Her Victim Impact Statement

Sexual assault survivors or the otherwise sensitive may find the themes of this post upsetting. 

As usual, I am behind on the big American news, and I first read the name "Brock Turner" in the  text of the survivor's victim impact statement. You may not want to read it if you are yourself a victim of sexual assault or humiliation. The small mercy is that she does not actually remember the original assault, a fact which was certainly used against her on the stand.

This was a very well written victim impact statement. It's difficult to write well about such things, but she did it. She grabbed my attention from the moment of her confused panic about her underwear might be. She didn't yet know, as her finders knew, that she had been found half-naked and exposed on top of pine cones behind a dumpster. Her attacker ran off when he was surprised in the assault by two Swedish graduate students, one of whom cried from the shock of what he had seen.

I have not yet read "the other side of the story", which I realize must be full of colour and dash because it will be about an American college athlete. One of the sharp contrasts between Canadian and American society is that in the USA college athletes are a Big Deal.

American college athletes are not only  a big deal because Americans are so interested in sports--Canadians are also interested in sports--but because the success of college athletes attracts money to their colleges, by way of ticket sales and alumni donations. (The vast majority of Canadian universities are publicly funded; there is no social hierarchy among universities, there is no "Harvard of the North.")  The fancy buildings, the groomed grounds, the fellowships for theology students are financed from the bodies of teenage to twenty-something boys. Therefore these boys get special treatment, and if they commit a crime (or are accused of a crime), they are deemed newsworthy. They are no longer mere thugs or victims: they are the heroes or villains of Greek tragedies.

What kills me is the dumpster. The meaning of what happened to the survivor is probably different for different kinds of women. Certainly my horror and fear of things like this were different when I was a 24 year old virgin from my horror and fear now.  This, of course, has nothing to do with the criminality of the crime. It is a serious crime to have sex with (or shove things into) a woman too incapable to consent, and that's all that really needs to be said regarding a man's point of view. But from the point of view of a sexually active woman being asked by the media to judge between a woman and a man caught on top of her -- consenting to sex with a complete stranger behind a dumpster? With pine-cones jammed into her back? No way.

Sometimes Nice Catholic Girls (among others) labour under the misconception that girls who have sex before marriage are so robbed of dignity that they will do anything. This is not true and can lead to NCGs who "make a mistake" behaving incredibly stupidly in "might as well be hung for a sheep as for a lamb" style. When I was in university, my rather Bohemian non-Catholic friends did a lot of things I found shocking but they did have boundaries and a certain measure of dignity. I can imagine this boho pal or that in college deciding to have intimate knowledge of a 19 year old stranger after a party in the fresh air, if it was a nice night, but not behind a bloody dumpster. And not when out of her mind drunk.

The survivor mentions the dumpster several times, as if the idea of any woman consenting to sex behind one is  simply beyond belief, and believes her readers will share her disbelief.  As she responds to his self-serving second-guessing, "Even if you did know me, I would not want [to] be in this situation. My own boyfriend knows me, but if he asked to [...] behind a dumpster, I would slap him. No girl wants to be in this situation. Nobody."  I would say, certainly not a woman who has any dignity, as this woman clearly does, as is made evident by her articulate victim impact statement.

What I am going to say now is not about the criminality of rape but purely about protecting yourself from it. Unfortunately, there are no guarantees. However, I have noticed that a big factor is alcohol. Another factor is party atmosphere, either at a home or in a club. Yet another is friends losing a friend or leaving her (or him--two Libyan soldiers were convicted of raping a young man in Cambridge, UK last year) alone. And it is worth repeating these things over and over again because sexual assault and rape can be absolutely devastating.

Sadly, telling young women how to protect themselves is sometimes considered a form of blaming the victim. Yes, boys and men need to be told not to rape, and boys and men are told not to rape. The problem is, there are men who will do it anyway. Even if their religion or culture says its okay sometimes (a serious problem in some communities in the UK), they know it's against the law in the USA, in the UK. Anyone not on Brock Turner's defense team would argue he knew he was doing wrong, or he wouldn't have run off--leaving the half-naked woman--when the witnesses appeared.

Unfortunately, some men see stories like this entirely from the assailant's point of view--although in this case, as the guy was caught in the act, I cannot see how a guy couldn't think, at best, "What an idiot"--and do not quite get how rape is a form of personality murder.

