Amazon reviews

 Friends, if you have read any of my stories, I'd be most grateful if you can find time to write an honest review on Amazon.

This can make a material difference to the availability of the books.

A while ago, Amazon blocked — removed from publication — my book The Hour Before Dawn, with 'customer disappointment' given as the reason.

The Amazon publishing platform seems to be run mainly by robots; correspondence proved frustrating because we were unable to determine the basis for the customer's disappointment. At all. The only thing forthcoming, no matter how we framed the question, was redirection to a page stating in general all the possible bases for customer disappointment. 

So we were not able to get it reinstated. We did manage to circumvent the problem by re-publishing the same book with a different ISBN, even though we couldn't include its position in the series. If we'd indicated that it belonged to the Hawk & Dove series, on republication it would have come up not as Volume 5 (which it is) but as Volume 13. So a minor annoyance, but hey.

When we republished it, I put out a plea to anyone who had read it to come and review it, and several people kindly did. I didn't ask for positive reviews, nor would I ever, only for honest reviews.

The first of my Hawk & Dove books was written in 1989 and published in 1990, so it's been around a while! In the course of time it's garnered hundreds of reviews on Amazon. But it's been less than two years since I got back the rights to all my books so we could publish them ourselves under our own Humilis Hastings imprint. Series 2 was always and only under that imprint, but until a couple of years ago Lion Hudson was the most recent publisher to have all the books in Series 1.

The reason I had more than one publisher was because the life span of the series is so long. The first publisher of The Hawk & the Dove and The Wounds of God and The Long Fall was Kingsway in the UK, under their Monarch imprint, started by Tony Collins (my husband) as part of his vision for promoting Christian fiction in the UK. In the US, Crossway took those books, and they were the publishers who did the one-volume book of that trilogy, first in 2000, and then in a new edition in 2012.

But Kingsway stopped publishing books, and became only a music publishing business, so Tony moved to Angus Hudson, taking his Monarch imprint with him, and Angus Hudson merged with Lion to create Lion Hudson. During that time of transition, Crossway was the only publisher for my Hawk & Dove books.

Then, to celebrate that trilogy having been in print for 20 years continuously, I asked Crossway if they'd be interested in a 4th book in the series. They were, so I wrote The Hardest Thing to Do. At the time I was writing mainly non-fiction, but once I re-entered the world of St Alcuins, I just kept writing.

After more stories had been added — The Hardest Thing to Do, The Hour Before Dawn and Remember Me — it seemed like a good idea to seek a UK publisher again, in addition to Crossway in the US. Lion Hudson wanted to take on the whole series, so we did that. Not long afterward, Crossway closed down its fiction department, so at that point all the books were with Lion Hudson, and I wrote three more — The Breath of Peace, The Beautiful Thread and A Day and a Life — all published by Lion Hudson.

Then Lion Hudson went bust, and their publishing programme was amalgamated into SPCK, so all my books, both fiction and non-fiction, more than twenty titles, were now with SPCK.

Then we decided to have a go at establishing our own imprint on the Amazon publishing platform. Years ago, self-publishing was not very satisfactory; the actual paperbacks were not very well-made, not pleasing products, but that has all changed. Nowadays, the books themselves, as objects, are really nice, and because Amazon operates internationally it's easy to get the books to most places around the world. My sales are, for the most part in the US, the UK, Canada and Australia.

While we were waiting (it took a while) to get the rights back from SPCK, I'd added some more stories, and that's why there's a Series 2. SPCK could have refused to return the rights, and I thought it wouldn't be quite ethical to appear to be continuing a series for which they were the publisher. Hence the 2nd series, which has This Brother of Yours, Brother Cyril's Book, A Path of Serious Happiness, and will shortly also have St Luke's Little Summer. After that, there will be one more book in Series 2, which I've started but am a way off finishing.

Because of this long and winding road through different publishers over the course of 35 years, some of these books have a shedload of reviews, while the more recent ones have fewer — or even none (in terms of actual comments). So, for instance, the Lion Hudson edition of The Hawk & the Dove has 347 reviews, the 2000 Crossway edition of the trilogy has 204 reviews and their 2012 edition of the trilogy has 173 reviews.

Meanwhile, the books in Series 2, that were always published by us for Humilis Hastings, each have a healthy amount of reviews. 

But the ones that were published with Lion Hudson then republished by us have few reviews (or none) in the new imprint. For instance, where The Hardest Thing To Do has 196 reviews of the Lion Hudson edition, it has only 4 reviews for our Humilis Hastings imprint edition. And of course, some of the reviews are just stars given, rather than a comment left.

When I started writing, I made a pact with myself and with God that my job would be to write the story and just leave it there. I would never chase sales or promotion, I would do no marketing and build no platform. I believe in the power of the hidden life, and I wanted to offer my work to God rather than to a marketplace as such. So I spend very little time looking at the numbers — I've only looked these things up now for the purposes of telling you about them.

