Building Resilience

A restful hotel room in Kraków

Good morning, faithful readers!

Where have I been, you ask? I have been off doing a partial internet detox, which means filling my morning hours before work with therapeutic reading, language study, and pedalling away on our stationary bike, which is now set up in the kitchen. This way, when I begin work around 10 AM, I have not already been stewing my brains in the internet for two or three hours.

I still sit around too much, but I've decided to work on that.

One of the problems with being addicted to the internet---the never ending stream of information, opinions, news items, laughs, shocks and alarms---is that it eventually fills me with rage and self-disgust. Hours and hours go by, wasted.

One of the worst aspects of words-on-screen is that they are harder to remember than words-on-page. Now when I'm writing a complicated story for work, I print out first source material so that I can actually read it and check it over and over again if need be.

That is why, after I wash the dishes in the morning, the first thing I do is read a chapter of a Real Book. Since returning from Poland, my Real Books have been James Clear's Atomic Habits and Rick Hanson's Resilient. I highly recommend both.

Happily for me, I took Resilient with us to Poland, so I learned about absorbing pleasant experiences for later use while still on holiday. In stressful moments in the past two weeks, I have been able to regain equilibrium by imagining myself back in Polish Pretend Daughter-in-Law's hotel room in the countryside, looking at the sunny, green lawn where my husband was sitting with a book, watching golfers hit balls into the pond. Ahhh...

Another lesson from Resilient is that human beings need safety, satisfaction, and connection with others to feel happy. Safety can mean a roof over your head, satisfaction a job well done, and connection simply remembering how much someone loves you. I woke up one day last week full of dread about something, and so I began to list off things I was grateful for--our home, our savings, the apple tree, everyone in my family is in good health--and the dread went away.

Resilient cost £12.99 because I bought it new at a real bookshop, and this was much less expensive than a single session with a therapist. Benedict Ambrose, alarmed by my rage and self-disgust, had begun to suggest I see a therapist.  Poor BA was trying to be a therapist by telling me that although some thing or situation (like a typo in an article I had submitted) felt like an enormity, it wasn't really.

So hooray for popular psychology books, structured activities, and the exercise bike. But now I must go for today is cider-making day. I shall let you know how that went anon.

Get out of the elevator, now.

Hello, me again to remind you that if you are a woman in any situation where a man makes you feel worried about your safety, get out of there.  Don't second-guess yourself. Don't worry if the man might think you are a Bad Person if you suddenly vanish. Don't check your privilege or conduct an internal struggle session. Just get out of there.

If the man is blocking your way, call for help. If nobody else is in earshot, call for help on your mobile/cellphone. The most important thing is that you get home alive and unharmed.

You are a woman. If you are like most women, you are only one-half to two-thirds as strong as the average man. You're probably stronger than most children, though, so please don't use your strength to threaten or brutalise children. In the meantime, bad men of all nations, colours and creeds use their strength to threaten and brutalise women and children all the time. And sometimes women and children have only seconds to guess if a man is bad or not. So if you feel scared, get off the elevator. Exit the shop. Get out of the stairwell. Leave the room. Run to the nearest place of safety. Pull out your phone and call someone.

You are a woman and if you're alone in a room/elevator/forest with man, and he happens to be a bad man, you don't have any so-called privilege anymore, whatever colour you are. You have a famously underprivileged female body---and a phone.

When I was an amateur boxer, many years ago, I learned two important things. The first is that the world doesn't end if a man punches you in the face, so don't go through life worrying that a man might punch you in the face one day. The second is that fighting men with your fists is nevertheless very, very dangerous. It is very, very dangerous because men--and I'm including 15 year old boys here--are so much stronger than you, even if you are a super-wiry 27 year old in top condition.

I'm sorry I have to say all this again, but I've just watched a video of a man mocking a woman who is clearly afraid of him because she has encountered him alone in the woods and she thought he was standing in her way. When she called the police on her cellphone, he shouted "You're not talking to anyone! You're not talking to anyone!" When it became clear she had been talking to police, he shouted "Karen!"

I don't know if he's (usually) a good guy or a bad guy. But I do know that if I were brave enough to go running alone in the woods, I would have pulled my phone out if I was startled by any man I encountered there. Finding oneself alone in the woods with an aggressive male stranger of any colour is just about every woman's nightmare.

Update: Here's some statistics from 95% "white" Scotland, population 5 million:

• [In 2018-2019] sexual crimes increased by 8% from 12,487 to 13,547. The recording of these crimes is at the highest level seen since 1971, the first year for which comparable groups are available.

The Absolute Necessity of Asking for Help

I have been falling asleep by reading the reassuring and familiar plots of Georgette Heyer, fairy tales for grown-up ladies. What struck me last night was the reassuring set of rules her characters know they are to abide by. When in London, for example, an unmarried "Lady of Quality" must not go out for a walk unless accompanied by a friend, her maid, or a footman.

What frightened me very much in high school, university and at various points in my life was not knowing what the rules were, the "How Tos" that would get me from "my dreams" to their fruition. n the same way I thought that merely attending language classes would make me fluent in, say, Irish, I initially believed that success and happiness would just come along through mere attainment of university degrees, the ability to attract positive male attention, and the avoidance of mortal sin.

(These things, by the way, are indeed helpful--the last is crucial--but not enough in themselves.)

I can still remember my utter dismay, my aporia, to employ one of the few terms I remember from my philosophy classes, upon approaching graduation and not knowing what to do about getting a proper job. I wasn't just dismayed: I was frightened. Reading want-ads in the student job centre was something I could handle, but actually asking someone in the job centre to help me was simply beyond me.

Sometimes, when thinking about my adolescent self falling into yet another pit of despair, I impotently ask "Why did you not ask for help?"

The first person to ask me this, if I remember correctly, was our German friend Johannes the Good, who was astonished when I complained of a  non-German stranger in Frankfurt who insisted on making me the subject of his amorous intentions and would have followed me back to the residence in which I was staying had I not finally, heart fluttering like a bird in a net, succeeded in discouraging him.

"Who would have helped me?" I asked, as when this annoyance began I was in a bus station surrounded by various Germans all busily minding their own business.

"An older German lady," said Johannes firmly. "If you had asked her, she would have shouted at him."

And this, I realised, was absolutely true.

If I were to compose a list of advice for Young Women Today, I would put "Ask for help" somewhere near the top. If a Young Woman's response is "The last time I asked for help, I didn't receive help" or "The last time I asked for help, I got yelled at", I would respond "Ask a different person for help" or "Figure out whose job it is to help you, and ask them for help."

"Always look for the helpers," as Mr Rogers famously said albeit in a different context--or is it?

Sometimes I feel modern life is a dark and scary cave and one must feel one's way along the walls to keep from falling into an even darker and scarier tunnel. I don't have a map; all I have are Regency romance novels, and they are really no help. In fact, they can make life worse for they underline, again and again, that women-of-honour are inescapably financially dependent on their families, especially their male relations or husband. This is simply not true.  It has not been true for a long time.

They suggest--indeed most books written before 1950 suggest--that women who have to work for their living are terribly unfortunate and usually socially inferior to women who don't. Work, in books, also makes you terribly vulnerable. Every time a runaway ingenue in a Georgette Heyer novel suggests becoming a governess or a chambermaid, her confidante is so firmly against the idea, that it is clear to the fully-adult reader that this is because governesses and chambermaids were routinely victims of sexual violence.

By the time I graduated from university, I wished I hadn't read so many novels that expressed such a horror of work, especially women working. The conservative circles in which I moved were similarly lukewarm about women's employment outside the home. I was also primed by such books as Lifting a Ton of Feathers: A Woman's Guide to Surviving the Academic World to expect unrelenting horror in pursuing my career dreams.

But now I am writing myself into a depression, so I will go back to my initial point which is that in an age in which we are no longer have a clear blueprint of how to get on in life, it behooves us all to find out whose job it is to provide help and advice and to ask for help and advice.

If you have children, I suspect it is a very good idea never to dissuade them from asking you for help and advice. Presumably if you tell children who ask you for help that you're too busy or  that they should be able to do whatever it is on their own, they will get the idea that asking for help is useless or bad. And that would be too bad.

Let's not glamourise the mortgage.

This morning it occurs to me--having seen the editor of a competitor tweet about his mortgage--that paying for a mortgage may have turned into a Symbol of Adulthood and that by writing it I have continued to make it sound glamorous and grown-up instead of the ridiculous modern institution it is.

Crean and Fimister's Integralism (which I recommend making the effort to read) comes down hard on wage slavery, and a mortgage is another form of wage slavery. Unfortunately, most people in the West cannot live in a what we consider a decent home (e.g. a roof, windows, cold & hot running water, a stove) without paying rent or spending an eye-watering sum.

