Perspectives

[Teresa Davey, there are three videos in this post. Each is inserted below the paragraph that refers to them. It should be possible on your phone to click on them and so play them on YouTube, but let me know in the comments if you have trouble with that and I'll try to figure out a strategy. I thought if I inserted the video into the block of text, rather than linking a word, it might be easier for your fingers to find. I hope so, because I'd love you to be able to listen to them. If it helps, on 21st December I posted just the inserted video of O Holy Night, with no accompanying text, so it may be easier to get to it through that.]

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For about the thousandth time this winter I went back to YouTube to listen again to the tenor Harry Gant singing O Holy Night, in the course of the 2024 broadcast of Carols from Kings (not the 2025 one).

Everything about it is beautiful.

That service starts in the remains of daylight at three in the afternoon, but is in total darkness by the end. When they were singing that carol, the chapel is entirely dark, lit by the candles inside their simple protective lantern sleeves of gleaming glass. You can see the people who have been lucky enough to attend the service — and how privileged and special that will feel — sitting quietly in their best clothes, their hands resting on the service sheets held on their laps.

The cameras in their various locations show us first of all Harry Gant start to sing, and the sensitivity he brings to it is its own kind of reverence. I have no idea what his personal faith may be, but I can see in his face that he understands the value of what has been entrusted to him. He sings not only the music, but the hymn. And then the other cameras show the rest of the choir — the trebles, just little kids, singing without affectation because music is woven into the everyday round of life for a boy at choir school. It's very wise, the dailyness of it sands away performance and exposes the music underneath. Then another camera on the man standing quietly beside Harry Gant, alert for the moment to add his voice. And one camera shows the accompanist, so sure and focused — four keyboards and the pedals to get right as well as reading the music. Organists astonish me.

I posted about it back in December, but here it is again in case you didn't see. 

What struck me watching it this time through is how young they all are. It took me right back to years gone by living in York, when we were just kids ourselves, university students. The man who became my husband singing in the Minster choir and playing the organ at Selby Abbey, all of us who lived in community together in St Martins Lane singing Vespers at All Saints Pavement, writing papers for the Theology Group at More House, staying at Ampleforth and joining in Vespers in the dark of winter evenings with the monks, sitting on the stairs to sing Compline every night at St Martins Lane (we made the staircase our chapel and the cantor sat on the half-landing), singing Irish folk songs round the supper table after supper. We were so young. Mike was the oldest of us at twenty-four.

And I know that if the people we were then could look at me now, all they'd see is an old lady.

Harry Gant and the young men standing beside him in Kings College chapel, they look to me as much like kids as the trebles. 

It's a curious thing, isn't it — I can see how young they are, and they can't; and they'd be able to see how old I am, and I can't. It's like the tradesmen who have worked on our house through this last summer; there's a sort of gentle understated gallantry, making sure we're all right, carrying heavy things upstairs for us, doing extra little things to look after us. It makes me realise how old we look to them, Tony and me.

It gives me a sense of life passing. I feel my body growing old, see it in the mirror, notice that I couldn't possibly run up a flight of stairs as I once always did, see the skin in wrinkled folds on my hands. But at the same time, I just feel like me. And it's only when I watch Harry Gant and the young men beside him singing O Holy Night that I realise how young I was then, all those years ago, when I didn't know I was young, I thought I was just me.

Here's a recording of Mike and John and Rog, singing the Agnus Dei from William Byrd's three-part Mass for the chant project Rog did towards his degree in 1977. They were in the Lyons Concert Hall at the university. What I treasure is that they were also friends, and living together in community, and used to sing that piece along with so many others, any evening of the week, just for the love of it.

And here, more than forty years later, our family (and Donna) playing at Pett Chapel in the Sussex countryside. Alice on French horn, Rosie with her trombone, Hebe and Donna with their violins, and Grace with her viola (it's at a stately pace to take account of mixed ability). But on the wall behind them, the stained glass cross that Alice made in the eastern window, and the forged cross that Bernard made — the cross of Christ at the heart of creation — above the pulpit.

