Apples and Roses
Wednesday 27 March 2024
The Parish Dance
Saturday 23 March 2024
The Frogs on the Tiling
Once upon a time I was very entertained by "transformation" scenes in popular films. It was fun to believe that streetwalkers could be transformed into elegant ladies, dowdy schoolgirls into princesses, and tough-talking cops into beauty queens over the course of a day at a beauty salon, plus new clothing.
Monday 4 March 2024
Observations from Misfortune
I once thought being car-free was a great blessing; now I think it is a luxury we can no longer afford. The last time we took a taxi anywhere, it became obvious that the driver had no idea how to navigate the area without a GPS, the GPS took us on a highly original route, and the driver charged us £30.72.
The first thing I noticed yesterday was that if I stand back and allow Benedict Ambrose to lift his lightweight rollator up or down a step, strangers will lunge past me to grab it. I am sure they mean to be helpful, it's lovely to live in a society where people care, and. B.A. is a humble, patient man. But it leaves me feeling like a seeing-eye dog who has just been chastised for laziness. People, ask first.
The second thing I noticed was that there was dried dog dirt on a wheel of the rollator. Mindful of the car we were going to travel in after our two bus rides, I wiped it off with a clean paper napkin I fortunately had in my pocket. I know everyone says this, but honesty, do pick up after your dog. Not everyone can see where it poops, especially after dark. (We had gone to a dinner party the night before, and our return journey was out of the Odyssey.)
The third thing I noticed (not for the first time) is that everyone is horrified when I mention the quotes given to us by mobility bathroom salesmen. Amazingly, nobody else has been asked to pay £16,000 for obviously cheap materials and a crew guaranteed to finish the job. I keep checking the internet, and it keeps telling me that people remodelling a small bathroom in the UK in 2024 should expect to pay between £4,000 and £6,000, unless they go all out and buy luxury goods.
One salesmen told us the high price was due to COVID and Brexit. He also told us that nobody uses plywood for waterproof wall panels anymore, and in fact plywood comes from Russia. (The horror!) On the coffee table before him was a catalogue of wall panels from a rival firm, and their centre cores are made from plywood.
As I have not yet spoken to a firm that remodels bathrooms, not just mobility bathrooms ("We did the bathroom for X hospital, have a look at the photos!), I cannot say if it is the word "mobility" that adds £10,000 to the bill. However, as the people most likely to hire a mobility bathroom firm are the elderly and disabled, which is to say the most vulnerable adults in society, I suspect an investigation is in order.
The fourth thing that I noticed is that my nerves are fraying, and that we both need the services of the cancer support service. Unfortunately, the cancer support service is two bus rides away, and when we were last near it and had time to go at once, it was closed.
The fifth thing that I noticed was that I reached a flow state yesterday afternoon while reading my daily two pages of Bolesław Prus's Lalka (The Doll). It is set in 1878, it is hardly a text for foreigners, and when I go over it unaided, I can only get the gist. However, it is great fun to compare the text afterwards to a translation and fill in the gaps.
This reminded me that I sometimes want to write a post arguing against feeling sad all the time. When Benedict Ambrose was very sick in 2017 and I was combining full-time work with second-guessing doctors and either begging them to do something or visiting B.A. in hospital, I received an angry email from an up-to-that-moment cherished friend disgusted by my blogposts about learning Italian. Apparently this then-friend believed that I was not doing enough to help Benedict Ambrose and that I was criminally negligent. I needed to stop going to Italian class and follow her [expensive and lunatic] care plan.*
What she didn't know was that Italian class, and thinking and writing about how speaking a second language changes a brain, and how and why second and third languages get scrambled up when you try to speak them, gave me a respite from acute mental torment. She knew Benedict Ambrose was suffering, but she couldn't seem to grasp that his wife was suffering, too, and that if she sent her wacko email, it would scar the latter for life.
Anyway, when someone you love is very sick, you don't have to be sad all the time. You should feel free to admit that you are sad, but you should also work on keeping depression at bay. Fortunately for me, I have never thought solitary drinking or drugging the path to joy. I am also not a fan of lying on the sofa reading endless paperbacks although I know that works for others. Instead, I disappear into the world of foreign languages, and quite a wonderful world it is, too.
*Yes, I know I have written about this recently. But it was, hands down, the worse communication I have ever received in my life. Never, ever write to the spouse of a very sick person accusing her/him of maltreating him/her.