Why it matters to have Amazon reviews divides into two reasons. The first is the simple one that, as happened with The Hardest Thing to Do, there's a risk that Amazon will simply take the book out of publication if it's not protected by good reviews. So if, for example, someone's left an unhappy review because the delivery man left their order on their porch and their dog ate it, and they left that as a product review — one star and bitterly disappointed — that could get the book pulled if there are no good reviews to mitigate their misery. And while I don't want to direct my energy to blowing my own trumpet, I do want people to at least have the chance to read what I've written, because I think it will be helpful for the development of their faith.

The second reason is that comments left by reviewers help people make up their mind if they want to read that book. I always read the reviews before I buy anything on Amazon. That's what helps me decide what to purchase.

So, if you have read any of my books, and feel inclined to leave a review on any of the ones in our Humilis Hastings imprint, that will help to keep them in print and help others to decide if they'd like to read them or not. If you're not sure which ones are our edition, you can see the covers of the Humilis Hastings editions in the side-bar to the right of this post.

Waving to you from England where it has finally stopped raining!

Private and public

 During my teenage years, most girls grew their hair long, but nearly all the adult women had perms (permanent waves) and short hair. I do recall one woman in our church who had long hair swept up in a bun, and another who had what was then called an Eton Crop (a short bob), but most women, everywhere you went, had short hair in big loose curls — which went a bit flat and frizzy over time unless you carefully put it up in rollers overnight, as my mother did.

Church for us was a very social event. People were keenly aware of one another — what a person was would be noticed in every respect, their demeanour seen and assessed in detail. 

Our congregation included a woman who I'll call Margaret Reilly, a pleasant, friendly person with a round, soft face and glasses. She maintained her hairstyle very successfully in the loose curls everyone was aiming for. 

Then one Sunday morning she came to Parish Communion having had a haircut. Evidently she'd decided to try something new. The perm had gone. Now she had completely straight hair in a short bob, that definitely bucked the trend and looked startlingly severe by comparison with her usual style.

On our return home, as lunch preparation was underway, my mother said, "Do you think Margaret Reilly was doing penance for something?"

To which my father responded, "Well, it must have been something very bad."

That made us laugh. But a crucial element was that Margaret Reilly wasn't there. Yes, the joke was at her expense, but it was only within our own home, in the private conversation of our family. Neither of my parents would ever have passed comment on her appearance to other members of the church congregation, or in any other context beyond our family home. Certainly not to the woman herself. To have done any of these things would have been considered tasteless and discourteous. 

Social media has exploded these social boundaries. Because my husband is a borough councillor, I occasionally (but carefully) read the comments on posts by or about the council, and I am every time shocked and disappointed by the ignorance, negativity and sour discourtesy there blatantly — even eagerly — displayed.

A confusion seems to have arisen about what is and is not private — or public. On one occasion a few years ago on a Facebook page for a Christian writers' group, I remonstrated with someone for posting something extremely rude and churlish about a Christian leader, saying I thought it better not to express such an opinion in public. As you might imagine, I got a very rude reply, to the effect that this (context) wasn't public, it was a private group. Yes, but a private group with 5000 members. 

There's a political voice I may have mentioned before, Carl Benjamin, whose videos on YouTube I used to enjoy until I became weary of his relentless discourtesy and contempt toward women. 

Today I noticed him online posting this: 

Julie Bindel is a journalist whose work focuses on human rights abuses toward women and girls, campaigning against male violence. She has written two books on this topic. I haven't read her work but she is described online as a radical feminist. She has contributed pieces and been interviewed about the complexities arising from integrating people transitioning from male to female into shared facilities, and also about the rape gangs in English cities (I have read that she was one of the first to draw attention to these crimes).

Note Carl's comment at the top, as well as the image he is sharing.

I wondered how his followers might be responding.

Many were joking that they had taken the image to be of a man. 

Here's a sample of some of the others:

As a heterosexual white man I can safely say no loss.

Clearly been given the blank all her life, and she's now double bitter lol

On behalf of all men, everywhere 'phew'!

The " one" who after 10 beers you still say no thanks to 

Because non of them are interested in her?

Und so weite.

There were, because Carl Benjamin is an intelligent person and has some serious-minded followers, other comments not stooping to these depths, either making jokes that weren't about sex or appearances, or added something actually thoughtful:

In the last few years she seemed to have moved over to the middle ground, I was actually interested in her opinions , shock horror !! It seemed the liberal line had moved too far and she saw it.

Misandry is on trend at the moment..

Finally, proper journalism.

This article is almost 20 years old. It would be interesting to see if her perspective has changed.

But what intrigued me was this blurring of public and private. 

