Sitting in the Back with Godling

My favourite of Godling's toys

I once read in a book about contentment that the most important part of a holiday is the end. It's the end that you remember most, the part that determines your memories of the trip and how much lasting happiness you get from it.

The way our holiday ended was a trip from Polish Pretend Son's house to the airport, with my Goddaughter (Godling for short) in the back with Benedict Ambrose on the left and me in the middle. We had a few car trips like this, for which B.A. and I are very grateful to PPS, especially as we have never driven him anywhere ourselves. I enjoyed all these trips, not least because they were on the normal (i.e. the right) side of the road, but I especially loved the opportunities to spend more time with Godling.

Godling is 7 months old and beautiful. She has dark slanted-down eyes, a lot of reddish-blond hair that is as yet so fine that she looks bald, two minuscule bottom teeth that have only recently appeared, and a lot of baby fat. She is at the stage where she can't crawl, exactly, but she can pull herself forward with her arms to get what she wants. When she realises she needs to employ her knees and lift her tummy, she'll be a speed demon. She hasn't said a discernible word yet, but she is certainly vocal. One of her monologues sounds like "Gid-gid-gid-gid-gid-gid." She can be entertained with such simple toys as a golf ball or a beer mat attached to a piece of string, and when I gave her a cardboard English-Polish book about animals, she was more interested in gumming the corners than in looking at the pictures. She is, usually, a very happy baby.

I am suddenly overwhelmed by a desire to get my passport, get on the bus, and get on a plane to see Godling again.

Godling's principal toy is a wooden fish inset with a row of beads that rattle back and forth. She had this with her in the back of the car when we went to the airport, but she found it insufficiently entertaining, so I rummaged in my handbag and found a small flashlight on a chain. I clicked this on and waved it back and forth, which distracted Godling from fussing. Entertaining Godling was how our holiday ended, and it was awesome.

I had lots of opportunities to entertain Godling during the week, especially thanks to impromptu dinner parties outside the country hotel we all stayed in. The hotel consists of two parts--a large butter-yellow "clubhouse" and stupendous butter-yellow mid-19th century ex-German Schloss. Between the house and the palace, there are beautifully landscaped gardens with a fountain in the middle, and behind the palace there is the smaller part of the golf course. The properly huge part of the golf course is across the rural highway, to which golfers scoot in buggies on the driveway between the house and a row of umbrella-covered tables. In the evenings,  we sat at one of these tables, drank prosecco (Italian champagne), ate filling and delicious Polish suppers, watched PPS spray wasps, and slapped at  mosquitoes.

A changing and fascinating array of PPS' family members and friends joined us outside the hotel as the week went on, and sometimes I held the baby. On one particularly memorable occasion, Godling's mother played folk tunes on her fiddle while my husband beat the rhythm on a tambour. The baby was passed around the table, but she soon stopped with me.

On an earlier memorable occasion, Pretend Polish Daughter-in-Law and Godling spent part of the afternoon on the small golf course, not far from where BA was reading his book and watching golfers contend with the water trap, rolling about by one of the holes, into which Godling threw a golf ball--her first hole-in-one. PPDIL wanted to go the driving range and practise her swing, so we went along, too. BA walked to the range, and I sat beside PPDIL in the golf cart, clutching the baby as she zoomed across the road and around the golf course. While PPDIL, now barefoot, taught BA how to hit the ball and proceeded to hit two baskets of balls herself, Godling and I played with a golf ball.

Apparently Polish Pretend Daughter-in-Law would like me to  come back and entertain Godling while she does something else for a few hours of the day, and if they had a room to keep B.A. and me in, I would do it in a heartbeat.

BA and I were supposed to have a small dinner party yesterday, which I hoped would take the sting out of being suddenly alone again. Unfortunately BA picked up a tummy bug of some kind in Poland (no symptoms of the Vile Germ, I'm relieved to report), so we had to cancel our party. Instead we watched a film about a woman who runs an informal boarding house in 1970s California (the boarding is clearly to help pay for the beautiful old building's restoration) and often invites people to dinner. Seeing the crowd around the table, and the impromptu conversations with boarders and drop-ins in the kitchen made me feel intensely nostalgic.

