In A Village By Mistake

It won’t have escaped your attention that it has been a bit rainy these last few weeks.

Obviously, grim winter weather isn’t particularly newsworthy when it only affects the horny-handed toilers of the rural ‘idyll’; but this year even Paul Daniels had to get his waders out and soon the Daily Mail was salivating with joyous schadenfreude over photos of half-submerged Range Rovers and exceedingly damp Mock-Tudor Mansions.

Because disaster is always so much MUCH more disastrous somehow when you are extremely rich and within an easy commute of London isn’t it?

Don’t get me wrong, I am not here to mock.

(Well, no more than is habitual and unavoidable, for a normal hot-blooded Englishwoman.)

On the contrary – I am here to help! As a reluctant recent* refugee to the countryside, I have plenty of tips for surviving and even enjoying everything that the extremes of winter in the British countryside can throw at you.

So here are Number6’s tips for a countryside winter:

1. Always listen to the updated list of all the closed roads on the radio in the morning. All the way to the end, including ‘and Dry Lane is still flooded’. This will remind you that you should never have moved to the countryside in the first place.
2. If you do insist on moving to the countryside then don’t move anywhere that is called ‘Brookside’, ‘Lake View’, ‘Snowy Bank’ or ‘I’ve Never Seen the River So High!’
3. Or anywhere below sea level.
4. When you first move to the country you will spend a morning walking round the nearest market town, marvelling at the shop windows full of dun-coloured country wear and wellies that cost more than a weekend break to Paris and you will say in wondering tones – who BUYS these things? And the answer to this question is all the sensible folk who know what the weather can be like and will be quietly sniggering at you in your Per Una ‘water’’proofs’.
5. Make friends with someone with a Land Rover. Not just a 4×4 Chelsea Tractor with personalised number plates and a cartoon of two rhinos shagging on the spare tyre cover, but an actual possibly-green-underneath-all-the-mud farmer-mobile, that looks like it could take a small volley of close-range fire in an emergency (or possibly already has) and may well have Bambi’s mum, skinned and lifeless, stored in the back. You might think these look a bit, well, ugly, probably drink petrol and are a bit tricky to park. All of this will become somewhat irrelevant when 15 miles of snowy roads stands between you and the emergency dentist one January night.
6. Ditto someone with a generator. And some water butts. And a boat. Basically you need to move in with a farmer. Offer to help them with some lambing, that will get you on their right side.
7. Don’t make any jokes about building an ark. They are probably all building an ark round the back of the lambing barn but you, in your suspiciously clean Joules wellies, are not among the righteous, but rather shall perish on the dry land.
8. If you do find yourself in the middle of some floods, just drive straight through them. Otherwise it’s a long way round, and you’ve got all that Waitrose ice cream in the back defrosting. Nice and fast – just put your foot right to the floor. Go on, just do it! Preferably swearing constantly throughout the process. That will help. Overtake this stranded vehicle! Surely the water won’t come up THAT high? I mean the engine is not THAT close to the ground is it? OH GOD WHAT’S THAT BURNING SMELL?
9. Make sure you have the phone number of your friend with the Land Rover on speed dial, so s/he can come and tow you out of the flood that you have just driven through and beached your Nissan Micro on a dead sheep. You may have to offer to buy them a new water butt, or to do that lambing thing where you have to skin the dead lamb to persuade the ewe to take on an orphan lamb**. But it will be quicker than getting a garage to come and get it; there are filled with all the other city-idiots who did the same thing.
10. Keep a snow shovel in your boot at all times. It can help to move drowned sheep out of flood water, or you can sit on it on sodden bank and think about how nice it would be to live a high-rise flat somewhere on a tube line.
11. If you do ignore all of these, because that really is a lovely new house at a bargain price and surely the government wouldn’t let a respectable house building firm build on a flood plain or chop down a whole load of trees that would have probably absorbed quite a bit of this extra water because we don’t need trees and flood plains and well-drained soil – we need houses, right? Well just in case you might start feeling a teeny bit, well, responsible or cross with the government – don’t worry, it’s OK and definitely not your fault. Pop over to the Daily Mail website to learn how it’s all the fault of the bloody foreigners for making a massive fuss about their natural disasters and STEALING our money. All the money that should have been sent to buy Paul Daniels some more inflatable paddling pools, has instead has being frittered away instead on malaria prevention and providing safe drinking water to the 900m people around the world who don’t have access to it. You can even sign a petition about it, if you are a particular fan of the sleight-of-hand-distraction away from the real issues of environmental mismanagement by the injection of some nasty xenophobic prejudice. Now that’s magic, as poor old knee-deep in flood water Paul Daniels might say.
12. Don’t move to the countryside.
13. Seriously, don’t.

