Home Economics: October Report

Happy November! I delight to inform you that we have bought, wrapped, and boxed 8 of 10 Christmas presents for overseas. (I will probably commission Amazon to handle the last two.) In an hour we will carry them to the post office for posting. Today is the Royal Mail's recommended deadline for sending parcels to North America via "economy," whatever that means. No doubt we will discover this at the P.O.

This unprecedented Christmas preparedness is thanks to my Budget Planner and the insight that one can enjoy shopping on holiday without guilt if it is, in fact, early Christmas shopping.  

FOOD

Meanwhile, after what I thought was a ruinous trip to Waitrose yesterday afternoon, I was delighted to discover that we had not blown the food budget as much as I suspected. 

October 2021: Groceries--£327.00; RBCT (Restaurants, Bars, Cafes, Takeaway)--£100. Total £427

I had optimistically budgeted £300 for groceries and £70 for eating out, probably because I anticipated a whopping Wellness bill of £350. Happily, the Wellness bill came only to £312.28, largely because my arm is sufficiently better for me to have given up private physiotherapy mid-month. My dental bill was, however, a little more punishing than I expected.  (More on Wellness anon.)

To compare October's food bills to previous months: 

September 2021: Groceries--£296; RBCT--£156.89. Total £452.89

August 2021: Groceries--£288.35; RCBT--£153.22. Total £441.47

Looking back at previous months, we haven't spent so little on food since Lent, so budgeting £370 for Golden October was not entirely rooted in reality. Nevertheless, I am very pleased and glad that at a certain point I counselled Benedict Ambrose, who does most of the shopping and cooking, to frequent Aldi instead of Tesco. 

WELLNESS

Living in the UK, B.A. and I don't have health insurance because the National Health Service, for which we pay through our taxes, is supposed to be our health insurance. And indeed the NHS supplied the GP, optician, surgeons and oncologist who saved B.A.'s life (some of them more than once), so we are grateful for it. At the same time, the coronavirus pandemic made access to NHS-supplied medical care very difficult. It also made it more difficult for dentists, for example, to offer NHS services. Thus, we learned what it is like to "go private" in the UK for dental emergencies and work-related injuries, and the first thought comes to mind is gratitude that we had the money for it. Yay, parsimony!  Yay, Budget Planner! 

PARSIMONY: Tips

A reader mentioned looking forward to my savings tips, and so I thought about what they might be. The number one reason for my newfound fiscal responsibility is B.A.'s near fatal illness in 2017. That, as they say, was a wake-up call. However, I wouldn't recommend brain tumours to anyone, so here are a few things I find helpful. 

1. Libraries are free shopping. I am not sure why shopping is such an entertaining pastime, but it is, and you get to "buy" all the books you want from the library for free. 

2. Do present shopping on holidays. Last-minute Amazon shopping is a pain whereas shopping in exotic (or at least romantic) locales is fun. 

3. Don't base your identity on a supermarket. To this day, the UK has a weird obsession with social caste, and supermarkets get mixed up in this. An otherwise brilliant scholar once informed me that "only students and foreigners" shop in Aldi. Madness. 

4. Always ask for the receipt and write down everything you or your spouse spends. Always, and because this can be onerous:

5. Invest in a Budget Planner and turn it into a scrapbooking project. I love my little Budget Planner and the one time I thought I had left it somewhere, I burst into tears. I actually decorate it with stickers, and I colour in the "Difference" box that follows the "Total Income" and  "Total Expenses" box. 

6. Have short-term, medium-term, and ultimate goals.  I probably should have put this first. A short-term goal might be to write down all expenses for a single month. A medium-term goal might be to save up an Emergency Fund (enough money to cover 3-6 months of expenses). An ultimate goal might be to pay off the mortgage, although having read Fr Crean's and Dr Fimister's Integralism book, I suggest that most of us have a duty to become financially independent of both employers and the state, if we can. Turns out that the girls who became hairdressers and started their own salons were better Catholics (from an Integralist point of view) than all of us who went to university and then into an office.  

7.  Distinguish between the Real You and the Fantasy You when about to buy a camel-coloured long wool coat on sale.  So there was this camel-coloured wool coat on sale at my very favourite Edinburgh shop full of high-end Made-in-Scotland clothing. It is on sale. In my size. And as I looked at it online yesterday morning, my hand hovered over the computer keys. 