The eye-watering sum is not necessarily the down payment although I shudder at what down payments can be for a house in London or Toronto. Our two-bedroom flat is worth less than the down payment on a one-bedroom flat in Kensington's Old Brompton Road I saw online this morning.  No, the eye-watering sum is the actual price of the home, which is not the price you (usually with the help of the bank) pay the seller but the price you end up paying the bank over the years. In short, you are lining the pockets of the bank with the money your employer or your client gives you for your time and expertise.

Benedict Ambrose and I have been watching an old British television series called "How to Live Mortgage Free," which addresses inflated housing prices and interviews people who get around them by either by building their own homes for between £5,500 - £30,000 or by paying down the mortgage early. These built homes are usually a houseboat, a converted vehicle, or a "temporary" dwelling built on a parents' farmland. Another innovation is to form a collective with others, buy a piece of land with some of your collective savings, and then build a multi-family dwelling together (using the rest of the collective savings) on that. (Actually, I'm not sure that is so innovative, as families in North America have been doing that for some time.)

But I have run out of time before work, so that's my thoughts on the subject now. Mortgages are not a sign of adulthood but a necessary evil that falls upon many adults. They may be a lesser evil, however, than rent. In the end it may depend on whether more money goes up in smoke on rent than it does on interest payments.

The Swans

B.A. and I are lucky enough to live across the street from wooded riverbanks. On the other side of the river is a Victorian factory that has been converted into offices. It has a working clock tower. Thus, we have a flat with a lovely view.

Yesterday I took a break from worrying about Covid-19 to hang up a load of laundry in our dining-room/office/guest-room, and while draping clothes over the radiator, I looked through the window and saw two swans in the river, nibbling at the opposite bank.

I had never seen swans so far up the river, so I called out to B.A. to have a look.

It was a lovely moment, really.

Yesterday we also went for a country walk, the country being a 15 minute walk from our door, and after lunch we spent hours in the garden. In the midst of a health pandemic, the question uppermost in my mind is, "If you have to stay away from people for two weeks, what would you like to do?"

Fortunately for the family finances, I work from home all the time, so there's no change there. And it's spring, so working in the garden is not only pleasant but necessary. Our nearest neighbours, whose gardens are in much better shape, came outside to cheer on our efforts. Going for country walks is one of our favourite shared activities. Because of all the pilgrimages I've been on in the past few years, I now associate long walks with the rosary, so we get in some prayer together, too.

I like talking to my parents on Skype, so I've been doing more of that.

I don't like washing my hands to song anymore, alas, as I have developed what looks like contact dermatitis on the backs of my hands. They itch. Even when they are not red they itch. Naturally I am not keen to go to the local medical clinic, so I'm self-medicating with Vaseline Intensive Care lotion and diaper rash cream. At some point I will consult with Dr. Sister-in-Law. Ma Belle Soeur is not keen on B.A. and I taking public transit, by the way. We are going to reduce our public transit time as much as we can.

My personal opinion on what the Catholic bishops should do for the next few months is what the Polish bishops have done: dispense the elderly, the ill, the children, children's caregivers (I'd add, the caregivers of the elderly), and the merely frightened from their Sunday obligation to assist at Mass while at the same time having more Masses, in part to have smaller congregation, and in part to obtain the grace of more Masses. This is a good opportunity for Catholics, especially Catholic clergy, to be true witnesses to our faith in Christ and hope for heaven, while at the same time not risking sending the vulnerable there before time.  It's also a great time for bearing our discomforts cheerfully, as the superior form of penance, so I will try to think of my itchy hands as a good thing.

I do think, however, that the elderly should be ordered by the bishops to STAY HOME. I suppose the suspension of Sunday Masses by various dioceses (including the Archdiocese of Toronto) may be inspired by a fear that the elderly will keep on going to Mass, and keep on putting themselves and each other in danger of an untimely death, if there is still a Mass to go to. This reminds me that this would also be a good time for Christians to show who we supposed to be by checking in with our elderly neighbours, friends, and family to make sure they have enough food, are staying safe, and are not going squirrelly of boredom and loneliness.

A Winter Walk

One of the nice things about living near Edinburgh is that it doesn't take us very long to get out into the countryside. There are all kinds of river walks and disused railway lines that have been turned into bicycle and walking trails.

Today B.A. and I went for a long country walk, ending up in the town of Dalkeith. Unfortunately, I spent the first two miles or so having a meltdown about double-taxation. We are hoping to pay off the mortgage early and invest for retirement with my salary, but so far my salary seems to be subject to the taxes of two countries, plus National Insurance contributions for them both.

My meltdown was caused by B.A.'s tax statement, which said that both he AND his employer had contributed to the National Insurance, the combined sum being larger than his taxes. As my North American employer, obviously, doesn't contribute to the British NI, how much NI am I going to have to pay?

It makes me frightened and angry and sure something must be wrong. Canada and the UK have a tax treaty, apparently to prevent people like me from being taxed twice. I got an (expensive) accountant to cope with the UK tax laws, and now I think I'll have to get a (guaranteed less expensive) tax firm in Canada to wrestle my money back from Revenue Canada.

Meanwhile B.A. swears up and down that the UK National Pension will not disappear when we are old and that being a pensioner is not the same thing as being on "benefits" (i.e. welfare). "We're paying into the system, and it's our money," he says.

B.A. clearly has never tried to draw on unemployment insurance, which I used to believe was "our money". I have, in Canada, and it was an utterly humiliating experience. I also worked in a Canadian welfare office, and I probably signed a confidentiality agreement*, so all I'll say about that is that you never, ever, ever, want to be dependent on The State for food, warmth, and a roof over your head.

Meanwhile, ending up in a nursing home can also be very unpleasant, not only because of neglect but also because of this.

Anyway, B.A. begged me to stop ruining our country walk with catastrophic thinking, so I turned off that part of my brain. Naturally I wish I hadn't stopped caring about money when I went to theology school, but regrets don't reduce taxes.

It was cold, but the countryside was nevertheless green and beautiful, for this is Scotland after all, and eventually I cheered up. We reached Dalkeith (chipped but charming to Canadian eyes) and looked around for somewhere to get bacon rolls. Greasy spoons being absent from the High Street, we investigated the in-store cafe of Morrisons, which is a national cut-price grocery chain. Result! Morrisons was serving breakfast items (like bacon rolls) until 3 PM.

We got our bacon rolls, a pot of tea, and a mug of cappuccino for the low, low price of £7.60 ($13 Canadian), which might not strike you as a low, low price, but this is the UK. And the amusing thing, when we looked around, was the large number of couples also amiably munching on breakfast items and drinking from mugs. Many were old, but some were middle-aged, and it struck us that this could be the Saturday afternoon "dating" venue of choice for the married denizens of Dalkeith.

I didn't think it was a particularly tasty bacon roll, but I did enjoy the idea that married couples can contentedly eat out as cheaply as possible whereas dating people have to stick to sophisticated joints, so as not to look cheap, or indeed like the sort of boring people who will end up eating bacon rolls in Morrisons.

(Incidentally, the next-door-neighbours, who are long-term renters, are loudly singing pop songs again. It must be Saturday night.)

Anyway, as B.A. says, we have at least another 20 years of employment before us, so I should not worry about being taxed into poverty or sexually assaulted in a U.K. nursing home before I am inevitably euthanised.  Also I admit that getting the old-age pension from the government cannot really be like collecting Canadian unemployment insurance benefits because nobody chivvies the elderly to go back to work ASAP.

Bus fare home was £3.40 (£5.80 Canadian).

*Update: Worst memories from working in welfare office:

5. A  male cop supervising cheque day told me that one of our clients, a pleasant woman, used to be a "crack whore."

4. A man I knew was on trial for murder that day showed up at my window. (Manager: "So why do you need a break now?")

3. Realising that the shell of a woman at my window was the mother of a famous murder victim.

2. A formerly employed, formerly solvent woman, now very ill, saying over the phone, "But that was my nest-egg" after learning that as a dependent on the state she wasn't allowed to keep it.

1. A female cop screaming at a lunatic to "apologise to these ladies" for his bad language when we had the situation well at hand, thank you very much.

We dealt with homeless people, mentally ill people and actual crooks all the time, but the only client who upset me as much as those two cops was the killer. (He was acquitted--to the shock of almost all involved--minutes before he arrived at my window.)

Update 2. The killer suddenly died a year to the day of his acquittal, I have just discovered.

The Professor and the Book

Even more updates at the end.

I was sorry to discover last night that Professor Stephen Lewis of the Franciscan University of Steubenville is no longer the Chair of the English Department, thanks to the scandal that erupted this week.

If you don't know the story, last spring Professor Lewis assigned the translation of a critically acclaimed French novel that was all the rage in French and then English literary circles to a class of five senior students. The author, Emmanuel Carrère, is an ex-Catholic atheist who--as many writers do--turned to the New Testament for inspiration and rewriting after getting some other novels under his belt.

"Under his belt" is apropos, for Carrère included in his novel a lot of pornographic salacious trash about holy people---including Our Lady. If you've ever read Saint Thomas Aquinas on blasphemy, you might recall that he thought the correct response to it was to have the writer executed by the state. I found this out when I was at grad school thinking hard about the Mohammed Cartoon Crisis, thirteen years ago.

