The Past is a Foreign Country

Ye werken womman c. 1387

I was going to call this post "Hotel Living," but I spent some of my flight back to Scotland and most of today reading L.P. Hartley's The Go-Between, whence cometh the famous remark.

The Go-Between, written in 1952 about 1900, is absolutely stunning and near the end made me think of Wuthering Heights. (I discovered afterwards, while reading the Penguin Modern Classics' introduction, that I was right to do so.) As good novels do, it both debunks and promotes myths, here of a "golden age." 

I am glad of the promotion, for civilizational health relies on myth. When Americans stop weeping over "The Star-Spangled Banner" and thanking veterans for their service, the USA is toast. But fortunately for my American readers, the USA is likely to survive Old Canada, which will die with the last Canadians to learn "The Maple Leaf Forever" at school. L.M. Montgomery's Avonlea may have been fiction, but I'd rather be a Canadian with Avonlea in her heart than a corrosive hatred for her ancestors. 

Interestingly, on my flight back to Canada I read Johann Strauss: Father and Son and Their Era by Hans Fantel (1971), which is also very good and also debunks and promotes the myth of a golden age. It also speaks in the same accent as the traditionalist Catholic Austrians I know, who both rejoice in Vienna's glorious past and seethe over what has happened to it since. 

I read the latter to try to understand the waltz. My poor parents plunked down up to $15  a week for me to take piano lessons for years and years without succeeding in making me musical. I much prefer silence to music, but I have committed to the waltz, so I should like to know more about it. It is also a "traditional" ballroom dance--although of course it was at one point considered revolutionary and immoral--and I am as interested in living traditions as in healthy myths.   

Incidentally, the idea that women didn't work for money before Ms. magazine rolled off the presses on July 1, 1972 is not a healthy myth. For one thing, there have been female paid domestic servants and farmers for millennia. As for the lettered, English-speaking women have openly written for money since 1688. Unmarried women survived as paid governesses from the 17th century into the 20th century, and as schoolteachers from the late 19th century. My Canadian grandmother was a teacher until she married; my American grandmother (born 1904) was a bookkeeper. 

There have also been, probably since the beginning of commerce, women in trades that don't rely on brute strength or in family businesses. The New Testament records that (in Acts 13) a certain Lydia of Thyatira was a dye saleswoman. Over 1300 years later, Chaucer characterized the Wife of Bath as a wealthy woman in the textile industry. 

That large numbers of European and North American women of quite humble origins did not go out to work in the19th and 20th centuries--not even in fields--strikes me not as "traditional" but as a historical anomaly. And as we have seen, it has proved to be unsustainable for all but the rich or the very determined. It is very difficult for men today to command the kind of wages commensurate with running a middle-class household according to the expectations of 1900.

And so I work and try to get along with men who think I shouldn't. When, at my work event this week, a man recommended that I read Mrs. Timothy Gordon's Ask your Husband: A Wife's Guide to True Femininity, I affably promised to do so because I want to see what she brings to the debate. 

One of the perks of this work event was staying in a business-class hotel with a a splendid gym; there I did bicep curls and other activities I do not expect to find in Mrs. Tim's opus. I very much enjoyed looking at the Canadian sky while running on the treadmill and travelling from this gym to my suite without having to go outdoors. There were lots of fluffy white towels that renewed themselves daily and apparently the bed remade itself. The breakfast buffet was bounteous and delicious.  It crossed my mind that it might be nice to live permanently in a hotel, if one could afford to do so. However, now it escapes my mind how I thought I would get a whole post out of that fanciful notion.  

UPDATE: Benedict Ambrose says he's going to write a book, too. He will call it either Make Me A Sandwich or How Interesting. Where's My Dinner? He's currently in the kitchen washing the dishes, so I am not taking this pronouncement very seriously. 

Toronto on Business

I arrived in Toronto on Thursday afternoon with a cloth bag of books and a small suitcase. For the first time ever, my parents were nowhere to be seen. I spent a few unhappy minutes looking for both my father and a payphone. The fortunate two quarters in my change purse were weirdly light. There is more heft to British coins in more ways than one. 

Fortunately, my father and I found each other soon after, and--I think also for the first time ever--I paid for the parking. We drove from unfamiliar Terminal One, special to Air Canada, missing one turn but recognizing another route home. The air was hot--"Italy hot," I said, meaning Italy in May, not Italy in the jaws of Cerberus. My mother and a tin of my favourite cookies welcomed me in.