Joy of Summer

I used to wonder why June 21, the first day of summer,  was called "midsummer," but now that I live in the UK, I know.

Summer in the UK begins when the rain stops and the sun actually feels warm, and this year that was today. I had a very splendid day, too. I used to love autumn best, but now that I live in the UK, my allegiances have switched to early summer, i.e. May. 

This morning I did an hour of Polish study, and then I dragged myself outdoors to the back garden and did two hours of weeding between the paving stones in the lovely sun. Then I hung out a load of laundry, and had some rosół (Polish chicken soup) left over from the dinner party we had last night. It turned out beautifully, so no more stock cubes for me ever. 

Then I did some more laundry and wrote three articles. It was launder, hang, write, fetch and fold, launder, hang, write, fetch and fold all day. Then B.A. made chicken croquettes, so I stopped working to eat. And then a Polish pal came with his mother to borrow a piano, and I rushed for the homemade black currant vodka, squeaking Czy macie ochotę na czarną porzaczkę? before our Polish pal had time to warn his mother about me and my linguistic obsession.

In my sitting room, where twice a week I harangue my Polish tutor po polsku, I am rather better at Polish than at church, so I did much better chatting with our Polish pal's bewildered mother than I usually do chatting with our Polish pal. So that was extremely awesome and rather put a crown on our first summer day. 

The denouement was sitting outside with B.A. screened by beech hedges as we pondered my handiwork, the telephone wires and the currently naked trellis against the shed and drank white wine. By the way, the apple blossoms have mostly blown away, but the roses (pink and white) have begun to bloom.

Tomorrow I will do an anti-dandelion search-and-destroy mission before I go to Barre class.  Yes, I do love summer.

Beautiful

Sometimes I cannot forgive the new flat for not being the old flat. It doesn't have enough memories in it. It's cramped and untidy and if/when we win the lottery, we're fleeing to the West End.

At the moment, however, it looks lovely, and not just because of the guggle fish of purple tulips on the coffee table. 

It's because Polish Pretend Daughter and French Pretend Son-in-Law have just been here with their baby. 

PPD is of medium height, slim and beautiful. FPSL is very tall, slim and cheerful. The baby is only a few months old, and very cute and good-natured. Benedict Ambrose and I had not met her yet, and here she was at last. 

We had tea and coffee, cheese-bread and butter, cardamom bread and cheese, and a Victoria sponge (the simplest of British cakes). PDD fed the baby, and FPSL told us about the home renovations. They both told us about the adventure of the baby's birth, and how the nurses were so excited that the baby had black hair. (Apparently Scottish babies arrive bald.)  PDD opted for a natural birth (no drugs), and smugly admitted that she yelled a lot during the worst hour. 

PDD also praised her husband for all the hard work that he does. In the mornings he takes the baby for a walk, so the wife-mother can sleep, and then he goes to work. When he comes home from work, he takes charge of the baby again. PDD is not engaged in paid work right now, so she believes that FPSL works much harder than she does. (N.B. PDD is up several times a night feeding her baby.) 

What a blessing to have a happy young family in our flat and to serve them tea and cake. After their visit, we volunteered to walk them to the bus stop, and as we were all busying ourselves with bags, boots and baby buggy, I chanced to look in the abandoned sitting-room. The coffee table was bedecked with my best china and the whole room looked beautiful. 

Maybe the longer we live here and the more young folk who come and go, leaving happy memories,  the more and more I will like the flat. 

IRONY ALERT: I start an exercise class tomorrow, so I have bought two pairs of leggings. I promise not to wear them in the street, let alone the at the Most Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. 

Screens are Bad, Friends are Good

Two article that I wrote last week created a stir, and I was up late on both Friday night and Saturday night watching developments on social media. As a result, I slept very badly both nights, leading to a decidedly unfunny comedy of errors this morning as I attempted to get both to Mass and the late morning train to Montreal.

My parents were quiet but very helpful and possibly reflected that I need more sleep and less coffee. On the other hand, they might have been thinking, "Why is she so often like this?"

At least they couldn't have blamed my going out at night because I didn't go out on Friday or Saturday night because I was working late--ha!

Saturday was nevertheless lovely because I went to an RCIA ceremony at one of the Oratorian parishes, and then to brunch, and then visited my best-friend-with-four-children, and then, as the children were usually sedate and her father and husband were both as home, I stole her away.

