Cinematic Interlude

I have watched Just Like Heaven two nights in a row, and I think I have a crush on Mark Ruffalo. This is problematic, given my job and Ruffalo's politics.  Oh, and we're both married.

I am totally into Just Like Heaven. This is probably too shame-making to blog about. However, if you are a girl, I suggest you see it. If you have Amazon Prime, you can even see it for free. But if you get a massive crush on Mark Ruffalo as a result, you may be disappointed to discover that 13 Going on 30 is not free to those with Amazon Prime. Not that I know anything about that

Update: Now I am having imaginary conversations with Dr. Jordan Peterson about why I am so entranced by Just Like Heaven.

JP: It's because of the archetypes. There's a man and a woman in a Garden. You're psychologically dispositioned to like that stuff.

Me: Really?

JP: And Mark Ruffalo stands up straight with his shoulders back.*

Me: So what you're saying is that I'm just a female lobster.

JP: No, I didn't say that.

*Update: B.A. says he doesn't. He also says Mark Ruffalo has a squishy face. It occurs to me that B.A. may be an eensie-weensie bit jealous. If so, how silly. You don't see me bad-mouthing Helen Mirren, Penelope Keith, Charlotte Rampling and all the other superannuated starlets B.A. finds so beguiling.

The Mini-Break Part 2

  Is it still hyper-patriotic if you're not actually Polish? Hmm...

On the second proper day of Benedict Ambrose's and my mini-break in Krakow,  I didn't leave our hotel until ten to noon because, as you may remember from yesterday, I had one of the three worst hangovers of my life. It was a truly epic hangover. Unlike those other two hangovers, however, I came to the conclusion that this hangover was a price worth paying for the revelries of the night before. It also provided two men with opportunities for heroism: the Astrophysicist imparted his knowledge of hangover remedies, and B.A. went out and got me one.

START

By the time the church bells rang the Angelus, B.A. and I were scurrying through the Old Market  back towards Ul. Grodzka and I felt well enough to make the Angelus responses and even to look forward to eating lunch. This was in Balaton, a Hungarian restaurant recommended long ago by the Astrophysicist, who knows many useful things. There we found him, blond and resplendent in an excellent suit* and tie, and we embraced or shook hands and then sat, and I praised him for his grapefruit hangover remedy.

We had only just ordered when Polish Pretend Son, dark but also resplendent in suit* and tie, and Polish Future Pretend Daughter-in-Law appeared. There was more greeting and then congratulating back and forth, as the Astrophysicist, too, is getting married.

The conversation was largely about weddings until the Astrophysicist asked if we had heard of Jordan Peterson, which naturally we had. And I think it very interesting, and glorious for Canada, that five different people, three of them Poles, sitting in a Hungarian restaurant in Krakow, all knew who Jordan Peterson was and how he had greatly discomfited a British interviewer on the UK's Channel 4.

PFPDiL was wearing a T-shirt from a hyper-patriotic Polish clothing store, which I recognised, having perused their website during the January sales and concluded that few were suitable for non-Poles. The T-shirt, featuring Pacman about to swallow Karl Marx's head, was a gift from PPS.

Meanwhile the Astrophysicist, B.A. and I ate enormous helpings of goulash with potato pancakes and  PPS and PFPDiL helped us drink a bottle of red wine. Then PFPDiL took a photo of us all (and my splendid fake bear-fur hat, which hitherto I have forgotten to mention), and off the happy couple went for their train north.

MART

After the Astrophysicist paid the bill, we entreated him to come with us on our book-buying expedition, and sure enough he found for us a bookstore that carried the book I wanted before toddling off to meet a Krakow friend for coffee. This bookstore is called De Revolutionibus Books and Cafe, in honour of Copernicus, and it is extremely cool. Indeed, I felt extremely cool perusing the Theology section, so glamorously near the Philosophy section, as in Oooooh, look at me, hanging out in the intellectual Polish bookshop in Krakow; I am soooo cosmopolitan, y'all. You would think that at my age I would be beyond such posturing but, sadly, no.

Then, clutching my intellectual copies of Książę Kaspian and Podróż "Wędrowca do świtu", I wandered happily through the back streets of the Old Town with B.A. until we came across the hyper-patriotic Polish clothing store. There was a sale rack. I was terribly tempted by the T-shirt illustrated with a lurid scene from the Battle of Jasna Góra, but B.A. thought it was too lurid, which left a lot of shirts stating firmly (in both Polish and Magyar) that Hungarians and Poles are brothers or that Poland is OUR country, or depicting various battle-weary soldiers or an elegant if enormous White Eagle.

