Recommending a YouTube channel

I'm just sharing this along because I think this YouTuber is wise, calm and very sane. He has made only a handful of videos, so it's very easy to catch up with his perspective and what he's proposing.

His personal background and history seem to me to particularly qualify him to comment on the present political landscape in America. I'm not 100% sure about this, because I find all the rage and chaos in my own country (England) bewildering enough — the poor blaming the rich, men blaming women (and vice versa), the Right blaming the Left (and vice versa), citizens blaming immigrants (and vice versa) — but I am very attracted to his approach of calm and intelligent thought, learning from past mistakes, supporting the human, and staying within the law.

Here's his video, watch his others if you have time, and let me know what you think.

Eating aeroplanes

 There's a person recorded in the Guinness Book of Records for eating an aeroplane — a Frenchman called Michel Lotito.

He is said to have consumed quite an array of hardware, starting small with hinges, metal chain, bolts and razors, and working up through medium-sized objects like a waterbed, some chandeliers and a coffin (with handles), to arguably more chewy items like shopping trolleys, a computer, a waterbed and a telly. But his pièce de résistance was without doubt the light aircraft he ate, a Cessna 150 which took him a while to consume.

The Guinness Book of Records people awarded him a brass plaque in recognition of his remarkable digestive achievements, and he ate that, too.

But I was thinking about him today because of mushrooms. 

Opinion on eating mushrooms is divided. Apparently, people who inform us about how to survive an apocalypse say there is no point eating mushrooms because you don't get much calorific value from them but they might kill you. They either are or aren't safe, but are never very nutritious. So it is said, and yet some varieties of mushroom (Lions Mane, Turkeytail etc) reputedly have marvellous healing benefits. They are in the fruit and veg section of the supermarket, but they aren't vegetables — they aren't animals either, but they're said to be more like animals than plants.

But why eating aeroplanes reminded me of eating mushrooms is because (are you the same?) when I eat mushrooms they pass through intact. I probably don't chew my food as assiduously as I should.

There's a very interesting man on YouTube called Lee Copus — his channel is called Kent Carnivore. Lee had ulcerative colitis, followed all the medical dietary advice for managing it, and ended up losing his colon altogether. He had been advised to eat lots of fibre and fruit and vegetables, but the anti-nutrients and plant toxins won the day, and Lee had to have a colectomy. As a result he has a bag attached to the stoma created on his abdomen to collect the digestive material that would normally pass on and out through the colon.

This means that Lee has an unusual opportunity to assess the extent to which food is digested and processed in the upper gut.

If he eats any fruit or vegetables, they pass out into the bag exactly as they went into his mouth — a bit chewed up of course, but clearly recognisable. But he found that all animal products he ate (meat, cheese, fish, eggs) never passed through as discrete objects; they were always digested and just came through as chyme. No lumps of meat or flakes of fish or pieces of egg, ever.

This is what put Lee on to first realising that fruit and vegetables were pretty much going through him like Michel Molito's aeroplane parts; he ate them, yes, and they went through him, but they came out as they went in, they were not in any real sense part of his food.

This is how I am with mushrooms. They are one of the things on the short but enjoyable list of food I can eat, so I have re-integrated them into what I have because I like the taste of them and they create variety; but they may well be entirely pointless beyond those motivating factors. Like eating aeroplanes.

Now, Lee believes he would still have his colon if he had latched on to this earlier and taken plants off the menu before he needed surgery. And surely most of us who attempted to eat a bicycle or a television would end up in the emergency room.

So I'm not sure now to what extent it's a spectrum — ranging from people who can only manage animal products, through those who can manage a few fruits and veg but not mushrooms, to those who can even eat the supermarket trolley itself — or if it's more that we should all really only eat animal products (what Dr Ken Berry describes as the proper human diet), just adding in broccoli and shiitake and chandeliers as an idiosyncratic quirk to satisfy a longing for variety.

Women and men

 My outlook on life was conditioned by my upbringing. I grew up in Hertfordshire, but my family were all Yorkshire people, and I think that made a difference; they were independent, forthright, and practical.

