Benedict Ambrose and I will soon be embarking on a voyage to Poland, and I have been instructed by a reader-in-the-know to warn my small audience, so that you are not constantly refreshing for updates.
There are some hoops we have to jump through this time. First, we had to not get sick, and we have managed, thank heavens. Second, we have had to fill out a form informing Polish health authorities where we are going and where they can reach us, should our plane have been full of contagion. Third, we will have to fill out a UK government online form no earlier than 48 hours before we return to Britain.
We have our top-quality homemade cloht masks, but these are difficult to breath through after half an hour, so I broke down and asked B.A. to buy the standard made-in-China blue ones. It hurt me very much to contribute to the Chicom economy, especially as the spread of the Wuhan flu is the Chicoms' fault. B.A. also bought two small bottles of hand sanitiser, made in the UK.
A short trip to Kraków from our idyllic country retreat is in the cards, and I have already bought and printed our train tickets, as the Polish train website earnestly encouraged me to do. I was assured by one of the train companies that I would not be made to prove that my travel is essential. To be honest, I'm not clear on this week's sentiments about moral justification for travel, either in the opinion of Her Majesty's Government, or that of Mr Duda & c. As it happens, not going to Kraków would now be a gross social solecism, as I have made two appointments to see fellow journalists there.
I have also printed small maps, both of the route from our Kraków hotel and of the route from the nearest railway station to our country hotel, in case of emergency. I even know what time the sun will set the day an emergency might befall us. Walking 45 minutes along Polish country roads is one thing, but doing so in the dark is quite another. I am not worried about vampires and ghosts or even chicken-slaughtering farm dogs; I'm worried about Polish men drivers.
Sadly, my conversational Polish is not in as good nick as my conversational Italian. For the past five months I have faithfully been phoning up my Italian tutor for hour long conversations about Arcivescovo Vigano, il nostro povero papa Francesco, and going for long country walks. I have recently been listening to Polish stories while pedalling away on our exercise bike, but I am not certain I have a thick enough layer of Polish overlaid on my consciousness to keep the Italian emerging or, indeed, from forgetting everything I know the moment I am introduced to someone's mother.
However, I have my books to take with me, and presumably I will be able to do a solid two hours of Polish reading on the flight. My primary goals are to relax, to read interesting books, to write descriptions of beautiful vistas, and to eat delicious things, so I will not be striving with might and main to converse in Polish. I will, of course, do my best, and I hope to see some old films. I am partial to old Polish films.
A week's holiday from the internet! On the one hand, heaven, but on the other I wonder if I will fall off the wagon and make B.A. pass me his laptop.
Showing posts with label Blog of a Plague Year. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Blog of a Plague Year. Show all posts
Saturday, 8 August 2020
Friday, 7 August 2020
Married Women who Work Outside the House
I came to the "Tim Gordon on Married Women Working" controversy a year after it happened, and I hope this post does not rekindle the conflagration. Tim lost his job as a well-respected Catholic school teacher because he criticised the Marxist BLM, and I don't want to pile on him months after most people have probably forgotten about his controversial interview.
As a matter of fact, I have heard denunciations of Married Women Working since I was 18 years old, and before then I read countless books that presented Married Women Working as objects of pity or scorn. My father's mother worked as a full time bookkeeper or accountant, but I had it in my head that this was to pay her sons' Catholic boarding school fees. My mother's mother, who lived in the era of the family wage (and good public education where she was), worked a bit for amusement and pin money. My mother had five children and so didn't have time for work until I was deep in my twenties, and then she got a job that paid for her younger son's private school fees.
About ten years ago, someone gave me a book from the 1940s or 1950s about Catholic Etiquette and there was a section about Married Women Working. The book stressed that a Catholic woman's primary obligations were to her husband, children, and house, and that she did no wrong by working outside that house as long as she did not neglect her sacred duties. At the same time, though, the book saw her needing to work as a calamity and counselled her husband and children to lighten her burden by taking part in the housework, etc.
This reminds me, by the way, of a priest who very much annoyed my mother in the 1970s when he preached about the messy state he found his parishioners' houses in when he paid calls. Can you imagine? Well, I can, for my father has a store of funny or alarming stories about the autocratic priests of his 1940s/1950s youth. But I digress.
Or do I? One of the characteristics of men of the so-called Greatest Generation is that many of them objected to their wives working for reasons that made sense to them. Some of them make sense to me, too. For example, working women were sexually harassed an awful lot. If homosexuality were not illegal for so long, I bet working men would have been sexually harassed an awful lot, too. But this sexual harassment was real, and the father of a former flame of mine once complained to him that things had come to such a pass that you couldn't tell a woman at work that she had nice breasts anymore.
Another characteristic of Greatest Generation men was that they thought Women Working suggested that their husbands were not Good Providers. Being thought a Good Provider was a big, fat deal for Greatest Generation men. And the fascinating thing is that, if employed, most of them really could provide for their families. Some of my favourite stories about life in post-war Edinburgh are told by the son of a union organiser. His father was also a builder of some description, and he managed to support his wife and children on his wages. If he stayed too long at the pub, his wife would bring his dinner and bang it down on the counter in front of him.
Unfortunately, millions of men in the West are no longer assured of a wage that will keep them, their wives and their children housed, fed and shod. I don't pretend to know why that is, exactly, and although as a child I thought we must be poor, I now realise we were very well off in ways that did not include designer clothes or ponies, my twin obsessions when I was 12. One of the ways we were rich was that my father had a career he enjoyed instead of a job or jobs, which is the lot of most people today, and another was that we had a proper house with gardens, front and back.
One of my most enduring memories is of my mother hanging out the washing on the ingenious twisted-metal line in the sunny back yard. The line worked on pulleys, and so I could see my young mother's impressive arm muscles working as she pinned up a piece of laundry and then pulled the line along to put up the next piece. My mother's arms were a testament to all the housework and child-lugging she did, and when she was in a good humour she was the most fun mum in the world.
However, my mother was not always in a good humour because she also had a first class, university medal-winning mind, and if you have such a mind, housework and childminding are terribly boring, especially when you are under thirty in the 1970s. My mother's mother yakked to the woman next door over the fence, and her eldest daughter now yaks to the woman downstairs over the fence, but the woman next door to my mother worked all day, and so there was no-one to yak to. It was frustrating. Also, my mother was both behind and before her times. Being a housewife was suddenly incredibly unfashionable, and there was no online community of mommy bloggers to encourage her because the internet had not yet been invented.
Therefore, women longing for paid employment simply because they are bored, lonely and unhappy to be at home all day with children have an advocate in me. And happily for primary obligations to husband, children and house, quite a lot of paid employment can be done from within the home, if necessary, especially now that the coronavirus lockdown has proved that. I recently read an hand-twisting essay by a man worrying about the Demise of the Office.
Naturally, this is not the only reason why married women work. One of the thing traditional Catholic women really need to understand about the traditional Catholic men they seek to be married to is that they are highly fragile. They are men, so they get sick. When I survey my family history, I come across all the calamitous early deaths of my ancestors or their siblings and--guess what? Those who die before 60 are disproportionately male. Most of the women seem to live well into their 80s.
You may laugh, but I have noticed that my friends' husbands aren't necessary blooming with health, and there is evidence that Benedict Ambrose's brain tumour was quietly, slowly and secretly growing even before I met him. Before B.A. got sick, I was a relatively lazy freelancer (although, you must admit, a very committed blogger). After B.A. got sick, I grabbed the first full-time job I thought I could get.
This turned out well: now I write for a living, and for a company that does not fire its employees for saying surgery and hormones do not turn men into women, etc. My job is more stable than my husband's job, not just because of the current epidemic of Woke but because the lockdown caused by the other epidemic has ripped the guts out of his industry. He has been at home for months now, atoning for the government-backed pay-cheques babes yet unborn will have to cover by working day and night to save his union members' jobs.
Just like male illness, male unemployment is a thing. It's a very terrible thing--apparently they suffer more than we do when they're unemployed, and there are various theories for why this is. If young men were at all likely to listen to me, I would tell them all to work and save as much as they can before they marry, fitting in university/college classes around their paid work, socking everything into an investment portfolio. Oh, what it is to know at 40-something what I should have learned by 18. Woe.
My pin-money earning grandmother told my mother c. 1965 that her B.A. would be something to fall back on if she didn't get married. Naturally I hyperventilated in feminist horror when I heard that in the 1980s. Now that I move in hyper-trad circles (although I must point out that the staunchly family-friendly company I work for employs many young mums who work with babies on their laps), I would say that professional or vocational training is something to fall back on if your full-time stay-at-home-mum dreams don't come true.
Important advice there, I think, is that if your one dream is to marry at 22 and become a full-time stay-at-home-mum, for heaven's sake, don't take on hundreds of thousands of dollars/pounds of educational debt. I'm a bit nervous about this advice, though, as I have just looked up the tuition for a Newman Guide approved American university, and yikes. Our Lady Seat of Wisdom, in Ontario, is nowhere near as expensive, though.
I'm a fan of both women's higher education/training and women marrying young enough to have children in the only manner God intended, and this is further complicated by my honestly acquired horror of debt. I'm also a huge fan of love marriages because I really don't believe western marriages can work without a golden, shiny founding myth to sustain the spouses as they get fat and cranky. Like me, my reader is likely to fall in love with a clever, funny, amiable man without either a job-for-life or an independent income. Oh, in what an age we live. Deus in adjutorium meum intende. Domine ad adjuvandum me festina.
As a matter of fact, I have heard denunciations of Married Women Working since I was 18 years old, and before then I read countless books that presented Married Women Working as objects of pity or scorn. My father's mother worked as a full time bookkeeper or accountant, but I had it in my head that this was to pay her sons' Catholic boarding school fees. My mother's mother, who lived in the era of the family wage (and good public education where she was), worked a bit for amusement and pin money. My mother had five children and so didn't have time for work until I was deep in my twenties, and then she got a job that paid for her younger son's private school fees.
About ten years ago, someone gave me a book from the 1940s or 1950s about Catholic Etiquette and there was a section about Married Women Working. The book stressed that a Catholic woman's primary obligations were to her husband, children, and house, and that she did no wrong by working outside that house as long as she did not neglect her sacred duties. At the same time, though, the book saw her needing to work as a calamity and counselled her husband and children to lighten her burden by taking part in the housework, etc.
This reminds me, by the way, of a priest who very much annoyed my mother in the 1970s when he preached about the messy state he found his parishioners' houses in when he paid calls. Can you imagine? Well, I can, for my father has a store of funny or alarming stories about the autocratic priests of his 1940s/1950s youth. But I digress.
Or do I? One of the characteristics of men of the so-called Greatest Generation is that many of them objected to their wives working for reasons that made sense to them. Some of them make sense to me, too. For example, working women were sexually harassed an awful lot. If homosexuality were not illegal for so long, I bet working men would have been sexually harassed an awful lot, too. But this sexual harassment was real, and the father of a former flame of mine once complained to him that things had come to such a pass that you couldn't tell a woman at work that she had nice breasts anymore.
Another characteristic of Greatest Generation men was that they thought Women Working suggested that their husbands were not Good Providers. Being thought a Good Provider was a big, fat deal for Greatest Generation men. And the fascinating thing is that, if employed, most of them really could provide for their families. Some of my favourite stories about life in post-war Edinburgh are told by the son of a union organiser. His father was also a builder of some description, and he managed to support his wife and children on his wages. If he stayed too long at the pub, his wife would bring his dinner and bang it down on the counter in front of him.
Unfortunately, millions of men in the West are no longer assured of a wage that will keep them, their wives and their children housed, fed and shod. I don't pretend to know why that is, exactly, and although as a child I thought we must be poor, I now realise we were very well off in ways that did not include designer clothes or ponies, my twin obsessions when I was 12. One of the ways we were rich was that my father had a career he enjoyed instead of a job or jobs, which is the lot of most people today, and another was that we had a proper house with gardens, front and back.
One of my most enduring memories is of my mother hanging out the washing on the ingenious twisted-metal line in the sunny back yard. The line worked on pulleys, and so I could see my young mother's impressive arm muscles working as she pinned up a piece of laundry and then pulled the line along to put up the next piece. My mother's arms were a testament to all the housework and child-lugging she did, and when she was in a good humour she was the most fun mum in the world.
However, my mother was not always in a good humour because she also had a first class, university medal-winning mind, and if you have such a mind, housework and childminding are terribly boring, especially when you are under thirty in the 1970s. My mother's mother yakked to the woman next door over the fence, and her eldest daughter now yaks to the woman downstairs over the fence, but the woman next door to my mother worked all day, and so there was no-one to yak to. It was frustrating. Also, my mother was both behind and before her times. Being a housewife was suddenly incredibly unfashionable, and there was no online community of mommy bloggers to encourage her because the internet had not yet been invented.
