Security, surveillance and deep sadness.

 I suppose that you, like me, keep a weather eye on what's going on around you, and have observed the breathless speed with which we are being ushered into a regulated, controlled form of existence, in which everything that's not mandated is forbidden. I am dismayed by what I see unfolding around us and I should think you will be too.

I can't remember the exact details to give you chapter and verse, but I presume you will have seen the latest news from the EU parliament   — the EU chat control, giving access to our private messages. This allows them to scan all private messages, within the EU, but there are also treaties with the UK so it extends beyond Europe. It gives permission for all messages to be screened and checked by social media companies, and passed on to government bodies if they think it appropriate. The carefully chosen timing of the EU vote on this optimised the chances of it passing despite its unpopularity, so it is now through and en route to become law once the EU council signs it off. It is ostensibly about child protection, but is part of the rising wave of intrusive surveillance and control. 

It will apply to a variety of platforms and providers; I don't know where the extent of its reach ends. I understand it will affect Google (so, Gmail) and Facebook and WhatsApp. Some email and messaging providers like Proton and Signal are promising privacy protection. The picture is changing and developing rapidly, it's hard to keep up with, you'll need to make your own checks and verifications.

On my Facebook page and in my blog posts and in my email there is not now, and there never has been, anything sinister or predatory, anything corrupt or underhand, anything unkind or even verbally violent. Neither I, nor any of my circle of friends and contacts, is now or ever has been inflammatory or hateful or antagonistic or cruel towards children or adults of any race or ideological affiliation.

But.

In my Gmail, going back to when I started the account around 2010, I have an absolutely massive archive of communications. People — readers of my books, or people who have heard me preach or for whom I've conducted funerals — have come to me through this blog and via my publishers and from other sources, entering private correspondence with me about their woes and troubles, their marital and other relational difficulties, their bereavement and spiritual struggles, their aspirations and fears. They have sent me their contact details so we could correspond. There have been so many that without this archive I couldn't possibly keep track of them. Someone will write to me and say, "Hi, do you remember me? I wrote to you about my husband's illness two years ago." And because I keep an electronic archive I can quickly and easily refresh my memory and pick up the conversation again.

And in the course of time, some of them have died. For instance, there was a reader of my Hawk and Dove books who over time became a friend. The last emails I had from her were first a hasty message to say she had been diagnosed with widespread cancer and had rushed to Amazon to buy all the Hawk and Dove series so she'd have it to read in the hospital, and then second to thank me because I sent her (she was an avid crafter) a parcel of stationery crafting bits to enjoy while she was in the hospital, and the a final email from her mother to say she'd been transferred to hospice care; and then radio silence.

She was just one. I have the emails from so many friends who died, talking about their faith and their pain in terminal illness, courage shining through, and dauntless hope.

I have trans friends, gay friends, talking about their faith journey in a church context not always kind.

These people have shared the depths of their souls with me.

Regardless of how well-intentioned one might imagine the government and the moderators of social media platforms to be, this much I know: it's like Pandora's box. Once you open the lid anything can come out. Personal details can be most useful on the dark web, and can be scoured to train AI — can be used for any purpose whatever. There is no conceivable circumstance in which I would expose such sensitive correspondence from people who have trusted me to public scrutiny.

And you know what that means? I will have to go through the whole lot, thousands upon thousands of such emails, and permanently delete them. I started reading through, but after several days had to accept that there are just too many. I'm just going to have to delete them en bloc. 

I cannot tell you what a grief this is to me, what a sorrow — because it's a memory bank, it's like an external hard-drive for my heart.

Once I've done this, if you have written to me about your family and your struggles, the abuse you have suffered, the heartbreaks, I won't remember; there have been too may such communications to hold them in my mind. I am so, so sorry. It means that now if you write and say, "You know what I told you about my grandson?" — well no, I won't. Because I won't be able to go back and check.

And there have been too many correspondents for me to download all the contact details and summaries of their circumstances. I couldn't track it as effectively as I could in email, and it's too big a task for me.