"Where are you going?" demanded the boys.

"To do secret woman stuff," replied their father and I both at the same time.

The boys hated this answer, but we grown-ups just laughed cruelly.

Those children aren't allowed the internet, so I will reveal that we walked down a now-fashionable street, looking for somewhere to have a mid-afternoon alcoholic beverage.

"Where do you usually go on [this street]?" I asked my friend-with-four-children.

"Nowhere," she said.

My friend rarely leaves home now. When she does, it is only after a monumental struggle with coats or snowsuits, bags, toys, strollers or prams, and an increasing number of small but wriggly people.  I must say, though, that she was very well put together for a prison break. She wore jeans, a striped black-and-white French top and a red cardigan. She is one of those tall, slim women who still looks good in jeans after 30, even after giving birth four times. If I didn't love her so much, I would be eating my liver with envy.

We had our secret-woman-stuff drink in a Polish-Canadian bar--the bartender said it was "very Polish and very Canadian," so who am I to say it wasn't? (Besides, I seem to recall eating pierogis there on one of my visits. Also, it serves Zywiec and Tyskie. Okay, I'm convinced.)  I ordered a Bloody Caesar on the grounds that there is no more Canadian a drink than vodka adulterated with clam juice. It came with greenery sprouting out of it.

"Is that a bean?" I demanded.

"Good Lord," said my friend. "I think it is  a bean."

It was a bean. It was green string bean. Craziness!

When we had finished our drinks and our serious discussion, I walked my friend home and then took the subway train home myself. Then I sat down and, as I promised my editor, worked away at another  important story.

Music Festivals and the Power of Parents

I once had a dream in which I discovered I had given birth to two daughters in my 20s and completely forgotten about them.  

As far as I know, I've never even been pregnant, but apparently I can have lost-child dreams anyway. The two girls--who looked nothing like me--were now at university, doing very un-me degrees like Mathematics. They were very unhappy to meet their long-lost fictional mother. 

"Where were you? Why did you leave us?" they demanded as I desperately tried to remember giving birth to them. 

I woke up next to B.A. crying my eyes out.  Poor B.A. We were on holiday in either Rome or Barcelona at the time. Probably Barcelona. It was very hot. 

The moral of that story is that never having children is sad and can haunt you for years afterwards, but it doesn't kill you, of course, and you just go on with your life.* You might even think about parenting decisions in a dispassionate sort of way and say, "If we had kids, I wouldn't let them...." to your husband. If you're smart you don't share these thoughts with actual, you know, parents.

But if I had kids, I wouldn't let them go to music festivals (with one exception). While pondering the horrible death of a Scottish TV star's daughter at "Bestival", I considered the great discomfort of British music festivals. Our soggy island has several mass concert events held in fields, and naturally it rains a lot here, so thousands of (predominantly urban) young people are forced to camp cheek-by-jowl in the mud. 

"It sounds very uncomfortable," I said.

"That's why everybody there drinks and take drugs," said B.A. 

"If we had kids, I wouldn't let them go to music festivals," I said. "Except one. 'You want to go to a music festival? Fine. You can go to Bayreuth and listen to Wagner for three days. Have fun.'"

Thinking about my friends who really do have children, I was quite heartened by the power and influence parents actually have. The children I know in traditional Catholic circles, including the teenagers, seem to be on the obedient side and go along with their parents' rules about the World. I'm never really sure they get my pop culture references as they don't watch television, surf the internet, or read Harry Potter. Instead they read gazillions of books published before 1963, draw, paint, camp, sing, play piano, play outdoors, compose and perform plays, go uncomplainingly (and in some cases enthusiastically) to Mass, make home films and, above all, do their schoolwork. 

I assume these incredibly healthy, intelligent and personable (if sometimes naughty) children are the way they are because THE authorities in their lives are their mothers and fathers, with some carefully chosen teachers and scout leaders as the parents' loyal auxiliaries. The parents, being very well educated as well as loving and clever, refuse to cede their authority to the television, radio, internet, celebrities, or super-cool priests who "love kids". Having all the money on their side, they refuse to buy electronic babysitters. They also keep a sharp eye on whose children their children play with.  