Therefore, women longing for paid employment simply because they are bored, lonely and unhappy to be at home all day with children have an advocate in me. And happily for primary obligations to husband, children and house, quite a lot of paid employment can be done from within the home, if necessary, especially now that the coronavirus lockdown has proved that. I recently read an hand-twisting essay by a man worrying about the Demise of the Office.
Naturally, this is not the only reason why married women work. One of the thing traditional Catholic women really need to understand about the traditional Catholic men they seek to be married to is that they are highly fragile. They are men, so they get sick. When I survey my family history, I come across all the calamitous early deaths of my ancestors or their siblings and--guess what? Those who die before 60 are disproportionately male. Most of the women seem to live well into their 80s.
You may laugh, but I have noticed that my friends' husbands aren't necessary blooming with health, and there is evidence that Benedict Ambrose's brain tumour was quietly, slowly and secretly growing even before I met him. Before B.A. got sick, I was a relatively lazy freelancer (although, you must admit, a very committed blogger). After B.A. got sick, I grabbed the first full-time job I thought I could get.
This turned out well: now I write for a living, and for a company that does not fire its employees for saying surgery and hormones do not turn men into women, etc. My job is more stable than my husband's job, not just because of the current epidemic of Woke but because the lockdown caused by the other epidemic has ripped the guts out of his industry. He has been at home for months now, atoning for the government-backed pay-cheques babes yet unborn will have to cover by working day and night to save his union members' jobs.
Just like male illness, male unemployment is a thing. It's a very terrible thing--apparently they suffer more than we do when they're unemployed, and there are various theories for why this is. If young men were at all likely to listen to me, I would tell them all to work and save as much as they can before they marry, fitting in university/college classes around their paid work, socking everything into an investment portfolio. Oh, what it is to know at 40-something what I should have learned by 18. Woe.
My pin-money earning grandmother told my mother c. 1965 that her B.A. would be something to fall back on if she didn't get married. Naturally I hyperventilated in feminist horror when I heard that in the 1980s. Now that I move in hyper-trad circles (although I must point out that the staunchly family-friendly company I work for employs many young mums who work with babies on their laps), I would say that professional or vocational training is something to fall back on if your full-time stay-at-home-mum dreams don't come true.
Important advice there, I think, is that if your one dream is to marry at 22 and become a full-time stay-at-home-mum, for heaven's sake, don't take on hundreds of thousands of dollars/pounds of educational debt. I'm a bit nervous about this advice, though, as I have just looked up the tuition for a Newman Guide approved American university, and yikes. Our Lady Seat of Wisdom, in Ontario, is nowhere near as expensive, though.
I'm a fan of both women's higher education/training and women marrying young enough to have children in the only manner God intended, and this is further complicated by my honestly acquired horror of debt. I'm also a huge fan of love marriages because I really don't believe western marriages can work without a golden, shiny founding myth to sustain the spouses as they get fat and cranky. Like me, my reader is likely to fall in love with a clever, funny, amiable man without either a job-for-life or an independent income. Oh, in what an age we live. Deus in adjutorium meum intende. Domine ad adjuvandum me festina.
Thursday, 6 August 2020
Singles Advice: Stepping Up or Chilling Out
Today I counted how many times I have been to Poland in the past ten years: 12. Lucky 13 is coming soon, if I can keep myself from catching the Dread Germ beforehand. The tickets cost at least three times what they cost in March, so the idea of falling sick now really terrifies me.
Yesterday I was speaking to a friend from the days of my youth, and we talked about the different needs of Nice Catholic Boy Singles and Nice Catholic Girl Singles. My pal runs a house for young Catholic men to learn to cook, clean, and generally learn to live with people not their parents before they attempt to get married. It's a wonderful apostolate. There's daily prayer and (before the pandemic) occasional very well-attended parties.
Naturally I am a big fan of this house, but it struck me that Nice Catholic Girl Singles don't need to live together to prepare for marriage although it is (or should be) a fun thing to do. (I wasn't even officially living with some of my friends before one first one got married, but it felt like I was living there. Good times. Amazing parties with photos as evidence.)
No, what Nice Catholic Girl Singles need to do is learn to chill out.
My pal agreed with this enthusiastically. He thinks (and has for some time) that modern girls have their education and career plans worked out long before modern boys have, and what modern boys must do (besides learn to wash, cook and clean) is "step up to the plate."
Basically NCGs have to stop worrying so much and wait for NCBs to get their acts together. Clearly different NCBs do this at different times, of course. I think it has been some years since I have typed the words "It's just coffee", so it might be worthwhile to assure new NGG readers that when a NCB asks you out for coffee, it really is just for coffee. If you agree to have a coffee with an NCB, you have not verbally signed a contract to go out for dinner to, or to get pre-engaged, or to get married. You can go out for coffee with Joe or Mike once, and never say more than a polite "Hi" to him in passing for the rest of your life. It's allowed. It's okay.
That said, if you do have coffee with Joe or Mike, blurt out all your deepest, darkest secrets, and THEN never say more than "Hi" every after (or hide whenever you see him coming), that's not very nice. Having become chilled enough to accept coffee with Joe or Mike, you must advance to the next stage of chill, which is to talk only about fun, lighthearted topics at your first coffee. Incidentally, make a non-breakable appointment for an hour after your coffee, so you don't talk forever.
"But I am not a talker!" I hear you wail from behind your screen. "Talking too much is not my problem. It's not have anything to say that is the killer."
I feel your pain, but there is an easy way out of this: talking to Mr Coffee as if you were interviewing him for a newspaper. I did a fun interview last week, and I started off with "Where were you born and brought up and where did you go to university?"
I learned many interesting things just from those questions, and the conversation could have gone fruitfully in many different ways. However, I had an agenda, so "How did you get into politics?" was my next question. In Mr Coffee's case, if the "born/brought up/university" thread snaps, you could ask "How were you introduced to Tradition?" or whatever it is you know you have in common. Actually listen to the answers, of course, and notice whether or not he listens to your answers or, indeed, asks you any questions.
Long-time reader Tiny Therese mentioned frustration with men not making it clear if an appointment is a real date or "is hanging out". I'm feeling cynical today, so I would say that if he clearly took pains with his appearance, it's a date, and if he didn't, it's just hanging out. I would also say that if the appointment was his idea, it's a date (unless it becomes clear that he thinks it is a free psychotherapy session), but if you asked him, it is probably hanging out. One of the facts of life is that although customs change, human nature doesn't, so if you ask a guy out you will not know for a long time if he really likes you back, or if he just lazily enjoys female company. If a man wants to ask you out, he will ask you out.
My classic advice for coping with my ban on NCGs asking NCBs on dates is to throw parties to which you invite the NCBs you like best. As the hostess, you are expected to talk to all your guests, so you will be able to talk to the NCB you like best, just as if you were on a date, only in a much more relaxed way. Make sure he is not the last to leave.
Relaxed and happy is the best way to be if you are a NCG Single, which is a terribly hard saying, but I am telling you from experience that this is the zone to live in as much as possible if you wish to cease being Single.
Yesterday I was speaking to a friend from the days of my youth, and we talked about the different needs of Nice Catholic Boy Singles and Nice Catholic Girl Singles. My pal runs a house for young Catholic men to learn to cook, clean, and generally learn to live with people not their parents before they attempt to get married. It's a wonderful apostolate. There's daily prayer and (before the pandemic) occasional very well-attended parties.
Naturally I am a big fan of this house, but it struck me that Nice Catholic Girl Singles don't need to live together to prepare for marriage although it is (or should be) a fun thing to do. (I wasn't even officially living with some of my friends before one first one got married, but it felt like I was living there. Good times. Amazing parties with photos as evidence.)
No, what Nice Catholic Girl Singles need to do is learn to chill out.
My pal agreed with this enthusiastically. He thinks (and has for some time) that modern girls have their education and career plans worked out long before modern boys have, and what modern boys must do (besides learn to wash, cook and clean) is "step up to the plate."
Basically NCGs have to stop worrying so much and wait for NCBs to get their acts together. Clearly different NCBs do this at different times, of course. I think it has been some years since I have typed the words "It's just coffee", so it might be worthwhile to assure new NGG readers that when a NCB asks you out for coffee, it really is just for coffee. If you agree to have a coffee with an NCB, you have not verbally signed a contract to go out for dinner to, or to get pre-engaged, or to get married. You can go out for coffee with Joe or Mike once, and never say more than a polite "Hi" to him in passing for the rest of your life. It's allowed. It's okay.
That said, if you do have coffee with Joe or Mike, blurt out all your deepest, darkest secrets, and THEN never say more than "Hi" every after (or hide whenever you see him coming), that's not very nice. Having become chilled enough to accept coffee with Joe or Mike, you must advance to the next stage of chill, which is to talk only about fun, lighthearted topics at your first coffee. Incidentally, make a non-breakable appointment for an hour after your coffee, so you don't talk forever.
"But I am not a talker!" I hear you wail from behind your screen. "Talking too much is not my problem. It's not have anything to say that is the killer."
I feel your pain, but there is an easy way out of this: talking to Mr Coffee as if you were interviewing him for a newspaper. I did a fun interview last week, and I started off with "Where were you born and brought up and where did you go to university?"
I learned many interesting things just from those questions, and the conversation could have gone fruitfully in many different ways. However, I had an agenda, so "How did you get into politics?" was my next question. In Mr Coffee's case, if the "born/brought up/university" thread snaps, you could ask "How were you introduced to Tradition?" or whatever it is you know you have in common. Actually listen to the answers, of course, and notice whether or not he listens to your answers or, indeed, asks you any questions.
Long-time reader Tiny Therese mentioned frustration with men not making it clear if an appointment is a real date or "is hanging out". I'm feeling cynical today, so I would say that if he clearly took pains with his appearance, it's a date, and if he didn't, it's just hanging out. I would also say that if the appointment was his idea, it's a date (unless it becomes clear that he thinks it is a free psychotherapy session), but if you asked him, it is probably hanging out. One of the facts of life is that although customs change, human nature doesn't, so if you ask a guy out you will not know for a long time if he really likes you back, or if he just lazily enjoys female company. If a man wants to ask you out, he will ask you out.
My classic advice for coping with my ban on NCGs asking NCBs on dates is to throw parties to which you invite the NCBs you like best. As the hostess, you are expected to talk to all your guests, so you will be able to talk to the NCB you like best, just as if you were on a date, only in a much more relaxed way. Make sure he is not the last to leave.
Relaxed and happy is the best way to be if you are a NCG Single, which is a terribly hard saying, but I am telling you from experience that this is the zone to live in as much as possible if you wish to cease being Single.
Tuesday, 28 July 2020
A Way of Life
I meant to write a long and luxurious post on the above topic, but all I have time to do is catch up.
On Saturday Benedict Ambrose and I went on a splendid walk from East Linton to Dunbar. This represented the last leg of the John Muir Way. Apparently some Americans are trying to cancel our Johnnie for saying rude things, but he'll never be cancelled in Dunbar. He was born there, his birthplace is now a museum, his statue in in the middle of town, and he was voted their "Man of the Millennium." I wouldn't suggest anyone go to Dunbar to fiddle with his legacy, for Dunbar is what B.A. calls "rather rough."
On Sunday B.A. and I went to Mass and did not pass out and die when the congregation of 40 absentmindedly sang their usual half of the Credo. Afterwards we enjoyed a Gin and Tonic of Togetherness and then went with a London-based pal (Andrew Cusack) to Bar Napoli to relive his student days and eat lunch. After Andrew ran for his train home, B.A. and I sauntered to our own bus stop, untempted by the luxuries of George Street.
On Monday after work B.A. and I went to the Historical House, secure in the permission of the Head Gardener, to harvest blackcurrants for next year's blackcurrant vodka. Someone had done a number on the rhubarb, so I picked the last forlorn pink stalks and took them home for crumble. I washed and dried the black currants and today, during my lunch hour, I bought a bottle of Absolut (on sale at £16) to pour over them.
Now we have three bottles of blackcurrant vodka in various stages: a bottle of creme de cassis, a bottle of straight czarna porzeczka for Christmas 2020, and today's mixture, to be left until Christmas 2021. I am drinking creme de cassis with soda at this very moment.
Today is July 28, exactly a year after my last tincture-making. As B.A. and I went off berrying yesterday, it occurred to me that this has become a tradition in our Way of Life. Our Way of Life is not the ideal for married Catholics--the absence of children still rankles my soul--but harvesting fruit for cordials and puddings is very pleasant.
