How to make your home larger for free

Currently when I am pedalling away on stationary bike, I watch videos about Tiny Houses. After every workout, I notice that my kitchen (where the bike lives) is much bigger than I thought. Then I go into the sitting-room and notice that it is bigger than I thought, too. Kitchen plus living room have a larger floor space than most Tiny Homes I've seen. And there's more! Across the hall, there's an enormous front bedroom, which is our dining-room/office/guest room, and a back bedroom with a closet bigger than any closet I've ever seen in a Tiny House. And tucked away by the front door, a wall apart from the kitchen, is a bathroom with an actual bath and a big cupboard for towels, sheets and demijohns of fermenting apple cider. 

Thus, after ever workout, I feel incredibly rich and simply luxuriate in all the space. I also think that if we wanted to, we could sell our flat and most of our possessions, build a Tiny House somewhere, and bank 90% of our profit. 

Therefore, if you are feeling sad and cramped about your modest house or flat, do have a look on YouTube at how the Tiny House class live. They're so cheery about it, too. 

Talent = Deliberate Practice + Love

"From Mulieris Dignitatem to Przygoda Słonia," said Benedict Ambrose as he walked into the sitting-room this morning. 

"It's all the all the same to me," I said, looking up from the bright green picture book that tells the story of The Elephant's Adventure.

This is not exactly true, for I have to look up a lot more words in the Polish translation (or original, let's face it) of Mulieris Dignatem than I do for Przygoda Słonia. But what is true is that reading Polish is reading Polish,  and picking up The Elephant's Adventure is a lot less daunting than the thought of another chapter of MD or St. Augustine's Wyznania.

Yesterday I met a Polish stranger in a sunny park for a "language exchange," and she told me (in Polish) that her dream was one day to speak English as fluently as she speaks Polish. I felt then that I had met a kindred spirit because of course I would love to speak both Italian and Polish (and a whole list of other languages) as fluently as I speak English. 

Since both my new acquaintance (perhaps a future friend!) and I are well over 14, fluency is going to be a lifelong project, and it is unlikely that we will ever speak our foreign-to-us languages without strong accents. However, this doesn't really matter as anglophones find accented English charming (or, if not charming, normal), and Poles find accented Polish miraculous. (I don't know what Italians think because, bizarre as this sounds, I don't have any born-in-Italy Italian friends, and have had the same Italian tutor for years.) 

What will get my znajoma and I to our linguistic goals is deliberate practice and love of our chosen languages. I doubt we have talent for languages because I less and less believe in talent and more and more believe in the power of deliberate, obsessive practise at something that a practitioner loves, especially if this practise is done before the age of 20. 

I now realise that my easy ability to put down words in a sonorous order is thanks to keeping a diary as a child. Being read to, and obsessively reading books, and listening to my parents discuss books also has something to do with it, but I am sure I put in my 10,000 hours of writing by the time I was 20. My brother Nulli undoubtedly had put in 10,000 hours of piano practise by the time he was 20.  I wrote and he played because I loved writing and he loved playing. 

I'm not sure how deliberate our practise was, though.   I am sure at least half of his must have been painstaking challenge, and I probably looked up words in the dictionary. My brother had good teachers, and I had good models: P.G. Wodehouse comes to mind. 

The more I think about it, the more gleefully I dance on Divine Talent's grave and read books like Bounce: The Myth of Talent and the Power of Practice by Matthew Syed. Realising that you can excel at something that you really love as long as you put the right kind of practice in is very exciting. The trick is that you really have to love doing it because otherwise you would need superhuman discipline. 

Update: Very cool eco devotees here and especially here. They seem very rooted in reality.

The Condition of Servitude

The problem with growing up with books written before 1950 is that most of them were written by authors with the privileged leisure to write books. I generalise, but as far as I could make out, the gentlemen had gentlemanly job titles (if any) like Professor and the ladies either lived by their pen, or on the family fortune, or on their husband's income. If asked how L. Frank Baum or Lucy Maud Montgomery had fed, housed and clothed themselves, I would have assumed they received an income from the sale of their books. Perhaps they did, but what I did not know about was that there was a vast ocean of authors who never achieved anything like Baum's or Montgomery's publishing success. 

My inner script, therefore, said that--since I got A+ in Creative Writing--I was sure to make a living as an author. By the time I was 19, however, I had divined that this was easier to dream than to do, so I vaguely set my sights on an academic career. Sadly, I still laboured under the mistaken belief that if something is hard, you lack talent, and should find something to study that you are talented at, i.e. find easy. How disappointed I was to discover that Ancient Greek is really hard. I thought this meant I had no talent in it.  Needless to say, I swam in a lot of self-hatred and anxiety until I switched my major to English Literature. The A's and even A+'s came back---because of My One Talent, I thought.  

