How I Worked Against Stress This Week

Yesterday I skimmed a lawyer's cease-and-desist letter, said "Not my problem", sent it to my editors and went sailing out to exercise class. This is probably not what the author thought would happen. However, I had had a glorious week fighting the good fight against stress. Here's what I did:

1. I cut back to one cup of coffee a day.
2. I got up between 5:30 AM and 6 AM every day.
3. I went to 10 exercise classes (12 including the classes I went to after opening the lawyer's email).
4. I began reading L'Art de la Liste by Dominique Loreau.
5. I wrote a lot of lists, and they were very cathartic, just like the book promised.
6. I finished transferring my savings to my dad (a three day process) to wire to me here in the UK, so that I can (A) put down an annual overpayment on the mortgage and (B) pay my accountant his surprise fee.
7. I said the Rosary before the Blessed Sacrament three days in a row.
8. I spent a few hours in the garden, weeding, mowing and chopping.
9. I had my blonde eyebrows weeded, mowed, chopped and dyed approximately the same colour as my hair.
10. I stayed off the internet before work, except to check emails. (A class was cancelled, and I didn't know because I hadn't checked my email.)
11. I began reading a book about puppy training. Thinking about puppies is tremendously relaxing.
12. I went with B.A. to the local famous ice-cream shop for ice-cream cones one evening.
13. I kept an eye on sugar--which means that I stuck to fruit and the occasional serving of ice-cream.
14. I enjoyed the very-rare-in-Scotland warm and sunny weather as much as I could.

This is not to say I had a stress-free week. I freaked out when I discovered I had to pay some taxes AT ONCE and also when I got a confusing and insulting surprise letter from my accountant's firm. ("We have been more than patient...") Anything combining paperwork and money sends me back to the depths of math class/piano practice hell, so that was very unpleasant. However, in general I had a very emotionally healthy week.

It helps that my spin class instructors launch into motivational speeches about how wonderful we are, how this time is for us, how there is no judgement in this room, how our strength begins in our minds, not our bodies, etc. "You are worthy," they yell. "You are enough!"

The Unflipped Switch & Soccer Speak

Can a cloth-eared, introverted native English-speaker who lives in the UK become fluent in a Slavic language?

Finding this out has been my principal hobby for seven years, and I still don't know the answer. I have learned a lot of Polish, though, as well as much information about memory training, bilingualism, cognition, and the imprecise definition of "fluent". 

There's a lot of unsettled science, so I feel free to believe that some people are born simply more talented than others in learning languages, possibly because the two sides of their brain "speak more quickly" to each other. Of course, early training is very important, too. When I think about the multi-lingual members of my family, the big stars are the ones who were put in French immersion schools as children. 

The biggest star, I suspect, is my sister Tertia, who is qualified to teach both French and Spanish, and is going to Italy in August for an Italian course. I am sure she will "smash it," as my Scottish spinning instructor would say. Tertia has everything going for her: early French immersion, a friendly disposition towards chatty strangers, years of experience teaching English abroad (mainly in Spanish-speaking countries), and God-given talent, whatever that is. 

Occasionally I ask fluent non-native speakers of English when they could understand it all, and the most vivid answer came from a gregarious Polish nurse who said that one day a switch just flipped in his brain. I am still waiting for the switch to flip, but I have made gains. 

The most astonishing gain is that I can now hear separate words in any foreign language, instead of just a mush of sounds. Somehow concentrating so much on Polish (and, to a much lesser extent, Italian) has vastly improved my ability to distinguish other foreign words, even when I don't understand what they mean.  

The most useful one is that I can now speak my less-than-standard Polish without feeling horribly self-conscious, which is very important, because "fear is the mind-killer," as says the "Litany Against Fear" in Dune.  This is thanks to my Polish tutor Anna, who says "Spokojnie" (Keep calm), whenever I am frantically searching my brain for some word I know I used to know. 

By the way, it is so much better to find a one-on-one conversation tutor than to take a night class once you have the basic grammar down. For one thing, you get in more speaking practise. For another, nobody laughs at your mistakes. Occasionally fellow students would laugh at my mistakes, and this wasn't helpful. Feeling strong emotion about a mistake does help you remember the correction, says the science, but I don't think this works when you begin to panic every time you try to speak in class. 