The original post was meant to be funny — and it was — but it was the same kind of funny as my parents' conversation about Margaret Reilly's hair; something you would say only at home. And why would you keep it private, say it only at home? Because to say such a thing publicly, encouraging ridicule, would mainly serve to put your own indiscretion and lack of refinement on display. It would reveal the deficiencies of your own upbringing; it would make your vulgarity very obvious. And it would be cruel.

Sometimes it's not the content of what you say, but the context of how and to whom you say it that makes all the difference.

English society is very, very classist. It is immediately clear to some English people what kind of upbringing and education a person has received who would put into the public sphere, for everyone to read, such implied mockery of an older woman, a dangled invitation to denigrate her as no longer sexually attractive. 

The headline itself, of course, was not a quotation. It may or may not have fairly represented Julie Bindel's views. But if she does indeed hate men, that is yet another instance of a private opinion best kept that way. I imagine it is more likely a Guardian editor's summarised impression. I do think, incidentally, that it wouldn't be hard to gather sufficient evident to write a similar column called "Carl Benjamin hates women", and mount a similarly unprepossessing photograph of him at the top. I wonder if it would garner comments of similar tone? I think maybe not.

To digress a little, I remember when it became known in a congregation I was pastoring that I would be marrying my present husband. This was just under two years after the death of my second husband. A man in the congregation asked me, "Where are you finding all these men?" It was meant as a joke, and I found it funny — but I also noticed that he evidently didn't think they were finding me. 

Now, to get back to the central point about what it is appropriate to say in public, I'm not sure that the lack of discretion (in Carl's post) is a moral issue as such. I think it may be more about manners — more an issue about being a gentleman than about being a saint, if you see what I mean.

Personally, I can well see why such a headline alongside such a photo would catch a man's eye and make him laugh. I can see why he might show it to his wife, and she would find the juxtaposition funny too.

But I think less of the man who shares it publicly, and invites all comers to laugh with him. That's not the way of an English gentleman, is it?

By contrast, this last week, I have listened at some length to Connor Tomlinson, a friend of Carl Benjamin, but one whom I have never known to denigrate women. I spent a while yesterday listening to him here, talking about the hideous phenomenon of the rape gangs disfiguring English towns and cities (that Julie Bindel has striven to bring to our attention), his fury and disgust and distress at what has been done to children and young women very apparent. That, by contrast, is a worthy use of the public space.

Knowing what to say in public and what to keep in the confines of your own trusted circle is a form of discernment that could only improve social media.

Dusty

 Today is Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent.

This is the day when, if you are at the more liturgical end of expressions of Christianity, you probably go to church and the priest has some ashes made from burning the palm crosses given out on last year's Palm Sunday, and makes the mark of the cross on your brow with those ashes, with the words "dust you are, and to dust you shall return" — a reminder of our mortality.

It was thinking about those words, and about the process of returning to dust.

The other day someone was talking to me about visiting friends in the same age group as she and I are (65-80yr ish), who are both unwell — that's why she was visiting them. One has cancer and the other has an unusual form of dementia giving clarity of mind but profound physical disability. The one with cancer needed surgery, but is the sole carer for the one with dementia. So friends rallied round and provided a round-the-clock care rota for both of them, and that all went very well. But then the surgical scar gave some issues and further treatment was needed, requiring further care support. The couple decided they'd imposed too much on friends, and chose for the one with dementia to go into a care home for a few days while the one with cancer underwent the extra treatment. The care home cost £1800.00 a week (that's about $2500 US).

So the one with cancer was a day patient, not staying in the hospital, and therefore was able to visit their spouse in the care home. The one in the care home had found a rapport with two other residents of the same sex on arrival, and a request had been made for them to sit together at meals. On visiting, it turned out the request had been ignored, that for all meals our person had been sat with much older residents of the opposite sex, whose minds had gone. The meals were served not on dinner plates but tea plates — tiny portions, a fraction of what our person would normally have. In addition, our person was routinely sat in a little tub chair, slumped over for lack of support, while a suitable wing chair stood empty nearby. They were also found with their shirt buttons done up all wrong (not by them since their condition made buttons too difficult) and on once occasion wearing nothing but underpants and a sock. 

The spouse with cancer decided this was not value for money at £1800 a week, and discharged them.

Instead, a waking carer was employed for the nights, at £345 a night ($465ish US).

The first waking carer, a woman, was found fast asleep in the morning, having gathered all the sofa cushions to make herself pillows allowing her to go to sleep. Hmm.

The second waking carer was a man, who arrived on an earsplitting Harley Davidson and started by playing loud music in the living room. His first question was "Where's the sofa?" There wasn't one, because the reception room in the couple's small retirement home had been re-purposed as a bedroom since both were sick and the cancer treatment precluded them sleeping together. So the 'waking' carer was disappointed to discover he couldn't just go to sleep. As things turned out, having been booked to stay through to 9am, he left at 7am because something had cropped up for him and he needed to go home. So he just left. The spouse then discovered this carer had turned off the baby monitor allowing him to hear the person he was meant to be looking after, with the result that the person he'd been employed to care for had not been able to make themselves heard, and wet the bed (for the first time ever). 

