The Most Beautiful Sunday

This morning was overcast, breezy and not overly warm but nevertheless the most beautiful Sunday this spring. Today a kind priest came to our home after we watched the Warrington Mass, heard our confessions and gave us Holy Communion.

We had not received Holy Communion since St. Joseph's Day. I won't tell you how long it was since I'd been to confession. (Benedict Ambrose is better about this than I am.) Having Holy Communion today reminded me of my First Communion--the first official one, I mean.*

The government regulations in Scotland are such that we can now visit with a few people from different households as long as we all stay outside and six feet apart. Thus, B.A. set up a chair on the landing right outside our outer door, and I put down our green silk Moroccan prayer rug just inside our hall. When Father arrived, I retreated behind the sitting-room door, and B.A. made his confession before the outer doorway. When B.A. was done, he got me. Then I made my confession before the outer doorway.

Then we had Holy Communion. For this the priest wanted a roof over his head, so he stepped into the hall, gave Communion to B.A., and then, when B.A. moved out of the hallway, gave Communion to me. The sun shone through the little white Disc, and afterwards I cried. Not so tough and sophisticated after all, am I?

B.A. brought the priest water in a china bowl for his finger and thumb, and the water went into the half-barrel herb garden. I shall have to think very carefully in future about exactly what goes into it! Servant of God Dorothy Day, having found herself at a coffee table Mass, took away the coffee cup used as a chalice and buried it, so that it could not longer be used for coffee again. All traditionalists should tell this story when other Catholics denounce her as a communist.

After this very happy and unprecedented reception of two Sacraments at our door, B.A. and I gave the priest Sunday Lunch under the apple tree. It was our first ever meal in the garden. Since I wouldn't let B.A. buy an ugly Made-in-China object (£30), he put his beloved barley-twist table (it looks like this but cost a fraction) under the tree. I covered it with the tablecloth we bought in Florence. Then I brought out a bottle of red wine and two bottles of our homemade apple cider. B.A. brought out the pork loin he had put in the oven before the Warrington Mass and a warm potato salad containing homegrown lettuce, kale, chard and radish.  Unsurprisingly, we were joined by Lightning the Friendly Cat, who clearly had designs on the roast.

For pudding we had slices of an enormous (if I say so myself) Black Midnight Cake, which I unashamedly boast comes from my mother's old Betty Crocker Cookbook recipe. This time I improved upon it by taking my mother's advice to tie wet dish towel collars around the cake tins, so that they would rise flat. They weren't entirely flat, but they were flatter than last time. I spread jam on the bottom of the slightly thinner one, stuck the fatter one on top and covered the whole with cocoa buttercream icing. This I served with peanut butter ice-cream, which B.A. thought slightly odd, but the priest appreciated.

It was a delightful lunch, and B.A. and I both prayed during the Warrington Mass "Prayer against Pestilence" that we would not pass along COVID-19 to the kind priest. We don't have symptoms--and have never had symptoms--so we think he is safe-- from us at any rate.

Not so safe my radishes. As Father and B.A. sat at the table talking about shoebills in Japan, I lingered nearby fussing with my veg trug.  Espying an insect on a fallen radish leaf, I picked up bug and leaf and asked Father if he knew what it was. He did.

"It's an aphid," he said.

Aphids have discovered my trug! I shall have to consult my growing collection of gardening books.

*My first unofficial "First Family Communion" occurred thanks to the liturgical experimentation of the 1970s. It felt very strange, and had none of the ceremony of my official First Communion, in which I wore the white dress and veil my mother made me, the next week. Yes, in the Church of the 1970s, you could have two First Communions: first First and, er, second First. Bizarre.

It, was, however, an excellent metaphor for the schizophrenia in the Church during the 1970s (and to a certain extent, ever since). Not being Europeans, my family didn't celebrate First Communions with parties, etc. But God bless my Grandmother Cummings: she sent me a gold cross and chain to mark mine.

