Health thoughts

 One of my all-time favourite writers is Oliver Sacks. I'm not sure what his exact designation should be — was he a neurologist or a neurosurgeon? Something of that sort. I think he was a physician, so let's say a neurologist then.

He wrote a series of books about different aspects of neurological disturbance and health, which are so vividly and engagingly written they read like novels. A superb writer, with a compassionate and curious mind.

There's something he said — I noted it down decades ago, and had to dig around to find it — that has always stayed with me. This was with reference to severe mental illness:

I believe that though one can be 'beside oneself' or 'lose oneself' for years on end, the self itself is still present, always present, intact, entire— however withdrawn or buried it may be.

He extends this to physical illness also — though I am fairly persuade by the view that mental illness is physical illness, as much as the condition of the body can equally be affected by state of mind — saying:

I think the ravages of physical and mental disease are both superficial; that there is something unfathomably deep beyond their reach...

[These two quotations are both taken from the extensive footnote 13 to page 277 of his book Awakenings]

The last five years I've been ill, doctors all puzzled and no help forthcoming, so I've been on a patient quest to restore health through simple and naturopathic means, and had a significant degree of success but never got all the way there (so far; I haven't given up).

Something that interests me about it is that occasionally (it happened this morning) I get a flash of how I used to be when I was well. And when that happens, what becomes apparent is that there's a whole version of me with the illness just pasted on top. It's like drawing back a curtain or a cover. Underneath there is suppleness and vitality and an unquenchable happiness. It's all still there, waiting; I just have to work on lifting away the slime mould of oppression sitting over the top of it.

This also gives me a different insight into death; I presume the logical extension of these thoughts is that at the end of our time here we walk through the doorway into the world of light and, as we go, we drop the cloak of sickness and disability, it just falls from us because it doesn't really belong to us, it was never really part of us — it's circumstantial, not proper to who we really are.

I don't know this, I'm only speculating. but it feels right.

Also this

I have a few other thoughts in my head, but I wanted to share with you this three-hour seamless loop (!) of Aunt Gladys (not my aunt, just everybody's I suppose) singing this marvellous song assuring you that you're going to be OK.

It seems to me that this is what we all need right now!

Earlier thoughts abut money and simplicity

 Because of a conversation with my husband this morning, about money and priorities, and how revealing of a person's values is heir expenditure, I was looking for the text of a haiku my daughter Hebe wrote some years ago. This one

I knew I had it on a memory stick somewhere, but then I thought I would have included it in a blog post at some point — so I searched to see, and I had.

But that search took me back to two different posts, one in 2019 and one in 2016, looking at money management and moneyless economy. I've been thinking down that same track again recently, and I thought you might be as well, so here they are.

A post from 2019 about minimalist management of money and resources, and another one from 2016 about minimalism and moneyless living.

About retrenching

Have you read Jane Austen's book Persuasion? Or if you're not an avid reader, have you seen one of the movies made of that story?

If you have, you might remember the bit at the beginning where Sir Walter Elliot considers leaving Kellynch Hall.

In case you don't know this story, I'll explain about the bit I mean.

Sir Walter Elliot, a pretentious English gentleman, presides over a household that has been living beyond its means. They come to a point where the stew has hit the fan, as it were, and necessity to cut back on expenditure becomes not only evident but actually urgent.

Their sensible family friend Lady Russell is on the case — gloriously described as being "of sound rather than quick abilities". She concludes this:

They must retrench; that did not admit of a doubt. But she was very anxious to have it done with the least possible pain to him...

So Lady Russell consults with Sir Walter's daughter Anne (the heroine of the novel), and Anne has some far-reaching cuts in mind. Lady Russell proposes a more diluted way forward, but even her gentler scheme is received with horror:

How Anne's more rigid requisitions might have been taken is of little consequence. Lady Russell's had no success at all: could not be put up with, were not to be borne. 'What! Every comfort of life knocked off! Journeys, London, servants, horses, table, — contractions and restrictions every where. To live no longer with the decencies even of a private gentleman! No, he would sooner quit Kellynch Hall at once, than remain in it on such disgraceful terms.'

Coming back now from Persuasion (it's a good book — I recommend!) to the present day, my guess is that 'retrenching' will be on a lot of people's minds.

