Scargill has been anointed with oil, several thousand litres of it. Thank God and Bayford Oil for that.

Thank God also for Robert, our kindly farmer neighbour, who responded to a call for help by sending his snow plough to clear the main drive and the track between the two cottages so that the oil lorry could get through at eight o’clock this morning. It was getting pretty serious. Fortunately, Simon, the Project Manager, offered a temporary solution before heading off on holiday. Twice a day for the last week or so I have trekked up through deep snow to a big red tank behind his house to fill a jerry can with a few litres of precious fluid so that the central heating system in our cottage could function for a few more hours.

I have begun to inhabit a world of oil. My gloves stink of it. My boots are spotted with it. It seems to have entered my very brain. In order to empty that blessed, cursed, maddeningly heavy can into our tank it has been necessary to balance my considerable bulk on a small ice-covered sledge so that I can open two infernally awkward plastic covers and lean over the exposed inner aperture to make sure the oil goes cleanly through the hole. A vastly overrated occupation. After doing this a couple of times I wondered why I was feeling lightheaded and giddy. It was the fumes, of course. Another week and I might have needed to join fellow sufferers at OA.

“My name is Adrian Plass, and I am an oil addict...”

Stocks had run dangerously low in the main house as well. Yesterday I phoned Sarah Sellers our administrator, who works up in the office, and prognosticated darkly about a future with no oil.

“Imagine,” I said, “if the snow goes on for ever and ever and no oil ever comes. There’ll be you, me, Bridget, and whichever volunteers are doing a stint, sitting dismally round a bonfire in the middle of the Snow Lounge chucking on bits of door-frame, chair legs, or any other bits of the Scargill fabric that might possibly be flammable. It’ll make Waiting for Godot look like Pollyanna.”

Anyway, that isn’t going to happen because the oil has come, and we are all feeling much happier. Even the ragged old sheep who has taken up residence in next door’s porch looks a little brighter. Perhaps our raised spirits are infectious. More likely it’s the cabbages we bought for her at Morrison’s in Skipton yesterday. Our teenage god-daughter,  hearing about this beleaguered creature on the telephone yesterday, suggested that we christen it Amy, after her, so that every time we look at it we think of her. She hasn’t seen the sheep...

So where is God in all this? Maybe I should quote that well known scripture verse: “Many are cold and more than a few are frozen.”

No, I don’t think I’ll do that. I don’t think I’ll quote any verses at all. I think I shall simply reflect on the fact that life happens and has to be dealt with. Snow falls and has to be dealt with (sometimes with the help of neighbours). Oil doesn’t come and it has to be dealt with. God is over, under, round and right in the middle of all our dealings, and that, in the end, is what will make all the difference.

PRAYER

Father, as Scargill grows and begins to fill up and turns into whatever it is going to become, remind us that life is good and bad and easy and complicated and rich and poverty-stricken and quite frightening, and that you are warmly willing to partner with us in dealing with the best and the worst. Amen