Gardening Update: Two of the five scarlet runner beans have germinated and appeared above ground.  The trug has released the biggest of the radishes so far. Some of the radish thinnings don't have proper round radishes growing, but red fingers. This may be due to over-crowding. 

The thinned out lettuces are growing bigger in both the raised bed and the trug. A bad cat has been digging around one of my new rows of radish seedlings in the raised bed for the usual reason. More wooden anti-cat spikes have now been inserted.

Joy of Summer

I used to wonder why June 21, the first day of summer,  was called "midsummer," but now that I live in the UK, I know.

Summer in the UK begins when the rain stops and the sun actually feels warm, and this year that was today. I had a very splendid day, too. I used to love autumn best, but now that I live in the UK, my allegiances have switched to early summer, i.e. May. 

This morning I did an hour of Polish study, and then I dragged myself outdoors to the back garden and did two hours of weeding between the paving stones in the lovely sun. Then I hung out a load of laundry, and had some rosół (Polish chicken soup) left over from the dinner party we had last night. It turned out beautifully, so no more stock cubes for me ever. 

Then I did some more laundry and wrote three articles. It was launder, hang, write, fetch and fold, launder, hang, write, fetch and fold all day. Then B.A. made chicken croquettes, so I stopped working to eat. And then a Polish pal came with his mother to borrow a piano, and I rushed for the homemade black currant vodka, squeaking Czy macie ochotę na czarną porzaczkę? before our Polish pal had time to warn his mother about me and my linguistic obsession.

In my sitting room, where twice a week I harangue my Polish tutor po polsku, I am rather better at Polish than at church, so I did much better chatting with our Polish pal's bewildered mother than I usually do chatting with our Polish pal. So that was extremely awesome and rather put a crown on our first summer day. 

The denouement was sitting outside with B.A. screened by beech hedges as we pondered my handiwork, the telephone wires and the currently naked trellis against the shed and drank white wine. By the way, the apple blossoms have mostly blown away, but the roses (pink and white) have begun to bloom.

Tomorrow I will do an anti-dandelion search-and-destroy mission before I go to Barre class.  Yes, I do love summer.

Beautiful

Sometimes I cannot forgive the new flat for not being the old flat. It doesn't have enough memories in it. It's cramped and untidy and if/when we win the lottery, we're fleeing to the West End.

At the moment, however, it looks lovely, and not just because of the guggle fish of purple tulips on the coffee table. 

It's because Polish Pretend Daughter and French Pretend Son-in-Law have just been here with their baby. 

PPD is of medium height, slim and beautiful. FPSL is very tall, slim and cheerful. The baby is only a few months old, and very cute and good-natured. Benedict Ambrose and I had not met her yet, and here she was at last. 

We had tea and coffee, cheese-bread and butter, cardamom bread and cheese, and a Victoria sponge (the simplest of British cakes). PDD fed the baby, and FPSL told us about the home renovations. They both told us about the adventure of the baby's birth, and how the nurses were so excited that the baby had black hair. (Apparently Scottish babies arrive bald.)  PDD opted for a natural birth (no drugs), and smugly admitted that she yelled a lot during the worst hour. 

PDD also praised her husband for all the hard work that he does. In the mornings he takes the baby for a walk, so the wife-mother can sleep, and then he goes to work. When he comes home from work, he takes charge of the baby again. PDD is not engaged in paid work right now, so she believes that FPSL works much harder than she does. (N.B. PDD is up several times a night feeding her baby.) 

What a blessing to have a happy young family in our flat and to serve them tea and cake. After their visit, we volunteered to walk them to the bus stop, and as we were all busying ourselves with bags, boots and baby buggy, I chanced to look in the abandoned sitting-room. The coffee table was bedecked with my best china and the whole room looked beautiful. 

Maybe the longer we live here and the more young folk who come and go, leaving happy memories,  the more and more I will like the flat. 

