Minimalism and moving house and sharing house space.

My father kept all his clothes in plastic bags. He travelled the world, and was never at home for many weeks before he had to go again. Even when, in the 1970s, he changed to working on the home market not overseas, he had a mill in Lancashire, his home base was in Hertfordshire, and he and my mother had a small cottage in Yorkshire for either of them to stay when their feet took them north. So his belongings were always packed and ready to go.

My mother made buying and selling houses her occupation — it was how she made money. We moved house when I was three, twice when I was seven, again when I was eight, and once when I was fourteen. I left home when I was eighteen and began my own house moves (my mother moved five more times during her lifetime).

First I lived with some monks in Devon, in a 12ft caravan. Then I lived in a shared room in the nurses' accommodation of a home for people with epilepsy and multiple disabilities run by nuns. Then I went to university and lived in hall for a year, moving from there into a tightly-packed shared house where we started a community. I moved from there to the ground floor of a disused rectory; it had a toilet but no bath or shower. After a while there (I was married by now, but still at university) we moved out into a 12ft caravan parked on the edge of a field of cabbages on a dairy farm. From there we moved into a barn on my parents' land. Then we moved to a small row house down in Hastings. It had two bedrooms, and we lived there from 1980 when our first child was born until 1984 when our twins (child 3 and 4) were born. 

The next house, a three-bedroomed row house, we lived in for longer — fourteen years. Our youngest child was born there, and various people lived with us, ex-prisoners, a lodger, a boy who had attempted suicide when his home fell apart after his father died, all sorts. 

We moved from there to a manse (US: parsonage) when I became a school chaplain. Problems at the school, that I shouldn't go into publicly, meant we moved from there after a year to another manse associated with a church pastorate where we lived for two years. During that time my whole life fell apart as difficulties originating in my husband's life meant I had to leave my work so we lost the house — this time we moved to a one-bedroomed apartment. None of our children had properly fledged at that point, so between us we occupied three one-bedroom apartments and a bed-sit, all within easy walking distance, and swapped homes (as individuals) quite often. During that time my husband left to be with someone else. A year later I married Bernard and moved to his little cottage on the edge of Flatropers Wood in the small village of Beckley, where he was able to offer me two drawers, half a cupboard, and a bed shared with him. He died after we'd been married 13 months, and I moved back to the one-bedroomed apartment in Hastings, along with Hebe who had been living with us at Beckley in yet another 12ft caravan. 

A year later my editor's marriage fell apart after a decade of difficult endeavour to glue it together. Some months after that, he and I married, but he worked in Oxford so I moved up to Aylesbury where he was based. During that time a succession of different people lived with us, some family members and some lodgers. We lived there for three years, but I missed my family atrociously and I was too unwell to work at that point, and left the church ministry. We moved back to Hastings and bought a house big enough to share with three of my daughters (they now own that house). We lived there with them for sixteen years. During that time I became chronically ill. When my husband was diagnosed with Parkinsons, seeing this could mean trouble for my daughters whose house we shared (female relatives are always the go-to for care provision), we moved out to live in the small rental house that was in effect my husband's pension.

That's a lot of house moves. In all of them, the success of space use was achieved by owning as little as possible — it makes the house bigger. The two steepest challenges were the time I spent living with Bernard with the two drawers and half-cupboard allocated to me (that made the 12ft caravan shared with my first husband and a dog look spacious), and the various permutations of incumbency we had in the one-bed apartment in Hastings after our life crash. Mostly my space there was a bed on the living room floor and I cannot remember where I kept my clothes.

I am so glad and grateful that I had a head start on all this by encountering Francis of Assisi when I was only fifteen. It meant there was no resentment, no adjustment of expectation, no disappointment or sense of being hard-done-by. The smallest, the lowliest and the least was what he went for in every circumstance of life. He stripped himself naked (literally) and walked away from his father's wealthy household to start again in an improvisation of poverty and hope fuelled entirely by faith and joy. He said he fell in love with Lady Poverty. That captivated my imagination as a teenager — and just as well, eh?

I have no idea what our future holds, but so far I have not managed to heal my health issues and I am growing old. Already our small house feels too big for me; the management of it makes me twitchy. But it is located in an undesirable neighbourhood, and is actually the cheapest kind of dwelling available bar moving hundreds of miles north; and I could not bear to part from my family; I love them.

