The Parish Dance

I saw the film Brooklyn during a visit to Toronto, and the scene in which Saoirse Ronan's "Eilis" meets Emory Cohen's "Tony" could have been filmed in the basement parish hall of an old Toronto Catholic church. (I have checked, and it was filmed in Montreal.) The low ceiling, the two-toned pillars, and the stage are just so familiar. 

I found a clip of the dance scene on YouTube, and in the comments a wistful viewer writes "Wish i could meet someone this way... Not at a club, not online, just a nice old fashioned dance."

It just occurs to me that Polish Pretend Son met his wife, not at a nice old fashioned dance, but at a tango-dancing festival. I had put his chances of meeting a Nice Catholic Girl at tango at zero, but I suppose the odds of meeting a Nice Catholic Girl in Poland, even at a tango festival, are still very good. 

However, we don't all live in Poland, so you are as unlikely to meet a Nice Catholic Somebody at secular tango-dancing, Latin dancing, and even swing-dancing events as you are at Tequila Jack's or the Opal Lounge. And back when my grandparents were young (and when my parents were children), young Catholics went looking for other young Catholics at their parish dance or--as Tony did in Brooklyn--at another parish dance. If you wanted to meet Irish girls in New York, you went to an Irish parish in New York. 

Young Catholics today may feel nostalgic for the dances they never knew; I am feeling nostalgic for a parish hall. When Father Flood and Mrs Keogh organized dances for the young folks, they already had a parish hall. Poor, poor Mrs McLean is a TLMer, so she doesn't have a parish hall. She must pay for everything. Therefore, she must also solicit donations and sell tickets. 

The Eastertide Dance is my most recent attempt at resurrecting the Nice Old-fashioned Parish Dance. (Unlike the parish dance in Brooklyn, however, there will be wine and beer, tea and coffee, crisps and cake.) Catholics who love the Traditional Latin Mass are a minority within a minority in Scotland, so my original idea was to bring them together for a night of merriment. (Unfortunately, I haven't yet figured out how to provide childcare.) This worked well, I thought, at the Michaelmas Dance, so now my goal is to attract an even larger crowd. Of course, the difficulty with being a minority within a minority is that the community is not necessarily very big. Thus, I have invited a priest at a conservative-enough parish to tell his youth group all about it. As Generation Z supposedly makes all its decisions at the last minute, I am crossing my fingers and hoping for the best. Oh, and experimenting with direct marketing. 

Looking at videos of the Brooklyn parish dance, I note that poor Dolores, who so badly wants to meet "fellas," is darting glances around like a crazed cockatoo. The viewer is invited to consider if anyone is likely to ask her to dance. One of the strengths of the Eastertide Dance over that dance is that we have 7 ceilidh dances planned. Our dance balances out "couple" dances with "group dances." Dolores, if she deigned to dance our Scottish gambols, could stop worrying about the fellas and just dance.

The Frogs on the Tiling

Once upon a time I was very entertained by "transformation" scenes in popular films. It was fun to believe that streetwalkers could be transformed into elegant ladies, dowdy schoolgirls into princesses, and tough-talking cops into beauty queens over the course of a day at a beauty salon, plus new clothing. 

Sadly, I have never found that beauty services plus new clothing transformed me into someone better, unless there is a particular virtue in having less money. In terms of physical appearance, what really does--or did--the trick is sleep, sharply curtailed calorific intake, a job involving much walking, and going to gyms up to 10 times a week. 

When I lived that way, I worked at a Canadian passport office and, still possessing the arrogance of youth, marvelled at the difference between older women who had clearly given up fighting the ravages of time and older women who seemed determined to fight them to the grave. "Older" meant over 40. And I was in a unique position to know exactly how old every woman was, as it was written on her passport application and printed on her birth certificate. 

Having worked hard to become athletic and slim, I was very much on the side of the Over-40s fighting time. And after I reached 40 myself I was among their number until 2017 when I was going so often to visit my husband at the hospital that I bought a bus pass. The bus pass photo showed an exhausted, worried middle-aged woman, a most-unfashionable kerchief tired around her mad hair. She looked terrible, like an Over-40 who had given up the fight. 

"Who cares?" I thought. "So be it." 

