"If I had more spare time"

 Just recently I saw a post doing the rounds on social media warning of  the intention to mine our posts, conversations and photographs for use by AI bots. This post said the initiative would include our direct (private) messages, but a friend pointed me to a Snopes article reassuring us that this isn't true — everything else, yes, but not the direct messages.

True or not, I thought the time might have come to go through my accumulation of direct messages and delete them. I do this routinely with my posts and my reactions to the posts of others. Apart from my interactions on the archive of the online church I started during the Covid lockdown, I clear out the whole lot from time to time. I remove it all.

I found the deletion of these messages surprisingly difficult. Most of my friends on social media are not people I originally met in person (some I never have physically met, ever), but are readers of my books who found their way to me wanting to chat about aspects of life and thought, and from there became real friends. So, many of my messages were first encounters with strangers who became dear friends, explaining what they had found in my writing that made them want to get to know me better. I read through their stories of life experiences and faith journey, and found it hard to lay them finally to rest. 

And then there were several conversations with friends who have now died — some were inconsequential in content, but even so it felt sad to cut that final tie.

But there was one message I'd saved that made me laugh a lot, both at the time I received it and now re-discovering it after years had gone by.

It was from a young man who had contacted me about something I've now long forgotten, perhaps a medical issue because I belong to a handful of self-help groups to do with health challenges, and individuals message each other sometimes.

But in the course of this particular correspondence it had been relevant to mention that I work from home because I'm a writer. It was his response that amused me. He said this (I think he's long forgotten my existence or I wouldn't post it here):

There are, of course, people who write books in their spare time, and that usually becomes clear in the first few pages. And there are many people who (oddly) confuse writing with typing, something you can take up and put down, nothing that particularly occupies the mind.

That recalls to mind a conversation I had during the years I was involved in a local group for Christian women who held regular weekly coffee mornings at their centre of operations. I was on the rota for overseeing these meetings, and on one occasion asked to be excused as I was trying to finish writing a novel.

Being the hostess of these events required one to make tea and coffee, be available to chat with whoever dropped in, serve cake etc, and clean up the kitchen at the end.

When I said I needed to finish off writing the book for a deadline, one of the good ladies, puzzled, asked me if I couldn't simply bring my laptop with me and do the writing in between whatever else ended to be attended to.

That was the moment I realised the extent to which people see a writer typing and think, that's it — that's the only thing going on; sitting at a table and typing, that's how books are made. And they too might have a go at writing one if only they can spare the time to sit down at the table and start to type.

To the young man far too busy on important matters to find enough spare time that he could do what I do, I think I simply encouraged him to have a go. To the good sister who couldn't see why bringing my laptop along to the coffee morning (and host it) might not work perfectly well, I simply said, no, I can't do that.

But both those memories still make me laugh, looking back.  

Margery

 I don't have any photos of Margery, or I'd put one here.

The Ashburnham Stable Family tasked itself with praying for revival in East Sussex, and with maintaining a 24/7 prayer presence in the stable block at Ashburnham. They also recommended all of us form prayer triplets or find prayer partners, because "Where two or three meet together in My name, there I am in the midst of them."

It was natural for Margery to get together with me, because our homes were within walking distance of each other. As I had five young children, we met at her place!

So every week we set aside a morning to pray together for revival in East Sussex, for the church and the world, and for friends in need of prayer.

Margery's home was the ground floor of a beautiful old house set in spacious and leafy grounds. This was the way in to where she lived.

Her garden had tall, old trees which she loved and defended passionately against the sometimes wistful longings of others who lived in that house to fell one or two. Her garden was not exactly wild and not exactly tame either. She had a grassy patch at the centre that she mowed, and places to compost grass cuttings and hedge clippings. By her front door she had a huge pink hydrangea that she loved, and in the summer she liked to cut blooms from it and put them in a vase with fiery orange crocosmia, delighting in the combination.

She used to save crusts of bread and small pieces of cheese for a robin who came to her doorstep — US friends, your robins aren't the same as English ones; ours look like this.

She had entered agreements with her neighbours that she adhered to strictly — Margery was quite firm and determined, I expect they had to adhere to said agreements as well. This included things like how early in the morning (or late at night) they were allowed to flush the lavatory and run the bath, and taking care to avoid being noisy in the house.

Margery was old-fashioned in her habits of mind and life — in age she was midway between my mother and my grandmother, born on the day the first world war was declared in 1914. Having lived through two world wars, she retained the ingrained patterns of practical frugality that characterised her generation. I remember a day when, toward the end of her life when her sight was going, she asked me to check her fridge and make sure nothing was going off. Setting about this I discovered a small dark lump of stuff in the middle of a tea-plate, and asked her what it was and if I should throw it out. She was horrified! Oh no, that was still good for re-hydrating and further use. It was, she explained, the final portion of meat from a tin of corned beef she'd been slowly eating.

