Turning round in your basket

 My husband has a very pleasing phrase for settling into a new home. He calls it "turning round in your basket."

By now I've almost lost count of the different places I've lived, but this I have noticed — in every new place I've wanted to reconfigure the furniture layout after a few months have gone by.

It's my opinion that the furnishings should follow the way you live, not the other way round. Nobody should have to alter what they want to do or be, according to the dictates of their furniture.

And in a new house, I've looked at the rooms and thought about what we're likely to want to do, based on what we've done in the past, and disposed the furniture. But then, every time, it's turned out that we do things differently here. And so it's been this time.

We came here from a shared house where we tended to be what I think of as "in cell" most of the time. We all retreated to our bedrooms, apart from an hour or two in the evening when I used to watch quiz programmes with Alice and Hebe, just to enjoy each other's company. My husband had his desk and his books and his comfy chair in his enormous bedroom, and my bedroom was titchy so I used to sit on his bed and chat with him.

But here where we have a place of our own, it's all been different. 

My husband has his study, so the layout of that and his bedroom is up to him.

My bedroom during the day is where Clarence the cat sleeps, after he's finished gazing serenely out across the garden and environs from the lofty perch of my bedroom windowsill.

It's the downstairs rooms I needed to re-jig. I thought that once we moved, because my husband is a borough councillor, now we have our own place he'd have an endless procession of people needing to talk with him about issues to do with local politics, and I would have friends and family calling in.

So we made the front room his sitting room and the back room mine.

But that's not what's happened. He still meets up with people in what is designated by the useful term, a "third space" — somewhere that's not his home or theirs, a café or the council building. When I see my family it's more often at their place rather than mine, because I have use of a car and it's that bit further than someone would really want to walk. And we've tended to just sit in one room together, chatting and praying and reading and just being together.

So I changed the furniture round.

In the front room I put our comfy chairs and the fake fire, to make it our homely place to sit and chat and pray and read.

The back room I turned into three zones.

A correspondence zone, with a chair by the little desk that flaps down from the wall, that has some flowers and the statue of Our Lady on it. She stands guard over my writing paper.

A dining zone in the middle for the obvious purpose of eating.

Then, by the double door at the back which opens out onto the garden, two chairs where we can enjoy the morning light and the fresh air when it isn't pouring with rain or freezing cold. Our equivalent of a conservatory, where we can be outside but inside, with the doors open but available if a delivery man calls or something.

We're quite pleased with the result.

Watching over me

 There's that old joke — you must have heard it — about a pastor doing the children's talk at church, starting out with a series of questions, and encouraging the children to speak up as soon as they know the answer. Saying: "It lives in a tree . . . it eats nuts . . . it's grey . . . it has a bushy tail . . ." 

And eventually a child ventures: "Well I know the answer must be Jesus, but it sure sounds like a squirrel to me."

That became part of the mythology of our household when my children were growing up, because it puts its finger so accurately on something very characteristic of church — the simplicity of straightforward truth that has to be distorted into piety on every possible occasion. And then that Emperor's Clothes moment of the joke, that looks for the pious but sees the ordinary. 

There's a lot to it.

And I've often thought, reading the Bible, that it might be fruitful just sometimes to simply look for the squirrel, if you see what I mean.

Take for instance, when Jesus says (Matt.25.29), "Whoever has will be given more, and they will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken from them."

If that's ever put into a sermon, it's always (understandably) to make a point. But maybe it's not a threat or a promise. Perhaps Jesus was saying that's just the way life is, that's just reality.

So my mind was wandering down this track in the course of the evening while I went for a stroll round the block — which is always a little eery where we live now, because it's a housing estate, but you never see a soul out after dark; it's all just houses, no people. Are they busy? Are they scared? Do they only go out in cars?

So anyway I was stumping along the road taking my constitutional, think about squirrels and Jesus, about figurative and literal speech, and about how I never meet any people when I go for a walk, and I thought about what that Pharisee said to Jesus, "And who is my neighbour?" 

Good question, I thought, especially here in Coventry Road.

