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.
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.
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.
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.
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 simplymustget 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.
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?
I wrote this down, read it through, thought about it overnight, read it again in the morning, published it, then unpublished it, thinking it sounded like a bit of an ain't-it-awful rant in which I hadn't managed to sharpen up what I wanted to say into something worthwhile. Then I saw the video I've put at the bottom, and thought at least that was worth saying. So here you are — pick out what resonates, leave the rest.
When I finished school, just before my eighteenth birthday, I stayed at home for my sister's wedding that summer, then I left. I loved my home and my mother, the village where we lived, but I had a road of my own to travel.
Until that time, since I was fifteen, I had worked various evening and weekend and school holiday (US 'vacation') jobs to give me some income of my own; I bought my own clothes and books and anything else I wanted, and put some money in savings. My jobs were in a supermarket and in care homes — one of them run by nuns.
Then I moved down to Devon, where I lived with some monks. They had a farm and a couple of cottages with a vegetable garden, and they ran the post office. In its small back garden was a caravan in a cabbage patch. They made the post office garage/shed into a chapel.
I lived in the caravan, helped with the cooking, milked the cow and made butter, helped take the produce from the garden to Bideford market to sell, helped with the post office remittance and served in the little village shop that contained the post office, and helped take care of the children from poor urban homes who came for country holidays and stayed at the farm.
It wasn't a paid job, just voluntary, so I lived on my savings until I moved on from there and went back to working for the nuns, living in their nurses' home until it was time to go to university in York.
After a year in university accommodation I became part of a nascent community —intentional. interdenominational, Christian. Father Fabian Cowper, an Ampleforth monk, was our chaplain.
I married not long before the community disintegrated, and moved down to Hastings where I raised my family. I was heavily involved with the Methodist church and the Ashburnham Stable Family (a Christian group devoted to revival in East Sussex), and later became first a preacher and then a minister. I spent my time with people in hospice care, men in prison, and with the faith communities where I preached and taught; and I was raising my children and writing books.
Looking back on all those years, I notice something.
I didn't have to think all that much about what I had or what I wore or how to occupy myself, because my life was full of people — and also animals and growing a garden, and the life of the mind associated with preaching and teaching and writing.
Thinking back to my mother's life, I saw a similar pattern. Born in 1927, she grew up on a Yorkshire farm that employed live-in horse-men, and housed German prisoners of war, and had a variety of other men associated with the farm work coming and going (mechanics, shepherds, men buying grain, pigeon fanciers, all sorts). So she had people all around her.
Later, when she got married and had a family of her own, she worked to create a property portfolio that included her own home. She spent every hour caring for her home, working in the garden, raising sheep and tending hens and processing the food she grew (or raised) for the winter.
Our possessions were very few.
When I left the monks in Devon I had a suitcase of belongings and some geraniums.
In my childhood, the ornaments in our home were mementos from my father's travels from around the world. My mother had two blouses, a cardigan, one skirt, one pair of trousers as her main everyday wear kit. We had very little. The only holidays we ever had were trips to Yorkshire to see our relatives.
As my mother grew old, having made money buying and selling houses, she began to acquire stuff and go on cruises and weekends away in hotels. I thought it was because she'd accumulated wealth and could afford it now. Obviously there was something in that, but now I think it was not the main driver of her choices.
For myself, I've noticed that in the last couple of decades I've spent a lot more money on things. I've never had much space for possessions to accumulate because of living in shared accommodation, so a pattern developed of acquiring then ditching belongings.
Thinking about all this in the last month as I have been systematically going through our home, taking it down to the minimum working kit so that we remain flexible in making choices, and the place is easy to care for as we grow old, I discerned a dynamic that I think has been at work in not only my own life but in the lives of almost everyone I know.
I have observed the rich, complex, all-hands-on-deck church communities I remember from years ago — that had morning and evening worship and many faith-centred weeknight groups and mission activities — dwindle to morning-only worship, pastors who have no time for people, and a bums-on-seats, finance-focused, numbers-based approach to church, with TV-style performance type of worship.
