This is a terrible confession to make, but my two best pals are my budget book and my desk diary. The former is our protection against an improvident old age, and the latter is my memory aid, journal, habit tracker and sketchbook. Its lovely blank, holiday-free spaces can be filled in with only those days that are special to me: birthdays, Easter, Christmas, Valentine's Day, Mothering Sunday, Canadian Mother's Day, Canadian Father's Day, and a very few others.
Thursday 23 November 2023
Personal Time
This is a terrible confession to make, but my two best pals are my budget book and my desk diary. The former is our protection against an improvident old age, and the latter is my memory aid, journal, habit tracker and sketchbook. Its lovely blank, holiday-free spaces can be filled in with only those days that are special to me: birthdays, Easter, Christmas, Valentine's Day, Mothering Sunday, Canadian Mother's Day, Canadian Father's Day, and a very few others.
Friday 17 November 2023
Etiquette for Ladies
Benedict Ambrose, who watched videos of graduation ceremonies the night before his own, told me that his attending his graduation in person was very important to his mother.
I am very proud of B.A.'s years of diploma work, to which he stuck in good times and in bad, in sickness and in health, and that he managed to finish his last course with honour, despite the new diagnosis, the radiotherapy, and the evil steroids.
The ceremony--which I was rather dreading, having gone to a number of them, all very long--was surprisingly lighthearted and truly celebratory. There was an organist playing pop music, and there were screens flashing the photos and heartfelt messages of the graduands. There was a sense that a whole new world was opening up before them and that all their dreams would come true.
These dreams, I reflected, were probably much more practical than those I spun when first I sat in Toronto's Convocation Hall. At the same time, however, I was delighted to see an elderly, stooped man shuffle across the stage to get his PhD in History. This was clearly the pet project of someone in later life, and good for him.
Having a lot of time on my hands, I asked myself if I still dreamed of a PhD, and the answer was no. I originally wanted to get into a PhD program, and I did, and then I wanted to teach at my theological alma mater, which I didn't. The PhD program was an obstacle to overcome, not something I wanted for itself. ("Just get your union card," Fr. Lonergan apparently said of persevering to a doctorate's end.) My goals for old age are financial freedom, the ability to climb up and down stairs, and the strength and wit to fight off whoever tries to put B.A. and/or me in a nursing home.
During our celebratory lunch, I received a message that a baby very dear to my heart is ill. As it was all we could do, B.A. and I got off our train home a stop early and went to a Mass dedicated to her recovery. It was the Feast of St. Margaret of Scotland in Scotland, which for various reasons was apropos.
We arrived early, and the priest handed me a book he had found and thought I would enjoy: Ward Lock & Co's 1930 Etiquette for Ladies. B.A. made a joke, the young men around chuckled, and I reflected that although it was once an insult to give a woman an etiquette book, I was delighted. It bridges the gap between Mrs Humphry's 1897 thoughts and those 1962 strictures of Mrs Maclean.
Interestingly, it has nothing to say about comportment at dances except that the hostess should "stand just inside the ballroom, and with quiet dignity and charm is on the alert to receive the guests are they are announced by the servant" and that she "looks round and makes every possible effort to ensure her guests having a good time."
Servants are mentioned several times in this volume, and there is a long and complicated chapter about calling cards. If anyone is wondering what women with servants between 1800 and 1962 got up to all day, it was paying calls. Foodies weep over the decline of fine French (and Italian) home cooking by women's near-universal entrance into the workforce, but the visiting tradition was utterly pulverized.
I cannot even imagine calling upon all the Edinburgh women of my acquaintance all morning. The bus rides would take longer than the calls themselves, and almost nobody would be at home. The ones who were home would probably be shocked to have a visitor turn up uninvited, and they might not have any biscuits in the house.
That said, I like to imagine that there is still a set of Edinburgh women--so rich and socially remote as to be entirely unknown to me--trotting about the New Town and/or Morningside to drop off calling cards and drink cups of tea in elegant drawing-rooms.
The photograph is of fine Scottish patisserie, which also featured in our very busy day. Scotland was once as famous as France in England for fine baking. When here, find a Fisher & Donaldson's if you can.
Wednesday 15 November 2023
Work Nightmares
"Last night I dreamed that someone had tweeted photos of me dressed inappropriately for the Rome Life Forum," I told Benedict Ambrose this morning.
They were doctored, though. One of these photos--very unflattering--was taken from below and showed that I had very long rusty-red braids falling past my denim-skirted waist. My braids are nowhere near that long, and I looked unusually tall, as if in a funhouse mirror.
