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.

Legal in Poland

Emptying the Attic Flat in the Historical House, aka Our Home of Nine Years, has been a difficult and painful job. Thank heavens I read Marie Kondo in 2017 and spend considerable time and effort getting rid of as much stuff as I could part with. Had I not done this, emptying the Attic Flat, which is at least twice the size of our new flat, would have been even more daunting. 

So far we have called a Man & Van service twice, a dear friend has brought over 2 carloads of stuff, another dear friend has helped move boxes of books down the stairs, into her car and then into her own cellars twice, and this morning three young men from a removals company turned up and took away everything we didn't want. 

By then the Attic Flat was looking rather empty. As B.A. showed the men around to tell them what not to take away, I suddenly remembered Something Illegal I had hurried shoved on the bedroom shelf weeks ago.

"Ahem," I said. "We have um, an illegal thing from Poland, that was left by a Polish guest, that um, forgot it was illegal here and um...."

"Oho!" exclaimed the leader of the removals gang, who all had Easter Road accents, such as I personally only ever hear in the Easter Road football stadium. "Whatever you do, don't give it to---."

But it was too late for an eager hand shot up and seized the Illegal Thing and curious eyes looked briefly at the word "Policjny" on the label before the Illegal Thing disappeared into a deep pocket. And I seriously hope it has permanently joined nunchucks and a ninja star and various other curios on a shelf or box for showing off to friends instead of being earmarked as a Friday night companion. 

The other object of interest to the removals gang that I know of was also left by the Polish guest. The leader of the gang found it on a shelf in the now ex-library and asked me if I wanted it. It was a small white statue of a famously ugly philosopher having a think, and I did not want it. 

"Who is it?" asked the leader.

"Socrates," I said. 

"Who?" 

"The Greek philosopher."

"I like it," said the mover. "I'll keep it on my desk." 

It is amusing to wonder what other flotsam and jetsam disappeared into pockets as I knelt in the ex-dining room wrapping up wine glasses. I was called in to examine the hall wardrobe (which belongs to theHouse and when we finally found the key, we found an elderly newspaper inside) because it was filled with too many nice jackets. There were at least four fleeces and three tweed coats, a moth-eaten university scarf, a pair of old shoes and a rather good brown waxed jacket.  I was pretty sure that B.A. had abandoned them, but the leader of the moving gang thought they were too good to throw away.

"My husband hasn't thrown any clothes out since uni," I said but phoned B.A. anyway to be sure. He was sure--he had already brought as many tweed jackets, shoes, scarves, etc., that he thought would fit. So it is also amusing to imagine the gang in front of the House trying on B.A.'s pale green tweed jackets for size. The boys were wiry rather than muscular, so they might actually have fit. 

And now the Historical Attic is empty, save for two piles of stuff (mostly wine-glasses), the repro-Jacobean sideboard, the china cabinet and nine blessed palm crosses we haven't burnt yet. Blessed palm crosses are a pain as one cannot just throw them out, of course. Some years ago my mother banned them from her house, and now I can see why.   

What You Need to Be a Journalist

I was asked the other day what one needs to be a journalist in the UK.

To be precise, the question was "What I need if I want to be journalism in UK?", so my first answer could have been "Fluency in English." However the questioner was serious, so instead I replied that that was a difficult question to answer as the profession had changed so much. 

"Excellent English skills are key," I warned.

My questioner thought this amusing and admitted that her English was poor.  However, she was willing to learn. 

"If you want to do journalism in the UK, your best chance--if you can fix your English to a C1 level--is through contacts in the Catholic Church," was my next advice.  

That may sound odd, but I was writing to a Catholic who, in her small way, is a mover and a shaker and a founder of pious groups. Moreover,  Catholics still subscribe to and publish newspapers while all around us mainstream media streamlines and collapses.  I suspect that when The Scotsman is no longer printed on paper, there will still be a plethora of Catholic newspapers for sale at the back of Sacred Heart, Lauriston Place.

"Why do you want to be a journalist?" was my next question. "It is badly paid. Especially in the Church." 

"I like writing," she said simply. 

Well, there is no arguing with that. I like writing, too. You have to like writing to be a print journalist--there's no way around it. You have to like reading as well, and if you don't like phoning people up and asking them difficult questions, you have to get used to it. You also have to do the hard slog of transcribing interviews, either your own or someone else's. It's very detail-oriented, but at least it's working with words. 

There are two ways to break into the industry that I know of. The first is to volunteer for your school newspaper and then go to journalism school. Presumably J-school arranges internships for you and, I sincerely hope, helps you to find a job after graduation. 

