Spiritual Luxury

Yesterday I decided to walk to the morning Mass at the Priestly Fraternity of Saint Peter chapel, and to my surprise, it took me less than half an hour to get there!

I wish I had thought of this earlier in our New Town exile, but my new policy is to think forward instead of regretting the past, so I'm just happy to have the (rare) chance to have the Traditional Latin Mass within walking distance. 

As part of the way is hilly, it's also makes for a good workout, something I sorely need as the combination of stress, sugar and ready-meals has made me rather squab. 

Squabs.

Happy Saint Anne's Day to all the Annes, Anns, Annas, Hannahs, Ancas and Nancys! I can't resist mentioning that Saint Anne, mother of Our Lady (and "Saint Annie, God's Granny" as B.A. keeps repeating) is a patron saint of husband-finding.

That said, I give St. Joseph's intercession the credit for my finding B.A. because B.A. didn't appear on the scene until I went on pilgrimage to St. Joseph's Oratory in Montreal. I went with a similarly husband-hunting friend, and she got married a year after I did. 

Toothbrush Signalling

I have begun my own little war against plastic. Behold the bamboo toothbrush (model):

I also bought soap nuts. Unfortunately when I opened their cotton bag, I found that they had been double-bagged in plastic! So I will be looking for a different brand next time.

I Ponder Enlisting in the Eco-Army

Between reporting for LSN and writing to our solicitor about the New Flat, I read a lot of books and articles on four subjects: Minimalism, Escapology, Self-Sufficiency and Zero Waste Living. I have come up with a clever acronym that you can pronounce only if you have some acquaintance with Polish: MESZ.  

To sum them all up: 

Minimalism is about living with as little stuff as you practically can. Escapology is about living as you please, getting by on your clever investments or thanks to a cottage industry, instead of trading at least a third of your time for a salary. Self-Sufficiency is, as far as I can tell, running a very small farm.  Zero Waste Living is about producing almost no trash for the landfill and precious little for the recycling bin. It is minimalism on speed, and it is also deeply rooted in reality. 

I very much like all these ideas. One seems to lead to another although perhaps not in that order. I hasten to say that they are all nigh impossible to put into practise without familial or spousal cooperation. That said, the very non-Minimalist B.A. and I have been living out of a suitcase for four months, and he has not uttered a word of complaint. 

Escapology for me is not about us quitting our jobs but making sure we are not miserably poor when we are old thanks to our jobs (and to highly impractical career choices made along the impecunious way).  Minimalism, budgeting and thrift are key. 

Self-sufficiency seems to involve gardening and tiny houses and other fun things. I do not know very much about it yet although I have a colleague who is pretty amazing at raising food for his family. 

Zero Waste Living is not something you can do all at once. However, it is something to work for once you have forced yourself to confront the reality of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and other horrors.

All of these concepts seem to me to be deeply rooted in reality and require the discipline of eyeballing reality, even if that reality is that your family and/or spouse are/is going to take some convincing. Meanwhile I am enjoying the thought of being a jolly environmentalist as well as a liturgical and doctrinal traditionalist: a crunchy trad, if you will. Naturally this would not include vegetarianism--except on fasting days, of course. 

Polish Prince Caspian

This morning I finished reading the official Polish translation of C.S. Lewis' Prince Caspian, so I am feeling moderately pleased with myself.

I say "moderately" because I know very well that reading is the EASIEST of language-learning tasks for adults, and for me listening is the hardest.

Still, it is a milestone, and this is the second proper novel I have finished reading in Polish while carefully writing down and looking up the words I don't understand. (I read two Harry Potter novels in Polish, too, but as I didn't stringently look up the words, that doesn't really count.)

I have some reflections, possibly of interest to the language-learners out there.

1. Language Diary: I have been keeping a language diary since October 8, 2017 to keep an eye on my daily language activities and progress (or regress). It is handy to know, for example, that I started reading Ksiązę Kaspian on May 21 and finished on July 23.

2. Vocabulary Notebook: This is essential for keeping me honest about what I don't know and for making flashcards.

3. The Stab Method: This is merely keeping an interest in a difficult language alive by attempting all kinds of small linguistic projects as they catch one's interests: memorising a 1930s tango song; reading a children's book with other learners; speaking as much of the language possible during a city-break; watching an episode of a soap opera; going to a classic film; praying the Angelus with Radio Maryja.  