Another one showed me wearing some sleeveless blouse of a shiny fabric quite unknown to my real-life closet. There was an outdoor pool quite unlike the one at the RLF, in which nobody was allowed to swim. Naturally these dream-photos were accompanied by thundering denouncements from whichever imaginary Americans had posted them on dream-Twitter and their viewers.
As I spend almost all my working hours on the internet, I think this counts as a work nightmare. As far as I can remember, it's the first one to feature Twitter. How very 21st century of my psyche.
Benedict Ambrose also had a work nightmare. In his he was in the basement of the Historical House with a group, and the ghost of a crying baby circled around and around his head.
"Of course it was really a demon," said B.A., who believes all the ghosts of the peoples are demons, so he hotfooted it out of there.
That was really quite interesting, as I used to get nervous in the Historical House basement, especially after a mysterious cold breeze blew down my neck, and prayed the Prayer to St. Michael the Archangel on my way to or from the laundry room.
There was also, occasionally, Something creepy lurking at the bottom of one of the ornate staircases, or at least I thought so, and once telephoned B.A., who was at a boozy men's party, to tell him that there was a Thing and he must come home. It was 2 AM or so, and B.A. had the phone on speaker, so there was great hilarity among the men and B.A. didn't come home for hours.
We preferred not to say anything to anyone about the cold breeze and the late January visits of the Thing out of respect for The (departed) Family and to avoid the visits of ghosthunters. I seem to recall there was an application of people who wanted to conjure up spirits in the drawing room and B.A. threatened to leave if they did.
Demons and trolls. To cheer us up, I will relate that one of my sisters will land in Scotland on December 27, and I am now planning excursions, revels and sprees.
What would readers like to do if they were going to spend 10 days in Scotland? Whenever I think of winter holidays I always want to go on a sleigh ride, but of course there is rarely enough snow anywhere but Quebec for such delights.
Saturday 11 November 2023
The Order of Charity
Here are some thoughts of St. Thomas Aquinas that have particular resonance this Armistice (or Remembrance) Day, touching on who first deserves our love and loyalty:
... [W]e ought out of charity to love those who are more closely united to us more, both because our love for them is more intense, and because there are more reasons for loving them. Now intensity of love arises from the union of lover and beloved: and therefore we should measure the love of different persons according to the different kinds of union, so that a man is more loved in matters touching that particular union in respect of which he is loved. And, again, in comparing love to love we should compare one union with another. Accordingly we must say that friendship among blood relations is based upon their connection by natural origin, the friendship of fellow-citizens on their civic fellowship, and the friendship of those who are fighting side by side on the comradeship of battle. Wherefore in matters pertaining to nature we should love our kindred most, in matters concerning relations between citizens, we should prefer our fellow-citizens, and on the battlefield our fellow-soldiers. Hence the Philosopher says (Ethic. ix, 2) that "it is our duty to render to each class of people such respect as is natural and appropriate. This is in fact the principle upon which we seem to act, for we invite our relations to a wedding . . . It would seem to be a special duty to afford our parents the means of living . . . and to honor them."
The same applies to other kinds of friendship.
If however we compare union with union, it is evident that the union arising from natural origin is prior to, and more stable than, all others, because it is something affecting the very substance, whereas other unions supervene and may cease altogether. Therefore the friendship of kindred is more stable, while other friendships may be stronger in respect of that which is proper to each of them.
St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae IIae II, Q. 26, Art. 7
Thursday 9 November 2023
The Trouble with Invitations
The days are short and cold but sunny and bright with yellow leaves. Yesterday I very much enjoyed my walk to the post office. There I posted a thank you note (written on a postcard) and a long letter written on notepaper.
For an informal dance an ordinary 'At Home' card can be used, filled in in exactly the same way as for a cocktail party except that 'Dancing' and the time to start dancing is to start is put where the word cocktails usually goes. For a formal dance all the information is engraved and the card is longer.
Tuesday 7 November 2023
The Church and the Railway Station
The Church
In the course of my work duties yesterday, I watched a stupid pop video. A journalist had submitted a story about the Bishop of Brooklyn saying a Mass of Reparation and disciplining the priest (a monsignor, even) who had allowed his church to be used in the making of this video.
In the video, a plastic-looking blonde wearing cartoonishly tiny and tasteless outfits attempts to convince viewers that multiple men might follow her down the street begging for her attention, fight each other to the death over her in the local boxing gym, and photograph her barely-clad bottom in elevators. All these men die gruesome deaths on camera. The men on the street are dispatched by an enormous speeding truck. The men in the gym spatter the singer with gore as they kill each other. The man in the elevator dies bloodily after the singer catches his tie in the doors. Blood streams down. The singer is delighted.