I flew Air Canada, not Air Transat, because a travel agent organized all the flights for overseas staff. Months ago I petitioned to be allowed to arrive four days before my colleagues because I suffer from extended jet lag. Past work events have seen me longing for my bed by 9 PM and creeping away unsociably at 10 PM. 

My mother always tells me it's worse West to East, but that's not how it is for me. On Friday morning I first awoke at 2 AM, on Saturday at 4, on Sunday at 5, on Monday at 5, and at last this morning (after remaining awake until around 11:30 PM), 6:30. Yesterday I thought I was teetering on the edge of a sleep disorder, but this morning I think I have finally acclimatized to Eastern Daylight Time. I will be able to comport myself at tonight's Gala like the sane woman I know myself to be. 

Incredibly, I spent my first afternoon in Toronto correcting the English translation of Polish liner notes for a friend's frantic musician sister. But I also called my best Catholic Toronto friend, and we made a Saturday brunch date. One of my sisters dropped by with her son. We sat on the deck over the garage with coffee and cookies and discussed her Latin American travel plans: Colombia, Costa Rica, Argentina. She is now taking a Spanish course in Colombia; the computer test placed her at C1 and C2. I felt torn between pride and envy. In Polish I careen from B1 to A2 to oblivion. In Italian, I'm probably a solid B2. I'll find out for sure next month.

Friday

The following morning, I had a 6:30 AM Italian lesson. My tutor, visiting family in Italy, was having a respite from Cerberus but expected its return later that afternoon. My brain was mush; really, there is nothing so bad for my language skills as actually travelling. (This is, as you can guess, inopportune.) And then I did a full day's work, texting "Could you...?" and "Would you...?" to reporters and publishing their submissions.

Saturday

On Saturday my Best Catholic Toronto friend (MBCT), accompanied by my Canadian goddaughter, bore me away in the family van to Cora's for brunch. MBCT and I agree on practically everything despite living almost complete different ways of life. She married in her mid-twenties, a few months before I met Benedict Ambrose in person, and now has five children. She is almost always with at least one of these children; she remembers our last pre-COVID brunch as a rare outing in which she was entirely "child-free." 

"What do you usually get here?" I asked as I turned the heavy colourful pages of the Cora menu.

"I don't," said MBCT in the firm tone of a felon unexpectedly released on parole. 

My Canadian goddaughter sat quietly listening to the adult talk and ate her brunch without fuss. This is not something I can imagine my Polish goddaughter doing, but to be fair, the former is almost 6. Neither of them is permitted smartphones, tablets, computers or any other screen except on the rare occasions the Canadian is allowed an (old) Disney film and the Pole a ballet. I know demanding it is for both MBCT and Pretend Polish Daughter-in-Law to have to tend their attention-greedy children almost ALL the time, but it makes such an enormous difference. 

Meanwhile, when MBCT got a call that her youngest was inconsolably crying for her, she took me home. When we pulled into the driveway, I felt like bursting into tears myself. Happily, we have tentative plans to meet after my work retreat. In fact, she and the children are likely to drive me back to the airport. 

Sunday

On Sunday I went to the Oratory for the 11 AM TLM, finding a Pride flag wound around a flagpole and lying wedged in a corner by the front doors. It made me think of the unamiable habit of Toronto's Orange Order of marching past St. Michael's Cathedral. The laypeople socializing by the religious articles counter were interested but not concerned. Only one lady voiced my private suspicion that it may have been left there for a later protest, and I wondered if she were a regular reader of my news outlet.

The choir and organist, as always, were incredibly good.  

Afterwards I met my Chicago-Polish friend (CPF), whom B.A. and I met through Polish Pretend Son, in the narthex. He is also in Toronto on business and, as he is fascinated by everything Polish, showed me phone photos of Toronto's Polish Combatants Association (SPK 20).  

We went for brunch, walking along King Street West to the Katyń memorial at the foot of Roncesvalles, where CPF took more photos. We then walked up "Marszałkowska" towards such remnants of the vanishing Polish-Canadian community as St. Casimir's Catholic Church, the statue of St. John Paul II, and "Polonez," where CPF spoke C2 Polish--and I oblivion Polish--to the waitresses. We consumed traditional fruit punch, cold soup, cabbage rolls, pierogi, a pork cutlet, potatoes and several salads, and then we resumed our walk. The Polish-Canadian highlight of this stretch was, of course, Chicago, where I once hid from an irate blog-reader who had verbally attacked me after Mass at nearby St. Vincent de Paul. 

