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. 

Married Ten Years

Today is the tenth wedding anniversary of Benedict Ambrose and me, and thus ten years since I stopped being "Seraphic Single."

I was going to joke that I am almost at the point where I can give advice about being married, but then I realised I have already. At least, I'm sure I blogged that a woman should take every opportunity to praise her husband for doing anything well, on the principle that men are like beautiful plants, and wives must metaphorically water them.  

Another useful piece of advice, aimed at wives in countries with imperfect medical systems, is to be prepared to fight to the death for your sick husband albeit without raising your voice or doing anything else that gets you kicked out of the hospital. To use a less martial image, be the squeaky wheel that gets the grease. 

A third piece of advice is to be grateful every day for what you have and not to think overmuch about what you don't have--money, children, a clean house, a PhD, a career, whatever. To a remarkable (although of course not total) extent, happiness or sorrow is up to you. 

I love the realism of the wedding vows: "for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health." We've definitely experienced all of that--never more so than in the last 26 months. 

The worst, I think, was the terrible spring after B.A.'s first brain operation when nobody, even me, took his first complaints seriously. (More advice: don't expect your husband to snap back to his old self within three months of  life-saving surgery.) The poorest was the terrible February I returned to the Historical House to find the contents on the front lawn and discovered we were banished from our home in the attic indefinitely. The sickest was when B.A. was sliding slowly towards a coma, and nobody seemed to see how ill he was except me. 

Speaking of sickness, the day the doctor phoned me to say that my bloodwork indicated signs of irreversible peri-menopause (and was I still sure I didn't want to try IVF ?) was also bad.

However, the interesting thing about this (now that you're all in tears) is that, just as soothing docken grows right among the nettles, the "better", the "richer" and the "health" were right there by the bad stuff. 

The night that B.A. was diagnosed with a brain tumour and hydrocephaly was terrible, but we lived most of it together, with an acuteness I don't think we'd experienced since we first fell in love. The next morning before his operation was like that, too. It was terrible, but it was the best. He sat up in bed--looking as healthy as could be, by the way--and I sat with my feet in his bed (against the rules,  I later discovered), and we just "were" together. 

The day we were officially evicted from the Historical House was awful, but we had saved up against this day, and so when we got the message that we were never going home, we had more money than either of us had ever had in our lives. So, in our most abject moment of poverty, we were richer than before (in money anyway). 

The year B.A. was so sick, I was physically well. A lot of anxiety, but no depression. I started a full-time job and managed also to visit B.A. in hospital every day and, when he was bed-ridden at home, I  forced him down the stairs for walks and made him what should have been fattening Christmas food. I called up the Caregivers Association and cried. I got on Facebook and asked for cards, letters, and children's drawings--which came. I walked five miles to a Scottish shrine three times. I gave houseroom to a temporarily homeless young married couple, too, and in return got youthful energy from them. In short, I had all the health I needed to get people to do their best to make B.A. (and keep me) well. 

Meanwhile, the day I learned from that cold, clinical phone call that I will never have a baby, B.A. rushed home from work as soon as I phoned him. I didn't think he would, but he did.  He held me while I cried, which reminds me now of the first time he rubbed docken on my arm when I got prickled by a nettle. 

Before all that, of course, there were the ordinary ups and downs of marriage: the parties, the weekend guests, the Christmas family visits, the summer family visits, the negative pregnancy tests, the arguments over how to wash dishes properly, the arguments over housework, the pride in each other's publications. 

Regrets? Yes--one. I had a prospective on my desk in 1990 from the University of Aberdeen; weirdly enough, I had a half-fancy to go there. Sincere apologies to all the friends I made between 1990 and 2008, but if I could got back in time, I would find some way to get to Aberdeen and meet B.A. when we were both in our twenties. However, there is no point thinking about impossibilities, so instead I will be grateful for my friends and B.A. Better late than never. 

Well, that's what our marriage looks like. Not as glamorous as a bridal magazine, that's for sure. But real.

Update: I realise I've said most of this before, but let's face it: it was traumatic, and people do tend to revisit their trauma.

Valentine's Day

I went out for dinner with my littlest brother! :-D

Okay, I am married so it's not the same thing as not having a sweetheart on Valentine's Day. However,   it was yet another Valentine's Day far from my sweetheart.

B.A. did give me a card to pack and open today. And he sent me a photo of snowdrops.

Always wanting more

I read this Atlantic piece with amusement. It concerns a study into a correlation between money and happiness, and the researcher became quite depressed as he realised that even the super-rich think they would be "perfectly" happy only if they had double or triple the amount of money they already have.

The researcher seems to have missed the forest for the trees, for what seems to make the super-rich he studies at least temporarily happier is winning high-states poker games or besting each other at charitable donations. Well, winning is always nice. I get quite excited when I win a free Lotto ticket or--yippee!--£25. That covers almost a quarter of our gambling budget for the year, and I mark it down in the Household Accounts as "Entertainment."

I think the secret of happiness is not to chase the emotion but to enjoy it fully whenever it comes. I am not actually sure what Maeterlinck's "Blue Bird of Happiness" is about, but if his point is that it flutters hither and thither and lands on your hand occasionally, then yeah. That makes sense.

While writing my annual Christmas piece for LSN, I was filled with gloom.

B.A. and I are going to have a perfectly nice Christmas, I hasten to say.  We're going to give a little Polish supper for Wigilia, and then we're going to Midnight Mass as usual. When we get home, I will roll up my Sacred Family Christmas Chelsea Bun and leave it to rise. On Christmas morning, I will bake the Sacred Family Christmas Chelsea Bun, and then B.A. and I will wash half of it down with coffee while opening our presents. Then we will find some sort of transport to Christmas III Mass, and after that we will go to the countryside, my Sacred Family Christmas Trifle wrapped in ice-cube filled dish towels, to stay with a friendly Catholic family for a few days. There will be a Christmas feast. It will be all very British Trad Catholic and jolly.

