efforts and the impression I have gained is that people in the aid agencies are faced with the biggest thing that has ever hit them, are doing absolute wonders, but that thousands - maybe hundreds of thousands - of people who managed to survive the Tsunami are still going to die because of the limited resources available to the aid agencies and the lack of any overall co-ordinating forces on the ground which can use modern, up to date telecomms and monitoring to make sure that things get to where they are needed. Already on the blogs we are seeing people in one location posting things like "don't send any more blankets here, it is a waste of time, what we need is rice" etc., while another location is crying out for blankets, and by the time everything gets to where it should be, it may be too late. The aid agencies are doing heroically, as usual, but it needs something bigger than what we can provide by holding jumble sales and telethons.
People in the UK have been brilliant as usual, raising millions in three days for the appeal, but by the time this money is processed and turned into practical help, again, time will have ticked by. There are organisations in the world that already exist that have the materials and the manpower and the technological know how to take over the aid operation and make it work in time. Primarily of course, the US armed forces. Like it or not, the USA has the wherewithal to do this, but not the political will. Obviously there are some things where the UN can safely be left alone! Sorting out WMD in Iraq, no, that's Bush's baby, but rescuing survivors of third world people, nope, that's one for the UN. Our own government is just as bad. Not a word out of Blair, no commitment to send troops to help.
I have long argued that apart from the essential forces needed for our own defences, the weapons industry and the world's armies should be transmuted to a world wide disaster relief civil defence organisation under the control of the UN. The same technology used to guide a missile can also be used to locate survivors and guide supplies to them. Maybe now is the time to start on this process.
If Bush and Blair want to be seen as the world's policemen and taken seriously, if they want people like me who they have turned into cynical non-believers by their cherry-picking actions to start believing in them again, get some boots on the ground in South East Asia, NOW and set up a telecomms network for the aid agencies to coordinate their efforts before yet more people die, this time of a surfeit of blankets. If ever there WAS a time for unilateral UKUS intervention, this is it.
So, it's been a pretty serious week, and by the time it got to New Year's Eve, I was feeling decidedly muted. We thought we would go out for a meal, but there were no meals to be had. One pub we phoned very helpfully said "as it's New Year's Eve, we have stopped doing meals in favour of a karaoke!". Well, thanks a whole bundle there. In the end, we ordered a takeaway from The Balooshai, the best curry house in Huddersfield by a country mile. Only trouble is, you have to go and collect it, they don't deliver. Town was deserted. Rainy, empty streets, and the only vehicles around were taxis and police cars. Happy New Year.
We ended up going to the Sair, a traditional pub, at Linthwaite, where they brew their own beer and weave their own curtains. Or vice versa, having tasted the product. Despite a notice that claimed to welcome dogs, they made us leave Tiglet in the car, so we didn't stay long. Then we came back, to celebrate the bongs at home, me with Talisker, Deb with Amaretto. I swept the old year out, in the way Granny Welgate had taught me, and came back in with a piece of coal. No sign of life from the neighbours, and apart from the fireworks, you wouldn't have noticed anything going on.
Un-noticed by anyone, then, a New Year slipped in. The sheep have started lambing (at least on The Archers) in the New Year snow. This reminds me of the stories about the genesis of the Council for the Protection of Rural England, when Gerald Haythornthwhite of the Sheffield and Peak District branch back in the 1940s, used to go and organise volunteers to look for lost lambs in the snow. This in the worst post-war winter we have ever had - 1948. I have a photo of Granny Welgate and her neighbour digging themselves out of their back gardens at Elloughton Dale. The snow drifts are higher than their heads.
The idea of the lost sheep in the snow always makes me think of the Bible, and the parable of the lost sheep from Luke 15: 3-7:
"Which of you men, if you had one hundred sheep, and lost one of them, wouldn’t leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness, and go after the one that was lost, until he found it? When he has found it, he carries it on his shoulders, rejoicing. When he comes home, he calls together his friends and his neighbours, saying to them, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep which was lost!’ I tell you that even so there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents, than over ninety-nine righteous people who need no repentance."
The discovery of the lost sheep, for the shepherd, is, perhaps, routine. What would be a miracle to a shepherd? Three strange, rich, wise, foreigners, turning up at a stable where a child had been born because of a lack of Christmas accommodation? And their claiming that they had been led there by a star?