I decided for the Eagle. The very pretty salesgirl beamed and said something complicated about sizes, which I didn't quite understand, but there was no way I was going to speak English to a Pole in the hyper-patriotic Polish clothing store, so I stuck with the size in hand, which does indeed fit.

"Happy birthday," said B.A. whose present it was. (We had agreed beforehand that I would choose my own present.) And then we toddled along with our rather political shopping bag until we came across our favourite grumpy lady cafe.

TART

There are many pastry shops--called cukierni--in Krakow, and many cater to foreign tourists. Our favourite grumpy lady cafe does not. It is entirely authentic, which means the women behind the counter have no customer service skills, charge extra if you want to put milk in your coffee, and have a door to the loo that can be unlocked only with coins. But authenticity also means that the cafe is scrupulously clean, that the coffee is excellent, and that the pastries are good. Elderly Polish ladies sit huddled in corners under mohair berets and scrawny Polish men in caps wander in accompanied by strapping sons to order cakes to take home. We love this cafe.

Sure enough, the woman behind the counter was true to the spirit of the place, for she refused to sell me a piece of makowiec (poppyseed cake) as it could not be cut and served in the shop but only sold by the gram to be taken away. This made no sense to me, but at the first sign of conflict my Polish dissipates like a cloud of vapour and the only English word the sprzedawka knew was "No", which was itself confusing as "No" in Polish means "Well ..." or even sometimes "Yes".  In the end I had a sweet cheese tartlet. B.A., as always, had kremówka in honour of St. John Paul II.  The coffee was excellent.

ART

Afterwards we went to the National Gallery of Art in the Old Market for its last hour of the day, where we happened upon the Astrophysicist on his way out, and admired various classics of Polish national art, like Wanda committing suicide, Nero watching Christians being burned alive and storks conspiring darkly together. We then went back to the hotel for a rest before venturing out for some cheap pierogis at a back street shop popular with the young of all the world.

ATHWART   

B.A. was not very hungry, so I bought just 10 pierogis and a small glass of beer, and to my surprise, B.A. enjoyed both pierogis and beer enormously. We got there at a lucky moment, finding a central table before the young of all the world arrived en masse and stood in a queue in front of the old fashioned counter. The two languages of this restaurant, the Koko Tavern, were Polish for the Poles and English for everyone else, including the couple beside us. The female half sat down while saying, "Not even a smile", which suggested that Koko Tavern was also very authentic vis-a-vis customer service. The male half complained about trying to learn Polish after studying Russian, and the words getting confused in his head. He himself had a Mediterranean accent of some sort, possibly Greek.

RAMPART

And then B.A. and I, having paid in advance, went out and had a slightly damp walk in the romantic drizzle, enjoying all the romantic Italian renaissance architecture, the expensive menus in the restaurant windows and the Christmas decorations hanging gamely on until, we assume, Candlemas. We returned to our hotel at about 10 and went straight to bed.

*B.A. says they weren't wearing suits but jackets and trousers. I say the word "suit" denotes jackets and trousers in Canada. At any rate, they looked splendid as usual. B.A. was wearing trousers, a pullover and a tie. The Giant, when he was on the scene, was not not so formally dressed, I seem to recall. I believe one word to describe the Giant, in comparison with our other Polish men friends, is "normal."

The Mini-Break Part 1

We are back in the Historical House after our weekend trip to Kraków. There were no major mishaps, a blessing for which I am truly thankful.

FLIGHT

We even had good luck on the airplane--on the way there B.A. had an empty seat beside him up in Row 5 and I had an empty seat on either side of me down in Row 31. On the way back, when we were allocated seats together, there was no-one in the window seat, and I could slide over. Thus, we were as comfortable as you can be on the cheapest airlines.

Well, on the way there, B.A. had to listen to the loud cackling of British women who'd had too much to drink. I, happily, was entertained by the rather limited, and therefore comprehensible, conversations of young Polish families, saying such things (in Polish) as "Look! Look! What is it?", presumably while holding picture books, and (near arrival), "There isn't much snow, but there are Christmas trees" and "We're landing!"

