Paul the Blackcurrant

Yesterday afternoon I found a tall cardboard box outside our door. It contained a tall budding stem in a plastic pot and a smaller, somewhat prickly stem attached to a beanpole. These were our new blackcurrant bush, which I have named Paul, and our new gooseberry bush, which almost inevitably is named Goose. 

Gooseberry bushes are self-pollinating, said my beloved Fruit and Vegetables for Scotland. It did not say this about blackcurrant bushes, so I did some extra research. Apparently it is not good for blackcurrant bushes to be alone, and so I have ordered Paul a spouse, Pauline. 

This morning I weeded, dug and composted the raised bed beside the shed and put Paul in. Then I dug a hole for Goose in one of the beds beside the apple tree, in front of the nodding daffodils and behind the blown snowdrops. Gooseberries are one of Scotland's hardiest fruits, so I am not very worried about Goose. I am a little worried about Paul. 

"I am now going to talk about the blackcurrant a lot," I warned Benedict Ambrose as we went for a short walk along the river, up the hill upon which Romans once lived, and down to the supermarket. However, the blackcurrant was driven from my mind when, on a rather wild bit of land at the end of a half-hidden green corridor, we saw a young deer with short, half-formed antlers. We stood stock still, apart from me taking out my phone to photograph the lovely thing, but he still leapt away. After that he stayed outside photographing distance and was joined by two other deer among the trees and the underbrush. The smell of foxes was very strong, and I was delighted that such a wild bit of Scotland still exists so close to Tesco. 

Upon arriving home, I discovered that I don't have to write for work today but instead read spiritual or professionally developing books. So I repotted Auntie Spyder (a spider plant) and ordered six packets of seeds from the trustworthy birthplace of Paul, Pauline and Goose. Last summer, B.A. and I liked the beans best, so I ordered broad beans, runner beans, French beans, and--hope winning out over experience--peas. I also ordered rhubarb and spinach. We still have lettuce, rainbow chard and kale left from last year, and they did very well, despite me ordering them from eBay. One important lesson from last year was not to order seeds from eBay or Amazon, but straight from tried-and-true garden centres. 

I thought I was behind on gardening, but I had a look at my blogposts of last March and saw that I began the weeding only March 23. Well, today is the 24th and I have weeded half the raised bed and the herb garden, plus planted two bushes and a small Tesco rosemary shrub. (The snow killed my last one.) At Tesco this morning, I also bought a coriander plant and a mint plant because the seeds packets cost twice as much. I shall transfer them in the herb garden tomorrow and hope for the best. And if it isn't raining, I will begin to dig the dandelions out of the lawn.

Last March and April I dug the dandelions out of the lawn as a kind of reaction to the lockdown. Naturally none of us knew that lockdown would last this long--although I must say, we in Scotland were a lot more free in August and October and even December than we are now. My hopes of going to Poland to see my little Godling this Sumer are dashed, and heaven only knows when I will set foot in Canada again. 

***

As I see I use my blog as a reference tool, I will add that I am almost finished translating Mulieris Dignitatem (Godność kobiety) Chapter III, and today's post brought Rilla di Ingleside, which begins: 

Era un pomeriggio caldo, alle nuvole dorate, delizioso. Nel grande soggiorno di Ingleside Susan sedeva con una certa cupa soddisfazione che le leggiava attorno come un'aura...

Lucy Maud Montgomery's original opener, which you can find in Gutenberg, if not on your own shelves, is as follows: 

It was a warm, golden-cloudy, lovable afternoon. In the big living-room at Ingleside Susan Baker sat down with a certain grim satisfaction hovering about her like an aura...

Another detail that might interest me in a year is that B.A. and I are still drinking daily glasses of Berocca (which isn't cheap) and swallowing daily doses of cod liver oil. We are also slimmer than we were on Ash Wednesday (Feb 17), having given up inter alia snacking. B.A. has also followed my example with the stationary bike in the kitchen. 