But this was the second Christmas we were planning to spend in Canada with family, and we can't. That is, we chose to follow B.A's oncologist's advice, to safeguard B.A.'s health. That doesn't sound as bad. Also, as Christmas-observing Christians all know, "Jesus"--not family-- "is the Reason for the Season."

Not all Christians observe Christmas, by the way. I am thinking primarily of the Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland, of which I am fond because of our friend Calvinist Cath. The Wee Frees, as they are jocularly called, observe Sundays with great staunchness, vigour and trouble to themselves, but they don't celebrate any of the feasts of the Roman Calendar because they don't believe God asked anyone to do so. I think this lacks historical consciousness, but as this is an aside, I won't get into that.

Right. So although we are going to have a lovely Christmas, complete with two feasts (three if you count the Bun binge) and two Masses--possible three, if we go to Mass on the 26th, too, as the Poles think we are supposed to--I am still sad that we will not be in Canada with my family.  And I must say that is rather ironic to be a pro-life, pro-baby, pro-family crusader when I've never been pregnant, never had a baby, and see members of my family three times a year max.

The general idea of pro-family activism is that happiness comes not from money and career but from loving (I mean loving, not having sex with) people, accepting their love in return, and putting up with them in and out of season while striving to make it easier for them to put up with you. That is actually sound, in a sense, although it is important to concentrate on the family and friends you HAVE instead of the ones you don't. And a good chunk of that happiness might have developed from the sense of a duty done because loving does not always mean liking, especially if you come from a broken home.

Meanwhile, the Stoics would argue that happiness comes from developing satisfaction with whatever life brings. You can't control what life brings, but you can control your reactions to what life brings. If you are sad you don't have children, it is worth remembering that there are many people who have children but are utterly miserable all the same. Children are not a magic happiness wand.

And I really have no cause to complain about my lot. I have a kind husband who is in work, and his brain tumours have stopped growing and may be disintegrating. I have an interesting job which brings me into contact with many interesting people but still leaves me enough time for housework, language study, and culinary projects. We own (!) our own home. My parents and siblings and their children are all still alive and (D.V.) I will see them all in February.

That's enough.

Won't Be Home for Christmas but...

"Normally the patient sits in that seat," said the doctor, or words to that effect, to me.

Yes, Benedict Ambrose and I were back at the hospital. This time we were there to hear the results of his most recent scan, the one that followed six weeks of radiotherapy to stop the resurgent tumour which, to add insult to injury, had brought along two friends. 

Fortunately it was my "retreat day" from work, so I simply brought along Peter Kwasniewski's Tradition & Sanity with me to the waiting room. I was at Mass dark and early at 8 AM, and afterwards our priest loaned me Michael Davies' Liturgical Revolution Volume II, so B.A. read that. 

I always go the hospital with B.A. to hear medical pronouncements because too often he doesn't come home afterwards: it's back to the ward with him. The news is usually bad although, come to think of it, this is better than whichever doctor saying B.A. is fine when I know he is NOT fine.

When B.A.'s name was called, we gathered our coats and books and sped off to the consulting room, where I chose the seat closest to the oncologist's desk as it was pushed farther back. However, it turned out to be the wrong choice, and I had a sense that the doctor was faintly surprised that I was in the office at all, which shows that she does not appreciate the implications of the Catholic marriage bond--or she is unaware that B.A. spent months of his cancer adventure delirious, increasingly blind and unable to remember much or ask important questions.

The news was good. The "tumour buds", which had rapidly doubled in size after being detected, have stopped growing. This is a great mercy, for apparently the radiotherapy was so aggressive, the doctor would not have done it a second time.  One of the tumour buds looks like it is "necrotising," too--a word doctors use instead of dying. Die, tumour buds, die--but without taking my husband with you, thanks. 

We looked at the latest interesting high-tech x-rays of the inside of B.A.'s head, which are almost amusing because some show his tongue, teeth and jaw, too. B.A. says he doesn't identify with these images; they seem completely apart from him. On one x-ray/computer image was a dark horseshoe shape representing where the oncologists had radiated B.A.'s brain, as close to his brain stem as possible without actually touching it. 

B.A.'s tumours, by the way, are technically "benign" even though, left untreated, they would kill him. The problem is that they are basically on the worst, trickiest and most sensitive part of his brain. Normally this kind of brain tumour doesn't appear there. And normally this kind of brain tumour appears in five-year-olds. The probability of B.A. ever being in this situation was low, but here he is. 

Slightly off-setting this misfortune is the fact that his neurosurgeon is a paediatrics neurosurgeon and so was probably one of the few people in the world who could have done the operation he did without leaving B.A. badly damaged---although famously I think the intercession of Our Lady of Fatima had something to do with that, too. And although the subsequent radiotherapy robbed B.A. of the ability to hear music properly, that turned out to be only temporary. Thank God for that. 

After making an appointment for B.A. to come in for another scan in a few months, the doctor asked if we had any more questions. B.A. politely said "No," thus proving the importance of my being there. 

"Can he go to Canada in [four] weeks?" I asked. "For Christmas? It's an eight hour flight." 

Actually, it's more of a seven hour flight, but I was thinking of snowstorms and airplanes circling around Lester B. Pearson airport for ages, waiting for their turn to land.

The doctor looked perturbed.

"Have you booked your flights already?" she asked. 

"No," we said. "We were waiting until we spoke to you."

That had been a good thing to do. To make a long consultation short, she thought it a very bad idea for B.A. to be on a long flight although if we had insisted she would have given him some sort of steroid to help him through it.

"No, no, no," I said, thinking of a disastrous flight to Pisa last year, so we don't know what this steroid would do, or why exactly it is a bad idea for B.A. to fly---quite apart from the cost of medical insurance for a cancer patient travelling to Canada, which is apparently astronomical. 

