Thought for the day

Each has his own tree of ancestors, 

but at the top of all sits Probably Arboreal. 

                                                      ~ Robert Louis Stevenson

Absolutely.

But if you're in the mood for a chewier version of this Thought, I loved what this young Jewish man said at his graduation from Harvard. I don't understand that title the YouTuber has given it, because if Ilhan Omar came into it anywhere I missed it — but that's YouTube for you, I guess.

Well-worn phrases

There are shoes you wear every day that become comfortable through familiarity, so much so that you never take them off, you no longer think about them, they're just what you walk through the world in. 

Donovan wrote a song about this back in the 1960s.

But eventually they start to annoy you as the soles crack and holes appear. The day comes to throw them out. And so it is with language — the vocabulary, the phraseology that belongs to the present moment. Eventually it's had its day. Time to move on.

At the present time there are phrases worn like garments, vocabulary fashion crazes adopted for effect.

Tedious beyond belief. Time to throw them out.

Top of the list for me at the moment is that phrase beloved of every politician —

Let me be absolutely clear.

"Let me be absolutely clear" Ha. 🤣  Clear, all right. We can see straight through you. It is so very transparent that we can see you are lying and manipulating us.

It is worn like a lanyard by everyone you should not trust, and just now it seems no political pronouncement is complete without it.

Next on my list — always sets my teeth on edge — is the sarcastic resort of every TV contestant (on Bake-Off, the Sewing Bee, anything like that) —

No pressure!

I am so weary of it that it passes through my head like a convulsion, every single time it resurfaces. Happily, it is slowly beginning to fade, as everyone else gets tired of it too.

After that, I am well weary of hearing (in that curiously robotic voice redolent with the self-righteousness that we know so well) the phrase —

Far-right thugs.

Oh, yes, "Far-right thugs." We know who they are, don't we? Ordinary people. Probably you. Anyone who has the temerity to mind when a lad is stabbed to death or a little girl brutally violated. 

Hot on its heels there usually follows, like the trailing scarves of Isadora Duncan (Did you know that's how she died? One strangled her) another fashion accessory — "Full force of the law". Worn to remind you that you are not safe, that someone who is not you has power over you, that you'd better be quiet, better comply, better be afraid, because someone in a suit or a uniform will ruin your life if you don't kow-tow.

Ah, these phrases; they take me back to the good old days when no Evangelical prayer time was complete without the curious phrase —

Just really

— as in "We just really want to praise you, Lord."

Type it into the YouTube search box.

Look:

Somewhere in heaven an angel murmurs "Seriously?"

"Just really" wasn't honesty, it was a badge, a tribal cry, the signal of a particular religious in-crowd.

Sometimes, of course, you may come across a well-worn phrase that is the sole property of a particular person, because no one else wants it. My prayer partner Margery treasured one such example, an elderly friend from her own younger days, who was fond of saying —

Nobody wants to see my old face.

And oddly enough, Margery said, she was right — they did not.

Margery herself had two well-worn axioms, but they came in verse form. They were still at the comfortable stage and hadn't yet begun to irritate. They were abidingly useful, and return to my mind from time to time.

The first was —

Here lies the body of Jonathan Grey

Who died defending his right of way.

He was right — dead right — as he strode along;

Just as dead as if he'd been wrong.

And the second, a caution from Ogden Nash for those of us who wear trousers; and it is sadly true —

Sure, deck your lower limbs in pants;

Yours are the limbs, my sweeting.

You look divine as you advance —

Have you seen yourself retreating?

(Reading it requires you to adopt an American accent, obviously, to make it rhyme properly and sound as it should).

He was right of course, no doubt about it. But there's a new phrase on the block, adopted and utilised on every possible occasion by the British politician Rupert Lowe. I rather like it, and it applies well to the trouser scenario —

I don't care.

Buying and making

Those who write and speak about minimalism often encourage us to choose experiences rather than things. It sounds like a lofty choice — more elevated and less materialistic — but it's important at the same time to acknowledge that experiences can be very expensive. Those who recommend that choice often suggest spending money on travel or eating out with friends, maybe concerts or theatre; whatever it is they mean by experiences. But look, meals out usually amount to more than double the cost of eating at home, and concert tickets are ever so expensive and you have to pay to get there as well as for admittance. And with travelling — as well as the fuel or train ticket (depending how you go) you have to pay for the Air B&B or hotel, and for the food while you're away. 