What I did not know when I was a slim 20-something is that you don't get the face and figure you deserve after 40. You get the ones handed to you by life. If you are blessed with good genes and good luck, you can appear youthful for decades. If, however, you are walloped with illness, family illness, unexpected deaths, financial disasters, political unrest, emotional betrayals, fire, flood, and goodness knows what else, it shows up in your appearance. Nowadays when I see an obese old woman on the street, I try to picture the slender teenager she probably once was and wonder what life did to her. 

Sometimes you can actually feel years of life taken from your body. This definitely happened to me in 2018 when I came back to the Historical House after an unpleasant social call and discovered the priceless, irreplaceable, never-to-be-touched-without-gloves contents of the museum collection set out on the front lawn. 

Benedict Ambrose and I had been more-or-less guarding that collection with our lives, so I thought immediately that B.A. could be, despite months of the NHS's hard work, dead. However, he suddenly became visible, breaking away from the huddle of people and precious furniture, coming towards me wearing a hard hat, and calling, "I'm all right. It's all right!"

It wasn't, really. The worst thing that can happen to an old house is fire. But the second worst--which had happened--is flood. The fire retardant sprinkler system had malfunctioned while we were both away from home. Almost all my clothes (right under one of the sprinkler heads) were destroyed, but it always seemed churlish to mention that (let alone demand redress) given the damage to the national treasure. And, of course, we were suddenly homeless. 

Catalogue of Alarums and Excursion:

Amoris Laetitia, the brain tumour, the Deluge, homelessness, brain tumour again, experimental radiotherapy, finding a mortgage, buying a flat, double-taxation (now resolved), COVID lockdown, B.A.'s subsequent voluntary redundancy, Traditionis Custodes, spinal tumours, more experimental radiotherapy, Fiducia Supplicans and, slowly yet unexpectedly, B.A.'s inability to walk unaided. 

No, I do not think a day at the beauty salon and a Rodeo Drive shopping excursion would suffice to soothe the ravages of time.  

You will be surprised to read that the intent of this post was to think in print about renovating the bathroom. The opening sentence was going to be something like "I have lost the desire to renovate myself, and now I desire only to renovate the bathroom." Bathroom renovations, I am assured by the internet, are naturally difficult, stressful, and involve many decisions. Mistakes are costly. And, sadly, in our case renovations are absolutely necessary, as B.A. can't climb over the side of the bathtub without risking his neck. Thus, it too gets added to the list of alarms and excursions. 

I veer between wanting to cut a hole in the side of the bathtub (and covering the edges with rubber trim), which would cost £30, and wanting the local bathroom designer to build us a spa, which would cost £15,000+. (American readers: this is not a request for funding! One of the most wonderful things about Americans is your overflowing generosity, but we both have jobs and are not on our uppers yet.) The good news is that home repairs done under the duress of a physical disability are sales-tax free. The bad news is that my preferred approach to life improvement is to remove things and habits that cost money, not buy new ones. 

However, I will have to lump it because B.A. doesn't like the hole-in-the-side-of-the-bathtub plan, and I have long since wearied of the frogs on the tiling. 

Observations from Misfortune

I was exhausted by bedtime last night, thanks to a long day dominated by travels by bus, car and rollator to and from Mass. 

I once thought being car-free was a great blessing; now I think it is a luxury we can no longer afford. The last time we took a taxi anywhere, it became obvious that the driver had no idea how to navigate the area without a GPS, the GPS took us on a highly original route, and the driver charged us £30.72. 

The first thing I noticed yesterday was that if I stand back and allow Benedict Ambrose to lift his lightweight rollator up or down a step, strangers will lunge past me to grab it. I am sure they mean to be helpful,  it's lovely to live in a society where people care, and. B.A. is a humble, patient man. But it leaves me feeling like a seeing-eye dog who has just been chastised for laziness. People, ask first.

The second thing I noticed was that there was dried dog dirt on a wheel of the rollator. Mindful of the car we were going  to travel in after our two bus rides, I wiped it off with a clean paper napkin I fortunately had in my pocket. I know everyone says this, but honesty, do pick up after your dog. Not everyone can see where it poops, especially after dark. (We had gone to a dinner party the night before, and our return journey was out of the Odyssey.)