This is why such articulate victim impact statements are so important. The answer to "Would you, if you could get away with it" would be different if the question was changed to "Would you, if you could get away with it but you knew the woman would suffer serious emotional trauma/lose her job/become an insomniac/find her relationship to her family disrupted ?" I read of a South Asian man in the UK who said he and his pals would never rape a South Asian girl because her family might kill her afterwards. See, even a racist jerk can feel compassion if he understands the impact his choices might have on a woman.

Anyway:

1. Intend not to get drunk at parties or in clubs. If you do get drunk, go home with a trusted friend. Never walk home alone while drunk. If you get in a taxi cab without your friend, take out your phone and call (or pretend to call) someone so the cabbie can hear you telling them. "Hi. I'm on my way home. I'm in Cab Number Such-and-such." Some cabbies rape customers. Sad but true.

2. Never leave your glass unattended at a large party or at a club, and consider having it filled with water between pints of whatever.

3. Don't ever leave a drunk friend alone. While taking precautions for your own safety, take your drunk friend home. If your drunk friend doesn't want to go home but wants to sit down on the pavement and sleep or leave the club or party with a stranger, tell them you're calling emergency services. If that doesn't smarten them up (or make the stranger flee), call emergency services. Emergency services will not be angry with you. In some UK cities, there are special squads to deal with drunk friends collapsed on pavements.

4. Consider not going to the parties of strangers or to clubs. Do you really enjoy them? If not, why do you go? As a twenty-something, I felt quite liberated when I stopped going to the parties of friends-of-friends. Large parties are often frightfully boring, which is why so many people get drunk at them. Clubs are also often frightfully boring and the state of the women's loo by midnight is just...

UPDATE: Just read Brock Turner's dad's statement. (Perps' dads get to make statements?) Apparently he once had to hide his snacks from his son, or he would eat them. I'm sure a sense of entitlement and a lack of impulse control is not what Mr Turner was trying to get across, but it certainly jumps to mind.  The "my son used to love rib-eye steak, but now he eats only enough to live" play for sympathy seems misguided. Here is the whole letter, representing "the other side of the story". Incidentally, insinuating that the victim is promiscuous is not just deluded, it is shabby.

UPDATE 2: Just read Brock Turner's gal pal's statement. Oh dear. I think Brock Turner's family and friends need to stop communicating with the outside world about Brock Turner.*** Nobody is interested in how sweet and gentle Brock Turner was before and after he decided to have his way with an incapacitated women. His personality is not on trial. No matter how much you like him or her, if your friend sexually assaults an incapacitated woman, he or she deserves a prison sentence.

UPDATE 3: American colleges, you have a problem.   But I don't think it's the athletes. I think its the culture you have built around the athletes. I think you are failing in your duty of care.

***CORRECTION: Brock Turner's family and friends are NOT communicating with the outside world. All these revelations are being leaked to the press from statements made to the judge. Who is doing this? Are these documents supposed to be in the public domain?

Just No

I was reading and writing today about why women can't be deacons, and I came across a now old story about a man who identifies as a woman,  got plastic surgery to make him look feminine, and fights women in mixed martial arts competitions.

No to that, too.

Although agitating for a women deacons is obviously just a step to women priests, I have to say that I am momentarily even more horrified by the man who punches and kicks women opponents while claiming to be a woman fighter.

When I was a boxer, I found out how strong men are. Even lazy, weedy men are pretty strong, relatively speaking, but big, muscular men who box? Really, really strong.  I used to spar men--I was the first woman fighter in my gym--oh dear, being "the first woman this or that" is starting to feel so lame--at any rate, being the only woman around meant that if I sparred anyone, I sparred with guys, and if the guys hadn't been good, clever, disciplined fighters, I wouldn't have a face now.

I am amazed Fall*n F*x retained a license and, in fact, wasn't arrested for assault or fraud after being outed. Whatever Thai surgeons do in "gender reassignment surgery", 30 years as a man, building adult male muscle and adult male bone, is a long time for a "female athlete" to be male. Even at my most devil-may-care and at the top of my training,  I would not have got in the ring with a 40 year old man, no matter what doctors had done to his face and genitalia. And my coach wouldn't have let me either.

And to think boxing fans still argue over whether or not real women should be allowed to fight. Whoo! Are they out of date. When I got involved with the sport, it was to find out if boxing would help or hinder female flourishing.  Transsexuals have certainly confused the issue,  and I will be interested to see if a soi-disant F-to-M attempts to join the Jesuits.