Our Way of Life clearly involves long walks in the countryside, the Traditional Latin Mass, meals with friends (whenever possible), the making of alcoholic drinks from flowers and fruit, the reading of books and The Spectator, the study of Polish and Italian (me), and the study of 18th century Scotland (B.A.).
On Saturday Benedict Ambrose and I went on a splendid walk from East Linton to Dunbar. This represented the last leg of the John Muir Way. Apparently some Americans are trying to cancel our Johnnie for saying rude things, but he'll never be cancelled in Dunbar. He was born there, his birthplace is now a museum, his statue in in the middle of town, and he was voted their "Man of the Millennium." I wouldn't suggest anyone go to Dunbar to fiddle with his legacy, for Dunbar is what B.A. calls "rather rough."
On Sunday B.A. and I went to Mass and did not pass out and die when the congregation of 40 absentmindedly sang their usual half of the Credo. Afterwards we enjoyed a Gin and Tonic of Togetherness and then went with a London-based pal (Andrew Cusack) to Bar Napoli to relive his student days and eat lunch. After Andrew ran for his train home, B.A. and I sauntered to our own bus stop, untempted by the luxuries of George Street.
On Monday after work B.A. and I went to the Historical House, secure in the permission of the Head Gardener, to harvest blackcurrants for next year's blackcurrant vodka. Someone had done a number on the rhubarb, so I picked the last forlorn pink stalks and took them home for crumble. I washed and dried the black currants and today, during my lunch hour, I bought a bottle of Absolut (on sale at £16) to pour over them.
Now we have three bottles of blackcurrant vodka in various stages: a bottle of creme de cassis, a bottle of straight czarna porzeczka for Christmas 2020, and today's mixture, to be left until Christmas 2021. I am drinking creme de cassis with soda at this very moment.
Today is July 28, exactly a year after my last tincture-making. As B.A. and I went off berrying yesterday, it occurred to me that this has become a tradition in our Way of Life. Our Way of Life is not the ideal for married Catholics--the absence of children still rankles my soul--but harvesting fruit for cordials and puddings is very pleasant.
Our Way of Life clearly involves long walks in the countryside, the Traditional Latin Mass, meals with friends (whenever possible), the making of alcoholic drinks from flowers and fruit, the reading of books and The Spectator, the study of Polish and Italian (me), and the study of 18th century Scotland (B.A.).
Saturday, 25 July 2020
Sinead, check in!
I have read that Ireland's health workers have the world's highest rate of Covid-19, so please check in Siobhan Sinead. I'm worried about you. Reader response is (obviously) low these days (moral of story: don't put up and close down blogs every couple of years), but occasionally I wonder how my old readers are doing.
Meanwhile, I have finished my review for Peter Kwasniewski's Reclaiming Our Roman Catholic Birthright (Angelico Press, 2020). I possibly went overboard on the feasting analogy, but I discovered it was the best way to describe the structure and properties of the book. One day I hope to write something with as much substance--something as meaty, as it were. But what I most admire about Peter K is that he works on his writing craft day after day.
Kwasniewski is prolific, but he's not cranking it out. He's thinking, structuring, and polishing those lovely or striking metaphors. Back in Jesuit theology school, I was taught to mark up books with symbols denoting desolation, consolation, new ideas, important information, and questions. For PK I have added a little daisy for phrases or sections I find particularly lovely. It's moving that in promoting the Traditional Latin Mass, Kwasniewski is striving to write about it as beautifully as he can.
"Beauty will save the world," said Fyodor Dostoevsky. I learned that in Jesuit theology school, too.
Now on the top of my pile is Fr. Armand de Malleray's X-ray of a Priest in a Field Hospital. What works in a homily does not necessary work in a book, so I have no idea what to expect. I've reviewed three Kwasniewski books now, so I will begin reading his next with a general idea. I was going to say that nobody (except Peter and Angelico Press) will want me to review PK's next one, but it occurs to me that I am developing much background knowledge. I can say authoritatively "This is an improvement on his last" or "This element that so distinguished his last is sadly MIA."
My undergraduate English professors at the University of Toronto were very old fashioned, fortunately for me, and I believe they were all New Critics. What this meant, in practise, is that they trained us to read every word of the books we read and judge the works on their beauty, balance, shapes--I'm not articulating this correctly. At any rate, I can tell you that the last words in Reclaiming Our Roman Catholic Birthright are "Printed in the United States." That's how hard "read every word" was banged into me as an undergrad. Naturally I am teaching my homeschoolers to read every word, too, and to look at how essays, stories and novels are structured.
I have just pondered what a feminist critique of Kwasniewski's works would look like and shuddered. On the other hand, I have been out of academia so long, I don't know what the latest fashion is. Possibly students of English Literature no longer write essays but defecate on books in public and then set fire to them as their classmates film the acts and post them to Instagram. When one of the hopeful sprigs of the local TLM indicated a desire to study English Literature at university, all the university-educated adults in earshot shrieked in horror.
On second thought, though, I suppose a student might be well-served by the English Department at a Newman-approved college. Also, I do read and write for a living, so my B.A. in English Lit/Classical Civ. was not useless, however I feel about my appalling English Lit M.A. Still, my undergrad professors were New Critics, and may God's perpetual light upon them. May those no longer with us rest in peace. (Special mention of Fr. Charles Leland, CSB, whose rendition of the first lines of A Streetcar Named Desire, once heard, could never be forgotten.)
Friday, 24 July 2020
The £11 Hamburger, or Keeping Institutions Alive
Benedict Ambrose and I have been worried about our local Latin American restaurant. It has excellent steaks at affordable prices and dulce de leche cheesecake. Before lockdown it was busy on weekends but usually rather quiet during the week. After lockdown it was deserted, of course.
Now that lockdown has been greatly eased, we decided to abandon parsimony for an evening and have a meal at the steakhouse. B.A. put on his tweed jacket, and I put on my Sala Stampa dress, and off we went. To our surprise, the restaurant was rather busy.
The new femme maitre d' was cheerful behind her plastic visor and informed us that the restaurant has been popular since it reopened. We professed ourselves happy to hear this and ordered supper. B.A. reacted with exaggerated expressions of shock when I ordered a hamburger instead of a steak. It was delicious. Replete and satisfied that the restaurant would survive if we didn't have dessert, we decided not to have the dulce de leche cheesecake. Instead we went home to sleep as well as we could, given the entire bottle of Montanes we drank. I woke up at 5 AM.
(An aside: what is the point of eating beef and drinking red wine at 7 PM - 9 PM at night? Wouldn't it make more sense to have these things at lunchtime, so as to tackle the rest of the day with vim? Or at least to have them for supper only if a night of dancing or some other vigorous activity is planned?)
I have finished reading Kwasniewski's Reclaiming Our Roman Catholic Tradition, and in it he asks the reader to invite as many people as possible to the Traditional Latin Mass, so that they too can worship God in this beautiful and fitting way. He begs us to be nice to the people who arrive with purple hair or black fingernails, suggesting that they will get the hang of correct dress in time.
(Another aside: whereas purple hair strikes me as banal, I don't mind black fingernails myself, even on men. If a tall Goth-like chap in a long black trench coat and shiny black nails turns up at Mass, I will certainly buzz up to him in the carpark afterwards and invite him into the parish hall for a cup of tea.)
I agree with Kwasniewski's pleas, and one of my proudest accomplishments is evangelising people with my blog. One would-be convert, shocked by her local Mass, went online to find out about Latin Masses and found my blog. She was inspired by my descriptions of the TLM it to seek out her local Oratorians. The Oratorians take would-be converts very seriously, and so today this lovely girl is a Catholic.
However, I feel that I must add somewhere that a TLM can be incredibly off-putting for the first-timer.
TLMers can also be incredibly off-putting, too. Thirty years ago (!) I was surprised at Mass in the ordinary form when a party of pro-lifers I knew suddenly knelt beside me while I was standing. I had stood at that part of the Mass all my little life. If I remember correctly, one of the pro-lifers my age tugged at my hem so I would kneel too. She explained later that the Mass itself was wrong, and I thought she was off her rocker. She explained about there being an Old Mass and that the Old Mass was the Right Mass, but I still thought she had gone over the edge into the Extreme.
However, I was curious enough about the Old Mass to go to one in my incredibly ugly and banal parish church. My childhood parish used to have a beautiful cruciform church on the principal street of our city. It was built around 1949. The land it was on, unfortunately, was worth millions by the 1980s, and so it was sold and a squat new church complex was built for us on a side street. Its only architectural connection with the old church is the stained glass windows. I'm very fond of those windows, and I learned about the Seven Sacraments from them before I could read.*
My pastor was, I now realise, a crypto-trad, and he had arranged (or allowed) for what was then called the Indult Mass to be said in his church once in awhile on Sunday afternoon. So one day I went, and it was the most boring thing ever. There were no instructions to be found. If I remember correctly, there was no sheet of paper with the readings. I didn't know such things as TLM missals existed. The church, being hideous, didn't raise my mind to heaven. I was disappointed and, what's more, didn't see the point. I didn't set foot in a TLM for the next 18 years.
The only reason why I went back to the TLM at all was because I went on holiday to Scotland and my host, who was about to be received into the Church, was a TLM enthusiast. I found everything very strange, and even rather frustrating, but I was very impressed by the intense silence. Everyone there seemed to be intently focussed on what was happening at all times. Having been liturgically brought up to focus on the community, I was very impressed by the piety of this community. Then I married my host, so good-bye to Bugnini.
Peter Kwasniewski thinks the Catholic Church is doomed without the TLM, and I suspect it will certainly be doomed in the West without the TLM. I will one-up Kwasniewski and say I think the West is doomed without the TLM because the TLM provides the spiritual foundation for parents bringing their children up in the classical tradition.
If there's anything we should have learned from the ecclesiastical debacle of the 1960s and 1970s, it's that a culture cannot survive having its foundations removed. B.A. and I want our neighbourhood to thrive, and so we spend our money in local businesses. Wanting our Church to survive (and souls to thrive, we support the TLM.
*Nobody should underestimate how much theology children pick up from church art and architecture. My parents unintentionally went to the most lefty church in town when I was an infant and the wooden stations of the cross are carved into my brain. The 1970s baldacchino--a large ring set with light bulbs hanging from the ceiling--reinforced my impression that whatever was happening at the altar was very important.
Now that lockdown has been greatly eased, we decided to abandon parsimony for an evening and have a meal at the steakhouse. B.A. put on his tweed jacket, and I put on my Sala Stampa dress, and off we went. To our surprise, the restaurant was rather busy.
The new femme maitre d' was cheerful behind her plastic visor and informed us that the restaurant has been popular since it reopened. We professed ourselves happy to hear this and ordered supper. B.A. reacted with exaggerated expressions of shock when I ordered a hamburger instead of a steak. It was delicious. Replete and satisfied that the restaurant would survive if we didn't have dessert, we decided not to have the dulce de leche cheesecake. Instead we went home to sleep as well as we could, given the entire bottle of Montanes we drank. I woke up at 5 AM.
(An aside: what is the point of eating beef and drinking red wine at 7 PM - 9 PM at night? Wouldn't it make more sense to have these things at lunchtime, so as to tackle the rest of the day with vim? Or at least to have them for supper only if a night of dancing or some other vigorous activity is planned?)
I have finished reading Kwasniewski's Reclaiming Our Roman Catholic Tradition, and in it he asks the reader to invite as many people as possible to the Traditional Latin Mass, so that they too can worship God in this beautiful and fitting way. He begs us to be nice to the people who arrive with purple hair or black fingernails, suggesting that they will get the hang of correct dress in time.
(Another aside: whereas purple hair strikes me as banal, I don't mind black fingernails myself, even on men. If a tall Goth-like chap in a long black trench coat and shiny black nails turns up at Mass, I will certainly buzz up to him in the carpark afterwards and invite him into the parish hall for a cup of tea.)
I agree with Kwasniewski's pleas, and one of my proudest accomplishments is evangelising people with my blog. One would-be convert, shocked by her local Mass, went online to find out about Latin Masses and found my blog. She was inspired by my descriptions of the TLM it to seek out her local Oratorians. The Oratorians take would-be converts very seriously, and so today this lovely girl is a Catholic.
However, I feel that I must add somewhere that a TLM can be incredibly off-putting for the first-timer.
TLMers can also be incredibly off-putting, too. Thirty years ago (!) I was surprised at Mass in the ordinary form when a party of pro-lifers I knew suddenly knelt beside me while I was standing. I had stood at that part of the Mass all my little life. If I remember correctly, one of the pro-lifers my age tugged at my hem so I would kneel too. She explained later that the Mass itself was wrong, and I thought she was off her rocker. She explained about there being an Old Mass and that the Old Mass was the Right Mass, but I still thought she had gone over the edge into the Extreme.
