Get out of the elevator, now.

Hello, me again to remind you that if you are a woman in any situation where a man makes you feel worried about your safety, get out of there.  Don't second-guess yourself. Don't worry if the man might think you are a Bad Person if you suddenly vanish. Don't check your privilege or conduct an internal struggle session. Just get out of there.

If the man is blocking your way, call for help. If nobody else is in earshot, call for help on your mobile/cellphone. The most important thing is that you get home alive and unharmed.

You are a woman. If you are like most women, you are only one-half to two-thirds as strong as the average man. You're probably stronger than most children, though, so please don't use your strength to threaten or brutalise children. In the meantime, bad men of all nations, colours and creeds use their strength to threaten and brutalise women and children all the time. And sometimes women and children have only seconds to guess if a man is bad or not. So if you feel scared, get off the elevator. Exit the shop. Get out of the stairwell. Leave the room. Run to the nearest place of safety. Pull out your phone and call someone.

You are a woman and if you're alone in a room/elevator/forest with man, and he happens to be a bad man, you don't have any so-called privilege anymore, whatever colour you are. You have a famously underprivileged female body---and a phone.

When I was an amateur boxer, many years ago, I learned two important things. The first is that the world doesn't end if a man punches you in the face, so don't go through life worrying that a man might punch you in the face one day. The second is that fighting men with your fists is nevertheless very, very dangerous. It is very, very dangerous because men--and I'm including 15 year old boys here--are so much stronger than you, even if you are a super-wiry 27 year old in top condition.

I'm sorry I have to say all this again, but I've just watched a video of a man mocking a woman who is clearly afraid of him because she has encountered him alone in the woods and she thought he was standing in her way. When she called the police on her cellphone, he shouted "You're not talking to anyone! You're not talking to anyone!" When it became clear she had been talking to police, he shouted "Karen!"

I don't know if he's (usually) a good guy or a bad guy. But I do know that if I were brave enough to go running alone in the woods, I would have pulled my phone out if I was startled by any man I encountered there. Finding oneself alone in the woods with an aggressive male stranger of any colour is just about every woman's nightmare.

Update: Here's some statistics from 95% "white" Scotland, population 5 million:

• [In 2018-2019] sexual crimes increased by 8% from 12,487 to 13,547. The recording of these crimes is at the highest level seen since 1971, the first year for which comparable groups are available.

A Beautiful House

Don't mind me! Just parking a link here so I can find it later. I'm working, so must go.

https://www.ingomar.org/about/carson-mansion


Update: B.A. does not like the above house and did not respond well to my suggestion that we build a house just like it when  if we win the lottery. But I remembered another big American house--the  Studebaker mansion in South Bend, Indiana. My elder grandma used to take us to there for grand lunches.

Update 2: "I don't like North American architecture. It's hideous and derivative," said B.A. re: Tippecanoe. He likes log cabins, though.

The Absolute Necessity of Asking for Help

I have been falling asleep by reading the reassuring and familiar plots of Georgette Heyer, fairy tales for grown-up ladies. What struck me last night was the reassuring set of rules her characters know they are to abide by. When in London, for example, an unmarried "Lady of Quality" must not go out for a walk unless accompanied by a friend, her maid, or a footman.

What frightened me very much in high school, university and at various points in my life was not knowing what the rules were, the "How Tos" that would get me from "my dreams" to their fruition. n the same way I thought that merely attending language classes would make me fluent in, say, Irish, I initially believed that success and happiness would just come along through mere attainment of university degrees, the ability to attract positive male attention, and the avoidance of mortal sin.

(These things, by the way, are indeed helpful--the last is crucial--but not enough in themselves.)

I can still remember my utter dismay, my aporia, to employ one of the few terms I remember from my philosophy classes, upon approaching graduation and not knowing what to do about getting a proper job. I wasn't just dismayed: I was frightened. Reading want-ads in the student job centre was something I could handle, but actually asking someone in the job centre to help me was simply beyond me.

Sometimes, when thinking about my adolescent self falling into yet another pit of despair, I impotently ask "Why did you not ask for help?"