From the day I was born right up to the present moment, I have never had a large income. This of itself has been an absolute blessing, because my mother and her mother and her mother were the people who ran their household budgets, and my word, did they know how to make the money stretch!

So I've never had a lot of money, but never did the money I had buy less than it does right now. I am assuming this is also true for you, regardless of your level of income. But with all that's going on in the world, I think we can safely conclude that present circumstances are only the beginning.

This is where retrenching comes in.

Back in 2009 I wrote a book called In Celebration of Simplicity, which was exactly what it says on the tin — about living simply and why it's a good thing. It's out of print now and will remain so, because my editor had a rush of blood to the head and made its layout so complicated that I don't think our self-publishing programme can handle it. But second-hand copies are still around. 

Then ten years after I'd written that book, it dawned on me that I'd overlooked a vital component. Living simply is powerful and effective, but there's a prerequisite (the part Sir Walter Elliot couldn't stomach): what Jane Austen called retrenchment and I've called relinquishment. So I wrote a second book, Relinquishment, about the art of letting go, which — once I'd thought about it — I realised was an essential first step of practicing simplicity.

The thing about retrenchment or relinquishment is that it can't be done fast. People cling tenaciously to their habits and their comforts and their expectations, and detaching oneself from all the nice things one is used to enjoying is hard to do and impossible to do overnight.

Why I'm saying this is to flag up that this may be the season to retrench, to relinquish. As the cost of living goes up like a rocket, prices rise and income shrinks and taxes increase, obviously we have to be able to manage on less — and my experience suggests this can only be done incrementally. As we gradually progress in managing without things we've always had and assumed we always would have, we become more adept at finding alternatives — cabbage not avocado, for example, or a homemade omelette not a store-bought quiche, or a friend round for a cup of tea in the back garden rather than meeting up at a café in town. But it's slow, it's gradual, and what makes it especially hard is that we take for granted what we habitually do, and our expectations have conditioned us; we are at first blind to the possibilities and alternatives.

So I'm thinking that now is the time to start. Even if you think you're already good at it, look again, re-evaluate. Keep a ledger if you don't already, and review your expenditure regularly and often. Take advantage of the many books and YouTube videos that talk about living frugally; even if you know it all anyway, it psychs you up to whatever needs addressing next. Then you will keep ahead of the curve and not be caught out by hard times.

Retrenchment, and therefore relinquishment, I suspect may be the order of the day. And I do recommend Persuasion, whether the book or one of the movies made from it. Excellent story.

On the bus

 We do have a car — here it is in front of our house. 

It's a nice little car and we both like driving it, but these days we have no reason to go very far or go anywhere very often. I take the car when I go up the hill to visit my family in the evening sometimes, if my body is hurting and I don't want to walk, and every week I take some of our family to the shops that are too far for them to walk, for their groceries. And if we go out in the evening when the buses have thinned out, or go out to one of the villages where public transport is patchy, then we take the car.

But mostly for going to church on Sunday or to the bank, or any other reason to go into Hastings town centre, or up the hill to see our family or get something from the shops nearby, we travel by bus, because we have old people's bus passes, so it's free after 9.30 in the morning.

Yesterday I caught a bus into Hastings. That maybe sounds odd, in that you probably know me as living in Hastings. I do, but like many seaside towns Hastings is a long sprawling place. St Leonards-on-Sea was a seaside holiday resort added on to it in the 1820s by a Victorian architect called James Burton. It grew through the Victorian and Edwardian era, and then in the 1930s when building deregulation gave rise to massive housing development in England, the housing estate where we now live was added to St Leonards in what had been a little country village called Hollington. So we do live in Hastings, but on the northern part of the bit that's St Leonards, and the centre of Hastings down by the sea is a couple of miles away — a bus ride.

I was going to a lunchtime concert. Through the summer these happen every week at the church where I go most Sundays now. It's a donation-only concert, so anyone can go even if they haven't got much (or any) money, and it's in the daytime, which I prefer, and only forty minutes long. These summer lunchtime concerts have a mixture of all kinds of music, but yesterday's was French café songs, very ably performed by two singers and a pianist — delightful.

