Life Advice — Chapter Two — Who are your people?

 If first base is establishing a principle (mine is She who sleeps on the floor will never fall out of bed), second base is knowing your people.

This flows in two directions, and you need both. 

It's both knowing you can absolutely trust them, and being 100% committed to their wellbeing.

I personally think that ideally this will be your family. In my case it is, but in the maternal line. I found that I could completely trust my mother, who would never abandon me and never let me down, and in the same way I know I can completely trust my daughters. 

I am also blessed to be married now to a trustworthy man; we make a good team.

A while ago, reviewing my life and the path ahead, I asked myself "Who are my people?" 

In tough times, when mutuality becomes starkly important, to whom do I give my commitment and whom do I wholeheartedly trust? Who are my people?

I found that for me the answer is this small group of people that makes up my immediate family. I have unreservedly thrown my lot in with them — when they were children, of course, but also as adults. There are other people who have been true fellow-travellers, people I entirely trusted and for whom I would have done anything, but they are dead now. And there are others I count as friends, people I like and admire and consider trustworthy, but the relationship is bounded in these cases by other commitments — if circumstances were different we could make common cause, but as things are I could not rely on them unreservedly, nor they on me.

It's important to know this clearly, to identify who your people are, because in difficult times you rely on each other. Think about the Amish communities in America; if someone has a barn fire, the whole church will be round to build a new barn. If someone has unusual medical needs, the church has a fund to cover that, or a church action will be raised to generate the funds. Family and church solidarity creates strength in Amish country, practical skills can be shared and pooled.

This can also be true in England — not far from where I live in Hastings there is a Bruderhof community (years ago they were Hutterites and share a similar dress code but no longer belong to that church). They live together and hold all things in common. And In the centre of Hastings we have a church that's a recent plant; it's a sort of grandchild of Holy Trinity Brompton, a strongly Evangelical church in London from which Holy Trinity Brighton was founded, from where in turn people came to make a go of Holy Trinity Hastings which was struggling and small. Some of the founder members actually sold their homes in Brighton and came to live here in Hastings (a place with very apparent challenges), because of their shared vision and commitment. So sometimes the belonging within a church can be trustworthy and strong; I think if you would up sticks and move house for the vision of your church leaders and the call of God on your heart, that is commitment others could trust and rely on.

Yesterday — Christmas Day — my husband spent with his children and grandchildren and ex-wife. She lives in a block of flats where there is a flat set aside for guests, and he'll stay there overnight and the two of them will have breakfast together in the morning before he comes home. He feels a deep loyalty to me and Christmas is a special time, but this is something I encourage him to do because I think it is a very healing thing for families of divorce to be restored in their original family unit at important moments like birthday and Christmas, funerals and weddings. It is a kind of keeping faith. You should be there for the people who trusted you even when the paths you walk have diverged; and trusting someone as I trust my husband and he trusts me means you can trust them to be somewhere else with someone else without it being a loss or betrayal.

So I and my daughters met up for Christmas. One of us has a car (ours was elsewhere with my husband driving it) and she drove round the neighbourhood to collect me (with a hot chicken and some cookies) and her sister (with a trifle and some prepared vegetables).

We all (three households) live within twenty minutes walk of each other.

So lunch came together, prepared in the different houses, and there were Christmas cakes that three of the sisters had got together to ice and decorate a week or so ago. We all brought small presents for each other, meaning no-one's outlay was great but the aggregate result was thoughtful and joyous.

The house where we met up has no car but has a woodstove, so the cheerful fire we sat by was fuelled with logs and briquettes that we went on a mission together to collect a fortnight ago.

We live separately, we each make our own living and manage our own accounts — but we all look out for each other. if anyone hits disaster then she can move into someone else's home until she's back on her feet. That's how it works.

My own preference is for a small group with very deep authentic ties; that's why I think family is the ideal option. In a church community (like the Amish or the Hutterites or the Buderhof), the belonging is ideological but not really personal; so you are sheltered and supported as long as you toe the party line. But if you transgress ideologically, if you fall out with the leadership, you can find yourself out in the cold. That's not what I mean by finding your people. You don't want just fair-weather friends, you don't just want something that works until it goes wrong, you want people who will stick by you through thick and thin, and believe in you; and that is partly their gift and partly earned by your own trustworthiness and unconditional support and love. 