Such a sense of time and change, of growing old and of being young,  but also of treasures of the heart that never fade, that nothing can erase. 

Light to see by

 I remember my prayer partner Margery telling me that the daylight extends by twenty minutes every week after the winter solstice (here in England). She told me that before we had the internet, and I carried the nuggets of information tucked away safe in my inner archive as a talisman of hope.

Thinking about it today, I looked it up online, and read that English daylight increases by two minutes and seven seconds every day after the solstice, which is an extra hour of daylight every month. After the feast of St John the Baptist in June they start to ration it until by the time Advent begins there's hardly any left and we have to wait for Jesus to be born. 

So we're three weeks on from the year's longest night, which is forty-three minutes and three seconds more daylight and thank God for that.

I say "daylight" but the grey drear in England today has personality. 

Still, any daylight makes it easier to work, and live and write.

Patient friends who ask me hopefully how I'm getting along with the next Hawk & Dove book will be pleased to know I'm making progress.  

I've gone back to the way I wrote the very first story, just sitting down each day to see who was there and write down what they said and what they did. I want to get it finished and out before the xenith of the year at St John the Baptist's feast, because 2026 looks set to be another turbulent ride, and we could all do with any light held steady to show us the way; and that place, those monks, do that for me. I must alert the artists to do a cover drawing for me; I don't like to rush them, hatching a picture takes time.

So, back to work. Just waving to you and saying hello from England. x

Morning thoughts

I've been making moderately good progress on the novel I'm writing, but yesterday I realised I need to completely restructure two chapters, amalgamating different sections of the material with each other. I don't want to lose any of the content but it needs re-ordering, not in big chunks but re-writing to integrate it differently. 

I've been reluctant to come to this conclusion because we're talking about 9000 words to be shuffled around, but I've come to the conclusion it has to be done.

That's today's task then.

Aside of that I've been considering growing zucchini. Here in England we normally say 'courgettes', but I've been conditioned in the direction of 'zucchini' by American nutritionists online; I like the word better anyway. If your name was going to be Zucchini or Courgette, which would you choose? Courgette is pretty, but does it carry too heavy overtones of Les Miserables? 

And the thing with zucchini is they are low FODmap, low in oxalates, high in L-citrulline, though they are high in salicylates so hmm. But I seen to be able to cope with them and although just meat has all you need I'm going to give them a go. But I'll grow my own because why wouldn't you?

Anyway, zucchini grow fast and vigorously and need good compost. We have plenty of garden space, and grass clippings aplenty in the summer months, but my compost waste is mostly eggshells and teabags; I don't really generate peelings. My husband does, but not much. He eats his food, he doesn't throw it away. And he mostly eats keto things like mushrooms and tomatoes and kale, where you eat all of it, there aren't peelings. 

I hate the idea of buying compost in plastic bags, though — I mean, what? We did this in the summer to get our garden going, because when we moved in there were plants in the wrong place and they had to come out of the ground into pots, and we built up one bed that then needed some earth adding in, to plant our heathers. And heathers need ericaceous compost, so we bought several bags of that. Plus, the front of our house just has a brick yard to park the car, so our garden there is all in pots and we bought extra compost for planters.

But it's stupid, isn't it, buying compost? If ever there was an example of modern insanity it has to be that. 

So early this morning (there's a lot of thinking time before sunrise in an English winter) I was not only reluctantly facing up to the reality that I need to restructure those two chapters, but equally reluctantly accepting that if I want to add zucchini back into what I eat then it makes sense to grow it and if I'm going to do that I need good compost and the best way to get the best compost is to make your own — bokashi-bran-neutralised dry closeting compost (I mean humanure) combined with grass clippings and weeds. To neutralise the pathogens and exclude rats, if you don't have a proper system in the sense of hardware you need a system in the sense of strategy. It's very easy. You need 2 large airtight buckets, one for collecting current deposits and one for curing already collected deposits. Said deposits (I hope you don't mind reading about this) are a combination of paper plus what naturally exits you plus a handful of bokashi bran (which neutralises pathogens). These are accumulated daily in a tub with an airtight lid until it's full, at which point you close it up and leave it for a fortnight, while you move on to the 2nd bucket for accumulation.