Someone at Franciscan U tipped off Church Militant this week about the controversial course material, and Christine Niles had the unhappy task of reading and reproducing one of the worst passages, which I have carefully avoided reading. It is ironic that CM introduced to the general public what Professor Lewis introduced to five senior literature students, but let's not get into that. I'm just happy LSN didn't go that route. Meanwhile, CM did due diligence by asking FUS about the story, and here is what their PR man said:

"Franciscan University challenges students intellectually, helps form them professionally, and engages them spiritually. This includes arming our students with the knowledge and wisdom to confront the challenges of a coarse modern culture, which often runs contrary to Catholic teaching. Heresy, and sinful acts such as murder and adultery that go against Catholic teaching, are addressed at Franciscan to help to strengthen students’ faith and prepare them to engage with today’s culture. While this happens through the study of literature by authors such as Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Shakespeare who portray many sinful acts, it can also happen when they grapple with significant challenges to Catholic faith by contemporary writers. Franciscan students learn through critical comparison to consider multiple sides of an issue or argument, led by professors who always promote Catholic spiritual and moral perspectives. Thus, our students graduate better prepared to solve problems and engage with integrity in a world that desperately needs to hear the truth. Where would we be, for example, if Catholics were unable or unwilling to engage with and push back against calumny such as The Da Vinci Code or against worse heresies and dangerous heterodoxies? Franciscan University promotes an authentic and vibrant Catholic faith—inside and outside the classroom—that helps students succeed spiritually, morally, and intellectually. We remain firm in providing the integration of faith and reason that will give them the best chance at lifelong success."

I've spent two days asking myself on-and-off if I buy that. My initial response, which I tweeted to Christine Niles, was that in "real life" nobody makes you read pornographic blasphemy. I added that I got two degrees in English Literature from a "world-class secular university" without having to read pornographic blasphemy. Only later did it occur to me that as a student I read very few novels written after 1950 and that I got my MA in 1997. For all I know secular university literature departments are awash in blasphemous pornography these days.

The biggest insult to Our Lady I came across as an undergraduate at the University of Toronto was a photograph of a statue of Our Lady with a banana balanced on its head. It was published on the front page of a tabloid-style student newspaper--probably The Gargoyle---and I was absolutely furious.

I was so angry, I scooped up as many copies of the newspaper as I could find when I was alone and threw them into the trash. When I told my father, a professor of English Literature, he mildly observed that this was both stealing and censorship.

"What about the Index?" I asked, thinking of the handy Church blacklist done away with by V2.

"The Index was wrong," quoth Dad, or words to that effect. (It was almost thirty years ago, people.)

My father, incidentally, never misses Sunday Mass and was the parent who dragged us kids off to Confession periodically.  Thus I was forced to think seriously for the first time about the best way to respond to blasphemy. Apparently throwing things in the trash or setting them on fire is not universally held to be the contemporary solution.

And that, readers, was over just a puerile black-and-white photograph of a statue with a banana on its head, not a disgusting novel by a fashionable French atheist.

To return to 2019, after the CM story broke Steubenville was inundated with angry messages by CM readers, including tuition-paying parents and donors, according to CM's next report. FUS responded within 24 hours with a massive apology and, within 48, by demoting Lewis as department chair--unless he resigned, of course.  That bit of the story I discovered on social media very late last night.

As I've said, I've been thinking about the scandal for two days, and I did some digging. There are so many questions. Who at Franciscan U. contacted CM over a book read last year by five students,  and why now, not then? Why did Lewis assign that particular anti-christian "new New Testament" novel, not another? Why did the Chair of the English Department assign the translation of a French book?  What is Lewis' specialty? Do Franciscan U grads actually get into PhD programs in English Lit? Should Franciscan U grads spend 5+ years of their lives in PhD programs in English Lit?

I found out that the dirty book is/was indeed considered very "important" and "brilliant" (etc.) by literary critics. I learned too that Lewis is the English-language translator of an important French Catholic philosopher, a phenomenologist named Jean-Luc Marion who was a student of Jacques Derrida of all people. I did not know Steubenville reached such academic heights: ortho-Catholic gossip characterizes Steubie as the Hufflepuff of the new, sound Catholic universities.

I also found out that while many of his colleagues were willing to go on record to CM and/or LSN to condemn the book Lewis assigned, they won't go on record to condemn him. And through social media I heard the same story several times from Steubie grads and people involved in American Catholic academia: Professor Lewis is a serious scholar and a good Catholic who would never introduce a dirty book to students to corrupt or amaze them (unlike Somebody Else).

That's what I would have written had I been assigned the story. I wasn't, so instead I made the following comment in the LSN combox when a commentator misread something in the LSN article:

Putting on my English Lit hat here to make a small but important point: the professor has an interest in "the erotic" not "erotica." Professor Lewis is the English translator of an important French Catholic philosopher, and in a philosophical and theological context "eros" is the inner impulse to reach outside oneself to something or someone else. It can be good, like falling deeply in love, or it can be bad, like succumbing to the lure of internet porn or high-stakes gambling. 

Did the professor ask his five senior students to examine critically a dirty (if fashionable, highly-acclaimed-by-literary-critics) novel? Yes. Is the professor a dirty person? His colleagues and Steubenville alumni rushing to defend him in social media say No. Did the professor make an error in judgement? His colleagues and Steubenville administration say Yes. Were his motives base? His colleagues and Steubenville administration say No. 

The most charitable but still intellectually honest assumption, given all this data, is that the professor simply wished to assist his students in confronting and effectively critiquing anti-Christian novels, so that as future Catholic scholars they could themselves combat the disgusting trends in contemporary literature. 

As Professor Hahn noted, however, there is a line that cannot be crossed. The novel's author treated our blessed Mother in a disgusting fashion, and no-one should ever be expected to read or discuss a work that contains pornographic trash about one's own mother, let alone the Mother of God.

I'm writing about the scandal here, too, because I'm sorry I got caught up in disgust and doubt when the CM piece first came out and tweeted without considering all the facts. Blasphemy (and porn, for that matter) whips past reason, straight to the passions. I think when Muslims say they love Mohammed more than their own mothers, I will pay more attention from now on.

My conclusions are that it is possible to hate the book and to believe that Professor Lewis made a mistake in judging it worthy of attention without needing also to believe that he had base motives in introducing the text to his five senior students. That is FUS's revised position, and I see no reason to doubt that.

As for forces of evil and secularism trying to turn FUS into the next CINO college, I am not qualified to comment or judge. But I do know something about poisonous academic politics, and if at the bottom of all this is an envious colleague trying to take down a more talented man, I hope Lewis is offered a tenure track position at Columbia with a massive increase in salary.
 
Update: By the way, sorry I've been late in okaying comments. I'm so busy these days, I forget to check.

Update 2 (Jan 13): It is becoming clearer that the book may not be dirty throughout although it has disgusting passages. As I should have done much earlier, I have been reading reader reviews. I was startled this morning to discover, via JDFlynn on Twitter, that the work was reviewed by First Things: https://www.firstthings.com/article/2018/12/dare-to-knock

Update 3 (Jan 13): It is also becoming clearer that the book and the author really are important enough not to be ignored by a literature department: see this New York Times Magazine piece. And this brings me to another point of interest: what is Franciscan University of Steubenville for?

Does FUS want to create a new generation of Catholic scholars, or does it want to avoid that and merely equip generations of American Catholic youngsters with the minimum education they need to be employable nurses, computer engineers, and other useful occupations?

I'm treading carefully here because a man's livelihood is on the line, but if FUS does not want to produce Catholic scholars who have read influential works (like, for example, Lolita) and therefore will be able to contribute to their fields of study, then maybe it is not the place for a serious scholar.

But that could lead to a problem. Unless we are all going to retreat from society, Catholics need intellectual leaders who will fight for Catholic philosophical positions in places of influence, and the Academy is quite obviously a place of influence, as millions of young people pass through it every year.

Update 4 (January 14): As more and more people chime in, I begin to see why FUS professors may be freaking out out over FUS professors. Nobody forced me to read Rabelais in the University of Toronto English Department, and when I left the University of Toronto, I didn't thing reading sexually explicit, anti-Catholic texts was a mark of sophistication, a necessary rite of human passage.

For more insight into the FUS story, better see this. I'm afraid it's a bit of an own-goal for the author because I was shocked. I had been wondering what other texts the FUS profs had been worried about, and now I know. There are good ways to present these texts, and there are bullying ways to present these texts. I was saddened by the girl crying over Aristophanes, not because she was such an innocent, but because losing one's innocence is  sad.

The Quiet of Good and the Glamour of Evil

I have been in bed with either the flu or food poisoning for two days. Too wretched for most of Monday to do anything but sleep or  stare at the horrible lampshade on the ceiling (which came with the flat) by evening I felt briefly well enough to watch something on Netflix.