4a. Being Rooted in Reality: Science. I have been working on Polish for almost seven years--rather more diligently in the past four or five--and, after much reading in the science of foreign language acquisition, I have concluded that it is impossible to become professionally fluent (i.e. C1) in Polish unless one lives in Poland or with Polish-speakers for a protracted period of time. This is both sad--since I cannot as yet afford to move to Poland for three months--and liberating.

4b. Being Rooted in Reality: Practicality. I am most likely to need to know spoken Polish when travelling, buying non-tourist things, suffering a medical emergency, ordering food (sometimes) in Polish restaurants off the beaten tourist track. Therefore, in terms of spoken vocabulary, memorising the contents of a standard Teach Yourself course or the first two years of a night-school course. And I do mean memorise. Memorise. Drill. Repeat. Practise.  Czy Pani mowi po angielsku? Nie? Nic nie szkodzi. Spróbujemy po polsku. My czworo chcilibyśmy pojechać do Wrocławia ...  

But I am most likely to need to know written Polish for work. I travel to Poland three times a year max, but I work five days a week. If I gather from the Polish newspapers that there's a big pro-life story afoot, I can usually get the gist of it.  But then comes the hard part, which is writing to Polish pro-life leadership over Facebook instant message. Dear heavens.  To be honest, I should be reading Evangelium Vitae in Polish every morning, not the Narnia books. But the central point is that I need to READ and WRITE Polish much more often than I need to SPEAK it.

5. But Balance... I have suspended my weekly conversation sessions with my Polish tutor, which is too bad, really, but there is just too much going on. But during our sessions, I discovered that reading Siostrzeniec Czarodzieje (The Magician's Nephew) was very much improving my spoken vocabulary. That said, I interleaved reading The Magician's Nephew with reviewing a grammar book, listening to a recording of Siostrzeniec Czarodzieja and actively memorising SC vocabulary. Afterwards, I realised that many, if not the most, of the words I worked so hard to commit to memory I would never be called upon to say aloud (dziedziniec--courtyard). However, the listening and the memorising were nevertheless very good exercises and helped me a lot. And, of course, if you want to speak a language, you actually have to speak it, not just read it.

6. Habit is Powerful. It's easy for me  to read an increasing number of pages of Polish because I do it from 7:30 AM to 8:30 AM every day.  What is hard forcing myself to listen to Polish, especially now that my earbuds have fallen apart. (I need new earbuds, clearly.) It is also hard to force myself to write Polish, except for the semi-literate messages I send the patient leaders of the Ruch Pro-Life w Polsce.

7. Enjoyment is also Powerful.  I should read Evangelium Vitae in Polish next, but I am going to read Podróż Wędrowca do świtu (The Voyage of the Dawn Treader) after making a dictionary of all the words I looked up for the first two Narnia books. But maybe I could devote 2 mornings a week to EV.

Not too Tired for a Hike

On Friday B.A., my mum and I all sat around the big kitchen table in the cellar-level of the New Town Flat and had supper. I had finished and submitted three stories that day, so I was feeling tired but cheerful.

"Tomorrow let's do something en famille," said B.A. "That is, the three of us, since the rest of the famille is in Canada."

"What would you like to do, Mum?" I asked.

"What about a Fife Coastal Walk?" she proposed, and so on Saturday morning we took a bus to Elie, Fife and walked along the official Fife Coastal Path to St. Monans.

The weather was warm--but not too warm--and slightly breezy--but not too breezy, and the sun began to shine when we alighted in Elie. We bought sandwiches in the village deli--there being no supermarket--and sat on tussocks of grass, watching men in white playing cricket on the beach. Cricket is an unusual sport for Scotland, let alone cricket on the beach!

We had a marvellous walk, exploring one of the small ruined castles that abound in Scotland, and puzzling over wildflowers, racking our memories for their names: bewgloss, rosebay willowherb, red campion...

The sky and the Firth of Forth were many shades on the spectrum of Blue, and home seemed comfortable near on the other shore. Sometimes the path was quite steep, and I was out of breath, and it felt all very healthy. B.A. observed that his treatment hasn't left him tired out yet. He's got two weeks, two days to go.

When we got to St. Monans, we all had a look in the restored 14th century church, which has been Protestant since the Scottish Reformation. As is our wont, when alone in pre-Reformation Churches, B.A. and I turned to the easternmost wall and sang "Salve Regina". On this occasion, the church vibrated with the sound.