A quick survey of my trad friends-with-kids turns up at least two lawyers and some university professors/lecturers, incidentally. They are smart, smart like the Silicon Valley millionaires who don't let their kids use the internet either. 

I say all this not to judge parents whose children drink and drug at music festivals, for I do not know their circumstances, and they themselves may have been abandoned by their parents to the television, newspapers and stupid magazines. They may have also been told so many times that they have little power (and should have little power) in the lives of their children that they believe it.  

No, I am writing all this out to proclaim that modern parents have an enormous amount of power as long as they are vigilant and don't cede it to someone else. The maxim that teenagers always rebel against their parents is untrue. When a teenage friend told me that an adult at school once asked her how she rebelled against her parents, she was confused. She loved and respected her parents, whom she rightly believed strove for her best interests. Why would she rebel against them? 

Meanwhile, I doubt this girl knows a quarter of what I have to know, thanks to my job, about the insanity of modern society. She would shocked and horrified to discover that an increasing number of girls her age want to take hormones and get surgery to "become boys". She would be mystified that a driving engine behind this trend is the so-called "transgender Youtube stars" PMS-bloated girls obsessively watch. Does she even know what Youtube is? (Hmm...) Does she have a mobile phone? (Scratches head.)

As a matter of fact, I am not myself a Wagner fan, so I would be open to some musical festival other than Bayreuth, as long as it was not characterised by sex, drugs, or rock-and-roll. Apparently there is a Monteverdi festival in Cremona every May. 

(Oooh...and a Bach festival in Leipzig in June.)

You may point out that the girl who died at Bestival was a day short of her 25th birthday. To that I reply that nobody gets to the age of 25 in a cultural vacuum. The child is mother to the woman, and a child brought up to despise decadence will probably still despise it at 24. 

*Another moral to the story: don't name children before they're even conceived. The imaginary girls in my dream had names I had picked out in case they came into existence one day.  How disturbing was that? I'll tell you: extremely. 

Advent 2: Black Currant Vodka

The Advent Candelabra is my Christmas present from B.A.! 

Some years ago, when Polish Pretend Son expressed unhappiness at being unable to smoke indoors at certain dinner parties, I rashly promised to buy a flat he could smoke in. It was, of course, a joke. However, now that Benedict Ambrose and I have our own home there is no ordinance forbidding PPS from smoking indoors, and it does seem inhospitable to forbid it, especially after years of promising PPS he could smoke indoors when we left the Historical House.

B.A. flip-flopped on the issue. First he said "No". Then, during the merriment of a Schola dinner party on Friday night, he said "Yes."  Then on Sunday he said, "Pipes only."  And, thus, PPS went out for his customary cigarette between meat and pudding, and then when pudding (piernik [gingerbread cake] & mazurek królewski  [ornate jam tart] ) was sufficiently demolished, no fewer than three guests lit their pipes.

Welcome to Traddieland.

The fact that we are no longer at the Historical House is most dramatically illustrated by fire. For nine years, we could not light a match indoors, lest Scotland's Treasure burn to the ground. Not only could no-one smoke indoors (and indeed had to go down three flights of old stone staircase to smoke outdoors), we could not light candles, not even on a birthday cake.

I bought my first box of matches in over a decade at Tesco on Saturday, and (excluding the gas hob) fire was introduced to our home yesterday evening when we lit two purple Advent candles on the dining-room table. And then, after the carrot soup, the roast chicken, roast potatoes, gravy and peas--and PPS's cold outdoor cigarette break--I lit two numerical candles on PPS's gingerbread birthday cake. From the expression on his face, I guessed PPS had mixed feelings about his age confronting him in candle form.

"Can you believe PPS is [redacted]?" I wailed later to the Schola Bass. "He used to be 23!"

"I never think that way," said the Schola Bass cheerfully and took his Hobgoblin beer to the sitting-room so I could clear up.

This morning I counted the bottles. We were expecting seven guests, but in the end we had only five. The seven of us still managed to get through three bottles of red wine, one and a half of white, three (four?) 500-ml bottles of homemade apple cider, three bottles of Hobgoblin , some blackcurrant vodka and some blackcurrant vodka liqueur. That's actually rather abstemious for Scotland. Oh, and five of us had gin-and-tonics before supper, naturally.

