Saturday 24 February 2024
Talking to Girls
Tuesday 20 February 2024
Yes, but have an emergency plan
In fact, I even had in my handbag an old notebook dating to 2016, about a year before I took a full-time job. I had word-sketched there a moment of absolute peace I was experiencing in a friend's greenhouse. My friend (who has since died) lived in half of a house built for a duchess, and I was living in the attic of a house bought by a law lord a few decades after it was built. It was a warm and rainy April day. My delightful and perfectly healthy (we thought) husband was at work. I did not have to earn more (we thought) than I was already earning. Naturally it was sad not to have children, but I wasn't thinking about that as I sat sheltered from the rain.
A year later our whole world had turned upside down, and I thanked the Lord of History that a woman, even a woman my age, could, in fact, find a good professional job and be paid the same wage as a man.
So my answer to "Compulsory Feminism" is "Yes, by all means let us work to bring back and support the traditional family, the traditional breadwinner, the traditional homemaker, and the traditional roles. Let us strive to make men and woman marriageable again. Let us teach young men how to woo women, and let us help young women to preserve their mental health. But at the same time, we must insist on an emergency plan. Husbands fall ill; fathers of young families die. The wives and children of sick men are vulnerable to predators; widows and orphans even more so. Every woman longing to marry a good man and have a family must have an emergency plan. This could be income insurance. That could be an in-demand trade or profession. Whatever it is, let us be rooted in reality. Let us have, by all means, emergency plans."
UPDATE: Children get sick, too. If you're looking for somewhere to put your Lenten alms, you might want to consider this poor family.
Monday 19 February 2024
How to be Youthful
I have seen elderly ladies with rollators all week; having been in the market for such a device, I suddenly noticed them everywhere. I have also noticed many people who ought not to have been sitting in the seats for the disabled on the bus. Such people have never really caught my attention before. But all of a sudden, the availability of the disabled seats on the bus is of city- (if not world-) shaking importance.
Anyway, the kindly salesman, who did not appear to be that much older than B.A. and I, tried B.A. out on three different rollators, which B.A. pushed up and down the pavement outside the shop, and divined which one B.A. liked best before telling us the prices. B.A. liked the medium-priced one best. At one point, while B.A. was pushing a rollator out the door, the salesman mentioned to me sotto voce that the gentleman was patient and unusually easy to work with.
"He's very practical," I said in response to this tribute, while thinking what a mercy it was to be working with a knowledgeable person instead of buying a rollator through eBay and hoping for the best. I also imagined crowds of stubborn 70- and 80-something men, all putting off getting walking sticks, let alone a rollator, because in their minds they are still the men who ran races or sailed boats or urged horses over fences. I am sympathetic to their point of view, though, for, as B.A. got on the bus home with his refolded new rollator and we took our seats in the disabled section, I felt about 75 years old.
By the way, my first authentic memory of a historical event is probably the funeral of Paul VI, so although no spring chicken, I am a generation younger than I felt on Saturday. Wearing a tweed coat, spectacles, practical shoes, a beret, and zero makeup like a Scottish granny of the old school no longer seemed like such a great idea.
Thus, B.A. and I, fast-forwarded into our 8th decade by misfortune, debated on how to be more youthful.
"Complain on Tik-Tok about having to work a 40-hour week?" I suggested.
"We already go to the Traditional Latin Mass," B.A. observed.
"True," I said smugly but typed "how to be youthful" on my smartphone. Unfortunately, the internet thought I meant how to look more youthful, and presented two lists--one all about expensive moisturizers and cosmetics and the other about drinking lots of water and getting enough sleep.
On Sunday morning I discovered I had mislaid an important key and, when I couldn't find it on our return home from Mass, became depressed and hysterical to the point of suicidal ideation which is, sad to say, rather youthful. Fortunately, today I got a message from someone who had found it, so I left off self-contempt and decided to blog.
In Gigi, a charming film lying about high-class prostitution, Maurice Chevalier sings a song about being glad he's not young anymore. It's mostly about love stuff but the "feeling you're only two foot tall" can unfortunately continue into adulthood. Right now, the part of youth I most envy is the power of compound interest, which is why I bombard my younger relations with advice to save at least 50% of their earnings or pocket money and invest it when they can.
I suppose planning ever more complicated dance parties is youthful. There's a school of thought that youthfulness involves going to dance clubs and rock concerts. However, I was scarred when I saw what middle-aged Goths look like after leaving a Sisters of Mercy concert in Glasgow that time. (It turned out the Sisters of Mercy were the early show, and we oldies left just as the younghies were queuing to get into the late show, and the contrast was just unspeakable.) Then there's the idea that to be youthful is to get on the floor with building blocks, or a train set, and entering fully into the interests of friends and family aged under 10.