"The acoustics are great," Mum enthused.

We decided that we didn't have enough time to walk to Pittenweem and catch the 4:10 PM bus back to Edinburgh, so we got ice-cream cones or espresso in a teashop  and visited a church jumble sale instead.

Thank you for all the prayers! B.A. was very moved last night when he read my last post and saw your comments.

His Hair is Falling Out

Just as I was feeling all depressed for having gained a lot of weight from the no-kitchen lifestyle AND for yet another crisis regarding the New Flat (which we were supposed to possess today, at the latest), Benedict Ambrose showed me a big clump of hair that had just come out of his head.

That put everything into perspective, and I burst into tears.

B.A. has hair like nobody in my family. It is brown, short, straight and soft like animal fur. Maybe like a beaver pelt. It's a miracle to me that real human beings have hair like that, and that thick, coarse, dry, wavy/curly hair is not a human universal.

B.A. told me not to cry, and he did not seem at all perturbed. The radiation therapy doesn't hurt, and no marks have been left on his skin. His doctor warned him that hair would eventually fall out, and now it has begun.  

Consolations in Unplanned Non-parenthood

Writing this post at the request of a reader, I would like to being by saying that childlessness is a terrible form of poverty, and the anti-child attitude of contemporary western societies is a kind of madness. I watch the birthrate of Italians, for example, plunge ever downward, its death rate shoot ever upward, and grieve for a merry,  once famously family-minded, Catholic people.

It is a terrible irony to be a married social conservative without any children of her own. When I was an undergrad, I remember a cynical pal sneering at a married Catholic professorial couple. "So why don't they have children?" he said with a knowing smirk.

"They married late," snapped their loyal student, and the cynic shut up.

As far as I know, that's our reason: we married late. However, young couples too sometimes have trouble conceiving, for reasons known (paralysis, for example) and unknown. The young, however, have more options in terms of becoming parents: they can accumulate money so that they can pay the exorbitant fees required to adopt a baby before they turn 40, for example. (Many countries do not allow people over 40 to adopt infants, presumably for the same reason Nature shuts down women's ability to have babies about then.) Therefore, I would advise any young couple would would like to adopt a baby to start planning NOW.

Meanwhile, what are the consolations of unplanned non-parenthood for a traditional Catholic couple?   This is a tough question, but I have slept on it and come up with a list.

Before I begin, however, promise you will NOT ask me if I have heard of this or that ground-breaking natural fertility treatment. I am too old. It will not work. I am not St. Elizabeth.

FAITHFULNESS TO GOD: The major temptation contemporary society holds out to the single woman who terribly wants children is to "just go out to a bar and get pregnant." This advice was given to me when I was in my early thirties. I gently told the woman that I was a theology student minoring in Christian Ethics, so I didn't feel I could do that.

The major temptation contemporary society holds out to married couples is In Vitro Fertilisation (IVF), which is not actually the most effective fertility treatment ever devised, but that is what UK doctors offer. Indeed, UK doctors offered it to me again and again until I accused one of anti-Catholic sectarianism. My, was she aggrieved. A kinder doctor told me that he hadn't known the Catholic religion forbade IVF.

So the bright side of the horror that is In Vitro Frankenstein is that fertility-challenged couples can now make the virtuous choice of saying no. Before IVF, we were all just unlucky.

CHILDREN DON'T SUFFER WHEN YOU DO: So last March my husband was suddenly diagnosed with an incredibly rare brain tumour and acute water-on-the-brain. He was hospitalised within fifteen minutes of receiving the Last Rites. He survived the operation, but spent the next seven months getting inexplicably sicker. We both suffered a lot--but nobody suffered the way children suffer when one of their parents is terribly sick and might die.

"This is why God didn't send us kids," I occasionally thought.

Of our own, I meant. God sends us other people's children with regular frequency. The night of B.A.'s incredibly dangerous, make-or-break, fifth operation, Polish Pretend Daughter and French Pretend Son-in-Law were living with me. If they hadn't been, that would have been me alone beside the telephone waiting to hear if B.A. was (A) Dead, (B) Irreparably Brain Damaged, or (C) Alive But We Won't Know Anything for 24 Hours.