Then B.A. remembered that we have already bought and paid for tickets to Poland in late January, but then the oncologist perked up and said that it was a good idea to start with a short flight.  Therefore, we are still going to Poland although I am a bit frightened about it. If anything like what happened after we flew to Pisa happens in Poland, we are taking the train to Berlin in July. And now the Berlin trip is now even more about seeing family than it was about museums. 

The oncologist advised us to go to the cancer patients' clubhouse for travelling insurance information for our European travels, so off we went to find it. We were met at the door by a kindly lady who showed us seats and offered tea and coffee and brought us cookies, a list of companies that insure cancer patients, and a schedule of cancer clubhouse activities. B.A. observed that it's my clubhouse, too, because I'm a Caregiver, to which I thought, "Dear God. I'm a Caregiver again." 

A Caregiver (or "Carer") is the United Kingdom expression for a person--sometimes paid by the state--who does most of the in-home caring for a sick or disabled person. I think the expression is meant to encompass the vast variety of people who may fill this role. As a concept, it has positive and negative implications. 

The positive aspect is that Caregivers are seen as a group of their own, and have their own clubs and advisers, who recognise how difficult being a Caregiver can be and that Caregivers need help and support. The negative aspect is that this reflects a breakdown in marriage and family. Once upon a time it was assumed that a wife took care of her sick husband, and vice versa, and parents took care of their disabled children, or children took care of their sick or disabled parents, and now it isn't. 

But the implications regarding Broken Britain aside, I am grateful for the identity label and the  resources available to Caregivers because, although obviously being the one with brain tumours is much worse, caring for a cancer patient can be frightfully annoying and difficult.  

The most annoying part is being treated by hospital staff as if you don't belong beside your sick person. Believe me, just offering the sick person's spouse/'partner'/Caregiver a glass of water is an unusual act of kindness. Possibly the nurses don't do it very often because they're embarrassed when the spouse/'partner'/Caregiver bursts into tears of gratitude. 

The most difficult parts are 1. second-guessing doctors and nurses--and I will never forget how starving  B.A. was fasted a day longer than necessary because a nurse made a mistake, and I thought she had made a mistake, but she didn't--and 2. not knowing what to do when something goes wrong. 

So although I am sad that we are not going to Canada for Christmas, I am glad that we are not going on a seven-hour flight. When we went to Italy in May 2017, we expected a relaxing holiday in which both of us would recover from the horrors of B.A.'s March diagnosis. The doctors had assured us that post-operative B.A. was fine. Fine to travel. Good to go. All was well. Nightmare over. Cheap flight to Pisa. Cheap train to Florence ... 

And then when B.A. got off the train, he fell and could not get up. Somehow I carried him and all our luggage to a seat, but after that, I did not know what to do or what was going on and, God love us, we both preferred to believe the doctors couldn't possibly have been wrong and he just had "low blood sugar". Neither of us knew, then, what delirium looked like. Hint: not just someone raving on their pillow about a lost love. Most of the time B.A. was delirious, he spoke with complete conviction in an ordinary tone of voice. He passed basic cognitive damage tests with flying colours. He wandered off to central Edinburgh because he fancied a doughnut.   

Well, anyway. No Toronto Christmas, but just remembering what happened in Florence (and then everything afterwards) has cheered me up a little. Better safe than that kind of sorry.

Update: I will say this again and again, but it is very shortsighted of the National Health Service not to recognise appropriately the role the sick person's primary caregiver plays in the healing of the patient. First of all, the caregiver has only ONE sick person in her care and so is an incredible resource. Second, the caregiver may be under so much stress, she is in danger of herself falling ill. If the caregiver falls ill, that can have a deleterious effect on the original patient. It will also add to the work of the NHS. Therefore, it is in everyone's interest to spend a half-minute a day acknowledging the primary caregiver, smiling at her or even offering her a glass of water.

Update 2: Given my readership, should acknowledge that our financial situation would be terrible if we were Americans or we lived in the United States without adequate health insurance. Speaking as a Canadian who lives in the UK and travels often to the Continent, I firmly believe in so-called "socialised medicine." There are a lot of things taxes shouldn't support, but cancer treatment is high on the list of things it should. 

Burying the Cake

Memoir can be a face-squinchingly embarrassing practice. One runs the risk of looking pathetic and banal. However, human beings are--let us face it--pathetic and banal compared to the animals, let along the angels, and yet God loves us. And sometimes there is beauty in the pathos--or at least a salutary lesson.

For example, yesterday I buried our wedding cake. In old-fashioned British-Canadian tradition, a bridal couple saves the top tier of their wedding cake for the child's baptism. This, traditionally, is fruitcake, and a proper fruitcake is edible for years, let alone nine or ten months after it is made. The Christmas cakes you will purchase in December may very well have been made last winter, and it is no big deal.

Since I was determined to follow whichever old-fashioned British-Canadian traditions would not shock our guests, I certainly kept the top of our wedding cake. Alas, we never had a child, so this cake has hung around in an old ice-cream container for almost a decade. My mother says we should have served it at our fifth anniversary, but I hadn't given up on the baby yet and, anyway, it was starting to dawn on me that nobody really wants to eat old fruitcake. The fruitcake had become a symbol, really, like when I didn't move out of the choir loft for years because my plan was to leave when the baby arrived. Leaving before the baby came meant giving up on the baby.

Now it's understandable that this is all very sad. The question is, Is it socially acceptable to write about?

I wonder because after I buried the wedding cake yesterday morning, there was a minor crisis when the movers took off with a bag of things I actually wanted to keep, and I burst into tears. As an Ikea bag of wooden hangers and a shoe rack is not really worth crying about, the issue was clearly the cake. The only things to do to get over it, I thought, was to have a good cry in the bathtub (as close to sound-proof as anywhere in the new flat) and then write about it.