I enjoy mining my mistakes to help other people, especially young women, not make them. To recap, the first mistake I explode in this post is that any but a minority of book authors make a living at writing books. The second is that your brain is made of concrete that has hardened in a certain shape and that you are incapable of learning things you find difficult so well that they become easy tak jak język polski. 

Unfortunately, both mistakes carry a heretical theological idea, which is "God must love those more/differently talented people more than me, or He would have set the concrete of my brain differently/sent me the requisite successful ideas/stamina for a bestseller." 

But I seem to have gone off-course, for what I really wanted to talk about was Jacob Lund Fisker's idea that most of us are born in wage-slavery, and it is our job to dig ourselves out. I have actually bought the book version of "Early Retirement Extreme," not because I want to retire extremely early (too late!) but because I don't want B.A. and I to have an impoverished old age. 

The time to begin preventing your impoverished old age is really when you are a teenager and earn your first paycheque. I read recently that if you manage to save $15,000 by 25 and then invest it in a tax-sheltered vehicle at 10%, you will discover when you are 65 that it has turned into $1,000,000. Of course, one problem--when you are a teenager or even 25--is that you cannot imagine being 65. Another problem is earning as much as $15,000 by age 25 although I bet if you added up all the money you have earned after taxes so far, you would faint dead away. I don't dare think about all the money I made and squandered as a teenager.

At any rate, were I speaking kindly to my teenage self today--a very good imaginary exercise, by the way, as it cheers up the teenager still residing within--I would tell myself to save 50% of everything I make for the rest of my life. One thinks of the charming child in The Pursuit of Love who hoarded all pocket money so that she could run away one day.  Perhaps the secret is giving children a goal. 

"Dear Nephews! Dear Nieces! If you save up 50% of all pocket money, all cash gifts, all summer jobs, you will be well on your way to wealth and can do anything you like when you are 40."

"Dear Auntie! We cannot even imagine being 40, so wouldn't it be better for us to buy wonderful clothes and delicious hamburgers when we out with our friends, and just trust to getting a good job that will let us do anything we like when we are 40? Also, dear Auntie, you are very old, so will you not just leave us your money?"

"Dear Nephews! Dear Nieces! First of all, I am planning to live to 102, when you yourselves will be rather long in tooth. Second, if you plan carefully, you can inveigle your parents into buying you wonderful clothes that will last the most crucial decade of saving up. (Wait until you have finished growing.) Third, you should take the lead in social plans and suggest a teenage supper club, in which you take turns entertaining at home (having banished your parents to the movies) or order the cheapest thing on the menu. Fourth, if you already know exactly what paid work you want to do and know infallibly how to get it, you are certainly an improvement on the 1970s model. Fifth, practising always saving 50% now will make it so much easier for you to do so when you are given your first paycheque for full-time work."

The most likely answer to this is loud guffaws and "Oh Auntie, you're so funny!" but perhaps it would plant seeds in their young, pliable, definitely-not-concrete minds.  

To go back to this "born a slave, must dig yourself out" analogy, one of the biggest shocks in Crean & Fimister's Integralism was the idea that being an employee is undignified. 

"Strictly speaking, whenever a person is employed by another for payment, he is in some sense that person's servant or slave," write the priest and the professor. 

 "[...] Even in the commonplace of paid employment, slavery is undesirable, for the paradigmatic form of ownership is where the labourer owns his own means of production. This is more attuned to the nature of man, whom 'God has left into the hands of his own counsel' [Sirach 15:14]," they continue.

"[...] It is in view of self-sufficiency and emancipation that the servant, that is, the man labouring for another in exchange for renumeration, labours. The condition of servitude is therefore of its very nature infantilising."

If we are to take this seriously (and your mileage may vary), it is therefore incumbent upon us to save up our money and invest it where it will work for us, sparing us the indignity of servitude. Naturally, human beings actually LIKE and NEED to work; the problem (if I understand it) is needing the paycheque. So a good compromise is to work at something you love to do and would do even if you were not paid for it. However, you must support yourself and your family, and the most lovesome work is not always the most remunerative work. The solution therefore is to slave and save until you have an "independent income." Sadly, the most effective time to do that is when you are young and compound interest works so dramatically in your favour.

A Weekend of Gardens

We had a beautiful weekend, with the sunny weather actually typical of east coast Scotland in the summer although everyone forgets this as soon as it rains.