The first person to ask me this, if I remember correctly, was our German friend Johannes the Good, who was astonished when I complained of a  non-German stranger in Frankfurt who insisted on making me the subject of his amorous intentions and would have followed me back to the residence in which I was staying had I not finally, heart fluttering like a bird in a net, succeeded in discouraging him.

"Who would have helped me?" I asked, as when this annoyance began I was in a bus station surrounded by various Germans all busily minding their own business.

"An older German lady," said Johannes firmly. "If you had asked her, she would have shouted at him."

And this, I realised, was absolutely true.

If I were to compose a list of advice for Young Women Today, I would put "Ask for help" somewhere near the top. If a Young Woman's response is "The last time I asked for help, I didn't receive help" or "The last time I asked for help, I got yelled at", I would respond "Ask a different person for help" or "Figure out whose job it is to help you, and ask them for help."

"Always look for the helpers," as Mr Rogers famously said albeit in a different context--or is it?

Sometimes I feel modern life is a dark and scary cave and one must feel one's way along the walls to keep from falling into an even darker and scarier tunnel. I don't have a map; all I have are Regency romance novels, and they are really no help. In fact, they can make life worse for they underline, again and again, that women-of-honour are inescapably financially dependent on their families, especially their male relations or husband. This is simply not true.  It has not been true for a long time.

They suggest--indeed most books written before 1950 suggest--that women who have to work for their living are terribly unfortunate and usually socially inferior to women who don't. Work, in books, also makes you terribly vulnerable. Every time a runaway ingenue in a Georgette Heyer novel suggests becoming a governess or a chambermaid, her confidante is so firmly against the idea, that it is clear to the fully-adult reader that this is because governesses and chambermaids were routinely victims of sexual violence.

By the time I graduated from university, I wished I hadn't read so many novels that expressed such a horror of work, especially women working. The conservative circles in which I moved were similarly lukewarm about women's employment outside the home. I was also primed by such books as Lifting a Ton of Feathers: A Woman's Guide to Surviving the Academic World to expect unrelenting horror in pursuing my career dreams.

But now I am writing myself into a depression, so I will go back to my initial point which is that in an age in which we are no longer have a clear blueprint of how to get on in life, it behooves us all to find out whose job it is to provide help and advice and to ask for help and advice.

If you have children, I suspect it is a very good idea never to dissuade them from asking you for help and advice. Presumably if you tell children who ask you for help that you're too busy or  that they should be able to do whatever it is on their own, they will get the idea that asking for help is useless or bad. And that would be too bad.

Let's not glamourise the mortgage.

This morning it occurs to me--having seen the editor of a competitor tweet about his mortgage--that paying for a mortgage may have turned into a Symbol of Adulthood and that by writing it I have continued to make it sound glamorous and grown-up instead of the ridiculous modern institution it is.

Crean and Fimister's Integralism (which I recommend making the effort to read) comes down hard on wage slavery, and a mortgage is another form of wage slavery. Unfortunately, most people in the West cannot live in a what we consider a decent home (e.g. a roof, windows, cold & hot running water, a stove) without paying rent or spending an eye-watering sum.

The eye-watering sum is not necessarily the down payment although I shudder at what down payments can be for a house in London or Toronto. Our two-bedroom flat is worth less than the down payment on a one-bedroom flat in Kensington's Old Brompton Road I saw online this morning.  No, the eye-watering sum is the actual price of the home, which is not the price you (usually with the help of the bank) pay the seller but the price you end up paying the bank over the years. In short, you are lining the pockets of the bank with the money your employer or your client gives you for your time and expertise.

Benedict Ambrose and I have been watching an old British television series called "How to Live Mortgage Free," which addresses inflated housing prices and interviews people who get around them by either by building their own homes for between £5,500 - £30,000 or by paying down the mortgage early. These built homes are usually a houseboat, a converted vehicle, or a "temporary" dwelling built on a parents' farmland. Another innovation is to form a collective with others, buy a piece of land with some of your collective savings, and then build a multi-family dwelling together (using the rest of the collective savings) on that. (Actually, I'm not sure that is so innovative, as families in North America have been doing that for some time.)