After that you empty the cured bucketful into your regular composter to mix with carbon elements (grass clippings, torn paper, spent compost etc) and leave it to rot down, which it does in short order and gives you the best compost you ever saw.

The only thing is, rats are very partial to humanure; so the composter for the second stage must be rat-proof. And I know we have rats in our compost because I have seen their tunnels. All they're getting is teabags, eggshells and grass clipping (plus a few ends of broccoli stalks and apple cores rejected by my husband) so I doubt they're too enthusiastic at the moment, but I don't want to create a population explosion of rats. At the end of our garden is a deck with a shed on it, and beyond the garden fence is the bank of the stream — so I'll bet you anything you like rats live under that deck.

But, as it happens our Hebe and Alice have two composters I bought when we lived with them, that they no longer need for various reasons. And those composters are the Subpod ones, which are rat-proof. Like this.

The earth in our garden is uncompromisingly heavy clay, and I think an eighteen-inch square hole might be a bit much for me to dig. I'm not sure. But if it is, then the alternative would be to create a raised bed and put both composters in that (because Alice and Hebe have two). Then if the raised bed is big enough to plant the courgettes alongside the composters, hey presto, we have both a composting system and a zucchini bed. 

I think we might do that.

And now the sun has risen (I think it has, behind all that cloud) and what we laughingly call 'day' at this time of year in England has made its appearance, and it's time to get up for our prayers.

Yesterday morning for breakfast I made myself egg-nog (beaten egg and hot milk, and a splash of vanilla and a teeny bit of manuka honey so it tastes nice, and cream), because I wanted to go to church without setting off abdominal agony by giving my gut anything more challenging than liquid to process. And that was delicious so I think I'll make that for my breakfast again today. It worked well for church, and I was glad I went because they had all my favourite songs in the one meeting. I walked home after to get some exercise, because I knew perfectly well that the chances of my going out for a happy afternoon stroll in the biting cold wind we had yesterday was exactly zero. So I was glad about that too. 

I haven't been to church all through Christmas because it gets a bit much for me — I need things to be plain and simple. I went to Russian Orthodox Christmas though, last week, because the priest is kind and a friend and invited me. So I have actually and literally been to church over Christmas, just not much.

It's two minutes to eight and time I got out of bed. Catch you later. But that's what I've been thinking about these last three hours as morning came. Wish me luck with re-structuring those chapters, it's not easy; praying friends, all prayer support in the endeavour gratefully received.

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Later on... evening...

Phew! Done it! The writing, I mean, not the composters.

Some good news on the topic of human diet

Hurrah! Well done America!

(Just so you know, there's an ad in the middle of this video. It's indicated by an orange bar moving across the bottom to show its progress. It's a benign ad for a good product — just letting you know because it's kind of grown-in to Dr Cywes talking)

Here's the new graphic showing the working principles, which are somewhat provisional and will be finessed with time.

It'll be interesting to see how this unfolds, not least because in the UK the EATLancet recommendations have gone with the ideologically driven "Green" agenda currently in vogue, with its reliance on grain and seed oils (good luck with that), to create the "Planetary Health" diet, as shown in this graphic —

— and detailed here:

In past years I'd have been all on board with the "Planetary Heath" diet, but as a result of taking that direction (as well as being very naive about the ubiquitous rollout of novel pharmaceuticals) I got an overload of oxalate and SIBO, and it's taken me a very long time and a great deal of money to figure out how to unpick the results. 

If this is a topic of interest for you, Max German has offered a careful analysis and response here:

Please, please note — the thing in that second video about vegans being deported is Max German's joke, not something the US govt is recommending!!

Moments

The Welsh baritone Cai Thomas is (I think) eighteen years old now. He has the most beautiful voice. Here he is, just this last Christmas, singing O Holy Night. A voice so sure and true. I love it.