In the summer evenings I used to turn right leaving our house, and loop round to walk along by the stream, but these dark winter evenings I turn left and walk along the roadways where there are streetlights so I can see where I'm going. The second house I went by had Anita's car outside it, which surprised me a bit because I thought she'd already gone to Derby to see her grandkids, but not yet apparently. And that made me notice that the inside of me was pleased she was still here. I mean, I don't really see her or have much interaction with her (yet), but I like Anita. I like just knowing she's there, somewhere inside her house. I'm glad she's my neighbour. 

But, yes. Who is my neighbour?

That set me off thinking about these five years I've been ill, and how limiting it's been and all the pain, and how I've gradually drifted to the margins and got out of touch. But it also made me think about the numerous doctors I've seen, staring listlessly at their computers, listening to me patiently, not knowing how to help or what to do. It was all summed up by a GI doc in Brighton: "Mrs Wilcock, sometimes there just is pain."

So they were here in my life, with their medical degrees and their consulting rooms, with their tests and machines and whatnot, and not one of them knew what to do.

But online I found people with some ideas. My best ones have been Dr Ken Berry, Dr Anthony Chaffee, Elliot Overton and Sally Norton. Those people, experts in their field, take the time to put masses of stuff online to help us figure out what the heck is wrong with us and slowly grope our way towards a solution.

I was intrigued to consider that people I'd really seen, and with whom I'd been physically present, people whose hands I'd shaken and looked into their eyes, might as well not have been there. They had nothing to offer; no diagnosis or treatment pathway, zilch. Anything I asked for (scans, antibiotics, laxatives) they let me have, because they were kind, they were willing to give anything a go. They just didn't have any ideas of their own.

But Dr Ken Berry, Dr Anthony Chaffee, Elliot Overton and Sally Norton showed me things to try and paths to take. They had constructive suggestions, they could offer hope. And they spent hour after hour after patient hour explaining online how to heal the human body of chronic non-communicable disease.

Take Elliot Overton. In the course of treating patients with dysautonomia and figuring out how to help them, he came across the efficacy of a particular form of Vitamin B1. But it wasn't made in the West and much of the documentation about it was in Japanese. So he got it translated and he set up his own lab to manufacture it. Not only that but he made a protocol that included the co-factors for it, and got everything bottled and bundled and available at low cost, supported with all the information you need to find your way with it.

That's just one example of the lengths these people go to to make us well.

And I thought about the neighbourhood and the internet, about the doctors I've seen who couldn't help and the doctors I haven't seen who could, and how those good practitioners far away, who I'll never physically meet and who don't even know I exist, nonetheless are watching over me. They are there for me and for thousands of other people like me. 

So I asked myself again, walking home through the dark, empty streets, to write this down for you who have never sat in the same room with me, whose face I have never seen — and who is my neighbour?

And I know the answer should be a squirrel, but it sure sounds like Jesus to me.

Wild Church

 Do you have forest church, or wild church, where you are?

Here in Sussex there's a few initiatives for church out of doors, because we have stretches of woodland where people can just wander or walk their dogs. 

And last night my daughter Grace sent me a message to see if I'd like to go with her to a wild church gathering this morning, a mile or so along the road from me, by Church in the Wood.

A church has stood there in the wood for a very long time. The first one was probably in the 11th century, and after that there was one in the 13th century, then the Victorians built the present one in a Neo-Gothic style. 

It's all on its own in the wood away from the housing development that sprouted later in the 1930s. For a long time it had no electricity. When I first moved to Hastings at the end of the 1970s, that church was lit only by candles. I remember one time when my then husband went there to play for a wedding. He was all poised for Widor's toccata with his hands over the keys, when they opened the door for the bridal party and all the candles blew out.

This is what the church looks like.

But we weren't in the church building, today we were in and of ourselves the church in the wood. 

So our church looked a lot less picturesque, more like this (Teresa Davey — a few camp chairs standing around in the mud and leaves amid winter trees)

One of the men, looking for a place to plant his chair where it wouldn't sink in to the rich and abundant mud, placed it carefully like this, sheltering the wild arum growing there, the plant we call Lords and Ladies, so he wouldn't accidentally tread on it and bring it to an untimely end.