Even so I know this is only a lily-pad my inner frog landed on for the present moment. So I work away patiently at decreasing my possessions (which are only clothes, stationery, natural meds, a sewing kit and a tool kit, and my altar and scant yard of books).

There is furniture here, and cooking utensils, crockery and cutlery, and things like pictures on the wall and a vacuum cleaner, a couple of rugs, some artefacts made by people I love. Several of our little sets of shelves and our stools/tables were made by Tony. These things made by people dear to me, I would find hard to walk away from. I'd search out homes where they would be treasured. But then I would walk away, because that's been the discipline of my life. 

Like so many people in these uncertain times, I live in this kind of limbo, wondering what's coming next. As I'm sure you can feel, the whole air is sombre with an unsettled, and frankly somewhat ominous, vibe. I don't know what's coming, but something is. And at the very least, old age is not a game for sissies.

With all this in mind, and if these considerations are also the kind of thing that preoccupy your thoughts, I wanted to share with you this very interesting video by a woman who has moved again... and again... and again. Good food for thought.

And if I were truly free to choose, I'd like something of this kind:

Here's an even better video about her wonderful home and life.

Brothers of St Alcuin sifting through Vicki's email

When she'd read this blog post from the beginning of this month, and got her misbehaving electronics under control, Vicki was back in touch with some further thoughts.

She said, about life at St Alcuins in the 14th century, that "Life was so much simpler and so much more complicated. The way you have portrayed life at Saint Alcuin’s, I have often thought that I could have lived there except for two things: getting up in the middle of the night in the cold, and the food."

She wanted to pass on to Brother Michael — "Please let Brother Michael know that he would have to work very, very, very hard to make me feel patronised or offended in any way. (I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what it means to be offended)."

And she wondered, about Paradise: "But if our “dear departed” are in Paradise with Jesus, how can they also be with us? God the Father is with me, Jesus said he would never leave me or forsake me, and the Holy Spirit of God lives in me. What about the “witnesses”? How/where do they fit in?"

Those are just some snippets from her letter. I mentioned these things to Brother Michael, and he listened carefully, then he said: "Thank you. Always such a relief to avoid giving offence! But — my dear sister, little Ghost — I hope you don't mind, I have more to get through than hours in the day to cram it all into. Would you — of your charity — might you take up these things with our abbot? If he's free, of course."

He did look distinctly harassed in my opinion, so I pushed off to give him some space to get everything done, and went to find Abbot John.

It's a bit unfair really, that if I show up like a ghost in their monastery, they don't have much option over whether to see me or not. I'm just there. 

"Oh — hello!" says the abbot, looking up from the mass of letters and what we'd nowadays call "paperwork" on the big oak table where he works. He puts his pen down. "Can I help?"

So I say again the things about getting up in the night, and the cold, and being offended and Paradise, and he listens quietly.

How many people do you know who really listen? These men do. It's very refreshing, I can tell you!

But as he thinks over what I've said to him, I think he seems a bit uncomfortable about something. Absentmindedly he picks up his pen again, and turns in over in his fingers, looking down at it. So I just wait, wondering what's bothering him.

And then he says, "I don't know... that is... I assume your friends who say these things to you also read your stories about our life here. If they do — if they have read the last one you wrote, about the light of one lamp, then they'll have a fair idea about Brother Michael and me, and that'll have given them a candid insight into giving offence and being offended, and the muddle I got into and trying to unpick it all. It... well... embarrassing, I suppose, and it wasn't easy. The thought of hundreds of people reading about it... oh... what a nightmare. Still, I'm glad your friend Vicki doesn't take offence readily, and I dearly wish I could say the same about myself; but the fact of the matter is, I can be more than a little touchy sometimes. Comes from jumping to conclusions and not looking deeply enough, or just getting stuck in my own point of view."

Then a small, lopsided, rueful sort of smile, and he lays the pen back down on his table, and glances up at me again.

"The cold? Yes, that can wear anyone down. But we wear wool and we light fires and eat hot food. We wear socks and wooly hats, and we keep moving. It's not so bad."

Then I ask him about something I've heard, with reference to getting up for the Night Office. I've read that back in the day it was normal to have two sleeps — people would go to bed when darkness fell, then naturally wake up during the night, even get up and do things or have something to eat, then go back to bed and fall asleep again until morning.