The outing was capped off by cappuccino and tea at Coffee & All That Jazz, and then CPF went back down Roncey for eventual Vespers at Holy Family. I loaded money onto my Presto Card and took various trains and a bus home. I was joined soon after by my youngest brother, youngest sister, and oldest nephew, the young man once known to these pages (and, come to think of it, to Seraphic Singles) as Pirate. 

We had what seemed to be a normal Sunday dinner. I told them the staggering price CPF pays to rent his Manhattan apartment, and they told me it wasn't staggering at all, as he could expect to pay that in Toronto, too. There followed a conversation about real estate, house prices, house taxes, and the interest rate, pet obsessions of the British middle-classes and very likely that of their Canadian counterparts, too.

Monday    

On Monday morning I began work at 7:30AM, annoyed at Elon Musk for taking Archbishop Viganò out of Twitter jail on a Sunday. But we got the news of his release published before 9 AM, so I was happy. 

I stopped work just shy of 3:30 PM and walked to the mall to get a mani-pedi at the salon my C1-C2 level sister frequents. Like nail shops all over, this one is run and staffed by Vietnamese-speaking women, and I was pleased when I was approached by "the chatty one." I was less pleased when she put the ultraviolet nail dryer on the edge of the foot basin. I asked her if I would die if it fell in.

"You make fun of me," said the chatty one genially and, as you see, the machine did not fall in. My toes are now a rakish dark blue-red and my fingernails a safe toasty pink because I am British now, ye ken, and even if the Princess of Wales got away with it.... 

Anyway, I paid up and walked to another part of the mall to meet my Poet Convert Friend (PCF) for a drink. Years before she was baptized, I admired her as the least egotistical career poet I knew. She ran a poetry event for years before I realized it was her show. This was heroically unassuming for the Toronto Poetry Scene, in which--incidentally--the Catholic Church was constantly the butt of jokes and the target of diatribes. However, for some art-loving non-Catholics Catholicism holds still holds some stale Brideshead glamour, so when PCF told me one winter-visit night that she was thinking of converting, I was suspicious.    

"Oh," I said. "Is it the art, or is it (ahem, ahem) Jesus?"

"Jesus," said PCF fervently. "I want Jesus." 

When I heard why, I gave her the Prayer to St. Michael and sent her to the Oratorians. The rest is salvation history. 

Tuesday

I am now going to take myself off and study some Polish. I brought my daily planner and some stickers, which have created the necessary psychological bribes needed to study. Then I will act against all normal routine and iron a load of laundry. I am, after all, in Toronto on business and should turn up uncreased.  

Will thank-you notes save the West?

I was quite startled, the other day, to read this column by one of my youngest colleagues. 

Myles argues that the problems of his generation, Gen Z (or Zoomers), can be blamed on a lack of silence in their lives. He contrasted the study habits of the Boomers--who looked for books in silent libraries--with those of the Zoomers, who have a constant stream of music filling their ears as they click around on the internet. It was if he were describing two different cultures. Meanwhile, he suggested that the reason so many twenty-something Catholics are choosing the Old Mass over the New is that they find there the silence they so desperately crave. 

"What else does your generation need?" I asked a Zoomer friend as we walked along a sunny Edinburgh street. 

She thought this over and said, "Challenge." 

In her view, Gen Z is given everything on a plate, and nobody challenges it to do difficult things. I thought this very interesting. It occurred to me that this may be more of an age problem than a generation problem, since the kind of young people who go to university have been throughly coddled since the end of the Second World War or (in the UK) since the end of National Service.*

On the other hand, I was made to do many things I disliked (for example, walk two long blocks between home and Brownies all my 7-year-old self), got regularly bruised playing ice hockey, rode my bicycle all over the neighbourhood, had reasonably restricted TV viewing, was bribed into silence with chocolate on 10 hour car journeys to Indiana, almost drowned in the municipal pool, had to call adults on the (rotary) phone, took coffee shop jobs, and rocked infant siblings back to sleep. Apart from the multiple infant siblings, I think these experiences were pretty typical of Gen X. 

