Willowdale 4: The Castle of the Kingdom

Our little white house was unusual in that the top storey had been a separate dwelling for the adult child of the previous owner. It was impossible to tell this from the outside. To understand, you would have to climb the staircase, which was tucked away in the centre of the house, to a small landing and open the left-hand door.

Upstairs

The door opened onto a suite of rooms in an L shape. The first room was my bedroom. The second room, at the corner of the house, had a sink in it. That was  Tertia's room. There was a short corridor lined with closets leading to a third room, which was Nulli's room. Eventually it became the boys' room. The short corridor (with was no more than six feet long) gave at least a nod to the concept of privacy. There was no privacy between Tertia and me although I felt I had some privilege since my room had the door. I could leave it open; I could shut it. Power! 

The right-hand door on the landing led to a small self-enclosed room with a window facing west. When we first moved into the house, Nulli and I still speaking with accents we picked up in England, that room was our mother's sitting-room. Later it became a nursery, and then for the last few months it became my teenage bedroom. This was more firstborn privilege, I imagine, since it would have been more fair for Nulli and Quadrophonic to have a room each. Infant Quinta was moved into my old room. 

Dear me. I feel like St. Augustine recounting his childhood sins. 

Landing

The landing itself had charms, for it had a window that looked onto the leafy avenue, and eventually my dollhouse sat in front of this window. The dollhouse had a "stained glass" window, and when the sun shone from the south, coloured lights reflected on the dark stairwell's walls. The landing also had a dark wood and glass bookcase full of books, including the Easter-egg coloured covers of my mother's Georgette Heyer collection. 

Lair of the Glue Monster

Our parents had a bedroom on the ground floor at the front of the house. I didn't like it. First, it was on the wrong floor, in my estimation. Second, there were bushes or trees in front the window, blocking the sunlight and the view. It had a door to the front hall and a door to the bathroom, which struck me as almost as good as a hidden door. 

We were vaguely forbidden to go into my parents' bedroom, but we sometimes cautiously did, especially if one parent or the other was in there and the door to the hall was open. For example, my mother could be coaxed into playing a game in which she lay on top of the bed and stuffed her children under it while making horrible gobbling noises. This game was called "The Glue Monster."

This room was where we officially welcomed the new addition to our number, the newborn, fresh from the hospital, lying flat on the bed and possessing astonishingly tiny fingernails. 

Living Room and TV Room

Across the dark front hall from our parents' room, past the mirrored door to the steep basement staircase, was the principal sitting-room. It had a picture window looking out onto the street, a long "mantlepiece" over a fireplace, and built-in bookshelves. It had a couch, armchairs, a carpet and standing lamps. It was quite obviously a room for reading in. At Christmas-time it had a tree in one corner or the other. 

Beside this room there was a pine-wood lined chamber which contained a small television, a love seat, and an upright piano. There was a window in this room, and on fine spring days, the sound of Nulli's music drifted through our window through Mrs Brown's window next door. She greatly enjoyed that, and I enjoyed waking up on Saturday mornings to the sound of Nulli's playing, too. In hot July, an air conditioner blocked up either that window or my bedroom window, which I did not enjoy, as it made my room too cold. 

The one bathroom was across a small linoleum hall from the "TV room", as we called it, the TV being more important than the piano. The staircase to the top storey was on the left and the route to the kitchen was on the right. The dining-room to the left of that. Before the kitchen was a short flight of stairs to the side-door, ending in a cat litter tray (for some years), a boot closet and a forest of coats imperfectly hanging on hooks.  

Kitchen and dining-room

Over the dining-room doorway was a deep shelf where our Hallowe'en baskets were stored out of reach. Apart from my door, the sewing-room door, my parent's bedroom door and the door to the scary basement, the house was as open-plan as it could be. I did not approve of this either, and would have been delighted had my parents hung long strings of crystal beads between the "living-room" and the "TV room", to say nothing of between Tertia's pink gingham terrain and my chamber of lime green, tan paint and panda-bear wallpaper. 

The memory of the green-and-yellow kitchen fills me with unease for some reason, despite the image of my grandmother at the round glass-topped table genially smoking cigarettes. I was washing dishes when she was carted off to the hospital with double-pneumonia, and I got down on my knees on the kitchen floor to pray for her life. Perhaps the unease stems from memories of our poor mother's early morning drudgery in stuffing an increasing number of children with hot breakfasts five days a week. 

At their zenith, these breakfasts consisted of hot cereal with brown sugar and milk, bacon or sausages, eggs and toast with jam or peanut butter, plus orange juice.  We would gently roll out the door at 8 AM to walk to the school bus stop. 

My feelings about the  dining-room are much less complicated. Despite my loathing for a dish called "Spanish steak", which I snuck to the cat as much as I could, it was a happy room. The room had windows all around the west and north sides, curtained with blue-and-orange plaid, and old-fashioned mustard pots, pewter tankards and fancy plates paraded along a narrow shelf.  We were the kind of family that had dinner together every night--with Dad at the head of the table to boot--and so the whole family was together in one space once a day. That is also the room of all the birthday parties and birthday present-giving and other memorable and rare occasions like the appearance of foreign dinner guests, usually weird-looking linguists from Scotland or the People's Republic of China. 

In the summer, as I have mentioned before, the scent of mock orange entered in through the screen windows. There was also the rose bush under the west windows. At least one of these did not have a screen in the window which meant that we children could surreptitiously climb in and out of it and hand the baby through it, at need. I don't think we did this very often, but occasionally we acted out plays in which there were tower scenes; the dining-room, naturally, was the tower.  

Philosophical reflection

I did not have friends who came from families as big as mine, which is a pity, for it may have made me less resentful of the lack of walls between bedrooms. I think I was 20 before I realised that children in Ontario's big Catholic families often lived three to a room. My understanding of what was right and proper in the world came from books, and the heroines of books always had their own room. 

At the same time, I assumed that every family in Canada, rich or poor, ate a hot breakfast in the kitchen together and then sat in a dining-room sometime after six to eat a hot supper. I had gathered that we were a rather old-fashioned family, but I didn't realise that this extended to the vanishing tradition of twice-daily family meals, to say nothing of the nightly enthronement of the Paterfamilias at the head of the table. 

As I said, there are only six people now living who can remember any of this. Well, maybe seven, if Quinta wasn't too young when we left for a larger house farther north. I wonder to what extent we were all permanently shaped by this small kingdom. Possibly my parents were just continuing to live as they were brought up--only with more children and more after-school activities. 

The Glue Monster's Daughter

Not having any children myself, I do not often enter into the old spirit of my childhood in Willowdale, except to argue that a dining-room is an absolute necessity to comfortable living. 

That said, I return spiritually to Willowdale days when I visit my beloved friend Lily, her husband and their growing family. They live in a three-storey house on the north side of a tree-lined Toronto street, one reason of many why I feel so at home there.  

In this house, with only a small amount of badgering, I will transform myself from a mere courtesy aunt into a kind of Glue Monster. This involves a great deal of underbite, growling and stuffing shrieking children into small spaces while roaring "YUM YUM YUM! HO HO HO!" 

This proves that I am not totally useless as adults go and was properly brought up.  

Angry Thoughts on "Incels"

Second post of the day. If you want to read a page of happy childhood, skip this and go down a post. If you have been hankering for some "Seraphic Singles" type thoughts, today is your happy day.

Or maybe not. I have been reading this article about the Incel movement, and now I feel nauseous. (Read the article and let me know if you feel the same.)

It doesn't help that I have discovered that at least two of the victims of the man apparently inspired by the Incel movement were graduates of my own all-girls high-school.

First of all, "incel" or "involuntarily celibate" is a misnomer. These men aren't complaining because they aren't married. They are complaining because they aren't having sexual relations with women. Thus, they are involuntarily continent. To, I imagine, only a certain extent, given the prevalence of internet porn.

Second, one reason an "incel" (or "incon") might not find women interested in him, if he even bothers to try to befriend women, is because he is the kind of man who thinks women "owe" men sex. Women are not exactly mind-readers, but we are much, much better at men-in-general at picking up unspoken clues to personality.

Third, apparently prostitution is not working for them. If continence is such the outrageous burden upon men they say it is, and they have no fear of God and little respect for women, then why do they not avail themselves of the world's oldest profession? I can only conclude that they have tried it and found it wanting. Either that or they don't have any expendable income or cannot look even a sex-worker in the eye.

Incidentally, the crumbs who say that if some woman had consented to sleep with the perpetrator of the Toronto Massacre, ten people would still be alive have clearly not considered that possibility. This is not to condone the sex trade, but why don't they factor it in? There is, and has always been, a class of woman available to just about anyone with a fistful of money. Why do some young men expect all women to be whores?