He frowns slightly. "Yes," he says. "Is... don't you do that, too?"

I wonder whether to talk to him about electric light and decide not to bother. I just say, "We've found ways of keeping the house lit so we can stay up as late as we like. So we go to bed near to midnight, maybe ten or eleven o'clock, and sleep through until morning."

He considers this, and we talk for a while about different patterns of sleep, and young men who stay up carousing and then find it hard to get up in the morning, and about the value of going to bed and getting up according to the rhythms of the season, and how beneficial it is to go quietly to rest, not overstimulated, and let the day end. That sort of thing. I was interested in what he had to say about it, but I must confess I've forgotten most of it now.

He moves on to what Vicki said about Paradise. "I'm not sure about that," he says, "but this I do know: there is no power but that of God. There is nowhere to go that did not proceed from God and is not in the reach of his Spirit."

Then he says, "Quo ibo ab spiritu tuo? Et quo a facie tua fugiam? Si ascendero in cælum, tu illic es; si descendero in infernum, ades. Si sumpsero pennas meas diluculo, et habitavero in extremis maris, etenim illuc manus tua deducet me, et tenebit me dextera tua."

And I look at him blankly. "What?"

"You... you don't know Latin?" He looks bewildered. "But... in your stories..."

"Oh, yeah," I tell him, "but I look it up in English and get it translated."

He still seems somewhat taken aback, but he immediately says, "Oh, I'm so sorry. Well, in English it would be, Whither shall I go from thy spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy face? If I ascend into heaven, thou art there: if I descend into hell, thou art present. If I take wing in the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea: even there shall thy hand lead me: and thy right hand shall hold me. Something like that. It's... um... it's from the Psalms."

Well, yes, of course it is.

"So I think," he says, "there is — maybe — nowhere to go except the presence of God. What varies is how we feel about that, how we respond, or react. Whether we are at rest after death, or are here on Earth, whatever or wherever, the only reality is Him. Perhaps. You might want to ask Theodore, if you like. But probably not right now because they'll be ringing the bell for Vespers very soon. Try him after supper, if you can. I don't know how hard it is for you to travel between your now and ours." He grins at me. "But I do know that both of those are in God. Everything is. Would you not see it like that?"

"So, no separation, you think?" I say. "Not compartmentalised?"

"Experientially, maybe," he says. "Perhaps like the spokes of a wheel are separate from each other. But they are all conjoined at the rim and meet at the hub. There are many spokes, but there is one wheel. How we look at it determines whether what we see is one or many. And we belong to one another because we belong to Him. We find one another — and discover our own true selves — when we take refuge under His wings. It is our frailty that divides us, that keeps us from perceiving how all things hold together in Him. It is the limitation of our humanity; but even that is held in Him, and becomes the conduit of the mystery of this unity. What Jesus said — "Ut omnes unum — oh — erm — sorry —That they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us. He is the ground of all that is, of all being."

And then, just as he anticipated, they begin to ring for Vespers. He waits, courteously, but I can see it's time for me to go. I don't really want to leave, I wish I could stay and ask him what parting even means in view of what he's just said; but yes, there is Reality and then there is reality. There's the ground of all being, but there's also Vespers and twenty-first century Hastings. So it's time to come back here.

As he gets up, ready to set off for chapel, I mention that Vicki remarked on God having a sense of humour, and Abbot John laughs. "Yes," he says. "He certainly does if He sent you here to ask me about all of this. I do my best, but I'm relieved if He just thinks it's funny. It could be worse. He might have been expecting I'd come through with something intelligent."

But — I think he did, didn't he?

Tom Pillibi

So many thoughts and phrases that pass through my mind end up as a cue for a song.

Getting my supplements ready for the evening and morning doses set me off this time:

"Nothing could be finer than to take your nattokinase in the mo-o-orning..." (Tune here)

And this afternoon, my mandatory low-oxalate choices for all foods started me singing "Black cherry jam is quite a find, perfectly sweet and charming", to the tune of Tom Pillibi.  But do you even know that song?

My father made our family a record player. He used a bathroom stool for the main part of the body, and cut up his aertex shirt for the speaker covers, and bought a kit to make the working parts.