One thing that I suspect may be typical of Gen Z is that it doesn't answer RSVPs or write thank-you notes. And here is where I get anxious because the primary directive of a hostess is to set her guests at ease. Do I want to embarrass my guests by publishing reminders that they should send me emails to announce their intended presence or absence at my tea dances, let alone a demand for thank-you notes? Decidedly not. And do I want to give the impression that I am a queen of etiquette? I'm afraid Benedict Ambrose, who has been known to flinch at my colonial lapses in taste, would object most strenuously to any such pretence. (This reminds me, my bread-and-butter note to Mrs. Polish Pretend Son is shockingly late.) 

"But if you don't tell them, who will?"asked my Zoomer friend, and suddenly I recall that one of the charges against Gen X (from which God has hitherto spared me by not sending babies of my own) is that we want to be friends or, to channel Hilary White, "fwends" with our children instead of parenting them properly. 

So I have gloomily concluded that I should lead a small seminar on Traditional Social Manners on behalf of The Youth on the grounds that this will challenge and therefore help them. And indeed I think it will help them because, like it or not, they are now in Grown-Up Land, and grown-ups like other grown-ups who respond to the acronym RSVP and are charmed by the ones who send thank-you notes, particularly the kind that come by post, after parties. In this electronic age, social media messages are perfectly acceptable, but the little cards are more tangible, make a greater impression, and linger in the memory. 

"So-and-so," I think as peruse the back of the envelope, "was very well brought up." 

Another challenge I would like to offer, since I am out on a social limb anyway, is a script for graciously saying No to a gentleman's invitation to dance and what to say if you are the gentleman receiving the No. Bear with me while I think out loud here:

Gentleman: Would you like to dance?

Lady: No, thank you. That last waltz tired me right out.

Gentleman: In that case, may I bring you a cup of coffee? 

Lady: No, but I'd love a glass of our TLM watered-down squash. Thank you!

Gentleman: I will be right back!

Off he goes.

Gentleman 2: Would you like to dance?

Lady: No, thank you. [Gentleman 1] has just gone to get me a squash. 

Gentleman 2: Yes, it is quite hot in here, isn't it? I wonder if [Lady 2] would like to dance?

Lady: Ask her, by all means!

In short, if you don't want to dance with someone, give him a polite excuse. And if your invitation to dance is turned down on the grounds of tiredness/heat, ask the lady if you can get her something to drink. If the excuse is that she is in anxiety about some no-show, offer to look for him/her. But, to be on the safe side, don't ask her to dance for the very next tune. Wait until later. 

(This scenario, by the way, presumes that everyone is acquainted and standing in a respectable parish hall or ballroom, not Club Super-Sexy in the Cowgate.)

The virtue underlying the RSVP, the thank-you note, the gracious negation and acceptance of negation is thoughtfulness. This is a quality for which I myself was not famed as a 20-something. Poacher turned gamekeeper, eh? But later in life I noticed that the secret to popularity was neither a fashionable wardrobe nor compliant parents--nor even the ability to speak Italian--but being known as a thoughtful person.

A thoughtful person someone who strives always to put people at their ease, who says please and thank you, who says how much they appreciate this or that, who brings the culturally-correct offering to dinner parties, who gives up his or her seat on the bus to the person who clearly need it (for example, not any lady but the old lady or the lady carrying bags or leading children, and not any old man, but the old man who looks past caring).  

This reminds me that the answer to the horrible woman who snaps at you for holding the door for her is "I apologize for having offended you, ma'am." That should take the wind right out of her ill-bred sails while leaving your dignity unimpaired. Normally, your good manners should never cause anyone discomfort. I once knew a man who practically had a seizure every time I touched a door. This was very unpleasant. 

To paraphrase the late Father Bernard Lonergan, the lovely old rules governing social life in the West have  torn to pieces, and it is up to young men and women of good will to put them together again. It would be absolutely lovely if, alongside silence, Zoomers who flock to the TLM also learned the social skills that would set them apart from--or, even better, edify--their generation. These are neither affections or the entree to a clique but manifestations of the thoughtfulness that fosters peace and friendship between men and women and even--dare I hope--between Boomers and Zoomers. 

*Or, in Poland, since post-communist prosperity.

Strauss at last!

Confirmation classes are over for the summer, so I can rent the technically-no-longer-a-parish parish hall for as long as I like on Sunday afternoons. 

This month I decided to shell out for three whole hours, so my Waltzing Party guests would have ample time to review the Polonaise/Polonez/Chodzony [pron. HOD-zon-ih] and the various turns of the waltz, drink a leisurely cup of coffee, and get back to the dance floor for "free dance." This did not mean, of course, bursting from the constraints of ballroom dancing but being free to... 