IRONY ALERT: I start an exercise class tomorrow, so I have bought two pairs of leggings. I promise not to wear them in the street, let alone the at the Most Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. 

Advent 2: Black Currant Vodka

The Advent Candelabra is my Christmas present from B.A.! 

Some years ago, when Polish Pretend Son expressed unhappiness at being unable to smoke indoors at certain dinner parties, I rashly promised to buy a flat he could smoke in. It was, of course, a joke. However, now that Benedict Ambrose and I have our own home there is no ordinance forbidding PPS from smoking indoors, and it does seem inhospitable to forbid it, especially after years of promising PPS he could smoke indoors when we left the Historical House.

B.A. flip-flopped on the issue. First he said "No". Then, during the merriment of a Schola dinner party on Friday night, he said "Yes."  Then on Sunday he said, "Pipes only."  And, thus, PPS went out for his customary cigarette between meat and pudding, and then when pudding (piernik [gingerbread cake] & mazurek królewski  [ornate jam tart] ) was sufficiently demolished, no fewer than three guests lit their pipes.

Welcome to Traddieland.

The fact that we are no longer at the Historical House is most dramatically illustrated by fire. For nine years, we could not light a match indoors, lest Scotland's Treasure burn to the ground. Not only could no-one smoke indoors (and indeed had to go down three flights of old stone staircase to smoke outdoors), we could not light candles, not even on a birthday cake.

I bought my first box of matches in over a decade at Tesco on Saturday, and (excluding the gas hob) fire was introduced to our home yesterday evening when we lit two purple Advent candles on the dining-room table. And then, after the carrot soup, the roast chicken, roast potatoes, gravy and peas--and PPS's cold outdoor cigarette break--I lit two numerical candles on PPS's gingerbread birthday cake. From the expression on his face, I guessed PPS had mixed feelings about his age confronting him in candle form.

"Can you believe PPS is [redacted]?" I wailed later to the Schola Bass. "He used to be 23!"

"I never think that way," said the Schola Bass cheerfully and took his Hobgoblin beer to the sitting-room so I could clear up.

This morning I counted the bottles. We were expecting seven guests, but in the end we had only five. The seven of us still managed to get through three bottles of red wine, one and a half of white, three (four?) 500-ml bottles of homemade apple cider, three bottles of Hobgoblin , some blackcurrant vodka and some blackcurrant vodka liqueur. That's actually rather abstemious for Scotland. Oh, and five of us had gin-and-tonics before supper, naturally.

B.A. and I made the apple cider, of course, and the more he drank it, the more B.A. liked it. He usually thinks it is too dry, but I think it's lovely. It tastes beautifully of apples.

I made the blackcurrant vodka and the liqueur myself. It was easy. In July 2017, I picked a bagful of black currants from their parent bushes, washed and dried them, put them in a big preserving jar, poured over a big bottle of vodka, and left them alone until Saturday night. On Saturday night, I poured out the liquid, pulverised the swollen blackcurrants, and squished the rest of their vodka/juice through cheesecloth. Then I turned half of the result into liqueur by adding simple syrup and putting the sweetened liquid in two nice bottles.

"You're a real housewife," said Polish Pretend Daughter-in-law, and I felt very pleased. This is a development. I grew up in two of the only three decades in human history when being a housewife was considered shameful, so naturally I never wanted to be one. I was also highly annoyed with PPS on some advanced birthday of my own when I mourned not having a "proper job" and he suggested I make vodka cordials instead. But that was before I stayed a a friend's home in Poland and discovered how important cook/build/pick/brew/distill-it-yourself is in Polish culture.

Now that I have a "proper job" instead of freelancing,  I love all the super old-fashioned housewifely things--like making flavoured vodka and apple cider--I do in what's left of my free time after language studies. And annoying as dusting-and-hoovering is, it is less annoying now that I make an annual salary, too.