The third thing I noticed (not for the first time) is that everyone is horrified when I mention the quotes given to us by mobility bathroom salesmen. Amazingly, nobody else has been asked to pay £16,000 for obviously cheap materials and a crew guaranteed to finish the job. I keep checking the internet, and it keeps telling me that people remodelling a small bathroom in the UK in 2024 should expect to pay between £4,000 and £6,000, unless they go all out and buy luxury goods.  

One salesmen told us the high price was due to COVID and Brexit. He also told us that nobody uses plywood for waterproof wall panels anymore, and in fact plywood comes from Russia. (The horror!) On the coffee table before him was a catalogue of wall panels from a rival firm, and their centre cores are made from plywood. 

As I have not yet spoken to a firm that remodels bathrooms, not just mobility bathrooms ("We did the bathroom for  X hospital, have a look at the photos!), I cannot say if it is the word "mobility" that adds £10,000 to the bill. However, as the people most likely to hire a mobility bathroom firm are the elderly and disabled, which is to say the most vulnerable adults in society, I suspect an investigation is in order. 

The fourth thing that I noticed is that my nerves are fraying, and that we both need the services of the cancer support service. Unfortunately, the cancer support service is two bus rides away, and when we were last near it and had time to go at once, it was closed. 

The fifth thing that I noticed was that I reached a flow state yesterday afternoon while reading my daily two pages of Bolesław Prus's Lalka (The Doll). It is set in 1878, it is hardly a text for foreigners, and when I go over it unaided, I can only get the gist. However, it is great fun to compare the text afterwards to a translation and fill in the gaps. 

This reminded me that I sometimes want to write a post arguing against feeling sad all the time. When Benedict Ambrose was very sick in 2017 and I was combining full-time work with second-guessing doctors and either begging them to do something or visiting B.A. in hospital, I received an angry email from an up-to-that-moment cherished friend disgusted by my blogposts about learning Italian. Apparently this then-friend believed that I was not doing enough to help Benedict Ambrose and that I was criminally negligent. I needed to stop going to Italian class and follow her [expensive and lunatic] care plan.*  

What she didn't know was that Italian class, and thinking and writing about how speaking a second language changes a brain, and how and why second and third languages get scrambled up when you try to speak them, gave me a respite from acute mental torment. She knew Benedict Ambrose was suffering, but she couldn't seem to grasp that his wife was suffering, too, and that if she sent her wacko email, it would scar the latter for life. 

Anyway, when someone you love is very sick, you don't have to be sad all the time. You should feel free to admit that you are sad, but you should also work on keeping depression at bay. Fortunately for me, I have never thought solitary drinking or drugging the path to joy. I am also not a fan of lying on the sofa reading endless paperbacks although I know that works for others. Instead, I disappear into the world of foreign languages, and quite a wonderful world it is, too. 

*Yes, I know I have written about this recently. But it was, hands down, the worse communication I have ever received in my life. Never, ever write to the spouse of a very sick person accusing her/him of maltreating him/her. 

Thinking about Our Boys

I tried to write a companion post to "Talking to Girls", but it got bogged down in the caveats about the minority of men who are mad, bad and dangerous to know, so I gave up. Let us put all that Daily Mail stuff aside and think about only those good men to whom you have been introduced at the Newman Center, CSU, Juventutem, on pilgrimage and/or at the After-Mass Coffee and Tea. In fact, let us talk about Our Boys.

Thinking about Our Boys suggests discrimination, and that's exactly what women should exhibit towards men: discrimination. After all, the Christian woman's ideal is to share her life with only one man (or, if a nun, only with the Son of Man) while being a cordial neighbour to the other men around. It is easier to be cordial when these men are sane, good and safe to know. And the easiest way to ensure that is to avoid the other kind completely. 

Sanity, goodness, and safety are merely the essential basics, of course. Young marriage-minded women often have a long list of traits that the Ideal Husband should have. It gets shorter as they get older and realize some of the things on the list are very trivial, or when they fall in head-over-heels with someone with few of the characteristics written secretly in the back of the notebook. Look at me: I married a man with a beard who can't drive.  