We didn't have money to buy records, but his firm (Everready) gave him a good expenses account for his worldwide travels selling their batteries, so he used to bring back records from the countries he visited all over the globe.

One of the records he brought back was this one, Tom Pillibi sung by Julie Andrews.

It came out in 1960, when I was three. I absolutely loved it and used to sing along and dance to it, throughout my childhood.

There were things I didn't notice about it — or just accepted — when I was a child, that catch my attention now.

One (these days this irritates me) is the part that says:

So, with a lover, as with a book,

Don't trust the cover or you might well be hooked.

Surely the whole point of a book cover is to hook a reader, and surely you should be able to trust the cover to accurately convey what the content is likely to be. A lot of thought goes into book covers for this very purpose. But I didn't think of that when I was three.

And then there's all the business about the 'technique' of the young man in the song — 'He has a very good technique'. 

Oh, do you remember that? 'His technique'! It's what we always used to say, as teenagers. I remember girls talking about boys they'd met at a dance — a 'disco', by my teenage years — boys they fancied, asking, "What's his technique?" Oh, my goodness, that feels like a whole world away, boys setting about their courting, their 'technique' for flirting and attracting a girl. Different times, eh?

But you can see now, "Black cherry jam is quite a find, perfectly sweet and charming" fits just right.

On the B side of that record was Lazy Afternoon.

 

 I can see the appeal of it now (I think) though I had a fairly low opinion of it when I was three. Part of me is still three, and still finds it a little tiresome.

But, Julie Andrews! The way she says "hand" and "lazy"! English diction from 1960, and yes, ordinary people did speak like that. Only gradually have we reached the place where even hymns in church van to be sung with an American accent.

Here are the voices of 1960s England.

 

 

Minimalism, laziness and calm

My attention was arrested by a minimalist YouTuber saying something along these lines:

"At the moment I have small children so it's very important to keep our home very functional and clutter-free. Later, when my children have grown up, I will have more time and more energy, so that might not be as important."

Haha. Hahaha. You think?

My mother was a very vigorous and industrious woman. She also had crazy hormone imbalances, life-long suicidal depression, and came of a family impressively endowed with psychiatric illness. But her physical toughness and sheer moral determination kept everything in order. Every morning, beds made (yes, with neat hospital corners), bathrooms cleaned, whole house vacuumed and dusted throughout, all meals and snacks made at home from first principles. All the (numerous, indoors and out) pots of flowers watered morning and evening, garden beds weeded, greenhouse watered and aired, hens and sheep fed and checked and dosed if necessary, dog walked. Every day. In the evening, knitting or sewing and methodically blanching and bagging garden vegetables for the freezer, stewing the apples (also for the freezer, ironing, walking the dog again after the evening meal had been cooked, eaten, and everything washed up and dried up and tidied away. My mother had no hobbies, ever — she didn't need any.

I am very different. Yes, in my childhood I was roped in for chores — feeding the hens, walking the dog, picking the gooseberries, watering the tomatoes, peeling the potatoes, even (along with my sister) concreting the barn floor.

But, as we had very little money and never went anywhere and my mother was always busy, I had plenty of time left over for communing with trees, watching garden insects about their busy lives, drawing and singing and listening to music and wandering along to the church for Evensong, and making up stories in my head. Nobody in our house had a very high opinion of school, so any homework I did was late night and last minute. 

When I grew up and left home, I worked for monks and nuns for a while, then lived in community, then got married and lived in the ground floor of an old rectory in York. Washing up was tedious so I and my young husband didn't do it (we borrowed a trestle table from church to accommodate the mountain of dirty crockery) and cleaning the house never occurred to us.

Later, with young children, everything we had was strewn around on the floor, dogs and hens wandering through — goats too, sometimes — and we washed up the dirty crocks when we'd run out of things to eat off.

Fortunately, since my encounter with Francis of Assisi when I was fifteen, we lived simply if casually, and never owned very much. Our nearest approximation to clutter was children's toys (and they didn't have all that many) and numerous musical instruments (my husband was a multi-musician and music teacher); everything from the normal things like recorders and guitars and a piano, through to euphoniums and African drums, a bugle and a harp and a sitar. My children are the same now. One of them even has a hurdy-gurdy (and a second one on order).

We had loads of books, of course — to our mind, that's what the alcoves either side of the chimney breast are for, bookshelves.

