A Trinity of Troubles

Do you remember the Flanders and Swann song 'Twas on a Monday Morning that the Gasman came to call' which told the saga of a succession of workmen each of whom arrived, mucked up the work of the guy from the day before, and went away to be replaced next morning by another cowboy?  There have been several weeks or more between each of our muckings-up, and none of our tradesman is a cowboy, but the pattern was reminiscent.  

In November, Colin the Chippy nicked a buried-in-the-wall electric cable when he was drilling a hole for a rawl plug in Jo's bedroom.  This gave Andy Spark Boy ample opportunity to grumble, but no harm was done either to Colin or the electricity supply.  In December Martin the Damp nailed through a water pipe in my kitchen which caused some small flood and much hilarity from the passers by.  To commemorate the occasion Martin cut out the piece of damaged pipe with the intruding nail still in situ, mounted it on a small piece of wood and inscribed it 'Martin's Bad Day'.  It sits in pride of place on my mantlepiece like some piece of Haywood Gallery miniature sculpture, and is much admired.  

The last Thursday in January, Poor Gary - not one of our accustomed merry band but a lovely man and very good at his job - arrived to lay a piece of new vinyl floor covering in my minute hall.  While first repairing a loose floor board, he hammered a nail through a gas pipe.  I heard a great roaring noise worthy of Hardraw Force when the Beck is in flood, and a frightened squawk coming from Poor Gary who was standing beside the offended pipe looking like a pallid and not very well set jelly.  "I've nailed though a gas pipe." he said.  As this was palpably obvious I didn't stop to comment.  

There are gas taps in a cupboard in the main hall, but my fingers proved too feeble to turn them off.  So I scuttled back into my hall and said quite briskly I had to get down stairs to the meter cupboards in the front area.  Poor Gary now turning a very rich shade of ruby red, twittered unintelligibly, but remained rooted to his spot which made it difficult for me to get back into the hall and impossible for me to get to the staircase.  At this point I lost my usual polite cool and said very crisply: "Get out of the way please,  I have to go down stairs."  This in my very best nasty schoolmarm manner.  Fortunately it worked.  He moved and I went down the stairs faster than I would have thought now possible.  

Everything was fine after that.  I turned off my gas; opened all the outside doors and most of the windows; phoned the Gas Board emergency number; put on two layers of fleece over the top of my very ample chunky sweater and sat down to wait for expert help, which was not very long in coming.  Poor Gary spent the rest of the day doing a Uriah Heap, alternately wringing his hands in apology and protesting how upset he had been/was/always would be.  This was very understandable but all quite unnecessary as my only abiding emotion was one of some small satisfaction that I, as the family’s most distinguished wimp in even the least dire situation, had for once contrived to keep my my head, do the right thing and best of all quickly regained my customary sense of humour.  

Naomi

March Hares

March Hares

I met an old man in my wanderings,
with thin grey hair and pale aged eyes,
who smiled at me as we passed
through the kissing gate at the end
of the path down from the high town.
By his side a dog of indiscriminate
parentage, brown inquisitive face,
ragged ears, eyes as dark and deep
as the waves which caress the old jetty.
His nose pushed into my hand, he
bestowed wet kisses on my fingers.
“Privileged creatures dogs -  further
than a mere man would dare go
with a stranger.” his master said.
He blew me a kiss and went away
whistling a sad haunting tune,
but his step was brisk and the set
of his head that of a happy man.

On a bank at the edge of a field
newly greened beneath the wall
of the old town, two hares boxed
on the March snow dusted turf.
They circled, hind legs erect,
feet en demi point, long ears
akimbo, front legs curved high
into the sky, two peasant dancers
in a dizzy rural pas de deux
whirling, bobbing, wheeling,
then subdued he bowed to her,
and docile followed after her.
I watched them, two brown
snowflakes, Eostre’s children
who melted away invisible
among the old trees, their once
exuberant presence marked
only by faint tracks in the snow.

I stood at the open graveside
where the old man lay in his coffin,
his small brown dog beside me
long nose resting on brown paws.
‘Eternal rest grant unto him
Light perpetual shine upon him’
The dog, sighing, licked my hand.
Together we walked the path
down from the high town,
past the old forest where
young leverets sleep and play
and white wood anemones bloom.
On to the beach amongst the
blue sea holly and grey leafed kale,
two Mad March Hares running
headlong into the new spring sun.

Brown Dog barks, and chases
a flock of teetering sandpipers,
while I hold up my arms to
radiant Phoebus, dazzling symbol
of Love and Light come again.
                                         Naomi

February . But only he who sees

February - ‘But only he who sees, takes off his shoes‘                    E B Browning

Through a gap in the harbour wall, on to the jetty
into the vortex of a feathered whirlpool,    
a flock of neat stone turning Arctic incomers seeking
the comforts of their winter holiday sun.
Oh my sweet avian children, how much
through the tiresome heat of the long summer days
have I missed you, and watched for your return.