*I have ‘only’ been living in the countryside for 16 short years now. An absolute baby-newcomer. My wellies aren’t even muddy yet.

** I know this is a true thing because I heard Debbie talking about it on The Archers.

As the Panto-villain Katie Hopkins memorably pointed out, names matter. New parents buy books of names, agonise over this crucial choice, right?

Well, not if you’re the fifth girl-child it turns out. By that time by parents had run out of ideas and frankly interest in the whole naming business.

The truth of how my name was chosen has become somewhat blurred by exaggerated teasing and guiltily fervent counterclaim, but the process seems to have involved slips of paper and no one aged over 16. A cross between the Secret Seven and a Secret Ballot.

I can only give thanks that one of my sisters didn’t extract the slip marked ‘runt of the litter’ and instead I got a perfectly serviceable, if rather commonplace, first name; the middle name, however, is a little more risky.

Joy. Joy of Joys. Glad tidings of great joy.

Calling someone after an emotion is asking for trouble; like all those chunky Willows and clumsy Graces, what if being called ‘Joy’ had backfired horribly and I had lived my life as a walking oxymoron: ‘Oh, look there goes Miserable Joy…’

Well thankfully it didn’t work out that way – I am mostly pretty cheerful, perhaps sometimes gratingly so. And this time of year I get to sing some pretty cheerful songs about my name. Glad tidings of great joy, that’s what we’re promised. But only if we believe, only if we are saved.

For those who believe in the truth of the miracle of the Christ Child, the Word made flesh, then Joy is a very straightforward thing. Believe in Him, everlasting life, boom.

Unfortunately, it seems to me that many of the Christians seem rather devoid of joy and often, frankly, pretty cross this time of year. More than a little cross that the ‘true’ ‘real’ meaning of Christmas has been lost.

Stop, Christians, stop fretting that Christmas has lost all its joy and become a debauched frenzied orgy of consumption. Take it from me, Unhappy Christians, for I know ALL about Joy. (Cause it’s like, my name, yeah?) There is still a whole lot of Joy to be found in Christmas 2013, and we all have plenty, plenty to be joyful about. This nonsensical, magical patchwork of traditions and quasi-semi-religious feeling is still stuffed full of the sheer joy of living.

First of all, obviously there is a great deal of joy to be had in taking part in a debauched frenzied orgy of consumption with your nearest and dearest. The darkest days of the year, when we need to cuddle up close and look forward to the light and the warmth that’s coming. That we hope is coming.

We search for joy in traditions that we associate with our childhood, that we make our own. We search for joy in the sharing of booze and feasting and singing with friends and telling the old old stories. The joy between us that was here before that cracking viral story about the little baby born into poverty who changed the world by being kind and giving us hope, and the joy that the nativity story carries with it in its viral way, even – strangely, magically – to those who don’t believe it.

Well it’s a great story, full of beauty and, yeah, joy. The lowest and the highest brought together, the promise of new light. I can’t promise there will be eternal life (soz) but I can promise that the world will turn, that Sun / Son will come again and before you know it we will be walking through the golden daffodils and barefoot on the hot sand and crunching through the fallen leaves and the virgin snow and watching Love Actually again even though we’ve seen it loads of times and it’s a bit rubbish it makes us feel Christmassy and we all love feeling Christmassy and we wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

Joy isn’t like happiness. Joy is the kernel of the human condition, the heart of us all. Happiness can come and go, but no matter how crappy the situation, no matter how full the inns or how far you’ve travelled on that bloody donkey – go deeper and you will find human beings can find joy in any place, any time.

Christmas without Christ is not empty – and neither was Yule / Saturnalia / The Feast of Fools / Whatever they were celebrating at Avebury and Stonehenge.