I have no words for how much this upsets me, or for what I think of the enormity of the political classes that in these days have our lives in their grip. 

But I just wanted to tell you, for two reasons — one because I will now no longer remember your contact details and the life circumstances you have described to me, which breaks my heart; and two because I want you to know that never, never will I permit the trust and confidence you have placed in me be betrayed in such a way. 

There is a poem called Conscientious Objector by Edna St Vincent Millay, which I believe to be in the public domain, so I can give the text of it here. It expresses how I feel at the moment.

I shall die, but 
that is all that I shall do for Death.
I hear him leading his horse out of the stall; 
I hear the clatter on the barn-floor.
He is in haste; he has business in Cuba,
business in the Balkans, many calls to make this morning.
But I will not hold the bridle
while he clinches the girth.
And he may mount by himself: 
I will not give him a leg up. 

Though he flick my shoulders with his whip,
I will not tell him which way the fox ran.
With his hoof on my breast, I will not tell him where 
the black boy hides in the swamp.
I shall die, but that is all that I shall do for Death;
I am not on his pay-roll. 

I will not tell him the whereabout of my friends 
nor of my enemies either.
Though he promise me much, 
I will not map him the route to any man's door.
Am I a spy in the land of the living,
that I should deliver men to Death?
Brother, the password and the plans of our city
are safe with me; never through me shall you be overcome.

Please continue to write to me, freely, as you always, have, knowing that I will delete your correspondence or start saving such communications offline where they cannot be read.

The busy road

 On Friday evening, Tony and I went down to the sea to walk along the promenade in the breeze as the sun was going down. The sea always brings joy to the soul, its life and power is so clear to feel, and the strength of its rhythm as wave after wave rolls in to the shingle shore.

Plus the prom is flat, and Tony's walking isn't so good these days, so it means we can have a stroll of enough length to stop our muscles turning to custard, without the added challenge of the hills that are everywhere in this coastal town.

We parked the car in the usual place (free parking there — yay!) then sauntered along as far as the spot where there's a natural end to that particular stretch, and the path slopes upward to the Next Bit. A convenient concrete planter offers a finish line and we slap our hands on it in triumph, then turn round to potter back to the car.

At this convergence of ways where we turn, another path comes up from the lower level by the actual beach, and on that evening a man was coming up it with his dog, just ahead of us.

The man was wearing tracksuit trousers, but with nothing on his top half. He was bronzed and muscular, very lean and fit, clearly someone who worked out plenty. His arms were decorated with old tattoos. His face was firm — not hard exactly but you wouldn't bother picking a fight with him. His hair was shaved right up the sides of his head, with a Mohican crest left running along the whole of the top down to the nape of his neck. 

His dog went with him rather well. It was a bull mastiff, white with random buff-coloured blotches, just as muscular and uncompromising in appearance as the man, with that lounging, rolling gait mastiffs have, swaggering alongside him up the path from the beach.

And then they reached the top.

The man bent down towards the dog, who came to see what was required. He reached for the dog's collar to attach the leash he held ready, saying gently and quietly, "You need to have this on now, because of the busy road."

❤️

Destinations and directions

 What I mean by a destination is a static condition, a plateau, the state of being where you have arrived and no longer need to press on.

What I mean by direction is a dynamic condition, a pathway, where you are travelling towards what you seek but the terrain alters as you go. There may be obstacles to go round, you may have to retrace your steps and try a different route; the direction of travel is an education of itself and a continually changing and evolving state of being.

I was mainly discipled to see the Christian faith as a destination, a fixed condition that was more like a home to live in than a road to walk along. The Bible was viewed similarly by those who taught me. 

So preachers and teachers would say "The Bible says..." or "The Bible teaches..." about such issues as authority, women in the church, marriage, parenting, financial giving, how to dress, and other similar topics of social importance.

The usual method was to take a proof text, and extrapolate from that a fixed governing principle. So, for instance, I'd receive the teaching to "Honour your father and thy mother so that your days may be long in the land the Lord your God is giving you." Or, "A woman must not wear men’s clothing, and a man must not wear women’s clothing, for whoever does these things is detestable to the Lord your God." And such texts (and many others) were referenced and quoted as abidingly true because they are in the Bible and the Bible is our book of truth.