The bus going into Hastings was almost full, with some people standing, and only a smattering of seats available. But I was lucky; at the point I boarded the bus the seat next to the emergency exit half-way down was empty. That's a good place to sit; it has more leg room, to make space for using the emergency door if need be. So I sat by the window, and as it's a double seat that meant there remained a vacant one next to me. And across the aisle from me the corresponding double seat likewise had someone sitting by the window and an empty aisle seat.

A couple of stops further along, several people got on board, including a small, thin, middle-aged man with a beard, wearing a rucksack and carrying a stick, and accompanied by his carer — who was a big, burly, gentle-looking young man with tattoos.

They came along the aisle past the many occupied seats, the man with the stick going first and saying softly "Not this one. Not this one." Mine was the first possibility of an empty seat, so he sat next to me, saying quietly to himself, "Keep quite still. Don't say a word." His carer took the adjacent seat across the aisle.

I spoke to the man who sat beside me, to tell him I liked his note to self — "Keep quite still. Don't say a word." — and he turned his head very fast and abruptly to look at me. He had bright, shrewd, twinkling eyes. I liked everything about this man. He told me his name is Paul Young, but explained that he was not Paul Young the rock star. He said a little more about Paul Young (the one he wasn't) and then after that our conversation lapsed; but sitting beside someone on a bus takes you within their aura, allowing you to continue to commune with them; and I liked his. 

When their stop came, silently inside my mind I said to him, "Have a good day," and as they got up from their seats his carer looked down and said to me, "Have a good day." So that was interesting. Evidently we were all tuned in, because nobody normally says that to you on a bus.

I hope I meet Paul Young (not the rock star) again one day. He felt like a friend.

As you can see, another friend has come to sit with me now —

— so I guess that's the end of that.

The Poor in Spirit

 Do you know the YouTube channel called The Awakened Believer? I find their videos on Bible texts most interesting.

I specially enjoyed this one on a verse from the beatitudes, about how its meaning has morphed in translation through the years.

I also loved this one from further along in the Sermon on the Mount.

And this one about the Lords Prayer.

Walking through the modern world

 The modern world has a kind of hyperventilating quality that is not conducive to peace.

I don't pay any attention at all to mainstream media news, because it's disappointingly propagandist, and information worth having can't be derived from that source.

I do listen to some informed and intelligent voices, to try and get some kind of map-bearing, a perspective of sorts, to help establish an appropriate direction of travel and see what's coming towards me. It makes everything less bewildering and gives me a chance to ready my own life and circumstances — always useful.

It seems fairly clear that the global patterns are moving at two levels — the one we're all supposed to be occupied watching, with its polarities and tribal antagonisms, and the orchestration behind the scenes that looks to be powerful, large and purposeful, the machinations of the Powers That were. For instance the strange coincidence of oil refineries around the world all being attacked or exploding or otherwise coming to grief at the same time. We ordinary people have no means of joining the dots, but we can be fairly sure it's not intended for our good.

Still, I've come to the conclusion that — large and powerful and heartless though the political machinery may be — it almost, from our point of view, doesn't matter. I don't mean it won't affect us, because it certainly will, but if we have no means of influencing it then it's in effect a distraction.

The last two books in the Hawk & Dove series, the ones I wrote this year, were set in 1326. That was one heck of a year in England. The king and his queen had fallen out. Edward II was a disappointing and unpopular monarch, and most of the country — church, aristocracy, people — backed the queen. Having been out of the country, she invaded and took over. Edward III was only a teenager at the time, but he was eventually set on the throne in place of his father at the beginning of 1327 — and he was an improvement, I gather.

But in reading about all this, what struck me was how bloody and barbaric the whole thing was. The King had various homosexual love affairs, which the queen was happy to ignore until it adversely affected her own interests. Then, after she'd seized power, she had one of his lovers — Henry Despenser — executed. Not beheaded as the man's father was, but raised up on a ladder that they tied him to after the initial partial hanging of being hanged drawn and quartered, and first castrated then disembowelled. The queen sat and had her lunch, watching his sex organs being tossed into a fire and his guts pulled out. After that they cut him up into pieces. King Edward meanwhile was held in captivity and died in mysterious circumstances around the turn of the year. It was rumoured that his death was brought about by having a red hot poker thrust into his rectum.