PPS and PPDIL both live in Poland now; this was just a weekend visit. The newlyweds were feted from the West End to the New Town to our humble neighbourhood, and at about 10 PPDIL fell asleep on the bed in the corner of our dining room. I found this perfectly sensible, for many a time have I crept away from Schola dinner parties, the men wreathed in smoke and shouting about clerical and musical personages from the halcyon days before their Tiber swims, to fall asleep on the coats on the Bass's bed. As far as I know, I was the only guest ever to do this, so I felt that PPDIL, covered in a beautiful Russian shawl under a cloud of pipe smoke, was a real chip off the Pretend Canadian Mother block.

The dishes were done by 1 AM, and unsurprisingly, I slept past 10 AM. Then I had much to do to stop the dining-room, which doubles as my office, from smelling of pipe tobacco, and I didn't quite manage it.

I thus hereby create a new ordinance called the Polish Pretend Son Privilege: no smoking anything unless PPS is here. After all, I never promised anyone else a flat he could smoke in.

Update: Traddies will be interested in my review of Dr. Kwasniewski's latest book, which I compare to piernik, not because he is Polish-American, but because I had gingerbread on the brain.

Dinner Party Reflections

We had a belated Martinmass dinner last week (without the traditional goose, however, as they are raised hereabouts solely for Christmas) with four guests.  One  guest explained that he would not have seconds of soup because he followed Stoical practises, and I was delighted to have met a practising Stoic. I have been reading William B. Irvine's A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy, and I think a return to Christian Stoicism is the way to go.

I think this in part because I complain much too much lately, but also because I have been battling some sort of eczema for the first time in my life, and it makes me feel like Job. Poor old Job lost everything and everybody except (irony) his annoyed wife and a few judgmental friends and THEN was afflicted with boils.  

For the first time in my life, incidentally, it occurs to me that Job's wife lost everything and everybody, too. She wasn't afflicted with boils, but she probably had to wake up to the sound of Job scratching away at his boils. Scratch, scratch, scratch. Horrible. 

Fortunately we have bought two nice secondhand bookcases and have finished putting all our possessions away and have hung up our pictures, so I have less to complain about. Also, I have been following the Stoic advice to imagine the flat burning down, so as to feel more grateful for it. In order to appreciate what you have, it is a good practice to imagine how much worse life would be without it. When my eczema clears up, I will think about having had eczema, so as to even more enjoy not having it. 

This negative visualisation works with people, too. On my father's 40th birthday, I was suddenly seized with a terrible fear he might die of old age at any minute. He's still going strong in his late 70s, but for over 30 years I have not allowed myself to take this for granted. My mother had a stroke at 50, so for over 20 years I have also not taken my mother's life for granted, either.  I hadn't realised that this was considered a healthy Stoic practise, however. 

In the 1980s, we were occasionally reminded by priests that we could die at any minute, and indeed we were all still alarmed by the prospect of a nuclear holocaust. Middle-age should therefore taste sweet to the children of the 1970s and 1980s, for it was not certain then that we would ever attain it.  Meanwhile, one of the most stupendous moments of my life was sitting in a Catholic radio studio in Warsaw being interviewed about Seraphic Singles (or, actually, Anielskie Single) because such a thing would have been beyond my wildest Iron Curtain-era dreams.

Another Stoic discipline suggested by A Guide to the Good Life is to eschew luxury and to value poverty. At the same time, however, you have to work hard serving humanity in one form or another, doing the best you can and becoming the best you can be, which often translates into having enough money for at least a simple existence. 

The emphasis is therefore on what you have, rather than what you haven't, with a primary interest in one's character. So I am going to try to become more Stoical by giving up complaining--which will be easier if this new steroid cream works and the dust mites, which I am currently slaying, really are to blame for these horrible spots. Scratch, scratch. 