My father was an unusual man; looking back I see that he was neurodivergent, but had to create compensations for that in a world where it was not yet understood. He was very solitary and rarely stayed in one place for long, travelling all over the world. So he wasn't at home much. Our household much of the time was my mother, my sister and me. We had friends of course, and plenty were male, but it was a very female household. 

I wouldn't say we ever considered ourselves as feminist; that wasn't part of our vocabulary at all. But my mother came of a line of self-employed people; her mother had managed the accounts and poultry on their family farm, her grandmother had managed the accounts and bakery in her family shop, as well as having trained as a textile designer because her family owned a mill. So, like her family before her, my mother didn't want a job as such, she wanted a holistic life that was organically integrated. She wanted to care for her children and her home. So she made her money buying and selling property, and made the money stretch by growing all our fruit and vegetables and herbs, and raising sheep and chickens. 

In consequence, I grew up not really connected to the workplace mentality of bosses and underlings, and the associated hierarchies of men and women. Furthermore, there wasn't such a hierarchy in our home since my father was mostly not there, and we were all women.

I'm glad of this, because it was a quirk of circumstances that of itself left me free from the resentments and bitterness that can exist between the sexes. The women in our family were strong and felt empowered, but without the need to attain that by denigrating or dominating men.

The feminist movement of the 1970s didn't make a great deal of difference to me personally, because the women I knew growing up never felt the need of liberation. They were never under anyone's thumb, they generated their own income, they took pride in their own areas of responsibility, and they pretty much let the world go by and did their own thing. They worked alongside their menfolk in strong and integrated relationships, both the men and the women having a vital contribution to make.

As a young woman, I strongly espoused Leftist politics, and stayed with that inclination until about five years ago. My family of origin were all on the political Right (though my great-grandparents were not) but I went Left because I felt certain that whatever life threw at me I'd find a way to make it work, so my vote was always for those people who couldn't manage, who needed a safety net to catch them when they fell. 

In the last five years, though, I think society has changed. Cynically opportunistic immigration has sky-rocketed, creating cultural and economic problems. The conversation about homosexuality and gender identity has moved from being a reasonable desire for inclusion to being an aggressive ideology challenging the family as a basis for society. The politics of envy have gained a hold that I consider detrimental to freedom. I do not warm to the socialist vision of society — what people often call 'the nanny state', though God help anyone with that kind of nanny. 

I prefer the greater informality and possibility for self-determination we left behind after the 1970s. I don't like the grid of laws closing in around our lives.

In consequence, after voting socialist all my adult life, in the last five years I went off-piste, exploring what people on the Right in UK politics had to say.

There are aspects of it, and personalities within it, that I like very much. Among those I admire are Jordan Peterson, Douglas Murray, Ayaan Hirshi Ali, Senator John Kennedy (of Louisiana) in America, Winston Marshall and Connor Tomlinson on Youtube in the UK, and Jacob Rees-Mogg in UK politics. And I liked Peter Whittle of the New Culture Forum, who died very recently.

There are others I admire less, and some I liked at first but found disappointing over time. I don't really like publicly running people down, so I don't want to say who I've gone off as time went on, but I'd like to say why.

Among speakers/pocasters/Youtubers on the political Right in the UK, there seems to be a disappointing level of misogyny. This outlook seems to thrive among young men on the political Right. Though they are deeply suspicious of immigrant cultures in general, their attitude to women would be right at home in Islam, I'd have thought. Let me give you a sample of comments from viewers of the Youtube channel of one such prominent influencer of the political Right, on a variety of his videos. These comments fairly represent the flavour of the group gathering around him because of his own outlook.

If a Woman can't park a car why would you let them fly a plane, it's madness.

They try steal the white mans lands, give his job to women who betray him and to outsiders who hate him, and start wars with those who hate him so he will die. . .and yet the white man endures.

Remember when your little sister would see you playing army and wants to join in but only wants to be a princess and cries and ruins everything and your mum sides with her and says you have to include her or else and so no one has any fun.