Well, in the end it meant being free to say "No" to a dance, which various belles did, leaving the askers to tell others that they had been "rejected." 

"It's all part of it," said I and made horrible faces at one rejectee and jerked my head in the direction of a young lady I knew longed to dance. He got the hint. Hashtag Doyenne. 

The real problem, I suspect, was that there was too little time between Mass and the Waltzing Party for lunch, and some of my poor guests were very tired by the time the "free dance" came along. Clearly I must think about what to do to spare them. I may have to smuggle them sandwiches to eat during the After-Mass Tea-and-Coffee-Hour, for B.A. and I cannot at this juncture afford to buy a flat in the West End. 

As always, I felt some anxiety about the male:female ratio because there are simply more young men than young women interested in the Traditional Latin Mass in our corner of Christendom, and the mother-chaperones always have to make up the numbers. Yesterday I was the only mother-chaperone, as it were, and we ended up with only 9 women to 10 men, which wasn't too bad. Come to think of it, it does create an impetus for the men to hurry up and ask the women to dance. 

However, there was no real impetus for them to ask anyone to dance during the "free dance," even when I, being spun around the room by a 14-year-old, wailed "Gentlemen, the ladies can't ask you; we're Trads."

The 14-year-old assured me that he much preferred having the whole room to dance in, which I could well understand, as he travelled all over the floor as if we were actually at a Viennese ball, and my sticker came off afterwards.

Yes, I have followed through on my sticker idea, and it has worked beautifully. Last month I bought two packages of rectangular neon green stickers, and my female guests have all worn them on their left shoulder blades. 

"Why don't the men have to wear stickers?" demanded one of the yesterday's female guests.

"Because the top of the shoulder is rather more obvious," rumbled the dance instructor. 

"Because men don't care if your hand accidentally slides any which way," thought the hostess. Hashtag Safeguarding Officer.

The one problem with the stickers is that they fall off after a particularly vigorous waltz, and I ended the afternoon wearing a plaster (band-aid) instead. However, I watched the 8 other couples carefully during the first waltz, and the hands remained firmly clamped to the shoulder blades, where they belonged. Am pedagogical genius.

Meanwhile, the waltzing instructor decided that we were all enough advanced to have real classical music, and not Whitney Houston or whatever horrors he has inflicted upon us unworthy non-Austrians in the past. Thus, we danced to Dmitri Shostakovich's "Waltz No. 2" and later--hooray!--real Strauss, including "Wiener Blut."  

When the waltzing instructor disappeared to entertain his visiting parents, he took much of the energy in the room (and one of the ladies) with him. However, Polish Pretend Son arrived soon after, having paid a visit to his old Edinburgh pastor and then supplemented his drawing room gin-and-tonic with a pint at a nearby pub. 

PPS had been shocked to hear that there is no alcohol at my Waltzing Parties and amused when I forbade him from turning up drunk, as he had been known to do at Edinburgh tango evenings. He wanted to know how I knew this, and I knew because it is a very small world and at least two women have told me. He certainly had returned intoxicated from tango parties to the Historical House, while staying with us, eyes horribly bloodshot. Nevertheless, he is also known to be an excellent dancer. Women have told me that, too. I certainly have chosen an interesting Pretend Son. 

Anyway, PPS turned up perfectly sober, held a civilized conversation with the young men to whom I introduced him, and then asked me to dance. 

"I cannot dance your slow English waltzes," he said, sounding rather like the waltzing instructor, and so we danced in the fast Polish (or Viennese) fashion. 

Incidentally, you may be wondering where Benedict Ambrose was, for one or two of my dancing partners asked that, too. The answer is that he was at home working on his diploma course, but he will come to the Waltzing Party next month. 

Sticking to it

How do you make yourself do things your higher self wants to do when your lower self doesn't want to do them?

I contemplated this question on the treadmill today around the 4 minute mark, as my lower self didn't want to continue whereas my higher self wanted to run 3 kilometres in fewer than 18 minutes. My immediate answer was "Practice," and that is indeed what we are doing when we are fasting or forcing ourselves to scrub the tub or to apologize for a misdeed. We are practising rising above the lower self to live up to the goals and values of the higher self. 

But as a matter of fact, my lower self wanted to go the the gym today only because she knew that if she did my higher self would reward her with a sticker. And suddenly I realize that my lower self is known to my oldest readers because--goodness gracious--she's the "bodice riper" writing Inner Child. At last my attachment to stickers makes sense. 

