Tom Pillibi

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, with a lover, as with a book,

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

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

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

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

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

On the B side of that record was Lazy Afternoon.

 

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

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

Here are the voices of 1960s England.

 

 

Minimalism, laziness and calm

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

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

Haha. Hahaha. You think?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is not what I want for myself.

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

You see what I mean?

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

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

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

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

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

Tomatoes

 

Thanks be to God, we have so many tomatoes!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good to have a solution, shame about the tomatoes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Imagine! Just three plants! Well worth it.

Them, You, Nobody and Everyone

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

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

Nobody Talks About These

You Are Not Crazy

Make Everyone Look

Are You Too Nice?

Let Them Think You Failed

Nobody Eats Out

What It Means For You

This Is Why You're Stuck

You'll Never Be The Same

Wu Wei You Got it Wrong

"Do Not Buy A House"

This Is Why They Mistreat You

We Didn't Want To Share This

Don't Say I Didn't Warn You

They Killed The Internet

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

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

Everyone is Full of Shit!!!

Remove It Without Telling Anyone

Nobody's Okay

You'll Never Be The Same

Do This

Stop Putting It Off

Don't Enable These

Why Journaling Doesn't Feel Fun Any More

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

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

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

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

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

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

It Finally Arrived

And So It Begins 

Good Luck With This

This Is Bad

This Kills 1,200 People Each Day

This Makes No Sense

This Has To Stop

It's All A Lie

It's Happening

It's Worse Than You Think

This Just Got Much Worse

They Are Everywhere

Total Chaos

Not Worth It (Anymore)

It's Harder Now

I Have Stopped

It's Over

[on a carnivore channel] Just Eat Cake

Nothing is Happening?

The Hidden Truth

It Worked

This is Epic

Over It

 

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

Even the subtitles often illuminate nothing.

Title:

Don't Make My Mistake

Subtitle

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

Understood what?

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

Give me strength.

The Tree of Life and the Bread of Heaven revisited

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

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

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

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

T-shirts and food and minimalism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In conversation with David and Martin Towns of Monastic Retreats

 

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

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

My Lighthouse

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

❤️  😄 

Vicki in Bellingham and Brother Michael at St Alcuins

Today my friend Vicki wrote to me from Bellingham. Things had been going wrong; specifically, electronic things. She had been patiently dealing with them, replacing her method of internet access and adjusting to the new one. Then she sat down to do what she wanted — write me a lovely long email about the thoughts and ideas that interest us both — only to discover, when she tried to send it, that her account storage capacity had been exceeded. Still patiently, she deleted some things she could manage without; but came back to re-send only to discover her email had vanished without trace. By this time Vicki was feeling a little less patient, and what's more she had other tasks requiring her attention. Promising to come back later, she said:

"Practicing the presence of God, like Brother Lawrence did, and like Brother Michael, the infirmarian obviously does, is harder than it sounds. My spirit is not at peace as I ponder rewriting those thoughts I had articulated over a period of about an hour."

My simple instinct was to sympathise and agree; but to my surprise, because I haven't heard from him in a while, Brother Michael had something to say about that. I couldn't see him, which was disappointing because I'd like to have spent a while chilling out in St Alcuins' infirmary with him, but I know what he thought. Talking to these fourteenth-century monks is a little like talking to cats. The words just appear in your mind. You have to trust them.

And he said this.

"Please to tell Vicki this small something about peace and practising the presence of God. 

"Here, we are taught how to practice peace and offer it to others. It's in how we walk, how we sit, how we gather and disperse, how we eat; externally like that, it's a discipline we learn — mortifying the eyes and giving one another preference and so on. It's easier in some situations than others of course, and it can be tiring in the early days, but it becomes a reflexive habit in the end, so that you almost forget how to do things any other way.

"But obviously that's just the outside of it. What's happening inside? There can be turmoil, a sense of injustice, irritation — that can be pronounced, even intense — or disappointment or just flat weariness. All of those; and none of them resemble peace. And then there's the frustration Vicki experienced, when patience has been applied repeatedly, and the work has been done faithfully, and even still it all goes wrong. 

