Church, Crisps, Spa, Reduced Sugar: A Better Week

Devoted readers will be happy to read that this was a much better week than last. On Sunday Benedict Ambrose felt well enough to go to Mass. He hadn't been since Assumption Day, and that was in a wheelchair. After a Member of the Men's Schola waved us over and suggested B.A. sit by the radiator in the choir pews, I surprised both B.A. and myself by bursting into tears.

Afterwards B.A. still felt well, so we went to someone's Sunday Lunch across town and had a lovely time until B.A. felt fatigue approaching and I called us a taxi. 

The next day, while I was typing madly away in my home office (formerly B.A.'s home office), he stuck his head through the doorway to inform me that he was going to the nearest grocery store for crisps. I was rather alarmed, partly because it was already dark outside, but B.A. was adamant, and  he returned half an hour later, only a little shaky, with a beer and crisps. 

He repeated this feat on Tuesday or Wednesday; I can't quite remember which for the big event of mid-week was my trip to a spa in the countryside. The various reviews I had read about this spa led me to believe it was heaven on earth, with doting attendant angels. Sadly, it did not live up to the hype. 

First, the spa, which is on the estate of a stately hotel, was a little hard to find. The estate was not well signed. I got lost in the drizzle, which was not at all nice. Then when I appeared in the antechamber of the rustic, rather Nordic- (or Canadian-) looking cottage, the young women at the desk were slow to amble out to greet me. This left me standing about awkwardly, wondering what do to with my wet boots, broken umbrella and damp raincoat. 

Eventually, however, a young woman did come out to greet me. She invited me to sit down and fill out a form, and my heart sank as she handed me a tablet, for the last thing I wanted to see on my day away from my desk was another screen. However, I filled in the electronic questionnaire and put on some slippers and followed my lacklustre hostess around the spa. She swallowed half her words and gave me the impression that she had been doing this for so long, she just no longer cared. Even worse, the sauna area was noisy; a drill split the air and visible through the ceiling-high windows were men building an addition. The "herbal sauna" was quite useless except for women who don't mind sweating in their bathing suits in the full view of construction workers. (Nobody told me to bring a bathing suit, incidentally, so it's a jolly good thing I did: the spa's bathrobe was not voluminous.)

This spa is rather expensive, so I felt rather cross about the noise and the men and the lack of customer service, and felt crosser still when a woman who seemed to belong to the spa (or the work project) in some management capacity began to pull open the door to my mud-treatment chamber while I was towelling myself off. The lazy girl who had showed me into it and given me inadequate instructions as to what I was supposed to do had neglected to turn over the sign that had "Busy" written on the back. 

"What kind of place IS this?" I cried. 

I started writing out my one-star review in my head, but then when I trundled out back to the desk, I was met by a blonde angel of a masseuse/facialist who bore me away to a lovely room with a massage table that was like the world's most comfortable single bed. There I spent an enormously 90 healing and relaxing minutes, and I forgave the spa for my stupid first two hours.  That said, I made darn sure I got the Afternoon Tea that was part of my Spa Day package. 

After I hoovered my Tea and tired of reading fashion magazines, I got dressed and floated back out into the rain.  I caught the country bus back into Edinburgh and went to my Polish lesson, during which I was inclined to be merry. 

In conclusion, the trip to the country spa was worth the time and money and initial aggravation because of the splendid masseuse-facialist and the chance to lounge around in a luxurious Nordic-chic interior reading Scottish Woman, The Tatler and Vogue.

Naturally I returned to work on Thursday, which was American Thanksgiving, so all the American journalists as LSN were on holiday. This meant that the Canadians had to buckle down and write our little heads off for two days. 

Fortunately I felt so great after my spa day that this was relatively easy to do, and I was given a very interesting assignment that involved translating five pages of astonishing revelations about Saint-John-Paul-2-as-Mystic and then scrolling through video to find exactly where the Monsignor was recorded saying those things. The biggest challenge was figuring out how not to translate "piaga" as "plague" and "orde" as "hordes" because, hello, islamists, like nazis and commies, are at any rate human beings. I failed in the latter attempt, but in the former I went with "scourge." I see Tornelli latterly translated "piaga" as "wound", which I like better, too, but is not really accurate.

Another reason I was happier this week than last (a week ago B.A. declared that I was angry all the time) was that I have once again given up wicked, evil, horrible sugar. I did have little cakes as part of my Afternoon Tea at the spa, but that was it. I am now back on the wagon until St. Nicholas' Day. 

Coming Up for Air

Does anyone want to read about someone who works all the time?  Hot Fuzz, the famous British comedy about workaholic cop Nicholas Angel, was brilliantly funny. It is one of the few films that has literally made me weep with laughter. But in reality....