In every case there are budget options, of course. For instance, we (people in our family) often go down to the bandstand at the park when Alice is playing her French horn in a summer concert, or Rosie is playing her trombone, and those concerts are free — though you do have to factor in that the musical instruments cost thousands of pounds each in the first place, and the musician had to save for them for years.

Experiences lead to friendships of course — you meet people when you go out — and that can in turn lead to budget option experiences; friends round for a cup of tea, or going for a walk with someone. But even the cheapest kind of experiences I know of — going to church and joining a choir — aren't actually free; there's always a subscription and a collection and other fundraisers of some kind.

So from the point of view of minimalism, experiences accrue no clutter unlike purchasing items, but sometimes people buy things because it's cheaper than the experiences and it's miserable never being able to do or have anything because you're a minimalist but you're too poor to join in with things or travel.

I find the YouTube videos made by young Japanese people illuminating. They typically live alone, and their dwellings are very small — especially the ones who live in Tokyo — and they have to either choose minimalism and make necessity into an art form, a way of life, or live in a mountain of clutter because there's nowhere to put anything. Those who have the smallest apartments, like this young man —

— have to eat out because there's no room to accumulate cookware.

It's something of a balancing act, and some of it is about life choices but some is a matter of necessity.

And then, as well as the choice between objects and experiences, there's a choice between buying and making. 

Again, this depends on other factors — what skills you have and how much money. You can grow a garden instead of buying cut flowers for your home, but you need enough money to get a dwelling with a garden in the first place (and maybe you save up towards that by making it a priority and not buying things like cut flowers). You can make cakes and quiches and bread instead of buying ready-made — but you need time and skill and energy to do that, which you might not have if you needed to get up at six to walk to the train station to get to work and you won't be home until seven that evening, and your weekends are spent gigging at a theatre to make some extra money for house repairs. There are often practical reasons for the choices people make.

Having said all that, though, espousing minimalism and choosing experiences over things and making instead of buying are all very life-enriching.

In our family, we do some and some.

For instance, on a Friday, because Tony and I have a car, I pick up Alice and Hebe (who don't have a car) and take them to two different edge-of-town shops to buy their groceries. The shops are too far to walk and carry groceries home, and are on opposite edges of our sprawling seaside town, and the benighted re-jigging of the buses means to get to even one of those shops would take them over an hour on the bus, and they'd have to change buses which would mean buying two tickets each way — so £12 and two hours for each person. It takes ten minutes max to drive to that shop from their place in our car. 

So that makes a happy experience out of the necessity of buying groceries, and means only one of the two households needs to run a car.

And if someone has a birthday we often get together in one of the family households for afternoon tea; and at least some of the goodies we eat might have been home-made. 

The birthday person is always given lovely presents, and again some of those will have been bought, and some home made. Because none of us has much money, birthdays are a good time to give something the person actually needs. Recently when one of us had a birthday, I gave her some Weleda deodorant spray and Gutology hydroxyaptite toothpaste and a dark grey t-shirt for work, because she asked for those things. The toothpaste costs a lot more than the fluoride sort from the chemist, and the deodorant is more than the cheap ones with aluminium in, so a birthday is a good chance to have these superior products. It's not exactly a fun present, is it, but helpful.

But Alice and Hebe (in addition to something purchased) gave their sister something they had made, and been working on for a while.

They made her a tote bag with a unicorn embroidered on — they drew the unicorn as well as embroidering it and making the bag.

Here's the unicorn stretched on the embroidery frame in process.

Now, the thing is (going back to considering minimalist principles), if a person is going to make rather than buy, and play at a concert we can all go to, and have homemade cake for a party, that does imply buying and housing embroidery threads and fabric and a frame, musical instruments and scores and a music bag and stand, and the instruments themselves, and the cookware and serving plates etc. Minimalism would to some extent throw you back onto purchasing rather than making, even if you have experiences rather than things.

So there's always a choice to be made and a balance to achieve, and then you have to consider what skills you have or want to develop as well as what you can afford in terms of money, time and energy.