Rooted in Reality: the Struggle Continues

I've just finished reading Laurence Gonzales' Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why (2003). It's very interesting, not the least because it is not just about surviving. It's also about sons' attachment to their fathers, and fathers' attachment to their children. The book does delve into the stories of female survivors (of plane crashes, shipwreck and mountaineering accidents), but as the majority of people who pick recreations that place them in danger's way are men, it's mostly about men. Gonzales' dad, whose World War 2 survival obsesses Gonzales, had 8 sons. (Gonzales' mum doesn't come into the story that much, except as the second woman his father wanted to survive for. The first woman Gonzales Senior had thought of, as his plane went down over Germany, was his mother.)

I'm thinking a lot about Catholic priestly orders and how the women who aspire to join them would thereby destroy them, so the masculine nature of Deep Survival leaped out at me (so to speak). My mother once told me that if women became priests, men would cease to take religion seriously. I'm not sure if she was slagging off men, but I've come to the conclusion that she was right, and it's not a question of men being jerks. It's just that women don't have the same meanings for men (and women) that men have for men (and women). There are men who love and respect women who would fight tooth and nail to prevent women from becoming deacons-priests-bishops because these are men who also love the priesthood and the Catholic Church.

But the principle theme of Deep Survival is being rooted in reality because people who get lost in the wilderness or the sea who are not rooted in reality rarely survive. They do not make the transition from victim to survivor. The book has harrowing tales of shipwrecked sailors who drink sea water (NEVER drink sea water), go crazy and decide to leave the boat for cigarettes. They step over the side and are eaten alive by sharks. There is a story of a man who so needed to believe that he was not lost that he smashed his compass with a rock. There is also a story of a firefighter, abandoned by a real jerk of a so-called friend on a hike, who refused to light a fire for days because it was against park rules. And apparently it is psychologically difficult for people lost on trails to turn back and retrace their steps.

This made me chuckle because Benedict Ambrose and I have been going on hikes once or twice a week since I came back from Chartres, and when we get lost, I hate turning back and retracing our steps--especially when my feet hurt and I'm hungry. I want us to get to town, and so I assume town is in front.

I mostly enjoy our walks, but when I wondered aloud why we hadn't done it every summer, B.A. reminded me that he wanted to, but I didn't. That's when memory kicked in, and I remembered what I hated about our early treks or bike rides: principally, that B.A. wanted to go way too far for too long, and by the time we returned home, I was exhausted, aching and--worst of all--sunburned. I could write a whole post on how much I hate sunburn and I probably will.

However, having done the Chartres Pilgrimage which, among other things, was a lesson in managing pain, I can walk just as far as B.A., if not farther, and I also bring food, water and a first aid kit, which includes a sizable bottle of sunscreen. I wear my French Guide hat and the biggest sunglasses I could find at Tesco. I wear layers, taking them off and putting them on as I heat up or cool off. I put adhesive tape where I am most likely to get a blister before I put my socks on. And, very importantly, I question B.A.'s assumptions. If I don't question his assumptions, and docilely assume they are facts, we can get into trouble.

Two Benedictine-Ambrosian assumptions that have gotten us into trouble are (A.) that there will be a shop selling sandwiches when we want one and (B.) that the ordinance survey map is correct.  We learn as we go, and I have learned to fight B.A. on the food issue and say, "Well, you don't have to make a sandwich, but I am making a sandwich."  When I said that--and I cannot recall my mother ever speaking to my father like that--the world did not collapse. Instead B.A. decided to make his own sandwich.

As for the ordinance survey map, which I am beginning to hate, its fanciful ideas about paths have caused us many a riverbank scramble and most recently resulted in an interesting encounter with beef cattle.* Two days later, I should probably find it funny, but the reality is that I don't. I do not like running away from half-ton animals. It's a fact. Nor do I like being so spooked by the experience that next I run from a flock of excited labrador retrievers, from whom I am in danger only of being licked to death, and look like an idiot. Nor do I like listening to B.A. have arguments with ornery countrymen about the Scottish Outdoor Access Code because "the path" runs through private property.

Being rooted in reality means dealing with the world as it is and not as we would like it to be. In Deep Survival, victims die because they see their surroundings not as they are, but how they want them to be. In some cases, they actually hallucinate their desires. Survivors become aware of their circumstances, make plans based on those circumstances, and even find beauty in the circumstances. Dark humour and prayer are also helpful. (More on the latter anon.)