Netflix is a morass of evil dressed up as entertainment, I concluded after B.A. and I watched Anthony Bourdain drag himself around the world to hang out with local chefs, curse and eat too much. In the end, Bourdain committed suicide offscreen, and it might have been the flu talking, but I concluded it was the show itself that was to blame. Apparently Bourdain was exhausted, so why didn't he just lock the door and sleep for three days? Or check himself into the hospital? But I suppose a production company can't sue a dead man.

Anyway, sick in bed but feeling somewhat (if temporarily) better, I scrolled through Netflix moaning, "Why isn't there anything Catholic?" At last I found Moonstruck, which is the Christmas go-to film for many of the women of my family. We can quote from it extensively ("Chrissy, bring me the KNIFE!"), but I hadn't see it for a while.

It started off well, and as B.A. was now home from work, I nudged him whenever a holy picture, pinned up in several Italian-owned Brooklyn shops, was in shot. I got quite teary eyed over that. The weak part of the film is, of course, the scene-chewing of Nicholas Cage ("HUH, sweetie?") and the evil part is Cage telling Cher (e.g. Loretta Castorini, surely a heroine for single/widowed women aged 37) that he doesn't care if she goes to hell as long as she gets into his bed.

Cage, as Ronnie Cammareri, makes an odd little speech including the idea that we aren't on the earth to love "the right people": "We are here to love the wrong people, to break our hearts, and die." That is a dangerous and stupid philosophy, and ridiculous in this context as Ronnie is clearly not at all the "wrong person" for Loretta for several reasons. She even knows his family, for heaven's sake, although, yes, it's inconvenient that she's engaged to his brother.*

The film ends well for the Castorini and Cammareri families. I, however, was suddenly and violently and disgustingly ill, so I stayed in bed another day and eventually binge-watched Sherlock.

The contemporary Sherlock is cleverly photographed, written, and acted, and if Sherlock is to be believed the best and most love-worthy women are high-class hookers and paid assassins. The sweet pathologist with her heart on her sleeve is a loser, and the respectable-looking landlady is a retired stripper. Yes, I see that it is good TV to overturn viewers' expectations, but the endless nudge-nudge, wink-wink, "everybody's bent" message is worst than wearisome, it's wicked.

I was frankly relieved to find myself having an instant message conversation with two theologate classmates, a priest and a married mum of four. The priest (who was eating supper) dropped out soon, but the mum kept on and thanked me for the work I do for LSN. This was quite heartening because it is actually very difficult to wade through the sludge every work day, scooping for the most harmful pieces of sludge, so I can say to the reading public, "Look, here's the sludge you really need to worry about."

And families really do need to worry about the sludge, as this column by Rod Dreher illustrates. The sludge is waiting to come into every house via the television or the computer or the radio or the child's homework assignment. Some Catholic families still have little stoups of holy water. The original idea was to ward off any demons who might leap onto you after you leave your holy Christian house and expel any demons who clung to you when you came back in. Whereas I do believe in real, take-possession-of-foolhardy-people demons, I think the average person is much more in danger of tracking, or inviting, really bad ideas into the house.

And the horror of the really bad ideas is that they cause mass suffering. Compared to the 19th century, for the western world, or to 1980, for everywhere outside the western world, we are all so materially rich, and yet there is so much unhappiness. White American men are committing suicide in droves, for example, apparently thanks to the sexual revolution. And yet insane numbers of girls have decided to have their breasts cut off and become white American men. What?!

All this evil and all this unhappiness is terribly exciting, but the truth is that happiness, like goodness, is rather quiet. The other day I had the good fortune to eat lunch with a traditional Catholic family. This is Scotland, so the fact that they live in an Arts-and-Craft neo-mediaeval cottage is not particularly notable, except that it added to a very timeless scene: a young mother and father and their many children of different sizes all gathered around a stone hearth, watching the flames after a good lunch. Apart from the fact that everyone was healthy and clean and the mother's and my skirts ended mid-calf, it could have been any year after the invention of the standard chimney (in northern Europe, 11th or 12th century, apparently).

There was a Disney cartoon playing in a different room, and the children drifted in and out, apparently torn between the video and interest in what the adults were doing, which was not very much: just talking, holding or feeding the baby, and looking at the fire. And I was struck by how very peaceful, happy and good this all was, and how very rich in all the important ways this family was.

Gainfully employed man + patient woman + healthy children + roof + hearth = happiness.

The children are homeschooled, by the way; the sludge I wade through for work and entertainment is kept well away from the beautiful A&C doors and windows. I really am not sure of how much of a chance other parents have of passing on such a quiet, happy and good life to their children without homeschooling and keeping the internet, trash-music and trash-TV out of their homes. However, I suppose everything I write these days has the potential of inspiring one more parent to say, "Enough. We're homeschooling from now on" or "Enough. We're not going to allow Netflix to turn our kids into zombies."

Naturally I was a little sad that my home doesn't have a fireplace, let alone any children, in it. My generation was told in a million ways that being a stay-at-home mother was the waste of a life and that homeschooling was a sure sign of "religious mania." Now, of course, I can think of no vocation for women more important than that of the homeschooling married mother--unless, of course, it is the prayers of cloistered nuns keeping the end of the world at bay.

*Since I haven't mentioned this for some time, I will repeat that the whole point of the story of Romeo and Juliet was that the only reason their marriage would have been inadmissible to their families was their fathers' dumb feud. They shared the same religious faith, the same culture, the same class, and even the same town. Shakespeare's point was not that there is "unity in diversity," but that personal feuds are harmful to society. My own philosophy of marriage is that if husband and wife share the same core values (which may not be shared ethnic and religious identities, but very often are), then they will probably be happy.

Always wanting more

I read this Atlantic piece with amusement. It concerns a study into a correlation between money and happiness, and the researcher became quite depressed as he realised that even the super-rich think they would be "perfectly" happy only if they had double or triple the amount of money they already have.

The researcher seems to have missed the forest for the trees, for what seems to make the super-rich he studies at least temporarily happier is winning high-states poker games or besting each other at charitable donations. Well, winning is always nice. I get quite excited when I win a free Lotto ticket or--yippee!--£25. That covers almost a quarter of our gambling budget for the year, and I mark it down in the Household Accounts as "Entertainment."

I think the secret of happiness is not to chase the emotion but to enjoy it fully whenever it comes. I am not actually sure what Maeterlinck's "Blue Bird of Happiness" is about, but if his point is that it flutters hither and thither and lands on your hand occasionally, then yeah. That makes sense.

While writing my annual Christmas piece for LSN, I was filled with gloom.

B.A. and I are going to have a perfectly nice Christmas, I hasten to say.  We're going to give a little Polish supper for Wigilia, and then we're going to Midnight Mass as usual. When we get home, I will roll up my Sacred Family Christmas Chelsea Bun and leave it to rise. On Christmas morning, I will bake the Sacred Family Christmas Chelsea Bun, and then B.A. and I will wash half of it down with coffee while opening our presents. Then we will find some sort of transport to Christmas III Mass, and after that we will go to the countryside, my Sacred Family Christmas Trifle wrapped in ice-cube filled dish towels, to stay with a friendly Catholic family for a few days. There will be a Christmas feast. It will be all very British Trad Catholic and jolly.

But this was the second Christmas we were planning to spend in Canada with family, and we can't. That is, we chose to follow B.A's oncologist's advice, to safeguard B.A.'s health. That doesn't sound as bad. Also, as Christmas-observing Christians all know, "Jesus"--not family-- "is the Reason for the Season."

Not all Christians observe Christmas, by the way. I am thinking primarily of the Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland, of which I am fond because of our friend Calvinist Cath. The Wee Frees, as they are jocularly called, observe Sundays with great staunchness, vigour and trouble to themselves, but they don't celebrate any of the feasts of the Roman Calendar because they don't believe God asked anyone to do so. I think this lacks historical consciousness, but as this is an aside, I won't get into that.

Right. So although we are going to have a lovely Christmas, complete with two feasts (three if you count the Bun binge) and two Masses--possible three, if we go to Mass on the 26th, too, as the Poles think we are supposed to--I am still sad that we will not be in Canada with my family.  And I must say that is rather ironic to be a pro-life, pro-baby, pro-family crusader when I've never been pregnant, never had a baby, and see members of my family three times a year max.

The general idea of pro-family activism is that happiness comes not from money and career but from loving (I mean loving, not having sex with) people, accepting their love in return, and putting up with them in and out of season while striving to make it easier for them to put up with you. That is actually sound, in a sense, although it is important to concentrate on the family and friends you HAVE instead of the ones you don't. And a good chunk of that happiness might have developed from the sense of a duty done because loving does not always mean liking, especially if you come from a broken home.

Meanwhile, the Stoics would argue that happiness comes from developing satisfaction with whatever life brings. You can't control what life brings, but you can control your reactions to what life brings. If you are sad you don't have children, it is worth remembering that there are many people who have children but are utterly miserable all the same. Children are not a magic happiness wand.