On Monday I was still in Poland and spoke almost as much Polish as I could, given that I was working in English on my computer much of the day. I didn't "have" to, of course, because Polish Pretend Son, Polish Pretend Daughter-in-Law and their real family all speak varying degrees of charmingly accented English. (PPDIL says her English is so good because she began learning it at 7.) However, it was a brilliant opportunity to be immersed, and I was grateful that at supper PPS, Mrs PPS and PPS's Real Brother all chatted together po polsku, even  though I understood only about a third of what was said.

I did understand that PPS and his brother had plans to play football that evening, and that his wife was going to go along to watch and hoped I'd come with them. Naturally this was a cultural treasure not to be missed, so I toddled along.

"You'll hear a lot of bad words," warned PPS, and I certainly did, for about twenty Polish men gathered on the village green by the town's five-a-side pitch, and they had to play in shifts. Various words one hears on Edinburgh buses came floating over to where Mrs PPS and I sat admiring PPS and his brother as they ran about after the ball.  PPS's brother is a professional athlete, actually, so he can run a lot faster than PPS, who smokes and drinks, and I was edified to see PPS pass the ball to his brother as Mrs PPS squeaked encouragement from the seats. 

 "Is p****** a very bad word?" I asked PPS the next morning, trotting out one of the words I had learned during his game. 

PPS paused. 

"Yes," he replied austerely.

"Whoops," I said. "Sorry about that." 

This was rather amusing for it followed our discussion about dupa and kupa. My tutor Anna turned green when I once used the word "dupa" (roughly, arse), not being able to remember the proper word for "hips" (biodra, by the way), and when she discovered "kupa" (poo) in the children's story I was reading, she told me to stop reading it. 

PPS said this was puritanical, and I have to admit that it is limiting not to learn relatively off-coloured language because it makes up a certain amount of colloquial speech. For example, on Tuesday morning before driving me to the airport, PPS said that he had kupa pracy to do that day, which roughly translates to "a lot of work" or "a ****load of work," as Catholic lady journalists do not say. 

At the airport, I spoke Polish to all officials although I fell down a bit when I couldn't recall the words for "to the RyanAir desk" fast enough. (Note to self: "do kiosku RyanAir" would probably suffice.) As I stumbled, the young chap at the counter said in a cross tone that he spoke English, and I apologised in English, saying that I preferred to try to speak Polish in Poland.

"Of course that is very nice," he said in the same cheesed-off tone that doesn't necessarily match what the English-speaking Pole in Poland is feeling.

The fruit of this particular anecdote is that I didn't feel suicidal--as I certainly would have two years ago--but cheerfully went to the RyanAir kiosk to have my passport looked at and greeted the man there in Polish. 

"In maybe about seven more years I will be fluent," I had said to PPS.

"Maybe five," he said kindly.  

"Feed My Sheep"

Neither Benedict Ambrose nor I emerged physically unscathed from his little cancer experience. B.A. has a long-term (if not permanent) bump on his head and I have two juicy rolls of belly fat, thanks to the stress and anxiety that B.A.'s tumour brought in its basket for little me. I have to say, though, that it's only fair that if he had to suffer damage, then I had to suffer damage, too, for we are married and therefore one flesh, etc.

However, I object to feeling sad all the time now that B.A. has mostly recovered, so I have cut my sugar intake, plan to get a puppy, and have taken up daily exercise classes.

Sometimes I take two exercise classes a day, and yesterday between one and the other I stopped into a   proper Catholic chapel to spend time with the Lord. My colleagues recommend that people in our line of work go to Mass every day, but the Mass nearest me is depressing, and the TLM is an hour away, and I have to get up before 6 AM even to catch the right train. But anyway I popped into the chapel and prayed my usually gloomy prayers, punctuated with "Lord have mercy." Then it occurred to me that I was wronging Our Lord by constantly addressing him as the Stern Judge. Thus I tried out, "Lord, I love you."