A sudden thirst for stickers came over me after months of buying sheets of stickers to send to my youngest relations. I had begun writing letters to them and thought that if they didn't enjoy the letters at least they might enjoy whatever else I tucked in the envelope. As there is not a wide variety of flat gifts, this is usually stickers. 

These are not the boring coloured dots I used last year to mark my visits to the gym and study sessions, mind you. No. They are either cool or super-cute. And then I found out about hobonichi art--that is, the art of drawing, painting and affixing stickers to one's own daily planner. Why, I wondered, was I marking off my study sessions with red and green dots when I could celebrate them with actual Polish and Italian flags? And why ink in a boring barbell when for very little money I could buy a multicoloured sheet of them? 

I couldn't think of a good enough reason, so I ordered some Italian flags and asked Polish Pretend Son to get me some Polish ones.

Now, as we all know, the first half of 2023 is coming to an end, and it may be time to review how our New Year's Resolutions are going. Mine involved eliminating anxiety, eating 5 portion of fruit and veg a day, 240 gym workouts, reading and writing both Polish and Italian 6 days a week, and writing letters to my younger relations.  

As it happens, I do not have stickers for eliminating anxiety and eating fruit and vegetables. However, I have been using boring old yellow dots in my planner to indicate sun therapy, which we're supposed to get first thing in the morning to help us get better sleep at night. Fruit and veg... Well, maybe I should invest in some fruit and veg stickers because I have been much more successful with the gym workouts: 98 so far, which will mean an even 100 on Friday morning. 

Interestingly, though, stickers alone did not keep me at my books. Despite my cheery flags, I studied Italian only 10 times in January and 6 times in February. In January I had only 5 sessions with Polish and and in February only 9. However, I seem to have had a language revolution on Shrove Tuesday, for after that the gaps between stickers are few. 

I studied Italian 21 times in March, 25 times in April, 27 in May and 17 so far in June--the sudden drop explained by a long weekend in Poland. As for Polish, the numbers are even better: 21 times in March, 26 times in April, 26 times in May and so far 24 in June. Thus, Poland is beating Italy 111:106. 

There are two reasons for this sudden spurt of study. First, I hit upon two challenging, but not too challenging, courses of home study: this gave me something similar to return to every day.  Second, I think the Catholic mind is more primed to accept Lent as a time of hard work, sacrifice and overcoming lazy impulses. 

Meanwhile, B.A. occasionally asks why he doesn't get stickers for the various chores he does around the house, and at last I have ordered him a set: they include cheerful skeletons and the motto "I was brave for the radiographer." 

I was going to add a photo, but I have to rush off for vigil Mass, tomorrow being a HD of O in Scotland. Thus, I'll do it later.  

The Next Battle

I apologize, dear readers, for neglecting you. My mornings are taken up with the accounts, language learning, and going to the gym. My afternoons and evenings belong to my employer. At night I sleep--or try to. 

Occasionally I wonder if I should have displayed so much of my life, unfictionalized, for readers, but I seem to have come out unscathed. Indeed, if anything, writing so much ended my chatterbox ways. Of course, I am still capable of conversation, but the only time my voice is guaranteed to take a frenetic note now is when I talk about Benedict Ambrose's brain cancer battle 6 years ago. I always feel wrung out and exhausted afterwards--a symptom, if I remember correctly, of post-traumatic stress. 

Therefore, I am not particularly interested in talking at length about B.A.'s latest diagnosis. 

When I mentioned to him a year and a half ago that I had a sore back, he said that he had one, too. Being a woman, I went to a doctor and then to a physiotherapist and did exercises to strengthen my core. Being a man, B.A. did nothing. Eventually, however, I ordered him to go to a doctor, which led to his oncologist suggesting he have--just in case, just to put his mind at rest--a scan of his spine. 

And B.A., who already has the remnant of a very rare tumour in his brain, turns out to have even rarer tumours in his spine. They settled there after behaving in a very singular fashion--breaking off from the parent tumour on his brain stem and migrating southwards.  

We discovered the existence of these tumours an hour before we had planned to leave our home for the airport and Italy. B.A. explained this to the doctor who telephoned with the news, and the doctor said we might as well go on holiday anyway, as a week's delay wouldn't make a difference. This was in late May.