Saturday 2 March 2024
Thinking about Our Boys
Thinking about Our Boys suggests discrimination, and that's exactly what women should exhibit towards men: discrimination. After all, the Christian woman's ideal is to share her life with only one man (or, if a nun, only with the Son of Man) while being a cordial neighbour to the other men around. It is easier to be cordial when these men are sane, good and safe to know. And the easiest way to ensure that is to avoid the other kind completely.
Sanity, goodness, and safety are merely the essential basics, of course. Young marriage-minded women often have a long list of traits that the Ideal Husband should have. It gets shorter as they get older and realize some of the things on the list are very trivial, or when they fall in head-over-heels with someone with few of the characteristics written secretly in the back of the notebook. Look at me: I married a man with a beard who can't drive.
However, Benedict Ambrose was definitely one of Our Boys, which for me meant that he was a Catholic who went to Mass every Sunday and prayed every day. And since shared Catholicism was my number one value of values, I knew that however much B.A. might irritate me in future (if he did), I would stick by him through thick and thin: he was one of Our Boys. Also, he was funny, clever, kind, talented, and had great dinner parties. But that said, while B.A. was sliding into a coma, all that was left was the shared Catholicism. It was enough.
The importance of thinking about men who share your most cherished values as Our Boys is that it helps dull the negative effects their more amusing traits have on you. In my experience, young women have a harder time understanding that men are not just women in larger, more rectangular bodies. Thus, it might seem hilarious when men are not as good as women are at certain things: striking up conversations with women, colour-coordinating outfits, reading micro-expressions, walking gracefully. It isn't really.
Incidentally, as I am writing primarily for Our Girls, I am sure I don't have to explain how unreasonable it is to say men "just shouldn't look" or "should keep better custody of their eyes" in response to complaints to immodest female attire. Of course, some of the more original-minded of Our Boys will argue that women should dress like statues of Our Lady of Sorrows. He is, of course, making the error of thinking that women are just men in smaller, rounder bodies who will dispassionately weigh such ideas in an abstract fashion and not view them as personal attacks or think immediately of the Taliban. Naturally, it would be an error to take these Our Boys seriously, just as it would be an error to dress like statues of Our Lady of Sorrows. Tell them that you tried dressing like OLOS at one point but gave it up when you tripped on your hem in front of a bus.
In short, I am counselling patience, understanding and kindness. It is a terrible thing to laugh at a well-meaning young man. It is also a bad idea to scold him. Given the very anti-male turn our society has taken, and given the female domination of the education industry, the average young man in the West has been bullied by women from birth and is mighty tired of it. Therefore, instead of employing the "delightful raillery" used by millionaire's daughter Elizabeth Bennett when punching up at the billionaire Mr. Darcy, it is a better idea to give young men the impression that you think they are marvellous.
There is an appropriate degree to this, of course. You don't want to give the impression that you are man-mad, and obviously you must be super-careful in what you say to married men. However, I cannot see that there is anything wrong in giving voice to positive, if trivial, thoughts that come into your mind when you see a pullover you like on a fellow Single or feel that your dance partner has greatly improved.
And that's all I have to say. To recap:
1. Avoid all men who are mad, bad, and dangerous to know.
2. Develop feelings of solidarity with the men you know who share your most cherished values, aka Our Boys.
3. Plan on marrying one of them, or someone like them, one day.
4. Be patient, understanding and kind when Our Boys, though well-meaning, are tongue-tied, puppyish, clumsy, or colour-uncoordinated.
5. Some boys come up with weird abstract theories that you should neither take seriously nor get upset about. If possible, make a joke about it.
Boy: Women should never work outside the home.
Girl: That's why I'm going to marry for money. What's your major?
Boy: Women should dress like Our Lady.
Girl: I tried, but then I tripped in front of a bus.
Boy: Women should not go to university.
Girl: But then how would we homeschool our sons?
6. If your outfit would have been morally acceptable in your town in 1962, it's fine now.
7. Their female-dominated education may have been rather tough on Our Boys. Feed and water them with kind words.
Saturday 24 February 2024
Talking to Girls
Tuesday 20 February 2024
Yes, but have an emergency plan
In fact, I even had in my handbag an old notebook dating to 2016, about a year before I took a full-time job. I had word-sketched there a moment of absolute peace I was experiencing in a friend's greenhouse. My friend (who has since died) lived in half of a house built for a duchess, and I was living in the attic of a house bought by a law lord a few decades after it was built. It was a warm and rainy April day. My delightful and perfectly healthy (we thought) husband was at work. I did not have to earn more (we thought) than I was already earning. Naturally it was sad not to have children, but I wasn't thinking about that as I sat sheltered from the rain.