But certainly making things and sharing in experiences generates and increases joy. It's also empowering. I was home-educating my children at the time my first novel was published. Back in those days, the publisher would send the author a sample cover to look at before the book came out. I remember saying nothing about it but taking that book cover and wrapping it round a book we already had and putting it on the book shelf — I wanted my children to get the idea that the books on our shelves could be written by us, just as the music at the concert we went to would be played by us, and at church the services would be led and and the organ played and the sermons preached by us, and in due course when they went to school, the teachers would be their parents and grandparents. The food they ate would be grown and cooked by their family, and at least some of the clothes they wore and furniture they used and the pictures on the walls would all have been made by people they knew and loved. This meant that without any lectures or coercion they would naturally grow into people who shape and create their own lives. The Montessori principle, "I can do it myself."

This is very helpful insulation against adversity. You don't have to wait for someone else to give you a job or a certificate or tell you you're good enough. You aren't subject to someone else's opinion. You just get started, you have the confidence. If you know what weeds to eat and what are the most resilient plants to grow and how to propagate them, you're less vulnerable to food shortages — even more if you can hunt and fish which sadly isn't part of our skill repertoire; though I can certainly milk a cow and a goat (two different techniques).

I remember when my children were small, concealing from them that I couldn't sight-read music as their father could. I mean, I could read music up to a point, but not like he could. But I didn't want them to know — I wanted them to grow up assuming everyone could read music, because I knew that if they thought that then they'd easily read music themselves. The best way for children to learn anything is to grow up in a family where everyone else does it, because confidence, assuming that everyone does this, is half the battle.

When our Grace went to school, she came back from her first day rather surprised. It turned out that she'd assumed that she (at the grand old age of four years old) would be going there to teach — because that's what all the family did. It hadn't occurred to her that she'd be one of the pupils. She thought this was how it began.

Hoodies

This is not a very elevated post. Just some thoughts about tops/sweaters/jackets with hoods.

Twenty-five years ago on British television we had a series about clothing choices called What Not to Wear, with Trinny Woodhall and Susannah Constantine. Each episode involved Trinny and Susannah advising their hapless volunteer on how to improve her fashion choices to achieve style transformation and attain dazzling chic.. 

I have forgotten almost everything about it except one opinion they repeatedly expressed, which has always stayed with me. They were profoundly opposed to hooded garments (in fashion at the time). 

"What do you think you are," they'd sneer: "a pixie?"

I've got too old to care a flying fig what Trinny and Susannah think now, but at the time I took their advice seriously and tried to apply the principles they recommended to improve my appearance. So for all these years I have studiously avoided hoodies. "What do you think you are — a pixie?" echoed in my mind every time I considered such a thing.

Well, I have graduated.

I think tops with hoods look nice on me. I am nothing like a pixie or any other kind of sprite. I am more of the "oh that this too too solid flesh would melt" Shakespearean kind of a woman. As my previous husband Bernard remarked the first time we were in bed in our birthday suits together, "Well, you're no sylph, are you?"

You see? I remember things. That's a fairly typical characteristic of a novelist. And I tell you what, I'm a damn sight fatter now than I was when I married Bernard.

So, not a pixie; no. 

But there are other aspects to my physical reality worth commenting on, and who knows but there may be some that strike you as relatable.

My south-sliding bust and ample panniculus combine to make a front elevation to which close-fitting garments are not kind. Further, I nowadays have the all too familiar lizard neck of the older woman utterly uninterested in cosmetic surgery, and there is no garment that suits this feature less than a crew-necked top. Well — a boat-neck maybe, that shudderous invention of cruel designers.

So... well I have several polo-shirts (tops with collars like a shirt, but made of stretchy stuff not woven). In the winter I wear roll-neck sweaters and fleece jackets with stand collars. I can't be doing with scarves, I am no fan of extraneous bits of cloth. High collars or roll necks keep the wind out without flapping or tangling or seeking to become one with my lunch in the way that scarves do.

But hoodies — it's not that I want to wear the hood up, you understand. It's not the hood per se. Trinny and Susannah missed the point (and arguably not only that one). It's the neckline the hoodie creates that is so valuable. Less stark than a V-neck. Not floppy and saggy like a cowl neck (I have enough floppiness and sagginess of my own, thank you very much). Skirting, with just a little helpful height, the lizard bit. At the same time, leaving the option of letting in some air, in case the weather is not cold enough to welcome a roll neck with its double thickness and threat of strangulation.

Hoodies, I now think, are brilliant; and I'm mildly annoyed with Trinny and Susannah for putting me off them, and even more with myself for being suckered in to their nonsense.

This is me in a hoodie a month ago.