Fourth, whinging that some men get all the girls, and others get none is not new. Even before the internet was born I read complaints in print from men who deeply resented their lack of popularity. To a certain extent, I sympathised. I was not popular myself as a child, and it took me forever to understand how to talk to boys. I did not enjoy being a real "incel" myself in adult life, but I learned very quickly that resenting men for my unmarried state was A) insane and B) counter-productive.
Anyway, one of the first "incon" complaints I read was by a man writing to a newspaper columnist about how he didn't have a car for moral reasons, but how women cared only for men with cars.

Nota bene: my husband does not have a car. Now that I think about it, none of the men in my Edinburgh social circle has a car. One is driven everywhere by his wife.

Five, men and women are not the same, and even the Pill hasn't transformed women into gay men. Lonely women don't deal with unanswered sexual longings by going for a walk to the park at midnight and waiting for someone to turn up. It is probably true that most women under, say 60, could find a bedmate merely by going to a local bar at closing-time, but we generally don't. We don't because that's not how we roll. Even if we literally can't get pregnant, we can still have our feelings very badly hurt through an unwise sexual encounter. We are also much more easily killed.

This brings me to point six, which is that female social loneliness strikes me as just as serious as male sexual loneliness. If anyone twits a man for his inability to get girls, he can at least cover up by snarling "I do all right" or "Those who don't, talk about it most." A woman who is loudly pitied by her female friends and relations because she hasn't got "a proper man" can't.

When Benedict Ambrose and I went to marriage prep class replacement, we had to write a compatibility exam, for which BA got a higher mark. I lost marks for circling Y on a statement like "I believe marriage will solve many problems in my life."  This necessitated a conversation in which I explained to the archdiocesan marriage prep lady that marriage would give thirty-something me companionship, a proper home, social leverage, possibly children, and the feeling that my parents no longer had to worry about me. Not being married can be a cause of great suffering. (I will have to look online and see if there is a community of unmarried women who work themselves up into a murderous rage about it.)

Reading now about "incels" ("incons"), I am staggered by their weird theories, junk mathematics and insane sense of entitlement. Some weirdo actually seriously suggested that single mothers should be forced by the state to have sex with unattractive "incels"---presumably believing that single mothers have no value in the marriage market. Newsflash: lots of single mothers get married or remarried. It's about who you are, and who you meet, not what you are. Sociology is an inexact science at the best of times, so good luck piecing together reality with PUA-type game theory.

On a better day,  I would feel deeply sorry for these men and puzzle out a post of advice on how to become the sort of man women are actually interested in. Today, however, I think about how their public whining has apparently inspired one of their number, who they will doubtlessly enshrine as a martyr, to kill my former neighbours, and I am just disgusted. There are thousands of lonely people in the world, men without sex and women without loving husbands, and the vast majority strive to get on with life and manage not to kill people.

Willowdale 3: The Gardens of the Kingdom

The small white house and green strips of land I'm about to describe exist now only in the memories of six living people but, reassuringly, also in the mind of God.

I was almost 15 when my family left, so I had ten years to impress the place upon my memory. Naturally, I did not do this consciously--I was a terrible skimmer-over of descriptions of place in books--and I'm frightened that I've forgotten something or, worse, have started mentally painting another scene over what was our home.

When I dream of home, I am always returned to this house and those gardens. We are Canadians, so  really we called them yards. The front yard rose gently up to the front steps; it was a green hill with a small rock wall supporting a minute garden. A black iron lamppost suspending a  house number sign from its ladder rest sprung from this hill. There was also a tree. It still lives.

The real treasure begins at the side, east-facing, door of the house, which had a green-painted milk-box on its right side, and a fragrant bush or tree of some kind that grew under a sash window--one of the kitchen's three windows. Directly opposite the door was a faded wooden shed, accessible over the eternal jagged gravel by flagstones. Facing the shed, but turning to your right, you would have seen a flagstone step or two taking you down to the grassy backyard. Eventually there was an alternate route beside the shed around a wilderness of bushes, a massive maple tree, and the stone outcropping where our father built a sandbox.

From a child's perspective, the backyard was enormous. It ran from flagstone-walled gardens beside the house, which filled with ferns every spring, to a broken wooden fence separating our land from that of a house on the next street. There were wire fences on either side to divide our yard from those of our single old-lady neighbours (when the westward one moved or died, she was replaced by a weirdly childless couple). Our dad put a swing set between two trees on the west side, and we swung facing east, sweet-peas growing up in the wire fence behind us, a friendly pussy-willow tree to our left, and a stern slim tree with high branches to our right.

I always longed to climb trees, but almost all our trees were unclimbable. We did manage from time to time to scramble into the massive maple, sometimes cheating by dragging a flat bench over the flagstones from its place under the big kitchen window facing north. We only made it as far as the first Y of the trunk; the Ys of the actual branches rose away out of reach.

The next most important tree was on the west side, surrounded by impenetrable bushes featuring dry white balls of tiny flowers. (I may have been told what they were called, but unfortunately I wasn't the kind of child who cared; I considered gardening a form of torture.) In the middle of this circular shrub was a pear tree. Its flowers made me break out in red spots, my only childhood allergy.

Some years our young parents climbed a ladder and harvested the pears of this tree. They erected a baby-fence in the kitchen doorway and boiled up jars and jars of pear jam. We ate so much pear jam, I began to loathe it, although now--of course--I long for a peanut butter and pear jam sandwich on supermarket white bread. (Yes, we were the sort of Canadians who really did buy and eat that sugary bread. For one thing, it was cheap, and my parents ultimately had five children.)

There was a mock-orange under the dining-room windows at the south-west corner of the yard, and it released great waves of perfume in summer.

Strips of flower garden stretched from the dry snowball bushes around the perimeter of the garden, overwhelmed here and there by bushes. There was also a thin and disappointing walnut tree that never gave any walnuts, for complicated sexual reasons my mother tried to explain. Then there was a large vegetable garden near the north-west corner of the yard, which my mother worked at and sometimes forced her children to work at, too, although I complained so much, her usually steely resolve faltered.

There was also a white-painted wooden arbour, with great purple flowers flowing up one side, and purple grapes and iconic green leaves flowing down the other. Finally, behind the arbour there was round raised garden made of flagstones, from which orange tiger lilies grew.

The north end of this yard--territory of the vegetable patch, the arbour and the tiger lilies--had been built up so it was slightly higher than the south end, which meant that in winter we children could amuse ourselves by sliding down the small difference on our sleds. It was a rather a short and sudden drop, however, so it wasn't that amusing, but it was something.

All that is left to describe is the grassy stretch along the west side of the house, which was separated from the forbidden front yard by a high wooden fence. My mother planted a rose bush here, which scrambled up the house's white harling wall. For some reason, the grass in this section was deeper, richer and greener than the grass anywhere else in the small kingdom, and much the pleasantest to our bare summer feet.

We were sent out to play A LOT, and in almost every weather, for which I am only now grateful. Left to my own devices, I would have sat indoors all day between September and April and read books. Going outdoors willingly in spring and summer may have been a concession to my fictional friends who seemed to think outdoors was just wonderful. For some reason only a very expensive therapist might be able to discern, I found the natural world deeply dull--and disappointing because there were no fairies in it.

As Nulli and I grew older, we became interested in history, especially in warfare, and so one of our favourite outdoor games was to recreate the dogfights of World War One flying aces. The skies of France were much more interesting to me than the glorious flowering kingdom around us. The southern swing was my Fokker triplane, and the northern swing was Nulli's Sopwith Camel, and our little sister Tertia was a blonde French maiden whom I invariably kidnapped so that Null would come swinging to her rescue.

Now, ironically and inevitably, this childhood game is of much more interest to me than the actual fatal battle between our esteemed countryman and the great German knight, which the Australians now claim to have won. Australians certainly watched the battle; our colourful re-enactments (the Red Baron probably left the French maids alone) may have been overseen by our young mother, either through the small window over the kitchen sink, or through the large glass plate beside the lace-covered kitchen table.

Our mum spent her thirties tending to that small white harling house, those sprawling gardens, and her growing family; she was younger than I am now when she and my father boxed everything up and left it. It now seems to me incredible that a one-income Catholic couple with two, then three, then four, then five children could own (actually own) a detached two-storey house with gardens in northern Toronto. When people talk about progress, that is something to think about.

Meanwhile, the house has vanished and the gardens gutted. A ridiculously huge and modern house stands in its place, well back from where it was, with only the tree remaining of the front yard. It contains a double garage and wide driveway stretches to the sidewalk. It ate up most of the back yard,     felling some of the trees and all of the bushes. All the gardens, all flagstones, and the arbour are gone.

There is a sales video of the monstrosity on youtube, dated 2011, accompanied by jewellery-ad music by Vivaldi. The introduction to the new house involves apparently exciting photographs of North York city centre, which is a rather vigorous walk away and, now, the site of a massacre.

Willowdale 2

Benedict Ambrose and I have been at early morning mass. On the way back to our Old Town refuge, we climbed the paths leading from Edinburgh's Princes Street Garden to the Castle Esplanade. The green slopes are covered with deep-yellow daffodils and butter-tinted narcissi. From halfway up onwards, we could see the hills of Fife clear over the glittering Firth of Forth.

