Call it good.

Such a good day, today.

I had to be out of the house early – a dental appointment at 8.30am.  I wanted to go by bus because my car had a flat tyre yesterday (Sunday, just as I was setting out to Mass).  The AA man (Automobile Association not Alcoholics Anonymous) came at once and sorted it out, but the spare wheel is a dinky little emergency one, so I didn’t want to drive it until I’d taken it down to ATS today to get a proper wheel back on.

So the day began with walking along our street smelling the fragrance of autumn, looking at the first russet leaves fallen, and the intensity of velvet moss in the cracks of paving stones, just beautiful, intoxicating.

I’ve been glad to leave behind the exhaustion of hours added to every journey by waiting for buses, but I still love travelling by bus and train, and enjoyed so much being on the bus again today.  I like the lurching bigness of it and marveling at the mindboggling variety of humanity clustered here in Hastings, sampled startlingly in the bus-travelling population.  The basic model of humanity; no add-ons.

In the town, the morning still early, brightest sunshine permeating lingering mist illuminated and bathed the old stone town hall in a haze of glory; made of it a mount of transfiguration.

My dentist is a person of rare quality; gentle, intelligent, skeptical, kind, perceptive, warm – and a most excellent dentist too.  As another member of the family observed, when you’ve been to see Ali, you always feel that he has given you energy instead of draining away all yours.  A healer, then.  He fixed my teeth.

On the way home, through the bus window I saw outside one of the dilapidated Hastings row houses a couple of delivery men stopping to talk to a woman with a puppy in her arms.  One of the men, small, thin, a face lined and worn by life and weather, hair in a pony tail, was focused entirely on the tiny dog, stroking its head. The puppy wriggled in an ecstasy of love, and the man’s face was alight with tenderness.

I took my car to ATS, where the men are astonishing – so cheerful and patient, good-humoured, funny, sensible.  Juggling their time between chatting to customers waiting while their cars are fixed, taking phone calls, brokering best deals on parts and chasing up loose ends.   Good mechanics, too.  I brought a car here once with a broken exhaust.  Replacing exhausts is one of the things ATS do – so they didn’t have to pull out all the stops to save me money in mending it as they did – the man even burning his hand in the fiddly welding.

If you watch the news, read the papers, you see nothing but tele-journalists with long faces spelling out just why you should be worried.  But everywhere I went today I found nothing but kindness, integrity, beauty and hope.  Humanity doing its best and life illumined with sunshine.

May God bless every person I saw, every life that touched mine.  As they go to bed tonight may they lie down in peace and their dreams touch heaven.  God bless this street, this town, this beauty, this ordinary kindness.  God look at it all and once more call it good.

Stop, little pot!

Oh, finally!!

I have been so out of kilter for so long, struggling along semi-ill and permanently bewildered.  I tried to be helpful and fit in with things – become involved in group events; churchy things and whatnot, socializing . . .  And it just does my head in.

A few weeks ago I made the decision to climb back up the mountain a little way – stopped answering the phone, said ‘No’ even when I felt desperately sorry for people and wanted to say ‘Yes’.

I’ve been working working working, editing someone’s first novel,  a fine work of hefty proportions, very ambitious and fraught with problems – takes me an hour or more to work through a single page, that’s every page.  But that suits me well, I love working.

And just this afternoon it’s like everything has fallen back into place and I feel like me again – yes, anti-social, semi-bonkers, lost-in-my-imagination, me.

What I craved and starved for was the thing I call ‘teenage time’.

Do you remember teenage time? 

There’s a wonderful poem by Brian Patten called Travelling Between Places.  I have to tell you, the first link I found for this, I thought, ‘Oh it’s in someone’s blog – oh never mind, that’ll do, they can still read the poem’ and – friends this is true – I never even noticed the poem was surrounded by gay porn . . .  Happily I eventually spotted a salacious close-up of somebody’s glorious bottom and the inevitable Michelangelo David or you might have got more than you bargained for when you clicked that link.  If you are disappointed, well I’m sorry.  Google Books is way more boring.