Next week, as well as Epiphany, marks the traditional anniversary of Plough Monday. The farmers' traditional prayer is "God Speed the Plough" . This day (January 7th) is traditionally the first Monday after the Twelve Days of Christmas is over and represents getting back to work after the holidays. On the Sunday before Plough Monday, ploughs are taken to church for a special blessing. On Plough Monday, however, you are supposed to decorate your plough and have your plough-boy (called a Plough Bullock or Plough Stot) drag your plough all over the neighbourhood asking for "plough-money" ("a penny for the ploughboy") which is supposed to be spent in "a frolic," and food and drink. At the frolic, or banquet, later that day, the whole village joins in Mummers' plays, enacting ritual combat and symbolic death and revival, and Molly dancing. A queen, known as Bessy, is then crowned and farm workers do sword dances around the ploughs.
So: next week contains both redemption - for the lost sheep who comes back to the fold - and hard work, for the ploughboys starting the year to come. Well, I have always welcomed both, so keep 'em coming. As Paul Simon said: I need a shot of redemption
And to all you lost sheep out there - the aid is on its way, just hold on. Hold on. You may feel the shepherd has let you down, and I don't blame you. But maybe you don't know the whole story. Maybe you can't know the whole story. Come back to the fold, and come back to us.
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Latest reply: Jan 2, 2005
Epilogue for 26 December
Posted Dec 26, 2004
It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. Frost, snow, wind , raid, and then frost again, and finally snow. As I sit typing this, on Boxing Day, in my little office at the top of the house, we have the central heating on both sides, Colin's and ours, plus the stove going full blast, and I am still wearing a poncho, an alpaca woolly hat, and on top of that a fleece bobble hat, and I have at my elbow a warming nip of Talisker. And I am STILL cold. I must look like Chris Bonington crossed with Clint Eastwood.
The animals have all made the most of Christmas. All of the cats have got new collars and Tig has got a personalised dog blanket and a squeaky goose toy. Russell refused to take his tablet on Christmas morning, even when wrapped in chicken breast, but what he didn't reckon on was that Deb's mother (aka the Neigbourhood Witch) was coming round, and that he would be sized by strong women, rolled in a towel, and have his pill popped down him with one of those thingies from the vet specially crafted for giving cats tablet without getting yourself clawed to shreds. His dignity ruffled, he retreated behind a chair, unnoticed until he made a daring comeback, three quarters of the way through Christmas dinner, when he leapt onto the table, nicked a chunk of Brie, clingfilm and all, and was off under the kitchen units with it clamped in his jaws before anyone could move a muscle to stop him. We all froze, sprouts on forks half way to our open mouths, aghast, and I uttered a silent and heartfelt prayer of thanks that he was well enough to do commit that theft, bearing in mind the year he's had. Needless to say, he didn't appear again until the Brie was all gone, apart from the remnants on his paws that he proceeded to smear over his head. This is another cats' eating habit that it would be amusing if humans adopted, I can just see us all dipping our hands into the gravy and plastering it across our hair.
There were eight of us for Christmas lunch, which is why I was up and prepping veg at 7.30AM. Alan, who Deb has spent a lot of time looking after but who she has rather lost touch with since he moved out, turned up unexpectedly but was a most welcome guest. Last Christmas, it was just me, Alan and Deb for Christmas dinner in the Lake District, so this year was a grander affair. And I didn't manage to set myself on fire this year either! The others were Debbie's family, apart from Damion and Paul, who are two of Deb's other charges. Both of them use wheelchairs, but because of the difficult access to the house, they were both "walked" in by Deb and her mother.
When they left, John came to collect them in the official car, and to save time, he and Deb actually carried Paul, who was helpless with laughter, out to the car, one under his arms, one holding his feet. God along knows what the neighbours must've thought, if any of them had been looking out at that time and seeing what must have looked like a very paralytic guest being poured back into a taxi!
It was great to see everybody round the table in the candlelight, tucking into festive fare, and I did try and give thanks, both to St Padre Pio and to Big G himself, that we'd made it to Christmas. Yes, 2005 is going to be a tough year, full of all sorts of challenges, but that is NEXT year's problem. For now, let's just rejoice in each other and the season, and be glad.