Sharp above the curve of the West Cliff
in the marine aqua February sky,
floats an etherial marbled landscape
 of smokey dark hills, gilt tipped
by the weary sun’s spent rays,
while soft valleys of Alice blue grey spill
their gentle streams into the burnished sea.

Up the hill to the East Cliff to look across the water
in the early twilight, with the winter sky fading
now to soft Egyptian blue, muted echo
of the crowd of a thousand June butterflies,
Polyommatus icarus - the Common Blue,
who brushed past me one bright
morning as I rode high above Stone Bay.

How can I call these exquisite creatures ‘common’
 when I have seen that every one is unique in its beauty?
Is it possible that the turnstones arrive not
for my pleasure, but each to show the miracle
of the universe, mirrored in every diminutive descendent
of the Mesozoic feathered theropod?
Does the fragile landscape disappear, like a dream
overcome by the sad harsh light of morning,
or will it exist for ever in the sightless all seeing eyes
of a loving and immutable God?

If these things should be, then I will take off my shoes,
for in this place I too will walk on holy ground.

Naomi

January - Winter of Content

January - Winter of Content

A time of sweetly sad memories,

    a dark evening, a piled high fire,

    embers curling and fiery tongues

    licking wood, hissing and sighing.

    Coffee hot in the old mug, a hand

    covering mine and the voice,

    long absorbed into the song

    of the planets and the ever circling

    bright stars, speaking warm

    and serene in the spluttering

    candle light and winter rain.

    

‘I will love you and care for you,

    I will walk with you in dark times

    and in light, your pain is my pain,

    your joy is my joy, and we have,

    my love, time enough before us.’

    

The veil of our temple was rent

    but no earthquake shook the land,

    no blackness blotted out the day.

    As long as the sleeping sun rises

    and memory stays fresh and green

    I will live in him and he in me.      

    For the gentle warmth and light

    of the nascent Spring cannot

    be overcome by lingering darkness

    or the bitter cold of winter sorrow,

    and now is our Winter of Content. 
                                                                Naomi

The uninvited guest - at home with Serpula lacrymans 

In the end … it won’t matter how much you know, but rather how much you love.       John C Morgan

I locate, at last, the fugitive soup spoon.  It peeps coyly out from under the fireside chair which is backed up against a wall.  Two orphan kitchen wall cupboards are stacked up against the chair  and the heavy coffee table nestles up to the cupboards. The carpet is carpeted with boxes of food and kitchen tools leaving me a six inch corridor in which to manoeuvre between table and sofa.  I begin to ease my way through, and poke at the fugitive cutlery with the handle of an umbrella. The spoon shudders and disappears further under the chair. I throw the umbrella at the chair but only contrive to sweep a vase off the coffee table which falls with a shattering crash onto the marble hearth.  I throw myself onto the dust shrouded sofa and, cursing, regard the domestic building site that now occupies my flat.

I have been sharing my life with an unpleasant minute organism called Serpula lacrymans.  Or to be rather more accurate, my flat has been sharing its life with a particularly dangerous pathogenic fungus whose sole function would appear to be the destruction of other living organisms. In my case, or in the case of my house, the destruction of  wood floors, frame and fittings left uncurbed, would lead eventually to the collapse of the building. To prevent this, Serpula has to be radically eradicated, involving the stripping of internal walls back to bare brick, the ripping out of all infected timbers, the application of noxious chemicals. Meanwhile my kitchen furniture lives in the living room and all the bathroom fittings have migrated to the garage - a quarter of a mile up the road. 

“To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven” wrote the Teacher, but I searched almost in vain for some benevolent purpose for this particular pathogen in what some regard as an  intelligently designed world.  Did God at the end of the third, or perhaps fifth, day of Creation look at Serpula lacrymans and see that it was good?  Or did an unbidden micro organism, in a moment of the Creator's creative absent mindedness, slip unnoticed into the Creator’s net?  

                                                                                                                                           

Serpula lives secretly in dark places; it sucks the liquid heart out of heathy timber leaving only a fragile desiccated skeleton in its wake; it may lie dormant for years then suddenly burst into a life of insatiable thirst as it travels without impediment through brick and old mortar. While today my builders tend to call it ‘house cancer,’ its existence and the damage it caused were first mentioned in the Book of Leviticus when, sometime between two and a half and three thousand years ago,  it was diagnosed as a “a fretting leprosy in the house: it is unclean.”  It might have destroyed my home; if it is not wholly eradicated, it still may do so.