I have long wanted a camel-coloured long wool coat because they are photographed so beautifully in the fashion magazines which, year after year, call it a wardrobe classic and a must-have for your capsule wardrobe. You can dress it down with jeans and boots. You can dress it up with a silk dress and stilettos.  I have often imagined myself in such a camel-coloured long wool coat, and there it was in my size, at my favourite store, and at half its usual price. 

But then I suddenly remembered having coffee and a baklava with a pal the day before. While chowing down in my usual inelegant way, I apologised to the pal as I brushed phyllo crumbs from my jacket. It is a dark jacket, flecked with green, which means it doesn't show stains from the foodstuffs or beverages I inevitably spill on myself. Alas, no camel-coloured coat could be a month in my company without being stained with something--probably cappuccino. 

Readers, I didn't buy it. Instead I looked at the dark red puffy coat I got for £35 at a charity shop on October 17 and was content. 

8. Be reasonable. If the radiator isn't working, you have to get it fixed. If you decide to except a London party invitation, you have to put aside a goodly sum for transportation, accommodation, and--as this is London--apparently just breathing in and out. And this accepted, when you do spend the money spend it joyfully and with gratitude that you had it in the first place

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Kindness from all as the solution to baby noise at Mass

Let's go to the cathedral!

Too many issues are treated as if they were a football game. People almost demand that others take sides. I was just reading a Twitter conversation that began, roughly, "It's so cringe when a priest of a trad parish makes parents take noisy kids outside." Someone asked "Why is it cringe?" and then there were variations on "A parish not crying is dying" and even accusations that priests who ask people to take out children are infected with American Puritanism and that pews are a Protestant invention in the first place.

My thoughts on the last sentiments are the following:

1. Questioning your traditional Catholic priest's decisions regarding how the Traditional Latin Mass will unfold sounds imbued with American Puritanism to me.

2.  Thank you, Protestants, if you invented pews.  

I have been going to a Traditional Latin Mass for 13 years now, and I have seen the congregation transform from a small community dominated by adults without child-aged children to two congregations greatly boosted by both young and middle-aged couples with small children. It is truly a joy to see so many children, and the fact that parents with children have decided to join our congregation has led to at least one couple with children joining themselves. 

As a result, there is now a far amount of babbling and some weeping although I can't recall any full-throated wailing lately. I suspect the parents of the babies, being kindly, conscientious people, take out the babies when they really get going. And that is a very good thing because, as I suspect the Original Tweeter has never considered, it is hard for a priest to celebrate Mass in Latin (or, I imagine, any second language) when someone near you is screaming at the top of his or her lungs. Priests are not Mass-saying machines, and saying Mass is not as simple as reading aloud. 

On the other hand, babies do scream and toddlers occasionally yell if they're not allowed to toddle, and it is passive-aggressive and unkind for other people in the congregation to shoot meaningful looks at their parents. (Sometimes, by the way, these are just looks of curiosity, though, especially if it is the pathetic mewling of a very new baby. I love to look at new babies.) However, if the looker drove all the way from Aberdeen that morning just to get to the Traditional Latin Mass, changed a flat tire on the way, and got to Mass dripping wet, I can understand his frustration.

I used to sit at the back of our church in the choir stalls with the Men's Schola (which is no more: we now have a Mixed Choir), and the Schola, which sang many complicated things demanding much concentration, was put off by babies screaming, let alone by toddlers running up and down the aisles. At the same time, one of my friends was utterly suffused with agonised embarrassment whenever her own baby (and then babies) began just to babble.

My own Schola Wife plan, if God blessed us with a child, was to see if I were blessed with a screamer rather than a sleeper, and if so, to take him to the Cathedral instead. There he could scream to his heart's content to the strains of John Michael Talbot and the St. Louis Jesuits. 

No, I'm kidding. I would have taken him out to the Cathedral's cavernous foyer once he turned purple or, even better, stayed at home with him while B.A. was at Mass and then toddled off to the Cathedral's Polish Guitar Mass after B.A. came home. 