The scenes in the venerable Brooklyn church apparently represent the funeral of this young woman's last relationship. She drives there alone in a pink hearse. She enters the empty church wearing a sheer black veil, a black net crinoline pulled up over her chest as a "baby doll" dress, and black stockings. Several pink coffins are propped up against the altar, which is covered with pillar candles. The singer mimics prayers and squirms around in a quasi-dance before the altar and in the aisle. She goes out again and drives off in her pink hearse.
The whole thing is so ridiculous that I'm not sure it's not all an elaborate joke. The speeding truck dispatching the three eager suitors in the street was straight out of "Bugs Bunny." In the gym, the singer shrugs over her inability to learn to punch and takes selfies of herself pouting and preening as men fight all around her. Her revealing outfits are more silly than sexy. Nevertheless, the whole thing struck me as satanic. The use of blood clinched it.
People throw the word "satanic" around a lot, so I'll explain what I mean. I mean that the video attacks the goodness of creation and profanes the sacred. The video tells lies about what it is to be a "beautiful" woman or a woman worthy of love and suggests that men's attraction to women is evil. It suggests that men who approach women deserve violent deaths. It uses a Catholic church as cheap symbol of (here meaningless) funerary rites and as a place for the singer to move lasciviously for the enjoyment of her viewers.
I won't link to the video, but here are the lyrics of the banal and self-contradictory song. In short, the singer feels as light as a feather because she isn't thinking about a man anymore, except that she is quite clearly thinking about him, as she's singing to him. To see how far the art has progressed, here's a pop song first published in 1612.
If today someone asked me why I organize parties for partner dancing, I would say that it is to cancel out the nightmare world of that pop video. In God's world, young women wear pretty but respectful clothes, young men ask them to dance, friendships develop, and from some friendships love.
In this world, women wait for those men willing to sacrifice their lives to us and, having with our whole hearts accepted them, stick with them through thick and thin, prosperity, poverty, health, sickness, fertility, sterility, normalcy and oddity. We do not murder them, shrug at their deaths, or dance at their funerals.
The Railway Station
Last night I discovered the easy way that a mob of demonstrators had occupied Edinburgh's principal railway station to express their displeasure with Israel. In doing so they inconvenienced and frightened not Israelis but Edinburghers. In fact, an 78-year-old ex-serviceman, a veteran of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, says that one protestor stepped on him, splitting his toe, and that he was punched more than once. Apparently the demonstrators were yelling against the British government, British people and Jews.
Jim Henderson, who was in uniform, had been selling poppies for the Scottish Poppy Appeal, which is unsurprising, given that it is November and both Remembrance (Armistice) Day and the Sunday nearest Remembrance Day are sacred in the United Kingdom--or were. The First Minister for Pakistan Gaza Scotland, Humzah Yousaf, is all for pro-Palestine marchers disrupting Armistice Day in London. He seems not to mind that tens of thousands of people angry about Britain's role in the creation of the state of Israel, some of them in full sympathy with a terrorist organization, might clash with thousands of British soldiers and veterans, including Scots.
Dear me. To think that Gaelic-speaking Kate Forbes lost the Scottish National Party leadership elections because she is, like the vast majority of Scots between 1535 and 1965, a believing evangelical Christian. The next national election cannot come fast enough. The strain of deciding whom I despise more, Humzah Yousaf or Justin Trudeau, is just too much for me.
But to return to the railway station, in which I have often been encouraged by a recorded voice to be on the lookout for terrorists ("See it, say it, sorted."), I am appalled that in the name of a region 2,473 miles away, a presumably (but not necessarily) British mob shouted out against the British, made it very hard, if not impossible, for fellow British to travel, and knocked about a British veteran selling poppies.
I repeat: this discommoded Israel not one whit. It hurt and frightened Scots and other people who live in or work in or travel through Edinburgh. It attacked one of the few shared traditions held as sacred by almost all British people since 1919: the poppy-seller. It was noisy, violent and rude in a country where it is considered gauche to speak loudly on the bus. My one comfort is that the demonstrators might conceivably have all been entitled-feeling foreign students. It seems unlikely, though.
If this protest had been in the official public square--outside Bute House in Charlotte Square, for example--it would have been unobjectionable, depending on what the protestors were calling for, of course. (Yousaf Humzah, amazingly enough, is a great fan of stringent Hate Speech laws.) But it was in the railway station, a necessary and yet vulnerable locus of order, the place where we are frequently reminded of terrorist attacks because that is where terrorist attacks are likely to happen.