So our home was untidy, and fairly dirty, but not cluttered. I mean, we washed our clothes and kept the bathroom clean, but did not keep house with the focus and rigour my mother brought to the task.

I like my house and family to be calm, and peaceful. I guess my priority is the things of the mind and soul. I have little enthusiasm for housework. I do believe in cleanliness, though, and in good food cooked from first principles as the foundation for health. I open the doors and the windows to let in the fresh air and the light. I am also hyper-mobile, so I tire easily — standing up is quite hard for me; I'm okay if I'm walking, or sitting/lying down, but standing up (standing still) makes me feel ill. And sport? Hahaha — no. I have not a competitive bone in my body, my joints are as soft as butter, my cardio-vascular system gives up at the slightest hurdle, and rules have always failed to fix my attention.

Now, in old age, far from (as that minimalistic YouTuber imagined) having more time and energy, I have time (yes) but such energy as I ever had has evaporated like a volatile chemical in an unsuccessful experiment.

But (you must surely have noticed this yourself), there is this thing about old people's houses. The lampshades are always cruddy with accumulated dust. The grout in the bathroom tiles is always infested with beige mould. The kitchen surfaces are festooned with grease that clingeth tighter than a brother. Blissfully unaware of all this because they haven't put their glasses on, old people potter about in their comfortable nest of a lifetime's clutter, breaking a femur when they trip over the vacuum cleaner lying in the passage.

This is not what I want for myself.

But I am, and always have been, lazy. I don't mean morally lazy, it's just that my body doesn't want to do much (and never has). An Alexander teacher who once tried to organise me had to concede I had the laziest back she'd ever seen. Also I don't know where I am on the autistic spectrum or if I qualify as a Highly Sensitive Person, and I don't much care, but I am off the chart on the Seriously Odd spectrum. 

You see what I mean?

My days drift aimlessly in the realm of weird, my friends have all died or got bored of me, and I have no wish to accumulate the paraphernalia associated with hobbies. My lifelong rule has been, and still is, to carry my occupation inside my head so it needs only the most minimal toolkit; once a lined A4 pad and a biro, now a laptop (the smallest and lightest available). I have no desk, no study, no office chair, no (physical) files. 

And I keep my house and my soul calm and clean and airy by having very little to curate in the first place.

There is, nowadays (it was not always so by any means) so little in my schedule that I can keep things orderly — throwing things away, and labelling the jars so I know one lot of white powder from another.

I have few enough things standing about that it is easy to wipe down the surfaces. 

My soul still yearns wistfully for the one-bag variety of minimalism, but I get cold in the winter so I have a small collection of thick sweaters plus a wooly hat plus wooly socks plus a fleece gilet (two, actually) plus a heated blanket, and these are very greedy for space. One bag? Maybe, but it would be a hell of a bag. I'll show you one day, what I have. 

Tomatoes

 

Thanks be to God, we have so many tomatoes!

Our back garden faces south and the sun has been blazing down this last couple of months.

We only put in three plants! I chose the Moneymaker because it's the one my mother always liked.

I can't eat tomatoes because I have oxalate toxicity and tomatoes are terribly high in oxalate. 

I wanted to grow them for Tony because he likes them — as do I even, though I can't have them.

Tony ingests quite a lot of oxalate because he drinks several large cups of strong tea every day, and has high-fibre wheat-based breakfast (though not every day now and he's reduced his bowl size) with dried fruit in. All of that is very high in oxalate.

But I cook for us both so, without really intending to, he's been on a much reduced oxalate intake over the last year. What he chooses and gets for himself (breakfast) has a lot of oxalate in, but nothing else does. This works quite well, because you mustn't step off a cliff with oxalate reduction, you have to take it down slow and toggle the intake amount, or you get dumping symptoms which can be horrendous, quite extreme (as I discovered when I went carnivore, which is zero-oxalate).

For years he used to have trouble with gout, but oddly he hasn't had any problems with it for a long while. Oxalate toxicity can cause what they call 'false gout' (same symptoms, different cause.

But when our tomatoes began to ripen I gave him a tomato each day with the cold meat and cheese and pickles/apple he has for supper every day — and the gout came back with a vengeance, both feet.

So he stopped the tomatoes and the 'gout' went away.

Good to have a solution, shame about the tomatoes.