I have lost ten pounds, thanks not to the bike, which is more of a mood-lifter than a weight-depressant, but to Lent. The lesson here is that snacking is bad, which perhaps you knew. Daily desserts are also bad, but Sunday-and-First-Class-Feast desserts turn out to be good, if homemade, or at least not terribly damaging. When Easter arrives, I will keep the no-snacking and no-daily dessert habit and cultivate such old-fashioned mantras as "I don't want to spoil my appetite" and "I must watch my figure."  

Also, B.A. has been accepted for a post-graduate diploma course in his preferred field, so that is really the great news of the day. 

A List of Things

I love minimalism when it means not having a lot of stuff. (I'm not so keen, I seem to recall, on minimalist art.) When B.A. was terribly sick four years ago, I read Marie Kondo's book and got to work throwing away possessions that did not "spark joy." B.A.'s CD collection did not spark joy, but as an act of wifely loyalty, I did not throw it away but instead filed it in shoe boxes in alphabetical order. I think I won an invisible Olympic Medal for Wifedom that day. 

Yesterday I clicked on Early Retirement Extreme (a minimalist's feast) to see which post had been recycled that day, and it was one about owning only 100 things. As the charity shops have been closed for months, and I missed the window they were open, our closets and my desk are an utter mess. Perhaps that's why I suddenly felt so amused and began to scribble a list of all the things I used that day. 

If you enjoy lists, you're welcome to read the list, minus the food. I don't think food should count as a possession, even though naturally it is good to have around. 

1. bathrobe

2. clock

3. kettle

4. French press

5. favourite mug

6. computer

7. computer remote keyboard (because of the state of the computer)

8. wooden board

9. big glass bowl (for dough)

10. wooden board (for kneading)

11. pen

12. paper

13. hand soap

14. hand towel

15. wellness journal

16. cereal bowl

17. spoon

18. kitchen scales 

19. kitchen sponge

20. water glass

21. bread tin

22. plastic wrap

23. bath towel

24. table

25. exercise clothes

26. cooling rack for bread

27. exercise bike

28. oven thermometer

29. Elizabeth David's bread book

30. bread knife

31. dinner knife

32. computer remote speaker (because of the st. of the comp.)

33. mobile phone

34. portable phone charger (Thank you, Nulli!)

35. day clothes

36. house phone (for remote Italian class)

37. Italian dictionary

38. Italian notebook

39. Carmelite brown scapular

40. pencil crayons

41. mobile phone cable 

42. remote speaker cable

43. dinner bowl

44. spoon

45. fork

46. chair

47. washing machine

48. oven with stove

49. laundry detergent

50. silver necklace with 2 pendants, one Scottish, one Polish

51. spectacles (Getting basic here.)

52. pack of playing cards

53. pair of dumb bells 

54. measuring spoons

55. liquid measuring jug

56. smaller glass bowl

57. pot with lid

58. 1.5 pint casserole dish

59. colander

60. tin opener

61. fridge with freezer

62. dishtowel

63. dishmatic (dish scrubber with tube of dishwashing liquid attached)

64.  knife for chopping vegetables

65. nightclothes

66. IKEA bag for laundry

67. toothbrush

68. sleep mask

69. pillow

70. bed with duvet, sheet, and blanket

71. hot water bottle

72. recycled squirt bottle/plant mist-er

73. spider plant

74. (forgot, although not at the time) Pears soap

So that's about it, short of the radiator, the kitchen counter, and the flat itself. I didn't list shoes because unfortunately I didn't go outside yesterday. Instead I read Polish, baked bread, had an Italian class over the phone, did my job over the computer, washed a load of laundry, ate a delicious Lenten dinner cooked by B.A., played whist, and then made a tuna casserole to put in the fridge. The gas men have come this morning and turned off the gas so that they may replace pipes without fear, so I had to prepare tonight's supper in advance. (The stove is gas, but the oven is electric.)