But then I gradually realised as I studied the Bible more, that it is essentially the book of a travelling people, not a settled and static people. Its truth does indeed abide, but it also develops. It's not so much like a building that once completed remains the same, it's more like a tree that starts as a sapling and changes in form as it matures.

So, for instance, people often say the Bible teaches that marriage is between one man and one woman for life. But that isn't quite right. The Bible has righteous and holy men in it who have many concubines and several wives, have sexual relations with their wives' slaves to procure a child for inheritance, and in no way are these scenarios presented as sinful. The teaching develops until we come to the New Testament advice that a deacon should be the husband of only one wife.

Or if we consider the Bible teaching about women not wearing men's clothes; that is taken to mean women should wear skirts and men should wear trousers — but how do we apply the rule in a time when women's trousers have come into existence? 

There are developments and transformations in the Bible; for instance there's the Binding of Isaac, which seems to me to be a way of embedding in the oral tradition (and I'm not implying the incident didn't take place) that the old Canaanite practice of child sacrifice is something we are leaving behind; or there's the occasion when Jesus's mother and brother come to claim his attention and send word that they are outside (to section him, actually) — looking round he asks who are his mother and his brothers, and avers that the gathered listeners are his mother and brothers (so much for 'honour thy father and thy mother); or there's the time in the Book of Acts when Peter has a vision from God telling him to move on from the dietary laws of the books of Moses, that it's now okay to eat as the Gentiles do. 

I (and you too, no doubt) could fill a whole book with the detail of how practice changes and develops while the underlying biblical principles hold fast, because practice walks on two feet — the abiding holy truth of scripture and the constantly evolving terrain of circumstance.

The helpful thing is to absorb and trace the journey of the people of God through the unfolding scriptural story — for instance, trace from the books of the Law teaching that a women be stoned to death for adultery clear through to Jesus putting a stop to that by saying "Let him who is without sin cast the first stone." We learn from this that we start out with the revelation that adultery is something God seriously doesn't like, but we journey on to a more constructive response to it, lifting away the violence, giving people the chance to start again.

The dependable truth is in the whole story, not in the proof text. It's revealed by the path the people walk, by their direction of travel.

I was thinking once more about this question of destination versus direction today as I was listening to a man who aspires to one-bag minimalism talking on YouTube. He's not yet where he wants to be, he still has a hundred or so possessions, and it's taken him a number of years to arrive at where he is now from where he started out with a normal houseful of stuff. He wants the freedom, he wants the flexibility; and he sees that with patience and perseverance he will keep going forward, passing the milestones, always moving on with his sights set on simplicity and freedom. The destination isn't wholly clear, but the immediate next stretch of the road is.

One of the reasons I love minimalism is that it is all about freedom and choice, and I see a strong focus on freedom in the New Testament, and I see that choice is fundamental to Christian discipleship.

If you picture in your mind a child's see-saw (I think they have a different name in the US) — 

On that see-saw, in the life of every one of us, possessions sit on one side and options sit on the other. That doesn't make it wrong to have possessions, it just means that the more you have the fewer options you will have. Inevitably. Options sink down as possessions rise up; and as possessions reduce so options increase.

In my own life I have reached a place of inching slowly forward, trying to get the balance right, optimising freedom and choice without letting go of practicality.

I remember that Jesus observed, "No one can follow me unless he gives up everything he has." And I can't help noticing that owning nothing was essential to the life he lived and what he was able to achieve. At the same time, I recognise that (like all one-bag minimalist nomads) he relied on someone else having a house and offering shelter and putting food on the table for his benefit. Simon Peter's mother-in-law, for instance. Simplicity as a way of life is complex and connected — simplicity with responsibility is the direction of travel, and that passes through changing terrain. Like a tree, like a river, like anything organic and alive, it looks different in different seasons and takes on new forms as the landscape changes. Even the River Thames is somewhere a mountain spring, and a great oak nourished by its own falling leaves will use the vitality to reclothe itself at the end of the winter.