However, it was now 11 AM and time for work, so instead of writing about it on my blog, I wrote about it for LifeSiteNews, adding some trenchant thoughts on the evils of IVF.  I fear the readers of LSN are going to think I'm a real moaner, given that my LSN blog pieces tend to be about such domestic catastrophes as "My husband has a brain tumour." But I also feared someone--a non-fan--would write it, "Being childless is your own fault for having got married so old, you stupid woman. Why don't you adopt? Oh, you can't afford it? Well, that's your own fault too, isn't it? Stop whining."

The non-fans of my imagination are really mean.

The slings and arrows of outrageous non-fans are risks I'm willing to run in order to say what I want to say in print. The question of fitness may concern the motive: unhealthy self-absorption ("Everyone must feel my pain!) or solidarity with other childless people? Or a warning to young married couples that if they leave child-having too late, they will never have children?

Personally, I thought that there was a certain grandeur in a middle-aged woman (any middle-aged woman) burying the cake she hoped to eat (or at least look at) at her first child's christening. It was certainly more respectful to the concept of motherhood than throwing it in the bin.

Update: So far one "Why didn't you adopt?" type comment and one "That was HER choice. I'm Catholic, I used AID [Artificial Insemination with Donor--I looked it up],  I don't regret it" Oh my. You do have to have a tough skin in this Op/Ed business.

Signs and Wonders

So now it is a year since the morning I prayed all 15 decades of the Rosary on the one-hour commute to my husband's hospital the day after his make-or-break operation.

It was the 100th anniversary of the last apparition of Fatima, and the trad (and mad) continent of the Catholic blogosphere had been rife with rumours that Something Bad would happen. Since my future now hinged on how brain-damaged B.A. was going to be, it did not seem at all megalomanic to ask Our Lady that the day's Great Event be instead that B.A. have a complete recovery.

I  did not know if B.A. would recognise me ever again, so it was a great relief when I arrived beside his bed in Intensive Care and it was clear that he did. He couldn't speak, however, as he had a ghastly breathing apparatus down his throat, and eventually his nurse, and then several nurses and doctors had much ado preventing him from tearing at it.

While the battle raged, I was sent out of Intensive Care, only to be called in again because after the machine was removed B.A. started screaming and carrying on, and they thought I could calm him down.

Like many delirious people, he thought he was dying, but B.A. also wanted Mass said for him while he did, so as soon as he laid eyes on me he yelled, "Darling, darling, call Father E, I'm dying ---and her Immaculate Heart will triumph!"

B.A.'s brain surgeon was tremendously pleased that B.A. could breathe on his own and was in such feisty spirits although you can bet that soon after I left (about 8 hours later) B.A. was pumped full of sedatives. He was not so feisty when I saw him the next morning, let me tell you.

For three days he repeated that Our Lady's Immaculate Heart would triumph. The first day he yelled this over and over. The next day, his yells weren't so loud and the repetitions were less frequent. The third day, he just mentioned this inevitable triumph from time to time in a conversational tone of voice.

B.A. had no permanent brain damage from the operation, and when we saw the surgeon a few months later, he stared at B.A.'s face to see if any of the muscles were sagging, and they weren't.

"It's pretty miraculous," said the surgeon, and I proceeded to write two newspaper articles on the topic.

It was an awful blow to both of us when we discovered, a few months after that, that B.A.'s brain tumour, which can't be entirely removed, was slowly growing back. Obviously the worst part was that B.A.'s ordeal was not over, and he'd have to have radiotherapy. However, it was also disappointing that our miracle hadn't signalled the end of it all. Perhaps our miracle wasn't a miracle after all?

But I think that it was still a miracle, in the way that the Raising of Lazarus was still a miracle, even though Lazarus died in the end.  B.A. did not have a complete recovery from the tumour , but he did have a complete recovery from the very scary operation that could have left him blind, unable to breathe, immobile or dead. (You name it.) He also helped to promote devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary when he was completely off his head.

Some people, even devout elderly ladies, spout obscenities when they are delirious. Not my B.A.  As a temporarily brain-damaged person, he was really rather sweet. He may even have been heroic because even while he thought he was being murdered, he was proclaiming the message of Fatima in a dourly post-Christian city at the top of his lungs.  

The Year Since Operating Dangerously

It's the first anniversary of my husband's incredibly dangerous fifth brain surgery. Naturally Benedict Ambrose remembers nothing of that day, whereas it is tattooed to my own brain.

The events are jumbled up, however. I do recall B.A. happily "signing" his consent to the procedure that could kill him and was half-expected to paralyse him in some way: he kept on scribbling until I took away the pen. Then I had to sign to confirm that was my husband's signature.

Then there were the could-be death bed visits. Naturally our priest came with the Blessed Sacrament (and poor B.A. was terrified evil forces would stop him), and B.A.'s mother came down from Dundee, and the Men's Schola came by, and the young Franco-Polish couple staying with me---and I think six was the maximum number of guests I thought B.A. could receive.

This was all very last minute, by the way. B.A. had been in the convalescent home, for which we had had great (but completely unfounded) expectations. He fell in the night and was discovered at dawn and whisked to the hospital for x-rays. I could understand very little of what he said, and the young doctors almost nothing. No bones broken, but the tumour had grown, and so B.A. was returned to the relative paradise of the Neuroscience department.

The memory that makes me cry is B.A. telling his mother with all seriousness that he had been in Carstairs. Carstairs is Scotland's prison for the criminally insane.

Well, my father would tell me that it is best not to dwell on these things. And he should know because my mother had a stroke at 50 and then brain surgery. She completely recovered and is hale and hearty, goes for long holiday hikes in the Highlands, and volunteers at a rehab hospital that nobody would think was Carstairs.

I suppose the value of talking about this at all is to provide hope for other people whose loved ones have a stroke or a brain tumour. Of course, the fact that B.A. was not damaged by the operation was a miracle, but that's a story for tomorrow.