I enjoyed writing my list, so if you need a lift, you may get one from doing the same thing. Perhaps a daily practise of object-listing will lead to emptier, tidier homes across the decadent west. My chances of having a truly Japanese-style minimalist home are, however, zero, as Benedict Ambrose has a fatal lust for chairs, and if he were rich, he would collect nice furniture, first editions, and paintings.  

And I would hire a daily cleaner.

Time to read the next exciting page of Mulieris Dignitatem po polsku. I have never appreciated to this extent how repetitive it is. "Na obraz i podobieństwo Boga" (in the image and likeness of God) is now stamped permanently on my brain. 

The Broken Jug

I came across this on Twitter early this morning, written by someone who calls himself or herself BrokenJug:  

What do you say to a person who has come to the conclusion that there is absolutely no reason for them to exist anymore, that they actually serve no purpose, have no meaning and think they should cease to "be"?

And I was saddened to see someone I know, someone in the public eye, respond by tweeting that he didn't know, as he was in the same boat.  I felt I should say something, so I wrote that circumstances always change and that the future held amazing experiences that are unfathomable now. 

I am absolutely certain of this because of all the extraordinary things that happened after I left a PhD program 15 years ago, my entire life (I thought) in ruins. It is not a stretch to say I wished I was dead, those hours I was in my brother's Montreal cellar. In fact, I embraced the possibility in literary form: putting fingers to keys and answering a not-so-distant-then what if.

What if (in 1998 or so) my coach had not forgotten (or, now that I think about it, "forgotten") my boxing license, and I had got into the ring with that woman who looked like a Ms. Olympia champion? Perhaps I would have been killed, and what then? Valhalla, surprisingly, which meant interesting new challenges and an end to all earthly responsibilities. 

My sanity was saved by Valhalla--through the workings of the Holy Spirit (how's that for syncretism?)--giving me a respite from crippling, painful depression for at least an hour a day. And then amazing things happened. I finished the novel--the first time I had ever finished a novel. I sent out the MS for my first book again and again. I was given a column in the newspaper that had published my book reviews and the occasional op. ed. I went to Scotland and fell in love. I got married, moved to Scotland and began a new life in a Georgian mansion (okay, its attic). My first publisher-published book came out. Eventually the Polish translation rights were sold. I flew to Poland, me, one of the last children of the Cold War. And as I waited in a Warsaw radio station, I reflected that it was I, and no-one else from my PhD class, who was about to give this interview. Life was incredibly, amazingly sweet. 

So there you go. Zero to hero (or zeroine to heroine) within four years, and incandescently in love within two. There is always hope, and as this story is too long for a tweet, I write it here. 

Combatting the Third Wave with Gratitude

 

& zeppole di San Giuseppe

Let's pretend I have been regularly blogging and move on ...

I felt rather desperate for a moment yesterday when I saw reports that there is a third wave of coronavirus in continental Europe. I didn't have time to delve into these claims, for I was whipping my donkey-like brain into rewriting the thoughts of an Israeli vaccine skeptic for work.  I have had professional advice that I should take ten days off, go somewhere with Benedict Ambrose and completely relax, with the proviso that I should wait until we are allowed to travel. However, from the headlines, I gathered that travelling to the Continent is off the cards.  

Thank heavens, I thought, that Benedict Ambrose and I travelled so much in 2020. And before anyone gets tetchy, I will assert that we haven't been within unmasked droplet distance of anyone aged over 70 (except our priest) since August, and to the best of my knowledge Polish Pretend Son's elderly great-uncle is fine. 

What a year of travel 2020 was! On January 2, we returned to Scotland from our very happy Christmas in Canada.  On February 28, we travelled to southwest Poland for my newest goddaughter's christening and returned to Scotland with Covid hard on our heels. There followed the March lockdown, when I was really quite frightened by the BBC, and the unforgettable "last public Mass" on St. Joseph's Day. 