And I really have no cause to complain about my lot. I have a kind husband who is in work, and his brain tumours have stopped growing and may be disintegrating. I have an interesting job which brings me into contact with many interesting people but still leaves me enough time for housework, language study, and culinary projects. We own (!) our own home. My parents and siblings and their children are all still alive and (D.V.) I will see them all in February.

That's enough.

Won't Be Home for Christmas but...

"Normally the patient sits in that seat," said the doctor, or words to that effect, to me.

Yes, Benedict Ambrose and I were back at the hospital. This time we were there to hear the results of his most recent scan, the one that followed six weeks of radiotherapy to stop the resurgent tumour which, to add insult to injury, had brought along two friends. 

Fortunately it was my "retreat day" from work, so I simply brought along Peter Kwasniewski's Tradition & Sanity with me to the waiting room. I was at Mass dark and early at 8 AM, and afterwards our priest loaned me Michael Davies' Liturgical Revolution Volume II, so B.A. read that. 

I always go the hospital with B.A. to hear medical pronouncements because too often he doesn't come home afterwards: it's back to the ward with him. The news is usually bad although, come to think of it, this is better than whichever doctor saying B.A. is fine when I know he is NOT fine.

When B.A.'s name was called, we gathered our coats and books and sped off to the consulting room, where I chose the seat closest to the oncologist's desk as it was pushed farther back. However, it turned out to be the wrong choice, and I had a sense that the doctor was faintly surprised that I was in the office at all, which shows that she does not appreciate the implications of the Catholic marriage bond--or she is unaware that B.A. spent months of his cancer adventure delirious, increasingly blind and unable to remember much or ask important questions.

The news was good. The "tumour buds", which had rapidly doubled in size after being detected, have stopped growing. This is a great mercy, for apparently the radiotherapy was so aggressive, the doctor would not have done it a second time.  One of the tumour buds looks like it is "necrotising," too--a word doctors use instead of dying. Die, tumour buds, die--but without taking my husband with you, thanks. 

We looked at the latest interesting high-tech x-rays of the inside of B.A.'s head, which are almost amusing because some show his tongue, teeth and jaw, too. B.A. says he doesn't identify with these images; they seem completely apart from him. On one x-ray/computer image was a dark horseshoe shape representing where the oncologists had radiated B.A.'s brain, as close to his brain stem as possible without actually touching it. 

B.A.'s tumours, by the way, are technically "benign" even though, left untreated, they would kill him. The problem is that they are basically on the worst, trickiest and most sensitive part of his brain. Normally this kind of brain tumour doesn't appear there. And normally this kind of brain tumour appears in five-year-olds. The probability of B.A. ever being in this situation was low, but here he is. 

Slightly off-setting this misfortune is the fact that his neurosurgeon is a paediatrics neurosurgeon and so was probably one of the few people in the world who could have done the operation he did without leaving B.A. badly damaged---although famously I think the intercession of Our Lady of Fatima had something to do with that, too. And although the subsequent radiotherapy robbed B.A. of the ability to hear music properly, that turned out to be only temporary. Thank God for that. 

After making an appointment for B.A. to come in for another scan in a few months, the doctor asked if we had any more questions. B.A. politely said "No," thus proving the importance of my being there. 

"Can he go to Canada in [four] weeks?" I asked. "For Christmas? It's an eight hour flight." 

Actually, it's more of a seven hour flight, but I was thinking of snowstorms and airplanes circling around Lester B. Pearson airport for ages, waiting for their turn to land.

The doctor looked perturbed.

"Have you booked your flights already?" she asked. 

"No," we said. "We were waiting until we spoke to you."

That had been a good thing to do. To make a long consultation short, she thought it a very bad idea for B.A. to be on a long flight although if we had insisted she would have given him some sort of steroid to help him through it.

"No, no, no," I said, thinking of a disastrous flight to Pisa last year, so we don't know what this steroid would do, or why exactly it is a bad idea for B.A. to fly---quite apart from the cost of medical insurance for a cancer patient travelling to Canada, which is apparently astronomical. 

Then B.A. remembered that we have already bought and paid for tickets to Poland in late January, but then the oncologist perked up and said that it was a good idea to start with a short flight.  Therefore, we are still going to Poland although I am a bit frightened about it. If anything like what happened after we flew to Pisa happens in Poland, we are taking the train to Berlin in July. And now the Berlin trip is now even more about seeing family than it was about museums. 

The oncologist advised us to go to the cancer patients' clubhouse for travelling insurance information for our European travels, so off we went to find it. We were met at the door by a kindly lady who showed us seats and offered tea and coffee and brought us cookies, a list of companies that insure cancer patients, and a schedule of cancer clubhouse activities. B.A. observed that it's my clubhouse, too, because I'm a Caregiver, to which I thought, "Dear God. I'm a Caregiver again." 

A Caregiver (or "Carer") is the United Kingdom expression for a person--sometimes paid by the state--who does most of the in-home caring for a sick or disabled person. I think the expression is meant to encompass the vast variety of people who may fill this role. As a concept, it has positive and negative implications. 

The positive aspect is that Caregivers are seen as a group of their own, and have their own clubs and advisers, who recognise how difficult being a Caregiver can be and that Caregivers need help and support. The negative aspect is that this reflects a breakdown in marriage and family. Once upon a time it was assumed that a wife took care of her sick husband, and vice versa, and parents took care of their disabled children, or children took care of their sick or disabled parents, and now it isn't. 

But the implications regarding Broken Britain aside, I am grateful for the identity label and the  resources available to Caregivers because, although obviously being the one with brain tumours is much worse, caring for a cancer patient can be frightfully annoying and difficult.  

The most annoying part is being treated by hospital staff as if you don't belong beside your sick person. Believe me, just offering the sick person's spouse/'partner'/Caregiver a glass of water is an unusual act of kindness. Possibly the nurses don't do it very often because they're embarrassed when the spouse/'partner'/Caregiver bursts into tears of gratitude. 

The most difficult parts are 1. second-guessing doctors and nurses--and I will never forget how starving  B.A. was fasted a day longer than necessary because a nurse made a mistake, and I thought she had made a mistake, but she didn't--and 2. not knowing what to do when something goes wrong. 

So although I am sad that we are not going to Canada for Christmas, I am glad that we are not going on a seven-hour flight. When we went to Italy in May 2017, we expected a relaxing holiday in which both of us would recover from the horrors of B.A.'s March diagnosis. The doctors had assured us that post-operative B.A. was fine. Fine to travel. Good to go. All was well. Nightmare over. Cheap flight to Pisa. Cheap train to Florence ... 

And then when B.A. got off the train, he fell and could not get up. Somehow I carried him and all our luggage to a seat, but after that, I did not know what to do or what was going on and, God love us, we both preferred to believe the doctors couldn't possibly have been wrong and he just had "low blood sugar". Neither of us knew, then, what delirium looked like. Hint: not just someone raving on their pillow about a lost love. Most of the time B.A. was delirious, he spoke with complete conviction in an ordinary tone of voice. He passed basic cognitive damage tests with flying colours. He wandered off to central Edinburgh because he fancied a doughnut.   

Well, anyway. No Toronto Christmas, but just remembering what happened in Florence (and then everything afterwards) has cheered me up a little. Better safe than that kind of sorry.

Update: I will say this again and again, but it is very shortsighted of the National Health Service not to recognise appropriately the role the sick person's primary caregiver plays in the healing of the patient. First of all, the caregiver has only ONE sick person in her care and so is an incredible resource. Second, the caregiver may be under so much stress, she is in danger of herself falling ill. If the caregiver falls ill, that can have a deleterious effect on the original patient. It will also add to the work of the NHS. Therefore, it is in everyone's interest to spend a half-minute a day acknowledging the primary caregiver, smiling at her or even offering her a glass of water.

Update 2: Given my readership, should acknowledge that our financial situation would be terrible if we were Americans or we lived in the United States without adequate health insurance. Speaking as a Canadian who lives in the UK and travels often to the Continent, I firmly believe in so-called "socialised medicine." There are a lot of things taxes shouldn't support, but cancer treatment is high on the list of things it should. 

Polish Pretend Son and Daughter-in-Law's Midnight Wedding Ritual

Polish Minimalism. 

After Polish Pretend Son's wedding service (ślub, pronounced shloop) and nuptial Mass, he drove off with his bride in the rented white Corvette they had arrived in and the rest of us followed to a charming 19th century palace-turned-hotel for the reception (wesele,  pronounced ves-SEL-eh).

The little hotel was for the "exclusive use" of the wedding, as adverts say, and it is very elegant indeed, having been lovingly restored by its Polish owners from the decrepit state the palace had fallen into after its former German occupants had fled westwards. There are lots of ruined little German palaces dotted all over western Poland, and as soon as B.A. and I win the lottery, we will buy and restore one ourselves. 