Well, what do you think? If you woke up feeling 75, what would you do to get back to your proper age?
Monday 12 February 2024
The February Dance Party
Saturday 10 February 2024
Flowing forward
Flow was fascinating and gave much insight into human behaviour. It was comforting to discover that ruminating on Everything That Can Go Wrong is what humans normally do when we are not concentrating on anything in particular. Psychic entropy is our default, and the way out and forward is to order our consciousness with absorbing challenges.
I tried this out the other evening when worry was preventing sleep. Remembering the insights of Flow, I tried to recall the Polish declinations for anyone (ktoś) and anything (coś), which I had reviewed that morning. It worked like a charm.
One wonderful thing about learning a foreign-to-you language, never mind two, is that it is a lifelong project. Even if you have an unusually quick grasp of languages, such that you develop C2 (near-native) fluency in 3 to 5 years, there will always be another, more complex language to learn. And once you have learned all the rules, you can learn how native speakers authentically break them. If you developed a lifetime goal to outdo Cardinal Mezzofanti, who spoke 30 languages fluently (and often), that would certainly order your consciousness and might give you sufficient meaning in your life to drive the blues away forever.
Naturally, a meaningful long-term learning goal would not have to involve languages. Partner-dancing is thoroughly absorbing, there are dozens of partner dances to learn, and they are always slightly different, depending on who you were dancing with. Dancing has the advantage over language learning of being very good for your body as well as your brain. The more frequently you danced, the greater the chance you would still be able to do it at 90. Naturally, the more you dance the better a dancer you become.
Flow says that our challenges should not be so complex as to cause anxiety. This reminds me of Dr. Jordan Peterson's advice to depressed young men to make their beds. Making a bed might be as much of a challenge as they need to cheer up a bit and look for some other challenge, like washing the dishes. Washing the dishes would hopefully get them positive feedback too, something else necessary for happiness. Having washed the dishes, they might go outside for a walk, stopping by the Job Centre to ask for help writing a resume. Telling a boy to get a job when he's too depressed to get out of bed would merely fill him with anxiety, I imagine.
The idea of working up from small challenges to big challenges reminded me of a plan/wish I had some years ago to have a Grand Ball for all the TLM-going families of the United Kingdom with teenagers. Never having rented a flat, let alone a ballroom, in the UK, I didn't know where to start. And the idea of having to find Edinburgh accommodation for all the TLM-going families of the United Kingdom with teenagers was too daunting. Besides, what for Canadians is a quick trip of 100 km is a wild adventure of 60 miles to a British person. Obviously this was much too big a challenge. The teenage girls with whom I had shared this dream were somewhat disappointed.
However, all was not lost. As you know, I decided to have a waltzing party in the parish hall last February, and it was successful enough to have another one after Easter. Then there was another and another, and I hit on the more complex idea of having a bigger dance in a bigger hall with live musicians and TLM-going families of All Scotland with teenagers. Including the musicians, there were 60 people, some who travelled from other Scottish cities.
The entertainment of 60 people was well worth the work, but the hall increased its prices, so the next challenge is to increase the number of people who buy tickets. (Sadly, I realized that I had to raise the prices of teenagers' tickets, but I kept the adult tickets the same.) My goal is to attract between 70 - 100 people, some of whom might conceivable travel up from the North of England or, if they would like to visit Edinburgh friends over the weekend, London. To meet this challenge I have so far bought an advertisement in the next issue of Mass of Ages magazine.
The self-appointed task of creating rational (and, incidentally, flow-creating) entertainments for TLM-going Catholics (while restoring Western Civilization along the way) throws up many, many challenges. One is actually teaching a dance myself. Talk about leaving one's comfort zone! Another is organizing a group trip to Vienna to waltz at a proper Catholic Viennese ball---a challenge so big as to be slightly insane.
Nevertheless, I spent part of last Saturday afternoon organizing my consciousness by working out the problems involved in taking young folk to Vienna and unleashing them upon the Viennese. I mentally picked the 6 candidates most likely to go, pondered how we could raise money, and found a dancing school in Vienna that could polish up their skills in an afternoon. I even sent an email to the St. Boniface Institute to ask if they were planning a ball for 2025.
But then I found out that there is a charity Viennese Ball tonight in Denver to raise funds for the International Theological Institute, and I got cold feet. At first I was charmed that these plucky Americans were recreating in Colorado what I hoped to see in Austria. But then I saw the word Quadrille. It had not occurred to me that the Viennese dance anything but the waltz at their dances. I checked YouTube and, lo, quadrilles. How on earth would I teach my merry band of 6 quadrilles? And which quadrilles?