Another interesting lesson in Deep Survival is that survivors don't wait to be rescued. In some cases it is wiser to stay put and begin living a hopefully temporary stone-age way of life, but in others (such as when invisible to planes as are buried deep in the jungle) they have to rescue themselves. A teenage girl in her Confirmation dress and high-heeled shoes survived a plane wreck in the jungle and walked to civilization whereas adults who had survived the wreck stayed where they were (invisible to the sky) and died. The lesson I took from this--which may seem obvious but I grew up in a really traditional family--is that you can't depend on your husband to ensure your survival, and it is unfair to expect him to do all the work or be angry when he can't.

As for prayer, while reading Deep Survival I was reminded less of our relatively safe (if sometimes uncomfortable) countryside walks than of the Chartres Pilgrimage. One expert in Deep Survival says that becoming acclimatized to pain is very helpful, and in fact, that seems to be one important aspect of the Chartres Pilgrimage. Naturally, the pain part of the Pilgrimage is its primary penitential aspect. However, it was also terribly good training for survival because it hurt so much. It hurt so much that prayer, especially sung prayer, came as a relief, and as a matter of fact, soldiers sing songs and chant chants to increase their stamina and dull pain. Survivors, even survivors who don't believe in God, pray a lot.

The Chartres Pilgrimage has a lot of rules, spoken and unspoken, and the number on unspoken one is that you keep up with your chapter. Therefore, when I was left behind by my chapter, I was both thrown on my own resources and liberated. The pace of the Chartres Pilgrimage is pretty fast, and although I'm a fast walker, keeping up with my Chapter was tough. Anyway, one of the most liberating (perhaps most "Canadian") moment for me that day was deciding to give myself an unscheduled break in the woods. Having spent a jolly morning chatting with a new friend in an English Chapter, I zipped on ahead to look for the Scots. (Unbeknownst to me they were at the front, with at least an hour's head-start.)  When I saw some handy loos, I stopped there, had a look at my feet, bandaged a new blister, ate an apple and decided to wait for the English. I sat on a wooden fence of some kind, dangling my feet and ignored any surprised glances directed at me by the procession.

I forget when it was that I decided that my one and only goal was to SURVIVE, which in this context meant walking the entire way to Chartres Cathedral (and not breaking down and getting into the emergency van), but I suspect it was the misery of the bitter cold on Saturday night (37 F/2.7C). As a matter of fact, belonging to a Chapter was indeed the best way to survive, especially the half-hour I was sick and needed rudimentary medical attention, which came in the form of high-carb food I did not myself have.  (Lesson learned: simple carbs, even sugar, not always evil.)

*Deep Survival is skeptical of maps, not hikers, being wrong. However, I can assure you that the ordinance survey maps for East Lothian and nearby areas are at least occasionally wrong and some of the paths they correctly identify are almost never used and therefore almost entirely grown over and have no signage.

Shoes, Hats, Class

If you move to another country, you really need to be rooted in reality. You need information, correct information, not only  to stay (e.g. how to renew your visa), but to thrive. You need to know how to get along with your neighbours, which means getting to know your neighbours, even if you are never introduced to 99.9% of them.  This means absorbing information--real, truthful information--about the culture. The real culture.  

In moving to Scotland, I had three advantages over many other migrants: I had married a Scot (the reason I'm here); my mother's ethnic background is 75% Scots (and 25% English ); I inherited the blue eyes and red hair of my Scottish great-grandfather---and therefore don't look foreign.

Not looking foreign has advantages and disadvantages. When I first voiced concerns about the UK's class system, which by mutual consent still exists*, I was told that I was exempt from its strictures thanks to being foreign. This is not entirely true, in part because I don't look foreign. I sound foreign, but in a country where people judge your background not only by ear but by eye, I may be mistaken for a weirdly behaving Scot. In general, people are less tolerant of weird behaviour than they think they are, and in the UK they can be brutal about people they perceive as trying to ape the clothing, manners, accent and tastes of a class to which they do not belong, especially if that class is perceived as having more privilege.

Incidentally, it is considered bad form to talk openly about class, even though class is one of the deepest anxieties of British life. (You're not supposed to care, but you have to care. Thus, you just have to look like you don't care--all while avoiding the 'wrong' supermarkets, etc., etc.) If I weren't a writer, I wouldn't do it, and if I weren't a foreigner, I probably couldn't do it.