OTHER PEOPLE'S CHILDREN: Just because children feel a need to win some independence from their own parents, doesn't mean they don't still need parents occasionally. I'm not even thinking of Little League, Guides, Scouts, and all the children who rely on the para-parenthood of volunteer adults. I'm thinking of university students in housing crises, young (and not so young) foreign brides crying with homesickness, and beautiful young things who might get into trouble if nobody clears their throat (or gets drunk) and says the difficult truth.

Sometimes if you pray for children you will find yourself called upon to parent Other People's Children. And this is a great consolation because, no matter how much contemporary theologians kick around marriage, its primary purpose is to turn self-centred adults into loving mothers and fathers.

Also, of course, I am an Aunt. There is great dignity and honour in being an Aunt. I am also the Godmother of three, including an Italian Canadian, which makes this often underplayed role incredibly iconic and awesome.

ONE'S SPOUSE: Fortunately for me, Benedict Ambrose is a hospitable chap who very much likes young people. If it weren't for the cut-throat politics, he would have made an excellent career as a university lecturer. Therefore, when I ask if this suddenly homeless Pole or that travelling Canadian can stay for a few days, he gives permission. Meanwhile, he was never so drawn to the idea of being a biological father that he feels particularly oppressed by childlessness. He is reasonably sad that I am sad, but that seems to be it. He thinks that he doesn't care so much because he is a man.


FREEDOM TO BE POOR: We are buying the cheapest two-bedroom flat we could find in a poorer neighbourhood instead of a one-bedroom flat in the New Town because we both love offering hospitality. That said, we live a rather cash-strapped lifestyle (soon to become even more cash-strapped, thanks to Mr Mortgage). This is because B.A. works for a Historical House charity, and I am a writer with socially conservative views.  We both love historical houses, and I love writing. However, if we had had children, our cash-strappedness might not have been fair to them. I would be terrified that my public social conservativism would preclude my ever being gainfully employed in Scotland, which would mean my children would not grow up with the security with which I grew up with.

That said, I know families with eight children who live on the father's salary while the mother homeschools and performs miracles of household economics. But that brings me to the final, and possibly biggest consolation.

FREEDOM FROM WORRY: All (ALL) my female friends with children worry about them constantly. Constantly. The social conservatives primarily worry that their children will be eaten up and spat out by the innocence-hating world, that they will lose their Christian faith, that they will harm themselves, or allow themselves to be harmed, in all kinds of horrible ways. This is on top of worries about illness, injuries, disappearances, kidnappers, child rapists, child murderers and the state sexual education curriculum.

I don't have that worry. What I do have is the childhood memory of my father's widowed mother crying at Mass because her other child, my only uncle, had recently died.

Don't get me wrong. I cried over poor, never-existed-except-in-my-dreams Baby McLean. I'm not denying my very real pain in saying good-bye to a baby who never was and never will be. But I suspect that is not as bad as suddenly losing a real, born, known child. That is unlikely ever to happen to us. We are free from that fear.

Hygge and Happiness

PREFACE: When I wrote this post, I was still rather depressed, so I'm glad the grumpy wifi wouldn't let me publish. After a day's reflection, I saw what the central problem was. See Afterward for that.
***

I spend forty hours of the week grappling with politics and scandals, civil and church, and at least seven hours reading Polish, so the rest of the time I try to read as widely as possible. This weekend I had a lot of reading opportunity as my parents were here, and when the adult members of my family are together in one room, we tend not to play board games. We tend to read. 

So yesterday I was greatly amused by Escape Everything, which is about escaping the rat race to do what you like, which I first did over fifteen years ago, albeit without thinking much about the economics of it all. Escape Everything delves into the economics, dancing a tarantella on consumerism while I applauded. It also forbids the reader from getting a mortgage, to which I could only sigh, having only just got one. Escape Everything enjoys the freedom of renting, as mobility is one of its primary values, and doesn't have much to say about old age.

When I had finished chortling over Escape Everything, which shored up my anti-consumerism beliefs and even inspired me to give up daily coffee (gradually),  I picked up The Little Book of Hygge: the Danish Way to Live Well by Meik Wiking. 

I didn't buy the hygge (pron. 'hoo-geh') books when they first snowed down upon the bookshops, for they were expensive, and I settled down to The Little Book feeling smug and snug, for I had borrowed it for free from the library. To my dismay, as I read about Danish lamps, warming drinks, bonfires on the beach, December weather, etc., etc., I felt sadder and sadder.  Eventually I put the book down and burst into tears. 

