"Out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water"

A brief thought about the Traditional Latin Mass this morning, as I made the mistake of looking on Twitter and seeing the calculated and sneering tweets of anti-tradition careerists. 

I've mentioned it before but here is it again: when I was in elementary school, official religious instruction dwindled to art projects and more time was devoted in making stoles for my class's Confirmations (yes, stoles) than to our instruction as to what the Sacrament meant. Having found an old catechetical textbook in the classroom's back cupboard, I divined that there was a lot more to know about Confirmation than what we were being taught. In retrospect, assigning us the task of making ourselves priestly garments was actually advanced theology of the dodgy sort. However, what little was taught seemed shallow, basic, and wholly inadequate.   

I told my mother my concerns, and she brought them up with one of our parish priests. He was apparently impressed with my fourteen year old's sagacity, but he said that as long as I knew the Apostles Creed, I would be fine. 

But the idea that there must be something more stuck with me for my adult life, especially as my religious education continued on lines rather different from those taught to every generation of Catholic schoolchildren previous to my own. Nobody ever talked about the Old Mass, and I really didn't know anything about it except that it was very long and in Latin and, according to Brideshead Revisited, people prayed the Hail Mary aloud at the end. 

Wait--that's not entirely true. Without associating it with the Old Mass, I knew that past generations of great composers had written beautiful liturgical music, and the one place in my city you could hear it  (I thought) was the Cathedral and that was thanks to the Cathedral Choir School, which was founded in the 1930s. I'm barely musical, but I understood that this music was of a much higher order than the hymns we sang from the official hymnbook which were themselves of a higher order than the hymns in "Glory and Praise." (Incidentally, I still like many of the "Glory and Praise" hymns in a nostalgic, sentimental way.)

There must be something more than this, I continued to think, and thought I had found it in theological studies until I went to Boston College. During that dark period, the greatest solace of my spiritual life was actually the excellent traditional liturgical music of St. Paul's Catholic Church, Harvard. 

I emerged from my BC-caused depression long enough to go on holiday to Scotland where I was taken to the Traditional Latin Mass, which I thought distinctly odd and most definitely confusing. However, in it--and in the whole blessed traditional Catholic ethos--I found the something more. Indeed, I found the romance and the poetry of the faith celebrated by my Catholic literary heroes.

Oh, gosh. Not the sadomasochism of Graham Greene, though, and thank God for that. No, I'm thinking of Waugh at his happiest and Chesterton at his most brilliant. All those lovely Anglican converts! Where would I--where would we--be without them? 

A curious thing: part of the historical (but apparently not Grade I listed) wooden church the FSSP has been permitted to use for the past 15 years or more was recently altered. A piece of wood whose name I can't remember but was over the sanctuary was removed, presumably because it was in Latin and had irked anti-Latinists. It was also part of a prayer from the Old Mass, so presumably someone couldn't see the point of it. It was replaced by a new piece of wood that has the text "Lord  Master, where do you live? Come and see" painted on it. 

BA and other purists tutted and sighed over having a question mark on that particular piece of church furniture. I wasn't too pleased myself and wondered if  "owning the Trads" (even to the point of flirting with the architectural heritage preservations laws) had been the motive. However, over the weeks that Come and see has taken on a significance in my mind for the preservation and propagation of the Traditional Latin Mass. 

Curious about the Traditional Latin Mass? Come and see.

Wondering what spiritually fed the saints up until 1965? Come and see.

Anxious to find the something more? Come and see.  

It will probably take you three tries to fall in love with it--and then you will drink and drink and never get to the bottom of the glass. 

UPDATE: Here's a terrific article by the Latin Mass Society Chairman, Dr. Joseph Shaw. 

Sweatshirts and identity

When I returned to Scotland, I discovered that the top floor of my local gym was really very cold. Not having a sweatshirt, I took to taking my husband's flannel pyjama top with me. However, he objected to this and suggested that I buy a sweatshirt. 

As it happens, I meant to buy a University of Toronto sweatshirt when I was in Canada, but I forgot. And I probably should have just gone to a charity shop and bought any old sweatshirt, but I had bought my sister-in-law a Cambridge University sweatshirt for Christmas and fallen in love with the wide, flat drawstrings in the hood. 