BLIGHT

I exulted in the cold, dry air that greeted us on the train platform, for it reminded me of proper Canadian winters. And we were both pleased by the baroque luxury of our hotel, which we nevertheless left at once to find something to eat. This is easier said than done on Thursday night at 11 PM unless you're willing to go to McDonalds or a kebab shop, and B.A. wasn't. We ended up in a "Carrefour" grocery store on Ul. Grodzka (Grodzka St.) and bought supplies for a hotel room picnic.

There and back we crossed the Old Market Square, advertised as the biggest piazza in Europe, and to our consternation heard a gang of Englishmen howling "When the Saints Come Marching In" and a gang of Scotsmen baying "Flower of Scotland." Kraków is still a favourite destination of stag parties, for which the British are, unfortunately, notorious. For a long moment, I bitterly regretted not having gone to Wrocław instead.

SIGHT

However, joy came on Friday morning when we set off into the cold towards Wawel Hill, via Planty, so as to avoid touristy Ulica Floriańska (Florian Street), but also because the tree-dotted park surrounding the Old Town is so pretty, even in a snowless late January. There were rather sobering posters posted here and there saying, in Polish, that a certain Piotr had disappeared during a night out in Kazimierz, and if anyone had seen him, please call, inform Facebook, etc. Real life was front and centre in Planty.

Benedict Ambrose was much more interested in Wawel Cathedral than in Wawel Castle and pointed out that there is no admission fee to the Cathedral proper. However, I decided to splash out and purchase tickets to visit the massive Sigismund Bell, the Royal Crypts and various Cathedral chapels closed to the non-paying public, plus electronic guides in English (for B.A.) and Polish (for me).

My Polish electronic guide, I later decided, was my Friday penance, for it definitely showed up my inadequacies, not only in Polish, but in the operation of electronic devices. (Climbing the steep steps to the Sigismund Bell was another penance, for I have developed a fear of heights in the past twelve years.) We spent three hours in Wawel Cathedral, with prayers in the curtained-off Chapel of the Most Holy Sacrament, which was my favourite part.  But I was very impressed by the sarcophagi of Polish writers, like Adam Mickiewicz, and generals, like Władysław Sikorski. Sikorski's sarcophagus is right beside that of Jan Sobieski III, which rather blew my mind. Everyone who has any interest in Polish history really ought to buy the tickets for Wawel Cathedral and not just toddle in for free.

After a quick and cheap lunch on Ul. Grodzka, we walked across the bridge over the Wisła River to Kazimierz and found the Ethnographic Museum. We had never been before, and I thought it was stupendous. On the ground floor are reconstructions of Polish peasant huts, a 1930s village schoolroom, mills, an oil press, etc. On the next floor are examples of every tool and craft known to local countryfolk up until mass production arrived--cheese moulds, tridents, bear traps, fox traps, bird traps, horse brasses, looms. The exhibit gave the impression the local farmers were still using all that stuff, made by themselves by hand on long winter evenings, until 1967, but this surely cannot be true. At any rate, the latest-looking exhibit was a photo from a village wedding in 1967.  Most of these objects were labelled only in Polish, so I greatly enjoyed translating them for B.A.

There were many fascinating photographs of pre- and inter-war village life, and a room lined with folk costumes from all the regions around, plus examples of embroidered jackets that filled me with admiration for the needlewomen who made them. There were also such interesting objects for entertainment and revels as masks and animal heads for New Year's Eve shenanigans, which were obviously pagan and definitely creepy, painted eggs for Easter and "szopki"--elaborate manger scenes--for Christmas.

As traditionalists know, the Christmas season does not definitively end until February 2, and Kraków still had her Christmas decorations--include szopki in many a restaurant window--up. Meanwhile, the Ethnographical Museum had a third floor, but Benedict Ambrose was exhausted, so instead of finding it, we went back to the hotel so he could nap before the BIG EVENT of the day: my birthday dinner.

NIGHT

For, lo, at around 6 PM a little party of beautiful young people, comprised of Polish Pretend Son, Polish Future Pretend Daughter-in-Law and their friend The Giant, appeared in the lobby of our hotel. They bore an enormous globe of red tulips, tied with red and green ribbons, a box of chocolates handmade by PFPDiL, and a hardcover copy of Father Jozef Tischer's Short Handbook for Life, which was highly flattering to my Polish-reading skills. There was some delay as the hotel found me a vase big enough for the bouquet, and then we went out to dinner in a traditional cellar restaurant.