We breathed the spring air and Roger who organised it read us Psalm 139 about us being made in the depths of the earth, and added some thoughts about the entanglement of all living things, interconnected like a mycelium, and we brought our bits of knowledge about Celtic thought and folklore out of the back of our heads for comparison, and Janine had made tea and coffee and brought some Jaffa Cakes to share. There was a dog called Ellie and another called Gorka, and we looked at the mud and the leaves and the oak moss and sprouting acorns. We breathed in and out and joined in quiet prayer.

It was peaceful and gentle and friendly, and we got gradually . . . very cold.

What Gerard Manley Hopkins said:

What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

Clarence the cat was left at home, sagely pondering similar things but through a closed window and right by a radiator.

Writing fiction

[For Teresa Davey: below this sentence is a photo from my home of stylised artificial flowers made of iridescent plastic stuff that reflects the light in rainbow colours. They're in a greenish glass vase with a wide base and narrow neck, in front of a dark wall, reflecting sunlight slanting in from the window]

 

I'm not sure how other people write books; though there may be patterns and similarities, I imagine each writer is different. It must be a very individual thing.

My husband is also writing a novel. I don't want to know anything about it because this much is certain — if you tell anyone the details of the story then the story is told. You won't write it. So in the morning when we meet up for our prayers, he tells me only if it's going well and how many words he wrote the day before. 

When I am writing, I can't read any fiction — I can't let my husband read me what he's written so far, because the other person's voice (authorial voice, I mean) gets into my imagination and muddles up with my own, throws me off my stroke. But that doesn't happen to my husband. I read him whatever chunk I wrote yesterday, usually about 2000 words, and he enjoys listening to it without it interfering with his own work in progress. 

I recently bought as a cheap deal on Amazon the whole set of PG Wodehouse's Jeeves books, which I've not read in decades. They're all lined up on my shelf looking at me, and I dare not start them until I've finished the book I'm writing. I've promised myself that in the summer I'll sit outside on the terrace in the sunshine, or down on the beach by the sea, and read them all, and that will be how I get all the Vitamin D I need, through my skin, without paying for it.

My husband speaks about deciding whether to develop a character, about narratives he's blending — choices in crafting his work. Three of my children write fiction, they've written whole books, and I do wish they'd publish them, they're really good — and my daughter Alice told me recently she'd read somewhere the advice to start a book with a question. So instead of five characters are going to have adventures in storyland, you start by asking yourself what they were are looking for in storyland. Something like that.

However, when I write fiction, it's not like this exactly. In the first place, I don't believe in fiction as a concept — I don't think anything is fiction, not even lies. I think fiction is revelatory, all of it, of aspects of truth. Even lies reveal the truth of the liar's nature. And I think fiction in the normal sense — novels and short stories — are truth as it exists in potential, as it is found in a person's imagination. When I write a story, I'm not spinning a yarn, I'm telling you the truth. And I think my characters are real. I can't really estimate in what sense they are real, but I think they are.

So when I want to write a book, it's because of a personal need to enter a real world, and find the real people who live there, and really spend time with them: be there, not here, for a while.

And often it starts with what one might call a clue. This book I'm writing now began with the idea of a time that is different from the context in which it's set — a time of temporary grace; a chance to make things different. That gave me the title and the sprouting germ. But then very quickly there was added a central image; the only thing was that I could perceive no connection between the image and the title/idea, or see how they fitted together at all. The only thing I could do is follow the clue, see where it leads, watch the characters interacting and write down what they say and do, until I began to see the connections as it all unfolds. I've been puzzling over this for about two years! People have given up asking me how it's coming along.

I'm about halfway through writing this book, and it's become apparent to me only now what is happening, what it is saying, and why it's of relevance to the times we are presently living in, in this world here as distinct from that world I go into looking for truth. Because that's important; surely nobody wants to write an irrelevant book — though that is how a sophisticated critic in the Church Times once described my work. She was reviewing my book Into the Heart of Advent, about spending time with Jesus.

Anyway, never mind her — back to what I was telling you. It's as though the book was waiting for me as a living thing, not a two-dimensional narrative but something alive that meets me and welcomes me in, so that I can come back and bring you its story, and let its truth meet your truth so that it all joins up and truth everywhere is strengthened and becomes light.

It's like mining, but not dark or scary. It's a vivid world, full of light and hope. 