Public Masses were "allowed" again in the summer, and B.A. and I returned to lovely Poland in August. This included 21.5 hours in my beloved Kraków, which so far I love above all other Polish cities, despite Wrocław's greater claim. Naturally, however, our best times were in tiny villages: sitting outside a country hotel eating delicious things and holding my quasi-divine goddaughter or watching Pretend Polish Daughter-in-Law's folk music group feature highly in my memories. 

Then in October, after B.A.'s job had died of lockdown, we went to Rome for a whole month. We really could not have done anything better. Naturally I was on the job for days on end, but B.A. was free to go for glorious strolls and to visit such empty museums that were still open and to go to Italian classes. He liked Italian classes so much (I knew he would) that he continued to take them until we returned to Scotland. Meanwhile, I had enough time for morning cappuccini in the piccoli bar, to go to Mass, to meet friends for evening drinks, to have occasional glorious lunches with friends, and even to go to Naples and beyond. Now B.A. discusses his Roman month with other men in his Rome-loving field, and they frizzle with envy. A whole month in Rome! 

That, I daresay, was very much a case of "when lockdown hands you lemons, make lemonade." I have yet to find the recipe for No-Travel-From-Britain lemonade, but it must be out there. The annoying--and shocking thing--is that it is much more expensive to travel within Britain than to get on a plane to Poland or Rome. Round-trip rail tickets for two to Cambridge, for example, are in excess of $500 CAD. In the end, my therapeutic 10-days-of-doing-absolutely-nothing may be spent no farther away than North Berwick. As North Berwick is to Edinburgh as Santa Marinella is to Rome, how traditional. 

But I comfort myself with a great duvet of gratitude for all the glorious travel we had in 2020, and--for some reason--also for the very pleasant little house I lived from the ages of 4 to 15. 

This may be a non-sequitur, but I was reading as much of The Millionaire Next Door online as I could for free, and suddenly I thought of the nice little house on a tree-lined street in lovely, then-affordable Willowdale. There actually was a pussy willow in our back garden (which, being Canadian, I then called a back yard), which I thought proper to Willowdale living. At one point, there were seven people living in this modest, two-storey abode, which is why my parents eventually sold it (at an enormous profit, if I remember correctly) and bought a larger house up north. At the time I was delighted, but when in sleep I return home, it's always the now-demolished pretty white harlinged house that I return to. 

I may be thinking about this because, like many millionaires (among whom we are not) Benedict Ambrose and I live in a humbler dwelling than we can afford. (Of course, when I say "afford", I mean "with an enormous mortgage.") And I must say that our dwelling is very humble-looking on the side facing the street. It is not as aesthetically beautiful as, say, a two storey white harling house with a red front door and a green milk-box by the side door, a small grassy down-sloping garden out front, and a long grassy yard in back, which features a vegetable garden, a two-sided trellis with grapes and climbing flowers, a round raised garden with tiger lilies, a pear tree, a willow tree, a fat maple tree, a swing-set and a thirty-something woman with a profusion of chestnut hair hanging out the laundry. 

It's an odd thing--and I wonder if I would have believed it when I was a child--that you can spend your childhood dreaming of the adventures you will have and the glamorous abodes you will live in when you grow up, and then when you grow up, you would swap everything in your bank account for one more day as a child in your childhood home. I suppose, though, that this is something only people with an above-average happy childhood would say. It occurs to me, too, that just as North American Baby Boomers were the last generation (on average) to be more materially wealthy than its parents, the children of those Boomers were the last generation (in general) to have as materially secure a childhood.  

That said, I have lived in the very glamorous Historical House for nine years--and for free--which would have filled my 10-year-old heart with joy, had it known. I have also been a guest in an equally glamorous 19th century castle in Poland on more than one occasion. In London, it must be said, I have stayed in a windowless closet in a Tune hotel, but there is a French bakery with the most glorious croissants I have ever eaten within a 5 minute walk of it. In Rome, we lived in the airy, spacious flat of our dreams. In Quebec my brother Nulli has a sprawling bungalow with an actual conservatory with an actual grand piano. Meanwhile, I live in Scotland, I am reasonably conversant in Italian and Polish, which would have awed my 10-year-old self, I have two published books to my name, and I write for a living. 