However, Benedict Ambrose was definitely one of Our Boys, which for me meant that he was a Catholic who went to Mass every Sunday and prayed every day. And since shared Catholicism was my number one value of values, I knew that however much B.A. might irritate me in future (if he did), I would stick by him through thick and thin: he was one of Our Boys. Also, he was funny, clever, kind, talented, and had great dinner parties. But that said, while B.A. was sliding into a coma, all that was left was the shared Catholicism. It was enough. 

The importance of thinking about men who share your most cherished values as Our Boys is that it helps dull the negative effects their more amusing traits have on you. In my experience, young women have a harder time understanding that men are not just women in larger, more rectangular bodies. Thus, it might seem hilarious when men are not as good as women are at certain things: striking up conversations with women, colour-coordinating outfits, reading micro-expressions, walking gracefully. It isn't really. 

Incidentally, as I am writing primarily for Our Girls, I am sure I don't have to explain how unreasonable it is to say men "just shouldn't look" or "should keep better custody of their eyes" in response to complaints to immodest female attire. Of course, some of the more original-minded of Our Boys will argue that women should dress like statues of Our Lady of Sorrows. He is, of course, making the error of thinking that women are just men in smaller, rounder bodies who will dispassionately weigh such ideas in an abstract fashion and not view them as personal attacks or think immediately of the Taliban. Naturally, it would be an error to take these Our Boys seriously, just as it would be an error to dress like statues of Our Lady of Sorrows. Tell them that you  tried dressing like OLOS at one point but gave it up when you tripped on your hem in front of a bus. 

In short, I am counselling patience, understanding and kindness. It is a terrible thing to laugh at a well-meaning young man. It is also a bad idea to scold him. Given the very anti-male turn our society has taken, and given the female domination of the education industry, the average young man in the West has been bullied by women from birth and is mighty tired of it. Therefore, instead of employing the "delightful raillery" used by millionaire's daughter Elizabeth Bennett when punching up at the billionaire Mr. Darcy, it is a better idea to give young men the impression that you think they are marvellous. 

There is an appropriate degree to this, of course. You don't want to give the impression that you are man-mad, and obviously you must be super-careful in what you say to married men. However, I cannot see that there is anything wrong in giving voice to positive, if trivial, thoughts that come into your mind when you see a pullover you like on a fellow Single or feel that your dance partner has greatly improved. 

And that's all I have to say. To recap:

1. Avoid all men who are mad, bad, and dangerous to know.

2. Develop feelings of solidarity with the men you know who share your most cherished values, aka Our Boys.

3. Plan on marrying one of them, or someone like them, one day. 

4. Be patient, understanding and kind when Our Boys, though well-meaning, are tongue-tied, puppyish, clumsy, or colour-uncoordinated. 

5. Some boys come up with weird abstract theories that you should neither take seriously nor get upset about. If possible, make a joke about it. 

Boy: Women should never work outside the home. 

Girl: That's why I'm going to marry for money. What's your major?

Boy: Women should dress like Our Lady.

Girl: I tried, but then I tripped in front of a bus. 

Boy: Women should not go to university.

Girl: But then how would we homeschool our sons?

6. If your outfit would have been morally acceptable in your town in 1962, it's fine now. 

7. Their female-dominated education may have been rather tough on Our Boys. Feed and water them with kind words.  

Talking to Girls

When I was a young thing, as thin as a pin yet bursting with dreams, I had a very hard time meeting handsome young men. After I married, they appeared as if by magic. Absolute crowds, my dear, around the dinner table, filling the guests rooms, asking my advice about minor ailments. 

This may partly be because I had joined, through marriage, the Traditional Latin Mass community which, in Scotland, has a male majority. More recently it is also because I have advanced in the brotherhood of scribes and thus meet many young men with strong views on political subjects. During the course of my working day, I may contact them to ask "Should we care that Counsellor X has been chased into a McDonald's on Y Square by a baying mob, or is this just a normal Tuesday?"

To my diminishing surprise, the young men I speak to most eventually ask for my advice about girls. These are always Catholics, so their ultimate goal is to get married and have children. I am very sympathetic to these aims, and I am particularly sympathetic if the men are in their 30s and having an awkward time of it. 