A better word than cheap.

 I once stayed the night with my friend Paul in Brixton (in his house, not in the prison). It was some years ago when he and I were both training on the Southwark diocese ordination course — the one set up by John Robinson, who wrote the wonderful book about John's gospel, The Priority of John. If you have never read it and you come across it for sale — an aged priest's effects being tossed out after his death, or on Abe Books or somewhere — grab a copy; it's worthwhile.

So there we were because Paul had kindly said he'd take me dancing in Heaven (which he did). When I discovered in the course of our college sessions that there was a place in London called Heaven where you could go dancing, I absolutely wanted to go. Heaven, it turned out, was a very dark nightclub under the arches near to Charing Cross station. But it was the idea I loved — dancing in Heaven. So we did that until the small hours one summer night and then went back to Paul's place.

He had the window open because it was July and very hot, and he went to sleep but I had so many thoughts filling my head and I needed to process them first. So I guess we laid down to sleep around three, and because of the time of year the dawn was about four. 

Near Paul's place in Brixton, under the auspices of Lambeth Council, there is Brockwell Park. In the morning when Paul surfaced from sleep, we went for a walk there. He wanted to show me the rose gardens, where you could sit on a bench, surrounded not only by roses but also by flocks of sparrows, confident and unafraid. This was a cheering sight because for a while in the UK the sparrow population declined significantly, and to see so many of them made me happy.

But the sparrows were evident not only in Brockwell Park in the morning, but during the preceding night, outside Paul's open bedroom window.

Sitting on the wall that surrounded the small yard, all through the night someone was saying: "Cheep. Cheep. Cheep. Cheep. Cheep. Cheep. Cheep." Occasionally varied by: "Cheep!" 

Reading blogs and watching YouTube videos on the topic of minimalism, as I often do, I am sometimes reminded of that night and that bird.

Some minimalists see minimalism through an aesthetic lens, primarily focusing on home décor and their chic wardrobe full of thoughtfully acquired good-quality pieces; some consider it in terms of survival (how small a Tokyo flat it is possible to live in, or how to make a car your primary residence); others see it in terms of productivity, applying models like Greg McKeown's Essentialism to their business practice and life organisation; some, like the one-bag nomadic minimalists, are mainly interested in freedom. There are all sorts of good reasons to be a minimalist.

But within the ranks of minimalists there exists a subset of (mainly) women whose focus is on frugality. They have discovered that if you have less, eat out less, buy less, and cook with fewer ingredients, why then, you spend less money.

Today I watched a minimalist YouTuber, a thin, meek looking woman with a gentle voice, having showed us her rack of half a dozen garments, allow us to run our eye along her kitchen shelf bearing oats, rice, beans and er... well, that was about it. We watched as she tipped some rolled oats from the jar into her saucepan on the stove in the supremely tidy and uncluttered kitchen, and then added quite a lot of tap water, and a very small spoonful of what I suppose was brown sugar. I cannot tell you what she did next because at that point I wandered off.

But what occupied her attention for the most part was how much things cost. Her food was definitely budget range (the sort that may not make you live longer but will certainly make you feel as if you had), and her clothes were made of hardwearing materials so she could get the most wear out of them. Her couch was covered with one worn out sheet on top of another, so the holes were in different places as they fulfilled their duty of protecting the couch from dirt. And her hobbies were chosen to minimise financial outlay. 

All good stuff and I have no doubt I could learn a lot from her — damn it, I've just paid a man £250 to cut back our hedge!

But even so, she brought back to my mind that sparrow, singing its rather limited song all through the summer night in Brixton twenty-five years ago.

I am all for minimalism, always in principle and on-and-off in practice because I do like to enjoy life, but I think "appropriate" is a better word than "cheap". And of course minimalism has the advantage of giving you greater freedom to choose what you consider appropriate. If you live simply and quietly for the most part, then you can afford to pay a man £250 to cut the hedge. 