It doesn't have to be family. During the second half of the 1980s, a challenging time for coming to terms with the AIDS virus and its impact, when I was giving much of my time to hospice chaplaincy work, I was blessed to make friends with a variety of gay men, and discover the Terence Higgins Trust and such initiatives as the London Lighthouse (which was an AIDS hospice then; I don't know if it still exists or keeps the same emphasis now). These friendships opened my eyes to the existence of a robust network of mutual support among people whose families often had rejected or abandoned them. Living outside the structures of conventional society (this was before the days of civil partnership or gay marriage), I saw how they set about creating found family, establishing sturdy, affirmative and protective links of love and care. I learned so much from that, lessons about how you have to take responsibility for building family and belonging. It's not just something you can take for granted, and it's built on mutuality; it is to some extent transactional. You build it from the quality of your character. 

Brené Brown writes and talks about what she calls "the anatomy of trust", using her concept of the marble jar (see here or here). She goes into the anatomy of trust in her books Rising Strong and Dare to Lead (where she applies the concept to the workplace). I think it's a helpful phrase because it conveys that trust holds together, it is a living thing that grows out of connected components developing over time. 

Trust is built by faithfulness, by showing up for one another.

There's a really powerful moment in the sixth chapter of John's gospel (verses 66-69, here my paraphrase), that goes like this:

Then many of his disciples turned back and no longer travelled with him. Jesus said to the twelve, “Do you also want to go away?” Simon Peter answered him, “Lord, to whom would we go? You have the words of eternal life; and we have believed, and have come to know, that you are the Holy One of God.”

In asking yourself, "Who are my people?", you want to have got to the place where if someone suggests you should turn your back on them, your soul response is, "to whom would I go?" They are your home, your mycelium of belonging, they are your people.

Of course, you can get this wrong. You can give your heart and your trust and your all to someone who walks away and leaves you, who lets you down — yes, don't I know it! But if that happens you still have the ground of your being, the God who is faithful who walks beside you in Jesus and wells up within you as the Holy Spirit; you are rooted, grounded, built in him. "Underneath are the everlasting arms." Even if you lose someone you trusted and your life is blown apart, you can start again, you can build anew. And it's also true that when one person in your trusted circle lets you all down, at that point the rest of you need each other all the more, holding together to survive as a body and heal the wound that has been made.

But although all humanity is flawed and frail, and even the best of people may disappoint you, even so I think that, after you have established your life principle, the second thing you must do is establish your community of trust — your family, be that born or found. 

So:

• What is my basic working principle?
• Who are my people?

The third thing we'll look at is choosing and structuring a home.

Warning — Life Advice! First chapter. Establish a Principle.

 I have a pronouncedly neurodivergent family, and among the various manifestations of this is PDA (pathological demand avoidance) which mandates that one always ask questions rather than instruct, always offer choices, and refrain from suggesting any way ahead too overtly. Anything else is counter-productive — and I mean, extremely so!

So I'm not in the habit of offering life advice, lest it doom the unwilling recipient to taking the exact opposite path at their peril.

Then — if you too are pathologically demand avoidant, I say one thing only: ignore all this. In any case I am probably wrong. In the last five years the universe in its glory has treated me to example after example of how spectacularly I am capable of getting things wrong (all to do with Pluto transits at the moment I suspect, but that's another topic entirely). So I might be wrong; but so far the basis on which I operate has served me and mine well, and I thought you might be interested to at least consider it.

Straight up I should tell you that this is advice for the impecunious. I have no ideas about shrewd investments and have never entertained the notion of a career plan; that's not been my kind of life, not the path I've walked. But in case you die of boredom before I get round to what I want to tell you, let me begin.

The first thing is to establish a working principle, a meta-narrative of sorts, from which to make decisions.

When I was training for ordained ministry I learned to drive, and consequently was thrown in to driving to unfamiliar places through large towns when I was still at the stage of remembering which order the foot pedals were in and to turn the headlights on when it got dark. I had to drive to Aylesford from Hastings on a regular basis, and when I first did it I didn't know the way and I was terrified of the large and complicated intersections I'd have to traverse. My then husband (he's someone else's husband now) gave me a really helpful piece of advice. He said, "It's easy. You just go to Maidstone and turn right." 

Now, this served me well; because it was so simple that if I made any mistakes I could rectify them. It gave me a general, broadbrush principle to apply, that I could implement without endlessly stopping to consult the map (no satnav back then, no Google maps, no smart phones). It worked, and it gave me confidence; in life as in driving, confidence is a positive precursor to things going well.