A year later our whole world had turned upside down, and I thanked the Lord of History that a woman, even a woman my age, could, in fact, find a good professional job and be paid the same wage as a man.
So my answer to "Compulsory Feminism" is "Yes, by all means let us work to bring back and support the traditional family, the traditional breadwinner, the traditional homemaker, and the traditional roles. Let us strive to make men and woman marriageable again. Let us teach young men how to woo women, and let us help young women to preserve their mental health. But at the same time, we must insist on an emergency plan. Husbands fall ill; fathers of young families die. The wives and children of sick men are vulnerable to predators; widows and orphans even more so. Every woman longing to marry a good man and have a family must have an emergency plan. This could be income insurance. That could be an in-demand trade or profession. Whatever it is, let us be rooted in reality. Let us have, by all means, emergency plans."
UPDATE: Children get sick, too. If you're looking for somewhere to put your Lenten alms, you might want to consider this poor family.
Monday 19 February 2024
How to be Youthful
I have seen elderly ladies with rollators all week; having been in the market for such a device, I suddenly noticed them everywhere. I have also noticed many people who ought not to have been sitting in the seats for the disabled on the bus. Such people have never really caught my attention before. But all of a sudden, the availability of the disabled seats on the bus is of city- (if not world-) shaking importance.
Anyway, the kindly salesman, who did not appear to be that much older than B.A. and I, tried B.A. out on three different rollators, which B.A. pushed up and down the pavement outside the shop, and divined which one B.A. liked best before telling us the prices. B.A. liked the medium-priced one best. At one point, while B.A. was pushing a rollator out the door, the salesman mentioned to me sotto voce that the gentleman was patient and unusually easy to work with.
"He's very practical," I said in response to this tribute, while thinking what a mercy it was to be working with a knowledgeable person instead of buying a rollator through eBay and hoping for the best. I also imagined crowds of stubborn 70- and 80-something men, all putting off getting walking sticks, let alone a rollator, because in their minds they are still the men who ran races or sailed boats or urged horses over fences. I am sympathetic to their point of view, though, for, as B.A. got on the bus home with his refolded new rollator and we took our seats in the disabled section, I felt about 75 years old.
By the way, my first authentic memory of a historical event is probably the funeral of Paul VI, so although no spring chicken, I am a generation younger than I felt on Saturday. Wearing a tweed coat, spectacles, practical shoes, a beret, and zero makeup like a Scottish granny of the old school no longer seemed like such a great idea.
Thus, B.A. and I, fast-forwarded into our 8th decade by misfortune, debated on how to be more youthful.
"Complain on Tik-Tok about having to work a 40-hour week?" I suggested.
"We already go to the Traditional Latin Mass," B.A. observed.
"True," I said smugly but typed "how to be youthful" on my smartphone. Unfortunately, the internet thought I meant how to look more youthful, and presented two lists--one all about expensive moisturizers and cosmetics and the other about drinking lots of water and getting enough sleep.
On Sunday morning I discovered I had mislaid an important key and, when I couldn't find it on our return home from Mass, became depressed and hysterical to the point of suicidal ideation which is, sad to say, rather youthful. Fortunately, today I got a message from someone who had found it, so I left off self-contempt and decided to blog.
In Gigi, a charming film lying about high-class prostitution, Maurice Chevalier sings a song about being glad he's not young anymore. It's mostly about love stuff but the "feeling you're only two foot tall" can unfortunately continue into adulthood. Right now, the part of youth I most envy is the power of compound interest, which is why I bombard my younger relations with advice to save at least 50% of their earnings or pocket money and invest it when they can.
I suppose planning ever more complicated dance parties is youthful. There's a school of thought that youthfulness involves going to dance clubs and rock concerts. However, I was scarred when I saw what middle-aged Goths look like after leaving a Sisters of Mercy concert in Glasgow that time. (It turned out the Sisters of Mercy were the early show, and we oldies left just as the younghies were queuing to get into the late show, and the contrast was just unspeakable.) Then there's the idea that to be youthful is to get on the floor with building blocks, or a train set, and entering fully into the interests of friends and family aged under 10.
Well, what do you think? If you woke up feeling 75, what would you do to get back to your proper age?