Neighbourliness has faded and gardens stand untended, full of weeds and junk people can't think how to dispose of. The people are inside and online. The doors are shut and they lock automatically, no longer standing open through the summer. It takes a long time to learn the names of your neighbours. When we had our local elections a few years ago, our next-door-neighbour Darren was elected as a borough councillor. In jubilation, I mentioned this to my next-door neighbour on the other side, as I saw her coming out of her house. She said: "Darren who?" Two doors away. Knew nothing about him.
As well as thriving on connection and interaction, human beings have a thirst for stimulus, variety and novelty. They now find these on the internet and by consuming 'experiences' and buying things.
My mother did this as she grew old. She transferred her lively interest in life to shopping and trips away. Driving around in her car visiting retail outlets and buying things kept her busy and happy.
And I — as my life was repeatedly uprooted by first my husband of 24 years leaving us for another family, then my second husband dying, then leaving my work and my family to relocate for a third marriage, then the onset chronic illness — became increasingly isolated.
I tried again and again to rebuild community and connection, because those are what we were made for; but it's not that easy any more, it no longer happens naturally.
And it occurs to me that a driving dynamic in modern life is the prevalence and increase of isolation and loneliness; people are easily suspicious of one another, consider each other in terms of social category not as individuals, drift apart.
As the new data centres accumulate, greedy for land and resources, already we are seeing the cost of computers and phones going up significantly. As government seeks ever increasing control, privacy/security risk driven by increased electronic surveillance handled by careless entities is steadily rising.
Homes are typically cluttered, and so are schedules. Burnout and chronic illness and neurological issues are prevalent.
When it comes to human relationship, even the word 'relationship' has come to mean 'sexual relationship', as if no other kind mattered.
It seems to me that in the near future we are going to have to find one another again, find our stimulus and novelty once more in human connection not in consuming, somehow rediscover how to sing together again (not just perform songs for money to passive consumers) and tell stories. The future, for ordinary people who value privacy, sanity and freedom, may very well once more be offline. To rediscover clarity of thought and peace of mind we will have to simplify our homes and our lives, move away from dependance on cars and computers and phones. To survive in harder times amid rising costs, habits of consumerism we hardly notice will have to be laid down.
I think change is coming, and the more simple and frugal and minimalistic are the habits we develop, the better we will thrive in the times to come.
So last night I sent the evening drinking tea and watching the British Sewing Bee with Alice and Hebe, and then the first series of Celebrity Traitors (gripping!) and then we entirely filled my tiny car with their boxes and bags of bric à brac and textiles and books, and I drove it home and left it with everything in the car as a kind of storage locker overnight ready for the Anglo Doorstep man in the morning.
It's a brilliant system — UK friends, it's well worth looking to see if they collect in your area. You book a collection a couple of weeks in advance, or they notify you if they'll be coming by your area in a week's time so you can book with shorter notice. You can choose from a selection of charities to benefit from your donation. I chose the animal charity — the RSPCA.
You start sorting and packing your donations — the sort of thing you would send to sell in a charity shop, not just rubbish — into the three categories (bric à brac, textiles, books), and label the bags/boxes ready to go.
Three days before the collection they email a reminder.
The evening before the collection they send a two-hour time slot.
You can put your things out for them, or they will knock on the door to collect (good in wet weather).
On the day they notify when the driver is on his way, giving you twenty minutes to get ready, and the email has a real-time map showing the van moving to your house.
And then bingo! It's done!
But — I was shocked by this — the driver told me that some people put out actual rubbish to be collected. He said these are people who the bin men refuse to collect from, and put red stickers on their rubbish bins, whether because they don't bother to sort it or because they just routinely put out too much, I don't know.
So these loathsome people book an Anglo Doorstep Collection — because it's free and they can't be bothered to take their rubbish to the tip — and box it up for the Anglo men to take, pretending it's charity donations. And when they get it back to the yard and open it they discover it was only actual garbage, so they have to take it to the tip.
That is mean and unpleasant beyond words. A particularly obnoxious and selfish form of fly-tipping. So the driver said he has been suggesting they levy a charge to disincentivise this behaviour.
But before these orcs manage to spoil the whole wonderful system for the rest of us, now's the time to book an Anglo Doorstep Collection and declutter your house!