One of my daughters, who is so skilled at minimalism she could write her own blog about it, has for some years lived in a shed. It costs about half as much as living in a flat. But look, she's a grown-up woman, she's just turned forty, she has a full-time job and is training to be a psycho-synthesis counsellor in her spare time; she gets tired. Living in a shed is hard work. She can do it, yes, but is it appropriate at this stage in her life? It makes me — I who am all for minimalism in all its forms — feel very happy and content that she has decided to upgrade her accommodation to something with its own proper bathroom and kitchen and washing machine. This, to my mind, is a hallelujah level of appropriate. And it's because of the skilled practice of minimalism that she can afford it.

And talking about hedges (which you may have noticed were occasionally mentioned in these musings) has brought back to my mind a glorious conversation once relayed to me by Bernard, to whom I was briefly and happily married before his death a couple of decades ago in the summer of 2004.

He told me about his cousin who had been working in the garden, mowing the lawn and trimming the hedges while his wife cooked their lunch. You are no doubt aware that mowing a lawn is incomplete until you have also trimmed the edges with a tool of this sort.

And when lunch was ready and his wife went out to admire the results of his labour (because, can a tree really fall in the forest if there is no woman to admire the work of the man who cut it down?) their conversation went like this:

He: "I've finished."

She: "No you 'aven't. You 'aven't trimmed the edges."

He: "I 'ave trimmed the 'edges!"

She: "You 'aven't! Look! You 'aven't done the edges."

He: "I 'ave done the 'edges!"

She: "No you 'aven't! Look!

He: "What? Oh — the edges! No, I 'aven't trimmed the edges yet — I'll do that after lunch.

May your day be blessed, your communication successful, your lunch be delicious, your aitches be clearly sounded, and all your choices be entirely appropriate.

The stuff

 So I have spent the last couple of weeks reviewing our home and the belongings inside it, thinking what to keep and what to move on.

A priority was to dispense with anything I couldn't easily move. 

We had a huge armchair.

In my room I had a very heavy chest of drawers.

In one of our downstairs rooms was a pretty but heavy chest of drawers with a marble top. The (removable) top by itself was quite a weight, and it was the sort of piece of furniture you have to walk across the room because you can't lift it.

So those have either gone or been spoken for and are now awaiting collection. Our beds are heavy and our sofa and Tony's armchair, but hey — those things have to stay or life would become too uncomfortable.

I went ruthlessly through my clothes and got them down to a small collection of garments that all go together, wash easily, and layer to accommodate the changes in weather. Consequently I was also able to move on a collection of excellent clothes hangers.

I chucked out all the stupid little knick-knacks from the kitchen — the soup whizzer and egg beater and tea-bag squeezer and potato peeler and toaster etc etc. We have a knife to chop veggies for soup. We have a grill to make toast (if we ever eat bread again, which I doubt). We have a fork to whisk eggs.  All that sort of thing has gone. 

I had some books picked up second-hand from a stall at Sainsburys that, honestly, I will never read. I've moved them on.

What remains is relatively easy to organise and find and look after. I've still got too many socks, because not only has our Alice knitted me several beautiful pairs over the years, but also my hubby was tossing out his very good Bridgedale hiking socks at some point, and I stupidly said I'd have them (so now I do have them).

But overall we are left with a house that feels easy to clean and that has plenty of peaceful breathing room.

I have two uh-oh categories left. There's a box of stationery — I'll definitely use the gift-wrap, but maybe not so much the accumulation of unused envelopes in random shapes. I have several pads of writing paper in there, and I don't send many handwritten letters these days (but I might, given the extent that Big Brother has decided to watch us all whether we like it or not). And I have a bigger collection than is ideal of letters received that meant a lot to me. Oh — and in terms of digital clutter, I'd be most happy to move on from Gmail except that I have such a massive archive going back sixteen years, tracking all my professional correspondence and medical history and personal interactions with people who contacted me through my blog, plus the correspondence detailing various family interactions — all of it important and amounting to thousands of emails. It would require a lot of courage to walk away from it and close the door. What Carlos Castenada said in Journey to Ixtlan:  

“I have no routines or personal history. One day I found out that they were no longer necessary for me and, like drinking, I dropped them. One must have the desire to drop them and then one must proceed harmoniously to chop them off, little by little. If you have no personal history, no explanations are needed; nobody is angry or disillusioned with your acts. And above all no one pins you down with their thoughts. It is best to erase all personal history because that makes us free from the encumbering thoughts of other people. I have, little by little, created a fog around me and my life. And now nobody knows for sure who I am or what I do. Not even I. How can I know who I am, when I am all this?”