Every day for supper she had two and a half slices of toasted Hovis bread; she had three at one point but decided she was getting fat and reduced it to two and a half. 

She liked brie with chicory. She drank Lapsang Souchong tea brewed in a dark brown teapot (the kind we all had years ago) —

— poured into elegant plain white china cups.

She made (every week) a wartime traybake that was halfway between a cake and a cookie, in two flavours — spiced and with fruit, or chocolate. Both were simple but delicious.

She had been a girl in the days before the high streets with their shops full of mass-produced goods. Twice a year – once in readiness for winter and once in readiness for summer — a dressmaker would come to her family home to measure them for the clothing they needed this time. Perhaps two summer dresses, and maybe a tweed skirt and two blouses for the cold weather? They would have knitted their own cardigans and sweaters of course.

Once I learned about autism and neurodivergence, I realised that Margery was definitely on the spectrum. Nothing was easy for her, nothing flowed simply, she planned and strategised and defined everything. She talked sometimes of how she had learned to make friends. As a young woman she felt the want of friends, but didn't know how to make a friend; so she thought about it until she evolved a strategy (she never said what it was) that proved successful. But then she realised having only one friend could be rather suffocating, so she employed the same strategy and made a second friend, and having two was just right.

In considering people, she was neither harsh nor kind, she was truthful and accurate, balancing what she knew of their weaknesses and strengths in the light of their benefits and adversities.

To our praying she brought absolute unshakable conviction in the power and goodness of God. She believed in the power of God to heal. She averred that no person ever needs to die of illness, that every condition and ailment could be healed, and death would come when God called us home.

She was very analytical in her thinking; she used to say that she had a masculine mind. This manifested in all sorts of little ways. One example of it was that she took her car to the garage to have the mechanic design and fit an extension of about an inch and a half to the turn signal lever, so it was precisely where she wanted it to be. Another example was the way, sometimes when I went to see her, she'd tell me, "I have had three shocks this week" (or however many it was), and then proceed to detail happenings — whether trivial or profound — that had jarred her inner being and upset her equilibrium. In everything she was honest, particular, and thoughtful. 

Her income was modest, and she regarded all of it as belonging to God. In her giving she was astonishingly generous, and she tried to identify people in need but who qualified for no government or charitable assistance. She was very aware of how costly were things like moving house, and when she saw someone — perhaps a young couple just starting out — whom she thought might need help, she'd take it into prayer and ask God a) if she should give them some money, and b) exactly how much. Those were the days when South Africa was still an apartheid state, and Margery used to send regular (large) gifts to a pastor growing a church in the townships.

She had a particular concern that we should pray during August, when so many prayer groups break for summer activities and vacations — she said August was a dangerous month, when we were in peril of war starting, partly because people had stopped praying.

She cut her own hair, and she planned her clothing purchases very carefully using the Colour-Me-Beautiful seasonal designations. She always wore the same brand of shoes (Ecco), and she kept a black velvet jacket for special occasions, worn with a silk scarf in the correct colours for her (Spring). She kept some pale pink items of clothing especially for when she had to go and see a bureaucratic official to get something done; she said pale pink was very good for making a woman look harmless. And she did get things done, persuading the council to add a bus shelter for people getting wet in the rain, and a traffic island giving a halfway point of safety for pedestrians on a busy stretch of road.

She had no jewellery except a Taizé cross on a leather thong that she always wore. I think hers was brass, and made as a cross-shaped space cut within a circle, but the shape of it was like this —

She set aside Wednesdays every week without fail for her creative work as an artist; she made a distinction between art and craft — if she was inspired, she'd design and create on a Wednesday, but if ideas and dried up she'd work on the craft aspect, the making.

Every single thing in her home was an art piece, beautifully designed and specially chosen and loved. In her hallway, which was not a corridor but an actual room, she had her dining table — one of the Arkana whitetulip tables from the 1960s, like this.

She never got tired of things; she loved them for their design. The rooms of her house were large and lofty, and she painted them white, except for one wall in a bold colour. 

She didn't tidy up too carefully — she would let her huge display of hydrangeas in a vase just stay there dead — because she said a certain amount of disorder created interesting shapes useful for creating designs.

Twice she had seen angels; once when her husband Bill died and (at his funeral) she had a vision of heaven opening and the angels singing Gloria in excelsis Deo; and once when she woke up in the morning and saw an angel ascending by the window.

Oh, I could tell you so much about her. I still miss her. She was a true spirit, and the very best of friends.

Between thoughts about Margery

I want to tell you some more about Margery, but two things happened this week that made me laugh, so those first.