I burst into tears becasue central to hygge--a north Germanic sense of hominess (as the book correctly says it is called in Canada)--is spending as much time as possible with family and friends. The top source of happiness, according to Copenhagen's Happiness Research Institute, is spending time with family and friends. People are particularly happy while playing with children. 

So even if you ignored everything in Escape Everything and bought expensive Danish lamps, woolly Danish jumpers, thick Danish socks, made Danish recipes and Christmas decorations and even imported a reindeer hide and had a fireplace put in, if you don't have friends and family around, you have missed the Happiness Nation in the World Express. 

Why this should so upset me after spending a (rare) weekend with my parents is strange. However, it's been a hard week of, e.g., "Humanae Vitae betrayed Casti Connubii by privileging the unitive end of marriage over the procreative end of marriage." It's easy to nod sagely over that if you're married and have kids.  

"Auntie, when you're not here, it's like you don't even exist," said my nephew Pirate, for which he is not to blame, for he was only seven. It was not even true, as I was still writing for his archdiocesan newspaper, and thus an out-of-date photograph of my smiling face appeared in his school library every two weeks. However, it hurt like hell. 

Sending presents can only go so far to maintain a relationship with children. When I was a child, American uncle and grandmother sent interesting brown paper parcels from time to him, but my Canadian grandmother, who lived a 30 minute stroll (if that) away, came to visit every Sunday. She brought cookies--my mother drew the line at candy--wrapped in paper kitchen towel that smelled faintly of cigarette smoke. She didn't play with us--and she rarely babysat ("My Nerves!")--but she was a genial presence in the kitchen, either smoking or washing the dishes and putting them away where my mother couldn't find them. (Or so said my mother.) As a result, my grandmother, who    went through the trouble only of having one child, was adored by five other children. 

I'm really not sure what to do about being thousands of miles away from my family and best friends almost all of the time, if spending as much time with family and friends is really the secret of happiness in earthly life. And when I think about it, I've never met any Danes--presumably because they stay with their family and friends in Denmark. 

However, I understand that there is a great deal of happiness to be found in gardening, and the mortgage will also get us a garden, so there is that.

****

AFTERWORD: So the central problem, of course, is that I stopped thinking about what we DO have and started thinking about what we DON'T have and, indeed, may never have. Escape Everything is about giving up non-essentials to embrace what you really love. The Little Book of Hygge is about lives entirely unlike mine. I can't imagine what a cloistered nun or a bereaved Syrian refugee, for example, would think of The Little Book of Hygge.

The whole point of the Seraphic Singles blog was to find out, and celebrate, what Singleness had going for it without denigrating marriage or religious life. Now the ongoing challenge, I suppose, is to always appreciate what childlessness and voluntary exile have going for them, without making the mistake of denigrating parenthood, the primary calling of married people, children and family.

There's got to be a middle ground between the dour "Childless spouses are cursed by God" point of view and the imbecilic "Hooray for child-free me".   

One of the nicest things I do have, something that doesn't cost me any money at the moment, is the chance to see whole streets of Georgian architecture, with amazing gardens in ceramic pots down the stairwells to the lower flats. So I'm off now to look at them again. 

Space and Hedgehogs

The downstairs neighbours, from whom we were subletting, have gone home to the Continent. Now we are renting directly from the owners, and we have emerged from our room. The New Town flat in which we have slept, washed, eaten and quarrelled for a over a month actually comprises two stories--and perhaps 2,000 square feet--of what was once a six storey townhouse, built before 1840. Now we are the sole inhabitants and can sit downstairs.

There is a garden, too, with a pile of sticks and leaves that may contain hedgehogs. I have been reading gardening books, and one was very enthusiastic about creating these hedgehog-friendly dens. 

I have moved my centre of morning operations to the kitchen. It is directly under the room of our refuge, and it has a twelve-light window looking into the street stairwell (the flat is "lower ground floor") with a cushioned window seat.  It is much more comfortable to study here than to study on the floor between the window and the drawn curtains in our room, which I did for weeks, as B.A. slept on. 

We used to say, when we lived in the Historical House, that we would never live anywhere so grand or comfortable again. This turned out not to be true, exactly, as now--thanks to our friends, the owners--we are living in a delightful two storey flat in the New Town. Temporarily. If a surveyor finds nothing seriously wrong with the New Flat, we will move there next Monday. 