On Saturday Benedict Ambrose and I took advantage of the combination of sun and my day off work to go to a National Trust for Scotland property featuring a huge, tiered garden with a pond, fields, and a curious horse hanging his head over a stone wall. Dogs are not permitted off the lead, and so dog-walkers don't seem to go there very often which is---I am sorry to say, for I like dogs--a blessing. It is thus a quiet place; an almost secret paradise. 

As the sun poured down, we switched from bench to bench to suit our comfort as we read our books. Around noon we moved to a large, sheltering gazebo. An hour later I volunteered to go to the nearest grocery store for lunch and came back with pork pies, a sandwich, water and crisps. B.A. continued reading David M. Levy's Scrolling Forward, and I continued Maryanne Wolf's Proust and the Squid. The latter is about the invention and implications of reading.  This reminded me of language acquisition in general, and I texted Polish Pretend Son to find out what words my year-and-a-half-old godling uses. It's clearly as summery in Poland as here, for her small store includes the first syllables of "mosquito" and "housefly."

One of the joys of Scotland is that we don't have mosquitos and, thank heavens, midges don't usually thrive this far south. The Highlands must be alive with midgies, though,  and this is why I never go there from May to October. They bite hard.

We stayed in this beautiful garden until 5 PM or so, went to the grocery store together, and came home. B.A. set up chairs under our apple tree, which abounds in small "cider babies," as B.A. calls them, with copies of the Spectator. Our next-door-downstairs neighbour came padding into our garden barefoot with a half-bottle of white wine he though we might like, and talked tipsily of apple cider making and illegal stills he has known. 

On Sunday after Mass--and our TLM still thrives, thank heavens--B.A. and I went to a birthday party held in one of Edinburgh's many private gardens. These gated gardens appear in the middle of Georgian or Victorian streets or squares and are the collective property of the residents who subscribe to their upkeep. If we ever live in the West End or the New Town, we will certainly pay the subscription and become happy key holders ourselves. (Perhaps I could keep my veggie trug on the roof.)

The gated garden in which we sat and ate Coronation Chicken sandwiches and raspberry Bakewell tart and drank sparking wine is at least a city-block long and lined with shrubs and trees. It has weathered grey curved wooden benches here and there. It is large enough to have several (music free) parties without them impinging on others. We watched with amusement as a party of small children whacked away at a piñata, and two small children turned and stared as B.A. and another birthday guest broke into a Gilbert and Sullivan patter song. 

This time the benches moved with us as we sought partial shade from the overly generous sun. B.A. and I sat and chatted (and B.A. occasionally sang) in this park from about 2 PM until 9:30 PM. Thus, it was very much an open air day and a very good use of the (east coast) Scottish summer weather 

One of our conversation threads wove around the recent Motu Proprio and the allegations launched at people who love the Traditional Latin Mass. Our host, who stands at the church door on Sundays with a clipboard in obedience to the archdiocesan COVID-19 procedures, revealed that not just cradle Catholics and convert Catholics but potential future Catholics come to our Mass. Because of B.A.'s illness and other difficulties of the past four years (e.g. COVID-19), I haven't been much of a parish social butterfly, but I dimly recalled hearing reports that some of the students who appear at Mass aren't Catholics or even yet Christians. Some of them have been baptised, and others haven't yet been received. I believer these converts and inquirers first come because enthusiastic Catholic university students bring them.   

As we trundled down Princes Street on the bus, I noticed crowds of people outside fancy bistros and bars. It seemed busy for a Sunday night--or perhaps it only seemed that way after a year and a half of lockdowns. 

Catholic Clothing, again

If I lived in an climate-controlled iron box with an internet connection, I would know it was summer from this article in Catholic World Report. I skimmed the article on Catholic clothing (I confess) and then went to the comments to see the usual complaints from women about the focus on female modesty, the usual rejoinder about hot pants, and the sneers at the very well-dressed men, who are accused here of trying to "out-dapper" one another. 

I particularly enjoyed the remark about people looking as if it were 1962, because I have a pet theory that 1963 was the Annus horribilis on which the good ship Western Civilisation foundered. But of course no woman dresses exactly as her grandmother or mother did in 1962 for women's underclothing in 1962 was atrociously uncomfortable. Also, the only trad Catholic woman I know eccentric enough to wear gloves to Mass is me, and only very rarely: to Polish Pretend Son's wedding, for example, and when extra-paranoid about the Vile Germ. 