I'm (fairly) sure my cognitive processes are ticking along nicely — I can think all right — but my inner librarian, challenged by the steady flood of incoming data to process and store, often gets overwhelmed. I don't really notice until I need to call upon her for a piece of information, such as the name of a person or a product of some kind. Then she rummages distractedly through the numerous loose papers on her desk, hunting for whatever it is I require. The results can be approximate, but she does her best to fulfil my request.

Like this.

Sorry, my drawing isn't very good, but now we have AI watching closer than our guardian angel, I no longer dare search for images on the interwebs. They have become like spiderwebs — sticky.

Back to my inner librarian.

There is a laxative I take when necessary (I have to be meticulous about gut motility because of all the health problems I've had), called Movicol. It has an ingredient in it called Macrogol (I think). There's a similar but different laxative called Miralax. So they all begin with M and they all have three syllables. Quite often if I am hunting in vain for the name of the one I want (Movicol), I put in a request to my inner librarian to supply it PDQ. Accordingly, flustered and harassed, her pencil behind her ear and loose strands of grey hair escaping from her bun, she peers through her glasses frowning, searching the Archive of Possibilities for what I want. "Miralax?" No. "Macrogol?" No.

And then, one morning this week, "Mollycoddle?"

Well, she does have a point. 

We got there in the end.

*        *        *

The second things that made me laugh — yesterday I called by the house where I used to live, to collect from my daughters some official-looking letters that had been sent there by some bureaucratic institution that had only my old address. 

That wasn't of itself very funny, of course, but I stayed to have a cup of tea and a chat, in the course of which our Alice said she'd answered the door to the postman the other day, and he seemed a bit concerned. He wanted to ask her, what had happened to the old lady? The one who used to talk to him. She had always been there, but he hadn't seen her for ages. He'd been worried about her.

Alice was bewildered. What? An old lady? Here? In our house? 

Then light dawned. The postie wasn't hallucinating and hadn't got the wrong house.

"Oh!" she said. "Oh — you mean Mum!"

So she was able to set his mind at rest. The old lady hadn't died or been incarcerated, just moved house. 

Yes. That old lady.

Margery — how I met her.

 In 1983 I got involved with the Ashburnham Stable Family, started by the Revd John Bickersteth — who I think may have been one of the most saintly men I ever met — at his home in Ashburnham, Sussex.

He had inherited the house and grounds of the Ashburnham estate, and chose to develop it into a Christian conference centre, which it still is, but he also lived there with his wife Marlis, in the upstairs of the house which they made into a flat, above the great hall where so many wonderful gatherings for Christian worship and teaching took place as time unfolded.

There was also a stable block adjacent to the main house, which John developed into a prophetic representation of the four gospels.

The stable block consisted of a substantial square enclosed by two facing sets of stabling, a carriage house opposite the entrance, and the entranceway set into a wall, with imposing lanterns set on either side. 

The yard was cobbled, with a fountain at the middle, brick paths running from the central fountain to each of the four sides.

Development according to the vision John has was slow and expensive; I don't think John had much money, just a massive house that needed fixing up, and the stable block.

But his vision (which came into reality) was as follows.

He wanted to create a permanent place for round-the-clock prayer for East Sussex, and a community of prayer, praise and ministry based solidly on the teaching and practice of the New Testament — which came into being as the Ashburnham Stable Family.

The carriage house that occupied one side of the block was the Johannine wing. John's gospel portrays Jesus as the great High Priest, a cosmic priestly figure, and carries the theme of glory and of Jesus as a light coming in to the world. John portrays the cross in terms of glory, the light lifted up. So the Johannine wing was where John (Bickersteth) began, because that was to be the place of prayer. It was made ready for gatherings of worship, and a prayer cabin was added for one-to-one ministry and to maintain a 24/7 presence of prayer, undertaken by the Stable Family.

The entrance-way opposite was the Matthean wing, because Matthew's gospel is the way in to the New Testament. Matthew shows Jesus as a teacher of righteousness and the fulfilment of the calling of Israel, the new Moses, the one who brought into fulfilment what had been intended in the calling of the chosen people. So the big lamps on either side of the entrance acted as reminders of the lamps in King David's temple (I think I've got that right).

As you went in through the entrance, the building on your right was the Marcan wing. Mark's gospel portrays Jesus as the suffering servant, and is a very straightforward and practical gospel. So the Marcan wing housed the kitchens, and I think there was a flat for visitors; it became the hospitality centre for the Stable Family.

The wing opposite that was the Lucan wing. Luke was a doctor and his gospel is known for its compassionate and inclusive approach, promoting the understanding of the Holy Spirit indwelling ordinary people. So that wing became three permanent residences for members of the stable family to live for as long as they were called to be there, the members of each household contributing to the work and ministry of the Stable Family according to their calling.