Imagine that but an entire society. That's us.

Women secretly like Toxic Masculinity, despite their complains.

You know At this point , i'm convinced that ninety percent of the problems we have in the west can be solved by telling women no

    Replies included:

    A woman's worst enemy is often herself.

    I need to rewatch the "How women; destroy civilizations" video

Women when given power they mess everything up every single time 

“Women In Charge - Chaos Assured”.

It does rather feel like western civilization went into decline after female suffrage. . . . 

women use to play hard to get, now they are hard to want 

Women have destroyed this nation never forget that.

Disappointed by the extent to which Methodism and the Church of England have been dominated in their thinking by the modern version of Leftist thinking (what is generally described as Woke), I have wondered if I would feel more at home in the Catholic or Orthodox wings of the church. But again, I was dismayed by the extreme nature of misogynist attitudes expressed when Dame Sarah Mulally was chosen as the Archbishop of Canterbury. I think these could be summed up by the person who commented on a podcast by a Catholic Youtuber, saying that 'there was a reason Satan targeted Eve rather than Adam'. It felt as if we were regressing to some of the more depressing attitudes prevalent among the Church Fathers — John Chrysostom, Augustine of Hippo, and Jerome, among others — calling women weak and fickle, and the devil's gateway, and created purely for procreation and nothing else.

The thing is, though I find the traditions and liturgies of the Catholic wing of the church beautiful, I would only be pretending if I lined up behind such attitudes.

As to priesthood in the church, and whether it should be extended to women or limited to men, I personally think — neither. I lean more to the Quaker testimonies of peace, equality, simplicity and integrity; but though Quaker meeting is wonderful, it is less and less Christo-centric in the UK (and that matters to me), and I think worship without hymnody is missing something vital, and I don't feel drawn to the political activism of the Quakers.

I would like church to be a circle more than a pyramid. I would like leaders to emerge rather than be imposed. I believe in the priesthood of all believers and the high-priesthood of Jesus; I'm not sure about having a priestly caste within the church. But I could live in peace with it — I don't feel the need to agree with everything; to some extent all institutions are one-size-fits-none. I am still exploring and searching for a way to fit in, a community to belong.

I feel queasy about designation of gender rôles. I do believe that in general women tend towards different occupations from the men. I do think that in general men are more competitive and women more collaborative. I think there are generalisations one can make. But I would want to stop there. When I heard Dr Gavin Ashenden opine that men can be priests and women can't, in the same way women can have babies and men can't, I thought that was a false dichotomy — ideology and biology are not the same thing. 

Looking back in the history of England, at Hilda of Whitby, Julian of Norwich, Queen Elizabeth I, Susanna Wesley — or coming to modern times, such figures as Margaret Thatcher and Queen Elizabeth II — regardless of whether one shares the outlook of the individual woman, how could one credibly say that when women are given power they mess up every single time, or that women are weak and fickle and created purely for procreation? The evidence simply isn't there, the ideology has no inherent logic.

So in all, I find myself truly at home neither with the Right nor the Left politically, neither with the Low nor the High when it comes to church.

I think there is room for anybody's opinion, but I can go along with neither the idea that a man can become a woman, nor with the idea that a woman is the gateway of hell. I think a woman, like a man, is just a person, and that each of us is individually and personally called by God, not according to our body but according to our soul.

The Inner Child

 Do you have problems with your inner child?

I surely do.

For background to what I'm about to tell you, I should mention that I have a modest income and that I recently joined a choir with a performance dress code of white top, black skirt or trousers, and black shoes. There's a performance in March and I have no black skirt. Each month I can allow myself small personal purchases, and with this in mind I have some black fabric on watch to make the sort of skirt I like.

The skirts I wear, all made by me, are 34 inches long, and are made from fabric 60 inches wide — double, so 120-inch width at the hem. I reduce the width at the top to about 40 inches in total by stitching down from the top about five inches to create box pleats all round, and I add a waistband channel on top for one-inch elastic. So I end up with a skirt that looks like this on the hanger. 