The Giant could not bring himself to eat meat on a Friday, which I thought showed a lot of integrity. The rest of us ate masses of pig, preceded by grilled oscypek cheese served with cranberry sauce. I was delighted to have real Poles to consult about such important cultural question raised by the Ethnographical Museum as to what chocioły (see photo) are or were.

Afterwards we went to a local beer aficionado bar, and then we walked through the bitter cold to Kazimierz, me displaying my vast improvement in conversational Polish to PPS.  Our goal was the famously hipster cocktail bar Alchemia, which was full of young people and the more adventurous of foreign tourists. One can smoke in Alchemia, and B.A. complained that it was like being transported back to the 1970s, but PPS and the Giant happily smoked cigars and I happily downed hot chocolate (real, thick drinking chocolate) with bourbon. Then, B.A. feeling weary, we all walked back to the Old Town and said good night to B.A. in the lobby of our hotel.

Then there was a magical hour, I think, in which the four of us wandered up and down the cold mediaeval streets visiting vodka bar after vodka bar. There was a truly festive atmosphere as many other people, mostly young Poles and Ukrainians, were out doing the same thing. With B.A. away, my young companions switched to Polish, switching back to English only when it was clear I couldn't understand. A mysterious and romantic mist hovered over the scene despite the cold. The feeling of otherworldliness I experienced must have been compounded by the vodka, but I didn't feel drunk until that last walk back to my hotel. I suspect the refreshing cold air between shots is the explanation for my wrongful belief I was sober.

TIGHT

Long, long ago, I took it as a life lesson that I must never match Poles shot-for-shot when they are drinking vodka. Unfortunately, I forgot this lesson on Friday night. It was all so merry and companionable that it never once occurred to me that there are consequences to knocking back several shots of vodka within a single hour.

"I am so drunk," Benedict Ambrose (a light sleeper) says I told him. And I definitely was. I fell asleep clutching B.A.'s hand and woke up a few hours later to be violently sick in the loo.

The next morning I was horribly, horribly, horribly ill, and had to cancel a morning coffee meeting with another young Polish friend, the Astrophysicist. Feeling utterly desperate, I asked him over the phone how to cure hangovers, and he sympathetically advised grapefruit juice, tomato juice or, if I was feeling adventurous, the juice from a jar of sauerkraut. Water, he assured me, was useless.

I was already beginning to suspect this, so I put on my coat to go out with B.A. to get some grapefruit juice, but then felt so ill again that I merely collapsed into bed. B.A. bravely went out for the grapefruit juice by himself. Fortunately "grapefruit juice" in Poland is called "nektar grejpfrut", so B.A. found it without any trouble. I got some into my stomach and then slept, facedown, in my coat for an hour, and then woke up and was miraculously able to head out with B.A. to our noon lunch appointment.

To be continued...

Away to Poland Again

An adventure tomorrow: Benedict Ambrose and I are going to Kraków for a long weekend. I hope the trip doesn't exhaust him, and I can't remember what was going on when I optimistically bought our airline tickets.

I do remember asking myself what I wanted to do for my birthday, and at that moment what I wanted to do was go to Poland, and hear Polish all around me, and see Polish friends if possible. I picked Kraków because it was the one Polish city I knew that Benedict Ambrose actually enjoys. It turns out that he also enjoys Wrocław, which would have been my first choice (in winter), so that it what I get for not consulting him properly.

In case you are Polish and wondering what my first choice would be in summer, it would be Sopot. There is more to see in neighbouring Gdańsk, but occasionally I like to sit on a beach, and Sopot also has forests and impossibly rustic restaurants and poetry festivals.

The surprising element in Benedict Ambrose's relationship with Poland is that he went there when he was a seventeen-year-old Anglican, not long after the Berlin Wall collapsed. He was there for four weeks, the beneficiary of a student (or choirboy) exchange program, and was shepherded all around by a pair of Polish university professors. Poland was much poorer, dirtier and stranger then. The relatively (to British) volcanic Polish character oppressed B.A., and he was disappointed when his host parents vehemently discouraged him from attempting to learn Polish.

B.A. was only seventeen, and I don't think he had ever met any Poles before, so he hadn't learned the correct way to respond to Poles who tell you with brutal honesty that they don't think you can learn Polish, that it is too hard, and that it is too impractical, and it is, in fact, stupid to want to learn it.