"Feed my sheep," was the response in my head, and then I remembered poor hapless St. Peter being asked three times if he loved the Lord and feeling a bit hurt even though, as we all know, there was reason for doubt.

This morning on my way to another exercise class, I thought that the instruction "Feed my sheep" might mean I am to write something other than The Worse News in the World, and that the one group of people I can really help today with my writing are other Catholic journalists, especially the ones who are fat because they are sad.

I checked this interpretation out with the Lord at the chapel this morning, and the image of a whale appeared in my head, which reminded me of Jonah, so I rushed home after class to get cracking instead of going to the library.

Right. So it has not escaped my notice that a significant number of Catholic journalists and bloggers are overweight, and although there is no doubt this is partly because we sit at a computer for eight hours a day or more, I believe it is also because we are terribly sad. We are terribly sad because we love the Church and the Church is in the middle of a civil war and we feel like the rug was pulled out from under us when Benedict XVI resigned.

It also feels like a hidden trap door opened before us, as we lay sprawling, and all kinds of  scary creatures came pouring out. I don't know if you remember this, but nobody was talking very much about communion-for-civilly-remarried or, heaven knows, celebrating in Church the "special gifts" that supposedly come along with same-sex attraction until October 2014. Here was Benedict, not even cold in his grave, having not actually died, and there were Archbishop Forte and Father Rosica making it up as they went along at the Extraordinary Synod on the Family.

That was well after "Who am I to judge?", which actually I survived pretty well, as I read what Pope Francis actually said, although when I was in Rome soon after that, most of my friends there went about squeaking "Who am I to judge? Who am I to judge?" in falsetto, and if life were Tosca, Scarpia would have shoved us all in a Vatican dungeon.

My little triumphalist Irish Catholic peasant heart didn't break until the mid-term relatio was given to the media, and had Archbishop Gądecki had not stomped over to Vatican Radio to tell the Poles it was all nonsense, I do not know what I would have done. As it was, I got super-drunk.

But we know all this. Ancient history. Since then McCarrick and Wuerl et cetera and et alia. It never ends, and so Catholic journalists--possibly even the ones who are trying to Sing a New Church into Being--are very sad. I am sure the anti-Catholic journalists are having a whale of a time.

So what to do? Well, first, I would recommend that all Catholic bloggers and journalists not turn on our computers until we have done 45 minutes of exercise, gone outdoors and eaten breakfast. (This is where everyone says "I am not a doctor, talk to a doctor before beginning any exercise regimen, etc. etc.")

Second, I would recommend that all Catholic bloggers and journalists give up booze, smokes, coffee, sugar and whatever else makes people more unhealthy and more depressed.

Third, I would recommend that all Catholic bloggers and journalists fast from the internet before and after work hours. Yes, we are all addicts. Of course, we are addicts. Find something that isn't food that is just as interesting as the internet. Last night I decided it was sleep.

Fourth, I would recommend that all Catholic bloggers and journalists make sure we balance our gloomy prayers with happy prayers. Thank God for the sunshine and the rain and the kids in the family and how good you feel having taken up 45 minutes of exercise for the day.

Fifth, I would recommend that all Catholic bloggers and journalists return to fun activities they put aside when they took to their current job or blogging. For me, that would be actually blogging. I like blogging and giving advice and thinking about other people's romances. It's a lot more fun than writing about the latest homosexual bishop to be found covering up his favourite's homosexual sex abuse.

Sixth, I would recommend that all Catholic bloggers and journalists read and write about all the filth only when we have to--and we DO have to, since we are the fumigators of the Church, and nobody else will do the stinky job--and the rest of the time read and write about lovely things.

Seventh, set a timer and get up every 20 minutes to move around although NOT TO SNACK.

This last point is for me, since I find myself in the kitchen several times a day, usually while reading something particularly horrible I'm going to have to write about even though Christine Niles already did a fine job and I have nothing new to add.

Well, I hope this is helpful to someone. I am now now going to check my work email to see what new horrors have been unleashed on the Church and the world.