And this is what they look like worn.

So — if I want to take part in the choir concert it's imperative that I buy the black fabric I have in mind, or I won't get it sewn in time. I have enough money to do this and I will enjoy the project.

Now enter the inner child.

I occasionally amuse myself looking at ladies' clothes on eBay, which is where I buy my sweaters and shirts. Under my skirts, incidentally, instead of ladies' briefs and a petticoat, I wear cropped jersey pyjama bottoms, which work as what they call pettipants, ie do both jobs in one. I buy those on eBay too.

So when I was pottering around on eBay, looking at dresses just for entertainment, I saw this dress.

It's a good make, it's viscose crêpe (a nice fabric) and is the right size and length for me, and the colours are small pink flowers on a blue background which I like. But the thing is, as my inner adult and my inner parent both know full well, I will neither wear it nor keep it. To be wide enough for my hips and shoulders it'll be loose enough at the waist to look saggy and sad in wearing. It'll be long enough but because it's a one-piece garment and I am hypermobile — so I'm round-shouldered and very slouchy — it'll look like a sack and make me look like Auntie Vera from the Giles cartoons of my teenage years. I have a long back, so the top half will be too short and make me look as if my bust is trying to reach my knees (and I hate those cantilevered iron bras with a passion). I look way better in a skirt and top than in a dress. Plus the skirt on that dress is only about half as full as I like my skirts to be.

In addition to that, I already have two dresses, and two is plenty, given that I usually wear skirts and tops.

Still, that didn't stop my inner child from melting down as I went to delete it from my eBay watch list and basket — oh no, it was all I want it! I want it! Let me have it! Why can't I have it? Sigh.

And not only that, but having — finally — understood what's been ailing my body and implementing the dietary changes needed to solve it, without being so radical as to stick to only meat, I have allowed myself (in addition to some low-oxalate vegetables) at afternoon teatime to have a biscuit or a piece of cake. Just one, once a day, because I don't want diabetes or dementia on my list of fun occupations of the future.

So what happened at breakfast time? There's my inner child, screaming Cake! I want cake! I want cake now and at teatime!

You know what? I raised five children, and not one of them gave me as much trouble as my own inner child does. And the worst part is knowing that, as long as I live, she will always be with me. She will never, ever, grow up and leave home.

How about you? Is your inner child well-behaved or as wearisome as mine?

Attitude, Tone, Confrontation, Public Discourse

My husband Tony is a borough councillor. For friends not in England, a borough is a town or a district. Ours is Hastings borough, which includes St Leonards as well as Hastings since they're effectively the same place. Within the borough we have wards, smaller residential areas, and each councillor is elected by the residents of the ward s/he then goes on to serve.

Because of his involvement in local politics I take a little more notice of what's going on around me than I might otherwise. So today, after a (local) meeting last night to do with the (national) government requirements for housing targets in our borough, I read carefully through the comments on a social media post giving a report n the meeting.

 

People said things like this: 

What they mean is more backhands in councillors’ pockets… 

 and in reply

 nothing beats the brown envelopes the council love them.

We can have our say but................makes no difference as its already decided amongst themselves. Just makes it appear that they care !!!

You most probably have made your minds up what you are going to do, how about the people of Hastings getting a vote to who they would like on the council.

Spend the money to re-elect all council, planner members and elect actual local people who live in Hastings to make decisions, get rid of the current people who have been doing nothing for years. We need people with common sense, hearts and brains.

This is what you get when you for for the left…

Share our views and then totally disregard them and do whatever they want anyway!!!!

No one's listening, so it will go ahead no mater what we think !

So issue we keep having reoccurring - water mains failure for large portions of the current town. Service provider claiming that they can't provide internet to houses/flats due to no space in cabinets with no plan to expand. Road ways that are some of the worst in the country struggling to keep up with current levels of traffic. A town that routinely floods due to poor drainage. A hospital, GP surgeries and dental practices that struggles to meet the needs of the local area due to expansion already exceeding limitations of what they can manage.