However, I was curious enough about the Old Mass to go to one in my incredibly ugly and banal parish church. My childhood parish used to have a beautiful cruciform church on the principal street of our city. It was built around 1949. The land it was on, unfortunately, was worth millions by the 1980s, and so it was sold and a squat new church complex was built for us on a side street. Its only architectural connection with the old church is the stained glass windows. I'm very fond of those windows, and I learned about the Seven Sacraments from them before I could read.*
My pastor was, I now realise, a crypto-trad, and he had arranged (or allowed) for what was then called the Indult Mass to be said in his church once in awhile on Sunday afternoon. So one day I went, and it was the most boring thing ever. There were no instructions to be found. If I remember correctly, there was no sheet of paper with the readings. I didn't know such things as TLM missals existed. The church, being hideous, didn't raise my mind to heaven. I was disappointed and, what's more, didn't see the point. I didn't set foot in a TLM for the next 18 years.
The only reason why I went back to the TLM at all was because I went on holiday to Scotland and my host, who was about to be received into the Church, was a TLM enthusiast. I found everything very strange, and even rather frustrating, but I was very impressed by the intense silence. Everyone there seemed to be intently focussed on what was happening at all times. Having been liturgically brought up to focus on the community, I was very impressed by the piety of this community. Then I married my host, so good-bye to Bugnini.
Peter Kwasniewski thinks the Catholic Church is doomed without the TLM, and I suspect it will certainly be doomed in the West without the TLM. I will one-up Kwasniewski and say I think the West is doomed without the TLM because the TLM provides the spiritual foundation for parents bringing their children up in the classical tradition.
If there's anything we should have learned from the ecclesiastical debacle of the 1960s and 1970s, it's that a culture cannot survive having its foundations removed. B.A. and I want our neighbourhood to thrive, and so we spend our money in local businesses. Wanting our Church to survive (and souls to thrive, we support the TLM.
*Nobody should underestimate how much theology children pick up from church art and architecture. My parents unintentionally went to the most lefty church in town when I was an infant and the wooden stations of the cross are carved into my brain. The 1970s baldacchino--a large ring set with light bulbs hanging from the ceiling--reinforced my impression that whatever was happening at the altar was very important.
Wednesday, 22 July 2020
Card-less in the Cash-free Toon
It's Professional Development Day for me, so I went to see my Spiritual Director. This was the first time I had been by for over four months, thanks to the lockdown. It wasn't as simple as getting on the bus, for on Sunday I lost my bank card on another bus and had to cancel it pronto. Thus, this morning I emptied out jars of change looking for pound coins, 50 pence pieces and, indeed, 20 p pieces to make up bus fares with. I also had two lottery tickets worth £5 in my pocket, for the McLeans enjoy their little flutter and occasionally win something.
Out I went into our (almost) cash-free society with my pocket of coins and lottery tickets. Oh, and my mask. The front part of my mask is denim, so it matches my new indestructible maxi-skirt of feminine traddery.
My journey through the town was like this: I walked to a bus stop and took the bus (£1.80) to the West End. Then I walked through the pouring rain to my Spiritual Director's house, arriving 20 minutes early. Next I had a long chat with my Spiritual Director before deciding to walk in the now-gentle rain towards Waterstone's bookshop on Princes Street. On the way I noticed that various cafes I might have stopped in were not accepting cash, so I didn't stop in any.
Waterstone's had a sign saying that it would take only cash payments. After ascertaining that they don't have Assimil Italian (is Assimil ever in shops?), I continued on. I caught a bus to the Bridges (£1.80) and cashed my lottery tickets at Sainsbury's. Then I had a look at my favourite cafe which, unfortunately, is not only still shut, there is a large wooden board over the doorway. This bodes ill. Next I stopped by Central Library, whose ornate gates are still shut, and so proceeded to the Bow, past Walker Slater to La Barantine, a cafe-bakery on my "Acceptable Croissants" shortlist.
There were a few tourists about, obvious from their cameras and need to photograph "The Elephant House: Birthplace of Harry Potter", but for once there were tables free at the Bow's La Barantine. The waitress did not want me to pay with cash, however, so we came to a compromise where I bought a croissant with exact change (£1.80) and toddled off. Munching my croissant, I examined the tweed-filled shop windows of Walker Slater and then went to Blackwell's Books.
Blackwell's had more staff around than customers. A masked young salesman in the foyer greeted me and explained the shopping protocol: gel for hands, mask on face, one-way system: the now-usual. I had hoped to find a nice comfy chair in an isolated corner in which to discreetly read more of Kwasniewski's Reclaiming Our Roman Catholic Birthright, but it soon clear that chairs are now hard, obvious and few. I had a distinct feeling that using reading a non-Blackwell's book would not be smiled upon. Thus, after some melancholy wandering upstairs and downstairs, I went back upstairs, picked up the Dummies Guide to Polish and had a skim. (It's quite good, and it would serve as an expanded phrasebook for the studious/committed.)
After that I got on a bus and went home (£1.80). My trip to and about the ancestral city cost £7.20, and I never dipped into our lottery winnings. I wasn't much tempted to, either, thanks to social disapproval of cash and also the doleful closures. The was a "For Sale" sign on "Mother India", which is a terrible shame, as that was our favourite Indian restaurant.
I'm feeling rather low about my favourite cafe. It was the scene of so many of my Polish conversations and last-minute bouts of Polish homework doing. I even wrote Polish letters while sitting in one or the other of the big red leather chairs and deciphered Polish Pretend Son's letters by copying them out by hand, word by word.
Months ago I wrote to the cafe ask what I could do to support them, and the respondent suggested I support the coffee company that now owns the joint. I signed up for the company's coffee subscription, so at least I have been drinking good coffee. I now see that my cafe is selling vouchers for future drinks. Having seen the wooden panel in the doorway, though, I'm a little nervous of doing that. But, as a matter of fact, I can't do that until I get my new bank card.
Sunday, 19 July 2020
You'll Have Had Your Te Deum
Today we went together to a publicly celebrated Mass for the first time since St. Joseph's Day. Benedict Ambrose wore a suit. I wore my brown silk dress and velvet jacket. We were cheerful, and not even the sight of closed cafes along our way could dim our joy for long. Some of the cafes are just closed on Sunday now. Some ... Well, we'll see.At any rate, we were two of the fortunate thirty-five who signed up to go to Mass this morning. Five others turned up without leave, so they were especially fortunate there were places left. There was a large blond Austrian scientist with a clipboard at the door, checking off names.
As we were already wearing masks, the Sacred Bouncer just indicated the bottle of hand sanitiser beside the box of disposable masks and asked us to leave the long pews in the centre of the church for families. He also explained that we now have a one-way entrance-exit system, so we would have to leave the church through the sacristy door afterwards.
The loos, being in the parish hall, were unavailable.
When B.A. and I went into the church, we saw that pairs of pews had been tied closed (as it were) with long blue cloth tape, and that worshippers had to sit, therefore, in every third pew. The faithfuls' door to the sacristy was open and the sacristy door to the car park was also open. There were a few open windows, too, so the church was certainly well aired.
It was lovely to be back in church before the Blessed Sacrament and to see people we haven't seen in person for months and to guess who they were. Some were obvious, even wearing masks, but others were less so. I was feeling quite gleeful, in fact, until the priest came out and gave a pre-Mass homily in which he declared that we should be angry at the injustice done to us by governments and that there would be no Te Deum as we had nothing to be thankful about, etc.
He also explained that there would be a Low Mass, and no singing, and that the [Eastern] Orthodox have only sung liturgies, so this no-singing rule affected them most severely. He then read the regulations about masks, so that we knew the actual letter of the mask law.
Then we had a Low Mass, complete with an organist in the back playing deedle-deedle, which made it more difficult for people with early onset age-related deafness (e.g. me) to hear, but B.A. liked it. There was no homily after the Gospel.
Between the checklist, the masks, the halved congregation, the blue cloth tape, the regulations, the unknown five, and the instruction to fume, I was strongly reminded of the Penal Times. I was not around during the Penal Times, naturally, but it really did seem that the government, casting around for someone not the CPP to blame for Covid, had hit on the idea that public worship should be deemed particularly dangerous and discouraged as much as possible.
One thing I noticed was that people in the church were much more spaced apart than people are on Scottish buses. The pews were naturally cleaner than the buses, as they were disinfected after the up-to-forty people at the Novus Ordo left the building. I don't know how many times a day the buses are disinfected, but it is almost certainly not after the first 40 passengers have all left. Scottish bus passengers do not sit, stand or kneel in silence, but chat away as usual. Presumably Scottish bus passengers could also sing, if they were so minded. Oh, and many Scottish bus passengers don't bother to wear their masks the whole time they are on the bus.
Don't get me started on the supermarkets.
Anyway, an offertory basket was set up at the door, and it looked like we didn't disgrace ourselves, so that was cheerful. Also cheerful was standing around 2 metres apart from our unmasked friends, chatting in the sunshine. Eventually a party of us strode off in the direction of the train station, most of us turning off, however, on an elegant street to have a three-household picnic lunch. It was supposed to be in the private park in the middle of the square, but the weather was uncertain, so we had it in the drawing/dining room instead.
In the kitchen (wonderful view!) our host caught his finger on the edge of the tin he was opening and exclaimed something highly mysterious, heartfelt and Austrian. It seemed to involve cats, but I am not sure. I am mentioning this only for colour. But I must say, although it is unlucky to cut oneself on a tin, it is lucky if the first words out of your mouth afterwards are in a dialect no-one around can understand.
Benedict Ambrose says that objectively speaking it was better to be present at Mass than in our sitting-room watching the Warrington Mass over the computer. I agree that this is objectively true, but I note that I was a lot more distracted than I have been watching the Warrington Mass, even though everyone around was at least outwardly attentive. A Low Mass on Sunday is not what I'm used to, and also I wasted a lot of time pondering the government regulations, the sad absence of half the congregation, the comparative danger of bus travel, how germy the mask my mother made me might be by now and what temperature I ought to wash it at, what emotions one ought feel at Mass, was that the thurifer in the pew ahead of us and will he eventually bring his new fiancée.
Now Polish Pretend Son is preparing to type "How just like a woman" which will be unfair, as I am sure St. Therese the Little Flower, St. Theresa of Avila, St. Theresa Benedetta of the Cross and probably even Mother Teresa never got so distracted during Mass. My point is that life is nowhere back to normal although I am very happy indeed to have been back in our church and to have seen some of our friends again.
I suspect the governments, Westminster and Holyrood, don't actually know what they are doing and, indeed, that they have been very badly advised. Naturally they have been running roughshod over our inalienable right to public worship, which is an utter outrage, as human beings owe worship to God as a matter of fundamental justice. But on the other hand, most of them are ignorant of this, some, no doubt, invincibly.
Those who cannot be invincibly ignorant of this are the Catholic Bishops. The most charitable interpretation of the Bishops' behaviour over the past four-and-a-half months is that they were terrified of their priests and flocks dying on ventilators en masse and then, once they noticed the busy supermarkets, they realised they had been conned and began to negotiate to get the churches open again. One does wonder what they will say to St. John Ogilvie, St. John Fisher, St. Edmund Campion, St. Margaret Clitherow, and the Carthusian Martyrs of London when they see them, but I suppose that's their business. No doubt quite a few saints have some choice things to say to me.
Friday, 17 July 2020
Our Deep Roots
I was up too late last night. I somehow--I don't now remember how--stumbled on online photographs of daguerreotypes of a set of my German great-great-great-grandparents. It was rather a shock seeing the face of an ancestor born in the 18th century. More clicking around brought more photographs, albeit mostly of gravestones, and biographies of other ancestors, and the names and relationships of people I know only from scraps of my father's and his mother's stories.
There were two sad stories in all of that biographical data. The oldest concerned a son of my abovementioned German great+grandparents. Not many years after he arrived in the USA--the family settled in the 1850s--he joined the Union Army and died of pneumonia in the first year of the Civil War. His obituary described the military endeavour he had joined as a Holy Cause.
The other story was the death of illness, at 45, of my "Irish" great-grandfather. His father was born in Ireland, but his mother was of pioneer stock, and like her he was born in the USA. But one scrap of story I heard from his daughter-in-law (who, of course, never knew him) was that his youngest son, my grandfather, was so poor he got only an orange for Christmas one year. The loss of a father had been an economic, as well as a personal, tragedy.