B.A. and I made the apple cider, of course, and the more he drank it, the more B.A. liked it. He usually thinks it is too dry, but I think it's lovely. It tastes beautifully of apples.

I made the blackcurrant vodka and the liqueur myself. It was easy. In July 2017, I picked a bagful of black currants from their parent bushes, washed and dried them, put them in a big preserving jar, poured over a big bottle of vodka, and left them alone until Saturday night. On Saturday night, I poured out the liquid, pulverised the swollen blackcurrants, and squished the rest of their vodka/juice through cheesecloth. Then I turned half of the result into liqueur by adding simple syrup and putting the sweetened liquid in two nice bottles.

"You're a real housewife," said Polish Pretend Daughter-in-law, and I felt very pleased. This is a development. I grew up in two of the only three decades in human history when being a housewife was considered shameful, so naturally I never wanted to be one. I was also highly annoyed with PPS on some advanced birthday of my own when I mourned not having a "proper job" and he suggested I make vodka cordials instead. But that was before I stayed a a friend's home in Poland and discovered how important cook/build/pick/brew/distill-it-yourself is in Polish culture.

Now that I have a "proper job" instead of freelancing,  I love all the super old-fashioned housewifely things--like making flavoured vodka and apple cider--I do in what's left of my free time after language studies. And annoying as dusting-and-hoovering is, it is less annoying now that I make an annual salary, too.

PPS and PPDIL both live in Poland now; this was just a weekend visit. The newlyweds were feted from the West End to the New Town to our humble neighbourhood, and at about 10 PPDIL fell asleep on the bed in the corner of our dining room. I found this perfectly sensible, for many a time have I crept away from Schola dinner parties, the men wreathed in smoke and shouting about clerical and musical personages from the halcyon days before their Tiber swims, to fall asleep on the coats on the Bass's bed. As far as I know, I was the only guest ever to do this, so I felt that PPDIL, covered in a beautiful Russian shawl under a cloud of pipe smoke, was a real chip off the Pretend Canadian Mother block.

The dishes were done by 1 AM, and unsurprisingly, I slept past 10 AM. Then I had much to do to stop the dining-room, which doubles as my office, from smelling of pipe tobacco, and I didn't quite manage it.

I thus hereby create a new ordinance called the Polish Pretend Son Privilege: no smoking anything unless PPS is here. After all, I never promised anyone else a flat he could smoke in.

Update: Traddies will be interested in my review of Dr. Kwasniewski's latest book, which I compare to piernik, not because he is Polish-American, but because I had gingerbread on the brain.

Dinner Party Reflections 2

I forgot, when I sat down at my keyboard this morning, that I meant to praise dinner parties as a great joy in life. Naturally I've done this before, but as it happens, the Stoics liked them, too. It wasn't for the food and drink, of course, that Stoics loved parties, but for the friendships.

The Anglo-Saxons thought of the after-life as an endless dinner in the celestial mead-hall, or so it seems in the Dream of the Rood.  There is quite a lot of feasting in the works of Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, but eating alone is frowned upon---even dangerous, if you recall what happened to Edmund after pigging out on Turkish delight.

(By the way, real Turkish delight is much, much better than that dreck you tried at your local candy store.)

Sometimes Benedict Ambrose fusses about the work involved in cooking dinner for six to eight people, and sometimes I respond by saying that my mother cooked dinner for six to eight people for over twenty years. When B.A. is on his game, he doubts that these were three-to-four course dinners, which is pretty accurate, except at Thanksgiving and Christmas.

But my more profound point is that I  ate supper around a table with other people until my third year at university, when I moved downtown. Therefore, every dinner was, to a certain extent, a dinner party. And if (for various reasons) you don't have children in the house, the best substitute is a regular number of dinner parties with adults of varying ages but relatively uniform interests.

My last dinner party involved six adults aged between 18 and 50-something, and we were all interested in traditional Catholic and Orthodox liturgies and music to a certain degree. We had something fun and liturgical to watch on my computer after pudding, and occasionally someone burst into song, which was never allowed at my family dinner table, although G.K. Chesterton valued singing at the dinner table very highly. Two of the guests were Polish, so occasionally I was asked for the English word to some homely object (cooking pot, which I knew) or concept (being disabled, which I didn't). I asked them to name some ancient Slavic tunes.