In keeping with the aristocratic nature of this dwelling/hotel, the wedding feast was a Polish-French hybrid, with a late afternoon, rather French, dinner served in the elegant dining rooms and a side room groaning with every Polish dish you can imagine in case anyone felt the slightest hint of a pang of hunger afterwards. 

What happened after dinner, however, was entirely Polish and very ancient, and even gave me goosebumps. First, the dining-rooms were invaded by Polish minstrels who bade us all perform the ancient Polish walking dance called the chodzony (pronounced hodZONE-ih). We walked out  into a field behind the palace where we were led in the various progressions of the dance as a violin scraped and a hurdy-gurdy groaned. It sounded and felt so ancient, we could have been in any era, were our clothes not so very, er, twentieth century.

Then we all processed back inside, and the bride and groom danced their first dance as wife and husband. As Polish Pretend Son is a tango fanatic and Polish Pretend Daughter-in-Law is very good at dances of all kinds, it was truly an impressive performance. 

At midnight, however, we were plunged back into the Middle Ages, or perhaps even further back, even before Christianity came to Poland, during the oczepiny (pronounced oh-chep-EE-nih). 

Nowadays, oczepiny are usually just a set of games that ritually humiliate the bride and groom in a mild and good-humoured fashion. They remind me of the dumb games American and Canadian women traditionally play at bridal and baby showers. At their worst they are as bad as garter-tossing and other stupid things we Anglos too often do at weddings. 

However the traditional oczepiny involve an elaborate ritual in which the bride is reminded that she is leaving the happiness of her youth and maiden fancy-free living behind and now has to knuckle down and be wifely. Everyone around sings cheerfully. 

Meanwhile, the bridal wreath is taken away from the poor girl and the traditional headscarf of the Polish married woman is forced on her head.  Polish Pretend Daughter-in-Law seems to have second thoughts about this, for she threw her pretty scarf on the floor twice.  I believe rejecting the kerchief is traditional, but PPD-i-L said later that, swept up in the moment, she really meant it. 

The whole thing--including the climax---sent chills up my spine. It wasn't just the fact that the ritual was so otherworldly and ancient. It was also an unusually frank reminder that marriage, like life, is very hard and, in fact, a bit of a gamble, and that if she accepts the wrong man, a bride's life will be unhappy. 

Update: PPS doesn't want his wesele videos public, so I've put up a photo instead:

Update 2: There are no nice photos of me from the okay-for-public-consumption file. It's too bad, but  months of unrelenting stress does that to a woman my age. Now when I see a woman who's "let herself go", I realise that there may have been some inescapable reasons for that. One of the nice things about PPS's wedding, which happened shortly after we were told we couldn't go back to the Historic House, and they wanted their Historic Centre Flat back, thanks, was that we had three days' respite from worry.  

The Year Since Operating Dangerously

It's the first anniversary of my husband's incredibly dangerous fifth brain surgery. Naturally Benedict Ambrose remembers nothing of that day, whereas it is tattooed to my own brain.

The events are jumbled up, however. I do recall B.A. happily "signing" his consent to the procedure that could kill him and was half-expected to paralyse him in some way: he kept on scribbling until I took away the pen. Then I had to sign to confirm that was my husband's signature.

Then there were the could-be death bed visits. Naturally our priest came with the Blessed Sacrament (and poor B.A. was terrified evil forces would stop him), and B.A.'s mother came down from Dundee, and the Men's Schola came by, and the young Franco-Polish couple staying with me---and I think six was the maximum number of guests I thought B.A. could receive.

This was all very last minute, by the way. B.A. had been in the convalescent home, for which we had had great (but completely unfounded) expectations. He fell in the night and was discovered at dawn and whisked to the hospital for x-rays. I could understand very little of what he said, and the young doctors almost nothing. No bones broken, but the tumour had grown, and so B.A. was returned to the relative paradise of the Neuroscience department.

The memory that makes me cry is B.A. telling his mother with all seriousness that he had been in Carstairs. Carstairs is Scotland's prison for the criminally insane.

Well, my father would tell me that it is best not to dwell on these things. And he should know because my mother had a stroke at 50 and then brain surgery. She completely recovered and is hale and hearty, goes for long holiday hikes in the Highlands, and volunteers at a rehab hospital that nobody would think was Carstairs.

I suppose the value of talking about this at all is to provide hope for other people whose loved ones have a stroke or a brain tumour. Of course, the fact that B.A. was not damaged by the operation was a miracle, but that's a story for tomorrow.

Meanwhile, I am eternally grateful for all the prayers, cards, small presents and kind words of family, friends, and readers, let alone the sacrifices of both money and time of family members who flew to Scotland to be with us last year.

Update: Trying not to dwell, but the other miracle is that I have not gone insane between March 2017 and now.  That might be a source of hope for others, too. It is possible to care for your spouse through a brain tumour diagnosis, five operations, the malfunction of a fire retardant system, another brain tumour diagnosis, eviction from your beloved home of 9 years, flat-buying, and his radiotherapy  (while working full-time) and not go stark raving mad. In fact, I gave up anti-depressants months and months ago because WHO HAS TIME?

My principal advice here--besides not trusting a dangerously overstretched medical system alone with your loved one--is to save every penny you can possible save as soon as it dawns on you that you should have done this from your first paycheque.

Runner's Knee & the Potential of Youth

This features much later in the post.

How can this happen ALREADY? Wah! After Wednesday's run my knees ached all day, and they began to ache again yesterday on a walk to the Historical House to pack a few more boxes.

I looked up "Why do my knees hurt when I run?" on the internet and discovered this horrible malady called "Runner's Knee." Tomorrow on my way to Michaelmas Mass I will stop in at the fancy running shoe shop and have a serious conversation with complete strangers about my pronated feet and their evil influence on my knees.

Enjoy being young, kids!

That is actually a better topic for my blog than aching knees, which are of interest only to me, B.A. and perhaps my mother. My hypothesis that the human body starts to break down from the ridiculously early age of 35 or so should be of interest to any human in danger of turning 35 one day.

G.I. Jane was probably not a great film, but I found it very inspiring, having begun to get in shape for the first time in my life. And for almost ten years I was in great shape and regretted only that I had not been more athletic as a teenager. Although not overweight, I had disliked corporal existence and felt that my body was something heavy and smelly that I had to drag around. A daily two-mile run somewhere pretty, followed by a dumb-bell session, and (probably above all) fasting from sugar would have made me less depressed.

A fun, enjoyable and healthy goal for a teenager or twenty-year old might be to become as strong, fast and fit as possible by 30. You can maintain the strength of your 30 year old self for twenty years, apparently. Oh, this is where my brother Quadrophonic would like me to warn you that I am not a doctor and you should not take any of this as a substitute for medical advice. Consider it philosophy.

For a young, healthy body to mooch around a shopping mall or sit in a chair with the internet all day is simply a waste of a young, healthy body. We all know what young, healthy human bodies are capable of from watching the Olympics or just an important race. Whereas I do not think Olympic training is necessarily good for bodies--the training goal is not the fitness of the body but the victory--it at least shows us what the human body can do.

Actually, that would be a fun experiment even for a middle-aged person: what can MY middle-aged, seemingly falling apart body do? However, even if I could run the Edinburgh marathon one day, it would not be as impressive as what a thirty year old, after twenty or even ten years of training, would be capable of.

So if you are under 30, I highly recommend that you see a doctor to ask for advice and permission to develop your fitness to the highest level you are capable of. And, again, this does not mean winning competitions but seeking the maximum health of your body.  For example, boxing training is fantastic for your body until you step into the ring and someone punches you in the face. I am grateful for my boxing years as they made me a stronger, healthier and braver woman,  but I hope I quit before my chances of developing Parkinson's skyrocketed.

The other unsolicited advice I have for the young is for those with dry, curly, bushy, thick hair. I wish I had known this at ten, let alone thirteen. Had I known this from a child, I would have been bullied less and felt a lot happier about my appearance. Dear heavens, the freedom of not having to think about one's appearance.

Anyway, it is this: never brush your hair, stop using shampoo, scrub your scalp with a bit of conditioner after working it through your wet hair from the ends, use a detangler on your conditioned-up hair, rinse, squish the water out with a towel, apply a tablespoon of coconut oil to your hair, comb it through with the detangler, and then loosely braid your hair for a few  hours, unbraiding it later long enough for it to dry, and then braiding it up again. Since I discovered coconut oil, I have been able to grow my hair as long as my smooth-haired mother can for the first time in my life.

And now I shall find some advice about fitness goals for the over-40 set, listen to some Polish, and learn some more about the anarchist objections to the minimal state.

Hens

"Hen" is an old-fashioned term of endearment in Scotland whose usage is falling off as it is now considered insensitive to women's new place in society, blah blah.

That's a great pity, for I much prefer being called "hen" to being called "pal", which used to be reserved for men. Democratic Scotland doesn't care for "sir" or "ma'am" although I suppose we would all "sir" and "ma'am" to the Duke and Duchess of Rothesay, were they to toddle by our places of work to open a new wing, etc.  Maybe when I'm older more bus drivers will call me "hen" instead of "pal" because I remind them of their grannies; something nice to look forward to.