A similar fate to Henry Despenser's was visited upon the Carthusian monks during Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries. The Church of England's inception rests upon those bloody tortures. And those who were not so dispatched were kept in prison, chained upright to the walls, left there to starve. Carthusians. Gentle, good men whose crime was keeping faith with the Roman church and not changing their allegiance.

And further back than that, in Roman times, there was the death of Jesus — and he was one of thousands, the crosses lined the roadway. What a grisly and horrific, cruel way to die. 

But going back to the 1300s, that was a long season of wet summers during which the harvest failed year after year, and in consequence many people died. In the 14th century, the development of root vegetables hadn't happened yet. There was grain, and fruit, and animal products (meat, fish, poultry, eggs, cheese, butter, milk). The animals ate grass, and the vegetable part of the human diet was fruit, spices, herbs and some greens. They ate things like rocket and chervil, onions and garlic. But the garlic and onions weren't as we think of them now — they were more like scallions (salad onions). The leeks were like the three-cornered leek we still have. So the human population and the animal population both relied on grain to see them through the winter — augmented by hay for the cattle, but in the wet summers the hay harvests would also have failed.

I am saying all this because I think it helps us avoid having a doom-ridden disaster mentality about modern times. Yes, there is much to dismay us. Yes, there are global elites who do not wish us well. Yes, the elites want all the power and all the blessings of life for themselves and themselves alone. But the thing is, they always did. Wars are terrifying and destructive and bring no good outcome, but it was always so.

We have deceitful leaders and society riven into factions, but that was always so too. Somehow we have to find a way to thread a pathway of kindness and quietness and practical love through all this violence and antagonism. if we don't, we'll go mad.

At the same time as all the strife and division, the oppression and domination and hardship, in every century there have been good and quiet folk, caring for the land and for their families, developing skills and making music and writing poetry, worshipping God and taking delight in the seasons of the light as the year turns in the natural world. People who spin and sew, who know how to build a fire on the hearth, who know how to birth a lamb and hoe a garden.

In modern times, that maybe means there are people who can drive a car and manage the online banking and household accounts, people who can cook a Sunday lunch and know which shops have the best bargains. I hope also that, as part of our worship of God and reverence for his Spirit in creation, we are paying attention to getting our groceries from farm shops or box schemes that re-use packaging, and sell us food that has been kindly and organically and regeneratively produced. None of this glyphosate and factory farming.

And I hope that we still find ways to sew or knit our own clothes and create our own art and write our own poetry, that we still play instruments and sing together. Let's not relinquish it all to the machines.

The books I've written this year are intended to speak into the times we're living through, to help us remember the essentials of thriving as human beings even in daunting and challenging circumstances: and those essentials — in every age and place — are gentleness and understanding, the willingness to talk things through and forgive one another when something goes wrong, the grace to help each other and lift one another up. There isn't the world that we have to live in: we are made in the image of God so we each make our own world, we each have the power to create it and sustain it and redeem it. We bring it into being by our life choices, and we strengthen it by practice that deepens into habit; we redeem it by starting again when we go astray.

And it was always so.

I am a huge fan of the work of Thomas Cranmer, who was responsible for the Book of Common Prayer. Somehow his collects always put into words for me what my heart wants to pray. He, too, got tangled up in the power struggles of political elites, and despite desperate attempts to comply with their conflicting and antagonistic requirements, he spent two years in prison and in the end was burned at the stake in Oxford, holding first into the flames the hand with which he had signed his recantations.

Here is his collect for the fourth Sunday after Trinity, from the Book of Common Prayer:

O God, the protector of all that trust in thee, without whom nothing is strong, nothing is holy: Increase and multiply upon us thy mercy; that, thou being our ruler and guide, we may so pass through things temporal, that we finally lose not the things eternal. Grant this, O heavenly Father, for Jesus Christ’s sake our Lord. Amen.

So may it be.

Being prepared

 I just want to make sure you know — and here I'm writing from the UK point of view — that it will be helpful to make some preparations for the effects of the coming oil shock.

There may not be much you can do to increase your resources, but some adjustment to timing and outgoings can help you to be more resilient.

It's worth bearing in mind that reduced outgoings are in effect an income increase, so that's an area to look at, because it takes a while to change ingrained habits.