You see? It creates a kindly neckline. The Lord only knows what it looks like from behind, I have no idea — but not a pixie anyway! And it probably helps break up the round-shouldered aged stoop.

The only thing I dislike about hoodies is the accursed strings. I hate strings. As you can see in that photo, that hoodie had strings but I chopped them off. 

And then this is a sweater with a high collar that does more or less the same thing (in terms of neckline).

And here's another of my hoodie tops, before I even got up in the morning. A night hoodie. So comfy.

Trinny and Susannah. I think they were just... wrong.

 

More or less

So my grand designs regarding furniture and moving things on evaporated.

Or friend from church who was homeless and had found himself an apartment, as things turned out, didn't want to actually live in that apartment.

He appreciated the wisdom of securing a bolthole for when it rains and freezes, and for storing his few belongings, but the confinement of being indoors did his head in. At least for the summertime, he needed the spaciousness of walking and drifting and sleeping outdoors. You can understand it, can't you?

So he didn't even want to think about the items of furniture and cookware we had made available for him. Food, he needs, from time to time — otherwise he simply stops eating — and someone to sit with him and allow him simply to be. But not furniture.

So I took the chair back up to my bedroom. Well, I say I took it — in fact I needed help from Tony. As armchairs go, it is small and light, but I got stuck with it at the bend of the stairs. I take this as a sign of growing old. Anyway, the return of the chair is appreciated.

It's good, isn't it? Even when things don't work out, they are not wasted.

The little chest of drawers I had taken downstairs ready to go makes handy extra storage and a place for the lamp to stand.

Ah — that cushion (in the middle of the sofa). It is — of course — not actually alive, but it has personality, don't you think?

The crockpot still awaits a new home. No one in the family has need of it. I shall gird up my loins for the task of posting it on the Hastings Give and Bakery, but for now it is in hibernation, in a state of dormancy interrupting its seasons of usefulness, on the floor outside the cupboard where the boiler (US, furnace) lives.

But look, not only did we fail to pass on that furniture and so reduce our in-house liabilities, but we actually augmented them by bringing something else home.

I have had to adjust the light right up so you can see its structure, because it is by nature deep and mysterious. It looks Chinese, in every possible way — it has that square, toad-like ambience of some Chinese aesthetics, it is as solid and secretive as Old Beijing. I mean this table (with the apples on).

( #should_have_been_a_furniture_salesman )   😉

The thing is, where we live people fly-tip whatever they don't want. Broken vacuum cleaners. Defunct mattresses. Old clothes. Cast-off children's toys. Car tyres. They put them out in the street and walk away. Someone else's problem.

That's how we got the blue and green blanket on the sofa further up the  page. Someone tossed it out into the road. I left it for a while in case they'd made a mistake and dropped it by accident (well, you never know). but eventually I brought it in from the rain and washed the mud out of it.

And this little table had been out in the street several days — we kept seeing it when we went for our evening walk. The weather was dry and hot, but then They forecast a thunderstorm, and I began to worry about it; because that table is, in its inscrutable, squat, Chinese way, rather beautiful. It is the kind of furniture you might have if your near relatives were dragons.

So Tony went back for the car, and brought it home. I cleaned it up. It stood in the passage. I showed photos of it to my family. They didn't want it. I considered offering it to Father Aleksandr —

— who is an avid collector with an eye for beauty. Frankly, he will take almost anything.

And then, seeing it adorned with apples like a harvest altar, I realised it was happy here. It wanted to be allowed to stay.

Not the only one.

Brian Walsh fixing the sky

 Brian Walsh comes from Lancashire, but we won't hold that against him.

To be honest I'm not a hundred per cent sure of his name. He was recommended to my husband Tony by someone on Nextdoor, the neighbourhood app you can get. So when we moved in to our house, after a financially disastrous beginning with Irish John who did some good work on our garden for sure, but charged us an arm and a leg and a second mortgage for the privilege, we paused a little while and then my husband found Brian Walsh.

Now, facial recognition is not my hubby's strong point — he doesn't always recognise me, and we've been married twenty years this September — but to go with that, he doesn't always recall names either. So on Sunday he came home after church and told me what an interesting conversation he'd had with Dave, told me all about Dave's doctorate and the book Dave wants to write and how many languages he speaks. I was beginning to wonder if Dave was seeking employment. And he mentioned Dave's wife Emily and her sphere of work.