I mention all this for the sake of my childhood self, who is somewhere back in the 1970s or 80s, propelling herself back and forth on the backyard swing set, staring at the blue sky to the east, and wishing with all her bored might that she was somewhere else, like England, Scotland, or Ireland.

What a shock to the poor child if she knew that her over-40 self would be thinking just as hard about her quiet tree-lined neighbourhood, and reminiscing about Zinia's (the nearest candy store), the hamburger joint where Nulli and I discovered soft-serve ice-cream cones, and our metal roller skates.

Crash-crash-crash-crash-crash!

For some reason, when this morning I was thinking about Willowdale, I heard a noise before I saw anything. It was the metal clashing of clamp-on roller skates against concrete sidewalk. There were four roller skates: two for me, and two for my brother Nulli.

At the time, Nuli was a bright little boy with a mushroom-cap of straight platinum blond hair. I, slightly taller, was a living embodiment of  Little Orphan Annie--albeit with proper eyes. (The cartoon Orphan Annie gave me the creeps.) We had been given these metal roller skates for Christmas, and when the weather was nice enough, we clamped them onto our running shoes and went rolling away up and down the sidewalks, annoying grown-ups with the racket.

At the time our street had sturdy, unassuming two-story houses, rambling bungalows, old trees, flowering bushes and a broad paved avenue that led to a locally important intersection at Yonge Street. Kids therefore had to take special care crossing the road; ours wasn't the kind of street you could play road-hockey on.

Therefore, Nulli and I were pretty much confined to the sidewalks, which was annoying for two reasons: first, because of the cracks between the slabs of pavement making up the sidewalk, and second because of our pebble driveway.

These were not round pebbles, but jagged pebble-sized bits of gravel which hurt our bare feet every summer until our soles hardened in late-July. These little rocks didn't stay confined to the driveway beside the house and front garden but instead rolled down onto the sidewalk and under the tree on Mrs Brown's front yard just to the east, and I found one just last month, as the tree is still there.

Because we disliked the jolting of the cracks and being tripped by gravel, Nulli and I skated away eastwards in search of a nice flat place, which was, of course, the smooth concrete walkway around Yonge Street's Sketchley Cleaners. There we found five or ten minutes of flat, smooth, rollerskating heaven. Then an officious grown-up appeared and chased us away.

Sadly, it would be almost forty years before Jordan Peterson would write "Do not bother children when they are skateboarding."  I am sure he would say the same about rollerskating.

We would have roller-skated on the relatively crack-free road, were playing in the street not an offence punishable by a spanking. Other such capital crimes included playing in the front yard unsupervised, "door games" and "stair games".  As we got older, however, we roamed beyond our street to other Willowdale streets---usually south of us, and rarely across the great traffic chasm that was Yonge Street.

However, there was one pearl of great price that did sometimes tempt us to cross this Amazon, and it was the hamburger-sausage-gyro joint kitty-corner from Sketchley Cleaners. I want to say it was run by a Greek family, but I do not remember for sure. It was a short distance, by grown-up reckoning, from the enormous print plant where our late grandfather had worked. Anyway, this hamburger joint sold soft-serve ice-cream covered in a chocolate coating that hardened shortly after it was poured over the white swirly pile of frozen sweetness.

To children whose normal tipple was a 15 cent popsicle, and to a girl whose big luxury was a 35 cent cherry-flavoured Lola, this hardened chocolate over soft ice-cream was nothing short of a MIRACLE of MODERN LIVING.

Like so much else of our childhood, that hamburger joint has disappeared. Now the miracle of modern life is that the candy shop where we got our popsicles and Lolas still exists. When we were kids, it was run by a couple named "Zinia" or "Zinnia" or, most probably, "Zenia." Now it is run by a nodding East Asian lady, who smiled politely when I told her I used to come there as a child. It is one of a row of mid-century shops that stretch from Johnston to Poyntz Avenue.

Poyntz, allegedly, is where the St. George Day killer stopped his rampage. I stare at the buildings in the background of images of him being arrested, and I can't quite believe them. I look at the Arabic (or Persian) letters and the glass-and-metal building and think "Poyntz? Really? That's Poyntz?"

Willowdale

I grew up in a pleasant neighbourhood of modest homes, deep back yards, old trees, small shops, supermarkets in outdoor malls, a municipal library and swimming pool, a old-fashioned cruciform Catholic Church just around the corner from the Catholic school, an old cinema, a hardware store dating from pioneer days on the north-west corner of the southernmost major intersection.

My mother grew up in that neighbourhood, too.

Our neighbourhood disappeared decades ago, or rather, was covered over with a new neighbourhood-- monster houses, row houses, giant condos, business towers, massive indoor malls, modern churches, a proliferation of Korean and Persian shop signs. The main street--Yonge Street--became a real concrete canyon.

As the development started when I was 13 or so, I guess I shouldn't say I grew up in the old neighbourhood. The new neighbourhood grew up with me: I worked in the  new North York Centre mall and I studied in the North York Central Library.  I've long been ambivalent about the changes, however. The last time I was home, I went for a walk with a new resident, a former professor of mine, showing him where my childhood home used to be, where the school-bus picked us up, and where the ravine starts. I pointed out where my grandfather's workplace--a massive printing press--used to be.

When I'm back in Willowdale, I like to pick out the few shops, buildings and trees that have managed to survive. The candy store, for example. And even here in Scotland I can recall great swathes of vanished streetscape.

This was not the first transformation of Willowdale, of course. After the Toronto Rebellion of 1837, British soldiers burned down the farmhouses owned by rebels on either side of Yonge. Until yesterday, that was the biggest local tragedy, and as it happened so long ago, it no longer seemed tragic.

Yesterday a man from nearby Thornhill  Richmond Hill got in a rental van and, from Finch Avenue to Poyntz Avenue, mowed down everyone in his path. At least ten people are dead.

One of my schoolmates was within earshot and seems traumatised, poor woman.

I saw the news online as I did a last check of Alfie Evans stories and went a little crazy as I tried to get in touch with my family. At last I got my dad on Skype, and while we were talking, my Toronto brother phoned him, so that was Quadrophonic accounted for, too. Try sister Tertia posted that she and her son Pirate were safe north of Steeles Avenue.  Mum was at her volunteer job north-east of Finch and Yonge; Dad said he'd look for a phone number.

Dad was quick to suggest that this wasn't a terrorist attack but the actions of a madman. The police have released the man's identity, and when he was a teenager he was a high school student in Thornhill. I am disgruntled with people on Facebook who see photos and footage of the Persian signs and assume that Willowdale is "a Muslim neighbourhood" and that the perpetrator was Muslim.

Sheppard-and-Yonge when I was a kid

I imagine it is possible to have an Armenian surname and also be Muslim, but as yet nobody knows why this man did what he did. Having been a Willowdale kid, I think it's too soon to ask that question.  I'm still wondering who died and if I knew any of them.

Does anyone ever imagine this could happen in their own quiet childhood town?

Sheppard-and-Yonge when my mum was a kid.

Pray that Alfie Evans has a good death

Most Christians have a prayer list already, so I'm not really into prayer requests--unless for Benedict Ambrose, as history shows. However, I do have one today: it's that Alfie Evans is allowed to die in God's time and not sooner than that. I worry he's in danger of a most unnatural death.

I have seen what is apparently a court order detailing how Alfie is supposed to be "treated" while his ventilator is removed. He is going to be injected, via cannula, with midazolam and fentanyl. I looked up fentanyl on Google, and sure enough, one of its more dangerous side-effects is respiratory depression. This article confirms that.  

One argument of Alder Hey hospital's supporters is that Alfie's life support is not "natural". Their assumption is that Alfie will die "naturally" once he is removed from the ventilator. But Alfie's father has long maintained that Alfie would be able breathe for himself were he not on drugs that were preventing him from breathing on his own.   

My hope was that, once the ventilator was removed, Alfie would breathe on his own, and keep on breathing until the part of the brain that controls breathing stopped. In short, I hoped the child would die a natural death. However, it seems as if he is not going to be allowed a natural death. If his father is correct, and if these drugs do repress his ability to breathe, Alfie might die sooner than God and nature intends. *

On the one hand, Alfie Evans is an innocent baptised infant. A moment after he dies, he will be eternally better off than any of us are now. On the other hand, intentionally speeding up the death of an innocent child is a crime against God, the Author of the child's life, and against the child himself. It also puts in danger every other living person in Britain whom the courts decide does not have a life worth living. Right now that means particularly severely disabled children. Perhaps eventually that will mean people with intransigently conservative views.  

I have a few thoughts about very mentally disabled people I have known. 

People from a local L'Arche community used to visit my theology school, and once I went to visit them. The L'Arche person I knew best, as it were, was a woman named Rosie. Rosie was severely brain-damaged--from birth, I believe. She had been found in a state institution, tied to the bars of her crib, when L'Arche rescued her.  She couldn't walk, and she needed 24 hour care. She was pre-verbal, but she laughed and shrieked and seemed to enjoy being spoken to. She was not at all pretty, but people loved her devotedly. 