But what I love in that poem is the last stanza “when the late afternoon / drifts into the woods, when /nothing matters specially”

I first read that when I was fourteen years old (yes, that’s forty-two years ago), and it stopped me in my tracks then and has stayed with me ever since.  It’s what I think of as the Boxing Day phenomenon – timeless time, unscheduled time, a whole day to read by the fire or walk in the lanes and the fields, the woods.  Time to write poetry, listen to music, dream and think and make up stories, sew things, draw pictures, wander in the garden and look really properly at the dewy grass, the cobwebs, the falling leaves, the way a tree grows, the flight of birds across the cloudscape.  Time unspoilt by the nagging guilt that you should be somewhere else doing something for somebody - time when nothing matters specially.

That, to me, is “teenage time”.  When I was a teenager (partly because I didn’t do my homework properly and I never joined a single club) I had OODLES of time like that.  Singing in tongues to our sheep and lying on my back watching the sky through tree branches, standing in the river shallows watching the water flowing over my feet, reading Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha and thinking about St Francis.

Then came the adult years – and somehow they got busier and busier and busier until I reached “Stop little pot! Stop!” A life overflowing with ontological porridge.

And in the end I came to feel if I couldn’t get back to teenage time I’d get sick and die.

I struggled free of a lot of things, but I have this urge to help people and preach the Gospel, which tends to get me embroiled again.  And by this Spring I was fast like a fly wrapped up by a spider, in Virtuous Things To Do.

And I had to get free again.  I just had to, or I’ll never write another book.

But this afternoon, in the solitude and the peculiar joyous wildness of autumn, I found I’d finally clicked into the groove again, got the melody back, the contentment and the peace.  And I say, THANK GOODNESS!

Okay then, back to the editing . . .

So where do you put it all?

When you go out, what do you take with you and what do you put it in?

Recently, I got this Sativa bag.

I like it a lot.  I 100% prefer a shoulder bag to one with short handles you have to hold all the time, because there is no scenario with me in it just standing around looking pretty with nothing to do but hold my handbag.    I also need quite a spacious bag because I need to get my specs and phone in it as well as my . . . er . . . well in the UK we say ‘purse’.  I think stateside you’d say wallet?  But here a wallet is just for cards and folding money; a purse is entirely or partly for coins.

I carry my beautiful mama’s housekey with me always.  She’s eighty-six today, and I will never forget the day we needed to get into my father’s house because he was no longer answering the door; he had really gone home.   So I always have her keys as well as my own.  And the car keys.  And a key to another place.  A small notebook and a pen.  One of those fold-up-tiny nylon shoppers.  A hanky.  Some lip-balm, a concealer and a lipstick.  A tiny fork for travel food – and at the moment until I get round to eating it, a tiny courtesy mint from a restaurant: actually I ate mine but the Badger didn’t want his.  

I always choose a canvas bag (the Sativa one is made of hemp) because it doesn’t slip off my shoulder like a leather one.  I know you can get cross-body bags, but it never ceases to amaze me how many things I need to do – put the bins out, pull those weeds I spotted on my way out, take the compost – oh, feed the cats again – pick up that litter the wind blew into the path, pack up the glass recycling and put it in the car to drop off, get some firewood in for later, just put that form for the council in an envelope to send off.

All these sorts of things occur to me as I try to leave the house handbagged-up and ready to go – and most of them involve bending and moving, so the bag swings about and drops off me. 

Then, when I get in the car – what to do, what to do?  I often have passengers and it seems rude to lumber them with my bag – put my bag in their footwell – especially as I prefer driving barefoot (illegal, I know. Sorry) so I often have a solid old pair of size 44 Birkis to stash as well.

So, though I do like my Sativa bag, I have concluded what I need is one of those articles they call a bum-bag in the UK and a fanny-pack in the US.  American friends, this is one of the few US expressions that is most unlikely to catch on here.  Why?  Because in England a fanny is not the entire rump but just the person’s lady parts.  A fanny pack would probably be for spare tampax and some hygienic wipes.