"Hen" is also not used overmuch by people who went to university or by foreigners like me, as it sounds funny in our non-Scots accents. B.A. some times calls me "hen" which leaves me in a bind as it sounds wrong to call him "pal" in return. I'm not sure what Scotswomen call their "partners" (another awful word) because the only Scotswomen I know either do not have partners or abstain from endearments in public.

Meanwhile, I have been reading all about hens because I am hoping to buy some in the spring and ensconce them in a hideously expensive but easily cleaned chicken coop under the apple tree.

Hens are the tentative solution to my need to mother somebody or something. B.A. does not want pets in the house, so hens are our compromise. Unfortunately, hens are a lot more work than cats and dogs, and you have to have two or three of them at once, as they hate living alone. But they do lay eggs, and they can be taught to love you through food-bribery, and they even enjoy a bit of a cuddle, so they may be worth all the attention, cleaning, worming, and tremendous chain and padlock I will have to buy.

The most depressing thing I read in the chicken books--and if you want to keep chickens the first thing you must do is read all about them--is that in urban settings you need to worry about humans even more than foxes because humans will steal eggs, chickens, coop and all. That was almost a deal breaker for me, for the last thing I want to worry about is serious sin. I write about serious sin all day long, and I do not want to tempt serious sinners into our garden with chickens.

Although chickens seem to pay their way through egg-production, they are not very economical pets, even if you buy or build a cheap chicken-coop yourself.  You have to buy chicken feed, grit, bedding, disinfectant, biannual de-wormer powder, a feeder and a drinker, and the occasional cabbage or head of broccoli so they get their greens. This seems more involved than being a cat-mother, who has  fewer things to buy: a comb, a collar, Meow Mix, Whiskas, a litter box, litter, and scoop. Being a chicken-mother is certainly more expensive than popping into Tesco for eggs.

Thus, poultry-keeping comes down firmly under the heading of "HOBBY", and as I already have a hobby--learning Polish--I have to ponder if I really have the time and money to invest in it. It would be easier to get a cat, but B.A. is adamantly against cats and my brother Nulli is deathly allergic to them, so he'd never be able to visit.

In case I haven't mentions, B.A. is adamantly against cats because he firmly believes that they creep into your bed at the crack of dawn and wake you up, and if you prevent them from doing this by firmly shutting the bedroom door, they avenge themselves by scratching the furniture.

I complained to cat-adoring pals about B.A.'s intransigence, but when I explained his reasons, they notably did not say that these reasons were unfounded.

B.A. is also against owning dogs, in part because of the terrible environmental damage to urban and semi-urban parkland caused by dogs and their owners. There are approximately 640,000 dogs in Scotland, and their urine is murder on trees and other plants. What their droppings can do to human beings is no joke. After twelve years at the Historical House, B.A. has seen just too much dog-damage to the precious Historical Landscape.

Chicken droppings, however, make a good fertiliser. So, now that I think about it, although chickens might not make strictly economical pets, they are environmentally friendly.

Run

My daily habits get a kicking in a little book called Eat, Move, Sleep. Apparently sitting is the new sugar, and every hour of sitting is shortening my life. Also, the more one sits, the more likely fat will collect in one's posterior. Goodness gracious. This is seriously bad news for contemporary journalists who spend eight hours a day or more at our desks.

There was more bad news in an article the Huffington Post, which suggests the the overweight should just give up hope that dieting will ever work in the long term.

I don't actually believe that, as the Fast Diet works long-term for many, and did work for me as long as I stuck to it. I forget when I quit, but I suspect B.A.'s illness had something to do with it. A year and a half of almost unrelenting stress have packed on the pounds, too. Besides all B.A.'s health woes, the flood-from-above, leaving our home-of-nine-years, shuttling about from refuge to refuge, the long, drawn-up process of getting our belongings moved to our new home, there is the sadness of almost everything I read and write about for work.

"How do you bear it?" someone asked---and the answer from June (at latest) until now is "I stuff my face."

Having granola in the house is just fatal.

That reminds me, by the way, of the saddest priest I ever met, who was also one of the fattest. Even then I had an inkling that he was self-medicating on food, but I had my own problems then, so I don't think it occurred to me to suggest to someone in authority that he might need help.

Anyway, Eat, Move, Sleep convinced me that everybody should get at least 150 minutes of cardio-vascular activity a week, so I have been going out for a half-hour run upon getting out of bed, five mornings a week. The first run was so awful, I hope I never quit, for having to do another "first run" is just too depressing a thought.

I haven't had a regular run outdoors since high school, as even in my most athletic days I was a gym rat and preferred the weatherless comfort of indoors. However, running outdoors--if you already have  running shoes--is free, and my route along the river to the Firth of Forth and back is scenic. It provides a mental lift to see the ducks and swans and to hear the oystercatchers peeping.

Benedict's Letters according to Bild

I spent the summer of 2006 in Germany, and it was pretty hard to ignore Bild because it carried a photograph of a topless woman on Page 1 almost every day. Apparently Bild moved the Page 1 girl to inside the newspaper in 2012, but unless I am very mistaken it's still just a rag full of gossip, football news, and soft porn. How surprised I was to discover that Bild broke the story of the Benedict-Brandmueller contretemps.

Speaking as a reporter at a media outlet that lobbed a real bombshell document at the world, I do not believe in other bombshell letters and documents unless they are actually linked to or reproduced below the lede. And furthermore I do not believe that someone who wanted to leak letters from Benedict would give them to Bild--unless Bild pays for such things, of course. But then why not publish the complete letters? 

Honestly, did no-one at The New York Times ask himself or herself these questions? Well, Brandmueller is still alive, so he can confirm or deny himself, I suppose. 

Meanwhile, I do not believe that Il Fatto Quotiadiano has part of the infamous 300-page dossier on a certain lobby group. I have read two articles by Il FQ on the topic of bombshell documents and dossiers, and they were all smoke and no fire. In fact, I got in touch with someone at Il FQ to ask politely if Il FQ would actually release the names they claimed to have seen, and the answer was "obviously not" because of "rules of civility."

Update: Okay, it looks as though Bild really does have the letters. I'd love to know how Bild got them. 

Good-bye to the furniture...

Today the antique dealer's Polish boyfriend and his equally strong buddy came by the Historical House to take most of the nicest pieces of furniture we still have in the Historical Attic. I wasn't there for the epic removal down three flights of very old stairs, but B.A. said it went very smoothly.

I was there this morning, cleaning out drawers. Although I am becoming minimalist and there is no space for it, I am a little sad thinking about the loss of B.A.'s great-grandmother's old desk. It wasn't a grand desk--the very thin veneer was flaking off,  ]the original drawer knobs had long since disappeared, and it was too small for a full-time journalism job. But it was my first desk in Scotland, and I wrote an awful lot on it, and it was B.A.'s last piece of his family's furniture.

What else went? An oak chest of drawers with a mirror, a painted screen, the cane-backed chair that lived in the bathroom, two inlaid tables, a glass-topped coffee table, a pine chest of drawers. a Victorian kneehole desk that was really too low but fit in the guest room, an elm stool.

Mostly I feel badly that B.A. had to give up his furniture.  However, there is some comfort in the fact that he will get some money for it, and it will presumably go to homes, good or bad.  B.A. was adamant that the furniture was not going to end up in a skip.  When I tried to get rid of our good dining-room table a couple of weeks ago--it wouldn't go through the hall door of the new place---my kind friend helped me stuff it in the back of her car and drove to charity shop after charity shop in the rain.

I couldn't find a charity shop that would take it. My pal would have driven me to the dump, but I couldn't bare the thought of telling B.A. we had thrown "such a good table" in the landfill. So we took it back to the Historical House, and I put it in an outbuilding. Hopefully someone will be able to take it apart, and then we will be able to get it through the door.

Another reason why I don't like losing the furniture is that it makes me think of families on their way down, like James Joyce's family. However, as property owners we are presumably on our way up and really have lost only our Historical House-derived delusions of grandeur. When you are the sole tenants of a 17th/18th manor house, it is very easy to feel like you own it!

As always I am comforted by the thought of the garden. Although we don't have room for flocks of furniture, we do have room for two people---especially with a long garden rolling out below our windows.

The Freedom of Being Nobody

St. Ignatius of Loyola, pray for us.

The "Principle and Foundation of the Spiritual Exercises" of Saint Ignatius of Loyola helped me a lot when I was grappling with a very difficult decision years ago.

Man is created to praise, reverence, and serve God our Lord, and by this means to save his soul. And the other things on the face of the earth are created for man and that they may help him in prosecuting the end for which he is created. 

From this it follows that man is to use them as much as they help him on to his end, and ought to rid himself of them so far as they hinder him as to it.  