She was at a mid-week Mass-in-the-round at our college, she escaped from her wheelchair and crawled along the floor to the centre of the "round", flopping on her back to look at the ceiling. She gazed at the ceiling so contentedly,  I wondered what on earth she saw to interest her there. 

I wondered so much that after Mass, when everyone was gone, I lay down on my back to look myself. And now I don't remember what was there--a dusty skylight? I just remember that Rosie's eccentric action and how she inspired me to look at something I had never considered before. 

She died naturally one or two years later, at the age of 43. Her obituary says " Rosie had a stubborn, independent and lively spirit that transformed the hearts of many people." It's absolutely true. 

Long before I went to theology school, I knew a few kids with developmental disorders. They were sent to "normal" school with everyone else. They were often bullied despite teachers keeping an eye on them and their tormentors. I am thankful to say that I was never one of the bullies although I do wish now I could have thought of them more as fellow children and not merely as "Special Ed." The ones who were best off had brothers and cousins among the rest of the student body. 

Anyway, one of the most intellectually disadvantaged was named Frankie. Frankie was pre-verbal and his greatest joy in life was tearing up bits of toilet paper and watching them drift away on the breeze. As long as Frankie and I were in the same playground, which may have been as long as eight years, I noticed him and his eternal relationship with paper and the wind. The only thing I have seen like that since is the plastic bag blowing around in American Beauty.  The blowing bag was beautiful, and so, in hindsight, was Frankie. 

*I changed part of this article because I don't want to be unjust to the medical staff. I know almost nothing about palliative care. The thing is, the justices I listened to were just so keen on Alfie dying ASAP.  They really believe it is in his "best interests" to "no longer remain alive." 

A Working Class Hero is Something to Be

This essay is not getting the attention I hoped it would, so please be little angels and read it. I'm not sure if the trouble is the headline, or too much coverage of the Alfie Evans case, or the mention of Liverpool.

Why should Americans be interested in Liverpool? Well, the Beatles came from there, famously, and I am sorry I didn't have time to do to any kind of "Beatles" sightseeing, for I am sentimental about 20th-century England. Then there's the "Irish" feel to the city, and thousands of Irish emigrants once made their way to the USA and Canada via Liverpool. There's also the residents' feeling of being ignored or looked down upon by the elites, which is something Americans from non-coastal areas might recognise. 

Liverpudlians--or Scousers, as they proudly call themselves--are on the friendly end of the British spectrum of amiability, with the Glaswegians. That made my job writing the aforementioned essay relatively easy.  Three out of four cab drivers were well-informed and willing to talk about the Alfie Evans case; the fourth was rather deaf.  The night receptionist at my hotel was informative, and the morning receptionist was willing to chat, too. Unsurprisingly, they were less candid than the well-informed cabbies. And then there was Alfie's Army.

Members of Alfie's Army were willing to talk, but they were not always easy to understand. From Edinburgh to Liverpool is quite an auditory jump, and I had to strain my powers of concentration to make sense of the new vowels. Writing down names was a nightmare. 

I also put my foot in it when trying to establish what family relationships were because I always assume siblings-in-law are actually married to the siblings. This engrained habit caused awkwardness when I met my own British in-law's partner's son's partner, and now I understand why so many people in the UK now say "partner." Nevertheless, I still tromp about in my dumb way, assuming all couples got married by their late-twenties, eat at a dining-room table, and were read Mother Goose's Nursery Rhymes as children. 

The Alfie Evans story is more chaotic than my essay does justice to. For one thing there are duelling Facebook pages--one supporting the parents (Alfie's Army Official), and one supporting the hospital (Dignity4Life)--and it is unclear how many of these people are actually from Liverpool.  I certainly did not meet anyone in Liverpool who said "Poor little Alfie should be allowed to die", but that is the refrain of Dignity4Life when they are not sneering at Alfie's Army.  

When it comes to insults, AAO mostly confined itself to calling the good doctors and nurses of Alder Hey Children's NHS Foundation (hospital) murderers. However, now it rails against Dignity4Life, and with good reason. There are those on Dignity4Life who hold up the working-class roots of Alfie's Army for mockery. They also attack the characters of Alfie's parents and accuse them of this teenage incident and that. 

There is deep resentment that Tom Evans is a hero in the eyes of thousands of people across the world. Dignity4Life posters accuse Alfie's Army of being blind to facts (to put it politely), but they themselves seem blind to the fact that Tom Evans is a powerful symbol of responsible fatherhood and parental rights. They can sneer "Saint Thomas" all they like, but none of my cabdrivers would be taken aback by any teenage scrape a working-class lad got into as long as he is a model father and partner today.  

In Kensington Gardens

In future I shall try to arrange an annual mid-April visit to London. First, I am a big-city girl, and I feel energised by London. Second, spring comes to England before it comes to Scotland, and by mid-April London  has blooming gardens and flowering trees. There was magnolia tree in a garden under my hotel window, and I could smell it from my room.

Yesterday morning I had no appointments, so I went for a walk to Kensington Palace ("No Photographs") via Kensington High Street and through Kensington Gardens as far as the Round Pond. I sat on a bench, admired the swans, and tested my Polish vocabulary with flashcards

One can now visit Kensington Palace and traipse through its gardens, but I thought I'd rather not. I prefer to keep a respectful distance from the Royal Family, so as to retain the mystery. There are also a playground and a fountain in memorial of the late Princess of Wales. I was sentimental about Diana from her engagement up to her honeymoon and then on the day she died, and that was enough. I am currently sentimental about Prince George, Princess Charlotte and the Royal Bump.  

But I am even more sentimental about my parents, who arrived in London with my brother Nulli and me a very long time ago. My mother was taken to London by her parents about 17 years before that, which is another sentimental thought. Her father had been on leave from his regiment in London on VE Day some years before that. Family legend said he stayed in his hotel and slept through the riotous celebrations. I pondered whether or not his father had been in London during (or before, or after) the First World War, and reflected on how different London must have looked a hundred years ago.

Yes, I had quite enough sentimentality to be getting on with, and it's a miracle if I didn't mutter "Centre of the Empire" again. 

Naturally, as I sat on a bench in the Centre of the Empire, I was vastly amused to hear passers-by speaking to each other in Polish. One pair of Polish conversationalists were two women in sports clothes, one older, one younger, and the younger one carried a hula-hoop with knobs on it. I couldn't imagine what it was for, and I still cannot. 

I did not do particularly well at understanding all the Poles around--the Polish businessmen in the hotel breakfast room, the tough Polish youths in Ealing, the Polish families in parks--but I did have some success on the Tube. On that particular Tube journey, some very noisy Polish girls erupted into the carriage and settled around an elderly Englishman trying to read the Telegraph and me. 

"I am sitting here!" announced one, in Polish, plunking herself down beside the Englishman. "You sit there," she advised her friend, who sat on his other side.

"And I am sitting here!" said a third girl, dropping down behind me. 

There was some conversation about Michał. I believe the girl beside me said she liked him. He was, at any rate, the grammatical object of the sentence. As for the rest, they spoke too quickly for me to understand, and I couldn't guess the context, which is usually a help. Then they came to their stop, and there were Polish cries of "Let's go!" and "Come along!" 

These Polish girls really made my day although probably not that of the elderly Englishman, who looked a bit squashed. Tube carriages are rather narrow. 

When I returned to my hotel from Kensington Gardens (and I did not, after all, go into the Kensington Hobbs of London, for I have an Edinburgh Hobbs of London to spend too much money in), I packed up my laptop in my old kit bag and left them with reception. Then I went to Kennington, which is south of the Thames, to visit the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children and lunch with a friend. 

Although Kennington is south of the Thames and therefore too far from Brompton Oratory for true comfort, it has some very elegant streets and, what is more, gardens and flowering trees. After half an hour of photographing SPUC, I went to a very pleasant salad place with my friend, and afterwards on the way back to the Tube station, I admired the sun, and the gardens, and the trees, and the quirky little streets and felt the kind of happiness I believe I felt when I was four. 

For, lo, the crux of the matter may be that I remember being four--and being three, for that matter--in England.  I have a goodly store of memories of England--quite apart from all the false memories bookish children get from English children's books. For the rest of my childhood, I  wanted to go back there.  And although people often tell me how awful London is--how unfriendly, how expensive, and how big--I think I could live there quite happily, especially in the spring.  

That said, I wasn't particularly interested in England after I got into the direct train to Scotland. Instead of looking out the windows all that much, I studied my Polish textbook and then wrote out first sentences of travel stories, to see how proper travel-writing is done. But four hours later, when we had passed Berwick-on-Tweed, I got rather excited about Outdoors again, and stood for the rest of the journey, looking out the window at Scotland. It was great fun recognising the coastal towns of East Lothian and then, to my great joy, I saw the Historical House flash by in the distance.