By the way, the problem is not always that women don't notice them, but sometimes that the women who like them don't like what they like, and the chap can't contemplate a lifetime with a woman who doesn't appreciate classics of 1970s cinema or whatever. 

"Well, that's because you didn't love her, so that's okay," I said on a similar occasion.

"Really?" 

"Yes. If you had been really crazy about her, you wouldn't have cared less that she didn't know who Clint Eastwood was. So don't worry about it. I almost never say this, but have you considered Ave Maria Singles?"  

As a matter of fact, I really dislike dating websites because they remind me of those windows in the red light district of Amsterdam where women sit about being ogled by men. Men and women looking for true love should not be divorced from their contexts, by which I mean their families, friends, neighbourhoods, parishes, professions, teams, and everything else that goes into who they are. And although women are said not to be as visual as men, we are still visual when looking at dating websites, and instead of seeing a man on his own at a party, we see one face among dozens, if not hundreds, of other male faces. By the way, the ones in their 20s are so much better-looking than the ones in their 40s and 50s, it makes me sad. 

Therefore, my next piece of advice to men looking for wives is not to rely on the dating websites but to go where there are a lot of women and not necessarily many men. Benedict Ambrose caught my attention, not only because my English pal Aelianus mentioned him in his list of marriageable friends, but because he became a frequent commentator on my then-popular blog for Single women. 

One place women who like men will always want to find men is the partner-dance dance floor. And women who frequent partner-dance dance floors will almost always dread being wallflowers and will almost always be grateful to be rescued from this fate by a man who is clean, polite, reasonably well-dressed, and can dance reasonably well. If he can dance very well, so much the better. 

In my swing-dance days, I became so frustrated at not being asked to dance, I paid a tutor to teach me how to dance better. (I had noticed that the best women dancers were always asked.) If you are the kind of young man who has money to spend on a private dance tutor, I highly recommend doing the same. Pick your favourite kind of music, match it up with its dance, and take lessons. 

Being great at something both public and prized by women is a definite advantage. I recall being terribly impressed by how well Benedict Ambrose gave a tour of the Historical House. It was lucky for both of us that I had a chance to see him do something that he really excels at (public speaking, lecturing on historical topics) so soon after meeting him. It was also lucky that he lived in the Historical House, if we believe women are as prone to hypergamy as all that. 

One of the most controversial ideas about women, its controversy springing partly from the fact that this has long been used as a weapon against us, is that we would prefer to marry men who are richer, more educated, and higher up on the social scale than we are. If true, this may be down to social conditioning; I can't see why it would be innate. But I can see why, in days of yore, it would be obvious: until very recently women were poorer, less educated, and by definition lower on the social scale than men. The addresses of almost any bachelor must have been flattering to any spinster whose only other options for survival were domestic service or life-long dependency on her male relations. 

Old attitudes die hard, especially when they are enshrined in such female scriptures as Pride and Prejudice, Little Women, and the Anne books. I no longer think Elizabeth Bennett was joking when she said her feelings towards Mr Darcy began to change when she first saw his stupendous estate, for I will never forget the Historical House first rising up beyond the dark woods to greet me one September night. I already liked Benedict Ambrose, of course, but his house! Naturally, it wasn't really his house, but--to adopt the theory--try telling that to my reptile brain, or wherever it is that the hypogamic impulse lives. 

Instead of judging me, gentlemen, ponder what you have of symbolic value (a Chair at the university, a great-grandfather who was Prime Minister, a great-great-grandfather awarded the Victoria Cross, a two-bedroom flat overlooking Edinburgh Castle) that you could present tastefully.

And that brings me to my next point, which is about talking to girls. When talking to a lady, it is a very bad idea to talk about yourself too much. It is a very good idea to ask the lady about herself. After all, you are not talking to the lady for the sake of talking about yourself. You are on a quest. This quest is to find the Future Mrs You but ALSO to make many female friends along the way. These new female friends will know many more eligible women than you do. Your chances of marrying the friend of a friend are rather higher than marrying a woman off the internet.

Mrs McL: Suzie, this is Scooter. He has driven all the way from Lasswade to be with us today. Scooter, this is Suzie. She is one of our many highly prized university students. Excuse me while I make the tea. 