None of this came to pass, of course, so I cannot say if I really would have put this plan into action. But for me, the real rivalry at Mass is not between Families with Babies/Toddlers and Everyone Else but between the Priest and the Choir. If I were Queen of the Parish, instead of just the veteran After-Mass Coffee Lady, I would put "Reserved for families with babies and toddlers" signs on the pews farthest from the Altar, which means the pews nearest the Choir. 

In short, the only solution to the perpetual problem of babies babbling and toddlers toddling at Mass is kindness from everyone old enough to make that choice.

Parents of the under-4 set should be kind to the priest, first of all, by placing themselves as far from the Altar as possible. 

Other parishioners should be kind to these parents and the priests by leaving these pews free for them. 

Parents of the under-4 set would then be kind to the other congregants by taking their babies out (or to the door to more comfortably jiggle them) when the babies cry and by bribing their toddlers with chocolate if they remain in their pew for the duration of Mass. (Well, this worked on me.)

Congregants would be kind to the parents if they refrain from turning around and staring, let alone--as I know happens occasionally elsewhere--hissing their displeasure. I worry for the souls of people like that, and presumably their priests do, too, which is why they occasionally put themselves on the firing line by asking parents to take out their children when they scream. 

As a non-parent, the admonition that worked best against my desire for the Ultimate Mass Experience was the suggestion that if you want a monastery-like Mass, you should have joined a monastery. But as an old-fashioned baby-loving gal, the revelation that worked best against my siding completely with parents was that celebrating Mass is hard work. When my dad was doing serious mental work down in his home office, we kids were not allowed anywhere near him. It's a thought. 

Were Clubs Fun?

There are a rash of articles in the UK newspapers about young women left reeling or semi-paralysed after their drinks were spiked or, even more chillingly, after they were injected with date rape drugs. My first thought this morning, on seeing the latest story, was something like "Holy cow! Stay out of pubs and clubs!" But my next thought was "Easy for me to say when I have stopped going to clubs and never go to a pub without my husband." 

Spiking drinks is not new, of course, and when I was a slim young thing frequenting Goth clubs (see above) and, much more rarely, Top-40 places, I either finished my drink before I left the table, or I yelled "Watch my drink" over the music at my most capable companion. I remember the Age of AIDS, so the idea of strangers stabbing the unsuspecting with syringes horrifies me on many levels. 

How fun were clubs? When I was a child reading about clubs in Time or the Toronto Star, they sounded like the most fun in the world. I couldn't understand why my parents, who had money and IDs, didn't go. When I was a young teen, my mother strictly forbade me from going to clubs, so my guilt when the parish youth group snuck into "Sparkles" was intense. 

"Sparkles" was incredibly boring, by the way, and I don't think it lasted long in that residential neighbourhood. Most teens or 20-somethings living within 20 miles of downtown Toronto and looking for noisy fun on a Saturday night made their way there. It took me forever to realise this, however, so I had more than one extremely boring evening under a glitter ball in a noisy suburban box.  

Downtown clubs could be scary, though, and even revolting. I enjoyed dancing, but I did not enjoy being approached by strangers. I enjoyed drinking too, if I was with friend who were also drinking. I vaguely recall a boozy night in the Queen Street West dance clubs with my pal Lily while home from Boston College. I also seem to remember us having taken a Jesuit scholastic to Velvet Underground although surely I am making that up. Surely we did not do that. Surely not. 

I'm rapidly coming to the conclusion that clubs were fun although it took me a while to figure out which clubs were more fun than they were dull or distressing. They were rarely as fun as I'd thought they'd be, though, and my advice to a young beginner is to have a taxi company on speed dial and go home as soon as she sees ennui creeping around the corner.  

Some readers will object that young people should not be in clubs at all, for they are dungeons of sin and vice, but I'm afraid such talk will imbue them with dark glamour. When I was a teenager, a much more effective means of convincing the young was telling them that something was boring. One of my religion teachers discouraged our class from watching The Last Temptation of the Christ by telling us that it was boring. My mother discouraged me from wanting to go to rock concerts by telling me that they were boring and if you want to hear the music, you should buy the album. (My mother had the chance to see The Beatles at Maple Leaf Gardens but chose not to go because she knew she wouldn't hear anything except girls screaming.) 

