North and South

 My mother's family came from West Yorkshire, a particular part of the country that was in old England the kingdom of Elmet. The father of my children — my first husband — was also descended from that part of the country, through his father's line. So my children's DNA is almost entirely from that particular place; they are quiet people, but very uncompromising.

There is also a smattering of Scandinavia in our genes, inherited from my father. He came from Scarborough, which was overrun with Viking Norsemen — and he could easily have been mistaken for a Norwegian in his appearance. The Norsemen, as you may know from English history, were not big on gentle and yielding temperament.

That area, the kingdom of Elmet, has its own particular genetic heritage; settled, not mixed, not created through diversity. 

I feel as though I know those people all the way back to the Dark Ages. They are in my soul, in my bones, in my blood. That's why I love so much the writing of Sally Wainwright — her stories are all of the people of that little patch of earth, and they have such a resonance for me. She writes about my people, and in her stories I find and recognise myself.

But my mother, dogged by poverty, not very educated and brought up in a small Yorkshire village, intelligent, perceptive, practical and with a stubborn rooted instinct for survival, was socially ambitious, upwardly mobile. She shed her Yorkshire accent, she studied the ways of the wealthy, and she relocated to the most elegant and refined part of south-eastern England. Everything we had and everywhere we lived was calculated to advance our path through the world. She bent her purposes to that. She was determined to do well, and she did — astonishingly so.

You can take the woman out of Yorkshire, but you can't take Yorkshire out of the woman. 

Not having much money, we went to what was free — church on Sunday and the village fair in the summer, walks in the countryside — and I socialised with schoolfriends, but things you had to pay for were beyond us for the most part. This was not exactly isolating, because back in the 1970s when I was a teenager, you could do a lot that didn't cost any money. But it did mean that the only holidays we had were with my mother's family in the West Riding of Yorkshire. It created a kind of insularity that made us more and more like ourselves; a little outpost of the kingdom of Elmet cut adrift and marooned in the Home Counties.

Though my mother had learned to speak BBC English, she never shook off the harder to eliminate idiom and emphasis of the Yorkshire structures and rhythms of speech — she didn't even realise it was there. And she had an unobtrusive natural steely determination, an invincible sense of purpose. My father likewise — a quiet man, he didn't argue for the most part, he usually held his peace; but every argument he did have, he won. 

I have only one sibling, a sister; and she has a personality like a blowtorch; bright and fierce and I advise you to not get in her way.

I am similar.

And now I live on the very south coast of England, surrounded by southern people.

I avoid social groups much of the time, because I am not easy company; but recently I have been part of a church house group. I'm not sure this is a good idea.

Today we were there, and I inadvisedly expressed my opinion on something that was under discussion.

One of the ladies in the group, a woman with a likeable personality and gentle, winning manner, responded to my observations. Her demeanour is pleasant and friendly, but it was clear to me we saw life differently. She began by saying, "I understand your fury and your anger" — and I had to stop her right there. "I am not furious," I said, "and I am not angry."

I have developed a habit of countering such observations because my husband —not the father of my children but the man I am married to now — over the years we have been married has often commented in a conversation, "I know you are angry" or "I can see how angry you are"; but I'm not (usually).

He is a southerner, with a habit of mild and diplomatic expression — the inflections, the vocabulary, the little ways, it's so different in the south of England. Nobody who comes from the north ever thinks I'm angry. And for sure, on those occasions when I am actually angry, there's no doubt about it.

There is a hard, definite, emphatic quality to the speech of the north, and a dry, sarcastic humour. It's in me. It's how I am. But it doesn't mean I'm angry. It's just a trace of the kingdom of Elmet resurfacing from the Dark Ages, oddly out of place amid the pleasantry and diplomacy of middle-class southern England. 

In all truth, it's a good thing I stay at home most of the time. I'm okay in a pulpit or chairing a meeting, but as a clergyman once observed, my mode of expression could scorch you at thirty paces. That was the same man who said I was born to rattle the cage of Methodism. He, too, was a southern-born soul. And I wasn't angry with him either, just sharing my point of view . . . 

 

Clarence

 Until last summer, we (I + Tony my husband) lived with two other family members — three really, but one of them is mostly elsewhere — in their beautiful Victorian gabled villa.

We had a little 1930s house let to tenants that became vacant in the summer and, as the economic changes in England are very adversarial to private landlords, we moved in there ourselves, and we love it. All of us are low-budget skinflints and living in separate dwellings gives us somewhere to go visiting. It's only a mile along the road from the home we left, so there's inbuilt exercise to the arrangement as well. Perfect.