For £345. Not good, eh?

A while ago, a friend of mine died from liver cancer. Durning her phase of terminal illness, Class A drugs (her morphine) were stolen by the daily care people she employed to feed her and give personal care, and her doctor refused to replace the drugs (leaving her with no pain relief) until a mutual friend made a huge fuss; and a fake 'nurse' called at the house and obtained the key code from a sitter covering the time between on friend on watch and the next.  

Our friend had made an agreement to go into hospice care for the last stretch, but that never happened because the hospice refused to take her until it could be said that she would die within three days. When she reached that point, the hospice refused to take her because they said she was now too ill to move.

When she eventually died and her friend called the surgery, the doctor asked her to strip our friend who'd died and video her so that the doctor could verify she was in fact dead.

All of this gives me a certain amount of concern as to how we — me and my husband — go about safely landing our own plane, as it were. I am not in favour of euthanasia (though I do understand why people opt for it) because I think our lives are in the hand of God. 

Both I and my husband are chronically ill, he from Parkinsons and me from a mystery ailment defying diagnosis that causes relentless strong pain. I think I may have oxalate poisoning, and am working from that supposition for now. 

What I notice is that it's as if there are four of us, not two. Each of us is the person we always were, with our habits of mind and personality, but each of us now has this old person to look after. He is the man he always was, but in addition he has an old man with a draggy foot to take care of. I am me, as I always was, but I also have to create strategies and diet plans for this old woman attached to me, and try and make her eat what she should and cheer her up and take her for walks, and maximise her health so she and I will be able to get it together to care for the old man that is the exterior shell sitting around my husband. At the moment he's doing very well and has a full and busy life, but I want to be the best version of myself I can be, in case my help is needed in the future.

It is extremely important that we educate ourselves and strategise intelligently, because what I have seen of the care provision available convinces me that even if we could afford £1800 a week or £345 a night, nobody in their right mind would want what that buys.

Dust you are, and to dust you shall return. Yeah, tell me about it! 

I conclude that the only realistic option is to trust steadily in God and do our best. What will be will be.

And I haven't been to the ashing service, because I don't need the reminder. We're getting dustier with very passing year!

I think of friends I've known, and family members, and people whose funerals I've taken, who lived calmly and peacefully, then with no warning died quietly in their own armchair or bed, in the course of an ordinary day; and I pray, quite often, "Father, please may I have that, too."

Early morning

 It's early in the morning and still dark.

This is just me sitting chatting with you, because I'm awake.

Furry purry Clarence was up well before first light, full of love and affection. Then for a while he sat on the windowsill, just a pointy silhouette against the moonlight and the light from the far-off streetlights, watching the garden. Then he was ready to start the day. It begins (for him) with a small plate of food on the back doorstep, the terms on which he agrees to leave the house in cold damp February. He's more willing to go out now he's confident he can call this home and he'll be allowed back in. Later on, when I make my bed and get dressed, he'll have returned to the back doorstep, to come in for a BIG plate of food then a long sleep, curled up on the chair in my bedroom.

Meanwhile, I've made a cup of tea and gone back to bed. It's half-past five, very dark outside.

Later this morning my friend Carole is coming to see me. She and I have known each other since I first moved to Hastings in my early 20s — we met through the National Childbirth Trust, back in the day when it was challenging hospital practice and revolutionising women's experience of birth and breastfeeding. We were all reading Ina May Gaskin and Michel Odent, Frederick Leboyer and Sheila Kitzinger. Ground-breaking times. I was expecting my first baby and Carole her second. Those babies are in their forties now, very capable people, friends on Facebook, holding together the connections made even before they were born.

There's something about those relationships that go back a long way. When you meet up, it's within a context of shared memory, and what you used to be when you were young is still present in the conversation; no need to mention it or reminisce, it's just there, understood. We remember.

Even thinking about it sets off memories. Going up to London on the train to hear Sheila Kitzinger speak, when our Grace was a new baby. Instead of carrying her in the sling I took her in a Moses basket, with spare nappies and wipes and muslins, so she had somewhere to lie down and sleep because it would be a whole day. I still think that was a good idea. I remember being in the hospital (for a whole month!) before our Rosie was born, where I met Nan (in the next bed). Nan had a dream one night that the obstetrician tried to burgle her house but she wouldn't let him in. When they tried to induce the birth of her baby, Nan's body absolutely refused. Nope. 

