The Joy of a Winsome Beast

 We were here.

This may be an odd one. 

It takes me a long time to relax on the weekend. Our favourite thing to do is to go for a long country walk, and I find that very helpful. I don't always expect JOY as it were. Just moving along, looking at beautiful vistas, like the one I photographed, is enough. I feel generally tranquil, or perhaps a little challenged, if we are climbing something steep. But yesterday I wondered why I was not feeling euphoric.  

"Should I not be feeling joyful?" I thought, for after all we were with friends, and we were hiking through the incomparably beautiful Scottish countryside. The sky was blue and cloudless. There were no cars to be seen. We even saw, after we came back down a hill, a horse and rider clopping along as if the car had not yet been invented, or was confined to highways and cities. 

We continued walking along what one of our friends calls "The Hidden Valley", replete with tiny stone villages and church in good repair, and castles and other churches in ruins. We had stopped to look at a church in ruins, when I looked behind me and saw a horse's nose reaching out towards a tall shrub of some  sort. The horse was having a little nibble while somehow contriving to look winsome. 

He or she was adorable and suddenly I felt what I felt when I was about 12 and had drawn and coloured the head of my dream horse. I was positively delighted with this work of art but forgot all about it, of course, until yesterday. The image swam before my eyes, and I felt overjoyed.  

I'm not sure if the joy was joy in seeing an extremely cute animal, or if the joy was in suddenly and magically being 12 again. 

The Joy that Cometh in the Morning

I am delightfully happy, the sort of happy that follows the news that your young friend, a gallant young adventurer, has not been drowned, shipwrecked, or murdered by pirates. 

He will no doubt be covered with enough public embarrassment to deal with, so I will be merciful and give him a pseudonym. Ajax will do. 

Ajax embarked on a sailing quest from England to Constantinople some months ago, taking photos for social media, writing freelance articles, making and meeting up with friends at various ports. I last heard from him on September 2, when I asked him if he would be in Italy in October (about which more anon). He replied that he would be in Greece. I saw his last social media postings a week later without thinking much about them.

But then other social media tom-toms began to beat: Ajax had not turned up at an appointment in Athens, and he was a week late. His phone was offline, and various maritime officials had not seen him. "Please pray." 

I joined the tom-toms and reached out to the only other British yachtsman I know,  a skipper with much more experience, and a much more sophisticated boat, to ask  if he knew anyone currently sailing in the Ionian Sea. He did not, but asked intelligently for all the details I could muster and then he presented various hypotheses of what had happened to Ajax, bad and good.

Since a surprise hurricane hit the Ionian Sea yesterday, the hypotheses of bad were stronger than those of good. Not being able to do anything else, I found my rosary and got on my actual knees. 

This morning I broke my new habit of staying off the internet until 10 AM, and I'm so glad I did. Two hours before Ajax had gone online and apologised to all. He reported various earlier thunderstorm and being blown off course back to Italy. He had unplugged his radio so that it wouldn't be taken out by lightning. He was about to reach a Calabrian town and check himself into a hotel to sleep. 

The social tom-tom had been beating joyfully for two hours. 

I wondered, yesterday, what Patrick Leigh Fermor's family, friends and acquaintances felt while he walked to Constantinople. I was having a weird time-shifting feeling, as though somehow Ajax had fallen into the 1930s, a much more likely decade for young men to set out on adventures and sometimes not come home. However, this is the 2020s now, and Ajax is alive and well. What a relief! 

I wasn't weeping all night, and indeed I hope nobody was, but when I was thinking of what sort of joy the joy of discovering a pal is not lost at sea is, I thought of a line of a Psalm. I didn't know what the Psalm was offhand, but I looked it up, and like a good Eng. Lit. MA, my inner translation came from the King James Bible: 

"For His anger endureth but a moment; in His favour is life: weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning" (Ps. 30:5).

 

The Joy of Discovery

In the midst of mental chaos, I managed to take 20 minutes for Italian reading yesterday. I am at a very tricky part of a book, in which the author imitates an encyclopaedia in describing the setting. The words, my tutor assured me when I asked, are old-fashioned and one of them he didn't recognise the the context. 

One of the most recent head scratchers was "martora", which my dictionary told me was a witness or a martyr. The online dictionary I was consulting assured me the same. This seemed unlikely, since martore in the book are a threat to poultry.  So I put the word into the Google search engine, no doubt adding to Google's psychological profile of User 987558977 (or whoever I am), and Google suggested "martora animale." I clicked on it, and here is what turned up: 

I was delighted. Not only did I find the word at long last, I got to see photos of a cute poultry-killing beast.   Meanwhile, I wouldn't have known what a European pine marten was had it bitten my toe. The more I know, the more I know I don't know (unlike, possibly, Google). However, the flash of discovery was a real joy. 

Update: We decanted the apple cider today. There was some evaporation and we avoided the gunk at the bottom of the fermentation bin, so we estimate we have about 9 L now.

 

The Joy of Work

Emotionally speaking, my job is a very difficult one. I put myself under a lot of pressure. If I haven't got two stories done by the end of the day, I feel badly. If I spell something wrong and editorial doesn't find it, I feel worse. If editorial puts its own mistakes in, I am incandescent with rage. 