Middle-Aged Me: So will that do? Are you okay with all this? Was this a fair trade for the little white harling house, the swing-set and the pear tree? 

10-Year-Old Me: Is the man nice?

Middle-aged Me: The man is very, very nice. 

10-Year-Old: Then yes, thank you. Thank you very much. 

Middle-Aged Me: You're welcome.

10-Year-Old: I'm so glad it's Scotland.

Middle-Aged Me: I know.

The Joy of Essay Writing

Happy Sunday, most faithful readers! As usual, I have been writing all the time, which leads me reluctant to blog. Sometimes I get a good blog idea and then remember if I write it for work, it counts as work. Work, work, work. 

However, I did a little more writing than usual last week, getting up early every day to work for up to 3 hours on an essay for a Catholic literary magazine. An up-and-coming young translator recommended me for an upcoming "Poland" issue, and so I found myself rereading a fat Polish novel (in translation, but frequently checking the original) over one week, and then writing my essay in the second. 

I hadn't written an essay about a novel in this century, and I thought briefly of myself turning them out like  clockwork for my Bachelor of Arts.  My secret was the "hamburger" form of the essay*, which I learned at 15 or 16, and used ever after as a model of structure. At its most basic, it looked like this.

This sentence grabs your attention[!] This next sentence states my thesis, X. I shall prove X with Arguments A, B, and C. This next sentence forms a gentle bridge to Argument A.

This sentence restates Argument A's significance for X. This sentence describes evidence in the text. "Illustrative quote."   This sentence describes another piece of evidence in the text. "Second illustrative quote." This sentence describes another piece of evidence in the text. "Third illustrative quote." Concluding restatement of Argument A that forms a gentle bridge to Argument B. 

Etc. 

But it has been some time since I did that, so before I began to write my essay, I read through someone else's peer-reviewed essay about another Polish novel. It was really very good, and after its long detailed introduction to the author and his works, it began an argument about the novel itself. Carefully buried under the verbal flesh was the good hard skeleton of Arguments A, B, and C. 

This cheered me greatly, and the next morning I sat down with a clean notebook and a mug of coffee and, after staring out the window at the dark sky and even darker trees, I wrote almost half of my own essay. 

The biggest difference between my days of writing undergrad essays and now, besides being twice as old and having a full-time job, is having someone in the house with time to read the drafts. To my initial chagrin, Benedict Ambrose didn't like my original introduction, which was a merely a plunge into the novel. However, after 40 minutes on the stationary bicycle in the kitchen, I thought of a solution, which was to introduce the author of the novel through a personal anecdote. B.A. liked the result, and I did too.  

Yesterday I had the interesting duty of taking my pupils through their most recent persuasive essays--one against idealising pirates and the other an argument that losing the Kaiser was bad for Germany. The latter hung rather more flesh on the skeleton than the former, but the structure was quite clear in both, so I was satisfied. For their next assignment, they will write about a theme of a novel, using the structure I used for my own recent paper. Although an essay skeleton is absolutely crucial, an utterly skeletal essay sounds a bit stilted: 

If the Land of Nod has a prison, Goldilocks should certainly be locked up in it. She is a criminal character. Her housebreaking, thievery and outrage upon the domestic intimacy of the Bear family illustrate that she is a public menace. Our society's outdated and suspect privileging of children with blonde ringlets should not blind us to the corrupt character of a girl who would enter a stranger's home uninvited.

To enter an unfamiliar home uninvited is pure and simply housebreaking. Etc.