That month was a good one — we women in the ante-natal ward got on like a house on fire; the nurses used to come and tell us off for laughing, sternly reminding us we were there to rest. The woman who was there before Nan arrived was on her 17th pregnancy, desperately hoping for her first live birth. 😭 So very sad. Then there was a fragile (looking) little lass with great big eyes and dark curly hair, petite and quietly spoken. But she was fiery. Her husband came to visit her, big and brawny and tattooed. We all sat in our beds quietly and looked at him, because we'd heard she pushed him down the stairs 😲. 

At the time I was reading a book by Rudolf Steiner — his book Occult Science which sounds creepy but isn't. One of the midwives came by and saw it by my bed. "D'you think that's going to help you?" she asked, somewhat aggressively. "With what?" I said. "Well . . . childbirth," she replied. But that's not what it was about. My horizons hadn't shrunk that much!

When my baby was born, another woman who had been in the ante-natal ward got very scared, because I went off to the delivery suite and shortly after she heard someone screaming, and thought it was me and that birth must be terrible because I looked so calm when I left. It wasn't me, and I continued calm. 

That baby — Rosie — was born on a beautiful March morning, so clear and bright. An induced birth, as they mostly were in those days. My understanding was that the midwives were there to take care of the physical aspects of birth, and my job was to hold the spiritual energies, to maintain it as a sacred space, a holy event. I'm not so sure they did their part so very well — I had a midline episiotomy that extended and altered my physical structure ever since — but yes, it was holy and quiet, and Rosie looked like a little buddha when she was born, a peaceful, perfect face, soft and pink.

In the post-natal ward the obstetrician came round and said, "What did you have?" I resisted the temptation to say, "a baby," and politely said, "A girl".

"Ah!" said he. "Another one to argue and fight with the doctors." So I just said, "Yes."

I met him one more time when I was expecting Grace, my second child — Mr Alaili of "one more Caesarian and I get my Mercedes" cocktail party fame. After the first go round I resolved I'd rather have a baby in a ditch than an obstetric department; I wanted a home birth but my doctor at the time didn't do that. So I settled for what was called the GP unit — with births assisted by community midwives with family doctors as back-up. When I went for an ante-natal check-up, the obstetrician was doing his rounds. He wanted to see me. He sent the midwives out and spent several minutes lecturing me on why I should choose the obstetric unit over the GP unit. When he'd finally finished I said, "Thank you. I'll bear that in mind," and off he went in a puff of green smoke. The midwives came back into my cubicle chortling " 'I'll bear that in mind!' " They thought it was hilarious. I was quite surprised, not grasping that it was expected I should treat him like God. I suppose I might have done if he'd reminded me of God, but he didn't.

Then there was the woman — Ajax's mother, was her name Letitia? I can't remember — who painted a face on her pregnant belly. You know how the umbilicus protrudes when you're pregnant? She made that the nose and did eyes and a smiley mouth to go with it. Mr Alaili examined her with no comment at all. Jeepers.

Later, when my twins were born, I'd changed my GP to Dr Mitchell, who was happy to do a home birth; but the community midwives were worried about it. So my twins were also born in hospital, on the proviso that I would come straight home afterward, not go to the postnatal ward where they'd be put in a nursery and fed cow milk. There was an argument about that, too. Our Hebe was born with chin presenting, and came into the world very bruised, and they were born a month early. So when I said I was going home, they refused to let me get dressed, and I had to walk down our street where the ambulance dropped me off, holding my babies and still wearing a nighty. 

My midwife for that birth was the lovely Amy Noakes, such a superb midwife. It was the first time I met her. My labours would slow right down when I went into hospital, because I deeply distrusted the environment — the same happens to a goat (or any other animal I suppose) if you disturb her in labour. When I finally got my home birth on my fifth baby, it was all done and dusted in four hours. But with our twins we were up all night, doctor very weary, husband very weary, me sustained by that spiritual energy that powers through you when you give birth. And at six in the morning the shift changed and Amy Noakes walked through the door and I could tell it would all be all right. Some junior doctors wanted to come in and see twins born and she told them to clear off. She said to my doctor, "Haven't you got a morning surgery? Yes? Well, go and do it, then." And she turned and looked at me and said, "Right. Let's get these babies born." And that's what we did.

So many memories from so long ago. There's another memory, too, from that time, of a friend carrying twins at the same time as I was, but hers came too early and she lost them. So desperately sad. Very, very bravely, she came to see my twins in the first few days of their life, and looked at them, and held them, and quietly went her way.

And also a memory of my aunt (who was my godmother), married to an abusive and controlling man who kept her as a virtual prisoner. But every year he came down from Yorkshire to the south coast for a trade union conference, and she asked if she could come with him to see my babies. He allowed her just twenty minutes to come in to my home (where she'd never been ) and see them. She looked at them very carefully, and held them, and she had tears in her eyes. I didn't know at that time that she'd been pregnant but he made her have an abortion, said she'd be an unfit mother. Nobody would have made a better mother than my auntie Jessie. Lord, the world is full of sadness, isn't it?