So maybe I love Scotland best of all. Hmm. 

London Work Day

Today was a very odd day for me. It was like living someone else's life.

First I woke up in a tiny, sightly smelly room in the Kensington district of London. It wasn't even 6 AM yet, so I got an hour's work in. Then I had a shower, took my bag to the desk, got a double macchiato at "Paul", and headed for the Tube.

I took the Tube to Westminster, while idly trying to guess people's jobs from their clothes, and then I went to the Court of Justice to see if I could get in yet. I couldn't, so I went to Pret-a-Porter  (free wifi) to do some work.

At 8:50 I went back to the Court of Justice and attempted to chat with big, tough, chummy paparazzi who looked at me as if I were a multi-coloured squirrel, so I meekly subsided. At 9 I went in and found the courtroom. The security guards were very amiable and kind.

Eventually I met some young journalists, and they were amiable too. I suspect the one from the Daily Mirror was surprised when I said, "Daily Mirror? That's AWESOME!" Not something he probably hears every day, but then he probably hasn't written almost exclusively for the Catholic/Christian press for twelve years. There was a young man from the Liverpool Echo there, too, and two or three people from the BBC. One of them was using actual shorthand.

Then court was in session, and everyone in the press gallery just wrote like mad. The hearing was, of course, very sad and rather complex, and I wondered how I was going to pull stories out of all this sad and complex stuff. I managed not to puff and sigh until near the end, i.e. about six-and-a-half hours later.

I understand why the judges think dying is in Alfie's best interests, but I can't get my mind around why they think his "privacy" is so sacred. He is 23 months old; even a fully functioning AGPAR-acing 2 year old has no real concept of privacy. In Liverpool I mentioned the privacy question to a cabdriver, and he reacted as though privacy was abuse and neglect and assured me that Alfie would never have any privacy even when he dies, for the whole city will go to his funeral.

Anyway, they managed not to mention privacy until about 4:30 PM, and I sighed before I could remember about contempt of court and stop myself. Fortunately it was a quiet sigh.

There was a two hour recess, during which I gobbled a sandwich at Pret-a-Porter and wrote messages to work, including my notes. Then I went back to the Court of Justice, and was there until 5 or so.  As it was too late (and hellishly expensive) to get a direct train to Edinburgh, I took the Tube back to Kensington. They gave me a nicer, non-smelly room, and after dinner at Wagamama (don't ask), I went back to work.

So that was my 9-5 work day in London. I wore my excellent grey tweed suit and not my rain boots.

Oranges and Lemons

In a moment of sheer serendipity, I was outside St. Clement Danes, City of London at 6 PM. The famous church rang the hour and then burst into a chorus of "Orange and Lemons". Could there be any child brought up on "Mother Goose's Nursery Rhymes" who could fail to be moved by that?

That's the thing about London, "centre of Empire" as I muttered aloud while waiting to cross to Westminster Tube Station. The woman beside me might have thought I was a bit crazy.  Not crazy--but tired. In another serendipitous moment, I found myself at Westminster Abbey in time for the Evening Service. Having been at Mass at the Brompton Oratory already, I took a programme and went in. My family has a devotion to Saint Edward the Confessor, and Saint Edward is, of course, buried in the Abbey. He decreed that it be built, too.

I went to "High Mass" at Brompton Oratory, which is at 11:00, according to the Novus Ordo, but in Latin. Splendid choir. The homily preached against the media, especially "the Catholic media", and gave "the blogs" a good drubbing. We are not to trust in the media but in the Gospel, which we should read instead. Something along those lines. All very sad for your humble correspondent, who was having a hard enough time praying instead of worrying about whether or not her computer was being stolen at that very moment by Kensington hotel thieves.

After Mass I saw absolutely no-one I knew other than the famous Andrew Cusack, who wanted to know the Edinburgh gossip and was delighted to hear that his favourite Edinburgh priest had not changed. The homily was very down on fake news, so I won't use scare quotes for Cusack, but I said something like "Father [redacted] is exactly the same" and Cusack said that this was the best possible news. That was literally the first piece of gossip that came to mind, in part because people who love Edinburgh are always happy to hear that it is just as they left it.

We walked along Cromwell Road a ways, and then Cusack disappeared, probably to some amazing luncheon party whose photographs will end up in Hello or, if not that, the champagne-fuelled launch of some exciting book about gentlemen's hats or shoes or jackets or some such.

I, being a "poor b... reporter" (as Salcombe Hardy in the Lord Peter Wimsey stories would say), bought a "meal deal" from Marks & Spenser, sent a few messages, and went to Ealing to take sad photographs.  Then I went back to the Brompton Oratory to buy a copy of the Catholic Herald, which I adore now that it is the Catholic Spectator.  Then, because it was nearby and has loos, I went to Harrods for the first time in my adult life and had quite a shock.

Not to put a fine point on it, Harrods is not very British. Harrods is the Hanging Gardens of Babylon in department store form. I went in thinking of Paddington Bear and found myself plunged into the playground of billionaires. No wonder the Saudis live in South Kensington.

There is--get this--there is literally a Hall of Perfumes in Harrods and when you walk in, you are almost overcome either with the combined scent of all the expensive perfumes of the world or one special scent Harrods spritzes into the air from hidden vents.  Meanwhile, in the ladies' loo on the first floor--the floor dedicated to women's clothing and I barely dared to look--one can douse herself as liberally with Coco Chanel or a number of other scents as she ought to use soap. The bottles are just sitting there above the sinks.

Having decided that this excess was actually pagan and part of the worship of Mammon or Baal or goodness knows whom, I did not dose myself in perfume but headed for the exit to Brompton Road as soon as I could. I swiftly marched away from wicked Harrods in my rain boots without a rest until I was safely in Exhibition Road. I then spent £6 on a double macchiato and a pain-au-chocolat.

After this restorative refreshment, I went to the Courts of Justice and took their photograph. Then it was 6 PM and the serendipitous moment happened in from of St. Clement's. I had a look at the Thames, which was grey and populated with tour boats, and then I went to Westminster. Poor Big Ben is still covered with scaffolding and his hands are missing.

The theme of the sermon during the Westminster Abbey Evening Service was "identity through stories." And you'll never believe it but there were special prayers for the media and subtle hints about our "fake news", as if we were all engaged in writing the "Hilary Clinton Space Alien Sex Shocker" stories that apparently so influenced the U.S. presidential election.

Now I am back in my slightly-smelling-of-drains hotel room, and I am pretty tired. I have also forgotten to have any dinner, woe is me, poor b... reporter.

W Londynie/A Londres

I am on assignment in London, which is not something I thought I'd be writing today. If I had, I would have fetched my Oyster card from the Historical House, not just my tweed suit. By Friday morning I knew there was a good chance I'd be sent to Liverpool to cover the Alfie Evans protests. On Saturday morning my editor and I were in agreement that I'd go to London next.

Naturally nobody I know in London has any space to keep me in, so I booked the cheapest room I could in Kensington. Kensington still carries the cache (in my mind, at least) of being safe, and my hotel is only a 30 minute walk away from the Brompton Oratory.

Strangely, it is sunny out.  Although I am in a tiny semi-underground room, I have a gauze-curtained window and the sun is shining through it.  Soon I will stop this blogging nonsense and go to church via Hyde Park.

It was sunny when I arrived in London yesterday evening, too. I was surprised at how light it was, and had a confused idea it was because London is so much further south than Edinburgh. Actually it's because at that hour I am usually in another small room writing up dark news. But all the same, I felt exultant and happy and remembered a line of poetry my mother used to declaim, "Oh to be in England, now that April's here."

A one-way underground ticket from Euston railway station was an eye-watering £4.90.

I found my hotel and after a struggle got online and then got the receptionist to call Ognisko and make a reservation for one. This saved me the embarrassment of being rejected, should the popular Polish restaurant feel disgruntled about single diners. However, Ognisko said I could come at 8:30 PM, which was fine by me, as it gave me time to call my husband, have a shower and walk to Exhibition Road.

Thank heavens for the shower, for I was exhausted. And thank goodness for Ognisko, as I hadn't eaten since 9AM. I spent most of Saturday taking cabs across Liverpool, rushing hither and thither and talking to Scousers about Alfie Evans. The cab drivers of Liverpool seem unanimous in their support for Alfie's parents and their disdain for Alder Hey Children's Hospital. Two cabbies told me they were sure Alder Hey doesn't want Alfie to go to "that Italian hospital" for fear the Italian doctors will find some hideous mistake Alder Hey made in Alfie's treatment. The cabbie who took me to my 3:50 PM train had been at the spontaneous 1000-person strong rally on Thursday night.

Showered and in my nice blue wool dress, I walked to Ognisko and had a splendid dinner: trzaski (deep fried pork crackling) with pear and horseradish sauce, barszcz with a tiny croquette of pate, smoked salmon blinis, and a shot of the house's pear vodka.  I had never eaten in Ognisko alone, but I've been there with Benedict Ambrose and with Polish Pretend Son, so the elegant dining room was full of deeply amusing memories.