Neighbours

We have learned the names of our neighbours either side. Two doors down there's Malcolm and Anita, next door to us on that side are Vicki and Paul, then us, then the other side of us are Audrie and Benny, and the other side of them are Pete and Trish. Along the road a few yards — on the opposite side from us — the DHL courier driver lives; I don't know his name but he's a nice man, and his house is easy to recognise because he's just had his roof done. Everyone else's roof is brownish and his is red (it looks very snazzy, too).

We pray for them and their households every morning, and for the so far nameless neighbours who live in that far-off world, The Other Side Of The Street. All I know about them is that they have damn fine parking skills. Like us they've turned their front gardens into forecourts, and how our neighbour opposite manages to wodge two saloon cars and a works van onto his space is beyond me. He does it flawlessly.

When my kids were little — when Alice and Hebe were a year old and Fiona wasn't yet born, we moved house, from a two-bedroomed Victorian terraced house to a three-bedroomed one nearer the shops and  — crucially — a school. 

The high-schoolers from the Bruderhof came and moved us, bringing a van from their workshop to ferry everything from the old house to the new one. In their community the people move house quite a lot, so they were very experienced at it and did it brilliantly.

The only houses we'd considered were those within short walking distance of a school entrance and on the same side of the road. Otherwise, when Rosie started school, going first just mornings then afternoons, then all day but home for lunch, it would have meant getting a toddler and baby twins dressed for an all-weather outing several times a day. I thought it would be better to stand on the doorstep and wave goodbye to her, watch her walk along the road and arrive safely at the school. 

The house that we settled on was right next door to an elderly couple from our church, Frank and Jean. One of the first things Frank did when we moved in was make a gate in the fence so our kiddies could get through to their garden — and house — whenever they wanted. He was very patient about Alice and Hebe coming through to raid the petals of his flowers as ingredients for their mud stews. 

Frank and Jean were in the church choir, and so was Betty who lived half a mile along the road. The other thing about Frank and Jean was that they had a telly, and we didn't. I remember them bringing Betty home with them after choir one evening for a cup of tea, and she was entranced to walk in to their living room to find five (or it might have been four depending on how long we'd lived there) little girls sitting in a neat circle on Frank and Jean's living room floor, watching their telly.

Just sound the corner in Perth Road lived Sandy, who also went to our church, with her two daughters who used to babysit for us. Most evenings I'd go round to Sandy's for a cup of tea and a natter, and my children knew where to find me if they needed me.

Two other people from our church lived a few minutes walk away in Paynton Road — Pete and Karen. Several times a week they'd call in and spend the evening with us. Karen had the loveliest voice, and we used to sing sometimes.

We never locked our house, so anyone could come in whenever they wanted, and Frank and Jean always left their back door unlocked so our children could get in to their place and watch the telly.

Nobody had to go very far for these relationships — just next door or across the street or along the road. You didn't need to own a car or pay a subscription or sign a data protection thing or get DBS-checked. I don't know if, in the normal way of things, we'd even have been friends, because we were all very different from each other. It's just that we were neighbours, and we were all in the same church.

And then something changed.

Pete and Karen got a telly. After that, they never came out in the evening, and we hardly ever saw them again.

When I think back to those days, and compare them to the modern world, it's helpful to have that specific memory of the moment Pete and Karen got a telly. It identifies for me why those relationships with neighbours are no longer a Thing. Because here I am on the internet, talking to you on the other side of the world, but I don't even know the name of the man across the street who is so remarkably skilful at parking.

Perspectives

[Teresa Davey, there are three videos in this post. Each is inserted below the paragraph that refers to them. It should be possible on your phone to click on them and so play them on YouTube, but let me know in the comments if you have trouble with that and I'll try to figure out a strategy. I thought if I inserted the video into the block of text, rather than linking a word, it might be easier for your fingers to find. I hope so, because I'd love you to be able to listen to them. If it helps, on 21st December I posted just the inserted video of O Holy Night, with no accompanying text, so it may be easier to get to it through that.]

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For about the thousandth time this winter I went back to YouTube to listen again to the tenor Harry Gant singing O Holy Night, in the course of the 2024 broadcast of Carols from Kings (not the 2025 one).

Everything about it is beautiful.