As it is summer, I usually wear to Mass the blue maxi dress I bought for wear to the Vatican Press Office with sturdy blue shoes (alas) or blue sandals. I object to the idea one cannot wear sandals to Mass, for monks and nuns certainly do. Also, my feet are aging faster than the rest of me, and apparently I can't wear ballet flats. Indeed, even my dowdy comfort shoes did not pass muster with my physiotherapist, who bent them in her hands to show how inadequate they are. 

Naturally I wear a blue denim maxi-skirt of indestructible traddery almost every day now. I'm happy to say I have three: one suitable for wearing in town, one only for the house, and one for gardening and painting. With this I pair a clean T-shirt and, in necessary, a cardigan. 

I felt confirmed in my uniform--which involves, as you see, weekday clothes and a Sunday dress---by reading about the late Latinist Fr. Reggie Foster, OCD. Fr. Foster was known for wearing a strange habit of his own design: a light blue jacket, a turtleneck and denim overalls. He looked like a janitor and was treated like a janitor by those who didn't recognise him and look down on janitors. Although I prefer priests to look like priests, I am still moved by his humility. 

Personally, I'm a bit worried of being treated as though I were insane. As far as I know, this hasn't happened yet. In my usual weekday outfit, while climbing up Fleshmarket Close, I looked warily at a man in a bizarre costume that was half-football fan, half-Viking. He was loud, with a friend, coming down Close and nobody else was around. 

"God bless your day, Sister," he shouted.

Maybe I should go back to wearing lipstick. But if we all stopped wearing lipstick, think of how much money and plastic we would save!

Lovely Young People

I was cheered, yesterday evening, by a little video showing lovely young people from Europe and beyond asking Pope Francis and the bishops not to suppress the Traditional Latin Mass. As Pope Francis doesn't understand English wonderfully well (as I noted on a BBC documentary), I told Benedict Ambrose it was a pity they didn't speak Spanish instead. 

"English is the universal language of the world," harrumphed B.A. or words that he will tell me later today he actually said.  

If some enterprising filmmaker really wants to wring hearts, they should do a similar project with young married people and their tiny children. Every time I see a new big young family at Mass, I am utterly delighted. 

I'm a blogger not a leader

My arms hurt too much for casual writing, so I'm asking BA to write this. One mistake people are making in the motu proprio firestorm is to confuse traditionalist Catholic bloggers with traditionalist Catholic communities and, worse, traditionalist Catholic leaders. If you really want to know what a given traditionalist community is like, you have to go to a TLM and then speak to members of the congregation afterwards. Your success in doing that will change from country to country. It's probably a good bet in gregarious Glasgow or the friendly USA, but in some British communities, you'll have to hang around a bit. The utility of a trad blogger like me is that you can come to the Edinburgh FSSP TLM and have someone to say hi to. (Don't be shy--I'm Canadian.) 

The problem, or a problem, with the internet is that people treat it like a diary at worst or a soap-box at best, shouting to the crowds in Hyde Park, hoping to get a following. But the witty chap on the soap-box yelling for veganism isn't exactly Linda McCartney.

My heart aches for the young Catholic parents who just want to bring their children up in the faith their parents or grandparents handed on to them. In many places, public Catholic education is a joke or, worse, a scandal. Children brought up by bad Catholics are a danger to believing Catholic children and even to their believing Catholic teachers. Many semi-pagan Catholics imagine that Our Lord is a cross between the Dude in The Big Lebowski and their soft-touch grandmother. Obviously to the orthodox Catholic this is ludicrous. However, so many soi-disant Catholics believe this,  the worldwide TLM community is the only Latin Catholic refuge, like a monastery when the Vandals were pillaging and sacking.

When my brother Nulli and I were children in the 1970s, we were asked to draw God by our Catholic kindergarten teacher. My picture of God included glasses. After questioning me on this, my parents realised I thought the priest was God. On the one hand, I had possibly discerned the priest in persona Christi. On the other, it shows the centrality of the priest's face and personality in Catholic worship according to the 1970s rites. (Tellingly, Nulli thought the cantor was God.) It would be interesting to test traditionalist children in this fashion. Lex orandi, lex credendi, indeed.

That's all I have to say today. Please, just don't judge either the beautiful TLM or the worldwide TLM community by me, or Steve Skojek, or any of us keyboard warriors. We are a dozen, maybe a few dozen, English-speaking windbags, really. The real trad is the brewmaster monk, or the tired mother of eight, or the head of the FSSP. I'll stretch a point and suggest that Dr Joseph Shaw is a credible spokesman for the traditional movement in the United Kingdom. Dr Peter Kwaniewski is a fine scholar of the liturgy, too. He's not a leader, but he's a darn good resource.