The correct way to respond to this is to give birth in your heart to a little tiny interior Pole who says, "***** Mac, I will learn Polish anyway." Then, when you are faithful to this intention,  Poles will cheer and help you along and think you are marvellous for complicated ethno-psychological reasons best not commented upon.

I should point out here that neither I nor any of my Polish friends have ever uttered the very bad word indicated by the asterisks. Except Artur Sebastian Rosman, naturally, and he emigrated to the USA. To Detroit. In the 1980s. No wonder he swears.

But tomorrow B.A. and I will go to Kraków, and hopefully I will get us from the airport to Kraków Główny railway station without embarrassing us, and even more hopefully B.A. will not suddenly fall ill, and I do not end up carrying both him and our luggage to the nearest bench, as happened one sad night in Florence. (I am still not sure how I did it, but I did.)

That reminds me that I must look up where the hospital nearest our hotel is.

Our plans involve Wawel Cathedral, which B.A. remembers you can visit for free, but I want to see the Crypt this time, for which one must pay; the Ethnographical Museum; and, if there is time, and it is still open, the Jan Matejko house. On Friday evening we are meeting Polish Pretend Son and the Future Polish Pretend Daughter-in-Law and having dinner with them in a romantic cellar full of roasted meats. Then we shall go to the Kazimierz  district and drink and drink and drink and perhaps I will dance on the bar, as my youngest sister allegedly did on her school trip to Greece, and afterwards I will sing "Płynie, Wisła płynie" to the Wisła River.

The next day will (we hope) involve more eating and drinking and a castle. On Sunday (we hope) there will be Mass and a mad dash to the railway station, so as to catch our plane on time.

I am qualifying all this with hope because my Polish travel plans have a sad habit of becoming so altered as to be unrecognisable. The last time I was in Poland I landed in the hospital with a galloping eye infection. (On the bright side, my Polish professor and I collaborated on a lesson plan devoted to vocabulary actually necessary to coping with such an emergency.)

In case you are wondering, I know how to say "My husband has had five brain operations" and "My husband has a tube in his brain." My poor Polish tutor, who is perhaps 23, listened to me talk about this for weeks.

"From Christian Friends"

I came roaring at Benedict Ambrose like a bear for he had the post but not my longed-for faux bear-fur hat. The postman had buzzed at the office door only once, we assume, and when no-one answered, he just just left a note saying we could get my package at the local post office. How frustrating.

But B.A. held up a card as if to protect himself from my wrath at the postie, and it contained a gift certificate for Tesco (a British grocery store) and a mysterious message:

"In thankfulness for Mark's recovered health. With love from Christian friends."

Naturally we looked at the postmark to see where these Christian friends had come from, but we had never heard of the town, so the pleasant mystery continued.

Meanwhile, from the very beginning we suspected that these Christian friends are from the Reformed tradition, as in "praying for the living, not for the dead," so let this be a tribute to their faith and gratitude to God on our behalf, bless them. We thank them very much.

Of course, they seem to want to be anonymous and may shun tribute, so I will end with "Praised be Jesus Christ forever and ever, amen."

"Non Moriar, Sed Vivam"

Recently Benedict Ambrose and I received another beautiful card from Emma, who sews habits for the Dominicans. Thank you very much, Emma! We are very touched that you arranged to have MORE Masses said for us.

We really will never be able to sort out whose intercession was the one that brought about B.A.'s "pretty miraculous" recovery! Maybe they all did.

Although there have certainly been ugly moments in the past year--the ugliest stemming from moral weakness or mistakes--there have been many, many, many beautiful ones, too. Some have been provided by readers! Some have been provided by family and friends around us. One was hearing the voice of the local Caregivers' Association representative on the phone.* The most beautiful were provided by Benedict Ambrose himself, when he was simply out of his mind.  One of my favourites was when, one or two nights before the final operation, he stopped fighting against me and food and decided he liked custard.

But he was in his right mind yesterday when he was in the back of church, in his old place in the choir pews, singing the Offertory:

"Dexteram Domine fecit virtutem, dextera Domine exaltavit me:
non moriar, sed vivam, et narrabo opera domine."

(The right hand of the Lord has wrought strength, the right hand of the Lord has exalted me: I shall not die, but live and tell of works of the Lord.")

Me, I burst into tears.