The second, and more traditional, is not to go to journalism school but to write all the time and then fall into journalism by accident, which is what I more-or-less did. I sold a couple of pieces to the National Post when it still paid top dollar for content in the then-splendid Arts section, and then I stepped into the breach when a books editor in a Catholic newspaper wanted one of my professors to write a book review. She didn't have time, so she asked me to do it.  I think I was paid $50. I'm not sure. It may have been $40. Perhaps less. But that's not the point at first.

The point at first is getting something you've written into print in a respected newspaper or magazine and to keep doing it, keeping track of all your articles on your CV until you have your own column, at which point you keep track on your CV of how long your column lasts and where else it appeared.  

Starting out may mean writing for free, just as you did for the high school newspaper and do now on your blog. (If you don't have a blog by now, you're not cut out for journalism.) There is no shame in not being paid; just make sure your work is appearing in a respected newspaper or magazine. (By respected I mean a newspaper or journal people are--or a Bishop is--willing to pay for.)  

Editors like new writers, especially if the new writers use spellcheck, understand the principles of grammar and style, and write with the editors' own audience in mind. This means pitching articles about golf to the editor of a golfing magazine and articles about quails to the editor of a poultry-keepers magazine. It also means checking a bunch of back issues to make sure nobody else has written on your theme recently already. 

When it comes to religion and politics, it is a good idea to be in sympathy with the most dearly held views of the editors. It amuses me greatly to think that once upon a time I had the bona fides to write for America. (I never attempted it, mind you.) There is some ideological wiggle-room with some of the papers---the ones whose editors sincerely believe they want "balance"---but a good rule of thumb is to pitch to journals you actually read and enjoy reading. 

I hasten to add that I am talking about opinion or informational pieces, not fiction or poetry. As I will never forget, I once sent a short story to my favourite indie arts journal and got a staggering rejection from the general editor, who asked if I had ever read the journal. I think that was in the 1990s, and it hurts to this day. The only advice I have there is "Don't give up"--although personally I have given up for the time being. 

This reminds me: to be a journalist you need to develop a thick skin. Many people do not like journalists, and some verbally abuse journalists by name in print. Sometimes you have to write unpleasant but important news about somebody many people like, and then those people get nasty on Twitter. You may also be called upon to be as politically incorrect as you can be within the narrowing laws, and this means a difficult and careful walk on the thin line between cowardice and hardheartedness. It's tough. It is probably much easier to test recipes for Chatelaine magazine: what a good gig that must be. 

The Excellence of Chickens

It is a truth universally acknowledged that anyone in Britain who can afford it should buy a little place in the country for the weekend repose and relaxation of his or her friends. Fortunately for us, we have such dutiful friends, and on Saturday after B.A. went to work, I went to the railway station where I missed my train by approximately 15 seconds.

Fortunately there was another train, so after a noisy cry (during which a foreign young man tried to comfort me, thus underscoring how very foreign he must have been), I got on it and went to my friend's little place in the country, which is half farmhouse and half Georgian grandeur.

To be precise, I went to the railway station nearest this Eden, and after my friend took me to her house, she remembered the dog food she had bought near the station, so she drove back to get it, leaving me in the chicken shed.

The chicken shed is a kind of large wooden box, about 7 feet high and 14 feet long and wide, with a plank outer door to the world and a chicken-wire inner door to the chickens, who live in one of two pens. Despite all this glorious space, there are only three of them. They are Rhode Island Reds and beautiful.

It was sunny, and as I stood among the chickens, who clucked and scratched away at the straw around my Wellington boots, I looked out through the open outer door at my friend's black lab sitting in the grass and beyond him (and a little to the left) at my friend's black-and-white cat sitting under a bush.

It was very, very peaceful.

After I fed the chickens, I went out both doors and around to their run and took the rock and the screen away from their pop-hole so they could enjoy grubbing around their orchard. They are enormously lucky hens in that their run contains at least one apple tree, so they can peck at apples or apple-eating bugs all they like. They also enjoy scratching at the earth while chuckling in a manner very soothing to the human ear.

And I thought that if you spend hours and hours every day in such worldly toils and cares as (for example) writing your 15th article about the McCarrick scandal, one excellent antidote is to spend some time with chickens, watching them peck and scratch in their tiny-brained way.  Minus chickens, it might be almost as relaxing as to play with blocks with toddlers. Watching chickens all day might become as boring as I'm told it is to play with toddlers all day, but as a change from brainwork both are excellent.