I have a friend who is a Carthusian monk. We don't check in often because Carthusians are hermits who live in community, and I don't like to make over-frequent intrusions into the silence and seclusion of his vocation of prayer and adoration (plus he does actually have work to do in his rôle within the community). But we do correspond on a semi-regular basis, and I treasure the connection and his friendship. We hold his community in prayer and his community holds us in prayer — and my goodness, does it make a difference!

When we moved I told him about our new home, and he rather unexpectedly (but very firmly and decidedly) advised me that we should have a pet; a cat or a dog.

Two robustly territorial cats live next door on one side, and three less ferocious but fairly assertive cats live next door on the other side. Both contingents are used to coming into our garden and kindly spraying the plants and leaving us surprise turds in the grass and on the terrace. O how we value that, as you can imagine. Introducing a sixth cat in the middle would be an invitation to war.

Not only that, but the home we left behind is not without its animals. There were three dogs next door to whom we always served snacks (a Bonio plentifully buttered, and one-third of a sausage) every morning and every evening. There was a pair of crows and whatever current offspring they had in tow any given year, who came every day to stock up on raw meat for the family. And there was one ... then two ... now three ... foxes coming for breakfast and supper every day. Not only those clients but that house also has a resident cat of its own; Miguel who is elderly but fabulously glossy and still catching the occasional mouse.

When I was a girl, if you you took on a cat then you probably had it neutered, but after that all that happened was feeding it the cheapest food you could find once a day. No beds, no toys, no vaccinations; just co-existence ending with natural death and euthanasia, Not any more! Ha!

Miguel is neither large nor greedy, but even so the monthly amount to cover his food, his emergencies insurance and his monthly pet care plan comes in at £125 a month (about $170 US). In the modern world he must have annual vaccinations or else his emergencies insurance is invalidated. Recently his vet, looking at him thoughtfully and declaring him to be a good candidate for general anaesthesia (uh-oh), suggested that he be brought in to have his teeth cleaned. Under general anaesthetic. For £700 (about $1000 US). Which would be covered by neither his health plan nor his insurance. And if she found any dental work needed doing, her idea was that he could return a week later for a second general anaesthetic, where she could cut his gums, do whatever she thought necessary, and charge whatever that cost. 

In preparation for these procedures the vet advised that Miguel be given no food and confined to the house for 24 hours. Try explaining that to a cat who eats little and often and has never used a litter tray. Not going to happen.

We declined this wonderful opportunity — not least because general anaesthesia carries a significant risk of triggering or accelerating dementia in the elderly, and at the moment Miguel is very healthy — but it certainly concentrates the mind, does it not?

Because Miguel is the responsibility of both our households, and because feeding the foxes, the crows and the dogs next door was all my fault, every month we send across £65 ($85) towards Miguel's upkeep and I send across an additional £50 ($65) towards feeding the others. I also keep back all the soft tissue scraps from when I make bone broth and take it along in a tub for Foxy.

But it doesn't need a genius to see that adding a dog to these responsibilities would be a bridge too far — we are, after all, old age pensioners who no longer enjoy income from a rental property, and have just doubled our household expenses by leaving a shared house.

Furthermore, after the recent experience of Miguel's vet's bright idea for emptying our bank accounts, I felt queasy about establishing any further such entanglements with the long tentacles and avaricious eyes of Big Pharma.

Even so, I take very seriously the advice of a Carthusian monk. All that prayer doesn't just go to nothing, you know. When a Carthusian makes a recommendation, you do well to pay attention. They have a hotline.

Hmm.

But then one day last summer — this.

During the warm weather we had the doors and windows open, and this individual would often come in, have a look round, check all was well, and leave. Our neighbours' cats likewise used to come in and check the place out.

Our former tenants had a long-haired black cat called Bailey, so we got in touch to make sure Bailey had not returned from her new home. They said no, that this person on our windowsill was a regular visitor but they had never been able to establish where he (if it is a he) came from. They said they called him Clarence.

As summer moved into autumn, Clarence would occasionally stop by. Bearing in mind the Carthusian advice, eventually I bought a tub of cat treats and a bag of complete food. Clarence liked it. For the first time we heard his voice (quiet) and his purr (very loud). He let us stroke him. Clarence is a thin cat, and his fur often has burrs and grass seeds. We wonder if he is a stray. Not sure.

Then, recently, when the cold weather came, we progressed to this.