This story doesn't quite mesh with stories about my grandfather and his older brother wandering into a poorer Irish neighbourhood, much to the disgust of their mother and nanny, but economic ups and downs were not unknown to my family. The Germans had done quite well for themselves in Germany--they emigrated in First Class--and they continued to do quite well in the USA until, ahem, 1929. The Irish--very cleverly, I thought--married into the aforementioned pioneer stock and then into my grandmother's German-American clan.
I went to bed, quite late, thinking about all of these ancestors and their siblings, and I wondered if any of my siblings' descendants will look at a photograph of me in 2200. Perhaps my life will have been colourful enough for one of them to have any interest in it, just as my eye was caught by that young German man who died at Camp Yates.
That's not really important for me, but it might be important for the descendants. I would hate a child of my family to grow up thinking that they sprung, fully formed, from a place of shameful privilege, or that their ancestors were boring and bad. It is much better to have a grasp of the ups and downs in their ancestors' lives, to know that even the times of prosperity brought the heartbreak of loss and that the times of poverty had their good side, too. Apparently my German-American great-grandfather got a job as a travelling salesman after the Crash of '29 and drove up and down his state scattering cigar ash out the window. What a great example.
Then there's Great-Aunt Meta, who had a crush on the Kaiser's brother, making a scene at a Red Cross dinner during the run-up to the American entrance into the First World War because someone insulted the German Royal Family. Imprudence or guts? Whichever, she's certainly someone to remember the next time someone trashes me on Facebook for my lack of Wokeness.
All these wonderful stories that root me in history. And I am just one person. Whole cultures or nations are also rooted into history by stories. It is important to know our stories and to love our ancestors, even if we unearth stories about them that make us uncomfortable. To take Pope Francis' most famous phrase egregiously out of context (as everyone else does), "Who am I to judge" someone born in completely different circumstances than I? We can judge that an act performed or a belief held by a particular, individual ancestor was in itself wrong, but I don't think we justly make a judgement against that particular ancestor.* Naturally what we think can't hurt him or her now, but sneering at our own ancestors hurts us. Cutting ourselves off at the roots makes us a very sick tree.
A very sick tree, and easy to topple.
There were two sad stories in all of that biographical data. The oldest concerned a son of my abovementioned German great+grandparents. Not many years after he arrived in the USA--the family settled in the 1850s--he joined the Union Army and died of pneumonia in the first year of the Civil War. His obituary described the military endeavour he had joined as a Holy Cause.
The other story was the death of illness, at 45, of my "Irish" great-grandfather. His father was born in Ireland, but his mother was of pioneer stock, and like her he was born in the USA. But one scrap of story I heard from his daughter-in-law (who, of course, never knew him) was that his youngest son, my grandfather, was so poor he got only an orange for Christmas one year. The loss of a father had been an economic, as well as a personal, tragedy.
This story doesn't quite mesh with stories about my grandfather and his older brother wandering into a poorer Irish neighbourhood, much to the disgust of their mother and nanny, but economic ups and downs were not unknown to my family. The Germans had done quite well for themselves in Germany--they emigrated in First Class--and they continued to do quite well in the USA until, ahem, 1929. The Irish--very cleverly, I thought--married into the aforementioned pioneer stock and then into my grandmother's German-American clan.
I went to bed, quite late, thinking about all of these ancestors and their siblings, and I wondered if any of my siblings' descendants will look at a photograph of me in 2200. Perhaps my life will have been colourful enough for one of them to have any interest in it, just as my eye was caught by that young German man who died at Camp Yates.
That's not really important for me, but it might be important for the descendants. I would hate a child of my family to grow up thinking that they sprung, fully formed, from a place of shameful privilege, or that their ancestors were boring and bad. It is much better to have a grasp of the ups and downs in their ancestors' lives, to know that even the times of prosperity brought the heartbreak of loss and that the times of poverty had their good side, too. Apparently my German-American great-grandfather got a job as a travelling salesman after the Crash of '29 and drove up and down his state scattering cigar ash out the window. What a great example.
Then there's Great-Aunt Meta, who had a crush on the Kaiser's brother, making a scene at a Red Cross dinner during the run-up to the American entrance into the First World War because someone insulted the German Royal Family. Imprudence or guts? Whichever, she's certainly someone to remember the next time someone trashes me on Facebook for my lack of Wokeness.
All these wonderful stories that root me in history. And I am just one person. Whole cultures or nations are also rooted into history by stories. It is important to know our stories and to love our ancestors, even if we unearth stories about them that make us uncomfortable. To take Pope Francis' most famous phrase egregiously out of context (as everyone else does), "Who am I to judge" someone born in completely different circumstances than I? We can judge that an act performed or a belief held by a particular, individual ancestor was in itself wrong, but I don't think we justly make a judgement against that particular ancestor.* Naturally what we think can't hurt him or her now, but sneering at our own ancestors hurts us. Cutting ourselves off at the roots makes us a very sick tree.
A very sick tree, and easy to topple.
Monday, 13 July 2020
Poland, Sunny Poland
Benedict Ambrose and I have bought airline tickets for Poland, and the price of Ryanair tickets are now so expensive, I cried. They are more than four times as expensive as they were in late February. But that said, we are going to Poland as the treasured guests of friends and do not anticipate many more expenses. We will not be spending more during our one week holiday in Poland than we used to pay for our glorious ten to twelve days in Italy.
Twelve whole days! That was before I began working full-time, of course. B.A., being British, has oodles of vacation days. My most recent long holiday was last July when we joined family members in Berlin. We had a week of sightseeing and family meals, and then I went to Poland for two days and B.A. went home.
B.A. waved me off at the bus platform before he headed for the airport. The Poland-bound bus driver steered the wheel with his elbows whenever blowing his nose on a paper handkerchief. He chatted merrily in Polish with his co-driver, and when the bus crossed the border into Poland it began bouncing up and down, so bad was the road all of a sudden. I found all of this quite comforting.
What I liked best about Berlin was drinking coffee with B.A. in the Hotel Adlon and then on a boat going down the Spree. I did not much like Potsdam or any of the palaces we wandered through because I am not one for urban sightseeing anymore, except from boats. I much prefer to walk for miles in the countryside and the survey the landscape from the top of a hill. Had our Poland plans fallen through, I would be planning a week's march along the John Muir Way--not the whole thing, but from Helensburgh to home, punctuated by B&Bs because B.A. does not enjoy camping.
We have not worked out yet what we will do in Poland besides admire my goddaughter and eat delicious cuisine polonaise. This must be discussed with our hosts. Perhaps we will walk for miles and miles in Przemkowski Park, if no other national park is nearer. If Kraków were not too far away, I would pay a call on Polonia Christiana.
Well, it is something to look forward to, and in the meantime I will cut all personal expenses, take a lot of vitamins, and not give the airline or the boarder guards any reason to suspect me of harbouring the Vile Germ.
Twelve whole days! That was before I began working full-time, of course. B.A., being British, has oodles of vacation days. My most recent long holiday was last July when we joined family members in Berlin. We had a week of sightseeing and family meals, and then I went to Poland for two days and B.A. went home.
B.A. waved me off at the bus platform before he headed for the airport. The Poland-bound bus driver steered the wheel with his elbows whenever blowing his nose on a paper handkerchief. He chatted merrily in Polish with his co-driver, and when the bus crossed the border into Poland it began bouncing up and down, so bad was the road all of a sudden. I found all of this quite comforting.
What I liked best about Berlin was drinking coffee with B.A. in the Hotel Adlon and then on a boat going down the Spree. I did not much like Potsdam or any of the palaces we wandered through because I am not one for urban sightseeing anymore, except from boats. I much prefer to walk for miles in the countryside and the survey the landscape from the top of a hill. Had our Poland plans fallen through, I would be planning a week's march along the John Muir Way--not the whole thing, but from Helensburgh to home, punctuated by B&Bs because B.A. does not enjoy camping.
We have not worked out yet what we will do in Poland besides admire my goddaughter and eat delicious cuisine polonaise. This must be discussed with our hosts. Perhaps we will walk for miles and miles in Przemkowski Park, if no other national park is nearer. If Kraków were not too far away, I would pay a call on Polonia Christiana.
Well, it is something to look forward to, and in the meantime I will cut all personal expenses, take a lot of vitamins, and not give the airline or the boarder guards any reason to suspect me of harbouring the Vile Germ.
Sunday, 12 July 2020
Sunday Best/A Long Walk/The Prophetess Lionel
1. I have had an instructive Sunday morning. First I read another chapter of Dr. Peter Kwasniewski's Reclaiming our Roman Catholic Birthright, which I will highly recommend in my book review for work. Then I broke my usual custom to send work emails to contacts. And then I put on a dress and a mantilla and watched the Warrington FSSP Mass with Benedict Ambrose.
The right of people in England and Wales to worship in public has been ... I'm not sure "restored" is actually the right word. Putting aside the consciences of other religious bodies, let us say that the CBCEW is no longer afraid to permit Catholics in England and Wales to return to Mass. Catholics in Scotland are not yet permitted by our bishops to return to Mass; the government has permitted them and us to return to Sunday Mass on July 19th.
Fr. De Malleray preaching on anger (for the four months we have been deprived of personal attendance at Mass), hunger (for the Holy Eucharist), the Gospel of the day (feeding the four thousand and then all the scraps collected in seven baskets), the Divinity of the Holy Eucharist (and therefore the necessity of the correct method of receiving the Holy Eucharist), and Correct Deportment and Clothing for Mass.
Correct Deportment and for Mass came right at the end, capping off a courageous homily with what might have been the most courageous part of all: risking annoying the congregation. As it was, we were well into the Nicene Creed before Benedict Ambrose and I stopped arguing over what Fr. De Malleray (who is French) meant by a "suit." Benedict Ambrose argued that a jacket and trousers (with shirt and tie) are smart enough for Mass; they don't and shouldn't have to match.
"If you would wear a suit to a wedding, why would you not wear a suit to the Wedding of the Lamb?" I said piously, echoing (I suspect) the married women scattered throughout the English-speaking world who had just heard Fr. De Malleray's homily. And how refreshing it is for a man to take umbrage at a priest's strictures about Correct Dress.
"I'm wearing leggings next week," I said.
"No, you're not," said B.A.
In the end I admitted that Fr. Malleray might not have mean "suit" in the same way that B.A. means "suit." But again I underscore that as trad women hear over and over again arguments that we must wear skirts, and that those skirts must be at least knee-length, and that our sleeves must be at least elbow-length and that, really, we should wear our Sunday Best, it is refreshing to hear that men must also bow to an exacting standard.
Incidentally, last night I insisted on changing my Denim Maxi-Skirt of Feminine Traddery before going to the patio of a newly reopened Italian restaurant for drinks. I put on my Sala Stampa dress, and B.A. (who put on a jacket) noticed that all the women on the patio were more formally dressed than the men.
Meanwhile, the Warrington Mass ended with a Te Deum. Thanksgiving was indeed apt.
2. Yesterday we had a splendid walk. We put on masks like good little subjects and took the country bus to Haddington. We queued up outside Falco's German bakery-cafe, which is in a splendid 18th century building, and ate our treats and drank B.A.'s coffee in the shelter of St. Annes Place. Then we toddled off along streets to a scary highway, which we crossed with great care. Then we followed a lovely path up into the Garleton Hills. At the top of one of these hills, we waded through long grass, Scottish thistles (ouch!), and little blue forget-me-nots to reach a ruined brick hut. There we had a rest. We could see for miles and miles all around, and I was quite delighted to think that all of these beautiful landscapes were our home.
When we were sufficiently rested, we continued on past ruined castles and healthy farmhouses towards Athelstaneford. Part of one ruined castle was being used as a shed for farming equipment and such rubbish as old pallets. B.A. noticed that the walls had slots for firearms and so decided the castle must have been built in the 16th century.
Athelstaneford is a pretty village overlooking the site where some marauding Scots and Picts trapped by King Athelstan of the Saxons and his men prayed for divine assistance and saw the Cross of St. Andrew in the blue sky. Thus Athelstaneford is called the Birthplace of the Saltire (Scottish Flag) and it has a splendid 16th century dovecot converted into a museum to celebrate it. The dovecot--and the view--is tucked behind the 18th/19th century village church. Naturally there has been a church there for many centuries before that, but this is merely its latest shape.
We ate our packed lunches on a bench outside the village hall and then we wandered through the village hoping to see my acquaintance who had me to lunch at her home there once. We didn't see her, though, and I couldn't remember which was her cottage, so eventually we wandered off the main road to look at a house I had seen advertise for sale online. We found it, and B.A. was enthusiastic. It would certainly make an excellent base for country walks. It would significantly add to our transportation costs, however.