Another deterrent, if you are determined to keep youngsters out of dance clubs, is to explain that they are not primarily a place to cut loose on the dance floor--as the innocent young probably think--but a warehouse where sex-minded adults seek other sex-minded adults for sex. Therefore, a young lady should not be shocked if, for example, a very drunk young man wearing comedy breasts dances up to her and shouts "Touch my breasts!" And this sex-mindedness is also the reason why they have to guard their drinks. 

The religion teacher who successfully put us off watching The Last Temptation of Christ also said that when he saw what we wore to dances, he wanted to kit us out in suits of armour. After reading these injection stories, I feel the same way about young women in general. Of course, they will not understand this, just as we didn't understand our religious teacher and some of my classmates were affronted. ("Men should control themselves," etc.) Innocent or ignorant, we just couldn't understand the Niagara River that is adolescent male sexual desire and the lengths to which some men, especially evil ones, will go for relief. 

It seemed--and is--incredibly unfair that men would resent young women for being simultaneously attractive and unwilling to have sex with them. Didn't they know that we could get pregnant? Didn't they know that our immigrant parents would throw us out of the house? Didn't they know that we wanted to get married one day? What were they thinking?

Yeah, so, male desire throws "thinking" right out the window, something extremely hard to explain to a teenage girl who thinks she knows everything.

At any rate, to get back to pubs and clubs, pubs are a deeply beloved feature of British life, and they function as a sort of communal neighbourhood living-room. It would be sad if young women just stopped going to them. My advice to anyone worried about being drugged in pubs is to pick a reputable local pub and make it her own. She could go with friends always to the same pub, or only to pubs at least one of the friends usually goes to, and get to know the staff. If the pub is okay with dogs, she could bring her dog.  She should never leave her drink unattended, and she should have a taxi company on speed dial. She should know her limit--mine is inconveniently 3/4 of a pint--and stick to it. Historically women in Scotland didn't go to pubs and, although this might be overly cautious, I won't sit in one alone.  

As for dance clubs, I have no applicable up-to-date advice except "go with responsible friends" and "discuss how much to drink beforehand" and "never leave anyone in the group alone", "have a taxi company on speed dial" and "find something else to do during Freshers' Week."  I keep wanting to say I stopped going to dance clubs after my friend Clara and I got followed around Edinburgh's The Hive by what seemed to be an uncle-nephew tag team, but that wouldn't be true, for I went to Balkanarama after that, and when it wasn't boring or tedious (the queue for the grubby loo was eternal), it was quite fun.   

Thus, the answer to my question is that clubs were sometimes fun, and sometimes distressing, and often dull. But I had so much fun in a dance club in Frankfurt-am-Main, I wrote a Graham Greene tribute novel about it. (I hasten to say, however, that I have neither lived in sin with the grand-nephew of a German archbishop nor indulged in club drugs.)  

Update: In reading another story, I was moved by the words of a teenager who said that she was "just trying to enjoy her first year of university." The illusions of the young--encouraged by the entertainment industry--are so sad, as is the fact that many of the activities we turn to in search of enjoyment we would find unbearable without alcohol. 

Update 2: And I would add to my advice to go to small clubs where people clearly go for the music itself--a speciality interest place, like where salsa-fans go to salsa--not to a big, sweaty Top-40 warehouse. Frankly, I am now wondering how to convince young folk not to go anywhere associated with drink-spiking and syringe attacks.

Update 3: I think it might be through convincing them that dance clubs are SO over and that they can think up much more consistently fun things to do themselves. 

Fourth Language

When we came home from our holiday in England, I wrote down all the languages for which I have study materials and worked out which ones I use most. I have several kits, lined up like a firing squad, that stare at me accusingly from my desk. 

Deep, deep down, I know that I should get through all 100 lessons of Assimil's German, for German is a family language, spoken recreationally by my parents. 

And I also have Assimil's Spanish because some time ago Benedict Ambrose voiced a desire to go to Spain instead of Italy for once. 

I have Assimil's Ancient Greek, too, but I think we can all agree that finishing this right now would not be practical.  

For some reason, I don't have Assimil's French, even though, as a Canadian with family in Quebec, I really should recover and improve my French. Half my Christmas list comprises people who are fluent in French. French would be even more practical than German. I really should get back to French. French, French, French.