So in this first chapter of Life Advice, I recommend that you put in place a clear and simple principle, a sort of North Star to guide you — something as simple as "Drive to Maidstone and turn right".

My own life principle is taken from a lovely book I once had — by a photographer, diarising the day of his elegant Siamese cat, each page having a photo accompanied by a caption. And one of the captions was this:

"She who sleeps on the floor will never fall out of bed."

That is my principle for practical living, and it has served me well.

Unpacking it, then. 

Life is full of uncertainty. Your spouse may commit a crime and go to prison, or leave you. You might unwittingly wreck your health by making the wrong dietary choices or accepting some kind of medicine in good faith. The financial and cultural fortunes of your country will rise and fall. Someone in your family may suddenly need urgent help, possibly on a longterm basis. All sorts of things could happen to you.

So though technically someone who sleeps on the floor can fall out of bed (roll off their sleeping mat), it won't make much difference. Do you see what I mean? What I mean is, things might go wrong, but the impact will be decreased to the degree your practice is humble and simple and lowly.

Digressing slightly onto the topic of actual beds but keeping with that principle of simplicity — my five children were born within a span of six years (Child 3 and Child 4 were twins).

So I had a just-four-year-old and a nearly-two-year-old when my twins were born: all still in nappies at night. 

Friends, I needed my sleep to get through! So I set up the cot with its side down, butted up against our bed and right next to me. I went to bed each night with one babe in my arms latched on and feeding, and the other just fed and asleep in the cot. We all fell asleep like that. When Cot Babe woke up, I swapped her over with Babe in Arms, and went straight back to sleep. Every night. Several times. Every morning I was well rested, the babies were contented and fed, we were all happy.

When my youngest child was worn, we got our Wild Card. She slept very little, but I still wanted a good night's sleep. So we changed to sleeping on a mattress on the living room floor, with a cot mattress and its own little cot duvet right up alongside it. When bedtime came, we went in and shut the door, went to bed and left Baby 5 tearing around the room with her toys until she eventually was ready to find her way onto her own little mattress next to us. We all got a good night's sleep according to our needs, and she wasn't lonely or abandoned or locked in anywhere without us. And she never fell out of bed.

Zooming out to the more general: I organise my life very simply — no debt, basic wholesome food, homemade or second-hand clothes for the most part, a small house with easy access from level ground, a modest size garden (more about that when I get on to considering choosing a home), a small car, and as few personal possessions as is practical. Everything very ordinary and easy to dismantle, nothing to make anyone envious of me, nothing to attract attention.

In fact, during the season of my life when I was much involved in a prison chaplaincy, and ex-prisoners or those on compassionate leave sometimes visited or stayed at our home, a burglar who specialised in gold used to call in often. A remarkable person with a gift for silence, I wouldn't know he had arrived until I looked up from what I was doing and he'd be standing in front of me. On one occasion, I asked him, "Phil, at some point I'd be grateful if you'd check through our house for me, and make sure we have nothing worth stealing."

"I have," he said. "There isn't."

It makes for peace, you see, and diminishes the impact of adversity.

So that's my principle upon which I organise my life.

"She who sleeps on the floor will never fall out of bed."

That's Chapter One of Life Advice, then. Establish a basic principle. 

What's yours?

More next time...

Blessed feast and may 2026 be kind to you

 

Here's your chair at my fireside, and I hope that during 2026 you will drop in here often to share thoughts and observations.

2025 has been quite a year, and I have the feeling that 2026 will not be a startling improvement. The tide has turned, I think, but we must wait a while yet for it to come in.

Even so, if the year ahead does not look full of hope, then at least our task is clear; we must bring to 2026 the hope that is in us, the certain hope that we have in Christ Jesus. 

We have come through difficult times before, and we shall come through these present days in the same way. This too shall pass.

May the Lord of creation who blessed all he had made, and pronounced it good, lift up the light of his countenance on the trees and waters, on the stones and the air, on the clouds and the birds, the animals, insects, invertebrates and fish, on every living thing and upon humanity. "All shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well."

Thus says the Lord:

“Stand by the roads, and look,

    and ask for the ancient paths,

where the good way is; and walk in it,

    and find rest for your souls.” [Jeremiah 6.16 RSV]

This Christmastide may you find peace and meaning in the coming of the Christchild. At this time of Yul, rejoicing in the infant Light with all the hope it carries, may your soul be renewed, your purpose be steadied, and faith strengthen within you. 