But I have run out of time before work, so that's my thoughts on the subject now. Mortgages are not a sign of adulthood but a necessary evil that falls upon many adults. They may be a lesser evil, however, than rent. In the end it may depend on whether more money goes up in smoke on rent than it does on interest payments.

In the Woods

Either it has been a strange weekend, or the uncertainty of the lockdown is getting to me.

Yesterday was Saturday, and B.A. and I took a short (for us) walk along an old railway line. Our county abounds in old railway lines which are now paved trails and nature reserves. This trail ascended gently through woods, and I saw a figure in army fatigues run into the undergrowth, leaving behind a large bundle.

The bundle moved, and I wondered then if it were a large dog or a person in need of help. When we approached it, I perceived that it had hands and something that looked very much like an assault rifle. In fact, the person lying there was in complete British military camouflage--face paint, fake greenery, the works.

What do you do when Western Civilisation seems to be burning to the ground, and you come across young men in army fatigues and assault rifles during your woodland walk? If you are me, you walk politely by, praying that the guns are fake.

"Is anyone stalking us?" I asked B.A.

"They look about nine or ten years old," said B.A.

Such was the state of My Nerves (long-time readers will recall I got them honestly from my grandmother) that I didn't notice this.

It was gently raining. It rained until we got to the next town, discovered that the Catholic Church is open for personal prayer only 2 hours a week (and that we were too late for both), and enjoyed looking at all the houses and cottages we will choose among when we win the lottery/have an unprecedented pay raise.

I had a wonderfully juicy "I told you so" comment when a large and beefy jolly chap told B.A. (who still had his map in his hands) that he could tell he was taking advantage of our new freedom to travel more than five miles.

We had coffee and millionaire's shortbread with one of B.A.'s pals, who lives in a beautiful house in the town.

When we returned to our own neighbourhood, we bought a small bottle of prosecco to celebrate our annual mortgage overpayment. Perhaps you thought my interest in minimalism was for the aesthetics of it all. Alas, no. While we were celebrating, I printed off the bank statement for June, so as to see how we spend our money. We spend it on food and drink, apparently. Our "ethical carnivore" bill would astound you, so I won't publish it. Jaunts to the famous local ice-cream counter came to £18.55.

Unfortunately, financial thoughts continued to chase each other round and round my head, leaving me utterly unable to sleep. Trying to relax with a Georgette Heyer novel didn't work this time, possibly because it was Faro's Daughter and the plot is all about debts, bribes, gambling losses and a mortgage. There was light in the sky before I fell asleep.

I am sure I am not alone in having a sleepless night over the mortgage. In fact, I think my mother used to lie awake picking at the counterpane thinking about hers 40-odd years ago. Meanwhile, I have received notices from our lender about "mortgage holidays" and when I got on the phone in an attempt to announce our overpayment to a live person, a recorded voice asked me to choose from various options, beginning with "mortgage holiday" requests.  Thanks to minimalism, we ourselves do not want to take a "mortgage holiday," but I feel awful for all those in Britain who have to.

Sleeplessness, the continuing ghastly news from the USA, and thoughts about what new horrors the lockdown will bring all rendered me rather weepy today. What makes the lockdown worse is the lack of consensus among my friends about whether or not it is even necessary. At least one calls the emergency measures the "coronahoax." It's also not great that in Scotland we talk about "Nicola" (the First Minister) as if she were Big Brother or rather, since the remarks are usually derisive, the bogey monster.

What I would really like is to  do now is take a live-in-person holiday. However, I prefer holidays abroad to see family and/or friends to holidays sitting on (as now seems likely) British beaches. Everyday, therefore, I check to see if "Nicola" has relaxed the mandatory two-week quarantine on travellers.

The Tomatoes

My friend in the countryside sent me home with two tomato plants, for she feels she has too many in her greenhouse. It is a truth universally acknowledged in Scotland that a tomato plant without a greenhouse perishes in the damp summer weather. We don't have a greenhouse, so I am experimenting with the windowsill. When the sun comes back, I will put the tomato plants for an extended daylight recess.