But listening to it made me think about about the way life passes, and the memories we hold in our hearts, of times that will never return. The chances we have that belong to particular circumstances and relationships and occasions. 

The Japanese have a wonderful term for this — ichi go ichi e — which means pretty much "one encounter one chance" expressing the fleeting nature of the moments life offers us.

There's a glorious speech in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar that goes like this: 

There is a tide in the affairs of men

Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;

Omitted, all the voyage of their life

Is bound in shallows and in miseries.

On such a full sea are we now afloat;

And we must take the current when it serves,

Or lose our ventures.

Those words carry the same haunting sense of a moment which, once gone, will never come again. Ichi go ichi e. Yes, there will be other moments of course — life is full of moments — but there are times that take your breath away, that are part of the reason you came to this earth to experience the human condition with all its terrors and uncertainties, moments that you know you will treasure for ever, all the more precious because they will never ever come again. Times that, whether in public life or just personally in your own heart, make you what you are; crossroads moments. It can be about a decision or an insight or a choice — or it can simply be a moment of sheer beauty and joy, and you are different for having experienced it.

What made me think of these moments, these bright jewels of life that are fleetingly ours then gone for ever, is this video of Cai Thomas six years ago, before he matured from a treble to a baritone. Here he is singing the Laudate Dominum from Mozart's Vespers.

Cai Thomas now, today, has the most beautiful voice; but I'm so glad that memory of him singing as a twelve-year-old boy was captured and recorded — that time which was ours for a while and will never come again.

Rondo

Our Alice plays the French horn. Probably the most famous horn piece of all time is this one by Mozart.

In consequence, at fêtes and concerts all through the summer, Alice is called upon to play it.

The only drawback is that it's fiendishly difficult.

She realised early that she had no choice; if she wanted to play French horn in a performance band, then playing that Rondo was non-negotiable — mandatory.

The neighbours at Beaufort Road (where we lived with Alice and Hebe) are remarkably patient and understanding. Alice used to practice in the attic room, which gets very hot in summer and cold in winter. Because all the gigs were in the summer — well, the ones with the Rondo were; it's all Good King Wenceslas and Hark the herald in the winter concerts — this meant Alice playing that piece on repeat for hours with the windows wide open until she got it absolutely right. Because it's essentially a solo, so for a concert it had to be error-free.

And she did get it right, and personally I never got tired of hearing it, and our neighbours (God bless them) never once complained.

But every time I heard it, and I do mean every time, what I was listening to in my mental interior was this rendition by Flanders and Swann.

Labels

I hate labels. All of them. Worst of all are the ones they sew in the collars of shirts, fiendish for irritating the back of your neck.

I hate the stickers they put on fruits in the supermarket. I don't buy fruit but my husband does, and he doesn't mind labels. So I go through the apples and bananas he's set out in his fruit basket on the supper table, carefully peeling off the wretched stickers.

I hate the Fire Resistant labels they affix to furniture, incomprehensibly sited to dangle down from the centre front of the chair so they're clearly visible. You have to keep them, of course, because if you ever want to pass on the item of furniture at a later point, the charity shops can't take it without its fire label. So I either re-attach it where it can't be seen (underneath, where it should have been stapled on in the first place) or I squirrel it away in a drawer to retrieve later if needed.

I understand why manufacturers need to attach labels like this.

But I cut them off.

Other members of my family share my dislike. At Christmas-time, Alice and Hebe had bought some very pretty double-gauze napkins for the lunch table. But they all had the mandatory labels, so when it was time to eat lunch Hebe passed round the scissors so we could get rid of the labels first. Ha!

A book I ordered recently came in yesterday's post. 

I've had this book before, but moved it on at some point, and I wanted to have it again, so I sent for a second-hand copy that didn't cost much. When it arrived I discovered a new and loathsome label manifestation. It was an ex-library book, so to protect it they'd covered it in crackly cellophane, and added a cataloguing label. Understandable but  . . . no.

Fortunately, being librarians and respecting books, they'd stuck the cellophane to an inner paper cover, ingeniously added under the book's own dust cover. This meant I was able to wrestle off the cellophane completely with its cataloguing label, and the book was left intact.