Meanwhile, I am eternally grateful for all the prayers, cards, small presents and kind words of family, friends, and readers, let alone the sacrifices of both money and time of family members who flew to Scotland to be with us last year.

Update: Trying not to dwell, but the other miracle is that I have not gone insane between March 2017 and now.  That might be a source of hope for others, too. It is possible to care for your spouse through a brain tumour diagnosis, five operations, the malfunction of a fire retardant system, another brain tumour diagnosis, eviction from your beloved home of 9 years, flat-buying, and his radiotherapy  (while working full-time) and not go stark raving mad. In fact, I gave up anti-depressants months and months ago because WHO HAS TIME?

My principal advice here--besides not trusting a dangerously overstretched medical system alone with your loved one--is to save every penny you can possible save as soon as it dawns on you that you should have done this from your first paycheque.

Canadian Thanksgiving

Today I was terribly sad and homesick, and it was through gritted teeth that I asked myself what I could do today to make tomorrow better. One thing I did was to acknowledge that I, like so many others, have an internet addiction and should strive not to get on the web before or after office hours.

But I also posted a letter to two nice Scottish girls immured in a French convent school and spent £17 on groceries, which I slowly began to turn into Thanksgiving supper. Originally I was going to have Thanksgiving supper on Sunday night with two English-Scottish couples, but one couple was out of town and the other's plans have to be made greatly in advance because of the need for a babysitter. I was going to invite another couple for real Thanksgiving, tonight, but I thought B.A. would be too tired from work. So in the end, I shopped for two.

The secret to Thanksgiving for two is to stick to the basics. If your spouse does not come from a Thanksgiving-celebrating culture, this is quite easy. You tell him what the basics are, and he accepts this as Canadian (or, I imagine, American) law. In our case, this meant a turkey leg, gravy, curried carrots with honey and ginger, and pumpkin pie with whipped cream. I also provided store-bought gnocchi as a fast take on potatoes.

I was quite surprised to find a turkey leg for sale among the poultry. I meant to buy guinea hens, but there being an enormous raw turkey leg, I bought it. I suppose it must once have been attached to a turkey crown, now sitting in the frozen foods department of some grocery store somewhere in the British Isles. Tesco has already starting stocking Christmas things. Hallowe'en is not strong enough a tradition hear to keep Christmas groceries at bay.

At any rate, I began to prepare Thanksgiving Dinner at 5 PM and it was ready at 8 PM, and it was eaten by 9 PM, with all the dishes washed and the leftovers sweetly stored in the fridge. I shall be delighted with my current self when my future self walks into a clean kitchen tomorrow morning.

Incidentally, I made my pumpkin pie crust with lard (not vegetable shortening), and it flaked beautifully. I used to be awful at making pastry, but now that I have been married for almost ten years, I am rather good at it. Like making friends, it takes time.

Making Women Friends Later in Life When You Don't Have Kids

Reader Booklover has asked how to have Catholic female friendships after thirty when all the Catholic females around have kids and you don't.

That's a very good question. Booklover is lonely, and I am not surprised because I was super-lonely when I was the only woman over 25 and under 55 amongst my husband's Trad Catholic friends in Edinburgh. Not only weren't there any more childless married ladies my age, there weren't any ladies my age at all.  I would sit at the table at Men's Schola dinner parties and bear the brunt of their masculine humour, e.g. my supposed job on Salamander Street.  DON'T ASK.

"We'll have to find you some other wifies, hen," said the Salamander Street jester, and eventually some other expat gals did end up at our parish. I was initially suspicious of each and every one of them--goodness knows why--but then they all became my friends. A married Scottish lady with two daughters also started coming, and after a few years, we became friends, too. She now has hens, so I'm going to visit her and them tomorrow.

Of my fellow foreigners, one was recently married, and two started out Single. Then one married a Trad and one married an N.O. type from the Cathedral. The one who arrived married had babies, but the others haven't despite my fervent prayers for us all . The baby-haver now lives abroad, but when she comes back, she abandons her children with their grandparents and we go out for delicious cocktails.

Of course, our Trad parish is a bit weird in that it is very heavy on single, nulliparous people and relatively light on married couples with children. Married couples with children are a relatively recent phenomenon at our parish but a very welcome one. Somehow my mother and I got swept along by a giant crowd of them this summer to the Botanical Gardens. There I played "Red Rover, Red Rover" until someone got hurt.

I don't remember what I talked about at this picnic; I mostly remember eating delicious things with my mother and wondering how to stop the "Red Rover" game before someone got hurt.

My social life with women improved a bit when I volunteered to help the Traddy Girl Guide troop.  I enjoy talking to the Guides themselves, and if the mothers of the Guides talk about their daughters, it's a bit like gossiping at school only I tend to say things like "I think X and Y are so beau-oooo-tiful and smart" or "Z is really so clever at woodcraft."

The truth is I really wish I had clever, pretty daughters like so many women my age, and you really can't go wrong telling women how clever and pretty their daughters are. Actually, I don't mind listening to women talk about their children because I find the children interesting. What I don't like is when complete strangers ask me if I have any children because it always makes me sad to say "No."

I am not sure any of this is helpful. Oh dear.

With the exception of two Protestant friends, my life rotated in a very tiny circle around the Men's Schola and such Edinburgh or St Andrews Uni students (often Polish, usually male) considered clubbable enough for dinner parties until I started going to night school. Then I got to see a completely different sort of person once a week for years. At first it was awkward being around non-Catholics, but eventually I stopped being quite so paranoid.

After several years of night school, I developed a friendship with another childless woman, the daughter of a Polish WW 2 veteran, and we may even travel together to Poland together one day, which would be great fun. It takes awhile to develop friendships with actual Scots when you are a foreigner in Scotland, by the way, unless they are work colleagues or wives of your husband's university pals.

This is sounding too much like All About Me and not enough like Advice, so I will try a list of suggestions of what to do when all the women around are mothers and you are not.