There is also the challenge of getting the story right. This is particularly difficult now, when the mainstream news (especially about Covid-19) changes so fast and contradicts itself so often, you would think we were living in Orwell's Oceana.  I have contradictory stories and voices and slogans coming at me all the time. That would be fine if I cared only for a narrative and not about truth, but like everyone else at work, I'm a believing Christian and truth is a big deal. Truth is the only deal. 

Then there's the disapproval of wider society. On Facebook a woman with whom I went to (Catholic) high school responded to one of my posts with "Pro-lifers don't care about children after they're born." This was so hackneyed and obviously wrong that I was stunned. In the end I wrote back "Do you know any pro-lifers besides me? Do you think I don't care about children?"  

Then there was the weird moment when I clicked on Mark Shea's Twitter handle and discovered he had blocked me. As far as I know, I have never spoken, let alone written, badly about Mark Shea in my entire life. Au contraire. I've been blocked by someone else at Patheos, too, and I really don't know why. 

I've been trying to submit two-to-three stories a day for over three years, though B.A.'s illnesses, hospitalisations, surgeries, radiotherapy, Covid-19 furlough, and now Covid-19 redundancy. When the fire system in the Historical House exploded, and we had to leave, I submitted stories from wherever we slept. When we are told we weren't coming back, and B.A. was told he needed radiotherapy, I submitted stories and negotiated to purchase a home at the same time. Meanwhile, I get as much annual leave as the average American or Canadian worker gets. All around me the British get 28 days off, plus public holidays. Twenty-eight days. Can you even imagine?

Anyway, I had a Very Bad Day a week ago, and it was so bad, it stopped the two-to-three-a-day train in its tracks. It was so bad, I agreed to call a therapist. It was so bad, I'm not going to tell you about it. I have been miserable. I'm miserable because I just want to write my two-to-three stories and feel good about it afterwards. 

However, I spent yesterday reading an interesting book for review, and then I interviewed its very clever author. I was so wrapped up in our conversation, that afterwards I felt great. I still hadn't submitted anything, but I felt so much better. The joy of work is a wonderful joy. It's one of the best joys. Usually it keeps me going.

 

The Joy of an ... Old Wall?

Despite excellent pastries, yesterday was a bad day. Near the end of it, Benedict Ambrose coaxed me out of the house for a walk.  The evening air was soft and warm. 

I followed B.A. along the route up the hill to where the Romans built their fort and multimillionaires now live behind high 17th century walls.  One of them has what sounds like a three-headed dog rushing forward from hell to rip our guts out. The rest of the village is usually tranquil and almost silent 

On our way back, the wall along the path loomed in the gloaming, and my heart actually lifted. I do not know why unless, like the Historical House the wall gives a sense of permanence. I don't think it is A-listed, but I very much doubt any of the villagers would permit its maiming or destruction. Thus, billionaires may make coercive plans for humanity, or journalists may write that they do, and plagues may rage, or  politicians say that they do, and yet the wall will still stand. 

The wall is also an easily proven fact. Whether or not we can believe anything well-meaning, or ill-meaning, people tell us, there is definitely that wall. It was also well-made, and whoever built it is blissfully anonymous. Even if (God forbid), some idiot comes along and scrawls racist epithets on it, no blame will fall upon the mason(s).  I hope he or they had a good life, and that he or they earned enough to feed their families. 

Finally, the wall is much bigger than my fears, my disappointments, and, indeed, me. Perhaps the wall is a metaphor for God. 

 

The Joy of Old Houses

Yesterday Benedict Ambrose and I went to the grounds of our old home, the Historical House, to pick blackberries before dark. 

It was a bit like the Second Mrs DeWinter's nightmare about Manderley in Rebecca. The shrubbery was overgrown, and the recently paved drive was marked here and there were tufts of bright grass growing right through it. A dog-walking couple who recognised B.A. told him there was a mass of hay just rotting at the end of the field; being in the know, I explained that there was so much dog faeces in it, it couldn't be sold for animal consumption. 

Fortunately, the House was okay. The rock-smashed window has been repaired. Whatever has happened to the grounds, at least the House looks fine. 

I felt a wave of nostalgia as we went through the fields looking for ripe blackberries. It's still rather early in the month for blackberries in Scotland, and someone had been before us anyway. I thought about past summers, especially the parties we would have. I felt a bit sad, too, that it is unlikely that I will ever visit our old attic flat again. 

But then I looked at the House, and B.A. quoted a poem by a long-dead owner addressed to its future possessors (us, once, in a way) about using his House and grounds generously and then giving them up cheerfully and with gratitude. And I was happy because this great man actually thought about us hundreds of years before we were born, and, unless there is a devastating fire, his A listed national treasure shall stand there long after we are dead.  

The Joy of the Enthusiasm of the Young

There were at least two excellent moments this weekend in which I witnessed youthful approbation. One involved a twelve year old revealing that he had finished reading The Eagle of the Ninth and had loved it. The other was the somewhat socially-distanced crowd that lingered outside the church after Mass yesterday. Once the priest drove off, I was the oldest person there, which means that everyone there was under 50.

There were two three main conversation groups: married couples and singles without children, married couples with children, and the children. Children clustered around the parents or ran around on the grass. The youngest teenager stood alone, not quite ready to join the singles-and-married-couples-without-children group. The oldest teenager present, however, was perfectly at ease in this milieu. 

It was a beautiful sight, and tangible evidence that at least a slice of the future has voted for Catholicism and the Traditional Latin Mass.