Make ready your soul to take hold of the Light, and anchor it firmly in the place where you are, and bear it steadfastly through the year to come.

Pax et bonum.

Blessed be, my friends.  x x

The blessed middle way

There have been a disquietingly high number of instances of assault — women assaulted by men — in the United Kingdom. This horrible problem has risen significantly in step with our open borders approach to immigration (despite government rhetoric telling stories of a 'tough' approach). 

Mainstream thinking in British society — our mainstream media, and our churches too — is very favourable toward immigration, and those who express concern about lack of assimilation into British culture, and lack of funds to support our new residents, meet a loud chorus of insults ('racist thugs', 'white supremacists', etc etc)

But the same liberal thinking that welcomes people from overseas without any cultural differentiation, also advocates for what trans rights have become (a very different thing from the approach I unhesitatingly supported just five or six years ago), and for the kind of feminism that calls masculinity (especially white masculinity) toxic, and insists that it is a woman's right to appear in public dressed however she pleases.

It doesn't take a very discerning mind to see a cultural conflict here. 

I personally would feel relieved to see a more level playing field in British justice and policing, better protection against assault for the indigenous population, and some restraint imposed on immigration. I think diversity can be a strength, but certainly isn't always. It depends on who's in the mix.

And I am deeply concerned about the evidence of video footage of British girls out on the town on a Saturday night being used to invite new residents whose culture has a very different expectation of how respectable women should appear in public.

But I — again, personally; I am well aware of how vehemently others disagree — also feel that some British fashions are both imprudent and inconsiderate.

So we have two extremes, don't we? On the one hand we are eagerly importing large numbers of people who would like to impose such standards of dress as we see in this video.

On the other hand, we see young women out and about in the town centre dressed like this.

Even though I understand it enrages the feminists and is taken for misogyny — yes, even so — I would like to advocate for a blessed middle path. 

I don't mind women in trousers (I sometimes wear trousers myself) but I would be most grateful to be treated to a vista of other people's personal anatomy that is altogether less pronounced.

I don't want to be veiled — I'll be relieved if both the burqa and the niqab continue to adorn only a minority of people in my country. I'll be horrified if either becomes mandatory.

But in consideration of those who have always lived here and those we have invited in, I think dress that is not provocative and doesn't flaunt the most private details of one's body parts would be a good path to choose. 

The Guild of Cauldron Makers

During the Covid lockdown in 2020, I started an expression of church on Facebook (The Campfire Church) with my daughter Grace and my husband Tony. In the end it ran for about four years, because people made friends and liked meeting up there. We only just this last week ended the group finally and closed it down. 

But while the lockdown was on and we were doing that, I wanted to add in some stories for children. Actually I prefer all-age over just-for-children, so the Child Inside You has a thinkabout as well as the Child Beside You.

I put all the stories into a blog that I set up for the purpose. I see it's fallen out of Google's mind now and their bots think it doesn't exist.

I was reminded of those stories when I read Vicki Kauffman's lovely blog post here — after I'd read it I went back to look for The Guild of Cauldron Makers, which is how I discovered Google had forgotten all about it. I'm quite surprised that I have a better memory than a robot. I didn't know you could.

So if you're in the mood for a story, all the stories are here (and I've added a link to it into the sidebar too) — though it helps to be aware that, being a blog, they begin at the end, as it were.

O Holy Night. King’s College Choir 2024.Harry Gant, tenor.

Jephthah

You have to be careful how you treat people who want to be good.

In an ideological setting like a church community or a political arena, being good and being right have blurred distinctions, and being accepted easily develops into aspiring to leadership. Then, having secured leadership, this ultimate form of being accepted and right (and therefore good) expresses as policing everybody else, to make sure — to insist — that they are kept firmly within the ranks of what is acceptable, right, and good.

I have been thinking about our Prime Minister, and wondering if this may not be the psychological motivation underlying the courses of action he takes; to please, to be accepted, to be admired, to be right (or, in his case, Left) — and therefore to feel affirmed as good. He began, after all, as a human rights lawyer, a defender of the downtrodden, a saviour of sorts, championing the cause of the oppressed; they must have been grateful. I wonder if it has become an addiction. In an increasingly ungrateful country, I wonder if this (potentially) underlying psychology has begun to work against all of us.

It reminds me of the situation of Jephthah in the Bible. Almost never will you come across a clergyman preaching about Jephthah, so it would be understandable if you'd simply never heard of him. His entire story is in Chapter 11 of the book of Judges.