Magaluf versus Milan

The one periodical that slips weekly through our letterbox is The Spectator, and so I was distressed this morning to read that James Delingpole, a personal hero, is allowing his daughter to go to a place known colloquially as "Shagaluf." The expensively-educated girl is 18, and so I am tempted into every parent's very favourite thing: the childless person's opinion of it all.

First, though, I should say that my distress is not untinged by envy because when I was 16 or 17, I very badly wanted to go to Italy to do an intensive course in Italian. My mother said no, and although this may have been partly because there was no money for this (which didn't really occur to me), I know it was because she had antiquated notions of what Italian men were like. 

Having recently read the reminiscences of a British woman her age about travelling to Italy with girls from her school in the 1960, I am more sympathetic now to her fears. Also, one of the first things that happened when I finally travelled alone to Florence at age 28 was that a complete stranger tried to pick me up using quite astonishingly bold lies. Finally, if I had had the gumption necessary for international social survival, I would have defied my mother, made all the arrangements, obtained a cheque book, paid for the term myself from my very hard-won earnings (if I had them), and then presented the permission slip after saying it was all paid for, so she had better sign. 

I did not have that kind of gumption, though. In fact, I may still have been too shy to call strangers on the phone--the reason why I never learned to drive, by the way, and now it is too late.

So now it occurs to me that Delingpole might know his daughter well enough to be certain she will come through a holiday in Shagaluf without harm. Still, I am of the opinion that an 18 year old girl should go nowhere near Majorca, and I am currently looking up excellent post-graduation Gap Year activities for former pupils to do in Rome. If they go, I will coach them very firmly about what to say to men in Italy who approach them with smiles, lies, and unwanted roses.

Herring and Mead

The sun shone on Wrocław when I first arrived. I had had an uneventful journey, spent mostly in looking up words in my Polish dictionary. Amusingly, the excellent highway in East Germany abruptly went bumpy at the border, but after some kilometres inside Poland, it improved. Then it worsened. Then it improved. I could see the village of Legnickie Pole from the highway, which was a thrill, and the twin towers of St. Hedwig Church were very impressive.

Polish Pretend Son and Daughter-in-Law turned up in the Wroclawia mall's ground floor Etno Cafe to fetch me, and we had a good Polish conversation while we drank coffee, and then we went to the historic centre to walk around the beautiful, multi-coloured Rynek (Market), stopping for drinks and snacks before settling on a Georgian restaurant for lunch. My favourite drink-and-snack place in Wrocław is "Przedwojenna", which literally means "Pre-war" but practically means "Between 1919 and World War II."  Eugeniusz Bodo (1899-1943) was singing "Już Taki Jestem Zimny Drań" over the speakers, and Józef Piłsudskiej (1867-1935) glowered down from a wall. I had a beer and delicious herring fillets on bread. 

Berlin struck me as a little sad, although this may actually say more about me than Berlin. On the other hand, there are dozens of monuments commemorating very sad events in Berlin, so maybe not. Berlin 2019 is the kind of place where people strive to be anti-racist and super-welcoming and yet continue to use picturesque images of Africans and North American Indians to sell things--and stare daggers at foreigners who applaud at the end of a suite. 

In contrast, Wrocław struck me as cheerful, unpretentious, and unabashedly Catholic, in part because a public rosary was being held in front of a statue of St. John Paul II when PPS, PPDIL and I ducked, shamefully late, into the "Church of Most Blessed Virgin Mary on the Sand" for the Traditional Latin Mass. It wasn't our fault we were late: service was slow at the Georgian restaurant. Mass was said by this priest; he looked in good shape, I am happy to say.

PPS's first choices of restaurant were shut, by the way: Sunday closing is a big deal in Poland now. It's not just stores and other businesses; some Wroclawians decide to close their restaurants. This may be for the owners' summer holidays, of course.  

When Mass had ended, we discovered that rain was bucketing down. We hurried to the car, and then drove to PPS's home village, which was not too far away. Mr and Mrs PPS live in a little house,with a loo and an office on the ground floor and a bedroom and a massive salon on the first (i.e. top) floor, which resembles a luxurious attic. 