I joke about the Rough Bus all the time, but as a matter of fact I resent the fact that I have to worry about what I wear on it, lest I offend some chippy class warrior who associates--for example--a vintage hat with a class of women he despises or assumes despises him. This class of women do not, in the main, take the Rough Bus (such women are presumed to have cars), so the woman who takes the Rough Bus wearing such a hat is probably "above herself", "putting it on" and "deserves to be taken down a peg."

"It wasnae me wha' spat in yer hair....!"

I wish I were exaggerating---and I no longer wear vintage hats. I also no longer wear fur, another symbol of upper middle class women and--worse--women who wish to appear upper middle class, who--as vintage fur is a tad beaten up--I much more likely resembled.

 I have not given up hats entirely, of course. When it is cold and windy, I wear a beret, and when  I am going to be out in the sun for a long time, I wear my French Scout hat or (very daringly) an enormous green straw hat I bought from a street vendor in Rome. In the Scottish context, the Scout hat looks weird and most definitely foreign, but as such it has no class indications. The enormous green straw hat is trickier.

"Don't draw attention to yourself" is a stricture of Scottish life so ancient and durable that it survived my great-grandparents' migration to Canada, and my mother drummed it into my ears when we travelled by public transit together. Unfortunately,  I couldn't help drawing attention to myself because I had (and have) bushy red hair and was dressed differently from my elementary school classmates. I gave up trying to be invisible or just unremarkable long ago. The laughter and jeers of boys ("Hey-you-need-a-haircut!") aged around ten seems to be my lot. I concentrate on wearing what I think looks good and protects me from the elements. This includes my green straw, which I wore to Tesco the other, very sunny, day with a tan linen shirt, spring green linen skirt, white ankle socks, sage green sneakers and a pair of sunglasses I bought at that self-same Tesco. Everything else but the hat and the socks came from charity shops. (Buying quality goods for as little money as possible is another East-Coast Scottish family value that survived migration to Canada.)

In the dairy aisle, a miniscule elderly lady caught my attention and told me how wonderful I looked. I thanked her. She continued. The hat, the skirt, the whole outfit, she enthused, was just so ... I forget what adjectives she used, but they were good. "How kind of you," I said. "Oh, how sweet."

But then, after I had left Tesco, had made a lightning visit to Iceland, and was crossing the latter's driveway, I heard loud, wild, ten-year-old-boy laughter, and a maternal voice shushing it. I turned to see a car, windows open, and the boy looking at his mother, who was now giving him a row. From long experience of this sort of thing, I assumed that he had been laughing at me. In his culture, large green straw hats do not belong in the vicinity of Iceland which, like all British supermarkets, has class associations.

It could be, however, that his mother liked my hat, and here is the really sad thing: even if she did, she might be too afraid to wear it. To wear it could be to court family displeasure, to cause comment at home, to become the butt of banter. To wear this hat, this harmless, simple, practical, inexpensive, straw hat.  I love Scotland, but how stupid is that? And it doesn't stop at hats. You would think that the entire male population of Scotland would don tweed jackets, as they are warm, water-resistant, hard-wearing, good-quality and good-looking. But no. If you are to the tweed born, you could probably get away with wandering through Craigmillar (for example) while wearing one, but if you are Craigmillar born and bred--forget it.

I broke down and bought a new pair of shoes, by the way. They came from a shoe shop B.A. likes on Rose Street. My gift of love is now that I spent only £75, ignoring PPS's advice to buy from the small selection of women's shoes offered by top English men's shoemakers. I was feeling particularly embarrassed about the bony deformity and annoyed by banter about women who wear "comfortable shoes", so I bluntly told the saleswoman about it. (Very North American, reassuringly foreign.)  The saleswoman brought me the feminine-shaped shoes I liked best and they fit, so I bought them. And on the walk home, I began to examine women's feet.

To my surprise, all the women walking near the Edinburgh Bridges were wearing comfortable shoes. Sneakers, ballerina flats, ankle boots, trainers. Not only were they not wearing high heels, hardly any of them were wearing  low heels. A few pairs of boots had low, squarish heels. Of course, I was in the university neighbourhood, but as all the shoes looked relatively new, student poverty probably had little to do with it. Still, a university neighbourhood has a character of its own. "Perhaps in the New Town....?" I thought. But I couldn't recall. It struck me that I notice high heeled shoes, usually stilettos, only at night, only at the weekends.