Well, now it's an hour later. I hope your day is going well. Did it bring back your own memories, all this talk of babies being born?

Later on Carole will come by, and we'll have a cup of tea together, and we won't talk about these times that are gone, but the silken web of them is what wove and carried our friendship clear through almost fifty years.

Writing thoughts

This is — for me — the waiting time, when I've written my story and now it's gone to my editor to read through. I am very blessed that my editor is my husband too. He was my editor long before he was my husband, the best editor I've ever worked with by a country mile. He asks the right questions, and he has the unusual ability of being able to both see the bigger picture and notice detail. Most people can't do that. Either they get what you're saying and lose themselves in the story and miss repetitions and inconsistencies, or the other way round. And there are many editors who are really frustrated writers and want to wrench your text into the image of what they'd have written if they'd been you. But my husband starts out with the approach that it's not his book; he's just there to help it be the best version of itself that it could be. Which is exactly what you want, isn't it?

So he has St Luke's Little Summer to read through, and then to edit and copy-edit. 

Since I got free of traditional publishers and have been able to write more according to what's in my own head, I think my stories have got odder. They come from the realm of weird; I just feel into it, through the membrane that separates us, and find what I can and bring it back here into the normal, organise it and write it down. 

At the beginning of a story, I don't even see where it's going or what it wants to do. When I began St Luke's Little Summer, there was just an image.

So I get all the bits and arrange them on the ground and look at them and see how they fit together, and write that down. Then I go back for some more bits and look at those and piece them in until it's done.

When I read it through at the end, it's more like reading someone else's book. I was surprised and relieved, reading through St Luke's Little Summer, to come to the end and think, yes, I do believe that's worked. I think it is an actual story. Because my idea in writing isn't entertainment or prowess, it's more like ministry — I'm aiming for the transfer from my soul into your soul of a way of being, a way of looking at things, that makes life more possible and helps us chart a way through this terrifying mess we've all been born into, left here trying to do the best we can. But I know there is the invisible realm in which there is the help we need, a place of grace and wisdom very close to us; and in writing I'm trying to make little holes in the membrane that separates us, so that some of its peace and kindness can leak through like liquid gold into our wilderness here, for hope and transformation.

I think I've managed what I set out to do in my new story, but I always get a bit nervous at this stage. Generally speaking, novels are meant to have plots — with twists — and action, and some kind of shape and direction; and I can see that mine . . . er . . . don't. All they do is let you go to the place where my mind and soul live, and walk around in it for a while. 

St Luke's Little Summer is about coming home (to oneself and to one another), and about understanding how to hold a vision by strengthening practice, which is achieved through habit; and it's about how the small circles and rhythms that characterise our life are part of a larger whole. 

So just now I'm waiting to see what my editor thinks, and waiting to see what my artists come up with for the cover. A limbo time.

Ha! Done!

 Sat up late last night, started again early this morning. Finished writing my story. 

Next is to read through and make any necessary adjustments, then it goes to Tony for editing and copy-editing.

Alice and Hebe are already working on the cover art, and Tony will write the back cover copy.

Then it'll all go to Jonathan for the text and cover to be formatted — it sometimes takes a few goes to get that exactly right.

After that it'll come back to Tony and me for proof-reading.

Then Tony uploads to Amazon and it'll take them a few days to publish. 

All this can take a while.

I'm hoping we'll have it to you by the end of March.

"St Luke's Little Summer."

How to deal with dark times | Tim Keller

It's not often I'd share a whole sermon on here, but what a humdinger this video is!

Worth getting yourself a cup of coffee and settling down with your knitting to listen. Wisdom and grace. I love it.

A Lenten program that may interest you

I wonder if you already know the output of Fr. Columba Jordan, a Franciscan friar of the Renewal. He's based at St Patricks friary in Limerick (Ireland). The Franciscan Friars of the Renewal website is here.

I follow him on YouTube at Called to More here, and I love his videos. There's also some of his teaching at Little by Little, here.

I read today in The Catholic Herald that Fr Columba will be hosting Crux: A Lenten Journey of Surrender which will be available on the Ascension app. I should make clear that it involves a purchase — not expensive, just a few pounds, but it isn't free.

You can read the article that tells you about it here.

I'd never heard of the Ascension app and don't know anything about it and I'm not wild about apps and tech generally — but I do like Fr Columba, and I like the idea of having a Lenten program to follow. If he's doing it, I think it'll be good.

So I thought you might like to investigate it for yourself. 

You can find out all about Crux (the Lenten program with Fr Columba) at the Ascension Press website. The page to go to is here.

Come back and say what you thought of it, if you decide to join in.