I knew a priest once who preached about wanting to paint smiles on all the statues of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Although I liked him a lot and usually found his homilies like manna in the desert, I did not like that. There was a metal sculpture in the centre of that town dedicated to dead and injured workers: it showed a strong, muscular man whose head had been crushed. It was a stark reminder of men throughout the history of the town who had been badly hurt or killed in any kind of dangerous job, and by extension their bereaved parents, wives and children. A smiling Madonna is lovely at Christmas, but when you are going through agony and disaster, the Sorrowful Virgin is the  woman you KNOW really understands.

In the same way, I think, the Traditional Latin Mass really expresses the seriousness of human worship for a God who is both good and terrifying, who permits an inexplicable (and rare) brain tumour to grow and yet who guides a dangerous operation to its optimal end.

And I throw in that plug because a reader  in Toronto wrote in to say that she had gone to a Traditional Latin Mass because I write about it and now goes regularly, because she loves it so much.

In other news: Although I have been making my painful way through the Urdu alphabet, I'm putting further Urdu studies on hold until July. It seems that I am being called to review German for the next few months.

Postscript: B.A.'s being sick, with all the blood, vomit, bumps and scars that it entailed, was not ugly compared to moments when other people's rashness, laziness, impatience, or incompetence--including and especially my own--came into focus. A tumour is sad and scary, but not evil, just as a hurricane is sad and scary, but not (in itself) evil. It is the human response to the illness the tumour causes (or to the hurricane) that is good or evil. I heard that in theology school, and I now I have done the field work, so to speak. It's true.

*What to say to the spouse of a very sick person after asking how the sick person is: "And how are you?" This, I think, is especially true in the UK where medical personnel can sometimes (not always) make you feel less useful or valuable than a seeing-eye dog.

"Pretty Miraculous"

One last post--I hope--on Benedict Ambrose's late, unlamented brain tumour.

Three months after his last operation, B.A. and I sat across from a brain surgeon, who peered avidly into B.A.'s face and said, "Nothing asymmetrical."

This was the first indication we had had that my husband's face might go asymmetrical after he was released from hospital. Maybe surgeons can't really tell what has happened to your face for a few weeks after they have cut things out of your brain. Or maybe the surgeon was just taking a personal satisfaction in an operation that went even better than he thought it could.

"It's pretty miraculous," said the surgeon.

Afterwards B.A. repeated, "He said the M-word! He said the M-word!"

I wasn't as excited because the "miraculous" had been modified by "pretty", and as happy as I am that B.A. isn't going to die anytime soon, and doesn't have brain damage, and doesn't seem to have nerve damage, I felt guilty that I didn't entirely focus on the canonisation of Venerable Margaret Sinclair when praying for B.A.'s tumour to disappear. In the end, I broke down and used holy oil touched to the bones of two different saints--one bottle sent from Arizona, and the other from Rome--and, really, I asked the Blessed Mother for help quite a lot and also prayed directly to the Source of All Miracles.

Given that as soon as B.A.'s breathing tube was removed he started yelling "Her Immaculate Heart will Triumph!," and he pronounced this at widening intervals over the next three days, I'm kind of thinking this miracle, under God, belongs to the Immaculate Heart.

(Nevertheless, I'll be making one last walking pilgrimage to the shrine of Venerable Margaret Sinclair. With flowers.)

And now life goes on. B.A. will return to work on Friday. He'll be part-time for awhile. He's picked up the permission-to-work letter from the GP.

For a couple of weeks now, he's been washing the dishes, taking out the rubbish and the recycling, and even reading up on the Scottish Enlightenment period, which is one of the nicest parts of his job. We're going on a trip to the Continent next week, and although we will have to tell security people B.A. has a delicate device in his head that can be messed up by magnetic x-rays, we're not expecting any trouble.

He has a zipper-like scar at the back of his neck, which he doesn't mind, and bumps and ridges on his scalp, which he minds less now that he's had a haircut that proves he still has enough hair to cover them.

He doesn't remember very much about the seven months between the diagnosis of his brain tumour and its removal. He's definitely hazy on the various operations in between and he seems to have forgotten all the horrid periods in which his health declined again and I had to beg reluctant doctors to see him. And I'm really glad about this because I remember these times in technicolour detail, and as painful as it was to be me, it was clearly much, much worse to be him.