Naturally I burst into tears and indeed cried myself to sleep that night in a strange bed within 200 metres of the Mediterranean Sea. B.A. was his stoical, cheerful, and optimistic self. In the morning, in the Italian sun, I cheered up. We lived the next six days to the fullest. When we returned to Edinburgh, we discovered that B.A.'s oncologist was also optimistic and that she had a good plan for controlling (if not curing) the tumours. 

The tumours are so rare, she said, that she didn't know if she could cure them or not. However, she assured us, the reason for their spread was not metastasis but mechanical. As spinal cancer can kill a man in four months, this seemed to explain why, after over a year of an aching tailbone and a host of other ailments he had simply thought the post-cancer "new normal", B.A. is still alive. 

So now he is on steroids, which make him bouncy, energetic, loud and slightly distracted. And I am not on anything, so I am lethargic, quiet and sleep late. In a week or so, B.A. will begin a new course of radiotherapy. And I will continue swimming the breast stroke in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch of contemporary news, as that is my duty and my job. 

We have cancelled a pleasure trip to Poland, but the doctor sees no reason why I can't go on a work trip to Canada in mid-July. Therefore, I will at least be spending some time with my family before radiation leaves B.A. feeling tired and ill. 

It is sad--even crushing--to think that B.A. felt tired and sometimes dizzy and ill for so long because he thought it was simply the "new normal" and nobody told him differently. Naturally, for the rest of his life, every time he mentions a slight ache, I will assume it is life-threatening and beg him to call his oncologist. 

I think the only thing left to say is that I have often thought about long-term "Seraphic Singles" readers overjoyed when they found "the One" and embarked upon a new life that turned out not to be a bower of bliss but a rocky journey featuring miscarriages and serious illnesses visited upon either their children or their husbands. 

This may or may not be a lesson to those who despise their Singleness and long for marriage. Of course, a life for which you take a permanent vow may feel more meaningful--whatever the innocent suffering--than one for which you have not. Whether it actually is more meaningful depends on the reader. A unvowed Single life dedicated to service is certainly more meaningful than a Single life dedicated to experiencing the maximum of pleasure and the minimum of pain. 

Married life is not a refuge from pain. However, there is a lot of joy--even at the most unexpected times--and hope. 

Desert Thoughts

I have a bad cold and therefore am not carrying out the morning routine I have been following since mid-March: improving the garden, studying Polish, studying Italian, going to the gym and swallowing a quick lunch before work. Instead I am sitting about in a dressing gown sniffing and treating myself to decaffeinated coffee.

I gave up coffee, proper and decaf, for Lent, and I now wake myself up by opening an east-facing window and sitting in the dawn light for up to half an hour. (That's probably how I caught this cold.) The other benefit of dawn sunbathing is that it helps me fall asleep at night. Dr. Andrew Huberman, the health guru of the moment, advises his YouTube followers to bolster the effect by having a good, long look at the dusk light, too. That way, even if you sit before the glare of Netflix before bed, you still get to sleep quickly.

It does seem to work. Yesterday Benedict Ambrose cajoled me to leave my work and sit out on the porch to look at the brightly setting sun, and despite not being able to breathe through my nose, I soon fell asleep and through the night. 

I am sorry for having disappointed anyone who thought I might to a cost-analysis of Lenten meal planning and shopping this year. It is only now that I feel that I can admit that the really hard work of our carefully planned vegetarian Lent that year fell upon poor B.A. I did the planning, and we shared the shopping, but B.A. did almost all of the cooking, and it exhausted him. 

B.A. likes to cook, but he does so slowly. A pot of boiled potatoes, a pan of blanched spinach, and two salmon fillets under the grill: that's what he signed up for. A vegetarian lasagna or cassoulet takes him a very long time to assemble. And that Lent was more Lent for him than for me because I absolutely adore fiddly vegetarian dishes. I love healthy cooking, and I am sure eating pre-assembled fishcakes from the supermarket will kill us before our time. Therefore, this Lent is more egalitarian, except that B.A. will always miss meat and wine more than I do.

Thought of Lent brings me to thoughts of deserts, and I remember writing an article once on the spiritual buds than bloom during Lent like flowers that bloom in the desert. In Scotland, a kaleidoscope of flowers blossom during Lent, most notably yellow, purple, and white crocuses; yellow and orange narcissi; and pink cherry blossoms. 