Meanwhile, the second courgette, which is trying to supplant the rosemary as the king of the herb barrell, has put out a blossom. I will eat it for breakfast tomorrow.

In pea news, the pea seedlings under pop bottle cloches have clearly developed so much faster than their younger brothers that I have made new cloches for them. So far there has been no damage to the peas seedlings.

The kale and the rainbow chard are flourishing hugely, and we are having the rainbow chard with dinner tonight.

I have complained to the First Minister about the 14 day quarantine on travellers to Scotland via Twitter. Unfairly, I did not complain to the Prime Minister of Canada about the 14 day quarantine on travellers there. However, what happens in Canada is a minority interest in Scotland, and the fact that the English can traipse back and forth across the Channel without a care probably rankles in many Scottish souls.

Keeping the Shadows at Bay

We had an excellent Dominion Day, thank you, spent in the countryside with another Canadian-Scottish couple and their children. We lunched on pancakes with maple syrup, and we dined on hamburgers. We had a lovely walk through fields up hills and down dales, praying the Rosary. The Canadians sang the National Anthem in French. Being able to sing the National Anthem in French just feels more Canadian. Don't ask me to write it out, however.

The next day I went back to swimming through the swamp of bad news, and it was pretty terrible. While researching a freedom of speech story, I watched a short video of a coked-up woman playing around with a gun in a car and then shooting the man beside her in the head. As the previously lively yet nervous man fell sideways with a sound like the air being let out of a balloon, blood pouring from his head, the woman and the man in the back burst out of the car.

The person who posted this video had introduced it with an unpleasant racial slur, which made it all the worse. The injured man did not die, by the way, but suffered significant brain damage. I had to find this out myself, as the poster wasn't interested in his welfare.

To put this in perspective, I couldn't make myself watch the "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" series because I couldn't take the violence.  I can't watch Scorsese films, and I lasted only the first two minutes of Wild at Heart. Incidentally, what the hell is wrong with the human race?

Don't answer that: I know.

As an exercise in freedom of speech, the poster failed in his object. Well, that's assuming that his object was to convince other people that his racial theory was correct. I'm doubting that his object was to traumatise (however mildly) a conservative alt-media journalist and give her a serious case of writer's block. Yesterday was not one of my got-two-stories-done days.

I seriously need a holiday but--and here is the point of this article, really--for once world events are having a serious impact on my daily, domestic life. What I really want to do is go home to Toronto, chat to my parents, possibly swim in their pool, definitely visit my siblings and best pals, rediscover how hot a Toronto July can be. However, my parents are over 70, and despite a torrent of stories suggesting that everything we have been told about coronavirus is wrong, I am mortally afraid of somehow infecting my parents.*

The more likely plan is going to Poland. However, this is not so simple either, for whereas England is not going to punish its residents with a two-week quarantine after returning from July travels, it appears that Scotland is determined to do so. Being quarantined at home doesn't matter as much to me, as we have a garden and food delivery accounts, but B.A. refuses to risk being quarantined. For one thing, if he isn't laid off at the end of the month, he will be called back to work.

Did I mention that B.A. (like so many others) is at risk of being "made redundant"? Yes. But we won't go there for now. I am not being made redundant, so we'll be better off than thousands of British households.

Under these circumstances, it would be great not to have to take on board all the other sufferings in the world. The ideological carnage in the USA is just really too much, and I deliberately did not read the Dominion Day news in Canada because I knew that a day celebrating Canada's history and people's would naturally be used by malcontents as an excuse to pour hatred on our country. (I don't know what is worse--that or using shows like "Anne with a E" to rewrite our history and literature.)

So what to do? Well, the first thing to do--I think--is to stop reading any news except the news I have to write on. That's it: two or three bad things a day. No more than three broken hearts, bad bishops, ideological outrages or social atrocities a day.

After that, I really don't know what else to do to keep the shadows at bay.

*And I can't stay elsewhere in Canada--there's a strict 14 day quarantine, so I'd have to stay indoors and not see anyone anyway.

Update: Occasionally I come across sanity-saving "good news" or, rather, good old news.