I admit that probably makes no sense. To travel back to 2021, when Benedict Ambrose and I were in Cambridge that October, I bought my brother and his children Cambridge University shirts as Christmas presents. I purchased the deluxe hooded version for Nulli Secondus and standard versions for Peanut and Popcorn, whom I expected to grow out of them. I also wasn't sure if they would actually like them. 

It bothered me not a whit that neither my brother nor his minor children are students or graduates of Cambridge University. Like mine, my brother's 1970s Cambridge education involved a term or two at nursery school while my father deciphered Anglo-Saxon handwriting. But I thought that Cambridge University shirts would be a nostalgic nod to a shared history (brother) and a reminder to reach for the top (his children), which was certainly not lost on clever them. And to my pleased surprise, they all loved their shirts and wear them rather often. On travels to the USA, they're asked if they're British, but there's no harm in that.  

Realizing that I had inadvertently left her out of this Cambridge University appropriation, I ordered the deluxe version for my sister-in-law this year and tried it on when it arrived so I could judge if it were a  reasonable size. Wherever it was made (I suspend my rule for Christmas gifts), it was very good quality and instead of having a shoelace-like string to the hood, it had a broad, flat, double-sided cincture. I was tempted to buy one for myself, but feared public censure. According to BA, it is Not Done here to wear a university shirt if you have not gone to that university. 

This makes sense as it is most definitely Not Done to wear the tie of a school of which you are not an alumnus or the club tie of an organization to which you do not belong. Making yourself look posh when you are not is a social solecism that can get you noticed on the Rough Bus, which is something you do not want to happen, believe me. ("Missus, it wisnae me wha' spat in your hair.") As far as I can divine, my neighbours rather like real life aristos and admire the rich but utterly loathe anyone they think pretentious. The very fact that you travel the Rough Bus means that you should not be wearing a charming feathery hat, for example. 

Meanwhile, my gym is a rather rough and ready place, and I would not be at all surprised to discover that I was the only university graduate in the building at any given time. I like it. It is cheap, cheerful, relatively quiet, and owned by a fellow immigrant while abounding in members who speak with the local accent. I may not be the oldest woman on the books, but I usually am the oldest woman present, so I probably stand out a bit. 

I also wear a tunic that covers my butt, which is unusual, and I wear glasses and a brown scapular (which might be like having TAIG written on my back) and no tattoos and naturally if I exchange greetings, I do it in my sadly flat Margaret Atwood accent. Happily, none of this has led to any unpleasantness, and so I think I can risk the boundaries of tolerance with a university sweatshirt.

I am a bit self-conscious, though, for the question of clothing and identity was raised by a bulky man near me one day. Addressing himself to a younger woman who speaks the exact same dialect (ken?), he confessed that he had once gone to a nearby health club but that it "a fashion show." To make a long story short, he felt uncomfortable there among those expensively dressed people, so he fled to the comfortable environment of our gym. 

My mind slipped back to my own health club, which we could afford only because I had an office-hour membership, and how it had amazing showers with luxurious shampoo and conditioner, and how I left when the COVID pandemic hit... Sigh, sigh, sigh. But I digress. 

In the end, BA and I decided that I could reasonably order a sweatshirt from his university, as it would not be at all embarrassing to answer inquiries about my attendance there with "No, but my husband did." 

I flirted with the idea of getting a Large, to give the false impression that it was my husband's and I had just borrowed it, but in the end I ordered a Medium, and now it is here. The amusing thing is that BA couldn't resist putting it on, but it is too small for him, so he is unlikely to borrow it himself. My concession to the bulky man is that I will wear it only upstairs in the frigid cardio room and not in the weights room.

Meanwhile, it was made in the Alexandria Free Zone in Egypt, not in China, so on that front my conscience is relatively clear. 

 

"It costs a lot of money to look this cheap."

So said singer Dolly Parton, but this morning I'm thinking about the Duke of Sussex, aka Prince Harry, aka Harold, whose book officially comes out today. Because it was released early in Spain and the British media hired translators, Harold's fellow anglophones have already had days to assimilate its grubby revelations. 