"But we don't need quadrilles," boomed an ancestral voice in my head. "We have many square dances of Our Own. And we don't need Viennese Balls. An Edinburgher Ball would be good enough."
Normally I get cross when people (even voices in my head) discourage me from doing things. But in this case, I think the ancestral voice was quite right. I shall wait until there is once again an actual Trad Catholic Ball in Vienna before I worry about taking people to one, and in the meantime I will work towards a proper Trad Catholic Ball of our own. It may take ten years, but I think it would be well worth working towards.
Saturday 3 February 2024
The Chas. K & M (if M he be) Dinner
To explain Chas. K&M: some Anglicans, Scottish Episcopalians and Catholic converts have a soft spot in their hearts for Charles I, executed on January 30, 1649. Naturally Charles really was a king, but these Anglicans and ex-Anglicans maintain that Charles was also a martyr because the Scots handed him over to the Roundheads after he refused to swear to establish Presbyterianism in England.
In short, Charles was a martyr for the Anglican religion, or so his adherents hold. And since old-fashioned Scottish Piskies are themselves a marginalized group, long snubbed by Catholics, long suspected (or even harassed) by Presbyterians, and then betrayed by their own now-woke communion, is it any wonder than they (even if now mostly Catholics) gather annually to commemorate Good King Charles?
It is also an excuse to drink themselves paralytic, and you couldn't pay me enough to go, even if women were invited. And since BA can't get very far without a walking stick, and because the last time he drank alone with men where there were stairs he fell down them, I was a tad concerned. BA's phone call from A&E is a trauma I revisit every time he tells me he's going to the pub. Fortunately, this is only once a month or so, and he never drinks more than two pints.
However, that pub has no stairs, and his host's flat is at the top of a lot of them. Thus, I popped out of my office yesterday to tell BA not to fall down these stairs and to remind him of the scar over his left eyebrow.
"If you're going to hold that over me every time I go out, I'll... I'll... just have to take it," said BA.
But he was so incensed by my suggestion that he inform his host that he might need help getting down the stairs that I gave up my plan of secretly emailing the host myself. However, BA had reserved his taxi home and trousered the £25 I handed him, so I hoped for the best and went back to editing articles about the sharp decline of Western Civilization.
When I was done, BA was at the party and I discovered we had no oregano. We might not have had it for some time because--brace yourselves, Gordonites--BA does almost all the cooking and his recipe for spaghetti sauce is entirely unlike my mum's. Anyway, I made myself a halfway house of a spaghetti sauce, cooked some pasta and settled down to watch The Gay Divorcee on the BBC.
The Gay Divorcee was over and I was watching International Lindy Hop Championship videos on YouTube when I heard a commotion at the front door and a voice that was not BA's. I got up to investigate and found BA propped up against the vestibule wall by his host. The host was looking very well, I must say, and was wearing a sharp jacket. Never one to ignore male pulchritude, I complimented the host on his appearance.
But he had apparently seen better days, as he had had to carry BA (and his stick) from the taxi, and two of our neighbours, coming home from the pub, had had to come to his assistance. BA, fizzing with happiness and wonder, told me that it had also taken three men to get him down the tenement stairs.
I imagined the scene with great wifely smugness.
"I'm not drunk," said BA cheerfully as I slowly lugged him from the minute vestibule to the loo. "I didn't drink more than anyone else, but when my taxi cab came, my legs wouldn't work. It was as if someone had turned off a switch."
"In fact you were literally paralytic," I said. "How much did you drink?"
"Two gin-and-tonics, three glasses of wine with dinner, then two glasses of dessert wine, and three ports."
"That's ten drinks. I think that's a week's worth of the NHS recommendation all at once."
"But I was able to walk from the dining room to the sitting room! It was after the singing. It was as if someone had turned off a switch."
Fortunately, this switch turned off only everything from his knees down, so eventually I was able to get him from the loo to his bed. It did cross my mind that it was a mercy that I go to the gym five times a week.
"I am going to blog about this tomorrow," I warned him.
Nevertheless, he provided me with a wealth of detail about the dinner and how much he had eaten (ah, steroids) and how amazing the trifle was (made from hot cross buns--a brilliant idea we must try) and how [So-and-So] had sung "The Vicar of Bray", including the new verses BA had penned for him. Already very satisfied with life (and amazed rather than frightened about the off-switch), he was very pleased that I wasn't cross.
And I wasn't cross because the deal was that he could go to the party but not end up in A&E. Also, this is the first time in 15 years that BA has had to be carried to and from a taxi by his hard-drinking pals, so it had all the charm of novelty. Plus, the dysfunction of his knees wasn't just the booze, obviously.
All's well that ends well, and this morning his knees are working again.