Now, Dave is moving on to a different town, so yesterday morning we prayed for Dave and Mrs Dave. "Emily?" I said, but my hubby said no, he thought she was called Fiona. Fair enough. Maybe Dave has two wives?

And so, after Irish John had departed with half my hubby's savings and left us with a nice new fence and a mended terrace and a sturdy plinth for our shed and various other jobs done, there was a pause while we recovered from our fiscal wounds and then my hubby found Brian Walsh. But later he said he thought Brian's name is in fact Welch. Or I suppose that could be Welsh. This is the whole problem with oral traditions. Hard to rely on. accurate record-keeping is everything.

But that was how Brian Walsh came into our lives, and what a Godsend he has proved to be. He took away the spaghetti of cabling festooned round our house like a cobweb enveloping a fly. And then he filled all the holes where the cables had gone into the house so that every room could have a telly and Christmas lights could be erected and old telephones had been connected. He filled the cracks in the render and repainted it all and slapped bitumen stuff onto the side gate and replaced the flashing round the base of the chimney where water was getting in, and sorted the barge boards and put back the slipped tile and boxed in the kitchen pipes and replaced the pantry window with one that both opened and had a trickle vent so the pantry didn't go mouldy any more.

Not only that but he told us about the time he'd seen God and about all the hundreds of paintings he'd collected, and he re-ordered the political structures of England to get a better result than the present unfolding fiasco, and he had a nice time drinking tea and eating chocolate biscuits on our terrace with his assistant (and son-in-law) Lee.

Lee is almost as silent as St Joseph, observant, courteous when he does speak, and very brave. This latter I know, because Lee doesn't like heights, but when they put the scaffold up to fix the chimney and the roof, Lee didn't say anything — he just went up the ladder and did the work.

It rained a lot this spring. Day after day of heavy cloud, cold and grey. I got fed up with it and Clarence hated it. Not that Clarence — our cat — likes the hot weather either. In last week's heat wave he had to lie spread out like a dead frog with as much of his belly in contact with the floor as he could manage. Because Clarence has luxuriant fur, and a lot of it; that fur goes very badly with heat waves.

Even so, he finds ways to get cool and at least it's dry. Because if there's one thing Clarence hates above all else, it's when it rains.

He came in one evening back in the early spring, telling me at length that the sky was broken and leaking all over our garden. He was soggy from nose to tail and he didn't think it was funny at all.

But then came Brian Walsh, bringing with him the sunshine and a tower scaffold, fixing our chimney (and our neighbour's while he was at it) and our slipped tiles (and our neighbour's the other side while he was at it). And after Brian had been there followed several solid weeks of glorious sunshine. Until yesterday. 

Now you and I know sunny days cannot continue for ever. What about the flowers? What about the snails? For that matter, what about the frogs and the streams and the summer fruit? Yes, I think we do need the rain; but Clarence does not share this opinion.

He put off going out into the garden for as long as his bladder would hold on, this morning. Eventually he had to give in. 

When he came back inside to find me, Clarence had Things To Say. His fur was wet, his paws were wet, it was even wet under the hedge. The sky was leaking again. The repairs had not held.

Clarence thought maybe it was time to place a phone call to Brian Walsh, and ask him to come back as soon as possible to fix the sky.

I told him I'd think about it.

Little yellow car at the roundabout

In the time the 1970s tipped over into the 80s, my mother had a buttercup yellow Renault 5. It looked like this.

She lived very frugally, focusing with sustained intention on buying and selling houses, which was how she made her living — this included the houses we actually lived in. So she was very sparing indeed when it came to any purchases other than houses. She grew our food. But a car was a (joyous) necessity, because we lived in the Hertfordshire countryside, and she also had a house in Yorkshire, where my father had a mill. The A21 road that runs between Hertfordshire and Yorkshire was a well-worn track for her. She loved driving, and often in the evenings — after the garden and greenhouse were watered, and the hens fed and we'd checked on the sheep, and had supper — she and I would go for long meandering drives round Hertfordshire and Essex and sometimes into Cambridgeshire or Suffolk or Norfolk. We lived near the boundaries of those counties, and she loved driving and chatting. 

Her car before the Renault was a Sunbeam Stiletto, a racy little machine with twin carburettors, in iridescent blue — like this.