Not having spoken to my neighbours or overheard conversations at the supermarket about it yet, I cannot tell you firsthand what they are thinking. What I am thinking, however, is that Harold inherited millions from his mother, so selling his dignity to Netflix and Penguin Random House for millions more, taking revenge on his father, brother, and sister-in-law thereby, is money for jam. 

The jam, in this case, is supposedly round-the-clock security, which Harold is said to now very much need, thanks for his publishing his estimate of the number of Afghan soldiers he had personally killed from the air. However, I very much suspect that it is also being able to keep his wife in the manner to which she feels she should become accustomed: that of billionaire celebrities. 

I am not sure if I am envious of the (current) Duchess of Sussex, aka Princess Harold. On the one hand, although she first tried for a family at around the same age I did, she managed to have two pretty red-haired babies. On the other hand, she is now deeply despised by approximately 67 million people, some of whom have no compunction in booing her in public. Then again, she has access to millions of dollars. However, it seems unlikely she would be happy living on less. 

I must admit that I too would find it difficult seeking joy as an extreme minimalist, owning nothing but the contents of small knapsack. Nevertheless, I have worked out how much I need to live a happy life independent of employers and how long it will take us to earn it and how we can do it without throwing my husband's family under the bus. Granted, nobody would pay us a penny to do so (Dundee Despair: The McLean Story), so the temptation is less. 

If you don't live in the UK, you probably are unaware of how saturated with Royal Family news is the British media. I don't know long it has been this way, but it has been unrelenting since Harold and Maude Princess Harold ran off to Canada. (It now seems amusing that we believed the Harolds were going to stay in Canada, white ewe lamb* of the British Empire Commonwealth, and that we were shocked when they bought a multi-million dollar mansion in Princess Harold's native California instead.) I spend so much virtual time with the Royal Family that I have dreams about them, and I believe this is a very common phenomenon in the British Isles. 

Although there are many unpleasant things I have to dwell on at work (like who said what about the Traditional Latin Mass where), at least I don't have to read or write officially about Harold and Haroldine. However, I check social media for breaking news, so I cannot escape them entirely. And it occurs to me that I, too, could get eyeballs on screen by writing about what their autobiographical industry means for traditional family values. And I would derive some pleasure by pointing out that a family is not just grandmother-man-woman-baby, but also the mothers and fathers of the man and woman, and their brothers and sisters and uncles and aunts and grandfathers and other grandmother and nephews and nieces. In fact, a family is a tribe, big or little, and if you're Scottish, there's a tartan to celebrate yours and a clan chief into the bargain. 

Of course, even conservatives are beguiled by the romance of standing by your spouse against his/her/your wicked family's inability to alleviate their mental health issues and creating a little fortress for  your spouse and children against the whole world (or at least your in-laws)--although I daresay that this is much more of a New World thing. Personally, I love the romance of the extended family to the extent that I include even my married brother's in-laws in my prayers. Indeed, I even ordered my tartan sash directly from my husband's Clan Chief's shop. 

Little wonder, then, that I back the vast and sprawling Team Windsor and not the tiny Team Sussex in my trivial Twitter moments. Incidentally, the image is of the now Prince of Wales (William) knocking the current Duke of Sussex ("Harold") into a dog bowl, a stupid and trifling altercation that the latter saw fit to include in his memoirs to the great amusement of many. In fact, the revelation looks like the honour of the Prince and Princess of Wales was satisfied in advance. No need for pistols at dawn. 

*Lest I meet the fate of Father Rosica, I should mention that this conceit comes from an old Canadian civics textbook of my mother or grandmother, and I believe the black sheep was South Africa. (Could you look for the title, dear Aged P?)

UPDATE: Just saw the latest "revelations." Americans and Canadians, don't try to hug British people on your first introduction to them. Really, just don't. They have their own culture. They have their own ideas about personal space. They have their own ideas about who gets to touch their body with their body when. This goes not only for the Prince of Wales but for everybody.

New Year, Old Budget

Happy New Year, dear readers! I have been abstaining from recreational typing, as my ergonomic keyboard broke on its way to Toronto and I inevitably had a flareup of RSI. So now I have an achey arm as well as an achey back; what a thing it is to be over 45. Youth's a stuff will not endure, indeed.