But I have had Teach Yourself's Get Started in Russian on my desk, and it has worked itself subliminally into my consciousness. Fellow language nerds tell me that Russian is a snap compared to Polish, and my buddy is marrying a Russian-American, so someone on her side of the aisle should really give a short speech in the language as a since of good will ....

And then of course my neighbourhood back home has long since been Russified, which reminds me of an amusing story about my mother.

About a thousand years ago, around 1987, my youngest brother would play with the neighbourhood kids. Many were Jewish and sometimes Russian-speaking to boot. (Nowadays there are as probably as many Christian, or post-Christian, Russians as Russian Jews around, but this was not so in the 1980s.) Anyway, boys will be boys and quarrel as well as co-operate, and one of my brother's pals got into a snit and then on the kitchen phone to complain to his (the pal's) mother about my brother. 

He did this this in Russian, secure in the belief that our family was as Anglo, white and boring as supermarket bread, parboiled rice, and mashed potatoes, all of which he could have eaten at our house, and one of which my mother was probably preparing for dinner as the boy complained about her son into the phone across the room. 

"Now is that really true?"snapped my mother, or something similar, in Russian, and my brother's pal dropped the receiver. 

I was not there, but in my mind's eye, I can see him jump. Little did he know that my mother had studied Russian in both high school and university, presumably to become a spy. (She also studied German, which made for a super cover story when she went to Germany shortly after the Cuban Missile Crisis, allegedly to work in a nursing home. She denies to this day that she was a spy.)

As it happens, I learned my first Russian phrases at my mother's knee. The first was "Иван идет на фабрику," Ivan goes to the factory, and the second was (roughly), "Здравствуйте, человек, купите мне пива," which I believed meant Hi, boys, buy me a beer. It's not quite as grammatical as that, I now know thanks to my new best friend DeepL Translate. 

Studying Russian is much easier now than then, for now after I finish work I can just go to YouTube and  entertain myself with training materials like this little video, whose soundtrack sounds suspiciously like it was produced by the American military back when Mum was sent to went to Germany. The "Okay, fellas, thanks for your time," is pretty much a giveaway. 

My mother claims she never got as far in Russian as she did in German and French. She used to knit while reading through massive nineteenth century novels in both languages, which is just as impressive as it sounds, and must have come in useful for code writing (or code knitting) while spying in Berlin.  All the same, she seems interested when I told her about my progress last night

"До свидания," she said as we signed off on Skype.

"Do svidanija," I replied.  

 

A Week Without News

Sweet triumphalism.

Hello, dear readers! Benedict Ambrose and I returned from our travels on Friday afternoon, and I plugged in my dead phone. Soon after, my phone began to buzz and I found out about the shocking murder of British Catholic MP Sir David Amess and, the next morning, the horrid revelation that a priest who knew him had rushed to the site to give him Last Rites and the police wouldn't let him in. 

That was the end of my news-free peace, but for once this was news the public (or the Catholic part of it, anyway) really needed to know, so that we could do something about it. The more useful thing I did was shoot off Tweets about it, at least one of which got forwarded on to the police. The less useful thing I did was yell at B.A. for trying to calm me down. 

But to lower my heart rate again, let us consider our lovely holiday down south. On Sunday we took a bus and a train, and then another train, and then another bus to the cathedral town of Ely, where a good pal of ours lives in a duplex originally built in the 19th century. We drank beer in a good old-fashioned pub decorated with horse brasses, picked up two pizzas, ate them and went to bed. 

The next day I made soup and pumpkin pie, and B.A. and I went to Evensong at Ely Cathedral while our pal was busy in Cambridge. We had a lamb tagine for supper, and it was very good. 

The day after that was Tuesday, the day we had designated observe Canadian Thanksgiving (which had actually been the day before). This was a lower key affair than I had planned, for B.A.  is a big Evensong fan and the one Evensong he wanted to go to was that evening at Kings College Cambridge. We had a  lovely afternoon in Cambridge, therefore, looking at painting is the Fitzwilliam Museum and scarfing Chelsea bun in Fitzbillie's across the street before queuing up by the College gates. 

Cambridge was beautiful, by the way, despite the rain. 