We meant to take the country bus to North Berwick, but the timetable on the bus stop did not match the notes B.A. wrote on a scrap of paper. Therefore, instead of kicking our heels in the village, we marched off in the direction of a hamlet called Needless and turned left at the road for Drem, which has a railway station.
B.A. thought it would be splendid to live in Athelstaneford (or Needless) and zoom up and down this very quiet country road on a Vespa to the railway station. We passed many farms and cottages, the cottages mostly hidden behind large hedges. We saw sheep and cows and, in the distance, the railway line and very much in the distance the Firth of Forth. It was a sunny, breezy day--excellent walking weather.
When we got to the empty Drem railway station we established that the Edinburgh train would arrive in just a few minutes, so that was splendid timing. We put on our masks and climbed aboard, dreaming of our drinks at the Italian restaurant. Originally we were going to have our post-hike beer in North Berwick, but we were just as happy to support our local.
A local, strictly speaking, is your nearest pub, but our nearest pub is somewhat frightening, so we are agreed that the snazzy restaurant is our local instead.
3. This morning I also perused the Spectator and saw that the novelist Lionel Shriver had written an essay against the concept of "white guilt." What struck me was her utterly secular observation that no human being can take on the responsibility of all the sins of humanity and that inherited guilt means damnation. Look at this:
As a species, we've been treating each other like [faeces] from the year dot. The horrors to which we've subjected one another, including slavery but a great deal else, are so incomprehensibly dreadful that no-one, as an individual, could conceivably bear the crushing weight of all that torture, mass murder and sadism. If guilt is inherited, then every last one of us should be condemned to Dante's nine circles of hell."
As a Christian, I have two observations. The first is that only God could bear that crushing weight and, in fact, He did in the Person of the God-Man Jesus Christ. The second approaches the doctrine of Original Sin.
Friday, 10 July 2020
A Beautiful House
Don't mind me! Just parking a link here so I can find it later. I'm working, so must go.
https://www.ingomar.org/about/carson-mansion
Update: B.A. does not like the above house and did not respond well to my suggestion that we build a house just like itwhen if we win the lottery. But I remembered another big American house--the Studebaker mansion in South Bend, Indiana. My elder grandma used to take us to there for grand lunches.
Update 2: "I don't like North American architecture. It's hideous and derivative," said B.A. re: Tippecanoe. He likes log cabins, though.
https://www.ingomar.org/about/carson-mansion
Update: B.A. does not like the above house and did not respond well to my suggestion that we build a house just like it
Update 2: "I don't like North American architecture. It's hideous and derivative," said B.A. re: Tippecanoe. He likes log cabins, though.
Wednesday, 8 July 2020
The Absolute Necessity of Asking for Help
I have been falling asleep by reading the reassuring and familiar plots of Georgette Heyer, fairy tales for grown-up ladies. What struck me last night was the reassuring set of rules her characters know they are to abide by. When in London, for example, an unmarried "Lady of Quality" must not go out for a walk unless accompanied by a friend, her maid, or a footman.
What frightened me very much in high school, university and at various points in my life was not knowing what the rules were, the "How Tos" that would get me from "my dreams" to their fruition. n the same way I thought that merely attending language classes would make me fluent in, say, Irish, I initially believed that success and happiness would just come along through mere attainment of university degrees, the ability to attract positive male attention, and the avoidance of mortal sin.
(These things, by the way, are indeed helpful--the last is crucial--but not enough in themselves.)
I can still remember my utter dismay, my aporia, to employ one of the few terms I remember from my philosophy classes, upon approaching graduation and not knowing what to do about getting a proper job. I wasn't just dismayed: I was frightened. Reading want-ads in the student job centre was something I could handle, but actually asking someone in the job centre to help me was simply beyond me.
Sometimes, when thinking about my adolescent self falling into yet another pit of despair, I impotently ask "Why did you not ask for help?"
The first person to ask me this, if I remember correctly, was our German friend Johannes the Good, who was astonished when I complained of a non-German stranger in Frankfurt who insisted on making me the subject of his amorous intentions and would have followed me back to the residence in which I was staying had I not finally, heart fluttering like a bird in a net, succeeded in discouraging him.
"Who would have helped me?" I asked, as when this annoyance began I was in a bus station surrounded by various Germans all busily minding their own business.
"An older German lady," said Johannes firmly. "If you had asked her, she would have shouted at him."
And this, I realised, was absolutely true.
If I were to compose a list of advice for Young Women Today, I would put "Ask for help" somewhere near the top. If a Young Woman's response is "The last time I asked for help, I didn't receive help" or "The last time I asked for help, I got yelled at", I would respond "Ask a different person for help" or "Figure out whose job it is to help you, and ask them for help."
"Always look for the helpers," as Mr Rogers famously said albeit in a different context--or is it?
Sometimes I feel modern life is a dark and scary cave and one must feel one's way along the walls to keep from falling into an even darker and scarier tunnel. I don't have a map; all I have are Regency romance novels, and they are really no help. In fact, they can make life worse for they underline, again and again, that women-of-honour are inescapably financially dependent on their families, especially their male relations or husband. This is simply not true. It has not been true for a long time.
They suggest--indeed most books written before 1950 suggest--that women who have to work for their living are terribly unfortunate and usually socially inferior to women who don't. Work, in books, also makes you terribly vulnerable. Every time a runaway ingenue in a Georgette Heyer novel suggests becoming a governess or a chambermaid, her confidante is so firmly against the idea, that it is clear to the fully-adult reader that this is because governesses and chambermaids were routinely victims of sexual violence.
By the time I graduated from university, I wished I hadn't read so many novels that expressed such a horror of work, especially women working. The conservative circles in which I moved were similarly lukewarm about women's employment outside the home. I was also primed by such books as Lifting a Ton of Feathers: A Woman's Guide to Surviving the Academic World to expect unrelenting horror in pursuing my career dreams.
But now I am writing myself into a depression, so I will go back to my initial point which is that in an age in which we are no longer have a clear blueprint of how to get on in life, it behooves us all to find out whose job it is to provide help and advice and to ask for help and advice.
If you have children, I suspect it is a very good idea never to dissuade them from asking you for help and advice. Presumably if you tell children who ask you for help that you're too busy or that they should be able to do whatever it is on their own, they will get the idea that asking for help is useless or bad. And that would be too bad.
What frightened me very much in high school, university and at various points in my life was not knowing what the rules were, the "How Tos" that would get me from "my dreams" to their fruition. n the same way I thought that merely attending language classes would make me fluent in, say, Irish, I initially believed that success and happiness would just come along through mere attainment of university degrees, the ability to attract positive male attention, and the avoidance of mortal sin.
(These things, by the way, are indeed helpful--the last is crucial--but not enough in themselves.)
I can still remember my utter dismay, my aporia, to employ one of the few terms I remember from my philosophy classes, upon approaching graduation and not knowing what to do about getting a proper job. I wasn't just dismayed: I was frightened. Reading want-ads in the student job centre was something I could handle, but actually asking someone in the job centre to help me was simply beyond me.
Sometimes, when thinking about my adolescent self falling into yet another pit of despair, I impotently ask "Why did you not ask for help?"
The first person to ask me this, if I remember correctly, was our German friend Johannes the Good, who was astonished when I complained of a non-German stranger in Frankfurt who insisted on making me the subject of his amorous intentions and would have followed me back to the residence in which I was staying had I not finally, heart fluttering like a bird in a net, succeeded in discouraging him.
"Who would have helped me?" I asked, as when this annoyance began I was in a bus station surrounded by various Germans all busily minding their own business.
"An older German lady," said Johannes firmly. "If you had asked her, she would have shouted at him."
And this, I realised, was absolutely true.
If I were to compose a list of advice for Young Women Today, I would put "Ask for help" somewhere near the top. If a Young Woman's response is "The last time I asked for help, I didn't receive help" or "The last time I asked for help, I got yelled at", I would respond "Ask a different person for help" or "Figure out whose job it is to help you, and ask them for help."
"Always look for the helpers," as Mr Rogers famously said albeit in a different context--or is it?
Sometimes I feel modern life is a dark and scary cave and one must feel one's way along the walls to keep from falling into an even darker and scarier tunnel. I don't have a map; all I have are Regency romance novels, and they are really no help. In fact, they can make life worse for they underline, again and again, that women-of-honour are inescapably financially dependent on their families, especially their male relations or husband. This is simply not true. It has not been true for a long time.
They suggest--indeed most books written before 1950 suggest--that women who have to work for their living are terribly unfortunate and usually socially inferior to women who don't. Work, in books, also makes you terribly vulnerable. Every time a runaway ingenue in a Georgette Heyer novel suggests becoming a governess or a chambermaid, her confidante is so firmly against the idea, that it is clear to the fully-adult reader that this is because governesses and chambermaids were routinely victims of sexual violence.
By the time I graduated from university, I wished I hadn't read so many novels that expressed such a horror of work, especially women working. The conservative circles in which I moved were similarly lukewarm about women's employment outside the home. I was also primed by such books as Lifting a Ton of Feathers: A Woman's Guide to Surviving the Academic World to expect unrelenting horror in pursuing my career dreams.
But now I am writing myself into a depression, so I will go back to my initial point which is that in an age in which we are no longer have a clear blueprint of how to get on in life, it behooves us all to find out whose job it is to provide help and advice and to ask for help and advice.
If you have children, I suspect it is a very good idea never to dissuade them from asking you for help and advice. Presumably if you tell children who ask you for help that you're too busy or that they should be able to do whatever it is on their own, they will get the idea that asking for help is useless or bad. And that would be too bad.
Monday, 6 July 2020
Let's not glamourise the mortgage.
This morning it occurs to me--having seen the editor of a competitor tweet about his mortgage--that paying for a mortgage may have turned into a Symbol of Adulthood and that by writing it I have continued to make it sound glamorous and grown-up instead of the ridiculous modern institution it is.
Crean and Fimister's Integralism (which I recommend making the effort to read) comes down hard on wage slavery, and a mortgage is another form of wage slavery. Unfortunately, most people in the West cannot live in a what we consider a decent home (e.g. a roof, windows, cold & hot running water, a stove) without paying rent or spending an eye-watering sum.
The eye-watering sum is not necessarily the down payment although I shudder at what down payments can be for a house in London or Toronto. Our two-bedroom flat is worth less than the down payment on a one-bedroom flat in Kensington's Old Brompton Road I saw online this morning. No, the eye-watering sum is the actual price of the home, which is not the price you (usually with the help of the bank) pay the seller but the price you end up paying the bank over the years. In short, you are lining the pockets of the bank with the money your employer or your client gives you for your time and expertise.
Benedict Ambrose and I have been watching an old British television series called "How to Live Mortgage Free," which addresses inflated housing prices and interviews people who get around them by either by building their own homes for between £5,500 - £30,000 or by paying down the mortgage early. These built homes are usually a houseboat, a converted vehicle, or a "temporary" dwelling built on a parents' farmland. Another innovation is to form a collective with others, buy a piece of land with some of your collective savings, and then build a multi-family dwelling together (using the rest of the collective savings) on that. (Actually, I'm not sure that is so innovative, as families in North America have been doing that for some time.)
But I have run out of time before work, so that's my thoughts on the subject now. Mortgages are not a sign of adulthood but a necessary evil that falls upon many adults. They may be a lesser evil, however, than rent. In the end it may depend on whether more money goes up in smoke on rent than it does on interest payments.
Crean and Fimister's Integralism (which I recommend making the effort to read) comes down hard on wage slavery, and a mortgage is another form of wage slavery. Unfortunately, most people in the West cannot live in a what we consider a decent home (e.g. a roof, windows, cold & hot running water, a stove) without paying rent or spending an eye-watering sum.
The eye-watering sum is not necessarily the down payment although I shudder at what down payments can be for a house in London or Toronto. Our two-bedroom flat is worth less than the down payment on a one-bedroom flat in Kensington's Old Brompton Road I saw online this morning. No, the eye-watering sum is the actual price of the home, which is not the price you (usually with the help of the bank) pay the seller but the price you end up paying the bank over the years. In short, you are lining the pockets of the bank with the money your employer or your client gives you for your time and expertise.
Benedict Ambrose and I have been watching an old British television series called "How to Live Mortgage Free," which addresses inflated housing prices and interviews people who get around them by either by building their own homes for between £5,500 - £30,000 or by paying down the mortgage early. These built homes are usually a houseboat, a converted vehicle, or a "temporary" dwelling built on a parents' farmland. Another innovation is to form a collective with others, buy a piece of land with some of your collective savings, and then build a multi-family dwelling together (using the rest of the collective savings) on that. (Actually, I'm not sure that is so innovative, as families in North America have been doing that for some time.)