Mirrors

Oh, for the days I blogged for others not for myself. Auntie Seraphic was a lot more cheerful and fun than Mrs McLean, we must admit. Probably more interesting, too. On Saturday evening I began reading a wonderful little book by the Venerable Fulton Sheen, and he said that the beginning of Inner Peace was not talking about yourself.

Let us meditate on that, but also on mirrors, for today I was thinking about the faces my mirrors have reflected. Not mine. My face I have taken with me to St. Benedict Over the Apple Tree, but alas the mirrors that have reflected more beautiful and younger faces I have had to leave behind.

Moving is one of the most stressful things you can do, but moving when you didn't want to move is even worse. Although my rational brain knows we didn't leave because of an invading army or natural disaster, my reptile brain doesn't seem to know that. Today I told myself it wasn't like the Highland Clearances until I realised that it was exactly like the Highland Clearnaces in that the wicked landlords had a legal right to shove the poor peasants off the land.

The poor Highlanders took what they could carry and watched the rest go up in flames. The poor McLeans are taking what will fit in their two-bedroom walk-up and slowly divesting themselves of everything else. Two pieces of furniture of which I am (despite becoming minimalist) still very fond are my 1930s vanity table and the ornate mirrored set of drawers on the landing, and neither of them will fit in S-BOAT, so I must say good-bye, not only to them but to the memories they evoke.

Both the vanity and the "hall table," as we imprecisely called the ornate, barley-twisted thing, remind me of wonderful dinner parties and weekends or full weeks with out-of-town guests. The hall table was one of the first things guests would see when they got to the top of the stone staircase. Men would put their hats and scarves on it, and the ones who cared checked their pomaded hair in the mirror. My mother and I, at 40-odd and 60-odd, once contemplated our ageing selves in it, and I saw my grandfather looking out from both of our faces, which was rather disconcerting.

The vanity table was useful for the ladies, usually pretty young ladies, staying in the best guest room. It was a rather feminine and dainty little room before the Deluge changed our lives, and now it has the porcelain wreckage of our destroyed bathroom strewn all over the now carpet-less floor. Sometimes, mid-dinner party, I would woozily reapply my lipstick behind the shut door, and hear the Bass (who has a heavy tread) tromp along the hall from the dining-room to whatever bottle awaited him in the sitting-room.

The Historical House is too well-kept to be a haunted house, and I hope and pray none of its occupants or guests are ever reduced to earth-bound spectres. However, it would be jolly if the noise of one of our dinner parties somehow soaked into the walls and oozed out again every once in awhile so that, were anyone standing at the bottom of the correct staircase at midnight, we would again be audible. Great bursts of guffaws and giggles would be optimal, but I would settle for the Bass's tromp-tromp-tromp to the sitting-room, which would scare the living daylights out of anyone at 10 PM at night in an empty manor house.

Another jolly haunting would be if the reflection of one (or all of) our pretty young guests popped out  from the vanity table mirror once in awhile. Some poor student would be innocently gluing on her fake eyelashes when all of a sudden there Polish Pretend Daughter's face would be beside the student's face in the mirror. If you don't want to be this student, try not to buy a vanity table from and Edinburgh Bethany Shop in the next few months, that's what I advise.

And now I shall write about the excellence of chickens.

 

The Michaelmas Party

Last night we hosted our first dinner party in St. Benedict over the Apple Tree. It was our first dinner party since, in early February, a faulty fire retardant system changed our lives forever. Dinner parties are our favourite social events, but unfortunately B.A.'s illness has curtailed them greatly for the past year and a half.  (We made an effort for Polish Pretend Son's visits home.) The fact that we can have them again is a sign of hope.

This dinner party took an unusual amount of preparation because of all the boxes lying around.  I  stuffed them into cupboards and closets between cooking tasks. Originally I meant the party to celebrate the end of our move, as well as St. Michael, B.A's anniversary, and our anniversary, but we haven't finished moving. Moving out of a working museum when both halves of a couple work full-time and one is a cancer patient turns out to be a very long, drawn out affair. However, I managed to clear a good space in our new dining-room/guest room/office, and go to Michaelmas Mass, AND cook dinner, so all's well that ends well.