A reader has asked for a blogpost, but my only interest this evening is household finances. It is very strange, but after a day of reading news, including Church news, and catching up on which unlikely person trashed the Traditional Latin Mass in which staggeringly awful website, I turn to the financial sites and feel soothed. There is something so clean and pure about these financially independent Stoics who, despite never having heard of Exodus 90, live within their means and take ice baths. They go for long hikes, remodel their own bathrooms, turn up their noses at designer bags, fast for three days at a time, eat a lot of vegetables and encourage all their readers to invest in index funds and slowly grow rich. 

Sometimes financial bloggers also publish how much they spent that year and how much they gained or lost on the stock market and how inflation is not really affecting them at all. Inspired by this, I totalled up what Benedict Ambrose and I spent on food over the whole year, and I was quite pleasantly surprised. 

2022 Groceries: £3,722.44

2022  Dining Out:  £2,241.21

Total: £5,963.65

I was surprised because I added up the monthly budgets in my head and was hoping the total would not go too much over £6,000. But I see that the average monthly grocery bill was £310 and the monthly dining out bill was £186.77. Of course, some months we spent much more on groceries and much less on dining out. But all in all, it came out to an average of £497/m. This is not terribly more than the UK national average of £206/m per person, and the fact is that Edinburgh is one of the most expensive cities in the UK for dining out.   

Full in the Panting Heart of Toronto

Full disclosure: for years I've thought the Men's Schola was singing "Fool in the Panting Heart of Rome" back in the halcyon days when Benedict XVI was gloriously reigning. Only now do I discover they were attempting to pronounce "Full." That's what happens when you don't give the mere congregation the lyrics. 

It has been a very Toronto week, notwithstanding my 8-hour-a-day work schedule--save for Monday, whose afternoon I long ago arranged to have off, knowing that jet lag would strike around 12. Instead of working, I telephoned my Canadian goddaughter's mother, and the latter came to get me in her automobile. We traversed the highways and byways of northernmost Toronto; I seem to recall these once having been thinner and racing past fields, not vast expanses of ugliness. We then went through neighbourhoods I've never seen before--there are Polish cities I know better than those parts of Toronto--and we never stopped talking.

Still, there was a very homey, very Canadian sight in one cul-de-sac: two tall boys on rollerblades playing road hockey, using a bona fide net. And even better, they were my friends' sons, three years older then when I saw them last. The eldest gave me a hearty squeeze. Inside the house there were more children, one of them the very pretty little girl who is my goddaughter. Naturally she did not remember me, but we soon became good friends. 

Tuesday I managed to sleep until 6 AM and had a good day's work. What I did in the afternoon completely escapes my mind, but I am certain it involved eating cookies. The Advent fast is nigh impossible at my parents' house, for my mother bakes dozen after dozen of traditional biscuits, and every one tastes like Christmas. 

Wednesday I got the message that a prominent local activist I knew very slightly at 18 had died, and that someone should write about this. Reading the obituary, I realized that not only should she be eulogized, someone should represent work at her funeral. Consultations led to the realization that the most senior person in Toronto that day was me, and so it was that one of my oldest friends came by in his car, and whisked me off through more neighbourhoods about which I know nothing to a church I haven't been in for 20+ years. 

I saw many people I know, of all ages, two of them nationally famous, one of them internationally so. I exchanged greetings with a woman I first met when I was 18  and her husband (ditto) and her mother (ditto). I exchanged greetings with a man I might not have spoken to since I was 19. And I must say, that was a very full church for a woman who had been 97 and never blessed with children. 

To the cemetery we went, my old pal--my actual prom date, come to think of it--now driving me through streets both familiar and unfamiliar, and once again the conversation was freely flowing. And then after the interment, the drive home. I bowed out of the funeral tea (to be precise, a late lunch at Red Lobster) to return home to work. 