Meanwhile, we live a New Town life, and I am too frightened to look at our bank account. B.A. bought two bottles of £10 wine at Margiotta's yesterday. What was he thinking?

"It was on sale," he said breezily, and as my parents are in town, and like good wine, I just repeated my stricture that once we move into the New Flat the party ends.  

The New Flat is in a much less exclusive neighbourhood, to put it mildly. It is in a row house built for such working-class Edinburgh people whose city centre slum was about to be knocked down. At the time, the river outside the row house was dirty, the ground was brown, and the air was full of noise.  Ninety years later, there is no more heavy industry in that part of town, and so the environment is actually liveable. But it is neither the Historical Estate nor the New Town, so I will have a very difficult time maintaining my delusions of grandeur. 

Comfort comes, however, in The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbary (translated into English by Alison Anderson), which is about a Parisian building superintendent, or concierge, who secretly lives for art, philosophy and fine food. She goes to extreme lengths not to allow anyone in her building--one of the most chic and luxurious apartment buildings in Paris--to find out she isn't the stereotypical Paris concierge: surly, uneducated, uncultured and dumb.   

I was not aware that there was a stereotype for Paris concierges. My friend the Economist lives in a new build in Krakow, and the management employs women to watch the door. One seemed very nice, and one seemed suspicious of my presence, much to the Economist's masculine joy. As I am 17 years older than the Economist, it seems unlikely that I could disturb the chaste soul of a Krakow concierge, but then you never know.  I am more familiar with the elderly Polish women who maintain the public loos, collecting coins in a little dish while (allegedly) listening to Radio Maria. 

But I digress. My point was that this concierge, while striving to live down to an awful stereotype, manages to have a rich interior life involving philosophy,  Russian literature (in translation) Japanese films (also in translation), and really delicious cheese and pastries. (I was concerned that she was not sharing her considerable gifts with anyone, but that is where character development came in.) 

So, although Madame Michel is an atheist French intellectual who gives phenomenology a good kicking,  The Elegance of the Hedgehog is a very inspiring book.  Madame M may tend to an architecturally and culturally snazzy building, but she herself lives in three pokey rooms.

Update: One critic pointed out that the central characters are rather nasty about others in the book. I noticed that. However, they are not nasty to these people, and personally I do not mind if incredibly rich left-wingers are trounced in fiction. I also enjoyed how the Catholic reactionaries are shown to be decent in times of crisis. I suspect many lefty French intellectuals enjoy freaking out other lefty French intellectuals by admiring (or pretending to admire) Catholic reactionaries. Look at Houellebecq. 

The Joy of Letting Go and Letting God (and Solicitors)

The best-case-scenario move-in date has come and gone because I found an interesting thing in the paperwork that everyone, including our solicitor, missed. Apparently third parties aren't supposed to know about it, so we'll leave it at that.

I may have saved B.A. and me £1,000 or more, so I am quite pleased instead of catastrophically depressed. I have even stopped whining about living in "ONE ROOM", as in, "Oh woe is me, what decisions have I made in life that have culminated in us living in ONE ROOM?" as if the one room were in debtors' prison instead of Edinburgh's ritzy New Town.

Meanwhile it is early July, so the chances of finding surveyors and (potentially) contractors who are not on the traditional two-week July holiday are slim, but that is not my business, but that of solicitors, so I have left them to get on with it, between their own July holidays, of course. No skin off my nose. I have transferred the equivalent of a year's pay (household) into my solicitor's client account and postponed Stage One of the move, and now all I have to do is wait.

All poor B.A. has to do is continue going to the hospital to have radiation shot into his brain tumour. That's why it is Mrs B.A. who is doing all the fine-print reading and dealing with banks, solicitors, mortgage brokers, and man-with-van, in case you were wondering. I have also met a future neighbour and signalled my willingness to put the garden to rights. But, really, all this is nothing to my decision just to let go and let God (and solicitors) work out when B.A. and I are actually going to move in.

Yay, me!

By the way, if I were still writing posts for Singles, I would point out that if you think you can avoid having to talk to bank managers, solicitors, mortgage brokers, and other intimidating people just by getting married to a traditional Catholic man, leaning upon his towering strength like a tender vine twined around a mighty oak tree, you can think again!