PPS, who always professed to hate hipsters, put a Glenn Miller record on the turntable and made some splendid coffee after grinding the beans himself. Glenn Miller was followed by Mieczysław Fogg (1901-1990) and then, the rain having paused, we went outside to the large garden to pick red currents, black currants and truly exquisite black cherries. When the rain began again we went back inside. 

PPS drank champagne and I drank mead at a round table in the middle of the big room, and Mrs PPS drank neither as she is having a baby in December. I admired a photo of PPS and PPDIL at the local races and risked the eternal wrath of PPS by bragging about the supremacy of British hats for women and encouraging PPDIL to look up Philip Treacy. As a matter of fact, though, PPDIL already has a splendid British-level pink hat.  

PPS put on Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet, which the young couple saw in Wrocław not too long ago. PPS read, and told PPDIL, that in that modern production R and J would survive, but he had been misinformed, and PPDIL cried buckets when they died. (In contrast, I sighed with relief when R and J   perished in a super-hip Kraków production of the Shakespeare play because it seemed to go on forever and the declension of Romeo--especially the genitive, Romea--was dancing on my nerves in hobnailed boots.) 

PPS and PPDIL are particularly fond of the scene in the ballet where Lady Capulet dances her rage and grief at the death of Tybalt, so we heard it two or three times, and then PPDIL went to sleep and PPS and I went for a walk around the dark, damp village. We saw the greatest hits: the railway station, the pizza parlour where PPS had his bachelor party, the one bar, the parish church, the TB sanatorium, the fantastic restaurant with the glorious duck pierogi, and the building PPS lived in as a child. I also admired the various examples of native architecture, which includes high, steeply sloping rooves, jutting gables and quaint balconies. The streets are lined with trees, and if there is any bomb damage in the last war, it was certainly not obvious to me.   

So that was my day in Lower Silesia, which the Poles call Dolny Śląsk, and today I have been carted off to an even smaller village in the countryside to write while PPS carries out some family business. My vacation is over, and I am back at work today. Fortunately it is the kind of work that can be done anywhere where there is an internet connection although I am somewhat hampered by the lack of a phone.  

Alas, my strict linguistic fast from English only lasted a few hours. However, I don't think I did too badly, and we all go back to Polish from time to time. 

Breslau? Wrocław!

I am in Wrocław, having just alighted from the bus. It left Berlin at 8:05 AM, which is why there have been no updates.

There is not too much to say about yesterday as I had a massive headache and, after a late brunch at KaDeWe, which is really an astonishing department store and much nicer than Harrod's, went back to the flat.

B.A. and I went to the 6 PM Vigil Mass, and it was fine. Excellent organ, so-so organist, 40 people including priest, altar girl and female EMHC. The priest spoke good clear German, which we couldn't understand well, but we were edified all the same. One family, which appeared to be a set of grandparents, a dad and a boy. That was it for children in this genteel Berlin neighbourhood church.

We spent the evening babysitting (so to speak) Peanut and Popcorn, which included eating pizza and salad while watching and singing along to "Help".

Now B.A. is on his flight back to Edinburgh, and I am waiting in Etno Cafe (the ground floor one) in the Wroclawia mall, having spent a pleasant 3.5 hour bus ride trying not to think in English. And that is it for my English now, for I am going to attempt exclusive Polish for the next 26 hours.

Croissants and a Friendly Grave

Yesterday Benedict Ambrose and I decided to take it easier. We went back to Kreuzberg for coffee and croissants at Chapter One, and then we walked through the market hall to Bergmannstrasse to look for the Dreifaltigheitsfriedhof (cemetery). It was marked on the map only as a green space, but we found it easily--in fact, it was just down the street from Felix Austria, where we all ate on Monday night.

The Dreifaltigheitsfriedhof is a delightful and typical Central European cemetery with lots of trees and impressive monuments--statues and Grecian temples, for example. Some of the gravestones had the profile of the deceased cast in bronze. Thanks to this feature, we easily found the grave we were looking for--that of Woldemar Bargiel, a composer and great-great-uncle of a good friend. Bargiel's grave is in the middle of the Friedhof under an oak tree and to the left of a great domed monument with a mosaic ceiling. A new pine bench right beside it doesn't add anything, but there is a proper dark bench at a distance, which serves for contemplation of Bargiel's profile.