After work, I went downtown to dine with my Toronto brother. This time I took public transit, and this too was a mix of familiar and unfamiliar: although the routes are the same, the elements have changed slightly. There was a new place on the bus to put my transit card--and the machine depressingly informed me how much money was left on it. The subway train--which for some years now has been one long snakelike compartment-- rang with the shouts of a mentally ill man. The northeast corner of Dundas and Yonge Streets looked onto a neon and jumbotron scene from Bladerunner and stank of now totally legal marijuana. The streetcar along Dundas Street West was dotted with people who wore masks and people who did not. The restaurant was dark, chic, tasty, and expensive. Oh, what it is to be a grown-up with a real job and to eat in the kind of restaurants I barely dared look at as a student.

My brother, happily, was materially the same. He is still into vegetables and initially ordered all the vegetable dishes on the menu (plus lamb chops and haute cuisine lasagna), but the waiter thought that would be too much. 

Afterwards my brother generously drove me home--the streets were all familiar even in the darkness--so once again I had the enormous treat of seeing Toronto by car. (When you're a non-driver married to a non-driver, car rides are as exciting as magic carpets and much more comfortable, I imagine.)

On Thursday I went to my goddaughter's house for supper. Her dad was summoned to pick me up from the nearest subway station. He pointed out that I could have waited for him from the nearest bus stop instead, but I said that for all I knew that intersection is patrolled by drug dealers. A fair main, he allowed this to be so. 

Anyway, once again I was met by some truly delightful children, and I had the great privilege of discovering that I was seen in the light of a gigantic huggable teddy bear by my goddaughter. She and a toddler both managed to sit on my lap, which was very cozy. There was dinner--the adults got their very own table for maybe as much as 10 minutes--and then family prayers, in which I felt greatly privileged to take part. My goddaughter and her siblings went off to bed, and I had a good long chat with her mother until her father drove me all the way home. So I had yet another magic carpet ride through the sprawling metropolis. 

Friday's exciting excursion was a 45 minute walk in the cold through very familiar ways to a new hairdresser to put my hair in some order. It was very reassuring to see that every woman in the joint, clients and staff, had curly hair. I emerged de-frizzed and went home to eat supper.

This morning I walked for an hour--it was bitterly cold--to visit my sister and then we went to the local mall, she to have her nails done and I to have lunch with another old pal. Then I had my nails done myself (although less ornately) and walked home. 

Tomorrow I go by train to Montreal. 

 

 

Return of the Native

The first thing you should know is that I have had an "Overuse Syndrome" flare-up in my right arm, which is why I haven't been blogging recently. 

The second thing is that I got on a plane in Glasgow yesterday morning and was deposited, about 7.5 hours later, in Toronto. 

Pearson International Airport was neither as crowded or slow as reporters been writing for years--perhaps because it was Sunday, or perhaps because I was lucky. Before speaking with border security, I stood in front of a large machine and stuck my passport in it. The machine froze when I pressed the screen to admit that I was bringing in an animal product, so I hit "QUIT" and picked up the resultant print-out as instructed. I joined a rapidly moving queue to the human border guards and soon found myself confessing my 300 grams of Scottish cheese to a solemn, mask-wearing, pale South Asian woman of university age. 

I was pleasantly surprised that instead of telling me my cheese--a present for my dad, who apparently no longer drinks single malt--would be confiscated, the border guard asked me if I had anything else to declare, handed me a yellow slip, and sent me on my way. I gave the yellow slip to the last man who looked at it, and he made no protest at all. 

The airport staff were all wearing masks. I was wearing a mask, too, for a family member believes he got COVID from the airport and strongly advised me to wear one. Most passengers were not and, when I spotted my parents in the Arrivals waiting area, I saw that they were among the very few watchers sporting them. 

There were no official questions about COVID tests or "vaccination status" or anything health-related at all. 

The parking ticket machine was in its usual place, beside a bin divided in half for trash and recycling. The highways were the usual frightening snarl of danger, and as usual, my mother looked to see when it would be safe for my father to get into the right lanes. 

"I haven't picked up anyone at the airport for years and years," Dad said. 

Three years.