The cobbled yard was refurbished into the shape of a cross set within a circle — created by the brick path radiating from the central fountain and expressing the Latin motto (of the Carthusian Order) Stat crux dum volvitur orbis, which means "the cross stands while/though the world turns/revolves".

The cobbles were all re-set in such a way that every single one of them was touching its neighbours, emblematic of the unity of all Christian people, the Communion of Saints.

And in the centre of it all was the fountain, representative of the Holy Spirit welling up to eternal life in the core of every Christian soul.

The Ashburnham Stable family was created to pray for the revival of East Sussex. Its members were drawn from around East Sussex, charged with a mission of working and serving in the local church in whichever town or village they lived, but coming together at Ashburnham for fellowship, teaching and prayer, to give them the inner strength often lacking under the leadership of the local churches.

Margery was a member of the Ashburnham Stable Family, and so was I. She was part of the decision-making body that headed it up (the trustees), and she made banners for our worship. She also made stained glass windows in various East Sussex churches, and widely sold postcards of her banners as inspirational and affordable art.

To give you an idea of her style (she trained at the Slade art college in London in the 1950s), here are two of her windows from St James church at Ewhurst Green.

She also had windows at The Sanctuary at Westfield, in the porch of St Clements in Hastings Old Town, and she made the east window for the now closed church of St Anne, in Hollington where I currently live.

And here's a photo of a painting she did as a student at the Slade in the early 50s, which hangs now on the wall in my living room.

In the 1980s I wrote two cantatas with my then husband Roger Wilcock for performance in church — I wrote the words and he wrote the music. Margery designed covers for the performance brochures for the first of them, called Light of the World.

Here's one of the cards she made from her banner designs for the Ashburnham Stable Family. She taught banner-making classes and workshops for churches all around East Sussex.

On the back it says this — so evidently that was her Christmas card to me in 1995.

Towards the end of her life Margery developed macular degeneration. The onset of it began while she was working on the last piece she ever made, drawing on her own font designed for making banners for churches, and her skills as a stained glass designer and maker. It was the cover for the first edition (published by Kingsway in 1992) of The Long Fall.

My daughters Alice and Hebe, artists who knew Margery and greatly respected her work, did the art work for our Humilis Hastings edition of the Hawk & Dove stories. They designed the cover for The Long Fall as a homage to Margery's original.

Margery was an astonishing artist, and a very dear friend. More about her in the next post.

To whom it may concern

 

Marjorie

 I once knew a woman called Marjorie and she was very old. My prayer partner of many years was also Margery — but as you can see a different spelling though it sounds the same. I'll tell you about Margery next time maybe, but we're thinking about Marjorie today.

She lived in a small Sussex country village, in a little Victorian cottage — what we'd call a terraced house here in England and you'd say 'a row house' in America (I think).

I met her because she went to church in the chapel just along the lane from her home. I liked that chapel a lot. For one thing, it was a simple, unassuming building only made to hold a few people, tucked away into the hedge with a patch of grass alongside where the preacher could park their car (but not in the winter when it puddled so bad your wheels would have sunk right in). And for another thing it had the best people in it — steady, calm, quiet, cheerful country folk, all of them ancient, whose faith had sustained them and whose eyes had seen all the changes of the world. Oftentimes a cat came to join in the worship too. I wasn't part of that congregation, but I'd be sent there to preach, and they came to be one of my favourite places to go.

When worship was over I'd stay a while just to chat and catch up with their news, and I remember one time sitting with Marjorie and asking her about her life. She told me how long she'd lived there and who had owned the cottage before her (a relative), and where she'd grown up — which was very nearby — and what her childhood had been like.

Now although you could walk from that chapel to Marjorie's place in just a few minutes, someone would fetch her in their car because she could only walk just a short way, a few steps only, and very slowly and needing to lean on a stick. 

So what sticks in my mind from that conversation with Marjorie (and this was decades ago) was her description of how she passed her time. She told me this with no self-pity. She was just saying. It was the time before we had cellphones, and our phones were plugged into wall sockets, so you had to be where the phone was if you wanted to use it.

A lot of people had their phones installed in the hall — passage, entrance corridor from the front door — because originally no-one chatted on the phone. People chatted with family and neighbours physically present, in fireside chairs over a cup of tea. The phone was to place a call with a definite objective, or receive news, or seek help. And since Marjorie had lived in that house since she got married and she was very old, her phone was out in the passageway.

Victorian terraced houses are mostly built on the same template, just bigger or smaller according to wealth and status. Marjorie's was the smallest sort, built for artisans and their families.

They look like this at the front.

Or they might have a bay window and look like this.

And the floor plans of these Victorian houses looked like this.

On the left you can see the downstairs. So you go through the front door into a narrow passage which has no windows and leads past the living room and the dining room to the kitchen right at the back of the house. Got it?

