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Diary: Pat Ashworth

04 October 2024

ISTOCK

O rest in the Lord

WE HAVE laid my sister to rest. I use that phrase deliberately, and not as a euphemism for burial, because we shudder to remember some of those. Worst were the burials of my in-laws, in a family grave in a Lancashire town cemetery. The aspect was bleak and the rain unremitting, and the earth fell on the coffin like a blow. It seemed a cruel final act, and all any of us wanted to do on both occasions was to go home and get warm.

Elizabeth’s resting-place is in open countryside, with green pasture and stone walls in the foreground and the peak of Ingleborough standing out on the horizon in the Pennine chain, the backbone of England.

There is nothing to mark the graves on this site except a discreet plaque for identification and a growing number of saplings and mature trees. And there is something Hardy-esque about our small procession behind her cardboard coffin: a winding, country thing, with the sun shining, and the sheep grazing, and bark chippings soft on the path beneath our feet. The vicar’s words are wafted on the breeze: they have their roots in Celtic Christianity, and the blessing falls like the benison it is.

How much less strange I hope this will be for her grandchildren — experiencing for the first time the death of a loved one — than the fearful imaginings as the curtains glide together at the crematorium, or the coffin joins the serried marble ranks of the dead. We have left her to the embrace of the earth, and I can walk away with peace in my heart.

 

A whiff of sulphur

IT HAS been a traumatic few months, and I take myself off in the campervan to recover. A new site is always a joy: this one is a grassy field by an orchard on a Yorkshire farm, with autumn colours starting to show, and the beginnings of an early-morning mist.

Campsites are great places for people-watching. In the evening sunshine, I sit idly in the sliding doorway of my van, feet up, glass of wine and the crossword, and marvel at the TARDIS that has driven in on the other side of the field. Out of the small black van appears first an awning, followed by folding chairs and table, a firepit, and a canvas windbreak to enclose them all. And then, most amazingly of all, a motorbike.

Their campfire flickers orange in the darkness, and there is a soft guitar. I’m uplifted. This could be Greenbelt. But another night, another site, and I get a dystopian vision of the Great Outdoors, as a veritable pantechnicon of a motorhome drives in, followed by the subsidiary transport of a second car. Out comes the awning, up goes the Sky dish. And, later, presided over in lordly isolation by the man of the van, out comes the barbecue, enclosed in steel — and reeking, not of succulent steak, but of paraffin.

 

Time was. . .

I HAVE taken the risky step of organising the first read-through of my new play before I’ve actually finished it, and can only imagine what my methodical scientist husband would have said. But I’m a journalist. I can’t work without a deadline. And the strategy has always worked before. And they’ve all said, Yes, lovely, see you on 3 November.

So, I throw myself with renewed vigour into the world of the early geologists and natural philosophers, and marvel at the confidence of the Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland James Ussher (1581-1656) in ascribing a date to the creation of the world so credible that it was included in a chronology footnote in the King James Bible.

In my mind, I had dismissed him as a likely charlatan, before discovering that he was a renowned scholar and theologian, and had one of the biggest libraries in Europe. He arrived at his calculated guess that God created the world on Sunday 23 October 4004 BC by adding up the lifespans of who begat whom, from Adam to Solomon, diving into Babylonian, Persian, and Roman history for the period from Solomon to Christ.

Taking into account the autumn equinox, he worked backwards from the sabbath — the seventh day — to establish it must have been a Sunday in October. And, calculating that the Flood occurred 1656 years after the Creation, he concluded that Noah embarked on Sunday 7 December 2349 BC, spent just over a year on the ark, and disembarked on 18 December the following year.

I eat a large slice of humble pie.

 

Heavenly host

WE ARE approaching our patronal festival of St Michael and All Angels, which, by good fortune, this year falls on the fifth Sunday, scheduled for choral evensong. The youthful saint is depicted with drawn sword on the marble panel behind the altar; and angel faces suffering mild erosion still gaze keenly out from our Victorian stonework.

What rousing stuff it all is! Our choirmaster sources copies of the anthem “Around the throne of God” (Charles Waters, words J. M. Neale) from we know not where, but, at 3d. a copy, it has clearly stood the test of time:
 

Bright things they see, sweet harps they hold,
And on their heads are crowns of gold. . .

So shall no wicked thing draw near,
To do us harm or cause us fear.
And we shall dwell when life is past
With angels round thy throne at last. 

No Amen. None needed.

 

Pat Ashworth is a journalist and playwright.

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