Never for long. He is watchful and alert even when dozing, and he doesn't make extended stays; he's just trying on the experience to see how it feels.

In the morning — around 8am in the light days of summer, more like 9am in the dark and cold of winter — Tony and I have a cup of tea and a time of prayer. Cats enjoy prayer, you know. If prayer is going on, they like to join in.

This morning when we met for prayer, there were the three of us.

I am not up for vets' fees running to hundred of pounds, and I have no wish to create mayhem in the already existing uneasy truce between neighbour cats. 

But this? Is it a Carthusian solution? I think it may be. 

And is it Clarence — or Clara?

Social and cultural concerns facing Britain today

In the last two years I have worshipped in two different Anglican and two different Methodist churches.

I've been disconcerted to find that while my own political allegiance has transitioned at warp speed away from the political Left (first Labour, then Green) to the place I now am politically — not because my views have changed but because society around me has changed — the churches I have attended (both clergy and congregation) adhere to what one might call the BBC point of view: sympathy for mass immigration, ignorance of (or indifference to) danger to women and children, apparent unawareness of the economic cliff-edge on which we now stand, indifference to the scale of threat to children from gender ideology, complacent indifference to the escalation of two-tier policing and the erosion of free speech and misinformation in public broadcasts with the intention of directing public opinion, and increasing anti-white racism.

The video below represents the concerns I feel about the state of our nation, and I cannot understand why these concerns are not shared by the clergy and congregations of the churches I know.

As always I welcome your comments and perspectives, regardless of whether you share my sense of concern — listening to friends who see life quite differently is something I value and seek.

The book of life

Revelation 20.12 (NIV):

Another book was opened, which is the book of life.

My great-grandmother, Louisa Ellen Hird (née Thornton, and known as Nellie) was born in 1877. Her father owned the mill at Cottingley in West Yorkshire, and that was where she grew up.

Here she is with her sisters, the one on the far right.

I was lucky to have known her when I was a child, by which time she was the only one left of those sisters in the photograph.

My mother loved her dearly, and when I was a child I heard so much about her and her life, about my mother's childhood on the farm in the same village where Nellie Hird lived once she was married. Everything about the lives of my mother and her sisters, and my mother's mother, and her mother — Nellie — and Nellie's mother, Mary Gott, was so vivid to me, woven into my making as a person, my attitudes to life. Here is Mary Gott, my great-great-grandmother, sitting on the steps of their home at Cottingley with her daughters. Nellie is sitting next to her mother.

It was because my mother loved her family so much, and we spent our school holidays up in Yorkshire with them, and I heard so much about them, that they became part of me and I became part of them.

When I grew up and married, I had five daughters of my own, and sometimes I wonder if they will be known and loved and remembered, or if they and I will just be like waves on the sea that arise and are lost, indistinguishable from all the others, here for a moment then merged with the great ocean as if they had never existed.

In this video, my daughter Alice is playing the bodhran, and Grace is playing the piano, and Hebe (who you might not even notice if you don't have sharp eyes) is turning the pages of Grace's music for her, and singing alto.

I love that video. It catches a moment in time, a memory. Because not that many people know our Alice well. 

She is an artist, who makes the most beautiful things. Here's an icon she painted.

And another one.

Here's a stained glass panel she designed and made.

And another one (this one, of St Joseph, is in the enclosure with the Carmelites at Thicket Priory at Thorganby near York)

Here's a stone she cut and gilded..

Here's a panel she painted for an Orthodox Church (the one on the right. Her sister Hebe painted the one on the left).

They work together.

Something I love in the video where she's playing the bodhran (she also plays the hurdy-gurdy and the French horn and the guitar and the flute) is that it brings out something of her personality — is her stance (she is also a dancer) — and her strength; because there never was a brighter soul or more true and clear.

The thing is, Alice is a quiet person. Very few people know her at all, and even fewer know how funny she is and how original in her thinking, what extraordinary poetry she writes — a person who thinks outside the box and is full of surprises — and how pure and authentic is her faith. 

So I was thinking about how these people, these individual lives, these bright flashes of creation and personality, arise so vivid and then they go, like shooting stars, the gift of a moment, coming out of the darkness and back into it again.

Who is there to remember them, to catch and treasure what they were?

Alice is so very like my Auntie Jessie, my mother's sister, who was my godmother, and I remember her so clearly — she was gentle, she was funny, she was perceptive and kind.

Only a handful of people in the whole earth ever knew my Auntie Jessie or are left to remember her. And yet, she was lovely.