It lasted well but finally bit the dust late one night when she was driving our friend Ant (short for Anthony) home after he'd spent the evening at our house. My father was away working abroad most of the time when we were teenagers, and our household was very laid-back and welcoming, usually full of kids who lived nearby. My mother fed them all and gave them lifts home when it got late.

Driving Ant home — so she said when she got back in — there was a loud bang, and looking back they saw glowing coals in the road, so they knew something must have gone wrong (!)

She managed to actually get him home, and drove back as far as the village church, at which point it just stopped, and she had to walk the rest of the way.

She thought it was quite funny, and interesting. My mother was a quiet woman, but she laughed a lot. She was intrepid. 

Nothing daunted her. "I expect it'll be all right," she used to say.

But the blue car was dead, so she moved on to the buttercup yellow one (all her cars were second hand). Yellow was her favourite colour, and I think that was her favourite car of all time.

She still had the little yellow Renault 5 when I went to university at York and then got married and moved to Hastings.

Once our kids were born, we'd drive up to Hertfordshire to visit her in the summer and at Christmas, and in between she'd come down to visit us. She had a house called Apple Tree Cottage at Coniston Cold in Yorkshire when our kids were between about 3 and 9 years old, and during that time we went camping in Yorkshire one summer, to visit my husband's auntie and uncle, who lived near Hebden Bridge.

My mother visited us at the camp site, and took our twins away with her to stay a couple of nights at Apple Tree Cottage, bringing them back when it was the day for us to drive back down to Hastings and her to drive back down to Hertfordshire. She lived in this house in Much Hadham at the time. What you're looking at is three cottages. She owned them all back then, and lived in the white one on the left.

 

There was a fourth, on the far right, which she didn't own. Those are just internet pics. I haven't kept any family photos. But those houses are all still there in the photo album inside my mind. At one point my father lived in the one on the right of the red-brick one, and my sister lived in the red one for a while.

So that was where my mother was driving home to, from Yorkshire.

Back in those days (the late 1980s) the roads weren't so busy, and we were able to drive in convoy, tailing her for 200 miles, all the way down the A21 from Hebden Bridge. 

When we got to the roundabout where the A10 branches off to Hertford and Bishops Stortford, that was her turning. Our road carried on south, another 90 miles down to the coast.

I still remember the feeling of that moment when we reached the intersection together, us following behind her, and she lifted her hand in a cheery wave goodbye, and then the buttercup yellow car peeled off to the left, and our ways parted. That lurch, you feel it in your heart, the realisation that this is for now but one day it will be for ever.

This year — 2026 — and this month (May of this year) has been a time of divergences and partings and ending, of various different kinds, some expected and some surprising.

It has been a time of the ways parting, and I am fairly sure this will be true for you as well as for me. There will be have been deaths or simply the realisation that something has had its season and is finished now.

If that is true for you, for whatever reason, give yourself the time you need to honour what has gone — space to acknowledge it, and a moment to grieve.

Budgeting time and energy.

I think of money, time and energy as the three interchangeable resources we all rely on — but watching the video below made me realise there's a fourth resource: possessions. Items we own, stuff we have in store, is of course a resource and I hadn't factored that in.

So in this video, Madisun Gray (I love her channel) takes us through how she used that fourth resource of possessions — traded it in — to maximise money and time, so her family could create a reservoir of shared memory and transformative experience to enrich their lives.

There have been two times in particular when I've had to focus hard on budgeting time or energy.

My first child was born in the March of 1980, and my second child in the late October of 1981. That was a nice gap, and felt very manageable to me. I had plenty of energy back then. I thought we'd have three children in all, then call it quits. At the time we lived in a small Victorian workers cottage with two bedrooms — it would have been three, but the middle one was at some point made into a bathroom.

So after a similar gap came my third pregnancy, but that turned out to be twins, which was a very different conversation. They were born at the beginning of August in 1983, so for a while we had four children under four years old. Looking after twin babies is a lot more than looking after one. All four of them were in nappies at night. We also had a dog and a cat and a garden, church responsibilities, and my husband was a school teacher. My energy budget was quickly exhausted.

During those days, I remember there being a particular issue around four in the afternoon. My husband had after-school duties because he was a music teacher (choirs, bands etc), so he wouldn't be home until perhaps five o'clock. When he came in we'd have tea (supper; our evening meal), then it would be bath time, then bedtime. But at 3pm the children were awake after their afternoon nap, I'd been doing the usual household chores that I could get on with while they were sleeping, and he wouldn't be home for what felt like ages.