But I have run out of time before work, so that's my thoughts on the subject now. Mortgages are not a sign of adulthood but a necessary evil that falls upon many adults. They may be a lesser evil, however, than rent. In the end it may depend on whether more money goes up in smoke on rent than it does on interest payments.
Sunday, 5 July 2020
In the Woods
Either it has been a strange weekend, or the uncertainty of the lockdown is getting to me.
Yesterday was Saturday, and B.A. and I took a short (for us) walk along an old railway line. Our county abounds in old railway lines which are now paved trails and nature reserves. This trail ascended gently through woods, and I saw a figure in army fatigues run into the undergrowth, leaving behind a large bundle.
The bundle moved, and I wondered then if it were a large dog or a person in need of help. When we approached it, I perceived that it had hands and something that looked very much like an assault rifle. In fact, the person lying there was in complete British military camouflage--face paint, fake greenery, the works.
What do you do when Western Civilisation seems to be burning to the ground, and you come across young men in army fatigues and assault rifles during your woodland walk? If you are me, you walk politely by, praying that the guns are fake.
"Is anyone stalking us?" I asked B.A.
"They look about nine or ten years old," said B.A.
Such was the state of My Nerves (long-time readers will recall I got them honestly from my grandmother) that I didn't notice this.
It was gently raining. It rained until we got to the next town, discovered that the Catholic Church is open for personal prayer only 2 hours a week (and that we were too late for both), and enjoyed looking at all the houses and cottages we will choose among when we win the lottery/have an unprecedented pay raise.
I had a wonderfully juicy "I told you so" comment when a large and beefy jolly chap told B.A. (who still had his map in his hands) that he could tell he was taking advantage of our new freedom to travel more than five miles.
We had coffee and millionaire's shortbread with one of B.A.'s pals, who lives in a beautiful house in the town.
When we returned to our own neighbourhood, we bought a small bottle of prosecco to celebrate our annual mortgage overpayment. Perhaps you thought my interest in minimalism was for the aesthetics of it all. Alas, no. While we were celebrating, I printed off the bank statement for June, so as to see how we spend our money. We spend it on food and drink, apparently. Our "ethical carnivore" bill would astound you, so I won't publish it. Jaunts to the famous local ice-cream counter came to £18.55.
Unfortunately, financial thoughts continued to chase each other round and round my head, leaving me utterly unable to sleep. Trying to relax with a Georgette Heyer novel didn't work this time, possibly because it was Faro's Daughter and the plot is all about debts, bribes, gambling losses and a mortgage. There was light in the sky before I fell asleep.
I am sure I am not alone in having a sleepless night over the mortgage. In fact, I think my mother used to lie awake picking at the counterpane thinking about hers 40-odd years ago. Meanwhile, I have received notices from our lender about "mortgage holidays" and when I got on the phone in an attempt to announce our overpayment to a live person, a recorded voice asked me to choose from various options, beginning with "mortgage holiday" requests. Thanks to minimalism, we ourselves do not want to take a "mortgage holiday," but I feel awful for all those in Britain who have to.
Sleeplessness, the continuing ghastly news from the USA, and thoughts about what new horrors the lockdown will bring all rendered me rather weepy today. What makes the lockdown worse is the lack of consensus among my friends about whether or not it is even necessary. At least one calls the emergency measures the "coronahoax." It's also not great that in Scotland we talk about "Nicola" (the First Minister) as if she were Big Brother or rather, since the remarks are usually derisive, the bogey monster.
What I would really like is to do now is take a live-in-person holiday. However, I prefer holidays abroad to see family and/or friends to holidays sitting on (as now seems likely) British beaches. Everyday, therefore, I check to see if "Nicola" has relaxed the mandatory two-week quarantine on travellers.
Yesterday was Saturday, and B.A. and I took a short (for us) walk along an old railway line. Our county abounds in old railway lines which are now paved trails and nature reserves. This trail ascended gently through woods, and I saw a figure in army fatigues run into the undergrowth, leaving behind a large bundle.
The bundle moved, and I wondered then if it were a large dog or a person in need of help. When we approached it, I perceived that it had hands and something that looked very much like an assault rifle. In fact, the person lying there was in complete British military camouflage--face paint, fake greenery, the works.
What do you do when Western Civilisation seems to be burning to the ground, and you come across young men in army fatigues and assault rifles during your woodland walk? If you are me, you walk politely by, praying that the guns are fake.
"Is anyone stalking us?" I asked B.A.
"They look about nine or ten years old," said B.A.
Such was the state of My Nerves (long-time readers will recall I got them honestly from my grandmother) that I didn't notice this.
It was gently raining. It rained until we got to the next town, discovered that the Catholic Church is open for personal prayer only 2 hours a week (and that we were too late for both), and enjoyed looking at all the houses and cottages we will choose among when we win the lottery/have an unprecedented pay raise.
I had a wonderfully juicy "I told you so" comment when a large and beefy jolly chap told B.A. (who still had his map in his hands) that he could tell he was taking advantage of our new freedom to travel more than five miles.
We had coffee and millionaire's shortbread with one of B.A.'s pals, who lives in a beautiful house in the town.
When we returned to our own neighbourhood, we bought a small bottle of prosecco to celebrate our annual mortgage overpayment. Perhaps you thought my interest in minimalism was for the aesthetics of it all. Alas, no. While we were celebrating, I printed off the bank statement for June, so as to see how we spend our money. We spend it on food and drink, apparently. Our "ethical carnivore" bill would astound you, so I won't publish it. Jaunts to the famous local ice-cream counter came to £18.55.
Unfortunately, financial thoughts continued to chase each other round and round my head, leaving me utterly unable to sleep. Trying to relax with a Georgette Heyer novel didn't work this time, possibly because it was Faro's Daughter and the plot is all about debts, bribes, gambling losses and a mortgage. There was light in the sky before I fell asleep.
I am sure I am not alone in having a sleepless night over the mortgage. In fact, I think my mother used to lie awake picking at the counterpane thinking about hers 40-odd years ago. Meanwhile, I have received notices from our lender about "mortgage holidays" and when I got on the phone in an attempt to announce our overpayment to a live person, a recorded voice asked me to choose from various options, beginning with "mortgage holiday" requests. Thanks to minimalism, we ourselves do not want to take a "mortgage holiday," but I feel awful for all those in Britain who have to.
Sleeplessness, the continuing ghastly news from the USA, and thoughts about what new horrors the lockdown will bring all rendered me rather weepy today. What makes the lockdown worse is the lack of consensus among my friends about whether or not it is even necessary. At least one calls the emergency measures the "coronahoax." It's also not great that in Scotland we talk about "Nicola" (the First Minister) as if she were Big Brother or rather, since the remarks are usually derisive, the bogey monster.
What I would really like is to do now is take a live-in-person holiday. However, I prefer holidays abroad to see family and/or friends to holidays sitting on (as now seems likely) British beaches. Everyday, therefore, I check to see if "Nicola" has relaxed the mandatory two-week quarantine on travellers.
Friday, 3 July 2020
The Tomatoes
My friend in the countryside sent me home with two tomato plants, for she feels she has too many in her greenhouse. It is a truth universally acknowledged in Scotland that a tomato plant without a greenhouse perishes in the damp summer weather. We don't have a greenhouse, so I am experimenting with the windowsill. When the sun comes back, I will put the tomato plants for an extended daylight recess.
Meanwhile, the second courgette, which is trying to supplant the rosemary as the king of the herb barrell, has put out a blossom. I will eat it for breakfast tomorrow.
In pea news, the pea seedlings under pop bottle cloches have clearly developed so much faster than their younger brothers that I have made new cloches for them. So far there has been no damage to the peas seedlings.
The kale and the rainbow chard are flourishing hugely, and we are having the rainbow chard with dinner tonight.
I have complained to the First Minister about the 14 day quarantine on travellers to Scotland via Twitter. Unfairly, I did not complain to the Prime Minister of Canada about the 14 day quarantine on travellers there. However, what happens in Canada is a minority interest in Scotland, and the fact that the English can traipse back and forth across the Channel without a care probably rankles in many Scottish souls.
Meanwhile, the second courgette, which is trying to supplant the rosemary as the king of the herb barrell, has put out a blossom. I will eat it for breakfast tomorrow.
In pea news, the pea seedlings under pop bottle cloches have clearly developed so much faster than their younger brothers that I have made new cloches for them. So far there has been no damage to the peas seedlings.
The kale and the rainbow chard are flourishing hugely, and we are having the rainbow chard with dinner tonight.
I have complained to the First Minister about the 14 day quarantine on travellers to Scotland via Twitter. Unfairly, I did not complain to the Prime Minister of Canada about the 14 day quarantine on travellers there. However, what happens in Canada is a minority interest in Scotland, and the fact that the English can traipse back and forth across the Channel without a care probably rankles in many Scottish souls.
Keeping the Shadows at Bay
We had an excellent Dominion Day, thank you, spent in the countryside with another Canadian-Scottish couple and their children. We lunched on pancakes with maple syrup, and we dined on hamburgers. We had a lovely walk through fields up hills and down dales, praying the Rosary. The Canadians sang the National Anthem in French. Being able to sing the National Anthem in French just feels more Canadian. Don't ask me to write it out, however.
The next day I went back to swimming through the swamp of bad news, and it was pretty terrible. While researching a freedom of speech story, I watched a short video of a coked-up woman playing around with a gun in a car and then shooting the man beside her in the head. As the previously lively yet nervous man fell sideways with a sound like the air being let out of a balloon, blood pouring from his head, the woman and the man in the back burst out of the car.
The person who posted this video had introduced it with an unpleasant racial slur, which made it all the worse. The injured man did not die, by the way, but suffered significant brain damage. I had to find this out myself, as the poster wasn't interested in his welfare.
To put this in perspective, I couldn't make myself watch the "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" series because I couldn't take the violence. I can't watch Scorsese films, and I lasted only the first two minutes of Wild at Heart. Incidentally, what the hell is wrong with the human race?
Don't answer that: I know.
As an exercise in freedom of speech, the poster failed in his object. Well, that's assuming that his object was to convince other people that his racial theory was correct. I'm doubting that his object was to traumatise (however mildly) a conservative alt-media journalist and give her a serious case of writer's block. Yesterday was not one of my got-two-stories-done days.
I seriously need a holiday but--and here is the point of this article, really--for once world events are having a serious impact on my daily, domestic life. What I really want to do is go home to Toronto, chat to my parents, possibly swim in their pool, definitely visit my siblings and best pals, rediscover how hot a Toronto July can be. However, my parents are over 70, and despite a torrent of stories suggesting that everything we have been told about coronavirus is wrong, I am mortally afraid of somehow infecting my parents.*
The more likely plan is going to Poland. However, this is not so simple either, for whereas England is not going to punish its residents with a two-week quarantine after returning from July travels, it appears that Scotland is determined to do so. Being quarantined at home doesn't matter as much to me, as we have a garden and food delivery accounts, but B.A. refuses to risk being quarantined. For one thing, if he isn't laid off at the end of the month, he will be called back to work.
Did I mention that B.A. (like so many others) is at risk of being "made redundant"? Yes. But we won't go there for now. I am not being made redundant, so we'll be better off than thousands of British households.
Under these circumstances, it would be great not to have to take on board all the other sufferings in the world. The ideological carnage in the USA is just really too much, and I deliberately did not read the Dominion Day news in Canada because I knew that a day celebrating Canada's history and people's would naturally be used by malcontents as an excuse to pour hatred on our country. (I don't know what is worse--that or using shows like "Anne with a E" to rewrite our history and literature.)
So what to do? Well, the first thing to do--I think--is to stop reading any news except the news I have to write on. That's it: two or three bad things a day. No more than three broken hearts, bad bishops, ideological outrages or social atrocities a day.
After that, I really don't know what else to do to keep the shadows at bay.
*And I can't stay elsewhere in Canada--there's a strict 14 day quarantine, so I'd have to stay indoors and not see anyone anyway.
Update: Occasionally I come across sanity-saving "good news" or, rather, good old news.
The next day I went back to swimming through the swamp of bad news, and it was pretty terrible. While researching a freedom of speech story, I watched a short video of a coked-up woman playing around with a gun in a car and then shooting the man beside her in the head. As the previously lively yet nervous man fell sideways with a sound like the air being let out of a balloon, blood pouring from his head, the woman and the man in the back burst out of the car.
The person who posted this video had introduced it with an unpleasant racial slur, which made it all the worse. The injured man did not die, by the way, but suffered significant brain damage. I had to find this out myself, as the poster wasn't interested in his welfare.