That has been food for thought for me for decades. So what it comes down to in the end is that the biggest challenges for me are socks, stationery and email. Hmm. How to address it?

Christ's Hospital

 Do you know about Christ's Hospital school? It's sometimes called the Bluecoat School. It was founded in 1552 by King Edward VI, established as a charity school to give an education to disadvantaged children. It's in Horsham, in West Sussex (I live in East Sussex). 

When my children were little I had vaguely heard of Christ's Hospital, but didn't know what it was like or where it was. I didn't know that they still wear the 16th century school uniform, or that it was a superb example of the best of multi-ethnicity without the nightmare of multiculturalism.

If I'd grasped as a young woman what that school was like, I'd have moved heaven and earth to get my kids a place there.

Here they are, the children of Christ's Hospital, marching in to lunch.

Danshari

 Danshari — that composite Japanese word meaning three things (all verbs): refuse, dispose, separate. It's written like this.

It is by itself more or less a minimalist manifesto for walking towards simplicity, living lightly.

It came to mind again this week, because our borough council has done a marvellous thing, and hooked up with a company that collects stuff we need to throw out, taking it away to sell on through charity shops, for good causes. They take — bagged up separately — books, clothing and bric-à-brac. We can book a collection online, pack up the items for disposal, and put them out labelled so they know to take it. The collection will be between 8am and 5pm, but the evening before they will email a 2-hr time slot. Then we can put it outside for them, or they will knock on the door to collect — very helpful for rainy days!

My general experience of life is that Stuff finds me. I have bright ideas for kitchen gadgets, or someone gives me a lovely present, or there's a book I want to read, and before long an accumulation of bits and pieces has gathered round without my ever having really intended it. 

But since I don't particularly enjoy housework, and have no wish to spent my time organising and dusting and curating my accumulation, from time to time I have to run it through a danshari process: saying no to even objects I regard with affection, separating out what is daily useful from what is just here because I brought it home, and disposing of enough items until our house can breathe again, simple to clean and calm to look at.

The doorstep collection people are coming on Wednesday, so I have been going through my belongings, imposing a radical cull. They can't take furniture, so some larger items have found their way into the world by other means. A huge plastic box with a lid, and a big laundry basket, have gone to a neighbour packing up her worldly goods to move house. Two folding tables have gone to two people from the Facebook Hastings Give-and-Takery, and a slow cooker and a drinks dispenser went by the same route. Yesterday morning early a woman came to collect a strong and sturdy footstool which she wanted for a step allowing her eighty-nine-year-old mother to climb in and out of their camper van because she's taking her on holiday. Someone came for the low Chinese-looking unit we rescued from the roadside. Bit by bit things have gone on their way.

It's involved a lot of thought and photographing and posting online and waiting at home for people to come by and collect, but it's very much worth it. In this world of mass production, moving things on and sharing them out is essential, otherwise we'll all drown in clutter.

The element of danshari I am not very good at is the refusing part. I'm well practiced at separating and disposing, but I think I need to exercise my refusing muscle a bit. And I am fairly certain we still have more belongings in our house than we really should. In fact I can think of several right now — but the snag is they are things that have emotional significance (though not for me), so I must be cautious and tactful and slow about detaching them. Their time will come, though.

We love our little house, but in another year or two we will probably need to move to somewhere where the house and garden are on one level, no flights of steps inside or out, and where the garden is a lot smaller than the one we have here. We are very happy here for now, but we know that we will need to move one more time to accommodate health issues and growing old. With this in mind, I am determined to reduce our store of belongings to the smallest and simplest I can get it, so as to maximise our freedom and flexibility as we travel the road ahead.