How Marjorie said she passed her days was sitting in a chair close to the telephone, there in the passage. That way she could answer it if it rang — and make phone calls herself. If she sat in her living room, she wouldn't be able to get there in time if it rang.

I have never forgotten this picture of what it means to be old. A woman whose husband has died and her children all elderly themselves, determinedly clinging to independence, not wanting to leave her home full of memories, the echoes of being married and raising a family, the country lane that had been the place she lived since she was barely more than a girl. Sitting beside the phone all day because otherwise she wasn't quick enough to make it there before it stopped ringing.

This image, this thought, tells me more than anything else how much we have lost and left behind.

I remember a woman called Dorothy who lived in a similar little house just across the road from my daughter Grace's first home.

Dorothy didn't sit by the phone all day, but if it wasn't raining she would stand out in her front yard, waiting for a friendly face to come by, someone willing to stop and chat for a little while.

And going back even more years, past the years when my daughters had homes of their own, past the long-gone time when I preached on Sundays in the Sussex villages, before the little country chapels closed, when Marjorie was still alive — going all the way back to when I was a girl in Hertfordshire — I used to call in to see Lucy, who was eighty. She could still walk slowly with a stick, and she lived near enough to the church to go to Evensong on Sundays. But on weekdays, she would sit by the open window in her front room, hoping someone passing by might stop and have a chat.

A low window, you see, right by the pavement (sidewalk), where an old lady could sit hopefully, and someone might pause to say hello.

Back in April this last year, my friend Steph died. She too had grown very old. The time came when she could no longer go to church, even if someone came to fetch her. She had a frame with wheels, and incorporating a tray, that helped her make the slow walk to the kitchen for a cup of tea or to the bathroom. Her daughter and daughter-in-law came in to take care of her every day. Once a week I went to see her — walking at first, and then when I became more unwell myself, taking the daunting step of going back to driving again, so I could still go and see Steph on a Thursday afternoon. Those were such happy visits, full of laughter. We had the same sense of humour and we liked the same books. We gossiped and we prayed together; both of us looked forward to those times. The lane I walked to reach her home — on days I was up to walking — was a footpath really, running by a mossy stone wall and a patch of woodland. It reminded me of the country places I lived when I was a girl, and the village where Marjorie lived, and times gone by.

These days, isolated by the wrecking ball of repeated change, and by illness, and by the whole world retreating to online communication, I have lost those connections. There is no longer an old lady along the lane who might welcome a visit, or if there is I don't know her, because I don't know anybody here. Steph was my last connection with the way things used to be. And now this blog is my window on the world, and you are the person passing by!

Marjorie, Dorothy, Lucy, Steph — they are all gone now, they with their quiet undemanding courage, making the choice to stay in their own homes because however lonely it might be, still it was exactly that — home.

Chicken Licken

As Chicken-Licken went one day to the woods, an acorn fell upon her poor bald pate, and she thought the sky had fallen. Then she said she would go and tell the king ...

Accordingly she went on her way, spreading the news and telling everybody — Henny-Penny, Cocky-Locky, Ducky-Lucky etc etc, gathering them all in her wake as she communicated the urgency of the situation, until she made her big mistake in telling Foxy-Loxy, who offered to show her the way to the king's abode.

Foxy-Loxy said, "Come along with me, and I will show you the way." But Foxy-Loxy took them into the fox's hole, and he and his young ones soon ate up Chicken-Licken, Henny-Penny, Cocky-Locky, Ducky-Lucky, Drakey-Lakey, Goosey-Loosey, Gander-Lander and Turkey-Lurkey; and they never saw the king to tell him the sky had fallen!

These old stories, they always had a moral, didn't they?

What's this one?

I cannot now track down the author but I read somewhere — which made me smile — that about 90% of the things we worry about never happen and about 90% of the things that happen took us by surprise when we weren't worried about them at all; so we're worrying about the right amount but about the wrong things. 

🤣

Yep.

Or I guess Chicken-Licken's story may tip us off that getting all worked up about something small, swelling it into something massive and alarming, so absorbs our focus that we are entirely distracted from reality and aren't paying attention when a real problem taps us on the shoulder.

Something like that.

There's also this cartoon that always makes me laugh — I'd post it here but in these days when AI enables entire industries to source their income by scanning the interwebs on the lookout for copyright infringements, perhaps I'd better not.

I don't know if you've noticed, but the world seems to be in a bit of a mess.

So very much of a mess, in fact, that I find it tends to loom extremely large in my everyday thoughts.