For this it is necessary to make ourselves indifferent to all created things in all that is allowed to the choice of our free will and is not prohibited to it; so that, on our part, we want not health rather than sickness, riches rather than poverty, honour rather than dishonour, long rather than short life, and so in all the rest; desiring and choosing only what is most conducive for us to the end for which we are created. 

The part that really challenged me was the idea of not desiring "honour rather than dishonour," since I was about to quit a PhD programme and therefore abandon my lifelong dream of becoming a university professor.  

Now, I would never recommend to anyone that they drop their PhD programme. Getting that far and then giving up--for whatever unhappy reason--can leave a very deep wound.  (I suppose if it is for a happy reason--like something so much better--then you'd be okay.) However, I eventually found a fulfilling life outside of academia, even discovering that the Great Conversation carries on outside the walls. 

In fact, the conversation inside the walls can become very restrictive, and I am reminded again of the time I positively savaged a book of feminist theology in a book review published in the Toronto Catholic Register. At that time, Canadian Catholics in academia did not rip apart the books of other Canadian Catholics in academia in print. Doing so is not very nice, and the Catholic Register was (and may still be) a nice paper, rather more interested in building up than tearing down, which was as it should be. Moreover, ripping into the works of potential future colleagues is not great for your future career. 

However, I was very passionate about theology, and I had a very low tolerance for the cotton candy quality of thought that came along with the 1970s-style pastoral branch, so I very much hated this book. I recall hating it so much, I threw it across a laundromat--which I may have said in my review. 

It did not occur to me to imagine how the authoress would feel when she read my review, as she inevitably did, and I have paid for my thoughtlessness since by reading reviews of my own work. (I no longer do this for I have suffered enough.)  

But not to put a fine point on it, she went nuts. She wrote to me at two email addresses, and she wrote to the editor-in-chief, and she telephoned him too. Telephoning a newspaper editor to scream is inelegant, but at least it leaves no traces. I never deleted the authoress's email and although I have written many stupid emails since the genre was invented, I have never written one quite like that. 

In short, the authoress was a learned, respected professor at a wonderful university who had the confidence and support of the bishops----"and who are YOU?"

"I'm nobody," said your humble correspondent to her screen and "--and that makes me free." 

I don't agree with St. Ignatius about the health and the riches, exactly. I'm not sure 16th century people had as much choice about these things as we westerners do now, and compared to 16th century people, we're all rich. However, I do think he is spot on about the honour/dishonour thing. If you do not care that much about what Very Important People think of you--caring more about, say, how you appear to the ladies of your mother's branch of the Catholic Women's League*--then you have more freedom to stand up for what you believe in, no matter how unfashionable it is.  

The outraged authoress did me three very good turns by freaking out, by the way.  

First, her tears (I think I was told she cried over the phone) were a wake-up call that words hurt even grown-up strangers with tenure. 

Second, although I myself have cried over bad reviews since then--even private ones from friends, shameful, shameful, shameful**---I have never pulled the "I am so GREAT, and you are so SMALL" stunt, and I hope God prevents me from ever doing it.  

Third, she alerted the editor-in-chief to the fact that there was something scream-worthy in that week's Register. He picked up a copy and had a read of my review. And that, mes enfants, is how I eventually got my own column and my first book published and thus the book republished in the USA and in Poland. 

I am very thankful that when my once-promising academic career fell sick and died, I had my writing career (!) to fall back on. But I am also grateful for the lesson that to be "nobody" is to be free and being "somebody" can lead to delusion.

*The ladies of the Catholic Women's League, I am quite sure, would draw a line well before  picketing outside a private house and telling a man's children that his father is a horrible person and loads of people hate him. I suspect the CWL eyebrow would have lifted right when Mr Bone told his parents that instead of getting a job after university, he was going to live on the public purse.

**When I had spent the requisite time with poets, story-writers and other scribblers in the 1990s, I began to notice that we seemed particularly vulnerable to certain sins, chief among them volcanic envy. I will never forget my reaction when I first discovered that a dear friend had had a book published by a mainstream publisher with a big advance and bee-oo-tee-ful binding: murderous rage. Up until that moment I thought I was proof against the snarling hatred certain poets I knew had for much more successful poets their age.  Ah ha ha ha ha--no. 

Mantra against Misfortune

I have a new technique against useless retrospection. Every time I begin a thought with "Oh, if only..." or "I wish I had...", I say, "What can I do today to make tomorrow better?" 

This mantra popped into my head--very possibly at Mass---when B.A. and I were living in the New Town this summer. At a certain point after the Deluge drove us from our happy home in the Historical Flat, I began to say such mournful things as "What terrible decisions have I made in my life that have led up to this moment?" 

This was nonsense, of course, as neither of us made decisions that led to the sudden malfunction of the HH's fire extinguishing system. Neither of us was responsible, either, for poor B.A.'s brain tumour deciding to grow again. And neither of us was responsible for the delay in taking possession of our flat, which was caused by some shoddy map-making at some registry office, plus a crack in the concrete around the [redundant] chimney.

As a matter of fact, our life decisions had left us well-off, not only because we had kindly friends with a kindly tenant who allowed us to rent a room, but because we had been working and saving against the evil day we would have to leave the Historical House. So in reality we had made excellent decisions that led up to the joyful moment in August went B.A. took possession of our new home. 

This mantra "What can I do today to make tomorrow better?"is a good dispeller of gloomy thoughts, I have found, especially as making tomorrow better includes digging a few dandelions out of the lawn. It occurred to me this morning that I may never finish digging dandelions out of the lawn, as they keep coming back, but that does not mean I should give up. (Giving up would lead to a brutal dandelion occupation.) The victory is in digging up the dandelions as long as I have breath and strength---which is also true of the struggle against sin. 

Gardening is a very theological activity. 

After reading a simple but persuasive book called Eat, Move Sleep by a pop scientist named Tom Rath, I decided that another thing I could do to make tomorrow better was to start running for 30 minutes a day. Despite my athletic years (ages 25-36), this was a very radical decision--especially as this running will be outdoors instead of in a comfortable gym. 

However, for over a year I have been sitting down for over 8 hours a day,  I have gained a lot of weight, and I have arms that ache from too much typing. It seemed to me that I had better take up cardiovascular exercise NOW, or I will be very sorry SOON.

So this morning I got up at 6:50 AM and ran along the river and back for what turned out to be 24 minutes, and it didn't kill me. Eat, Move, Sleep promises (as have other books I've read) that cardiovascular activity improves learning, too. so that will be useful for my Polish. 

The Bubble

I don't think there is such a thing as a Catholic bubble. The "bubble" is really popular culture, fashion, and the boring platitudes of modern life.

An illustration:

Two homeschooled girls  wanted so badly to go to school they were sent to an excellent, old-fashioned convent school in France where they read a lot of French poetry, play ping-pong, and shiver in winter.  Not a bubble.

Another girl, sent all her life to a "normal" "Catholic" schools, dropped English Lit when it was shoved into a Gender Theory straitjacket and now wants to drop French because it, too, is being taught according to the ideology du jour.  Bubble. 

It is easy to avoid the bubble if you see that it is a bubble and not "real life". It is easy if you are an adult, that is. If you were born inside the bubble, you may be stuck for at least a while.  

Another illustration:

I once went on a tour of the Lake District with my mother and some other Canadians who were mostly retired schoolteachers. They were very PC, and my mother shook them to their core by telling them I was her paid companion. This was not strictly true although my mother did indeed pay my way.  

One woman upbraided another for saying that she had been robbed, in Italy, by Gypsies. 

"You can't call them Gypsies," said the offended woman primly. "They're Roma."

"I think they're Roma when they're in a government office," I said, having worked in a Roma-serving government office. "When they've just robbed you, they're Gypsies." 

The prim lady didn't think this was amusing. She later asked me why her daughter's UK university addressed correspondence to her as "Miss" not "Ms."  

She was certainly living in a bubble. 

I grant you that it is a big bubble. In the UK it includes schools, universities, television, radio, most newspapers, art show openings and cocktail parties with Guardian readers. If your life revolves around those things, you may never realise that there is an enormous world outside them. 

For example, there are 20-somethings who live on half their income so that they can retire at 30. There are young parents of large families. There are people who forage in hedgerows for food. There are truffle hunters. There are zero-wasters. There are beer-brewing monks. There are 1940s re-enactors. There are women who sew mantillas and/or monastic habits for a living. There are homeschoolers who learn a gazillion things they would not have learned in normal school. There are small homesteaders. There are traditional walking pilgrimages from shrine to shrine. There is the local Hunt. There are cloistered nuns with apple orchards and bees. There are women who refuse ever to wear trousers. 

I could go on at great length, but I am tired from a long week of writing articles for so-called "alt media", fervent gardening, house-moving, grocery shopping, rosehip-picking, reading Podróż "Wędrowca w świtu", and pricking myself with pins while repairing my denim maxi-skirt.  I have also made two batches of carrot soup and an a Polish apple pie called "szarlotka".