There were two things, really, about Jephthah. The first was his status as a mighty warrior, and that must have counted for a lot. He was renowned, people looked up to him — what mighty warrior is not admired by other men?

But there was something else. Jephthah was a son of Gilead — and we should carry in mind that this can mean either personally and directly Gilead's son, or simply a member of Gilead's tribe in some sense — but he was also the son of a prostitute. So on the one hand he belonged to the tribe, but at the same time he was an outsider. 

In his case, it seems that Jephthah was in a literal sense Gilead's son, because the Bible story says that his brothers, the sons of Gilead born to Gilead's actual wife (unlike Jephthah), drove Jephthah away on the grounds that he did not belong, he was not one of them, he was "the son of another woman".

He was one of them but he was not. He was an insider but an outsider. I think our Prime Minister is a bit like that. The most cursory glance shows you that he has "establishment" written all over him; and yet he chooses a career that involves taking up the cause of the outcast against the establishment. Inside but outside. Like Jephthah. And, tellingly — on the side of the right; restoring people to righteousness, back into the fold.

Anyway, returning to Jephthah; when his brothers threw him out, what was he to do? He took refuge with bandits, who gathered around him and made him their leader. 

He wanted to be accepted, to be affirmed, to be important.

That's what I see in our Prime Minister. As the vote of the electorate evaporates over time, the Muslim vote becomes ever more important to Labour. The Muslim sector of the population now becomes the cause to champion, the outsider to welcome in, the people who gather round him and hail him as leader while the rest of the country turns against him. If the people with whom he culturally and nationally belongs reject him, he might inevitably and understandably look elsewhere for affirmation.

Hmm.

But that wasn't the end of Jephthah's story.

The people of Israel went to war, and needed a mighty warrior, so they came looking for Jephthah, offering a welcome back into the fold — what he longed for, to be accepted and affirmed and celebrated. 

So he was enticed back, and led his people into battle.

Is this what our Prime Minister is doing? Sabre-rattling, looking to rally the troops and lead us into war, to unite the people behind him and so regain popularity and assert dominance? Is it something similar? Is that what the drums of war are all about? The dream of being a hero?

But Jephthah's story ends with an interlude most bitterly sad, because Jephthah had a daughter. 

On the eve of battle Jephthah, desperate to do well, to be the hero, to be celebrated by his fickle family, begged the Lord God for victory in the conflict, promising in exchange to offer as a sacrifice whatever first met him on his return home. And that, as it turned out, was his daughter — coming out dancing with joy to welcome him home. 

Jephthah was devastated. Disaster! Who did he blame? Yes, I expect you've got it in one — her.

So Jephthah, being a man of his word and one to stick to his guns, let her have a little holiday and then offered her life on the altar of sacrifice.

Isn't that what our Prime Minister is doing? The girls who have fallen prey to the grooming gangs in Luton, Rotherham, Manchester, London, Oxford, Birmingham; and the little girls of Southport who also came out dancing, the girls of Epping, the girls of so many places in England now afraid to go out into the streets — he is deaf to their cause. Evidently they are worth the price. Evidently they are to be offered up for the bargain he has struck. They are, it seems, what must be sacrificed to honour the deal — with their lives are bought the vote, the favour, the admiration, the encouragement, of a soul insatiably hungry to be accepted, to be right, and to be good.

One cannot blame people for the hunger to be affirmed, and what it will drive them to. One can only try to understand. After all, in the book of Judges it began with Gilead, and Gilead's sons rubbed salt into the wound. Jephthah was just the first casualty of rejection in that story.

But in these times, as in those bygone days, I am left with a question — where is the God of Jephthah's nameless daughter?

 

Thinking about 2026

New Year resolutions are probably a good thing if they take the form of a path to walk — direction of travel — rather than hard-and-fast rules. Rigidity is brittle, it shatters, its legacy is disillusionment. But a direction of travel imposes less demanding expectations because it is not so specific.

With that in mind, here are the paths I choose to travel in 2026.

The first is to do with food shopping. My heart is troubled for the farmers in our country. Only yesterday I sat and watched a video clip of an MP raising with our Prime Minister just how grave is the situation for family farms. The waiving of Inheritance Tax for farms has enabled them to be passed down through generations; typically farmers make small profits but the land they own is a significant capital asset. The new regulation coming into effect in April 2026 could wipe out our food security in a generation. The MP told the Prime Minister how, in her constituency alone, quite a number (I think she said eleven) of elderly farmers, or farmers living with terminal illness, are in a predicament. If they die before April 5th, their children can inherit the farm. If they die after April 6th, Inheritance Tax will apply and their children will be forced to sell the farm. To whom, I wonder. Probably developers of land for housing or leisure facilities or "Green" industry. So they are considering committing suicide to protect the heritage of their farming families. The Prime Minister agreed that this was likely so. That's all. He had no plan to reconsider.