The flags--for Canada, for Ontario--were in the same places. The sun was strangely bright, and the air outside was very cold. The buildings were the same and in the same places. The signs for Algonquin Park still rather weirdly (if accurately) pronounced it to be 250 kilometres away. Yorkdale Mall--the height of schoolgirl glamour in 1985--was looking positively decrepit. The charming little houses in my parents' neighbourhood looked modest and unassuming and great places to bring up two or three children. However, each would cost about $1,500,000 before being ripped down to build a wasted-space, cookie-cutter behemoth.

The front lawn looked tidy. I got down on my knees and kissed the ground. It smelled green and tasted of chlorophyll. I thought belatedly of dogs, but oh well. Did John Paul II think about dogs when he kissed airport tarmacs? Very probably not. 

The kitchen was the same, and when later I made coffee the tablespoon was in the same little drawer in the spice cabinet it has been kept for 30+ years. When I sat in the sitting-room the view was exactly the same as on Skype. I momentarily felt as if I had suddenly appeared in the TV show I had been faithfully watching. My mother pointed out the latest cushions she had embroidered. Although new in themselves, they were not all that terribly different from whichever cushions were newly embroidered in 2019. 

The coffee, by the way, came from a 930 gram Tim Horton's can on the top shelf of the cupboards on the left, as I should have expected. Instead I was pleasantly surprised. Three years is a long time, even at my age. I felt as if I had travelled back through time. 

I spent the afternoon looking at familiar things and sometimes touching them. The jadeite frog. The remains of the dolls' china tea set. My grandfather's cigarette lighter with "RED" scratched on it no later than 1975. I found the clothes I keep in Toronto to save having to bring clothes over from Britain. My blue flannel pyjamas are at least 10 years old, but they look almost new. 

My mother showed me the photographs tucked into my grandmother's old wallet: I was particularly charmed by the coloured one: my parents were in their twenties, going to a formal dinner, my pretty mother wearing the green-and-blue gown that's still in her closet and the both of them with round, soft faces. 

"I never throw anything out," my mother has said on occasion, which is not true of the garbage and the recycling, but is definitely true of the personal effects of her family, living and deceased. Fortunately, this is a big house, and six living former occupants have moved most of our stuff out. While looking for dumbbells, I found a ceramic plaque, a gift for me from Italy, reading Attenti al gatto  (Beware of the Cat). I imagined taking it back to Scotland and affixing it to my veggie trug to ward off, gargoyle-like, the neighbouring felines.

My sister Tertia arrived with her son and her dog for supper. The time machine effect dissipated as Pirate is now taller than his mother and has a wild shock of dyed black hair. Also, it was a novelty to hear this larger-than-expected pocket bully click-clicking over the ceramic kitchen tiles and across the wood floor of the dining-room. She hovered under the dinner table, shoving a hopeful snout under the crotcheted lace tablecloth. We ignored her hope, and we also ignored Pirate checking his phone under cover of the table. I have lost track, but I think he's 18. 

My sister and I talked about language-learning. Functionally fluent in Spanish, she was recently summoned at work to explain to two children from Central America why they couldn't bring Nutella sandwiches into the building. She had to look up the word for "hazelnut".  She laughed merrily about their conversation.

A wisp of a five-year-old memory of a badly beaten young Pole passed over my mind. He was in my husband's room at the hospital, and he wanted his clothes back, and the nurse was frustrated because she couldn't explain that the police needed them. 

"My wife speaks Polish," addled Benedict Ambrose shouted helpfully, and my heart squeezed with fear. But miraculously I could, in fact, say "The police need your clothes; they're evidence" and the young Pole nodded. 

But Tertia and I spoke about Italian, not Polish, and I was intrigued that after only a week or two of Italian classes, she had cheerfully chatted with a Roman cab driver, for this shows one essential difference between my sister and me: she is cheerful and relaxed about languages, whereas I agonise over every syllable unless I am in a psychological state in which I can automatically rattle out words.  

No account of a visit home is complete without reference to languages, so there it is. The first language story is, however, my father examining a page of Paul Kingsnorth's The Wake, and murmuring, "Why did he choose the past participle instead of the aorist?" I did not know English ever had an aorist, but there you go. Every member of my family seems to have a vast, mysterious reservoir of specialist knowledge. 

I went to bed at 20:00 EST (or, my body thought, 1:00 GMT) and fell asleep over an old paperback. I woke up definitively at 3:58 AM, and now I have half an hour or so before I start work. 