From my own point of view, if money is involved I probably won't do it. If that's true for you as well, but you do want a focus for your thoughts through Lent, there's a playlist here on my own YouTube channel of my Lenten book The Wilderness Within You. It goes through every day from Ash Wednesday to Easter Sunday. Also, my Hawk & Dove story The Hardest Thing To Do (Volume 4 of Series 1) is a Lent book, but I haven't made a YouTube playlist of it. I might do at some point.

Thoughts about money and family tradition

 A lot is said about money at the moment — with good reason. The economic prospects of England look fairly bleak, and such sectors as farming and the hospitality industry have been dealt very damaging blows by political decisions. The situation with housing is tough, the roads are coming to pieces, councils everywhere are struggling desperately. These are not affluent times.

In this context, envy and resentment are often apparent. I often hear it said that pensioners are unreasonably well off — that the triple lock on the pension is crippling to the economy, that paying the state pension is too great a burden for those in work, and that "statistics show" pensioners spend their money on booze and cigarettes, cruises and restaurants and generally having a good time. Young people cannot afford to buy a home and start a family, while the older generation live comfortably on their savings and state pension, and this is not sustainable.

It intrigues me that this is a common enough scenario to be universally accepted as accurate, because it's not my own experience of life.

In the family I was born into, people worked together. Married couples built up affluence through hard work, from very lowly beginnings, and they were self-employed so they could pass on the family business. My uncle inherited my grandfather's farm, but a bungalow was built for my grandmother on the edge of their land, and my unmarried aunt who had fragile health lived with my grandmother who was blind. So everyone benefited from everyone else. My other aunt married an accountant farmer, and their daughters married but their unmarried son lived and worked the farm together with them. My aunt lived to be very old, and stayed at home living with her son after she was widowed, to the end of her life. In budgeting, the needs of all of them were considered.

This is the way of thinking I knew growing up, and it also characterised the family I married into, in which context my children were born. My mother-in-law used her savings to pay for the deposit we needed to buy a house, and every Sunday as a matter of course we — my husband, me and our five children — went to church with his parents and then ate a massive roast lunch with them at their home. We never had to pay for childcare because they baby-sat for us, and when my mother-in-law did her grocery shopping she used to include a bag of groceries for us, too. Plus each time I had a baby, my husband's aunt would leave peeled vegetables on our doorstep for several days, to help make supper preparation easy.

In this family context the older generation, having earned and saved all their lives, would help their adult children buy their own homes, and help financially with big purchases like cars, and do as much as they could afford to ensure that bills were covered for the whole family. The older family members kept aside enough money to ensure they were not a burden on the younger ones — enough to pay their bills and cover any necessary care costs — but apart from that, whatever they had was channeled down into the next generation. In many cases adult family members continued to live together, so elder care happened naturally as the need arose.

I thought that was how everybody lived, but maybe not. There was no scenario of rich old people spending extravagantly while the younger generation couldn't even afford a home or to start a family. 

Each person took responsibility for themselves, but always with a view to helping each other and contributing to the whole. Each one valued the opinions of the others and would be proud to play their part and make the most of their abilities.

What I find disturbing about articles and podcasts on the topic of finance in modern life, is that they seem to carry the assumption of everything being only about the individual. The assumption that it will be normal for some family members to be comfortably wealthy while others have too little to eat. I read about people going to food banks or couch-surfing because they are homeless, or a parent with children managing in temporary accommodation in a hostel, and I wonder — where is their family? 

I feel something similar about all these tales of sexual abuse of girls on a grotesque scale currently dominating the new, both Jeffrey Epstein's trafficking and the rape gangs in England: I wonder, where were the families of these girls? Was there no warning, protection, advice? Were they not helped to read between the lines of invitations and opportunities? Where was the wisdom of older sisters, mothers, aunts, grandmothers? How did people end up so vulnerable in such massive numbers? I know that in some cases fathers tried to intervene at a late stage, to get their girls back — but surely what would have protected them in the first place would have been collective wisdom and tradition within the family. I realise that there are many people in the world and most families have someone who makes unfortunate choices, but on such a large scale? Incidentally, the political establishment and mainstream media have for the most part turned their backs on the victims of rape gangs in the UK, and those who have tried to bring it to public attention have been smeared and persecuted. Rupert Lowe MP has now put in place a crowdfunded public enquiry to bring to light what has happened, with a view to prosecuting the perpetrators. If you would like to learn about the enquiry and financially assist it, go here.

In my family, the people know that the others will always have your back, that home will always be a sanctuary. There is no question of it being just about the individual, of calmly watching other people struggle. My children have varied income levels, but the ones with more will treat the ones with less to lovely outings, the ones who can drive will give lifts to the ones who can't. We mostly live near together, but the one of my children who lives at a distance will always say, if anything problematic occurs, "Do you need me to come home?"