It does have inner labels of course — but if there's one thing even worse than a label it's a disfigured surface where a label used to be; so I left well alone. 

I can live with those inner labels because I don't have to look at them; I can just shut the book.

That blanket, by the way, that still has a label (shown above) — that's an example of the fly tipping where I live. It was thrown out in the street. I left it there a few days in case someone had left it there by accident and actually wanted it; but no, it just stayed there covered in mud and sodden with rain. So I brought it home and washed it, and when my husband sits up late reading, he wraps it round his legs these cold winter nights. I think I will make a nice picnic/sunbathing rug when the summer comes, too, because it's quite thick, not flimsy at all. So it's a new acquisition which is how come it still has its label.

Correspondence cards. Monastic shopping.

Monastery shops aren't always what first comes to mind for online purchasing, but it's worth thinking of them if you are looking for candles or soap or correspondence cards. 

Buckfast Abbey in Devon has an excellent on-the-premises shop stocking wonderful products from monasteries all over Europe, but maybe you aren't anywhere near Devon. They have an online shop too, but with very limited stock.

Prinknash Abbey shop is fab (here), and they sell their lovely incense, but I think it's another one where you have to actually go there. For people not in the UK, "Prinknash" is one of those weird English words that isn't said how it's written. You say it more like "Prinnitch".

I used to buy the most wonderful bathroom things — soap, shampoo etc — from the Abbazia di Praglia, all made in European abbeys and convents; but sadly they stopped shipping to the UK after Brexit. Understandable but sad.

I have bought two or three things — gorgeous ceramics — as gifts from the St Elisabeth Convent at Minsk, a most life-affirming and holy foundation. They ship worldwide.

Something I always like to have in stock at home is correspondence cards. I have a stash from St Hughs Parkminster (where my Carthusian friends are), but of course their own cards aren't the ideal choice if I actually need to write to them, which I do at the moment because I think they've tightened up their internet discipline as the procurator seems to have gone into radio silence. 

The online shops of monasteries mostly sell things they make themselves, and the products can be a little more idiosyncratic than I had in mind, or super-religious which isn't always what I want.

Searching around online to see who was selling what, I came across the shop of the Carmelites at Quidenham in Norfolk, and they make really lovely cards at startlingly low prices. The normal-sized ones are a pound and the little prayer cards are only 35p. They sell handicraft things they've made, plus soaps and balms as well — here. Shipping costs are modest and despatch is prompt. The cards themselves are very high quality. Here are the ones I bought:

If you are in America or Australia, of course you'll have alternative sources of your own. Let us know in the comments if there's any you especially recommend.

Carthusians and oxalate

 What I really want to talk to you about is oxalate, because it's much on my mind at the moment. I had never grasped how much toxicity is wrapped up in what we have been encouraged to see as health foods, and I had no idea that it would store up in one's tissues all over the place and then burst forth — "Surprise!" — like the Spanish Inquisition, causing an astounding array of symptoms entirely bewildering to doctors and involving PAIN — like that, bright red and in bold and in capitals.

But.

There are so many circumstances in life that have a concomitant 'but', don't you find? This is one. Experience has taught me that just as our well-bred aunts and grandmothers knew never to discuss politics or religion (and obviously not sex) in polite society, so one of the modern taboo subjects is health.

I guarantee you this. Try it. If you ask a friend (any friend, pick any one you like) what they eat, a strangely steely look will enter their eye — we call it defensiveness — and they will respond (sweetly, calmly, courteously), "Oh, we have a very healthy diet." And then you know you must stop. Don't say another word. Even if you know more about oxalate than you ever knew there was to know. Even if you are in Susan Owens' Facebook group and you've read Sally Norton's book from cover to cover (even the index); just shut up about it. Say nothing. They don't want to know.

So all I will say to you is that after four years of the most exhausting and debilitating pain, I think (oh God, I hope so) I know how to fix it now. That's all. I don't want to stir up any kind of hornet's nest. I can blog about it if you like, but only if you truly want to know.