Actually, that's not terrible. My pride prevents me from writing something dull, but you know what I mean: "Goldilocks! What a bad person. Her housebreaking, thievery and bed-trying shows she is bad. Even just going into the Bears' house is proof of her badness. On to the next paragraph!"

Of course, not everyone in the world knows who Goldilocks is, and so an introductory paragraph, filled with the fruits of research, would be necessary in some circumstances. Wikipedia has produced a rather good one. What a surprise that Goldilocks is a Victorian creation and actually started out (1837) as an elderly lady. She's British, rather than German or Danish, which is also a revelation. She might be a dirty housebreaker, but she's our dirty housebreaker.

*Hamburger essay: the introductory paragraph is the top half of the bun, the body of the essay is the meat, and the concluding paragraph is the bottom half of the bun. I suppose the "gentle bridges" between intro and body and between body and conclusion are the ketchup and mustard.

She wrote something recently, but she wanted money ...

Dear readers! It is I, your old blogging pal, back from the trenches of the culture war, but not for long. 

This week I have been heavily engaged in what more than one Pole is calling "a battle with the Civilization of Death", by which they mean, unfortunately, the UK Court of Protection that effectively, in the words of a Polish archbishop, "sentenced [a man] to death by starvation." 

You can read all about it here. 

The case of the NHS vs RS was heard on December 15, and I wish to goodness I had known about it by then. As it was, I wrote my first article about it on December 23, and the story got picked up by wPolityce.pl, who ran with it. 

In short, a hard-working Polish man had a heart attack, sustained bad brain damage, and fell into a coma. Although he is by no means brain dead, his wife agreed with the hospital to cease life-sustaining treatment. As he could breathe on his own by December 15, that meant ceasing such basic care as clinically assisted nutrition and hydration until he was good and dead. So much for the corporal works of mercy. 

However, the man's birth family, including his mother, objected to his being starved and dehydrated to death, and his aged widowed mother went through two-thirds of her life savings to stop this. Eventually the devoutly Catholic family turned to a British  Evangelical Christian legal charity called Christian Legal Centre, the same people who fought for the life of Catholic Alfie Evans. 

The Christian Legal Centre has so far spent £70,000 on the "RS" case, and my workplace hit upon the notion of raising at least £50,000 for them. I feel very personally involved in the CLC's unexpected financial burden, and so I am asking everyone I can think of to donate even just £5 towards these legal fees. If everyone who reads my day job writing donates just £5, we will have the money in a brace of shakes. And I don't think I have been so anxious about a fundraising campaign in all my life. 

Anyway, that is all I have to say, really, except to pray that God's will be done in the RS case. 

Polish media are fighting among themselves about whether the Polish Government should annoy the British Government by insisting on their citizen's right to life; from what I've read, Polish Catholics are pretty well horrified that their fellow Polish Catholic is going the way of Alfie Evans. And Alfie, as you may recall, couldn't breathe for himself for very long. RS has been without food or more water than it takes to keep him sedated and (I hope) pain-free for over a week now. Also, Alfie was never able to speak for him, and RS was. One of the things he said was that he was against what the judges did to Alfie. And one of the horrible ironies in this case, is that the Court of Appeal judge who said that Alfie had "the right not to be alive" was one of the judges who held the same for RS, too.

Many walks, much study, pierogi & cgm

Happy New Year, dear blog readers. I apologise for my long absence; the writing well had run dry. As it is, I have been on Christmas holidays since December 23 (although I wrote at least two articles during that time) and yet only now do I feel sufficiently enthusiastic to put fingers to the keys. 

What have I been doing? Well, Christmas baking and Christmas cooking: florentines, gingerbread cookies,  Chelsea bun, makowiec (poppy seed cake), Alaskan trifle, cheese-and-potato pierogi, mushroom-and-cabbage pierogi, clear red borscht with mushroom dumplings... Not bad for a woman who had Christmas dinner elsewhere, i.e. in the countryside with husband and friends. 