I noticed that I'd get very snappy around 4pm, and I stopped to ask myself why. I realised that I was just tired, and the only source of energy I had left was adrenalin, which is very irritable energy — anger, really. I thought about Jesus, on the road on foot every day, followed and surrounded by people desperately needing his healing touch, gathering in crowds to hear him preach, and I wondered what was the fuel he ran on. I suppose one might say faith or prayer, but the answer that came to me at the time was that Jesus ran on joy; that was his energy. I identified that in times of energy deficit the two options available to us are anger or joy, and that's to do with the orientation of our souls. Writing it down now, I have to admit it doesn't sound very plausible or convincing, but it's what I've always believed since those days.

Owning less helps, of course — fewer chores and more naps are two of the luxuries of minimalism, and living simply makes the money go further, which meant at least I was only trying to be a mother and a house angel, I didn't have an outside job as well.

Budgeting time came into focus for me in the season when my first marriage ended. The odd circumstances of what happened meant that (through no fault of my own) we lost our home and my job, as well as my husband's job. But there were still our five children not yet fledged, so I had to come up with options and solutions and apply them fast.

While I rebuilt my life, I worked in a number of different roles — as a palliative care assistant in a nursing home, as an assistant in a gift shop, writing, and crafting non-standard ceremonies for marriages, funerals and welcome-to-the-world ceremonies for babies. Eventually I was reinstated as a Methodist minister and had pastoral charge of churches again, but I kept on the ceremonies work as well, and it was time-consuming. Meanwhile I was living in a two-roomed apartment with one of my daughters, sleeping on the floor in the kitchen/living-room, and also running a fresh expression of church we called the Universal Glue Factory (because the glue that holds the universe together is love). That room where we lived and I slept and worked and wrote, and we cooked and ate, was also where we held church parties and taught theology classes and had the Glue factory meetings. It was insane.

I had to budget time very carefully, because the ceremonies were paid by fees, so had to be good quality, and often required accompanying leaflets with liturgies or orders of service. There was a lot to do.

At that time, in order to fulfil everything and forget nothing, I timetabled every day from 5am through to midnight. I made weekly timetables on paper, with every hour of every day mapped out and coloured in so I knew what I'd be doing and when. There were some blocks that doubled up. I discovered it is possible to prepare something that needs thinking about while you are asleep. You can instruct your mind to come up with a ceremony or a sermon or a chapter when you lie down to sleep, and it will be there in the morning. 5am is a good time to start, because no one else is up and the phone hasn't started ringing. That's the time to write down what you asked your subconscious to come up with on waking, when you went to bed last night. The other doubling up was meal times. I could check correspondence and pay bills and deal with electronic paperwork while I ate my lunch. I could allocate time to my family over the evening meal. For a while, it was the only way to get through.

Then I married Bernard and everything changed. At that point I was driving around East Sussex running 4 churches and looking after him as he became ill. Then I discovered, when I ran into deficit of both energy and time, that music keeps you going, especially music with a pronouncedly rhythmic beat. I had rock and roll CDs for my car, that kept me awake and functioning when, at ten o'clock at night, I was driving home through the Sussex countryside to check on Bernard.

So — joy, music, and meticulous planning. Those helped me. It's good to have a sense of humour too, because laughter fuels joy. And since you have to have money and you can't stop loving people, there is also that necessity which is the mother of invention. Somehow you get through.

And then, if it feels helpful, I like this as a prayer for letting all the accumulated baggage drop away.

Space, simplicity and budgets

 Most of the time these days I don't think very hard or very often about my space and my belongings — but that's because I now live in a 3-bedroomed house with only one other person, so I don't have to.

Every now and then I look through what I own or cast an eye over the arrangement of our belongings, to see if there's anything I can move on or if I can dispose our furniture to better facilitate how we live and what we do. For instance, now the summer has come and we like to have the doors to the garden open through the day, I've moved our table and chairs nearer the door so that when we sit down to eat or chat or have our morning prayers, we are right there by the fresh air and looking out at the trees and the flowers.

