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

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. If not the start of spring, then at least the end of winter. Each day I have watched from the window outside this office as yet more catkin buds open on these branches. The cats have welcomed the warmer weather, especially Nigel, who is in mid-moult, and Kitty, whose rodent ulcer condition is always improved by the coming of summer. Dusty has tended to treat the warmer days and lighter evenings with indifference, and Russbags has been stuck in his chair by the stove, still very thin and still very much recuperating.

Tig has been playing football in the park: I have been grappling with the VAT return and the print queue. Debbie has been pruning trees in the garden in the dark, because she does not like the neighbours seeing her doing it. No, I can't understand that one either.

Wednesday was a pivotal day of the week for me. Up at 5.15AM for the drive down to Chichester, for Maisie's book launch. For some reason, Wednesday slipped back momentarily to the weather of November, rather than March. I thought, as I went along, that the fog would lift when the sun came up. But no. First I had fog, then, rain, then foggy rain, then rainy fog, all the way down the M1.

The launch itself was great. People mingled, they listened to the speakers, the food was munched, the wine drunk, and I saw several people I had not seen in too long a time, spending some precious hours with them. All too soon it was time to set off on the long drive home.

I had had a bad feeling about the day, for some time now. I should have trusted my instincts. On the homeward leg, I got as far as Pease Pottage, where I was queuing at the roundabout to go across into the services. It was the sort of roundabout where if you don't wait for a gap and then go for it, you sit there all day. I saw a gap, and went for it, unfortunately, the Toyota Yaris in front of me didn't, and the end result was the loss of my headlight on his rear bumper. The car in front is a Toyota. In this case, it certainly was.

After we'd swopped details and he'd driven off, I looked at the state of my bumper. Bent almost back into the tyre, and the headlight glass completely smashed. Two hundred miles from home, and getting dark.

There was nothing for it, but to set off and hope for the best. I brought to mid all of those people who won the VC for climbing out on the wing of burning Wellington bombers and thought well, if they can do it, I can do it, so I rejoined the motorway and pointed my wheels northward.
It was dark, and rainy, and I only had half my normal headlights. By the time I got to the M1, I was ready to give up. But I kept repeating a sort of prayer to myself, that if I got home OK, I would try and be a better person. It was dark, it was rainy, and for a lot of the time, I was sailing into the unknown and unseen at 70MPH with the bumper only half an inch away from the tyre, but somehow I made it home, at 11.15PM.

Faith will get you through, I suppose. I was reminded of this by the death of the Pope. He was in a similar situation, entering a very dark time, sailing into the unknown, but praying that he would get there OK.

I was fortunate enough to hear him preach once, at the Knavesmire (York Racecourse) in 1982. I can't remember the subject of his sermon, but I can remember that it was a brilliantly hot sunny day, and that Basil Hume waved at me (or so it seemed) from the back window of the Popemobile. I also remember being in a huge crowd of people chanting "Saints of God, come to our aid" and what a profound spiritual effect it had on me.

Whatever you think about him - and he certainly had his detractors - the Pope lived by what he believed in. Living by what you believe in isn't always a good thing - one has only to think of Adolf Hitler and Margaret Thatcher - but in the Pope's case, he genuinely thought he was trying to do God's will.

Just when I am still struggling to come to terms with the ideas of forgiveness, his death - or to be more accurate, his life - has opened up another vast moral chasm for me. I can't begin to agree with some of his views on women and on contraception, in particular as they affect the developing world, but I have to admire him for sticking to his beliefs. He told it how he WANTED it to be - or how he thought Big G wanted it to be, rather than how it was. And this refusal to compromise lies at the heart of his mission on earth. If everybody lived according to the natural law of God, then everything the Pope said would have made perfect sense. The fact that people didn't, as he saw it, was OUR problem, not his. Or our problem, not God's.

So in addition to not being able to crack the idea of forgiveness, I now have to grapple with whether the spiritual life should compromise with reality as it is lived, or ignore it. Don't expect any answers this week. And in addition to that, I will no longer be able to do my Pope impersonation, by putting a jiffy bag on my head, and intoning in a heavy Polish accent that it gives me great pleasure to open this bring-and-buy-sale. An impression which is only vaguely funny if everyone else who witnesses it has had at least as much to drink as I have.

One area where I had to admire John Paul, much as I disagreed with him, was in the manner of his dying. We tend to sanitise death in our modern society, he embraced it full on, and was determined to make sure his grapple with the grim reaper was reported blow by blow, as a lesson to us all.

Next week, I hope (d.v) to attain the age of fifty. As Orwell said, by the time a man has reached fifty, he has the face he deserves. Naturally, my thoughts have been turning to the fact that in twenty years time (which seems but the twinkling of an eye) I will, if I am spared, be seventy, and have attained the Biblical span of three score years and ten. Contemplating your own bodily extinction is not pleasant. But John Paul has shown that at least it can be a triumphant experience as well as a profoundly sad one. If you have to go, what better way than on a Spring morning when the catkins are budding, your friends are all around you, and there are crowds of thousands of well wishers singing psalms outside your window.

Certainly, when the grim reaper cuts the legs from under me, I would like to have started something new that morning. If it goes on to annoy the government, even after I am gone, so much the better.

One of the things I like about the Catholic church is its clearly defined promotion path for dead people, if they work hard enough, to eventually become saints. You settle into eternity, you get to know the ropes, you perform the odd intervention here and there, you save a life or two, you stop something going wrong, and before you know it, you are officially a "blessed". Next stop, sainthood. Saint Karol Wotiljya. You heard it here first.