I think about the assaults of an intimate nature on young girls by gangs of men, about stabbings and fly-tipping and homelessness, and the tidal wave of chronic sickness and turbo-cancers and all the rest of it set in motion in 2021, and about the extraordinary increase in Parkinsons disease, and the predictions for our future of Geert Vanden Bossche. I think of our country's economic blunders and the truly dreadful implications of political decisions, and about the threat of digital ID hanging over our head like Damocles' sword. I think about our food security imperilled by inadvisable punitive tax measures imposed on our farmers, and about people sent to prison for years because of an imprudent text. I think of deceit by those we entrusted with the leadership of our country, about the politicisation of our police force and the proposal that jury trials be widely abolished. I think about how much it will cost in both money and water to put our public infrastructure into the hands of robots. I read about incels and hikikomori, and about the wandering tribes of people made homeless in India and China because cyber-crime or glitches in the system locked them out of their bank accounts in a cashless society. I see clickbait headlines telling us World War 3 is threatening. I listen to the account of the Jewish hostages released from their captivity in Gaza, and try to take in everything they endured and how long it went on. I think of men coming across the sea in their thousands in search of a better life in England, blithely unaware that we are running out of the money we need for their upkeep (and with it the goodwill). I think of the cows — and ruminants are basically digestive systems on four legs — made to eat the Bovaer chemicals to disrupt their alimentary processes. I think of governments planning to try and dim the sun, spraying chemtrails with aluminium that is toxic to all life, and about the ubiquity of glyphosate poisoning, and the suppression of medical trial data in the interest of financial investors. I think about all of this and so much more. 

And I feel as though the sky is falling on our heads.

I suppose if you're as small as Chicken-Licken, an acorn is very big.

But there is this hope — there comes a point when doom threatens so large and loud, and from so many different sides, that there is simply too much to worry about.

There is nothing for it then but to open the curtains and make the bed and clean my teeth and put the laundry out to dry and feed the cat and kiss my husband and choose food that will truly nutrify me and write a thousand words of another novel and send my children some Christmas money and put tinned food in the Foodbank box and take some time to pray and some time to rejoice when the sun shines.

If I do all those simple, ordinary things, then when doom catches up with me I shall at least have lived. After all, if I spend my days transfixed with worry and it turns out that what I thought was the sky falling was actually only an acorn when it comes to it — well, that would have been a waste of a life, would it not?

So I will make the best choices I can with the information and resources available to me, and I will give thanks for our lovely house and its garden, for the quiet neighbourhood where I live, and for the chance to be here in this world where there is kindness and laughter and birdsong and sunrises and crocuses in the spring. I will hold these things in my heart, not for myself only but also for those who are locked in prison cells or held hostage or trapped in hells they cannot escape. So far as within me lies, I will tend and protect the sweet ordinary of simple human life, so that it may always be there for whoever needs its solace and its hope.

I will walk away from the falling acorns and be careful not to discuss them very much. And I will be cautious of those who proclaim themselves able to whisk me into the presence of the king. Not everyone with amber eyes and pointy noses and whiskers is entirely to be trusted.

 

Iridescence

 

Iridescence draws me and nourishes my soul.

As a child I loved the rainbow light that lay across the polished wood of our church pews, as sunshine flooded in through the stained glass windows. I liked the stained glass windows themselves, but I liked the abstract shedding of colours better, because it was all colour and no picture.

My grandmother (my father's mother) had a prism alongside other ornaments in a display case in her sitting room, and she let me hold it and turn it in the light, and I loved it so much. When she died, my father enquired if there was anything she had that I would like, so I asked for that prism, and it was mine for a while. I let my children hold it and play with it as my grandmother had allowed me to do, and in time it got broken — these things of beauty come and go, don't they, in the hands of children? But it's important to let children handle them, not separate them; that way they get to keep them in their souls even after the material thing has gone.

My grandmother also had a bracelet of crystals — the sort called Vitrail Medium, like this:

I loved it so much that she gave it to me, and I had it for a while. But then I passed it on to a friend, whose soul I could see hungered for it — she was a sad, lost kind of person, and I hoped it would feed her spirit.

Still now I am grown up I love iridescence. In my room at our new house I love the interplay of sunbeams with the lustre of iridescent artefacts.

Disappointingly difficult to capture in a photograph.

I always wear earrings, and I have several pairs in two kinds — some are pearls, with that quiet lustre that is so beautiful, and the others are Swarovski crystals. 

I like fibre-optic lamps too, and fibre-optic Christmas trees — the sort that slowly change colour, going through the whole rainbow.

And this year I have an Advent calendar that is like a peaceful rainbow, communicating the luminous wonder of adoration.

I don't want to open the little numbered windows to mark the days of Advent, because I like it so much just as a picture.

The orientation of our new house means that sitting in bed in the morning I look out on the colours of the dawn. 💖 So very beautiful.

And we have no fireplace, but in the evening I turn on the electric wood stove. The coloured light and the dancing 'flames' make me happy. 

Landing the plane

I'm not quite sure who I have reading here — I know there's a lot of you because the stats are visible to me, but not many people comment so I don't have much sense of a community, if you see what I mean.