That service starts in the remains of daylight at three in the afternoon, but is in total darkness by the end. When they were singing that carol, the chapel is entirely dark, lit by the candles inside their simple protective lantern sleeves of gleaming glass. You can see the people who have been lucky enough to attend the service — and how privileged and special that will feel — sitting quietly in their best clothes, their hands resting on the service sheets held on their laps.

The cameras in their various locations show us first of all Harry Gant start to sing, and the sensitivity he brings to it is its own kind of reverence. I have no idea what his personal faith may be, but I can see in his face that he understands the value of what has been entrusted to him. He sings not only the music, but the hymn. And then the other cameras show the rest of the choir — the trebles, just little kids, singing without affectation because music is woven into the everyday round of life for a boy at choir school. It's very wise, the dailyness of it sands away performance and exposes the music underneath. Then another camera on the man standing quietly beside Harry Gant, alert for the moment to add his voice. And one camera shows the accompanist, so sure and focused — four keyboards and the pedals to get right as well as reading the music. Organists astonish me.

I posted about it back in December, but here it is again in case you didn't see. 

What struck me watching it this time through is how young they all are. It took me right back to years gone by living in York, when we were just kids ourselves, university students. The man who became my husband singing in the Minster choir and playing the organ at Selby Abbey, all of us who lived in community together in St Martins Lane singing Vespers at All Saints Pavement, writing papers for the Theology Group at More House, staying at Ampleforth and joining in Vespers in the dark of winter evenings with the monks, sitting on the stairs to sing Compline every night at St Martins Lane (we made the staircase our chapel and the cantor sat on the half-landing), singing Irish folk songs round the supper table after supper. We were so young. Mike was the oldest of us at twenty-four.

And I know that if the people we were then could look at me now, all they'd see is an old lady.

Harry Gant and the young men standing beside him in Kings College chapel, they look to me as much like kids as the trebles. 

It's a curious thing, isn't it — I can see how young they are, and they can't; and they'd be able to see how old I am, and I can't. It's like the tradesmen who have worked on our house through this last summer; there's a sort of gentle understated gallantry, making sure we're all right, carrying heavy things upstairs for us, doing extra little things to look after us. It makes me realise how old we look to them, Tony and me.

It gives me a sense of life passing. I feel my body growing old, see it in the mirror, notice that I couldn't possibly run up a flight of stairs as I once always did, see the skin in wrinkled folds on my hands. But at the same time, I just feel like me. And it's only when I watch Harry Gant and the young men beside him singing O Holy Night that I realise how young I was then, all those years ago, when I didn't know I was young, I thought I was just me.

Here's a recording of Mike and John and Rog, singing the Agnus Dei from William Byrd's three-part Mass for the chant project Rog did towards his degree in 1977. They were in the Lyons Concert Hall at the university. What I treasure is that they were also friends, and living together in community, and used to sing that piece along with so many others, any evening of the week, just for the love of it.

And here, more than forty years later, our family (and Donna) playing at Pett Chapel in the Sussex countryside. Alice on French horn, Rosie with her trombone, Hebe and Donna with their violins, and Grace with her viola (it's at a stately pace to take account of mixed ability). But on the wall behind them, the stained glass cross that Alice made in the eastern window, and the forged cross that Bernard made — the cross of Christ at the heart of creation — above the pulpit.

Such a sense of time and change, of growing old and of being young,  but also of treasures of the heart that never fade, that nothing can erase. 

Light to see by

 I remember my prayer partner Margery telling me that the daylight extends by twenty minutes every week after the winter solstice (here in England). She told me that before we had the internet, and I carried the nuggets of information tucked away safe in my inner archive as a talisman of hope.

Thinking about it today, I looked it up online, and read that English daylight increases by two minutes and seven seconds every day after the solstice, which is an extra hour of daylight every month. After the feast of St John the Baptist in June they start to ration it until by the time Advent begins there's hardly any left and we have to wait for Jesus to be born. 

So we're three weeks on from the year's longest night, which is forty-three minutes and three seconds more daylight and thank God for that.

I say "daylight" but the grey drear in England today has personality. 

Still, any daylight makes it easier to work, and live and write.

Patient friends who ask me hopefully how I'm getting along with the next Hawk & Dove book will be pleased to know I'm making progress.  