But there is this; these souls, so dear, so loved, with so bright and clear a radiance — their names are written in the book of life.

For life is eternal; and love is immortal; and death is only a horizon; and a horizon is nothing save the limit of our sight.

(Rossiter Raymond) 

 

"My Jesus I Love Thee" 250 Voice Mass Choir at Hyderabad

I love this hymn and I love this recording of it.

It's one of several hymns and songs that I learned when I first knew Jesus.

My Jesus, I love Thee, I know Thou art mine;
For Thee all the follies of sin I resign;
My gracious Redeemer, my Saviour art Thou;
If ever I loved Thee, my Jesus, ’tis now.

I love Thee because Thou hast first loved me,
And purchased my pardon on Calvary’s tree;
I love Thee for wearing the thorns on Thy brow;
If ever I loved Thee, my Jesus, ’tis now.

I’ll love Thee in life, I will love Thee in death,
And praise Thee as long as Thou lendest me breath;
And say when the death dew lies cold on my brow,
If ever I loved Thee, my Jesus, ’tis now.

In mansions of glory and endless delight,
I’ll ever adore Thee in heaven so bright;
I’ll sing with the glittering crown on my brow,
If ever I loved Thee, my Jesus, ’tis now.

3. (William R. Featherston 1864)

Hollington

 The place I live now is called Hollington.

The red dot shows our house.

It used to have a pretty front garden, like this —

— but when our tenants (who lived there before us) had a joy-rider smash into their car and ruin it at 2am one night, we turned the garden into a parking lot (reminds me of Joni Mitchell) to keep their car safe. So now it keeps ours safe too.

Hollington is mostly a large housing estate that was settled into a country village on the edge of Hastings in the 1930s for London overspill people. Our house was built in 1937, a mock-Tudor style very typical of that era of architecture. It's one of those things where you never notice how many similar houses there are in the local area until you live in one yourself. What we in our household (Tony and me) think of as the Morris Minor effect — you don't notice them at all, then you get one and suddenly they seem to be everywhere. Though not now, of course. Morris Minors are very vintage cars nowadays. These days we have a little red Smart Car. It's smarter than I am, actually. I need everything set permanently to auto, and I even struggled to get the fuel. cap off to re-fuel it, but the man from the garage helped me. Pleasingly, the emojis on the internet include this for their image of a car: 🚗 🚘. Yep; that's our car! 

But I digress.

I had no aspirations to live in Hollington. It has a reputation as a rough neighbourhood like Shady Lane where the weasels lived (if you ever read Alison Uttley's Little Grey Rabbit books when you were small).

I don't mind rough neighbourhoods. Some of the people there are rough diamonds, others merely flint all the way through, but they are neither better nor worse than the more well-to-do — which are likewise a muddle of diamonds and flint, but polished.

Even so I had no high hopes of it being a great place to live, but it has taken me by surprise.

The people here are friendly and kind. If I go for a walk in the evening, there are often people out with their dogs who enjoy to stop and chat (both the dogs and the humans). When the dustcart has been by to collect the garbage, if my neighbour is going out to her car she'll bring my wheelie bin back for me, right up to the house not just at the edge of the path, as well as her own.

When our kitchen sink was being repaired and the water and electricity were turned off, our neighbour the other side said to come to them if we needed anything — and he meant it, too.

Today I had the car parked on the front yard while I carried in the groceries, and when I went out to get a pack of bottled water (6 big bottles), a young man passing by with his dog stopped to ask if it was too heavy for me and if I needed him to carry it in to the house.

That's the kind of neighbourhood it is. A place of quiet kindness.

When we moved here, from a house that backed on to a long strip of parkland full of trees and wild animals and birds, I was sad to be going somewhere with just roads and houses. But — but but but! — I hadn't grasped that right behind our house runs the Hollington Stream, where the streams from higher ground flow down, and trees grow along the banks. If you click on this aerial view, can you see how if I come out of our house (red dot) and turn right and keep going right until I'm round the back, I have a lovely evening walk alongside the stream with its trees and green spaces? Can you trace on the picture the little path that runs along the greensward and goes under the trees, from right at the end of Coventry Road where we live? That stream with its trees will always be there, because you can't build on it. 

❤️

There's a verse in the psalms that I remember worded from the Book of Common Prayer (we always sang the psalms at Evensong back in the day), which says, "My lot is fallen in a fair ground." (Psalm 16.6)

And so it has. Hollington turns out to be characterised by loving-kindness, and trees, and a stream, and what more could you want?