Then, it's a good idea to have a pantry of spares. It's not realistic for most people to have a huge basement like a home grocery store, but just making sure you have two spares in the cupboard where you normally would have one. This also applies to any meds and supplements that are important to you.

If (as is somewhere between possible and likely) we run into issues about power outages and water treatment plants, it can be prudent to have a power station and some bottled water or a filter system for foraged water. Shop around before making such a purchase; the power stations can almost always be had at a significantly reduced price from Amazon or a store's own sales. The links I've given you are for the ones we personally have at home, that we find very satisfactory, but there's a variety of options so something else may suit you better.

It's a good plan to have some cordless lamps (I have these), and a hot water bottle for each person. Also for the wintertime, electric blanket throws (I have this one and it's really good) mean you can keep warm without having to heat a whole house.

In case of a power outage I have a one ring camping gas stove with a supply of gas canisters. Amazon stocks a selection; there's no point linking you to the sort I have because they are no longer stocked. If you don't know which one to pick, reading the reviews is always helpful. Of course, if you have a wood stove or an open fire that gives you good options, but we don't have either in our new home.

But for everyday cooking I've completely stopped using our regular oven. We now cook just about everything in a multi-cooker air fryer thing. We have this one. Something I love about it is that it's a damn sight easier to clean than a normal oven. These machines are much more economical of fuel than normal ovens, and I find it easy to cook a whole meal (eg something like sausages plus veggies) all in one dish in just twenty minutes. Brilliant. Obviously that wouldn't help you if the power was out, but as it plugs in to a normal household socket you could use the power station if you weren't saving that to keep your freezer running. It's all about what your own priorities would be.

If you have a garden or a balcony, it's a good time of year to start some veggies growing. I like to have lots of herbs; they're tasty and easy to grow, and mean you get both the flavouring and the veggie side of things both in one. 

I'm not quite sure what to expect from this oil shock; we've had several significant national financial crises in the course of my life, and then the pandemic lockdown, and the way I live means I didn't even notice them. But I think the one coming could be quite bad, not least because our national leaders are distracted by their own political problems, do not seem to have our national interests at heart, and are following a puzzling (and I suspect not fully declared) ideology. So it does make sense to be prepared — but not to survive an apocalypse, only to give yourself some thinking time if there are shortages, and to smooth the bumps in the road caused by power outages and similar disruptions.

If these are not things you've given much thought to so far, here are a couple of videos you may find helpful. I recommend both channels.

 

 

I know this second one looks a bit alarmist but a) I think he's not being unrealistic, and b) What he has to say is wise and practical. 

 

Cover art and works in progress

As I understand it, some people are visual thinkers and other people aren't.

If I'm honest, I'm not quite sure what this means.

Do the people who are visual thinkers think entirely in pictures? Or only partly? If they are thinking about something invisible, what do they see?

I think I am a visual thinker, in as much as I do think very visually. So I tried out feeding into my mind "Air" and "God" to see what came up. And I found that I saw those words written down in my mind's eye. I could see the words very large in Times New Roman type font. Dark grey with a white background, on a rectangular piece of paper (landscape not portrait).

My husband Tony is writing a novel — he has written two books, and both were stories in a way: one was the story of the time he walked the Camino pilgrimage route (Taking My God for a Walk), and the other was the story of his working life as a publisher of Christian books (They'll Never Read That). They are both easy to read like stories are, but of course these were things he actually did, they aren't made up, so what he's writing at the moment is his first work of fiction — and he has at least two more planned, he never does things by halves!

So sometimes he talks to me about how he's writing his book — not what he's writing, it's death to a story to share that before it's told.

And the other day he was telling me how he plans and structures and creates and develops and adds twists und so weite, to create a scene — then he asked me about how I go about writing mine.

And all I could think of was that I just go to the place through my imagination, and I watch the people and listen to them, then I come out again and write down what they said and what they did.

So I suppose that's visual thinking, isn't ? 

But I noticed he said at one point yesterday that when he got stuck on resolving part of his story, a very minor character had stepped out of the shadows and fulfilled the rôle. So, is that visual thinking too, or just a visual metaphor — an image — for thinking that wasn't necessarily visual?