When the pandemic lockdown happened, there was a deadline after which we could not travel and had to stay where we were. My daughter who lives away dithered about what to do. At the time she had a rented ground-floor room in someone's house. Not wanting to disturb them after bedtime, she made a last-minute decision, and used the window to go in and out to pack her car, leaving them a month's rent money and driving through the night to come home. My daughter who lives alone was the permitted member of our family bubble through lockdown, and we used to walk round to my married daughter for doorstep visits, chatting at the required distance. The rest of us all lived in one house anyway, and those of us with savings helped those whose incomes were affected; the pandemic lockdown was just ike a lovely holiday for us.

None of this requires anybody to have a big income. Everyone is okay because we all look out for each other. It's what most people used to do. But evidently in society as a whole this is no longer true. In our borough the main cost, almost half the budget, is temporary accommodation for homeless people, and the main driver of homelessness is family breakdown. 

This isn't surprising. If you have a family with three children living in a three-bedroomed house, with one boiler (furnace, US) one television, one internet provision and one car, with both parents one way or another supporting the household, and the parents split, what happens? Now each parent wants part of the custody of the children, so now they need two three-bedroomed houses, each with a boiler, a telly and internet access and a car, but now with only one income for each household. Of course it can't work. There's no wonder we have a housing crisis and people made homeless. 

It feels to me that I am watching the systematic dismantling of traditional family life — assisted by the aggressive promotion of pick-and-mix sexuality. 

The breakdown of the family unit will lead to the economic collapse of society, because the costs of trying to do life on your own are beyond the reach of most ordinary people. The more you split, the more you have to pay for.

A similar set of attitudes applies to expectations of citizenship. In my childhood, if it snowed all the men of a street would be outside with shovels, clearing the snow from the pavements (sidewalks US) to make them safe for pedestrians. People took a pride in their homes, growing vegetables in the back garden and flowers at the front, and they weeded the pavement in front of their home. Now, nobody clears the snow, they wait for the council to do it. Nobody weeds the pavement, the council comes round once a year and sprays with glyphosate (which happens to be a neurotoxin) so the weeds are still there but dead now.

The council workmen have to be paid, and their wages are raised from the public purse. The result is that less and less gets done but costs more and more, all because we have abandoned the habit of working together.

One final example. Net Zero — the political aspiration in the UK that by 2050 our carbon emissions will reach net zero. Ha! It cannot work. It will tank the economy, and all we'll have done is export our industrial activity, making in fact a net increase in dirty technology, while losing our manufacturing independence and economic resilience.

But that doesn't mean we have to give up and just "Frack, baby, frack!"

We could approach it differently. Let industry continue with use of fossil fuels, let development of renewable alternatives be assiduously pursued, but in the meantime let the citizenry work together to reduce pollution and reliance on dirty energy — informally, not by government mandate and regulation. Let all those of us who can afford solar panels put them on our houses, our churches, the buildings of our businesses. Let all of us conserve energy as much as we can, heating the person not the space at home, using modern technology that is less energy hungry — for instance, cooking in an air fryer not a big oven. Let those of us with gardens grow our own fruit and vegetables. Let us reduce waste and manufacturing by buying second-hand and sharing. We could travel fast in the direction of Net Zero and adequate housing provision and clean streets (with no fly-tipping, thank you), at the same time as taking pressure off the local and national government budget, if we simply prioritise working together for the good of the whole.

Sardine hungry

 There's a thing they say in the carnivore nutritional sphere, if people say they're hungry — "Yes; but are you sardine hungry?"

Always make me laugh, because how true!

In case it sounds merely baffling at first acquaintance, maybe some explanation is needed. 

In general carnivores aim to eat once or twice a day and mostly don't snack. They follow the principles of intermittent fasting to support health. Sometimes they fast for longer periods than 24 hours, perhaps 3 or 5 days.

When people transition to a carnivore way of eating, it takes the body a while to get used to the differences, especially changing from the frequent top-ups typical for people whose diets rely on carbs. 

So, though in general one of the great things about carnivore as a way of eating is that people don't feel hungry, ever, there are exceptions to that at first or on a prolonged fast. 

There's more than one kind of hungry, of course. There's the sort that can more or less be defined as "My teeth are bored", which is very different from the body running out of fuel and urgently needing help.

This is where that marvellous question comes into its own — "Yes; but are you sardine hungry?"

The other evening I'd been defrosting chicken, but when supper time came it was still half frozen, so I left it for the next day, but I still wanted some supper. There in the cupboard, for just such a time as this, was a tin of sardines in brine. 

I know sardines are good for us. I know they are full of Omega 3 oils that will transform our lives and banish inflammation. I know you can crunch up their spines (yuck) and that's a marvellous source of calcium which will chauffeur away the oxalates that fasten on to the calcium. And even so, somehow I can fancy almost anything else. 

But I ate them, along with some Jarlsberg cheese slices and a solitary gherkin. I hope they have done me good.