Husbands get sick. Sometimes they even die young. I knew a young woman whose husband dropped dead at 24 or so of a heart attack; she was a few months pregnant at the time. She was a model of faith and courage, and everyone admired her so much. But the tragedy was certainly a reminder that youth is no guarantee against death and widowhood.*

There are only so many things you can do about that, too. Top of the list is making sure your husband  goes to the doctor when something is clearly wrong with them, e.g. being overweight, being underweight, having a chronically sore neck. For some weird reason, in UK culture men don't go to the doctor unless their wives of kinswomen make them. If your husband is easily influenced by your own habits, don't smoke and don't drink too much. Serve him vegetables. Take him for walks, if that's the only exercise he'll take. If he is of a nervous disposition, try not to stress him out. Speak kindly to him as much as possible, as if he were your prize rose bush.

But really, that's it. With husbands' health, as with real estate, there needs to be a strong let-go-and-let-God (and professionals) philosophy at a certain point.

Meanwhile, as you can see, the two things uppermost on my mind are still the New Flat and B.A.'s Brain Tumour, despite my decision not to be stressed out about either. But I suppose that is not unusual.

*To be scrupulously fair to traditional Catholic men, I should add that some of them may have no taste for business and might actually be relieved if their hardheaded wives do this stuff instead.

Enforced Minimalism

Thank heavens for Marie Kondo, authoress of The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. Last summer I gave our flat in the Historical House a tremendous clear-out, little knowing that a pipe would burst, destroying our bathroom and leading to our exile. We have Kondo to thank for the fact that our flat, though much trodden upon by firefighters and workmen, is not a complete shambles.  

After a few short (thank heavens) stays in hotels, we were put in a one-bedroom "holiday let" flat with a kitchen for some months. Then, having received the bad news that we could never again live in our beloved Historical House, we were asked to vacate the holiday let. Now, thanks to a generous friend who has bought a country home, we are living in a room in the New Town.

This is downsizing to a whole new level, and I keep thinking about James Joyce's family's spiral down the property ladder. However, that is not fair, for the reason we have not just signed a year's lease on a £900/month flat in the New Town is that we have offered to BUY a flat and now we are just waiting for the solicitors to tell us where to send the money and to give us the keys. Unlike the great majority of flood victims, we have a choice here.

Meanwhile, I have been learning what is absolutely essential for comfortable living, and to my surprise, I only do need one pair of shoes although I admit a prettier pair for Sunday Mass would be an excellent addition. Strangely, my husband seems to need five or six pairs; occasionally I collect them from around the room and place them in two rows by the door.

Also essential (for summer): one raincoat, two skirts, a suit, four T-shirts, enough socks, tights and underclothes for a week, two nightgowns, a Sunday dress, bed-socks and a towel.

In terms of furnishings, one really does need a stove of her own. After a month of microwave meals, I  can safely say that when I have a stove again, I will never willingly eat a microwaved meal for the rest of my life. A hot plate would have saved us a lot of money, for we might not have been driven to eating out so often with a hot plate.

Then one needs a table, a chair, a fork, knife and spoon, a wide bowl that can also serve as a plate, a drinking glass, a mug for coffee, a kettle, a french press (for coffee), a tray on which to keep the morning coffee equipment, a shelf for books and papers, a bed with pillows that can double as cushions, two fitted sheets, two duvet covers, a duvet and a bathroom with plentiful hot water.  Oh, and a wardrobe for hiding all clothing. And a plastic bag for the rubbish which one must take out ASAP to the friendly bin on the street. And two dishtowels. And a dirty-laundry basket.

If you are B.A., you also need a radio and wi-fi. I admit I wish the building's wi-fi was strong enough to reach my computer, but after 8-9 hours online in my little office back in the Historical House, I am happy to be off while back in the One Room.

If we had a stove, naturally we would also want a sharp knife, a chopping board, a mixing bowl, a pot-holder, a pot and a frying pan.

I am thinking these thoughts because one day in the next two months we are going to have to pay movers a hefty sum to take all our belongings down three flights of stairs from the long Attic Flat in the Historical House and carry them up one flight to the short First-Storey Flat in the Riverside Row House. This means that we are going to have another massive clear-out, and I am stiffening my resolve with the thought that we need much less than we currently have.

This is going to be a serious exercise in being rooted in reality.