This Lent, however, instead of experiencing spiritual flowers bloom, I am being battered and frozen by the harsh winds of the ideological battles against the traditional family--and not just the family. The whole late 20th century philosophy of what it is to be a decent, charitable, even liberal person--looking for common ground with strangers, sharing the value of freedom of speech--with an agreement that certain things are not for children's ears or eyes--modesty about religion, respect for local culture, boys-don't-hit-girls, civil servants being both civil and servants--is not just being spat upon, it's being battered and shot. 

Having spent six years with my face to the hurricane, I am absolutely certain that forces want to destroy Western Civilization as we have known it--I just don't know which ones. 

I have already edited out several frank paragraphs, but I will add another one. I believe that the strength of any society is based in natural law and the natural hierarchy of loves and loyalties. That is, the strength of a society is the self-sacrificing love of a man and a woman who risk getting married and having children.

It is, and should be, something of a wrench, because the first loyalties of both should have been to their parents and brothers and sisters. Now these first loyalties are to each other and their children. Of course, they should continue keeping close ties with their birth families in a way that does not betray their new primary ties. (One reason I was so pro-B.A. is because I knew my family would like him.) Men must do whatever they can to make their wives and children feel loved and protected. Women must do whatever they can to make their husbands and children feel loved and protected. Children should obey and trust their parents, not "because I said so" but because they are incredibly vulnerable in every possible way: emotionally, intellectually, physically, spiritually. In fact, children shouldn't just feel protected; they must BE protected. 

Of course, love and loyalty does not stop at birth families and marriage families--or a wide network of relatives, if you have them. They should also encompass friends and neighbours and co-workers--the people you see around you every day or every week--and so on into ever wider circles to include the whole world, including a solemn obligation to help feed even the very distant poor. (However pathetic, the distant poor must not trump your children or next door neighbour in your affections, however.)

If you find yourself cut out by God and fate or biology or illnesss or misfortune from marriage-and-children, you still have a role in loving and supporting your birth family and the children of your brothers and sisters in a way that does not interfere with their primary ties. This may, in fact, be a way of bolstering the love and protection your brothers and sisters have for their children. And this is more necessary than ever before because there are whole armies of people who want to come between parents and children, robbing children of their parents' protection and robbing parents of their children's love and loyalty. 

I believe the relative success of people of European stock in Canada is down to their traditional family structure and family ties. Whereas Italian-Canadian kids were wrong to tell me in the 1980s that "Canadians" (i.e. local Anglo-Saxons) don't care about family, they were certainly right to fear the devaluation of traditional ties. The long-term misery in which several communities of Canadian indigenous people find themselves is attributed in part to the dissolution of traditional indigenous families in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The effects of the mid-century destruction of the African-American family are obvious and far-reaching. For more on that, we need only read Thomas Sowell. 

The thing is, societies in which the majority of mothers and fathers live together and treat each other and their children decently (and the children respect and obey their parents) are strong, and societies in which the majorities of families are headed by women whose children don't obey them are not. 

Thus, if I were trying to destroy a society, I would do everything I could to break up the traditional family. 

I would convince young men and women that the opposite sex is nothing but thieving cash machine-sex robots and that early marriage is risible. 

I would tell them that allowing their children to be born is irresponsible unless they are over 30 and in a committed partnership, and that they are not ready for either children or a committed partnership unless they have already travelled the world and can buy their dream home.

Because I have convinced them that having children before they are 30 is irresponsible, I would suggest to them that they should overcome their "hang-ups" and try those 100% accidental-pregnancy-free same-sex relationships. 

If they object to this, I will suggest to them that they are moral lepers, i.e. homophobes or even transphobes. 

And if they do manage to give birth to children despite all my advice, I will warn them to keep their human treasures away from their relations' potentially bad influence (Grandma has such antiquated ideas) while encouraging them to buy devices with which their children can talk to strangers on the internet. 

Through the internet, I would tell children all the grown-up secrets their parents won't tell them and suggest that their fears around growing up to become a man or a woman can be resolved by changing their sex. And through the universities, I would make sure to raise up a generation or two of teachers who will tell children the same thing. 

During their every waking moment, I would tell them that "celebrities"--especially entertainers--are the most important people on earth and that they should emulate them. 

As all of these things are actually happening and because they are relentless and so obviously destructive, I am beginning to think that the destruction of my culture is planned. 

And that's very scary for me. I prefer believing the problem is technology (the Pill, the PC) and ordinary human greediness outstripping human intelligence.