Perhaps not that interesting.

Nevertheless, my parents still read my blog, so this is what my weekday looks like:

6:50 AM --Wake up, thinking about work.

7:15 AM -- Check Facebook, thinking about work.

8:00 AM - 11:00 AM -- Language study/get groceries/laundry/housework.

11 AM - 7 (or 8) PM -- Work.

7 PM or 8 PM -- Make dinner and eat it with B.A. Think about work. Take breaks to check work. 

8 PM - 11 PM -- Try not to think about work. 

It's Saturday, and I don't want to think about work. Shortly I will close the computer and look up Polish words instead. One brilliant thing about language study is that it is all-absorbing, which means it prevents me from thinking about work. 

Of course, sometimes I translate something for work, which means I am doing language study and work at the same time. 

While I work, Benedict Ambrose sits in a chair between the radiator and the empty fireplace and convalesces. He is slowly gaining weight, but his eyes are still sunken in his lined face. He reads a lot of Catholic news, so when I ask him at supper what he's done today, the conversation becomes about work. 

The change from writing (tops) an article a week to writing up to three articles a day has been nerve-wracking. It's an entire different discipline. In fact, the first activity isn't really a discipline: it's just fun. Well, maybe not ENTIRELY fun.

When I wrote this article, I spent several hours in my guesthouse room or in a cafe reading and translating (with dictionaries) various Polish news articles. Since I had been at the Warsaw Independence March anyway, out of sheer curiosity, it made sense to write it all up the next day and send it to Catholic World Report. I was a year ahead of my time; the western media took more of an interest THIS year, when I wasn't there.

Not being there made it a bit frustrating to write THIS article, but it was morally necessary to write it because of all the fake news in the English-language press. This time I had to contact people who WERE there and would both talk to me and consent to their names appearing in LSN. And now, of course, I have set deadlines, so I usually need people to talk to (or message) me at once. 

Another frustration is that Poland (not just Polish) is hard for the English-speaking world to understand, and the English-speaking world is hard to explain to Poles who don't speak much English. It's like trying to explain the Second Amendment to the American Constitution to Swedes, and Swedish comfort with nudity to Americans. 

One of the problems papered over by the Agents of Diversity is that people--peoples--actually are really diverse. It's not just their foodstuffs, or their religious traditions, or what women wear. It's also their relationship to the physical environment in which they live, and their attitude towards politicians, and their concepts of manhood or womanhood, and their histories, and their borders. 

Diversity is not changing dresses on a Barbie Doll. Sometimes diversity is almost all people in a given area sharing a multi-generational experience of the same place, language and history. That's not how it is in my hometown Toronto, but as much as I love Toronto, I don't think the world is or should be a giant Toronto. 

With the exception of conquest of the Channel Islands by the Nazis (which is almost never spoken of), Britain hasn't been invaded since 1066. Perhaps that's why the English* allowed their borders--mental, religious, cultural, personal, sexual--to have become so porous, whereas the Poles--whose borders have been erased and redrawn dozens of times in the past thousand years--have firm and distinct borders regarding Poland and Polish life. 

Complicating this, are internal Polish battles over what these are or should be. From a conservative Polish point of view, a left-wing Pole (still absolutely furious that the conservative PiS party won the last election) would sell his grandmother on the streets of Brussels, let alone write a whiny article in the Guardian about how awful Poland is. 

Anyway, so much for my attempt not to think about work on a Saturday. Maybe I will flee the Historical House and take refuge in a hipster cafe.

*Update: Britishness, by the way, is by its very nature multi-national and multi-ethnic. Canada has never had colonies--being made up of former British colonies--but it too has always been dramatically multi-ethnic, starting with three major groups: First Nations peoples, French-speaking Canadians (mostly descended from the French) and English-speaking Canadians (mostly descended from, or born in, Britain). 

Winter's Day

An oldie but goodie from The Clerk of Oxford, reminding us that November 7 was considered the first day of winter by the Anglo-Saxons.

Super-trad Calendar 

I am reminded of Anglo-Saxon class at the University of Toronto long ago, the pleasant melancholy of leaving the old Mediaeval Studies house after an hour or two of group translation of Beowulf. Across the street stretched the wooded Queen's Park in which wicked Grendel might have lurked, lonely and envious of the warmth and companionship of indoors. 

Currently I am reading C.S. Lewis' The Magician's Nephew in Polish, writing down all the words I couldn't generate myself in conversation on cue cards.  I've budgeted a week per chapter, and such is the magic of the Narnia heptalogy, listening and reading to the same chapter over and over again is not at all dull.