And I have been going for walks: a lovely long countryside walk in Fife, and then a tramp up and down Berwick Law (and I fell heavily on the ice three times on the way down and was then quite terrified), and yesterday a hike along the Firth of Forth (and B.A. fell heavily on an icy stone and had to limp to the bus stop). Today I walked around and around the icy Meadows by the University of Edinburgh in the rain, under an umbrella, chatting with a girlfriend who wears latex gloves under her woollen gloves, as her hands got cranky from too much hand sanitiser. 

Then I have been studying: weekly Italian classes over the phone, and making and memorising Polish flashcards, reviewing Polish grammar, and reading Polish articles clearly derived from my own articles. 

Polish Catholic journalists are quite clear about their sources, and it is interesting to see how many Polish articles end with the words "Zródło: LifeSiteNews." I am both happy and annoyed that most of the articles in Polish on a certain story of Polish interest are derived from my articles on the story. On the one hand, I am pleased to be so influential, but on the other, I wish the Polish journalists would find out something new for me to cite in return. 

In related news, I am getting rather better at making pierogi. I had relatively few in-pot explosions this year, and when I was running low, I just mixed up another bunch without fear and trembling. The secret to pierogi-making, besides not putting in too much or too little stuffing, is to make many often--or, at very least, make them every Christmas for years. The ultimate goal is to make pierogi dough so soft and thin that it all but melts in the mouth when you bite into the pierogi. If eaten boiled, it should taste of clouds. If you fry them afterwards in butter, though, it can just taste of ... well, summer holidays near Wrocław, winter birthday weekends in Kraków, and Christmas Eve. 

I have been trying out a new hobby: the Curly Girl Method. In short, I got tired of wearing my hair in two braids all the time, like a superannuated Greta Thunberg. For a week I wore it in rather untidy box braids, hoping to look more like a hippy than a culturally insensitive white pop star, and then I read a lot of agonised online questions from other white women with super-dry, super-curly, super-thick hair on some forum about socially acceptable hairstyles. Che incubo/jaki koszmar/quel cauchemar/what a nightmare! 

I decided to find out what my curl pattern actually would be if my hair wasn't as dry as horsehair sofa.  I hydrated the living daylights out of it, and then plopped it on top of my head in a long-sleeved T-shirt to air dry. The result was a mass of waves and ringlets no wider than a pencil and an itchy scalp. Within a week, the ends of the waves and curls had snarled together and my hair was drier than ever. So I repeated the operation, this time with more products, and I again had a mass of waves and ringlets that eventually snarled together before drying out. 

What the CGM & NHM call "Day 2".

This went on for a month or so, and then this morning--after an arduous hour in the shower involving only Maui Moisture Hair Care Shea Butter Hair Mask, Faith in Nature Dragon Fruit Conditioner, Cantu Coil Calm Detangler and Aussie 3 Miracle Oil--I drew a straight line down my scalp with my comb and put my damp (but tangle-free) hair in two braids. My hair still isn't dry yet, so I may undo it and attempt to coax it  into 18 ringlets. On the other hand, I am not Bernadette Peters, and I can just keep winding my braids around my head like Dorothy Day. 

Of the above, the second-cheapest, Faith in Nature Dragon Fruit Conditioner, is pretty useless for my hair (not enough "slip", as the Natural Hair Movement video stars say), and the cheapest, Cantu Coil Calm Detanger, is the best. I read and watch good things about other Cantu products, so if you have somehow stumbled upon my idiosyncratic blog by Googling "Curly Girl Method," I recommend trying them.  

I have learned from the Natural Hair Movement that box-braids, cornrows and various different kinds of hair arrangements are known as "protective styles" because they stop dry and fragile hair from snarling breaking. However, they are laden with cultural significance, and I dread being attacked on the bus by Guardian readers for appropriating the wrong one.  

Well, a few more months, and I will be able to wind my braids over my head so thoroughly, I will be able to braid the ends together and tuck them up, and that will be the superannuated Greta problem solved.