I've gone back to the way I wrote the very first story, just sitting down each day to see who was there and write down what they said and what they did. I want to get it finished and out before the xenith of the year at St John the Baptist's feast, because 2026 looks set to be another turbulent ride, and we could all do with any light held steady to show us the way; and that place, those monks, do that for me. I must alert the artists to do a cover drawing for me; I don't like to rush them, hatching a picture takes time.

So, back to work. Just waving to you and saying hello from England. x

Morning thoughts

I've been making moderately good progress on the novel I'm writing, but yesterday I realised I need to completely restructure two chapters, amalgamating different sections of the material with each other. I don't want to lose any of the content but it needs re-ordering, not in big chunks but re-writing to integrate it differently. 

I've been reluctant to come to this conclusion because we're talking about 9000 words to be shuffled around, but I've come to the conclusion it has to be done.

That's today's task then.

Aside of that I've been considering growing zucchini. Here in England we normally say 'courgettes', but I've been conditioned in the direction of 'zucchini' by American nutritionists online; I like the word better anyway. If your name was going to be Zucchini or Courgette, which would you choose? Courgette is pretty, but does it carry too heavy overtones of Les Miserables? 

And the thing with zucchini is they are low FODmap, low in oxalates, high in L-citrulline, though they are high in salicylates so hmm. But I seen to be able to cope with them and although just meat has all you need I'm going to give them a go. But I'll grow my own because why wouldn't you?

Anyway, zucchini grow fast and vigorously and need good compost. We have plenty of garden space, and grass clippings aplenty in the summer months, but my compost waste is mostly eggshells and teabags; I don't really generate peelings. My husband does, but not much. He eats his food, he doesn't throw it away. And he mostly eats keto things like mushrooms and tomatoes and kale, where you eat all of it, there aren't peelings. 

I hate the idea of buying compost in plastic bags, though — I mean, what? We did this in the summer to get our garden going, because when we moved in there were plants in the wrong place and they had to come out of the ground into pots, and we built up one bed that then needed some earth adding in, to plant our heathers. And heathers need ericaceous compost, so we bought several bags of that. Plus, the front of our house just has a brick yard to park the car, so our garden there is all in pots and we bought extra compost for planters.

But it's stupid, isn't it, buying compost? If ever there was an example of modern insanity it has to be that. 

So early this morning (there's a lot of thinking time before sunrise in an English winter) I was not only reluctantly facing up to the reality that I need to restructure those two chapters, but equally reluctantly accepting that if I want to add zucchini back into what I eat then it makes sense to grow it and if I'm going to do that I need good compost and the best way to get the best compost is to make your own — bokashi-bran-neutralised dry closeting compost (I mean humanure) combined with grass clippings and weeds. To neutralise the pathogens and exclude rats, if you don't have a proper system in the sense of hardware you need a system in the sense of strategy. It's very easy. You need 2 large airtight buckets, one for collecting current deposits and one for curing already collected deposits. Said deposits (I hope you don't mind reading about this) are a combination of paper plus what naturally exits you plus a handful of bokashi bran (which neutralises pathogens). These are accumulated daily in a tub with an airtight lid until it's full, at which point you close it up and leave it for a fortnight, while you move on to the 2nd bucket for accumulation.

After that you empty the cured bucketful into your regular composter to mix with carbon elements (grass clippings, torn paper, spent compost etc) and leave it to rot down, which it does in short order and gives you the best compost you ever saw.

The only thing is, rats are very partial to humanure; so the composter for the second stage must be rat-proof. And I know we have rats in our compost because I have seen their tunnels. All they're getting is teabags, eggshells and grass clipping (plus a few ends of broccoli stalks and apple cores rejected by my husband) so I doubt they're too enthusiastic at the moment, but I don't want to create a population explosion of rats. At the end of our garden is a deck with a shed on it, and beyond the garden fence is the bank of the stream — so I'll bet you anything you like rats live under that deck.

But, as it happens our Hebe and Alice have two composters I bought when we lived with them, that they no longer need for various reasons. And those composters are the Subpod ones, which are rat-proof. Like this.

The earth in our garden is uncompromisingly heavy clay, and I think an eighteen-inch square hole might be a bit much for me to dig. I'm not sure. But if it is, then the alternative would be to create a raised bed and put both composters in that (because Alice and Hebe have two). Then if the raised bed is big enough to plant the courgettes alongside the composters, hey presto, we have both a composting system and a zucchini bed. 