To put it simply, don't invite the town to a BBQ when you've got one pack of sausages. Don't even expect you to fix the issues, just start making a damn plan.

And how many of these so called homes go to people on the waiting list in hastings and surrounding and how many go to people that live no where near or of boats every year uou build houses and every year thoes that have been on waiting list or homeless get over looked cus there given to people from London and such like seriously its about bloody time you lot woke up and thought of your OWN people in your OWN town befor others 

 

I'm sure you get the drift. In case you were wondering — no, there are no "backhands" or "brown envelopes". Our councillors neither give nor accept bribes, nor are even offered them. 

They work punishingly long hours. The meeting under discussion by those commenters had a preparation document running to 400 pages, which each councillor had to assimilate and understand, ready to answer questions; and that's just one meeting of many similar, in addition to ward responsibilities and heavy correspondence. 

Today my husband has gone to meet with a local group focusing on mental health for men, and will go on from there to meet with two women who have had huge success in organising and running a volunteer group to manage the rose gardens on the sea front, securing a partnership with the David Austin Roses that provides new plants and information on their care. When he gets home, there will be the day's crop of emails, typically about 150, to read and respond to before his evening meetings.

I know several of the councillors personally; they are serious-minded, courteous, committed, intelligent and astonishingly hard-working. They won their seats in fair elections, and have made admirable wins in improving things in our borough — most notably the finances, which were teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, and now are not.

I am no longer surprised but still always disappointed, to see instance after instance of ignorance, rudeness and contempt in the comments people leave about the council on social media; the unquestioned assumptions, the sourness, the cynicism. I wish we could do better.

Looking beyond our borough to national politics and civic life, I see more of the same thing. An example is the recent choice of Dame Sarah Mulally as Archbishop of Canterbury. Leaving aside entirely whether she would have been my choice, I have been taken aback by the spite and vitriol poured out by her fellow Church of England priests — many of whom have been quick to call the election and the woman herself satanic (because she is not a man).

Another example (take your pick, there are so many) is the instance of self-styled citizen journalists using their phones to film in sensitive areas (eg around asylum hotels) or in sensitive encounters (eg with the police or with TV licence inspectors). 

Concerned by reports of police aggression and incompetence, and intrusive inspectors overstepping proper boundaries, I have watched a number of such videos, only to conclude that the "citizen journalists" brought their problems on themselves — provocatively rude to the police, to the inspectors, to officials of every kind.

Perhaps I've just been unlucky in the videos I've seen and the comments I've read; it is always possible. But it seems unlikely.

I think we have reached a place where a reset of attitude and tone would be helpful. Yes, it is responsible to speak truth to power, to counter injustice, to take seriously our rôle as citizens; but with courtesy, with respect, and bringing the assumption that people in public office are doing their best. 

With this in mind, I came across this video (inset below this paragraph) about the troubles in Minnesota and the shooting of Alex Pretti. I haven't so far watched any of the video footage recording what happened (though I will), but that's not exactly what the video below is about. It's more about extrapolating relevant principles to apply in the way we conduct ourselves. I found it very sane and sensible, and I hope you will, too.

Winter

 It's cold in England, even here down on the south coast where we don't get the worst of the weather. 

Thanks be to God, we've had days of cheerful sunshine interspersed with the grey drear, but we're in the middle of a few days of rain.

I'll tell you how wet it is here! Right opposite us — and bear in mind we live in a housing estate — there's a house with a tall evergreen tree at the back of it. You get a glimpse of it from our front room. Can you see what I mean in the picture? A tall, sparse, shaggy-looking tree, the same sort of shape as a redwood. But not that big. I don't know what it is.

Anyway, yesterday when we met up for our morning prayers, Tony (my husband) was sitting with his back to the window, telling me about some relevant and important thing, when what I took to be the top of that shaggy tree moved around a bit and I thought  . . . wait . . . no . . .  that's a bird! Is it — it's not a heron?

And then I thought, oh no, I was mistaken it's a seagull . . . no, it's  . . . 