Before we lived here, my allocation of personal space was very small. This wasn't a problem most of the time because I loved my little room, though I do feel able to breathe easier in my larger room here; but there were some challenges to having only enough storage for what I actually used. The biggest difficulty was that in the last five years while I've been ill, trying various different modes of eating to fix my health, and being less active because of pain and tiredness, my weight fluctuated quite a bit. I went through several different sets of clothes because garments no longer fitted or that type of garment no longer looked good — and then guess what everything changed again and I had to start over. Even though I shop on eBay and buy secondhand clothing very cheaply, I spent a lot of money that way. I would say I wasted that money, but I don't think that's true. If I hadn't been content with such a small space, meaning I couldn't store clothing in case I came back to it again, we might have needed a bigger house with bigger rooms, or not been able to accommodate so many people in the house we did have. Instead of renting space I rented clothes, in effect. That's okay.

But during that time, and the many years before when I had only a small allowance of space, there were some principles I found helpful in living frugally and simply and owning few possessions.

I had what I thought of as the Moon in the Sky principle, which is that you can love the moon, admire it and gaze at it, but you don't have to own it or try and bring it onto the earth. It's better to just leave it where it is in the sky. If you are in the homeware department of a store — or the stationery department — you might see many objects you fall in love with and want to bring home. But unless you are actually looking for a colourful mediterranean salad bowl or a hard-backed journal, it's probably a good idea to categorise it along with the moon in the sky, and leave it right there where it is.

My daughter Fi helpfully identified another principle — I consider this a very shrewd observation. She said that if she goes into a shop with lovely clothes or jewellery or other beautiful things, often what she wants to do is show her sisters or friends — to call them over and say, "Look at this!" They would admire it together — and then move on. She realised that there were times when she bought something not because she needed it or wanted to keep it, but to take it home and show everyone. After that it was more or less redundant. I suspect that happens to us quite a lot, and probably has roots in our hunter-gatherer past, when calling the tribe over to look at these juicy berries was part of living effectively and successfully.

And the third principle I want to mention (and then that'll do, I don't want to overwhelm you) is having a financial reservoir. In effect it's being your own overdraft or credit system. A separate bank account where you keep a pool of money to dip into if you run out. So in your main account you have whatever is there to last however long it has to, but if — as so often happens — it doesn't stretch or something unexpected comes up, instead of a credit card or an overdraft you have your pool of money in the separate account, to dip into and then return later, just the same as if you'd used a credit card or an overdraft but with no danger of incurring interest payments. I find it important to keep this reservoir in an actually separate account, because I tend to spend up to whatever limit I can see is in my current account. There are more things I want to spend money on than I have money to pay for, but it puts the brakes on psychologically if I can see it running out in the current account. I also have a third account for savings. All three are empty right now, but no worries — it's nearly the end of the month and we have everything we need. I do also have a back-up fourth option, the joint account I share with my husband that we both pay into each month, saving up for annual costs (like house/car insurance, road tax, etc) and from which we pay the monthly bills like council tax, internet, electricity and so forth. We pay in a little more than is budgeted, so an amount accumulates there as well, for repairs and unforeseen expenses. Right now I owe it £100, but tomorrow is the last working day of the month so I can repay it and get some groceries too.

Please do say in the comments your own strategies for budgeting space and money. Maybe in a separate post we could also think about budgeting time and energy, because those too have limits and require strategies.

Meanwhile, I thought you might enjoy this YouTube video from Madeline Hegedus — I always enjoy listening to what she has to say.

In the video she mentions two things I want to follow up — Becky Truda's excellent channel Minimal Ease, and Adam Grant's book Think Again, which looks really interesting.

The Light of One Lamp

This is the last of the Hawk & Dove books. We are growing old, Tony has Parkinsons, the future looks uncertain. I wanted to be sure the tale was told and these stories were complete, in case we get de-railed by life either ending or continuing with extra difficulties!

I put something of a sprint on to get this one finished, because looking at the world today it seems to me that people are losing the plot a bit when it comes to understanding how to resolve difficulties, how to make peace and live in peace, remembering that the enemy is never flesh and blood, we are all on the same side, one world, one humanity. I wanted to add to this mix a story delineating a path to peace and reminding us to hold our light steady through turbulent times because that's what we're here to do.

As ever, it comes to you with my love, and gratitude for being my kindred along this quiet way.

And please, a reminder friends — an Amazon review is so very helpful if/when you have read the story. Amazon reviews built a wall of protection around the book to keep it safely there.

Amazon UK and on Kindle ebook here.

Amazon US and on Kindle ebook here.

Amazon AU paperback and Kindle ebook.