Cloud bread

 Today, for the first time ever, I made some cloud bread, which came out well.

Not only is it the first time I made cloud bread, it's actually the first time in years I made anything from a recipe at all. I don't get past basic ingredients as a general rule.

I expect you already know what cloud bread is, but — in case you don't — it's basically a soufflé. You're meant to cook the mixture in little rounds so it comes out like rolls or biscuits, but I didn't have any liners/baking parchment to go in the air fryer, so I just greased a tin and cooked it in one flattish lump in the tin. That meant it took longer to cook, so I had to turn it over and do the other side for a while, and even then it was still more soft in the middle than it should have been, but I'd made my sausages by then so I just ate it. And it was nice.

I made it because I miss bread a lot — I eat a carnivore diet, no plants, which is gradually healing my gut (slow going though). To my surprise I don't miss vegetables whatsoever; maybe I ate enough of them in the first 60 years to last the rest of my life! I slightly miss fruit, but not as much as I thought I would. But I do miss bread with butter on it ❤️, and to a lesser extent cookies and cake. 

I have tea and coffee. They are plants (obviously) and so they do flame up my gut, but I drink them for specific reasons. Coffee is a sovereign thing for gut motility (mine is spectacularly impaired though it is slowly improving now); and tea halts oxalate dumping. 

Oxalates (I hope you're not bored, you probably know all about this) gradually gather in small armies around your body until the time comes for them to attack (gout, kidney stones etc). All the food I thought was healthy and ate loads of is full of oxalates — spinach, sweet potatoes, quinoa, rhubarb, beetroot, tea — and has been gathering strength in my body waiting to wreak vengeance on its unsuspecting host. The thing with oxalate is it doesn't dissolve (though they do say lemon juice can make it a little less like granite), it just sits there waiting for a chance to get out. Then if your diet changes to being low oxalate, your body in effect says Haha! and starts dumping it. It comes out through your ears, your skin, your eyes, your bladder, your gut, round your teeth — grit, lots of it. If you're unlucky it comes out in kidney stones. As it's very, very gritty — sharp, scratchy — it hurts a lot. And the way to arrest this tsunami of crystals making their exodus is to drink some black tea. 

Carnivore diet (plant-free — what I eat) has absolutely no oxalates in, so changing from an oxalate heavy diet to none at all triggers massive dumping that goes on a very long time — months or years. As this is wearisome and can create health issues of its own, most people who experience it drink a bit of black tea to send their body back to sequestering instead of dumping. That way you can slow it down and make the experience more gentle. Sally Norton is the person who writes about oxalates and health, she published a very informative book about it called Toxic Superfoods.

So mostly I just toss some meat in the air fryer and eat it roasted, or if it's stewing meat I cook it in the slow cooker with some home-made bone broth (I keep back the bones when I roast a chicken and boil them up into broth). But I've been thinking it would be nice to have a change, and I liked the sound of the cloud bread. 

I'm waiting for the Black Friday sales, to get a Ninja Creamie, and then I'm going to make some carnivore ice cream, which is basically just egg yolks added to cream. It sounds rather boring, doesn't it, but a lot of what's nice about ice cream is the texture, plus if you don't eat sugar your palate changes its mind about what tastes sweet.

After that I'm planning to have a go at this recipe. You can't get zero-carb cream powder in the UK, but I found some that has only 3.75% carb, which I think comes within the category of Good Enough.

I went down to the spring to get some more water today, too — we have an iron spring here in the park in Hastings, which has the most fabulous water (though we do filter it in case the water table has smuggled in non-fabulous elements) but the drain had clogged up with leaves so today it was a lake not a spring. Therefore instead I bought mineral water from Asda, but I didn't mind because the Elmhurst Spring (where their water comes from) is in the part of England where all my family — all my ancestors, most of my DNA — came from, what in ancient times was the part of West Yorkshire that was the Kingdom of Elmet. There is a sense of rightness about sometimes drinking the water from there — though obviously I prefer to get it straight from the earth in the place where I live.

+      +       +

CLOUD BREAD

To make carnivore cloud bread in an air fryer, you will use a three-ingredient mixture of eggs, cream cheese, and a binder like whey protein or crushed pork rinds. The recipe works because cloud bread is naturally grain-free and can be made without the plant-based ingredients sometimes used in keto recipes. 