Moving on.

I woke up this morning to a lovely long email from Krista, full of all sorts of memories and thoughts and family snippets; an absolute delight. I'll write back to you Krista, of course, but there was one bit I thought might be of interest to several people. 

Krista said: "You have expressed that [the Carthusians] have a life devoted to prayer.  I am curious when they started and if for a specific purpose?"

Oh my goodness, the Carthusians! I'll try not to go on for too long.

They were started by St Bruno of Cologne at the end of the 11th century. There is so much to say about him that I think I'd better redirect you to a potted history.

If you plough through that article you can read all about him — an accomplished and considerable man — and then you eventually come to the bit where he backed out of being made a bishop and went off with some friends to become hermits instead. The bishop of Grenoble (in France), Hugh de Châteauneuf (that translates as Hugh of Newcastle which doesn't sound quite so posh, does it?) set them up in a place called Chartreuse in the French Alps — and that was how the Carthusian order began. If you look at the word you can see how "Carthusian" is extrapolated from "Chartreuse", and that's why each Carthusian monastery, wherever situated, is also a Chartreuse, or 'Charterhouse'.

So the Carthusians are hermits, but with the difference that they are hermit who live in community. That's why their monasteries are so massive — each of the monks or nuns lives alone in his/her own hermitage, but all built together. Here's the one in West Sussex. 

Their life is enclosed and contemplative, dedicated to prayer.  

I'm going to digress for a moment to wonder if whoever wrote the Disney film Encanto knew about St Bruno, because this encounter . . . well, he went off to be a hermit, didn't he? There are similarities. He's called Bruno. 

So St Bruno started off the Carthusian order, and their Rule of life has remained unchanged from the 11th century to the present day, which is quite something.

You have heard of the liqueur called Chartreuse, yes? Well, the Carthusians make it. On the one occasion I went to visit them (they aren't meant to have visitors but they graciously let me go and meet them), they plied me with Chartreuse. I was going to refuse it because I don't drink, but I realised that not only would that be extremely rude because it's their special product but also if I said no then they probably wouldn't be able to have a glass either. I accepted on these grounds and in consequence was too drunk to get the best out of the meeting, but such is life.

There were nine Carthusian houses in England before the Reformation — Witham Charterhouse in Somerset was the first, founded at the end of 1178, as part of Henry II's penance for the murder of Thomas Becket. Then Hinton Priory was founded in 1222 in Gloucestershire (but moved to Hinton in Somerset five years later), then Beauvale Priory was founded in Nottinghamshire in 1343, then the London Charterhouse was founded in 1371 on a burial ground for the great plague (!)

Hull Charterhouse came next in 1377 in the East Riding of Yorkshire, followed by the Coventry Charterhouse in 1381 and Axholme Charterhouse near Epworth in Lincolnshire in 1397. The last of the 14th century foundations was Mount Grace Priory in North Yorkshire, founded in 1398. And the very last of them was Sheen Priory (otherwise known as Richmond Priory) in 1414 in Surrey.

And then came Henry VIII and his reformation. The Carthusians, gentle, quiet men, men of prayer, steadfast and true, would not renounce their Catholic faith. You can read about their martyrdom here. It makes my head reel. This is what the Church of England is founded on. God bless Margaret Clement who did what she could to help them.

One of the Carthusian martyrs, Blessed William Exmew, was the procurator of the London Charterhouse, executed at Tyburn on June 15th of 1535. He was one of the first members of Christ's College Cambridge founded by Margaret Beaufort (who married Owen Tudor). He wrote his name in the frontispiece of a copy of The Cloud of Unknowing that he copied out for his monastery. They have that treasured script safe at the Charterhouse in West Sussex.

So they were men of the utmost courage.

After Henry VIII had finished his grisly work, there were no Charterhouses left in England. But they came back, founding St Hughs at Parkminster in West Sussex in 1873.

And there they live in faithfulness, praying for us and for all our fallen world, day by day. 