I have never worried much about this; I just write down thoughts as they pass through my head and put them here for anyone who might find them useful, to take or leave, like apples by the garden gate at harvest time.

I have a settled aversion to the shrewd/calculated business of building a promotional platform etc. I can see it's a good idea, but it's not how I've ever done things. For one thing, I believe in the power of the hidden life, the way of simplicty.

There used to be a type of Christian evangelism described as "friendship evangelism" (perhaps there still is). The idea of this was to target individuals, encouraging them to think you liked them and wanted to be their friend, whether you actually did or not. You got alongside them as a golf buddy or as another parent at your child's school's PTA or just in the course of social encounters, and set about making them like you. The end game was to attract them in to the church. 

I have been on the receiving end of this — when I was a very young mother in my early 20s, married to a gifted musician, the curate of the church we attended "made friends" with us. He used to call in to our home to socialise; and as I was new to the area and short of friends, I enjoyed his visits and was happy to have found this friend. Only later did I discover that it was in effect a kind of religious entrapment — he'd been detailed off by his parish priest to make sure my husband (the one whose contribution they valued) put down roots in their church and stayed there. I felt disappointed and betrayed.

So when I started writing for publication about 35 years ago, I made myself and God a promise that I would do no networking or ladder-climbing, I wouldn't try to worm my way in to any circles of successful people, I wouldn't try to appear to be anything special or important to attract readers and create a market; I'd just write what is in my heart and offer it to God and let him bring the increase if he wanted to. And that's what I've done.

In consequence, I won't monetise this blog or use it to build any kind of little empire of my own. I say what I think and I'm interested in what you think, and I have made some good friends here; but there is no hidden agenda.

And so I haven't strategised for a "readership", much less a "market", and I don't know who most of you are.

But today, whoever you are, I wanted to ask you a question: do you have any plans or strategies for landing the plane?

What I'm talking about is old age and death. As I get older, more of my friends die, and I have lost several friends in the last year or two. One of them died the way I would love to. She had her lunch, settled down on the sofa for a little nap — and never woke up. How brilliant is that?

It reminds me of the man whose funeral I took, who got up one morning, made his bed and got washed and dressed, fixed himself a cup of tea, sat down in his armchair and drank, put the cup down, and died. Perfect, eh? But we all know not everyone dies like that.

My (previous) husband died of a horrific illness (pemphigoid). I wrote about it in the most recent edition of my book Spiritual Care of Dying and Bereaved People, so I won't go into it all again now, you'd be here all day. It wasn't a long illness — about a year and a half — and in the last months of his life when he was increasingly incapacitated, I and my daughter Hebe were there to take care of him, doing everything he needed so he could die at home.

My present husband has Parkinson's disease. As he is a few years older than me and has a heart condition and swampy lungs, it is our expectation that he may (nothing is assured) pre-decease me. He and I love each other very much, and I hope I will be there to take care of him right to the end of his life. Taking care of the people I love, watching over them and doing all I can to help and encourage them, is the nearest thing I have to a sense of vocation.

My prayer partner Margery, who died back in 2004 (the same year my previous husband died) was deeply involved in Christian healing ministry, and firmly believed that nobody needed to die of anything except death; everything could be healed, and in the end the Lord calls us home. I concur with that.

Accordingly I take very seriously the responsibility to build and maintain my own health; as my mother liked to say — quoting the Matron of Scarborough Hospital where she did her nursing training — "Your first duty is to yourself, nurse." Yes, it is; you're no good to others if you don't look after yourself. So I research quite a bit on health maintenance, and observe a strict diet — not so good on the exercise these days for various reasons, but I go for walks at least.

And at the end of her life Margery was in a nursing home for a year or two; and my mother had a carer come in daily to her home for the last stretch of time, plus she had the attentions of my sister.

But nursing homes and daily carers are very expensive, aren't they? My budget is all I need for paying bills and buying groceries, as half of a marital partnership. If my husband died, things would be very tight, but I think I could make it work.

But I was thinking today, as I was hanging out the laundry and doing the washing up — I have no idea how to land the plane in my own life.

Like many writers, I am a solitary soul and not very likeable. "Spiky," my husband says, and how right he is. I had several dear friends, but most of them have died now, and chronic illness (which I am working on healing with very slow positive progress) has kept me almost housebound the last few years.

And our health service in the UK . . . well . . . there was a thing Thoreau said in his glorious book Walden:

It would surpass the powers of a well man nowadays to take up his bed and walk, and I should certainly advise a sick one to lay down his bed and run.

Let's leave it at that.

God willing I shall be here for my husband to see him safe home — but I have no idea how to land the plane for myself. No plans. All I know to do is live for today and use it to lay the foundations for tomorrow. I am growing old and the space between here and eternity diminishes every day. How I look at it is that every day ticked off shrinks the problematic bit, that comes at the end.