As I munched I reflected that if I were to die at a restaurant, as trad heroes sometimes do, I should like it to be at Ognisko, although not until I had eaten the trzaski. The barszcz, by the way, tasted as though it had been stewed from the bones of the oxen of Mt Olympus, or so I wrote to PPS afterwards. Quite a heady soup for a lady used to the vegetarian Christmas Eve version.

Then I walked back to my hotel to assure my Edinburgh-loving, London-hating husband over Skype that I had not been killed. Cromwell Road has unintentionally funny real estate ads for Saudis, featuring Dad-Mom-Child photos of Saudis in full Saudi dress sitting in a field with an English palace in the background. I passed a live Arab Dad-Mom-Child family on the street, the Mom all in black with a face veil. There were also other young Arab men on the street, but also a dozen other people from all over the world, it seemed, usually carrying shopping bags and looking heartbreakingly tired.

Earls Court Road teemed with Poles. I passed an incensed Polish woman just as she yelled "----JUZ alkohole!" at her man, and a couple of young Polish men conversing in very drunken Polish. This morning the neighbourhood seemed less Polish. Soon after the fire alarm went off in my hotel, I sauntered off in the direction of "Paul", a French (or "French") boulangerie and cafe, having spotted it last night. (When you're as addicted to coffee as I am, you look out for these things in advance.)

Paul has a very large variety of croissants, doughnuts, breads and colourful little cakes shining like jewels behind high plastic windows. The counter is staffed by pretty women from various places in Europe and (indirectly, I am guessing) China, and the espresso is very good. The large "Americano" was less good, but that serves me right for being greedy.

The Joy of a Truly Free Press

"Listen," I said. "I come from a small country, too, a country with a big neighbour,  and so I understand. And yes, Poland got squashed several times by its big neighbours. But you mustn't care so much about what other nations think about you. You should concentrate on your achievements."

This advice did not seem to console my interlocutor one jot. Living in the UK, she bears the brunt of other people's misconceptions about Poland and the Poles. The misconceptions come mainly from the media, and I am not talking just the Daily Mail here. I am talking about the oh-so-correct Guardian and all the rest of the British establishment media. The woman who told me that Polish must come in handy for speaking to workmen at the Historical House does not read the Daily Mail.

Reflecting on what the western mainstream media has published about Poland, the woman sitting beside me seemed to be on the point of tears. Therefore, I was once again glad that last November I was able to publish this.  If I never again write anything of any importance, at least I wrote that.

One of the problems with contemporary journalism is that most newspapers can no longer afford to keep offices in several foreign countries. That is one explanation for the scandalous and appalling fake news about Poland that was foisted on the British, the Canadians and, especially, the Americans about the 2017 Polish Independence Parade in Warsaw.

There are other explanations, of course, and I remember when I first lost my touching faith in mainstream media: it was while watching a Toronto TV station's coverage of a pro-life demonstration. I had been there, and I knew that something City-TV said about it was not true.

I also flinched at the unmistakable contempt in newscaster Mark Dailey's universally beloved voice. The fake news I don't recall, but the contempt left a permanent scar. By the age of 18, I knew that lots of Torontonians despised pro-lifers, but it hadn't occurred to me that Toronto's big-voiced sweetheart did, too. I thought the press would be like, you know, neutral.

Goodness knows why I thought that after years of reading Doris Anderson in the Toronto Star. Anderson was a famous feminist, but that did disturb me until I came up with a bang against her sneering prediction that Pope John Paul II's play would bomb on Broadway but be a hit in church basements. Somehow I remember that and not all her abortion apologetics, probably because the slam was just so bizarrely petty.

I recall asking my mother about it and my mother saying something about Anderson being from out West (where anti-Catholicism presumably festered). But the objections of the lady columnists of the Toronto Star also included the saint's Polish birth. (I forget which one it was, exactly, attributed John Paul's alleged dislike of women (!) to being Polish. It probably was Anderson, but it might have been Michelle Landsberg.)  "Polish jokes" had recently been banned from the schoolyard,  and I was surprised to see such an obvious ethnic slur in the Star. 

As a matter of fact I had very little interest in Poland, but things I heard about it in childhood did linger. For example, I still cannot shake the impression, formed in 1977, that Poles (all Poles) are desperately poor. The beautifully paved road from the John Paul II airport to Krakow was, therefore, quite a shock.

I'm not sure if there's a moral in that, other than that one needs to be intelligent and be cognisant of historical changes in the countries one visits or one risks sounding stupid or even offensive.

My real point in writing this post is to celebrate the existence of a truly free press--which in English-speaking countries may mean the online press--that interrupts the unjust or merely craven narratives of the mainstream press.

I don't mean to abjure all the MSM. As long as The New York Times continues to publish Ross Douthat I will have some respect for The New York Times. But I am highly suspicious of any British, Canadian or American MSM narrative about Central and Eastern Europe right now.

Meanwhile, I am deeply contemptuous of how the British mainstream press swallows the abortion industry's lies about the British pro-life movement. (It really astonishes me how an obvious INDUSTRY has the British press in thrall, but I don't discount the role of blackmail. In Canada, abortionist Henry Morgantaler  blackmailed Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau.) That, however,  is a topic for another time.

Update: The Spectator is good value, though. See this article from January, for example. It looks okay to me.

Dating a Russian Man

A young Russian friend alerted me to the following video, which was apparently made in Canada. If so, I have a pretty good idea where, since the Russians invaded it by their thousands after 1990 and without founding any good restaurants.

Video here (Safe for work, little brothers, et alia)

 I have never been on a date with a properly Russian man, only with an ex-Israeli cantor from Minsk with a German surname, and it's a very long story. It is also a dull story and ends with a Slovene music conductor grilling me over the phone about what I had done to his poor friend. The Slovene was not dull, but that is an even longer story.

Anyway, the young Russian friend also sent me a link to the next video, which is about dating (anglophone) Canadian women.

Video here (Safe for work, slightly more dodgy for little brothers)

I know rather more about Canadian women than about dating Russian men, and the very amusing thing about the video is that it is true--especially for Toronto. Toronto women don't do eye contact with strangers.  We are perfectly capable of pretending that we are lesbians to put off prospective suitors. We are incredibly offended when men offer to help us carry ludicrously unwieldy things like mattresses until we have half-killed ourselves lugging them up four flights of stairs. And we do tend to have a sporty streak. (I had to give up watching sports soon after marrying B.A. because of football rage. My own football rage. B.A. doesn't have football rage. B.A. doesn't have football.)

Anyway, I was vastly cheered watching all this generalising because I greatly enjoy generalising myself. Also, it reminded me of a book on divorce I once read, in which the author--a retired divorce lawyer active before 1986--strongly advised against Canadian women of British or Irish descent ever marrying Russian, Polish, Yugoslavian, Czechoslovakian, Romanian or Hungarian men. (Apparently, it was fine for Canadian men of British or Irish extraction to marry Russian, Polish, etc., women.)

While watching the Russian Man video, I was very irritated by the Russian Man tutting and sighing and shaking his head, and I am very meek compared to what I was like in my twenties. Also, I cannot think of a more boring way to spend an evening than dancing in spike heels in a North York condo with a bunch of Russian-speaking girls while all the men sit a a table getting drunk.

Unfortunately there does not seem to be a "You know you're dating a SCOTTISH man when" video. However, I do not think it would speak to my experience as much as a "You know you're dating a TRAD CATHOLIC man when" video.

Lessons Learned Rather Late

Caveat: I will be linking to the Daily Mail, which is essentially a tabloid, which is to say that it specialises in attention-grabbing, emotion-yanking stories. One of the stories it likes to tell is "Unattractive Smart Woman Moans that She is Treated Unfairly by Life."

The unattractive smart woman sometimes complains that women hate her because she is too beautiful, but more often she complains that men reject her because she is too smart. There are egregiously unflattering photos, and I can only assume the writer is paid a hefty fee. (Pause while I ponder how big a fee would tempt me to humiliate myself in the Daily Mail.)

Here is the latest addition* to the ghastly tradition.

My first thoughts were as usual: what gets you ahead at work and school is not what makes you the belle of the ball, and there is nothing shameful in putting aside one set of intellectual tools to take up another. I know of a brain surgeon (not B.A.'s) who speaks to her much-less-well-paid husband in baby talk, much to the chagrin of the surgeon's single sister.

I thought also that it is indeed rude to go on holiday with a chap and then have a rip-snorting laugh-a-minute conversation in a language he doesn't understand right in front of him. B.A. is very goodnatured and tolerant, but he doesn't like that sort of thing either.

Finally I had a new thought, which is that the author should have dialled down and dated younger chaps, not older. This is the United Kingdom, so this is entirely possible. Any young man who is attractive to older, successful women is not going to mind if she dominates dinner conversations. He is going to expect it. He might also expect her to pick up the table at fancy restaurants, which is only fair if he is still on the bottom rungs of his chosen career.