Because our government has bought into the Net Zero philosophy and the febrile Green religion that has seized the public mind, people have been sold the legend that meat and dairy must be minimised in our diet. It seems they do not know the crucial rôle played by large herbivores in protecting and regenerating the land. If farming were entirely arable — tilled earth agriculture — the end result would be a dust bowl. The heart of farming should be fields and hedgerows full of biodiversity, for mob-grazed sheep and cows. There should be plenty of forest cover, managed so as to include pigs and chickens on a sufficiently occasional or widespread basis. Our farm animals should have freedom to roam and fulfil the natural social patterns of their lives, the ruminants raised on pasture and the mono-gastric animals fed a varied and wholesome diet — not soy and other cash crops and the leftovers of ultra-processed junk.

It may be that one day I will be able to eat other than just meat and dairy. But that might not be possible. As things are at present it would likely cost me my colon. I contemplate with dread and a level of despair our ruling élites' brave new world where the ordinary people's diet is built on grain and seed oils and sugar, with a few vegetables and only a grudging ration of butter and meat allowed. Already the public is being softened up in this direction, with the EATLancet dietary programme influencing the public mind to accept that as a way forward. If that happens, we can look forward to ever increasing reliance on food as a factory product, on agro-chemicals and hydroponics and laboratory grown "meat", with an outcome of even greater manifestation of metabolic illness than we see at present.

Where the large herbivores still have permission to even exist, the eagerness to cull them and inject them with mRNA gene cocktails and Bovaer digestive disruptors will undermine their health and the budgets of the farms.

What to do? What to do?

This one small thing I will resolve for 2026: I will buy my food (which is all meat and dairy) from the small local farm shops, so the money goes to the actual farmers in the place where I live; or from English farmers with especially regenerative practice, who are kind to their animals. Not to agribusiness. Not to the shareholders of the supermarkets. Not to halal practitioners. To the farmers whose animals are free to live on pasture and eat wholesome and natural food, who produce meat slaughtered humanely in small local abattoirs so the animals don't have long stressful journeys packed into lorries. 

So that will be one direction of travel.

Then the second thing I want to do is make 2026 what is sometimes called a low-buy year. I think if I try for a no-buy year I will set myself up for failure. I want to be able to buy books. Other than that, I think I probably already have everything I need, but there's no doubt in my mind that before I've gone many steps down the path I'll think of something I simply can't live without. But my daily life is uneventful and routine with no important functions to attend, that might have a special dress code. I like making clothes, but I have seven skirts now, and a (small) drawer full of hats — that's surely enough? I have shirts for the summer and warm sweaters for the winter, three pairs of sandals and three pairs of boots. That's plenty, isn't it?

The third thing I have in mind for 2026 is to find a church community that feels like home, that can accept me for who I am and make me welcome. Not politics dressed up as church, and not with a lazy pastor who can't be bothered to shepherd the flock or dig deep to find the word of God for the people. I don't even know where to look. 

So, those are my three signposts for the journey through next year:

• Meat and dairy from local famers
• Low-buy and keep my possessions down to a minimum
• A church family to authentically contribute and belong

That, and every morning as we pray through these terrifying and dystopian times, we here will be praying for our country, for our farmers, and that the sabre-rattling chatter of war with Russia will come to nothing, will fade and evaporate. Not one single English person I know or have ever met thinks war with Russia is a good idea. Not one. May it never come to pass. May 2026 be the year even the thought of it is scuppered for ever. God bless our land and our farms and the peaceful beasts in our fields. God bless our trees and hills, our waters, our birds and fish and insects and invertebrates and stones. God bless our world in all its diversity and complexity. God bless each culture and tribe within their own land and nation, and may a safe home be built for them there. May there be peace, may there be quietness, the contented hum of family life simply and honestly preserved. May God guide us wisely in 2026. May we be safe, may we be free, may we choose well.

And what about you? Do you have hopes and dreams for the year ahead?

"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 my existence has passed from his consciousness, 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 I asked to be excused from this duty 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.

As for 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 hosting 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.