Suzie: Nice to meet you, Scooter. I don't actually know where Lasswade is. 

Scooter: Nobody does, really. It's about ten miles south. Are you from Edinburgh?

Oh, brilliant Scooter! He has turned the conversation to Suzie in his third sentence. 

Suzie: No, I'm from Fife, but I'm now living near the uni. I share a flat with Miriam, Jane and Georgie over there. 

Scooter: I hear Edinburgh rents are very high.

Suzie: They are atrocious. How are they in Lasswade?

Scooter: Well, I don't know. I do know the mortgage rates are ghastly. 

Oh, look: Scooter owns his home. He also, Mrs McL has dropped, has a car. Will this frighten Suzie, intrigue her, or leave her utterly indifferent? I'm not sure. It all depends on Suzie, and if Scooter is smart, he will leave it at that. He should be finding commonalities with Suzie, not obviously striving to impress her. He could ask "How did you meet Mrs McL?" or "How long have you been in Edinburgh?"or any other open-ended question. 

Suzie, like most women, is a genius at small talk, so she will be certain to ask Scooter more questions about himself, which he will answer as humbly (UK) or as impressively (US) as possible. 

Scooter (in UK): And so they gave me a promotion. The fools! I don't know what I'd doing, really. 

Scooter (in US): So now I'm the youngest Vice-President of Operations in company history.  

Well, that is quite enough advice from me. I now want to ask Benedict Ambrose if he would like to go to Lasswade,  as there is a mobility bathroom designer there. And that, by the way, is an opportunity to remind you all that marriage is serious stuff. There's a reason the Anglicans serve up the bad news along with the good in their wedding vows: poverty, sickness and bad times are guaranteed in this valley of tears. 

It is possible you could get along reasonably well in marriage with someone you just rather fancy, but should cancer arrive and disrupt your bower of bliss, you will need something rather stronger--like profound respect for a sterling character--to rely on. So develop one and don't marry until you find another one. That's my ultimate word on the subject. 

To recap:

1. When you are in love, you don't care if she's not interested in your dumb masculine interests. (That said, her not being interested in them is not a good reason not to ask her on a second date.)

2. Don't expect dating websites to give you an advantage over other marriage-minded men.

3. Go where the women are and want men to turn up.  

4. The renewed craze for partner-dancing has brought such places back.

5. Learn to dance or do something else very well that is public and valued by women.

6. Continue increasing your social capital through work and education or, in a pinch, association with stuff that the kind of woman you would like to marry finds impressive. (I imagine that in some communities chaining yourself to endangered trees or flinging yourself between the hunter and the baby seal is the thing to do.)

7. When talking to women, ask them about themselves sooner rather than later. Women want to feel that we are interesting as ourselves, not just as Potential Wife Material.

8. Pay strict attention to cultural expectations when presenting your accomplishments.  

9. Life is hard. Continue developing a good character, and marry a woman of good character. 

Yes, but have an emergency plan

This morning I took the bus to Edinburgh's west end to retrieve an important key I had misplaced despite years of careful husbandry and subsequently had hysterics. 

On the way home I looked at First Things on my mobile phone and came across a thoughtful article about the destruction of America's careful and (in general) fruitful democracy based on the complementarity of the sexes. The article gave me a lot of food for thought, and I agreed with it (in general). 

In fact, I even had in my handbag an old notebook dating to 2016, about a year before I took a full-time job. I had word-sketched there a moment of absolute peace I was experiencing in a friend's greenhouse. My friend (who has since died) lived in half of a house built for a duchess, and I was living in the attic of a house bought by a law lord a few decades after it was built. It was a warm and rainy April day. My delightful and perfectly healthy (we thought) husband was at work. I did not have to earn more (we thought) than I was already earning. Naturally it was sad not to have children, but I wasn't thinking about that as I sat sheltered from the rain.

A year later our whole world had turned upside down, and I thanked the Lord of History that a woman, even a woman my age, could, in fact, find a good professional job and be paid the same wage as a man.