Very often at our dinner parties I miss out on great slices of dinner party chat, for I'm away back in the kitchen, washing up the soup bowls and dinner plates between courses so that I'm not up too late afterwards. However, this time, I stuck around from soup to nuts (or, this time, soup to violet creams) and enjoyed the merriment wholeheartedly.

The joy of dinner parties occurred to me while reading A Guide to the Good Life, perhaps prompted by an invitation to ponder what I enjoy most in my ordinary life. I would have to include also visits to and from my family, and travel to and through Italy and Poland, and the Traditional Latin Mass. Then coffee, good books, and successful conversations in foreign languages. Letter-writing, sending presents to children, and conversations with unusually intelligent and/or personable children, too.

I prefer sending gifts to children to giving them in person, for children are terribly honest. If your present is a dud, they will not be able to hide their disappointment. But if you send a present, it is usually their parents who respond, and they are always politely enthusiastic.

Polish Pretend Son and Daughter-in-Law's Midnight Wedding Ritual

Polish Minimalism. 

After Polish Pretend Son's wedding service (ślub, pronounced shloop) and nuptial Mass, he drove off with his bride in the rented white Corvette they had arrived in and the rest of us followed to a charming 19th century palace-turned-hotel for the reception (wesele,  pronounced ves-SEL-eh).

The little hotel was for the "exclusive use" of the wedding, as adverts say, and it is very elegant indeed, having been lovingly restored by its Polish owners from the decrepit state the palace had fallen into after its former German occupants had fled westwards. There are lots of ruined little German palaces dotted all over western Poland, and as soon as B.A. and I win the lottery, we will buy and restore one ourselves. 

In keeping with the aristocratic nature of this dwelling/hotel, the wedding feast was a Polish-French hybrid, with a late afternoon, rather French, dinner served in the elegant dining rooms and a side room groaning with every Polish dish you can imagine in case anyone felt the slightest hint of a pang of hunger afterwards. 

What happened after dinner, however, was entirely Polish and very ancient, and even gave me goosebumps. First, the dining-rooms were invaded by Polish minstrels who bade us all perform the ancient Polish walking dance called the chodzony (pronounced hodZONE-ih). We walked out  into a field behind the palace where we were led in the various progressions of the dance as a violin scraped and a hurdy-gurdy groaned. It sounded and felt so ancient, we could have been in any era, were our clothes not so very, er, twentieth century.

Then we all processed back inside, and the bride and groom danced their first dance as wife and husband. As Polish Pretend Son is a tango fanatic and Polish Pretend Daughter-in-Law is very good at dances of all kinds, it was truly an impressive performance. 

At midnight, however, we were plunged back into the Middle Ages, or perhaps even further back, even before Christianity came to Poland, during the oczepiny (pronounced oh-chep-EE-nih). 

Nowadays, oczepiny are usually just a set of games that ritually humiliate the bride and groom in a mild and good-humoured fashion. They remind me of the dumb games American and Canadian women traditionally play at bridal and baby showers. At their worst they are as bad as garter-tossing and other stupid things we Anglos too often do at weddings. 

However the traditional oczepiny involve an elaborate ritual in which the bride is reminded that she is leaving the happiness of her youth and maiden fancy-free living behind and now has to knuckle down and be wifely. Everyone around sings cheerfully. 

Meanwhile, the bridal wreath is taken away from the poor girl and the traditional headscarf of the Polish married woman is forced on her head.  Polish Pretend Daughter-in-Law seems to have second thoughts about this, for she threw her pretty scarf on the floor twice.  I believe rejecting the kerchief is traditional, but PPD-i-L said later that, swept up in the moment, she really meant it. 

The whole thing--including the climax---sent chills up my spine. It wasn't just the fact that the ritual was so otherworldly and ancient. It was also an unusually frank reminder that marriage, like life, is very hard and, in fact, a bit of a gamble, and that if she accepts the wrong man, a bride's life will be unhappy. 