A blessed Advent to all my readers! 

Here too

There are areas of deprivation in Edinburgh, their residents dubbed "the socially excluded." They can be dangerous even to travel through, and one night when I was travelling home on the Rough Bus a rock came flying through a window. Some of the socially excluded enjoy throwing things at symbols of the ordered society from which they feel excluded: busses, police cars, ambulances. 

Therefore, I was not terribly surprised yesterday evening when our driver suddenly stopped the bus before driving through a notorious slum and shouted at us to shut the windows. I reconsidered our seats but decided they were relatively safe from flying rocks. The sky was bursting with fireworks and dark silhouettes were thronging the streets. It was Bonfire Night, aka Guy Fawkes Night, allegedly the celebration of "papists" failing to blow up the House of Lords in 1605, as if anyone living in an Edinburgh slum could care less about the House of Lords. A goodly number of them are themselves papists---or descended from us anyway. 

Sadly, this is supposed to be a fun night for children, and the only reason why I can imagine for its continued celebration. At heart, it is deeply anti-Catholic--they used to burn the Pope instead of poor Guy in effigy, the weather is cold and/or damp, the night is dark, and who needs a bonfire to warm himself when he has, at very cheapest, a microwave oven to heat his tea? In past years, the bonfires have represented an orgy of destruction; one Bonfire Night a gang built an enormous blaze on Portobello Beach and threw in a piano. 

I felt a bit uneasy, thinking about a neighbouring family who, for the first time ever, I saw walking together, two parents, two children, down our street as we waited at the bus stop, probably bound for some official Bonfire Night fireworks display. 

Our slums, by the way, are mainly populated by "White, Scottish" (as the Census denotes them) although there are a number of immigrants from various countries there, now, too. I hope their White, Scottish neighbours warned them about Bonfire Night. I saw a trio of Indonesian ladies in hijab get off the bus at a spot I should not like to alight after dark, and I hoped they got home okay. 

We were going to a concert performance of Gilbert and Sullivan's Patience. It was held last night in the Canongate Kirk, the official church of the Royal Family when they are in residence at Holyrood Palace. The church was comfortably full of the kind of people one would expect to find at an Edinburgh G&S performance: quiet, orderly, companionable, some wearing tweed jackets, some draped in silk scarves.

I mention this for contrast. 

After the performance, at which we recognised seven friends or so, we went to the Tollbooth Tavern with five of them and had a pint (or, in my case, a half-pint) of ale. We talked about 18th century Chinese wallpaper and ecclesiastical vestments.  

Benedict Ambrose and I got back on the Rough Bus at about 10:45.

This time the driver told us that he would be deviating from the route and that anyone who wanted to go to [slum] would have to get off at the last stop before his detour. This understandably disconcerted the passengers, some of whom were foreign students. However, Benedict Ambrose and I were merely annoyed by the delay (the driver seemed to get lost twice or thrice), suspecting and then knowing--I checked the news on my phone--that the point was to avoid the slum, which had been locked down by police. 

It was very dark, indeed, and it was difficult to see the bus stops. We rang the bell a trifle late for ours, so we alighted further from our home than we expected. The driver, B.A. thought, was rather frazzled. As he said so, I heard loud wailing. A youngish man in a hoodie was lurching down the other side of the street, one hand held to his torso, making gulping noises and occasionally bursting into noisy sobs. I couldn't see his face, but I had the fleeting impression that it was bloody. 

"Ambulance?" I suggested, but Benedict Ambrose thought that the man was merely drunk. He was, after all, still on his feet. We scurried--well, I scurried--home. 

I could write here at great length what I think is fuelling the rage of the socially excluded in Scotland, but instead I'm going to the gym to prepare my body for the old age that may leave me vulnerable to the fury of the young, Scottish and poor. I will throw out three concepts for exploration later: the breakdown of the family; consumerism; celebrity culture--especially celebrity culture. Jack and Lewis will never live like Kanye West, and they think they've been robbed. 

They have been robbed, in fact, but not of Bel Air mansions and babes. But that's a subject for later, for I'm off to the gym.