To put this in perspective, I couldn't make myself watch the "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" series because I couldn't take the violence. I can't watch Scorsese films, and I lasted only the first two minutes of Wild at Heart. Incidentally, what the hell is wrong with the human race?
Don't answer that: I know.
As an exercise in freedom of speech, the poster failed in his object. Well, that's assuming that his object was to convince other people that his racial theory was correct. I'm doubting that his object was to traumatise (however mildly) a conservative alt-media journalist and give her a serious case of writer's block. Yesterday was not one of my got-two-stories-done days.
I seriously need a holiday but--and here is the point of this article, really--for once world events are having a serious impact on my daily, domestic life. What I really want to do is go home to Toronto, chat to my parents, possibly swim in their pool, definitely visit my siblings and best pals, rediscover how hot a Toronto July can be. However, my parents are over 70, and despite a torrent of stories suggesting that everything we have been told about coronavirus is wrong, I am mortally afraid of somehow infecting my parents.*
The more likely plan is going to Poland. However, this is not so simple either, for whereas England is not going to punish its residents with a two-week quarantine after returning from July travels, it appears that Scotland is determined to do so. Being quarantined at home doesn't matter as much to me, as we have a garden and food delivery accounts, but B.A. refuses to risk being quarantined. For one thing, if he isn't laid off at the end of the month, he will be called back to work.
Did I mention that B.A. (like so many others) is at risk of being "made redundant"? Yes. But we won't go there for now. I am not being made redundant, so we'll be better off than thousands of British households.
Under these circumstances, it would be great not to have to take on board all the other sufferings in the world. The ideological carnage in the USA is just really too much, and I deliberately did not read the Dominion Day news in Canada because I knew that a day celebrating Canada's history and people's would naturally be used by malcontents as an excuse to pour hatred on our country. (I don't know what is worse--that or using shows like "Anne with a E" to rewrite our history and literature.)
So what to do? Well, the first thing to do--I think--is to stop reading any news except the news I have to write on. That's it: two or three bad things a day. No more than three broken hearts, bad bishops, ideological outrages or social atrocities a day.
After that, I really don't know what else to do to keep the shadows at bay.
*And I can't stay elsewhere in Canada--there's a strict 14 day quarantine, so I'd have to stay indoors and not see anyone anyway.
Update: Occasionally I come across sanity-saving "good news" or, rather, good old news.
Tuesday, 30 June 2020
Fiori di Zucca 2
It really was the taste of Rome. I didn't even like anchovies until we discovered fiori di zucca in Rome.
The plan, going forward, is to eat the blossoms the day they first bloom. They don't stay that big for very long. The thing to do is to have mozzarella, anchovies and mint to hand from mid to late June.
In other gardening news, the last runner bean has emerged from the soil of the trug and so have the pea shoots. To save them from the ghastly greenfly, I have put plastic pop-bottle cloches over them. One of the second-sowing radishes in the raised bed was ready, so I popped it out, gave it a scrub, cut off the greens for later and ate it.
The radishes are very small, and I think after a year or two of learning from trial and error I will attempt to grow big vegetables like the best-in-show type vegetable growers. I am not a great radish fan, preferring the green tops, to be honest, so perhaps I'll concentrate on bean production, or something like that. It would be lovely to have enough green beans for us to eat a handful every day.
Next year I may also splash out on a greenhouse because I am longing to try tomatoes and aubergines (eggplants). We eat a lot of tomatoes, and even though, yes, the canned Italian variety cost only 35 p a can, it would be marvellous to have delicious Calabrese salads.
Monday, 29 June 2020
Fiori di Zucca
Here is a lovely photograph from our Saturday walk around the Historical House. We ran for a familiar old shelter just in time not to get drenched.
Sunday, 28 June 2020
The Zoom Reunion
It has been many years since I graduated from high school. My body has thickened, and my face is melting. However, such is the lot of women who live past forty as was impressed upon me yesterday by the sight of over a dozen old classmates on my computer last night.
It was supposed to be an online cocktail party; I drank a little too much red wine instead.
"Did you talk about the faith?" asked Benedict Ambrose, or words to that effect.
"Goodness gracious, no. We talked about where we all lived now, children, Sr. W's matching red-white-and-blue outfits, D being pregnant the year we graduated, V's arranged marriage and how she is now, how M likes living in Dubai, how at least of two of them were bullies, and which girl had had a baby with another girl, which I don't think is true, actually."
That is a reconstructed statement, to be honest, as I am not sure what I exactly said to B.A., having drunk too much wine. I think what inspired that was one of the women still living in the principal Italian-Canadian neighbourhood asking a woman with an Italian married name what part of Italy her husband was from. Nothing brought back my school days like that. Reminiscing about hairspray and the Dep brand of gel carried only faint shadows of feeling like an outsider.
Hey, paesana! Hey, chica! Come stai, ha? Oh, okay, you know? Hey, Carmela, what part of Italy are you from? Calabria? Yeah? Cosenza?
That said, this may have been the exact same woman who asked me how my husband was doing, which strongly suggested that she or her parents were still reading the Toronto Catholic Register in 2017. That was very kind, and the closest we got to what B.A. was hoping for. He was so indignant that my graduating class, despite having gone to a convent school (so to speak) and taught by nuns, were so uninterested in Catholic topics that I ran away back to my computer to send a message to my prom date, who was and still is a practising Catholic.
I noticed that the women who had been quiet, studious girls, didn't attempt to get a word in edgewise, and that the women who had been great at sports and parties did most of the talking. My own set of outsiders--some of whom had been bullied by the girls some of these women used to be--were not there. I was moved, however, that the former bullies remembered their principal victims and asked after them.
Memories were shaky and information shared--including by me--unreliable. Someone suggested X and Y had had a baby together, but someone else said that Y was married to a man. I said that Q was in Colorado, but today I see that she is in Toronto.
Someone said that 1 in 10 of us must have been gay, but that we didn't even talk about such things back then. I thought privately that possibly 1 in 100 of us was deep-seatedly same-sex attracted and that we certainly did talk about such things back then. For one thing, all my schoolmates were collectively called "The Lezzies of [School]" by outsiders, and for another there were rumours that two girls had been caught kissing in the washroom/behind a shed/in the art room, etc. I myself entered the school with a massive crush on an older girl that was soon replaced by a massive crush on a boy at my brother's school. Adolescence is complicated.
Occasionally a child or photograph of children showed up on the screen and at one point a computer was taken outside where a man was barbecuing. It looked as thought we had mostly turned out the way I always suspected the school meant us to: university-educated or at least married to university-educated men, with at least two children (but not more than four), employed or at least married to employed men, with suburban houses and back yards, and the school cheer still resounding somewhere in the back of our middle-class minds. This was not the life I thought I wanted, and (as you see) this is not the life I have.
I found the reunion profoundly interesting and yet disturbing, and I was thankful afterwards that for once my best practising Catholic female friend, mother of my Canadian god-daughter, picked up the phone. Lily (as I call her online) is one of the few people outside my family to whom that I can sincerely say, "I love you so much, and I think you are fabulously beautiful."
To tell the truth, though, my family is not given to enthusiastic use of the L-word. We fight back tears at our weddings and funerals instead and occasionally harangue each other about losing weight/quitting stressful jobs/not risking dying alone of Covid-19. So thank heavens for my quiet American ex-pat Lily, locked down in a downtown house with a handsome, clever husband and four beautiful, clever children. (The fifth won't emerge fully on the scene until later this year.)
With Lily I can talk about the faith and society and American politics and everything under the sun without a shadow of reticence or fear, and with her children I can be both a gift-giving aunt and a hideous monster that drags them along the floor before gobbling them up. And so I do not begrudge similar friendships among the old classmates I saw last night: I think its wonderful and hopeful that they last so long.
Lily and I talked until I was sober enough to picture the phone bill, and then I went to bed.
Update: B.A. doesn't think that anyone on last night's call would be thrilled if they read this description, so I apologise in advance. I do think the reunion was a great idea. Yes, I felt "on the margins" of the conversation, just as I felt awkward around many of the conversations at school. As for the reconstructed "Hey, Carmela" conversation, I understand the factors that led to close knit Italian-Canadian communities, and I don't begrudge the members their membership. At any rate, I will have an interesting conversation about all this with my non-Canadian Italian tutor this evening.
It was supposed to be an online cocktail party; I drank a little too much red wine instead.
"Did you talk about the faith?" asked Benedict Ambrose, or words to that effect.
"Goodness gracious, no. We talked about where we all lived now, children, Sr. W's matching red-white-and-blue outfits, D being pregnant the year we graduated, V's arranged marriage and how she is now, how M likes living in Dubai, how at least of two of them were bullies, and which girl had had a baby with another girl, which I don't think is true, actually."
That is a reconstructed statement, to be honest, as I am not sure what I exactly said to B.A., having drunk too much wine. I think what inspired that was one of the women still living in the principal Italian-Canadian neighbourhood asking a woman with an Italian married name what part of Italy her husband was from. Nothing brought back my school days like that. Reminiscing about hairspray and the Dep brand of gel carried only faint shadows of feeling like an outsider.
Hey, paesana! Hey, chica! Come stai, ha? Oh, okay, you know? Hey, Carmela, what part of Italy are you from? Calabria? Yeah? Cosenza?
That said, this may have been the exact same woman who asked me how my husband was doing, which strongly suggested that she or her parents were still reading the Toronto Catholic Register in 2017. That was very kind, and the closest we got to what B.A. was hoping for. He was so indignant that my graduating class, despite having gone to a convent school (so to speak) and taught by nuns, were so uninterested in Catholic topics that I ran away back to my computer to send a message to my prom date, who was and still is a practising Catholic.
I noticed that the women who had been quiet, studious girls, didn't attempt to get a word in edgewise, and that the women who had been great at sports and parties did most of the talking. My own set of outsiders--some of whom had been bullied by the girls some of these women used to be--were not there. I was moved, however, that the former bullies remembered their principal victims and asked after them.
Memories were shaky and information shared--including by me--unreliable. Someone suggested X and Y had had a baby together, but someone else said that Y was married to a man. I said that Q was in Colorado, but today I see that she is in Toronto.
Someone said that 1 in 10 of us must have been gay, but that we didn't even talk about such things back then. I thought privately that possibly 1 in 100 of us was deep-seatedly same-sex attracted and that we certainly did talk about such things back then. For one thing, all my schoolmates were collectively called "The Lezzies of [School]" by outsiders, and for another there were rumours that two girls had been caught kissing in the washroom/behind a shed/in the art room, etc. I myself entered the school with a massive crush on an older girl that was soon replaced by a massive crush on a boy at my brother's school. Adolescence is complicated.
Occasionally a child or photograph of children showed up on the screen and at one point a computer was taken outside where a man was barbecuing. It looked as thought we had mostly turned out the way I always suspected the school meant us to: university-educated or at least married to university-educated men, with at least two children (but not more than four), employed or at least married to employed men, with suburban houses and back yards, and the school cheer still resounding somewhere in the back of our middle-class minds. This was not the life I thought I wanted, and (as you see) this is not the life I have.
I found the reunion profoundly interesting and yet disturbing, and I was thankful afterwards that for once my best practising Catholic female friend, mother of my Canadian god-daughter, picked up the phone. Lily (as I call her online) is one of the few people outside my family to whom that I can sincerely say, "I love you so much, and I think you are fabulously beautiful."
To tell the truth, though, my family is not given to enthusiastic use of the L-word. We fight back tears at our weddings and funerals instead and occasionally harangue each other about losing weight/quitting stressful jobs/not risking dying alone of Covid-19. So thank heavens for my quiet American ex-pat Lily, locked down in a downtown house with a handsome, clever husband and four beautiful, clever children. (The fifth won't emerge fully on the scene until later this year.)
With Lily I can talk about the faith and society and American politics and everything under the sun without a shadow of reticence or fear, and with her children I can be both a gift-giving aunt and a hideous monster that drags them along the floor before gobbling them up. And so I do not begrudge similar friendships among the old classmates I saw last night: I think its wonderful and hopeful that they last so long.
Lily and I talked until I was sober enough to picture the phone bill, and then I went to bed.
Update: B.A. doesn't think that anyone on last night's call would be thrilled if they read this description, so I apologise in advance. I do think the reunion was a great idea. Yes, I felt "on the margins" of the conversation, just as I felt awkward around many of the conversations at school. As for the reconstructed "Hey, Carmela" conversation, I understand the factors that led to close knit Italian-Canadian communities, and I don't begrudge the members their membership. At any rate, I will have an interesting conversation about all this with my non-Canadian Italian tutor this evening.
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