We were very pleased that we had found Bargiel, for whom we prayed, and then we went back onto Bergmannstrasse for a relaxed ramble, being careful not to be hit by the bicycles flying down their special lane on the pavement. Bicycles are king in Berlin.

We got on the U-Bahn at Mehringdamm and went to Friedrichstrasse and Dussmann Das KulturKaufhous, a  splendid multi-story bookshop, to buy presents for Peanut and Popcorn. Peanut got a kids' English-language comic book of the Odyssey  and Popcorn got a Semikolon notebook as a journal. (I love, love, love Semikolon stuff, which I can't find anywhere now except Amazon and Germany.)

I was mildly offended that Dussmann's English and International section did not have any Polish books. They had French, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Dutch, Turkish, Arabic, and Chinese books, but nothing in Polish. To put this in perspective, there are over 100,000 Poles living in Berlin. However, I see that there is Buch Bund to fill the book gap.

We went back to Alt Tempelhof and bought some groceries. Back at the flat, we had a rest from all that shopping and then researched local Saturday Vigil masses. Tomorrow morning I leave for Wrocław and B.A. returns to Scotland for an academic conference. We found a local church with a vigil mass a 15 minute walk away and walked to it. It seems to have been built in the 1880s and was completely whitewashed at some point. It has really super Gothic altarpieces and statues, which B.A. thinks are excellent 19th century copies. There was also an elderly lady sitting in a pew reading  the newspaper: presumably she was keeping an eye on the place. When we went in there was a large man  in casual clothing and sporting a big beard smoking outside the parish house. We greeted him with "Guten Abend" and assumed he was the priest.

Back at the flat, we saved concert tickets onto a data stick and took Nulli with us to a print shop on Georgenstrasse and then the Berliner Dom to hear the concert. Berliner Dom had the biggest pipe organ in the world when it was first installed, and the concert featured Felix Hell playing it.  He played pieces by Reger, Von Rheinberger, and Healey Willan.

After the first piece by Reger, B.A. came a cropper by pulling his usual claque stunt. In Edinburgh, you can assume that a cathedral concert is filled with musical know-nothings (like me) who don't know when to applaud. B.A., therefore, cocks his head, raises his hands, and then hits them together to produce the sound of a gunshot. Sadly, it did not occur to me to warn him that Berlin is probably not like this and that even a cathedral concert in Germany is likely to be stuffed with Hochschule music teachers, not bored tourists. Anyway, after the first piece, B.A. made his gunshot noise, and there was a polite patter of applause, but not before a woman in a brown wig turned around, attempted to kill B.A. with her eyes and hissed something in German which none, and yet all, of us understood.

"We applaud each piece in Britain," B.A. loudly whispered to me, and later gave me the green light to blog that he said that. It cannot be too widely known (e.g. in Berlin) that we applaud each piece in Britain. But not in Germany, peoples.

After that there was no more applause for Felix Hell until the last note of Healey Willan died away.  Benedict Ambrose and Nulli enjoyed the concert in their knowledgable way--Nulli rather more knowledgeable than B.A. as he is an organist himself--and I put up with it and looked at the golden ornaments around and the statues of the Major Protestant Reformers and wondered if the Vatican was really as corrupt in Calvin's day as it appears to be in ours, etc. Your humble correspondent can appreciate "The World of the Organ" recorded by Simon Preston, but that's about it.

Afterwards B.A. and Nulli said things like "He made me like that "Adagio" until the last note" and "He really swooped into the Willan at the end." We made our way back over the Frederich Bruecke (bridge), on which a bearded man was still creating large flocks of bubbles with a long stick and children were still dancing among them.  Nulli then hurried home to his family, and B.A. and I attempted to eat sushi, but no waiter came to take our order so we went to a late-night grocery shop back on Bergmannstrasse, and went home to eat pasta and "grave lachs", which most readers will know better as grave lox.

I had dreams about Pope Benedict and then about spies.