Moving on.  It would be the perfect hands-free kit that won’t swing round and drop in a puddle when I stop to pull up a few stray willow-herbs along the path, or present a problem when I launch myself into the car.

I did get a very nice bumbag (I won’t call it that other thing) when we were visiting the Badger’s family in Penzance recently.  It seemed perfect.   FAIL!   It’s too small.

But the Badger has a better one – I know, because I borrowed it once.  So I have one on order like his.  It’s an Eastpak one, and they have avoided the indelicacy of the name entirely by calling it a doggy-bag.  It should be coming in the mail any day . . . I'm getting one in navy (they don't have purple), but you can see it better in the grey.

But, what about you?  Or maybe you have one of these cunning jackets and don’t even need a bag to go on holiday!  Oh, incidentally – I am lost without pockets in my clothes!  The clothes I make myself always have MASSIVE pockets, and I love my Lands End fleece gilets that have normal pockets and then what my friend Clare calls a Poacher’s Pocket on the inside too.

Rachel and her sparrows

I’m wondering if you have come across the work of Rachel Phifer?

I’m kind of hoping not, because then you will have heard about it first from me and be incredibly grateful to me for alerting you to it – kudos, kudos!!

She’s just had her first novel published in July – called The Language of Sparrows.  Already she has more reviews on Amazon than you can shake a stick at, all basically saying you have to read this book.  I suspect that if you take a few minutes to read the ‘Look Inside’ pages on Amazon, you will agree with them.  One of those writers who know how to do that thing they always used to say about crossing the road: STOP LOOK LISTEN. 

This is Rachel in her garden:

She’s written a thing specially for us, about the prayer of St Francis, and I just loved it.  

This is what she wrote:

There were times that “Help!” was the only prayer I could come up with. Sometimes for months at a time. It’s not such a bad prayer, really. It’s honest. It’s direct. But that little word didn’t begin to address the depth of need I felt. 

About twenty years ago, in the midst of unemployment, broken friendships and a long period of blue days, I stumbled across a book with The Prayer of St. Francis written in the back. Lord, make me an instrument of your peace, it began, where there is hatred, let me sow love. 

I didn’t have to read very far into the prayer to know it had the words I’d been searching for. So in the mornings, I would make my way out of bed half an hour earlier, and curl up in my hand-me-down gold chair. I’d say the prayer slowly, trying to concentrate on each word. I’d say it twice more, and in the end, I’d whisper the words at the end of each line: peace, love, pardon, faith, hope, light, joy, console, understand, love, pardoning, giving, eternal life. 

It was a bit odd for me. I was raised in a Baptist family and I’d never heard anyone reciting a prayer. There was even a niggling worry that repeating a prayer was the “babbling of many useless words” from Matthew 6.  

But it wasn’t just a recitation, and it certainly wasn’t useless.  It was a prayer spoken to God, with words I hadn’t known I wanted to say. And to tell you the truth, my old chair seemed like a temple for a while. 

It was such a relief to come to God with words I hadn’t known I wanted to say, asking to be something nobler and deeper than I would ever have known I wanted to be. I’m not saying that I became a walking prayer of St. Francis. The truth is, I still had blue days. I was still a sinner. But I began to sense God inhabiting my days.  

I’d like to say that I’ve kept the practice of praying the prayer over a lifetime. But I can’t. I’m not that disciplined. Still, when I can’t find the words I need, it’s an anchor to come back to.  

I’m a working mom and a writer. So there have been quite a few times, when I’ve been too exhausted even to pray those two stanzas of the St. Francis prayer. But the practice itself of saying words that aren’t my own still sustains me.  

One minister thrown into a communist prison and tortured said he forgot every prayer he’d ever learned, but he remembered to pray, “Jesus!” I’m not that hard pressed. No matter how exhausted I am, I can always recite something like, “In You I live and move and have my being” (Acts 17) or “This is the day You have made. I will rejoice and be glad in it.” (Psalm 118)  

There are always words to fill the dark spaces with light and the empty spaces with God’s presence. 

  

 Thank you, Rachel, so much.