Then on Wednesday we all went to an antique market in Ely where I bought a number of Christmas presents, for I am avoiding the last minute Amazon scramble this year, and then my pal and I took care of a dog. I think it was a Labrador retriever of some sort, about 13 months old, and extremely energetic. We took it on two walks and played with it in the garden, and it was some hours before, tuckered out, he curled up beside me on the sofa and put his head on my knee. It was then that I realised that I really don't have time for a dog and will have to wait until I have retired before I can get one. 

We had duck for supper. 

Thursday was another Cambridge day. B.A. proposed visiting my childhood home which, incidentally, is probably one of only two of my childhood homes still standing. This time I sat down a lot to try to see the woods, the "field" (i.e. grassy square), and the duck pond from my earliest perspective. I'm afraid the woods and field were still weirdly small, but the view of the duck pond was correct. 

Our next Cambridge port of call was Our Lady and the English Martyrs Catholic Church, which is a beautiful structure built in 1900, very much in the face of disapproving non-Catholic Cantabs. There's a whole row of windows dedicated to Cardinal John Fisher, and you can tell who Margaret More is because her handbag is embossed with MEG. The high altar is still intact, for when Catholics who hate Catholic tradition try to destroy such things in Britain, the government says No. Ah, irony. Irony is not just a course I took in grad school, but a living, breathing thing. 

Next we went to Heffers Bookshop to buy more Christmas presents and a new Italian textbook, for I love to buy language books even more than I love to study languages. B.A. mostly sat quietly in a comfortable chair and read. He carried on this activity in the Cambridge University Press bookshop, where I was almost afraid to breathe, so rarefied was the air inside. I looked for friends in Theology and family in Linguistics, but found only our enemies. The top-of-the-line language books in CUP were too expensive, and they didn't have Polish in their "Using..." series, so I wasn't TOO tempted. (The Italian "Using..." books were less tempting for I had already bought an Italian textbook.) 

Then we went back to Fitzbillie's to meet our pal and have a snack before we all went together to St. John's College to hear Evensong. We sat right behind half of the choir in the choir stalls, and B.A. liked this Evensong best. One of the readings was from the writings of Sr. Joan Chittister, which was a surprise, but the main thing was that the music was Elizabethan, just the way B.A. likes Evensong to be. 

Dinner, I see, was leftover duck with ginger and spring onions. 

On Friday, we all got up at 6AM so B.A. and I could catch the train to Peterborough, where we caught the train to Edinburgh. I read a pal's manuscript all the way home. 

So those are the highlights of our travels. My primary thought was that I will not spend retirement (when it comes) reading Twitter but doing the kinds of things I do on holiday: visiting friends, going to religious services, cooking, going for walks with a dog, staring at paintings with B.A., correcting manuscripts, studying languages, and spending money in bookshops and tearooms. 

By the way, we went to the Vigil Mass at St Mary's Cathedral in Edinburgh on Saturday night, and I felt a bit teary singing "One Bread, One Body," for it reminded me of when I was a child. This, I realised, was that nostalgia people who dislike people who love the Traditional Latin Mass keep accusing us of. It is a bit silly, really. I'm no spring chicken, but I started going to the New Rite the Sunday after I was born. Of course, I also felt a tad teary because when I was a child, I thought all Catholics really were "One Body in this One Lord," but now I can't imagine a Mass celebrated by Fr. Martin, say, in which Massimo Faggioli shared a hymnbook with Peter Kwasniewski. So that's a bit sad. 

But the plus side is that I didn't feel at all uncomfortable in the Anglican Evensongs, possibly because the buildings were so old all yr cthdrl & chpl really belong to us. Also, I was with B.A., the ex-Piskie, and he knows his way around a choir stall. In the choir stalls of Ely Cathedral, I thought how nice it was to be totally ignorant of contemporary Anglican politics--with the exception of Michael Nazar-Ali swimming the Tiber, which B.A. told me about during my internet fast. 

Internet fast

I'm not going to be typing for a whole nine days. Yes, it is time for my October holidays, and although I will not be spending them in Golden Poland or Glorious Rome, I will be spending them offline. 

My plans are to copyedit an English translation of a Polish novel (on paper with a pen) and to do all the exercises my physiotherapist said to do. I will also be making pumpkin pie from fresh pumpkins found at Tesco and plotting new ways to save money. 

Hopefully my arm will be restored to health, and my brain will become all pink, spongy and pliable again.

Go tell my friends that I remember them