1. Become a kind of helper to the mothers of older girls, like a Temporary Deputy Girl Guide Captain, which will give you something in common with them.

2. Try to cultivate friendships with mothers who have passed the stage of talking about nothing but their children, e.g. mothers of teenagers.

3. Try to cultivate friendships with mothers who lived for rock'n'roll before their children were born. Hint: this may be the woman who says "Sometimes I wish I could go back to being 22 for just a week, you know?"

4. Accept the fact that most women your age or older who do not have children are probably not good Catholics and make friendships with them based on shared interests, like foreign language class or love of books.

5. Also accept that fact that women are simply not going to play as big a role in your life right now as they did before you were married. Yes, this is rotten and, no, a husband does not make an adequate substitute. Keep a few women's phone numbers on hand for emergency wailing sessions.

6. Read books by splendid Catholic women you wish you could go out for cocktails with, like Rumer Godden or Anna Haycroft (Alice Thomas Ellis).

7. See your very best BFFs in the world, who are probably college pals, when you can. I have two. One is a non-Catholic with no children on Toronto's Queen Street West and one is Catholic with four children just off Toronto's Roncesvalles. I see them once a year. I go to their houses and sit on their sofas and sit calmly as the hurricanes of their daily lives roar around me.

8. Befriend older Catholic women as they appear in your lives.

9. Join a network of Catholics that is much bigger than your immediate Catholic world, for the chances of meeting other Catholic women without children will thus rise.

The women in (or who regularly come to) the UK I know well enough and like enough to have over for a cup of coffee range in age from 17 to 72. They are American, Australian, English, Scottish, French, Polish, Balkan, Bulgarian, Estonian and Italian. Some are Catholics, some are Protestants, and some are simply Communists, let's face it. Two are cloistered nuns so, in fact, they can never come for coffee. Of those with children, one is pregnant with her first, three have two children each, and nice new one has seven strikingly beautiful children under 13. Of those without, at least three are over 60.

Interestingly, only three of all these excellent women has had a cup of tea or coffee or hot buttered apple cider with rum in the new flat so far.  This, however, has a lot to do with the slow progress of our move, B.A.'s health, and my full-time job.

We make cider and survive

Benedict Ambrose and I share the same core values (very important in marriage), but we have very different personalities. This can cause friction although I have always appreciated that B.A. is very laid-back and presumably he admires my energy. I sure hope so.

I am often on the lookout for hobbies that we can do together that are not watching television. (Of course, being trads, we occasionally sit together transfixed before my computer screen, watching Michael Voris snark, or Michael Matt seethe, or Raymond Arroyo ask the Papal Posse what this all means for the Church.)

Unfortunately, swing-dancing is right out. One of the happiest moments of my life in Scotland was seeing B.A. across the swing-dancing class floor, but then it turned out he was just saying "hello" on his way somewhere else.

I no longer go to swing-dancing. The loneliness and having to smile all the time despite the In-Crowd just about killed me. Anyone who thinks traditional Catholics are snooty and judgemental should spend a year in the Edinburgh social dance scene.

Of course, anything strenuous is right out for now, as B.A. is still recovering from radio-therapy. This reminds me of his ill-fated night school French course. To my great joy, B.A. decided one year to study French. Shortly after his classes started, he got really sick. As he began to slowly slip into delirium, I was doing his French homework half an hour before his class.* That was it for French.

This year, having acquired this wonderful apple tree, we decided that we would make cider. While B.A. read Twitter, I watched two videos and bought all the equipment online. When the boxes arrived, I opened them up, and we decided we would being making the cider on B.A.'s next day off, which was Sunday.

On Sunday I got up at 7 and went outside with a ladder to pick apples as B.A. snoozed on. This was great fun although the ladder was very tippy, so once he got up I summoned B.A. to help. B.A. held the ladder and squawked with dismay when I gave up on it and climbed into the tree.

"Oh darling please be careful," said B.A.

"I'm fifteen again," I cried, 20 feet in the air.

"You'll never reach those ones," said B.A.

"Yes, I will," I thought and sometimes did, and sometimes didn't.

Once B.A. was back inside, sure we had enough apples, I climbed up the ladder again to get more. Thus, we ended up with 130 apples. Thirteen of them weighed 2 kilos (about 4.5 lbs), so that was 20 kg of apples, which the internet told me should produce 2 imperial gallons (9 litres)  of juice. After Mass I washed them in the bathtub.

Then we had a squabble about sterilising the equipment. B.A. has made a fair amount of elderflower champagne in his time and never bothered with Camden tablets,  champagne yeasts, disinfectants and all that modern stuff. However, the cider books I got from the library were adamant about sterilising all equipment, so I took the highly caustic disinfectant ("Oh darling please be careful") to the bathroom and sterilised the fermenting bin and its lid. The bathtub was as clean as newly fallen snow afterwards.

Meanwhile, B.A. had started chopping and blitzing the apples. Essentially, the way to make cider juice is to cut apples into quarters, put them in a vegetable chopper, blitz them to bits and then stick them in your  handy-dandy bag-lined apple press. This is more labour intensive than it sounds, and in hindsight is not the ideal Sunday-afternoon activity for a cancer patient and a journalist with tendonitis. It is fun, though, although it would have been more fun if we had invited friends to help, providing snacks and other people's cider to inspire us.

Another argument was whether or not we should bolt the apple press to the floor. It was a nice enough day that we could have bolted it to the lawn, but B.A. wasn't feeling well and wanted to stay indoors. We don't like our kitchen linoleum and will eventually tile the floor, but we don't have a drill for making bolt-holes, so that was that. When it got difficult to turn the handle to squish out the last of the juice, B.A. got me to hold the legs.

When we had about 50 apples to go, B.A. was really very tired. We had only 6 litres of juice--just over a gallon--but the thought of cutting, blitzing and squishing 50 more apples was too much for him.

"We'll never do it," he said and went to lie down.