What happened next — Carol wanted to know.

Writing stories has brought me many blessings, not the least of them being the people from far-flung places around the world who find their way to me — usually through this blog — and become dear friends, mostly via email correspondence. 

One such friend, Carol, one of the people to whom The Light of One Lamp is dedicated, wrote to me a day or two back, wanting to know if in due course Nicholas had his sight gradually restored, and if he did ever become a monk in the end.

It occurred to me that some of you might have wondered the same thing. This is what I was able to tell Carol:

Yes, he did; both those things. His eyesight was never that wonderful, but he faithfully followed what he was told to protect his health, and obtained signficant improvement, enough to greatly ease his practical daily difficulties.  

The first thing Abbot John did when he'd finished his recuperative stint in the infirmary was to receive Nicholas into the community as a postulant. When Nicholas entered, he gave Gervase Bonvallet (who was very pleased with them) his beautiful blue woollen hood with the liripipe, and his green and blue surcotes. He carried on working in the pottery, becoming much better at that craft than Brother Robert, who was proud of him and didn't mind at all. Nicholas took his simple vows in 1327 and his solemn vows in 1328. His name in religion was Brother Barnabas. His reception into that community was a pride and joy and massive relief to his mother Melissa; he made the right choice and lived very happily there. Seeing him around the place continued to be an eery reminder of his grandfather, whom he so resembled.

 

And — I don't think I would have expected this, but it did happen — over time Brother Cyril was priested, and he became the abbot of that community in due course, after Abbot John. I don't yet know the circumstances that made them decide he should go to the university and become a priest, but I do know what happened that first drew their attention to his inner resolve and authority.

In fact, Cyril was their abbot when St Alcuins reached the dread year of 1348. At one point I intended to write the story of that — a book that would have been called The Plague Angel — but I didn't have the heart to write it in the end, because they were all lost, that whole community, as the Black Death swept the country. It was heartbreaking. They were just gone, doors banging in the wind, all the accoutrements of a life left behind. I realised you wouldn't want to read about that.

Brother Michael was still their infirmarian then, and John (an old man by that point) worked alongside him after he'd done his stint as abbot and handed over to Cyril. It — the plague — became the scenario Michael sometimes had nightmares about. But they were steadfast and brave, continuing quietly, doing their best and caring for one another, right through to the end, putting one foot in front of the other, persevering in love and in prayer, prioritising kindness.

That would have been an awful book though, wouldn't it? People go to St Alcuins for comfort and support, to lift their spirits and think about how to live faithfully. I don't think that chronicle would have helped! So I didn't write it down.

But meanwhile, from time to time I will still go there and talk to them and watch how they live in the timeline where I can find them, and I can tell you about that if you like.

The need to be sharp as dragons.

 I wonder where you get your health information?

Before 2020, if I had any health issues I would make an appointment to see our family doctor, and follow whatever advice or instructions they offered.

So much has changed since then. 

Our trusted and beloved doctor retired before the pandemic hit, and since that time there has been little consistency of care and getting an appointment is so difficult that I no longer even try.

Then as we came out of the pandemic we had a very welcome (to some of us) rollout of a preventive procedure we trusted and were eager to take. Many of us have been ill ever since.

For myself, the years since 2021 have been spent primarily managing illness that settled into chronic illness, searching for solutions from all the usual trusted and respected sources — our family doctor surgery, hospital consultants, doctors working in the private medical sector, and the testing facilities they recommended. All this left me a lot poorer and no more well. By the end of 2023, after numerous scans and blood tests, randomly prescribed antibiotics and anti-depressants, and endless visits to kind and courteous but clearly unengaged doctors, I realised I was on my own with this.

For 'on my own', read 'Youtube and Facebook'. 