This must have been how it felt on the Western Front in 1914, when the British trenches heard the sound of "Stille Nacht, Heilige Nacht" floating across no-man's land. What a tragedy that the truce didn't spread far enough and fast enough to stop the war in its tracks. Instead, it became like Christmas will be to us, a brief island of peace in a world that is soon going to be back to its normal self, the world of "telegrams and anger. "
But for now, I have achieved a strange type of peace. I sang Stille Nacht myself, to myself in the car, driving back in the rain and wind, with the motor overheating. All the verses. In German. Well done, Frau Graham, wherever you are now, you were an excellent teacher. And then I topped it off with "In the Bleak Midwinter"
"What can I give him, poor as I am
If I were a shepherd, I would bring a lamb
If I were a wise man, I would do my part
But what I have I give him - give my heart"
My own taste in carols tends towards the bolshie though. I am a great fan of the traditional "Withy Carol" where Mary sends Jesus out to play, and he meets three rich young lords. He asks them to play with him, and they refuse, saying:
"For you are nothing but a Jew's child, born in an oxen stall"
So he does what any self respecting saviour who has been "dissed" would do - he builds a bridge out of the beams of the sun, and dances over the river. The rich young lords follow after him, and are all drowned. Their mothers naturally complain to Mary, who thrashes Jesus with a bundle of withy twigs - he then curses the willow and says it will be the very first tree to perish each winter. Not a very forgiving saviour, but one that appealed to my left-wing tendencies when I first heard that carol, over two decades ago. I have to say, in those two decades, Christmas as a whole has got a lot less spiritual. A lot less connected.
When we were going round Sainsburys on Thursday night, buying our own modest Christmas shopping list, I couldn't help but feel amazed at the amount of consumption going on all around us. While the speakers blared "I wish it could be Christmas every day" the tills were adding their own descants of joy for Sainsburys' shareholders. I bet they DO wish it could be Christmas every day. Me I would like to see a stall set up in the car park, taxing people 10% of their Christmas shopping bill and sending the money to Darfur, or even to one of those estates in the North of England where the trainers get handed down through the brothers in the family until they are so old and warn out that all there is to do is to burn them on the fire to try and keep warm, because coal costs too much. Or to the homeless, making the most of their week in the Dome that costs £250,000 of our taxes a month to keep empty. Because in seven days time, they will be back out in the cold, and I bet they wish it could be Christmas every day, too. Where is that bridge made out of sunbeams when you need it.
I wish it could be Christmas every day. I wish that we could keep that spirit and pay it forward through 2005. If I require anything of 2005, I would settle for reports of truces breaking out all over the world, of hungry people being fed, of sad people being given a meal, a fire, a pet to cuddle, some human warmth and charity.
In a world where even Santas have to have police checks, 2005 no doubt has some fairly dismal things in store for us and ours. Things that will test us, and our beliefs, situations we'd rather not be in, places where it would be oh so easy to cross by on the other side. We can retaliate though. Every time in 2005 somebody does something mean spirited or bad within your sight and hearing - say to them "shame on you, it's Christmas". Even if it's July 29th. Every time in 2005 you see someone needing a hand up, or a good feed, say to them "I can help you, - it's Christmas." Even if it's April 6th. Every time you are asked to turn your back on all the things that make each one of us the incalculable and never to be repeated beings that make up this crazy old world, say "No, I can't - it's Christmas, and I will give, give, and give again, until the need for giving, and for forgiving, is removed from the face of the Earth." Even if it's May 15th. Or December 2nd, or January 6th. Then it really will be Christmas every day, and we'll have gone a long way towards having something to really celebrate.
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Epilogue for 19 December
Posted Dec 20, 2004
It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. It is the year's deep midnight and it is the day's, as Donne said of St Lucy's day (who "scarce seven hours herself unmasks".) Actually, unbeknown to John Donne (rave on, John Donne) Lucy - the one that I know - hasn't been "unmasking" herself at all, but has been very sensibly curled up in front of the fire with Freddie, across the valley at Berry Brow.
So, this is the week when we have nearly reached the turning point - the "still point of the turning world", as Eliot put it. In the words of the song "I noticed tonight that the world had been turning". The ascent towards Christmas has been like toiling up a rocky pass between two mountains, and finally we have reached that flat shoulder at the top of the climb where you can look down in to the valley beyond, the valley called 2005. At the top of the pass is an inn called Christmas, where we will spend a few days resting and carousing and where we hope there will be room for everyone, before we have to press on.
Russell has been keeping a low profile this week, indeed all of the cats have. The tide of cold air that seeps through the house has left them stranded high and dry in odd places where there are isolated pockets of heat - under the heated towl rail in the bathroom, in a box of gone away envelopes in the office and, most usually, curled up in the armchairs nearest the kitchen stove. Russell had a bad "do" during the week, when the paroxsyms of his coughing and heaving were giving cause for concern, but he calmed down again and went to sleep in the chair, on top of my fleece. Like Mohammed with the tabby cat, I didn't have the heart to move him.