Ingredients 

• 3 large eggs, separated
• 3 oz (90g) cream cheese, softened
• ½ teaspoon cream of tartar
• Optional seasonings: Pinch of salt, garlic powder, or Italian herbs 

Instructions 

1. Prep the batter. In a clean, dry bowl, beat the egg whites and cream of tartar with an electric mixer until stiff, fluffy peaks form.
2. Combine the ingredients. In a separate bowl, mix the egg yolks and softened cream cheese until smooth. Stir in your chosen binder and seasonings until just combined.
3. Gently fold. Carefully fold the yolk mixture into the stiff egg whites using a spatula. Be careful not to over-mix, as this will deflate the egg whites and prevent the "cloud" texture.
4. Form the bread. Preheat your air fryer to 300°F (150°C). Line your air fryer basket or tray with parchment paper. Scoop the batter into rounds, leaving some space between each one to allow for even cooking.
5. Air fry. Cook the cloud bread for 12 to 15 minutes, or until it is a captivating golden-brown colour.
6. Cool. Remove the cloud bread from the air fryer and allow it to cool slightly before serving. Letting it cool completely will help it set and achieve a more stable texture. 

Bored

Our family (me and my relatives, my husband and his, two separate clans) has more than a smattering of neurodivergence. As understanding of this and research into it has increased in the last forty or so years, we have acquired the insight and vocabulary to help us manage the various manifestations of neurodivergence in our tribe. This has been very helpful, and has considerably augmented the feeling our way instinctively that we relied on before, into a more confident management of who and what we are.

One of us — most definitely on the autistic spectrum — recently moved house. This family member has a history of rather detailed hoarding (careful curation of every letter and birthday card, every till receipt, written transcripts of every phone text message) and of marked hypersensitivity to noise, crowds, and all the usual sources of stress to the nervous system.

Other family members helping with the house move (a daunting task in this case for even the most experience and determined) reported back that the move had been effected, and the new home had a bed, a chair,  and fifty-two boxes waiting to be unpacked. And they said the one of us who had just moved said they were "bored".

This word "bored" deserves attention.

It's a word children use very often. Adults often respond crisply, impatiently, their tone warning of their lack of sympathy. I recall the educational philosopher A.S.Neill (of Summerhill School; I love his work) writing that when children — or adults — tell him they are bored, he says, "Everyone's bored until they find something to do."

I've also often read articles on creativity recommending that we should allow our children to be bored, that boredom is the compost from which ingenuity and invention sprout.

I probably agree with all that, but with the proviso that often when people say they're bored, it's not quite what they mean.

Do you know the word alexithymia? It's useful.

Alexithymia — the "a" denotes absence, the "lexi" is words, and the "thymia" is feelings. So it's when someone has no words or vocabulary for what they are feeling. Sometimes they can't even identify how they feel o even try and express it. They feel deeply, but don't really know, can't really say, what they feel. The Google AI overview puts it rather well:

Alexithymia is a personality construct characterised by difficulty identifying, describing, and processing one's own emotions. People with alexithymia have trouble differentiating between feelings and bodily sensations, and may have difficulty understanding the emotions of others. It is not a mental health disorder but is a trait that can be co-occurring with other conditions like autism, PTSD, and depression.

In our family, we have felt our way to the proposition that when children say they are "bored", sometimes they mean what it is supposed to mean (like A.S.Neill meant it), but sometimes it is the nearest familiar expression they can reach, for something they —as yet — have no vocabulary to describe; burnout, exhaustion, too much demanded of them, the flatness felt when life is altogether too much. This is familiar territory to those on the autistic spectrum.

This is how the Google bots describe autistic burnout:

Autistic burnout is a state of severe physical, mental, and emotional exhaustion resulting from chronic stress, often caused by masking and trying to meet neurotypical expectations. It is characterised by an extreme lack of energy, loss of skills, and reduced tolerance for sensory input, which can lead to an inability to manage daily tasks, more frequent meltdowns or shutdowns, and a need to withdraw socially. Recovery involves rest, reducing demands, and adjusting environmental factors, but it can be a long process.  

Do you see how, if you were a child experiencing this, you might describe yourself as "bored"?

The problem is that boredom never elicits sympathy. When people say they are bored, those on the receiving end of this observation typically respond with impatience and recommend more action, more engagement, more stimulus. But what if, when the person says they are "bored", it is an example of alexithymia, of someone who finds it hard to identify, distinguish between, and categorise, their feelings, reaching for the word they know that best fits what they are experiencing — a state of prostration that is beyond exhaustion.