I am so grateful that they are there, walking with us quietly, out of sight, holding us up in prayer. We certainly need it.

To get a flavour of their life, I most highly recommend to you Philip Groening's wonderful film Into Great Silence. You have to buy or rent it (and your money would not be wasted, it's the best film I've ever seen) but there's a trailer here.

Snow and silence

 In the winter of 1962 it snowed a lot. I was five years old, and we lived near the bottom of a steep hill.

This was our road.

Right at the bottom, tucked in the corner, was our house — the middle one in this picture. It was a new build, and we moved there from north London when I was three.

In the house next door (to the left in the photo) lived an elderly couple called Freddie and Dorothy Paine. They will have been promoted to a mansion in Heaven long ago.

They had a marvellous car like this one, that we children were occasionally allowed to sit in. I don't know if they still have it in Heaven, but it would fit right in.

You can't see how steep the hill is from the photo that shows our road — but you can tell from this photo of the road that ran adjacent to it, which was called Bells Hill.

Our garden (front — tiny — and back) continued the precipitous downhill descent. My father had to cut steps into it to get down to the garden gate at the bottom. Here are the steps I used to go down when I set out for school in the mornings.

My mother used to stand at the foot of our garden and tell me when it was safe to cross the road, and she'd be there waiting for the same purpose when I returned home at the end of the school day.

Several of the other houses included little children in their household. 

That winter when it snowed so much, at the end of 1962, the children in our road all came out of their houses to play in the snow. We made snowballs and ran about enjoying it, and then we had the idea to make a snowman. We started at the very top of the hill, at the start of our road, and we rolled it all the way down to the bottom, stopping outside our house on the pavement hidden underneath all the snow. The rolling snowman's body increased in size as he rolled down the hill, and once we had made a head for him and set it on top of his huge body, that snowman was taller than I was. 

In those days we all had coke boilers to run our central heating (morning was always heralded by the sound of my father riddling the boiler), and coal fires in the little fireplaces. Ours looked very like this.

So when the snowman's head and body were all complete, one of the children tied their scarf round his neck and one of them ran for pieces of coal to make his eyes, and one of them begged a carrot from their mother to make his nose, and so he was gloriously finished. We were immensely proud of him. 

I tried for the first time ever, eating snow. I can still remember its coldness and purity and the texture of it.

My father travelled the world, and spent a lot of time in Scandinavia at that point in his life, so on our mantelpiece we had a Swedish dala horse like this — 

— and I had a warm Norwegian cardigan similar to this —

— and Norwegian mittens like these to keep my hands warm.

But even so my hands got very, very cold playing out in all that snow.

When the snowman was finished and admired, and my mittens were soaking wet and I'd been eating the snow, I came inside to warm up again. My mother had the fire alight, and she made me some hot orange squash (I had never had it hot before), and we said how marvellous was the snowman very visible from our front window because it was a bay window and the garden sloped up steeply and there stood the snowman at the top.

So I think that exciting day with all the children playing must have been far from quiet — children calling out and laughing, shouting instructions to each other as the snowman was rolled down the hill. Quite noisy, I should think.

But then I remember another time when it snowed, forty-eight years later in 2010, by which time I lived here in Hastings.

Sometimes, because a ridge of hills wraps all round Hastings, it snows here but nowhere else, or everywhere else but not here.

But that year it snowed across the whole of England. They had a photo of it at NASA.

My friend Pearl Thornton was still alive then, and I remember her talking about that snow. She delighted in it, she responded so deeply to its beauty and purity; but the thing she loved best was — she said — it covered all the clamour of humanity just for a little while in a blanket of utter silence. 

Pearl loved the hush of fallen snow.

She is gone now (she died at the end of 2018), but she, too, was lovely. On New Year's Eve every year she used to stay up until midnight, then step outside, then put through her front door her picture of beloved Jesus, so that he would have the first footing into her home as the year turned.

This picture.

Rest in peace, Pearl. Thank you for your eagerness and your joy, for your gift of healing and your loving-kindness. Thank you for loving the silence of the snow.