Tig has spent her time dozing with her nose in her tail, waiting, like the rest of us. Do they know it's Christmas? Probably not, their lives are like a permanent Christmas anyway.
From my vantage point at the top of this imaginary Christmas pass, I can look both forwards and backwards, backwards over the past week and forwards into next year. The past week has actually had little to comment it. At one point I was in a meeting during which someone broke off to take a mobile phone call from a graphic designer in Hungary, called Attilla (I kid you not) which was mainly about inflatable guitars. Debbie's Christmas "do" on Tuesday night was the usual volatile mix of alcohol and social workers, which inevitably continued into early Wednesday morning. While driving into town to pick her up, a group of drunken young male revellers - or, as I prefer to call them, prats in Santa hats, spilled into the road in front of me, trying to stop me and flag me down under the mistaken assumption that I was a taxi. I am ashamed to say that it was only the thought of the paperwork, and how bad prison food can be, that made me finally decide to swerve and miss them.
Arriving at the joint just as they were tipping out, I found little to report, except that someone had apparently tried to pick up Gail, one of Debbie's co-workers, with the immortal chat-up line "Scuse me luv, are you normal?" Ah, Huddersfield, Verona of the North.
Then on Thursday the windscreen wipers packed up on the car, which meant much chuffing about with batteries and fuses, only to discover the motor has burnt itself out. This is probably my punishment from on high for having bad thoughts about winging drunken yobs the night before. On my way to the garage, I drove past a house which had outside it an 8 foot high illuminated inflatable Homer Simpson in a Santa suit. Please, Lord, I have suffered enough.
One way or another, Santa Claus has been present in the background a lot this week. We watched the programme on TV on Saturday about the real St Nicholas. His bones were stolen from the Turkish shrine which contained them, by the fishermen of the Italian port of Bari, where most of them now lie (give or take the odd jawbone and bit of the true cross) in the basilica there, where every year the priests draw off a mysterious liquid (known as "manna" that seeps from them. Urgh.) The programme used reconstructive computer technology to build up a 3-D picture of what he must have looked like, based on a detailed survey done when the tomb was last opened in 1953. They even lowered a camera on a stick down a crevice into the tomb, to see if he was still there.
Debbie then pointed out to me that it can't be the real St Nicholas, because "where are the bones of all the reindeer?" This led us on to a detailed discussion of the names of the reindeer, and the following exhaustive canonical list:
Rudolph, Dasher, Prancer, Donner, Kebab, Blitzen, Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Titch. It's like the four horsemen of the Apocalypse, you can only ever remember three of them at any given time.
Sunday I spent fixing Debbie's mother's emails, and proving conclusively that it was working by sending her a test email which popped up straight away on her machine a mile away across the valley. I phoned her to see if she had got it. "Yes, well, I seem to be getting yours anyway. At least if you've fixed it so I can get local emails, that's better than nothing." I suggested she send her friend in Canada an email asking her to reply as a test, so we could see how far "local" extended!
Then in the afternoon, I ferried Deb to Meadowhall. I didn't particularly want to go, as I thought I had already seen enough of the commercial bits of Christmas, but I did venture into Past Times, which had a large display of statues of the Buddha, under a notice which proclaimed "The perfect gift for Christmas".
Do they know it's Christmas time at all.
I have been waiting for the turning point of the year, for Christmas with all its miracles, for what seems like such a long time, that now it's finally in sight I feel rather numb. The world seems drab, dreary and full of bad things at large. Gyres run on - and what rough beast, its hour come round at last slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? The chinese Book of Changes, the I Ching, (probably what the Buddha will be getting for Christmas, in a special Past Times edition) talks of the passes between the mountains being sealed at the solstices, so that no one could travel. Back again to the idea of the point of stillness.
So maybe what I need to do this week (and this may only work for me, I am not saying it's OK for you too) is to concentrate on the idea of the stillness. Forget the inflatable guitars and the mobile phones and the windscreen wipers and the Homer Simpsons and the karaoke Moose (rational and irrational) and sit still and enjoy the rest while I can.
Listening for the quiet voice that says it's finally, OK to celebrate.
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Latest reply: Dec 20, 2004
Slightly-Foxed of that Elk (rational or irrational) Laird of Phelps (one foot over) and Keeper of the Privy Seal
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