I might be wrong, but I think when our family member — having gone through the hoarder's nightmare of a house move — said they were bored, they may actually have meant "overwhelmed".

Neurodivergent people sometimes need those who are close to them to be skilled enough to read between the lines.

 

Statistics

 Most of the statistics I look at — or the opinions resulting from statistical evidence — are to do with health or national politics.

When it comes to health, I'm particularly interested in the rôle of diet, since one way or another we do actually have to eat.

I've found it puzzling to see how doctors — proper doctors with degrees and a keen interest in metabolic health, high profile doctors with huge followings — profoundly disagree when it comes to diet. Every way of eating from vegan to carnivore has a cohort of high-profile doctors with huge followings passionately expounding their point of view and backing it up by statistics.

I've listened carefully, tried things out, made comparisons, followed logic, and made my own choices in the end. But it's made me wary of statistics. Yes, "There are lies, damned lies and statistics." So it would seem.

An illustration of the tangled web you can weave with statistics is found in a new set of statistics recently emerging from the statistical swamp about Hastings — the place where I live.

I first came to Hastings when I was nineteen, and I've lived here on and off since I was twenty-two (with brief spells of time living away during my years as a Methodist minister). I'm now sixty-eight, so I've had the opportunity to get to know Hastings well. A lot of poor people live here, and it's something of a sink town. Indeed, I came to live here for that very reason; the houses were a lot cheaper in Hastings than in the surrounding area, so our first family home was here even though my husband's job was twenty-six miles away. 

When my children were teenagers they began to notice the phenomenon that you could be dressed appropriately in Hastings, thinking you looked quite elegant and smart, but if you went on a day out, shopping or to visit relatives, you quickly realised that outside Hastings you looked eccentric or shabby.

It's a poor town. The roads are in bits, the place is full of drug dealers, the council is annually brought to the brink of bankruptcy trying to cope with all the homeless people. But it's also true that kids play out in the streets and women walk home alone at night, and it's a kindly, neighbourly place taken all round.

So I found this recent set of statistics intriguing.

Here's a map of England shaded according to social deprivation. Dark is deprived, light is prosperous,

You see that tiny dark dot down on the south coast, over to the right (east) as you look at the map? That's Hastings. You'll have to click on the image to make Hastings big enough to see.

The images I'm posting are just screen-shots, but where I saw the map originally (it's in this article) it was interactive, so you could check out the place where you live. I hovered on Hastings and it brought up this.

Intrigued, I looked to see the statistics for the area where Hastings is set — Hastings and Rother (the Rother is actually a river that gives its name to the area).

But what are the implications of that? Hastings is "highly deprived", outstandingly so, and deprivation usually goes hand in hand with crime, yet in a recent presentation by Hastings police to members of the borough council, I heard (from my husband who is a councillor and was at the presentation) that the police say crime is down in Hastings and (I'm paraphrasing) everything is lovely.

So I looked up the statistics and found this.

The crime rate is 132% of the national average — mostly made up of violent crime, sexual assault and robberies! Wow! That sounds dangerous. Further searches brought up an agreement that Hastings is the most dangerous place in a wide area. Here's a representative example result from a locksmith.

But my searches also brought up the result that Hastings is the safest major town in East Sussex — as well as being the most dangerous. What? Yes, that's what they say.

A resident sheds a little light, on Reddit (I agree).

Baffled by the statistical evidence that Hastings is simultaneously the safest major town in East Sussex and the most dangerous place in the local area, I asked the Google bots how both these things could be true.

They said this.

So, what they're saying is that compared with other major towns in the area, Hastings is very safe, but since there aren't that many major towns in East Sussex, it's farming country with a lot of little villages and small market towns, if you compare Hastings with the Sussex hamlets and villages, it's comparatively unsafe. All that tells us, I suspect, is that urban locations are usually more dangerous than country villages, which is not astonishing — especially as the houses in the country villages cost a lot more, so the residents have more comfortable and well-ordered lives.

But just to double-check, I asked the Google bots again this morning if Hastings really is the safest place in East Sussex. And they said this.

So Google searches have told me — all based on statistics — that Hastings both is and is not the safest place in East Sussex, that it is the most dangerous place in East Sussex but also the safest major town.

What I take away from this brief foray into statistics about something where I actually have substantial personal experience, is that statistics are useful for politicians or to win an argument, but of little or no use in navigating my way through life. Personal experience is better.

I suspect you are not surprised.

All Hallows Eve

Tomorrow is Hallowe'en, and I have mixed feelings about it.