Could it be that, far from being the anamoly, most women wear comfortable shoes?

Eventually a pair of heels did catch my eye. Their owner, aged about 60, was wearing a wiggle dress and an updo.  A small voice in my head muttered, "Mutton dressed as lamb", but a louder one said, "Good for her! Let her wear what she likes. Attagirl!"

*I used to think that class was an illusion, akin to those in Plato's Cave, and--as I told my future M.P.-- if everyone in the UK would just wake up, they would see that, too. However, I now see that class is real,if only a social construct, as our characters are all made up of our decisions, tastes, values, and we pick our friends, spouses and as many associates as possible based on those decisions, tastes and values. That said, one of the great gifts of traditional religious faith is that adherents are expected to put class distinctions aside, at least for the length of public worship. There the only distinctions are spiritual, i.e. between clergy and laity, and biological, i.e. between men and women. The way one dresses for church reflects an honouring of these distinctions.

Note: Lest this put people off Scotland, I should mention that I am faced with these social difficulties primarily because of the neighbourhood in which I live. However, as an England-born neighbour is completely mystified by all the unpleasant social encounters I experience, I have to say that a strong second factor is that we do not have--as she has--a car. If you have a car, you never take the Rough Bus, and you always drive, never walk, past the 'wrong' supermarkets, whatever the 'wrong' supermarkets are for you.

Note 2: American university students in the UK, anxious to reap the benefits of the privileges they perceive among the soi-disant "upper classes", sometimes consciously attempt to develop an "upper class" accent.  This is a serious social faux-pas, and everyone notices. Everyone who grows up in this system has an ear perfectly tuned to such fakery.  If you are such a student who has stumbled upon this post, for the love of heaven, just be the best American you can be.

Note 3: I go to each and every supermarket I feel like going to, thanks very much.

UPDATE: I seem to have confused my North American readership, and no wonder. The British class system is intensely complicated and embarrassing to talk about. For the record, the entire island (plus Northern Ireland) did not give me a hard time for my feathery vintage hats and elderly fox fur stoles. I would have been quite all right in many a neighbourhood, even in Edinburgh, and perhaps particularly in some neighbourhoods in Edinburgh. The people I am complaining about are people whose great-grandfathers probably were of the same social class of my Scottish great-grandfather. All things considered, this particular (and local) culture is shared by a relatively small group of people. That said, it has much in common with other groups of Britons who lack, or whose ancestors lacked, social privilege.

For a lighthearted take on the different classes to be found in Edinburgh, and their various neuroses, I recommend the "44 Scotland Street" series by Edinburgh superstar Alexander McCall Smith. For the nightmare version of what Edinburgh was like (for some people) in the 1980s, try Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting.

Bardzo Kolokwialny!

It's Polski Piątek, so I will contemplate the fact that last Friday there was a Polish language expert staying in the Historical House. This was less nourishing for my polszczyzna than you might expect, for it is against the laws of hospitality to tie up guests and make them listen to you read "Baltic, pies, który płynał na krze" (i.e. Baltic, the Dog who Sailed on an Ice Floe). However, I spoke to my guest first thing every morning, when he was most vulnerable, with cheery Polish greetings:

Me: Good morning!

PPS: Good morning.

Me: Did you spleep well?

PPS: No. Not spleep. Sleep.

Me: Spleep?

PPS: NO! Sleep!

Me: Oh! Did you sleep well?

PPS: [Incomprehensible idiomatic expression]

PPS is greatly given to incomprehensible idiomatic expressions, which he calls "real Polish" and which my Polish teacher, when I manage to repeat them, calls "bardzo kolokwialny (i.e. very colloquial)!" I am always delighted when I innocently trot out some phrase which staggers my Polish teacher, for it means I have actually absorbed something from all my extramural efforts.

The sad thing is that although I am enthusiastic and hard-working, my incredibly lazy ears have rendered me selectively deaf. For example, I have never been able to understand the lyrics of songs the first time I hear them. This meant that the popular music I know best is the oeuvre of ABBA, for my mother had their albums, and the albums had liner notes. (This is in direct and startling contrast to my brother, who could hear Allegri's Miserere once and then write it all down from memory.) It also means that if PPS deviates from the conversational outlines laid out by my Polish teacher, Polish in Four Weeks, Colloquial Polish and Pimsleur, I panic and my brain shuts off.

Me: Hello! I'm so happy you're here!

PPS:  Miło cię widzieć.

Me: Please to repeat.