I'm going to have to ask Grace (my daughter) to read this and comment — she's very good at knowing about this sort of thing.

Anyway, I think I must be a visual thinker because I do see in my mind's eye pretty much everything I think about.

Let me give you an example. Before I wrote St Luke's Little Summer, I was finding it increasingly difficult to see the men at St Alcuins and the place. And I was sad, because I missed them. Then one day I saw something like the top of a rubbish bin (but sideways on like a picture frame) in my mind's eye, and it was perhaps 18 inches from side to side and made of beige plastic. A bit like one of these apertures would be if you looked straight down onto it.

And beige, and square. Floating in mid-air. And there was a tough, thick membrane stretched across the opening, not added on but part of it. And I was thinking about the men at St Alcuins and William in particular, and he had pushed his arm through this membrane — there must have been a space to do that at the centre, because it wasn't broken, and it stretched the membrane a bit to extend his arm through — and he said, "We are still here, but you can't see us any more." Which was part of how I knew the series was finishing.

That sounds like a dream, doesn't it, but it's how I think (though I don't mean it wasn't real, but it's how it arrived in my mind). Impressions come into my mind. Sometimes they are only words and then I see the words, or sometimes like that odd thing with the arm, they are visual and have words going with them. Is that visual thinking?

Anyway, what I was intending to tell you is that because my mind is very visual in its activities, I find the cover of a book is one of the most exciting parts about it.

I love the bit where it's time to ask our artists for the cover art, and then wait to see what they have made.

My last book in the Hawk & Dove series, The Light of One Lamp, has been written and edited and the text has gone off to Jonathan to be formatted — but he was away in Copenhagen when we sent it, so I believe he's expecting to work on it this week once he's properly back and got his breath. Then we have to proofread and amend any errors, then it'll be good to go.

But while Jonathan was in Denmark, the cover art came through. This was very good of our artists because they have a lot on at the moment. As well as their usual day to day work of letter-cutting at a stone masonry, their workshop at home is filled with queuing projects — two large statues of Our Lady in mid-transformation, a small herd of Gothic-looking reliquaries (very tall with loads of long pointy bits like gnarled stalagmites) that need repairing and gilding, a huge picture frame to be gilded, a taxidermied scene inside a case that needs cleaning and the background refreshing, and two busts of saints to be repainted. But they still managed to shoehorn in my book cover art.

What they sent through to me looks like this.

Which is perfect.

They still have to do the watercolour for the background coloration, and they say it's going to be blue and gold this time. I always trust their instincts which are pretty much flawless because they locate themselves in the Holy Spirit as well as being highly skilled and with a very good eye.

So all that's coming along well and I hope will all soon be ready to publish — though when it comes to publishing a book 'soon' doesn't mean 'tomorrow'. We do everything at warp speed, and it still feels like ages. But we can do in two months what would take 18 months in the world of traditional publishing. Anyway, I'll get back to you about it when it's all up and running, but I thought you might like to see the cover art, because I find it one of the most exciting parts.

I have no idea what my husband's cover art will be like — his book's about werewolves! He'll have a different artist, because my work aligns with the work of my artists, and I don't think his does particularly. I mean, they could draw you anything, but an artist's work has a spirit, doesn't it, a character, a personality, that has to sing in harmony with the story.

Songs for change

 So yesterday I was mulling over in my mind where we are headed as a society, and assessing how well our household has prepared for coming storms, according to the limited resources that are ours.

One thing that stands out for me is that, in the coming days, our deepest and most urgent need will be for one another, and the greatest contribution any one person will be able to bring is a trusting, peaceful and calm spirit — chilled out, cheerful and unafraid.

These considerations brought me back to the glorious Playing for Change Song Around the World videos, that exemplify this spirit of co-operation. Here are my favourites.

 

 

For me these songs make present to the imagination the power of ordinary people around the world to create a reality of harmony and hope, beauty unbowed and undaunted. Whatever happens to us, and however little we have, this can still be our North Star.

The two books I've written in the last year (but have been thinking about for ages), St Luke's Little Summer and The Light of One Lamp, are my own way of making present to the imagination this sense of strength through connection, the kindness by which we lift one another up, how we protect and nourish the dignity of the human spirit, and remain faithful in asserting that we are loved by God.