I have been giving them to Alice and Hebe because they eat a lot of tomatoes. Right now they have all the fresh ones they can cope with, and their freezer is also too full to add any in.

I have freezer space though, so I am going back to what we used to do in my childhood when we had a 12ft greenhouse full of tomatoes and cucumbers and Galia melons.

To freeze tomatoes for soup and stews and relish for the winter, it's best to skin them. This is easy if you blanch them first. You have to bring a pan of water to the boil, and put in a few at a time into the boiling water for one minute. Then lift them out and skin them — the skin slips off easily.

That's my job for the day! I will bag them up and put them by in the freezer for Alice and Hebe to take as needed for their soups and stews in the autumn and winter.

But I will leave two or three nearly-ripe ones in the bowl with the green ones, because ripe tomatoes give out a hormone that encourages the green ones to ripen.

We still have a lot outside in the sunshine, and they will ripen in the next week or two as this hot weather is continuing; the plants beginning to die back now.

Imagine! Just three plants! Well worth it.

Them, You, Nobody and Everyone

Call me old-fashioned, but I think a title/cover should give some vague clue as to content. 

An idea seems to have seized the YouTube community that it is somehow intriguing to make an eye-catching cover/title for a video that is loosely in the same category as the GASP! and POW! and ZAP! that used to feature in kid's comics. A stark, bold, attention-grabbing exclamation that gives you no idea what's in the video. I mean, imagine these (taken on one random foray into YouTube this morning) as the spines of the books on your bookshelf:

Nobody Talks About These

You Are Not Crazy

Make Everyone Look

Are You Too Nice?

Let Them Think You Failed

Nobody Eats Out

What It Means For You

This Is Why You're Stuck

You'll Never Be The Same

Wu Wei You Got it Wrong

"Do Not Buy A House"

This Is Why They Mistreat You

We Didn't Want To Share This

Don't Say I Didn't Warn You

They Killed The Internet

Your Doctor's Hands Are Tied (and You Don't Know It)

A quick refresh of the page. Here we go again.

Everyone is Full of Shit!!!

Remove It Without Telling Anyone

Nobody's Okay

You'll Never Be The Same

Do This

Stop Putting It Off

Don't Enable These

Why Journaling Doesn't Feel Fun Any More

That's just the Presumptuous Shelf. The main effect these title have on me, apart for a sense of irritation/impatience, is making me want to argue with their assumptions about who I am and what I think.

"You'll Never Be The Same" — as what? How do you know what I am now? 

"Wu Wei You Got it Wrong" — how do you know? You have never met me. You cannot possibly know what my understanding is of the Taoist concept of wu wei. 

"We Didn't Want To Share This" — No? Keep it to yourself, then. Let me not intrude. I won't bother watching it.

"Are You Too Nice?" No. No chance.

But the Presumptuous shelf, making assumptions about my procrastination and thought processes and relationship with my doctor, sits right above the Paranoid Shelf with its gasp shock horror exclamatory even sillier nonsense pronouncements:

It Finally Arrived

And So It Begins 

Good Luck With This

This Is Bad

This Kills 1,200 People Each Day

This Makes No Sense

This Has To Stop

It's All A Lie

It's Happening

It's Worse Than You Think

This Just Got Much Worse

They Are Everywhere

Total Chaos

Not Worth It (Anymore)

It's Harder Now

I Have Stopped

It's Over

[on a carnivore channel] Just Eat Cake

Nothing is Happening?

The Hidden Truth

It Worked

This is Epic

Over It

 

I mean, for goodness sake! It's ludicrous. Whatever has happened to people? Is this twaddle AI generated or have the humans lost their minds all by themselves?

Even the subtitles often illuminate nothing.

Title:

Don't Make My Mistake

Subtitle

I'm 44. I Wish I Understood This At 30

Understood what?

How to change a fuse? How to make meringue? Stages of neurological development? The cheapest way to obtain a train ticket? How to avoid a rip tide? Dog training? We just don't know. Zero clue given. Picture of a plump bearded man in a hoodie and spectacles sitting at his desk occupies all the space not taken up by the large red letters of the title blazed across the screen.

Give me strength.

The Tree of Life and the Bread of Heaven revisited

This is from about six years ago — and, by 'eck, have I put on weight since then!! I'd better take action on that.