Whenever people came together to sing and give and receive and eat a lot of Quality Street and drink mead or mulled wine and tell stories about the past and make plans for the future – even without the promise of eternal life, there is, always has been, joy in this one.

The last 24 hours have emphasised the difficulties for the amateur blogger. No sooner have I started some mildly humorous reflections on package holidays and maybe something about how much I bloody love the Greek Islands, via some very trivial moaning about Kindles and how they STILL make my teeth itch, than it all become painfully trivial compared to what is happening right now in Syria.

But while it would be perverse to ignore, I have never been more conscious of my amateur status as a commentator, or more acutely conscious that the world could probably bumble along nicely without my opinion. But when everyone around me seems to knows what to say about what we should do, I at least need to work out what I think.

Facebook and Twitter are bursting at the seams with opinions –passionate and divergent opinions, held by people who I admire and respect greatly.

The difficulty is, I see both sides, all sides, and although I feel the depth of the passion, I can’t completely agree with either side, not yet.

Our feelings about this war – or conflict, or military intervention – are obviously coloured by all the conflicts we have lived through before, or lived with the aftermath. For me, and for many of us, this is a back-catalogue of vivid and competing narratives, from Saturday afternoon films, history lessons, the news – two World Wars, Korea, Vietnam, The Falklands, Bosnia, the first Gulf War, Afghanistan, Iraq.

We have absorbed and merged our own versions of a muddy, bloody set of competing narratives and conflicting emotions about when, or if, we should have joined, and left, and the nature of the actions that were carried out in our name.

We are all of us bringing to this particular crisis point our own mixture of guilt and pride and fear.

This is not intended to be a thorough sweep of the complex historical threads of the 20^th century – I’d be pushed to manage that in 800 words. But unless you are a Miraculist thinker – Why can’t we all just get round a table and TALK THIS THROUGH?? – then the other arguments seem too finely balanced to reach anything other than a cautious, temporary conclusion about the right thing to do.

Those who are cautious about intervening in Syria are, I would guess, most inhibited by our recent history of intervention in the post 9/11 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the latter being perhaps the most strongly opposed war in our British history – at least publicly. The arguments against intervening in Iraq seem to carry a heavy weight of precedent here.

I understand these inhibitions, yet the case for intervention has moral power behind it too, undeniably – the human need to reach out to those horribly oppressed and suffering terribly. The story of the UN involvement in Bosnia, and further back (though still incredibly potent in our national psychology) the war against the Nazis retains a great deal of power for those arguing to help an oppressed minority. And the story of our appeasement in the 1930s casts a long dark shadow.

Leaving aside the shouting about Hawks and Doves, and excepting the dictators and the warmongers and the arms-dealers – for most of us, we are more or less resigned to armed conflict being part of our present and future as well as our past. Human history is, to a very great extent the history of war; and little has changed since Aristotle wrote that sometimes to make peace, you have to make war.

But there was a time – not so long ago – that the many lions on the front line were supposed to risk everything for King and Country and no questions asked. The decisions were taken by the few and affected the many. What can we gain here, what can we lose, and how many lives might be lost? And is it worth it? Does a soldier’s life weigh heavier than a civilian’s. or vice versa? What about the lives of the enemy? And when do we stop counting the deaths? When does the war end for the purposes of making this calculations? And how can we predict the outcomes. The other costs – to neighbouring countries, to our reputations on the world stage – how do they weigh in the balance?

Leaders have always made this balance in the secrecy of their talking chambers, we know they didn’t always do a great job – but now we are all supposed to be able to do it.

The political changes of the last hundred years mean that the will of the people – public opinion – is now used to justify our actions. Yet if we were to intervene in Syria, the chances are that very few of us would be involved directly or indirectly.

I find it impossible. I don’t know enough – about what’s happening on the ground, about the potential outcomes, to make that calculation. I hope, I trust, that those in charge are doing their best to make this impossible balance.

I am not a hawk, nor am I a dove. I am just an ordinary person, whose heart and gut wrenches to see the horrible scenes in Syria. I hope that is what democracy really means – not that the really tough decisions are made by all of us, collectively, but rather that they are made by the right people with the right information, balancing out what seem to me to be irreconcilable arguments and counterarguments.