So my answer to "Compulsory Feminism" is  "Yes, by all means let us work to bring back and support the traditional family, the traditional breadwinner, the traditional homemaker, and the traditional roles. Let us strive to make men and woman marriageable again. Let us teach young men how to woo women, and let us help young women to preserve their mental health. But at the same time, we must insist on an emergency plan. Husbands fall ill; fathers of young families die. The wives and children of sick men are vulnerable to predators; widows and orphans even more so.  Every woman longing to marry a good man and have a family must have an emergency plan. This could be income insurance. That could be an in-demand trade or profession. Whatever it is, let us be rooted in reality. Let us have, by all means, emergency plans."

UPDATE: Children get sick, too. If you're looking for somewhere to put your Lenten alms, you might want to consider this poor family. 

How to be Youthful

On Saturday Benedict Ambrose and I took the bus to an old-fashioned mobility aids shop and got the former a rollator. A rollator, if you happen not to live or work with elderly or sick people, is a kind of trolley that helps you walk as you push it along. It usually has a seat and it sometimes has its own work or shopping bag attached. The next time you are at a bus stop look out for a very elderly lady; she might very well have one. 

I have seen elderly ladies with rollators all week; having been in the market for such a device, I suddenly noticed them everywhere. I have also noticed many people who ought not to have been sitting in the seats for the disabled on the bus. Such people have never really caught my attention before.  But all of a sudden, the availability of the disabled seats on the bus is of city- (if not world-) shaking importance. 

Anyway, the kindly salesman, who did not appear to be that much older than B.A. and I, tried B.A. out on three different rollators, which B.A. pushed up and down the pavement outside the shop, and divined which one B.A. liked best before telling us the prices. B.A. liked the medium-priced one best. At one point, while B.A. was pushing a rollator out the door, the salesman mentioned to me sotto voce that the gentleman was patient and unusually easy to work with. 

"He's very practical," I said in response to this tribute, while thinking what a mercy it was to be working with a knowledgeable person instead of buying a rollator through eBay and hoping for the best. I also imagined crowds of stubborn 70- and 80-something men, all putting off getting walking sticks, let alone a rollator, because in their minds they are still the men who ran races or sailed boats or urged horses over fences. I am sympathetic to their point of view, though, for, as B.A. got on the bus home with his refolded new rollator and we took our seats in the disabled section, I felt about 75 years old. 

By the way, my first authentic memory of a historical event is probably the funeral of Paul VI, so although no spring chicken, I am a generation younger than I felt on Saturday. Wearing a tweed coat, spectacles, practical shoes, a beret, and zero makeup like a Scottish granny of the old school no longer seemed like such a great idea. 

Thus, B.A. and I, fast-forwarded into our 8th decade by misfortune, debated on how to be more youthful. 

"Complain on Tik-Tok about having to work a 40-hour week?" I suggested.

"We already go to the Traditional Latin Mass," B.A. observed.

"True," I said smugly but typed "how to be youthful" on my smartphone. Unfortunately, the internet thought I meant how to look more youthful, and presented two lists--one all about expensive moisturizers and cosmetics and the other about drinking lots of water and getting enough sleep. 

On Sunday morning I discovered I had mislaid an important key and, when I couldn't find it on our return home from Mass, became depressed and hysterical to the point of suicidal ideation which is, sad to say, rather youthful. Fortunately, today I got a message from someone who had found it, so I left off self-contempt and decided to blog. 

In Gigi, a charming film lying about high-class prostitution, Maurice Chevalier sings a song about being glad he's not young anymore. It's mostly about love stuff but the "feeling you're only two foot tall" can unfortunately continue into adulthood. Right now, the part of youth I most envy is the power of compound interest, which is why I bombard my younger relations with advice to save at least 50% of their earnings or pocket money and invest it when they can.  

I suppose planning ever more complicated dance parties is youthful. There's a school of thought that youthfulness involves going to dance clubs and rock concerts. However, I was scarred when I saw what middle-aged Goths look like after leaving a Sisters of Mercy concert in Glasgow that time. (It turned out the Sisters of Mercy were the early show, and we oldies left just as the younghies were queuing to get into the late show, and the contrast was just unspeakable.) Then there's the idea that to be youthful is to get on the floor with building blocks, or a train set, and entering fully into the interests of friends and family aged under 10. 

Well, what do you think? If you woke up feeling 75, what would you do to get back to your proper age?