I know to keep things simple, to make sure I retain minimal possessions so I am flexible and adaptable; so that, for instance, if I have to live in one of the households of my children I will take up as little space and cause as little inconvenience as possible. I know to live within my income and make sure that the house is kept in good repair so there is nothing worryingly unattended if the time comes when I cannot address it. Beyond that, I have no plans; and I have a moral objection to euthanasia — I believe in trusting the wave I came in on, and I believe my times are in God's hands.

But what I wondered is — how about you?

Have you thought about this? What have you concluded? Who do you rely on? Who might be your companions on the journey? What are your hopes and what are your strategies? I'd love to know.

North and South

 My mother's family came from West Yorkshire, a particular part of the country that was in old England the kingdom of Elmet. The father of my children — my first husband — was also descended from that part of the country, through his father's line. So my children's DNA is almost entirely from that particular place; they are quiet people, but very uncompromising.

There is also a smattering of Scandinavia in our genes, inherited from my father. He came from Scarborough, which was overrun with Viking Norsemen — and he could easily have been mistaken for a Norwegian in his appearance. The Norsemen, as you may know from English history, were not big on gentle and yielding temperament.

That area, the kingdom of Elmet, has its own particular genetic heritage; settled, not mixed, not created through diversity. 

I feel as though I know those people all the way back to the Dark Ages. They are in my soul, in my bones, in my blood. That's why I love so much the writing of Sally Wainwright — her stories are all of the people of that little patch of earth, and they have such a resonance for me. She writes about my people, and in her stories I find and recognise myself.

But my mother, dogged by poverty, not very educated and brought up in a small Yorkshire village, intelligent, perceptive, practical and with a stubborn rooted instinct for survival, was socially ambitious, upwardly mobile. She shed her Yorkshire accent, she studied the ways of the wealthy, and she relocated to the most elegant and refined part of south-eastern England. Everything we had and everywhere we lived was calculated to advance our path through the world. She bent her purposes to that. She was determined to do well, and she did — astonishingly so.

You can take the woman out of Yorkshire, but you can't take Yorkshire out of the woman. 

Not having much money, we went to what was free — church on Sunday and the village fair in the summer, walks in the countryside — and I socialised with schoolfriends, but things you had to pay for were beyond us for the most part. This was not exactly isolating, because back in the 1970s when I was a teenager, you could do a lot that didn't cost any money. But it did mean that the only holidays we had were with my mother's family in the West Riding of Yorkshire. It created a kind of insularity that made us more and more like ourselves; a little outpost of the kingdom of Elmet cut adrift and marooned in the Home Counties.

Though my mother had learned to speak BBC English, she never shook off the harder to eliminate idiom and emphasis of the Yorkshire structures and rhythms of speech — she didn't even realise it was there. And she had an unobtrusive natural steely determination, an invincible sense of purpose. My father likewise — a quiet man, he didn't argue for the most part, he usually held his peace; but every argument he did have, he won. 

I have only one sibling, a sister; and she has a personality like a blowtorch; bright and fierce and I advise you to not get in her way.

I am similar.

And now I live on the very south coast of England, surrounded by southern people.

I avoid social groups much of the time, because I am not easy company; but recently I have been part of a church house group. I'm not sure this is a good idea.

Today we were there, and I inadvisedly expressed my opinion on something that was under discussion.

One of the ladies in the group, a woman with a likeable personality and gentle, winning manner, responded to my observations. Her demeanour is pleasant and friendly, but it was clear to me we saw life differently. She began by saying, "I understand your fury and your anger" — and I had to stop her right there. "I am not furious," I said, "and I am not angry."

I have developed a habit of countering such observations because my husband —not the father of my children but the man I am married to now — over the years we have been married has often commented in a conversation, "I know you are angry" or "I can see how angry you are"; but I'm not (usually).

He is a southerner, with a habit of mild and diplomatic expression — the inflections, the vocabulary, the little ways, it's so different in the south of England. Nobody who comes from the north ever thinks I'm angry. And for sure, on those occasions when I am actually angry, there's no doubt about it.

There is a hard, definite, emphatic quality to the speech of the north, and a dry, sarcastic humour. It's in me. It's how I am. But it doesn't mean I'm angry. It's just a trace of the kingdom of Elmet resurfacing from the Dark Ages, oddly out of place amid the pleasantry and diplomacy of middle-class southern England. 

In all truth, it's a good thing I stay at home most of the time. I'm okay in a pulpit or chairing a meeting, but as a clergyman once observed, my mode of expression could scorch you at thirty paces. That was the same man who said I was born to rattle the cage of Methodism. He, too, was a southern-born soul. And I wasn't angry with him either, just sharing my point of view . . .