Update: PPS doesn't want his wesele videos public, so I've put up a photo instead:

Update 2: There are no nice photos of me from the okay-for-public-consumption file. It's too bad, but  months of unrelenting stress does that to a woman my age. Now when I see a woman who's "let herself go", I realise that there may have been some inescapable reasons for that. One of the nice things about PPS's wedding, which happened shortly after we were told we couldn't go back to the Historic House, and they wanted their Historic Centre Flat back, thanks, was that we had three days' respite from worry.  

Polish Pretend Son's Wedding Mass

Polish Pretend Son loves the Traditional Mass so much, he hopes this video of his and Polish Pretend Daughter-in-Law's wedding helps to spread devotion to the Rite.

If you watch carefully, you may even see me under an enormous blue hat. (Hint: I am not the pretty Welsh blonde who is also wearing a large blue hat.)

I will have more to post and much more to say about the wedding. Isn't the bride beautiful?

Caveat: There is not a word of English in this video. When it is not Latin, it is Polish. But it is so gorgeous, that shouldn't matter.

Caveat 2: The groom also has fond memories of his years in the UK, so there are some unusually British elements at this Mass. First, Polish women tend not to wear fancy hats to weddings; female guests were specifically asked to wear them. Second, the groom's attire is very Saville Row-ish, if not, as I fear it may be, actually from Saville Row. Third, the entrance antiphon sounds very British indeed.

The bride and groom arriving together to Mass is, however, the normal Polish custom.  The groom has already bribed the bridesmaids at the bride's door, and the bridal pair have been blessed by their parents.

Mirrors

Oh, for the days I blogged for others not for myself. Auntie Seraphic was a lot more cheerful and fun than Mrs McLean, we must admit. Probably more interesting, too. On Saturday evening I began reading a wonderful little book by the Venerable Fulton Sheen, and he said that the beginning of Inner Peace was not talking about yourself.

Let us meditate on that, but also on mirrors, for today I was thinking about the faces my mirrors have reflected. Not mine. My face I have taken with me to St. Benedict Over the Apple Tree, but alas the mirrors that have reflected more beautiful and younger faces I have had to leave behind.

Moving is one of the most stressful things you can do, but moving when you didn't want to move is even worse. Although my rational brain knows we didn't leave because of an invading army or natural disaster, my reptile brain doesn't seem to know that. Today I told myself it wasn't like the Highland Clearances until I realised that it was exactly like the Highland Clearnaces in that the wicked landlords had a legal right to shove the poor peasants off the land.

The poor Highlanders took what they could carry and watched the rest go up in flames. The poor McLeans are taking what will fit in their two-bedroom walk-up and slowly divesting themselves of everything else. Two pieces of furniture of which I am (despite becoming minimalist) still very fond are my 1930s vanity table and the ornate mirrored set of drawers on the landing, and neither of them will fit in S-BOAT, so I must say good-bye, not only to them but to the memories they evoke.

Both the vanity and the "hall table," as we imprecisely called the ornate, barley-twisted thing, remind me of wonderful dinner parties and weekends or full weeks with out-of-town guests. The hall table was one of the first things guests would see when they got to the top of the stone staircase. Men would put their hats and scarves on it, and the ones who cared checked their pomaded hair in the mirror. My mother and I, at 40-odd and 60-odd, once contemplated our ageing selves in it, and I saw my grandfather looking out from both of our faces, which was rather disconcerting.

The vanity table was useful for the ladies, usually pretty young ladies, staying in the best guest room. It was a rather feminine and dainty little room before the Deluge changed our lives, and now it has the porcelain wreckage of our destroyed bathroom strewn all over the now carpet-less floor. Sometimes, mid-dinner party, I would woozily reapply my lipstick behind the shut door, and hear the Bass (who has a heavy tread) tromp along the hall from the dining-room to whatever bottle awaited him in the sitting-room.

The Historical House is too well-kept to be a haunted house, and I hope and pray none of its occupants or guests are ever reduced to earth-bound spectres. However, it would be jolly if the noise of one of our dinner parties somehow soaked into the walls and oozed out again every once in awhile so that, were anyone standing at the bottom of the correct staircase at midnight, we would again be audible. Great bursts of guffaws and giggles would be optimal, but I would settle for the Bass's tromp-tromp-tromp to the sitting-room, which would scare the living daylights out of anyone at 10 PM at night in an empty manor house.