I see today that the the Current National Threat Level is set at "Substantial." I would say that, in terms of neighbourliness, it's at Critical. It seems incredible to me that a Briton can claim to love the Palestinians when he hates his British neighbours.
Well, as Orlando Gibbons sang in 1612, "More geese than swans now live, more fools than wise."
Monday 6 November 2023
The November Waltzing Party
On the way to my bus stop and as night fell on Edinburgh, a young man asked me what my goal was with the Waltzing Parties.
Saturday 4 November 2023
Home from Rome
Benedict Ambrose and I have returned from Rome after almost two weeks away. We began our travels by bus and we ended them by taxicab, for we overestimated B.A.'s strength and general health.
There was a terrible, terrible moment on October 22 when I looked behind me on the endless Roma Termini platform towards our train and saw B.A. struggling under the weight of his small knapsack. His poor face was red and sweaty, and he was literally staggering. I did not then recall that famous line from Withnail and I-- "We've come on holiday by mistake!"-- but it was clear that an error had been made, most likely by me.
The errors compounded when we caught the Pisa train and I brooded on B.A.'s exhausted face instead of watching out the door for our station. Normally I would have counted exactly how many stations the train was supposed to stop at, especially if (as in this case) there were no announcements and no electronic signs. And indeed it was almost impossible to see our station (let alone its sign) when we stopped at it, for it is under refurbishment and was almost entirely dark. I didn't realize where we were until I saw the very familiar buildings slide by, and in fact, from the hubbub I gathered that other people were caught out, too. We all alighted at the next station, where I had a very noisy cry.
Is this where the middle part of middle age loses sight of youth and meets old age? It certainly felt like it. However, not even when I was 27 could I have carried a backpack, a knapsack, my handbag, and a man weighing 10 stone (168 lbs), shrugged off missing a foreign railway station after dark, and summoned a taxicab as if I could fluently avoid being cheated over the fare. Fortunately, I had the sense to check my phone and accept our landlord's offer to pick us up.
We had a lovely three days by the sea. We ate one huge lunch in the sun, a smaller one which watching the rain and wind whip up the Mediterranean, and a small one in a tavola calda near the railway station. We then spent a week at a luxury hotel (deep bathtub AND shower cubicle; very large bed), attending a press conference and then the Roman Life Forum. We went from there (by taxicab) to an AirBnB on the Via dei Pettinari, which is beside the FSSP church in Rome, Santissima Trinità. We went to the latter for Mass three times: once for Sunday, once to pray for the late Fred Stone (a former leader of Una Voce Scotland), and once for the Feast of the Holy Souls (see photo).
I reflected at one point that we had been in our usual holiday town this year both before the tourist season began and just as it was ending. We were therefore spared crowds and oppressively hot weather. In May B.A. had just received his new cancer diagnosis, but after a day at the seaside, he physically felt great. In late October, having been weaned off his beloved steroid medication, he really did not. However, when he felt well enough to be out and about, he was, and when he didn't, he stayed in bed. I, his penny-pinching wife, fought down my detestation of cabs as a waste of money. We hailed one at Stazione Roma-San Pietro on Thursday, near Chiesa Nuova on Friday morning, and at Haymarket Station on Friday afternoon.
I'm afraid this is not much of a travelogue. I was at work, really, so the one tourist destination I spent much time in was the park around the Villa Doria Pamphili, which is huge and dotted with umbrella pines. It has lovely 18th century landscaping and romantically battered buildings, as well as Romans young and old going for jogs or walking small dogs. It shares in Rome's perpetually running public faucets, from which B.A. drank the one time he felt well enough to walk in the park with me. We strolled from bench to bench, taking long rests. It was very pleasant.
My computer had Netflix as usual. I stayed up very late watching the 2019 Little Women, the 1994 Little Women, and then the 2019 Little Women again. Clare Danes was a fantastic Beth (though Eliza Scanlen was very good), and Florence Pugh actually made Amy sympathetic, although I wish she had been paired with Christian Bale's Laurie, not Timothée Chalamet's. The latter seemed a tad too pixie-like for Laurie, but otherwise Greta Gerwig's film was perfect. We all know it was a huge artistic error for Louisa May Alcott not to let Jo.... Well, you know what I'm talking about. When I was 11 or so, I rewrote the ending to Little Women, and so I thought it so cool that Gerwig did, too.
Any similarities between Beth and B.A. have occurred to me only now, and I have discarded them.