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 . . . 

 

Clarence

 Until last summer, we (I + Tony my husband) lived with two other family members — three really, but one of them is mostly elsewhere — in their beautiful Victorian gabled villa.

We had a little 1930s house let to tenants that became vacant in the summer and, as the economic changes in England are very adversarial to private landlords, we moved in there ourselves, and we love it. All of us are low-budget skinflints and living in separate dwellings gives us somewhere to go visiting. It's only a mile along the road from the home we left, so there's inbuilt exercise to the arrangement as well. Perfect.

I have a friend who is a Carthusian monk. We don't check in often because Carthusians are hermits who live in community, and I don't like to make over-frequent intrusions into the silence and seclusion of his vocation of prayer and adoration (plus he does actually have work to do in his rôle within the community). But we do correspond on a semi-regular basis, and I treasure the connection and his friendship. We hold his community in prayer and his community holds us in prayer — and my goodness, does it make a difference!

When we moved I told him about our new home, and he rather unexpectedly (but very firmly and decidedly) advised me that we should have a pet; a cat or a dog.

Two robustly territorial cats live next door on one side, and three less ferocious but fairly assertive cats live next door on the other side. Both contingents are used to coming into our garden and kindly spraying the plants and leaving us surprise turds in the grass and on the terrace. O how we value that, as you can imagine. Introducing a sixth cat in the middle would be an invitation to war.

Not only that, but the home we left behind is not without its animals. There were three dogs next door to whom we always served snacks (a Bonio plentifully buttered, and one-third of a sausage) every morning and every evening. There was a pair of crows and whatever current offspring they had in tow any given year, who came every day to stock up on raw meat for the family. And there was one ... then two ... now three ... foxes coming for breakfast and supper every day. Not only those clients but that house also has a resident cat of its own; Miguel who is elderly but fabulously glossy and still catching the occasional mouse.

When I was a girl, if you you took on a cat then you probably had it neutered, but after that all that happened was feeding it the cheapest food you could find once a day. No beds, no toys, no vaccinations; just co-existence ending with natural death and euthanasia, Not any more! Ha!

Miguel is neither large nor greedy, but even so the monthly amount to cover his food, his emergencies insurance and his monthly pet care plan comes in at £125 a month (about $170 US). In the modern world he must have annual vaccinations or else his emergencies insurance is invalidated. Recently his vet, looking at him thoughtfully and declaring him to be a good candidate for general anaesthesia (uh-oh), suggested that he be brought in to have his teeth cleaned. Under general anaesthetic. For £700 (about $1000 US). Which would be covered by neither his health plan nor his insurance. And if she found any dental work needed doing, her idea was that he could return a week later for a second general anaesthetic, where she could cut his gums, do whatever she thought necessary, and charge whatever that cost. 

In preparation for these procedures the vet advised that Miguel be given no food and confined to the house for 24 hours. Try explaining that to a cat who eats little and often and has never used a litter tray. Not going to happen.

We declined this wonderful opportunity — not least because general anaesthesia carries a significant risk of triggering or accelerating dementia in the elderly, and at the moment Miguel is very healthy — but it certainly concentrates the mind, does it not?

Because Miguel is the responsibility of both our households, and because feeding the foxes, the crows and the dogs next door was all my fault, every month we send across £65 ($85) towards Miguel's upkeep and I send across an additional £50 ($65) towards feeding the others. I also keep back all the soft tissue scraps from when I make bone broth and take it along in a tub for Foxy.

But it doesn't need a genius to see that adding a dog to these responsibilities would be a bridge too far — we are, after all, old age pensioners who no longer enjoy income from a rental property, and have just doubled our household expenses by leaving a shared house.

Furthermore, after the recent experience of Miguel's vet's bright idea for emptying our bank accounts, I felt queasy about establishing any further such entanglements with the long tentacles and avaricious eyes of Big Pharma.

Even so, I take very seriously the advice of a Carthusian monk. All that prayer doesn't just go to nothing, you know. When a Carthusian makes a recommendation, you do well to pay attention. They have a hotline.

Hmm.

But then one day last summer — this.

During the warm weather we had the doors and windows open, and this individual would often come in, have a look round, check all was well, and leave. Our neighbours' cats likewise used to come in and check the place out.

Our former tenants had a long-haired black cat called Bailey, so we got in touch to make sure Bailey had not returned from her new home. They said no, that this person on our windowsill was a regular visitor but they had never been able to establish where he (if it is a he) came from. They said they called him Clarence.

As summer moved into autumn, Clarence would occasionally stop by. Bearing in mind the Carthusian advice, eventually I bought a tub of cat treats and a bag of complete food. Clarence liked it. For the first time we heard his voice (quiet) and his purr (very loud). He let us stroke him. Clarence is a thin cat, and his fur often has burrs and grass seeds. We wonder if he is a stray. Not sure.

Then, recently, when the cold weather came, we progressed to this.

Never for long. He is watchful and alert even when dozing, and he doesn't make extended stays; he's just trying on the experience to see how it feels.

In the morning — around 8am in the light days of summer, more like 9am in the dark and cold of winter — Tony and I have a cup of tea and a time of prayer. Cats enjoy prayer, you know. If prayer is going on, they like to join in.

This morning when we met for prayer, there were the three of us.

I am not up for vets' fees running to hundred of pounds, and I have no wish to create mayhem in the already existing uneasy truce between neighbour cats. 

But this? Is it a Carthusian solution? I think it may be. 

And is it Clarence — or Clara?

Social and cultural concerns facing Britain today

In the last two years I have worshipped in two different Anglican and two different Methodist churches.

I've been disconcerted to find that while my own political allegiance has transitioned at warp speed away from the political Left (first Labour, then Green) to the place I now am politically — not because my views have changed but because society around me has changed — the churches I have attended (both clergy and congregation) adhere to what one might call the BBC point of view: sympathy for mass immigration, ignorance of (or indifference to) danger to women and children, apparent unawareness of the economic cliff-edge on which we now stand, indifference to the scale of threat to children from gender ideology, complacent indifference to the escalation of two-tier policing and the erosion of free speech and misinformation in public broadcasts with the intention of directing public opinion, and increasing anti-white racism.

The video below represents the concerns I feel about the state of our nation, and I cannot understand why these concerns are not shared by the clergy and congregations of the churches I know.

As always I welcome your comments and perspectives, regardless of whether you share my sense of concern — listening to friends who see life quite differently is something I value and seek.