"To heck with that," I thought (maybe not that politely). "I want 9 litres!"

The thought of those 3 extra litres gave me extra energy. So I cut up the 50 apples, blitzed them, emptied out the "cheese" (dry squashed apple bits), and filled up the press again. Then I turned the handle of the apple press myself, which wasn't that hard until the end.

Shortly after 8, I thought I'd better check on B.A. There are too many stories of husbands going to lie down and then simply dying.

So I stuck my head in the bedroom door. B.A. was under the covers with the reading lamp on.

"I'm just lying quietly with a book," he literally said.

"I'm not mad at you," I replied. "And I'm almost done."

And then I was. I can barely type now, but we have 2 gallons of juice sitting in the fermenting bin, its natural yeasts being killed off by the Camden tablets. Tonight I will add wine-and-cider yeast---which reminds me: I must get B.A. to show me how to turn on the heat as we need the cider to live at a balmy 20 degrees celsius for the next week.

The juice is really delicious, so I hope the cider is too. Maybe for our next batch we will not add the Camden tablets and just see what the natural yeasts do. On the other hand, this is all so labour-intensive, I cannot bear the thought of failure.

*One of the stranger aspects to B.A.'s 1.5 year battle with the brain tumour is my inability to grasp what is happening when it starts to happen. However, I've noticed that some of his doctors are like that, too. Some have insisted that he was fine, when I knew he wasn't fine, and others have admitted that they didn't know what was wrong. Our gentle G.P., who tried to care for B.A. but was stymied, has retired early. Was it us? We hope it wasn't us.

May We Dispense with Our Husbands' Stuff?

Benedict Ambrose had a day off work yesterday, and when a friend agreed to store some boxes of books for us, B.A. went to the Historical House to carry them down three flights of stairs. I was a little worried about his ability to do this and so was vastly relieved when he phoned to say he was okay.

Our friend appeared at St. Benedict Over the Apple Tree (our new home), our first guest after our solicitor, with two beautiful plants for the garden, and we drove off to the Historical House. It was a warm and sunny day, and it was wonderful to be outdoors.

We met B.A. at the bottom of the stairs.  He looked like an exhausted cockatoo. He's still very thin, and of course half the back of his head is still shaved or bald. He was drenched in sweat, clutching a box and staggering a little.

"I've carried down twenty already," he said, panting, as I clucked like a hen and ordered him to sit down. He collapsed into a garden chair in the sun, and J. and I and B.A.'s co-workers carried the boxes to the car. They're relatively small boxes but heavy.

Ignoring my system--the most elementary division of books into most valued and less valued--B.A. had just started with "the books in the hall", which means the "most valued" books are now in a cellar in the New Town. But the good news is that the least valued books are still in the Historical Attic, which means we can more easily banish them to a charity shop.

When our friend's car was thoroughly packed with "most valued" books, I suggested to B.A. that he sit amongst the "lesser" books (mostly novels) and choose which ones should go to the charity shop. He responded with faint wails of horror and exhaustion. The mental energy this would take was simply beyond him.

To put this into perspective, B.A. has neither read Marie Kondo's The Life-changing Magic of Tidying Up nor surfed the internet in search of inspiring Minimalist blogs. And as hoarding goes, he is nothing to my mother, who still has a few pairs of my great-grandmother's spectacles. My great-grandmother died, I believe, in 1978.

Actually, a list of the hilarious objects dating from before 1980 to which my parents have granted houseroom would make for a very funny post. Meanwhile, my great-grandfather and grandfather each brought back a German helmet from their respective World War, a grisly reminder that our their* Iron Age ancestors used to fasten the skulls of their enemies to their door lintels.

B.A. doesn't have any helmets, let alone skulls, but he has had an awful lot of junk which I began throwing away after maybe five years of marriage. I think I waited five years. For a very long time, I did not think I had any right to throw away any of my husband's belongings, including worn-out trousers. Now that we have been married for almost ten years, I realise that the secret of unburdening my husband of objects he has not seen for years is just to make an executive decision and throw them away without mentioning it.

This should not be treated as a universal rule. Still, it might solve a major household headache if the minimalising spouse asked the non-minimalising spouse if the way forward is just to proceed with a closet/attic/basement purge without telling him/her what had disappeared.

There are limits, of course. Although B.A. doesn't listen to his large collection of compact discs, there exists a possibility that he may in future want to listen to a specific contact disc. Therefore, I have not eliminated his contact discs. Nor have I got rid of the DVDS although their days are numbered.

Lest the frequent reader think I hate all my husband's stuff, I should mention that I admire B.A.'s taste in antique and mid-century furniture and very much like all but one of the pieces we have already transferred to our new home.

*I say "their" because only my mother's ancestors were 100% British. My father's were also Irish and German, and I don't know what they got up to during the Iron Age.

Why Keep Books?

Today I went to the Historical House and filled boxes with books.  When I first started this gargantuan task, I decided to start with books I didn't want anymore. The problem, as I may have mentioned, is that I don't feel comfortable getting rid of B.A.'s books. And I definitely do not want the vast majority of B.A.'s books. Did he really read Justine? Will he ever read Justine? I have my doubts.

However, the very thought of choosing between his books made my poor, radiated husband feel very tired, and he shouted "What?!" when I said I didn't think I needed the Latin-language version of the Summa Theologica anymore.

The problem with books--and we have hundreds--is that too many are relics of one's one past and very often represent destroyed dreams. For example, I have dozens of theological textbooks which I bought and kept because I sincerely believed that I was going to be a professor of theology and would need them. That is why I have, for example, most of the Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, not to mention the Summa in both English and its original Latin. I even have Mary Daly's Beyond God the Father--or had, as I have binned it.

I also have quite a few books I have never read and may never read and many, many books I have read but may never read again. Therefore, it seems mad to keep them around.

Poor B.A. countered that he has books because he likes to sit in a room surrounded by good books into which he can dip when the mood strikes him.

