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 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 thoughtful acquired good-quality pieces; some consider it in terms of survival (how small a Tokyo flat it is possible to live in, 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 form 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 flat 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 have 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  a couple of decades ago.

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.

Heatwave sympathy

 Sympathy to all fellow English folk for whom this heatwave feels like an actual illness — especially hyper-mobile friends; I imagine that (like me) you just have to remain as near horizontal as possible until it eases off. I managed to remain upright long enough to water the herbs and veggies and flowers in pots, then crashed out again. 

It's supposedly easing off toward the end of the week.

😓 😵‍💫 😬

Meanwhile, keep up the electrolytes, especially the sodium.

A song for these days. Prayers, please.

 Never give up.

Your prayers requested please for our homeless friend, who has moved out of our area and messaged today his intention to commit suicide. 

May God's host surround and protect him, may God watch over him, may Jesus walk with him.

Waiting and carrying

 Sometimes I dream of a time when I neither have to wait for anyone nor carry anything. It hasn't happened yet.

I remember the days when my children were small — before I learned to drive and had a car — when, through my living room window I would see my neighbour walking along the street with nothing in her hands. It was beyond my imagination that this could ever happen to me. Everywhere I went I had a toddler on my hip or a baby in my arm, or a stroller and a bag of nappies/snacks/wipes/toys. 

Sometimes, coming home up the hill from the bus stop, carrying four bulging bags of groceries, I didn't feel certain I could make it all the way to our house — I wasn't strong enough, the hill was too steep, the bags were too heavy. But I managed it because there was no one else, no one to help, so what can you do?

But those days have passed. I had learned to drive by the time my first husband left me in my early forties, and a result of his departure was that for the first time I got to choose my own car. No more cast-offs from my mother-in-law or navigating the country lanes in a massive Volvo estate (husband's preference).  

I got a zippy little Nissan Micra like the one that belonged to the Classics teacher in the school where I'd worked as a chaplain. I used to look at her car and wish I could have one the same. And once my husband left, I did. I loved that car. From then on I no longer had to carry everything with me and travel by bus. I could roll up to the edge-of-town supermarket and get as many bottles of milk and packs of toilet paper as I wanted, because I could just toss them in the back and drive home. How wonderful was that? 

So I don't have to carry much any more, but I still have to wait.

I remember being at York University when I was nineteen, Ken Roberts coming by (also a student then). I still see him, an elderly man nowadays, he lives in our town. He stopped and asked me what I was doing — because I was just standing there, in the foyer of Vanbrugh College. "Waiting for Roger" (who became my first husband and the father of my children), I said. 

Every time I saw Ken in college I was waiting for Roger. I spent many hours of my life waiting for Roger. Waiting for him to come home from school (he was a teacher) so I could give everyone supper and bath the kids. Waiting for him to come by with the car and pick me up from the roadside where I stood with bags of groceries. Waiting on windy street corners for a lift home from preaching somewhere in the Methodist circuit. Waiting maybe twenty five minutes, maybe three quarters of an hour...

I came new to this town — Hastings — when I was carrying my first child, waiting for her to be born. It's a seaside sprawl of roads and buildings, straggling along the coast. Unlike the compact medieval market town of York, Hastings resembles a trailing drift of seaweed. Everywhere is a long way from everywhere else. I didn't know anyone here except my in-laws then, but I made friends with other young mothers. On Thursdays I would catch the bus up onto the Ridge to see my new friend Carole. I would wait patiently for Thursday to come round, the day I got to see another adult, a friend. I remember waiting at the bus stop, Rosie as a toddler holding my hand on the narrow pavement, Grace as a baby strapped to my body in the sling. There was a bus only once an hour, and sometimes it didn't come at all — and we would have to trail home, Rosie screaming, Grace asleep.

That was forty-five years ago, but today I am still waiting. My (current, different) husband has gone out but someone has to be home for the tradesmen working on the roof. I can't get too involved in anything because they intermittently need attention. So I am waiting until later, until they have finished, until they go away. My husband has arranged for them to brief us on the work they have completed when he returns home at 12.30. He says he will try to be prompt (and he always is, and is a man who does his best in every respect).

In the afternoon he has another appointment.

I wonder when we will have lunch, and how it will materialise, if I have to be part of the builder's briefing but we have to eat before my husband goes out. I have no idea.

I have turned this over in my mind. I think if I assemble everything and start cooking, if I get the timing right then it can be not quite ready but not going cold or burning, and I can get back to it in time to serve up before my husband has to go out again. Meanwhile I will be ready with cups of coffee for the tradesmen from time to time in the course of the morning. I will not allow myself to concentrate on anything that engages my attention. I will remain on duty.

So I am waiting, to get the timing right, to weave through the inflexible concrete posts of masculinity that trust me to be ready when they need me but otherwise in the background not impeding their complex lives balancing important and pressing obligations. Cheerful. That is what men want women to be, primarily. Cheerful. 

Can you tell, I do not feel cheerful today?

I remember a day when we had builders in when our kids were little, and I was similarly occupied as a handmaiden. There to let them in to answer any questions as and when they arose, to make coffee and tea and serve snacks.

"Day off, is it?" the builder asked me kindly.

I wish.

Waiting. Carrying. Waiting and carrying. These two unacknowledged and unnoticed commitments are so very much part of the lives of women. 

But I also remember a day when instead I asked someone else to wait. It was when my second husband Bernard was in hospital, terminally ill. The doctors had cut a hole in his throat for a tube and offered to cut out his kidney — but no, he was coming home. The consultant came round and said he could leave. It was at the end of July. And I... I said he'd have to wait. My twins' twenty-first birthday was on the third of August. Before I plunged into juggling round-the-clock care of Bernard with pastoring four churches, I wanted to just pause and make sure they had the best birthday. Treats. A lovely afternoon tea. Gifts. Time dedicated to them, not pushed aside because someone else needed me and couldn't wait. My dear, clever, gentle twins, my third and fourth children, who — when they were little — waited so patiently for the chance to hold my hand, as we bundled along through the world; and whose eighteenth birthday was tossed aside in the chaos of losing our home and our income as their father left us. So, since Bernard was safe in the hospital, I told him for that last couple of days he had to wait, and then I would bring him home. But that's not what I normally do. I usually fit round what other people have on their agenda.

And you?

Day off, is it? What have you been doing this morning?

Try to be cheerful.

*        *        *

Later, it turned out that all of us were waiting.

Our builder (a solar panels engineer) was waiting for a part that should have come today but didn't, and for a colleague who couldn't come after all so the last bits of work to the roof had to wait. He looked very despondent about it — had to reorganise what he'd planned, because our job can't be finished until tomorrow. He just had to wait.

And my husband did his best to get home when he said, but he had to wait for the bus, which didn't come, so he had to get a different one and walk home the last bit down the hill from Asda.

But both those men were also patient and cheerful. They did their best.