When I was a child, it just wasn't a Thing. We sang For All the Saints at church, and other than that it went unremarked.

By the time I'd grown up and got children of my own, England had adopted America's Trick or Treat tradition, with costumes and children going from house to house. At that time I was adamantly opposed to it, and wanted nothing whatever to do with anything celebrating and death and the demonic, ghosts and witchcraft.

Then at some point I saw a TV programme about Temple Grandin, an autistic woman made famous by Oliver Sacks chronicling in one of his books her work as a designer of abattoirs that reduced stress for animals to be slaughtered. The TV interview with her was done in the days approaching Hallowe'en. Temple Grandin had no children of her own, but she remark with joyful anticipation, "The children are coming!" — and that made me see Hallowe'en differently. She completely bypassed all the disturbing and sinister spiritual shadows, and went straight to a consideration of little children coming to her home in hope of being given sweets; which she looked forward to doing, with delight. This changed my outlook; I thought her approach felt healthy and sane, and adopted the same way of looking at it.

For a few years I carved pumpkin lanterns, some with a smiley face and some with a cross cut unto them. Some years I made up bags of sweets and included a little leaflet I'd written, saying to children to remember if ever they are afraid of any kind of darkness, that Jesus is the light of the world, and you only have to call out to him and he will help you.

More recently (I'm not over-keen on pumpkin) I moved on to just a couple of light-up artificial pumpkins in the window, and a few tubs of sweets to offer to children who called at our house.

But in the last two years my approach changed again. I came to the realisation that I find Hallowe'en immensely stressful. Sitting for several hours in readiness to answer knocks at the door — frequent but unscheduled and unpredictable — caused me such tension and anxiety that I found it exhausting (yes, I am on the autistic spectrum and flourish in predictable routine). The women we lived with before we moved shared the same sense of it being stressful, so the last couple of years we just turned out the lights at the front of the house and pretended to be out.

Four years of illness and pain have left me less resilient and more used to solitude. This summer, our house move has involved many days of tradesmen working here, each of these days requiring many hours of being on duty like a receptionist, ready to leap up and respond every time they stood at the door and shouted for attention. I found this so exhausting it left me flattened. It was like an extra illness of its own. And I realised the other day that on the back of this I am dreading Hallowe'en. 

Enquiring of neighbours, we have discovered that Hallowe'en is big in our neighbourhood — a lot of families with little kids live here. I have bought tubs of sweets (I think sweets are pretty much poison, but hey, I don't want to be a kill-joy), and acquired a light-up pumpkin to go in the window; but I'm conscious of having to steel myself to face a whole evening of random unpredictable callers knocking on the door and having to leap up and rush in response to open up and offer sweets, while my nervous system is progressively shredded.

I just don't want to.

I'll be glad when it's over.

But I don't object. No ghouls, no ghosts, no death's heads, just sweets and a smiley pumpkin and some window clings saying "Happy Hallowe'en". 

What John Martyn's song said — "I don't want to know about evil; I only want to know about love."

 

Chronic illness and the Rife frequencies

 I think several friends who come by here face the daily challenges of chronic illness.

Of course you may have a good and trusted practitioner to whom you can turn, and of course if you have physical symptoms then the responsible thing to do is get them thoroughly checked out.

But like many of us (especially since the interventions that began in 2021), you may have strong physical symptoms that defy diagnosis no matter how many scans, blood tests, stool/urine tests, etc etc you may undergo to find the problem.

Perhaps, like me, you have identified a healing pathway for yourself, because you are working with zero effective help from the usual practitioners, but are not yet all the way there and are living with significant and intrusive levels of pain — which in turn create tiredness, stiffness, and all the usual spin-off problems.

If that's you, have you had a go with the Rife frequencies? I find them remarkably helpful.

You can get actual Rife frequency generators, like this one, but for me that is (at present) both too complicated and too expensive to consider. Having your own generator like that — provided you can figure out how to use it successfully — is the most powerful way to administer frequency treatments, but on Youtube, for free, you can administer them aurally, which is not as powerful but good enough to make an impressive difference.

The ones I go to are this channel and this one. I have a playlist that lasts all night, and if the pain is bad I just go to bed with my ear-buds in and let the frequencies roll in while I sleep. 

Not only does it help reduce pain, but it eases my whole body, so that, instead of a solid clump of pain, my body is just loose and easy, just itself, albeit with areas of pain still within it.

In case you have never heard of the Rife frequencies and don't know what I mean at all, there's an explanation here and here.