But in general I think complaining because men like to be flattered by a woman instead of being argued into submission by her is as silly as railing against nature because chocolate is poisonous to dogs. Acknowledging this fact and adjusting one's social behaviour accordingly is what separates the Smart Smart girls from the Dumb Smart girls.

For those permanently  (but involuntarily) Single women who are utterly convinced that being fun instead of intellectual at parties is a form of dumbing down, may I suggest they take up studying a foreign language and attempt to converse with native speakers (minus, of course, the presence of a disgruntled monolingual beau)? This way you will be doing something intensely brainy while at the same time sounding charmingly hapless. You also have the added bonus of sounding romantically exotic.

That said, just sounding American or Canadian in Scotland makes you sound romantically exotic, one reason why Mrs Smartypants is now married. That and the fact that soon after I met B.A. I caught a cold so terrible, I could barely speak, let alone crush all comers with my fearsome intellect.

Update: It just occurs to me that the very fact that the Daily Mail delights in such clickbait as this article is evidence of how much people dislike well-paid older women complaining "It's 'cause I so smaaaaart!"

*Polish Pretend Son has just written in to point out that this story is actually from 2013.

Wedding Guest Dress Found!

Polish wedding attire

Trigger Warning: Post almost entirely about women's apparel.

“We should treat all the trivial things of life seriously, and all the serious things of life with sincere and studied triviality,” said Oscar Wilde, who was wicked but nevertheless would have been fun to go shopping with. 

That said, I am not so sure finding a nice dress for Polish Pretend Son's wedding is so trivial anyway. 

First of all, I have only one Polish Pretend Son (so far). Second, there will be photographs. Third, Poles are very blunt, so there is always the danger that some other wedding guest might say "Who is that frightfully frumpy lady?", meaning me, and in my anguish I will once again forget how to speak Polish. 

So as devoted readers know, I have been popping in and out of Edinburgh shops looking for a splendid wedding guest dress. Until today I had only got as far as buying a navy blue Jacques Vert hat on sale. In the UK, Jacques Vert is the tried-and-true label for the aunts-mothers-and-grandmothers set, but his line-up this spring does not thrill me. There is also the problem of British women's wedding clothes looking a bit odd on the Continent. If you've ever happened upon an English destination wedding in an Italian church, you may know what I mean. 

That said, Polish Pretend Son and his Narzeczona are romantic about the UK--or Poland's glorious, hat-wearing, pre-Communist past--so the N. has asked her female friends to wear hats, and I snapped up the JV number. The £ to $ calculation would have made my frugal mother and grandmother (great-grandmother, great-great-grandmother et alia) blink, but I inwardly argued that the hat was large, tipped at a jaunty angle, and half-price. Also, I told my roiling Scottish-Canadian conscience, it is navy blue, and therefore highly practical, as navy is basically a neutral, my dear.  

Its purchase meant that I would have to find a dress to go with it, which was a worry because the shops are full of on-sale navy blue shift dresses and white dresses with navy blue large floral prints, and the wedding is in June. Does one want to wear a navy shift dress (or large floral prints) to a June wedding in rural Poland? No, one does not.

To improve my chances of finding something more exciting, I went to the charity and consignment shops of Morningside. Alas, I found nothing. I also looked online (and thank you to Alias Clio for suggestions) and scrolled through images of bright bohemian maxi-dresses. They did not suit. This morning Benedict Ambrose and I went to a very modish ladies' tailor shop and examined an azure tweed suit. Although value for money (£500, cough), it was totally inappropriate for a Polish wedding.

But then B.A. and I went to that Mecca of high-end charity shops, Stockbridge, and BEHOLD, we found a delightfully embroidered pale blue gown at the Red Cross emporium. As a denouement, we also found a beaded midnight-blue-lace-over-"nude"-slip shift dress at Oxfam. It was only £15, and B.A. said I ought to get it, so we went back to the Historical Shelter with two wedding dresses.

To my surprise, the navy JV hat goes better with the pale blue gown than with the midnight blue lace, so the pale blue gown wins. I will wear the midnight blue to the second, non-hat, Polish wedding I'm attending in June.

B.A. will be wearing a kilt to PPS's wedding. My sartorial drama is over, but B.A.'s continues because he has only a Prince Charlie jacket for the evening and still needs a jacket for the day wedding. B.A. has literally skipped a wedding ceremony because he does not own a day jacket. (Wearing an evening jacket before 4 PM is apparently akin to stabbing your own mother and dancing on her corpse.)  But he is not allowed to skip Polish Pretend Son's wedding ceremony, and so the hunt is on.

On Reporting News about the Pope

When I wrote for the Toronto Catholic Register, I was always conscious that it was a family newspaper that was read by people who knew my parents. It was available in the library of my nephew's elementary school and in the libraries of the two colleges I call my almas matrae. My favourite professors did not read my column, but the late janitor of the theologate did, bless him.

Therefore, I knew that the vast majority of my readers were "simple faithful", which is not an insult but praise. Most faithful Catholics do not bother their heads with church politics or theology but try to love God and their neighbour and do the right thing instead. Simple, in this context, means honest, straightforward, humble. And I did my best not to disturb my readers' simple faith

After the Star of Bethlehem episode, that is. I once wrote an article about how there might not have been a Star of Bethlehem, and a distressed member of the simple faithful, a friend in her late twenties, asked me how the Three Wise Men had found Baby Jesus then. After a second, during which a smarty-pants answer  trembled on my tongue, I said instead, "That's a very good question."

At the time I was not a trad; like many Lonerganians, I thought I was in Lonergan's "not numerous center." It was not until I went to Boston College that I knew I was perceived to be a ultraconservative, that rival factions of the American Catholic Church hated each other with a white-hot hate, and that I was now in left-wing Catholic HQ.

One target of left-wing Catholic hate at the time was Cardinal Ratzinger, whom many feared, and the hate blazed up into a fiery furnace when he was elected Pope. When the haters discovered that none of them had been fired, hatred simmered down to contempt. The contempt for "Rome" was like a poison gas floating through the halls. The paranoia, too, was contagious. One of my fellow PhD students broke out in a welter of fear because disgruntled conservative undergrads had written a letter protesting some inter-religious event or other.

Having been a Catholic tribalist and triumphalist all my life, that was all very hellish for me. And hating the hate with all my heart, I never imagined that twelve years later I would be in the thick of the Catholic civil war.  But just the other day I wrote a summary of a dozen articles reacting to the news that Benedict's successor had allegedly told a journalist pal that hell did not exist and that, instead of denying this with guns blazing, the Vatican had politely asked the world to discount the journalist pal's punctuation.

Yesterday morning I discovered that the Drudge Report had linked to this article. Yesterday evening I discovered that my parents may have read it. At any rate, they had heard the "Pope says there's no hell" story, and that made me very sad. It's only now that I realise that they must have heard about it from the Canadian television news last weekend.

It seems that the simple faithful cannot help but be scandalised after all. Only the really obtuse (or, to be charitable, the really frightened) can keep yelling "Fake News" at this point. We have a crisis on our hands, and it's not because there's a big anti-Francis plot that began the day he was elected. It's because there was a big anti-Doctrine plot hatched long before Francis was elected.

Crises often have good theological and doctrinal outcomes. In the first centuries of Church life, Christians battled each other in an attempt to get at the truths of faith. The truths were unchanging, but we didn't understand them right from Pentecost Day onward. The exact relationship of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost was a problem that had to be worked out. The role of the Son's human mother is salvation history had also to be worked out, and this was only finally pronounced upon in 1950.

A good that may come out of the present crisis would be a better understanding of what a pope is and what the papacy is. The star power of Saint John Paul II  blinded many of us to the dangers of overemphasising the person of the pope, and I see now that my convert mother was right to hold the papacy a little at arm's length.

We simple faithful were very proud of JP2 as a world figure, as an intellectual, and as a defender of deeply unfashionable Catholic sexual and reproductive ethics, that most of us weren't interested in discussing any theological defects he might have had. Had the internet been born 20 years earlier, there would have been a lot more screaming about his take on inter-religious dialogue, not to mention the excommunication of Archbishop Lefebvre.

It is probable that Pope Francis does not believe the Catholic faith the way that Benedict XVI believes, and Saint John Paul II believed, the Catholic faith. That's a problem. However, the bright side is that this is an opportunity for Catholics to prove to other Christians that we don't, actually, worship the Pope.

Almost twenty years ago, on my first visit to Rome, I overheard a Protestant tourist tell a nonbeliever that the difference between Catholics and Protestants was that Protestants believed the Bible but Catholics just did whatever the Pope told them to do. I was so utterly furious, I didn't know what to say. Besides, it is quite true that we expect the Pope---in communion with all the other Popes, with all the saints, doctors and Fathers of the Church---to mediate Scripture to us and help us understand how to be faithful to it through every age.

But just because we expect the Pope to do that doesn't mean he will. We have had atrocious Popes before, as historians are happy to point out, and we may have atrocious Popes again. We may have an atrocious Pope now, but it generally doesn't do to call living Popes names.

