The view from here

 Wendy commented yesterday saying this:

I was wondering whether you still have your beautiful altar in your bedroom? I used to picture you sitting on your bed writing the next Hawk & Dove book… now I don’t know where to put you!

During the summer we painted my bedroom — my husband did all the nightmare fiddly parts of painting the woodwork on the cupboards, and I did the walls. It's still a work in progress because the cupboards need one more top coat and we want that to be the same shade of cream as the picture wall; but at the time we bought the paint they didn't have that shade of cream in stock, so we had to go with more plain white than we wanted. When the spring comes and longer hours of daylight we'll get to it again. 

But it all means that now the view from my bed, where I mainly sit and work, is still of my altar with my icons, but the statue of Our Lady who was there went downstairs at Christmas. I left her there because in an ideal world I'd have a saint in every room — but the nice ones are very expensive. 

So now my altar, or icon shelf or whatever it is, looks like this.

There is the little figure of Our Lady that Hebe made, the picture and calligraphy that Maria sent me from Russia, an icon of Jesus and an icon picture of St Melangell both made by Alice, an icon picture of St Paisios of Mount Athos made by Hebe, a prayer card to speed on its way the project by our local Eastern Orthodox friends to fund their Good Shepherd chapel purchase, a picture of Jesus on his shelf and a twig I found in the road that looks like a crucifix, my rosary and assorted blessing cards, and a picture by Hebe of someone nestled in the heart of a tree.

It feels like a real luxury to have so big an entire shelf, and right opposite where I am — so every time I look up, there it is.

I have loads of statues of Our Lady on my Etsy favourites, but they are all a lot of money, so unless something surprising happens, that's where they's stay. Here are some of them, so you can see how lovely they are if you share my taste!

Some of the baby Jesus figurines do have gammy hands where something bad has happened, but our Alice and Hebe have astonishing abilities to fix that kind of thing.

I still have things to pay for like an outdoor cat kennel for Clarence because he doesn't like going out at night, and I want to go down to Dorset for a weekend in the spring to see our Fi, who lives near Wimborne, and I have a dream of making a retreat at Worth Abbey — plus I do actually have a statue of Our Lady already, it's just that I like her to be right there where I can see her.

I'd also like a statue of St Francis and St Benedict and St Bruno — but there are all there in my head and in my heart, so it doesn't feel imperative. The important thing was that they lived and shone their light for us to see the way.

There are some fab statues of the Sacred Heart as well, though I do tend to the view that a person's heart should be tucked away inside their body, not outside their clothes. And the face of Jesus has to be just absolutely right, which is why I stick with the photo I have, even though people say to me, "Who is that man on your altar?" 

I actually took it from Facebook, where it was the profile picture for one Yeshua ben Josef — "Ah, it's Yourself!" as Father Ted used to say.

The bits of paper on his little shelf with him say "Abba, I belong to you" and "When I am most afraid, I put my trust in you" — because that's true.