"You must — please, please — pass on to Vicki that I am not as saintly as she thinks I am. Some days I am absolutely seething and the best I can do is not slam an ointment jar down onto the counter so hard I would break it, not say something so unkind and mean to one of our old men that I would leave him wounded to a degree it would be hard to mend later. The external discipline of peace we practice is my friend here; it allows me to stop short of doing something I could not undo and would bitterly regret.

"But what about practising the presence of God? Well, happily for me, God is practicing being present as well. At times when my sense of peace seems to have left the building, and the fountain of life within me seems to have unaccountably got blocked by wet leaves, so there is nothing left inside me worth sharing with another living being, God is still there. I know he is, because this has happened to me so often I've lost count.

"I turn to him then, my Good Shepherd, and say the only prayer of which I am capable in that moment — 'HELP!' And you know what? He always does. If things are really dire, I sometimes have to say it two or three times, which is not a bad thing because it helps re-orientate my attention towards him. 

"The crucial thing — but please, I know your friend Vicki is a faithful believer, so I hope I'm not patronising her, I honestly don't mean to — the key to it all is that God is not the product of our practice, if you see what I mean. His presence with me and in me is not dependent on me; he initiates, he stands at the door and knocks, he leaves the ninety and nine on the hillside and comes to look for me. 

"It only takes a moment. I don't even have to close my eyes or take a deep breath. In fact it would probably better I didn't, because that would give whoever I was with a distinct clue that they were annoying the hell out of me. All it takes is to recognise that I have run dry, and send a desperate plea for help. And God is with me."

Then he stops. I feel his attention on me, waiting for my response, and I say to him, "Thank you. Two things. One is that about three hundred years on from your time we had a famous battle in England called the Battle of Edgehill. In it, the Major General of the Infantry was Jacob Astley — Baron Astley of Reading. On the morning of the battle, he prayed: 'O Lord, Thou knowest how busy I must be this day. If I forget Thee, do not Thou forget me.' And then he said, 'March on, boys!'

"And the other thing was something that happened to me years ago when I was involved in a bit of a battle of my own — a church battle. Before I had to go into battle I phoned a friend. A phone... oh, well, I won't go into exactly what a phone is right now. What I mean is that my friend was neither with me nor (as it turned out) at home; I left a message for him, telling him about it and asking him to pray. And when I came home from the difficult thing I had to do, he had in turn left me a message, very simple. He just said 'I'm with you.' "

Brother Michael listens to this. "That's exactly it, " he says. "And would you kindly let your friend Vicki know that the angels of God, and I — Brother Michael — and all of us here at St Alcuins, we are on the other end of the line, out of sight, but we are with her."

Sometimes I wish Brother Michael could have the benefit of all these hundreds of years of the history of the faith. I say to him: "Centuries on from where you are now, there was a great man of God called John Wesley. He preached until he was in his eighties, he was still preaching a fortnight before he died. And then he finally ran out of strength. He was in bed, his life ebbing, and he told his family gathered round him that he loved them. And then — the very last words he spoke on this earth — he said, 'The best of all is, God is with us.' "

Brother Michael's face lights up with a smile, but at this point in our conversation he absolutely had to get on, because I'd interrupted him right in the middle of his morning chores, which didn't seem to annoy him; though, thinking about what he'd said to me, I do wonder. Anyway, he said he simply must get on with his work or there'd be mayhem. But he told me to give Vicki a hug from him (and it didn't seem the moment to explain she lives hundred of miles away and the Atlantic Ocean is in the way), and said for her to hang on to the certainty that God is practising being present even when she can't hold up her end. 

He looked at me and laughed. "March on, boys!" he said.

Have you seen the Shed Talks man?

 I recently discovered a YouTube channel that I absolutely love.

Here's the video where he explains what he's doing.

He's fab, isn't he?

His ambition is to reach 1000 subscribers. Should be doable, no?

Here's his most recent video, which I found very thought-provoking indeed. I do so hope he keeps to his way of integrity and honesty, and that it is rewarded by contentment and peace.

And finally here's the first video of his that I came across, which I found so intriguing. It stuck in my mind for ages.

Learning about his life from what he posts, I think he is so courageous, a soul noble and true.

Might you consider becoming one of his subscribers — you don't have to pay anything for that — to help him reach his target of 1000 subscribers for the bet he made with his nephew?

If you like what he's doing, would you consider sharing it with your friends to help him surpass his target and believe in himself and do well?