I think we might do that.

And now the sun has risen (I think it has, behind all that cloud) and what we laughingly call 'day' at this time of year in England has made its appearance, and it's time to get up for our prayers.

Yesterday morning for breakfast I made myself egg-nog (beaten egg and hot milk, and a splash of vanilla and a teeny bit of manuka honey so it tastes nice, and cream), because I wanted to go to church without setting off abdominal agony by giving my gut anything more challenging than liquid to process. And that was delicious so I think I'll make that for my breakfast again today. It worked well for church, and I was glad I went because they had all my favourite songs in the one meeting. I walked home after to get some exercise, because I knew perfectly well that the chances of my going out for a happy afternoon stroll in the biting cold wind we had yesterday was exactly zero. So I was glad about that too. 

I haven't been to church all through Christmas because it gets a bit much for me — I need things to be plain and simple. I went to Russian Orthodox Christmas though, last week, because the priest is kind and a friend and invited me. So I have actually and literally been to church over Christmas, just not much.

It's two minutes to eight and time I got out of bed. Catch you later. But that's what I've been thinking about these last three hours as morning came. Wish me luck with re-structuring those chapters, it's not easy; praying friends, all prayer support in the endeavour gratefully received.

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Later on... evening...

Phew! Done it! The writing, I mean, not the composters.

Some good news on the topic of human diet

Hurrah! Well done America!

(Just so you know, there's an ad in the middle of this video. It's indicated by an orange bar moving across the bottom to show its progress. It's a benign ad for a good product — just letting you know because it's kind of grown-in to Dr Cywes talking)

Here's the new graphic showing the working principles, which are somewhat provisional and will be finessed with time.

It'll be interesting to see how this unfolds, not least because in the UK the EATLancet recommendations have gone with the ideologically driven "Green" agenda currently in vogue, with its reliance on grain and seed oils (good luck with that), to create the "Planetary Health" diet, as shown in this graphic —

— and detailed here:

In past years I'd have been all on board with the "Planetary Heath" diet, but as a result of taking that direction (as well as being very naive about the ubiquitous rollout of novel pharmaceuticals) I got an overload of oxalate and SIBO, and it's taken me a very long time and a great deal of money to figure out how to unpick the results. 

If this is a topic of interest for you, Max German has offered a careful analysis and response here:

Please, please note — the thing in that second video about vegans being deported is Max German's joke, not something the US govt is recommending!!

Moments

The Welsh baritone Cai Thomas is (I think) eighteen years old now. He has the most beautiful voice. Here he is, just this last Christmas, singing O Holy Night. A voice so sure and true. I love it.

But listening to it made me think about about the way life passes, and the memories we hold in our hearts, of times that will never return. The chances we have that belong to particular circumstances and relationships and occasions. 

The Japanese have a wonderful term for this — ichi go ichi e — which means pretty much "one encounter one chance" expressing the fleeting nature of the moments life offers us.

There's a glorious speech in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar that goes like this: 

There is a tide in the affairs of men

Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;

Omitted, all the voyage of their life

Is bound in shallows and in miseries.

On such a full sea are we now afloat;

And we must take the current when it serves,

Or lose our ventures.

Those words carry the same haunting sense of a moment which, once gone, will never come again. Ichi go ichi e. Yes, there will be other moments of course — life is full of moments — but there are times that take your breath away, that are part of the reason you came to this earth to experience the human condition with all its terrors and uncertainties, moments that you know you will treasure for ever, all the more precious because they will never ever come again. Times that, whether in public life or just personally in your own heart, make you what you are; crossroads moments. It can be about a decision or an insight or a choice — or it can simply be a moment of sheer beauty and joy, and you are different for having experienced it.

What made me think of these moments, these bright jewels of life that are fleetingly ours then gone for ever, is this video of Cai Thomas six years ago, before he matured from a treble to a baritone. Here he is singing the Laudate Dominum from Mozart's Vespers.

Cai Thomas now, today, has the most beautiful voice; but I'm so glad that memory of him singing as a twelve-year-old boy was captured and recorded — that time which was ours for a while and will never come again.