One of the hardest things for me to wrap my terrified mind around was that the natural order, as I had experienced it, had been turned upside-down. I grew up in a traditional family in which the Dad was rarely ill, never seriously ill, and never unemployed, in both senses of that word. He went to "the office" (which was in a university) to work, and when he came home he went "down to his office" (which was in the cellar) to work some more. When something needed doing around the house, like fixing the washing machine, he did it. All sources of material goods, my stay-at-home mother was very adamant that we children understood, flowed from my father.  Ultimate honour and obedience, under God, belonged to my father. And when finally someone in the family did fall very ill indeed, it was my mother.

You can probably see where I'm going here.

I've always expected to take care of children, and I helped with the bathing and dressing and diapering and spoon-feeding of my youngest brother and sisters and, much less often, of my nephews and niece. But nothing prepared me for carrying out amateur physiotherapy and basic hygiene for my own husband. Or for overriding his complaints that he couldn't, he didn't want to, that hygiene preserves health was a myth, etc. Or for--in the most stressful period of my entire life--taking a full-time job--a very important, specialised and hard-to-get job, too, the answer to a prayer, but also a reversal of the natural order as I know it: the Man is the principal breadwinner, and he takes care of the Woman. Man, the head; Woman, the heart. Man, source of cash. Woman, reading books while doing laundry.

There were many low points, but the one that haunts me today is that, when after a long argument, I got B.A. into a hot bath, he screamed because the porcelain tub hurt him so much.

Oh, and that last bath, in which he simply couldn't get out, so I had to get in myself and pull him out. (That, I know now, was so incredibly dangerous, I should have called an ambulance instead.)

It wasn't like a nightmare from which we couldn't wake up because it was all real, and I knew it, even if the first doctor I spoke to that day didn't know it, or insisted that the last operation had gone so well. And then, believe it or not, a friend sent me an email claiming that mutual friends had entreated her to make a "formal intervention" telling me (in short) that I was culpably negligent in my husband's care. Part of the evidence, apparently, was my blogposts. There was too much about me and my interests, about which nobody gave a ****.

Blogging, which had always been a source of comfort in times of serious stress or depression, had led to this completely unexpected kick in the head by someone I had greatly admired and considered a dear friend. I had just returned home from the hospital to which I had managed to get B.A. admitted, and I couldn't believe my eyes. On the one hand, this person isn't married, and just as happily married 22 year olds don't really understand what it is to be 36 and Single, many lifelong Singles don't really know what "happily married" actually means, or what a spouse's illness does to the other spouse, or how one particular couple habitually interacts. On the other hand--cruel, cruel, CRUEL.

I'm very happy and thankful that B.A. is better. He isn't going to die from the late, unlamented tumour. He hasn't been permanently incapacitated. He's going back to work.  He's recovering. But I have not recovered.

I have not recovered. That's just how it is. And if you don't care because clearly Benedict Ambrose, who does not have a blog, and whose few articles you have never read, is so much more interesting, likeable, and valuable to you than I am, then ask yourselves how you know him at all.

Screen Time, Cookies, Languages

Screen Time 

How many hours do you spend on the internet?

I wrote an article this week about concerned Apple investors who want the company to do something about children's addiction to their iPhones. But as I read their letter, I thought about my own internet habits, and how I worried ten years ago that I was addicted. I thought it had something to do with the short wait between pressing a button and getting the information (or email) I wanted, and made a resolution never to play a slot-machine.

However, now that a growing number of people are worried about children and the internet, and concluding owlishly that parents have to be better models of screen-use, I hypothesise that all human beings are potential internet addicts.

If I don't have a computer around, I don't break into a sweat if I can't check my email. Minus a computer, I can go for days without the internet. However, it feels like a nice treat to pop into an Internet cafe and see what email is waiting for me.

It's weird, isn't it?

Yesterday I started to track my screen time, and I thought that it wouldn't be very much because it was a Sunday, a day off from work. At the end of the day, I totalled up 4 hours, 45 minutes, plus 1.5 hours of watching television. So that was 6 hours, 15 minutes.

It's been 32 minutes today already.

Cookies

The Christmas cookie eating ended when my parents went back to Canada. It was lovely while it lasted, but now it is time to repair the damage. This year's method of post-Christmas slimming involves intermittent fasting (16-8) and a low-carb diet. If the scale is correct, I have lost almost 5 pounds so far.