So that is more-or-less what I would say to the simple faithful. The Pope doesn't matter as much as Doctrine matters. The Pope is supposed to protect Doctrine, not Doctrine the Pope's relationship with his family, his friends and The New York Times. Therefore, one should listen to the Pope when he tells  the mafia that they're in danger of hell, and one should not listen to the Pope when he tells Eugenio Scalfari that hell does not exist.

"One Month": My Polish Tutor Weighs In

I may be becoming a language bore, but too bad. I spent the day writing about what the media thought of Hellgate and then about the epistolary correspondence of various bishops, so now I want to write about Polish. I could write about the fact that the actor playing TV-Jughead was seen canoodling with the actor playing TV-Betty in Paris, but I'm above such an inordinate desire to discuss  the private lives of thespians.

Before adding to the headaches of the Secretariat for Communications of the Holy See, I went to my favourite hipster cafe to chat with my Polish tutor and eat avocado toast. There was a bearded chap at the table next to us, writing in a notebook. At the table next to him there was another bearded chap. Really, it was all very hipster, and I hope we did not disturb the atmosphere of literary endeavour with our Polish chatter. I am inclined to think not, for the Polish language is very hipster in itself, if the speaker is not actually Polish and is wearing cat's-eye frames. 

I complained to my tutor at some length about the stupidity of Kobieta Sukcesu and my inability to understand its dialogue, thanks to the subtitles vying for my brain's attention and the psychological impossibility of becoming fluent in Polish in a non-Polish environment. 

My Polish tutor (or MPT as she will now be named) agreed that it is impossible to become fluent in Polish in a non-Polish environment but that linguistically gifted individuals do not need to spend a whole year in a total immersion context. For example, I would need only a month. 

I looked at MPT with myopic eyes of doubt. Nobody has ever suggested that your humble correspondent is linguistically gifted in anything but English, and I am not ready to return to the myth of giftedness anyway. Years of pondering the topic have led me to believe that adult language-learning is all a matter of rewiring one's brain and retraining one's tongue through years of toil. 

The MPT pointed out that she is graduate of linguistic science--at least, I think that's what she said--and therefore knew what she was talking about.  It occurs to me know that she also tutors other people in Polish, and I am her star pupil, so she probably does know what she is talking about. 

So that was rather cheering, even though I cannot imagine spending an entire month in Poland with--or even without--B.A. At least, no month soon, and I would have to be nestled in the bosom of a Polish family because I have learned that lodging in a Polish rectory is a recipe for loneliness and eye infections. 

Overcoming Yet Another Temptation To Quit

On Easter Monday I popped by the Odeon and saw that a Polish film is playing. This cinema often carries Polish films, not because it is artsy (it isn't), but because of the large Polish minority that lives in Edinburgh. Although I knew nothing about Kobieta sukcesu ("Successful Woman"), it had been a long time since I saw a Polish film, and I thought it would be a fruitful use of 90 minutes of my time.

I walked out well before the 90 minutes were up. 

Every nation has the right to make lousy films to entertain the less reflective and more easily entertained of its countrymen, I told myself later. Hollywood produces stupid movies all the time. Possibly Canada does, too. 

On the other hand, neither Canada nor Hollywood produces films that suggest that belief in premarital chastity is only for shamefully stupid bumpkins from the countryside, and only shamefully stupid bumpkins would believe that an engaged couple wouldn't be living together, having sex before marriage, etc., etc.  When the heroine's loving uncle and aunt turn up in Warsaw and utter these stupidities, I finally walked out. And I had had much to bear before then, believe me. 

I hate the idea that virtuous behaviour is laughable. I really, really hate it. I hate it because such an attitude is demonstrably bad for society, especially for the children of that society.  The children, the poor--everyone vulnerable. 

Besides that, I was disappointed that I had a hard time understanding the dialogue of the film at all. Ironically enough, this was partly because of the English subtitles. I find it very hard to hear what people are ACTUALLY saying in film when English subtitles pop up on a screen. It's not quite as bad in Italian, but Polish sentence structure is significantly different from English sentence structure, and I find it very hard to think in English and Polish simultaneously. However, I assume also that I had a general defect in understanding, which is terribly frustrating after six years of trying to learn this stuff. 

On Sunday I asked a European scientist who has been living in Edinburgh for some years now, how long it took her to stop having to think about English actively and just be able to understand and speak without thinking it all out. She said that it was sometime in her second year here. That was very crushing for me, for that meant it took over a year of immersion in an English-speaking city for a well-educated woman to get to that point. 

This is in part why I went to see this stupid film: to get a little extra immersion. However, I see that this was a big mistake in terms of morale. 

One thing the "Fluent in Three Months" school of thought advises is to pick your vocabulary.  This is because it is actually impossible to be fluent in three months unless you are a child in an immersion environment. It takes the native anglophone who is doing nothing but study for eight hours a day approximately 11 months to become fluent in a Slavic language. Therefore, if you want to start having proper conversations in your target language sooner rather than later, you have to think out what you are most likely to want to talk about.

Because I am never going to act out the unlikely scenarios of Polish comedies, there is really no point in watching them. My goals are to be able to function linguistically as a tourist, as a wedding guest, and as a reporter on the Polish pro-life movement, and then to be able to read Polish literature written after January 1863. I can already do this to some extent, but naturally I have endless room for improvement. The big question is--is it endless or will I hit a wall? Without immersion, is it psychologically possible to speak and listen with C-level fluency?

Touristic Ground Zero

Someone asked me yesterday if I would like to live permanently in Edinburgh's Old Town.

Hitherto, I thought I would like that very much. The Old Town has much to commend it. It includes the University, my favourite hipster cafe, excellent bakeries, and good shops. It has Blackwell's, probably Edinburgh's best bookshop. Cinemas for discerning grown-ups are within walking distance.

However, it also has clouds of swarming tourists.

To be honest, the tourist traffic is heavily concentrated between the National Museum and Princes Street. Although tourists do occasionally reach the Brew Lab, they are usually outnumbered by students. They are also largely absent from the upper reaches of Blackwell's, too. However, they choke the George IV Bridge and the Bow and other places where I need to walk to buy groceries, visit the post office, and get back to shelter when it rains.

I never realised that there were this many tourists in Edinburgh in March and early April, time of horrible weather. I thought that the city's appeal to tourists was mostly between May and September.  In August the city swells to double its size. In August about half a million tourists--mostly from England, I believe--turn up for the Edinburgh Festival(s), and I avoid the Old Town as much as possible.

Not usually misanthropic, I found myself today wishing the hoards of foreigners to blazes. For the first time I felt a deep sympathy with an ex-pat acquaintance in Italy who screams "Get out of my way!" at tourists blocking her path when she is in Rome. The first time I witnessed her rage, I was shocked. However, I now understand the motivation although not its underlying cause.

Why be angry with tourists? I'm a tourist myself once or twice a year. I was a tourist in Krakow in January, for example, in my foreign tweed coat  accompanied by my similarly tweed-coated foreign husband. Like  all the other foreigners we ambled through the Old Market and down Ulica Grodzka, went to Wawel Castle, and frowned at the restaurant price levied upon a bottle of water. Did some harried housewife hate our guts as we unknowingly impeded her way to the post office? Has she had enough of the endless procession of Brits trudging through her neighbourhood?

Normally I find it comical to fly from one of Europe's tourist hotspots to another: Edinburgh to Rome, Rome to Edinburgh, Edinburgh to Krakow, Krakow to Edinburgh, Edinburgh (once) to Paris, Paris to Edinburgh. The Edinburgh-Krakow flight at least has the honour of taking Polish workers home to see their families. The Edinburgh-Rome-Edinburgh flights are simply packed with tourists, British and Italian, either on holiday or coming back from holidays.

This is undoubtably good for the economies of all the cities involved. It may even be good for the architectural treasures of the cities themselves. Who knows what buildings have been spared the ravages of time and progress because foreign tourists love them and pay money to see them? If you love your town, it is illogical to dislike its tourists--unless, of course, they are prone to getting drunk and using public fountains and other monuments as urinals. And that would be the British abroad, not the relatively pacific crowd from the Iberian peninsula shouting outside my window right now.

Possibly the problem is that human beings don't like being crowded off their pavements by other human beings standing around gawking and exchanging remarks in foreign languages, the reptile brain being unable to distinguish between harmless travellers and occupying armies. Or possibly the problem is envy, as the tourists are obviously on holiday whereas the residents are not.

I recall one elderly Italian lady outside the St. Peter's railway station in Rome watching the steady stream of us foreigners emerging from the station and babbling past her.

"Che stronzi!" she shouted, an expression one was not taught in Mrs Angelini's Grade 10, 11 or even 12 Italian class.

At the time B.A. and I merely giggled and concluded that la signora was not entirely sane. However, it is possible that fifty years of mass tourism had finally got to the old bird, and she simply couldn't take it anymore.