It was a thinkabout for one of our Campfire Church gatherings. I went back to it and thought it still relevant for where we are now, so here it is again. I hope it's helpful.

I'm aware that I don't stick to a proper hairstyle like normal people — it just grows and grows and grows and eventually it annoys me and I cut it off. I apologise if you find it disconcerting that I have completely different hair at different times, and only very rarely is it styled with anything more professional than whatever pair of scissors I can find lying about at the time.

The one about the Heaven Tree that I mentioned in the first video is here.

T-shirts and food and minimalism

 Having a keen interest in minimalism — especially the nomadic one-bag variety — and living simply, I watch a lot of YouTube videos on the topic.

In general I prefer the men's channels, because I find the ladies' ones can be a bit wafty and aesthetic; rather more Instagram than the vibe of my own life. I am more the pragmatic type. "My minimalist wardrobe for Spring" isn't really the focus of my interest.

And the men (especially the nomadic one-bag people) generally own about 3 t-shirts. 

I understand the 3Ws principle: one to Wear, one in the Wardrobe and one in the Wash, it's what people always used to do before consumerism ran over us like a Bedford truck and squashed our lives flat.

I'm good with underwear, I can do the 3Ws principle with that. Coats are easy — I have two warm fleece gilets. Trousers are easy. I have one skirt for the odd occasions when I go to the Orthodox church or visit the Hutterites, so I don't give offence wearing the wrong thing. I have way more socks than I should because our Alice is a knitter, so my socks are handcrafted marvels of creation. I have kept every pair she ever knitted me, and I darn them when they go into holes. For the same reason I have two winter hats where I really need only one.

But I have a problem with t-shirts. It could easily be solved by remembering to wear an apron. 

Cooking generates a certain amount of tallow splash in our house and, as you no doubt know, an oil stain is the Worst Thing to get out of laundry. So my clothes in general drift towards a sort of hobo aesthetic. 

Not only that, I am a terror for dropping food on my clothes. I tend to sit sideways to the table because I like space in front of me and around me, and I'm usually chatting to Tony while we eat (living with me is like having Radio 4 turned on), so I'm not properly looking what I'm doing. And I can almost guarantee that the very first time I put on a new t-shirt, it'll have a dollop of fried zucchini dropped right there in the mid-boob territory before the end of lunch.

So I have to wash my t-shirts quite a lot. And on the rare occasions when I'm going out somewhere, I might have to change my top more than once a day.

Also, I have five pairs of trousers — 2 black, 1 navy, 1 khaki, 1 cream. I hardly ever wear the cream ones because a splot of stew dropped on those would be The End. I might as well get rid of them but they are comfy and I like them. The navy pair is very warm, so only for winter really. One of the black pairs I try to keep for best (like going to church or to a concert) so they are Oil Free. That means for everyday I alternate the khaki and the other black ones. Already that's not very minimalist is it? Not what a one-bag nomad would do at all! 

But the thing is, I like black t-shirts because they don't show the dirt too badly, but I think a black top and black trousers is all right for Steve Jobs or whoever, but on an elderly lady it just looks like the knell of doom ("Going to a funeral?").

So I need about twice as many t-shirts as I should need if I were a one-bag minimalist who isn't an elderly lady and doesn't drop his lunch on his clothing.

Not only that, but I really do need to lose a bit of weight. All this chronic illness has led to a more sedentary life than I used to have, which has made me about ten years older than I ought to be, if you see what I mean, so life has accumulated in waves of flab around the torso. In consequence I have 3 more black t-shirts waiting in wistful hope that I actually will fit into them one day, but not quite as eye-catchingly as at present. I think it will happen. I am making steady progress with my health, things will improve. But in the meantime it has added a you-never-know subsidiary stack to the stash of t-shirts.

If I were a nomad, I'd have to be a two-bag variety — one for almost everything and a second one for t-shirts and socks. Those one-bag men must be very tidy eaters.

In conversation with David and Martin Towns of Monastic Retreats

 

I almost never get tangled up with interviews, because I have a tendency toward greater candour than is ever advisable, and a consequent aptitude for saying things I should never have put into words. So I usually refuse unless it's something in writing.

But I like David and Martin, they are good friends, and I love the work they do at Monastic Retreats; so here I am.

My Lighthouse

 This is my totally favourite version of My Lighthouse. I absolutely love it.

❤️  😄