Until very recently any beneficent purpose for the existence of Serpula  remained a mystery.  And that perhaps was its purpose.  It warned of the myriad intricacies and baffling paradoxes of the natural world about which we as a species know so little and it humbled us in the face of that which we did not understand.  Yesterday I found a News Item dated July 2011 from the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences.  A consortium of scientists from 10 countries has reported - under the headline “Dry Rot Fungus (Serpula lacrymans) Can Produce Biofuel”- that to pursue its task of breaking down wood so that it may drink and continue to live, the fungus uses a newly discovered enzyme which binds itself to wood cellulose fibres and then breaks them down. “It is this process that makes it possible to produce biofuel out of wood.”

On whether or not biofuels are generally a “good” thing or a “bad” thing for the environment, the jury is still out.  It is as likely that Serpula and its newly discovered enzyme will be shunned, as that it will be warmly welcomed as a source of easily produced power.  But this is the first indication I have found of any  scientists’ enthusiasm for Serpula lacrymans. Whatever the outcome of the current biofuel investigations, I marvel at the newly recognised capacity of this minute and mysterious organism to help  power up my computer and cook my dinner  -  I may even come to love my uninvited house guest.

Naomi

Young hope and an old dream

Young hope and an old dream

We sat on a bench, my new young friend and I, looking over the Bay,

he with feathers checkered brown and grey, fawn and cream, 

 the tips of his new black wings not yet distinguished

by the butterfly mirrors of grown-up white.

He stared long at me with his small dark eye, quietly snapped

his curved dark beak, and turned his sleek gull’s head

to stare far out into the shimmering horizon.

There he saw, I fancied, a seething shoal of forty hundred herring, 

bounty enough to feed his flock for a season and a day.

I saw there a Man, who walked across the the tumbling waters

with two small fish and a basket of loaves, 

and love enough to feed the whole sad, hungry world.

Naomi

Canterbury Cathedral - the Corona chapel

And glow more intense than blaze of branch, or brazier,

Stirs the dumb spirit; no wind, but pentecostal fire

In the dark time of the year.                                       Eliot:  Little Gidding

 

At the farthest eastern point of the Cathedral there is a circular chapel long known as the Corona Chapel. Its shrine once held the crown of Tomas Becket’s head sliced off in 1172 by one of Henry II’s murdering barons.  It became a place of popular pilgrimage, the air sharp with the the fragrance of incense and the vault echoing with a million prayers of the faithful.  But in 1537 its treasures were plundered and the shrine destroyed by Henry VIII’s iconoclastic Commissioners.  Empty now, it serves to remind us of those other myriad brave souls who lived and died serving God and loving their neighbours.  With its jewel stained windows, its airy emptiness, its soft light and gentle peace, it has become place of thankful remembrance and quiet contemplation.   

Here are especially honoured the saints of our own time, among them Martin Luther King;  Archbishop Oscar Romero assassinated because he fought for the rights of the poor;  Maximilian Kolbe, Franciscan priest, took the place of a stranger sentenced to death by starvation in Auschwitz;  Maria Skobtsova Russian aristocrat, poet and nun, assisted Jewish refugees to escape Nazi occupied Europe, died in a Ravensbruck gas chamber in the place of an unknown Jewish woman;  Edith Stein, Jewish philosopher and Carmelite nun, gassed in Auschwitz.

Theirs was a noble and disparate company, faithful to their God and prepared even to die for love of a stranger.  They took no account of race or colour, in times of need they did not question creed or unbelief.  If their enemy was hungry or sick they cared for him; if a stranger crouched in the dark shadows of depression and despair, they took his hand and guided him into the light.  They saw only that God had walked beside them along the paths of injustice, terror and shame, and He did not discriminate between the unworthy and the righteous. 

Canterbury Cathedral - December - The Corona Chapel

In this quiet chapel, where the welcome smile
of a winter morning streams through lapis glass
lighting up sun gold slim pillar and wide stepped stone,
I meditate on the saints and martyrs of our time,
commemorated here where once Becket’s crown was laid.
Archbishop, poet, philosopher, minister, priest and nun, 
long cherished in the hearts of all whose lives they embraced,
their loving spirits bright mirror of the divine.

They followed their Master far up the dangerous mountain path,
along the edge of the precipice, across the roaring torrent,
into a city of sad madmen, tyrants and thieves.
There, to reject neither the summons to deathbed or prison cell,
the trembling outstretched hand, the empty pleading eyes,
but to nourish the broken and the hungry soul,
to touch with love the outcast and the untouchable,
and break again the alabaster jar and anoint the weary feet.

They went to Bethlehem to greet the Christ Child’s coming,
they sat in the Temple amongst the wondering doctors,
in the wilderness they prayed for him and at his baptism rejoiced,
they walked and talked with him beside the Sea of Galilee,
they wept for him in the moonlit agony of Gethsemane
and in his footsteps trod their own Via Dolorosa.
He, their Child, their Teacher and their Lord.
Verbum caro factum
Venite adoramus Dominum

Naomi