I did not point out that he has not sat in such a room for over six months and, like me, does most of his reading on the internet and, because computers impede sleep, goes to bed with the Spectator. I even stopped nagging him about discarding books. He was sitting on the edge of the soon-to-be-abandoned sofa bed in what used to be our library, half the back of his head shaved or simply bald. He looked as weak as a kitten.

So I spent the day putting books in boxes without making judgements and taped the boxes shut. However, I know perfectly well that it may be a very long time before those boxes are every opened again. Therefore I began to fill a big red wheeled suitcase with books I need and read often. And because I am a nice wife, really, I made sure I brought some books B.A. highly values, has read recently and will probably read again.

So here are the books that have actually made it to St. Benedict Over the Apple Tree. Most of them came with me today, dragged half a mile in a suitcase or carried on my back:

Churchy, Liturgical & Theological (mostly B.A.'s)
The Holy Bible (NRSV, Catholic)
Biblia (the Bible in Polish and therefore not B.A.'s)
Chwalmy Pana (Polish prayers & liturgy book)
The Monastic Diurnal
The Penny Catechism 

St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica (in English)
Benedict XVI, Spe Salvi
CCCB, Statement on the Formation of the Conscience (aka Winnipeg Statement)
Dom Gregory Dix, The Shape of the Liturgy
Alice Thomas Ellis, Serpent on the Rock 
Adrian Fortescue et al, The Ceremonies of the Roman Rite Described
Dom Prosper Gueranger, The Holy Mass
St. John Paul II, Evangelium Vitae 
Sister Stanislaus Kennedy, Gardening the Soul
Joseph Kramp, S.J., Live the Mass (1925)
Peter Kwasniewski, Noble Beauty, Transcendent Holiness
Father Lasance, The New Roman Missal (1945)
Robert Llewelyn, A Doorway to Silence (super-High Anglican guide to the Rosary)
Richard John Neuhaus, Catholic Matters: Confusion, Controversy and the Splendor of Truth

Aidan Nichols, O.P., Critising the Critics
Aidan Nichols, O.P., The Holy Eucharist
Aidan Nichols, O.P., Holy Order
Aidan Nichols, O.P., Lovely Like Jerusalem
Aidan Nichols, O.P., The Realm
Aidan Nichols, O.P., The Shape of Catholic Theology*

Pius X. Catechism św. Piusza. Vademecum katolika (I'm going to memorise it. That's the plan.)
Fr. Jacques Phillipe, Searching for and Maintaining Peace 

Card. Joseph Ratzinger, The Spirit of the Liturgy
Card. Joseph Ratzinger, God and the World

Henry Sire, Phoenix from the Ashes 
Aelred Squire, Asking the Fathers
Ks. Józef Tischner, Krótki przewodnik po życiu

Historical
Thomas Ahnert, The Moral Culture of the Scottish Enlightenment, 1690-1805
William Zachs, Without Regard to Good Manners

Journalism
Associated Press, Guide to News Writing
Emma Lee-Potter, Interviewing for Journalists
Strunk & White, Elements of Style 

Linguistic
Peter C. Brown et al. Make it Stick
Gabriel Wyner, Fluent Forever

Larousse French-English, Anglais-Francais New College Dictionary

JACT, Reading Greek
Langenscheidt, Pocket Greek Dictionary
Liddell & Scott, Greek-English Lexicon
Oxford Grammar of Classical Greek

Collins Concise Italian-English, English-Italian Dictionary
MOIT, Il Mio Primo Dizionario
Oxford, Mini Italian Dictionary
Esplora Firenze con Dante e i suoi amici
Un Giorno in Italia 2

Langensheidt, Premium Slownik polsko-angielski/angielsko-polsku (cut in 2 halves, a sign of love)
Langensheidt, Slownik uniwersalny, Angielski
Oxford & PWN, English-Polish Dictionary
Assimil, Le Polonais
Klara Janecki, 301 Polish Verbs 
Iwona Sadowska, Polish: A Comprehensive Grammar 
Oscar E. Swan, Polish Verbs & Essentials of Grammar 

Literature
C. Alan Ames, Through the Eyes of Jesus (gift of pious neighbour)
Martin Amis, The Information (accident)
Anita Brookner, Hotel du Lac
Alice Thomas Ellis, The Summerhouse Trilogy
George MacDonald Fraser, The Complete McAuslan

C.S. Lewis, Książe Kaspian
C.S. Lewis, Podróż Wędrowca do świtu (Polish trans. of below)
C.S. Lewis, Voyage of the Dawn Treader

Nancy Mitford, The Pursuit of Love & Love in a Cold Climate
Bolesław Prus, Lalka
Bolesław Prus, The Doll (English trans. of above)

& two poetry books belonging to tutor which I mean to give back soon

Other
Eyewitness Guides, Poland
Victoria Harrison, Happy by Design
Jack Monroe, A Girl Called Jack: 100 Delicious Budget Recipes 
Cal Newport, Deep Work
Matthew Rice, Rice's Architectural Primer 
Simon Sinek, Start With Why
Brian Tracy, Eat That Frog
Kate Watson-Smith, Mad About the House
Lexie Williamson, The Stretching Bible

That appears to be 77 or so. Dear me. And that is the smallest drop in the library bucket.

Why I brought all the Classical Greek books when I am unlikely to be called upon to teach it ever again is a mystery. Lest I appear more high-brow than I actually am, I bring your attention to my must-have English novels. Well, Brookner is eminently respectable (I do think Hotel du Lac is a masterpiece). The others are for comfort (or Polish studies).

I think I have at last answered my question. Some books you need as tools, but others are simply for comfort: mind snacks.

*B.A. really loves the work of Aidan Nichols. He once got me to take at least some of these books to a conference where Nichols was speaking for the learned priest to sign. The great man kindly did so although he seemed a little surprised by the number.