I steadily gathered information and followed a number of false trails until eventually I found my way to a diagnosis and therapeutic pathway that is gradually restoring my health. It's long and slow (and will continue to be so), but every week is now better than the week before, and I have stretches of days when I am no longer frantic with pain. Every now and then comes a day when I have very low levels of pain, and can even go to sleep at night without a TENS machine attached to me. I think I'm getting better, and without information sourced on Youtube and Facebook, it is highly unlikely that would have happened.

But through the last year we have watched the rise of AI, which has indisputably changed the Internet — what you can find, what you can access, and what 'information' is offered.

In case you, like me, have had to rely heavily on self-sourced material gained primarily from Youtube and Facebook, I invite and strongly recommend you to watch this video from Max German (whose work I highly respect).

As Jesus warmed us, we need to be as sharp as dragons as well as being as simple as doves. Trust is a good thing in this world, but we have to be careful where we place our trust.

Max Ehrmann, in his poem Desiderata, observed:

... Exercise caution ... for the world is full of trickery...

... but let this not blind you to what virtue there is...

Absolutely.

If ever there was a time to pray daily for discernment, I think it is surely now. At the moment the information we need is still there for us, but we have to know who to trust and where to look.

Hotheaded

 We live in a nice little house that works very well but has one persisting problem. It is prone to damp and thus to mould. 

Of course this has been exacerbated by the modifications encouraged in the modern world. There's nothing like installing UPVC replacement windows and filling cavity walls with foam for encouraging damp. Both those things have happened to our house.

So in the spring, autumn and winter we have de-humidifiers, one upstairs and one downstairs, that we run extensively to draw out the impressive quantities of water accumulating in the internal atmosphere of our home.

Our pantry off the kitchen had actually fluffy mould like small forests, but we fixed that by a) washing down the walls with bleach, b) not filling it with stuff, and c) changing its window for one that actually opens — and opening it. 

Now we don't get mould.

This summer is part of a wave of hot summers, much like the hot summers we had in the 1970s and again in the mid-80s; and the summer Bernard died, 2004, was shimmering with heat like this year, as well. It has been so hot — by British standards, I mean; I'm only talking about 25^o-30^o Celcius, which is 77^o-86^o Fahrenheit.

So I began to think longingly about getting an air-conditioning unit, even though we do get a lovely through breeze in our home whenever any breeze is blowing.

I looked up on Amazon about small and affordable air-conditioners, and was not filled with enthusiasm by what I read. 

It turns out they are merely fans sitting above a reservoir of water into which you can include ice cubes. So they make a breeze that wafts the moisture from the tank of water around your home as the heat evaporates it.

Wait, what? We spent all autumn, winter and spring sucking the water out of our house and now, just as the sun is drying it out thoroughly, here's a way to put it all back? No thanks.

It made me realise, too that the Hollington stream flowing along behind the houses just beyond the foot of our garden is in effect a giant air-conditioner. Mature trees grow along its banks, the heat evaporates water from it, and the sea breezes we have here make the trees into fans distributing the resulting coolness. I was intrigued and impressed. All for free as well.

So I moved on to thinking, well, if we actually live adjacent to a massive natural air conditioner, and I don't want to make the house damp, so I'm not buying one from Amazon, what can I do to get cool?

Our Grace, who feels the heat terribly, always likes to put a cold can of drink against the back of her neck; it makes her feel better. So I thought about that.

Our brains must be kept at a stable temperature; the human body goes to some lengths to protect the stability of brain temperature. The rest of the body can cope with a much wider fluctuation.

This means that in the winter, you can often keep your whole body warm just by wearing a woolly hat. If you keep your brain warm in cold weather, your body doesn't need to keep sacrificing the heat it has generated to protect the stability of brain temperature. Bald men need beanies.

So I reasoned it should follow that if I wrap an icepack from the freezer in a dish towel, and place it on the base of my throat or the back of my neck, where all the blood vessels and spinal cord etc come near the surface en route to my brain, that would keep my brain temperature stable, which in turn would mean the rest of my body wouldn't have to keep ferrying heat away from my head and making the rest of me too hot.

It's also a lot cheaper than buying an air conditioner off Amazon and getting a mouldy house thrown in for free.

I tried this — with the ice pack — and it does seem to work.