We have a friend who is an intense keto dieter, and this entails eating a lot of meat and abstaining from sugar, grains, potatoes, etc. I looked up "keto desserts" that eschew artificial sweeteners as well as maple syrup and date syrup, but in the end the only ones that don't sound awful involve Greek yogurt or whipped cream and raspberries. I was hoping that I would find something clever involving carrots or celeriac, which both taste very sweet to me now. However, I think the most thoughtful way forward, when one has invited a keto dieter to supper, is to serve the cheese course at the same time as the pudding, assure the keto-er that they need not have any pudding at all, and supply him or her with a square of 90%-100% chocolate with their coffee.

One difficulty I have with the temptation to "go keto" myself is that B.A. and I are going to Kraków later this month, where there are such delicious rose-jam doughnuts, potato pancakes, cream cake (the kremówka so beloved by Saint John Paul II), and pierogi that it seems a shame not to eat them. Of course, being already on a low-carb diet, I shouldn't eat them anyway--unless in small amounts so as not to get sick. Maybe I will let B.A. do the honours to the carbs, and I will pay my respects to the vast range of Cracowian meats--oh, and the grilled oczszepek cheese.

Languages

I have now read Chapter 11 of The Magician's Nephew in Polish (i.e. Siostrzeniec Czarodzieja), and will spend the next few days looking up the words I don't know and memorising the ones that seem most useful.

Something interesting happened last week--it took me a much shorter time to read and to finish looking up the vocabulary for Chapter 10, and then Chapter 11 had significantly fewer words I didn't know. I have read that language acquisition involves sudden jumps in improvement, and my experience bears that out. This seems to be one of them.

Meanwhile, I have begun memorising the Urdu alphabet.

I have now spent an hour on the internet, so off I go.

Skating and its Aftermath

Happy New Year! I am relatively motionless in an armchair for the second day in a row, having hurt my right shoulder on December 27 and not doing anything about it until yesterday.

I am typing with my right elbow jammed against the side of this conveniently designed chair so that my shoulder doesn't move.

The injury came about because of skating. Last week I went skating in Edinburgh's St. Andrew's Square with my mother and brother and a young family with children, and it was wonderfully warm. It was so warm that the ice kept melting and refreezing, so that every scratch and tear in the surface instantly healed as if by magic. It was constantly a centimetre deep in water, and it made for fantastic skating, even with picks on the ends of the purple plastic rental skates.

Suddenly I realised that I was good at something I'd forgotten, having learned how to skate at the age of four and having been enrolled in an ice hockey league at 11 or 12, or whenever it was. I was a terrible player, but I was a good, fast skater. And, lo, even with picks on the ends of the rental skates, I quickly returned to my teenage facility on the ice, skating forwards and backwards and generally speeding about like Gaetan Boucher while all about me Scots tottered and fell. Not only was skating over that constantly self-smoothing ice a marvellous feeling, a fellow ex-pat popped up unexpectedly and witnessed my triumphant flight.

But alas! I turned up at the rink a week later to experience the magic again, and the ice was in a shocking state. It was very, very cold, so the ice could not heal itself, and if the ice had been cleaned before opening that day, I would be very surprised to hear it. And then there were those stupid picks on the ends of the purple plastic rental skates. Before long they caught on the pitted surface, and I fell. And fell again. And then fell with an almighty crash with--bizarrely, since I was taught better than this over 35 years ago--one arm out to stop my fall. That was it for Ms. Right Shoulder.

"Are ye all right?" demanded a blue-eyed old man with a wide grin as I dragged myself to a bench. He was not skating himself, so I suspected him of having a kinky interest in watching women fall down and hurt themselves. I sat down until I established that my arm was not broken, and then I went back on the ice to finish my allotted time.

Afterwards I went on a cafe crawl with my brother Quadrophonic, and then next day the Historical Household went to the countryside for two days, so I didn't do anything about my shoulder, except not do any work. On Saturday, however, I was in enough pain that I had a meltdown to my ex-pat pal about my Lot in Life, and on Sunday morning I telephoned the NHS 24 hour hotline.

I hoped very much nobody would advise me to go to an Emergency department, and nobody did. Instead they told me to take paracetamol and ibuprofen at intervals all day, and so I did. And I am doing the same today. And it is marvellous.

Sitting immobile in an armchair popping pills and reading novels because you have to is a great way to end the old year. It is also a good way to begin the new year. Well, after an hour of Polish review and my first lesson in Urdu because, never mind a new year, there is no better way to start a morning than with  a good helping of brain training.

Życzę wszystkiego najlepszego w nowym roku (& *نیا سال مبارک ہو ) !

*We will have to trust Google Translate on this: lesson one was very basic.