A guest who is increasingly visually impaired got lost on the way, and there were several expeditions to find her. The Schola Bass brought her in, and after I had handed her a restorative glass of hot buttered apple cider with rum, we had the flat blessed by our priest. It was really quite a short ritual beginning with Latin prayers and ending with Father sprinkling holy water in all the corners of the room, where demons might lurk. He sprinkled the hall cupboards, too, so if there are any demons in the flat, they are limited to the bedroom closet.

Then I brought out the soup, vastly grateful that B.A. had set the table. This had not been an easy task because he had to find the wineglasses in their boxes and to remember to bring the silverware and the electric candles from the Historical House.  Now that we no longer live in a museum, we can have real candles, but there were no beeswax candles at either Real Foods or Tesco, so I decided it would be more eco-trad to stick to our rechargeables.

Dinner consisted of "Autumn Vegetable" soup (my family's traditional Thanksgiving and Christmas soup); two fat, roasted free-ranged chickens;sage, apple and onion stuffing; gravy; curried carrots; green beans with almonds and red pepper; and szarlotka, Polish deep-dish apple pie, with whipped cream. There were also cheese, apple slices, and oatcakes afterwards, but nobody was interested in the cheese this time. The truffles I got on sale at Waitrose a few weeks ago were more popular.  And of course there were many bottles of wine, beginning with the fancy Cava my parents sent for B.A.'s birthday in August.

I think one day I will put everything on the table à la Russe so that I don't spend that party jumping up and rushing to the kitchen for the next course, etc. The routine was easier when the kitchen was directly across the hall from the dining-room. This time I missed out on most of the conversations although I do have an amusing anecdote for, having noticed a massive volume on my desk in the corner, an Oxford man, well-primed with wine, asked me why I had a book about polish.

"It's Polish," I explained---and he will never hear the end of it.

I think there was also a conversation touching on modernism, for we were entertained by an anecdote about a Catholic countryman telling a Catholic lady that "It's time somebody put a bung in Kung."

But I must say it was very odd, after nine-and-a-half years of dinner parties in the old dining room in the Historical House (built approximately 1683), to be in a high-ceilinged square room with a rectangular window instead of a long, low-ceiled room with a fireplace and an ox-eye window and the "Polish corridor" (a sleeping nook for visitors or suddenly homeless Polish students) behind B.A. at the head of the table. This time Father was at the head of the table and B.A. was at the foot beside me, and the lighting was different, and the room felt crowded and strange.

It will be more like home, I think, when we get in the last of the furniture, empty the last of the boxes, and get the pictures on the walls.

I wish I had an account of all Historical House dinner parties since late September (or early October) 2008, when B.A. threw a dinner party for me, the recently arrived Canadian guest. but we had so many of them, the basic formula is tattooed deep inside my brain. The most similar part this timewas the Great Dishwash. Looking down into the sink, it was easy to imagine myself in my old kitchen  and forget that the dining-room wasn't just across the hall but through the new sitting-room and then across the hall. Of course, I may have been slightly delirious at that point.

Our guests said nice things about our new flat, and the Bass said the sitting-room reminded him of our sitting-room in the Historical House, which pleased me very much. When the others went away the Master of the Men's Schola, the Bass and B.A. settled into armchairs for a good chat. Shortly after B.A. went to bed, I announced that there would be a new tradition. Thus, the MMS and the B moved their chatting-and-drinking operations into the kitchen while I continued the Great Dishwash.

It's funny about second winds--or third winds. I was probably on my third wind by then. At 1 AM I was on my hands and knees scrubbing the kitchen floor with Dr. Bonner's soap and a sponge--as happy as a robin in spring. I don't think it was the rum-laced apple cider either. It was joy at dinner parties returning to our lives.