Then it stretched out its long neck, and yes it was a heron, sitting right on the tippy-top of our neighbour's shaggy tree. And in no time at all seagulls were bombing it and pigeons watching it in horror, thinking it shouldn't be there. A heron. Not standing knee deep in a pond somewhere but sitting on top of a tree in the middle of a housing estate, no doubt looking for signs of Noah's Ark.

Yes. It's that wet.

Clarence, who by now owns the entire house and spends his nights snuggled up close to me, purring loudly whenever he surfaces from sleep, takes a very dim view of any ideas I might have of him going out in the garden at all, to exercise the various need of his constitution.

But spring will come, and summer; it always does. "While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease." And so it will be this year too.

Meanwhile every day I'm writing, writing, writing, and I hope very soon my story will be finished for you to read. It's about three-quarters complete.

I had the sense to get my heated blanket off my bed before Clarence curled up to sleep on it, so I've been able to put it on to keep me warm while I write. That helps a lot. 

It's too wet to go out most of the time, so every now and then I walk round and round the house like the Brontës walking round their dining room table because the weather on Haworth moor was so bad you wouldn't even think of venturing forth.

The view from here

 Wendy commented yesterday saying this:

I was wondering whether you still have your beautiful altar in your bedroom? I used to picture you sitting on your bed writing the next Hawk & Dove book… now I don’t know where to put you!

During the summer we painted my bedroom — my husband did all the nightmare fiddly parts of painting the woodwork on the cupboards, and I did the walls. It's still a work in progress because the cupboards need one more top coat and we want that to be the same shade of cream as the picture wall; but at the time we bought the paint they didn't have that shade of cream in stock, so we had to go with more plain white than we wanted. When the spring comes and longer hours of daylight we'll get to it again. 

But it all means that now the view from my bed, where I mainly sit and work, is still of my altar with my icons, but the statue of Our Lady who was there went downstairs at Christmas. I left her there because in an ideal world I'd have a saint in every room — but the nice ones are very expensive. 

So now my altar, or icon shelf or whatever it is, looks like this.

There is the little figure of Our Lady that Hebe made, the picture and calligraphy that Maria sent me from Russia, an icon of Jesus and an icon picture of St Melangell both made by Alice, an icon picture of St Paisios of Mount Athos made by Hebe, a prayer card to speed on its way the project by our local Eastern Orthodox friends to fund their Good Shepherd chapel purchase, a picture of Jesus on his shelf and a twig I found in the road that looks like a crucifix, my rosary and assorted blessing cards, and a picture by Hebe of someone nestled in the heart of a tree.

It feels like a real luxury to have so big an entire shelf, and right opposite where I am — so every time I look up, there it is.

I have loads of statues of Our Lady on my Etsy favourites, but they are all a lot of money, so unless something surprising happens, that's where they's stay. Here are some of them, so you can see how lovely they are if you share my taste!

Some of the baby Jesus figurines do have gammy hands where something bad has happened, but our Alice and Hebe have astonishing abilities to fix that kind of thing.

I still have things to pay for like an outdoor cat kennel for Clarence because he doesn't like going out at night, and I want to go down to Dorset for a weekend in the spring to see our Fi, who lives near Wimborne, and I have a dream of making a retreat at Worth Abbey — plus I do actually have a statue of Our Lady already, it's just that I like her to be right there where I can see her.

I'd also like a statue of St Francis and St Benedict and St Bruno — but there are all there in my head and in my heart, so it doesn't feel imperative. The important thing was that they lived and shone their light for us to see the way.

There are some fab statues of the Sacred Heart as well, though I do tend to the view that a person's heart should be tucked away inside their body, not outside their clothes. And the face of Jesus has to be just absolutely right, which is why I stick with the photo I have, even though people say to me, "Who is that man on your altar?" 

I actually took it from Facebook, where it was the profile picture for one Yeshua ben Josef — "Ah, it's Yourself!" as Father Ted used to say.

The bits of paper on his little shelf with him say "Abba, I belong to you" and "When I am most afraid, I put my trust in you" — because that's true.

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.