PPS: Miło cię widzieć.

Me: .....

As a matter of fact, miło cię widzieć literally means "Nice to see you" (or nicely you to see, to be super-literal), so I'm not even sure it is as colloquial as "Jak leci?" (lit: How's it flying?) which is the equivalent of our colloquial "How's it going?"  (I asked two classmates "Jak leci?" yesterday, and they made no response whatsoever.) And taken separately, I knew the meanings of every single word. Obviously I should have been able to figure it out after a second, but no. I panicked.

Falling down so early in a conversation is incredibly humiliating, but this chap (featured in Mezzofanti's Gift) is so convinced that humiliation is part of language-learning that he recommends learners stride about a public park shouting out the foreign sounds they are listening to over headphones. Boiled down the advice seems to be, "Yes, attempting to speak a new language is embarrassing. Get over it."

My best attempts at Polish conversation happened at a dinner party on Sunday where I drank a glass of wine and enjoyed myself by being childishly rude. My mother was ever of the opinion that it is rude to speak foreign languages in front of people who do not understand them--which must make her hometown one of the rudest places on earth--but she never hinted that it might be liberating and fun. She did, however, reveal that in the 1970s was easier for her to speak Russian when she had had a skinful, and so it is with me and Polish. Wine is relaxing, and by definition when you are relaxed, you don't panic and forget everything you ever learned.

However, even better than wine is immersion, so now I am going to listen to dialogues on Polish in Four Weeks. Unfortunately there are no early morning conversations in the kitchen, and nobody ever asks anyone else if they slept well.

The Elegant Young

Summer has come to Edinburgh. This means that B.A. and I can have our dinner parties out in the Historical Courtyard. We had our first such courtyard supper on Monday, having invited a decade of youthful guests. A very elegant lot they were, too, with four of four women in pretty skirts or dresses and five out of six men in jackets and ties.

When I reminded my guests over Facebook that they were invited to supper, I experienced a moment's temptation to write "dressy casual" but promptly dismissed the impulse as in bad taste. Our young guests should come as they liked, and as it turns out, they like to dress for dinner, as well they should. One of the great delights of a dinner party is the excuse to dress up, and the UK does dress clothing very well, despite what you might see slouching down the high streets.

Youth is another country, and they do things differently there. However, there are various kinds of young people, as I have noticed from dinner parties.

The best kind is the young person who comes well-dressed with a bottle of plonk or fizz (at least) for the host or hostess, takes the last bus back downtown (or, if pressed to stay, the first night bus back downtown), and sends some sort of thanks, followed up within the next six months by an invitation to a party of his or her own.

The worst kind (so far) is the kind that comes wearing any old thing, checks his or her mobile phone throughout dinner and leaves before pudding because he or she has another, presumably more joyfully anticipated, party to go to. Possibly there may be old people who do this, but as yet I haven't met them or (she thinks carefully) behaved like that myself. One can only assume that this sort of young person has never been to a formal dinner party in his or her life, and perhaps neither has his or her parents.  

As for thank-you notes, I have bought so many thank-you notes, only to forget to take them out to the postbox, that I don't complain when I don't get them. If it weren't for nicer people's habit of sending thank-you notes, I would just send a message over Facebook or call up the kind host or hostess. As it is, I always mean to send the thank-you note, so when I don't, it means a shamefaced and horribly tardy little message over Facebook or verbal thanks after the next Sunday Mass.

But it is terribly nice when people pay you the compliment of dressing nicely for your formal sit-down dinner party, and if they are young, they look positively radiant, too.  The cheerful irony about this party is that I did not have time to change for supper, and so apparently resembled "a Slavic granny." Having seen photos from this party, which show me from behind, kerchief on head and red tights on legs, I can see that this is true. Fortunately, I sat beside the guest in a jumper and jeans and we slummed it comfortably together, admiring the beauties in our midst.

Better than Candy

On the diet and exercise front, I am happy to report that, five weeks into my eight week diet, my favourite green silk dress (originally from Hobb's; I do love Hobb's) now fits.

The new goalpost is my powder blue early 1960s shift dress (Roderick Tweedie by Munrospun). I can already wear the matching coat.

Interestingly, B.A. has also lost weight and reports feeling better than he has all year. This provides more circumstantial evidence for the view that spouses influence each other's health, fitness, diet and therefore weight. B.A. may do most of the cooking, but I do most of the grocery shopping--and baking.