Another jolly haunting would be if the reflection of one (or all of) our pretty young guests popped out  from the vanity table mirror once in awhile. Some poor student would be innocently gluing on her fake eyelashes when all of a sudden there Polish Pretend Daughter's face would be beside the student's face in the mirror. If you don't want to be this student, try not to buy a vanity table from and Edinburgh Bethany Shop in the next few months, that's what I advise.

And now I shall write about the excellence of chickens.

 

The Marble Run & Adult Conversation

We have returned from our friends' delightful farmhouse, having had a lovely time and a 28 hour fast from the internet. B.A. doesn't have much energy these days, so he sat in sunbeams or by the fire and read "The Spectator" magazine while I cuddled the hens, or read Polish, or went for a walk, or discussed the stages of apple cider brewing.

While we were reading, a young family turned up, and eventually I found myself upstairs with a four year old, a two year old, and torture device called a "Marble Run." The torture part of the device is putting the blasted thing together.

Downstairs the young mother of these handsome children was having a chat with our mutual friend at the farmhouse kitchen table, and as I struggled with the not-particularly-helpful blueprints to the Marble Run, I was reminded of my mother's deep longing, in the 1970s, for Adult Conversations. 

Not to brag, but I have Adult Conversations all the time. These are usually work conversations, but before I had daily work conversations, I could pop across the Historical Fields to a similarly underemployed neighbour's house for an Adult Conversation about European travel, poetry in translation, or what have you.

My mother would very much have liked to have locked us all up in a closet and gone to a neighbour's for Adult Conversations, but she wasn't that sort of mother, so she didn't do it. But she did moan about how boring childish prattle is, and I admit that it can be, especially when you think of children not as children but as very short and obtuse adults. 

The way forward, I feel, speaking as someone who spends almost no time at all with them, is to remember that children have their own weird psychology, and if you can't put together the ghastly Marble Run, they will not hold it against you for life, or mention it at the next dinner party you're not invited to. 

In fact, a two year old and a four year old can be fobbed off for a pretty long time just with rolling a marble along a piece of plastic track, which in itself seems to be impressive. What children apparently want, besides telling you how old they are and what their parents' real names are (i.e. besides Mummy and Daddy), is a friendly adult person to entertain them with bits of plastic. 

Still, it's hard to lose the feeling that you're letting down the adult side by not being able to construct a Marble Run. By the time supper was announced, I had had quite enough of not being able to fulfil expectations of adult competency. I took comfort from the thought that the children would forget as soon as they had something to think about, i.e. supper and which parts of it they wanted to eat. 

The point of playing games made of plastic with children, I thought, is really to give their parents some time off, so that they can have some Adult Conversations, perhaps with other parents. But then I got my own reward, which was the feeling, after dinner, when we were still all around the table, of somebody under the table trying to remove my slippers. 

Paradoxical as it may sound, two year olds and four year olds do not try to steal the slippers off the feet of adults they don't like. No, they save such felonies for adults that are worth bothering about. It is thus a wonderful compliment to discover that some pint-sized sneak is removing one's footwear. And it is also an opportunity to play my favourite game with children, which is "I'm A Scary Monster Who Has Got Your Leg and Is Going To Pop Off Your Head." 

Naturally I thought a lot about Booklover's plight of wanting to make friend with Catholic mothers and have proper conversations with them that do not involve children. But I also thought about Catholic mothers, and how lonely they can be from day to day, and how little time they have to have any Adult Conversations at all. 

There were more young families at Mass today than usual (hooray!), and the young mothers and fathers, who seemed to be covered in children, talked happily together. I chatted briefly with a university student, a grandmother, a young mum I hadn't met before, a young dad I hadn't met before,  an old bachelor, a pregnant married lady who (alas!) is going back with her husband to their native country, her husband, her mother and her father.  And B.A. and I got a ride home from Mass from our  hostess, so we had another lovely conversation with her. 

I think one of the solutions to the no-Catholic-female-friends problem, as annoying is this will sound, is patience. When I first arrived as a bride in Edinburgh almost 10 years ago, I had no female Catholic friends here. But now I have many and a bunch of acquaintances that might also become friends, if and when they have time for Adult Conversations. Sometimes it just takes time.