Another excellent thing to do is go on long walks through the Scottish countryside with the hospitable friend, who is wearing bright rain jacket so neither of you is mistaken for a duck/grouse/deer and shot. You walk over hill and under dale and climb over fallen trees (or crawl under fallen trees) and fall in the mud and get deliciously tired before dark and sitting down to a splendid supper. Naturally before eating you put the screen and the rock in front of the pop-hole after having checked that the chickens are all now companionably roosting together in a great feathery squash.

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.

 

A Nun's Cell

I'm still sharing office space with boxes, which is why this post seems so poignant.

When I think of my idea living space, it's a white-washed cell in a beautiful house shared with others--a Victorian house, with a polished wooden staircase, wooden floors, a sitting-room with old furniture and a Turkish carpet, a dining-room and a cheerfully tiled kitchen. 

In short, it's a small non-cloistered convent in Toronto, only with family and friends in it instead of women religious. Apologies to the women religious and to women religious in general! 

Before my husband got so sick, I thought--should I be widowed relatively young--I might have a late vocation to a cloistered convent. But while B.A. was in serious danger of death, I knew that I did not. But it does seem like such a beautifully spare way to live! 

 

Owning versus Renting

I have been reading Early Retirement blogs, not because I want to retire early, but because I don't want to be desperately poor when I do. Dancing gaily through life writing this and that, picking up various lifestyle university degrees, and then running away to a foreign country has been fun but impecunious. It would have been a good idea to have read Early Retirement blogs when I was 19 and lived off dividends from age 32, but there were no blogs when I was 19 and the possibility never occurred to me.

Having read quite a lot of Early Retirement Extreme and Mr Money Moustache,  I have recently been reading  Millennial Revolution, which is based in Toronto. The authors, being from Toronto, absolutely loathe the idea of buying a house. Instead of buying a house in Toronto, which can plunge the average person into almost a million dollars in debt,  Mr and Mrs Millennial Revolution put all their savings into stocks and bonds, rode out the 2008 crash, and retired when Mrs MR was 31.

As I read the Millennial Revolution's nightmare articles about their-friends-who-bought-houses-in-Toronto, I ponder whether or not it was a mistake to buy a home near Edinburgh instead of whacking all our savings into stocks and bonds and renting. After all, even as homeowners we can still hear people coughing or yelling on the other sides of the walls. Pinning someone down to fix the roof was a chore, too.

When, this summer, I began to doubt the buying project, Benedict Ambrose argued that paying rent instead of a mortgage was akin to setting the money on fire instead of investing it.  Also--this is not true in Canada--when you rent a flat in the UK, you still have to pay a kind of property tax to the government anyway. It's called "council tax". When we were the proud "key-holding" tenants of the Historical House, we weren't paying council tax only because B.A.'s employers were paying it for us. (I found this out only after the Deluge drove us from our home.)

Eventually I sat down with a pen and paper and calculated that, given our relatively small mortgage and relatively small council taxes, it did make more economic sense for us to buy a flat in our modest (but not crime-plagued) neighbourhood than to rent. Even locally monthly rent on a two-bedroom flat is more than our monthly mortgage payment.

Meanwhile, in the United Kingdom, if you invest in a Help-to-Buy ISA (Investment Savings Account) at a bank, the UK government actually pays you a whopping percentage (20%) of what you put in. It is free money (supplied by the taxpayers) to bribe/help people in the UK to buy their first homes.

Therefore the answer to the question "Should I buy or rent?" seems to be another question: "What does it cost to live where we work?"

Where B.A. works--a ten minute train journey from the glorious Georgian facades of Edinburgh--property prices are relatively low: you can buy a two-bedroom flat for £120, 000*.

Near where my sister Quinta works, you can buy a miniscule two-"bedroom" condo for $530, 000 Canadian, which is about £311, 290.

Therefore, whereas buying near BA's UK workplace makes sense for a two-income couple, it would make less sense for Quinta to buy near her own Toronto workplace.

My gosh. I have just looked up property prices in my parents' neighbourhood and my eyes almost fell out of my head. Teeny-weeny bungalows going for $1,400,000 (£821,975).  Less than that would get you this in Edinburgh.

*Theoretically. In Scotland, all homes are sold by blind auction. You tell your solicitor how much you are willing to offer (which means all the money you can spare plus whatever mortgage you have "in principle" from a lender) on the closing date and then wait and see if your offer was the best. So if you want to buy a £120,000 flat and you know there are 5 other people who want to buy it, you shut your eyes, bid £130,000, and pray that if you win, you couldn't have won by bidding £127,000 instead.